This may be somewhat unrelated, but International Relations scholars tend to swear by a thing called the ‘Democratic Peace Theory’. This theory states that democracies are less likely to go to war - especially against other democracies - than dictatorships.
The theory is made up of several concepts: institutional constraints stop democratic leaders from entering a war, as does free media, and (here comes the important bit) democracies will fight fewer wars but fight them better. A democracy entering a war is an event so out of the ordinary, that it will devote all its resources to winning it. Furthermore, since losing a war will almost always make a democratic government lose the next election, it is in its best interest to make sure this doesn’t happen.
I’m not sure what academia has had to say about this concept in the last few years, but at least that’s what it said when I studied International Relations.
This part is just silly; the US didn’t devote all of its resources to winning Vietnam, or Korea, or Desert Storm, or Afghanistan, or Iraq in 2003, and similarly Germany and the USSR devoted themselves quite fully to fighting each other in WW2 with Germany in the end being reduced to throwing 14 year old boys and 65 year old men into the front lines. A dictator losing a war risks losing a lot more than the next election, yet they can still lose wars too.
Of course, it is. I myself have never been a big fan of the Democratic Peace Theory, just though it was worth pointing out.
It is a theory that depends on an excessively specific definition of ‘war’ (referring almost only to total wars) and of ‘democracy’ (meaning only countries that are fully democratic and not democratising). But since the DPT seems to have great following in Washington DC, it’s worth mentioning.
World War II was the USA’s last officially declared war; every conflict we’ve been in since has been authorized under other congressional mandates. And after Vietnam the USA abandoned any idea of drafting citizens and has moved to a professional military model. This is scary because it’s more or less the modern version of the Marian reforms, and that eventually led to the Roman civil wars and the emperors. Furthermore, there’s been an almost Orwellian erasure of the distinction between being at war and being at peace, de jure after WW2 and def facto after 9-11.
I sometimes worry that the only reason we’re not a military dictatorship is that we’re living on the inertia of our former values- it just hasn’t happened yet.
The common trope was that the problem with Soviet soldiers in any hypothetical cold war confrontation was this - the Soviets had less initiative. The explanation was somewhat similar to that for dictators - the consequences of failure tend to be more drastic than in a democracy. The consequences of bad decisions, all up and down the chain of command, was bigger.
A mistake or misjudgement by a front-line soldier of the west meant courtmartial, reprimand, dishonorable discharge, etc. Nobody shot your family too. If the decision was debatable, or to cover up incompetence higher up, the issue could be debated in congress. I think too, US soldiers (in the WWII pPacific, for example) would fight harder and tolerate worse conditions knowing that in a few years (if they survived) they were going abck to cheeseburgers and major league baseball, not Soviet-imposed Ukrainian famines.
In a dictatorship, there were no checks and balances. the risks of sticking your neck out and guessing wrong could be much worse. The old maxin “don’t volunteer” applied strongly here. Simply follow what you were told to do, and any failure is blamed on your superiors. Deviate from those orders and you bet your life.
(The one illustration I have of this sort of attitude - I had an acquaintance who was a consultant for a short while at a refinery in communist Albania. He said the workers would listen to a pump dying for a day or more, grinding itself to pieces until the who process batch was garbage. If they ordered the pump shut down, they were responsible for the loss of production. If the pump died on its own, the production failure was not their fault, they could not be blamed… So, nobody stuck their neck out, nobody had the authority to shut down production and nobody took the initiative.)
You forgot the most important reason: WWI. Many of the lower to middle officers from WWI were of the opinion that Germany gave up too early, and that they could have turned things around. These lower officers became the higher officers in WWII. This was even one of the many silly arguments the Nazi’s hung around the heads of the Jewish: the Jews and the Democrats and the Communists had sabotaged the German war effort. I watched a German documentary yesterday (I live near Berlin) about how certain these young officers were that Germany would be able to turn things around during WWI. They had lots of time to convince themselves of how right they were in the years after WWI, and the heavy reparations certainly helped to convince them that things could not have been worse if they had gambled a bit more during that war.
Seen from that perspective, and considering the heavy indoctrination in the 30’s, it’s no wonder that the German army basically fought until it ran out of space.
You’re quite right, the ‘stab-in-the-back’ mythos was a core part of Nazi ideology, although I wonder how much of a factor this was towards the end. Hitler himself simply wanted to go down in flames, believing the German race had failed him. In the SS ranks there were those who thought the fighting (on the western front) should end - Wolfe in Italy, for instance. Even the Reichsfuhrer SS himself sent out peace feelers.
I think the predominant thought in German minds towards the end was simply fear of the Soviets - in the army, from knowing what horrors they had inflicted in Russia, and in civilian life hearing dark rumours from eastern refugees and propaganda. In the higher ranks there was bitterness that the western allies had betrayed European civilisation by fighting against the only bulwark against Bolshevik barbarism. Among the ordinary fighting man, continuing to resist the Soviet advance as it was the only chance he had to save his family from the fate of Nemmersdorf.
No, it wasn’t. The Red army did its best to keep Leningrad supplied, but there’s only so much you can do to feed a besieged city that size. No level of competence would have prevented starvation in this situation.
(Except if you meant that Leningrad wouldn’t have ended up being besieged in the first place had Stalin been more competent.)
Indeed, but not all dictatorships are totalitarian, by a long shot. You’re mentioning China, but today’s China hasn’t been totalitarian for a while. The party isn’t anymore involved in every single detail, information isn’t free, but isn’t purely propaganda, either, criticism is tolerated up to a point, etc…Basically, this dictatorship isn’t all encompassing. For a right-wing example, the numerous South-American dictatorships of the 70s-80s weren’t totalitarian, either.
I don’t think there is any totalitarian dictatorship left apart from North Korea.
FTR, though, Albania under communism was an absolute extreme. It was very similar to North Korea now (complete paranoia, self-sufficiency as a central tenet, bunkers build everywhere, no contact whatsoever with the outside world, including other European communist countries, etc…). I’m in fact surprised that you knew someone who actually had worked in Albania. I met such a guy once in a train during the early 80s, and I remember being completely amazed at meeting someone who had been in this country.
Yes, I thought it incredibly strange too… but toward the end of the iron curtain, they were desperate for hard currency and needed to figure out why they could not make a profit with something almost as cheap as slave labour. They wanted to update the process.
But yes, this is the absolute extreme - probably not even the head of the refinery felt safe ordering a production shutdown since every day of production meant $X hard currency.