Most of you have all heard the saying or its paraphrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” words actually written by George Santayana.

This concept has a special meaning now when special interests – those with an agenda – try to guide us in their direction. The special interests include plutocrats and their agents, principally the GOP.

I can think of two distinct directions they want to guide us, directions that can lead to future hardship, even death and destruction, for millions of people. I speak of an economic policy and of war. Both have historic events that should dissuade us, if we only remember them.

A stock market collapse and an archaic ideology brought a concept of economic austerity in the 1930s at a time when economic stimulus was needed. This brought the Great Depression in the pre-World-War-II period, causing a 25% unemployment rate. Completely ignoring this historical lesson is the conservative establishment speaking through the Republican Party and a few Democrats. The media parrots this “balanced-budget” message. Such a position completely ignores America’s development needs, prolonging unemployment, adversely affecting tens of millions worldwide.

The second misguided direction is championed by conservative elements in the Republican Party and the private defense industry, both having reason to beat the drums of war against Iran, even Syria. If the populace takes the time to reflect on past wars and their gruesome casualties, and especially the corrupt forces that pushed us into the last war in Iraq, we won’t repeat that mistake.

Unfortunately since only one-percent of us were involve in the last two wars and since no one was punished for lying us into the Iraqi War, it is easier to forget first the pain and suffering of war, and secondly the deception and hubris that led us there in the first place.

That is why you still have people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush and their allies hyping the war in Iraq as though they were the heroes who led the charge, glossing over the pain, suffering and death of millions over almost a decade of turmoil. In fact, the carnage continues now but without our presence.

In the US Senate during Senate hearings for Chuck Hagel’s appointment to Secretary of Defense, another apologist for the Iraqi War, John McCain, who should know better, tried to browbeat Hagel into admitting the war’s merits. McCain is even helping to stage an unprecedented filibuster against Hagel’s appointment to attempt to punish him for speaking against the war several years ago, a war McCain has always supported.

If the perpetrators of the war had been prosecuted and properly discredited, we wouldn’t have players like Dick Cheney still bragging, indeed, still lying about the need and necessity for the war, still casting glory instead of shame on the Bush administration’s Machiavellian imperialism.

Regrettably, we still see the GOP controlling the argument for budget cuts and austerity when orthodox economic policy shows a need for further stimulus, and the Great Depression showed the folly of a balanced budget during a period of high unemployment.

Furthermore, we still see neo-conservative proponents of the Iraqi War openly advising Republican foreign policy, Mitt Romney in the past election, for example, when instead, they should be testifying for their prior bosses in court, on trial for abuse of power.

Then the lessons of history might point us in the right direction: prosperity and peace.

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