>>17974495
>I wonder then why Western armies aren't as sharp as this anymore. Like look at the recent US army parade and even British military parades have been sloppy of late.
>>17974594
>I don't really have a good answer for that, more modern and beyond my specialty. "They're cucked" is the answer you'll see here, but my guess is that as nations in the west became more pacifist/liberal in the late 20th century that their military became less performative.
I think these parades just reflect a more authoritarian political mentality. It's like: there's Xi Jinping / Vladimir Putin / Kim Jong Un and he's the boss and the military is absolutely obedient to the leader and is operating in sync with this. This is intended as a message for us because they're showing off weapons and saying "don't mess with us," but they're also communicating to their own population that they can feel pride in this thing, but they're going to crush you like a bug if you get in the way. Everyone is supposed to be on same page and moving in the same direction:
https://youtu.be/fezNbo33LUg

I'm not even saying that's bad, but there were relatively few liberal democracies in the late 19th century. Large parts of Europe still had emperors. Those ancien regimes collapsed at the end of WWI, and some (Russia, China, North Korea) became communist which liked the displays of state power, and then there was an attempt to do fascism in some countries which did those parades (look at military parades in Nazi Germany), but those were destroyed. If you watched the U.S. Army birthday parade, the soldiers were waving at the crowd. It's a different relationship.