When you are not familiar with history, it is possible to find yourself in the position of the British and French kings of the time of the revolutions. Something similar happened to Trump. Putin is also facing this danger. By E. Dainov.
"In order to produce people capable of making a significant contribution to society", wrote the great British educator John Henry Newman in 1852, "they must be scholars of history and literature, who will acquaint them with the moral evil that befalls fallen human beings."
Dictatorship-minded individuals, besides being fallen human beings, are familiar with neither history nor literature. That is why all dictators repeat the mistakes of their predecessors, which is why most of their dictatorships do not survive them.
The King and Taxes
Unlike Donald Trump, for example, Newman understood the deep meaning of the British, American and French revolutions - those profound transformations that ultimately lead to the democratic order in which we are fortunate to (continue to) live. And this meaning rests on taxes: who collects them, from whom they are collected and on what they are spent.
The English Revolution, known as the "Civil War", began the moment King Charles I became acquainted with the legal restrictions imposed on the money (collected from taxes) that Parliament gave him. Charles refused: how could some commoners limit his sovereign will? Parliament, in turn, erupted: no one can break the law, no matter who the king is. A revolution follows.
A hundred years later, something similar happens in America, then a British colony. The British king increases taxes, but refuses to promise any autonomy to his American subjects in return. A revolution follows. Taxes again - and more precisely, the refusal of the aristocrats to start paying them - are also at the heart of the French revolution, which took place a generation after the American one.
What Trump is doing
Donald Trump probably hasn't heard of any of this. And suddenly he finds himself in the position of the British and French kings from the time of the revolutions. We are talking about his order, which these days has stopped all payments "down" from the US federal budget, the so-called federal aid. The problem is that by law he is obliged to spend this money (collected from taxes), since Congress (parliament) voted for it and formed it into law. The president's job is to uphold the laws. But according to Donald Trump, he is not a regular president, but a king. His will is above the law. Literally: he does whatever he wants.
With his previous sudden ideas - deportation of migrants, dismissal of prosecutors, suspension of aid to other countries - Trump managed to avoid riots, because, although illegal, these ideas did not directly interfere with taxes.
However, his latest idea is "royal", because it does exactly that. And the rebellion at all levels in the US started - except, of course, with the Republicans in Congress, who demonstrate that flattery and fear are not a Bulgarian patent. However, everyone jumped in: governors, prosecutors, judges, civil organizations. And now, a federal court in Washington has temporarily blocked Trump's request to suspend federal aid.
Putin has apparently forgotten these important points
Trump's former friend - and lately not so much - Russian President Vladimir Putin also seems to ignore history and literature. If he had paid at least some attention to history, he would have known that Russia disintegrates relatively easily after losing an important war.
After the heavy defeat in the Crimean War, which began at the time when Newman wrote about the benefits of history, Russia was on the verge of collapse. Revolutionary unrest and peasant uprisings began. The collapse was postponed by the reforms of Alexander the Liberator, which, however, quickly sank into the Russian mud. To distract attention, in 1904 Russia went to war against Japan, which it lost within a few months. Then came the revolution of 1905, which was practically not suppressed and continued to smolder, despite attempts to tame things again with reforms, which, however, quickly stalled again. Then came the ignominious defeats of the Russian army in the First World War, followed by the October Revolution and the collapse of the empire. The Bolsheviks managed to reassemble it and were saved during the Second World War by massive aid from the British and Americans. However, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 followed, which led to another lost war and a new collapse of the empire, this time under the name of the USSR.
The most important thing that history teaches is this: every two or three generations, in the bowels of events, a powerful tide begins, pushing things in a certain direction; and there is no separate human will, be it that of a king or a dictator, that can stop this tide. And the least capable of stopping it are those kings and presidents who have no idea of either history or literature.
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This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the DW as a whole.