CONDEMNED TO REPEAT HISTORY: 1933 to 2026

Through this cartoon Herblock originated the term McCarthyism.

It was as if we, Peter Levitt, poet and Buddhist teacher, and I were sitting together on the patio in Topanga looking out through the trees to the meadow, or we were on his porch in Salt Spring looking down the slope of the hill to the lake, as we have done so many times over the course of our friendship which began in the early 80s. That’s a long time to sit in conversation, allowing the practice of speaking what matters, to develop. This time, it was Peter who asked the question from which the impact of what had occurred at Daré, on Sunday March 22, rose up in me to be told.

This morning, beginning to write this piece after reading the morning news, I am alarmed again that we have a mad President. This is not an epithet, it is a grave truth, not sufficiently understood in its origins, implications and consequences to prevent us from collaborating in destroying our world. A mad leader happened before in 1933. We can learn this from history.

I remember my trepidation when I first became aware of the vuelos de la muerte in Argentina, Chile, Columbia and Guatemala, from the late forties through the nineties, which had been preceded by death flights of French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers, 1957. As a young woman, I often imagined myself a child witnessing such cruelty and I knew then the world would be permanently affected by that horror.

Since those years, we have accommodated to extreme violence – even regularly invoke it as our entertainment and so also profit from it – while much of the world is living in rubble, poverty and terror. Additionally, the few are luxuriating in gross opulence and the majority are obsessed with achieving and supporting lifestyles that our planet cannot possibly accommodate.

I am not holding a naïve question when I ponder why we do not grasp the consequences of what we do and do not do. There is no simple answer. For myself, the failure to viscerally identify with, empathize with, the extremity of particular and individual suffering, with all the instances of global war trauma, is one of the reasons we are in peril.

While Elon Musk says empathy is the failure of western civilization, I think the opposite; the failure of empathy is, indeed, civilization’s failure. Hopefully, you have read and entered the meditation on identifying with war-wounded Earth and with the war-wounded natural world, in my last Substack essay, If Earth is Living: The Ways of Ecocide. Perhaps you are breaking the pattern of disconnection.

As Daré was created so we can speak among ourselves about what matters, I was reflecting that we are in War, in unending vicious situations. Does this not require us to undertake the practice of feeling into the current nightmares?

Then someone who is a Protector, spoke. A Protector is someone who currently delivers food to frightened immigrants or drives immigrant children to school because their parents can’t go out, or have been detained or deported. They said that the unexpected advice given to them if they saw ICE approaching their car, was to throw their phones into a body of water before being required to give up the phones to ICE which wants names. Many illegal detainees report that that they were told by the Federal agents, if they give the names of their associates, they, themselves, will be immediately released. Extracting names is one of the central demands of fascism and the intent of torture.

The dangers of being a Protector and a peacemaker became evident and so became the subject of our concern. Then I asked a question, a bit tongue-in-cheek, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a peacemaker?”

The question fell flat. A few people indicated they understood why I had asked it in that particular way but the majority did not recognize the phrase. I knew then that despite education and experiences, few have a full understanding of what we are in today because there is no visceral understanding of what transpired in our country between 1947 to 1960.

Peter, of course knew that the origin of my question was the question posed to educators, unionists, Hollywood screen writers etc., called by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the late forties and fifties, to answer the intimidating question: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” These hearings led to blacklisting, mass firings and national distress.

Fortunately for us, on Sunday, one of the participants was the daughter of a blacklisted Hollywood writer, an Oscar winner. Her early years were spent in exile while her father struggled for work. She was able to explain that period in American life and we could takeit in because one of our kin had suffered it. A living history.

(Aside: Roy Cohn, who was Trump’s mentor in Trump’s early business dealings, came into prominence while prosecuting the Rosenbergs. He was also McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army McCarthy hearings and an informal advisor to Richard Nixon.)

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Peter and I lamented the national and global consequences of not having consciousness, despite having information, about our collective history. We both remembered George Santayana’s crucial statement:  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Let’s pause.

It seems evident that violence leads to trauma and trauma leads to violence, the one escalating the other. The practice of empathy, an aspect of remembering and understanding history, may be a bitter but necessary medicine.

Once again, it really is in each of our hands.

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