{"id":60264,"date":"2021-11-03T18:58:59","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T23:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60264"},"modified":"2021-11-03T18:58:59","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T23:58:59","slug":"the-next-european-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60264","title":{"rendered":"The Next European War"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/the-next-european-war\/?fbclid=IwAR0OgTzhKLL3nlOSYlBPXh15GwECsHdLmvX6IlUrELyMyEWdRUE52EggQho\">The Next European War<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>The notion that history has nothing to teach us is one of the most pervasive beliefs in modern industrial society.\u00a0 It\u2019s also one of the most misguided. Sure, we\u2019ve got all these shiny new technological trinkets, and we love to insist to ourselves that this means we\u2019re constantly breaking new ground and going where no previous society has ever gone before. Clinging to that fond delusion, we keep on making mistakes that were already old when bronze swords were high tech, and flailing helplessly when the usual consequences yet again land on top of us.<\/p>\n<p>The shambolic end of the US occupation of Afghanistan earlier this autumn is a case in point. The self-satisfied gooberocracy that runs the United States these days talked itself into believing that the hard-earned lessons of the Vietnam war didn\u2019t matter any more, and sent American soldiers blundering into a country that earned the name \u201cthe graveyard of empires\u201d long before the United States was a twinkle in Ben Franklin\u2019s eye.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t just Vietnam that the slackjawed warlords of Washington ignored, of course.\u00a0 The Russians had their own messy experiences in Aghanistan, so did the British, so did half a dozen great Asian empires, and so did Alexander the Great. None of that made any difference, because the political class in the US had convinced itself that the past didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n<p>Back when the invasion first happened, wags suggested that \u201cKabul\u201d is how you pronounce \u201cSaigon\u201d in Pashto, and of course they were quite right.\u00a0 Having refused to learn from their history, four US administrations duly repeated it, right down to the humiliating final scenes of helicopters on rooftops and victorious insurgents parading with captured US military hardware&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Next European War The notion that history has nothing to teach us is one of the most pervasive beliefs in modern industrial society.\u00a0 It\u2019s also one of the most misguided. Sure, we\u2019ve got all these shiny new technological trinkets, and we love to insist to ourselves that this means we\u2019re constantly breaking new ground [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[15417,281,2500,3520,1758,827,3142,862,865],"class_list":["post-60264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-ecosophia","tag-europe","tag-history","tag-imperialism","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-united-states","tag-us-empire","tag-war","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60265,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60264\/revisions\/60265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}