Those Who Know History Are Doomed To Repeat It.

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I watched a doc on ISIS last night. These ISIS folks are doing their best to live exactly like Muslims lived a couple thousand years ago based on what they know of history. Even though they know history, they are determined to repeat it. The idea those who don't know history are doomed to repeat might be true too, but that isn't the entire story, is it?

Well I think the argument to do with history is essentially if you don't learn from the mistakes you did and see what you did wrong you are doomed to make the same mistakes again. And yes knowing history at the end of the day probably does create a kind of pressure to return back to a time in the past thought to be better. E.g because Isis knows their past with the caliphate it sees it as good to return back to that time.

The difference is choice.

Your post makes zero sense because you are lumping together two totally different kinds of "repeating the past".

When the philosopher Santayana said "those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it" he meant if folks ignore the mistakes of the ancestors then they will likely make the same mistakes as their ancestors (make wrong decisions, and get into wars, or whatever). He was talking about decisions and outcomes.

By "repeating the past" he did not mean adopting the lifestyle of the Amish in Lancaster County Pennsylvania who have a low tech life style that to us is "living in the past" ( but not "repeating [eventsof the} past").



ISIS (in much more evil and depraved way than the Amish) seeks to "live in the past" by forcing its members, and it reluctant subjects to live in a way that supposedly mimics a utopian past-that of the original Caliphate set up by Mohammed and his successors in the eight Century AD. But that has nothing to do with what Santayana was talking about when he talked about "repeating the past".

In fact its ironic that you use ISIS as an example of a group who "knows history" because part of the ISIS ideology (its extreme interpretation of Islam) is actually about obliterating history. Somewhere in Islamic scripture is the line "that which happened in darkness shall remain in darkness": meaning that any relic of the five thousand year history of the Middle East that predated the 1400 year history of Islam needs to be obliterated. That is why ISIS destroys historic buildings (Greek, Roman, Babylonian, etc) in areas it seizes, and why they say they will even "grind the pyramids to dust" if they take over Egypt. Not all Muslims ofcourse interpret Islam quite that way. And many brave Syrian scholars who happened to also be muslim have bravely attempted to save Syria's heritage from ISIS.