Capto Iugulum Background Thread

[Grandkhan]

While I wouldn't necessarily go this far, the cleverness of Russian arms build-up is still overstated. I accepted sometime in the 1920's that I would never be able to match the economic and technological advantage Russia had and both Britain and Germany refused to share designs with Scandinavia so I gave up on having a modern military -- to the exception of the air force where prior to jets I still had some level of competence -- and focused on trying (with virtually no success but whatever) to strengthen the international Revolution.

Thats kind of a terrible idea. You had about as much EP as Brazil, and more than Argentina, and somehow they weren't too out of date technologically. You basically went "Bugger it." and folded. Especially since you didn't need to worry about your fleet since there wasn't going to be much of a naval war anyway.

You literally said "London is threatened but we can't risk losing India." which probably wasn't your best idea. Though I guess we both assumed that a Great War wasn't going to start for a while, and hindsight is 20/20.

 

[Jehoshua]

Jehoshua your plan was fairly transparent I think to most people. I was well aware at least, and perhaps you could also tell that I was actively preparing a counter-offensive for liberalism in Europe. I too (with Switzerland) was creating a charity organization to help refugees and those in need in the war, an explicitly secular one, to bolster secular credentials against Catholicism. I was also cultivating Septembrism to be a social democratic pro-worker ideology, and I was writing up a speech-story for this year in which I was to declare the "d'Auvergne Doctrine" - I was preparing social liberalism to replace proletarism as a beacon of light on the left.

Of course it was, most of the things I did were in the public sphere and I was hardly attempting to keep the Church's position secret. As to how things would have panned out in Europe... I would hazard a guess that the Church (in comparison to Switzerland) would have had more success in the case of the charity organisation it was establishing it had clear support from a good number of third parties financially and otherwise, and since the Church by its nature has an established institutional structure transcending national borders its charitable extension would have had an advantage there as well in ensuring a broad charitable outreach. (you would have had some difficulty in working territories occupied by the LTE, and had to build an international structure from scratch whereas I already had one)

As to the ideological front, you are right that I was well aware that you were cultivating septembrism in Europe. Indeed part of the "workers push" I has planned for the coming turns was to undercut the Church's secular opponents on the social front (seeing as I conceptualised septrembrist "social liberalism" as basically social proletarism with French characteristics due to their indistinguishable policy patterns vis a vis the updates). I was also betting that establishing a clear paradigmatic proposition for the relationship between the worker and the means of production, the right conduct of workplace relations, and how this sphere of life should be embedded in society would trounce any vague lefty worker doctrine that might come up, and reinforce the Church's role as advocate of the poor and the "moral voice" of Europe along with its general response to the war.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Thats kind of a terrible idea. You had about as much EP as Brazil, and more than Argentina, and somehow they weren't too out of date technologically. You basically went "Bugger it." and folded. Especially since you didn't need to worry about your fleet since there wasn't going to be much of a naval war anyway.

You literally said "London is threatened but we can't risk losing India." which probably wasn't your best idea. Though I guess we both assumed that a Great War wasn't going to start for a while, and hindsight is 20/20.

When you look at the amount of EP Russia had (circa say 1920) and the amount of EP Scandinavia had (same time period) the difference is just so great it's not even really comparable. Russia's economy was more than twice as much -- as I recall -- as ours, and Russia already had the advantage of multiple technological trading partners. Everyone in the NES remained unwilling to share technology with the Workers' Commonwealth up until the beginning of the war for fear that the supposedly-omniscient and omnipotent international Revolutionary conspiracy would rise up and murder them in their beds, or worse, that their governments would be impeached for working with proletarists even in secret. As a result we had virtually nothing to work with in terms of designs and funding.

Theoretically supporting Revolutionary states, like the UPRA, would have created a network of willing partners that would assist Scandinavia in funding its own designs, SRPs and military research. Unfortunately this worked only for a little while, and thanks to the UPRA's failure, all the EP invested in propping up trade and technological partners was wasted.

I am still frustrated about the circumstances that proletarist movements had to deal with (basically universal condemnation and assault with no reservations regardless of the benefit some nations stood to gain from quietly supporting the Revolution outside of their borders) and nigh-constant failure. I remember being told after a certain point that people thought proletarism was such a failed, broken ideology that only the most miserable, worst places on Earth with no other options left would ever seriously consider active Revolutionary resistance.

In short, it isn't that simple

 

[Circuit]

I'm getting awfully annoyed of folks saying Britain never noticed Russia given that that was almost my entire foreign policy. Just about every cent of my EP went to trying to counter them in some way or fighting in Guangxi. I modernized the army only a couple years before the invasion, tried hard to build up the navy, did send funds to aid those fighting Russia's allies, and British Intellignence had identified and bribed the cocky Russian spies so a Normandy-esque surprise attack could be launched. I just don't go advertising everything I'm doing.

 

[Crezth]

One thing I noticed about CI was Britain never noticed Russia. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Jehoshua]

My impression (and it is only an impression) from Circuits comments is that serious British hedging against Russian power really came only after the fruits of Russian antagonism had already begun manifesting to its detriment, rather than its actions being a consequence of natural hedging and balancing put in place immediately after the great war when it was quite clear that Russia was the primary potential adversary for Britain and Europe in general. Ergo, the policy Circuit outlined, if its the whole story (which it might not be) seems to be one of reaction, which if true means that Britain really responded far too late in the game and committed a major strategic blunder in its immediate post-war strategic analysis.

However as I said, that's just my impression though I get from reading his comments and recalling the game, I'm sure he can correct us if he in was in fact seriously hedging against Russia (perhaps even seeking to push back its influence) before it was obvious that Russia was actively hostile towards Britain.

 

[Circuit]

When I first got into Britain I tried to follow Crezth's plans. An opportunity to invade Arabia (which was in Crezth's plans) came right away, so it was now or never (or so it seemed at the time). The war made it pretty obvious that the military was in need of reform; I didn't like the doctrine and the most advanced airplane was a triplane (the tank wasn't much better). So I worked on modernizing the military. Next came the dissolution of the Kongo, which was also in Crezth's plans to eliminate, and I had no love for them (I imagined they would be a problem when the war with Russia erupted), so I funded rebels there, in hopes to break them up and eventually claim the colonies for myself. It wasn't too long afterwords that, due to a mistake in my orders, Africa revolted and then The Fireworks Massacre occurred, which did in fact really drain my resources.

I will admit that British foreign policy became somewhat reactive, though I felt the only way to really counter the Russians was to build up my own military and try to unite Europe politically against the Russians. I really focused on trying to get an anti Russian coalition, and I thought I had some success with the French, but it seems like I didn't manage to convince many that Russia was a serious threat.

 

[Crezth]

You teamed up with the continentals to invade Arabia, which I had no intention whatsoever of doing. And what's more, I didn't really care about Arabia, sweet sweet oil notwithstanding. I was more focused on the Kongo/East Asia.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Britain's schizophrenic foreign policy is a great tradition, going back to the fifteen-some turns that Nuke was at the helm

 

[Luckymoose]

You teamed up with the continentals to invade Arabia, which I had no intention whatsoever of doing. And what's more, I didn't really care about Arabia, sweet sweet oil notwithstanding. I was more focused on the Kongo/East Asia.

The key to unstoppable British power was always a strong allied Brazil. I never understood the shift Circuit made there. It was absolutely clear that the two top naval powers were nigh untouchable together, and that is how we set it up to be.

 

[spryllino]

The other big mistake was Germany's repeated attacks on the Confederation. If they hadn't done that they could have been enormously better off...

 

[Quisani]

Yeah, I was surprised about the shift away from UK-Brazillian tag teaming. Japan really profited from it during the Pacific war, but it never made a whole lot of sense to me. Sure Lucky was aggressive, but Brazil is aggressive and has aspirations.

I feel like Western Europe dropped the ball on it's game plan, but a lot of that could be contributed all the players switching and dropping. I stopped paying attention to who was who in Europe and what they were doing abroad.

 

[Crezth]

The UK-Brazil alliance was based in what I believed to be the correct geopolitical knowledge that:

1. As long as Russia was around, Europe would be compelled to follow Britain if it didn't want to get smashed. Britain could antagonize Europe, ignore Europe, etc., and at the end of the day Europe has to go with Britain if they fear Russia. And defying Britain with Brazil's backing was out of the question, see: the great war.

2. Brazil and the UK combined created an unstoppable naval hegemony. It cements Britain's security at home permitting additional power projection.

3. Brazil has too much utility in a British ally to rebuke it. They have virtually no colliding interests and Brazil's player loves meddling. A strong alliance means Brazil has a controlling interest in South American power plays (to say nothing of the New World writ large).

Of course Luckymoose and I had our disagreements (the fate of Africa, the Japanese question, Circuit's USA both pre- and post-dissolution), and I always attempted to court other allies (Iggy, Circuit, Quisani, and LoE at points), but nobody was a good substitute for Brazil because of the reasons mentioned above.

 

[Jehoshua]

To be honest, I think the entire endeavour to dissolve the Scandinavian Kongo remnant was massively misguided in that actually supporting de-colonisation (and it succeeding) was inevitably going to proceed into a general decolonisation movement in Africa and around the world generally (we of course know that other powers were pushing for independence movements as well, but we are talking about Britain here) which was something that was self-evidently against British interests, and only come back to bite them. (easy to say in hindsight, but I think it was obvious that promoting African nationalism would spread ideologically to other colonies not part of the Kongo-sphere)

Indeed with the exception of Russia, every major power I think actually had a vested interest in maintaining a stable colonial order, since every Empire except Russia (which was a territorial rather than colonial Empire) was to some degree invested in the colonial project. Likewise as we can see in retrospect, once the decolonisation ball was rolling that move towards national independence contributed amongst other factors to the slow relative decline of British power vis a vis Russia and other rising powers.

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On Germany, I think its main problem was that it failed to suitably cultivate and maintain its own sphere of influence. Ergo it was a poor friend. Thus we saw the gradual erosion of its influence in eastern Europe to the point that it lost friends in the form of Hungary and Czechy-Morava leaving Germany with only Croatia as an ally. We saw Italy disassociate itself correspondingly and shackle up with the Russians, and we saw the former Confederate states (leaving aside whether it should have attacked the confederation to begin with) which were originally under clear German hegemonic domination reform as Germany over decades failed to project its influence west and slipped into nihilistic drexlerian isolationism.

 

[Lord of Elves]

The position of the Workers' Commonwealth was, initially, that African native cultures were not evolved appropriately and enough in order to support a Revolutionary movement such that it was both beneficial and essential (as a responsibility of Revolutionary brotherhood and human charity) that the colonial empire be maintained. Significant energy was devoted to attempting to gain allies which would either negotiate a settlement between the Workers' Commonwealth and the Kongo traitor state or resolve the colonies for the Fatherland. This effort was built on the proposition that an independent Kongo would eventually fail in the face of African nationalism and serve to create a domino effect of independence movements. Let me be very clear that this is exactly what happened.

Once these independence movements became successful Scandinavian Revolutionary intellectuals quickly backpedaled and attempted as best they could to both make peace with the loss of the empire and also the imperial attitude, revising previously-held beliefs on the suitability of native culture to the Revolution and so on. Unfortunately by this point EQ had decided and explained to me that all black people everywhere hated us, except in the American south, and that proletarism was considered a white ideology.

 

[Crezth]

I never once promoted African nationalism. My objective was to supplant the Kongolese government authority on the grounds that the Kongo was basically Big Somalia with a figurehead king. I had a plan but it went unexecuted until I lost interest and quit.