Celebrity worship is weird, even when it's celebrities from the past.

Celebrity worship has always bothered me, but one of the stranger corners of that hobby shows up in how people revere historical figures.

Worshiping historical figures and holding them up like icons is weird, especially when you remember that most of these people were, by modern standards, pretty awful. Today you see people worship The Orange Man. Academics will eventually look back at this era and study how bizarre that was. But people do the same thing with Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, or even "The Founding Fathers" of the USA. The blind reverence people have for these figures ignores the fact that they were politicians, and politicians are almost universally bad people. There is no doubt that many of their subjects hated them, not because they voted for the other guy (if they got a vote at all), but because they were powerful people who used force, influence, and celebrity to shape the world through warfare and domination. Power, coercion, subjugation, embargoes, colonization, slavery... all of it.

If you wander into history or mythology-adjacent spaces online, especially on the more common social media site like Youtube, you will find people basically worshiping the images and ideas of these ancient figures.

They romanticize life in the Roman Empire while ignoring that not being a Roman citizen meant living under a lower class then Roman elites. People marvel at the "glory" of Rome and the achievements of people like Julius Caesar, but at what cost? Are you ignoring the genocides and campaigns of terror that created that alleged "glory". Can you imagine people worshiping our modern day leaders in 500 years, even the warmongering ones who have caused nothing but trouble in this world? I can, and it bothers me.

In some academic circles you see near-worship of figures such as King Arthur, or Robin Hood. People treat these figures with lots of enthusiasm. I get it, they have cool stories and legends built around them. But assuming they were real at all, one was a criminal gang leader guilty of robbery, theft, murder, and other seditionary acts, and also a religious terrorist in the Crusades (Robin Hood). Not a good dude. The other was a monarch, and history shows that monarchs have never been good, loving, caring people to all of their subjects. They ruled through taxation, forced religion, and rigid class hierarchy that separated them from the lowly, worthless people beneath them. You know, the lowly, no-good common people like you and me. Yet people talk about Arthur in flowery language, the same way a crowd on a red carpet treats a Hollywood actor. It's celebrity worship.

In the East you see the same thing with figures like Genghis Khan, Sun Tzu, Oda Nobunaga, and others. Complete reverence for a romanticized fantasy version of their lives, ignoring the terrible ideas and actions they unleashed on the world. Our world, not some distant fantasy world. We still feel the impact of their actions, but history often forgets the bad, and people embrace a fictionalized narrative that contradicts reality, but is an entertaining story when put on paper.

Even people like George Washington are treated this way. He was not a good man by today's standards. He was a war general, a revolutionary terrorist in the eyes of the British Empire. He was similar to other worshiped figures like Che Guevara, who was a political mercenary and a terrorist in the eyes of his enemies. They're historical figures that, because enough time has passed, are essentially worshiped as celebrities. With enough time, even The Orange Man will be treated the same way.

Celebrity worship is weird, even when it's celebrities from the past.