Santayana Said it Best

How many times have you read or heard that fat, stupid Americans are ignorant of history, and therefore on a bumbling path to ruin? This is a good example of such tripe.

Meanwhile, the talking heads largely ignore, when they're not openly praising, those who really are on a path to doom well-trod by history. So when I opened my latest issue of The Economist today and read the latest about the evil despot Hugo Chavez in Venezuala, I thought of George Santayana's excellent admonition about those not knowing history being doomed to repeat it. Chavez's murderous thugs have now launched their effort to make land ownership "fair," by stealing it from those who own it now and giving it to others -- which is bad enough, but that they're giving it to hand-selected "peasant co-operatives" really makes the ol' alarms go off in the history department.

Okay, I could see how a poor country's peasants may not have heard of the collective farms of the Soviet Ukraine, or the Great Leap Forward in China, or even Pol Pot's magnificent repopulation of rural Cambodia (that is, with the Cambodians he didn't kill immediately). So maybe they don't know that the peasants in those co-operatives mainly ended up starving to death, in their uncountable and unimaginable millions. But for Pete's sake, Zimbabwe is pretty recent history, and the collapse of its previously productive farming capacity thanks to dictator Robert Mugabe's racism should be fairly well-known.

Ah, well. Santayana will again be proved right, and the peasants cheering for Chavez now will rue the day later -- at least the ones who survive. Here's more (and thanks to McQ at Q and O Blog, who shared my thoughts and did even better research.)