Carville: Wake up Democrats; you could lose

[SirNitram]

When did anyone suggest the Allied Forces victory against genocidal empires justified the evil acts they did? I didn't see it in this thread. No one said 'And that's why Dresden was OK' or 'That's why you can't talk shit about internment camps'. Oh, wait. It's a strawman. Big surprise. You can't justify your unwavering, illogical stance, so you start trying to start offshoots. And No One Was Surprised At All.

Simple question, DX. You're president of the US in 1942. A city and harbor was just bombed in a sneak attack, and your oldest allies are slowly being crushed to death under a war machine fed by death and conquest. Do you try and talk the Japanese out of attacking? They must to fuel their Empire with oil, and that means conquest. Will you ask Hitler to not kill those he considers subhuman, those his god alledgedly told him to deal with?

[Junghalli]

That the Allies ended up being on the "right" side of that war was an accident. This is the biggest danger to saying WW2 was justified: if the ends did justify the means (a moral philosophy that logically must be rejected), it was purely by chance. Using it as a model for future justifications is simply a terribly idea.

Lately I've begun to think that the way popular history remembers WWII may have a toxic effect on our culture because of how conveniently it fits into militaristic narratives of international politics being some kind of saturday morning cartoon where you keep the world safe and make it better by using military power to kick the asses of villains.

I remember somebody, I think it was Dooey Jo on NT, made an interesting speculation that if Hitler had been less evil WWII would probably have happened anyway, because it was pretty much a natural result of the politics of the time, but the allied war effort might be remembered much more cynically. Instead of "we kicked the asses of those horrible evil fascists and defended freedom" the popular narrative might end up more like "millions of people died and tons of shit was wrecked on a rematch of WWI and the end result was a power grab by the USSR and some regime changes and redrawn borders, and then the ashes and blood's not even cooled when the winners are already falling out among themselves and starting to get ready for Round III, thankfully cancelled on account of uranium rain."

I wonder if that would be a better world.

[Simon_Jester]

I remember somebody, I think it was Dooey Jo on NT, made an interesting speculation that if Hitler had been less evil WWII would probably have happened anyway, because it was pretty much a natural result of the politics of the time, but the allied war effort might be remembered much more cynically. Instead of "we kicked the asses of those horrible evil fascists and defended freedom" the popular narrative might end up more like "millions of people died and tons of shit was wrecked on a rematch of WWI and the end result was a power grab by the USSR and some regime changes and redrawn borders, and then the ashes and blood's not even cooled when the winners are already falling out among themselves and starting to get ready for Round III, thankfully cancelled on account of uranium rain."

I wonder if that would be a better world.

I don't think I buy that part. The British and French were very antiwar in the early 1930s, at least when it came to wars fought over places with white people in them. And that really didn't change much until some years after Hitler took over. I have a hard time seeing them 'cynically' trying to have a go at Germany again for the hell of it.

Likewise, the Stalinist-era Soviets were very worried about the idea of the capitalist nations all dogpiling them at once out of anticommunism. So they didn't start making really aggressive moves in Europe until they knew they could count on the powerful distraction of Nazi expansionism.

Or go to the Pacific, and Japan... well, I dunno, they might have tried to secure an empire via land grab anyway, but they'd have been very ambiguous about taking their chances with it if they didn't know the British were heavily distracted, for example.


So if you want to speculate down that road, I think you're really better off positing that if Hitler had never lived, the last world war would have been the first one- there might have been a "Pacific War" fought between Japan and various others, or "colonial wars," or relatively minor wars fought on the fringes of Europe, but no knock-down drag-out total war between all the major industrial powers.

And yes, I think we'd have a much healthier world for that, one that would have evolved in more reasonable and healthy directions.

[Junghalli]

I don't think I buy that part. The British and French were very antiwar in the early 1930s, at least when it came to wars fought over places with white people in them. And that really didn't change much until some years after Hitler took over. I have a hard time seeing them 'cynically' trying to have a go at Germany again for the hell of it.

I think the idea was more that the politics of Germany after WWI were such that some kind of revanchist-leaning government coming to power is likely, but one can imagine that government not sharing a lot of the Nazis' let's say more spectacular ideological peculiarities, and this might have lead to WWII coming to be percieved rather differently, as more "glorified imperialist dick-fencing contest" like WWI instead of "heroic brave stand against Mordor."

[Simon_Jester]

A revanchist government without Hitler's long-range ambition to dominate Europe would probably not have triggered World War Two, because they'd most likely have stopped at the Anschluss. Or maybe the Sudetenland. But they wouldn't have proceeded to simply annex the Czech lands and then move on to a massive unprovoked attack against Poland, which is what really touched things off in a big way.

Even without the racism and the Holocaust, Nazi occupation policy and aggression were blatant enough to make fighting them a great way to seem like the good guys, even for otherwise horrible guys like the Soviets.

[CarsonPalmer]

I don't think I buy that part. The British and French were very antiwar in the early 1930s, at least when it came to wars fought over places with white people in them. And that really didn't change much until some years after Hitler took over. I have a hard time seeing them 'cynically' trying to have a go at Germany again for the hell of it.

Likewise, the Stalinist-era Soviets were very worried about the idea of the capitalist nations all dogpiling them at once out of anticommunism. So they didn't start making really aggressive moves in Europe until they knew they could count on the powerful distraction of Nazi expansionism.

Or go to the Pacific, and Japan... well, I dunno, they might have tried to secure an empire via land grab anyway, but they'd have been very ambiguous about taking their chances with it if they didn't know the British were heavily distracted, for example.


So if you want to speculate down that road, I think you're really better off positing that if Hitler had never lived, the last world war would have been the first one- there might have been a "Pacific War" fought between Japan and various others, or "colonial wars," or relatively minor wars fought on the fringes of Europe, but no knock-down drag-out total war between all the major industrial powers.

And yes, I think we'd have a much healthier world for that, one that would have evolved in more reasonable and healthy directions.

It seems like it'd be a mixed bag. There'd probably be no Israel, so the Israel-Palestine conflict as we know it wouldn't be happening, but at the same time, anti-Semitism would likely remain a much more socially acceptable prejudice than it is today.

The British and the French probably hold onto their empires for longer than they did, especially Indochina for the French (unless the Japanese take it from them in our hypothetical Pacific War) and India for the British (that one in particular might end badly). Colonialism in general probably does better than it did, and fascism/other forms of extreme right-wing nationalism probably do much better in the second half of the 20th century, instead of becoming poison like they did for a long time. Places like Spain and Portugal might stay fascist past the 1970's, and Italy might stay fascist that long too.

On the other hand and going back the other way, Eastern Europe might actually do much better if it doesn't become a Soviet satellite.

[CarsonPalmer]

I think the idea was more that the politics of Germany after WWI were such that some kind of revanchist-leaning government coming to power is likely, but one can imagine that government not sharing a lot of the Nazis' let's say more spectacular ideological peculiarities, and this might have lead to WWII coming to be percieved rather differently, as more "glorified imperialist dick-fencing contest" like WWI instead of "heroic brave stand against Mordor."

I don't know if it needs to happen, though. Sure there were the trigger factors there that could have caused it, but if the Cuban Missile Crisis had turned into World War II, we might well be sitting around today saying that a war between the US and the USSR was inevitable because something was going to trigger it anyway. The Cold War sort of proves that it is possible to get through a time of high tensions and flashpoints without actually triggering a massive global conflagaration.

[Sea Skimmer]

It kind of helped that the actual USA and USSR were thousands of miles apart, rather than sharing a border and generally had long term interests which were pretty different. WW1 and WW2 meanwhile were for the Europeans about directly redrawing each others borders, coming after hundreds of years of having done so on a regular basis without thinking that much about it.

[SirNitram]

When did anyone suggest the Allied Forces victory against genocidal empires justified the evil acts they did?

"WW2 was a just war."

You can't divorce war from evil, seeing how it is evil incarnate. And, even the worst parts of it are practically inseperable from the concept as a whole. Like Leon Panetta recently said about a massacre in Afghanistan, in war, these things happen.

Your personal moral views are not inarguable facts. So do not throw out 'war is evil incarnate' as an argument. Surely you realize that your views are not objective facts.

Simple question, DX. You're president of the US in 1942. A city and harbor was just bombed in a sneak attack, and your oldest allies are slowly being crushed to death under a war machine fed by death and conquest. Do you try and talk the Japanese out of attacking?

Yes, of course. Now, if I was president in 1942, it'd mean I was president in 1941 as well, which gives time for prevention. Let's try not to bring in info they didn't know then, so intercepting them at the attack isn't an option.

But, there were analysts at the time who could see the path they were on; a lot of people expected a Japanese attack was on the way at one point or another, and some could also see American actions as likely to provoke it.

The tricky part though is each provokation made good sense; they seemed like the best option at the time to the policymakers. What this means is I'll be in the difficult position as President to argue against the best option, saying we'll have to do something seemingly suboptimal each step of the way in order to get off that slippery slope.


Question though: is it already too late? Well, maybe, but I don't think so: Tojo wasn't in place yet, and the Emperor hadn't even approved the attack. But, it is late enough that any decision is going to cost us.

I think the best choice is to lift the oil embargo in exchange for relatively modest concessions. A Japanese withdrawl from China almost certainly isn't going to happen at this point (pity the League of Nations didn't do something sooner ), but maybe we can improve the situation there.

I'd probably settle for two things, given my relatively limited knowledge of everything, and that's 1) stop the Japanese expansion. Not push them back, just contain it where it is now. and 2) embed human rights observers. The Japanese at the time were pretty brutal toward the people in their colonies; the Rape of Nanking had already occurred, for example. Maybe we can use our trade strength to improve the lot of those folks at least a little, alleviating some of that pain to give Chinese Gandhi a chance to find his feet.


With a little luck, we'd have a diplomatic solution that nobody is really happy with... but everybody can live with.

This will run into trouble. The Japanese expansion is not based entirely on resources or land. It is ultimately a Holy War; they called it Hakko Ichui; 'Eight Corners of the world under one roof'. Human rights observers are a non-existant thing so far; their earliest form, legal observers, had been present in protests in England, due to agent provocatuors involved in protests around the British Union Of Facists. So you're trying to swap oil for them to violate a holy order, AND introduce this brand new concept you just came up with in the past 10 months. You can see where this runs hard into the jagged reef of reality.

What if Pearl Harbor has already happened though (or happens anyway)? I'd have to give them one last chance at a deal. If that doesn't work out, ideally we'll both refuse to kill and refuse to cooperate. Since my religion also preaches moderation and tolerance though, I can deal with self defense. If someone points a gun at you and you don't want to be martyred... shoot him.

Where I draw the line on self-defense though is preemptive bullshit. If you aren't imminently threatened, you can't shoot him. It isn't justified self defense to shoot someone for simple trespass nor just because he happens to be a gun owner.

Well, no one could possibly claim the Americans are acting in pre-emptive measures. Germans had sunk many American ships, and the Japanese bombed your navy.

At this point, the war may be on. But, big difference between me and Roosevelt: I won't insist on an unconditional surrender. I won't call "defense" when launching a pure attack. I won't say "it is justified for the greater good". If I'm doing war, I'll call it evil.

If they're willing to turn back the clock, well, so am I. No need to go on the offensive for disproportionate revenge, nor to use the Pearl Harbor attack as an opportunity to be expolited. Hey, if we can get some good out of it, I'll take it, but if we can't, I'll settle for limiting the bad.

And this leads us into the most controversial parts of the Pacific Theatre, the Atomic Bomb. Only one of the six ministers running the war, the Naval minister Yonai, wanted an early end. He was effectively a warm body here, the Navy being reduced to hulks and some light warships by now. Now, in January of 45, you'd have received a dossier for a negotiated surrender. The Japanese had expected this, planning their entire war to basically reach the bargaining table of the Americans, to retain most of their new Empire, and their Emperor in his absolute authority. It's possible you can head off the hardliners who wanted another high-casualty battle to gain more territory, but you need to keep Stalin on his leash; he wants to invade, and an invasion will be devastating for all sides. IF you cannot stop the hardliners, the atomic bombings are your best option for limiting the bad; the shock of these weapons will lead to surrender, with far less casualties than either the American or Soviet invasions.

Will you ask Hitler to not kill those he considers subhuman, those his god alledgedly told him to deal with?

Yes, of course. I'd call on every American to take a threatened family into their own homes. Of course, America was (and still is) a throughly racist country, and still had economic problems that would make that easier said than done, but living in America still beats the crap out of dying in Europe.

I assume you will, then, not declare war on Germany through it's alliance with Japan? Will you maintain the Neutrality Act and not sell to the Allies? Indeed, will you support or reject the Lend-Lease?

[MKSheppard]

France and Britain were trying the pacifistic route for a long time precisely because they didn't want to risk disaster (after all, they remembered the brutality of WWI).

Well that, and everyone feared that the first 72 hours of a German War would involve thousands of German bombers dropping MUSTARD GAS onto British cities; with immense fatalities; due to the poorish state of Britain's air defenses.

And, oddly enough, had they pressured Hitler with military threats early on in his regime (for instance, after the Anschluss or the annexation of the Sudetenland), he wouldn't have been able to start WWII at all, and likely would have not had the Holocaust, or had one that was much, much more reduced in scope and lethality (more like a larger Aktion T4 rather than a full-blown Final Solution).

So, in that instance, being a bit more belligerent would have been the better course of action, as opposed to being pacifistic.

Yes, or spending money in the mid-1930s on military defenses; instead of putting it off.

[Akhlut]

Britain and France in the 1930's ran with a strategy of almost entirely hands off. Obviously, that was a mistake. Perhaps if the League of Nations went with the economic sanctions they talked about things would have been different (I don't like economic sanctions, and they have a very, very poor success rate, but that's a tool they discussed at the time that may have worked).

Yes, economic sanctions against one of three/four nations on the earth that was managing to somehow avoid the effects of the Great Depression mainly through internal actions. I'm sure that is going to work out in a stunning manner.

And I especially doubt that will play right into Hitler's hands, as he blamed the economic disaster in Weimar Germany on the Jews already. The League of Nations, an international organization, convinces many nations to try to destroy Germany economically.

Yeah, that won't lead to Hitler playing up the international Jewish banker-commie theory like a fiddle.

Japan, on the other hand, would just see sanctions as a better reason to invade south Asia for all the resources they're lacking. About all it would do would shift priorities for them to invade oil rich regions quicker.

Perhaps a propaganda war could have made a difference in changing public opinion.

Let's be honest, the Nazis had one of the better propaganda bureaus the world has ever seen; people know exactly what they did in WWII and they still have a sizable fan club and there are a lot of people who still admit that, despite their vile behavior, had one hell of a sense of style.

So, how do you propose on combating their already well-established and highly polished propaganda arm?

Whereas the Japanese are a highly insular society that puts the Emperor above all else and have a very strong religious ideology about trusting and following the Emperor and his hierarchy. Now, while not impossible to break that, it's one hell of an uphill battle that probably won't be won before they start murdering the hell out of Korean and Chinese people.

Maybe more liberal trade, leading to better peaceful prospects in the eyes of German and Japanese leaders could have made a difference.

Or it could have convinced them that the other nations were too weak to stop them and they'd be willing to invade more. Hard to say, but you're not dealing with societies that at least nominally view war as a last resort. Rather, you're dealing with societies that view war as the second resort (if outright intimidation and bullying doesn't work) and a great resort at that. Trying to deal with them on a pacifistic footing probably isn't the best way to go about things.

Naturally, this would be hard to do with the depression; protectionism had its own merits, but it is another tool that may have helped. In fact, it is probably my favorite of the options, since that helps solve one of the major pushes for war on the attacker's side - the need to acquire materials to support their own growth.

And where would you get these materials from? The US's own flagging economy? The Soviets, who were about as interested in trade as they were in religion? European colonies, just so you can brutally exploit them to appease Hitler and Tojo? There's no good options there.

And, oddly enough, had they pressured Hitler with military threats early on in his regime

Yes, certainly possible. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

Of the ways though, early military threats are among the worst of the options. Pre-emptive war is an ugly thing.[/quote]

It wouldn't be preemptive, though. Using military pressure after the Anschluss or annexation of the Sudetenland would be after very aggressive actions; not necessarily military ones, but you didn't have to be Nostradomus to see where Hitler was taking this sort of thing. And it wouldn't have had to have been a full-blown, total war as WWII was. A quick invasion and stalemate probably would have been enough to keep Hitler quiet in Germany, as they really weren't in a great position for the war ever. It was mainly through superior application of force rather than any great material advantage that Germany was able to win as long as it did.

Do you think that when Hilter invaded the USSR that all the Jews there would have been simply shipped out instead of shot and thrown in mass graves?

He said he was willing to ship the Jews out if someone would take them at the Evian conference. Maybe he was lying or had different plans for conquered areas, but it'd be worth a try.

Hitler, a liar? Perish the thought!

Why must the ends justifying the means be rejected? After all, one has to consider that any consequences as a result of the means are included in the ends.

Look at the consequences of consequentialism: virtually every war (including WW2, on both sides) is justified in some kind of humanitarian "greater good" terms. Domestic tyranny is the same: we need to do this to protect the majority in this country. If there's a ticking time bomb, yes, use torture - this one guy's rights are outweighed by the rights of the potential victims. And so on.

Except that torture doesn't actually produce any results like that, and most people who go to war rarely do a good analysis on the outcomes; hell, as a 17 year old high school kid, I could have told you that going to war in Iraq in 2003 was just going to result in a large insurgency and more terrorists for no discernible reason.

So, in the end, a lot of people who say they abide by consequentialism really DO NOT look at the consequences of their actions anymore than most Christians really follow the Golden Rule and abide by Jesus' words about, essentially, being Commies.

[Panzersharkcat]

I'm trying to remember where I read it but somebody stated that, at least in Europe, the war could have been avoided had the same demands Hitler made been appeased under the Weimar government. The demands for the return of German lands weren't entirely unreasonable, after all. Those lands had majority populations that wanted to return to Germany and if the Western powers really wanted to go with the whole self-determination bit, they should have accepted out of magnanimity. The refusal to do so with the Weimar republic and their folding to those demands with Hitler in power undoubtedly convinced a lot of Germans that it was his banging on the table that did it. I believe that Japan's actions have some cause in Britain's severing of the Anglo-Japanese naval alliance at the behest of the Americans. They were faithful allies to the British in World War I and they were repaid by basically being spurned from the cool kid's table and made to accept an inferior naval ratio in the Washington Naval Conference. This is just from memory, though, and I would not be too surprised if I got some things in this that results in me being bludgeoned over the head with some history tomes.

[Sea Skimmer]

I believe that Japan's actions have some cause in Britain's severing of the Anglo-Japanese naval alliance at the behest of the Americans.

As far as I've ever seen, both nations already knew that alliance was dead by then, the US just wanted it formal. Japan was clearly running into conflict with European interests in the far east, and the Entente Cordiale of 1904 had evaporated the biggest military logic behind the alliance which was a British cruiser war with Russia and France at the same time.

They were faithful allies to the British in World War I

Not at all. Japan helped itself to a few weakly defended colonies and escorted a few Australian troops to the Red Sea, and then stopped. They refused to even aid the war in Africa against the Germans colonial troops, and sent no forces what so ever to Europe until 1917 when they sent a few destroyers. They did that only then because the U-boat threat looked like it might actually beat the British and French, and the destroyers did not stay long in the Mediterranean. They refused the outright sale or loan of warships to be manned by British personal which was asked in 1914. In other words, they acted only when it was to the direct and complete benefit of Japan.

and they were repaid by basically being spurned from the cool kid's table and made to accept an inferior naval ratio in the Washington Naval Conference.

Yes, on the clear logic that if Japan was made equal in numbers, she would always be considerably superior in the Pacific and that this ratio was vastly above Japans economic weight, and thus any possible ratio she could obtain in an unlimited arms race. What was more, the treaty banned the US and British from building new fortifications close to Japan which was a large military advantage ensuring that Japan would not have to worry about a foreign battle fleet based close to its own shores.

These facts are why Japan signed and ratified the treaty in the first place, everyone rational in her government, including more that a few naval leaders accepted this logic and most believed the terms were actually favorable. When the Great Kanto Earthquake literally destroyed 1/3rd of Japans GDP soon after in 1923, well, the treaty became even more favorable. That quake wrecked several shipyards, including destroying one battlecruiser hull and a light cruiser, which otherwise would have been packed with warships that would have been ruined. Unfortunately crazed militarists then assassinated or forced everyone rational out in the years that followed, and replaced them with fanatic retards who dragged the country down into complete ruin trying to build a world empire.

Now sure, militarists did at times argue that the treaty was a great insult, but this was jargonistic posturing. It had no basis in fact; the real facts were without the treaty you get exactly what happened in WW2. The US or Britain alone could vastly outproduce Japan, the US to a comical degree reflecting its roughly 10 times greater industrial power. The Washington Naval Treaty and London followup are the only reason Japan ever even had the chance to launch such a wide ranging war, and they still lost horribly.

[Simon_Jester]

[bludgeons]

The return of the Rhineland would probably have been accepted under the Weimar government. That was not unreasonable.

The Nazi ambition to annex Austria arguably was unreasonable, and their tactics certainly were- the German Nazis used the Austrian Nazis as puppets to ensure that the annexation went as planned, including blatant acts of terrorism and kidnapping of government officials as a way to coerce them into signing the annexation treaty. Without all that violence and trickery, it is far from certain Austria would ever have wanted to lock itself into Germany.

The Nazi ambition to annex the Sudetenland was even worse, because the Sudetenland was far from exclusively German, was a vital industrial and defensive region for the nation of Czechoslovakia, and... honestly, the Germans there weren't being treated too badly.

So if we remove Hitler and his violent revanchism, which at best was to normal peaceful negotations as date-rape is to dating, we probably remove the Anschluss and almost certainly remove Munich. I'm pretty sure Weimar never demanded them, and they'd certainly never get the consent of the Austrians and Czechoslovaks without Hitler's bullying and intimidation.


As to Japan, the fundamental problem that triggered their aggression is that they saw themselves in a very large, dominant role within their hemisphere. From the 1890s on there was a consistent pattern of Japan trying to build up a colonial empire in the Far East, at the expense of the Koreans, the Chinese, and anyone else who got in their way.

This wasn't really all that different qualitatively from what the European powers (and to some extent the US, which got into the game rather late) were up to. But the Japanese kept at it well into the twentieth century, after it had started to become unacceptable behavior elsewhere in the world. By the 1930s, aggressive colonial wars aimed at conquering territory at the expense of native governments was widely disapproved of. Colonial powers were still holding their large empires, but even that was unpopular in places like the US (the US's disapproval of British rule in India had a lot to do with the British withdrawal post-WWII).

Their determination to pursue regional conquest made it almost inevitable that they'd end up fighting the US, British, Russians, or some combination of the above. Regardless of who 'betrayed' them by preventing them from fulfilling their ambitions and becoming the dominant power in the Far East, they were going to end up in a fight if they kept following the road they were on.

[Panzersharkcat]

Without all that violence and trickery, it is far from certain Austria would ever have wanted to lock itself into Germany.

Looking things up, Kurt Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor at the time of Anschluss, was fervently in favor of keeping Austrian independent. His predecessor, Engelbert Dolfuss, banned the Austrian Nazi Party before he was assassinated by the Austrian Nazis. So yeah, I'm wrong on that and on what Sea Skimmer noted.

[PeZook]

Even if violence was a necessary evil to stop the Nazis (or Imperial Japan), it doesn't mean you should disregard the pacifist ideal.

Basically, I think Simon is being too fast to dismiss "plan B". While it might not work in this one situation, there's still many, many times where it did work.

I'm all for using exclusively peaceful solutions where they're appropriate ; It's just that sometimes they're not. The pacifistic ideal is just that, an ideal, and is fundamentally no different than the illusion that you can have a clean war and instill democracy in a foreign nation at the point of the bayonet, because your soldiers and weapons are going to behave perfectly and only kill the bad guys and the foreign civilians will be entirely rational and calm about the whole thing.

As presented in this thread, the pacifistic ideal of resistance also depends on people uncharacteristically willing to submit to murder without doing anything to defend themselves or their families.

The Allies lost shitloads of military battles too, but ended up winning the war in the end; just because something had a lot of failures doesn't mean it is hopeless and we should just give up.

It's one thing to lose some battles and win others, it's another entirely to use a strategy which leads to constant and predictable defeats. Peaceful resistance in the face of a genocidal enemy has the problem that failures don't cause casualties for the enemy: the SS men will simply move on to slaughter even more people after massacring your failed protest...unless they fear massive violent relatiation from the population they are trying to control. Sure, some will break down and descend into substance abuse and become completely ineffective as soldiers, but that's not a problem of the same sort as "literally everyone joins the resistance, no group of less than twenty SS men is going to be safe outside their barracks"

Remember that the only reason work slowdowns and "soft" sabotage worked at all was because the Nazis had a war to fight on the eastern front, and thus needed the railways, industry and administration functional. They also couldn't bring in millions of extra troops to slaughter civilians, or just take their sweet time doing this, because those troops were needed to fight a huge-ass army to the east.

Had you depended entirely on unarmed, non-violent resistance and non-compliance, without the threat of millions of Russians with guns and tanks and airplanes, the Nazis could've afforded to just murder every single one of the non-cooperative locals where they stood - one combat soldier would need to murder only about ten people to make it happen. Not that it's an achievable ideal, anyways: you can't expect everyone, or even most people, to just sit down on the platform and not board the cattle cars, because scared people will latch onto any sliver of hope they can see. If there's the tiniest chance of survival, vs.guaranteed execution, most will take the chance and board the train. Or rush their captors and attempt to overpower them.

Incidentally, this is precisely why the Germans took so many pains to pretend the transports were NOT going to their deaths, and to murder people out of sight (some transports never made it to the camps, but were unloaded in a secluded spot and massacred there).

Even confining the question to Poles and Russians under Nazi occupation I'm not sure there could have been no resistance that was effective at all except violence.

Actually there was plenty of non-violent resistance, because obviously not everyone could pick up a gun and fight - if for no other reason, then because there weren't nearly enough guns.

But here's the thing: non-violent and violent resistance was a synergistic combination. Germans couldn't intimidate the populace with wildly disproportionate punishment (well, more disproportionate than they already were, anyways) because that bred resentment and fed volunteers to violent partisans who would then go on to blow up trains and stab gendarmes and shoot officials, so they had to be relatively considerate - murdering people in secluded locations, etc.

That's why I mentioned Kutschera: when the polish resistance proved that they COULD assassinate even the highest German occupation officials, the repressions eased up so as not to make such a risky operation seem worth it again...thus, the murder made non-violent resistance more effective, because less people would be intimidated into compliance.

And yeah, sure, if EVERYONE stopped working and chose to starve to death instead, the Nazis would've been fucked, because they'd have to bring in their own people to run the basic infrastructure, but that would never happen, because people are people and want to survive.

Keep in mind this is in the context of the Nazis fighting a big war ... which making things inconvenient for them would divert resources away from, weakening them and making their demise more likely and sooner.

But that's the thing, isn't it? You need millions of Russians with guns for that to work. You need millions of Russians with guns for violent resistance to work, too. Either way, SOMEONE has to get violent somewhere in this sort of situation.

[Irbis]

You CAN see the difference between two groups can't you D13? I mean there is a significant plant in the whole 40s era political parties of the day

Meet the British
We want to rule over you
We want your natural resources
Our stated goal is to use you to help us ship your natural resources back to Jolly old England
We'd also like Taxes, Tribute and a hearty thank you for us civilizing you

Let me point out that yes, Brits can be compared to the Nazis, especially when their "benevolent" shipping natural resources to jolly old England and inept scorched earth policies did, in fact, produced things equal to or worse than the Holocaust. Example with 7-10 million people dead because no one cared about these Indian subhumans enough to release food from stockpiles where there was plenty of it. They just let the food rot instead. Churchill's reaction?

In response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, and Viceroy of India Archibald Wavell, to release food stocks for India, Winston Churchill the Prime Minister of that time responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why Gandhi hadn’t died yet."

Though, yes, you're indeed correct that non-violent resistance against armed force determined to shoot you to death simply isn't that viable, as even last decade plainly demonstrated.

[Simon_Jester]

For all the British atrocities in India, there were two really notable differences, and these were the reasons Ghandi's campaign worked against the British:


One, the British were a fully democratic society, at least among their own colonial overlord class. There were no secret police to control public opinion, there was a free press, citizens could travel wherever they pleased if they could afford it (Britons to India, Indians to Britain; both were legal). That meant that a nonviolent protest in Dandi, or a massacre in Amritsar, or the like would earn a lot of attention among the British public. Which made it much easier for Ghandi to change the minds of the British without violence. He could talk to them. British reporters could walk up to him and ask him questions, and print his interview in the newspaper where other British people would read it, and no one got in trouble for this. Even when government officials hated Ghandi (as Churchill did), they could not outlaw the expression of opinions like "Ghandi is a great guy and we should get the hell out of India."

Hitler, by contrast, could outlaw any opinion he wanted, and if you printed something he didn't like he could totally have the Gestapo drag you off in the middle of the night and torture you to death with red-hot pincers. So whereas there was a steady stream of media articles saying "we should get the hell out of India and quit oppressing Indians," there was no similar stream among the Nazi Germans about getting out of Poland or not killing all the Jews. It was, for practical purposes, illegal for citizens of the state to even discuss among themselves the idea that the state shouldn't engage in horrible, violent, cruel behavior. At the same time, any foreign behavior got relabeled in the media so efficiently and comprehensively that it makes the distortion of the modern American press look trivial. every battle was presented as a victory, every enemy of the state was presented as cowardly and horrible and vicious, and no contradictory narrative was allowed anywhere, even along side channels. As far as the average German knows, those nonviolent protestors in Poland? Yeah, they're rebel armies. Goebbels will just cynically say that to his own people, and a lot of them will believe him.

So that's difference number one: you could get at the mind of the average British citizen and the British government, make them question the rightness and justice of their actions, and have a public dialogue with them about it all. Having such a dialogue in Nazi Germany would be nearly impossible, which makes the nonviolent resister's task orders of magnitude more difficult.


Difference number two: at no time did the British ever seriously plan to reach a future in which India would contain no living Indians. The British never had the equivalent of the Wannsee Conference where they sat down and decided to destroy the Indian people. They would certainly do terrible damage and kill millions of Indians, callously, brutally, and unthinkingly. But there was never an organized effort to make the human culture of India as a whole cease to exist and be replaced by a sort of budded offspring of Britain. You might contrast this to the way the Aborigines were destroyed, and Australia remade in a British image.

This is especially important because nonviolent resistance takes time to work. The success of the nonviolent campaign took from some time in the early 1920s (check out the speech Churchill gave during Parliamentary debates after Amritsar, by the way; history is complicated) up to the late 1940s. Ghandi and others had to struggle for a generation to make independence happen- and that was in a society with a free press, with freedom of expression, with the freedom of British citizens to exchange their views on independence and learn from the independence movement. Contrast this to Germany, where persuading the German people to abandon their evils would have been that much harder... and where within a generation, the independence and culture of the Jews, the Poles, or the Russians might well have been gone. There would have been no Jews in Europe if the Holocaust had continued through 1950; there might have been effectively none left by 1947. A campaign of nonviolent resistance takes much longer than that to succeed against a stable, hostile regime... so it's very questionable whether the campaign could ever succeed against the Nazis in time to avert the destruction of the resisting culture.

As a smaller part of this, an illustration: We see that the British did not plan to forbid Indians from getting any education (Indians, or at least the ones who could afford to pay, sometimes even attended British schools). Which helped a lot- Ghandi himself was the product of a pretty good education, and so were a lot of his most effective friends and allies among the independence movement. So the Indians had no trouble preserving a cultural memory of what their society was like without British domination, or remembering what the British had done to them, or writing literature to convince more Indians (and foreigners) to support independence, or organizing large-scale movements. All these things are much harder to do if people in your country can't get an education. Which the Germans knew very well, which is why they made a special effort to kill off community leaders and educators among the Poles and Russians, but didn't do that in Western Europe: they were trying to destroy Eastern European culture and reduce the Eastern Europeans to serfdom. Whereas the British, largely without realizing it, sowed the end of their own oppression in India by allowing and even encouraging the Indian people to educate themselves and awaken their own cultural and political goals.

This, too, made long-term nonviolent resistance much easier.

[ChaserGrey]

Japan, on the other hand, would just see sanctions as a better reason to invade south Asia for all the resources they're lacking. About all it would do would shift priorities for them to invade oil rich regions quicker.

I've largely stayed out of this to avoid dogpiling, but it's worth noting that this is, in fact, what actually happened. Japan originally had no particular plans to fight the Americans, British, Dutch, and Australians over the Pacific area and confined their imperial ambitions to China. When the Americans grew increasingly cranky about this and began embargoing weapons, then war material, and finally oil exports to Japan, the government there took that as a sign that they wouldn't be able to pursue their preferred foreign policy as long as they were dependent on foreigners for resources. The solution, obviously, was to declare war and seize those resources by force, after which Japan would be free to run the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere as best suited them.

So we know what economic sanctions do to the Japanese government at the time. It convinces them to go to war.

And yes, I've seen the books condemning the American actions as "economic aggression" intended to "cripple Japan's economy", and I think they're bunk. When refusing to sell weapons and fuel to someone engaged in a war of aggression becomes an aggressive act, I think you're officially in Wonderland...

[Junghalli]

I'm kind of interested in this point:

This will run into trouble. The Japanese expansion is not based entirely on resources or land. It is ultimately a Holy War; they called it Hakko Ichui; 'Eight Corners of the world under one roof'.

Just how big of a factor is this? I mean, it seems to me like a lot of states have ideological reasons for expansion as well as "rational" ones of wanting more land and resources (which if you think about it is itself ideological). Communism was theoretically a utopian ideology that's ideally supposed to eventually exist everywhere (IIRC), same goes for American democracy/"freedom and justice" type ideals, European imperialism was often justified in terms of civilizing the savage natives instead of just self-interested land grabs, and Christianity and Islam are potential ideological motivations for massive conquest in the service of missionary aims (and I bet you could say the same about other religions too). Seems to me like there are tons of states in the world where you could argue "trying to rationally disincentive them from aggression is problematic because they have ideological reasons for it too."

Was Japan unusual in this respect, or was the problem (from an international politics viewpoint) basically that they were acting essentially like every other colonial power and muscling in on the Allied powers' turf?

[SirNitram]

I'm kind of interested in this point:

This will run into trouble. The Japanese expansion is not based entirely on resources or land. It is ultimately a Holy War; they called it Hakko Ichui; 'Eight Corners of the world under one roof'.

Just how big of a factor is this? I mean, it seems to me like a lot of states have ideological reasons for expansion as well as "rational" ones of wanting more land and resources (which if you think about it is itself ideological). Communism was theoretically a utopian ideology that's ideally supposed to eventually exist everywhere (IIRC), same goes for American democracy/"freedom and justice" type ideals, European imperialism was often justified in terms of civilizing the savage natives instead of just self-interested land grabs, and Christianity and Islam are potential ideological motivations for massive conquest in the service of missionary aims (and I bet you could say the same about other religions too). Seems to me like there are tons of states in the world where you could argue "trying to rationally disincentive them from aggression is problematic because they have ideological reasons for it too."

Was Japan unusual in this respect, or was the problem (from an international politics viewpoint) basically that they were acting essentially like every other colonial power and muscling in on the Allied powers' turf?

From their own plans for the surrender terms(Again, they had planned to surrender to the US after enough losses were inflicted), they planned to withdraw from the colonial land under the requirement they would be independent. They planned to keep as much as the other turf as possible. And yes, you can argue that alot of nation-states like that, but we should remember Japan was already punished to rationally disincentivse(Is that the word? Is that even a word?) their acts, the whole oil embargo. Which they looked at and decided, 'We'll go straight to antagonize the fuck out of the US.'

[Blayne]

I helped a friend write a paper on Japanese expansionism and militerism and its origins (he got like 98% :) ) where we concluded it had its roots in how in Japan's rush to modernize they ended up with weak central civilian institutions that couldn't control the overly militant security obsessed military that was crudely constructed post 1904 along ideological lines under the false and entirely fictional cultural construction of "bushido". It was kinda complex and I ended up having to draw my friend a big ass flow chart that covered two pages and everything fed into each other but the end result was this downward spiral of where Japan had to keep expanding to gain economic and military security which made the "world" more hostile making them more insecure creating a "strategic delemna" which resulted in Pearl Harbour; because there was no strong central authority to eventually stop the death spiral because things had just gone too far and too ideological for anyone to dare stomp on the breaks before disaster.

The key was when the finance minister stimulated the armaments and heavy industry to combat the great depression through heavy government spending... Which worked and they got out of the recession and had economic growth again after a few years but it also worked too well and Japan's economy was superheating. So the minister tried to cut back on military spending but got assasinated for it which pretty much destroyed any authority whatsoever the civilian institutions had remaining and everything went downhill from there like a rock in free fall.

It was a 20 page paper so I'm really simplifying and paraphrasing the paper.

[PeZook]

If you want to I can bow out so that you have time to reply to others.

[Simon_Jester]

This will run into trouble. The Japanese expansion is not based entirely on resources or land.

There's no one reason for any war. It's always a combination (I say it is because one person can't do a war, so they need multiple reasons to get enough support to pull it off). If the Japanese didn't have a (perceived at least) resource problem, they might still believe in some kind of manifest destiny, but not go over the edge to start a war. Keep in mind that they offered to negotiate before broadening the war.

The only thing that was off the table in negotiations, for Japan, was that the Japanese wanted to reserve the right to keep killing millions of people in China.

Is that OK? "Sure, we'll sell you all the oil you need so your planes can keep bombing Chinese cities, because that's better than us maybe needing to fight a war with you?"

Seriously, is that OK?

Or, of course, the other option is to just declare the war over and go home. If Stalin wants to make his own mistake and invade, I'll try to talk him out of it, but at the end of the day, that's his decision.

It's pretty fucked up to nuke someone for their own good.

If you succeed in talking Stalin out of it, Japan will keep killing millions of people in China. Is that OK?

And I don't think this is a bad consequentialist argument: "the house is already on fire," as you put it. The Japanese were already killing millions of people in China the whole time their war with the US and the British and (for two brief whiles) the Soviets were going on. They didn't stop until someone else held a really, really, ridiculously large gun to their head.

[SirNitram]

If you weren't so predictable, you'd at least provide some neural exercise. Sadly, you are as predictable as Newtonian physics.

Your personal moral views are not inarguable facts. So do not throw out 'war is evil incarnate' as an argument. Surely you realize that your views are not objective facts.

If something is "just" is a moral question, and if something is evil (your words originally) is a moral answer, but now we're not allowed to talk about morals, and you're shifting the discussion to "objective facts".

You're one of the worst posters on this board.

And yet you still can't bring yourself to actually answer the question. I asked you to name someone who said the Allied genocidal/terror attacks were OK, and you blubber some quote with no attribution and still no condonement of the atrocities. I never asked if the war was just, retard. You'd know that if you read my posts. Alternately, you're a troll, but I can't see you as being a troll. Just painfully naive and moronic.

This will run into trouble. The Japanese expansion is not based entirely on resources or land.

There's no one reason for any war. It's always a combination (I say it is because one person can't do a war, so they need multiple reasons to get enough support to pull it off). If the Japanese didn't have a (perceived at least) resource problem, they might still believe in some kind of manifest destiny, but not go over the edge to start a war. Keep in mind that they offered to negotiate before broadening the war.

'They might.. but not go over the edge'. Evidence for your made up claim, kiddo. Weinberg's book 'A World At Arms' points out the Japanese strategy was to assemble a buffer zone reaching into the Central Pacific so they can exploit the resources of everything inside. They had already started killing the ever-loving hell out of the Chinese. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident was designed to start that war, and I've never found any evidence of negotiating before going in. Or is your farcical belief that genocidal killing is better than declaring war?

So you're trying to swap oil for them to violate a holy order, AND introduce this brand new concept you just came up with in the past 10 months.

Your perspective on religion is childish and insulting.

My perspective on extremists.. Those that declare war and kill for their god.. Is accurate. I'm sorry if it makes you butthurt. Show me some evidence I'm anything but accurate on Imperial Japan's divine mandate handed down by the Sun God.

The idea of a rights observer is a very simple one though. It's not like bringing in a revolution of technology - it is just getting some people in there who report on if they are holding up their end of the deal.

So you have convinced yourself you can replicate a program that hit it's strides in 2001, in 1940. You're a looney tune.

Will they be called spies? Yeah, they are spies, in a sense. But, it is something we can talk about ahead of time and their mission has nothing to do with military secrets, so hopefully we can work something out.

And you honestly believe that, as spies, they won't simply be shot full of holes?

IF you cannot stop the hardliners, the atomic bombings are your best option for limiting the bad; the shock of these weapons will lead to surrender, with far less casualties than either the American or Soviet invasions.

Or, of course, the other option is to just declare the war over and go home. If Stalin wants to make his own mistake and invade, I'll try to talk him out of it, but at the end of the day, that's his decision.

'War is the ultimate evil.' 'I won't try and stop super-costly wars if someone else wants to start them!'

It's pretty fucked up to nuke someone for their own good.

WW2 was pretty fucked up. You seem to ignore this in favor of your ridiculous naivete.

I assume you will, then, not declare war on Germany through it's alliance with Japan? Will you maintain the Neutrality Act and not sell to the Allies? Indeed, will you support or reject the Lend-Lease?

I think the Neutrality Acts were a bad call, not because they aimed to stay out of war, but because they limited options to prevent the war too. Being anti-war is not the same as being strictly isolationist.

I'm undecided on lend-lease though. Like President Roosevelt said at the time, the house was already on fire.

Well then, your people are already under attack. Every ship with an American flag is being u-boated the hell out of.