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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   32099 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Not really. You could get a lot of positive change simply by identifying and liquidating the right elements. Look at the power the french revolution unleashed without any coherent vision, simply by executing entire classes of people and confiscating all their horrifically misallocated assets.
It wasn't the "temple of rationality" and the decimal calendar that let them fight off the whole of Europe. It was liquidating the existing order in a tide of violence and hate.

An awful lot of America's problems could be solved by tearing off the cover over government spending and taking a hot poker to the blood-sucking parasites clogging up the system. No other reforms needed. Suddenly ten billion dollar federal grants to build EV charging stations might actually get something done instead of being laundered into handouts for party members through dozens of layers of non-profits and agencies.

It wasn't the "temple of rationality" and the decimal calendar that let them fight off the whole of Europe. It was liquidating the existing order in a tide of violence and hate.

Correction- it was Napoleon’s willingness to direct civilian resources towards the military. Levee en masse was the main reason France broke Prussian and Austrian power so thoroughly.

Long before Napoleon, I mean the original first coalition wars.

without any coherent vision

You mean establishing a totalitarian state worshipping reason as a god (for a while) which forcibly conscripted much of the population (for the first time ever)?

fight off the whole of Europe

Historical demographics are quite different from today's. On the eve of WWI, Europe had 25% of the world's population. To copypaste an old comment of mine a bit later:

The idea that Napoleon’s odds were insurmountable in 1813-14 doesn’t add up numerically either. The demographics of Europe in the early 19th century were very different than they are today. The French Empire and its Italian, Swiss, and Dutch client states contained 56 million people. French-occupied Germany was another 20 million at least. The Russian Empire had 35 million people, Austria 23 million, Britain 10 million, Prussia 10 million, and Sweden 3 million. Britain had imperial possessions as well, but their governments were even more decentralized than in later periods and their people could not be effectively mobilized for war. So, we can see that the “inexhaustible allied hordes” are a myth. Altogether, the allies controlled 81 million people and the French 76 million. France also controlled what was then the richer part of Europe, and could more easily mobilize its population. Case in point, after the total loss of his army in Russia Napoleon had another one waiting for him in Germany already.

In 1800, metropolitan France had about 30 million people and Russia 25 million (including many Poles, just incorporated, who would support Napoleon.)

I would argue, actually, that Revolutionary France developed extremely impressive state capacity, and it was its near-unprecedented level of mobilisation of resources that allowed it to fight off half of Europe. That wasn't something that automatically appeared in the absence of the king, but rather had everything to do with the systems of government of the new republic, some inherited from before the revolution, but some built anew as well. That level of organisation just doesn't come from nowhere.

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