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Issues due to the size of polities

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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by runsforcelery   » Tue Jun 17, 2014 11:44 pm

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Direwolf18 wrote:
DrakBibliophile wrote:I suspect that major difference between Manticore's efforts and the US's efforts is that Manticore's government is better set up for a very long term effort.

IMO a ruling monarch (like Queen Elizabeth) doesn't face re-election and can focus on things other than the "next election".

An elected President can start a long-term project only to see the next President just discard the project.

A Manticorian Monarch can exert his/her considerable influence to keep such a project going even in the face of a change in government.



Good case in point is the US Space program. We get a president who supports it, gives them the funding to do something, and next thing you know the new guy guts NASA to the bone, or in some cases starts amputating said bones altogether.


The biggest differences are two in number:

(1) Manticore went into Masada in the reconstruction phase, not in the conquest phase. A huge part of the Bush Administration's problems (and missteps) in Iraq stemmed (IMO; I'm not trying to start any flame wars here) from the same sorts of over-optimistic assumptions and lack of clear, analytical thinking which characterized the initial Allied (and especially US) attitude towards de-Nazifying Germany after WW II. The nasty Nazis had hijacked and brainwashed the German people. Once the German people had been forced to confront the truth about the Nazis, their war crimes, and the Holocaust, the German nation would be well-behaved once more and well on the path to recovery. As part of the process, obviously anyone who had ever been a member of the Nazi Party must be banned from political office and purged from the (rebuilt) German police and military organizations. This, however, overlooked the centrality of some of those one-time members of the Nazi party to their national and local economies and societies, and it was just a tad difficult to rebuild a military and/or police force from which anyone who’d ever had any affiliation with the Nazi Party was unacceptable for military service. I’m not arguing that retaining ardent, unreconstructed Nazis in such positions would have been a good idea; I’m simply pointing out that this view of things grossly oversimplified exactly what membership in the party had meant, how some people had gotten there, and the extent to which people who’d lonce been members of the party could become something else. It also overlooked the pragmatic consideration that making bricks requires straw. That is, that one cannot always have what one wants to have and that the secret to accomplishing one’s goals depends on making the best — and most realistic — use of what one actually does have.

In the case of Germany, a little thing called the Cold War supervened and policies changed quickly in Western Germany which, coupled with the Marshall Plan led to the "German Miracle" which rebuilt West Germany's economy. The problem wasn't with the Allies' intentions in Germany's case, or with their post-war objectives (at least until the Cold War came along and they realized Uncle Joe was just as cynical a practitioner of real politik as Churchill had warned everyone he was) so much as it was a misunderstanding of the political and economic terrain and a failure to think through their post-war plans as thoroughly as they had threshed out their plans for actually fighting the war.

In Iraq's case, the Administration made the huge error of concentrating a hell of a lot more thought on how to defeat Saddam than it did on carefully — and realistically --- analyzing the political, economic, and social structure of Iraq and planning just as carefully on how to replace Saddam with a reasonably stable regime. The notion of disbanding Saddam's military without creating a new one or giving thousands of young men whose only skills were with weapons different employment was . . . not optimal, shall we say? The enormous underestimation of the bitterness of Sunni-Shiite hostility and that the teeny problem that the guys who planned the war didn't take into account little things like the fact that Iraq was an essentially socialist economy with the government as the primary employer (which meant that if you were going to overthrow that government you had to figure out a way to keep the economy running instead of relying on "unleashing capitalism) provided plenty more of the same sort of forehead-smacking, "D'oh!" sorts of moments. And it was unconscionable that it took so long for people to start figuring out what they'd gotten wrong and begin getting at least some of it right. That doesn't mean that it couldn't have been gotten right from the beginning, however, in which case I suspect the results would have been very different. If nothing else, the US public's war weariness probably wouldn't have kicked in anywhere near so soon if there'd been a public perception that the Administration had a reasonable (or at least clear) policy towards rebuilding Iraq and was pursuing it steadily.

Manticore started, in Masada's case, with the military conquest of the system and planet as the response to aggression by the existing system government. It hadn't had any reason to expect it was going to need a "Masada policy" prior to that event. Instead, it found itself with a sudden, unexpectedly acquired military and moral responsibility it couldn't (and wouldn't) walk away from by simply declaring victory and going home. Because of that, it consulted very carefully with Grayson in order to gain insight into and as much indepth understanding of and insight into Masada (and conducted its own analysis of Masada based on firsthand observation) before formulating its post-conquest policy. In addition, the SKM’s policy goals were very clearly enunciated from the outset, as was the SKM’s willingness to be flexible in its means for achieving those goals. That is, the policy’s strategy was very clear, the policy’s pragmatic constraints and opportunities were as carefully analyzed as possible, and the policy’s tactics were subject to continual critical evaluation and modification in light of actual results and newly observed/detected/created realities on the ground.

Which brings me to ---

(2) Continuity of policy. One may take whatever position one wants on whether or not the Iraq War was a good idea to begin with and also on how well the post-military phase was conducted by the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, policies, whether good or bad, have consequences and create the starting point for any new policy. A hallmark of US policy over the years has been that administrations frequently ignore the fact that even policies against which the newly elected president campaigned bitterly and with honest outrage are still the starting point for where his own policies begin and that anything constructive he intends to accomplish has to springboard from that starting point. This has accounted for many a whiplash moment in US policies, domestic and foreign alike, and I would argue that the result has very often been far, far worse than might have been accomplished by a more gradual modification of the existing policy, even if it was a bad one to begin with.

This is not, of course, unique to the US experience, but one advantage of hereditary forms of government (I am sometimes tempted to say the only advantage) is that there is far less pressure for the "new broom" to "sweep clean." Policy discontinuities can still be wrenching (as an historic example the shifts following Henry VIII's death between Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth), but I think there's been a somewhat better chance historically of continuity. The huge differences in Manticore's case (as opposed to the US in Iraq) is that (a) the monarch has a greater degree of constitutionally protected control over government policies, both foreign and domestic; (b) the SKM's system is hereditary and the monarch cannot be simply voted out of office, (c) that both Elizabeth and Roger are prolong recipients, and (d) that the entire Masada situation emerged from a lengthy Cold War just as it started to turn hot.

As a result of (d), the situation vis-à-vis Grayson and Masada is much closer in American experience (and attitudes) to the situation vis-à-vis North and South Korea than to the war in Iraq. That is, Manticore is making a substantial but not enormous investment of manpower and economic and military resources in stabilizing (or helping to stabilize) a relationship of huge importance to a local regional ally, although in this case Grayson is actually a lot more akin in importance to Manticore to Western Europe's importance to the US rather than South Korea's.

As a result of (a), the monarchy's commitment to staying the course in Masada's case is vitally important. If the monarch says the SKM is staying, then the SKM is by God staying, whoever the hell gets elected PM, or there will be hell to pay and no pitch hot domestically.

As a result of (b) and (c), the monarch doesn't have to worry about being voted out of office, which is a huge boon to maintaining continuity of policy at the national level, and the same person is likely to be monarch for well over a century, which is an even greater boon to continuity. And one of the implications of this which is equally important, in my view, is that virtually all of the fanatics who are likely to prove truly intractable are not prolong recipients. If you assume that Elizabeth is 45 at the time (I think she's actually a little younger than that) and that she will live to be 250 T-years old, she has another 210 years on the throne, barring accident or abdication. If you assume that the average Masadan reactionary was also 45 at the same time (the real hardcore reactionaries were even older) and that in the absences of prolong they will live to be no more than 110, then they have only 65 years left before they're all dead, and they will begin becoming increasingly irrelevant within 20-30 years. That gives Manticore a huge advantage in successfully restructuring the planet as long as nothing happens to change the monarchy's policy objectives in the interim.


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by kzt   » Wed Jun 18, 2014 1:36 am

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So is it a reasonable comparison to how the average SL citizens thinks about OFS and the verge is how the average western taxpayer thinks about UN peacekeepers? I'm fairly sure that not many Germans or Americans get kept up at night thinking about the (taxpayer supported) peacekeeper child sex/rape scandals that seem to reoccur with monotonous regularity, so my guess is that about as many SL citizens worry about how OFS works.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by KNick   » Wed Jun 18, 2014 1:50 am

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A point to consider with respect to the Maya Sector. Adm. Roczak started planning and building toward something like this situation somewhere between 40 and 80 years ago. We have no idea when he originally started thinking about it, but it was somewhere near the start of his career. He saw the cracks in the SL that long ago and realized the implications for the future. Finding Gov. Barregos was simply the icing on the cake.
_


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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by namelessfly   » Wed Jun 18, 2014 10:39 am

namelessfly

Bravo RFC for a response that should not provoke flamewar.

I was not trying to provoke a flamewar either, BTW.

While acknowledging that Bush, Cheney and Rummsfield made some erroneous assumptions about how eagerly the Iraqis would embrace democracy, freedom and religious tolerance, they were frustrated by alleged allies in their attempts to things right. Given the intransigent imbecility of people such as Highridge and Janacek, I would expect that Manticore would have experienced similar sabotage of the Queen's policies.

Consider the major criticisms of Bush:

Not enough boots on the ground, especially for the invasion.
The original battle plan called for the 3rd Infantry Division to come in from the North through Turkey. The increasingly Islamist government of Turkey first granted permission, then demanded $100 billion in aid, then denied permission. As a result, Bush's choices were delay/cancel the invasion or go in with essentially only three Divisions from the South. The performance of US troops in the major battles was superb. Each of our two heavy divisions were simultaneously engaging and defeating two Iraqi divisions, repeatedly which is astonishing. However; without more troops and no heavy Division coming in from the North to pin them down, we had to allow them to melt away rather than force them to formally surrender.
Think about how the American Civil War might have degenerated into an insurgency if General Robert E Lee had not formally surrendered at Apomatix. Lee's troops could have made the South just as ungovernable as Iraq was if they had retreated to the Apalacjian and Ozark mountains to wage a guerilla war. As it was, the North did a wonderful job of alienating the South during reconstruction and it probably would have turned to feces if Southerners had not had the option of moving West.

Bush actually attempted to provide economic support to temporarily replace government employment. It was called the Iraq Reconstruction Fund. Senator Highridge, I mean Edward Kennedy, first tried to block the reconstruction fund then succeeded in inserting an amendment that imposed peace time procurement rules. By the time Bush could get money flowing into the Iraqi economy, the insurgency was at full intensity. Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army was motivated by the fact that the troops were a bunch of useless thugs who would just prolong the animosities and Bremer desperately needed the money to try to get Iraq's oil production back on line so he would have more money to pacify the population.

I always thought that civilizing Afghanistan was even more improbable than Iraq. If Bush had been willing to impose a Constitution that would accommodate the historical precedents of extreme federalism and a centralized government that would have an upper house of tribal leaders as well as a lower house of popularly elected representatives, it might have worked.

I cited the historical examples of Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate how daunting the task of civilizing Masada and Silesia could be. Bush was using more subtle tactics to implement his strategy of modernizing the Muslim world. The precipitous drop in birth rates in the Muslim countries since 9-11 is the direct result of aggressive support for education, particularly of young girls. Women who can read are less eager to devote their lives to pumping out baby jihadists. I see this type of "SOFT POWER" tactic working well in Silesia but not in Masada. Perhaps the ability to do KE strikes from orbit dramatically enhances the effectiveness of occupation forces. However; it is difficult to imagine Manticore and Grayson being able to deploy enough troops to compel Masadan men to relinquish control of their women unless they were willing to castrate all of the adult and adolescent men. (I have implemented this technique on numerous occasions to transform vicious bulls into docile steers. The effect is almost instantaneous)





runsforcelery wrote:


The biggest differences are two in number:

(1) Manticore went into Masada in the reconstruction phase, not in the conquest phase. A huge part of the Bush Administration's problems (and missteps) in Iraq stemmed (IMO; I'm not trying to start any flame wars here) from the same sorts of over-optimistic assumptions and lack of clear, analytical thinking which characterized the initial Allied (and especially US) attitude towards de-Nazifying Germany after WW II. The nasty Nazis had hijacked and brainwashed the German people. Once the German people had been forced to confront the truth about the Nazis, their war crimes, and the Holocaust, the German nation would be well-behaved once more and well on the path to recovery. As part of the process, obviously anyone who had ever been a member of the Nazi Party must be banned from political office and purged from the (rebuilt) German police and military organizations. This, however, overlooked the centrality of some of those one-time members of the Nazi party to their national and local economies and societies, and it was just a tad difficult to rebuild a military and/or police force from which anyone who’d ever had any affiliation with the Nazi Party was unacceptable for military service. I’m not arguing that retaining ardent, unreconstructed Nazis in such positions would have been a good idea; I’m simply pointing out that this view of things grossly oversimplified exactly what membership in the party had meant, how some people had gotten there, and the extent to which people who’d lonce been members of the party could become something else. It also overlooked the pragmatic consideration that making bricks requires straw. That is, that one cannot always have what one wants to have and that the secret to accomplishing one’s goals depends on making the best — and most realistic — use of what one actually does have.

In the case of Germany, a little thing called the Cold War supervened and policies changed quickly in Western Germany which, coupled with the Marshall Plan led to the "German Miracle" which rebuilt West Germany's economy. The problem wasn't with the Allies' intentions in Germany's case, or with their post-war objectives (at least until the Cold War came along and they realized Uncle Joe was just as cynical a practitioner of real politik as Churchill had warned everyone he was) so much as it was a misunderstanding of the political and economic terrain and a failure to think through their post-war plans as thoroughly as they had threshed out their plans for actually fighting the war.

In Iraq's case, the Administration made the huge error of concentrating a hell of a lot more thought on how to defeat Saddam than it did on carefully — and realistically --- analyzing the political, economic, and social structure of Iraq and planning just as carefully on how to replace Saddam with a reasonably stable regime. The notion of disbanding Saddam's military without creating a new one or giving thousands of young men whose only skills were with weapons different employment was . . . not optimal, shall we say? The enormous underestimation of the bitterness of Sunni-Shiite hostility and that the teeny problem that the guys who planned the war didn't take into account little things like the fact that Iraq was an essentially socialist economy with the government as the primary employer (which meant that if you were going to overthrow that government you had to figure out a way to keep the economy running instead of relying on "unleashing capitalism) provided plenty more of the same sort of forehead-smacking, "D'oh!" sorts of moments. And it was unconscionable that it took so long for people to start figuring out what they'd gotten wrong and begin getting at least some of it right. That doesn't mean that it couldn't have been gotten right from the beginning, however, in which case I suspect the results would have been very different. If nothing else, the US public's war weariness probably wouldn't have kicked in anywhere near so soon if there'd been a public perception that the Administration had a reasonable (or at least clear) policy towards rebuilding Iraq and was pursuing it steadily.

Manticore started, in Masada's case, with the military conquest of the system and planet as the response to aggression by the existing system government. It hadn't had any reason to expect it was going to need a "Masada policy" prior to that event. Instead, it found itself with a sudden, unexpectedly acquired military and moral responsibility it couldn't (and wouldn't) walk away from by simply declaring victory and going home. Because of that, it consulted very carefully with Grayson in order to gain insight into and as much indepth understanding of and insight into Masada (and conducted its own analysis of Masada based on firsthand observation) before formulating its post-conquest policy. In addition, the SKM’s policy goals were very clearly enunciated from the outset, as was the SKM’s willingness to be flexible in its means for achieving those goals. That is, the policy’s strategy was very clear, the policy’s pragmatic constraints and opportunities were as carefully analyzed as possible, and the policy’s tactics were subject to continual critical evaluation and modification in light of actual results and newly observed/detected/created realities on the ground.

Which brings me to ---

(2) Continuity of policy. One may take whatever position one wants on whether or not the Iraq War was a good idea to begin with and also on how well the post-military phase was conducted by the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, policies, whether good or bad, have consequences and create the starting point for any new policy. A hallmark of US policy over the years has been that administrations frequently ignore the fact that even policies against which the newly elected president campaigned bitterly and with honest outrage are still the starting point for where his own policies begin and that anything constructive he intends to accomplish has to springboard from that starting point. This has accounted for many a whiplash moment in US policies, domestic and foreign alike, and I would argue that the result has very often been far, far worse than might have been accomplished by a more gradual modification of the existing policy, even if it was a bad one to begin with.

This is not, of course, unique to the US experience, but one advantage of hereditary forms of government (I am sometimes tempted to say the only advantage) is that there is far less pressure for the "new broom" to "sweep clean." Policy discontinuities can still be wrenching (as an historic example the shifts following Henry VIII's death between Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth), but I think there's been a somewhat better chance historically of continuity. The huge differences in Manticore's case (as opposed to the US in Iraq) is that (a) the monarch has a greater degree of constitutionally protected control over government policies, both foreign and domestic; (b) the SKM's system is hereditary and the monarch cannot be simply voted out of office, (c) that both Elizabeth and Roger are prolong recipients, and (d) that the entire Masada situation emerged from a lengthy Cold War just as it started to turn hot.

As a result of (d), the situation vis-à-vis Grayson and Masada is much closer in American experience (and attitudes) to the situation vis-à-vis North and South Korea than to the war in Iraq. That is, Manticore is making a substantial but not enormous investment of manpower and economic and military resources in stabilizing (or helping to stabilize) a relationship of huge importance to a local regional ally, although in this case Grayson is actually a lot more akin in importance to Manticore to Western Europe's importance to the US rather than South Korea's.

As a result of (a), the monarchy's commitment to staying the course in Masada's case is vitally important. If the monarch says the SKM is staying, then the SKM is by God staying, whoever the hell gets elected PM, or there will be hell to pay and no pitch hot domestically.

As a result of (b) and (c), the monarch doesn't have to worry about being voted out of office, which is a huge boon to maintaining continuity of policy at the national level, and the same person is likely to be monarch for well over a century, which is an even greater boon to continuity. And one of the implications of this which is equally important, in my view, is that virtually all of the fanatics who are likely to prove truly intractable are not prolong recipients. If you assume that Elizabeth is 45 at the time (I think she's actually a little younger than that) and that she will live to be 250 T-years old, she has another 210 years on the throne, barring accident or abdication. If you assume that the average Masadan reactionary was also 45 at the same time (the real hardcore reactionaries were even older) and that in the absences of prolong they will live to be no more than 110, then they have only 65 years left before they're all dead, and they will begin becoming increasingly irrelevant within 20-30 years. That gives Manticore a huge advantage in successfully restructuring the planet as long as nothing happens to change the monarchy's policy objectives in the interim.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by HungryKing   » Wed Jun 18, 2014 10:08 pm

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I've always seen traces of cuba post the spanish american war. Do you know why we did not annex Cuba? Certain parties, including some of our senators, as I recall, deemed it better that Cuba not be under US jurisdiction, but at the same time subject to our governance. During a closed door meeting with those who stood to gain from such an arangement. Don't you love client states. BTW, the part about the meeting is not a guess.

kzt wrote:So is it a reasonable comparison to how the average SL citizens thinks about OFS and the verge is how the average western taxpayer thinks about UN peacekeepers? I'm fairly sure that not many Germans or Americans get kept up at night thinking about the (taxpayer supported) peacekeeper child sex/rape scandals that seem to reoccur with monotonous regularity, so my guess is that about as many SL citizens worry about how OFS works.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by hanuman   » Thu Jun 19, 2014 3:03 am

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dreamrider wrote:Plenty of other historical examples of nation-building are available. Both disasters and successes.

dreamrider


Hey, I'm a South African and let me tell you, Apartheid itself was probably one of the most successful such projects ever devised and executed.

The caveat being off course that its originators and executors came from within the Afrikaner ranks themselves, and its 'target market' was the Afrikaner people. I suppose a better label would be 'affirmative action' rather than 'nation building', although in a sense there isn't all that much difference between the two.

The historical context is important, off course. After the Anglo-Boer War large numbers of Afrikaners migrated to the cities, because during the War the British had followed a scorched earth policy wrt Afrikaner farms (and many of the smaller rural towns as well). What compensation the British Crown offered AFTER the war was completely inadequate to rebuild all of the destroyed rural infrastructure, which meant that of a surviving Afrikaner population of about 450 000 (about 90% of whom had lived on farms and in small villages before the war), about 60-70% were forced to move to the cities.

There they found themselves competing for jobs not only with the Anglo-Africans but also with a huge influx of black workers, who had also been displaced by the war, AND for the most part with no skills that were suitable to the jobs available in the cities. And since it was quite acceptable at the time to pay black workers less than white workers, the Anglo-African magnates who controlled the urban economy (mining, finance, manufacturing, commerce etc) tended to prefer hiring black workers rather than the incoming Afrikaners.

Thus, by the time the Great Depression struck, the urban Afrikaner population was in dire straits indeed. I'm sure you've all seen the squatter camps that can be found in every African city throughout the continent, if only on television. Well, those were the conditions under which the Afrikaners lived then, and which gave rise to the Afrikaner nationalist movement.

And the leaders of that movement realized that, if only they could garner enough outrage among Afrikaners, they could easily win any challenge at the ballot box. That was because, despite the more than 50 000 Afrikaners who had died during the Boer War, they still constituted 60% plus of the electorate. So they played on Afrikaners' bitterness towards the Empire, and on the white working class' (both Afrikaner and Anglo-African) anger about the magnates' preferential hiring policies towards black workers, to start winning elections - on a platform that promised to exclude blacks from the cities, reserve certain jobs for whites only, and higher wages for whites doing the same jobs as blacks (and to appease their Afrikaner base, a promise to eventually establish a republican form of government for the country).

And the rest, as they say, was history. Apartheid didn't work out very well for black South Africans, and in fact became one of the most evil and brutal ideologies ever devised by mankind, but it certainly succeeded in its stated purpose, which was to 'uplift' the Afrikaners.

Just wanted to give an example of a 'successful' nation-building project, and got carried away as usually happens when I put on my historian's hat. Hope to be forgiven.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by namelessfly   » Thu Jun 19, 2014 11:49 am

namelessfly

This is certainly an excellent illustration of why "Nation Building" is complicated by the competing interests and legitimate grievances of the various people groups involved. We presume that planets in the Honorverse are all homogenuous, but they are not. Even Grayson which was settled by a very exclusive sect had a nasty civil war. Coping with these ethnic and sectarian tensions will complicate the expansion of the SEM.


hanuman wrote:
dreamrider wrote:Plenty of other historical examples of nation-building are available. Both disasters and successes.

dreamrider


Hey, I'm a South African and let me tell you, Apartheid itself was probably one of the most successful such projects ever devised and executed.

The caveat being off course that its originators and executors came from within the Afrikaner ranks themselves, and its 'target market' was the Afrikaner people. I suppose a better label would be 'affirmative action' rather than 'nation building', although in a sense there isn't all that much difference between the two.

The historical context is important, off course. After the Anglo-Boer War large numbers of Afrikaners migrated to the cities, because during the War the British had followed a scorched earth policy wrt Afrikaner farms (and many of the smaller rural towns as well). What compensation the British Crown offered AFTER the war was completely inadequate to rebuild all of the destroyed rural infrastructure, which meant that of a surviving Afrikaner population of about 450 000 (about 90% of whom had lived on farms and in small villages before the war), about 60-70% were forced to move to the cities.

There they found themselves competing for jobs not only with the Anglo-Africans but also with a huge influx of black workers, who had also been displaced by the war, AND for the most part with no skills that were suitable to the jobs available in the cities. And since it was quite acceptable at the time to pay black workers less than white workers, the Anglo-African magnates who controlled the urban economy (mining, finance, manufacturing, commerce etc) tended to prefer hiring black workers rather than the incoming Afrikaners.

Thus, by the time the Great Depression struck, the urban Afrikaner population was in dire straits indeed. I'm sure you've all seen the squatter camps that can be found in every African city throughout the continent, if only on television. Well, those were the conditions under which the Afrikaners lived then, and which gave rise to the Afrikaner nationalist movement.

And the leaders of that movement realized that, if only they could garner enough outrage among Afrikaners, they could easily win any challenge at the ballot box. That was because, despite the more than 50 000 Afrikaners who had died during the Boer War, they still constituted 60% plus of the electorate. So they played on Afrikaners' bitterness towards the Empire, and on the white working class' (both Afrikaner and Anglo-African) anger about the magnates' preferential hiring policies towards black workers, to start winning elections - on a platform that promised to exclude blacks from the cities, reserve certain jobs for whites only, and higher wages for whites doing the same jobs as blacks (and to appease their Afrikaner base, a promise to eventually establish a republican form of government for the country).

And the rest, as they say, was history. Apartheid didn't work out very well for black South Africans, and in fact became one of the most evil and brutal ideologies ever devised by mankind, but it certainly succeeded in its stated purpose, which was to 'uplift' the Afrikaners.

Just wanted to give an example of a 'successful' nation-building project, and got carried away as usually happens when I put on my historian's hat. Hope to be forgiven.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by Commodore Oakius   » Thu Jun 19, 2014 12:29 pm

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Also, look at Germany post WWI. It was in terrible straights in all ways, no military to speak of, desitute from the reperation it was forced to pay, broken national spirit... Then out of the mists comes one of the most charsimatic men in history, Hitler. He inspired his entire nation to overcome some of the greatest trouble that every plagued them, up til then.
Unforunatley he turned out to be quite deranged as will, with his aryan supriorty belief.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by hanuman   » Thu Jun 19, 2014 1:04 pm

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Commodore Oakius wrote:Also, look at Germany post WWI. It was in terrible straights in all ways, no military to speak of, desitute from the reperation it was forced to pay, broken national spirit... Then out of the mists comes one of the most charsimatic men in history, Hitler. He inspired his entire nation to overcome some of the greatest trouble that every plagued them, up til then.
Unforunatley he turned out to be quite deranged as will, with his aryan supriorty belief.


The truth is that, whenever people (in both senses of the word, as individuals or a collective) suffer severe difficulties, they're going to look for someone to blame. And when we talk about 'a people' (the collective sense of the word), their scapegoat is almost always going to be some class of people who are different from themselves and are perceived as being a threat to themselves.

That was certainly the case in Germany post-WWI, wrt German attitudes towards and persecution of Jews, but that was complicated by the very long history of anti-Semitism in the German lands.

The same was (and still is, to some extent) true of race relations in South Africa. Too many people accept as true fact the oversimplified premise that ALL Afrikaners were white supremacists and that Apartheid was something entirely of Afrikaner making. That couldn't be further from the truth.

A careful comparative study of South African history will quickly reveal that many of the elements of Apartheid were based on pre-existing policies that had been introduced by the British colonial authorities in the Cape and Natal colonies - one example is the concept of ethnic 'homelands'. The first 'native reservations' were established in the 1850s already, by Governor Sir Shepstone of the Natal Colony. Another was the concept of separate facilities for each race, which was first introduced in the Cape Colony back in the 1870s.

Moreover, those British policies were the logical outcome of the Social Darwinist thinking that was prevalent in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, and which, ironically, originated among German philosophers.

So, Apartheid itself took those policies much further, but was in essence simply a continuation and further 'logical' development of British segregationist policies. Only, the word 'apartheid' (which itself means 'segregationism') has a nice ring to it, and it comes from another language than English, so easier to condemn (because the fact that its language of origin was NOT English obviously means that the English-speaking consumers of mass media couldn't possibly be culpable in any way whatsoever).

I'm afraid that's the way human nature works. But the point being, what we do is influenced by who we are (including how we think), and in turn who we are is determined by where we come from (i.e. our history).

PS and btw, I know this is off-topic, but since I've already wrote the two posts, I should include this qualification. At no point was it my intention to 'de-blame' the Afrikaner people. Just because some of the major elements of Apartheid were derived from pre-existing policies and practices, does not take away from the fact that it were our leaders who bound them all together into a comprehensive whole. Nor does it mean that our 18th and 19th century ancestors weren't extremely racist in their thinking. They were.
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Re: Issues due to the size of polities
Post by kzt   » Thu Jun 19, 2014 1:08 pm

kzt
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Commodore Oakius wrote:Also, look at Germany post WWI. It was in terrible straights in all ways, no military to speak of, desitute from the reperation it was forced to pay, broken national spirit... Then out of the mists comes one of the most charsimatic men in history, Hitler. He inspired his entire nation to overcome some of the greatest trouble that every plagued them, up til then.
Unforunatley he turned out to be quite deranged as will, with his aryan supriorty belief.

If he had died in July 1939 he'd have been ranked with Bismark. Dies in July 1940 he'd be ranked with Fredrick the Great.
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