Here's an interesting tidbit from one of those conflicts that you don't hear too much about: The War of the Pacific (1879-1884). A recurring question in this subreddit is when the last time a king or a nation's leader commanded an army in the field. What follows is one such story taken from a longer answer of mine:

In response to the Chilean amphibious landing at Pisagua in November 1879 and the subsequent offensive inland to occupy the economically important province of Tarapacá, a portion of the combined forces of Peru and Bolivia were planned to be used in an offensive to catch the Chilean forces in a concentrated attack. The Peruvian force under General Buendiá was in place in Tarapacá, but the Bolivian force had to march south to join them.

This is where it all went wrong. Leading the troops was none other than the President of Bolivia himself, General Hilarión Daza. Daza led 3000 men in a 62 miles march through some of the most inhospitable environment in the world (The Atacama desert) without proper supplies, caring little to prepare his men for the march ahead and forcing them to march at day when the sun was at its worst and without guides to lead them to their actual destination. It took the men 3 days to walk from Arica to Camarones, a march of around 50 miles and in which plenty of Bolivian soldiers died on the way due to thirst, hunger and pure exhaustion. Camarones was not the final destination. Tana, the final destination, was still 22 miles away but the soldiers would never reach it.

For some reason, whether it was Daza's fear that he was about to be overthrown back home in La Paz or because, as Daza himself argued later that the president of Peru, President Mariano Prado, who had actually helped Daza planned this operation to begin with was at fault for not supplying him properly, the remaining men turned around and marched back to Arica. This did not only doom the planned offensive, leading to a Peruvian loss at the Battle of Dolores/San Francisco, but also led to the downfall of Daza's regime. He was heavily criticized for essentially defecting and both Bolivian soldiers and civilians turned on him. Daza was ultimately overthrown by the army and forced into exile in Europe.

To this day, what happened that day at Camarones in 1879 remains a mystery to historians. Many different versions have been brought up but no consensus exists and this is aggravated by the fact that the historiography of the War of the Pacific is intensely nationalistic. Some Peruvian historians have gone as far as to call it the "treachery at Camarones". In the end, the Camarones incident is a microcosm of how badly led the Peruvian and Bolivian armies were during the War of the Pacific, although Chile was not too far behind in incompetence.

Not strictly a history comment but a flair here should be able to answer a question I had...

I read [this recent NPR article] (https://www.npr.org/2017/12/26/570806064/north-korea-designed-a-nuke-so-did-this-truck-driver) about John Coster-Mullen writing a very detailed book about the construction of Little Boy and Fat Man. I also read the Monday Methods article by u/restricteddata (shoutout for being a go-to expert) about using secret material. I have not read Coster-Mullen's book, but the article said it contains a lot of technical details.

My question is this: hypothetically, if a person were to piece together enough publicly available information (as Coster-Mullen did) to come up with a complete nuclear weapon blueprint, and then published said blueprints, what kind of legal trouble might he be in? If he could prove all the information was publicly available and legitimately obtained (e.g. declassified, redacted FOIA reports, etc) he could prevail in a trial I suppose, or would he still fall under some kind of anti-espionage law?

If this deserves to be it's own question I can repost but I feel like it belongs here for violating the 20 year rule.

A few days ago I read an article on ScienceDaily about a wildly interesting paper that, using a database of global historical and archaeological information, found a more or less homogenous and predictable statistical pattern in how human societies develop, that different patterns and characteristics of complexity are interconnected, that societal complexity can be meaningfully scientifically quantified and that most human societies, as a general trend in the data, tend to increase in complexity at some rate.

That reminded me of a concept I'd been thinking about for a while, and one I think is contested on here every now and then (though perhaps not in this specific form).

Teleology in history in the form of unilineal evolution and historical determinism, of course, has been debunked by most historians for some time now. Europe was never destined for global hegemony, democratic (or communist) governments were not the end point in a line of progress in government and could have easily been something else, essentially everything we see today is not a fated result of a driving force that selected specifically for it. Anybody that suggests otherwise is immediately shown historiography 101 as well as some basics of empirical thought. I actually don't think I need to explain why teleology is dumb on this subreddit.

We know history is not teleologic in nature. But what about considering it to be teleonomic; is this an acceptable way to view history? There are indeed no overt purposes to large-scale change of this sort. Yet change happens anyway, and while it is sometimes reduced in some ways to a less complex form, it is almost always a general increase in complexity of some form, at some rate, and is, as a trend, cumulative. The idea of systems becoming cumulatively complex on average over time is an elemental part of information theory. Human society fits in quite well with these systems. While not headed by a definitive 'purpose', societal change can be observed to operate on net increase in complexity guided by nothing other than the basic rules that drive other information systems, such as species and ecosystems.

The reason for my asking is questions sometimes come up here that use teleological language like 'backward' and 'progress', as well as other posts that go into more in-depth discussions of teleology; often brought up by supporters that use the aforementioned increase in complexity as evidence of teleology. The regulars on here promptly dispel it in great detail with good evidence and alternate paradigms, but often throw baby out with the bathwater by ignoring or failing to completely address these trends, which is what I'm sure most people arguing for teleology are most interested in.

What I'm asking is if it's possible to interpret a teleonomic directionality in change throughout history, without falling into the teleology trap? Do historians do this already? How popular is it?

Week 10

The Italian Chamber celebrated Christmas break with a wide margin confidence vote towards Vittorio Emanuele Orlando's government, under the reassuring auspices of the Piave front stabilizing against the last pushes of the Austro-German offensive.

That was more or less the end of the positives. The economical situation was – if not dire – difficult. The war had determined a large deficit of balance (deficit had been 85% of actual revenue during 1916-17 and was projected at the same level for 1917-18, with expenses being 329% and 224% of actual revenue respectively); trade deficit had been 5,300 millions for 1916-17 and was projected at 5,420 for 1917-18, roughly twice the exports, which had causes a depletion of the already modest values reserves; disruption of economical activities had been a consequence of the new needs of war economy.

The social climate was tense – a tension not reduced by the continuous anti-socialist (but also, in a lower measure, anti-catholic and anti liberal) propaganda of the interventionist forces that had found their expression in the parliament through the Fascio Parlamentare di Difesa Nazionale.

The Chamber itself, despite the large confidence to the Government (only the “official” socialists – i.e. those who had not supported the war and had thus created their own block after the split up with the socialist interventionists and the trade unionists), had closed its year of activities with an embarrassing display of division, accusations and recriminations, that pitted the Fascio against the Socialists, the Socialists against the Government, the interventionists against Giolitti, and so on. These untimely conflicts – that the political class attempted to suppress without much fortune, or to hide behind the curtain of the secret committee – did nothing to restore the Parliament's prestige within the country. The Italian Parliament that had been the consistent target of Nationalist and Radical attacks, and the Giolitti system, that had guided the nation through a flawed, democratic process of development until introduction of universal suffrage in 1913, appeared to have worn out itself and the liberal institutions of the state. Despite it being rather easy to point fingers at the inability of the political class which had brought Italy into the war without any military, economical or social preparation^1 for such a conflict, it was in fact apparent that the Italian politicians and establishment by and large understood the need to change, reform and innovate the State institutions – to the point that any measure of reform was actually taken into consideratio, including getting rid of the Parliament entirely.

If the moderates, that area in between the liberal tradition going back to Cavour and the new promising themes of international cooperation symbolized by Wilson's League of Nations, looked for a reform of the Chamber's institutes, others believed that the reform had to take place within the larger body of the State, of which the Chamber was only a no longer needed appendix. Among both fields though, the difficulties of the war and the poor display of the Chamber – the realization also that an essentially paralyzed legislative body appeared to have had little negative consequences on the Italian society, except for making the Executive work harder – had helped spreading the idea that the Chamber was something that Italy could do without, just fine, at least for a few weeks, or months, or longer if necessary.

On December 16^th Mussolini had written that one of the necessary conditions to win the war […] was closing the Parliament since a democratic conduct of war was the most extraordinary of human follies. And already on March 1917 he had expressed [in a censor redacted piece titled Dagli imboscati agli esonerati - loosely “One's a shirker, the other's exempt”] his view that 1917 had to be the last year of the war and yet for twenty months [it had been] a constant display of Governments that favored […] the sabotage of the war effort by the official socialists and the giolittians [the Giolitti fraction of the liberals, which had been the core of the neutralist forces during the war build up] and by all the discipline and control organisms – the first conscious of their nefarious work, the others perhaps unaware but not less at fault. […] [Interior] Minister Orlando was right when he spoke of men being not up to their task of safeguarding both the Motherland and civilization. [… despite that] the shirkers would have remained where they were and, with every new draft, those exempt would have increased [while] those who had no patrons, or had dignity enough in themselves not to ask for, would have continued to get themselves killed on the front to build tomorrow's Italy for the shirkers and exempt of the day. and expressed his wish that the same powerful tide that once swept away Giolitti and his cronies, could sweep away as well [that] entire organism of dignified speakers that ruled [the Italians], so that supreme power would be concentrated within few but strong individuals. And the Country would have been with them, had they known how to dare, for daring is what a strong man does.

Only six years and a half before Italy had celebrated grandiosely the 50^th anniversary of its unification – the “holy year of the Motherland”, as poet Giovanni Pascoli had named it. And, yes, there had been already a copious amount of works on the various troubles of post-unitary Italy; still, the liberal economist F.S. Nitti could proclaim that in fifty years [Italy], overcoming natural hardships and the difficulties of competition […], had seen a new industrial life grow, a new civilization flourish […] Even looking at reality with no delusions, taking account of all the things still to be accomplished, the sight of the course made, led to a feeling that was almost of marvel.

The Italian establishment took its last summer bath in those Risorgimento values that ideally merged together the liberal state, individual freedom and national identity. By 1917 the liberal state appeared no longer able to secure either, and freedom and nation no longer looked like two moments of the same natural aspiration, in the way they had been conceived by Giuseppe Mazzini's “religion of the Motherland”: without a motherland you have no name, nor sign, nor votes, nor rights, nor christening of brothers among peoples. You are the bastard children of humankind. And still the religion of the motherland was the holiest but it was not to create rights and duties of citizens, but of men because wherever the sentiment of individual dignity and conscience of those rights proper to human nature don't govern it […] there is a religion that can make the motherland powerful, never blissful.

The liberal world was moving forward and that part of the Italian establishment that hoped to keep intact the liberal core of the state's institutions had begun to look at the renewed ideas of nationality and cooperation among peoples. Future Italian President Luigi Einaudi praised [on the December 19^th issue of the Corriere della Sera] the goal of a peace based on respect of the principles of [international] right and nationality; a peace that would allow Germany, as an equal, to all the advantages of international trade... [this] wasn't a poor prize for peace. Einaudi pointed in fact out that – according to a contemporary Italian study – during 1913, 65.3% of the German imports and 57.7% of its exports had been with countries that were by then on the opposite side of the conflict; a situation that would have made Germany's position untenable even if it had been able to hold its gorund. And the Germans also had to admit as a self evident fact [...], that before the war no one even dreamed of forbidding German access to foreign markets [again, going by Einaudi's data German exports to British colonies had risen five times from 1900 to 1913].

As for the ongoing war, thanks to Wilson open arguments, everybody knew by then that the allies had no intention to demand an unfair price for resuming economical relations; [that] the only price was that of a fair peace.

A fairly different take was that of the nationalists; fairness in international relations was, for them, a mere delusion. The fight was a necessary law. Italy could not and must not contain itself – wrote, with remarkable lack of nuance, the nationalist paper Il Tricolore of June 1^st 1909 – It must compete with the great nations […] which requires a policy of power, of great feats, of expansion: the victorious policy of the great peoples; the traditional policy of Rome, conqueror and master of the world […] against lazy conniving parliamentarism, weak and immoral, that no longer represented national conscience and didn't understand the new role of the nation within the world. There was no cooperation in the nationalist world: a nation could be either victorious or vanquished. For the Nation was no longer the Motherland of the patriots^1 , an abstract entity of sentiments, but […] the mighty and strong collective unity, on which were rooted […] the world wide clashes in every field of human activity. According to Enrico Corradini, an inescapable law drove the chosen peoples from the inception of their national unity […] towards the “impero” [empire, but also the act of ruling over someone]. The Nation, explained Alfredo Rocco, was an organism of the organized collectives which served as its organs. The end goal of politics was the development of the Nation; which meant expansion outside. The war was only an episode of the eternal struggle of the peoples for survival and primacy and imperialism was the iron cast law no nation could repudiate without succumbing^2 .

I hope this fits in here: I've always kept recommending "The Faithful Executioner", but I had a discussion with someone from here about "Guns, Germs And Steel" which I also thought of as a fairly solid piece of work. Now I'm starting to doubt and would like to know if anyone knows any issues with the "The Faithful Executioner". The author is very upfront when he said that he filled in some blanks with things that were nearly universal true about executioners of the time and I do think the author tries to be very honest and upfront, but I just want to know what you guys think about, so I know the pitfalls and shortcomings of that thing that I keep recommending. Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure if this fits but I was wondering if there are events or time periods in history that often get overlooked but should get more attention. I tried searching but couldn't find anything so if this has already been answered and someone has a link to a thread, I'll be grateful. Thanks!!

Is it OK to include /u references in a post in hopes of attracting their attention?

I asked questions about Roman historiography yesterday in the Theory Thursday post, and I was considering pinging Celebreth, XenophonTheAthenian, and Tiako, unless anyone has better suggestions. (Someone mentioned that Reddit doesn't ping if you have more than 3 /u references.)

Was Tartessos destroyed by Carthage? If they fought... Did this fight happen due to the vassal status of Tyre to Assyria and the other empires, making it unable to stop them?