(Not) Learning From History

The crippling sanctions the United States imposed on Japan after their invasion in Manchuria are, when you set aside the propaganda, the cause of Pearl Harbor and the war it engendered.

Roosevelt wished to go in against Germany, and certainly accepted the probability that Japan would allow him to go after them, too. In his perspective, the course of the United States was a logical one.

The sanctions against Russia are all but crippling, and I am persuaded that, at the moment, we are merely at the barking stage. However, what I find worrying is a couple of circumstances that do not help to ease my mind. The first is the fact that these sanctions seem to keep dripping, according to the mood of the populace in Europe. The more the Ukrainian Government riles the EU people up, the more the push to further sanctions increases. The second is the utter incompetence of our ruling classes all over Europe (not to talk of Brandon), people of such galactic stupidity that they have crippled an entire continent for two years because of a nasty flu whose origin they do not even want to investigate.

Therefore, we are having here the blind leading the stupid. The EU populations demanding more and more sanctions against Russia seem to have an implicit belief that these sanctions will never lead to war. It is as if they felt heroic because they accept to pay more at the gas pump next time they refuel, which they think is all the price they will have to pay to “defeat” Putin. I suspect that many people in the US had, in 1941, the same belief: We put sanctions in place, they cave in, we win, what’s for dinner?

This is why I think this is dangerous. People don’t know history anymore, so they cannot learn from it.

You know what happens to people who don’t know history.