• 1: Noam Chomsky claims, “…from the Romans into the late 19th century the idea of having a job was considered an abomination. You’re placing yourself in a position of subordination to a master. No person with any integrity of self-respect should submit themselves to this.” Is this accurate?, submitted on 2021-12-22 06:02:47+08:00.
• 2: Did the Chinese Communists have any plans in case they lost the Civil War?, submitted on 2021-12-22 13:39:34+08:00.
• 3: Is Russia now in a similar situation as Germany in 1871-1914?, submitted on 2021-12-22 16:30:02+08:00.
• 4: Will US go to war with China over Taiwan?, submitted on 2021-12-23 00:12:39+08:00.
• 5: Why hasn’t the Syrian Arab Army fought to take back the rest of Syria in the past year or 2?, submitted on 2021-12-25 19:01:56+08:00.
• 6: How brutal was European war in the 18-19th century ?, submitted on 2021-12-26 00:17:38+08:00.
• 7: What were the reasons for Italy poor performance in WWII., submitted on 2021-12-26 21:59:18+08:00.

1: Noam Chomsky claims, “…from the Romans into the late 19th century the idea of having a job was considered an abomination. You’re placing yourself in a position of subordination to a master. No person with any integrity of self-respect should submit themselves to this.” Is this accurate?, submitted on 2021-12-22 06:02:47+08:00.

—– 1.1 —–2021-12-22 12:44:13+08:00:

Information Services Provider/Managed Service Provider. IT outsourcing.

—– 1.2 —–2021-12-22 12:55:19+08:00:

100% - it’s also worth noting that in some developing countries the rate of self employment remains over 50%. This employment - subsistence farming, street vending, and so on - is hardly glamorous.

—– 1.3 —–2021-12-22 13:02:54+08:00:

1948 falls well outside the scope of the time period Chomsky is talking about. I would absolutely agree there was a massive shift in the cultural prestige of the crafts in the subcontinent after colonization (and the wholesale destruction of craft industries that came with it) and there are a lot of subaltern works that study it.

2: Did the Chinese Communists have any plans in case they lost the Civil War?, submitted on 2021-12-22 13:39:34+08:00.

—– 2.1 —–2021-12-23 13:24:48+08:00:

They lost at Siping and nearly half the Northeast Democratic United Army (the Red Army group in Manchuria) was destroyed in the rout.

—– 2.2 —–2021-12-23 13:34:44+08:00:

No, because they never considered it a possibility. That is not to say they didn’t think they could start losing the civil war (they were almost annihilated at many points: the encirclement campaigns, the Three Alls Campaign, and the disastrous Battle of Siping), simply that they didn’t think they could lose completely.

China between the death of Yuan Shikai and the founding of the People’s Republic was something of an amorphous concept. The Central Plains were always subject to a swift contest of arms and someone was always dominant there - that was the beating heart of “China” and where all the power was. The south was, until the Northern Expedition, always the site of secessionist movements and dissidents owing to its mountainous and defensible geography. Well into WW2, Yunnan remained de facto independent. The Northeast was China’s “wild west”, filled with cowboys, bandits and gunslingers and was hardly ever controlled by anyone. Zhang Zuolin and later the Japanese only ever managed to directly control the big cities and rail network, and cooperated with criminal interests to “reign” over the remainder. The West and far North were hardly even Chinese, ruled by autonomous or fully independent Mongol, Tibetan, or Hui warlords. The CCP’s enemies only ever totally controlled one or two of these provinces - the remainder were all candidates for the establishment of an alternative base.

The plan if the CCP lost in 1946 was the same as if they lost in 1940, and the same as when they did lose in 1933: run away. By 1946, Mao and co. had begun to see the CCP as an indestructible movement. It had hundreds of base areas and guerilla columns. If it lost in one place, it could just retreat and go somewhere else. That is, in fact, what it did. Losing Changchun and Shenyang (two of the “three big cities” of Manchuria) and its capital of Yanan, the Chinese Soviet simply retreated to Harbin. When things were really bleak in Manchuria after Siping, Lin Biao even proposed the whole NDUA (Manchurian army group) just pack up and march through the mountains of Rehe to Shaanxi and Gansu. So, there is no doubt that if the CCP lost in Manchuria, they wouldn’t be destroyed until Chiang chased them all the way to Xinjiang.

3: Is Russia now in a similar situation as Germany in 1871-1914?, submitted on 2021-12-22 16:30:02+08:00.

—– 3.1 —–2021-12-23 10:57:40+08:00:

No, if anything it’s in the same position as the Ottoman Empire during that period. Russia is already a fallen power. It still packs a punch, just a much diminished one. It lives off of memories of past glories, and occasionally those memories still scare Europeans even if there is no substance behind them. Like the Turks of the long 19th century, Russians have a reputation of being the world’s fiercest, toughest warriors due to the glories of their distant past. This is in spite of the fact that their military performance has been abysmal for decades and their equipment is literally falling apart.

Also like the late Ottomans, today’s Russia is slowly becoming a client state of a rich, commercial backer. In the case of the Turks, that was Britain, and in the case of Russia, that was China. In both cases, the state in question was forced to become a satellite because another country was senselessly bearing down on it. It did not benefit the Russian Empire to constantly go after the Ottomans, and in some periods (like1828-50 and 1890-1912) they recognized that and briefly wooed the Ottomans away from Anglo-French domination by playing nice. In other periods, however, pan-Slavist ideologues forced the Russian Tsar to antagonize the Ottomans over a few petty Slavic states and delusional dreams of reclaiming Constantinople.

This is very similar to the situation with Russia today. Countless American geopolitical writers propose an American-Russian alliance against China and correctly point out that there is zero conflict of interest between Russia and the United States. However, they are forced to continue to antagonize Russia because ideologues in the US government want to advance liberal democracy in Eastern Europe. Consequently, Russia is forced to rely on China in spite of the fact that China is far more likely to dismember their remaining sphere of influence in the future, similar to how Britain and France - not Russia - ended up with the lion’s share of the Ottoman Empire.

4: Will US go to war with China over Taiwan?, submitted on 2021-12-23 00:12:39+08:00.

—– 4.1 —–2021-12-23 10:25:11+08:00:

Yes. Point by point:

1. The US government could care less about Taiwan and has a history of screwing the island’s government over. They do want to destroy China, however. Taiwan is just a tripwire to force the public into a war that can bring down the US’s nemesis before it becomes too powerful.
2. No, but every time the blob (US foreign policy establishment) gets behind a war they start convincing themselves it will be, or at least not that bad. We see a lot of echoes of Kenneth Pollack’s book on why invading Iraq would be easy in the US-China situation today. Virtually none of the conversation considers the possibility that this will actually be a very long war against an enemy with a 10:1 industrial advantage. It is all about whether Taiwan can repel the initial landing with American assistance, or whether carriers can survive a missile attack. Since the conversation is so narrowly focused around the opening stages, everyone has convinced themselves that that is all that matters. This is not a uniquely American disease - the Western allies in WW2 also convinced themselves Poland could hold against Germany alone, simply because the alternative - a long, had war - was unthinkable.
3. Yes. It’s a very different America now than in the 1940s when neutrality and disengagement from global affairs were keystones of the American national identity. This had more to do with romanticism about what the founding fathers wanted: back then America was still a hodgepodge of first to third generation immigrants who retained ethnic identity. Entering too many foreign wars had a real potential of causing a civil war as different ethnicities took the sides of their home countries. That’s no longer the case and modern America is readily interventionist everywhere.

5: Why hasn’t the Syrian Arab Army fought to take back the rest of Syria in the past year or 2?, submitted on 2021-12-25 19:01:56+08:00.

—– 5.1 —–2021-12-29 23:53:11+08:00:

To add on to what everyone else said, the SAA did try to make a move on Idlib and were absolutely eviscerated. The Turkish battalions there had more firepower than SAA brigades.

6: How brutal was European war in the 18-19th century ?, submitted on 2021-12-26 00:17:38+08:00.

—– 6.1 —–2021-12-26 05:44:14+08:00:

It got less brutal then much more brutal. In the 18th century the brutality of mid 17th century war, with all its requisitioning and reprisals, was replaced by a brief professional period. This “era of maneuver warfare” relied on small mercenary armies (most of these “mercenaries” were recruited domestically and were the equivalent of modern day enlisted volunteers) that were well taken care of because conventional wisdom was that they were expensive to replace. Countries shipped food from the homeland and were careful with their soldiers lives - since armies were expensive, seeking battle randomly was frowned upon, and armies instead preferred to “lever” each other out of position. Since the object of war in the age was usually to acquire a territory that could generate revenue, destruction, both of troops and land, worked counter to the “business” of war.

The extent to which here was a hard division between an “age of battle” and an “age of maneuver” in early modern Europe is debated by historians. Hans Delbruck, who arguably invented modern military history, believed maneuver warfare was the primary mode of warfare throughout the 18th century, broken abruptly by the French Revolution. The Prussian officer corps took great objection to his publications and insisted Frederick the Great was an exception - an “annihilationist”. Modern historians when reviewing the controversy usually settle for the happy medium that Frederick was a bad practitioner of maneuver warfare saved by his talent in battle.

The French Revolution ushered in a new age of “annihilationist” warfare that lasted in its purest form until WW1. Purges in the French officer corps after the revolution forced the revolutionary regime to throw conventional military thought out the window and devise a system which, while “sub optimal” from the standpoint of state finances, allowed them to overcome the professional armies of Europe and defend national sovereignty. After the recovery of French fortunes at Valmy (a much mythologized battle which in reality amounted to an indecisive artillery duel and the Prussians losing their nerve), France employed a new playbook. Instead of paying for and supplying armies, they would send hordes of poorly equipped and poorly trained young men into foreign countries. There, the men would “live off the land” (loot). These “armies on the cheap” would chase down and destroy enemy armies wherever possible, both because they were expendable and because the French knew they were inferior at traditional maneuver warfare owing to the chaos of the revolution. Unlike earlier “battle seeking” armies like the Caroleans, Prussians, and Suvorov’s Russians, the French did not love cavalry, shock, and cold steel. Their goal was not to sweep superior armies off the field with a sudden strike, but rather to guarantee victory given numerical superiority. To this end, they engaged frontally and held large reserves, which they slowly released onto the field until the enemy’s reserve was exhausted. Over time, they improved their loss ratio in these frontal musket duels through the natural learning process inherent to their “impulse” system. Per this system, battalion commanders had near total freedom to decide their deployment, approach, and use of terrain, provided they were always staying engaged. The French gradually became the most prolific users of loose order over tight formations, and by Napoleon’s time could win the “reserve depletion” race even when outnumbered by maintaining a favorable rate of attrition. This approach seems to provide only an even exchange, but what’s forgotten is that victory is profitable in itself: the victor captures cannons, recovers all the wounded, and can launch a pursuit.

While these attritional tactics had consolidated by the time Napoleon gained his first command, the Corsican ushered in a new age of unprecedented destruction by devising an “annihilationist” system of maneuver that still echoes in the encirclement tactics of today. While the French had pushed Europe back in the first two coalition wars, they had failed to secure any crushing victories. The age old question of how to make an inferior opponent fight instead of flee had not yet been answered. Napoleon provided that answer by devising campaign plans that maneuvered his army stealthily behind the enemy’s. There is no tactical advantage to “enveloping” someone like this, contra popular belief, but it forces the enemy to fight immediately or be cut off from resupply and reinforcement. By 1815, these “annihilationist” campaign plans, striving to cut off and destroy blocks of the enemy’s force instead of occupy territory, became standard. The adage that the objective in war was to destroy the enemy’s force and not merely “lever him out of place” was popularized by both Jomini and Clausewitz after Napoleon’s fall.

Against the backdrop of all this was a mindset shift from the state being the personal purse of the King to being the vehicle for “the public” to achieve “political” aims higher than their impact on the budget. Save for a few episodes like the patriotic resistance of the French to Marlborough’s invasion, states and subjects in the 18th century usually had a transactional relationship. The latter were seen by the former as sources of money to be bartered, traded, and accumulated through “hostile takeovers”, while subjects tended to “suffer” the government in silence until it pushed too far. Policy after the French Revolution became far more romantic. While the Vienna Conference had echoes of the old “revenue-driven” statecraft, that meeting of the diplomatic old guard was the last time such motives would be the guiding hand of foreign policy. For the rest of the 19th century and beyond, countries started to fight wars over “isms” and nationalist ambitions. Territories were valuable not because they produced anything but because they “rightfully” belonged to this or that group, or because their governments were despotic and their subjects deserved to be freed.

The side effect of this was that preserving the economic value of a territory was no longer a priority. It did not matter to the British that the Boer Republics were smoldering ruins by the time they were occupied, their populations starved in the world’s first concentration camps. The fact was they had won the war, they had preserved British rule over South Africa, and that was enough. Many often think of 19th century war as bad, but still more “gentlemanly” than it would later be. This perception is inaccurate: if war was not as devastating, it is only because the generals of the time lacked the means, not the intention. After taking Peking in 1860, the British commander remarked that the Qing should have “set fire to the suburbs and driven away all the cattle” as Wellington had in Torres Vedras - in effect, displaced and starved the entire populace. Then, he claimed, the British would surely have been defeated. British advisor to the Qing General Charles Gordon made a similar remark to the Dowager Empress during the little known Sino-Russian Ili War - “burn down the capital and fight, fight for five years, or give up [Northern Xinjiang] in Toto”. These quotes perfectly illustrate the 19th century military mindset: victory, and its political fruit, were ends in by themselves and great loss was something to be accepted or even worshipped.

This is exactly why you hear only of the heroism of the time - no one thought very much of the suffering that occurred as the battlefield became more destructive and soldiers became more unruly. Everyone thought very highly in contrast of heroics on the field. The “linearization” of war: the herding of men into organized firing lines and their reduction to shapes on a battlefield map, was intensely dehumanizing and emasculating for the fighting man. The traditional, individual warrior spirit was not only useless on the organized, regimented battlefield of the day, but condemned. A good soldier marched, starved, lined up, and reloaded at his lieutenant’s beck and call. He had no room for individual thought and action, nor could his individual acts change the course of the battle at all. Moreover, unlike in the age of melee combat, victory did not just go to the braver side in early modern war: bullets killed heroes and cowards in equal number.

In such an environment, armies had to find a new definition of “heroism”, divorced from the consequential individualized heroism of the past. Heroism took on more a symbolic, even mystical meaning - he who exposed himself to danger and showed great spirit inspired his comrades and intimidated the enemy. By putting himself in harm’s way and enduring fire - each time the enemy’s volley went off, he had a chance of dying - a solider was having an impact on the battlefield through his “moral force”. Officers provided the greatest moral support of all - by putting themselves in the firing line, they became the morale of their entire unit. So important were these “symbolic heroics” to armies that they became the French army’s primary mode of promoting during the early 19th century: with no exceptions, all of Napoleon’s marshals were “heroes” who showed dash in abundance. The Emperor himself both displayed and admired this quality greatly.

—– 6.2 —–2021-12-26 08:39:22+08:00:

In some parts of the world it still exists. I’d say the beginning of the end of the Dulce et Decorum Est mindset in the West was, of course, WW1. It took another world war for “war is bad” to become an almost universal sentiment in Europe and the Americas thereafter.

—– 6.3 —–2021-12-26 08:44:47+08:00:

From Delbruck’s “Niederwerfungsstrategie” though that may not be a perfect translation.

7: What were the reasons for Italy poor performance in WWII., submitted on 2021-12-26 21:59:18+08:00.

—– 7.1 —–2021-12-27 04:44:52+08:00:

Because they didn’t really expect to fight. Mussolini entered the war when he (and most other people, mind you) thought the Germans had already won just so he could have a seat at the negotiating table. The mistakes of Italy are endless in this war, namely:

• Not making available adequate artillery to destroy the French forts

• Not abandoning interior Libya and staging a coastal defense (the more motorized British, with bigger tanks, would always have won a desert battle)

• Keeping the RM in harbor, failing to take Malta when it was possible, not keeping pressure up on the RN

But critically all these failures presuppose a “total war” or “knockout” mentality in the Italian government, which was simply not what existed. In plainer terms, Italy was not trying to do serious damage to France and Britain in 1940 - it in fact did not even have a plan to invade Egypt. It was simply trying to enter an “already won” war and take a slice of the pie. It saw its “intervention” in the same light as the Japanese capture of Tsingtao in World War 1.

On that note, the Japanese are the perfect foil to all the typical criticisms of Italy. Many authors have argued Italy’s failures stemmed almost solely from their industrial weakness. Japan had roughly the same amount of industry, and yet achieved some of the most impressive victories of the war. Moreover, they were usually outnumbered whereas the Italians typically had numerical superiority. The main difference was that the Japanese were simply thinking seriously about landing a knockout blow against the “ABCD” (America, Britain, China, Dutch) forces where Italy was not doing the same with France and Britain. Japan was doing real staff work, flying over Malaya, interviewing companies and tourists, testing landing in coral reef conditions, rehearsing dozens of times the port strike on Pearl Harbor, analyzing Anglo-American naval SOP and drilling night fighting tactics against it. There was no similar rigor in the Italian HQs at any level because their government thought they could freeload off the Germans.

The one place where Italy did expect to fight and win alone was in Greece, but even here they didn’t think very hard about what was to be done because they expected an easy win. Mussolini spoke of his objectives in that war as a simple land grab on the border, perhaps coupled with some landings to seize Western islands. The Italians had no respect for the forces of the chronically bankrupt Greece. They conducted no infiltrations through the mountains, didn’t stock sufficient artillery shells for proper and sustained combined arms, and didn’t plan any naval landing to outflank the defenses on the narrow border.

If this all seems like complete stupidity, it wasn’t. Mussolini played his cards well diplomatically, and even after repeated failures essentially achieved all of Italy’s nationalist and irredentist aims in Europe. His forces were occupying the Yugoslav coast and 2/3 of Greece. The only task left was to wait for Germany to defeat Britain and end the war… but as we know that’s not what happened. Germany canceled all plans to bomb or invade Britain and attacked the USSR instead. And, while many historians hold this to be obvious in hindsight (“just read mein kampf”), it shocked almost everyone at the time. The idea that Germany would win World War 2 in October 1940 was a very widespread belief.

So when people compare Italy to the other main Axis powers it’s not a fair comparison. Germany and Japan were aiming to deliver knockout blows, and all their planning and training reflected that. Italy was just hoping to acquire a few body bags and say it fought. If the Italian aim was the same as the German-Japanese one, there is no question that they would have done better: Mussolini was intimately aware of his military’s deficiencies, and as newer histories (see Carver) point out, the Italian army actually was a quick learner after its catastrophes of 1940. There was simply no way they could have had the same mindset: it was optimal for them to only join the war when they thought the Germans would win, and, even if they wanted to join at the start, the Germans were notoriously uncommunicative allies and explicitly assured Italy that no war would occur before 1942.

—– 7.2 —–2021-12-28 09:04:19+08:00:

Did he mean only navy? Because if he said forces in general that’s not true. The Finnish army survived the war in tact. You could argue the Finns weren’t exactly an axis power, but in that case so did the IJA and IJA aviation, who had amassed millions of men and thousands of planes for the climactic battle for the home islands and had lost only a fraction of their strength by 1945. Very much unlike the latter, Italy also quit halfway through the war.

Then there are the Indonesian and Thai armies, aligned with the Japanese, both of which survived the war. The Indonesians under Sukarno in fact continued the war by themselves and won their independence from the Netherlands by 1949.

The RM is unfairly maligned and performed respectably (so did the RA for that matter, which traded favorably with the British), but it’s achievement of surviving the war on the losing side was by no means unique.