We are losing the peace… in Europe

Monday, October 20th, 2003

We’ve been hearing a lot about nation-building in Iraq versus nation-building in Germany and Japan after World War II. In We are losing the peace… in Europe, Den Beste points us to some old Life magazine articles from just after the end of WWII:

Oh, dear; it seems as if we’ve won the war but are losing the peace… in Europe, in 1946. Jessica’s Well makes a magnificent discovery: an issue of Life Magazine published in January of 1946 which contains articles about how badly things are going in Europe in the aftermath of the war. This was about seven months after V-E day, and about five months after V-J day and the end of the war. That’s just about where we are now relative to the end of major combat operations in Iraq, and the article sounds uncannily like much of the negative reporting we’re seeing now from Iraq. One could take that article and replace ‘European’ with ‘Iraqi’ and ‘Nazi’ with ‘Baathist’ and ‘Hitler’ with ‘Saddam’ and it would sound like it had come out of the NYTimes in the last week

Definitely read the original Life articles.

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