History Does Not Repeat Itself; it Teaches, and We Learn from it, or We Not?

By Gustavo Gac-Artigas*

Translated from Spanish by Priscilla Gac-Artigas. The original version in Spanish was published by "Le Monde diplomatique" edición Chile

It is not that history repeats itself. History teaches.

It teaches when there is something to learn, when the human mind is open to learning, when thought has not yet been pigeonholed and chained.

I lived through times of teaching, learning, and rebellion; I studied the soul and the body, the human and the beast, and I confronted one with the other.

They wanted to teach me words light like a bag of popcorn, words floating in the clouds, yet I discarded that teaching.

I learned from the heavy words, loaded with meaning, written with blood, with love, with the hand of the people, I?made them my own, my words.

My body learned from the pain of other bodies, and those blows of history broke the shell that protected me, that glass wall that prevented me from going out into the world.

I knew power and prison and rejected both. I reject the power of force. I reject the jails of society. I prefer the rebelliousness pushing me constantly to discover injustice and denounce it.

I learned that history is found beyond the universities, in the streets, in the houses destroyed by bombs, that the food of books is not enough to satisfy the hunger of a person, of a girl, of the millions besieged by misery, or fenced for extermination in Gaza.

In 1968, I burned flags, and occupied universities; no, it was not to be anti-American. It was to be human, to oppose the crimes committed in Vietnam. My beaten body did not alleviate the pain of a girl running naked through the streets with her skin torn off by Napalm.

One learns from history should one wish to?learn, should one understand that nothing human is alien to us and that inhuman actions must be exposed.

One does not have to be anti-anything; I am not anti-Semitic, just as I am not anti-Islamic, for condemning the crime of Hamas or that of Netanyahu and his pack. It is easy to try to hide the crime and justify oneself by screaming, “They are against us, they want to destroy us,” while they destroy a people.

And I’m not sure if I’m talking about Gaza or Vietnam, about bombs directed by AI in Gaza, or the B-52s dropping Napalm or orange gas in Vietnam destroying even the unborn “enemies”. I am talking about the starvation that slowly kills or destroys Palestinian children and prevents them from growing and developing.

I am not sure about all that since history does not repeat itself. One learns from it when it did teach you to learn, but for that to happen, you must know how to read history.

And I am unsure if I am talking about yesterday (history) or about?today?(present history); if I am talking about my years of struggle for university reform in Chile and against the war in Vietnam in 1968, or about the university students who raised their voices against death and demanded a ceasefire in Gaza today, in 2024.

I had professors who taught me to think and?to oppose the chains of thought. Others wanted to teach me to obey, to bow my head, to become part of the mass, and repeat. The latter were not true teachers, yet they also taught me; they taught me what not to learn, that they were nothing more than overseers protecting the fields of their bosses and saw us as cattle destined to feed their enterprises. I am unsure if I am talking about yesterday (history) or today (present history).

I thank them both. They both taught me that deep down, life is the best book, that human beings are found in the paths surrounding the universities, that they are not strangers to it, and?that they represent the word that signifies and dignifies. They taught me that history does not repeat itself, that one learns from it, and that it may nourish a verse or a protest.

Once, I went out to meet history. I am still looking for it, not in the past, but in the present. And I join the journey of those young people who, today, are illuminating history. They are few, but they are lanterns.

* Chilean writer, poet, and playwright, corresponding member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE). He lives in NJ.

Priscilla Gac-Artigas, PhD, Translator, Fulbright Scholar, Full member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE), corresponding member of the RAE and professor of Latin American literature at Monmouth University, NJ.