Those Who Cannot Remember The Past
Are condemned to repeat it. So said George Santayana. And those who never learn history will repeat history over and over until the end of time. Thomas Sowell describes the terrible history of "peace" movements that inevitably cause wars.
One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.
"Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called "peace" movements — that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.
Take the Middle East. People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.
Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany.
There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia — not by cease fires or bowing to "world opinion" and there were no corrupt busybodies like the United Nations to demand replacing military force with diplomacy.
There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.
"World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.
The ones who start the war will get a pass on the repercussions of their actions because certain well-meaning (usually, anyway) people will want to limit suffering and casualties. Even if that means the same cycle will repeat in a few years. This is another must read. There seem to be a few of them today.
By Kathy, July 21, 2006 @ 2:31 pm
Are condemned to repeat it. So said George Santayana. And those who never learn history will repeat history over and over until the end of time. Thomas Sowell describes the terrible history of “peace” movements that inevitably cause wars.
History only repeats in its broad outlines. History never repeats itself exactly. That means the task for humans is to figure out what the the lessons of history are for our actions and behavior in the present.
One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that when an entire subset of people are demonized because of a particular ethnic, racial, religious, or national identity, that entire group of people become subhuman in the eyes of others. That is when genocide happens. One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that this kind of mass murder can happen any time an entire group of people is defined by a single characteristic. If we think the lesson is that we must never let the Jewish people be exterminated again, then we have not learned the most important part of the lesson. The Nazi Holocaust happened only once. It will never happen again. But genocide can happen again, and obviously has, many times. And *any time an entire group of people is dehumanized because of ethnicity, religion, race, etc.,* we start to create the conditions in which genocide can happen again.
I also disagree with your notion that history proves peace movements lead to war. My reading of the last century tells me that war leads to war. World War I led to World War II. World War II, although it defeated a terrible evil, led to another great evil: the nuclear arms race, and the very real possibility of global nuclear conflagration. World War II also led to the Cold War (which also fed the nuclear arms race, of course}. The Cold War created the ideology of anti-Communism; and anti-Communism led to a U.S. foreign policy so obsessively focused on keeping other countries out of the Soviet sphere of influence that successive U.S. administrations were completely blind to any and all evils they might be encouraging in the name of fighting Communism. And that blindness played a huge part in the development of fanatical Islamist ideology and the rise of Islamic terrorism.
I’m not saying that the danger of appeasement is not ONE lesson history has taught us. But to focus on that one danger, and to see every element of foreign policy through that one lens, to the exclusion of any other possible lessons 20th century history may have to teach us, is not only short-sighted, but also very, very dangerous.
By Tano, July 22, 2006 @ 2:05 am
Take your own advice Gaius. Learn the lessons of history. Resolution of conflict through force is almost never final - it simply leads to the next round of violence. Granted, you could find a few examples to the contrary, but those examples are very illustrative.
Just about the entire human species learned, in the first half of the 20th century, the lesson that you and the neocons seem determined to forget. Watching the endless European Wars climax in the absolute blood bath of WWI, and then shortly later to be repeated to a greater extent in WWII, humans learned that the resort to violence, driven by people who are willing to use force to solve problems, leads to inevitable escalation (there are always such people on both sides), and endless repetition.
After WWII, with the wise leadership of American liberal ideas, we attempted to establish some global values and institutions that would be dedicated to resolving conflicts peacefully, and we used them to navigate through a half century of unprecedented peace and prosperity. With nukes on the table, we all uderstood the importance of resisting escalation. Modern conservatives have been relentlessly trying to undermine these institutions and these ideals, and have taken up the traditional recourse to using force if you think you have it over your opponents. You are plunging us back into the nightmares of the early 20th century (and before). Only this time with WMDs around. You people are the most dangerous humans to ever strut your stupidity on the world stage.
By Gaius, July 22, 2006 @ 5:55 am
You might want to actually try learning the history instead of using liberal indoctrination theory. Tano, I have banned you for the repeated ad hominem attacks. I let this one through to tell you that - yet again. I will not let another through. Period. Don’t waste your time or mine.