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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35123 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.

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

Has anything like this ever happened in the real world? (Starship Troopers describes something like this, but is fiction) The specific case of "demobbed soldiers stage a coup, against a democracy" hasn't had many chances to happen because democracies don't fight on that scale very often, and as far as I aware has never happened.

There are plenty of cases of "successful army stages a coup led by its generals while still under arms" (this is basically all of Roman history after the Marian reforms), but I don't think there has been one against a democracy - Tom Holland in Rubicon argues that the reason why the Roman Republic became vulnerable to coups was because the Marian reforms changed the social composition of the army such that most soldiers were too poor to have a meaningful voice in the Centuriate Assembly (which elected the consuls, and was originally set up with the specific intention of overweighting veteran votes).

I agree the Battle of Athens comes close, but it was an uprising against a blatantly rigged election, with the victory condition being "find and publicly count the hidden ballots". I do not think something like the Battle of Athens happens in a working democracy - not least because under normal circumstances the loyalties of returning veterans would be divided between existing political factions.

Thinking about it, the nearest example is probably the October Revolution in Russia - the Bolshevik's power base was the enlisted soldiers in the Petrograd garrison.

Well, the Beer Hall Putsch didn’t get traction, but it had a pretty direct line to the actual dismantling.

Napoleon deposed the Directory to become Emperor in the first place. The Hundred Days don’t count because it was a constitutional monarchy and hadn’t even managed to dismantle his imperial institutions. I’d also give Napoleon III half credit for couping himself.

There’s also the various post-Bolivar democracies of South America. Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador. More if you go back to the initial revolutions.

Well, the Beer Hall Putsch didn’t get traction,

Also the Kapp Putsch, but that got even less traction.

Napoleon deposed the Directory to become Emperor in the first place. The Hundred Days don’t count because it was a constitutional monarchy and hadn’t even managed to dismantle his imperial institutions. I’d also give Napoleon III half credit for couping himself.

Napoleon was still under arms when he couped the Directory. Napoleon III never served (except briefly leading from the front as Commander-in-Chief), so it wasn't a military coup.

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