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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Even the Khmer Rouge, where the US is oft blamed for their rise to power because the US... Bombed them in a desperate attempt to stop Cambodia from falling to a bunch of omnicidal maniacs?

Dropping millions of tonnes of bombs on a country does not endear the local population to you or your collaborators. If you bomb and leave without properly installing an occupation govt (because your plan is to get out of South East Asia while saving face) then you're asking for trouble. There was no proper occupation government in Iraq either. The US showed up, took all kinds of hostile actions 1991-2003 (the air campaign, encouraging revolts, sanctions and then the 2003 invasion), they wrecked the governing institutions (Ba'ath party), installed nothing to replace them and then wondered why Iraq was disintegrating and everyone hated them.

Suppose aliens show up and say 'you've offended us for not being vegetarians' and start razing cities from orbit. The waste chemicals from the alien war machines poison the water, huge swathes of land are irradiated. Nigh-invincible tripods wander around, mostly batting off local resistance. Some governments collaborate since they prefer vegetarianism anyway, they draft troops to fight on their side and ban meat. Chaos and anarchy reigns.

Then the aliens leave due to esoteric domestic concerns. What do you think people are going to think about vegetarianism? Is it going to be more or less popular? It's going to be much less popular, since the aliens are widely hated for killing enormous numbers of people, violating sovereignty and vegetarianism is tainted by that. People are going to be salivating over cooking and eating aliens alive.

Dropping millions of tonnes of bombs on a country does not endear the local population to you or your collaborators.

Current relations between the US and Vietnam, not to mention the US and Japan and the US and Germany would seem to indicate otherwise. Funny that.

US and Japan and the US and Germany

If you bomb and leave without properly installing an occupation govt

US and Vietnam

OK, China switched to being the primary threat to Vietnam shortly after the US left. But this 'enemy of my enemy' effect would be much greater in the counterfactual where the US had never fought them. Vietnam's relations with Russia are much better than with the US, they use mainly Russian equipment.

What has Vietnam done to actually help the US, if their relations are so good and history matters so little?

The US isn't currently carpet bombing Saigon and commissioning bombers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

China's already learned what America couldn't figure out in Afghanistan in the last 20 years, and that's that open trade and commerce are a better way to get people to be receptive to wanting to deal with you than sending your air force in and imposing conditions on them.

The US did not decline to properly install an occupation government. They lost. Their ally fell to the Khmer Rouge after a lengthy siege of the capital.

And regardless with your example, do you think the Earth's militaries would be made stronger if aliens bombed us into the stone age? How? Will our jagged rocks and clubs become magic?

Peasants were radicalized by the bombing, it played into the hands of the radicals who were fighting the US. Why would normal people join the Khmer Rouge?

In the case of my scenario, I'd expect a massive and sustained militarization effort to strengthen our defences. Look at North Korea with it's 'military-first' doctrine and hatred of the US. It's a fairly poor country with limited resources but with hydrogen bombs and ICBMs, along with a very large conventional army. My main point is that the alien's political goals would be put backward by this policy. Their goal was not to kill or destroy but to convert us to vegetarianism, which then failed.

Claiming that the Khmer Rouge were radicalized by and against the US does not square with their actual behaviour, which was omnicide primarily directed at Cambodians but generally against everyone.

At least with Hamas you can point to them being interested mostly in killing an external opponent they have a grievance against, rather than everyone especially themselves.

As for South Korea, who were invaded and almost destroyed by the North, why did they not then become radicalized in the same way? North Korea's radicalization clearly predates the Korean War because it's visible in them starting the war in the first place.

OK but why did the Khmer Rouge manage to get into power, if as you say, their policy program was omnicide directed at the Cambodian population (which is untrue given they were pro-peasant, grossly incompetent, weird and self-serving but still pro-peasant)? The sane, normal people were discredited and undermined by the US bombing campaign which killed a lot of people.

Johnny Cambodian the illiterate peasant doesn't know much about the fine details of Marxism, Maoism or Pol Potism. But he's against being bombed. That's the key ingredient, not Chinese or Vietnamese assistance. No amount of money can substitute for people prepared to fight - Afghanistan and our other counter-insurgency failures show that much.

North Korea's radicalization clearly predates the Korean War

The US razing every urban area in the country certainly worsened things. Proportionately North Korea got bombed much more intensely than Japan or Germany in WW2, massed incendiary attacks are roughly as devastating as nuclear strikes. The North Koreans might've started off weird but they got a lot weirder after the war - see the Korean axe murder incident. I'm no psychologist but I suspect having the whole country bombed to smithereens such that people were living in holes in the ground might induce some paranoia and xenophobia in the broad population. Anyway, South Korea didn't get hit as hard as North Korea.

if as you say, their policy program was omnicide directed at the Cambodian population (which is untrue given they were pro-peasant, grossly incompetent, weird and self-serving but still pro-peasant)?

Killing a quarter of Cambodia's population in about 3 years isn't oops. You can't achieve that unless it's your goal. The Cambodian genocide was deliberate, and definitely not pro-peasant.

Johnny Cambodian the illiterate peasant doesn't know much about the fine details of Marxism, Maoism or Pol Potism. But he's against being bombed.

Johnny Cambodian the illiterate peasant doesn't smash infants against trees because he dislikes being bombed.

but they got a lot weirder after the war - see the Korean axe murder incident

The weirdness of North Korea is more clearly indicated in their political system and continued use of concentration camps, not an incident in which North Korean soldiers killed two American ones, which is frankly a footnote in comparison.

Anyway, South Korea didn't get hit as hard as North Korea.

If it didn't, the differences are fairly slim. At one point, almost all of South Korea was occupied by North Korea. Many hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians were killed, often in deliberate massacres.

As North Korean troops advanced into South Korea during the Korean War and were followed by communist officials, they systematically massacred former South Korean government officials, anti-communists, and others deemed hostile to the communists; and such killing was intensified as North Koreans retreated from the South. We do have some estimates of the dead, as for Taejon (lines 103 to 105) and Wonju (lines 106 to 107). There is one overall estimate of the minimum number of South Koreans that were murdered, which is from the South Korean Overseas Information Agency (line 111).

How many Republic of Korea (ROK) POWs were killed by the North Koreans is difficult to pin down. This is because the communists claimed that they had captured 70,000 soldiers overall but they only returned near 8,000 of them.1 We do know they killed near 5,500 ROK POWs and may have impressed into their military another 50,000.2 From this it seems that North Koreans killed from 5,000 to 12,000 ROK POWs (line 121), which is consistent with their murder of 5,000 to 6,000 American POWs (line 141).

Besides illegally impressing POWs, the North also forced 400,000 South Koreans into their army. They are therefore responsible for their deaths. Given that the army often ordered these people to do the most dangerous tasks or combat and that the North Korean army suffered around 350,000 killed throughout the war (line 13), almost two-and-a-half times the army's original strength (lines 3 to 4), a range of one-third to two-thirds of the impressed/conscripted killed in battle seems conservative. This means a North Korean democide of around 225,000 (line 128).

Altogether, during the war the North Korean communists probably killed near 500,000 Koreans (excluding at least 6,000 killed by the South-line 152), including their own citizens (line 95). With a probable 1,500,000 civilians killed in the war (line 81), this democide seems, if anything, an underestimate and the true figure may be closer to the high democide calculation of almost 775,000 dead (line 95).

Unless you're suggesting some weird response curve where killing 700,000 civilians is okay but the moment you cross the 800,000 mark everyone goes insane, the differences in the North and South Korean political systems cannot be explained by bombing.

The Cambodian genocide was deliberate, and definitely not pro-peasant.

They killed ethnic minorities, city-dwellers and intellectuals. Pol Pot was an agrarian socialist, he wanted to 'purify' the state by getting rid of all the non-Cambodian and non-peasants. You can't just simplify him down to being an omnicidal maniac.

His system wasn't good for Cambodian peasants but as far as they were concerned, they were fighting for and advancing the interests of peasants. That's why they got support from the peasants! This is the key thing. How, in your model, does Pol Pot take over Cambodia unless he has some supporters? It's not like he recruited from the psychos and innately Chaotic Evil community. He encouraged the poor, young and resentful to take part in classicide and succeeded because the natural stabilizing pillars of pre-war Cambodian society had collapsed, in large part due to US bombing.

I maintain that a North Korean soldier wandering up to some Americans, telling them they couldn't chop down a tree because it was personally planted by Kim Il Sung and later running up to murder them with axes (over a tree) is pretty weird.

North Korea was less populous than South Korea (20 million to 9 million) and took much higher losses proportionately. Some parts of South Korea weren't wrecked by the war, all of North Korea was wrecked.

Furthermore, I do not claim that all of North Korea's political issues stem from the war (the last couple centuries of Korean history not being terribly fortunate or successful wrt foreign relations). But the war did have significant cultural impacts regarding relations with the outside world, resulting in a more militarized and isolationist dictatorship, even by Stalinist dictatorship standards.

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