> Looking backward it is easy to see that the world would probably be much
> better off if the U.S. had been Balkanized. Mayube. Like shag, I'm not
> too fond of hypothetical pasts.
> But that is all daydreaming. We really are not learing anything about
> our present tasks from debating what should have been done inm 1860 or
> 1865. We need to strive to understand history to grasp as fully as
> possible how history works and how it doesn't work. We con't need to
> understand history in order to learn lessons from it. There are no
> lessons to learn. That is why criticism of the past is almost always
> ahistorical and at best futile.
Philip K. Dick, not Perry Anderson.