FROM THE “ROARING TWENTIES” TO THE “WARRING TWENTIES”

How much has mankind really progressed in the last 100 years?

I started to write this editorial last night while Venezuela was still an independent country. Now I am having to return to the beginning of the piece to insert this lead. Which is the same as my original one.

One hundred years ago, the world was celebrating. The Great War, the first world war in human history, was over. What followed was the Great Exhale – the Roaring Twenties – a decade full of exuberance of hope.

I marked it last night by posting The Roaring Twenties – five of my recordings featuring Joplin, Gershwin and Cole Porter music which dates from that era.

A century ago, machinery promised ascent — the funicular, the radio, the bandstand, electricity in public rooms. Violence was terrible, but it was still framed as an aberration from peace. People danced because the war had ended.

As I sat down last night to write this editorial, I started by asking the question:

How much has mankind really progressed in the last 100 years?

The answer:

Technologically? Enormously.
Morally? Not at all.
Spiritually? Downward spiral.

We’ve mastered means but not ends.

Worse, we did not learn from history. Which means we are doomed to repeat it.

Witness the Second World War with many more tens of millions dead as compared to the First.

Witness the many regional wars since: the perpetual Middle East violence, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan I and II, Gulf War I and II, Chechnya, Yugoslavia (Bosnia+ Kosovo), Ukraine, etc.

In fact, there have been 285 distinct armed conflicts since the end of World War II, according to the Uppsala University.

As I wrote in a 1993 Truth in Media editorial, the motto of the New World Order elite is not World Peae through World Trade, as they duplicitously profess.

It is Perpetual War for Perpetual Commerce.

Today, we possess technologies that could abolish scarcity and distance — yet we normalize permanent conflict, outsource killing to screens, and carry the world’s crises in our pockets. War no longer interrupts life; it cohabits with it.

The Roaring Twenties believed progress would civilize power.
The Warring Twenties reveal power has simply outpaced conscience.

So yes — your two images already answer the question, quietly and brutally:

We’ve progressed in capability, not in wisdom.
And the distance between the two has never been more dangerous.

What happened in Venezuela overnight, underlined this editorial in spades. That’s another lesson we could have learned from history but did not.

“Laws are like spider webs. If some poor weak creature comes up against them, it is caught; but the bigger one can break through and get away.”

Solon (a Greek philosopher –c.630-c.555 B.C.)

“IBM’s actions in the marketplace demonstrate a striking similarity with the above teachings of Solon. The fact that ‘might makes right’ philosophy still applies to the world of high tech, makes one justifiably wonder just how much we have truly progressed in the last 26 centuries.”

ACR Jan/85 editorial “Is IBM Wagging Users’ Tails?”

I wrote that over 40 years ago.

When “Might Makes Right” becomes the guidepost of the most powerful in the world, then thousands of years of civilizations and laws fall by the wayside.

God gave us Free Will. Told us to love one another. We abused His gift and turned on one another. Repeatedly.

Unlike in Solon’s time 2,600 years ago, thanks to the advancements of science and technology we now have the means to destroy the planet.

Will we ever learn before our home – Gaia, Mother Earth – becomes just another dead planet?

Update January 3, 2026

Was Trump’s Military Action in Venezuela Justified?

It is easy to cast stones at Trump and America and accuse them of “gunboat diplomacy.”

That’s how kidnapping of Maduro looks

Was America justified to conduct this act of war against a sovereign country without the knowledge and declarations of Congress?

Certainly not, legally anyway. There must have been half a dozen various international and US laws that Trump brazenly broke to bring the Venezuelan president Maduro to justice in the US.

But laws are like spiderwebs, as Solon noted 2600 years ago. Was the us MORALLY justified to do that?

Well, that’s a sticky wicket.

To the extent that Venezuelan drug producers have been exporting drugs that were killing Americans, certainly, it would have been justified. But was that country’s government, and specifically Maduro, complicit in that?

Well, that is yet to be proven in court, if at all. Thus sticky wicket.

What is a far stronger argument for the American invasion and taking over the governing of Venezuela is that 50 years ago that country’s government illegally seized and nationalized that oil producing assets of American multinational companies. Like Exxon, Chevron (Gulf Oil), etc.

And not only did they seize the assets, they usurped the future profits these companies were generating from the oil wells. For 50 years! They accounted fro 90% of the country’s exports.

While no accurate estimates exist, it would be safe to assume that such a figure is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That money, which the private US shareholders would have earned from their investments in Venezuela, was channeled into Venezuelan socialist government’s social programs. So the oil revenues and the government finances became intertwined.

Now Trump says he wants to right that wrong. And he is not wrong in saying it. But whether the Venezuelans will stand by and let him do it is another question.

The country’s vice president, now interim president, of whom Trump disparagingly spoke as someone “who has no choice,” has already condemned on Venezuelan public TV the US invasion and the arrest of Maduro.

So looks like she may not so easily play a puppet to the Trump puppeteer.

How the Venezuelan military reacts in the next few days will be critical. So far, they have been quiet. Life on the streets of Caracas seems to carry on as before. But that can change quickly.

Furthermore, the biggest buyer of Venezuelan oil is China. Trump says he wants to even increase the oil exports to that country. But at what price?

Will China calmly stand by and let America take over one of its key trading partners? Or will Xi decide to do a Trump and invade Taiwan? After all, that’s another feud that has been festering on and off ever since the end of World War II.

Summary

What happened in Venezuela this morning is not a police action, nor a routine intervention. It is a tectonic shift in how global power is projected and justified. When legal arguments fail, moral arguments are summoned; when moral arguments fray, history is rewritten in real time.

Whether Venezuela becomes a precedent, an exception, or a warning will depend less on rhetoric than on how other powers respond — and how far this logic of coercive force is allowed to travel before it meets resistance.