Pener Kropoopkin posted:

There wouldn't have been a war then. Hypothetically, if the Americans accepted Ho Chi Minh's proposal then Vietnam would've been independent of France after WW2. No French-Indochina War, no American entry into the Vietnam war. The only potential snag is that the Viet Minh would've still embraced socialism and that was going to be a problem.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

There wouldn't have been a war then. Hypothetically, if the Americans accepted Ho Chi Minh's proposal then Vietnam would've been independent of France after WW2. No French-Indochina War, no American entry into the Vietnam war. The only potential snag is that the Viet Minh would've still embraced socialism and that was going to be a problem.

Milo and POTUS posted:

The vietnamese have a military history that almost defies belief in its success

Ardennes posted:

Admittedly, they could have ended up as the Yugoslavia of SE Asia, socialist but neutral. (Guess why there was almost zero chance of that happening?)

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Yugoslavia's non-aligned status was a little more than neutral. Tito saw both the Soviet Union and NATO as existential threats.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Vo Nguyen Giap is the greatest general of the 20th century, and is well within the top five of all time

(2nd place of course is Georgy Zhukov)

Ardent Communist posted:

Might be a hot take, but Chinggis Khan doesn't get enough credit. sure, there might have been skull mountains of his enemies, but he laid the groundwork for the largest contiguous empire in world history, going from hunting rats to bringing together disparate nomadic peoples, creating a law system, and promoting genuine meritocracy.
Most of the hate is cause the western world was on the losing side, if he was one of ours he'd be basically a saint.

Ardent Communist posted:

1: Giap
2: Subotai
3: Zhukov
4: Napoleon
5: Caesar

Might be a hot take, but Chinggis Khan doesn't get enough credit. sure, there might have been skull mountains of his enemies, but he laid the groundwork for the largest contiguous empire in world history, going from hunting rats to bringing together disparate nomadic peoples, creating a law system, and promoting genuine meritocracy.
Most of the hate is cause the western world was on the losing side, if he was one of ours he'd be basically a saint.

Rutibex posted:

Flavius Belisarius could kick Caesars rear end

Southpaugh posted:

top 5 all time??

Ardennes posted:

Admittedly, they could have ended up as the Yugoslavia of SE Asia, socialist but neutral. (Guess why there was almost zero chance of that happening?)

Johnny Cache Hit posted:

i mean you can say what you want about the will of the French to shed blood to hold French Indochina, and gradenko's amazing posts are showing just how hilariously bad the Americans were. and his personal involvement against the Japanese can be argued. but for nearly 50 years the Vietnamese fought off three major imperial powers, ousted Pol Pot, and held out against attacks from China and Cambodia. Giap has to be in the conversation.

Rutibex posted:

Flavius Belisarius could kick Caesars rear end

Southpaugh posted:

Oh I wasn't doubting it, I just wanted to hear gradenkos top 5 of all time.

The ancient world is lousy with lauded warrior kings. It's fun to put petit boug strivers (Napoleon) and swamp communists in the same list as them.

cat botherer posted:

Sure but Justinian sucked rear end. Way overextended the empire, which bit them in the rear end when they had the 1-2 punch of the Persians and then the Arabs. Heraclius was a badass and strategic genius though. It could have been worse.

sullat posted:

IIRC Ho Chih Minh offered the US a big ol' naval base in Cam Ranh Bay too. I guess in 1946 they didn't think they'd need it.

Frosted Flake posted:

I understand what you’re saying, and I can sort of understand it, but I’m trying to wrap my head around the British happier at being relegated to an insignificant rainy island rather than keeping the Jewel in the Crown? Wasn’t the whole premise of the Civilizing Mission that they turn Indians into Little Englishmen? If the entire point of Liberal Empire was to bring Britishness/Frenchness to these people, and I understand the racist premise and how Liberal Empire was still violent and exploitative, then… wouldn’t the ultimate success of the project be cricket playing Etonian Indian MPs representing Bombay in the Commons? Similarly, if France’s rallying cry was “ici, cest la France!” wouldn’t coffee drinking egalitarian deputies from Beirut and Dakar be testiment to the French national motto?

I guess I’m picturing the trolly problem and one track is “maintain global power, flourishing society, national prestige and economic significance” and the other is “be racist” and they chose the racist path.

I don’t know, I guess it comes across as them being insecure, because if they had any conviction in the project they had spent all that blood and treasure on, there would be nothing foreign, alien or scary about the new MPs and Deputies, they’d be compatriots as much someone from Cornwall or Brittany.

Why didn’t the UK admit Ireland? That seems like it would have been a smaller hurdle, even for people in the 19th century.

Frosted Flake posted:

I understand what you’re saying, and I can sort of understand it, but I’m trying to wrap my head around the British happier at being relegated to an insignificant rainy island rather than keeping the Jewel in the Crown? Wasn’t the whole premise of the Civilizing Mission that they turn Indians into Little Englishmen? If the entire point of Liberal Empire was to bring Britishness/Frenchness to these people, and I understand the racist premise and how Liberal Empire was still violent and exploitative, then… wouldn’t the ultimate success of the project be cricket playing Etonian Indian MPs representing Bombay in the Commons? Similarly, if France’s rallying cry was “ici, cest la France!” wouldn’t coffee drinking egalitarian deputies from Beirut and Dakar be testiment to the French national motto?

I guess I’m picturing the trolly problem and one track is “maintain global power, flourishing society, national prestige and economic significance” and the other is “be racist” and they chose the racist path.

I don’t know, I guess it comes across as them being insecure, because if they had any conviction in the project they had spent all that blood and treasure on, there would be nothing foreign, alien or scary about the new MPs and Deputies, they’d be compatriots as much someone from Cornwall or Brittany.

Why didn’t the UK admit Ireland? That seems like it would have been a smaller hurdle, even for people in the 19th century.

vyelkin posted:

The trick is that the civilizing mission was always just an intellectual facade for rapacious imperialism to extract wealth from the colonies and transfer it to the metropole. The French and the English didn't actually see their colonial subjects as future Englishmen and Frenchmen, they saw them as labour units to make money to bring back to London and Paris. The success of the project wasn't to turn India into Britain, it was to extract all of India's wealth, impoverish the Indians, and enrich the colonial overlords. Investing resources to turn Mumbai into London or Dakar into Paris wasn't just ancillary to the project, it was in fact counterproductive to the ultimate objective, because any pound or franc spent on that was a pound or franc not extracted and sent back to the metropole. And to the decision-makers this wasn't contradictory because they never saw the colonial subjects as equal participants in the imperial project. Uplifting the colonies to the same status as the metropoles wouldn't have been seen as maintaining imperial power and glory, it would have been seen as giving up the imperial power and glory that already belonged to white English and French people, because it would mean the end of the enormous transfer of wealth and resources back to the metropole.

StashAugustine posted:

Bolivar probably needs an honorable mention in here afaik

Frosted Flake posted:

When you put it like that, oof. It makes me kind of feel bad for the MPs who spent their lives promoting that idea, I guess that means they were naive idealists, because you’re right - a Greater Britain would not be directing everything to London, so why would they ever allow it, even to save the Empire? It makes British decolonization make sense too, because for them what was the point after India was lost? I have to say it even makes how Partition went down seem out of spite instead of everyone doing their best in a bad situation.

What a colossal waste. Just the whole thing, when nobody ever believed in anything with all of that power and responsibility. I guess I always thought if they had more people like Elgin and Curzon things could have been different, but it seems like they served the role Obama making nice speeches did - window dressing for rapacious capital accumulation.

Spazmo posted:

A similar dynamic, which I think Fanon lays out in detail In The Wretched of the Earth (I may be thinking of the wrong book), is that the colonizer never allows industry to develop in the colony. You only extract natural resources and send them back to the metropole to be refined or transformed into more complex or finished goods, which you can then sell back to the people living in the colony at absurd markups, in exchange for the wages you paid them to labour in your mines or oil fields or fields or whatever. If you allowed resource extraction, transformation thereof into finished goods and consumption of the goods to all happen within the colony, then they wouldn't have any need for the metropole.

What's interesting is that through this lens we can view the more recent deindustrialization of the United States, Canada, the UK, etc. as a process of colonization of the metropole, which helps explain the increasing degree of repression, surveillance, violence etc. in those countries. But the metaphor gets wobbly here because it would follow that the metropole has followed the real industrial base and moved to China.

vyelkin posted:

It's racism, OP. In 1913 there were 46 million people living in Britain, 304 million people living in India, and 52 million people living in Britain's African colonies. If you legitimately tried to enfranchise all those colonial subjects as citizens with equal rights and political representation, white British people would suddenly become a tiny minority in their state, which is why it was never, ever going to happen. And even if you only partly enfranchise them and give them partial citizenship rights, to the extent that white British people maintain some kind of political control over the rest of the empire, then that means you're distorting the politics of this supposed unitary state to the extent that a tiny white minority continues to rule over a massive majority of people of colour, and you've just set up the same paradigm that eventually leads to imperial collapse and decolonization.

Basically, white British (and French) people would not accept a state where they weren't the politically dominant majority, and colonial populations would not accept a state where they continue to be ruled by the imperial metropoles, and those are two fundamentally opposing views that cannot really be reconciled without completely changing how tens of millions of people saw their place in the world.

sullat posted:

Reminds me of Patrick Cleburne, the Irish confederate general. In like 1864 or so, he was like "Hey, we're all about state's rights and liberty, so why don't we free the slaves so they'll fight for our independence against the hated Yankees?" and so he was laughed out of the room (and put in the front lines at Franklin and got shot).

Frosted Flake posted:

When you put it like that, oof. It makes me kind of feel bad for the MPs who spent their lives promoting that idea, I guess that means they were naive idealists, because you’re right - a Greater Britain would not be directing everything to London, so why would they ever allow it, even to save the Empire? It makes British decolonization make sense too, because for them what was the point after India was lost? I have to say it even makes how Partition went down seem out of spite instead of everyone doing their best in a bad situation.

What a colossal waste. Just the whole thing, when nobody ever believed in anything with all of that power and responsibility. I guess I always thought if they had more people like Elgin and Curzon things could have been different, but it seems like they served the role Obama making nice speeches did - window dressing for rapacious capital accumulation.

Spazmo posted:

A similar dynamic, which I think Fanon lays out in detail In The Wretched of the Earth (I may be thinking of the wrong book), is that the colonizer never allows industry to develop in the colony. You only extract natural resources and send them back to the metropole to be refined or transformed into more complex or finished goods, which you can then sell back to the people living in the colony at absurd markups, in exchange for the wages you paid them to labour in your mines or oil fields or fields or whatever. If you allowed resource extraction, transformation thereof into finished goods and consumption of the goods to all happen within the colony, then they wouldn't have any need for the metropole.

What's interesting is that through this lens we can view the more recent deindustrialization of the United States, Canada, the UK, etc. as a process of colonization of the metropole, which helps explain the increasing degree of repression, surveillance, violence etc. in those countries. But the metaphor gets wobbly here because it would follow that the metropole has followed the real industrial base and moved to China.

Frosted Flake posted: