The Great War
Published on 7 Jul 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
July 8, 2018
Postal Service – Trench Deployment – US Air Force I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
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Swedish home defence
Last week, Strategy Page took a look at Sweden’s home defence arrangements, including their first surprise mobilization of the Hemvärnet – Nationella skyddsstyrkorna (Home Guard) in over 40 years:
Swedish Home Guard soldiers in Kungsträdgården, Stockholm on 6 August, 2001.
Photo by Peter Fristedt, via Wikimedia Commons.
On June 4th Sweden held its first nationwide, unannounced mobilization of the Home Guard since 1975. This is another effort to prepare Sweden to deal with the renewed Russian threat. The Home Guard consists of reservists and volunteers whose job is local defense and maintenance of order in a national or local emergency. The Home Guard currently has about 22,000 members organized into 70 infantry battalions (each with 2-5 companies) that are assigned to areas where their part-time soldiers work and live. The Home Guard was created in 1940 and now depends on volunteers who are either former full time or reservist personnel who have at least three months of basic training. Twice a year Home Guard personnel two four day long training exercises. These four-day events involve practicing mobilization and doing what they are expected to do in wartime or a major emergency. In addition, most Home Guard companies (about 70 troops each) hold weekend training sessions ten times a year.
The unannounced mobilization of the Home Guard serves to find out how well the Home Guard as a whole would function. The Home Guard is voluntary and members can leave the force any time they choose to. Since 2014 there have been more volunteers and the Home Guard units could be more selective in who they accepted. The Home Guard mobilization is but the latest effort by Sweden to rebuild its traditional defense. The Home Guard take their training and readiness very seriously, especially when there is an obvious threat. In 1940 it was the Germans but after 1945 it was the Russians, at least until 1991. Now the Russians are once more a threat and the government had to agree that the Home Guard required more attention, resources and training.
Yet the Home Guard is more a police and emergency services than a military one. While the guardsmen are armed they are not expected to be a primary defense against invaders. This point was made when the people of Gotland Island recently pointed out that the local Home Guard was not enough to protect areas like Gotland from a surprise attack. The resulted in the government taking action to put a military garrison back on Gotland.
The Home Guard is not the only component of Swedish military readiness being tested. In late 2017 Sweden held its largest military exercises since the 1990s. Some 19,000 full-time soldiers and reservists were involved and the exercise was based on Russia attempting to seize and hold the island of Gotland after a surprise attack. The defense of Gotland has been an issue in Sweden ever since conscription was ended in 2010. Since the 1990s the military budget and number of full-time troops were cut. That led to the elimination of the Gotland garrison, a small force of full-time soldiers to watch for a Russian surprise attack and alert the reserve forces on the island to mobilize. With the end of conscription, it proved impossible to attract enough volunteers from Gotland to sustain the traditional force of military reservists, who would quickly mobilize and confront the invaders.
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Western Approaches – the bunker from which they won the war
Lindybeige
Published on 17 Jun 2018The command bunker ‘Western Approaches’ is now a museum in Liverpool. I was invited to take a look before it re-opened.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeThe Museum’s website: http://www.liverpoolwarmuseum.co.uk
Many thanks to Richard MacDonald for inviting me and showing me around (you saw him plugging the big fuse in).
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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QotD: Marx on how to run a true communist state
What really clinched this for me was the discussion of Marx’s (lack of) description of how to run a communist state. I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. It seemed like a pretty big gap.
[…]
I figured that Marx had just fallen into a similar trap. He’d probably made a few vague plans, like “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers,” and “Property will be held in common and consensus democracy will choose who gets what,” and felt like the rest was just details. That’s the sort of error I could at least sympathize with, despite its horrendous consequences.
But in fact Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say “It is irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work.” He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out. Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.
Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.
Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?
I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Singer on Marx”, Slate Star Codex, 2014-09-13.
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