How To Interpret Historical Analogies

Historical analogies – basically, the claim that two events or phenomena separated by time, and sometimes also by space, are similar in essential ways – are all around us. ‘History is repeating itself’ is a prominent idea, often phrased as ‘We’ve been here before’ or ‘This feels awfully familiar.’ Given that analogies are not a central feature of historical writing, or even something historians are normally trained to do, it’s worth asking: who makes historical analogies and why? How do historical analogies work? When do they catch on? Why are they so popular? What purpose do they serve? Do they help us better understand the world?

Probably no one loves using historical analogies more than bad-faith political actors. When the George W Bush administration prepared the American people for a war in Iraq based on lies and deceptions, it inundated the public with comparisons between the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler; the idea was that we cannot ‘appease dictators’ the way that Britain and France ‘appeased’ Hitler in Munich in 1938, one year before he invaded Poland and started the worst war in history. The analogy rendered going to war with Iraq a moral requirement, since not going to war with Iraq would be like allowing Nazi Germany to run amok. Even if historically absurd, the analogy was probably effective politically, given that the then-recent attacks of 11 September 2001 (which, by 2002, most Americans believed were connected to Saddam) had already been analogised to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor of December 1941.

Historical analogies can also be invaluable and enlightening, as long as we remain wary of those using them, and of their reasons. If we are conscientious about the past, we want to learn from it, pay respect to our predecessors, and derive proper lessons from how they might have dealt with their own challenges and hard times. One of the intuitive ways we react to a confusing, frightening present is to reach back into the history we know to find ways to render the current moment legible. All this is normal and natural.

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.