05-18-2020, 04:12 PM
(05-17-2020, 09:11 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(05-17-2020, 07:14 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: "There could be a trivial
incident today, tomorrow or the next day, with a small clash between
China and Japan that spirals into a war because of the massive
nationalism and xenophobia on both sides."
Also, the arguments about nuclear weapons don't apply here, since Japan does not have nuclear weapons. China might make the assumption that the US wouldn't use nuclear weapons to defend Japan.
I still think it's more likely that China will see an internal war, though, which would presumably not be nuclear.
I have a separate question: at one point in response to a question from me, I think you said Russia had been moved from the WWI time line to the WWII time line by WWII. Is that still your view - that Russia is now on the WWII time line?
Wow! If he made that shift he would be agreeing with me! I see Russia as having been in a protracted Crisis that struck early and hard, and having been multiple waves of disasters beginning with military calamities involving the Tsar's armies, going through a Civil War in which the opposing Red and White sides were similarly bloodthirsty and ruthless, the failed restructuring of a plutocratic economy into a 'socialist' economy, a short respite with Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), followed by Stalin's forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture and purges, an abortive abatement as the executioners ran out of victims, and then the Great Patriotic War with the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied sections of the Soviet Union.
Thirty years of crisis apply also to China, as I see it, with the Communist takeover in 1949 putting an end to political chaos. Because Communist takeovers of countries with significant development of capitalism I consider Commie takeovers as Crisis events, typically beginning or closing a Crisis. This is far bigger than, for example, formally ending colonial rule over decades of gradual relaxation but without war, a nation achieving independence (the break-up of Czechoslovakia and most of the Soviet Union are not Crisis events), or abolition or institution of a royal house. (Romanian Commies forcing the abolition of Michael is a Crisis event for what else was going on, but the deposition of Constantine II in Greece is not a Crisis event.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
