“We have learned that you cannot live from history,” a Kosovo Serb told a New York Times reporter in 1999. “Americans have no history and they live wonderfully well.”
Sometimes progress takes the form of historical amnesia.
But while applying the supposed lessons of history to the present may be inevitable, doing so is always perilous, for it involves the use of analogies that may, in hindsight, look wildly inappropriate. Generals are not the only people with a tendency to fight the previous war.
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