While Syria slaughters its own people and Cairo burns yet again, idealism reveals again, that war is to be left in the dustbins of history. Similar predictions were made in 1909, just 4 years before the first World War, and in the 1930's by Neville Chamberlain, on the eve of the Second World War. In the 90's, Clinton slashed our military with the idealism that the world would be a safer place. It ignored the rising attacks by Islamist Terrorists and declarations of war by al-Qaeda, in hopes it would just go away. It claimed terrorism was a law enforcement problem, and should be tried in court, rather than prosecuted by militaries.
Zero Ponsdorf of This Ain't Hell points out the latest prediction of the impending future world of peace. And some blame the realism of Veterans, of the fact that Sovereign Nations maintain standing Armies for self-defense, that wars continue. Evidently, some believe that if Nations will just give up the means to defend themselves, then dictatorships will stop trying to take over their land and people.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Communist Central Party of China has selected their new set of leaders, without ANY input from their Chinese subjects and are publishing new passports with maps of claiming the territory of several Pacific Nations, from the Philipines, to India, to Korea, to Japan, and of course Taiwan.
Communist China has been using the profits of the lead coated toys it sells to our kids, to buy modern battleships, aircraft carriers, and troop transports. It has taken over from the Soviets in stealing our technology, for such things as the Stealth Fighter which the Obama Administration decided was unneeded for our own military. It has doubled its military spending in the last decade, and continues to increase it by double digits. And now, it is making claims on the islands of the Pacifics in a manner reminiscent of 1930's Japan. The one thing that has contained China's military threat for decades is being erased: its inability to project the power of its 4.5 Million man Military.
As the world begins to see the results of Islamism unleashed in the wake of Obama's retreat from the Middle East, it is becoming more apparent that we have repeated 1978 Iran, rather than 1989 Eastern Europe. Veterans that lived through those days predicted it. The people of the effected countries feared it.
Tunisians ran for the boats before the Islamists could loot & burn their homes. The Italians had to beg the European Union for help in dealing with the refugees as thousands flocked to their Island. Women in particular feared as the Islamists returned from exile. A formerly stable country, with remarkable freedoms, considering its geographical position, and its nervous ethnic and religious divides, de-stabilized rapidly, opening the door for Islamism to seize power.
Egyptians, enamored with the idea of a greater say in their own politics flocked to the square, and got what they thought they wanted, unleashing the Islamists Mubarrak had held in check for decades in the process. Obama had ordered Mubarrak to step aside and make way for the Muslim Brotherhood. He had begged the Military to force out Mubarrak, and then demanded they hold elections before non-Islamists could organize political parties.
Today, Egyptians have learned the Muslim Brotherhood's Morsi, is declaring himself greater authority than even Mubarrak dared claim. They have learned that democracy can be as much an illusion in Egypt, as it is in Islamist Iran.
Islamist terrorists are pushing the war front South in Africa, into Mali, Nigeria, and Kenya, while civil wars continue to be as prolific today on continent, as they ever were, along with corruption, poverty, disease, and famine. Tyrants, like Islamist al-Bashir of Sudan, care less what stripe of Ideology they "represent" than that they maintain tyrannical control. And the 2 decade alliance of Islamist Iran and Sudan, finally bore fruit in 2012 Egypt, a country they had given up on in the 2000's.
And let us not forget Syria, where unrest of reasonable people has been seized upon by the jackals of Islamism, as they fight for the future dictatorial rights of tyranny. Average, freedom loving Syrians are now being crushed in the middle as Iranian backed Islamists, including Iran's Quds Force and Hezbollah, battle Hamas backed al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood terrorists. The violence has spilled into Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel.
In Pakistan, Taliban terrorists continue to slaughter Shi'a celebrating the assassination of a 7th Century descendant of Mohammad, as other Islamists do the same in Baghdad and Iraq.
Europe is not immune, and not just on the fringes of the Empire. While Turkey becomes more Islamist, Greece has burned at the behest of Communists and Socialists, who first created a debt crisis, and now violently protest measures to correct the problems. The birthplace of city-states, citizenship, and democracy is rocked and fire-bombed into the mayhem of socialism on the fringes of the Islamist Caliphate its descendents in Turkey helped create.
Spain continues to experience the pains of 25%+ unemployment, despite voting out the Socialist that turned their record economy into shambles in just a few years. Italy is having similar problems but not to the same extent. The good news for Spain is that the economy is so bad that even the Islamist terrorists are considering giving up. Parallels in Spain and Italy are erily reminiscent of pre-Fascist days of the early 1930's Europe, years before World War II.
In America, the words "Military Industrial Complex" continue to be spoken derisively, in an economy closer to the 1930's depression, than at any time since Jimmy Carter. Like FDR, the Obama Administration has attempted domestic spending programs with similar failures. The National Debt to Gross Domestic Production ratio exceeds any since FDR's World War II. Our entire Nation's annual production is now worth less than what our Government owes. But lost in the lessons of history is that FDR's attempts at spending the US out of depression failed. Lost in the lessons is that it was Defense Spending that lifted us out of Great Depression.
In the 1930's, as FDR saw the threat of a rising Nationalist Socialist dictator in Adolf Hitler and an Imperialist Emperor heading his own religion in Japan, he ramped up production of military equipment, selling it to Britain & the Soviets, and backfilling Chinese and Burmese fighting the Japanese.
And all of the treaties and the precursor to the United Nations, the League of Nations, could not ensure their prediction that World War I had been the war to end all wars. The treaties had limited the production of the machines of war, particularly that of Japan, Germany, America, France, and Britain. And while the Allies enjoyed the elimination of expenditures on military equipment, Japan and Germany enjoyed the economic benefits of a robust and aggressive weapons business. They invested in the technologies to be at the forefront of warfare, and ignored those de-moralizing treaties that ended the war to end all wars.
By the late 1930's, the dictators of Germany, Japan, & Italy had the Armies they needed to sweep across their neighbors, who had believed that if they just didn't build defenses, they wouldn't have wars. In less than 6 years, between 1939 and 1945, 4% of the population of the effected Nations, 62 Million to 78 Million, including up to 55 Million civilians and 25 Million soldiers had been killed, just 30 years after "the war to end all wars," and the new era of peace.
Today's threats include an Imperialist minded Communist China, parallel to the 1930's Japan, and Islamist Iran, expanding its influence in the Middle East and South Asia, which uses the same anti-Semetic propaganda and symbolism as did Germany's National Socialist's Goebels & Goehring. Like Hitler's Germany, there is the appearance of elections, so long as you vote for Ayatollah's Islamists. And the Aryans oppressed under Iran's Ayatollah & Ahdiminijad have as little say in their fate as did the Aryans oppressed under Germany's Hitler & Goebels.
Today's military defenses see increases in Russia rather than Germany, while Europe, including Britain, increasingly cut their own. The policies of appeasement espoused by Neville Chamberlain for Hitler are in full force in modern Europe to Islamists, Socialists, & Communists.
While Russia's Putin is more akin to the National Socialism of Hitler than his historical experience in Communism's KGB, he is re-building the grip on power Stalin and Lenin executed to create the largest empire of the 20th Century. To quote Hillary, "one would have to be willfully ignorant" to not see the friendly relations between Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, & Syria.
For the prophets of peace, the lessons of history should be ignored in the hopes that the human race will "evolve" beyond the base animal instincts, which continue to drive 99.5% of all the human animal does. Idealists continue to hope that if individuals stop attaining the means to defend themselves, and Nations stop attaining the means to defend their borders and citizens, the predators: criminals, terrorists, and tyrants, will stop swooping down on the weak, and taking what they want.