By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, September 01, 2016
In today’s technically sophisticated and globally
connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it
has not changed all that much.
Facebook and Google may have recalibrated our lifestyles,
but human nature, geography, and culture are nearly timeless. Even as
ideologies and governments come and go, the same old, same old problems and
challenges remain.
Compare what dominated the news in 1966, 50 years ago.
Abroad, Israel was constantly fighting on the West Bank
against Palestinian guerrilla groups and in the air over Syria. It is likely
that in another 50 years the story will remain about the same.
The Middle East in 1966 was going up in flames, just as
it is today — and in many of the same places. The Syrian government was
overthrown in a coup. The Saudis, Jordanians, and Egyptians were involved in a
civil war in Yemen. The Egyptian government executed Islamists charged with
planning a theocratic takeover.
Africa, as today, was wracked by wars or coups in places
such as Chad, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan.
American relations with Russia were tense. Moscow clamped
down on dissidents and opposed almost all U.S. initiatives abroad.
The Castro government in Cuba was railing against the
United States, outlawing free expression and alleging American interference in
Cuba’s affairs. The only difference from today was that Cuban dictator Fidel
Castro then was a 40-year-old firebrand, not a 90-year-old near-invalid.
Nothing has much changed elsewhere in the world either.
Just as Cyprus today remains a bone of contention between Turkey and Greece, 50
years ago Greeks and Turks were meeting to resolve tensions on the divided
island. Ditto the ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan, whose leaders met
frequently during 1966 following outright war in 1965.
There were also the sorts of rifts within NATO that have
become so familiar. Today, the U.S. worries that the alliance is unraveling due
to bickering and the unwillingness of European countries to increase their
defense budgets. Fifty years ago, the problem was France. In 1966, the French
actually quit the alliance, which suddenly had to transfer its headquarters
from Paris to Brussels, Belgium.
Nor were things that different at home than they are
today.
Fifty years ago, Walt Disney died while working on an
animated version of Rudyard Kipling’s The
Jungle Book, whose remake this year was a summer hit. In 1966, a new
science-fiction series, Star Trek,
premiered on television. Yet another installment in the “Star Trek” movie
series (Star Trek Beyond) just came
out in July. For all our new computer and video technologies, millions of young
Americans still watch The Jungle Book
and Star Trek, not that much
differently from the way their grandparents did a half-century ago.
Pop hits today do not sound all that much different from
those that swept America in 1966, performed by groups such as the Rolling
Stones, the Beatles, and Jefferson Airplane. Even fashion tastes come full
circle. A man at work in a coat and tie looked about the same then as now. In
1966, miniskirt hemlines hit the mid-thigh — similar to the retro miniskirts of
2016.
We often worry that 2016 America has become a violent
society, with unprecedented mass killings at schools and universities. But
unfortunately, nothing much has changed here either. In July 1966, mass
murderer Richard Speck was arrested for butchering eight student nurses in
their dorm in Chicago. The next month, Charles Whitman climbed up into a tower
at the University of Texas at Austin and fatally shot 14 innocents, wounding
another 32 (after killing his mother and his wife).
The United States has dealt with racial unrest this year
from Dallas to Milwaukee, after rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and in
Baltimore last year. The so-called Division Street Riots broke out in Chicago
in 1966, and there was also rioting in Lansing, Michigan, that year following
the Watts Riots of 1965.
The protest group Black Lives Matter has sprung up to
galvanize popular support against the perceived mistreatment of African
Americans by police. In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black
Panther party in a similar context.
America and the rest of the world have made enormous
progress in technology, science, and social relations. But beneath the veneer
of 2016, human nature remains the same, and life often operates on principles
similar to those from a half-century ago — and even before that.
We assume that life in 1900 was unrecognizable in
comparison to the modern world of 1950. It was, or was not, in the same way
that 1966 is both like and unlike 2016.
That persistent continuity of the human experience is why
studying history remains about the only way to understand who we were, are, and
will be.
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