Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(06-15-2016, 11:15 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:

(06-14-2016, 01:51 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: >   I think of the ferocity of the Thirty Years' War, a long Crisis
>   war that did cultural damage that may have even contributed to the
>   Holocaust. Protestants and Catholics who hated each other united
>   against another group -- the Jews. it was only a matter of time.
>   That's duration.

You're using a kind of "glob of history" approach which says that if
people get angry at each other over a glob of years then it must be a
crisis war.  If you want to believe that, then you're entitled to do
so, but it has no relationship whatsoever to either S&H generational
theory or Generational Dynamics.

(I'm always bemused by the fact that there are people who spent years
in the FTF forum, but who completely disbelieve the FTF theory.)

 The Russian civil war between the Reds and Whites was genocidal; whoever won was going to slaughter millions. I see the Russian Whites similarly vicious as the Bolsheviki when they got the chance. Take the ferocity of the American Civil War, which also represented a Crisis war in which the opposing sides split into hostile and exclusive camps -- but with no semblance of mercy upon either side upon victory. The collectivization of Soviet agriculture, even if not strictly speaking a war, caused mass death characteristic of a genocidal war. The Soviet Union conducted its war against Nazi Germany with consummate ferocity.

This is at the minimum 28 years (more if one goes to the collapse of the Imperial Russian Armed Forces during World War I) of Crisis Era ferocity either ongoing or waiting to strike. It is freakish tragedy, and it may be nearly distinct to Russia. Saecula have lasted a century, and while Crisis Eras are usually short, this particular one is not far from a quarter of a saeculum.

Be thankful that you were not a Russian or Soviet citizen between 1915 and 1945!

Quote:Yours is take a more recent glob of years -- the Mideast since 1948.
Using your glob of history approach, you could say that the Mideast
has been in a crisis war for 70 years.  After all, you've had one
brutal war after another -- the 1948 war between Jews and Arabs, the
1953 Egyptian revolution, the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and
Egypt, the Syrian revolution, the Syria-Lebanon war, the Iran/Iraq
war, the Israel-Hezbollah war, the Fatah-Hamas war, the Israel-Gaza
war, and others.

All modern war is brutal. Not all of it is genocidal. The establishment of Israel in 1948 looks like the end of a Crisis Era, at least for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, as political institutions of the State of Israel crystallized rapidly. The 1950s were undeniably 1T in Israel. The Suez Crisis is definitely a 1T war in Israel, and the Six-Day War is ambiguously near the end of a 1T and the start of a 2T in Israel. The 1973 war between Israel and the Arab World was a 2T war in Israel.

I do not follow intellectual trends of the Islamic world closely. War forces its own recognition. Crises in the Islamic world are hard to figure unless the hallmarks of a Crisis exist. Is the Iran-Iraq war a WWI-style war of attrition or is it so close to the end of 3T of Iraq that the invasion of Kuwait begins a Crisis Era for Iraq that has lasted nearly a quarter century?

Of course if ISIS dies (may such happen soon!) then the Crisis Era could be over in Iraq.

Quote:So according to your reasoning, you can glob all of those wars
together and call them one big crisis war.  That's nice, but it bears
no relationship whatsoever to generational theory.

I recognize Russia between 1917 and 1945 and Iraq between enduring a freakish succession of horrors. Wars and persecutions do not exist to fit theories; theories exist to fit wars and persecutions.

[/quote]What you have to do is drill down into the individual conflicts.  The
Jew-Arab war was a crisis war, the Syrian revolution and Syria-Lebanon
war were crisis wars, the Iran/Iraq war was a crisis war, and pretty
much all the rest are a bunch of non-crisis wars.[/quote]

The Arabs and Israelis may not have been on the same timetable.

If you took the 30 years war and drilled down in the same way, then
you'd find that the 30 years war wasn't one long crisis war at all,
but a collection of crisis and non-crisis wars that spread across
Europe.

(06-14-2016, 01:51 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: >   It's all a matter of interpretation.

In the last 15 years, I've done hundreds of these generational
analyses, maybe by this time into the thousands.  And I can say with
absolute certainty that there's no "interpretation" about it.

In order to evaluate a war or collection of wars, you have to look at
multiple historical sources.  If you can't tell whether a given war is
a crisis war or non-crisis war, then it doesn't mean that "it's a
matter of interpretation."  What it means is that you haven't looked
at enough historical sources to make an unambiguous determination.
This kind of evaluation process is non-trivial.  It takes a lot of
work.  I've done this hundreds of times over the years, and I can tell
you that this evaluation process has never failed to produce an
unambiguous result.[/quote]

Classification of historical events is often tricky even if one agrees on the realities of those events. The Thirty Years may have had some mobility in its worst horrors, as is true of all Crisis wars. If this is not Crisis, then what is? (Wikipedia, on the horrors of the Thirty Years' War:




Marauding soldiers, Vranx, 1647, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin

The war ranks with the worst famines and plagues as the greatest medical catastrophe in modern European history.[74][75] Lacking good census information, historians have extrapolated the experience of well-studied regions.[76] John Theibault agrees with the conclusions in Günther Franz's Der Dreissigjährige Krieg und das Deutsche Volk (1940), that population losses were great but varied regionally (ranging as high as 50%) and says his estimates are the best available.[77] The war killed soldiers and civilians directly, caused famines, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted commerce, postponed marriages and childbirth, and forced large numbers of people to relocate. The reduction of population in the German states was typically 25% to 40%.[78] Some regions were affected much more than others.[79] For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war.[80] In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas, an estimated two-thirds of the population died.[81] The male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.[82] The population of the Czech lands declined by a third due to war, disease, famine, and the expulsion of Protestant Czechs.[83][84] Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers.[85] Villages were especially easy prey to the marauding armies. Those that survived, like the small village of Drais near Mainz, would take almost a hundred years to recover. The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages, and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.[86]
The war caused serious dislocations to both the economies and populations of central Europe, but may have done no more than seriously exacerbate changes that had begun earlier.[87][88] Also, some historians contend that the human cost of the war may actually have improved the living standards of the survivors.[89] According to Ulrich Pfister, Germany was one of the richest countries in Europe per capita in 1500, but ranked far lower in 1600. Then, it recovered during the 1600–1660 period, in part thanks to the demographic shock of the Thirty Years' War.


A peasant begs for mercy in front of a burning farm

Pestilence of several kinds raged among combatants and civilians in Germany and surrounding lands from 1618 to 1648. Many features of the war spread disease. These included troop movements, the influx of soldiers from foreign countries, and the shifting locations of battle fronts. In addition, the displacement of civilian populations and the overcrowding of refugees into cities led to both disease and famine. Information about numerous epidemics is generally found in local chronicles, such as parish registers and tax records, that are often incomplete and may be exaggerated. The chronicles do show that epidemic disease was not a condition exclusive to war time, but was present in many parts of Germany for several decades prior to 1618.[90]
When the Imperial and Danish armies clashed in Saxony and Thuringia during 1625 and 1626, disease and infection in local communities increased. Local chronicles repeatedly referred to "head disease", "Hungarian disease", and a "spotted" disease identified as typhus. After the Mantuan War, between France and the Habsburgs in Italy, the northern half of the Italian peninsula was in the throes of a bubonic plague epidemic (Italian Plague of 1629–1631). During the unsuccessful siege of Nuremberg, in 1632, civilians and soldiers in both the Imperial and Swedish armies succumbed to typhus and scurvy. Two years later, as the Imperial army pursued the defeated Swedes into southwest Germany, deaths from epidemics were high along the Rhine River. Bubonic plague continued to be a factor in the war. Beginning in 1634, Dresden, Munich, and smaller German communities such as Oberammergau recorded large numbers of plague casualties. In the last decades of the war, both typhus and dysentery had become endemic in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

Quote:

Furthermore, these methodologies are backed up by theoretical advances
in generational theory that I've documented on my web site and include
from time to time in my World View articles.

When I first started out in the FTF forum, the usual suspects used to
attack me by saying that I'm not qualified to write about these
subjects because I haven't read enough history books.  So today I'm on
the other side of that criticism.  You can't evaluate a war or
collection of wars unless you've looked at numerous sources, usually
at least 10 or 20 sources, though for the 30 years war it would
probably need even more than that.  After that, there's little or no
need for "interpretation."

Maybe I should have referred to classification instead of interpretation, interpretation following from classification. One can see patterns in history even if one does not know the whole history (think of Arnold Toynbee, whom I respect greatly even if I recognize his limitations as he did; after all, what did Socrates say of the true wise person? He knows that he is ignorant!). But neither of us is close to having the full knowledge of history.

The Thirty Years' War ended much like the end of a typical Crisis Era with a formal treaty and a "never again" attitude toward its horrors. Conformity would prevail in all areas affected by the war-ending settlements, and political systems would crystallize rapidly. (I am tempted to believe that the Crisis Era in the wake of World War II ends in 1948 and not 1945, with the mostly-clear division between the Soviet Bloc and the West after the February coup in Czechoslovakia, the failure of a Communist coup in Finland, the Berlin Airlift, the establishment of the German Federal Republic and a communist government in the Soviet zone of Germany, the break by Tito with Stalin, and the collapse of the Communist insurgency ion the Greek Civil War. Much still happens in 1948, but history freezes in Europe. Such is the end of a Crisis Era and the beginning of a 1T.