06-15-2016, 11:15 AM
(06-14-2016, 01:51 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > I think of the ferocity of the Thirty Years' War, a long Crisis
> war that did cultural damage that may have even contributed to the
> Holocaust. Protestants and Catholics who hated each other united
> against another group -- the Jews. it was only a matter of time.
> That's duration.
You're using a kind of "glob of history" approach which says that if
people get angry at each other over a glob of years then it must be a
crisis war. If you want to believe that, then you're entitled to do
so, but it has no relationship whatsoever to either S&H generational
theory or Generational Dynamics.
(I'm always bemused by the fact that there are people who spent years
in the FTF forum, but who completely disbelieve the FTF theory.)
Let's take a more recent glob of years -- the Mideast since 1948.
Using your glob of history approach, you could say that the Mideast
has been in a crisis war for 70 years. After all, you've had one
brutal war after another -- the 1948 war between Jews and Arabs, the
1953 Egyptian revolution, the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and
Egypt, the Syrian revolution, the Syria-Lebanon war, the Iran/Iraq
war, the Israel-Hezbollah war, the Fatah-Hamas war, the Israel-Gaza
war, and others.
So according to your reasoning, you can glob all of those wars
together and call them one big crisis war. That's nice, but it bears
no relationship whatsoever to generational theory.
What you have to do is drill down into the individual conflicts. The
Jew-Arab war was a crisis war, the Syrian revolution and Syria-Lebanon
war were crisis wars, the Iran/Iraq war was a crisis war, and pretty
much all the rest are a bunch of non-crisis wars.
If you took the 30 years war and drilled down in the same way, then
you'd find that the 30 years war wasn't one long crisis war at all,
but a collection of crisis and non-crisis wars that spread across
Europe.
(06-14-2016, 01:51 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > It's all a matter of interpretation.
In the last 15 years, I've done hundreds of these generational
analyses, maybe by this time into the thousands. And I can say with
absolute certainty that there's no "interpretation" about it.
In order to evaluate a war or collection of wars, you have to look at
multiple historical sources. If you can't tell whether a given war is
a crisis war or non-crisis war, then it doesn't mean that "it's a
matter of interpretation." What it means is that you haven't looked
at enough historical sources to make an unambiguous determination.
This kind of evaluation process is non-trivial. It takes a lot of
work. I've done this hundreds of times over the years, and I can tell
you that this evaluation process has never failed to produce an
unambiguous result.
Furthermore, these methodologies are backed up by theoretical advances
in generational theory that I've documented on my web site and include
from time to time in my World View articles.
When I first started out in the FTF forum, the usual suspects used to
attack me by saying that I'm not qualified to write about these
subjects because I haven't read enough history books. So today I'm on
the other side of that criticism. You can't evaluate a war or
collection of wars unless you've looked at numerous sources, usually
at least 10 or 20 sources, though for the 30 years war it would
probably need even more than that. After that, there's little or no
need for "interpretation."
