A Conversation for A Celebration Four Years in the Making
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minorvogonpoet Posted Dec 2, 2018
Yes, the little French village we know best has a war memorial between the Mairie and the church, and there are three names from the same family on it.
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paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant Posted Dec 3, 2018
I read Beevor's book about the 1944 Ardennes campaign. It painted a horrendous picture. 1918 would have been an earlier glimpse of Hell. The soldiers didn't have a choice, poor souls...
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Elektragheorgheni -Please read 'The Post' Posted Dec 3, 2018
The sad thing is nobody learned anything from WWI ----all the resentment and revenge fed directly into WWII.
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paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant Posted Dec 3, 2018
It took WWII to make the lessons sink in. We've had 70 years of relative peace since then. Fate may well laugh at us fifty years from now, if Europe and the U.S. are bit players because Africa* has three billion people, a booming economy, and the Indian Ocean has supplanted the Atlantic as the main aquatic thoroughfare of the world.
*The Chinese are working hard to build railroads and harbors in Africa.
Africa's geography has isolated the different tribes, but once those obstacles have been circumvented, Africa could be where it's at. Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have a lot of talent, there's abundant mineral wealth, and the amount of rainfall would be enough to feed everyone if it were dispersed more equitably.
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Superfrenchie Posted Dec 3, 2018
Relative is the word, though, isn't it? There hasn't been another world war, true, but there have been wars (still are, right now, with Western countries chipping in), there have been genocides (sorry, "ethnic cleansing"), so it seems we as a species don't really ever learn...
All we can do is try to keep the memory of all that waste and hope for the best...
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paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant Posted Dec 3, 2018
The biggest tinderbox is the Middle East, which should not have been carved up the way it was after WWI. The Ottomans (Ottomen?), for all their faults, knew which tribes/religious groups would want to be kept together, and allowed a bit of self-rule. Putting Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds together in nations such as Iraq was bound to cause trouble eventually. France and England drew some very strange boundary lines in the Middle east and Africa. I'm trying to remember how big a role Lawrence of Arabia played in that.
Samuel beckett said "“The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.” He might as well have been talking about the post-Ottoman Middle east.
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- 1: FWR (Dec 2, 2018)
- 2: minorvogonpoet (Dec 2, 2018)
- 3: paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant (Dec 3, 2018)
- 4: Elektragheorgheni -Please read 'The Post' (Dec 3, 2018)
- 5: paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant (Dec 3, 2018)
- 6: Superfrenchie (Dec 3, 2018)
- 7: paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant (Dec 3, 2018)
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