Canada uses a politically correc

We're in an economic and financial mess. Most of us are scared and uneasy, and all we want to know is what comes next. Well, don't ask the historian.

People who study the past are no more likely to know what the future brings than people who read tea leaves. So, although it's true that severe economic downturns of the past may share certain similarities with today's crash, drawing conclusions from them to forecast what will happen is an almost worthless waste of energy.

History has been described as the nexus of character and circumstance. This description takes account of both the human factor in history (that history is the written record of human actions and that all humans are unique) and the fact that human action (or inaction) always happens in a particular time and place.

If this is true (and I believe it is), then each and every event in history is different because both the people who made (or allowed) the event to happen and the circumstances in which it happened were different. History, therefore, will not repeat itself. History might explain something of why we are where we are right now - and thus offer some guidance about what has worked in the past and what has not - it has virtually no predictive value.

Take the outbreak of wars. In the past 110 years, Canada has been involved in two world wars, the Boer War, the Korean War, the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, the Kosovo air war of 1999 and the war in Afghanistan. There is no similarity whatever in the way these wars began.

The First World War may be said to have been sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Was there a historian alive who might have written on June 27, 1914, that all of Europe would be in flames within six weeks? Possibly, but he/she remains unknown.

There were those who forecast that should another war come to Europe, it would be terrible and lengthy. Even members of the German general staff who launched the massive German attack through Belgium into France that brought Britain into the war, feared that, and also feared that Germany might well be destroyed in such a war. But they attacked anyway.

This is another reason why historians aren't particularly useful in helping to predict events.

Even when the history of an enterprise that ended in failure is well known and has been long studied, there is always someone who will try the same thing again. Barbara Tuchman, in her masterful book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, closely examined four such instances of what she called "the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest." In each case, history was clear that certain actions of political, military and religious leaders had led to disaster. Yet, a combination of hubris, self-hypnosis, cynicism and sheer bloody-mindedness led people to make the same stupid mistakes all over again. Or similar mistakes, anyway.

Take the folly of the Maginot Line. French generals concluded from the First World War that building a giant concrete and steel, heavily gunned trench would keep them safe from another German war. And yet, it was the French at the Battle of Verdun in 1916 who pioneered the tactics of manoeuvre that eventually overcame trench warfare. And it was a French general, Charles de Gaulle, who wrote one of the earliest books on armoured warfare.

Generals, it is often said, always tend to want to fight the last war instead of the current one. But generals are just people in uniform, and all people want to be guided by previous experience. The best generals are the ones who know they can't, and who constantly remember that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Or as some military men put it: "The enemy has a vote."

So who is the enemy? Life. Events. The sheer bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Plans always go awry because no one can predict outcomes with any certainty - except scientists who have done experiments and know that if X is added to Y, Z will result.

History isn't a science. Neither is economics, even though economists may think they do science with all the mathematical formulas they use to measure inputs and outputs.

There were a handful of economists and financial experts who forecast the current disaster, but there are other experts who believe that, if Lehman Brothers had not been allowed to fail last fall, the Dow would be no lower than perhaps 10,000 today. In that case, we would not be discussing the successful prophets of doom.

Ultimately, humans make things happen. Although some aspects of human behaviour are completely predictable - hunger, fear, etc. - specific human actions rarely are. And when they are, they never are with complete certainty.

Of course, in predicting that historians have no great claim to be able to predict anything, this very prediction must be called into question. I am, after all, a historian.

David Bercuson is director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

One Key Canadian Economic Cancer is the Politically Correct taboo towards mental health. Even our Judiciary require no psychological screening to become judges. The result? We have judges appointed to the bench who Abuse their powers, absolute power corrupts absolutely and those most prone to being corrupt are those with an underlying mental health problem and or personality disorder, that tends in the direction of being a psychopath, the symptom, a flagrant disregard for the economic and family destruction they leave behind.
Their solution is to attack those who criticize the judiciary.
Take Justice Allan Sheffield or Denis Power for example, they appear to have a sadistic satisfaction in depriving children of any relationship with their fathers. Thats child abuse which means the worst child abusers in society are not in jail, not on the sex abuser registry, now you find them on the list of Ontario Superior Court Judges, where they flagrantly disregard the Rule of Law and operate like Hitler and make decisions to put loving deserving fathers in concentration camps without a trial, and without the right of appeal or later variation. It is underbelly Corrupt judges like this that are costing Canada billions of dollars in lost productivity, damaged children and destroyed lives.
One symptom of their personality disorders is a chronic disregard for the long term repercussions to society and their own reputations. Their personality disorders cause them to think that they are all powerful, and beyond reach. The Judiciary need to recognize that we need a real judicial police force not the white washing face of JDC that we have today. Until that problem is solved, Canada will continue to be ridden with a mega-billion dollar economic and legal cancer that threatens Canada's future far more than any terrorist group. www.OttawaMensCentre.

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How long will this madness last? Don't ask the historian