Fireside this week! We’ll pick up looking at some of the successes of Hellenistic armies next week.
For this week’s musing, I wanted to take the opportunity to expand a bit on a topic that I raised on Twitter1 which draw a fair bit of commentary: that fascists and fascist governments, despite their positioning are generally bad at war. And let me note at the outset, I am using fascist fairly narrowly – I generally follow Umberto Eco’s definition (from “Ur Fascism” (1995)). Consequently, not all authoritarian or even right-authoritarian governments are fascist (but many are). Fascist has to mean something more specific than ‘people I disagree with’ to be a useful term (mostly, of course, useful as a warning).
First, I want to explain why I think this is a point worth making. For the most part, when we critique fascism (and other authoritarian ideologies), we focus on the inability of these ideologies to deliver on the things we – the (I hope) non-fascists – value, like liberty, prosperity, stability and peace. The problem is that the folks who might be beguiled by authoritarian ideologies are at risk precisely because they do not value those things – or at least, do not realize how much they value those things and won’t until they are gone. That is, of course, its own moral failing, but society as a whole benefits from having fewer fascists, so the exercise of deflating the appeal of fascism retains value for our sake, rather than for the sake of the would-be fascists (though they benefit as well, as it is, in fact, bad for you to be a fascist).
But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.”2 Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is.
Now how do we assess if a state is ‘good’ at war? The great temptation here is to look at inputs: who has the best equipment, the ‘best’ soldiers (good luck assessing that), the most ‘strategic geniuses’ and so on. But war is not a baseball game. No one cares about your RBI or On-Base percentage. If a country’s soldiers fight marvelously in a way that guarantees the destruction of their state and the total annihilation of their people, no one will sing their praises – indeed, no one will be left alive to do so.
Instead, war is an activity judged purely on outcomes, by which we mean strategic outcomes. Being ‘good at war’ means securing desired strategic outcomes or at least avoiding undesirable ones. There is, after all, something to be said for a country which manages to salvage a draw from a disadvantageous war (especially one it did not start) rather than total defeat, just as much as a country that conquers. Meanwhile, failure in wars of choice – that is, wars a state starts which it could have equally chosen not to start – are more damning than failures in wars of necessity. And the most fundamental strategic objective of every state or polity is to survive, so the failure to ensure that basic outcome is a severe failure indeed.
Judged by that metric, fascist governments are terrible at war. There haven’t been all that many fascist governments, historically speaking and a shocking percentage of them started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state, the worst possible strategic outcome. Most long-standing states have been to war many times, winning sometimes and losing sometimes, but generally able to preserve the existence of their state even in defeat. At this basic task, however, fascist states usually fail.
The rejoinder to this is to argue that, “well, yes, but they were outnumbered, they were outproduced, they were ganged up on” – in the most absurd example, folks quite literally argued that the Nazis at least had a positive k:d (kill-to-death ratio) like this was a game of Call of Duty. But war is not a game – no one cares what your KDA is if you lose and your state is extinguished. All that matters is strategic outcomes: war is fought for no other purpose because war is an extension of policy (drink!). Creating situations – and fascist governments regularly created such situations. Starting a war in which you will be outnumbered, ganged up on, outproduced and then smashed flat: that is being bad at war.
Countries, governments and ideologies which are good at war do not voluntarily start unwinnable wars.
So how to fascist governments do at war? Terribly. The two most clear-cut examples of fascist governments, the ones most everyone agrees on, are of course Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Fascist Italy started a number of colonial wars, most notably the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, which it won, but at ruinous cost, leading it to fall into a decidedly junior position behind Germany. Mussolini then opted by choice to join WWII, leading to the destruction of his regime, his state, its monarchy and the loss of his life; he managed to destroy Italy in just 22 years. This is, by the standards of regimes, abjectly terrible.
Nazi Germany’s record manages to somehow be worse. Hitler comes to power in 1933, precipitates WWII (in Europe) in 1939 and leads his country to annihilation by 1945, just 12 years. In short, Nazi Germany fought one war, which it lost as thoroughly and completely as it is possible to lose; in a sense the Nazis are necessarily tied for the position of ‘worst regime at war in history’ by virtue of having never won a war, nor survived a war, nor avoided a war. Hitler’s decision, while fighting a great power with nearly as large a resource base as his own (Britain) to voluntarily declare war on not one (USSR) but two (USA) much larger and in the event stronger powers is an act of staggeringly bad strategic mismanagement. The Nazis also mismanaged their war economy, designed finicky, bespoke equipment ill-suited for the war they were waging and ran down their armies so hard that they effectively demodernized them inside of Russia. It is absolutely the case that the liberal democracies were unprepared for 1940, but it is also the case that Hitler inflicted upon his own people – not including his many, horrible domestic crimes – far more damage than he meted out even to conquered France.
Beyond these two, the next most ‘clearly fascist’ government is generally Francisco Franco’s Spain – a clearly right-authoritarian regime, but there is some argument as to if we should understand them as fascist. Francoist Spain may have one of the best war records of any fascist state, on account of generally avoiding foreign wars: the Falangists win the Spanish Civil War, win a military victory in a small war against Morocco in 1957-8 (started by Moroccan insurgents) which nevertheless sees Spanish territory shrink (so a military victory but a strategic defeat), rather than expand, and then steadily relinquish most of their remaining imperial holdings. It turns out that the best ‘good at war’ fascist state is the one that avoids starting wars and so limits the wars it can possibly lose.
Broader definitions of fascism than this will scoop up other right-authoritarian governments (and start no end of arguments) but the candidates for fascist or near-fascist regimes that have been militarily successful are few. Salazar (Portugal) avoided aggressive wars buthis government lost its wars to retain a hold on Portugal’s overseas empire. Imperial Japan’s ideology has its own features and so may not be classified as fascist, but hardly helps the war record if included. Perón (Argentina) is sometimes described as near-fascist, but also avoided foreign wars. I’ve seen the Baathist regimes (Assad’s Syria and Hussein’s Iraq) described as effectively fascist with cosmetic socialist trappings and the military record there is awful: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq started a war of choice with Iran where it barely managed to salvage a brutal draw, before getting blown out twice by the United States (the first time as a result of a war of choice, invading Kuwait!), with the second instance causing the end of the regime. Syria, of course, lost a war of choice against Israel in 1967, then was crushed by Israel again in another war of choice in 1973, then found itself unable to control even its own country during the Syrian Civil War (2011-present), with significant parts of Syria still outside of regime control as of early 2024.
And of course there are those who would argue that Putin’s Russia today is effectively fascist (‘Rashist’) and one can hardly be impressed by the Russian army managing – barely, at times – to hold its own in another war of choice against a country a fourth its size in population, with a tenth of the economy which was itself not well prepared for a war that Russia had spent a decade rearming and planning for. Russia may yet salvage some sort of ugly draw out of this war – more a result of western, especially American, political dysfunction than Russian military effectiveness – but the original strategic objectives of effectively conquering Ukraine seem profoundly out of reach while the damage to Russia’s military and broader strategic interests is considerable.
I imagine I am missing other near-fascist regimes, but as far as I can tell, the closest a fascist regime gets to being effective at achieving desired strategic outcomes in non-civil wars is the time Italy defeated Ethiopia but at such great cost that in the short-term they could no longer stop Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria and in the long-term effectively became a vassal state of Hitler’s Germany. Instead, the more standard pattern is that fascist or near-fascist regimes regularly start wars of choice which they then lose catastrophically. That is about as bad at war as one can be.
We miss this fact precisely because fascism prioritizes so heavily all of the signifiers of military strength, the pagentry rather than the reality and that pagentry beguiles people. Because being good at war is so central to fascist ideology, fascist governments lie about, set up grand parades of their armies, create propaganda videos about how amazing their armies are. Meanwhile other kinds of governments – liberal democracies, but also traditional monarchies and oligarchies – are often less concerned with the appearance of military strength than the reality of it, and so are more willing to engage in potentially embarrassing self-study and soul-searching. Meanwhile, unencumbered by fascisms nationalist or racist ideological blinders, they are also often better at making grounded strategic assessments of their power and ability to achieve objectives, while the fascists are so focused on projecting a sense of strength (to make up for their crippling insecurities).
The resulting poor military performance should not be a surprise. Fascist governments, as Eco notes, “are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.” Fascism’s cult of machismo also tends to be a poor fit for modern, industrialized and mechanized war, while fascism’s disdain for the intellectual is a poor fit for sound strategic thinking. Put bluntly, fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them.
This is, however, not an invitation to complacency for liberal democracies which – contrary to fascism – have tended to be quite good at war (though that hardly means they always win). One thing the Second World War clearly demonstrated was that as militarily incompetent as they tend to be, fascist governments can defeat liberal democracies if the liberal democracies are unprepared and politically divided. The War in Ukraine may yet demonstrate the same thing, for Ukraine was unprepared in 2022 and Ukraine’s friends are sadly politically divided now. Instead, it should be a reminder that fascist and near-fascist regimes have a habit of launching stupid wars and so any free country with such a neighbor must be on doubly on guard.
But it should also be a reminder that, although fascists and near-fascists promise to restore manly, masculine military might, they have never, ever actually succeeded in doing that, instead racking up an embarrassing record of military disappointments (and terrible, horrible crimes, lest we forget). Fascism – and indeed, authoritarianisms of all kinds – are ideologies which fail to deliver the things a wise, sane people love – liberty, prosperity, stability and peace – but they also fail to deliver the things they promise.
These are loser ideologies. For losers. Like a drunk fumbling with a loaded pistol, they would be humiliatingly comical if they weren’t also dangerous. And they’re bad at war.
On to Recommendations:
Let me start with this short essay by friend-of-the-blog Liv Yarrow from October of last year on, “Why Latin?” It is more of an open musing as an answer to the question, but I think touches on many of the reasons to learn a language generally and to learn Latin in particular: the unique kinds of mental demands and rewards from learning a language, the powerful window into another culture it provides, and the challenge and satisfaction of doing something difficult.
I’ve also made a few podcast appearances broadly organized around my continuing effort to try to bail out the sinking ships that are our disciplines. I talked again with Drachinifel, this time on the nature of the interaction between academic historians and public-facing history educators on various forms of social media – in particular discussing how both groups (though there is overlap between them) rely on each other and could do a lot more to work together effectively to promote history and history education. In addition in a more higher-ed oriented venue, I talked with Jeff Crane, Dean at Cal Poly Humboldt on his wonderfully titled podcast, Yeah, I got a F#%*ing Job With a Liberal Arts Degree on the importance of public facing work in academia as well as some of what embattled fields in the liberal arts can do to try to help themselves both within the academy and outside of it.
For a bit of gaming history rather than history gaming, over on YouTube, HeyCara compiled a brief one-hour history of Paradox Interactive, charting its rise and the shifts in the kinds of games they’ve produced. It’s a neat look at the history of the company and writes down some of the ‘lore’ that longer-term Paradox players may know that newer folks may note, like the sudden expansion and then equally rapid sputtering of Paradox Interactive as a wide-ranging publisher from 2008 to 2013. As strange as it sounds to say this about what is already an hour-long video, I’d love to see someone do something like this in a lot more depth, split between the trends in PDS and their design philosophies (what I’ve split into generations in my discussions) and Paradox Interactive itself and the different periods of different publishing strategies they’ve had. But there’s real value in keeping and recording the history of these companies and creators, as that is important for understanding their creative products.
For this week’s Book Recommendation, I am going to recommend a book that, quite frankly, I am surprised I haven’t gotten to yet, Greg Woolf’s Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998). This is a work that is one of those foundational books every graduate student has to read to get their footing on the topic, but is well worth a read from a general ‘lay’ reader as well, as a useful corrective to the public conception of ‘Romanization.’ While the study of Mediterranean cultural exchange – almost no ancient historians use the term ‘Romanization’ except in scare quotes these days – has advanced a lot (with a real sea-change in our thinking starting really in the 1990s), the public conception, in as much as there is one, hasn’t moved very much. Where there is a public awareness of the spread of Roman cultural features (togas, Latin, red ceramic tile roofs, aqueducts, etc) it is understood as ‘Romanization’ – a process the Romans did to other peoples which reproduced elite Roman culture in some uniform and standard way.
Woolf’s book, focusing on Roman Gaul (modern France, mostly) is one of the cornerstone studies in overturning this notion. First, Woolf notes that in Gaul, as elsewhere in the Empire, the process of cultural convergeance was not ‘top-down’ from the imperial elite, but rather motivated by the local adoption, typically by local elites, of Roman cultural habits as a sign of urbanitas (‘city-living’ with the sense of sophistication) and humanitas (‘gentility’ ‘liberal education’), a way to display status. Those habits, which Woolf tracks across a wide range of cultural features (architecture, urbanism, pottery, etc.) in turn steadily work their way down until eventually even the poor “had learned to be impoverished in a Roman manner” in their limited goods.3 Indeed, Woolf argues, quite rapidly the distinction we see in the archaeological evidence is not between ‘romanized’ and ‘unromanized’ Gauls, but between wealthy and poor Gallo-Romans, all taking part in the same cultural fusion. Of course, Romans – or perhaps we might say Italo-Romans to distinguish them from our increasingly Roman Gallo-Romans – were involved in the process too, as exemplars to imitate, as merchants from whom to buy the markers of Roman cultural identity and so on.
Yet at the same time, as Woolf notes, this is not the death of cultural diversity nor the end of Gallic culture. Woolf rejects ‘Romanization’ as a paradigm, but also notes that there are few, if any, “islands of residual ‘Celticism'” to be found in Roman Gaul. But there is cultural fusion, perhaps most evident in religious practice, with Roman Gods and Roman-style temples (especailly in the cities) operating alongside long-established Gallic ritual practices (like throwing swords into bodies of water – God bless the Gauls (and other Celtic-language speakers) for continuing to throw weapons into lakes and rivers where we can later uncover them) and long-established Gallic holy sites. And these experiences were not uniform, but themselves regionalized, especially with the distinction between largely demilitarized interior and southern parts of Gaul and the militarized north-east.
I hope even this brief effort at description has given you some sense of the wonderful complexity of the picture Woolf paints here, even if I am doing his book ill-service. Woolf writes well and the book is clear and readable, even for the non-specialist. The book also features a number of maps which do well to guide a reader who may not be familiar with the geography of Roman Gaul. The one thing I will say it is missing is pictures beyond the maps, for some of Woolf’s points depend on street plans, architecture and artwork and these may be unfamiliar to the lay-reader and thus hard to picture, though you will have no problem following the argument itself (and should one want to then picture it, the book has footnotes and a full bibliography to oblige further reading!). Cultural change in the Roman Empire is one of those topics that is heavily regionalized, and so no one region quite looks like any other – all one can do is pick a region and try to grapple with its complexities. At this task, Becoming Roman is eminently capable and so well worth a read.
If we are going to criticise Hitler for declaring war on the US and USSR, should we also criticise Britain and France for declaring war on Germany? That decision would seem to have gone disastrously badly wrong even faster than his.
And no other democracy got involved with the war voluntarily, so there was none whose decision to involve themselves could be called wise.
(This does raise questions about Canada/Australia/NZ, but I’m not convinced they independently declared war.)
Not sure how Britain’s declaration of war in 1939 went “disastrously badly wrong” at any point. Britain ofc eventually won the war, & (Hollywood notwithstanding) never came particularly close to losing or surrendering.
Britain’s record of *protecting other countries* from fascist expansion is mixed but not especially poor either— while Germany & Italy did conquer most of mainland Europe, Britain & the other Allies evicted Germany & Italy from Easy Africa, Iraq, & the Middle East by mid-1941, while and checked their expansion in North Africa.
Because strategically, war in Europe was – unless it was really quick – going to lead to greater economic dependence on the USA and the evidence of only 20 years previous was that the price of that dependence was going to be a)paid in full and b) economic subordination to the USA meaning c)the loss of the Empire.
Dependence on the US was probably inevitably by the late 1930s (at least if Britain wanted to do things like project power in the Pacific Ocean); though I agree that the war hastened that process
It was very widely accepted in Britain before 1939 that the First World War had already cost Britain its status as a superpower, and that US dominance was assured going forward.
See, of all things, “1066 and All That”- (1930), specifically its final chapter covering the aftermath of the War, which I reprint in its entirety below:
“A BAD THING
America thus became Top Nation, and History came to a .”
Britain lost its Empire following the Second World War and in large part due to it. The whole British strategy prior to 1939 centered around defending the whole Empire, not just the British Isles. Who knows if the Empire would have survived to the present if not for the war, but very few thought in 1939 that India would become independent in less than a decade, but by 1945 that was clear. Indians are not without agency, but I think even Indian nationalists(secular and Hindu) would agree that Britain by 1945 didn’t have the strength to keep the subcontinent under its rule. Of course, once India was gone, it was just a matter of time before the rest of the colonies became indepedent.
This seems largely unrelated to the question of whether World War II went “disastrously badly wrong” for Britain. Maybe you’ll claim that losing the empire as such was a disaster, but that’s dubious– it’s not clear that losing the empire was even a net negative for most British people, or that they perceived it to be.
Beyond that, claiming the fall of the British Empire was “in large part due to” World War II is at best deeply contestable. The empire’s fall was the result of a multitude of factors, including the political (growing nationalist, socialist, & independence movements in South Asia & Africa; increased institutional independence of the dominions; declining support for empire among the British voting public) to the economic (Britain’s declining share of global manufacturing output; the transition from coal to oil as the preeminent maritime fuel, nullifying Britain’s global monopoly on coaling stations). But almost all of these trends were well underway before World War II. I agree that on balance, the war probably accelerated these trends and led the British Empire to fall faster than it otherwise would; but it’s hard to see the empire surviving to the present day, even without that war.
Speaking as a British person…
That Britain won the war (and to judge from the way it’s spoken of in certain quarters you’d think we did so virtually single-handed, with American and Soviet contributions grudgingly acknowledged and pretty much all other Allies, with the occasional exception of the Poles, ignored almost altogether) is taken as read and indeed celebrated, but it’s also generally recognised that the war was disastrous for Britain’s position as a world power. Even if we generally date the end of Britain’s superpower status to 1956 rather than 1945 (a distinction which is in any event more about perception than reality) the war is recognised as the cause.
As to whether we see the decline of the Empire as “bad”, that’s obviously a hot topic when looking at it retrospectively, but I think it is safe to say that going into the war in 1939, holding the Empire was a major strategic objective. No party in the elections of the 1930s campaigned on a platform of decolonisation.
While we may now look at the way things were going during the 20th century and say that the Empire was always unsustainable, nevertheless losing it was a major strategic failure for the UK by its own standards, and WW2 is generally recognised as the biggest single reason why it happened.
Well, they did hold down the fort single-handedly for some time while the USA wasn’t in and the USSR was still a German ally.
China was still fighting then, but against Japan.
@Tom (not sure why it’s not letting me reply directly)
Fair point about preserving the empire as being a major strategic goal of the British government/voting public at the time. Britain still didn’t undergo any disaster during or after the war comparable to what the fascist powers brought on themselves, but you’re right that losing the empire was seen as a loss at the time.
I don’t know who you mean “generally regards” the war as the “biggest single reason” for the empire’s fall, but I doubt most historians would say that. There’s just too many other critical reasons for British decline that were well underway by the 1930s. Britain’s global network of coaling stations, for instance, was the lynchpin of their thalassocratic power, yet that network become less and less relevant as oil displaced coal as the preeminent maritime fuel. Britain’s economic dominance as the first industrial power likewise became less relevant as its share of global industrial outlook declined throughout the early 20th century. It’s difficult to see how Britain could have kept control of its empire or remained a world power in the face of these trends. It’s all well and good to say that the Second World War was also a cause; but there’s no reason to say it was a more important cause.
“it’s also generally recognised that the war was disastrous for Britain’s position as a world power. ”
See, I don’t think it was, necessarily.
August 1939: Britain has two allies (informal) on the Continent. France, which a) isn’t actually very strong militarily, as it turns out, and b) is a significant colonial rival elsewhere in the world; and Poland, which is even weaker militarily and has no strategic value to Britain. Its chief strategic threat is close by with an immense army and a very worrying navy and air force.
Within a few years of the end of the war, Britain is in a formal alliance with:
a nuclear superpower, which is also the world’s dominant economy, which has a huge army on the continent;
France, which is no longer a colonial rival because it can’t even hang on to its own colonies;
West Germany, which it effectively occupies;
Italy, and almost every other country in Western Europe.
The colonies, which are a drain on money, manpower and resources, are heading for independence; those with strategic resources such as tin and rubber are leaving with friendly governments in place. Nuclear weapons have given the UK a final argument against conquest. The chief strategic threat is a naval nonentity and its large army is well away, behind several buffer states.
Not sure you can say the loss of the British Empire is entirely a product of British involvement in the war. Spain and Portugal stayed out and lost their empires anyway.
The disaster for Britain was Singapore. It showed every British colony that the British weren’t really the elite and well-bred soldiers who could defeat anyone, because they got trounced by the Japanese, and embarrassingly so. The luster was off, and suddenly the Brits were viewed with more discerning and critical eyes. The impossibly tall British social pyramid, chock full of lords and ladies, Oxford dons and sonorous admirals, suddenly looked very small. “Brits are just overstretched wankers from a small island who shouldn’t be colonizing anybody!” After too many of the colonies had that epiphany, the Empire was doomed. But it might not have survived Monty Python anyway.
I think there is a better argument for WWI than WWII, at the very least.
I think Britain losing it’s overseas possessions broadly was already underway long before 1939 – e.g., Canada and Australia moving into effective independence, or the oldest and most closely integrated overseas possession, Ireland, already being 4/5ths a “Free State” (or just “Eire”, actually, and soon on it’s way to explicit Republic status). Certainly, WWII didn’t help with any attempt to hold Carribean, Indian Subcontinent, African, and South-East Asian possessions, but given what was already happening in the 20s and 30s, why would we think it wouldn’t have happened long term?
britain losing its empire, of course, being a good thing.
Britain wasn’t “protecting other countries from fascist expansion”, it was trying to curtail German expansionism, which is quite different. That’s why Britain could fight Germany while supporting the side with all the Nazi collaborators in the Greek civil war
Britain effectively stopped being a great power as a result of WWII. From a strategic perspective entering the war was a massive mistake for Britain, even if was definitely the correct thing to do morally.
I don’t think you can call the British and French declaration of war in 1939 a war of choice. They had made it clear that they would fight alongside Poland in the event of war, giving Germany the choice whether to invade Poland or not, and Germany took the choice to invade. It may not have been absolutely literally an existential struggle for the survival of either state at that point, but “war of necessity” extends beyond pure struggles for survival and into contexts where a polity must fight for more abstract reasons like guarantees to other polities. I wouldn’t call it reasonable to declare the American Civil War a war of choice on the Union side, even though the compelling threat was abstract.
They choose to make it clear they would fight alongside Poland. You can argue there was no other right choice, but it was still a choice.
I don’t think we should, as it seems like a rational choice to make in August 1939. Hitler has broken every international agreement he ever made, and broken every promise that this land grab is his last, so Germany will have to be fought eventually. Poland and France together have large armies with a victorious record, and Britain’s navy can reimburse the blockade. There were some German generals that thought Hitler had doomed the country in 1939. If we don’t have foreknowledge of the Blitzkrieg it looks very reasonable. We can fault how they fought that war, but declaring war seems like the right call.
To add to your point, unlike the Weimar Republic, which was willing to grudgingly accept the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, Hitler was very much insistent that Alsace-Lorraine was German. Plus, of course, pure revanchism.
If Britain and France had stayed out in 1939, I give it even odds that Hitler invades France and Luxembourg in 1940 anyway, to annex Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg, rather than starting Barabarossa a year early. Depends a little on how the internal debate shakes out, but Hitler’s internal reputation as a warlord is much less good after the Polish campaign. It’s the West that cements him, to the Wehrmacht generals, as a great war leader, not Poland.
I think you’ve completely missed the point: winning a battle or two doesn’t matter if you lose the war. Britain and France, which ultimately won the war, came out far better than Germany, which lost the war and was forced into unconditional surrender and the complete dismantling of the fascist regime.
Frankly, I find the claim that France won the war to be highly debatable: its allies won, and De Gaulle tagged along them long enough to make this pretense acceptable.
Having allies that can carry you in a war is in fact a good part of sound warfighting strategy
Given that France didn’t move a finger to help its allies Czechoslavakia and Poland in 1938-9, and that it was in turn let disastrously down by both Belgium and the UK in 1940, I don’t think that part of its strategy worked very well.
France came out of WW2 with empire mostly intact. France became and still is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Not a bad outcome.
France came out of WW2 with empire mostly intact.
Just in time to lose it right after the war.
one of the five permanent members of the UN Security
Something which is universally reviled by the rest of EU, and probably much of the world. As I said before, France’s allies won the war, and then engaged in the polite fiction that France won it too.
I think this conversation reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of modern war. Ancient wars of conquest notwithstanding, it is very rare for any participant in a modern war to experience a net positive outcome. It’s a question of losses relative to goals. Lower net loss is a win, esp. if a participant isn’t declaring an intention to benefit, but is fighting for some other reason. Authoritarian regimes, it seems clear, claim to be good a war, that is, to be able to actively benefit from their military adventures. The entire raison d’etre of Nazi Germany was to conquer it’s neighbors for additional territory, thus to achieve the destiny of the German folk. They failed.
Meanwhile, the Allies at least *claimed* to be fighting a defensive war, and while many of them lost territory and resources (and other allies didn’t), gaining something wasn’t their stated intention. Preventing Germany and Japan from conquering their neighbors was, and they succeeded.
It’s worth mentioning that Churchill recognized that the British Empire could no longer claim to be a world power, and deliberately set about aligning his country with the United States, such that a US success would, in the long run, benefit a weakened Great Britain. He largely succeeded.
Preventing Germany and Japan from conquering their neighbors was, and they succeeded.
Something in which France notoriously did not succeed.
I don’t need a lesson telling me that I “misunderstand” modern warfare, but I think it’s very clear that France’s strategy failed. Its deterrence against Hitler failed, its attempt to mantain the status quo in Central/Eastern Europe failed, and most importantly, its basic goal not to be conquered and occupied by its own neighbour failed.
France in WW2 is a near-perfect demonstration of what TV Tropes calls “The Power of Friendship”.
Was France conquered and occupied? Sure. But because France had friends and allies, the invaders got driven out and the pre-war government structures / society restored.
Oh yeah, France in turn occupied Germany from 1945 – 1949. As part of that alliance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany
Fascists think that having allies is cheating and shouldn’t count as success. Non-fascists, even including many authoritarians such as medieval and ancient kings, see alliances as sensible policy.
Was France conquered and occupied? Sure. But because France had friends and allies, the invaders got driven out and the pre-war government structures / society restored.
Which is exactly what I’ve been saying since Friday. I’m glad you agree with me on this point now, since it didn’t look that way before.
France in WW2 is a near-perfect demonstration of what TV Tropes calls “The Power of Friendship”.
If you were being beaten to death and only survived because your friends came in to rescue you, it would be, to put it mildly, an extremely non-standard use of the English language to claim that this incident showed you were “good at fighting”.
@Mr X That’s because ‘fighting’ and ‘war’ are not the same thing.
‘Being good at fighting’ means winning the fight (i.e. beating the other person). ‘Being good at war’ means ‘achieving your strategic outcomes’. France’s strategic outcome of WW2 was survival as a state, which it succeeded at. Not because its army beat Nazi Germany’s, but because it had friends whose armies did.
Only one of those two polities still exists today.
‘Being good at fighting’ means winning the fight (i.e. beating the other person).
Say I was fighting to stop the other guy mugging me. Lo and behold, when my friends came and chased him off, he left behind my wallet, phone, and any other valuables I had on my person. Ergo I achieved my goals, ergo I’m good at fighting.
France’s strategic outcome of WW2 was survival as a state, which it succeeded at. Not because its army beat Nazi Germany’s, but because it had friends whose armies did.
France didn’t survive as a state — it was conquered and partitioned between a German-occupied zone and a German-dominated vassal state. It was later reconstituted by the victorious Allies, but reconstitution and survival aren’t the same things.
@MrX ‘Fighting’ is a poor analogy for war, and ‘individual person’ is a poor analogy for ‘state’. They work on some levels, but eventually the analogy parts company with the reality of the thing.
If a state is ‘mugged’, but they have strong enough friends to get their stuff back, then yes that is successful. The goal is ‘continue to have my stuff’ and they still do. The method is war, and part of that is ‘making sure you have strong allies who can get your stuff back if you can’t’.
Likewise, a state that is dismantled but then reconstructed in a form that has a measurable amount of continuity to its previous iteration is still that same state. Because a state is not a person, and can survive dismantling and rebuilding.
>Fascists think that having allies is cheating and shouldn’t count as success.
Germany had allies, both independent ones (Italy, Japan, Finland for a time) and puppet states (Hungary, Romania, Croatia, etc.) Many, many non-German troops participated in Operation Barbarossa. Hitler made overtures to Franco to get Spain to join the Axis, though they were unable to come to an agreement.
Obviously Germany’s allies were insufficient, and in some cases (e.g. Germany/Japan) there was poor coordination at the strategic level. But I’ve never heard the idea put forth before that fascists objected to the *concept* of having allies.
France backed up its status as a nominal member of the victorious WW2 allies by developing nuclear weapons. Among other things this meant that the U.S.S.R. could not count on overrunning and utterly conquering France like Nazi Germany had without France at the last resorting to at least the tactical use of nuclear weapons. This significantly clouded any surety on the Soviet Union’s part that an invasion of central/western Europe could succeed, at least on non-Pyrrhic terms.
At the end of the day, when the dust settled and the peace treaties were signed, French troops were occupying Germany, not the other way around.
The fact that France had quite a rocky time during the war and had to rely on substantial help from allies isn’t really relevant: what matters in the end is results, and the result of World War II was the US, USSR, Britain, and France occupying the entirety of Germany and entirely dismantling the Nazi government and empire.
It’s not just about number of battles won vs number of battles lost. Things like “having allies capable of liberating their occupied territory” and “being able to create and support a substantial armed resistance throughout the empire” are some of the strategic advantages France had obtained through its policies and decision-making.
French troops were occupying Germany, not the other way around
The point is that German troops occupied France for four years, and in the end France managed to occupy part of Germany only because a) its allies did all the hard bits and b) USA & UK found it convenient to prop up another winner to counterbalance the USSR.
France had quite a rocky time during the war
That’s quite an understatement.
isn’t really relevant
I beg to differ: it actually is, in fact, very relevant.
It’s not just about number of battles won vs number of battles lost
I haven’t talked about battles, as I find them a poor metric for evaluating WW2 performances.
Things like “having allies capable of liberating their occupied territory” […] are some of the strategic advantages France had obtained through its policies and decision-making.
As I’ve argued before, France spectacularly mismanaged its alliances in WW2: first it destroyed the Little Entente leaving Czechoslovakia and Poland to their fate, then it failed to coordinante any strategic planning with Belgium, Luxembourg and the Low Countries, and then it was basically left hanging on its own by the UK, which in 1939-40 did the bare minimum effort to help it, and probably not even then.
France was liberated because it was the best place to open a new front, not because USA & UK were won over by the power of brotherly friendship.
“being able to create and support a substantial armed resistance throughout the empire”
What are you referring to ? The French empire supported the Vichy regime, and the Allies actually had to invade Syria and North Africa.
responding to your comment two replies down… how on earth are you arriving at the conclusion that France was “let down” by the Brits? The British had nothing to do with (a) French High Command ignoring their own aerial recon reports of the mass of Army Group A gridlocked in the Ardennes on May 11, (b) Giraud assigning the border between the 2nd/9th Armies at the exact point the Germans crossed the Meuse in 1870 and 1914, leading to disaster at Sedan, (c) the inane counter-attack maneuver by Huntziger which wasn’t itself a failure but directly led to Guderian’s defeat of the 6th/9th Armies, and (d) the cowardice of senior French military and political leaders to continue the war elsewhere in France or even Algeria.
And no, I’m not some frog-hating limey, I’m an American… though one who thinks post-WWII French historiography to be on par with the Confederate Lost Cause for how much of the facts it twists to erase culpability for the Fall of France and the subsequent willing partnership with the most evil regime in history.
Perhaps you should read “Case Red: the Fall of France” by your compatriot Robert Forczyk, since it explains the point quite well:
– the UK only sent the bare minimum in France, only a token force to adhere to their obligations. The BEF originally was made up by four ill-trained and under-equipped divisions; it was later expanded to ten, but I distinctly remember that at least three TA division had no artillery, transports nor any other equipment except for small arms.
– the French felt that the British were always looking behind their shoulders for the nearest port, and that’s why they put Giraud’s 7th Army between the BEF and the sea. I guess they were right, given what happened to the second BEF: its commander, Alan Brooke, spent less than 24 hours in France before deciding that it was useless, and promptly ordered a general evacuation without even telling the French Command who, as you can imagine, was more than mildly annoyed to find out that the British forces on the frontline has turned tail without explanations. Brooke even repeatedly lied to the War Cabinet about what was happening: I remember Forczyk detailing a phone call with Churchill where he lied about having posted the 52nd ID as a rearguard in St. Valery while it was already reimbarking.
– the RAF force in France was pitifully small and included mostly outdated planes; Hurricanes and Spitfires were purposefully kept in Britain. Despite frequent appeals from the French both the Chamberlain and the Churchill cabinets steadfastly refused to reinforce it, and they were reluctant to even replace suffered losses.
– need I mention operation Catapult and the attack at Mers el Kebir ?
Also, some minor corrections:
b) Giraud was the commander of the 7th Army in Flanders, and he had nothing to do with the 9th Army or the Ardenne. You’re probably mistaking him for Georges or Gamelin.
d) as a matter of fact, the Reynaud government wanted to continue the fight in Africa, but it was undermined by Weygand and Petain. Reynaud was arrested and later sent to Sachsenhausen; Mandel and Giraud were arrested too but the former managed to escape in Africa where he was caught and executed, the later joined the Allies in Africa too in 1942. You may also have heard about De Gaulle, by the way…
the entire point of the alliance was for France’s Army to hold the line on the border with Germany and for Britain’s Navy to hold the seas (which they did very well. There was no Phoney War in the North Sea!)
Any analysis of British war plans that does not recognize that the senior service of the British Armed Forces was in 1939–and for centuries prior–the Navy is unserious, though certainly common among continental Europeans who think only in terms of tanks, railroads, and infantry.
It was France, not Britain, that was perfidious in WWII. That Adm. Darlan would have allowed the fleet to fall into Axis hands despite being in no risk of imminent destruction by Germany or Italy constitutes a brazen betrayal of Britain and indeed betrays the fact that senior French political and military figures were amenable to fascism. I understand why the French may have felt betrayed, but no disinterested party could say the War Cabinet & Somerville’s ultimatum was unreasonable, even if one hates the outcome.
I do regret the confusion of Giraud with Gamelin. Indeed, I esteem Reynaud’s courage, though he is the exception that proves the rule, frankly. De Gaulle and his 7,000 Free French were useful politically but militarily negligible. Inflating their importance is exactly the sort of post-war historiography I’m talking about–the same historiography that would have you believe the median Frenchman was a member of the Resistance rather than Milice or on good terms with the Milice.
Britain’s Navy to hold the seas (which they did very well. There was no Phoney War in the North Sea!)
That’s because that was where UK’s main interest was, not for altruistic motivations.
continental Europeans who think only in terms of tanks, railroads, and infantry.
Neither France nor Italy thought in those terms; not even Germany, as it had a very precise (if completely unrealistic) naval plan. And you forget that the Air Force was a key point in both German and Italian strategy.
It was France, not Britain, that was perfidious in WWII. That Adm. Darlan would have allowed the fleet to fall into Axis hands despite being in no risk of imminent destruction by Germany or Italy constitutes a brazen betrayal
Oh, for f**** sake. Please provide some evidence for your claim, as what actually happened was exactly the contrary: Darlan repeatedly stated that he would never allow the French fleet to fall into Axis hands, he even told this personally to Churchill (you can check Auphan and Mordal, “The French Navy in WW2”, for the story); and, quite obviously, he never did.
The Axis never got the French fleet, which as a matter of fact actually scuttled itself at Toulon in 1942, precisely in order not to fall into Hitler’s hands.
no disinterested party could say the War Cabinet & Somerville’s ultimatum was unreasonable
As an historian (admittedly a mediaevalist) and a disinterested party (I’m Italian, and we don’t especially like the French), I can confidently say that the ultimatum was totally unreasonable.
De Gaulle and his 7,000 Free French were useful politically but militarily negligible.
This is the only point I do agree with. You seem to be surprisingly prone to unmotivated and unsubstantiated French-bashing, for someone who claim not to be a frog-hating limey…
Darlan may well have promised both himself and Churchill that the fleet would not fall into Axis hands, but it need not fully be up to him. What if the Axis launches an operation that takes the French by as much surprise as Fall Gelb? Should Churchill stake the future of North Africa, Malta, and perhaps the war on the promise of an admiral of an armed forces already shown to be impotent in the face of Nazi Bewegungskrieg?
I do *despise* the vast majority of 1940 French government and military officials. I included the bit about not being a frog-hating limey because this hatred comes purely from their active abetting/impotent acceptance of the Nazis, not from some intergenerational grievance about Napoleon, which is the sense I get from a lot of Brits.
That 70k French Jews were willfully handed over to their deaths; that thousands of Free French and Dominion troops lost their lives having to fight to liberate Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, and French West Africa from a supposed former ally; that more people served in the Milice than the Maquis–these are all among the most shameful acts by a world superpower. And yet they have never properly atoned due to the mythmaking of La Résistance–cf. the disgraceful banning of The Sorrow and the Pity.
What if the Axis launches an operation that takes the French by as much surprise as Fall Gelb?
The Germans DID actually launch such an operation, and the French scuttled their fleet rather then let it fall into German hands.
I already told you this, I even cited you a book written by the very Vichy Secretary of the Navy who ordered the scuttling, but apparently your antipathy towards France has blinded you to the facts.
While this isn’t a great point to raise about WW2 due to the real costs associated with not joining the war alongside Poland, it’s an excellent critique of them joining WW1.
For the record, Canada declared war (independently) a week after Britain (September 10th vs September 3rd). Precisely what would have happened if they didn’t declare war is unknown.
Australia and New Zealand entered the war concurrently to Britain (though if I understand correctly both governments ratified the entry as well)
Canada and New Zealand independently declared war on Germany in WWII; Australia declared that it was following Britain’s declaration, but could have done so independently if it wanted.
The 1931 Statute of Westminster granted all British Dominions the right to pass laws and conduct foreign policy independently of Whitehall. Some of them asked Britain to keep control of specific legal functions that they felt they weren’t prepared to handle, but in practical terms it meant they were formally independent countries.
They were obligated to do so by alliance with Poland. The war certainly didn’t proceed the way they imagined (it never does for anyone, but WWII France especially so), and following their obligations to Poland didn’t go much beyond that declaration of war, but honoring your alliances is the right thing in principle.
You need to realise that the run-up to a war is a gigantic multifaceted operational game of chicken where you’re hoping to drag an enemy into a war when you think you have the advantage, while keeping others out, or gain other concessions by being aggressive but not-too-much (Munich), or keep an enemy out of a war when you think they’re too strong for now, or biding your time to strengthen your own military, etc etc.
The right thing to do would’ve been to not allow Munich agreement without an attack on Germany, much less the pincer of Poland. The reality of war was that Poland was trying to hold out till help arrives (wasn’t gonna happen), Germany was trying to take Poland without opening the western front, Germany was preparing for war with USSR, USSR was preparing for a war with Germany, Germany was preparing for defeating France (success) and Britain (failure) quickly enough to focus on USSR (partial success), and there was also a hot potato named USA. Operations ended up playing out the specific way they did mostly by chance; Poland drew the short straw in that arrangement since it needed a lot of luck to survive (it didn’t and a new Poland was made after the war). However, strategy-wise, WWII was basically set in stone way earlier.
You’re unfair to the Nazis’ military record when you combine every war they ever fought into one and then say they never won a war. You elide the successful invasion of Czechoslovakia, most but not all of whose soldiers declined to fight. After the invasion concluded, there was a period of nominal peace before the invasion of Poland, so it should be regarded as a separate and victorious war.
That’s not much of a success compared to the major strategic failures before and after it, but you ought to at least acknowledge it because of the lessons it teaches. When the fascists invade, they can actually succeed if you hand over your guns instead of using them.
Speaking of the earlier strategic failures, if a regime mismanages its economy so badly that famine is inevitable unless they plunder a neighbor – as the Nazis did – do you consider the resulting invasion a war of choice?
To your last point, if a country screws up it’s economic and diplomatic situation so bad it sees no choice put to start an unwinnable war, I would still consider that a war of choice given that the government’s other choices lead them down that path. And even if you don’t agree with that, it hardly refutes the point that facists are bad at war. If anything, it proves that facists also tend to suck at every other aspect of government as well.
The Czechoslovakia war created the preconditions that helped compel their later war though. The militarization needed to force other nations to concede wasn’t a sustainable economic policy.
Strategically the entire action of 1937-1945 was not quite deterministic, but had very few offramps and none that likely ended well for German political leadership. They probably should be grouped.
That said, one victory against a manifestly smaller power and one catastrophic defeat against what, 75% of the worlds gdp, is still awful.
I’m not sure “But they won a war when the other side more-or-less refused to fight back” actually makes much difference…
Part of the whole point of the message above was largely that part of war is choosing when to fight. If Germany is judged bad at war for having tried tyo fight to USSR, USA and UK at once then by the same token it could surely be hold as good war fighting to choose to fight only where victory is easy earlier.
I don’t think “choice” is a correct metric. If I recall, Hitler claimed to have had no choice but to act as he did. I think measuring outcomes against stated goals is a better benchmark. According to Hitler’s own rhetoric, invading Czech. was but one step in a larger plan. He intended to attack the USSR all along. Against that context, the invasion of Czech can be seen as one step (temporarily successful) down a road that ultimately failed.
The War with Poland is quite simply not a separate or victorious war. That war was the Second World War and the Germans were debellated.
The Polish Campaign is part-and-parcel with war with France and Britain. Germany would win the campaign against the Poles and it would even win the campaign against the French, but could not defeat the British, resulting in increasingly insane bankshots like “start a war with the Soviet Union”
I agree. The Polish Campaign is a fundamental part of World War 2. After the Polish campaign, there would be no peace with Britain. That distinguishes it from the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
I’m personally inclined to still call that a war of choice in that it was the result of their policy. They mismanaged their economy because of their commitment to ideology, they made their economy as dysfunctional as it was because they wanted “have a big military so we can invade everyone” far more than they wanted to have a functional German economy. They created a self-fulfilling prophecy where they needed to invade other countries, especially the USSR, to fix the economy which they broke by planning to invade other countries, especially the USSR, no matter what the cost would be.
Yes it was a war of choice; it’s just that the “choice” in question happened a few years before the actual invasion. Nazi economic policy was always predicated on the assumption that they’d be plundering their neighbours within a few years; it was an active choice to pursue those economic policies that constrained their future decisions.
By analogy, if I voluntarily implant a bomb into my skull that will blow my head off if I don’t murder someone in the next 24 hours, I am definitely still morally responsible for that murder.
The problem is that Munich agreement made it clear that the western “allies” were leaving us out to dry. It wasn’t simply German might that made Czechoslovakia give up, but the fact that fighting won’t accomplish literally anything. At least invasion of Poland got a declaration of war, for all the good that did. For a Sudetenland Czech, the best option wasn’t defending his home to the last breath, but becoming a partisan/foreign legion soldier. Which some did, and gave the Germans a bit of a bloody nose at least. A war wasn’t fought in this case, so there was no war to judge German success by.
Czechoslovakia also had plenty of internal tensions due to multiethnicity. HSĽS, generally known as the “1st nazi party of Slovakia”, was originally aiming for a federative arrangement with other parts of Czechoslovakia. In the end, they declared independence as Germany invaded the Czech leftovers, completely removing an industrial area and part of manpower due to split loyalty.
All in all we can say Germany was able to leverage diplomacy both internal and external to break a country without fighting, but nothing about conduct at war.
This is an important point which I think needed to be highlighted.
If we’re using war in the strategic sense Nazi Germany largely avoided armed conflict whilst achieving its stated goals on 4 occassions, namely the Rhineland, Anschluss, Munich conference and the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
I’m not sure much can be taken from a case study of one but it highlights some strengths of this particular fascist regime. The appearance of military readiness, willingness to use force and frankly the appeal the regime had to elites in nations opposing it, as well as the context and war weariness of the time meant that other nations backed down to their brinkmanship.
The weakness of this strategy of course is that the fascist leadership believed their own hype. Their ideology meant the couldn’t consolidate their gains and survive, they had to engage in continuous escalation until they destroyed themselves.
Yeah, I think that’s a good point well-made. Nazi/fascist propaganda basically railroaded them into an unwinnable war eventually, but before that they did manage to accomplish strategic goals effectively. I think it’s also worth comparing with the USSR – Germany committed to many of the aesthetic values of military success, including economically/technologically with over-engineered, high-tech weaponry that was effective in applying peacetime pressure to neighbouring nations, as shiny new equipment IS very scary. The USSR however, didn’t have better equipment, or better, manlier soldiers, but committed to expanding its base in heavy industry. In the end both policies failed in the opposite circumstance – Nazi technology was not as effective in wartime as absolutely loads of factories producing less advanced technology, whilst the Soviet approach failed during a period of posturing. The latter being a slower decline, but still a visible one.
Obvious question then, what form of government is best at winning wars of choice? That is, the government has the ability to be clear-eyed about the relative advantages of both sides, not ideologically blinkered when conducting the war, but also willing to start wars to get things it wants.
My vote would be the Roman Republic.
The Roman Republic certainly was good at winning wars, although I’m not sure how well its system would translate into the modern world.
An excellent point. The Roman Republic’s system wouldn’t translate well into modern society. I would argue that there’s a very good reason why one of the best-proven examples of a government good at winning wars of choice in all of history has a social structure incompatible with modernity.
In modern times, decisively winning a war of choice and actually profiting by doing so has become nearly impossible for developed nations. One might say that ever since 1914, Most military victories have been Pyrrhic victories.
As such, a form of government well suited for handling the pressures of modernity in general will usually not be one as eager and enthusiastic about waging wars of choice as the Roman Republic. And a form of government that is very good at starting and then winning wars of choice will usually fail at other things required for the administration of a modern state.
In a world with nuclear weapons, and a global supply chain, the opportunity to benefit strategically from wars of choice has probably passed.
Against, peers, yes. Non peer interventions are still done and still profitable, certainly to elites and probably in general.
Why isnt there a reply button to the people who replied to me?
In any case, to the point about non-peer intervention, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine seem to argue against wars of any kind.
The blog replies top out at five levels of nesting. If you’ve arranged to be emailed notifications of replies in the comments, replying to the notification about a specific comment will respond accordingly. I made this reply by literally pasting in the comment number#.
Despite how militaristic communist countries have been, they do not per se value militarism for its own sake. Rather their ideology glorifies the initial revolutionary struggle and then maintains the necessity of “defending” themselves from the counter-revolutionary forces of global capitalism. Had Trotsky won the struggle for control of the U.S.S.R. and extended the revolutionary phase indefinitely seeking the overthrow of Europe’s governments it might have been another matter. Indeed a bizarrely fascinating counterfactual is if it had been a Trotskyite Soviet Union that launched an expansionist campaign of European conquest in 1940, been defeated by a coalition that included Nazi Germany, and the Nazis who became the postwar “totalitarian but pragmatically concerned with internal matters” power.
Demarquis – February 24, 2024 at 10:22 am>
The reply function doesn’t you go more than 3 levels deep because if you allow that you eventually get comments which are only a few letters wide and the words wrap weirdly.
If it is important to specify what you are responding to copy the name and time at the top as I have done here.
I would count any state that managed to become an empire, except for short-term empires like Hitler’s. Rome certainly does stand out for its longevity.
At first blush yeah, but I think there are hairs worth splitting on this. Rome was good at winning wars and it was bad at avoiding wars. That means it won a lot of wars of choice. It’s not the exact same thing because sometimes they made the wars of choice a lot harder then they should have been.
Rome just didn’t face much peer opposition during it’s rise. I’d say the only three peer conflicts were the 1st and 2nd Punic wars and the 1st Macedonian war. By comparison there were more then three conflicts of choice that they made harder then they should have. The 1st Mithridatic war was a costly war of choice for no gains. (And to a lesser extent so was the second) The Pyrrhic war was a victory against an inferior opponent that they managed to turn into a near peer opponent. The first Punic war was a victory against a peer but it was also a war of choice that lasted 23 years! The Sertorian war was them putting their own military expertise and leadership in the hands of the Iberians to turn a decidedly inferior opponent into a difficult struggle. So yeah they are batting 3-3 in major peer conflicts but they got themselves into four fights way more difficult then they needed to be, quagmires if you will.
Compare that to the US. 2-2 in major conflicts against other industrialized nations. (Dismissing the Spanish American war for the same reason I dont count the Roman conquest of Egypt). Meanwhile we’ve got three quagmires, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, but only one of them was really a war of choice like all of the republican era Roman quagmires were. And meanwhile the US has no shortage of lopsided victories in non peer conflicts, just like Rome. So Rome isn’t doing much better then the present day USA and the US is hardly considered exemplary on the wars of choice front.
Of course them not being very good compared to the modern world doesn’t mean their potential peers weren’t a lot worse. Carthage kept fighting wars with Syracuse until they decided to destroy their state invading Rome. And they look good compared to the monarchies, the Seleucids and Ptolmaics exhausted themselves. So it’s kinda a case where in the world of the blind, the one eyed city state is imperator.
The USA record is actually pretty great. Most modern industrial wars against peers are at best pyrrhic victories. The number of modern industrial wars one nation came out of stronger than it entered is sparse, to the point id actually argue only the USA and the Soviets managed it in WW1 and WW2. Everyone else lost WW1 and the only surviving nations better off after WW2 by any measure were the USA, Soviets, and communist China. Wars are just a bad idea now.
I don’t think that is true of the USSR. 27 million dead and the western third of the country devastated – it survived and rebuilt, but the scars are lasting and deep. It came out stronger in international position, but domestically weakened.
The best is probably countries with a) some form of representative government and b) a imperialist sentiment within the population and the elite and c) with a population without deep divides. Some examples: the Roman Republic, ~19th century Britain, ~19th century United States. The representative government creates generally competent leaders, the imperialist sentiments means those leaders are selected for their ability to win, and without internal devides that aggression is directed outwards. But if any of these elements is lost, the ability to win wars may deteriorate.
A safer bet would probably be various kinds of monarchies. They tend towards a 50:50 win rate and primarily limited wars that rarely lead to state extinction.
Note of course that because wars tend to not be profitable on average anymore, a democracy that is less war-prone (with a lower win-rate) would likely outperform a more war-prone one (with higher win-rate) on most measures, likely including power on the international stage.
Wars aren’t profitable for a modern democracy in the same way that putting out burning buildings isn’t profitable. Both of them are you spending money on something that generates no revenue. But that doesn’t mean that the work they do might not be extremely lucrative. Britain and France had to mortgage away their empires to win WWII but they are far better off with a democratic western Europe then they were with the empires. The Pax Americana was very expensive but left the US both richer and more secure.
America’s successful wars against Mexico, the Native American polities and if you want to stretch the 19th c a bit, interventions against various Central American and Caribbean countries weren’t really against peer competitors though, were they?
That is also a strategy that gives you a lot of wins, isn’t it? Britain afaik was also cautious in challenging peer competitors and tried to build coalitions when they did. (But I was indeed hesitant to add the US to the list, it fits less well than the other two.)
That seems like exactly the point. Only fighting wars you know you can win is one way of being good at war.
Fair point, although my preferred way would be “don’t do wars of conquest” to begin with.
That’s true if your goal is ‘win as many wars as possible’, which was the question I suppose.
However, if fighting wars is a net negative to the amount of power you can project, you can become more powerful through fighting fewer wars than your competitors. Eventually (all going to plan), you will be powerful enough that none of your competitors can challenge you.
Win the war without having fought it in the first place. The Sun Tzu ideal.
Yes, but ‘only fighting wars you know you can win’ is very easy to do when you are the most powerful country on your own continent. If you have no real peer in your neighbourhood, becoming the hegemon of it is not an extraordinary accomplishment.
The Mexican-American War was more peer conflict than a similar war today. US forces were outnumbered by Mexicans for most of the war.
I’m not sure that I’d count the 19th century US as being a country without internal division, considering the whole “American Civil War” thing that happened between 1861 and 1865.
The Mongols had a pretty good run?
American representative democracy. In terms of aims American conflicts have tended to be largely successful in establishing their strategic goals, with largely successful (but not universally so) operational and tactical success too.
The major exceptions are 1812 (strategic mistake to my mind, operational stalemate), maybe the Civil War (all civil wars are arguably strategic failures, but here for the confederacy mostly), The US intervention in the Russian Civil War (utter mistake), Vietnam (self evident), and a smattering of post cold war wars like the Iraq war and the US interventions in the Somali civil wars.
On the positive side we have the revolution, numerous frontier wars, WW1 (of the belligerents we are the *only* one who can be said to win), WW2 (both theatres), Korea, numerous South American interventions (you and I can dislike the objectives but they were accomplished), the Gulf War (ditto), and most of the American military interventions post cold war. If that seems shorter, remember that there are dozens of wars each buried as footnotes.
Every time America fights against a peer nation they tend to achieve stalemate or victory. The US strategic aim of keeping problems on the other side of the Atlantic and trade flowing have both been kept. The world almost precisely looks like how America as an institution wants-A bunch of disunited powers that trade with us and no united political rivals. The two/three exceptions are Russia, China, and soon to be India, and each of them is as far away as possible and ringed in allies. That’s an almost unparalleled win record and strategic accomplishment.
Not to say those goals are necessarily good for its citizens or humanity, but you can’t argue that the results of Americas wars don’t tend to achieve what they set out to do. Even from a leftists perspective America’s flawed but real democracy can push it into wars that may be bad for its people, but they still serve the nations larger strategic interests and tend to be both winnable and executed well.
Great Britain also has a fantastic record, for similar reasons. Europe pretty much looks precisely how Great Britain wants it to-disunited peers with large trade pacts. Unfortunately their choice to enter WW1 tanks their record utterly. And they have a similar political system.
As a rule?
Democracies, *but only if* the majority of the population supports the choice to go to war.
Do bear in mind that, following Clausewitz, even defensive wars are a *choice* (see German invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia vs. German invasion of Poland). Invaders rarely want a war; they want to bring land and people under their control. It is the defender, who desires to not be so occupied, who chooses war.
National self-defence, the defeat of an invader, is a casus belli many, perhaps most citizens are willing to support, but it is not necessarily the only such.
Which is why less-scrupulous national leaders have tried to frame wars of choice as wars of necessity.
The U.S. has a pretty great record.
And before them, Great Britain.
It’s interesting to me that Communist regimes have a better record than fascist ones. They have definite similarities — totalitarianism, appearance of strength with things like the May Day military parades, even goosestepping — but exercised much sounder strategic judgement.
The Soviets beat the White Russians, reasserted Russian control over much of Imperial Russia’s former territories, lost the Soviet-Polish War, lost the Winter War, won the Continuation War, won the Second World War, and then mostly stayed put other than brief interventions against Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1967 before losing in Afghanistan. The PRC has been more picky about its conflicts, Vietnam has been quiet since deposing the Khmer Rouge and North Korea, despite the Kims’ cult of personality, hasn’t done anything since 1953. Similarly, Cuba helped Angola in its civil war in the 70s, but hasn’t really fought a war since Castro took over.
It’s interesting to me that Communist regimes have a better record than fascist ones. They have definite similarities — totalitarianism, appearance of strength with things like the May Day military parades, even goosestepping — but exercised much sounder strategic judgement.
Insofar as “exercised much sounder strategic judgement” equates to “didn’t start wars of choice”, I think the existence of nuclear weapons post-1945 is a pretty big confounder. It seems quite plausible to me that, without the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the Soviet Union would have tried to conquer Europe sometime after WW2. Equally, had the main countries all had nuclear weapons in 1939, I think even Hitler would have held back from starting a world war.
Indeed, and the existence of nuclear weapons is also a major strategic asset for Russia in its current war: the West can supply Ukraine with basic materiel for frontline infantry combat, but more sophisticated long-range weapons systems capable of striking at Russia’s operational rear are essentially off-limits due to the desire to avoid a civilization-ending nuclear apocalypse, and as Alex Vershinin presciently wrote back in June 2022, the long-term project of Western deindustrialization in the decades since WWII has severely compromised the West’s ability to compete with Russia in the production of “dumb” mass-consumption munitions.
In so many words, the West revamped its modern military-industrial apparatus on the assumption that nukes would make industrial-scale Great Power land war obsolete, and then it decided to get involved in an industrial-scale Great Power land war anyway.
Most of that makes sense but I don’t think you can really call it a Great Power war when there aren’t any Great Powers involved. If Russia qualified for the title they’d have won the war long ago.
That, plus also supporting Ukraine does not appear to have harmed the “West” (the US and it’s military allies) in any significant way, at least relative to Russia. Quite the contrary.
Whatever terminology one would use, then, for a war between two modern militaries both capable of advanced combined-arms operations over an extended high-intensity ground war, without one military immediately curbstomping the other like the U.S. vs Iraq in 1991 or 2003. Maybe “peer conflict” would be a more appropriate blanket term, both in the sense of taking Russia down a peg by promoting Ukraine to the status of its “peer” (albeit Ukraine with the full weight of NATO at its back to supply and fund its war effort), and in the sense of emphasizing how badly the United States may have ultimately miscalculated by knowingly committing itself to a de facto non-nuclear peer conflict with Russia, even after having structured its modern military-industrial system around the assumption that extended non-nuclear conflict between two nuclear-armed militaries would be impossible.
To be fair, I suspect the U.S. assumption going in was that economic sanctions would cripple Russia severely enough to prevent the war from dragging on as long as it has, but on the other hand this hardly exonerates U.S. policymakers from the charge of severe miscalculation either.
What do you mean by that? I wouldn’t call the US’s involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian war “commitment”. The West has been floundering with support throughout the entire engagement, and besides that giving away parts of its military stockpile, most of which was built for war with Russia anyways, and some of which was on the brink of expiry anyways. There wasn’t even a single official NATO soldier that died in Ukraine (only private volunteers; definitely nothing like Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion.
In order for us to be able to say that the US “miscalculated by knowingly committing itself to a de facto non-nuclear peer conflict with Russia”, we first have to calculate the opportunity costs of non-involvement. And, honestly – I don’t see any gain for the US to not send its surplus, soon-to-expire equipment to Ukraine, nor any significant loss by cutting economic trade with Russia. Meanwhile, tacitly approving the full-scale invasion of Ukraine could lead to diplomatic instability in the future, à la the Munich Conference.
Obviously predicting the future can be a fool’s errand, but I don’t think you’re taking full measure of the potential downsides for the West in having fully committed to this conflict (if not materially with a total WWII-style military-industrial mobilization, then at least ideologically with the repeated invocation of Manichean good-versus-evil Hitler/Munich rhetoric) especially if Ukraine loses the war outright and/or gets thoroughly wrecked economically as a result. For one thing, the example of a wrecked/abandoned Ukraine would send a strong signal to any other potential Western proxies in similar conflicts in the future: how would potential U.S. proxies in the so-called “Indo-Pacific,” for example, react to the prospect of aligning with the U.S. in an ever-escalating military buildup against China, if the only realistic choice they can perceive is whether their ultimate capitulation to Washington’s enemies would take place before or after a devastating shooting war on their territory?
For another thing, we’re still in the relatively early stages of European economic decoupling from Russia, particularly in terms of its dependence on cheap Russian fossil fuel energy dating as far back as the 1964 Druzhba pipeline, and the effects on European industrial competitiveness and energy costs could ultimately be pretty severe, with the resulting potential for anti-U.S. blowback in European democratic politics. Would it not be a pretty severe blow to U.S. interests, and a pretty great bargain for Vladimir Putin, if a losing Western effort in the Ukraine war ultimately helps facilitate the rise of more Orban-style Russia-friendly governments throughout Europe, particularly if it impacts core EU/NATO countries like Germany or France?
The neocon/hawk response to such possibilities would presumably be “and this is why we must double down on doing everything possible to ensure a Ukrainian victory, come hell or high water!” — but would this really be a rational response if the implied “hell” involves the literal risk of a civilization-ending nuclear apocalypse, or would it fall somewhere on the Strangelovian spectrum between Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper?
It should be noted that “adversarial depictions” is greatly soft-pedaling things — much of the West’s early narrative about the conduct of Soviet military during WWII, for example, was formed via the retrospective accounts and memoirs of former top Nazi military brass like Franz Halder, Heinz Guderian, and Adolf Heusinger, whose wartime perspectives were obviously shaped by the ideological imperative to justify Germany’s preemptive invasion of the USSR, and whose postwar perspectives were just as obviously shaped by a direct personal career imperative to play up the formidability of the Soviet military threat in order to downplay their own failings in having been defeated by it.
(Sorry, that second comment was a response to Simon_Jester below.)
Both of these wars (and the obviousness of the comparison with the current Russia/Ukraine war) should also probably be chalked up as counterevidence to the automatic assumption that the inevitable result of allowing a Russian victory in such conflicts would be the apocalyptic annihiliation of the targeted country and/or a domino-effect Russian westward march across all of Europe — in both cases, Russia settled for fairly limited territorial and geopolitical concessions, and Finland was able to remain politically and economically intact!
And that one was a response to Arilou below! (Sorry, my HTML brain is apparently on strike today.)
You can say “it seems quite plausible to me that” the USSR would have made a bid to conquer Europe at some point without nuclear weapons coming into play. But this is by nature speculative.
Getting an accurate sense of what the Soviet Union’s strategic goals and likely intentions would have been is… difficult. Because for several decades, English-speakers had almost no direct access to Soviet internal politics, while being constantly steeped in adversarial descriptions of what American and other Western thinkers thought Soviet politics and strategic plans were like.
A lot of the thinking of this time was paranoid, simplistic, or simply wrong. After all, 1950s-era Americans genuinely did not know very much about the Soviet Union and the Soviets, a closed society riddled with government dishonesty, did nothing constructive to end this ignorance.
So while it is of course impossible to falsify “the USSR would have tried to conquer all of Europe eventually if Hitler hadn’t struck first,” it’s also tricky to prove this using arguments that aren’t heavily entangled with questionable sources and lines of evidence.
I’m not aware of much support for the idea that comes out of direct research on the internal politics of the Soviet Union, or primary sources on Soviet intentions.
Given Russia’s record of military expansion both before, during and after the Soviet era, I’d say that it’s a rather plausible speculation.
I think Stalin might have attempted further military conquests at some point (he said something to that effect in a speech, about expecting another world war by 1960 or so), but Khrushchev and his circle, not so much. It’s a mistake to see all communist governments or even all Soviet leaders as the same.
Stalin was an opportunistic expansionist, not a reckless one, and a land war with NATO would’ve been all sorts of reckless
Without knowing the quoted speech I can’t say for sure, but I suspect the expectation regarded a world war launched against, not by, the USSR
I think Stalin might have gambled and caused another World War, but I don’t think he would have *tried* for one, if that makes sense?
I had read the claim that Stalin had planned to invade the ‘revisionist’ communist regime in Yugoslavia, but had abandoned that idea after witnessing the speed of NATO intervention in the Korean War.
Source: https://warisboring.com/the-korean-war-saved-the-world-from-nuclear-annihilation/
However, I do not know how good that source is.
Okay, but we’re not limited to the Iron Curtain era for ideas of what the Soviets would like to do in Western Europe. The view that (absent some kind of magical deterrence) the USSR would have sought to take over occupation responsibility for everything liberated from the Axis goes back to the early 1940s where it was developed not by their adversaries but by allies who had continual top-level access to Soviet leadership and thinking.
It should be noted that “adversarial depictions” is greatly soft-pedaling things — much of the West’s early narrative about the conduct of Soviet military during WWII, for example, was formed via the retrospective accounts and memoirs of former top Nazi military brass like Franz Halder, Heinz Guderian, and Adolf Heusinger, whose wartime perspectives were obviously shaped by the ideological imperative to justify Germany’s preemptive invasion of the USSR, and whose postwar perspectives were just as obviously shaped by a direct personal career imperative to play up the formidability of the Soviet military threat in order to downplay their own failings in having been defeated by it.
Given that the existence of nuclear weapons isn’t stopping post-communist Russia from attempting to conquer chunks of Europe right now, it seems pretty clear this doesn’t really hold up.
The war in Ukraine has remained a limited war in large part because everybody’s too scared of nuclear war to escalate it.
Bela Kun’s regime is a counterexample (stupidly resisted giving up territory and ended up being invaded by several of their neighbors), but that seems to have more to do with his vision of greater Hungary than with anything specifically communist.
Cuba also intervened successfully in the Ethiopia-Somalia war and unsuccessfully in the Congo/Zaire civil war in addition to the Angola civil war, and I don’t think China has been all that strategic with respect to its conflicts, but other than that, that’s about right.
You could arguably say Korea and Vietnam were Chinese victories. Korea by pushing NATO back to the starting line and I don’t think I need to explain Vietnam.
?? The Vietnamese mopped the floor with China, it wasn’t even close.
both sides claimed victory, but it seems like a totally pointless war to me, started by China (and China failed in their strategic obvective of getting the Khmer Rouge back into power).
I think he’s talking about the US-Vietnam war, not the China-vietnam war.
@Arilou Then I don’t know why specify China. I was always under the assumption that the USSR was a bigger contributor to Vietnamese victory against the US, wasn’t it?
Vietnam certainly preferred Soviet assistance, and after winning, extended basing rights to Soviet warships in one of its ports.
But then, if you had China on your doorstep, you’d probably want an ally that can give China pause, too. Unless you’re India.
Korea was definitely a strategic win for China, they ended up with a client state as a buffer on the Korean peninsula which is historically a launching point for invasions of China.
this is more a matter of geography and distance then anything else.
Germany is more of a immediate threat to France and Britian who have bigger trade connections to America to get dragged in and thus was always their First Priority, you don’t see France and Britian declaring War on Soviets for doing the exact same thing do you?
Germany was viewed as the more immediate neighbor threat and thus earned first priority.
they were Dam Fools for fighting the 4 biggest/Strongest Empires in the World at the Time, but the fact that they COULD Make a Fight out of it says alot really. the German/French Rivalry made that inevitable, but the fool actions with Britian and viewing them as the bigger and stronger power put Britian on the other side, and America had better trade connections TO the UK.
Facisism diddnt work better then communism for anything about the two political systems facisism worked cause of the New German Power alarming folks again and again and being RIGHT THERE.
if Russia had been Fascist and German commie I imagine the same thing happens.
the Communist Corpse was propped by the Americans for a good chunk of that fight and would have lost without direct aide, but after they got to have the spoils of victory and then actions where most peer empires have been devastated and only PEER is oceans away as well as to dangerous to directly fight cause Nukes.
I wouldn’t count Vietnam’s wars against the PRC and Khmer Rouge either way since both sides of both wars were communist. I would also count the Winter War as a draw (while a moral victory for the Finns, they did have to cede territory in a negotiated peace) and the Continuation War as simply an extra theatre of the Second World War. Also, if you’re going to count the Russian Civil War, you should probably also count the Chinese Civil War.
Korea is a hard war to call one way or the other; if you are judging from each belligerent’s goals, North Korea clearly failed its goal of forcefully unifying with the South, PRC clearly succeeded at its goal of maintaining a buffer between its own border and South Korea, and the UN forces succeeded at their goal of defending South Korea while failing at their goal of forcefully unifying it with the North. I’d say it comes out as a wash for communists as a whole.
I don’t think you can really count either the Winter or Continuation wars as anything other than losses: Not *catastrophic* but still: The Continuation War explicitly sought to recover lost territories and lead to further territorial losses.
Both of these wars (and the obviousness of the comparison with the current Russia/Ukraine war) should also probably be chalked up as counterevidence to the automatic assumption that the inevitable result of allowing a Russian victory in such conflicts would be the apocalyptic annihiliation of the targeted country and/or a domino-effect Russian westward march across all of Europe — in both cases, Russia settled for fairly limited territorial and geopolitical concessions, and Finland was able to remain politically and economically intact!
While that is true, it also points out the importance of actual resistance: Had the Soviets easily overrun Finland (rather than the grinding conflcit they actually experienced) the terms would have probably been different. (and of course, a large portion of it is that Stalin had multiple fish to fry, and the finnish herring was far from the tastiest)
I think there’s a degree of variance in both Communist and Fascist regimes, where the “best” ones look like crappy Liberal Democracies and the worst ones commit spectacular acts of national suicide within a decade of coming to power.
Francoist Spain, for example, acted more like some of the less offensive Communist regimes, while the Khmer Rouge’s self-immolation in the late 1970s makes Hitler look almost competent in comparison.
But it is true that Fascist countries tend to cluster on the lower end of the spectrum, while Communist ones are fairly evenly distributed.
As a counter (and purely to start the argument) what you say applies just as much to Liberal Democracies. Take for e.g. Britain since WW2 – Suez, a messy win in Malaya, defeat in Northern Ireland (on the basis that a military campaign which leaves a faction dedicated to your removal in power is a military defeat (if a political qualified-success)), a win over a joke regime in the Falklands, defeat in Afghanistan, defeat in Iraq, counter-productive engagement in Libya and so on.
So perhaps truer to say that there are no militarily active countries which, by your metric are “good” at war? I don’t think in the British example, that the liberal democracy has made grounded assessments of its power and strategic aims…
Or in the US case — draw in Korea, defeat in Vietnam, win in Iraq 1, very heavily qualified victory (at best) in Iraq 2, defeat in Afghanistan. This low ratio (one unambiguous win out of five major wars) is particularly notable given that the US has spent most of the post-war period as the world’s only superpower, so in theory it should have been able to wipe the floor with its enemies.
I think America’s poor record is a result of its strategic goals. Broadly, I’d say: It is excellent at crushing conventional militaries. It is poor at putting down insurgencies. It is bad at remaking societies into its own image (democratic, quasi-secular, capitalist) using military force.
Yes, but that’s basically the same problem the Nazis had — good at fighting battles, lost anyway due to poor strategic judgement.
The difference being, when the US “lost” there was an article in on the front page of their newspapers, people shrugged and pointed fingers, and life went on the next day. When the Nazis lost, there were no more Nazis.
What? Just as the USSR remade East Germany and North Korea into central-planned autocracies, US occupation remade West Germany (with help from Britain and France, obviously), South Korea and Japan in its own image.
I’d rather say that WW2 had enormous popular buy-in, allowing a large fraction of GDP to be thrown into combat, followed by an approach to the losing regime and the social structures that supported it that was simultaneously professional (no emotionally-driven cruelty) but also well described by “vae victis”. By contrast, when there is little popular support for a war, it can only be fought in an “expeditionary” form with limited resources. (Vietnam is notorious both because more resources were drawn than the population assented to, and because those proved insufficient.) This results in “surgical” methods and limited goals in relation to the regime and social structures, with results that are rather indifferent.
I tend to put Germany and Japan into a separate category, for a few reasons. The main question, as I see it, is whether the “country” “wants” to be remade in the image of the US. My impression is that Germany and Japan went along with the US because it was the best available option, since they could see what happened when the USSR took over countries, and it was clear that the US and the rest of the world would use overwhelming force to put down any resistance.
Regarding South Korea, I think its dictator decided to try duplicating what happened in Japan. I could be wrong, I don’t know too much about his reign, but I think more of Korea’s success is due to him (and of course the Koreans), rather than any specific intention of America. If he’d wanted to turn Korea into a banana republic, it doesn’t seem likely that the US would have objected?
Another factor is whether the country doing the “remaking” is willing to use overwhelming force. The USSR and China have been willing to do this, but the post-WWII US has (collectively) not. We seem to muddle around in the middle until we’ve committed just enough atrocities to turn domestic opinion against the war, and then leave. Given that we (thankfully) don’t have the stomach to do what (e.g.) China is doing in its conquered provinces, I think we’d be better off sticking with soft power.
Another country in which I’d say that America failed to do sufficient nation-building due to local resistance, is America. Specifically, the former Confederate states after the Civil War. There was a certain sort of collapse after reconstruction ended and the federal troops pulled out, which reminds me a bit of today’s Afghanistan.
In West Germany, the trends were entirely internal. There was a democratic tradition here that developed during Weimar, but was under threat by anti-regime parties (KPD, DNVP, Nazis), one of which eventually won. Then after the country was occupied, the remnants of the old democratic tradition reasserted themselves. Adenauer had been the mayor of Cologne in the Weimar era, for example. The Grundgesetz was written by Germans, unlike the Japanese constitution, written by Americans. The ordoliberal tradition is based on an internal German understanding of how to Hitler-proof the state, including elements that are not usually taught in the US and UK, like the concentration of the economy into conglomerates (ordoliberalism is usually criticized in the US and UK as austerian; its antitrust elements are entirely ignored by Anglo leftists who are antitrust in their own countries).
Korea was very clearly a strategic victory for the United States, as they preserved the existence of South Korea, which was what the war was fought over.
So, Britain was maybe-plausible due to the overall decay of its empire, but this doesn’t really work at all.
Not only has US-led NATO grown over the last 75 years but in actuality the US *has* largely wiped the floor with its enemies when things have come to blows (except Vietnam of course)
The US largely accomplished its initial strategic goals in Iraq and Afghanistan–killing off existing state regimes and forcing regime change–but there was no political will to turn either country into an enduring client state (you need large numbers of civilian settlers, or a lot of depopulation for that!) so instead the US puttered around until things blew up, an excellent example of being “good at war” but bad at… installing a stable and remote friendly state from the other side of the world, with no common language, religion or shared history? Which is something that few states have accomplished, period. (It’s only the strength of the US military which deluded political leadership into thinking something like that was possible, at least until the adults came back into the room)
The US largely accomplished its initial strategic goals in Iraq and Afghanistan–killing off existing state regimes and forcing regime change–but there was no political will to turn either country into an enduring client state (you need large numbers of civilian settlers, or a lot of depopulation for that!) so instead the US puttered around until things blew up, an excellent example of being “good at war” but bad at… installing a stable and remote friendly state from the other side of the world, with no common language, religion or shared history? Which is something that few states have accomplished, period.
To quote the OP, “Countries, governments and ideologies which are good at war do not voluntarily start unwinnable wars.” If the US can’t “install a stable and remote friendly state from the other side of the world, with no common language, religion or shared history,” then it shouldn’t try, at least not if it wants to be good at war.
We absolutely could have, though. For the cost of the Iraq occupation, we could have given every single Iraqi four years of free room-and-board-and-university education in the US; we simply lack the political will to allow the free-flow of people into the US from the Middle East and prefer as a polity to spend any unallocated dollar killing a stranger rather than feeding him.
Again, you have to judge wars against their stated outcomes. Many of the stated outcomes (by the Bush regime) for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were nonsense, but they didn’t include territorial conquest. Afghanistan is a clear loss, but Iraq can be seen as a qualified success (the Hussein regime is gone). Regardless, the US long term strategic aim is to preserve as much of the post-war liberal order as possible, and at that, they have largely succeeded.
We absolutely could have, though. For the cost of the Iraq occupation, we could have given every single Iraqi four years of free room-and-board-and-university education in the US
How would that have helped?
While that’s certainly true, the US did install a number of stable and remote friendly states from the other side of the world. Germany, Japan, and South Korea were just some of their successes.
The US certainly had its share of failures later on, but those were failures it could afford to have. Neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan were existential wars with the fate of the US at stake. Very different from Japan and Germany, who picked unwinnable wars with powers completely capable of invading and occupying them.
That arguably wasn’t the point of Iraq. Iraq was meant to get Cheney’s buddies rich making weapons. At that it succeeded in spades.
The fact this wasn’t in America’s interests is may not significant. Most wars by monarchies have, historically, been over an elites claim to another political entity. The nation they currently control isn’t usually or even often the benefactor of these wars.
The other perspective is that having elites running the country is against our American strategic interests, which is to my mind a much more robust theory and one I believe in.
Afghanistan was a failure of strategy but may have accomplished what it was meant to. America and the world are worse off, but the modern Taliban has undergone an effective manpower replacement on basically all levels. It’s not the same organization. So from the perspective of vengeance or war against the specific people responsible for 9/11 it’s a success. In terms of defeating the larger ideological movement, no.
Neither was unwinnable for the publics goals, mind you. It’s just that our politicians didn’t further those goals. They furthered their own economic and political interests instead.
That arguably wasn’t the point of Iraq. Iraq was meant to get Cheney’s buddies rich making weapons. At that it succeeded in spades.
Back in 1990’s Dick Cheney opposed going to war against Iraq, as that would destabilize the country*. This despite that there were Neoconservatives who already wanted to invade Iraq to get rid of Saddam before 9/11.
How does that fit into your crony capitalist theory? Do you have a better answer than ‘Dick Cheney only became friends with the arms industry after 9/11’?
* Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11wu0z5/in_1994_dick_cheney_said_that_toppling_saddam/
It’s just that our politicians didn’t further those goals. They furthered their own economic and political interests instead.
Ah, the ‘crony capitalist theory’ of US foreign policy.
I always wonder why it is so popular to apply it to the Middle East.
The ‘crony capitalist theory’ might work for Central America and the Caribbean before WII, or when direct foreign investment of US businessmen were nationalized without compensation of at least market value during the Cold War. But when applied to US’ foreign policy over the entire world at all times it falls flat.
In the Middle East, take, for example, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict; one would expect that if US’ politicians care so much about economic concerns they would side with Azerbaijan; as that country was host to numerous US multinationals doing deals in oil and natural gas in the Caspian Sea. Yet Congress instead took an a pro-Armenian attitude, even banning any kind of direct United States aid to the Azerbaijani government, under pressure of the Armenian-American community**.
Another example is US’ support for Israel. How are the economic interest of US’ politicians or their corporate friends served by turning the US into a terrorism magnet and angering the enormous Islamic world for the sake of tiny Israel?
Even Mearsheimer admits US’ support for Israel makes no sense from a ‘real politic’ perspective, and he is a ‘Neorealist’ who goes so far with his ‘states act rationally on their security interests’-nonsense that it drives him to absurd, obviously false claims like that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was caused by NATO expansion.
I can see how supporting Israel so much makes sense for US politicians who want to gain the votes of crazy evangelicals who believe that ‘the Jews need to own the Holy Land for Jesus to return’ or something; however, I don’t see how that would make sense for US’ politicians who want to gain the favour of business’ interest or make economic gains themselves.
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_907
I’m not a fan of US foreign policy historically, in general, but I’m not sure you can say the US “failed” full stop, in Afghanistan. They successfully got rid of the Taliban government and carried out a social revolution (not least in terms of stuff like women’s education, etc.) which lasted 20 years. The median age in Afghanistan is 17, so by 2021 when the US withdrew the median Afghan had grown up under the American-backed social order. 20 years is a long time, and who knows, maybe in 50 or 100 years things in Afghanistan will look totally different, people will look at the 2001-2021 period in a favorable light and there will be statues of Karzai, Ahmad Shah Massoud, Malala Yousufzai and George W. Bush everywhere. (Or not). If that happens, will it be fair to say that the US installed regime was a failure, just because it turned not to have been self sustaining?
They conducted an expensive occupation for 20 years, and the government they left behind fell to the previous rulers within a few days of the US pulling out. That certainly seems like a failure.
20 years is a long time, and who knows, maybe in 50 or 100 years things in Afghanistan will look totally different, people will look at the 2001-2021 period in a favorable light and there will be statues of Karzai, Ahmad Shah Massoud, Malala Yousufzai and George W. Bush everywhere.
If that happens, then sure, I’ll revise my assessment. But I see no real reason to think it will.
In 50 years, the median Afghan would’ve lived 75% of their lifetime under Taliban. In 100 years, US presence would’ve been out of living memory. If something changes about Afghanistan, it’ll have to be due to entirely new causes. The current course of Taliban government is completely opposite.
Also, in order to claim that US successfully carried out a social revolution, we need to look at how the Afghan population was willing to fight together with them against Taliban. A small number of westernised people doesn’t a social revolution make.
If something changes about Afghanistan, it’ll have to be due to entirely new causes.
I agree, but if, in the future, the 2001-2021 era is seen as an inspiration and a high point by a future generation of Afghans, then I wouldn’t say it was a “failure”, at least not an unqualified one.
Most regimes and states shuffle off the world stage sooner or later, after all. I’d say that a regime that lasts less than a year is probably a failure on its own terms, and one that lasts a thousand years is a “success” at least by some measures, but what about one that lasts 20 years? That seems like a gray area, and how you judge it is going to depend at least in part on your ideological perspective (and the ideological perspective of the future generations of Afghans, as well). There are lots of periods of time that are shorter than 20 years that people often describe as a “golden age” or are nostalgic for.
You could spin the US occupation positively, after all: “America established women’s rights in the face of extreme local opposition in one of the least favorable places for it in the world, and it lasted for 20 years!”
Most regimes and states shuffle off the world stage sooner or later, after all. I’d say that a regime that lasts less than a year is probably a failure on its own terms, and one that lasts a thousand years is a “success” at least by some measures, but what about one that lasts 20 years? That seems like a gray area
20 years isn’t a grey area, it’s a rubbish amount of time for a state to last.
“20 years isn’t a grey area, it’s a rubbish amount of time for a state to last.”
i think that depends entirely on context. If someone established a utopian society somewhere and then they were obliterated by a nuclear bomb after 20 years, for no fault of their own (let’s say they were just in the way of some other hostile power), i don’t think it’s unreasonable for some people somewhere to consider them a ‘success’ who were unfairly destroyed.
as noted below, the French Revolution and the regimes it gave rise to only lasted about 25 years (and Napoleon’s regime, if you’re a bonapartist, only lasted about 15), but there are certainly people who wouldn’t consider either one a failure and instead would look at them as an ideal and an inspiration. (not me, to be clear, but there are people who would).
whether the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was a failure or not can only be judged by future generations- we’re not really in a position to do so.
“Also, in order to claim that US successfully carried out a social revolution, we need to look at how the Afghan population was willing to fight together with them against Taliban. A small number of westernised people doesn’t a social revolution make.”
I’d quibble with the term ‘westernised’ here (I don’t think “modernity” and “westernization” are the same thing), but more importantly, I disagree with the idea that if a revolution is imposed partially from outside and propped up by foreign troops, it isn’t actually a revolution. Clearly there were many Afghans who agreed with stuff like women’s education and who allied themselves with the Americans, and also many who didn’t- whether one side or neither had 51% support, and whether one side or the other was ultimately more effective at winning at the battlefield, doesn’t seem to me to be decisive in terms of whether this was genuinely a revolution or not. I would say the same things about communist revolutions backed up by Soviet or Cuban or Vietnamese soldiers, liberal revolutions backed up by French Revolutionary or Napoleonic soldiers, etc..
i think that depends entirely on context. If someone established a utopian society somewhere and then they were obliterated by a nuclear bomb after 20 years, for no fault of their own (let’s say they were just in the way of some other hostile power), i don’t think it’s unreasonable for some people somewhere to consider them a ‘success’ who were unfairly destroyed.
Sure, you can come up with a scenario where a perfectly stable, popular, peaceful, prosperous, etc., society is unfairly destroyed through no fault of its own. But that’s not at all what US-occupied Afghanistan was like. A regime which relies on foreign backing to prop it up, and falls apart as soon as its foreign backers withdraw, is not by any reasonable definition a successful one.
as noted below, the French Revolution and the regimes it gave rise to only lasted about 25 years (and Napoleon’s regime, if you’re a bonapartist, only lasted about 15), but there are certainly people who wouldn’t consider either one a failure and instead would look at them as an ideal and an inspiration. (not me, to be clear, but there are people who would).
In my experience, such people are generally bitter, nihilistic characters who care less about establishing a functional society than they do about punishing the rich for the crime of being better-off than them. I think their views on success can be safely discounted.
The Taliban controlled more of Afghanistan after the US left than before the US invaded. How is that not a victory for the Taliban and a defeat for the US?
I think you can somewhat argue that Iraq was a qualified success, but that is obviously not true for Afghanistan: 20 years later the Taliban are still in control. Trying to spin it as anything else than a loss is a silly, unless you have an *extremely* narrow victory condition (IE: Kill Bin Laden)
Afghanistan and the Taliban seems to me a lot like France with the Bourbon restoration. They had (several) different governments for 25 years or so, then got the heirs to the old regime back in.
IIRC it was said of them “They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”
OTOH it’s not like France did not have any changes at all during that period. Afghanistan may have changed; we’ll have to see.
Hard to win a war when the strategic objective is *shrug* And the conflict is mostly an excuse for companies and friends of the president to self enrich
I think you could say that *nobody* is good at war any more, because we’ve reached a point where wars are so expensive and so destructive that “everybody loses” is the most common outcome, even in wars like Iraq where one side achieves an overwhelming conventional victory. Even then, fascist regimes are especially bad at war, because the ideology rejects the key strategic insight that war is a bad idea that you should avoid whenever possible. By contrast, pretty much all the liberal democracies had figured this out by 1939, and had oriented their diplomacy around avoiding war even when they had the strength to win.
This is a great point and our host has raised it previously like in here https://acoup.blog/2023/06/09/fireside-friday-june-9-2023/ with current military capabilities or the Azar Gat argument about decreasing returns to warfare – Hitler in particular fought in WW1 and then decided he wanted more of it. Our host gestured at the latter but it was kinda brief imo, sadly a bit of a missed opportunity here.
You have some interesting interpretations of “defeat” – calling Northern Ireland a British “defeat” would certainly be news to the Irish. Suez you have to respect that another liberal democracy, the USA, was unsupportive, and when two liberal democracies are on different sides you can’t conclude much (same with how the Sino-Vietnamese War isn’t a testament to either communist superiority or communist incompetence; it was both sides!). Libya is also awkward – we’ll never know for sure how “counter-productive” it was, but as a reminder, there was a potential mass killing afoot with Gadaffi’s army headed toward a rebel-controlled city. It’s not like Gadaffi would have been on good terms with the UK had it just sat on its hands, as not-great as the situation is currently.
The Falklands is the biggest head-scratcher here. There is an argument that the UK isn’t that great at war, but it’s not that the Argentinians were a joke; it’s that they got lucky. Things could have gone much worse for the UK than they did, and being so far away from their home ports was a huge risk – if things went bad, they weren’t going to easily be fixed. That said, they certainly did well enough to win, so it’s a reasonable thing to crow about.
The distinction to make is that the united kingdom still exists as a state.
Like, let’s say we both play roulette. You put $20 on red, while I put my entire life savings on red. It then comes up black, and we both lose. Who was better with money? You could say that we both made a bet and lost, so we are equally bad. And certainly, betting on roulette always has a negative expected value, so neither decision is truly smart from a financial perspective. However, losing $20 isn’t a big deal for you (presumably), while I committed financial suicide, so I think most people would say that I made a worse decision.
The same logic applies to your example. Liberal democracies definitely do lose wars, but they mostly don’t choose to start wars that would cause state extinction if lost. That absolutely does make them “better at war” when compared to a bunch of fascists who declared war on everyone around them and promptly got wiped off the face of the earth.
But you can also argue that fascist dictatorships also “mostly don’t start wars that would cause state extinction if lost”. Even if we say that WW2 was predetermined to be a lost cause that’s only one, very messy example.
The biggest issue here is that there aren’t enough fascist states for the argument to work – either it’s just Germany/Italy so not enough data, or it includes Portugal, Spain etc who avoided wars which would cause state extinction.
Eh. Liberal democracies post WWII have largely not fought by themselves–NATO strategic victories (such as the Balkans, etc) largely benefit their member states strategically so they fall more in the “good at war” than bad.
And of course, military engagement alone doesn’t really qualify as a “war of choice.” Countries do wasteful but harmless things with their militaries all the time.
Judged by that metric, fascist governments are terrible at war. There haven’t been all that many fascist governments, historically speaking and a shocking percentage of them started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state, the worst possible strategic outcome. Most long-standing states have been to war many times, winning sometimes and losing sometimes, but generally able to preserve the existence of their state even in defeat. At this basic task, however, fascist states usually fail.
I don’t know that that’s a very good argument — in WW2 the Allies decided to push for unconditional surrender, so whilst Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese government can be faulted for starting wars they couldn’t win, I’m not sure they can be faulted for getting their states destroyed rather than suffering a normal defeat, because the latter wasn’t an option.
And of course, if we count other countries as fascist (personally I wouldn’t, but let’s suppose we do), their wars of choice all ended up as normal defeats rather than state-destroying ones, so I’m not sure this argument would apply at all.
The Allied demand for unconditional surrender wasn’t just something the Allies randomly decided on – it was a direct reaction to things the fascists had said and done. The fascists can be faulted for getting destroyed because they did things that made their enemies particularly want to destroy them.
The Nazis were particularly responsible here. Other than the sheer scale of atrocities they committed in occupied territory, there was also the fact that they had made the negotiated surrender at the end of WWI a major pillar of their rhetoric, and so the Allies intended to completely demolish that pillar by forcing an unconditional surrender the German population would have no choice but to accept.
I do note that the reason the allies decided to push for unconditional surrender was the conduct of fascist governments prior to and during the war. So it’s not that easy to get out of that.
Not really accurate. The Italian government surrendered to the Western Allies in 1943 after throwing out Mussolini with a conditional armistice. Japan also surrendered conditionally, albeit with minimal conditions. The requirement for unconditional surrender was flexible in actual practice- and the definitely-fascist governments refused to even consider pursuing it. (There were fascist dissidents under the Nazis who contemplated negotiated surrender, but they were removed from strategic decisionmaking in any case.)
Japan surrendered unconditionally. We ended up giving them what they would have asked for (we spared the Emperor), but only after making it clear that it was our decision and not something they were able to negotiate for.
That’s a distinction without difference. All conditions on surrenders are the decision of the negotiating parties to accept or reject. In actual, practical terms, the Potsdam Declaration was made with the intent of destroying the Japanese monarchy as part of the surrender, and that intent was altered at Japanese request.
That is incorrect; people remember the request to keep the Emperor’s throne intact, but the Japanese had other asks, like being able to hold onto Korea, conduct internal war crimes trials of their people, and to be a ‘junior regional security partner’ which is somewhat vague in their cables but seemed to involve not disarming. None of that stuff happened.
I don’t really think you’ve thought this through. If Japan brought X number of conditions to the table and the Allies rejected X-1 of those conditions, that is still a conditional surrender. “Conditional” doesn’t mean “the surrendering party gets all it wants”, it means “there are limits beyond those imposed by the laws and customs of war on what the party accepting the surrender may do to the surrendering party”, and in this case we know, historically, that the Allies went from intending upon the destruction of the imperial system at Potsdam to letting that go in exchange for victory in 1945.
Surely, the usual view is that the unconditional surrender demand was in large part due to the Soviet and Anglo-Americans mutual suspicion/fear of the other “ally” cutting a side deal with Hitler and leaving them to face the Third Reich alone. Hence the mutual pledge to go for unconditional surrender.
It was very much ‘this regime commands a state essential to world peace and prosperity and yet is so detestable and so untrustworthy that there is no alternative but to destroy it’.
I think there are a lot of separate reasons for the unconditional surrender demand. I am sure you can find supporting evidence for “this will reassure Stalin that we’re not thinking of pursuing a separate peace,” but you can also find plenty of supporting evidence for “we are convinced that leaving the fascist regimes in charge of their respective states is a terrible idea for so many reasons, so we’ve decided that there’s no point in fighting this war only to have to fight it all over again in ten or twenty years.’
I understand another cause was to avoid anything like a “stab-in-the-back myth” from forming again
Imperial Japan I’m not sure how to asses the war record of. During the Meiji period, Japan was absolutely crushing the Chinese in the 1890s, humiliating the Russians a decade later, and taking several of Germanies colonies in WW1. By the end of this period Japan had gone from being a back water to internationally recognized great power. Even into the Taisho and Showa era Japan still had considerable success, in 1931 they seized Manchuria with little more blowback than strongly worded letters. The Second Sino-Japanese war went poorly as a result of underestimating Chinese resolve and declaring on the United States proved to be a mistake. I’d agree they have a poor war record looking at 1937-1945 but prior to that they were very successful and they were at least on paper operating on the same constitutional framework throughout all of these wars.
It’s worth noting that Japan circa 1900 is a very different beast than Japan circa 1930.
While some of the institutional problems would plague Japan in the 1930s were also present in the 1890 and 1900s, they hadn’t fully come to a head yet. The period right after the Russo Japanese war is often called the Taisho Democracy. The name might overstate things and they weren’t really a liberal democracy, but it wasn’t quite the genocidal samurai death cult it would become later.
Anyway, you can see that their war aims earlier on were much more modest and they treated their Russian PoWs, at least, well within European norms.
The invasion of Manchuria was successful initially, and the Kuomintang decided not to actively resist by the end of October, but conventional warfare continued until February of 1933 and the guerrilla war lasted until 1942, though it was effectively over by 1940. Invading Manchuria committed Japan to all of that, but it also guaranteed an eventual war with China later, significantly increased the risk of war with the Soviet Union, and opened up open-ended demands from the puppet Manchukuo government. I think it has to be understood as a strategic draw at absolute best, and really a self-inflicted strategic defeat that constrained Japanese diplomatic and political options so heavily it outweighed any ability to ship farmers to Manchuria to relieve rural tensions.
It also brought about the end of party politics in Japan, as following the effective coup against the liberal Reijiro Wakatsuki government with the Mukden Incident and the invasion of Manchuria, the next prime minister from the largest conservative party, Inukai Tsuyoshi, was assassinated the following year and every prime minister after that until the end of the Empire of Japan was from the military or a pseudoparty controlled by the military. I think calling Japan from 1932-1945 fascist is defensible but thorny, but certainly they engaged in many of the same failures of reasoning fascist governments did during that period, and they brought their state to ruin in a mere 13 years.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said. I would argue the near unlimited access to Manchuria’s natural resources did make it somewhat worth while for Japan and that that due to it’s position and ideological conflicts tensions were always going to be high with the Soviet Union. I do think though that the various governments and particularly the IJA, which did a lot with little to no consultation of the civilian government, squandered the strong position Japan had attained by the end of WW1. Without the Second Sino-Japanese war I’m almost certain Japan would still hold Taiwan to this day, and with the Cold War eventually coming and the Soviets long standing support for communist groups in Korea I don’t think it’s impossible they could hold onto Korea. Certainly prior to the 1930s one of the Empire of Japan’s greatest assets was that while much smaller than the French or British Empires, they were much less over stretched and able to concentrate the entirety of their might in one region.
The core lesson Japan missed in the runup to World War Two was that access to natural resources is meaningless if it draws you into conflicts too large and all-consuming for your state to have a reasonable chance to thrive. Even nigh-unlimited supplies of iron, coal, oil, rubber, and so on will do you no good if you antagonize an enemy state that has equally large supplies of those resources and two to three times your machine tool production capability and available manpower reserves. And Heaven help you if you antagonize two or three such enemy states at once.
But the same obsession with supremacy, martial spirit, and achieving national vindication through conquest that tripped up the European fascists was infecting the real power-holders in Japan as well. So they kept deciding, again and again, that they “had to” do things they absolutely did not have to do, and that repeatedly made their strategic position worse.
You’re probably right, but that raises the question… what should they have done instead? They didn’t have any resources, especially oil. The Allies had a monopoly on the world oil supply, and were enforcing an embargo on Japan. Should they have invaded Indonesia without doing Pearl Harbor, and just hoped like crazy that the US and UK didn’t stop them (not likely)? Or should they have just rolled over and surrendered, accepting their fate as a vassal state to the more powerful nations that had colonized most of the rest of the world?
They could have, you know, stopped invading China.
I think you’ve completely missed the point: winning a battle or two doesn’t matter if you lose the war. Britain and France, which ultimately won the war, came out far better than Germany, which lost the war and was forced into unconditional surrender and the complete dismantling of the fascist regime.
Arguably Britain and France also ‘lost’ WW2, in the sense that they came out of it relatively and strategic weaker than they went into it. Depending on how strongly you feel the defence of Poland to be a “war of choice”, the decision to intervene then and there is catastrophic.
The Roman example might be the Eastern Empire intervening in Armenia to hinder the the Parthians from doing so, but ending up 5 years later broke, shattered and surrounded by the Hunnic Empire in the West (to whom btw the Eastern Empire owes 10 years worth of taxation) and an immensely strong Indian confederation which stretches to the border of China in the place of Parthia. We would rightly question whether such a war was “worth it”…
No, Britain and France very clearly did not lose WWII. They came out of it weaker, but that’s pretty standard for modern industrial warfare, which is extremely costly and doesn’t tend to bring much direct benefit to the victors.
It makes absolutely no sense to put that into the same category as Nazi Germany being completely dismantled a dozen years after its creation.
Difficult to argue that WW2 didn’t benefit the USA and, in the long term at least, the USSR, so what’s the basis for the claim that modern industrial warfare doesn’t tend to bring benefit to the victors?
The point I am making is that the UK decided on war in 1939 officially for the defence of Poland. It ended the war that was precipitated by that decision in a much poorer place both in absolute and relative terms than it began which seems to blow a whole in the “liberal democracies don’t tend to make miscalculations on that scale” thesis put forward abovr
USA is also the nation among the victors who participated least in the war, and had no fighting in or near its mainland at any point. Main benefit to US was relative: everyone else was wrecked, but they were fine.
As for USSR, idk, they gained a whole bunch of satellites, but took absolutely massive losses in population and economy. And then they had a post-war famine. Clearly there were certain benefits from WW2, but I am not convinced it was actually better to them than if they’d somehow avoided it to begin with.
The way to square this I suppose is to ask whether France and the UK refusing to join the war would have gone better for them than joining at that point
Germany had already taken Austria & Czechoslovakia and still went after Poland, If the UK and France allowed Poland to be taken without action and waited until Denmark was invaded to declare would they have ended the war in a better or worse position than they did in our history? If they waited until Germany invaded Belgium to declare? Would they have a better outcome if they waited until he declared on France?
By 39 the writing was on the wall that war was coming no matter what the UK and France tried (Arguably they tried to appease and prevent war for too long). Choosing to start the Inevitable war early to prevent your enemy from consolidating gains and keep more allies on your side in my mind would count as the best decision in a bad situation
Well, there’s a good reason the British and French pursued policies of “we really, really do not want to fight another major war in Europe” throughout the 1930s. Their populace and leadership knew such a war would be a disaster, and to a real extent the entire period of 1933-39 was one long succession of attempts to throw “off-ramps” at Hitler in hopes that he’d sober up and realize just what a bad idea it was to push things to the point where France and Britain would be forced to fight him because they couldn’t accept his total dominance of Central Europe.
But on ‘fascism brain,’ Hitler was never going to settle for anything less than dominance of all of Europe, and would keep picking fights until he got it. So the British and the French, though they could reasonably foresee that they would suffer and be diminished by another world war, were eventually put into a position where they reasonably concluded that they couldn’t avoid such a war without suffering and being even more diminished in the long run by Nazi hegemony.
@ Tapkomet
The Soviet Union’s problem was that it could not avoid a war with Nazi Germany. It was totally clear that Hitler intended to seize all of Eastern Europe up to the Urals.
He even stated this in Mein Kampf.
This is something Bret has covered before. In pre-modern warfare, land and population were the primary sources of productivity, and capturing more of both via war was enormously valuable. In modern industrial warfare, the primary source of productivity is industry and industrial investment. War mostly just wastes and destroys that, while land and population are much more difficult to exploit for immediate benefit.
The US and USSR would have been the undisputed superpowers of the world before long, even without the war, due to their high industrial potential. Sustained industrial warfare just exposed that gap a bit more quickly.
As for Britain and France, entering the war was undoubtedly a positive for them. Sure, they lost their empires and were reduced to a subordinate role in world affairs. But if they HADN’T joined the war, they still would have lost their empires and been reduced to a subordinate role in world affairs. They just would have been subordinate to an enormously expanded Nazi Germany in their immediate neighborhood, rather than a largely-friendly US far off in the distance.
This is something Bret has covered before. In pre-modern warfare, land and population were the primary sources of productivity, and capturing more of both via war was enormously valuable. In modern industrial warfare, the primary source of productivity is industry and industrial investment. War mostly just wastes and destroys that, while land and population are much more difficult to exploit for immediate benefit.
Though I wonder, regarding areas with valuable natural resources (e.g., oil, valuable minerales), would it be worthwhile to conquer them, even today? Or do even these require so much technical expertise that capturing them by force is counterproductive?
France didn’t survive the war. They lost thoroughly and were overthrown. The fact that they were reconquered by the USA and UK, who were nice enough to make them independently whole again, doesn’t change that they lost.
The UK survived because it was based on an island, and won because the USA showed up. Is the UK being non-fascist important in which allies it got? Maybe, although they were ideologically opposed to communism but still allied with Stalin as a matter of practicality.
France did survive the war. At the end of the war, it was reinstated in a form almost entirely recognisable to pre-war France (minus millions of its citizens and most of its industry, just like everyone else in Europe). States aren’t living things, and their destruction is not final.
‘Being good at war’ can also mean ‘having allies that are happy to reconstitute your polity rather than annex your lands/force a regime change’.
As Brett so eloquently puts it, war is entirely about the end result. The end result is that France is still a thing today, and Nazi Germany isn’t. QED.
As Brett so eloquently puts it, war is entirely about the end result. The end result is that France is still a thing today, and Nazi Germany isn’t. QED.
Not only is that not how people talk about being good at war in ordinary English, it’s not how *Brett himself* talks about it elsewhere. E.g., he recently wrote an article called “Spartans were losers”, even though the Spartan state survived for over 500 years, meaning that, if “good at war” = “surviving state”, the Spartans were actually notable winners.
Also, you’re not comparing like with like. The appropriate comparison with “France” would be Germany, which is still here. The appropriate comparison with “Nazi Germany” would be the French Third Republic, which isn’t still here.
They certainly came out stronger vis-à-vis Germany and Italy, but not compared to U.S.A and the Soviet Union. So totally stronger against the enemies, but weaker in the regard of wartime allies.
It’s instructive to look at Overlord. Because the Western democracies had legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens – including its military – they could afford to place the entire operation under one commander. They were certain that he wouldn’t revolt against them, and they were certain that their soldiers wouldn’t fight even if Eisenhower did revolt.
Meanwhile, the fascists often tout the value of having a single leader in charge. However, because the single leader has limited legitimacy, he is forced to divide up his commands so that no single commander gets strong enough to challenge him. And so the defense of France was a hodge-podge of different strategies because one general got one command, another got another command, Hitler had personal command of some forces and some forces couldn’t be released without his say-so… it was a really messy situation.
For those of us that know that the Italian war in Ethiopia happened but don’t know much about it (or how it affected relations between Italy and Germany), can you recommend some further reading on that?
I’m not aware of any publications in English; John Gooch’s “Mussolini’s wars” only has a brief chapter in it. If you can read Italian, then I suggest you:
– Giorgio Rochat, “Le guerre italiane, 1935-43”;
– id., “Le guerre italiane in Libia e in Etiopia”;
– Nicola Labanca, “Oltremare”;
– id., “Una guerra per l’impero”;
– Angelo del Boca, “Gli italiani in Africa Orientale”, in 4 vols.;
– id., “La guerra d’Etiopia”;
– Emilio Longo, “La campagna italo-etiopica”, in 2 vols.; this is the the official history form the Italian Army’s Historical Office.
TimeGhost Army on Youtube has a video on it. It’s called “One More Scramble In Africa”.
@paolo: Thank you, but sadly I don’t have any Italian
@Anders: Thanks, I’ll check it out
“Syria, of course, lost a war of choice against Israel in 1967, then was crushed by Israel again in another war of choice in 1973”
Ah yes, the Bret Devereaux definition of “war of choice”: Israel attacks Syria.
Much of the disinformation spread through this blog comes in the form of these quick little throwaway assertions which were been completely debunked decades ago.
“The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war,” – Gen. Matituahu Peled, chief of logistical command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff, in March 1972.
“This whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived, and then elaborated upon, a posteriori, to justify the annexation of new Arab territories,” – Mordechai Bentov, member of the wartime government and signer of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, April 1971.
“in June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” – Menachem Begin, August 1982
In any event, none of this is even relevant to Bret’s thesis to begin with. Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, AND Syria in 1967. What an incoherent blog post.
I feel these words are likely to be wasted, but Syria specifically attacked Israel on day 5 of the Six-Day War and thus ignoring anything about whether Egypt violating the 1956 agreement to keep the Straits of Tiran open or not really could be constituted a valid casus belli for Israel, Syria’s war with Israel in 1967 was a war of choice on the part of Syria.
And Egypt under Nasser is not typically regarded as potentially fascist, unlike Syria under the Ba’ath Party.
> Ah yes, the Bret Devereaux definition of “war of choice”: Israel attacks Syria.
Wut? Alternative facts much?
There are a few other south American nations that one can argue were fascist. One can reasonably levy the claim against elements of Turkeys chaotic government post dissolution of the Ottomans too.
I’d argue some of the authoritarian Marxist-leninist vanguardist dictatorships of the cold war (North Korea, for instance) may qualify if you stretch the definition and account for the reactionary components of their ideologies. It depends on if you consider fascism as primarily ideological or rhetorical. They weren’t *trying* to do fascism or *saying* they were doing fascism, but they did the same things fascists did and believed most of the same ideas, depending on when you’re viewing them.
They all still fail miserably, either being so politically unstable that they collapse into civil war or starting wars they lose.
Personally I think the failing it one generally found in authoritarianism with fascism just being…worse than other forms.
One distinguishing feature of fascism is the centrality of war to its ethos (as Brett points out). To fascists, wars are good (hence their predilection for starting them). This is not true of all authoritarian regimes – Franco was more a Catholic reactionary than a fascist (although his regime had a fascist wing). Communism is militant but not militaristic – the ideology posits that war may be necessary but is not good in itself. So communist regimes have had a more rational approach to war.
Ah, but some Vanguardist ideologies like Juche are explicitly pro-military and inherently nationalistic. It’s hard to tell if they would still be such outside of their specific strategic context, but given the inherently nationalistic elements and the strong cultural and ethnographically reactionary elements I’m inclined to believe the same logic that *pushes* fascist regimes to be pro war also pushes these ideologies to be pro war generally, if they were in a position to argue for generic warfare as opposed to specific warfare.
To clarify, the North Korean regime puts its military first and argues for violent reunification with the south. If they achieved this unification I believe they would then be pro invasion of it’s neighbors-likely Japan in practice, as the other neighbors are too powerful. The general jingoism of the ideology is masked by the fact that it’s specifically jingoistic towards a contextual foe.
Basically, fascists are pro war as a result of certain ideological causes. Fascism is inherently pro war because the reactionary heroism and purity cult needs an external enemy to justify it to the domestic audience. Many Vanguardist regimes are pro war because their own totalitarian measures need similar domestic justification.
I’m just uncertain if this is better attributed to authoritarianism. Authoritarians will almost inevitably use nationalist rhetoric and militarized violence to exert media and physical control over the population. The nature of authoritarianism in the modern world requires it.
As to communism in general-it’s slightly complicated by the fact that Vanguardism, I.E. Soviet style authoritarian communism, isn’t the only expression of the movement. The same economic and structural causes that lead people to embrace communist rhetoric are also satisfied by libertarian socialism (I.E. Anarchism). Vanguardist regimes can theoretically transition along the spectrum of totalitarianism without just collapsing. Fascism doesn’t have a similar offramp because it’s only libertarian counterpart, anarcho-capitalism, inevitably reveals the ideological failures of fascism as a result of how property rights concentrate power and betray the principles of the movement. Fascist states cannot ever reduce their internal suppression or they collapse (I.E. the continuity of power is broken, and the elites making decisions suffer). Vanguardist states *can*, at least theoretically.
Hence Vanguardist states can move towards less extreme ideological positions, but Fascist states can’t. It’s always death spiral 100% of the time, and the fascists who do reduce their oppression don’t maintain meaningful control, I.E. they suffer failure mode. But if we keep the states ideologically frozen, both philosophies are jingoistic and bad at it.
I always felt that marxist… let’s call it vulgo-predestination, acted as a check on the worst aspects of communist states in some cases: Basically there was always an ideological excuse to *not* committ ideological suicide because the revolution is inevitable anyway, so why hurry?
Not all communists picked the “wait and see” option, but it was always a “sanctioned” option.
It’s probably accurate to call it predestination. Traditional Marxism states capitalism will inevitably collapse. That’s pretty deterministic. Of course post fascism, post Soviet Marxist had to deal with the fact that the Soviet Union was manifesting a form of Marxism that wasn’t up to the promise, and that fascism seemed to offer either a “stable” alternative capitalism using the new tools of suppression, or a global death cult that might end humanity. The idealistic socialists of the early 20th century had to update their philosophy for those truths.
Ah, but some Vanguardist ideologies like Juche are explicitly pro-military and inherently nationalistic. It’s hard to tell if they would still be such outside of their specific strategic context, but given the inherently nationalistic elements and the strong cultural and ethnographically reactionary elements I’m inclined to believe the same logic that *pushes* fascist regimes to be pro war also pushes these ideologies to be pro war generally, if they were in a position to argue for generic warfare as opposed to specific warfare.
Obvious counterpoint: North Korea hasn’t started any wars since the ’50s.
Hence Vanguardist states can move towards less extreme ideological positions, but Fascist states can’t. It’s always death spiral 100% of the time, and the fascists who do reduce their oppression don’t maintain meaningful control, I.E. they suffer failure mode. But if we keep the states ideologically frozen, both philosophies are jingoistic and bad at it.
Franco’s Spain seems like an example of a fascist state that became less extreme over time. (Unless we say it doesn’t count as fascist, but then we end up with the “How far can we really generalise from two data points?” problem.)
North Koreas neighbors are the most populated nation in the world, the nation with the most weapons of mass destruction, and an effective client state of the most powerful nation in the world. Id argue that their belligerence given how *manifestly impossible* victory is against *any* of these powers suffices as evidence, although you are absolutely right it’s less evidence than if the leadership had pursued war with and been rendered into a fine particulate.
And yes, Spain is a counterpoint. The fact that the fascist regime off ramped and that they weren’t persecuted en mass is a huge flaw in my reasoning. I think it comes down to Franco not wedding the state to fascism completely and being a monarchist personally, but I’m reduced to arguing about a person’s motivation, which is antithetical to my analytical framework.
I think most of what you wrote is correct, but in what way is anarchy-capitalism a counterpart to fascism?
Capitalism inherently concentrates wealth and power into a hierarchy. Anarchy is the absence of hierarchy. Anarcho capitalism thus contradicts itself foundationally. Attempts to implement it this end up with one of three possibilities.
One, the people organize once the flaws become clear , leading to a transition to a potentially liberal but usually more socialist state. This can be done through democracy or unionization. This is arguably how we went from a mostly lassaiz faire economy to a neo-liberalist one in the states during the early 20th century. It helps that we weren’t fully anarcho capitalist, there weren’t laws preventing socialism, just an absence of socialist laws.
Two, the owners of wealth prevent organization and establish inherited estates where they wield effective legal power. The increasingly weak government offloads and remaining administration to these people, and you have corporate manorialism. This is only kept stable by constant oppression.
Three, the losers of the economic hell they’re trapped in organize, but are drawn to conservative principles. They other various elites and ethnic groups and begin organizing paramilitary violence. Some of the would-be nobles choose to join this movement seeing it as a pathway to more power, and it becomes funded. Eventually it overthrows what government exists, reorganizes the corporations to reward rich or powerful supporters, and you have fascism.
One of the three is inevitable because the second is the end state if nothing is done by the working class, and manorialism isn’t sustainable with an educated workforce.
“Capitalism inherently concentrates wealth and power into a hierarchy. ”
This statement needs a little support.
A bunch of other communist states were highly nationalistic too (Vietnam certainly was, and several of the Eastern European communist states were, at least in the sense of strongly preferring an ethnically homogeneous society), but they weren’t especially militaristic. North Korea has evolved in some very strange ways over its history, and I’d agree they seem fairly aggressive today, but I don’t think that was inevitable result either of communism, nationalism, or the interaction of the two.
One notes that for all the rhetoric, North Korea has not actually attacked South Korea. Fascist regimes did not just indulge in militaristic rhetoric – they regularly and enthusiastically start wars they have little prospect of winning. Italy went to Ethiopia, then Spain, then Greece, then took on the British Empire. Germany’s career is well known. The Falange tried to push Franco into war, then went off to die in the USSR – as did Degrelle and a number of the small fascist groups in Occupied Europe. The DPRK is mad, but it’s not rabid.
Yet the power mismatch in North Korea’s case is uniquely extreme. No sane person anywhere can possibly think they can win a war with anyone they border. They are completely ringed by nations which aren’t just the most powerful regional powers, but either the most powerful world powers or welded at the hip to one by proven and enforceable defensive pacts. And they’re just barely capable of sustaining their economy. Any potential war might just be one of the most extreme power discrepancies in the history of the industrial world.
The fact they *still* provoke belligerence with their great power controlled neighbors when their allies have been very clear that they won’t support offensive wars indicates an inability to assess risks kept in check by the last possible human instinct to save off destruction.
I guess it’s only to be expected that Bret conspicuously avoids mentioning Israel as an example of a fascist or far-right government and even tries to present it as the victim in 1967.
It’s so odd how every mention of Israel in this blog always downplays those characteristics of it which are “inconvenient” for the public image of the US.
Here’s a letter from others who have a better understanding of the matter. Strange that Bret appears to be entirely ignorant of it.
Letter to the New York Times:
New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed
To the Editors of the New York Times:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.
Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.
The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants240 men, women, and childrenand kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.
The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.
During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
Discrepancies Seen
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a “Leader State” is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ, HANNAH ARENDT, ABRAHAM BRICK, RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO, ALBERT EINSTEIN, HERMAN EISEN, M.D., HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D., H.H. HARRIS, ZELIG S. HARRIS, SIDNEY HOOK, FRED KARUSH, BRURIA KAUFMAN, IRMA L. LINDHEIM, NACHMAN MAISEL, SEYMOUR MELMAN, MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D., HARRY M. OSLINSKY, SAMUEL PITLICK, FRITZ ROHRLICH, LOUIS P. ROCKER, RUTH SAGIS, ITZHAK SANKOWSKY, I.J. SHOENBERG, SAMUEL SHUMAN, M. SINGER, IRMA WOLFE, STEFAN WOLFE.
To give some context, the “Freedom Party” mentioned in this letter is known today as the Likud.
In the ordinary use of the English language, a fascist state is a right-wing totalitarian one-party state. Israel has always had multiparty elections and a free-market economy since its inception. Therefore, in the usual sense of the word, Israel can not be a fascist state.
DanGer is apparently a person to whom the word fascist is nothing more than an insult to be hurled at people who he dislikes.
For half the population of the territory it has annexed, it is indistinguishable from totalitarian one party rule.
By that argument, you presumably think America was a totalitarian one party state, at least until 1960 or so. And that every cylinder is a sphere, since from one angle they appear equally circular.
No it is not at all like a totalitarian one party state; it is like the aggressive military occupation by a hostile state. Which is no surprise, since that is what it is.
I think the point is that the term “occupation” becomes less and less meaningful the more the conquering power succeeds in integrating the conquered territory into its own polity without any corresponding enfranchisement of the conquered population. At that point, what you’re talking about is less a “military occupation” than, say, a “military dictatorship.”
Fair point! But a military dictatorship is still not the same thing as a totalitarian one party state.
I’d say that this framing points to a central weakness in the commonly-understood notion of “totalitarianism” (i.e. the Cold War liberal “horseshoe theory” version) and in many of the ways Western political discourse tends to speak about issues of freedom and state domination more broadly: the focus is fundamentally on how a government behaves toward “its own” people, with little if anything to say about how a government behaves toward “foreign” people.
It’s hardly a novel observation that when viewed from the perspective of its victims, Western colonialism even as practiced by governments we consider “liberal democracies” is essentially indistinguishable from the worst criticisms we might mount against “authoritarianism” or “totalitarianism”… no less an authority on these topics than George Orwell himself wrote in bitterly scathing terms about this pseudo-distinction in skewering the hypocrisy of pro-colonialist Western critics of German fascism, so much so that I used a URL shortener to avoid being mod-filtered on the sardonic racial slur that Orwell included in the very title of his essay.
But there is a difference, at least later in the British empire. Gandhi wouldn’t have been left alive by either Stalin or Hitler. He basically used the free press and independent courts,two pillars of the non totalitarian nature of the colonial power, against it. That would not have been possible in a totalitarian state.
Also, the concept of totalitarianism is important, since it points to a system with a goal of changing the feelings and personalities of its subjects, and not just exploit their labour and resources. It is not enough to shut up and work for Big Brother; you have to love him.
I do think that many (but not all) western colonial projects weren’t neccessarily totalitarian not because they weren’t awful (they were) but because they were usually run on a shoestring budget without much intention of actually excercising total control. (though that gets into the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian)
“It is not enough to shut up and work for Big Brother; you have to love him.”
some of the western colonial projects definitely had an ideological basis, though (in particular, Christianization).
Yes, especially if you look at the early ones, like Spain both in the new world and the Philippines. But Dutch and British not so much. They were pushed by religious groups in the homelands to accept missionaries coming along, but mostly tho them a nuisance getting in the way of economic exploitation.
“But Dutch and British not so much. They were pushed by religious groups in the homelands to accept missionaries coming along, but mostly tho them a nuisance getting in the way of economic exploitation.”
I think the British in India and Africa definitely did talk a fair amount about spreading Christianity, civilization, etc.- the rebellion in 1857 was largely about resistance to perceived Christianization. but, you may be right that that was more about propaganda than reality.
Free market economies do not mean the state isn’t fascist and a pro-capitalist ideology is, in fact, one common aspect of fascism. Fascism tends to be slightly to fervently pro capitalism, and it grows out of capitalist principles like property rights and the justness of the market economy in determining economic outcomes. It has always marketed its regulations of the free market as a means of ensuring a more “pure” expression of capitalism; the incongruity makes sense to the insecure and reactionary adherents, who think the inequities of capitalism they are subject to are a result of their social and ideological enemies and refuse to entertain that they are a function of the system itself.
Tellingly, all anarcho-capitalist or minimalist nations inevitably either collapse under the incoherency of the philosophy or inevitably slide into either mild interventionalist policies (becoming some variety of neo-liberal) or full out fascism, depending on if the elites would rather compromise their social rights or property rights. Almost inevitably it’s the former, as they control the police institutions that oppress social rights. Hence belief in free market capitalism isn’t incongruous with fascism, it’s one of the preconditions that lead to it.
The fact that the state also has elections is also of less significance than you’d imagine. There are many ways to have multiparty elections without not being fascist. All the electable parties just have to be fascist. One way to accomplish this is to so thoroughly rig these elections that they’re meaningless (Singapore does this, but isn’t fascist for other reasons), and another is to brainwash the population utterly. Israel is on it’s path to accomplishing both of those things, the first via judicial corruption and war measures, and the second via it’s military draft and state propaganda apparatuses created and controlled by those war measures.
Hence Israel isn’t a fascist state yet, but has every imaginable hallmark of a nation teetering on the edge of full out and out fascism.
Agreed. If they’re not fascist, they are making some incredibly fascist-sounding noises.
The part of me that still holds some optimism for liberal democracy has me wondering how long it is before Israel’s good will with the rest of the world’s liberal democracies will last. They certainly seem to be spending it at quite a rate.
From a national perspective, it only appears to be the USA and (regrettably) the UK who are supportive of their current political decisions (the latter I expect in a pathetic effort to ingratiate ourselves with the USA).
I’m more pessimistic about the likelihood of Israel facing significant international pressure at least from Europe in particular, given the obvious utility of pro-Israel sentiment in a European ideological climate that seems to be following Israel’s own rightward ethnonationalist march in terms of anti-migrant demagoguery toward Muslims. In so many words, wrapping themselves in Israeli flags is an easy tactic for the gentile nations of Europe to ignore the obvious and uncomfortable historical resonances in their increasingly open desire to get rid of a population they depict as a subversive fifth column of non-Christian Semitic foreigners from the Near East, and perversely even allows them to argue that the real Nazis are the Semitic foreigners they’re attacking!
The pairing of “anti-antisemitism” with an ever more fascistic reactionary chauvinism is at its most absurd in Germany, where a common scene especially over the past few months has been for police to beat and arrest a group of left-wing Jews (Berlin being an increasingly common destination for Israeli dissident émigrés) at a pro-Palestine rally, yet for the resulting German public discourse about the incident’s Nazi-era parallels to be directed not against the German police/authorities but against their left-wing Jewish victims.
If it helps we’re seeing meaningful progress against Zionism in our discourse for the first time in decades. I know I was pro Israel until about two years ago, then neutral, and now I don’t know how Israel can ever meaningfully redeem itself in my lifetime. I know people who’ve gone from Zionist to arguing for America to declare war on Israel in a week. Even ignoring extreme views and examples the traditional discourse has dissolved into a slurry. It’s irrecoverable. The next couple generations aren’t going back to the way things were.
Fascists are pro-free-market only insofar as they fob off the duties of making the economy work on private corporations. The purpose of the market is still to deliver what the government, not the market, wants.
There’s a difference between a fascist state and a democracy with a fascist political party. The latter have sometimes turned into the former after the fascist party won an election or staged a coup, but if the other parties are still active and are competing in free elections then by definition the state isn’t fascist yet.
I think it’s fair to characterize Israel as apartheid, and apartheid is a thoroughly despicable system of government that almost rivals fascism in both horror and futility. But, to quote from the OP, “fascist has to mean something more specific than ‘people I disagree with’ to be a useful term.”
Israel might be heading that way, though. Its political class says some deeply disturbing things these days.
I’d recommend reading the letter that you’re quoting, in which criticism is leveled at this specific fascist tendency for *being a threat to the larger Israeli project*. Hell, they’re criticized for “building no settlements”, a criticism which is both deeply ironic considering the present policy of that organization’s descendant, and not exactly a condemnation of Israel’s policies of dispossession and subjugation. This is hardly the smoking gun that you seem to think it is, and some of the people who signed it produced far better criticisms of the Zionist project as a whole than this letter. There’s certainly a lot of very real and important criticism to direct towards the State of Israel and the ideology that spawned it, but that’s not what this letter is even talking about.
Much as I support taking Wehraboos down a peg, I find myself unable to share your more general confidence about the inability of authoritarians to achieve their goals. The unfortunate reality looking at history is that sometimes the bad guys win. Their victories may not last forever, but then nothing does. (But then, I’m also unconvinced that there’s a less-bad thing called “traditional monarchy” that can be clearly distinguished from things like Fascism or “tyranny” in the Greek sense.)
May I recommend selectorate theory?
It differentiates between “traditional monarchies” and more modern autocracies on a continuous spectrum. In the latter, there are few a priori legal rules excluding groups of people from various positions of power — many autocracies like(d) to pretend to be democracies, writing down generous suffrage rules and holding sham elections. Whereas in monarchies, most positions of power are legally restricted to members of the nobility, a small class. This leads to different power dynamics.
In a modern autocracy, only a tiny fraction of “citizens” are in positions of power, thus the regime can for the most part efficiently buy their loyalty with private goods. In a traditional monarchy, a fair share of the nobility is a part of the regime at any one time, and basically any noble can realistically aspire to be part at some point in their life. This means that public goods (well, club goods; the peasants are excluded) feature much more heavily, and notably these also benefit those nobles who are not, at this time, active participants/supporters of the regime. This aspect works similarly to a democracy; if a party is elected into power on promises to improve the roads/sewers/etc., those voters who didn’t vote for them still get the improved roads/sewers/etc. (assuming the party to be competent and at least somewhat honest).
This is very important for matters of diplomacy, including war. Perhaps a better example is: assume that some sleazebag nation (without loss of generality, Saudi Arabia) wants to invade Canada, and asks for the right to use US soil for bases. Authoritarian America calculates and says “it would cost roughly a billion dollars in goodies to mollify the offended sensibilities of the hundred or so top-ranking regime security officers; you up?”. Democratic America calculates and says “uh, maybe if you can solve climate change worldwide, and on top of that fix our broken healthcare system for us, you can earn enough goodwill for that? Clearly you will not be able to do that, so we decline, and you wasted your time even asking.” The same applies to wars to the extent they are popularly endorsed.
It’s not that authoritarians cannot achieve goals.
It’s that fascism, a very specific political ideology, fails to achieve its particular goal of enforcing supremacy and glorifying the state via military conquest.
There are many ways to be authoritarian without falling prey to the specific brainworms that cause fascists to start, then fail at, warfare.
Given how much he talks about the effectiveness of ancient Rome, I think it’s safe to say that Bret isn’t talking about authoritarians in general. He’s specifically talking about fascism here.
Julius Caesar was much better at war than Mussolini, and it was partly thanks to his much more logically sound brand of evil.
Folding Ideas cinematic analysis of “Triumph of the Will” is a fascinating adjunct to Bret’s piece:
This short film is excellent. The analyst’s final comment is both accurate and chilling.
I find it funny that so many people think authoritarian governments are better at war or at economic development than liberal democracies. Then when you ask why the conversation is happening in english rather than german or russian(I’m not a native english speaker) you get a series of what about this or that with special cases and pleading. The same thing is true for economic development ; all the rich countries are liberal democracies except for some petrostates.
Yes I concede to them that the german army was top tier pound for pound in a tactical and operationnal sense. But it would always have been this way given the prewar german history and a more reasonnable german government could have probably won a more limited war. Morehover the german army was way less plagued by the problem of political hacks beeing given command and micromanagement from political authority (at least in the beginning) than other authoritarian regime. All the things specifically nazi where huge problems ; inadapted weapon systems, hitler removing generals that tell him his orders where bad, interservice bickering and petty fights, generally having an amateur making strategic decisions. Even if you concede that the german army was good and you just demand more examples, there is generally a blank stare or a throwback to some premodern empire where comparison become somewhat weird. But even then, I would suspect that you would tell us about how the roman republic was clearly the most economic and military dominant regime in large part because it was a more open society with large popular participation.
The same is true for economic development. Appart from a few petrostate, all the rich countries are democracies. The few exceptions have more to do with regimes that behaved like normal developped countries and good circumstances than with the particular ideology or the authoritarian nature of the regime. Spain for example had a huge economic boom and became a first world country because Franco was less ideological and megalomaniac than most authocrat. In the 50s Franco was old and he was more like an arbiter at his ministers reunion where everybody was discussing their idea reasonnably. Large part of the day to day decisions where made by competent technocrats. The country was at peace with booming rich neighboors and a young population. The only good thing with Francoism at that time was repressing anarchists and communists, but otherwise the country was behaving normally. The same thing could be said about Taiwan or South Korea. I’ve written in a previous comment that many countries are stuck in a dynamic of party of order vs revolutionnary movement and I think late Francoism or South Korean dictatorship is the best that a party of order can do ; maintain safety and stability, have a normal rule of law for non political things, get trains to run on time, protect property rights. Yet it is telling that most dictatorship fail at those (trains don’t in fact run on time in most dictatorship).
For development there is an interesting chicken-and-egg questiosn, are rich countries democratic or are democratic countries rich? I don’t think there’s ever been an actual genuine answer to this.
Or, does some third factor cause countries to become democratic and rich at the same time, in isolation of one another.
Good rule of thumb for commenters here: if you start a sentence by saying something is “unfair to Nazi Germany,” you have almost certainly lost the plot.
Blaming the Katyn massacre on them was indeed unfair to them. An easy mistake to make, since they really did carry out massacres just like that in Poland all the time!
Starting a war – and fascist governments regularly started such wars – in which you will be outnumbered, ganged up on, outproduced and then smashed flat: that is being bad at war.
To be picky: I am not convinced that fascism-admirers admire an alleged fascist ability to win wars. It looks to me more like they admire the fascists ability to seize power, murder their domestic opponents, and stay in power.
I don’t really buy that from most fascism believers/admirers. For the ones near the pinnacle of power, sure – that is probably one of Putin’s biggest reasons, for example. But for Chud Mc8chan? For a nobody, it’s much more likely to be based in a desire to build pride, strength, virility, and other such virtues.
(Shame that they ignore so many other human virtues – the ones like humility, understanding, and freedom, which prevent the first list from diving straight into madness and evil. But if they had a sensible worldview, they wouldn’t be fascists, so I guess it comes with the territory.)
It looks to me like Chud Mc8chan thinks that someone who has seized power, killed his opponents and demonstrably stayed in power however many people hate him, has indeed demonstrated pride, strength, virility, and other such virtues.
Sure, but that’s incidental, not the core of their worldview.
Minor typo: the start of “God bless the Gauls (and other Celtic-language speakers) for continuing to throw weapons” should be “Gods” not “God”.
Also kind of redundant: the Gauls etc would say of course the Gods bless them, that’s why they’re throwing weapons into lakes in the first place 🙂
I think Dr. Deveraux is saying that, from his point of view, the Gauls throwing weapons into lakes is a fantastic notion _irrespective of what the Gauls thought of it_. He’s calling on whatever divinity he believes in — which is apparently monotheist — to bless the Gauls. More generally, he’s approving of the manner in a somewhat hyperbolic, comedic manner
I know that, I was just depressed by the flood of fascist apologists and trying to be light hearted myself.
The wording I would prefer would be “God bless the Celtic Gods for demanding that the Gauls (and other Celtic-language speakers) throw weapons …
I am pretty sure Devereaux is a Christian, thats why.
I think to understand where the apologists for fascism are coming on this, it is necessary to distinguish between the ability to win battles and the ability to win wars Many people do see virtue in the ability of soldiers to win battles against great odds, regardless of the outcome of the war. And “Our soldiers are badass, undefeated in the field, it’s our incompetent leaders who squander their victories and bring us to ruin” is not unique to fascism; I saw way too much of that in the aftermath of the US defeat (yes, it was) in Vietnam.
If that’s the claim being made, it is not effectively rebutted by pointing to the strategic defeat. If the fascists are finding virtue in the ability to win battles against great odds, then unfortunately for us the examples of WWII Germany and Japan do make a good argument for those societies being able to field armies and navies that punch above their weight class.
Where the usual pro-fascist argument fails, I think, is in the belief that the unwinnable wars against overwhelmingly powerful coalitions were forced on the fascist regimes by the evil meanies in the democratic and/or communist nations. We’ve recently seen an example of this with the fascist-adjacent Vladimir Putin explaining to Tucker Carlson that the dastardly Poles forced Germany into an unwinnable war.
To the third paragraph: while mercifully it seems to have abated, a year ago I had been hearing a lot of noise to the effect of “Russia was forced to invade Ukraine because” something-or-other. (The two frontrunners were “because otherwise Ukraine would have joined NATO” and “because the Ukrainians were mean to Russian-speaking/identifying citizens”.)
@John Schilling, are Germany and Japan punching above their weight in WW2?
Seems to me that Japan was the third largest navy in the world. On land in Asia they’d be only behind the Soviet Union, and maybe behind China *if* the Chinese end their own civil war.
In Europe the German army would have been number 1 or 2 in 1939, and their navy perhaps 6th in the world behind France and Italy.
I’m not sure that the initial German and Japanese victories are much of a surprise.
Sometimes I wonder if the most effective rhetorical strategy wouldn’t be to flip the ‘Stab in the Back’ myth back around on the Nazis. “The heroic German army, betrayed by the incompetence of its moronic leader.”
That’s starting to sound uncomfortably close to the ‘Clean Wehrmacht’ myth though.
You could tone it down a bit to “The skilled German army betrayed by the incompetence of its moronic leader”.
Except that the last two generations of historical scholarship has thoroughly demolished the “It was all Hitler’s fault” myth. And few trouble to look at WWI, where the generals took over the state and proceeded to make a series of blunders at almost every level – with the active participation of the colonels who became the WWII generals.
FWIW, I’ve tended to think of fascism as being defined by revanchism, militarism (almost always of an aggressive sort), nationalism, and dictatorship. I don’t think left/right is useful here – it’s better to break things down in a touch more detail than that.
Basically, fascist nations tend to be ones that feel like their nation has been laid low by some kind of brutal mistreatment from some “outside” force – whether that’s Italy’s “mutilated peace”, Germany’s “stab in the back”, Russia’s failures of decommunization, or China’s “century of humiliation”. (And yes, I believe that the modern PRC is very definitely fascist.)
The natural way to soothe this pain in your own mind, as a nationalist who believes in the greatness of their nation, is to say that the nation is truly strong after all, but that the loss was caused by unfair and unreasonable exploitation by outsiders, and exacerbated by divisions within the nation. “If only we’d been more united, and fought harder, we’d certainly have won!” is a great story to tell yourself.
So their fundamental goal is rebuilding the “greatness” of their nation, and they see military strength and internal unification as the key tools for achieving that. Internal unification clearly means crushing of any dissent, and forcing people to follow the leader’s path. And naturally, if you’re doing that, then 99 times out of 100 you’re going to be a dictatorship. This is also why they’re so keen on starting wars, because that’s how you can (in theory) wipe away the stains of the old defeat and get your own back.
As a side note, this is also why they tend to be so focused on morale and aggression as a substitute for materiel and logistics in warfare. Their whole worldview is that it was internal division that laid the nation low, and so they obsess over ending any kind of internal division lest it happen again. Other concerns fade into the background for them.
Fascism is the ideology of losers – not in the pejorative sense of “loser” (though that’s also true), but in the sense of “a country that has lost”. Few countries will look themselves in the eye after that and say “Yeah, we kinda deserved it” – Germany did after 1945, but that took some truly extraordinary circumstances, and a lot of time and effort coming to terms with it. Instead, they’ll usually let bygones be bygones with a bit of grumbling about it (most nations), or else start to plot for how they can get their own back next time. For the latter group, fascism is a very attractive mindset – it fits a natural desire in the human psyche for people in that situation. There’s other ways you can take it – for example, you can begin to identify with a different group than your nation (whether you go bigger and make the EU, or go smaller and make a separatist movement). But fascists are the ones who try to bulldoze right through instead.
So yeah, in the modern world, the main fascist powers are Russia and the PRC. Both believe that they suffered some ugly periods in their history (true) as a result of foreign interference (largely true for China, almost entirely BS for Russia), and that the way they get theirs back is by unifying all lands that properly belong to their nation, in particular Taiwan and Ukraine (sorry guys, but trying that won’t help you at all, even if you “win” in the long run).
And yeah, fascists regularly stick their heads into proverbial wood chippers. Let’s just hope we keep the Ukrainian chipper fueled up for as long as it takes, and hopefully make the Taiwanese one very obviously unappealing.
Mussolini pushed Fascism because he was seeing problems with socialism during the Great War. He was urging socialists to fight (he was a leading socialist editor and writer) and he thought the war would bring about the proletarian revolution (He’d been raised a communist by his communist parents, and he’d worked as a communist agitator/propagandist).
He broke with the Italian Socialist Party and there was very bad blood between them, as he felt they’d stiffed him out of the Socialist Party’s leadership position, which he felt was his by right because of all the work he’d done advancing their cause. So when he finally got a seat in the Italian Parliament, he sat on the far right side to be as far away from his former colleagues as he could, and they traditionally sat on the left side. Thus he is right-wing. He also had them beaten up and probably murdered.
He rethought Marx’s class struggle because it could never sell in Italy where most people worked in the family business. Killing your parents or grandparents to take over the store they were going to leave you anyway just didn’t make any sense. So he recast the Marxist class struggle as a struggle between exploited, working class nations like Italy and exploitive capitalist nations like Britain and America.
The militarism, pomp, and nationalism comes from revisionist communist thinkers who were struggling to explain why the proletarian revolution wasn’t happening anywhere, and observing that people would fight for king and country and flag. So they said that the revolution should have all those trappings or the masses wouldn’t follow. Thus Mussolini consciously made himself a larger-than-life strong man, with huge parades and symbolism, as did Hitler for much the same reasons. But they didn’t get along very well.
By the mid-1930’s Austria had been a fascist country for over a decade, and the Austrian Fascist government was hunting down Austrian Nazis, while the Austrian Nazis assassinated the Fascist president of Austria, causing the brief Austrian Civil War. Mussolini nearly went to war against Hitler but backed down because of Germany’s far greater industrial might. They never did cooperate very well, didn’t notify each other of Earth-shattering surprise moves, and Italy never could get a license to build Panzers or Messerschmitts.
Eventually Italy threw Mussolini out and the Fascists joined the Allies. We supplied them with weapons and never bothered purging all the Fascists from parliament, we just made them rebrand themselves and run under a different name. It’s fun to trace where they’ve ended up, politically. So Italy ended up winning the war along with the rest of the Allies.
It is joking said that when Mussolini was in power he sent fascists through all the libraries to destroy any evidence he’d been a leading socialist writer and party member. After his death the Italian socialists went through the libraries to make sure the fascists hadn’t missed anything. ^_^
Mussolini’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, currently serves in the European Parliament.
I personally wouldn’t consider the Dolfuss regime in Austria to be fascist (yes, I know they’re called Austrofascists, but they didn’t call themselves that) but overall agreed.
So yeah, in the modern world, the main fascist powers are Russia and the PRC.
I myself would not call the PRC fascist; that is unless you want to stretch the definition so much it becomes nearly useless.
Also whilst the PRC is a totalitarian dictatorship, they historically have had a prudent and cautious foreign policy.
I simply cannot see them replacing their current ‘salami slicing’ for YOLO poorly-thought out and poorly-planned wars, like Mussolini’s invasion of Greece.
I don’t feel like it’s even really a stretch. It was not always fascist, but especially under Xi, it’s absolutely in line with my above definition. And while it’s not exactly the same as other definitions, I think it gets at the core of it much more precisely than something like Eco’s fuzzy mess.
And I don’t really see them doing salami-slicing at all right now. Their foreign policy mostly consists of issuing territorial claims against most nations they border, either by land or by sea, and just generally acting like belligerent jerks about it as well. “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy is very much in keeping with fascist ways, and the invasion of Taiwan they keep talking about could easily become such a painful YOLO experience for them.
Given this very blog post is arguing about the position that fascism is good at war albeit against it, I think the position is not so self evident that you can cite not foolishly entering a war as evidence against fascism.
This is just sophistry based on changing the definition of changing the definition of words to suit your argument. No one normally says that warfighting ability = “being allied with the side that has the most numbers” which is basically what you’re arguing here.
If you want to go down that road, what about the Romans? They were the original fascists, literally inventing the fasces symbol and being in a near constant state of war with everyone constantly being drafted into the army. For a while they won battles, but in the end they were eventually defeated. So, I guess that makes the Romans losers who sucked at war? No point in studying the losers? Sounds like Trump thinking.
There is in fact some difference between having a state that survived for like a thousand years (or two thousand if you consider Eastern Roman Empire) and starting a single war that you lose and get your state destroyed in 12 years.
Also, in fact being allied with the right people and only fighting when you have the advantage is a big part of warfighting strategy. Germany picked a fight with Britain, USSR, and USA simultaneously when they could have simply avoided that situation entirely (concerned about Britain? Don’t attack Poland. Concerned about USSR? Guarantee Poland. Ez.)
“being allied with the right people and only fighting when you have the advantage”
Indeed. So much so that it’s one of the best known epithets from The Art of War.
Epithet is definitely the wrong word there! Not sure what came over me. I meant ‘axiom’.
calling the Romans fascist completely misses the actual definition of fascism, an ideology which explicitly exists in the context of modernity as an expression of modern social and political tendencies. Rome wasn’t fascist, because it lacked the reactionary characteristic intrinsic to fascist thinking. You can’t reject the enlightenment if you live before the enlightenment, you can’t be hyper-nationalist before nationalism exists, etc, etc. Fascists later comparing themselves to Rome doesn’t make Rome itself fascist.
“what about the Romans? They were the original fascists”
Fascism changed in meaning just like “dictator” changed in meaning.
There’s two separate meanings of warfighting ability, IMO – the tactical, and the strategic. On the tactical level, i.e., winning battles, fascism does okay. On the strategic level, i.e., winning wars, it’s a dumpster fire being carried on board a derailed train that was driving through the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
And I don’t think Rome was actually fascist. Mussolini used Roman imagery, but that’s not the same thing. They were a genre that’s largely dead today, because modern war is so obviously terrible, but which was very common in history – they were conquistadors.
Sure, that makes sense to divide up the meanings that way (tactical and strategic). Or you could go even more detailed- tactical, operational, strategic, and grand strategy. Or look at some specific things they did well (massing up the tanks into their own separate mobile division) and what they did poorly (logistics, and declaring war on great powers that they had no real plan to win).
But this post seems to argue that none of that matters, you should only judge them as “winners” or “losers” based on the final outcome. Which is ridiculous. It leads to absurdities like saying that Luigi Cadorna of “let’s try climbing up the mountains of Isonzo 12 times” was a great general because he ended up on the winning side in WW1.
Fascism is famously slippery to define, with many different scholars offering different definitions. I don’t think it matters whether you define the Romans as fascist or not. My point was that it was a heavily militarized (and often ruthless) society which was obviously very effective at war, won a lot of battles, but still lost in the end.
You don’t judge generals by the same standards as standards. Luigi Cadorna was not responsible for Italy’s grand strategy, and so cannot take credit for it. Luigi Cadorna was responsible for the terrible battles, and so can be judged for that.
Massing tanks was not something new or exemplar that they did. France had the DLM, DLC and DCR divisions for instance. The BEF was sufficiently armoured and motorized the distinction was meaningless. Soviets had their own equivalents as well. The main innovation was massing armoured divisions to employ them together, though the Soviets were well along that path as well.
It does not lead to absurdities like saying Cadorna was a great general. Cadorna was a terrible general. By being a terrible general, he may have inadvertently assisted in Italy switching sides (which I could see being argued), though that necessarily leaves the argument of ‘Cadorna was a terrible general’ intact.
‘Cadorna was a terrible general which inadvertently assisted Italy’s change of allegiance to the winning side’ would be the way to describe it.
“Fascism” here is discussing a specific political ideology derived from the practices and pronouncements of Mussolini’s dictatorship and defined through the research and thought of the writer Umberto Eco who grappled extensively with the problem of defining an ideology that views ideological consistency as weakness and hypocrisy as strength. “Fascism” does not simply mean ‘anything with a fasces on it,’ as that would include not only the United States (which has used the fasces in official iconography since its founding and continues to do so today) and many other Western democracies.
Broad definitions are dangerous and will not help you understand what the people around you are talking about; this one especially so, as it puts you a very short distance from erroneously labeling symphonies with bassoons in them and LGBTQ language-reclamation proponents as Nazi-adjacent.
Didn’t Angela Merkel and François Hollande both go on record that the Minsk accords (i.e. the French/German-mediated temporary stalemate between Ukraine and the Russian-backed Donbas separatists) were deliberately intended as a stalling tactic to give the West and Ukraine time to prepare for a future war with Russia?
I think these are the kinds of situations where we “little people” without access to the high citadels of power should probably concede that we don’t necessarily know what military preparations may or may not have been going on behind the scenes, especially when the U.S. in particular has a history of obscuring the full scope of its overseas military deployments. To take an obvious point of comparison, it wasn’t until long after the Cuban Missile Crisis that official U.S. sources finally acknowledged the secret nuclear arsenal in Turkey that they’d secretly agreed to withdraw in exchange for the Soviet nuclear withdrawal from Cuba — a piece of context that radically rewrites the overall narrative of the crisis, from one where the Soviets made an aggressive and disproportionate nuclear deployment until the U.S. unflinchingly intimidated them into backing down, to one where the Soviets offered a measured and proportional response to an aggressive U.S. nuclear deployment until the U.S. meekly agreed to a mutual drawdown on the condition that it wouldn’t have to admit it publicly.
Ukrainian here, if that helps.
The Minsc agreements were in large part an effort to stall so Ukraine can build up its military and prepare. For context, in 2014 our army was pathetic – generals at the time estimated we had single digit thousands of soldiers that can be deployed, and their equipment and training were horrendous too.
However, while Ukraine prepared and built up its army, the West didn’t, particularly. Plus, there was some backtracking on it (e.g. in 2019 Zelenskyy largely ran on a conciliatory peacenik platform, and subsequently his government slowed down military buildup). And of course russian economy is much larger to begin with, so it was very difficult for any Ukrainian buildup to match russia’s, and that’s after starting at a massively worse position. So there’s no contradiction, really.
And Ukraine also *lost* single digit thousands of soldiers in that first phase of the war.
Meanwhile I’m hardly aware of any actual preparations specifically in the EU (we might know about them decades later ?) : and on the contrary, Germany and France *started* building new methane transportation infrastructure projects with Russia *during* the war !
At least the USA seems to have slowly started ramping up NATO help going into Ukraine in 2014… (which seems to have paid off !) with one infamous exception of Trump diverting some of that money to build his stupid wall.
Didn’t Angela Merkel and François Hollande both go on record that the Minsk accords (i.e. the French/German-mediated temporary stalemate between Ukraine and the Russian-backed Donbas separatists) were deliberately intended as a stalling tactic to give the West and Ukraine time to prepare for a future war with Russia?
It’s true, the Ukrainian army wasn’t exactly unprepared for the war. Given that Ukraine’s been receiving billions of dollars of military aid since the war began, “a tenth of the economy” doesn’t give an entirely accurate picture either.
France and Germany did grudgingly start some military modernization after the trough of the mid-2010s, but I don’t think they really oriented themselves toward fighting peer conflict against Russia. (Neither did the US, while we’re at it – the Army 2030 plan for bringing back armored divisions is from 2021.) The mil org and materiel decisions were mostly a continuation of previous affairs, so the French Army is still optimized for fighting expeditionary wars, and the Bundeswehr has shockingly few tanks for an army that’s supposedly designed to fight armored peer conflict. The security heads here in Germany remained Putinist or soft-Putinist until shockingly late, like the head of the navy, or Merkel’s security advisor who kept calling for Ukrainian territorial concessions because Russia has escalation dominance (over Ukraine, sure, but not over NATO).
Didn’t Angela Merkel and François Hollande both go on record that the Minsk accords (i.e. the French/German-mediated temporary stalemate between Ukraine and the Russian-backed Donbas separatists) were deliberately intended as a stalling tactic to give the West and Ukraine time to prepare for a future war with Russia?
Yes, I had heard that earlier.
However, in the period just before the Russian invasion of 2022, Germany refused Ukrainian offers to buy weapons ‘as to avoid provocating Russia’ and the German, I think it was the Chief of Intelligence, had been assuring the Ukrainians in Kiev that a Russian invasion was ‘extremely unlikely’ only to then immediately flee away after he learned that Russian tanks crossed the border.
So, I had the vague suspicion that Angela Merkel had just made up that ‘stalling tactic’-thing out of thin air because she did not want to embarrass herself. Admitting that she had not the faintest idea that Russia would decide to invade the rest of Ukraine might make her look like an idiot.
I think saying “war is an activity judged purely on outcomes” goes a bit too far. Humans have been celebrating the aesthetic component of war for a very long time. And I don’t think that is entirely meaningless today – having a military that the population is proud of because they consider (for example) its soldiers heroic and its causes just will increase happiness within a country at least somewhat. But it is very important to be able to evaluate these characteristic as distinct from the ability to win wars and fascists are largely unable to do that.
I’d think that humans celebrated war more or less since they became human, because it used to be practically important to winning them. For most of human (pre)history — human evolution, really — “wars” were skirmishes between small groups. “We have a single individual whose prowess breaks the morale of the enemy” was an entirely workable theory of victory, as attested in …protohistorical (is that a word?) myths, like the Iliad or the Bible (Goliath and David), and IIRC Roman expansion into Gallic/Germanic areas yielded a bunch of reports of “they offered to decide the battle in a duel of champions, which is hilarious”. Moreover, it continued to be relevant through the era of agricultural empires, until the (second) industrial revolution, when its importance sharply decreased.
You’d think that a “duel of champions” would make its return in the postmodern era, where both sides are often expected to be the losers in a real war… :'(
See the movie “Robot Jox”, unless you have a phobia of exploding tables, or dislike bad movies.
Or a modern “flower war”, where fascist states could send their young men to win glory in battle without things spilling over into a society-destroying catastrophe…
War is the continuation of diplomacy. Things in that space just short of war do happen; they are called “saber rattling” when we dislike the country doing them, and “just another military exercise, why do you ask” when we and/or our allies do it. Perhaps the most fascinating ones — and closest in spirit — are occasions like Ocean Venture 81 and its successors. Without any cooperation, both parties (opponents? contestants?) are present, and are giving a nearly-full-scale workout to their equipment and procedures against an adversary, holding just short of opening fire.
Of course, they also hold particularly high risk of unintentional escalation into actual war.
To add to Marvin’s comment, the post misses one point about fascism (and other ideologies that glorify war). The heroic ethos (which fascism translates to the state level) does not value winning; it values fighting. The true hero (Achilles, Cuchulain, Beowolf and many more) goes to war even when it is foretold he will lose – for fame and honour, not for victory.
For the Nazis, dying amid the rubble of Berlin after a long and savage fight was an achievement in itself. Or, as Tom Shippey remarked of the Vikings, the core beliefs were that of a nihilist death cult (you die in battle, go to Valhalla, fight against the apocalypse alongside the gods – and lose).
On Hitler’s last day, he could have picked up his pistol and died fighting the Red Army. Instead he despaired and turned the pistol on himself. Other Nazi leaders did the same, or surrendered.
I think that ultimately, the Nazi leaders were men who had long internalized the idea that heroic sacrifices were for other people to make.
Committing suicide to avoid falling into enemy hands is quite compatible with a heroic ethos. Cf. Brutus, Cato Uticensis, various samurai…
Given the state of Hitler medically, I don’t actually think he could. The man was a wreck at the end.
(He had a lot of health issues, some of which were just standard old guy health issues, but a lot of them were made worse by him having a quack doctor and his relaince on various drugs)
With all due respect Dr. Devereaux, this is nonsensical. Among other things, you’re actually insulting the Allies by saying that they didn’t have a serious challenge to overcome in WWII, negating the significance of victory.
There’s a reason why Nazi Germany invented blitzkrieg, why France fell in 6 weeks, the Red Army took massive losses (and we took a fair share as well), and why it took the combined efforts of England, US, and Soviet Russia to defeat them (and it was still a close battle), they had the first mass-produced assault rifle, the first jet fighter, the first ballistic missile, and why their tactics & technology have been influential ever since, and why they were blitzing London and at the gates of Moscow in 1941. The reason for all that is not that they were “bad at war” — the Axis (Italy notwithstanding) were good at war, but the Allies were even better.
To assume that whoever lost must be “bad at war” is not only simplistic, but meaningless. Was Napoleon bad at war? He won almost all his battles, multiple wars, and was one of history’s greatest leaders & strategists, but he’s apparently “bad at war” because of the final outcome at Waterloo. Are the 49ers bad at football because they lost the Superbowl? No, they were good, but the Chiefs were better. Given the outcomes of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the stalemate in Korea, does that make Liberalism “bad at war”, or a loser ideology?
You also switch randomly between criticizing tactics and grand strategy. Sure, the nazis were unprepared for mud season and winter, and they got overwhelmed by lend-lease and the Red Army’s ability to regenerate, but they were still a formidable opponent in many other ways. I assure you, panzers and junkers were not inferior, and they came dangerously close to getting their much-needed oil from the Caucasus.
Another problem is the small sample size: it’s difficult to make sweeping generalizations about fascism when it’s a rather unique historical phenomenon. That’s yet another problem I have, the gross overuse of the term “fascism”, but that’s another topic. In short, fascism is an authoritarian, militaristic perversion of democracy, that seizes power by violently over-running democratic mechanisms. We haven’t seen its like in the world since WWII (excepting regimes like Franco, Marcos, and Pinochet, but that’s a broad definition).
We speak of WWII as a forgone conclusion, but it could’ve ended quite differently. A few different decisions and rolls of the dice, and fascism may have won to a greater or lesser extent: does that mean being good/bad at war can be decided by chance? If anything, the fascists took an all-or-nothing approach to war; they bet everything, and lost. But that doesn’t mean that it had to turn out that way.
Much of what I said above also applies to Imperial Japan, who humiliated the British at Singapore, had the edge on us at first with their zero fighters, and came fairly close to building their “co-prosperity sphere”. It’s not hard to imagine an alternate timeline where they didn’t get bogged down in China nor awakened America’s wrath; yes it happened that way, but it didn’t have to be so.
I hope this doesn’t come off too confrontational, it’s just that there’s plenty enough you can criticize fascism for without slandering them or sacrificing historical accuracy. I understand on some level why you would do this, but the study of history should not be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency — that’s true of this, as it is of white nationalist historians claiming that Ancient Egypt (kemet) was white, since they can’t stand admitting that people of color may have built a major Bronze-age civilization. Much respect to you if you don’t censor/ban me for wrongthink.
tl;dr: The Axis (especially Nazi Germany, not so much Italy) were a military juggernaut, their defeat was not a foregone conclusion, the sample size is too small for sweeping generalizations, and trying to portray fascism as inherently bad (or even good) at war is incoherent at best.
pardon me, I forgot to space out the paragraphs. I submitted a spaced-out version of this, if you could replace the above with it, that’d be better.
“invented blitzkrieg”
Is like saying “invented shock and awe”. There was no such thing as a blitzbrieg doctrine, the actual term is spearhead doctrine. Blitzkrieg is a purely political term.
I point this out because the use of term blitzkrief is generally a solid indicator that a lot of the stuff that follows is going to take a lot of wehraboo nonsense at face value.
(maybe the formatting isn’t such a big deal, nevermind. but I’ll be sure to remember that from now on)
Of course, blitzkrieg had older roots, especially in Von Moltke. But I don’t consider it a mere political term — I think it accurately describes German innovation in mechanized mobile warfare, coordinated with radios, which took the French completely off-guard, as they were committing the classic error of “fighting the last war”. The Maginot line was very well-fortified in preparation for the static, defensive warfare of WWI, only for the nazis to sweep through the Low Countries and invade France, the speed and force of which was enough to cause collapse. I wonder, does that make the French “bad at war”? Jokes aside, I don’t think they are, despite how they crumbled in WWII (although the Resistance helps make up for it). I regard being good/bad at war as an incoherent metric in most cases.
It seems you jumped to conclusions, AiryW, my analysis was quite fair.
> The Maginot line was very well-fortified in preparation for the static, defensive warfare of WWI, only for the nazis to sweep through the Low Countries and invade France
The Maginot line performed as intended. It forced the Germans to go around the Franco-German border instead of straight across. Obviously the overall plan to stop the German invasion failed, but the Maginot line was not the point of failure.
To add to this, the Maginot line had a few other goals as well.
For one, I suspect France remembered very well that England had not gone to war in 1914 to protect France – they’d done it to protect Belgium. Forcing the Germans to go through Belgium instead in a future war had obvious grand-strategic advantages.
For two, it allowed them to economize manpower dramatically, and for a country as manpower-starved as France, that was obviously really advantageous.
And for three, a lot of the French industrial heartland was very near the German border. Preventing cities like Strasbourg, Metz, and Mulhouse (plus a bunch of very important mines) from falling would be extremely important for fighting a long, industrial war successfully. That makes defense in depth impractical, meaning you need to stonewall the enemy right at the border.
These are good points. I don’t mean to place the blame squarely on the Maginot Line, but it’s often been used to symbolize “fighting the last war”. Even if it’s not at fault, you have to admit that France was quickly and decisively overrun, and being unprepared for blitzkrieg played a significant role in this.
The British regular army of 1940 pulled off a very similar operation to the German thrust through the Ardennes (over a longer distance and less favourable terrain) in Operation Compass, effectively destroying the entire Italian position in North Africa. Mechanised mobile warfare was not unique to Germany (USSR doctrine was similar).
It’s a bit more complicated than that, since the German invasion of the Low Countries and Belgium was fully expected, and the French mobile troops rushed there to defend preplanned positions (the Dyle-Breda plan). Meanwhile the Ardennes hills, located between the Maginot Line and Belgium, were only lightly defended, deliberately: it was considered that a German attack there would be good news, since it would be terribly slow and easily countered.
And the actual German plans (Fall Gelb), going through Belgium, *were exactly what the French expected*. However, part of the German high command was increasingly worried about it, and in February 1940 (three months before the general offensive), Von Manstein went around the OKH and managed to convince Hitler to change everything, and to attack through the Ardennes instead. That was a huge gamble, but it actually worked (and Guderian deserves the credit for the excellent execution). This is how all the best motorized French divisions were driving into Belgium, while the main Panzer thrust was cutting behind them, eventually isolating Allied armies at Dunkirk. It was devastatingly effective, but also lucky and largely improvised.
Can read for ref, “The Blitzkrieg Legend”, by Karl-Heinz Frieser, which goes into what you were saying: why it was indeed an old concept, how radio, close air support and panzer generals leading from the front can make a difference, but also why it was a lot messier and disorganized than the propaganda later claimed — and it really wasn’t an actual doctrine at the time. Generals on the ground (Guderian, Rommel) repeatedly disobeyed orders, attacking where and how they saw fit, without coordinating with each other (not in small part motivated by their narcissistic need for personal glory). Hitler was freaking out but couldn’t control them, issuing ‘halt orders’ that were largely ignored (which they got away with thanks to the convenient excuse that they were ‘leading from the front’ and ‘never received’ the orders they didn’t like). These guys gambled everything, and it turned out it worked — that time. Later in the war they’d often try to repeat it (in Russia, in Africa), and it usually failed miserably *because they were winging it, their plans were truly bad*.
And that’s part of the larger topic here: for many reasons Nazi Germany propaganda remains strong today, largely obfuscating systemic dysfunctions. And I think that’s the main cause of our disagreement here: I respect where you’re coming from, but I’d encourage you to look into the technical details: what was really new and effective, and smart tactical execution; what was ballsy, and sometimes was rewarded, sometimes was punished hard; and what was just bad, patterns of flawed decision-making that should be identified and avoided.
(… and how similar toxic patterns in other armies were dealt with, or not)
Honestly this is much more complex and interesting than the “accepted” memory of the war, because it’s full of surprises; and I’d argue that it supports the idea that things were never so simple and deterministic, that victory was never certain, that “anything could happen”. But also that you’re more likely to draw 7 with 2D6 than 2 or 12. Individual results were largely unpredictable, but IMO the general patterns are convincing. (Also very true for Japan, similar myth-making tendencies in the immediate post-war period)
Well of course, it’s always more complex than generalizations allow. That’s a major reason I’m opposed to judging regimes as good/bad at war, unless there’s overwhelming evidence one way or the other — in WWII, America had overall effectiveness, while Italy did not. In the case of the Third Reich & Showa Japan, evidence is inconclusive, although I’d lean towards “militarily effective, but wagered everything and lost via being outproduced”, which is not covered by simplistic labeling.
“If the fascists were so bad at war, why did it cost so much to defeat them?”
The main factor would be that despite some *terrible* strategic decisions, they still had access to a modern industrial base; and that alone meant that any war was going to be incredibly bloody and devastating (which of course is precisely why everyone else was trying to avoid a war). And Hitler committed Germany’s economy to a military buildup earlier than his enemies, giving him a significant first-mover advantage.
But mostly I wanted to react to your 2nd paragraph, because many of these examples are in fact pretty weak, and really should be avoided:
_ the first mass-produced assault rifle
but way too late to matter… they fought most of the war with the kar98k (against semi automatic M1 Garand). The MG 34 or the Flak 18 were very good for their time though.
_ the first jet fighter
no, the Gloster Meteor was actually the first one. It didn’t matter anyway, the Me 262 came way too late (insert Chuck Yeager quote here)
_ the first ballistic missile
Completely useless and a waste of scarce resources. Good technology, absolutely terrible weapon.
This also tends to ignore the *actually good* Allied technological advantages:
_ radar (for air defense of course, but also naval fire control, airborne ASW patrols, AA proximity fuse…)
_ air-dropped ASW acoustic torpedo (mk 24 FIDO)
_ HF/DF (Huff Duff)
and of course atomic bombs, code breaking, etc
It’s not to say all the German weapons were bad, but they do tend to be overrated.
_ they were blitzing London and at the gates of Moscow in 1941
And both were *very bad ideas*, that ended in strategic failures! The whole Battle of Britain campaign was foolish, doomed from the start, and a disaster for the Luftwaffe. As for Moscow, despite the myth it was actually extremely well defended at this point, and never in danger, and by pushing way past its culminating point the Wehrmacht set itself up for disaster — but then Stalin totally botched his winter counter offensive.
Finally,
_ There’s a reason why Nazi Germany invented blitzkrieg,
Blitzkrieg is a propaganda slogan, not a real tactic. What the Germans did well was putting together the Panzer division concept, and actually implement it. It’s not as novel and revolutionary as people think, and it had serious limitations that are often overlooked, but it did produce results.
_ why France fell in 6 weeks,
it wasn’t as one sided as most people think, but Gamelin was completely outplayed and after that there was no coming back.
_ the Red Army took massive losses
the Red Army of 1941 was basically unable to defend itself (and had previously showed it during the 1939 Winter War). The German invasion plan was lazy and amateurish, but the level of tactical incompetence displayed by the Red Army was just extraordinary. There was extremely heavy fighting though (which is ultimately why Barbarossa was a failure — not because of the weather).
I mean all that respectfully — I would agree that we shouldn’t make it sound like defeating them was easy and painless. But it’s also true that the war happened only because Hitler was completely reckless, taking insane risks with no realistic strategy to win. I’d say he was *lucky* with the dice rolls: what do you think would have to happen differently to bring a German victory?
Points taken on wunderwaffen. I also didn’t mean to downplay Allied innovations in radar, proximity fuses, etc. My point is that the fascists demonstrated technical brilliance, which is inconsistent with the claim that they’re ineffective due to a fatally flawed ideology, which seems to be the thesis here. And of course they stretched too far, lost air dominance, and were unable to put away a regenerating Red Army — the point is that Nazi Germany projected power far & wide across Europe, which again, is inconsistent with being “bad at war”.
There are many plausible what-ifs in WWII, even late in the war. If the nazis won the Battle of the Bulge by driving to Antwerp (presumably without Eisenhower’s capable command), the Allies would’ve been dangerously divided and cut off from supplies. This likely would’ve led to a ceasefire on the Western Front, giving the Germans a much-needed reprieve, allowing them to focus on a single front, possibly bringing the Red Army to a stalemate around the Oder River. Another alternative is if Rommel had lived, I believe he had anticipated the Normandy landings, and if he had been nearby commanding armored divisions, D-Day could very well have ended in disaster rather than triumph, leaving the Third Reich in an even stronger position than the first example. Of course, this didn’t happen since Rommel was killed off by intrigue, and internal frictions were generally troublesome for the nazis, with Hitler sometimes ignoring the better advice of his generals. That’s not even getting into larger alternatives, like not underestimating Soviet Russia, securing oil in the Caucasus without biting off more than they could chew, or maybe a different outcome in Stalingrad/Kursk, and so on. It could’ve unfolded differently.
I’m not arguing that the Axis were flawless, and that it took a miracle to defeat them, certainly they had their flaws and shortcomings. My point is that fascism is not bad at war, and that claim is incoherent. There’s a tiny sample size, the role of luck & chance is completely disregarded, as is the overall conduct of the war. If they were actually bad at war, they would’ve swiftly collapsed after an abortive attempt at conquest, which is not what happened at all, yet Dr. Devereaux insists that only outcomes matter, which would not distinguish between an abortive war vs the actual battle to the death taking years. It is slander meant to demoralize the far-right, and obfuscates history more than anything. A historian distorting history, even with the best intentions, is something I object to.
“My point is that the fascists demonstrated technical brilliance, which is inconsistent with the claim that they’re ineffective due to a fatally flawed ideology”
Germans demonstrated technical brilliance before Hitler took over. The Nazis made use of that brilliance but did not contribute to it.
I don’t think that really contradicts what he said, though. At most, it’s evidence that Germany’s effectiveness in WW2 wasn’t due to fascism specifically — which is probably true, but is a different claim to “fascists are bad at war”.
Popular history and war games portray the outcomes as finely balanced. So, often, do memoirs, as the participants hardly want to show their achievements as easily-won.
When examined in detail, most of the outcomes are not nearly so precarious. Sure, if one side had all the luck, and the other none, and one made all the right calls, and the other all the wrong ones, then things would have turned out differently. But that does not often happen. When you look at logistics in particular – a crucial factor not to be remedied on the battlefield – this becomes very obvious. The Germans did not have the fuel to reach Antwerp, or the rail supply to sweep through Stalingrad (let alone reach Baku), or the trucks to reach Alexandria, or the air force to counter Allied naval artillery on D-Day. Needing the iron dice to come up double sixes every time is not a good way to bet.
Certainly it’s true that Nazi Germany was running low in the latter phases of the war, and even in the case of Stalingrad (when they were trying to defend a corridor for much-needed oil extraction from the Caucasus) it was a case of attempting too much with not enough. That said, the odds were not as long as you’re making out. The examples I gave were just a couple what-ifs, there are many other variables at work. There’s a tendency to assume that the historical conclusion was a foregone one, but there’s no guarantee that a replay of WWII would end the same way at all.
This goes back to the problem of extrapolating from a sample size of 1, which doesn’t provide any certainty. There is also the problem of completely ignoring how the war played out, the interplay of variables and chance, in favor of only the outcome, as if a hypothetical collapse after an abortive war were qualitatively the same as the Axis getting ground down over years after achieving a high-water mark. Losing a war doesn’t mean you’re incapable of waging war, it could just mean that your opponents were even better. Yet, fascism is dismissed as being inherently incapable of waging war despite major evidence to the contrary in our very limited sample size.
As I said, the central claim that fascism is bad at war is not just overly simplistic, it’s incoherent and wrong.
I don’t want to give the Nazis too much credit, but do the annexations of Austria and what we would now call Czechia not count as “wars avoided” while still accomplishing strategic goals? And indeed the Spanish Civil War as a war fought and won?
It would seem to me that before 1939 Nazi Germany was very successful at leveraging its military to achieve strategic goals, even if we ignore the remarkable run of German success in WW2 itself to September 1940 – and while I gather ignoring it is the point of the exercise here, it may be wide of the mark in terms of persuading modern fascist sympathisers, who are more than happy to extol the successes of the invasions of Poland, Norway, the Netherlands etc. and the Battle of France while ignoring the end result of the war… just as, with a rather longer historical lens, a certain strain of English nationalism will make a big deal of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt while ignoring that the Hundred Years War was as a whole a decisive loss for England.
I do think that the string of nazi successes is acutally kind of the point? They basically kept picking fights until they got one they couldn’t win, rather than settling for what they’ve had, and in doing so they burnt all of their political capital meaning they effectively *could not* end the war on favourable terms because no one would trust them to keep their word.
And the point is that this was a feature of the regime and its ideology because they saw war as a positive good, not merely an tool in the toolbox of politics: Hitler was going to keep picking fights until he got one *because he wanted a fight* so even the remarkable successes of “peaceful” diplomacy didn’t matter becuase that wasn’t his actual goal.
I think Hitler was quite happy to take surrenders. And it’s not like he stopped picking fights once he got a fight! Instead he was a gambler who just kept doubling down because he was sure he would win (which he was, early on) until he lost it all.
I do not, under any circumstances, wanna hand it to fascists, but the logic underlying our host’s arguments seems shaky in a couple of major ways.
1. Dr. Devereaux claims “a shocking percentage of [fascist regimes] started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state.” We’re really looking at an n of two sample here. We have two unarguably fascist regimes (Italy and Nazi Germany). Both of them started wars, and both of them lost big. Furthermore, we might actually have an n of one sample here, since the two were allies in one big war, which they lost together (the outcomes for each regime were not independent events). The results World War II are too limited to draw conclusions about how a hypothetical fascist regime (in speculative fiction, satire or elsewhere) would perform in a different war.
If we expand the sample size, we do not get any further towards supporting the claim. Francoist Spain came to power after winning a civil war, but did not start many wars of choice. The regime dissolved as a result of democratic transition following the death of its leader, not due to loss on the battlefield.
If we include Imperial Japan as a fascist power, then we are back to the n of one problem.
2. The claim that “war is an activity judged purely on outcomes” is quite broad and leads to some strange conclusions. The fact that a polity or leader loses a war does not mean that it or he is bad at war. It is perfectly possible that Germany could have been very good at war, but the coalition of the USA, USSR and UK was even better. I’m not claiming this to be the case in World War II, but sometimes the more talented side loses. After all, “[t]here is no human affair which stands so constantly and so generally in close connection with chance as War” (drink!).
To put it another way, if you were partying in Vienna in 1815 and you heard that Napoleon was back and once more Emperor of the French, you wouldn’t say, “Nothing to worry about. That guy is terrible at war. He has a track record of overreaching, causing his enemies to form coalitions. This eventually led to the dissolution of his empire.” Instead, you would remember what the average-size-for-a-Frenchman corporal was capable of, and get to work at putting another coalition together as soon as possible.
Very true! It seems we’ve converged on similar points.
Yep! I was writing my post when you submitted yours. I would have just replied to you had I seen your contribution beforehand. You had more detail than me, and I liked your point that portraying the fascist powers as being bad at war devalues the achievements of the Allies.
So… Napoleon was very good as a general at least at the tactical level (operational level, there’s no avoiding the disaster that was the Russian campaign). But as a ruler his diplomatic and strategic efforts were poor. He won many wars but increasingly few improved his strategic position and eventually the odds caught up to him leading to the dissolution of his regime and the Bourbon restoration, an attempt to undo the French revolution. Neither it nor his regime that sort of continued it had been fascist but they did go from existential but increasingly unnecessary wars ending in overreach and collapse.
Also didn’t our host do a whole paragraph warning against the nothing to worry about sentiment?
The point is that just because Napoleon lost one war does not mean he is bad at war or will necessarily lose another war.
The final paragraphs use the analogy of “a drunk fumbling with a loaded pistol”. The implication is that fascist regimes can cause incredible harm, but that so long as their adversaries are smart and united, they can be overcome without too much trouble. The lesson I would take from World War II is that Germany and, to a lesser extent, Japan were formidable, intelligent adversaries, and it required incredible efforts, sacrifice and indeed an alliance with another totalitarian regime to overcome them.
I do think that Napoleon obviously wasn’t a fascist, but the long shadow he cast ends up as kinda the forerunner of it: In a very real sense *fascists want to be Napoleon* or at least the imgainary Napoleon produced by part in propaganda and reminiscance.
I do think that a major difference is that while Napoleon was terrible at grand strategy, he was largely caught in a feedback loop: “Start in a war, beat up the enemy, set up some kind of peace that weakens them to ensure peace, this triggers other states to contain you, beat them up again, creating another containment coalition, etc.” This cycle taught him a bunch of very bad lessons and ultimately he lost the dice roll. But I don’t think it’s quite the same as the fascist states.
The example I gave wasn’t dependent on the idea that Napoleon was fascist, but rather to push back on the claim that a commander or regime that loses a war that results in regime destruction is necessarily bad at war. Napoleon lost a war, saw his regime fail, then came back. It would have been unwise in 1815 to say that Napoleon was bad at war.
Coming back – to be immediately declared hors la loi by the united Powers of Europe – makes one bad at war.
@Peter_T
The United Powers of Europe took Napoleon seriously. You don’t all agree to put 150000 men in the field to defeat someone who is bad at war.
I don’t think adding Japan leaves us with n=1, because the two halves of WW2 were actually fairly separate. It’s better to think of WW2 as being a bunch of wars in a trenchcoat, where each one added to the strategic situation that triggered the others, but they were not actually all that closely related otherwise.
The wars I’d count as being largely separated, and mostly connected through alliances of convenience and grand strategic analysis:
1) Japan trying to conquer China piece by piece
2) Italy throwing down against whoever was around that day
3) Japan prodding the Russian border to see if they could grab anything (a short one)
4) Germany taking Poland
5) Russia’s efforts to reconquer their old imperial borders (and, later on, countries like Romania and Finland trying to take back what they’d lost)
6) UK taking Iceland to forestall anyone else doing the same (this was a very brief one, but still)
7) Germany’s ideological crusade against Russia
8) Japan’s tiny little oil grab
You could call US-Germany a separate one, but I don’t think it really was – I’d file it under #4, being expanded slightly by the influence of #8. And, if you really want to stretch things, you could throw Ecuador-Peru 1941 in there too, but I wouldn’t.
Looking at how fascists did in those, #1 was never as successful as they wanted, and its failure eventually triggered #8, which was fatal to the regime. #2 ranged from Pyrrhic to humiliating to regime-fatal. #3 was a fairly minor loss. #4 was successful at first, but eventually regime-fatal (especially when combined with #7, but I think they’d have lost even without that). And #5-6 didn’t involve all that much in the way of fascism – Antonescu joining in on #7 was about the extent of it, but obviously that was also regime-fatal.
That’s a pretty awful strategic record. And yes, they were related in practice, but not so much that they collapse into a single data point IMO.
The problem with dividing up World War II is that it detracts from Dr. Devereaux’s main point that the ultimate outcome of the war is all that matters. If you want to divide the war, then one could also look at Germany versus France and Britain in 1939-1940, Germany versus Norway and Holland in 1940, and Japan versus the British and Dutch overseas empires in 1941-42 (the oil grab to which you refer, I assume).
Also, we are still back to the n of 1 problem because one of Bret’s main points is that fascist regimes fail because they tend to make bad grand strategic decisions. Germany’s decision to declare war on the United States was obviously influenced by Japan’s actions.
Those are campaigns, though, not wars. You’ll notice I split the wars up by “country X was started a war for objective Y”, not “the fighting in region A during year B” – each one had a separate political goal, and those political goals are how you judge the decision to start the war.
Regarding the exact split of wars:
– Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg were all attacked to improve Germany’s position against the British and French, not as separate objectives in their own right. (You could argue that Iceland was the inverse of this, and should also be lumped in, but I’ve kept it separate because it was started by the opposite side.)
– Yes, Japan’s oil grab was the “We need the Dutch oil fields, so we have to fight them. And they’re allied with the British and French, so let’s fight them too. But all of this involves sailing past the American Philippines, so let’s fight *them* as well, because why not? AGGRO!” war that began with Pearl Harbor.
I do agree that they all influenced each other, but I’d argue that it was only influence, not deterministic.
I’m not sure I would quite say “n = 1”, but I entirely agree that a small sample size makes the conclusions here pretty weak. (And if you broaden the definition of “fascism”, which you really probably shouldn’t, then you get the problem that many of those states weren’t especially trigger-happy when it comes to war).
> Imperial Japan’s ideology has its own features and so may not be classified as fascist
Now I’m confused, and feel that this discussion could’ve used a definition for fascism. I thought it’s something like “totalitarianism with dreams abroad”, which would put both the empire-building Japanese as well as most communist regimes under the fascist umbrella (the Soviets did go for Poland and Finland among others). I don’t know anything about Franco’s platform or whatever was happening in Portugal, but under that definition it would be ambitious to count countries that aren’t warring with their neighbors as “fascist”.
Is fascism defined by “aggressive totalitarianism”? Or by “whatever Mussolini did” (in which case every socialist country would count)? Or by the machismo and Versace suits? What makes a country “fascist” for the purposes of this argument?
He refers to Umberto Eco’s definition, which is summarised here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco
Thanks, I overlooked that. Though tbh, looking at that list, I don’t feel any wiser on the topic. It’s a lot of criteria and “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”. Guess I need to skim the 1995 book.
It’s only a few pages, and it’s available online.
Never thought Umberto Eco was a good source on what fascism is.
I thought it’s something like “totalitarianism with dreams abroad”, which would put both the empire-building Japanese as well as most communist regimes under the fascist umbrella (the Soviets did go for Poland and Finland among others)
if your definition is so broad it captures that many wildly differently types of governments, I’d say it’s nearly useless and meaningless.
The best definition I’ve seen has something to do with believing in national renewal or national regeneration through armed conflict, which better captures, I think, what made these types of regimes relatively unusual. Authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism, alone or in combination, are very common and completely standard around the world, historically and today- the idea that the world is an arena for struggle between strong and weak nations, that a nation needs to expand or die, that war and other kinds of conflict are ennobling, etc. are more unusual (not unique, just unusual).
For my money, fascism is a (type of) conspiracy within democracy against democracy; i.e., a program of refactoring state legitimacy so that it no longer derives from popular consent and instead is organized around a theory of national unity, personalist dictatorship, and militaristic expansion. A fascist state is one whose government has been captured by a fascist movement.
(Obviously, movements can be more or less fascist, and governments ditto.)
And in fact this analysis does a good job explaining the interstate failures of fascist states. Another way of describing fascism is that it is a way of reaching into the wiring of a modern liberal government, finding as many feedback loops and stabilizing systems as you can, and ripping them out.
This is dangerous for your neighbors—modern nation states are extremely potent mechanisms, and it’s bad when one nearby goes supercritical—but it’s in some sense even more reliably catastrophic for the state itself, since once you commit to always double down, you will, at some point, invariably lose everything.
Your definition of “fascism” is a turtle (à la “turtles all the way down”) resting on the back of another turtle, the definition of “totalitarianism.”
If I recall correctly, the original articulation of the concept of “totalitarianism” came prior to the familiar midcentury Cold War liberal “horseshoe theory”-style critique of fascism and/or state socialism, in the form of an earlier antimodernist-conservative critique of modern statecraft writ large (encompassing fascism, socialism, and liberal democracy) as exemplified in the “total war” and “total mobilization” policies enacted by the belligerent powers during World War I, even if not especially the “liberal” “democratic” ones.
I would personally define a fascist regime as a totalitarian (meaning that the economy and civil society is directly subsumed into the state) regime that uses nationalism as its legitimizing principle. According to fascists, the nation-state should act as one organism, avoiding the divisions of class and party.
It’s a much better definition than Eco’s gibberish at any rate.
What isn’t better than Eco’s definition, though? It’s such a useless mess without real meaning.
+1000.
What does being “good at war” mean though?
In general, wars seem to be won by fielding more soldiers and manufacturing more arms than the other side.
The fascist states you name were worse than their opponents at those things, and were eventually ground down. So in that sense they were “bad at war”.
But it also means being “good at war” is largely meaningless in isolation, since it’s basically the same as “good at manufacturing stuff and having a large population”.
Suppose instead you defined being “good at war” as having a military that is particularly effective per unit soldier.
Nazi Germany does seem to have been “good at war” in those terms. The initial conquest of Western Europe was highly effective. It overcome an enemy in prepared defences with relatively few soldiers and tanks. Even in the other theatres, it seems to have required a large superiority in soldiers, armor and aircraft to defeat relatively smaller German units. The German army was well ahead of its opponents in auftragstaktik and combined arms operations.
It feels like you’re trying to win the argument by defining your terms in a highly specific way which makes the terms rather useless.
It’s a legitimate question to ask at any point “How can we make our military more effective per unit soldier with a given budget?” If you accept that there can be answers other than “have more soldiers and a higher budget”, then there is an alternative definition of “good at war”.
So … if you don’t count unsuccessful invasions, being invaded themselves, having their governments overthrown and their social / political structures redesigned by the non-fascist victors, fascist governments can actually be considered good at war?
Re-read paragraphs 5 and 6, where Bret gives his definition of being “good at war”. Like most people, his definition includes winning.
His definition doesn’t even include winning, just “securing desired strategic outcomes or at least avoiding undesirable ones”. So you could say Vatican City is reasonably “good at war” (assuming you take it as being founded in 1927) by that definition.
It’s a definition that sounds superficially reasonable, but breaks down when you actually try to apply it, because it starts to differ wildly from the way the phrase would actually be used in common language.
Was Vatican City “better at war” than Britain over the 20th century? Vatican City maintained its territory and status, Britain lost its empire and sank relatively far in relative status. Vatican City secured its desired strategic outcomes just fine. So fine, Vatican City was “better at war” than Britain in the 20th century. But if those two powers had actually gone to war, Britain would have annihilated the tiny state with ease.
The whole framing of “desired strategic outcomes” is dubious. Weak powers tend to have modest desires. The definition means that the more ambitious a power’s goals are, the “worse at war” it is. The definition drifts further and further from everyday use the more you examine it.
The Vatican is a microstate designed as part of a special relationship with another state, namely, Italy. Its original goal was to let Mussolini perform religious traditionalism by giving the Holy See a small piece of territory to avoid having the pope be technically subject to the sovereignty of a secular state. So if we’re evaluating the geopolitical track record, we should not think about the Vatican at all, but rather about the Holy See, whose record is pretty mixed, for example in its inability to stem the secularization of the Catholic world.
I think you’re confusing a complete definition of “good at war” with an attempt to bound the definition. I’d gloss Bret’s argument as follows:
“We can of course debate what it means to be ‘good at war’, but we should agree that any system which leads to catastrophic defeat is on the whole NOT ‘good at war’, however we define it.”
This is an important logical maneuver. Consider for example the land speed record.
There’s a lot of debate about what counts as a land speed record these days. E.g., if I have a rocket that flies very low (faster than any wheel-driven vehicle), how much does it have to touch the ground to qualify as “land speed”? Does it need to touch the ground with a wheel or would an antenna count? What if the antenna abrades away during the trip? What if it snaps off? Are we racing on a standard track or on natural salt flats? Etc. etc. etc.
But now suppose I enter in the land speed record contest a Hyundai Elantra with a tactical nuke in the trunk. At the sound of the starting gun, I set off the bomb. And I say, look, at least some of the debris landed on the far side of the finish line, and in record time, too!
We don’t need to resolve all of the precise questions raised above to say, listen, in order to win the land speed record, the vehicle has to cross the finish line in some more cohesive sense than “a bit of the debris got there”. And we don’t need to pretend that this is an edge case. There are, in fact, edge cases! Is the vehicle allowed to drop rocket stages? What if a wheel falls off as it’s crossing the line? Etc. But the car with a nuke is not an edge case; it’s simply a loser.
I hope the analogy here is clear. There are all sorts of questions about comparative military strength subject to precise and subtle arguments, not least because wars are the domain of both specificity and of chance. But a political system that guarantees total defeat can be excluded as a winning system, regardless of how those precise and subtle arguments shake out.
Fascism as a political system committed fascist states to escalating violence whose inevitable conclusion was comprehensive defeat. It’s a flawed system, and it lost because of its flaws. The relative performance of specific militaries in particular contexts over the course of WWII doesn’t undermine that central, inarguable point.
Suppose somebody trains at martial arts until they can beat any two people at once. Then they get carried away and try to fight five people at once, and get killed. Yes, that person has a problem. But being “bad at fighting” isn’t their problem. Knowing when not to fight is their problem.
In general, when we say someone is “good at something” we take into account ambition as well as success rate. Suppose one person only ever cooks mac and cheese, and they always do so perfectly. Another person tries ambitious recipes, and sometimes finds their souffles don’t rise. We don’t say only the first one is “good at cooking”.
A professional tennis player might win a smaller percentage of matches than the best amateur in your tennis club. But we wouldn’t say the amateur is “better at tennis” than the professional.
Bret’s definition uses language in an unnatural way, so that “good at war” becomes inconsistent with the way we talk about being “good at” anything else.
Normally I like Bret Devereaux’s work. But this is just empty sophistry. He wants to be able to annoy fascists (a worthy goal tbf) by saying “fascist governments are bad at war” and has constructed a definition to allow him to use the phrase.
The deeper problem is that I think it fosters a dangerous sense of complacency to imagine that fascist or fascist-like states will always overreach and destroy themselves.
Putin seems to be very aware of Hitler’s big mistake, and is instead playing careful games of brinksmanship that stop short of getting into a shooting war with any state much larger or with more manufacturing capacity than his.
It seems quite plausible that Putin and his successors will keep enlarging Russia indefinitely with salami-slice tactics, such that no slice is big enough to provoke a war. Already the powers that were arming Ukraine seem to be losing interest and focus.
To defeat the fascist states, the liberal free-market democracies had to temporarily become something much more centralized and authoritarian. Britain held no elections between 1935 and 1945. The US built 4.7 million cars in 1940, but almost none for the next three years: not because of the free market but because the government decreed that military production should replace civilian. Economically, to defeat fascism it was necessary to become more like the fascist states in that there was a tight integration between companies and the state, with the state in control.
It’s a complacent fantasy to pretend that fascist states are intrinsically bad at war and will self-destruct.
Well, actually… the Nazi state specifically did not do any of this integration in the first few years of the war. It only switched to a total war economy in 1943, whereas the UK did as soon as the war started and the USSR and US did as soon as they were attacked. The thinking on the German nationalist right (not just the Nazis) was that Germany lost WW1 because the home front refused to support the troops or believe in final victory, due to the British blockade (read: hunger); therefore, they reasoned, they should not have a total war economy. Besides, the conquests of Poland and France were quick. Hitler thought he was about to win in 1940-1, which also colored his negotiations with Stalin over the USSR joining the Axis – Stalin correctly thought it was a long war and made large demands, Hitler thought he was about to win anyway so Stalin was in no position to demand anything and therefore rejected his advances and chose to invade the USSR instead.
Well, actually… the Nazi state specifically did not do any of this integration in the first few years of the war. It only switched to a total war economy in 1943, whereas the UK did as soon as the war started and the USSR and US did as soon as they were attacked.
If Nazi Germany was able to conquer most of Europe on a non-total-war footing, that suggests that they were actually quite good at fighting.
They beat one peer: France, whose failures in 1939-40 are well-known and enormous. Then they failed to beat the UK (but Hitler thought he was about to, never mind that the Battle of Britain wasn’t a win for the Luftwaffe), and failed to beat the USSR, and failed to beat the US.
You don’t need to be a Wehraboo. You choose to be.
to Theophile – unlike martial arts, war is about much more than fighting. One can be good at fighting (as the Germans were) and bad at war. In fact, the German emphasis on being good at fighting to the neglect or active detriment of other factors in both World Wars was a key cause of their loss in both.
Alon Levy – that Germany did not go over to a total war footing until 1943 is a common belief, but a wrong one. The regime switched to military at the expense of domestic production from 1934. By 1939 this had undercut both ordinary living standards and ability to export. And a higher proportion of German women were at work than in Britain at its wartime peak. Source: Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction.
On the other hand, the United States managed more than Germany did.
Source: Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 by Leila J. Rupp
@TheophileEscargot
The comparison with martial arts is, I think, instructive. There are 2 main reasons why someone might pursue martial arts. The first sees martial arts as something to pursues for its own sake; for fitness, self-improvement, etc. The 2nd, much more practical reason, is that martial arts is a means to protect yourself. (I’ve heard this dichotomy expressed as “self-protection vs. self-perfection”).
The thing is, self-protection is a lot broader than just fighting well. It also includes everything you do to avoid getting in a situation where you have to fight in the first place. So your example of someone who picks a fight with 5 people at once and gets killed could plausibly be said to be “good at martial arts, but extremely bad at self-protection”. Which, to someone in the 1st group, might make sense, but to someone in the 2nd, would seem utterly absurd, because it’s effectively elevating the means above the end.
I’d say that the biggest problem with how fascists view war is that they see it the same way the 1st group sees martial arts: as something to be done for its own sake. And thus, while they can sometimes be good at fighting, they are almost always bad at obtaining strategic objectives (indeed, one might say, “good at fighting, but bad at war”).
As to your last point, that seeing fascists as “bad at war” will lead to overconfidence and complacency, I think it’s important to note that war isn’t a zero sum game; it’s a negative sum game. And thus there’s no inherent contradiction in saying that fascists are bad at war, while also being a major threat to their neighbours. It’s entirely possible for a state to make decisions that are bad for it, but even worse for its neighbours, and so “fascists are bad at war” should not necessarily be comforting.
@TheophileEscargot “But being “bad at fighting” isn’t their problem. Knowing when not to fight is their problem.”
The argument being that ‘knowing when to fight’ is a critical part of ‘being good at fighting’. People really need to read more Sun Tzu…
Also, people are using ‘fighting’ as an analogy for ‘war’ where it makes a poor analogy (or at least, like all analogies, works on some levels but needs clarity of thinking about where the analogy differs).
“Yes, that person has a problem. But being “bad at fighting” isn’t their problem. Knowing when not to fight is their problem.”
But Bret didn’t say “bad at fighting”. He said “bad at war”.
Amateurs talk tactics. Professionals study logistics. Historians consider strategy.
It is the prerogative of experts in a domain to decide what the appropriate scope of analysis is, and to make an affirmative case that that scope, rather than other scopes, are the appropriate unit of consideration.
It’s true that the sort of fascism-fans enamored of the might of the Werhmacht (or whatever) may focus narrowly on fighting to make their case for their darlings. Bret’s (implicit) argument above is that this focus is wrongheaded.
In general, arguments about definitions are inconclusive. One can’t compel one’s interlocutor to adopt one’s own definitions. But in this case, the argument is that a concept of “good at war” independent of “good at strategy” is meaningless; that it is a useless and stupid frame of analysis. Sometimes experts make this case. Sometimes they’re right. I find the argument here to be completely persuasive. People who imagine that fascism might make their country great should consider that history’s most notable fascist regimes left their countries a smoking crater, partitioned by their enemies.
It is the prerogative of experts in a domain to decide what the appropriate scope of analysis is, and to make an affirmative case that that scope, rather than other scopes, are the appropriate unit of consideration.
Firstly, Brett’s an expert on Roman warfare, not on fascism or WW2, so I’m not sure this argument is relevant.
Secondly, experts don’t actually define “good at war” in such a way that only winners count. Military historians universally consider Napoleon and Hannibal to have been among the greatest generals ever, and their campaigns are studied in staff colleges throughout the world, although both of them got comprehensively beaten in the end.
People who imagine that fascism might make their country great should consider that history’s most notable fascist regimes left their countries a smoking crater, partitioned by their enemies.
depends on what kind of “fascist’ they are- if they’re a hard-core Catholic fan of the Schussnigg regime, then they’re not going to be convinced by evidence that Nazi Germany was terrible, because they already agree that Nazi Germany was terrible.
Why would you define “particularly effective per unit soldier” as “good at war”? That’s functionally a definition which is rigged to declare that, because the Nazis were able to fight effectively on the defense in a modern industrialized war, they were therefore better at war. But very straightforwardly, the Nazis suffered crushing operational defeats like Overlord, Bagration, Cobra during that time, and they were functionally annihilated in the Battle of the Atlantic by 1943 and were unable to respond except by putting faith in technology alone. They proved unable to run an effective logistics system except when they had a clearly defined and limited operational box, as was evident in North Africa and during Barbarossa.
Or to put this all another way, the USSR, bereft of Lend-Lease aid that began to arrive in quantity only in 1943, significantly poorer per capita than Germany prior to the war, reeling from the Great Purge and its effects on the civilian population and military, having upended its entire defensive system, shackled with an interventionist dictatorial leader… still fought the Nazis to a standstill in 1941 and accomplished the Stalingrad encirclement in 1942. The USSR was able to produce effective, mass-producible designs for their military equipment which made Lend-Lease aid able to focus on building up their mobile forces through the necessary logistical capabilities. If matters were simply ones of raw numbers of people and raw industrial capacity, you would expect the fight to be weighted fairly strongly against the USSR. But what actually happened is that the Nazis achieved their successes against the USSR at the cost of weakening their forces overall, and forestalling further victories, while the USSR grew stronger by developing capabilities that enabled the stunning victories of 1944 and 1945.
The Nazis opened the war against the UK and France unable to clearly understand how victory would be brought about, which was no clearer after May 1940. The British, and the Americans once they joined the war, had a clear understanding of how they would bring about victory against Nazi Germany, and although significant dissension existed in the RAF and USAAF about that understanding, that dissension was never allowed to totally obviate the buildup of the capacity to carry out the necessary operations. To contrast, the brightest Nazi hope for victory against the British was the submarine battle in the Atlantic, but there was never a coordination of Nazi efforts to support that battle or even full acceptance in Nazi strategic leadership that this effort was worth pursuing, nor even a clear direction of effort by those believers in the submarines. Beyond the balance of materiel, where the Allies were severely disadvantaged until well into the war, the Nazis failed to capitalize operationally on their advantages or strategically analyze what they were trying to do to win in the West.
And all of this is directly relevant to Eco’s evaluation of fascism- the Nazis were unable to evaluate what they needed to do to subjugate the British, because they were unable to evaluate the British rationally. They were unable to accurately evaluate any of their opponents in the Second World War, and as a consequence, they lost, though they aimed to kill as many people as they could in the throes of their loss.
It is possible to go into ever-more exhausting detail- contrasting Western Approaches Command to the Unterseebootwaffe staff, say- but I’ll leave off there.
Being “good at war” means winning wars, or at least surviving them intact. The thing that matters most is results!
There’s no point in quibbling about “effectiveness per unit soldier” when you’ve lost the war, your bombed-out cities have been occupied by the victors, and your government and military have been entirely dismantled and replaced.
Regardless of individual battle results, Nazi Germany was bad at war. On the strategic level, it instigated several wars against powers it had no hope of beating, and constantly hampered the efficiency of its own military establishment by deliberately encouraging factionalism and division. Logistically, it was totally unprepared for a drawn-out war, massively overextended its logistical capabilities, failed to prepare for foreseeable events like a Russian winter, and wasted substantial resources on developing ridiculously ineffective weapons. Tactically, it was deceived by its own early successes and adapted to changing conditions far slower than the Allies did, and was hamstrung by absurd commands from Hitler and top leadership. Sure, the Wehrmacht started out quite good at combined arms operations, but they had plenty of other issues that lost them the war despite that.
That sounds contradictory to the outcomes. Nazi Germany, which, by your definition, is “good at war”, lost the war; the Soviet Union, which, by your definition, is “bad at war”, won the war. You ended up saying that “good is bad” and “bad is good”. The conclusion to take away from this is that it’s best to be “bad at war”, because then you win the wars you are “bad” at. Which is really silly.
It’s a trap. Increasing the budget can reduce effectiveness per unit soldier while increasing effectiveness of the military in general. For example, the Panzer V Panther was a better tank than the T-34 (and maybe even the M4 Sherman) on a unit-per-unit hard stats comparison, and due to logistical constraints it made sense for Germany to switch over from the Panzer IV, but the sheer cost of switching over production en masse to a tank of equivalent strength (something like the IS-2) might have cost the USSR much more materially than remaining with the production lines set up to churn out T-34s.
It’s fine to focus on unit effectiveness – but not at the cost of losing the forest for the trees. The very first question a military should concern itself with is – given a potential war, what could we do to maximize our chances of victory, and minimize the risk of catastrophic loss (which, as Mr. Devereaux already noted, may mean coming to the conclusion of “don’t start a war of choice to begin with”)? Only afterwards can one consider military cost-effectiveness, although it’s still important to note that the US decided to focus on funding their military several times more than any other country’s regardless, because the ability to win a war is just that important.
That sounds contradictory to the outcomes. Nazi Germany, which, by your definition, is “good at war”, lost the war; the Soviet Union, which, by your definition, is “bad at war”, won the war. You ended up saying that “good is bad” and “bad is good”. The conclusion to take away from this is that it’s best to be “bad at war”, because then you win the wars you are “bad” at. Which is really silly.
No, it just means that having superior resources can make up for being less effective per unit soldier.
I think Putin’s Ukraine gambit of 2022 is a disaster for Russia for a more subtle reason. Note here that the Russia Ukraine war began with the Russian taking of the Crimea and the Donetsk in 2014. February 2022 was just a heating up of an invasion that had begun 8 years previously.
One of the major objectives of Russian policy has been neutralizing Finland and Sweden. The Finns gave Russia all it could handle during WWII. The 2022 attack on Kiev convinced both countries to join NATO tout suite.
If the whole conflict goes back to being frozen in place as it was 2015-2021. The expansion of NATO will be seen in future ages as a massive unforced error.
Dear Prof. Devereaux: let me commend you for going straight to Umberto Eco’s concept of fascism. However (of course), let me commend you not so much for going back to Clausewitz (drink!): If war is the continuation of policy by other means, we may say that fascist regimes are terribly bad at policy. Fascists regimes were terrible at choosing allies, at choosing enemies and (therefore) at choosing wars.
Franco may be a case in point. He was never really into ideology or the day-to-day of governing politics. A very popular (most probably apocryphal) quote in Spain has him advice one of his sycophants: “Do like I do, don’t mess with politics”.
He did use the support of a very small fascist party (Falange Española), but immediately after assuming the leadership of the rebel army, he merged it with an ultra-conservative, ultra-catholic, ultra-monarchist party (Partido Carlista), creating a nationalist conservative party with a very confusing ideology.
Franco’s Spain was never a member or an effective ally of the Axis. He did send one (Wow!) division to the Russian front in July 1941, but his intentions were clearly very mixed: he signalled support for Nazi germany, but gave very little help; he took the opportunity to send thousands of the most ardent fascist (Falange) veterans to die in Russia or, at least, to disappear there for a time.
Then, in October 1944, after an agreement with the Allies, he ordered the withdrawal of the Spanish contingent. So: never really an ally of Hitler, then abandoned him and, in the process, he disposed of a few thousand fascists. By 1959 he was already an US ally.
Franco’s army was mediocre (it’s enemies were worse, always an advantage); it was his political decisions that granted him victory and political survival.
I haven’t read all the other comments so perhaps this point has already been made, but the justification in the second paragraph strikes me as a fig leaf. This is never going to deter anyone from seriously considering fascism as an ideology because it is too brutally honest. Calling someone a loser to their face is never going to convince anyone of anything, however much you back it up with reasoned arguments.
While it’s true that the first time you tell someone that they’re wrong almost never succeeds in getting them to see that they’re wrong, it’s also true that the first time you *refuse* to tell someone that they’re wrong *always* fails to get them to see that they’re wrong.
It’s less about choosing whether to tell someone they’re wrong, and more about choosing _how_ you do so.
Insulting someone is a sure-fire way to close down any chance of them accepting what you have to say. If you say ‘you’re a loser’ followed by ‘here’s a true thing’, the person has two options of how to take this. 1: ‘This person is correct about the true thing, and thus I must be a loser’ or 2: ‘This person is wrong about the true thing, and thus is also wrong about me being a loser’.
You can see how the second one is far more palatable than the first, and doesn’t require any painful introspection and self re-evaluation. There is a third option ‘this person is right about the true thing, but wrong about me being a loser’ but that’s a tricky logical leap in a fraught situation.
I suppose our host may be trying to catch future-fascists at a key point before they self-identify as fascists, and divert their course away from fascism as a way to prop up any insecurities they’re nursing (and thus by calling fascists ‘losers’ the would-be-fascist thinks ‘I don’t want to be a loser, so I’ll be something else instead’.
Lots of comments about the failures of other nations and political systems, but I notice something many of the wars share; the attacker had no real plan that would allow the enemy to leave the war and endure the loss.
Whether it is WW2, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq etc they all seem to have unreasonable war goals, complete destruction or changing the regime to something the locals don’t like or simply punishment.
My guess is that in successful wars the winner had clear goals that the loser could accept and endure and understood that if you win the war you are the country in position to pay for the rebuilding.
Or at least, a backup that allows you to “settle” if the big prize is not possible to achieve.
In WW2 isn’t the goal of the Allies is complete destruction of the fascist regimes?
And in Vietnam there is no goal of complete destruction or changing regime at all.
With Vietnam the US was attempting to do the same thing it had done in Korea. But I suppose the “attacker” is North Vietnam, which did indeed fail with the Tet Offensive, but by persevering wound up successfully sending its tanks in and conquering the place once the US pulled out.
Re Syria and 1967 and 1973: it’s not really a failure of fascism per se, because in 1967 Syria shared the failure with Jordan and Egypt, which had different regimes. Then, the most notable feature of Syria leading to its military disasters was not fascism, but rather the constant military coups (1961, the 1962 attempt, 1963, 1966, 1970), which made the army totally dysfunctional; the Baathist ideology that ended up winning in Syria was fascist by most accounts, but that’s not the first thing that should come to your mind about why Syria was losing battles when it had divisions to the IDF’s brigades.
What’s true is that in 1973, Egypt did achieve its grand strategic goal of getting the Sinai back, at a price of having to make peace with Israel, whereas Syria achieved nothing (and Jordan sat that one out). But again, the first thing that should come to your mind is not that Sadat’s ideology was better at war than Baathism but that pan-Arabism in that era in practice meant that Jordan and Syria were Egyptian clients and the metropole pursued a policy that benefited it at the expense of a client. The same thing happened to Jordan in 1967 – it had placed its army in the West Bank under Egyptian control for better coordination.
Then, the examples you give from Saddam Hussein aren’t exactly failures of fascism either. A non-fascist Iraq would have still been clobbered by the US in both 1991 and 2003. In both cases, what happened was a series of mixed messages – the US had been sending mixed messages to Saddam in 1989-90 about invading Kuwait, and there, sure, his gamble that he could get away with it is plausibly a failure of the militaristic gambler mentality that Eco associates with ur-fascism. But in 2002-3, Saddam was trying to tell the US he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and also tell Iran he did, leading to his dishonesty around the WMD inspections. That’s not really a failure of militarism – it was a miscalculation about who the biggest threat was to a passive, defensive army. In terms of aggression, Saddam was a lot less brazen then than, say, the Houthis today, who probably are not going to be annihilated over attacking US Navy ships in international waters, so in that sense, if we’re rating ideologies, Jihadists are way more likely to be undertaking actions leading to their destruction than secular fascists are.
The point isn’t that a non-fascist Iraq would somehow have had a military of a size/force to fight off a US invasion. The point is that a fascist regime is bad at making strategic decisions and figuring out who/if they should fight; Iraq could never have beat the US, so they never should have attacked Kuwait and/or they should have accepted the offer to leave the country and end hostilities.
Yes, and in the context of 1990-1, that makes sense. But in the context of 2002-3, it doesn’t: Saddam was not being a reckless military adventurer the way he was in 1990, but rather miscalculated who the bigger threat to Iraq was after 9/11. The way Saddam was behaving in 2002 was not a debellatio offense in normal times whereas war with Iran was a risk; as it is, a lot of outside actors did read the signs correctly and tried to tell Bush that Saddam didn’t have WMD. It’s just, he wasn’t facing normal America but post-9/11 Bush-run America, for which ambiguity was casus belli.
Unsure how useful Eco’s definition is. If you compare his list to what we know of society and politics in the USSR (or just about any society which was ostensibly socialist or communist), I believe more than half of his points were true. Not too many people call the USSR (as opposed to Russia today) fascist.
Examples: “Action for action’s sake” (don’t just stand there, do something), “disagreement is treason” (lots of things), “obsession with a plot” (wreckers and kulaks are preventing success), “everyone is educated to be a hero” (Stakhanovites), “selective populism” (Stalinism), and “Newspeak” (reading Pravda was an exercise in decoding what happened).
Since he suggests that even one point is enough for a society to fall into fascism, it looks like it may cover too much. So you end up back at fascism being used for things you don’t like.
Admittedly I have not read the essay itself, only the Wikipedia summary of his points. So he may have gone into more detail to better explain things.
One point is enough for a society to be susceptible to being sold on all the other points, and a society may be fascist without fully adopting all of the points if it is clear that the adoption of the remaining points is progressing.
Part of the point of Eco’s essay is that fascism is not an alien force- it grows out of things we recognize in ourselves and our societies. That said, there are several major distinctions of Eco’s essay- the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, the appeal to the frustrated middle, and the origins of nationalism- which very firmly put the USSR under Stalin in a different category; though a uncomfortably similar one, just as he calls out modern Italy and the New Age religious movement as uncomfortably fascist in the essay.
One of Eco’s remarks in his essay (available at the Anarchist Library; it’s not long) is that fascism lacks theory or an ethic, which I don’t think you can really say of the USSR – rather tediously the opposite, in my view. Therefore fascism can only ever be identified aesthetically, which are his “coagulation points”.
This wasn’t Eco, but someone mentioned that the major communist thinkers and predecessors are boring sociologists and political scientists who write huge tomes on political economy. The fascist forerunners are often poets or other artists. (d’Annunzio, etc.)
You should read the essay, it’s very good and if anything the other elements of it have held up better than the 14 characteristics of ur-fascism. I keep saying I should send a review to the Liberal Currents; the tl;dr version is that the “action for action’s sake” point is not at all a characteristic of fascism but of political leaders in general, even ones who are democratic, mainstream, and non-populist in mature democratic societies. Conversely, quite a lot of present-day democratic backsliders are characterized by inaction – Netanyahu is extremely hesitant and indecisive, for example. So it’s a good essay but the 14 characteristics haven’t held up terribly well.
(Separately, WW2-era Japan was fascist by basically any reasonable criterion, and Westerners just memory-hole how fascist it was because its victims were Asian. But the mass starvation it inflicted on Vietnam was right up there with how the Nazis treated the non-Jews of occupied Eastern Europe.)
the tl;dr version is that the “action for action’s sake” point is not at all a characteristic of fascism but of political leaders in general, even ones who are democratic, mainstream, and non-populist in mature democratic societies.
The old “politician’s fallacy”: Something must be done; this is something; therefore, this must be done.
Netanyahu, Orban, Putin and the like do tend to be bad at taking action, but they are all quite good at publicly performing the role of ‘man who takes big actions.’ Moreover, the larger part of the indecision that you do see is a refusal to stop an action in progress; that’s not mere stubbornness, they’ve engaged in an urfascist valorization of action and so they can’t just stop.
Isn’t that just standard modern politics, though? Everybody runs on a platform of “Vote for me and I’ll do X, Y, and Z”. Vanishingly few run on a platform of “Vote for me and I’ll basically do nothing and try not to rock the boat,” even if that’s what they actually end up doing once in office. Refusal to change course or abandon a policy for fear of looking weak is also very common in democracies.
Yes, but public performance of taking big actions is not at all a distinguishing feature of democratic backsliders (a term that, in the 21st century, is more relevant than fascism). Presidents in democracies do it all the time – performing decisiveness is a big part of the job of the presidents of the US and France. In parliamentary cabinet governments, consensus in the cabinet takes precedence, but even here, prime ministers often wish to perform decisiveness, coming to firm action and closing debate within the government; Angela Merkel did this and Olaf Scholz does this occasionally too.
But yes, backsliders tend to be atypical in how much they talk more than act. It’s very visible with Bibi especially, and also with Trump. But then it’s also common among populists who are not backsliders – in Southern European clientelist democracies, overpromising and underdelivering is normal (and the US too has some of this – “campaign in poetry, govern in prose” – but less so). The relevant feature of populists is that there are painful things that often need to be done to move the country forward, and populists refuse to do them, so they talk a lot and do little.
I think that while fascism tends to committ horrible crimes against humanity, doing horrible crimes against humanity does not make you a fascist. (neithe the United Kingdom nor the United States were fascists states)
When people are talking about Imperial Japan not being a fascist state they do not generally mean there were not fascists in imperial Japan: There clearly were, but more that because of how politics work it never quite coalescend into a unitary system. Other non-fascist institutions continued to function to a degree they didn’t in other fascist states (though notably, this varied in toher fascist states too)
I’m making a more precise claim than “Japan committed Nazi-scale war crimes” (the USSR did too). I’m making a claim that the form of government in Japan, while separating the actual military junta from the cult of personality of the emperor, was thoroughly fascist. It was traditionalist and anti-leftist, coming from a history of political violence in the 1920s that has some similarities with that of Weimar Germany, with a culture of elite toleration of political violence from the far right if it was said to come from pure (i.e. hyper-nationalistic) motives. It was militaristic from the outset. It had such a cult of death that there were kamikaze pilots.
“a culture of elite toleration of political violence from the far right if it was said to come from pure (i.e. hyper-nationalistic) motives”
Concerning considering the capitol hill riot…
Concerning considering the capitol hill riot…
You mean the one that got multiple of its participants arrested and sentenced to prison? That Capitol Hill riot?
@MrX True, that bit was heartening.
The fact that 2000 people could just waltz in there with minimal resistance is not. The fact that the guy who instigated it all (Trump) stands a non-zero chance of getting back into the presidency (indicating at least a fair proportion of tolerance for his actions among the political elite) is not.
I suppose the kicker in terms of ‘elite tolerance’ is asking ‘what would the response have been if it was left-leaning black people who did it instead of far-right white people?’. Couched in those terms, I’d argue that ‘no fatalities on the day’ would constitute significantly higher tolerance of violence from the far right than other parts of the political (and racial) spectrum.
I do acknowledge that perhaps adding race into the mix is a confounding variable. Even if the question was ‘imagine it was far-left people instead of far-right people that stormed capitol hill’ I’d expect the aftermath would have been far bloodier and there would have been a lot more anti-left propaganda flying around.
I suppose the kicker in terms of ‘elite tolerance’ is asking ‘what would the response have been if it was left-leaning black people who did it instead of far-right white people?’. Couched in those terms, I’d argue that ‘no fatalities on the day’ would constitute significantly higher tolerance of violence from the far right than other parts of the political (and racial) spectrum.
Left-leaning black (and white) people caused the most expensive string of riots in US history just a few months before the Capitol affair. How many of them were killed?
@Mr. X: How many of them were killed?
More on an absolute basis, fewer on a per-capita one.
@Ynneadwraith: the reason the Capitol Hill rioters were able to just waltz on in was because no one thought that they were going to do something violent, so no one was prepared for it when it happened. The usual pattern for right-wing protests in the US had been “show up, open carry weapons, mill about, clean up after yourselves, leave,” so when things turned pear-shaped everyone was caught flat-footed.
“everyone is educated to be a hero” (Stakhanovites)
Stakhanov was a “hero” in a very particular, and particularly socialist / communist way (being an exceptionally productive manual laborer) that many past societies, including the slave-based empires that the Nazis drew inspiration from, wouldn’t have recognized. That particular point does more to emphasize the differences between socialist and fascist states (as well as socialist and capitalist ones) than the similarities.
I agree with you that in general those points you quote seem pretty useless at separating fascist regimes from other kinds of states.
I have read the essay. It does not redeem the definition. It is a long list of things the author noticed growing up in fascist Italy with no frame of reference to know if they were distinct to fascism, distinct to authoritarian regimes, or universal to politics. So his points are a mix of all three: some are actually characteristic of fascism, some are more broadly authoritarian, and some are done by everyone (making up your own political jargon that makes things sound better, for example).
Of course, this very vagueness which allows anything and nothing to be fascist is why the definition remains popular.
I think that the full essay is a lot more informative than the list of points, some of which mean something other than what might be assumed (“cult of tradition” is about antirational ahistorical mysticism, not about just liking tradition). I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.
I think it would be easy to put together a set of “characteristics of authoritarian leftism” that would have a major overlap with the characteristics of fascism, but also some major differences. For example, instead of a cult of tradition we would have a cult of historical determinism vis-a-vis “materialism”.
First, I think it’s a bit unfair to claim the French government won WWII while claiming the German government lost. The French government was dissolved by WWII *twice*, as the Third Republic and Vichy. The Fourth republic got most of the Third back though.
Germany was partitioned and occupied.
Second, the fascist thing with inadvisable wars is, in my mind, a subset of the big authoritarian weakness – limited checks on insane policy. All governments have problems with policy of course, but when it becomes suicidal to contradict leadership, leadership quickly becomes suicidal. Fascists, with their focus on glorious war tend towards suicide that way, but authoritarians of other stripes have their own problems. Communist governments have a hard time digesting that their economic plans have failed, for example.
This can be mitigated to some extent if the leadership is canny (Iberian authoritarians, fascist or not, avoided peer-wars, for example), but authoritarian secession is … uneven … even compared to democracies.
My big worry is leaders detached from reality with nuclear weapons.
Could be Bad.
I’m reminded of the “tech fear is tech hype” argument. Fascists are evil [citation not needed], and so their opponents often paint them as terrifying. But while this is strictly better than depicting them as heroic, righteous, etc., it still plays into mythmaking of fascist power, which fascists themselves deploy and benefit from.
Or, as I’ve put it more humorously elsewhere:
Tired: fascism is a deal with the devil where you give up your soul in exchange for national greatness.
Wired: fascism is a pinky promise that when you are inevitably bombed flat by the advancing armies of any other ideology, you will all die wearing the same stupid hat.
Lindsay Ellis’s video about Mel Brooks and The Producers points out that of all the big depictions of the Nazis in media, this is the one neo-Nazis haven’t appropriated for themselves. American History X, she points out, is an anti-Nazi film through and through, but the Nazis look badass at the beginning so the neo-Nazis copy its aesthetic. But in The Producers they look so ridiculous that the neo-Nazis haven’t bothered.
Indeed, the one thing that fascists hate more than anything is to be laughed at.
A question for Bret: you said on one of the podcasts that the majority of military history jobs are DOD at the academies and staff colleges. Would you consider that a viable and desirable direction to go with your career? I would imagine that the academies have the same biases in hiring as other colleges , but I don’t know.
How was the 1967 war a “war of choice” for Syria? It started with Israel’s invasion of Egypt and occupation of the Sinai Peninsula (the second such “war of choice” for Israel after the Suez crisis)
Eco is excellent on the psychology of fascism, and his checklist is a good diagnostic. There is more, however. Ze’ev Sternhell locates the origins of fascism in Sorel, the syndicalists and similar movements (largely French) of the later C19. The core is nationalist, antimaterialist (all the fascist movements stressed the organic, mystical side of nationalism and the ‘triumph of the will’) and anti-rationalist (they were all about feelings, not calculation). The latter two are good clues to their fate – wars are won by calculation and a firm grasp of the material necessities, but are also the foundation of the militarism – war as an exercise of the heroic spirit, to be waged as a good in itself.
Aside from Italy, there were fascist components to Vichy, Degrelle’s Rexists in Belgium, Estado Novo in Portugal, Spain (the Falange), the Netherlands and a few others. The corporatist side allowed close collaboration with Catholic reaction (Vichy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium). So there are a fair few, and all advocated war (the Falange tried to push Franco into the Axis, but he would not go without firm guarantees that Hitler would provide the arms and food).
If you read their programs, they all wanted war with only a basic regard for who or where; most never achieved enough control of the state to carry the program into action.
What about the clerical-fascist government in Austria, before the Nazi takeover?
I’ve been enjoying reading the debate in the comments section this week! 🙂
Late to the party on this one, but I really think the Indian Annexation of Goa deserves a shoutout hear in terms of being a humiliating loss for fascism on the part of the Portuguese, sort of a reverse Falklands but much, much faster. (Forgive the wikipedia citation, I mostly learned about it at a museum there and don’t have a better source to immediately pull up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Goa
The Estado Novo Salazar regime pulled every stupid trick in the book to resist decolonization including asserting that all of the colonies were part of metropolitan Portugal and adamantly resisting any attempts to negotiate. India telegraphed repeatedly that they were going to invade (and had already taken several land locked exclaves 7 years earlier), and Salazar was warned by his generals that trying to defend Goa against an Indian invasion was a suicide mission. Salazar’s order was “Do not expect the possibility of truce or of Portuguese prisoners, as there will be no surrender rendered because I feel that our soldiers and sailors can be either victorious or dead.” He took it as far as trying to prevent Portuguese civilians from evacuating back to Portugal (was partially ignored).
The Portuguese were completely defeated within 36 hours with <100 casualties and more than 4,000 prisoners of war. The whole 'victorious or dead' thing was transparent fascist posturing and because the audience for it was domestic, not colonial, it didn't even have buy in from the troops he was giving that order to.
The whole ‘victorious or dead’ thing was transparent fascist posturing
I don’t think that’s unusually or uniquely a “fascist” thing- Fidel Castro gave the same “no surrender” order to the Cuban soldiers on Grenada during the U. S. invasion in 1983. (in the event, he was embarrassed when they did surrender).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/10/26/us-invades-grenada-fights-cubans/253e2bd0-01ff-4c31-aa6c-24c531c1166b/
Heck, the Spanish Republicans gave the same order whilst fighting fascists during the Civil War.
Not arguing that ‘no surrender’ is a uniquely fascist order, but giving it to colonial troops in a bid to retain overseas territory so transparently futile that it was practically a war of choice is a very fascist move. If you agree with the theory that fascism and particularly nazism was the techniques of colonial repression being redirected towards the homeland, it is arguably the specific soup of shallow arrogance and perception of your enemies and your local troops as dehumanized pawns that fascism evolved out of.
If you agree with the theory that fascism and particularly nazism was the techniques of colonial repression being redirected towards the homeland
I think that might work for Nazis in Germany, but not really for fascism in general- a bunch of regimes often called “fascist” were in countries that never had colonies (Slovakia, Romania, Croatia etc.).
In any case, Portuguese colonialism was way older than fascism- they were the first European colonial empire, if we don’t count the Crusader states or maybe the Baltic crusades- so I don’t think we would need fascism in prticular to explain Portuguese colonial wars or their unwillingness to give up the colonies.
maybe it’s an Iberian thing, LOL.
In exactly what way is it fascist posturing instead of non-fascist posturing?
Instead, war is an activity judged purely on outcomes, by which we mean strategic outcomes. Being ‘good at war’ means securing desired strategic outcomes or at least avoiding undesirable ones. There is, after all, something to be said for a country which manages to salvage a draw from a disadvantageous war (especially one it did not start) rather than total defeat, just as much as a country that conquers. Meanwhile, failure in wars of choice – that is, wars a state starts which it could have equally chosen not to start – are more damning than failures in wars of necessity. And the most fundamental strategic objective of every state or polity is to survive, so the failure to ensure that basic outcome is a severe failure indeed.
By this definition, ancient Sparta, whose polity survived from probably sometime in the 8th or 7th century BC down to its annexation by the Achaean League in 192 BC, was very “good at war”, although judging by what you’ve said elsewhere I was under the impression you held the opposite view?
I recall in the final entry of his Sparta series, he went through the various strategic objectives of the Spartan state and how well it accomplished them. In the least amibitious goal of “state survival”, they did pretty well, but if I recall correctly they didn’t do so well on any of the others.
So, definitely better at war than the Nazis (who couldn’t even manage state survival), but not necessarily great at war either.
“In the least amibitious goal of “state survival”, they did pretty well…”
So did the Picts. For that matter, there are hunter/gatherer tribes in the Amazon and on islands in the Pacific that still use stone-age technology. In each case, it was because there were so few resources that no one thought them worth fighting for. It’s hard to argue that someone who’s survived by not having anything worth taking is good at war.
In Sparta’s case I got the impression of a dude that peaked in high school–constantly bragging about how great he is, but increasingly irrelevant as the years go by, eventually becoming ridiculous while everyone else moved on.
IIRC, Sparta was the most powerful polis in Greece (or almost the most powerful) for about 300 years. Which polises have a better record?
It’s not obvious that Athens, for example, had a better record against Sparta than Sparta had against Athens.
Which 300 years are you talking about? Sparta starts dominating the Peloponnesus around 550 BC, but by 350 BC Thebes has thoroughly beaten them and they’re well on their way down their slide into irrelevancy.
Which 300 years are you talking about? Sparta starts dominating the Peloponnesus around 550 BC, but by 350 BC Thebes has thoroughly beaten them and they’re well on their way down their slide into irrelevancy.
200 years is probably closer to the mark than 300, but that’s still longer than any other Greek state managed (even Macedon was only dominant for around 148 years, from Philip’s victory at Chaeonea in 338 BC to the defeat at Cynoscephalae in 197). Sparta did a better job of maintaining its independence than most other poleis, too — certainly better than Athens, which was occupied at various times by the Persians, Spartans, and Macedonians, or than Thebes, which was occupied by the Persians and Spartans before being destroyed by the Macedonians.
Spartan independence after Leuctra and the subsequent liberation of Messenia had nothing to do with any great achievements of either warfare or statecraft, simply a matter of geopolitical irrelevance and geographic isolation. Conquering it would’ve been minimal effort, for a microscopic reward, to alleviate a nanoscopic threat.
It may not be the best conceivable way to illustrate the pivotal importance of Messenian enslavement as the economic basis for Sparta’s period of relevance in Greek history, but it’s my favorite: the only city in the Peloponnese you’ve likely ever heard of outside a history book is the Messenian regional capital, Kalamata.
Spartan independence after Leuctra and the subsequent liberation of Messenia had nothing to do with any great achievements of either warfare or statecraft, simply a matter of geopolitical irrelevance and geographic isolation. Conquering it would’ve been minimal effort, for a microscopic reward, to alleviate a nanoscopic threat.
Which illustrates a key problem with the idea that “good at war” equates to “not being conquered” — whether or not a state gets conquered is down to all sorts of factors, only some of which are military-related.
Sparta was, IIRC, also over twice as large as Athens.
So one could make the argument Sparta underperformed for its size, even if its track record was in reality somewhat better than that of Athens.
Though, this makes me wonder what would happen if the same adjust performance for size/economy/manpower was used for Bret Deveraux’s examples for WWII. Then I wonder whether the USSR and France might be rated as
equally ‘bad at war’ as Fascist Italy.
“Conquering it would’ve been minimal effort, for a microscopic reward, to alleviate a nanoscopic threat.”
It’s worth pointing out that this nanoscopic threat was a threat to itself as well. We’re talking about a state that literally declared war on itself as a matter of routine. The Spartiate were a dying breed (rapidly declining more or less from the start), and internal discord from the various underclasses (who quite openly wanted to slaughter the Spartiates) meant that a wise ruler could simply sit back and watch Sparta take itself out of the international equation. You’re not good at war if the reason you’re not conquered is that everyone else is waiting for you to destroy yourself.
Note that even if it didn’t happen in Sparta, it certainly happened in world history–colonial powers often gained footholds in regions via such internal discord. I’ve also heard this as a criticism leveled (rightly or wrongly) at the USA during the Civil War.
As people have observed above, you can’t really do statistics with a sample size of 1, so you can’t deduce very much about fascist states from the fact that the ones in WW2 happened to be on the losing side.
(I might also point out that existing fascists already know that Germany lost WW2, so repeating the fact cannot tell them something they don’t already know, and can’t persuade them of something they don’t already believe.)
OTOH, I have noticed that whenever people claim the WW2 Germany was good at some military task, they always give the army as the example of military effectiveness. They never seem to be talking about the Kriegsmarine’s performance at the battles of Narvik or the Barents sea, or comparing the bombing campaigns of the RAF and Luftwaffe. When it comes to judging military effectiveness, the air force and navy are assumed not to count. The German army is declared to have fought better than the allied ones, and the record of the air force and navy ignored.
As it happened, 1930s Britain/ America concentrated their rearmament programs on the air force and navy – the army was ignored. Their armies were built up only after the fighting started. And they are typically though to have fought less well than the services which were built up years earlier.
Perhaps the real lesson of WW2 is that if you want an armed service to fight effectively, it helps to prepare it for war before the war actually starts. I don’t see why this should surprise anyone.
The Kriegsmarine was horribly outmatched. They got lucky with the invasion of Norway, but afterward they were basically only successful sending submarines after merchant ships which hadn’t yet gotten into the convoy system. The Luftwaffe is another story. Since Germany had no aircraft carriers, they had to rely land-based planes instead, and Allied ships were wary of them. They were able to quickly capture Allied forts with paratroopers, and while they abandoned that tactic after the high casualties of Crete, they did actually manage to capture the island without a naval invasion, which I don’t think had ever been done before. They did lose the Battle of Britain, when the Brits had the home-field advantage of more gas remaining in their tanks, but when the Allies tried to bomb them in return they frequently got chewed up by German fighters. The Allies were able to build more planes than the Germans (whose aircraft production facilities they focused on destroying), so they eventually won the war of attrition and air dominance. In that respect, they resemble the Japanese navy, which was quite potent early on but couldn’t win a long war with an industrial powerhouse like the US.
Plenty of people have made the comparison between Nazi Germany and Napoleonic France. In both cases their armies ran rampant over continental Europe, but could not defeat the Brits at sea and eventually got overextended in Russia. Napoleon lost in the end (and then lost again when he came back), but I don’t think it’s sensible to say he was bad at war.
“They did lose the Battle of Britain, when the Brits had the home-field advantage of more gas remaining in their tanks, but when the Allies tried to bomb them in return they frequently got chewed up by German fighters.”
No British city was more than a few minutes flying time from the sea, giving the RAF only minutes to intercept an attack. Allied bombers attacking Germany were vulnerable for hours. The advantage was overwhelmingly with Germany throughout most of the war.
“The Kriegsmarine was horribly outmatched.”
That may be true, but if the Kriegsmarine being overmatched by the British Navy isn’t proof that Germany was bad at war, I don’t see why the Heer overmatching the British Army should be proof that Germany was good at war.
The Heer didn’t just beat the British army. They first beat the Poles, then the Norwegians and the western allies in Norway, then invaded France to beat the Brits & French again, then after the Italians floundered against the Greeks the Germans invaded to beat the Greeks and yet again the Brits. Bailing out the Italians in North Africa was not as successful in terms of kicking out the Brits, but they seized a lot of British territory by the time they launched Barbarossa. That was the largest invasion in history, which seized a massive amount of territory (and prisoners, who were deliberately starved). Stalin wanted the allies (which included the US after Pearl Harbor) to show they their commitment to the fight against Germany before they were ready to open up a new front, so the Brits and Canadians attempted the Dieppe raid (supposedly intended to force the Luftwaffe to attack there, although the RAF wound getting the worse of it there, which was a complete disaster.
I’ve mentioned the Brits getting beat a lot of times, and that isn’t at all because they were bad at land war. If we compare Axis forces that fought both the Brits & Soviets, they could win at much more of a numerical disadvantage against the Soviets than the Brits. The Brits were simply able to stay in the game because they were an island large enough to support a decent military.
The allied dominance at sea was important in terms of permitting the Brits & Americans to even reach battlefields to fight the Germans, but they weren’t going to win the war with just that. Nor even with air dominance (although Arthur Harris thought strategic bombing would accomplish that much earlier than the war wound up lasting). What caused Germany to actually lose the war was getting beat on land, which is typically what’s required (the US victory over the Japanese more with sea & air power but short of invading the home islands of mainland Japan is atypical and involved weapons never used against any other country).
I’ll just address the first couple of examples.
The Germans did beat the Poles, that’s true. However, they also did so with a 3:1 superiority in tanks and aircraft, 2:1 superiority in guns, a 3:2 advantage in manpower, and the assistance of the Soviet Union when they knifed the Poles in the back.
Meanwhile, in Norway, they succeeded via coup de main, the Allies were actually regaining ground before the invasion of France dramatically altered the strategic situation and they decided to withdraw, and the Kriegsmarine lost a good portion of its surface units in the doing.
Don’t get me wrong, they fought well, but you’re exaggerating the achievements by just a tad.
If you’re going to be specific about fascism, then there’s an argument that Nazism is distinct.
I don’t think you can so easily dismiss the argument that the Germans lost because they fought so many people rather than because they fought badly. If Hafthor Bjornsson challenges an elephant to a lifting competition and loses, it makes him foolish for thinking he can accomplish the impossible, but not bad at lifting things. If the Germans had been bad at fighting wars, one would have expected them to have lost much earlier. You come up with excuses about the democracies being unprepared (even though there was quite some time between the invasion of Poland, when they declared war on Germany, and the invasion of France) and politically divided (because they’re democracies rather than one-party states), but a larger majority for their governing coalitions wouldn’t have put them on the cutting edge of mechanized warfare as the Wehrmacht happened to be.
I also see that you haven’t mentioned any of the victories Putin had prior to Ukraine. He’d been popular for a long time because he succeeded where Yeltsin failed with Chechnya, and likely got overconfident as a result of his short war with Georgia.
Any thoughts of serializing another paradox game?
Imperator is coming.
“Countries, governments and ideologies which are good at war do not voluntarily start unwinnable wars.”
How do you know which war is unwinnable? The Mongols – kind of like proto-fascists that liked wars and genocides – started a war against the stronger Jin dynasty. They won and kept winning until the death of Chinggis Khan. Germany also kept winning until their failure at the gate of Moscow. The reason Germany kept fighting more and more is because Hitler is a gambler, rather than a fanatic fascist. He saw himself wining, so he kept betting higher. If he lost the war with Poland, I doubt he would keep fighting more wars.
Italy also only attacked weaker countries, typical opportunistic land gabbing like they did during WW1. Spain didn’t join Axis. So why you make it like all fascist countries are suicidal at wars?
Also consider other non-fascist wars: for example, Vietnam war. “David” Vietnam vs “Goliath” USA. Was it unwinnable from the start?
“Starting a war in which you will be outnumbered, ganged up on, outproduced and then smashed flat: that is being bad at war.”
The Crusaders also did that in the first crusade. But by doing that, they also created their own states. So are they bad at war too?
“Syria, of course, lost a war of choice against Israel in 1967, then was crushed by Israel again in another war of choice in 1973”
So you means Syria attacked Israel JUST BECAUSE Syria is fascist? Again, was that war unwinnable from the start?
“Russia may yet salvage some sort of ugly draw out of this war – more a result of western, especially American, political dysfunction than Russian military effectiveness”
So it is not unwinnable?
Now that I think about it – one thing this article is missing is the distinction as to what is it that makes fascist nations specifically bad at war as compared to ancient and medieval nations that were highly militaristic and glorified martial prowess. Mussolini styled his Italy after the Roman Empire – in part, so did Hitler style Germany after Fascist Italy. What is it about the Roman Empire that made it successful in warfare and inoculated it from falling down into the fascist trap?
My absolutely non-expert opinion is that a few things probably contributed:
1) Roman civilian leadership was heavily trained in the realities of their style of combat. Their career paths took them through positions that dealt harshly with the realities of waging war, such as supplying the legions. This likely beat out some of the idealism and propaganda you see in fascist leadership.
2) The styles of warfare are very, very different. That may have something to do with it. I haven’t given this sufficient thought, though.
3) The economics of war is very, very different now than in the past. In the past you were fighting wars for territory, which in turn made you more wealthy. It was an economic win. Now? There are some key strategic locations (the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, stuff like that) which can make or break a nation, but realistically there’s nothing in France (or Germany, or Poland) that’s worth the cost of winning a war against those nations. So Fascists are essentially fighting modern wars with ancient economic theories.
4) Rome’s mentality wasn’t a reaction against anything, but rather something deeply rooted in their society. In contrast, Fascism seems to be a counter-culture built to oppose Liberalism (not the Democratic Party, but the socio-political concept). And I think that makes a difference. If nothing else, Roman thought survived a lot longer, and that necessarily meant that it had some of the rough edges sanded off–things that didn’t work would have been removed. In contrast, Fascism has only been around for a handful of decades. Add to it that the Romans were a fairly practical people, whereas the average Fascist tends to be idealistic and to give practicality very little consideration.
I’d lean heavily on number 4 as my explanation, with the other three kind of merged together.
Roman and other Mediterranean/ancient military culture is an adaptation to circumstances. Which you can see by how all cultures in that region valued conquest, had fighting as a key part of citizenship in city states, etc.: conquering other places brings big rewards, places want to defend themselves from said conquests, which forces a big focus on fighting wars from everyone involved.
Since the culture is an adaption to circumstance, and not an opposition or reaction to something else, the people involved will be happy to adjust the militarism if needed, and combine it with less harsh ways of doing things if this makes sense. (such as Romans being somewhat less restrictive on women than some nearby cultures, or being willing to incorporate more outsiders as citizens.)
It isn’t just fascism and war, it seems like any tough guy, anti-left/anti-liberal, dominance/dog eat dog ideologies aren’t that great at even the things they are supposed to be good at, but a lot of people want to believe in them for some reason. The real man Russian military isn’t actually that great. (“They/them, Was/were”) Tough on crime policies and prosecutors don’t seem to actually reduce crime any more than other systems. Universal health care is generally cheaper then more competitive systems, lots of other examples.
Tough on crime policies and prosecutors don’t seem to actually reduce crime any more than other systems.
Tough on crime policies seem to be working fine for El Salvador, which over the last few years has gone from being one of the most violent countries in the Western Hemisphere to one of the safest.
more generally, the reason humans are relatively low-violence species compared to our chimpanzee cousins seems to be because we ‘self-domesticated’ by executing our most violent males, over many millennia of pre-history. i don’t know what to make of the strange claim that being ‘tough on crime’ doesn’t help with, uh, reducing crime, although i also don’t think it’s *sufficient*.
El Salvador’s government also isn’t ‘right wing’ or anti-left (Bukele’s origins are in the communist FMLN) but thta’s a separate point.
“…we ‘self-domesticated’ by executing our most violent males, over many millennia of pre-history.”
I’m not convinced this is the case. This presupposes that the primary driver for violence is genetics and that selection pressures map with combat; both premises are suspect.
I think the self-domestication idea has merit, but I think mostly we should look at society. For example, Rome had two major competing virtues, roughly heroism and obedience, which held each other in check. You could be heroic, but you also had to obey orders and respect those who had earned that respect. Similarly, in the Middle Ages martial prowess were considered hugely important virtues, but so were piety and civility and courtly manners. I’ve heard it argued (on Chivalry Today, and I’m paraphrasing here) that in the Middle ages men acted, but women rewarded (and yeah, that often means what your filthy minds are thinking 😉 ). (Mostly this is discussing the upper classes; the lower classes had different virtues that rarely get written about.)
Basically, humans value status more than other apes. Stable, functional societies turn our propensity for violence toward useful ends by dolling out status judiciously. It’s not bad to cut people in half, burn cities, and loot the countryside–it’s only bad if you do it to the wrong people. If you do it to the right people, it’s praiseworthy and noble. And to be clear, I’m not necessarily condemning this. I’ve known a lot of fire fighters, often volunteers, and I’ve rarely met one (and never a top-tier one) that wasn’t also a pyromaniac. These urges are part of our species; eliminating them isn’t an option, so wise rulers direct them.
“Universal health care is generally cheaper then more competitive systems”
The criterion to measure health care systems is not cheapness.
“The criterion to measure health care systems is not cheapness.”
It is when outcomes are otherwise comparable. And in fact, the USA spends much more per capita on health care than any other country while having *worse* access and outcomes. Higher maternal mortality. Fewer doctors per capita. More people who forego necessary care or checkup due to financial worries. Obvious systemic inefficiencies — insurance companies had to be forced by law to pay for basic preventive care like vaccines, because they have no natural incentive to care about your long term health, given that you quite likely won’t be their customer 5 years later.
Notice that this lists one legitimate issue. Higher maternal mortality. OTOH, that one’s dependent on many other things besides the health care system. The others are on part with “cheapness” for criteria.
It is when outcomes are otherwise comparable. And in fact, the USA spends much more per capita on health care than any other country while having *worse* access and outcomes.
I have noticed it is of no use to argue with Mary Catelli. She will simply claim that the USA, despite exceptional spending as percentage of GDP, having much worse health outcomes, even when measured by objective criteria like child mortality or life expectancy, than is to be expected from a country with its income is the result of certain people doing such things as eating unhealthy or smoking whilst pregnant.
However, I do wonder with what kind of reply she will come up with when told that in the US all top 8 states with the highest life expectancy tend to vote for the Democratic Party, whilst all top 8 states with the lowest life expectancy tend to vote for the Republican Party*.
Will she also claim that was the result of unhealthy lifestyle choices instead of differences between healthcare systems?
* Or at least, that was I had noticed on the following Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy which provided various sources.
That’s because of your non-standard meaning of the word “argue.” That maternal drinking, smoking, and use of illegal drugs has a higher correlation with infant mortality than both race and poverty is simply a fact. To dismiss it as a “claim” does not mean it is not a fact. It only casts doubt on your grasp of the necessary facts.
2) The styles of warfare are very, very different. That may have something to do with it. I haven’t given this sufficient thought, though.
One difference is that warfare is just so much more expensive nowadays. Obviously war has never been cheap, but the Roman Republic could reasonably expect all its conscription-eligible citizens to supply all their own equipment out of their own pockets, and to do at least the individual aspects of training (practising swordsmanship etc.) in their own time, which would reduce the costs of raising armies quite considerably. Nowadays war is both more expensive and less lucrative (because of point (3)), so engaging in continuous warfare is more likely to bankrupt a state than enrich it.
wars never make a state richer right away. It’s the power of the state after a victorious war that enables it to become richer.
3) so what is the economic theory that lead to the USA fighting wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan…? Why do you think the fascists cannot fight wars by the same theory as USA?
I suspect Dinwar’s #1 accounts for a lot of it. As far as I can recall, fascist leaders were armchair militarists, they never rose from the military itself. Which also helps one romanticize war.
I was thinking of the medieval definition of the nobles as “those who fight”, but as far as I can tell, if you were a medieval noble, fighting was the best chance to make a buck (by capturing people for ransom). In Rome, where most citizens had gone through enlistments, I would expect the citizens to be very unromantic about the glories of war, and only support them for pragmatic reasons.