Ignoring History

The famous quote "Those Who Ignore History Are Bound To Repeat It" or versions thereof, variously ascribed to Santayana or Burke, has been around for several centuries. Isn't it interesting how relevant this admonition is today? Consider several examples:

For hundreds of years, ending in the early 19th Century, pirates were the scourge of the seas, particularly off of North Africa--the infamous Barbary Coast. Finally, after decades of ransom paying by European nations, the fledgling US Marines finally wiped out the Barbary pirates in 1815 thus causing the phrase "...to the shores of Tripoli " to be included in the Marine hymn.

Then for the better part of the next 200 years, "pirates" were romanticized in the minds of the public, beginning with the classic Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera "The Pirates of Penzance" (which contains the most parodied song ever "I am the very model of a modern Major-General"), then onto Capt. Hook from Peter Pan, numerous sports teams using "Pirates" as sort of a benign nickname and finally Johnny Depp as a dandified captain in "Pirates of the Caribbean". The emergence of real latter day pirates, this time Somalis off the East Coast of Africa, received relatively little publicity until the recent dramatic rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips. Shipping companies and some governments paid ransoms instead of doing something to stop this practice. Ignoring history has increased the price of combating this scourge, which at least is finally receiving overdue attention.

Attention has not been lacking on another scourge--financial fraud. But again history has been ignored. A lot of people think that Charles Ponzi invented such frauds in the 1920's. But he was actually a small timer, preying mostly on the most vulnerable segments of society. 65 years earlier in 1855, when Dickens wrote "Little Dorrit" (now an excellent Masterpiece Theatre series) he portrayed the British aristocracy as being taken to the cleaners by a smooth, trustworthy, hard to approach (sound familiar?) con man eerily similar to Bernie Madoff, who of course preyed on a modern day "aristocracy" of sorts. The fictional counterpart was named Merdle, which is probably the original family name of Madoff, before it was de-anglicized to better identify with the majority of his victims. There obviously were real life models for Merdle, as well as for numerous other crooks who continue to fool people, all of whom ignore history at their peril.

Finally, the real history of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, involving a bailout of the East India Company (really!), was largely ignored on April 15, with the ubiquitous "tea parties" organized largely by Fox News to complain about taxation without representation. That was obviously valid three years prior to the Declaration of Independence, but wasn't there just a fair, democratic election? And worst of all, the "spontaneous" protesters ignored a modern day British (vulgar) usage of "teabagging" referring to a sensitive part of the male anatomy. Easy to ignore when you know nothing.