Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TimeGhost History"
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I think that depends on the context. If your political goal is, say, to free your country from a military occupation that is itself established through violence, sometimes violence is the only means to accomplish that. This is something that I think Gandhi and King were wrong about - they both had the luxury of having opponents that, however brutal they could be in their systems of control, had to operate in the larger context of more or less liberal democracies. They were wrong in thinking the policeman will always tire of beating his victim - what happened with both of their movements is that the people back home were repelled by the policeman's brutality and eventually refused to countenance it any longer. The SS and NKVD are perfect examples of how, with the backing of a like-minded (usually totalitarian) government, it is sadly very easy to build a police force that will never tire of beating its victims, or indeed of murdering them, until it runs out of victims to murder.
Ireland probably could have been freed without violence, but as pointed out above, the disproportionate violence of the British response to Irish nationalism convinced many Irish people who had previously not supported the IRA that the British would never give up control of Ireland unless they were forced to, and violence was the only means of forcing them. The execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising was probably the most important British action in this context, but bringing in heavy artillery to level downtown Dublin in response to a few hundred ragtag, badly-armed, an largely unsupported rebels didn't help much with public opinion either.
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"William of Normandy did rule the region as a vassal of the French King"
That is... complicated. As was feudalism. You could rule one territory as the vassal of one overlord, and another as the vassal of a different overlord, and yet another as vassal to no one. So while William was a vassal of the French king as Duke of Normandy, he was not a vassal of the French king as King of England. However, the French king could force him to do homage in the former capacity, and when it came to a war between the French and English crowns it got downright ugly.
It got even more complicated later when the Count of Anjou, who was also Duke of Normandy, became the first Plantagenet King of England. And then his descendants inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine from their mother, and later still inherited the French throne according to English, but not French, inheritance law. Positively messy, it was.
Free farmers in Anglo-Saxon England were not as poor or oppressed as you might imagine, although they certainly became more so after the Norman conquest. How much that was due to the conquest is still hotly debated.
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If you're going to discuss the origins of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, it borders on the criminal to exclude the crucial fact that in the wake of WW2 the US and UK underwent a massive demobilization while the USSR did not - sources vary, but in 1948 the US Army probably had approximately 400,000 soldiers while the Soviet Red Army still had something like 4 million. You speak of, for example, confrontations in Berlin as if these confrontations were on anything remotely approaching an equal basis militarily, which is absolutely contrary to fact. For the US, nuclear weapons were seen as a relatively inexpensive way to balance out this massive Soviet conventional military superiority. This policy continued throughout the Eisenhower administration: conventional US forces were built up substantially after the outbreak of the Korean War, but never to anything approaching the level of Soviet forces until the Vietnam War escalation. NATO was another part of the western response to this massive Soviet military establishment, the largest peacetime military force in the history of the planet.
This becomes particularly important in looking at the Cuban missile crisis. Less informed observers will point to the US superiority in nuclear warheads, and the deployment of land-based nuclear missiles in places like Turkey with the ability to strike the USSR, and say the US was overreacting because the missiles in Cuba weren't doing anything the US wasn't already doing to the Soviets. But this ignores the larger strategic context in which these weapons were deployed. No world leaders in 1962 saw nuclear weapons solely in terms of a nuclear exchange trying to wipe out the other's cities; they were assets in a much larger and more complex strategic picture. Specifically, the US nuclear threat was seen primarily as a deterrent to Soviet use of their massive conventional superiority to overrun western Europe. NATO didn't have the conventional military capacity to invade eastern Europe, while the USSR and the Warsaw Pact didn't dare invade western Europe for fear of provoking nuclear retaliation; thus, there was a stalemate in which neither side had much to gain by starting a war.
Putting missiles in Cuba or anywhere else that gave the USSR a substantial capacity to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike changed the situation dramatically. The threat Kennedy and the military planners feared from this wasn't a Soviet first strike (which still would have been suicidal), it was that by making Soviet retaliation a serious threat it removed NATO's nuclear deterrent from the table in the scenario of a conventional war in Europe, and thus gave the Soviets a free hand to launch such an invasion if they chose without having to worry about a nuclear response. Put simply, Soviet missiles in Cuba made the threat of a massive conventional war in Europe much more likely than it was in the absence of those missiles.
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