-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 14:29, Tyler Durden wrote:
OK, Mr Donald. You clearly imagine the China of 2,500 years ago to operate like a modern 20th century nation-state. You need to rethink this, given a few simple facts:
My delusion is evidently widely shared: I did a google search for legalism. http://tinyurl.com/56n2m The first link, and many of the subsequent links, equated legalism with totalitarianism, or concluded that legalism resulted in totalitarianism.
1. There were no telephones during Confucious' time.
Pol Pot's goons mostly murdered people by killing them with a hoe, and mostly tortured people with burning sticks. Does this make Pol Pot's Cambodia not a modern nation state? What made the Ch'in empire a modern despotism was total centralized control of everything, and a multitude of regulations with drastic penalties for non compliance. Telephones are irrelevant. It was the liberal use of the death penalty for non compliance, not the telephone, that made it centralized.
2. Several provinces of China are larger than all of Western Europe. Even a very high-priority message could take months to propagate. 3. "Control' of China 2500 years ago was almost nonexistent.
When a provincial commander marched fresh conscripts from place A to place B, he would do it in the time alloted, and be there on the date specified, or the Ch'in emperor would cut his head off. It is the cut-his-head off bit, and the minute and overly detailed instructions concocted by a far away bureaucracy, that made it a modern totalitarianism. Analogously, in the recent war, Iraqi troops failed to blow several bridges because they had to wait for orders from Saddam. Wireless and telephone did not help.
It was a geographically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse set of quasi-nation-states.
So was the Soviet empire.
"Law" in early China was NOTHING like what you imagine it to be, and was a higly decentralized affair.
So was Stalin's Soviet Empire, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, in the highly unusual sense of "decentralized" that commie/nazis use. Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, decentralized in that they had twenty thousand separate killing fields, but was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly centralized in that the man digging a ditch dug it along a line drawn by a man far away who had never seen the ground that was being dug. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG kIKFSkaq39tHojTf6+FAu2WFT3X6iHJMyTUNi7kx 4kLyg7PvSEfnbAOwjYFVGCmxNpP52VH6X9inrj6cM