Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

The Soviet advance and the expulsions are estimated to have sent more than 12 million German civilians fleeing as refugees, killed more than 2 million of them, and subjected on the order of a million German women to rape.

Soviet atrocities

self-pity and sense of victimization have not dominated Germans’ view of themselves after World War Two, as they did after World War One. Part of the reason has been German recognition that the horrors inflicted by Russians, Poles, and Czechs on German civilians resulted from the horrors that Germans had so recently inflicted on those countries.

Despite his initial military successes, his unrealistic appraisals led him repeatedly to override his own generals and ultimately to cause Germany’s defeat. Those fatally unrealistic decisions included his unprovoked declaration of war against the U.S. in December 1941 at a time when Germany was already at war with Britain and the Soviet Union, and his overriding of his generals’ pleas to authorize retreat by the German army trapped at Stalingrad in 1942–1943.

Military incompetence of Hitler

Interestingly, recent German history provides four examples of an interval of 21–23 years between a crushing defeat and an explosive reaction to that defeat. Those four examples are: the 23-year interval between 1848’s failed revolutionary unification attempt and 1871’s successful unification; the 21-year interval between 1918’s crushing defeat in World War One and 1939’s outbreak of World War Two that sought and ultimately failed to reverse that defeat; the 23-year interval between 1945’s crushing defeat in World War Two and 1968’s revolts by the students born around 1945; and the 22-year interval between those 1968 student revolts and 1990’s re-unification. Of course, there are big differences between those four sets of events, and external factors played a role in determining those intervals, especially the interval between 1968 and 1990. But I think that there is nevertheless a significance to those parallels: 21–23 years is approximately one human generation. The years 1848, 1918, and 1968 were decisive experiences for Germans who were young adults then, and who two decades later became their country’s leaders and finally found themselves in a position to try to complete (1871, 1990) or to reverse (1939) that decisive experience of their youth.

One generation’s reaction to the previous generation’s experience

The First Fleet consisted of 730 convicts, their guards, administrators, workers, and a British naval officer as governor. More fleets and ships followed, bringing more convicts to Sydney and then to four other locations scattered around the Australian continent. Soon the convicts and their guards were joined by British free settlers. However, 32 years later, in 1820, Australia’s European population still consisted of 84% of convicts and former convicts, and convict transport from Britain to Australia did not cease until 1868.

The criminal past of Australia’s first settlers

Australia’s economy since World War Two has been dominated by mining of the minerals with which the continent is so richly endowed: Australia is a world-leading exporter of aluminum, coal, copper, gold, iron, lead, magnesium, silver, tungsten, titanium, and uranium.

The first substantial group of non-British immigrants began to arrive in 1836 in South Australia. That colony had been founded not as a convict dump but by a land development company that carefully selected prospective settlers from Europe. Among those settlers were German Lutherans seeking religious freedom,

More controversial was the arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese in the 1850’s, drawn (along with many Europeans and Americans) by Australia’s first gold rush. That influx resulted in the last use of the British army in Australia, to quell riots in which a crowd beat, robbed, and even scalped Chinese. A third wave of non-British arrivals arose from the development of sugar plantations in Queensland beginning in the 1860’s. The plantation workers were Pacific Islanders from New Guinea, other Melanesian islands, and Polynesia. While some of them were voluntary recruits, many were kidnapped from their islands by raids accompanied by frequent murders,

Despite all these arrivals of modest numbers of Germans, Chinese, contract Pacific Islanders, and Indians, Australia remained by policy overwhelmingly British and white until after World War Two.

Australia arose as six separate colonies—New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland—with far less contact among them than the contact among the American colonies that would later become states of the U.S. That limited contact was due to the geography of Australia, a continent with few patches of productive landscape separated by large distances of desert and other types of unproductive landscape.

The lessons of World War Two for Australia were two-fold. First and foremost, Britain had been powerless to defend Australia. Instead, the defense of Australia had depended on massive deployment of American troops, ships, and airplanes, commanded by the American General MacArthur,

in 1967 Britain announced its intent to withdraw all of its military forces east of the Suez Canal. That marked the official end to Britain’s long-standing role as Australia’s protector.

By the 1980’s Australia’s leading trade partner was—Japan!—followed by the U.S., with Britain far behind. In 1982 Japan received 28% of Australian exports, the U.S. 11%, and Britain only 4%.

Britain’s African and Asian colonies were becoming independent, developed their own national identities, formulated their own foreign policies even within the Commonwealth, and (over British objections) forced South Africa out of the Commonwealth because of its racist apartheid policies.

Britain applied to join the EEC. That application and its sequels constituted a shock to Australia’s and Britain’s relationship even more fundamental than had been the fall of Singapore, although the latter was more dramatic and symbolic, and lingers today as a bigger cause of festering resentment to Australians. Britain’s application created an unavoidable clash between British and Australian interests. The Six were erecting shared tariff barriers against non-EEC imports, barriers to which Britain would have to subscribe. Those barriers would now apply to Australian food products and refined metals, for which Britain still represented a major export market. Australian food exports to Britain would now be displaced by French, Dutch, Italian, and Danish foods.

While Japan’s large domestic debt attracts much attention (more about that below), nevertheless Japan is the world’s leading creditor nation. It has the world’s second-highest foreign exchange reserves, and it rivals China as the biggest holder of U.S. debt.

so many births are to unwed mothers: 40% of all births in the U.S., 50% in France, and 66% in Iceland. But that mitigation doesn’t apply to Japan, where unwed mothers account for a negligible proportion of births: only 2%.

Japan’s next neglected big problem, after immigration, is the effect of Japan’s wartime behavior towards China and Korea on its current relations with those countries. During and before World War Two, Japan did horrible things to people in other Asian countries, especially China and Korea.

as long as China and Korea are armed to the hilt while Japan remains without the means to defend itself, a big danger will continue to hang over Japan.

Japan especially does not want to be seen as giving in to the anti-whaling campaigns of Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd, and to international pressure to regulate the Bluefin Tuna fishery. One could describe Japan as “anti-anti-whaling” rather than pro-whaling.

Its dictatorial government can get things done much faster than can our democracy hobbled by two parties and by checks and balances. To many Americans, it seems only a matter of time before China overtakes us economically and militarily.

Or dictatorships more efficient than democracies?

The reason for the U.S.’s large population is its large area of fertile land. The only two larger countries, Russia and Canada, have much lower populations, because a large fraction of their area is Arctic, suitable only for sparse habitation and no agriculture.

What about global warming ?

raids on the U.S. mainland have been negligible: just a British raid on Washington during the War of 1812, Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus in New Mexico in 1916, one shell fired by a Japanese submarine in World War Two onto the U.S. coast at Santa Barbara, and six American civilians killed by an explosive-laden balloon launched from Japan also during World War Two.

Those are some of democracy’s big advantages that the U.S. enjoys, and that China doesn’t. The lack of those advantages is in my opinion the biggest single disadvantage that will prevent China from ever catching up with the U.S. in average income per person—as long as the U.S. remains democratic and China remains non-democratic.

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electronic communication and many other technological innovations became established first in the U.S., from which they and their consequences then spread to other affluent countries.

Exception: Mobile phones were first popularized in Europe. the GSM standard is a European standard!

factors making a bad outcome more likely in the U.S. than in Chile include far more private gun ownership in the U.S., far more individual violence today and in the past, and more history of violence directed against groups (against African Americans, Native Americans, and some immigrant groups).

The basic flaw in our American system of voter registration is that, in Florida and many other states, our registered voter lists and election procedures are controlled by partisan procedures at state and local levels, not by non-partisan procedures at the national level. Partisan electoral officials often seek to make voting difficult for citizens likely to prefer the opposite political party.

So a republican state tends to remain Republican for example.

That growing skew between rich and poor Americans is due to a combination of American government policies and American attitudes. As for government policies, “redistribution” in the U.S.—i.e., government policies that in effect transfer money from richer to poorer people—is lower than in other major democracies. For instance, income tax rates, and social transfers and spending such as vouchers and subsidies for low-income people, are relatively low in the U.S. compared to most other major democracies.

The conclusion of such studies is that socio-economic mobility is lower, and family intergenerational correlations of incomes are higher, in the U.S. than in other major democracies. For instance, 42% of American sons whose fathers belong to the poorest 20% of their generation end up in the poorest 20% of their own generation, whereas only 8% of sons of those poorest fathers achieve rags to riches by ending up in the richest 20%. Corresponding percentages for Scandinavian countries are about 26% (below Americans’ 42%) and 13% (above Americans’ 8%). Sadly, the problem is making itself worse: economic inequality has been increasing, and socio-economic mobility has been decreasing, in the U.S.

The American dream is a lie

our American belief in the feasibility of rags to riches is a myth. The rags-to-riches path is less feasible in the U.S. than in other major democracies.

Within the foreseeable future, the U.S. will experience urban riots in which plastic strips of police tape won’t suffice to deter rioters from venting their frustration on affluent Americans. At that point, many affluent Americans will receive their own personal answer to the question, “Does it cause any harm to rich Americans that they live surrounded by poor Americans?” One answer is: yes, it causes personal insecurity.

All schoolteachers in South Korea, Singapore, and Finland come from the top third of their school classes, but nearly half of American teachers come from the bottom third of their classes.

Our long history of maintaining the same two major political parties—the Democrats since the 1820’s, and the Republicans since 1854—is actually a sign of flexibility rather than of rigidity. That’s because, whenever a third party started to become significant (such as Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, and George Wallace’s American Independent Party), it soon faded because its program became partly co-opted by one of the two major parties.

The US

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the low opinion that the Soviet premier Khrushchev formed of U.S. President Kennedy at their 1961 Vienna meeting led Khrushchev to miscalculate that he could get away with installing Soviet missiles in Cuba. When the U.S. did detect the missiles, U.S. generals urged Kennedy to destroy them immediately (posing the risk of Soviet retaliation), and warned Kennedy that he risked being impeached if he did not do so. Fortunately, Kennedy chose less drastic means of responding, Khrushchev also responded less drastically, and Armageddon was averted. But it was a very close call,

Did the US Secret Service kill JFK the next year because he was perceived as a weak president and a national security risk, in order to avoid other incidents like the Cuban missile crisis?

Germany’s reaction might have been dominated by self-pity and a sense of victimization for the millions of Germans killed during the war (including all those killed by Allied bombing of German cities that would have been considered a war crime if the Allies hadn’t won the war); for the million German women raped in the Soviet advance from the east; and for the loss of large German territories after the war.

Germany has the misfortune to lie in the center of Europe, and to be exposed to more neighbors (several of them large and powerful) across land and sea borders than any other European country.

All of these countries have thus experienced intermittent constraints on their freedom of action, but not as serious and chronic as the ones constantly operating on Finland and Germany.

the dangers hanging over small countries near aggressive large countries.

the Athenians besieged Melos; the Melians resisted successfully for some time; but they eventually had to surrender; and—the Athenians killed all the Melian men and enslaved all the women and children.

there is a universal lesson: small countries threatened by large countries should remain alert, consider alternative options, and appraise those options realistically. While this lesson may seem so embarrassingly obvious as to be not worth mentioning, sadly it has often been ignored. It was ignored by the Melians; it was ignored by the Paraguayans, who waged a disastrous war against the combined forces of the much larger Brazil and Argentina plus Uruguay from 1865 to 1870, resulting in the deaths of 60% of Paraguay’s population; it was ignored by Finland in 1939; it was ignored by Japan in 1941, when Japan simultaneously attacked the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, and China while Russia was hostile; and it was ignored by Ukraine in its recent disastrous confrontation with Russia.

One set of themes consists of the behaviors that have helped our seven nations to deal with crises. Those behaviors include: acknowledging when one’s nation is in a crisis; accepting responsibility for change, rather than just blaming other nations and retreating into victimhood; building a fence to identify the national feature(s) needing to be changed, so as not to be overwhelmed with a sense that nothing about one’s country is working adequately; identifying other countries from which to seek help; identifying other countries’ models that have solved problems similar to the problems now facing one’s own country; being patient, and recognizing that the first solution attempted may not work and that several successive attempts may be necessary; reflecting on which core values continue to be appropriate, and which are no longer appropriate; and practicing honest self-appraisal.

The whole world now faces global problems—but within the past century, and especially within recent decades, the world has been developing institutions for addressing global problems.

This book precisely doesn’t address those problems

Was the 911 attack on US soil a revenge on this US backed coup?