WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
9mo ago
so this is actually one of the really interesting parts of Wages of Destruction. It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization. I'm recalling from memory but if i recall correctly
- an ongoing housing crisis sucking up peoples meager wages
- bizarre financialization schemes to trick people into buying vehicles they'd never get
- the inability to create a decent radio that could compete in the international market
- the average german still being so poor that their diet lacks sufficient protein
- lack of mechanization on farms
- large swaths of the economy still being literally small land owning peasant farmers
- subsequently an obsessions with land inheritance laws as early at 1933.
- price controls on both ends of the market for the purpose of political support.
- lack of enough labour for the farms requiring requisition/corvee labour/slavery
- still not enough food to create a net calorie balance
and finally not enough steel for everything. there's just not enough steel for construction, fortifications, tanks, airplanes, ships, & ammunition. Let alone the domestic economy. And so one of the central ideas in Wages of Destruction is that the Nazi state uses this scarcity of steel and turns it into a means of political control. Dolling out steel here and there to favour one industry/military faction over another.
The Nazi's take this total control and use it to focus everything into one area or another the result is visible, legible, & shocking. But it's going all out for short term sugar highs over and over again. And the underlying health of the economy is nowhere near that of the US, UK, or France. And it doesn't have the comparative scale of the capacity of the USSR.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
There's also a few Hmong in French Guiana. Instead of bringing old allied Hmong to the metropole the French basically looked around, found an equivalent jungle geography, and sent them there. And instead of getting culture-bound diseases they flourished instead!
There's also several large enclaves of Mennonites/Anabaptists. I recall specifically in Bolivia and Argentina but there are probably some elsewhere.
Brazil used to have a sizeable Japanese diaspora in the millions.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
My intuition is that it's
- an internal propaganda offensive to shore up internal support. Something to avoid the grinding stalemate narrative.
- a social taboo coup. US has restrictions on it's equipment being used to attack into Russian territory. Perhaps this offensive is intended to normalize the idea of fighting on Russia soil itself until the US gives permission to use donated equipment to strike inside Russia territory. There are many cases of Russia artillery attacking target in Ukraine and then scooting across the border to avoid retaliation. Get permission now and normalize the idea before the US presidential dice roll.
- There is no politics involved and it was just an intended to draw away Russian troops from further south. Russia has been slowly but successfully grinding forward there.
but mostly, be skeptical of anyone saying with certainty they know what it is.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
Likewise for me.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
I'd like to apologize to the critics of my post. Their comments deserve to be read as well.
It's a bad habit of mine to write in a fit of passion and then find myself unable to find the time or willpower to respond to critiques of my comments. But really, if you read my comment please also make time to read other people's criticism's of my case.
Should we bring back thee & thou?
We should.
As George Fox points out in his classic book titled
A Battle-Door For Teachers & Professors To Learn Singular & Plural; You to Many, and Thou to One: Singular One, Thou; Plural Many, You.
Wherein is shewed forth by Grammer, or Scripture Examples, how several Nations and People have made a distinction between Singular and Plural. And first, In the former part of this Book, Called The English Battle-Door, may be seen how several People have spoken Singular and Plural; As the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Susanchites, the Dehavites, the Elamites, the Temanites, the Naomites, the Shuites, the Buzites, the Moabites, the Hivites, the Edomites, the Philistines, Amalekites, the Sodomites, the Hittites, the Medianites, & c.
Also, In this Book is set forth Examples of the Singular and Plural, about Thou, and You, in several Languages, divided into distinct Battle-Doors, or Formes, or Examples; English, Latine, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Caldee, Syriack, Arabick, Persiack, Ethiopick, Samaritan, Coptick, or Egyptick, Armenian, Saxon, Welch, Mence, Cornish, French, Spanish, Portugal, High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, Danish, Bohemian, Slavonian: And how Emperors and others have used the Singular word to One; and how the word You came from the Pope.
Likewise some Examples, in the Polonian, Lithvanian, Irish, and East-Indian, together with the Singular and Plural words, thou and you, in Sweedish, Turkish, Muscovian, and Curlandian, tongues.
In the latter part of this Book are contained severall bad unsavoury Words, gathered forth of certain School-Books, which have been taught Boyes in England, which is a Rod and a Whip to the School-Masters in England and elsewhere who teach such Books
We should value our language.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
The problem with trying to make language rules explicit for students is that it violates two department's inclinations.
Linguistics majors are predisposed to fetishize change. They find language stability boring. Stability isn't why they got into this niche subject.
Meanwhile Education majors find education programs that work tremendously boring. They hate Direct Instruction, the 'Banking Model' of education, and they hate repetition. Doing sentence diagrams day after day isn't what inspired them to get into teaching.
What happens when you combine a group that finds teaching sentence structure boring with a group that thinks teaching kids grammar at all is inherently evil is that each group feeds into the other. The teachers are given an worldview that says they never need to teach sentence diagrams, they don't need to repeatedly explain the same concepts over and over again, and they don't have to awkwardly watch as some kids get it and some don't. The teachers in turn advocate for the linguist worldview. A Gordian knot is born.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
One of the things Scott does not bring up is the lack of an easy narrative from the anti-woke right to allow people to an easy out. If you want victory over your opponents then make it narratively easy for people to recuse themselves until your opponent's coalition is miniscule. Give them plausible deniability, even if it's hollow. Make it as cheap as possible to defect from a coalition.
Your inspiration should be Winston Churchill fighting on behalf of Eastern Front legend General Erich Von Manstein to get him cleared of war crimes charges.
Within living memory of the war itself America & Europe constructed a narrative that recast Nazi's on the Eastern Front into Simple Soldiers merely Doing Their Duty, unaware of the war crimes amidst them. Even the former SS members were recast as what David Glantz describes "above reproach, knights engaged in a crusade to defend Western civilization against the barbaric hordes of Bolshevism". Which is bullshit of course, and to be clear Glantz arguing against this absurdity. But consider the power of the following narrative in giving people an out from their previous enmeshment with a regime.
The German army, or Wehrmacht, fought a "clean" and valiant war against the Soviet Union, devoid of ideology and atrocity. The German officer caste did not share Hitler's ideological precepts and blamed the SS and other Nazi paramilitary organizations for creating the war of racial enslavement and extermination that the conflict became.
The German Landser, or soldier, as far as conditions allowed, was generally paternal and kind to the Soviet citizens and uninterested in Soviet Jewry. That the German military lost this war was due in no way to its battlefield acumen, but to a combination of external factors, first and foremost Hitler's decisions. According to this myth, the defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front constituted a tragedy, not just for Germans, but for Western civilization.
For decades that narrative gave people an excuse. It took until the 90's for Germans to confront the reality of what the Wehrmacht did. But in that crucial period after the war there was a narrative path for millions of people to distance themselves from evil. Interested WW2 amateurs today decry the existence of wehraboo's and how many Japanese and West German officials were former members of their respective regimes but when I compare what happened with de-baathification it sure looks pretty efficacious.
and what's remarkable is that Scott directly links to Yarvin but only regarding Yarvin's coining of the term Brown Scare. And merely linking to Yarvin is a massive risk to Scott's reputability. But in spite of taking that risk he avoids the more relevant to the point at hand which is that Yarvin, from the ultra-right, makes a similar case for avoiding cycles of retaliation by means of giving people an out.
"There's a funny fact about regime change. The federal republic of Germany is still paying pensions not only to retired Stasi officers but also to retired Wehrmacht officers. It is accepted that both of those regimes were Germany. If you served those regimes, and you wern't some major criminal who was prosecuted, yeah, you're entitled to your pension. And the way that shut down worked is, that the day the doors of the stasi building were closed and these people were sent home, you couldn't reboot that system."
Yarvin is also fond of telling parables of Caesar constantly forgiving his enemies. He tells a tale of Caesar winning a battle and scavenging a bag full of letters that would allow his faction to engage in reprisals against every single person who supported his enemies. And that's Caesar's response was to burn the bag. A point independently echoed by Mike Duncan of the History of Rome podcast where Duncan points out that resolution of the civil war basically required someone to take it on the chin and not engage in property confiscation and tribunals after total victory.
So lets simplify and add one more bullet to Scott's list at the end of how to approach this problem instead of massive retaliation.
- Remove the laws that give rise to this culture
- Encourage universities to follow the Chicago Principles
- Improve internet moderation
- Make what Cancel Culture is explicit, not generable
- Weave a narrative that allows for mass defection
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
Sid Meir observed that people simply cannot process probabilities.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU&t=1168
"We found that there is this point, and it's kinda around 3 to 1, 4 to 1, where people do expect to pretty much win everytime"
30% doesn't mean about 1 in 3. It means impossible. He had to manipulate how the numbers played out in the background so that it fit with people's sense of what probabilities mean, rather than actual probabilities playing themselves out.
So far the only luck i've ever had explaining it to people is to say "most pollsters thought it was impossible. Silver said it was unlikely but about the same chance as hitting a baseball. and people do hit baseballs"
For some reason the baseball analogy is the only thing that seems to crack the innumeracy.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
- the amount of calories in X doesn't count because 'it's good for you'.
- dividing 4 by 2 is too much math. calories counts are whatever it says in bold. checking serving amounts is an unreasonable and absurd ask
- "you can't expect me to just not socialize" when it's pointed that dieting and then a full meal at a restaurant twice a week is futile
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
Your 'Magic Wand Thinking' term is eerily familiar. I've internally termed it some variation of 'Tribal Brain' or 'Shaman Brain'. Just that acute sense that how the world must work is that there is Good Stuff and Bad Stuff. You either need to find the good stuff and it will all be better, or you need to excise the bad stuff and it will all be better. "The Dose Makes The Poison" makes no sense in this magic world. Good things are absolutely good and more is always good. Bad things are absolutely bad and the smallest dose will ruin everything.
But it's hard for me to be too harsh, even if it's despairing. Because whenever I read of one of those obscure African tribes that attribute all ills to witches or cargo cults in the Pacific it just feels like that's basement humanity. That's what we all instinctually revert to if we don't have constant social pressure from birth, or predisposition luck, to be otherwise.
I think there is also a gigantic intuition in the brain to go with whatever is the local social default. Human despise figuring thing out from first principles over and over again. Whatever others are having must be what's normal. Whatever others are having must be what you personally should want. Which makes sense in an amazonian, PNG, or savannah tribal context. But portion sizes have shifted to ridiculous extremes and now everyone is trapped is a default = poison context.
That's a very reasonable question! The mainstream account focuses on the dangerous potential and near victory of the Nazi's. It also tends of overlook economics in favour of operational accounts of the war. With a further focus on the sexy attention getting offensives of 1939-41 (42 for some).
For reading I would combine Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction alongside Robert Citino's "Death of the Wehrmacht". The two compliment each other quite well. Death of the Wehrmacht deals with the military from the start up to 1942. His subsequent books The Wehrmacht Retreats for 1943 and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand are also engaging and accessible for average war nerd.
If you'd prefer the cliffnotes version here are some youtube video's for each.
Citino
Tooze
Tooze economics highlight the constraints the domestic economy puts on the war effort. How resource & industrial capacity constraints affected decision making. Citino's account emphasizes continuity with the old Prussia tradition and the concept of Bewegungskrieg (Maneuver Warfare) over the incoherent concept of Blitzkrieg (a journalistic invention). Citino's account also explains why Prussia developed such a tradition, namely on account of the comparative poverty of Prussia and the awful geographic situation it was placed in. To quote from the first source online i could find that summarizes it neater than I can
I'd ask you to consider it this way: Germany starts off by fighting a bunch of small doomed states. Victory over Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, & the Netherlands are not prestigious victories. They are assumptions. However the real impressive victory is over France and while this is an accomplishment it comes from a mix of French failure and German operational art. And it's an incredible upset that shocks the world!
But it does not come from a well calibrated economic engine developed by the Nazi's which overpowers the French in an attritional warfare contrasting each countries total industrial capacity. And the moment it becomes a match up between the other real players on the world stage, the UK, US, & USSR, the Nazi war economy simply isn't capable of handling the challenge.
also here's another great video by John Parshall of Shattered Sword fame comparing the Nazi tank production economics to that of the Soviet Union.
Parshall
flipping back through it there is a great slide that really highlights things. From 43 minutes in:
I would suggest that having one of your major tank facilities only able to crank out 2 tanks a day while fighting the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US might not be a sign that they had the best possible economic/industrial set up before the war.
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