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So your claim is that the Taliban regime ca. 2004 was the obvious Schelling point for Afghans interested in the long-term thriving of their country, and those who did not support the Taliban were clearly defecting from the common good of the country?
Personally, I think the loyalty of a population is earned, not given. Citizens of the US or modern Germany should display some loyalty to their government because it represents an equilibrium which has a higher utility than any other equilibrium they are likely to establish working against the government.
By contrast, less optimal regimes do not deserve loyalty. In 1945, Hitler was just the mobster in power, Stauffenberg blowing him up would not have let to a lower utility equilibrium, hence it was not treason to try to do so. Nor were the exile Germans who aided the Allies betraying Germany, because even with the Soviets, Ally-occupied Germany was a far better place for the Germans to thrive than Nazi Germany.
The real world is not Civilization where governments change but annexation is forever.
No. I just don't think they are demonstrating qualities that would make them uniquely valuable citizens, worthy of being fast-tracked through a special process. We have plenty of carrots and sticks for dealing with collaborators: money, status, security... And if we want our local collaborators to be effective, they should be invested in the success of our effort for the long haul. If their plan is to be on an evacuation flight out, why not staff the army with soldiers who only exist on paper, and rob the treasury blind?
...what occupation services do you think soldiers who only exist on paper would have provided that reduced the chance of the evacuation before it became necessary? And what do you think the treasury's prospects are if you had to pay actual market rates for collaborators to occupation forces who expose themselves and their families to retaliation?
The prospect of immigration preference for themselves or their families is the non-fiscal carrot to incentivize cooperation. It's fine if you don't think this demonstrates qualities that would make them 'uniquely' valuable citizens, but your zinger is kind directly ignoring the sort of direct contributions that they are providing, i.e. what services collaborators provide that a paper army doesn't, and how the prospect of compensation in some forms (migration) compensates/reduces the requirements of compensation in other forms (treasury).
You might as well ask 'if the plan is to get out of a collapsing burning building, why not replace firefighters with sinecures?' The answer is rather simple: because while there is a limit to what you can expect hires to do, the jobs they are hired to do is what reduces the risk of the sort of disaster that the hires would not stick around to die in.
I think the point was more "If you hire someone to keep a building from catching on fire, but part of their incentive package is a reliable promise that if a fire happens then they will be the first to get rescued and also they win the lottery, then overall you haven't given them a strong incentive to be invested in a lack of building fires."
If so, it would be a poorer point. Collaborators during an insurgency aren't hired to keep a building from catching on fire- the building already being on fire, hence why you need collaborators to operate the buildings while your counterinsurgency forces try to stamp out the fires the arsonists are regularly starting.
It may be very disappointing that the hired help did not nobly perish in the flames the employer gave up fighting, but a man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or a petty distinction.
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The Allies did polling in West Germany a year after the war ended in 45’. Hitler was still remarkably popular even then. Different societies have different attitudes about what they believe their relationship to their governments should be.
For you to have been a patriot back then you’d had to have actively opposed your own government, essentially knowing you were going to be rounded up and executed as these people undoubtedly knew. And they are certainly heroes for what they did.
It always boggles my mind how so many revisionist types can think otherwise. At heart I think a lot of people have this suppressed desire that they wish to have seen the Nazis win out and to have gotten their racial utopia. If you look at Nazi society it didn’t work very well for the people who were in it. And it certainly didn’t end very well for the people who were in it. Some people definitely benefitted but it wasn’t a government of its citizens, but of a particular category of citizens who the Nazis saw populating Germany’s future.
It’s also why the Allies took very careful steps in their postwar planning of Germany to crush Prussia and its influence over Germany. It historically was a massive fountainhead for its supremely militaristic attitude over all aspects of society. There’s a reason why it was called the “Iron Kingdom” and the “Sparta of Europe.” States like that tend to have a short half life. The ancient Assyrian Empire ended the same way, eventually declaring war on almost everyone within its neighborhood and having a religious ideology that demands you bring order and stability to the world outside by conquering the chaotic neighbors among the fringes of your borderlands.
What do you mean? Morality aside, it appeared to be working great. As you say, Hitler was remarkably popular, even after the extremely costly war was lost, and all the evil was revealed to those who pretended not to see.
First, like FDR, he presided over the recovery for the worst economic crisis of the century, which by itself confers Saviour status, even though it’s likely just mean reversion. In foreign policy, he was a gambler who repeatedly won big. At first the western allies kept flinching, giving him everything for nothing, and then when push came to shove he even easily beat what was in theory the best army in the world, partly because of his own tactical input.
In domestic policy, he understood himself as both of and as a ‘friend of the people’ – as a lower middle class guy, a corporal, he disliked both the liberal elites which ran weimar and the old conservatives elites, the ‘vons’. Aside from the economic recovery/rearmament boom, he was also transferring to poor germans the wealth stolen from jews, and later, other people’s jews’, and other people’s. Because of all his achievements and popularity (which he and his regime cared very much about), for the first years there was little repression.
I would say he bribed the germans far more than he threatened them, but bribe implies that they didn’t intrinsically want to follow him in the first place. The truth is, as vile as he was, he genuinely cared about and improved the life of the common man (in peacetime at least, and with increasingly evil means), and they always loved him back.
💀. Well yeah. Morality aside, everything was working fantastically.
Apart from that to the economic point. Hitler either understood or ultimately figured out (or rather his advisors did) that large scale Keynesian state expenditures could rescue a morbid capital economy from destruction. Basically what American businessmen later learned during WW2.
But it’s difficult to say this is because they lived under a “Nazi” program specifically. “Nazism” faced the exact same problem “Communism” did in this sense. The Nazis weren’t in power all that long and so nobody really got a chance to see what a “National Socialist State” would look like. They didn’t just oppose Communism. They also opposed Capitalism. One reason they wanted lebensraum was to prepare for an autarkic economy because they knew their activities were going to lock them out of international markets; quite similar to the way North Korea is today. Hitler specifically wrote about this. They also opposed modern practices of the credit system. The amount of days you could analyze their political program and domestic policies numbers in the mere months at best, outside of the war effort.
The same with Communism. Marx never wrote about what a post-Capitalist system would look like. He died before he was able to do that. When people attack “Marxism” and they point to the Soviet Union, what they’re really attacking is “Marxist-Leninism” which is one particular twist and variation that was grafted onto Marx’ ideology by others and at a different time.
Well, yeah of course morality aside. I actually think people were too easy on the germans of the time, my grandparents. We let them get away with their lies; that they didn’t believe, or profit, that they didn’t know, that they were threatened, that the war just happened to them, and that it was hard.
I think that’s more true of japan; they thought that without the resources of an empire, they could never fight and win a long war, therefore they could not threaten one, therefore they’d be relegated to the third rank of powers.
Hitler had a more dramatic, crazier theory: as more nations became industrialized and more populous, they would find it increasingly difficult to exchange their competing industrial goods for the limited food surplus from more agrarian countries, who themselves were industrializing and therefore there was less and less food surplus to trade. So he needed lebensraum to avoid the inevitable Malthusian starvation of his people. Not such a bad guy after all. Well, other people would still all starve. Anyway, it’s not that he loved autarky, it's that he thought all international trade would soon break down naturally. And then he planned to ‘keep a balance’ between the lebensraum-agrarian part (farms in the east)and the industrialized part(german factories) of his empire so that there would be no reduction of the agrarian food surplus and no starvation.
Yeah, I remember the Covid times too.
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Yeah he wouldn’t be such a “bad guy” were it not for the implications and designs that were baked into his desire for agricultural sustainability. This wasn’t some national policy of ecology he was seized by. It was part and parcel for his desire for German colonies via the war effort.
Anyone else can speculate endlessly about his ideas for the future state.
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