‘History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’

Karl Marx famously wrote that “history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Ben Cohen explains here how this apothegm applies today: “Afghanistan and Gaza: Tragedy and Farce,” by Ben Cohen, JNS.org, Algemeiner, September 15, 2024:

Keen-eyed readers of this column will know that I am fond of occasionally quoting Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In those lines originally published in 1852, Marx was referring to the coup in France the previous year carried out by Louis Napoleon, nephew of the far better-known Napoleon Bonaparte. But since then, his aphorism has been applied in many contexts where current events echo the past.

Looking at recent developments in Afghanistan, I was again reminded of Marx’s quote. When the Taliban first seized power in that shattered country in 1996, that was undoubtedly a tragedy; first for the Afghan people, yet again denied the opportunity to nurture a democratic polity, and later for the United States and the rest of the world. The terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States—the 23rd anniversary of which was solemnly marked last week—were incubated in Afghanistan after the Taliban provided Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda with a haven there. That terrible atrocity right at the turn of the millennium turned history on a different course, setting up an epic battle between Western liberal democracy, with its emphasis on pluralism and individual rights, and an Islamist form of totalitarianism that sought to crush anything and everything in its path it deemed to be a deviation from its vision.

Wars duly followed, in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and existing and new threats, especially from the Islamic Republic of Iran, deepened at just the time that Western publics grew tired of foreign interventions and foreign wars, setting the stage for a revival of both left-wing anti-imperialism and right-wing isolationism. Finally, in 2021, amid the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban returned to power, in a heartbreaking confirmation that the previous 20 years had been a colossal waste of blood and money.

That, too, was a tragedy—and yet, there are elements of farce here that suggest, at least to my mind, that history can repeat itself as both tragedy and farce simultaneously.

As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, only a few regional specialists and policy wonks grasped the grave threat posed by the Taliban. The rest of us were shaken from our slumber when those passenger planes careened into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Twenty years later, with a new generation coming of age, we stopped caring and just wanted out. All that was and is a tragedy, and the restoration of the Taliban is the most tragic aspect of all. But where is the farce?

That can be summarized in one word: Gaza. For all the incompetence and corruption of their leaders, the Palestinians have long been adept at exploiting guilt over colonialism and the long tradition of antisemitism in Western countries, even as large numbers of them thumb their noses at the values our civilizations represent, from the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 massacre, when many danced in the streets and handed out candy in celebration, to the pogrom of Oct. 7 last year, when Hamas and allied terrorist groups murdered, raped and kidnapped their way through southern Israel. The result? As pro-Israel advocates on social media constantly point out, seemingly to no avail, our streets are empty of protesters when blood is shed in Ukraine or Sudan or, indeed, Afghanistan, but as soon as an Israel Defense Forces missile strikes a Hamas command center in Gaza City or Rafah, they pour out like rats from a sewer. Therein lies the farce….

One sentence in Ben Cohen’s piece goes to the heart of the current moral disarray: “The fixation with Palestine is one major reason why Western publics remain largely indifferent to, and even contemptuous of, the suffering of non-Palestinians.” They don’t have space on their mental bandwidth. They’re all in on “Palestine,” because that allows them to indulge, morally, their pre-existing antisemitism, “which has gone viral,” and which can at long last be safely expressed as anti-Zionism. Don’t try to get Western publics alarmed about how women are mistreated in Afghanistan or Iran, or about the mass famine in Sudan, or about the Uighurs forced into their re-education camps in Xinjiang, or about the murder of Christians by Boko Haram in Nigeria, or Putin’s murder of Alexei Navalny, or North Korea’s thermonuclear progress. These are mere blips on the nightly news. But Gaza, poor tortured martyred Gaza, and that nasty little Sparta, Israel, whose IDF so torments and murders tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza practically every month — for that our publics are all ears. They can’t get enough of it.