[Peace-discuss] Civil War (& misuse of historical symbols)

[Stuart Levy]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 02:02:56PM -0700, Bill Strutz wrote:
  [... omitting other very good points ...]
>    Wars don't always happen for dramatic, momentous, and meaningful reasons.
>    Sometimes people just screw up.  Maybe we didn't have a reason to invade
>    Iraq at all.  Maybe it was expected to be so easy that the question wasn't
>    "Why?" but "Why not?"

A frightening thought, but this makes all too much sense.
We were told it would be a cakewalk -- maybe in this respect our
Admin. wasn't trying to delude us so much as revealing their own delusions.
"Why not bring this unruly country to heel, and set an example for the
other tougher nuts we'd like to get to later?"

>    However, we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we argue about stuff
>    that happened seven score and six years ago.  Do we really care what the
>    Civil War was about?

In this I disagree.  Yes, we do care -- we need to keep examining
history in enough detail that we can, for example, tell a credible analogy
from an incredible one.   Just this week someone in the Admin. was quoted
on NPR comparing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to, I think, Hermann Goering.
And the neocons are making it a commonplace to compare Ahmadinejad to
Hitler, with the implication that Iran has the expansionist warmaking
intention and capacity that the Third Reich did, and that therefore
we must Fight Them To The Death, etc.  We need to know enough history,
and keep enough sense of proportion, to be able to rebut this sort of
inflammatory use of symbols.

>       -- Bill

   Stuart
> ---------------------------
> William J Strutz 
> "Beware the Ides of March" -- Soothsayer to Julius Caesar
> PO Box 11464,Champaign IL 61826       (217) 359-0598
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