The Madmen May Change, But The Headlines Don’t

Some things in history do repeat themselves

History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. Mark Twain originally wrote that. Or not. This being the post-truth age, his authorship, too, has been questioned. But some things in history do repeat themselves. The madmen may change, Putin today. Hitler then. But the headlines don’t. Over and over, some unbalanced autocrat manages to submit innocents to lunatic horrors on his way to victory.

I was researching the 1930s (long story), and there again was  Russia ravaging Ukraine. In 1932-33, Ukrainians endured Josef Stalin’s man-made famine. Millions died. The cruelty now fits the legal definition of genocide. Even as Stalin was torturing Ukraine, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were either about to or already were laying waste to humans in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

• You’ve got to be fundamentally crazy to do the things that Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao. Kim il-Sung, and Saddam Hussein, among scores of others, did. I think we need to accept that many – most?- autocrats are autocrats precisely because they are less than sane. It’s pretty obvious to their victims and even their peers. There’s also some science to the diagnosis. In 2011, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi of Tufts University laid out the clinical links between even our less horrible leaders and mental illness.

But then we forget them, even excuse them. Someone makes the case that what they did wasn’t all that bad. Even as the lunatics themselves are making their case, enough people are fooled enough of the time to accept whatever threat the next autocrat tries to scare us with. Autocrats all achieve power the same way. Something – communism, secretive puppetmasters pulling the people’s strings, intellectuals, immigrants, etc – threaten to ravage our nations, our cultures, our religions, and souls. There is, of course, only one uniquely qualified man or woman who can stop it.

It’s said that humans can’t remember pain. We recall suffering pain, though not the pain itself. That, I imagine, is a wonderful thing. But we don’t remember how these obviously unbuttoned narcissists got in the position to cause the tragedies in the first place. Then, alas, these leaders proceed to go further around the bend  Over and over again, we make the same mistake of accompanying them.

Another repetitive phenomenon: when we face the next looming threat or complexity some leader has ginned up, we wistfully recall  “A Simpler Age” and “Good Old Days” that were neither simple nor good.

And as the tragedies in Ukraine (and China, Myanmar, Sudan, etc.) unfold, we might accept that there has never been a time when ginned-up political lies don’t successfully compete with truth and sanity, much less decency. But you get the idea. Abroad and at home, sanity once again seems to be on a losing streak. Too many of us still believe the bad guys’ absurdities and pretend we haven’t heard the same things before. It remains a mystery why we’re more willing to reveal the lies in other lands than the ones right here.