Putting the current Trump era into historical perspective, which also helps to clarify what the real issues are behind all the daily noise, needs to gain traction in our culture.

It continues to amaze me how misunderstood our last hundred and fifty years or so has been. Somewhere shortly after the turn from the 19th to the 20th century there was a cosmic shift in western civilization.

I start with the funeral of Britain’s King Edward VII on May 20, 1910, as good a turning point to highlight as any. That is described as the last great gathering of the Old Order in Europe as nine kings of European nations attended, mostly related to a greater or lesser degree. The future King George V of England and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were there as direct cousins, and a third cousin, Czar Nicholas II of Russia, could not make it but sent a representative.

King Edward’s title was technically the King of Great Britain and Ireland and Emperor of India. There is a famous photo of all nine monarchs together all regailed in their military dress, covered in medals and sashes. They were all there together, attending banquets, drinking the same lemonade, making the same small talk about this and that, taking countless stiff photos and even some early silent films.

It was a cool, damp day so there were not more images of all the inbred royals playing croquette or romping on a lawn.

There had been a proto-revolution in Russia, including the famous mutiny on the battleship Potemkin, in 1905 that Tsar Nicholas put down with considerable effort, and there were political storm clouds everywhere that arose from the widespread Gilded Age abuses of labor and the working classes. The Second International confederation of pro-worker organizations, founded in 1889, was gaining strength, as was its ideological grounding in   Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

It would be simple to say that the nine monarchs at that 1910 funeral came together to plot a massive offensive against the rising tide of worker revolts. But the historical record seems to show they were much too narrow minded and petty for that. They were more like ego-centered buffoons playing off each other, none with a wider global perspective.

But I contend that there still was a shared, if unwritten, bond which led, lacking a major intervention, into the unfolding of the Great War only four years later. It wasn’t their vision, but their lack of it, that defined what was to come. It was like a powerful form of entropy was being set loose. In fact, the outbreak of World War I is often analyzed through the lens of social, political, and thermodynamic entropy. This view describes how a highly organized, predictable system of European empires dissolved into complete, chaotic disorder between 1815 and 1914.

 So maybe I am starting too late marking the turning point at 1910. Still, the momentum proceeding to the Great War could have been undone then, when they were all together, and there was not the slightest indication that anyone wanted to think in such a fashion.

So, the laws of entropy acted out from that point forward to the all-out human slaughter that defined the next three dozen years, increasingly driven by selfish self-interests and political superstructures that advanced them.

Yes, the Great War and World War 2 were part and parcel of the same dynamic, with the infamous “long weekend” between them, also likened to a second 30-Years War. The most advanced scientifically-grounded cultures in the history of humanity were pulverized and over 100 million people killed. Fascism, the most purely nihilistic and cruelly self-serving political system, formed and gained traction during that era, along with its equivalent on the other side, Stalinist totalitarianism. Both “systems” of brutal nihilism remain with us.

It brings us to those today who insist the wrong people won World War 2, like the Russian oligarchs and their cohorts in the West, like Donald Trump and his sad party. Looking at that photo from 1910, we can ask, “Have we learned nothing?”