Napoleon and the current situation - Johnson's bio
Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 8:40:18 AM 
From Paul Johnson's Napoleon. My intuition was this could be relevant. I am not disappointed.
Thereafter, however, the Bonapartist legacy, aided by France's decision to treat the dead ruler as a national hero and exemplar to the world, came into its own. The First World War itself was total warfare of the type Bonaparte's methods adumbrated, and in the political anarchy that emerged from it, a new brand of ideological dictator took Bonaparte's methods of government as a model, first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany, with many smaller countries following suit. The totalitarian state of the twentieth century was the ultimate progeny of the Napoleonic reality and myth. It is right, therefore, that we should study Bonaparte's spectacular career unromantically, skeptically, and searchingly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, anxious as we are to avoid the tragic mistakes of the twentieth, we must learn from Bonaparte's life what to fear and what to avoid.
Comment: compare this to Marshall's essay on Empire referenced yesterday. For deeper background, Spengler, in the Decline of the West, wrote that empires of necessity turn toward the authoritarian, because any sign of weakness will lead others, internal and external, to tear them apart. I say this because it is important to not blame it all on Bush, but to see Bush as an unfortunate choice of President in what is already an unfortunate situation for the US and its people.
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