Lessons From History

We take lessons from history. Often we take the wrong lessons. From World War I, when half a generation of young European men were wiped out in the trenches, England and France took the lesson "Don't be on such a hair trigger; let's try very hard not to go to war next time". Germany took a lesson from what was widely interpreted as their being "stabbed in the back" by weak leaders and powerful traitors who were not real Germans. From the depression and hyper-inflation, they learned to distrust democracy, and so on. American understanding of history was satirized by our second president, John Adams, when he complained "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington, fully clothed and on his horse. Franklin then proceeded to electrify them with his rod and thence forward these three - Franklin, Washington, and the horse - conducted all the policy, negotiations and war."