News flash: History doesn’t care

Last updated on: May 18, 2015 at 6:35 pm by Jane the Actuary

News flash: History doesn’t care 2015-05-18T18:35:34-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Or maybe I should say, “history doesn’t give a rat’s a**”, except that it’s a bit wordier. But every now and again I feel the need to gripe about this. (Here’s my post from last year — and I thought I wrote something similar more recently but I can’t find anything.)

But you know you’ve heard this — not just from Obama, that Russia or ISIS is on the “wrong side of history,” for example, but with respect to any sort of Bad Guy who seems to have an advantage.

So let’s get this straight:

Yes, Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich was defeated — but not without millions of deaths. Yes, the Soviet Union is now in the dustbin of history, but, again, only after millions of deaths. Sometimes the good guys win. But sometimes they don’t.

Consider the Christians in Syria and Iraq: do you believe that, sooner or later, things will work out, even if things look pretty dire right now because: Right Side of History? Tell that to the Algerian Christians — well, if you can find them. Prior to the French colonialization in the 1800s and the arrival of (charitable) missionaries, the Christian Church in that area, which one numbered among its members St. Augustine of Hippo, had wholly disappeared in the late middle ages due to forcible conversion. (See Wikipedia) Or how ’bout Tunisia or Morocco? Libya and Egypt, at any rate, still have a certain population of Coptic Christians, but the Christian communities in the western half of North Africa vanished some centuries after the Muslim conquest.

History doesn’t care about right or wrong, or whose cause is more just. History just happens.

And in Syria and Iraq, the fact that ISIS is unspeakably monstrous — that doesn’t mean that somehow, inevitably, they’ll just fail all on their own, so we can sit on our thumbs.

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