Heinrich Hegseth or Bumbling Mustache Pete?

Or, a futile thought experiment.

The challenge lies in discerning whether the last word of the second aphorism is, or shall be shown to be, the final word: playwright Eugene O'Neill, "There is no present or future - only the past, happening over and over again - now"; political theorist-sociologist Karl Marx, "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce."

Present testimony, followed by the past's.

The leader had been in office "for six months ... but he did not yet possess absolute power." A higher authority still commanded "the regular army."

Despite "newspaper stories about [the foreign leader's] erratic behavior and his government's brutality..., throughout America there was a widely held belief that ... surely no modern state could behave in such a manner. At the State Department, however, [the U.S. ambassador] read dispatch after dispatch in which [were described the nation's] rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship."

Arrests were being made of priests and politicians. The U.S. embassy's general consul "sensed a rising 'hysteria' among" the leader's immediate subordinates, "expressed as a belief 'that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.'" In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, Erik Larson, 2011.

There should be no self-reproach when stumped by discernment's challenge: In the end, which is to be? — America's tragedy of historical magnitude, or its darkest comedy of all farce.

The inescapable-thus-self-pardoning kicker, of course, the unknowable future. And that itself is buried in the absolute unknown degree of magnitude wrapped in philosopher George Santayana's, third, challenge-related aphorism about the condemning of mass forgottenness to the past's repetition.