Fireside this week! We'll pick up looking at some of the successes of Hellenistic armies next week.
Percy, having found a use for some of my books. And of course, less I miss a chance to note, at the top of the pile there is the Brill's Companion to Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare, in which I have a chapter (the whole volume is excellent).
For this week's musing, I wanted to take the opportunity to expand a bit on a topic that I raised on Twitter which draw a fair bit of commentary: that fascists and fascist governments, despite their positioning are generally bad at war. And let me note at the outset, I am using fascist fairly narrowly - I generally follow Umberto Eco's definition (from "Ur Fascism" (1995)). Consequently, not all authoritarian or even right-authoritarian governments are fascist (but many are). Fascist has to mean something more specific than 'people I disagree with' to be a useful term (mostly, of course, useful as a warning).
First, I want to explain why I think this is a point worth making. For the most part, when we critique fascism (and other authoritarian ideologies), we focus on the inability of these ideologies to deliver on the things we - the (I hope) non-fascists - value, like liberty, prosperity, stability and peace. The problem is that the folks who might be beguiled by authoritarian ideologies are at risk precisely because they do not value those things - or at least, do not realize how much they value those things and won't until they are gone. That is, of course, its own moral failing, but society as a whole benefits from having fewer fascists, so the exercise of deflating the appeal of fascism retains value for our sake, rather than for the sake of the would-be fascists (though they benefit as well, as it is, in fact, bad for you to be a fascist).
But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, "For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle...life is permanent warfare" and as a result, "everyone is educated to become a hero." Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms - indeed, I'd argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is.
Now how do we assess if a state is 'good' at war? The great temptation here is to look at inputs: who has the best equipment, the 'best' soldiers (good luck assessing that), the most 'strategic geniuses' and so on. But war is not a baseball game. No one cares about your RBI or On-Base percentage. If a country's soldiers fight marvelously in a way that guarantees the destruction of their state and the total annihilation of their people, no one will sing their praises - indeed, no one will be left alive to do so.
Instead, war is an activity judged purely on outcomes, by which we mean strategic outcomes. Being 'good at war' means securing desired strategic outcomes or at least avoiding undesirable ones. There is, after all, something to be said for a country which manages to salvage a draw from a disadvantageous war (especially one it did not start) rather than total defeat, just as much as a country that conquers. Meanwhile, failure in wars of choice - that is, wars a state starts which it could have equally chosen not to start - are more damning than failures in wars of necessity. And the most fundamental strategic objective of every state or polity is to survive, so the failure to ensure that basic outcome is a severe failure indeed.
Judged by that metric, fascist governments are terrible at war. There haven't been all that many fascist governments, historically speaking and a shocking percentage of them started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state, the worst possible strategic outcome. Most long-standing states have been to war many times, winning sometimes and losing sometimes, but generally able to preserve the existence of their state even in defeat. At this basic task, however, fascist states usually fail.
The rejoinder to this is to argue that, "well, yes, but they were outnumbered, they were outproduced, they were ganged up on" - in the most absurd example, folks quite literally argued that the Nazis at least had a positive k:d (kill-to-death ratio) like this was a game of Call of Duty. But war is not a game - no one cares what your KDA is if you lose and your state is extinguished. All that matters is strategic outcomes: war is fought for no other purpose because war is an extension of policy (drink!). Creating situations - and fascist governments regularly created such situations. Starting a war in which you will be outnumbered, ganged up on, outproduced and then smashed flat: that is being bad at war.
Countries, governments and ideologies which are good at war do not voluntarily start unwinnable wars.
So how to fascist governments do at war? Terribly. The two most clear-cut examples of fascist governments, the ones most everyone agrees on, are of course Mussolini's fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Fascist Italy started a number of colonial wars, most notably the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, which it won, but at ruinous cost, leading it to fall into a decidedly junior position behind Germany. Mussolini then opted by choice to join WWII, leading to the destruction of his regime, his state, its monarchy and the loss of his life; he managed to destroy Italy in just 22 years. This is, by the standards of regimes, abjectly terrible.
Nazi Germany's record manages to somehow be worse. Hitler comes to power in 1933, precipitates WWII (in Europe) in 1939 and leads his country to annihilation by 1945, just 12 years. In short, Nazi Germany fought one war, which it lost as thoroughly and completely as it is possible to lose; in a sense the Nazis are necessarily tied for the position of 'worst regime at war in history' by virtue of having never won a war, nor survived a war, nor avoided a war. Hitler's decision, while fighting a great power with nearly as large a resource base as his own (Britain) to voluntarily declare war on not one (USSR) but two (USA) much larger and in the event stronger powers is an act of staggeringly bad strategic mismanagement. The Nazis also mismanaged their war economy, designed finicky, bespoke equipment ill-suited for the war they were waging and ran down their armies so hard that they effectively demodernized them inside of Russia. It is absolutely the case that the liberal democracies were unprepared for 1940, but it is also the case that Hitler inflicted upon his own people - not including his many, horrible domestic crimes - far more damage than he meted out even to conquered France.
Beyond these two, the next most 'clearly fascist' government is generally Francisco Franco's Spain - a clearly right-authoritarian regime, but there is some argument as to if we should understand them as fascist. Francoist Spain may have one of the best war records of any fascist state, on account of generally avoiding foreign wars: the Falangists win the Spanish Civil War, win a military victory in a small war against Morocco in 1957-8 (started by Moroccan insurgents) which nevertheless sees Spanish territory shrink (so a military victory but a strategic defeat), rather than expand, and then steadily relinquish most of their remaining imperial holdings. It turns out that the best 'good at war' fascist state is the one that avoids starting wars and so limits the wars it can possibly lose.
Broader definitions of fascism than this will scoop up other right-authoritarian governments (and start no end of arguments) but the candidates for fascist or near-fascist regimes that have been militarily successful are few. Salazar (Portugal) avoided aggressive wars buthis government lost its wars to retain a hold on Portugal's overseas empire. Imperial Japan's ideology has its own features and so may not be classified as fascist, but hardly helps the war record if included. Perón (Argentina) is sometimes described as near-fascist, but also avoided foreign wars. I've seen the Baathist regimes (Assad's Syria and Hussein's Iraq) described as effectively fascist with cosmetic socialist trappings and the military record there is awful: Saddam Hussein's Iraq started a war of choice with Iran where it barely managed to salvage a brutal draw, before getting blown out twice by the United States (the first time as a result of a war of choice, invading Kuwait!), with the second instance causing the end of the regime. Syria, of course, lost a war of choice against Israel in 1967, then was crushed by Israel again in another war of choice in 1973, then found itself unable to control even its own country during the Syrian Civil War (2011-present), with significant parts of Syria still outside of regime control as of early 2024.
And of course there are those who would argue that Putin's Russia today is effectively fascist ('Rashist') and one can hardly be impressed by the Russian army managing - barely, at times - to hold its own in another war of choice against a country a fourth its size in population, with a tenth of the economy which was itself not well prepared for a war that Russia had spent a decade rearming and planning for. Russia may yet salvage some sort of ugly draw out of this war - more a result of western, especially American, political dysfunction than Russian military effectiveness - but the original strategic objectives of effectively conquering Ukraine seem profoundly out of reach while the damage to Russia's military and broader strategic interests is considerable.
I imagine I am missing other near-fascist regimes, but as far as I can tell, the closest a fascist regime gets to being effective at achieving desired strategic outcomes in non-civil wars is the time Italy defeated Ethiopia but at such great cost that in the short-term they could no longer stop Hitler's Anschluss of Austria and in the long-term effectively became a vassal state of Hitler's Germany. Instead, the more standard pattern is that fascist or near-fascist regimes regularly start wars of choice which they then lose catastrophically. That is about as bad at war as one can be.
We miss this fact precisely because fascism prioritizes so heavily all of the signifiers of military strength, the pagentry rather than the reality and that pagentry beguiles people. Because being good at war is so central to fascist ideology, fascist governments lie about, set up grand parades of their armies, create propaganda videos about how amazing their armies are. Meanwhile other kinds of governments - liberal democracies, but also traditional monarchies and oligarchies - are often less concerned with the appearance of military strength than the reality of it, and so are more willing to engage in potentially embarrassing self-study and soul-searching. Meanwhile, unencumbered by fascisms nationalist or racist ideological blinders, they are also often better at making grounded strategic assessments of their power and ability to achieve objectives, while the fascists are so focused on projecting a sense of strength (to make up for their crippling insecurities).
The resulting poor military performance should not be a surprise. Fascist governments, as Eco notes, "are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy." Fascism's cult of machismo also tends to be a poor fit for modern, industrialized and mechanized war, while fascism's disdain for the intellectual is a poor fit for sound strategic thinking. Put bluntly, fascism is a loser's ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them.
This is, however, not an invitation to complacency for liberal democracies which - contrary to fascism - have tended to be quite good at war (though that hardly means they always win). One thing the Second World War clearly demonstrated was that as militarily incompetent as they tend to be, fascist governments can defeat liberal democracies if the liberal democracies are unprepared and politically divided. The War in Ukraine may yet demonstrate the same thing, for Ukraine was unprepared in 2022 and Ukraine's friends are sadly politically divided now. Instead, it should be a reminder that fascist and near-fascist regimes have a habit of launching stupid wars and so any free country with such a neighbor must be on doubly on guard.
But it should also be a reminder that, although fascists and near-fascists promise to restore manly, masculine military might, they have never, ever actually succeeded in doing that, instead racking up an embarrassing record of military disappointments (and terrible, horrible crimes, lest we forget). Fascism - and indeed, authoritarianisms of all kinds - are ideologies which fail to deliver the things a wise, sane people love - liberty, prosperity, stability and peace - but they also fail to deliver the things they promise.
These are loser ideologies. For losers. Like a drunk fumbling with a loaded pistol, they would be humiliatingly comical if they weren't also dangerous. And they're bad at war.
On to Recommendations:
Let me start with this short essay by friend-of-the-blog Liv Yarrow from October of last year on, "Why Latin?" It is more of an open musing as an answer to the question, but I think touches on many of the reasons to learn a language generally and to learn Latin in particular: the unique kinds of mental demands and rewards from learning a language, the powerful window into another culture it provides, and the challenge and satisfaction of doing something difficult.
I've also made a few podcast appearances broadly organized around my continuing effort to try to bail out the sinking ships that are our disciplines. I talked again with Drachinifel, this time on the nature of the interaction between academic historians and public-facing history educators on various forms of social media - in particular discussing how both groups (though there is overlap between them) rely on each other and could do a lot more to work together effectively to promote history and history education. In addition in a more higher-ed oriented venue, I talked with Jeff Crane, Dean at Cal Poly Humboldt on his wonderfully titled podcast, Yeah, I got a F#%*ing Job With a Liberal Arts Degree on the importance of public facing work in academia as well as some of what embattled fields in the liberal arts can do to try to help themselves both within the academy and outside of it.
For a bit of gaming history rather than history gaming, over on YouTube, HeyCara compiled a brief one-hour history of Paradox Interactive, charting its rise and the shifts in the kinds of games they've produced. It's a neat look at the history of the company and writes down some of the 'lore' that longer-term Paradox players may know that newer folks may note, like the sudden expansion and then equally rapid sputtering of Paradox Interactive as a wide-ranging publisher from 2008 to 2013. As strange as it sounds to say this about what is already an hour-long video, I'd love to see someone do something like this in a lot more depth, split between the trends in PDS and their design philosophies (what I've split into generations in my discussions) and Paradox Interactive itself and the different periods of different publishing strategies they've had. But there's real value in keeping and recording the history of these companies and creators, as that is important for understanding their creative products.
For this week's Book Recommendation, I am going to recommend a book that, quite frankly, I am surprised I haven't gotten to yet, Greg Woolf's Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998). This is a work that is one of those foundational books every graduate student has to read to get their footing on the topic, but is well worth a read from a general 'lay' reader as well, as a useful corrective to the public conception of 'Romanization.' While the study of Mediterranean cultural exchange - almost no ancient historians use the term 'Romanization' except in scare quotes these days - has advanced a lot (with a real sea-change in our thinking starting really in the 1990s), the public conception, in as much as there is one, hasn't moved very much. Where there is a public awareness of the spread of Roman cultural features (togas, Latin, red ceramic tile roofs, aqueducts, etc) it is understood as 'Romanization' - a process the Romans did to other peoples which reproduced elite Roman culture in some uniform and standard way.
Woolf's book, focusing on Roman Gaul (modern France, mostly) is one of the cornerstone studies in overturning this notion. First, Woolf notes that in Gaul, as elsewhere in the Empire, the process of cultural convergeance was not 'top-down' from the imperial elite, but rather motivated by the local adoption, typically by local elites, of Roman cultural habits as a sign of urbanitas ('city-living' with the sense of sophistication) and humanitas ('gentility' 'liberal education'), a way to display status. Those habits, which Woolf tracks across a wide range of cultural features (architecture, urbanism, pottery, etc.) in turn steadily work their way down until eventually even the poor "had learned to be impoverished in a Roman manner" in their limited goods. Indeed, Woolf argues, quite rapidly the distinction we see in the archaeological evidence is not between 'romanized' and 'unromanized' Gauls, but between wealthy and poor Gallo-Romans, all taking part in the same cultural fusion. Of course, Romans - or perhaps we might say Italo-Romans to distinguish them from our increasingly Roman Gallo-Romans - were involved in the process too, as exemplars to imitate, as merchants from whom to buy the markers of Roman cultural identity and so on.
Yet at the same time, as Woolf notes, this is not the death of cultural diversity nor the end of Gallic culture. Woolf rejects 'Romanization' as a paradigm, but also notes that there are few, if any, "islands of residual 'Celticism'" to be found in Roman Gaul. But there is cultural fusion, perhaps most evident in religious practice, with Roman Gods and Roman-style temples (especailly in the cities) operating alongside long-established Gallic ritual practices (like throwing swords into bodies of water - God bless the Gauls (and other Celtic-language speakers) for continuing to throw weapons into lakes and rivers where we can later uncover them) and long-established Gallic holy sites. And these experiences were not uniform, but themselves regionalized, especially with the distinction between largely demilitarized interior and southern parts of Gaul and the militarized north-east.
I hope even this brief effort at description has given you some sense of the wonderful complexity of the picture Woolf paints here, even if I am doing his book ill-service. Woolf writes well and the book is clear and readable, even for the non-specialist. The book also features a number of maps which do well to guide a reader who may not be familiar with the geography of Roman Gaul. The one thing I will say it is missing is pictures beyond the maps, for some of Woolf's points depend on street plans, architecture and artwork and these may be unfamiliar to the lay-reader and thus hard to picture, though you will have no problem following the argument itself (and should one want to then picture it, the book has footnotes and a full bibliography to oblige further reading!). Cultural change in the Roman Empire is one of those topics that is heavily regionalized, and so no one region quite looks like any other - all one can do is pick a region and try to grapple with its complexities. At this task, Becoming Roman is eminently capable and so well worth a read.
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