Those who forget history...

Further to Mike's comments the other day about American and European attitudes to war being attributable to European memory of what war is actually like, I found this comment in an interview on Salon to be interesting:

[America's] forgetfulness makes it possible at any moment in history for us to believe in our essential innocence. We don't remember that we've ever done anything other than what we do now. It's a great triumph to a civilization that it can go from being a white supremacist country in the late '50s, when a substantial portion of the country didn't believe in racial intermarriage, to racial egalitarianism. We can believe that this is just the triumph of what our essential values have always been.

Americans see their lack of memory as a virtue, because it allows them to forget the bad past and focus on the (assumed) better future - and there's some truth in this. However, in forgetting the bad past, they also forget why it was bad, which robs them of the very guidance they need to ensure that the future stays better rather than regressing back to the bad old past again. We can see this in American economic and social policies over the last twenty years, where their rush to deregulate everything seems to give no thought to why such regulations were implemented in the first place. It's just assumed that they're there because regulation is the sort of thing Government just does (because its Evil and Spiteful and wants to Impede Business) - rather than a response to the very real problems of an unregulated market (see the nineteenth century for an example of this). And of course, we see it in the American desire to ignore existing international agreements on warfare, and return to the barbarities of the past.