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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says we must choose our commemorations wisely.
Coming from a historian who wrote an Armada book for 1988, a life of Columbus ahead of the quincentennial of 1492, and a study of Amerigo Vespucci in time for the 500th anniversary of the naming of America, what I'm about to say may sound incredible.
I can see no reason - except superstition or pointless adherence to tradition - for commemorating events at intervals of decades and centuries.
In writing those books, I was responding to public interest, not endorsing its irrational quirks. I'd be as happy celebrating a memory every 42 or 395 years, say, as every 40 or 400. When we engage in these commemorations, moreover, we often seem to choose the wrong event.
This year, in most of the Western world, the 40th anniversary of a reputed annus mirabilis has captured most of the attention of the commemoration industry. But 1968 seems unworthy: a year of false hopes, failed dreams and dispiriting deaths.
In Spain, people are marking, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the 200th anniversary of the so-called War of Independence - the uprising against Napoleon that Goya painted so vividly. The war was a disaster, igniting Spanish nationalism, empowering the army, installing a reactionary regime and provoking Spanish America into rebellion.
But in all of this, the...