If you are a student of William Butler Yeats (or Joni Mitchell) you will recognized the title as the first line of Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming, where the Irish nationalist forecast doom, even as the world was trying with all its might to put the horrors of the First World War behind it. Had more Germans read Yeats poem, perhaps 1934 would have looked different for that benighted country, which up until then, had in many ways led Europe and the world in being a progressive, permissive, and enlightened society.

Why 1934? It was the end of June, beginning of July of that year (Night of the Long Knives) when Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by his criminal coterie purged his party of dissidents. I won’t go into detail here because the blood-soaked story is easily found online. Back in 2016, I wrote to many friends that the presidential election made me feel like it was 1933 again. I was derided by many as being hyperbolic. Was I? Currently, the echoes and rhymes of history are beginning to resonate ever more deeply for me. Large segments of the American electorate feel aggrieved. Equally large segments feel either baffled or lost. Political violence is on the rise. The last line of Yeats’ poem seems prescient (again): The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

One is pushed to question whether our permanent neighbours and one-time friends to our south (and northwest) can pull themselves out of the “widening gyre” before they descend into the same type of chaos that destroyed Germany and huge swaths of Europe. We can certainly hope so, but we cannot be sure, and as Canadians what happens to our neighbours will have a potentially profound impact upon us here in the True North Strong and Free.

Hitler analogies are both facile and odious (because he was both) so perhaps I should use another more fitting example of a nation that slid willingly into chaos. That describes the country of my birth and King Victor Emanuel III’s appointment in 1922 of Benito Mussolini (elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1921) as the Prime Minister after which his Fascisti used violence and intimidation to slowly take over all aspects of Italian government, economy, and eventually, society. a slide that took Italy a half century from which to recover. What was the central slogan of Fascism? “Il Duce ha sempre ragione.” (The Leader is always right.) Sound familiar? Seen the latest red MAGA hat lately?

Time for me to segue to military theory and practice (but still relatedly).

Canada is on the cusp of spending huge amounts of capital to rebuild its long-suffering military. All of us who have worn the “King’s Tweed” are heartened to see this. But are we prepared to do so? Collectively as members of society, members of government, or members of the military, are we fully prepared to spend this money wisely? Have the leaders of these three concentric cadres realized where we sit in the ebb and flow of history? Sadly, I seriously doubt that they have. Let me be clear. I am inordinately happy to see what the current government is doing. Bravo! But I worry at the depth of understanding of what we need, how much we need to do — and after we buy whatever we are about to buy — how we will employ it all.

To be clear, I do NOT consider myself qualified to opine on what type of ships, submarines, or aircraft we need and what roles they should be given (although as a student of strategy, I believe we do need a bigger blue water navy to secure all three of our ocean coasts). But I am allowed and equipped to opine on tanks and armoured vehicles, and my concerns in that realm have pushed me to write a short book on the subject that is at once an explanatory epistle and a crie de cœur. It is in the final editing stages and with a bit of luck and a lot of work by my friend and editor over at Double Dagger Books, Not Dead; The Case for Tanks in the Modern Battlespace should be available in the next thirty days, or so.

To sum up: There is no point in studying history, if we refuse to learn from that study. We do not need to relive the horrors of the past if we will simply attune our inner ears to the rhymes that we should be hearing, whether that is regarding social norms, political behaviour, or military acquisition.