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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   35901 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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The European governments will not have much difficulty in conscripting young men. There will be lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but they can definitely get away with it.

The problem for those governments will be when veterans of war return home. Carrying out violence is a durable skill set, and it is a pretty rare skill set in the west. The United States maintains the equivalent of a full time domestic army in the form of police, and even trains a small amount of them in full on domestic war techniques (SWAT teams).

Meanwhile in Britain they can send female officers to go arrest YouTubers for posting videos of their dog giving Nazi salutes.

Civilization is always held together by people being unwilling to commit coordinated violence. This can be accomplished a few different ways:

  1. Barely anyone is skilled in violence, and thus most violence is easy to quash with any level of coordination. The modern European approach.
  2. The most violent are in charge. And they must constantly and indiscriminately wield that violence to field off contenders, the moment a more aggressive and more violent faction arises they will take over. The third world banana republic approach (and most of history).
  3. Multiple different groups that can wield coordinated violence are at a detente. They've agreed to some rules of conflict and they stick to those rules to avoid escalation into all out war. The American approach (and how most Empires operated)

Europe has mostly forgotten how to wage war, and how to pacify the men returning home from war. The US has kept the skill set depressingly fresh. Whoever comes home from the war will end up controlling the governments of Europe.

This type of thing might be the best they can hope for: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/battle-of-athens.html But the worst will look more like Russia in 1917.

Edit oops meant to post this in response to @jeroboam below, but still mostly relevant to Ukraine war stuff and Europe getting engaged.

I think a lot of this presupposes that the peacekeepers actually get involved in the nuts and bolts, nitty-gritty of war. Isn't the whole point of a European aligned peacekeeping force to put a little skin in the game and be a tripwire force? Obviously a large part of that would depend on how stable the truce would be, but if Russia were committed and the Donbass separatists didn't get up to trouble then it's entirely possible a buffer zone would be somewhat peaceful, not Iraq 3.0.

Or do you think that training in violence is provided by military base training alone, no actual combat required?

What do you think happens if the tripwire is tripped? Either European forces have to fight, or the nukes have to fly, or the tripwire is pointless.

What happens is that a few peacekeepers die, all the troops are immediately pulled out as the markets crash (and then recover), and then more sanctions are leveled against Russia. Casualty tolerance in European armies is extraordinarily low for reasons that have little to do with immigration. They’re not going into the trenches.

Yes, this would fall under "the tripwire is pointless".

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