Subj : Bible                                                    [2]
To   : Frank Masingill
From : Curtis Johnson
Date : Tue Oct 24 2000 10:33 pm

 FM> In fact, this shuttle away from reality was so pronounced in
 FM> the early part of the century that people were SHOCKED that
 FM> such a thing as WW I could come at ALL.  Read the history
 FM> books written
 
 CJ> It had been preceded by several crises that had come close to
 CJ> the brink while the alliances in place.  There had been an
 CJ> incredible amount of jingoism beforehand (I have a ca. 1910
 CJ> Belgian schoolbook, and it was amazing what what was being
 CJ> inculcated in this small neutral country).  France had been
 CJ> explicitly and publicly been vowing "revanche." The real
 CJ> surprise was that a general European war would last for so
 CJ> long:  it had "proven" that it would be economically
 CJ> impossible.

 FM> Well, I note the rather grudging concession.  Actually, I
 FM> have the difficult task of first proving to you that I'm not
 FM> ignorant of the "annals" of "history" and then of showing the
 FM> respectability of what Ted V. McAllister has called the search of
 FM> Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin for a "postliberal order."  You
 FM> actually make my point VERY well in that last paragraph.  I'm just
 FM> as aware as you are of the revanche movement wherein one of the
 FM> French statesmen after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War
 FM> said that he could think of no other reason for living except to
 FM> take revenge for Alsace and Lorraine.  The ancient Treaty of Verdun
 FM> question.  But none of this reduced the enthusiams that ran so high
 FM> with assurance that mankind in the western world, aware of the
 FM> tremendous growth in firepower, surely could not engage in another
 FM> major war.  I'm certain that you've read both Fay and Schmitt on the
 FM> diplomatic efforts to limit a war that the major powers, both
 FM> England AND Germany simply permitted to happen anyhow in full
 FM> consciousness in the final analysis.  This was followed by the

	The argument I mentioned that a war would be a short one is
not an argument that a war will not happen at all.  Nor are diplomatic
efforts to stave off a war evidence that the war was unthinkable.  
<Shrug>

 FM> unreality of "peace" through bankruptcy of one of the great powers
 FM> saddled in article 232 with the total responsibility for the war
 FM> which the diplomatic archives soon proved to be a false charge. 

 FM> I really do not consider that in a Philosophy echo one
 FM> should have to deal with the details of historical annals beyond
 FM> a certain broad understanding but at the same time, I suspect you
 FM> are right that this cannot be true.  When we have such stark
 FM> disagreement upon what it was that Cohn was attempting to say the
 FM> interpretation of what is transpiring in our recent memory can
 FM> hardly be resolved.  

	I had gone back and reread the appropriate parts of Cohn
to check my assertions.  <Shrug>



--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR]
 * Origin: America's favorite whine - it's your fault! (1:261/1000)

.