However, our nation can and must prove itself as magnanimous in peace as we are awesome and determined in war or the peace shall be lost after having won the war. There was never a finer hour for the United States' honor than the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japanese society under military occupation after World War Two. Having won the most awful conflict humanity has ever seen, and hopes to G-d never to see again, we demonstrated our enlightened self-interests by staying on the job to ensure that Germany and Japan reformed their militarist societies into the model democracies of peace and pacifism they are today. An incredible achievement for so short a time period. America can be justly proud of its record in the conquered Axis power nations.

I agree with all that has been said about the irrational and dangerous notion of ethnic identity and nationalism. What else was it that brought Bosnians of all kinds to murder each other if not irrational divisions based upon a shared historical sense of defending one's own people against an identical foe that also thought it was doing the same thing for itself. The two sides spoke the same language but forever will disagree on who owes whom an apology for five centuries of bloody family fueding.

The Serbians were blamed by NATO for not having the enlightenment to show restraint by stopping the deadly game. Serbia was the stronger of the two sides and therefore the more threatening and the one to exert greater pressure on to halt the fighting, in NATO's view. The Serbians, in turn, resented being singled out for bombing and censure and prosecution because their national mythology considers what they did to be self-defense of their proud identity and a just response to terrorism from the other side.

Interestingly, the German National Socialists also saw themselves as the defenders of civilization against the terrorism of the "Zionist world conspiracy" which "stabbed Germany in the back" in World War One, imposed humiliation on their national pride at Versailles, and toppled and murdered the Tsar to place a "Jewish Bolshevik" monster at their doorstep only once removed across the other side of a hostile and weak Poland.

History has so many lessons to be learned by us every day but USians normally don't read as much as Europeans and our television history lessons are on the most rudimentary superficial level of the beginner's basics about international relations and war. This situation was reversed during the Vietnam conflict but has long ago since returned to the status quo of the daydreams of a pampered adolescent white male drunk at a football game. He cheers the war blindly and loudly with no understanding of its true horrors and brutality, simply because that is the nature of the beast that is war.

There seems too little the minority tens of millions of educated U.S. people can do to raise a deeper public awareness of the finer nuances of our overseas policies in these times without being branded beyond the pale of the responsible and acceptable. This is not conspiracy or direct censorship. It is simply a climate and culture of much greater fear of criticism from the right than from the left. There is so much less fear of criticism from the left because the right extremists are the ones who complain the loudest and the most menacingly when their daydreams are challenged with evidence to the contrary. It is the right extremists that cause sponsors to cancel advertising campaigns, not those on the left. The commercially based media corporations are ever fearful of controversy which would reduce income from advertizers so they dumb everything down to slop so as to offend no one. In the process they emasculate the necessary function of the press to inform the electorate in a democratic society about the deepest roots and background of leading issues of our times domestically and internationally.

In time, as the demographics of the U.S. is slowly shifting to people of darker hued skins this blindness to the overseas sensibilities of the international community will also adapt. This current crisis that we face is hopefully the last ferocious denial of adulthood by the waning groups of self-delusional white separatists terrified just as much as the al Qaida are of the dissolution of their identity and pride into the global melting pot of sinful immorality and decadence and that most dangerous vile liberalist notion of all: moral relativism.

In the Patriotic Spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and our Constitution's Crown Jewel, our Bill of Rights,

Semper Fidelis !