Tannenberg book pt 1
Fallout reading club pt 1
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
As recommended by Phil Blood.
Drawing some parallels with the past.
Phil hates that, I don’t :)
So lets dive into a very very recommended book!
Russia might hypothetically have responded positively to a systematic German policy that was conciliatory, self-effacing, and deferential. p.21
Nah, don’t think so.
Zentrum deputies expressing solidarity with Catholic Poles, Progressives and National Liberals disgusted by increasingly overt anti-Semitism, contributed their voices to a negative chorus that maintained strong intellectual links to the Russian opposition. p21
Unfortunately nowadays the zentrum in Germany is losing voters to the Nazis in the AdF. Denazification should have been more thorough and frankly, brutal, in Germany.
The proverbial lieutenant and ten men could not really have closed the Reichstag, but parliament’s role in German foreign policy involved far more pointing with pride and viewing with alarm than systematic participation in decision making. Russia’s foreign affairs were even more firmly in the hands of an elite—an elite not necessarily susceptible to journalistic attacks on German intentions and literary suspicions of German good will. p24
And German foreign policy was and is in the hands of Ostpolitick Germans sneering at Poland and Ukraine and the Baltics. Or just bought by Russia like the Russian agent, Ivan Schroder. Even now the upper levels of German government, spurred along by corrupt interests like BASF (addicted to Russian cheap gas, btw where is the recession you predicted you genocide funders?)
Russia was in no position to issue direct challenges to any of the great powers. Her sponsorship of the Hague disarmament conference of 1899 reflected more a general consensus of the state’s military backwardness than an altruistic concern for international order. Russian military appropriations had the highest growth rate of any European power during the 1890s. After 1892 Russia consistently outspent France; after 1894 Germany too fell behind the tsar’s empire. But though Russia did move increasingly toward self-sufficiency in arms production, on the whole the amount of security purchased did not match the actual outlay of rubles. This reflected less internal inefficiency and corruption than the sheer size of the Russian military establishment—almost a million men during the 1890s, as opposed to the half-million or so kept with the colors by France and Germany. Russia’s extensive frontiers, the lengthy period of active service considered necessary to train peasant conscripts for modern war, and the slow mobilization imposed by an underdeveloped transportation network combined to generate a conviction that Russia needed the largest peacetime army she could possibly support. This in turn meant more money spent on maintaining the structure than improving it. p30.
The UK spends billions on an army that can’t do anything except kill brown people and lose wars to brown people. And battleships that can’t battle. Or sail.
As for Russia… read our upcoming book.
Britain was not merely sated, but saturated. Appeasement seemed by far the wisest course. This approach is historically congenial to imperial powers in decline. It reflected as well the position of the bourgeois-conservative elites that dominated Britain, and demanded global grandeur with limited liability. p31.
Well America isn’t sated as the post Reagan neo neocon idiots of the Clinton, Bush Jr and then Obama administrations showed. Ironically, perhaps only Trump’s convictions (can this sack of lies and hatred and filth and shite have convictions?) stopped America rushing into a war with Iran which would have been a hundred times more disastrous than the debacle at Kabul that Trump left as a poison pill for Biden. A war with Iran, which would be ongoing still, would have collapsed the world into a lasting depression but also massively fueled the Russian war machine with $400 a barrel oil. Ukraine would have been invaded and genocided with a distracted America possibly fighting China as fallout from its Iran insanity. The wars America should have fought, for Ukraine in 2014 and earlier for the Russian murderered civilians of Syria, weren’t fought because while America isn’t sated, it often bites off much too much than it can chew. And it always has eyes bigger than its mouth, in the words of Tony Soprano. Now America is gearing for war with China with the blue eyed white hair crop haired generals and admirals, especially Marines, clamoring for a war that would smash the world.
Bülow viewed international relations in a traditional context of alliances, balances of power, and national security. His concept of Weltpolitik was anything but a coherent program of economic or political imperialism. p32
So like Kissinger but a hundred times less shite?
To expedite the deployment of the remainder, railroads were being built in European Russia with all possible speed. Russian strategic concepts had correspondingly altered. p33
Russia only started building railways in Poland very very late. Poland was a Russian colony to be exploited and oppressed. The Germans weren’t friendly to Poles but they managed their occupied lands a lot better.
Image: Techpedia?
The above is a map of railways in Poland in 1918 and the below is the map of Partitions of Poland. Blue is Prussian/German. Orange is Austro-Hungarian. Green is Russian. You can see how the Russians starved Poland of railway development, in line with general neglect.
Image: Wiki.
You can still see the affects of Russian neglect and partition on the railway map of Poland in 2023.
Image: PKP map.
Even without the wars of the 20th century, Poland could have been as rich as Germany today if the majority of the country hadn’t been mismanaged by Russia for 150 years. Russia doesn’t build. Russia destroys.
In an age when all armies were trained, armed, and equipped essentially alike, the prospects for securing more than a marginal advantage in quality seemed severely limited. p34
And this is the Ukrainian problem in 2023. Now that the initial combat phase is over and morale has stabilised for both sides, Ukraine is fielding an army that qualitatively is little better than the Russian army. Both sides have similar equipment. The Ukrainians might be using their weaponry a little better but the Russians have more of it. The key weapon on the front is artillery. The Russians have more. Maybe worse artillery. But very good artillery. Artillery from 1950 will kill infantry as it has done for centuries.
The Ukrainian army is essentially the same as the Russian army, as the French army was to the German army in 1914. Morale in a war of attrition does not win because its metal from the sky and numbers on the ground that win.
If NATO was to intervene, there would be a huge qualitative advantage with air superiority (but not supremacy), much better modern equipment in appropriate numbers and sheer weight of trained NATO troops. Fresh troops.
Of course this would be mostly the Americans.
Just like in 1917.
East Prussia’s complex network of lakes, swamps, and woods offered excellent possibilities to well-trained, boldly commanded defenders. p.34
That’s the terrain on the Belarus border, especially north of Kyiv and on the east bank of the Dnipro, in Donbass.
What they were expecting was not a gentlemen’s war, not a repetition of 1866 or 1870, but an Armageddon in quick time, with events proceeding at the outer limits of comprehension and control. p.35
And this is the fundamental flaw in NATO planning. American war is predicated on Armageddon in quick time. In 2023 NATO can smash Russia out of Ukraine. That’s enough to stop the genocide and should happen. But perhaps NATO cannot defeat Russia beyond Ukraine’s borders if Russia doesn’t collapse in the face of being pushed out of Ukraine. Especially with America hoarding its strength to fight China in a war of soon to annihilated Taiwan (Ukraine is not a small island in the ocean but a huge country bordered by de facto allies). Does America have the stock to fight Russia? We know European NATO doesn;t.
Schlieffen was hardly isolated in his growing belief that the armed forces available to modern nations could be maintained for any length of time only at the expense of the economic, social, and political institutions they were supposed to sustain. p.36
Can NATO sustain war against Russia? Germany can’t and won’t. The left loves Russia, the centre wants business and the AdF Nazis will Ribbentop Molotov anybody they can. France doesn’t want to fight. Hungary is a Russian friendly traitor. Britain doesn’t have an army, government economy or society. So what, Poland and the Baltics and the Nords fight Russia?
And in this context Russia, combining tremendous reserves of human and material resources with a relatively primitive social structure, emerged as the most likely survivor of a protracted war. p.36
Russia doesn’t have tremendous reserves of human resources any more thanks to killing its population off and the genocide pact between Putin and Russia’s slave citizen population - I don’t send you to war, you don’t revolt. That’s why Putin uses criminals and the stupid, the poor and the evil, like Filyatev (he’s all of that), to fight.
Dustin Du Cane
But Russia has four or maybe more times the population it can mobilize than the Ukrainians, who are losing the war of attrition.
Dustin Du Cane
Russia has resources though it can’t spend them as easily as it could in the times of the Tsar and Stalin, what with Putin needing to bribe his slaves.
Dustin Du Cane
And Russia’s political and social structure is as primitive or more than it was in the times of the Tsar.
Bunkered thieves at the top, aspiring thieves in the middle and the poor and stupid at the bottom with the murder clergy serving power.
In his annual reports for 1906 and 1907 Ambassador Sir Arthur Nicolson was impressed by the “intimate and cordial” relations between Russia and Germany’s courts and governments—relations he ascribed both to the unusual skill with which Germany managed her Russian affairs, and by the absence of direct points of friction between the empires. p37
Chancellor Bismarck Merkel meets the Tsar on the eve of apocalypse war.
Image: Yevgeny Odinokov / TASS / Forum - August 2021
“Particularly on the defensive the Russian army “would render a good account of itself even against a combination of its Western neighbours . . . any material successes gained by the attackers would involve the greatest effort and sacrifices.” p44.
Or Western weaponry.
Ukraine won its Tannenberg around Kherson (?). But can it win its war?