Afghanistan seems to be in the news again and lives are still being lost . . . and for what? Nothing as in zero, has been achieved over the last twenty years at the cost of a king’s ransom, other than creating some dedicated enemies. And I don’t blame the Afghans for hating us: I don’t want jihadists in this country telling us what to do any more than they want us there. Those people are best left alone and going there was a big mistake.
Converting people to our way of thinking is a job best left to our religious leaders, if at all. When it comes to democracy, that’s a concept whose propagation is best done by example and not at the point of a gun. Looking at our country over the last twenty years, we haven’t done too good of a job ourselves and the last thing we want to do is export our chaos overseas.
History is full of examples of people doing the same thing over and over and failing each time. In 1812 Napoleon was unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded Russia anyway, and that action precipitated the fall of the French empire. In 1941, Adolf Hitler, was also unprepared for an extended winter campaign but invaded Russia anyway, thus precipitating the fall of the Third Reich. Russia is a big country, it has 11 time zones, it’s 5,600 miles (9,000 km) from east to west and it gets cold in winter. How hard is that to understand?
Both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King worked to liberate their “people” by peaceful means and were shot dead. Why didn’t Mr. Gandhi and Dr. King take more precautions? Or Bobby Kennedy, for crying out loud. Indira Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Malcom X, Julius Cesar, and one of my favorite leaders, Anwar Sadat, followed in their footsteps, metaphorically speaking of course. They all knew the dangers and yet . . ..
History is full of examples and lots has been written on the subject of why we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If only it were that simple: that’s good advice to a wise man, or woman, but to forget something, one must first have knowledge of it, and act on that knowledge, not just fluff it off as something inconsequential, or of little relevance, and file it with the other things that “won’t ever happen to me.”
Lincoln was a smart man, but failed to recognize he was in any danger and dismissed the concern of his friends and allies. How can that possibly be? I ask myself: the civil war had barely ended, the surrender of Lee at Appomattox had only happened a few days before. People were upset and blamed him for the loss of thousands of lives, for the loss of an entire way of life, and their autonomy. People being people, are still upset about the result of the civil war, and that happened over 150 years ago.
Anyway, when it comes to Lincoln and the others, it’s a mystery and we will never know. Here is my latest article on the Denton Record Chronicle and that’s pretty much what I say. https://bit.ly/2RsJI73