War talk

When Central Bohemian Gov. David Rath told LN last month that Hitler reacted to the economic crisis between the two world wars by putting Germans to work making weapons, he was lynched in the media. When Nobel Economics Laureate Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times this week that World War II ended the Great Depression and booted the U.S. economy out of a debt trap, he was merely restating accepted economic theory from the standpoint of one of the victors. The idea that death and destruction can be positive isn't something many Europeans understand, but Americans suffered less during WWII and tend to see the "positive" aspects of it as well as the obviously negative. When Rath alludes to a run-up to war, he's being insensitive but otherwise can't be taken very seriously. Yet when a leading opinion maker from a country already fighting losing battles in two countries mentions war as a solution to the crisis, it makes one wonder how many others in the world's major capitals are thinking the same thing. [Czech Republic ČSSD Adolf Second]