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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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The Japanese and German militaries both entered the war with a substantial advantage in technology and training over their opponents.

OK, stop there. The Japanese were a joke, technologically. They had a couple of goodies, like the Zero (which had 6 months of dominance before the Americans figured out how to fight it) but the rest of their military was terrible. They had no business declaring war. Their carriers were impressive right up until they took damage and blew up.

The Germans won their early victories with crappy Panzer I and II, and were heavily outclassed by French and British tanks of the era. What they did have were tactics, which the aristocratic Junkers of the Wehrmacht fought vociferously against. The likes of Guderian and von Rundstedt were saved only by the personal intervention of the autodidact Hitler.

utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere

The Americans conquered an entire continent, and the British the world. But sure, they were lacking in warrior spirit.

proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood

You have accidentally stumbled on the correct answer: attrition. That's how the war was won. The Allies simply had more steel, more coal, and especially the banks were utterly dedicated to the cause (because the Germans weren't going to pay back all those loans made to Europe). When you have 1,000,000 men and the enemy has 500,000, and you force a battle where both of you lose half a million men, you win.

IJNS Yamato

The proper appellation is HIJMS Yamato.

OK, stop there. The Japanese were a joke, technologically. They had a couple of goodies, like the Zero (which had 6 months of dominance before the Americans figured out how to fight it) but the rest of their military was terrible. They had no business declaring war. Their carriers were impressive right up until they took damage and blew up.

But the Japanese did not start of attacking Pearl Harbor, they started off invading China 2 years before war kicked off in Europe; and they surely had an advantage in technology, organisation and training over the Chinese at the time. (The Chinese were an utter mess at this point.) The Japanese were shocked by the Chinese resistance after the initial advances, e.g. in Shanghai, because they expected Japan to steamroll over China in less than a year because they were Obviously Better, as evidenced in their surprise victory decades before in the First Sino-Japanese War (edit: and the Russo-Japanese war, and the occupation of Manchuria, etc, etc.)

The reason the US got roped into the war was in large part due to the US embargoing oil to Japan (in retaliation of Japanese activities in colonial southeast Asia, including actions made to secure resources for the mainland campaign and to cut off aid to China). If their technological and cultural advantage over the Chinese was sufficient to overpower China (the “substantial advantage in technology and training”), the US may not have been involved in the war after all, or at the very least, the timeline would be drastically different.

It isn’t much of an argument for HBD in any case. The Japanese military was delusional, campaigning to conquer a country at least an order of magnitude larger was always going to be a Herculean task, any technological advantages aside, and it wasn’t like China was working with sticks and stones. One would have to also ignore how the Chinese led the Japanese in social organisation and technology for history up until the Meiji restoration and conclude that actually, all of that was just luck, and only 1860s and after really counts.

Japanese military was delusional, campaigning to conquer a country at least an order of magnitude larger

The Quing conquered China, and Manchuria looks to only be ~2x the size of Japan at the beginning of their conquest

The Qing also helpfully had much of the Ming military defect to them (Wu Sangui opening Shanhai Pass being the most famous, but many of the most capable officers had already defected as early as 1620-1630) as the Ming collapsed and the Shun was ransacking Beijing. Most of the military used by the Qing to defeat the Ming (and the generals formulating strategy) were ethnic Han, not to mention specialised troops like artillerists that the Jurchens didn’t have institutions for. Even then it took some 30 odd years from the unification of the Jurchens and conquest of Manchuria to the subjugation of the entire Chinese mainland, excepting remnants and Taiwan. (The Three Feudatories revolt shortly after was also an existential crisis for the Qing.)

It’s not really comparable.

What's the actual HBD prediction, though? Can it actually be used to check against previous data?

Japanese are high-IQ, right? So why were they behind technologically? And sure, there's a whopping huge cultural explanation available, the Japanese had just recently left the iron age less than a century before... but claiming that "HBD is decisive except when it isn't" isn't actually all that useful. All the excuses for why cultural factors predominated seem entirely relevant, but then we're supposed to discard similar cultural factors from our current situation?

If the Japanese and German war efforts were so doomed, why were they stupid enough to throw themselves into a war they couldn't win?

I actually think it's considerably more likely than not that HBD is true. I continue to argue that it isn't useful, because it doesn't generate novel predictions. I don't need an HBD thesis to tell me that Blacks Less Likely; I can just look at fifty years of data from previous interventions to see that's clearly the most likely outcome from future interventions, especially if those interventions limit themselves to a particular cluster in theoretical space.

I don't need an HBD thesis to tell me that Blacks Less Likely; I can just look at fifty years of data from previous interventions to see that's clearly the most likely outcome

This is the way of scientific hypotheses. I don't need a theory of gravity to tell me that things will fall when dropped; I can just look at the history of things having fallen when dropped. But people want to know why.

Sure. But part of the "why" is definately environmental, because we can see significant short-term changes correlating with attempted interventions. Black marriage outcomes really did crater starting in the 60s. The black murder rate really has skyrocketed post-2020. If policies can make things worse, then fixing those policies can probably ameliorate the harm they caused, and that would be an improvement over the current state.

Scientific theories are useful when they give us actionable predictions. "If you do this, such and such will happen". It seems to me that HBD is short on actionable predictions, at least under anything approaching the existing situation. It gives us no constructive path forward, only a whole lot more conflict. Black people aren't going away, we do actually have to figure out how to share the country with them, and they are never going to accept permanent underclass status with no hope of a solution. I actually think that a lot of their problems are self-inflicted, and a lot more are caused by misguided Blue attempts at helping. But the "your racist" meme is, at this point, simply an axiom, and appeals to HBD won't fix that, so I think we're better off focusing on the way bad interventions have made things worse than on genetic explanations we can't actually do anything about.

HBD is absolutely necessary to respond to the Norwegian Prisons argument, i.e. the claim that disproportionate outcomes are proof of discrimination, and that category of argument can swallow the whole world if it does not have a ready response. That is more than ample justification for believing in HBD and promulgating its truth.

the Japanese had just recently left the iron age less than a century before

This far overstates the case (and makes the extraordinary Meiji restoration even more incredible). We usually put the end of the Iron Age with the start of historiography, and Japan has had a tradition of organized states and written records for a good long while at that point.

Japan was also no stranger to gunpowder. the late Warring States period leading to the Tokugawa shogunate saw extensive and innovative use of guns; both the Ming and the Japanese under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, when fighting over Korea at the end of the 16th century, were well-armed with muskets, and both sides had understanding of tactics like volley fire.

That American gunboats far outstripped anything the Japanese had seen previously doesn’t mean they didn’t know what a gun was, just a recognition that their military technology is some two centuries dated.

All solid points. I guess a fairer comparison would be something like the renaissance, or perhaps the age of pike and shot?

Pike and shot would be fair, yeah.

If the Japanese and German war efforts were so doomed, why were they stupid enough to throw themselves into a war they couldn't win?

Because it was a desperate, last-gasp gamble for both of them. Starting a war usually is (unless you're a neocon).

The Japanese knew they were engaging on a high-risk venture with little chance of success. But they had been forced into a corner by FDR's steel and oil embargos. It was either strike now, or be assassinated by the ultranationalists they had been egging on. We actually have the minutes from the last imperial council meeting where they made the final decision for war and they're quite clear on this.

Hitler considered that there were too many Germans and not enough food to feed them. The soil was giving out, and what would happen then? Germany must rely on imports, and hence become yet another slave of the western bankers. Hitler always felt himself racing against time, and needed to strike quickly. Imagine if he wasn't so hasty and had an army of Tiger tanks and V2 rockets to start with.

This just seems to kick it back up a layer. Why did they find themselves in such a position? Why did the Japanese egg on the ultranationalists? Why didn't Hitler dedicate himself to, I don't know, fertilizer research, or try literally any other solution than aggressive war against an unbeatable enemy? Or just mortgage himself to the gills to the bankers, who if memory serves didn't have much of a problem with him pre-war, use the money to finish climbing the tech tree, and THEN go all Mongol horde on his creditors?

And this presumes they thought the war was unwinnable, which is really not the impression I've gotten from what history I've read.

This requires a broader understanding of how both theatres were going, and more importantly, the political climates that led Germany and Japan to war in the first place. I will mainly talk about Japan here, as I think someone else can probably do a better job illustrating the particulars of Hitler’s views on lebensraum.

The Japanese knew they were engaging on a high-risk venture with little chance of success. But they had been forced into a corner by FDR's steel and oil embargos. It was either strike now, or be assassinated by the ultranationalists they had been egging on. We actually have the minutes from the last imperial council meeting where they made the final decision for war and they're quite clear on this.

In an attempt to be concise:

  • The Japanese civilian government has had been dominated by the IJA/IJN at that point, especially after the perceived failure of Taisho democracy in the early 1930s. This was not helped with the many assassinations (and many more attempted assassinations) of civilian officeholders by military staff; most notably, of PM Inukai in 1932 in the May 15th Incident. Further background to this: the Meiji restoration was led mainly by the daimyo and samurai military classes, and only were (relatively) discredited by the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war in the 1900s, which saw Japan winning but with the public broadly dissatisfied with its gains; as such, liberal-democratic norms in Japan were relatively superficial. This was exacerbated by (among many, many other things) that the Army and Navy had zero civilian oversight; the chain of command went straight to the Emperor, bypassing any civilian decision-making. The initial invasion of China was essentially a unilateral escalation by the IJA, with the civilian administration in Tokyo reluctantly being dragged along. (Conversely, the Army and Navy were also entirely separate from each other, and often at each others’ throats as well - each side would frequently assassinate officers and civilian supporters of the other side. Naturally, they also had different approaches to the war; the Army wanted to expand north into Siberia, while the Navy wanted to expand south.) In short, Japan’s militarists egged themselves on, no second party necessary.

  • Japan had been at war with China for more than 4 years at the point of the attack at Pearl Harbor; the principle reason for Japan to extend the war to Southeast Asian were to 1) block aid to China, and 2) procure resources for its war on the mainland. (They started by occupying French Indochina, which Vichy France under Nazi control ceded to Japan.) When the US retaliated by embargoing oil, the Japanese war machine (esp. navy) was stuck: they only had a very limited amount of oil left, and had to get it from somewhere (I believe the Manchurian deposits were not known at the time). One of the least bad ways they could think of out of the situation was to try to hamstring American force projection in the region, quickly occupy SEA, then hopefully try to sue for peace with the non-interventionist US; if that didn’t work out, at least it would have bought them time to dig in in the region. As far as desperate plans go it at least made sense for the IJN.

  • The Japanese war command, in its hubris (but also due to not really having suffered defeats at any point, and having already occupied Manchuria), really didn’t expect to be that bogged down in China. They expected the war to be over in a year with Chinese resistance collapsing quickly; instead they were stuck in a long, protracted war where they had trouble extending their control beyond the coast plus some supply lines into the interior.

  • The Japanese also thought that due to irreconcilable regional interests in Southeast Asia, the US, Britain, and Japan would have to come to blows at some point anyway, as Japan expanded its colonial empire.

Edit:formatting

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