The enormity of WWII

[Thumpalumpacus]

They labored under poor leadership.

The leadership is inseparable from the culture which had superficially adopted the trappings of modernity but did not really embrace the rationalistic and humanistic values that underpinned it.     

When a traditional culture achieve remarkable success in adopting imported modernity to make up for its previous short comings, at some point the very success it achieved by adopting the import is paradoxically used by traditionalist as proof of the superiority of some eternal cultural trait .  While this reaction is in full force the culture holds onto the trappings of modernity but regresses in its intellectual world view a cartoonish version of the pre-modern. 

We saw this with japan’s remarkable success in adopting imported modernity under the Meiji restoration, culminating in Japan defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese war and becoming accepted as one of the great modern powers.  At this point traditionalist began to push back and held up japan’s startling success not as evidence of the power of imported modernity, but as evidence of the mythical strength of eternal japan.    By WWII the intellectual regression was in full swing.

We are also seeing this with China now.   China’s remarkable success under Deng’s reform and opening up culminated in China becoming both the largest economy on purchase power parity basis and largest trading nation.   Under Xi the traditionists in the guise of descendants of communist old guard began to push back and attribute china’s success not to the value of what it imported, but to some eternal Chinese characteristics which the communist party leadership made to shine.

If the U.S. were to fight the Chinese in an open war,  I expect to see the Chinese military would exhibit a very similar array of initial material strength coupled with long term wish-thinking intellectual weakness that japan exhibited in WWII.

All fair points. I think that does, indeed, point to poor leadership, because those hard-liners were also the ones leading the government and, especially, the army, after 1937.