Imperial Valley Press

Willis Thornton's
Editorial
On
History
May
Not Repeat,
But It Regurgitates

The glib saying that "history repeats itself" is a dangerous one, taken too literally. Certain it is that some things happen with a familiar ring and a dream-like feeling that "this has all happened before." But to argue "it happened thus once, therefore it must happen so today" is dangerous.

Nevertheless, we are all prone, preoccupied as we are with the tumbling events of our day, to feel that nothing like this ever did happen before; the world was never so topsy-turvy.

That simply is not true. Almost all people seem to have felt that their own times were out of joint. Hence it is interesting to turn for a moment from today's preoccupations to certain letters written in Paris in May of 1905. The writer was Henry Adams, who for 80 years bent his glacial gaze down from an ivory tower on what seemed to him a mad and brutal world.

In this May of 1905, Adams looked about him from Paris into what many people now look back to as a sort of recent "golden age" of peace and plenty. And this is what he reported to John Hay:

"I see precipices all round, and dread every morning to open a newspaper. The situation is frightfully dangerous. . . . Europe is an awful nightmare. It scares me."

Thus Henry Adams, 34 years ago. True enough, 10 years after he wrote, Europe was reeling in a death-struggle as mad as any he had foreseen. But it survived, after a fashion.

Is Hitler's drive for expansion some new, unheard-of dream which this man alone devised? Not at all. Adams, sitting in his quiet room in Paris, saw the same forces moving in 1905 that are on the move today.

"I hope," he wrote to John Hay, "France and England will try to let Germany have her way. As yet she has asked for nothing very serious. The time must come when she will ask for Holland or Austria or the Baltic provinces, or a strip of Poland. Her manners are almost as bad as those of England or France were, 100 years ago. . . yet war would be fatal to everyone, except perhaps to us: and victory would only raise greater dangers and more enemies. . ."

So a wise man reflected in 1905. And the war came which he foresaw, and was nearly fatal to everyone, even to us. And victory did raise only greater dangers and more enemies.

Now Germany again knocks at the world's door like a perennial Oliver Twist, demanding more. We are surprised and shocked. But we need not be. The world's troubles of today are only the grandchildren of the world's troubles of yesterday, and bear a striking resemblance to their parents.