H'mm, I got nuthin' -- Hey, didja hear the Rooooshians, in the closing ceremonies for the Sochi Winter Olympics and Farewell Party, played the instrumental version of a song about reclaiming Alaska?
Welcome to the run-up to WW III. Be sure'n take your iodine tabs.
Frikkin' morons. Y'know what the upper-limit boundary* to the time between really honkin' big wars is? The lifespan of the participants in the previous one. Seriously, check your history books. Oh, you'll get a few outliers and there's regional variations, but about the time the bulk of the guys who fought amidst massive loss of life are dead, another opportunity to look at people's inside on a large scale comes along. The species may be programmed for it in our hardware. It only takes a few bastards to flip the switch and then...it's on.
Dammit.
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* The lower limit is, of course, the time it takes to re-arm. Twenty years, more or less, is the modern record.
Gotta preserve that Soviet meme of keeping your boarders safe by insulating them with Eastern Europe, Finland, Afghanistan and fill-in-the-blank.
ReplyDeleteBecause, the Winter War, ya know!
gfa
"Y'know what the upper-limit boundary* to the time between really honkin' big wars is? The lifespan of the participants in the previous one."
ReplyDeleteI wish this wasn't true
That is sure a depressing thought. And what often follows a major war are the twin ragged bastards of disease and famine.
ReplyDeleteSad but true!
ReplyDeleteMerle
It took a century from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the start of WWI. It took longer than that to go from the end of the Thirty-Years War to the French Revolution.
ReplyDeleteJoseph: And nothing happened in that hundred years? Nothing at all?
ReplyDeleteGosh. Wait'll I tell Tam.
Obama told 'em to be patient, he'd have more latitude and freedom of action following re-election.
ReplyDeleteWell... He's waging war internally on Americans and letting his pinko pals do whatever they please. We have a State Dept that isn't paying any public attention to this, by design. Do you think for a moment the Russian embassy folks don't know what music is being played at public ceremonies and what it means? If they don't that's is sad. But they do. That's part of their job.
Think about this - we have Geneva John, The Winter Soldier, running State.
Joseph,
ReplyDeletePretty sure the French, the Prussians, the Italians, the Irish, the Spanish....oh heck. The entire Eurasian land mass would disagree with 'nothing happened between Napoleon and WWI'.
And that's just that side of the pond.
In all fairness, Joseph is addressing my thesis as stated. He has a point and disagreement with it depends on where you draw the line -- for that matter, it depends if three or four "little" wars count as one big one.
ReplyDeleteIn North America, we got up to some serious killin' in that timespan. And just as the surviving youngsters from that war were mostly graybeards nodding on the porch, we decided it was way better for North and South to go take on a third party, which turned into a Master's-level course in Modern Mobilization, in plenty of time to be ready for the Ph.D. exam in Europe a couple decades later when things really het up there.
Song about Alaska? Which tune is that?
ReplyDelete