Liddell Hart and the weight of history

What Hacker News says

1. mcguireMar 2022
   I've seen a bit of twitter chatter from international relations people about this article. Most of them are fairly dismissive of Mearshiemer's position---I've seen the phrase "stuck in the 1815 world" of colonial powers used repeatedly.

   One substantive issue that I have seen is that he discounts nationalism; it seems like Ukrainians are rather attached to their independence.

   One that I haven't seen much about in the nuclear non-proliferation issue: if the existence of a country without nukes is predicated on the whims of one with them, every country is strongly incentivized to develop them.

   As for me, a little bit of my heart belongs to his book, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History.

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2. kragenMar 2022
   John Joseph Mearsheimer (/ˈmɪərʃaɪmər/; born December 14, 1947) is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation.[3]

   ...

   Mearsheimer's books include Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss Jr. Book Award; Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (co-editor, 1985); Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007); and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (2011). His articles have appeared in academic journals like International Security and popular magazines like the London Review of Books. He has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune.[9]

   Mearsheimer has won several teaching awards. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. In addition, he was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993–1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[9] He is the recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2020 James Madison Award, which is presented every three years to an American political scientist who has made distinguished scholarly contributions. The Award Committee noted that Mearsheimer is "one of the most cited International Relations scholars in the discipline, but his works are read well beyond the academy as well."[10]

   Mearsheimer's works are widely read and debated by 21st-century students of international relations. A 2017 survey of US international relations faculty ranks him third among "scholars whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years."[11]

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer

   I very much do not agree with Mearsheimer's point of view, but describing his lectures as "Russian propaganda" suggests that you are the one in the grip of an extreme form of propaganda. Rethink where you're getting your information.

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3. mcguireNov 2020
   IIRC, little things like German generals, in their autobiographies, saying things like "if the Brits and French had listened to Liddell Hart, they wouldn't have lost to us in 1940" or "our tactics were based on reading Liddell Hart's early infantry tactics work" when there is little to no chance that they could have known who he was at the time and most of his writings prior to WWII were based on the ide that "blitzkrieg" was impossible. In turn, he wrote several books along the lines of the "clean Wehrmacht" and that German generals were brilliant---specifically, most of the German generals you've ever heard of.

   See *Liddell Hart and the Weight of History" by John J. Mearsheimer.

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