History Doesn’t End, It Repeats

I wonder if this will exhaust the illusion of Democrats as the purveyors of social justice and the political home of societal change:

If the reality of living in the midst of trash, rats and people pooping in your streets isn’t enough to exhaust the basic illusion of liberalism I wonder what will.

Let it be noted that even Mr. Fukuyama, who prematurely announced the end of history in 1992 as it appeared that Western liberalism would prevail on the world stage, has reexamined his premise and found it lacking.

You’re right!

As far as I’m concerned... when the textbook, the school board and the instructors manipulate the facts, abbreviate the facts... edit the facts... It’s identical to telling lies.

The ‘whole truth’ is the ONLY truth...so if you produce your own personally ‘cherry-picked’, streamlined version... you JUST lied!

And our public school students are purposely taught no history.

I taught history in jr high for 30 years. Thing was as annual testing became “more important”, math, science, and reading/grammar became the state-tested subjects. History was not considered important enough to test for. As a teacher this was pretty good news, since I was never blamed for poor test scores.

The state issued standards for ‘social studies’, but since there was no test, the standards were pretty much pointless. Oh, I had to waste a lot of time documenting how my curriculum satisfied the standards, but since I knew that no one would ever read my curriculum guides, I just cut and paste from other school’s guides. No one ever called me on it. That said, my kids learned American history above and beyond what the standards called for.

Toward the end of my career, I was told that my main role as a history teacher was to support the reading and math programs—you know, the important stuff. I already required a lot of reading from my students and I’d throw in an occasional math problem on my tests like, “The Wright Brothers first flew in 1903—how many years ago was that?—No calculators!” About half my 8th graders would get the problem right.

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

An example of history failing to repeat has been the assumption that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tops out with self-actualization. It does not in all cultures, Muslim in particular.

That thinking led to neo-conservatism with its implication the democratic values could be successfully exported, at gunpoint if necessary, to any society. The ME wars discredited Maslow and neo-conservatism.

The history of conquest did not repeat. But it rhymed in the lessons of post-WWII Japan. With unconditional surrender and occupation, democracy can be exported.
Anything less doesn’t work predictably. You have to be ruthless.

And that sounds an awful lot like Napoleon’s admonition of “If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.” IOW, don’t mess around with anything less than total resolve. Or history will repeat itself.

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