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Notes -
War, Genes, History, Capital, Data
Opening
I’m making a top-level response to the Quality Contribution (QC) of RandomRanger for the week of September 8, 2025: "But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?". This will be blunt, but I’m open to being moved.
My stance: It shouldn’t have been a QC. The Motte defines QC as: "interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered." and the comment is certainly polished. But the bar that made me join here was higher: QC is a comment/post that explains something counter-intuitive, or something that changes my mind, or at the very least makes my view of the world more nuanced (and yes I know that I just repeated the same thing three times). This QC does the opposite: it uses an eloquent voice to sell a very strong claim about “racial war ability” that its own evidence doesn’t actually support.
The comment argues, and I quote, that: "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary. Ye olde racist might be wrong 9/10 times but is right where it matters, regarding key civilizational abilities of which warfare is the most important".
Before I push back, I want to note what I think the QC gets right. It’s absolutely true that warfare is a brutally demanding composite of logistics, industry, organization, and abstract thinking, and that it tells more about a society’s real capabilities than feel-good representation in sports or prestige slots. I also think it’s fair to say that colonial wars were often “easy” given the power and capital disparities involved. My disagreement is not with those premises, but with the jump from those facts to a story about fixed racial essence.
In this comment I’m doing two things: (1) arguing that the specific racial thesis is not supported by the evidence presented, and (2) arguing that holding this up as Quality Contribution lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
Let's get into it. I have three rebuttals, and then some various thoughts that I put in an appendix.
1. "Too early to tell" isn't a dodge, it's history
Stephen Kotkin's "too early to tell" should be the first test for any broad assertions. Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.” Or The Motte in Tang-era China, self-secured about southerners who’d been ruled on and off for a millennium, then asks Vietnam about how permanent that looked. Hell, look at the Jews and how long did it take before they got to really rule themselves?
History routinely punishes premature essentialism. The fact that we can point to an era where one region dominates does not conclude a law of peoples for all time. And even within Africa, we’re barely a few post-colonial generations into modern state formation, compared to the half-millennium runway European and some East Asian states had to iterate on fiscal-military institutions.
On the timescales we are talking about, modern African states are a brand-new experiment. Their “industrial-era warfare record” consists of a small number of highly skewed trials, many of them fought under extreme external constraints. Declaring a permanent “war ability gap” on the basis of this very particular, very lopsided historical window is not caution, it’s overfitting.
2. "GDP not HBD” and that compound interest fights wars
War isn't about race, it's logistics, industry, and fiscal state capacity. If it can be pointed out how genetic components lead to the development of the bond market, increasing financial capacity to feed armies and wage wars, now that would be a much more compelling argument.
Right now, the examples in the QC are consistent with at least two stories:
The data cited in the comment simply doesn’t distinguish between (A) and (B). If we line up a low-capital polity in 1885 against a peak-industrial empire, we didn’t measure “innate war-ability”; we measured who got to compound capital for 400 years and who got repeatedly reset or never even started.
Take a more personal compound-interest analogy. Start two players at $100k and $1M: the 8% guy with a head start beats the 8% guy without it, every time. It should be obvious to everyone here that the player without the head start has to be more hardworking, more brilliant, more cunning, more successful, and do that repeatedly over a sustained amount of time to have a chance. If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing, then you don’t need chromosomes to explain outcomes.
This is what I mean by path-dependence (see Appendix point 7): outcomes depend on the sequence of early moves, not just the static “inputs” we see today. Once one cluster of polities industrializes early and builds fiscal-military states, and another cluster is repeatedly raided, partitioned, and ruled through extractive institutions, you should expect a persistent gap even if the “human material” were identical.
If you want to argue for (A) over (B), you’d need cases where institutions and capital are roughly comparable but ancestry varies, and then show a robust systematic gap. You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”. The QC never even sketches what such a dataset would look like, let alone shows it. Before we invoke genes, we should at least exhaust the far more direct account in terms of path-dependent sabotage, disinvestment, and the inertia of early advantages.
3. Mutilating a dataset and how successes are flukes, failures are inherent
Methodologically, there’s a clear pattern in the comment. When an African/Black polity wins, it’s “disease,” “terrain,” “numbers,” "politics," or “European rifles.” When whites lose strategically, it’s “just politics.” When blacks lose, it’s taken as evidence about their essence. That’s not a neutral reading of history, it’s a one-way explanatory filter that can only ever point in one direction.
On top of that, the metric itself is baked to produce the conclusion. “Only once did a black army inflict a major campaign-ending defeat on a white army” sounds impressive until you notice how narrow and hand-picked that category is: “black” vs “white” armies, in “major campaign-ending defeats”, under modern conditions defined by European great-power wars. If you define your dataset so that African victories mostly don’t count, then treat what’s left as a natural experiment in “racial war ability”, the result isn’t surprising—you built the maze.
Apply the same moves to European history and it becomes obviously silly. Napoleon’s march on Moscow? “Oh, that was just winter and supply lines, doesn’t tell us anything about French military competence.” Stalingrad? “Just weather and Hitler’s politics.” If you treat all your side’s failures as contingent and all the other side’s failures as intrinsic, you can prove anything you like about “innate capacity” without ever admitting you changed the rules midstream.
Now, to some of the specific cases.
Yes, the 1896 Battle of Adwa shows that forces with almost equivalent technologies (French vs Italian rifles/artilleries) but one side has the superior numerical advantage would lead to ... predictable results. That's not surprising nor evidence for some proof-of-contradiction for inherent racial ability. But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.” When Africans lose to an industrial power, it’s suddenly racial essence again. Heads I win, tails you lose.
And the 1935 Italian comeback was because of airplanes and ... chemical warfare. That's industry and international impunity, not racial revelation. The only tenuous argument that I think can be made here is why there wasn't industrialization of Ethiopia between the two wars, and well, industrialization is hard.
Haiti isn’t an asterisk, either. Attrition by yellow fever was probably the strategy as much as winter is Russia’s. I think a general who was also "well known as an 'herb doctor'" would be aware of the health advantages between his people and the colonizers. If Napoleon freezing outside Moscow counts as “Russian generalship plus winter,” it’s odd that disease in Haiti gets counted as “just disease.” Subtracting an adversary’s environmental advantages but keeping your own is a one-way filter, not an empirical method.
“Portuguese defeat were primarily political defeats, not military ones.” That’s a category error if you’re using those defeats as evidence of “innate capacity.” A great general once said: "war is a mere continuation of [politics] by other means", or in other words, to impose your will on the enemy at an acceptable cost. If your battlefield kill ratios are fine but you cannot hold territory, sustain the war, keep your coalition intact, or secure the population’s compliance, you have lost at the thing war is for. You don’t get to call tactical performance “essence” and strategic failure “mere politics” if your thesis is about civilizational war capacity. That’s not an exception, that’s just defeat.
Finally, let's jump to modern day and examine the vignette of "a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy." Right, old-superpower-backed paramilitary group vs capital-starved country fractured by decades of external meddling. Again, not attributing industry and capital and international impunity, but assigning ancestry as the reason. If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.” We correctly treat it as a story about power, capital, and position, not chromosomes. The fact that the same kind of mismatch in Africa gets read as “racial war ability” is exactly the asymmetry I’m criticizing.
Closing
The QC claims that "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary." On its own terms, it never actually establishes this. It interprets a highly skewed historical record under one favored story about essence, filters counterexamples until they don’t count, and then declares victory.
I’m not denying differences exist between peoples. I’m denying that the QC, as presented, can tell us where those differences come from, or cleanly separate history, capital, contingency, path-dependence, and politics from “innate ability.” It treats a lopsided, distorted record as if it were a clean experiment in racial war-ability, and then summarizes the result into "essence".
At best, the evidence on offer is compatible with multiple causal stories: one where genes sit at the root of everything, and one where geography, timing, conquest, and accumulated institutional and capital advantages do most of the work. Nothing in the QC even tries to tease these apart. It just assumes the genetic story, then reinterprets every data point in its light.
To me, that shouldn’t qualify as a Quality Contribution. QC should make it harder, not easier, to confuse the complicated truth from the stories we tell ourselves. If we’re going to invoke genes and civilizational fitness, the standard of care should go up, not down. Holding this up as exemplary lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
What would satisfy me? At minimum, an attempt to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”, and some acknowledgement of how far our current evidence is from that ideal. And even then, I’d still want an answer to a simpler question: even if Europe and East Asia did get lucky in some deep way, why must that luck be retrofitted into a story about racial essence, instead of leaving it as just that, simply luck?
Appendix of unconnected thoughts
I like this post, I've read all of it, and there were a few nits I wanted to pick.
First, with your point 1:
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the pace of change we have experienced. If barely a few generations counts as a brand-new experiment, then demographic replacement of 30-40% of the dominant population within the same timescale counts as a catastrophe. We're currently two generations in to the accelerating racial replacement of Europeans in Europe and their colonies. Whites, in other words, in white countries built by whites for whites, as any Mottezin of 1904 would happily tell you.
If race doesn't matter, then we can afford to wait around for historical time scales before passing judgement. If race matters, then the time to act is decades ago, and yesterday, and today.
Which brings us to 2.
There's no starting, stopping, fair, or equal to be considered here. We're millennia, eons, removed from the starting point, and restarting to make everything fair is functionally the same as playing to win. This also reflects on the prior point: whites went from winning bigly to being replaced. What gives? Someone else is playing, and winning, the game. All I need to take A over B is to acknowledge race as an axiom of self interest*, and the rest follows. It makes no sense to discard genes when considering path if the gene is acknowledged.
Or, race doesn't matter and none of this matters. There's that sticky thorn again.
Along to 3.
What happens rhetorically is that the side that made all of the guns used by both armies gets bonus points, and the side that used borrowed technology gets dinged. The losing side learned better, stopped selling out, and came back with bigger, better stuff to assert its comparative advantages.*
Yellow fever has been beaten, Winter is undefeated. Yellow fever was beaten in the same way as all of the other advantages were defeated: through ingenuity and innovation exhibited infrequently outside of Europe.
The reason to give attribution to racial war ability is because there is first a difference in race, and a significant one. Two groups of slavs conquering each other doesn't leave much room for race. Second there is the matter of examples. Is there an African country that you think could stand up to Wagner? Probably Ethiopia at least. I won't count Egypt as I'm talking about people and not geography. South Africa used to have nukes, but "South Africa used to" could have been my whole post in four words.
I wanted to bring this part to the fore. This story is true, genes do sit at the root of everything, given you define everything as "life on planet earth." Yeah, genes really do sit at the root of everything. They're what differentiates between kelp and kangaroos, between horses and men. That's the point, that's the sore spot, that's your ultimate contention with the original post.
For the extras.
This is true, and the response is to ask why whites are choosing not to use the tactic they're best at, the ultimate tactic that offers no recourse: war. Why fight with one hand tied behind your back when you're losing, and why leave it there until it's too late?
I was very unimpressed with the AskHistorians links, because they actively prune any arguments that are racial in nature. That's the water we swim in, but I notice the water. I'm not sure you do. Most of this is a long disagreement that race matters, which I guess is the point. That has never made any sense to me. Of course race matters, how could it not? We don't have to understand it for it to matter, after all, and we'd see it in the outcomes if it did (we do). So between saying it's not a problem, and starting with wait and see, there's not much here to sway me.
Overall, good OP that you disliked, good reply from you, and that's what the QCs are supposed to be for. This has taken up plenty of my time, so I don't think I'll reach this length of post again in the replies, but I understand the struggle. I don't keep working on posts for more than a day, or two at most. The best you get from me is something like this, where I start writing in the morning and then reply in the evening. It's tough to make it worthwhile, and while there's always a place for quality, often what we want is timely.
*The parallels to modern day China are illuminating.
Thank you for taking the time to reply, totally understand the cost-benefit dilemma of "should I participate?" you're talking about. Since I did make a top-level comment, I will try to reply to all that replied to me.
That's definitely a dilemma, on one side is the possibility of inflicting injustice and persecution for who knows how long, the other side is making a civilizational-level mistake. I think I remember an AAQC that talks about how even if HBD is proven, they're not sure what would be the next steps and that some proponents of HBD does seem to be true "follow the science" types while some seems more interested in the societal engineering.
I suppose one can say that on a long enough timeline, everything will work out anyway so why worry about whether to act or not. At an individual level, migrate to majorly white societies and enact strict immigration assimilation laws. If race does matter, then over time, where suffering is stretched so thin it's minuscule, the "correct race" will win.
True, and I also still don't see how the disparity has to be explained by race.
I agree with you that right now I can't think of many countries in Africa that can stand up to Wagner. I've only recently gotten interested in African development so maybe I'll have a better opinion to share with all once I have more intuition on this.
Why does it have to be gene? Why couldn't it be something like: god exists, who is white, and doesn't like black people? Or they were cursed ala "Midichlorians isn't the Force, it's only an indication of the Force powerscale of a person" kind of situation?
I thought of this as well, but it was hard to find scholarship that was digestible and that I myself feel sufficiently authoritative. I've lurked for a while but it's not necessary that I know what sources would people accept. And even then, I don't necessarily want to deny myself a source that I would often trust. TheMotte for me is the same, another water where I dip my toe in and try to synthesize "the truth" from other waters I take from.
I do believe Argument 1, though the most abstract, is the most likely to instill some pause. Argument 2 and 3 aren't really attacking HBD itself but more the epistemology of the OG comment. From the vibes, I know that there's "not much here to sway" you, but maybe there was a slight flutter of the wings of a fly at least.
War does sharpen us, and so does culture war. I know that these are well-trodden grounds for you and others, it is probably tiring to debate and communicate over and over, so I really appreciate that you engaged with my comment.
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