I hope that we will learn from our history and act better. I fear that we won’t.
George (Jorge) Santayana famously philosophized that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Georg Hegel more cynically quipped that “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” For satirist Mark Twain the lesson was different: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
Go back, for example, to the social and political analyses following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the lead-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost trillions of dollars and so many lives.
Read what those on the Left soberly and correctly wrote compared to the erroneous, oversimplified, bloviating bombast that liberals, centrists, moderates, conservatives, right-wingers, and most others offered, including the “expert” neo-conservatives and neo-liberals of the time.
In the midst of fear, sensationalism, xenophobia, and jingoism, carefully stoked in Machiavellian ways, Bush the Lesser garnered an astounding approval rating of around 90% of Americans for a while, as Leftist critics were ignored, attacked, mocked, and sometimes worse.
If you go back and investigate with even a slightly open mind, it will become crystal clear that the Left was right again, while the Right was dead wrong again. As it was with the first war against Iraq, Vietnam before that, and much else.
Yeah, we told you so. And we on the Left are still telling you, on major issue after issue after issue. War. Climate Change. Racism. Healthcare. Education. Jobs. Minimum wages. Taxes. Wall Street regulations. Campaign finance reform. Housing. Human, civil, women’s, and LGBT rights. Police reform. Reproductive freedom. Natural resources. Farming. Social Security. Medicare. Poverty. Inequality. Democracy.
But who will listen? And when?
Feel free to start here:
Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” (September 29, 2001).
And here is something I wrote back then called “An Open Letter to Barbara Lee” (October 14, 2002).
For longer, more general history, I would recommend Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Michael Parenti’s History as Mystery, and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Start there, but please don’t end there. Let your increased knowledge guide your future actions. We have important work to do. We have a world to save.
