History: Doomed to repeat it, and repeat it

ON the same night that I watched a television program about the English massacre of Pequot Indians in 1637, I had been reading about the Sunni slaughter of 78 Shiite Muslims, and I realized how little we have learned from history.

If you look on today’s world as a village and its segmented groups of human inhabitants as tribes, you come to understand that we’re still killing each other for the same stupid reasons, whether it’s for territory, religion or cultural differences.

Given the hatred and the opportunity, and fed by hysteria, tribal confrontations escalate too often into genocide, which is the deliberate mass murder of an entire race of people. All it takes is a perceived insult, an assassination or a raving maniac to lead to the murder of hundreds or thousands or millions.

Only over a passage of centuries when memory becomes history do we regard with horror the madness that once spurred us to butchery.

The TV show, one of a series called “10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America,” was a History Channel dramatization of an attack by English settlers on a Pequot Indian fort that killed 500 men, women and children, and all but eliminated the Pequots as a tribe.

It was the first of many wars between the whites and the people we now call Native Americans in linguistic atonement for stealing their land, their culture and their heritage. It’s our way of dismissing decades of brutality with an airy, “Sorry about that.”

True to the obsessive nature of power, five centuries later, armed with considerably more sophisticated weaponry, we have taken a newer brand of Pax Americana into Iraq, theoretically to topple a dictator and to bring peace as we know it to the troubled land.

The result of our incursion has been not only the deaths of about 2,300 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, but has also stirred up civil war between the two Muslim sects. God is fighting God on the sands of the Middle East, and all the villages on the globe are beginning to take sides again. One can only guess where it all might lead.

You don’t have to be a historian to realize what has been taking place in the world since the Pequot massacre. Within the framework of modern memory are genocidal episodes so wildly surreal that, reduced to the white pages of history, it seems that they never could have happened -- until the 11 o’clock news reminds us that the kinds of hatreds that fuel racial, religious and ethnic wars are still going on.

In the 20th century alone, Turks have slaughtered Armenians; Nazis have murdered Jews; Hutus have butchered Tutsis; the Khmer Rouge has slaughtered Cambodians; and Serbs have murdered Muslims. Have I missed any? Probably.

If we dug into the frozen soil of Russia, we would find the graves of peasants murdered by Stalin in the name of power. If we dug into the red clay soil of Dixie, we would find the graves of blacks murdered in the name of racial domination.

Today, as we view our planet from space, we are coming to realize that we are only one among perhaps billions of tight little balls drifting through eternity toward an uncertain end. We are still seeing the same tribal wars that were probably taking place in the time before human history, through the Stone Age to the Iron Age and into the Nuclear Age. Wooden spears have evolved to atomic fusion. The tiniest elements of human knowledge have potentially become the deadliest manufacturers of human carnage.

I’m not really sure how a television show translated into a feeling that mankind is staring down into the abyss of our future. It just seems that we’ve always been at the mercy of leaders too limited in vision or wisdom to understand who we are and the consequences of what we do.

In 1637, it was John Endicott, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who organized an army to slaughter the Pequots. Today, it’s George W. Bush, president of the United States, who gathered an army to invade a sovereign nation in the name of a nonexistent threat; it’s an effort that brings new pain to a world already screaming in agony.

And the new historians prepare to write it all down for people who don’t read, don’t understand what they do read or don’t much care about it anyhow. One is compelled to echo the cry of the young radio reporter 69 years ago when he watched the Hindenburg go down in flames. It still applies:

“Oh, the humanity!”

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.