Napoleon in Russia: Why some wars go on until there’s no-one left to fight
Two hundred years ago Sunday, Napoleon crossed into Russian territory with the largest army the world had ever seen; the following December 16th, the main body of his force counted just 16,000 men as it crossed the Russian frontier on the way out. ”Am I a Napoleon, am I a Mohammed?,” muses Dostoevsky’s murderer Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. What linked the legendary founder of Islam and the author of a legendary military catastrophe in Dostoevsky’s mind, I think, was this: charismatic leaders launch wars of total attrition by offering advancement to ambitious young men with nothing to lose. Wars of this sort continue until there aren’t enough young men left to put into the ranks. Frenchmen and Americans have fought this kind of war with suicidal abandon; all the more so should we expect such wars of attrition to characterize the Middle East during the next generation.
The strangest thing about Napoleon’s Russia campaign is what happened afterwards: despite the catastrophe, Napoleon was twice able to raise enormous armies, the first in 1813 (when a coalition of his former allies ganged up on him at Leipzig), and again in 1815, after he returned from his brief exile to Elba and lost at Waterloo.
As I report in a “Spengler” essay this morning, enthusiasm for the jumped-up Corsican lieutenant of artillery remained undiminished until there simply weren’t enough Frenchmen left to die for him. Roughly 30% of the military-age men of France died for Napoleon (and very large numbers of volunteers from the rest of Europe). After France replaced its lost generation, it bled for his nephew Napoleon III. Human beings will throw away their lives with abandon for the chance to jump a few steps up the social ladder.
The same proportion of military-age men died for the Confederacy during the Civil War, which fought until there simply weren’t enough men to replenish the ranks. 30% seems to be the critical number (although the Serbs managed to lose fully half their military-age men during the First World War). When you approach the one-third marker, the available pool of manpower diminishes rapidly. As I observe in Asia Times:
Like the Confederacy of 1865, France was bled dry by 1815 after absorbing losses on this staggering scale. It takes sustained heroism and resilience to slaughter a whole generation, and this heroism feeds on the hopes and dreams of ambitious young men. Napoleon offered his recruits the opportunity to rise above the ruins of Europe’s old aristocratic order. The men of the South fought – as Professor Robert May argued persuasively in his 1973 study The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire – for the chance to get land and slaves, even if only a tenth of them already owned slaves when the war erupted.
There was something distinctly Napoleonic about southern ambitions. If the Corsican artillery officer could become the emperor of Europe, then every corporal could entertain dreams of a field commission and entry into Napoleon’s nobility. The poor Scots-Irish farmers who fought for the Confederacy hoped to join the pseudo-aristocracy of slaveholders. And for these ambitions, both fought with nearly suicidal tenacity.
Again, the decisive consideration is that the men of France as well as the men of the Confederacy stopped fighting not because they were tired of fighting, or because their odds of winning were negligible, but rather because there simply weren’t enough of them left to put up a fight. Evil causes as well as good ones can draw on the impassioned enthusiasm and capacity for self-sacrifice of a whole generation of young men.
“Am I a Napoleon, am I a Mohammed?” Raskolnikov’s question should remind us that in the Christian West, indeed in the United States of America, we have encountered generations willing to die in unlimited numbers in the service of an evil cause. The memory of Napoleon no longer persuades Europeans to commit mass suicide. The memory of Mohammed, tragically, is a different matter.
Wasn’t it TWO hundred years ago?
Nasser tried to unite the Arabs under a single banner which did not work out so well. If anything the Muslim world is more divided than ever which is a good thing for Israel and the West.
The essay reminded me that Napoleon was in what is now Israel. In 1799 his army captured Jaffa. The French brutally sacked the city after capturing it and slaughtered the captured Turkish prisoners. However, the French army was devastated by an outbreak of the plague shortly therafter. There is a famous painting of Napoleon visiting the sick troops in a Jaffa hospital.
they had a good reason for that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jaffa
“To assume that China will fail because it is not a democracy is complacency stretched to the extreme of folly.” Yes, but probably it’s liberty not democracy that Chinese leadership fears more. And on that front, China’s culture could quickly succumb to liberal pressures as at the same time they learn how to consume and/or discard what they produce.
Technology is the holy grail and should be getting priority from investors for years to come. Futurists are better at explaining why. BTW, it is amazing how many futurists are starting to dabble in geopolitical debates. Traditionally, they seemed to consider geopolitics below their pay grade.
I’m not convinced that young southern male fought for a chance to move up the social ladder.Such a notion does not factor in other inducements in any case.
Burgeoning industrial economy 1, Slave fueled agrarian economy 0
Three quarters of southern military-age men fought, and of these, nearly 40% died. Except for the Serbs in WWI, you can’t find numbers like these anywhere else in modern history. It is a staggering number and requires explanation.
Soldiers are human beings, and will often fight for reasons that a professional historian might find inconceivably counterproductive or trivial. Academics often overlook such factors as–for example–the sheer unlikeability of a particular enemy. This is doubly so if said enemies are the eventual victors (and, inevitably, end up writing the history books).
Following the one of those battles in Virginia a Yankee officer asked a captured Reb why he fought. The, old, grizzled veteran of many a march with Stonewall looked up at the Yankee and said, “Because your here.”
The Confederates were fighting an invader, a voracious invader bent upon destroying his home and family.
They should have moved into the hills and mountains and fought on as guerrillas.
It would have been interesting to have heard any response by the U.S. Army officer to the rebel. I expect he’d have mentioned Fort Sumter.
The Confederate gov’t had given Yankee officials sufficient time to evacuate Ft. Sumter and other Yankee establishments on Confederate soil. Lincoln fouled the deal when he tried to sneak supplies and men into the Fort thereby lying and breaking his word.
To Robert Cheeks: The government of the United States was not obligated to evacuate a federal facility at the behest of a criminal conspiracy. Also, dispatching a ship, flying the flag of the United States, with supplies under the flag of the United States is hardly “sneak(ing)”.
BTW, nothing in my comments should be taken to negate my respect for the proficiency, sang froid and panache of the Confederate armed forces.
I’m sure there is some validity to the factors you mention. It was also the 19th century, the age of wooden ships, and iron men, as apposed to the modern American metrosexual. Dueling, mutually agreed combat to the death, to remedy slights to honor was still prevalent among males. There’s also the regional rivalries: The South also fought because the the North was down there. Loosing thirty percent of your military age males may be a factor in stopping the fighting–although it didn’t seem to bother the North Vietnamese–but I do wonder if the Federal reconstruction of the South had been, shall we say, more rigorous, would the fighting have continued or flared up on a classic insurgency model, as with Spain during the Napoleonic Wars?
“Dueling, mutually agreed combat to the death, to remedy slights to honor was still prevalent among males.”
The dueling culture was almost exclusively in the South heading towards the Civil War. Andrew Jackson infamous dueler but I never heard of John Quincy Adams ever in a duel despite his wicked tongue.
Don, there was an insurgency of a sorts in the South after the Civil War. It started during Reconstuction and was called the Klu Klux Klan.
Afraid I don’t buy it either. Regardless of what was said in 1973, you have personally pointed out that populations will only fight to extinction when faced with extinction in the first place, mortal or cultural. It is difficult to understand how thoroughly distinct the societies of the American north and south are without spending substantial time in each. David Hackett Fisher’s work is an outstanding primer. Nobody would fight for individual status past a certain point of possible success. It was only the impending extinction of their way of life that drove them to do so – a way of life much more complex than the single issue of slave ownership.
I would also recommend examining the distinction between Southern and Scots Irish culture as well. It is significant in its own right and the two cannot be conflated. I say this all from the perspective of someone who grew up in Virginia, with one parent from New England and one from Texas, whose friends span all groupings. Work like a new englander, live like a southerner, and pull out the scots Irish when celebration is in line – anyone who can understand this from experience has a better perspective on the closest America ever came to legitimate ethnic warfare.
Keep in mind that the perspective you have is from the survivors of That Late Unpleasantness. The large numbers that perished might have coloured those sentiments a bit differently…..’>…….
I wouldn’t expect a civil war casualty to feel like his culture had more in common with the Yankee industrialists or King Carter class than it does today. The perspective of total cultural distinction was more legitimate then than it is now.
I’m holding to the position that total war changes societies, not the least being the consensus that has the most bellicose interests often pays the highest price. We can’t ignore that German and Japanese societies were very much different after WWII than before…….
I am reading an interesting book about the Antebellum South, The Road to Disunion by Willam Freehling. If I interpret him right the non-slave holding soldiers of the CSA were fighting for their “herrenvolk” society. Equality among whites with absolute superiority over blacks.
For the best objective analysis of the ‘late unpleasantness,’ try Jeffery Hummel’s, “Freeing the Slaves and Enslaving Freemen.”
Only ignorant Yankees and academics could believe that herrenvolk crap. There is no doubt that white supremacy was as accepted as the air one breathed; that wasn’t limited to The South and didn’t end with The War. The Southerner leadership cohort seceded to preserve slavery and went to war out of self-deception and arrogance. The 90% of Southerners who went into the ranks of the Provisional Army of the Confederate States went to war to fend off invasion and because their friends and neighbors went to war.
Reading your article I can’t help but think of the utter folly of the current attempt by the Obama administration (supported by the Republican Establishment of course) to feminize the military by allowing (now encouraging) homosexuality and by steadily increasing the number of combat jobs for women.
Our loathsome and degenerate political class already has no basis for resistance to a more determined force such as radical Islam so hollowing out our protective institution puts us in danger in the long run.
So what was it that Douglas Haig offered the young men of Britain in WW1?
Except for the Serbs, who lost half their military-age men, none of the combatants came close to the 30% mark for Napoleon or the American South.
I believe what WW1 offered to young British men was adventure. Afterwards “the narrative changed” as we say these days and nobody wanted to admit it. Post WW1 Britain, under the shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution, preferred to remember the event as rank upon rank of hapless proletarians dragoooned to their death by bumbling aristocrats. So we remember it today.
I’m sure the same lust for adventure inflamed Napoleon’s and Robert E. Lee’s soldiers.
To an 18 year old carrying a rifle looks a lot better than dedicating the next forty years to working in a shoe shop.
There was also a sense of duty. My great uncle had immigrated here from Great Britain, along with the rest of the family around 1912 or so. He enrolled in college to study science/engineering, did his freshman year, then WW I broke out. He could have easily stayed here, but instead voluntarily went back to the old country and enlisted. Made it all the way through, including spending a year recovering from the loss of part of a lung thanks to a gas attack, and because they were so short of men he went back in, getting killed 5 weeks before the Armistice.
Still, the effect of WWI casualties on the UK was terrible. JRR Tolkien served on the Western Front and afterwards wrote: “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then … it was like a death … (b)y 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead”.
UK military deaths, at 1.8% of total population, compare to the deaths of about 6% of the white population of the Confederate states.
“Again, the decisive consideration is that the men of France as well as the men of the Confederacy stopped fighting not because they were tired of fighting, or because their odds of winning were negligible, but rather because there simply weren’t enough of them left to put up a fight.”
I don’t know about France, but the men of the Confederacy did, indeed, tire of fighting. As the Provisional Army of the Confederate States faced the Union onslaught in April of 1865 less than 30% of its nominal establishment was actually in the ranks. As late as the winter of 1864-65, the nominal establishment of Gen. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was over 80,000 men, yet only a little more than 28,000 were present to stack arms on April 12, 1865. There were still firebrands willing to fight even after the disasters of early April, but even had Lee managed to carry out his plan to join Johnson in the Carolinas, the combined army would have been less than half the size of any of the three union armies that could have been brought to bear against it.
The missing men were either hiding in the woods or simply had gone back home rather than continue the fight. As a general matter officers did not record missing men as deserted unless and untill the man was captured away from his assigned post by the provost or other legal authority or formally took the Oath of Allegiance to the US. Most muster rolls just have a blank for any musters after the man went missing. The Confederacy went so far as to consider censorship of letters to soldiers because of the plaintive requests from families back home that the men come home. The vast majority of PACS soldiers were subsistence farmers and there had been no one except the womenfolk, the very young, and the very old to work the farm and provide for the families’ needs since the war began in many cases and especially since CS conscription began in April of ’62. I know from my own family’s stories and surviving records that officers of units from the areas of Georgia overrun by Sherman’s troops simply looked the other way as the men left. My g/grandfather in Co. F, 48th Georgia Infantry simply shows in Henderson’s Roster of the Confederate Soldiers of Georgia as “Last on Record December 1864.” Most of the men of the 48th were from the area directly in Sherman’s path in the Walk to the Sea in Nov – Dec 1864. Likewise, his brother captured at Manassas Gap on the retreat from Gettysburg and parolled that fall from Pt. Lookout honored his parole and stayed home, the only one of the ten men of their family of military age in the clan community. Of those ten men, only three were alive in April of 1865 and only one was in the ranks as April began. After the debacle of Sailor’s Creek, he decided he’d seen enough of war since April of ’62, turned his musket upside down, found the Yankees, and got a meal. Consequently, the man who stayed in the ranks the longest is the only one who goes down as a deserter.
You’re certainly correct about 1865, and I appreciate the family anecdotes. But it took the South long enough. Some years ago I did a timeline of Civil War casualties:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF12Ak01.html
Most of the deaths on both sides occurred after the tide had turned in the Union’s favor at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
The most insightful moment in the Burns “Civil War” piece was the conversation between Burns and Shelby Foote regarding “Pickett’s Charge.” The ANV might well have been the most experienced and deadly army since the Roman Legions, and those men in the woods behind the Emmittsburg Pike looking up that damned hill had to know what the odds were. Burns asked Foote why they went on the “forlorn hope,” to use the phrase of the times. Foote replied that it would have taken more courage not to go. First, as much as I admire Foote, he was a bit of a Southern mythologist too, and some significant number of those men found the courage to skulk in the woods and not go up Cemetery Ridge. That said, most of them did go and I think that is owed to two things: predestinarian Christianity and personal honor. Most of the religious among the men, and most were religious if not necessarily churched, subscribed to predestinarian Protestant faiths and fundamentally believed that whether or not they died in a shoulder to shoulder assault on wheel to wheel cannons was in God’s hands, not their own, that the manner and time of their death had already been determined. Consequently, what mattered most to men who were serving in units composed of their family members and neighbors was being respected by their family members and neighbors. The very last thing a young man wanted was to have the girls back home know that he’d “skulked.” And even the older men were under enormous pressure to maintain their standing in their communities and, not least, in the eyes of their often very bellicose wives.
I have many of my gg/grandfather’s letters home. I don’t mind admitting that he was something of a “bombproof.” He was an educated, landed man, a teacher, and even a slave owner – one family. He didn’t want to serve and used every political connection he had, including even a personal appeal to GA Governor Brown, to get into some exempt position to avoid service. He failed and “volunteered” in the Georgia muster of 4 Mar 62 rather than face conscription. He was wounded in the Seven Days and came to know doctors and hospital administrators in Richmond and used his education and connections to spend much of the rest of the War on various administrative details working in hospitals, though he was in the ranks at Chancellorsville where he was among the units that formed the hinge upon which Jackson’s Flank Attack was swung and saw heavy fighting.
As the Confederacy truly did begin to rob both the cradle and the grave to put men in the ranks in the spring of ’64, he, after many appeals and protestations, lost his detail and returned to the ranks in time for the Overland Campaign. During the course of his appeals, he exchanged several letters with my gg/grandmother in which he talks about buying a substitute, then about CS$10,000.00, which he had available. I don’t have her letters – letters from home to a soldier are very rare – but it is clear she was having none of it. She was absolutely NOT going to have her husband “lying abed” while others were fighting for The South. He was KIA in Mahone’s counterattack at The Crater. She went from a relatively well-off wife of a man with some stature to the Indigent Soldiers’ Widows and Orphans list in the ensueing three years and, like so many widows, married a much older man of much lower social position in order to keep body and soul together and her children fed and clothed. As with so many Southerners, pride had one Helluva price, and, frankly, that side of my family never really recovered from the losses.
So, there is truth in the proposition that “it took them long enough,” and their pride caused them to accept tremendous losses. But in the end, they gave up. No doubt the losses were a major part of giving up, but ultimately, the men gave up the fight so that they could care and provide for their families and kinfolk. Academics can prattle about territorial ambitions and without a doubt some Southern leaders had territorial ambitions, but the Southern men fought for hearth and home and kith and kin, and ultimately the welfare of his family and his kith and kin came to be of more importance to him and he decided not to “study war no more.”
Wonderful history. I hope you plan to publish it somewhere.
Just curious, Mr. Goldman. What did marriagable Southern women do with themselves after the War Between the States, and what other effects did those demographics have on the South?
Mr. Goldman may have another answer, but I’ll posit that your answer is in the movie “Steel Magnolias.” The South became very, very matriarchal after The War. What often goes unnoticed is that even many of the men who survived the war were no great shakes. Many “heros” of the Confederacy never heard a shot fired in anger and hardly crossed the county line in their Departmental cavalry units – cavalry was the province of the rich since a trooper had to provide his own horse and accoutrement. The farms and widows of better men were easy pickings after The War.
Despite the “bite the bullet” myth, morphine and laudenum were readily available and many, many veterans were hopeless opiate addicts. Many more were amputees who couldn’t do the brutally demanding physical work of subsistance farming. For many years after The War the single greatest expense of the State of Mississippi was pensions and prothetics for War veterans.
The Southern woman married a man often from a different locale and often from a different social status. It can generally be said that she held the shattered South together while at the same time shattering the psyche of the men around her. That Dixie Darlin’ knows all about bein’ born and bred to be a decoration on a rich man’s arm – well, that should be aahm, the letter R really doesn’t exist south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I know that it is a toss up to me as to who would be the greatest contributor to my being hanged for treason; my grandmother, who learned of Sherman’s troops in the yard at her mother’s knee, or my high-school principal – both gave me some serious authority issues.
Very good point about the opiates. It was a massive problem and not only in the South. The Northern veterans had their problems with drug addiction as well.
Opium/opiates are currently being reconsidered as medication for the severest PTSD.
I had a commenter at my blog tell me that ALL the female opiate addicts he knew were sexually abused in childhood.
And yet the Drug War continues.
Any recommended reads on the matriarchy point?
There were a lot of family shake-ups and out-marriages that would’ve been uncommon before. At least four of my great-great grandfathers enlisted in far-flung Confederate states, and at war’s end were left high & dry in Atlanta (possibly hospitalised), where they married local girls.
This had certain loosening effects on social mobility, and even on ethnicity. Union draftees fresh off the boat to New York are a common story, but considerable numbers of immigrants (including one of my great-greats), happened to sail into ports such as New Orleans, promptly joined the fray on the Confederate side, and ended up adding a bit of unexpected European colour to corners of the South.
What linked the legendary founder of Islam and the author of a legendary military catastrophe in Dostoevsky’s mind, I think, was this: charismatic leaders launch wars of total attrition by offering advancement to ambitious young men with nothing to lose. Wars of this sort continue until there aren’t enough young men left to put into the ranks.
The young Moslem Man has more to gain. I’ve seen porno films of Jannat, and although the pedophilia thing is bad, the flowing rivers of wine and perpetual Viagra are strong motivators.
Frenchmen and Americans have fought this kind of war with suicidal abandon; all the more so should we expect such wars of attrition to characterize the Middle East during the next generation.
I appreciate your optimism; Israel may yet survive if there’s a reprise of Saddam vs. the Ayatollah through the 1980s.
At the conclusion of the War of the Triple Alliance (1860s-70s?) of Paraguay versus Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay’s population reduced from about 500,000 to 200,000, and there were only about 20,000 military age men left. It was a near total war of attrition, and as a matter of national survival, polygamy was introduced into Paraguay for two generations. Loss of life among military age men was considerable higher than 50%.
I’m well aware of the Paraguayan numbers. The Paraguayan business is a unique sort of mess, hard to compare to any European or American war. Most of the deaths on all sides apparently were from cholera. The casualty figures (both size and cause) range all over the map. For those reasons I’ve never tried to compare it to wars where we have relatively good information.
Before the Civil War, per capita income in North and South were about the same. After the war, the South’s per capita income was about half of the North’s. That’s what happens when you kill the best of the male population. It took the South most of a century to recover.
One might add the decline in “wealth” by a third due to the ending of slavery.
Yeah, there is the outside chance that the complete political dismantling of the basic institutions of economy had something to do with the decline in national productivity.
I’m an expatriate Southerner. My family used RS preference to get land in the 1795 Creek Cession lottery in Southeast Georgia. My sister owns a half acre and I own about 4 acres of what was once 5600 acres of Georgia dirt. That’s on the faternal grandmother side; the rest of the family, all landowners antebellum, don’t have a speck of dirt that goes back before The War.
The South has not and to my mind will never recover from The War. To the extent that some parts of it have recovered, it did so at the cost of becoming something other than The South. There’s not much that is Southern about Atlanta or Charlotte, and while the Dixie Dahlin’s are still cute, seeing them dancing naked for the black gangstas at The Gold Room in ATL ain’t exactly like the Dixie Dahlin’ on the pedestal of another day.
To your major point, it wasn’t just the loss of so many men; it was the loss of the good men. If one studies Confederate units from the early war, they are composed of the very best of Southern life; if not the pater familia, then at least the scion of the family raised a company or a regiment. The unit my gg/grandfather was in was the second in which his Captain had been involved: the first he armed, uniformed, and equipped and his son, KIA on the first day at Gettysburg, commanded. The second was a Georgia muster unit that he commanded through Sharpsburg despite the fact that he was exempt. He has a modest grave on old family property. The men who stayed home have the big momuments in the town cemetery.
The very biggest monument in the old cemetery in my home town is that of a man who hardly crossed the county line but is celebrated for his service to the Glorious Cause. He survived his arduous service and preyed on the lands and widows of the better men. The post-war history of The South is written of men like him.
The South became the land of the zero sum; somebody got ahead only as the result of somebody getting behind. Say what one will of the New Deal, but most of it was about breaking up the stupidity of the post-war Southern economy. It’s easy to hate Yankees for the way they exploited the supine South, but it was so easy; you only had to threaten Southern whites that they’d lose their sh*tty job to blacks and they’d pay you to let them work.
I love those mystic chords of memory. My ancestors are almost all buried in Southern dirt, some even in clay. Some of them, though, are buried in unmarked graves in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Can’t say I wouldn’t join another try on that Goddamned hill. But, that said, the very worst thing you could do for your family was fight in the Confederate Army, and those who didn’t, and those who they allied with after The War, spent a century exploiting – rape comes to mind – The South.
Thank you for your posts today and sharing your family’s history.
I learned quite a bit I did not know.
Good stuff Art. My people were border people and four ‘went South’ ending up in various service. The youngest died in a Yankee prison camp, the next ended up a bushwacker in the mountains of east Tennessee, the eldest served honorably in the 6th North Carolina Infantry and his company captured Yankee artillery at Culps Hill, (that damned hill). The youngest brother, Billy, was a veteran volunteer in the 85th Penna Infantry, serving on the N. Carolina coast. He re-upped and died on furlough while visiting his parents at Burgettstown, Pa. It says on his daily report that he ‘died of hard service.’ Indeed.
The two living rebels came home to Pa following the war and were not welcomed. One made it to Texas. My uncle, during WWII was training in Mississippi and ran into a kid with the same surname. The boy told him his great-grandpappy had come from Pa after the war.
Still: Vive L’Empereur!
Then there where all the veterans of the Civil War that moved West. One of the reasons that I always disliked the movie “High Noon” was that more that one outlaw gang that got the shit shot out of it by town shop keepers who were vets.
I should have added a reference to this 2008 essay:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JB20Dj08.html
If America’s Civil War had not broken out in 1861, the Union probably would have lost the war, and the Southern slave system would have spread like cancer through South America. If the South had bought time to ally with France under Napoleon III, who invaded Mexico in 1862, and Britain under Lord Palmerston, the Union never could have imposed a blockade on the Confederacy. The highly motivated Southern armies, which took casualties amounting to nearly 30% of military-age Southern men, would have worn down the North with sufficient materiel.
If the South had not seceded with a violent tantrum, firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the North might not have mustered the support for a civil war. The secession of the South was of no economic consequence to New England manufacturers who bought its cotton, and was remote to the Midwestern farmers who eventually won the war under General W T Sherman. Northern outrage against the Southern initiation of hostilities gave a military mandate to Lincoln, who had won less than 40% of the popular vote in the 1860 presidential election.
John Brown takes a great deal of the credit for the missteps of the South. His 1859 raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal with 21 men ostensibly sought to distribute the 100,000 firearms on hand to revolting slaves. It had no chance of success, but it persuaded slave-owners that their worst-case scenario was to have their throats slit by mutinous slaves. Fear guided Southern policy rather than rational calculation, and the war came soon enough for the Union to triumph. Oft evil will shall evil mar, as Tolkien said. Brown’s name still makes bile flow in the South. Blessed are the pre-emptors, for they shall set up the hostiles for a sucker punch.
Comments on this post seem to have spun off into the always interesting but not necessarily immediately relevant area of Napoleonic and U.S. Civil War history. If I may, I’d like to offer a thought on Iran.
David – Your AT column discusses Hitler’s error of declaring war on the U.S. Perhaps it was due to hubris or petulance or perhaps it was the hand of Providence, but I agree that it was decisive. Moving to current events, perhaps Iran’s refusal to even given the P5+1 even the mere illusion of hope during the recent Moscow talks might be a similar blunder and facilitate decisive action against their nuclear program and/or regime?
Of course, P5+1 are pretty good at supplying the illusion of hope themselves.
MarcH,
Let’s imagine that Joseph Kennedy had been president in 1941 rather than FDR. The Iranians are emboldened by the stupidity of the Bush administration, which placed hundreds of thousands of de facto American hostages in Iraq, and by the dreadful Obama administration, which opposes the assertion of American power as a matter of principle. I’ve drawn parallels between Iran and Hitler before.
I hate to say it, but JPK might be an improvement. As an old rum-runner he was at least grounded in reality.
I learned much from and agree with your comparison of Nazi Germany and Iran as both seeing themselves as required to act quickly and decisively due to deteriorating positions (I actually included your Iran analysis in a briefing to the staff of a U.S. Army brigade prior to a 2007 deployment to Iraq).
We’ve discussed Iraq before. I don’t think the US deployment there weakened us, as much as the way we used, or failed to use our position. Please consider, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq 2003/2004 is widely acknowledged to have intimidated bad actors (Iran, Libya) in the region so that they altered (or at least pause) their WMD policies. If, by 2007 to 2008 our forces in Iraq, four storied US Army and Marine combat divisions, allied combat formations including the UK Royal Army, innumerable fighter-bombers wings and many detachments of lethal SoF, were seen by US policy makers and the IRGC as hostages rather than as a threat to Iran, shame on us.
Speaking of Russia, (for once I am not OT
David and Spengler readers should see this: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/06/26/Obama-Offers-Israel-Election-Year-Platitudes-Putin-Offers-Strategic-Economic-Partnerships
Even Breitbart is starting to detect which way the wind is blowing from Tel Aviv — North.
Question to David: did Nazi Germany surpass the 30% mark of all military age men killed, wounded or captured by 1944? Or 45′? Although the American Civil War has many more discussion groups on the web, I know a great deal more about Barbarossa and its results than I do about the ‘War of the Northern Aggression’ as some still call it down South. It’s interesting that Putin was in Israel this week to dedicate yet another Israeli memorial to Jewish veterans of the Red Army. I don’t know if he and Netanyahu met with any living vets of that conflict still around in Israel or not, the media doesn’t say.
Napoleon wasn’t a simple Corsican caporal but a heir of a Tuscany old noble family
http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_youth.html
http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_youth.html
Napoleon was charismatic, he knew how to talk to his soldiers, and was one of the greatest tacticians in warfare
“Died of Wounds + Camp Disease, France Proper: 1,400,000 during the period 1792-1815, incl. 916,000 [65%] under the Empire.
■Total war dead among all Eur. armies: 3 million during the Napoleonic/Revolutionary Era [65% or 1.95M under the Empire?]
■Civilians: 1 million
-http://necrometrics.com/wars19c.htm#Napoleonic
-http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/society/c_education.html
http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_genius.html
-http://www.napoleon-series.org/index.html