My guess is that just about any reader willing to pay attention to the texts on this site is well acquainted with the aphorism, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” This is one of those examples of the text being more familiar than the source, the source being the philosopher George Santayana, whom I first encountered when writing a high school term paper about Bertrand Russell. This morning my memory was triggered while I was browsing through the Al Jazeera Web site and found a NewsFeed Web page with the headline “Schumer slams Trump over Iran war.” This is a video summarized by a single sentence:
‘A recipe for utter disaster.’ Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has slammed President Donald Trump’s handling of the war on Iran, accusing him of repeating past mistakes without a clear strategy.
Mind you, expertise in history is not necessarily a prerequisite for holding any political office, particularly one selected by the electoral process; but these days, whether I am reading about the news or watching accounts on television, I keep feeling that I have already “seen the movie” and know that the ending is seldom a happy one.
