Yes, It Could Happen Again - Roger Cohen - The Atlantic
Instability in Ukraine, chaos in Syria, conflict in the East China
Sea—the trigger points for World War III are in place.
He concludes...........................Consider this article in my father’s 1938 high-school yearbook:
The
machine has brought men face to face as never before in history. Paris
and Berlin are closer today than neighboring villages were in the Middle
Ages. In one sense distance has been annihilated. We speed on the wings
of the wind and carry in our hands weapons more dreadful than the
lightning … The challenge of the machine is the greatest opportunity
mankind has yet enjoyed. Out of the rush and swirl of the confusions of
our times may yet arise a majestic order of world peace and prosperity.
Optimism
is irrepressible in the human heart—and best mistrusted. Our world of
hyperconnectivity, and the strains and aspirations that accompany it, is
not so novel after all. The ghosts of repetition reside alongside the
prophets of progress. From the “rush and swirl” of 1938 where “distance
has been annihilated” would follow in short order the slaughter of
Stalingrad, the mass murder of European Jewry, the indiscriminate deaths
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the anguish of all humanity. We should
not lightly discard a well-grounded pessimism or the treaties it has
produced.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
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