| Saturday,
October 19, 2002 There was a time when I would have been
invited to this:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0,12543,365576,00.html
Ah well. And a lovely thing she is, too.
Subscribers who did not get yesterday's mail from me should be certain
I have the correct address... I have corrected several and alas found one
I had neglected to get into my list. Fortunately that kind of error is
rare.
About half a dozen had mail bounced because they are over quota...
Timothy Brown I have a BIX mail address for you. BIX no longer
exists...
Over in mail there is a
long letter and an even longer reply regarding the coming war. Most
of it I dealt with there; but one point made there needs addressing here.
"The foreign policy you seem to be advocating
was tried once, and ended in disaster. Before we try it again, I'd like to
see something to support it other than slogans, biased predictions of the
future, and nostalgia."
No instance was given, so I don't know to what this refers. If it means
that it was a disaster that the US stayed out of the Napoleonic Wars, or
the Austro-Prussian War, or the Franco-Prussian War, or the Crimean War,
or the Kichener Expedition to the Sudan, or the First and Second Afghan
Wars, or the Zulu Wars, or the Boer War, then I can say with some confidence,
"nonsense." It wasn't a disaster that we stayed out, but it
might well have been one had we gone in.
If this refers to World War One, the case is more ambiguous: we did go
in. And it can be argued that one result of that was the Treaty of
Versailles, and Keynes has analyzed the Economic Consequences (his thesis
was disputed in The Carthaginian Peace). It can be argued, indeed, that
American intervention in WWI, which was a territorial dispute in Europe,
was in fact a disaster. For more on that see Perpetual War for Perpetual
Peace; it may well be that Hitler was a direct result of the collapse of
the German Empire, and that was a result of American intervention: the War
might well have ended with the Kaiser's Peace Offensive had the Brits not
confidently expected that the US would be "Colonel Housed" into
the war...
If it refers to World War II, there's a lot better case to be made for
early intervention; although with what consequences isn't so very clear.
There were two very real threats to the West, and Hitler's Germany was
only one of them. From 1945 to the Fall of The Wall was a fairly long and
perilous time.
If it refers to our not fighting the USSR in 1945, or starting
pre-emptive war in 1950, or 1960, or having a nuclear war in 1962, any of
which we could have won but at great cost, again it is not clear that
staying out was a disaster; and it can be argued that taking Patton's
advice ("We're going to have to fight the Russians anyway, why don't
we do it while we've got a goddam army over here to do it with?")
would in fact have been a disaster. It's not at all clear that the
Russo-American War of 1946 would have been easily won or quickly over, or
have resulted in the perpetual peace we seek. And it's very clear that by
1962 pre-emptive war wasn't such a great idea at all.
So: it may have been a disaster that the United States did not go to
war with Germany in 1936 or in 1938, although I know of no way we could
have managed a war vote by Congress in 1936 or 1938 or 1940 for that
matter; but I don't know of any other instance in which it clearly was a
disaster that we stayed out of war.
As to slogans, biased predictions of the future, and nostalgia, not
guilty.
I suppose the charge most likely to be proved against me is nostalgia.
I still plead not guilty.
I don't want to see the US return to a republic out of nostalgia; and
any prediction of the future is "biased" in the sense that it
must be informed by one's sense of history. My view of history is that of
Aristotle: an endless cycle of government forms; modified by Cicero and
later Madison and the Framers: there never was a democracy that didn't
commit suicide, but perhaps there is a "mixed form" of
government, neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy nor tyranny nor
oligarchy nor demagoguery: a federal republic, whose component parts have
collectively enough power to resist the tendency to make it a single
national democracy. That was what they sought to establish in Philadelphia
in 1787 over a hot summer without air conditioning. "A Republic,
Madam, if we can keep it."
I lived under such a government, and I think it better than what we
have now. Whether we can return to it or no, I can't say. It's not likely.
Should I then cease to remember it?
I will dispute that "energy independence" is a mere slogan. I
am not quite sure which slogans I am supposed to be using as my only
justification for my views. I have the charge but not the specification.
Perhaps I will be given the courtesy of being told, but I doubt it. In any
event, I do believe it possible for the United States to be independent of
most of the world, in energy and in raw materials and in human resources.
Note I don't say this would be the best thing to do: I do say there
are some prices for globalism that are too high to pay. Dropping atom
bombs on foreign cities in retaliation for 911 is one obvious example.
Extensive overseas armies involved in running other people's affairs is
another although perhaps not so universally agreed as too high a price.
My prediction of the future? American hegemony. Perpetual war for
perpetual peace. With luck it will be low level war, and with luck we will
do more good than harm, and we won't have to kill too many women and
children in our relentless pursuit of peace. Perhaps we can make people's
lives so much better that they will cease to see us as conquerors, and
learn to love us. We can hope so -- and that those we have not yet
conquered will see things that way too, and likewise cease to hate us and
seek ways to harm us. We can hope.
My wish for the future? To make examples of those we can prove to have
been involved with and to have supported any and all attacks on American
citizens; and otherwise to come home, mind our own business, and develop
our resources. To be, in a trite phrase, the best America we can be, a
land in which we are born free and show others what freedom is.
The Persians chose ethnic Greek subjects of the Persian empire to go to
Athens to persuade them to submit. The Athenian answer was "Ah, you
have not known freedom. If you had, you would advise us to fight for it,
not with the sword only, but the battle ax."
A couple of generations later, the Athenians could tell another people
"The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they
must." And sell an entire city to slavery because it refused to
submit to Athenian will.
There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.
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