Bad history can kill. Those who butcher the truth may end up butchering people. Every day, the news from Ukraine says as much. You would think, what with existential calamities — ecological and biological — bearing down hard and fast on the world, that even the most empire-addicted, power-ravening despot would have better things to do than wage war in the name of historical myths and fables.
But no, somewhere within the mind of tyrants lies the strange urge to be a professor; to cloak Machiavellian brutality with the gravitas of scholarly authority.
