Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Jabzy" channel.

  1. I get the feeling that China, as a whole, is a bolted-together empire in haphazard way. Much the same as the Roman Empire as i recall, with the similar requirement of a charismatic imperial dictatorship to hold it together.
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  2. Because war is good for the armaments business. The loosers are the dead, wounded and dispossessed. The winners are politicians, generals and armament manufacturers including engineers.
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  3. There were a few modern equipped regiments in late Qing China; full compliment of rifles for each company and adequate training and discipline. However, these "elite" troops were very much in the minority in the Qing army as a whole, which were mostly a motley collection of adventurers and scoundrels without fire-power.
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  4. The same quote about Japanese propaganda concocting a fiction about their puppet state; Manchukuo, and is not very appealing or convincing. A similar conclusion can be levelled at propaganda created by all media controlled by the the CCP. The reason is simple; facts on the ground are at odds with the fiction propagated.
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  5. I don't know why Abraham Lincoln refused the Thai king's gift of Asian elephants. They could have released them in Florida; ah oops, that was in the Confederacy.
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  6. Interesting. Chaplin was just an interested spectator of horrendous events going on in Japan then, but his visit was obviously out of cultural interest in Japan. As a Western film celebrity without diplomic immunity, he was a target of these fanatics in Japan. I've heard of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism in Japan, and the ultranationist offshoots of Nichiren that formented in Japan during the 1920s to 1940s which reversed the fundamental teachings of Buddha, against violence and war. The Nichiren sect was a particularly mystical sect which prophesied certain ages of Buddhism in Japan, without seemingly clear edicts (shrouded in mysticism) or much evidence. The Japan ultranationist fanatics used the vapid nature of Nichiren as a sounding board justification to pursue their own aims of aggressive warlike expansionism in Asia, with lethal assassination attempts at government officials at home in Japan. This Nichiren inspired fanaticism was quite well exposed, albeit in one chapter by the book, "Why God is not great, how religion poisons everything", by the author Christopher Hitchens.
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  7. Seems a lot of nationalities fight wars for other nationalities here, and that is sometimes for far away wars that their governments or nationalities have nothing to do with. Why you would volunteer to do this is another extended question. Even in the nineteenth (and earlier) centuries, you don't need go to war somewhere to travel. Politics is like shifting sand and war is an extension of it by other means (Carl von Clausewitz, "On war").
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  8. Can explode the myth of Han China, by all the minorities this large country has. About time the CCP developed a tolerance or inclusion of these minorities, which i doubt it will ever do except in a token or cosmetic way, which is worse than insulting in my opinion. This system of muticulturalism works better under representative government; universal suffrage and rule of law (independant judiciary).
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  9. .. that is because Hirohito (the Showa Emperor with the ironic title) was managing a backdoor clique of mainly generals and admirals to undermine the policies of the Diet (the Japanese parliament).
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  10. Facinating that the US and Britain saved the bacon of the tottering Qing Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, then later museums of hate against the Opium Wars and westerners (which mainly only affected a few southern Chinese provences at that time) were erected all over China by the CCP, as part of a propaganda narrative to prop-up an ailing feudal system (the Qing) that failed to militarily modernize. Much as in the same way as the Ottoman Empire. I'm not lauding a couple of wars fought mainly over drugs and forcing trading concessions, but really? Come on.
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  11. The background map of China is wrong for this period in history (19th century). The Qing Dynasty were lucky at it's large and unwieldy empire did not split apart (this actually happened in the 1920s during the warlord period). Obviously also too, China was backwards with regards to more advanced military technology and tactics from Europe.
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  12. Peace with permanent warfare. Um, Israel?
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  13. I don't know why Abraham Lincoln refused the Thai king's gift of Asian elephants. They could have released them in Florida; ah oops, that was in the Confederacy.
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