Sunday, May 31, 2015

That Munich analogy

I've been on a trip to Buenos Aires so I've missed a few days posting.

This article by Michael Cohen is a good place to start up again, The Past’s First Lesson: Beware of False Historical Analogies World Politics Review 05/27/2015.

Foreign policy by analogy has become a chronic problem for the US. Especially the Munich analogy.

But Cohen falls into the Both Sides Do It cliche. The US blundering into wars against one New Hitler after another has done far more damage than any alleged excess of caution about charging into war, especially since the "unipolar moment" after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I wish, I wish that senior policy makers were at risk of listening too closely to Seymour Hersh and Glenn Greenwald!

But I give him credit for more-or-less getting the Faulkner quote right. "The past is never dead. It's not even past." is the correct one from "Requiem for a Nun" (1951), Act 1, Scene 3. But it's actually a quote from a Faulkner *character*, Gavin Stevens.

I consider Faulkner's works part of the Scriptural canon, so I can get OCD about them sometimes.

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