History:
Are we doomed to repeat it? Can we ever fathom it?
The Confounding
Tyranny of History (Sol, Portugal)
"Confronted
with the past, we tend to rationalize everything that happened as if it perforce
had to have happened. The great religions - with a provident and all providing
God - and the great historical determinism of, for example, Marxism, pushed people
onto these paths … codified in seductive prose with the subtle threat that people
who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. ... From this tendency to rationalize also comes the temptation to seek the roots of the present in the past, not admitting to the possibility of alternatives and neglecting the potential future of paths marginalized by the march of history."
Confronted with the past, we tend to rationalize everything
that happened as if it perforce had to have happened. The great religions -
with a provident and all providing God - and the great historical determinism
of, for example, Marxism, pushed people onto these paths - paths that the reactionary
conservative French of the second half of the 19th Century - Ernest Renan, Hippolyte
Taine, Maurice
Barrès, Charles Maurras
- codified in seductive prose with the subtle threat that people who ignore
history are doomed to repeat it.
Countering this line, Nietzsche tried to
destroy - and partly succeeded - the good and evil of 2,500 years of Western
philosophy and religion, in which the Logos - divine
or human - gave meaning to history and the lives of men. A sense that, starting
with the Gospels, to Thomas
Aquinas, to the humanists
and even to their secular successors in the Enlightenment, was
synonymous with progress. Friedrich
Hegel, a master conservative and revolutionary, explained it this way: "All
that is real is rational and all that is rational is real."
From this tendency to rationalize also comes the temptation
to seek the roots of the present in the past, not admitting to the possibility
of alternatives and neglecting the potential future of paths marginalized by
the march of history. Like Theseus, we
are afraid of losing the thread given by Ariadne,
and in this perdition, losing reason, we allow ourselves to be devoured by the Minotaur
of any obscure past.
For in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, to change or determine the
course of history, all the stakeholders, victims and murderers had to be there:
Archduke
Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie
Chotek, the wrong driver and GavriloPrincip. And the driver had to make a mistake
along the way and turn down a barren lane where waiting was the disillusioned
assassin. It was a tragedy of errors that put us into a labyrinth of possible
futures - our future.
The shots in Sarajevo would be the engine (we were in the
time of machines) that would set in motion the next 50 months that would lead
to the deaths of roughly ten million people, end four empires - the
Austro-Hungarian, the German, Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman - and launch a
class revolution in Russia that would trigger, by contagion and reaction, other
revolutions and counter-revolutions.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
The proletarian dictatorship of the Bolsheviks would contribute
to the victory of the Italian fascists and the dictatorships and authoritarianism
of the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans and Central Europe; and almost 20 years
later, to Hitler gaining power in Germany. By that time, in 1933, Joseph Stalin
was already leader of the Soviet Union and had begun the Great Purge.
Out of the confrontation of these totalitarian regimes was born
the European civil wars and World War II, which would cause the world - civilian
and military - six or seven times the ten million deaths of the first great war,
and carnage and crimes worthy of the narratives of antiquity.
