He Who Wins, Writes the History

“History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns will not forget, either in those events, or in the era of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of mankind.” – Edmund Burke

            As the statement reads, history is an extremely accurate record of all of our actions. How we read and understand history is critical of how the future is shaped, or in the cases of certain cultures and generations, if the same history would repeat itself. Burke points to the French Revolution as a turning point not only for France, but also for the majority of the world which consisted of Europe, a few countries in Asia, and a colonial America that only earned independence ten years earlier. Without a revolution of any sort, the world continues to rotate in a chaotic fashion and the original revolutionaries eventually become conservative toward any change. For instance, the children of Louis and Antoinette were forced to watch their parents beheaded by the Napoleon-led commoners.

            For us Christians in America, history indeed repeats itself as a result of what sin we have supposedly obliterated with a “we’ll never do it again” and then turn around to magnify the same misdeed ten times over. It comes in different forms of transgression, and while each is worse than the previous as a result of knowing better, the opportunity for forgiveness remains. Hence, for history to repeat itself, one must either be so complacent or ignorant of wrongdoing that there is no turning back.