We seem to have learned nothing from history!

I once got a book recommended by a client from a historian. I don't have the book anymore, but I think it was about the time of the Persian Wars and Alexander the Great. In any case, it became very clear to me that history repeats itself in variations. We as humanity have not evolved from an ethical point of view. The Ukraine war just shows us that again very clearly.

In this context from an article about George Orwell - I found most interesting and still totally up to date. Orwell was in the Spanish Civil War in a resistance militia:

In 1942 Orwell called pacifism "objectively profascist" and added: "This is quite largely uncontroversial. If you undermine one side's war effort, you automatically help the other. There is also no way to somehow stay outside of such a war as the present one."Pacifist propaganda was therefore "in other words, aiding and abetting totalitarianism."

Immediately after the end of the war and the Nazi capitulation, he wrote in his "Notes on Nationalism" that the majority of pacifists "either belong to peculiar religious sects, or they are simply humanists who refuse to take the life of anyone, and who reject any further consideration beyond this elementary principle. But there is a small group of intellectual pacifists whose real, yet unacknowledged, motive is hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism."

For, Orwell continues, pacifist propaganda makes it appear that it is usually limited to the simple assertion that some are as bad as others. But if you then read the publications of younger pacifists, you can easily see that they usually accuse Great Britain and the United States almost exclusively."

After all, today's discourse in connection with the Ukraine war is one hundred percent the same as described above. I wonder, therefore, why this is so and why we seem to be incapable of learning. I guess it has to do with the degree of our personal, psychic, spiritual - or whatever you want to call it, awareness. If we don't self-reflect, we simply act and react with our lower, selfish instincts.