What to do
It is natural, and sometimes important and noble, to invoke historical analogies to help take moral and normative stands about the world in which we live. If, for example, a national leader is obviously venal, autocratic and rapacious, we will seek precedents for that, either in our own national history or in the history of other nations. If armed authorities attack minority communities and their allies protesting against police violence and brutality, we might want to invoke historical events that also involved police or state brutality. In these situations, analogies can help stir the public, convey anger and dismay, and suggest that we might be facing moral and political challenges others have also confronted. Such analogies will never be completely accurate, as every historical event is unique. But they will make a point by directing our minds to events in the past that carry great meaning for people in the present.
Historical analogies are not the same as historical comparisons. A comparison might be more direct or straightforward, between two events that are inherently similar. Natural disasters such as earthquakes can happen at varying moments in history and aren’t necessarily dependent on human activity. But they will interact differently with society given changing social circumstances, political leadership and economic development. In that sense, a hurricane ravaging a medieval landscape will be different from the exact same-sized and same-speed hurricane hitting a modern city. We will be comparing between the effects of, and response to, an otherwise similar pair of events. (Of course, we can also compare between the frequency and strength of hurricanes today and those of hurricanes in the past, establishing a link between natural disasters and anthropogenic global warming.) Likewise, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918 emerged as a tool to help us think through the challenge. The diseases are different, but the human body is pretty much the same, and pandemics, by their nature, have repetitive features. A comparison between the two health crises will focus on the changes in the world – and perhaps specifically in public health policy – that have taken place over the past century.
Historical analogies, by contrast, are somewhat metaphorical in nature, not simply a repeated example of a phenomenon. When we make a historical analogy, as opposed to a comparison, we are taking different sorts of events and suggesting that they are similar, and can tell us something essential about the other. For this reason, analogies are also more controversial. Because political culture is degraded – by a shallow and sensationalist political media, persistent classism and racism, and dishonest and ineffectual leaders – we are constantly subjected to offensive, silly or obtuse analogies that are not worth repeating here. Let us instead focus on those occasions when historical analogies ring true. This is when they are most powerful – and provocative.
In June 2019, when the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to US immigration detention camps in Texas and elsewhere – where frightened children were separated from their parents (who were often eventually deported without them) – as ‘concentration camps’, it created a public outcry. Ocasio-Cortez used a term that was not only straightforwardly descriptive, in her view, but invoked an analogy with the Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War. The analogy itself was flawed, and didn’t teach us anything new about history. But it captured something essential about the banal evil that makes the link between the 1940s and our era so plausible and alarming.
Ocasio-Cortez, like the many historians who attested to the merits of her statement, knows perfectly well that we are not living in Nazi Germany and that the migrants in Texas are not sent to gas chambers, for example. But her analogy (which she made implicitly, since she never mentioned the Nazis) serves as a stark reminder that concentration camps have a long history, one that included (and predates) the Nazi genocide of European Jews; that the US is no stranger to the history of concentration camps; and that its Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) detention camps are in fact the latest iteration of that global history. She also reminded us that the historical crimes of fascism took place while most of the public continued living their lives in normal, mundane ways. Her analogy is also a sort of call to action: understanding ICE camps as concentration camps means refusing to minimalise them, and seeing them as morally unacceptable, with all that this entails.
So historical analogies, done in good faith, can make crucial points about the present and help to clarify where we stand on moral and political issues. The problem begins when we begin to substitute historical analogies for historical analysis – or, even more problematically, when we come to believe that history ‘repeats itself’. This sort of cliché has become a bane of our public discourse, especially regarding the sorry state of the US.
We can say that ICE’s detention camps are part of the longer history of concentration camps, and that they evoke the history of fascist regimes. We cannot say that European fascism of the interwar years is the reason that the US has concentration camps in 2020, or why ICE behaves the way it does today. Nor is saying that ICE follows in some US ‘tradition’ any kind of historical explanation. Xenophobia and nationalism are not physical things that travel through time. They have no agency. To explain ICE, we need to account for recent history, viewing its customs and power as products of a historical process. We should ask: what causes this migration in the first place? What responsibility does the US bear for the arrival of desperate asylum-seekers at its borders? Who created, funded and empowered ICE, and for what reasons? US racism of the past is not an explanation. To paraphrase the historian Barbara Fields, racism is something that we create anew, every day. Who, or what, creates racism in our own day? Under what conditions do racism and xenophobia thrive?
Another way to think about this issue in historical perspective is to take the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Bolsheviks to power. There are historical sociologists and other scholars who have emphasised the similarities between revolutions across space and time, or even showed how one revolution might have helped set up a subsequent one. People looking for historical precedents to the cataclysmic event of 1917 in Russia might focus on, say, the French Revolution, which started in 1789. They could plausibly point to the social, economic, intellectual and political dynamics that led to the fall of the French monarchy and to the possibility that similar dynamics played out in the demise of the Russian tsar. They might highlight the ways in which Russian revolutionaries were inspired by, and modelled themselves after, the French revolutionaries of the 18th century, and how ideas from the earlier revolution permeated the later one. The two events are not entirely detached in history.
But no serious historian would consider the French Revolution an explanation for why the Russian Revolution happened or for how it played out. Nor would they presume that because the French Revolution produced certain outcomes, the Russian Revolution would have to produce similar ones. Except maybe at some high level of abstraction, very little that occurred in late 18th-century France had any bearing on the actions of most Russians in the early 20th century. For the overwhelming majority of Russian people in 1917, France in 1789 might as well have been another planet.
Instead of simply looking to another major revolution, an understanding of the triumph of Bolshevism would require an analysis of Russian history itself – how far back one wants to go would really depend on the individual historian, but she would probably put the greatest emphasis on developments in and around Russia most immediately preceding the outbreak of the revolution: the various failures of the sclerotic, incompetent tsarist regime, including losses in the First World War and the earlier humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05; the crushing poverty of peasants; agitation among the growing urban industrial working class; an intensifying demand for democratic participation; and the leadership and strategic abilities of the Bolsheviks themselves.
