[rayiner]

> the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know

That is non-responsive to the point raised by OP. That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese. The point OP raised is much more salient. If we end up in another World War, what lessons do you want to have from the past? “Don’t put racial minorities in internment camps” is well and good, but it won’t help you build a giant navy and win a war.

I learned con law from a social studies PhD who had little interest in the constitution, and focused the entire class on this or that minoritized or oppressed group. It’s a terrible way to learn constitutional law—or anything else—because you over-focus on the 20% of the story while missing the big picture about how the country was actually designed to work.

[eesmith]

> That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese.

Or the people killed in the Port Chicago disaster, and when enlisted men later refused to work due to unsafe conditions, they were court-martialed. ("Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among Americans opposing discrimination targeting African Americans; it and other race-related Navy protests of 1944–45 led the Navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation of its forces beginning in February 1946.", quoting Wikipedia.)

Or the infamous Zoot Suit riots, where newly arrived white American servicemen thought Hispanic culture, including wearing zoot suits, was anti-American and unpatriotic - L.A. was one of several cities during the war with race riots (eg, the Beaumont race riot of 1943 caused by relocated white defense workers who attacked local black residents).

[wat10000]

Not putting thousands workers into camps for no good reason will help you build a giant navy and win a war. It’s small compared to the whole country but it does help.

But the main lesson I'd want to take is to shut down strong aggressors early, then you don’t need to run a massive war production program in the first place.

Judging by Ukraine, we seem to have learned this lesson but not very well.

[rayiner]

Preemptively getting involved in wars that don’t concern us isn’t a takeaway from world war ii. The circumstances that caused that were the result of 300 years of the Westphalian system, and are quite unique.

[wat10000]

It might not be your takeaway but it sure is mine. All that stuff with Austria and Czechoslovakia didn’t concern us, until it did. Putting a stop to those shenanigans would have been a million times easier if done early.

[roenxi]

You'd be involved in a million times more war. There are too many conflicts for that sort of thinking to work.

The lessons from WW1/2 were (1) don't be involved in the first few years of a World War, they are empire wreckers and (2) after a war, winners should invest in the economic success of the losers and (3) more Bismarck. Being even more aggressive would hardly have helped, the Europeans were all aggressive. Turns out aggression as a strategy led to ... more and bigger wars. Who'd a thunk it.

[wat10000]

I was careful to say “strong aggressors.” You don’t need to go after every tinpot dictator who decides to pull something stupid. But something like Russia conquering bits of their neighbors should have been stopped early.

Europeans didn’t get aggressive with Germany until they invaded France, at which point it was too late to bring things to a conclusion without years of fighting and tens of millions killed. A stronger response to anything up to and including the invasion of Poland could have averted the catastrophe.

[roenxi]

> But something like Russia conquering bits of their neighbors should have been stopped early.

So would it be fair to say that your WWII lesson is leading you to suggest escalating a war with a major nuclear power as the proper path forward? Because that should be setting off alarm bells that you learned the wrong lesson.

You can see in the world's reaction to the 2003 Iraq invasion; the correct response is no escalation and let the government of the defending country get pancaked. The damage is kept to a reasonable minimum and then some attempt can be made to put civilisation back together again. A China or a Russia going in to escalate the conflict or trying to stop the aggressors would have been a disaster for everyone. We could have had something as bad or worse than the Ukraine war 20 years earlier.

[bcrosby95]

I think you missed their point. Everyone was pulling in the same direction because not doing so could land you in prison. During a war (a real declared one) you have little to no right to free speech. More than one person was jailed due to dissent.

[rayiner]

That’s a good lesson. What the U.S. did in war time isn’t dissimilar to what China and Singapore did in peacetime to lift themselves out of poverty in a generation.

[hollerith]

But Beijing doesn't suppresses dissent for economic reasons. Beijing suppresses dissent because social harmony is a core tenet of Chinese culture.

Also, the kind of centralized control the US imposed during WWII is not particularly useful for encouraging economic growth. China's economic growth was caused by Nixon's decision to bring China into the US-led maritime trading system plus Mao's dying and eventually being replaced by someone who was not completely incompetent at economic policy.

The reason China or Russia or Bangladesh cannot afford to adopt a British- or American-style culture that emphasizes liberty or heroic levels of individualism is that they have too many militarily-powerful neighbors: the combination of a culture that encourages free expression and experimentation with technologies that cause profound social changes with the geography of a China, Bangladesh or Russia will tend to lead to deadly civil wars, rebellions and invasions. If their geographical situation were like the US or the UK (i.e., secure in their respective islands, i.e., not in danger of invasion by land) then they would have the option of switching to a culture that emphasizes freedom of expression and free economic activity, and if they did that they would tend to reap considerable economic benefits over the decades.

[roenxi]

The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else. Allowing dissent and maybe even adjusting to it generally leads to better results in the long term.

I was mulling on my commute today as I dodged several homeless people. I can't speak to the US experience, but in Australia if I'd offered those people jobs at the wages and conditions of Chinese workers in the 90s, with the expectation of achieving the same civilisation progress as China ... I would expect to be fined and told off. If I persisted in running a business that way, eventually I'd probably be arrested.

Quashing dissent is illegal in the West, but that isn't the thing that needs to be changed to get industrial results. We need to legalise the industry part. Pollution has to be acceptable, mistakes decriminalised and it needs to be easy to employ people productively. All these Western countries are going a good way to banning mining, restricting cheap energy, blocking industrial processes as environmentally unsound and over-regulating how business is done. All on purpose and largely due to consensus opinions that too much industrial progress is bad for people. The result is much to most of the capital investment for the last few decades seeming to have happened in Asia where they were happy to let the world improve around them. It has nothing to do with division. If anything we don't have enough division, the people who want progress are hamstrung because they are forced to conform to the whims of timid environmentalists.

(and I endorse bcrosby95's reading of my comment).

[rayiner]

> The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else.

OP’s reading above was that quashing of dissent was what helped everyone pull in the same direction in world war ii.

[roenxi]

And my counter-reading is that that cannot be all that important. If pulling together was what mattered in a clash between industrial powers, most societies would win most wars [0] because it isn't that hard to squash dissent if the generals want to.

The hammer gets bought down on dissenters, true enough. Happens in every big war, I count myself lucky that HN is remote and anonymous from some of the people I've talked to or I'm sure I'd have some nasty injuries from my views on the Ukraine war. But industrial production never has and never will be determined by how hard people wish for things and hold hands. Industrial production is a function of resource availability and capital investment. There is no strong need to get many people on side for either of those things and the people who handle capital investments tend to be a class that thinks alike so if a few are convinced then all of them will go along happily.

The pulling together is important insofar as bodies are required for the meat grinder and if you want to deploy literally everything in a war effort then work will be found for idle hands. But if we're talking about wartime manufacturing; it really isn't the major factor. The US is not industrially limited by its cohesion, it is limited by legislation written by people who are in the majority and enjoy a societal consensus which they are using to diminish industry.

[0] Which is logically impossible given that minimum of half the sides in wars must lose.