46 // DISCOVERY | POLITICS
The Past Which Will Not Pass: Policy Makers Trapped Under History’s Shadow AUTHOR // LOTTIE TWYFORD Politicians are notorious at employing ‘history’ to (supposedly) both make sense of a situation, and, convince others that their chosen policy path is best. Think of Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis who didn’t want to be Tojo, or every time, from Truman in Korea, Nixon in Vietnam or Bush in Iraq, that you’ve heard the words ‘Munich’, ‘Chamberlain’, ‘Hitler’ and
‘Appeasement’ in the same sentence. This is them doing it, and often, it’s a bit of a problem. Nolte, a German historian, calls history like this the “past that does not want to pass away” and here refers specifically to the shadow of the Holocaust looming over the German collective consciousness.
