Former UK Prime Minister, the Credentialed, Educated Lawyer-Politician Tony Blair, was known to brag of his ignorance of History because, to him and the rest of the Credentialed Experts and Authorities who are destroying Liberty and the rest of Civilization, ABSOLUTELY KNOW that all History is irrelevant to governing Free World Countries today.
I love history and have been studying it for the preponderance of my seventy-seven year lifetime.
Modern European History is thought to have begun with the French Revolution of 1789, the Napoleonic Era and the Termination of Medieval Feudalism.
The Nineteenth Century had lots of exciting wars – but no TV Fake News to make profit by ‘juicing’ the propensity of humankind to have group and individual objects of hatred so as to promise a ‘better world’ through Idealistic Beliefs imposed with Force from Idealistic Government.
World War I was the second Total War in modern history. [The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the first such war – which therefore required the beginnings of financial finagling to fund. Were it not for the enormous growth in real wealth created by the Industrial Revolution, all of America would have been as impoverished as the Confederate States losers endured for one to two generations.]
It is an old cliché in military studies that wars: ‘Kill People and Break Things.’ This is the antithesis of creating wealth.
In antiquity the soldiers of the losing side were enslaved (for profit) or ransomed for larger amounts than slave markets would bring to the victors. Soldiers had to be paid with real money: Gold or Silver.
Modern European warfare in the Nineteenth Century was limited in scope, and invariably ended when all the major European Imperial Powers held a ‘Congress’ to determine the post-war peace. National identities were subsumed inside the great Empires of the era. National hatreds were never a dominant factor as it has been since World War I changed everything.
When the guns of August 1914 were launched by an Imperial German attack through Belgium into Northern France, the German advance failed to conquer Paris and bring the whole enterprise to a speedy end. The French Army stopped the advance and, before the end of 1914, the German Army and the Allies each dug a trench system that went all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Four more years (during which millions died for minuscule changes to the front lines) ensued.
Were it not for Financial Finagling, each side would have been bereft of funding within one year. Financial Finagling was made easy in the short term and impossible in the longer term.
In 1912, the United States joined the rest of the Modern World in creating a Central Bank that could print money, create debts and enable the lunacy of World War I to continue until the guns fell silent on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.
Two factors explain the subsequent disasters to Western Civilization – Printed Money and Unbridled Nationalism.
A. Money – War Debts, War Loans
The impossibility of Reparations to be paid created a world-wide depression beginning in the 1920’s and extending through the 1930’s. Wealth creation through the science and technology furthering of Industrial and Agricultural Growth took years to develop. The tragic history of Weimar Germany illustrated the process. Few today have any understanding of that enormously complex era.
B. Nationalism
After World War I, Nationalism was and continues to be the driving force of endless wars often without end. There is always another war. There is always a Nationalist grievance and an endless parade of oratorical geniuses to inspire such mass insanity. Before World War I, the United States was the exception. Personal Liberty under Constitutionally Limited government ‘deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.’ That once unique American Exceptionalism has been eroding in several waves.
Starting in the 1960’s, this final wave of Fake Science from credentialed educated masters of empty Sophistry has brought us to where we are today.
There was a good idea (the plebiscite) invented during the Peace Process of World War I and promptly manipulated and misused to make a vastly worse world rather than a better one. Since World War I saw the ending to the dominant Empires that ran Europe – Nation-States were invented as political entities. [Poland, a medieval power in East-Central Europe, which had been totally dismembered by three great Empires just before the French Revolution, was reborn after World War I.] ‘Leaders’ of Czechs and Slovaks came to an agreement in Pittsburgh to create Czechoslovakia as a Nation-State in the wake of World War I for example. Sometime in the last two or three decades, they voluntarily split. War was unnecessary.
Would it not have made more sense for Ukrainians and Russians to vote by plebiscite which area should be part of which Nation-State?
Southern Ukraine was part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire until, in stages, in the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire advanced.
The botched breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War had almost as much influence on the insane Ukrainian War today as the insane Yalta Agreement (1945) did in creating a Communist North Korea, the Korean War and the tragedy of North Korea today.
Must there always be an Idealistic Nationalist ‘making of a better world’ to dominate political thought – beginning in and dominating the Formal Education process? Is there something seriously wrong with ‘live and let live’ with Private Life left in the private world without all this Big Government ‘making a better world’ stuff?
