I wonder if it’s Metal Gear Solid V or Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) that constitutes the plurality American impression of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
By D-Day the Atlantic Wall defenses had been reinforced several times, even taking seriously the need to muster and build up stockpiles in Britain an attack could have broken through the coastal defenses earlier.
…but those defenses were still enough to force a concentration of forces into a single spearpoint, which inland reserves could have mobilized to encircle and neutralize.“… until they were redeployed to the Eastern Front. It really was Russians fighting in the east that decided the European theater of WWII.
Of course, Stalin exerted whatever pressure he could to bring the West into the fight ASAP, but letting the Red Army bear the burden and pay the costs of attritting the Reich away and then only afterwards sweeping through a hollowed-out Western Front as the preferable option to surrender to was a critical part of Anglo-American grand strategy.
Even with that, they still then had to grind out a Cold War evenly matched enough to last half a century.
The Whiskey Rebellion was this great example of early American state incapacity, like sub-Colonial, medieval – there’s like no viable currency in circulation so frontier grain farmers are basically coining their own by distilling whiskey and refusing to cut the feds in so George Washington himself raises an army – which basically amounts to insisting an army be raised and threatening to impress stray farmers with a handful of regular troops until he eventually gathers a mass of nearby absolute rabble plus every local elite from the area who all insist on being in command in their own way. This mass then sets off under the sitting President’s personal leadership eating, looting, and likely raping its way across its own country, and is considered a testament to Washington’s leadership that it survives intact all the way to Western Pennsylvania, at which point the rebels have already dispersed (and further sub-military expedition attempts to apply federal authority prove largely fruitless).
It was a complete nightmare the Lewis and Clark Expedition was at-the-time understood as a recovery from, a proof of the ability of the United States to sustain disciplined operations across the continent.
(And then the Civil War, and then like every Western country in the world the executive branch restructured and modernized itself modeled off Prussia.)
Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period
@plum-soup said: I mean post war Japanese government has been very much been defined by the recruiting of former Japanese fascists, war criminals, etc to form the LDP and make sure an American friendly government maintained a stranglehold on Japanese politics. So yeah, fascism
Maybe there’s something in the way the South Korean government was pretty lineally descended from the Japanese occupation compradors too, and under the postwar settlement these two states took parallel paths, but both of self-directed development within a First World order.
And that was the capitalists’ Cold War pitch: operate within a multilateral capitalist order and you’ll be able to become a rich developed country.
And that was also the communists’: “the capitalists’ plan is really just to put the fascists back in charge!”
The French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars honestly make a lot more sense when you remember that the British literally operated on the principle of ‘officer’s commissions are pieces of property we auction out to rich failsons with literally zero competency checking besides making sure the check clears’.
In an island country where the Navy is the outward-facing force, the Army largely exists to preempt the possibility of any other army taking over, in which capacity “alignment with existing dynamics of social power” is an advantage against potential subversion.
Like, the Napoleonic army very explicitly represented untethered officers as a power base capable of displacing the established social order, which the British system had very explicitly been arranged to prevent since the New Model Army in the English Civil War.
This is how capitalism is designed, so its not surprising. It’s just incredibly stupid and morally indefensible. Capitalism is a failure of a system that never should have become the dominant system. Hundreds of years of slavery, death, and disgusting violations of human existence is all we have to show for it. None of it was worth the cost.
I assure you that “the system optimizes for the interests of large landholders” is not specific to capitalism and was a well-recognized, load-bearing feature of the systems that preceded it.
Always shocking to go back and realize how far aviation had developed and been integrated into the everyday working of the human world before basic principles of piloting and aircraft design were discovered.
ALT
