The fact is the progressive solution really hasn’t worked,
The progressive solution - what's that? A final solution? Utopia? Surely there many utopians and cracked visionaries among the progressives, but still we've made progress. Society remains dreadfully imperfect. What kind of criticism against progressivism is that for a conservative to make? Would strict constitutionalism have ushered in utopia in its place?
@ Sully:
In hindsight, the Brits didn't need aggressive action. They may just have needed to act a little less afraid. For a zillion reasons, they were afraid. They desperately wanted peace. Chamberlain was a hero. But as Churchill said, he chose dishonor over war, and got both.
The book doesn't explore how good the British intelligence was on Hitler's economic desperation. If they had been informed, they would have known that letting him take Czechoslovakia was a fundamental error. It wasn't just the Brits, though. If the results weren't so horrific, there'd be a pleasureful irony, or sense of just deserts, in what eventually happened to the Poles, who not only failed to resist, but urged the Germans on, then took their own piece of land during the settlement.
What the book does explore is the tragic indifference of Chamberlain and Halifax to the German opposition, members of which at great personal risk struggled but failed to convince them that the Hitler could be brought down. At one point they were within a day of launching the coup. It's enough to make you go all Pastor Hagee on it all and think God was determined to make use of Hitler.
@ narciso:
Or maybe it was all Lodge's fault for defeating Wilson on the League of Nations. Or maybe it was God again for giving Wilson a stroke.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Your pessimism is too extreme, Rex. Even if it's all a magic act, life expectancies and the carrying capacity of world economies have greatly expanded. If the dollars don't measure it right, there's something wrong with the dollars. Technological progress has made life better in many virtually un-measurable ways, as well. Unless you really do hate life and everything that the simple and the complicated folk alike, with relatively few exceptions, associate with better living, something's been going righter.
This is why I don’t understand Colin’s battle with any of our all too few modern day Thomas Paynes who are doing all they can to sound the alarm and rally us all around core principles under threat.
They're not Tom Paines, Z, IMO. They're offering dead ends, nonsense, and falsehoods in too many cases, and not much good comes of that in the end. Anyway, I'm not battling with them, little ol' me. I'm just calling things as I see 'em, tracking down what's interesting to me, especially the differences whose existence implies new and potentially useful things to be learned.
Plus I now have an active and voluble anti-fan club of proudly closed-minded HotAirians. Who could ask for anything more?
@ Geoffrey Britain:
Eventually, GB, the world may gain a replacement hegemon, but getting there could be a lot of fun, and if two or three aspirants believe themselves deserving, the bidding may go through the roof. With modern weapons, it wouldn't take much time at all to make people yearn for the happy, innocent days of Nanking, Stalingrad, and Hiroshima. What I describe in the passage your quote, and that the book describes, is what happens when an aggressive, rising power meets declining ones.
@ Seth Halpern:
Things might have gone well, too. A post-coup Germany might have developed along the lines of Chile under Pinochet, provided a bulwark against Bolshevism, remained reluctant for many years to risk its strength and resource vulnerabilities against its neighbors and the great powers.
History doesn't reveal its alternatives, and, at a certain level of analysis, it gets hard to see how anything could have turned out much different from how it actually did, all the way up to the line I'm typingcutting and pasting right now. I think we have to remain reluctant to decrybless what was , simply out of fear of what might have been anyway. The Nazis were thugs, criminals, and aggressors even before they were genocidal mass murderers, they were vulnerable in 1938, and, instead of standing their way, Great Britain and the rest of the world including us, effectively encouraged them, and not just at Munich. The alternative wouldn't have had to be a worldwide peace crusade - maybe just a bit of realism and stubbornness.
As for attacking the Red Army in 1946 - that wasn't remotely in the cards for us. Speculating further about the Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide gets you into all sorts of games within games. Sure, Pax Americana has been hugely imperfect, but hugely successful compared to the recent alternatives - for us especially, and overall for the world.
...or Southern cooking.
narciso wrote:
The progressive solution - what's that? A final solution? Utopia? Surely there many utopians and cracked visionaries among the progressives, but still we've made progress. Society remains dreadfully imperfect. What kind of criticism against progressivism is that for a conservative to make? Would strict constitutionalism have ushered in utopia in its place?
@ Sully:
In hindsight, the Brits didn't need aggressive action. They may just have needed to act a little less afraid. For a zillion reasons, they were afraid. They desperately wanted peace. Chamberlain was a hero. But as Churchill said, he chose dishonor over war, and got both.
The book doesn't explore how good the British intelligence was on Hitler's economic desperation. If they had been informed, they would have known that letting him take Czechoslovakia was a fundamental error. It wasn't just the Brits, though. If the results weren't so horrific, there'd be a pleasureful irony, or sense of just deserts, in what eventually happened to the Poles, who not only failed to resist, but urged the Germans on, then took their own piece of land during the settlement.
What the book does explore is the tragic indifference of Chamberlain and Halifax to the German opposition, members of which at great personal risk struggled but failed to convince them that the Hitler could be brought down. At one point they were within a day of launching the coup. It's enough to make you go all Pastor Hagee on it all and think God was determined to make use of Hitler.
@ narciso:
Or maybe it was all Lodge's fault for defeating Wilson on the League of Nations. Or maybe it was God again for giving Wilson a stroke.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Your pessimism is too extreme, Rex. Even if it's all a magic act, life expectancies and the carrying capacity of world economies have greatly expanded. If the dollars don't measure it right, there's something wrong with the dollars. Technological progress has made life better in many virtually un-measurable ways, as well. Unless you really do hate life and everything that the simple and the complicated folk alike, with relatively few exceptions, associate with better living, something's been going righter.
zoltan newberry wrote:
They're not Tom Paines, Z, IMO. They're offering dead ends, nonsense, and falsehoods in too many cases, and not much good comes of that in the end. Anyway, I'm not battling with them, little ol' me. I'm just calling things as I see 'em, tracking down what's interesting to me, especially the differences whose existence implies new and potentially useful things to be learned.
Plus I now have an active and voluble anti-fan club of proudly closed-minded HotAirians. Who could ask for anything more?
@ Geoffrey Britain:
Eventually, GB, the world may gain a replacement hegemon, but getting there could be a lot of fun, and if two or three aspirants believe themselves deserving, the bidding may go through the roof. With modern weapons, it wouldn't take much time at all to make people yearn for the happy, innocent days of Nanking, Stalingrad, and Hiroshima. What I describe in the passage your quote, and that the book describes, is what happens when an aggressive, rising power meets declining ones.
@ Seth Halpern:
Things might have gone well, too. A post-coup Germany might have developed along the lines of Chile under Pinochet, provided a bulwark against Bolshevism, remained reluctant for many years to risk its strength and resource vulnerabilities against its neighbors and the great powers.
History doesn't reveal its alternatives, and, at a certain level of analysis, it gets hard to see how anything could have turned out much different from how it actually did, all the way up to the line I'm
typingcutting and pasting right now. I think we have to remain reluctant todecrybless what was , simply out of fear of what might have been anyway. The Nazis were thugs, criminals, and aggressors even before they were genocidal mass murderers, they were vulnerable in 1938, and, instead of standing their way, Great Britain and the rest of the world including us, effectively encouraged them, and not just at Munich. The alternative wouldn't have had to be a worldwide peace crusade - maybe just a bit of realism and stubbornness.As for attacking the Red Army in 1946 - that wasn't remotely in the cards for us. Speculating further about the Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide gets you into all sorts of games within games. Sure, Pax Americana has been hugely imperfect, but hugely successful compared to the recent alternatives - for us especially, and overall for the world.