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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

> We really should stop looking to the GD as a lesson for today’s problems. We don’t use the 30 Years War as means of explaining religious conflict or the Crusades to explain the state of the middle east.

I don't know anything about the Thirty Years war, but I doubt that there's any major recent act of stupidity that was caused by excessive cleaving to (or knowledge of) historical experience.

I suspect we'll keep on looking back at the great depression until it ceases to seem salient.

Oh, and the Crusades explain quite a bit about the state of the middle east.

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>I don't know anything about the Thirty Years war, but I doubt that there's any major recent act of stupidity that was caused by excessive cleaving to (or knowledge of) historical experience.

Let me introduce you to Balkans war(s) of the 1990s. People who had been living side-by-side peacefully for decades decided to rehash hundreds of years of historical conflicts which to outsiders looked insane.

>I suspect we'll keep on looking back at the great depression until it ceases to seem salient.

The Great Depression is no longer relevant since we don't live in a world on the gold standard. The factors that drove the economy into the ground in the 1930s (massive deflation and bank failures) are not going to happen again. Deflation because countries can print as much cash as they like (Greece excepted), while in regards bank failures we now know banks (and bankers) are too big to fail.

>Oh, and the Crusades explain quite a bit about the state of the middle east.

Nothing about the middle east today is the result of the Crusades except some misguided people thinking the Crusades are relevant.

There's a difference between knowing history and bearing grudges. Generally folks who bear grudges have a very poor (and one-sided) view of history.

The Great Depression was not solely caused by the gold standard, although getting rid of it certainly seems to have aided recovery (worth noting since some argue for returning to it).

Iraq wasn't going to be like Vietnam either because the people loved us, and our weapons were so much awesomer. Incidentally, Bremer was reading about the occupation of Germany and Japan after WWII on his way to Baghdad. History can be instructive, but you need to use it wisely, not cherry pick the instances that support your existing view. There's plenty of Roman history (for example) that maps beautifully onto modern America, even though we are very different from the Romans.

History can be a guide, but an untrustworthy guide. Use history, but always be aware that today is not a repeat of yesterday.

In regards the Great Depression the gold standard seems to be mostly responsible. The countries that left the gold standard first were the first to recover and those that delayed suffered longer. The USA is an interesting exception since Roosevelt revalued gold by fiat in 1933 which had the effect of getting the USA effectively off the gold standard and introducing inflation into a deflationary spiral.

Replace "history" with any body of knowledge and you get an equally valid truism.

No, the OP is correct about the Crusades, particularly if you care about the POV of the political actors in the Middle East itself.

Some actors in the middle east like to claim that any involvement of the west is another Crusade, but no western country is interested in “freeing the Holy Land” from non-christians.

You are correct of course. Unfortunately some Western leaders have been a little unwise when speaking publicly:

"this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." - GW Bush[1].

"President Bush said to all of us: 'I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did."[2]

It's pretty easy to paint a picture of attempted cultural (if not religious) domination by the West even without quotes like that. Add that stuff in and it is harder to explain how it isn't the same.

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

I am of the thought that it is very much a crusade, because there is no reason to believe the actual crusades were anything beyond riling up the peasants for the benefit of the rich.

My father -- German Jew who escaped in 1938 (only mentioning this because this view is often conflated with anti-semitism) -- was of the view that Israel was a new crusade and would have much the same impact and outcomes. Recall that the medieval crusades also resulted in some long term occupations of the holy land, and they did not have support of an unrivaled superpower.

This is an interesting hypothesis, but I think we should consider that the nobles actually believed in the religious aspects of the Crusades. While I am sure some were in it for the money or prestige at least the first couple of crusades appeared to have been motivated by religious zeal.

Don't mistake excuses for motivations. The law of primogeniture (inheritance to eldest son) along with large family size played a big role in the causes of the crusades.

Let's suppose you've managed, as a family, to hack and slash your way to the top of the nobility. Grandfather was a friend of the guy who became king, father inherited lands and got them productive, and now five brothers have all survived. The eldest gets the land. The next four have learned to ride horses, swing swords, and wear armor. One of them decides that the Church isn't so bad, and thus effectively goes into politics. There are still 3 armed badasses who won't be getting the power and wealth they are used to... unless they go and take it from someone else.

Their brothers in the Church have an idea: maybe you can go be violent somewhere else?

This also had a pretty big impact on South and to a lesser extent North America. All the guys who had finally driven the Moors out of Spain only knew how to fight so went off to Mexico with Hernán Cortés to carry on doing more of the same.

Yes there has been some lose language been used in this area by people how should have known better. The problem is the word “crusade” has a meaning in English different to its original historical origins.

The word "crusade" has the same meaning it always had. It has a positive connotation, just as it always had. And the same goes for the word "jihad" in the Islamic world.

You are correct about the Crusades. And the below commentators act as though you have to somehow choose between the post-WW2 context and that time period for explanatory power, when of course Middle East history is lengthy and rich and has room for both and a lot of important additional contexts besides, including the Ottoman empire, the Persian empire, the breakup of the original Caliphate, etc. etc. "Those who cannot learn from history," and so on.

If you really want to see an explanation of the Middle East, look at the way France and the UK divided up the region in the wake of WW1, and then abdicated their responsibilities after WW2.

Yeah we've all watched Lawrence of Arabia.

I was thinking more about Leon Uris' Exodus.

Most of the faults of colonialism seem to come from how poorly the handoff between the imperial powers and the local population went. It's an interesting dynamic, since almost all of the traditional colonial powers were a shell of themselves by 1945, while the two ascendant powers were the USA and USSR, who really hadn't been involved in the Victorian era colonial land-grabs, at least to the extent that the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, and even Italy were.

Maybe if every western country decided to shithouse ISIS for their brutalities with their younger sons. And all of Occupy Wall Street banded together behind some charismatic idiot and marched over there without warlike equipment to fight the Arab/Turk.

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