The German Army

The German Army was the best fighting force in the second World War. While this little snippet is very supportive of my point in many ways, the most important point is at the end:

"An often-overlooked characteristic of the late-war German Army was the liberal use of machine-guns with high rates of fire and medium- and heavy-caliber mortars. Although German battalions were often smaller than those of their opponents by 1944, they were still capable, in terms of organic weapons, of bringing substantially higher weights of fire to bear than those of their opponents. This discrepancy in relative weights of fire made the dislodgement of defending German units difficult, and often resulted in Western Allied and Soviet tendencies to 'even the odds' through the use of artillery and air support."

The most important point to note here is that the German Army was too difficult for other armies to defeat - because the land forces of the Western Allied and Soviet countries were inferior to the German army, they could not attack entrenched German troops and had to attack with their air forces instead, fighting instead of the Heer the comparatively weak Luftwaffe.

Military Bravery

Take a gander at this little piece of marvelous evidence! The German Army was awarded 65% of all of the total Iron Cross awards given out to all branches of the Wehrmacht, indicating that it was, in fact, better than the other two branches. Take that, other two branches! Looks like the Heer beats you again! You can only have about 20% each!

Importance Pwnage

In view of a certain Nate Charnas' cowardly surrender, I too will be shifting my argument to match and easily overcome him in a new field of argument: that of the Heer's obvious superiority over the Kriegsmarine, as well as over the Luftwaffe, in regards to their contributions to the overall German war effort. This, too, may be an easily won victory for the land army. Just as in an all-out battle between the three the Heer has a simple victory - the air force cannot defend its bases, and the kriegsmarine starves to death in the oceans - so too the Heer is obviously the most important: without it, the Germans cannot conquer territory and they are unable to hold anything, whereas losing the air force results in a minor strategic disadvantage and losing the Kriegsmarine does nothing but allow the US to invade more easily. While the US can surely invade far more easily without the Kriegsmarine, the lack of the Heer means the Germans could not even have defeated the French.
A better argument therefore is which was comparatively better. Was the Heer notably better than other countries' armies? Was the Luftwaffe notably better than other countries' air forces? Was the Kriegsmarine notably better than other countries' sea armies? Which was the most superior? This is an argument that can be sustained, one in which I do not have the extreme and obvious advantage, and one in which the Heer will, of course, still come out completely ahead.

The 88 mm FLAK

"The true German trump card was the feared and respected 88mm FLAK. Its high velocity gun made it an anti-tank threat which could defeat almost any tank armor in the world. Its accuracy also made it a deadly anti-aircraft weapon. The same weapon could serve in both modes without any modifications to the carriage or mount. The 88mm FLAK was 25 feet long overall, had a rate of fire of 8 rounds per minute, a crew of 6, and had a maximum effective altitude of 14,680 meters and a horizontal range of 10,600 meters. A development of the 88mm FLAK weapon was the 105mm FLAK and was mostly used as an AA weapon against Allied aircraft. I had a crew 5 and a rate of fire of 3 rounds per minute. Its maximum ceiling was 12,800 meters."

I am not sure this actually needs any explanation, but basically, this means that the German army's "true trump card" is, in fact, an anti-air weapon. If we just installed some of these all over the place, the pitiful Luftwaffe would have a hard time fighting back against the Heer.

Finally, a Navy Post

The thing about the Heer defeating the Kriegsmarine is that it's something of a silly idea, since the Heer is on the land and the Kriegsmarine is floating like noobs on the water, noobishly. However, I have a solution! Allow me to quote Feldgrau on German long-range capabilities:

"The Germans also had an assortment of rail guns, huge artillery pieces mounted on railroad cars, and self-propelled mortars that crawled about on huge tracked carriages. One such mortar or "Mörser" was the 600mm "Karl" battery. It weighed 132 tons, was 35 feet long, and moved at 3 mph by a 580hp diesel engine. It had a ground crew of 109 men and it could fire a 4,850 pound mortar round that could penetrate 98 inches of concrete or 17-3/4" of armor. The rail guns were even larger yet, the 800mm Kanone "DORA" had a range of 29 miles, a crew of 250 men for assembly and firing and 4,120 men in all. It could fire one 10,500 pound shell that measured 25 feet long plus the length of the case at a rate of 2 rounds per hour. The 280mm KS(E) rail gun was 95 feet long, weighed 479,600 pounds. and could fire a projectile 38 miles. It used a crew of 10 for firing."

Weapons like this can be mounted on the land, but they don't float on the water. And if the Heer can keep the Kriegsmarine out at sea forever, eventually all the Kriegsmarine soldiers will become fishermen instead of soldiers and the German navy will become just a German collection of fishermen with extremely well-armed fishing boats.

Anti-Aircraft Tanks

The Heer was not without its share of weapons with which to defeat the Luftwaffe. While I am still working on the concept of what exactly a land vs sea battle consists of, the Luftwaffe can clearly be fought by the glorious land army. The Heer did not only fight the enemy air force with stones and hope; there were also the Ostwind, Flakpanzer, Mobelwagen, and Wirbelwind. All four of these were highly effective anti-air weapons, developed later in the war, once, I quote wikipedia, "In 1943, due to the waning ability of the Luftwaffe to combat enemy ground-attack aircraft, ground-based anti-aircraft weaponry was becoming increasingly important to the Wehrmacht." Let us note the phrase "waning ability of the Luftwaffe to combat enemy ground-attack aircraft." This statement says something: that the Luftwaffe is secondary, and that the Heer was called in whenever it proved too weak to accomplish actual tasks.

Existentialism

One of the things that I find so interesting about existentialism is that it is both much darker and much more clear than many of the philosophies that had come before it. While books with names like "The Phenomenology of Spirit" may have some kind of academic value, the sheer degree to which it is masked by techniques such as making up words like "phenomenology" degrades much of that value.
Existentialism, on the other hand, strikes me as vaguely sensible - they seem to know what they're talking about, and the absurd, the other, and the idea that you create your own sense of morality are all fairly well-defined. I like existentialism, if in part because it appeals to my sense of the emptiness of conventional, universal morality.

Kursk

A certain "JED" has recently stated in his controversial, frequently fact-distorting blog of hate and lies that the Luftwaffe would be able to defeat the Heer because air supremacy plays such a vital role in combat, and because, in his own words, "when one side had the air controlled, that side was winning." Though air supremacy surely played a vital role in this battle, the fact is that this is simply not true. The Germans had air supremacy throughout the entire battle - such was their dominance that they lost only 39 aircraft, and the Soviets lost 386. BUT THE GERMANS DID NOT WIN. They were pushing an offensive, and the soviets stopped them. Why, despite this overwhelming aerial victory which cannot even be disputed, could the soviets have won this fight? The answer is simple: in warfare, air is but a side note to the central ground battle.

The Dunkirk Evacuation

If, hypothetically, one were to believe that the Dunkirk Evacuation were proof that the air force was more powerful than the land army, one would be greatly mistaken. A certain honorable colleague of mine attempted to use this as proof of the superiority of the air force over land armies, when, in his own words, it was an attempt by the shattered remnants of the British forces to escape. What's more, they were escaping from the beaches! On boats! The day boats count as land weapons, while it will be glorious, is not a day that had occurred during the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. It was the shattered remnants of an army fleeing by sea - not an example of the air force defeating the army. Not at all.

The Cold War

Part of what I feel is so interesting about the cold war is that because of nuclear weapons, the two couldn't just have a big war, but had to work through proxy countries. However, what I find more interesting than that is the fact that the proxy countries proved to be so difficult to conquer. It would appear that something like that would be easy - Vietnam had little military strength - but America's quagmire that it ultimately became trapped in would end up revealing the uselessness of warfare during this period, which was part of what was so important - the major countries stopped getting involved, playing the role of the man behind the man rather than directly fighting.

WW2 Land Combat Source Infodump

Now that I've begun my research on the German army during WW2, I'll just link some of my sources here for now: the wikipedia page, the wikipedia page on the German tanks, and a website called Achtung Panzer!

World War 2

The thing that I most like about World War 2's story is the degree to which it seems to follow so many typical heroic tropes. It started, as the book makes clear in its description, Hitler initially conquered France and it shocked the Allies, then it seemed that Britain was alone in a struggle against Hitler, with Russia also fighting him but being barely a friend and at least a very dangerous ally, until America entered the war and saved everybody. The textbook heroic story of the war, I feel, may be a major contributor to the way in which it tends to be viewed as justified, unlike World War 1, whose story was essentially "lots of people die, nothing really happens."

Hitler's Rise to Power

Hitler's rise to power is a fascinating exercise in the power of oratory to control people. According to wikipedia, Hitler's rise to power was largely due to his oratory and organizational abilities, as well as his willingness to use any means to get to where he is. My first thought about the election of Hitler, as with most people, is that he was a mad dictator and there's no way I wouldn't have personally opposed him. However, upon thinking about it, something about having a man come to power who is going to solve all the problems appeals to me on some level. Thinking about a government like ours, where the people are against so many things and have so many little views that the government has to respond to, sometimes I think that it would be better if we could just have one person take over and deal with everything, and that's how I imagine Germany must have felt before Hitler - and now, Hitler is the reason people tend to not give in to those thoughts.

The Debate: Final Reflections

Our debate in class was very interesting - seeing how each side defended its own point, and how the pro-fascism side (especially Nick) managed to convey the sense of insane fanaticism present so often in fascism. The central problem with the debate was the problem with all debate, which is that you can't prove philosophical postulates and each team entered with different ones. Their team continuously referenced anti-social elements being suppressed, and our team continuously said that what was more important was tolerance.
It's possible that this is a reflection of how everything worked in the actual world - there cannot be reasoned debate, and sometimes even discussion is strained, when two opposing sides have worldviews based on mutually contradictory postulates.

In Response...

In response to Jonathan's response to Nate's post, I would like to say that I think that people acting in their best interest and supporting the groups that people think will follow their best interests is obvious. I think the question in politics is more about which group you think will support your own best interests, and that people being hesitant to support the "whites" on the grounds of them being instruments of foreign powers is an example of people supporting those who will act in their own self-interest.

Hitler vs Stalin

Hitler is the general western world's first thought when we think about the ultimate incarnation of evil, the second being Satan. This is despite his much lower death toll compared to Stalin - though there are occasional people who argue that Hitler was worse than Stalin, even amongst them the death toll for Stalin is higher, and the vast majority consider Hitler more important - when I type "Hitler" into my google search, which gives me suggested searches based on others' searches, a variety of suggested searches about Hitler come up, but amongst the Stalin suggested searches are both "Stalin and Hitler" and "Stalin vs Hitler" - in terms of mass-murdering villainy, Stalin is clearly Hitler's still-evil-but-not-quite-as-bad assistant.
The reason for this is probably American propaganda during WW2, which led to lots of "Captain America fights the Nazis" and very little "Captain America fights the Russians". However, I wonder whether there is any other reason that Hitler is so much more the ultimate villain than Stalin.

Fascism

Fascism was, and is, an interesting ideology, to the point that either there is an American Fascist Party or some crazy guy made a website, though it isn't as if that hasn't happened before. The interesting thing about Fascism is that it's so simple, and it must have been how government originally emerged - some guy was just charismatic enough, and had a large enough group of soldiers, that he convinced everybody else to listen to him. The fact that this kind of leadership emerged instead of democracy, which is one of the most complex forms of government, indicates the degree to which Italy was devastated by World War One.
The other interesting aspect of fascism is the degree to which it derives itself from democracy - the closer a form of government gets to completely expressing the will of the people, the easier it is for a charismatic person to seize power by convincing the people he should have it. It's a vicious cycle.

Dear Nate:

While you may have mostly agreed with my post, I don't think that the reason why the soldiers committed less atrocities before was due to technological limitations. After all, soldiers have been able to attack civilian settlements at little cost for a very long time - the vikings raided stuff for a long time before world war 1 - as long ago as the 790s, and they didn't have any technological advantages apart from their extreme manliness over the populations which they were raiding.

While perhaps it isn't necessarily true that it was the mind-breaking, I think it was a combination of perhaps that and fervent nationalism, which translated easily to a hatred of other cultures.

Communist History

All I can think about when I'm learning about the history of the Soviet Union is Animal Farm, but I always loved Animal Farm and maybe that's part of the reason I find this so interesting. It was definitely heavily simplified from the actual event, as one would expect from a fairy tale adaptation, but I think the central themes were the same.
Stalin seized control, and from then on (and even for some time before that) it wasn't really communism, it was something resembling it, mostly because true communism, at least in Russia, was totally untenable. For one thing, it hadn't come about by a natural Marxist revolution, and in addition it had the New Economic Plan, which seems to me like a total refutation of communism that's so blatant as to be hilarious. The Communists, in order to strengthen their economy, turned partially capitalist temporarily. This was a refutation of all Lenin's ideas that Russia could turn communist anyway, no matter which way you look at Marx. If Marx was wrong, this proves that capitalism simply performs better than communism. Even if you look at Marx as right, this proves that Russia needed to become stronger and more industrial before it could become a true communist state, capable of staying communist and not backtracking to capitalism when weak. The final point that proves completely that Russia was not ready for communism was the appeals to nationalism - Stalin consistently appealed to nationalism rather than to the working class as a communist would be expected to.
The fact that Russia was not really very communist ties this back to Animal Farm - the pigs were, after all, not very different from the humans.

Total War

The weird thing about WW1 is that it turned into total war, and that it somehow caused everyone to commit more atrocities against civilians than most soldiers had in wars prior to this one. The reason for this is uncertain to me, but I think it's because of the increased sense of nationalism in this war as well as the level to which the soldiers are disgruntled. World War 1 is generally, at least the land war, portrayed as having been extremely empty for soldiers, extremely deadly, and extremely destructive of their minds, and this is especially interesting because of the reading I'm doing for Literature of WW1, so far All Quiet on the Western Front and Mrs. Dalloway. The war broke the minds of soldiers with constant barrages of artillery fire as well as with the horrors of trench warfare, and I think the cruelty to civilians was a result.

Weekly Summary

This week, I feel like we have finally moved into the modern era with Freud and Nietzsche. Nietzsche's ideas don't have the same raw, pulled out of whole cloth sense that the previous philosophers, such as Kant, had (using people as a means to an end and not acting out of non-universalisable maxims are equivalent? What?). Similarly, Freud's ideas seem to be not rejecting the church and established morality but merely ignoring them, as they are no longer such powerful forces in everyone's minds and thoughts.
Nietzsche was a lot like Machiavelli, in that he spoke of rejecting morality, but he spoke in much more vague and metaphysical terms, which is a luxury he had in the modern era. Machiavelli's work was highly practical, and simply assumed that one would abandon morality when he needed to, which presumably successful leaders were already doing, or they wouldn't be successful leaders. Nietzsche, on the other hand, formally said that this form of leadership was good, which would've been impossible to argue in early Renaissance philosophy.
I really like Freud's ideas. Humans are not in control of our own minds, and it really refreshed me to see someone in history finally admit that.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche's comment on the noble side of things being the center of morality is something that makes intrinsic sense to me - that morality all originates from the weak and poor saying that the noble who rules them and takes their things is bad. Nietzsche's statements about negative will to power, to me, however, do imply that we should all act in the noble way, rejecting morality. Cas said that Nietzsche, if read improperly, can lead people to believe that they can do whatever they want, but, to me, that is what Nietzsche said, and I cannot find any evidence to the contrary.

Freud

My objection to Freud's Civilization and its Discontents is primarily that he says that the war committed by large groups against each other is an indication of human aggression and violence. I will not deny that those in power frequently want to expand their power, though whether power corrupts or corrupt people get power I'm not sure. However, while the Huns and the Mongols may be good examples of human aggression being set free and running wild, I don't know enough about these to comment. The crusaders, on the other hand, were operating out of a sense of piety, not aggression - though the popes who ordered the crusades may have been aggressive, those who went on them were likely more following the call of their leaders, and the World War even more so - having read All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldiers were not aggressive toward their enemies but rather always following the orders of their leaders and seeking glory for their countries when they joined the army.

Weekly Summary

It seems to me that the main focus of the previous week was Russia, and the actions of the Tsars that led up to the Russian Revolution. The main problem the tsars faced was that they were trying to keep their country conservative rather than give any ground to the rebels, and they were not skilled enough to balance the interests of the nobles, the peasantry, and the working classes. Essentially, their goal was originally to create bad conditions for the peasantry in the countryside to get many of them to move to the cities, but while some moved to the cities many were less proactive and merely whined about the poor conditions, until ultimately the whining ended up removing the tsars from power.

Lenin

Lenin was an intriguing fellow, if perhaps having completely departed from Marx - Marx's central theme is the way in which history is shaped by great forces, and Lenin's goal was to take a small group of revolutionary leaders and forcibly change the government to make it more liberal and democratic.
Throughout history, we have seen that this simply does not work. Whenever revolutions have fallen under the control of small groups, those small groups have ended up becoming authoritarian. The Reign of Terror in France, the Napoleons, and, ultimately, the 1905 Russian Revolution, which ended up giving power to the Tsar again, ending the revolution.
Lenin's belief that small groups of people can be trusted to defy history and start things off before they are ready is inaccurate even had Marx been right.

The Dreyfus Affair

In my last summary post, I discussed the tendency of people to regard themselves as superior to other groups. Racism, of course, is a natural consequence of this, and Drumont's anti-semitic journalism and the Dreyfus affair provide good examples of racism. However, there is one other major factor that runs through this whole trend - when things are going badly, when you've just lost a Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when your Second Empire has just collapsed and been replaced with a Third Republic that already doesn't know what to do, when you're starting to feel like the chew toy in some kind of cosmic story of Europe, it's easy to just blame it all on the Jews, and that is what ended up happening.

Imperialism: Summary

This week's primary theme was imperialism, its causes, and the effects it had upon native populations. Imperialism was caused by many things, one of which was the European sense that they were superior to the rest of the world. However, I believe that the only reason it was Europe and not anywhere else that ended up becoming imperialistic was that Europe had the fastest technological advancement and sustained it the longest. They had ships that could cross oceans, so they crossed oceans and conquered. Frequently when discussing imperialism, the West is treated as some kind of "monstrosity", and that is really not the case. While imperialism was terrible, it was not a "monstrosity," it was just human nature - people tend to want to feel superior to other groups, and, when they do, they tend to conquer other groups around them. Imperialism may have been terrible, but it was a reflection of general human nature, not only of the evil of the west.

The Congo Free State

The Congo Free State's most interesting implications are those it raises in argument against the idea that people are inherently good. As Heart of Darkness would argue, the people who went into the Congo in service of Leopold as part of the Congo Free State, as well as Leopold himself, said that they had come to civilize and improve the Congo, but instead ended up making the African natives work in appalling conditions, giving them no medicine or sanitation and killing them in huge numbers primarily in order to avoid the threat of violence.
At first, I thought about arguing that this disproved the idea that anarchism could work, but the fundamental problem here was not an absence of the state, it was the presence of a large group of people with vastly less power and knowledge than another, as well as the separation of individuals from the more powerful group. Essentially, the Congo became an area that drew in all sorts of people who could achieve large amounts of wealth and avoid the pressures of society, and, when they became so free, they ended up enslaving and abusing the natives.

Imperialism in India

The most interesting thing about British rule in India was the way in which Britain managed to maintain control over a vastly larger population with a much smaller group of soldiers and a much smaller population - there were 45,000 British and 150 million Indians. They initially managed to maintain power by force, but it quickly became clear that this would not work with the Sepoy rebellion.
What I liked most about the way in which they ended up holding power was the fact that the way in which they ruled reflected so much a sense that they operated in a similar sense to the traditional Christian image of Satan - rather than actually march large armies around or invade India, they had small groups of British who played existing tendencies toward violence amongst the Indian peoples against each other and using them to further their own aims.

Weekly Summary

For this week's summary, I will merely respond to Nate's summary, thus summarizing my opinions of the week as they relate to his. It is true that everything was chaotic, wild, and changing in most places on a governmental level, but I am not sure whether the events of the actual people were as related. In Russia, serfdom was abolished, and a few serfs who were able to go to the cities now did, but the majority of people remained as serfs. To most Germans' daily lives, the only effect of Germany being one nation is a psychological and minor one. The same thing goes for Italians. The major effect that these changes would have had upon people were the wars that swept through periodically, not the vast change in perspective and culture.

The Abolition of Serfdom

Serfdom was abolished by decree in Russia in 1861, as part of a project of modernizing that had become more clearly necessary in the Crimean war, which Russia had barely won despite formerly being a power of such scope that smaller countries' mountains would actually shake when they heard rumors that Russia might be displeased. Wishing to once more build itself such an awesome reputation, Russia's abolishing of serfdom represented its wish to once more build itself into a great power, and its idea that modernizing represented imitating the west. This idea had finally become almost universally accepted long after the death of Peter the Great.
Abolishing serfdom was a key step in making Russia a more modernized country. However, it was not undertaken for the slavophiles' reasons - to make Russia a collection of traditional Russian peasant communes - and not, truly, for the westernizers' reasons, because they emphasized Western liberalism rather than Western industrial power. Industrialism was the true focus of the abolition of serfdom - it left life just as bad as it had always been for the farmers, but also gave them the ability to leave and go to cities, where they could begin the slow process of turning Russia into an industrial nation.

Realpolitik

Realpolitik is an idea that brings up the memory of Machiavelli, of politicians who care more about maintaining power than about any kind of morality. Bismarck was the epitome of this political trend - he openly said that he admired power, and he thought that he was destined for greatness, and he had a reputation for cynicism.

However, what he achieved, the unification of Germany, was much more than anyone else had been able to achieve, and in this way his realpolitik was able to achieve a romantic, idealist, nationalist dream - the German nation was able to come into being not only because of Bismarck, but because of its growing national feeling as well. Bismarck enabled national feeling to be expressed in his regime and achieved a goal the people of the nation had wanted.

Realpolitik, at least in this case, was a force for expressing what the people wanted. Rather than doing everything the people wanted, Bismarck achieved their overall goals. In Germany, at least, realpolitik let the leader get something done.

Week Summary

This week, everyone seems to agree that the primary issue was nationalism - it was all about what a nation was, as we discussed in class whether the US was a nation - and in our modern world, it is - and the history involved two very important events, the unification of Italy and Germany, both of which were driven by nationalist feeling.

However, I feel that this focus on nationalism as the central focus of the week undermines something else that was equally important - the conflict between conservatism and liberalism that drove so much of this period. I believe that this was at least as important a factor as nationalism in the revolutions of 1848 and the unifications that occurred afterward - conservatism and liberalism divided people, and they were ultimately united in nationalism or more powerful forces.

In France, the country had revolutions that went back and forth with becoming more liberal and more conservative, until ultimately they were united by Louis Napoleon, who was a symbol of the power of France through his relation to Napoleon.

In Italy, the country again had conflicts between liberalism and conservatism, between Mazzini/Garibaldi and Cavour, prevented unification until it was ultimately enabled by the power of Piedmont-Sardinia to conquer. Germany functioned similarly, with Bismarck ultimately uniting the nation with his political power.

This week was not only about nationalism - it was more about nationalism as a response to the liberal/conservative conflict.

Romantic Nationalism at Frankfurt

The Frankfurt assembly was compared to the French assembly in 1789, as both were good examples of revolutions whose leaders were less concerned with the reality of their times and more concerned with the ideals they hoped to be able to follow. The Frankfurt Assembly hoped to be able to draft a liberal constitution and then bind an existing monarch by it, an enormously great goal for such a small and powerless group. The Frankfurt assembly demonstrates the reason why Bismarck would become necessary later in German history for unification - Frankfurt would be the example that proved why bottom-up nationalism built on ideals would fail, and fail utterly. This failure was ultimately cemented by Frederick William IV's refusal of the throne - he rejected even allowing a bottom-up structure to exist, saying that all power had to come from divine right.

Nationalism and Idealism

Idealism and nationalism were tied throughout the history of Europe in several ways in the mid-1800s - there was a clear divide between the more idealistic and more pragmatic rulers and revolutionaries, with the more pragmatic almost always being more effective. Such figures as Mazzini, who sought to create a people's republic for his unified Italy, were unsuccessful, while the later leader Cavour, a much more pragmatic leader who sought to unite Italy by whatever means he could, managed to reunite Italy for the first time since the Roman empire.

However, Cavour may not have been an idealist, but he was still devoted to a cause, which he managed to achieve, unlike the idealist romantics Garibaldi and Mazzini. In his way, Cavour was just as much an idealist, but rather than achieving everything he wanted to do he achieved everything he could do, which I see as just as admirable as any action of Garibaldi or Mazzini.

Synthesis

The three French Revolutions are an example of the way that rule by only liberals and rule by only conservatives cannot work. In each revolution, it began with a conservative king - Louis XVI, Charles X, or Louis Philippe - and ended with the declaration of some form of liberal government, whether it was the Assembly, a constitutional monarch, or a republic. However, none of these systems were, at this point in time in French history, stable. The country was too polarized between liberals and conservatives, with conservatives wanting monarchies and liberals wanting some form of republic, and because of this the only system it could sustain was dictatorship, by both Napoleons.

Proletariatophobia

While I agree with Charlie's central point that a Marxist revolution is not inevitable, I disagree with his reasons why, and instead believe that his reliance on the labor theory of value is flawed. His first point, that we have a variety of other classes which are in-betweens and make our society less polarized, requires examples - most social classes have the means of production, don't and serve those who do, or occasionally, such as lawyers, work in some other field that has nothing to do with either. However, it hardly seems to me that lawyers are going to prevent a proletariat revolution. Second, this election was not proof of propaganda being insufficient - Obama had just as much propaganda as anyone else, and simply used it better. Finally, Marx's point is that those who are poor and proletariat will need to tear down the entire structure of capitalism to achieve their aims - capitalism could accomodate civil rights, but it cannot accomodate the proletariat.

Response About Romanticism

Laura's post about Romanticism was very interesting, but I see both the Enlightenment and Romanticism as working in the opposite way. When I picture the enlightenment, I see young iconoclasts who break the rules, who think about what has been learned through the years, reject all of it, and make up their own equally arbitrary systems. They may be more intellectual and more logical, but tradition has never been based on logic, and they break tradition far more obviously than romanticism does - Romanticism may be applied to conservatism, but Enlightenment thought almost never is.
Romanticism, on the other hand, seems much more traditional. While it's vibrant and emotional, unlike the enlightenment, its almost excessive level of emotion is inextricably tied to the past - to a nostalgia for the peaceful countryside and the spiritualism that came before the Enlightenment. Nostalgia rarely makes old ladies say 'tsk'.

The Restoration

The restoration was characterized by simultaneous attempts from former powers to return to the status quo and attempts by formerly weak or subjugated countries to establish a new power or independence. The Congress of Vienna, which sought to restore Europe to its former state, included all the countries that had been extremely powerful before - Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia were the members of the quadruple alliance, and even France, which had been responsible for the Napoleonic Wars, was later admitted. However, just as the major powers sought to maintain order, those who had not emerged as powerful were frequently in opposition to the Restoration. While Leopold of Belgium wanted to prevent a conflict, he had been put on his throne by the quadruple alliance. In Italy and Spain, however, revolts against the restoration were common, even though the rulers who had been put in power by the Restoration forces were in support of the Restoration. Likewise, Greece, Serbia, and Latin America were all hotbeds of revolution during this period.