How far has Alex Magno gone away from his leftist roots? Very far. He is so far gone that he either forgot or was unwilling to directly attribute a quote from Karl Marx. In his
column today, he wrote
"They just thought history would simply do a re-run, forgetting Hegel’s famous injunction: that when history seems to repeat itself, the first time it is a tragedy, the second time it is a farce."
I have always thought this was a quote from Karl Marx but I was taught that Marx borrowed a lot of ideas from Hegel and since Alex Magno was one of the teachers who taught me that, I had to consider that I might be mistaken and Marx actually quoted Hegel. So I googled the quote and found out that I was right. Marx was the originator of the phrase, it was the first sentence in his work "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte". "Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire."
This sentence was followed by my favorite quote from Marx "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."
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