Ali is talking about Andrew Sullivan using his "30 years War:Sunni vs. Shia, etc., in Iraq" analogy. All the talk is cool, but there's a serious problem with the analogy: no one knows anything about the 30 Years War! You heard me right. For an anology to work like so: X ⇒ Y, you need to know a about X to map inferences onto Y, for the nature of Y is unfamiliar and X is familiar. The idea is that the 30 Years War will convey information to those not in the know about the current conflicts in the Middle East which emerge from sectarianism. But again, the problem is that hardly anyone knows enough about the 30 Years War to really map anything novel from it to the current events. Though straight up, who is our Wallenstein, because that was a hardcore thug!
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Gustavus Adolphus should be our guy. He and Maurice of Nassau revolutionized warfare. He developed the Swedish military to the point that as late as 1709 it was thought of as invincible. The later king Karl XII was a kamikaze and he ended up uniting all of Europe against him, and Sweden hasn't been a power since. What Karl did from his small, impoverished country was amazing, though not admirable.
so your critique is not that the analogy is wrong but that "the people" don't know enough about the 30 years war for the analogy to be relevant?
that's the nerdiest critique of an analogy i've ever seen.
that's the nerdiest critique of an analogy i've ever seen.
it transmits no substance. why is that a nerdy critique? it isn't "wrong," don't put words in my mouth. it simply doesn't convey anymore information that you had before the analogy without a base to target mapping. but in any case, "nerdy" is a compliment in these parts. perhaps if we had a "nerdier" president we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.
aren't you assuming that people do not know what the 30 years war is?
what the heck is wikipedia for?
aren't you assuming that people do not know what the 30 years war is?
what the heck is wikipedia for?
1) yes, i am, most people are stupid. they can look up the 30 years war, but that doesn't mean they know enough to extract information from it when mapped onto another concept
2) wikipedia has its uses. but boning up on the 30 years war with enough subtly to be informed enough about interrelationships in analogies isn't what it's good for
please see this post on analogical reasoning. what i'm trying to say will be clearer.
I would bet that there are more people that know about the 30 years war than you would think (a few 10's of thousands more anyway, which probably doesn't affect your point). There is a fairly popular series of (ongoing) fantasy books about what would happen if an American town was dropped into 1631 Germany. Tilly, Wallenstein, all those guys would be considered genocidal maniacs today. That is progress in my book. They could still probably win elections though....hmm...
yeah, i've read that series. i'm a big AH fan. and this analogy might work well with that set.
Gustav II Adolf (Let's use the Swedish name of a Swedish king) was a military genius, but was he a good guy? Perhaps he was better than most of the other thugs of the time, but anyone using the books by Eric Flint as a guide will get a pretty distorted view.
The real "kamikaze" was Karl XI who did manage to start wars with just about everyone in his search for glory. Karl XII didn't have much of a choice since he was immediately faced with an alliance determined to crush Sweden.
Gustavus Adolphus was a major European figure at a time when Latin was still in wide use. He definitely was not a nice guy, but neither was Wallerstein.
Karl XII's initial wars were inevitable, but he didn't know when to stop. Even after he'd been decisively defeated by Russia and had lost most of his non-Swedish territory, much of which he had inherited, he stayed on the attack. During his last year or so he even made plans to invade England.
Voltaire's "History of Charles the Twelfth" is good -- he interviewed many of the key players. Hatton's biography is presumably more accurate and up-to-date.
Well, it's not an analogy that's going to immediately throw light on the situation for a lot of people, true.
But it may be that the sectarian war in Iraq is something that calls for far-flung analogies. I don't think Lebanon quite cuts it.
The Thirty Years War is not well known, but it has already happened, and it's pretty well-studied, so people can find out about it today.
The Iraq War they'll have to wait for.
Another interesting thing about this period is that teh end of the 30 Years War roughly coincided with the beginning of the English Civil War. This long interlude of religious war led pretty directly to the substantial reaction against religious enthusiasm in the 18th century and the "religion of social convenience" attitude (deism and outright hypocrisy weren't uncommon) that became so prevalent among the elites in the 18th century.
So maybe if we can just ride out a religious civil war of our own, we'll be home free!