AFAIK most Chinese citizens do not perceive themselves as victims of tyranny - more likely they are to perceive themselves as proud citizens of a rising country, which has a troubled past. All I'm aware of is the polls showing an overwhelming popular support for the Chinese government. Even if the results were skewed, to deduce the opposite result just due to suspected bias would be an error of colossal magnitude.
You can't actually make a blanket statement like Caplan is here. The degree to which would-be emigrants from a nondemocratic regime are mostly unhappy dissidents in search of freedoms, and the degree to which they are mostly loyal nationalists of their homeland in search of higher wages, actually differs a LOT from place to place and time to time. As well as from ethnic group to ethnic group within a country (a Sunni Arab Iraqi and a Kurdish Iraqi, for example, might have been expected to exhibit very different levels of loyalty to Saddam's regime).
Today, Chinese immigrants in the West are more likely to fall into the "loyal nationalist" group, Russian immigrants in the "unhappy dissident" (i.e. anti-Putin) group -- though less-so than in the Soviet years, when they notably included many unhappy Russian Jews.
The Chinese regime also makes great use of their diaspora network for espionage purposes, and is quick to label any inquest into their bad behavior as de facto evidence of racism on part of the inquirers. A tactic for which they also use on anybody who criticizes the PRC's bad behavior in any capacity, such as the smears which to this day are used against anyone who claims Covid-19 was man-made, the result of a lab leak, part of bioweapons research, or the PRC deliberately exacerbating the release of Covid from their borders, even though there's strong evidence for all four of these points:
then highlighting the divergence where "our" policy splits those two groups: if "we" are against Bad Chinese Government Policy, but not Chinese citizens, it makes it salient to those citizens how their interests might indeed diverge from their government's. Especially since most citizens' main demand from their government is to protect them from other governments, in order to convince them to support our goals and not their governments, you have to convince them you aren't a threat to them (the citizens). Obviously yes, no doubt many Chinese citizens have other reasons (flawed or not, coerced or not) to support their government, but if another government is perceived to be a threat to * them *, then they will * always * support their government against that other one.
Similar for Russia. I know there are Russians who are against the war. Some I know personally. And they know they are a minority. And I know some of the majority; some among the emigrated, too. - I still agree with Caplan's main take: opening our borders to more of them is the best strategy to change their minds and to weaken their criminal government. With a net profit for us: Even the pro-Putin guys here mostly just work and pay their taxes, not attacking Ukrainian refugees on the street (and 3 to 6 million in Germany have some relatively recent "Russian" background). - Bombing did not change the minds of Germans, Iraqis or Ukranians. As long as Putin and Xi command the guys with the machine-guns, the opinions of their peons do not matter that much - contrary to Harari. Still: I do "have some quarrel" with the bigger part of the Russian people. As with Nobel-laureate Brodsky whose ultra-chauvinistic hate-poem most would nod to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Independence_of_Ukraine#cite_note-7
And if I could read Chinese blogs and/or could collect data of their opinions, I might well have some quarrel with them.
> polls showing an overwhelming popular support for the Chinese government. Even if the results were skewed, to deduce the opposite result just due to suspected bias would be an error of colossal magnitude.
Even IF the pools were skewed....SUSPECTED bias? The fascist Chinese govt murders FAMILIES of opponents. Youre stupid beyond stupid.
Thank you; your assessment of my cognitive faculties is quite impressive.
Even if you did confidently believe that the bias in polls showing massive support for the Chinese government was huge, that does not itself carry with it much if any evidence towards the contrary. You're merely restating your beliefs by explicitly stating you're unwilling to entertain (some) evidence. What evidence would suffice?
You can, of course, assert that no poll on Chinese opinion on their government provides any info whatsoever. Then we'll just have to discard all the results they provide, including for ex the ones showing declining trust towards the govt during the pandemic. I have no clue what purpose such fabricated results would serve for the government, but then again I've always had trouble with doublethink.
The current Chinese govt is led by a group that murdered 34-64 million people. They might occasionally speak truth but one would never know when or why. Economists regard their statistics as political, not science.
Chinese history includes many rebellions and civil wars when political leaders failed on their promises.
That indeed is the gist of the post. However, Caplan quite confidently asserts that the vast majority of Chinese people are victims of tyranny, and insinuates a significant part of that majority would perhaps like to move.
Any and all knowledge we have of what the majority of Chinese citizens actually thinks flies in the face of this idea. It is not at all problematic to speak of majority opinions like this; I doubt many would take issue with me claiming, for example, that the majority of U.S. citizens likely would not want Sharia law to be implemented in their state or county. Saying that does not mean I've stopped judging U.S. citizens as individuals.
The problem still stands that the overwhelming majority of the PRC's overseas dirtyworkers have always been members of the Chinese diaspora. Whenever you get skewed results for groups, you always get accused of racism and persecution no matter how unimpechable your conduct or necessary the operations. The FBI's crackdown on black nationalism was absolutely tarred in popular consciousness, and remains so to this day, even though the likes of the Panthers were genuinely criminal and dangerous, and needed to be stopped to at minimum avoid turning the US into Northern Ireland.
Even if you aren’t willing to let quote unquote ordinary people in, you may drastically increase the amount of high quality visas to suck out all Russian/Chinese/Iraqi/etc clever workers or newgrads
It doesn’t cost much to do but your economy will be happy afterwards
That’s, btw, the reason why Armenian economy grew like 12% last year and IT sector in Armenia grew twice in the same period. Ton of Russians employed on their highly selective IT jobs in Russian companies either work remotely from countries that are happy to get some foreign tax money or move their companies to those countries.
And you might as well go crazy with patriotic PR around it too. I get that perhaps Armenia may not want to go all out on crowing about "look at all these smart and talented Russians coming to our obviously better country!" but there's no reason that the US shouldn't. Every case of that is another example of A) why "our" side is better and B) why average citizens in the "other" country should recognize that our enemy is not those average citizens.
I (guess why) personally dislike when governments are using poor people / bad circumstances to seize even more societal virtue credits, but yeah, in that case it seems like it is at least somewhat instrumentally rational to brag about clever people who move to US with the goal being “convincing others to do so as well”
Sure, I mean it's definitely propaganda, but as a form of inter-state competition, I think it's much better (both in effect and morally) than war, trade wars, saber-rattling or most of the other techniques usually employed.
Well sort of yeah, but I mostly believe that almost all “west” governments are much more concerned about inner stuff, then about some weirdos in some other country
So I don’t really know whether it’s higher or lower on relative propaganda’s ugliness scale than the median
oh, you're absolutely correct, for almost all purposes (at least in the US, where I am, but I assume it's true most everywhere) foreign countries only exist for most people as symbols to support their domestic agendas. If an American politician/citizen could do something that improved the effectiveness of our diplomacy or foreign policy, but would lose them support/votes at home, they'd wouldn't even consider it.
>True, most Russians and Chinese are not active dissenters. The vast majority are normal, apolitical people.
No citation is given for this assertion, and it is not necessary to make the general point that they are human beings and should be free to seek better lives. Rooting the argument for immigration on this weakens the case for immigration - especially since there is ample reason to doubt that it is even true.
First, the description of people from vastly different cultures as "normal" is questionable. If the definition of normal is the same as one's frame of reference, why would members of a very different culture be normal?
Second, is being "apolitical" a neutral, reasonable, or desirable trait in the context of extreme behavior? E.g. if a German citizen were ambivalent about the genocide of millions of Jews, or a Soviet citizen ambivalent to Holodomor and gulags, would that be desirable? At what level of severity of government behavior does citizen indifference become a mark against them?
Third, the assertion does not seem to be factually true, at least not as I would, I think reasonably, interpret it.
>If the governments of Russia and China are tyrannical - and they are - a rational observer would remember to ask, “Who do they tyrannize over?” The primary answer is, perforce, their own citizens.
The implication that if the Russian state oppresses Russians, then most Russians must oppose that behavior is unfounded.
Worse, genocide-adjacent views and rhetoric are actually popular in Russia. Even the anti-Putin so called "liberal" elements in Russia promote (or have promoted in the last few years) imperialism with genocidal overtones, (see e.g. here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin/comment/21812376).
Dude, we invaded Iraq because some unrelated brown people did 9/11.
We are sanctioning Afghanistan and causing millions to starve to death because they rejected our plan of having pedophile warlords on our pay control the countryside.
Your average American citizen either thinks or thought that was OK because the news told them so.
Do you think everyone that didn't physically oppose the Iraq War should be subject to...what exactly? I doubt even Bryan Caplan would pass that bar.
One day Ukraine may be viewed in much the same Iraq or Vietnam are. I know you think it is impossible, but time has a way of changing things.
The milligram experiment showed that an average western citizen would kill someone simply because an authority asked even when there was no penalty for non-compliance.
"At what level of severity of government behavior does citizen indifference become a mark against them?"
If by "mark against them" you mean "severe punishment imposed on the defeated" count me out. I'm glad we didn't go through with the Morgenthau Plan or its like.
What happens to a defeated power during the war is usually enough of a punishment.
Saddam's commitment to international terrorism, particularly the global jihadi movement, was absolutely a legitimate concern. He was already harboring the bisexual rapist who founded the Islamic State in his borders back in 2002:
Your points on Afghanistan and Vietnam likewise are so wrong they're barely worth engaging with. Ho Chi-Minh was unusually fanatical even by the standards of revolutionary socialists. He was in Russia during the death of Lenin, and as Mark Moyar detailed in his book, stood in line to view his mummified body so long, it gave him frostbite. Nor did our leaving end the Vietnam War. It perpetuated until the enslavement of the South by the North, after which a campaign of State terror every bit the equal of Lenin's was taken against anyone unfortunate enough to stay behind. All we had to do for the South bybthat point was maintain a minimal garrison force like we did for Korea -- and should've done for Afghanistan -- to save hundreds of thousands of lives. But we didn't. And we didn't for entirely political reasons. (Much like we did for Afghanistan.)
Everyone who opposed the Vietnam War was a swine. No more deserving of retrospective lionization than Confederate Lost Causers, who at least had the decency to support a slave state that wasn't as murderous and destructive.
So he did some follow up studies and while the number of people doing a lethal dose was lower then the first, it was still shockingly high.
"eicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in."
And the other 60% didn't drop out?
"Prior to this work Milgram asked colleagues how many people would give a shock of 300 volts or more, and many said only true psychopaths would do so."
I think is the basic thing we are supposed to take away. The Milligram studies were supposed to show that only a tiny group of psychopaths would "just follow orders". It turned out a pretty significant part of the population would, and that is without much incentive.
Moreover, we just have so so many examples in history. The lesson I take away is that a very large portion of society will do almost anything under the right circumstances, and so its hard to blame people for not taking extremely brave action (that is what we call them brave, they are exceptional).
> we invaded Iraq because some unrelated brown people did 9/11
We responded to 9/11 with the evasion of religion as immoral, with the evasion of American rational individualism as morally superior to primitive tribalism and Dark Ages religion and w/the conservative altruist policy of helping Iraqis get unlimited majority rule govt. 2+ decades later, we still haven't destroyed Iran's nukes or stopped all Islamist Jihad. We evade the need for victory in war.
Most religions aren't organizing international terrorist operations at a level the world hasn't seen since the heydays of revolutionary socialism.
That said, the issue isn't even Islam in that regard, but of the states and organizations that have made, and continue to make, terrorism an instrument of their advancement. There are numerous states which do this to various degrees, but if we cracked down hard on them rather than continuously tried appeasement for the sake of a peace that never comes and never will on account of these regimes and organizations basing their legitimacy on peace never arriving (Assadist Syria, Khomeini'ist Iran, Pakistan and their slave regime in Afghanistan), we would see a strong reduction in the jihadist threat.
Religion is one of the rationalizations of the unfocused mind. But its consistency wildly varies among societies and historical eras. Religion,w/its hatred of mans independent, focused,reasoning mind and with its death-worshipping, life-hating, tranccendentalist morality is a principled attack on man's life and happiness. The fact that this attack is more or less consistent with particular religions and particular historical eras and particular political situtations is irrelevant. Further, even when explicit religion has a small influence, it has, virtually always, retained an implicit influence via its mysticism and selflessness, eg, Nazi racism and Marxist dialectics. You drop the context of Islamic political terrorism as if Islamic groups value some sort of ideologically and morally neutral "advancement." You evade identifying the ideal of that advancement. Only modern, post-Enlightenment US rejects ideals for unprincipled, anti-systematic, short-range Pragmatism. Totalitarian Islam is the explicit goal of Iran, Afghanistan, the Palestinians, and, until recently, perhaps, Saudi Arabia. The US appeases Jihad because it evades the principled destructiveness of religion and multiculturalism. Thus the anti-ideological, willed, morally obligatory stupidity of evading a morally certain denunciation of Islam because its a religion and because all cultures are allegedly morally equal. Part of the cause of the WW2 Allied victory was the global denunciation of the elitist, tryannical ideal of fascism. That ideal was not incidental to fascism but part of its basic ideological cause. Your problem is less an ignorance of these ideas than your ignorance of how to use your mind. Intuition-based associations is how man used his mind before Aristotle discovered sense-based, systematic reasoning,a discovery that became a practical guide w/the 17th century Scientific Rev. Modern subjectivism has reversed this back to intuition-based associations, this time with statistics for a facade of science.
US foreign policy must denounce religion and multiculturalism and advocate rational individualism first before its appeasement can end. Then we can, eg, invade Iran, seize its nuclear weapons and publicly kill, without trial, its religious, political and military leaders.
But a human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not. A human being needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no matter how rudimentary, and, since his consciousness is volitional, a sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values. Who, then, provides Attila [the man of force] with values? The Witch Doctor [the man of faith].
-Ayn Rand
Concrete goals are the product of ideals, even when ideals are explicitly rejected or only implicit. Religion is necessarily destructive, regardless of how consistently its applied. America must denounce religion and multiculturalism and advocate rational individualism as its guide to destroying Jihad. Our allies, enemies and others must know what we will defend and destroy. We need a foreign POLICY, not paniced responses to emergencies that we evaded predicting.
I was just chatting with a Chinese woman today, and she explained to me that the government in China is very kind. They give money and medical care to old people. If you don't break the law, you live a good life in China.
I was trying to figure out if we were being bugged or something, because she seemed extremely bright, and it would be more pleasant to think that this is an extreme idea that she has to say, but then she continued.
Woman: in the United States a brother can make love to their sister, and nobody does anything about it. In china, those people would go straight to prison.
Me: Straight to prison, wow
Woman: Yes and we only have one husband and one wife, not like those Indians and Arabs
Me, as neutrally as possible: a happy family is very nice
And in this moment, I discovered that I'm actually a little bit libertarian.
If the US government funded NGOs to promote LGBTQ+ in China and convince Chinese that the CCP was illegitimate because it didn't respect such human rights, would you think that is a good thing (trying to bring new liberties to people oppressed by the CCP) or a bad thing (interfering in another country and raising the CCPs awareness of fifth column meddling in there internal affairs by the west thus increasing hostility).
What we want would be irrelevant. The PRC has the power to make any entity that operates within their borders their bitch, and they use that power enthusiastically. A pro-LGBTQ+ NGO would at best be toothless to the point of worthlessness if they allowed it to operate at all.
I think China has the right to forbid such energy owes from forming or operating within their borders. In terms of it being a good or a bad thing, I think it's generally a bad thing to try to impose things from the outside.
Individuals have rights. Groups have no rights. See: Declaration of Independence. Rights are a moral view of freedom of action in society. Ie, is initiating force moral?
You evade free will. Might never makes right. Right is a product of mans focused mind. Force contradicts mind. The attempt to forcibly change values is the product of late 19th century Progressivism and its imperialism. Your Leftist hatred of individual rights, ie, America, is noted. I await your next Leftist rationalization of mans independent,focused, reasoning mind.
Foreign policy to promote LBQXYZwhatever rights is bizarrely selective about rights. What happened to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all in all parts of life?
Didn't mention the role of sanctions in US foreign policy, which apparently are supposed to make citizens rise up and overthrow their leaders (which essentially never happens). Sanctions are clearly damaging to folks that "we have no quarrel with".
If you accept it as power politics and the USA punishing a rival or rebel against hegemony, it makes sense. (And other countries do the same thing where they can.)
Except that it doesn't work. And it badly hurts the people "we have no quarrel with".
And, as for the whataboutism: no country comes anywhere near the sheer volume and intensity of US government sanctions. And when other governments sanction the US, it's generally in response to onerous sanctions put on by the US.
I said it made sense, not that it was good. Power politics is eternal. In the Cold War, we were the right-wing, capitalist power, and the USSR was the left-wing, communist power. Now, we are the left-wing, LGBT-friendly power, and Russia is the right-wing, Orthodox Christian power. Our local sympathizers with the other side were on the left then, they are on the right now. Did we switch, and meet somewhere in the middle, or is it just the endless dance of geopolitics as power blocs move for advantage?
Very well stated. I'm not sure it'll convince anybody else, but it's a good start.
That said, as Nutrition Capsule opines: I suspect most Chinese and Russians don't see themselves as victims of tyranny. They've both got very long histories of living with regimes that are far worse than their current regimes and this kind of cultural memory is strong whether individuals see it or not.
Russian culture has been religious nationalism and religious globalism since the Renaissance. At that time, the Rus. Ortho. Church condemned Western Christianity for compromising w/reason.
>Collective guilt is the guiding principle of modern warfare:
Im confused. Did you graduate from high school? Collective guilt is as ancient as man. Your libertarianism is a rationalizationof and guide to the unfocused mind. War is possible only when morally and economically supported by the dominant culture of a nation. As merely one example among a vast historical many, prior to contact w/the West, Comanches were especially feared by other American Indians for their systemic ,total destruction of enemy tribes. And dont forget Romes total destruction of Carthage in which farms were salted to prevent the growing of food. You should limit your thinking to economics.
At the beginning of the Ukraine War I was pretty shocked at the amount of vitriol and retribution was inflicted against anyone with the crime of Russian blood in their veins pretty much regardless of who they were and how they acted. It all seemed worse then what happened during the War on Terror, perhaps because the liberal groups that usually try to stand against that thing friend/enemy sense went off against Russians.
It's certainly reasonable to think that in a just war there will be civilian casualties and that is just part of victory. And I can see using economic sanctions if engaged in a total just war if they can reasonably be expected to impact the war effort. However, one should always keep in mind that economic sanctions tend to impact civilians far worse than militaries. Economic sanctions seem to be our go-to response all the time, even though it probably causes the most destruction.
Bryan, let me ask you some direct questions.
1) Do you support the Ukrainian government's ban on emigration of all adult males?
2) Do you support the Ukrainian practice of conscription?
3) Do you support US AID to Ukraine? Past, present, or future? Is there anything you would change about US AID?
4) What exactly should we be trying accomplish in this whole situation and through what means?
If people are oppressed, do we have an obligation to liberate them from that oppression?
Do we have an obligation to liberate people in the Donbass and Crimea? Do you believe their lives will be less oppressed if we do what it takes to make that happen?
The use of the word appeasement obviously brings to mind Hitler and Munich.
You also state, "Putin is one of the worst on Earth."
It is your believe that we are facing a similar situation to Hitler with Putin?
If we are, should we be prepared to end it in a similar way (total war ending in similar level of destruction for Russia).
6) From the same piece:
"The upshot is that Putin invaded a country with powerful and committed allies, several of them with nuclear weapons. The invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and even Syria were bad for those countries, but they did not plausible endanger the peace of the world. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine does. We’ll probably avoid nuclear war over Ukraine, but it’s hard to believe that the risk hasn’t multiplied tenfold this year."
It kind of sounds like your conclusion is "might makes right". Our invasions of these countries was less bad because they were too weak to oppose us. But if Ukraine didn't have our support it too would be in a similar position. Ukraine has no nuclear weapons. The only chance of this becoming a nuclear conflict is through our involvement. If so, we could solve that problem by not being friends with them. I guess I just don't understand the logic of the piece.
7) Do you favor declaring war over Taiwan if there is an invasion? How do you think such a war should be prosecuted? Should we be preparing for such a war (higher military budget, etc)?
I know enough an about Munich 1938 to know that every single situation across time and space is not a 1:1 repeat of Munich. Even Munich is more complicated then Munich.
I've watched Munich be used to justify every single idiotic foreign adventure America has gotten into for 50 years.
Mindlessly memorizing an arbitrary selection, organization and interpretation of concretes is the brute animal method of survival. This can be easily verified by observing birds, cats, dogs, rabbits,etc. in your neighborhood. Their stupidity requires short-range survival or, as Chamberlain praised it, "peace in our time," in September 30, 1938. Germany, the SU and the Slovak Rep. invaded Poland in Sep 1, 1939. That one-year peace resulted in the most destructive war in history. Man survives by integrating concretes into concepts and inducing concepts into principles. Short-range, pseudo-practicality, ie, Pragmatism, guides post-WW2 America. And Pragmatism rationalizes altruism, the explicit purpose of most of our post-WW2 foreign non-policy. Eg, Johnson morally justified Vietnam as protecting SV voting, even if that resulted in communism.
The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
It’s quite an assumption that Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1938 would've saved the world from WW2; Germany was more prepared for it than Britain and France and Hitler actually kind of expected invading Czechoslovakia to result in war. Hell even after declaring war in ‘39 they still did basically nothing for almost a year. Britain likely benefitted from the extra year of rearming. For all the complaints about Munich and appeasement it probably didn’t increase Germany’s chance of victory.
You evade moral and jntellectual power, ie, a statement of principles that allies and enemies must consider. Contra modern materialist meatheads, man is not a pool ball merely reacting to events. Human action is the product of the mind. Post-Soviet Russia started many wars to regain territory. See Wikipedia. There was no opposition of any kind. Finally, Ukraine.
Mindlessly memorizing an arbitrary selection, organization and interpretation of concretes is the brute animal method of survival. This can be easily verified by observing birds, cats, dogs, rabbits,etc. in your neighborhood. Their stupidity requires short-range survival or, as Chamberlain praised it, "peace in our time," in September 30, 1938. Germany, the SU and the Slovak Rep. invaded Poland in Sep 1, 1939. That one-year peace resulted in the most destructive war in history. Man survives by integrating concretes into concepts and inducing concepts into principles. Short-range, pseudo-practicality, ie, Pragmatism, guides post-WW2 America. And Pragmatism rationalizes altruism, the explicit purpose of most of our post-WW2 foreign non-policy. Eg, Johnson morally justified Vietnam as protecting SV voting, even if that resulted in communism.
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The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
The opportunity to cross borders is a privilege often reserved for a select few who conform to governmental regulations. While some professionals, like Filipino nurses, enjoy more fluid mobility, many others face significant barriers. The system appears to work smoothly for those within governmental circles, but remains a challenge for the broader population.
>> “If the governments of Russia and China are tyrannical - and they are”
Being one of the main founding points in this stack - may I ask what’s a basis to say this?
Aside of personal bias/propaganda and en masse cognitive distortion installed with smth like “we are the most democratic country with the most developed human values and going to show other non democratic country (we decide who is that) how it should be”
People like fake simplicity, where they dont have to think about the complexity of the world
Its way easier for most people to categorize every country as corrolary with its people
The alternative solution is individualism funnily enough, where instead if thinking about every nationality as its own people, you think about humans as its own categoy, and judging every human on its own
The pressure campaigns to get companies to stop selling groceries, medicine, cars, and beer in Russia are pretty strong evidence of the west not giving a shit about Russian civilians.
Not a huge fan of open borders...mass immigration is a big part of what's driving the fascist/right-populist (depending on your degree of concern) revival in Europe and America. Like it or not, people are irrational monkeys with big brains and like to be around people like them, whether it's skin color, language, religion, or culture (and if one of these are the same the other steps in to make problems--look at the Thirty Years War, the Dominican Republic vs Haiti, religious killings in India...forget where do I start, where do I *stop*?). Heck, look at the way division by skin color prevented the American working class from demanding the rights their counterparts had in much of Europe.
I doubt that most people truly believe the 'we have no quarrel with you' rhetoric. Others have made this point already, but some see Russians and Chinese as basically complicit in the crimes of their government; most of them at least to some extent support their governments and their actions. The rhetoric is purely propagandistic in nature. The US used the same rhetoric in WW2 with the propaganda it distributed in Germany even though, as is clear in retrospective interpretations of the third reich, most people definitely believed the quarrel was with the German people, who were understood to be collectively to blame, not merely their government. So I think this rhetoric is only really used cynically to try to foment dissent or apathy among the general public of the enemy country.
When it comes to foreign countries most people are instinctively very collectivist. The rare use of individualist rhetoric in foreign affairs is (unfortunately) usually cynical.
The issue with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is that, with the caveat that genuinely accurate polling did not and could not exist, the evidence still points to the majority of the populations of both countries supporting their governments and the actions of said governments. And not out of ignorance of the worst actions. Many of the atrocities were well known and had a high degree of popular support. Including the Holocaust itself. (The Speerian claim of mass ignorance of the Final Solution was always a lie, and anyone who pretends otherwise is either a buffoon or a fraud.)
Nor every tyrranical or dangerous regime in history is reviled by the populous. It would be wonderful if that were the case. But it's not. And it's usually a spectrum of some sort. The Bolsheviks were far more detested by their populous than the NSDAP, but the Bolshies were still able to find willing agents among émigrés and the diaspora, such as the Palmer Raid deportees and Armand Hammer.
This doesn’t really contradict my point. Something like 40% of civilians were children, inarguably innocent (probably a lot lower % today but still relevant), and the general attitude was still ‘reap what you sow’ even for babies in cribs. As educated a man as Thomas Mann explicitly defended collective guilt as a justification for violent reprisals *after the war was over* even against German children.
So I’m sticking with my explanation that people are just instinctively collectivists when dealing with foreign countries.
Given the prevalence of child soldiers and child conscription in the Axis, and the degree to which their brainwashing programs for child soldiers, child conscripts, and child civilians generally both inculcated and exacerbated genuinely wicked beliefs and actions, what the fuck does "innocent" even mean by that point?
It's still one thing to make the case that there should be ages of bearing criminal responsibility, but there's nothing innocent about a child soldier who leads a suicide charge to stop International Jewry from conquering the Reich. The soul has to be thoroughly corrupted before you get to that point.
That said, you're certainly right that guilt or innocence has nothing to do with the genuine emotions that war brings out. We murdered a horrifying amount of civilians during WWII, including women and many children too young to even be child soldiers, on both fronts, and all without any serious protest from the homeland.
We had to. We had no choice but to win, and the only shame is that we stopped halfway and didn't storm on Moscow the moment Berlin fell and shoot as many Bolshies as it took to drive a stake through the heart of revolutionary socialism. But it's still genuinely disturbing how easily people get used to mass violence, regardless of its necessity.
"the 1991 invasion of Iraq" ? Famously the US stopped at the Iraqi border. And I think this is more than a quibble. If your thesis was that the US had a quarrel with the Iraqi people, you'd have a hard time explaining that. (Similarly, if your thesis was the US had a quarrel with the people of the Soviet Union, shouldn't you predict that it would continue to have said quarrel when the USSR fell apart?)
High immigration barriers are pretty unimpressive evidence going the other way: both the govt and most voters treat mostly-closed borders as the default. It's a shame that's what 0 concern looks like, but that is in fact what it looks like.
I think it is perfectly ok to imply some culpability in the average citizens, sure they voted for Putin or donated to the war cause. But I think when you are crafting your foreign policy, it really is important to have proportionate responses to each level of the other country. (Either for Russia today, or Germany/Japan in 1946)
Tyrannical leaders, war-crimes committing soldiers: sure, full responsibility, shoot on sight
Regular soldiers: shoot in combat, treat as culpable until hostilities are over, treat well as POWs
Regular pro-war citizens: disagreement with their views, but after the war, they aren't going to get punished outside of perhaps being removed from positions of power
Anti-war citizens who escape and denounce their country's crimes: treat as heroes
Random citizens you don't know their opinion: why target them? You want them on your side eventually.
The point isn't to perfectly assign blame, it's to prevent bad stuff in the future! If you are fighting country X, you want to avoid that problem in the future. Best ways to do that: convince the citizens of X that your ideals are better, and working peacefully with you is better than fighting you. Minimizing the perceived or real idea that the citizens of X are your enemy is a good tactic for that.
This might also be a good framework for your domestic enemies as well.
> Best ways to do [prevent war]: convince the citizens of X that your ideals are better.
ABSOLUTELY!!!!! But the philosophy of Pragmatism, which has dominated American culture since the early 20th century, rejects ideals for short-range trivia, like a drunk who has one more for the road. America's founding ideal of Enlightenment, rational individualism seems more respected beyond America because Pragmatism has not traveled well. Immigrants are bringing "the shot heard 'round the world" back to us.
"Your example somewhat proves the point: those seeking to escape X obviously aren't OK with the system, so of course we embrace them."
If by "we" you mean the U.S., or "The West", Europe included, we far from embrace migrants from nearly any region. Particularly, as the number of aspiring immigrants sharply increases (as did in Europe around the 2015 migrant crisis), the facade of open-arms-welcome drops and countries will attempt to close their borders.
AFAIK most Chinese citizens do not perceive themselves as victims of tyranny - more likely they are to perceive themselves as proud citizens of a rising country, which has a troubled past. All I'm aware of is the polls showing an overwhelming popular support for the Chinese government. Even if the results were skewed, to deduce the opposite result just due to suspected bias would be an error of colossal magnitude.
Yep, this is about right.
You can't actually make a blanket statement like Caplan is here. The degree to which would-be emigrants from a nondemocratic regime are mostly unhappy dissidents in search of freedoms, and the degree to which they are mostly loyal nationalists of their homeland in search of higher wages, actually differs a LOT from place to place and time to time. As well as from ethnic group to ethnic group within a country (a Sunni Arab Iraqi and a Kurdish Iraqi, for example, might have been expected to exhibit very different levels of loyalty to Saddam's regime).
Today, Chinese immigrants in the West are more likely to fall into the "loyal nationalist" group, Russian immigrants in the "unhappy dissident" (i.e. anti-Putin) group -- though less-so than in the Soviet years, when they notably included many unhappy Russian Jews.
The Chinese regime also makes great use of their diaspora network for espionage purposes, and is quick to label any inquest into their bad behavior as de facto evidence of racism on part of the inquirers. A tactic for which they also use on anybody who criticizes the PRC's bad behavior in any capacity, such as the smears which to this day are used against anyone who claims Covid-19 was man-made, the result of a lab leak, part of bioweapons research, or the PRC deliberately exacerbating the release of Covid from their borders, even though there's strong evidence for all four of these points:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62902808-no-limits
then highlighting the divergence where "our" policy splits those two groups: if "we" are against Bad Chinese Government Policy, but not Chinese citizens, it makes it salient to those citizens how their interests might indeed diverge from their government's. Especially since most citizens' main demand from their government is to protect them from other governments, in order to convince them to support our goals and not their governments, you have to convince them you aren't a threat to them (the citizens). Obviously yes, no doubt many Chinese citizens have other reasons (flawed or not, coerced or not) to support their government, but if another government is perceived to be a threat to * them *, then they will * always * support their government against that other one.
Similar for Russia. I know there are Russians who are against the war. Some I know personally. And they know they are a minority. And I know some of the majority; some among the emigrated, too. - I still agree with Caplan's main take: opening our borders to more of them is the best strategy to change their minds and to weaken their criminal government. With a net profit for us: Even the pro-Putin guys here mostly just work and pay their taxes, not attacking Ukrainian refugees on the street (and 3 to 6 million in Germany have some relatively recent "Russian" background). - Bombing did not change the minds of Germans, Iraqis or Ukranians. As long as Putin and Xi command the guys with the machine-guns, the opinions of their peons do not matter that much - contrary to Harari. Still: I do "have some quarrel" with the bigger part of the Russian people. As with Nobel-laureate Brodsky whose ultra-chauvinistic hate-poem most would nod to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Independence_of_Ukraine#cite_note-7
And if I could read Chinese blogs and/or could collect data of their opinions, I might well have some quarrel with them.
> polls showing an overwhelming popular support for the Chinese government. Even if the results were skewed, to deduce the opposite result just due to suspected bias would be an error of colossal magnitude.
Even IF the pools were skewed....SUSPECTED bias? The fascist Chinese govt murders FAMILIES of opponents. Youre stupid beyond stupid.
Thank you; your assessment of my cognitive faculties is quite impressive.
Even if you did confidently believe that the bias in polls showing massive support for the Chinese government was huge, that does not itself carry with it much if any evidence towards the contrary. You're merely restating your beliefs by explicitly stating you're unwilling to entertain (some) evidence. What evidence would suffice?
You can, of course, assert that no poll on Chinese opinion on their government provides any info whatsoever. Then we'll just have to discard all the results they provide, including for ex the ones showing declining trust towards the govt during the pandemic. I have no clue what purpose such fabricated results would serve for the government, but then again I've always had trouble with doublethink.
The current Chinese govt is led by a group that murdered 34-64 million people. They might occasionally speak truth but one would never know when or why. Economists regard their statistics as political, not science.
Chinese history includes many rebellions and civil wars when political leaders failed on their promises.
That indeed is the gist of the post. However, Caplan quite confidently asserts that the vast majority of Chinese people are victims of tyranny, and insinuates a significant part of that majority would perhaps like to move.
Any and all knowledge we have of what the majority of Chinese citizens actually thinks flies in the face of this idea. It is not at all problematic to speak of majority opinions like this; I doubt many would take issue with me claiming, for example, that the majority of U.S. citizens likely would not want Sharia law to be implemented in their state or county. Saying that does not mean I've stopped judging U.S. citizens as individuals.
The problem still stands that the overwhelming majority of the PRC's overseas dirtyworkers have always been members of the Chinese diaspora. Whenever you get skewed results for groups, you always get accused of racism and persecution no matter how unimpechable your conduct or necessary the operations. The FBI's crackdown on black nationalism was absolutely tarred in popular consciousness, and remains so to this day, even though the likes of the Panthers were genuinely criminal and dangerous, and needed to be stopped to at minimum avoid turning the US into Northern Ireland.
As a Russian citizen myself I definitely agree
Even if you aren’t willing to let quote unquote ordinary people in, you may drastically increase the amount of high quality visas to suck out all Russian/Chinese/Iraqi/etc clever workers or newgrads
It doesn’t cost much to do but your economy will be happy afterwards
That’s, btw, the reason why Armenian economy grew like 12% last year and IT sector in Armenia grew twice in the same period. Ton of Russians employed on their highly selective IT jobs in Russian companies either work remotely from countries that are happy to get some foreign tax money or move their companies to those countries.
And you might as well go crazy with patriotic PR around it too. I get that perhaps Armenia may not want to go all out on crowing about "look at all these smart and talented Russians coming to our obviously better country!" but there's no reason that the US shouldn't. Every case of that is another example of A) why "our" side is better and B) why average citizens in the "other" country should recognize that our enemy is not those average citizens.
I (guess why) personally dislike when governments are using poor people / bad circumstances to seize even more societal virtue credits, but yeah, in that case it seems like it is at least somewhat instrumentally rational to brag about clever people who move to US with the goal being “convincing others to do so as well”
Intstrumental rationality is dependent upon the end. The effective Nazi death camps were irrational.
Sure, I mean it's definitely propaganda, but as a form of inter-state competition, I think it's much better (both in effect and morally) than war, trade wars, saber-rattling or most of the other techniques usually employed.
Well sort of yeah, but I mostly believe that almost all “west” governments are much more concerned about inner stuff, then about some weirdos in some other country
So I don’t really know whether it’s higher or lower on relative propaganda’s ugliness scale than the median
But I guess you should know better :)
oh, you're absolutely correct, for almost all purposes (at least in the US, where I am, but I assume it's true most everywhere) foreign countries only exist for most people as symbols to support their domestic agendas. If an American politician/citizen could do something that improved the effectiveness of our diplomacy or foreign policy, but would lose them support/votes at home, they'd wouldn't even consider it.
>True, most Russians and Chinese are not active dissenters. The vast majority are normal, apolitical people.
No citation is given for this assertion, and it is not necessary to make the general point that they are human beings and should be free to seek better lives. Rooting the argument for immigration on this weakens the case for immigration - especially since there is ample reason to doubt that it is even true.
First, the description of people from vastly different cultures as "normal" is questionable. If the definition of normal is the same as one's frame of reference, why would members of a very different culture be normal?
Second, is being "apolitical" a neutral, reasonable, or desirable trait in the context of extreme behavior? E.g. if a German citizen were ambivalent about the genocide of millions of Jews, or a Soviet citizen ambivalent to Holodomor and gulags, would that be desirable? At what level of severity of government behavior does citizen indifference become a mark against them?
Third, the assertion does not seem to be factually true, at least not as I would, I think reasonably, interpret it.
>If the governments of Russia and China are tyrannical - and they are - a rational observer would remember to ask, “Who do they tyrannize over?” The primary answer is, perforce, their own citizens.
The implication that if the Russian state oppresses Russians, then most Russians must oppose that behavior is unfounded.
Unlike Americans, most Russians don't say that freedom of religion, regular elections, free speech, free media, or free civil society are very important. Out of 34 countries polled, they were the second lowest on freedom of religion, the lowest on regular elections, and the lowest on free civil society (see: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/democratic-rights-popular-globally-but-commitment-to-them-not-always-strong/).
Worse, genocide-adjacent views and rhetoric are actually popular in Russia. Even the anti-Putin so called "liberal" elements in Russia promote (or have promoted in the last few years) imperialism with genocidal overtones, (see e.g. here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin/comment/21812376).
A survey of mostly liberal Russians conducted last year (that was designed using a list questionnaire to measure actual support, not just expressed support of those who are scared to express their true views) found that most of them supported "actions of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine" (see: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2022/04/06/do-russians-tell-the-truth-when-they-say-they-support-the-war-in-ukraine-evidence-from-a-list-experiment/. See also this thread: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1516162480157822976 regarding popular Russian sentiments on Ukraine).
This is certainly not "normal" by Western standards, where most people oppose this.
Dude, we invaded Iraq because some unrelated brown people did 9/11.
We are sanctioning Afghanistan and causing millions to starve to death because they rejected our plan of having pedophile warlords on our pay control the countryside.
Your average American citizen either thinks or thought that was OK because the news told them so.
Do you think everyone that didn't physically oppose the Iraq War should be subject to...what exactly? I doubt even Bryan Caplan would pass that bar.
One day Ukraine may be viewed in much the same Iraq or Vietnam are. I know you think it is impossible, but time has a way of changing things.
The milligram experiment showed that an average western citizen would kill someone simply because an authority asked even when there was no penalty for non-compliance.
"At what level of severity of government behavior does citizen indifference become a mark against them?"
If by "mark against them" you mean "severe punishment imposed on the defeated" count me out. I'm glad we didn't go through with the Morgenthau Plan or its like.
What happens to a defeated power during the war is usually enough of a punishment.
Saddam's commitment to international terrorism, particularly the global jihadi movement, was absolutely a legitimate concern. He was already harboring the bisexual rapist who founded the Islamic State in his borders back in 2002:
https://kyleorton.substack.com/p/zarqawi-profile-to-2004-al-qaeda-jihadism-iraq
Your points on Afghanistan and Vietnam likewise are so wrong they're barely worth engaging with. Ho Chi-Minh was unusually fanatical even by the standards of revolutionary socialists. He was in Russia during the death of Lenin, and as Mark Moyar detailed in his book, stood in line to view his mummified body so long, it gave him frostbite. Nor did our leaving end the Vietnam War. It perpetuated until the enslavement of the South by the North, after which a campaign of State terror every bit the equal of Lenin's was taken against anyone unfortunate enough to stay behind. All we had to do for the South bybthat point was maintain a minimal garrison force like we did for Korea -- and should've done for Afghanistan -- to save hundreds of thousands of lives. But we didn't. And we didn't for entirely political reasons. (Much like we did for Afghanistan.)
Everyone who opposed the Vietnam War was a swine. No more deserving of retrospective lionization than Confederate Lost Causers, who at least had the decency to support a slave state that wasn't as murderous and destructive.
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-milgram-wrong
So he did some follow up studies and while the number of people doing a lethal dose was lower then the first, it was still shockingly high.
"eicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in."
And the other 60% didn't drop out?
"Prior to this work Milgram asked colleagues how many people would give a shock of 300 volts or more, and many said only true psychopaths would do so."
I think is the basic thing we are supposed to take away. The Milligram studies were supposed to show that only a tiny group of psychopaths would "just follow orders". It turned out a pretty significant part of the population would, and that is without much incentive.
Moreover, we just have so so many examples in history. The lesson I take away is that a very large portion of society will do almost anything under the right circumstances, and so its hard to blame people for not taking extremely brave action (that is what we call them brave, they are exceptional).
> we invaded Iraq because some unrelated brown people did 9/11
We responded to 9/11 with the evasion of religion as immoral, with the evasion of American rational individualism as morally superior to primitive tribalism and Dark Ages religion and w/the conservative altruist policy of helping Iraqis get unlimited majority rule govt. 2+ decades later, we still haven't destroyed Iran's nukes or stopped all Islamist Jihad. We evade the need for victory in war.
Most religions aren't organizing international terrorist operations at a level the world hasn't seen since the heydays of revolutionary socialism.
That said, the issue isn't even Islam in that regard, but of the states and organizations that have made, and continue to make, terrorism an instrument of their advancement. There are numerous states which do this to various degrees, but if we cracked down hard on them rather than continuously tried appeasement for the sake of a peace that never comes and never will on account of these regimes and organizations basing their legitimacy on peace never arriving (Assadist Syria, Khomeini'ist Iran, Pakistan and their slave regime in Afghanistan), we would see a strong reduction in the jihadist threat.
Religion is one of the rationalizations of the unfocused mind. But its consistency wildly varies among societies and historical eras. Religion,w/its hatred of mans independent, focused,reasoning mind and with its death-worshipping, life-hating, tranccendentalist morality is a principled attack on man's life and happiness. The fact that this attack is more or less consistent with particular religions and particular historical eras and particular political situtations is irrelevant. Further, even when explicit religion has a small influence, it has, virtually always, retained an implicit influence via its mysticism and selflessness, eg, Nazi racism and Marxist dialectics. You drop the context of Islamic political terrorism as if Islamic groups value some sort of ideologically and morally neutral "advancement." You evade identifying the ideal of that advancement. Only modern, post-Enlightenment US rejects ideals for unprincipled, anti-systematic, short-range Pragmatism. Totalitarian Islam is the explicit goal of Iran, Afghanistan, the Palestinians, and, until recently, perhaps, Saudi Arabia. The US appeases Jihad because it evades the principled destructiveness of religion and multiculturalism. Thus the anti-ideological, willed, morally obligatory stupidity of evading a morally certain denunciation of Islam because its a religion and because all cultures are allegedly morally equal. Part of the cause of the WW2 Allied victory was the global denunciation of the elitist, tryannical ideal of fascism. That ideal was not incidental to fascism but part of its basic ideological cause. Your problem is less an ignorance of these ideas than your ignorance of how to use your mind. Intuition-based associations is how man used his mind before Aristotle discovered sense-based, systematic reasoning,a discovery that became a practical guide w/the 17th century Scientific Rev. Modern subjectivism has reversed this back to intuition-based associations, this time with statistics for a facade of science.
US foreign policy must denounce religion and multiculturalism and advocate rational individualism first before its appeasement can end. Then we can, eg, invade Iran, seize its nuclear weapons and publicly kill, without trial, its religious, political and military leaders.
But a human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not. A human being needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no matter how rudimentary, and, since his consciousness is volitional, a sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values. Who, then, provides Attila [the man of force] with values? The Witch Doctor [the man of faith].
-Ayn Rand
Concrete goals are the product of ideals, even when ideals are explicitly rejected or only implicit. Religion is necessarily destructive, regardless of how consistently its applied. America must denounce religion and multiculturalism and advocate rational individualism as its guide to destroying Jihad. Our allies, enemies and others must know what we will defend and destroy. We need a foreign POLICY, not paniced responses to emergencies that we evaded predicting.
Search for text, audio and video on "Ayn Rand Islam."
Winning The Unwinnable War-Elan Journo
Failing To Confront Islamic Totalitarianism-Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo
I was just chatting with a Chinese woman today, and she explained to me that the government in China is very kind. They give money and medical care to old people. If you don't break the law, you live a good life in China.
I was trying to figure out if we were being bugged or something, because she seemed extremely bright, and it would be more pleasant to think that this is an extreme idea that she has to say, but then she continued.
Woman: in the United States a brother can make love to their sister, and nobody does anything about it. In china, those people would go straight to prison.
Me: Straight to prison, wow
Woman: Yes and we only have one husband and one wife, not like those Indians and Arabs
Me, as neutrally as possible: a happy family is very nice
And in this moment, I discovered that I'm actually a little bit libertarian.
If the US government funded NGOs to promote LGBTQ+ in China and convince Chinese that the CCP was illegitimate because it didn't respect such human rights, would you think that is a good thing (trying to bring new liberties to people oppressed by the CCP) or a bad thing (interfering in another country and raising the CCPs awareness of fifth column meddling in there internal affairs by the west thus increasing hostility).
What we want would be irrelevant. The PRC has the power to make any entity that operates within their borders their bitch, and they use that power enthusiastically. A pro-LGBTQ+ NGO would at best be toothless to the point of worthlessness if they allowed it to operate at all.
I think China has the right to forbid such energy owes from forming or operating within their borders. In terms of it being a good or a bad thing, I think it's generally a bad thing to try to impose things from the outside.
Except by force.
Individuals have rights. Groups have no rights. See: Declaration of Independence. Rights are a moral view of freedom of action in society. Ie, is initiating force moral?
If you're going to try to change someone's values, might often makes right. The USA was very comfortable with this idea for a long time.
You evade free will. Might never makes right. Right is a product of mans focused mind. Force contradicts mind. The attempt to forcibly change values is the product of late 19th century Progressivism and its imperialism. Your Leftist hatred of individual rights, ie, America, is noted. I await your next Leftist rationalization of mans independent,focused, reasoning mind.
Atlas Shrugged-Ayn Rand
Edit: ngos
Foreign policy to promote LBQXYZwhatever rights is bizarrely selective about rights. What happened to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all in all parts of life?
Didn't mention the role of sanctions in US foreign policy, which apparently are supposed to make citizens rise up and overthrow their leaders (which essentially never happens). Sanctions are clearly damaging to folks that "we have no quarrel with".
If you accept it as power politics and the USA punishing a rival or rebel against hegemony, it makes sense. (And other countries do the same thing where they can.)
Except that it doesn't work. And it badly hurts the people "we have no quarrel with".
And, as for the whataboutism: no country comes anywhere near the sheer volume and intensity of US government sanctions. And when other governments sanction the US, it's generally in response to onerous sanctions put on by the US.
I said it made sense, not that it was good. Power politics is eternal. In the Cold War, we were the right-wing, capitalist power, and the USSR was the left-wing, communist power. Now, we are the left-wing, LGBT-friendly power, and Russia is the right-wing, Orthodox Christian power. Our local sympathizers with the other side were on the left then, they are on the right now. Did we switch, and meet somewhere in the middle, or is it just the endless dance of geopolitics as power blocs move for advantage?
Very well stated. I'm not sure it'll convince anybody else, but it's a good start.
That said, as Nutrition Capsule opines: I suspect most Chinese and Russians don't see themselves as victims of tyranny. They've both got very long histories of living with regimes that are far worse than their current regimes and this kind of cultural memory is strong whether individuals see it or not.
Russian culture has been religious nationalism and religious globalism since the Renaissance. At that time, the Rus. Ortho. Church condemned Western Christianity for compromising w/reason.
>Collective guilt is the guiding principle of modern warfare:
Im confused. Did you graduate from high school? Collective guilt is as ancient as man. Your libertarianism is a rationalizationof and guide to the unfocused mind. War is possible only when morally and economically supported by the dominant culture of a nation. As merely one example among a vast historical many, prior to contact w/the West, Comanches were especially feared by other American Indians for their systemic ,total destruction of enemy tribes. And dont forget Romes total destruction of Carthage in which farms were salted to prevent the growing of food. You should limit your thinking to economics.
At the beginning of the Ukraine War I was pretty shocked at the amount of vitriol and retribution was inflicted against anyone with the crime of Russian blood in their veins pretty much regardless of who they were and how they acted. It all seemed worse then what happened during the War on Terror, perhaps because the liberal groups that usually try to stand against that thing friend/enemy sense went off against Russians.
It's certainly reasonable to think that in a just war there will be civilian casualties and that is just part of victory. And I can see using economic sanctions if engaged in a total just war if they can reasonably be expected to impact the war effort. However, one should always keep in mind that economic sanctions tend to impact civilians far worse than militaries. Economic sanctions seem to be our go-to response all the time, even though it probably causes the most destruction.
Bryan, let me ask you some direct questions.
1) Do you support the Ukrainian government's ban on emigration of all adult males?
2) Do you support the Ukrainian practice of conscription?
3) Do you support US AID to Ukraine? Past, present, or future? Is there anything you would change about US AID?
4) What exactly should we be trying accomplish in this whole situation and through what means?
If people are oppressed, do we have an obligation to liberate them from that oppression?
Do we have an obligation to liberate people in the Donbass and Crimea? Do you believe their lives will be less oppressed if we do what it takes to make that happen?
5) Your one writing on this I see is this:
https://betonit.substack.com/p/the-ethics-of-putin
The use of the word appeasement obviously brings to mind Hitler and Munich.
You also state, "Putin is one of the worst on Earth."
It is your believe that we are facing a similar situation to Hitler with Putin?
If we are, should we be prepared to end it in a similar way (total war ending in similar level of destruction for Russia).
6) From the same piece:
"The upshot is that Putin invaded a country with powerful and committed allies, several of them with nuclear weapons. The invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and even Syria were bad for those countries, but they did not plausible endanger the peace of the world. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine does. We’ll probably avoid nuclear war over Ukraine, but it’s hard to believe that the risk hasn’t multiplied tenfold this year."
It kind of sounds like your conclusion is "might makes right". Our invasions of these countries was less bad because they were too weak to oppose us. But if Ukraine didn't have our support it too would be in a similar position. Ukraine has no nuclear weapons. The only chance of this becoming a nuclear conflict is through our involvement. If so, we could solve that problem by not being friends with them. I guess I just don't understand the logic of the piece.
7) Do you favor declaring war over Taiwan if there is an invasion? How do you think such a war should be prosecuted? Should we be preparing for such a war (higher military budget, etc)?
A Russian victory in Ukraine would encourage militant nationalism elsewhere. That would eventually hurt the US. Or are you ignorant of 1938 Munich?
I know enough an about Munich 1938 to know that every single situation across time and space is not a 1:1 repeat of Munich. Even Munich is more complicated then Munich.
I've watched Munich be used to justify every single idiotic foreign adventure America has gotten into for 50 years.
Mindlessly memorizing an arbitrary selection, organization and interpretation of concretes is the brute animal method of survival. This can be easily verified by observing birds, cats, dogs, rabbits,etc. in your neighborhood. Their stupidity requires short-range survival or, as Chamberlain praised it, "peace in our time," in September 30, 1938. Germany, the SU and the Slovak Rep. invaded Poland in Sep 1, 1939. That one-year peace resulted in the most destructive war in history. Man survives by integrating concretes into concepts and inducing concepts into principles. Short-range, pseudo-practicality, ie, Pragmatism, guides post-WW2 America. And Pragmatism rationalizes altruism, the explicit purpose of most of our post-WW2 foreign non-policy. Eg, Johnson morally justified Vietnam as protecting SV voting, even if that resulted in communism.
The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
-Ayn Rand
It’s quite an assumption that Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1938 would've saved the world from WW2; Germany was more prepared for it than Britain and France and Hitler actually kind of expected invading Czechoslovakia to result in war. Hell even after declaring war in ‘39 they still did basically nothing for almost a year. Britain likely benefitted from the extra year of rearming. For all the complaints about Munich and appeasement it probably didn’t increase Germany’s chance of victory.
You evade moral and jntellectual power, ie, a statement of principles that allies and enemies must consider. Contra modern materialist meatheads, man is not a pool ball merely reacting to events. Human action is the product of the mind. Post-Soviet Russia started many wars to regain territory. See Wikipedia. There was no opposition of any kind. Finally, Ukraine.
Stephen Grossman
Writes Stephen’s Substack
5 hrs ago
Mindlessly memorizing an arbitrary selection, organization and interpretation of concretes is the brute animal method of survival. This can be easily verified by observing birds, cats, dogs, rabbits,etc. in your neighborhood. Their stupidity requires short-range survival or, as Chamberlain praised it, "peace in our time," in September 30, 1938. Germany, the SU and the Slovak Rep. invaded Poland in Sep 1, 1939. That one-year peace resulted in the most destructive war in history. Man survives by integrating concretes into concepts and inducing concepts into principles. Short-range, pseudo-practicality, ie, Pragmatism, guides post-WW2 America. And Pragmatism rationalizes altruism, the explicit purpose of most of our post-WW2 foreign non-policy. Eg, Johnson morally justified Vietnam as protecting SV voting, even if that resulted in communism.
=====
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The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
-Ayn Rand
The opportunity to cross borders is a privilege often reserved for a select few who conform to governmental regulations. While some professionals, like Filipino nurses, enjoy more fluid mobility, many others face significant barriers. The system appears to work smoothly for those within governmental circles, but remains a challenge for the broader population.
>> “If the governments of Russia and China are tyrannical - and they are”
Being one of the main founding points in this stack - may I ask what’s a basis to say this?
Aside of personal bias/propaganda and en masse cognitive distortion installed with smth like “we are the most democratic country with the most developed human values and going to show other non democratic country (we decide who is that) how it should be”
https://hal.science/hal-03635889/document
People like fake simplicity, where they dont have to think about the complexity of the world
Its way easier for most people to categorize every country as corrolary with its people
The alternative solution is individualism funnily enough, where instead if thinking about every nationality as its own people, you think about humans as its own categoy, and judging every human on its own
The pressure campaigns to get companies to stop selling groceries, medicine, cars, and beer in Russia are pretty strong evidence of the west not giving a shit about Russian civilians.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/business/russia-companies-exit.html
Not a huge fan of open borders...mass immigration is a big part of what's driving the fascist/right-populist (depending on your degree of concern) revival in Europe and America. Like it or not, people are irrational monkeys with big brains and like to be around people like them, whether it's skin color, language, religion, or culture (and if one of these are the same the other steps in to make problems--look at the Thirty Years War, the Dominican Republic vs Haiti, religious killings in India...forget where do I start, where do I *stop*?). Heck, look at the way division by skin color prevented the American working class from demanding the rights their counterparts had in much of Europe.
I doubt that most people truly believe the 'we have no quarrel with you' rhetoric. Others have made this point already, but some see Russians and Chinese as basically complicit in the crimes of their government; most of them at least to some extent support their governments and their actions. The rhetoric is purely propagandistic in nature. The US used the same rhetoric in WW2 with the propaganda it distributed in Germany even though, as is clear in retrospective interpretations of the third reich, most people definitely believed the quarrel was with the German people, who were understood to be collectively to blame, not merely their government. So I think this rhetoric is only really used cynically to try to foment dissent or apathy among the general public of the enemy country.
When it comes to foreign countries most people are instinctively very collectivist. The rare use of individualist rhetoric in foreign affairs is (unfortunately) usually cynical.
The issue with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is that, with the caveat that genuinely accurate polling did not and could not exist, the evidence still points to the majority of the populations of both countries supporting their governments and the actions of said governments. And not out of ignorance of the worst actions. Many of the atrocities were well known and had a high degree of popular support. Including the Holocaust itself. (The Speerian claim of mass ignorance of the Final Solution was always a lie, and anyone who pretends otherwise is either a buffoon or a fraud.)
Nor every tyrranical or dangerous regime in history is reviled by the populous. It would be wonderful if that were the case. But it's not. And it's usually a spectrum of some sort. The Bolsheviks were far more detested by their populous than the NSDAP, but the Bolshies were still able to find willing agents among émigrés and the diaspora, such as the Palmer Raid deportees and Armand Hammer.
This doesn’t really contradict my point. Something like 40% of civilians were children, inarguably innocent (probably a lot lower % today but still relevant), and the general attitude was still ‘reap what you sow’ even for babies in cribs. As educated a man as Thomas Mann explicitly defended collective guilt as a justification for violent reprisals *after the war was over* even against German children.
So I’m sticking with my explanation that people are just instinctively collectivists when dealing with foreign countries.
Given the prevalence of child soldiers and child conscription in the Axis, and the degree to which their brainwashing programs for child soldiers, child conscripts, and child civilians generally both inculcated and exacerbated genuinely wicked beliefs and actions, what the fuck does "innocent" even mean by that point?
It's still one thing to make the case that there should be ages of bearing criminal responsibility, but there's nothing innocent about a child soldier who leads a suicide charge to stop International Jewry from conquering the Reich. The soul has to be thoroughly corrupted before you get to that point.
That said, you're certainly right that guilt or innocence has nothing to do with the genuine emotions that war brings out. We murdered a horrifying amount of civilians during WWII, including women and many children too young to even be child soldiers, on both fronts, and all without any serious protest from the homeland.
We had to. We had no choice but to win, and the only shame is that we stopped halfway and didn't storm on Moscow the moment Berlin fell and shoot as many Bolshies as it took to drive a stake through the heart of revolutionary socialism. But it's still genuinely disturbing how easily people get used to mass violence, regardless of its necessity.
"the 1991 invasion of Iraq" ? Famously the US stopped at the Iraqi border. And I think this is more than a quibble. If your thesis was that the US had a quarrel with the Iraqi people, you'd have a hard time explaining that. (Similarly, if your thesis was the US had a quarrel with the people of the Soviet Union, shouldn't you predict that it would continue to have said quarrel when the USSR fell apart?)
High immigration barriers are pretty unimpressive evidence going the other way: both the govt and most voters treat mostly-closed borders as the default. It's a shame that's what 0 concern looks like, but that is in fact what it looks like.
To all the Russian and Chinese spies reading this: I have no quarrel with either you or your people.
I think it is perfectly ok to imply some culpability in the average citizens, sure they voted for Putin or donated to the war cause. But I think when you are crafting your foreign policy, it really is important to have proportionate responses to each level of the other country. (Either for Russia today, or Germany/Japan in 1946)
Tyrannical leaders, war-crimes committing soldiers: sure, full responsibility, shoot on sight
Regular soldiers: shoot in combat, treat as culpable until hostilities are over, treat well as POWs
Regular pro-war citizens: disagreement with their views, but after the war, they aren't going to get punished outside of perhaps being removed from positions of power
Anti-war citizens who escape and denounce their country's crimes: treat as heroes
Random citizens you don't know their opinion: why target them? You want them on your side eventually.
The point isn't to perfectly assign blame, it's to prevent bad stuff in the future! If you are fighting country X, you want to avoid that problem in the future. Best ways to do that: convince the citizens of X that your ideals are better, and working peacefully with you is better than fighting you. Minimizing the perceived or real idea that the citizens of X are your enemy is a good tactic for that.
This might also be a good framework for your domestic enemies as well.
> Best ways to do [prevent war]: convince the citizens of X that your ideals are better.
ABSOLUTELY!!!!! But the philosophy of Pragmatism, which has dominated American culture since the early 20th century, rejects ideals for short-range trivia, like a drunk who has one more for the road. America's founding ideal of Enlightenment, rational individualism seems more respected beyond America because Pragmatism has not traveled well. Immigrants are bringing "the shot heard 'round the world" back to us.
"Your example somewhat proves the point: those seeking to escape X obviously aren't OK with the system, so of course we embrace them."
If by "we" you mean the U.S., or "The West", Europe included, we far from embrace migrants from nearly any region. Particularly, as the number of aspiring immigrants sharply increases (as did in Europe around the 2015 migrant crisis), the facade of open-arms-welcome drops and countries will attempt to close their borders.