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Total nonsense regarding invading nine out of ten countries.
The British Empire it started off with Chartered companies such as the Hudson Bay Compant or Dutch East Indies companies and these companies helped forge the British Empire
"Britain didn't invade all those countries, British corporations did... Who were chartered and protected by the British government, but that is totally different." - t. Brave New World, City-Data, 2018
I'll give you a pass because you are doing what any good Brit would do, defend the honor(honour?) of Britain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brave New World
Britain a naval power kept a much smaller army that her European rivals, and often relied on the local rulers to keep order. In terms of India, the Maharajas ruled different regions and had there own Armies, and Britain kept them happy by making them wealthy through international trade.
Britain was definitely the best empire-builder for exactly what you said, their preference to "indirect-rule". The United States would adopt effectively the same system.
Britain's policy was to find a faction in a country, help them rise to power, or to keep power, with British protection, on condition that they open up trade with Britain, and then keep them dependent on British Trade for their wealth/position.
With indirect-rule, the British left most governments in-place(IE kept the elites in power), which prevented the elites from organizing an uprising(common people are useless).
Britain's switch from indirect-rule to direct-rule(The British Raj) during the Age of Imperialism, led to mass famines, and ultimately to anti-imperialism and Indian Nationalism, and the collapse of the British Empire.
Which is why Britain's invasions kind of resemble America's "invasions", or our interventionist-policy more-broadly. We aren't really "invading", we are just helping one side of another in a Civil-War, and our occupation of a country is only to stabilize it and bring an end to the bloodshed. If we invade at all, it isn't to occupy, but merely to overthrow an "evil-dictator" and "spread democracy"(IE put in place pro-American leaders who will do what we want).
Britain and America are basically twins, insofar as we ripped-off the British system and made it our own. But we are on a massive continent with tons of natural resources and basically no rivals, and you're a tiny island surrounded by people who hate you. Sucks to suck bong.
The Communists were testing us in many places and if We didn't fight in Vietnam or Korea or show them we were willing to use force then where and when? When and where you draw the line and fight against communist aggression during the Cold War?
Korea and Vietnam are not the same thing, not even close. Korea was justified as last time I checked, South Korea is doing pretty damn good as a nation. Whereas Saigon fell literally as soon as we left.
Communist aggression was UNSUSTAINABLE. All we had to do was sit back and watch it fail. If we never entered the Vietnam war everything would’ve been just fine. Thailand and the rest of SE Asia did not fall to communism as we foolishly thought.
But we didn’t listen to France and we chose to find out the hard way. There is zero justification for Vietnam whatsoever even if we were granted a full on invasion of north Vietnam
Britain and France had military alliances with Poland, and both Britain and France both declared war on Germany on the 3rd September 1939 after Germany invaded Poland.
Britain didn't sign the "Polish–British common defense pact" until August 25th, 1939. Which was two days after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and a week before the German Invasion, precisely because they knew the invasion was imminent. But that pact would have required Britain to go to war with anyone who attacked Poland(which includes the Soviet Union).
The British Prime at the time was Neville Chamberlain, and it was Chamberlein who declared war on Germany after they invaded Poland and not Winston Churchill.
I never claimed otherwise. But Chamberlain "didn't do anything"(IE Phoney-War).
Chamberlain expressed his intention to step down as Prime-Minister on May 9th, 1940. Dunkirk wasn't until May 26th, 1940.
Ironically, Chamberlain stepped down because of the failure of the Norway campaign, but that campaign was actually Churchill's idea. But while Chamberlain stepped down, Churchill took his place.
Regardless, you are missing the point. Britain didn't give a **** about Poland. They had no intention of saving Poland, and they didn't save Poland. And Poland was a military dictatorship which had basically zero relations with Britain. Poland was just a pawn in Britain's game.
Sure, we lost 50,000 lives in NAM but how many other wars it avoided by showing our enemies that we were willing to fight you anywhere and anytime and for each life we lose they would lose 3 times that........
Our enemies had nukes at that time, giving up 50,000 men didn’t show our enemies anything.
The Soviet Union gave up MILLIONS to fight for communism. They literally purged their own military several times just because they felt like it. The Chinese gave up half a million to fight for communism in the Korean War.
LOL at thinking our enemies would flinch at the Vietnam numbers. Russia is a 2nd world kleptocracy and they are still one of the most intimidating countries on earth. And China, they are still our biggest threat on earth and own a good portion of our debt.
50,000 men, nah, that doesn’t scare China or Russia. They were laughing at us when Saigon fell and it’s didn’t cost them 50,000 men.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Redshadowz
"Britain didn't invade all those countries, British corporations did... Who were chartered and protected by the British government, but that is totally different."
I'll give you a pass because you are doing what any good Brit would do, defend the honor(honour?) of Britain.
Britain was definitely the best empire-builder for exactly what you said, their preference to "indirect-rule". And the United States adopted effectively the same system.
Britain's policy was to find a faction in a country, help them rise to power, or to keep power, with British protection, on condition that they open up trade with Britain, and then keep them dependent on British Trade for their wealth/position.
With indirect-rule, the British left most governments in-place(IE kept the elites in power), which prevented the elites from organizing an uprising(common people are useless).
Britain's switch from indirect-rule to direct-rule(The British Raj) during the Age of Imperialism, led to mass famines, and ultimately to anti-imperialism and Indian Nationalism, and the collapse of the British Empire.
Which is why Britain's invasions kind of resemble America's "invasions", or our interventionist-policy more-broadly. We aren't really "invading", we are just helping one side of another in a Civil-War, and our occupation of a country is only to stabilize it and bring an end to the bloodshed. If we invade at all, it isn't to occupy, but merely to overthrow an "evil-dictator" and "spread democracy"(IE put in place pro-American leaders who will do what we want).
Britain and America are basically twins, insofar as we ripped-off the British system and made it our own. But we are on a massive continent with no rivals, and you're a tiny island surrounded by people who hate you. Sucks to suck bong.
There was lots of poverty across the world at the time, try reading Engels, Dickens, Orwell in relation to England itself.
The average life expectancy for a male in Liverpool was 26 years old, and poverty, disease, hunger and poor housing/working conditions were ripe at home, and life was generally cheap. In the undrained slum areas of some British industrial towns the average age of death was thirteen.
The death rate in 1840 England was 23 per 1,000. In the early 18th century it’s estimated that the death rate was 80 per 1,000. To put that in context, Sierra Leone currently has the worst death rate in the world: 22.1 per 1,000. The past truly is a foreign country.
At the trime children in Victorian Britain cleaned chimneys, worked down mines,worked under cottom mill machines and often suffered horrendous industrial accidents.
Men were press ganged in to Naval Service, and all kinds of injustices went on, indeed Children, like adults, continued to be sentenced to death for a very large number of felonies up to 1838 although it was normal for younger children to have their sentences commuted for the less serious crimes as there was increasing public disquiet about hanging children.
Whilst many women and children died in disgusting conditions in Victorian Workhouses or were deported to convict colonies in places such as Australia. Prison conditions were equally appalingm as were mental hospitals, and life generally was very very harsh and very very short.
It was also a very different period in time when war was largely fought with sailing ships and muskets rather than weapons of mass destruction.
There were numerous famines in India across history, indeed the country still suffers from extreme poverty, whilst the Hindhu Caste System also caused intense misery.
"Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most clearly observable here. Here the centralization of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more completely with every passing day." - Friedrich Engels
How does that make you feel?
Also this from George Orwell's, "England your England".
"In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it. As a positive emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the upper class – the cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic demonstrations than the expensive ones – but the number of definitely treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling type, is probably very small. In the working class patriotism is profound, but it is unconscious. The working man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. But the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are more national than the rich, but the English working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they are obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly. During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time. But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good. At bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader." - George Orwell
Our enemies had nukes at that time, giving up 50,000 men didn’t show our enemies anything.
The Soviet Union gave up MILLIONS to fight for communism. They literally purged their own military several times just because they felt like it. The Chinese gave up half a million to fight for communism in the Korean War.
LOL at thinking our enemies would flinch at the Vietnam numbers. Russia is a 2nd world kleptocracy and they are still one of the most intimidating countries on earth. And China, they are still our biggest threat on earth and own a good portion of our debt.
50,000 men, nah, that doesn’t scare China or Russia. They were laughing at us when Saigon fell and it’s didn’t cost them 50,000 men.
If the Soviets weren't scared of our retaliation, why did they take the nuclear missiles out of Cuba against the wishes of Fidel Castro, he wasn't happy that the Soviets took out the missiles without telling him.
If the Soviets weren't scared of our retaliation, why didn't they take over Western Europe?
The same for China, why didn't they take South Korea if they thought it would end like South Vietnam? why not Japan and the rest of Southeast Asia? Because we were willing to take on them on every aggression they made.
you think the Soviet Union collapsed on its own? LOL.....China depends on our 330 million consumers to survive. Without our technology that they steal and cheat, China would be another 3rd world country and their economy collapse.
Korea and Vietnam are not the same thing, not even close. Korea was justified as last time I checked, South Korea is doing pretty damn good as a nation. Whereas Saigon fell literally as soon as we left.
Communist aggression was UNSUSTAINABLE. All we had to do was sit back and watch it fail. If we never entered the Vietnam war everything would’ve been just fine. Thailand and the rest of SE Asia did not fall to communism as we foolishly thought.
But we didn’t listen to France and we chose to find out the hard way. There is zero justification for Vietnam whatsoever even if we were granted a full on invasion of north Vietnam
you could say the same thing for Nazism and the empire of Japan...it was UNSUSTAINBLE...so why fight WW 2?.......All we had to do is sit back and watch it fail....right?
Thailand and SE Asia didn't fall because the USA wasn't going to let it fall......you think the communist aggression didn't go to countries because they didn't want to? LMAO!!!!!! The Soviet Union increased communist influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Africa, Vietnam, and Latin America. That was their goal and We were the only Super Power in their way.........without us, who would have stopped them?
Speaking of democracy, I once again express democracy as a voluntary action of those involved. If democracy were applied to centralized power then the same problems applied to state power apply to democracy. If democracy is limited to only those who participate in it, the nature of the agreement is held at a more personal level.
Your version of democracy is actually what Thomas Jefferson would have called a "Republic". He wanted all government to be extremely local, to the extent that you actually personally knew the people you were voting for, and you could see them on a near-daily basis.
Bakunin discusses this a bit in that essay(but it is near the bottom, not sure if you got that far).
If you want to do a "search", go to "Here then is a society already divided into two categories".
Jefferson wanted to fix this tendency to develop classes and centralize power and to run up massive debts to be repaid by future generations, by having government basically "reset" every generation.
So why didn't it happen? Simple, because a government that constantly reset itself doesn't allow for long-term investments in things like infrastructure necessary for the development of an industrial economy. In fact, some projects could take a generation just to build before they even become valuable.
Then of course there is the problem of a military. Jefferson and Rousseau believed in arming the people and forming militias powerful enough to stand up to a regular Army. Which might have worked in the 1700's, but with nukes and tanks and planes and bombs and drones, militias as a basis for national defense just looks like suicide.
In short, centralization is more-powerful than decentralization.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winterfall8324
Where I do see myself disagreeing with you is in possibility. Yes, states, as the essay suggests, are formed from power and wish to retain that power, but while power can not be eliminated, it can be controlled through natural means.
If you look at societies before modern times (even early agrarian societies for the most part) goods were not able to be stored, and as such could not be accumulated. People then formed groups, provided for each other freely, and all mutually benefited from it.
My main hope from your reading of Bakunin, was for you to see that the entire history of the world has been shaped by power, not ideology. Everything which has ever been done in human history, at least on a large-scale, was driven by power.
But power doesn't necessarily mean something nefarious. Power could simply mean, the power to preserve oneself in the face of a grave threat.
So when we discuss pre-civilization, and things like communal living, socialization, sharing, egalitarianism, or our tendency to protect children and the weak, these exist because of "Darwinian-selection" since we live in a Darwinian world.
Humans are the most-social creatures on the planet. Because the part of our brain that regulates interpersonal-relationships is the largest of any Ape/Animal. In fact, the "natural" group size for humans is between 100-230(150 average). For our closest cousin the Chimpanzee, their troop size varies from 10-47. And for Gorillas, their average group size is only 10.
Why do humans live in such large groups? Because there is strength in numbers. And things like egalitarianism and protecting the weak, help to maintain the stability of the group.
Inequality makes people unhappy, and often leads to violence. If there is strength in numbers, the tribe which could sustain the most numbers had an advantage over other tribes, so Darwinian-selection favored "socially-desirable" traits.
Where we disagree is on scale. Our slightly more-advanced Chimp brain is not designed to maintain relationships with billions of people. And even worse, human brains are wired to understand who are members of the "in-group" and members of the "out-group"(again for self-preservation).
The in-group in this sense, are members of your family/tribe/etc. Basically, you are wired to "care" more about people closer to you. You obviously "love" your mother much more than a stranger, and are willing to do more for her, to sacrifice more for her. And if you have kids, this feeling should be even stronger.
Human relationships are basically a series of circles. The closest circle is your immediate family, then your extended-family/friends, then people who you see on a daily basis(coworkers, other students, neighbors, etc), people from your church and other organizations, and then it expands outwards to cities, states, countries, etc.
The further you get away from yourself, the less you care about them, and thus the less you are willing to do for them. At some point, you simply aren't willing to do anything for them at all.
The size of the circle varies from person to person. Some people care far more about the people close to them(and kinda wish everyone else would just die, or at least stay out of the way), and some people have larger circles. But what is absolutely true is, you cannot love the entire world, and you cannot love every person equally. And love is the major force which drives people to sacrifice their lives for the benefit of others at no benefit to themselves.
If you don't love the whole world equally, then you will always favor those who you love more.
This is part of why socialists would often raise children communally. To prevent the children from having any more attachment to their own parents than to any other member of the group, and likewise preventing the parents from becoming more attached to their own children as any other child.
But this is so fundamentally unhuman, that it appears to me a form of child-abuse. But what is social-engineering anyway?
My point is, I think you're going up against human-nature itself. And human-nature is just too strong to be overcome(see Soviet-Union).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winterfall8324
And before I move on, it seems I hit another one of Bakunin's point. If a group of people form, would not an individual feel threatened by the greater numbers and want to form their own group breeding conflict? I guess.
That is one of the many flaws of tribal societies, and in retrospect I can see why.
Bakunin is basically saying the same thing as Thomas Hobbes; The only way to prevent the possibility of conflict is to bring everyone under the same authority/system/government(IE a one-world government). Although like you, he wants that government to be more compartmentalized instead of centralized.
But that of course leads to the real problem here. How do you hold together a massive, diverse, and decentralized society? What prevents parts from "breaking-off"(IE secession, independence, etc)?
The heart of our disagreement, is that you sort of presuppose people will voluntarily cooperate once they are made equal-members of a group. On the contrary, I think the natural desire of man is independence, and he cooperates only by force and necessity(fear and greed).
The fact that we even have 320 million people living in this country is quite an amazing feat. But this feat can only be sustained by nearly a million police officers, let-alone the military, national guard, the courts, security guards, etc.
This whole country would disappear from the map in a fortnight without the Police, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc, and it would NEVER come back together again if it did.
And all of the laws in this country, even the worst ones you can imagine, all exist to prevent conflict, thus maintaining stability. Then other government policies/regulations help to drive/facilitate economic-growth(eg infrastructure-spending, central bank, subsidies, protections, etc).
There was a quote I read many years ago, I can never find it though. It was a few years prior to WWI, and people were wrapped up in this concept of human progress and technological advancement. Many believed that European countries would never war with each other ever again, and that basically "globalism" was the inevitable future.
There was one guy who basically argued that civilization is far more fragile than it seems. And that civilization could devolve into barbarism much quicker than anyone seemed to realize. A few years later, WWI happened, which seemed to be a war about nothing, and everyone shook their heads in disbelief, but no one thought it could ever happen again.
Then of course, just a couple decades after that, the most-barbaric war in human history.
All of this that we call civilization could all be gone, just like the Roman Empire, and it wouldn't take much.
Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about the collapse of the Roman Empire? Good thing or bad thing? And before you answer, look at this picture.
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