Mexico, Barbara Tuchman and Iraq

The Conversation today had a disappointingly shallow account of Mexican democracy by a founder of the Sydney Democracy Institute.

I offered a long comment, in the course of which I mentioned the late Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. Which seems less read than it should be. As also people have probably stopped reading her book on the origins of WW1 (with the lack of other than military options) which purportedly Kennedy asked his National Security Council members to read, before they were confronted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the need to reject military advice. Which is something the current US National Security Advisor McMaster thought inappropriate in his Dereliction of Duty.

Anyway, the article at The Conversation is here and this is a little bit of it. Iraq is entitled to a place in the headline above from my last line.

From a mural at the Secretariat of Public Education, Mexico City
my photo 2015
"True Civilisation with be the harmony of men with the earth
and men between themselves."
I think this is attributable to Emiliano Zapata.

Ordinary people have a sense of history far more than average Australians, history of, as you suggest, interwoven nations of ancient peoples. But not for nothing did Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly include the way the Aztecs yielded to the Conquistadors as among the great and strange moments when nations have acted against their national interests, as when the popes lost half the church to beautify Rome, King George lost North America over a petty issue of democracy … and Australia seems to have lost half its brain wandering into Iraq.

Here's a page that seems popular at my 2015 Mexico blog.