Musings

Harnessing History Heralds Hope for Humanity(12/24/07-THNT)

Harnessing History Heralds Hope for Humanity
by Aditya Raina

As the year draws to an end, the New Jersey State Legislature passed a monumental piece of legislation. On December 17, 2007 Governor Corzine signed into law a ban on the death penalty within the state of New Jersey. For the past several decades, the death penalty in NJ had seemed worthless being that it had not been implemented since 1963. Many within the state now saw it as an unnecessary practice. By passing the legislature, our state modelled the necessity of looking back as we move forward; by looking back and realizing that this immoral practice was dispensable, the state legislature was able to learn from history. Unfortunately, as our nation, and the world, progresses, the importance of this great teacher,history, is diminishing; we are no longer learning from the mistakes of yesterdays, and instead are allowing the vicious cycle of history to replay itself without any improvizations.



Yet, we can see some hope in the upcoming elections of 2008. After the long lasting blunders of President Bush, we see a new batch of candidates that are out to fix the problems, both Democrats and Republicans. No one, currently or in the future, can look over Bush's biggest blunder, the war in Iraq. This unnecessary infringement on the Iraqi sovereignty portrays our inability to learn from the past; in other words we committed what will go down in the books as The Gulf War II, or Bush Jr.'s war for his old man.
If one looks for more reasons for our failure in Iraq, one only needs to look farther back in history. Lately, many have been drawing parallels between the Iraq war and Vietnam War, and they have every right to do so. The American army is getting bogged down in Iraq, just like we were in Vietnam, while Iraq is spiralling into chaos and civil strife. However, even with the abundance of evidence showing that the war in Iraq is a lost cause, the current administration remains stubborn and refuses to admit its misjudgement. Whether it is the unpopularity of the war, or the war itself, one can easily see the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam; however, we refuse to use this knowledge from history to our advantage, and get out of the situation as quickly and as painlessly as possible.



In the past couple of years, environmentalism has become a heated subject, and the search for alternative fuels has been sparked. Nevertheless, some feel it is too little too late, and the damage to the environment is irreversible. Our soon-to- be- shortage- of- oil is another factor in our search for an alternative energy source, but some ask if our new found environmentalism is just need driven. A valid point, because it was not too long ago that coal and wood were major, if not the only, energy producers. Then it was seen that coal was terrible for the environment, and, at the rate our nation was going, timber would run out too. Pressured to find something new, humans found oil to be an even better alternative. Now, is it not ironic that we are in the same predicament with oil, except the stakes are even higher because our environment is in dire straits and at the breaking point.


Looking globally, one can see our historic mistakes around the world. Currently, the unrest in Pakistan has made headlines across the world; President Musharraf's implementation of martial law and emergency rule caused great civil unrest in his country, and confirmed many people's assertions that he is indeed more of a dictator than a president. However, what is ironic is that the democracy-spreading United States of America greatly supported and heavily endorsed this dictator, but only because he said he would help America in the war on terror. America's actions show the rest of the world that essentially America will turn a blind eye to your immoral and totalitarian actions if it is in its interest to keep you in power, something it has done before; one can always draw on history to bring out pitfalls that could have been easily avoided if we had just looked back. Just as we are doing in Pakistan with Musharraf, we did with the Taliban in Afghanistan, ironically Pakistan's neighbor to the north. Using the ideology that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, we supported the fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan in eighties, only because they were battling to get the Soviet Union, America's sworn enemy, out of Afghanistan. Some years later, the same Taliban became our worst nightmare!



During the Paris Peace Conference, at the end of WWI, President Woodrow Wilson was forging a peace treaty with the European powers; new territories had to be drawn, and colonies had to be redistributed as well. At this conference a man representing a French colony came to Wilson to beg him for the freedom of his colony; the man was willing to be forever loyal to America, but despite the man's entreaty Wilson refused to grant him his colony's freedom. We now know this man to be Ho Chi Minh, and his colony was that of Vietnam, the location of a later seven and a half year war! If back in 1918, we had given Vietnam its independence, the entire Vietnam fiasco could have been avoided. A minor event, decades prior to the actual war, lead to the war itself, and shows how failure of diplomacy, even such a small occurrence, can alter the course of history completely.



The power of history is immense, and by harnessing it we can in fact make our foresight stronger and avoid the predicaments we find ourselves in today. As the years pass, we must look back and see what we have done and what we are doing, and based on that determine what we should be doing.

posted by thethoughtless @ 11:42 AM