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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35133 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.

This sort of presupposes that there's an actual war and European troops sent to Ukraine aren't able to deter Russia further. (Bear in mind that the proposal European countries are discussing is not sending European troops in to fight the Russians - it's to send peacekeepers in afterwards). But let's go with it and assume there's a direct war between NATO - US and Russia (and nobody gets nuked).

Whoever comes home from the war will end up controlling the governments of Europe.

By what mechanism? Is your position that cadres of veterans will stage a coup? That seems... incredibly unlikely. As I'm sure you are aware, they have police in Europe. Many European countries have a gendarmerie or equivalent, which the US does not.

In the event of a war between the EU and Russia, the means by which veterans take over European government will be that they will run for office and anyone who isn't a veteran will be so delegitimized in relative term that it will be an easy win.

By what mechanism? Is your position that cadres of veterans will stage a coup?

Generally by the methods available. If there only path to control is a violent coup, then ya. I think it much more likely that they will just have a degree of legitimacy and experience with the bureaucracy of government that will give them an advantage in attaining positions in governance.

They will also be more difficult to intimidate and suppress. There is a large amount of ground to cover before a violent coup takes place. It could just be that some of them are a little crazier and willing to engage in terrorist acts or intimidation acts against the best of their political opponents.

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