‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Yeah, not so much

People are fond of repeating the George Santayana aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

That comes to mind whenever I read about the fighting in Ukraine. We have seen this before so many times.

Nearly 40 years after losing a million lives in the carnage of World War II, the Soviet Union somehow decided it would be a good idea to invade Afghanistan. It did look like a mismatch, but it cost the country thousands of lives and helped lead to its disintegration.

They should have learned from the United States, which learned the only way to succeed in Vietnam was to kill everyone. A few later we would go into Afghanistan ourselves, confident we had a better plan.

Forty years later after Russia should have learned its lesson, it invaded Ukraine on what looked like the first step to reclaiming at least the land that used to be the USSR. It isn’t working much better than their Afghanistan adventure. Gee, who would have figured? Wars of conquest have gone so well lately. Although it did work out for what used to be North Vietnam, but the price was terrible.

After World War I — the war to end all wars — there were some valiant attempts to promote peace. But the seeds of peace that were sown had no chance against the herbicides of violence.

“Only the dead have seen the end of war,” Santayana also said.

There is always someone who thinks he can do what a person before didn’t get done. This drive can be good but when it leads to war it is borderline insane. But it never stops.

“We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.”

That is credited to Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman skeptic, more than two millennia ago. He was beheaded by Mark Antony who came to his own bad end.

Science fiction Harlan Ellison was equally pessimistic in the 20th Century: “The mistake we all make is in assuming anybody remembers any damn thing from one day to the next. But few of us keep accurate records of what we learned as we hobble through life barking our shins in the dark on experience we’ve already had.”

Of course not everyone agrees. That noted philosopher and martial arts expert Chuck Norris is quoted, “I think you can learn from history.” I don’t know the context but at least he is optimistic.

Eddie Vedder — front man for the band Pearl Jam — is slightly more philosophical as he said, “Life moves fast. As much as you can learn from history, you have to move forward.”

But obviously we don’t learn before we move on. Otherwise I would stop getting cats, there would be no movie sequels and no more Chuck Norris movies.