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What's the point being made here? Bombing bad, but in increasingly convoluted prose? Economical considerations bad? Does the author think the UK had the manpowe

by tgv 3y ago

What's the point being made here? Bombing bad, but in increasingly convoluted prose? Economical considerations bad? Does the author think the UK had the manpower to simply waltz into Germany and convince Hitler peacefully of his folly? Or the capability to sustain what was effectively a siege forever? The author wants to express indignation at something. That much is clear from the shrill tones of the opening paragraph. That the UK and US relied on high-tech is not that odd. It is odd that the author contrasts that with Germany. They too did fight a high tech war (U boats, enigma, tanks, V1 and V2), but they couldn't achieve their goals with just tech. You don't get Lebensraum by bombing your neighbours. You need an actual occupation force. The UK was very much on the defensive, and had to resort to blockades and bombing to stay afoot. Or is the point "to destabilise liberal complacency", whatever that may mean?

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
The weird use of "liberal" confused me, too. It's more "liberal" to bomb than to have ground troops do the killing, because it minimizes your own casualties? No, that's just efficient use of military resources. "Liberal" might be holding on to the idea of minimizing civilian casualties. (Though, in an industrial production war like WWII, that might be a significant handicap. And it wasn't the Allies that started the bombing of civilians.) So, yeah. What's the point being made here? It sure feels like some weird axe is being ground, but it's done so badly that I can't even be sure what the axe is.
- c_crank 3y ago
  To the extent that there is any historical continuity between then and now, the 'liberal' USA still tends to value heavy bombing as a way to condition enemy forces into surrendering. Something it has a poor overall track record of.
- kouru225 3y ago
  It seems to me like the author thinks being smart is “liberal” and also he doesn’t like it.
- mediumdeviation 3y ago
  That's what confused me too. Is the point because somehow the word liberal is in both "liberal" (as in unrestricted, total?) war and liberal economics / politics that there's somehow a connection there? That's such a tenuous argument it seems incongruent with the rest of the article which seems decently articulated.
- claytongulick 3y ago
  I've noticed in academia, as well as other places, that's it's becoming more fashionable to be anti "liberal", as in, against small "L" liberal values. There's a sort of concerted effort to destroy the meaning of the word, or it's been co-opted by political organizations and bent to an extent that it's become meaningless. To those on the "right" - the word "liberal" is almost a curse word, it doesn't mean liberal values (which many of them share) it means some fuzzy combination of "woke, democrat, evil, america hating". To progressives, it's an increasingly inconvenient word as it becomes more difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously supporting authoritarian positions (censorship, consolidated power, militarism, embrace of public/private blurring, health dictates) while attempting to retain the mantle of liberalism that powered the "left" for the past fifty years. So it's easier for everyone to just attack the word, this article is a great example of that. It leaves us "classic liberals" stranded on a sinking island surrounded by sharks.
  - c_crank 3y ago
    "The classical liberals seem much like the old Tsarists, happy to wax poetic about a regime they were incapable of defending or restoring."
    - claytongulick 3y ago
      I don't understand the point you're trying to make here - are you implying that liberalism is some sort of regime, or a bad thing that needs to be replaced?
      - c_crank 3y ago
        Classical liberalism is a government, a regime, and it has been overtaken and is being replaced already. Hence why classical liberals feel surrounded by sharks.
        claytongulick 3y ago
        > Classical liberalism is a government, a regime I don't understand this point. Classic liberalism is a set of ideas that gave birth to many forms of government - are you trying to make an analogy? If so, it doesn't track very well for me. > it has been overtaken and is being replaced already I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?
JPLeRouzic 3y ago
> ". The UK was very much on the defensive" By bombing Hamburg or Dresden and deliberately targeting civilians? Even France, Belgium or the Netherlands were bombed. They even bombed their own troops during Operation Overlord! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_ref-45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_1944 https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_19...
- tekla 3y ago
  Yes. You can be on the defensive and still bomb enemy positions
- Aloha 3y ago
  As I point out in a parallel comment - By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. Essentially providing a justification why any civilian population center was also a valid military target.
- kouru225 3y ago
  Yes. What did you want them to do? Deescalate? England’s absurd attempts to deescalate in response to Hitler’s aggression was what made WW2 a war in the first place.
gumby 3y ago
The point is that modern war is an industrial process. The failure to recognize this led to the vulnerability of the US processes from Viet Nam through the 2000s' Iraq and Afghanistan. The irony of this failure is that the US civil war was the first true economy-vs-economy conflict, with mechanized rail changing the scope and nature of conflict (while actual combat was still with napoleonic-class cannon, cavalry charge and the like). European powers mostly ignored this conflict, and so it took a while for them to understand what WWI was really about. Then the US took this lesson to heart, and didn't recognize that the only alternative for their adversaries was asymmetrical combat...a full circle as that was the approach the US had taken in its own war of liberation from a superpower. The other, even more meaningful point about industrialized warfare is that it has its own Taylorist logic. For the European theatre, they built an enormous machine that assembled planes, filled them with fuel and tons of bombs, and then daily launched them eastward from the UK. Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war it was still operating at full tilt, with the allies seemingly unable to switch it off. In small (pop < 50K ppl today) cities of Germany you can find plaques in the Marktplätze indicating that the city had been flattened, bombed for the first time, in late April 1945. The machine had been flattening cities in order of importance, and had run down the list to the point where they'd run out of anything worth bombing. It's hard to argue that any of those bombings were individually "unethical" (assuming you can accept carpet bombing cities at all) because they were bureaucratic decisions with no real room for individual judgement any more. That is a critical lesson both for wartime and for peacetime. We don't really mind if a company makes a worthless product -- it merely goes out of business. But at the state/strategic level it can be tragic.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  The Germans could have avoided bombing entirely by not attacking their neighbors and trying to genocide 1/2 or more of the population of the countries they invaded to "make room" for more Germans. At any point in the war the Germans could have stopped it, but they didn't, they kept shoveling children in to ovens (or for slavs, bullets to the back of the head at the edge of a ditch). All the German cities could have been spared if they had simply stopped murdering everyone and stealing everything. That they chose to continue isn't the fault of the victims who were desperately trying to conclude the war to avoid the sensless deaths. There are moral grey areas in war but trying to find them in the desperate attempts to slow down and stop the NAZI genocide machine, by the victims of that machine who were still being killed by the millions, is a bit insulting. I would love to be able to put these great military minds in charge of the allies in 1940 and see how well they stick to their moral sensibilities as they become directly responsible for more and more deaths.

by tgv 3y ago

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

The weird use of "liberal" confused me, too. It's more "liberal" to bomb than to have ground troops do the killing, because it minimizes your own casualties? No, that's just efficient use of military resources. "Liberal" might be holding on to the idea of minimizing civilian casualties. (Though, in an industrial production war like WWII, that might be a significant handicap. And it wasn't the Allies that started the bombing of civilians.) So, yeah. What's the point being made here? It sure feels like some weird axe is being ground, but it's done so badly that I can't even be sure what the axe is.

c_crank 3y ago
To the extent that there is any historical continuity between then and now, the 'liberal' USA still tends to value heavy bombing as a way to condition enemy forces into surrendering. Something it has a poor overall track record of.
kouru225 3y ago
It seems to me like the author thinks being smart is “liberal” and also he doesn’t like it.
mediumdeviation 3y ago
That's what confused me too. Is the point because somehow the word liberal is in both "liberal" (as in unrestricted, total?) war and liberal economics / politics that there's somehow a connection there? That's such a tenuous argument it seems incongruent with the rest of the article which seems decently articulated.
claytongulick 3y ago
I've noticed in academia, as well as other places, that's it's becoming more fashionable to be anti "liberal", as in, against small "L" liberal values. There's a sort of concerted effort to destroy the meaning of the word, or it's been co-opted by political organizations and bent to an extent that it's become meaningless. To those on the "right" - the word "liberal" is almost a curse word, it doesn't mean liberal values (which many of them share) it means some fuzzy combination of "woke, democrat, evil, america hating". To progressives, it's an increasingly inconvenient word as it becomes more difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously supporting authoritarian positions (censorship, consolidated power, militarism, embrace of public/private blurring, health dictates) while attempting to retain the mantle of liberalism that powered the "left" for the past fifty years. So it's easier for everyone to just attack the word, this article is a great example of that. It leaves us "classic liberals" stranded on a sinking island surrounded by sharks.
- c_crank 3y ago
  "The classical liberals seem much like the old Tsarists, happy to wax poetic about a regime they were incapable of defending or restoring."
  - claytongulick 3y ago
    I don't understand the point you're trying to make here - are you implying that liberalism is some sort of regime, or a bad thing that needs to be replaced?
    - c_crank 3y ago
      Classical liberalism is a government, a regime, and it has been overtaken and is being replaced already. Hence why classical liberals feel surrounded by sharks.
      - claytongulick 3y ago
        > Classical liberalism is a government, a regime I don't understand this point. Classic liberalism is a set of ideas that gave birth to many forms of government - are you trying to make an analogy? If so, it doesn't track very well for me. > it has been overtaken and is being replaced already I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?

JPLeRouzic 3y ago

> ". The UK was very much on the defensive" By bombing Hamburg or Dresden and deliberately targeting civilians? Even France, Belgium or the Netherlands were bombed. They even bombed their own troops during Operation Overlord! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_ref-45 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_1944 https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_19...

tekla 3y ago
Yes. You can be on the defensive and still bomb enemy positions
Aloha 3y ago
As I point out in a parallel comment - By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. Essentially providing a justification why any civilian population center was also a valid military target.
kouru225 3y ago
Yes. What did you want them to do? Deescalate? England’s absurd attempts to deescalate in response to Hitler’s aggression was what made WW2 a war in the first place.

gumby 3y ago

The point is that modern war is an industrial process. The failure to recognize this led to the vulnerability of the US processes from Viet Nam through the 2000s' Iraq and Afghanistan. The irony of this failure is that the US civil war was the first true economy-vs-economy conflict, with mechanized rail changing the scope and nature of conflict (while actual combat was still with napoleonic-class cannon, cavalry charge and the like). European powers mostly ignored this conflict, and so it took a while for them to understand what WWI was really about. Then the US took this lesson to heart, and didn't recognize that the only alternative for their adversaries was asymmetrical combat...a full circle as that was the approach the US had taken in its own war of liberation from a superpower. The other, even more meaningful point about industrialized warfare is that it has its own Taylorist logic. For the European theatre, they built an enormous machine that assembled planes, filled them with fuel and tons of bombs, and then daily launched them eastward from the UK. Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war it was still operating at full tilt, with the allies seemingly unable to switch it off. In small (pop < 50K ppl today) cities of Germany you can find plaques in the Marktplätze indicating that the city had been flattened, bombed for the first time, in late April 1945. The machine had been flattening cities in order of importance, and had run down the list to the point where they'd run out of anything worth bombing. It's hard to argue that any of those bombings were individually "unethical" (assuming you can accept carpet bombing cities at all) because they were bureaucratic decisions with no real room for individual judgement any more. That is a critical lesson both for wartime and for peacetime. We don't really mind if a company makes a worthless product -- it merely goes out of business. But at the state/strategic level it can be tragic.

ltbarcly3 3y ago
The Germans could have avoided bombing entirely by not attacking their neighbors and trying to genocide 1/2 or more of the population of the countries they invaded to "make room" for more Germans. At any point in the war the Germans could have stopped it, but they didn't, they kept shoveling children in to ovens (or for slavs, bullets to the back of the head at the edge of a ditch). All the German cities could have been spared if they had simply stopped murdering everyone and stealing everything. That they chose to continue isn't the fault of the victims who were desperately trying to conclude the war to avoid the sensless deaths. There are moral grey areas in war but trying to find them in the desperate attempts to slow down and stop the NAZI genocide machine, by the victims of that machine who were still being killed by the millions, is a bit insulting. I would love to be able to put these great military minds in charge of the allies in 1940 and see how well they stick to their moral sensibilities as they become directly responsible for more and more deaths.