Violence Never Settles Anything!

To which the Geek replies, "Like hell it doesn't!" For definite proof simply channel the Carthaginians as to what matters were like for them after the Third Punic War. Or, if channeling isn't your thing, simply look at the maps of Europe at various times during the Twentieth Century.

Look particularly at Germany. Notice how it expanded and contracted according to the fortunes of war.

Then consider Poland. You see how the whole damn country moved west as the guns fell silent in May 1945. The Soviets simply took a goodly chunk of the eastern marches of Poland. As compensation, (that's right, the fine old word, "compensation" which decorated so many treaties ending the multifarious wars of Europe in previous, presumably less enlightened centuries), Poland was given a nearly equal sized section of Germany--Silesia.

This dual land grab was sanctioned not simply by the greed of Stalin but by the good wishes of the leaders of the other Great Powers, Great Britain and the US as well as the pretend Great Power, France. No one blinked over the ethnic cleansing which accompanied the move of the borders. No one was perturbed over the loss of lives, mainly those pesky Germans, which resulted inevitably from the forced relocations.

Wars are noted as real estate transactions. Indeed, that has been their primary characteristic and major reason for existence. And, contrary to the popular assumption, most settle the questions of who owns what and who lives where.

Even countries such as the UK and Japan, which are fortunate enough to be defined geographically by their status as islands, owe their identity to aggressive warfare. In each of these cases as in so many others including the US, the indigenous population was invaded and defeated by outsiders. Whether exterminated or banished to remote and unpleasant locations as well as political and social marginalization, the result was the same. A new nation existed by virtue of war.

Filled with the adrenaline of success against the deeply fractionated and demoralized Christian populations of the Mideast and North Africa, the Muslims made a play for Europe. They were stopped at Tours in France by Jeff the Hammer and his boys but held fast to the Iberian Peninsula for a goodly spate of years. In the fullness of time, however, the Muslims were ejected after a very long and quite bloody war of reconquest by the Catholic Spanish. Since the late Fifteenth Century there has been no question about who owns the Iberian Peninsula.

(Admittedly there has arisen within the more primitive minded sort of Muslim the strange and specious notion that Islam must reassert its "historic" sovereignty over the Peninsula. These Koranic fantasists dream of undoing the verdict of war fought hard and long to say nothing of reasonably fairly and quite openly with a campaign of terror, kidnapping, and assassination. These Mighty Warriors of Allah must be partaking of the same hashish which gave the original Assassins their name.)

Then, of course, there are the more than simply annoying Muslims who fail to acknowledge that the Israelis beat them fair and square in a series of wars between 1948 and 1973. None of these wars were necessary. In particular the first wars, those of Israeli Independence, were the result not of Jewish greed or Western machinations but rather of pure, unadulterated Arab Muslim stupidity and obstinacy to say nothing of an unrealistically high belief in their own military competence.

Having failed at both war and diplomacy to settle who owns what and who lives where, the irredentist Muslims have practiced the low and dirty craft of terror coupled recently with an even more abysmal effort at provocation and delegitimization. Unlike other populations who have experienced the nation defining effects of war--for good or for ill--the Muslims of the Mideast driven by the primitively violent diatribes of a religion from the barbaric wastes of the Arabian Peninsula cannot accept the verdict of battle.

The Arabs lost. The Israelis won. What is so hard to understand and accommodate?

The Ottoman Empire died in war. The recent effort by Erdogan in Turkey to resurrect in effect if not in name the golem of the Ottoman Caliphate and Sultanate is an effort to deny that history happened. That the Ottoman welter of bureaucratic inefficiency, fiscal mismanagement, and pure military incompetence allowed the Empire to expire in the throes of defeat in no way matters to Erdogan the Muslim Revanchist.

A case can be made for the desirability of an Ottoman Restoration. Under the Ottoman loose hand, the Mideast was stable and comparatively peaceful. Islam was worn lightly. The dreams of conquering Vienna had faded before the need to secure Istanbul against the Russians, the Bulgars, the Greeks. The fringes of the Empire slept quietly, quaint destinations for tourists.

Unfortunately, that halcyon past can no more return than can the days when the crescent and scimitar flew over Cordoba. Violence settled the Ottoman Question just as it created the secular Turkey which Erdogan desires to expunge.

Muslims are not the only folk eager to rewrite the decisions of battle. The Mexicans (who can rival a Muslim in fine fettle when it comes to whining about history) want to pretend the war between their country and the US either did not happen or was the result of Gringo aggression. As long as one overlooks the simple reality that the Mexicans wanted war, were so proud of their war plan that they published it and were assured by both the British and French embassies that their fine army would clean Anglo clocks, the Gringos-Did-It-To-Us thesis passes muster.

In point of fact the Mexicans promoted war expecting victory. Their plans were good. Their estimate of the impact of political divisions within the American population bang on. Much of their army was good and their cavalry excellent.

It didn't matter. They lost. The Yankees won. As Mexico was prostrate, the US could have sought to occupy the whole damn place. Being smart enough to understand the sheer impossibility of absorbing a very large number of Spanish speaking Catholics into an American population which was not only predominantly English speaking but afflicted with profound fear and loathing of all things "Papish," the Gringos took only California (not for the gold but rather so as to have a face on the "Ocean of Tomorrow," the Pacific) and the sparsely populated future states of New Mexico and Arizona.

That's history for you. The war did settle who owned what and who lived where. It is a ground truth that cannot and will not be reversed by "migratory rights." The Mexicans have no real choice but that of accepting that what happens on their side of the border--for good or for ill--is the sole responsibility of Mexicans. The freight cannot be offloaded onto the back of Uncle Sam.

The Mexicans and the Muslims have to get a grip on the same reality as have so many others (including that portion of the Geek which is forever Apache.) Here it is, boyos, war, which is to say, "violence" does settle a lot. In particular it settles who lives where and who owns what.

Brain Dead At Live Oak High

Yesterday was 5 May, Cinco de Mayo. The date does not commemorate Mexican independence. That comes on 16 September. Rather the Fifth of May is celebrated in one Mexican state and the US as a tribute to a meaningless military victory by the outnumbered Mexican army against the French invaders back in 1862.

For a number of reasons which center on the blooming of identity politics and its Siamese twin, the politics of victimization, the Fifth of May has loomed ever larger on the American folk horizon. Going back fifty or so years ago, Cinco de Mayo was no big deal at least in New Mexico, a state which, as the name makes explicit, is not without a certain Mexican heritage.

Times have changed. In California it has become such a major phenomenon that officials at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, a burg south of San Jose gave five male students a stark choice: take off your tee shirt with its American flag or go home. To their credit the guys chose the latter course.

The bigoted officials justified their violation of the First Amendment rights of the students by averring that the American flags might, by their mere existence and display, so outrage students of Mexican ancestry that violence was a real possibility. Not only did this action on the part of timorous school administrators shred the First Amendment, it constituted an insult to the students of Mexican descent by alleging these folk had, shall we say, poor impulse control and low anger management skills.

At the same time the school wallahs had no problem with the wearing of tee shirts and other clothing displaying the Mexican flag. Apparently they were convinced that nice, Anglo kids could see the flag of our "neighbor to the south" without flying into fist waving, butt kicking rages.

The senior personnel at Live Oak High are far from alone in their warped view of people, history, and human dynamics. They are, in fact, in words and in actions, quite obviously members in good standing of the American hoi oligoi. Card carrying True Believers of the Blame America First movement which has infested so much of American academia for the past forty years with results evident throughout the political, media, and educational structures of this country.

Before catering to and thus reinforcing the nasty and destructive nature of identity and victim status politics, the learned administrators of Live Oak High should get a grip on the history of the French adventure in colonialism in Mexico between 1861 and 1867. The same advice applies to the legion of "advocates" who noisily praise Mexico and Mexicans while damning the US and Americans.

In 1861 Napoleon III of France decided the time was ripe to overturn the Monroe Doctrine. To this end he used the default on Mexican bonds ordered by President Juarez. The French Foreign Legion and a few elements of the long out of practice French army were dispatched to collect the debts and raise the flag.

There was one reason and one reason only that Nappy the Third felt up to the task of carving a new French Empire in the Western Hemisphere. The US was preoccupied at the time in a fracas variously called the Civil War and the War Between the States. Absent this preoccupation there would have been no French invasion.

In the early months of the invasion the poorly organized and commanded French force of some 8,500 men had a meeting engagement with the roughly 4,000 man Mexican army detachment at Puebla. The Mexicans won--or, more accurately, the French lost--that May Fifth. Not that the loss mattered, the French flag did eventually fly over Mexico City as Nappy installed a distant relative, Maximilian, as emperor.

The reign of Emperor Maximilian I did not last long. The Big War Up North came to an end as all wars must. The French military attache watched the two day long Grand Pass in Review, first the smart looking and marching legions of Grant and then the shambling, hard bitten, hard marching and harder fighting warriors of Sherman's Army of the West. After Sherman's "Bummers" slouched by in the long, lazy ground eating gait of the experienced combat infantryman, the French attache advised his masters in Paris that the US not only had a first class army in Grant's troops, more it had a new breed of warrior who "could and would not be defeated."

With the military means readily available the US now reminded Nappy that the Monroe Doctrine still applied. Our SecState implied that we would enforce it with means of our chosing at a time of our choice.

Not yet the fool he would soon prove himself to be, Napoleon took the hint. The French withdrew. Maximilian having far more guts than good sense did not do likewise. As a result he died well (issuing the commands himself) before a Mexican firing squad.

Neither the officials of Live Oak High nor the assorted ever-so-concerned advocates may like to admit the truth. Neither may the hypernationalistic sort of Mexican. Yet it is unmistakable. Ejecting the French, ending their occupation of Mexico, was an accomplishment not of the Mexican army and patriots but rather the credible threat of American action in support of the Monroe Doctrine.

Not to put too sharp a point on the knife: They might be speaking French south of the Rio Grande were it not for the Monroe Doctrine and Sherman's Army of the West. Both of these were Hecho en Los Estados Unidos.

Of course it may be too much to expect that credit be given where credit is due in the final defeat of the French--a defeat which did not occur on 5 May 1862 but nearly four years later--and fly the American flag. After all the same people who sent the boys home for doing so also don't acknowledge another "inconvenient truth." When the US won the war with Mexico it took only very little territory and almost no Mexican citizens outside of California (and not very many there) despite the fact that the war was both provoked and started by the Mexicans.

Don't you just hate it when history didn't go the way your beliefs of today would like it to have gone?