Never Again - Until Next Time

Amazing, isn't it, that an avidly-capable and learning animal like man seems functionally incapable of learning from prior experiences. We seem indeed destined to live and re-live experiences. It's as though history is mere theory, seen through the lens of someone else's tainted vision. It's as though credulity has been given a truly bad name. It's as though there's an inbred instinct never to learn, to listen to anything cautionary. We are destined, time and again, to live our errors.

Perhaps it starts when we're young and our parents, caring souls that they were, warned against certain activities that were certain to end in personal disaster. And our listening ears were affronted at this abrupt dismissal of our choices, our needs, our direction, the path we'd chosen, however pedestrian, however life-affirming, we'd think. So we'd surreptitiously seek to do whatever it was we wanted, then kept a stiff lip and a silent tongue about it afterward.

But did we learn from those early childhood experiences? Rarely. Transpose early experience of an individual to the collective experience of a group. Same thing portends. There are those among us who are professionals in reviewing the great events of the day, and who transpose their impressions of those events, and commit them to posterity, from the ancient writings of Herodotus and Josephus to modern historians.

We read these accounts avidly, and take unto ourselves the information they purvey about human nature, and the tragedy of human relations. We recoil in horror reading of the atrocities mankind is capable of delivering to its own. We wonder what in heaven's name would compel thinking, ostensibly intelligent human beings to lend themselves to the ungovernable, unforgivable theatres of war.

The human tradition is one of incremental technology, easing the way for those yet unborn to realize the fruits of their forbears' inventive capacity. The human tradition is one of reliable hostility one against the other, and the consequent prosecution of war, to tear down all those civil institutions that we have built to celebrate and enhance our lives. And each time one of these impulses to destroy and to kill has been brought to a conclusion, we hang our collective heads in the shame of remorse.

We'll never forget, we say. This will never happen again. This will surely be the very last of all wars; no one would want to live through a repetition. And we are, after all, civilized, mature civilizations, countries imbued with wealth and presence and conducting reasonably good relations with one another. Why succumb to hostilities? Yet we do. Sanity dissipates, into a fog of suspicion and anger.

After the Second World War when the world looked at the evidence of man's incalculable cruelty out of the ashes of the Holocaust, who didn't declare the end of war? We were finally cured. We'd never forget, and would never again do these unspeakable things to one another. And then there were the Pol Pot Cambodia massacres.

Followed by Rwanda, while the world looked on in disbelieving horror. And did, actually, nothing to stop it. Then there was Bosnia, and we tried. And then came Sudan. We care, we really do. But what to do? We wring our hands, demand action, prod the United Nations which then goes on to wring its hands and demand action from the government responsible.

Are we imprinted forever for genocidal slaughter?