The song we hear from our rulers is that America was built by immigrants. The other version is that America is a nation of immigrants. The latter does not hold up under scrutiny, but the former probably gets closer to the truth. The nation was obviously settled by people from over the sea and that settlement continued into the 19th century. The word “settler” is correct as most people who came over came in search of land, which is why there was a steady march west during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The last couple of decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th, on the other hand, were a time of high immigration. These were people headed for urban centers to work in factories. The new industrial barons wanted cheap labor so they imported it. It is probably true that the rapid industrialization of American could not have happened without the massive flow of migrants from Europe. It is certainly true that the newly minted industrial millionaires got rich from the supply of migrant labor.
By the second decade of the 20th century, the great fortunes of the industrial age had been built. Men were still getting rich, but they were not getting rich like Carnegie, Rockefeller or Mellon. There was also a move to reign in the super rich of the day by busting up trusts and forcing competition back into the market. Again, you could still get rich making stuff, but it was mostly by applying industrial techniques to narrow areas of the economy. Of course, the end of the industrial boom saw the boom in global finance.
The other thing that developed in the late phase of the industrial era was organized crime, most notably La Costra Nostra. The official narrative says it was Prohibition that ignited organized crime, but there were gangsters in America before that event. A better way to frame it is that urban criminal organizations were uniquely positioned to flourish in the era of illegal booze. They had worked out most of the problems that come with organized crime and so they had the people and structures in place to be rum runners on day one.
Prohibition era gangsters were cold blooded killers, for sure, but many were quite innovative in the crime business. Many of the techniques they employed to secure their businesses, territories and settle problems in their organizations are right out of the modern business school. The more famous gangsters could have been successful in legitimate business, but by the time they cam along, the big money from industry had already been made and the doors were closed to newcomers, so they went into crime.
It should also be noted that organized crime did pretty well through the Depression and the Second World War. Things got a little tougher in the post-war era, but the Mafia was still going strong into the 1970’s. The wheels came off for the Mob in the 1980’s, at the dawn of the technological revolution. New laws, but mostly new technology allowed the Feds to roll up the Mafia. The state had also taken over their rackets, like gambling and loan sharking, while foreign cartels took over the drug trades. Today, the mafia is dead.
Like the industrial revolution, the technological revolution has created some fantastically rich men. The difference is that the modern billionaire is most likely making his money from all over the world. Technology has allowed him to get rich because it allowed him to easily do business everywhere. The men who made the railroads were constrained by geography. They had to settle for being rich men in one country. Therefore, they took an active interest in their host country, often being very patriotic and nationalistic.
The new over-class lives globally so they think globally and that has brought problems unique to the technological era. But like the industrial age, the great fortunes were mostly made early on as everyone raced to apply the microprocessor to the big problems of society. Men are still getting rich, but the age of the instant billionaire are largely over. The SnapChat people are probably the last guys to hit the lottery with a killer app. The low hanging fruit has been picked. What’s left is the stuff that is harder to reach.
Another similarity to the industrial age is the role of immigration. As Steve Sailer has pointed out, the tech people were granted an unofficial waiver with regards to labor laws and identity politics. Up until very recent, we have not seen any pressure on Silicon Valley to hire blacks or women. They have relied on an army of helot labor brought over on visas or setup up in camps over in Asia. In many cases, firms have flagrantly violated the laws aimed at curtailing this stuff, without facing much in the way of scrutiny.
In all probability, there will be people in the coming decades who point to the microprocessor revolution and say it was built on the backs of immigrants. Our cosmopolitan grifters already believe this. As with the industrial revolution, it will not be entirely wrong. The more accurate way of stating it is the great fortunes could not have been amassed without cheap foreign labor. The initial work, the groundbreaking work, was done by locally grown pioneers who did the inventing and innovating.
The one main difference between this age and the prior age is we have not seen the growth of organized crime. There are Russian gangsters stealing credit cards and running various financial scams, but nothing like the Italian Mafia. No one has tried to organize tech workers like the mob organized Jewish butchers or the garment industry. The old mob used fear to tax legal business and fearlessness to monopolize illegal business. We are not seeing anything similar, outside of the drug game run mostly by Mexicans.
Part of this is due to the fact that most vice is legal. Gambling is everywhere now, mostly run by the state or state sanctioned enterprises. Booze is everywhere and pornography is on TV. Even prostitution is largely ignored by the state. The only illegal business is drugs and that’s run by Mexican cartels. There’s also that fact that there are many ways for a clever and adventurous person to get rich in politics or the shadier sides of finance. Crime simply does not pay as well as politics or banking.
That may be the way to look at something like the Clinton Foundation and, coming soon, the Obama Foundation. These are not explicitly criminal organizations, but they certainly play outside the spirit of the laws. Obama is out of office and prohibited from running again, but he still controls the Democratic party. The Clintons would be in charge, if not for the fact that the voters took their under boss out in the Tuesday Night Massacre, otherwise known as the presidential election. Even so, the Clinton Family is still a player.
In other words, the analog to the great mafia families of the prior era will be political organizations and operations that work the fringes of the system to rake in huge piles of cash for the people running them. Right now, the best way for a moderately intelligent person to get rich is to win a seat in Congress. Even a seat in the state legislature can be parlayed into a comfortable lifestyle paid for by insider deals and influence peddling. If you are not the sort to run for office, helping those who do run for office is very lucrative.
In one of histories great ironies, the English speaking world went to war with fascism and defeated them on the battlefield, but ended up adopting most of the fascists socio-economic polices. Similarly the US government went to war with the mob, but is now embracing the same ethos as those long vanquished gangsters. Maybe like the oxpecker, the tiny bird that lives off rhinos, human society will always have a quasi-criminal class that lives off the people at the pleasure of the people in charge.
“The men who made the railroads were constrained by geography. They They had to settle for being rich men in one country. Therefore, they took an active interest in their host country, often being very patriotic and nationalistic.”
True, even the scions of late phase oligarchical families who made it big industrially & government like the Kennedys, Bushes & Fords signed up for WW2. Once the US evolved into the last remaining superpower the upper castes no longer served in the military & the all-volunteer military became viewed as a place for suckers. Note that it was the draftee army who were blamed by inept administrations & the Pentagon for the long protracted failure in Vietnam, they were easy scapegoats, & by the time of the 1st of our winless foreign wars of late phase global capitalism, the Korean War, military was no longer fashionable by the upper castes & the US military largely became a default job for the lowest classes & disproportionately immigrant classes as it remains today.
“Right now, the best way for a moderately intelligent person to get rich is to win a seat in Congress.”
Except if you are a Democrat, you don’t even have to be moderately intelligent.
Even a seat in the state legislature can be parlayed into a comfortable lifestyle paid for by insider deals and influence peddling.
The solar panel scam is a clear example.
Terror is the new organized crime. The violent get the notoriety, but no wealth – just like with the Mob. The guys who run the drugs and protection stuff – they still do pretty well.
No it’s the health care racket, it’s beyond organized crime even.
If you’re not sure about the future, just watch/rent Wall-e, the Pixar film. They’ve been right so far. Just replace “cheap foreign labor” with “robots”.
As global living standards rise, cheap slave labor will be harder to come by. What actually remains as places like China, India, and Mexico become too expensive will be workers in other parts of the world who are too stupid, too violent, too criminal to do useful things. That means robots, and lots of them. There’s already a sense that robots will have to be taxed like labor in order to subsidize the welfare state.
Read an article some time ago of a New York writer that wax nostalgia for the mafia. Seems their family store was in jeopardy of being lost to a con- man.
Local Mafia was employed, con-man disappeared = problem solved.
Much easier and cheaper than lining the pockets of some local politician.
Most likely why the mafia is no more . Too much competition
“…but ended up adopting most of the fascists socio-economic polices.”
Uh, you sure about this ZMan? You might want to check your facts. German NSDAP social and economic policies transformed a ruined country in 1933 into an economic powerhouse within five years, raising living standards and giving hope to a people who had been thoroughly looted by a weak and corrupt Weimar regime. The NSDAP actually cared about its constituents and enacted and enforced policies that made their lives better. Comparing that to our modern globalist economy, which is a full-on asset-stripping and looting operation, does a great disservice to what the Germans accomplished in less than a decade durng the 1930s.
haha i bet you upvoted yourself!
the nsdap did a fair amount of asset stripping and looting themselves. still, a humorous tale…
The NSDAP were not Catholic Authoritarians determined to impose the status-quo ante: a stasis ridden corporatist society with rigid hierarchy and the primacy of the Church and the Aristocracy. See Juan Peron, Alberto Salazar, and Francisco Franco. Ironically Mussolini was too much of a futurist to qualify as full Fascist in that sense.
Rather they had the good luck to inherit German rather than Portugese or Italian or Russian workers, stopped paying War Reparations, and had a massive military buildup. Reagan’s military spending sopped up a lot of left-over Carter era unemployment, the late Stephen Ambrose gave a lecture on New Orleans cable access TV in which he noted that New Orleans unemployment went from 70% of adults in 1940 to about 1% in 1942. The Higgins Boat Company alone operated three factories that had three 8 hour shifts, with onsite day care and medical facilities. Anyone who was able-bodied could find good work. If they weren’t drafted first.
Eventually however military buildups cease. There is either enough stuff to intimidate the enemies (the smart play) or the war begins and then finally ends. The story of the end of military spending is one of boom-bust: Reagan was followed by Bush; the mini depression of 1947-48, etc. The Nazis certainly employed a lot of people but how sustainable that could have been is pretty questionable. They could have simply defaulted like the Hapsburgs did for centuries, and found willing lenders (at higher prices) but how that would translate into domestic employment was an open question. Part of Hitler’s desire for conquest to the East was to create a giant slave empire that would pay for all the stuff he promised Germany. Which sowed the seeds of his own destruction.
Patton was a skilled tactician, there was a reason his contemporaries who knew him very well — as his West Point classmates — did not follow his advice. Ike “the dummy” who wrote Crusade in Europe (an engaging though dry read) noted that Napoleon’s stock fell when military historians realized that he faced coalition forces. Ike makes great mention of the logistics that underpinned Allied Victory and constantly constrained action in: North Africa; France; and the advance into Germany. The same lack of supply would have haunted allied forces (the British would likely have thrown Churchill out and refused to fight so bled-dry were they) as it did Germany. By this time Russian factories were churning out lots of tanks (better than ours too); planes; artillery etc. Nor was Zhukov an idiot either.
George Marshall was believed by those around him to be the best military man in the Army, and he was needed to ride herd on FDR and Congress; Ike the second best and then Patton and MacArthur coming in fourth. Ike and Marshall both held that as a practical matter there was simply no way to supply a US army into Russia — and defeat Japan at the same time. Ike in Crusade in Europe also notes the manifest difficulties in prosecuting war against Russia — no roads to speak of, no rail lines, Germany itself shattered with no transport and needing emergency assistance as did most formerly occupied countries. I highly recommend the book particularly the portrait he paints of the US military as it existed in Dec. 1941 — basically with no real transport or supply mechanism at all — like Sherman, Ike was at heart a logistics man.
Bottom line, America in 1945 was not willing to spend a couple more million American lives to free Eastern Europe and figured we had done enough.
0. American & USSR armies roughly equal in number on VE Day.
1. Everyone looks at the map and assumes an Allied invasion of Russia meant marching into the teeth of the Red Army from west to east sort of like Napoleon & Hitler did, but with resistance starting in Berlin. Yep, that would be a tough nut though I think Patton was right and that it could be done that way.
2. Thing is, why would we march cross-wise against all those N/S river systems when we had a humongous amphibious capability, as was proved with the invasion of Normandy and also in the Pacific?
3. Why not hold on the Red Army’s belt buckle with a portion of or forces starting in Berlin and launch an amphib operation up through the Black Sea so as to utilize those (well developed for commerce) river systems in UKraine & Russia west of the Urals? Now, the log issue is one of broad flowing riverine highways instead of mud track running cross-wise to the line of advance. A similar & smaller amphib operation in the Baltic to close off the route along the shore of the Baltic. So now American & allied forces are supplied via Baltic ports, not overland from English Channel ports. All supported by naval aviation (Black Sea) and US Army Air Corps B17 & B29s flying out of NW Iran, Denmark, and the German-held area around Riga.
4. The primary mission of the amphib operation(s) up the Don, Volga, Dneper, and Dnester (and down the Oder, Vistula, & Dvina) would not be conquest, but merely to cut the supplies going to the Red Army in central Europe and to cut the Red Army’s line of retreat back east. Control the big rivers & river crossings, cut bridges, blast railroad infrastructure and whatnot.
5. The Red Army would truly be in a pickle and I expect a huge problem dealing with all the prisoners that would give up the fight in the face of starvation, exhausted fuel, and exhausted munitions.
6. At the very least, the USSR could be pushed back to pre-war borders, if not further east after liberating the Baltics, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Caucasus. With special emphasis on depriving Russia of Black Sea access.
Hitler outlined the future almost exactly what he prescribed in Mein Kampf as it transpired in 1940. Germany wanted restitution of all the colonies & European provinces taken from them by the Versailles Treaty plus a few cherries on top like the Belgian Congo (quite a coveted bauble in the 1940s after diamonds were discovered there). Back channel negotiations were enacted with Britain as France fell & the retreat to Dunkirk with its impending doom for the British empire on the near horizon, but Churchill’s ascension was the X-factor then. Rommel was livid as his panzers were halted at the Dunkirk outskirts, had he proceeded he would’ve destroyed the remaining Allied forces with 400,000 instant Allied prisoners casualties. Master diplomat negotiator Churchill played the 3rd Reich for time to evacuate the British army without which they could sustained a British defense & eventual European invasion & reconquest. It was bluff poker in 1940 at the highest levels, the Alllies gambling that the British navy alone could halt a German invasion & the Germans gambling the British would settle & piece off a small portion of its then extensive empire for an Axis victory privilege.
I’d like to add that I’m not unsympathetic to the classic Fascists, they at least saw a model that had provided stability and a sense of purpose and was part of their latin authoritarian heritage. They were not futurists like Mussolini or Neo Roman revivalists like Hitler or hideous tyrants like Stalin bent on being the most murdery Tsar ever.
Most essentially wanted to be the Duke of Milan. And there were far worse things in Europe than the Duke of Milan. As models go, it was a hell of a lot better than most of the alternatives. Certainly better than foreign and unnatural Communism to a Latin Catholic country.
IDK, the DNC, the Democrat donors and media sure are acting like a mafia. It’s all inside stuff… everyone is married to one another…. huge amounts of graft and collusion, fraud, intimidation and money. Lots of money…. and for now…. they are ALL above the law. No one can touch them cause they run the place. Like NYC back in the day.
Among currently fashionable “crimes”, I would include the charity- fundraising scam, which would also include as a subvariety, the political fundraising advisors. Then the is the investment Pump-n-Dump stock venture. And of course all the telemarketing and robocall scams, many of which seem to be rum by South Asians.And also the whole field of Diversity shakedowns, PUSHed by the rear-end Jesse Jackson.
I did some posts on the think tank rackets. It’s basically money laundering. Rich guy X can’t bring his favorite pol, but he can give to a think than that happens to employ friends and family of the pol. Alternatively, the think tank shakes down rich guys in exchange for pumping out their agit-prop and helping the favorite pol write legislation. The most cynical variety don’t actually do much of anything, but they get plenty of suckers who want to feel like insiders.
Magazines like Mother Jones and National Review run the cruise scams where they charge triple the normal rate for a cruise, in exchange for having their writers rub elbows with the guests. The staff of these rags hates these things, but it’s part of being a whore.
General Smedley Butler would have agreed with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
My understanding is that organized crime moved on from even drugs because there was so much more money to be made in hacking/cybercrime. Not exactly an unbiased source but man they throw around some big numbers:
https://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/reports/rp-economic-impact-cybercrime2-summary.pdf
I of course agree you can’t make money on a numbers racket when you’re competing with Powerball.
“If your parents came over on the Mayflower, if you’ve got a nation — you didn’t build that! Immigrants made that happen!”
Making a lot of money will tend to be a matter of providing services on a large scale or in finding a way to skim a little off of the transfers of things between parties. Making things will be risky because someone may be able to beat you at your own game without government protection. I think, or rather hope that the ability to get rich in politics is a phase we are going through. It could be that the administrative managerial state that we hate so much could end up standardizing the interactions between government and business to the point that those interactions become cookbook like how case management in hospitals has practically done away with physician initiative in patient care. Like the doctor, the politician will sit back and watch the nurses do all the care, the pharmacy order the meds, and he documents all this on a computer that will be available to consult when he gets sued. Not much incentive to stick around.
Most people tend to tolerate corruption as long as the plates keep spinning (rising tide lifts all boats sort of thing). This will continue until wealth derived from foreign-based labor can no longer be consumed in the US via the promise of a future payback. What happens when they figure out that they’re not getting anything back? You can’t exactly walk across the ocean to complain. Universal scamming is the last vestige of a dying civilization.
There have been attempts at “organizing” tech workers – with calls to unionize . For the most part – they get extremely limited traction, with only the most slacker level workers even giving them an audience. I have worked in high tech for 20 years now – and while there is definitely a population of imports – they’re not predominant. At least not where I have worked – which is in hardware and in “internet” companies.
The call to unionization in tech falls on deaf ears because at least among the start up crowd – there is a definite realization that success is built on brains and hard work. And while there are often false promises of getting rich thru IPO’s and stock offerings – the mature people recognize that is a gamble and a risk – and act accordingly.
There is little sympathy for calls to unionization in the high tech world from what I have seen. This probably also has something to do with the fact that jobs that end up being drudgery – get automated in some form or fashion. So there is no “underclass” of workers doing rote labor thinking they somehow deserve to be paid CEO wages.
When the mob went to unionize the kosher butchers, they got little resistance. It’s amazing what people will do after a beating.
Butchers, or shochetim (the guys who slaughter the animals)?
Tommy Lucchese figured out that the kosher chicken butchers union operated like a secret society. So, he bullied his way into controlling the union, this controlling a key node in the meat packing business. This let him control a small union to control the rest of the labor force. He then levered this into the garment industry, as truck drivers are truck drivers.
It helps that many of the shot caller gangsters of the era were Jews themselves. The idea that the Italians were pushing the Tribe around in the same era that the Tribe was throwing WASPs out of their ultimate position in society is just another eposode of revisionism and pop history.
Murder Inc. had more Jewish than Italian hit men. Though almost all were either one or the othet.
(((Who))) founded, developed and still run Hollywood today? That’s why you have ”mobsters are Italian” sterotype.
Can you reveal more about your work situation? I have worked in the tech sector (hardware and software) for almost 30 years–large, global multinational corporations which we all know and love /s/. I work in the trenches of the technology, i.e., not in the softer sides of tech companies like marketing, finance, or HR.
My experience is the polar opposite of yours. I rarely encounter a white person anymore. On the hardware side maybe 5%-10% of the people who do the actual tech work are white, 90% are Asian/Indian/MENA, and a few “other” just for good measure. Whites are more common on the software side and in smaller companies, but are still a distinct minority. H1B visa holders are absolutely predominant in all tech work in the US.
with the commensurate decline in quality of work
I worked in the Silicon Valley the last 20 years & can tell you the H1N visa program is a leveraged scam in the guise of globalism. It’s the the cheap skilled tech scam what am that put hundreds of thousands of Americans out of high-paying tech jobs & reinforced the advent of the Gig Economy & Right to Work scams that made employees disposable & the eventual ownership Society scam that disenfranchised the working class & made the oligarchy so much richer..
Asians (including Indians) outnumber whites in Silicon Valley. Thanks to H1-B program. Many articles have been written covering the economic reality of the H1-B program *depressing* salaries for everyone in tech (except those who hit the jackpots).
Meant to include this URL. one of many.
http://www.siliconvalleyoneworld.com/2015/04/20/demographers-asians-now-outnumber-whites-in-silicon-valley/
Crime simply does not pay as well as politics or banking.
You’d be a better writer if you didn’t repeat yourself three times in one sentence. :-/
Even on the low end, politics has been feather bedded to such a high level.
Isn’t a congressman’s pension around $180,000 for life and that for serving just 2 years? Let alone what they can steal and swindle and then get sweet heart positions when they leave.
The old stories how Truman was broke when he left office or Nixon’s financial problems seem quaint. Not that I feel the least bit sympathy but look at the high plains grifters we have now. Even that perve Dennis Hastert had millions of which he used some for hush money.
I was under the impression that you had to serve 5 terms in congress before you got the pension. It was quite a while back that I herad that though.
My mistake on that,still better than any other private sector of course.
CRS, June 13: Members of Congress are eligible for a pension at the age of 62 if they have completed at least five years of service. Members are eligible for a pension at age 50 if they have completed 20 years of service, or at any age after completing 25 years of service. The amount of the pension depends on years of service and the average of the highest three years of salary. By law, the starting amount of a Member’s retirement annuity may not exceed 80% of his or her final salary.
“Maybe like the oxpecker, the tiny bird that lives off rhinos, human society will always have a quasi-criminal class that lives off the people at the pleasure of the people in charge.”
You taken it down one more level than necessary. Human society will always have a criminal class that lives off the people at the pleasure of the people in charge because it IS the people in charge.
criminals and politicians are just two sides of the same coin.
Remember in the Godfather that it was their ultimate goal to go “legitimate”
and get one of their own as a senator or better.
In Hillary’s case, the same side.
classic!
It’s truly a shame that Mammon has displaced all other gods, thus creating conditions that make it extremely difficult to persuade the young that honesty truly is the best policy.
The people observe the gods of their ruling elite. When your elite is largely Jewish, you worship Mammon. You can have the old norms of gentility and forthright dealing back only when the grifter elites are displaced.
The decline of communities also killed the Mob. If nobody’s from anywhere, and nobody stays there, what’s the point of organized crime in “the old neighborhood”? NOT saying the Mob, or the IRA, or what have you, was *good,* but they did base a lot of their appeal on “helping” their community. What can Vito from Mulberry Street do for the community these days?
To piggyback on your point, there are certainly different kinds of organized crime. Organized crime runs both West Baltimore and Providence, one is a disaster, the other is a perfectly nice place to live.
if you are a “bear”
A gang is but a government in adolescence.
Yes, Providence has been run by the successors to Patriarca and it is a pleasant place to live in many respects.
But, what mafia “family” runs West Baltimore? I wasn’t aware of anything more organized than the typical black street gangs (e.g. Bloods, Crips, countless gangs on the southside of Chicago) one finds in most large American cities.
This is precisely what I meant by different kinds of organized crime. Want a nice place to live? Get yourself an Italian mafia. Want anarchy? Go with typical black street gangs.
On another note, the WASP mob aka Wall Street is really starting to tank it when it comes to running the show.
“In one of histories great ironies, the English speaking world went to war with fascism and defeated them on the battlefield, but ended up adopting most of the fascists socio-economic polices.”
The US Government worked with Italian Mafia to replace Mussolini’s fascists in Italy, to take over running the nations’ bureaucracy and infrastructure so the Allies did not have to. I believe the OSS also worked with them to in their covert operations they conducted as well, because, hey, criminals are pretty good at organized hiding and getting about, and have connections Then you have Operation Paperclip, where the US recruited Nazi scientists and war criminals to help them in the Cold War with the USSR.
I’d bet the farm we and other nations made even more dirty deals with criminal elements, besides selling out Eastern Europe to Stalin in order to save the Western allies from more casualties. Churchill was so bloody single-minded in wanting to defeat Hitler, that he was blind to the Faustian pact he agreed to until it was too late. All those deals resulted in future consequences that made all the gains won in WWII with so much blood and treasure all but negated.
So the question is, does war make government and criminals allies, or do governments initiate war to justify acting like a criminal? Hard to tell.
I’m no FDR fan, but in early 1945 the Red Army was in full control of E Europe and Japan still held most of Asia. So aside from launching WWII 1/2 against Russia as a de facto ally of Japan, there was little that could have been done for E Europe at that time. By the end of 1945 following the surrender of Japan, continuing the war against the USSR to free E Europe would have likely resulted in the revolution in the US that so many elite fellow-travelers were so fervently working towards.
Re Churchill’s single-mindedness, the correlation of forces was very different in 1940 – 41. Don’t forget that Stalin was Hitler’s ally until 6/22/41 and provisioning German the German war machine. Like during most of WWI, the US bankers and industrialists were profiting from aiding the British Empire but the US was officially neutral. Also, we now know that Stalin was making back-channel offers to temporarily buy Hitler off. So any wavering by Churchill could have resulted in Stalin backing off the fatal pressure on the Ost Front to refocus Hitler on England.
de facto allies, 1945?! or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War_(1945)
Karl;
Look at the date of the invasion. My point was that had we gone to war with the USSR in early-to-mid 1945 to liberate E Europe from the Red Army, or threatened or even hinted at it, the Russian 8/9/45 offensive against Japan’s empire in mainland Asia would never have happened for good and obvious reasons. Thus the geo-strategic danger to Japan would have been greatly reduced to our detriment by pushing for E Europe’s liberation.
The Japanese general staff had plans to transfer most of their China garrison (which was most of their army) to Japan proper to repel our planned invasion. Their plan was to use these forces to make any invasion so costly that we’d have to make a deal to leave their empire intact. As shown by the results in Okinawa, they may well have succeeded under this scenario. The Red Army’s threatened and then actual invasion negated this very important threat.
Don’t forget, until the 7/16/45 Trinity Test, nobody knew if the A Bomb would actually work. So there were many geo-strategic reasons to turn a blind eye to the plight of E Europe, unfortunately.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Heard that a lot in the WW2 era and the years following.
General George Patton’s opinion of the fighting capability of the commies in 1945, in conversation with U.S. Secretary of War Robert Patterson:
“I understand the situation. Their (the Soviet) supply system is inadequate to maintain them in a serious action such as I could put to them. They have chickens in the coop and cattle on the hoof — that’s their supply system. They could probably maintain themselves in the type of fighting I could give them for rive days. After that it would make no difference how many million men they have, and if you wanted Moscow I could give it to you. They lived on the land coming down. There is insufficient left for them to maintain themselves going back. Let’s not give them time to build up their supplies. If we do, then . . . we have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them, but we have failed in the liberation of Europe; we have lost the war!”
It makes you wonder….
Patton talked a lot.
The Red Army used a lot of expedient methods, and its men often operated on a shoestring. However, the Soviet supply system was enough to take them from the outskirts of Moscow to Berlin, and to sustain advances of 60km per day over multiple days, on many occasions.
It was enough to get them across the Great Khingan and capture Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and North Korea in a week and a half, moving mechanized armies across deserts and mountains.
Patton of course was a very distinguished general, and was great at maneuver warfare, but he never had to deal with anything like Operation Bagration.
The Soviets might have collapsed if they had gone to war with the US in 1945, but the weak point was not their military or supply system. It was their economy. They were stretched to the breaking point.
It’s an interesting question. British and American material kept the Soviets from collapsing. Lend-Lease provided billions in material. For instance, the US provide 400,00 trucks and 11,000 aircraft. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin, the Soviets had rebuilt some of their manufacturing capacity, but not enough to sustain the sort of losses Patton could have inflicted, assuming he had full support. It’s not unreasonable to think the Red Army would have collapsed.
Patton was one of the great improvisational generals in US history. His relief of Bastogne is on the list of the things that should not be possible. Taking on the Red Army in a large scale combined arms set piece battle was probably not his strength. But, the Allied leadership dwarfed anything the Soviets possessed or ever possessed. The list of great Russian generals is one guy, Alexander Nevsky, and he dies in 1263. The massive edge in talent and material would probably have broke the Red Army in a couple of months.
That said, there is some evidence the Soviets used germ warfare in defense of the motherland, so who knows.
also, we would have built a few more a-bombs and fried those fukkers in place.
The list of great Russian generals known widely outside Russia is one guy.
Napoleon’s army did not kick itself out of Russia. Neither did the Swedes in their heyday, nor the Turks. (You know 1941 wasn’t the first time they took Berlin, right?)
Guys like Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky made their bones dealing with the Germans in their heyday, in 1941-43, and ground them up. Something like 75% of German losses happened on the Eastern Front. Regarding maneuver warfare, they drove the Germans from the Caucasus all the way across the Ukraine, Hungary and the Balkans, across mountain ranges. That didn’t happen through trench warfare, and the tanks and planes and artillery didn’t get there on hay their crews stole from the local peasants, nor were they shooting locally quarried rocks. The Soviets had a highly functional logistical system.
The Americans supplied them with their trucks, and a lot of other stuff. But those tens of thousands of T-34s were not made in Michigan (though the equipment they were made on was.) I think the Soviets had enough to get to the Atlantic.
Patton’s assertion was that the Soviets had no meaningful supply train and had largely lived off the land as they pushed the Germans back into Germany. Once they made it to Berlin, there was nothing but blasted waste to their rear. Patton saw that if he forced the Soviets back the way they came, they would be badly constrained logistically as they had basically made a one-way trip. Frankly, if I had to choose between the tactical and strategic judgement of one of the greatest military commanders of all time, and a random internet commenter, I’d pick Patton every time. It’s bad he didn’t take matters into his own hands and attack the Soviets when he had the chance.
Patton may have been able to pull it off, but if he made even one mistake early in attack, and failed to cut off them off, the Sov’s tactical superiority in armor would have made scrap iron of the US tanks. We had few of the new Pershing’s, and the Sherman was not the equal of the Soviet armor any more than they were of the German ones. I also don’t think the US troop morale or the civilians at home would have stood for it. The average Russian solider was resigned to fatalistically fight to the death, but not US troops, especially after finally breaking the German resistance and mopping up boys and old men. The absolute huge scale of the Soviet forces dwarfed the US, and their Generals were very competent and experienced, having learned the hard way fighting the Germans for four years.
By the time hostilities were nearly over the Red Army was sputtering along on US supplied fumes. Patton would have crushed them like a wormy apple.
My father was in Patton’s 3rd Army from ’43 until ’46 in Europe & Germany. It was more than a popular rumor that Wild Bill Donovan & the OSS assassinated Patton in that auto accident b/c of his unsquelchable big mouth talking up a potential WW3, “We’ll eventually have to fight the Soviets in Europe so let’s do it while we have the army here…” — it was accepted as common knowledge, but we’ll never know. It was probably just as it appeared, a simple fatal accident. Ironically I think Stalin would’ve welcomed a land war vs. the exhausted Allies while he held all the aces in Europe even with the US with the A-bombs. His spies had penetrated Los Alamos & the Manhattan Project sufficiently to know we required several months to produce fissionable material for more bombs & Stalin could’ve overrun Europe all the way to Paris in that time.
The Germans underestimated the Russians in much the same way.
I don’t believe we had to engage the Sovs in, but we sure could have done better negotiating at Yalta and elsewhere. Should of told them, “Hey, you guys made your bed with Germany, and gave them the raw materials to invade Europe. Too bad they suckered punched you, but that’s honor among thieves. BTW, we gave you a lot of war materiel at great cost, and own you nothing. So we’ll keep whatever we take, instead giving up Czechoslovakia and anything our troops take over.”
Well Ron, we all should remember why Stalin did so swimmingly at Yalta…. I mean, FDR was surrounded by Russian agents and spies. Thick and insidious.
Like the mobsters of yesteryear, our corrupt politicians have to know the basic rules and while getting comfortably rich, not get too greedy. Bob Menendez is probably going down this year because he just couldn’t help himself yet again. And like Hillary, he didn’t use a bag man.
>The men who made the railroads were constrained by geography. They had to settle for being rich men in one country. Therefore, they took an active interest in their host country, often being very patriotic and nationalistic.
Not so-they became globalists right away.
Examples:
https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_the_bolshevik_revolution-5.pdf
https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_Hitler.pdf
The modern “globalist” oligarchs have absolutely nothing on them. How many revolutions have Gates, Zuckerberg, Thiel sponsored? Granted, it’s early yet.
>The one main difference between this age and the prior age is we have not seen the growth of organized crime.
Well, wait for the system to crash a little.
What happened in the USSR in the 1990s? Answer: there were a ton of young athletes and Afghan War veterans who on one hand had no prospect of making a decent living through a square job, and on the other hand had the mental and moral characteristics necessary to take calculated risks and deal in violence for a high payoff. How many Iraq/Afghanistan combat vets does the US have?
And the law enforcement apparatus couldn’t pay the cops’ salaries, so the cops stopped doing their jobs. Kind of like what will happen as the municipal, county and state employees pension crisis comes to a boil in the US. Not to mention the Ferguson Effect.
>In one of histories great ironies, the English speaking world went to war with fascism and defeated them on the battlefield, but ended up adopting most of the fascists socio-economic polices.
They adopted those policies BEFORE going to war with the fascists, in the New Deal. FDR LOVED Mussolini:
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt
Chinese men were brought over here to build railroads (they were industrious and worked well as a team). They weren’t permitted to bring wives and families or partner with white women, so they often formed relationships with black or native women (my great-grandfather being a product of such a union). We don’t hear much about the considerable presence of Chinese illegals or the Chinese community in general. Perhaps they more easily assimilate into our culture without the factor of violence or financial dependence.
The warlords will continue to plunder the treasury until we the people find the will to stop them. Comey was the archetypal suit-wearing gangster installed to protect the interests of the other gangsters. Martha Stewart was his token bust. They rise to the top on a pyramid of illegal activity, the base being illegal voters and ballot box stuffing. This is where we will have to start cleaning up if we want to drain the swamp.
East Asians are not a terribly useful population for the Left to exploit. Discrimination against Chinese was often quite harsh, but they have been a highly successful group and modern Chinese assimilate so enthusiastically, they make for a bad example in the Cold Civil War.
Don’t forget the Taiping Rebellion. If not for all the chaos in its wake, there wouldn’t be nearly as much Chinese immigration. They were just convenient to import.
Western railroad builders did have an affinity for Chinese labor though. Europeans took jobs in mining and timber where they seem to prefer the lifestyle. That left the Chinese, but then the engineers discovered the Chinese were really good at laying rails. There’s a lot of contemporaneous data that makes this point. There’s a well known divide in China between rice and wheat farmers. My hunch is we got a lot of rice farmers.
Makes sense. The Taiping Rebellion destroyed South China, i.e. the rice growing region. It was a nice confluence of circumstances for the railroad builders. Too bad they weren’t as wise as we are, though — what with them being “refugees” from a “civil war,” they could’ve been living the high life getting resettled in Minneapolis on the government dime. “Little Peking” would be a hell of a lot nicer, and safer, than “Little Mogadishu.” More opium use though.
Before the Somalis, Lutheran Social Services specialized in Vietnamese and Hmong refugees. In Minesota the Vietnamese assimilated well and upward. The Hmong not so much.
i have been told that the overwhelming majority of Chinese -Americans trace their roots back to just a few southern districts in southern Guangdong province, and that is all rice-growing country. The wheat farmers are northerners.
America was in essence the biggest long con in human history founded largely not for freedom but as a tax dodge and a way to opt out of paying the costs of society
Freedom was as much a pretext as an ideology, it was really about money
To cut costs we started with slavery ,tried mass immigration, forced labor, you name it.
Now its on the fail train simply because culturally there is no “there”, there.
Even the vaunted WW2 and post war culture was fake, a product of mass media and industrialism and fear of communism
All gone now and with a new immigration wave of people from low trust/no trust cultures the US is screwed
Given we’ve been Uncle Sugar for a few decades, when not if we go 3rd world or stop functioning period, things are going to get interesting in the Chinese curse sense.
Your optimism is depressing.
absolute twaddle. not worth the pixels it takes up on the screen.
I’d say it’s a bit worse than that. Chinese Diasporas were typically dumb cheap laborers, Malaysia – mine coal for the British, America – build railroads, and yet their descendants are typically intelligent, successful and pro-social. In Malaysia they have to go so far as put strict quotas on Chinese admission to universities, otherwise no Malay could become a doctor or a lawyer.
It’s not just about being a poor weapon in the Cold Civil War, Chinese Diasporas have to be completely ignored because merely looking at them would melt the leftist brain with cognitive dissonance.
Well, we do have a lot of magic dirt in California.
the magiciest dirt you ever did see!
They may be economically assimilated, i .e. earning as much if not more than whites, but not culturally. This becomes especially obvious in Europe, where Chinese are just as alien as Moslems or Blacks. The US was kind of doomed from the start (importation of blacks, later of rice-eaters followed by brown-eyed olive-skinned Mediterranids from southern Europe), but Europe might still have a chance.
I know a number of Chinese who have immigrated here.
You are correct – they assimilate quite “enthusiastically” .
Case in point: A Chinese family moved down the street from my father a few years back. This is a suburban neighborhood with split-level houses. My father became friends with the family – since they both shared some common interests as electrical engineers.
A few years went by – and they (the Chinese family) decided to move to NH and get out of MA. They didn’t like the liberal attitude or the high taxation. Apparently when he moved to NH, they “enthusiastically assimilated” to the point where the guy has amassed quite a gun collection – and now flies a rebel flag in his front yard.