The importance of history

Harry Barnes takes a personal view of the need for history and concludes that the problem with having no feel for history is that it leaves politicians with a fatal ignorance about what needs to change, when and how.

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

Tony Blair was born in 1953, the year the CIA helped overthrow the Government of what was then often called Persia, which had been led by Muhammad Mussadiq. The Persian/Iranian Prime Minister was a huge figure in world politics and Britain was in a massive conflict with him over the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

Yet, as Johann Hari reminded us recently in his column in “The Independent”, Jon Snow once had a conversation with Blair where the Prime Minister revealed that he did not know who Mussadiq was.

Should Prime Ministers know what happened when they were babies? Well, I only ever made it to the backbenches of Parliament, but even as a youngster I had heard about the Spanish Civil War which broke out 5 days before I was born.

Hari also claims that in 1997, it was discovered that Blair knew nothing about the Kissinger-Nixon years. Yet Blair was 20 the year Nixon resigned from office and that partnership ended.

The Vietnam War was a massive Kissinger-Nixon concern and they developed what was called the “Nixon Doctrine” in a desperate attempt to reduce American involvement and losses in the war.

When I myself was 20 it was 1956 and I was undertaking my National Service in Iraq. When Geoff Hoon heard of this, he asked me “Harry, what were British Troops doing in Iraq at that time?”. He asked this although he was Secretary of State for Defence and had just sent our troops out to join in the 2003 invasion.

Hoon was born in the same year as Blair, so they were both young children in 1956, which was the year of the Suez invasion. Both should at least have been briefed that Iraq was then something of a client State of Britain’s, until its own revolution and regime change of 1958.

The lessons leading up to 1958 actually warned us against a modern invasion.

New Labour’s lack of interest in what (to some of us) seems to be just the recent past, fits in with their post-modern deconstruction of history. Only the present counts.

Yet as Mary Kaldor explained in her book “New and Old Wars” (1999), America and Britain (currently it is Israel) have a commitment to forms of warfare which are bang up-to-date technologically, but rest on the assumption that we are involved in hot fights with cold-war style adversaries.

The problem with having no feel for history is that it leaves politicians with a fatal ignorance about what needs to change, when and how.