Keeping the simple spectrum approach of “Left” and “Right”, I’d divide the world into the fundamentally incompatible camps of “Theory” people and “Reality” people. We all know all about the Theory People, so just one quick example: J.B.S. Haldane. Indisputably a great scientist, and not just a great scientist, a great evolutionary biologist. If there’s anyone on this earth who should’ve been convinced, right down to the very marrow of his bones, that human beings are NOT blank slates, it was J.B.S. Haldane. And yet, he was a Marxist — and not just a Marxist, a really loopy one, even by the standards of the early 20th century.
It was guys like Haldane who caused Stove to write a great essay about “The Ishmael Effect”. He said something like (from memory) it’s a striking fact about powerful minds, that even though they know better than everyone else some fact about the physical world — the conservation of energy, say — their powerful minds cause them to get caught up in all the fascinating implications of their pet theory, such that they fail to see their pet theory requires energy not to be conserved. Thus (said Stove), a guy like Kant: After telling us that no human mind can access the Thing-in-Itself, he gives us four hundred pages of extremely detailed information about the Thing-in-Itself. Or Karl Marx, who was able to soar so far above his own economic class situation as to tell us, with oracular certainty, that no one is able to transcend the cognitive limits of his economic class situation. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that “the Ishmael Effect” pretty much IS 19th century philosophy … and thanks to entropy, 20th century politics, and now 21st century culture.
Such are the Theory People who, however many raw IQ points they have, will really see five lights if The Party tells them to, because The Party controls the Theory and the Theory is never wrong, facts be damned. Call them Rubashovs if you like (and are feeling literary), but let’s move on to the Reality People. If Rubashov is the ultimate Theory Person — marching willingly off to his destiny in the dreaded Lubyanka, because The Party requires it and The Party is never wrong — so the ultimate Reality Person is Niccolo Machiavelli.
Much hooey has been written about The Prince, that it’s ACK-shully a biting satire (you could call the Rubashovs’ junior varsity the ACK-shully kids), but Ol’ Nick meant every fucking word. Politics was a contact sport in his day — he picked the wrong side of a political dispute, and got the strappado for it. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and had the disjointed shoulders to prove it.
Machiavelli is often called a cynic, but just as everything in Clown World always turns out faker and gayer than the most jaded can imagine, so even the hardest-bitten cynic can’t touch Ol’ Nick. The Prince is beautifully written, but it’s one of the toughest reads you’ll ever have, because surely he can’t mean what he just wrote … he just can’t. But he does, and it’s true — that for example a man will more quickly get over the murder of his father than the loss of his patrimony. And you know it’s true, if only in the darkest watches of the night when you toss and turn in the coldest of cold sweats. There aren’t more than a handful of sentences in The Prince that won’t give you insomnia, if you really start thinking them through …
But just as (one hopes) even Rubashov would balk at shooting his children on The Party’s orders, so even Machiavelli marvels at the truth that no one is thoroughly, consciously evil, even when it’s in his obvious best interest to be. A man will always convince himself he’s doing good, even when he’s obviously, objectively doing the most heinous evil, and that — Nick implies — is the way to manage a tyrant. Even when doing X is the obviously advantageous thing to do, and doing Y is obviously disadvantageous, you can convince someone to do Y by changing the moral frame.
There’s obviously a spectrum here, which like all human behavior bends in on itself at the extremes. One imagines Rubashov, for instance, going through an “if only Comrade Stalin knew!” type thought process if The Party ordered him to shoot his infant children. Yes, The Party is never wrong … but even though Comrade Stalin IS The Party, The Party is, finally, the historical manifestation of a metaphysical necessity, and therefore, in the light of the Highest Truth, Comrade Stalin — though never wrong!! — is perhaps misinformed in this case … Just as Francesco Sforza or whomever balks at murdering those infants in their cribs, though it’s clearly the very best course of action, politically.
Rubashov vs. Machiavelli. That’s the best I can do.
Severian, “Mail / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-10.
December 19, 2024
QotD: Replacing the outdated “left” and “right” with more accurate terms
December 13, 2024
QotD: Nostalgia, or “they were better people back then”
The Golden Age was better because the Golden Men were better, not because their lives were materially better. There’s a reason all those medieval and Renaissance paintings show “historical” figures in contemporary garb, and it’s not because the Flemish Masters didn’t know about togas. Though they assumed the men of the Classical Past were better men, they assumed material life back then was pretty much the same as now, because it was pretty much the same as now. One can of course point to a million technological changes between the Roman Republic and the Renaissance, but life as it was actually lived by the vast majority of people was still basically the same: Up at dawn, to bed at dusk, birth and death and community life and subsistence farming, all basically the same. A world lit only by fire.
The modern age changed all that. At some point in the very near past, we started assuming tomorrow would look very different from today. And I do mean the very near past — there are probably people still alive today who remember people who assumed that tomorrow would be pretty much like today. Because, then, our lives are so materially different from even the very recent past, we tend to assume that our nostalgia is for material things. It’s very hard to put a name to something like the feeling “I wish we could have family Christmases again, sharing that one joke we had about how Uncle Bob always sends you goofy socks.” It’s very easy to put a name to something like “vinyl records” or “the Bob Newhart show” or “Betamax tapes”, so we use those as synecdoche.
In other words: Even though we could actually recreate the material world of 1983, and even though we think we want this, we don’t. We wish we could live like we lived in 1983, but very little of that has any relationship to the material culture of 1983.
Severian, “Nostalgia”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-19.
December 7, 2024
QotD: Game of Thrones as PoMo “deconstructionism”
Again, I guess I can forgive my colleagues, under-sexed little closet cases that they are, for being distracted by the boob cornucopia up on screen, but in the books, anyway, this comes through plain as day: Everyone in Westeros is either a psychopathic scumbag, or dead. In the very best PoMo style, the author is rubbing our faces in his belief that, since it’s extremely difficult to be heroic — or, all too often, merely decent — everyone who even thinks about trying is a fool, and deserves all the awful shit that happens to him. I’m told that back in the 18th century, a fun topic of debate at salons is whether a society of atheists could endure. Martin’s entire oeuvre seems dedicated to proving that life — mere, grubby, eating-shitting-sleeping existence — will continue in a society composed entirely of scumbags … but he has no idea why.
I have no idea why this idea (if that’s the right word) is so deeply appealing to academics, but evidently it is … and these are the people who are teaching your children.
Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.
December 1, 2024
QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered
[…]
In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.
Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.
The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).
In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
November 25, 2024
Andrew Sullivan as an (unconscious?) exemplar of the mentalités school
I sent the URL to Andrew Sullivan’s article I linked to yesterday to Severian to see what he’d make of it. He certainly didn’t disappoint me:
Founding Questions coat of arms by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.
Because someone like Andrew Sullivan is the kind of guy he is, we might have a good example to hand of a mentalités approach to History [Wiki]. We can all play along, because the key to a mentalités approach is a version of our favorite game, “For That to Be True”. Let’s see if we can’t ferret out some of Sullivan’s cultural assumptions here, and what that might tell us about our world.
There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.
A couple things stand out immediately. The great thing about fags and chicks as pundits is that they’re hyper-emotional, so they always go for the big splashy adjectives. “Surreal”, for instance (and not just surreal, “truly surreal”). Let us instead return to the cool, rational prose of 18th century diplomacy, and term this a volte-face.
They happen all the time, of course. Indeed it’s one of the standard criticisms of representative government — they’re impossible to deal with, long term, because the volte-face is baked into the system. No agreement is so airtight that it’s not at immediate risk of repudiation if one of the other guys wins the next election. This is Diplomacy 101.
So, there’s the first assumption we need to examine: Since this kind of thing does, in fact, happen all the time — as any professional political analyst surely knows — why does this particular volte-face seem so “truly surreal?”
Moreover, it’s not as if the Biden Administration has been the model of consistency up to now. Not only is the diplomatic volte-face pretty common, so is the domestic — again, it’s a standard criticism of parliamentary-style government. And not just during election season. Domestic policy changes with the winds, because that’s kinda what it’s supposed to do. Vox populi, vox dei, at least as far back as the early 18th century, and the populi are notoriously fickle.
So why is this one “truly surreal”? If I were one of those Peter Turchin or Steve Sailer types, I’d plug all the Biden Administration’s policy decisions, foreign and domestic, into an Excel sheet and graph the changes. You know, plotting “variance ratios” against “consistency coefficients” and whatnot. It’d be all over the damn place, for reasons we here in this clubhouse call “The Do Long Bridge” — Brandon is the titular head of government, but there ain’t no fuckin’ CO, and if you look at the spastic incoherence of “Biden’s” policy decisions you’d see it plain as day.
It seems extremely unlikely, to put it no stronger, that a paid political analyst like Andrew Sullivan doesn’t see that. So either he does see it, but is pretending not to, for fun and profit — possible cultural assumption #1 — or he truly doesn’t see it, which would be revealing of cultural assumption #2.
I can’t decide which is which yet, but I can see a common denominator for both. It’s the last sentence I quoted in that paragraph:
You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.
There’s a whole world full of embedded assumptions there. Does Trump actually do that — “a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power”? […] To me, it sure looks like Trump was actually remarkably restrained when it came to unilateral demonstrations of presidential fuck-you power, alas, compared to Biden and especially Obama (he of the infamous pen and phone). And the few times he tried, he got Hawaiian Judged to hell and back. But since I don’t have my Steve Sailer graph to hand, I’m not going to assert that (maybe it’s one of my assumptions — I really want to see Trump exercise some fuck-you power).
And the verb is extremely interesting. They’re worried about Trump doing it; they’ve heretofore not been bothered by Biden doing it.
QotD: Le Corbusier
But most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
November 19, 2024
QotD: The Reformation
Your hotter Protestants, your John Calvins and Oliver Cromwells and so on, saw all of this as mere ritual. And to be fair to them, late-medieval Catholicism was very elaborate, and very, very weird — slog through a few chapters of The Stripping of the Altars if you want the details. To the Prods, this was cheating — you can’t just go through the motions and expect to get into Heaven. They made a similar distinction between “natural magic” and the unlawful stuff — the one was undertaken only after deep study and the most rigorous self-purification, while the other “worked” entirely mechanically, because what the sorcerer was really doing was cheating; he was really making a deal with a (or The) devil, to short-circuit the natural processes.
Now, it’s important to realize that the Protestants were not saying anything close to “do your own thing, man”. They were NOT hippies, encouraging everyone to read the Bible and decide for themselves how best to commune with the Big JC. The German peasants thought that’s what Martin Luther was saying back in 1524, but Luther himself was out there urging the authorities to smash the peasants with extreme prejudice. The Protestants were, in fact, extremely concerned about ritual. It just had to be the right ritual, the Biblically sanctioned ritual, and nothing but that — that’s what “Puritanism” (originally an insult) means.
Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.
November 13, 2024
QotD: The 1990s
Consider that if we really do live in a computer simulation, then everything the #wokesters are always going on about is actually true. Everything really IS a “social construction”, because “society” was literally constructed. All that stuff about “systemic racism” is true, too, because again, we’re dealing with a design. Nothing evolves organically inside The Matrix, because there’s nothing organic in there at all. It’s ALL on purpose …
… and you, #wokester, are the only one who can see it. Unlike Karl Marx, who was able to see beyond his class situation enough to say that no one can see beyond his class situation, because reasons, you, #wokester, can do it because you’re Neo. That, too, is built into the system. It’s an endless recursion … but one that entails that you, and you alone, are special, on purpose.
That, kameraden, was the 1990s. Even those movies our author mentioned — Beverly Hills Cop III, Lethal Weapons 3 and 4 — weren’t just copies of copies, they were ironic, snarky commentaries on copies of copies. See also Scream, which was a “deconstruction” of every slasher picture ever made. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em … but since both beating ’em and joining ’em entail making a sincere effort and sincerity is forbidden, all you can do is mock ’em. That’s what “deconstruction” is, one long polysyllabic mockery of the very idea of excellence. It’s the perfect philosophy for people who know themselves to be mediocre but have been told from day one that they’re special.
See also the tv show Friends, where five ludicrously attractive people and David Schwimmer all pretend to be just normal folks (who happen to live in 3,000 square foot apartments in Manhattan) — each episode is “the one that’s just like The Brady Bunch, but snarky”. Or Seinfeld, which was deliberately designed to be a grating mockery of stuff like The Odd Couple. All snarky mockeries of the very concept of sincerity.
See what I mean? That’s normal now, which is why the 90s must be dragged into an alley and shot, for Western Civ’s sake.
Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
November 7, 2024
QotD: Fear of … freedom
Since this is my blog and it’s Friday and all that, I’ll go ahead and expand this into a nebulous Theory of Everything: What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.
If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small”. If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.
It works outside the academy too, of course. The two main CRT loons, Robin De Angelo and that Ibram X. Kendi guy, are maxed out and they know it. They weep, because they’ve seen they have no more worlds to conquer. Ever-escalating lunacy is the only emotional escape hatch they have left. You saw the same deal with “the workers” under Communism. They’re stuck there, forever, and they know it. They can’t move up — wrong class background, comrade, plus you lack Party connections — but they can’t really move down, either, if for no other reason than the KGB, vast as it is, can’t bother with every moribund tractor factory in Krasnoyarsk. Can’t move up, can’t move down, so you drink yourself into oblivion and spend your still-conscious hours in petty backbiting.
Severian, “Mailbag Etc.”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-06.
November 1, 2024
QotD: J.D. Vance, a Führer for the rest of us
Expert: JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism
Quoted for the lulz. Ol’ JD, a Führer for the rest of us.
But since we’re here … a fascinating footnote in Jaynes informs us that schizophrenics, who Jaynes thinks might be throwbacks to the “bicameral mind”, have no problem with “diffused identity” or whatever the term was. Jaynes hypothesizes that ancient, preconscious peoples didn’t see images of their gods in cult objects; they saw the actual, physical gods. We unicameral people can’t wrap our heads around it, since there are lots of statues and they can’t ALL be god — even if we grant that the biggest statue in the best temple can be god, or if we allow that the black meteorite or whatever is really god to them, still, god can’t be diffused like that: Either your statue is god or mine is; or neither of them are, but they can’t both be.
Schizophrenics, at least according to Jaynes, would be down with that. He notes that you can put two guys who think they’re Napoleon in the same padded cell, and you don’t get a schizo bum fight, you get complete agreement: They’re both Napoleon, somehow. The law of the excluded middle, personal identity version, simply doesn’t apply.
And since my hypothesis is that smartphones are re-decameralizing (it’s a word) us at Ludicrous Speed, well … here you go. Donald Trump is Hitler, but J.D. Vance is somehow also Hitler. It’s not like the real, historical Hitler lacked for shitty, evil underlings — J.D could easily be Heinrich Himmler or somebody. But no, he’s gotta be Hitler, the same way Trump has to be Hitler, and if that means they’re somehow both Hitler, well … there it is. Bicamerality for the win.
Severian, “Catching Up With the Crazies”, Founding Questions, 2024-07-29.
October 26, 2024
QotD: Henry VIII
Leaving all of Henry’s personal quirks aside — and his was a very strong, distinctive personality — that’s got to affect you.
So many of the changes in Henry’s reign, then, must have been driven in part by the fact that it was the same man, reflecting on a lifetime’s experience in a job he was never expected to have, wasn’t really prepared for, and didn’t seem to want (aside from the lifestyle). There’s been lots of pop-historical theorizing about what was “wrong” with the later Henry — senility, syphilis, the madness of power — but more naturalistic explanations of his later actions must take into account simple age. A man nearing the end of his life, knowing that his succession was very much in doubt and fearing for the state of his soul, will do things differently than a young man in the prime of life.
[…]
Life was hard back then, and cheap. When every other child dies before the age of five and the average life expectancy is 35, I imagine, you live your life cranked to 11 every waking moment. Accounts of grown men weeping like little girls at the theater aren’t an exaggeration; the whole age was given to extreme outbursts. And that’s just the baseline! Now consider that a guy like Henry never had a moment to himself, and I do mean never — not once, in his entire life. He even had a guy with him on the crapper, who would wipe his ass for him. The relationship between Henry and a guy like Wolsey, then — to say nothing of his relationship with the Groom of the Stool — must’ve been intimate in a way we can’t possibly grasp. Compared to that, you and your wife are barely on speaking terms. If Henry seemed sometimes to set policy just because he was pissed at Wolsey, we must consider the possibility that that’s exactly what happened.
The best you can do, then, is imagine yourself back there as best you can, and make your interpretations in that light, acknowledging your biases as best you can (I’m not a medievalist, obviously, but I’m a much better read amateur than most, and though Henry VIII is a very hard guy to like, he’s equally hard not to admire). Most of all — and this, I think, is the hardest thing for academic historians, more even than recognizing their presentist biases — you have to keep your humility. Perhaps Henry’s decision about ___ was part of a gay little frenemies spat with Wolsey. That’s sure what it seems like, knowing the man, and having no contrary evidence …
… but contrary evidence might always emerge. It might not have been the optimal decision, but it might’ve been a much better one than you thought, because Henry had information you didn’t, but now do. It makes for some restless nights, knowing that your life’s work could be overturned by some grad student finding some old paper at a yard sale somewhere, but … there it is.
Severian, “Writing Real History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-18.
October 20, 2024
QotD: The “Spirit of the Sixties”
Not to get all Classical Rhetoric up in here, but for prior generations, things like “The Beatles” are synecdoche. They’ll go to their graves insisting that The Beatles were “the greatest band ever”, but if you press them on it, most of them are honest enough to admit that Ringo et al weren’t such great shakes, musically. At their best, The Beatles’ songs are musically simplistic and lyrically gibberish; at their worst, they’re “Rocky Raccoon”. The Beatles are “great” because they were innovators, not so much musically but because they were so goddamn pretentious. They wanted to be not mere entertainers, but artistes, and we indulged them, and that combo — pretentiousness and indulgence — became The Spirit of the Sixties.
Thus if you answer “The Beatles” to the question “What’s so great about The Sixties?”, it’s a synechdoche for “the spirit of the age”.
Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
October 14, 2024
QotD: Americans and their cars
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
October 8, 2024
QotD: The competitive instinct
One thing chicks of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to genders don’t realize these days is how competitive men — actual biological males — are hardwired to be. Things like World of Warcraft and fantasy football only exist because the genius who invented those figured out a way to tap into that heretofore-unexpressed male competitiveness. And indeed, it’s the guy who’d never even dream of putting on shoulder pads who’s the most insanely competitive guy in a fantasy football league or (I’m certain) a whatever-they’re-called in World of Warcraft. Even the uber-dorks in the Math Club and the Speech and Debate Society went after each other like Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. It’s just how guys are … or, at least, how guys used to be.
[…]
When it comes right down to it, that’s why men of a certain age simply don’t get “women’s sports”. Few will be as crustily chauvinistic as yer ‘umble narrator, and come right out and say it, but here goes: Women’s “sports” are just a shoddy knockoff of the real thing, because women just aren’t wired that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitive women, or athletic women — obviously there are, some very athletic and very competitive — but the female of the species just isn’t wired to put in the work the way males are. When faced with the prospect of three straight hours in the batting cage, swinging at curve after curve until your blisters have blisters and your shoulders feel like they’re falling out of their sockets, most women will quite sensibly ask “why bother?” Competition-for-competition’s-sake, even when it’s only against yourself in those long, long, looooong hours in the cage, just doesn’t motivate them the way it does us.
Which is why a person’s reaction to Simone Biles, or the USA Women’s soccer team, or the WNBA, or what have you is an almost perfect predictor of their age, not just their “gender”. I judge sports as sports. I don’t care about soccer, but if I did, I’d care about it as soccer — meaning, I’d want to see the best possible players, playing at the highest possible level. Women’s Olympic teams — that is to say, all star teams, the very best players — routinely get smoked by teams of 15 year old boys. Sir Charles is pushing sixty, but he could dominate the WNBA right now, in street clothes. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Pee Wee or rec leagues, but if you’re going to take a paycheck for doing it, then I want to see exactly what I paid for.
In estrogen-drenched, synchronized-ovulation Clown World, it’s all about appearances. Sure, she let her team down and wussed out (while still talking up how great she is), but can’t you see that it gave her the sadz? Sure, Megan Rapinoe et al keep getting smoked by 14 year old boys, then choking in international competition, but can’t you see her out there, with her pink hair and her tats and her Strong, Confident Empowerment? The “competition”, such as it is, is an excuse for the display. Michael Jordan ought to give baseball another shot. We know he can cry. These days, that’d get him a first-class ticket to Cooperstown.
Severian, “On Competition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-02.
October 2, 2024
QotD: Alternative history Operation Barbarossa
Knowing full well how dumb it is to bring up World War II on the Internet, consider that a pretty reasonable case can be constructed for Operation Barbarossa. Having purged all their competent, experienced officers, the Red Army had just gotten their clocks cleaned by the Finns in the Winter War. Yeah, the Soviets “won” in the end, but with that disparity of forces, there’s pretty much no possible “win” that doesn’t look like a loss … and the Soviets, to put it mildly, were nowhere near that best-case scenario. Moreover, even if you took the show trials for exactly that — kangaroo courts — their very existence showed there was a deep rift at the very top of the Soviet leadership. Anyone, not just Hitler, could be forgiven for thinking that the Soviet Union would collapse under one big sledgehammer blow.1
It works the other way, too. If we accept the “Suvorov Thesis”, that Hitler only attacked Stalin because Stalin was gearing up to attack Hitler, then we can easily construct a similar case from The Boss’s perspective: The Wehrmacht can’t play defense. The one time they came up against anything approaching a real opponent with technological parity (the Battle of Britain), it was at best a bloody draw, more than likely a stinging defeat. And the Hitler regime was reeling, internally. No show trials for der Führer, but Rudolf Hess, who was at least the number three man in the Reich and at the time Hitler’s heir apparent, had just defected to the British. Anyone, not just Stalin, could be forgiven for thinking that the Third Reich would collapse under one big sledgehammer blow.
See what I mean? Both of those cases are quite plausible, and fit with most known historical facts … and yet, they’re retcons. “Rationalizations” might even be a better word, because the thing is, even though those arguments are “logical”, and might indeed have been convincing to important people at the time, that’s not why Hitler did what he did, or why Stalin would’ve done what he would’ve done under the Suvorov Thesis. No, the truth is simpler, and much more horrifying: They would’ve done it anyway, because that’s who they were.
That’s what the Castle Wolfenstein people got right about the Nazis. Same deal with that Amazon show (which was interesting for a season) The Man in the High Castle. In the real world, there’s no possible way the Nazis could’ve invaded the USA, no matter how it turned out on the Eastern Front …
… but in the real world they would’ve tried nonetheless, somehow, because that’s just who they were. Everything Stalin, Khrushchev, et al did during the Cold War here in the real world, Hitler, Heydrich, and the gang would’ve done in the Castle Wolfenstein world where the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk went the other way.2 They couldn’t have done any different, without being different people, and while it’s fun to speculate on questions like “who would’ve been the Nazi Gorbachev, who self-destructed the Reich by attempting however you say ‘perestroika‘ in German”, it’s not really germane.
Severian, “The Man in the High Chair”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-05.
1. And Soviet losses were stupendous, utterly mind-boggling, in the first few months of Barbarossa. Tanks and planes destroyed in their tens of thousands, prisoners captured in millions. Even as it became clear that OKW had underestimated Red Army strength by orders of magnitude, it was still almost inconceivable that they had anything left to fight with. Just one more push …
2. This is actually the world of a fun novel, Robert Harris’s Fatherland.
