Pretty much any time you hear someone making a grand historical analogy, it's a good idea be sceptical. Contrary to rumour, history doesn't repeat itself, and each country, each situation is different. The NYT's Rachel Nolan points us to this great passage from Rory Stewart's recent LRB piece:
Each position has its own historical analogy. If you oppose intervention, you call it “another Vietnam.” If you support intervention on national-security grounds, you call the opponents appeasers and invoke Munich. And you could still do a “replace all” and instead of Libya insert Zimbabwe, Darfur or for that matter Abyssinia, the Hejaz or “the Kingdom of Caubul and its dependencies.” Here more than ever what seems to matter is not detailed knowledge of the country concerned but a basic attitude of mind: a high optimism, a reactionary pessimism and very rarely anything in between.
As Nolan says, Stewart is very much a 'detailed knowledge of the country' kind of a guy.
We know this because, historically, grand historical analogies tend to be used without much thought to bolster ideological decisions, right?
Basically, I agree with you, and I know what you mean by 'grand', but knowing what happened before in situations that are as similar as we can find helps us play the odds. Some people read this kind of piece and retreat into a kind of funk because everything is too complicated, and exact comparisons are impossible, so how will we ever know for sure we are doing the right thing?
Posted by: Robbie | March 29, 2011 at 08:40 AM
I stick to my point, which is that comparisons are tempting but essentially bullshit.
How will we ever know for sure we are doing the right thing? Well we won't, but our confidence can be increased by having a detailed, non-metaphorical knowledge of the country/countries/situation involved. Analogies involving those countries's history might be helpful, but then those aren't really analogies. Analogies between different regions (Vietnam/Munich and Iraq, say) are dangerous, because they offering the alluring but false sense that we've been here before. Human societies/history just too complex to model like this.
Posted by: Marbury | March 29, 2011 at 08:59 AM
On the other hand, I knew there was a crash coming, and (some of) my banking friends didn't.
Exact analogies are bullshit, but history is a useful theatre of human nature, acting out in real situations. You're not going to face the Cuban Missile Crisis again, but you're going to be better prepared to face whatever you do have to face if you know the way different kinds of institutional prejudices face different kinds of concrete realities. Of course, this might lead you to make the wrong comparisons, but I'd rather be aware of how good or bad decisions were made under what pressures, in case they help.
Posted by: Robbie | March 29, 2011 at 09:36 AM