Posts by Keir Leslie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Keir's point seemed to me to be that the Allies won because of some sort of national & regime superiority over the clusterfuck that was the Nazi leadership and philosophy.
My point is that Nazi Germany was not an effective military power. The reason I think this is because it lost the only war of any note that it ever fought. I do think that yes the British Americans and Russians were militarily superior to the Third Reich, because look, Berlin was the capital razed to the ground.
I mean, suppose Britain folds in '40; so what? Britain didn't fold in '40. Britain kept fighting. That's what happened.
Or, yes, the Allies won because they were superior military powers; that's very close to being tautological.
(The emphasis on who'd be Churchill if Churchill didn't exist is daft, because we obviously have no way of knowing, given that Churchill did exist. Also, suppose Churchill dies in '39, there's lots of things still putting a anti-appeasement PM in power by '40, unless you think it was purely luck that put him there.)
-
One can't answer a question about the state of British politics were Churchill not to exist by looking at the state of British politics where Churchill does exists, just as a general philosophical point.
Less theoretically, Churchill did not exist in a vacuum; there were other politicians who shared his views and there would have been support for them. I mean, read the Norway Debate and Guilty Men, there's this anger and sense of betrayal that focussed on Churchill more because he was there than anything else. Suppose he isn't there, some other Tory comes out the wilderness and gets the Labour & Liberal & dissident Tory votes to oust Chamberlain.
Hell, even Lloyd George might have done it, were he not suspect himself. But of course, without Churchill, the attraction of being the Man Who Won The War(s) might have been enough. And so-on. Christ, Maxton could have done it if enough else fell out right.
But it's all a bit odd, because if Churchill didn't exist, things would be different, in such a way as to make this kind of discussion pointless.
-
No, it isn't manifest destiny, it's a distrust of free floating counterfactuals.
-
A quick squizz through British politicians of the day pretty quickly demolishes the idea that there was any other alternative to Churchill if Britain was going to hang in there.
But Churchill was there, and that was that. (And in fact of course there were alternatives, this kind of great-man history is a bit simplistic.)
There are so many what-ifs in the way the SWW played out, the dysfunctionality of parts of the German leadership, was just one and one should never underestimate just how horrendously efficient the Nazi machine could be when it set its mind to it.
And a great many what-ifs go the other way; what if the Spanish Republic had been supported by the democracies and had won?
But in the end, the Nazi machine wasn't as good as the Russian and the British and the American machines; in the end, it was a failure. The Australian cricket team wins their games; the Nazis lost their war.
Which is what makes a lot of the Nazi worship a wee bit suspect (not that I'm talking about anyone here); in fact the Nazis were not that impressive compared, like I say, to the Mongols or the British or even Louis XIV's France. Yet they get a lot of (for want of a better word) love, which is generally I think misplaced.
-
Come on, I don't see how the interminable ranks of fake-gothic and fake-greco-roman architecture can be more offensive than fake-mughal. Maybe on some metaphysical distinction between copying and imitating, but I don't think there's much to choose between a fake-gothic structure designed to be like generic olde, and a fake-mughal structure designed to look like specific old.
(Seriously, the High Court at Calcutta is apparently just a straight replication of somewhere else, and that seems reasonably anointed Gothic Revival; I dare say that there are a great many other examples but sadly the Library's too far away today.)
-
But the argument normally goes `look at Nazi-ism*, it may have been evil, but it worked', and the thing to do is to point out that no, it didn't work.
I shouldn't have a problem with admiring Genghis Khan or Subotai as technically brilliant generals, without any particular feeling for their non-military actions, or admiring the Royal Navy as a thing for maintaining an Empire; but the Nazis were not in fact very successful; indeed, one might even say they were rather inept when one takes it as a whole.
If one wants truly brilliant military ability coupled with immorality, Her Britannic Majesty's Armed Forces are a good example; a regime that fought one war and lost, resulting in the destruction of their nation as a single independent entity for fifty years, is not.
-
It was a very happy chance that someone like Churchill was leading Britain in 1940, especially when one considers the shitty standard of the other politicians that filled the front benches of Westminster at the time. The Nazis did not choose to go to war against the man, it was a lucky chance that when war came, Churchill was there.
It wasn't chance that Churchill was Prime Minister; it was the result of a series of conscious decisions made by British politicians.
The argument is that Nazi-ism was a series of ideas about reality, and that those ideas about reality were so screwy that Nazi-ism was functionally incapable of existing as a stable state in that particularly place and time. I don't think that's true of Francoism or Fascism & I don't think it's an argument for complacency or anything, but rather an argument that admiring the Nazis as being like the Australian cricket team is just wrong, because the Nazis were losers. It's the `say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time' thing, and it is just wrong.
For instance, the Nazi inability to decide between butter and guns was a Nazi failure; organising your economy is one of the most important things about winning an industrial war, and Nazi-ism wasn't up to it, and so they got destroyed by nations which did in fact have a sensible industrial policy.
-
It was a very close thing and only failed because of several disastrous decisions on the part of the Nazi leadership, and the luck of chance that Britain, thanks to it's leadership, decided to hold out rather than roll over. If Britain had sued for peace in 1940 the world would be a very different place.
In other words, because Nazi-ism was run by Nazis, it failed. Which is I think the point; maybe if Nazis hadn't been in charge of Nazi Germany Nazi Germany wouldn't have lost, but then it wouldn't have been Nazi Germany.
And it was hardly chance that Britain held out in '40; it was a series of foreseeable decisions made by an exceptionally transparent British leadership .
But the Nazis lost: the SS may have been man for man the best fighters in the world*, but wars are not fought man to man, they are fought by nations, and it turns out that the Ruhr was no match for the Dneiper and Detroit and the Clydeside, and that Nazi actions resulted in the utter levelling of Germany.
* though I doubt this; part of the point of combined arms is that man for man you needn't be that impressive.
-
The point is that Nazi Germany was a world historical failure, and the `look at the German talent' misses the obvious fact they got royally owned, and that Nazism just didn't work.
(Or, as Alex Harrowell puts it on the subject of Prussian military virtue, what do we call Prussia these days? That's right, Poland.)
-
I make no apologies for my harsh language.
But you aren't using your harsh language to mean anything but bad! bad! bad!; it gets rather dull and annoying.
I mean:
Indeed. But you quite explicitly think that there are some people who just shouldn't be represented. And that is simply undemocratic.
is rather arguable; all many-to-one systems of mapping populations to parliament inherently misrepresent people all the time.
The claim is that artificial barriers to representation above and beyond the inherent size of parliament if horribly undemocratic, whereas the inherent size of parliament issue is not undemocratic, which is a bit odd.