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History doesn't repeat, it rhymes

Blogs > Shady Sands
Post a Reply
Shady Sands
Profile Blog Joined June 2012
United States4021 Posts
Last Edited: 2013-03-15 21:48:24
March 15 2013 21:34 GMT
#1
History doesn't repeat, it rhymes
+ Show Spoiler [mood music] +
[image loading]
How do you say 'clusterfuck' in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian, and Danish?

A: Westphalia

[image loading]But wait! Let's add a few more languages to that list...

[image loading]
...starting with English.


Ever since graduating college, I've taken to reading as much post-Renaissance Western history as I can, since I felt that was an area of my education in which I was lacking. One of the key lessons of Western history is that up until 1648 Europe didn't comprehensively embrace the modern concept of a 'nation-state'. Before 1648, states, for predominantly religious reasons, felt compelled to interfere in the internal affairs of other states. What's more, subjects of a ruler could have competing ethnic, religious, and even sub-national ties to neighbors (or distant popes, princes, and Emperors), and this was considered totally fine... except it meant that there were now that many more excuses for common folk to get killed.

This culminated in 1618, when Protestants in Bohemia rebelled against the Catholic Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria, and a massive religious war followed, as Protestant princes and Catholic princes turned on each other in order to 'save' each other's denizens from worshipping God in the wrong way. And what better way to save a village than by hiring a bunch of mercenaries to go and rape, pillage, and burn it?

Basically, the resulting thirty years of religiously-motivated total war made Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia look like a three-way pie-making contest.
[image loading]
66 and 33 represent % population decline. So great was the devastation brought about by the war that estimates put the reduction of population across the German states at about 25% to 40%.


Why was the shit this bad? Because the various princes, in order to properly align the incentives of the Merc companies they hired, offered most (or nearly all) their pay in terms of 'prospective loot'. Yeah. As in if you were a mercenary, you didn't get paid a cent for risking your life--but if you defeated another army (or happened upon an unfortunate prince who didn't hire a bunch of jackals) you could loot, rape, and plunder to your pleasure.

[image loading]
How do you make war crimes look boring? Answer: Hire a Dutch painter.


Eventually the various princes, dukes, an Emperor, a King, and a Pope wised up and realized this sort of mutual prisoners' dilemma was stupid, and they should sign a treaty respecting the basic tenets of national sovereignty: a sovereign could do with his people as he wished (especially in terms of religion), and other nations have no right to interfere by force.

For the next three centuries, this principle held up decently well. That is, until, 'whose realm, his religion' turned into genocide... and it met CNN, as well as a military-industrial-congressional complex with a profound sense of strategic drift following the end of the Cold War. Cue the creation of a new ideology: R2P, or responsibility to protect--an ideology Gustavus Adolphus, or what I like to call the original 'Adolph the Blitzer', would have found intimately familiar; he went to war to protect Europe's Protestants against Catholic oppression, after all--a brilliant field commander who built Sweden into Europe's foremost military superpower and turned a six-years' war into a thirty-year one that didn't end until sixteen years after he died.

After the Arab Spring came along, uncorking religious pressures that had been building up in the Muslim community for decades, nay, centuries, R2P had a perfect chance to be deployed. We saw NATO exercising it in Libya against Gaddhafi, and now we see the Saudis and Iranians exercising it in Syria (which bears a striking resemblance to poor Germany caught between Spain, France, and Sweden. Poor Germany. Poor, poor Germany) But that's not all. The violence could spill over into Iraq as well... an outcome which Saudi Arabia seems to be eager for:

Abu Saleh sits in a striped tent pitched by the side of the highway joining Jordan and Syria with Iraq and reflects on the latest, improbable twist in his 10-year career fighting those he considers the enemies of his fellow Iraqi Sunnis.

A decade ago, when the Americans rolled into Ramadi in their tanks and Humvees, the former Saddam regime security officer led a group of Sunni fighters who took the fight to the occupiers with improvised explosive device (IEDs) and ambushes.

The scars of their insurgency are still visible in Ramadi's industrial quarter: deserted shops riddled with bullet holes, metal shutters twisted like foil, black soot covering the walls.

But Abu Saleh and his fellow fighters lost their way, he says. "We made mistakes. We took people randomly. Some of us resorted to kidnapping to fund the resistance, then it became an industry, detaining people inside their neighbourhood, planting IEDs in front of people houses." He explains how the resistance fragmented into competing groups, how they began to fight each other and al-Qaida and how their neighbours eventually turned on them.

By 2009 they had been, in effect, run out of town by a local militia hunting them on behalf of the Americans. Like thousands of other Iraqi Sunnis, Abu Saleh took refuge in neighbouring Syria.

Now in his mid-30s, Abu Saleh is back in Ramadi, borne on a tide that sprung from the revolutions of Tahrir Square and Benghazi and gathered force amid the bloodshed in Syria. Abu Saleh and other Iraqi Sunnis believe it is a tide that could flow all the way to Baghdad, sweeping away the Shia government they despise.

...

In another echo of recent Arab uprisings, Abu Saleh says he and other Sunni leaders have now secured support from wealthy Gulf state figures who funded them during the early years of their insurgency against the Americans.

After the truce between Sunni groups, he says, a meeting was set up in the Jordanian capital, Amman, between a united front of Iraqi factions and representatives of "charities" from the Gulf.

The Iraqis asked for money and weapons; after a decade of war their arsenals were almost depleted. What didn't get destroyed by US or Iraqi forces was sold to the Syrians. They needed money to train and recruit new fighters but more importantly a religious sanction from the religious authorities for a new round of fighting.

The Gulf figures asked for more time and a second meeting was held in Amman, this time attended by a higher-ranking group of officials from the both sides. The answer was yes: the "charities" would offer support as long as the Iraqi Sunnis were united and used their weapons only after Iraqi government units used force against them. Another Sunni leader confirmed to the Guardian that the Amman meetings had taken place.

"There is a new plan, a grand plan not like the last time when we worked individually," another commander told me. "This time we are organised. We have co-ordinated with countries like Qatar and Saudi and Jordan. We are organising, training and equipping ourselves but we will start peacefully until the right moment arrives. We won't be making the same mistakes. Baghdad will be destroyed this time."


Dafuq? Have these people not read history? Do they not understand that religion is the one force that makes people even crazier than nationalism? And now they want to marry it with unlimited petrodollars and high-tech NATO/Soviet weaponry... what the fuck man?

Now, if it was just the Gulf states and Iran, this problem could be localized (and possibly even benefit the world economy, because hey, all those missiles are expensive = more exported oil = cheaper gas prices for everybody!). But unfortunately, it looks like Russia has some backing of Iran, and NATO, thanks to this trio of lovely individuals is quasi-aligned with the Saudis. (Thankfully, America's stalwart regional ally Israel, like the Ottomans of the Thirty-Years War, are staying out of the conflict, even though America is already knee-deep).

So now it looks like the world is at risk of unlearning the lessons won through so much pain nearly four centuries ago. Given nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, I'm not sure the world can afford a thirty-year process of re-education...

***
Что?
spinesheath
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
Germany8679 Posts
March 15 2013 21:49 GMT
#2
If you thought humans could learn form mistakes made by humans other than themselves, you've been misled.

It's not just war. It's pollution, excessive usage of resources, whatever. All of it has happened before. And not just once. We know about negative effects this crap will have, yet we don't seem to have the power to change anything about it.
If you have a good reason to disagree with the above, please tell me. Thank you.
jubil
Profile Blog Joined March 2011
United States2602 Posts
March 15 2013 22:57 GMT
#3
Just a note on your second to last paragraph - The US may be quasi-aligned with the Saudis, but we have no slight connection to Iraq's current government as well. The US has always been uneasy about these Saudi "charities" since they fund anti-American groups as well so I don't think we'll be too enthusiastic to see the Shiia government in Baghdad fall, especially as the old fears that Iraq under the Shiias would become Iran's puppet don't seem to have come true.

In the big picture, the Middle East has always been torn apart by nationalism and religion. One the problems that prevents it from reaching a kind of modern peace of Westphalia is that the region has gone through enough colonizations and war that people remain deeply dissatisfied with current divisions/borders, but the current leaders in the region are more willing to gamble on conflict than submit to a peace, partly because of the support they get from outside powers...
Marineking-Polt-Maru-Fantasy-Solar-Xenocider-Suppy fighting!
Entertaining
Profile Joined September 2007
Canada793 Posts
March 15 2013 22:58 GMT
#4
A quote from Steven Ericson's book 2 of malazan "The lesson of history is that no one learns". Thought it fit nicely here.
Mongoose
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom190 Posts
March 15 2013 23:31 GMT
#5
On March 16 2013 06:49 spinesheath wrote:
If you thought humans could learn form mistakes made by humans other than themselves, you've been misled.

It's not just war. It's pollution, excessive usage of resources, whatever. All of it has happened before. And not just once. We know about negative effects this crap will have, yet we don't seem to have the power to change anything about it.

This. It's not possible for everyone know everything about history though, it's up to the leaders to learn about these mistakes and act upon them though.
Master league EU Terran
sths
Profile Blog Joined October 2012
Australia192 Posts
March 16 2013 00:39 GMT
#6
I don't think it's a simple matter of not learning from history. How history is presented and taught matters.
Shady is asian and looks at old European histories from a lens of detached curiosity with no personal and family history. This is probably the same for most of us.

For example if we imagine the pie making contest between Croatia/Serbia, we'd picture something like this.


But if you're Croatian/Serbian. I'm sure that pie making contest will be a lot less jolly since your grandpa might have lost his leg in it and you woulda heard stories since you were 6 about those evil Serbians and their disgusting leg pies.

Or imagine if you're Chinese and you're home town is Nanjing.

It's not that we don't learn from history. It's that there are too many versions.
bumwithagun
Profile Joined January 2011
United States153 Posts
March 16 2013 04:10 GMT
#7
This is a very China-convenient conception of Western history: sovereignty was a key development, sovereignty must be protected, not respecting sovereignty is a bad idea.

Of course this falls apart when sovereignty must be ignored (see: genocide)

but then i don't support R2p all that vigorously either so what the hell do i know?
Shady Sands
Profile Blog Joined June 2012
United States4021 Posts
March 16 2013 05:45 GMT
#8
On March 16 2013 13:10 bumwithagun wrote:
This is a very China-convenient conception of Western history: sovereignty was a key development, sovereignty must be protected, not respecting sovereignty is a bad idea.

Of course this falls apart when sovereignty must be ignored (see: genocide)

but then i don't support R2p all that vigorously either so what the hell do i know?

I'm completely confused as to how this is a China-convenient conception of Western history
Что?
bumwithagun
Profile Joined January 2011
United States153 Posts
March 22 2013 21:12 GMT
#9
On March 16 2013 14:45 Shady Sands wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 16 2013 13:10 bumwithagun wrote:
This is a very China-convenient conception of Western history: sovereignty was a key development, sovereignty must be protected, not respecting sovereignty is a bad idea.

Of course this falls apart when sovereignty must be ignored (see: genocide)

but then i don't support R2p all that vigorously either so what the hell do i know?

I'm completely confused as to how this is a China-convenient conception of Western history


Sorry, i think that came across hostile.I only meant that sovereignty has tended to be a useful concept for China in recent history while it has fallen out of favor in the west.

Most US IR departments and policy makers aren't realists anymore and no longer think sovereignty is that useful. China, on the other hand, has gone totally embraced old the old western orthodoxy of sovereignty academically and in its policy statements.

I suspect it tends to be something important only relative to one's power projection capabilities and one's military parity with its neighbors. If that's right, China may speak less of sovereignty in the near future.
Shady Sands
Profile Blog Joined June 2012
United States4021 Posts
April 16 2014 15:54 GMT
#10
It looks like the National Interest has picked up this theme:

http://server1.nationalinterest.org/commentary/thirty-years-war-the-middle-east-10257?page=show
Что?
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