No doubt the U.S. is viewed in the rest of the world as being very war-like,
but that is not how we view ourselves most of the time. Our first president,
Washington, marshaled enough force to defeat the British and win our
independence, but just barely. And he passed on to his successors the advice,
“don’t get involved in foreign (meaning European) wars.” Thus, the majority in
the U.S. didn’t not want to be involved in WWI – because it was a European War.
Wilson promised that he would not get the U.S. involved in that war, but then
he did. And after that war, Wilson was repudiated and the U.S. went back to
being an isolationist nation.
The Germans and Japanese didn’t believe that the U.S. would fight, but if the
U.S. did send troops to face them, the more warlike Germans and Japanese
believed they could easily defeat them. All the Germans & Japanese feared from
the U.S. was their ability to make a lot of things, especially military things,
very quickly.
And so it was an ongoing surprise that the Americans, primarily the
all-volunteer Marines were as warlike as the Japanese soldiers. The Japanese
were surprised in battle after battle.
The Army we sent to Europe was another matter. It was made up primarily of
draftees. Churchill is generally seen as being correct in opposing the
American leaders who wanted to immediately establish a second front in France.
He thought the Americans needed experience and their initial ineptitude in
North Africa and Italy bore that out.
After WWII was over, after both Germany and Japan unconditionally surrendered,
American politicians and the majority of American population wanted to go back
to being isolationist. We had two oceans to protect us from invasion. Let
that be enough. But the Cold War changed that. The Marines and Army sent to
oppose Communist North Korea were equipped with left-over weaponry from WWII.
It was during the Cold War that it became American policy to fight it by
opposing Communist expansion wherever it occurred; so our weaponry improved
dramatically.
That policy of opposing Communist expansion wherever it occurred wasn’t
understood or appreciated my most Americans. Perhaps it was okay to defend
South Korea, but what we did in Vietnam was never understood or appreciated by
a majority of Americans. Thus, after we abandoned Vietnam, perhaps a majority
in America wanted to go back to being an isolationist nation. We didn’t do
that, but later on when Islamists evaluated us, their opinion was very like the
Japanese and Germans before WWII. They thought we wouldn’t be willing to fight.
Now, in the world today, perhaps the U.S. is seen as the most willing to fight.
That probably isn’t true. A president can start a small war and call it a
“Police Action” as President Truman did in regard to Korea. But the President
must sell his decision to congress in order to get a war financed adequately.
If the president who replaces Trump were to decide that America should once
again be an isolationist nation, and if he were to pull troops out of all the
other nations were American troops are stationed (something that is considered
in the ongoing TV series The Messiah), I suspect that Russia would be able to
do whatever it liked against the EU. NATO without the U.S. wouldn’t be very
effective.
Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is still seeming a good
assessment of how military actions will play out in the future.
But the president who replaces Trump won’t be able to turn the U.S. into an
isolationist nation. He will be worried about an ongoing Islamist threat. He
will also be worried about China. We have a treaty with Taiwan. Will we honor
that treaty and go to war with China if it invades Taiwan? The Taiwanese
aren’t overly confident about that, and Americans who want to support the
Taiwanese aren’t overly confident either.
We spend more on military equipment than any other nation in the world. But
the Islamists scoffed at that saying that we wouldn’t send soldiers to oppose
them and bleed, but I’m not sure anyone is saying that any longer.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of adriano paolo shaul gershom palma
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2020 9:16 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: On receiving
Lawrence's experience is interesting.
my own view is that none of the urgency of what "made the steel" was ever
available, e.g., in the US.
the reasons are many, one of the crucial ones is that war has always been
popular, while the position of the Russian autocrats in ww1 never was of any
interest to anybody who was there from slavofile to narodniki.
similarly what happened in a second generation
(bets reading IL GIOCO DEI TRE REGNI, by C. Sereni)
Kerem jojjenek maskor es kulonosen masho
palma, a paolo shaul םֹשׁ ְרֵגּ
On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 3:04 AM Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
From page 43 of The House of Government:
“’Strange as it may sound,” writes Kon, ‘the years I spent in prison were the
best years of my life. I did a lot of studying, tested my strength in a long
and bitter struggle, and, in constant interaction with other prisoners . . . It
was in prison that I learned how to judge my own life and the lives of others
from the point of view of the good of the cause.’ Osinsky and Bukharin
cemented their friendship when they lived ‘in perfect harmony’ in the same
prison cell, and Platon Kerzhentsev, who had defeated Osinsky in the high
school debate on the Decembrists, ‘studied thoroughly . . . the literature of
both Marxism and populism and left prison – the best university of [his] life –
as a Bolshevik.’ Iosif Tarshis’s (Osip Piatnitsky’s) time in prison was ‘a
university’ because he ‘studied systematically under the guidance of a comrade
who knew Marxist revolutionary literature . . .”
Years later in 1959, in the midst of the Cold War, I graduated from college and
went to work in engineering at Douglas Aircraft Company. Alex D., a
longshoreman and classmate took to coming to my house regularly hoping to
convert me to Communism – sort of. He wasn’t very forceful or sure of himself,
but he had been influenced by a very intelligent, forceful older longshoreman
(whom I never met) and believed what he said. He presented arguments to me and
books to read, he told me, to get my opinion on what his Longshoreman mentor
was teaching him. In reality I suspect he was hoping to sway me to the
Communist position. I knew very little about Communist ideology when Alex’s
visits began, but I took the opportunity to read all his materials and hear the
arguments (second hand) of his longshoreman mentor. When I would criticize a
particular book and give it back to him, he would always have another handy.
This was my education, but the effect wasn’t what Alex (and perhaps his mentor)
hoped it would be. Alex was never very good at debate and he several times
wanted me to debate his mentor. I was willing, but the mentor was not. I
don’t know why.
Alex didn’t realize that I had honed my debating skills on my mother who was a
follower of the millenialist, Herbert W. Armstrong of the World Wide Church of
God. Just like Alex later on, she would become flustered and take my arguments
to one of the church elders. She also tried to get one of these elders to
“convince me of the truth” (I think is the way she put it).
Lawrence
