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Good advice Karnal.

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Why did this make me think of Abu's apologetics for Muhammed's warmongering? Are you two reading from the same pamphlett?

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Of course, we were fighting for economic hegemony, but neither the people or their leaders knew about it. Who was pulling all the strings Gandalf?

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They were defending our democracy and our freedom Gandalf. Everyone's including their own. They did not share your apologetic delusion that Australia would get along fine if the Nazis took over Africa and Eruope, and the Japanese took over Asia.

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Stalin was nearly as bad as Hitler, but I don't think fighting for either of them was fighting for freedom.

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You do realise that the world was not run as a 'good business model' for all those millennia, don't you? Do you think it is merely a coincidence that the vast explosion in wealth over the last few centuries coincided with the growth of freedom and democracy?

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There is a reason they were punished for this.

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They will still figure it out for themselves, eventually. You cannot stop these ideas creeping in, or emerging independently. And you cannot stop them agitating for it when they are no longer on the brink of starvation.

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The curbs on China's population are a big contributor to their current economic success. Population is no guaranteed of economic prosperity. The two are almost completely independent, and where there is a relationship it is inverse.

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No wonder you like Gandalf so much.

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Yet you appear to describe different paths to the same vision.

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A 'non-empire' form of empire?

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And yet even here the actions of the US are unprecedented. No 'empire' in history has ever done what the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it takes a particular devotion to self delusion to imagine the US intends to maintain control of these countries after it leaves.

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They lost a fortune, but they did it for the money? Perhaps they forgot how expensive it is to fight a war?

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It was fighting for our freedom. In the aftermath of WWII, democracy was established In Japan (albeit on an existing pluralistic system) and South Korea (which has had it's ups and downs since, but may be a good indication for the future of Afghanistan). Defeat of the Japanese also lead to, or at least permitted, the establishment or continuation of several other democracies. These democracies have lead almost inevitably to greater freedoms. Not that this was our goal in WWII. We genuinely (and justifiably) saw it as a personal threat. The beneficial outcomes for so many other Asian countries is testimony to the genuinely different visions for the world.

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It has nothing at all to do with racism. It is about different values. The French, British, Americans etc genuinely value freedom and democracy. This is not because they are white, but because they have gone through the process of securing their own freedom and democracy, and seen the benefits for themselves. They failed to share these ideals largely out of racism and greed, but you cannot have genuine freedom while slavery persists, and it was pretty much inevitable that these values would be extended to all. The Nazis and Japanese regime did not value freedom and democracy and had no intention of establishing democracy or protecting the freedom and rights of the countries they occupied. It would have genuinely been a different world order had they won.

Most people put this in the bleeding obvious category. I do not skip over it out of some vague appeal to racism. I am continually, and genuinely, surprised that you do not see the obvious difference and the dire position the world was in.

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I am trying desperately. That is why I keep asking you how it was that we were not fighting for freedom and democracy, but for economic hegemony, while you concede that neither the troops nor the leaders realised that is what we were really fighting for. I can quote you if you'd like.

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While the start of WWI was 'messy' from an ideological perspective, none of the four main central powers were democracies. Had we lost to them (or had we not participated and simply watched the allies lose to them) the great democracies of the world would have been replaced by old style empires, and ours would have followed soon after. Both WWI and WWII directly threatened a complete reversal in the emerging world order, and it is nothing but naive to think that we would have been OK if the outcome had been different.

Vietnam: we genuinely feared the spread of communism, which, whether you approve or not, was why we (or the yanks) went to Vietnam, intervened in Afghanistan, and did a whole lot of other nasty things. The threat has crumbled now, but they had no way of knowing this would happen. Russia was a genuine superpower, and the spread of Russian style communism was a threat to everyone's freedom. We were obviously pretty far down on that list, but the threat was there.

I was against the invasion of Iraq and don't think they posed a direct threat to us, but like I said, if it is successful in establishing democracy there, it should make the entire world a safer place. Saddam was a threat to the freedom of the Iraqi people, and the democracy currently being established is their only real option for attaining freedom. The intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan is the culmination of a shift in thinking from defending our own freedom and democracy for our own interests to robustly supporting it globally. It happened sporadically in the past, eg Napolean, and the various democracies established in the aftermath of WWII - largely because the opportunity was simply there and we did not know what else to do and did not want other Hitler to take over and start it all again. Despite the inevitable treachery of war, we have consistently (yes, not universally) been on the side of freedom and democracy, whether it was merely our own, or projecting it onto others. This process only began in earnest a few centuries ago. Go back 500 years, and there is no hint of it in western Europe. But it has transformed the world, and flipped the economic and military power balance on it's head. WWI and WII were genuine and immediate threats to the entire world order.

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It's a bit more these days.

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And poo on each other's plates. If they stopped doing that, they would not be asking us for crumbs.

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True, it started out as more subtle forms of pluralism, rights and freedoms. Parliamentary democracy is the final stage, or at least, the current stage. But the industrial revolution was entirely reliant on those freedoms. Where those freedoms went, industrialisation followed and thrived, and people grew wealthy. This is where you miss the point and pretend the GFC put us back in the stone age.

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For how long? Germany benefited from many reforms imposed by the French, as did much of western Europe. The map of the French empire is an astonishingly good predictor of modern wealth in western europe. The French Revolutionaries were unashamed cultural imperialists, and the world benefited greatly from this. The fascists would have destroyed this, given a little time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon

He implemented a wide array of liberal reforms across Europe, including the abolition of feudalism and the spread of religious toleration.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_period

This period represents the first half of the Empire of Japan during which Japanese society moved from being an isolated feudal society to its modern form. Fundamental changes affected its social structure, internal politics, economy, military, and foreign relations.

The first reform was the promulgation of the Five Charter Oath in 1868, a general statement of the aims of the Meiji leaders to boost morale and win financial support for the new government. Its five provisions consisted of the:

    Establishment of deliberative assemblies;
    Involvement of all classes in carrying out state affairs;
    Revocation of sumptuary laws and class restrictions on employment;
    Replacement of "evil customs" with the "just laws of nature"; and
    An international search for knowledge to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule.

Guess what Karnal - those reforms caused the economic growth of Japan, and the institutions paved the way for functioning representative democracy, despite the detour into fascism.

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For a long time people thought this would work. You probably still do. It didn't. Russia achieved a great improvement in efficiency by moving people from the land, who were superfluous to the labor needs, into industrialisation. It was a top-down effort that attempted to mirror what was happening to the west, but it was a facade, and it crumbled. It worked a lot better than other empires at the time, who forbade industrialisation in one way or another, but it could not compare with a liberal democracy.

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Like I pointed out, there are two key reason's for China's boom - population control, and freedoms that the dynasty is yielding to the people. If it continues yielding more freedoms, the boom will continue. If it doesn't, it will go the same way as Russia.

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The industrial revolution was reliant on various forms of pluralism that lead eventually to complete democracy. The two went hand in hand. The same pattern has happened with many previous empires. They thrived while they yielded freedoms and political power to their people. The ones that went back collapsed. Britain went all the way.

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I agree that this is peculiar, but they are still a democracy, aren't they?

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They are a barrier, not a cause, of growth.

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It benefited greatly from doing so, and benefited even more when the vote was extended to more people. These were hard-won gains.

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Would you include Singapore, Japan and South Korea in this?

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And how well is that working out for them? The economic success of Latin American countries matches very closely their freedoms and democratic institutions. They are a good example of the important of pluralistic social institutions over 'nominal' parliamentary democracy.

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Duh. That is why I said the same thing, which you managed to leave off your quote:

Not that this was our goal in WWII.

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So we somehow failed because we did not establish democracy worldwide?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea

South Korea's subsequent history is marked by alternating periods of democratic and autocratic rule.

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They did, in many of them. Remember telling me how Malaysia is an example of a progressive Muslim country? Guess where they got their democracy from?

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They fought to maintain their own freedom. WWI and WWII were not just about the colonies. Hitler was destroying freedom in the heartland of freedom and democracy. Who gives a bugger about colonies when there are brown shirts marching down your street?

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Hitler was evil (just like Muhammed). As for the rest of it, whatever else each one may have been, in most cases it was freedom and democracy on one side, and tyranny on the other. You simply cannot see the wood for the trees.

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In other words, destroying their freedom and democracy? Not just 'other' civilised people - the German public too. Good on you for recognising this as a sin. You could almost pass for a white man.

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Britain ending slavery doesn't count? Or did they only do that to exploit them? Economic Hegemony wot?

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Like it or not, they were and still are, and they brought freedom and democracy to many places. Iraq and Afghanistan most recently.

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I did ask you to clarify at the time who actually knew what they were fighting for. Is this another example of "for all we know..."? You did specifically include leaders in the people who did not know. But then you went all silent, presumably because you ran out of string pulling conspiracies. Better go back to the new socialist website and find out.

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Germany inherited democratic institutions from the French revolutions. They were being wound back, but were restored by WWI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire

The German Empire (German: Deutsches Reich or Deutsches Kaiserreich) was the historical German nation state[6] that existed from the unification of Germany in 1871 to the defeat in World War 1 in 1918
The German Empire consisted of 27 constituent territories (most of them ruled by royal families).

Although authoritarian in many respects, the empire had some democratic features. Besides universal suffrage, it permitted the development of political parties. Bismarck's intention was to create a constitutional façade which would mask the continuation of authoritarian policies. In the process, he created a system with a serious flaw. There was a significant disparity between the Prussian and German electoral systems. Prussia used a highly restrictive three-class voting system in which the richest third of the population could choose 85% of the legislature, all but assuring a conservative majority. As mentioned above, the king and (with two exceptions) the prime minister of Prussia were also the emperor and chancellor of the empire – meaning that the same rulers had to seek majorities from legislatures elected from completely different franchises. As mentioned above, rural areas were grossly overrepresented from the 1890s onward.

Good post, FD, and well worth a read. Your Napoleon idea is compelling.

You are, I think, confusing freedoms granted to small interest groups in economies with rights and freedoms granted to populations as a whole. Oligarchical capitalism is the former - universal suffrage and participatory democracy is the latter.

By your standards, Putin’s Russia is a democracy. Myanmar is a democracy. And yes, Pakistan is a democracy.

Ah.

Karnal wrote on Apr 27^th, 2014 at 8:05pm:


Not confusing. Failing to distinguish adequately. Read the book. It makes the distinction. It is compelling reading. The best thing since Jared Diamond.

freediver wrote on Apr 27^th, 2014 at 8:09pm:


A good discussion.