TRUTH: History Is Repeating Itself, And For The Same Reasons

Have you been paying attention to what is happening in Ukraine right now?  Do you know enough history to realize this is an old story: invading another nation on the guise of ‘protecting’ the people in that nation who speak your language?  This is an old game for the Russians: Georgia in 2008; Czechoslovakia in 1967/68; Hungary in 1954.  But they learned it from another master, Adolf Hitler.  Look up the invasion of the Sudetenland in 1939, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in the name of protecting ethnic Germans.  Now, do you understand enough history to realize that there are other commonalities between these events aside from the excuses given to invade sovereign countries?  There are, and Obama is repeating one of them as you read this post.  But, if you do not know and understand history, you will not see what Obama is doing – or more accurately – failing to do.

In all the events I named, the West sat by and did little more than threaten.  But more than that, in every case I listed in the paragraph above, the West had an active hand in bringing about the circumstances that led the invader to believe they could get away with using force against another nation.  Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland is a very good example.  It was Wilson’s meddling in European affairs as a result of the Allied victory that set up the German invasion in 1939.  Had Wilson been half as smart as he thought himself to be, he would have seen what anyone who knew and understood European history should have seen: that beating Germany down to prevent another war only insured that another war would be inevitable.  You just need to understand the German people and history up to that time to see that this should have been obvious.  But the Allies were too focused on vengeance, and Wilson was too enamored with his own sense of genius to see that they were sewing the seeds of WW II.

Now, we see this cycle repeating all over again.  Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney (among many others) tried to warn Obama and the American people in general that Russia was going to invade Ukraine.  Our weakness on the global stage only encouraged it.  And now that Russia has invaded – in the name of protecting Russian speaking people – Obama is playing out the second part of the Western mistake: he’s doing nothing but casting transparent threats at the Russian bear.  This has happened in the past — and is happening now — because the Western leaders simply do not live in the real world.  They have convinced themselves that things actually work according to their theories, and that this places them in some sort of magical position to control the tides of history.  They were wrong in the past, they are wrong now — and for the same reasons.  But then, that is the problem with those who seek to control others with their mind (i.e. manipulation and coercion) rather than the sword.

 So, as history repeats itself, I will leave you with a picture of the problem that allows it to do so: