[Personal update: I stayed home from work again today. Still no voice. Maybe I’ll make it in tomorrow. I really don’t want to pass this nightmare on to the students, though.]
The conviction prevails, in privileged circles that, if we study history without reshaping it to our contemporary prejudices, history will corrupt us. May I suggest that the opposite is true?
…Those who deny history die of myth.
In that quotation from his Introduction, Ralph Peters sums up much of the lessons he propounds in his 2010 collection of essays and columns, Endless War
Our great mistake, as I read him, is our insistence on “understanding” our opponents. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but the way our academics and academically-trained soldiers do it is so informed by postmodern secularism that they end up violating both fact and logic. Better than academic anthropology and political theory, these people should read original historical and religious texts, and myth. Our enemies are fighting for a dream, not an ideology.
Peters (who is also the author, under the name Owen Parry, of the Abel Jones novels which I’ve often praised in this space) expresses some iconoclastic opinions on our current struggle. Contrary to what you’ve read, he says, Iraq was the “good war,” and Afghanistan (following the original incursion, which should have been more massive) is a waste of time. Afghanistan, he says, has no strategic importance, is impossible to govern, and was only the base for the 9/11 terrorists because they’d been kicked out of every other safe haven. In Iraq, he maintains, the terrorists chose to make their real stand, and Saddam Hussein was genuine military threat. Control of Iraq also gives us considerable strategic advantages.
Having read Endless War, I feel a little better informed than I was, though the whole question remains Endlessly Complex.
The only major problem I had with the book was one essay (can’t find it now) in which he said he was as afraid of Christian fundamentalists as of Muslim fundamentalists. That’s a remarkably “conventional wisdom” kind of observation for a thinker of Peters’ originality. He doesn’t repeat it, so perhaps he thought better of it later.
Full disclosure: I got this book free for my Kindle through a special offer.
Endless War is an extremely readable, highly original, and penetrating analysis of the struggle between East and West. Recommended.
claims there are fraudulent voter records known to the DOJ, which they have no plans to clean up because they would benefit from them. Adams claims racial politics is overriding justice, and no, it hasn’t been that way for decades. Big Government has 
, which “has uncovered the story of ancient Carthage, the Semitic civilization which flourished in its North African home city and in colonies all over the western Mediterranean until it was conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C.” Voves writes: 
in his off time.
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. According to Burton, emotions determine our confidence more that rationale. Riley writes that Burton “makes a strong case for the biological weirdness of that feeling, and its 
is a collection of columns Chesterton wrote for the London Daily News during the years up to World War I. They’re not his absolute best work. He admits in the preface that many of them were written under tight deadlines, when “there was no time for epigrams.” And what he wrote frequently got snipped down, pretty arbitrarily, by editors.