Americans have not learnt the lessons of history

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Sun, 2 Oct 2005 21:10:53 -0700 (PDT)

Americans have not learnt the lessons of history

 

 

 

Americans have not learnt the lessons of history

 

By Niall Ferguson

Telegraph.co.uk

10/04/2004

 

 

 

Around this time last year I had a conversation in Washington that

summed up what was bound to go wrong for America in Iraq. I was

talking to a mid-ranking official in the US Treasury about American

plans for the post-war reconstruction of the Iraqi economy. She had

just attended a meeting on precisely that subject. " So what kind of

historical precedents have you been considering? " I asked. " The

post-Communist economies of Eastern Europe, " she replied. " We have

quite a bit of experience we can draw on from the 1990s. "

 

 

 

 

 

When I suggested that the problems of privatisation in Poland might

not prove relevant on the banks of the Euphrates, she seemed

surprised. And when I suggested that she and her colleagues ought at

least to take a look at the last Anglophone occupation of Iraq, her

surprise turned to incredulity. Not for the first time since crossing

the Atlantic, I was confronted with the disturbing reality about the

way Americans make policy. Theory looms surprisingly large. [...] The

lessons of history come a poor second, and only recent history -

preferably recent American history - gets considered.

 

 

 

 

 

There was amazement last year when I pointed out in the journal

Foreign Affairs that in 1917 a British general had occupied Baghdad

and proclaimed: " Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as

conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. " By the same token, scarcely

any American outside university history departments is aware that

within just a few months of the formal British takeover of Iraq, there

was a full-scale anti-British revolt.

 

 

 

 

 

What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of

1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. [...]

 

 

 

 

 

Comment: Freedom can be defined in terms of the level of ability to

interact in a real and meaningful way with life and the world around

us. Freedom is nothing if it is not freedom to know and understand

truth and reality. The closer we can get to an objective view of true

reality the freer we are. Conversely, the further we are from a true

understanding of reality, the less we are able to interact in a

meaningful way with life, and the more enslaved we are.

 

 

 

 

 

Far from being a land of opportunity where persecuted peoples the

world over could find refuge and realise their dream of creating the

first truly free and egalitarian society, with hindsight it seems that

modern America was designed, from the very beginning, to be a vast

Petri dish for an experiment to create a nation of people that would

willingly submit their will to the ruling elite to an extent never

before seen in modern times, while at the same time believing

themselves to be the living embodiment of personal freedom.

 

 

 

 

Of course, such a grand plan could not be accomplished overtly or by

the use of force, since the key to success was in creating an

environment where the people themselves would fight to maintain their

own state of enslavement. The most obvious and natural way to achieve

this was to make lies and illusion the foundation of modern American

society and the yardstick by which the American people define

themselves. The battle then was for control of the minds of the

American people.

 

 

 

 

As infants we know nothing of reality, as we grow we undergo a process

of socialisation, from which we obtain our sense of who we are, our

values, our sense of morality and, perhaps most significantly, our

education. All of these things are given to us at a stage in our lives

when we have no ability to choose if we truly want them or not. By the

time we are old enough to make " independent " choices about what to do

with our lives we have already been so programmed to view the world in

one specific way, that there is literally nothing independent about

any choices we might make from then on. This process of socialisation

then is crucial in defining our view and understanding of reality.

 

 

 

 

While morality, values and sense of self are all important for our

development as conscious responsible human beings, we will not get far

without at least a semi-objective understanding of the world in which

we live. As a result of the dire level of education offered to the

average American citizen, their understanding of the world outside the

borders of their " great nation " is virtually nil, or distorted to such

an extent that they would probably be better off if it were nil. Of

course, such a state of affairs is without doubt deliberately

contrived by those that set the educational curriculum. Humans by

their nature have an inherent need to understand, yet we also tend

towards egocentricity and fear of the unknown. This aspect of human

nature has been used against Americans to great effect in securing

their participation in their own enslavement.

 

 

 

 

By denying most Americans access to good quality education the ruling

elite are able to play on this fear of the unknown and make Americans

very susceptible to xenophobic propaganda and the idea that their

country is the definition of freedom. Of course, when your have little

or no awareness or appreciation of other cultures or peoples (at least

none that is based in reality), it is much easier to allow yourself to

be convinced that your country is the " greatest nation on earth " and

that other nations and peoples are somehow lesser. The level of

deception is so deep and the illusions so engrained that few Americans

know or would be willing or able to accept that their " great nation "

stands tall only because it stands on the corpses of 80 million native

American Indians who had to be sacrificed to create the world's first

" free and democratic nation. " It seems that the ability of modern

Americans to appreciate irony is another casualty of the grand

American enslavement experiment.

 

 

 

 

While on one level it is true that America became a home for a

diversity of racial types and cultures, any potential benefits of this

eclecticism were subverted through the promotion of an internal

xenophobia, and all original cultures were forced to give way to the

hollow " benefits " of a homogenous yet soulless American " culture " .

 

 

 

 

It is not hard to see how the ignorance and fear of other cultures and

the ethnocentricity that is rife in American " culture " readily gives

rise to indifference among Americans when their leaders are seen to

carry out acts of cruelty and inhumanity against other peoples. Of

course, there are US citizens who, even when made aware of the

deception and lies that have lead them to support the atrocities

carried out in their name by their leaders, will continue to support them.

 

 

 

 

 

The real tragedy is that there appears to be a large number of US

citizens who, even at this late stage, remain unwitting victims of the

insidious and incredibly pervasive mind programming that defines

American society and culture. If given a chance, they might choose to

stand up for truth, yet the fact that they have never known even

simple truth, and never admitted that are being lied to, makes the

task of recognising and accepting deeper truth all the more difficult,

if not almost impossible. One wonders then why we would even try to

convey these ideas to our American readers? The reason of course is

that there is no other option. We have to hope that, even against odds

that were not included in our expectations, the seed of love for the

truth exists and will finally spring forth.

 

 

 

 

Nothing short of an intense and deliberate effort to SEE the truth of

the perilous situation is required, if we are to hope that the bonds

of mental (and soon to be physical) enslavement can be broken, and the

chance to act for our own collective destinies secured.

 

 

 

 

As Gurdjieff commented:

 

" The white man knows, as it were, nothing about the ways of life

which are not his own. The world-wide diffusion of western

civilisation has protected him better than ever before from having to

take seriously that of other peoples.The uniformity of behaviour and

the general outlook which he sees are prevalent everywhere seem to him

sufficiently convincing and he accepts without further ado the idea of

a simple equivalence between human nature and his own cultural standards. "

 

 

 

 

In Order to shake off the contemptuous ignorance and prejudices

which still exist in contemporary man, a certain disorientation seems

necessary at the outset. He needs to feel the full blast of a gale

force wind and to submit to the shock of enquiry, which runs counter

to all his habitual ways of thinking and his ethical beliefs. If his

instinct for self preservation, or concern for his intellectual

comfort do not hinder him too much, he has some chance of then

discovering in himself and echo of these ways of thinking and of

feeling which are so unfamiliar to him, and which will resound in him

not as a menacing frustration but, the very opposite, as an

enrichment, a broadening of his field of experience. - " In Search of a

Living Culture " - Lecture by Henri Tracol, 1961, Aix en Provence, France