It’s Just History Repeating

Those who know no history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who know history are doomed to know they are repeating it.

In the moral certitude of many Americans at the transformation of this country from a multilateral Republic to a unilateral militaristic Empire, I see the same awful certitude that overwhelmed the Euro colonial powers during the latter part of the 19th Century when the fruits of their technological revolutions finally delivered them an overwhelming, yet temporary, hegemony over Asia, India, and Africa. Well, I say nations, but it was mainly the British in the lead, and everyone else scrambling for minor chunks of Africa and Asia.

Anyway, it seems like a predictable yet saddening social development, a kind of normative development.

Just as our parents’ parents began to question the terrible economic and social cost of maintaining Empire, and as we now look back at those Victorians and wonder how they ever really believed in “The White Man’s Burden” and their destiny to remake the world’s cultures in their image, so too might our children’s children begin to question the lack of social progress accompanying the endless “War On Terror”.