Sarah Perry
I remember in my early teens two atrocities unfolding at more or less the same time. My parents listened every evening to the 5pm news on Radio 4, which was just before we’d sit down to eat. So my memories of the dining room in Chelmsford are sometimes mixed up with scraps of reporting from the war in Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide. I suppose when you are twelve or thirteen you haven’t yet become a little numb to war, and there are things I remember so clearly I could almost think I had been the reporter, not the listener. One incident in particular, delivered by the journalist impassively from a village recently liberated from the Serbs, was an account of such absolutely baroque violence visited on captive men that I am completely incapable of either typing it out or saying it aloud.
At that time it seemed very clear to me that there were goodies and baddies. The Serbs (baddies) were committing ethnic cleansing against the Bosniaks (goodies, by virtue of their suffering). Meanwhile, in Rwanda the Hutu (baddies) were massacring the Tutsi at demonic speed and scale. For years I foolishly imposed this model on whatever conflict happened to be unfolding – my sympathies were entirely and unambivalently with whichever faction at that moment could be considered the oppressed. It’s embarrassing to imagine such a childish view of things – to have thought there were nationalities or ethnic groups who were benevolent and mild and inclined to be victimised on both small and unimaginable scales, while other nations were by their nature brutal. I was far older than I ought to have been when I understood something of the deep roots of the Serbian atrocities against the Bosniaks, and that for centuries under Ottoman rule it had been the Christian Serbs who had been oppressed by the ethnic Muslim Bosniaks (and that the Serbs had suffered cruelly under Nazi rule). The Hutu, mobilised into vile outrages against the Tutsi, had at one time been a peasant class with whom I might naturally have had sympathies, and wished for their liberation and equity – failing to understand what cost might be exacted for that freedom.
The oppressed will become the oppressor, given time
It would of course be madness to suggest these histories behind histories exculpate either state or individual from a single violent act – and as an observation it tends to falter against the ravages of colonialism motivated by expansionist power and financial gain. But history’s grim lesson for me has been to understand that the oppressed will become the oppressor, given time – that man hands on misery to man and so on, with conflict deepening like a coastal shelf (naturally, as I write this, I think of Gaza). I’ve no wisdom arising from having understood this, still less any solutions. I suppose it has taught me always to look deeper and deeper back to understand how we have arrived at where we are, and – more soberly – where in due course we might be going.
Sarah Perry’s most recent novel is “Enlightenment” (Jonathan Cape)
Ben Wilson
“This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.” So reads the sign marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where the US military’s most toxic nuclear waste is buried 2,000 feet beneath the desert of New Mexico. It will remain hazardous for more than 300,000 years, longer than Homo sapiens has been on this planet. The defences built to protect it might one day look enticing to an intrepid explorer when all other traces of our civilisation have been lost. How do we speak to people tens of thousands of years in the future? There is a field of science dedicated to finding ways to communicate across eons of time, to humans (or other unknown species) who will not recognise our symbols or comprehend our language, just as we only understand whispers of the world of our distant ancestors. Here is incapsulated an important lesson. The past is a record of rises and falls; things go backwards even as they trundle forwards; disaster always breathes down our necks. Seen against the passage of millennia, what we enjoy and hold dear is inherently fragile; we should prepare for the worst even as we do our level best to extract every ounce of pleasure from the present. To see one’s self “on the right side of history” is to believe that we are on a journey somewhere, that time arcs towards a better future. Like the warning in New Mexico, history talks to us in enigmatic ways: working to decipher its lessons and warnings is never straightforward, never fixed. And that is what makes it at once so deliciously interesting and so dangerous.
Ben Wilson’s most recent books is “Metropolis: a History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention” (Vintage)
Ian Hislop
A few years ago, at the age of 90, my wonderful mother-in-law told me that she had been keeping up with the news and that she had never been so frightened by the international situation as she was now. This made me feel a bit depressed, but then I thought about what she had said for a minute and replied “But surely you were a teenager in the late 1930s?”. She paused for a minute and then smiled. “Oh yes” she said, “so I was!” We then agreed that the Second World War had been quite frightening really, even in comparison with today. Sometimes history can be reassuring, even in a grim way.”
Ian Hislop’s radio series Orwell vs Kafka is co-presented by Helen Lewis
Artemis Cooper
The Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 allowed Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia without fear of reprisal from England, France or Italy, so that those countries could enjoy “peace in our time” – but appeasement doesn’t work. Democratic leaders have a lot of trouble understanding this because they hate and fear the prospect of war, but dictators don’t. Whether they are Napoleon or Hitler, Mussolini or Putin, war makes them feel big and powerful. They don’t care about the human cost; they believe they will win and the loser will pay for all the destruction. My grandfather Duff Cooper understood this. He knew the deal was shameful and the agreement worthless, and in protest he resigned from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty in Neville Chamberlain’s government. He also noted that among the married couples he knew who were divided on the issue “in every case it was the husband who supported and the wife who opposed Chamberlain. Many would have expected that women would have been more ready than men to accept the spurious peace at its face value. It was not so.”
Artemis Cooper is currently working on “Paris, a Cultural History”
Professor David Reynolds
A prized book on my shelves is Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers by Harvard academics Richard Neustadt and Ernest May (1986) – based on a course they ran for top officials from the Pentagon and the State Department. The case studies, mainly from international crises of the 1960s and 1970s such as Cuba and Vietnam, may seem dated but I think the approach of the book is invaluable. Too often the goal of trying to “learn from history” is to find a situation analogous to the mess we’re now in. Is this a “gathering storm” moment like 1938, when we need to learn the lessons of appeasement? Or a “July crisis” moment like 1914, when we should be wary of sudden escalations that trigger explosive reactions? No, say May and Neustadt. You’re asking the wrong question. Don’t say: “What’s the problem?” and then dip into a props box of historical examples to find the best fit. Instead, ask: “What’s the story?” In other words, “How and why did we get into this mess?” – and use that storytelling to discern a possible way out. The book’s title is a deliberate pun. Thinking in time, before it’s too late; but also thinking in the dimension of time because “history” is not a collection of useable facts but a way of thought. As human beings, we’re historical animals, conscious of the passage of time, operating across the interface of past, present and future.
As human beings, we’re historical animals, conscious of the passage of time
Every day we ask ourselves historical questions: “How did that meeting go?” “Did X change their position as Y talked?” History is also a “common-sense” subject, rarely needing higher mathematics or specialist science. And although having a PhD might help, we can think of many examples of brilliant history writing from authors who are “undoctored”. Each of us can and should try to be our own historian. So, enjoy thinking in time – before it’s too late.
David Reynolds’s most recent book is “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him” (HarperCollins)
Rachel Cockerell
“It’s never inevitable at the time,” my dad’s 94-year-old cousin told me. She grew up in New York in the 1930s, in a time we now think of as “pre-war” with the future looming darkly over it. “When you’re in it, you don’t know what’s coming,” she said. “You don’t realise it’s a build-up. Looking back, I can see the war clouds gathering.” I spend my time reading about how the twentieth century unfolded, and I keep catching glimpses of different centuries we might have had instead. One thing that would have led to a very different century: in 1903 the British government offered the Zionists land in East Africa. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was tempted to accept. “A pioneer party of Jews is likely to be sent out to Africa later next year,” said the New York Times when the offer was made public.
The past often seems foreordained, hurtling straight towards some unalterable destination
Although the Uganda Plan failed, it was the first in a decade of attempts to build a Jewish homeland somewhere that was not Palestine. Australia, Iraq, Libya, Canada, Mexico, Angola and even Antarctica were considered. Some of these projects came close to fruition. A common refrain was: “If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.” The past often seems foreordained, hurtling straight towards some unalterable destination. It is only when we zoom out that we see all those sprawling possibilities, intertwined and constantly dividing, through which we are forging one narrow path.
Rachel Cockerell’s most recent book is “Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land” (Wildfire)
Joanna Grochowicz
Jane Franklin offers an example of one of history’s greatest lessons – or great ruses: peddle an untruth long enough and it will eventually become an accepted, even celebrated, fact. Lady Franklin knew a fair bit about manipulation and mass persuasion. After her husband, Sir John Franklin, went missing in 1845 in the Canadian Arctic along with two ships and 128 men, this particular polar wife set herself the task of bringing glory to the missing without a shred of proof that they had achieved their purpose. Petitioning the Admiralty, Queen Victoria, the US president and the Russian tsar, Lady Franklin also won the hearts of the nation through the use of the press, theatre and music halls. Even Charles Dickens took up the cause.
When it became clear that the mystery of the disappearance would never be solved, Lady Franklin declared her husband the discoverer of the Northwest Passage. Franklin’s statue stands proudly in London’s Waterloo Place, its twin stands in Hobart, in Tasmania, still another looms over a roundabout in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, while the memorial at Westminster Abbey presents a much younger, more handsome and heroic-looking Franklin than the balding, obese 59-year-old who set sail. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s words lend further weight to the fiction: “Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou, / Heroic sailor-soul, / Art passing on thine happier voyage now / Toward no earthly pole.” Belligerent, bombastic, narcissistic, Lady Franklin did offer proof of something real – how easily truth can be constructed from lies.
Joanna Grochowicz’s most recent book is “Mawson in Antarctica” (Allen & Unwin)
Andrea Wulf
I’ve never believed that history is just a pile of dusty old ideas but frustratingly, at least for a historian, that’s how we often treat the past. Take our climate crisis, for example, which is a catastrophe that could have been completely avoidable had we listened to a few smart people in the past. In 1800, the Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt warned about harmful human-induced climate change. He was the first to describe nature as a web of life, as an interconnected whole. And seeing that everything hangs together, he also realised the vulnerability of nature. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel, he said. And as he travelled through South America, Humboldt saw how humankind was destroying nature through monoculture, deforestation and irrigation. Sugar plantations, mining, pearl fishing, colonialism, the greed for gold and timber, the exploitation of land and indigenous people, environmental damage caused by damming rivers – you name it, he warned about all of this more than 200 years ago.
He was the first to see ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other, criticising unjust land distribution, monocultures and violence against tribal groups – all powerfully relevant issues today. “I think they are raping nature,” he wrote in Mexico, and later even predicted that humans could affect the climate “through the production of great masses of steam and gas at the industrial centres”. He was so shockingly prescient. But did we listen? Clearly not. So, in a way, my choice is about the lessons we haven’t learnt from history.
Andrea Wulf’s most recent book is “Magnificent Rebels: the First Romantics and the Invention of the Self” (John Murray)
Dan Richards
I come from a family with a mercurial relationship with the past.In 1912 my great-great-uncle, I A Richards, told his history supervisor at Cambridge that he “didn’t think history ought to have happened”. In 1974, as part of a Clark Lecture, he told his audience the same thing. On another occasion, he said that he “hated the past” for its suffering and cruelty and always looked ahead “even now” – he was 80 at the time. So it was that the young Richards turned by accident to rhetoric and philosophy because he “couldn’t bear history”. This deep conviction left its imprint on his criticism, with its rejection of the heavy backgrounding of works of art in historical periods and his antipathy to personal memoir and biography.I think of the idea that “history ought not to have happened” quite often, the fact that it seems so frequently to be a record of cruelty and inhumanity, with no clear overriding pattern beyond the aggressive asset-stripping of the earth and its most vulnerable people and their support networks. The frequent mushrooming of the far Right in times of crisis and the spectre of the charismatic strongman return to haunt those with short memories. As Albert Camus once observed: “Be careful, when a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.
The recent past has shown that coalitions can puncture and face down threats from those who would divide
”However, the recent past has shown that coalitions can puncture and face down threats from those who would divide, blame the weakest and warm their hands on burning bridges. Perhaps the lesson from history I cherish just now is that compromise, community and common interests across borders have been shown to offer an onward, future-facing hope – anathema to the essential xenophobia of nationalism which so often trades on an imagined, partial past, robbed of nuance and plurality. I, too, hate a great deal of the past, for its suffering and cruelty. I, too, look ahead, but suddenly with more hope that with concerted, collective effort in good faith, democracy may be on the mend.
Dan Richards’s most recent book is “Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth” (Canongate)
Peter Stothard
Read history. That’s the most important lesson of history. Don’t think it will repeat itself but tiptoe over it like a tightrope walker, ready for one side to be familiar, the other alien, some of the sights useful, some not. Learn to judge which might be which. Beware promises and other predictions of the future, particularly promises of progress. The past is all we have. Don’t be afraid of it.
1 Comment. Leave new
This reflection on historical lessons highlights the dangers of simplified narratives and the cyclical nature of oppression and violence. It emphasizes the importance of understanding deeper historical contexts and the potential for past oppressors to become future oppressed. The commentary underscores the necessity for continuous learning and critical analysis of history, reminding us that humanity’s darker aspects can resurface if left unchecked. It also suggests that hope lies in collective action and a more nuanced understanding of history’s lessons.