They are out and in force again saying that Iran, like Germany of the Nineteen Thirties, is about to launch an offensive in a quest to conquer the World and establish a dictatorship. If this sounds familiar it is because we heard it before. We heard it when they said the same thing about Iraq and were successful in mobilizing enough support in the United Stated and Great Britain to launch the disastrous war that messed up the Middle East and exposed the so-called American democracy as a joke not worth laughing at anymore.
And yet, it would have taken only a minimum amount of thinking for these people to realize that neither Iraq nor Iran can be compared to Germany because of a number of reasons. One reason is so glaring it cannot be missed even by a child who plays war games on a video machine. It is that since the Industrial Revolution, warfare has increasingly depended on the high quality weapons only a nation that is advanced in science, technology and industry can mass produce.
This is not to say the size of the military does not count, it does. But where two helicopters can fight better than one, a lone helicopter gunship can overwhelm a hundred soldiers armed only with hand guns. Thus a modern war machine depends on the quality of its equipment as much as it does on the size of its military.
The Industrial Revolution started in Germany at the same time as in the other nations of Europe. With it came the scientific and technological revolutions because all three revolutions are naturally linked together. In the Nineteen Thirties Germany was as advanced as any nation in the World and in some areas more advanced than all the others.
Moreover, Germany had an industrial base that equaled any in the World and a scientific establishment that surpassed them all. In short, the country was equal to its neighbors, and was even regarded as first among equals. It was therefore realistic to think of Germany as a possible menace to the World in the event that it was taken over and ruled by a deranged dictator.
By contrast, Iran does not come close to being equal to a single European nation of size let alone to the combined might of Europe, the United States and the rest of the World. Iran, like every country that remained behind when the Industrial Revolution was roaring ahead has a two hundred year gap to fill before it reaches the level of Europe.
The name given to the nations that were left behind by the Industrial Revolution is Third World. The name given to those that rode the train of the Revolution since the beginning is West. It so happens that during the past few decades a number of Third World nations seemed to leapfrog the West but this only happened at the superficial level. Yes, the so-called Tigers of Asia and a handful of other nations managed to industrialize their territory at a fairly quick pace but they did not leapfrog the West in the development of their institutions.
This is not to say that industry is the domain of one race and not the other. In fact, it so happens that Japan, which is an Asian nation, managed to close the gap with the West because the country jumped on the modernization bandwagon a century before any other nation in Asia. By the mid Twentieth Century the Japanese were still very much an Asian culture but were thinking and behaving like a Western nation, warts and all. They made themselves equal to the West in many ways and then chose to challenge it. And this is when the Japanese learned they were close to the West but were not completely there yet.
To industrialize a nation is to grow it horizontally but this is not sufficient to make it rival the West because while the launching of factories will expand the industrial horizon, it will not grow the scientific and technological institutions that are needed to move the nation forward. To do the latter, you will need to grow vertically. I call the human and cultural infrastructure that which is necessary to mobilize a nation and remodel it so as to grow vertically. This is what the Third World needs to catch up with the West but this is also where you cannot race against time.
To construct a scientific, technological and industrial powerhouse, you need the time that it takes to raise a child and teach it science, technology and the other subjects. But more than that, you need two or more generations to change the habits and the mindset of human beings. And what makes this task even more difficult is that human beings are steeped in one culture or another and they do not relinquish old habits to pick up new ones on demand.
A Third World country can assemble a team of its own nationals who studied abroad and maybe recruit a few foreigners to build a nuclear bomb in one generation. But it will not be possible for such country to develop the scientific, technological and industrial base as well as the human and cultural infrastructure to threaten the West within that time frame. Having one bomb or a number of them and challenging the West without the logistical support that will sustain a war against it for any length of time will therefore be suicidal. The attempt will look as pathetic as a lone gunman challenging an armored division.
Consider these examples. China, India and Pakistan have experienced an accelerated economic growth for nearly a generation and have produced nuclear bombs yet they still remain at Third World levels because a large part of their societies did not develop in tandem with the rest of the country, let alone attain Western levels. If there is to be an all out war between them and the West, their combined might will not match the developed nations. Argentina has learned this lesson during the Falkland war of 1982 when, as a country fighting near its own shores, it was defeated by a flotilla of British warships fighting thousands of miles away from home.
To understand how something like this can happen, we must know something about economic growth. This word means that a fraction of the population produces enough food and other goods and services to supply the whole nation. It allows the rest of the society to go to school, do research, make scientific breakthroughs, produce art and literature, discover cures and so on. In short, growth creates the surplus that allows the vertical infrastructure to develop which in turn helps to raise the nation to a higher level.
Let us now look at some numbers. To ask the families of a nation to save 30% for their income is to ask them to live on 70% of their annual revenue which is the most they will do on a sustained basis. If they hand you their savings to invest year after year, you can grow the economy of the country by 10% a year. Repeat this performance seven years in a row and you will double the size of your national economy therefore double the per capita income.
This is impressive but if a Third World nation starts an industrialization program when it is at one twentieth the per capita income of the West, it will take it more than 30 years to catch up with the West. However, the West will not stand still and will most likely grow at the moderate rate of 4% a year if only to help the Third World realize its own 10% growth. In this case, it will take the developing nation more than 50 years to catch up with the West and that is equal to two generations already.
But this is not all because in that context, catch up means to catch up with the level of industrial production that exists in the West. It means having a number of machine operators working on the assembly line comparable to the numbers in the West. What is not taken into account is the fact that the assembly line is made of machines which are produced by journeymen, technicians and engineers with levels of education, skills and experience that are higher than those of the machine operators. As a developing nation you will need another two generations or more to educate and train a pool of these people large enough to run your industrial establishment.
And there is still more. There is a layer on top of all that called Research and Development. It is an activity done by a community of exceptional people called inventors, scientists and engineers, and they are found in the colleges, universities, institutes of higher learning, research labs as well as their own garages, study rooms and basements where they think and where they tinker. These people invent new products and they design the machines that produce those new products. Here too, you will need a generation or more to develop such a community, and a few more generations after that to see it attain a world class status. Finally, this is what a country like Iran must develop before it can build a fighting machine that will defy the West and not look pathetic.
What this boils down to is that the 200 years head start the West has had over the World is not going to be filled overnight by a Third World nation anytime soon. It is therefore insulting to our intelligence for someone to pull the ghost of Germany out of the past and say that Iran will have the wherewithal to conquer the World in a few years time.
A Zionist speechwriter may impress the President of the United States by inserting such nonsense in his speech but there are nearly seven billion people on this planet who are smart enough to dismiss the claim off hand. Whatever their form of government, these people can take comfort in the knowledge that they have not sunk to a level where their President would stand in front of the legislature and shamelessly puke the garbage that an imported Zionist riffraff has inserted in his speech.
No doctrine of theirs is ever going to be formulated in this manner and this is why no children of theirs will be sent to die thousands of miles away, taking the treasury of the nation with them, so that a foreign speechwriter may write a book afterward and brag about putting words in the mouth of their President. In this sense these seemingly backward people remain light years ahead of the United States of America, democracy or no stupid democracy.