Nationalism

A referendum on his own presidency reportedly passed almost unanimously, and a historian who studied it concluded the result was likely falsified without being able to say by how much, which sums up how hard Nasser's record is to read straight.

The man later called the only wholly admirable figure in modern history conquered a kingdom with a thousand volunteers and then handed it to a monarchy he privately despised, because unification mattered to him more than his own republicanism did.

The institutions he built outlasted the specific decisions, from Kashmir to the 1962 war with China, that historians now judge far more harshly than his contemporaries did.

The poet's own friends burned his memoirs a month after he died, which means the most candid record of his life was destroyed by the people who claimed to be protecting his reputation.

The man who built a continent-wide system for suppressing revolution was toppled by one in a single day in 1848, which either proves the system was fragile all along or that thirty years is a long run for any settlement.

Saddam Hussein ran Iraq for over three decades on a mixture of genuine modernisation and calculated terror, and the two are hard to separate in the record he left behind.

The revolution he spent decades preparing succeeded without him in the room, yet both governments that later split China still claim him as their founder.

Austria voted 99.7 percent in favour of joining Nazi Germany a month after the invasion, and historians still argue how much of that number reflected genuine sentiment.

Bosnia's war produced Europe's only post-war genocide conviction and a tribunal record so extensive that few of its facts are actually in dispute, only their framing.

1815

1995

1992

1916

1949

The rebellion Greeks fought alone for six years is remembered in the West largely for the one naval battle three foreign fleets fought for them almost by accident.

1998

1993

1921

More than fifty countries had uprisings within the same eighteen months, and almost all of them failed for the same reason: the workers, the middle class, and the nationalists wanted different things and only briefly pretended otherwise.

Historians still cannot agree on a single definition of fascism precise enough to say cleanly which interwar movements actually qualify and which were merely borrowing its aesthetics.

1871

1815