Hoover Wrong Again

Victor is a member of the Hoover Institute; a cabal of right wing fools who are paid a high salary, get to live near Stanford University, all because the name sake of a hideous building (Hoover Tower) purports to be an academic research center.

In fact, it is a bastion of right wing politics.

And in this article it shows its base stupidity.

The same stupidity, actually ignorance on poor Herbert Hoover’s part, that saw the world in the paradigm of the 1920s.  This ignorance plunged the United States into a tariff ridden depression in 1929; just like Trump is doing now.

After the war the paradigm was heavily influenced by the disaster that was WWI.  

The war had begun like all European squabbles, a local dispute that led to an assassination and then dragged related monarchs into a localized war.  These wars usually resolved themselves in short order, more ritual than violence.

But America’s Civil War had happened about 50 years earlier.  And it taught the practitioners of war new techniques: rapid fired weapons, artillery and even airplanes.

The Civil War, the first “modern” war was won by attacking civilians and destroying the capacity of the enemy to make war.  Sherman’s “March to the Sea” that was really a practice of “total war” destroyed the south’s civilian capacity to make war.  It ended with mass casualties and a level of violence not seen in mankind’s history.

And that was what first Germany and then other European nations practiced for 1914 to 1918.  The war was almost won at first in the old way, a glorious offensive that out maneuvered the enemy, with minimal casualties, then a brokered peace.  Unfortunately for the youth of Europe, that quick end did not happen, and the artillery and machine guns took over, reducing the war to a killing machine.  

And entire generation of young men died in that war.  Cities and towns were attacked more and more; killing the enemy meant killing ALL the enemy, including women and children.  

Only the entry of the United States, who used the budding technology of the next war, tanks and airplanes, maneuvered around the trenches that had chewed up a generation and defeated the Germans.

What fed this human calamity was a paradigm shift that nobody could see in warfare (except for the state of Georgia that had endured Sherman’s war crimes in 1864).  This total war and attacked on civilians was a key factor in the new paradigm of warfare that killed 55 million twenty years later.

And Victor doesn’t see any of it.  He is still stuck in that paradigm of 1914; he sees nationalism as a manifestation of democracy somehow.  He doesn’t even notice the danger of modern warfare, that this time, holds the real threat of the end of mankind.

But he sits in the phallic  Symbol of Hoover Tower and writes his nonsense, paid well and ignored by a University that should know better.