Saturday, November 12, 2005
AFTERTHOUGHTS ON ARMISTICE DAY
AND PICKING UP EUROPE'S DIRTY LAUNDRY
87 YEARS AGO YESTERDAY at eleven in the morning the guns fell silent, marking the end of the greatest, most terrible war man had ever fought.
For my family, it meant that soon my grandfather would be returning from the Argonne Forest where he had stood against the army of the land from which his father had emigrated less than forty years before.
For the world, the "peace" was but a pause. The treaty that ended that great war became the catalyst for the great century of war to follow. The injustices of Versailles and the arrogance of the Colonial fops who penned it foredoomed mankind to wars that continue to this day.
The nation of Iraq was invented at Versailles.
Four score and seven years ago, the silence of the guns punctuated the greatest strategic error the US ever committed. Not the error of choosing the wrong side, but the error of choosing a side at all. Led by Woodrow Wilson, the most educated, intelligent fool to ever reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the US inserted itself into the centuries-old conflicts between nations whose cast-off masses had become the great free people of our land.
For Europe, the outbreak of general war in 1914 wasn't a beginning; it was a continuation. For Wilson, the original American Neoconservative empire-builder, it was an opportunity deliberately capitalized on. Our government, while technically neutral, nevertheless allowed and even encouraged trade with the belligerents, especially the British, trade which gave American industry a stake in the conflict while putting Americans in harm's way.
Our faux neutrality drove the events that "forced" the US into that awful contest.
We didn't have to get involved, but once involved there was no turning back. From the failure of the League of Nations through WWII, the Cold War, and even to this day we're still picking up the dirty laundry of Europe's colonial truculence, while by and large the heirs of "Old Europe" look on and laugh.
Had enough yet?
87 YEARS AGO YESTERDAY at eleven in the morning the guns fell silent, marking the end of the greatest, most terrible war man had ever fought.
For my family, it meant that soon my grandfather would be returning from the Argonne Forest where he had stood against the army of the land from which his father had emigrated less than forty years before.
For the world, the "peace" was but a pause. The treaty that ended that great war became the catalyst for the great century of war to follow. The injustices of Versailles and the arrogance of the Colonial fops who penned it foredoomed mankind to wars that continue to this day.
The nation of Iraq was invented at Versailles.
Four score and seven years ago, the silence of the guns punctuated the greatest strategic error the US ever committed. Not the error of choosing the wrong side, but the error of choosing a side at all. Led by Woodrow Wilson, the most educated, intelligent fool to ever reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the US inserted itself into the centuries-old conflicts between nations whose cast-off masses had become the great free people of our land.
For Europe, the outbreak of general war in 1914 wasn't a beginning; it was a continuation. For Wilson, the original American Neoconservative empire-builder, it was an opportunity deliberately capitalized on. Our government, while technically neutral, nevertheless allowed and even encouraged trade with the belligerents, especially the British, trade which gave American industry a stake in the conflict while putting Americans in harm's way.
Our faux neutrality drove the events that "forced" the US into that awful contest.
We didn't have to get involved, but once involved there was no turning back. From the failure of the League of Nations through WWII, the Cold War, and even to this day we're still picking up the dirty laundry of Europe's colonial truculence, while by and large the heirs of "Old Europe" look on and laugh.
Had enough yet?
