I am pretty bad with these puns. But this one might just be SSC-worthy.
One of my goals for the rest of Anti-Bolshevik Month is to write a comprehensive alternate history in which the Russian Republic survives WW1.
Randall Parker’s question on Twitter: “Imagine a time traveler goes back to 1913 and kill Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Gavrilo Princip and a few others. How does 20th century play out?”
Gave me a convenient opportunity to sketch out the basics: “If you study the details, success of both October Revolution & Nazi ascent were almost freak occurrences. Moreover, latter depended on the former. Very unlikely to repeat. There might not have been a WW1, and not just Pinkerian reasons, but Realpolitik ones. Russian power was rapidly converging to German, making two front war increasingly untenable; hence, German General Staff urged war sooner, before 1916 at the latest. USA and Russia would dominate mid to late 20th century, and more equally; a China on S. Korea’s development trajectory would be surpassing both ~2000 (instead of Russia in 1990 and the US around ~2030 in our TL). Tech in general might be about a decade further advanced, though rocketry might lag slightly. But global warming also worse, since Communism wouldn’t have retarded many countries’ development.”
In other news, Andy Weir, the guy who wrote The Martian, now has a new sci-fi book “Artemis” about a 2,000 population lunar base in the late 21st century.
Anyone read it? Is it any good?
Tolkien’s son resigns as director of the Tolkien estate. Hopefully the days of capricious copyright exploitation are coming to an end. Film adaptation of The Last Ringbearer when?
Main
- Top 500 supercomputer list for November 2017 is out.
Although China first overtook the United States in June 2016 by the smallest of margins, for the first time the gap has become truly significant: China – 202; United States – 143.
As per usual, Russia has a grand total of around 3, because the Putin regime prefers the Rotenbergs to R&D.
- Inspirational imagery from the Polish nationalist march in Warsaw. Vincent Law attended and has a good writeup.
Much more impressive than the sad affairs that pass for such in the Trumpreich and the Putlerreich. But long-term prospects are mixed, at best.
- Lubos Motls: Bitcoin congestion singularity may be coming. Can’t really serve as a normal means of exchange if a single transaction costs you several cups of coffee.
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spandrell: Biological Leninism.
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Scott Alexander: Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours
They feared that a written law code generally available would lead to rules lawyering and supported unequal treatement based on the unequal status of those to whom the law applied…Some early writers argued against making the law code publicly available. …
Where the offense did not seem to fit any category in the code, the court felt free to find the defendant guilty of doing what ought not to be done or of violating an Imperial decree — not an actual decree, but one that the Emperor would have made had the matter been brought to his attention.
The sections on China were fascinating – it was the definition of Kafkaevschina. And the same order prevailed at the end of the Qing dynasty.
- Caitlyn Green with a world map of where Byzantine artifacts have been found.
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Gerald Clare: The Forgotten Dream of a Russian Africa
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Alt Left podcaster Robert Stark has a book out, Journey to Vapor Island. B.W. Rabbit reviews it.
Russia
- Russian rearmaments program from 2018-2027 is, at 19 billion rubles, virtually equal to that for the period 2011-2020.
Adjusting for inflation, this translates into a massive cut to military spending.
- New VCIOM poll: While Putin’s approval remains high, indicators of social dissatisfaction nearing the heights they reached around late 2011, when mass protests kicked off.
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Patrick Armstrong: RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 16 NOVEMBER 2017
So now RT America is a “foreign agent“. (Remember all the faux outrage about Russia’s FARA imitation law? No? But it was only a year ago: “Russia: Four years of Putin’s ‘Foreign Agents’ law to shackle and silence NGOs“. Hard to keep up, isn’t it?) In case you think this reflects poorly on the “champion for free speech and free press”, John McCain, channelling Brezhnev, explains why it doesn’t.
- Bershidsky: Russia’s RT Just Isn’t Worth Attacking. Simpler Explanations Are Usually Correct. Even on Russia.
It looks like Russia’s retaliation will be very mild; so far, we only know that RFERL/Voice of America and their various projects will have to register as foreign agents.
- Alexey Kovalev: Here’s what Russians think: Brexit is your creature – don’t blame it on us
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Kevin Rothrock translates Oleg Kashin’s op-ed for the liberal Republic webzine (formerly Slon): When Russians stopped believing in the Western media:
There’s a thoroughly naive misperception that the people working for propaganda outlets are all hard-nose cynics ready to say that black is white just so they can make their mortgage payments. In fact, anyone who’s talked with just one of these people knows that any cynicism that might guide them is something entirely different: it’s not “I lie because of my mortgage,” but “I say what serves the state’s interests because that’s how it works everywhere — we serve Russia, CNN serves the U.S., and the BBC is itself a state organization.”
Hearing this kind of talk, Russians from the independent media of course always laughed, but time has shown that the ones who said “it’s like this everywhere” were right. At the very least, over the past year and a half, the Western press with its highest standards has gifted us too many outrageous stories to ignore.
Kashin is a Russian liberal, yet even so, he is of the firm opinion that the Western media has gone way overboard in their Russiagate hysteria. In this sense, he parallels Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky and Alexey Kovalev, who sometimes writes for The Guardian – both of them are highly anti-Putin pro-Westerners, yet not completely devoid of critical observation, for which they in turn have been accused of being Kremlin trolls by the ROG truthers.
- Joe Lauria: The Creation of RussiaGate
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Russian freedom fighting anarchist Pyotr Pavlensky flees to the West (after a rape accusation cooked up by the KGB… maybe not). Burns down a French book. Neoliberals who praised him when he was pulling his stunts in Russia now practice punitive psychiatry on him.
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Bryan MacDonald: How George Soros’ people enlisted me as a ‘foot-soldier in the fight against Putin’. There are a lot of these scam NGO’s sucking up State Department and Soros money.
* Muh based Putlerreich introducing gender equality law inc. quotas for female % in politics; will solve “problems of sexism, ageism, harassment.”
- Russia Elections 2018:
Will Putin run? Bryan MacDonald thinks there is still a slight chance that he won’t. Will have a separate post on this.
Ksenia Sobchak got a Vkontakte account just this week. Goes to show why she won’t rise above the single digits: All the Russian liberal kreakl tusovka hangs out on Facebook.
World
- James Thompson: Boost your IQ. Important discussion of two recent papers on effect of more school education on later IQ.
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Gregory Hood: The Lie of Law
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Defrosted: Just noticed that Peter Frost is writing again, though at his own website now.
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New study: Moderate alcohol consumption improves foreign language skills (the paper). Funny and so very true.
- GDP per capita map of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan used to be richer than India, really strikes home the fact that this is no longer the case.
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The Atlantic has a very long profile of Andrew Anglin. Skimmed through it. Seems like a stereotypical background for a Neo-Nazi.
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Inventor of Ethereum is much less cool than Pavel Durov.
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Bunch of Alt Right/Alt Right people lost their Blue Checkmarks on Twitter (Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler, Laura Loomer, James Allsup would be recognizable to many); Baked Alaska got suspended entirely.
This is in line with a new Twitter policy to remove verification from users who “promote hate” (except, presumably, against white people).
However, the real fun will begin on Nov 22, when new rules on the display of “hateful imagery and hate symbols” – developed in conjunction with the ADL – will come into effect. Like schools and workplaces, it will now also take into account offline behavior, as well as “monitor for hate speech in usernames, display names, and profile bios.”
Since everyone born in 1988 is, by definition, a Nazi, there’s some chance @akarlin88 will be shut down around that time. Can’t say I’ll miss it.
- Wrath of Gnon digs up a note on medieval German hospitality.
I have sometimes wondered about practical logistics of long-term travel in the deep past (esp. if you lose your purse). This helps explain things, I suppose.
Personally, I’ve always thought that simply strangling Kaiser Wilhelm II in the cradle would have done the job.
Then Hitler could have become a housepainter, Stalin a bank robber, Lenin would have had a stroke in a library in Switzerland, Trotsky would have revolutionised the dockworkers of Halifax and Gavrilo Princip would have blown himself up in a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
And all would be for the best.
Amazon is making a LotR TV show now- I wonder if the son resigning has anything to do with it. I imagine it will be sexified and diversified.
Wilhelm was a flawed personality who made many grotesque statements but I very much doubt his influence was decisive for the outbreak of WW1 (and yes, I know there are historians like his biographer Röhl who still hold that view, but seems rather excessive to me; nationalist and imperialist rivalries would still have been strong factors in pre-WW1 Europe if Wilhelm had never existed).
One issue Karlin didn’t address in his alternative history is the fate of European colonial empires…it’s probably true hat Russia and the US were always destined to have a dominant influence in the 20th century, through their sheer size and their resources…but Europeans in the first half of the 20th century still ruled vast extra-European territories. I suppose this would eventually have become untenable, but probably not like it actually did as a consequence of the world wars and the anti-colonialist pressure of both the US and the Soviet Union.
I’d like to have seen an Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy that became a constitutional monarchy along the British example.
This is something worth speculating about, especially now days. It’s too bad it was French Jacobin nationalism that was the preferred model in Central and Eastern Europe, rather than the United Kingdom or Swiss Confederation. The French Republican model is to draw a line around a piece of territory and force everyone inside it to be as culturally similar as possible. Of course, many French rejected this but the militant centralizers and homogenizers managed to get the upper hand time and time again.
Wilhelm was a great man. So were Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Although they were also extremely overrated generals, especially Ludendorff. Horthy in Hungary was another great man who hasn’t been properly appreciated by history, but probably will be in the long run.
From the Franco Prussian war until the end of WW2 there was a real fanaticism that infected the entire German Army High Command and that is what led to both World Wars. Hitler gets criticized for a lot of his decisions but they were mostly in line with what was then the conventional German military thinking: Germany is under siege, the very existence of Russia is an existential threat to German security, Germany needs strategic depth and resources that can only be found in the east.
By the time WWI broke out, Germany was losing the race against time. France and Russia were growing stronger and Germany’s Austria-Hungary ally was facing dissolution. To make matters worse, Britain and its dominions were backed up by the United States which was clearly on the road to becoming the world’s most powerful country.
So a lot of the self destructive decisions Germany made from 1914 through 1945 make sense if seen from the perspective of preserving German power. The only alternative would have been acceptance of Germany becoming a 2nd tier player on the world stage, similar to what contemporary France is (not quite that bad, but close). One can understand why such an outcome would have been seen as unacceptable to the German military.
What Germany should have done was seek a merger with Austria-Hungary and then brutally stamp out the separate Hungarian, Czech and Slovakian national identities. The same could have been done with the Polish regions that the German Empire than controlled. This could all have been done with the cooperation of the Russian Empire. Ultimately, Germany could have added the baltics and the western regions of the Ukraine when the opportunity presented itself. This would not just bring in more territory but would also turn Scandinavia and the balkans into permanent German satellites and even leave open the possibility of eventually absorbing those regions into a larger Reich. Northern Italy and Switzerland could also eventually be annexed, along with the rest of Poland. Such a country would be able to compete with Russia and the US on the global stage.
Germany would also want to work with Japan to prevent a united China from ever emerging, as that could also be a threat to German power.
Can’t agree. Wihelm was a rather erratic character and made a lot of embarrassing statements (though the damage he did has probably been exaggerated). Hindenburg and Ludendorff admittedly did achieve some greatness by repelling the Russians in 1914, but on the whole had a profoundly negative influence, Hindenburg being a narcissist who was mostly interested in his self-promotion and who paved the way for Hitler; while Ludendorff, with his dreams of German empire in Eastern Europe and his weird neopagan interests, could even be seen as somewhat of a proto-Nazi.
I’ve come around to the view that this perception pre-WW1 was pretty much accurate, there was indeed a hostile bloc encircling Germany. Granted, German policy and its imperialist ambitions had contributed to that bloc solidifying, but to some degree that development was probably inevitable and rooted in deeper structural causes.
Well, they tried Germanization in the majority-Polish areas of imperial Germany in the decades prior to WW1, led to much bitterness. Personally I disagree in principle with such oppression of established national minorities, that’s one aspect of nationalism that shouldn’t make a comeback in Europe imo. But your basic point is of course correct, the problem for Germany (and other European countries) of safeguarding our interests against actual or potential giants like the US, Russia and China remains acute. That’s why in theory at least I’m not entirely opposed to some form of European cooperation, though the EU in practice is disastrous on every level, and opens us up to invasion by 3rd worlders and blackmail even by shitty countries like Turkey.
Franz Ferdinand supposedly had plans for giving greater rights to the Slavic parts of the empire and turning the Dual monarchy into some sort of confederation; may have been part of the reason for his assassination (since such a development would have been bad from the point of view of nationalists).
Wilhelm II was certainly a bumbling buffoon, but the corollary of your argument is that we have no idea how many figures who are obscure in OTL—soldiers who died young, drunken guys ranting at bars, petty criminals, etc.—would have become world-changing figures given some small changes in historical contingencies.
Artemis is about a lunar (rather than Mars) colony. The book is pretty good but very light fare. It’s quite short and mostly setup for a not entirely satisfying third act heist. That should translate well to the film version (someone — Fox? — purchased the film rights outright before the novel was released, which is a pretty rare alternative to buying an option on the film adaptation). It also has a woman of color for a protagonist, which you might think is pandering and it surely is somewhat, but on the flip side she is an apostate daughter of a Saudi welder and a lot of the plot revolves around how everyone in the colony thinks she is a huge slut (in addition to being a small time crook). So hard to say what the PC police will make of the movie when it comes out, except of course that they will be pissed if some Weinstein flunky rewrites the heroine as a willowy blonde to boost the box office. (I would nonetheless give that better than even odds.)
What does Moscowite AK think of smart city Moscow?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nikolaikuznetsov/2017/11/15/moscow-is-on-its-way-to-becoming-a-smart-city-and-fintech-powerhouse/#72e90d60983d
Moon colony, pay more attention.
Weir does not think much of Mars colonization in our lifetimes.
http://www.businessinsider.com/andy-weir-artemis-book-moon-colony-reason-2017-11?IR=T
The right word is symmetric.
Bank, French bank.
He rejected such plans. FF was a centralist who wanted to break Budapest’s power.
TL;DR version: We wuz have been kangz.
@whahae
No, we wuz have been kangz! (see: Alash Orda)
https://kk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%88_%D0%9E%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B0
Kazakhs came very close to a state of our own in 1916– perhaps the horde would have achieved great things had it not been for Stalinist terror and famine.
-CK
Anything about Mars is more “fi” than “sci”. There’s literally nothing there on Mars and literally no reason to go there. We’re staying here on Earth, you’ll need to say goodbye to your gradeschool spaceman fantasies.
Hopefully never.
Good. “Supercomputers” are an even more worthless and meaningless dick waving contest than the Olympic Games. Hopefully a future, more sane government will divest us of both. (Nothing useful ever gets done with these “supercomputers”, it’s 99% graft and 1% muh patriotism.)
[Hopefully the days of capricious copyright exploitation are coming to an end.]
Surely you mean they are just beginning.
[But long-term prospects are mixed, at best.]
Not true, not least because the Poles who have seen the poz in England are not importing it to Poland, quite the reverse.
https://twitter.com/arisroussinos/status/931774432049319936
It wouldn’t have lasted long: Britain lost Ireland immediately after the war despite winning it.
Is Gennady Golovkin a hero in Kazakhstan? What do Kazakhs think of Jacobs exposing Golovkin as an utter fraud and Golovkin’s refusal to move up to 168 and fight Andre Ward because Golovkin knew that Ward would take his head off?
The idea definitely didn’t start with Ludendorff.
If the US was allowed to conquer what became the central and midwestern US and Russia was allowed to conquer Siberia, why couldn’t Germany conquer Eastern-Europe/European-Russia? I can assure you such a conquest would have been much more humane than the US and Russian conquests (unless it was the Nazis who did it, in which case it would be infinitely worse).
In fact, I would say that such a conquest could have been achieved without displacing a single person other then those displaced by the war itself.
The problem with the dreams of Ludendorff, et. al., was that France, the UK and the US would never ever ever go along with it.
But it still has Scotland and Wales (and Man and the Orkneys).
Looking at the top 500 list, I was surprised that Poland had more(5) SCs than Russia(3) despite Russia being frankly more advanced in IT than Poland is and likely ever will be.
As for the “future of Poland”, I’m quite skeptical, too. I never bought the ostrich theory, that Poland, and Eastern Europe by extention, can just skate by as the West faces more turmoil.
Unlike a lot of WNs, I don’t have any delusions about Russia. To me, and I know you don’t support the current regime, Russia is a lot like a poor cousin of the West. It also is anti-nationalist. It’s pro-Islam. It’s not as crazy on SJW activism(though as you have noted, increasingly in the liberal and young crowd, who will have a greater say in Russia’s cultural future), but OTOH it’s a lot more corrupt.
So, to put it cheekily, I reject both ZOG and ROG. The long-term solution would be somekind of slavic federation, at least as a start, but given Europe’s long history of backstabbing, I see that as unlikely. It’s hard to say where Poland will be, but it’s nevertheless fair to say that even if we start seeing more of the Western cultural cancer, the impact will be much smaller and much drawn-out than what we see in other countries. And when/if the West finally goes fully nationalist, we will rebound much faster from said disease.
Poland will not survive on its own, it ultimately needs the rest of Europe to come to its senses. But I will concede that it has much better chances of coming out of the next 20-30 years of struggle much better than most other countries(except maybe CZ/SK) given it has a highly homogenous society, and unlike a lot of European countries, Polish youth are more right-wing than than elders. Meaning that the Poland we will see 20 years from now will be even more nationalist.
I’m not sure that the colonial issue would have developed too differently. Sweden certainly gave a lot of resources to “freedom fighters”, having never been in the wars. It wasn’t officially arms, but I think it is reasonable to assume it led to more violence, at least in the short term. Political ambition, egalitarianism, and petty jealously are pretty powerful, perhaps irresistible forces when combined with modern arms.
The one major question mark for me would be perhaps South Africa, if some of the many Europeans who died had instead moved there. It may have led to a different dynamic. Perhaps an independent and white Western Cape, if nothing else.
There is a theory that most Irish preferred the status quo of the early 20th century. That it was the executions which moved opinion, and they may not have happened without the larger war.
Sweden is pretty irrelevant though (even if its inhabitants are prone to bizarre illusions about their own importance and goodness). What really broke the European colonial empires was the general exhaustion and loss of prestige/control caused by the world wars (in Asia they never really recovered from the shock of the Japanese conquests in 1941/42), plus the fact that the international system after 1945 was dominated by the US and the Soviet Union which both were opposed to the continued existence of European colonial empires.
I suppose in a world without the world wars colonialism would still have eventually ended, though much later, and in a way I can’t really imagine. Without the Cold war we probably would have had much less “antiracism” though.
I was referring to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Greater_Austria
Admittedly my knowledge of Austrian-Hungarian politics is rather limited, maybe some other commenters can clear up the issue.
The Russian conquest of Russia was relatively humane (approximate analogues Alaska in the United States, Canada, Greenland, New Zealand)
Maybe. But on the other hand it is highly likely Japan would have kept Manchuria and became vastly more powerful if World War 2 never happened. Such a scenario definitely would not have been good for China. If the Bolshevik revolution never happened maybe the Nazis wouldn’t have existed but Japanese expansionism definitely would still have existed regardless.
“Tolkien’s son resigns as director of the Tolkien estate. Hopefully the days of capricious copyright exploitation are coming to an end. Film adaptation of The Last Ringbearer when?”
Don’t you know Copyright is now Life + 70 Years. Tolkien died in 1973, so will be in copyright until 2043. Exploitation will continue until then.
If you want real ” capricious exploitation ” then look no further than the Bayreuth Festival. Wagner died in 1883. Whole generations of his descendants have been in control since. There seems to be no end to them, and we’re up to 130+ years and counting.
Britain got off relatively lightly in that moment of history when three other monarchies fell. It’s worth mentioning too that that the Irish Republic only came about in stages from the end of the first war until the late 1940s. Also Ireland was never an enemy state in the way, say, Finland or the Baltic States were to the Soviet Union. Compared to the Russia, Austro-Hungary and Germany, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland failed gracefully and with relatively little trauma.
On military spending:
I think those figures will be adjusted sooner or later, upwards. Maybe in 5 years, or so. Those kind of long-term spending plans don’t even seem to make too much sense, you can’t take them too seriously.
If the economy grows, and Russia keeps military spending at 2-3% of GDP (both of which I think are likely), the military spending is not going to be much lower than 2010-20, if anything quite the opposite.
19 trillion seems way too conservative… they just don’t seem to take any future economic growth into account, i.e. with that kind of spending, the military spending’s share of the GDP would rapidly fall to a low, Western European levels, which I think is very unlikely and simply makes no sense.
For now. Scottish nationalists are still a major force in Scotland.
Good comment, agreed with virtually all of it.
Just a clarification – ROG is just a meme, it is entirely fictive, much more so than even ZOG (which I use about 80% ironically). In reality, the Putlerreich of the collective imaginations of Hillary Clinton, Louise Mensch, and assorted Blue Checkmarks is a Putletreich. We use the term ROG primarily as ironic satire, and as a vision of what Russia should actually strive to be.
I mean, you probably won’t much like our vision of ROG either, you being a Polish perspective. 🙂 But it has nothing to do with Putin.
Hopefully, we’ll see.
I should stress that the SJW element in Russia is still contained to a narrow slice of Moscow/SPB young SWPLs. It is not any sort of mass phenomenon outside that very narrow demographic. Some commenters here (e.g. 5371) claim I am insane and/or purposefully consort with the biggest freaks and misfits I can find in Moscow.
However, I watched it break out first-hand in the decade that I was in the United States, at virtually Ground Zero (Berkeley), and I think I recognize the symptoms. I give Russia about 15 years.
But can it spread outside of Moskva/SPB as much as did it in America outside of California?
“There might not have been a WW1, and not just Pinkerian reasons, but Realpolitik ones. Russian power was rapidly converging to German, making two front war increasingly untenable; hence, German General Staff urged war sooner, before 1916 at the latest.”
Actually, I’m not so sure about this part. After all, even if Germany will become more tame after 1916/1917, Russia might eventually become more bold in its actions. Thus, we could still see a World War I occur, but at least a couple of decades later than in our TL Indeed, in such a World War, Britain will almost certainly side with Germany while Russia would still remain allied with France.
Also, I am unsure that the Bolshevik rise to power was a particularly freak occurrence. After all, they do appear to have been better at organizing and at mobilizing than anyone else–whether the Russian Tsars, the Russian Provisional Government, or the other Russian political parties–was.
Finally, while I am unsure about how quickly the Imperial Russian military was improving before the start of World War I (Yes, I know about the Russian Great Military Program; however, I am unsure that it would have been as much of a big deal as you think it would have), I would like to point out that, in terms of industrialization, Imperial Germany was actually moving even further ahead of Imperial Russia in spite of its much smaller population:
http://www.beaconschool.org/~bfaithfu/greatdivergencecharts.pdf
Indeed, Imperial Germany’s total industrial potential rose from 27 to 71 to 138 between 1880, 1990, and 1913 whereas Imperial Russia’s total industrial potential rose from 25 to 48 to 77. This is especially notable because Imperial Germany’s population appears to have been growing at a slower pace than Imperial Russia’s population was growing.
Ultimately, one’s military power is determined in large part based on one’s level of industrialization. Indeed, this is why both Britain and the U.S. were able to build up large armies in both World War I and World War II and why I don’t think that Imperial Germany would have had too much to fear from Imperial Russia for a while in a scenario where World War I would have never occurred.
@German_reader: Completely agreed that both Hindenburg and Ludendorff made some very poor decisions–with Hindenburg appointing Hitler Chancellor and with Hindenburg and Ludendorff deciding to resume unrestricted submarine warfare (USW) in 1917 and thus causing the U.S. to enter World War I.
Also, in regards to German Kaiser Wilhelm II, I agree with you that he might not have been the decisive force which caused World War I. After all, as you said, nationalism and tensions in Europe were high in the pre-World War I era and thus even with a different German Kaiser Europe might have descended into war sooner or later.
In addition to this, interestingly enough, had it not been for U.S. entry into World War I, Germany could have come out of World War I greatly strengthened. After all, it would have had a series of satellite/puppet states in Eastern Europe which could have gradually united with Germany to form a Mitteleuropean superstate. Indeed, such a Mitteleuropan superstate could have been quite a formidable challenger to both rump Russia and the U.S. during the 20th century.
OT: On Tuesday night there was a 16-minute segment on Italian television (Canale 5) featuring interviews with three Georgians who were part of the team of snipers responsible for the Maidan “massacre” by firing indiscriminately on demonstrators and police — one was a former member of Saakashivili’s security service and the other two were “militants” from his political party. They
are now “confessing” due to their outrage at not receiving their promised payment.
Here is a link to the segment
http://www.video.mediaset.it/video/matrix/servizi/esclusivo-guerra-in-ucraina-le-verita-nascoste_776854.html
and here is an article from the Italian newspaper Il Giornale summarising the programme:
http://www.ilgiornale.it/news/politica/versione-dei-cecchini-sulla-strage-kiev-ordini-1463409.html
Not surprisingly, this story is being totally ignored by the MSM.
Thanks for the Polish perspective. Given that the younger generation is more right-wing – is that translating into traditional families and such? Just wondering what you think the prospects are for Poland to pull itself out of the free fall population. Like how would they go about it? Or maybe that’s just not a big concern at this point?
Peace.
No. There’s a difference. “SJW” is just another iteration of the centuries-old European elite Gnostic religion. It spreads like wildfire in the USA because the USA is post-Christian (or even anti-Christian), and nature abhors a vacuum.
Russia is heavily Christian and becoming more so, not less; there’s no way SJW will make inroads when it has to fight against a real religious tradition to do so.
Mr. Karlin – are you serious about that 15 year mark or was that just joking around? If not, God help us all if the two countries with the largest nuclear stockpiles are run by SJWs that can be easily ‘triggered’.
Peace.
I left the US before SJWism really took off, so I don’t know the signs of which Anatoly speaks. On the other hand, I would say that university students in Moscow (of whom I know many) are fairly old-fashioned, even compared to the students of my generation in some small institution in fly-over country. So I think 15 years is overly pessimistic.
Whew!!! I hope that remains the case.
Peace.
Most of the colonies were sinks of money. Was that not why Bismark did not want any? But India was the exception, and there were plenty of people in India who would have liked the British to stay. If you think of that country as the trigger, and I do, then it might not have ended at all.
With how ridiculous that opening is I’ll chime in, more serious first and then the funny parts. Not sure it’s a project worth following through with, I thought the same with the previous posts mentioning this, but I don’t see how one can be that optimistic about Tsarist Russia in a parallel universe timelime.
First it’s a quite tenable position – Orwell was basically right about this – that by the end result WWII accelerated technological progress and a parallel universe without WWII or a comparable war that nonetheless resulted in sufficient gains by certain victorious sides could be decades behind our world in science and technology. The stagnant world in its year 2000 would be only as advanced as our world in 1970, instead of the other way around.
Obviously as a second matter, the most interesting, and not that unlikely, development in a parallel universe with the minimum requirements being something like “different WWI, no Lenin” would be a successful Communist revolution in the USA or Britain. Too complicated to talk about exploring that further here.
Russia at any rate had not necessarily converged with the military power of Japan, and what a thorn in the side that was! While “disappearing” certain historical figures might have clearer consequences in Europe, how much would have to be done in the rest of the world? (and colonial world too) Nor is there any reason to be optimistic that certain conflicts would be escaped; even the actual Russian Revolution (just the civil war, not WWII) was relatively bloodless compared to other historical civil wars and what might potentially happen in a parallel 20th century. Compare the Taiping Rebellion, and consider 20th century technology. In general, the instability of many, many states and empires suggest that even a “different or no WWI” parallel universe would not escape the first half of the 20th century to 1950 better off than our world; it could have been a lot worse.
Regardless, in a realpolitik sense, I think the USA/Britain/to a certain extent France alliance would be very likely to be drawn into an eventual “alternate universe world war” no matter what. Especially if that’s given no Communist Revolutions in the West, circa say 1932 in a “no WWI” universe. No clear reason why Russia would end up better off than the USSR-as-WWI-victor in our universe; 90% of the time it might end up much worse.
So here’s our story. By the 1940s, after a period of economic troubles across the world including many droughts and famines, the Empire of China, Empire of Japan, and Russia, a sorta-constitutional monarchy republic where the Tsars never fell, are at each other’s throats. While there is no crisis like that of Nazi Germany in Europe, states such as Britain, France, and Germany are preoccupied in Europe with Italian/Spanish/Eastern European civil wars and their consequences.
As war in Asia breaks out, the USA mostly backs China, sending them massive amounts of supplies and matériel.
Immigrants to the United States from Russia and a few other European countries, disproportionately Jewish, urge on each further action by the American state. Opinion writers whose motto is “If you hear hoofbeats, think neither zebras nor horses, but Cossacks” launch a campaign in the American news media to oppose the formerly-quasi-Tsarist state at all costs. This propaganda provides soft support to the geopolitical aims of the American state.
The Empire of China is eventually victorious, officially annexing territory out to the longitude of around Lake Baikal into its province of Northern Mongolia. Whatever European rump states remain suffer heavy sanctions and international scorn, in addition to raw wartime damages. Some tens of millions of Slavic peoples die in the latter decades of the 20th century, officially mostly by starvation but some by oppression and civil conflict in the remaining third-world level states.
Let’s turn to the arts and some other considerations for a broader universe-building picture. Without Battleship Potemkin and other works, Chinese cinematography is considered the only alternative to the Western form, but it’s esoteric and widely lacking in mass appeal, so Hollywood appears to be winning anyway.
As for other parts of the world, for example, India never develops a space program or first world economy or anything, but then again it didn’t in the 20th century in our universe either.
On the plus side, our parallel timeline counterparts by their year 2030, if they could communicate with us, would report that all their Internet videogame servers (though they are still decades behind in technical specs) are remarkably free* of foul language and indeed toxicity of any kind.
*Except the occasional Pinoy, of course, but for some reason that’s like the gravitational constant, a fixture in the universe.
I am not sure we live in the same country. Most Russians are nominally Christian (even I would mark myself as such on a census) but its degree of penetration into everyday life is minimal.
When was the last time the average Russian visited a church? (last Easter, at best).
n=1 experiences will differ.
We shall hope, at any rate.
Certainly, and there could have been a total nuclear war. All sorts of worse alternatives are imaginable.
Only 25% national support at what was likely the absolute peak of its popularity. Lenin narrowly escaping arrest after the July Days. The Kerensky-Kornilov misunderstanding that brought them back from the dead. Lenin narrowly avoiding arrest twice (!) on the route to Smolny in October 1917 (the Bolsheviks would not have been the Bolsheviks we know without him).
It was a remarkably contingent affair all things considered.
This is a good and important point but there’s a major issue with it.
Industrialization proceeds fastest during the middle stages. Initially, you have a 90% rural population, with very little capital reserves to finance industrialization. (This was Russia around 1900 and Germany around 1850). But once it gets going, it goes much faster – as with Germany and the United States 1870-1914. However, then it slows down, as per capita income converges to that of the leading countries such as the UK. Germany was close to that stage by 1914. Russia, however, was just at the start of its sweet zone of fast industrial growth.
The Hungarians would never have accepted this. I think a case could be made that if in 1918-21 the Dual Monarchy was split along the borders drawn here (rather than along the borders it actually did happen), and the German parts would have been allowed to unite with Germany, then there’s a very high chance that eventually both Hungarians and Germans would’ve accepted the results.
The problem is that until 1914 in Hungary the middle classes and political elites wanted either the status quo or a dissolution of the Dual Monarchy with Hungary becoming independent within its then borders (and usually they wanted to keep Croatia to boot!, although some people quite realistically warned that Croatia should be granted much more autonomy than they enjoyed at the time), so there’s no chance anybody in Hungary would’ve accepted depriving the country of over half of its territory while not granting independence to it. The attraction of the Dual Monarchy to the Hungarian elites was that 1) it was dual (i.e. Hungary theoretically had a 50% say in most important matters, for example the Hungarian prime minister Count Tisza could delay the declaration of war against Serbia for a week or so…), and that 2) Hungary managed to keep its borders (even though Hungarians were barely a majority even without Croatia). Now if we lose territories, and become a small part of some larger federation, then Hungary would have no more say in important matters (e.g. foreign policy), and so it would make no sense to stay within that federation. Better become fully independent.
Actually I think that was the thinking of most elites. For example by 1910 the Czechs had it pretty OK within the Monarchy: they were the most industrialized part of it, and enjoyed the large markets (it seriously inhibited the growth of the much less advanced Hungarian manufacturing sector, for example), while within Czechia (and this included the largely German-inhabited regions like the Sudeten region) Czech became an official language, and it meant that for example to join the civil service, one had to speak both Czech and German. This meant that within the Czech areas (this included I think at least two provinces, Bohemia and Moravia, and perhaps a third, the very small rump Silesia) only Czechs could qualify for civil service, because Germans usually couldn’t speak Czech (they learned some more useful languages like French or English instead), while all educated Czechs could speak German. The great city Prague (a German speaking city as late as the early 19th century) became culturally Czech. (This was not much different from how Budapest became Hungarian at the same time, but Hungary theoretically had the advantage of being a major component of the Monarchy.) On the other hand, Czechs also had their representatives in the Landtag (the parliament of the Austrian half of the Monarchy), where they could influence all decisions (even foreign policy decisions), but of course their voice was weak (for obvious reasons – they were only a small part of the whole). So they preferred either Trialism (where they’d get a third of the vote regarding important foreign policy decisions) or – increasingly – full independence (together with the Slovak lands, whom they wanted to convince that Slovaks and Czechs were actually one and the same ethnicity). I fail to see how their calculations would’ve been much different under these proposed terms – they’d lose some territory they already considered “theirs” (traditional lands of the Kingdom of Bohemia) while not gaining much in status (becoming one of a dozen or so federal subjects could not have been much of an improvement).
But at least for the Czech elites there would’ve been some limited incentive. For the Hungarian elites nothing whatsoever.
Same thing for Hitler. I’m sure if we re-ran history a hundred times, we’d only get Hitler a few times (and probably only once).
I actually know a few, in Moscow. But it’s indeed a small minority.
Zhuganov’s daughter is very devout and sincere, goes to church every week.
Germany was actually investing in its colonies rather than simply exploiting them. It would have been interesting to see how German East Africa would have turned out after a few more decades of German tutorship.
He wanted to break Budapest’s power in order to prevent it from continuing its grip on its Slavic subjects and thwart his idea of a confederation.
Karl, who was weaker than FF, conceded to the Hungarians that they could do what they wish on their territory, while planning to transform only the Austrian part into a confederation.
I wouldn’t have any problem with it if only they didn’t shit all over their great-grandfather’s legacy.
Good comments. However we were discussing a scenario with Central Powers winning – so no pressure whatsoever from the victorious West for all these little countries to be independent,on the contrary. Under such conditions it is possible that a Swiss-style confederation would have weathered the era of nationalism and remained.
I doubt an independent landlocked Hungary surrounded on all sounds by the Austrian confederation would have been a viable state. It would have come to terms with its status. It would have been larger than what it was in 1918 – it would have included parts of Transylvania and Slovakia.
Do you think that if the Nazis won the war that Hitler would have eventually have incorporated Hungary into the Reich? Would Hungarians have gone along with it?
Nope, FF was less of a friend of the k.u.k. Slavs than you think.
He was in favor of better relations with the Russian Empire, though.
First and foremost, he wanted a strong central government, something neither the dual monarchy nor a confederation could provide him.
On ROG: I’m aware of the ironic connotations, hence my prefare of ‘putting it cheekily‘. But as in any joke, the best ones are those who have a grain of truth in them. I’m aware that Russian nationalists, those who are unburdened from false Soviet nostalgia such as yourself, do harbor semi-imperial ambitions, certainly WRT the Baltics, probably Ukraine(if you could get away with it). Such a situation would drastically reduce our strategic environment, which is why we’re pushing NATO as hard as we can eastwards.
My greater point about ROG is really about the nature of empire. Russia is an anti-nationalist, pro-Islam empire. The irony here is that the greatest repression is done unto Russian nationalists. But the point remains: Russia is not some WN paradise which many clueless/low information WN think it is. It’s basically just as anti-nationalist and pro-Islam as the West, but poorer and more corrupt.
Ideally, if Russian nationalists were to take power and understood that the old empire isn’t coming back, I’d be in favour of going full Slavic Federation, together with Russia and virtually all of Eastern Europe + honorary Slavs such as the Hungarians. But as I noted, as long as these imperial delusions exist among Russian nationalists, you’ll get NATO instead. Don’t blame us, blame your greed. We won’t accept Russia on our doorstep, so we’ll push NATO on yours. This is an area where we will never agree and which is bound to be a source of acrimony, which is why I’ll leave it at that.
On the SJW element, I can see it in Poland, too. But the good part is that while the leftists are getting more radicalised, they are also getting fewer. We’re not at the point where ethno-nationalists have a majority among the educated youth, but (especially among younger men), more right-wing/radical type of libertarian type of politics is popular(KORWiN, if you’re famillar with the vibe. Ironically also the most pro-Russian faction in Poland). Kukiz’15 is also popular, which is right-wing populist in spirit but unfocused. Still, a decent base to build upon.
The major problem from my PoV is that the generational change will take 20-30 years. And PiS won’t rule forever, especially with the EU all-but-fomenting color revolutions and the like. If the favoured neoliberal parties gain power in mid-2020s, how much damage can they create? That’s why I made it a point that the delusion among some, far too many, Polish nationalists that we can ‘just skate by’ is a dangerous fantasy. The one whitepill, to use common parlance, is that the emergence of a real and serious external enemy, the first since the height of the Ottoman Empire’s invasions, has focused minds and made many of us join together. But obviously we have a long way to go before that work is complete, if it ever is.
Russia lost the war against Japan and was in chaos after the 1905 revolution. Germany had a golden opportunity in 1905 to smash the French; it was wasted and for that the Kaiser should have been hanged. Russia was the first country to mobilise, the first to declare war,and the first to cross a border. The Kaiser had nothing to do with the decision to go to war he was off Norway in his yacht . The generals and foreign policy establishment and his advisers (the closest of whom were gay) had long excluded him from having a meaningful say. They were waiting for the Kiel ship canal to be widened. Fisher the (half-Malaysian) head of the British Navy predicted the date Germany would start the war was the completion date of the Kiel widening works, and it was, almost exactly. The Kaiser’s silly ideas about sea power, exacerbated by his friendship with Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, led to the Tirpitz tendency gaining untoward influence and Germany waiting too long. The Russio-Japanese war and 1905 revolution (and hence WW1&2) was indirectly the work of Korean diplomacy by the way.
Nope. We’d have fought against it like the Poles.
At least here, my n=1 experiment agrees with Anatoly’s. Russia is at this time far from being a religious country. Most who identity as Orthodox Christians rarely attend church and are quite ignorant of basic beliefs and practices. Also, I am rather skeptical that having religion classes in schools, or having the hierarchy pal around with politicians, is going to have a long-term positive effect for the Church. That being said, new churches continue to built, it does seem that slowly there are more and more devout people, and so far as I can tell, devout people do reproduce more on average than the non-devout, so a hundred years from now maybe Russians will at least have Holy Friday as an official day off work.
I remember having read (though I can’t recall exactly where) that even India wasn’t profitable for Britain anymore in the 20th century on a purely economic level. It was however crucially important as a source of military manpower. Once India was gone (inevitable after WW2), there wasn’t really much chance of holding on to the rest of Britain’s Asian empire (even those parts which were economically useful like Malaya).
And yes, the princes and many others certainly would have liked British rule to continue, though I still suppose it would have ended at some point in the later 20th century.
Poland shall share the fate of the CSA, a necessary sacrifice for greater unity.
Is it greed to push for unity with compatriots?
Pushing NATO against Russia is only reinforcing that by undermining pro-European/Western Russian nationalists. Not that it bothers me.
Thank you, that was very interesting. I have to admit the internal politics of Austria-Hungary are somewhat of a blind spot for me.
Which enemy would that be?
Yes, most of the contemporary ones are pretty contemptible.
An organised muslim minority of 50 million and growing. They are (still) too few and dispersed for now, but as long as they are getting concentrated in Western Europe and not spread around all of Europe as Brussels wants, then they will grow in importance as concentrated power is always the fastest path to influence. If their population doubles and stays concentrated in the same coutnries, then it is reasonable to think that we’ll see significant unrest.
To be clear, I am not suggesting some kind of fervid right-wing fever dream where Le SHARIA LAW takes over or such. They don’t have that power and likely never will. I am merely positing a humble suggestion, namely that once we get to 15-20% of the population, they will become increasingly aggressive.
This is compounded by the fact that their proportion among the youth, who have the highest revolutionary potential, is always higher than among the general population. For what’s its worth, I don’t believe the official statistics on muslims in Western Europe. This (leftist) claims that if you count people who have “muslim cultural heritage”, it’s closer to 10% in Sweden. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was 15% already in France.
https://tobiashubinette.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/muslimer-sverige-minoriteter/ – you’ll have to go through Google translate.
I’ve also looked at the offical numbers on, say, Sweden and noticed that the percentage of the population has barely moved from 2005 to 2015, even as Sweden has had extremely generous refugee policies. Hübinette is probably right that there is significant undercounting, because authorities are afraid of stoking the ember of nationalism.
I also think, beyond Islam, that Europans will find that there are limits to the notion that national identity is a jacket anyone can take on at all with ease. However, here I think there will be deep splits. In this environment, I can see Polish nationalists helping out German nationalists. The common enemy would then be anti-German whites who favour Somalians over their fellow Germans. They would of course be allied with said Somalians(and other muslims as well as non-whites) as shock troops. In fact, we’re already seeing this. The left-liberal upper middle class Germans/Swedes/French are already weaponising non-white and muslim minorities against their fellow countrymen, especially the working-class ones. This is national treason and sooner or later, it will be treated as such. That’s our common enemy. But this is like 20-30 years away. And it will be a gradual process.
Many Ukrainians don’t want forced unity, certainly not those in the West. The Baltics hate Russians deeply. Go to Estonia or Latvia and find out how popular Russians are (heh). You display the same kind of deluded Russian nationalist mentality that I noted would likely ever prevent a Slavic Union, whether you are Russian or not. If you are not, then they have picked it up from now.
Had Russian nationalists been more modest, basically more German(as they are now), they would be able to dominate Eastern Europe but Russians are always so clumsy, always make their moves so transparent, which inevitably triggers the reactions in others. The biggest NATO-boosters are the Baltic states, not Poland, though we are certainly not shy about securing strategic space to deter Russia. And I view this as unnecessary, because I want co-operation with Russia. But as I noted, as long as Russian nationalists harbor imperial delusions, this is impossible. Ultimately, in order to extend its influence, Russia must learn modest. Not exactly a national trait.
This is delusional. The most pro-European faction in Russia are liberals who, by the way, often hate Russians. They also love open borders. And I doubt that Putin’s suppression of Russian nationalists have anything at all to do with NATO. It has much more to do with the fact that Russia is already, as I have noted, a pro-Islam/anti-nationalist empire. That is why I want to see a post-Putin nationalist Russia first. Only then does it become interesting to me. If it does not change, it will simply be a poorer and more corrupt West and that would be a tragedy.
I think he is talking about the waves of immigration- at least I think. That seems to be the only thing uniting certain sections of Eastern Europe.
Peace.
I agree with your analysis. The problem just is that in Western Europe this still is a minority view. Even people who are anti-mass immigration often don’t fully understand the dangers imo and only come up with arguments like “It will ruin our welfare systems” or something of the sort. They are incapable of understanding that the safety of post-WW2 Western Europe isn’t a natural state of existence. Germans are really, really bad about this. It’s beyond their understanding that there might be people who simply are your enemies, without yourself being at fault for this. Personally I can easily see some really bad scenarios playing out in Europe over the next few decades…e.g. what if Turkey continues on its Islamist path, acquires nuclear weapons and increses its support for Islamic subversion in Europe? But there is very little serious discussion about such dangers.
I’m a bit skeptical if all is well in Poland (tbh given experiences with Christian “conservatives” in my own country who are now busily lobbying for Islamic mass immigration I’m wary of close links between religion and politics), but I sure do hope that you’ll manage to avoid the mistakes people made in Western Europe.
When was the last time the average Russian visited a church?
It’s more that they don’t go to church the way American Protestants do, where you get the whole family up early on a Sunday and go there dressed in your best clothes. If they’re passing through the area they’ll pop in to kiss an ikon or two, light a candle, maybe request prayers for an ailing relative or something. In my experience the churches are fairly active throughout the day like this, even in the more liberal parts of central Moscow (and the shops attached to bigger churches are usually the best place to find works by conservative thinkers like Ilyin).
I am not religious – at all. That puts me in a minority in Poland, but I can also say that religiosity is declining with the youth. This is both good and bad. Christianity, while domesticated in Europe, is fundamentally a Middle Eastern religion – not a European one.
Furthermore, one has to be open-minded enough to concede to both Islam and Judaism are both religions that are more realistic in their treatment of human nature compared to Christianity, which has a child-like view of human conflict(“turn the other cheek”). Islam famously has Taqqiyya(spelling?) which is frankly a brilliant concept. Judaism is also very pragmatic about not just lying but outright committing genocide on other tribes(the old testament is full of it, and far from condemnation, it is put as a necessary act). Of course, both religions have other problems(especially Islam with its de facto anti-intellectualism and anti-nationalism)
Right now, Poland is a place where a lot of Catholics are going to the borders to pray for a Christian Europe(https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2017/10/12/catholic-rosary-border-event-highlights-immigration-concerns-poland/).
However, the discrepancy between Polish Catholicism and the globalist/far-left/masochistic version that is pushed out from Rome must sooner or later come to a head. I would personally be in favour of ditching Christianity alltogether instead of trying to reform/save Christianity, which is built upon a rotten corpse that is not even our own. (The czechs are famously atheist yet are more right-wing than Poles on most surveys, so I don’t buy the argument that religion is necessary for self-preservation. The atheist Chinese are another good example.)
This is a long way of saying, I agree with your skepticism, but the good news is that fewer and fewer young Poles are religious. Those who are not go in two directions, three actually. Most become indifferent and materialistic but not self-hating but perhaps passive. A smaller minority but still sizable become nationalist and the by far smallest minority become full-on SJW retards. Right now, the nationalists are winning the youth, but in life, anything can change. We have no room to be complacent.
As for your comments on Germany and Western Europe, I think the fact that any serious threat to Europe in living memory has only been from other Europeans(Russians, Germans, French or Americans) has had deep effects. This century will change that. You can’t forget that the average white person has literally never had it so good. Comfort and wealth makes one fat and lazy, and that is true for individuals as well for people. Basically, I’m not so blackpilled on Germany or Western Europe.
To me, Germany will always remain the most important country. It’s the most important country from a philosophical or political point of view. It’s also the only major European country in Western Europe which has a serious conservative philosophical tradition. The French went full retard Marxist earlier than most. But even before that they were noted for their frivolity. The English are more respectable, but their disease is blatant and nonstop liberalism. Germany has often been the anchor to which all these nonsense trends from France and England were tested and ultimately brought down. Even the worst “German” invention, Marxism, ultimately failed to take root in Germany and instead found Russia as its seed for destruction. I still haven’t found a non-German philosopher even close to Schmitt. Nietzsche, who was certainly not as nationalistic as the Nazis pretended he was(he curiously once claimed he was a Polish nobleman, which is absurd), has nevertheless been co-opted by the left in an equally ridiculous propaganda operation to be presented as /theirguy/. But reading even a little of him reveals a brilliant legacy which is makes a mockery of this pretense. Even more contemporary thinkers, like Hans Hoppe, are unsurprisingly Germans.
This is merely a phase you’re going through. You are, by far, the most important country in Europe. Where Germany goes, so will the Nordics, Austria, Switzerland and arguably the Netherlands and the Flemish parts of Belgium. We in the East feel closer to you than we feel to America or the UK. Certainly if you look at the V4. That’s why I focus on Germany more than any other nation in Europe. You hold the keys to the continent.
As for Turkey, I must admit I am somewhat skeptical of the scenario you are presenting. I view the Turks as fiercely independent but also delusional about their own power. Furthermore, they have anything between 15-25% kurds, with more just across the border who have higher birthrates. Most turks are at 2 kids per woman, kurds are at 3 kids. On top of that, Erdogans open borders attitude has meant millions of Arabs, primarily Syrians and even some Africans have begun to show up. Turkey’s rhetoric of ‘muh civic nationalism’ aside, the fact remains that turkish ethnicity is a real thing and they’ve started to have refugee burndowns there, too. I think a lot of people underestimate the rage that many turks have over being, well, invaded by Arabs demographically. They may also be muslims but guess what, I wouldn’t want Catholic Africans in Poland. And a lot of Turks don’t want Syrians, regardless of their religion. All I’m saying to you is, yes, religion matters in Turkey but so does national culture and ethnicity. Don’t underestimate those factors. Turkey will be more and more internally weakened by conflict, just as Western Europe will, going forward.
As interesting as the shift between countries in the supercomputer list, the sum of the performance of all the top 500 systems over time:
June 1993: 1.13 teraflops
June 1998: 22.6 teraflops
June 2003: 370 teraflops
June 2008: 12.2 petaflops
June 2013: 224 petaflops
November 2017: 845 petaflops
Clearly there has been a dramatic slowing in the last four-and-a-half years from the pace maintained for a long time previously. It’s the same looking just at the single most powerful system in the world at various times, though there it seems clear that progress was much faster from the early 90s till 2013 than it had been previously.
Germans are more modest because their minorities outside of the Reich were purged, but the state well-integrated into the European/Western system and the population indoctrinated to believe in Europe.
Russians have still many compatriots outside of Russia and their attempts to integrate Russia were rebuffed.
Putin or not, these people would not want to cooperate on Western terms as long as the Western policy from the Putin era continues because it means surrender and an end of Russia as a sovereign country.
I am talking about pro-Western nationalists like Navalny.
It makes the suppression of them more legitimate. After all, if NATO would not act like an enemy, West would be a viable alternative.
Otherwise, it is no less of a threat than Islam.
I think that’s actually a bit of a myth, iirc Taqiyya is a tactic Shias adopted when persecuted by Sunnis (leaving the details of their beliefs vague; there are a lot of strange heterodox groups in the Mideast who did things like this, their beliefs often kept secret to outsiders). It doesn’t really have anything to do with the behaviour of Sunni Muslims in non-Islamic societies today. But Islamic subversion is very real of course and actively enabled by the left.
I’m a pretty secular person myself and have mixed feelings at best about Christianity and its impact on European history, and have very little sympathy for Christian reactionaries of the “Europe is nothing without Christianity” type. But still, I don’t think nationalist movements should become anti-Christian (that is against the religion itself, ecclesiastical institutions and their privileges are another matter) or try to replace religious faith with some sort of political religion or some neopaganism. We must strive for some healthy balance between respect for Christanity and its moral teachings (as long as they don’t become irrational and self-destructive) and a robust sense of a secular national/political community. The presumptuous open borders-lobbyism of church dignitaries needs to be countered though.
Western Europe certainly is quite decadent, Germany especially so. West Germans became infantilized during the Cold War…limited sovereignty and mass affluence plus American security guarantees were a deadly combination. This should have changed after 1990, but unfortunately the political class wasn’t up to the task of really adapting to new realities, and a significant part of the population is lost to bizarre post-materialist fantasies (hence the continued influence of a party like the Greens which imo is a quasi-religious sect in many ways). So my view of Germany is probably much more negative than yours…I have my doubts if what has happened since 2015 would have been possible like that anywhere else…and so far the reaction has been much too muted imo. But yes, unfortunately Germany is very influential in Europe, so what happens here will affect the rest of the continent.
Anyway, thanks for your contributions, very interesting to read. It’s one of the strengths of AK’s blog imo that it attracts many intelligent readers’ comments from different countries and perspectives.
fewer young Poles are religious. Those who are not go in two directions, three actually. Most become indifferent and materialistic but not self-hating but perhaps passive. A smaller minority but still sizable become nationalist and the by far smallest minority become full-on SJW retards. Right now, the nationalists are winning the youth, but in life, anything can change.
Are many of these young Polish nationalists in the main cities, like Warsaw & Krakow? Or is it like the West with SJWish whites dominating the important centres of influence like London/Amsterdam/Berlin/NYC/Toronto/Melbourne?
Sure, after a civil war and a hard crackdown on Hungarian nationalism. Like thousands executed, tens of thousands in prison or concentration camps, etc.
Look, after our failed war of independence in 1849 over a hundred people were hanged (among them many noblemen and even a few aristocrats), thousands sent to prison (often in Austria, far away from home), with tens of thousands in exile. At the time it was considered a very hard crackdown, especially since it was well recognized internationally that it wasn’t a simple rebellion, since arguably the Habsburg side started the thing by breaking its own laws. Franz Joseph for example wasn’t legally a king (he wasn’t crowned, after all), the validity of Ferdinand’s forced abdication was legally questionable, and it was even more questionable if the king had a right to just abolish laws which were voted for by the diet and signed and proclaimed as law by the king.
In 1848-49 the Vienna court allied with the ethnic minorities in Hungary, and after the defeat Hungary was reduced with Transylvania, Croatia, and the Serb areas removed, while even the rest was directly ruled from Vienna.
All this resulted in a passive resistance by the Hungarian elite, and it had enough support from the general population that eventually Franz Joseph was forced to conclude the Compromise with the Hungarian elite. Part of the reason for that was that most minorities in Hungary (Romanians and Serbs) had their own countries outside the empire, and were naturally gravitating towards them. No amount of autonomy was going to change that. The Slovaks only had a tiny elite, because they had only a few cities and their nobility was thoroughly assimilated to the Hungarian nobility. (Kossuth, the Hungarian leader in 1848-49, had a cousin who was a Slovak national leader. I think he had him arrested once.) Even in 1918 there was very little separatism in the eastern part of Slovakia, only the western region (closer to Czechia) was thoroughly separatist. (This would change quickly.)
In any event, the Hungarian elite didn’t think Vienna was strong enough to break them, and if the emperor was to break the constitution, they were willing to fight him, as they did half a century earlier.
There were two major parties in the Hungarian parliament during the Dual Monarchy: the governing party (they were called liberals for most of the period, though I think later they were renamed the Labor Party, which had nothing to do with social democracy or anything of the sort), which supported the Dual Monarchy because of Hungary’s good status within it, and were fiercely opposed to any decrease in Hungary’s position, and the nationalists (usually called the 48 party as they stood for the April 1848 laws, which gave Hungary de facto independence), who were opposed to the Dual Monarchy because they felt (quite delusionally in my opinion) that Hungary didn’t get enough. They were only once allowed to win an election (ironically under the son of the revolutionary leader Kossuth), and they became probably the biggest disappointment ever in an elected government. They were mocked as His Majesty’s most loyal opposition, but were so ineffective that they were forced to resign after less than a year.
Okay, the vast majority weren’t allowed to vote (there’d have been a sizable social democratic party and a huge peasant party, probably the latter winning the majority; of course there would’ve been large minority parties as well), but (with the possible exception of the social democrats and of course the minority parties) they also didn’t support any diminishing in Hungary’s standing or especially borders.
Anyway, the two parties and most of the people would have united quickly against the emperor if he simultaneously tried to force Hungary into accepting its much smaller area and its reduced status.
Coalition talks in Germany have failed, the FDP liberals walked out.
Greens and Christian Democrats are making a big show about how close they were to reaching an agreement, and how irresponsible sabotaging that is. The Christian Democrats (including the Bavarian CSU) are such despicable cucks, these parties just need to die (which they will eventually, given that a lot of their voters are pensioners…but they’ll cause a lot of damage before that).
No idea what happens now, a minority government or possibly new elections. I just hope that the AfD vote won’t decrease if it comes to elections again.
I spent some time last year thinking about this proposition as well. What would it take and how would that be accomplished? The answer I came up with was fairly decent but I never wrote more than about twenty pages on it, since I only have so much free time. Anatoly, maybe a brief summary below could help you in your project, which can hopefully reach a wider audience than my efforts could.
In this alternate universe, the major diverging point was Brusilov having a major revelation in April-May 1917 about the long term viability of the Provisional government. He acknowledged that the monarchy could not be restored at that point, but also recognized that Russia would not be able to continue fighting the war with the current political situation in Petrograd. This leads to a series of events where he quickly mobilizes a number of units from his South-Western Front for the purpose of seizing the capital.
However, the old general is not a fool. The vast geographical distances and the timing involved means that if he does not have support from other quarters in the Russian Army, his plans will die in the planning stages if he does not gain support from other senior generals. On a meeting to the capital to discuss strategy (which from my research was in our real history a precursor to Brusilov being appointed Commander-in-Chief just a few months later), he approaches Kornilov, who was far more popular than Brusilov and commander of the Petrograd Military District. Kornilov is swayed by Brusilov’s logic, and is not unwilling to support the coup but he will not give his support unless his conspirator is willing to push for some major social reforms in the government. Brusilov is desperate to achieve any sort of successful push against the status quo and agrees.
Alekseyev is brought over when he realizes this might be the only way to keep the army from falling apart, since the conspiracy is too large for him to squash at this point and is going to have major consequences even if he could. He is also given a seat on the junta, along with the other Front commanders who are lesser personalities who go along with the flow.
The coup happens on May 25th, 1917 and the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet are both caught off guard by it. Only a small portion of the Russian Army actively participates in it, but the rest are bought off not to act by promises of land reform and better conditions in the trenches, among other bribes. Petrograd, Moscow, and a number of western provincial capitals are seized. Since Brusilov’s South-Western Front covers much of the modern Ukraine, may key cities are captured there as well. It is not a flawless or bloodless action. May rogue soldiers and various leftist revolutionary groups fight back, and a small number of army units do resist but in the short term they are driven back. Keresnky and his clique managed to arm a small clique of them, and some run off to continue the fight against the army.
Lenin is arrested, and he along with a number of members of the Petrograd Soviet are executed for inciting against the war effort. Since of course no one will ever see what Lenin is really capable of, he becomes a martyr to the Left, one of many. The junta begins to stabilize its rule, but a Civil War is brewing on the horizon and Brusilov and Kornilov are left with the stark realization that they can either fight to pacify Russia or fight the Germans, but not both. Under very tense circumstances they call for an armistice with the Germans…
I have more, and it actually goes up to the 1990’s. If you are interested I can contact you with further details through your website. Again, I remain respectful of your own opinions and if you want to plot your own path it is within your full rights to do so. Anyway, hopefully Russia can continue to reconcile with its past, as no nation can ever truly move forward until it does. May the grim centenary of the Revolution be that catalyst.
(My original username was blocked by the system, but I am back.)
His beloved wife was a Slav, and he stated: “irredentism in our country … will cease immediately if our Slavs are given a comfortable, fair and good life.”
He was also opposed to war with Serbia, stating ““And what, for heaven’s sake, would we gain? Some plum trees and goat pastures full of shit, and a bunch of rebellious killers.”
Serbian nationalists wanted a war and he was in the way.
Two are not mutually exclusive. He wanted a stronger central government in which his person wielded more power, but one organized on historical/ethnic lines, allowing Slavs to be the equal of the Hungarians. It would be a relative loss of autonomy for the Hungarians (who had much) but a gain for the Slavs (who had less).
Again, thank you for the information.
Would it have come to that? Would Hungarians have resisted if it was clear they would lose, they had no outside support, the world was on the side of Vienna, they would only make their position worse?
By the 20th century Hungary’s minorities were much more self-aware and capable of acting on behalf of Vienna than they had been in the 1840s (nationalism had been spreading). They probably would have been given a lot of support and may have acted brutally against the Hungarians. Remember what happened to rebellious Polish nobles at the hands of Habsburg-supported Polish peasants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_slaughter
IIRC F.F. had drawn up plans to station his own troops in Budapest to render resistance much more difficult. The plan was to take control and screw the Hungarians before he took the oath to bind himself to their autonomy.
The situation in 1849. The Habsburg army outnumbered the Hungarian one (and had better equipment), but just to be sure, the Habsburg emperor asked help from Russia. So Russian Emperor Nicholas I sent a few hundred thousand troops to help his “cousin” Emperor Franz Joseph crush the “rebellion”.
The ethnic minorities did fight guerrilla war against Hungary (except the Slovaks and the Ruthenians), so minority areas were lost immediately. They did act brutally, burning down Hungarian villages and massacring Hungarian peasants. Nothing on the scale of WW2, but it did happen.
The borders German Reader linked were quite brutal for Hungary. Historically Hungarian cities with a Hungarian majority at the time (Kassa/Kosice had an 80% Hungarian majority, Kolozsvár/Cluj was maybe 70% Hungarian, Nagyvárad/Oradea similar, Pozsony/Bratislava had a German plurality, but with Hungarian a close second), and I’m not sure what the ethnic map was based on. (Budapest German? In 1906? Seriously?)
So I think Hungarians would’ve thought that they had nothing to lose: the borders looked brutal (yes, we’d love them today, but that’s retrospective knowledge), our influence within the empire reduced, so why not fight to the death? Nationalism, in any event, is not always about dispassionate rationality.
I also think that the idea was largely mistaken. The Czechs wouldn’t have liked it much with historical regions of the Kingdom of Bohemia cut off. The Poles, Romanians, and the Serbs (and quite possibly the Ruthenians) would’ve liked to join their respective states across the border anyway. The only nationalities where it could’ve worked are Czechs and Croats. But since the Czech lands were also reduced in the map, it looks like it took their support for granted. When already at the time there was a growing pro-independence movement there. Only the Croats would’ve been satisfied.
Also the Slovaks and the Slovenes.
This is false. You need to visit Russia outside the rich Jewish inner-city enclaves. In towns under 1 million people the Church is the only functioning and ever-present institution.
The Russian Orthodox Church actively discourages “church visits” unless you’re willing to go the full fasting-confession-eucharism route, so this isn’t a valid metric.
(In fact, when people start “attending church” instead of participating in holy rites is the surest mark of a post-Christian society.)
Actually, a key difference is that in the late 1840s there were revolutions all around Europe (Spring of Nations).. Revolts tend to happen when there is a perceived chance of success – when it looks like the government may fall, when there is a war, etc. 1848 was one of those years.
With no World War I, and no mass revolutions, the Hungarians would have been alone, though the Austrians would have had German rather than Russian help in crushing them. F.F. had a very good personal relationship with Wilhelm.
This action was so popular among Ruthenians that it heavily increased the local Russophile movement in Ruthenian/Ukrainian lands.
The map was put together by a Romanian. IIRC the Romanians within Austria-Hungary were not desperate to join the Kingdom of Romania because it was poorer and less “civilized;” widespread cultural autonomy and freedom from the Hungarians by having their own province would have been very good for them. It would be like Albanians from Yugoslavia wanting to join dirt-poor Albania itself. I know for sure that you are wrong about the Ruthenians. By 1914, Ukrainianism was the dominant idea among them, and Ukrainian nationalists were treated much worse in Russia, there was no wish to join it. Ukrainians were famous for their loyalty to Vienna (called Tyroleans of the East) and having their own province, without Polish domination, was their dream.
So that leaves the Poles. They would have indeed been upset about losing eastern Galicia to the Ukrainians (their position vis a vis Ukrainians was a little but like that of the Hungarians vis a vis their Slavic subjects, though Vienna kept the Poles at bay more than it did the Hungarians). On the other hand, Poles were still much better off within Austria than they were within Germany or Russia.
So overall, Austrians, Croats, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Romanians would have been very happy, Czechs perhaps neutral, Poles unhappy, but only the Hungarians would have disliked the situation enough to possibly rebel, although the circumstances for a rebellion would have been worse than in 1848.
I’ve wondered whether the political path of West would have been different without the outside funding and agitation provided by the Communist Party, but, in the end, I think a lot of covert efforts (including those of the US) are more of a vanity that anything else.
: You appear to be ignoring the possibility that Hungary might ask for Russian military support if it attempts to secede from Austria-Hungary. Indeed, Russian military support could be a game-changer here. Plus, Russia was willing to ignore ideology when a particular alliance was perceived to be in its benefit–such as allying with republican France; thus, it might have been willing to ally with a secessionist Hungary–especially if France had supported it in this.
Also, even if Russia doesn’t help Hungary, there is the possibility of Serbia and/or Romania sending their own troops into the Serb/Croat/Romanian parts of Hungary in an attempt to annex these areas. Indeed, they could portray such a military intervention as helping Franz Ferdinand fight against the Hungarians, only to then feign surprise at the alleged desire of the inhabitants of these areas to join Serbia/Romania. Then, if Franz Ferdinand demands that Serbia and/or Romania withdraws from the parts of Hungary that they captured and they–with Russian support–refuse to do this, then World War I could break out over this issue.
In addition to this, even if Franz Ferdinand would be able to get through all of this without a Great War starting out, I am unsure that the various ethnic minorities within Austria-Hungary would be very happy for long in relation to Franz Ferdinand’s (semi-)absolutist inclinations. Indeed, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Franz Ferdinand’s rule initially results in euphoria and rising expectations among the non-Magyars of Hungary only for them to gradually become disappointed later on. After all, I am unsure that the ethnic minorities in Austria-Hungary would have been willing to indefinitely live under an autocratic government even if this government would have been willing to give them minority rights. Thus, I could certainly see a revolution eventually breaking out in Austria-Hungary in this scenario–especially if the Franco-Russians give a lot of support to the various minorities within Austria-Hungary.
The scenario we are discussing is if such a crisis occurred in peacetime – Franz Josef dies, F.F. takes over and implements his reforms. I doubt Russia will go to war for Hungarians in such circumstances.
Karl had similar thoughts about confederation as did F.F. but because he took the throne during the war he of course confirmed all of Hungary’s rights; his plan was to be limited only to the Austrian part.
This is possible but not for at least a generation or two. Getting rid of the Polish (for Ukrainians) and Hungarian (for Croats, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Romanians) overlords would be a big deal, with the “liberated” generation’s longtime gratitude. They would also be very preoccupied with cultural work (organizing schools, spreading literacy, etc.) which would take decades, and less interested in F.F.’s autocracy, which would be focused on political/military spheres.
@AP: “The scenario we are discussing is if such a crisis occurred in peacetime – Franz Josef dies, F.F. takes over and implements his reforms. I doubt Russia will go to war for Hungarians in such circumstances.”
I know what scenario we’re discussing here. Also, Yes, I agree with you that a Russian military intervention is unlikely in this scenario; however, it shouldn’t be completely ruled out.
Also, again, there is the possibility that Russia will give support to Serbia and/or Romania to occupy Serb/Croat/Romanian parts of Hungary after Hungary attempts to secede from Austria-Hungary. Indeed, this could trigger a World War if Austria–after defeating Hungary–insists that Serbia and/or Romania withdraw from these territories.
“This is possible but not for at least a generation or two. Getting rid of the Polish (for Ukrainians) and Hungarian (for Croats, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Romanians) overlords would be a big deal, with the “liberated” generation’s longtime gratitude. They would also be very preoccupied with cultural work (organizing schools, spreading literacy, etc.) which would take decades, and less interested in F.F.’s autocracy, which would be focused on political/military spheres.”
To my knowledge, though, most people in Austria-Hungary were already literate by the 1910s. Indeed, even the literacy rate in Galicia–one of the most backwards Austro-Hungarian territories–was 59% in 1910 (and almost certainly even higher than that in 1914). Thus, with Austria-Hungary already being mostly literate, I suspect that the various peoples of Austria-Hungary will begin focusing more on economic and political issues.
Indeed, can Franz Ferdinand deliver continued economic prosperity as well as good working conditions and a good standard of living for working-class people? If not, he could experience large-scale opposition to his rule sooner than you think–even if his policies in the cultural sphere are very good ones.
Also, how exactly do you put other people’s quotes here into boxes? Indeed, I never managed to figure out how to do this.
You select the text you want to put in a box with your mouse and then click on the ‘Blockquote’ button.
At least that’s how it works on my laptop. Not sure about mobile.