The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    This time is different

    By Flavius on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 7:48am |

    o In 1936 Hitler hosted the Olympics 

    o Later he invaded the Sudetenland  claiming  with some plausibility there was discrimination against ethnic Germans

    o The League of Nations had no ability to deter him

     

    o Last month Putin hosted the Olympics

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    Comments

    George W. Bush didn't exactly set a high bar for illegal wars with his order to invade Iraq to 'destroy the WMD', which he joked about not finding less than a year later.

    As much a thug as Putin is, he's a million or so short of the death total our previous Republican administration wreaked on the people of Iraq.


    by NCD on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 9:29am

    True. But , if you may, that seems to me  irrelevant. Every country has things in its past it shouldn't have done.

     So be it. Now what should we do today?

    How about 101 Airbrorne occupying Kiev's airport? Wouldn't reverse things in the Crimea. But that may be OK with them. Not true of the western Ukraine.

     


    by Flavius on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 10:39am

    History, even very recent history, is either misremembered or forgotten by most Americans. If they even knew what happened in real time (c Fox News viewers). History is rarely 'irrelevant', although the establishment media prefers and promotes falsehoods, confusion, and/or short memory in the population. Americans seem to be OK with that, they keep the TV news turned on.

    I think it was Emma that had this link to a Ukraine expert, who, from what I could understand, said both Ukraine and Russia have huge economic problems and corruption, they must solve things on their own.

    Both have close historical ties. Putin ain't solving it all anytime soon, and satisfying all the groups would be a huge challenge for him, Russia and the Ukraine, and almost certainly beyond the ability of the US or the EU.


    by NCD on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 12:42pm

    Maybe it's less different from this other time?

    "History" repeats itself differently every time.cheeky


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 1:01pm

    Istanbul enjoys  a thriving Australian tourist trade with the descendants of  Aussie soldiers killed in Churchill's futile  attempt to occupy Gallipoli a "historical' repeat  of the similarly futile charge of the four hundred ("C'est  magnifique but is it War? "a French military observer"  ) .

    But conversely the garrison of "western"troops in 1950 west Germany was a non futile tactic to convince the Russians that we would have had perforce a nuclear response if they poured through the "Fulda Gap". Too few of us(and too ill eqipped )to resist but  too many for any President to survive politically if we didn't 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     
     

    by Flavius on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 5:25pm

    "C'est  magnifique but is it War? "a French military observer"

    This is hilarious, and so French,  and I had never heard it before, so thank you for the story.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/04/2014 - 5:34pm

    En francais " C'est magnifique ,mais ce n'est pas la guerre".

    Marshal Pierre Bosquet.

    Compare and contrast with Beyond the Fringe,from memory

    'Perkins you know how in football nine men can sometimes play better than 10.  We want  you to be that tenth man.

    "It's time for a futile gesture Raise the whole tone of the war. Get in your crate. Pop over to Hamburg. Don't come back.

    "Goodbye Perkins. God I wish   I were going with you"

     

    Goodbye Sir.Or perhaps it's  Au Revoir .

     

    "No Perkins"

     

     
     
     
     
     

    by Flavius on Wed, 03/05/2014 - 12:46pm

    Are you suggesting that events will repeat...or won't?


    by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 03/05/2014 - 7:40pm

    Despite my great age I have no great wisdom. Rightly or wrongly  I think human nature doesn't change.  Or, maybe more to the point,that we don't learn from our own  mistakes. And  certainly not from the mistakes of others.

    So anything that has happened before is likely to happen again.


    by Flavius on Wed, 03/05/2014 - 10:32pm