Comments on: Alexander Boot on D-Day

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:44:18 +0000

I think there’s a crucial difference, Luckylucky. The gods were believed changeable and beyond the ken of man, as well as to be in constant conflict with each other.

Modern ideologues’ certainty is their chief vice in comparison. Even the most pious pagan believed the gods might desert them. Communists did not think they could be deserted by the Dialectic; it was, to them, a fundamental part of the universe.

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 20:48:50 +0000

Scipio, I think that is the same path. In the past the gods explained everything; now it is a conspiracy theory or a “scientific” theory. There is need of something that explains the whole.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 15:42:40 +0000

Quite so, Marcus. I was applying the Philosophical Principle of Charity to show that even the most generous interpretation of the argument didn't work.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 14:46:17 +0000

Scipio, the Allies didn’t enter the Po Valley until Germany collapsed in Spring 1945. The Gothic Line could have held far superior Allied forces at bay for even longer if the homeland hadn’t been under attack from Poland.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 12:38:49 +0000

Thank you, Lucklucky. I was about to make the same point.

“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.” — Tom Clancy

Better the ancient mind, which saw the hand of capricious gods in the mad jumble of real events, than the modern mind that must press reality into the procrustean bed of one or another totalizing ideological construct.

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 04:13:22 +0000

One of the worst things people make — in itself a progressive behavior, not a conservative one &mdahs; is trying to extract meaning or narrative from everything. In itself it is a primitive behavior that gives us the capability to learn and extract conclusions about what happens, but it also opens up the doors of the terrible overreaching that gave us the murderous ideologies of 20th century.

Many things that happen don’t have meaning or at all. A version of events that makes sense means that all events were controllable and predictable beforehand. They weren’t. WW2 war results doesn’t make sense, because they were unpredictable. In 1940 the World War was just at that time a European War. The atomic bomb in 1942 was just a possibility.

There is chaos — lots of action, reaction — opportunity, luck. Ideologies and peoples are boats in the ocean of human history.

This kind of thinking that tries to give meaning to everything is also an extreme political vision of the world where everything is defined and controllable by the political world.

By: Contemplationist

Contemplationist — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 03:44:19 +0000

Holy $hit, this is the only version of events that makes sense. Light bulbs went off in my mind when reading this superb piece. So, basically, WW2 was a successful Soviet ploy to use Western useful idiots to conquer Europe.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 02:31:19 +0000

Yes, “he may have known when not to attack.” And I don’t say Kaisershaven was the easiest target. And MacArthur wasn’t great at everything — great at military rhetoric, great guy to administer a conquered province, great at amphibious attacks, OK otherwise. But there’s a lot to be said for invading Germany when you are at war with Germany. Invading France or Norway or Greece or Italy or North Africa didn’t always work great. Somewhere on the coast of Germany, I bet there was a weak point.

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 21:24:04 +0000

Alexander Boot seems not to know the Spanish Civil War air war, the tank industry, or the submarine number at vigil of WW2.

By: Marc Pisco

Marc Pisco — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 18:52:00 +0000

Bruce, if MacArthur’s amphibious attacks always worked, he may have known when not to attack.