In the long run, providing that the government is based on a similar form and structure to the previous governments, I don’t know what the difference in quality of life should be, at least tangibly. If you want to argue for national pride, I guess that’s one thing, but I don’t really see it as a good excuse to go to war killing millions more in the process.
Also, I’m uncertain as to how much worse off Poles (even Jewish Poles) would have been under the Third Reich of Germany as opposed to being under the Second Polish Republic - ignoring the advent of the holocaust in 1942, of course and any resistance to the Third Reich coming into power that would result in war.
I would say that as long as the two governments possess similar institutional structures, the standard of living shouldn’t change too drastically. I should be clearer that I’m really only referring to how ordinary citizens actually live their lives from day to day. If, for example, Austrians were to suddenly find themselves ruled by a very similar German government with very similar policies, I don’t see why one should expect a large difference in quality of life for the common man. Do you?
As far as the holocaust, I’m really restricting the definition to the stereotypical death-camps for the Jews. Obviously deaths will increase as war gets tougher, but as we’re exercising historical revisionism, I think it’s valid to question what if England never declared war on Germany in the first place?
Ah, so it is those defending against aggression, who are making an excuse to go to war.
Because Poland likewise had the Polish inteligentsia exterminated,removed all legal recourse Poles had in relation to the state, subject 1.5 million Poles to deportation, closed down all institutions of higer education and high culture, attempted to make elementary schools tools of Germanisation, unleashed the Gestapo,enacted terror and collective punishment for AK raids and generally planned the destruction of Poles as a people and put the state to that use?
I’m reading Karl Hess’ autobiography right now and he confusingly calls Murray Rothbard someone who was a great influence but “had tragically moved toward the fringe of Republican Party politics called paleo-conservatism.” It would be tragic, actually, if that ever became the interpretation of him.
I think Pat is friends with Joe Sobran, too, who is a catholic anarchist. Sobran is closer to Pat’s social conservatism, while being an anarchist.
My thoughts on this, from reading him, is that he became more removed from economics and political radicalism as he aged and became more associated with groups of largely conservative libertarian-leaning people - such as Lew Rockwell. This meant that, in practice, more he was writing about were conservative concerns and so forth and I believe it is possible he became more conservative, or traditionalist, in his later life. He was, of course, always fairly radical.
But, hey, I was four years old when he died. I am sure there are people who work at MU who would know better than I would.
One bully defending his turf from another bully isn’t exactly what I think of as an endearing war story of heroism.
Also…
Pretty close - might have even become worse later on, who knows?
The point isn’t so much about who committed the worst atrocities. It’s about the fact that every government and institution in the area - or close to it - was guilty of some pretty heinous acts of violence against human beings. Which one ended up winning isn’t exactly relevant, I don’t think.
Despite his political radicalism, Rothbard was always a pretty conservative (socially, except maybe on abortion) bourgeois guy. Hell I first read him via his op-eds and his Chronicles articles, where he usually made socially conservative observations on American life. Being as such shouldnt lead one to believe that he wasnt a political radical; he was just not a social one.
Rubbish. Your argument was that the Poles were no worse off under the Germans. They were and that is a fact. Wheter you give a damn about that is your own choice and I could not care less wheter you do or not. But that does not give you the ground to speak of what is not factual as factual.
My argument was that when one jurisdiction replaces another jurisdiction as authority, provided the two institutions are similar, the outcome of standard of living will probably not be different.
No. I think it’s rather similar. Did the Third Reich ramp things up? Yes. It was a time of war. That tends to happen in times of war.
If the shoe were on the other foot, I would expect the same thing to happen. There was nothing particularly evil about the Germans. Put in the same position with similar institutions, the Poles, the Romanians, the Soviets, the Americans, the British, etc. would do the same thing.
You seem to think that people with certain nationalities are much more different than they really are.
Hitler was convinced not to press the Tyrol issue with the Italians, so if the French and the Brits had said "We’re not going to defend Central/Eastern Europe and have at with the Bolshies; we won’t attack you from behind’ I believe that he would have begrudingly accepted French control of Alsace-Lorraine. Allowing Stalin and Hitler to knock each other about seems like a better approach than the one the Allies took.
People forget that Britain was treating the Soviet Union as an ally of the Facist regimes and their first major action of the war would have been to attack Soviet forces in the low countries…
Imagine how different the world would have been then. [^o)]
If we are going to get all realpolitik on the situation then we must discover that the war would have possibly never happened if UK and France had pursued realpolitik the way it should be pursued and had not stuck up their noses over advances made by the USSR. Ultimately what made war likely was that there was no balance of power because USSR had been isolated and made into a pariah outside the recognized powers.
Earlier on Europe had been for centuries characterized by a system of balance of power, a system that had for a long time included Russia. But now France and UK alone were not strong enough to maintain the status quo on the continent, jet they would not accept another ally. USSR was during the 30s trying to break free from its isolation and was signaling its willingness to join the West in a coalition whose combined power could have kept revisionist Germany at bay, but its advances were spurned.
The two western powers wanted to have their cake a little but they also wated to eat it a little, they were indecisive and did not know if they wanted to maintain the order of Versailles, which would require dealing with Stalin. Or if they wanted Germany and USSR to duke it out, which would have require keeping the hell out of Hitler shredding Versailles.
(Stalin, having been spurned by the west ultimately reversed course and decided to do one over it and made a deal with Hitler which allowed Hitler to smash Versailles over western opposition, meaning Stalin succeeded in doing to the western powers what they had hoped to do to him, and set Hitler on them. Of course then Hitler did one over Stalin in turn, but that is a different story.)
Also as folks who are libertarians and therefore supposedly value lives of individuals I don’t think it is becoming to be very gleeful of a war ‘between Hitler and Stalin’. 16,7 million civilians died as a result of the war in USSR alone. I do not exactly think a war between Hitler and Stalin was a good thing.
No, but it likely would have stopped the war expanding into Western Europe. So it’s likely that less would have died than did. That and without Lend Lease it’s likely that Stalin’s regime, and therefore possibly the Soviet Union, would have run into the ground and Hitler along with it. Not the same as saying you wish that there was a Nazi and a Soviet regime or that you wished that Eastern Europe had been bled dry, but it seems that letting Stalin and Hitler duke it out would have been a better approach than the US getting involved, Nazi occupation of Western Europe for a spell, Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe for an even longer spell, and giving aid to a man whose regime killed at least 20 million people.
Why are you trying to justify it with stuff from Eastern Europe? No, leaving Hitler and Stalin to fight would not be the better thing to do because less people would die and they would not be aiding Stalin and USSR would maybe not export Communism and whatever other stuff. It would be the better thing to do because of the French, British and American citizens themselves who were taxed and conscripted for war and because of German civilians killed in the bombings. There is no more or other morality to it than that.
It’s hard to say that WWII could have logically played out any other way than it did. France and the UK were not going to allow a new German Empire. The U.S.A. was not going to allow a United European Empire. Why? Because it threatened their own imperialism.
The other reasons are baloney. You are making it sound as if western powers went to war for the sake of Eastern Europe. They did not. They went to war for their own sake. So there is no reason to try to invent reasons why staying out would have been better for Eastern Europe. Perhaps it would be, perhaps it would not be. In any case the west doesn’t owe Eastern Europe anything so there is no need for these sort of acrobatics.