History Will Teach Us Nothing? What We Missed In The Past To Prevent Wars In Future
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What have we missed, what did we fail to do or did wrong in the distant or not so distant past, that has led things to yet another military showdown?
You have to admit that this is not only a Russian question. And, no, not only an Indian one, although we are all watching with concern the current state of things on your border with Pakistan.
Russia is currently in the midst of soul-searching in its own and global past, celebrating the 80-year anniversary of its stunning victory in the Second World War. So, a lot of wonderful or shocking ideas about lessons of the past and present are filling the Russian information space. It’d be only wise to present some of these ideas to the Indian audience, instead of giving that audience the unwanted advice on how to handle South Asian affairs.
And the most spectacular quotation on the subject comes from the Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said that “History is not a science about the past; it is a science about the future”.
What’s remarkable, these words have not been prepared in advance by some speechwriter. They kind of spontaneously hopped up in a dialogue with a 17-years old youngster who wants to be a historian, and asked the President a question during a forum called Knowledge: The First Educational Marathon.
This sudden and thought-provocative quotation fits perfectly with my multiple colleague’s attempts to comprehend the motives for current European behavior, that blatant sabotage of any attempt to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine, even when these attempts are not Russian, but American. All the answers provided are about the history of the conflict, and most of them go back to the results of the Second World War, ended, to repeat, 80 years ago.
I may safely predict that, in only two years’ time, you will encounter a lot of the same kind of digging in the distant past. As in “what went wrong in 1947 that prevents us from living normally today”.
Speaking about the past and the future, there is a funny situation when one group of nations have sent their heads of states and governments, as well as other dignitaries, to Moscow, to participate in the military parade on the Red Square on the 9th of May, commemorating the victory of an alliance of nations against the Nazi Germany, probably the most terrible regime in human history. But yet another parade has been scheduled in Kiev, and, as a lot of people in Russia have noted, the nations represented there happened to be the ones that have been on the Nazi’s side in the Second World War, or initially were there for a while, hoping to throw the Nazis against the USSR. So how could that happen, and why nobody on Kiev’s side even sees that ugly reality?
The most common answer in Moscow media is, these people do not know their history. In fact, they have been fighting for their right not to know it for decades. So even the President of the USA is absolutely sure that it was his nation that has crushed the Nazis, while Russia was only a kind of a sidekick in that affair.
There are hard and documented facts, of course. These facts show that the USSR has crushed 607 Nazi divisions in the course of that war, while all other allies combined are accounting for only 180 of divisions. That means that about 70 or 80% of the victory belongs to Moscow.
But, for some reasons, almost nobody in Europe or in the US wants to know about it. The above-mentioned facts tend to produce sensation and dismay in any kind of Western audience, and is invariably disputed against all odds.
No, what we are facing is not lack of education, it’s rather resentment of those who lost, says a Russian columnist. And then he proceeds to list all the names of European leaders, whose grand- or great-grandfathers served the Nazi regime, so that now their descendants are fighting history to reclaim their pride.
The Russian television is reminding us that our country should definitely not be blamed for forgetting its history. It was very educative to see, these days, an old documentary movie called Ordinary Nazism, done by Mikhail Romm in 1965 and screened many times after that.
I remember it very well, since, as a schoolboy, I was watching it again and again, eager to know what kind of enemy my father and two grandfathers were fighting. Now I see it with slightly different eyes, noting that the very concept of such a movie was spectacular. The thing is, that black-and-white masterpiece was almost 100% based on German documentaries, with only scant comments from the Russian narrator. What we see in that movie is a whole nation going mad, resenting the results of the previous World War. And then we see the soldiers of that nation perpetrating most horrible crimes on the territories of Russia, Poland and other nations, and boasting of that to their mothers and wives.
So you may say that Russia, learning its history the hard way, was well equipped to see all the telltale signs of a whole nation becoming a bloodthirsty monster.
To think of it, our experts have been warning everyone around about that ruinous ideology gripping Ukraine even 10 or 20 years ago. And then it so happened that the East of Ukraine rised in arms against its West, with the latter’s Nazification happily supported by Europe and the US, and you know the rest.
Every nation has to learn its history by itself, so people like me can only watch from the distance that horror, called Jihadism, and the consequences of that horror, possibly inflicted on millions of folks who cannot even be blamed for anything.
Going back to the idea that history is a science about the future, I couldn’t help but to look up the words of a song of a wonderful British personality, known as Sting. No need to quote all of his famous song called History Will Teach Us Nothing, it’d be enough to give you a couple of lines that tells everything.
Without freedom from the past things can only get worse…
Sooner or later just like the world first day
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away…
Sooner or later just like the world first day
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away…
And – finally – here comes that line that became the song’s title: “history will teach us nothing”.
That’s, probably, what poets are for. They are for probing the unthinkable and getting away with it. Here we have a hopeless rebellion of one exasperated and simple-minded personality against all the bloody past of humanity, here we have a mad desire to obtain freedom from old and (probably) failed wisdom, and start everything anew.
Who knows, maybe that naïve rebellion against reality has tainted the brains of too many people in the world, and thus contributed to the current sordid state of Europe, Asia and the world.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
