Sleepwalkers and the Germans.

[alice malice]

For starters, the US was never the "sandbox" that the Prussians were.
Your point can't be that the contrasts are not easy enough for any
student of history to grasp but that the US empire was built on some
ideological family resemblances with the Prussians. Not so very
different? Yeah, that's one way of doing history. Quite common these
days. All the Empires are evil empires and they are all pretty much
the same.

Not very impressive, Monte.


>
> On to Iron Kingdom next. While I understand that the brusque, decisive
> Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars were much fresher in memory in 1914
> than today,  I've always found it hard to see what made "Prussian
> militarism" so very different from the contemporaneous rise of US empire
> (Hawaii, Spanish-American war, Philippine counterinsurgency, "open door" for
> China, routine Latin American intervention) or from the broader cult of
> manly, virile Social Darwinism (from Theodore Roosevelt to Baden-Powell) in
> all the Anglophone nations.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l