The Probability Broach, chapter 18
Gallatinopolis, normally a sleepy rural town, is jam-packed with delegates arriving for the Continental Congress. Win and Lucy elbow their way through the crowds to get to their hotel room, which fortunately they reserved in advance. Win says that many late arrivals are sleeping in their cars. (But why wouldn’t the innkeeper cancel their reservation and give the room to someone else who offered more money?)
Over lunch at a cafe (“THE JEFFERSONBURGER—IT’LL SET YOU FREE”), Lucy reminisces over past congressional meetings. While they eat, she explains more about this society’s history, including some details Win apparently didn’t absorb before.
As I’ve previously mentioned, the North American Confederacy’s largest military engagement was a “Prussian war” in Europe, which was this timeline’s equivalent of World War I. In this chapter, Smith narrates a full account of it:
In 138 A.L. [1914], Prussia decided to emulate North America by confederating Europe—even if it didn’t want to be confederated. In brief campaigns, the other German states, France, Benelux, and the Italies were gobbled up. Spain and Portugal fell to fifth channelists, and England, as usual, was in trouble.
An agitated Congress assembled, the first since 1900, a disheartening sight to Europeans who’d come begging for assistance: even the assembly hall was roughed out of pine planks. The Old World was mystified at the vital barbarity of the New, but they had good reason to ask for help: Scandinavia was threatened by a Czar emboldened by the Prussian distraction, the Finns fighting a gallant but futile guerrilla war against the Cossacks; two great barge fleets stood ready to invade England—under Hamiltonian leadership, the Irish were preparing their final revenge.
Despite Europe’s pleas, the NAC Congress voted to stay neutral. But immediately after the vote, legions of Americans volunteered to go and fight, giving rise to “the fabled Thousand Airship Flight”. That force—including some of the delegates who voted for neutrality—went to Europe to fight the Hamiltonians.
After just a hundred days, the better-equipped and better-armed Confederate force routed the Prussian army and turned the tide:
Wherever they went, Confederates left anarchy behind. Gallatin’s ideas carried them fully as far as the force of their arms; enemy and friendly nationals alike learned quickly. Many a nobleman returned home to find his castle turned into a resort hotel by some local enterpriser. The Germanies and Italies remained fragmented. Spain fractured into a dozen polities. Brittany seceded from France. Armed at Prussian expense, Eire returned to her ancient tribal anarchy. The Balkans sub-subdivided until every village was a nation.
Leave aside the mystifying altruism—in an anarcho-capitalist society premised on self-interest and profit—of people volunteering to fight, at their own expense and risk. No doubt Smith would justify that by saying that the Confederates loved freedom, or some such.
I have a different objection to this. Obviously, Smith wants us to believe that the Magic of Anarchy makes his people superior combatants. He’s said as much before. But if there’s anything that’s inherently a state enterprise requiring centralized control and hierarchy, it’s war. You can’t have an army with no one in charge!
It’s true that a guerrilla force fighting on their own turf can stymie a superior foe and defeat them by exhaustion and attrition. That’s how the American colonies beat the British in the Revolutionary War, and it’s how America was defeated in turn in Vietnam.
But that’s not the same as saying that a country can muster an invasion force, equip them, arm them, and send them across an ocean to fight a near-peer adversary in combined arms warfare—all without anyone in command to decide who should be doing what.
Winning a war requires strategy. There has to be someone to make the broader decisions: when to attack and when to defend; which points of the enemy line to target and which to bypass; how subdivisions like brigades and battalions should coordinate their efforts to support each other; which units should be held in reserve as reinforcements, which should be thrown into the fighting, and which should be sacrificed to achieve a more important goal.
If every soldier is a sovereign individual who answers to no authority, this is impossible. The NAC’s assault would be a chaotic, disorganized melee, failing to concentrate enough pressure at any one point of the enemy line to break through. The brave or foolhardy ones who wanted to be heroes would charge into the fray alone and would likely be massacred. They would constantly argue about where artillery or air support should be aimed. Valuable resources like missiles (Smith alludes to “Goddard rockets”) would be squandered without any coherent plan of which enemy assets they should be used to target.
Smith makes a big deal of how anarchist forces are almost impossible to defeat, since they have no leader who can order them to surrender. In reality, morale would be a constant problem. Since no one was forcing them to be there, the NAC combatants would abandon the battlefield and flee the first time they thought it wasn’t going their way. Who wants to be the last one to die for the losing side?
TPB previously mentioned one more war, with Russia. This section expands on that, saying that it began in 1956, when the Russian czar and NAC prospectors came to blows over mining rights in Antarctica:
The Czar declared war, attacking Alaska, occupied the Kingdom of Hawaii, and invaded Japan, shattering her centuries-old isolation. The Confederate hoverfleet, a small-but-deadly 250-mile-per-hour navy, won decisively at the Bering Strait.
…By 1958, the real war was being waged by advertising people. Broadcasts into the Russian homeland told serfs that their lives were their own, and disputed the fatherly intentions of a ruler who’d let them perish by the millions. Fusion-powered space-planes rained propaganda into the streets of Saint Petersburg.
The flood of propaganda inspires the Russian people to rise up, and the Czar flees. Smith concludes, “The war was over, the last significant nation-state on Earth destroyed.”
I’ll give Smith this much credit: defeating a tyrant by undermining him with propaganda is at least a conceivable way an anarchist society could win a war, as opposed to the virtually-inconceivable scenario of winning a straight-up fight. But what I’d like to know is: who paid for all this?
Two years of round-the-clock broadcasts and leaflet drops couldn’t have been cheap. There are no taxes in the NAC to fund this, so was it funded by the selfless donations of private citizens? If so, how did they overcome the Prisoner’s Dilemma logic of people concluding it’d be rational to sit this out and let some other sucker pay for it?
Or was it funded by corporations who foresaw the opening up of a new market? It would be very much in keeping with real-life shock-doctrine capitalism to participate in overthrowing an existing government, in order to create a captive audience of new customers.
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1000 airship flight – wasn’t the airship the vehicle of peace that could not turned into a military craft easily?
This reminds me of the Battle of Stirling Bridge, which was depicted in that atrocity “Braveheart” as a wild melee with both the Scots and English running pell-mell at each other swinging swords wildly.
In reality Wallace used some pretty good tactics by letting a couple thousand of the English knights and foot soldiers cross the bridge onto the narrow causeway. Both the bridge and the causeway on the other side were only wide enough for a couple horses to walk abreast. Wallace then used some of his men to capture an hold the end of the bridge, again, not many English soldiers could attack them directly and archery would have also hit English forces. Then pushed the line of horses and men off the causeway into the marshes on either side. Horses are not all the good in a bog. The English who had crossed the bridge were slaughtered and the English commander collapsed the bridge to delay Wallace from attacking his now demoralized and decimated army and retreated. It’s almost a textbook example of how an inferior force can overwhelm an enemy by proper choice of terrain.
Of course, I expect the author, Smith, would say that a chain of command was immediately established as everyone recognized the superior anarchists and deferred to them. Much like everyone deferred to John Galt in a related monograph.
Wallace was much more of a noble and a thinker in real life than in the movie.
Propaganda war is unlikely to work but I guess possible. One issue is that it happened after the invention of the radio. Radios allowed for central control and coordination over vast distances and made the central government of Russia stronger.
The issue of who pays for it has come up in passing several times in the story. It’s the magic of libertarian government. Lack of money prevents government abuse when Smith wants that to happen but freely donated money and resources are sufficient to finance large projects when Smith needs that to happen.
There are several other things about operating a large war based on donations. It is possible to get donations to finance obviously significant parts of the military for a while. Getting donations to finance food, medicine, clothing, tents and other gear and finance the logistics to get those supplies to the front is harder. You can see that in the real world with Ukraine going around asking for cash donations exactly because they need money for stuff other then vehicles and ammunition.
Getting money and manpower over time is a big problem. History shows that at the start of a popular war there can be donations and volunteers from the population for a while. No matter what 6 months to a year in those drop off just because all of the easily available stuff has already been donated and everybody interested has volunteered. Every military eventually depends on looting, loans or a command economy.
Volunteer armies are very subject to infiltration. Any large army has problems with this, an army with a volunteer command structure is very vulnerable.
The Czar declared war, attacking Alaska…
Um…hadn’t Catherine the Great already established Russia’s claim to Alaska? In our timeline it was Russian turf until Andrew Johnson bought it, shortly after the Civil War. Maybe the NAC’s happy anarchists had inspired Alaskans to join them along with the rest of their continent?
The flood of propaganda inspires the Russian people to rise up, and the Czar flees. Smith concludes, “The war was over, the last significant nation-state on Earth destroyed.”
Um…China…?
Prussia decided to emulate North America by confederating Europe…
Gotta wonder what the alt-Bismarck amused himself with in this timeline.
You can’t have an army with no one in charge!
Apparently Smith’s alt-history also elides the Spanish Civil War and the decidedly mixed military record of the Anarchists therein.
Yabbut those were LEFT-wing Anarchists, so they don’t count!
Bringing up Russia and the Tsar/Czar reminded me of something else, too.
As you note, wars that last a long time and have no end in sight tend to get very unpopular and bleed money and support rapidly. Including support from the military itself, if they feel like they’re being misused or commanded poorly. And once the military no longer really supports the government, even if a coup doesn’t happen, all the military has to do is not fight to full effect for the government against any internal agitators.
It’s not a coincidence that the Russian Revolution happened in 1917, during World War I. The War made the Tsar even less popular than he already had been.
Similarly, its not a coincidence that the French Revolution happened not long after the American Revolution, during which the French had been spending a lot of their money and military might helping the Americans and harassing British shipping.
“”Since no one was forcing them to be there, the NAC combatants would abandon the battlefield and flee the first time they thought it wasn’t going their way.” Military historian John Keegan has pointed out that was the norm for much of history. The idea of holding your ground even when you’re going to die is relatively new.
“Eire returned to her ancient tribal anarchy.” Tribalism is not anarchy. And kinda racist (yeah, those Irish, can’t stay sober enough to run a government!).
From what I recall of Paul Linebarger’s “Psychological Warfare,” propaganda can be very effective at undermining moral, encouraging deserters, giving hope to resistance movements. By itself it ain’t enough and Smith’s idea of propaganda sound’s very uninteresting. Paul Linebarger is better known as Cordwainer Smith. Interesting dude.
“Many a nobleman returned home to find his castle turned into a resort hotel by some local enterpriser.” Um, that sounds less like anarchy and more like the kind of looting and crimes of opportunity that take place in lots of wars. And how the hell would this work — “I turned this into the Hotel Von Bananarama because I reject the logic of aristicratic rule!” isn’t going to settle anything unless everyone’s already rejected the aristocracy. Even then, an angry village mob might show up and take over the castle for their own people.
And the assumption Gallatin’s arguments are so persuasive they will sweep the world like wildfire … even if Smith wasn’t writing such bad arguments, I wouldn’t buy it.
“The Old World was mystified at the vital barbarity of the New” — not the worst thing Smith wrote but easily the corniest thing he’s written. It’s the kind of book where talk about inscrutable orientals wouldn’t be surprising.
So Prussia is conquering Europe, and volunteers from the NAC come to the rescue of *Great Britain*!?! What about British colonial empires in Africa and Asia? I note while Ireland, France, Germany and Russia are now anarchies, we have no news of the status of Wales and Scotland, or India, or South Africa, or Egypt, or (the list of British possessions goes on much longer).
“Many a nobleman returned home to find his castle turned into a resort hotel by some local enterpriser.” Cool. So in the anarchies, private property doesn’t mean anything? Or is that just the private property of bad people?
Yes it’s one step away from communist revolutionaries liberating the castle for the people!