Posted on 02/12/2023 10:19:02 PM PST by familyop
The UK prevails....... England was
Don't know how to process your reply. Sounds like you agree with me - but are then going off on an unrelated rant. This thread is not about Detroit or SF.
Regards,
I think that irishjuggler was making a valid (if rather shop-worn, to be honest) point about the "best" always being the ones to die in a military conflict (at least, in traditional conflicts).
There might actually be something to this commonplace saying about chiefly the unfit shirkers surviving and then dominating (or at least exerting more influence than they would have otherwise) in the post-war years.
Your pointing to total outliers and anomalies like Konrad Adenauer is specious and unproductive.
Regards,
Finish your cup of tea, oh great Carnak! By reading the tea leaves perhaps in your very finite wisdom, you can determine a way out of this quagmire that poopy pants XiJinBiden has got the world into. You’ve done so well analyzing me! NOT!
My point is that the hypothesis needs to be tested.
West Germany is an excellent place to test it.
The postwar German Chancellors -
Konrad Adenauer - not an exceptional case across the board, as the war generation was too young. Early postwar leaders tended to have been too old for war service, unless they were quite senior officers.
Ludwig Erhard - very much the German economic miracle guy. Severely wounded in WWI. He spent WW2 as an academic economist.
Kurt Kiesinger (in 1966)- The first ex-Nazi. No military service. Worked for Ribbentrop and Goebbels.
Willy Brandt - A war-resister. Ran off to Sweden.
Helmut Schmidt (1974) - The first with WW2 service. Junior officer in a Panzer Division. It took until thirty years after the war for the bulk of war veterans to achieve leadership, at which time the milieu of the postwar was already set.
Helmut Kohl - Drafted into the Hitler youth at 15, in 1945. No real service.
Wrong! Because of the Entnazifierungsprozeß of the entire civil and military population after the lost war - combined with a prolonged military occupation by the Victorious Powers during which they closely monitored the Germans, strictly censored the media (entertainment films, t.v., newspapers, etc.), and made sure that no extremism could develop.
An additional factor that "queers" our analysis: W. Germany was, for approx. 25 years, siphoning off the "best" East Germans.
W. Germany would thus be a lousy test subject!
A better test subject would be a country (or - in the case of a lost civil war - part of a country) which, after its devastating military defeat, was left more or less alone and allowed to recover on its own, without excessive interference from outside - read: from the victorious power(s).
So perhaps the American South after the lost Civil War would be a better example.
Before we stray too far, let's re-iterate the "hypothesis" we wish to test:
War kills off the "best" men. Those who remain will, for the most part, be the shirkers, queers, cowards, and imbeciles. This helps to explain the cultural rot which inevitably ensues in the wake of such a vast military conflict.
BTW: I assume that you mean that this "rot" would affect BOTH sides - the victor and the defeated, right?
Konrad Adenauer... Ludwig Erhard... Kurt Kiesinger... Willy Brandt... Helmut Schmidt
I am appalled that you haven't included the unforgotten Franz-Josef Strauß!
Regards,
To limit my casual sample I was just including German Chancellors.
Franz-Josef Strauß was never Chancellor.
In WW2 Germany suffered the highest % loss of men, as military casualties, in Western/Central Europe. Nowhere else compares. So if the thesis applies anywhere it should be in Germany.
Going East it was the USSR, by far, followed by Poland, but arguably the Polish sample may be severely skewed by its predominantly civilian losses on the one hand - the weakest die of hardships - and on the other the deliberate extermination of its leadership classes by both sides.
The Daily Beast has some Republicans too like Matt K. Lewis. Also the author Julia Davis doesn’t write about politics, but my guess is that she holds many conservative views.
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