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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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And they all had overlapping war goals that got varied levels of success.

Hell, the Ottomans almost sided with the Entente, Germany brokered a separate peace that secured a lot of the eastern lands they wanted and Russia, well, had a revolution.

WW1 is not exactly a simple affair, but I do think the comparison with Ukraine is relevant because it was mostly about interlocking spheres of influence and nations being afraid of each other in a way that seemed to require escalation.

There is a good argument that can be made for both being failures of diplomacy even if you think that Europe was due a bloody conflict.

To the extent that all conflicts can be described as about 'overlapping war goals', yes, and all war is a failure of diplomacy.

The whole exercise just seems to be about embedding the same old Russian gripe about NATO expansion in more respectable, historiographical context. Learned and wise. Except anything is analogous to anything at a high enough level of vague generality.

Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails, unless you don't actually want to contribute to understanding whether or not it has merit. You seem to primarily just want to ridicule the Russian position ("same old gripe", implication of not being "respectable", the "learned and wise" snark), which could either be a knee-jerk response (in which case, please don't) or because you think you have a moral imperative to help lower the enemy's status. But in the latter case, does doing that on a niche forum with bounded readership really help your cause? There are few normies here that could be converted or made to pick up subtle status signals, while the ability to maintain niche forums with nuanced discussion is actually one of the bigger status advantages that the West has over Russia, which has been organically and artificially stamping out its nuanced voices. Thus you might just be giving ammo to fence-sitters to point at you and say "see, both sides are exactly the same". (On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.)

Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails

I did, right at the beginning: there were many more powers involved in the international politics of WWI than there are in the Ukraine war.

On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.

They don't need me for that. Western contrarians have decided Russia is Really The Good Guy all on their own (well, mostly).

Fun exercise: try to figure who, if anyone, the following statement refers to:

I am a Self Aware Individual, aware of and thus immune to the lies spread by propagandizers. Anyone who disagrees with me is a captured entity, and their failure to acknowledge the validity of my rational position reflects the depth of propaganda capture. What more, they believe THEY are the ones in the right, and that I am propagandized!

Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points. Man, what a tragedy that would be if internet words actually mattered to us and we acted on it!

Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points.

I have bad news about the modern world.

Honestly my impression as I start to learn about this topic is the opposite of this. It it looking like Britain (today Russia) really screwed things up. I get why they did it and saw it as their interest to oppose Germany, but everybody would have been better off just letting Germany (today America) win to establish pax Germana on the European continent.

But yeah, I guess I am trying to look for something deeper than "Putin is an insane tyrant" as the reason for Russia's current behavior. Do you really oppose even that minimal amount of respect and context applied to the current conflict?

This assumes Germany would have established a pax Germana on the European continent. 'Everyone would be better off just accept the despot's peace' tend to miss the despot is a despot because he already forewent the social and political systems that facilitate peace, and is actively preventing their re-assertion in order to remain the despot, and as such will be replaced in time with another despot whose own interests do not align with institutional peace.

And this is without Wilhelm or the era's German self-perception as a global power deserving colonies and privileged interests abroad. Imperial Germany may have been no worse than other colonial Empires, but it was also no better while still being a colonial empire whose colonial interests were at odds with others.

Very interesting. If you have time, can you elaborate on what Germany was doing to destabilize the continent and/or prevent its re-stabilization? In the book Buchanan claims that Germany would have been largely content with a tranquil European continent but minimal colonial presence, so their only real goal was a navy large enough that England would fear getting involved in a conflict with Germany and Germany wouldn't be cut off via English control of its sea routes to the wider world.

Austria-Hungary.

Germany gave lots of very aggressive assurances to the country, which would otherwise not have dared to provoke Russia. And not just realpolitik tactful deterrence—things like “Germany stands ready to draw the sword!” The “blank check” is the most famous, but sentiment was very much in favor of brawling. If the Schlieffen plan had paid off, if they’d stayed out of Belgium, if France had cold feet about aiding Russia, if if if…there were ways it could have panned out favorably. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, and Germany had a lot of enemies.

Wilhelm II more generally bought into the militaristic romanticism which had served Prussia and early Germany so well. He collected honorary military ranks and was quite optimistic about the indomitable German spirit. But it wasn’t 1871 anymore, and a British/French/Russian coalition was a lot more likely. He exacerbated the problem by poking at French and occasionally British colonies.

Also, he loved his boats. Thought they were the most important symbol of national prestige. Built a ton of them, directly challenging Britain for naval power. Not great support for the continental hegemon thesis. I mention this mostly to argue against the hypothetical where he’d give up the fleet to keep Britain out of war. Not a chance.

I’m going off what I’ve been reading in Massie’s Castles of Steel. If that’s out of date or revisionist, trust @Dean over me. But from what I’ve seen it holds up.

Ill second Castles of Steel as an excellent read.

If you have time, can you elaborate on what Germany was doing to destabilize the continent and/or prevent its re-stabilization?

Among other things, the formation of modern Germany started with provoking a territorial conflict with established major power neighbors like France for a Prussian-centric state, instigating a major naval arms buildup despite the lack of naval relevance to its primary competitors (and thus really only being usable against Britain), alignment with the Austrian-Hungarians who were already cracking under the efforts to repression national identities (and thus getting involved in messes observable to Bismark), attempts to interfere in the overseas sphere's interests of its continental neighbors (demands for access to Africa and China, attempts to build influence in Latin America), the role of treaties as a co-belligerancy rather than defensive arrangement (thus getting Germany into wars of others choosing), and the previously mentioned adoption of the cult of the offensive.

This doesn't include such things like the flavors of ethno-supremacy of the era, the reputation for diplomatic brinksmanship, prussian militarism, monarchism, and so on in the post-victorian age.

This is, again, not to say that Germany was worse than its neighbors, but that it was not better, and the same flaws that saw its neighbors unable to provide pax Europa applied to Germany as well: greed, pride, and jingoism were all there, and such things do not work well for a peace and stability or abroad. The German empire felt it was entitled to territorial and colonial expansion at others expense, and the limits it faced were those of consequence of opposition, not self-limitation.

In the book Buchanan claims that Germany would have been largely content with a tranquil European continent but minimal colonial presence, so their only real goal was a navy large enough that England would fear getting involved in a conflict with Germany and Germany wouldn't be cut off via English control of its sea routes to the wider world.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pat Buchanan is writing as a moralist ideologue, not a historian.

Buchanan is an ideological paleoconservative, and part of that is an ideological alignment with American isolationism vis-a-vis Europe. He is writing with that conclusion in mind and working backwards via historical metaphors to try and convince the audience of the moral preferability of American isolationism/innocence by contrasting it to morally bad involvement in undeniably bad conflicts. However, doing so requires the metaphor fit and provide the narrative elements, such as to have a villain (the selfish/evil politician who links the alegorical Americana to Europe) drag the innocent (the US / US-analog England) into sin (needless European wars). When actual history gets in the way, it needs to be glossed over or ignored to fit the narrative.

As part of that, Buchanan needs to downplay the moral agency and responsibility of the opposing side, because if the conflict would come or occur regardless because the opponent was unreasonable it undercuts the moral argument for isolationism, since isolationism wouldn't avoid the conflict as much as delay it to a potentially worse position. Therefore, Kaiser Germany's naval buildup was 'just' a deterrence, despite torpedo boats being more than enough to keep battleships away from shores, and not a way for Germany to try and force its way into overseas territories to form a colonial empire that would lead to competition over colonies. Hitler's demands for a Polish corridor are not unreasonable demands as part of a publicized design to control Poland and treat eastern europe as living space, but a genuine attempt to build a German-Polish alliance. And back to WW1 again, Germany is a passive recipient to being forced into a war by the Russians, rather than the Russians being forced into the war by Austria-Hungary's attack on Serbia, or rather than a supporter of Austria-Hungary's response. It's classic hyperagent / hypoagent morality framing.

Likewise, Buchanan needs to elevate the sins of the tempters, the politicians who bring Americana into European issues. Hence the scale of the Holocaust is a consequence of Churchill's choice not to accept a peace in 1940, as opposed to an ideological fixation of Hitler's antisemetic party that was pursued despite and even against military utility. And in the context of WW1, Prussian militarism needs to be a myth invented by irrationally afraid British leaders to bring Britain into the war.

Buchanan isn't approaching history from a perspective of truth-seeking, but allegory. It relies on the audience not knowing enough about the subject to find the conclusion plausible, and the conclusion is to agree with Buchanan's politics of appropriate US foreign affairs regarding Europe.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pat Buchanan is writing as a moralist ideologue, not a historian.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. You're definitely correct that he downplays the role of German aggression or treats it as a background inevitability in his narrative of the leadup to WW1.

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