…my strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure
-Tennyson
Greer blamed some of this on Tolkien, a frequent sparring target, and with some reason.
But this is as an old idea, and I place the most modern wellspring firmly in the mythos of World War II.
The Germans were Nazis, and the Nazis implemented the Holocaust. The Holocaust was Evil, not just evil. At first they seemed unbeatable, but the forces of good did eventually win.
Every western war of my lifetime has had its propaganda wellspring firmly in World War II, as the constant Hitler and Munich analogies suggest. “We must stop him now” (whoever he is), “or he will keep going, just like Hitler did.”
Saddam wasn’t going to conquer much beyond tiny and completely artificial oil-states. He tried with Iran and failed. Putin isn’t going to conquer Europe. China has some territorial disputes but it isn’t going to go on a Japan style rampage and conquer multiple neighbours.
But every time I deal with Ukraine supporters they fail to account for fundamental realities. Russia has more resources and the backing on China. It has air superiority and artillery superiority, and it is producing more artillery shells than the West, whose shelves are bare and and who has not ramped up war production significantly.
WWII wasn’t won because we were the good guys. It was won because more of the world’s resources wound up on the other side and Hitler made huge mistakes, over and over again. One example is that Germany was winning the Battle of Britain with its initial strategy of attacking airfields and factories: it was killing RAF planes and pilots faster than they could be replaced. Then Hitler freaked out after the British raid on Berlin and ordered the Luftwaffe to attack population centers, which allowed the RAF to recover.
If the initial strategy had been stuck to, the RAF would have been defeated, and the Royal Navy, without air support, would have been unable to stop the German from crossing the Channel and conquering Britain. Imagine trying to do DDay without holding Britain?
Germany lost because more resources were on the other side, and because Hitler screwed up multiple times, not because they were evil, though they were that.
And while the Allies were less evil, Dresden and the Tokyo firebombing and so on show that were not “good”.
Ukraine cannot make up for material short-fallings and bad strategy by being the “good guys” (we’ll leave aside whether they are the good guys.)
America, having given its industrial base to China will not defeat China in the game of Great Powers because they are the good guys either (and they aren’t, though for some reason they think they are.)
There are some advantages to genuinely being the good guys, even military advantages, but they aren’t large enough to determine most wars, especially since it’s very rare that either side is good, the best we usually see is “less evil.”
It doesn’t matter if Ukraine is the “good” side. What matters is who has the best strategy, tactics and resources. And in a war of attrition, well, that ain’t Ukraine.
I would love to live in a world where the good always vanquishes the evil, but that ain’t our world and it never has been.
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