Watching Ukraines resistance is one of the most heroic events of my lifetime. I am still proud that under Biden we were able to help them survive long enough to now essentially stand up on their own. It’s one of the most encouraging reversals in contemporary history.
One of the aspects of the Iran war that is interesting to me is how much it lays bare that Trump is fundamentally a coward. He likes to seem to be a strongman without being much of one in substance. Not to say he isn’t corrosive to democracy. He is. It’s just that in Iran he didn’t take Putins tactic of “throw everyone in the meat grinder until I get what I want.” When the going got tough…he quit. Now he’s just begging to be allowed to say he won and run away.
Trump still operates on the theory that elections matter. This adds some constraints on his idiocy, which is already pretty intense. He's doing his level best to rig the election system, but he hasn't figured it out just yet. Imagine if you took that factor away from him, gave him total control over the media, and a loyal police force that could kill or intimidate anyone who speaks poorly of him.
And then, of course, there's General Patton, ""No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country"
The V-DEM’s 2026 report has more than a hint of hysteria about it. The idea that the UK is no more liberal than Argentina or the US because we use the law to protect vulnerable groups from verbal attacks, is ludicrous. If you can say it, you can do it - and somebody will end up doing it. Once you get it into your heads that words are a category of action, you may be able to avoid sleepwalking into genuine autocracy.
I don't like giving the government a veto on what people can say or not say very much, although I'll make exceptions for fraud, libel, and maybe a few other things. Probably not hate speech, though.
Libel laws provide protection for high profile, wealthy people. Laws against hate speech are a minimum protection under criminal law for everyone. Initially the police have tested the boundaries of the law with a few over-zealous, attempted prosecutions, most of which were thrown out before they got to court. But the law is basically sound if used appropriately.
Making hate speech illegal gives absolute control to those who define what is considered hate speech, which is why it isn’t illegal in countries (is there only one？) with constitutional guarantees of free speech.
Of course. And if a country is governed and policed not by consent, but by force and fear, then limits on free speech are likely to serve the interests of those in power rather than reflecting the shared values of the population. The UK doesn't have a written constitution which is why we can be more flexible around issues like this (and why we don't end up vesting ultimate power for some vital decisions in the the hands of a small number of judges appointed for life by the head of the Executive power.
Once you make exceptions for libel, you'd better be awfully careful that it doesn't become a backdoor for the kind of speech suppression you don't like. It's happening now in the US.
Then you can forbid the expression of any illiberal ideas - fascism, communism, or perhaps even conservatism or social-democracy; and will end with an autocracy to end all autocracies...
No, just the hateful ones. Progressives who stumble over into (actual) antisemitism when supporting the Palestinian cause - that's on the list of proscribed speech along with the other racial slurs, homophobia and misogyny. Transphobia, too. Why should defense of women-only spaces (a legitimate point of view) entail coarse or vulgar attacks on trans people? It doesn't need to and it shouldn't. Unfortunately if you give people the right to offend others in the course of arguing for a point of view, a lot of people make giving offence the object of the exercise for the attention or money it brings them or the hurt and trouble it makes for those they're offending.
The issue is how hate is defined, if the US was able to prosecute hate speech, Trump would have all his detractors and late night comedy show hosts locked up.
He's had some success silencing his critics in the media and academia without any hate speech laws. You need to worry more about over-mighty, wealthy citizens than about laws designed to protect beleaguered minorities.
Until the would-be autocrat becomes more popular due to the state suppressing their views, after which they turn those laws against defenders of democracy once they gain power. Worked well for Hitler in Weimar Germany.
I am genuinely alarmed by the lack of alarm surrounding the global rise in fascism (there's a chance that's downstream of reading a lot of Philip Roth novels lately). Regardless, "number of countries democratizing" is obviously a nonsense statistic. After all, the "indicator" would be at its most "alarming" level when every country on earth is a democracy. A more relevant stat would look at the proportion of non-democratic countries that are democratizing, not sheer volume.
The greatest threat of fascism doesn't come from those who want to legislate against hate speech. It comes from those who want to be free to use hate speech. How different history might have been if the Weimar authorities had been able to lock up Hitler the first time he started using antisemitic language, before his insane brand of ethnic tribalism was able to gain any momentum.
That viewpoint overestimates any regime's ability to differentiate between would-be Hitlers and other forms of benign intolerance. And it also assumes a regime's moral evaluations of speech are correct in perpetuity. We don't have the legacies of MLK or Ghandi if not for the broad-based valorization of free speech in America or GB. Your example is a cherry-pick for the ages, and it is certainly the case that limiting expressions of free speech produces worse outcomes on net than does defending freedom of expression.
You can't legislate for the ages. Only for the immediate future. Because you don't know what the distant future holds. If you try to, the laws risk becoming sacrosanct and a straitjacket for future generations. Now that Mad King George and the Minutemen are long gone, does the Second amendment really help America?
Nothing that's banned under our hate speech laws could possibly be of value in any society that most of us would want to live in. If some future, would-be dictator wanted to ban free speech beyond the types specified in the act, the existence of these laws wouldn't help them do that. At most, they might provide a dubious precedent.
Very few, if any, rights are absolute. They're all subject to trade-off against other principles. And free speech is no exception. The question is where you draw the line. We choose to draw it at the type of speech acts that in recent memory set the scene for an attempt to liquidate an entire race. That seems like sensible trade-off.
Weimar Germany did crack down hard on Nazi speech. It backfired. Their true mistake was in failing to prosecute violence conducted by brown shirts (and communists) in the streets. The chaos increased support for the Nazis, who promised they would enforce order. The other catastrophic mistake was in releasing Hitler from prison, where he was serving a sentence for conducting an attempted coup.
Not sure it backfired. It just didn't work. Probably because it was too little, too late and that was probably because German society at that time was shot through with antisemitism from top to bottom. The objective of banning hate speech is to prevent it from spawning violence. But once violence starts (violence, not mass peaceful protest that some find a bit scary because people of colour are involved) - once violence starts, you have to come down on that far harder. To fail to do that is simply inconsistent. The Weimar authorities had the right idea, imprisoning Goebbals and co. for what they were saying, but didn't follow through. (I admire Nadine Strossen. She's completely consistent and honest on this issue, which is rare in these debates).
Yes, but that doesn't mean that any curbs on free speech seriously risk opening the door to repressive governments. It just means we need to guard against creating the sort of calamitous state that Germany fell into in the 1920s and 30's.
From the context . . . In the expression of political views, if you can say it you can do it. Though mental ideation is a precursor of most significant action. So people who actually set fire to things, do start by doing it with their minds.
First a trite attempt at dramatic irony, then a factual error (far more autocratic dystopian movies are set in the US than in the UK) which is also a non-sequitur (even if more of them were set in the UK, what would that prove?) and finally the word 'but' turning up where a 'but' has no business being. Well done, genius.
Hitler probably did want to be the only dictator but that didn't motivate the invasion of Russia, I don't think.
Molotov-Ribbentrop was only ever intended by Hitler to be a temporary arrangement to avoid having to fight simultaneously on Western and Eastern fronts. Germany was historically wary of Russia and with the non-aggression pact Hitler was following received wisdom about what to do when you go to war with other countries - make a good 'peace' deal with Russia to stop them taking advantage of your being militarily distracted.
When Hitler invaded Russia it was because of his ideological belief that Slavs were untermenschen and their lands forfeit to Germany's geopolitical need for land to the east. Communism was Nazism's natural ideological enemy. And more pressingly he needed their resources - in particular, agricultural output from Southern Russia - if Germany was going to get through another harsh winter.
Hitler had always wanted to invade Russia. There's been an intense Germanic identarian struggle with the Slavs since the time of the Teutonic Knight Crusades. Most Americans know only of the Crusades to the Holy Lands. But the HRE Emperor sent his Crusaders East, where, over a period of centuries, they carved out and Catholicized the enclaves we know today as East Prussia and the Baltic States.
But you're right, when fighting Communism was added to the mix, it further inflamed German anti-Slav animus.
And if it weren't for Hitler micromanaging the 1942 Summer offensive, the Wehrmacht might have defeated the Red Army. It was a close thing.
The bottom line is that ruthlessness--a quality Noah repeatedly extols as a virtue in conservatives--is no substitute for tactical and strategic competence. Something that Trump's Iran blunder has highlighted.
But enough ruthlessness (combined with a good chunk of luck) can lock us into bad outcomes for decades. Taking a different example, the USSR eventually collapsed, but it took more than 70 years from the era when the Bolsheviks brutally captured power and eliminated their rivals.
If it's a binary choice, I'll take competence over ruthlessness any day.
Unfortunately for the US right now, our ruling party is ruthless, but incompetent. Except when it comes to grift. They do corruption exceptionally well.
> you should probably look at the actual battlefield, and feel a little encouraged.
And while you are consider how you can help Ukraine! There’s a ton of good fundraisers, including Americans such as Preston Stewart. In a democracy free will and personal action are paramount. ;-)
This is a very important topic, but I am not sure the framing is correct. It is not clear to me that the framing is "liberal democracies vs tyrants," Rather, perhaps the right framing is ubiquitous access to technology increasingly limits the use of force to overwhelm a population. From Vietnam to Iran today, there are numerous examples. BTW.. liberal democracies can act pretty tyrannical in their foreign policy.
This is a very interesting and important statement: "Under Trump, the U.S. has put itself in a very perilous position by throwing its alliances overboard and going it alone. The U.S. alone has little chance to achieve the scale of production needed to match China. And when Trump alienated his European allies by throwing up huge ridiculous tariffs and threatening to conquer Greenland, he lost any chance for assistance with the Strait of Hormuz."
Although the issue is not China, who has its own issues to deal with. There is no reason that NAFTA cannot match China's industrial output...a discussion for another day. Rather, in the world where force is increasingly ineffective (other than defense), persuasion is much more important, and things like morality, values, stability...dare I say it..maturity.. matters. In this context, keep an eye on the Canadian "middle power" construct. If this gains momentum, we are likely looking at the next geopolitical world order. There is a long way to go yet.
"liberal democracies can act pretty tyrannical in their foreign policy."
I think this is true, but I also think it's true that liberal democracies genuinely do face constraints in their foreign policy. We haven't seen another conscript-based ground invasion like Vietnam, since Vietnam. Iraq was the closest example we have (with a professionalized military), and we haven't seen a lot of appetite for that kind of invasion since the mid-2000s. Trump started a bombing campaign on Iran, but it's really unpopular and he would obviously like to stop now (and he spent the whole election running on a promise not to get involved in wars in the Middle East.) The US is incredibly powerful, so even a "constrained" version of us is very dangerous, but imagine an unconstrained one?
well.... through the CIA there is a lot of covert activity around the world. During the Obama administration, drone strikes went up significantly. Libya, Afganistan, Iraq are the visible aspects. It has been my experience that checks-and-balances work ok for domestic policy, but for foreign policy, the President tends to have a very free (illiberal) hand. I do agree with the statement "The US is incredibly powerful, so even a "constrained" version of us is very dangerous."
You missed something important: autocratic leaders often don't know their own capabilities because each link in the chain of command below them paints as rosy a picture as possible to their superiors and the absence of free inquiry means there are no corrective forces to this.
The fact that this wasn't just a special three day military operation genuinely blindsided Putin; he thought his military was better than it was. Just as Xi was blindsided by Chinese anti-air simply not working in Venezuela and Iran.
Same goes for Trump, after capturing/kidnapping Maduro, Hegseth and the other clowns convinced Trump that taking down Iran would be a breeze, and here we all are.
True. There was a theory doing the rounds at the time that the reason Saddam behaved as if he had WMD was because he believed he did. Whenever he asked those in charge of the weapons programs how things were going, fearing for their lives if they admitted failure, they told him everything was proceeding well. I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly plausible.
I think that case was different; he probably acted as though he had WMD because he hated and feared the Iranians more than the US and he thought the anti-Iranian deterrence was more valuable than the potential anti-US provocation. Turns out he was wrong, but he might have been correct if the 2000 presidential election swung the other way.
I will leave military analysis to theJohn Keegans, Antony Beevors and the Philips O'Briens of this world. But as to reasons to fight, any man or woman has a deep atavistic impulse to defend their children, their home and each other. They may have no choice but to run, but give them a chance to fight and arms to fight with and you'd best take heed. The United States has confronted this lesson throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, but still hasn't learned it, preferring to think that threatening and name calling or having the best guns will carry the day. If you don't care to read history to understand this, look to your own heart and ask what you'd do if someone threatened your spouse or child in your hometown.
Like Trump in Iran, Putin lost this war because he had no Plan B. The assumption was the enemy would be overwhelmed with conventional military might. This didn’t work in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq War 2.0, why would it suddenly work? Smart missiles? Military strategists, planners, and game-theory gurus had nothing about drones in what amounted to speculation. They had nothing about drone hobbyists on bicycles.
“It is about whether the United States can still be trusted as a defense supplier when the customer has money, urgency, and a clear strategic requirement.
The most unconventional, resourceful, creative, and effective military is in Ukraine, providing the best defense of Europe: constant degradation of Putin’s troops, equipment, and now his oil wallet.
The biggest failure is that the U.S. didn’t give Ukraine what it needed to win in the early stages of the war. That cost hundreds of thousand of lost lives of citizens and military personnel. Don’t think Ukraine will remember this when it bids to join NATO.”
Arguably, Europe got more benefit out of a Russia tied down and "slowly winning" useless land in Ukraine than it did out of a vanquished and angry one with its military still partly intact. I hate that this calculation might be valid, but it's one way to look at things. I believe that there was a serious belief that Russia might go nuclear (taken seriously by intelligence agencies, anyway) and this was effective at constraining the US, right or wrong.
Putin threatened to go nuclear if Sweden or Finland joined NATO. They did. He didn’t. NATO’s border with Russia doubled with the addition of Finland. Putin is the boy who cried wolf. China, which wants and needs the EU market, would have been furious, to say the least. Russia is a vassal state subordinate to China.
Oh I know. And one can always say that. But these concerns were much more specific and apparently involved intelligence intercepts involving discussions of where to launch a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine. Blackmail, yes, but the kind where you can end up in a real war by calling that bluff.
The point about the invader vs. defender dynamic is clearly important and explains a lot about why historically democracies tend to be victorious as they usually are not the ones to initiate action.
I do think there's a subtle difference however in the current Iran situation - are the Iranian people willing to die for a government that they despise? Or are they just terrified of being gunned down in the street? And if the war drags on and the economy gets worse, do the people and more moderate elements of the regime upend the current hard line militants? In other words, is there a corrollary that equates the population as an interest that is more democratic than an autocratic regime and if the populace works together they can overthrow the autocrat? That has happened before - see the Soviet Union and the East bloc countries as clear examples.
It is clear that Trump hasn't fully thought out the US strategy and has completely failed to communicate what's at stake here. So he has failed to rally the country around what he believes to be the necessity of the operation if he even could convince the half of the country that so despises him. If you believe that Iran was weeks from getting a nuclear weapon that could directly threaten the entire region and allow them to hold everyone hostage while sowing instability and potentially revolution int he region (and eventually developing a ballistic missile capable of reaching the US), then the potential cost of inaction could have been higher than action.
Only time will tell - autocracies tend to be able to project stronger will than democracies where dissension is visible. And autocracies don't need to explain to their publics what the rationale for the conflict is meaning there is no outlet to change the governments policy. But that doesn't mean there isn't dissension that could ultimately tip the balance in the autocracy.
Final thought - my wife is Cuban. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, her family was still in Cuba but had turned against the Cuban Revolution. Her mother prayed that the invasion would succeed and overthrow the Castro regime. We know several Iranians (all outside the country) who are praying for the IRGC / Mullahs to fall and there are plenty of signs that a significant portion of those in the country are hoping for the same thing.
I wish my fellow Americans were more willing to understand the importance of your last paragraph--that understanding the human heart and will depends on understanding its point of view. Or, as stated by Miles' Law: where you stand depends on where you sit. Jumping to the conclusion that your opponent is simply "evil" might make for good propaganda, but often lousy tactics and strategy. Better we learn to pause and hold a mirror to ourselves before cursing others.
One bright spot is Japan, who are strengthening alliances with Australia, Philippines and other neighbors, starting up weapons exports (the US should order some warships before the queue gets too full) including a joint venture with a Ukrainian drone maker, and actually has a government with high approval ratings, unlike most other countries.
As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried. Even if you remove the moral aspect of the comparison, democratic nations have typically outlasted and out competed their authoritarian rivals. Dictators and tyrants can have short term success, but it seldom lasts for long. I believe this will continue to be shown over the course of this century.
I believe this is true, but it doesn't mean we can't end up in mad local minima for decades at least. We've never experienced this on a global scale, but regionally? Absolutely.
Definitely agree. Just because the democracies largely came out on top in the 20th century didn't mean a whole bunch of horrible things didn't also happen, as well.
"the moral advantage that you get from defending your homes and families against an invader"
Just my take, but I think this part cuts closer to the heart of the matter than anything else you bring up.
People seem highly motivated to defend their conception of an "us." And this tends to supersede a lot of other things that people claim to believe in.
I think that this can be a bit difficult to see as a generalized rule because sometimes it presents as heroic, sometimes as evil, sometimes as simply inexplicable. "Us" is so malleable, often exasperating.
But the same force that makes a Ukraine or Afghanistan or Vietnam or, now, probably Iran, such a tough nut to crack for apparently vastly superior powers is also the same force that fires international backlash against immigration and sense of white grievance and Christian grievance in the US.
It's not just drone technology that makes this work, it is also communications technology. Leaders are effective to the extent that they convince followers that they represent an attacked "us" and each advance in communications technology over the past century has made this more effective.
The Right and the Left might disagree as to the identity of the attacker and the "us" but they share the viewpoint that all other norms ought to be set aside in the service of defending "us." It's no surprise that free speech is out and violence is in -- from both ends of the spectrum.
Obviously, I am glad that this is working to the benefit of Ukrainians, but whether that means liberal democracies in general will benefit, I am far less certain.
George H. Bush understood the world of modern warfare better than any President. He had the best résumé in the Western World: Air Force pilot in WWII, Congress, Ambassador to England, director of the CIA, and Vice President. He knew the days of Empire building were over and went into Iraq with clear objectives and no plan to remain. Bush was criticized by some for not going into Baghdad. History has proven him right.
Shortly after the Iraq War I had the opportunity to spend a long day with then-retired General Schwarzkopf in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. (It was as shock to see him in a business suit, but at least it was Army green.) Schwarzkopf made it clear that logistics was the most important aspect of the Iraq War. He also knew how to manage press relations.
Ukraine is continually adjusting its logistics to meet the changing war environment. It’s Darwinian: survival of the most adaptable, not the strongest.
That Iran's population failed to rise up against their autocratic rules doesn't say much about how wars are won or lost. It just says that in the end, they deserve the government they have. Nobody else will ever do anything even remotely close to giving them an opportunity like this. If they fail to take it then there's really not much else to say about it. All of that talent in Iran will go to waste as they become yet another failed state, and the rest of the world won't care except to periodically come and bat down the IRGC's toys any time they come close to becoming a real threat. Outside of that it will just be a place where the IRGC and its supporters can seethe and rage against the US, pointlessly, from their hermit kingdom. Maybe one day they'll tire of it and finally prevail in a good old fashioned civil war, at the cost of near total destruction of civilian infrastructure and millions of lives lost. That's some 10D chess right there.
Mea culpa once again for the US - I had high hopes for Iran despite the usual Trump buffoonery. Too bad, but what can anyone do? As per usual the people trying to put their bleeding-heart humanitarian bonafides on full display by opposing every US action will move on to the next thing, smug and secure in their great moral victory of assisting the IRGC in their quest to eternal subjugate 90 million people. Bravo folks, well done. You really stuck it to America this time!
Watching Ukraines resistance is one of the most heroic events of my lifetime. I am still proud that under Biden we were able to help them survive long enough to now essentially stand up on their own. It’s one of the most encouraging reversals in contemporary history.
One of the aspects of the Iran war that is interesting to me is how much it lays bare that Trump is fundamentally a coward. He likes to seem to be a strongman without being much of one in substance. Not to say he isn’t corrosive to democracy. He is. It’s just that in Iran he didn’t take Putins tactic of “throw everyone in the meat grinder until I get what I want.” When the going got tough…he quit. Now he’s just begging to be allowed to say he won and run away.
Trump still operates on the theory that elections matter. This adds some constraints on his idiocy, which is already pretty intense. He's doing his level best to rig the election system, but he hasn't figured it out just yet. Imagine if you took that factor away from him, gave him total control over the media, and a loyal police force that could kill or intimidate anyone who speaks poorly of him.
And then, of course, there's General Patton, ""No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country"
The V-DEM’s 2026 report has more than a hint of hysteria about it. The idea that the UK is no more liberal than Argentina or the US because we use the law to protect vulnerable groups from verbal attacks, is ludicrous. If you can say it, you can do it - and somebody will end up doing it. Once you get it into your heads that words are a category of action, you may be able to avoid sleepwalking into genuine autocracy.
I don't like giving the government a veto on what people can say or not say very much, although I'll make exceptions for fraud, libel, and maybe a few other things. Probably not hate speech, though.
Libel laws provide protection for high profile, wealthy people. Laws against hate speech are a minimum protection under criminal law for everyone. Initially the police have tested the boundaries of the law with a few over-zealous, attempted prosecutions, most of which were thrown out before they got to court. But the law is basically sound if used appropriately.
Why wouldn't libel laws protect the average person?
Costs.
In my country the loser usually pays the costs, so if you have strong case the costs are not much of a issue.
Making hate speech illegal gives absolute control to those who define what is considered hate speech, which is why it isn’t illegal in countries (is there only one？) with constitutional guarantees of free speech.
Of course. And if a country is governed and policed not by consent, but by force and fear, then limits on free speech are likely to serve the interests of those in power rather than reflecting the shared values of the population. The UK doesn't have a written constitution which is why we can be more flexible around issues like this (and why we don't end up vesting ultimate power for some vital decisions in the the hands of a small number of judges appointed for life by the head of the Executive power.
Once you make exceptions for libel, you'd better be awfully careful that it doesn't become a backdoor for the kind of speech suppression you don't like. It's happening now in the US.
"f you can say it, you can do it"
Then you can forbid the expression of any illiberal ideas - fascism, communism, or perhaps even conservatism or social-democracy; and will end with an autocracy to end all autocracies...
No, just the hateful ones. Progressives who stumble over into (actual) antisemitism when supporting the Palestinian cause - that's on the list of proscribed speech along with the other racial slurs, homophobia and misogyny. Transphobia, too. Why should defense of women-only spaces (a legitimate point of view) entail coarse or vulgar attacks on trans people? It doesn't need to and it shouldn't. Unfortunately if you give people the right to offend others in the course of arguing for a point of view, a lot of people make giving offence the object of the exercise for the attention or money it brings them or the hurt and trouble it makes for those they're offending.
The issue is how hate is defined, if the US was able to prosecute hate speech, Trump would have all his detractors and late night comedy show hosts locked up.
He's had some success silencing his critics in the media and academia without any hate speech laws. You need to worry more about over-mighty, wealthy citizens than about laws designed to protect beleaguered minorities.
Until the would-be autocrat becomes more popular due to the state suppressing their views, after which they turn those laws against defenders of democracy once they gain power. Worked well for Hitler in Weimar Germany.
I am genuinely alarmed by the lack of alarm surrounding the global rise in fascism (there's a chance that's downstream of reading a lot of Philip Roth novels lately). Regardless, "number of countries democratizing" is obviously a nonsense statistic. After all, the "indicator" would be at its most "alarming" level when every country on earth is a democracy. A more relevant stat would look at the proportion of non-democratic countries that are democratizing, not sheer volume.
The greatest threat of fascism doesn't come from those who want to legislate against hate speech. It comes from those who want to be free to use hate speech. How different history might have been if the Weimar authorities had been able to lock up Hitler the first time he started using antisemitic language, before his insane brand of ethnic tribalism was able to gain any momentum.
That viewpoint overestimates any regime's ability to differentiate between would-be Hitlers and other forms of benign intolerance. And it also assumes a regime's moral evaluations of speech are correct in perpetuity. We don't have the legacies of MLK or Ghandi if not for the broad-based valorization of free speech in America or GB. Your example is a cherry-pick for the ages, and it is certainly the case that limiting expressions of free speech produces worse outcomes on net than does defending freedom of expression.
You can't legislate for the ages. Only for the immediate future. Because you don't know what the distant future holds. If you try to, the laws risk becoming sacrosanct and a straitjacket for future generations. Now that Mad King George and the Minutemen are long gone, does the Second amendment really help America?
Nothing that's banned under our hate speech laws could possibly be of value in any society that most of us would want to live in. If some future, would-be dictator wanted to ban free speech beyond the types specified in the act, the existence of these laws wouldn't help them do that. At most, they might provide a dubious precedent.
Very few, if any, rights are absolute. They're all subject to trade-off against other principles. And free speech is no exception. The question is where you draw the line. We choose to draw it at the type of speech acts that in recent memory set the scene for an attempt to liquidate an entire race. That seems like sensible trade-off.
Weimar Germany did crack down hard on Nazi speech. It backfired. Their true mistake was in failing to prosecute violence conducted by brown shirts (and communists) in the streets. The chaos increased support for the Nazis, who promised they would enforce order. The other catastrophic mistake was in releasing Hitler from prison, where he was serving a sentence for conducting an attempted coup.
https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would-censorship-have-stopped-rise-nazis-part-16-answers
Not sure it backfired. It just didn't work. Probably because it was too little, too late and that was probably because German society at that time was shot through with antisemitism from top to bottom. The objective of banning hate speech is to prevent it from spawning violence. But once violence starts (violence, not mass peaceful protest that some find a bit scary because people of colour are involved) - once violence starts, you have to come down on that far harder. To fail to do that is simply inconsistent. The Weimar authorities had the right idea, imprisoning Goebbals and co. for what they were saying, but didn't follow through. (I admire Nadine Strossen. She's completely consistent and honest on this issue, which is rare in these debates).
In Germany in 1939 insulting the NSDAP would have been considered "hate speech"
Yes, but that doesn't mean that any curbs on free speech seriously risk opening the door to repressive governments. It just means we need to guard against creating the sort of calamitous state that Germany fell into in the 1920s and 30's.
Ah, so you say YOUR version of fascism is morally good and justified unlike all the others?
Wow well that changes everything! We've never seen this before! And you're from the UK you say? What are the odds!
> If you can say it, you can do it
I can light objects on fire with my mind
From the context . . . In the expression of political views, if you can say it you can do it. Though mental ideation is a precursor of most significant action. So people who actually set fire to things, do start by doing it with their minds.
So people like you DO exist after all. Amazing.
Is it any wonder that almost every future-autocratic-dystopia movie is set in the UK? You really protected those minorities but good!
First a trite attempt at dramatic irony, then a factual error (far more autocratic dystopian movies are set in the US than in the UK) which is also a non-sequitur (even if more of them were set in the UK, what would that prove?) and finally the word 'but' turning up where a 'but' has no business being. Well done, genius.
Hitler probably did want to be the only dictator but that didn't motivate the invasion of Russia, I don't think.
Molotov-Ribbentrop was only ever intended by Hitler to be a temporary arrangement to avoid having to fight simultaneously on Western and Eastern fronts. Germany was historically wary of Russia and with the non-aggression pact Hitler was following received wisdom about what to do when you go to war with other countries - make a good 'peace' deal with Russia to stop them taking advantage of your being militarily distracted.
When Hitler invaded Russia it was because of his ideological belief that Slavs were untermenschen and their lands forfeit to Germany's geopolitical need for land to the east. Communism was Nazism's natural ideological enemy. And more pressingly he needed their resources - in particular, agricultural output from Southern Russia - if Germany was going to get through another harsh winter.
Hitler had always wanted to invade Russia. There's been an intense Germanic identarian struggle with the Slavs since the time of the Teutonic Knight Crusades. Most Americans know only of the Crusades to the Holy Lands. But the HRE Emperor sent his Crusaders East, where, over a period of centuries, they carved out and Catholicized the enclaves we know today as East Prussia and the Baltic States.
But you're right, when fighting Communism was added to the mix, it further inflamed German anti-Slav animus.
And if it weren't for Hitler micromanaging the 1942 Summer offensive, the Wehrmacht might have defeated the Red Army. It was a close thing.
The bottom line is that ruthlessness--a quality Noah repeatedly extols as a virtue in conservatives--is no substitute for tactical and strategic competence. Something that Trump's Iran blunder has highlighted.
But enough ruthlessness (combined with a good chunk of luck) can lock us into bad outcomes for decades. Taking a different example, the USSR eventually collapsed, but it took more than 70 years from the era when the Bolsheviks brutally captured power and eliminated their rivals.
If it's a binary choice, I'll take competence over ruthlessness any day.
Unfortunately for the US right now, our ruling party is ruthless, but incompetent. Except when it comes to grift. They do corruption exceptionally well.
> you should probably look at the actual battlefield, and feel a little encouraged.
And while you are consider how you can help Ukraine! There’s a ton of good fundraisers, including Americans such as Preston Stewart. In a democracy free will and personal action are paramount. ;-)
Noah, thanks for the post!
I would recommend Come Back Alive: https://savelife.in.ua/en
Indeed! they are an absolutely stellar organisation, just had a 12 year anniversary this past week.
This is a very important topic, but I am not sure the framing is correct. It is not clear to me that the framing is "liberal democracies vs tyrants," Rather, perhaps the right framing is ubiquitous access to technology increasingly limits the use of force to overwhelm a population. From Vietnam to Iran today, there are numerous examples. BTW.. liberal democracies can act pretty tyrannical in their foreign policy.
This is a very interesting and important statement: "Under Trump, the U.S. has put itself in a very perilous position by throwing its alliances overboard and going it alone. The U.S. alone has little chance to achieve the scale of production needed to match China. And when Trump alienated his European allies by throwing up huge ridiculous tariffs and threatening to conquer Greenland, he lost any chance for assistance with the Strait of Hormuz."
Although the issue is not China, who has its own issues to deal with. There is no reason that NAFTA cannot match China's industrial output...a discussion for another day. Rather, in the world where force is increasingly ineffective (other than defense), persuasion is much more important, and things like morality, values, stability...dare I say it..maturity.. matters. In this context, keep an eye on the Canadian "middle power" construct. If this gains momentum, we are likely looking at the next geopolitical world order. There is a long way to go yet.
"liberal democracies can act pretty tyrannical in their foreign policy."
I think this is true, but I also think it's true that liberal democracies genuinely do face constraints in their foreign policy. We haven't seen another conscript-based ground invasion like Vietnam, since Vietnam. Iraq was the closest example we have (with a professionalized military), and we haven't seen a lot of appetite for that kind of invasion since the mid-2000s. Trump started a bombing campaign on Iran, but it's really unpopular and he would obviously like to stop now (and he spent the whole election running on a promise not to get involved in wars in the Middle East.) The US is incredibly powerful, so even a "constrained" version of us is very dangerous, but imagine an unconstrained one?
well.... through the CIA there is a lot of covert activity around the world. During the Obama administration, drone strikes went up significantly. Libya, Afganistan, Iraq are the visible aspects. It has been my experience that checks-and-balances work ok for domestic policy, but for foreign policy, the President tends to have a very free (illiberal) hand. I do agree with the statement "The US is incredibly powerful, so even a "constrained" version of us is very dangerous."
You missed something important: autocratic leaders often don't know their own capabilities because each link in the chain of command below them paints as rosy a picture as possible to their superiors and the absence of free inquiry means there are no corrective forces to this.
The fact that this wasn't just a special three day military operation genuinely blindsided Putin; he thought his military was better than it was. Just as Xi was blindsided by Chinese anti-air simply not working in Venezuela and Iran.
Same goes for Trump, after capturing/kidnapping Maduro, Hegseth and the other clowns convinced Trump that taking down Iran would be a breeze, and here we all are.
True. There was a theory doing the rounds at the time that the reason Saddam behaved as if he had WMD was because he believed he did. Whenever he asked those in charge of the weapons programs how things were going, fearing for their lives if they admitted failure, they told him everything was proceeding well. I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly plausible.
I think that case was different; he probably acted as though he had WMD because he hated and feared the Iranians more than the US and he thought the anti-Iranian deterrence was more valuable than the potential anti-US provocation. Turns out he was wrong, but he might have been correct if the 2000 presidential election swung the other way.
Your theory is also plausible, though.
Putin's "preferred negotiating partner would be Germany's former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder".
Right. And Hitler's preferred negotiating partner would have been Neville Chamberlain.
I will leave military analysis to theJohn Keegans, Antony Beevors and the Philips O'Briens of this world. But as to reasons to fight, any man or woman has a deep atavistic impulse to defend their children, their home and each other. They may have no choice but to run, but give them a chance to fight and arms to fight with and you'd best take heed. The United States has confronted this lesson throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, but still hasn't learned it, preferring to think that threatening and name calling or having the best guns will carry the day. If you don't care to read history to understand this, look to your own heart and ask what you'd do if someone threatened your spouse or child in your hometown.
Like Trump in Iran, Putin lost this war because he had no Plan B. The assumption was the enemy would be overwhelmed with conventional military might. This didn’t work in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq War 2.0, why would it suddenly work? Smart missiles? Military strategists, planners, and game-theory gurus had nothing about drones in what amounted to speculation. They had nothing about drone hobbyists on bicycles.
“It is about whether the United States can still be trusted as a defense supplier when the customer has money, urgency, and a clear strategic requirement.
The most unconventional, resourceful, creative, and effective military is in Ukraine, providing the best defense of Europe: constant degradation of Putin’s troops, equipment, and now his oil wallet.
The biggest failure is that the U.S. didn’t give Ukraine what it needed to win in the early stages of the war. That cost hundreds of thousand of lost lives of citizens and military personnel. Don’t think Ukraine will remember this when it bids to join NATO.”
Arguably, Europe got more benefit out of a Russia tied down and "slowly winning" useless land in Ukraine than it did out of a vanquished and angry one with its military still partly intact. I hate that this calculation might be valid, but it's one way to look at things. I believe that there was a serious belief that Russia might go nuclear (taken seriously by intelligence agencies, anyway) and this was effective at constraining the US, right or wrong.
Putin threatened to go nuclear if Sweden or Finland joined NATO. They did. He didn’t. NATO’s border with Russia doubled with the addition of Finland. Putin is the boy who cried wolf. China, which wants and needs the EU market, would have been furious, to say the least. Russia is a vassal state subordinate to China.
Oh I know. And one can always say that. But these concerns were much more specific and apparently involved intelligence intercepts involving discussions of where to launch a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine. Blackmail, yes, but the kind where you can end up in a real war by calling that bluff.
It’s worth Googling.
The point about the invader vs. defender dynamic is clearly important and explains a lot about why historically democracies tend to be victorious as they usually are not the ones to initiate action.
I do think there's a subtle difference however in the current Iran situation - are the Iranian people willing to die for a government that they despise? Or are they just terrified of being gunned down in the street? And if the war drags on and the economy gets worse, do the people and more moderate elements of the regime upend the current hard line militants? In other words, is there a corrollary that equates the population as an interest that is more democratic than an autocratic regime and if the populace works together they can overthrow the autocrat? That has happened before - see the Soviet Union and the East bloc countries as clear examples.
It is clear that Trump hasn't fully thought out the US strategy and has completely failed to communicate what's at stake here. So he has failed to rally the country around what he believes to be the necessity of the operation if he even could convince the half of the country that so despises him. If you believe that Iran was weeks from getting a nuclear weapon that could directly threaten the entire region and allow them to hold everyone hostage while sowing instability and potentially revolution int he region (and eventually developing a ballistic missile capable of reaching the US), then the potential cost of inaction could have been higher than action.
Only time will tell - autocracies tend to be able to project stronger will than democracies where dissension is visible. And autocracies don't need to explain to their publics what the rationale for the conflict is meaning there is no outlet to change the governments policy. But that doesn't mean there isn't dissension that could ultimately tip the balance in the autocracy.
Final thought - my wife is Cuban. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, her family was still in Cuba but had turned against the Cuban Revolution. Her mother prayed that the invasion would succeed and overthrow the Castro regime. We know several Iranians (all outside the country) who are praying for the IRGC / Mullahs to fall and there are plenty of signs that a significant portion of those in the country are hoping for the same thing.
I wish my fellow Americans were more willing to understand the importance of your last paragraph--that understanding the human heart and will depends on understanding its point of view. Or, as stated by Miles' Law: where you stand depends on where you sit. Jumping to the conclusion that your opponent is simply "evil" might make for good propaganda, but often lousy tactics and strategy. Better we learn to pause and hold a mirror to ourselves before cursing others.
One bright spot is Japan, who are strengthening alliances with Australia, Philippines and other neighbors, starting up weapons exports (the US should order some warships before the queue gets too full) including a joint venture with a Ukrainian drone maker, and actually has a government with high approval ratings, unlike most other countries.
As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried. Even if you remove the moral aspect of the comparison, democratic nations have typically outlasted and out competed their authoritarian rivals. Dictators and tyrants can have short term success, but it seldom lasts for long. I believe this will continue to be shown over the course of this century.
I believe this is true, but it doesn't mean we can't end up in mad local minima for decades at least. We've never experienced this on a global scale, but regionally? Absolutely.
Definitely agree. Just because the democracies largely came out on top in the 20th century didn't mean a whole bunch of horrible things didn't also happen, as well.
"the moral advantage that you get from defending your homes and families against an invader"
Just my take, but I think this part cuts closer to the heart of the matter than anything else you bring up.
People seem highly motivated to defend their conception of an "us." And this tends to supersede a lot of other things that people claim to believe in.
I think that this can be a bit difficult to see as a generalized rule because sometimes it presents as heroic, sometimes as evil, sometimes as simply inexplicable. "Us" is so malleable, often exasperating.
But the same force that makes a Ukraine or Afghanistan or Vietnam or, now, probably Iran, such a tough nut to crack for apparently vastly superior powers is also the same force that fires international backlash against immigration and sense of white grievance and Christian grievance in the US.
It's not just drone technology that makes this work, it is also communications technology. Leaders are effective to the extent that they convince followers that they represent an attacked "us" and each advance in communications technology over the past century has made this more effective.
The Right and the Left might disagree as to the identity of the attacker and the "us" but they share the viewpoint that all other norms ought to be set aside in the service of defending "us." It's no surprise that free speech is out and violence is in -- from both ends of the spectrum.
Obviously, I am glad that this is working to the benefit of Ukrainians, but whether that means liberal democracies in general will benefit, I am far less certain.
George H. Bush understood the world of modern warfare better than any President. He had the best résumé in the Western World: Air Force pilot in WWII, Congress, Ambassador to England, director of the CIA, and Vice President. He knew the days of Empire building were over and went into Iraq with clear objectives and no plan to remain. Bush was criticized by some for not going into Baghdad. History has proven him right.
Shortly after the Iraq War I had the opportunity to spend a long day with then-retired General Schwarzkopf in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. (It was as shock to see him in a business suit, but at least it was Army green.) Schwarzkopf made it clear that logistics was the most important aspect of the Iraq War. He also knew how to manage press relations.
Ukraine is continually adjusting its logistics to meet the changing war environment. It’s Darwinian: survival of the most adaptable, not the strongest.
That Iran's population failed to rise up against their autocratic rules doesn't say much about how wars are won or lost. It just says that in the end, they deserve the government they have. Nobody else will ever do anything even remotely close to giving them an opportunity like this. If they fail to take it then there's really not much else to say about it. All of that talent in Iran will go to waste as they become yet another failed state, and the rest of the world won't care except to periodically come and bat down the IRGC's toys any time they come close to becoming a real threat. Outside of that it will just be a place where the IRGC and its supporters can seethe and rage against the US, pointlessly, from their hermit kingdom. Maybe one day they'll tire of it and finally prevail in a good old fashioned civil war, at the cost of near total destruction of civilian infrastructure and millions of lives lost. That's some 10D chess right there.
Mea culpa once again for the US - I had high hopes for Iran despite the usual Trump buffoonery. Too bad, but what can anyone do? As per usual the people trying to put their bleeding-heart humanitarian bonafides on full display by opposing every US action will move on to the next thing, smug and secure in their great moral victory of assisting the IRGC in their quest to eternal subjugate 90 million people. Bravo folks, well done. You really stuck it to America this time!