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I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.
Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.
Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.
The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.
The fact that there was quite persecution of Christians in the roman empire obviously showed that Romans were worried about the potency of said religion.
Twenty Thousand Legues under the sea was 1870, from earth to the moon was written in 1865 (Jules Verne just rules), Ada Lovelace was dead for 20 years and the idea that we will have bombs that make even bigger bang was not far fetched.
But try and explain to someone in 1969 that 70 years later we won't be having any presence outside of the LEO.
Yes, that one was a poor example. The person of 1870 would have rolled their eyes and gone "Oh you mean all those things the novelists are writing about right now?"
1870 was the year Verne published his follow-up to "From the Earth to the Moon", entitled Around the Moon. Stop me and say if any of this is sounding familiar from the moon missions of the 20th century:
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The persecution of the Christians does seem to have been somewhat overstated by Christian authors, whose writing comes down to us with a bit of an agenda.
There was only ever really one concerted push to stamp out Christianity and that was under Diocletian. Before this point the persecution of Christians was largely sporadic and localised. Even when Diocletian actually tried to eradicate Christianity, enforcement was spotty and largely depended on the feelings of local officials.
To reduce the opinions of a vast number of people, living across several centuries, down to a sentence. The Romans did not feel threatened by Christianity, they found Christianity to be weird, alien and therefore unsettling.
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I don't think it does by itself? persecutes is one of the most common relationships between groups, historically, so its presence doesn't tell us much.
No subjugation is most common. Persecution is a lot rarer because of its low ROI
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