![]() Their post-1945 obsession with saying "never again" and preparing to re-fight Operation Barbarossa is entirely explicable in that light (even before we get into Russia's history of being invaded and stomped flat from all directions, but especially the west). They lost somewhere between 5 and 15% of their entire population dead everybody lost somebody. Oh, and another point: Americans in particular but the west in general vastly underestimate how traumatic WW2 was for the Soviets. Ditto the western spook agencies such as the CIA and MI5 - all were passing the hat around, talking up terrorists and paedophiles and drug dealers as if they were the new Soviet Navy or something.įrankly, the Thirty Years' War warped European culture and history for about three centuries - it'd be astonishing if the impact of the World Wars doesn't last at least one hundred years. Iron law of bureaucracy applies: NATO didn't simply disband in 1991 even though its nominal raison d'etre (the USSR) had shrivelled up and blown away. And in the case of the World Wars, preparation involved building institutions so vast that they provided entire 18-65 year career paths, right to the highest levels. People who live through that kind of thing tend to be a bit swivel-eyed about over-preparing for the re-run. Well, let's see: because WW2 was actually the deferred second act of WW1 - deferred for almost exactly enough time to breed up another few windrows of cannon fodder - and between them they were the most traumatic military event to affect the developed world since the Thirty Years' War (and it's sideshow, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, aka the British Civil Wars)? Yet NATO military developments continue to be justified on the basis of fighting a great power war against China or Russia. It would be an enormous improvement if it actually were popular to emphasize the last war - or any war following, oh, the dissolution of the USSR. I know it's a popular saying that generals are always fighting the last war, but in this case it looks like the victorious Western powers of WW II, and their allies, are always fighting the one good war. Taiwan circa 2000 is 1938 Czechoslovakia and the PRC is Germany Iraq circa 2002 is Germany circa 1938 and not-invading it would be Chamberlain-style appeasement Bush is Chamberlain and North Korea is 1938 Germany When it comes to Crimea, CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1938 REDUX: In this drama, Putin plays Hitler while Obama is Chamberlain. ![]() Not-bombing Iran is a repeat of Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement. There's also the it's-always-1938 interpretation of geopolitics. Nobody pay any attention to the swords of armageddon hanging on the wall! Let's all plan for massive-scale conventional war and pretend that it is both psychologically plausible and likely that a great-power conventional loser will accept defeat like Germany 1945.Īnd it's not just the bizarro-world fantasies about fancy kit going toe-to-toe over years of big exciting battles that are stuck in the youth of my grandfather. We need huge numbers of planes to go toe-to-toe with China. We need more stealthy pew-pew to strike deep into Russian territory. Russia and China apparently use similar outlandish scenarios but with NATO playing the villain. But there's no plausible path to taking France at gunpoint.) (Of course, Zombie Hitler could devastate France with conventional weapon strikes against its infrastructure too. The only interesting question is whether Germany would suffer nuclear devastation or a "clean" crippling like Baghdad in Gulf War I. France would run out of significant targets before it could train up the first new batch of green conscripts. If Zombie Hitler became leader of modern Germany and tried to occupy France again, the crippling strikes against German oil, rail, and electricity infrastructure that took years during WW II would be largely complete in a matter of weeks. Every major power has reasonably accurate cruise missiles and various other precision guided munitions. The material circumstances have changed such that great powers can no longer engage in a years-long national mobilization slugfest against each other. Why is World War II always being refought?
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