Controversy

I posted about how much I enjoyed a biography of haig based on the ‘unsanitised’ papers held by the awm and got pasted by others about it. There is huge dislike for critical history against minor factual errors, driving people to false in unum false in omnibus.

Lots of ww2 vintage Australians loathe Churchill, for reasons unrelated to why British working classes hate Churchill.

The more ww1 history I read, the less I think it was about the kaiser and the more I think it was about the decline of the Austro Hungarian empire against rampant Serbian/slav nationalism and opportunistic politics left and right. If the tzar had kept to himself, would the Finland train have happened… its counterfactuals all the way down.

I’m in two minds about nuclear power. On the one hand, it makes an awful lot of sense from an air quality and climate change perspective. On the other hand, it’s unclear if human neurological wiring is capable of effectively managing kind of extreme low probability, but extreme high impact, risks posed by nuclear energy.

Chernobyl I am willing to write off as Soviets being Soviet; Three Mile Island I’m willing to write off as a teething problem caused by naive ignorance of the true dangers of a comparatively new technology. Fukushima, however, is something different. Nuclear power was well understood when the Fukushima plant was built and the Japanese have a reputation for being one of the most detail-oriented, well-managed, cultures in the world. Despite this, the Fukushima meltdowns still happened.

In an ideal world of competent regulators, designers, operators, and owners, I’d say convert all base load to nuclear power. In the real world of regulatory capture, greedy and/or incompetent management, and corner cutting in the name of profits, I really wouldn’t want to live in the meltdown risk area of a nuclear power plant.

If it were possible to build nuclear power plants in barren, isolated, areas where the consequences of a nuclear accident would be minimal, then by all means let’s collectively go for it. Losing a chunk of economically and ecologically unusable land to a meltdown is entirely worth the benefits in reduced emissions. Otherwise, no thanks.

Charlie W’s last sentence captures the gist of the current historical understanding on WWI. Transformational socio-political shifts rarely happen without major violence (US Civil War, French Revolution, Thirty Years War, end of the Qing, Indian independence…- all took millions of lives). In 1914 all the major states of Europe – the Ottomans included and France excepted – were wracked with both internal and external tensions. It would have taken extraordinary restraint, luck, cooperation, good management, foresight and goodwill to avoid a meltdown. The more the archives are explored and analysed, the clearer it is that all these were in short supply.

Arno Meyer’s The Survival of the Old Regime, Alexander Watson’s The Ring of Steel (Austria-Hungary and Germany), Dominic Lieven’s Toward’s the Flame (Russia), David Cannadine’s The British Aristocracy and Sandra Halperin’s War and Social Change (both on Britain), Volker Berghahn on Imperial Germany – all in different ways outline how much pressure things were under, and how panicky and irrational elites were.

What caught my eye here was not the controversial subjects but your observation that

As with expertise on the details of firearms in gun control debates, I’ve found that the greater the level of detailed knowledge on this topic, the more likely someone is to be an apologist for mass slaughter.

Isn’t that why anything becomes controversial? People with a strong interest in a particular subject, hobby, sport, industry, etc. will find a way to justify their interest regardless of the level of harm its continued practice brings on. Human beings, it seems, are far more “rationalizing” beings than “rational” beings as the internet has proven, search on any topic, no matter how obscure, and you will find a corner of the web where controversy on the topic abounds.

I can’t think of one good reason for suggesting that the Belgians were wrong to fight in 1914. I think they were absolutely justified.

They could have chosen to surrender instead, but what grounds are there for arguing that they should have done so?

Following thought: about a year and a half ago, I realized, “We don’t know how to make the Green New Deal work, yet, but we do know how to build a nuclear power system that will do the job – that’s where we have spent most of our efforts over the last 70 years.” – Getting Started: the Green New Deal. Which is discouraging.

I suspect I am one of the few people here who has actually worked for a nuclear electric generating entity (a “utility” when I started; now a GENCO under the current dysfunctional US electric economy) and on nuclear power projects.

Many of the 3rd generation nuclear power plants were built on the far distant edge of regional economic zones in lightly populated areas. Time and US exurbanization development patterns being what they are many of these site are slowly being surrounded by human dwellers/workers. You can see this clearly at Braidwood Nuclear Station when driving south on I-55 from Chicago: that plant was deliberately sited in an old strip mining zone to (a) provide space to build a cooling pond (b) because nobody would ever want to live in that zone, and is now being surrounded by subdivisions. This enormously complicates the design and operation of the Emergency Planning Zone/Evacuation Zone, and in some cases has led directly to the retirement of a plant (e.g. Zion Nuclear Station – the Wikipedia article is not correct on the fundamental driver of the closure of that plant).

This means any new generation of nuclear plants would have to be sited in the absolute middle of nowhere to avoid the same cycle occurring again during their 60-year lifespan. So my question to ‘more nuclear plants!’ advocates is this: are you personally willing to spend the 3 years in trade school , or 6-year hitch in the Navy, it takes to become a candidate for a nuclear plant operator job, then move to Nowheresville, Empty State and live/work there for 40 years as a plant operator? You’ll earn a good buck (and historically a good pension, although the Mitt Romneys of the world have done their best to take that away), but you will never be able to move more anywhere more than an hour drive from work, standard workweek is 50 hours but during maintenance turnarounds and problem periods will be 80 hours or more [1], and you will never get that big promotion to HQ in Chicago or Dallas. Howabout it?

Strangely the topic gets changed whenever I bring up that physical reality of operating nuclear power plants.

[1] 100+ hour workweeks used to be common in the 1970s and 80s but are now frowned upon by the NRC and INPO.

“World War I was a pointless slaughter”

Pointless is an ethical judgement. If we compare this to WW2, then one can say that anti-nazism was an just cause (and therefore not pointless), but then nazism evidently wasn’t so from the point of view of the axis powers it was pointless ultimately.
On the other hand from an axis imperialist point of view, from their point of view WW2 was the last chance at building a proper empire and world domination, in fact axis power failed and became american satellite states.

So the pointlessness of the war depends mostly on what are the moral standards you are comparing it to.

On the other hand, if we ask if it was preventable or an historical necessity, in some sense everything that has yet to happen is preventable, and everything that has already happened was an historical necessity, but I think that WW1 was the natural conclusion of european imperialism, so to a large degree was preordinated; sure if people acted differently they could prevent it, but people acted the way they did because it was the natural behaviour for them, and this behaviour depended on what up to that point worked during their life.

Nuclear power: fortunately we’re now only 20 years away from economic and safe fusion power… as we have been for the last fifty years.

I suppose it’s pretty boring to just say that I agree with both opinions, but hey, sometimes boring is right. A lot of the “justification” of WW1 seems to me to be post hoc stories about how it enabled this or that development in international politics that we now think is good, but there’s no reason to think that some counterfactual timeline in which WW1 doesn’t happen wouldn’t have brought about some similarly good or even perhaps better results. Evaluated in its own context, it was clearly a catastrophic multisided failure of international diplomacy, put 20 million or so people in the ground, and laid the seeds for an even more appalling conflict just 20 years later; it’s not hard to imagine that absent such a conflagration we might have gotten to a more civilized world faster.

On the nuclear side of things:

This means any new generation of nuclear plants would have to be sited in the absolute middle of nowhere to avoid the same cycle occurring again during their 60-year lifespan. So my question to ‘more nuclear plants!’ advocates is this: are you personally willing to spend the 3 years in trade school , or 6-year hitch in the Navy, it takes to become a candidate for a nuclear plant operator job, then move to Nowheresville, Empty State and live/work there for 40 years as a plant operator?

Even granting the premise here for the sake of argument, this question doesn’t prove anything. First, people routinely move to all sorts of remote places for much less serious reasons than “a well-paid job.” Rural America is certainly depopulating but there are still plenty of people in it, so I don’t think the dearth of candidates would be a problem. If we cared very much about such things, we could subsidize nuclear training school (well, we already do via the Navy but we could do it in a civilian context) and we could pay them enough to attract people who would be fine living in remote areas. You could even offer them reduced tours of duty (say, 25 years in a kind of Civilian Nuclear Corps) followed by a comfortable retirement during which they could live somewhere else; you don’t need that many of these people so we can afford to be lavish to them. But second, whether or not I myself am willing to be one such person should be irrelevant as a public policy question. I’m not willing to be an IRS agent or a doctor, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have IRS agents or doctors.

An obvious problem with nuclear is that it entrenches the power of the mining industry.

While I agree that the first world war was an abominable catastrophe, I cannot agree that the countries Germany invaded should not have resisted. Mark Twain’s forecast in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, was not quite right; he got the barbed wire, but not the machine guns, and over-emphasized high explosives turning combatants into “homogeneous protoplasm”.

Here’s a recent article from Ars Technica on why nuclear power remains expensive and thus uncompetitive. The small modular reactors that Nuscale may soon bring on line won’t change the game.

As for gun control, I’d cheerfully trade restrictions on assault rifles for general adoption of California’s rather modest regulation of handguns. These handy little engines of death take far more lives, considering both crime and suicide, than the showy emblems of masculinity and apocalyptic fantasies.

Opinions about past events are inevitably colored by present events. The damage wrought by Chernobyl, as Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival shows, was not only covered up by Soviet officials but by the international nuclear lobby in general,beginning with the U.N – which has weirdly harnessed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to its health organizations, effectively putting nuclear power lobbyists in charge – leading the way. The argument about coal versus nuclear is not just about the products and their effects themselves, but about the international regulation of the power sources. And frankly, on that level, nuclear power still sucks. Thus, who or what is telling Japan that it cannot dump a million gallons of highly radioactive water in the Pacific, water from the Fukushima disaster? Nobody. Nobody is stopping it. If coal destroys the atmosphere and nuclear destroys the oceans, well, the planet is not going to be in good shape. The advantage of coal is on the level of regulation, which can operate just as it did with the release of ozone. Nuclear accidents, on the other hand, are governed, still, by no protocol – making disasters which can be well contained into disasters that disperse over large areas. I would love nuclear power advocates to step up to the plate and call for a very high level of global regulation for nuclear power, but the coincidence of nuclear power advocacy and the deregulatory agenda of the right and neoclassical economics is depressingly predictable.
https://www.dw.com/en/tepco-fukushima-contaminated-water/a-55334567#:~:text=The%20Japanese%20government%20has%20reportedly,groups%2C%20locals%20and%20neighboring%20nations.

In that sense WW1 was as pointless as any war, just on a much bigger scale.

When asking whether WW1 was pointless, one ought to ask: for whom?

Austria-Hungary was trying to use the war to maintain its integrity as a Great Power. In retrospect, a long, grinding war was a bad way to do that. A short war would probably at best have been neutral, but a short war with Serbia alone would likely have not been possible (leaving the moral question aside).

Germany was worried about losing economic ground to France and Russia and diplomatic isolation. We can now recognize that Germany’s Great Power status was not contingent on winning a big European war; it lost two, within 25 years, and remained a Great Power. Big mistake here.

France and Russia were attacked by Germany, so they didn’t really have an option.

Britain I think made the right call that unchecked growth of German militarism wouldn’t lead to a new, stable order, but simply growing instability as Germany would consider itself to be insufficiently ‘respected’ on the world stage, would continue to try and outbuild the Royal Navy, and moreover would spend greater and greater efforts to incorporate new conquered territories, costing resources that it could only get by further conquests.

The Ottoman Empire was a bit stuck. Russia was a traditional enemy, France and Britain were cool at best and looking to pick off more of the Empire at worst. Germany was a decent choice of ally in isolation, as it had few territorial claims on Ottoman territory. Letting Germany go down would simply put the Ottoman Empire next on the chopping block. On the other hand, the same factors gave it a tremendous strategic vulnerability to the Entente. Neutrality, however hard, was the right choice here.

Italy made the right decision to stay out in 1914 (Cadorna was itching to go to war, though). In 1915 there was a sense among some that picking the ‘right moment’ to join could mean the difference between victory and defeat for the Entente, and so would reap tremendous rewards at relatively little cost. Obviously wrong, and Romania made the same mistake a year later.

For the United States: Its interests largely aligned with Britain in this case; checking German militarism was necessary to maintain its security in the long run.

Ray Davis @14 writes “The American Civil War was not begun to ‘end slavery’ (Union leaders even offered to support an explicit pro-slavery constitutional amendment to prevent the war), but blatantly was instigated by the desire to defend and extend slavery free from the aggro of the non-slave states.”

The question that immediately should be asked and correctly answered is, why wasn’t explicit pro-slavery support from the federal government satisfactory? The answer here, that the southerners were annoyed by abolitionists, is not at all satisfactory. Preventing the extension of slavery to the territories and new conquests, breaking the censorship and other political repressions in the South, majority rule in the federal government were not aggravations, but a long-term program to strangle slavery.

Like the abolitionists who convinced themselves that the Bible was anti-slavery, those abolitionists who convinced themselves the Constitution could be read as at least neutral on slavery (usually by promoting the Declaration of Independence to a principle of free government) were about as close to objectively wrong as you can be in something so complex and grave.

The proposed Corwin amendment simply promised to state explicitly what the majority of people, including legal-minded Republicans like Lincoln, already believed was Constitutional. What the Corwin amendment gave, the repeal of the Corwin amendment would take away. When the Republicans won a plurality that overcame the minority rule biases structured into the Constitution, the writing was on the wall for slavery. That’s why the Corwin amendment was not pro-slavery, but a truly meaningless symbol. Only if you think political symbols are historical causes does this really matter. That’s why this allegedly pro-slavery amendment didn’t resolve the crisis.

Being against majority rule is being for the preservation of class despite the popular will. Antebellum, that meant being for the preservation of slavery, which is a class relationship…class is defined by property in social reproduction. (A contentious thought, when the majority opinion is that class is best marked by differences in income and formal education and tastes in consumption, but still, class is like geography, it affects everything even if you imagine it’s just the way things have always been and always will.)

The Civil War was about democracy as majority, well, technically, plurality rule. That’s why I think people who prefer moralizing and social discipline of Bad Thoughts and Bad Taste have basically joined hands with Lost Cause theorists to portray the Civil War as an evil, at best a tragedy, instead of the last great bourgeois revolution. (People may argue that the early twentieth century Turkish, Chinese and especially the Mexican revolution are “great” too, if they wish.) The Thirteenth Amendment was meant to re-establish slavery, racism now is as bad as slavery, John Brown was an evil White Savior and John Wilkes Booth saved America from the racist Lincoln, etc.

The people who want to believe today’s version of democracy is just fine, so long as there’s a little tinkering, have to believe that the American Revolution must not have been democratic because they can’t admit democracy is about conquest whether overt or covert, not just then, but worse, now. They people who want to believe that all sorts of social evils can be reformed away with a little politics, trickle-down social welfare spending and the cure of Bad Souls have to believe that the civil war, and the expropriation of property on a gigantic scale, have nothing to do with ending oppressioin.

The dictionaries I have checked vary in their definitions of ‘pointless’. One suggestion is that it means ‘having no purpose’; but the people who launched the First World War did have purposes, so in that sense their actions were not pointless.

I might describe as pointless an action which has no chance of achieving its purpose (and I’m not alone in that), but it’s not clear to me that the people who launched the First World War could have known when they did so that they had no chance of achieving their purposes.

Launching a war is always wicked, but wickedness is not synonymous with pointlessness. (The only way I can figure that the wickedness of launching a war might not be clear is when it’s not clear who launched the war.)

Cranky Observer,
Thanks for your reply. I’ve (sorry) never considered what the lives of people who work in nuclear power might be like. I distinctly recall touring the Connecticut Yankee Nuclear Power Plant as a school kid. Even then, I remember thinking, woah, this isn’t far away at all. (It wasn’t.) Your comment about populations moving towards plants made me think about how it’s probably not just people, but rising sea levels headed towards many nuclear plants. Sigh.

@35

I was going to make this point but you beat me to it.

There is something so inexpressibly depressing that, over a century after the end of a war that was widely seen as a pointless, endless bloodbath at the time there are still people prepared to defend a war that, let’s not forget, was a total pointless disaster even on its own terms (it did not, fact, end German militarism, nor did it ‘make the world safe for democracy’).

Those claiming that (e.g.) Belgium had a ‘right to defend itself’ might want to remember that there was no such country as ‘Belgium’ in 1914. What there was, was the Belgian Empire (also, there was no such country as ‘France’. Instead there was the French Empire. CF also the British Empire, the Russian Empire etc.).

And which Belgian Empire was this?

It was the Belgian Empire that had, within living memory, committed one of the greatest crimes in human history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Death_toll

No one has ever, ever, ever popped up in CT comments threads to insist that the Congolese had a right to defend themselves against the Belgian onslaught, even though what the Belgians did to the Congolese was so much worse than what the Germans did to the Belgians there is simply no comparison.

The British Empire of course, were no slouches in the genocide department.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts

The French Empire was no slouch in the ‘mass murder’ department either.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-crimes-of-french-imperialism/

And as for the Russian Empire…well.

It’s also worth pointing out that Germany under the Kaiser was not a dictatorship as we understand the term: in the same sense that none of the Allies were democracies, as we would understand that word.

As I say it’s so inexpressibly depressing that there are still people (unsurprisingly British and American people: no one from Africa or India would be so stupid) prepared to defend this pointless bloodbath.

JQ@35: “neither side made any attempt to seek a negotiated peace”.

There was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 2018, which did in fact establish a negotiated peace between Russia and Germany, on terms disastrous for Russia. I think that counts.

I wondered whether there had been earlier attempts at negotiated peace; having a vague memory that there had been, but that they all collapsed because the German minimal terms were their continued occupation of their important 1914 conquests, and the British and French minimal terms were the German withdrawal from those conquests. I found what looks like a thorough account of various attempts to establish a negotiated peace, from late 1914 onwards, at https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/peace_initiatives, which includes details of confidential and public appeals for peace, and explains why neither side accepted the minimal demands of the other.

Given the actual terms of Brest-Litovsk, it looks as if the Allies were not altogether wrong to reject German offers.

Adam Roberts@28 possibly rejects the idea that a counterfactual can be legitimate, which would make writing about science fiction a rather odd way to spend time.

As to the likelihood of the counterfactual? Right now, in the twenty first century, Roberts rejects slavery as the cause of the war. He doesn’t say, Northern War of Aggression, true, but…. All that’s left is the old Lost Cause argument for the right of self-determination (and resistance to the tyranny of the majority over tariffs.) The only people who favored the North did so because of their opposition to slavery and support for democracy as majority rule. The two issues are not separable, by the way, no matter how desperate people are to condemn the North for impure motives. The Tories disliked the whole democratic project and favored the South because the CSA was the failure of democracy.

It would have been very bold of me to suggest Roberts would have favored the South as putting paid to the kind of popular democracy represented by the Republic. That suggestion really would have been a mere imputation based on nothing. Fortunately, that’s not what I said.

The ineptly-named “reason” would be far more impressive if giving a reason. Rejecting the characterization of the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution is itself delusional. There should be a hint of why anyone would make such an extreme claim. (For those not paying attention, the phrase about massive expropriation of property was such a hint, though not a subtle one.)

First of all, it’s not popular; the dominant opinion overwhelmingly implicates Germany and Austria as the “villains.”

Hm. Well, I guess I don’t know how popular the opinion is that both sides were equally at fault, nor how popular the opinion is that Germany and Austria-Hungary were the villains. Both opinions are held, I know that much, but I don’t know how widely, in either case.

Still, I think bothsidesing the First World War is more popular than bothsidesing the Second World War. Am I wrong about that also? Perhaps, but for the time being I’m going to continue on that assumption and observe where it leads.

But more pertinently, what makes “bothsidesing” the correct judgment is that every participant was gearing up for war, and the major powers were ready to step in to guarantee the security of their client states.

Again: how is that not also true of the Second World War? Why does this not justify bothsidesing the Second World War just as much as bothsidesing the First World War?

Certainly adding some useful data here, in terms of the kinds of responses putatively uncontroversial statements can elicit. If you view the Kaiser as portrayed by the most extreme Entente propagandists, and Hitler as portrayed by, say, David Irving, the German side on the two world wars would look equally worth fighting to the death. Otherwise, not so much.

I’m not viewing anybody as they were portrayed by liars, but I am asking how the Belgians were wrong to fight against the Germans in the First World War. Is the opinion that the Belgians were justified in fighting a controversial one? I can’t tell whether you accept it or reject it.

What strikes me about WWI is how many of the issues of the time are still unresolved. The world is still, a hundred years later, grappling with border conflicts stemming from the collapse of the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg empires: Former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Armenia, Syria, …

It is easily forgotten how recent an invention the nation state as we know it today is. The drive to reorder the world by nationalist terms has been a disaster in most parts of the world and still causes endless “pointless” wars.

Hidari@37 is, as they say so coyly, interesting. But even though Hidari has picked another side, I will ask why the people of Belgium are believed to be the Belgian empire.? The Congo was as I remember very specifically a personal property of Leopold. The ordinary people of Belgium (basically, the failures in the great competition of the free market, also known as “us,”) should I think have had as great an interest in overthrowing Leopold as in ousting Germans. The implication that the ordinary people of Belgium simply deserved whatever they got from both the Leopolds and the Germans seems to me to be an example of getting confused about “us” and “them.” But then, many would imagine for some reason that Leopold (and the bourgeoisie, aristocracy, land lords, military etc. etc. which is what “Leopold” means here,) was somehow benefitting the mass of the Belgian people. Again, I think this is a dubious proposition.

Mister Mr is skeptical about significance of territorial changes, as in they didn’t matter? But…The demolition of the old Ottoman Empire, with its semifeudal remnants (semifeudal for lack of a better term,) the creation of a bourgeois nation of Turkey entailed the clarification of ethnic territories, which meant the removal of the Armenians and the Greeks. Yet, the notion that the Great War which dismantled the Ottoman empire definitively was pointless inadvertently implies there was no difference between it and the secular republic of Turkey? Or even that the fall of the Ottomans was a Bad Thing? Ethnic cleansing/genocide as democracy building would seem to be an unthinkable thought, despite the historical record.

But if you manage to escape illusions about what democracy is, the failure of the Great War was the escape of the British and French and Dutch and, yes, Belgian empires. People confused about us and them find the victorious empires perpetration/perpetuation a Good Thing, which is why the Great War has defenders I think. The nearly universally held belief that the great tragedy of the Great War was the Bolshevik Revolution is another aspect of this same belief. After all, just like imperial Germany, imperial England and imperial France were democracies in the real world sense. They just weren’t retroactively, now when people want to claim that “democracy” can be fixed up with a few minor reforms that don’t require expropriating property en masse.

Still, I think bothsidesing the First World War is more popular than bothsidesing the Second World War. Am I wrong about that also?

No? I never claimed you were wrong about this.

Again: how is that not also true of the Second World War? Why does this not justify bothsidesing the Second World War just as much as bothsidesing the First World War?

You surely cannot seriously be taking my nonexhaustive description of WW1 as intended to draw equivalence to WW2, for the simple reason that a minimal amount of historical knowledge would be sufficient to discern the difference in circumstances between them. And since I don’t believe you are lacking in this knowledge, I can only assume that this is some sort of argument jiu-jitsu you are trying to pull on me, rather than an honest question.

I’m not viewing anybody as they were portrayed by liars, but I am asking how the Belgians were wrong to fight against the Germans in the First World War. Is the opinion that the Belgians were justified in fighting a controversial one? I can’t tell whether you accept it or reject it.

The correct question is not “why were the Belgians resisting the Germans?” but “why did we end up in the situation of Belgian neutrality being violated in the first place?”

“If you view the Kaiser as portrayed by the most extreme Entente propagandists, and Hitler as portrayed by, say, David Irving, the German side on the two world wars would look equally worth fighting to the death. Otherwise, not so much.”

And if you view them according to standard historiography, what would it look like?

In actual history, the Triple Entente did not fight to the death. Russia negotiated peace, Great Britain and France ceased fighting even before territories occupied by Germany had been freed. That doesn’t look like an unreasonable standard, when 1/20th of your population lives under occupation.

Or in other words, I do believe you are trivializing the very real atrocities – organized starvation, mass deportation, summary execution, forced labor, pillaging – that Germany perpetrated in occupied France (and probably Belgium, but I don’t know much about the topic), not to mention the much worse ones it perpetrated in occupied Eastern Europe.

Does that mean that France and Great Britain were morally better states, in particular in their dealings with their colonies? Of course not. Does that mean that the Peace Treaties were not colossal crimes? Of course not.

The correct moral reaction 100 years later is to condemn all, not to whitewash any of them.

Peter T@52 ignores how much WWII was the great anti-Communist crusade. Unlike WWI, which some view as a pointless catastrophe that undermined the free trade gold standard system dominating the world with no end in sight, to produce the world historic tragedy of Bolshevism (unlike Germany, blessed with the Freikorps,) WWII merely failed. It’s not like the English and the French and the Americans actually had much to do with stopping the Nazis before Moscow. After Moscow, the Germans were playing catch up with the odds against them. It took decades to drag central Europe backwards.

I asked the question ‘were the Belgians justified in fighting?’ and that’s not just a question to be discussed in a retrospective evaluation, it was the question which actually confronted the Belgians in 1914.

This question is easily answered: of course the Belgians were justified in fighting. I have never heard anyone argue otherwise.

That the question is so easily answered suggests that it’s the wrong one; interesting questions do not have simple answers like this. The Belgian resistance to German invasion, however justified, is not the thing that sparked the war, which is why I don’t understand why it’s even relevant except as some sort of generalized musing about resistance.

The problem with starting any analysis when the war is already underway is that it truncates the causal chain artificially and therefore makes it difficult to address questions of responsibility. Yes, once the war was underway the German military committed war crimes in occupied territory; there’s no real debate about this either. That’s why I’m focusing on the start and causes of the war, since the placing of the blame begins not just with the real atrocities of the war itself but with the causes, and once we’re in the realm of combat the context shifts completely. What you refer to as “bothsidesing” is, in my view, not an attempt to say that German aggression was justified, but to point out that the war, such as it was, took place within the structural context of a continental great power politics that incentivized aggression on the part of all participants, Germany and Austria-Hungary obviously included. This is not to say that I agree with the “war was inevitable” take because I think the diplomatic history demonstrates just how evitable it actually was, but that it was the specific structure of the alliance systems and the interpersonal relationships of the involved parties that made it possible for a single-point-of-failure like a political assassination to collapse the entire framework.

Or, as was stated in less prolix fashion above:

The correct moral reaction 100 years later is to condemn all, not to whitewash any of them.

This question is easily answered: of course the Belgians were justified in fighting. I have never heard anyone argue otherwise.

That the question is so easily answered suggests that it’s the wrong one; interesting questions do not have simple answers like this. The Belgian resistance to German invasion, however justified, is not the thing that sparked the war, which is why I don’t understand why it’s even relevant except as some sort of generalized musing about resistance.

My position is that in most wars, and perhaps in all wars, there is a distinction between those belligerents who launched the war and those against whom they launched it, and that (for this reason) not all of the same kinds of culpability attach to the actions of both sides. When you write that the Belgians were justified in resisting German invasion, it seems as if you are accepting this point of view, particularly when you refer to ‘the thing that sparked the war’, which suggests that identifying the action or actions which sparked the war is a relevant consideration.

If you do think that the Belgians were justified in fighting back against German invasion, do you also think that the British were justified in aiding the Belgians in fighting back against German invasion? You may think that the answers to questions like these are so obvious as not to require statement: the reason I raise them is that in my mind John Quiggin’s comments create unclarity about his position on questions of this kind.

Yes, once the war was underway the German military committed war crimes in occupied territory; there’s no real debate about this either.

The issue of war crimes by the Germans in occupied territory (in the First World War) was raised by Z, not by me; my position is that I expect both sides committed atrocities during the course of the war, because that’s typical of wars, and each side was culpable for its own atrocities because people are (by definition) culpable for their wrong actions. Typically, in a war people on both sides commit atrocities and the perpetrators on each side are culpable; typically, the initiation of a war consists of the actions of people on side and not the other and it’s people on the side that launches the war who are culpable for those actions. I think that’s true of the First World War. Perhaps that seems obvious to you. It seems obvious to me. It’s not clear whether it’s obvious to John Quiggin.

What you refer to as “bothsidesing” is, in my view, not an attempt to say that German aggression was justified …

What I refer to as ‘bothsidesing’ is not the view that aggression was justified but rather the view that both sides have the same sort of culpability for aggression.

,,, but to point out that the war, such as it was, took place within the structural context of a continental great power politics that incentivized aggression on the part of all participants, Germany and Austria-Hungary obviously included.

I agree with the general observation that wars take place in the context of structures which create incentives for aggression, and further I take the position that those structural contexts are the product of human choices and human actions for which many people are culpable, and not just people on one side. Typically, many people from many different countries are responsible for the political decisions which produce the context for a decision to launch a war. That’s so common that it’s not a distinctive feature of the First World War, and it’s specifically and emphatically true of the Second World War as well. On the other hand, although the decision to launch a war can only be understood in its context, it’s still a decision for which the people who make it are (typically) culpable, and it’s typically a decision made by people on one side of the war which ensues and not the other. If the Allies had made some different choices in the 1920s and 1930s, it’s possible they could have avoided the context in which the Axis launched the Second World War, and if they did make bad choices then they are culpable for them, but that doesn’t change the facts that it was the Axis and not the Allies who launched the war and the Axis and not the Allies who bear the culpability for that, and that the Allies were justified in fighting back. I don’t think, however, that makes the Second World War unusual. I think that makes it typical. I think something similar is true of most wars (perhaps all wars), specifically including the First World War. Even if you agree that all of that is so obvious as not to need stating, it remains the case that John Quiggin’s comments create unclarity about his position on this point.

@Tm 56

“This doesn’t prove that the nation state is the right solution, only that it still seems to be the only game in town. Hopefully the European experiment in transnational governance will change this logic.”

It depends on what you mean with “nation state”:
If, for example, the EU becomes more and more important and EU states lose sovereignity to the point that we have an USE, we end up with a single big nation state instead than many smaller ones.
If on the other hand by nation state we mean ethnically omogeneous nation state, this is a big tricky: ethnicities are a fuzzy thing. Is the USA a single ethnicity nation? In some sense yes and in some sense no.
The same could be said of Italy where, until recently, there was a big separatist movement in the north, that wanted to prove that there was also an ethnic difference between northeners and southeners (I still remember Bossi, the main politician of the Lega of the time, asserting that italian northeners are celts, lol).

By this I mean that the concept of ethnicity was indeed implied in the concept of the sovereign nation state, but that concept is largelly illusory, or perhaps better largely a social construct.

Hidari@60 An invaded country has the right to pursue the armed struggle. What is the point of limiting this to colonial powers, whether stronger or weaker? The invasion of Belgium was not the cause of WWI but an event in the war. It is represented as the cause of the English entry into the war, but we need not take that very seriously.

I think your most controversial opinion is that interest rates will be zero forever. Being an economic forecast it is almost certainly wrong, but I don’t see interest rates going up any time soon either. A massive switch to Keynesianism or even (god forbid) to MMT might do it.

@steven t johnson 62 and J-D 64

The way I see things, the cultural/social construction side is a byproduct of a deeper level (good old base VS superstructure theory). I think that a good analogy for it is Freud’s idea of conscious/unconscious:
– The superstructure, the cultural factors, is equivalent to the conscious (ant in facts in some real way it is actually the social conscious, the way a society sees itself); but this “self perception” of society is also largely a consequence of the “base”.
– The “base”, that is mostly made of economic relationships, is aquivalent to the “unconscious”, it is where the real pushes (equivalent to the “drives” in Freud’s theory) come.

So there are two symmetrical errors in my view: the most common one is that of taking something that pertenes to the superstructure, such as ethnicities, as if it was really part of the base, which it isn’t (this is what I meant when I wrote that ethnicities are an illusion); the second is to assume a smoke filled room and a conspiracy of capitalists and, in practice, to assume that the “drives” that come from the base/unconscious are acted consciously by some rather evil dudes (evil dudes exist in the world but it is IMO wrong to assome that everything that happens happens as planned by someone, this isn’t how the world works).

“If we must assert the importance of the ideal over reality, I would say that outlawing war would require a world government that usurps the sovereignty of nations. It would be the annihilation of all nations as previously understood. The implication of your approach I think would be that the man in the street would be as outraged as the ruling classes at the murder of their nation.”
Yes I think a lot of people would be very outraged by it, included a lot of working class people, in facts I think that this is the reason right wing dudes can pretend to be populists.

I’ll have a stab at the question of the “pointless” war. I usually cringe when people describe specific wars as “senseless” or “needless” with an ostensibly critical intention. Wars usually are waged for a purpose and are not “senseless” from the point of view of the leaders ordering them. Those purposes are almost always morally indefensible. Whether a war is “pointless” or “senseless” therefore is beside the point when your intention is to express a moral judgment; or worse, it obscures the actual moral case one ought to be making . (J-D 31 I think agrees).

Nevertheless, let’s take the “pointless” argument at face value, from a historian’s perspective. A war might be seen as pointless if it has no discernible objective (from whose point of view, one obviously needs to ask), or fails to reach that objective, fails to resolve the underlying political conflict(s) that provoked it. An obvious example is the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s.

In the case of WWI, clearly the political conflicts were not resolved, or there wouldn’t have been another, even more horrible world war within a generation. The Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires disintegrated as a result of the war but really it had already been obvious that their time was up. Their elites failed to enact the reforms that might have enabled a less bloody transition to the new era. The Habsburg elites especially hoped to use the war to preserve their hegemony in the Balkans, an objective that was already unrealistic. In that sense, their aggressive stance versus Serbia, which triggered the war, was pointless. It was in nobody’s real interest, just a foolish act of chauvinism. Neither did the German, Ottoman and Russian empires reach any war objectives. What about the ostensible victors France and UK? The war was a struggle for hegemony between the European powers and essentially, they all ended up as losers – the US was established as the new hegemon.

It is obviously not the case that the war changed nothing, like the Iraq-Iran war that just reaffirmed the status quo. To the contrary it caused or catalyzed huge political changes. But I think there was a strong feeling after the war that everybody had lost, at least among the more reasonable, sober politicians and intellectuals (some of whom were now ashamed of their former rapturous war enthusiasm). That the war was foremost a failure of civilization.

And that failure is reflected in how we still take the “right to self determination” i.e., the right to create an ethno-state, as supported by active segregationist Wilson, and something that can only be achieved through deportation and forced assimilation – as if it actually were something respectable.

*I’ll admit it narrowly beats extermination or apartheid within the same borders.

I’ll have a stab at the question of the “pointless” war. I usually cringe when people describe specific wars as “senseless” or “needless” with an ostensibly critical intention. Wars usually are waged for a purpose and are not “senseless” from the point of view of the leaders ordering them. Those purposes are almost always morally indefensible. Whether a war is “pointless” or “senseless” therefore is beside the point when your intention is to express a moral judgment; or worse, it obscures the actual moral case one ought to be making . (J-D 31 I think agrees).

Nevertheless, let’s take the “pointless” argument at face value, from a historian’s perspective. A war might be seen as pointless if it has no discernible objective (from whose point of view, one obviously needs to ask), or fails to reach that objective, fails to resolve the underlying political conflict(s) that provoked it. An obvious example is the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s.

Consider, by way of contrast, the First Silesian War. Frederick the Great had an objective which was fairly clearly defined and a plan which was realistically calculated, as demonstrated by the fact that he achieved more or less what he sought out to achieve with costs that would not have exceeded what he was prepared to pay (or to have other people pay for him). To that extent his action in launching the war was the opposite of what people typically call pointless. It’s posssible that a case could be made that what he did was pointless in terms of a more profound evaluation, but it wasn’t pointless in the most obvious and unambiguous way.

The same could be said of many acts of brigandage, and that’s essentially what Frederick the Great was engaged in, a form of brigandage on a larger scale; and brigandage is wicked, regardless of whether we assess it as pointless.

However, while brigandage is wicked, resistance to brigandage is not wicked. Therefore, if you’re going to evaluate the First Silesian War, it’s important to be clear about whether you are including both the brigandage and the resistance to brigandage in the scope of your evaluation without distinguishing between them. The distinction between them doesn’t stop being important no matter what faults or crimes might be committed by those who resist. Both sides may be guilty of something, but they’re not both guilty in all the same ways.

The actions of the people who launched the First World War were not as well calculated, and their objectives not as clearly defined, as those of Frederick the Great in the First Silesian War, and that means there’s a stronger case for describing them as pointless, although still not an unambiguous one; but it’s not those factors which are fundamental for evaluation.

Tm@74 is wrong again, though no doubt it is annoying to be called out on so many errors and much more gratifying to pretend it was all irrelevant. The chain of equivocations nation=nation-state=ethnically homogeneous=idealization agreed upon by enough people is bad enough, but simultaneously believing that most political entities are not proper nation-states yet “we” all think in terms of European nation-states suggests it is not the world that is confused, but Tm.

The old joke was that nineteenth century nationalism was the belief that every language should have its own flag. That this meant its own army is de-emphasized, to put it mildly. Given that “ethnicity” can mean different alphabets, so that Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak are three different ethnicities, or Hindi and Urdu are different languages for different ethnicities rather than religions. Then there’s the concept of ethnicity as a development of the notion of the tribe, where all the members are supposed to share a common descent into a common history…except for the ones that center their ethnicity in a common inheritance of a specific land like Kosovo or Palestine.

If anything the nineteenth century nationalism was much more diverse in its supposed universal notion of homogeneity, as some deliberately omitted religion/upheld secularism while others defined themselves partly as religious. Which was the universal notion of nation-state mindlessly copied by all humanity that “we” have failed so miserably to rise above?