History Repeats Itself

The other question I brought up after our discussions was relevant to any history class I have ever taken. I believe that we have all heard hundreds of times that history repeats itself. I began to wonder why. Does determinism have anything to do with it? I always thought of it before as a coincidence, but what if it isn't? What if all the natural laws that create determinism also create tendencies towards certain things? It seems to me that this could be true. We could possibly say that it is a natural law that people do not like living under a totalitarian government. When has that ever worked? It didn't work out for Hitler's regime, or Stalin's communist set up, or Mussilini's fascist control over Italy, and more recently, there are doubts about China's future as a communist state. People do not like being told what to do, they want to choose what they do, or, in my opinion, be under the impression that they are choosing what they do. From there we can probably assume that China will have problems in the future as communist nations had in the past, and in the future the attempt will be made again, and it will probably fail again, and so on and so forth. I think that is the most obvious notion of history repeating itself, I can't think of anything else right now seeing as  how I always hated those history classes. I'm sure there are other instances though and I think that they are results of these natural laws that compose determinism.