I regularly, and especially lately, hear people say “if we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it,” or popular variations of it, like being on the “right side” of history. This idea may come from George Santayana, who wrote in The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But the truth is we know very little of history. Monographs by historians are typically about a singular topic. In school we’re taught a miniscule fraction of the course of human events. History was taught to me with a jingoistic bent, grounded on a belief in “progress” and focused on individual “accomplishments.” The atrocities of colonialism and war were usually explained in passive voice, the European and/or US perpetrators (other than the Third Reich) were neutralized as if they weren’t making conscious choices. The victims were either glorified or pitied for their “sacrifice” and the survivors ignored.
That said, I do think it’s important, vital even, to learn history. But it’s not so we learn what not to do in order to not repeat it. Because here’s the thing — the atrocities of history always repeat.
History repeats because the powerful and the greedy and the hateful want it to. History isn’t necessarily written by “the victors,” but the most dominant narratives of…
