History

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my study of history, it’s that we’re doomed to repeat it. Over and over again. We, as a species, have a unique capacity to learn from our mistakes. We, as a species, are wasting that capacity.

I have a couple of specific instances in mind that we really should have learned from: Europe’s pacifism and appeasement’s role in Hitler’s rise to power and WWII, and (closer to home) the policies that lengthened the duration of the recession and depression Black Tuesday heralded in 1929.

Let’s start with appeasement. In 1937, Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister of Britain. He faced a Hitler, belligerent and drunk with power granted him by the people of Germany. Chamberlain, believing that the Treaty of Versailles which ended WWI was unfair, and wishing to avoid a second war that would involve most of Europe, adopted a policy of giving Hitler what he asked for. At least, until April 1938, when Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia with the excuse that he was merely granting the wishes of the native, ethnic German population therein that wished to rejoin the fatherland.

Even then, what Chamberlain attempted to do was negotiate a deal where Hitler wouldn’t go for the rest of Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, though Hitler agreed, he later invaded and took the rest of the country in October. Nor did he stop there, ultimately inflaming all of Europe in WWII.

In August of this year, not long after I started this blog, Russia invaded two regions of its former satellite state of Georgia, using the excuse that the Russian population of these two regions didn’t wish to be ruled by the Georgian government. Like in 1938, most of Europe’s policies have leaned toward appeasement of the former power. Joining Europe in its preferred policy is one of the current presidential candidates. The current President likes Putin, and cannot believe malice of his friend.

I predict that we’re seeing a similar resurgence of Russian power just as Europe saw a resurgence of German power in the late 30s, leading to WWII. I don’t necessarily predict another World War—mostly because I don’t believe the political will exists in the US, NATO, or the EU to draw a line in the sand—but what I do foresee is Russia moving to retake the countries it formerly held as vassal states. If the current atmosphere of appeasement holds, it may move to take more of Europe, and possibly move further afield into the rest of the world. If we refuse to act, and NATO cannot, there is nothing to prevent it.

Second, recent studies have postulated that the Great Depression of the 1930’s lasted a good several years longer than it should have, and that there is one, previously irreproachable, suspect for why it did: FDR’s New Deal policies.

Roosevelt believed that excess competition was at fault for the deflation that started in the early thirties; wages reduced, jobs reduced, and consumption reduced, driving the country toward economic collapse. He believed that the only way to combat the problem was to sign into law policies that allowed unions to force artificially high wages—leading to much higher unemployment—and allowed businesses to grow unchallenged by the anti-trust legislation passed by earlier governments. Without these policies, a couple of UCLA economics professors who’ve studied the Depression and the New Deal extensively believe that the Great Depression would likely have ended in 1936, rather than 1943.

Judging by the current legislation passed and signed into law today, we have learned no more from this than we did from Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938. We’re facing another Great Depression, thanks to the massive governmental interference in the market starting with the strengthened threat of prosecution of banks refusing mortgages to the unqualified (creating the subprime mortgage industry pretty much from whole cloth right there) of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995. The banks are busy buying one another, trying to become “too big to fail”—and government isn’t disallowing the mergers. Government has agreed to buy up the current “toxic assets,” or subprime mortgage liabilities, and failing retirement accounts—including those which are failing because unions demanded more than the industries could support.

Many different philosophers have commented on how those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Several science fiction authors have commented on—or written sagas illustrating—the same concept. Unfortunately, science fiction is rather a niche market, with the serious science fiction (as opposed to pulp sci-fi like Star Trek or its clones) tending to be the only ones willing to listen to and learn the lessons history has to teach.

Here’s hoping we can learn to learn from our mistakes before we face repeated wholesale destructions of civilization as chronicled in Walter Miller's novel of repeated nuclear holocaust and rebuilt civilizations, A Canticle for Leibowitz.