“2014 has probably been the best year in history”
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
It was under these politics of world conquest that WW1 and WW2 were fought upon. All countries... US included, fell into the trap of imperialism. Expanding during the Spanish American war, gaining the Philippines, Guam and other territories.
The current world has no apatite for imperialism, although I guess this can change quickly. But... knock on wood... lets hope the great powers of the world continue to refuse a direct fight with each other. The worst we have between great powers today are some economic rivalries.
After WWII there were only two great powers left. Now there's one. It has nothing to do with appetite. The military budget of the US dwarfs the other countries. It would be suicidal to start a war that the US will seriously want to be involved in. Welcome to Pax Americana.
Right now there are many 'great powers' simply because power is a function of distance from its source. The US is able to project its power across the globe but would have a very hard time taking on Russia, China or even North Korea or Iran on their own or neighbouring soil. Power is (very much) limited by distance.
So even if starting a war that the US will seriously want to be involved in may be folly several such wars at the same time could easily overwhelm the capacity available. The safe bet seems to be to only wage war where there is no oil in the ground, then you can do almost whatever you please.
It is historically very unusual for a great power to care so much about how others think of them. Part of it is Hollywood. The US naively wants to be loved. A major component of the misguided Iraqi War was that we'd be loved by the Iraqis once we toppled Saddam.
Outside of Pax Romana, I don't think any of the other great eras of peace were characterized by this "loved by the lesser barbarians" attitude. Instead, they were characterized by massive armies conquering the world with an iron fist.
This was of course a seriously misguided concept. But believe me, the naivete of the Bush Administration has been recorded, and the US seems to have learned its lesson... for now anyway.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/17/jeb-bush-2016_n_634...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Khwarezmia_a...
As usual, the artisans were sent back to Mongolia, young women and children were given to the Mongol soldiers as slaves, and the rest of the population was massacred.
I'm talking about historical norms here. In the great eras of single-power world dominance (US, British, Spanish, Romans, Mongolians, Chinese, Babylonian, etc. etc.), the US, the British, and the Romans were the most peaceful, in approximately that order.
US wins vs Brits because we aren't using Gatling guns against spearmen and conquering entire continents (erm... anymore).
If you disagree, name me a great period of single-power dominance and I'll offer a counter-example.
The US is still somewhat run by people - a lot of work has gone into dismantling legitimate democracy in America, but fundamentally I doubt even in the gerrymandered guaranteed seat no choice electorate system the US has today, that the people would idly allow the American military to pillage nations around the globe for gold and jewels.
At least, they could not do it as fast as Ghengis did. I do understand a lot of looting happened in Iraq / Afghanistan and in a large part the motivations to go to war there were over possessions of a different kind.
China and Russia do wish to expand, but they're not going to do it while the US is in power at least.
The closest we've got is "spread democracy to the world", which is less a "conquer the world" spirit, and more of a "make the world like our way of thinking" cultural expansion. We do it through movies, literature, debates, exchange programs and so forth.
And... erm... conquest. But only rarely (Iraq, South Korea). And whenever we do it by conquest, the US Population seems to get really pissed in general. Its why we had such a "hands off" approach in Libya and Syria so far... and why we're trying to get Iraq out of our hair. (Iraq seems to be a "we broke it we bought it" situation at this point)
I guess that's one way to put it. I could think of less favourable ways.
What evidence is there for China wanting to expand? It seems like they have made claims to disputed territories based on historical claims. They have a claim on Taiwan and and some disputed islands, all which had been under Chinese control in sometime in the past. That's not imperialism or colonialism. Look at Japan's behavior early 20th century. They took Korea, large parts of China and south pacific islands, things they never had a claim to and that is imperialism. Even Tibet had been under Chinese rule throughout centuries of history.
It seems like to me that China is only interested in achieving the same kind of cultural dominance and influence they've had through history. I've never read anything about China wanting to expand territory outside of traditional China.
Just because China once had some claim to certain seas doesn't mean they have any right whatsoever to them now.
Historically, yes, Crimea and Ukraine were all under strong Russian influence. But expanding to its historical size is an expansion from the current norm nonetheless.
Same with China. Do remember that Japan and Korea were historically claimed by China. Its unlikely that the US will let China expand to its historical size... and gobble up Japan and Korea while its at it.
Most of history isn't a great guide for what happens next because of technology changes. Up until "recently" wars were won by logistics, numbers and training. In the modern age, logistics requires a very complicated industrial system capable of producing, eg, nuclear weapons and satellites. So far, only the US has pulled this off and only the EU has come close to (maybe they have managed as well, I don't know).
Life may get more tense when a new challenger to the US emerges. Maybe China.
"We tend to take peace for granted in most of today’s world, but the broader historical record suggests peace is an occasional luxury and never a guarantee. Standards of living have repeatedly regressed throughout human history, and very often war and its associated catastrophes have been primary causes behind these misfortunes. "
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.
According to reports, this terminology is still being used today:
Under the sub-heading "Rude language a la British", she wrote that "[Prince Andrew] railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the 'idiocy' of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia".
She said the prince also criticised Guardian journalists - "who poke their noses everywhere" - for investigating the deal.
Ms Gfoeller said Prince Andrew told her that the UK, Western Europe and the US were now "back in the thick of playing the Great Game" - a reference to the 19th Century struggle between the British and Russian Empires for control of Central Asia.
"More animated than ever, he stated cockily 'and this time we aim to win'," she wrote.
The Brits were literally trying to outplay Russia, and both countries were knee-deep in Imperialism. They fought to physically control territory and claim land... an idea that is seen as quaint and naive today.
Well, count me among the quaintly naive then. We must read from very different news sources.
The big difference now seems to be that the type of total warfare used in the early and middle 1900s between great powers is not palatable to the world today - much in line with the Einstein quote the destruction both to civilian life and to infrastructure would be absolutely terrifying. The Great Game continues today with proxy wars, economic warfare, subterfuge including sabotage and intelligence warfare (much of it network and satellite today), and with stability warfare (trying to pull the support of people from beneath their governance).
But I feel like a major aspect of the "Great Game" was using superior technology to massacre civilians and other soft targets. The invention and use of Gatling Guns, Explosives, and Chemical Warfare through that period was truly terrifying.
Remember though that many other (non-destructive) technologies made their entrance during these wars: blimps, new classes of naval vehicles (the so called battlecruiser) and also submarines, precision bombing, new types of artillery, the first tanks, trains for transporting goods and troops, radar...
And remember that the tactics of the time changed as much or more than the technology. In WWI a prevailing tactic was troop attrition - the infamous Battle of Verdun being a sick but paragon example. WW II saw the advent of the term 'strategic bombing' which in essence was the idea that if you directly kill huge numbers of civilians it will demoralize the enemy, cause them to withdraw, and end the war faster - in the end supposedly saving lives. Of course it didn't work out that way, but the belief that it would contributed to the constant bombing raids and huge civilian bombardments that WWII was famous for.
So let's make it the new bottom line. Let's say it is a awful time in history. Internet should be is as ubiquitous as electricity, and electricity should be as ubiquitous as having water near by; but there are places without internet, without electricity and where you need to walk miles to get some water.
I like to think of these time as a new "Dark Ages". We have internet, electricity and infrastructures that would be unthinkable in the actual dark ages, but is far from enough. I like to think about our governments and corporations as the equivalent to those feudal lords and duches and sires. I like to imagine a future that is unthinkable.
Maybe is time to start hoping for a global government, that could be no government at all, but an efficient way to coordinate efforts. Maybe this "global coordination" would be doomed in the event of some global catastrophe that could destroy the necessary infrastructure . It wouldn't matter, if we have it once, we will want it forever. Like with democracy in the greco-roman culture.
This is crazy, far fetched, but so it was the human rights, flying, self moving cars, etc.
We humans are inherently crazy and we like far fetched ideas. We picture an image of the world and then try fit the actual world in it. Some times that takes us to war and genocide, some times to the Moon.
We don’t need to know how this global future will be, we won’t know.
Quite frankly, who gives a shit what some article says about this? Was it your best year? That's all that matters. Let's focus on things that ought to be improved, not this lazy, pat-ourselves-on-the-back "we're doing the right thing" circle jerk.
We would have a safe and perfect society if we were living in a society described by Brave New World. But I'd argue that it would be worst year of human history.
People make the argument that civil rights were a problem, which is true. But I feel that my personal freedoms are far more restricted and no matter how petty they maybe, I don't want to forfeit them for your brave new world.
They did mention ISIS ("Isil"). There's a seeming trend of these newspapers to fail to capitalize things that should definitely be capitalized (acronyms). I've seen at least a dozen cases of it in the last week. I don't know if perhaps it is a side-effect of automating/technologizing the editor's role or if this is a new style thing or what?
Edit: in this article, it is almost surely intentional:
> The Isil barbarity in the Middle East is so shocking, perhaps, because it comes against a backdrop of unprecedented world peace.
Putin can largely be ignored now. He played his hand completely wrong and now the sphere of influence he wanted around Russia will crumble (as will the economy).
So none of the issues you mentioned are that significant. What was really big in 2014 was Ebola and the US/China's efforts on Climate Change.
If "we've never had it so good" then why did my parents and grandparents generations never have to attend a food bank?
Probably because they lived in a bubble of wealth and privilege. Now that the labor market includes 2.5 billion other people who can pull levers for half the cost, its going to be a lot harder to make a living in a developed nation doing a developing nation-job.
I'm sure if you ask the millions who have escaped poverty worldwide in the last decade, they'd tell you its been a pretty great year.
EDIT: The article can be summarized with something my grandmother used to say whenever you asked her how she was: "Good, if you ignore the bad parts".
> Judging the world through headlines is like judging a city by spending a night in A&E – you only see the worst problems.
But I'm not sure that, it is meaningful to point out 2014 in particular as the best year in history. If we just go by "we're still making progress and third world nations are still becoming better places to live", of course 2014 is the best year in history so far. As will 2015 be. Or any year after that, world-wide catastrophes notwithstanding. But that's nearly tautological.
So depending on how you look at it, the article's claim is either trivial enough not to warrant ending up on HN IMO (any point along an upward slope is the highest point on that slope compared to those preceding it, by definition), or it's simply inaccurate (by sweeping the real problems 2014 surfaced under the rug and just saying it's all good).
We take progress for granted, because we live in one of the most peaceful times in all of recorded history. But the Dark Ages were periods of centuries, where technology was lost and culture destroyed.
Of the seven great novels of the Greeks for example, only two remain: The Odyssy and the Iliad.
Look up the history of the Epic Greek tales, and learn just how much has been lost to the ages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle
One day, this great golden age around us will fall. All golden ages fall eventually, and we will lose our culture, our history to a dark age of true war once more. Future historians will look upon these times as the golden age of America.
But all empires collapse, and history always cycles between peace and war. And when the age of darkness comes, the current peace we have will be but a legend.
For now, we should be happy for the great age we live in, while striving to make it even better than how it is currently.
As such, I prefer being reminded about how remarkably not-awful things are versus the next pointlessly negative everything's falling apart rhetoric. Mind, that may have to do with where I live, maybe, and I prefer balanced rhetoric. But it's useful to remind people that the general goodness of the world is monotonically increasing (perhaps with a 10-point moving average and a little spot of outlier filtering).
And yeah, this sort of conversation is almost necessarily a long-now topic. To talk about it over the course of a few months or just a year is a bit silly - there's a lot of noise. But over many decades and especially centuries, things certainly look better now. Things may be crap now in many ways, but it's only knee-deep crap. In the bad old days people waded through crap up to their eyeballs uphill both ways.
But for Europe and the US this was most certainly not the "best year in history", regardless of general positive trends.
EDIT: Okay, seriously, what the fuck with the downvotes? The EU does have a nazi problem and the contemporary problems with the financial crisis and Islamists are very convenient vehicles for it. Ever heard of the demonstrations against Islam we had in Germany? The organizers are blatant neo-nazis. Heard of the interest groups like PEGIDA? Plenty of neo-nazis and even Holocaust denialists among their leadership.
Criticising Islam or the EU is perfectly valid and acceptable. Anything can and should be criticised. But don't be misled to believe that all these protests are orchestrated by liberalists and constitutionalists just because that's how they present themselves. The "Euro-sceptic" AfD we voted into parliaments have strong ties with other nazi organisations. Same with PEGIDA and its various offsprings.
I'm not seeing we're heading towards another beer hall putsch anytime soon (even if vocal left-wingers would have you believe that), but the various problems have made radical right-wing thinking more socially accepted than it had been a few years ago. And that's a bad thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_sawing
The world is a better place today than it was back then. Even in the 1900s, US Internment camps of the Japanese was clearly unnecessary racism designed to build propaganda for the war effort.
Oh yeah, and the historial norm of selling your prisoners of war as slaves. The great powers selling slaves (ie: Britian, US, India, Russia, etc. etc.) kind of isn't a thing anymore.
Minor powers condone sex trafficking, but it isn't anywhere near as bad as as it used to be. The greater powers in the world today police the minor powers and discourage the behavior.
---------------
Sure, if you ignore the CIA torture, the NSA mass-surveillance, the US drone strikes
Casualties in British conquest frequently numbered in the dozens of thousands per battle. We are far more careful and precise with our modern weapons than previous powers were.
Mind you, the US also used gatling guns and rifles to wipe out Native Americans in our conquest through manifest destiny. I'd take our modern "defensive conflicts" any day over our blatantly unfair policies of the 1800s and early 1900s.
the protests in the US and Turkey
I'll take modern protests any day over the historical norm of killing the protesters.
the Islamists in the Middle East
Complete and total wipeout. There was a single British survivor in a major event during the Anglo-Afghan War in 1842.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul
the NATO/Russia stand-off in Ukraine
Yeah, Russia stand-off in Ukraine is soft stuff. It is par-for-the-course for Cold War era politics, which is still far safer than historical norms.
the lukewarm handling of the Ebola epidemic,
Let us not forget the recent past where things were not so great. From a global perspective much of the developed world existed under oppressive totalitarian governments up until the end of the Cold War. Also, as to the US alone, look back on: the McCarthyism, Jim Crow, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. Yeah, things aren't great right now, in some regards things are pretty awful. But things have always been awful, we just weren't noticing or we wrote that off as being normal.