As the subject of world history has become less about facts and more about the evils of Western Civilization, due to the perceived sins of our ancestors, I dread the truth of George Santayana’s famous quip, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
From the perspective of the year 2020, things are looking a lot like they did a hundred years ago. Back in 1920 the world had just finished a Great War, and a massive pandemic, estimated to have killed upwards of 100 million people. Considering that the global population in 1920 was approximately 1.8 billion people, the number of deaths caused by the Spanish Flu pandemic represented nearly 5% of the global population.