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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 23, 2024 10:45:43 GMT -8
I read the book, but have to admit that I don't remember much about it. I was trying to understand how "Apocalypse Now" could be based on the book. It is probably my least favorite Conrad tale.
I have read other Conrad stories such as this one and The Secret Agent. The latter is probably my favorite of his stories, although Lord Jim touched a chord with me because of my many-year sojourn in S.E. Asia.
I think many readers are fascinated by Conrad due to his being a Pole who wrote English well enough to have his works published in the U.K. and U.S.A.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 23, 2024 21:13:46 GMT -8
I am almost finished with the book, and will say it is better than the Washington book. Perhaps the reason is that I know much more about Washington than I do about the four covered in this book, although I have read biographies on MacArthur and Patton as well as a number of books on WWII. The book would probably be most interesting to someone who is not interested in footnotes and such, i.e. history in depth.
That said, there are some lines which I found got to the roots of much of the miserable American foreign policy is Asia, and The Middle East, since the war.
Truman sent Marshall to China in order to bring about some sort of agreement between the CCP and KMT, i.e. the commies and nationalists. The author writes:
Even from Truman's perspective China was a hornet's nest, but he still couldn't see why Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung's Communists couldn't put aside their differences for the greater good and give democracy a try.
This type of arrogance, which brings on the stupidity of a blithering idiot, is common amongst American provincials in power, who believe everyone in the rest of the the world thinks like the provincials do, and if they don't, they should. Such thinking has caused the world, and America, no end of troubles.
When Marshall arrived, he was told by the American general in charge of US forces in China, Wedemeyer that:
"he would never be able to effect a working agreement between the Communists and the Nationalists"
Of course, Marshall knew better...
"to this admonition Marshall gave short shrift:"I am going to accomplish my mission and you are going to help me."
Marshall met with Chiang and later Zhou En-lai, both of whom "agreed" with the American agenda. :
"Almost magically the cease-fire agreement materialized in early January 1946, and the Political Consultative Council (PCC) began meetings on what appeared to be a constructive note. By February 4, Marshall could report back to Truman that the council and its deliberations resembled our own "Constitutional Convention," and that it was "doing its job well." Shortly thereafter, Marshall could tell Truman the "prospects are favorable for a solution to the most difficult of all problems."
What an idiot. Before he left China, Marshall made the following silly American sports analogy which one heard too often from Americas overseas.
"We have not the authority of an umpire, but we endeavor to interpret the rules and agreements that have been arrived at in Chungking. And baseball goes along with American democracy."
The author correctly notes:
"The problem was these Chinese were interested in neither."
He then notes the very true observation by Chiang that is still true today:
The Americans tend to be naive and trusting." "This is true even with so experienced a man as Marshall."
Chiang was absolutely correct about American naivite'. But many wondered if Marshall's naivite' didn't have more to do with the many leftist in the State Dept. than the "ah shucks" attitude so common amongst the non-coastal elites. Even today, many people believe Marshall "gave away" China.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 24, 2024 6:48:10 GMT -8
Yes, that seems sensible enough. I'd date sci-fi going wrong at about the same time.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 24, 2024 6:53:04 GMT -8
You're not besmirching "religion of peace" George W. Bush, are you? Please tell me you're not.
I suppose one can see it in the context of having already successfully imposed our will on Germany and Japan. But that doesn't happen without a lot of bombs and guns. Mere rhetoric wouldn't move the Chinese. Only bombing them back to the Stone Age might have brought in a more democratic government. Short of that, yes, lots of wishful thinking.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 24, 2024 7:14:16 GMT -8
That will have to remain a mystery, for I'm not going to attempt that book again. Maybe I'll give Lord Jim a try in the future. My list of books that have been scrapped grows. I tried Mary Beard's "Emperor of Rome." It's about Roman emperors, supposedly the real story. But her writing is so hodgepodge, there is no way I can trust her to tell the "real" story. She just sounds like a kook contrarian trying to make a name for herself by defying conventional wisdom (much like those Leftist judges up for nomination who think truth should be parsed out according to the needs of DEI). Perhaps I'm being harsh. Probably not. As one Amazon reviewer wrote:
Remember, I'm making judgments on this books usually withing ten pages or so. I sussed out this one exactly. So why write this book? I think just to join the "published book club" or because it's a way to keep her lips moving. But this book seemed like joining a boring blabbermouth conversation at some party that you just can't wait to escape.
Before that I tried to read Teddy Roosevelt's "The Rough Riders." And if you want to learn about The Rough Riders, you'll probably need to turn to a third party because Teddy's version seems to spend most of his time telling us how everyone was involved was such a good chap. And I'm sure they were. But then I started skipping pages, hoping to get to some action. And skipping some more. I couldn't stay with it. But I would like to read about the subject….just not from the horse's mouth, as it were.
"The Lost Gutenberg" by Margaret Leslie Davis. It took only about five pages to note that this was drivel. There may be some interesting history in there. But I just couldn't stand the "voice" of the writer. It put me off. Too flighty.
But I sample a lot of things. And I'll stay with anything that is reasonably interesting.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 24, 2024 8:18:07 GMT -8
The question arises, "Why is it our business to make another country democratic?" The correct answer is, "It isn't."
On the other hand, I can understand how it would be in our interests to support a non-communist regime/movement over a communist movement. But we didn't do that at the time, and look how a communist China has caused the USA huge trouble over the decades, not to mention the misery it has visited upon the Chinese people.
1) They sent in something like 1 million troops into North Korea just as the U.N. forces were mopping up the Kim Il Sung's forces. This was in 1952 and we still have troops in S. Korea. 2) They were huge supporters of the North Vietnamese during the war. I met a couple of Chinese engineers who fought in the Vietnam War against Americans. 3) They are now causing trouble around Taiwan.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 24, 2024 11:54:09 GMT -8
There are good reasons to resist totalitarian regimes. But the painful irony is that we have troops stationed in Japan, Europe, and South Korea. And yet our southern border is not defended and we did not defend ourselves successfully from the internal communists.
So who knows where this all is going. I watched this video. It's likely riddle with inaccuracies. Arrows can't go through 3 inches of metal, for example. But I really wasn't conversant in the Bronze Age Collapse. But if feels like we're in some kind of collapse now.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jun 24, 2024 16:34:12 GMT -8
The most honest sentence in that video was the last, which went something like, "We really don't know what brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. All we have is theories." Yet they spent the previous 30 minutes with a lot of blah, blah, blah about the subject as if they knew.
What really got my B.S. antenna up was the hint at "climate" as a major reason for the collapse. A three hundred year period of little or no rain? That seemed a little too close to today's "Climate Emergency" narrative.
I have read a fair amount of ancient history and always found the Hittites interesting. The rapid collapse of the powerful Hittite Empire has always been a mystery to the historians I have read. I do not recall ever encountering the claim that the Empire fell because of the Sea Peoples.
That said, the period is interesting and the mystery of exactly who these peoples were is something that keeps historians guessing. Something like the Hyksos who invaded Egypt and ruled part of it for one-or-two-hundred years.
No doubt something happened over a period of a couple of centuries which resulted in a collapse of Eastern Mediterranean societies or power structures. I wonder if we will ever know the real causes.
P.S. I wondered what type of metal the narrator was talking about when he said "an arrow could go through three inches" of it?
Too true.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jun 24, 2024 19:53:20 GMT -8
Aluminum foil?
This is probably a better presentation of The Bronze Age Collapse, Mr. Kung.
The "Sea People" still remain a mystery, although according to Egyptian writings, they were a conglomeration of four different peoples as understood by the Egyptians.
Contributing factors to the collapse were: Drought, massive eruption of volcano in Iceland, and the regular enemies of these great nations attacking while the Sea People had distracted and weakened them. That is, the Sea People did not conquer all. And, it seems, with drought hitting pretty hard, there might have been many internal rebellions.
Also, it's thought that the use of steel had spread to the lesser nations and gave them parity, along with mass infantry formations overcoming the advantages of the chariot.
But I don't buy the author's conclusion at the end regarding the organization structure of the Sea People. He paints them as a rabble who were escaping famine and just joined together somehow in a common cause of plunder. To me, given how they overwhelmed some truly strong cities, they must have been highly organized, not hodgepodge.
Were they driven out of their own lands because of famine, failed crops, etc.? Sounds plausible. But it seems the truth is that not much is known about these Sea People. There are an extraordinary mystery, it seems.
But that entire civilizations can be pushed over the edge in such a short length of time is a warning to us as we fritter away our wealth on "climate change" boondoggles and allow invaders from the south.
That other video put more emphasis on the weakness of the chariots in battle. I don't know. But I read an article the other day that said that China had weapons that were making the big American aircraft carriers obsolete. I could have told them that 40 years ago. Those are a lot of eggs to be putting in one big floating basket.
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