What Have We Learned From History

9/12/2024 | MosesKnows

[MosesKnows]

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history. George Bernard Shaw

History is, indeed, little more than the register of the ‘crimes, follies, and misfortunes’ of mankind. But what experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it. Georg Hegel

Two president’s farewell addresses with similar messages separated by 165 years.

From President Washington’s 1796 farewell address.

Over-grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

Context:

Hence likewise they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of Government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty: In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

From President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

Context :

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Rumors are that Ike’s draft address spoke of the military-industrial-congressional complex.

[MosesKnows]

What have we learned from history that benefitted the nation?

[Da Coyote]

We may have learned things, primarily good ones.
The left has also learned things, virtually all bad ones.
Sooner or later, we must deal with the left...in terms that they understand. Not nice terms.

[marktwain]

The founders were students of history. They crafted a nation of checks and balances on political power, to gain the benefits of government while avoiding the worst excesses of tyrannical government.

The system created the most powerful, most free, most tolerant large country in the history of the world.

That system has been under attack at its core by power-hungry people for a long time. They have eroded the checks and balances in their quest to return to despotic, central, power.

[mabarker1]

They’re just using the Manual.

Mein Kampf, the English version.

[ansel12]

That immigration has been used to undermine us for at least 160 years.

That the closer Americans live to a problem, for example Indians, the more they understand them while the farther away the media and population are from them, the more they get romanticized and treated as more noble and good compared to the American people.