This Mt St Helens comming awake reminds of some posts awhile back where everyone was keeping track of St Helens every burp and bellow...someone suggested that the volcano can be symbolic of a kind of trumpet blowing...like the trumpets that are blown in Revelation before each of the great woes...now we have stock market trouble and St Helens rumbles again...perhaps there is a connection! Also scientist in the South Pole have discovered a volcano had a
massive eruption there about 2,400 years ago and I came across this, Lessons of the
Peloponnesian War :
although the current "war on terror" and the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece are separated by over 2,400 years , their similarities are striking, instructive, and cautionary.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Lessons+of+t......-a0141091249 interesting, yes?
Here's a quote from the article:
More than 2,000 years ago, Pericles and his fellow commanders demonstrated an unreasonable confidence in the eventual success of their preemptive strikes on Sparta and her allies. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and their co-conspirators are likewise convinced of the ultimate victory over the "axis of evil." Such exuberance at the beginning of questionable martial ventures is easy. However, just as Pericles could not foresee the physical plague that would cripple Athens, there are undoubtedly plagues, moral and physical, that lay beyond the myopic view of modern American imperialists.
Finally, we must ask if the Insiders are surprised that their agenda of financing friendship has been fruitless. In April 2004, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz informed the House Appropriations Committee that foreign aid was not charity, but a form of defense spending: "Regrettably, foreign aid, and security assistance programs in particular, are still viewed by some as charity--unnecessary spending that we can ill afford ... but it has become vitally important in the war on terrorism.... Security assistance spending is in many ways an extension of defense spending."
Will Paul Wolfowitz (now head of the World Bank) be shocked by Iraq's lack of gratitude for all the American blood and treasure spent on its behalf, just as Pericles was astounded by the dearth of indebtedness felt by Sparta's neighboring city-states? Will any of the nations whose alliance we purchase with blood and burden be truly allies or will they be merely debtors who look upon the creditor not with thanks and humility, but with disdain and envy?
Thucydides recorded the events of the Peloponnesian War because he foresaw a time when the lessons of the war would be needed. We need but to learn from the past.
Joe Wolverton II, J.D.