Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)

[James A. Donald]

    --
James A. Donald:
> > 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.

Tyler Durden
> Well, this was difficult given that there were probably a
> good number of Qin Shr Huang's 'subjects' that didn't even
> know they were subjects until well after Qin Shr Huang died.

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.

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.

> However, the nature, reasons, and byproducts of any
> particular instance of despotism very hugely...trying to pack
> them all into one simplistic grid is a formula for.

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. 

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         James A. Donald
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