History Offers Valuable Lessons

To the Editor:

There are reasons we were required to take history in school. One is so that, in the case of negative things in history, you might make wise decisions and not help history repeat itself. Stick with me to see how that works.

There are those that think war is cool. They watch war movies avidly. They try to imitate the heroes of the film. They have a problem. On the other side, there are those that are against war. That is understandable. General Sherman said, “War is Hell.” He was right. But it is sometimes necessary. Even God ordained wars when He sent the Israelite people against evil nations to exercise his judgment on them.

I understand that some people do not like the fact that, in these times, we are in other countries taking down terrorist leaders and defeating their armies. But why are we doing it?

History lessons

Maybe for this. There was a time when as a nation we did not pay much attention to what was going on in other countries. We were too busy trying to repair our economy after a long stretch of problems, starting with 650,000 Americans being killed by the Spanish Flu. That was followed by the Dust Bowl. Most folks do not understand the devastating effect that had on the food supply in the U.S. for several years. On the tail of that was a 10-year depression that makes the total number of homeless and hungry we have now seem, insignificant.

Then on December 7, almost our entire Pacific Fleet was destroyed by a country that wanted to take ours away from us. It took four years of fighting to solve the problem. We recognize it on Pearl Harbor Day. That is history that we do not want to see repeated. These things, are one reason we study history and keep it in mind for guiding us going forward. As in, maybe we do need to, in advance, be weeding out terrorist groups bent on destroying us before one Sunday morning we wake up to news of another Pearl Harbor or 9-1-1 event.

Another lesson

Here is another look at history. There was a country that had the same economic problems we had, which I mentioned above. A man with unique leadership skills came up with a plan on how to get things straightened out for his country. He even wrote a book on it. People liked what he had to say.

He developed a large following of folks that thought he could do nothing wrong. They blindly followed him because he made them think he was going to make their country great again. They did not see how he slowly destroyed their justice department, took control of the news media by putting out fake news, negated the country’s constitution and made policies that favored the rich, widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.

He tried to control every aspect of the government and got rid of anyone who even suggested he might be doing something wrong. Many working for him had short-lived careers.

He also tried to blame the country’s ills on a particular ethnic group and incited the people against them. He enlisted a group of bullies and used them to do the dirty work of intimidating those against him by beating them or flat-out killing them.

They had little training but thought they were big stuff. They were known as the Brown Shirts. Perhaps you would understand them better if you think of White Supremacists in our country.

I don’t think we want that kind of history to repeat itself. You can read about it in your old high school history book. The organization was a right-wing conservative group called The Third Reich. The leader went by the name of Hitler.

Remember history, so the bad stuff does not happen again. Use your mind. Pay attention to what is going on around you. Make wise choices.

Dick Ford

Martinsburg

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