As well you should be, but do you really think they would have given out a low figure?
The question is not whether or not totalitarian states can accomplish anything; after all, the Soviets put the first man in space, and that’s saying something. The question is: what is the opportunity cost? What could the Soviet Union have accomplished if it was evolved into a free, democratic state, run by the rule of law, in the late 1940s? Probably far more than it did, as evidenced by the tremendous productivity and advancement of those industrialized states that WERE run as free democracies.
I note the OP has not selected North Korea for his most recent list, although I think it would make a much more appropriate choice for discussion than fascist Italy, or Afghanistan.
I don’t think anyone would argue against totalitarian societies being rather good at certain types of military endeavors, or at least temporarily forcing their people to work in relative unison to a specific goal. OTOH, the notion that the measure of a society’s efficiency or worth is its relative ability to produce and use certain types of weapons, or reach an arbitrarily selected goal such as production of a certain amount of steel, as the OP seems to be arguing in his threads, seems a rather narrow and not particularly useful one.
Which is the higher or more broadly useful innovation: an AK-47 or a personal computer? A hydrogen bomb or an MRI unit? An ICBM designed to terrorize distant civilian populations or the same rocket used to orbit a communications satellite?
Totalitarian societies do not seem to be much concerned with the status, comfort or condition of individuals, other than those of its own ruling class, and without some impossibly efficient method for subjugating their people, seem to be too reliant on coercion to achieve their ends, to be stable for more than a few decades at a time. I suppose if we assume that the organization of an anthill is something to aspire to, then there may be something to be gained in a totalitarian society, but then, anthiills work well in part because an ant does not appear to ever contemplate its position.
The point has been well made by now: sure, totalitarian governments can force resources onto a single problem and come up with some narrow accomplishments, but clever and new solutions, intellectual accomplishments, these are poorly served by such a model.
For each of the case studies look at how they fared both against other societies of their time and against the high points of intellectual and technologic innovation within their own cultures.
In each case the comparisons shows the totalitarian regieme to come up short. Weimar Germany vs the Nazi era? China now (relatively open) vs under the many failed 5 year plans and the Cultural Revolution? And so on.
For another perspective we can ask what have been the common attributes of the most creative and intellectually accomplished cultures. Without doubt it is an exposure to and an exchange of many ideas. Totalitarian and insular societies will, over a long term, lose to societies that allow a free flow of ideas and information which spark innovation in ways that could not be anticipated. Freedom has its inefficiencies, but the pay-offs are great enough that the model wins out.
Actually, the OP has half a point: totalitarian regimes have indeed driven advancement, but not their own. They’ve driven the advancement of other countries. At least, those countries that recognise and feel the danger. The survival instinct is very powerful. One only has to look at the Cold War, and the conflict between Israel and the surrounding dictatorships. Ditto South Korea with North Korea. Similarly apartheid South Africa.
They were pretty good at Ballet and Gymnastics, I think the Nazis liked those two as well! Chinese have some damn good Gymnasts too! And I hear Kim Il-sung likes to wear a tutu.
Totaliatarians make good ballet dancers, it’s proven FACT. yeah for totalitarian states…
Not as much as you might think. As Arthur C. Clarke has noted several times, the Soviets, who were unable to build small, efficient nuclear warheads, had to develop big rockets to launch the heavy warheads they did have. This came in very handy for both Sputnik and manned space flight.
In addition, Eisenhower forbade the Army from launching a satellite that competed with the Navy’s Vanguard program. IIRC they were close to doing a launch but got ordered to stop. The speed with which Explorer I was launched after Sputnik shows how close they were. So, for us, this is an example of politics stifling innovation.
A recent program about the early space race made the claim that America deliberately let the Russians get Sputnik up first to set the precedent of free overflight.
Completely anti-intellectualist dictatorships, like that of Pol Pot, should at least be mentioned here. There’s not a lot of scientific advancement when all the laboratories have been closed. I recall that there was once a similar regime in a small West African country (Gambia?) where anyone who wore glasses was persecuted on suspicion of being educated.
It was, but also under that African regime. I can’t remember anything else about it; I read about it sometime during the 80s in a magazine, probably Newsweek.
Not that this makes it at all fair, but it seems to me that there is a tenuous link between wearing glasses and being educated. Consider: in order to wear glasses, you must have enough money to visit an ophthalmologist and buy a pair of glasses. Finer problems (i.e., those that impair reading but not necessarily rough labor) are more likely to be treated by those with money. It is much easier to have enough moeny to do this with a good job, and those jobs tend to require education. So wearing glasses tends to indicate that the wearer’s parents were educated, which in turn has a strong correlation with the wearer’s education.
Well, it’s valid but not sound, if that matters.
The key is that in dictatorships, matters of life and death are not determined by a court process but on the whim of anyone ruthless enough to climb sufficiently high in the hierarchy, in a system where advancement in that hierarchy naturally selects for ruthlessness. Whether or not the V2 is considered an impressive technical feat (I think it was, though “decades ahead” is a gross overstatement), it’s significant that Von Braun had been arrested and could easily have been summarily executed by Nazi thugs who didn’t understand his work and didn’t seem to care. He was saved only by other Nazi thugs who were a bit less stupid. Some contemporary comments written during and after the war express shock that a gifted nation like Germany would slide so easily into Nazism, given it’s obvious flaws and philosophical distrust of reason. Had the regime somehow continued, those in the hierarchy would have continued to turn on each other and indeed anyone who seemed insufficiently loyal, and this pattern gets repeated in any dictatorial regime. Heck, in a moment of madness (near the end of a life not known for steadiness), Stalin declared war on Jewish doctors and his sycophants, eager to get in his good graces, cheerfully began the arrests, show trials, expulsions and executions, all on the boss’s whim.
The OP’s thesis is easily disprovable and I’m sure he knew it.
Actually the V2 was a really bad idea. Rockets cost a lot of money, could only be used once, were very inaccurate, and only delivered a relatively small payload. Germany would have been better off putting their resources into conventional bomber aircraft.
I remember the US government’s ceaseless calls of alarm (about how the Soviets were outproducing us in engineers, scientists, etc.). It got easy to believe this crap-coupled with the Soviet Union’s own propaganda. You could literally believe that Russia was leaving us in the dust.Now we know that the elite of the Soviet society DID have access to excellent education-and Russia did produce many outstanding scientists. But the fact is, most of the “Space race” was a Russian propaganda contest, the Russia was falling apart. Since that time, i’ve gotten to know quite a few Russian emigres-and they all said there was a huge amount of “make believe” in the old SU. One guy i knew told me that most of the Red Airfoce was grounded (at any given time) due to lack of spare parts or necessary material (like the cooling alcohol in the “Foxbat” interceptor)-the ground crews would steal it to drink or sell it!