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However, the influence of the [leader] on [country] politics made [country]’s isolation inevitable. A byzantine system where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy made for a state that was not a credible partner."
Many people became successful militarily and even seized power afterwards during tumultuous times. Very few actually ended having such an impact worldwide.
And before any Brits come in with centuries old grudges, of course he did plenty of bad, most notably how he treated Haiti (which he at least acknowledged later in life).
Prior to the war, Robert Brovdi (Magyar) was a local businessman on a periphery of Ukraine. Now he is a commander of probably the strongest drone force in the world.
And if you try to create a merit based system, you take away the liberties of the people. Who decides what person deserves more than another? You will create a system ripe for corruption.
If revolution is the old answer to oppressive organizations together with its tragic loss of life, then… where’s our cure for cancer?
One example is incompetent people with extreme willpower. They can Make Shit Happen; even if it is not good stuff. I think we've all had bosses like that. Some folks will just jam beans into their noses[0], and, for whatever reason, they are in a position to impose this on others. Sometimes, the bad stuff is actually a trigger for growth. I doubt we'd have much of what we have now, if not for a couple of genocidal wars, last century.
Others can be insanely competent, but are never in a position to apply that competence to cause any meaningful change.
Also, never underestimate the power of personal insecurity. This can be a huge driver, and substitute for willpower. People spend millions, trying to salve personal insecurity, and, likely, many tyrants (and great leaders) have been driven by personal insecurity.
[0] https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-nos...
>his liberal father
Might be a stretch to imply that the Wilhelm II was a mediocre illiberal. HIM was (for a time) interested in protecting workers' rights. However great he was, Bismarck couldn't overpower a "mediocre" populist
https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/forging-an-empire-bismarcki...
Assume every side has great individuals in positions of power (great being here evidently in relation to ability), greatness is thus evenly balanced and not so important to the final outcome.
>Germany’s interests were incomprehensible and thus there was no option other than to balance against this rogue state in the heart of Europe
>There was a saying of the Kaiser in Vienna, that Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”
Indeed, indeed.
This once again causes oversimplifies history to a few people and some nebulous "structural forces", and provides an attractive but wrong model of how history developed. In software terms we would call this a "leaky abstraction", and this particular abstraction leaks so much it's barely useful at all.
The world is much too complex to be understood by examining less than at least a few hundred million people. That this is beyond the capability of humans is not the world's problem.
Only when you step back, you realise all that drama you read is mostly inconsequential. What will be the impact of Napoleon 1000 years from now? Of Columbus? If instead of Hitler Germany had Rohm? It’s all monkeys and typewriters all the way down. What matters are the structural forces, the natural resources, the geography, and so on. Chances are it’ll be all forgotten in a billion years.
Now, on a more serious note, did anyone else, at some point, started wondering whether the article was really about Wilhelm II?
Napoleon and Columbus have secured for themselves their seats in the pantheon of history and it will take longer than a thousand years for mankind to forget about them.
All these men built our world.
Though by that metric, all of written history is 300 generations (6,000 years), of modern humans about 30,000 generations. About 100,000 generations separate us from chimpanzees.
But yes, our timescale is pretty short by that measure.
Isn't the idea more that the large-scale political forces are what allow those supposedly "great men" to become "great" in the first place? Yes, once Napoleon was in power, a lot of the details of history were dependent on his individual decisions - but the forces that led to the French Revolution were what gave him that power in the first place. An if he had actually died of a stroke, or if Hitler had been killed in WWI, then the specifics of history would have been different, but probably not the large-scale trajectory: Post-revolutionary France would still have been there and the deep divisions, senses of injustice and reactionary and capitalist influence in post-WWI Germany that gave rise to the Nazi movement would also still have been there. And chances are, other "great men" would have emerged and captured those forces.
As such, I see the relationship more like the one between lightning strikes and wildfires: Yes, a particular wildfire might have been caused by that particular lightning strike (or careless hiker or whatever), but the reason why that particular local event could spiral into a blaze that burns down acres and acres were the larger environmental conditions, i.e. hot weather, wind and dryness. And if firefighters could take a time machine and prevent that particular cause, then it's likely another random event would trigger a slightly different but still extremely similar wildfire - so not much would have been won.
(I'm sorry)
This synthesis has already been done as early as at least 1898, see G.V. Plekhanov, "On the Role of the Individual in History" [0].
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individua...
Many of us have written the “was Hitler inevitable” paper at uni and elsewhere. His particular phobias were extensive, but that time and place was ripe for such rule to appear.
There are various repetitions of the Tower of Babel as individuals come and go.
Or, instead of analysis, we could nail Jell-O to the wall.
The elites in the gayclub had many ties — personal and/or blood — to Britain, and pushed Wilhelm toward moderation in his foreign policy. Once the scandal hit the papers, gayclub dissolved, leaving (forcing, even) Wilhelm II entirely to the counsel of his generals.
By “forcing,” I mean the fellow elites in gayclub were widely known to hold pro-Britain sentiments, so Wilhelm was somewhat forced into a 180 to not go down with them in the court of public opinion.
In some small way, WWI was a “beard.”
But career spooks like him and his inner silovik circe don't really understand war and, at the same time, don't trust the army enough to actually build it up to strength. And so he started something that he cannot finish.