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The Insect Court posted:You need only look to the history of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution to realize just how wrong that sort of relativism is and what a monster Mao was. Mao was a monster, so was Chiang. He just had less people to inflict terror on. Read a book. Or at least a Wikipedia article.
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Aug 19, 2015 15:09
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the white mans burden
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Aug 19, 2015 15:19
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vintagepurple posted:On the subject of building railroads and poo poo, I've been told in layman discussions that the infrastructure built in the colonies was primarily built either for military purposes or to move goods to the coast, and thus pretty unhelpful for the actual inhabitants of the various colonies. Is this broadly true? It was export-orientated infrastructure to support local agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Why do you hate export-orientated economic development? Like, it's not broadly true, as those inhabitants would be unemployed without appropriate efficiency in their sector.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:17
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Hair Is Spiders posted:You are partially right. this argument might work better in a thread that's about Every Bad Thing Done By People Ever and not one that is specifically about the evils of the british empire
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Aug 19, 2015 17:37
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Popular Thug Drink posted:this argument might work better in a thread that's about Every Bad Thing Done By People Ever and not one that is specifically about the evils of the british empire So it is ok pointing out that they partook in slavery. But to point out that it was a common practice before Brits even existed and they stopped the practice and actively combat it despite that it is still an accepted thing elsewhere, doesn't count? Ok. We are only allowed to criticize the Brits in this thread. Got it. Anything that points out other countries are guilty of the same crimes or shows they have the ability to recognize a terrible thing, stop it, and work to end it in other parts of the world isn't. Shut up.
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Aug 20, 2015 01:33
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Stopping doing a very bad thing is not a good thing, it is merely no longer a bad thing that you are doing the bad thing. You don't get praise for deciding not to take a massive poo poo all over human dignity today, you get moved a notch down on the poo poo list, if you're lucky.
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Aug 20, 2015 01:38
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OwlFancier posted:Stopping doing a very bad thing is not a good thing, it is merely no longer a bad thing that you are doing the bad thing. Actually yes it might be. Making these comparative judgements is how we deal with real life.
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Aug 20, 2015 03:04
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OwlFancier posted:Stopping doing a very bad thing is not a good thing, it is merely no longer a bad thing that you are doing the bad thing. They did stop doing the bad thing, however the British then paid out a ridiculously huge sum of money to the poor, poor former slaveowners. Anyway, I don't really see what point is made by talking about the shittiness of slavery throughout history when the thread is specifically about people playing down the ill effects of the British empire, which was built on the back of slaves. In fact it's a classic rhetorical strategy to play down the badness of [Specific Instance of Bad Thing] by saying 'well, that's been done before lots' in order to imply that the specific instance's badness is somehow lessened.
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Aug 20, 2015 03:17
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asdf32 posted:Actually yes it might be. Making these comparative judgements is how we deal with real life. I hope your real life doesn't involve choosing between the evils of imperialism and the evils of anything else. TBH when you get right down to it i don't think there's much of a difference between strapping indians to cannon barrels and firing and, say, scaphism.
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Aug 20, 2015 10:16
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Baron Corbyn posted:Mao was a monster, so was Chiang. He just had less people to inflict terror on. Read a book. Or at least a Wikipedia article. The difference is that Chiang was mostly interested in purging any and all political opposition to himself Mao wanted that, but on top of that he wanted to radically transform society based on half-baked ideas that weren't very well thought out. And he demanded that the average person actively participate in it or else. So Mao does some stupid poo poo like ordering all the sparrows in the country be killed because he thought they were eating grain but surprise surprise. The sparrows kept the locust population in check and because the sparrows got killed in some mass movement the locust population bloomed and ate all the crops and millions of people starved to death. At the end of the day cold war era right wing dictatorships were evil but at least they weren't overly ambitious and fucks with you mostly if you were political, Communist regimes will gently caress with you no matter what.
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Aug 20, 2015 10:59
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might be wasted effort, but I caution against generalizing on moral monsterhood and the Platonic nature of communism/imperialism just to answer the relatively narrow question posed by the OP as to why the British legacy is more subject to sympathetic interpretation I would suggest looking outside the US/former white dominions and its Niall-Fergusonian spin on such revisionism, for one thing. Presumably there are reasons for the unpopularity of the institutional British imperial legacy in Britain, relative to parts of the third world: 
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Aug 20, 2015 11:26
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asdf32 posted:Actually yes it might be. Making these comparative judgements is how we deal with real life. It does. In other news government is bad therefore I don't want government. You want government?! Oppressor! It's an utter waste of time to pretend morals are absolutes.
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Aug 20, 2015 14:00
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TomViolence posted:British imperial revisionism is a lot like pardoning a serial rapist because he was nice enough to wear a condom. There seems to be (among the British nationalists I've had the immense displeasure of talking to) a subset of apologists that still rationalise it with some twist on the old White Man's Burden argument. Britain built roads or railroads or whatever, Britain saved Greece's relics from being plundered by the Turks, etc. The other school of thought among such morons is that everyone else was just as ruthless and nobody's hands were clean, which I guess is a fair point, you know, unless you're actually saying our empire was still something to be proud of -- as these people invariably are. It's the same kind of mindset that comes into play whenever you bring up abolishing the monarchy. They make a big deal about continuity and tradition and even such trivial hurdles as changing the name from "United Kingdom" to "United Republic" or whatever, all while missing the point that we should be breaking with the past and going forward, instead of clinging to regressive, archaic nonsense that shackles us to our inglorious history as the world's abuser-in-chief. Such people's worldview and sense of identity must be so empty that robbing them of their pride in empire and monarchy leaves them with nothing. Britain is pretty hosed though. How do break with the past if your country has no future except further decline as the oligarchs suck out the last blood from the withered husk of a once dominant power and leave it to blow away in the wind? The same capitalist forces that created the British Empire are now destroying the British nation. This is a country so hosed that Margaret Thatcher got her policies through under a literal slogan of "There is No Alternative". That was really her slogan--we're going to gently caress you because we can and nobody can stop us. They will cling to the past until the end because only poverty, despair, and the unraveling of the union lie in their future. The Scotland referendum is only the beginning. The British are going to be reminiscing over the empire for a long, long time. After all, there is no alternative but to face the inexorable logic of neoliberalism, exposed and helpless, as it destroys your country while you can only watch and take your pick among neoliberal parties with identical views. E: The feeling that there is still a future to look forward to, that things can still get better, is important to hold back reactionism. What happened to Germany after WWII might have been objectively worse but it seems to have lacked the utter hopelessness of the post-WWI era and that held back the return of fascism. If they had gone forward with the Morgenthau Plan there probably would have been a permanent far-right insurgency. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 15:06
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nuzak posted:I hope your real life doesn't involve choosing between the evils of imperialism and the evils of anything else. TBH when you get right down to it i don't think there's much of a difference between strapping indians to cannon barrels and firing and, say, scaphism. Um, well, I'd say it's a lot quicker and less painful a death (and was invented by the Mughals, not Britain). I don't know that it's any worse than hanging or guillotining someone.
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Aug 20, 2015 16:38
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Hair Is Spiders posted:So it is ok pointing out that they partook in slavery. But to point out that it was a common practice before Brits even existed and they stopped the practice and actively combat it despite that it is still an accepted thing elsewhere, doesn't count? i think only criticizing brit imperialists or other contemporary imperialists in the british imperialism thread is a pretty decent and sensible rule, you may disagree you know what was worse than british imperialism? dinosaurs eating their young. what can be worse than that. the british weren't so bad, if you compare it to a screeching demon bird devouring eggs. also rose kennedy was lobotomized, that was awful as well
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Aug 20, 2015 17:07
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Britain is also currently an incredibly undemocratic nation, preventing its voters from influencing its own political parties. Parliament tells the people when they wish to hold elections. And Brits just scurry about and allow character assassination of its prophets.
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Aug 20, 2015 17:08
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the people who like to promote British imperialism in Britain are, to nobody's shock, often Tory Monday Clubbish right-wingers outside of Britain - since this isn't the British Imperialism thread, but the As Compared To German/Japanese Revisionism thread - there are contexts in which e.g., the use of English in South India stands in defiance to the prospect of Hindi domination. I pointed out earlier that sympathetic revision of Japanese conquest likewise takes place in Taiwan, as a rejection of the dominant KMT narrative (which claims the historical role as liberator from Japanese occupation). But Taiwan is small. Most countries do not have domestic political faultlines that favour a pro-Japanese revision as part of their political binaries. But the former non-white-dominion Empire is huge, and it is often the case that legacy of empire is politicized. Factions claim legitimacy from their historical antecedents as independence leaders (even if it meant negotiating an exit on British terms), on defending certain desirable aspects of the postwar colonial legacy (liberal democracy, universal suffrage, multiethnic coexistence....), or on successfully maintaining infrastructure or institutions from the era of empire (highway systems, universities, high schools...). Counter-factions dispute these claims. Regardless, the claim enters the zeitgeist, and (this being an idealized postwar legacy against the grubbiness of actual electioneering) tends to position the Britishized, cosmopolitan position on the liberal, reformist side of politics. So: the claim becomes acceptable. e: Nonsense posted:Britain is also currently an incredibly undemocratic nation, preventing its voters from influencing its own political parties... man, what. if Britain is undemocratic, are there any democratic nations on the planet?
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Aug 20, 2015 17:25
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The Tories seem to understand democratic systems amongst its own peers a whole lot better than the nerds who think they deserve unlimited Blairite power, rather than bloody disemboweling wedgies.
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Aug 20, 2015 17:30
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Britain didn't just stop engaging in the slave trade, they actively fought to suppress the slave trade after they made it illegal. Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. It doesn't excuse the years of slave trading they engaged in beforehand, but it's certainly a moral act that deserves more credit than simply ending involvement with slaving would.
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Aug 20, 2015 17:40
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in Britain at least, internal party democracy is very much a product of the neoliberal era - forcing one-member-one-vote onto the Labour Party (which you may have heard of as the end of the union bloc vote) was a Blair faction priority it is relatively alien to Britain, historically speaking (as compared to eg West Germany). Westminster's strong whip and separation of MP responsibilities from constituency administration is not especially friendly to internal party democracy. Ideologically, Labour shuttled between assorted kinds of vanguardism or worker-managment philosophies before the neoliberal individualism evident in OMOV triumphed.
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Aug 20, 2015 17:44
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It demonstrates that you have no clue what revisionism actually is. Hint: It's how History happens. You take the old position or narrative and you revise it. Usually adding new evidence, or a different perspective, or a new methodology. There's an actual term for the discourse this creates that I assume you don't know, historiography. The history of the British Empire and post-colonialism aren't my specialty, but my understanding is that in the case of british imperialism, 'revisionism' is based on adding new voices to the discourse. ie the people the colonized. Or analysis of old evidence that is more nuanced than "we built those darkies some schools, aren't they lucky". German/Japanese 'revisionism' is based on pretending historical evidence does not exist in order to create a fictional narrative that wouldpretend they did nothing wrong. So one is based on evidence, and is productive and useful. The other is not. Edit: Whoops sorry, confused you with someone else OP. Either way, evidence based revisionism is good. Halman fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 18:17
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Halman posted:OP this is your second bullshit thread about ~revisionism~. This seems fairly unlikely given I've made one thread in D&D. Halman posted:The history of the British Empire and post-colonialism aren't my specialty, but my understanding is that in the case of british imperialism, 'revisionism' is based on adding new voices to the discourse. ie the people the colonized. Or analysis of old evidence that is more nuanced than "we built those darkies some schools, aren't they lucky". There are positive and negative forms of revisionism, that is true, and I considered choosing the word negationism to be more exact (I didn't because people don't really know it and the word revisionism has acquired the same meaning in popular language). However, the idea that only the positive form of revisionism is compatible with the British Empire and only the negative form is compatible with the German/Japanese empires is innately wrong and the fact that you believe this proves the point I've been making. There are plenty of examples of revisionism about the British empire that can be described as negationist. The idea that no one has ever presented false historical evidence about the British empire (or destroyed it, repeatedly, in the British government's case) to justify a pro-British narrative is innately wrong. The most famous example of British negationism would be our attempts to downplay the death toll of the Kenyan concentration camps, but similar attempts at denying the statistical evidence have been made for almost all of our major crimes. One difference I will accept between German and British attempts to reimagine their histories is that people who defend the British empire often simply ignore the facts rather than attempt to disprove them. George Monbiot has an interesting article about this http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities. lmaoboy1998 fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 18:55
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lmaoboy1998 posted:This seems fairly unlikely given I've made one thread in D&D. Yeah, sorry about that. I confused you with someone else, in the awful thread about "indefensible Hiroshima revisionism", and was a bit more negative than I meant to be. quote:There are positive and negative forms of revisionism, that is true, and I considered choosing the word negationism to be more exact (I didn't because people don't really know it and the word revisionism has acquired the same meaning in popular language). However, the idea that only the positive form of revisionism is compatible with the British Empire and only the negative form is compatible with the German/Japanese empires is innately wrong and the fact that you believe this proves the point I've been making. In the context you presented, and how people generally understand revisionism, yes? The emphasis, to me, is what the 'revisionist'/negationist position is refuting that seems especially important in this instance. For the british empire, they would be refuting or ignoring actual evidence challenging the grand narrative. For Germany and Japan, they're refuting the grand narrative itself. And I did not say that revising the grand narrative re: Germany/Japan is innately wrong. But rather that negationism in that instance is largely nationalists refuting the evidence based grand narrative. Something like Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, which presents a pretty humane picture of a bunch of reserve policemen who were sent to eastern europe to shoot jews and other 'undesirables', is in fact increadibly good and useful and is still a revisionist position. Negationism pretty much always bullshit. Because you're just looking at evidence and going 'nuh uh' quote:There are plenty of examples of revisionism about the British empire that can be described as negationist. The idea that no one has ever presented false historical evidence about the British empire (or destroyed it, repeatedly, in the British government's case) to justify a pro-British narrative is innately wrong. I don't think I said that no one ever lied to support the grand narrative. I said that revisionism of the pro-British grand narrative is, in my understanding, usually evidence based. Presenting false evidence, in support of either the grand narrative or the counter narrative, is bad. quote:The most famous example of revisionism is probably our attempts to downplay the death toll of the Kenyan concentration camps, but similar attempts at denying the statistical evidence have been made for almost all of our major crimes. Again, this is way outside my focus, but my understanding is that people doing actual academic history aren't really white-washing British Imperialism. Outside of shitstains like Niall Ferguson anyway, and usually their attempts to do so aren't really taken seriously outside of the handful of them who all agree with eachother. Collective Memory (I think this may be more what you're talking about, based on a quick glance through of that article), on the other hand, is an entirely different ball game and honestly the grand narrative in collective memory often has only a passing familiarity with the truth. The problem is that you simply cannot negate the extant collective memory no matter how great the weight of evidence, Memory has its own kind of inertia and larger changes to public understanding are incremental at best.
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Aug 20, 2015 20:10
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Typo posted:The difference is that Chiang was mostly interested in purging any and all political opposition to himself Of course there weren't tens of millions of those in China.
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Aug 20, 2015 20:11
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If the British hadn't made all these inroads imagine how much of a pain it would've been to establish our American Empire? Ungrateful colonists!
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Aug 20, 2015 20:16
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America threw off the yolk of british colonial oppression too.
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Aug 20, 2015 20:51
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Any statements regarding Britain's activities against the slave trade in Africa have to also be weighed against the British expansion and manipulation of traditional corvée systems in Africa that persisted well into the 20th century as means of raising a free labour force for colonial construction projects, murder and violence where routinely used by traditional chiefs acting as administration proxies to force compliance - with the British keeping the system at arms length while profiting immensely from forced labour especially in East Africa. Considering that the destruction of the slave trade was the official reason for the continued expansion of such colonial projects as Leopold's Free State I think it pays to approach any continuation of this narrative immensely sceptically.
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Aug 20, 2015 21:08
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Britain also used forced labor in its colonies in other forms than chattel slavery during the 1800s very regularly, usually through debt peonage, a common technique in colonies throughout the world.
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Aug 21, 2015 00:52
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lmaoboy1998 posted:One difference I will accept between German and British attempts to reimagine their histories is that people who defend the British empire often simply ignore the facts rather than attempt to disprove them. George Monbiot has an interesting article about this http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities Monbiot reaches too far for an explanation. Kenya did not raise the issue because successor governments achieved independence through negotiations and were dominated by people who collaborated with the British. Furthermore, since the exit was on palatable British terms, London itself continued to have an interest in maintaining the new status quo. Therefore, there are obvious reasons why the triumphant Kenyatta administration - led by a Mau Mau rebellion leader, no less - would avoid raising the issue:    When you are asking the RAF to scout your own nationalist rebels and the RN to intimidate your domestic political rivals, you can hardly talk up a storm about shared suffering in a colonial prison. ronya fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 02:25
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Typo posted:
"if you were political" was basically dissatisfaction with toiling in countries stuck in 1920's life conditions with barely any kind of hope for education, social mobility or work conditions, yeah. By the time Mao died child mortality rates were lower than India's child mortality rates in 2005. India's considered a bastion of neoliberal success while Mao's China, even with the literal millions of dead in the great famine and the cultural revolution, is demonized while factually improving the life conditions of more than half a billion people in ways that virtually no other third world country ignoring Yugoslavia ever did.
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Aug 21, 2015 03:07
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Until 1990 India was the bastion of Nehruvian socialism (detailed five year plans and all) and the License Raj, not neoliberalism of course, until 1990 being non-Soviet was enough to qualify one as part of the "free world", so YMMV. ronya fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 03:10
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Mans posted:"if you were political" was basically dissatisfaction with toiling in countries stuck in 1920's life conditions with barely any kind of hope for education, social mobility or work conditions, yeah. quote:By the time Mao died child mortality rates were lower than India's child mortality rates in 2005. India's considered a bastion of neoliberal success while Mao's China, even with the literal millions of dead in the great famine and the cultural revolution, is demonized while factually improving the life conditions of more than half a billion people in ways that virtually no other third world country ignoring Yugoslavia ever did. India 1950s-1990s was a Socialist country, it says more about Nehru-style Socialism more then anything else.
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Aug 21, 2015 03:24
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it's absolutely ridiculous to say that you would get shot on sight for slight dissent in post war eastern bloc while in spain or portugal you'd get shot if you protested if you had no bread to eat. Also universal healthcare, education, public transportation, decent work conditions and life quality compared to living in a feudal world that had the priviledge of having m16s and F86 Sabres like in South America. Authoritarian, highly militarized and paranoid are words that can easily describe the eastern bloc but they brought massive economic, social and technological development that was hardly seen compared to the general right wing dictatorships whose main job was to keep things still. it's also ridiculous to compare China or Vietnam, who had to deal with decades of brutal warfare and then had to develop with virtually no foreign aid while constantly dealing with conspiracies and sabotage from former colonial powers with right wing dictatorships who massacred anyone who slightly interfered in their attempts to stop time while receving endless western support. Cuba had to deal with naval blocades, air bombings, amphibious landings and endless assassination attempts and sabotage by the U.S., the military junta in Brazil had to deal with peasants and workers who wanted their country to be more than an exporter of coffee and milk. Completely baseless comparisons that are also used as apologism for colonialism, like the British using the local agressive behavior as justification to use their own violence, ignoring that the first is defending their territory from outside invasion while the later is simply invading. ronya posted:Until 1990 India was the bastion of Nehruvian socialism (detailed five year plans and all) and the License Raj, not neoliberalism the point is that by the time Mao died China already had life quality and conditions that similar nations like India never managed to obtain up until the last decade, and in India's case at the cost of massive chronic unemployment misery and starvation, which makes the narrative that Mao's rule was a rule of misery baseless looking at the progressive drop of various death rates and increase of life conditions and even food security. Suharto or Pol Pot(whose movement was supported by the west and post-Mao China even after they were taken from power by evil puritan vietnamese ~~socialists~~) were much bigger and genocidal monsters than Mao, whose tallies were only lower because they didn't have the land to massacre that Mao had. Chiang Kai-Sheg would've done exactly that in China had he won. Mao was the best choice assuming zombie Sun Yat-sen couldn't reach power.
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Aug 21, 2015 04:15
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I don't think an Oppression Olympics between Franco's Spain and the GDR is at all illuminating, but I'm also not sure how you are drawing the conclusion that the postwar boom was limited to the Soviet bloc I am not sure food security is the card you want to play with regards to Mao, at least relative to the starker benefits of abrupt birthrate controls on infant mortality
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Aug 21, 2015 06:52
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JeffersonClay posted:Britain didn't just stop engaging in the slave trade, they actively fought to suppress the slave trade after they made it illegal. Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. Hmmm.... I wonder what's special about the period of time between 1808 and 1860....
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Aug 21, 2015 09:30
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Mans posted:it's absolutely ridiculous to say that you would get shot on sight for slight dissent in post war eastern bloc while in spain or portugal you'd get shot if you protested if you had no bread to eat. Also universal healthcare, education, public transportation, decent work conditions and life quality compared to living in a feudal world that had the priviledge of having m16s and F86 Sabres like in South America. Authoritarian, highly militarized and paranoid are words that can easily describe the eastern bloc but they brought massive economic, social and technological development that was hardly seen compared to the general right wing dictatorships whose main job was to keep things still. See North Korea and South Korea, or Singapore. At the same time, the issue is with people who -don't- protest, Communism wants you to participate in communization of agriculture or the lynching your co-workers or what have you lest you get lynched yourself. Right wing regimes are less ambitious about their social programs, and hence you don't get that to the same degree quote:it's also ridiculous to compare China or Vietnam, who had to deal with decades of brutal warfare and then had to develop with virtually no foreign aid while constantly dealing with conspiracies and sabotage from former colonial powers with right wing dictatorships who massacred anyone who slightly interfered in their attempts to stop time while receving endless western support. Cuba had to deal with naval blocades, air bombings, amphibious landings and endless assassination attempts and sabotage by the U.S., the military junta in Brazil had to deal with peasants and workers who wanted their country to be more than an exporter of coffee and milk. Completely baseless comparisons that are also used as apologism for colonialism, like the British using the local agressive behavior as justification to use their own violence, ignoring that the first is defending their territory from outside invasion while the later is simply invading. quote:the point is that by the time Mao died China already had life quality and conditions that similar nations like India never managed to obtain up until the last decade, and in India's case at the cost of massive chronic unemployment misery and starvation, which makes the narrative that Mao's rule was a rule of misery baseless looking at the progressive drop of various death rates and increase of life conditions and even food security. Suharto or Pol Pot(whose movement was supported by the west and post-Mao China even after they were taken from power by evil puritan vietnamese ~~socialists~~) were much bigger and genocidal monsters than Mao, whose tallies were only lower because they didn't have the land to massacre that Mao had. Chiang Kai-Sheg would've done exactly that in China had he won. Also Sun Yat-Sen is the person everyone thinks is the best precisely because he died very early on, so everyone can project their hopes onto him. In reality he probably would have being a moderate leader at best. Typo fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 09:40
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I peeked into this thread and am absolutely astounded to hear people defending the British Empire. You walked into places and machine-gunned all the people to death until they were your subjects, then you set about enslaving them, selling drugs to them, or stealing their poo poo. You don't get a loving gold star just because you built some roads while you were there.
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Aug 21, 2015 09:53
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Sergg posted:I peeked into this thread and am absolutely astounded to hear people defending the British Empire. OTOH nobody is surprised that people are defending Mao
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Aug 21, 2015 09:55
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Typo posted:OTOH nobody is surprised that people are defending Mao Mao is quite possibly the most incompetent leader that China has ever had in living memory. Hurf durf, let's plant crops twice as close together and twice as deep, we'll double agricultural output! Don't get me wrong, Chiang Kai-Shek was no picnic either, but Mao's mistakes are cringeworthy. EDIT: Seriously I'm scratching my head here trying to think of a worse leader than Mao. Yuan Shikai? The Wang Jingwei puppet government under the Japanese? He was basically a fool bumbling around in the dark and would have been hopelessly lost without Zhou Enlai holding his hand and basically carrying him every step of the way. Sergg fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 10:34
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To be fair to Mao he was an excellent politician, he was sidelined from power after the whole "millions starved to death" thing, but managed clawed his way back to absolute power and had red guards physically beat the poo poo out of his political opponents. But when it came to administration and actually running the entire country he was pretty much the worst case study for Dunning-Kruger effect ever If Yuan Shikai had the political skill of Mao pretty much everything bad with Chinese history 1919-1970s probably would have being averted Typo fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 10:49
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