History Repeating

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This undeniable truth points out something I've never really understood about humanity; why do we not learn from history and keep making the same mistakes over and over again?

We all know the truth of this quote, most often attributed to writer and philosopher George Santayana, because it also works on much smaller timescales. When individuals don't learn from their mistakes, they're bound to repeat them and when couples don't learn from their fights, they eventually break up. But individuals mostly do learn from their mistakes, or else we would never grow up. So why don't we take lessons from our predecessors and stop making the same mistakes over and over again, always on route to the next war?

Maybe we can begin answering this question by simply realizing that history doesn't just happen. Another well known proverb about history is this one: "history is written by the victors." I don't think this is difficult to understand, but still when I search for this phrase on Google, I find lots of pages trying to debunk it... But if we just assume that the broad strokes, sketching our path through time, are largely shaped by discoveries and wars, it's completely logical and rational to think that the accounts describing these events, the ones that survive at least, are mostly written by the discoverers and the victors. History doesn't just happen; we make history, we're writing history right now, by our actions.

War is a peculiar thing when you think about it, and after thinking and reading about it, I've come to this conclusion: never in history has a group of young men decided to just pick up some weapons, travel to a far away land, and kill other young men they've never met before. This just doesn't happen. They always have to be motivated by their leaders to take this huge step. And even when they've made that step, studies have shown that most foot soldiers have great difficulty killing another person when facing them; drones and bombardments from a distance have sadly taken away this barrier.

But atrocities do happen in war, so how do we get these young men killing, pillaging, raping and destroying far away people in far away lands? Well, we lie to them. More precisely; our leaders lie to us. Victors write history, and this essentially means that what's left over for the official historical accounts, is the war propaganda that was used to demonize the enemy. Because when you're angry and afraid, you will pull that trigger. And when there's no apparent reason to fear the selected enemy, our leaders have shown to be very capable of providing us those reasons. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, yet the war rhetoric during the George W. Bush years still has the connection between the two cemented in many people's minds. Before this junior Bush, his father used the lie about incubator babies being thrown on the floor to ignite the anger needed to start the first Gulf war.

All wars, and I do mean ALL of them, are based on the stories told by our spiritual and political leaders, who have historically also been our economical leaders. Just remember the simple fact that selective violent mass-hysteria among large percentages of young men isn't spontaneous; the hysteria is always directed by and focused around the material needs of a very small elite. The dehumanization of the enemy, sparked by the lies from the leaders, becomes complete within the group dynamics and group psychology of these small "bands of brothers" trying to stay alive in this hostile land full of evil enemies.

The historical accounts of these armed conflicts that become "canon" and gets taught in schools, is written by the winners and they omit the lies that led to this one-sided perspective on our cultural and political history. And then there's that other war, the overarching war between the classes; not all wars are between nations. In that war history is written by the winners, the financial elites, too. And it's not just the wars, it's the discoveries as well: the mere fact we use the word "discovery" instead of "conquest", which often is far closer to truth, should give an indication of how much of history's accounts are highly skewed and romanticized. We further conceal the ugliness of the collective actions in name of the elite, by using euphemisms like "ministry of defense", when the honest thing to call it is "ministry of war." Or saying that innocent people are being used as "a human shield," instead of just admitting to bombing hundreds of people to death in order to destroy one strategic target. Or the use of "news" instead of "propaganda"...

We don't know our history, really, and that's at least one of the reasons why I think it keeps repeating. Just these last decades, with the fast spreading of alternative information on the internet, we've been able to catch our leaders in the act of painting false narratives. When we look at the tremendous influence the attacks of September 11 2001 still have on our daily lifes, and if we remember the dry FACT that governments usually have to create the enemy they want their people to attack, it's no wonder there are so many conspiracy theories going around. Well, looking at history, probably one of these theories is true, and most certainly the official account, painted by government officials in the mainstream media, is false. Whatever your government tells you about any war they're involved in, it's most probably a lie. And that's not a conspiracy theory, that's just history repeating itself.

The above is a redacted version of a post I originally released on Steemit in December 2018

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