"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

[Butters 0]

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>Applying organized violence does not happen by itself, it takes ideas, values, etc...

Agreed - but those values can be nearly anything. Militant atheism, fascism, democracy, protestantism, you name it.

>You don't think the world would be a different place if the Axis values had
>been more widely accepted than the Allies?

Of course the world would be a different place. The reason it's not is because we put forth a better military effort than they did.

But what you are implying is that the quality of our military effort had nothing to do with our ideas, values, etc...

"That looks dangerous." Leopold Stotch

[billvon 2,433]

>But what you are implying is that the quality of our military effort
>had nothing to do with our ideas, values, etc...

They are peripherally, not directly, related. Had our ideas, values etc been exactly the same in the 1780's, it would not have made us a world power. A massive GNP, lots of bombers and a well-supplied military DOES make us a world power.

Now, you could argue that with different values we would never had grown like this. That may be true - but again, is peripherally, not directly, related.

[kelpdiver 2]

Japan is the clear counterproof to this nonsense. It behaved just like every "Western" power in the colonial era running through the mid 20th Century. Was at least as ruthless, and grew a considerable sphere of power. China today doesn't reach as far beyond its claimed borders, but still behaves like any other dictatorship.

The Allies of the West won because it had the benefit of the US being beyond two oceans with a manufacturing base that wasn't destroyed by war fighting. Even if the Germans got the nuke first, this advantage might still have been enough to allow the US to prevail.

And then we entered the nuclear era where you can't directly engage (nevermind invade) a nuclear family member, so the power structure at the end of WWII has held up. And that is why the West won...for now. In the post oil era, a shakeup is likely.

[crwtom 0]

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Let me try this again. Applying organized violence does not happen by itself, it takes ideas, values, etc... You don't think the world would be a different place if the Axis values had been more widely accepted than the Allies?

There is really only one thing that decides large wars like WWII - and that is availability and allocation of RESOURCES.

In terms of man power resources the Axis powers were no match to what Russia put into it - incurring 20 Mio death. This despite the fact that their war technology was mostly behind.

Lack of oil resources grounded most of German air force after eastern access broke down.

Moreover, the US was geographically protected against attacks on their home territory, and could go undisturbedly about producing weapons and other supplies. Compare this to European nations where bombing each other factories was daily routine.

Similar for war R&D. The Manhatten people were in a cosy desert removed from all action, with all the needed resources, and prominent refugees that fled the war and the Nazi's on staff. The few that stayed in Germany had to work in bunkers with little access to plutonium etc.

Geography is one of the big factors allowed the US to become the superpower it is over the course of history.

The geographic protection by oceans allowed population growth, industrial development, and scientific advanced to be essentially unperturbed by wars for the last 142 years.

Additionally geography provided for essentially no limits in living space and natural resources.

There are only very few nations that had this kind of luxury.

Cheers, T

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Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

[SpeedRacer 1]

you guys are all talking about success in war, mostly WWII.

What about success in trade?? Success in movies & music & art & medicine & technology & all the other things that people all over the world use? Did Western ideas and values have NOTHING to do with success in those areas?

Speed Racer
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[Butters 0]

The point I am making is that to become and maintain being a world power is not determined solely by the ability to apply superior organized violence.

"That looks dangerous." Leopold Stotch

[CanuckInUSA 0]

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The Allies of the West won because it had the benefit of the US being beyond two oceans with a manufacturing base that wasn't destroyed by war.

That's exactly what I wanted to say, but you beat me to it.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[Butters 0]

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The Allies of the West won because it had the benefit of the US being beyond two oceans with a manufacturing base that wasn't destroyed by war.

That's exactly what I wanted to say, but you beat me to it.

Wouldn't this also imply that the reason the Allies won was because the values of the USA aligned with the Allies instead of the Axis?

"That looks dangerous." Leopold Stotch

[vortexring 0]

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you guys are all talking about success in war, mostly WWII.

What about success in trade?? Success in movies & music & art & medicine & technology & all the other things that people all over the world use? Did Western ideas and values have NOTHING to do with success in those areas?

A question I think worth asking is where did the success stem from?

What allowed the development of these ideas and values?

A certain kind of freedom achieved through military superiority perhaps?

A freedom achieved from the above, and therefore financial superiority?

'for it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'

[SpeedRacer 1]

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What allowed the development of these ideas and values?

A certain kind of freedom achieved through military superiority perhaps?

I'm saying it was the other way around. Certain ideas of the west caused society to fluorish in wealth and technology. As a byproduct, the west also developed superior military technology as well.

we didn't achieve the advancements in technology & wealth just by stealing it from others by force. In western society individual creativity and entrepreneurship is encouraged & the society as a whole therefore gains more wealth. With more wealth it can finance a stronger military.

Speed Racer
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[nathaniel 0]

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What allowed the development of these ideas and values?

I'm reading a book about it these days. It credits the Catholic church for (not entirely purposefully but neither inadvertently) creating the circumstances that led to the emergence of contemporary Western philosophy & values.

Amazon

With respect to the original post, it's that the West's ideas and values and religion were largely the reason both that it won the world and gained superiority in violence. Plenty of other cultures have held significant technological advantages and warmaking advantages over the West at one time or another, but none of them took off and saturated the globe quite the way the West did. For one reason or another failed to use and build upon their advantages. Either lacked the collective inspiration to do so -- often literally trapped inside of narrow philosophies -- or wiped out before they could insulate themselves from natural and man-made disasters.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[kelpdiver 2]

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you guys are all talking about success in war, mostly WWII.

What about success in trade?? Success in movies & music & art & medicine & technology & all the other things that people all over the world use? Did Western ideas and values have NOTHING to do with success in those areas?

It's a lot easier to have that sort of success after success in war, rather than defeat or massive infrastructure devestation.

[kelpdiver 2]

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Wouldn't this also imply that the reason the Allies won was because the values of the USA aligned with the Allies instead of the Axis?

would ignore the fact that the US was pretty willing to sit it out up till the point where the Japanese struck. Sentiment and some assistance went to the Brits, but they went more than a year with the Germans dominating the western continental mass.

[SpeedRacer 1]

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you guys are all talking about success in war, mostly WWII.

What about success in trade?? Success in movies & music & art & medicine & technology & all the other things that people all over the world use? Did Western ideas and values have NOTHING to do with success in those areas?

It's a lot easier to have that sort of success after success in war, rather than defeat or massive infrastructure devestation.

I think that people like Ben Franklin, Louis Pasteur, Salk, Henry Ford, Eli Whitney, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a whole shitload of other people are evidence that the west's success DOES have something to do with the West's elevation of the Individual's creativity & productivity.

To say it was all achieved through violence simply isn't born out by history.

Speed Racer
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[billvon 2,433]

>The Allies of the West won because it had the benefit of the US
>being beyond two oceans with a manufacturing base that wasn't destroyed
>by war fighting.

That was part of it. But again, without our military, that wouldn't have mattered. Japan/Germany would have projected their power on the american continent as surely as we projected our power on Japan and Germany.

>Even if the Germans got the nuke first, this advantage might still
>have been enough to allow the US to prevail.

Nuclear weapons combined with the Sanger skip bomber (or the Von Braun A-11) would have very rapidly changed the course of the war, I think. How many US cities would we have been willing to lose before negotiating some sort of cessation of hostilities?

[SpeedRacer 1]

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Japan/Germany would have projected their power on the american continent as surely as we projected our power on Japan and Germany.

except here there would have been an armed insurgency against the occupiers.

of course, maybe it would be put down in 6 days or 6 weeks or so, I doubt six months.

Speed Racer
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[vortexring 0]

Well, the debate is going back and forth. Not a single person seems to have mentioned how 'Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.'

'for it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'

[kelpdiver 2]

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I think that people like Ben Franklin, Louis Pasteur, Salk, Henry Ford, Eli Whitney, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a whole shitload of other people are evidence that the west's success DOES have something to do with the West's elevation of the Individual's creativity & productivity.

To say it was all achieved through violence simply isn't born out by history.

I'm sorry, what does Bill Gates and creativity have to do with each other?

Science and philosophy has come out of other parts of the world. Gunpower was invented in china a very long time ago.

[kelpdiver 2]

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That was part of it. But again, without our military, that wouldn't have mattered. Japan/Germany would have projected their power on the american continent as surely as we projected our power on Japan and Germany.

Both were overextended on resources. We were not.

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>Even if the Germans got the nuke first, this advantage might still
>have been enough to allow the US to prevail.

Nuclear weapons combined with the Sanger skip bomber (or the Von Braun A-11) would have very rapidly changed the course of the war, I think. How many US cities would we have been willing to lose before negotiating some sort of cessation of hostilities?

It's again about resources. If Japan hadn't surrendered after Nagasaki, what do we do next. We didn't have a 1000 nuke arsenel sitting around. The same would have been true for Germany. By 1945, it was difficult for Germany to get an aircraft to US soil. After the first attack, it would be even harder, and again it's unlikely they'd have many to work with. And to risk a scarse bomb on a 4000 mile flight that might not succeed - they'd be better off using it to keep the Russians from pouring into their country.

I think it would have delayed the end, may have dramatically increased the US dead, but would still end with a dead Hitler and a crushed Germany.

[billvon 2,433]

>Both were overextended on resources. We were not.

We had even more natural resources in 1780. But had we tried to fight a world war in 1780 we would have lost.

>If Japan hadn't surrendered after Nagasaki, what do we do next. We didn't
>have a 1000 nuke arsenel sitting around.

We would have gotten very good at rapidly building plutonium-based implosion devices, and gotten much better at refining/breeding U-235.

>By 1945, it was difficult for Germany to get an aircraft to US soil.

Hence the skip bomber.

>After the first attack, it would be even harder . . .

At that point we had nothing that could even _detect_ a skip bomber, much less shoot it down. We'd be defenseless against it. And that military advantage would have rapidly turned the tables.

[kallend 1,647]

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Similar for war R&D. The Manhatten people were in a cosy desert removed from all action, with all the needed resources, and prominent refugees that fled the war and the Nazi's on staff. The few that stayed in Germany had to work in bunkers with little access to plutonium etc.

While it is true that Britain moved all of its nuclear R&D (which was very extensive and ahead of the US in 1943) to the US following the Quebec agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, primarily for geographic reasons, it is also true that the reason so many European scientists ended up in the Manhattan project had a great deal to do with their disaffection with Nazi values and methods. Without people like Frisch, Fermi and Bethe it's certain the bomb would have been delayed into 1946 or maybe 1947.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[crwtom 0]

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We had even more natural resources in 1780. But had we tried to fight a world war in 1780 we would have lost.

In 1780 this nation didn't really exist yet and people had just began to settle in resource rich areas with no time to build an industry on it. Give them 85 more years and the story is a whole different one.

The man powers, technology, and strategies that came together in the civil war would have been a serious threat to any European nation at the time - if that had ever become an issue. (e.g., armored warships and submarines were a first and many battle fields looked like those of WWI)

In fact some historians credit Grant as an inventor of the "battle of materiel" as a winning strategy. The north had won before the war started because of its access to coal, steel, an industry built on these, control of greater ports and trade routes, as well as the larger man power. You just couldn't beat that with cotton and whiskey. Grant exploited that, and aimed to maximize damage to the enemies resources, human or supply, and relentlessly wear them down over time.

The sentiments, morals, idea, etc involved are mere footnotes in this dynamics, and had at best marginal net impact.

The US was thus 50 years ahead of the rest of the world in warfare until the next battles of materiel took place in Verdun etc.

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>By 1945, it was difficult for Germany to get an aircraft to US soil.

Hence the skip bomber.

It didn't really matter what "Wunderwaffe" they could come up towards the end of the war. If you had no gasoline to fly those things they were no good to anyone. (Not to mention no factories to build them in any useful quantities, few trained pilots that were still alive, etc)

The grounding of the German air force was largely due to lack of gasoline, especially after the easter front and supply lines collapsed, and, further on, the deterioration of most other infrastructure needed to sustain an air fleet.


Cheers, T

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Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

[billvon 2,433]

> It didn't really matter what "Wunderwaffe" they could come up towards
>the end of the war. If you had no gasoline to fly those things they were no
>good to anyone.

Well, alcohol and liquid oxygen, actually.

I understand your point, but it's not really what I'm talking about. A strong military includes the logistics to support that strong military, which includes the country's economy, resources etc. And it is that strong military that wins wars, not the ideology behind that military. Victors write history, which is why the winners are always defined as "the good guys." It's not that goodness in and of itself gives you any military advantage.

[nathaniel 0]

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And it is that strong military that wins wars, not the ideology behind that military.

This kind of stuff is so deeply in-built to our mindset that it's easy to overlook. It's the same reason that indigenous tribesmen worldwide are not building skyscrapers, researching vaccines, or invading continents-- their ideology does not allow them to anticipate the benefits of doing so. They live in the present much the way their ancestors did, and that is good enough for them.

Western culture was among the earliest to realize that it is possible to improve on our ancestors and to capitalize on the idea, especially to devote huge resources toward the future.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[kelpdiver 2]

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We had even more natural resources in 1780. But had we tried to fight a world war in 1780 we would have lost.

Relevance? We had even more resources in 1492! Who the fuck cares? We're talking about WW2.

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We would have gotten very good at rapidly building plutonium-based implosion devices, and gotten much better at refining/breeding U-235.

In time. Like a year's time. Maybe more.

Germany had a lot of technology that could have made a difference two years earlier, but by 1945, it didn't matter. Shouldn't have invaded Russia.