BFO!

6 Jan 23

 

 

 

Chief of German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, to Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914, on the occasion of the Kaiser abruptly ordering von Moltke to diverge from the entrenched “Schlieffen Plan” and immediately send troops deployed on the Western Front to the Eastern Front

 

The “Schlieffen Plan” (after Field Marshall Count Alfred von Schlieffen, who immediately preceded von Moltke), was first articulated in 1906. For the first half of the Twentieth Century, the Schlieffen Plan took-on the status of a secretive religion among German war-planners, greatly influencing the Kaiser, Ludendorff, and Hitler a generation later.

 

It was a German offensive strategy involving sequential conquest of France, then Russia. This carefully-spaced sequence was considered vitally necessary in order to avoid a simultaneous, two-front “war of attrition,” that German war planners knew they could never win (and didn’t, twice!)

 

The 12 June 1939 issue of Time Magazine was the first time the terms “World War I” and “World War II” were ever used. The title of the articles was, “Europe: War Machines”

 

Heretofore, “WWI” had been known only as “The Great War,” and “The War to End All Wars,” and the 1920s and 1930s were known only as the “Post-War Years,” not the “Inter-War Years,” as they are today.

 

Likewise, today’s historians refer to the nearly simultaneous Boxer Rebellion in China (1899-1901), Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Philippines (1898), Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria (1904-1905), and Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), as the “Last of the Little Wars.”

 

However, The Winter War (Finland 1939), Spanish Civil War (1936-39), The Korean War of the 1950s, The Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s, Chinese Civil War, Greek Civil War, Colombian Civil War (“La Violencia”), several Arab-Israeli Wars, the current Russian-Ukrainian Invasion, and a host of lesser conflicts/rebellions/invasions/uprisings/civil wars have amply demonstrated that “little wars” are far from extinct!

 

Efforts on the part of governments to “disarm” populations, so as to make armed conflict less likely have done little to prevent wars nor violent crime, as we see, but rather have converted “wars” into genocidal massacres, without fail!

 

We witnessed this predictable phenomenon during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917), Cambodia (1975-79), Bangladesh (1971), Biafra (1966-1970), Tibet (1960), Zimbabwe (1983-87), Rwanda (1994), Somalia (1988-1991), of course The Holocaust in Europe (1939-1945), and a hundred other brutal genocides few of us have ever heard of.

 

In our world, the disarmed do not fare well. The unarmed, or “voluntarily disarmed” fare even less well.

 

They’re called VBCs!

 

I can’t imagine how many historical examples are necessary.

 

We sometimes call it a “BFO” (Blinding Flash of the Obvious)!