Putin and Erdoğan. www.kremlin.ru/Wikimedia. Some rights reserved.“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” (Hegel).
Our governments have repeated the same mistakes time and again. They have repented, promised not to fall back into the trap of war and then forgotten all about it, each time with ever increasing precipitation. It has become so routine, in fact, that we should have learned by now not to expect anything different. Wednesday's vote in the British Parliament to bomb Syria demonstrates a perverted, muscle-flexing attitude to war that cannot be simply attributed to short-term memory loss. The mistakes of the past are not there to be learned from. They have become meaningless. Facts and data to be pushed aside and ignored, proving that other interests are obviously at play.
It is not just about short-term memory loss, however. Our failure to learn from history has plunged diplomacy and international strategic games back into 19th century real-politik - when the Western powers and the Russian Empire struggled to impose their will and influence over western Asia and the waning Ottoman Empire.
