Posted on 05/31/2019 6:56:45 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
I don’t blame the US for starting WWII/forcing Japan to fight, but the fact is that they had built a modern country dependent on oil and we (along with Britain and Holland) cut off most of their oil. Once that was done (justifiably, in response to Japanese aggression - THEY started it), they had no choice but to fight. It was no accident that when they went on a tear in 1941, they quickly drove towards the oil of Indonesia.
Regardless of how we would arrive at that same point (where we needed oil for our economy to function), we’d do exactly the same.
“...Historically inaccurate and really, quite a foolish take.
Backward, primitive, ultra nationalist Chinese chose to go miles out of their way...all foreseeable... morons even managed to make enemies of countries that did not have colonial possessions...If they follow the same policy prescriptions again, they’ll get their asses severely kicked again...” [FLT-bird, post 36]
In no sense was the Boxer Rebellion a coordinated counterattack imagined, planned, and chosen by the leaders of a Western-style modern state, then implemented with military precision.
The parallels you are drawing between today’s PRC and the moribund Imperial China of 119 years ago aren’t so clear as you believe. But breezy assumptions about universal human behavior traits and dogmatic faith in the moral superiority of all that Western Civ has done in the past 2019 years aren’t unknown in this forum.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at your flung accusations; my sources for the details & timelines of the Boxer rebellion are no one’s propaganda, but are largely Western.
To reiterate an outcome or two that you have ignored, the Boxers weren’t “crushed” in the sense a Western army might nail down and eradicate an identified adversary. They were never that organized.
What passed for a central government in China at the time fled the scene. The peasants that had swollen the ranks of the Harmonious Righteous Fist went back to whatever they had been doing before: “melting away” is apt.
Imperial Germans - whose obstreperous machinations had been a cause - were less than pleased that they’d missed out on the rescue of the Peking Legation. Western and Japanese allied troop levels in the area had risen dramatically; Kaiser William II saw another big chance to prove how his nation had mastered Weltmacht and sent a large number of his own soldiers, haranguing them in person just before they embarked with explicit personal orders to get really nasty. He pestered other Euro leaders until they agreed to make the commander of this German detachment the supreme commander of allied forces in China.
Arriving after it was over, the Imperial Germans set about raping, pillaging, plundering, and burning villages; officers of the other allied contingents noticed but remarked on it privately. William had told his minions to go at it with no mercy, to ensure the primitive pagans learned their lesson: lots of dead peasants - women & children included - whose guilt may have had some tortured Westernesque legalistic foundation but whose operational involvement was minor.
I thought our self-appointed moral arbiters had been telling us that revenge wasn’t ours to take, and that pride was a sin. What does that say about upset pursuant to injured pride?
The Kaiserliche Marine went back to building up its naval station at Tsingtao.
I’ve no interest in the religious nor metaphysical import of the Western missionary presence in China in the 19th century. Only the geostratigc, logistic, and technological aspects concern me. This will of course earn me a flurry of condescension from most American conservatives, who take it on faith that the United States was Divinely Inspired and created expressly to prosecute the Church’s Sacred Mission of spreading Western religious beliefs to every heathen corner of the globe (and, one presumes today, the galaxy) - whether the locals want it or not.
From our perch in the 21st century, proselytizing in remote regions by numerous sects during the 18th and 19th centuries (and even today) looks less wonderful than we Americans believed it to be as recently as 80 years ago. Can we seriously claim that Spanish & Portuguese takeover of the Americas was bad, but that Catholic & Protestant missions undertaken in Africa, China, and other places in the 19th century were good?
The Chinese have a history longer than ours - indeed longer than the West - by orders of magnitude. The century-plus that has passed since the Boxer Rebellion is barely discernible from their viewpoint. They will look on us as barbarians no matter how many indignities and outrages are visited on them. They will not indefinitely lie down and allow a bunch of religious types to trample on every facet of their culture. We will never change that, no matter how zealous our missionaries become. I urge forum members to set aside chauvinism and conviction to think it over. For a minute or two, anyway.
Well, thank you for your fabianist diatribe, completely fabricated though parts of it are.
Nobody said it was coordinated or very organized. I wouldn't say parallels between today's PRC. I'd say the ultranationalist Chinese propaganda of the PRC does side with the primitive barbaric boxers though - because it does from Mao to the current day. Assumptions about moral superiority of western civ? I'd argue it IS morally superior. Regardless, butchering foreign nationals including noncombatants and ambassadors IS going to be seen in an extremely negative light by others. It is therefore awfully foolish to do so and incur the wrath of everybody else simultaneously which is exactly what the boxers did.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at your flung accusations; my sources for the details & timelines of the Boxer rebellion are no one’s propaganda, but are largely Western.
Just as I couldn't help at laugh at your regurgitation of Chinese propaganda.
To reiterate an outcome or two that you have ignored, the Boxers weren’t “crushed” in the sense a Western army might nail down and eradicate an identified adversary. They were never that organized. What passed for a central government in China at the time fled the scene. The peasants that had swollen the ranks of the Harmonious Righteous Fist went back to whatever they had been doing before: “melting away” is apt.,/i>
Yes, "Crushed" is the appropriate term. Their efforts were fruitless. They were mowed down by the forces of everybody else. Had they persisted they would have had their asses kicked even harder and even more of them would have been mowed down. None of their aims were accomplished. In fact, foreign powers took harsh reprisals on China and forced it to pay a massive indemnity. Crushed.
Imperial Germans - whose obstreperous machinations had been a cause - were less than pleased that they’d missed out on the rescue of the Peking Legation. Western and Japanese allied troop levels in the area had risen dramatically; Kaiser William II saw another big chance to prove how his nation had mastered Weltmacht and sent a large number of his own soldiers, haranguing them in person just before they embarked with explicit personal orders to get really nasty. He pestered other Euro leaders until they agreed to make the commander of this German detachment the supreme commander of allied forces in China. Arriving after it was over, the Imperial Germans set about raping, pillaging, plundering, and burning villages; officers of the other allied contingents noticed but remarked on it privately. William had told his minions to go at it with no mercy, to ensure the primitive pagans learned their lesson: lots of dead peasants - women & children included - whose guilt may have had some tortured Westernesque legalistic foundation but whose operational involvement was minor. I thought our self-appointed moral arbiters had been telling us that revenge wasn’t ours to take, and that pride was a sin. What does that say about upset pursuant to injured pride?
Yes as I said, pissing everybody else off and murdering an ambassador is going to have negative consequences for your country. Perhaps you should not do that.
The Chinese have a history longer than ours - indeed longer than the West - by orders of magnitude. The century-plus that has passed since the Boxer Rebellion is barely discernible from their viewpoint. They will look on us as barbarians no matter how many indignities and outrages are visited on them. They will not indefinitely lie down and allow a bunch of religious types to trample on every facet of their culture. We will never change that, no matter how zealous our missionaries become. I urge forum members to set aside chauvinism and conviction to think it over. For a minute or two, anyway.
If they wanted the missionaries out, then expel them. Do not murder them. Personally I don't see anything wrong with missionaries going someplace to peacefully try to persuade others as to the truth of their faith. I don't see that as trampling on anybody else's culture. If they don't want to convert then don't. As to how the Chinese view us, I don't really care so long as they obey "the rules" of civilization which is that you do not murder our citizens and diplomats. If you can't follow those "rules" then we'll take it as our duty to inflict enough pain on you that you understand its an exceptionally stupid idea to ever do so again.
For the Chinese people, as opposed to the Manchu Qing state, it was considerably more complicated than that. Shanghai had maybe a quarter million people in 1842. The foreign concessions in Shanghai (the “international” one run by the British and the Americans, and the French one) introduced the Chinese people there and soon throughout the nation to new technologies, new business techniques, new ideas (individual rights, women’s rights to participate in society in particular, Darwinian evolution, the scientific method, the idea that societies could be dynamic and didn’t have to be mindlessly wedded to tradition, private civic activism and many others). While some of the other foreign concessions did not amount to much and were governed cruelly, millions of people poured into Shanghai to work and to escape events like the Taiping Rebellion. (This tradition continued through World War II, when even under Japanese occupation thousands of Jewish people found refuge from Hitler there.) Certainly outside the concessions and to a substantial extent within them, this Shanghai was the freest place the Chinese had known in their two millennia of history. The British, French and Americans often (though not always, especially in the case of the Christian missionaries) looked at Chinese as inferior, and Chinese had no representation in governance in the concessions at all until the late 1920s, but the foreigners let them build their own lives, without molestation. Which they did once their energies were unleashed, economically and culturally.
Before Chiang Kai-Shek’s unification of most of the nation under his increasingly socialist (a poisonous idea that unfortunately also came from abroad) and nationalist party in 1927, Shanghai led the Chinese transformation toward modernity. So vibrant was it that even KMT corruption couldn’t completely stop the process. That Chinese people poured into Shanghai, and that both the foreign powers (vastly outnumbered by Chinese by about 1910 even in their own concessions) and the locals whose parents probably were migrants themselves accepted this with such equanimity allowed them to continue to build Shanghai as a cosmopolitan, ever-more modern city. That this was destroyed by the Japanese after 1937, the KMT between 1945 and 1949 and the CCP from then on meant that a chance to become the kind of place Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea became after the war was lost for decades.
Then I am glad to read that you will provide a fairer and more objective analysis...
The fists of Righteous Harmony (to give them their title in local parlance) was a movement composed principally of peasants...
This sounds like standard Communist Party propaganda.
They objected to modernization and economic exploitation in general, but the spiritual imperialism of Christian missionaries loomed larger.
They sound just like millenial generation democrats!
Railroads didn’t merely deprive indigenous boatmen and carters of livelihood, they violated sacred burial grounds. Telegraph lines hummed and whirred in the winds - an affront to native spirits of the air.
Now this sounds like it is straight from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"!
Proselytizing missionaries were a more serious cultural incursion: Chinese converts to Christian beliefs were not welcomed as bearers of “Good News,” they were traitors to the unconverted.
Ouch, sounds like these heathens needed pacifying.
Missionaries weren’t brightening the lives of peasants with enlightenment, they were fifth columnists and pre-invasion special forces, ridiculing traditional beliefs...
My goodness, did you write all this yourself? If so, may I ask which American-hating, liberal arts college you attended?
[Snipped several paragraphs of anti-Western drivel]
...Westerners (including many civilians who had just been rescued) took revenge by looting.
Now that's just silly. I am no fan of the Queen Victoria and her shameful narco-terrorism, but your history is really over the top. Have you spent much time with the Chi-Coms, or are you one yourself?
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