Correct. This is rather why the glorious past is such a dangerous fallacy - they see the artefacts and remnants of regimes that specialises in propaganda, and mistake it for reality. The same happens within minds as it does in the external world - rose-tinted glasses - and so the cycle repeats.

I honestly don't know if we're up to escaping it. We are beautifully fallible and flawed - without, we would not have art and love and all that is good, so we must take the bad with, lest we lose what it is to be human.