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Phone posting so I'll let someone else fill in the details but it has a lot to do with us propping up the French and the settlements from that war. France was being a major bag of cocks re: nato and the Soviets and what side they were on.
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Apr 6, 2016 01:58
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hogmartin posted:Was colonialism/anti-colonialism even a factor, really? The French were gone AFAIK by the mid-1950s, almost a decade before the US got involved. South Vietnam, a notionally representative republic, was threatened by a communist neighbor to the north. I don't think anyone in the US really thought the Diem regime itself was worth a poo poo, but it looks bad if a kinda-democratic country gets steamrolled by PRC/USSR-supplied communists when you're trying to conduct a respectable cold war. Colonialism was massively a factor. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/55election.htm
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Apr 6, 2016 02:14
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Huh, I didn't know that. I thought the French were long gone by the time we got heavily involved. I knew they were being touch-and-go about NATO but not that it had anything to do with US policy re: Vietnam.
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Apr 6, 2016 02:27
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Didn't the CIA and French intelligence also back opposing forces in their own conflict in Saigon?
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Apr 6, 2016 02:58
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hogmartin posted:Huh, I didn't know that. I thought the French were long gone by the time we got heavily involved. I knew they were being touch-and-go about NATO but not that it had anything to do with US policy re: Vietnam. Truman started military assistance to South Vietnam in 1950. Ike ramped up American involvement enormously in 1953, supplying roughly 80% of the materiel for the French before they pulled out, then formed SEATO which committed the US to the direct military defense of SV.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:02
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Fangz posted:Uh, since we have been talking around this topic, do we actually have a good definition for imperialism? As pleased as I am to discover that I can accidentally poo poo up the thread for most of three pages purely by accident, when I asked the who created whom question about imperialism and racism it was a reference to postcolonialism. By "imperialism" I meant specifically the 19th-20th century European version, which is descended from earlier varieties but very much distinct from them. In point of fact racism is one of the specific characteristics that separates latter-day empires from those that came before. The Romans weren't racist in any meaningful way, which is one reason (among many) that Roman conceptions of empire, of settlement and colonization, of authority, of slavery, etc. were hugely different from, say, Rudyard Kipling's. We use their word to refer to something different. I may have gotten a little too po-mo for the military history thread, sorry. Let's all spend some time applying techniques of literary criticism to Soviet tank design. I think the design of the IS-3 indicates subconscious Soviet preparation for an aggressive posture against the USA/UK/France in postwar Europe; the forward thrusting arrow of the pointed glacis is highly suggestive.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:46
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Recently got caught up to the thread again after a long hiatus involving sails, rigging, and 3-pounders. Question for the thread - when and why did "ship classes" start becoming a thing? We hear about things like the Nimitz-class or the Queen Elizabeth-class today, but you don't really hear about similar things in, say, the Napoleonic period. So what changes caused people to start thinking about ships as divided by specific named classes instead of "44-gun frigates" or "74s"? For that matter, what exactly differentiates a class of ship from earlier methods of shipbuilding which didn't use such distinctions?
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Apr 6, 2016 03:47
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it is accurate to say that the support of the French union (colonial France) initiated American involvement in Indochina but after the French pulled out it was really only a communist containment exercise. as such I'm not sure how much you can say the French colonial adventure really contributed to the communist takeover other than giving them military experience and galvanizing support of ho.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:53
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bewbies posted:it is accurate to say that the support of the French union (colonial France) initiated American involvement in Indochina but after the French pulled out it was really only a communist containment exercise. as such I'm not sure how much you can say the French colonial adventure really contributed to the communist takeover other than giving them military experience and galvanizing support of ho. And the American support for France was wholly for the containment of communism. It started only after Mao and Stalin started arming NV.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:56
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Tomn posted:Recently got caught up to the thread again after a long hiatus involving sails, rigging, and 3-pounders. Seems like it was always the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9m%C3%A9raire-class_ship_of_the_line
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Apr 6, 2016 03:59
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Tomn posted:Recently got caught up to the thread again after a long hiatus involving sails, rigging, and 3-pounders. well, ships were classed in the age of sail, e.g., ship of the line (and then first rate, second rate, etc by number of guns and decks), frigate, sloop, etc. this started really at the beginning of the age of sail. ships of the line evolved into battleships, frigates into cruisers and modern frigates, destroyers and aircraft carriers and submarines emerged due to technological advancements like torpedoes and airplanes and such. as for actually naming classes the French were doing this in the 18th century, I think they were the first to do so although the royal navy did have standardized designs during the same period.
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Apr 6, 2016 04:01
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bewbies posted:it is accurate to say that the support of the French union (colonial France) initiated American involvement in Indochina but after the French pulled out it was really only a communist containment exercise. as such I'm not sure how much you can say the French colonial adventure really contributed to the communist takeover other than giving them military experience and galvanizing support of ho. One of the Vietnam books I read said that at then end of the war Ho Chi Minh was actually in favor of the French returning and taking control. His reasoning was that the alternative was that the Chinese (who had invaded and occupied North Vietnam under the auspices of the UN after the Japanese surrender) would start sticking around on some pretext, and beating the French( a war weary country 12 timezones away) away was going to be much easier than ejecting the Chinese who are just across the border. As it turns out the nationalist Chinese collapsed themselves not too long afterwards so who knows how on the mark he was.
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Apr 6, 2016 04:25
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Q: What's a good resource on the history / organization of the British Raj? The Book Barn is having a Kipling read for April, and are looking for supplementary material recommendations.
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Apr 6, 2016 04:31
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Tomn posted:Recently got caught up to the thread again after a long hiatus involving sails, rigging, and 3-pounders. Good question. I'm probably going to cover stuff you already know but in case anybody else reading is interested: there are a lot of different ways to design a ship depending on the resources available to you and the tasks you want the ship to be able to perform. In some sense fighting ships have been split up according to their design features and capabilities, with nomenclature to match, going back to the dawn of warfare. The ancient Greeks and Romans differentiated between types of fighting galleys according to how many decks of rowers they had--i.e. bireme, trireme, and so on. This has held true continuously into the modern day. In the medieval to Renaissance period you might have carrack, barque, galleon, galleass, xebec, etc. and so on in endless variety. The import of this for fighting purposes is that, because of the size, the design, the layout, the necessary crew to operate, different varieties of ship will behave differently in combat. A galleon may have more endurance at sea, mount more guns, carry a larger crew, and be better able to survive gunfire, but it probably won't sail as well as a barque. A galleass is likely to be highly maneuverable and will have a huge crew relative to a sailing ship of the same approximate size, but because of its design characteristics it cannot mount much weight of gunfire, it will not perform well in heavy seas nor have much endurance, and it will be less heavily built and therefore less resistant to gunfire. And so on. Sailors could spot ships and make estimates about their capabilities just from the arrangement of their sails, because different types of ship would have distinct profiles. In the age of gunpowder navies one of the most immediately important characteristics was the weight of gunnery a ship carried, because this obviously translates directly into winning or losing a fight. Since the gunnery technology of the time dictates that naval engagements often resolve with a lot of pairing off in ship-to-ship actions, this is key. First of all you want to know if a ship can even stand in the line of battle. A real ship-of-the-line, which is constructed to give and receive cannon fire, is an entirely different animal from a frigate, which is designed for a balance of sailing and fighting. In serial engagements, a ship of the line can chew up a whole lot of frigates one after the other. They're better off being sent away from the line engagement, to raid commerce or something else that takes advantage of what they actually do well. It's a bit like putting a welterweight in the ring with a heavyweight--it doesn't play out well. But of course there can also be variation among ships of the line. Thus they start looking at how many guns a ship has, what weight of shot it can fire, and so on. It might be referred to by number of guns, or it might be called a first- second- or third-rate. That way they know who to pair up with to have a chance of winning, and you know how impressed you should be when they win a fight. With the way production worked at the time, these ships were built to order and might vary considerably in their details, but you still needed to know first of all how they threw down. So two second-rate ships might be unique in their own way, but they were still fairly close in terms of how well they would hang in the line of battle. Eventually, with industrialization, ships start to be built by standardized processes to the same blueprint, to a much greater extent than ever before. This is early 20th century. They get to the point that a design is drawn up and a prototype or two is launched, and if it works satisfactorily then a pile of the very same ship is made with very little variation. At that point, you no longer have to say "this is Prancer, a 44-gun frigate, she can fight other 44-gun frigates and probably beat up on 32-gun frigates, but she should run from any ship of the line, oh and she sails better before the wind than most ships in her class but she tends to slow down and take on water in heavy seas, and the seamen say that the foretop is haunted by the ghost of a jilted woman". You can say, "this is Arizona, she is a battleship functionally identical to Pennsylvania", thus Pennsylvania-class. AFAIK ships were still getting built as basically one-offs into the 1890s but the naval arms race and refinement of the military-industrial complex in the early 20th century took hold, and that's when the idea of ships belonging to a class of basically identical sisters took hold. I mean, think of something like a ranch house. Any two ranch houses of similar square footage might be different in a lot of ways, but they'll be broadly similar, just like comparing a number of different 74-gun two-deckers. Meanwhile, a class of ships is like a bunch of houses built on exactly the same plan, with only very minor variation.
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Apr 6, 2016 04:52
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Tomn posted:For that matter, what exactly differentiates a class of ship from earlier methods of shipbuilding which didn't use such distinctions? A class is a batch of ships built from substantially the same plans. There were, of course, usually not built all at once, so the later ships in a class would have improvements over the first one to fix any flaws, but on the whole, Iowa and Missouri are like, say, two year models of the same car. It goes way back -- as bewbies said, the French were doing it in the 18th c. The "number of guns" rating system is more akin to "coupe/sedan/van" in car terms, purely a size ranking. Much easier at the time, since every navy was cranking out so many ships of a given size at any time that it wasn't really useful to define them by classes. The class thing became the main way of talking about it probably around the turn of the last century, when there were only relatively few warships being made, and mostly only one or two classes at a time. Also the trend of fewer, bigger guns probably was a big factor -- in Nelson's time, more guns = more murder, but in Jellicoe's, the newest, most badass ships had fewer guns than the much weaker state of the art from as little as ten years prior. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 05:02
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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There's some transitional stuff in the late 1800s and early 1900s because part of the shift was that designing a ship became more convoluted and shipyards that mattered started to be more uniformly capable. As an example, the US' first class of destroyers, the Bainbridge class is sometimes divided into four more classes because different shipyards laid them out differently, with different machinery layouts. The Delawares got different propulsion plants to gain experience on the relative advantages of triple-expansion and turbine engines. The later you get in the process of shifting, the more it's a matter of shipyards passing recommendations to the designers if anything rather than just laying things out differently. For example, later on, US destroyer escorts in WWII were fragmented in terms of powerplant because they couldn't get enough reduction gears and some got a diesel rather than steam powerplant. By then that meant a new class. At least in the US experience there seems to be a shift from a class as a group of units bought together with similar characteristics to a group of units ordered at once that are basically interchangable tactically and logistically. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 05:29
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Classes of vessel built to more or less a single plan certainly predate the 20th century. Just as an example from one of yesterday's featured Wikipedia articles, take a look at the list of gun brigs of the Royal Navy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gun-brigs_of_the_Royal_Navy?wprov=sfla1). There are named classes going back to 1794. Many Royal Navy ships were designed, ordered, and built in batches (the 74 gun ships based on the Bellona come to mind) and I am sure this was not unique to the Royal Navy. The first-rates were often one-offs but there were very few of them built. I think the British only built a total of around ten during the entire 18th century.
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Apr 6, 2016 06:08
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Well this was the generation that saw appeasement allow Hitler to come to power and get 30 million people killed. Then the Soviet Union shows up and starts invading it's neighbors. Suddenly communism is spread faster than fascism ever did and has nuclear weapons to boot. And they weren't living in 2016 when communism has been dead for 3 decades and become a joke. It was a rapidly spreading, incredibly violent and totalitarian ideology that was killing literally millions of people at the time. Think about what the North Koreans are like now and then imagine them when they had a super power in their corner and could invade their neighbor. This is, uh, a rather rightwing view of the whole period, FYI. Exactly which millions of people was Communism killing at the time of the Vietnam war?
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Apr 6, 2016 09:52
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EvanSchenck posted:As pleased as I am to discover that I can accidentally poo poo up the thread for most of three pages purely by accident, when I asked the who created whom question about imperialism and racism it was a reference to postcolonialism. By "imperialism" I meant specifically the 19th-20th century European version, which is descended from earlier varieties but very much distinct from them. In point of fact racism is one of the specific characteristics that separates latter-day empires from those that came before. The Romans weren't racist in any meaningful way, which is one reason (among many) that Roman conceptions of empire, of settlement and colonization, of authority, of slavery, etc. were hugely different from, say, Rudyard Kipling's. We use their word to refer to something different. I may have gotten a little too po-mo for the military history thread, sorry. Let's all spend some time applying techniques of literary criticism to Soviet tank design. I think the design of the IS-3 indicates subconscious Soviet preparation for an aggressive posture against the USA/UK/France in postwar Europe; the forward thrusting arrow of the pointed glacis is highly suggestive. I don't see why people get so sniffy about posting about racism, imperialism, or colonialsm in this thread. Why is it automatically considered making GBS threads the place up? Those are hugely important factors in why and how many wars were fought. We're adults, we can talk about that stuff. Talking about which rifle or tank is the best shouldn't be considered any less important than why people pick up those rifles or get into those tanks, or what factors affect the choices they make with that equipment. These things are hugely important and interwoven into the story of military conflict. I am very sorry for posting about posting.
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Apr 6, 2016 10:42
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A_Bluenoser posted:Classes of vessel built to more or less a single plan certainly predate the 20th century. Just as an example from one of yesterday's featured Wikipedia articles, take a look at the list of gun brigs of the Royal Navy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gun-brigs_of_the_Royal_Navy?wprov=sfla1). There are named classes going back to 1794. Many Royal Navy ships were designed, ordered, and built in batches (the 74 gun ships based on the Bellona come to mind) and I am sure this was not unique to the Royal Navy. The first-rates were often one-offs but there were very few of them built. I think the British only built a total of around ten during the entire 18th century. There were definitely what we would know as 'classes' of ship in the 18th/19th centuries, especially in the Royal Navy and the French navy - the RN had 'Establishments' setting out basic dimensions and specifications for ship types from 1745. But it's true to say that, in the pre-industrial era they were not quite the same idea of having a group of largely identical ships built off the same plan in a co-ordinated batch. The technology and methods of building wooden ships simply didn't allow for it. Every wooden ship is, in detail, unique with every structural part shaped, bent and cut to fit its neighbour and then the whole thing is fettled and made true as the structure is built up. Then new individual parts are fitted as required in service, requiring more modifications here and there (which is why every ship had at least one carpenter on board). It simply wasn't possible to make standardised and interchangeable structural parts and major fittings so the concept of a 'class' of ship as we know it just wasn't useful to the individual sailor or the naval command chain - at a strategic or tactical level it mattered far more whether you had x-amount of cutters/sloops/frigates/ships-of-the-line and what gun count they had rather than what plan they had been drawn off. But multiple (sometimes very large numbers - the Leda frigate 'class' was 47-strong and there were 100+ copies of HMS Cruizer) ships were built from the same plans (known as the 'draught'). But even this could be interpreted quite loosely. When a shipyard was ordered to build "three ships to the draught of His Majesty's Frigate 'Leda'") this only meant that the result would be a 38-gun frigate with the same hull form and the same dimensions. How the yard produced that hull form didn't really matter and ships from the same draught could differ significantly in their structural details depending on the supply of wood available, the practices and habits of the shipwright that oversaw their construction and to reflect any changes in shipbuilding practice that had occured since the draught was originally drawn up - the Ledas were built over 30 years and I suspect that HMS Thalia (1830) was actually a very different design to HMS Leda (1800). Prior to the 19th century there was remarkably little science in shipbuilding - it was a case of gradually improving on each design after the other by trial and error, eliminating features that didn't work and continuing those that did. While it was broadly understood that, say, certain frame shapes were stronger or certain hull shapes were faster, there was little understanding as to exactly why this was the case. So when a particularly good ship was built it was common to keep building ships off the same draught for as long as it remained effective to do so. One of the reasons why French ships were held in such high regard in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic war era was that the French were really the first to adopt real scienctific principles to ship design as part of the glorious rational enlightenment of the Revolution. The RN often made capturing particularly effective French designs, such as the Temeraire '74' and the Sibylle-class frigates, a priority so they could be copied. Once you start getting mass-produced standardisation of parts (first for guns, pulleys and rigging) it becomes possible to fit ships from the same draught with the same parts. Once iron and steel structural parts come along you can build ships that are, to all intents and purposes, identical from the same draught in different shipyards. Naval architecture advances along with everything else in the industrial age and the basic 'draught' becomes detailed plans to which you can specify (and build) precision interchangeable parts. Then it becomes useful to designate ships by their class rather than just their type and firepower.
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Apr 6, 2016 11:10
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cheerfullydrab posted:I don't see why people get so sniffy about posting about racism, imperialism, or colonialsm in this thread. Why is it automatically considered making GBS threads the place up? Those are hugely important factors in why and how many wars were fought. We're adults, we can talk about that stuff. Talking about which rifle or tank is the best shouldn't be considered any less important than why people pick up those rifles or get into those tanks, or what factors affect the choices they make with that equipment. These things are hugely important and interwoven into the story of military conflict. All goons are terrified that the thread they like could suddenly turn into DnD. Talking about racism is fine and then suddenly it's 20 pages of 16 year olds screaming about Hiroshima. But yeah I agree, it's good when this thread discusses this sort of thing, as they do a good job. OctaviusBeaver posted:Well this was the generation that saw appeasement allow Hitler to come to power and get 30 million people killed. Then the Soviet Union shows up and starts invading it's neighbors. Suddenly communism is spread faster than fascism ever did and has nuclear weapons to boot. And they weren't living in 2016 when communism has been dead for 3 decades and become a joke. It was a rapidly spreading, incredibly violent and totalitarian ideology that was killing literally millions of people at the time. Think about what the North Koreans are like now and then imagine them when they had a super power in their corner and could invade their neighbor. You just have to hope clowns like this guy aren't around when you do it.  -- Thanks for all this effortposting about ship names, it's something which has confused me for ages. BalloonFish posted:Prior to the 19th century there was remarkably little science in shipbuilding - it was a case of gradually improving on each design after the other by trial and error, eliminating features that didn't work and continuing those that did. While it was broadly understood that, say, certain frame shapes were stronger or certain hull shapes were faster, there was little understanding as to exactly why this was the case. So when a particularly good ship was built it was common to keep building ships off the same draught for as long as it remained effective to do so. One of the reasons why French ships were held in such high regard in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic war era was that the French were really the first to adopt real scienctific principles to ship design as part of the glorious rational enlightenment of the Revolution. The RN often made capturing particularly effective French designs, such as the Temeraire '74' and the Sibylle-class frigates, a priority so they could be copied. I wonder how enlightenment principles played out with military secrets. Splode fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 11:17
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feedmegin posted:This is, uh, a rather rightwing view of the whole period, FYI. Exactly which millions of people was Communism killing at the time of the Vietnam war? The Great Leap Forward had just finished, the Cultural Revolution had just started (didn't kill millions, to be fair), so...yeah. EDIT: The Prague Spring was crushed rather violently, too. ArchangeI fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 11:46
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We're also just really bad at the discussion. No, the Romans didn't have a concept of race in the same way that post-enlightenment Europeans did and they thought about the world and people's correct place in it in very different ways. But they did have structures of prejudice based on where you grew up and who your family were that for the vast majority of practical purposes basically indistinguishable from colonial-era racism, and were very much tantamount to 'you look a bit foreign, therefore I consider myself superior to you'. So it's both different and the same and on the internet people choose the aspect that suits their argument and then talk past each other for several pages.
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Apr 6, 2016 11:52
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First World War historians on Twitter are having a bit of a giggle about the upcoming Somme centenary, you may find it mildly amusing, even Gary Sheffield cracks off a well-honed gag about From-el-le-les on Gallipoli.
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Apr 6, 2016 12:15
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feedmegin posted:This is, uh, a rather rightwing view of the whole period, FYI. Exactly which millions of people was Communism killing at the time of the Vietnam war? I think his point was that the decision makers during the Vietnam era had come of age in the era of Stalin's purges and had just witnessed the Great Leap Forward. They'd also just witnessed fairly naked communist aggression in Berlin and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and they didn't have the benefit of hindsight (and access to Soviet documents) like we do now, so to suggest that they were all being reactionary and paranoid is a bit revisionist (though clearly some were even by the standards of the time). That being said the obvious answer to your question though is the Khmer Rouge. In addition it should probably be said that anticommunism in the US really wasn't limited much by political affiliation. Progressives (Hubert Humphrey, Truman, Kennedys), centrists (Eisenhower), and conservatives (Nixon, McCarthy lol) were pretty much all staunchly anticommunist throughout the Cold War. bewbies fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 12:29
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Yo that shipbuilding class discussion is really Northern Europe centric. The Venetian Arsenale Nuovo was doing (admittedly fairly artisinal but still standardized) distributed interchangeable manufacturing in 1320, which by its very nature was turning out ships to a blueprint for a class. Now, the ships were designed primarily via trial and error and modifications of existing designs, but the process still turned out pretty much identical copies of ship types.
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Apr 6, 2016 13:21
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Alchenar posted:We're also just really bad at the discussion. The late-republic Romans fought a devastating civil war over who was and who was not Roman (or allowed to be Roman) on the Italian peninsula. I don't think this specifically had to do with race or any modern structures, but it does indicate that the issue of who was Roman and who was not was important and divisive enough to result in a violent internal conflict.
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Apr 6, 2016 13:25
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The late-republic Romans fought a devastating civil war over who was and who was not Roman (or allowed to be Roman) on the Italian peninsula. I don't think this specifically had to do with race or any modern structures, but it does indicate that the issue of who was Roman and who was not was important and divisive enough to result in a violent internal conflict. The current party line among most history buffs is that Romans only cared about whether or not a person was a Roman or a dirty foreigner. As in, if you were a Roman, it didn't make a difference what you looked like. I'm not 100% sure which tv show, popular history book, or article this comes from, but you'll hear it repeated as gospel truth by a lot of people. Probably something from the late 90's or early 2000's. It leaves out a lot of complexities, to say the least.
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Apr 6, 2016 13:52
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The late-republic Romans fought a devastating civil war over who was and who was not Roman (or allowed to be Roman) on the Italian peninsula. I don't think this specifically had to do with race or any modern structures, but it does indicate that the issue of who was Roman and who was not was important and divisive enough to result in a violent internal conflict. Right, the Social War was more about Italian allies (actually client states) revolting against Rome because despite the fact that they were culturally identically and shared the same military risks as Rome, they were not citizens (no say in their own foreign policy) and they reaped none of the rewards for military success. Although on a map of this time period you'll probably see all of Italy painted red or whatever to signify Roman control, at the time that's not actually the case. Yes, Rome is the dominant power, but in truth Italy is a patchwork of alliances between Rome and various other subjugated peoples. These "allies" have total control of local affairs, but Rome can demand tribute and legions from them, and controls their foreign policy, even relations with each other, completely. Some are considered better allies than others depending on whether they willingly allied with Rome (Latins) or had to be defeated in war in order to be brought into the fold (Samnites). Anyway, Rome and their loyal allies (basically just the Latins) actually defeat the rest of Italy but the conflict is extremely bloody since it's the first time you really have legions face off against each other. Rome gets the point and grants citizenship to the Italians...sort of. Communities that remained loyal to Rome, or at least did not join the revolt, get blanket citizenship and Roman rights. I think eventually the losers do too, but not in the immediate aftermath. It wasn't a war that had anything to do with racism in the modern sense but it is a way to illustrate the way Romans viewed others. Up until this point only those born in Rome were Romans, even the Latins who lived essentially down the street weren't considered equals. After the war they reevaluate this a bit and you'll find throughout the rest of Roman history they're more careful and try not to repeat the mistake of alienating allies and useful communities. What makes someone "Roman" becomes more flexible.
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Apr 6, 2016 14:01
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BalloonFish posted:ne of the reasons why French ships were held in such high regard in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic war era was that the French were really the first to adopt real scienctific principles to ship design as part of the glorious rational enlightenment of the Revolution. The RN often made capturing particularly effective French designs, such as the Temeraire '74' and the Sibylle-class frigates, a priority so they could be copied. Not the Revolution (the original Temeraire was captured in 1759!). Pre-revolutionary France was Top Dog militarily speaking in Europe and was at the cutting edge of a lot of stuff like this, see also the Gribeauval system in artillery.
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Apr 6, 2016 14:28
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Right, the Social War was more about Italian allies (actually client states) revolting against Rome because despite the fact that they were culturally identically and shared the same military risks as Rome, they were not citizens (no say in their own foreign policy) and they reaped none of the rewards for military success. Although on a map of this time period you'll probably see all of Italy painted red or whatever to signify Roman control, at the time that's not actually the case. Yes, Rome is the dominant power, but in truth Italy is a patchwork of alliances between Rome and various other subjugated peoples. These "allies" have total control of local affairs, but Rome can demand tribute and legions from them, and controls their foreign policy, even relations with each other, completely. Some are considered better allies than others depending on whether they willingly allied with Rome (Latins) or had to be defeated in war in order to be brought into the fold (Samnites). Lex Julia de Civitate Latinis Danda offered full citizenship only to those Italian cities which did not revolt against Roman rule. It was a community decision - each city had to make the decision to accept or reject as a polity. Individuals could earn citizenship via meritorious service in the Roman military (or immediately later under Lex Plautia Papiria by presenting themselves to a Praetor within 60 days, and that law probably allowed citizens of revolting municipalities to prove their loyalty and earn citizenship). The law was probably an expediency to try to prevent all the fence-sitters in the Social War from joining the Italians since it was passed in 90, the second year of the Social War. It's funny, the Italians technically lost the Social War, but got pretty much everything Marcus Livius Drusus was proposing by 89, which was such an anathema to the Roman elite in 91. Good times. edit: jamwad pretty sure you know all this but I'm mostly elaborating for others KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 15:21
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feedmegin posted:This is, uh, a rather rightwing view of the whole period, FYI. Exactly which millions of people was Communism killing at the time of the Vietnam war? Um. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
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Apr 6, 2016 16:36
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Phanatic posted:Um. Devil's advocate here, but the Khmer Rouge's genocide is considered to have started in 75, distinctly after the Vietnam war. The great Chinese famine causes many millions of deaths but it was likely exacerbated by Mao's policies rather than caused exclusively. You can point to many devastating famines in the last 100 years in China(millions of dead etc).
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Apr 6, 2016 17:28
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It's very unlikely that the US actions in this period was a reaction to the famines of the Great Leap Forward, given the nature of the Chinese cover up of the whole fiasco. The first figures that attempt to estimate a death toll wouldn't be until the 1980s. If anything I would suspect that the main fears of the US was that the Great Leap Forward would succeed, given that the stated goals of the project was for China to exceed the UK in industrial production, putting further leverage in communist hands. In the event, the failure of the GLF would have come as a great relief, especially given how it would also drive a rift between the Chinese and the Soviets due to the USSR's criticisms of Mao. Observing the developing alignment of the US with the Chinese, I think it's reasonably apparent that US policy in this region is really mainly about the USSR, and rather less about some sense of humanitarian concerns. Fangz fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 17:52
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Fangz posted:You can't really look at the ethnicities of leaderships in non-democratic societies and make conclusions about prejudice in those societies. I mean you can't even look at America, observe that Obama was president for 8 years, and claim that the US doesn't have racism. That's why I asked "what primary sources are people basing these assertions on?" and mentioned the only one I could think of offhand (the Vindolanda "Brittunculi" reference) and how it wasn't even applicable.
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Apr 6, 2016 17:55
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Fangz posted:It's very unlikely that the US actions in this period was a reaction to the famines of the Great Leap Forward, given the nature of the Chinese cover up of the whole fiasco. The first figures that attempt to estimate a death toll wouldn't be until the 1980s. If anything I would suspect that the main fears of the US was that the Great Leap Forward would succeed, given that the stated goals of the project was for China to exceed the UK in industrial production, putting further leverage in communist hands. In the event, the failure of the GLF would have come as a great relief, especially given how it would also drive a rift between the Chinese and the Soviets due to the USSR's criticisms of Mao. I think it was mostly Berlin/Korea that informed their decision making. Nixon's idea was to reach out to China and take advantage of the fissure between Vietnam and China to his advantage. This resulted in a bunch of very embarassing stances toward the Khmer Rouge in the West.
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Apr 6, 2016 17:58
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Coldwar timewarp posted:Devil's advocate here, but the Khmer Rouge's genocide is considered to have started in 75, distinctly after the Vietnam war. The great Chinese famine causes many millions of deaths but it was likely exacerbated by Mao's policies rather than caused exclusively. You can point to many devastating famines in the last 100 years in China(millions of dead etc). The cultural revolution ('66-'69 in a tight definition) happened entirely during the American involvement in Vietnam and the lowest of lowball estimates you'll find will be about two thirds of a million. They go a lot higher, north of three million. This doesn't include the deaths from famine, which were the result of the Communist Party's policies, even if they were not usually intentional.
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Apr 6, 2016 18:00
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Fangz posted:It's very unlikely that the US actions in this period was a reaction to the famines of the Great Leap Forward, given the nature of the Chinese cover up of the whole fiasco. The first figures that attempt to estimate a death toll wouldn't be until the 1980s. If anything I would suspect that the main fears of the US was that the Great Leap Forward would succeed, given that the stated goals of the project was for China to exceed the UK in industrial production, putting further leverage in communist hands. In the event, the failure of the GLF would have come as a great relief, especially given how it would also drive a rift between the Chinese and the Soviets due to the USSR's criticisms of Mao. Stalin's purges in the '30s would have been a bigger issue. They weren't covered much in the Western press, but those in power would have been aware of them. Nonetheless, the fear of communism was very real. Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946 was sincere. Stalin made no secret of his ambitions to export communism, and Mao's victory scared the poo poo out of the West - the "Yellow Peril*" went right along with the "Red Scare" in motivating military action in Vietnam and Korea. 99% of the motivation was ideological. *Yes, "Yellow Peril" is a racist reference to the Chinese, but it was more of a label than derogatory. China's population was about 500M in 1950, and the sheer size of it as a potential adversary was terrifying.
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Apr 6, 2016 18:08
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Endie posted:The cultural revolution ('66-'69 in a tight definition) happened entirely during the American involvement in Vietnam and the lowest of lowball estimates you'll find will be about two thirds of a million. They go a lot higher, north of three million. This doesn't include the deaths from famine, which were the result of the Communist Party's policies, even if they were not usually intentional. Two problems - American involvement was ramping up even before then, and the US wouldn't have known in real time about the magnitude of death in the cultural revolution or the GLF.
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Apr 6, 2016 18:40
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Deteriorata posted:Stalin's purges in the '30s would have been a bigger issue. They weren't covered much in the Western press, but those in power would have been aware of them. To an extent I think people really undervalue the effect that China turning communist had on a lot of people. To the average American citizen in 1948, China was a longtime ally that we'd fought alongside during the War, and many servicemen had even been sent there as a part of the 14th Air Force flying against the Japanese, or had even joined the famous Flying Tigers before then. Then one day you open a newspaper and you read "HOLY poo poo CHINA'S GONE COMMUNIST" and the world's turned upside down-if a country like China could go communist, what did that mean for France? Britain? Us? Most people didn't really know or care about the context of the Civil War, or how the Nationalist Government was overwhelmingly corrupt and incompetent-all they knew was that it had happened there, and that meant it could happen here. Then of course you get the one-two punch the following years that the Soviets have the bomb, and American spies helped them get it. Suddenly not only are the Soviets an ideological threat, but they're a physical one-and otherwise ordinary neighborhood in your office or your church or even your home could be traitors, and America collectively loses its poo poo. Edit: As for the effects of turning Communist-the purges and internal workings of the Soviet Union may not have been well-publicized at the time, but the aftermath of the Russian Revolution-brutal civil war, numerous killings, and the widespread confiscation of property-had been, and it was still well within living memory. You've also got to remember that Communism represented a spiritual threat as well-the Soviet Union and other communist countries enforced Atheism harshly, and to a particularly religious country such as the United States, this was beyond the pale. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 19:07
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