History does not always repeat exactly. But given the constancy of human nature, certain circumstances do.
Over the weekend, I wrote an appreciation of the late Paul Johnson’s 1983 book Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, a magisterial work of history that lives up to its plain yet ambitious title. I argued that the book, “apart from providing invaluable knowledge of the period studied, furnishes in itself a moral toolkit by which to assess reality itself.” Johnson’s close study of human nature and history yields many timeless observations. Some of them appear prescient (such as his repeated intimations that the Soviet system was doomed). Others, owing to the endurance of human nature (and of human folly), are both familiar and relevant.
Two examples stand out in this latter regard. The first involves the U.S. State Department, described in National Review in 1962 as “undoubtedly the world’s most maladroit.” Johnson recounts how President Carter’s administration initiated a focus on “human rights” as a guiding imperative for foreign policy that, however noble in theory, ended up working to America’s detriment in practice:
Even more damaging was Carter’s ill-considered “human rights” policy, based upon an agreement signed in Helsinki, under which the signatories undertook to seek to end violations of human rights throughout the world. The idea was to force Soviet Russia to liberalize its internal policy. The effect was quite different. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Helsinki Accords were ignored and voluntary groups set up to monitor observance were arrested. In the West, America found itself campaigning against some of its oldest allies. Again, a human rights lobby grew up within the Administration, including an entire bureau of the State Department, which worked actively against American interests.
This policy led the U.S. to abandon reliable if unsavory allies (whose governments often then became left-wing), while not moderating Soviet conduct at all. Furthermore, it exacerbated the ongoing Soviet practice of turning America’s sins back on it as a means of regime-level self-defense.
The notion of a State Department working counter to U.S. interests was not an unfamiliar one at that time, nor is it now. Today, State prioritizes exporting the vanguard of left-wing ideology in a manner that wantonly antagonizes otherwise friendly nations. The Chinese Communist Party, moreover, has mastered the old Soviet practice of forcing America to dwell on its own transgressions, a tactic that works all too well on the American left, as Jimmy also noted in his assessment of the U.S.–China summit in Alaska in 2021.
The second example is also related to the Soviet Union. Johnson recounts how the Soviets deviously moved away from an outright Gulag system of political imprisonment by classifying certain political dissidents as psychologically unwell. This practice accorded with Marxist teaching, which held that rejection of Marxism was itself a sign of psychological malady. But some in the West did not want to admit that the Soviets were so blatantly abusing science:
The West first became aware of Soviet penal psychiatry in 1965 with the publication of Valery Tarsis’s Ward 7, and thereafter efforts were made within the psychiatric profession to obtain documentation of specific cases and to raise the issue at meetings of the World Psychiatric Association. These efforts Were partly frustrated by the anxiety of some (chiefly American) psychiatrists to preserve Iron Curtain participation in the body at any cost, partly by the skill with which the Soviet psychiatric establishment covered its tracks and, in 1973, arranged a Potemkin-type visit to the Serbsky [Institute, the Soviet Union’s main psychiatric-research center].
Eventually, evidence of this conduct emerged despite the efforts of both Soviets and Americans to cover it up.
The obvious parallels are to how the CCP covered up its own complicity in the spawning of Covid-19 and to how Western scientists who studied the disease, accustomed to collaborating with counterparts in China, conspired to maintain contact with and even exculpate them despite mounting evidence of perfidy. Contact with communist regimes can be reciprocal if care is not taken, and it may lead to the import of aspects of that system to the other country in question.
History does not always repeat exactly. But given the constancy of human nature, certain circumstances can recur. Let the wisdom of Modern Times demonstrate the utility of studying the past.