various pitfalls

Well, the neocons at the Weekly Standard think we've got to prove we're man enough to Iran and that the suffering that results will be good for us. After all, once again, it's permanently 1938. For a long time this constant resort to the failure of Appeasement confused me, I sympathized with the worry, after all, who wants Hitler?

Still I couldn't agree with it, and would put to the dangers of historical analogy, after all, Hitler was able to rise so qucikly (after years of near irrelevance) because those who were in a position to stop him compared him to various things, people and movements that he was not and therefore, helped him. People are always talking about history repeating itself but this is nonsense. Events are distinct and made up of millions of pieces. Patterns emerge in places but then are subsumed by subsequently occuring events so that only when we look at a part do we see seeming similarities of the whole. Having said that...at some point I was teaching World War One again, a subject I love to teach, at some point and I thought, 1938 hell, this is all shaking out much more like 1898, 1900, when the forces of various programs led by the plutocratic idealists also held sway over much of the world. How else to explain the delusional fantasies of Cecil Rhodes's deepest Africa or other European actions in Africa, Asia and just about everywhere else and how compatible those various beliefs are with the beliefs of the plutocratic administration led by Bush and Vice?

Also, this makes sense because imperialism unleashed a vision of the world that has become pervasive and hard to shake, because to shake it is to confront the darkness of our own cultures. To anybody that's examined Conrad, this should come as no surprise. This vision suggested that as we exploited those weaker than us, we would elevate them in spirit and show them that our way led to the light of salvation if they would just cooperate and let us dictate to them what actually was.

The idea that we are instruments of salvation is beguiling and gives us the confidence to look beyond injustice or to interpret it as something allowable because it is part of a larger movement that is God's Plan. Other people's suffering or unbelief, regardless of the cause, after all, allows us to become missionaries of God's Love and God's Will. This argument is used everywhere seemingly, at the moment.

Imperialism, likewise, suggests that we can invasively make changes, and as long as they are done in the spirit of our beliefs, these changes we make to others will benefit them. These beliefs can be religious, and they can also be brought about by ideas of what our culture stands for, what our country means and other nonsense that allows us to justify our violences as the spreading of peace, economy and community. As in the late 1800s and early 1900s, actions create reactions, and reactions create reprisals, and reprisals create revenge and revenge creates fury and fury creates the the law of the jungle as practiced by man. Wherever we look, there it is: the massings of anger.

In the early 1900s, as now, there were plenty of skirmishes, even some pretty big wars (Russo-Japanese and Boer Wars for instance - the American incursion into the Philippines), and tensions rose over the competitions of national feeling, the desire to control how the world's prizes were divvied, as the world armed itself to the teeth, and as nations counted their friends and their enemies, war came because the dialectic of war had been entered into.

And if we are to talk about appeasement and its dangers, should we not talk about the failures of historical analogy that preceded and drove that appeasement and take a long, hard look at how much Iran has profited from the American actions of the last few years and should we not look at the brushfire of radical religion everywhere in this world, including Washington D.C.

And yet, there is another precedent that would be interesting to explore, cheaper and perhaps more useful. In the late 1940s George Marshall and company devised the Marshall Plan, a massive aid program to rebuild Europe and contain the spread of communist sympathies in the countries we counted as our friends and satellites. I believe that to exit from the dialectic of war, it would be helpful if the schools that most Lebanese and Palestinian children went to weren't run by Hamas and Hizbullah. I believe that increased cultural exchange and interaction would also be necessary, the United States should be included in this increased cultural exchange and attempt to play a central role in the development of peaceful enterprises. We should believe that peace is stronger than the acts undoubtedly arrayed against it by the many forces of hate. Down the path we are on the fires will only grow more fierce.