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Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

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Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#31

Post by oblio »

bsder wrote: post #29
loorinm wrote: post #2

What an insane and fascinating read. Two things occured to me: I don’t really understand how and why war happens. Like, it starts out as two parties both wanting the same resource, and then somebody says “over my dead body” or something and then a million other people decide to also join in this fight? I do not get it. The other thing is : The “inherent harm of technology”. Every single advancement will 100% hurt som…

In the case of World War I, Otto von Bismarck put together an interlocking set of alliances to forge the German Empire. Unfortunately, Wilhelm II was not as capable (I'm being nice--Wilhelm II was an idiot), and didn't know how to manage this properly. It is, of course, possible that even Bismarck could not have continued to manage them given the strains of nationalism that he set in motion. However, Bismarck was ver…

> "One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans"

I absolutely despise these statements, that are perpetuated to the present day. I'm from near the Balkans, from Romania.

They depict the Balkan region as being some sort of backwards warmongers, which is not the case (yes, the region is not very developed but it's far from the poorest regions on this planet; also, yes, I know about the Yugoslav Wars, but that's a rather extreme scenario and even people in the region were appalled at what the Serbs did, especially).

Anyway, the reason I don't like it: it was foreign empires vying in the region that made the mess. Turks, Austrians, Russians, Brits, Italians, Germans, French, they're the ones that started the wars. There was no way the local conflicts would have ever become global conflicts. The locals just didn't have the desire or resources to escalate such a conflict. Instead these empires just used them as battering rams against the other empires.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#33

Post by nscalf »

If you're interested in this, RadioLab did a great episode on good and evil and really took note of Fritz Haber. It's called The Bad Show. Fritz Haber was a really conflicting character, he seemed extremely patriotic and made a lot of personal sacrifices for his country.

Every time I see someone who is described like that, I have to wonder how much of the disdain we have for him is because that wasn't our country? If we had a brilliant man who invented a solution to the worldwide fear of an impending food shortage, but they also made a disturbing wartime weapon, would we feel the same way?

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#34

Post by nscalf »

soneca wrote: post #17

"Billions of people would not exist without him. And yet without him, World War I would have ended years earlier" The article is very interesting, but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things. The text even mention the Allies developing a poison gas, why not other German chemic? No one other person would be able to discover how to produce amonia? I don't subscribe to thi…

To put some of this into context, there were a lot of people saying that the world was going to run out of food soon and we couldn't sustain our growing population. It'd be as if someone today invented a solution to global warming, it was a problem everyone knew about and worried about to some extend.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#35

Post by aalleavitch »

nscalf wrote: post #33

If you're interested in this, RadioLab did a great episode on good and evil and really took note of Fritz Haber. It's called The Bad Show. Fritz Haber was a really conflicting character, he seemed extremely patriotic and made a lot of personal sacrifices for his country. Every time I see someone who is described like that, I have to wonder how much of the disdain we have for him is because that wasn't our country? If…

Isn't that basically the case for all the famous men on the Manhattan project?

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#36

Post by ghaff »

smackay wrote: post #8
JCSato wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly recommend you check out The Great War series on Youtube. Even if you just watch the prologue to the war videos, very informative on how WW1 got kicked off. Short answer: nationalism and a lot of treaties and grudges from past wars.

I saw a history documentary on the BBC many, many years ago where the historian was describing that the reason WWI started was because of railway timetables - basically moving all those troops and material was a logistical nightmare. Once the armies were assembled it was going to be impossibly difficult to move them all back so they got put into action instead. Most likely the historian was AJP Taylor: http://www.ae.…

Dan Carlin's Countdown to Armageddon also gets into these aspects in detail. The basic argument is that a number of factors, including technology at a macro level and logistics at a more micro level set various policies and machinery in motion that was difficult to stand down once it got moving.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#37

Post by mhneu »

loorinm wrote: post #2

What an insane and fascinating read. Two things occured to me: I don’t really understand how and why war happens. Like, it starts out as two parties both wanting the same resource, and then somebody says “over my dead body” or something and then a million other people decide to also join in this fight? I do not get it. The other thing is : The “inherent harm of technology”. Every single advancement will 100% hurt som…

> how war happens

Orwell captured one way total war can happen: a powerful small group of people gains control of a propaganda apparatus, and uses control of messaging to divide a country, or turn a country against a demonized minority group or external rival.

That happened with Mao, with Hitler, with Stalin, with Mussolini. Today’s challenge is ensuring that the propaganda arms created by Murdoch and Mercer and Koch don’t do that to America.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#38

Post by mannykannot »

soneca wrote: post #17

"Billions of people would not exist without him. And yet without him, World War I would have ended years earlier" The article is very interesting, but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things. The text even mention the Allies developing a poison gas, why not other German chemic? No one other person would be able to discover how to produce amonia? I don't subscribe to thi…

There is no doubt that if he had not solved the nitrogen-fixing problem, someone else would have, and it is certainly possible that someone else would have pushed the use of poison gas into practice. It is also generally simplistic to claim that any one thing greatly prolonged the war. 'Great men' and 'pivotal event' historiography is a simplistic way of looking at the past, but nevertheless, it is a simple historical fact that he was the person who did these two things, and the case for nitrogen-fixing extending the war is better than most other 'but for...' stories.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#40

Post by baybal2 »

Haber was a true giant.

Nobody out people there would've lived without him inventing a process that lead to first generation chemical fertilizers.

An invention I rank second to invention of fire in history of our species.

(third being the metallurgy)

Yet, the man is unknown to non-chemist, and some anthropologists

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