Misusing history.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Essay

The lesson of history, the British scholar A. J. P. Taylor once observed, is that there is no lesson. It is not a stricture, however, that has ever enjoyed much acknowledgment, let alone acceptance. Quite the contrary. In the past few months, a fresh spasm of analogizing the past to the present has taken place as politicians and journalists, at home and abroad, draw upon a rich treasure chest of events--World War I, whose one hundredth anniversary arrives this August, the Munich agreement in 1938 or the Cold War--to explain foreign affairs. At times, the battles over the meaning of the past almost seem to eclipse in intensity the original events themselves.

In Britain, for example, Education Secretary Michael Gove created a flap in January when he came out swinging against Sir Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, in the Daily Mail. "Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?" Gove asked. Far from being about incompetent political and military leaders mindlessly sending millions of young lads to their deaths in the trenches on the western front, the Great War, we were told, was truly the stuff of greatness. Evans, Gove claimed, had traduced the efforts of British soldiers and "attacked the very idea of honouring their sacrifice as an exercise in 'narrow tub-thumping jingoism.'"

If Gove pointed to World War I to inculcate British national pride in a new generation, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe took a slightly different course. Speaking at Davos in January, he raised eyebrows among the international elite by alleging that Japan and China were in a "similar situation" to Britain and Imperial Germany on the eve of World War I and by noting that close economic ties had not prevented those European nations from going to war. Abe called for greater communication channels between the two powers to avoid misunderstandings (though he himself has gone out of his way to incite Chinese ire by espousing Japanese nationalism, as evidenced by his recent visit to the Yasukuni shrine, where the remains of soldiers, including numerous war criminals, are interred). A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, in turn, dismissed Abe's allusion to World War I: "Such remarks by Japanese leaders are to evade the history of aggression, to confuse the audience."

In the United States, which did not enter World War I until 1917 and, unlike Great Britain, doesn't have an uneasy conscience about the conflict, most historical allusions...