Warmongering

Somewhere along the 1580s.....the term "warmonger" got started.  Edmund Spenser was a British writer and poet.....who sat down and crafted the "Faerie Queene".....an epic two part poem (about as long as you can go in poetic lyrics).

The original piece, got a fair-sized audience and was noted by the Queen.....who decreed that Spenser would receive 50-pounds a year for life.....for his first work.

Spenser wrote up part II of the Faerie Queene, and it was published a couple of years later (1596) and he noted at the time....there would be twelve parts to the Faerie Queene.  Well.....he passed on at the age of 46 (1599).  The other ten parts never came.

In some ways, he was one of the many lucky individuals whose life came along at the age of printing (the mass printing capability came up after 1525), and the public sought stories as a form of entertainment.

Warmonger was supposed to describe a person who invents ways to start a war.  It could simply be words.....sometimes actions.....sometimes just behavior by itself.  In a way, just about everyone who slips into a war situation....could be accused of being a warmonger (Wilson, FDR, Bush, Chamberlain, Lincoln, etc).

This past week, here in Germany......Frank Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister of Germany.....uttered the phrase and accused NATO of warmongering.  The action committed by NATO over the past month was a massive exercise in Poland and Eastern Europe.....to counter Russian tough-talk.

Was NATO guilty of warmongering?  Well......as much so as Germany and the EU were warmongering back three years ago in the handling of the Ukraine application to the EU and the blundering around triggered the Ukraine and Russia to go into a civil war routine.

The thing is.....if you were viewing all all the minor activities of Russia over the past year or two....they haven't exactly been angels and some commentary toward the border states around them (near Germany's neighbors) have been a bit worried over what was said and done.

My guess is that this is the start of political season, and that Steinmeier will make more anti-NATO speeches along the way to the fall of 2017 election.  Maybe he'll do an occasional anti-Trump speech as well.

Oddly, no one ever wrote an epic British poem for peacemongering.  I guess that kind of literature or poetry never catches anyone's fancy.