[Kat]
Since I'm home sick, I have time to read and write about some subjects here. Ry linked to an article called "What Have We Learned?"
At first, I was kind of going along with the guy about not learning important lessons from history and that, yes, globalization has a way of turning shared experiences on their heads as well as bringing out all sorts of crackpots and petty grievances that can effect a nation state. People are no longer solely dependent on a national history or identity, but can choose from many different ideas and data points. We know this because this is exactly how terrorists recruit around the world from people who, normally, should have no complaints about their lives.
He points out that Americans (USA) may have not learned important lessons like our European friends because, unlike them, we have never really experienced war directly and totally as a nation. For instance, Europeans, Chinese, Russians, etc have all lost not only millions of soldiers, but millions of citizens that have necessarily changed their point of view about war. You could almost agree with him accept that, instead of making us more willing to tromp around and start huge global wars like our European and Asian friends in history, we have become very select in what actions we will take about what.
More so, we have become casualty averse. I believe that we can certainly chock that up to our experiences in war, losing large quantities of men, money and materials while staving off the worse of the European causes. Including, I might add, the Viet Nam war which he points to without ever mentioning that it is post-colonial France that leads to that war. It is not a stand alone war we chose to entertain without cause or reason.
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Yet, I find the authors somewhat wistful praise of the Euro/Asian model of "pacifism" ridiculous and, frankly, disingenuous because, as modern history has shown, the Europeans, Russians and Chinese are not adverse to war, they are just more adverse to risking their own military or their political prestige at home with their own casualties. To that effect, they have used small wars, proxy wars and various other support of violent movements to obtain their political means with little military expense to themselves.
The French in Rwanda and the Ivory Coast, the Chinese in Sudan, the Russians (name a place they are not) giving nuclear capabilities to Iran or selling unknown quantities of arms around the world. I do not find the European model something to aspire to or somehow containing a better memory, thus aversion to war. All I see they have learned is how to avoid risking their own population and military. Period.
He wrote:
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today.
Really? That's why Buckingham Palace has the trooping of the guard and the French have their regular air shows? Or, even the French who will more boldly claim that they would use nuclear weapons directly against a particular nation than any President of the United States would so boldly claim?
Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today.
I address that above. I am not so sure I find any such behavior where proxy wars and arms sales become the predominant act of Euopeans and Asians to avoid risking their own populations, but providing for the death of hundreds of thousands or even millions of some other nation while not getting their hands dirty. This is elitism at its worst, not its best. And, while we have certainly participated in such actions, it certainly does not prove any superiority of these other nations that they have avoided participating in conflict while pushing proxy wars.
Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
And then he blows it all away claiming that it is "neoconservatives", the great bogeyman of the modern American politics, that claim that war and conflict are things that Americans understand. Sorry, in fact, the two men who most embodied those statements are long gone and dead. Theodore Roosevelt and Patton made those claims long before the advent of the neo-conservatives.
I would also add, as I am reading the book now, John Adams who notes that the United States was born in war and, as freedom and democracy are an anathema to much of the world, then as now, that war is likely the long term effect for any who seek those two paramount desires.
Empires may be dead and the writer may look longingly upon Europe for his models, but it does not necessarily mean that European nations or any others have ended their obsession with shaping the world, even through military means. They have simply pushed it below the radar so that they can pretend to some detachment from it and its outcomes.
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