Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Ah. Well, it's fair in that case, I suppose.
Another interesting anecdote I learned from the book: William Halsey actually wanted to ride Emperor Hirohito's propaganda white horse into Tokyo, and the American public loved the idea so much that it was used to promote war bonds and someone even sent him a custom-made saddle for exactly that purpose.
Sadly, it never came to be, partly because Nimitz basically told him "Come on...really?" But he did ride a white horse provided by a U.S. Cavalry in Tokyo. The best bit was that he was actually scared of horses but still wanted to ride Hirohito's horse just for the hell of it.
Well, yeah, it helped that he really, really, really hated Japan. ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Edited by dRoy on Feb 16th 2021 at 8:19:53 PM
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
Cringe but free
That's the reason why, wasn't it? MacArthur didn't want any funny businesses with the subjugated Japanese populace, and giving the spotlight to someone who'd called them "yellow bastards", "yellow monkeys" and "a product of mating between female apes and the worst Chinese criminals" (something that wartime Japanese media eagerly reported) would've just been asking for trouble.
China targets rare earth export curbs to hobble US defence industry.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last month proposed draft controls on the production and export of 17 rare earth minerals in China, which controls about 80 per cent of global supply.
Industry executives said government officials had asked them how badly companies in the US and Europe, including defence contractors, would be affected if China restricted rare earth exports during a bilateral dispute.
“The government wants to know if the US may have trouble making F-35 fighter jets if China imposes an export ban,” said a Chinese government adviser who asked not to be identified. Industry executives added that Beijing wanted to better understand how quickly the US could secure alternative sources of rare earths and increase its own production capacity.
Fighter jets such as the F-35, a Lockheed Martin aircraft, rely heavily on rare earths for critical components such as electrical power systems and magnets. A Congressional Research Service report said that each F-35 required 417kg of rare-earth materials
The Chinese move follows deteriorating Sino-US relations and an emerging technology war between the two countries. The Trump administration tried to make it harder for Chinese companies to import sensitive US technology, such as high-end semiconductors. The Biden administration has signalled that it would also restrict certain exports but would work more closely with allies.
Beijing’s control of rare earths threatens to become a new source of friction with Washington but some warn any aggressive moves by China could backfire by prompting rivals to develop their own production capacity.
In a November report, Zhang Rui, an analyst at Antaike, a government-backed consultancy in Beijing, said that US weapons makers could be among the first companies targeted by any export restriction.
China’s foreign ministry said last year it would sanction Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon for selling arms to Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its sovereign territory.
The proposed guidelines would require rare earth producers to follow export control laws that regulate shipments of materials that “help safeguard state security”. China’s State Council and Central Military Commission will have the final say on whether the list should include rare earths.
Rare earth minerals are also central to the manufacture of products including smartphones, electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Some executives and officials are, however, questioning the wisdom of formally including rare earths in the export control regime. They argue that it would motivate Beijing’s rivals to accelerate their own production capacities and undermine China’s dominance of the industry.
“Export controls are a doubled-edged sword that should be applied very carefully,” said Zhang of Antaike.
The Pentagon has become increasingly concerned about the US reliance on China for rare earths that are used in everything from precision-guided missiles to drones.
Ellen Lord, the top defence official for acquisitions until last year, told Congress in October that the US needed to create stockpiles of certain rare earths and re-establish domestic processing. She said the US had a “real vulnerability” because China floods the market to destroy any competition any time nations are about to start mining or producing.
In recent months, the Pentagon has signed contracts with American and Australian miners to boost their onshore refining capacity and reduce their reliance on Chinese refiners.
The US National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.
Chinese rare earth miners themselves are worried about the enhanced power the regulations would give MIIT to control their output.
China began setting rare earth production limits in 2007 to keep prices high and reduce pollution but the policy is not legally binding and many miners regularly exceed their output quota. The latest regulations would allow the government to impose steep fines for unapproved sales.
“The new rule is not going to make China stronger in the global supply chain when local mines can’t operate at full capacity and an export ban is easier said than done,” said an executive, who asked not to be identified, at Guangdong Rare Earth Group, one of the nation’s largest rare earth groups.
In a statement, MIIT said the new law would help “protect national interest and ensure the security of strategic resources”.
According to government statistics, China’s demand for rare earths is so high that it has consistently exceeded domestic supply over the past five years, prompting a surge of Chinese imports from miners in the US and Myanmar.
A wide range of industries are driving demand for the strategic resource, including China’s electric vehicle and wind power generation sectors.
“China’s economic planners have failed to predict the surge in rare earth consumption,” said an executive at Gold Dragon Rare Earth Co in south-eastern Fujian Province.
“China’s own rare earth security isn’t guaranteed,” said David Zhang, an analyst at Sublime China Information, a consultancy. “It can disappear when the US-China relationship deteriorates or Myanmar’s generals decide to shut the border.”
While China’s dominance in rare earth mining is under threat, it maintains a near monopoly in the refining process that turns ores into materials ready for manufacturers.
The country controls about four-fifths of global rare earth refining capacity. Ores mined in the US must be sent to China as the US has no refining capacity of its own yet.
Industry executives, however, said China’s strength in refining had more to do with its higher tolerance for pollution than any technological edge.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Feb 16th 2021 at 4:11:21 AM
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
vicarious
Halsey is the same dude who would start KILL THE JAPS KILL THE JAPS chants in the cafeteria
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Another funny bits from the book, an exchange between Chester Nimitz and his wife in the middle of December 1941:
Catherine: Congratulations on your promotion! You always wanted to command the Pacific Fleet, it's such a "height of glory!"
Nimitz: (actual, exact wording) Darling, the fleet is at the bottom of the sea. Nobody must know that here, but I’ve got to tell you.
Apparently the full extent of the damage from the Pearl Harbor attack was kept secret for a bit.
"Oh, except for a couple of carriers."
I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Speaking of which, I find it sad that one of the biggest passion projects of Halsey post-war was trying to save Enterprise CV-6 and turn it into a museum.
Shame. I would've loved to visit Enterprise during my stay in the U.S.
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
Redmess
So I'm reading Frank Mc Lynn's book on Genghis Khan, and I come across this passage:
[[quoteblock]]But how cruel was [Genghis Khan]? He was not perceived by contemporaries as being exceptional in this regard, since the atrocities he committed and the things we in the twenty-first century would perceive as war crimes were commonplace in the thirteenth century among all peoples of the time, including Christian crusaders.He did not have the kind of exceptional reputation for cruelty among his contemporaries that Henry VIII of England had in the sixteenth century, could not rival Tamerlane for slaughterous brutality, and can be documented as less bloodthirsty than contemporary Khitans, Persians, and Jin Chinese.[[quoteblock]]
Wait... Henry VIII? What exceptional reputation for cruelty would that be, exactly? I don't remember Henry VIII stacking piles of skulls outside of Paris or anything like that.
I don't know about the other guys, but Henry VIII seems to be rather out of place there.
Optimism is a duty.
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Also, I don't remember the Crusaders cutting people's head off and throwing them into castles with catapults or flinging infected corpses into settlements to start pandemic.
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
Redmess
Maybe not that, but the Crusaders weren't shy about butchering civilians either.
Optimism is a duty.
Actually, if I remember correctly, they did precisely that, but I could be wrong.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
Cringe but free
That wasn't Temujin, though. That was his descendants in the Golden Horde, over a century after his death.
Henry VIII was certainly notorious for sending folks to the block for the slightest provocation (and starting a bunch of dumb wars on top of that), but I don't remember him doing anything on the degree of Genghis Khan's total annihilation of the Tangut Xia state. Which admittedly happened because they'd rebelled against him after submitting.
One thing you gotta remember is that history is written by the literate, and in the past, that largely meant the clerical/monastic types in religious institutions. The Mongols, whatever else they did, didn't go after any particular faith within Genghis Khan's lifetime, while Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church (and subsequent plundering of monasteries and abbeys) was seen as a Moral Event Horizon for many religious chroniclers of his time.
European human rights court backs Germany over Kunduz airstrike case.
The ruling by the Strasbourg-based court rejects a complaint by Afghan citizen Abdul Hanan, who lost two sons in the attack, that Germany did not fulfil its obligation to effectively investigate the incident.
In September 2009, the German commander of NATO troops in Kunduz called in a U.S. fighter jet to strike two fuel trucks near the city which NATO believed had been hijacked by Taliban insurgents.
The Afghan government said at the time 99 people, including 30 civilians, were killed. Independent rights groups estimated between 60 and 70 civilians were killed.
The death toll shocked Germans and ultimately forced its defence minister to resign over accusations of covering up the number of civilian casualties in the run-up to Germany’s 2009 election.
Germany’s federal prosecutor general had found that the commander did not incur criminal liability, mainly because he was convinced when he ordered the airstrike that no civilians were present.
For him to be liable under international law, he would have had to be found to have acted with intent to cause excessive civilian casualties.
The European Court of Human Rights considered the effectiveness of Germany’s investigation, including whether it established a justification for lethal use of force. It did not consider the legality of the airstrike.
Of 9,600 NATO troops in Afghanistan, Germany has the second-largest contingent behind the United States.
A 2020 peace agreement between the Taliban and Washington calls for foreign troops to withdraw by May 1, but U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is reviewing the deal after a deterioration in the security situation in Afghanistan.
Germany is preparing to extend the mandate for its military mission in Afghanistan from March 31 until the end of this year, with troop levels remaining at up to 1,300, according to a draft document seen by Reuters.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Feb 16th 2021 at 5:13:01 AM
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
@Redmess - Yeah, but as already been said, so did everyone. The Crusaders were murderous dicks, no denying that, but even they were actual saints (hah) compared to the Mongols.
Edited by dRoy on Feb 16th 2021 at 11:26:48 PM
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
On the other side, Saladin was unafraid to execute prisoners whenever he wanted to make a point, but occasionally let them go if he wished to.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Henry VIII was also notorious for how erratic he was. A major reason the English Reformation was such a mess was because he'd change his mind on some matters apruptly.
Including which groups should be persecuted. He repeatedly sent his closest friends and allies to the chopping block because their views didn't line up with his anymore (or they found a wife for him that he didn't like the looks of).
Basically, Henry VIII acted like what you'd expect from a stereotypical ancient potentate, not from an "enlightened monarch" of his time.
While Genghis Khan was more a product of the area of the world he came from.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Feb 16th 2021 at 6:31:00 PM
Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.
Cringe but free
Righto. Henry VIII's entire brand was his willingness to smash apart rules and checks-and-balances whenever they didn't suit his whims. A tendency which hardly stayed within England's borders, as the whole "Kingdom of Ireland" episode showed.
Whereas despite the stereotype of steppe nomads being illiterate barbarians, Genghis was big on the law-and-order thing. Part of the reason he managed to unite so many nomadic peoples under his rule (and collaborators from other cultures alongside) was because he offered stability: the Mongol wartime decrees (that would later be codified into the secret Yassa) might have been tough at best and extortionate at worst. But as long as you followed them, you were typically safe from random raids from bandits and enemy tribes and stood a fair chance at advancing your station.
And that mattered a great deal, because the Mongols rose to power in an already dangerous, unstable world. If you were living in China, then the borderlands between the Jin, Song and Western Xia had already been torn up by a century of war, with the Jin sack of the Song capital of Kaifeng (then named Bianjing) in the previous century rivalling anything that Genghis would do in brutality. If you were in Central Asia, then your homeland might just as well had been fought over by the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Qarakhanids and countless other rival powers. The lands that the Mongols conquered were no strangers to the whole Rape, Pillage, and Burn routine; with the Mongols, at least, you'd know that they'd do it on their noyan's order when they had a clear pretext, not whenever they felt like it.
One of Genghis' best-known speeches was the one that he allegedly gave to the conquered populace of Bukhara (per Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni, writing a century after his death), where he said:
That wasn't just a boast. The Mongols were dead serious about establishing clear casus belli to legitimise their conquests, whether it's for murdering their envoys (the Khwarezmian Empire, as seen above), manipulating their tribes into a proxy war and executing those who resisted (the Jin Dynasty), rebelling after surrendering (too many cities to count, but the Western Xia were the most infamous case) or harbouring an enemy (the Rus' principalities and the Kingdom of Hungary).
All those conquests followed extensive diplomacy from the Mongol side: not necessarily to limit the bloodshed (because after all, these were proud and rising empires themselves, often with a chip on their shoulder), but mostly to ensure that the world knew what their enemies' crimes were (whether or not that warranted having their cities razed to the ground). And it gave a way for any potential turncoat from the other side to defect "honourably", which both helped uphold their reputation and made their job all the much easier in the end.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
Redmess
Yes, that's basically what Mc Lynn argues as well, though he disputes that the Yasa was secret at all, as well as disputing the Secret History as the ultimate source on the Mongols.
His account of Jamukha's (or Jamuga, as he spells it) death differs notably from what Wikipedia and presumably the Secret History say, for instance.
Optimism is a duty.
Cringe but free
Well, every source has its issues. The Secret History is just one piece of a really big puzzle.
The thing about Mongol history is that they only really became a literate culture under Genghis. If you're a historian trying to specialise in the Mongols, then you can't just learn Classical Mongolian and expect that to give you access to enough sources, because you'd also need to deal with texts in Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Jurchen (Manchu), Tangut, Khitan, Uyghur, Tibetan, Qipchaq, Armenian... you get the picture. Not only because these were peoples that the Mongols interacted with, but also because in many cases, the Mongols themselves assimilated into the local culture and wrote their histories in the local language (especially Persian).
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
Redmess
Funny, that's pretty much the argument Mc Lynn starts his book with. He also notes that such a hypothetical scholar simply does not exist, and that it would be hard to do even if you had a lifetime to work on it. But he does try to cover all aspects of Genghis Khan's history, instead of just covering one or the other side of it.
Optimism is a duty.
Given that the Mongol conquests were brought up here and the cruelty practiced in these conquests, I do have to this about how post-Genghis Golden Horde's siege of Genoese Kaffa by using plague-infected corpses? How were disease-ridden corpses handled back then? Was being infected an acceptable (at the time) risk or not?
Isn't the corpse-flinging claim actually heavily disputed in historian circles these days?
Is it safe to say that Biden will likely extend the troop presence in Afghanistan in order to prevent thw victory of the Taliban, but in acknowledgement of war weariness not conduct any mayor offensives, thereby just kicking the can down the road?
It is, partly because people were not completely stupid back then. Most of them kmew that touching bodies of plague victims was a bad idea.
Edited by Zarastro on Feb 17th 2021 at 12:39:31 PM
Redmess
Well, they didn't know about microbes back then, so they were handled poorly by our standards. They knew just enough to avoid too much contact with any fluids, but mostly they would try to ward off diseases by prayers and magic.
Optimism is a duty.
Cringe but free
Getting a bit off-topic, but I'm actually reading through Charles Kenny's The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Diseases right now, so I'll see if there's anything interesting to be found there.
In the meantime: I don't know how dead bodies were handled during the Black Death specifically (beyond pop-cultural portrayals). But Daniel Defoe's historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year (published in 1722, available here) is quite noteworthy for its portrayal of the 1665 plague outbreak in London, which while technically fictionalised, was likely based on his uncle's accounts.
The book portrays the undertakers (who put the infected bodies on the dead-carts) as hard men doing backbreaking work, wrapping cloths soaked in vinegar around their faces to keep out the miasma that they believed caused the plague (this was before the germ theory, mind). And if it's to be believed, then they did suffer from an extremely high fatality rate on the job.
And the corpse-flinging at Caffa isn't too contentious a claim, to my knowledge. What's been contested by historians is the claim that the plague first emerged (and killed millions) in Asia rather than the Black Sea/Caspian region, which we have no evidence for.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
Probably because the Marine Corps has always been pretty small. At the height of WWII, Hap Arnold was responsible for a much larger and more widespread fighting force than any Marine general would be, though I guess there's no reason that a Marine general couldn't hypothetically rise to a high enough position to be in charge of multiple services' troops, it just never seems to have happened during WWII (the idea of a "Joint Force" didn't take it's current form until relatively recently).
But anyways, by the numbers, there were about 500,000 Marines serving in WWII, and about 2.5 million airmen.