History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

The Second Time Around

On 15 August 2021, Taliban fighters walked into the presidential palace in Kabul as the last American forces prepared to leave. The images of desperate crowds at the airport echoed another retreat: in 1989 the Soviet army had withdrawn from the same country after a decade of war, and in 1842 a British army had been destroyed on its retreat from Kabul. Three great powers, three confident interventions, three humiliating exits. It is hard to watch such scenes without recalling Karl Marx's famous line, written in 1852, that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. History does not repeat itself by any law of fate; it repeats when people forget, deny or misread its lessons, and the repetition turns from tragedy to farce because the second time the folly has no excuse of ignorance.

To begin with, the line has a precise origin. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx noted that Hegel had remarked how great world-historic events and personages appear, so to speak, twice, and added that Hegel forgot to say the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Marx had in mind two coups: Napoleon Bonaparte's seizure of power on 18 Brumaire in 1799, which remade Europe, and his nephew Louis Napoleon's coup of December 1851, which borrowed the uncle's name and costumes without his genius. The first was a tragedy in the classical sense: grand actors swept along by forces larger than themselves. The second was a farce: a hollow imitation that knew the script and played it anyway.

The tragedy and the farce are best seen in war and peace. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 humiliated Germany and sowed the resentment that Hitler exploited, ending in a second world war within twenty years, even though the League of Nations had been created to prevent exactly such a repetition. The note of farce came with appeasement at Munich in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain returned promising "peace for our time" eleven months before war broke out. Afghanistan repeats the pattern: each power believed it could remake a proud, mountainous society by force, and each left a costlier failure behind it. The phrase graveyard of empires is a cliche precisely because the lesson has been ignored so often.

Moreover, economic history is full of such repetitions. Tulip mania in seventeenth-century Holland, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the crash of 1929 and the global financial crisis of 2008 share one script: easy credit, a story that this time is different, prices detached from value, and a collapse that ruins ordinary savers. Germany's hyperinflation of 1923 was a tragedy born of war debts and reparations; Zimbabwe's hyperinflation of 2008, which drove its central bank to issue a one hundred trillion dollar note in January 2009, looked like a grim farce that ignored a lesson every economics student knows. The collapse of the crypto exchange FTX in 2022 replayed the old drama of a charismatic promoter and missing customer money, this time in digital dress.

India knows the pattern too. The Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984 killed thousands and became the world's worst industrial disaster. Yet in May 2020 a styrene leak at the LG Polymers plant near Visakhapatnam killed several people and sickened hundreds more, a smaller echo that exposed the same weaknesses in plant safety and emergency planning. Communal violence, too, has recurred across decades with depressingly similar triggers: rumour, mobilisation and a slow administrative response. Each recurrence felt less like fate than like a failure to apply what earlier inquiries had already recommended.

However, the antithesis deserves a fair hearing, for history also shows that repetition is not inevitable. The famines of colonial India, culminating in the Bengal Famine of 1943, did not recur after independence: the Green Revolution, the public distribution system and, later, the National Food Security Act of 2013 turned memory into policy. The Odisha super cyclone of 1999 killed around ten thousand people, but when Cyclone Phailin struck in 2013 and Cyclone Fani in 2019, timely warnings and mass evacuation kept deaths remarkably low. Europe, after two world wars, chose to bind its old enemies together, starting with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, so that a third war between France and Germany became unthinkable. Learning broke the cycle in each case.

This contrast reveals what actually drives repetition. George Santayana warned in 1905 that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Hegel, more gloomily, said that what experience and history teach is that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history. The truth lies between them. History repeats where institutions lack memory: where inquiry reports gather dust, where leaders flatter themselves that they are exceptional, and where citizens are fed myths instead of facts. It does not repeat where societies build lessons into law, budgets and habits. The Indian idea of cyclical time, the turning of the yugas, may suggest that patterns recur, but the Gita's emphasis on right action reminds us that each generation still chooses its deeds.

There is also a modern twist to Marx's line. In an age of social media, the farce often arrives before anyone has digested the tragedy. Misinformation that fuelled lynchings in one place resurfaces in another, and conspiracy theories that crippled public health in earlier epidemics returned during COVID-19 with greater speed and reach. Technology has not ended repetition; it has shortened the interval between the original and the parody.

The same law works at the scale of a single life. A student who fails an examination and blames only bad luck is likely to fail again in the same way; one who studies the answer sheet and changes the method rarely does. Psychologists describe a repetition compulsion, the tendency to re-enact old patterns until they are understood. Organisations behave alike: a company that hides one accident behind a press release usually suffers the next one, while airlines, which investigate every crash publicly and share the findings across the industry, have made flying steadily safer over the decades. The difference is not intelligence but honesty about failure. Where mistakes are confessed, examined and turned into rules, history becomes a teacher. Where they are buried, it becomes a stage on which the same play is performed again, each time to a smaller and more cynical audience.

What, then, can a society do to avoid the second act? It can teach history as a discipline of evidence rather than a quarry for grievances, so that citizens recognise old manipulations in new forms. It can give institutions a memory: implementation of commission reports, disaster audits and safety codes should be tracked and published. It can value dissent, since those who warn against repeating a mistake are usually unpopular before they are proved right. And it can practise humility, remembering that every generation believes it is wiser than the last.

The scenes at Kabul airport in 2021 were not the work of fate but of forgotten lessons. Marx's line is best read not as a prophecy but as a warning: the first failure may be forgiven as tragedy, but the second, committed with the record open before us, deserves the ridicule of farce. History offers its lessons once at full price; whether a nation pays again depends on whether it remembers. For India, building institutions that remember is the surest way to make its future more than a rerun of its past.