Party Like it’s 1929
I saw this article on CNN yesterday, but I didn’t mention it because it was just too eerie. Today, however, Mark Steyn said precisely what I was thinking in his column: that the Spanish people just let al Qaeda elect their government for them.
That’s not what I intended to blog about today. I’d found a cool quote by Bertrand Russell:
No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to sin; he does not say, “You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.” He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right.
Unlike Russell, I wasn’t going to claim that sin is a wholly pernicious idea. The trouble is that people insist on moralizing issues that are not moral in nature. They don’t scold their cats or their cars, but they will scold corporations, political parties or entire nations - and yet your dog has more of a moral sense than the average corporation.
So I will not scold Spain. Spain is not a moral agent but a symptom that Europe still hasn’t gotten over WWI. Looking around today, we find ourselves in a nightmare house where the clocks all stopped on the eve of an unthinkable disaster. It is 1928 all over again. –The Roots of European Appeasement by David Gelernter, September 2002. Here’s some more:
As the Second World War and its aftermath fade, they reveal a “new world order” that is strangely familiar–amazingly like the Western world of the 1920s, with its love of self-determination and loathing of imperialism and war, its liberal Germany, shrunken Russia, and map of Europe crammed with small states, with America’s indifference to Europe and Europe’s disdain for America, with Europe’s casual, endemic anti-Semitism, her politically, financially, and masochistically rewarding fascination with Muslim states who despise her, and her undertone of self-hatred and guilt.