Does History Repeat Itself?

By Alan Caruba

Does history repeat itself? Yes, but with different faces and names. We evolve technologically, but we remain emotionally the same people as those in ancient Rome and Egypt. We are not that different than them.

The relentless repetition of wars, the justice systems processing miscreants, the holidays we celebrate, it has a continuity to it that is echoed in diverse civilizations. The obsession for power and wealth seeps through the ages.

That is why the images of a giant dust storm slowly engulfing Phoenix, Arizona evoked images from the 1930s when such storms were common. They become a symbol of the Great Depression in which even farmland was devoid of sustenance.

On top of the financial conditions of the 1930s, there were conditions worldwide that would lead to the manmade devastation and loss of life that was World War Two. Imagine! Two major wars in just one century, the latter stretching across vast oceans and continents. It was a century filled as well with many lesser wars.

For me “the greatest generation” were the many young men I encountered as a child riding the train between my parent’s home in Newark, NJ and Long Branch where my grandparents lived. The trains were filled with newly-minted soldiers from Fort Dix.

I can recall “rationing” as my Mother and neighbors swapped coupons to purchase sugar and other items that were scarce. Halfway though the war, the family had moved to a suburb where milk was delivered in a horse-drawn wagon!

In the run-up to the war in Europe, Hitler had made no secret that Germany was rebuilding its military. Even our “ally” in WWII, the Soviet Union, had cut a secret deal with him to divide Poland. His intent, of course, was to control Europe. More accurately, it was to loot Europe because the Nazis were more like a huge Mafia operation than anything else.

Now we have Iran “testing” missiles that it says can hit Europe and planning others that can hit America. Instead of Deutschland Uber Alles, it is now Iran threatening not just Israel and the entire Middle East, but any potential military response from NATO and others. To no one’s surprise, Russia has been their ally.

Sadly, but presciently, the poor NATO performance in Libya and the draw-down of troops in Afghanistan will be correctly read by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as indications that their plans are right on schedule as they move ever closer to becoming a nuclear power exercising hegemony over the Middle East.

There are other indicators of unrest such as the riots in Greece and those that took place earlier in London when austerity measures were instituted to stem the financial bleeding occurring in the wake of the global crisis in late 2008 during the U.S. political campaigns. In retrospect it has the look of an “October surprise” designed to affect an outcome and the outcome was the present Obama administration.

It was preceded by a sudden electronic run on banks that was surely deliberate. Within hours the Federal Reserve stepped in to stop the massive withdrawals, but it has curiously never revealed the names of those parties or banks involved in what was quite simply an attack on the U.S. economy.

Indeed, the fact that billions, if not trillions, can be transferred at the speed of an electron represents a whole new structure of global finance than those who put the system together could have anticipated.

We are, in effect, using a financial system that dates back to the 14th and 15th centuries to deal with the exigencies of the 2lst century. Even the invention of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, put together in secret by a handful of Wall Street Bankers, seems unable to respond to the present crisis. Both the present and prior chairmen admit they do not understand why.

Meanwhile, eerily echoing the Great Depression from 1929 to 1941 when World War Two began, the nation today is deep into the same levels of unemployment, housing foreclosures, and business stagnation. The growth of the gross domestic product is practically invisible, the debt defies the imagination, and there is a lot of misery while the nation’s leaders in Congress and in the White House are at loggerheads.

The reason for this short history lesson is that, indeed, lessons can be learned from history, but only if the nation is willing to act on them.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

"A Date that will live in Infamy"

A 2008 commentary is a reminder of what this day means.

By Alan Caruba

December 7, 1941, “A date that will live infamy” is a fading memory for those alive at the time and most certainly for those born since that day. For most Americans I suspect it is just a date they may have read about in a high school history book or seen dramatized in documentaries or films.

It was, if you are still trying to recall its significance, the day the Empire of Japan attacked the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor. It was the date that Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to in his speech to Congress calling for a Declaration of War against, not only Japan, but the Nazi regime and its Axis partner, Italy. It was the date when the term World War took on a whole new meaning beyond the WWI trenches in France.

In Hawaii, when I rode out to visit the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, the thing I noticed was that I was sharing the ferry with dozens of Japanese tourists. It had never occurred to me that it was, of course, part of their history as well. I recall their pausing before the wall with the names of the sailors still entombed below to offer prayers for them. That is what peace is all about.

The cliché is that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. It is a cliché because it is true.

To be a child in America from 1941 to 1945 was to know that America was at war. If you did not know exactly what that meant, you understood it was important. For me, it was the memory of trains filled with young men in uniform as I and my Mother made the trip to visit my grandparents who lived on the drowsy Shrewsbury River in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Years later I would be one of those young men leaving Fort Dix in uniform.

From the end of World War II until 1991 the Cold War continued as the United States and its allies stood firm against the Soviet Union. We extended our protection in the Pacific to Taiwan, waged hot war in Korea and Vietnam, and waited until communist China concluded that capitalism was a good idea, as least in terms of building a viable economy, if not in terms of human rights.

To grow up during World War II was to know that there was absolute evil in the world, the likes of which would be revealed in the Nuremberg trials and similar military trials for the leaders of Japan’s military solution to problems that have since yielded to the pursuit of profit. Today, it is in part Japan’s (and China’s) purchase of our treasury bonds that helps prop up our profligate government.

There is, however, still absolute evil in the world. On 9/11, another sneak attack reminded America of that fact. The evil is called Islamism or Islamofascism and all who support it either openly or covertly, eagerly or passively. It is a fever loose in the world that will kill a lot of people before it is destroyed. Neither communism, fascism, nor have dictators disappeared.

The good news is that, since the end of World War II in the lifetimes of many Americans and others, democracy has been gaining in nations around the world. Winston Churchill, of course, said it best. “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

I suspect that few Americans living today have any idea of the significance of December 7, 1941. It literally changed the world and catapulted America from a Depression wracked nation into its current superpower status.

It also produced one of the all-time worst ideas, the United Nations.

Generations since those times live with the legacies of December 7, 1941. We need to rededicate ourselves to its best ideas; freedom, justice, tolerance, democracy, and human rights that individual nations pledge themselves to honor and uphold.

(c) Alan Caruba, 2010

Hiroshima 1945, Hiroshima 2010

This is Hiroshima today.

By Alan Caruba

It was sixty-five years ago, August 6, 1945, and the anticipation of the end of the war in the Pacific swept across America when the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Surely they would surrender, but there was no response from the Emperor or Japanese high command.

A second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki six days later. And still we waited! Finally, on August 15, Japan announced its acceptance of an unconditional surrender. That avoided what military experts of the time estimated would be casualties in the hundreds of thousands if the U.S. had been forced to invade.

By May of 1945 the allies had defeated Nazi Germany and secured its surrender. What followed was the division of Europe as the Soviet Union seized control of its Eastern bloc nations. They would remain under its oppression until it finally collapsed in 1991.

Japan would be occupied by the United States and its allies until September 8, 1951. On April 28, 1952 Japan regained its status as an independent nation. Japan would go on to become an economic powerhouse.

History has been re-written since 1945 to depict the United States as the aggressor, as a wicked nation that used atomic bombs in war. The destruction of Hiroshima is depicted as evidence of some moral flaw in the American character. That is hogwash.

The United States had done everything it could to avoid going to war with Japan and only what it could to aid Great Britain that had already been at war with Nazi Germany from 1939 after the invasion of Poland began World War Two. At the time, the Soviet Union was an ally of Germany.

In Asia, Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. On December 7, 1941, a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor launched America into a two theatre war, the Pacific against Japan and the Atlantic against the Axis powers.

The use of the atomic bombs ended World War II. By then much of Europe and much of Japan had been bombed to rubble. By then millions had died throughout the world as the conflict raged in various nations.

Since then, the awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons has deterred a global war, though America engaged in smaller deadly conflicts in Korea, in Vietnam, and in Iraq.

Until September 11, 2001, the American homeland had not been attacked since Pearl Harbor, sixty years earlier. The American response in Afghanistan was conventional warfare with no hint or suggestion of nuclear weapons. The wars conducted against the most aggressive nation in the Middle East, Iraq, were fought with conventional weaponry.

The generation that lived through and fought World War II is now passing from the scene. Those who fought in Korea are old timers and those who fought in Vietnam are men in their fifties and sixties.

Whatever else will be said at the ceremonies marking the bombing of Hiroshima, generations born since must be told they asked for it. The day they attacked America was one Franklin Roosevelt said “will live in infamy.”

August 6, 1945 was not infamous. It was necessary.

August 6, 1945 did not end the war with Japan. It took a second bomb to do that and, even then, the warmongers argued among themselves for several days whether to surrender. In the end, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki set Japan free to pursue peace.

A new generation of Americans must be reminded and must understand that America does not start wars. It ends them.

© Alan Caruba, 2010