From Boston to Gaza: learning nothing from experience

It can be such a bore, studying history. And what’s the point anyway? As Henry Ford so rightly pointed out, the only lesson to learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history. 

It’s much more exciting just to go blasting ahead and learn by surprise that things work out just as badly for you as they did for the last guy to try the same trick. Not a pleasant surprise, of course. Just a surprise which you’d have been denied had you gone to the tedious lengths of trying to learn from experience.

Take British General George Gage, way back in 1768. This was when the Americans, and above all the inhabitants of Boston, were revolting. They were doing things like boycotting British goods, distributing incendiary leaflets against the enlightened rule of the British government, and generally behaving as though they were entitled to the same rights as the British born. 

But Gage had the answer. He landed 3500 troops to occupy the city. At the time, the population numbered 16,000, so that was close to one soldier for every four Bostonians. Since he knew the troubles were all down to a small band of hotheads, he knew he’d sort them out, with that level of force, in no time at all.

To his astonishment, it turned out he was mistaken. Far from a few hotheads stirring up trouble, there was no sympathy anywhere in the city for British rule, and especially none for the ‘lobsters’, British soldiers in their red uniforms. On 17 March 1776, British forces, by then increased to 11,000, had to evacuate the city. The event is still marked annually by a holiday known as ‘Evacuation Day’.

British troops evacuating Boston after failing to pacify the city

Within four months, the American colonies had declared themselves independent of Britain, and within seven years, they’d achieved that independence.

Or take the Spanish, four decades later. At the time Spain, which has had more than its share of appalling kings, had been suffering under one of its worst, Charles IV. His son Ferdinand VII would be still worse, so awful that in his carefully balanced and moderately toned book on Spanish history, Una historia de España, Arturo Pérez Reverte describes him as the greatest ‘hijo de puta’ in the country’s rich history of such ‘sons of whores’ (that’s a literal translation: I’m sure you can think of plenty of English expressions that communicate the same degree of respect and admiration).

And yet when, in neighbourly fashion, France decided to free Spain of such men, ‘inviting’ both father and son to be their ‘guests’ across the border, ultimately replacing them with Joseph, brother of the then French Emperor Napoleon, the Spanish people showed no gratitude. Quite honestly, replacing their own ‘hijos de puta’ by a foreign military occupation didn’t leave them feeling particularly liberated. On the 2nd of May 1808, there was an uprising in Madrid in which a number of French troops were killed, an event strikingly recorded by the outstanding painter Francisco Goya.

Francisco Goya’s painting of the French Mameluke soldiers
under attack by the people of Madrid on 2 May 1808

No problem, decided Murat, overall commander of the French troops in Spain. He was a highly effective general, one of Napoleon’s great cavalry commanders, and he commanded serious forces from what was then Europe’s, and probably the world’s, best-trained, best-led and most effective army. He could sort out this uppity behaviour in no time at all.

The next day, the 3rd of May, he had several hundred men rounded up around Madrid and shot. Again, Francisco Goya depicted the executions, producing what has become one of his most celebrated paintings. With hindsight, we view the rising and the shootings as the starting point of what came to be known as the Peninsular War, covering Spain and Portugal, which culminated five years later with the French armies driven back across the Pyrenees into France.

The Third of May shootings, depicted by Francisco Goya

Sadly, that left Spain saddled with its ‘hijos de puta’. But what it mostly showed, as the people of Boston had shown Gage, was that a civilian population that loathes you, is unlikely to be pacified by military force. Even if it is the best in the world.

I could go on and on. But let’s summarise.

In 1916, Britain put down the Easter uprising in Dublin, and shot a number of the ringleaders. That included one of the finest political leaders not just of the time but of all time, James Connolly, who had to be shot tied to a chair, because the wounds he’d received in the earlier fighting made it impossible for him to stand to face the firing squad. He would have died of his injuries within a day or two anyway.

And yet, within six years, 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties had broken free of British rule.

Between 1954 and 1962, France sent colossal armed force into Algeria to put down a rising for independence. I personally knew one of the soldiers who went, a civilian conscripted into the French army at a time when military service was still obligatory, and who came back so destroyed by what he’d seen – and perhaps what he’d done – that he never recovered and died, a depressive alcoholic with his liver shot to hell, in his forties. The war was marked by the widespread use of military force, backed by brutal police action, torture and executions. 

And at the end, where did that lead? Despite the murder of many leaders, the Algerian National Liberation Front ultimately achieved its aim and France was forced to leave its colony.

And what about those six counties in Ireland that didn’t go with the rest of the island when it broke free from Britain back in 1922? I remember the terrible shock of seeing news coverage on the invasion of the most fiercely nationalist area of the city of Derry, the Bogside, in 1972, on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

At the time, the most effective organisation opposed to British rule in Ireland, the Irish Republican Army or IRA, had hit bad times. It had few members or resources and was unable to do much in the way of mounting operations. But then, on Bloody Sunday, the British army decided that it could pacify the Bogside, in no time at all, by sending in crack units, paratroops. In they went and at the end of the operation, thirteen civilians had been killed.

That night, the IRA was inundated with volunteers demanding to be enlisted.

It took 25 years of the so-called ‘Troubles’ before, by political and diplomatic action rather than military force, a way out was finally found, in the Good Friday agreement that brought peace at last to the six counties. For a moment, it looked as though we had at last learned a lesson, learned that blundering into a civilian population like George Gage in Boston in 1768, was no way to solve this kind of problem. That military force couldn’t beat insurgents with popular support, but would only do shameful harm and drum up more support for the insurgents.

Which makes it all the sadder to see what’s happening in Gaza today. Because the Israeli government, entirely justified in reacting to the horrifying terrorist attack on its civilians on 7 October, entirely justified because of the sheer venomous brutality of the assault, has chosen to react not with intelligence and targeted skill, but in the most blundering, incompetent and inappropriate way imaginable. It’s sent the heaviest of forces into Gaza, the most densely populated place on Earth, no doubt expecting to wipe out Hamas in no time at all.

General George Gage in spades. 

Israeli tanks leaving a trail of death and destruction in Gaza

It’s costing thousands of Palestinian civilian lives. Now it’s even caused the deaths of three Israeli hostages, shot by the very force sent to rescue them, so blunt and misguided an instrument it’s proven to be. And, as ever, it’s undoubtedly recruiting more men into the Hamas terrorist organisation than it’s wiping out – no doubt two, three, maybe even ten new recruits for every Gazan civilian killed.

Teaching us again that harrowing lesson from history, that no one learns lessons from history.