> The last one always struck me as implausibly dumb.

Really? The current world is over 60% globalized.

Another way to state the exact same thing is: "all ideologies except one have failed. The vast majority have failed multiple times".

So it seems very obvious to me that 80% of the population would want to forget most of history. Plenty of countries do that explicitly. China, North Korea, all muslim countries (muslim countries of different branches outlaw different parts of their own history, e.g. Iran vs Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia they say "in the name of racial harmony" and erase essentially all history, even their own), ...

Forgetting history is just not something the west does, and most people here have grown up in that culture. So it "feels" implausible. It doesn't feel implausible to other cultures though. It's called the "Judeo-Christian west" and, well, Judaism is obsessed with history and Christianity, perhaps a bit less than Judaism, but I bet anyone from a different culture would still call it obsessed. Islam, by contrast, has a rule that states there's pre-islamic history, which is "wrong" and is to be destroyed entirely and there's post-islamic history, which doesn't matter because islam is the answer.

(and there's the issue that islam is all conquest. In other words, go back further than a few hundred years in most muslim countries and all history is churches or synagogues. And recent muslim history ... well muslim economies were built on slavery as recent as 1965, so ... there's a bit of "that's not a ditch inside a locked room, that's where we shackled the slaves during the night" architecture)

The classic example is Orwell’s 1984, but, like, book burnings were real, Orwell wasn’t making it up out of whole cloth. The Nazis, in particular, were _very_ keen on this, but most authoritarian regimes try it to some degree.