Societies and civilizations tend to repeat the same historical mistakes that led to disasters and conflicts and conflicts in the past. Today, during the summer Ukraine offensive against Russia seeking to retake land in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, a summit was held among sponsors of Ukraine's war efforts with reports from the meeting calling for Russia to pay for the cost of rebuilding Ukraine's destroyed infrastructure after the victory of Ukraine over Russia. Not only is there an element of hubris in building upon anticipated victory, there is also the obvious problem of repeating the historical mistake made by the west following the armistice ending the First World War.
The allies held Germany responsible for the war and levied vast reparations on Germany. The demand for compensation was one of the primary contributing causes for development of the Second World War. At least in the United States the lesson learned, yet forgotten by the Biden administration perhaps, was that it is better to treat former adversaries well and not demand payments from them to avoid exacerbating antagonistic sentiments. Sect. Blinken informed Europe that Russia would be held responsible for the costs of rebuilding damaged and destroyed Ukrainian infrastructure with costs expected to rise above a half trillion U.S. dollars Democrat party leadership are lawyers seeking compenstory and possibly punitive damages levering laws so far as possible since the Senate makes laws. Compensation for war damages does not apply to wars waged by Democrat party Presidents obviously; such wars are always just and well founded in their own minds. Extending Democrat Party legal force includes international relations too if possible within the Democrat criterion. Good judgment isn’t nearly as meaningful as legal power for the administration since the Senate can make agreeable laws for Democrats. Nuclear war is an externality to Democrat Party legal empowerment levered through the U.S. constitution; fundamentally it doesn’t exist. Democrats don’t worry about nuclear war today, tomorrow or in the future; that will be some future Richard M. Nixon’s problem.
After the end of World War Two the United States treated Germany and Japan as well as possible despite the war crimes of each nation. European leaders and Joe Biden may have not learned that lesson. They seem ready to build the greatest Maginot line kind of war setup against Russia in world history with NATO military hot on the Russian border from Finland to Turkey after the war is won. Nukes may flank the line of political adversity of course, yet Amazon and Hilton with other corporate and national investors of what may be a corporate war could be counting on technological supremacy neutralizing future Russia nuclear weapons use. It does seem a bad way to conclude the present war.
Corporation profiting wars could themselves be on a recurring schedule. The United States for one has a large weapons industrial sector that might like to have substantial sales of weapons without letup. When wars conclude sales drop so a new one need arise with five years or so to keep things going, and the Pentagon procurers may want to replace aging weapons with new ones too. The Ukraine conflict was ideal for letting the economics of some southern and northern states receive a boost from weapons production. It probably would be better for civilization to lead corporations to invest in environmental restoration and reconstruction instead of war so their recurring trend to be to keep finding ways to restore the world’s ecosystem. Even making the ecosphere integrated productively with environmental economics would be a more sustainable corporate investment that war with its Sisyphusic capitalist creative destruction bipolarism.
There may be a reason why President Joe Biden says very hostile things, and takes belligerent attitudes when interacting with perceived international adversaries. A day after Sect. of State Blinken returned from China where he met with Chinese leaders to try to ‘reboot relations’- probably one where Democrats get everything they want from China- President Biden referred to the Chinese leader as “a dictator’. Since the loss of Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential election the Democrat party has taken a position of politics as war through other means. They believe and act to press their goals in democracy through legal means and maximum legal force as lawyers. As lawyers able to make laws in the Congress they may use any adverse description of their opponents as they find useful, even if untruthful, in order to get their agenda accomplished. Unfortunately going off the rails in governance can be accomplished too when one runs roughshod over the civil means of government.
Government isn’t an institution that isn’t fool or idiot proof. Bad leadership and a callous congress can take a government to bad ends. The cliché that ‘you can’t make a better man by act of congress’ also applies to congress itself in a way. That is a failure of wisdom and an overly hostile congress cannot act intelligently enough to keep a nation together and functioning well.
Human beings are endowed with original sin along with other characteristics that lead them to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors in politics. The U.S.A. is a nation with a revolutionary beginning yet social and financial establishments inevitably follow to rise in any society. Technological developments occasionally create revolutionary social develops that liberate the masses to a new day of economic and social opportunities yet inevitably following that is the consolidation of power to close off the frontier to the masses with the formation of new elite classes to dominate the new technology financially.
Established social classes are very difficult to change. They tend to repress competition to class interests. Even the internet that was so promising just a couple of decades ago has appeared to move toward quasi-monopolistic status that isn’t consolidated yet. Google that was supporter of new communication opportunities has become regarded as developing monopolistic tendencies as was Microsoft before it in the 1990s. Open source operating systems may have been the leading liberator from the Windows neo-monopoly yet nothing like that has arisen for internet service providers to my knowledge.
There seems to have been a great confluence of forces during the last decade, or since the Obama administration, so close down free speech in social media, supported by the Democrat party and democrat party constituents. Homosexuals and females working for Google and throughout social media and Internet service providers are a huge element of the industry workforce, and as insiders joining with Democrat party leaning leadership in corporate ownerships found support in repressing free speech for political purposes through outright bans to demoting search engine listing to the status dark web status so no one would every encounter politically banned writers.
Google is viewed as profiting from the symbiotic liberation movement to consolidate power in the general tendency for wealth to consolidate while employed democrats repress opposition force intellectuals and even blue collar writers. Large corporations like Google and Microsoft buy up internet competition and coo-opt or close down outlets for free expression, or at least free expression for pay. Like the Democrat party Google and Microsoft don’t look for ways to let the poor profit from writing on the internet; they eliminate pay and explain that without a minimum number of views the accounting costs isn’t worth paying anything at all and shut pay channels down. That tendency occurs even in audio-video outlets like YouTube and Spotify that recently acquired Anchor Press.
The historical rise of liberating movements that evolve into repressive establishments is one of the recurrent patterns of history. The historian Arnold Toynbee commented in his ‘A Study of History’ that economic and political establishment classes of a society cannot evolve sufficiently to outgrow in founding and mature form. Toynbee cited the inability of ancient Greece to adapt to the new political form of a Republic developed in Rome as one example. Greece was divided into a number of city-states such as Sparta and Rome with different forms of government that could not compete well with the unified rule of the Roman Republic in war or peace.
The United State is presently developing several recurring historical patterns leading to failure that one might find in Toynbee’s roster of things civilizations do that lead to failure. Sometimes failure can lead to new synthetic growth of a positive sort obviously, yet it can also lead to diaster. It would seem better to develop new economic and security of a true marketplace of ideas willfully through intelligent design rather than to blindly crash about within international relations and national economic evolutions like a blind bull in a China shop. Observers of contemporary history may view all the matters of interest with concern, yet with the knowledge that the follies of historical bad judgment and inability for government to act intelligently is well precedented.
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