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Originally posted by ivanhoeBit of a sweeping dismissal there, Ivanhoe. Nietzsche was embarrassing on the topic of women (much like Ghandi was embarrassing on the topic of "kaffers" ), but a lot that he wrote is still well worth reading--if you have the ears to hear 🙂 .
....and we should not listen to Nietzsche in any case ....... down the toilet he goes ....
Who is your "we", by the way?
Originally posted by Great Big Steesyou consider:
Any thoughts out there?
if i make a mistake ... then do you expect me to learn from it? ... i might ... or might not learn.
benjamin makes a mistake. do i care? do i learn from it?
you can expect that i probably do not learn from benjamn's mistake.
history is "his story" - it is the idea of learning from other people's mistakes ... very nice in theory, but impractical.
Originally posted by ivanhoeIvanhoe proves again that we do learn from history, but the history that we learn from is distorted and incomplete. The lessons we learn are motivated by our politics. And we only learn from a narrow range of the possible pasts that flutter behind us (paraphrasing Roger Waters).
There are masses of people who never learned anything from the second world war. The "Let's Retreat, Then The Problem Will Go Away" advocates prove this time and time again.
The world learned from WW I and WW II that wars bring unbelievable carnage, brutality, and destruction. That's why the world created the United Nations. For the next 55 years, the United States sought to justify its actions to its allies, and to frame these actions in the context of the laws of nations. Then Bush was elected and chose advisors who reduce the lessons of WW II to the failures of Neville Chamberlin. That's not enough history.
More study of history renders explicit two points:
1. The Bush doctrine in foreign policy is a radical change in US diplomacy.
2. Despite the drama of 9/11 and the recent London bombings, there are few aspects, if any, in the "war against terrorism" that are novel.
If therefore, the novelty is the fundamental justification for the radical departure from traditional commitments, then we have a serious problem in the United States other than Al-Qaeda.
If the lesson of Neville Chamberlin's failures of appeasement informed U.S. policy, why did Iraq take precedence over North Korea? Even this terribly condenses version of history that is trotted out as a rationalization does not inform U.S. and British policies as much as some folks would ask us to believe.
Originally posted by WulebgrJust how dramatic a change does the Bush foreign policy doctrine represent?
More study of history renders explicit two points:
1. The Bush doctrine in foreign policy is a radical change in US diplomacy.
2. Despite the drama of 9/11 and the recent London bombings, there are few aspects, if any, in the "war against terrorism" that are novel.
Is the "war against terrorism" part of an historical continuum of some sort? If, what are the roots of this process?