As we approach the front end of the summer long silly season, here’s some (borrowed) thoughts the subject of history and the general inability of any of us to implement whatever lessons it may have for us:
Marx: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, so to speak, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
Hegel’s original reference has never been found, but this is probably the closest to the subject in hand: “What experience and history teach is this – that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it”.
They weren’t the only ones thinking in this line:
Coleridge Taylor: “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us”.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979), Catholic archbishop: “The British never remember it, the Irish never forget it, the Russians never make it, and the Americans never learn from it”.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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