The History Thread!

As Race For The Iron Throne told me in an online Q&A:

Thomas Jefferson is "the creator of both the Declaration of Independence and the doctrine of state’s rights that more than anything else has hampered our ability to put the ideals of the Declaration into practice."

Jefferson was the inventor of political partisanship, smear campaigns on opponents, and hypocritically opposing the size of a large government as "tyranny", clothed with appeals for democracy of the common man, and that the yeoman farmer is somehow more American than 'em city slickers. Jefferson was a coward, morally speaking. He would talk nice in public but then pass smears on Washington under pseudonyms. It is Jefferson that manifests most visibly of all founders, the symptom of Psychological Projection which is the classic American neurotic disorder. Externally blaming and assigning others to be guilty of traits of which one is most guilty of. You see this recurring time and again, what Freud called the repetition-compulsion syndrome. Whether it's fighting for "states rights" but abusing the Federal Government to enforce laws in other states, whether it's fighting the war on Northern Aggression when you declared war first, whether it's saying so-and-so is tyrannical when you are responsible for that tyranny taking root, or whether it's fighting against the "media and the liberal elite" when you and your compatriots are transparently oligarchs abusing and undermining the media that had it been a little less liberal and more shrewd and ruthless, would never have allowed you to come to power.

Jefferson kept accusing his enemies of being ambitious grasping individuals when he was the most ambitious and grasping of them all. He opposed big government scheme but he used big government to accept the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. He had contributed little in the Revolutionary War. He was a co-author of the Declaration which he exaggerated into a big deal while Pauline Maier and others pointed out it was a collaborative effort and much time was wasted because the others in the room found his language unusable and himself too stubborn and unreceptive of criticism. He destroyed Aaron Burr's career in a show trial that was literally thrown out of court but which he supported fully to destroy his rival/enemy. It wasn't the Hamilton-Burr duel that ruined his career, it was Jefferson. Using mass media and judicial machinery to create a show trial to destroy your opponent has a long history in America and it was Jefferson who started it. In addition to all that,Jefferson, legally speaking, is a rapist. Sally Hemmings was what 15 when he started sleeping with her. And she was his slave, so there's no real sense of consent there. He somehow, out of the non-existent goodness of his non-existent heart, allowed to free her and his slave children in his will but he kept his other slaves in bondage (which even Washington, a far less lettered and no more scrupulous man, relented on). So he's not just a liar, a political opportunist, and a conniving subverter of institutions and political processes for personal gain, he's a colossal hypocrite with an immense capacity for mendacity, who more or less lied every day of his life. You see this in such future a—holes like Joseph Mc Carthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn who were homophobe redbaiters who turned out to be closet Gay Conservative, you see this in Strom Thurmond, "son semblable, son frere" to Jefferson.

Basically in the history of American supervillainy: Jefferson begat Jackson begat the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, begat Woodrow Wilson begat J. Edgar Hoover begat Joseph Mc Carthy begat Richard Nixon begat Ronald Reagan begat Newt Gingrich begat Dubya Bush, Cheney and others, begat Donald Trump. Ave Satani

I shall be blunt and to the point. Jackson has a well earned reputation as a colossally predatory and opportunistic asshole. He also wasn't the only one. Several of the Founding Fathers have less then sterling histories and habits.

In brief change of topic. I just finished European Medieval Tactics: The fall and rise of Cavalry 450-1260. (1) by David Nicolle and Illustrated by Adam Hook This is an Osprey Book so it is pretty easy to get a your hands on. Like most of the books it is relatively short but also reasonably dense and covers the material inside rather well.

The gist of the book is a look at how after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cavalry for a time fell out of favor and it was instead the infantry that were the center piece of nearly all militaries until around the 13th century. The book covers how they developed or adapted and changed their various tactics and strategies in various parts of Europe from Western Europe to Central, East, and the Mediterranean region. It details their roles and how they came back to being a key center piece of militaries through out Europe. It covers early innovations and general practice in weapons usage as best as possible.

Of interest is the mutual influence of Roman, Arab, and various Steppe peoples had on the development of European Cavalry in that time frame.

Under the Note Tab is my pile o' notes with loose organization at best.

^note Early Medieval cavalry can be broken up into a few generally broad categories. The first is the Western European cavalry which initially was very reminiscent of late Roman Spear and some archer cavalry. This branch of early European cavalry was largely dominated by skirmisher style cavalry attacks until close to the 13th century.

Cavalry wore armor such as lamellar or malile, helms that covered the top half of the head, carried shields, and javelins/spears that could also be used for thrusting attacks. Thrusts were done over hand from above to stab down, under to thrust low, or with both hands in a hard forward thrust. The attacks were noted to be effective against armored opponents as well as less protected soldiers. Riders sometimes wielded shields for the one handed options to protect from archers and other skirmishers from injuring rider or horse as easily.

Horses were sometimes armored to varying degrees. Most of the early cavalry used tactics reminiscent of various steppe peoples that had moved into the region and spread their style of mounted warfare. Notably using tactics such as the false retreat.

A typical cavalry attack from this region was usually wheeling pass with cavalry relying on archery and thrown spears and javelins to weaken enemy infantry formations. The long cavalry spears would sometimes also be thrust at the infantry while trying to keep out of the infantry weapons own reach. This tactic was an attempt at allowing their own infantry forces to exploit weak points. The degrees of success seemed to vary widely and were very dependent on the discipline of the enemy infantry.

Most western European bodies of organized militaries relied on three general groups of troops. Infantry often a mix of armored soldiers, from well protected, moderately protected, to relatively unprotected skirmishers and peltast. Infantry were organized most armored men up front, less armored behind, and the other troops in back.

There was a heavy reliance on archers especially against cavalry and massed enemy formations of infantry. Bows used were either flat bows or the various varieties of longbow.

Lastly were the cavalry who were usually wealthy or highly placed individuals who could afford the equipment to be cavalry. They tended to have more and better armor for themselves then infantry and sometimes armored their horses. There is no standardization of equipment beyond common forms for weapons and armor for the era and region.

These cavalry were more often then not used as a sort of raiding or flank force in both tactical and strategic scale. Raiding being a key aspect of most warfare especially among the former groups of tribes and clans that migrated from other regions to that part of Europe. While their use of cavalry was known they were overwhelmingly reliant on infantry.

Cavalry was chiefly only available to those groups who could afford the expense of the equipment.

Byzantine and the Mediterranean region had a mix of Roman and Steppe people cavalry influences and more heavily used mounted archers and composite bows for all their forces. They relied heavily on the more fluid and darting attack patterns favored by step archers. Roman style horse archery was less focused on rate of fire and constant mobility but on more powerful bow draws and well aimed shots. Most Roman style horse back archery that survived the early medieval era was done from a horse that preferably standing as still as possible before the formation moved. Rather then hit and run the riders would move to positions and fire volleys and then move again using the mobility afforded by the horses differently.

The early cavalry had simple cloth or leather saddles and no stirrups or spurs. Riders held themselves firm to the horse by pressure of the knees and thighs. Later a wooden saddle would be introduced that would greatly improve the stability of a mounted combatant.

The Northern Eastern and Sub Artic regions of Europe tended to rely far more heavily on infantry but did use cavalry early on but typically as raiders armed with spears. This was especially true in the more heavily forested regions.

The Iberian peninsular region had a somewhat unique variation on the cavalry adopted by both the Muslims and the nominally Christian forces fighting for control in the region. The preferences for was for cavalry with spears and shield used in rapid attacks with some limited mounted archers. The spears were somewhat unique from most of Europe in that they tended to be used for slashing and cutting as well as thrusting with spear points having qualities similar to blades and even points at both ends.

The Vikings for example were highly reliant on well armored and equipped infantry and this frequently gave them an advantage over their less well equipped opponents. They also tended to have a comparatively larger group of professional soldiers where their typical rivals, mostly the Anglo-Saxons, relied heavily on levies and militias with a smaller group of professional soldiery.

Most of what could be called Eastern Europe that is north of Byzantines of the time were very heavily influenced by the nomadic and semi-nomadic steppe peoples and their cavalry tactics. Their arms and armor tended to more heavily reflect their equipment and style of fighting with very little influence from rest of Europe showing through. Though these various groups would slowly convert to a more infantry focused military model as they moved further west into increasingly heavier forested areas.

Formations of the era of all professional militaries in general relied on the three general military unit types mentioned above. Infantry were typically armed with spears and swords and carrying large shields, archers had one of the various bows usually the form suited for their region and a melee weapon usually a dagger and/or a sword of some sort, and cavalry were overall largely using spears over any other weapons with and without shields.

Formations and tactics also varied as noted above and were usually dictated by what influenced the region the most. However it was generally common for the Archers to be out front, backed up by infantry, with the cavalry waiting in the center or on the flanks to sortie against the enemy. There was plenty of variation in the forces and their organizations especially in how the cavalry formations themselves were handled.

Overall though while valued, infantry were overwhelmingly seen as the center piece of the various military bodies with cavalry serving to augment their capabilities.

By the middle of the 12th century however a mixture of technologies, the various saddles, new types of bit and bridle, the re-introduction of the horseshoe, and stirrups as well as improvements in the manufacture of armor led to cavalry increasingly becoming more and more common. Cavalry could travel further and longer and improvements in organization lead their increasing efficacy on the field. Infantry faded from the forefront as the key center piece of military forces in general with larger and larger formations of cavalry being sought after. However various records and accounts point to these cavalry groups just as often being mounted infantry rather then dedicated cavalry with very little to distinguish them. This may be because they used common equipment and one part of the force acted as mobile armored footman.

Of note is that by the end of the 12th century there was almost no existing tradition of horseback archery in Western and Central Europe and it was instead Eastern Europe and Byzantine region that retained such traditions in part because of their regions and contact with steppe peoples with whom they constantly fought with.

In Eastern Europe you have a bit of an odd occurrence. Several of the still tribally oriented Slavic peoples, especially around Poland, relied exclusively on infantry forces used from ambush in forested regions and developed a solid tradition for infantry oriented archery. However they were considered by their neighbors and opponents to be backwards in terms of tactics and military capability and were often bested by better organized military.

One of the best organized European military bodies of the time were the Normans. They had a disciplined and well trained military as well leveraging use of solid tactics and strategies to maximize their efforts. They typically used infantry archers protected by heavy infantry in armor to weaken an enemy and then attack them with a coordinated cavalry assault.

Once the large military body of the region was defeated and broken the Normans would then use raiding to weaken local resistance further and would build a series of heavily defended fortifications to control major points of travel and trade in the region. This eventually allowed them to effectively conquer the area. The French shortly after would also rise as a powerful entity in Western Europe.

Both the Norman's and the French became known for the use of the couched lance and for having some of the best cavalry in Europe at that time. This was largely due to organization, quality equipment, and well trained military members. Cavalry did not advance at a gallop instead they moved at a walk and when ready for the charge would go into a canter rather then a full gallop.

The typical style of warfare was less large clashes and more numerous skirmishes. Extensive use of fortifications as both launching and holding points of assaults was widely practiced as were attempts at deception in regards to deployment of forces. The key goal of most warfare was typically raiding and damage to enemy economy and infrastructure and occasionally to try and seize fortified positions if possible.

This period also saw the rise of the crossbow back into use as a military weapon and increasingly the presence of professional mercenary bodies. Apparently a troupe of Italian crossbowmen were considered the best and most highly paid mercs of the time. Namely the Genoese of Northern Italy in the late 12th century and the Gascons of France.

Infantry and basic field fortifications came to the fore by the end of the 13th century as means to improve the capability of infantry against cavalry. This included palisades, ditches with or without spikes, shield forts, and in some places the use of wagons and/or sledges as barriers.

Another common tactic was to have a portion of the armored cavalry dismount and march with the regular infantry on foot to counter better armored opponents sometimes including enemy cavalry.

edited 25th Feb '17 3:25:41 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Because even history should not be exempt from shitposts.◊

I think there should be a holiday celebrating the downfall and end of the miserable petty and useless oligarchy known as The Roman Republic...and we should celebrate it by forced compositions and guessworks of Caesar's Anti-Cato, after that piece of trash who supplied his name to the Republican think-tank and donated the Lost Cause concept to the Confederacy.

Sure I guess Cato just walked out of the grave after 2000 years and agreed to lend his name to some conservative think tanks. And if we celebrate the downfall of the Roman Republic we must also by that logic celebrate the birth of the Roman Empire, which I don't see how any person claiming to support democracy can do, then again, lots of people these days think Democracy should go the same way, out of the arrogant belief that if only they ruled, than they would make the plebs see what was "in their own best interests".

edited 25th Feb '17 7:44:01 PM by JackOLantern1337

Noam Chomsky said it was okay to celebrate the downfall of the USSR precisely because it opened the possibility of a new and better socialism rather than a highly flawed, self-destructive and compromised version of it to stand as representative of the entire movement/philosophy and economic system. The downfall of the Roman Republic allowed later observers to dream of a better and more just republic, one far worthier of the name than Rome; likewise modern democracy is far closer to its literal meaning of "Power of the People" than classical Athens, where the only ones who really had the vote were the Aristocrats (a greek word that means "power of the best men"). Aristocracy begins in Democracy and Republican governments. In Rome the aristocrats were optimates, patricians, or in a Latin rendition of Greek concepts, the Boni (I.e. Good).

For the majority of people living in Rome, Italy and the wider Mediterranean there was no real difference between the Republic and The Empire, the latter merely confirmed the fact. Rome's institutions and codes could not sustain the smallest breaches of its norms, could not accede or allow to the most basic and obvious of reforms, and individuals like Cato and even Cicero were not only ignoring this problem but were doubling down, putting their heads under the sand and making things worse and worse for everyone, refusing to compromise or accept changing reality. They were radical reactionary ideologues, the kind that always makes things worse and who tend to Create Your Own Villain.

Cato was long lionized for his recalcitrance, his supposed incorruptibility, but he lent those virtues to patently indefensible ideas (i.e. defending tradition and opposing any necessary reforms, and getting in a petty feud with Caesar who repeatedly humiliated him).

One can't really dispute that America has a decided inclination towards anti-intellectualism. I'd further stipulate, though, that intellectuals (or possibly, just American intellectuals) have been notoriously bad at communicating their ideas to the public at large. This may be a reaction to public anti-intellectualism, or the perception of it an any rate, but from my own experiences in academia, a lot of academics seem to have a big chip on their shoulders. Frequently, it isn't seen as necessary or even desirable to try to communicate intellectual ideas to the great unwashed. There is as well an intense antipathy for being questioned by non-intellectuals. The intellectual must always be sensitive to the fact that they're asking people to suspend their own judgment and trust the experts, whose qualifications (and whatever rigors were taken to achieve those qualifications) are unknown to them. Much more needs to be done to bridge the gap between the public and the intellectual.

edited 26th Feb '17 1:04:20 PM by Robbery

A corollary to the American tradition of Anti-Intellectualism is the fact that America is interested in ideas but not really good ones. It's anti-intellectualism can be mistaken for being anti-ideological, anti-academic or being Book Dumb but that's not *quite* the case. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the Dunning School Thesis is a very cunning, very shrewd, very deliberate campaign of misinformation and abuse of the tools and methods of historical science for the service of propaganda. If you look at The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D. W. Griffith, you will find that it's true equivalent isn't today's mindless blockbusters but more or less a Ken Burns style documentary in that it's realistic, its intertitles cite history and even outright excerpt quotes from the "historians" of the time. It's very academic, i.e. citations and sources. It's just that it's all wrong. There's also a set of discourses preventing effective reform of textbooks to properly update and reflect a more accurate look at world history.

One thing historians and social commentators are starting to grasp nowadays is that Americans tend to see successful people as being intellectuals and look to them for their ideology. The web series History Respawned touched on this. It's a video series that looks at how video games intersect with history but it has actual historians offering commentary and discussing and summarizing their work, so it's inherently informative and even if you aren't into games, provides cool visual aid. So this episode talks about Bioshock which was a kind of take on Ayn Rand. And the main thing the historian notes is that Americans tend to see businessmen and entrepreneurs as intellectuals, and this drives businessmen in America to often try and act like they are intellectuals, with their opinions being sought on a variety of fields outside of business. It's an inversion of the proverb, "if you're so smart why aren't you rich"...if you are rich, you must be smart. So American businessmen have a Cult of Personality, with Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, W. R. Hearst, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and so on, until, well you know...

This is not really universal. Like The British Empire was filthy rich and spun money like nothing else and it was the cradle of Capitalism and yet it didn't have an anti-intellectual culture nor did it seek ideas from successful businessmen. I mean only specialists know of William Beckford, one of the first "world's richest men" i.e. private entrepreneurs whose personal wealth was said to have greatly exceeded Kings. The most well known British entrepreneur of the Empire is probably Cecil Rhodes and that's because he promoted a scholarship program, he briefly served as the namesake for Zimbabwe and he was kind of the exception in trying to be intellectual. In Imperial Germany you had the famous Krupp family of entrepreneurs but that didn't mean Germans were anti-intellectual. Now of course, the fact that the British and Germans had intellectual traditions didn't prevent them from doing evil. Intellectually Supported Tyranny exists for a reason as a trope after all, and one must certainly not make a Cult of Personality of intellectuals or artists (Richard Wagner) or even scientists (the Aristotle cult did real damage to science).

In America, people tend to be drawn to all kinds of heterodox ideas and notions...like Ayn Rand, Scientology and so on, which provides a kind of substitute Dummies idea for intellecutalism, and in the case of Rand, is created by someone with a certain amount of education (thanks to the Bolsheviks and the free college tuition provided to her by their decrees allowing women of any class to the university...for which she was needless to say not very grateful).

You can see a lot of lampooning of the hard-nosed, successful businessman (who's also generally an ignorant, upjumped boor as well) in a lot of British popular fiction from the pre-World War II era (I'm thinking particularly of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse). Wodehouse lampooned everybody, regardless of social station or intelligence level, but there's a definite feeling in Christie's work that she's trying to paint the old order (where the titled gentry were rich, the working class knew their place, and all was right with the world) as The Way Things Should Be.

Cecil Rhodes...didn't he think that the English were the natural masters of the world, or some such? I've read that he thought England should re-annex the US and Australia, and endowed the Rhodes Scholarship with the idea that if Anglo-Saxon youth could but experience England, they'd want to be a part of it.

I have to wonder, though, that when you say England and Germany didn't have an anti-intellectual culture, who are you talking about? For a long time, I think you could argue that there was more than one culture at work in a lot of the old European aristocracies. The governing classes may not have been anti-intellectual, but what'd the working classes and the lower classes think of intellectualism? I know Marxism seems to have a distinct bias against anything that isn't of practical, concrete value, which would seem to me to be a mite anti-intellectual.

edited 26th Feb '17 1:51:26 PM by Robbery

There is also the tendency for intellectuals to be arrogant about their intelligence/knowledge, or at least to be perceived as such by anti-intellectuals. This sort of cerebral snobbery is off-putting, in much the same way that hipsters are despised by non-hipsters, and vice-versa. If you're not a member of their exclusive clique, they have neither the time nor the inclination to educate the unwashed masses.

edited 26th Feb '17 1:52:55 PM by pwiegle

For anyone who wants to read more about anti-intelectualism in the US, here's an interesting post on it's history.

That's what happens when you are raised on a diet of patriotism and superiority complexes and are the only remaining superpower in the world.

Karl Marx and Marxism was materialist precisely because they didn't see any true meaningful spirituality to be found in a society of exploitation. Only illusions and ideology, and if the boss is nice, spare time.

Marx defined a communist society as a world,

"For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."

Marx was critical of the traditional role of intellectual, cooped up in the university, patronized by the state or the rector in charge of the university (appointed by state, church or corporation) and not trying to actively take a stand and change the world. He worked non-academically, writing for newspapers and journals, taking stands on issues. Personally, Marx was an immensely cultured intellectual, he loved Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Aeschylus and above all Goethe. As a teenager he wrote Tristram Shandy fanfiction (no seriously).

Marxism has one of the richest intellectual traditions in any field. Dialectical Materialism was immensely helpful to the scientific advancement of USSR as Loren Graham pointed out. In the United States in particular, Marxism was avant-garde in The '30s, and it was the Marxists who greatly championed American folklore and inspired calls to record American blues music and other folklore, which inspired the WPA to send folklorists like Allan Lomax accompanied by the future auteur Nicholas Ray to record American music in the wild and those recordings inspired rock and roll in The '60s.

I can think of one other possible driving factor for Anti-Intellectualism. A lack of access to the same amounts of information in general. For example as a history student it is a lot harder to find documents you need as an academic neophyte without someone already having a degree and having connections where you need them. Especially harder to view historical documents. Such as copies of old manuscripts, detailed studies on any number of historical subjects, or even affordability of such materials.

See, you can have all that access and publish your writings but no one will listen to you because your reputation as an expert will count for zilch in the wider culture. You won't show up on major Talk Shows and so on, and something like Fox News will always provide and influence people more than anything.

America doesn't have anything like the BBC which is not perfect but is pretty solid and reliable, informative, educational and scholarly. It could have had it if the New Deal had fully succeeded and taken root and wasn't gutted the way it was. The WPA was truly the foundation for a solid intellectual institution in American society and politics.

America has produced great thinkers and intellectuals, but how many politicians and generally influential people know Ralph Waldo Emerson or John Dewey, how many have read Moby-Dick fully. Heck Republicans are conservative and obsessed with tradition but few of them are as well read as Niall Ferguson who is a hack historian, economist and general a—hole but he knows Edmund Burke, has read him and so on whereas few American conservatives have any real knowledge. In France for instance, hacks like Nicholas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande can give eloquent tributes to arthouse film-makers like Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette (the kind whose movies, well the latter in particular, are obscure in France and Europe as well).

Even then simply allowing people the opportunity to do more then wade in the academic shallows would likely go a long way in helping reduce the attitude of Anti-Intellectualism. Part of that is if we can all access that same info people can look for themselves.

Cost barriers is another one. Uncommon books with the details that are very good to have tend to be very expensive. I have seen no small number costing 200 bucks and more.

I was a literature student myself, and it's always bugged me immensely that the so-called defenders of American culture are so profoundly ignorant of what American culture is. They might know who Alexis De Toqueville was, given that he said nice things about early America, but ask 'em about Civil Disobedience or any of the American Transcendentalists, or ask 'em why Mark Twain called the 1890's "The Gilded Age" and they'll give you a blank stare. Beyond that, what do they know about the folklore, the traditions, the philosophical underpinnings of the people whose way of life they claim to be defending?

As a side note, I find it amusing that Herman Melville (who wrote Moby Dick, among other things) apparently thought Thoreau was an effete twit. Someone did a study of the marginalia found in the books belonging to great authors (that is, the stuff they wrote in the margins of the books they owned) and found Melville had all kinds of unkind things to say about Thoreau's philosophies, the most eloquent of which was "To one who has sailed the storms off the Cape of Good Hope, what stuff this is!"

The US does have PBS, and NPR, They don't exist to the same degree in all parts of the country, but they do a pretty decent job and being accurate, educational, and scholarly. C-Span does an excellent job of displaying the governmental process, but hardly anyone watches it because it can be as boring as all hell.

edited 26th Feb '17 10:02:43 PM by Robbery

I feel gutted every time I think about this. Also I just finished Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States and Oliver Stone really wants me to think that Truman's selection as VP over Henry Wallace is one of the bad turning points in history.

His position seems to be that Truman started off as an ignorant, gullible dummy for Byrnes and Henry Wallace who was an actual visionary like Roosevelt could've averted the Cold War.

That's Stone conspiracy mentality talking...Henry Wallace had no real recognition and he had no real popular support (he won 2.4% popular vote in the 1948 election behind Strom Thurmond and Thomas Dewey). He had no gumption for party politics and wasn't shrewd enough in balancing sympathies and understanding of USSR and the yearnings of the American left-behinds with pragmatic survival. FDR had that, Wallace didn't. It's Wish-Fulfillment to think that FDR was grooming him to be his successor, about as much as those who think Leon Trotsky was the one true heir of Vladimir Lenin. Just because Wallace and Trotsky may have been decent honorable individuals is no reason to think they are good politicians or would have been good rulers.

And I'm not even sure that the Cold War could have been averted at that point. The only man who could have prevented that was FDR and he only had a hope to do so if he completed his fourth term (and lbr, there won't be a fifth term). And even then once he steps down, you can be sure that people will move against USSR, for a variety of geopolitical, economic and military reasons.^note The main reason why the Cold War happened was economic, America produced a surplus of goods and wanted markets to buy that, and to make products they needed "free trade"/free reign for America's exploitative corporate-IP practises. A European continent which after World War II was quite sympathetic to USSR, even outside the Iron Curtain (like in Italy) was a huge huge problem. Why do you think the Americans invested so much cash and money in the infamous Scare Campaign of Italy's elections after liberation which makes Putin's interference in 2016 look like a school prank by comparison? The Italian Communist Party were behaving democratically, were not advocating revolution and were friendly with the Anglo-American occupation. They simply couldn't allow the Communists to win the peace after they had played such a huge part in winning the war. Why do you think Winston Churchill crushed the Greek Partisans and reinstalled the fascist-backed monarchy and allowed nazi collaborators to hunt down, torture and execute war heroes?^note Stalin wasn't going to interfere there, he said that the Mediterranean was not his sphere of influence, Eastern Europe was, ELAS, the Greek Resistance (which included Communists. Socialists, Anarchists, Liberals and others) kept their army outside of Athens and allowed the English in, and it was English and Americans who fired on a parade celebrating liberation. The answer was to Make an Example of Them. Then there's South America...and of course the American South with Segregation and so on.

...to get back to the New Deal. So many of the problems affecting America today, man they "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot. The WPA built theaters and cultural centers across America, hosted theater productions there, this allowed for migration, development of identity and regionalism. The whole city-country divide, the New Deal was trying to solve that, with artists from the city and craftsmen in the country employed and rubbing shoulders with one another. It was city-slickers like Allan Lomax and Nicholas Ray who palled around with Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Lead Belly and others to record folk music across America. You had the Living Newspaper theatre productions. In New York and Chicago, you had Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Orson Welles. If you ever get the chance see Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, entertaining movie and believe it or not, totally accurate in milieu, setting and background detail. One scene in that movie shows the original HUAC, before the Blacklist days. Remember the HUAC led by Martin Dies (an awful racist and a horrible human being) was first convened to investigate and shut down the WPA Theatre program. That led to the ultimate moment of American Anti-Intellectualism, where they called the director of that Hallie Flanagan to Washington, and no "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:

The Irony here is that the real life Marlowe was murdered by the Elizabethan government. And since he's likely to have been a homosexual atheist, he would have been blacklisted in 20th Century America too.

edited 27th Feb '17 1:43:59 AM by JulianLapostat

And rural 21st century America.

My reading of The Wages of Destruction continues. It's amazing just how badly the Nazis managed to fuck the German economy after it actually looked reasonably promising in 1932.

See the real motives of Nazi Germany and Germany in general wasn't really economic recovery and development in and of itself.

Nazi Germany shared with some politicians of the Weimar Republic and several others of Imperial Germany the dream of Drang Nach Osten. They saw Eastern Europe as a German Transatlantic Equivalent of Manifest Destiny. They saw themselves as cowboys and the Jews, Russians, Poles, Slaves as Indians or Native Americans. Andrew Jackson and his herrenvolk democracy was their ideal. There was a reason why Karl May had this huge cult there.

Economics was a means to fund recovery and rearmament so that they would eventually complete the mission. It was not any real end by itself. This by the way was true even in Weimar Republic where politicians even non-and-anti-Nazis harbored similar ambitions. Gustav Streseman, the Nobel-Prize winner had similar plans.

So trying to apply post-WW 2 Bretton Woods Liberal logic to the Nazis is going to get you into trouble. That is just not the way they saw things. Imperial Germany wanted to take Eastern Europe and they went on a two-front war and got handicapped, a situation that Hitler wanted to avoid but his ultimate goal was always invading Eastern Europe and instituting Lebensraum. That was not a means to an end, that was the end in and of itself.

That's not what the book is doing, though. The book is (effectively) trying to chronicle the economic history of the German Reich, both in the sense of 'what were their actual policies, how did the massive rearmament and revitalizing programs actually help the country, did they help the country, and how extensive were they actually?'

It's basically an examination of the myth of the rapid recovery of Germany under the Nazis and Albert Speer in particular, as well as looking at how they could afford to sustain a conflict for so long in spite of their limited economic and natural resources. It's not using Bretton Woods liberal logic so much as looking at the economic rationale (including this Manifest Destiny appeal) in Nazi ideology, as well as looking at how things like the Holocaust and other war crimes factored into that economic strategy.

Your description of Streseman is somewhat inaccurate according to the book, though - as far as Streseman was concerned, any future enemies of the German state would be the United Kingdom and France, and the only way Germany could meaningfully compete with two large imperialist economies was to team up with the sleeping giant of the United States, effectively trying to cement and strengthen US-German financial ties at the expense of the UK and France. He was a German nationalist with rearmament plans, but his plan wasn't to rearm the military for future conquests - it was to regain Germany's international prestige through economic progress.

This focus on economic history also explains the idiotic decision to declare war on the United States along with Japan. Essentially, as early as the 1920's, everyone saw the writing on the wall as far as the United States' future economic superpower status. Not being the sort of person who entertained the idea of people other than Germans being on top (and conceiving of the capitalist US and UK as Jewish conspiracies), Hitler reasoned that you'd need the resources of a continent to take on the United States.

In other words, the invasion of the Soviet Union (and subsequent genocide) was an end, but it was also a means to an end as far as trying to oust the fledgling United States as the world power.

edited 27th Feb '17 8:24:13 AM by math792d

I've read accounts that say there were people in power in Britain and France that saw Germany as a potential threat as early as the 1890's. Not sure if that isn't just morning-after thinking, though.

Hmm..."Germany" has been a major threat to the British and the French for a very long time. The concept of a unified German state was anathema to them. Why do you think in the Thirty Years' War, France, eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Richelieu backed and buttressed the Protestant Swedish over her "natural" Catholic allies Spain and the HRE? Because they weren't keen on an unified German state. When Frederick the Great started invading and land-grabbing and parlaying that as "enlightened monarchy", it upset the Balance of Power in that region because Prussia, the major principality of the HRE and the future engine of German unification, went from one potentate of the HRE to major power. The "second Miracle of Brandenburg", i.e. when the Tsarina Elizabeth died and was replaced by Peter who inexplicably spared Prussia a deserved and crushing defeat was one of the major turning points in history. Had Peter done differently then, well it would have meant no Bismarck, no Hitler, no Holocaust, no Barbarossa.

When German Reunification began, Bismarck knew that France would go to war against it, and Napoleon III would have. A Reunified Germany meant that suddenly after centuries of being the most populous and great superpower in continental europe, a new German state became the most populous nation (and continues to be so in Western and Central Europe). After the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, military became closely linked to demographic and economic systems, so countries with large populations had an innate advantage. France saw that as an existential threat to its identity, i.e. we are superior overlord of all Europe, with the best culture and best "women, wine, lifestyle" etcetera. England saw that as a threat to access to markets in the Continent and weren't too keen on a rival landpower in Europe in less than a century after Napoleon came close to toppling the Empire.

The biggest issue is that Germany's ambitions were stymied by land and time. They wanted to be Number 1, as opposed to today's cuddly Germans inoculated and vaccinated by the Allies, and they knew that UK spread its navy too wide for them to catch up, that USA had more territory and land to encourage expansion and population growth. So they had to look East. This begins with Frederick the Great, who more or less wanted to destroy Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, because he felt the Poles were an inferior people, in his writings he compared them explicitly to the New World savages he had heard about, the fact that its leaders and form of government were terrible (which...this doesn't justify it one bit...but yes it was pretty bad, the Commonwealth was the pits) and he wanted the land for Prussian settlement and expansion.

Well that book has been criticized for having a very Americocentric bias, and emphasizing the Western narrative at the detriment of the Nazi's attitudes in the East. As for Stresemann, I suggest you read AJP Taylor on that...rearmament in that context definitely meant some plans in the East for colonization and expansion, if not all the way into Ukraine than Poland at least. German Irredentism was a big thing at the time.

That's fair - I'm getting that impression as well, and obviously the Eastern European needs to be included for a holistic history of the Second World War, but it still seems (to me) like the most comprehensive and (relatively) approachable book of Third Reich economic history, which also tends to be a neglected facor in understanding the period outside of the rather well-worn comparisons of relative industrial capacity and resource access.