Yesterday, work stopped in Paris as people commemorated Victory in Europe Day. When the war was over in Europe in May of ’45, people celebrated. Americans in Paris were cheered as heroes and liberators…barkeepers poured them free drinks and women offered free kisses. And everyone was glad the fight was finished. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was time to get back to work and families…the war was over.
We stoop to history again, dear reader. You will pardon us, I hope. But what else can we do? What else do we have…other than the record of what Voltaire called the “crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind”? Though we know little about what actually happened…and are suspicious about how people interpret it…we know nothing at all about the future…except that it is an extension of what came before it.
“It’s all happened before,” said Jim Rogers on the phone yesterday, referring to the boom/bust cycle. “Just look at history. You know, I teach college classes here in New York. My students sometimes ask me what they should study if they want to be successful. I tell them to read history and philosophy. They say, ‘shouldn’t we be studying accounting or business…?’ I say, ‘No, you’ve got to study history because that is all we have…a record of all we’ve learned or should have learned.'”
What Europe learned from WWI and WWII was not to do that again. This was not so much an intellectual lesson as a sentimental one. Those who lived though the wars…the occupations…the uniforms…wanted nothing more to do with them. The anti-war sentiment was on their lips and in their blood.
But now the old soldiers are dying off. We missed the little gathering in Lathus, but there were only a handful of veterans left, Mr. Minig told us….this past winter had claimed a couple more. Soon, there will be no one to recall what it was really like.
The new generation of warriors – mainly in America – has a different sentiment.
Arnold Toynbee explains:
“The survivors of a generation that has been of military age during a bout of war will be shy, for the rest of their lives, of bringing a repetition of this tragic experience either upon themselves or upon their children, and…therefore the psychological resistance of any move towards the breaking of a peace…is likely to be prohibitively strong until a new generation…has had the time to grow up and come into power. On the same showing, a bout of war, once precipitated, is likely to persist until the peace-bread generation that has lightheartedly run into war has been replaced, in its turn, by a warworn generation.”
War is still a lark to the peace-bred generation in the U.S….still an exercise in geo-political jingoism as daft as Wilson’s “making the world safe for democracy,” but without the casualties! They think they are defending western civilization…fighting terrorism…spreading democracy and freedom.
It is a different world for them than it was for the survivors of ’45. Then, it was the Europeans who stirred up war…and a reluctant American who helped put things right. Now, it is the Americans who go looking for trouble…but who will sort out the mess they make?
Then, it was the Germans who tried to crush everyone who got in their way. Now, it is the Americans who are on the move…offering a new kind of Empire…a soft empire…whose intention is not to conquer and steal, but merely to slather peace and democracy throughout forlorn areas of the world…thereby making the rest of it safer and more prosperous, too. This new Empire of Goodwill is led by a warrior…but not a Commodus (who fought hundreds of combats in the arena…the spectators scarcely noticed that his opponents had their feet cut off in advance to make sure the Emperor won…)
No, Mr. Bush sees himself as Tiberius or Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius…a fighter, but not a tyrant.
Things have changed. It is not the world of 1945. The U.S. stands on the threshold of a new era in world politics.
Rome stood in a similar position in 146 BC. In that year, Scipio Emilius finally put an end to Rome’s ancient enemy – Carthage. He lay siege to the city, then took it and destroyed it.
But as Carthage burned before him, Scipio is said to have cried; he seemed to understand that a new era had come to Rome. She no longer had a rival; she was now master of the Mediterranean world. She was an empire. Scipio must have looked ahead…and seen the spectral image of Rome in the smoke of Carthage. Sooner or later, all empires collapse. This was not necessarily the beginning of the end for Rome, he may have thought…but perhaps the end of the beginning.
About that same time, the consul Metellus put down a revolt in Macedonia…and Mummius took Corinth and razed it. Greece, formerly the great power of the region, became a Roman province.
Like Europe compared to the U.S. today, the Greek city-states were the old world. They were the source of much of the culture and learning of the Romans, but they had lost their military edge. If they had ever really had an empire of their own, it was definitely yesterday’s empire. The empire of today and tomorrow was Rome.
But before destroying Corinth and enslaving the Greeks, the Romans first rescued them.
“In the spring of the year 176 before Christ [that is about a quarter of a century before Greece was made a Roman province],” writes Peter Bender, “all of the notables of Greece assembled at Corinth in order to hear what Rome had decided for them. After a century and a half of oppression of the Greeks by the Macedonians, the Romans had beaten Philip V and had made him renounce all his possessions in Greece. But all their experience suggested that the Greeks were merely exchanging one master for another.”
“At the sound of a trumpet, the herald of the assembly imposed silence and read the message from the senate: ‘We give you liberty and administrative independence; there will be no occupation and no obligation to pay tribute.'”
The Greeks couldn’t believe their ears. But when the word got around, and they realized what had been said, they gave the Romans a loud ‘Huzzah!’ and tried to get rid of them as soon as possible.
Everyone had the best of intentions. But history had intentions of her own.
“Every super-power has, by nature, a tendency to oppress more and more inferior nations,” a Greek orator had warned after the Romans imposed their “soft empire” in ’76.
Like markets, politics has to run its course…from the beginning to the end.
May 10, 2003
Bill Bonner [send him mail] is the founder and president of Agora Publishing, and the author of The Daily Reckoning.
