Post

War and Peace: An Overview (Robert Whealey, US) (John Eipper, USA, 09/13/07 6:31 am)

Robert Whealey responds to recent posts by Tim Brown, Massoud Malek,
Nigel Jones, Alain de Benoist and others:

The reality is that between Verdun in 843 (Charlemagne) and the 1955
Saar treaty, the French and Germans had hundreds of small and large
wars to determine where the border would be.

In 1945 the city of Minsk celebrated its 102nd liberation (62 of those
invasions came from the West).

Leaving out the American Revolution and the Civil War which were
constitutional in nature, the US has fought 9 wars. It could be argued
that World War I [and WWII?--JE] and the Korean War were defensive in nature. The US defended GB, France and South Korea from an aggressive imperial power.

That leaves 7 wars in which powerful economic interests in the US
attacked weaker peoples in Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam,
Afghanistan and Iraq.

Between 1914 and 1991 the European imperial powers gradually learned
that imperialism does not pay. Most Portuguese and Spaniards learned
the bitter fruits of imperialism by 1648. Americans are peculiarly
anti-historical. The reactionary fascists have too much selective
mythological history of some glorious past. Peace comes not from
games of logic, but a careful study of international history in which
all the players have unique national historical accounts to tell.


JE comments: There's lots to think about in Robert Whealey's brief
summary of the last millennium's wars. I would agree profoundly with Robert's claim that Americans are anti-historical, or even more accurately, a-historical. We have a very short memory--this might explain why we are condemned to repeat historical mistakes.

But does any nation learn from its mistakes? I wouldn't say, for starters,
that the Spanish and the Portuguese realized much about empires by 1648--the
Portuguese were clinging to their African possessions as recently as
1975, and to Macau even later. Spain still lays claim to Ceuta and
Melilla in Africa, all the while protesting the British presence in
Gibraltar.


-- For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

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