4 ms·

What on earth are you talking about? I mean all of it: Republics, invidious prose, copywriters, a literary precedent, England being a republic, rent-a-kings...

• B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  Gibbon was indulging a pastime of republican apologists, which is badmouthing anything about monarchy. In this case just sneering, but it stretches to inciting assassination - 'sic semper tyrannis' has been a thing for some twenty five centuries. Way back when, the Roman aristocrats killed their king and instituted a wildly successful senatorial republic which lasted some five centuries. Later, the English aristocrats, going with the flow of the times, had their republic based on the Magna Carta - which kept a nominal king, serving at the pleasure of Parliament. Those kings were hired and fired at will, sometimes with loss of head, like Charles I, or just the threat of it, like James II. Long before multinational corporations, there was international recruiting for the job, which is why German aristocrats had to change names for WWI. Copywriters write advertisements, which is how governments get picked nowadays. They put a shiny gloss on unpleasant facts, or make the audience believe claims which are hard to prove with facts. Industrial manufacture of consent, or advanced belief production, whatever, it works. (Since you asked. But do your own reading.)