Those amongst the leftists in power who happened to have read a little bit of Marx will obviously claim that History is not written by individuals, but is rather the result of social evolution. It is the conflict of social forces that writes history.
The more one delves into studying the facts, the more it becomes clear that from the time of Cheops to Joseph Stalin, from Isaac Newton to Napoleon and the paranoid Hitler, historical developments are determined by people, even if they are schizophrenic criminals.
Quite often, protagonists in History will make unexplainable mistakes. They destroy themselves while historians lose track, unable to explain the unexplainable.
Many years ago, a professor at one of the finest American universities posed the following question: How can one explain the mistakes of “great men” who were ruined by their fatal mistakes? As examples she mentions Napoleon who ignored the Russian winter in his campaign, the Greeks who abandoned the Sangario resulting in the Minor Asia Catastrophe, Hitler who repeated Napoleon’s mistake with Russia etc…
The students gave their answers, but the professor dismissed all of them. She told them that the answer was quite simple. They were fools. They made their mistakes out of sheer, unadulterated foolishness.
There are many such examples of foolishness in our time, but they are not documented for obvious reasons. After all, the leaders of our time obviously have the time to prove that while they make mistakes, they are not foolish.
Especially when they have time ahead of them. Because ultimately, the end result is what matter and that is what defines everything in our past.
Stavros P. Psycharis
