Re: Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)
That seems improbable: Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person subject to his control had to participate. A subject of Qin, like a subject of Mao, was more aware of Qin, than he was of his mother and father.
You are apparently simply unaware of the real size and terrain of China. There were villages in remote parts of China that were unaware of Mao's death into the early 1980s. Travel around in China for a while and you'll get the picture. Just to give you an idea, short of renting out a helicopter, there are plenty of parts of China that are more than a week away from even me, living here in NYC.
The proposition that the chinese emperors ruled with a light hand is historical revisionism. Some of them ruled with a moderately heavy hand, some of them with an extremely heavy hand, and Qin was as heavy as it gets
No, as usual you seem to think that because I disagree with the simplicity of your "grid" that I must believe the opposite. Let's put it this way: The Qin was absolutely despotic in areas that could be guessed at ("Burn Books Kill Scholars"), as well as quite despotic in areas that would seem pointless now (like bell volumes, because bells were also measurements for grain). They also completely didn't care about other things that you would think a despot would really care about. A thing to think about was that Qin Shr Huang seemed to truly believe that everything he did was necessary for the unification of China (which he accomplished). YOU (not me) might argue that by unifying a large portion of central China he actually prevented a lot more deaths due to "Barbarian" incursion by "Unfree and uncivilized" Muslims...OOPS--Did I say that? I mean "Unfree and backward people that should be killed". -TD
I did not pack them in to one simplistic grid - I said that legalism was much the same thing as communism/nazism, whereas Confucianism is a mixture of that, and also of rule by social conservatives. The rule of Qin was very similar to commie nazi rule. The rule of Qianlong was substantially different. Both were despots, but Qianlong was no totalitarian.
--digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG k6s+2bFmGHKlU9v6wCbmGCo+6m4eAEfjtEfJ3b3W 4EcgDCvx/77or2uD2Vhx/20HURcJ8XVeRylOk8puI
-- James A. Donald:
Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person subject to his control had to participate. A subject of Qin, like a subject of Mao, was more aware of Qin, than he was of his mother and father.
Tyler Durden:
You are apparently simply unaware of the real size and terrain of China. There were villages in remote parts of China that were unaware of Mao's death into the early 1980s.
Bullshit. Everyone knew that which the regime decided they must know. And if true, which I very much doubt, you are not only arguing that Qin's legalism was a different thing than communism/nazism, you are also arguing that Mao's communism was a different thing than Stalin's communism. It was a lot harder to get to Afghanistan from Moscow than to get to any place in China from Peking, yet every Afghan child knew in painfully excessive detail what Moscow commanded them to know, and the regime was partially successful in preventing them from knowing what it wished them to not know. When, during the great leap forward, Peking commanded unreasonable grain requisitions from the provinces, *all* provinces contributed, and *all* provinces suffered starvation. It is often said that Mao's famine was an unfortunate accident, while Stalin's famines were intentional, but any differences are merely a matter of greater self deception. Both did the same things for the same reasons, but Stalin justified his actions by anti peasant rhetoric - "liquidation of the kulaks", whereas Mao justified his action by pro peasant rhetoric, but this is a mere difference in the emphasis in the rationalizations and propaganda, not any difference in means and ends. Both used ruthless terror to establish extraordinary control over a far flung empire that had formerly been ruled by relatively light hand, and then used that extraordinary control to extort extraordinary resources from the peasantry. The difference between Stalin's frequent references to the poor peasants (who were supposedly carrying out the liquidation of the kulaks in revolutionary zeal) and Mao's similar references is merely that Mao was more thorough in creating the simulation of a mass movement. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG xGYJrVMJ5Hx9Dgyly/Lt7Vk6TKJAugVqAcp3+7mq 4rvMXJ51mdk2UqHkU40M50T9s5aAMzX99JW0hQGT/
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Tyler Durden