Russia the humiliated
Commenter “Bauxite” has some interesting things to say:
Russia is what it is. It’s a big mess, and it has been a big mess more often than not for most of its history.
I have no argument with that.
Next:
But, at least because of its natural resources and its nuclear arsenal, Russia is still a major power.
I agree as well. However, the Ukraine war has so far given evidence that Russia’s conventional military forces are not as good as originally thought, although its nuclear arsenal still gives it enormous power to threaten.
More:
Russia also found itself in a situation after the Cold War where many long-time regions of the Russian empire became independent neighbor states. This includes Georgia and especially the Ukraine.
“Found itself”? I don’t think that phrasing quite covers the fact that the USSR collapsed internally after many years of corruption, tyranny, and aggression, and lost some of its empire, as has happened from time immemorial to once-powerful nations.
By the way, Crimea was only annexed in 1783 into the Russian Empire, when the Ottoman Empire of which Crimea had been a part since the mid-1400s was defeated. As far as Ukraine goes, I wrote about its history in this post as well as this.
Bauxite goes on to add:
You can talk about NATO or the EU, but the bottom line is that western policy over the last 20+ years has been to pull former long-time pieces of greater Russia out of the Russian orbit and into the western orbit.
I would amend that this way: “…the bottom line is that Russian policy over the last 100 or so years has been to push former long-time pieces of greater Russia out of the Russian orbit, and later they leapt at the chance to voluntarily become part of the far more attractive the western orbit.”
More:
It is virtually impossible to do that without humiliating Russia.
Russia has humiliated itself. And it goes on doing so.
Furthermore:
That’s not to say that the Ukrainians wouldn’t be better off in a western oriented country. I have no doubt that they would. That’s not to defend Russian action in any way at any point in history. There are myriad reasons to criticize Russian policy going all the way back to the Czars.
Agreed.
And then:
What I’m saying is this – Humiliating a major power is very risky. If one decides to pursue a policy that involves humiliating a major power, one had better have a very good plan. A humiliated major power is an immensely dangerous thing.
Indeed, a humiliated major power is an immensely dangerous thing. But there are really only two choices in dealing with an aggressive and tyrannical power – appeasement or opposition. Russia’s own internal horrors as the USSR helped lead to its defeat and dissolution, and its external aggression and tyranny helped lead many of its former possessions to not want to be part of it.
Russia actually was welcomed into the economic sphere as a friend when western Europe became dependent on it for fuel. But Russia – led by Putin – has responded by reverting to aggression and tyranny towards its now-sovereign neighbors. The west’s helping Ukraine to oppose that successfully might indeed result in more “humiliation” for Russia, but the alternative to that is to allow Russia to swallow up other sovereign nations in Europe. That is also immensely dangerous, as appeasement usually is – and as a failure to stand up to nuclear blackmail also is.
The situation is intrinsically dangerous.
It is certainly true that the Soviet Union collapsed internally after many years of corruption, but one should not fail to take into account what happened during the next decade of misrule by Yeltsin. Russia was systematically and brazenly looted (as viciously as during the 1920s by the Bolsheviks) by rapacious oligarchs (aided and abetted by many American economists, including the “Harvard boys” with their shock therapy), much to the detriment of ordinary, poor, and powerless Russian citizens. The suspicion harbored by many Russians about the intentions of the ever-expanding NATO and about the rhetoric surrounding “the superiority of the West” is hardly unfounded when one considers both recent history and the utter corruption of our republic by “woke” leftists drunk on power and intent upon the establishing of totalitarian control.
It’s the old “Now-look-what-you-made-me-do” defense….
(Often honed to perfection by abusive spouses!)
…with a healthy dose of “This whole thing started ONLY when/because you/he/she/it hit me back….”
“But there are really only two choices in dealing with an aggressive and tyrannical power – appeasement or opposition.”
That is stupid. Crack open a history book about something other than Munich 1938. The implication the U.S. and Western Europe has spent the last 30+ year just spewing nothing but sweetness and light toward Russia but…somehow…FOR NO REASON AT ALL…this bad man got power in Russia and he does bad things because he’s a bad man who does bad things, is stupid.
Just stupid. There is genuinely no other appropriate word for the position that NOTHING the United States or Western Europe has done can be questioned or critiqued or reconsidered. Nope. Putin is just a bad man who does bad things because he’s a bad man who does bad things.
For pity’s sake, forget about learning anything from the Iraq War. The stubborn refusal to even ask the simple question “Why is this happening now and not when Trump was President?” makes it impossible to have anything like a reasonable debate.
Just stupid.
j e:
If we are destroying ourselves, then all Russia need do is watch.
Invading Ukraine is not about that.
And Russia’s horrible condition in the 1990s reflected the fact that it was a failed state whose economy and social structure was a mess. Others also took advantage of that, as usually happens with weak states with corrupt governments.
We have sent them 80 billion dollars that moves the needle how far is unclear they brought in general surivokin who has been infamous since he crushed protesters in 91 and shown brutality in chechnya and syria you think it has been bloody now just wait
This is the face of western capitalism that they saw and many have recoiled tne ‘good guy’ oligatchs like berezovsky and co are not seen that way much of the liberal faction yabloko was discreditd for benefiting from these policies
I suspect a large portion of that $80 B or whatever the figure past or future is going into pockets.
Pretty decent analysis
The situation is intrinsically dangerous.
Yup, it is inherently dangerous to have Russia ruled for 2 decades by a former KGB honcho who has declared that the fall of the Soviet Union was a/the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Putin: Soviet collapse a ‘genuine tragedy’
Putin humiliated Russia.
I don’t think so, he’s a dragon’s tooth, that was sowed, by the callous experiment that sachs and summers conducted on the Russian economy, a backlash of the balkan wars, regardless of the questions of wmd, the management of the iraq theatre of operations was pretty dismal, but generals austin and milley rose up through their like a flower,
unlike the way fukuyama understood it, the soviet collapse, triggered a reset, a peregruska, to czarist settings in this case, the time of peter the great, when Russia was as shorn of territory, as current circumstances,
How does one stand up to nuclear blackmail? And what comes next? Occupation? Partition? Treaty of Versailles level demilitarization?
@j e
To put it mildly.
Agreed.
Sorry, but no.
The Early Bolshevik Period saw the end of a World War, attempts by Lenin to start another one (leading to a massive half-a-continent spanning series of wars), plans by his successors to start the sequel, and massive hardship where dozens of millions were murdered or died avoidable death.
The catastrophic implosion of the Brezhnev Stagnation during Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s era was extremely devastating and even worse in some ways, but it was an order of magnitude less brutal for Russians (let alone anyone else) than what happened in the 1920s.
This is true as far as it goes, but I think it seriously doesn’t go far enough. For starters, many (maybe even most) of those oligarchs were either established criminals or members of the Soviet power structure (sometimes highly placed ones but otherwise not; Putin got his start as a middle management “Chekist” who embezzled state resources and did troubleshooting for the Leningrad political machine). Moreover, Shock Therapy was meant to try and fix the critical crises in the Soviet system (which were already well established and in many cases terminal). The problem was it was hastily, poorly done and lacked the kind of safeguards necessary with denationalization.
It also points to another issue with the role of the state in Soviet and to another degree Western society.
I’m not so flattering. Putin is more than a bit woke in some ways himself (especially in terms of outreach to and flattery of Muslims), and Western superiority was hardly unwarranted. Even nations like Hungary with similar problems and pathologies to the late USSR navigated decommunization much better than Russia did. And of course the woke Left spent much of the decades following a bipartisan policy of appeasement and attempts to get Putin on side.
Putin is far from our worst problem, I’d argue in many ways he isn’t even Russia’s worst problem, but like ourselves Russians should look closer at home for remedies.
who had the resources, not average russians or georgians or azeris, but the konsomol figures like berezovsky and khodokorshy, (the good oligarchs, feted by the west) the bratva which had emerged from prison, which had been given opportunity, like capone got with prohibition, and the oprichnik class that became the siloviki, the security bureaucrats, putin and sechin* at the top of that pyramid,
*he’s a terrible manager of these sorts of enterprises
the West had Russia in their glass ant case, and sought to tinker in ways, we would never consider for ourselves, some liberals craved a Pinochet, well remember that line about ‘being careful what you wish for,
@MBunge
I agree Neo is overstating it, but a lot of the options we have to deal with it (such as simply ignoring it) are much less effective both due to the global stage of modern tech and due to previous attempts. And in particular I do think opposition or appeasement are our options, the issue of course being there are many shades of both.
If that is the implication, it is stupid. However, it is also one not many people would articulate, precisely because it is not merely untrue but flagrantly, strawman-ly untrue.
The West has certainly not been spewing nothing but Sweetness and Light to Russia for the past 30 years, but the fact remains that was a significant part of the West’s foreign policy. In particular with some European governments (especially Germany and Italy) and incoming US Presidents of every strand. It was usually later in their terms after hostility dealing with Putin that they changed their message… and were usually duly attacked for it by domestic political opponents capitalizing on their “failure” in mending fences with Russia.
Moreover, Putin did not come to power for “no reason at all” and while I think he is clearly a bad man who does things in part because he is a bad man, he mostly does it for other reasons. He skillfully navigated the Late Soviet period and the Yeltsin era to amass power and wealth for himself, saw the humiliation of his empire in disintegration and even internal secessionism (and vowed not to be made a fool of there), and so came to power promising centralized authority and law and order. Which he capitalized on – using Western cupidity and naivety- to shake hands with one palm while holding a knife on the other, selectively picking away at unfriendly nations in what he viewed as as his “near abroad.”
And periodically overplaying his hands in attempts to amass said power and Russian dominance.
Which is why I thoroughly oppose such an idea, and why I fully reject any idea that questioning, critique, or reconsideration should be verboten or thoughtcrime.
I do think that much of said questioning, critique, or reconsideration ranges from unhelpful to self-defeating and that there is much less scope for effective policy than this implies, but to hell with that. A free society relies on the ability of people to debate the age of the Reptilians that have hijacked the British Royal Family; there is no reason that should be clear for it.
The issue is, a lot of us have talked about why this did not happen when Trump was not President, and we have skewed Biden, Obama, Clinton, and their handmaidens for that.
@chase Eagles
I have plenty and to complain about JFK, but I think his posture was appropriate. Take a line and do not budge from it, while using what pressure is possible to get the enemy to back down without provoking a confrontation (even if it means limited concessions or stage acting m$.
In the event of a full total war that would be worth considering, but not here. Repulse the invasion and end the occupation, and then contain the Russian government (with perhaps limited dial down of the sanctions) until something changes.
putins ambitions are relatively small, now you make it a question of survival, and there is no turning back, in 2014, it was deemed that ukraine was largely starved of offensive weaponry, for reasons, the shootdown of the Dutch airliner, was considered an oversight,* there were those perfunctory sanctions about some accountant’s passing that was misrepresented as the jackson vanik,
*Girkin the man in the middle of that event, has gotten more attention, from the Kremlin
some informed conjecture was this was all about securing the iran deal, another catastrophe, whose top players, malley and sherman, as well as kerry have risen up from their failure,
MBunge:
You write:
Do you really think that insulting me constitutes a convincing argument, or is acceptable? Especially when you follow it with a strawman arguments like this one:
Misrepresenting my arguments and knocking down a strawman of your own making is not going to help your cause or convince anyone that you are right, except people who are already in agreement with you.
You continue on your merry way:
Another strawman followed by another insult (actually, the same insult). I not only have mentioned several times why it’s happening now but not when Trump was president, but I recently devoted an entire post to that question.
there be dragons here,
By August 1991, he was a captain and commander of the 1st Rifle Battalion in the 2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division. During the 1991 August Coup in Moscow, Surovikin was ordered to send his battalion into the tunnel on the Garden Ring, where three anti-coup demonstrators were killed. After the defeat of the coup, Surovikin was arrested and held under investigation for seven months. The charges were dropped on 10 December because Boris Yeltsin concluded that Surovikin was only following orders. He was promoted to the rank of major afterwards.
that’s just the beginning of his career,
think of him, like the Joker, summoned by the mob bosses,
western policy over the last 20+ years has been to pull former long-time pieces of greater Russia out of the Russian orbit and into the western orbit.
Pulling? The people of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, governed with the consent of the people, desired to join NATO. Why?
Regardless of whether it was wise policy to let them in – why?
it was at odds with the understandings implicit in gorbachev’s concession, now putin is not hitler, but he is closer to a von papen figure, that might have arisen in a post weimar accounting, to the average Russian liberty has been intertwined with license, and capitalism with poverty, except for the very top, that may have been the only model of development they recognized,
Mike Plaisse
Getting to the point. Good question.
Putin is just a bad man who does bad things because he’s a bad man who does bad things.
His political object is to reassemble the Soviet Union.
it’s not surprising at all, but we must always consider that our point of view, as well as that of former warsaw pact allies are not mirrored by all parties,
director burns, admitted as much, in his memoir, as to the sentiment of a plurality of russian citizenry about nato expansion,
20 years ago, the views I hold now would be considered out of mind, but this is the voice of experience, the valor of the soldiers and sailors and airmen, that fought the dual expeditions is unquestioned, but the management and strategy of same by figures like mattis, austin and milley, have left much to be desired,
those who averred like general flynn’s bolduc, are cut out of the policy discussion, for the large part some relegated to the proverbial phantom zone,
to engage in a direct prolonged conflict with a country with 6,000 nuclear weapons, a restive moslem populations seems rather illconsidered, those that tell us it will be fine, can’t really be credited anything but hope,
the fact we are manifestly weaker, than we started these expeditions, in ways tangible and intangible, (the latter referring the cultural foundations that underpinned out society back then) tangible meaning the matters of industrial capacity, energy resiliency, and the mass of depleted armaments, must be considered,
Two movies:
1. The Russian military has taken huge casualties, Putin is on the edge of being ousted, and their military effectiveness has been destroyed. The Western Supplied wonder weapons have created the conditions the conditions for a Ukrainian victory.
2. Russia has taken few casualties due to a strategy of bleeding the Ukrainian forces through retreating, and over whelming use of artillery. The US hoped to create a modern day Afghanistan to bleed the Russians through a war of attrition in the Ukraine.
Mike Plaisse and Richard Aubrey:
It indeed humiliating to Roosia that it had to keep it’s “friends” by force of arms. Almost a toxic property. Sad and a puzzle.
@miguel Cervantes
Agreed. Ukraine is still hideously corrupt and military procurement and foreign aid are generally pretty inefficient. It is helping, but that does not mean I have to be blind about it.
I can believe that. Though we will see how much. He seems to have had an underwhelming but not disastrous debut as commander of the South.
Agreed there. In many ways I think the Desovietization of the economy was the worst of both worlds, not cleaning out the kind of corrupt insiders and central managers but also devastating what accountability and stability there was.
I’m more blasé about it. Goldman and Sachs and the fallout from the Yugoslav Wars may have helped water Putin, but he was ultimately planted by himself and the Soviet administrative state. He was a mid level “Chekist” who marinated in that culture for years before the end of the Soviet chapter and got much of his start- in terms of resources, connections, and skills/ there. He climbed during the chaos but he was already around.
Which is also why I do think he is largely a symptom of the wider problems.
Agreed, and they embody many of the worst problems with American pathologies.
I disagree in as much as it was the aftermath of the aftermath of the Soviet collapse that saw that – with the manifest failures of democratization and market deregulation- that saw the return. But on the whole that is an astute analysis.
Agreed, though they have some.
Agreed.
Agreed with caveats, though I think a big part of the issue is such “tinkering” was requested in part by the Russians, in light of the decaying economy. “Shock therapy” was so named because it was a drastic attempt to save a drastic situation.
Putin has consistently phrased this as a battle for survival before, indeed he relies on it in part for his successes. He made his bed, and while I am opposed to cockamamie plans such as “decolonizing Russia” I see it as only just to try and kick him back.
Which the West unsurprisingly responded to by trying to remedy that. Especially in light of things like Budapest 1994.
Sure but it was still an utterly brutal and counterproductive act that has never been convincingly explained.
Which is fitting given the man was killed by abuse in prison, and was an American national.
And all of the aforementioned deserve condemnation.
The Joker was an “independent contractor” that the Mob turned to when they were desperate. Surovikin has rarely wanted for a salary under the current regime. Which I guess makes the situation worse than in The Dark Knight.
The issue I see with that is how implicit they were, and which was understood by whom.
An interesting point, and a fair one. That said, I do think people overestimate the gulfs between Hitler and other authoritarians or totalitarians. It was no coincidence that Papen’s “invisible dictatorship” helped se the stage for Hitler or that he actively collaborated with the National Socialists.
Hitler was an extreme case and perhaps the worst of a bad lot, but much of his ideology and policies were drawn from what was already prevalent among the totalitarians in the left and right wings.
Agreed, and that is a major problem
And I think one reason why Putin dreads what might develop in Ukraine or the Former Pact countries. Examples are often illuminating, especially neighboring ones.
I agree, and that is one reason why we needed to be cautious. I generally am supportive of NATO expansion but that does not mean it should have been done quite as drastically or witho it a lot of diplomatic preparation with Russia. Maybe it would not have changed matters for the better, but at least it could be done.
Understandable indeed.
Agreed. Though we have already engaged in protracted conflicts with it when we were worse.
Agreed, but I can similar about the Kremlin. And this conflict plays to many of the US’s strengths while downplaying its weaknesses.
@Ray SoCa
Neither movie is the truth, though both have elements of it. Though the first movie is almost certainly closer to reality. Western weapons are probably not as overwhelmingly important as made to be, but important in their concepts. Both sides have suffered hideous losses, with the Russians in particular being more so. And honestly this is far costlier than Afghanistan; Russia lost more in these months than the United USSR did in multiple years in Afghanistan.
see we can be civil about this, if we see that China will be the last man standing, and it’s perfidy has been manifest from 2019 on, and yet we treat them with kid gloves as mentioned last night,
the eu’s greatest contempt as well as the figurehead regime, that biden fronts, seems to be for the likes of hungary that holds out against schwab and soros,
*what kind of xenobiology, they represent is pure conjecture,
Yup, it is inherently dangerous to have Russia ruled for 2 decades by a former KGB honcho who has declared that the fall of the Soviet Union was a/the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Gringo:
Double yup.
following the post weimar scenario, if it hadn’t been putin it would have primakov, the more leathery oprichnik, some speculation the former was his protege,
but the bottom line is that western policy over the last 20+ years has been to pull former long-time pieces of greater Russia out of the Russian orbit and into the western orbit.
You left out “back” into Western orbit.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had all been Western aligned between the world wars.
Georgia, Armenia and even Ukraine all tried to go Western during the Russian Civil War. Their desire to break from Russia and become democracies is well over 100 years old. It isn’t remotely recent.
The accusation that the West bears some brunt, by virtue of its economic advice, to the current state of Russia is BS.
All the ex-Soviet states started from the same point. They all received the same advice. Those that chose to follow the Western advice and Western methods have done very well indeed — the Czechs, Estonians etc have built functioning systems from almost nothing.
The mental processes of Russians prevented that. They only did the bits they liked, without concern for the key underlying reasons.
Ukraine started out that way. Then they looked around, decided that it was a path to ruin, and had a revolution. *That* was the start of Putin’s anger — that Ukrainians chose to head away from oligarchy. Right from the start it was all a “US coup” — that the US hasn’t been able to pull off a coup like that ever was never discussed. In Putin’s mind no-one would choose to be like the West when they could be like Russia.
That said, I do think people overestimate the gulfs between Hitler and other authoritarians or totalitarians.
They don’t.
It was no coincidence that Papen’s “invisible dictatorship” helped se the stage for Hitler
This is an incoherent statement.
That aside, all three ministries which preceded Hitler had to contend with the reality that the Nazis and the Communists held most of the seats in the Reichstag.
or that he actively collaborated with the National Socialists.
Papen was in diplomatic positions stationed outside Germany for nine of the twelve years the regime was in power, and not in office most of the rest of the time.
A conceivable alternative to Hitler in 1932 can be seen in observing the other authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, which did not have much of a revanchist element
Speaking of humiliation, much thanks to miguel cervantes for tracking the steadily rising tab for Brandon’s Ukraine spending spree. That said, financial debasement pales in comparison to having a demented pedophile illegitimately installed as our commander-in-chief. Corruption happens, for which the Founders provided legal remedies. But when those constitutionally entrusted to fix a corrupted election decline to do so for blatantly disingenuous reasons, the disgrace is especially embarrassing.
The near-complete mobilization is, it would seem, upsetting a good many Russians beyond those called up. Based on what we hear. And it’s horribly organized, which I suspect would add to the upset. If they can’t even get my father a pair of boots, what’s the prep for combat going to be like, not to mention his commanders?
I suggest that part of Putin’s longevity depends on the faith of the non-bereaved in the justice and competence of the cause. What the big shots do might not be as relevant, comparatively, as has been thought. They got where they are seeking money and power and if one or both are threatened by hanging on to Putin as if they have the same dreams for Mother Russia and the population is demonstrably NOT HAPPY, things might change.
So… how’s the population doing?
The near-complete mobilization is, it would seem, upsetting a good many Russians beyond those called up.
–Richard Aubrey
Peter Zeihan says that over 300,000 Russian men have fled the Motherland. Some are paying $25,000 per seat to fly out. Others drive out via Finland and Georgia and those routes are jammed.
Apparently these men are aware of Russia’s military history of human wave attacks making up for poor training, poor equipment and poor logistics. It worked about half the time, as in WW II. Tough luck for the grunts, though.
God bless these men. May they find better lives elsewhere.
This is Russia’s last war. Hopefully, not ours.
I guess the possibility of Ukraine going nuclear — not necessarily all-out nuclear — as better than 25%. I am not comforted.
What does Putin do if he’s losing the war in Ukraine?
Cauchescu or out the window.
@Art Deco
Do more research before you humiliate yourself.
An assertion without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. However, I prefer dismissing assertions by means of evidence.
Hitler and the National Socialists were almost certainly worse than just about every other German totalitarian or authoritarian of their time, but they were not a world away. Indeed, a vast majority of their crimes and policies held roots in a fusion of right-wing German absolutism and “Royal Socialism” and left-wing Bolshevism. And indeed a good many of the policies that we think define the Third Reich started before it.
Let me count the ways:
Illegal rearmament? Was German government policy since 1919 at the LATEST.
https://phdessay.com/the-rearmament-of-germany-in-the-1920s-and-30s/
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111359588-005/pdf
Alliance with the Soviet Union in order to pursue said illegal rearmament and help set the stage to partition Central and Eastern Europe? Was cemented no later than Rapallo in 1922, cemented by von Seeckt’s secret alliance between the Soviets and the German Reichswehr in which they would fight as allies if the West tried to stop rearmament.
https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1921-2/trade-pacts-with-the-west/trade-pacts-with-the-west-texts/treaty-of-rapallo/
https://warontherocks.com/2016/06/sowing-the-wind-the-first-soviet-german-military-pact-and-the-origins-of-world-war-ii/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1871084
Indeed, the foundational elements of the German War Economy and military machine were built in the 1920s and 1930s, both during and before Hitler’s rise to power.
The Fuhrerprinzip? Even the Fuhrerprinzip was basically a crosspollination between the Bolshevik conception of the Vanguard State and the Kaiser’s sole prerogative over matters of the military, in which they held unilateral power to decree what was legal and illegal and to vest military and bureaucratic officials (such as Kanzlers like von Bismarck and military officers like Ludendorff and Hindenburg) with such power.
Hence why during Nuremburg the Nazis fell back on the “following orders” excuse; because that is what had gotten German war criminals off the hock during the (shambolic German-overseen) WWI War Crimes Tribunals.
Autatarkic Socialism? One of the few things the Hohenzollern Monarchy’s loyalists and the Social Democrats agreed upon, and indeed a large part of Hitler’s initial economic policies were borrowed from his predecessor and rival, General-and-then-Kanzler von Shlicher, who Hitler later murdered.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45337114
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1877954
Living Space in the East and continental dominance of Europe? Articulated already in the September Programme of 1914 back in WWI, and while ironically disavowed by its originator went on to become the basis for WWI German policy.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing? Herero, Nama, Poles in the “Polish Border Strip”, support for the Ottoman Turks and the Austro-Hungarians in their own genocides inside the Ottoman Empire and occupied Serbia. An effort which included von Papen, who spent part of the war as part of the German diplomatic mission to the Porte and who thus cooperated with the CUP/Young Turk Government in the genocide and persecuting would-be whistleblowers and dissidents like Armin Wegner.
https://agmipublications.asnet.am/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Stefan-Ihrig-Justifying-Genocide-Germany-and-the-Armenians-from-Bismarck-to-Hitler.-Reviewed-by-Robert-Tatoyan.pdf
Pillaging of occupied territories in order to feed a Totalitarian Economy during war? Refined from German practices in WWI.
https://www.pygmywars.com/rcw/history/latvia/historylatvia1919.pdf
http://www.remembrancetrails-northernfrance.com/history/the-department-of-nord-and-the-coal-basin-under-german-occupation/looting-requisitioning-and-food-shortages.html
Reprisal executions, Slave Labor, abuse of POWs? Again, see above.
https://mises.org/library/hindenburg-program-1916-central-experiment-wartime-planning
https://www.historyhit.com/forgotten-forced-labour-in-first-world-war-germany/
With a final book suggestion, that of Prisoners of War by Sibylle Scheipers
Persecution of Jews? Fortunately no Imperial or Spartakist argued openly for the extermination of the Jews (especially given how many were supporters of them), but both were happy scapegoating and isolating them with black propaganda.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/judenzahlung_jewish_census
And I could go on (such as state terrorism, where indeed Papen became the most damaging terrorist godfather in American History between the downfall of the Confederate Secret Service and the rise of Josef Stalin), but I think this illustrates the point.
People like Papen were not as bad as Hitler, but they were not that much better than him, and most people ignore that. The quibbles they had with totalitarian government, national socialist collectivism, genocide, mass murder, unaccountable government power, and so on were matters of Degrees and Aims, rather than principle.
As shown by Papen ultimately helping Hitler to gain power and playing a non-trivial role in the regime’s atrocities.
No, it absolutely isn’t. Your arguments and knowledge of the history are incoherent.
While the “Invisible” or “silent” dictatorship by Papen in the aftermath of the “Prussian Coup” is well noted in history, and was well noted at the time in which he purposefully short-circuited the German constitution and legislature and ruled by Decree with the support of the military, bureaucracy, and powerful leaders of such like the aforementioned Hindenburg and Schleicher.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/1816048
https://academic.oup.com/book/2553/chapter-abstract/142870083?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Which is important because it essentially killed the Weimar Republic in all but name during its last two years, and helped pave the way for the totalitarian emergence of both the KPD and the ultimately-victorious NSDAP while also fashioning the Chancellorship into an authoritarian office Hitler could capitalize on.
This is true but ignores the fact that that situation was caused in large part by a systematic campaign by what we might call the “German Deep State” to persecute the SPD and the Catholic Democrats of Zentrum (especially by the last two, Papen and Schleicher). It was made worse by Bruning’s decision to put so much power and faith in Hindenburg, who was an absolutist at heart and promptly betrayed his Republican backers and helped empower the latter two.
The best that can be said for any of them is that they A: Were not as bad as Hitler or Thalmann, and B: Periodically viewed the aforementioned as worse than the Constitutionalists. But that is faint praise indeed, especially given how their actions helped the aforementioned rise to power.
I was not talking about his rather marginal role in the Nazi Dictatorship, but his role as near-absolute dictator in 1932, as I linked above. Which is important both for helping to turn the country into a dictatorship in practice, and by supporting Hitler’s ascension to do so de jure.
There’s just one, “teensy tiny”, forest-sized problem with this. Which even the much-degraded pop culture about WWI and the Interwar period manages to get but you apparently haven’t.
Almost none of those other authoritarian regimes claimed to be heirs to an empire that had existed within the last hundred years, let alone within living memory.
And none of those had experienced a government run along the lines of the revolutionary totalitarianism that was WWI era “War Socialism”/Kriegsocializmus”
Germany HAD. Meaning that Revanchism was baked into the public DNA and policy in a way it wasn’t in places like Pilsudski’s Poland, and even the constitutionalist republicans tended to downplay German imperial atrocities and guilt. Which meant the authoritarians and totalitarians like Papen took revenge and expansion as articles of faith.
Which is also why you see similar nonsense pop up with things like the German and Hungarian Bolsheviks in the immediate post-war period.
The comparison of Papen to Putin is quite apt, but not for the reasons you seem to think. Both present themselves as relatively moderate dictators, Authoritarians rather than Totalitarians who seek law and order and national revenge but who do not wish to subsume all of society and human life into politics. Which is true as far as it goes.
But this ignores the fact that they knowingly enable said totalitarians as both a power base and pressure group, and indeed share many of their convictions and policies (even if not all).
Which is why they really aren’t actual ALTERNATIVES to the likes of Hitler or Dugin, but symptoms of the same problems.
If you have absolutely no choice besides Papen or Hitler, or Putin or Dugin or Vorobyev, it is fairly clear who the lesser evil is. But that in no way changes their guilt or the fact that not only are they still evil, but they helped enable the greater evil when they saw it as convenient and doubtless killed thousands (and presumably would kill millions) if given the leeway.
@Chester Draws
Bravo, and well written indeed. I wished I had brought up the parallel economic recovery more, as well as the interwar period and the attempts at independence after WWI and later (such as the large scale anti-Soviet guerilla wars).
How many soldiers you think we could mobilize you see how our enlistment quotas are lighly understrength because the general staff hates the military that austin and milley and that fatuous twit donahue.
huxley. I’d heard that number. Figure two-thirds–arbitrary–are capable of being made into decent soldiers. Figure an older division structure of 15k guys per division. That’s thirteen divisions over the border.
Plenty of times in WW II, one commander or another could have used thirteen
more divisions. That is a honking BIG number.
Or ten divisions and the rest in smaller formations–artillery or tank battalions for attaching to Infantry divisions, ditto engineers and air defense, and artillery brigades, transportation battalions.
But my point is whether Putin’s inner circle, and the circle next outside that, can or would like to stand against a massively unhappy population whose annoyance is exacerbated with each news report validating that which was misinformation last week.
In WWII, the bulk of the US population was convinced of the justice of our cause, probably more than in any other of our wars.
Having no useful information on the subject, I’m not in a position to judge whether the Russian population has the same unity.
But….I’m guessing not.
You think they forgot they.cried to crush the Russian economy it didnt work because china provided an off rank and western europe stabbed itself not once but four times
Meanwhile, Tucker takes a dim view of the troll in a T-shirt demanding that Santa and his elves (Uncle Sam, NATO, etc) send him billions more for “critical economic needs”. It’s unseemly.
Where are we going here, did everybody stock up on crazy pills will europe being another mud slog like the great war?
“…the alternative to that is to allow Russia to swallow up other sovereign nations in Europe.”
That’s exactly my fear. I’d rather throw material at Ukraine than the bodies we’d be throwing if Putin was allowed to swallow Ukraine. Putin has stated, exactly as he did with Ukraine, that Poland “belongs” to Russia. Russian troops facing Polish troops at the Polish/Ukraine border would be a guaranteed disaster.
1) The Polish troops, government, and populace HATE Russia.
2) Poland is, like it or not, a member of NATO.
3) Article 5, collective defense.
Between Putin’s push for Russian Manifest Destiny and the Poles visceral hatred of the Russins, sooner or later that spark will occur.
Breaking: Printing money and flushing it down the Ukraine rathole has already produced mushroom cloud #1.
For all the talk of the world being on the verge of nuclear war courtesy of the dementia patient in the White House, a real life financial nuke just went off at 8:30am when the BLS reported a shocking CPI print so unexpectedly hot ( a 2.9-sigma upside surprise to consensus), that even the bears were shocked. The result was… well, an absolute disaster doesn’t even begin to cut it.
Keep it up, mushroom farmers. There will be more coming.
Even for Vlad, what is unsustsinable, will stop. USSR, the Great Roosian Empire. Humiliation, hubris. One follows the other.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
Pardon me Neo, looks like my reply to Art Deco is stuck in moderation. Probably due to the source links.
I have very little confidence in the people pushing the “Russia, Russia, Russia” line. The Ukraine has been a playground for the US security state since the Clinton administration. And what did happen there in 2014? Trump showed that he really did not know what he was doing when he called on Zelensky to help him get the goods on the Bidens. It resulted in a trumped up (sorry) impeachment apparently with some Ukrainian American Lt Col Vindman at the controls. WTF?!!?? We are being lied to about everything.
We don’t know what is going on in Ukraine. One could argue that we are keeping Russia from swallowing a poison pill. What would it take to pacify Ukraine if the Russians were to succeed in their aggression? There are no natural borders there. Russia has the longest land borders in the world to defend with a shrinking population. How long until a weakened Russia becomes a client state of China?
The one thing we can be confident of is that the Biden administration is not playing this smart.
good people can have different opinions on this topic, but what amazes me is that mask wearing chicken hawks seem to be the most hung ho war mongerers
Just the worst course of action
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/does-the-united-states-have-a-plan
@amadeus 48
As is appropriate. I (and VDH and Neo, as noted in a prior post) have observed how many of those who demonize even Putin’s regime the most are so insincere because they almost immediately shift to appease it.
Eh, it’s been more contentious than that, with the “US Security State”, Russian Security State, and assorted oligarchs and other factions wading in.
To make a long story short, Putin’s man in Ukraine did a series of evil dumb dumbs that saw him ousted by his own party (with support from political opposition and foreign actors like the US State Gov’t, Soros, etc) for violating the Ukrainian constitution and incapacity to carry out the duties of President, which led to Putin sending “Little Green Men” to invade and try to pry Crimea and the Donbas Oblasts away.
To make a long story short, Ukraine is far from the healthiest society or economy, and had been in a state of trade war with Russia for almost as long as I’ve been alive along with such anti-Russian luminaries as… Lukashenko’s Belarus. For various reasons negotiating with the EU in order to obtain an association agreement for trade was pretty popular, and even had some support in the more traditionally Pro-Russian, Russophone and Ethnic Russian East (Yanukovych’s political home), where the workers in places like Luhansk had been living in a rust belt watching their earnings get throttled with every shift of trade policy.
Yanukovych had been drummed out of power following exposure of rigged electioneering in 2004 during the Orange Revolution, but he was able to make a comeback in the election of 2010 by among other things taking a softer hand, falling back on Russian support, and triangulating in the midst of his enemy coalition’s implosion due to infighting by promising to negotiate an EU Association Agreement, which helped take the thunder out of the “Orange” Coalition.
And during his first year or two in power this is what he did. But his patron Putin was not pleased, and essentially strongarmed him in order to drop the EU Association Agreement in favor of one with Russia, which was (rightfully or wrongly) viewed in Ukraine as being humiliatingly unbalanced in favor of Russia. Which led to the start of pro-EU Association “Maidens”/Protests, hence Euromaidan, compounded by Yanukovych agreeing with Putin to extend the Russian Naval lease at Sevastopol.
This is where Yanukovych started to respond with his more typical “class”…by first trying to ban the protests and gradually clamping down on assorted civil rights more and more (including the passing of the “Dictatorship Laws” and the deployment of Berkut, who are basically what you get when you mix Detroit Police with Riot Gear in terms of being politicized thugs). Which partially backfired in various ways such as drawing the previously-thriving-and-apolitical “Rent a Protestor” market that had sprung up in the previous years of Ukrainian political turmoil, and helping to spark riots, leading to more violence by both sides, etc….
All of this compounded by things like the mysterious sniper attack at “Maiden Square” and ultimately Yanukovych trying to order to the Ukrainian Military to open fire on all protestors and essentially clean them. The Ukrainian military unsurprisingly refused and leaked this to the public. Which all piled in to essentially cause a mutiny. To hugely simplify what happened, the Verkovna Rada is essentially Ukraine’s Parliament. The “Orange” coalition were unsurprisingly opposed to Yanukovych, but had been kicked down to minority status (albeit a LARGE minority) in the form of opposition, with Yanukovych relying on a coalition of “Blue” Parties centered around his own Party of Regions.
But the shenanigan’s had basically caused a mutiny in his own support base as this got a bit much for even the Party of Regions. So in essence the Rada got together and demanded Yanukovych and members of his cabinet appear before them in order to answer questions about the government’s conduct. Yanukovych saw this and basically fled the country, stealing a few things on his way out. The Rada seethed and responded to this by initiating proceedings to strip Yanukovych of the Presidency on grounds of incapacity (on the grounds that a man in Russia who would refuse to come back to do his duties such as answering questions from Parliament could not do so), basically a shortcut around formal impeachment. This passed pretty overwhelmingly and the new Regionnaire leadership denounced Yanukovych for tyranny and corruption, which led to a sort of caretaker government coming in pending elections. This being the “coup” that often gets talked about.
Putin responded to this and apparently panicked, and decided to deploy false-flagged Russian troops (at first mostly Spetznaz in Crimea but then expanding) to parts of Ukraine to basically prop up Separatist statelets in the areas of Ukraine he figured would be most willing to go with him and which could be detached, not even waiting for the new government to come in.
This is the seriously abridged (and probably biased) Cliff’s Notes version, focusing more on internal Ukrainian political stuff without touching as deeply on the nitty gritty of what the US State Department, Russian FSB, Soros, or the like did (in part because we legitimately don’t know the full story, and in part because I think they tend to get overstated by those who want to portray this as merely a chessboard for the Great Powers while ignoring that without favorable internal situations Great Power and External influence often fell flat, as both the US and Russia learned at various times over the past 20 years).
I don’t doubt that the likes of Obama’s State Department or Putin’s government were involved, and probably to degrees beyond what we expect doing things like bribing Rada members and providing material support to “their side.” Indeed we have pretty good evidence about at least some of this. But this is just the starter.
Honestly I do think the move was quite understandable on Trump’s part, he just seriously underestimated the corruption and brazenness of a lot of the Deep State. To be fair, so were a lot of us, especially in terms of the number of snakes in Trump’s own employ.
Probably, though not about everything by everyone, and not always very convincingly.
Eh, on some level I’d say while we cannot understand the entire situation we can be reasonably sure of some broad strokes.
This is possible; I do think that in some ways they are already choking on a poison pill from their attempts to cement occupation over part of it.
Probably a lot. During the 1930s there was the emergence of this “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” centered around assorted Ukrainian Fascist ideologues (in particular the warring camps of Stephan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk) who were basically limited to Galicia in the far West of the country and divided by their own bitter fratricidal civil war within the organization and by conflict with the Soviets and Nazis. But they still lasted well into the 1950s with moderate support from the US before the Soviets and their neighboring client states finally put them down.
A modern Ukrainian insurgency- especially over all or most of the country- would be far worse.
Which admittedly is why Putin does not seem to be so interested in occupying all of Ukraine any more, at least not directly. Which is why he usually puts forward two distinct but non-exclusive visions.
A: “Novorossiya”, essentially a third of Ukraine stretching from the Donbas on the East down South across a land bridge to Crimea in the South. This is what a lot of Russian propaganda put forth during the initial start of the war in 2014-2015 only to silently bury it when Ukrainian resistance made a mockery of this and support from former “Blues” in the area proved way less than they expected. But now they are slowly bringing it up agian.
B: A “Neutral” (whatever neutral means to the Kremlin), demilitarized, “De-Nazified” Ukraine which is not directly under Russian administration but can bbe assumed to have either a pro-Russian or at least cowed and neutral one that seeks to avoid further conflict with the Kremlin.
In any case, I doubt Putin wishes to try and drive all the way to Lviv, and he seems to have concluded that if he cannot secure control over Ukraine by covert political and influence games he might as well break it and take what he can.
Honestly, I’d say there is a decent argument that it either already is or is closely there. Mark Steyn pointed out years ago that the Kremlin would almost certainly prefer an anti-American orientation in a new bi or multipolar world, and that seems to have been borne out.
Quite so. Smartly, or ethically.
avi:
How would you have a clue who wears masks and who doesn’t, in an online forum? As for “chicken hawk,” it was a worthless ad hominem when it was a charge coming from the left, and coming from the right doesn’t make it any more worthwhile. In the case of the Ukraine war, it’s especially meaningless as no US troops are being sacrificed there, and Russia attacked Ukraine and the Ukrainians themselves wish to fight and therefore a war was already ongoing.
Turtler:
I got your comment out of moderation. I believe you are correct that it was automatically placed there because of the number of links.
Why do we think any projecr biden ocasio cortez schumer and mcconnell agree on is a good thing soecially one where nuclear war is the worst option but famine and brownouts are the next one
miguel cervantes:
Because it’s dangerous to make decisions based on doing the opposite of someone with whom you often or usually disagree. Disagree on the merits, not for ad hominen reasons.
However, I think it’s correct to distrust them to carry out a plan or an approach competently. But that’s a different issue.
Do more research before you humiliate yourself.
I do research and I do not humiliate myself.
An assertion without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
It’s a blog post you jack-wagon. You’re alone here in thinking 2,000 word essays are appropriate for a forum like this.
“…Smartly…”
Might an escalation of hostilities affect the US elections, which are less than three weeks away?
If so, how?
Might the multi-crises engineered (choreographed? orchestrated?) by “Biden”, to perfection(?!), “necessitate” a “most UNFORTUNATE” obligation—by “his”, or any(?), “responsible government”—to put off or otherwise delay (or pervert?) those elections.
And might one dare consider such an escalation of hostilities AT THIS JUNCTURE as just another Putin favor to the regime (junta?) in DC?
They have brought this country to a pitiful state by accepting this fraud and his gang of pirates everything they do brings pain to this country
They treat parents as terrorists arrest preachers singing hymns
Breaking: Printing money and flushing it down the Ukraine rathole has already produced mushroom cloud #1.
An unimportant fraction of federal spending is being sent to the Ukraine. It is of no significance macroeconomically.
a real life financial nuke just went off at 8:30am when the BLS reported a shocking CPI print so unexpectedly hot ( a 2.9-sigma upside surprise to consensus), that even the bears were shocked. The result was… well, an absolute disaster doesn’t even begin to cut it.
The annualized rate of inflation reported is 4.9%. That’s regrettable and cause for further action by the Federal Reserve. Whoever you’re quoting knows nothing.
Related to my previous post (but, somehow, I forgot to link to it…):
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11315297/Putin-moves-nuclear-bombers-airbase-near-Finland-Norway-borders.html
– – – – – – – – – –
+ Bonus
Welcome to the PARTY….
‘ “I Lied”: Clinton Associate Testifies He Fabricated Claim That Made Its Way Into Dossier’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-lied-clinton-associate-testifies-he-lied-about-claim-made-its-way-dossier
Lying seems to be all the rage…
(No doubt, “Trump made me do it…!”)
Turtler at 9:08–that is a great post. Thanks!
“How would you have a clue who wears masks and who doesn’t, in an online forum? As for “chicken hawk,” it was a worthless ad hominem when it was a charge coming from the left, and coming from the right doesn’t make it any more worthwhile. ”
I was talking in general about the mask wearing covid cowards, now being arm chair generals. not posters here. I dont know who the mask wearing cowards are on line
the term ” chicken hawk ” was appropriately used by the left when pro Vietnam War hawks avoided service and it is appropriately used now for cowardly war mongers.
I like the Israeli term ” Acharai” – follow me or me first. doesn’t seem to apply to chicken hawks here
It’s simply amazing that when discussing the former “quasi-independent” republics of the USSR, many describe the actions of the West / NATO / USA as the root cause of Russian military actions against Ukraine or Georgia.
Basically, Russia was “forced” to do ….whatever…..because of NATO / USA / the EU; as if Russia had no other recourse other than launch an invasion of a sovereign nation.
Give me a F’n break.
Somehow the desires and goals of these now totally independent nations are never addressed by those touting the Russian version of things. It’s as though these new nations are merely puppets whose strings are controlled by the west and should have no role whatsoever in determining what they believe is best to maintain their own national security.
A nation cannot join NATO or the EU or anything , unless they seek to do so. It is their own decision. Whether or not they are accepted into any organization of states is another matter.
The really stupid line of reasoning – Russia’s hand was forced – suggests that Russia has the right to invade Poland, Finland, Sweden, Latvia,Lithuania, Estonia, the former E.Germany, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia,
etc, …. many of which are former members of the Eastern Bloc and all now members of NATO.
Geez, I wonder; why did they CHOOSE, in the first place, to apply for membership
in NATO??
Because they really trust Russia?
What a bizarre way to show that trust.
NATO is and has always been a defensive alliance, but to the Russian apologists, this means nothing .
Ever since 1917 or so, there has never been a paucity of Western “useful idiots,” who cannot wait to tout the Russian version of things.
Some things never change.
A very interesting article on Germany, Russia, Ukraine and NATO
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/germany-apokalypse-now
Who, I wonder, is going to rebuild the Ukraine?
I get the impression that Russia, not to mention other polities, current or long-gone, are considered as entities on some kind of auto-pilot buffeted by…mostly…stuff said by guys few of whom are still alive about what is or should be happening. And so they’re pitched off at the next intersection to reconstruct whatever was in their nav system, if anything.
The way I see it, this whole thing was Putin’s idea and how it ends is going to be Putin’s idea. His idea might be influenced by a strong suggestion that retiring at his age and in his current health situation could be relaxing. Or because somebody put a bullet in his head. Or because the Russian people are cheering him on, ready to sacrifice all for his view of Mother Russia’s legitimate borders.
Now, it could be said it’s up to the West, whether to contest his moves or allow them.
But it’s people making the decisions, wisely or foolishly, not compendia (is that a word?) of historical documents weighed one pile against another.
I get the impression that Russia, not to mention other polities, current or long-gone, are considered as entities on some kind of auto-pilot buffeted by…mostly…stuff said by guys few of whom are still alive about what is or should be happening.
Game set match.
@Art History
None of us do enough research, but the difference is you were apparently baffled by my reference to Papen’s dictatorship, thinking it was a reference to his role in the Nazi Regime rather than his role prior to it and as one of the contributing factors to its birth.
That speaks to ignorance about the topic you decided to weigh in on.
And yet, that is exactly what you did by snidely sniping at me without even understanding my points, and making claims that were remarkably false and self-defeating.
Firstly: It’s a blog COMMENT, not a blog post (which is what our host Neo did).
Secondly: And?
Yeah, this is just dishonest, gaslighting bullshit from you.
Take a gander to what Amadeus 48 wrote just above, and to Neo’s remarks about my posts before, and Bauxite’s to my comment on the previous Russia/Ukraine thread. Obviously, I’m not alone in thinking these is a niche for in-depth comments like this.
And I doubt even you are dumb enough to think otherwise.
This is a reaction to you being called out for your posturing bullshit, ignorance of history, and willingness to overlook the toxic pathologies both Papen and Putin play host to. A reaction that is as petty as it is self-defeating.
If this is the best you can do on the subject of Putin, Papen, and interwar Germany then you should quit while you’re behind.
@miguel cervantes
You know what one thing all of the aforementioned agreed was a good thing? Crushing IS. Does that mean that IS is suddenly good? Of course not. Neo is right about that.
Besides, there is plenty more valid reasons to doubt what they support is a good thing. Even in regards to Ukrainian aid.
A fair point, though one that I note is largely being worsened by Putin’s decision to wade in here.
@neo
Thank you kindly Neo, I appreciate it. Sorry for the bother.
was appropriately used by the left when pro Vietnam War hawks avoided service and it is appropriately used now for cowardly war mongers.
Mr. Avi, the selective service system in effect from 1 January 1969 to 27 January 1973 summoned people for induction physicals according to lottery. If you failed the physical, you were classified as I-Y (contingently disqualified) or IV-F (categorically disqualified). Men with dependent children were excused and a scatter of others were excused due to their occupation, prison record, &c. Prior to 1969, undergraduates in good standing were excused and men who had not yet served were summoned according to their date of birth (oldest first). On your 26th birthday, you ceased to be subject to conscription. This system was in effect from 1948 to 1973. Most men subject to conscription elected to enlist before their draft board caught up with them. Conscripts were sent to the Army, enlistees joined the other services (though I’m told there were some conscripts in the Marines as well and some in the Army enlisted).
Now, when you accuse someone of having avoided service, you’re accusing him of (1) having gamed the physical or (2) having successfully persuaded an influential official to intercede with your draft board or (3) having attended college to avoid entering the service or (4) pressed a bogus claim for conscientious objector status, or (5) hired a draft lawyer to successfully gum up the works until you aged out of eligibility.
Note, anyone subject to conscription during the VietNam War was born after 1938 or prior to 1954. You’d be hard put to find many people who were politically active during the war years in starboard causes who had also avoided service. You’d actually be hard put to find many people politically prominent in later years who had done so. It’s easier to find people whose service record has been misrepresented to manufacture a talking point.
you were apparently baffled by my reference to Papen’s dictatorship
I wasn’t baffled at all. That was a misrepresentation of the political life in Germany from 1930 to 1932.
Yeah, this is just dishonest, gaslighting bullshit from you.
I’ve said nothing dishonest and gaslighted no one, you prolix fraud.
@Art Deco
If you’re going to lie and gaslight, you’re going to need to do better at that.
For that matter, if you’re going to contribute at all to this thread you’re going to need to do better. Stuff like your response to avi is better.
Let me count the ways, dishonest fraud.
Firstly:
This is objectively fucking bullshit, as can be seen by others who do think my posts are “appropriate for a forum like this.”
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/10/13/russia-the-humiliated/#comment-2647932
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/10/11/excellent-vdh-post-on-how-the-obama-administration-and-biden-paved-the-way-for-russia-moves-in-ukraine/#comment-2647824
I can dig back further, but these disprove your point handily. Even if you want to argue that Bauxite and Amadeus 48 are wrong in thinking my posts are appropriate for a forum like this, the fact is that they think so. Ergo I am not “alone.”
Secondly:
As I mentioned, this is fucking stupid and ignorant as I proved. Papen having managed an invisible dictatorship in 1932 is not at all “incoherent” and indeed is a very cogent and important -if overlooked- part of history. The fact that you assumed I was referring to his tenure after Hitler’s formal ascension to power underlines that you did not know what I was talking about.
It also disproves your previous claim:
The fact that people like Papen and Schleicher had already destroyed the Weimar Republic and were ruling in a sort of Diet Coke version of the Fuhrerprinzip months before Hitler’s decisive victories in 1932 and 1933 underlines that fact, as did the fact that much of their ideological makeup was similar to his, whether it was revanchism (since again, Germany was not Poland or Greece or Estonia), genocidal racism, or state socialism.
But please, go on blathering about how I am a “fraud.” That will totally justify your boorish behavior and the fact that you cannot refute a single point I made.
Note, anyone subject to conscription during the VietNam War was born after 1938 or prior to 1954. You’d be hard put to find many people who were politically active during the war years in starboard causes who had also avoided service. You’d actually be hard put to find many people politically prominent in later years who had done so.
Dan Quayle and war profiteer Dick Cheney
“Now, when you accuse someone of having avoided service”
nice straw man. there are those who claim Clinton and Trump dodged the draft , but they were not chicken hawks now were they?
I don’t know about the fraud part, but the comments are trending towards tome-land.
Case in point.
Release the Kraken! (Clash of Egos!)
@om
I concede the time part, and I admit that is one of my greatest flaws. But it can also be a strength, and at least I can back up my arguments when I choose to wade in.
Neo owns this blog, and what comments to allow, and their permitted length, are her decisions. She is quite generous about it, but what is appropriate here, and what isn’t, are hers to choose.
When comments get lengthy, or when an irritated back-and-forth discussion gets going, I sometimes look at the author’s names to decide whether I’ll learn something from reading them.
@Kate
Understandable indeed. Ultimately it’s up to you to see what to make of this.
For my part, I’m glad Neo is so generous on matters, even if they get long or heated or stuck in automodding due to kinks or something.
there are those who claim Clinton and Trump dodged the draft , but they were not chicken hawks now were they?
Trump was not politically active at the time. He was issued an unremarkable I-Y deferment of a sort issued to about 12% of each cohort. He could have been recalled for another physical within 90 days. As it was, he was not recalled. Eighteen months later, the draft lottery was instituted. Trump and his brother received lottery numbers sufficiently high that they were not summoned for a physical in 1970 and were then excused for the rest of the war. Everyone born prior to 1951 who had not in December 1969 served were either examined in calendar year 1970 or excused thereafter. There were no special dispensations for either Trump brother.
Clinton was, if anything a fashion-conscious opponent of the war. Clinton was enrolled in ROTC from 1964 to 1968. That includes service obligations on graduation. He was able to con a gatekeeper official in the program into getting him a special dispensation which allowed him to shirk his service obligation. The man realized at some point he’d been conned. He filed away the exchanges of correspondence he’d had with Clinton and released them when Clinton was running for President. They had no observable effect on public opinion. \
Dan Quayle and war profiteer Dick Cheney
Quayle was issued an ordinary student deferment when he enrolled in college in 1965. He graduated in 1969 and enlisted in the National Guard because it was convenient. Richard Cohen among others promoted the notion that Quayle must have gotten someone with pull to find him a berth. This thesis was discredited in actual reporting on Quayle by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. NB, the National Guard took in about 100,000 new recruits per year; it’s not plausible that that many people at once had pull. I’d be more impressed with Quayle if he’d enlisted in some other service. NB, a majority of those born between 1938 and 1954 had no history of any kind of service.
Cheney was during the period running from 1959 to 1965 in school intermittently, working blue collar jobs around Caspar when he was not enrolled. Draft calls tended to be low prior to 1965 and that covered six of the eight years Cheney was eligible. He was excused while in school and the military never got around to calling him up when he wasn’t. Prior to November 1961, there were no Americans in combat in VietNam. The period running from November 1961 to February 1965 was the period of the ‘advisory war’. The American troop force never exceeded 25,000 during that time, and their task was training and leading South VietNamese troops, not a task for Joe Blow off the sidewalks of Caspar. Note also that Cheney’s father was not an influential man; he was a mid-level official of the Soil Conservation Service (USDA). Cheney’s deferment was extended when he entered graduate school in 1965, but it was only salient for about 14 months. His daughter was born in July 1966 and as a father he was excused from service. He aged out of eligibility in January 1967. The award of graduate school deferments was discontinued at the end of 1967.
I’d be more impressed with Cheney if he’d enlisted.
Of the men who died in VietNam, 1,315 were drawn from the 1941 cohort, accounting for 2.25% of the deceased. If I’m not mistaken, about 3.9 million men were posted in theatre during the period running from 1964 to 1973, though many of them were not posted to VietNam per se. If the mortality rate of the 1941 cohort was similar to the mean, that suggests that there were about 88,000 men from that cohort posted in theatre. I believe there were 1.3 million males born in 1941, so that would suggest 6.7% of the men of that cohort were posted in theatre. My guess would be that a large minority of those men were career military.
Art Deco
Completely irrelevant.
I dont care if someone evaded service in a BS war like Nam or any other useless war for Raytheon et al unless they were happy to have others serve instead .
Had JFK not greenlit the bloody coup against Diem we would never have had to be there . Karma can sure be a beech.
maybe JFK shoulda let Minelli do his job.
The fact that people like Papen and Schleicher had already destroyed the Weimar Republic and were ruling in a sort of Diet Coke version of the Fuhrerprinzip
They hadn’t and it wasn’t. There was a constitutional provision which allowed the use of presidential decrees which had been invoked during the ministry run by their predecessor, Heinrich Bruening. They continued using it during their ministries. The Reichstag was in such a state that there wasn’t much else to be done. BTW, von Papen and von Schleicher were a pair of shizzy office intriguers, not charismatic even in a debased sense of the term.
@avi
Unlikely. Couping Diem was a mistake (especially as the Communists saw it) but US advisors were already in-country (and indeed a few had died) prior to the coup, and the fact of the matter is that the North was still hell-bent on unifying the South. So we’d likely have fought there in much the same way we fought in Korea, albeit under a saner and more stable authoritarian dictatorship that might’ve had an easier time.
As for “useless war for Raytheon et al” I have very little good to say about our military conduct in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq but at a minimum we can count on Osama and Saddam being dead and the network that struck on 9/11 being broken up. Raytheon certainly benefitted but those outcomes weren’t for them.
I dont care if someone evaded service in a BS war like Nam or any other useless war for Raytheon et al unless they were happy to have others serve instead .
You should sober up before you post again.
Had JFK not greenlit the bloody coup against Diem we would never have had to be there .
We were already there.
Karma can sure be a beech. maybe JFK shoulda let Minelli do his job.
I’ll wager that Vincente Minnelli was satisfied with the work he had at that time. Directed six films between 1961 and 1971.
Turtler, from a couple of years of reading this blog fairly closely, I see that Neo will remove discussions which become completely ad hominem, or which are blatantly racist or prejudiced against some ethnic group, but usually after warnings.
FWIW, I usually read your comments if it’s a topic which interests me. Since I majored in history, and read a lot, yours usually do interest me.
@Art Deco
Then what the hell happened in 1932, when among other things Papen and Schleicher helped destroy the elected government in Germany’s largest state using intentionally convoluted abuse of the system mixed in with incoherent, mutually exclusive rationales? And all undermined by kidnapping members of the previous administration and not releasing them unless they agreed to abdicate their posts (either officially or de factor)?
There’s a reason why Papen was all but ostracized from Zentrum and why he was their central enemy (outside of maybe the KPD) in 1932. Because they recognized what he was doing.
Oh I am well aware of the allowances in the Weimar Constitution to rule by decree; indeed it was one of the greatest defects of the Constitution and played a direct role in Hitler’s rise to power (while many speak of “the Enabling Act” in reference to Hitler’s own, it was sadly the latest in a series).
However, the fact that a Chancellor could legally and constitutionally rule by decree in no way changed the fact that Papen had done what Bruning and his predecessors had not by engineering the deposal of an elected government in Germany and pointedly rejecting all offers to end the “emergency period” that rule by decree was supposed to entail. It is telling that even the best the Supreme Court could put on it was that this was “partially legal.”
Which is true, and also why I point out how there was much less of a gulf between Hitler and the rest of political life in Germany than is often made out to be, especially among authoritarians like Papen.
… again, in large part because of Papen, Schleicher, and Hindenburg pointedly sabotaging all attempts by the major Weimar Republican parties to form a new government, and in particular devastating the SPD and National Democrat representation by locking them out of Germany’s largest state in an attempt to overturn the results.
Weimar Germany had suffered plenty of problems and the Reichstag was a mess, but it wasn’t like this even a couple years ago (during the apex of Weimar). The Great Depression explains a lot of that, but not all.
Totalitarians don’t need to be charismatic in order to be dangerous, and while they lacked Hitler’s skill and magnetism they shared many – though not all or even most- of his ideological convictions.
… again, in large part because of Papen, Schleicher, and Hindenburg pointedly sabotaging all attempts by the major Weimar Republican parties to form a new government, and in particular devastating the SPD and National Democrat representation by locking them out of Germany’s largest state in an attempt to overturn the results.
I assume you’re referring to the German Democratic Party, which ceased to exist in 1930. The Nazis and the Communists held a majority in the legislature after July of 1932.
“Unlikely. Couping Diem was a mistake (especially as the Communists saw it) but US advisors were already in-country (and indeed a few had died) prior to the coup, and the fact of the matter is that the North was still hell-bent on unifying the South. So we’d likely have fought there in much the same way we fought in Korea, albeit under a saner and more stable authoritarian dictatorship that might’ve had an easier time.”
Advisors were in country in small numbers.
However JFK made the same error Brutus and Cassius did as well as “W” did and Hillary and Obama did.
You dont knock off a sovereign without a viable replacement.
The nation destabilized because only buffoonish quislings replaced him and hence the US had to take over the war.
Had JFK let DeGaulle and Manelli done their work perhaps there would never have been a major war, Then again Raytheon et al wouldn’t have gotten their profits.
@Art Deco
Not entirely wrong, but I was speaking more broadly such as the Conservative Peoples’ Party and German Democratic Party and other right-wing, conservative democrats, who were generally junior members or frenemies of the SPD in Prussia and who were also purged.
In large part because pf Papen, Schleicher, and Hindenburg taking steps to cut down the major republican parties to size in things like the Prussian Coup (which in fact helped lead to the NSDAP sweep through Prussia by devastating the SPD government).
This had not been Papen or Schleicher’s plan; they wanted an authoritarian “Presidential Dictatorship” that could restore the Hohenzollerns to their imperial prerogatives. But they did not realize that they had devastated faith in the Republic without actually making the Hohenzollerns that much more popular, and that others were ready to step into the vacuum their actions had opened up.
@avi
Agreed. The issue I see is often times you don’t have a viable replacement and have to make one. That said, the US has generally not been good on that front; the only cases where I’d say it worked of the three were Afghanistan and South Vietnam, and both were dubious successes at best.
Eh, agreed to a limited degree. South Vietnam was already destabilized due to the Communists and at least partially due to Diem’s sectarian policies. Diem remaining in power wouldn’t have immediately fixed all that, but the problem was that the coup that killed him happened at just about the time it seemed like Diem was getting a handle on the situation.
Agreed, that I think would have been the best idea.
That’s the other thing: there would be plenty of market for Raytheon etc. al. to make profits by selling to our Allies. Which makes it all the more galling, and why I think Raytheon etc. al.- while not exactly top problem solvers for major strategic or political problems- are usually tertiary in making the problems compared to the likes of Foggy Bottom and the wider swamp.
@Kate Ah, another history nerd! Pleasure to meet you, and thank you for the kind words.
What did you major in for history? Any particular eras or subjects interest you?
I studied mostly English and American history, along with a minor in English lit., mostly Elizabethan.
Turtler:
By the way, I value your comments, which are usually chock-full of detailed and clarifying information. If now and then you let your frustration show a bit much, it’s more than balanced by your patience at other times.
Turtler,
I appreciate your knowledge
John Tyler:
I have been surprised at that attitude, too – that countries like Ukraine have no right to make their own decisions, if those decisions would enrage or frighten an already enraged or frightened Russia, and make a Russia that already considers them part of Russia’s territory want to invade and annex them.
And yet that is a very common point of view on the right. It’s driven in part by pundits such as Tucker Carlson and plenty of others, as well as a deep-seated isolationism that wants to justify non-involvement, as well as an admiration for the “alpha male” Putin who is unabashedly nationalistic (as opposed to the left here who wants the US to not be nationalistic at all). Also, of course, the desire to oppose whatever the Biden administration is doing. That’s not even an exhaustive list of what drives it.
avi:
Actually, “chickhawk” is never an appropriate term and is always a cheap shot.
No one who uses it actually believes that the only people who are allowed to support any war are those who served in the military already. It is used only for political enemies, selectively.
In large part because pf
The German establishment had perpetrated three gross disasters over a period of 18 years. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that might have something to do with why they were rejected in 1932, and not attribute it to von Papen and von Schleicher scamming around during the 8 month interval when they were in charge of the government.
“avi:
Actually, “chickhawk” is never an appropriate term and is always a cheap shot.
No one who uses it actually believes that the only people who are allowed to support any war are those who served in the military already. It is used only for political enemies, selectively.”
I disagree . until a better term is achieved I think it is quite appropriate.
It doesn’t mean that you had to have served. Having served in the last war means nothing to the current situation. There are periods of peace when the military is downsized and people missed out on the chance to serve. Or if there was a BS war you opposed I dont think its imperative to serve. But if one pushes for a war that one would never serve or has his or her family serve or put out of harms way( like being a military reporter) it is a perfect term.
It would have been appropriate for as many Bush’s and Cheney’s to have enlisted and been on the front lines in Iraq.
Didnt see it.
And I use it appropriately for both sides.
And having sinecures in the military doesn’t impress me. A fireman may have a riskier life than a drill instructor on Parris Island, and a grunt who served only three years may be far more heroic than a career bureaucratic general
avi:
People ordinarily use the term to mean someone who supports a war and has never served in the military.
And today – unlike when most men were drafted and did serve – that is the vast majority of the population.
Cheap shot and meaningless ad hominem, then and now.
I’m not a chickenhawk, I’m an REMF! 🙂
The fate of an EM with a STEM degree, not that I complained.
I had lots of childhood friends wind up as 11Bs. All of them made it back in more or less one piece, physically. One (to an above comment – drafted into the Marines) who had small pieces of shrapnel work out of his body for years, and my BIL had nightmares about Nam for years. Don’t miss those parts at all.
avi:
People ordinarily use the term to mean someone who supports a war and has never served in the military.
And today – unlike when most men were drafted and did serve – that is the vast majority of the population.
Cheap shot and meaningless ad hominem, then and now.
It is very meaningful, then and now.
it can be used both ways.
Were it just for past service people who went into the National Guard during Nam but supported the war would not have been called in real time chicken hawks.
and serving means nothing if you didnt fight.
Goober Graham never met a war he didnt want other peoples children to die in and yet all he did was have a safe sinecure as a JAG officer. seriously. Al Gore taking photos.
Sorry past service means less than willingness to make sacrifice either self or loved ones during the current conflict.
Unless you or someone comes up with a better term that describes this reprehensible attitude I’ll continue using it.
I’m not a chickenhawk, I’m an REMF! ?
The fate of an EM with a STEM degree, not that I complained.
My cousin was a Columbia trained engineer who spent Nam in Havre de Grace , Maryland
“The German establishment had perpetrated three gross disasters over a period of 18 years. ”
look up the Nama and Herero genocide.
The Shoah wasn’t their first rodeo
Heine had them pegged in 1834
avi:
You’re saying I’m wrong doesn’t make it so.
Serving in the military doesn’t make a person’s opinion about a war correct. Not serving in the military doesn’t make a person’s opinion about a war incorrect. And expanding the definition to a ridiculous degree by saying someone who served in the National Guard is also a chickenhawk doesn’t invalidate my argument, it actually augments it.
I repeat: the “chickenhawk” accusation has no meaning, and is a cheap shot ad hominem. Arguments stand and fall on their own merits, or should.
@Art Deco
At least as many, depending on how we define “The German Establishment” and disasters.
This is true to some extent, and certainly the Weimar Republic had inherent, specific flaws in it (to say nothing of German society as a whole). The issue I see is that in many ways Schleicher and Papen were far more emblematic of “the German Establishment” – or at least a a German establishment that had transcended 18 years by 1932 and could go back to 1914- than anyone else, as deeply entrenched and empowered members of the military and bureaucratic aristocracy – as embodied by their close cooperation with Hindenburg at a time when Hindenburg had showed his true colors and was no longer interested in acting as “defender of the Constitution” a who quite literally wished to take the clock back to before 1914 and reject the Republic and constitutional rule for both good and bad).
They obviously did not cause every problem with Germany that it was suffering in 1932. But they did cause many of them, and in particular they helped set the stage for Hitler by gutting the German Republican constitution while remaining tok unpopular to implement their preferred vision and sustain themselves in power. Which is why they ultimately tried to work with and “tame” Hitler as a political ally in their own quarrels with the Republican parties and with each other.
But as we know, Hitler had no interest in being tamed, or in going back to before 1914 in terms of government. Which Papen was prepared to tolerate while Hindenburg did not live long enough to adjust to and Schleicher was killed to pre-empt him.
Maybe it would have happened anyway even if the aforementioned had not tried to derail the parts of the Republic they dislike, but they certainly made it easier for it to collapse entirely. And as avi and I pointed out, they certainly influenced Hitler politically and philosophically and helped make unthinkable policies that much less unthinkable.
“You’re saying I’m wrong doesn’t make it so.
Serving in the military doesn’t make a person’s opinion about a war correct. Not serving in the military doesn’t make a person’s opinion about a war incorrect. And expanding the definition to a ridiculous degree by saying someone who served in the National Guard is also a chickenhawk doesn’t invalidate my argument, it actually augments it.
I repeat: the “chickenhawk” accusation has no meaning, and is a cheap shot ad hominem. Arguments stand and fall on their own merits, or should.”
and you’re saying i’m wrong doesn’t make it so.
whether or not a person served in the past whether it was a sinecure or real service or didnt serve is irrelevant to me.
what matters more is would they or their family be willing to share the sacrifice now.
If like the Bush and Cheney families during Iraq , I have only contempt. Its easy to make pawns of other peoples children.
WRT the Guard back in Viet Nam war days:
First, you go on active duty like anybody else, learn your military specialty and then get out and into the Guard according to your contract.
In the Infantry, enlisted men in their Advanced Individual Training–following Basic–got training in fighting in Viet Nam. Less combined arms training. But that is less important since you’ll do what your sergeant tells you and he knows. So if you’re in the Guard, you’re looking at the Inter German Border.
In OCS, Infantry candidates learned both the Viet Nam thing and high-intensity conventional warfare. Many of our buddies went to Europe for their first posting.
The Reserves are federal troops and are mostly specialty outfits, training units and so forth.
The Guard answers to its state. It’s a state army. And it’s the Guard where you go to get combat units; tank battalions, that sort of thing. From time to time, they’re called up to go fight somebody. Alek Skarlatos, college student and part-time Guard rifleman, was off fighting somebody with his Guard unit when, on his return he was involved with the Thalys train incident.
It looks different now, but in those days, the question was, how many Russians can you take with you before your inevitable death. And that applied to the Guard’s units, presuming they even got there without being shot down or sunk.
So, while we knew the Guard guys were, for the moment, safer and more likely to have descendants, their chances weren’t 100% safe.
See what may have been the first Military Techno Thriller, a genre which Tom Clancy mined so profitably. “August, 1985: The Third World War” by Hackett. Mostly from the Brit point of view, but with many US characters and units. Interestingly, he had the UK PM a Mrs. Plumber.
Likely how things would have gone.
If a draft-eligible guy is in college, is he a draft-dodger? Once he graduates, he enlists or is drafted. Does this take him off the draft-dodger number?
what matters more is would they or their family be willing to share the sacrifice now. If like the Bush and Cheney families during Iraq , I have only contempt. Its easy to make pawns of other peoples children.
Cheney doesn’t have any sons. He has a son-in-law who was 37 years old on 9/11 and too old even to enlist as a buck private under the rules in effect at that time, He also had dependent children. Bush also does not have any sons and his daughters were unmarried at the time. The elder George Bush had four sons in 1990; all of them had dependent children, two were too old to enlist, one ceased to be eligible to enlist in January 1991, and the remaining son has a disability which would have disqualified him.
Bush also does not have any sons and his daughters were unmarried at the time
well that explains it.
too bad he has no nephews or other family members who might have served in his BS wars
avi:
You have quite a simplistic view of things.
Also incorrect in the factual sense. For example, George W. Bush’s nephew, George P. Bush, son of Jeb Bush:
In addition, Pierce Bush (the son of George W’s brother Neil) and Jeb Bush’s other son, John Ellis Bush Jr., were of an age when they might have served in the Iraq and/or Afghanistan wars, although to the best of my knowledge they did not enlist.
The military has, of course, been all-volunteer for quite some time, so the draft has basically become irrelevant, unlike during the Vietnam War.
And by the way, George W. Bush is the last president to have served in the military. George H. W. Bush was a fighter pilot in WWII.
@neo
Thank you kindly Neo. Those words are among the most rewarding I’ve had in a fair bit, and I’m glad they are of use.
too bad he has no nephews or other family members who might have served in his BS wars
You’ve spun like a top between issuing anathemas and saying you didn’t give a rip when it was demonstrated your claims were ill conceived. Now you’re saying we have to take an inventory of extended families. Do you want Lynne Cheney’s relatives included? Laura Bush’s? How many degrees of relation do we have to have to investigate? How far above the mean for a particular set of cohorts is acceptable performance? Can we get a set of standards from you that are fixed, or is this discussion going to consist of you bouncing from one bogus complaint to another?
That escalated poorly were talking about the merits of this particular enterprise vis a vis real threats like the insurgenncy that plagued us in 2020-21
You have quite a simplistic view of things.
https://bootcampmilitaryfitnessinstitute.com/2021/06/11/what-is-a-chicken-hawk/
The definition as I said is not just avoidance in past tense but past and present.
George P did a Mayor Pete style political 8 month sinecure out of harms way for future political considerations.
do you not think a mercenary army has negative ramifications. Politicians who have no skin in the game while other peoples children do?
when was the last time a first degree relative of yours served AND served in combat ( not a George P/ Mayor Pete gig?) Any losses?
I wonder why George P didn’t go to Ranger School like his inspiration?
“Do you want Lynne Cheney’s relatives included? Laura Bush’s? How many degrees of relation do we have to have to investigate?”
Perhaps if there were a few missing faces in the Cheney/Bush Xmas gathering , they might have second thoughts on BS wars or prolonging BS wars by ignoring the plan and disbanding the Iraqi Army. But they profited while others lost.
Now youre just trolling were trying to have a serious discussion of the value of us interventions like this one
Perhaps if there were a few missing faces in the Cheney/Bush Xmas gathering , they might have second thoughts on BS wars or prolonging BS wars by ignoring the plan and disbanding the Iraqi Army. But they profited while others lost.
This is an evasion, as expected.
There were 500,000 deaths of American soldiers and civilians during World War II, the Korean War, and the VietNam War. With the exception of a modest population of career military, these were distributed over 50 birth cohorts (1905-54). That’s about 10,000 deaths per cohort. The mean size of a male birth cohort during that span of years was about 1.4 million, so you have 1 in 140 deceased. An average person would have to walk back about four generations in his pedigree and then look at all the descendants and their respective spouses to find one or two missing faces.
Your complaint is just sh!te.
avi:
Quite a crater you’ve built, ever expanding. Stop digging.
avi:
You’ve moved the goalposts so far back from where you started that they’re in another state.
Neo,
I posted the definition of chicken hawk proving once and for all that I was correc and you were not.
If you want to support wars that neither you nor your loved ones would die for, that is on you.
avi finds room in his crater (Bingham Pit) for his many goalposts.
http://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2013/11/utah-bingham-canyon-mine.jpg
John Tyler @ 11:02 am linked to a Tablet article that, if accurate, should raise additional concerns about the war.
“As many Germans see it, Ukraine’s dazzling advances do not leave Putin with the binary choice of accepting his own death and defeat or else embarking on Armageddon. He may instead be left with the potentially attractive option of deploying a tactical nuclear bomb to achieve a limited military objective in Ukraine, or of causing an “accident” at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and attempting to blame it on the Ukrainians. This would almost certainly trigger some sort of NATO attack on Russia—to which Germany would never, under any circumstances, ever agree. Berlin would instead lead a small dissenting bloc within NATO, including Hungary, refusing any use of its funds, communications, weapons, or territory. In other words, Germany would violate its treaty obligations—as Putin has likely judged.
NATO would thus officially break along the lines Putin knows it is already broken. The EU’s commitment to Ukraine would also fracture. The U.S.-German alliance would be no more. Even a small nuclear explosion would send markets crashing, and the German economy would grind to a halt. All of Europe would enter a depression more severe than anything Russia has experienced to date. It would no longer make sense to speak of “the West.” This, as much as reclaiming lost territories, would be Putin’s life’s work.”
Russia may be better equipped to survive such a scenario than either the US or the EU.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/germany-apokalypse-now
The difference between a tactical nuke and a strategic one is intent. Any use of nukes will be strategic.
Yeah that makes sense, Vlad will “crap up” (radioactively contaminate) his own countryside east of Ukraine and possibly maritime trafic in the Black Sea. Contamination doesn’t care about borders. Where does Roosia get its grain from? Can you make bread from cabbage?
Otay.
avi:
Saying it over and over and over still doesn’t make it so.
Here’s the dictionary definition of “chickenhawk,” by the way:
By your definition, lots of people would not be allowed to have opinions in support of a war. Also, of course, it depends on the definition of “loved ones,” according to avi the wise. Do cousins qualify? Nephews? Great-nephews? Second cousins? Devoted friends? Are women without sons automatically disqualified from having such opinions? What about conscientious objectors who might think a war is just but refuse to fight in it themselves?
@avi
Dear God, this is such tortured “logic” it isn’t even funny. This is getting out of hand.
Let me count the ways.
Firstly: You’re conflating WILLINGNESS to serve with actually serving, which is a problem. Especially when you are dealing with services that try to maintain fairly high standards of readiness. For instance, I would like to think I would be willing to serve (and indeed talked extensively with recruiting offices). But that doesn’t change the fact that I was and am physically INCAPABLE of doing so, at least until I get MUCH healthier, and might be psychologically unable to do so (since I have an Autism Spectrum Disorder).
It doesn’t take much to realize that some of “the elite” probably have similar situations, even if not much.
And this is before we talk about those who are told or at least suggested, George Bailey style, that they can do more help to the effort at home in civilian capacities. To be sure, a significant number of people have gotten filtered into support roles, often outside of the official military in many of the contractor roles, whether PMCs (unlikely in most cases) or those tasked with maintaining equipment and logistics. Who not infrequently have sizable chunks of their organization go into the AO with all the attendant risks that implies (if you want to read lists of the number of “civilians” or “contractors” killed in places like the Green Zone of Baghdad from assorted terrorist attacks, by all means. it is grim reading).
Now, are more than a few of the people – especially from well to do families or the like- entering into those precisely because they are more lucrative or less at risk? Almost certainly, sure. But that doesn’t change the fact that outside of outright make-work positions (which granted, certainly exist: see Hunter Biden), those jobs have to be done.
And? Like, there doesn’t have to be any particularly lavish praise on that but a lot of times those terms of service Do need to be done. Which is one reason why people like Nathan Phillips (the man who claimed to be a combat veteran while actually being a domestic, home front logistics man) are so loathed; because while terms of service out of the combat zone may not be either glamorous or particularly horrifying, they ARE necessary for a war machine to run.
But at the same time this kind of chickenshit “chickenhawk” accusation helped breed more of them, precisely because of the incoherent, subjective, and inconsistent standards and the heavy opprobrium accompanied by it. And sure, a lot of times that is justified, but far from all of it.
Of COURSE I do, which is one reason why I have been distressed and alarmed by the growth of our dependence on militarized contractors, especially PMCs, because it points to some pretty systematic flaws in the US and its military, as well as the fact that for various reasons these corps are more attractive to the people who Would be going into the Military than the actual military. That’s not a healthy situation.
But the fact remains that one has to view the military practically.
You speak as if this is particularly unusual or shocking.
The simple fact of the matter is that conscription is pretty alien to American military traditions. Just about the highest level of organization you could get it to prior to the Civil War was the County or Town level with assorted mandatory militias, and when Lincoln instituted the Draft it was (justifiably) controversial in spite of there been an existential, incredibly bloody civil war for the survival of the Union. It went on and off for another century and change before being pretty decisively discontinued.
Mix this in with the fact that the military can only ever budget for so many people, and in a volunteer context it has a vested interest in picking only those it deems “the best” for whatever criteria (which doesn’t necessarily mean they ARE the best for doing their duty, but which can be used), and it really isn’t surprising you have a surprising amount of people whose families and children were never directly involved in the military. Hell, this was the case even in the World Wars, and I’d need to check regarding the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
Both grandfathers served in WWII, and I know an uncle that served in the Nam in some capacity I do not know.
But this too is illustrative. One Grandfather was an Army Ranger who fought the Japanese through the islands of the Pacific, certainly “in combat.”. The other was a USAAF Air Traffic Controller who while intimately involved in the war effort would probably never have seen “combat” (especially given the extremely desiccated state of the Luftwaffe and its puppet air forces) precisely because the only enemy planes were hundreds of miles away and probably had half-empty tanks and half-cannibalized hulls by the time he got there.
Does that mean he “never saw combat” or was involved in a “sinecure”? Here’s another thing: WOULD IT EVEN MATTER if it was?
Tooth v. Tail. Learn It. Seriously Learn it.
Because you’ll realize how a war machine operating at peak performance should always have most of its vital personnel operating outside of combat roles.
Simple Answer: it’s Fucking Ranger School. If the US military and assorted PMCs as a whole are or were fairly selective (and I’d argue they still are, just with the criteria for selection being much more politicized and less military relevant than it was), the Rangers are doubly so. They take only those they deem the best, and they regularly wash out even those. Hell they semi-regularly wash some Ranger Trainees out THROUGH LITERALLY NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN in order to test their resilience and willingness to go through the hell again.
There’s a REASON why the Ranger motto is “Rangers lead the Way” and why even back in their origins they served as specialist light infantry during the colonial wars of the American Frontier rather than line troops (whether regulars or militia). Because this is a specialist role that most people are flatly not qualified for.
Any answer to the question you posed above that DOES NOT account for these facts as a basis is by definition short-sighted and flawed.
Seriously avi, go fuck yourself for this nonsense. Because the military veterans I am used to are more than open about the fact that war is dangerous and who comes back and who does not is often a matter of raw chance, regardless of your position. ESPECIALLY but NOT ONLY in combat roles.
With this in mind, turning this into some kind of Wound-Counting by measure of who didn’t and did lose family members is not merely stupid and illogical, it is immoral.
For starters, George H. W. Bush VERY NEARLY avoided becoming one of those missing faces. The rest of his unit FUCKING DIED either from exposure or being literally eaten by the Japanese, and he was lucky to have been picked up by a US Warship (and to have carried out duties like a seaman on it until he returned to harbor).
He has ever right to be counted as any actually missing faces. And that is just one example.
To which I respond: “define BS wars. PLEASE do. Because it’s been a few weeks since I’ve tonguelashed the last person who tried to argue that there was no justification for Iraq and Saddam was totally not a terrorist sponsor and collaborator with Al Qaeda who did not have WMDs.”
And this- as Neo astutely pointed out- is another matter entirely than “chickenhawk” issues. It goes to the merits of military action, or more specifically (because one can be utterly justified in principle in fighting but utterly foolish to do so in practice; see the issue of Luxembourg or Denmark against Nazi Germany) the stated reasons for this. Afghanistan should be a literal no-brainer in justifications even if not in execution, since it was an Islamist dictatorship that openly and knowingly sheltered the world’s most prolific terrorist while he struck the US Heartland and killed thousands.
Iraq was a Communist-Fascist Cosplay Dictatorship that violated the Gulf War Ceasefire, opportunistically supported Islamist terrorists like the aforementioned Al Qaeda, and in fact INTENSIFIED said support after 9/11 in one of the greatest Galaxy Brain moves in Middle Eastern History for reasons I still struggle to fathom on a rational level.*
Fixation on the WMD (which I always opposed precisely because) or arguing about to which degree Bush “lied” or so about the intel they had about them or the exact level of cooperation between Saddam and Osama is and always has been a red herring that completely ignores that Saddam had no rights to be even ambiguous on the matter.
* Oh, and anybody who wants to claim that “Saddam didn’t support Al Qaeda” or “Saddam didn’t have WMD” will trigger me putting sources on my boot before I insert said boot as far as I can. Which is one of the issues I loathe Bush most for: his complete inability to effectively counter-attack on this issue.
I have plenty of issues with how the Iraq War was run (and I will mention some), but “the plan” that was ignored was ignored because it had serious flaws.
And as someone who is friends with many who did serve and has a couple Iraqi friends (admittedly largely Kurds), I do think that disbanding the Iraqi Army was correct, THOUGH NOT THE WAY IT WAS DONE.
The Iraqi Army was institutionally rotten by way of Baathist politicization and tribal Sunni favoritst politics. While it had already had a sketchy history going back to before WWII (including sectarian atrocities that give those of us studying the matter deja vu), by 2003 it had become a totalitarian institution that essentially existed to keep the House of Hussein and the Sunni Arabs in power using any measures. During which time they had committed hideous genocides and other war crimes such as systematic rape, torture, mutilation, and reprisal executions in places like the Southern Marshes and Kurdistan, which (among many other things) meant that their credibility and goodwill among non-Sunni non-Arabs was Negative (to the point where the Kurds are STILL hesitant about flying the official flag of Iraq in the North for all kinds of reasons).
Which is one reason why we decided to disband it. That and the fact that people literally could not stop giving reports about how captured Iraqi units in captivity had the (largely Shiite) Enlisted venting their rage at (largely Sunni or other loyalist) officers or vice versa.
The entire organization needed to be destroyed root and trunk in order to rebuild, not unlike the German and Japanese Armies after WWII or North Korea if we did liberate it, and I will happily defend THAT much.
THE PROBLEM was the Method. That in the pollyanna delusion, we simply disbanded the military and began turning its members loose – sometimes even with their weapons – immediately after liberation. Which unsurprisingly resulted in a lot of people with guns and no particular reason to love the West out on the streets, and IN PARTICULAR created a jittery, militaristic, and brutal “Sunni Street” that had maintained power in Iraq for decades through a mixture of patronage of terror stripped of their power. Power that they (unsurprisingly) mostly wanted back, while being (often justifiably) terrified about retaliation from their previously downtrodden rivals (and considering how Shiite dominated the current Iraqi government is, I CAN’T EVEN SAY THEY WERE WRONG except in matters of degrees).
These people were very obviously a nexus of recruiting for Neo-Baathist hardliners or Sunni Islamists, and the failure to acknowledge this was one of the most grievous of the many, Many US policy failures in Iraq. Which is why I (as a “chickenhawk” non-combatant with the benefit of hindsight, but also with a knowledge of successful reforms) would have favored disbanding the military but continuing to intern most of its personnel in reasonably comfortable situations until a new Iraqi government and military could be established. But keeping them in organization or even trying to repurpose them institutionally was a bad idea that likely would’ve lead to more of the same atrocities and helped destabilize our efforts even more than what happened. Which of course tends to be ignored by those who want to use this merely as a cudgel to beat the Bush Admin for rather than actually asking what kind of system the Iraqi Army under Saddam was and what would happen if it was left around.
And I note that this failure was far from unique to “chickenhawks” or those who had never served in combat roles.
Which is unsurprising for the reasons I mentioned, including basic Tooth v Tail limits. Unfortunately in many cases, certainly, but still.
There are multiple definitions of it, even if they usually have overlap.
If you want to support or oppose wars PERIOD, that is on you. But ultimately that can’t be divorced from the merits (or lack thereof) of said arguments for them.
Also, let’s ignore the fact that there have been more than a few examples where people have actively hoped their family or “friends” would die in war. The most extreme of which being where they wanted it so much they literally started a war to do it, or otherwise tried to arrange it (like the story of Uriah the Hittite, which may or may not have really happened but sure as hell establishes that Bronze Age people could CONSIDER it).
@Brian E
The key fallacies I find with the Tablet Mag are twofold.
This strikes me as being too trusting of surface level economic analysis from the Kremlin. For starters, being able to print money does not mean you can print value or make people value said money, which they are transparently doing less (especially among nations in the Eurozone refusing payment in Rubles), along with unstable inflation (that the Russian Government managed to over-correct for and now needs to lower the value of the Ruble). It also ignores the fact that Russian sovereign debt is quite high in relation to that of the West, and that it is facing harder issues getting credit. In addition, there has been a noted crisis in the Russian foreign markets as other nations cut or trim down commitments with Russia and have openly expressed worries about the quality of Russian equipment.
What the author fails to address is that many of the deals (especially oil) are only sustained by the Kremlin offering rather prohibitive discounts to its market partners. All of which cuts into Russia’s long term viability in a long war negatively compared to the West. I am no tea leaf reader beyond a very rudimentary amount but that has to be measured relative to the very real Western problems.
Secondly:
The issue I see with this is in assuming that even a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine would IMMEDIATELY lead to an Article 5 NATO war with Russia, that such a strike would not do major work to destabilize pro-Russian or Dovish leaders in Hungary, Germany, and elsewhere, AND that the intentionally-vague threat definitively amounts to a threat of war.
While I have very little love for the Brandon Junta, none of these seem safe assumptions, let alone taken together. The most favorable one is the question of cleavage, since a nuclear strike might either displace people like Scholz or Orban or make them stronger I simply don’t know.
But we HAVE encountered a situation where nuclear fallout hit the West before (including NATO countries) thanks to Russian actions, and Chernobyl should loom larger in this analysis than it does given how the war factored in. This did not lead to Article 5 being invoked at all. Now granted you might argue this is comparing Apples to Oranges and that Chernobyl was above all an accident that hurt nobody more than the Soviets. And that is true, but it also establishes that NATO might not immediately go to war over a fallout “attack.”
Moreover, I’d argue they have little incentive to. Instead they have an incentive to use this within a short period of time to try and wring concessions out of Putin, counting on the international shock from this to galvanize support and THREATENING intervention if not met. This is appealing (at least to the Pols, and dangerous for everyone) for a few different reasons, starting with the fact that it seems to offer the possible benefits of direct war without the costs, and the fact that such an unprecedented strike on something very much less than Imperial Japan in 1945 is going to go down sourly with the wider world.
A 24-72 hour delay or ultimatum sets in the aftermath would likely hurt Putin far more than it helps him, and we have to assume that at least some parts of the Russian public would be aghast at this, even if they otherwise support the war, precisely because of the risks it entails. It would also be an opportunity for ambitious would-be-Tsars to bump Putin off in the name of “peace” without having to abandon most of his policies or actions (or at least so they might think).
Speaking of cruse missile attacks on Ukraine (and later in the discussion on future attacks by Roosia on NATO):
Cruise Missiles: Russia’s Bombardment of Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfSy_6ihdgI
The phrase “13 minutes” is not heard in this video.
Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” saw two political classes; the “citizen”, one who was honorably discharged from military service, and the “resident”, one who had not served. The latter had all the rights of the former except for voting and positions of public trust. The presumption was that the citizen had proven that the welfare of society was more important to him than his own life, should it come to that. Thus, it was the citizen who should be in charge.
This was considered fascist, not solely because of the stupid hat Doogie Howser wore in the worst move made from a good book.
Since I would qualify as a citizen, along with most men in my family going back, possibly, to the Spanish-American War, the idea interested me.
Heinlein was at pains to describe how one who wanted to serve could do so, despite handicaps. Testing new combat space suits on Titan, maybe. Or…something which cost time and effort and was down and dirty and made the price of the franchise something worth contemplating, one way or another.
It’s an interesting idea. Chicken hawk is a stupid idea. One may or may not be right about war, irrespective of service history.
The veterans of WW II might have been nearly universally in favor of French resistance to the German militarization of the Rhineland…after the war. Likely would have prevented the war in Europe, or made it less horrid and precluded the Holocaust. But how about the veterans of WW I, seeing the European Usual happening yet again? What would they be thinking in 1936?
Sowell, in “Intellectuals and War” gives the intellectuals a real shellacking for their views running up to WW II. Their insistence that the Axis wouldn’t do what the Axis were threatening to do, and the consequent resistance to preparedness cost the Allies horribly in the event.
Nowhere in this calculation does the serving soldier or his family have a lock on what is the best thing going forward. Sowell details the lasting horrors of WW I. Sepsis was controlled, but there was no reconstructive or cosmetic surgery. Hence, those who might have died in hospital in earlier wars were walking reminders, with their ceramic faces (in France, at least), presuming they could walk of the horrors of war. And to do it again in 1936…? Would have been a good idea, notwithstanding the military service record of those who were for it, or their families.
Turtler,
Thanks for the comments.
Whether Russia would benefit from continued discounted oil sales depends on the cost of production. In 2020 Putin signaled Russia was comfortable with $40 prices and as oil is heading north of $100 one would assume it’s still profitable.
As to the use of small nukes– I read Russia has developed something in the range of 20 kilotons, I think it’s most likely propaganda. Would the prospect of thermonuclear war be more likely to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table more than continued bombing and abuse of civilians?
The use of nuclear weapons seems much more scorched earth and I would assume Russia wants to benefit economically from controlling portions of eastern Ukraine.
But combine with uncertainty of nukes, along with a long cold European winter might have many of the EU rethinking their resolve for a protracted war. And I would include the US in that.
One of the things in the article was the fractured nature of NATO and the EU. Germany has been a reluctant (hostile?) partner for some time. As the US fades from the world scene, should Russia particularly care about EU postering?
Small tactical nukes have been around since the 1960s IIRC. See SADM, 8 inch artillery rounds, Davy Crocket system (US Army) as examples.
Roosia wants. It may not get. Time will tell.