I have fun and surprise to discover history winks today. There are many practically daily. For example, when Donald Trump announced the new tariffs against China last week, he cited as one of the reasons to introduce them that Xi Jinping has not prevented the export of fentanyl to the US. "My friend President Xi said he would stop the sale of fentanyl to the United States, this never happened and many Americans continue to die!" Trump tweeted.

Fentanyl is a drug from the opioid family, it is said to be 50 times more deadly than heroin and would be related to more than 28,000 overdose deaths in 2017, according to the US government. The striking thing is that Trump's argument evokes the famous Opium Wars of the nineteenth century , but vice versa. Then, the United Kingdom and France forcibly imposed free trade in opium to China, whose emperor considered that its uncontrolled sale had harmful effects on the population.

When I see environmental activist Greta Thurnberg I can't stop thinking about the Crusade for Children of the 13th century. The fourth crusade had failed in its objectives and had become an expedition of hooligans for what is now Zadar (Croatia) and Istanbul. No one wanted a fifth crusade, let alone the king of France , but behold, a little pastor appears to Jesus Christ to commission him to release Jerusalem. The anthropologist Emilio Lara, who has just published Times of Hope, the novel narration of this adventure, has rightly stated that "the Crusade for Children was the action of a populist influencer from the Middle Ages."

The shepherd recruited thousands of children who ended up being sold as slaves after boarding the ships of pirates who promised to cross the Mediterranean from Nice to Jerusalem. Greta will also catch a ship soon.

We could consider that history is circular, that man stumbles twice with the same stone, that in reality history is a spiral that unfolds in time, as the British Arnold Toynbee thought. And even go to the interesting reflections that Jorge Luis Borges made about the different sources of the eternal return to conclude with Marco Aurelio that "nobody loses the past or the future, because nobody can take away what they don't have." But we can also conclude something more banal: that the scriptwriters of political current affairs have very little imagination and are always using what is already written to cover their campaigns.

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