Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TIKhistory"
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@parlyramyar Again, false dilemma. Socialism involves collectivization, but not all collectivization is socialism. Socialism is opposed to capitalism, but not all that is opposed to capitalism is socialism. There are alternatives that are neither capitalist nor socialist. Feudalism (in the Marxist sense) is one such. Another I have pointed out in the past is the centralized Bronze Age palace system.
A key component of socialism is control of the means of production by workers . In state socialism control is exercised by the state on behalf of workers, and the state itself is, at least theoretically, representative of the workers. (Of course this was never true in the Soviet state, but that is a flaw in the Soviet system as it developed in practice.) Socialism is about economic class, specifically, the working class.
Nazism is not socialism (or capitalism) because nothing is controlled on behalf of or by workers OR capitalists and nothing is determined by economic class. Workers exist to serve the state, not the other way around. So do capitalists and their businesses. The state serves Hitler's mystic conception of the German volk , which is an ethnic class, not an economic one. In Hitler's flawed understanding of Nietszche, the volk effects its will to power through war, the state is the means of waging war, and the Party subordinates the state and everyone in it to this aim.
As Orwell pointed out, the Nazis had some economic policies that were capitalist and some that were socialist, but in no case was this because any economic philosophy drove policy, it was because those policies were whatever Hitler and his party decided would produce the maximum efficiency of production in service to the state and thus to the war machine.
TIK will never understand Hitler or the Nazis and their policies as long as he approaches them from the standpoint of rational economics and fails to understand what really underlay ALL of Hitler's philosophy and policy, which is the flawed interpretation of Nietszche and Darwin that held that the ultimate, and only valid, meaning of life was the struggle for superiority between ethnic groups.
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Racism in the modern sense was an invention of capitalism in the early modern era, and preceded the existence of the term or ideology "socialism" by at least two centuries. This is not a condemnation of capitalism, it is simply historical fact. Racism emerged because the new capitalist colonial powers needed cheap labor to work the cash crop plantations in their newly won American colonies, and racism provided a convenient justification for using captive people from Africa as slave labor while denying them the economic and political rights that indentured servants from Europe expected to earn through their labor, while at the same time claiming to adhere to Enlightenment values that were incompatible with concepts like chattel slavery.
Today racism can be found in, and used by, capitalism, socialism, or any other economic system. The two concepts exist on two different axes. It's sort of like arguing whether socialism or capitalism is more authoritarian, it's a meaningless discussion because there's no necessary relationship between any of them - there can be authoritarian capitalists and authoritarian socialists, and there can be liberal (in the traditional sense) capitalists and liberal socialists. Likewise socialism is neither more racist nor less racist than capitalism. The fact that people refuse to accept that is how you get flaming racists like Jeremy Corbin on the left who insist that they can't possibly be racists because they're left-wing, and useful idiots on the right who can't accept that people who literally march around wearing swastikas and chanting anti-Semitic slogans are Nazis because the original Nazis were socialists, not conservatives.
As for "socialism," I wouldn't quite say it's a term that is too broad and diverse to have useful meaning, but it's getting close, and if you're going to have a useful discussion of it you have to have a thorough understanding of its history and development. Yes, socialism historically had diverse branches, some of which were more left-wing and some, like National Socialism, more right-wing, but it's dangerous and generally mistaken to try to place Nazism on the spectrum of modern socialism because of developments both during and after its time. For one, while the DAP did include some left-socialists when Hitler joined it and accumulated more in the early days of its leadership, those people were purged when or shortly after Hitler took power as Führer und Reichskanzler and had virtually no impact on the policies of the NSDAP when in power - the Night of the Long Knives being the most dramatic episode in this purge.
Second, because National Socialism was so thoroughly discredited by the events of World War 2, it has virtually nothing to do with socialism as it has existed as a movement since that time. Modern socialism is almost entirely the product of either Marxism and its Bolshevik successors, or from the Democratic Socialism that developed as a response to the excessive authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks and their allies. And after the excesses of the USSR the extreme authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks was also largely discredited on the left in the West. To say today that one is a socialist, whether of the Marxist or Democratic variant, is to indicate adherence to beliefs and policies like trade unionism, internationalism, and the primacy of the material welfare of workers that were absolute anathema to Hitler and the Nazis. This is why TIK is 100% mistaken in saying that modern socialism has its roots in Nazism and is where the "real Nazis" are found today - modern socialism is the descendant of the people who were most diametrically opposed to Hitler from 1933 to 1945, people who ended up in concentration camps if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves under Nazi rule. (Or, for that matter, Soviet rule, since Stalin hated and persecuted non-Bolshevik socialists more than anyone else.)
(You did find a lot of former Nazis in government in Eastern Europe after 1945, though usually not in higher leadership positions - those were reserved for people who had been reliable Soviet stooges the whole time - but that has a lot more to do with Stalin's cynicism and Cold War practical necessity than with any ideological affinity between those people and Soviet Communism. Some former Nazis did very well in the West as well for the same reasons. Most of them were not Nazi true believers anyway, they were people who were happy to jump on Hitler's bandwagon when it helped their careers and just as happy to turn their coats when that became more advantageous.)
Likewise, the people who today claim or demonstrate an affinity for the Nazis generally have nothing to do with Hitler's economic policies and usually little or no knowledge of them; the parts of Nazi ideology that are reappearing today are mostly its racism, jingoism, militarism, and ideological elevation of violence as both a means and an end in itself.
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@valenrn8657 True, but that has nothing to do with race in the sense we use it today. The Thracians, Lydians, Gauls, Italians, and other neighbors of the Greeks were not very different from the Greeks in terms of physical appearance, it was purely by virtue of speaking something other than Greek as their native language that Aristotle classified them as barbarians. And they were no more or no less seen as barbarians than Ethiopians or Nubians.
The ancient world had little or no notion of all of humanity being divided into three (or any other number of) races. Even the classification of the descendants of Noah's sons in the Torah, which in the early modern era became closely associated with the idea of race, only covered the people in the general vicinity of the Israelites and didn't correspond to either ancient or modern actual relationships of people: Semitic Babylon and Nineveh were founded by a grandson of Ham, while non-Semitic Elam was founded by a son of Shem, and the Canaanites who were virtually identical to the early Hebrews except in not adopting monotheism were said to be descendants of Ham.
It's funny, people today get all wrapped up in arguing things like whether Hannibal or Cleopatra was black, but in the very numerous writings about those figures it's worth noting that the Romans and Greeks writing about them never uttered a single word about their race. To the ancient world Hannibal wasn't black and he wasn't white, because those concepts didn't exist: he was Carthaginian. No one particularly cared how dark his skin was or how curly his hair was or what shape his skull was because for the most part those things meant very little to the ancients except as interesting personal trivia.
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@bludfyre "I would argue that "fascism" is socialism for a narrowly-defined ethnic or national group"
I agree completely. That is why fascism is not socialism. Socialism is aimed at the betterment of the working class, fascism (and nazism, to the extent it is a different thing from fascism) is aimed at the betterment of an ethnic group. Socialism is entirely about economic class conflict, fascism is about a different breakdown of classes of people based on race or ethnicity, not economics.
TIK fallaciously argues that socialism is not about bettering conditions for workers because its policies actually make things worse for workers. He is correct in that premise -socialism does not, in fact, work - but wrong in his conclusion. The fact that socialism makes things worse for workers is an inherent error in socialism, not a thing that makes socialism not socialism, or a thing that defines socialism. You can't say, as he does, that because socialism makes things worse for workers, any system that makes things worse for workers is socialist. That is the commutative fallacy.
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The first fatal flaw in your analysis is separating the Vietnam War into separate and barely related conflicts. From Hanoi's point of view it was one continuous struggle for national liberation that started in 1945 and ended in 1975, separated into phases named by the principal opponent in each stage. For them the Paris Accords of 1973 were not the end of anything but American involvement. A vital clue in this interpretation was their rock-solid insistence that any "peace" treaty left their forces in place in South Vietnam ready to renew their offensive any any time they chose. The South Vietnamese government understood this as well and that is why it was vehemently opposed to the treaty, but they had no power to compel the US to stay in the war or support the South after the treaty was signed. Yes, Hanoi really needed a truce in 1973to stave off the collapse of their offensive capability to US bombing, but they understood that Nixon needed an end to US involvement in the war even more, and that they held the upper hand in the truce negotiations and could hold out for their bottom line which was the maintenance of that offensive capability not only against, but in South Vietnam.
The Napoleonic Wars are a good comparison, and I think most historians, while giving individual names to the various phases of those wars, would indeed regard them, or certainly all of the phases after the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, as one continuous conflict that Napoleon ended up losing, separated into phases defined by who was actively fighting Napoleon at any given time. Every one of those wars was fought for the same reason, Napoleon's desire to make France the hegemon of Europe with his own Imperial dynasty at its head and the refusal of the other European powers to accept that result, and ultimately they achieved their goal and Napoleon failed utterly in his. Any temporary successes he achieved along the way, however impressive, didn't affect that ultimate result.
As you stated, the American goals in the war were the preservation of South Vietnam as an independent, non-communist country, and the containment of communism in Southeast Asia. Regardless of the temporary lull in the fighting in 1973 - a lull that every major player on the planet other than Richard Nixon, and probably even he, understood could not possibly be anything but temporary and brief - the fact remains that within two years of the American withdrawal South Vietnam was absorbed by the communist Hanoi government and Laos and Cambodia were controlled by communist governments as well.
Watergate and Nixon's fall certainly made South Vietnam's position more difficult by cutting off any possibility of continued US support, but I believe the ultimate result, the complete conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North, was inevitable from the day the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Public support for any continued US involvement in Vietnam was about zero even before the Watergate scandal broke, and the Saigon government simply wasn't capable of resisting the North's attack without massive US support, if not active intervention, and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam understood that. The lack of US enthusiasm for keeping its promise to Saigon was not a surprise to Hanoi, they had been counting on it - they could watch CBS Nightly News even if their subjects couldn't.
The second fatal flaw in your analysis is confusing battlefield success with strategic success. Body counts and battles won do not determine the winner of a war, achievement of the political goals of the warring powers do. If we go by body counts and number of battles won, the British won the American Revolution and the Confederates won the American Civil War, but obviously no one would claim that. Britain lost its American colonies (aside from Canada) and the South was forced to remain in the Union, so they lost those wars. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were taken over by communist governments, so the US lost its struggle to prevent those outcomes by military force.
As to America gaining by, for instance, lessons learned, the British Empire's naval superiority and general geopolitical position against its greatest rival, France, were better in 1784 than they had been in 1775, but again, few if any historians would argue that that means the British won the American Revolution.
Don't get me wrong, I am an American patriot and I think the US military achieved remarkable things in the Vietnam War and were forced to leave the conflict by purely political, not military, factors, but like Napoleon's astounding victories in battles like Austerlitz, military successes mean nothing if they fail to achieve the political goals they are intended to achieve. The simple fact is that the US did not possess the political will to win the Vietnam War, and so it lost the Vietnam War. North Vietnam's military position in 1968 was not good, the Viet Cong had virtually ceased to function as a fighting force, the Soviets lacked the stomach for a direct showdown with the US over Vietnam, and Hanoi's relations with China had broken down to the point that China was no longer a sanctuary or sufficient supply route for the North Vietnamese, so if the US had had the political will to mount an invasion of North Vietnam comparable to MacArthur's invasion of North Korea in 1950, the result very well may have been a collapse of the Hanoi regime and a complete US victory - but the US did not have that political will, and all of the leaders involved knew it, so there was no such invasion and no US victory. (And of course, there was also the possibility that such a radical change in US policy might have resulted in an equally radical change in Chinese and/or Soviet policy and a much more destructive direct war between superpowers, and that possibility is a large part of the reason for the American unwillingness to support such an invasion.)
The real crying shame is that the Johnson administration, and especially SecDef MacNamara had concluded by 1965 that the war was unwinnable for political reasons, but they lacked the moral courage to try to explain this to a then-hawkish public and accept the political cost of having the war lost on their watch. I'm pretty sure Nixon and Kissinger understood this as well, and they had no more moral courage than LBJ did, but they were much better politicians and managed to spin the inevitable loss into a US victory under Nixon's administration followed by a "loss of the peace" under his successors. He just got booted out of office more quickly than anyone anticipated and his successor lacked both the political support and the motivation to stave off the debacle in South Vietnam until a Democrat was in the Oval Office. IMO it is a testament to the consummate and devious political skills of Nixon and Kissinger that they sold their BS so cleverly that intelligent and informed people like you are still buying it today.
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@MarkErikEE You are correct that socialism is all about the workers. You are wrong in thinking Nazism was about workers. Hitler and the Nazis had to appeal to workers to get elected, but it was always about the German people as an ethnic group, not any particular class. Capitalists, managers, and professionals were part of the German volk every bit as much as workers were. It wasn't socialism with a side of nationalism, it was nationalism with a side of socialism, and in some other ways, a side of capitalism. Everything Hitler wrote and said in his adult life supports this view - class was nothing, race and nationality (which were inseparable for Hitler) were everything.
The Bolsheviks were not national socialists, they were international socialists. The dispute between Stalin and Trotsky wasn't about nationalism, it was about whether communism should consolidate its gains in the nation it already controlled before trying to spread to others, or whether it should always try to spread to other nations from the moment it gained power in one. Stalin took the former view, Trotsky the latter. Of course for Stalin it was always really about his own personal power, as Orwell described, but that doesn't really speak to Stalin's ideology so much as his lack of a genuine one. (Which also distinguishes Stalin from Hitler, for whom his nationalist and racist ideology was the only point to having power.)
You can't hope to understand Hitler without starting with what he took from Nietszche and Darwin (mistakenly in both cases, but those were his core beliefs).
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The mistake you're making is ignoring the even more massive elephant in the room, the fact that the DAF was a means for the state to control workers, not a means for workers to control the state or the workplace. The fact that DAF was often adversarial to management does not mean it was controlled by the workers. This is the difference between the DAF and a real labor union. The quote you put up at 12:03 shows this - corporate management was taking directives from government officials, not workers' representatives. A labor union isn't just an organization of workers, it is an organization run by workers or by representatives elected by workers.
In general you always seem to fall into the trap of reasoning that Hitler had to either be a capitalist or a socialist, and therefore that you can show he wasn't a capitalist, he must have been a socialist. This is a classic false dilemma fallacy. The Nazis were neither capitalist nor socialist, they were a third system in which neither the interests of capitalists nor those of workers controlled policy, they were both subordinated to the militarist state. Everything done by the DAF was intended to benefit the state and its war machine - if it advocated for better conditions for workers, that was solely because it had determined that better conditions would make workers more productive in support of the war effort. George Orwell, as good an authority on communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism as I think there has ever been, put it best: the Nazis borrowed from both capitalism and socialism whatever policies they thought would make the economy more efficient in serving the state.
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Anarchy is your sixth grade gym class, forever.
Anarcho-capitalism is much like socialism: it's a great idea that cannot possibly work because it requires human beings to be Vulcans, elves, or something other than human beings. It's also a religion. Libertoons irrationally worship the market in the exact same way Marxists worship the inexorable march of history. Your blind faith that the market, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything is no less irrational than the blind faith of socialists that the government or the Party, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything.
And anyone over the age of twelve who think taxation is robbery is profoundly ignorant of the foundations of liberal (in the classical sense) economics and politics. Again, it's exactly as ignorant and naive as "property is theft". It's something a teenager who knows nothing about the real world says.
I would highly, highly recommend you study of on Edmund Burke and the American Federalist Papers and proceed from there. Or better yet, study economics and political science at a university. And study some history that doesn't involve tanks.
And the belief system you're describing utterly and completely fails to take into account that some things (not restaurants) are inherently communal. Clean air and water, for example. Sure, the market can provide drinking water for a price. But I don't just want my own personal drinking water to be clean, I want the creek behind my house not to be toxic and stinking and kill all the wildlife, and also not kill me if I happen to fall into it. How can a market possibly provide that? How do I buy my own individual creek and not have the same creek that flows past everyone else's house? And what if my upstream neighbor values pouring the waste from his lead mine and smelter into the creek more than he values the water downstream from him being clean? How can market possibly address that? And do we really want to pay individually for clean air to be pumped into our own little airtight bubbles so we can breathe it? The reality is that everyone breathes the same air, regardless of how much we pay or how much we pollute as individuals. You're too young to remember the days when we had "market-provided" clean air and water and the government kept its nose out of it, which meant we had rivers catching on fire and life expectancy cut by ten years or more by breathing smog all day. In practice, the way the market provided clean air and water was that rich people all lived upwind and upstream from the pollution and poor people lived with the smog and toxic rivers. But that only worked so well, and the wealthiest men in London still breathed toxic fumes when they went into the City.
And the idea of a "market for security" is quite simply idiotic. Yes, there can be market solutions to providing those services - but the market cannot possibly determine how much funding should be put into security, or provide the funding, because security (beyond the level of private bodyguards, who are pretty much zero use when another country invades or lobs nukes) is also inherently communal. If I think I need $100 per capita worth of security, and the other 99 people in the area to be secured decide they want to pay zero for security, my $100 will buy $1 per capita of security for me and also for all of my 99 neighbors, who will pay nothing but get the exact same security that I get. Thanks, I'll take the state military-industrial complex over that any day of the week.
And then we can get into a market for justice. Then again, let's not. I can only take so much brain hurt from the stupid in one day.
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@adolphdresler3753 Social control of the means of production, which means either by (in most cases) or on behalf of the workers.
In a broader sense, any system in which the distribution of wealth is a political process and is intended to benefit the working class almost exclusively. The existence of some amount of corruption doesn't necessarily take the system out of the realm of socialism (it makes it flawed socialism), but at some point you have to say the scheme is no longer intended even theoretically to benefit the working class and what you have is a kleptocracy.
The Nazis did not come anywhere near either of those models, so they were not socialist. To the extent they controlled the means of production, that control was not exercised by or on behalf of the workers, or to their benefit, it was directed to the benefit of the military machine. To the extent the Nazis granted any concessions or benefits for workers, it was only because they calculated that this would make the workers more productive and efficient servants of the military machine. For the same reason, the Nazis generally did not interfere with the extraction of large profits by the industrial capitalists, not because the Nazis were devoted to capitalism, but because they deemed that this was the best way to maximize production in support of the war effort.
Unlike TIK, I'm not just making up my own definitions because they suit my purposes. This is how actual socialists define socialism.
George Orwell called all of this 75 years ago.
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@suddenuprising None of that is true. All the government does is restrict who they can sell weapons to if they choose to make weapons, and decide what weapons it wants to buy. But Northrop Grumman could decide tomorrow that it won't produce a single additional piece of military equipment and will instead make commercial aircraft and fishing boats, and the US government can't do a thing to stop them. No one would go to jail and no part of the company and its assets, aside from classified material it possesses, would be confiscated. Of course that's not going to happen because Northrop Grumman makes a fortune selling weapons to the US government and our allies. That's capitalism. But there is nothing in US law that would allow the government to nationalize, confiscate, or liquidate a Pentagon contractor that decided to stop producing armaments.
The situation in Nazi Germany was very different. When Hugo Junkers decided he no longer wanted to make military aircraft for the German government, the Nazis seized the company, installed their own managers, and prosecuted Hugo for treason. He died soon after, while they were still in the process of seizing his assets and before they had a chance to send him to a concentration camp.
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That plan was for the most part not entrusted to radio communications, though. There were updates on things like diplomatic moves and expected local weather sent by radio to Kidō Butai once it was underway, and of course the famous and completely ambiguous go code "Climb Mt. Niitaka," but the preparation and planning for the mission was generally restricted to more secure methods, which was possible because all of the units involved in the attack remained in home waters until the attack force sailed. AFAIK there's no record that any mention of the task force's objective was ever transmitted by radio, let alone that such a transmission was even detected, let alone decoded, by anyone in the US or UK. And the Japanese were so determined to maintain comms security on the mission that they left the radio operators from the task force's ships in Japan to fake normal radio traffic as if those ships were still in port (which fooled everyone in the USN, including Joe Rochefort, into thinking they were) and physically disabled every last transmitter in the fleet, including those on the planes, until the attack was ready to be launched.
I think people today have been given an unrealistic view by Hollywood of how signals intelligence actually worked in WW2. Even with the Midway operation six months later, for which detailed plans had to be transmitted by radio to units scattered across millions of square mile by ocean, the Allied picture of Japanese intentions was extremely unclear and argued about vehemently by various commands. "Code breaking" in this context usually didn't mean reading the other side's messages word for word, it meant trying to assemble a picture from thousand of isolated message fragments and data points out of tens of thousands more that couldn't be decoded. And I find the idea that anyone among the Allies was reading JN-25 word for word at any time in 1941 not just implausible but ludicrous, given the absolute clown show of British response to much more widely expected Japanese moves against their own empire. In fact, Allied estimates of Japanese intentions were harmed in this regard by how much they did pick up on Japanese intentions in Southeast Asia, coupled with the erroneous assumption that Japan had neither the resources nor the inclination to conduct more than one major operation at a time. This assumption was shared by the British as well as American analysts and leaders.
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@ricardokowalski1579 That's the big question, isn't it? Get three socialists in the same room and you'll get at least four answers to it. Through the state, through the party, through workers' councils, through unions, through local communities, or directly themselves are some of the more common ones. I'm sure there are others I'm not recalling atm. But the important point is that the government is only one of the options. There are many socialists who don't believe in having a state or government as we know it.
And there are systems, like Nazism, in which the government controls the economy to a large degree but the system is not socialist since the benefits don't go to the workers as such, even theoretically. In some of these ownership and control is by and for the benefit of the military, which is largely autonomous or even controls the state rather than the other way around - Egypt and North Korea are examples of this.
But the biggest and most irreconcilable difference between socialism and Nazism is that socialism is by definition based on class loyalty and conflict while Nazism is based on ethno-national loyalty and conflict. In socialism, a Russian atheist, a Polish Jew, and a German Christian who are all workers are allies, the religious and ethnic differences between them being deemed completely irrelevant, and their enemy is the upper class, while in Nazism a German industrialist or financier and a German worker are allies, their class differences deemed insignificant next to their loyalty to the German people and Aryan race, and their enemies are Slavs and Jews (who are defined as an ethnicity, not a religion).
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@JRDavies "In the modern sense" is a shortcut because I didn't feel like typing a book-length explanation of how racism as we've known it for the last 400 years or so differs from its antecedents. Obviously it wasn't invented from scratch, but the pseudoscientific racism of the modern (including early modern) era has some very important differences from the simple ethnic or cultural prejudice many people are trying to cite here as evidence of pre-modern racism. The evolution of those differences is very closely linked to early capitalism, particularly, but not exclusively, cash crop plantations in European colonies in the Americas. I have studied this pretty extensively in the context of the history of my home state, Virginia. Most of the other colonies (aside from Louisiana) followed Virginia's lead in developing the institution of slavery and in defining and codifying race, although for economic reasons slavery never became the predominant mode of economic activity north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line. The evolution of indentured servitude into race-based chattel slavery as a legal and economic institution is a complex and interesting subject.
Racism and abolitionism are not mutually exclusive. As Exhibit A, I give you Abraham Lincoln. And of course many British people, particularly the ones making enormous profits from West Indian plantations and from the slave trade, were opposed or indifferent to abolition. And there were several centuries of slavery in British colonies before abolitionism became a significant social force.
I don't believe racism is particularly associated with capitalism today. (Some academics, Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander, for example, disagree, but you can take that up with them.) It was 300 years ago. The economic conditions that made racism such a convenient prop for certain forms of capitalism have been gone for over a century. Neither the US nor Caribbean islands nor Brazil have any need for a mass import of cheap labor, indeed quite the opposite, nor do the first two need to justify treating the native inhabitants as subhuman because for the most part those natives no longer have anything (mostly land) worth stealing. (Sadly, in Brazil, using racism as an excuse to steal natives' land is still very much an ongoing process.)
Authoritarianism covers much more territory than the economy. Many East and Southeast Asian countries are extremely authoritarian but capitalist. Many mixed, but much further toward the socialist end of the spectrum than ours, economies exist in liberal democracies in Europe.
Stalin, Mao, Kim, etc. are all from a specific branch of Marxist ideology. On the left, they are not seen as representatives of Marxism as a whole. You may disagree. I suspect that you are not on the left end of the political spectrum. This is the same as Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, etc. being seen on the left as discrediting everything to the right of Bernie Sanders, but on the right as not representative of the right wing in general. Democratic socialism emerged specifically as a response to the violence and authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks before they had taken power anywhere.
I watched this video and TIK's original video on Hitler being a socialist. I think there are some very serious problems with his analysis and even more with people supporting him here. Most of the people commenting, including you, seem to be using this subject as a way of using Hitler to discredit the left rather than the right. Both approaches are highly flawed and driven by ideology rather than scholarship, just as your using Stalin to discredit everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan is highly flawed and ideologically motivated. It's also mistaken to equate class struggle with racism or tribalism. They are completely different ways of looking at the world. Just for one, race and tribe are intrinsic, mostly unchangeable, and 100% heritable conditions while class is none of those things (other than for a few extremists like Pol Pot). It is true that both can be used by authoritarian governments to create an enemy to justify repressive measures, but the similarity ends there.
I'm doing this for fun and not getting paid for it, so please excuse me if I don't feel sufficiently motivated to look up and post a long list of citations. My university education in this area was 35 years ago and my graduate education was in a completely different subject, so I remember much of what I read but not much about where exactly I read it. You do your own research easily enough yourself with a trip to Google.
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@ETBrooD Again, only if you expand the definition of socialism to the point of meaninglessness.
No reputable historian or political scientist I'm aware of would call, for example, New Kingdom Egypt or medieval monasteries socialist. And I've done a good bit of study of the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages in a university setting. (Much more, I'm pretty sure, than TIK has.)
(Edit: and before you respond that that's because academics are all socialists, medieval and ancient history are probably the least leftist subjects in academia - you can't possibly call, for example, Victor Davis Hansen, a number of whose books I've read, a liberal, much less a socialist.)
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@ikindawanttodie2236 That is incorrect. Control and profits are both part of the equation. Pure socialism is when control of the company and profits from the company both belong to the workers in the factory. State socialism interposes a state organ between the workers and the factory, but the profits flow either to the workers in that factory, or communally to all workers in society. And in Soviet socialism the manager of the factory is appointed by the Soviet, which is at least theoretically a council of workers, or by the Communist Party, which is, again theoretically, a body made up of and working on behalf of workers.
None of that was true in the National Socialist model - the profits from the factory went to its private owners, not to the workers or the state, and control over the factory was distributed between the owners, who oversaw how production is performed, who is hired to do it, etc., and the state, which means the Nazi Party, which was NOT an organization made up of or working on behalf of workers.
You and TIK are arguing that National Socialism and left-socialism are the same because they both involve state control of the means of production, but socialism and state control are not the same thing. Many socialists advocate a stateless society, and what Marx called the feudal society and the slave society both involved a substantial amount of state control (through the feudal aristocracy in the former) of the economy but were not socialist by any stretch of the imagination.
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Both of those examples are more a matter of design priority and execution than technological superiority. The Mark 14 wasn't a more primitive design, it was just badly executed, and its flaws undiscovered because the Navy wasn't given an adequate budget to test it. Like the Zero, the Type 93's superior performance came at the cost of a dangerous and explosive propellant that was more of a design choice than a technological advantage - the Allies didn't want anything that dangerous on their ships. You see the drawback when they detonated on the ships that were carrying them, as on the Mikuma at Midway. Likewise, the Zero had paper stats better than Allied fighters, but at a terrible cost: flimsy construction, poor handling at high speeds and especially in a dive, no armor, and unprotected fuel tanks that made it incredibly vulnerable compared to an F4F. Once Allied pilots learned to fly to the Wildcat's strengths and the Zero's weaknesses the kill ration turned in favor of the Wildcat.
Put it another way: there was nothing in either of those designs that the Allies couldn't have copied if they'd wanted to make the same design choices. This is unlike, say, the proximity fuse or the a-bomb that the Axis powers couldn't possibly have built.
The Japanese crews did have advantages in training and experience at the beginning of the war, but that's also not quite the same as technological superiority.
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@matthiuskoenig3378 Lincoln died before the war ended, and when his successor, Johnson, tried to institute his lenient policies, he was strenuously opposed, sidelined, and eventually replaced by the hard-line radical Republicans, to the point where he became the only American president impeached by the House of Representatives in the first 200 years of the nation's existence.
What prevented a second civil war was that the issues that caused the first one became irrelevant. Slavery was gone and was never coming back, but after a decade or so of Reconstruction the southern states were allowed to institute Jim Crow policies that prevented the former slaves from having any part in governing the southern states or the US as a whole, while the sharecropping system as well as the massive employment of convict labor kept them exploited economically far more efficiently than slavery had. At the same time, the south was so economically devastated and essentially colonized by northern moneyed interests that former system in which tariffs that fell chiefly on the south were the main source of revenue for the federal government no longer functioned - the south didn't shoulder the burden of supporting the federal government because there was little wealth left to be extracted from the southern economy. Along with this the economic and political power of the planter class who had brought the war on was broken.
What put Reconstruction to its final end was one of the most corrupt political bargains in US history in 1877, in which the southern states agreed to let the blatantly fraudulent election of Rutherford Hayes stand in return for a Republican promise to withdraw all remaining troops from the south and cede control of the southern states to the exclusively white southern Democrats.
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You make that sound very one-sided. Like Hitler, the Japanese militarists engaged in a long series of violations and escalations, invading Manchuria, invading China itself, conducting numerous massacres and atrocities in the course of that invasion, bombing a US naval vessel, invading French Indochina, bullying Thailand into a very one-sided alliance, and making their intentions very clear to absorb other European colonies like Malaya and the Dutch East Indies into their "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". What was the US supposed to do, just sit by and whine while Japan conquered and brutalized half of Asia?
And why was it unreasonable to expect japan to surrender half of China? (To the Chinese government, not to the US.) They were conduction an aggressive war. No one was asking Japan to give up an inch of territory it controlled before 1937, including its conquests in Korea, Formosa, and Manchuria.
And as for the US naval buildup, Japan, not the US or UK, was the first to repudiate the Washington and London Naval Treaties. The US naval building program was a response to Japanese aggression, not the cause for it.
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I think it's dangerous to overlook the distinction between "insane" and "irrational". Hitler's decision to declare war on the US may have involved rational calculations, but it was also premised in part on his irrational beliefs: mainly, the notion that a racially impure society run by Jews and socialists couldn't possibly defeat the pure, Aryan German nation led by National Socialism. Hitler assumed that because he saw the US as a contemptible, corrupt society, its own citizens (at least the ones who counted, the Aryan ones) must see it the same way, and would never fight for it.
This is even more true of the Japanese decision to go to war with the US and UK. Yes, I fully understand the strategic considerations that went into this decision, but there were numerous rational voices in the Japanese leadership (most notably Yamamoto) who understood how hopeless such a war would be against countries that had industrial economies literally dozens of times larger than Japan's. (Of course it is possible for a poorer nation to win a limited defensive war against much stronger powers, particular if it has covert support from another superpower - Vietnam being a good example - but that wasn't the sort of war Japan was starting). The decision can only be understood in light of the fundamentally irrational belief that the superior martial and spiritual virtues of the Japanese race would make up for the massive industrial and technological superiority of the Allies. Of course, we can all see how this turned out in practice.
This may be easier to understand in the southern US when we look at our own past folly in this regard - thinking that the superior virtue of an agrarian society led by genteel aristocrats would make up for the large population advantage and fantastic industrial advantage of the northern states. Of course, the Confederates at least had the more rational possibility that the northerners wouldn't be willing to fight to keep other states in the Union against their will. The crowning folly of the Japanese leaders was failing to understand that beginning the war the way they did would certainly galvanize the American public to fight the war to its bitter ultimate end.
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@engelsteinberg593 There are many and I don't know if I can come up with all of them offhand, but I would say militarism-pacifism, nationalism-internationalism, social conservative-social libertarian, authoritarianism-individual liberty, economic collectivism-economic libertarianism, centralized authority-devolved power ("states' rights"), and environmentalism-maximizing productivity at the expense of the environment are probably the most important ones.
And movements and people can align on some of these but not on others - Soviet communism was extremely collectivist, authoritarian, and militarist but as far opposed to environmentalism as it is possible to be, while Bernie Sanders is extremely collectivist economically but more or less pacifist, socially libertarian, and strongly environmentalist. To say they occupy nearby places on a political spectrum is just contrary to fact.
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It was okay for Britain to have an empire outside of Europe (as France, the Netherlands, Portugal, the US, and even Japan did) but not okay for anyone to dominate Europe.
Sure, it's racist, but it's also rational. Britain's empire in India was no threat to anyone else in Europe. Germany building an empire in Russia and/or France was an existential threat to everyone else in Europe, and thus, the world.
And you are incorrect about the start of WW1. It doesn;t make sense to you because you are ignoring the thinking and policies of Germany's military leaders, who effectively controlled foreign policy. Germany tried to keep Britain neutral, but its general staff worked very hard to make sure the Austro-Serbian crisis was fanned into a war between Germany and Russia and France, because they felt they could win that war in 1914 but in a few more years Russia's rapid modernization would make it impossible for Germany to win such a war. Read David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer for an account of how and why the crisis played out the way it did.
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@johnburns4017 The Matilda was an excellent tank, just too early to call it the best of the war IMO. It could never have been upgunned to deal with late war tanks. The Churchill was also an excellent design, but only in a specialized role, it was too heavy and slow to be a general-purpose tank. You can't call it versatile if it's too slow to carry out a tank's primary mission which in WW2 was to rapidly exploit breakthroughs.
Guns and armor are good but for a tank mobility and reliability are more important. The Sherman was a great tank because it had an adequate gun (in the 76mm version) and armor but great mobility and fantastic reliability. It could ride in landing craft, cross bridges, and climb slopes that none of the late-war monster tanks so beloved of fanboys could even dream of. The only one in the same league was the T-34, for the same reasons, but the Sherman was considerably more reliable and easier to service than the T-34, as well as having vastly superior ergonomics (which is a field too often overlooked in evaluating tanks - a tank with a fatigued, overwhelmed, and half-blind crew is a much less effective tank). There's a reason the T-34 and Sherman were the only WW2 tanks that saw widespread use after the war, most notably in Korea. If you're looking at gun, armor, and other paper statistics, the Pershing was a fantastic tank, but in real life it was mediocre at best because, like the Panther, it was overloaded and consequently had mediocre mobility and poor reliability.
The Challenger was a good design as well, but not enough were built in WW2 for it to have had much effect on the outcome of the war. But the Cromwell and Challenger were both immature designs - the really outstanding tank from that line of designs was the Centurion, which was better than any WW2 tank but didn't see combat until Korea. (It was a bit slow compared to the Sherman or T-34, but otherwise had excellent mobility.) For its time I'd say the Centurion is one of the best tanks of all time - but it wasn't around in WW2.
The Firefly was also a very good tank but again built in fairly small numbers and more of a specialist than a general-purpose war-winner. The 17 pounder barely fit in the turret (sideways) and that caused serious issues for the crew trying to load and fire it and otherwise fight in the tank. Many of the overgunned late war German tanks and TDs had similar ergonomics issues.
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Sure, Churchill had plenty of flaws. But he was the only man west of the Rhine in 1938 who really understood who and what Hitler was (as you still do not), and if not for his conniving, badgering, and outright bludgeoning the Conservative government to prepare for the war, and without his steadfast insistence on holding out in 1940, half of Europe might have suffered under the Nazi yoke for at least a generation, with who knows how many millions more Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and others deemed "untermenschen" by the Nazis dead.
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@Warcraft40000 I get what you're saying, but the problem is this: in the academic world you're often talking about a very specialized context, and bringing in a definition from a dictionary that is not meant for that context only creates confusion and makes meaningful discussion more difficult.
I am an attorney, I've made a career in statute interpretation and annotation, and I can tell you that if you try to apply definitions from Webster's or even the OED in a legal context, or even worse if you look at the etymology of words that are used in legal jargon, you will get things very badly wrong. This is not because lawyers are trying to bamboozle the public, it's because its a very specialized and technical context that requires its own terminology to describe concepts that don't even exist outside that context, and while that terminology borrows words from everyday English and from other languages like Latin and Norman French, the meaning of those words changes when you use them in that context.
This is no less true of history, economics, politics, or any other academic field. If you are involved in a discussion on economics that involves the concept of elasticity and you insist on making pedantic points about the physical properties of rubber bands or the meaning of the Greek word elastos you are only adding confusion and removing actual meaning from the discussion.
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@johnburns4017 Whatever, little boy. What got you so butthurt about the US?
American aeronautical inventions are too numerous to even begin to mention, including, of course, the airplane itself. American fire control computers for naval guns and submarine torpedoes were the most advanced in the world; the US was the only country producing 100+ octane avgas, which gave a huge performance boost to Allied fighters; the Higgins boat, often called the weapon that won the war; synthesis of penicillin on a useful scale; blood plasma transfusions; radar fire control for warships; synthetic rubber; and, of course, the atomic bomb, probably the most important development in weapons technology since the invention of stone tools.
"Even the A-Bomb was worked out by the MAUD Committee then given to the USA free"
I don't think you could possibly make a more ignorant statement.
The theoretical science behind the a-bomb was the product of many people in many nations (although the world's first nuclear reactor was, of course, in Chicago, not London or Berlin), but the only nation that actually developed a working bomb, indeed the only nation that had anything remotely approaching the ability to refine enough uranium or synthesize enough plutonium for a bomb, was the US. You might as well say the V-2 was an American invention because of Robert Goddard.
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Race is more than genetic variation between people or even populations. The reason race doesn't exist is twofold - one, while traits do vary between local populations, but the way they are geographically distributed varies between different traits - there's no single border where everyone on one side has one set of traits and everyone on the other has a completely different traits, each trait has its own border. For example, take a look at the distribution of sickle cell trait - you'll often see it described as being common among Africans, but that isn't strictly true: there are parts of Africa where it is very common and other parts where it is as rare as it is among Europeans, and there are also parts of the Middle East and Asia where it is very common and other parts where it isn't. Its distribution does not match the distribution of, say, the genes for dark skin or kinky hair. Or look at the cephalic index, which represents head shape - there's not one head shape unique to Europe, another to Asia, and another to Africa, there are populations on all three continents with longer heads, and populations on all three continents with broader heads. Here's a map showing that distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalic_index#/media/File:PSM_V50_D602_World_cephalic_index_map.jpg Compare the similar index for Turkey, Poland, Burma, and Central America to the extremely different index for the UK, Arabia, India, and Japan. Doe those patterns match any race models you know of?
And two, humans have been far too mobile for there to be exclusive lines of descent. Almost everyone has mixed ancestry - like most male Europeans my own R1a Y-DNA haplogroup originated in southwestern Asia, while my mDNA comes from early western European hunter-gatherers. 5,000 years ago those ancestors lived ~ 2,500 miles apart. R1a is also found from India to the Bering Strait, those guys really got around. And there's also been large-scale migration between Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe for thousands of years, including large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans traded as slaves and even used as soldiers by Arabs for centuries before the tansAtlantic slave trade began. Madagascar was colonized by Malays and Mongols reached as far west as Hungary - where they found Magyars who were originally from western Siberia. Outside of a few very isolated places like the Amazon rain forest or the Andaman islands, the idea of "racially pure" populations anywhere is nonsense.
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@davedoe6445 No, I am not, and you are misconstruing what race means. Tall and short are not races in literally any sense of the word, they are categories of otherwise unrelated people who share ONE single trait. And you completely missed my point. The point isn't that there are fuzzy boundaries, it's that the boundaries are completely different for different traits.
Yes, there are short people and tall people. There are fat and skinny people. There are intelligent and stupid people. There are blondes and brunettes. But if someone suggested that tall people are also intelligent, skinny, and blonde and short people are stupid, fat, and dark-haired, you'd laugh at their stupidity, because these traits are not linked in any way, there are many different combinations and someone's height tells you absolutely nothing about their intelligence or the color of their hair.
This is why race is a myth, except the differences we're talking about are between small(ish) groups of people rather than individuals. Of course there are groups of dark-skinned people and groups of light-skinned people. There are groups who tend to be tall and groups who tend to be short. There are groups where hair is almost always straight and groups where hair is almost always very curly. There are groups who tend to be long-headed and groups who tend to be broad-headed. And none of these traits are related or necessarily found together, or with any other trait. Dark-skinned populations can be (on average) tall or short, they can be long- or broad-headed, they can have straight or curly hair. If you map the world into regions based on any one of those traits, say, dark skin, and then map the world into regions based on another, say, skull shape, the maps don't look anything at all like each other. The boundaries of whatever races you propose are completely different depending on which traits you choose as your criteria. There is no possible racial breakdown you can create that coincides with all the maps for all traits, because they don't coincide with each other. What you end up with isn't three races or six races or ten races, it's 3,000 races - at which point you're no longer talking about races, you're talking about local populations.
Races are by definition broad categories - black people and white people, Europeans and Africans, Slavs and Aryans - who share not just one trait but a whole list of traits, traits which are generally exclusive to that group. A system that includes 500 or 3,000 races, each with its own arbitrary list of shared traits, where there is no individual trait that isn't shared with many other groups (just not in the same combination with other traits), isn't race.
Your second point is, again, not about race, it's about individual populations. Inuit, Sherpas, Andes Mountainers, these are not races, they are small populations. Yes, Sherpas and Andes Mountainers are very good at surviving at high altitude. So which race is the race that is good at high altitude, Asians or Native Americans? The answer is neither. Yanomamo aren't any better at surviving high altitude than Irish people are, nor are Khmer. These are not traits shared across a broad group of people occupying a whole continent or even a whole country, they are traits developed locally by small groups living in specific conditions. And the map of people good at surviving at high altitude does not even remotely match the map of people with dark or light skin, or the map of people with long or broad heads. Whatever list of traits you use to define your race, there will be some people good at high altitudes in it and some outside it, and there will be some people who do poorly at high altitudes in it and some outside it. It is not a racial trait, it is a local trait.
Likewise, dog breeds aren't race, they are something entirely different, something that can only come to exist through deliberate selective breeding. No dog breed is a natural adaptation to environmental conditions. And no dog breed would survive for even one generation if purebred dogs were allowed to mate with whatever other dogs they happened to encounter. (Thus the strict laws against miscegenation in highly segregated societies - they know race would soon cease to exist if the races were allowed to mix. The problem for them is that no such laws have existed for most of history in the vast majority of human societies. I was actually very surprised when my ancestry test came back 100% northwest European, because that's fairly uncommon for anyone whose family has been in Virginia as long as mine has, because European women were pretty scarce here in 1631.)
This is also what people mean by saying that the variations within each race are greater than the variation between purported races. Which race is taller, Europeans or Africans? The answer is neither. Africans includes both Pygmies, who are very short, and Masai, who tend to be very tall. If you measure the difference between the average Pygmy and the average Masai, that difference is much greater than the difference between the dead average African (with or without including North Africa) and the dead average European. So there is no tall or short African race, there are populations of people in Africa who tend to be very tall, and other populations within Africa who tend to be very short. You have to get to a very local area - usually only one of many groups within any given country - before you can find groups that are distinct in that way.
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More after 1945 than before, and only because the Nazis lost the war. If they'd won and carried out their plans for the east, they would have eventually murdered hundreds of millions of people. But the biggest difference was less the extent of Nazi crimes than the loose cannon Hitler was on the world stage - Stalin, for all his crimes, never deliberately started a world war, and for the most part was very careful to avoid letting local crises like Berlin and Korea escalate to world war. He might not be entirely honest, but he could generally be counted on to keep agreements as long as they were to everyone's benefit - for example, he gave the British a free hand in Greece in return for having a free hand in Poland, which, if not great for the Polish, was FAR better than provoking the West to war over it. He stole nuclear secrets from the US and UK, but used them for deterrence, not to launch a nuclear war. Hitler had no such scruples and deliberately sought a rematch of WW1 and a struggle to extinction with the USSR. And we can only imagine the horror that would have resulted had Hitler gotten his hands on nuclear weapons.
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@gg_rider I have, innumerable times, given the reason National Socialism is neither communist nor, in the sense the word is used today, socialist: because communism and socialism are by definition about class struggle, with other divisions like race and nationalism being treated as distractions from the real issue, while National Socialism was about race and nationality, with class being treated as a distraction from the real issue.
The fact that National Socialism has "Socialism" in its name is about as significant as the fact the North Korea has "democratic" in its name.
As to fascism, I would say you have to treat that label the same way we treat communism: there is capital C Communism, which means the specific movement and party in the USSR and those other movements and parties (like CPUSA) that are subordinate to it, and small c communism, which means all the many other movements and parties that share a certain amount of doctrine with big C Communism but also differ from it, especially in terms of how the doctrine is put into practice. Likewise Mussolini's Fascism and the broader category of global fascism.
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I would dispute that the Shokaku class were superior to the Yorktown class. They were more or less equivalent in terms of carrying capacity, speed, and protection, and the Yorktowns had greatly superior AA armament and fire suppression equipment. The huge disadvantage the Americans had in carrier warfare was malfunctioning torpedoes carried by obsolete planes - if the Americans had had B5Ns and their torpedoes and the Japanese TBDs and Mk 13s for the first four carrier battles of the war, the only US carrier lost would have been the woefully underprotected Wasp (and that to a submarine) while Shokaku would have been sunk twice!
I would also dispute that Japanese cruisers were better than the Baltimore or Atlanta class or that Japanese destroyers were better or even as good as modern American destroyers. They were simply optimized for night surface actions, so of course they did better there, at least early in the war. But the American ships were vastly better at anti-air and anti-submarine warfare, and also had a huge advantage in radar once American commanders learned to use it properly (or even at all). And in the war these proved more important by far than night surface actions - aircraft (and carriers) and submarines decided the war, not surface ship. The Americans lost at Savo Island and Tassafaronga and still won the Guadalcanal campaign, while the Japanese lost at Midway and lost the battle vs. American commerce-raiding submarines and lost the war.
(Another factor you don't mention is that the Japanese were not so much better at designing ships as they were better at fudging treaty violations - or in the case of Yamato simply ignoring the treaties. The South Dakota class battleships were arguably the best treaty-compliant (more or less) battleships in the world and technically superior to the Yamatos in pretty much every respect, but having an extra 30,000 tons to play with makes a big difference, if not making much sense from an economic standpoint.)
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@ImperialSenpai The Holy Roman Empire was a relic by then. It didn't really function at all the way it did in the Middle Ages after 1648. There was a thing called the Thirty Years' War, perhaps you should read about it.
I just recently read a book about the Napoleonic Wars which concentrated on the political arena and argued that the Napoleonic Wars were less like the revolutionary wars and more like 18th century wars in terms of great power goals, ambitions, and tradeoffs. The carving up of the former HRE, as with the Ottoman Empire, took several centuries not because the petty states being carved up had any meaningful say in the process, but because each great power very carefully balanced the costs and benefits of any territorial change against the costs and benefits to its rivals.
Also, Napoleon never called himself the HRE, he was styled Emperor of the French, which was a novel institution that claimed no continuity with the Roman Empire.
Austria still exists because the Allies won WW2 and didn't want Germany getting any territory it hadn't had in 1918. Czechia was never German. Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, all the other old German states do not exist as sovereign states as they were in 1700, they are constituent parts of Germany the same way New York and Virginia are merely constituent parts of the US. In both cases its a federal union but supreme power resides at the federal level.
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That's something I think TIK, whose analysis is otherwise excellent, consistently fails to recognize. For Britain, for France, even for Stalin, war and foreign policy were inextricably tied to rational, if not always ethical, political goals. For the German generals and many other Germans, that was true as well. But Nazism was a romantic movement, one that placed itself in diametric opposition to Enlightenment rationalism - that's the reason for all those torchlit rallies and book-burnings and blood banners and all the SS occult weirdness. For them, while rational goals still mattered, ultimately war was a spiritual exercise, a way to both attain and demonstrate the dominance of the Aryan race, to purify the blood and purge the nation of weakness. You cannot understand Hitler by analyzing him solely as a rational actor, because the heart of his ideology was a rejection of pure rationality.
And Hitler had another motive as well: like many Germans but even more so, he was extremely bitter about the defeat in WW1 which he could never accept as a legitimate loss of the war by Germany. Hitler had to have a rematch against Britain and France in order to prove that Germany would have won the first time but for the "stab in the back" by Jews and communists. No matter how well off Germany might be materially after the new conflict, if it didn't accomplish that - humiliate the Western Allies and show the spiritual and military superiority of Germany beyond all doubt - it would not satisfy him personally.
Many of his generals understood that in 1938 and that was why they saw him as a dangerous madman who would bring ruin on Germany. And Churchill understood it as well.
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@misarthim6538 " In terms of air combat, that means that it could pretty much choose when to fight and thus only fight under favorable conditions." Only if the fight started low and slow. If not, F4Fs and P40s could always dive away from the fight while Zeros, which would become uncontrollable and even shed wings at speeds the American planes could easily tolerate, could not. It also had insufficient armament - the 20mms had atrocious ballistics and very little ammo, and the 7.7mms might as well have been peashooters against the tough American planes - and could take far less damage. And in a head-on, which was relatively easy to achieve with the right wingman tactics, the American plane had a huge advantage because of the advantages in toughness and firepower.
Climb rate is nice to have, particularly for bomber interception, but climbing into a fight would get you killed even in a better plane, and climbing couldn't save you from an opponent who started with a big advantage in energy and position. Climb rate mostly helped in an even engagement between similar small numbers of planes starting at a similar speed and altitude, and while often that's the expectation in games, in the real war the Americans quickly learned not to even think about fighting like that.
The Japanese pilots, even more so in the AAF, placed way too much stock on maneuverability, particularly tight turns at low speed, seeing air to air combat as a dogfight with victory going to the first plane to get guns on target. The planes they ended up in reflected that. The Americans, like the Germans, quickly learned to treat fighters as ambush hunters, not knife fighters, scoring kills when they had an initial advantage and refusing combat when they didn't, and the planes they flew reflected that.
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@misarthim6538 "Zero's could choose whether they'll initiate fight or not because they were faster in level flight and climbed better."
Again, only if they start on an equal or better E basis. If the Wildcats or Warhawks started with a significant altitude advantage, the Zeros were trapped because the American planes were faster diving than the Zeros were either diving or in level flight. If the Zeros started with a significant altitude advantage, the American planes could still dive away unless they were already on the deck. And...
"Zeros could fly circles around Wildcats without Wildcats being able to do anything about it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave Zero pilots never learned any way to counter this tactic. Part of its effectiveness was because a Wildcat could always turn into an attack by a Zero, while a Zero didn't dare turn into an attack by a Wildcat because the much sturdier Wildcat would win the resulting head-on nine times out of ten.
Anyway the numbers just don't bear your assertions out. Zeros racked up impressive scores for the first six months or so because the inexperienced American (and British, Commonwealth, and Dutch) pilots didn't know how to fight them properly. Once the gap in pilot skill and experience closed, Wildcats and P-40s could and did engage Zeros on at least an even basis. And of course once P-38s, P-47s, F6Fs, and F4Us, all significantly faster than Zeros, started appearing int he second year of the war the Zero was obsolete and doomed.
"Yes they could run away, but that's not really an option if you protect say squadron of SBDs."
Which is why American fighter pilots learned to cover the bombers from above so they could dive down and break up incoming attacks rather than flying close escort where they'd get bounced by intercepting enemy fighters.
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@bakters The US wasn't getting large numbers of replacement pilots either in autumn, 1942. But they understood that fewer pilots who were not half-dead from exhaustion, stress, and tropical diseases was better than more pilots who were at that point of collapse. Sick, exhausted, demoralized pilots were more of a liability than an asset. The Japanese simply expected their pilots to buck up and take it, and that was a terrible idea no matter how good the pilots were or how urgently they were needed.
Winning at Midway wouldn't have changed much except the temporary balance of carrier decks. Relatively few Japanese pilots went down with the carriers at Midway, most of their aircrew losses (a bit over 100 men) were to US AA fire and would have happened even if they'd won. Their pilot losses in the Santa Cruz battle, which was a tactical victory for the Japanese, were actually more severe than at Midway, despite fewer carriers being involved and none lost. Santa Cruz is a typical story: the Japanese inflicted more damage on the US fleet, but lost 99 aircraft to the US' 81,and, much more important, 148 pilots and other aircrew to 26 for the US. American aircrew were highly likely to survive the loss of their planes while Japanese aircrew were not.
The really bad human loss at Midway was the hundreds of highly skilled mechanics, armorers, and other technicians who were in the carrier hangars when they were turned into infernos. Even the engineering spaces of the doomed carriers had a better survival rate than the hangar decks.
But what killed the pilot corps of the IJNAF was the long, relentless slog of the Solomons campaign as a whole.
A major factor was the difference in recovery rates for downed aircrew, which was the result of several factors but had the united theme that the Japanese simply didn't prioritize this while the US did. This is where having a feudal death cult mentality in a modern technological war gets you. The US didn't need to throw hordes of untrained rookies at the Japanese, not because they were getting large numbers of replacement pilots, but because their veteran pilots were surviving to fight another day regardless of the outcome of individual battles while the Japanese veterans were dying gloriously for the Emperor.
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@bakters Armor was "fragmentary" because it is heavy, weight is a huge consideration for aircraft, and a lot of thought was put into where it was most needed and where it could be dispensed with.
The TBD wasn't a deathtrap because of any particular design feature or philosophy, it was a deathtrap because it was terribly obsolete by 1942. Both pilots and planners were aware of that and a much better replacement was in the pipeline, it just hadn't been built in sufficient numbers to replace the TBDs at Midway. You go to war with the weapons you have. By contrast, the Zero (and the Betty it was designed to escort) was a deathtrap because of a design philosophy: putting all priority into speed, range, and maneuverability at the expense of survivability. It was not obsolete and waiting replacement in 1942, it was the newest and best design the Japanese had for a naval fighter until 1944.
Many planes, including the F4U-1A and the Merlin-powered P-51s, had some self-sealing tanks and some that weren't. The idea was to use the fuel in the non-self-sealing tanks before reaching the combat area (and in the case of the F4U, jettison any remaining fuel in them and purge them with CO2 before commencing combat, I'm not sure if the Seafire had this feature or not). The Japanese did eventually realize the folly of trying to fight with non-self-sealing tanks full of fuel and added self-sealing tanks (as well as pilot armor) to many planes including the later Zero variants. But again, the early Zeros lacking any self-sealing tanks was not a matter of their not being available, it was a deliberate design choice, and, as it turned out, a very bad one. They felt range was more important, and their pilots paid the price.
(Also, I'm in this discussion with several people and I don't remember whether it was you or one of them who pointed out that many of these defects were inevitable due to the limitations of Japanese engine technology, which may deflect some blame from the designers, but saying the Zero suffered from being underpowered for a 1942 fighter, which it was, kind of negates the idea that it was technologically superior. it just means its technological inferiority had a different cause. Having 30% more engine power, as the F4F-3 and P-40E both did, was a form of technological superiority.)
You asked for sources, I gave some to you. I can't read them for you. Let's put the shoe on the other foot: cite me a source to support your claim that Japanese aircrew losses were not much worse than American from mid-1942 to the end of 1943.
As for feudal death cults, if you have any account of any Allied pilot declining to wear a parachute because bailing out and possibly being captured was dishonorable, I'd love to hear it. Japanese pilots having that attitude has been documented in too many sources to even begin to list them. It's been ages since I read Suburo Sakai's book, and I don't have it with me, but I'm pretty sure he mentions it.
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@TheImperatorKnight "Can you not pay for these things directly through the market?"
No, you can't, because you can't buy public safety just for yourself, it is inherently communal. (You can buy private security, but it doesn't perform the same function.) The criminal who would mug me or rob my house would also mug you or rob yours, putting him in prison benefits you as much as it does me - it benefits all of society, not just the person he happens to be caught robbing. You can't pay for tanks and fighter planes to defend your own life and property but not mine, war obviously doesn't work that way. Either all of us are defended or none of are. Also things like pollution - we all breathe the same air, I can't pollute my air without polluting yours as well, so either it is prohibited for everyone or it isn't prohibited for anyone. You can't buy your own clean atmosphere. It's a combination of the problem of free riders and the tragedy of the commons. Libertarianism has yet to come up with any answers to these problems.
And these are hardly socialist ideas. Edmund Burke would agree with me 100%. I am pretty sure Thomas Sowell would as well, at least as far as national defense and public safety are concerned. Socialism is redistribution of wealth from individuals to other individuals to be more "fair", not banding together and pooling resources to handle issues that are inherently communal like national defense and public safety. In fact, those are the primary purposes for which governments were instituted, as America's founders stated in our Declaration of Independence.
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@KI.765 I'm not saying they don't have specific meaning, I'm saying that when you get into detailed discussions in any specialized field those meanings are not found in a general dictionary. The meaning of "socialist," for example, isn't what's found in Webster's OR on Wikipedia or even the OED, it's a meaning that has to be gleaned from a thorough education in economics and political science. There's no shortcut to that. If you don't have a good professional education in those subjects, all you can do is consult someone who does, or be willing to do a LOT of reading - I mean years doing literally nothing else.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm an attorney. I occasionally find myself getting into debates online about the interpretation of statutes or case law and the meaning of certain terms. Anyone who doesn't have a professional legal education simply isn't equipped to have that debate with me, just like I'm not equipped to argue the meaning of quantum theory with a particle physicist. And if I'm involved in a discussion of what is or is not included in the legal concept of habeas corpus and the other guy starts throwing definitions from an English-Latin dictionary at me, useful discussion will have ended because they simply have no idea what they're talking about or how irrelevant their points are. Habeas means one thing in classical Latin and something entirely different in a modern American legal context.
Saying TIK should stick to panzers isn't an insult, it's simply a recognition that he's out of his field and doesn't understand the definitions of the words he's using in the context he's using them, and is compounding that error by looking to the wrong places to gain that understanding. I have two very well-educated housemates, one is a PhD candidate in Political Science and the other in History, and if they tried to have a debate about tanks with TIK and started dragging in the OED definition of "tank" to say that an underground oil tank is a form of AFV, I would tell them to stick to their fields and let the experts say what is or is not a valid definition of "tank" in this context. OTOH, they both agree that TIK's understanding of the nature and meaning socialism is deeply misinformed.
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