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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

What's the point being made here? Bombing bad, but in increasingly convoluted prose? Economical considerations bad? Does the author think the UK had the manpower to simply waltz into Germany and convince Hitler peacefully of his folly? Or the capability to sustain what was effectively a siege forever? The author wants to express indignation at something. That much is clear from the shrill tones of the opening paragraph.

That the UK and US relied on high-tech is not that odd. It is odd that the author contrasts that with Germany. They too did fight a high tech war (U boats, enigma, tanks, V1 and V2), but they couldn't achieve their goals with just tech. You don't get Lebensraum by bombing your neighbours. You need an actual occupation force. The UK was very much on the defensive, and had to resort to blockades and bombing to stay afoot.

Or is the point "to destabilise liberal complacency", whatever that may mean?

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The point is that modern war is an industrial process. The failure to recognize this led to the vulnerability of the US processes from Viet Nam through the 2000s' Iraq and Afghanistan.

The irony of this failure is that the US civil war was the first true economy-vs-economy conflict, with mechanized rail changing the scope and nature of conflict (while actual combat was still with napoleonic-class cannon, cavalry charge and the like). European powers mostly ignored this conflict, and so it took a while for them to understand what WWI was really about. Then the US took this lesson to heart, and didn't recognize that the only alternative for their adversaries was asymmetrical combat...a full circle as that was the approach the US had taken in its own war of liberation from a superpower.

The other, even more meaningful point about industrialized warfare is that it has its own Taylorist logic. For the European theatre, they built an enormous machine that assembled planes, filled them with fuel and tons of bombs, and then daily launched them eastward from the UK. Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war it was still operating at full tilt, with the allies seemingly unable to switch it off. In small (pop < 50K ppl today) cities of Germany you can find plaques in the Marktplätze indicating that the city had been flattened, bombed for the first time, in late April 1945. The machine had been flattening cities in order of importance, and had run down the list to the point where they'd run out of anything worth bombing.

It's hard to argue that any of those bombings were individually "unethical" (assuming you can accept carpet bombing cities at all) because they were bureaucratic decisions with no real room for individual judgement any more. That is a critical lesson both for wartime and for peacetime. We don't really mind if a company makes a worthless product -- it merely goes out of business. But at the state/strategic level it can be tragic.

The Germans could have avoided bombing entirely by not attacking their neighbors and trying to genocide 1/2 or more of the population of the countries they invaded to "make room" for more Germans. At any point in the war the Germans could have stopped it, but they didn't, they kept shoveling children in to ovens (or for slavs, bullets to the back of the head at the edge of a ditch).

All the German cities could have been spared if they had simply stopped murdering everyone and stealing everything. That they chose to continue isn't the fault of the victims who were desperately trying to conclude the war to avoid the sensless deaths.

There are moral grey areas in war but trying to find them in the desperate attempts to slow down and stop the NAZI genocide machine, by the victims of that machine who were still being killed by the millions, is a bit insulting. I would love to be able to put these great military minds in charge of the allies in 1940 and see how well they stick to their moral sensibilities as they become directly responsible for more and more deaths.

Not that I disagree, Germany unequivocally started it and it was unequivocally the best outcome to have them lose the war. Further, because the Germans failed to prepare for a counterattack (or even a less than overwhelming victory) from the jump, they had no strategy that could lead them to winning the war.

But there are 2 important points to consider: 1) The allies did not care about the Nazi genocide until after the war had begun in earnest. In the US, whatever anti-anti-semitism Roosevelt felt, it was clearly less important to him than losing the anti-semite vote by stridently coming out in opposition to the Holocaust already in motion (or even permitting the refugees from the Holocaust to come to the US). Stopping the Holocaust or the Japanese crimes against humanity was, for the most part, a consequence of accomplishing their other strategic goals, not a strategic goal unto itself.

2) The terms of the treaty of Versailles was unambiguously a major cause of Hitler's rise to power and the start of WW2. England's and (especially) France's desire to punish Germany led to a lot of terms that punished the people of Germany, but largely left the decision-makers relatively unscathed.

>The allies did not care about the Nazi genocide until after the war had begun in earnest.

The Wannsee Conference was January 1942, all the allies were quite fully at war with the axis powers. I'm not aware of any further steps they could have taken aside from total war and industrial incineration of cities (which, as OP's article bemoans, they 110% committed to.)

>Stopping the Holocaust or the Japanese crimes against humanity was, for the most part, a consequence of accomplishing their other strategic goals, not a strategic goal unto itself.

Not true. Ending the Holocaust was a war aim and plans were considered for operations specifically to disrupt it, but nothing was ever proposed that would be as effective as simply winning the war.

A lot of things we now recognize as actual genocide had happened prior to the Wannsee Conference. Kristalnacht, the Aryanization of businesses, the Babi Yar massacre, etc. You'd have to ignore a lot of out-and-out massacres of specifically Jews (in addition to a whole bunch of other war crimes) to think that the Nazis were not already fully committed to the concept of extermination prior to that conference. You should understand the Wannsee Conference as an effort to consolidate and scale up the extermination process, not as its birth place.

I don't have a hard time imagining the Wannsee Conference as stemming from a post-mortem (pardon the pun) of the Babi Yar massacre in particular, as the Nazis came to terms with the overall cost of doing a genocide manually.

The outcome of the Wannsee Conference was Auschwitz, an intensification by a factor of 1000 of what had gone before. The point is not that this represents the absolute beginning of German attacks on Jews, just that it represents the beginning of turning a death count in the 1000s to one in the millions, which is what we call "the Holocaust". All of this, and the serious strategic deliberations in real time of what to do about it, is a matter of historical record, which has been gone over quite thoroughly over 80 years.

Curious that Auschwitz was established fully 18 months prior to the Wannsee Conference[0].

There were a LOT of things the Allies chose not do (consider the Evians Conference, for instance) well before hostilities broke out.

I don't disagree that once fighting broke out, there was nothing to be done. But there was plenty to be done way back in 1933 when the first concentration camp was opened.

I'm also not denying that after the Wannsee conference, the efficiency of the Holocaust really picked up [1]. I'm saying that it's a mistake to believe that anybody in control was at all on the fence about what to do with all these undesirables, until they held a conference and said "why don't we just kill everybody?". They'd been trying for years, and it turns out that just shooting 17 million people is a lot harder than it sounds.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Holocaust

1. https://theconversation.com/quantifying-the-holocaust-measur...

>Curious that Auschwitz was established fully 18 months prior to the Wannsee Conference

No, it's not curious at all. It was established to exterminate Soviet and Polish POWs, only after Wannsee was it involved in mass extermination of Jews and other "undesirables", because that was the point of the conference. It didn't come out of thin air, there were certainly signs that something like this was going to happen, but it didn't actually happen until it actually did. This is all completely uncontroversial and a matter of historical record.

The point of the Holocaust is its exceptional nature, and the Nazi treatment of Jews prior to Wannsee was not "exceptional" by the standards of the time. The atrocities of the USSR and the late Ottoman empire had established the European benchmark. In 1937, in the Dominican Republic, tens of thousands of civilians were massacred by the government[0] and nobody did anything about it, despite the fact that it would have been orders of magnitude easier than winning WW2, because it was not considered exceptional. You can tell this is true because no one remembers it. What separates the Holocaust, what makes it exceptional, is the scale. And it is Wannsee where that begins.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley_massacre?wprov=sfla1

I have no idea why you are trying to carry water for nazis, but quickly: there were many genocides the nazis engaged in. When you say genocide you meant to say jewish holocaust. The germans also intended to kill all slavs, among many others. The Soviets certainly cared about slav genocide, no? The Soviets were part of the allies? This shows your statement to be not just false, but completely ignorant.

I'm not?

Just about every serious critique of the treaty of Versailles makes it clear that the way the war ended set up Germany and Austria for the populism of the Nazis.

The other important thing to consider is that while it's true that there was nothing the Allies could do militarily until quite late in the war, there was plenty they could've done, but didn't, either because of fears of communism, fears of lost business opportunities, or fears of encouraging more Jewish/Polish/Slavic/Romani/etc immigrants. Look at what happened with the M.S. St. Louis, or what role IBM played in the late stages of the Holocaust.

What I'm trying to make clear is that while it takes a genocidal regime to do a genocide, it also takes the apathy of the rest world, when the rest of the world still has the means to do something. A lot of narratives around how the Nazis came to power hinge on this idea that only the dedicated ideological core of the regime was responsible for what happened, and that simply isn't so.

> The point is that modern war is an industrial process.

And had been for at least 300 years at that time. Germany did know the 30 year war. It was a bit of a sore point. And it is obvious that you can't fight a war without industrial support. Economical warfare was also at least 300 years old back then. Neither is even mentioned in the article. It is also a much wider and more abstract point than the bombing of Hamburg. The article mixes ethical, moral, economical, technical, strategic and political ideas and ideology until the point is utterly lost.

> Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war

That's very much a hindsight argument that may sound rational, but omits a lot of considerations. The Germans kept fighting until the bitter end; why didn't they stop if they could no longer affect the outcome of the war? There apparently was a reason to keep going. Even after the capitulation, German troops made casualties. Pure revenge, paving the way for the troops, and stopping the approaching Soviet army may also have influenced UK/US policy, as did perhaps the idea that Germany really had to be prevented from rebuilding its army, a painful lesson from WW1.

> the allies seemingly unable to switch it off

They did stop bombing once Germany had capitulated though, so they did have that capacity. It was not an autonomous process.

The weird use of "liberal" confused me, too. It's more "liberal" to bomb than to have ground troops do the killing, because it minimizes your own casualties? No, that's just efficient use of military resources. "Liberal" might be holding on to the idea of minimizing civilian casualties. (Though, in an industrial production war like WWII, that might be a significant handicap. And it wasn't the Allies that started the bombing of civilians.)

So, yeah. What's the point being made here? It sure feels like some weird axe is being ground, but it's done so badly that I can't even be sure what the axe is.

To the extent that there is any historical continuity between then and now, the 'liberal' USA still tends to value heavy bombing as a way to condition enemy forces into surrendering. Something it has a poor overall track record of.

It seems to me like the author thinks being smart is “liberal” and also he doesn’t like it.

That's what confused me too. Is the point because somehow the word liberal is in both "liberal" (as in unrestricted, total?) war and liberal economics / politics that there's somehow a connection there? That's such a tenuous argument it seems incongruent with the rest of the article which seems decently articulated.

I've noticed in academia, as well as other places, that's it's becoming more fashionable to be anti "liberal", as in, against small "L" liberal values.

There's a sort of concerted effort to destroy the meaning of the word, or it's been co-opted by political organizations and bent to an extent that it's become meaningless.

To those on the "right" - the word "liberal" is almost a curse word, it doesn't mean liberal values (which many of them share) it means some fuzzy combination of "woke, democrat, evil, america hating".

To progressives, it's an increasingly inconvenient word as it becomes more difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously supporting authoritarian positions (censorship, consolidated power, militarism, embrace of public/private blurring, health dictates) while attempting to retain the mantle of liberalism that powered the "left" for the past fifty years.

So it's easier for everyone to just attack the word, this article is a great example of that.

It leaves us "classic liberals" stranded on a sinking island surrounded by sharks.

"The classical liberals seem much like the old Tsarists, happy to wax poetic about a regime they were incapable of defending or restoring."

I don't understand the point you're trying to make here - are you implying that liberalism is some sort of regime, or a bad thing that needs to be replaced?

Classical liberalism is a government, a regime, and it has been overtaken and is being replaced already. Hence why classical liberals feel surrounded by sharks.

> Classical liberalism is a government, a regime

I don't understand this point. Classic liberalism is a set of ideas that gave birth to many forms of government - are you trying to make an analogy? If so, it doesn't track very well for me.

> it has been overtaken and is being replaced already

I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?

>I don't understand this point. Classic liberalism is a set of ideas that gave birth to many forms of government - are you trying to make an analogy? If so, it doesn't track very well for me.

The government in America based on classic liberal ideas - to be specific, is being overtaken and replaced.

>I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?

It's not a good thing. But one also has to see why that form of government was overtaken the way it was. It becomes hard not to view classical liberals with a certain amount of contempt when they just advocate a return to a form of government that proved very fragile under pressure.

> a form of government that proved very fragile under pressure

Seems to have done pretty well [1], all things considered.

I see authoritarianism as an entropy state. It takes active energy to resist.

I agree that the US needs to put more energy into this.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-wor...

>Seems to have done pretty well [1], all things considered.

If being a democracy with elections is all that matters, yes. Putin's Russia fits that bill.

> ". The UK was very much on the defensive"

By bombing Hamburg or Dresden and deliberately targeting civilians?

Even France, Belgium or the Netherlands were bombed.

They even bombed their own troops during Operation Overlord!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy

https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_19...

Yes. You can be on the defensive and still bomb enemy positions

As I point out in a parallel comment - By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. Essentially providing a justification why any civilian population center was also a valid military target.

Yes. What did you want them to do? Deescalate? England’s absurd attempts to deescalate in response to Hitler’s aggression was what made WW2 a war in the first place.

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