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For what it's worth I feel like there's a common thread in @xablor's post on voting and some of the replies to @zataomm's post on WWI that really ought to be broken out and examined on its own that being how exactly do we ascribe agency and responsibility.
It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight. It's trivially true that World War 2 may have avoided or postponed if the Poles had acquiesced to being partitioned between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis instead of choosing to fight, or if the British Empire had valued Germanic notions of racial brotherhood over their own self-conception as World Hegemon/police or desire to adhere to previously made agreements.
But that's just the thing, they didn't, and the arguments that they ought to have seem to be relying on a lot of legwork that is not in evidence.
I recently read a book of CS Lewis' letters and essays including the full version of The Abolition of Man over the course of a cross-country flight, and it struck me as surprisingly relevant/contemporary for something that was written over 80 years ago now. It also reminded me of an argument between Habryka (or maybe Hlinka?) and some long-standing DR aligned poster from back in the day. I don't recall whether it was on LessWrong or in the CW thread on SlateStar codex but it was prior to the move to reddit and in anycase I can't seem to find it now. The jist of it was that it was impossible for an actor to be both moral and rational because having "moral principals" was effectively a precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances. IE While I know that I could easily get away with lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise "hitting the defect button" and that it might even be in my personal interest do so, I won't do that because to do so would be wrong and right/wrong is something that trancends rational self interest.
For example I'd like to think we could all recognize that killing 77 men over a puppy and a car is wholy disproportionate and perhapse even a bit extreme but at the same time I would also like to believe that all but the most autistic of contrarians would agree that a world of men like Neo is preferable to one of men like Theon Greyjoy
I feel like this is something that Lewis saw clearly that a lot of otherwise intelligent commentators today do not. Namely, that it is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the British were idiots to abide by this agreement or that, but this must be whieghed against the question of what value does any agreement with the empire have once you've set the precident of reneging on any agreement the moment it looks like the bill might come due? After all, the thing that makes a debt a debt is the obligation to pay.
I feel like we see something similar in a lot of the rhetoric around voting and other forms civic duties. There seems to be this widely held belief that voting doesn't matter unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote but how dumb is that? how many elections are decided by one vote? and how do you decide which specific vote for candidate A or policy B out of however many is the deciding vote. It seems to me that the sanest, if not neccesarily most rational, approach is to stop asking dumb questions. Voting, even when your vote isn't neccesarily the deciding vote, has value for the same reason honoring your agreements has value. Doing so (or otherwise not doing so) tells the rest of the world something true about you.
How does the development of tools for mass murder in the world wars fit into the paradigm of ‘following the rules’? After the fact, the indiscriminate killings of civilian populations via bombings or starvation by the UK, US, USSR, and to a large degree Nazi Germany are treated ambivalently by contemporary recountings, while the discriminate killings were immortalized by the Nuremberg trials and have been written into the foundation of contemporary morality. ‘Don’t kill civilians’ is perhaps an unworkably high standard, but I’d much prefer if that was held to a bit more strongly than tripwire alliances designed to further geopolitical goals. The US was actually pretty good about not doing evil shit aside from a handful of bombings later into the war, and I’d like that to be that standard, which the indiscriminate and pointless night bombings of the British very much fall short of.
Following what rules exactly?
Why should the British be held as more culpable for waging a war to defend thier allies than those who attacked those allies in the first place?
Why should the pressence (or absence) of WMDs factor into the calculation at all?
Culpability isn’t a very useful metric when this stuff seems pretty overdetermined. Germany and France will try to unify Europe under their control, UK will try to stop said unification, Russia will try to expand the empire, Americans will sell stuff. The stuff I’d like to argue about is whether to treat a particular player as behaving in a respectable way or not. WWI, with all its slaughter, had its deaths concentrated among men explicitly waging the war, with some exceptions for starvation in Germany near the end. We don’t revile Germany for its behavior in that war today, because their conduct was within the relatively wide bounds of honorable conduct for that conflict. WWII on the other hand has widespread and unrelenting barbarity by nearly all players, excepting the US and France. The Germans are rightly reviled not because of their blitzkreig through Belgium but because they liked to kill civilian Jews for bad reasons. We too should revile the British approach of sending planes to scatter bombs indiscriminately amongst civilian German populations for different but still bad reasons.
Very few people care about the alliance between Poland and the UK because the alliance was explicitly built as a last-second deterrent for German expansion, not because the Polish and British governments had a long and close relationship of mutual protection. Local players had their own reasons for disliking said expansion, but from the American perspective there really wasn’t any reason why we should care.
If we aren't discussing culpability what exactly are we discussing?
Likewise while it is true that the US had no particular reason to care about Polish sovereignty in 1939, we arent talking about the US in 1939. We are talking about the Poles and the British, both of whom had very obvious reasons to care. The Poles because it was thier sovereignty being threatened and the British because they had made an agreement with the Poles.
If you want to argue that the Poles should've valued thier sovereignty less or that the British should have valued keeping thier word less that is your perogative, but at least make that argument explicit, and provide your reasons why.
Culpability shouldn’t be a binary thing, where if you throw the first punch I get to burn your family alive and that’s on you. Britain make a last-second alliance with Poland which failed to deter German expansionism, and after Germany beat France the capacity of Britain to win a direct conflict against Germany dropped to zero. The whole of Churchill’s maneuverings were to provoke Germany into committing an atrocity that would bring the US into the war, which he did by targeting civilian German populations. Germany was culpable for starting the conflict, absolutely, but Britain was responsible for escalating the conflict to a total war.
That's certainly a take.
Firstly, the British didn't initiate the bombing of civilian infrastructure and populations the Germans did, the British were just monumentally better at it because the British had more competent leadership and greater resources to draw upon.
Secondly, Churchill's maneuvering didn't bring the US into the war, the Japanese did. Even then, the US didn’t move against Germany directly until after Germany had declared war on the US and started attacking US shipping in the Atlantic.
Finally, the German decision making process looks especially retarded when you recall that they really ought to have known better. The Belgian example two decades prior had already demonstrated that the Anglos were both ready able to wage a costly war against Germany over the sovereignty of a stupid made up country.
The British sent bombers targeting Germany for IIRC 9 months before the Germans retaliated. I can’t speak to Germans bombing civilians in Poland, tho I would believe it.
On Churchill: yes. This is why Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do. He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war. Additional beef: Hitler’s offer to turn Madagascar into a Jewish-German colony was denied by Churchill because he wanted to maximize the number of mouths Germany had to feed on the continent. Decent odds Madagascar would have been turned into a charnel house anyway, but we won’t know thanks to Churchill.
Agree with Germany being dumb, but I think it was more that the Nazis thought that their struggles were due to a Jewish conspiracy that ran Europe, rather than perfidious Albion being perfidious. German theory-of-mind takes the L once again.
The Germans were the ones who opened Pandora's Box by bombing civilian infrastructure in the opening phase of their invasion of Poland. Meanwhile the RAF did not start intentionally targeting civilians until the Luftwaffe made night bombing and the targeting of population center official policy in the latter half of the Battle of Britain.
In short, your claim that the British were the ones to "escalate" the conflict is false.
I would consider the fact that Churchill's side won pretty much every every war he was involved in to be evidence to the contrary.
This is a very dumb objection for you to be making here. Either Churchill was a brilliant mastermind who played the German high command (and everyone else in the world) like a fiddle or he was a "warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do". Pick one.
In either case it doesn't adress the issue that the US didn't move against Germany directly until after the Germans had declared war on the US and started shooting at American ships.
Finally "the Madagascar plan" wasn't even proposed until the summer of 1940. Not only were Britain and Germany already at war by that point but Madagascar wasn't even Germany's to give. Forget Churchill, what reason would anyone in the British leadership have to agree to that plan at that time?
Maybe if the Germans had used one of thier own colonies, or an ally's colony, or tried to cut a deal with the global hegemon instead of declaring war on them things would've played out differently but we don't live in that timeline.
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