this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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I mean... no? The "gold-plated statues chapter" is just history; elite vanity projects happen both in good and bad times. The question is how much restraint they can exercise while robbing the lower class blind; too little and you (sometimes) get the guillotine chapter.
Yeah, ancient history is full of gold plated statues, and not a guillotine in sight for thousands and thousands of years.
I mean if you take the guillotine to be a stand-in for retributive violence directed at the elites (which is incidentally not what the actual guillotine was for) then there's actually a good deal of that historically, though it's rarely as explicit as—say—the execution of Louis XVI. The assassins of Julius Caesar (among other things, a popular reformist politician at the time) for instance tended to be executed or kill themselves in the subsequent civil war.