[lit-ideas] Japan, Turkey and those aggressive Armenian children
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:39:41 -0700
In How America Got it Right, Bevin Alexander on page 90 writes about the
aftermath off WWI, "The Paris Conference produced precisely the dictated
peace that Wilson had feared - begetting an angry Germany thirsting for
retribution. Niccolo Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Italian political
theorist, prescribed two ways to deal with an enemy: destroy him altogether,
or treat him so generously that he will become your friend. A middle course
is dangerous. Wilson and the Allies chose a middle course - and begat a
whirlwind." [Alexander here references pages 504-505 of A History of United
States Foreign Policy by Julius Pratt, 1955]
Machiavelli would have approved heartily of the way we treated the Japanese
after WWII, treating them so generously that they became our friend. Irene
if she were true to her words would have treated them more along the lines
of the treatment imposed on German by France, Britain and the U.S. after
WWI: "On June 28, 1919, Germany was forced to accept the loss of its
colonies, Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar for fifteen years, a corridor to the sea
for Poland, and border areas to Belgium and Denmark. It had to agree to a
demilitarized Rhineland and to provide reparations set in 1921 at $33
billion, well beyond its ability to pay. These reparations included the
full cost of pensions for Allied soldiers. The German army was limited to
100,000 men, and the navy reduced to insignificance."
Note to Irene: On April 17 on PBS there will be a program on "The Armenian
Genocide." Over one million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds were
killed. Maybe you won't be as hard on the Turks as you are on the Japanese
because, as Yusuf Halacoglu, head of the Turkish Historical Society says,
"the fact is there were two sides involved in a civil war." Ellen Bork
reviewing the film for The Weekly Standard, comments, "The argument boils
down to a claim that the events were not genocide but a response to
provocation in which the victims, including unarmed women, children, and the
elderly, brought on their fate."
Lawrence
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