© Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe glorious dead?
A Q&A with the historian Sir Max Hastings on worrisome parallels with the Great War.Of all the famous things Mark Twain
never actually said, perhaps none is repeated more often and with less justification than "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." And since the election of Donald Trump as president, history as verse has become a farce: He is
Hitler, he is
Stalin, he is
Mao, he is
Caligula, he is
Cyrus the Great, he is
Pharaoh, he is
Joe McCarthy, he is
Charles Lindbergh, he is King George III (both the
sane and
insane versions), he is
Julius Caesar, he is
Hamlet, he is the
Know-Nothing Party, he is
Charles Manson, he is
Jimmy Carter, he is
Andrew Jackson, he is
Herbert Hoover, he is
Woodrow Wilson, he is -- wait, what: Woodrow Wilson? Seriously?
"Ironically," writes Trygve Throntveit in
Time, "Trumpism finds ample historical precedents in the immediate and long-term aftermath of U.S. intervention in World War I." He adds that in pledging to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson was foreshadowing "Trump's make-America-great-and-safe-first foreign policy."
Hmmm. I'm not sure I'm sold that the 28
th president was the MAGA man of his day.
1 But it's a fresher take than the many
uninformed comparisons of Trump to the
Republican isolationists who followed Wilson, and thus a contribution to the growing body of journalistic analogies between our present moment and the era of the Great War. You can see the parallels, we are told, in
Brexit, the
backlash against immigrants in the U.S. and Europe, a radical autocracy in Russia roiling the West with
propaganda, the collapse of order in the
Middle East, secessionist movements in Europe (Serbia, meet Catalonia), and so on.
So, with this Veterans Day marking the centennial of the final year of the War to End All Wars, I decided to hash out which of these supposed historical echoes make sense, and whether lessons learned 100 years ago can help see us through the fraught present. And I was lucky enough to get to do so with
Sir Max Hastings. This eminent British historian, newspaper journalist and TV broadcaster has written 26 books (his first, on the radical America of 1968, when he was 23) including one very relevant to this debate:
"Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War" in 2013. So, pin a
poppy to your lapel and read this lightly edited transcript of our chat:
Comment: If Bahrain wants to accuse Iran of sabotage, fine. Show us the evidence!!!
Update November 13 - Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi has refuted allegations of Tehran's involvement in the explosion, calling Riyadh's accusations "absurd" and "groundless". No one was injured in the fire and oil supplies between Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have resumed following the incident.