How do we learn from history
How do we learn from history?
People aim to learn from history by constantly telling stories about their past to their students, friends —stories that are supposed to convey moral and practical lessons about how to behave.
Trying not to repeat the same mistakes of history can also have unintended consequences. For example, the lessons drawn from a comparison between the American occupation of Germany in 1945 and the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Resistance to American forces in Iraq, it was suggested, should neither surprise nor discourage us since similar resistance could be found at the beginning of the United States' extraordinarily successful project of nation building in postwar Germany. With the proper patience and resolve, this resistance would be overcome and a stable democratic state could emerge in Iraq, just as it did in Western Germany in 1949. This is an easy case because it rests on a single, empirically verifiable piece of misinformation: there was not, in fact, any violent opposition to American forces in Germany after May 8, 1945. Not surprisingly, we have not heard much about postwar Germany in recent months.
My second example, also from the debate on the Iraq war, is rather more complicated: it is the use of the "Munich analogy" to explain why preemptive military action against Iraq was both necessary and justifiable. To continue to appease Saddam Hussein in 2003, this argument runs, would have had the same unfortunate consequences as appeasing Hitler in 1938; both were signs of weakness and miscalculation, in which an unavoidable conflict was imprudently postponed. The lesson of the Munich analogy rests on at least two claims. The first is that Saddam and Hitler were alike, not simply because both were vicious tyrants (a proposition that is undoubtedly true), but also because they both could only be defeated by military force—that it would, in other words, have been necessary to fight them sooner or later. The second claim is counterfactual:
People aim to learn from history by constantly telling stories about their past to their students, friends —stories that are supposed to convey moral and practical lessons about how to behave.
Trying not to repeat the same mistakes of history can also have unintended consequences. For example, the lessons drawn from a comparison between the American occupation of Germany in 1945 and the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Resistance to American forces in Iraq, it was suggested, should neither surprise nor discourage us since similar resistance could be found at the beginning of the United States' extraordinarily successful project of nation building in postwar Germany. With the proper patience and resolve, this resistance would be overcome and a stable democratic state could emerge in Iraq, just as it did in Western Germany in 1949. This is an easy case because it rests on a single, empirically verifiable piece of misinformation: there was not, in fact, any violent opposition to American forces in Germany after May 8, 1945. Not surprisingly, we have not heard much about postwar Germany in recent months.
My second example, also from the debate on the Iraq war, is rather more complicated: it is the use of the "Munich analogy" to explain why preemptive military action against Iraq was both necessary and justifiable. To continue to appease Saddam Hussein in 2003, this argument runs, would have had the same unfortunate consequences as appeasing Hitler in 1938; both were signs of weakness and miscalculation, in which an unavoidable conflict was imprudently postponed. The lesson of the Munich analogy rests on at least two claims. The first is that Saddam and Hitler were alike, not simply because both were vicious tyrants (a proposition that is undoubtedly true), but also because they both could only be defeated by military force—that it would, in other words, have been necessary to fight them sooner or later. The second claim is counterfactual: