Quote:
Originally Posted by Bullitt
[Marv Albert] And in comes Undertoad with the backhand from downtown![Marv]
@ Sugar, your post delves into my area of interest/degree major of history and how it's done. You should look into John Gaddis' book The Landscape of History: How Historians Map The Past. It goes into detail of how chaos and complexity theory determines how we should view events in history. War is a great example of a complex system in which the macro-level behavior of the system as a whole is non-linear, meaning that there are so many variables that are so interdependent that calculating their effects on the course of the whole is near impossible. What if Cleopatra's nose had been ugly, would history have been different? Etc. "We are culpable in helping to create the environments that allow these kinds of things to occur" is a particular generalization that relies upon the idea that all the phenomena within this complex system of The War on Terror is linear in nature, when in reality as said before, macro-level behavior of a complex system is in fact non-linear.
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I will check it out when I get a chance, thanks.
I don't believe I was necessarily talking about linear vs non-linear though. I was talking more about human nature, cause and effect, and the clash of civilizations that have very, very different belief systems. When you don't take the time to try and understand or respect the other side and where they are coming from, you will never get anywhere.
One other thing about history- it is written by the winners. You can learn a lot by looking at it from the other side, because the winners will always write history so it is favorable to their actions and beliefs, so it is never completely accurate. Just look at how certain people are trying to rewrite the past 8 years...