Monday, January 26, 2015

Beware the synergy of the tyranny of good intentions mixed with the Law of Unintended Consequences.

David Stockman: Woodrow Wilson's War & Why The Entire 20th Century Was A Mistake
The above link was sent to me with the comment: "Time travel must be impossible. Otherwise, Woodrow Wilson, along with many others I could name, would surely have been strangled as an infant in his cradle."

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just read "The Kings Depart" by Richard M Watt The Tragedy of Germany: Versailles and the German Revolution.

Woodrow Wilson does not appear with any honor ... Democrat, Libertard Utopian who simply could not do the correct thing concerning the Armastice and 'Peace' Treaty after WWI

They just stay the same - learning nothing.

III

ag42b said...

One would have thought Wilson should have known better.

His father had a brief stint as a Confederate chaplain during the War between the States.

Wilson had a poor record on encouraging democracy, and history portrays him as a vicious would-be aristocrat.

Anonymous said...

It's not about learning and critical thinking.

It's about arrogance, egomania and megalomania without restraint or accountability, and the ability to send someone else with a gun to your door, under color and cover of law and authority because they don't like you, and don't respect the constitution and bill of rights.

This is now the norm for much of the United States.

Anonymous said...

David Stockman: Woodrow Wilson's War & Why The Entire 20th Century Was A Mistake

1. Stockman writes a long and scholarly article on Wilson and completely leaves out the mysterious character “Colonel House.” How in the hell do you do that?

2. The entire 20th century was a mistake: A mistake? Entirely a mistake? I guess Stockman would have us believe that President Kennedy was mistakenly shot in the head by an old geezer across town who accidentally touched off a round while cleaning his deer rifle and consuming a six pack of Lone Star, … entirely.

3. Is there actually a market for this main-stream history BS that concludes that the plans and accomplishments of thousands of powerful men (and women) operating at the highest levels of multiple nation-states for a hundred of years are, in the end, nothing more than “mistakes”?

4. In my experience, anybody who tries to tell you that world history is nothing more than the sum total of many, many mistakes is wasting your time due to their inability to grasp an ugly reality or is trying to play a Jedi mind-trick on you.

Kristophr said...

Wilson managed the trifecta of bad.

After promising not to, he did three things:

Made global war by the US possible by implementing an Income Tax, and a Central Bank, and then declared war on Germany.

He realized how badly he screwed up after the fact:

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

-Woodrow Wilson

Anonymous said...

Sebastian Haffner in his book on the
German Reich Ailing Empire
remarks that without the "relentlessly
wrongheaded strategy" of the Allies,
the Reich could not have fought as
long as it did in WWI. I've always
wanted to know more about that.

There seems to be a certain increase in
interest in WWI lately

Anonymous said...

to Anonymous 12:32. it's called preparing
the battlespace -- for your mind. The
"mistakes were made"... "fog of confusion"
approach has been employed for some time
now e.g. with respect to Waco. I don't have the cite handy

Anonymous said...

to ag42b: one would think that all the
commands in Europe, in particular the
German Reich and Great Britain would have
known better, given that participants
and observers from all over were present
at the war here 1861-1865