history repeats itself

If it be true that history repeats itself, then assuredly a narrative of domestic trials, of political emergencies, and of religious animosities can never be out of date, since men and women still bear in their hearts, passions as vindictive, a patriotism as ardent, and, let us hope, a piety as sincere as distinguished, in the sixteenth century, Philip and Charlotte du Plessis de Mornay.

1871, The Edinburgh review, or Critical Journal, →OCLC, page 486

In other words, Ballard's pseudo-scientific tales remap social history's penchant for psychoanalysing the impact of historical atrocity (World War II) by deflecting it onto another historical disaster (Vietnam). Only, history repeats itself in Ballard's text with one crucial, contemporary difference: in 'Love and Napalm: Export USA' it is no longer the combatant, the active participant of war, who comes under psychological scrutiny, but the passive spectators

2016, Jeanette Baxter, J.G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination, →ISBN

We all know [in paraphrase] Marx's remark that history repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. Marx had in mind the tragedy of the fall of Napoleon I and the later farce of the reign of his nephew Napoleon III. Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse remarked that the lesson of Nazism seems to be the opposite one: first as a farce (throughout the 1920s, Hitler and his gang were mostly taken as a bunch of marginal political clowns), then as a tragedy (when Hitler effectively took power).

2021 January 25, Slavoj Žižek, “Debates: First As Farce, Then As Tragedy?”, in The Philosophical Salon: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel