China-Taiwan Situation

[Judge Bean]

China-Taiwan Situation

They'll have a war, they'll have as much war as they can, restrained only by the costs. I don't mean the human costs.

All you need to do is read the history of the world for the past couple of centuries. There is nothing unique about the modern age-- that is, other than our ability to kill more sooner than later.

The "Cold War" was nothing but a protracted siege, in which two massive city-states held one another in artillery check for 50 years. Some fun. Traditionally, when the siege is broken, the victor is entitled to kill everyone in the other city. Upon such traditions our civilization is built.

Now the Americans in power have convinced themselves that they have conquered the other city, and are entitled to roll in and kill anyone they encounter. This entitlement is felt religiously and patriotically.

Any religion, on the other hand, compelled to surrender its dignity by means of some kind of "psyops" pork humiliation will simply adjust dogmatically and return to take heads. No, kids, it's not true that when you shoot the Chief all of the Indians turn and run away.

My apologies to my comrade Native Americans.

Urban populations have replaced artillery as the primary weapon of warfare; that is, the willingness to expend millions of your own people as the means to obtain advantage over other countries is the modern equivalent of the willingness to use up your pile of rocks millions of years ago to win the mudhole for your tribe.

It is the willingness to do it, mind you, not the actual doing of it. Warfare is also nowadays symbolic, metaphorical. This is why the neocons are having so much difficulty adjusting their recipes to the actual oven of Iraq. The inhabitants of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom exist in a Looking-glass world of "saying it makes it so" and "this computer program cost so much money, it must be able to predict all possible scenarios consequent to our complete abandonment of civilized values."

There is no politics. There is no mission to bring freedom to the world by bombing irrelevant backwaters and putting foreign leaders in Leavenworth. Shall we wake up and smell the napalm?

 

[phase12]

China-Taiwan Situation

Probably nothing is going to happen. All of you will be surprised just how much support there is within Taiwan for at least some sort unification.

P.S. It's a disclosed fact that Chinese military intelligence made dramatic adjustments to their strategies in case they chose to invade after studying the incredible effeciency of US and British forces in an urban environment. Before you laugh this off in light of the current situation in Iraq, they are thinking of "conventional" warfare that would be encountered in a real city, not the mess you have dealing with dangerously irrational terrorists.

The mess in Iraq would have nothing to do with it in a comparison of a confrontation with China, which will not likely happen.

 

[Eutychus]

China-Taiwan Situation

There's a great Tom Clancy novel in all this somewhere.

 

[Judge Bean]

China-Taiwan Situation

Originally posted by Eutychus@Dec 26 2004, 09:20 PM
There's a great Tom Clancy novel in all this somewhere.

​

Good for him if he finally manages to write a great one.

 

[CaryP]

China-Taiwan Situation

Seems the Chinese are having internal problems of their own. The have's and the have not's are playing nice in the sand box.

China's 'Haves' Stir the 'Have Nots' to Violence

WANZHOU, China, Dec. 24 - The encounter, at first, seemed purely pedestrian. A man carrying a bag passed a husband and wife on a sidewalk. The man's bag brushed the woman's pants leg, leaving a trace of mud. Words were exchanged. A scuffle ensued.

Easily forgettable, except that one of the men, Yu Jikui, was a lowly porter. The other, Hu Quanzong, boasted that he was a ranking government official. Mr. Hu beat Mr. Yu using the porter's own carrying stick, then threatened to have him killed.

For Wanzhou, a Yangtze River port city, the script was incendiary. Onlookers spread word that a senior official had abused a helpless porter. By nightfall, tens of thousands of people had swarmed Wanzhou's central square, where they tipped over government vehicles, pummeled policemen and set fire to city hall.

Minor street quarrel provokes mass riot. The Communist Party, obsessed with enforcing social stability, has few worse fears. Yet the Wanzhou uprising, which occurred on Oct. 18, is one of nearly a dozen such incidents in the past three months, many touched off by government corruption, police abuse and the inequality of the riches accruing to the powerful and well connected.

\"People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat,\" said Mr. Yu, reflecting on the uprising that made him an instant proletarian hero - and later forced him into seclusion. \"Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark.\"

Though it is experiencing one of the most spectacular economic expansions in history, China is having more trouble maintaining social order than at any time since the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989.

Police statistics show the number of public protests reached nearly 60,000 in 2003, an increase of nearly 15 percent from 2002 and eight times the number a decade ago. Martial law and paramilitary troops are commonly needed to restore order when the police lose control.

China does not have a Polish-style Solidarity labor movement. Protests may be so numerous in part because they are small, local expressions of discontent over layoffs, land seizures, use of natural resources, ethnic tensions, misspent state funds, forced immigration, unpaid wages or police killings. Yet several mass protests, like the one in Wanzhou, show how people with different causes can seize an opportunity to press their grievances together.

The police recently arrested several advocates of peasant rights suspected of helping to coordinate protest activities nationally. Those are worrying signs for the one-party state, reflexively wary of even the hint of organized opposition.

Wang Jian, a researcher at the Communist Party's training academy in Changchun, in northeast China, said the number and scale of protests had been rising because of \"frictions and even violent conflicts between different interest groups\" in China's quasi market economy.

\"These mass incidents have seriously harmed the country's social order and weakened government authority, with destructive consequences domestically and abroad,\" Mr. Wang wrote in a recent study.

China's top leaders said after their annual planning session in September that the \"life and death of the party\" rests on \"improving governance,\" which they define as making party officials less corrupt and more responsive to public concerns.

But the only accessible outlet for farmers and workers to complain is the network of petition and appeals offices, a legacy of imperial rule. A new survey by Yu Jianrong, a leading sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, found that petitions to the central government had increased 46 percent in 2003 from the year before, but that only two-hundredths of 1 percent of those who used the system said it worked.

Last month, as many as 100,000 farmers in Sichuan Province, frustrated by months of fruitless appeals against a dam project that claimed their land, took matters into their own hands. They seized Hanyuan County government offices and barred work on the dam site for days. It took 10,000 paramilitary troops to quell the unrest.

The article is four pages long, and I'm only going to post the first page. You may have to register your name and a password to see the whole article, but it's free. Signs of things to come here?

Cary

 

[Darkwolf]

China-Taiwan Situation

Any religion, on the other hand, compelled to surrender its dignity by means of some kind of \"psyops\" pork humiliation will simply adjust dogmatically and return to take heads. No, kids, it's not true that when you shoot the Chief all of the Indians turn and run away.

Not true Paul. These tactics have been used by the eanglish and french many times with great sucess. The Muslims have not adjusted their dogma, and the uprisings that were put down that way stayed down untill the occupying countries developed qualms about doing things like that. While we're at it, they seem to like striking at our symbols of power, so why don't we strike at theirs. Take a good look at some of the things the Koran says Allah won't ever let happen and make them happen. Make Mohammud look like a monkey. The militant muslim's power comes from the unshakable and psychotic faith of their followers. The way to win is to shake that faith.

 

[sosuemetoo]

China-Taiwan Situation

Originally posted by Darkwolf@Jan 1 2005, 11:11 PM
Take a good look at some of the things the Koran says Allah won't ever let happen and make them happen. Make Mohammud look like a monkey. The militant muslim's power comes from the unshakable and psychotic faith of their followers. The way to win is to shake that faith.

Darkwolf, I want to preface that I am not attacking you personally. I extremely disagree with your thinking, however.

I know we are angry when we hear things being done in the name of Allah. Speaking of making Muslim's touch pig parts, and/or offending their faith will not win any war.

How can we preach freedom of religion here in America, yet do things like that in war.

As a Christian, I would not want to be buried facing Hell. This would not shake my faith, shake my family's faith, nor would it shake the faith of America. It would fuel the flames of war. The thought of not having everlasting life (speaking of my faith) because of what someone else did to me is horrifying.

 

[Judge Bean]

China-Taiwan Situation

Originally posted by Darkwolf@Jan 2 2005, 04:11 AM

Any religion, on the other hand, compelled to surrender its dignity by means of some kind of \"psyops\" pork humiliation will simply adjust dogmatically and return to take heads. No, kids, it's not true that when you shoot the Chief all of the Indians turn and run away.

Not true Paul. These tactics have been used by the eanglish and french many times with great sucess. The Muslims have not adjusted their dogma, and the uprisings that were put down that way stayed down untill the occupying countries developed qualms about doing things like that. While we're at it, they seem to like striking at our symbols of power, so why don't we strike at theirs. Take a good look at some of the things the Koran says Allah won't ever let happen and make them happen. Make Mohammud look like a monkey. The militant muslim's power comes from the unshakable and psychotic faith of their followers. The way to win is to shake that faith.

​

There is a thousand-year history of the miserable failure of Europeans (and their progeny) to overpower Islam. When the tables have been turned (e.g., in the Iberian peninsula), Islam has had moderate success.

There is also a mistake in believing that the current conflict has anything to do with a conflict between religions or cultures. As much as Bush would like to say it, he cannot wage a war against a religion of three-quarters of a billion people spread over the globe.

The religious confrontation is simply propaganda. There is no adequate historical precedent to justify attacking a religion.

 

[Darkwolf]

China-Taiwan Situation

Darkwolf, I want to preface that I am not attacking you personally. I extremely disagree with your thinking, however.

No sweat Sue, I'm hard to offend anyway.

As a Christian, I would not want to be buried facing Hell. This would not shake my faith, shake my family's faith, nor would it shake the faith of America. It would fuel the flames of war. The thought of not having everlasting life (speaking of my faith) because of what someone else did to me is horrifying

The thought that we can not only kill them but send them to Hell is a very powerful weapon. It has dampened their will to fight every time it has been used for centuries off and on and it worked. In fact it seems to be about the only thing that has. As to making them angry, that is going to happen anyway, and might not be a bad thing. If we can draw them out into a decisive military style confrontation, we can win. Tick them off enough and that might happen. Other things we can do is make the bad imams look like they are not so holey to their followers.

There is also a mistake in believing that the current conflict has anything to do with a conflict between religions or cultures

With respect Paul, theres a very grave mistake in believing that it is anything but a clash of cultures. It is a collision of different and mutually exclusive worldviews. The world has gotten smaller and there is no longer enough space for us and them to share. Whenever that happens, cultures must meld, change, or fight until one dominates the other. Personally I don't want to live in a culture that melds or changes into something that the Talliban folks find acceptable.
Most Americans just don't get it, and I fear that our children or grandchildren are going to pay dearly for that.

 

[Judge Bean]

China-Taiwan Situation

Originally posted by Darkwolf@Jan 3 2005, 09:01 AM

There is also a mistake in believing that the current conflict has anything to do with a conflict between religions or cultures

With respect Paul, theres a very grave mistake in believing that it is anything but a clash of cultures. It is a collision of different and mutually exclusive worldviews. The world has gotten smaller and there is no longer enough space for us and them to share. Whenever that happens, cultures must meld, change, or fight until one dominates the other. Personally I don't want to live in a culture that melds or changes into something that the Talliban folks find acceptable.
Most Americans just don't get it, and I fear that our children or grandchildren are going to pay dearly for that.

​

The current conflict is the creation of the corporate and criminal powers now ruling the world, and did not spontaneously arise out of the hatred of one people for another. The bitterness and resentment of some fundamentalist Moslems for the West is rooted in the unfairness of the division of wealth and property in the Middle East, which they perceive as being the result of Western greed and disrespect.

This animosity for the West has been channeled by a radical into the capacity to commit a single enormous crime. However, it was absolutely necessary for Bin Laden to get the money to do what he did, and only somewhat necessary to have the correct number of willing followers. You cannot have a war unless you have an enemy; Bin Laden is not a political enemy of any consequence, and his "battle" consisted of a multiple hijacking in which the "soldiers" simply steered and crashed the planes. There is good evidence that he almost failed completely, and that he did fail by almost 50%.

Bin Laden needed a lot of money to do even the poor job he managed-- he himself apparently said that he didn't expect the towers to completely collapse like that, and the previous attack on the WTC was a dud in comparison. Follow the money, as they say. Where did Bin Laden get his cash? And why do you think that the feds want so badly to connect "charities" with terrorism, and why did they want the power to examine all of our bank accounts, and make it a crime for the bank to tell us whenever this was done?

Why is the American military presence in Saudi Arabia compared among Arabs to the Israeli occupation of Palestine? Does the oil pipeline through Afghanistan have anything to do with the narcotics industry? Does the world drug trade have anything to do with the CIA management of the combat in Afghanistan? Have you wondered why the National Guard and Reserve is not in the forefront of the "war" there?

The "war" consists in the long-delayed invasion and occupation of a nation which had nothing to do with the crime, which is now over 3 years stale with no arrest. Mind you, this is not a crime in which the suspect is unknown, or his general whereabouts. The primary American military action in this "war" is the conquest of a country on the other side of Iran-- which, mysteriously, remains untouched by an administration bent on wiping out our enemies in the region and imposing democracy.

If this had anything to do with a war between cultures, Iran would have been next in line after Afghanistan. Iran, the radical fundamentalist theocracy that once kidnapped an entire American embassy and held the occupants hostage-- for how long again? Was that terrorism? Iran, the newest member of the nuclear bomb club-- a "weapon of mass destruction" in the hands of a regime on the record as officially hating us.

Coincidence, I suppose, that just now a great many Americans feel that a great many Arabs want to kill them for no reason. A coincidence, with no connection to the needs of a sham president and his oilcoated cohorts.