Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
Autocratic governments consolidate their power by flooding the societies they control with lies and propaganda. Anyone who questions the lies can feel isolated, powerless, and uncertain, but uncertainty helps to sustain authoritarian systems. Confusion about “what is true” weakens confidence in public institutions and fosters doubts about traditional expertise, so authoritarian leaders attract popular support with promises of decisive action and with simple solutions for complex problems.
Americans who believe that truthful information should shape public communications and government policies are thus struggling to stay afloat in a sea of MAGA misinformation that threatens to sink its critics under the waves of debilitating lies.
The Courage to Tell the Truth in Twentieth-Century France and Czechoslovakia
The onslaught of falsehoods about government agencies, universities, health care, tariffs, and the “legacy media” has generated fears that the United States has entered an unprecedented national crisis. People in other modern nations, however, have confronted government lying with far fewer options for telling the truth, as we can see in the history of two courageous writers who rejected the dehumanizing lies of authoritarian systems in twentieth-century Europe.
The French historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) faced powerful autocratic regimes that endangered their own lives, but they both believed that the lies of authoritarian leaders would eventually give way to a future revival of national democratic traditions and values.
Bloch was a distinguished expert on medieval European history who served in the French army that was destroyed by the German conquest of France in1940. Although some French intellectuals found ways to escape the country, Bloch joined the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation and continually supported the national struggle until he was arrested, tortured, and executed by the Gestapo in 1944.
Havel, by contrast, survived the Russian military occupation of Prague in 1968 and several later imprisonments to play a leading role in the anti-communist “Velvet Revolution” of 1989; and he would later serve as the first President of post-authoritarian Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) as well as the first president of the new Czech Republic (1993-2003) that emerged after Slovakia became a separate independent state.
Despite the differences in their life stories and in the authoritarian regimes they rejected, Bloch and Havel shared commitments to the essential democratic belief that telling the truth is ultimately more powerful than telling or accepting lies. This belief in the liberating power of truth gives these writers exceptional historical value whenever big lies threaten democratic societies and the freedom of political communities.
Public lies are weakening America’s institutions and democratic political culture in civic spheres that far exceed all brief enumerations, but it’s worth noting a few examples of the blatant misinformation that now impairs America’s civic health.
Some falsehoods refer to domestic issues: Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2020, or vaccines are more dangerous than the illnesses they prevent, or executive orders can unilaterally dissolve government programs that the US Congress created and funded.
Other falsehoods refer to international relations: Ukrainians are responsible for the ongoing war in their country, or foreign nations pay the tariffs on America’s imported goods, or immigrants can be deported without legal processes and judicial hearings.
Each lie helps to justify and expand authoritarian claims or actions because the misinformation confuses people who assume that presidential statements must be true; and the endless lying pushes others to withdraw from civic life because they feel overwhelmed or powerless.
Marc Bloch’s Analysis of France’s Strange Defeat
If you feel powerless in 2025, imagine the despair that French people felt in 1940 as the German army occupied their country and destroyed their democratic government. The French sense of political and social loss during this hostile takeover of their governing institutions (with the collaboration of right-wing French allies) still carries unsettling historical echoes for Americans who assume that well-established democracies cannot disintegrate.
Most French people had also assumed after the First World War that their nation would remain a strong democratic republic for future generations, but France’s carefully constructed political system collapsed in the chaos of the German invasion.
Seeking truthful alternatives to the public lies that justified both Nazi imperialism and the collaborationist French regime at Vichy, Marc Bloch wrote an unpublished book called Strange Defeat to analyze how strategic and political failures had contributed to his nation’s humiliating military defeat. He also examined cultural flaws in the nation’s prewar institutions before concluding (optimistically) that a new democracy would eventually emerge from the ruins of France’s shattered political system.
The historian was therefore already looking in 1940 toward a “new springtime” of national renewal that would make it possible for future generations to restore France’s democratic institutions and build creatively on “our authentic [national] heritage, which is not… what some self-styled apostles of tradition have imagined it to be.”
But Bloch himself was facing the insidious lie that he could not be truly “French” because he was a Frenchman who was also a Jew. Although he had always lived in France and served in the French army during both twentieth-century wars against Germany, he recognized that France had become a nation “from which many would like to expel me.”
France fell into this crisis, he explained with the regrets of a self-critical professor, because French schools had failed to help students understand the meaning or value of democratic citizenship and because “a whole group of young leaders” took their ideas solely from right-wing newspapers that ignored the interests of most people in French society. The national media of the 1930s, in other words, fostered both the ignorance and “deep fissure” that helped to destroy the political foundations of France’s democratic republic.
This breakdown of democratic traditions became part of the “strange defeat” which Bloch challenged through the anti-Nazi resistance that led to his execution. His final testament of beliefs, however, set aside specific political ideas and requested that he should be remembered with a single Latin epitaph, Dilexit Veritatem: “He loved the truth.”
A new French republic later emerged after allied forces drove German armies out of France and the Vichy government was abolished, which opened the way for Strange Defeat to be published as an enduring description of the truths Bloch had learned from his own searing experiences and from the democratic heritage he had never abandoned.
French civilians with their hastily made American and French flags sing the “Star Spangled Banner” as they greet U.S. and Free French troops entering Paris, France, Aug. 25, 1944, after Allied liberation of the French capital from Nazi occupation in World War II. (AP Photo/Harry Harris)
Vaclav Havel and The Power of the Powerless
Vaclav Havel was a seven-year-old boy in Prague when the Gestapo murdered Marc Bloch, but he encountered new kinds of lies in postwar Czechoslovakia. By the 1960s he was writing plays to challenge the perpetual misinformation of a communist regime that falsely told workers they were free, banned Havel from foreign travel, and suppressed all critiques of the ruling party.
Defying this autocracy, Havel wrote an (unpublishable) essay in 1978 called The Power of the Powerless. Although he conceded that many Czechs supported their mind-numbing, authoritarian system because it explained “all mysteries” and claimed to remove “anxiety and loneliness” from unstable lives, Havel argued that the powerless opponents of the regime’s falsehoods still held the powerful weapons of truth.
Authoritarian leaders demanded obedient silence, but their government was “captive to its own lies,” which meant “it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.” Those who wanted to challenge this apparently omnipotent force could nevertheless choose human options for “living within the truth” and thereby (ultimately) free the nation from its lying leaders.
The power of liars had created an anti-democratic darkness that many Czechs rejected when they “decided to live within the truth.” Havel knew that truth-tellers needed courage “to say aloud what they think,” but the truth enabled them to “live in harmony with their better self.”
This message from a powerless playwright must have seemed naïve to Czech readers who somehow found illicit copies of Havel’s essay in 1978, yet the truth-tellers would displace the regime of lies within eleven years—and Havel would become their president. The powerless writer and his vulnerable allies used the power of truth to turn the wheel of Czech history toward human rights and the restoration of a democratic political culture.
The Powerful and the Powerless in Contemporary America
Bloch and Havel lived in times and places that differed enormously from our own historical moment. Their stories still resonate among contemporary Americans, however, because they responded to attacks on their beliefs and aspirations with honesty, self-awareness, and historical perspectives.
They understood that the resurgence of democratic political cultures would require new ideas and actions that could not yet be imagined in their own hard times. Rejecting the temptations of despair, they asserted that each truthful statement mattered and that even the simplest actions might help revitalize communities and causes that were greater than themselves.
Above all, Bloch and Havel believed that affirming truth against lies would give integrity to individual lives, courage to others, and real-world power to democratic ideals. If you feel powerless to challenge today’s dispiriting lies, you might draw empowering encouragement from the history of truth-tellers in Nazi-occupied France and Russian-controlled Czechoslovakia.
Americans who strive to “live within the truth,” in short, are also honoring vulnerable people who challenged public lies in the past and urged their compatriots to carry democratic aspirations into a better national future.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. He has recently published “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
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