The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Over recent days several things that I have stumbled across have brought that idea to mind.
Firstly, these days I have had the good fortune to be on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but less fortunately the trip coincided with some of the biggest anti-government protests in the history of the State. Israel almost came to a halt as thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest against a proposed law by which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would dramatically curtail the power of the judiciary vis a vis the legislature. Many ordinary Israelis feared that this would spell the end of democracy in their country. But underlying the protest lies a much deeper, and much more serious issue – the clash between secular and religious Israel. Ultra Orthodox Jews – known in Israel as the Haredim – essentially wish to see a theocracy established in Israel, and that Israel would be governed according to the prescriptions of the Torah. Israel’s founding fathers – the radically secular Zionists – unequivocally rejected this theocratic option for the state of Israel (instead opting to grant certain concessions to the Haredim, such as exemption from military service and public funding for Yeshivas – traditional religious schools). However simple demographics are against the secular vision of Israel. The Haredim, according to recent projections, will form a third of the population of Israel by 2065. And so increasingly and inexorably, clashes between the secular and the theocratic vision will continue and inevitably worsen over the coming decades.
But this tension is nothing new. It dates back three thousand years to the time of the prophet Samuel and the conflict between the popular desire for a monarchy (what we would term a state) as a defence against the Philistines, and the divinely willed theocracy. Samuel reluctantly granted the Jews their wish for a monarchy, though fearing – correctly as it turns out – that the end result would be a betrayal of the Law and divine punishment (which came in the form of exile).
And it is this same historic fault line which is making itself felt now, as it was during the foundation of the State of Israel. As Paul Johnson writes in his A History of the Jews:
It is true that the Zionists, who were mostly non-religious or even anti-religious, invoked the aid of Judaism. They had no alternative. Without Judaism, without the idea of the Jews as a people united by faith, Zionism was nothing, just a cranky sect.
… For Zionists, Judaism was just a convenient source of national energy and culture, the Bible no more than a State Book. That was why from the start most religious Jews regarded Zionism with suspicion or outright hostility and some … believed it was the work of Satan. But just as Samuel agreed to anoint Saul, so religious Jews had to recognize the existence of Zionism and take up attitudes towards it.
It probably pays to know history.
Someone who had a keen sense of the worth of history was President Harry Truman. At the moment I am reading David McCullough’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning biography Truman – and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Truman famously said that not all all readers are leaders but all leaders are readers, and he himself was an avid reader. Even by the age of ten he was reading “everything I could get my hands on – histories and encyclopedias and everything else.” And history in particular informed his approach to political action. McCullough recounts how during one of the greatest crises during his presidency – the growing insubordination of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War – Truman saw a parallel between his predicament and that of Abraham Lincoln a century before. One of Lincoln’s generals during the Civil War, General George B. McClellan, was refusing to obey Lincoln’s orders to attack. Also McClellan, like MacArthur a century later, occasionally made unwarranted and very unhelpful political statements. And so Truman sent one of his staff to the Library of Congress to review the details of the Lincoln-McClellan crisis and give him a report. McCullough writes:
“Lincoln was patient [Truman later wrote], for that was his nature, but at long last he was compelled to relieve the Union Army’s principal commander. And though I gave this difficulty with MacArthur much wearisome thought, I realized that I would have no other choice myself than to relieve the nation’s top field commander….”
Also in McCullough’s biography, I came across a passage that seemed almost written as an explanation for Russian aggression against Ukraine. The passage features in the famous 1946 “long telegram” – a message sent by George Kennan, the scholarly US chargé d’affaires in Moscow, back to Washington. The telegram contained Kennan’s analysis of the cultural and historical forces shaping the motives of Soviet leaders and influencing Soviet conduct around the globe. The brilliance of the analysis was immediately appreciated by Truman and it shaped US policy towards the Soviet Union in the years following. McCullough describes part of the telegram:
The Kremlin, wrote Kennan, had a neurotic view of the world, at the heart of which was an age-old Russian sense of insecurity. For this reason, the Soviet regime was “committed fanatically” to the idea that in the long run there could be no “peaceful coexistence” with the United States, and further that “it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state broken….” Stripped of the “fig leaf” of Marxism, Kennan said, the Soviets would stand before history “as only the last of a long session of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security for their internally weak regimes.”
Certainly it looks as if Santayana was not mistaken when he wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”