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Totten and Hanson discuss war and peace — 36 Comments

  1. On the one hand I like it because they’re getting just what they asked for, but on the other hand, it’s tragic. And it’s dangerous. We shouldn’t be doing this.

    Agree 100%. But we are doing this, and there’s nothing we (patriotic Americans) can about it right now. If in the meantime a bunch of Europeans get splattered because they got their way, chalk it up to karma.

  2. Europe and the world wanted to get rid of Bush the “cowboy”, well they got their wish.

    When your town fires the police chief and disbands the police department, don’t be surprised if your neighbor gets murdered, your house gets robbed, and the gangs start taking over your town.

    Europe can’t save itself, and Obama has more in common with despots than democratic leaders.

    Iran knows that they will be able to use their nuke with no repercussions – except for maybe another strongly worded letter from the U.N. asking them not set off another one…pretty please.

  3. Europe has a public face of accommodation, a cynical greed for trade with tyrants, but a ruthless behind the scenes efficiency for security.

    Our office in France just ran a technical seminar. We had to decline the interest of the Iranians (US company and all), but the Jordanians could not get French Visas to enter the country! The admiral is completely correct.

  4. Military history is didactic, and those who study it can get some idea why wars break out, how they progress, how they end, and how peace is kept. I can’t think of where you could get that information other than from the study of wars in the past.

    Right.

    War is not just the battle field, but the moves of politicians maneuvering as well.
    The left, regardless of what label they wear, are at war with the all other kinds of state.

    Since day one I said if you want to understand what’s going on, then study the subject and prior history, as that’s where they go to, to learn as well.

    WHERE DO YOU GET INFORMATION on how to make a fundamental change, or whatever you want to call it when a group takes power and then restructures the state to prevent their removal?

    From history

    could that be why they don’t teach the history of the revolutions in detail, nor any American history related to similar moves performed in the US?

    I have been bringing up detail from revolutions with names, players, methods, and so on, trying to point all those asking questions to the right place to find answers.

    I bring up harmon, and the earliest progressive and communes, and when I do, I get a talk at how X feminist is not the same as other feminists, or my friends don’t believe that… or so on and so forth…

    But if you HAD read all that stuff you would have been following common threads that are and remain unchanged to today. They CONSERVED their ideology at the expense of everything else they claim is ideology (including culture and capitalism, which are not ideologies).

    I once wrote a book called Ripples of Battle that traced the great art and literature that came out of just three battles–the Battle of Delium, the Battle of Okinawa, and the Battle of Shiloh. I could have done that with hundreds of battles.

    And more than once I have traced linage of ideas from Weimar Germany to now, connecting leaders then, to new leaders, to leaders who started and copied things over here. Even more so I have gone back even farther and shown that the Weimar republic was actually copying the American progressives who had, like today, been in one of the times we forgot about them.

    You asked as to conspiracy at the NY TIMES… you don’t take the CULTURE WAR seriously as a WAR, but they do. so did ANY person read the answer?

    Did their commentaries changed based on the FACTS they didn’t know that were exposed, or rather the start of the facts exposed? Did any one go and expand them as the information is voluminous, and too long for me to post.

    NOT one person is willing to put the present into the context of the past. When Obama declares himself a progressive twice in a speech, who knows what that ACTUALLY means from the history, not from the msm meme? Who knows what feminism is from the history, not the public message always touted (that doesn’t match their actions).

    Early war was war on the battle field, with the population mostly all in (no internal war with it). it evolved, and you had war on the battle field, AND war between factions in the population. Vietnam was such as was wwii.
    War violence was minimized, and so you now have small altercations, not war

    And we BELIEVE war is not increased between factions.

    But that is what’s going on. one side doesn’t believe there is a war, and is the ball on the field… the other sides know there is a war on… a permanent cultural war as declared in words in the past in history.

    So there are three groups. The masses, the progressives/statists, and the oppositions

    The masses want to be ignorant. So they are the ball to be manipulated to a goal
    Their ignorance precludes their having and keeping their own goals!!!

    The progressives statists, want the social war to cause the masses to deliver to the progressives enough control that they no longer need to manipulate the masses.

    The oppositions which are not part of the progressives game of smoke, mirrors, false fronts, aggregating smaller movements, etc… they want the masses to wake up and realize that they have their own goals, and while they might not be lofty, in a universe with no declared purpose, they are as good as any other.

    So you have a game of lies (mostly half truths) on one side
    A game of whole truths and limits on the other.

    In between the two are an ignorant population who by their own desire
    Doesn’t want to work to choose an end, but instead wants to blindly FEEL their way
    [as they have been raised by progressive education to think feeling is better than thinking]

    All one has to do is look at the asymmetry and outcome to know which is the lying group. lies take energy to maintain. When not maintained, then one has to hide them.

    So on one side is a large number of people all coordinated to a common themic goal (not specific, which would be impossible, but themic is not), using their own money, others money, and money given to them by states outside who see them as convenient.

    Here is an example using race, not gender, since gender is more powerful a progressive war weapon.

    The progressives teach the claims of southerners and racists as the norm for America
    That is, they teach that the constitution favored slavery and give all the reasoned arguments that were brought up during the time of such arguments.

    Specifically the three fifths rule applied to slaves. Go into harlem or amoung the racialists and they will tell you how white men only valued slaves as three fifths people. and then they will tell you what that all means in absentia of the past arguments. In ignorance of Frederick douglass speech in Scotland, one might believe that the constitution was a slavers document. (three fifths was to insure that slave states could not use human property as full people so as to acquire more seats in congress. If they wanted more seats they had to set them free. the arguments are interesting to read as the north said if you count property as representational, we will count our farms, shovels, etc)

    If you want a similar game, but with god, you can read dawkins books. He follows the great arguments of the church and god, basically copying half of the debates, and leaving out the awesome rebuttals. He basically does the same trick in that its up to you to know what he is leaving out.

    And all that plays into the elite idea of we know and you don’t!!

    HE knows the whole argument, but if his half argument takes traction, he can logically deduce the validity of taking control of your life given your level of ignorance and interest in knowing important things that affect your life choices.

    One only needs to know history to understand clearly what’s going on.
    History can tell you what’s happening in abstract strokes.

    While the ignorant, want to be convinced of histories repeating exactly, or else they can side with not having to take effort and act. they will tell you the info has no bearing. That experience doesn’t count (unless it validated or seems to validate their ideas).

    That its too long and they want the total in a concentrated little pill which not only is full of meaning and knowledge that they can use, but is also fun to read and entertaining.

    Of course if you’re lying, then you can do that.
    So it amounts to tell me lies..

    You don’t really believe there’s going to be an EU strike force, do you? Nobody here believes that. If you become neutral, what are we supposed to do?

    The last paragraph of your article is pointing out part of what I have been crowing about with my bringing up military equipment, missiles, tactics and such.

    If we become neutral, Europe falls to Russia

    And if Europe falls to Russia, sure seems like they are finishing what they started and failed with when they teamed up with Hitler, no?

    So the BILLIONS Russia has spent to buy media companies, pay off people, create subversive organizations, lobby, fix elections, and on and on…

    Was all part of a war that started in 1917, and BY THEIR OWN STATEMENTS will not end until there is peace.

    They define peace as the absence of any opposition to socialism

  5. “They define peace as the absence of any opposition to socialism”

    Ditto for the moslems, who define peace as the ultimate consolidation of islamic authority… and we have a closet moslem-communist now occupying the White House.

  6. Liberals have good ideas (in their own minds) and, based on magical thinking, they know that what they believe will come true will come true. They disregard history, unless it reflects badly in their minds with something said or done or not done by conservatives (about which they never forget). Moreover, they really don’t care if their good ideas work in the real world as their self importance and identities derive from their thinking good thoughts, not on whether those good thoughts work in the real world. In fact, a good liberal is on to another good thought long before his last good thought turns into someone else’s disaster. And, the good liberal casually disassociates himself from those disasters by pointing to the kinds of people who were “in charge” but not capable of bringing the good thoughts to fruition. “We are the ones we have been waiting for” is the current liberals’ lament that finally we have found in the Dope the non-Stalin, the non-Hitler, the non-Mussolini, the non-Lenin, the non-Chavez, and so on, that can finally and absolutely make socialism work the way it was magically dreamt to work.

    A good liberal will brag that he has no history and that the his world begins today, without realizing that he is also admitting that everyday one can truthfully say about him that he was “born yesterday.” So, Totten and Hansen were engaging in a thoughtful historical discussion of absolutely no interest to liberals. Nonetheless, those of us who live in the non-magical world listen intently, for the wisdom we hope is imparted to us, even if in small dribs and drabs by thinkers like these.

  7. “If you become neutral, what are we supposed to do?”

    Well, Admiral, I would recommend that you grow a pair.

  8. They[liberals] disregard history …

    Not exactly. What they do is revise history to fit the Progressive viewpoint.

  9. What they really disregard and deconstruct is REALITY, and war is only the most stubborn and inconvenient part of reality.

  10. If war is never acceptable then massacre has to be. And all it takes for a massacre is for one party to be unprepared for war.

  11. People in the ancient world weren’t worried about things that shock the modern mind, things we’re not supposed to say. There’s an honesty that permeates the literature and drama. It helps. People explicitly said why they did what they did. They would invade a place and say they did it because they could, because nobody could stop them. They took it because they wanted it, and they didn’t apologize. There was no pretense, like when Stalin said he supported national liberation movements or when Hitler said he needed space.

    for those who wish to study history like you never seen before.

    http://www.ospreypublishing.com

    i have easily over 100 digital volumes of various books from them… read most of them… but you can also read really good books that are FREE online… (which i have previously recommended, but now that VDH says its good, others may decide that it is).

    [and i own almost nothing from paladin press, or a couple of others. they are conspiracy hacks… its enough to try to get through Osprey which is real histories… ]

    after about 60 or so volumes, you START to get a much clearer view of the world. each new book whipping the dirt from your vision.

    and 60 is not a high number.
    Lenins works alone
    “His known writings compose 54, 650-page volumes”

    so if you only read one person, you can meet that number. and if you only read that one person, you would not know history from that.

    to know that one mans writings from the people in question is 35,000 pages… and to hear people complain that i cant condense it into a witty paragraph, is inane, silly, and shows how completely ignorant of the subject.

    to summarize the poltiical and historical of 20 or 30 people whose collective writings span more than a 100,000 pages of work, and that just scratching things, is not possible.

    especially when whats under discussion is not commonly known… and so cant be condensed by common reference.

    and liberals learn and repeat history as progressives use it and other countries as a laboratory.

    to read history is to read the source of their work and ideas, and to know what they are going to do next.

    we have journied together on this from a point wheer we were economically pretty good. but a recession.

    we are nearing the point everyone said i was wrong about. an economic storm like germany as hyper inflation and no ability to pay the welfare poor..

    in about a year or less, we will be there.

    i said a long time ago, i was generally 4-5 years ahead of the curve. though no one but close freinds believed.

    this curve bothered me msot… because i could not see after this curve. that is if you can see in a vague way whats happening generally in a few years… you always see that.

    but what happens when you cant see past things any more? where the differences in outcomes are so disparate, that you have to reach the fork to start looking ahead again.

    looking at how the financial world is frozen, they too cant see ahead and are waiting for the fork to see how the field breaks.

  12. I’m worried that Obama believes this anti-Western rhetoric, or at least thinks it’s legitimate, and by voting “present” he sold out all these people. They’ll just go back into their shell or make the necessary accommodations.

    We saw this in the 1930s in places like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. People there accepted that hardly anyone would speak out against Hitler, that if they aligned themselves with Britain, Britain wouldn’t do anything for them.

    so many sources… from greece and europe…
    and others like VDH… are commonly now saying its so much like 1933…

    before, everyone was saying it was crazy and that things are not so close. well they are so close its pretty scary to those who know history.

    The leader of the Communist Party USA, Sam Webb, offered the following “verbal remarks” to the 29th National Convention of the Communist Party USA last month:
    He congratulated Communism’s “friends and allies” on recent achievements. “What a difference between now and five years ago when we convened in Chicago!” he exclaimed.

    “At that time a Puerto Rican woman raised in the South Bronx didn’t sit on the Supreme Court. Then the president didn’t call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Millions had no health care and no promise of it in the near future…. We weren’t in a position to fight for a progressive agenda, but on the defensive. The pendulum of power didn’t yet tilt in favor of working people, people of color, women and their allies. And, an African American wasn’t president.”

    According to Webb, Obama’s election ended “the long night of rule” when the country’s most reactionary groups were in power.

    The Communists, with help from their allies and friends, had pushed back the reactionaries.

    But, he warned, “Corporate negligence is killing miners and oil workers” while a “racist and anti-immigrant offensive is thick in the air, the planet’s temperature is rising, debt is piling up, and the right wing and finance capital … are regrouping and trying their damnedest to reconstitute their power.”

    The key to thwarting right wing extremism, lectured Webb, is to keep following the applied strategy that “deepened our mass connections” contributing to the “historic victory in 2008….”

    It is vital, Webb explained, “that we further build and unite the working class based coalition that came together to elect President Obama.” This coalition must grow stronger, in order to “consolidate the victory against right wing extremism and, in doing so, weaken the capitalist class as a whole.”

    The Communists, says Webb, know that they cannot “skin the rightwing cat” by themselves.

    They need a popular movement up front, a broad “people’s coalition” that extends far outside the political left.

    The Communist Party also needs “good sense in its strategic orientation, flexibility in its tactics, and freshness and imagination in its analysis.”

    In that event, says Webb, Communism’s best days “are ahead of us!” It is also important to realize, he explained, that “we are part of an international movement.” Yes, that’s right. Part of something much larger.

    A decisive victory over the right is possible, noted the Communist leader. “Thus, the struggle against the right, as some suggest, doesn’t submerge or bypass or postpone the class struggle; on the contrary, it is evident that it brings to the surface, clears the ground, and creates a more favorable terrain for a more open struggle against finance capital, corporate power, neo-liberalism, and imperial rule. For now we are in a transitional stage.”

    The language is familiar to those who have studied the long range strategy of the Communist movement globally.

    It is also the language of Soviet strategy. “In short,” said Webb, “people’s anger is growing, the popular mood is changing, and the coalition that elected the president is moving forward again. Yes we can!”

    And yes, the Communists can. How is this possible? Lenin provided an answer many years ago when he wrote a famous little aside, which reads as follows: “As a result of my observations,” noted Lenin, “I have concluded that the so-called cultured classes of Western Europe and America are incapable of comprehending the current situation and the real balance of forces; these classes should be regarded as deaf and dumb and treated accordingly.”

  13. Telling the truth is a bourgeois superstition. On the contrary, it is the end that sanctifies the lie. While chasing profits in the Soviet market, the world’s capitalists will close their eyes to reality and thus change into deaf and dumb blind men. They will give us credits that will help us to maintain Communist Parties in their countries and, by supplying us with essential materials, will rebuild the war industry we need for our future victorious attacks on our suppliers. In other words, they will be working toward their own suicide.” Lenin

  14. My brother used to date a woman from Canada. He was in the Navy for 25 years and she was a Canadian liberal. It didn’t last long.

    She told him that our military is too large and too aggresive. Said we don’t need it. To convince him she brought up the point that Canada doesn’t have a large military and neither does Mexico, and no one has ever invaded them. She honestly didn’t get it, even after he pointed it out, “That’s because you live next door to us!”

  15. To convince him she brought up the point that Canada doesn’t have a large military and neither does Mexico, and no one has ever invaded them.

    No one has ever invaded Canada or Mexico? Ah, the stupid is strong in that one.

    Quebecois might beg to differ with her. Had she never heard of a little unpleasantness involving New France?

    Or wonder where the phrase “Halls of Montezuma” comes from in the Marine Corps hymn? Or why the Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

    Honestly, sometimes I think that the primary driver of liberal viewpoints is gross stupidity and ignorance.

  16. More to the point: if there were a bump in the night did she get up to investigate or nudge your brother to do so, and if so, why?

  17. America should move all our troops come, and that includes very publicly removing our troops from Normandy.
    I would love to let South Korea defend South Korea.
    .
    And no asylum for war refugees. You wanted the US out, deal with your problems yourselves.

  18. Occam’s Beard said: “Or wonder where the phrase “Halls of Montezuma” comes from in the Marine Corps hymn? Or why the Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo? ”

    Lets also not forget about the apparent Mexican struggle with the real natives of the southwest. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican American war of 1848, made arrangements:

    “…It shall not be lawful, under any pretext whatever, for any inhabitant of the United States to purchase or acquire any Mexican, or any foreigner residing in Mexico, who may have been captured by Indians inhabiting the territory of either of the two republics; nor to purchase or acquire horses, mules, cattle, or property of any kind, stolen within Mexican territory by such Indians. ”

    http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=26&page=transcript

  19. Jon, absolutely right. I also decided not to mention Pershing and Pancho Villa.

    Moss, I’m with you 100%. South Koreans (in my limited experience) have more than a streak of anti-Americanism (motivated in no small part by Red agitprop re the Korean War, apparently).

    OK. You’re on your own. Best news I’ve heard in a long time. Rotsa ruck.

    Same thing with all of Europe.

    Apropos the psychology of this: when I taught freshman chemistry undergrads used routinely to squawk to me after the first lecture about being required by some counsellor to take the course. They’d indignantly give me their impassioned arguments for why they shouldn’t have to take it, how they’d previously taken AP chem courses, how brilliant and knowledgeable they were, etc., while I looked back at them with all the expression of a smoked herring.

    When they finally talked themselves out, I’d say, “So don’t take it,” and turn to the next kid.

    Nothing deflates late adolescent rebellion against authority figures quite like the realization that the authority figure couldn’t possibly care less what they do, or indeed, what happens to them. Could be 300 spotty faces in this lecture theater next time, could be 299. All the same to me.)

  20. Honestly, sometimes I think that the primary driver of liberal viewpoints is gross stupidity and ignorance.

    I think that the primary driver of liberal (on the street) viewpoints is ignorance informed by half truths that all resonate with a PC worldview reinforced from school through the media all through their lives like a constant drone constantly shifting in one direction.

  21. Occma’s Beard:

    “Rotsa ruck”

    Was such a rude, obnoxious, stereo-type really necessary? I suppose you believe that Oriental eyes “slant” as well?

  22. You bet.

    Tell me something about yourself and I’ll come up with a suitable canard for you too, unless you get over yourself.

    Happy now?

    If you think you’re going to intimidate me by playing the PC card you are ever so mistaken.

  23. “If you think you’re going to intimidate me by playing the PC card you are ever so mistaken.”

    They are still under the illusion that the PC card has not been overplayed.

  24. “If we become neutral, Europe falls to Russia”
    Nonsense. Russia now hasn’t enough troops to send them to Kyrgyzia, as Kyrgyz government asked, to stop pogroms.

  25. Russia has enough troops if the kind of conflict is different. they dont have enough troops to play nice like the US does and drop 100k rounds per combatant dropped, but they DO have enough to do brutal scorched earth winner takes all kind of fighting

    which becomes possible again given that we dont have manufacturing infrastructure and europe doesnt either. couple that with a 95% failure rate for the populations ablity to meet minimum requirements for the military, and you have a recipe where a blitz type fight would just have states giving up as they did last century.

    Russia never portrays itself truthfully, and given the disconnect between the state and economics, the condition of the people is absolutely no indication of where they have been applying their money and influence over the past 90 years.

    they spent a huge amount on yamentau mountain… why spend there and not on economics to help the people not suffer so much. whats the alcoholism rate? wahts a doctors monthly salary? where are the exports other than weapons, candy, and fish eggs? why stockpile gold and diamonds above a certain size?

    compared to facilitating modern war, old fashioned stuff is very cheap… doesn’t cost much to train 100 men and put them out into another country. for that matter it doesn’t cost much to do 1000 men.

    lets see… in 20 years, 1000 men each year, that’s the ability to send out 20,000 people into one country to cause trouble.

    Russia now hasn’t enough troops to send them to Kyrgyzia, as Kyrgyz government asked, to stop pogroms

    Russia stop pogroms?
    (like the pogrom they are stopping by providing nuclear weapons to kim and alma, right?)

    russia DOES have the power, it just doenst have the will. it also doesnt have the desire to put up with what its reputation would be if it handled it their way.

    so until the US is handcuffed and the west is in a place to say and influence and make a change to the situation, they wont bother.

    as soon as that’s over, the whole place will be swept clean, and a large number of citizens will move there to become a permanent place keeper.

    what one CAN do and what one WILL do are very different things, and failure to do everything and anything is not a sign of lack of ability, its a sign of applied and judicious will.

    yamentau is nuclear hardened and “may span as much as an entire degree of latitude and longitude”

    For people too poor to fight that is a mighty big nuclear hardened base… no?

    … the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains in the central and southern Urals … were huge construction projects begun in the late 1970s, when U.S. nuclear firepower took special aim at the Communist Party’s leadership complex. Fearing a decapitating strike, the Soviets sent tens of thousands of workers to these remote sites, where U.S. spy satellites spotted them still toiling away in the late 1990s. Yamantau is expected to be operating soon. According to diagrams and notes given to me in the late 1990s by SAC senior officers, the Yamantau command center is inside a rock quartz mountain, about 3,000 feet straight down from the summit. It is a wartime relocation facility for the top Russian political leadership. It is more a shelter than a command post, because the facility’s communications links are relatively fragile. As it turned out, the quartz interferes with radio signals broadcast from inside the mountain. Therefore the main communications links are either cable or radio transmitters that broadcast from outside the center.” The Washington Post Sunday, May 25, 2003

    and what about the new military doctrine that approves of first strike using nuclear munitions?

    ria novosti
    en.rian.ru/russia/20100205/157786616.html

    Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has approved the country’s new military doctrine which includes the option of using nuclear strikes against potential aggressors.
    -=-=-=-

    Russia’s military policy

    * The main goal of the Russian Federation is to prevent a nuclear conflict as well as any other military conflict

    * Russia retains the right to use nuclear weapons in response to an attack against it or its allies with nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, or in response to an aggression with the use of conventional weapons

    their troop numbers are low, but they have a history of immediate conscription, so thats not indicative of anything.

    22,000 tanks…
    25,975 armored vehicles
    15,000 armored infantry fighting vehicles
    4,705 units of self propelled artillery
    10,065 units of towed artillery
    2600 rocket units

    the us doesn’t even have half that much
    though we have twice as many people in service

    and the nuclear treaties cover big bombs, not tactical weapons, of which russia has a huge number of.
    (which they are worried some has been removed. given some incidents, its probably true. but given the player, who knows if its intentional or not)

    britain has 225 nuclear warheads
    the US has 5000+

    Russian Nuclear Weapons Account Falls Short
    http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2010/05/russiacount.php

    meaning that we dont know how much they actyually have (unless maybe guestimating due to kamiokand)

    how hard would it be to scorch kyrgyz once there is no political opposition in the world?

    if the US, RUSSIA and CHINA were all of one Marxist mind, what would happen to all the other states as they fulfilled Engels and Marx prophecies on conflagration?

  26. Moss said: “America should move all our troops [h]ome…”

    I have lately become just as exasperated as you are, Moss.

    More than once I have given in to the emotional side and – especially during the Bush years – thought: “Let’s just bring *all* of the troops home, deploy them on our northern and southern borders and tell the rest of the world to f@#k off and die. I wouldn’t even leave the abandoned bases. I would tear the buildings down and grind up the streets and runways into gravel and ship it all home too. And then sit back and watch the results with glee.

    Unfortunately, reality would soon set in and instead of a new peaceful world, it would be like the last years of the Roman Empire – chaos advancing as the legions retreat, followed in a very short time by the barbarians at our own gates.

    Still – it would be fun for a short while.

  27. It would be lots of fun to live in Yamentau.

    BTW, it’s funny how much science-fiction imagines the scenario that seems to be developing these days. Time to reread “The City and the Stars.”

  28. The bussing of the b’s
    and the radioactive trees
    and the glowing water fountains
    where the boson springs
    and the fermion sings
    on that Yamentau mountain.
    (sung to big rock candy mountain)

  29. This is not the first Kyrgys-Uzbek clashes. In 1990 Osh and Fergana valley were on fire, and Gorbachev deployed troops that stop the pogroms. Kyrgyzstan has too few specialists – geologists, mining and construction engineers – to develop her own minerals. It also is too poor to pay Western engineers.

  30. The French have produced a host of keen socio-political analysts, like de Tocqueville, the Marquis de Custine, and now this anonymous french Admiral who describes Europe as lunatic.

    I feel androgynous would be a better term.

  31. This paper in “Economist” is somewhat misleading. There were no “arbitrary” dividing of Fergana valley: it almost completely belong to Uzbekistan. It is impossible to divide the land to make mono-ethnic states here, since population distribution is dictated by landscape. Uzbek people are farmers, they live in low lands and river valleys, while Kyrgyz people are highlanders and herders. Tajiks are herders, too, and most are highlanders. Ethnic distribution is patchy, there sizable enclaves of Uzbeks in low mountain slopes with fertile land, and centures old history of hostilities between herders and farmers.

  32. Occam;

    No PC card playing on my part. I was reading what I thought were otherwise intelligent comments and was struck by an obvious racist comment and called you on it.

    For you to answer “you bet.” Well then, no surprise really that you truly do believe that Orientals have “slanted” eyes; and would say yes to it.

    Feel free to use whatever “canard” you wish with me. It only shows your own ignorance and rudeness. Not the sort of stuff I expect on Neo’s blog; even in the comments section.

  33. Sergey,
    the point is that he shouldn’t have been drawing up borders, by doing so, you have both sides having to live or find a medium in a situation they never created. which to Stalin was the point, and why when there was no such schism in a country, he shipped away a large portion of the population and moved in a new population to create such a situation for two sides to live with and not be able to resolve. if they drew the lines of borders themselves, they could live with what it ended up as, in the absence of that, they will never settle down until such happens. and that was the whole point for stalin, provide the people with a constantly shifting sand of a surface to live on, so that none could stand on some stable footing and oppose power.

  34. And before you say that’s not true, explain to me how Latvia today would be much less contentious of a place among the people if there wasn’t a huge Russian population that Stalin moved in, and large purges to the gulag to move the residents out.

    Using immigrant enclaves to hide your people among others is a simple and constant function taken advantage of by closed societies towards open ones. like vines establishing a new foothold in a flowerbed.

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