On Aug 25, 2004, at 8:25 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
Maybe not (arguable, though). But we have some empirical evidence that we can use to test that hypothesis. Damon's military history is a lot better than mine, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that he would agree with me that the German armies fought really, really, really well during the Second World War - man for man, they were probably the best of any of the major combatants (possible exception for the Finns). Indeed, I know that in the standard US army wargames simulating the Western Front in the Second World War, German units are rated as considerably superior to their American counterparts. While you can argue that American elite formations (the 101st Airborne, some historians argue Patton's 3rd Army) fought as well or better than their German counterparts, I don't think there's any question that of all the reasons that the Germans lost the war, the fighting abilities of their armies (on a one for one basis) is dead last on the list.
I wasn't thinking of their fighting abilities, but rather that they got spread very thin very fast. IIRC they were overdeployed and too disconnected to keep up the campaign indefinitely. That's what I meant when I referred to their arrogance and belligerence.
Two, any social system that attempts to quell diversity will suffer and probably fail when it is forced to compete with another, more cosmopolitan social system. For instance the collapse of Communism in Russia was more or less preordained; as soon as it became a thought-control, monotonous experiment, all original thinking -- which is crucial to keep a society going artistically, technologically and so on -- was crushed. (The ridiculous attempts to force Lysenkoism into agriculture are an extreme example of how backwards such systems can become.)
I think that's a little optimistic. A simple historical "what-if". What if FDR had died in, say, mid-1944 instead of mid-1945? This is eminently plausible - his health was poor throughout 1944. If he had, Henry Wallace would have become President of the United States, and presumably won reelection in 1944. Henry Wallace had, at one point in his career, named the people he would have picked for several senior positions in his Cabinet. We now know his choices for both Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury were paid Soviet agents. Wallace himself was not, but was so ludicrously sympathetic to the Soviets that it seems virtually certain that, had he been President instead of Harry Truman, Stalin would have been able to secure a dominant global position after the war. Controlling the two most important people in the Cabinet might have helped as well. It seems at least possible, to put it mildly, that this would have changed the outcome of the Cold War.
I'd agree, but it doesn't refute my outlook, I think, because of the condition about being forced to compete with a cosmopolitan society. Had events unfolded as you described, the US may not have been that competition, so probably the outcomes would have been different, and possibly dramatically.
I still feel (so far) that, all things being equal or equivalent (population, power, etc) at the beginning of a contest, if you have two evenly-matched nations, one of which is totalitarian and the other more liberty-oriented, the totalitarian system will ultimately, eventually collapse. I don't believe totalitarian systems are flexible, innovative or robust enough to survive that kind of competition.
The liberty society doesn't even have to do a heck of a lot apart from maintain its border security -- internal forces like paranoia and purges in the totalitarian society will gut its power structure, its population will hemorrhage into the liberty society, and its inability to adapt to new ideas will cause it to lag further and further behind in technology until it is simply incapable of going on any longer.
-- WthmO
If you can't beat 'em, have 'em flogged. --
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