The UK Guardian features a rather sobering assessment for what this new year might hold, a refrain of hostilities a hundred years ago hence, which would mean that the season of commemorations assay something surpassingly ironic in their keeping, rather than the chance for honest reflection on the frailty of the human condition and wisdom, as it should be—if the warnings of this Cambridge history professor prove prescient by any degree.
Perhaps not all events, convictions and factors have one-to-one counterparts (the article is introduced with the
snowclone that history does not repeat itself but often rhymes), but this
Cassandra figure draws some pretty scary and apt parallels. One of the more striking passages vignettes concerns how the shift in world-dominance is ever a time of peril, citing how American quietly drew up contingency plans for an invasion of Canada in the decade after the Great War, assuming that a threatened super-power, the British Empire, would precipitate fighting close to home. There is always the potential for such dire predictions and such things as self-fulfilling prophesies, so what do you think? In any case, I hope that such admonitions are heeded.
