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We know that being a Roman or Viking sympathiser is acceptable 1500 years later.

We do?

Did the Romans or Vikings even have a common ideology one could "sympathise" with, regardless of the intervening timespan?

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The Romans did - be the most powerful nation. We often see America compared to them, not as a bad thing, but as a good thing that might fail someday. The cruelty of the Roman circus is seen as a curiosity now, even appearing in children's books, but various Nazi atrocities still aren't. Suffocating Jews somehow isn't funny yet, but releasing hungry lions on slaves is.

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