Manly History
Salon is running — for its subscribers only — an interview with Daniel Ellsberg in which he does something he does not do in his new book: speculate on the motives of the very smart people who made such very bad decisions:
My best guess is that Lyndon Johnson psychologically did not want to be called weak on communism. As he put it to Doris Kearns, he said he would be called if he got out of Vietnam, an “unmanly man,” a weakling, an appeaser.
He preferred to risk office, and to lose office, as a tough guy, than to gain and retain office while facing some strident charges from politicians who were beaten that he was a weakling. And I believe that he was not alone in that. Many Americans have died in the last 50 years, and maybe 10 times as many Asians, because American politicians feared to be called unmanly.
And now we have a president waging a war that he has failed to justify against a foe who defeated his father. Couldn’t possibly be any psychological motives there. Nah.
Furthermore, doesn’t this mean that we can learn surprisingly little from history? The policy of appeasing Hitler turned out to be a deep mistake, yet it wasn’t incontrovertibly wrong at the time, and afterwards we made just as deep a mistake by “learning from it.” Having to know how to apply the lessons of history means they’re not much in the way of lessons at all.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Santyana: History teaches us that man learns
nothing from history.
I remember reading that in about jr high. It
stunned me. I used to repeat it to people and
they’d tell me it didn’t make sense.
Cool! Scooped by Santayana.
Even better, I’ve been scooped by Hegel who is the actual author of that quote, in his “Philosophy of History.”
But this does echo my own policy: When in doubt about who the author of a quote is, you can’t go wrong attributing it to Mark Twain or George Santayana. :)
Damn! Well, jr high was quite awhile ago and I
must have gotten it second hand since I sure never
read Hegel. At least it appears I got the quote right.
“Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must.” – Thucydides
This particular lesson from history seems to have been learned very well!
Thanks for depressing me further, Vergil ;)
I don’t know the source or the exact quote, but the essence is:
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it; those who do learn will find new ways to screw up.
The study of history can turn an ordinary man into a leader- Polybius