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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony McFadden who wrote (34639)	7/19/2002 11:57:48 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Tony McFadden; Re: "The key to strong leadership [i.e. Churchill's] is to maintain this level of defiance in your followers regardless of the size of the defeat." By the time the invader has killed 5 or 10% of the population, it is impossible for the defeated people to maintain defiance. This is a fact of human nature. There are zero counterexamples in history, except with groups that are so small (much smaller than 1 million) that psychological statistics do not apply. Re: "Churchill, by truly leading, (lying, in some cases, about the reality of the situation) inspired collective defiance in the face of what other groups may have considered untenable odds." (1) In WW2, the UK was never even invaded, much less defeated. (2) The UK took 360,000 dead in WW2. Their population was something like 40 million. The percentage killed was around 1%, which is well below the 5~10% figure that is required to force a people to submit. (3) Britain was never in danger of losing the war to Germany. They only had one relatively close call, and that was when they screwed up by failing to begin the convoy system early on. Other than that, their being a US ally prevented them from ever having the slightest danger of being defeated. US production was about 4x that of Germany. Even if Germany had not made the mistake of attacking the USSR they would still have been defeated, though in that case the war would have ended later than it did (with hundreds of nukes dropped on Europe in 1945-46). Only people who fail to understand materiel, logistics and military production would have considered Britain's position hopeless. *How many British generals were even privately suggesting that Germany would defeat Britain? Zero.* Humans, like dogs, are a pack animal. The psychological consequence of this fact is that humans tend to revere their leaders in victory, and endow those leaders with abilities that do not exist. Humans also tend to despise their leaders in defeat. Given this strong psychological tendency, I would suggest that we only conclude that "leadership" won a war in the absence of a preponderance of materiel and other considerations. But in WW2, the advantages of materiel and production were all with the Allies. There is not a single category of military production (or population) where the Germans had even half as much as the Allies, even not counting the USSR. I've documented this fact about WW2 numerous times on this thread. The numbers were so tilted in favor of the Allies that the war was over in only 7 years. Great power wars between equally matched foes typically go on for many decades. This is a fact that those who have only read 20th century history are unaware. WW2 was not even close to being close. Bill Clinton could have led Britain to victory in WW2. Better examples of leadership (stupidity) would be stuff like Alexander the Great, where he fought against a superior enemy (the whole rest of the world) and beat them (for a while), and ended up being immortalized (when he conveniently died *before* his dictatorship collapsed). -- Carl