In the same way, as Ahkenaten's worship of Aten became more fanatic with age, he commanded the destruction of every monument, altar, temple, account, citation or inscription touching on the worship of the god Amen. Ahkenaten himself, along with his son, Tutankamen, were eradicated from history by the succeeding line of Ramses pharaohs.
This is not altogether a bad thing: it depends on who is being eradicated. My proposal is that a mass political movement be organized to pressure the Obama administration to eradicate every document, honor, award, citation, book, newspaper (On-Line or print), or other indicator that so much as mentions the name of George W. Bush. As the most odious president in the short but historically important history of this country, it would be an act of mercy for our great-grandchildren and all further generations, that they never learn of his existence or have to study the record of his cruel and despicable deeds.
If this is not done right away , something far worse than allowing Dubya to entertain a future life in the Pharonic heavens may happen. There is another historic precedent we all want to avoid, which is that a certain kind of hack historian may take it into his head to append the honorific "The Great" after his name. Indeed, George W. himself explained at a press conference shortly before retiring, that he believed that history would honor him as "the great liberator".
Who has not heard of the fabulous deeds of Alexander the Great, Charley the Great, Frederick, Peter and Catherine the Great? Bloody butchers, all of them, who may have done a few things, on the level of Hitler's funding of the system of autobahns in Germany to ensure the praise of centuries, but who certainly distinguished themselves in the statistics of mass slaughter.
Alexander's supposed achievement was the dissemination of Greek civilization over a wide stretch of the known world. One would like to know what the Persians, Egyptians and Indians needed Greek civilization for, given their own considerable achievements in science, art, letters, philosophy and other sensible indicators of civilization. Perhaps as much as a fish needs a bicycle.
The Greeks themselves didn't see him in that light. What they remembered of him was that, after murdering thousands of people (sparing Diogenes, it is said, after putting Corinth to the sword) Alexander suppressed what little remained of traditional Grecian liberties. Greatness is most often measured in genocidal units.
Charley the Great? Well, he created an administrative system that parceled Europe into scores of microscopic principalities, all fighting wars with one another for a thousand years. He also dropped an iron curtain of superstition, the Holy Roman Empire, over Europe from which we are still not free today, ruining the teachings of a great Jewish Zen master while sending the rest of the Jews scurrying for shelter.
Peter built ships; Catherine invited Euler to Russia; Frederick created a system of education which has persisted down to our own day, designed to turn out obedient soldiers, clones for the Reich. Apart from these dubious achievements they did what they could to amass the largest number of genocide units. That's what "the great" stands for.
If the Obama administration does not do what it can today to erase his name from the history books, "Dubya the Great" may well be the name by which George W. Bush will be known in future centuries. Unfortunately this has yet to be done for our other modern homegrown monsters. One can anticipate a situation, centuries down the road, when innocent school-children are learning about the lives of Hitler the Great, Mussolini the Great, Stalin the Great, Mao the Great, Milosevic the Great....