While I believe in American exceptionalism as much as the next guy, you guys do have a tendency to forget that we in Europe (and the rest of the world) have bee

While I believe in American exceptionalism as much as the next guy, you guys do have a tendency to forget that we in Europe (and the rest of the world) have been doing this for a very long time. "Militarism has intellectual consequences" - is probably true, but the British and French (and Dutch and Prussians and Spanish et al) were doing it for 500 years, a period which gave us the birth of The Royal Society, Proust and Voltaire, Leibniz, and so on. The Islamic Golden Age happened under an expansionist empire. The Romans weren't short the odd intellectual as well... I'm sure someone more familiar with Asian history can give many examples too. "It's all PR, of course: the veterans end up as broken husks that are left to rot as soon as they get home" - while true, this is nothing new, either.