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The famous 1933 debate at Oxford about whether that year's students at Oxford would defend "king and country"

I think you misunderstand the historic context of that debate. Students at Oxford in 1933 would have been born between 1912 and 1915. Around 10% of the adult male population of the UK died in war between 1914 and 1918, and another 10% were injured in battle; the casualty rate among junior officers was terrifying, higher than the average for enlisted soldiers. Because Oxford was the domain of the privileged back then, this was a generation largely consisting of war orphans or children of traumatized veterans.

Note that the students aged 18-21 in 1933 were aged 24-27 when war was subsequently declared in 1939. They weren't notably more reluctant (or eager) to fight than their fathers' generation.

>I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and the regions from which the West gathers intelligence. And there is. And there will be for a while. If eventually few people in the civilized, democratic countries of the West feel the need to spy on other countries, that will be mostly because those countries have become more civilized and more democratic--that is, more like the West.

What a load of racist crap.

While there are degress of which countries are more or less democratic (and third world countries are lagging behind in some areas that -- others one can consider a cultural preference: some cultures put communal values over individual freedoms for example) calling other countries "less civilized" is pure racism.

Furthermore, it has nothing to do with Western powers spying on them. Not to mention that Western powers have been spying on them for centuries, and often in order to put their pals in power and make them LESS democratic (like toppling the legitimate elected president of Iran in the '50s, or supporting tons of dictatorship "allies" in fucking their people). I'm not even going into colonialism and post-colonialism, where the "civilized" countries did horrible attrocities and kept 1+ billion people as slaves or subordinates for their own economic benefit.

Not only that, but western powers also spy one another, whether they are the same or even more "democratic" and "civilized" than themselves. Like Germany spying Sweden for example.

If a country is backwards in some issues, that does not give an excuse in another country to do anything to it. Those things are solved by sovereign people themselves. Like, you know, a certain country is the king of incancerations (totally uncivilized), had seggregation till the 60's (totally uncivilized) and has tons of people and places still treating black people as second class citizens (totally uncivilized), has the death penalty (totally uncivilized), uses SWAT teams extensively (totally uncivillized), has some of the most trigger happy cops in the world (totally uncivilized) and has a huge numbers of bible yielding populace (totally uncivilized), stolen lands from natives (totally uncivilized), a dismal public health coverage for its poor (totally uncivilized) etc. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I also fail to see how some third world country that never harmed any other country, is say, less "civilized" than Germany, who, 7 decades ago, burned millions in furncaces, invaded, killed and executed people all over the world.

Let's put it in very simple terms: they spy on those "less civilized" countries, only in order to intervene, steal their resources, and control and secure whole areas for their economic benefit. The bigger the player, the more he spies. They could not care less about how "civilized" those countries are or not. Just that they are much less powerful, and with tons of natural resources, or in important strategic areas.

>(Yes, over the years, the United States itself has been in that category, but the United States seems largely to have learned from its comeuppance in some countries where it previously deposed elected leaders.)

The don't care about elected vs dictatorships. They merely care about their interests. If dethrowning a dictatorship helps them, they'll do that, even if it means fucking over a stable region, and turning it over to chaos and civil war (actually that's for the better, because it assures it will never recover from that). Plus, nowadays, "to bring democracy" sounds as a better excuse to meddle into another country than "for our interests" did.

As Ghandi said when asked "What do you think about Western civilization?": "I think it's a good idea".

The problem here is that "the West" is one of the regions "from which the West gathers intelligence". The NSA and GCHQ are both spying on even other Western countries like Germany, to say nothing of spying on their own citizens.

I appreciate Stross too, he always reminds me of The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz... "the writer's essential task – to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole." I think this quotation applies to the article he was writing, and I found this both chilling and liberating.