"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?
Image by Javier-Rodriguez - source: Pixabay
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 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 this... 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, or 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.
Who built this? - Image by Sam valadi - source: Flickr
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 financial leaders. Just remember the simple fact that selective violent mass-hysteria among large percentages of young men isn't real; 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 history. And then there's that other war, the all overarching war between the classes; not all wars are between nations. In that war history is written by the elite too. And it's not just the wars, it's the discoveries too: the mere fact we use the word "discovery" instead of "conquering" or "annexing", which often are 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 use "news" instead of "propaganda"...
And what about the pyramids of Gizeh and the countless other megalithic structures found around the globe, for which there's no explanation of how they came to be? I mean, how many people still believe that the great pyramids of Gizeh are a tomb for farao Cheops? As far as I know there was no mummy found there. There are no hieroglyphs found that indicate the Egyptians of that period have anything to do with the pyramids. Not one. If the farao accomplished something so grand, wouldn't he order his subjects to write down his glorious deeds? In the pyramids themselves there's no hieroglyphs either. They had copper saws; do we really believe they used that to cut the limestone and granite? And how did they move these blocks that sometimes weigh hundreds of tons? If it's built during Cheops reign, it would have been finished in 25 years... Simply not possible. And that's just Egypt; there are so many more examples that defy what we're taught in the classrooms.
We don't know our history, really, and that's why 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 pictures. 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, it's just history repeating itself.
Propaganda (Ministry of Truth)
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