Do Totalitarian States drive the intellectual advancement of the nation?

Great Debates
1

Dseid suggested I start this thread so here goes:

Let us take the major totalitarian states as defined by the below:

So we, are looking for single party states with strict controls on life and culture.

This then includes:

  1. Nazi Germany
  2. Communist Russia
  3. Fascist Italy
  4. Communist China
  5. Afghanistan (until 1992)
  6. Spain 1936-1978.

Next, to avoid the 2000+ post club getting the peanuts ready to throw from the gallery there will have to be proof that these countries improved their intellectual advancement during that time.

I feel have made a case for Nazi Germanies advancements so do not need to tread over old ground. I will therefore choose Communist Russia and fascist Italy for the time being. I may have to extend my arguements depending on the volume of peanuts.

Communist Russia - ok, let us look at their achievements
1.

  1. Stalingrad - an incredible achievement
  2. Sputnik 1
  3. Economic growth
  1. Controlling so many groups under one identity - something we are failing to do in Iraq today.
  2. The USSR produced 11 nobel prize winners at a time when they were closed off from the western world
  3. Yuri Gagarin
  4. Nuclear Physics - detonating a hydrogen bomb 10 months after the US, despite recovering from a major war within it’s borders
  5. the Ak47, RPK and other revolutionary light weapons
  6. Great wide brimmed hats and parades

Fascist Italy

  1. The trains ran on time
    er… anyway

Discuss

2

Neither Fascist Italy nor Fascist Spain were Totalitarian by any reasonable definition of the word. Authoritarian, certainly, but they simply did not demonstrate the level of control of each citizen’s life necessary to achieve a totalitarian society.

Your efforts to hold up Nazi Geremany as some sort of exemplar of intellectual advancemernt has been throroughly shredded in your original thread. (You seem to have missed that point.) (And when you falsely held up anceient Rome, you were unable to provide a single example of whatever you thought ypou were asserting, resorting, in rather poor form, with a simple link to Google™.)
Your premise here is, no surprise, fatally flawed, as well. Simply pointing to advances that a totalitarian society might have made demonstrates nothing. What you need to be able to establish is that a totalitarian state that is in direct competition with a free nation will outperform the free nation in some substantial measure. Such has not been the case in any of your examples.

The odd case of a Sputnik (in which one nation pursues a course different from any other nation and happens to arrive first) hardly overshadows the overall technology produced in the U.S. Nearly every major advance in Soviet technology occurred in areas where the U.S. was not bothering to go–and when the U.S. did take an interest, it generally (not always) overtook and surpassed the Soviet efforts rather swiftly. (And this is not even considering the amount of Western technology that was simply stolen by the Soviets.)

So, to recap, you do not understand what a totalitarian state actually is and have a hard time correctly providing examples of such.
You believe, wrongly, that you have demonstrated some sort of imaginary superiority displayed by Nazi Germany.
And your basic argument consists of an odd collection of individual events or persons without an actual coherent argument demonstrating an overall superiority of technological improvement.

Are you with me so far? I really think you need to pull back and try to imgaine what a coherent argument looks like.
(And you will do much better if you drop the snotty attitude you have been displaying in several threads, including this one.)

3

I have a feeling that tomndeb (or Tom, anyway) has a thing for parenthetical statements.

What he’s trying to get at is that when the biggest nation in the world invests 20% of its GDP in defence, they’re bound to hit upon a few nifty weapons with absolutely zero civillain benefit.

e.g. I believe the Soviet navy was the first to pioneer Vertical Launch systems (VLS) for ship-borne missiles, a system used by all modern warships, and shamelessly copied by the dirty Americans.

I’m sure Russians today are quite pleased about it, since whatever ships the Russian Navy hasn’t sold to China or India is now rusting away in port.

4

I have a feeling that tomndeb (or Tom, anyway) has a thing for parenthetical statements.

What he’s trying to get at is that when the biggest nation in the world invests 20% of its GDP in defence, they’re bound to hit upon a few nifty weapons with absolutely zero civillain benefit.

e.g. I believe the Soviet navy was the first to pioneer Vertical Launch systems (VLS) for ship-borne missiles, a system used by all modern warships, and shamelessly copied by the dirty Americans.

I’m sure Russians today are quite pleased about it, since whatever ships the Russian Navy hasn’t sold to China or India are now rusting away in port.

5

Let’s look at your examples:

  1. Actually, the Soviet Union did establish a powerful industrial base in the 1930s. Having the ability to order people around does provide a certain capacity for construction.
    However, the Soviet Union was never once during its existence a powerful economy. You need to discover what that means to understand the difference. And, of course, that same powerful industrial base was created at the same time that it was starving huge numbers of people in the richest arable land in the world, (partly on purpose, but partly because they really never understood what they were doing).

  2. The desire for the Russians to dig in and defend themselves at Stalingrad is one of the remakable stories of group heroism in history. Whether it was accomplished because or in spite of the totalitarian state in which they lived would be a point you would need to prove in oreder to use it as an example of “intellectual advancement.”

  3. Sputnik provides you some ammunition. Of course, putting 8 pounds of electonics on the top of a rocket demonstrates the ability to build a powerful rocket. Now, within ten years of that advance, which nation had launched the most weather satellites, communications satellites, and research probes? Are you going to assert that the U.S.S.R. stayed ahead in the space race?

  4. You really need to read up on economics and history. The U.S.S.R. survived only as long as it did because it had such enormous reserves of raw materials, (following which it had numerous client states that could serve as a modified form of colonialism). The U.S.S.R. ewas never an economic leader, beig far surpassed by just anout any First World nation you can think of. In fact, it is generally described as a third world nation with a second world military.

  5. While I am not in any way desirous of emulating the U.S.S.R.'s “control” of disparate groups, you are, I hope, aware that they used massive military repression, massive starvation, and very nasty successive groups of secret police to accomplish their goals and that they were often held off for rather more than the four years we have spent in Iraq before they accomplished that control?

  6. If you wish to trumpet the U.S.S.R.'s ability to produce winners of the Nobel prizes, you must compare the number of U.S. or British Nobel winners for the smae period. Care to wager where the greatest number will lie?

  7. I am sure that Comrade Gagarin is a truly heroic individual, his existence proves nothing regarding intellectual advancement. The U.S. was able to come up with a few Shepherds, Glenns, Grissoms, Yeagers, Armstongs, Aldrins, etc. (as did the U.S.S.R. come up with numerous brave individuals, as well).

  8. You are aware, I hope, the the U.S.S.R. stole most of the information needed to create both its fission and fusion bombs, right? I am perfectly willing to grant their scientists all the respect due them, but your point is a bit clouded. Fighting a war inside one’s borders has little to do with applying technology taken from another source and applying it. (And since they had already moved their industry back to the East of the Urals during the War, the particular issue of devising a bomb was not much affected by the battles fought on their soil.)

  9. Weapons development can be a sign of advancing technology. Of course, none of the weapons you named are techologiacl breakthroughs. They are very good designs based on situations discovered on the battlefield (and, to a certain extent, borrowed from captured weapons from other places). I would not minimize their quality, but they are simply not on the order of transistors, radar, proximity fuzes, etc.

  10. Do you have an example of a brilliant wide-brimmed hat?

6

Just look at these hats!

Tell me they are not intellectual giants!

7

In one Hulk comic, there was a small mutant that rode on top of people’s heads and mind controlled them; it seemed fairly smart. No brim though.

8

By my count, that makes you 1 for 10 (and on the only one on which you were not directly proven wrong).

Can we close this thread, now?

9

I object - you can’t claim victory just because you as a moderator say so. This is not Communist Russia!

The Ak47 has killed more people than any weapon known to man. I’m afraid as far as succesful inventions it really has to rate as high as they come. 100 million have been produced source

I’m confused why you think that a country that had 20% of the worlds total production was not a powerful economy. Because it used peasant power and it’s resources? I would say that made the economic growth and control all the more intellectually powerful - to do that purely on this basis is clever

10

Where did you get the cite for this that you quoted in the OP?

11

But the AK-47 can’t be claimed as a successful Soviet *innovation; * it is based on features of the US M1 Garand and the German StG44, as well as other weapons.

12
  1. I am not claiming victory because I am a Mod. I am not even claiming victory. I am asking whether you aere willing to pay attention to actual facts and logic and recognize that you have a lot of work to do before you are sufficiently able to actually maintain a coherent debate in this Forum.
  2. THIS is not a democracy.

The success of a particular weapon is not a measure of the intellectual advancement of a people. One reason for its high rate of homicide is simply the number of targets available for its use, so if you intend to use that argument, you will have to demonstrate that it has killed proportionately more of the available victims than would have been slain by a Roman gladius or a Mongol bow. (And if you did demonstrate that it has a higher proportion of deaths, you still need to make the defensible argument that simple putting a sturdy weapon with mass-fire capabilities in the hands of soldiers, militia, and kids is some sort of intellectual advancement, and you have not even begun to address that issue.)

Production is a nice thing to have. However, the Soviet production focused on heavy industry and ignored light industry and agriculture. As a result, the U.S.S.R. had to constantly borrow against its income from exports of durable goods in order to finance the purchase of the minimum necessities of food and smaller, nondurable goods. Therefore, the U.S.S.R. was effectively a debtor nation even at the height of its run of high production.

A standard measure of economic size and strength is Gross Domestic Product. In 1950, the U.S. had 27.3% of the world’s GDP with $1,455,916,000,000 while the U.S.S.R. had 9.6% with $510,243,000,000. Based on your posts, to date, I suspect that you would jump on that, claiming, “Look, the U.S.S.R. is #2.!” While true, you would miss the point that the U.S. had a rather smaller population (131 million to the U.S.S.R.'s 193 million). For that matter, the United Kingdom, with 48 million people, had 6.5% of the world’s GDP with $347,850,000,000.

You have already tried to sabotage the discussion with your reference to the peasants, but the reality is that it took 60 million more people in the U.S.S.R. to achieve barely more than 1/3 the U.S. production. The U.S. produced $11,113.86 per person, the UK produced $7,246.88 per person while the U.S.S.R. only produced $2,643.75 per person. That is not a strong economy; that is simply a weak economy with a huge number of people.

(I used the 1950 figures because I was not easily able to discover the relative populations of each country in 1973, basing my GDP figures on the tables at this site. I am quite confident that the figures from any other sources will e similar.)

13

I am suspicious of any figures - on production, agriculture, population, anything - provided by Soviet Russia, especially in Stalin’s era.

14

If you really believe this, I think you need to read this article (pdf). Not that it will do any good.

15

In my opinion, totalitarian states can establish a short-term advantage because they can focus an incredible amount of effort in building up existing technology. But in the long-term, free states will always take the lead because they’re the ones that develop new technology.

To use an analogy, in a totalitarian state with a hundred engineers, they’d all be put to work building doo-hickies. In a free state with a hundred engineers, you’d be able to persuade seventy five of them to build doo-hickies and the other twenty five would decide to work on other projects. Twenty four of them might never do anything useful but the twenty fifth would invent the machine that renders doo-hickies obsolete.

16

I think the point that the OP is missing, again, is that totalitarian governments can have great technological breakthroughs. These breaktrhoughs, however, usually come at the expense of the rest of their economy.

A totalitarian state may have 100 engineers in their Ministry of Science but a free state has those same 100 engineers plus anyone else who has a good idea in his/her head.

17

Speaking of agriculture (an area in which the Soviets achieved disastrous failure), it is hard to speak of intellectual advancement and Lysenko in the same sentence.

Yet another example of rigid ideology vanquishing common sense and stifling innovation.

18

?? Totalitarianism advances intelletual activity?? This seems completely backwards to me. Totalitarianism by definition concentrates power and kills or exiles those who might ask why, those very intellectuals who “think outside the box.”

Totalitarianism may promote industrial efficiency, but it kills, ruins or exiles its artists and geniuses. We could list the victims/exiles of the Nazis and the Soviets and the Romans too, if necessary.

(Note that there are degrees of totalitarianism–Rome was not as totalitarian as the Nazis or the Soviets when it came to controlling the econcomy/production/trade.)

19

Be fun to see lamonfire’s list of artistic/cultural achievements under Soviet rule. :dubious:

20

I prefer the furry hats- now those are a Soviet cultural achievement.