Borg,
Quote:In war there are no winners.
A nice sentiment, but wrong. Most wars do have winners, and losers. Sometimes the bad guys win, and sometimes they are defeated. Who are most often the bad guys? Hitler and Stalin are perhaps the two most infamous victors in modern times. For a time they demonstrated the cost of losing to totalitarian states in the grip of mad men. Those defeated by Hitler and Stalin were enslaved and murdered. They both intended to rule the World, to impose their evil notions over all mankind. They had no mercy, no conscience, and no guilt about telling the greatest lies. They converted their countries economies into nothing more than a war-making machine to enforce their power at home and extend their rule throughout the world.
Hitler and Stalin had at their disposal modern technology, communications and transportation networks, but they were not the first "bad guys" in history. The Turks have the dishonor of conducting the first modern holocaust against the armaneans at the beginning of the last century. Napoleon "invented" the idea of "total war" that involves every citizen and resource available to a nation, and the British out did him at it. During the Reformation the winners of wars slaughtered the defeated in the name of God. In ancient times defeat almost always meant that the victor killed all the males above the age of 10, enslaved the children and raped the women before either killing them or enslaving them. The defeated provided the muscle power to mine the metals on which empires were built. Captured POWs pulled the oars of war galleys until they died. Captured cities were utterly destroyed and the fields salted so that they could not be planted again. We know of the military victories, because those nations tended to survive long enough to generate historical records. We don't know much about those countless communities that were defeated and vanished into darkness leaving little, or no record that they ever existed. War does have winners and losers.
European civilization has an impressive string of victories. Many were not pretty, much less politically correct by modern standards, but they were never-the-less victories. Merchantilism and now obsolete economic theories drove European nations to colonize the Americas, Africa, and many parts of Asia. The old style colonialism is gone now, but a new form of "colonialism" is complained of by emerging communities set adrift in the post Cold War. The new "colonialism" is not intended to exercise political, or even economic control over third world states. It is, instead, the by-product of our success in providing individuals with what they most want and desire.
We are politically free to disagree with our government. We eat well, perhaps too much. We have all the trappings of wealth; fancy automobiles, snappy cloths, mansions to live in, leisure to travel to exotic locations where every whim is catered to. Our streets seem to be paved with gold. Of course, that isn't true, but it is the image of Western Civilization that is portrayed in the media and everyone loves a good Hollywood thriller. The world loves our entertainment, and they have even more trouble understanding the difference between fact and fiction than many of those who have lived all their lives in the West.
Western Civilization continues to expand and capture the hearts and dreams of the world's downtrodden. The contrast with their own lives is obvious. Their leaders, both secular and religious, prey upon those unfulfilled aspirations to enhance their own positions of power. They do it with hate, and promises that the "Chosen" will with the help of their God/Dictator defeat the infidels and secure all the blessings of the world for their own people. In the meantime, sacrifices must be made to support the leadership. Victory is promised to the faithful, and they really do intend to defeat Western Civilization if they can. That they are unlikely to ever be totally victorious over Western arms is remote, so they must pursue other strategies. Propaganda is one of those tools, and they have shown themselves capable of using it on their own People and on the Western masses.
