jaidamack

AV by @distressedegg

  • they/them

🔞 I say lots of heck words and post questionable smut. Stick around if that's your thing, but if you're below legal age to view such things in your jurisdiction, kindly go someplace else.
🚜 Bob Semple was right.


feybeasts
@feybeasts

The Nazis were incompetent criminals whose mythical reputation in warfare is wholly unearned, and whose utter incompetence was on display constantly. You should mock their drug-addled stupidity at every turn.


jaidamack
@jaidamack

Nobody would do that. Nobody would do that! That's so incredibly dangerous! Your armour racing ahead of your infantry, nobody stopping to consolidate positions, a supply corridor that runs the length of an entire fucking country? That's insane. Unless you were racing to capture ports-OH FUCK!

That's why it worked once. Oh, you're gonna blitzkrieg into the Soviet Union? You got high on your own supply and decided you're geniuses, huh? Go on, then! Plough across thousands of kilometers of goddamn nothing which you now actually have to dedicate security units to policing because, once again, you've got a supply corridor thin as the streak of piss down your leg as the cossacks rampage through your rear? Great move, dingus!

You're gonna blitzkrieg across North Africa? Egypt, Libya, Tunisia... and THEN WHAT? It's the fucking desert you sundried sauerkraut shitstains! German and Italian forces are gonna see-saw across almost the entire northern stretch of the continent without ever achieving a knockout against the 8th Army? You'll spend all the ammo, fuel, and lives you can to get just... within... gasping distance... of Tripoli... when the Allies, pushed back against their ports and literally sitting right on top of their supply network, can thump you right in the face and chase you back to the Suez Canal? How many times?

Oh, smashing through the Ardennes worked once, right? Driving through Belgium hell for leather to divide Allied units and break apart their ability to counterattack, yeah? That worked so well the last time! You remember kicking the British out of Dunkirk, right? Do it again! In the snow! Drive! Throw everything into the pot, go for it! ...wait a minute, using WHAT FUEL? You've got all these magnificent Wunderwaffen ready to deploy against the fractious Allied nations, but nothing to make them go! BETTER START DIGGING HOLES IN BERLIN TO MOUNT A DEFENCE, YA DOINKS.

If anybody ever tells you that blitzkrieg was a surefire sign of superior German strategic acumen, you can pour a glass of water over them and walk away. The German army could usually excel at the tactical level, where relatively small units and ad hoc formations would be gathered up by competent mid-level officers and thrown against the wall, but at a strategic level? Where all the dipshit Nazis were jerking one another off with Clausewitz manuscripts? They lost the war in 1940, they just didn't know it yet.


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in reply to @feybeasts's post:

the sick thing to realize is we live in an age where many powerful and influential figures do not understand the difference between the two

you look at the situation with genAI, where "progress" is measured entirely in ego-stroking terms rather than actual factuality and utility, and you can draw a direct line from there to the kind of mindset that argues "but the Nazis had some good points; they were efficient!"

look at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who cannot understand there is a difference between "what they want" and "what they actually have"; they assume anything they might actually want is theirs already, the "getting" is just details they can elide by shouting loud enough

in reply to @jaidamack's post:

The Nazis were, at the end of the day, 'geniuses' at this whole war thing in the same way someone who doesn't know anything about chess beyond what piece can move which way might pose an actual challenge to a grandmaster, at least for a little while; by being so utterly incompetent as to be impossible to read before having the floor wiped with them anyway.

They also made such great and helpful friends by nature! "Wait, Italy, what are you-... no, don't fucking invade Abyssinia! New Roman Empire are you dense? You have even fewer trucks than we do! Fine, fuck it, maybe we'll manage to score Libya, that'd be helpful-... Japan what did you JUST DO."

What's really great about it is that fiction spent so much time trying to game out what a disaster the new German nation would be for the rest of Europe. Like, multiple stories about which countries would need to ally themselves with the new war machine just to survive. And in retrospect, I almost have to wonder if it was part of some extraordinary long con of building them up as geniuses before any of them were even born, so that they'd just walk into walls whenever they had the barest glimmers of a working economy...

What's astonishing to me is how the myth was perpetuated even after the war had ended. Maybe it was more satisfying to say, "We bested a crafty and well-organized foe!" than "You wouldn't believe how hard it was to whack those moles, we never knew what they'd try next."

Part of me suspects it's because the whole image works out so well for businesses. If the Nazis were only wrong because they were so efficient that they lost their humanity or whatever nonsense people floated, then no, a labor union would obviously be bad, and you can forget about a workers' cooperative. But yeah, I could see "No, no, it was more like Hogan's Heroes" making people question the value of getting involved, because we see how easy it is for people to decide that maybe the philosophy wasn't so bad.

Tangentially, it reminds me of one of the most comforting things about history, to me, is how we had thousands of years of almost exclusively authoritarian empires in half the world, lasting for hundreds of years. Then a few people casually asked "but maybe civil rights?" and two hundred years later, household pets tend to outlive authoritarian regimes, unless they're irrelevant (North Korea) or propped up with obscene amounts of oil money, almost like the idea genuinely doesn't work...

i keep thinking about how one of the reasons the nazis got as far as they did into russia going after the oil fields they had no chance of reaching is because stalin looked at their leaked plans and went nahh they'd never do that