Found this off of Failbook

I've seen this type of statement floating around the internet, and I don't think it's really fair. If you try to use modern moral standards, there's no country on earth that's ever been great.

Take Italy. Their great time was the Roman Empire... when they invaded and slaughtered millions of people to create it, then used most of the POWs to generate slave labor. On top of that most of even the native Roman population couldn't vote. Women definitely didn't have equal rights to men.

Egypt's great period also employed slave labor (as well all well know), was subject to the whimsical desires of a pharaoh and his family, which often used incest as a method to keep the bloodline pure. God knows they committed war atrocities.

What about the Turkish great period? You mean the part where they invaded another kingdom to create the Ottoman Empire? Or how they would often forcibly take Christian babies from their parents and convert them to Islam to be part of the sultan's elite infantry, the Janissaries?

Or what about the Aztecs? We don't even have to fucking think that hard. Their goddamned religion meant they killed a goddamned person at least once a week to keep the sun moving.

China's had several great periods, and pretty much all of them used Confucianism or something similar to keep women in line. They also demanded the majority of the population to give free labor as part of their taxes, and many of them died in the process. Bribery was pretty much a thing, which meant even with a meritocracy most of the population couldn't get ahead since they didn't have the cash.

You can't look at history from your own position too hard because then there's really nothing good about pretty much anything. What society hasn't put women in an inferior position? Or been prejudiced against another religion/ethnicity? Or had some form of slavery? Or condoned child abuse? Or unjustly conquered another land? Or did war crimes in the process? No one can say they've done none of these things at some point. And although we're getting better than before, it's not going to end anytime soon. If you're thinking we've had a utopia out there at some point in the past, you're delusional.