Everybody knew there were prison-like camps, which were called “protective custody camps”, starting with Dachau in March 1933. The camps were covered widely (and positively) by the German press and weren’t extermination camps -”regular” criminals could be and were semi-regularly released from the “protective custody camps” and some people survived in Dachau for a decade. Extermination camps only began (depending on how you want to define the terms) with Belzec in March 1942. The extermination camps are what we today visualize as the archetype of the concentration camp. What precisely was going on in the camp system from 1933-1941 wasn’t really clearly known to the public, and the camps were portrayed by the regime as a reformatory prison.

Obviously, eventually you had to either be gullible as hell or intentionally ignoring the evidence that the KZ were killing off a lot of people, but it wasn’t as clear-cut as the camp system later evolved to become. You can’t argue that Lloyd George was supporting Auschwitz, because that wasn’t what the camp system was in 1936.

But one of the big lessons of the 70’s was that technology must be carefully regulated to keep it from changing the power structure.

If we were to have a crisis that required us to use new technologies regardless of their social status effects, we might get some big changes. We might reduce health costs by declaring tobacco an illegal narcotic and nicotine a rarely-prescribed drug. We couldn’t keep it from being grown illegally but the volume would surely be much less than now. Similarly our balance of payments would be improved if coffee and gaurana were declared illegal narcotics and caffeine became a rarely-prescribed drug. Modern building techniques are potentially much cheaper—for example spray concrete with spray foam insulation, not necessarily greener to construct but far better insulation, better hurricane and earthquake resistance, etc. Whyever would we keep building cars with internal combustion engines? If we ignored the dislocations resulting from technological change—which we would ignore if the first priority was to win a war, and which loom large under every other circumstance—then we might do great things.

Surely the obvious lesson is that money spent on science, technology, and engineering provide truly stunning benefits?
And yet the US population is resolutely against spending more money in this way, and can only be conned into spending what it does through games like DARPA which disguise lots of fundamental research as military expenses.

So looking at the unreliable numbers, if we’re going to be undeterred by somebody’s nuclear arsenal, it would probably be better to be undeterred by china’s nukes than russia’s. But I don’t really know since the closest we have to actual data is secret, and it probably isn’t very good data anyway.

I repeat, if we’re going to start a nuclear war to give ourselves sufficient incentive to end a depression when we wouldn’t be willing to do so otherwise, it really needs to be a nuclear power because there aren’t any nonnuclear powers that are scary enough to get excited about. Indonesia? Hardly.

And starting a war with a nuclear power would provide various advantages for various people. Like, for around 50 years we’ve based our security on MAD, on the idea that nobody would attack us because we have nukes that would hit them back. There’ve been a lot of americans who say that this is crazy, that we can’t depend on this to protect us from people who don’t care whether their nations get genocided, and so whenever we suspect some other nation of wanting to nuke us anyway we need to nuke them first just in case. But the USA has not been willing to actually wage a first strike on this reasoning, and for 50+ years we haven’t actually gotten attacked. This provides the illusion that MAD actually works, when it’s quite possible that the reason we haven’t been nuked is sheer coincidence.

If we were to nuke china or russia, we would decisively disprove MAD and it would open the way to an entirely new nuclear strategy. “We know there’s a nation that’s crazy enough to nuke a nation that has 250 nukes aimed at them. Namely, us. So it follows we need to take pre-emptive action against anybody we suspect might be as crazy as we are.”

The more I look at this, the crazier it gets. Here’s an alternative plan. Let’s get somebody to give nukes to lebanon. Maybe 200 or so of them. And then israel and lebanon can have a nuclear war. Afterward we start a Marshall plan for both countries, and as the whole world looks at the consequences of that little war everybody agrees that there aren’t going to be any nukes. Sanctions on any nation that refuses inspections to prove they don’t have them. Make the world safe for conventional warfare.

And then if we need another WWII to rescue our economy we can have one.

But I now see that my reasons for preferring war with Pakistan to war with China can equally be used to argue for war with China. One man’s modus ponens is another modus tollens and all that. As I see it, there remains only one problem with J Thomas’ excellent analysis: it is not at all certain that, in a war with China (which, surely, would escalate into a global conflict, since the greatness of the powers would de facto not allow for the neutrality of other nations), the U.S. would emerge victorious. By victorious I mean not only that we would kill more Chinese and destroy more Chinese infrastructure than vice versa, but that we would do so with enough of our population and infrastructure intact so as to allow for “our own internal Marshall Plan,” in J Thomas’s words. I prefer engaging in wars in which I can fairly accurately predict my chosen side’s ability to withstand the economic and social fallout, and I worry that a war with China might do more economic harm than good. One needs a functioning market, after all, if one hopes to help the S&P 500!

So, we need a big conflict, but not one so big that it would destroy the very social conditions for the possibility of the corporations we are trying to help. Perhaps if we waged simultaneous conflicts against Pakistan and, say, Russia, we could meet J Thomas’s criteria while ensuring for our own survival.

Yes, I am taking the piss. I will repeat it in new words.

If somehow a war can get us out of our economic troubles when other methods won’t, the fault is not in our economy but in ourselves. It is simply that we are unwilling to do what is neede because it is needed, but will only do it for a war.

And in that context a war with pakistan is useless. It isn’t a big enough war for us to sacrifice our economic ideals to win it. If we could solve our problems with a little war, then why not instead invade paraguay? It’s closer to us, the logistics are easier, it has natural resources we could develop, its neighbors are far more likely to approve the idea of letting us invade through them, etc. The name even begins with the same two letters.

No, if we want a war that will scare us into doing the right things for our economy, we need to fight china. China is bigger and scarier. China is a real competitor. We owe china lots of money, debts which we would cancel as soon as a state of war existed—or sooner if we declared sanctions against them in the leadup to war. China is a better enemy in every possible way.

And suppose that china did manage to nuke twenty or fifty US cities. We could have our own internal Marshall Plan, we could do much better for our economy than we could from some puny little war with pakistan. Pakistan probably couldn’t nuke us at all, and if we destroyed their cities we wouldn’t spend all that much building them back again, either.

Starting a war to improve our economy is an utterly stupid idea, but if we’re going to even consider it, we need to look at how to do it right.

& there’s a world of difference between “Iraq has WMD”, and “Iraq is a growing/eminent threat with its WMD”. Even if there was consensus that Saddam probably had WMD, only a small faction of the US policy elite came up with the latter gem (which then was eagerly adopted as a self-evident truth by foreign policy “experts” and other “very serious people” and amplified through the media).

anyway…

On his return to Britain, Lloyd George wrote an article for the Daily Express on 17 November 1936:

“I have just returned from a visit to Germany. In so short time one can only form impressions or at least check impressions which years of distant observation through the telescope of the Press and constant inquiry from those who have seen things at a closer range had already made on one’s mind. I have now seen the famous German Leader and also something of the great change he has effected. Whatever one may think of his methods – and they are certainly not those of a parliamentary country – there can be no doubt that he has achieved a marvellous transformation in the spirit of the people, in their attitude towards each other, and in their social and economic outlook. . .

“What Hitler said at Nuremberg is true. The Germans will resist to the death every invader at their own country, but they have no longer the desire themselves to invade any other land. . .

“The establishment of a German hegemony in Europe which was the aim and dream of the old pre-war militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism. …”
http://www.icons-multimedia.com/ClientsArea/HoH/LIBARC/ARCHIVE/Chapters/Stabiliz/Foreign/LloydGeo.html

It was explained at the time that Lloyd George didn’t really know about “the camps”, which is curious as the entry on 16 March 1936 in George Orwell’s research diary for his book for the Left Book Club that was to become: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) reads:

“Last night to hear Mosley [founder of the British Union of Fascists in 1932] speak at the Public Hall [in Barnsley], which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap – Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied ‘We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.’ . . . ”
George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940 (Penguin Books) p.230.

Note the references in that entry to “a Socialist angle” as well as “concentration camps”.

As for Nazi economics in Germany:

“We must not reckon profit and loss according to the book, but only according to political needs. There must be no calculation of cost. I require that you do all that you can and to prove that part of the national fortune is in your hands. Whether new investment can be written off in every case is a matter of indifference.”
From a speech of Goering in 1936 quoted in John Hiden: Republican and Fascist Germany (Longman 1996), p.128.

At that point, lots of people and lots of governments became aware that, in all probability, there were no WMDs. The governments of several countries you mentioned, which had supported UN 1441 on the basis of the assumed likelihood of WMDs, opposed the invasion on the basis that the inspections should be allowed to proceed – had they done so, of course, they would have found nothing.

It is perhaps not surprising that support for wars is correlated, almost perfectly, with incapacity to recall basic facts about those wars.

WHICH “non-Iraqis” were “quite aware” that Iraq didn’t have any WMDs? AFAIK, although they were all wrong in the event, the British, French, German, Polish, Czech, Italian and Israeli intelligence services—both military and diplomatic as well as their respective political leaders—all were on record both in public and in private in the belief that Iraq did indeed possess such weapons (to one degree or another, and with varying degrees of confidence.) And both the Russians and the PRC made public noise to the same effect (no matter what their private knowledge) So are you talking about pvt analysts, or what? And what do you mean by “a lot?”

I would rethink that, as, that political argument doesn’t really jive with the reality that all of the military stock produced by the USA during World War II was obsolete or nearly so by the time it had ended. I mean, how many surplus B-17s did you really want to have shot down over North Korea?

Everything the USA had produced during World War II was practically junk by the time it ended, and keeping an army of that size going would have made little sense. Even the Russians demobilized their army to a large degree following the war. Nobody could afford to keep those massive armies going perpetually and everything in them would have had to have been replaced. The advent of the jet made all of those propeller planes obsolete, the newly constructed Iowa class battleships never really fufilled their intended role, the aircraft carriers were too small to operate jet aircraft, the Russians were busily studying the captured sturmgewer and thus creating an assault rifle that would make the M1 obsolete. Sherman tanks were no match for the T-34 they would have had to go against. GATO class submarines were obsoleted by the XXI U-Boat and would wind up being replaced with the first nukes barely a decade later… and then, you had the pretty good argument that the atomic bomb would make conventional forces obsolete anyway.

The American intervention in the Korean war started in 1950, did it not? That means over 4 years between the end of WWII and the start of the Korean war. That may not be much in terms of remaking the political map of Asia by military occupation, but it’s a decent chunk of a normal economic cycle.