From RR

• Britain’s future is with America, not Europe. Could be neocon at its worst (Airstrip One, the Coalition of the Bullied going to foreign wars) but a valid point for obvious reasons (a handful of well-known differences but the mother country and the old colonies are basically the same people).
• In defense of bourgeois civilization.
• One of my faves: WWII revisionism. America did not go in to save the Jews. I love the Greatest Generation but no longer buy the political propaganda. A rebuttal to another variation of ‘libertarians are selfish’. How’s not forcing you or your son into the Army by conscription and sending you/him off to die in a war nothing to do with the country’s safety selfish? (Flip side: nobody cares about our wars now – they’re not a campaign issue – because the well-off whites aren’t getting drafted and sent over there. The Wrong Kind of Whites and the non-white helots get to do the state’s dirty work.)
  
  Reminds me of Clint Eastwood’s quip about the current cartoony version of the official history: we sent the Tuskegee Airmen and the ‘Go for Broke’ battalion to save the Jews while the white soldiers guarded the internment camp at Manzanar.
  
  We ended up helping a far worse government win the war, handing it half of Catholic Europe and handing back its refugees.
  

  There would not have been a Holocaust in the first place had it not been for humanitarian war-making. Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in World War I – the war to end all wars and make the world safe for democracy – led to the toppling of Germany’s Kaiser and the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s hard to imagine the Kaiser appointing Hitler chancellor or an imperial Austria submitting to the Anschluss. Wilson’s well-meaning war cleared the way for the most virulent expressions of nationalism and socialism on the European continent. (Wilson didn’t use humanitarianism as his primary rationale for taking America into the conflict, but once involved the administration insisted upon regime change in Germany and stoked the nationalist flames that consumed Austria-Hungary.)

  Right. The mainline were hawks – turn Catholic Europe into good American Protestants – and the fundamentalists doves then (the Southern Baptist Convention as recently as 1936).
  

  As a rule, from a humanitarian perspective no less than a realist one, humanitarian warfare is a self-defeating proposition.

Labels: England, history, peace, politics