Armistice Day

I say a 111 post thread. What say you? I’m game!

Let’s just pretend that we are all each one of us, one of the “…hundreds of thousands of people who just wanted to live in peace…” and say sorry and love you to each other.

I Am Sorry. I Love You.

If you’ve got an actual practical idea for helping the world avoid what look to me like inevitable future conflicts over both resources and ideologies,

I’d argue that a good place to start is with pointing out that the only thing inevitable about war is that war is inevitably a negative-sum game. That, and this:

“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on
a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of
it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people
don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in
Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

John, it’s a tragedy-of-the-commons sort of thing. Even if you’re smart enough not to start a war over resources, very likely somebody stupider will start a war with you.

Consider the US role in WWII, for example. We were peacefully minding our own business, lending arms to britain and sinking german submarines, when we noticed that japan didn’t have enough steel or oil and would collapse if we cut off their supplies. So we cut off their supplies. They knew that without a strong military they would be absorbed into somebody else’s empire and lose all choice, which was why they had to build their own empire in the first place. So they decided their best chance was to attack us and hope that we would cave in and go back to selling them vital military supplies.

See, it all makes sense when you think it out.

The central problem here is more basic than war. It’s that we have to coerce people into doing what we want. It’s inevitable that this will happen, because if we’re the strongest and we choose not to coerce people then the next strongest will inevitably coerce the rest. But each time we try to force somebody else to do what we want, there’s the chance they will refuse and then we must use violence. The alternative is that others will see that we’re a softy who can be disobeyed without consequences, and then nobody will be our ally and it will keep getting worse until we have to fight people who think we’ll cave in if they try to coerce us.

Having a central world government that’s easily able and willing to coerce everybody might possibly reduce the violence, or maybe not. Would that be worth the consequences?

To get out of this trap we’d need a whole new way of thinking, a way of thinking that’s so compelling and insidious that most people choose to follow it even without being forced to. A way of thinking that somehow handles the throwbacks who want to coerce people, without coercing them in return.

I can vaguely sort of imagine such a thing, but I don’t have the details straight. Christianity had part of it, but not the whole thing.

Consider the US role in WWII, for example. We were peacefully minding our own business, lending arms to britain and sinking german submarines, when we noticed that japan didn’t have enough steel or oil and would collapse if we cut off their supplies

I think you’re missing out the ‘to stop them killing millions of Chinese in a brutal unprovoked war of aggression’ bit here.

“clever clogs?”

To what degree do masses of people demand wars, and to what degree to leaders manipulate those masses into supporting wars the leaders want? Americans were ready for a rumble post 9-11, but the specific target of Iraq was the child of Bush and his clique, not the righteous rage of the ordinary citizens.

There was an interesting article in Foreign Affairs recently which argued that, contrary to the common narrative, the world wars may have actually fulfilled the ethnic nationalist dream, rather than ending it.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301faessay87203-p0/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them.html

Mous: “Proof war is bad” That needs proving?

It seems to me that a strong executive, like the American President, commanding, without significant check, a powerful and capable military, makes military options to any crisis a little too easy. The public doesn’t object because most of the public (in the US) doesn’t see any cost. War happens on television. And has great visuals. And the visuals that aren’t so great, like a mass of flag draped coffins…

Not every president pulls bonehead plays. Adams was too smart to get us into a shooting war with the French. Eisenhower turned down the poisoned cup of Vietnam.

JThomas’s remarks about Japan in the 1930s are pretty ridiculous.

Matt, it isn’t my remarks that are ridiculous. It’s the facts that are ridiculous.

I agree with you that the japanese would have been better off to surrender before they started. They didn’t see it that way, they hoped to maintain their independence.

As do we. I claim that if the time came that the USA had a choice between surrender to the USSR versus kill everybody in the world, that we — and the whole world — would have been been better off if we surrendered. Lots of people didn’t see it that way and luckily the choice never came up. (Though various military people have told me that we did threaten to kill everybody in the world over israel, in 1973.)

Lots of people have told me that it was only because we were ready to kill everybody in the world, that we didn’t have to.

The only thing that let us keep our independence was that we were ready for every single US citizen to die horribly rather than refuse to fight.

And we also saved the independence of the whole Free World, many many nations which stayed independent only because we gave them total protection without ever asking anything in return. It was only because we were ready to kill them all on fifteen minutes notice that they were not enslaved.

From that, can you begin to see the japanese side? They wanted their freedom just as we want ours. To be free they started a stupid war over resources. Any chance we might do that someday? Of course our war of aggression war on iraq wasn’t for oil. We did it because … because … because … Bush wanted to. Nobody knows why Bush wanted to do that….

To be free they started a war that could possibly kill every japanese citizen. Our invasion plans for japan considered the possibility that they would continue to resist and we might have to kill very large numbers of them. We expected to lose large numbers of US soldiers. Did that slow us down? Of course not. But we nuked them and they surrendered.

Was their war that could have killed them all really so much stupider than our war that could have killed everybody? Yes. We are alive and undefeated, and they are not. But it could have gone the other way, and in that case we would be dead and no longer arguing about it.

Lots of people have told me that it was only because we were ready to kill everybody in the world, that we didn’t have to.

See quote from Goering above.

The only thing that let us keep our independence was that we were ready for every single US citizen to die horribly rather than refuse to fight.

What keeps Costa Rica, with no military, independent?

The only thing that let us keep our independence was that we were ready for every single US citizen to die horribly rather than refuse to fight.

Somebody needs some remedial history lessons….

Twenty million dead Chinese? Thirty-five million? Somewhere in there.

But mercy sakes, the poor Japanese couldn’t be expected to feel threatened!

And FDR was a bad, bad man for not supplying them what they needed to kill Chinese!

Lemuel, you’re talking as if you’ve never seen _Red Dawn_! We know they wanted to come take the cars out of our garages and run our filling stations! Just like someone was just about to subordinate the Japanese, or NATO is going to destroy Russia now, or, well, something.

Actually Japan in the 1920s did have a choice(I’m not an expert) but I remember it was framed (at the time) as between being wealthy or being powerful, sort of “guns or butter.” It’s hard to see who was threatening Japan’s independence in 1920s 0r 30s.

The trouble with World War II is that for millions of people targeted by the Axis it wasn’t a choice between surrender or die, it was a sequence: surrender, then die.

I agree with Peter Hart’s point.

Lemuel, clearly you haven’t seen the documentary “Red Dawn.”

in a last fight over the remnants of the Russian Empire that did so much to create the War

Another hornets’ nest here. But how much weight do historians give to the thesis that Russia carries a major part of the blame for WWI?

But how much weight do historians give to the thesis that Russia carries a major part of the blame for WWI?

Plenty.

on July 29 … the Czar signed orders for both partial mobilization (full mobilization against Austria-Hungary and of the Baltic and Black sea fleets) and general mobilization. Later that day, the Czar received a telegram from the Kaiser warning that Russian intervention would lead to a general war and he revoked the general mobilization decree, leaving only the decree for partial mobilization in force. On July 30 the Czar’s ministers convinced him to reorder the general mobilization of Russia. On July 31, Austria-Hungary ordered the general mobilization of its army in response to the Russian mobilization.

General mobilization by Russia turned a local, Balkan war into a European war. I don’t think it was realistic to imagine that Germany could refrain from mobilization with the Russians mobilizing.

However, had Germany not planned to hit France first, Germany probably *could* have waited a bit and tried diplomacy. The need to defeat France before Russia completed mobilization led to Germany’s going to war vs. France, invading Belgium, and bringing England into the war.

So there’s plenty of “war guilt” for Germany, but Russia has to bear its fair share of the blame. Of course, by November 1918, the Russian regime that started the war was gone.

It is funny how the American wars are wars and the rest just didn’t happen. Look. this thread is on WWI, which unlike WWII, had far less American contribution and even less American merit. As to that, had not Hitler invaded Poland, Japan raping China would have been just that much more fun for you isolationist folks. You yanks jumped in ’cause your fraternal affinities were threatened in Europe. Nothing wrong with it. But everything wrong to say you jumped in because you felt bad that one slant-eyed fucked another up the backside when that is a blatant bald-faced lie. You didn’t. So shut the fuck up about Japan and China.

WWI was a redrawing of empires. And the continuation of the time honoured tradition of land-grab. Something that stopped only in 1962. It was time for it. And it happened. One end of the rope was the brownest of them all, the Ottomans. The other end, the whitest of them all, the Brits. The tug of war ended up with the coloured falling flat on their faces. Nowhere is the U. S. of A. anywhere near anything of a substantial decider in this whole sorry affair.

But everything wrong to say you jumped in because you felt bad that one slant-eyed fucked another up the backside when that is a blatant bald-faced lie. You didn’t.

Leaving aside Malaclypse’s resort to the facts, the thesis that we simply didn’t give a shit does not explain FDR’s embargo. There was in fact a substantial amount of support for China in the U.S. (for whatever motive). Not enough to go to war on China’s behalf, but then, that would’ve been extraordinary in any event, let alone for a Depression-weakened, isolationist America.

Er…”makes you both more convincing….”

Matt, sticks and stones. Stick and stones. This is not my doctoral dissertation. This is the Internet. Grow up. And corrected, the Dutch are the whitest. I should know. Lines on the map half-way across the mountains and all that. Mea culpa.

Malaclypse and Anderson, engineering a participation is precisely that.

“Engineering a participation is precisely that.”

Okay .. and a rose is a rose is a rose.

Whatcha got besides tautologies and bad history?

If you look closely into the history around the effective oil embargo on the Japanese, it seems clear that it was driven by a concern for what the Japanese were doing, not the Europeans. You could argue that it was a concern for what the Japanese were doing to European and American interests in Asia and the Pacific instead of China, but, as I said, arguing that it had to do with Germany would be questionable at best.

Also, there was initially no formal oil embargo. Congress empowered the executive with authority to approve individual shipments of oil to Japan b/c of various concerns about what the Japanese were doing. In August of 1941, the administration did not approve any shipments. But it is actually unclear whether FDR made this decision or Dean Acheson, acting independently, forced his hand once a de facto embargo had been established following a period of a few weeks of not approving any shipments. The whole story suggests a process of clumsily attempting to use economic sanctions to deter an aggressor. I would say that it was a process that could have been successful with a more reasonable government, however.

Whatever the case, I don’t believe there is much equivalency between Russia’s current behavior in Georgia to Japanese behavior pre-WWII. One of the big problems with Japan was that due to the extreme idiocy of their governing military junta they were extremely militarily aggressive and impossible to deter. Hard to imagine avoiding war in those circumstances. Fortunately, there is not a comparable government controlling substantial resources in the world today.

Anderson, and what may be the reasons for the oil embargo? The Japanese position in southern Indo China and its stand off with the Dutch there? How does that affect the U. S. of A.? Oh! Loss of oil revenue. Once more, sorry. My bad. It is a “human rights violation” to use economic sanctions as a reason for violence. Sorry.

I’m pretty sure I would argue with this logic, if I could follow it. But I can’t.

Anderson, brush up on your history. Preferably from decidedly un-American sources. You should be able to follow the logic.

Back to WWI, how come African casualties are not as venerated or mourned as the others? For that matter, the South Asians? The tens of thousands who wanted to be left alone in peace that JQ spoke of, were predominantly Africans, particularly in the East which was a German stronghold. Some words of regret for them, please.

If we are going to play the most deserving victims card, I would start with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment and the people of Newfoundland. Asians and Africans can get in line like the rest of us; isn’t that equality or are we still trying to build hierachies of righteousness?

What a silly little game.

Northern Observer,

Any member of any Regiment is not a victim. By definition.

mpowell,

Sorry. Linguistic ambiguity. I try my best to better that style. It has improved. But it sometimes backfires. Re-phrased and tagged attempt begins:

“{Rhetorical} Anderson, and what may be the reasons for the oil embargo? The Japanese position in southern Indo China and its stand off with the Dutch there? How does that affect the U. S. of A.? {Sarcasm} Oh! Loss of oil revenue. {Resignation} Once more, sorry. My bad. {Sarcasm} I did not know that it is a “human rights violation” to use violence as a reaction to economic sanctions. {Resignation} Sorry.”

As to your comments @ 54, yes, it was made very clear. Clarity is a pre-requiste. Not self-sufficient. Once it was clear, giving up Indo China was not an option because it did not affect US-Japanese trade other than a reduced oil exim balance sheet. By squeezing Japan in a corner, the Japanese could have succumbed. That they didn’t speaks of Japanese motivations for Indo China and not of American motivations for the embargo.

Do you have any causes you are willing to die for?

“For this cause I too am prepared to die, but for no cause, my friend, will I be prepared to kill.” Mohandas Gandhi

“The occasion of war, and war itself (wherein envious men, who are lovers of them-selves more than lovers of God lust, kill, and desire to have men’s lives or estates) ariseth from lust. All bloody principles and practices, as to our own particulars, we utterly deny; with all outward wars and strife, and fightings with – outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever; this is our testimony to the whole world.” George Fox, Quaker Peace Testimony

Much of the point for point here depends on the validity of monochromatic entities like “the Japanese” “the Germans” “the Americans” “the Bolsheviks” etc.
Quiggin’s point about the post-war Japanese rests entirely on this.
But the reality is the actual character of “the Japanese”, the tonalities and essentials of the people that compose the nation, shifted dramatically from one “kind” of Japanese to another because of what happened.
It’s these shifts that produce and evolve ethnicities with identifiable characteristics, if not character, in the first place. And it has a lot more to do with breeding and reproduction than it does anything like philosophy or ethics.
That’s too complex for our present graphic capability to illustrate, just as the tonalities and essences of evolutionary reality generally were too complex for Darwin and his peers to nail precisely, but the overall, the big picture was there and caught accurately enough.
The historical picture of post-WWI England, with everywhere the missing young men, and the damaged and broken, who should have been moving up and into power, not there to take up their burdens and responsibilities and privileges. Which meant the ones who were there and fit had much more room, much more weight to their presence, and a much greater share of posterity. Over time these changes are profound and fundamental.
This is rendered meaningless when all members of the community are viewed interchangeably.
In Japan especially there’s a dramatic difference between the imperial ethnic warrior supremacy of pre-1945 and the capitalist hustler-princes post-war.
Success in those very different cultures bringing with it an evolutionary advantage as distinct as any other form of fitness, though since they’re all “Japanese” they can be conflated and the differences ignored as long as you pretend, as many do, that there’s no permanent shift in essence happening.
Also at work in war, at least until very recently, is the heinous to me intentional sacrifice of evolutionary competitors by established breeding males, to put it baldly.
Getting rid of the up and coming young males, and the threats they pose to existing holders of genetic dominance, has possibly been a significant purpose behind waging war for a long long time.
Most people accept that without thinking, it’s what makes Dresden and Nanking so horrifying, and the carnage of Passchendaele much less so. Because of who it happened to, the difference between destroying cities full of civilians, the women and children and elderly, contrasted with slaughtering ranks of expendable young men.
Does this have evolutionary significance?
How can it not?
Add to that manipulation of young lives the flagitious capitalizing on armaments and materiel that have increased wartime profiteering returns exponentially over the last few hundred years. Bullets and bodies no more than units of commodity on the balance sheet.
What these historical wars start to look like is something similar in purpose if not in form and number to what the current “war” in Iraq has been all along, the powerless, and the powerless young, dying for the powerful, and the poor dying for the rich.

Jthomas,
You’re being deliberately simplistic, and it weakens your argument. If Japan wanted to be independent it was welcome to be independent. No one coerced Japan. Certainly by the 20th century, there was no danger of a imperial style takeover, as in other countries in Asia. Japan, or its military elite, attacked other people, and those people resisted. This does not put the Chinese or the Americans on the same moral plane with the Japanese.

No one coerced Nazi Germany into attacking other countries. There was no danger of anyone taking away Germany’s independence. In fact, other countries accomondated Hitler to avoid war, and only resisted when they were attacked by the Germans. This does not put the Poles, or French, or Jews, or British, or the myraid of other Nazi victims on the same moral plane as the Nazis.

There are plenty of times any national government you can name has acted greedily, cruelly or foolishly. But we have national governments. Certainly many wars are needless, including the current occupation of Iraq. It would be a better world without war. But that’s not the world we live in. And given the world we live in, we have to act as humanely and responsibily as we can. What is the alternative? That’s not a rhetorical question.

Well this is a regular sermon, isn’t it.

KAS:

On this Veterans day, for all those who have fought for a worthy cause or know others doing the same

I think one of the points John Q is trying to make is that Veterans Day is not just for those who have fought for a worthy cause, but for *all* vets. We don’t have to figure out whether their cause was worthy before we remember them; we don’t get to treat the ones who fought in unjust wars like trash.

As John notes, Veterans Day was originally established to honor survivors of the wretchedest, most Pyrrhic war *ever* — especially if you agree with the current historians’ consensus, that WWI & WWII were actually one war with an intermission.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

Down indeed.

The best history of WWI I’ve read recently: A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918
by G.J. Meyer.

J Thomas, I think you’ve made your point. The problem is you haven’t really offered the alternative way of thinking that you’ve acknowledged previously as being necessary to replace the current thinking. Until then we are pretty much stuck using the means we have available to us of preventing bad people from coercing others when it is worth the cost of doing so.

Empires worked in the past because of technological disparity and sometimes because of the illegitimacy or disunity of the less powerful state being attacked. As long as cheap, mass produced weapons like repeating rifles, machine guns and artillery could be monopolized by an industrial power, that power could colonize non-industrial societies. But where the technological level of two societies were more evenly matched, occupation by the imperial power was much more tenuous. This was true of Britain’s occupation of the US, Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, French and US occupation of Indochina and Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Even without WW II, it would probably have proven true of the Japanese occupation of China and likely of German occupation of Western Europe. It is proving true of US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Occupation of an alien culture becomes almost impossible because occupation troops are readily identifiable even out of uniform, but insurgent troops are not.

If a state can co-opt the elites of a another state without an actual occupation, there can be enormous benefit to the co-opting state. Even military bases can be beneficial to the empire if the host country consents, but consent is rarely given if the imperial power meddles in the internal politics of the host state. But co-opting and basing is not war. Actual occupation against the will of large segments of the host country is one way of defining war and will almost always drain the empire’s resources in an asymmetrical conflict. The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are fantastically expensive for the US but very cheap for the Iraqis and Afghans. That’s the way it works when a multi-million dollar tank or APC can be destroyed by an EFP easily manufactured in a small machine shop for a few hundred dollars.

Thus, in today’s world, the forcible occupation of a foreign culture can not possibly be a net benefit to the occupying power. This is what will ultimately bring relative peace to the world. Unfortunately, it will be a while before Americans come to understand this. Most likely, it will not be understood until the US is bankrupted, a process that is well on its way and unlikely to be interrupted by Barack Obama.

On the other hand, co-opting the elites of another state can be of huge benefit, at least in the short-term. Thus has Israel co-opted US elites and gotten the US to support it with all its might and even fight wars to Israel’s short-term benefit. However, this will no longer benefit Israel once the US is bankrupted. Obama’s appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, and Obama’s pronouncements on “Russian aggression,” his claim that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon and his threats to Pakistan are all an indication of no change we can believe in. The US is already over the precipice and it seems Obama is enjoying the euphoria of weightlessness. As a result, he will likely be a one-term wonder, taking the blame not only for our defeat in the Middle East (a fait accomplis), but the total destruction, bankruptcy and isolation of the US economy. I dare say we will be energy independent in 2012 because we will no longer be able to affort foreign oil after the rest of the world decides it can no longer afford US.

There must be something wrong with me. I spent most of Armistice day sitting in the staff club at my little Australian university, programming and drinking coffee. Most of the folks at the other tables were older academics, talking about their memories of past wars and dead mates. I took the minute of silence – not at 11am as per the tradition, since I’m a bit scatterbrained sometimes – and listened to the other conversations around the room, in effect letting their stories do the remembering bit for me. It was nice, and a bit sad, I guess. Call me crazy, but I suppose I thought that was the point of the day and of John’s post too – to remind us that saying “innocent people die in wars, and those wars are usually fought for other people’s reasons” isn’t just a platitude, but such an obvious fact that we don’t actually think about it as often as we probably should. Damned if I can figure out why needed a long angry comment thread over this.

When I was a kid we called it Rememberance Day, though I now call it Armistice Day and I’ve learned that Americans tend to call it Veterans day. Maybe I’m a bit simple, but I’m glad I spent my November 11th doing my peaceful little job and remembering stories of wars past, rather than getting angry on the internet. Oh well. It’s the 12th here now and I’m late for work.

Moreover, I would argue that very few wars are caused by the crimes of the rulers. Historically, most wars start with the consent of the ruled.

Yes, yes…but few wars are begun by the governed, rushing out to take up arms against someone against the strict orders of their rulers. And many rulers have marshaled their people to war for their own cynical purposes. I enjoy a good bout of revisionist history as much as anyone, but yes, yes, yes, rulers deserve a far greater share of the blame than the soldiers they send to war or the people who cheer them on. To say otherwise is nonsense.

Jeebus, but this thread is ridiculous. After the past six years, how the hell are there still this many self-satisfied warmongering fuckwits on Crooked Timber? And more importantly, why on Earth do the bloggers tolerate them?

Jeebus, but this thread is ridiculous.

It does seem to have been the victim of an early threadjack, doesn’t it? Just over 90 years ago the guns fell silent in Europe after one of the bloodiest episodes of modern history, and the CT thread on the topic is more argumentative than reflective. Doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the spirit of the Armistice, really.

If I might suggest – I think it’s still the 11th over the Pacific ocean. Maybe the CT community could declare its own little armistice with what’s left of the day.

I tried it, Michael. Everyone else in the bar just stared at me for a minute, and then went back to arguing about football.

Actually, on a very geeky note, DC at #5 has got to be right. The simple act of required rememberance probably makes a substantial difference. It certainly makes a difference in individual behaviour in undergrads – from memory, it’s called the “mere reference” effect, and it basically implies that simply referring to moral codes acts to to increase adherence to them. Dan Ariely at MIT actually has a really nice example where reference to the “MIT honor code” decreases rates of cheating, despite the fact that no such honor code actually exists. Can’t be bothered tracking down the original paper, but I think he talks about it in Predictably Irrational. I’d like to think that there’s an analogous sociological effect caused by the mere existence of Armistice day.

Anyway. I really need to stop wasting time on the intertubes and get back to work.

I suspect, Doctors S and S, that CT has a cunning arrangement of regular decoy posts to distract the blowhards. Now if only some clever programmer could create a blowhard-free view of this site.

It’s a sign of something, either the times or inebriation, that nobody’s yet picked up on “brought forth the horrors of Bolshevism and fighting in Russia continued well beyond the Armistice.” Without giving the Reds a free pass or anything, one might note the extent of post-Armistice intervention to support the Whites. Fighting did not just continue of its own accord.

Or one could say to hell with quibbling and support John’s last sentence, which I’m happy to do.

Bad Jim:
a candidate who unequivocably opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq
As long as you keep that sentence in the past tense you’re doing fine.

Actually, Soviet propaganda of the time to the contrary, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War was almost negligible. The only significant outside forces were the Czechoslovak Legion which found itself deep within Russia through no fault of its own on the eve of the revolution and basically wanted to get the hell out and the whole Polish-Soviet war which was more about border disputes than ideology (Poles and Whites like Denikin and Wrangel didn’t get along either for obvious reasons) and the Japanese who were involved in a straight up land grab. Most you could say is that military supplies from the Allies allowed Denikin to postpone the inevitable a bit longer. Some troops and advisers were sent but never did much of anything.

Dear John,

Thank you for reminding us all. Here in Greece, it’s hard to forget, no matter where one travels. On the northeastern Aegean island of Lemnos last summer, we came upon the following: http://www.diggerhistory2.info/graveyards/pages/anzac/mudros.htm
There’s a very moving musical and visual tribute to the Blue Puttees at

Or one could say to hell with quibbling and support John’s last sentence, which I’m happy to do.

No way. It’s got a typo, for one thing. Unless there actually is something called “form dying” and John’s whole point is that we should save more of it.

[NOTE: This is has been an auto-generated message from the BHPRS (Blowhard Honeypot Periodic Replenishment Script). Had this been an actual contribution from an actual blowhard, it would have made even less sense.]

Please piss off, Lex

I am more than willing to support war for the right cause, but I generally believe that it’s better to stick flowers in nasty men’s guns than on young men’s graves.

Of course, it is not exactly true that the “War brought nothing but evil.” Some fairly good literature came out of it.

Is there something specifically neocon, or even con at all, about a doctrine of preventive war? I’m not being partisan, here. I’m just a little worried about the intellectual sloppiness of over-extending the notion of neoconservative, possibly back into the paleolithic, if archaeology happens to establish some hazy resemblance to some identifiable group of hunter-gatherers.

“Neo-con” Saddam Hussein: possibly attacked Iran because Iran was going to eventually attack Iraq.

“Neo-con” Imperial Japan: attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded Singapore rather than wait until the oil embargo against them weakened them to the point of being much more easily defeated.

“Neo-con” my older sister: punched my shoulder that time I opened my mouth to once again mercilessly mimic the way she sang along to her favorite Monkees song. (It didn’t hurt, but thanks for asking.)

I wanted to go out and buy a flower to wear on my lapel today to commemorate those innocent wedding guests who were ruthlessly murdered, but nobody was selling any.

Here in the UK, the Peace Pledge Union has been selling white poppies since 1934:

http://www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy/index.html

They’re not very common, but I’ve been buying them instead of the British Legion red poppies since the start of the Iraq war.

You’re being deliberately simplistic, and it weakens your argument.

I dunno. Sometimes piling on complexities and exceptional cases and such weakens the argument.

Try this. When my daughter went to preschool two of the rules were “Share” and “Don’t hit”. And the kids mostly followed those rules with some exceptions. What would happen if every time one kid didn’t share the others stopped sharing too? What would happen if every time one of the kids hit somebody the others started hitting people too?

Well, that’s what we do when we start fighting other people’s wars. Suppose that when two nations start fighting that everybody else asks them to agree to arbitration. Would that work? Sometimes. Sometimes one side believes that the rest of the world wrongly refuses to see their point of view, so they have no choice but to win the immediate war and then deal with world disapproval. Serbia faced a lot of that. The russians could understand that they had good reasons on their side but mostly nobody else did, and the russians weren’t ready to stop the bombing. Israel faces a lot of that. Essentially nobody outside of the USA sympathises with their problems or sees the necessity of their treatment of palestinians, and without the US support they’d get the serbia treatment. Except of course for their nukes. Nukes are a sort of ace-in-the-hole when nobody likes with you. When nobody likes you and you have nukes, you can say “OK, I don’t like anybody either” and they’ll talk mean about you but not do anything. When you don’t have nukes they might send in the airstrikes.

So when people have disagreements and both sides think they can get a fair hearing, they’re likely to accept arbitration by the World Court etc. It’s when they think that they’re right but that the world disagrees that they’re more likely to insist on war.

There are plenty of times any national government you can name has acted greedily, cruelly or foolishly. But we have national governments.

Yes, we just have to live with that. If we expected more from our national governments they might live up to our expectations. Or else we’d get rid of them and try again.

And given the world we live in, we have to act as humanely and responsibily as we can. What is the alternative? That’s not a rhetorical question.

OK, here’s one alternative. I say that human beings need something like war for social purposes. We need a way for young men to prove themselves. The Olympics are no good for that because only a very few, the world’s best, can get recognition that way.

I propose we set up a new game, maybe kind of like paintball. Set it up so that thousands can play on each side. Winning is more like winning in war, but ideally casualties should be no more than maybe 0.3%. Paintballs that hurt and can put out an eye, grenades that don’t kill you unless throw yourself on them, artillery that only kills the people it lands directly on. Tactics matter. Strategy matters. Precision teamwork matters. Individual prowess matters too. Individual small towns can compete against each other. Colleges compete. US cities compete. Nations compete. Participants can wear their uniforms whenever they feel like it, and get the prestige they’d get from high school letter sweaters but more so.

Nations can bet diplomatic agreements on their teams if they want to, but they don’t have to.

A game like that would give us a lot of the social value we get from war now, without nearly so much bloodshed. It would be clear that you win by keeping to the rules of the game, and so the rules of the game can be adjusted to provide the social value we want. It was a loss when armies at war had to stop wearing bright uniforms with gleaming metal, and had to crawl in the dirt and dig holes to cower in. Once the participants agree to rules they can make the rules work for them. A place for heroes, a place for teamwork, lots of opportunities for glory, and it all happens on a battlefield with no civilians.

A game like that, you can let girls play provided they make the team. If they want to.

Our current warfare doesn’t provide nearly enough opportunities for glory. We could do much better, and still with very low casualty rates, and with rules that can be adjusted to fit our needs. If we had a game that met our social needs well, then actual warfare would be far less attractive.

It saddens me that in so many of these “debates” the actions of all the European forces – even the Nazis – are given the benefit of understanding (e.g. WW1 and Ww2 were really one war with an intermission, the treaty of Versailles caused it, etc.) but “the Japanese” continue to be derided as a bunch of warmongering imperialists whose actions don’t have an explanation. Attempts to point out the containment going on before the war (treaty of London, anyone?) are derided, European racism towards Japan at the time and fear of its growing economic power (read anything from 1905 to see how far back that goes) are ignored, and the growth of military dictatorship is trivialised.

If the Germans’ willingness to vote in a Nazi thug and go to war gets the benefit of an attempt at understanding, I think the capitulation of the Japanese to tyranny and their actions in Asia also deserve something more sophisticated than “they didn’t have to do it”. And portraying american and british actions at the time as moral or honourable is really unfair.

We did not fight Germany and Japan to “make them be good.” We fought them to stop their killing and oppressing millions of victims.

Well, it didn’t work.

Look, sometimes when people fight they reach some sort of agreement to end it. They agree to go back to the status quo ante, or one side makes some concessions, or both sides make concessions, and they stop fighting.

Otherwise they fight until one side is too exhausted to keep fighting.

Did our fighting get them to stop when they were less exhausted than they would otherwise be? No. If anything we made it harder for them to stop, because we made it harder for them to negotiate anything but an unconditional surrender.

Have you ever looked at the Nazi plans for Russia after a German victory?

Sure. Stupid of them to publish that, since it made it impossible to get a russian surrender. Our enemies are often stupider than we are, which is a good thing for us.

This Nicholson-Baker-style “waaaah, war is bad” stuff should be beneath you.

I hear this stupid argument a lot, in a lot of different contexts. “We all know war is bad so shut up and get ready for the next war.” “Sure, everybody knows we can’t keep running the trade deficit like we’re doing, so shut up about it and just accept it.” “Stop talking about doing IRV voting because it just isn’t going to happen.” Something about this reasoning leaves me with a nameless doubt. It just is not a serious argument.

Yes, war sucks. …. But the people to blame are the ones who started the wars in the first place.

But Mommy, Bobby started it! I was *right* to burn him alive! I didn’t do anything wrong, I did everything completely right because Bobby started it!

We fought to stop their fighting.

You think that. And you thinking that makes you part of the problem.

And unlike raping for virginity, it did in fact work.

It hasn’t worked yet. Rather, it kind of worked on the germans, after they got exhausted enough to quit they haven’t had another war since except the ones we dragged them into, and they got into those in a minor way. It kind of worked on the japanese, they haven’t had another war though they helped finance our Gulf war. But we’ve had lots of wars on various stupid excuses. Fighting to stop fighting does not work. You have to stop fighting to stop fighting.

J Thomas’ usual insightful head has failed him here. notsneaky is on the mark.

This is just nonsense.

Well, Notsneaky, I think before we discuss this you need to admit that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Until we get that established we aren’t going to get anywhere.

First notice that a whole lot of what passes for scholarship on this topic was written for the purpose of showing that the USA was correct in its intentions and actions. This literature should be heavily discounted.

Second, notice that you don’t know what japanese government officials were thinking. They had strong incentives to keep that secret. We said we would accept nothing but unconditional surrender. Any weakening in their position would look like they were about to collapse and accept unconditional surrender, and would make it harder for them to negotiate other terms if other terms were possible. So while we gave no hint of concession it made sense for them not to also.

The Japanese put their faith in the islands’ defenses and the dedication of their troops. There were factions within both governments that may have thought about it but they never influenced the conduct of the war, if they didn’t get purged as soon as they appeared in the first place. At one point the Japanese thought they could get a separate peace with the Soviets or get them to influence to US, but even there they (and this seems crazy in retrospect) weren’t thinking surrender but rather cease fire based on the status quo (Japan gets to keep what it grabbed, the Soviets and US get to keep what they got)

How much farther would you expect them to go, when we demanded unconditional surrender and nothing else? You interpret the negotiating position they were forced into as their true desires. That’s possible. I don’t know what they were thinking either, since it was secret. But you believe you know things you have no inkling of.

And the Allies agreeing to anything less than unconditional surrender or the possibility of separate peace treaties would’ve been a very very stupid policy and strategy.

That depends. Maybe it was uneasy allies who had a hard time negotiating with each other while negotiating with the japanese. Maybe they were just not flexible enough to try for anything but unconditional surrender because anything else might result in the tragedy of a separate peace or a backstabbing new alliance.

And there’s the possibility that leaks about negotiations might cause a slowdown in the war on both sides. Why should japanese soldiers and sailors and airmen take heroic action leading to almost-certain death when the war is about to end? Why should we push hard against mostly-irrelevant targets when the surrender is close? If the pace of the war had slowed then japan would have gotten into increasingly serious straits without so much bloodshed.

Any negotiation requires at least two partners. If we had given japan a chance to perhaps negotiate something other than unconditional surrender, they might have refused. You claim they definitely absolutely would have refused. But we never found out, we only assumed that. The research that claims it wouldn’t happen is all research that references other people who made the same assumptions.

Suppose we had offered to let the imperial family live in some circumstances. One of japan’s reasons not to surrender unconditionally was to save the emperor. If they had the chance to surrender and save the emperor, the idea became more thinkable.

Suppose we had offered to spare japanese soldiers and officers, except those convicted of war crimes. What would that lose us?

Suppose we had promised not to commit mass rapes in the occupation. They were expecting mass rapes and not just because they did that in china. They thought of that as the default. We might have reduced resistance to surrender considerably, if they believed us.

Suppose we had offered to send enough food to japan for everybody to get 1200 calories a day.

Suppose we had actually sent food to japan. They needed it — they were starving. We say “We know the surrender is not in doubt. We give you food because we don’t want you to starve.” Do they reject it and starve? Do they admit they live only by our mercy? Would that have shortened the war? They didn’t want to throw themselves on our mercy with an unconditional surrender because they hadn’t seen anything about how merciful we’d be.

There’s the chance if we look too eager to offer concessions that the enemy will think we’re desperate and will hold out for better terms. We definitely didn’t make that mistake.

But if you think you know how the japanese high command thought, and how they would have handled hypothetical negotiations we might have proposed, please reconsider.

“I think before we discuss this you need to admit that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Until we get that established we aren’t going to get anywhere.”

Uh…ok. Why are you bothering to reply exactly?

“First notice that a whole lot of what passes for scholarship on this topic was written for the purpose of showing that the USA was correct in its intentions and actions. This literature should be heavily discounted.”

Even if that’s true, and it isn’t, what makes you think that I’m talking about US-Centric scholarship?

“Second, notice that you don’t know what japanese government officials were thinking. They had strong incentives to keep that secret.”

I guess they could’ve been thinking of cuddly puppies and chocolate chip ice cream, and never said anything out of fear of violating the Bushido code but who the hell cares? There is such a thing as the study of wartime Japanese documents, memoirs and sources. It goes by the esoteric and little known word of “History”. I hear some institutions of higher learning are considering offering courses in this exciting new field.

“Suppose we had offered to let the imperial family live in some circumstances. One of japan’s reasons not to surrender unconditionally was to save the emperor. If they had the chance to surrender and save the emperor, the idea became more thinkable.”

This is a common myth pretty thoroughly debunked by historians. Yes, there was a faction within Japanese leadership that considered a emperor+territorial status quo for peace option. It was a minority, never had influence on the actual conduct of the war, they were pushed aside politically and some were even accused of being traitors for even considering the idea.

“Suppose…”

“Suppose…”

“Suppose…”

“Suppose…”

Suppose that blue bunnies from outer space parachuted on Iwo Jima and started hoping around while singing jolly songs about faire maidens and chivalry in a little known dialect of Esperanto while building pyramids as landing sites for their spaceships. Suppose you stop making shit up.

You know, I used to think to myself “95% of time I have no idea what J Thomas is going on about”. Then I realized that I was being charitable. It seems that I do understand what you’re talking about it’s just that it never makes sense.

John Quiggin:
…lasting almost as long as the subsequent period of Empire, and costing untold numbers of lives and huge amounts of money

Untold numbers of pretty specifically mostly young underclass expendable male lives. And nothing, at least this is how it looks to me, simply “costs” money.
The current US financial “bailout” may “cost” umpteen-tumpety billions, but the recipients of that desperate largesse won’t be looking at it like that. Won’t be feeling it “cost” them much of anything.
It may have “cost” the light artillery 300 florins for a well-made bombardelle, or twice that for a goodly accurate and transportable bronze cannon, but the foundryman, at the receiving end, will have seen the transaction somewhat differently, all in all.

I see, reading not very far between the lines, that my entirely general denunciation of JQ’s po-faced sanctimony has been read as an endorsement of precisely the kind of imperialist warmongering that commenters seem not to like.

I guess after recent experience, I’m just not very impressed by empty chatter about “po-faced sanctimony” from people pretending to be realists. Quiggin’s precis of how the first Great War segued into the second seems to be pretty reasonable, his linking of the current Russian-Georgian conflict to the ridiculousness of the War “To End All War” seems at least arguable, and your immediate default to blathering about “sanctimony” seems patently dishonest and intellectually mediocre. Far as mediocrities go, it’s true that I’ve come to be indiscriminate about the declared warmongers as opposed to those who just don’t mind sounding like the declated warmongers, and in the bargain can’t be much bothered about stupid things like facts. Fucking sue me.

Peter Hart: Perhaps the gross fallacy we need to focus on here is the belief by govts and interest groups that aggressive action is urgent, an absolute necessity, that its the only alternative to humiliation or decline or whatever, or that a quick war will solve big problems and we musn’t let the opportunity slip by.

Interestingly, but not too auspiciously, for that point of view: the man who ended up planning the Pearl Harbor attack, Adm. Yamamoto, was of the opinion that it was sheer folly. He said that it would, at best, give Japan 6 months free run of the Pacific, after which the U.S., with its superior industrial might, would grind Japan down.

Now, from a purely rational point of view, the Japanese high command had every reason to believe Yamamoto. He was brilliant, experienced, educated, more than sufficiently expert for such a judgment call. He had a track record in innovation with naval aviation technology, putting Japan’s navy ahead of the Britain and America in certain respects. He also knew that the industrial precursors for the realization of his aviation work traced back to relatively primitive low-productivity cottage industry craft production. He’d hung out at Ivy League universities, had toured America to assess its industrial capacity. The Japanese leadership had every reason to assume Yamamoto what the hell he was talking about.

But what happened? Yamamoto was ostracized. During his banishment from circles of respectable opinion, he disconsolately gambled and whored and talked idly about emigrating. He probably knew, though, that if he left Japan and its sphere of influence, Imperial secret police would track him down and assassinate him. I sometimes wonder if his misbehavior and drunken rambling about emigrating around that time wasn’t a kind of sotto voce invitation to the spy agencies of America and Britain: “Please, ‘kidnap’ me!” If so, they didn’t go for it, maybe they didn’t even notice. At any rate, he caved in: he planned Pearl Harbor. (An attack semi-botched probably because he himself didn’t execute it.)

It was at best a desperate roll of the dice. Maybe they hoped that something heavily distracting would happen for the U.S. and Britain in the European theater. After all, the Japanese military (who had their own A-bomb program perhaps as early as 1939) probably knew that the Germans were working on the bomb, but that program was probably far more opaque to them than it was to U.S. and British intelligence. They could not have known that the Germans wouldn’t be able produce a weapon in time to make a difference. Even though they’d gotten a lot of their nuclear equipment from the U.S., maybe they thought it was a race that Germany could win. A chance worth taking?

Still, it’s hard to understand what the Japanese leaders were thinking, except perhaps that they decided Yamamoto was simply wrong. Groupthink is strong, group pride is strong, the Japanese are as prone to both as any nationality, if not more so, and perhaps most important: how many of them had seen what Yamamoto had seen in America? After all, seeing is believing, and not-seeing is not-quite-believing. (I think Machiavelli said that.) These days, when Japanese and American naval officers study together at Pearl Harbor, they study the life, work, and thought of Admiral Yamamoto. After all, what could be more instructive for them?

What Peter Hart above calls a “gross fallacy” can appear quite different in the eyes of beholders, if they only wishfully minimize one factor and overestimate one other. Much is made of Colin Powell’s not-quite-Adlai moment at the U.N., in the face of his own intelligence branch’s reports saying there wasn’t nearly enough reliable WMD evidence to go on. But all of the other branches were telling him there was something to worry about. So maybe he figured State had it wrong, and everyone else was on to something? I hate to hand Powell even a sliver of soap, but if that’s what happened, it’s what happened. It would hardly have been unprecedented. But perhaps just as likely: he caved, so as to continue on with some hope of influencing the outcomes positively. That’s not unprecedented either.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much history you’ve studied. Sometimes you’re doomed to repeat it anyway, eyes closed, or even more harrowingly: eyes wide open.

“r hw bt shrtr vrsn: frm nw n, whn smn sys “pc, lv nd ndrstndng r prfrbl t wr,” y dn’t gt t jst tnt nd mck thm. Y ctlly hv t bck p th tntng nd mckng wth cncrt rsns why thy r wrng nd y r rght.”

Th qstn s nt, r thy rght, bcs bvsly, n tht frmltn, thy r. Th qstn s, gvn tht hmn scts hv hd tht frmltn hld p bfr thm t lst snc th tm f th Bddh, nd hv fld t d nythng mch bt sng t s gd t prctc, why shld rptng 2500-yr-ld plttd s f t wr prfnd nsght gt fr pss?

Y wnt qck bt f prfnd nsght? try ths: t’s prsnr’s dlmm. W cn ll gr, n thry, tht f vryn dsrmd, vryn wld b bttr ff. Bt f lmst vryn dsrms, nd smn dsn’t, vryn ls s scrwd. Th nly wy t dflct th rsk f ‘chtr’ s t ctlly sty rmd. t’s nt nc, t’s nt fr, bt t s tr. nd th trrbl thng bt hvng rms bcs y cn’t trst ppl s tht y mght b tmptd t s thm – bcs y cn’t trst ths thr bstrds nt t snk n n frst [nd tht’s nly th mst rspctbl f mny mtvs tht ppl n pstns f pwr wll lwys b pry t, nlss y cn nvnt mgc nc-gs t spry thm wth.] Thrfr th rsk f wr wll lwys rmn. nd w hvn’t vn bgn t dscss ctl dlgcl cnvctns tht smtng n’s nms mght b gd thng. Wstrn rp’s ldrs hd t kll 40 mlln ppl nd str dwn nclr rmgddn bfr thy cld pt sd thr dffrncs, nd vn tht ddn’t stp thm rnnng ff nt fghts lswhr rnd th wrld thrgh th 50s nd 60s. Mdllng hmnty s smhw ntrlly pcfstc s rl chllng, whn y pply yrslf t th vdnc.

nlss y r th knd f prsn wh blvs tht, fr xmpl, nclr ‘dtrrnc’ s whlly mnnglss, nd tht Wstrn rp cld hv btn ll ts swrds nt plghshrs nltrlly n th 1980s, nd tht wld nt hv tmptd th Svt Gnrl Stff t hv hd g t tht rn fr th Rhn thy’d bn plnnng fr frty yrs? n whch cs dmr th prty f yr cncptn f hmn ntr, bt vry lttl ls bt yr thght-prcsss.

Nthng n ths xcss ny sck wrmngrng bstrds wh my hv bn n ffc r nflnc vr th lst dcd, nd wh my ctlly njy th d, nd th rlty, f drppng bmbs n ppl. Thy r crmnls nd shld b trd fr thr crms. Bt tht s qt dffrnt qstn. Thnkng tht t’s th sm qstn s yr mnchnsm, nt mn.

The educated position on Germany is that it started a foolish and evil war of aggression as a consequence of extreme pressure; the educated position on Japan is that they are inscrutable evil orientals who tried to take over the world. I see quite a bit of that going on here.

If so, that’s too bad. The educated positions in Japan itself are: toward the right, that the Empire was at least a little better than the European empires; and, toward the left, that it was about the same, and . . . therefore as just as damnable as those inscrutable occidentals who tried to take over the world.

Well, OK, I made up that last part. Educated liberal/leftie Japanese are too nice to say that. Except when they are drunk, maybe. Later, we all politely pretend we don’t remember.

There are also two uneducated positions here: that the Empire rooled (shared by at least one of my wife’s older sisters), and “huh? I slept through those 15 minutes in high school” (neither of my wife’s kids, thank God.) The teacher’s union here is pretty leftwing, but the curriculum shots are called by the Education Ministry, which was turned into a kind of bureacratic refugee camp for unindicted war criminals after WW II, so they canceled each other out to a great degree.

Maybe it’s cultural Stockholm Syndrome, but years of living here and not being too sure what to think, I’m now pretty much down with the educated left-leaning Japanese view of the Empire (which is also my wife’s position, but then she votes kyosanto [commie], so duh.)

sg,

As I keep saying, it is because a shitload of people believe that intelligence, governance, morality, technology and philosophy was born only about 200 to 300 years ago. As one gentleman I know recently informed (quite very exasperatedly, might I add), another, who was holding a passport of a decidedly different origin, “The walls of my toilet are older than your constitution!”

It is our incompetence that we can do absofuckinlutely nothing about it. Yet. Pity.

Good stuff, PHB, and all very original. Plus your logic is chillingly precise. Group X has trait A, Group Y has trait A, therefore Group X = Group Y. Or close enough for sales purposes.

I’ve already designed the book’s cover: there’ll be a happy face, but with circular-lens spectacles and a goatee. It’ll be called “Neoconservative Communism: The Secret History of the American Right, From Trotsky to the Politics of Neener-Neener-Neener”.

Well, I’ll probably have to change the subtitle a couple times, but you get the drift. What’s important is that it’ll be like nothing anyone has ever done before. You just wait.

Michael, this is not an argument of the form ‘National Socialism has socialism in the title and thus must be the same thing’.

The argument here is that the founding fathers of neo-conservatism started out as Trotskyites, a particulary authoritarian form of communism and have developed a particularly authoritarian form of conservatism. Along the way they have swapped one incoherent and incomprehensible economic policy for another and one abstract class of purported beneficiaries ‘the proletariat’ for another ‘wealth creators’. They remain committed to transformational politics.

Accusing the political extremes of being equivalent is hardly the same thing as accusing all liberals of being fasicsts, particularly when the argument is in fact ‘the founders of group X used to be members of group Y and have only made superficial changes to their views since, supporters of group X who beleive that they are in fact anti-group Y should become less ignorant’.

What you miss about Goldberg’s book is precisely the fact that it was a work of projection. A more appoprirate title would be ‘Fascist Fascists: The Public but Unremarked History of the American Right from the Klu Klux Klan to Abu Ghraib’

“…with their lives otherwise, if they would mostly have been hanged as criminals etc, then the opportunity cost of getting them killed in foreign lands would have been low.”

Despite the wankish grandiosity and collegiate sarcasm that seems to lurk beneath its delivery this is a pretty common serious idea about the past.
That the hanging was being done to people who were broken into exitless poverty by invasion and injustice and subjugation to corrupt authority and the workings of corrupt economy doesn’t enter into it. Though it should, to be morally complete.

Agreed.

But I believe my point stands, morality aside. The other guy claimed there was a tremendous opportunity cost — that the british human beings whose lives were wasted creating the empire might otherwise have created tremendous wealth by their sheer labor, and the labor of their unborn children and grandchildren and so on.

And I say that opportunity cost is a might-have-been. If there was a way for those people to create fantastic wealth, but the british society was not capable of going down that way, then the relevant opportunity cost is the improvement they’d have gotten if they’d done the alternative they would actually have done. If the alternative to empire was to waste those lives at home, then the empire didn’t cost so much after all.

But of course we don’t know what alternatives were possible. Maybe no alternative was possible, and the actual thrust of events was inevitable. Maybe there was room for a better past than I can imagine. It’s an experiment with one replication and no control group.

It’s often fun to imagine what the world would have to be like if things were different.

Maybe there was room for a better past than I can imagine
That there’s the diffrence between an irrational pathological condition that’s unaware of its own symptoms, and one that is. Aware of its symptoms, as they’re expressed.
Because of how the words go, when you don’t filter them through all that learned rationality.
When you get spontaneous, in other words, you sound more insane in direct proportion to how spontaneous you get. When you have that condition.
Oh yes just maybe, just very much maybe there just might have been a better past than you, with your great and magnificent intelligence and perspicuity, might imagine.
Even now with all your accumulated knowledge and so forth.
Given time constraints and all those books you would have had to digest in addition to the volumes required by professional duty, to get to imagining real good.

Lex: “You want a quick bit of profound insight?”

I would love some, but I sure won’t be getting it from watching you tear down ultra-pacifist swords-into-ploughshares strawmen that have nothing to do with Quiggin’s post., now will I?

“The question is, given that human societies have had that formulation held up before them at least since the time of the Buddha, and have failed to do anything much about using it as a guide to practice”

Actually, history is littered with any number of examples of unnecessary, futile conflicts that could have happened, but didn’t, because cooler heads and an appreciation of the destructiveness of war prevailed. The question is, how many such wars were averted by vapid twits prattling about how useless it is to state that war is bad? And the answer to that question is, probably none.

You want a quick bit of profound insight? try this: it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. We can all agree, in theory, that if everyone disarmed, everyone would be better off. But if almost everyone disarms, and someone doesn’t, everyone else is screwed. The only way to deflect the risk of a ‘cheater’ is to actually stay armed. It’s not nice, it’s not fair, but it is true.

Wait, you assert it’s true. I say it sounds plausible, but we may not have gotten to true yet.

Is it always true? Consider the last time the russians invaded czechoslovakia. They told their troops that a bunch of counterrevolutionaries had taken over czechoslovakia and they had to root them out. The czech army put up essentially no resistance, and they set up an occupation. And then a bunch of czech girls started inviting russian boys on picnics, and they told them there weren’t any counterrevolutionaries, they just wanted to do communism right and the whole country wanted it. The russian armies involved got so dispirited it took a tour at the china border protecting the motherland from the chinese hordes before they could be allowed to talk about it.

Most modern armies are plagued by idealists who care about what it all means. If you tell them a story and then act contrary to it, they get upset and cause trouble. Czechoslovakia didn’t win, but they came a lot closer than they could have by fighting.

It makes a difference if you want the native population to survive. If you want to exterminate an unarmed population, you can do it provided you have sufficient dedicated killers. If you want them to work smoothly for you, it’s harder. The more people you need that interact with them, the more chances for them to get their story across.

Well, what about places where they think it’s right to kill unarmed civilians to create lebensraum or to encourage the rest? Lots of places, the army just wouldn’t do that. It takes a special kind of person to continue to kill the harmless just because you’re ordered to. There aren’t that many places like that left.

Most of the places they do that, they don’t have ambitions to rule the world. Israel wants at most their original god-given borders, and maybe some land with oil. Serbia only wants the land serbs are from, plus land serbs have now. The mongols have gone from ruling china etc to just wanting their independence. The USA however has the overt goal of preventing bad things from happening all over the world.

When bad things happen anywhere in the world, we debate whether we should kill people to make the bad things stop. The US public mostly supports the idea to stop bad people from doing bad things anywhere, by killing them. There is a big difference between this and ruling the world. We don’t want to make everybody do what we say by killing them if they don’t. We only want to make people stop doing what we say to stop doing.

We are in a prisoner’s dilemma with the world. If we aren’t stronger than the rest of the world put together, then the rest of the world will be stronger than us. They might band together to hurt us. We can’t take the chance. We have to be stronger than them.

Somehow this particular prisoner’s dilemma sounds crazier than it did the way you said it. At least to me.

As far as the American Civil War is concerned, there was a conference in 1864 between Union and Confederate commissioners over ending the war. It floundered(in part) because there was no common ground between the two sides. Lincoln wanted an end to slavery and the seceded states back into the Federal Union, and Jefferson Davis wanted to preserve slavery and have an independent Southern Confederacy. These are mutually exclusive aims. One side would have to win, and one side would have to lose.

Thank you, Matt. So Davis was unwilling to accept defeat on the big issues, and so he got nothing on the small issues either. There’s nothing the winners can do if the losers refuse to compromise, except to win and impose terms.

It deserves a solid attempt, unless the victor wants the war to continue as long as possible.

J Thomas

See, it’s the point you made (and which I have made elsewhere over at Winds of Change) about “now or never” mindsets of national leaders with limited assets facing larger and more dynamic societies that I worry about in re Iran and China. Just like Japan and, to a lesser extent, Germany, I fear the religious zealots actually in control in Iran will, seeing the inevitable desire of the under twenty-five crowd (now almost one-third to one half of Iran’s population, I believe) for western lifestyles, (zealots perhaps, but not stupid–they know a trend when they see it) come to believe they are on the inevitable glide-slope to losing ultimate control and elect a “now or never” approach.

The same for China. Already one faction of the party (significant because it WAS NOT
made by the even more normally bellicose Army) is on record as saying in a “then what will become of us?” article that it would be worth it to accept 600 million casualties in a nuclear war with America if it meant the obliteration of the majority of our 300 million. Otherwise, the article went on, slowly but surely the party would lose it’s grip to the materialism of capitalism. Articles such as this one exhibit much of the same attitude as old Imperial Rome held versus merchant-trader/mercantilist Carthage. I am afraid that just as Rome thought it could not afford to co-exist with a dynamic society like Carthage, China will eventually draw the same conclusion about the US.

Such attitudes as are held by those who are willing to risk a win or extinction strategy
are like those of the famous Mr. Toad of Toad Hall in “The Wind in the Willows.” When arrested after his “wild ride” occasioned by stealing a shiny motor-car and going joy-riding, and facing a long, long sentence, he declaimed: ” It is the end of the world! Or at least it is the end of Toad, which amounts to the same thing for me.”

….“now or never” mindsets of national leaders with limited assets facing larger and more dynamic societies that I worry about in re Iran and China.

China is the larger and more dynamic society. But we can hope they don’t think they need a nuclear war with us.

Iran doesn’t have to attack first unless they believe we’re going to attack them. Even then, the disparity in strength is too big. They know they can’t win a war with us, so they have to persuade us not to attack. A nuclear deterrent might scare us, but it’s risky because it scares us too much — we might persuade ourselves they’d commit national suicide by trying to nuke us, and that might get us to attack.

They claim they aren’t trying to get a nuke. It’s rational for them not to, though it’s also rational for them to claim they aren’t if they are. But their cover story actually makes good sense. They really are heading to run out of oil in 20 years or so, and it didn’t make sense for them to burn oil that they could get $100/barrel for, to make their electricity. To have a functioning nuclear power grid in 20 years they need to start now. And they need to hide their nuclear sites from us because we’re likely to bomb them.

Their supreme religious leader has told them not to make nuclear weapons. We say their government is controlled by that guy, who gets his temporal authority from people who believe he’s pious. We don’t have a good western analogy to that, but what would happen if the Pope told the world that it’s the purest evil to make nukes, and then the Vatican made nukes? He controls the iranian government because people believe in him, he tells the iranian government not to make nukes, the iranian government makes nukes. You can have it both ways, but you have to work at it.

I can’t really see the iranians being scared enough of us to attack until after we finish collapsing and are on the way back up. Likewise china.

Be careful about disinformation. Would a chinese communist authority publish a paper that said the chinese communist party will inevitably lose market share unless they get into a nuclear war? Wouldn’t that be like a prominent GOP party source saying publicly that the GOP is doomed forever unless we start a war with china? Prominent GOP hacks would never say in public that the GOP is doomed. It’s suspect that a prominent chinese communist would say that.

John Quiggin:

You’re certainly right about the Cuban Crisis, although the Soviets HAD to know that the shootdown of one of our reconnaissance aircraft during the stand-off would be interpreted as a provocation and thus in this single instance at least one could accuse them of risky and irresponsible behavior–although I chalk that up to the “10%” in any bureaucracy who “never get the word,” just as American naval forces were forcing Soviet subs to the surface despite Kennedy and McNamera issuing orders not to. No, what I am talking about are those who actually thought that a nuclear war could be fought and “won.” There is a considerable literature and Soviet documents that indicate that many in the Soviet military never bought into the entire concept of MAD and that the only thing that constrained them was the belief that, given our range of weapons systems and distribution of forces in conjunction with our allies–they might actually “loose.” Remember after the fall of the wall, findings in East Germany revealed that they had thousands of street signs pre-manufactured with new street names for W. Berlin and tens of thousands of campaign medals struck off to award to those participating the victorious “liberation” of Europe. Only people totally removed from the realities of nuclear war would go to the trouble of doing such things. I would note that no such counterpart anticipatory medals or street signs for a post-nuclear conquered Soviet Union have ever existed in the West……

J Thomas

As an ex-USAF type who sat on top of nuclear weapons for a living from time to time while on alert in England in the late sixties and early seventies I can attest from personal experience that from our end we were far more worried that, due to multiple checks and redundancies in the command structure, we would never get the “GO CODE” in time before a Soviet SS#20 came stumbling by. And all this even if things worked as advertised–which they rarely do–even within our own command structure.

I would also point out that while during the Cold War many, many unarmed reconnaissance aircraft of ours were shot down with great loss of life by both the Soviets and the PRC, not once was a Soviet or Chinese reconnaissance aircraft downed by gunfire by the Western powers–let alone with loss of life. It was the North Koreans who violated international law and in a technical act of war seized a US naval vessel in international waters by armed assault with loss of life, not the other way round. And I would remind you that it was the Soviets who rejected Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” confidence-building proposal of mutual reconnaissance flights–not the other way round. I think you’re looking for psychopaths in all the wrong places……

J Thomas

MAD was designed by McNamera around what he(McNamera) thought would deter HIM, if he were a Soviet. It posited a force sufficient to cause a 25% attrition of the Soviet Armed forces, industrial capacity and population, respectively. Only problem with that is that while that might be enough to deter McNamera, would it have indeed deterred the Soviets? History provides a guide here. In order to preserve the Communist party Lenin, at the treaty of Brest-Litovisk, gave away 98% of Russia’s steel mills, 89%of her working coal mines, and 20% of her most educated and productive population. So what would give one confidence that a loss of 25% of ANYTHING would deter committed ideologues? And conversations with Russian bureaucrats “in the know”
post collapse of the SU seemed to confirm that MAD was not a limiting factor.

Remember, the concept upon which MAD was based required a destruction of national muscle and bone sufficient to deter even a side with distinct superiority of weapons at any given time because of the shock of unacceptable losses even in victory. In short, the beauty of MAD from McNamera’s point of view was that it allowed for aysmetrical force postures which meant that, beyond a certain point, the US did not have to compete in the arms race, saving pressure on the budget. Kissinger’s desperate SALT efforts were a recognition that the Soviets did not buy into the logic of MAD and that only by keeping the opposing forces at relative parity could the Soviets be deterred. SALT was a tacit recognition that MAD was a failed concept unrecognized/honored by the Soviets.

Virgil, you can say that the soviets were not deterred by MAD, and yet every time we threatened them with nuclear war they backed down.

Your recent posts to me read like a series of non sequiturs. Sure, israel and north korea attacked mostly-unarmed US spy ships, leading us to stop sending them in unprotected. The USSR was weak and they knew it; they didn’t want us to know where all their stuff was all the time. I sure don’t see how Brest-Litovsk compares. The bolsheviks agreed to give up stuff which they reasonably promptly got back. It was a controversial move that got them breathing time they needed. But after something is nuked you don’t get it back. Different context entirely.

SALT was a recognition that we had kept increasing our nuclear force by default, without any thought to how big it needed to be, and we got ourselves a face-saving method to quit. Note that after SALT the USSR was still deterred. We couldn’t quit building new nukes unless the USSR quit too, or else another politician would try Kennedy’s ruse and claim there was a missile gap.

I claim that MAD succeeded in preventing world war between the Warsaw Pact versus NATO etc. While you seem to be saying tht it failed to do so. I’m really not sure how to proceed here.

Virgil, I suspect that you and I are simply ideologically incompatible on this topic.

Note that britain, france, china, india, and pakistan all depend on MAD and none of them has been bombed yet. Only the USA, russia, and israel attempt large numbers of nukes, and they haven’t been bombed yet either.

Note that the whole idea that iraq or iran mustn’t be allowed to get one single nuke is that MAD is completely effective on us. We are not willing to attack a nation that can destroy part of a single US city.

Note that the russians were considering a preventive attack on china, and perhaps it was us that persuaded them not to, and pretty soon china had enough nukes that the USSR negotiated a more-or-less peace with them rather than fight.

I have a suspicion that you have confused a part of the MAD idea. If some enemy were to nuke us and destroy a quarter of the USA, would we surrender? No, we’d hit them back as hard as we could. But if we saw a chance to completely destroy an enemy and lose only 1/4 of the USA in return, would we do it? Absolutely not. We only invade foreign countries when it looks like a cakewalk. And the same with the USSR and russia. If we attacked them they’d fight back until they couldn’t fight any longer. But would they attack us? No. They never did.

Our conventional forces in europe were never adequate to stop a Warsaw pact advance, until toward the end. We had the idea we’d fall back and make them take unacceptable losses. And we said we’d use tactical nukes, and their own doctrine said that any use of nukes would inevitably escalate to total nuclear war. Even though they probably could have reached the west atlantic coast, the russians never attacked. Maybe they just didn’t want to? However the details went, they didn’t think the rewards were worth the cost.

And it does no good to say that the arms race was useless in that both sides had more than enough weaponry to destroy each other at much lower levels. The point is, the Soviets believed that “size matters” and what we are talking about is deterrence seen in the psychological eye of the beholder.

Well, we had so many nukes that we ran out of targets, we were reduced to targetting *crossroads*. We had a collection of military contractors whose prosperity required that we continue spending enough to increase our nuclear arsenal. And the doctrine was that it didn’t matter how utterly we destroyed the USSR while they destroyed us, what mattered was only what we thought the russians thought. Sweet. And if we cut back on new nukes all by our lonesome then it would become a campaign issue. “The incumbent let us get another missile gap!” What really mattered was what US voters thought.

But in reality, it truly didn’t matter whether we destroyed every isolated railroad bridge in russia, along with all their cities and towns and rail yards. We did have enough stuff there for MAD to work. If you want to say that MAD doctrine called for us to stop making nukes at a tenth or a twentieth or a fiftieth of the level and we didn’t, OK, no problem. There was an unknown chance that MAD would not have worked, that what we did might not have worked. If the wrong russians were convinced it was OK to lose 25% of everything, they might just as easily get convinced they have saboteurs in the USA who have disabled all our missiles and they can attack at will. If they were willing to pay some private group in the USA to do that, is there a chance they’d find one who’d try to convince them it was done? You bet.

When you get right down to it, if you don’t want your cities destroyed there’s no substitute for peace.

Our bone of contention is that I am of the opinion (and I think the literature supports me on this) that if the Soviets thought they could have launched a “winning” first-strike that would have cost them “only” 25% of their population, they would have. Remember, it depends on WHICH 25% would have been lost, the nomenklatura or the Turkmanians.

That cuts both ways, of course. If a Democratic administration could handle a really troublesome foreign situation while losing only texas and the South south of north carolina plus alaska and say idaho, well, where’s the downside?

But a GOP administration that had the chance to lose new york and massachusetts etc would really need to look at their remaining tax base….

The Battle-Management Ballistic Missile radar near Moscow was targeted with NINETY-FOUR (94) warheads.

Ninety four because they weren’t sure about the precision? So how far away were those nomenklatura, that they’d be sure they’d be unbombed?

I can easily believe Zbigniew Brzezinski told that story. It’s kind of like Kahn’s story, “You don’t have a war plan, all you have is a sort of horrible spasm!”. Of course he wanted to tell the world he was an expert on russians and the military was doing it all wrong, but were we actually sparing 75% of the white russians? No way.

Here’s the story I believe. Our nuclear contractors were producing new nuclear devices at a rate that was comfortable for them. It wasn’t that our military planners looked at new maps of russia and decided which new places needed bombing and asked for that many bombs. It was the contractors decided how many bombs to make, and congress provided the money, and then the military guys looked at the maps and figured out places they could target with them. The site you mentioned couldn’t possibly deserve 94 hits, except that we had that many bombs extra. Not like we had market forces to tell us how many bombs to make.

And, btw, we DID cut back on the nukes “all on our lonesome ” during the Carter years. Only problem was the SU didn’t follow suit and Carter’s last defense budget showed an increase reversing three budget reductions.

Sure. It wasn’t an arms race, since it didn’t matter how many bombs either side had. We finally noticed how expensive it was getting and cut back, and the russians who were even less sensitive to market forces than us, kept going. and then Carter had to build back up again or he’d have some Republican claim there was a missile gap and win the election that way. A couple of bureaucracies playing “status quo”. Luckily, neither of them had their status quo involve actually using the nukes.