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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35134 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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From time to time I'm reminded of this quote from Orwell's essay "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius":

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism, that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle steamer of equal horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one.

He wrote this in July 1940, in the midst of the Blitz. With the stunning battlefield defeats of the Allies in the west, and the division of the east between the Soviets and Germans, it certainly seemed that liberalism (and capitalism along with it) was Done For. One can not exactly blame Orwell for this sentiment, given that he was enduring bombing raids while writing it; it would seem rather axiomatic. Of course the next five years showed that liberal, capitalist countries were far superior at fighting total wars than their autocratic contemporaries, and when pushed to the brink were endlessly more evolutionarily fit.

I'm a liberal. I am unashamedly so, even if I am certainly ashamed of how liberal democracies have conducted themselves by and large these past few decades (post-1991, to put a point on it). I would not count liberalism out yet. It has survived through far worse periods. It managed after Carlsbad, after the failures of 1848, the nadir of World War II, the spread of communism during the Cold War. Each time it has eventually triumphed as the dominant political ideology. This isn't to say that it won't collapse on itself eventually, or that it has been found decidedly wanting in recent crises, but I think it is far too soon to count it out yet.

Of course the next five years showed that liberal, capitalist countries were far superior at fighting total wars than their autocratic contemporaries, and when pushed to the brink were endlessly more evolutionarily fit.

Yeah but having America on your side is basically cheating, isn’t it? A massive country with immense resources surrounded by oceans, and founded explicitly as a liberal nation? What if America never existed, or was a much smaller nation the size of say, New Zealand? Then we would all be saying the same thing except it would be fascism (or communism) which is the most “evolutionary fit” ideology

The question is complicated because one could argue that a liberal country, because of checks and balances, would not have made the Nazis' monumentally stupid mistake of entering a war against the UK and France (and they did enter it voluntarily, since on September 3, 1939 they were offered peace in exchange for withdrawing from Poland, and they turned down the offer) despite having no ability to knock the UK out of the war and knowing that the US would be fairly likely to help the UK.

Of course liberal countries also do very stupid geopolitical things sometimes. One could argue that the Iraq war was an example. But I can't think of any example of a liberal country making an existentially catastrophic mistake like Hitler's decision to fight the UK and France. Maybe Kerensky's decision to keep fighting in WW1 is an example? I feel like that is a special case though, since that liberal country was just a few months old.

Not that it wasn't coming eventually, but Germany also declared war on the US even though it was under no obligation to. And that is of course after adding the Soviet Union to the coalition.

Yeah but having America on your side is basically cheating, isn’t it? A massive country with immense resources surrounded by oceans, and founded explicitly as a liberal nation? What if America never existed, or was a much smaller nation the size of say, New Zealand? Then we would all be saying the same thing except it would be fascism (or communism) which is the most “evolutionary fit” ideology

The British won the 19th century for Liberalism without those advantages.

The 20th century is slightly harder. Can the British Empire and USSR win WW2 if the USA is a nothingburger? Without nukes, probably not (it's closer than the American schoolboy view of history would suggest), but in that world most of the refugee scientists who staffed the Manhattan Project end up in Canada so all we actually need to do is to hold out until we get the Bomb in 1945/6. If the USA exists as it does in our timeline but Pearl Harbor doesn't happen, I am reasonably confident that the UK/USSR can win the war without nukes with the US as a sympathetic neutral and, again, we eventually get nukes.

Of course the next five years showed that liberal, capitalist countries were far superior at fighting total wars than their autocratic contemporaries

They were vastly inferior at warfighting, prevailing through sheer size and resources alone.

Germany wiped the floor with Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France singlehandedly. Germany had no oil, no rubber, no tungsten, poor reserves of iron and aluminium, only coal in large quantities. They barely had a navy and only established their air force 4 and a half years prior but put Britain on the ropes nonetheless.

If you look at a map of the powers involved in WW2, you see the sheer scale of allied ineptitude. How can you possibly struggle for so long and take serious defeats when this is the balance of the powers involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_participants_in_World_War_II.svg

It required the primary efforts of three huge countries (one of them fiercely autocratic) to beat Germany. Without the Soviet Union in the war, it's hard to see how Germany could lose in Europe. Likewise with any of the Big Three. Somehow this relatively small country was by far the strongest power in the world, stronger than the next two combined!

And this is despite Messerschmitt being a complete clownshow in procurement and project management, despite German intelligence being horrendous the whole war, despite having their codes cracked, despite not mobilizing fully until 1943, despite bizarre Fuhrer-prinzip orders...

Liberalism is just that bad. After the war, it then took 50 years to overcome the Soviet Union. The Anglo-American liberal alliance had secured all the wealthy, industrialized parts of the world: Western Europe and Japan. The Soviets suffered 27 million dead and conquered the poor parts of Eastern Europe. Their economic system was totally broken. But thanks to liberalism, it was a remotely even struggle. The Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan outlasted Soviet withdrawal, it even outlasted the Soviet Union by a small margin. A liberal puppet government in Afghanistan disintegrated before the withdrawal was even completed.

If you look at a map of the powers involved in WW2, you see the sheer scale of allied ineptitude. How can you possibly struggle for so long and take serious defeats when this is the balance of the powers involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_participants_in_World_War_II.svg

At the time when the allies were struggling and taking serious defeats, specifically from 1939 to Barbarossa, the balance of power looked more like this: https://i.imgur.com/XWHKkcI.png. I'm sure there's probably omissions in Africa and the Pacific (of approximately no military value anyway) but this gets the point across that many of the countries painted in green on that map were not fighting against Germany in 1939 and 1940, and one of them was even fighting alongside Germany.

There are also several countries that should really be blue even on the map you posted if it's supposed to represent balance of power rather than strict allegiance. To name one, Iran. Not an axis power, but concurrently invaded by the allies.

It shows that authoritarian regimes pick 10 to 1 resource disparity fights, so they are retarded QED.

They were vastly inferior at warfighting, prevailing through sheer size and resources alone.

Taffy 3 and the 101st airborne have entered the chat.

If this is the case, why were the axis consistently unable to prevail against the western allied forces post '43 even in situations where they had a siginifigant local superiority in terms of men and equipment?

The Battle of Hürtgen Forest?

The Ardennes Offensive, aka the Battle of the Bulge.

Approx. 52,000 german troops against approx. 20,000 Americans who where cut off and surrounded. On paper it should've been an easy win for the Germans, why wasn't it?

Maybe it was because the Americans knew they had total air superiority, columns of tanks (with fuel!) and broad numerical superiority. They could wait for the weather to improve. They could expect relief.

And the goal of the offensive was not 'encircle and destroy a few cut off Americans' but 'reach Antwerp and cut off the entire American army'.

How about the first three attacks on Monte Cassino? Or Operation Market Garden?

So what?

If the US was indeed "vastly inferior at warfighting" the gemans should have been able to roll them up with minimal effort given that they had a 2 to 1 numerical advantage and that western air-power had been grounded by the weather.

Maybe consider something, anything, a little more broad and wide-ranging than one battle? It's not like this is a new idea:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/05/05/their-wehrmacht-was-better-than-our-army/0b2cfe73-68f4-4bc3-a62d-7626f6382dbd/

why were the axis consistently unable to prevail against the western allied forces post '43 even in sotuations where they had a siginifigant local superiority in terms of men and equipment?

Because, and like the last time the Americans went to war against Germany (you say "allies" and "axis", but let's be real here) and won single-handedly, the Germans were completely exhausted while the Americans were mostly fresh. It turns out that a campaign of island hopping doesn't really require a massive army to wage, and highly mechanized forces like navies and air forces don't exhaust a population's will or ability to fight in the same way.

Remember that Germany, America, and Japan were three of the four newest nations on the planet at the time, and with youth brings vigor and innovation.
(They all began three generations- 70 years- before going to war with each other: Germans would defeat France and transition from a confederacy to a federation in 1871, America would conclusively defeat its confederacy faction in 1865, and Japan would unify its confederate states in 1868. The Soviet Union is the other one, formed in 1917, where House Romanov was defeated by House Stalin. It's not so much the age of the country so much as it is the age of that country's elite- when a large amount of it is defeated it creates living space for newer special interests- and while that won't protect you from going to war and losing, which the French [a 70 year old country themselves at the time] did in 1871, it does put you in a position to be reasonably able to contest with weaker, more sclerotic countries for dominance.)

Do you have any specific examples?

Probably the most egregious: at the beginning of Wacht Am Rhein, the Germans had designated 1 SS Panzer Corps as the key breakthrough unit on the northern flank of the Ardennes offensive. It was the most fabulously and extravagantly equipped formation in the Wehrmacht at the time by far: 2 SS panzer divisions, 2 Volksgrenadier divisions, a parachute division, as well as two additional armoured battlegroups. It had been the chief beneficiary of Germany's last great spurt of industrial production (contrary to intuition, German war production peaked in 1944). It was the force meant to spearhead the charge through Allied lines and seize Antwerp. Facing it was only a single American infantry division that was brand new to the ETO and only had five of its 9 infantry battalions. It had been placed in this part of the line because it was thought to be safe from attack.

The German attack failed. The Volksgrenadier divisions didn't get anywhere on the first day, so on the second the panzer divisions (which were being held for the breakthrough) were added in, but they didn't make any progress either. And then by that time reinforcements were flowing in and the next week of fighting ended in stalemate. It's kind of amusing to me that some people try to play the "what if?" game with the Battle of the Bulge because never had a German attack had such a local superiority in force and failed so spectacularly, and right at the start of the offensive too.

Taffy 3 off the coast of Samar, and the 101st at Bastogne to start.

I'm no wehraboo but for Bastogne, the Allies had already gained air superiority in France. Bastogne was playing defense (and I won't downplay the courage of the 101st, it was a damn difficult defense) for 6 days until the weather cleared and air support could relieve them.

Meanwhile on the Eastern Front virtually all major Soviet victories (Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration, Berlin) still had the Soviets taking far more casualties than the Germans.

I think some of the late-war soviet losses vs. German losses are a bit overstated simply due to the Soviets generally being on the offensive - which is typically going to take more casualties than the defense

This doesn't really get at the heart of Soviet casualties - it might be true that in attacking a certain specific fortified position the attacker will take more casualties than the defender, but in a modern war where armies have great strategic mobility and the combat power of a given corps/army/army group etc. is sourced from vulnerable rear areas, an attacker that has the initiative has the potential to achieve lopsided victories. This is what the Germans did to the Soviets in 1941, and likewise what the Soviets returned to the Germans in later 1944-45. A third of the German war dead (1.5 million) came in the final four months of the war when the Soviets were able to fully turn the tables and inflict disproportionate losses on them.

The purges had left the Red Army in a state completely unfit for fighting a modern war, and so the Red Army was essentially almost wholly destroyed twice: first in June-July and then again in September-October 1941. From that point on it was such a desperate struggle for survival that the Soviet Union essentially had little time to try to rebuild or improve its institutional knowledge with respect to fighting a modern war. Every element of Soviet warfighting was massively deficient, essentially up until the operational pauses in early 1944 where after they had recovered enough territory (and suffered such horrendous casualties in the process) that they were able/forced to devote serious time and attention to overhauling their approaches to all elements of the war.

I dunno. Democratic Israel outperforms its neighbors in battle cartoonishly. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is really a democracy, but Ukraine is much more democratic than Russia and punching well above its weight comparatively.

Germany knocked out so many countries, so quickly, mostly due to surprise attacks and incompetence.

If Germany was able to surprise France after a good 9 months of Phoney War, then something was really wrong with France. Britain had years to notice that Germany was building up a powerful army and yet couldn't manage to get enough troops to France in time...

Israel isn't really that liberal, they're more like Britain in the early 19th century or (ironically) Nazi Germany. Liberal countries don't conduct opportunistic border revisions, evict people and settle their land. Liberal countries don't sterilize Ethiopians. Liberal countries don't launch sneak attacks on their neighbours. You wouldn't see Americans storming a military base to protest the imprisonment of soldiers accused of raping civilians.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-party-leader-calls-for-jailing-lawmakers-after-protest-over-gang-rape-of-gazan-detainee/3288858

I dunno. Democratic Israel outperforms its neighbors in battle cartoonishly.

HBD. Every time.

And since someone is already typing "North Korea", let me just state that national IQ is a ceiling, not a floor. A sufficiently awful government can ruin any country, but no government can ever redeem a low IQ country.

Israel's HBD advantage during its three existential wars is overstated- 100 IQ Arab Christians made up a proportionately much larger part of Jordanian and Syrian society at the time and Israel's HBD isn't that impressive because Ashkenazim aren't a majority of the population.

HBD. Every time.

If you would like to argue that Germans are the runts of Europe and simply genetically predisposed towards losing world wars, i would not argue against you.

Germany: we may lose the game, but we always beat the spread.

What's your explanation for WWI, then? The autocratic Russian and Austro-Hungarian states embarrassed themselves repeatedly, and on the Western Front, Germany wasn't all that different to France or Britain. A theory of liberal military weakness, and presumably autocratic strength, would seem to suggest that autocracy ought to correlate with positive military performance. But that seems more like the opposite of what we see in WWI.

Again, we look at a map. The British empire: Canada, India, half of Africa, Australia. The French Empire: the other half of Africa. America! Russia! Gigantic global empires - plus Italy, Romania and Japan.

The German Empire? 2 tiny scraps of land in Africa and Papua New Guinea. The Austro-Hungarian empire? Small, poor and disorganized. The Ottomans? Mid-sized, poor and disorganized, the sick man of Europe.

Germany had no rubber, little iron, not enough food, they had to choose between fertiliser and explosives.

Germany was massively overperforming, fighting three huge empires to a standstill and knocking Russia out of the war while France and Britain underperformed considering their size and access to world markets. But it was a totally stacked war where most of the strong powers were on one side.

(Italy had universal male suffrage since 1912, it was arguably more democratic than Britain in WW1 but their military performance was horrendous).

My theory is not that autocracy correlates to positive military performance but that liberal countries have inferior military performance considering the size and resources of the powers involved. Autocracies have a huge range from astonishing capacity to horrendous. But liberal states are regularly subpar.

I'd argue that by the standards of 1914, Germany was a relatively liberal power.

I'm actually not all that convinced that the deck was as stacked as you think - it's a mistake to just look at a map and assume that the amount of colour on the map is directly proportional to military power. Germany didn't have a huge colonial empire, but it was a large, rapidly industrialising European power with a lot of human capital, which had also militarily embarrassed France relatively recently in the 1870s. I don't look at French West Africa and therefore assume that metropolitan France should have had an insurmountable military advantage over Germany, its larger and more populous neighbour, with access to the same technological base.

But at any rate, let's grant that Germany overperformed in WWI and WWII. Is that enough to conclude that liberal states militarily underperform? That seems like a lot to generalise fron a single example, particularly considering that WWI Germany arguably was a liberal state, and that illiberal states (Austria, Russia, the Ottomans) also put in noticeably poor showings. If we grant that Britain and France underperformed, that seems less like liberal states being weaker, and more like... well, everybody underperforming relative to Germany. Maybe Germany just had really good fundamentals, or lucked into a few military geniuses and associated reforms, or something else. My point is that the pattern doesn't seem to be "liberal weak, illiberal/autocratic strong". At best the pattern is "Germany strong".

That is, however, a single example, and I am wary of drawing strong conclusions from single examples. For instance, if we go back a century (plus a half, if you're counting from WWII), we find Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which was undoubtedly the most liberal country in Europe by a massive margin, and their decades-long overperformance. If you were generalising from the period 1790-1810 or so, where France took on pretty much the entire rest of Europe and kicked them around one by one, you might be tempted to conclude that liberalism is a kind of cheat code to military supremacy.

I'm just not seeing a strong general correlation between a liberal constitution and military underperformance.

Particularly when military-industrial investments and the quality of the opposition's decision making is factored in.

If you show a map of a large part of the world and small part of the world, but the small part of the world invests more in the most relevant military technologies that can be brought to bear than the large part, you should expect to see to see the smaller part of the world out-perform and out-compete the larger parts, and to continue to do so until industrial outmatch leads to disparities that can overcome advantageous positions (like, say, being able to launch history's largest naval invasion to overcome the moat that is the English Channel).

It turns out, military-industrial economics don't work like in video games, where you pay money to buy a formation whole-cloth. You actually need to, you know, build the relevant assembly lines beforehand... emphasis on before. And a significant part of the WW2 opening military dynamic was that the western europeans were much later to invest in military expansion.

That, in turn, was driven by the rest of the world's assessments of what a good german leader would do. German headstart mobilization was tolerated / not matched up to a point in no small part because the western europeans and soviets alike thought Germany would have to be very stupid to begin a warmongering campaign against the western empires who economically outsized them on the west, and particularly with the the soviets who outsized them on the east. It would be a particularly bad leader who, even with the early military investments, would try to take one or the other, let alone both.

Which was correct! It was very stupid of the Germans to begin a warmongering campaign. That was an accurate understanding of the situation, because even with its unexpectedly high initial performance advantages the Germans did ultimately fail and fall. The unexpected success in topping- which was unexpected on both ends and hardly a reasonable expectation- did not, in fact, enable Germany to beat the Soviets in turn, even when the Soviets took several non-necessary policy errors like 'purge the Red Army right before a war' and 'ignore strategic warning intelligence.' Even with major unexpected failures on the part of the allies, and gambles that even the Nazis acknowledged were gambles, the Nazis still lost. The pre-war expectations- that the Germans would have to be stupid to try such things- was validated.

It just didn't mean that the hyper-authoritarian Germans wouldn't do stupid stuff that got their own country conquered in the process. Hitler was a romantic-nihilist, and that is not exactly commonly understood even now, let alone back then.

Which, in turn, throws another wrench in the 'liberalism is incompetent, authoritarianism is based' premise. The authoritarian lost, and lost badly, and lost for reasons broadly known beforehand. The western liberal incompetence along the way, in turn, were generally either 'this emerging aspect of technology was not recognized across the world'- in other words, not a general competence failure- or failures to believe the authoritarian would be that stupid by gambling on high risks... which, of course, is treated as a validation of the authoritarian.

The former is hindsight bias of believing what is known afterwards should have been obvious at the time, and the later is just the military variant of 'jokes on you, I was just pretending to be retarded.'

Germany massively outperformed everyone else on land for the first 3 1/2-4 years of war; Austria did badly but by Austrian historical standards actually pretty well.

The German empire fought France and Britain to a draw, alone, and defeated Russia while carrying Austria on its back. The balance of resources, population, and geography was against the central powers, same reason the confederacy lost the civil war.

Certainly Germany did very well in WWI, but Germany was also the most liberal of the Central Powers. Austria and the Ottomans both gave middling to poor performances, and on the Entente side, it was the most autocratic power, Russia, that performed worst. This strikes me as a data point against any reactionary theory that autocracies are more militarily capable than liberal states.

Depending on how you count them, you might also count the Russian Revolution and the Turkish war of independence - while neither set of revolutionaries were a liberal dream, both seemed to perform much better on the battlefield than the autocracies they overthrew.

Austria was probably more liberal in practice, at least in the sense of tolerating diversity, even granted that Germany had more liberal government structures.

If anything, WWI is probably the reason why liberal countries struggled at first in WWII, because they generally did not want to be forced into another mega-war at first, AIUI.

Indeed, one can argue perhaps that liberal democratic states can be more dangerous in warfare than autocracies:

“In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, an European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.”

Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 13 May 1901

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1901/may/13/army-organisation#column_1572 (I still find the record keeping involved in this incredible)

Not related entirely to the point at hand, but two things strike me from this:

  1. As you say, the record-keeping required to have exact meeting minutes of a session nearly 125 years old available at the touch of a button is amazing.

  2. Churchill was always an incredible speaker. The way he excoriates some of his fellows is incredible - "Indeed, if the capacity of a War Minister may be measured in any way by the amount of money he can obtain from his colleagues for military purposes, the right hon. Gentleman will most certainly go down to history as the greatest War Minister this country has ever had." He speaks only once, at the very end of this meeting, and after he's done it adjourns. He'd been an MP for all of three months.

Is the Allies winning WW2 really evidence of liberal societies with unplanned economies being better when they only won by taking national control of ~their entire economies, in some cases suspended elections, and turned the entire state towards control, propaganda, and bureaucracy?

I’d go so far as to say that “liberal” countries in the pre-WW2 sense just plain don’t exist today. Pre-Wickard v. Filburn the idea that the government even had the authority to decide whether you could grow grain on your own property to feed to your own horses was unthinkable. Such ideas didn’t really survive contact with war.

Wickard was a federalism case, not a natural rights case. It concerned which government had the authority to decide whether you could grow grain on your own property to feed to your own horses. A state law doing the same thing would have been constitutional, but probably ineffective given the nature of the national economy, under founding-era jurisprudence. (It might have been ruled unconstitutional under Lochner-era jurisprudence, but we now consider Lochner anticanonical for good reasons.)

As a separate issue, the law at issue in Wickard was a stupid law. But there are non-stupid laws which regulate the growing of your own grain on your own land to feed your own horses, like a law restricting stubble burning. The law pre-Wickard was that a state government could ban stubble burning, but the feds couldn't.

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