Posted on 09/10/2006 9:20:42 AM PDT by Korvac
Bump! Wake up America!
Yes I have met stupid Chinese people. Quite a few, in fact.
Napoleon had a translation of Sun Tzu's writings. Clauswitz wrote his remarks (which were put into book form by his wife) based on Napoleon's campaigns (seen by an opponent).
Jomni and Dennis Hart Mahan are my favorite military authors. The latter promulgated simple Principles of war, to make correct actions accessable to a wide spectrum of people in a republic, and the former used geometry and quantitative aspects to permit analysis by professionals.
I think it is rather funny that the article asserts that Stalin first didn't defend Moscow, and then asserts that he was in a Siberian hideaway.
The Soviets built three defensive rings around the city. An aquaintence of mind got a severe case of frostbite in Tula, a city just east of Moscow, where they tried to bypass the defensive rings, and were subject to counter attack.
"I am told that in contrast to European countries, China was never engaged in conquests such as the conquest of America, mistaken for India by Columbus. This is true. Columbus was after gold and slaves, while China had paper money, and there was nothing she wanted to buy from other countries, which were perceived by China, with its silks and porcelains, as populated by paupers and savages. It was ridiculous to suppose that anyone wanted to topple the sophisticated Center of the World in order to establish a Western savage pauperland."
The Mongols did in fact topple China. Columbus was not trying to capture gold or slaves, rather, he was seeking a route (not controled by Muslims) to get spices, and thought, using references in the Bible, that the earth was 3/5th its actual size.
"In World War II, Hitler also fought, without winning, for more than four years. Sun Tzu's key word 25 centuries ago was strategy. In post-Roman Europe, the word was borrowed (from Greek) in 1810, and so Hitler knew it. But his fighting of World War II shows no trace of grand strategy and hence could end in nothing but his suicide."
Hitler became chancellor in 1933. He uses strategy remilitarize the Rheinland, to support Franco in Spain, to take Austria, to take Czechoslovakia. All this happened without fighting.
Hitler coordinated with the Soviet Union in dismemberment of Poland. He took over France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway. After Dunkirk, Britain (with Churchill as PM!) did some serious teasing and appeasing, to convince Hitler to leave Britain alone and head east. That is when the Strategos stopped.
He came darn near to winning. Alas that FDR didn't send over one Marine regiment to counter his remilitarization of the Rhineland. Alas, we weren't so clever to do "preemptive" war back then. Some still oppose it, and want to go back to the good old days of 400,000 US deaths in war.
Thanks for that post. Moving forward with a strong alliance with India is very important to balance against China in the long term. People say that China has never been an "expansionist" power, but that may just be because they never had enough power to really be expansionist. We should guard against the possibility.
The Art of War should be required reading for every HS student.
Thanks For The Thread,,,Psalm 144:1
In my experience, the only business people who take The Art or War or Machiavelli's The Prince seriously are half-wits.
Who do you think Machiavelli was writing to?
Who do you think Machiavelli was writing to?
Ha!
The thing people don't realize is that ole Machie was writing to curry favor after making some political blunders and finding himself outside the charmed circle.
Sun Tzu knows the drill. More people ought to look into him because he knows the drill.
China will not be a democracy. For their culture, it would make no sense.
Hopefully, they either see us as not a threat to them (which is doubtful) or to strong to take on (which is what they see now, but for not much longer).
The next world war will be in Asia. China needs the resources of its neighbors to advance, and as long as they give her that all is fine. But one day someone will say no, and troops will be sent in.
Because we are drunk with "free trade" while our enemy builds up its industrial base at the expense of ours. We won WWII because we could self supply. We can't even come close to that now. Heck, we don't even make our own ammo for the rifles anymore.
Mark Steyn predicts China will creep in and take over the vast expanse of northern Asia (Eastern Siberia) as depopulating Russia vacates and retreats west of the Urals.
Another expansionist opportunity for BEijing would be central Asia and there the pickings again would be ripe indeed.
Places like Indo-China etc are too much trouble militarily speaking for the resources they offer.
My 2 cents.
The Chinese had better hold onto their butts. They're reading Sun Tzu, our guys are reading John Boyd.
Citation?
Excellent post. Although I consider China a major threat, it gets tiresome to see so many on FR treating them as some sort of supermen. They're just another bunch of commies, and we'll clean their clocks too if they don't do it to themselves first.
Alas even more that the Brits or French didn't take care of it. IIRC, Hitler remarked later that a French brigade could have stopped the rein of his Reich before it started.
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