No, history does not repeat itself, systematically, indefinitely or in identical fashion. In reading the “classics”, however, as A.Y. Portnoff has done here, one sometimes finds analyses which remain eminently current.
Such is the case with the reflections of Demosthene in his effort to warn the Greeks against Macedonian expansionism, more than three centuries B.C. He denounced verbal condemnations as useless and warned that to refuse battle was to risk falling into the hands of tyrants.
History proved him right; we are never sufficiently vigilant when it comes to the emergence of barbarism. Nor are we attentive enough to the lessons of history, as the massacres tolerated today in the former Yugoslavia attest.
Démosthène, Munich, Sarajevo...
This article is published in Futuribles journal ,
