History as a Kaleidoscope

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]What you said a minute ago, George, is very true.

[00:00:04]Uh we are living in a an age of amnesia, history is so poorly taught. When it is taught, it's ideologically loaded that many young people have almost no idea of the realities of 19th century life or for that matter the realities of 1950s geopolitics, which is a lot more recent.

[00:00:30]It's funny that it was in 1956 that the sewers crisis happened and simultaneously a rising against Soviet control was crushed uh by the Red Army.

[00:00:48]You might say that the history isn't repeating itself here, which of course Mark Twain never said. Mark Twain never said that history repeats itself, but it rhymes. That is a madeup quotation. What Mark Twain said was that the the past was like looking through a kaleidoscope, one of those toys we used to have before the invention of uh the internet. As you turned it, he said, the patterns would change, but they would sometimes recur.

[00:01:23]So, what's happening at the moment is a bizarre echo of 1956.

[00:01:28]The United States has gone to war in the Middle East with Israel to try to change a regime.

[00:01:39]In 1956, it was Egypt. It was Nasser's Egypt.

[00:01:44]And the unintended consequence was the closure of a strategic waterway, which was the Sewish Canal. And the economic consequences caused the entire enterprise to unravel because the allies of uh the United Kingdom, which is what I should have said, the allies of the United Kingdom did not support the endeavor.

[00:02:05]It's 2026, 17 years, 17 years later, the United States has gone to war with Israel to achieve regime change in Iran and a strategic waterway has been closed.

[00:02:15]One of the things that made the sewers crisis so painful was that it coincided with the great Hungarian attempt to break free from Soviet control and its crushing uh was one of the things that most concerned uh the administration of Dwight Eisenhower.

[00:02:37]But when history's kaleidoscope turns, there are differences always. There's never an exact match. It's not yet clear if the American intervention in Iran will fail the way the British intervention in Egypt did.