Seeing Things As They Are

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana (1863-1952)

I have just been granted a return to Facebook after being banned for 24 hours for "violating community standards" as it pertains to “hate speech” which “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence.”   According to Facebook’s posted community standards, “hate speech” is defined as “a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability. We also provide some protections for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation.”

Personally I have no objection to this definition. Yet somehow my posting of the philosopher George Santayana famous aphorism - “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” -  as it might apply to the current occupant of the Oval Office and his apparent ignorance of the dangers of Fascism is for Facebook a bridge too far.  I frankly do not see how this constitutes “hate speech” as defined in its community standards.

Santayana was not the first philosopher to address the concept of history repeating itself.   – Karl Marx (1818-1883) wrote “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” [German: “Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon), his essay originally published in 1852 in the German journal Die Revolution.  The American novelist and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910) is said to have stated that “history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes” although the source of this claim has never been corroborated.  It does, however, sound like something witty he might have said.  Santayana’s quotation can be found in The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense (1905).  In a 1948 speech before to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill paraphrased Santayana.  “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”  I have never come across any reference to these statements being considered “hate speech” in their time.   Surely it has not evolved as such today.  Or has it?  This is a simple reference to the idea of cause and effect throughout history.  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it . . . those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.  Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.  Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them . . . however you want to look at it.   

We as American, including our elected leaders and representatives have an obligation to know our history and the history of others in order to learn from them.  History helps us understand how the world as we know it today has come to be, and by studying it we are better able to learn from our mistakes and failures in order you avoid repeating them now and in the future.

It is a rather sad commentary on the time we live in if such an innocuous statement can be perceived and/or reported as “hate speech.”  Be that as it may.  I guess I am lucky I have not been banned before now.  Still, I call it the way I see it and will continue to speak truth to power.   To quote Santayana again . . . “"Only the dead have seen the end of war."   Let the good fight continue with a sound knowledge of the past.