It may be old Nazi propaganda, but the Germans had something right.

The painting is eerily relevant. I was reading a little bit about the Mexican War of 1846-48, and I came to the profound conclusion that our present "War on Terror" is not dissimilar to the war with our southerly buddies not a century and a half ago. Basically, the American traders invaded Mexican territory--according to the Mexican nationalists--so the Mexicans got a bit rough, and the Americans retaliated by artillery bombardment of a few Mexican cities, and the war was on. President Polk and the expansionists claimed that the Mexicans had "spilled American blood on American soil," when in fact it had been the opposite. So, the Americans romped through Mexico with many guns, and concluded a treaty with them after blowing them up a bit which gave the US the California, Texas, and New Mexico territories.

How little things do change.

We invade the Arab world with our commercial interests, their extreme nationalists retaliate against what they see as an invasion of their way of life, and we blow the shit out of them under the pretext of self-defense. When we're finished with that, all that will be left is to take something from them.

Then we will all forget about it. We'll say, "that was terrible, why did we do that?" And then we will change the channel.

It's the American way.

We are a people without history and without our own culture. We are violent, paranoid, and greedy. We are, at least according to Jakob Burckhardt, barbarians.

I look at the history of the US and I see rape and pillage. We can barely go ten years without killing people somewhere. We steal what we want from other people by force or by deceit, we take their people with promises of better material goods and then we send those people out to destroy their mother country.

I'm not saying that other countries don't do these sorts of things, it's just that we Americans don't keep track of our past. We can barely remember what we had for lunch, much less what happened a century and a half ago. We do not keep ourselves--and our rhetoric--in check by comparing it with the past. We don't learn from our mistakes. We ignore them and repeat them, and look like hypocrites.

We are doomed to savage the frontier, to delude ourselves with ever-changing forms of Manifest Destiny, without looking back to see the consequences. We move to a different house when we collect too much stuff or feel we "need more space," rather than just getting rid of some things. Many Europeans live in the same homes that their family has inhabited for centuries. We bulldoze everything and build something newer and shinier.

They remember their past. We throw it away like old fast food wrappers.

"That was terrible. Why did I eat that?"

When we are forced to look at our past we say, "that was a terrible chapter in our history." Slavery, the Indian Wars, American imperialism/expansionism, Japanese internment camps, Vietnam, Nixon/Kissinger, the Contras... our history seems to be "terrible chapter" after "terrible chapter," with little lulls in between. Twenty or thirty years from now people will see the "War on Terror" on History TV and say, "that was terrible. Why did we do that?" as American forces are killing people somewhere else.

And then they'll change the channel again.

~Halcyondream~

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