HISTORY DOES NOT REPEAT ITSELF?

We had a fine lesson in historiography from last night's speaker at our Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War Two History Roundtable:

History does not repeat itself. Don't pounce on that. Read on. What changes over time is the context of how that behavior plays out. Context is everything. Context changes as history is a process of continual accretion. So the point is: history does not exactly repeat itself. It is, by definition, a new history.

In other words, events build on past events. We each have a psychological past. Our national psyche or any country's national psyche is the sum of all our individual experiences and the psychological result.

The United States was hesitant to enter World War Two because of the horrific devastation and loss of life in World War One. We did not want to imagine another such war, much less one even worse. Consequently, we were unprepared for World War Two. Of course, this is simplifying a very complex subject.