A page out of the history books

I like history. I used to hate it in high school, not to mention when I was taking IB history. Years after graduating from high school I came back to visit the old stomping grounds (which, unfortunately is gone and been since rebuilt). I dropped by my history teacher's room to say "hi." This was somewhere in 2002 after international relations were going nuts. After 9/11, North Korea declaring that it was pulling out of the NPT and international relations were in a total stir. I told him that after studying all that (painful) history at the time that I've come to appreciate the intricacies and the level-headedness needed to look at history. He told me "if I had a dime for every student that came back and told me that, I'd have enough to retire several times over."History is very fascinating because we see it happening over and over again. Just with different people and whatever new toys that engineers and scientists come up with over the time.

And so, here I was at about 10:00 am, reading the news at the BBC when I came across this article: France accepts Trafalgar Legacy if you don't know this event, don't feel so bad, neither did I until I read the article. The long and sort of it is, 200 years ago when Britian and France were at war (and hell they were at war a number of times for really long periods too if you remember your history) the British crushed the French navy at the battle of Trafalgar with the French losing 10,000 men out of 15,000. Fast forward 200 years later, the British are celebrating their historical victory and the French? Well they're sending their biggest air craft cruiser to the party to observe. And so, history is history. Yeah still the Brits and the French are still thorns in each other's sides politically, but according to the article as silly as their governments can get sometimes, they're still friends.

Considering how much history humanity has, it could be hard to imagine how everyone is getting along. Everyone's probably been to war with everyone else at one point in time. The Romans steamrolled over all of Europe, so did the Mongolians. The Greeks used to be a powerhouse and the French with Napoleon had their little run at European continent too. In the 1900s there was WW1 with the Russians, Germans, French and comapany. There was WW2 with Japan and Germany getting clobbered by the rest of the world after the US finally stepped in. But for the most part after 50 years most countries are getting along fine.

I mean look at Germany, they're part of the EU now, no hard feelings right? 60 Years later, the Japanese, Chinese and the Koreans are still having issues. I think this is ironic... (and yes I love irony... because it is the simplest way of showing others how stupid things are) the Japanese and Chinese are having issues about history books and yet they failed to consider how the rest of the world dealt with things.

Some might think that I am just making a "hand waving argument here" that I am glossing over the trickier parts of international relations and that I'm over simplifying. But consider this: international relations in other parts of the world aren't any simpler. Humanity has had a long history, probably whatever we've done was done by someone else in one point of time. History does and will always "repeat."