Spanish philosopherGeorge Santayais credit with the quondam adage : " Those who can not commemorate the yesteryear are condemned to double it . " Sure , it ’s a little dramatic , and you would n’t be blamed for letting loose a tawdry sigh and eye bowl if someone said it to you in a preachy way . But the man who write these language had a skilful point . persistence is necessary to progress — or , in normal - multitude language , we must recollect stuff from our past in ordering to do it intimately in the hereafter .
When you put it that manner , it seems like common sensation . You eatice creamtoo tight and you get aheadache . So next fourth dimension you slow down a fiddling . understandably . But if story is full of warnings , we have n’t always been very good at heeding them . The past times is bursting with masses who made mistakes similar to those of their predecessor , and , lo and behold , they suffered similar aftermath . These tragedy are specially deplorable because they are often preventable .
So did all of chronicle ’s disasters happen because some poor sap degenerate the globe ? Not really . Sometimes big things happen that no one can control . And sometimes they happen over and over again to the same people . It ’s but risky luck .
Either way , there are passel of examples throughout chronicle of repeat tragedies . Here are some of the worst .
10. Military Miscalculations
Take it from Vizzini , the barefaced abductor in " The Princess Bride " : " Never get involved in a land war in Asia ! " Or , at the very least , get out of Russia before wintertime . That ’s the deterrent example bothNapoleon Bonaparteand Adolf Hitler learned during their failed attempts to attack the massive Eurasian country . True , these were pretty bad dudes and the cosmos is good off because they lost . But the horrific suffering of their armies nevertheless made the invasions likewise " inconceivable ! "
In June 1812 , Napoleon assembled an army of 600,000 to encroach upon Moscow and subdue his former ally , Czar Alexander I [ source : PBS ] . As he march into Russia , it was typhus - carrying lice , not foe soldier that began to take a cost on his force . But despite typhus and oceanic abyss fever , a weakened Gallic army reached Moscow on Sept. 14 , declaring triumph in the largely annul city [ source : Knight ] . On the take trip , however , temperature plump to -34.6 degree Fahrenheit ( -37 Celsius ) , freeze down the beleaguered soldiers ' lips together and kill 1000 of horses . front such harsh circumstance with little food , as few as 10,000 men made it back plate [ sources : Brenstrum , Brinch ] .
Fast - forward to 1941 as Hitler ’s army begin its ownJune encroachment of Soviet Union , have sex as Operation Barbarossa . believe victory would take only a few months — and despite owning several books about Napoleon — the Nazi leader get off his troops into battle badly train for the impending winter . Again , plummeting temperaturesand a deficiency of warm coats and hats mean many returned home without ears , olfactory organ , fingers and even eyelids . By the end of Barbarossa , more than 800,000 soviet had been kill , and another 6 million were wounded or captured . Another 775,000 Germans soldier were casualties , too , take a shit Barbarossa one of thedeadliest military operationsin history .
9: Economic Crashes
In belated 2007 the United States economywent into a tailspin . The stock marketplace drop like a lead balloon while the only affair going up , it seemed , was unemployment . Predictably , commentators before long start to make Last Day comparisons between the " cracking recessional , " as it became bed , and theGreat Depressionof the 1930s . But was this really a repeat ?
Certainly , the law of similarity were relate . Both were antedate by periods of prosperity . Both came at a fourth dimension when banks were experiment with raw manner of doing business ( consumer mention in the 1920s and pooling mortgage debt in the 2000s ) . Both even followed asset house of cards , which occur when price transcend what something is actually worth ( Florida real estate and the stock marketplace in the 1920s , and tech company and real acres in the 2000s ) [ origin : Geewax ] . And then there was the shrill stock certificate marketplace decline in the first 18 months after the initial crash : 45 percent during the Great Depression and 54 percent during the heavy Recession [ germ : Jacobsen ] .
By and large , however , the Great Depression was much worse . Its 43 - month continuance made the 18 - month Great recess seem balmy by comparability . In the stop after the 1929 crash , unemployment rise 19.3 per centum points compared to rising just 5.7 percentage points after 2007 . And remember all the banks that give way during the Great Recession ? There were 443 , which seems gamey until you consider that some 9,000 closed during the Great Depression [ source : Geewax ] . Ouch .
8: Assassinations
You bang those messages that get posted on social media claim to let out supposedly shocking coincidences between two historical events ? If you ’re like many multitude , you probably ca n’t notice the delete button fast enough . But if not , you might have see the one about the singular similarities between the assassinations ofAbraham LincolnandJohn F. Kennedy .
While some of those claims have been debunked ( it is the cyberspace after all ) , some are unfeigned . Yep , both presidents were shot on Fridays with a fatal heater to the head . Their successors were both named Johnson ; Andrew Johnson was contain in 1808 and Lyndon Johnson in 1908 .
Both assassins — John Wilkes Boothand Lee Harvey Oswald — have 15 letters in their names . And , most curiously , Booth escaped from a theater and was captured in a warehouse ( well , a tobacco shed ) , and Oswald fly a warehouse and was caught in a theatre [ source : Snopes ] .
These are pretty intriguing similarity , but before we adjudge a rip in the blank - time continuum , consider this : There are a caboodle of other things that are n’t similar . Lincoln and JFK were n’t shot with the same gun . It was n’t the same time of Clarence Day . Heck , it was n’t even in the same city . Perhaps , as some experts believe , it ’s simply human nature to look for patterns even if there really are n’t any [ source : Shermer ] .
7: Genocide
When people imagine ofgenocide , chances are their mind quickly change state to theHolocaust . During the fearful event , Nazi Germany systematically rounded up and jug Jews , homosexual , Roma people , Communist and others who did not fit out into Hitler ’s worldview .
Some 11 million concentration camp prisoner ultimately died from famishment , exhaustion or execution . It was so terrible , in fact , that German schools now mandate teaching of the Holocaust in hopes that future generation will never repeat the mistakes of their preceding [ source : Frontline ] . And other state have drink to stop it if it does materialize . " … never again will the world … give out to act in fourth dimension to prevent this terrible crime of genocide , " U.S. President Jimmy Carter proclaim in 1979 [ informant : Holocaust Museum ] .
But sadly there have been as many as two dozen instances of genocide since the Holocaust [ source : Inter - Parliamentary Alliance ] . That name depends on how genocide is defined , but loosely it involves violent crimes carry out against a group of hoi polloi with the ultimate intent to root out them . TakeCambodia ’s Khmer Rouge , which , between 1975 and 1979 , defeat as many as 2 million political dissidents — a shocking one - third of the country ’s population .
Just 15 years later , during a 100 - day straddle in 1994,Rwanda ’s Hutu governmentkilled between one - half and 1 million Tutsis . Such crimes continue into the twenty-first C , as some leaders have accusedSyrian president Bashar al - Assadof killing his own people to retain power [ source : Holocaust Museum ] .
6: Pandemics
It ’s a Greco-Roman Hollywood storyline : A new disease pops up and spreads worldwide , much faster than science can come up with a curative . But this is n’t just the stuff of activeness movie . It ’s called apandemic , and it ’s find more than once in our history .
One that ’s still reasonably well - have it off , despite the passage of several hundred years , is the Black Death , aka the pest . Theplagueoriginated in Asia , reaching Europe by the late 1340s , where it killed a stupefying number of people . Because the records back then were n’t entirely exhaustive , no one is completely trusted how many died , but approximation swan from 25 million to 100 million [ source : WHO ] . Either way of life , it was nothing to sneeze at . In some cities , so few people survived that there was no one to inter the utter [ origin : Kennedy ] .
But that only happen before modern medicine , right ? Not exactly . Another pandemic begin just four decades ago and carry on to lay claim lives today : AIDS . This disease originated in Africa as early on as 1920 , but did n’t spread worldwide until the 1980s [ source : McCoy ] . Since then , somewhere between 63 million and 89 million people have been infected with HIV , and 30 million to 42 million of those have die [ source : UNAIDS ] . That means , incredibly , that AIDS may have killed as many people — or even more — than the Black Death .
While the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic that began in late 2019 likely wo n’t kill anywhere nigh that many masses , its numbers game are still cool down . Despite the speedy development of several effective vaccine within its first class , COVID-19 has infected some 24 million people as of October 2021 and killed most 5 million worldwide [ seed : Worldometer ] . With many countries currently ineffectual to get vaccines , and a stubborn per centum of the population refusing to get them , the computer virus continues to kill .
woefully , as these late pandemics show , despite all that we cognise about disease , they still inhabit on thanks to insanitary status , cultural misunderstandings and a lack of education . Even the pestis still erect its atrocious nous from meter to time , particularly in developing country in Africa and Asia . Which make you wonder : Will we learn from these retiring pandemics , or are we setting ourselves up for more ?
5: Shipwrecks
TheRMS Titanic . It ’s inspired unnumerable documentaries , an Academy Award - winning motion picture , and not one , but several museum . You ’d think from all that attention it must be the pernicious wreck of all time . But it ’s not even close .
Almost everyone , Leonardo DiCaprio fan or not , roll in the hay the canonic storey of the Titanic . In 1912 it countersink sail on its maiden ocean trip from England to New York , a luxurious and New rider liner that the builder take was " practically unsinkable . " Anicebergin the North Atlantic proved them wrong , and the ship belong down along with 1,503 of the passengers and crew [ source : Louden - Brown ] . A number of miscalculations by the constructor , and the ship ’s captain — but most famously its shortage of lifeboat — lead to the Titanic ’s dying .
Decades later , in December 1987 , theferry Doña Pazdeparted Tachloban in the Philippines bound for Manila . It was jam with mass move around for the Christmas vacation : some 4,000 passengers on a ship built to carry only about 1,400 . Disaster struck in the Tablas Strait when the ferry collided with anoil tanker , stimulate a monumental explosion that apace sink both ships . A passing ship pulled a couple dozen survivor out of the urine , but as many as 4,375 perished [ source : Jackson ] . It is still the world ’s worst peacetime nautical disaster and has even been called " Asia ’s Titanic " [ source : National Geographic Channel ] .
4: Tornadoes
Tornadoesare uncollectible news . These storms have proven time and time again that they can tear down large swaths of residential area unfortunate enough to fall in their paths . Because of this baneful potential , people in Tornado Alley routinely flee to cellar , closets and bathrooms when austere conditions menace . normally , it ’s a false alarum . But sometimes a cruller does touch down . And every great once in a while , one will strike twice in the same stead in just a few years , months or even hr .
That ’s nothing compared to the 23 tornadoes that have hit tiny Moore , Oklahoma , since the late 1800s , include five in a five - twelvemonth span . The lethal event was May 3 , 1999 , when that class ’s tornado killed 36 and injured intimately 600 [ source : NBC News ] .
peradventure the creepiest tornado repeat happen in Codell , Kansas , in 1916 , 1917 and 1918 . Not only did they strike during three sequential years , but they all happened on the same day : May 20 . The first two twister , rated F2 and F3 , did n’t take any lives and caused only minimal damage . But the third was a powerful F4 that deplume straight through the middle of townspeople . Again , no one was defeat — perhaps because the townspeople had wised up to the weather condition ’s repeat antics [ rootage : Kansas Historical Society ] .
3: Engineering Disasters
Dam disastersare particularly dangerous because , unlike other structures , you do n’t have to be on or near them to be anguish when they miscarry . A catastrophic collapse can place million , or even billions , of gallons of piddle into communities statute mile downstream . It ’s find oodles of times , sometimes because of misfortunate design and other time because of just downright bad luck .
One of the United States ' most ill-famed dam collapses chance May 31 , 1889 , just out of doors of Johnstown , Pennsylvania . Looming just upstream was the South Fork Dam , which start out operation in 1853 and had , disturbingly , already failed double before . Because of poor building and some equally misguided maintenance decisions , the decameter failed , institutionalize 3.6 billion gallons ( 16.4 billion liters ) of water supply into the community below . When the waters receded , 2,209 people were dead [ seed : National Park Service ] .
Despite the failure at Johnstown , few measure existed when dam builder extraordinaire William Mulholland build the St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon out of doors of Los Angeles in 1926 . The first sign of trouble appeared on the morning of March 12 , 1928 , when piss start out pour out from one side of the concrete structure . By midnight it had collapsed , sending water and rubble through town after downstream town . No one knows precisely how many the great unwashed perished , but some estimates are as in high spirits as 600 [ source : Blitz ] . While there were many reasons for the dekameter ’s collapse , Mulholland and his subordinates used poor judgement throughout its building [ author : Association of State Dam Safety Officials ] .
2: School Shootings
heap killingsare in the news a mickle latterly , and perhaps the most tragic are those thatoccur in schools . Whether it ’s at a college like Virginia Tech , a high schooling like Columbine or an elementary school day like Sandy Hook , the taking of young lives is an incredibly heartbreaking consequence .
One of the more tragic school massacre occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown , Connecticut . That ’s where a 20 - year - old man arrived at 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 14 , 2012 , with two shooting iron and an assault rifle in tow . He had already kill his mother when he shot his way into the schoolhouse and pop 20 students and six adults before turning the gun on himself . The child were just 6 and 7 days honest-to-goodness [ source : CNN ] .
masses in the United States hoped that the senselessness of Sandy Hook might end school shot , but it did not . It seemed to just embolden more shooters . In February 2018 , a 19 - year - old son drink down 17 students and wounded 14 more at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland , Florida , a school from which he had been expelled . His weapon system of option : a semi - reflexive rifle [ seed : Chuck , et al ] . Then , just a few months later , another 17 - year - old male child killed nine students and one teacher at Santa Fe High School near Houston , using a .35 revolver and shotgun [ root : Hanna , et al ] . The Marjory Stoneman Douglas shot did spur theMarch For Our Livesmovement by students , which postulate an conclusion to gun wildness .
Many people imagine such killings are a recent phenomenon , but the deadliest school massacre occurred nearly a century ago in Bath , Michigan . In 1927 , school control board member Andrew Kehoe spent several calendar month wiring the Bath School with explosives before explode them May 18 . The blasts killed 45 the great unwashed , including 38 children . Like Lanza , Kehoe first killed a family member ( his married woman , Nellie ) and later kill himself . While it was a terrible tragedy , it could have been even worse : Just 100 ( 45 kilograms ) of the 600 pounds ( 272 kilograms ) of dynamite Kehoe institute actually detonated as planned [ source : Larson ] .
1: Mass Extinctions
When you talk aboutmass extinctions , you ’re not talking recent story . You ’re blab out geological history . But this is , without a doubt , the worst way history has repeat itself . Why ? Mass extinctions occur when more than 75 percentage of all species on Earth die off in a relatively shortsighted geological catamenia — less than 2.8 million years [ source : Begum ] . It ’s happened five time over the preceding 500 million years , and some scientist mean we ’re in the early throes of the 6th .
One of the most far-famed of the " Big Five " extinction , as they are known , is the Cretaceous - third event . It fall out about 66 million years ago , when volcanic activity , clime change and an asteroid impingement wiped out 76 percent of all coinage , including the dinosaurs . But the granddaddy of them all was the Permian mass defunctness , also known as the Great Dying : A massive eruption in Siberia sparked a catastrophic chain reaction that killed an incredible 96 percent of all mintage [ seed : Begum ] .
Now some scientists claim the 6th massextinctionis already underway . That ’s because species are going extinct at a much fast pace than normal — possibly three to 12 times faster . That give us three to 22 centuries to do something before we reach aggregative extinction district , which is certainly something we do n’t want to take over [ beginning : pop ] .
