Delenda Est

 

Impressionism / Stefan Luchian/ The well

I love discussions.  I will discuss anything.  But there are folks out there who can turn any discussion nasty as soon as you dare to disagree with them. 

I haven’t figured out the rhyme or reason behind this.  Now, I recognize that a lot of my views are not in the least mainstream, but it seems to me that the range of acceptable opinions for the majority of the population seems to be narrowing.   It seems to me that there are too many options for ways to look at things for most folks and rather than looking for more ways to look at things, they are trying for less and coming down hard on thoughts outside their view of acceptable.

Today’s thoughts came from a discussion about the aftermath of the second world war.  In particular, the idea that other than being “the arsenal of democracy” the actual combat input to the second world war was not that great in comparison to our allies.  Our major input to the war was from the squids and the zoomies.  Aircraft Carriers, Battleships and B-17’s were our tour de force.  We rode those horses hard.  But the horses themselves were comparatively lightly crewed and the damage that they generated was far beyond their actual manpower inputs.

But riding technology usually doesn’t mean that we are good in a fight.  Truth be told the Russians and the Brits/Colonials bore the weight of the close in fighting.  The Russians did the bulk of the heavy lifting.  

Consider our current wars or anything since the sainted WWII.  We have lost every time.  We levelled North Korea with more bomb tonnage than we dropped in WWII and they are still standing.  We bombed the living bejesus out of Vietnam and they are still standing.  We have been dicking around in Iraq for thirty years and Afghanistan for twenty and they are still standing.

One of the things that everyone likes to think is that we are the “New Rome”.  No my friends, we are the new Carthage.