"What's Past is Prologue"
In recognition of the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Power Line publishes the text of FDR's speech to Congress just after the attacks. The Big Trunk ends his post with a quote from Shakespeare: "what's past is prologue." Something everyone should make a conscious effort to remember.
Reading the speech, particularly the part in which Roosevelt lists all of the places Japan had just attacked, my initial reaction is to wonder how any sane person (or group of people, leading a country or organization) can believe that world domination is a reasonable goal. Upon having that thought, I remembered that even today, we're living in a world in which a group of people connected by a particular bastardization of an otherwise good religion share that goal.
I don't know enough about what its like to grow up in an Islamofascist community or family to truly understand how anyone could imagine that one group, one belief could rule the world (though I do believe that freedom could be a universally shared belief, it is an inherently diverse concept, unlike fundamentalist Islam).
The entire concept of world domination to me seems old fashioned in the oldest sort of way - something out of literature and movies made in the 40s, but not something that could plausibly exist in today's age of information. As a college student, studying international relations just after the fall of Communism, I almost took for granted the eventual certainty of an economically interdependent, multi-lateral global society. That was only ten years ago.
How quickly things change, though. I still believe in economic interdependence as the most viable path to "world peace" (whatever that means-I used to think I knew). The path to economic interdependence, unfortunately, seems a lot rockier to me today than it did in 1993.
Reading the speech, particularly the part in which Roosevelt lists all of the places Japan had just attacked, my initial reaction is to wonder how any sane person (or group of people, leading a country or organization) can believe that world domination is a reasonable goal. Upon having that thought, I remembered that even today, we're living in a world in which a group of people connected by a particular bastardization of an otherwise good religion share that goal.
I don't know enough about what its like to grow up in an Islamofascist community or family to truly understand how anyone could imagine that one group, one belief could rule the world (though I do believe that freedom could be a universally shared belief, it is an inherently diverse concept, unlike fundamentalist Islam).
The entire concept of world domination to me seems old fashioned in the oldest sort of way - something out of literature and movies made in the 40s, but not something that could plausibly exist in today's age of information. As a college student, studying international relations just after the fall of Communism, I almost took for granted the eventual certainty of an economically interdependent, multi-lateral global society. That was only ten years ago.
How quickly things change, though. I still believe in economic interdependence as the most viable path to "world peace" (whatever that means-I used to think I knew). The path to economic interdependence, unfortunately, seems a lot rockier to me today than it did in 1993.
posted by Kit Pollard at
1:19 PM
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