(07-28-2021, 01:59 PM)robkelk Wrote:(07-28-2021, 01:12 PM)Jinx999 Wrote: https://theweek.com/politics/1003035/the...can-caesar
Well . . . .
Hmmmmm...
Quote:Once the conversation really gets going (around minute 45), Yarvin makes clear that he has a highly idiosyncratic take on American history. In his view, roughly every 75 years, a "Caesar" seizes dictatorial powers and institutes "substantive regime changes." George Washington did this in 1789. Abraham Lincoln did it again in 1861. And FDR did it last in 1933, speaking in the closing passages of his First Inaugural Address about the national emergency of the Great Depression and the need to wield unprecedented government power to combat it, which he did with the New Deal.
And all three ended up in creating conditions where the USA had no choice but to engage in armed conflict - the War of 1812, the Civil war, and WWII, respectively.
So, if you want all-out war with somebody, this appears to me to be one way to go about getting it.
I don't think you're giving the political tensions that led to the Civil War and WWII enough credit. Reason being? Both of these were going to happen no matter who the PoTUS was.
The Civil War was bound to happen sooner or later, simply because the Southern politicians wanted it. That is, they wanted to be the Confederate States of America before it was a thing. This isn't a checken-or-egg dilemma. They only considered all-out war only because they so direly desired to have their own nation built on the institution of slavery.
The fact that it was Abraham Lincoln who was at the helm at the time is nearly inconsequential. The Southerners were beating their drums long before he came into the Oval Office. Really, this had been brewing ever since the Constitution of the United States of America had been penned! And even if Lincoln wasn't the President, then it would have happened anyhow because by that time the Southerners had their hearts set on it. It was only a matter of time.
Besides, if Abraham Lincoln is Cesar, then so was Obama, because he incited the Republican Party just as Lincoln incited the Democrats. If anything, Trump was Nero, not Cesar.
As for WWII... Uhm. Sorry. No. That was bound to happen regardless. Taking on America was in the long game for both Hitler and Hirohito because they knew the moment America got involved, it was all over for them. They knew that America was an industrial powerhouse with such vast resources that the Americans had only barely just begun to tap into them. They knew that even if American strategists weren't the greatest, they could still bury both Germany and Japan in one go just by spamming their factories and ship yards.
In fact, the entire Japanese strategy was absolutely dependent on giving the Americans in the Pacific a coup de grace in the opening salvos. Which they nearly succeeded in, except that as luck would have it, the Carrier fleet wasn't in port at the time of the Pearl Harbor Attack.
This wasn't some spur-of-the-moment knee-jerk-reaction on the part of the Japanese. The idea was in the works since the 1920's. Before FDR was even President. And before FDR was President, WWII was a done deal the moment Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Because with that, no matter who the next President was gonna be, the next logical step after all other diplomatic entreaties had been rejected would be to embargo Japan. Thing is, no one had thought that the Japanese would be so suicidally insane as to provoke America into an all-out war.
Except that "suicidal insanity", as it turned out, is a specialty of theirs. We just never realized it because things were going so well for them at first.
So, FDR or not, it would have happened anyhow. Because the only natural reaction would be to curb the ability of the Japanese to wage war. It was a moral imperative, even, since they were using the goods we traded to them to wage that war. And once we cut off that supply line, their only option was to take it back by force.
Thus, the Pearl Harbor Attack and their effort to decapitate the US Armed Forces in the Pacific in one fell swoop.
Up until that moment, though? American diplomatic policy was basically "Don't start nuthin, there won't be nuthin." They were trying so very hard not to get drawn into yet another war, because people still remembered how horrible WWI was. And FDR was behind that idea.
Up until the Japanese pissed off just about every single living American, and even a fair number of their own expats living in America. And with good reason because the message we were sending was clear. We were doing everything in our power to remain uninvolved. Please do not involve us. We are only supporting our allies because that's how the treaties from the last war are set up. We do not want to fight anyone.
WWII was going to happen. Because Japan wanted it. They wanted their Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, but the only way they would get it was over America's Dead Body. And they knew it long, long before it came to actual blows.