Columns

C icero, the great Roman philosopher, lawyer and statesman, once mused that “a man who knows nothing of what happened before he was born shall remain forever a child.” Rudge from Allan Bennett’s The History Boys said, “How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another.” Though the two men differ greatly in time, culture and the fact that one was a fictional schoolboy from Sheffield and the other possibly the greatest orator to ever live, they are equally insightful in their analysis.

History is the human story. An appreciation of the past allows us to better understand our present and anticipate our future. It also, as the exasperated Rudge would attest to, shows that some world leaders should read a book every once in a while because a lot of this shit has happened already. The US-led war in Afghanistan is just one such example. It began in 2001 with the delightfully named Operation Enduring Freedom, but actually was the latest in a string of wars and armed conflicts dating back to the first successful conquest of modern-day Afghanistan and its inhabitants by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE. Old mate Alex was quite possibly the only “Westerner” to subdue and rule the Afghani people for an extended period of time and did so in a booze-sodden romp across the Persian Gulf all before the birth of Jesus, a person whose historical veracity we might get to in a later column.

The Americans, before nobly trying to give Afghanistan all the freedom it could endure, should have taken the time to chat to their allies, the British, who enjoyed not one, not two, but three Afghan wars before their 2001 effort. Or even to their erstwhile enemies, the Russians, whose Soviet troops were hounded out in the 80s by the Mujahedeen, who were armed, funded and trained by … the Americans. Yet, apparently, by the time 2001 rolled around the US had forgotten all that.

This column shall attempt to tell some of the historical stories from the rich and sordid past of our species so that you don’t one day find yourself declaring war on Mesopotamia with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Some will be funny, some will be horrific, some will provide a greater understanding of current events, and some will just be absolutely fucking irrelevant, fit only for pub quizzes and trying to impress Tinder dates.