(07-05-2018, 11:19 AM)Cynic Hero Wrote: You do notice that there was a discussion of geopolitical issues on this thread? The Rest of us do not want to be distracted by this partisan clap-trap. Stop Cluttering up this thread with politically motivated nonsense.
So what? This news item demonstrates the impulsiveness and quick anger of the President. Political choices include military blunders (including pointless war crimes*) of political leaders, and can make the geopolitical reality. They can force people who dislike discussing it to contemplate it.
It is not partisan claptrap. Personalities matter greatly in events. Have someone like Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor of Germany in 1938, and history is very different. The faults with geopolitics include its neglect of personalities as drivers of military decisions..
History is more than a collection of disjointed biographies, but personalities matter, too. Generational theory connects people to the times of their origins and in to the times in which they do their critical deeds )if ever) or are parts of mass markets or cultural trends even if 'only' consumers. Time is environment, too.
Conduct matters.
I separate news from comment because I respect AP. If you want to say that the story is a fabrication, then that is your choice. That is not to say that you made a mistake in doing so.
*I attribute the Allied victory to Axis war crimes more than to anything else -- even better generalship, greater economic power, tighter economic controls, and better use of science and technology. Had it not been for the horrible crimes that the Nazis committed in Poland from the start of their invasion, the British would have surrendered at the decisive defeat at Dunkirk and steered clear of the fanatical anti-Nazi Churchill. The Allies had the great Jewish scientists that the Nazis would have murdered had they gotten the chance. The Poles successfully slipped an Enigma machine to the British, and the British practically invented a computer to read the Nazi naval 'mail'.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
