And so it begins…
It was the Dawn of the Third Age of Mankind… oh wait, we’re talking about Chinese history. However, the Shaolin history shares one thing with Babylon 5: they’re both long as heck.
Not for semi-literates living on the internet and not for people who get bored reading anything longer than 2 paragraphs. Oh you’d be surprised how many of those there are on the net.
Here’s a modern example of Shaolin conditioning.
Great map here of how Islam uses peace.
Starting from Nathan Bedford Forrest, we get to this issue on the US Civil War.
I was raised north of the Mason-Dixon, in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln”. I spent my childhood and young adulthood under the understanding that you “nasty, racist, evil southerners” fought the in the “Civil War” for slavery. You know, the standard victor’s propaganda and all… I studied the War, was a Yankee (and occasional Confederate) re-enactor, and the funny thing was, in spite of my in-depth knowledge of trivial matters such as AP Hill’s favorite shirt (red fireman style), dates and casualties, as well as the sequence of most of the major battles, and the gear, weapons and equipment, used, I never delved into the war from the South’s perspective, until recent years.
Although I live almost as far north as an American can live, I consider my self a Southerner “in spirit”. Whether thay flies with any of you south of the Mason-Dixon, well, that might be another story.
Here’s the question I have, and I would like to hear personal stories, family stories, I would like to get recommendations of websites and offline books to read, to help me better understand.
What is it like? Really?
-ArcticPatriot
While I’ve been in the South for more than a decade, it’s interesting to see what those with generations of family have to say. They are mostly classified by me as being in the Jacksonian camp. Not particularly interested in long term strategic consequences, but with virtues to go with their deficiency. Of course, I count myself in the Jacksonian camp as well, but I don’t have the subjective bias that comes with having generations of family going back to the Civil War on the side of the South. This allows me to see things from more than one perspective. Not the Leftist history of the US Civil War but not the South’s biased view either. I have to do the work of research myself, combining sources from everywhere. But hey, that’s why they call it a work ethic. Because hard work by itself is its own virtue, regardless of the outcome.
In other news, this is a good view of Leftist ideology and what their cult members think. Not only what, but how as well.
My best friend in the world (not “some of my friends”, but my best friend) is a conservative Republican who loves Anne Coulter. Meanwhile, I’m looking for a good price on a “2L4O” (Too Liberal for Obama) shirt. Why is he my best friend? Because time and time again he has demonstrated that he is one of the best, most honorable men I know. Human decency can transcend political differences.
It’s a good contrast view with Southern perspective. Some Southern perspective. It shows how closed off people can be, regardless of their personal circumstances or political ideology. Are humans as amazingly slow and parochial as presented here? Why yes. But they can still be useful for the purposes of society and the nation. Useful doesn’t mean they are right in their views.
My comment reply to various things in the comment section:
Either Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis were right about secession or King George and President Lincoln were. It can’t be true that both Jefferson and Lincoln were right about Secession.
Both were right. Thomas Jefferson didn’t ever say you could secede without fighting a damn war, now did he. In fact, Jefferson did in fact, you know, fight a war on secession. He didn’t just think, for he was no fool, that removing himself from the political protections of a system (British monarchy) would also confer upon them the protections, minus the costs, of the system.
Lincoln said the South couldn’t seize Ft. Sumter and union property or take captives of those that are in union forts which happened to be in Southern states to protect the various harbors and routes of the US from external enemies. The Southern states disagreed, so they went and started sieging various union forts, notably Sumter. Georgia declared secession causes on January 1861, Sumter started to fall in April of that same year. This, remember, was without the concurrence of the entire Confederacy. No vote was taken. The Southerners acted as individuals, believing the North would simply allow them to do as they pleased. The Southern states believed they could remove themselves from the authority of the US Constitution, while also having some kind of “natural right” protections from said Constitution, after having fired cannons at union soldiers, who refused to return fire for hours given what they knew of the political situation.
Pure foolishness on the part of Southern leaders. They primarily did so because they believed Northerners were too gutless to fight, like good Southern gentlemen. That’s a cultural conceit that paid what it was worth in the events afterwards. War, ladies and gentlemen, is no tea party where you can bow out when you are full of it. At least not the non-peacekeeping total war.
If I ever get seriously back into re-enacting the war, I will never put on that blue uniform again.
You’re making the mistake of what is often seen in fast converts. They were 100% convinced the Other was alien and to be hated, then they converted to the Other and now they are 100% convinced that the new Other is faulty, bad, and to be hated. Both are distorted views and both are ideologically flawed.
It’s not a balanced view taken with comprehension of all the factors of the war. It’s just choosing one side to portray well, while ignoring the rest.
Slavery was on the way out. All of the horror and death of the War shortened it only by a bit.
Let’s put that to the test. Give Obama 4 more years by voting for him. Since he’s going to be out anyways, why go to all the trouble of campaigning for and voting for conservatives. Go ahead. Vote for Obama in 2012. In fact, just vote for Reid and the other Congress Demoncrats. He’s going to die off, sooner or later. Take that 100 dollar out of your ATM machine, and give it to Democrats. If you really believe that it doesn’t matter how long they are in power.
What’s the difference. They’re not going to be in power forever right. So why not. Just like slavery, it was going to go away, right. So why fight against it. Why pay the cost. Why trouble yourself over nothing.
Oh, I know why not. Because deciding to allow others to suffer, who you neither know nor care about, is much easier than making the decision to allow a bad state of affairs to persist for your own existence. Isn’t it. Human mortality and vices are more prevalent then most would like to believe.
Since we’re on this topic of historical laziness and taking golf vacations the Obama Way, the KGB and the Soviets were going to go away anyways. So what’s up with Reagan trying to get the world nuked and using extreme rhetoric like “evil empire”. Why don’t you chill and let things die out in a generation or two. Well, why didn’t conservatives chill out about John Walker Lynn, Jane Fonda, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union? Vietnam was going to be lost anyways, why even worry about the Communist invasion. Just let history takes its course. The Soviet Union was going kaput soon anyways, so why worry about traitors giving out Navy encryption codes for their communiques world wide.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the virtues of honor, duty, courage, or hard work. But then again, treason never required such.
Why wouldn’t the Republicans live up to their wartime promises of providing land or other economic opportunities to African-Americans, e.g. forty acres and a mule?
President Johnson vetoed all the Radical Republican bills that was intended to secure the actual protection of civil liberties for freed blacks in the South. This delayed things for long enough that the KKK and other Democrat affiliates began to alter the political balance in the South, restoring Democrat politicians to their rightful place. Bedford Forrest was forced to disband the KKK he personally created, which resulted in the KKK splintering like terrorist cells, which ultimately ended up in the various hanging incidents for blacks. Without black votes in the South for Republicans, Republican politicians fell. And Democrat Jim Crow replaced them. The rest was history. The Democrat party stoked up and maintained Southern resentment for more than a century, before Reagan finally broke them free of it. The Dems kept the Southerners in a hutch much like the Dems do with blacks today.
Johnson was a Democrat. Lincoln selected him as a sort of compromise with Southern Democrats believing Lincoln was out to get them. Johnson was not just a Democrat, he was a Southern Democrat.
Wouldn’t that be better than butchering hundreds of thousands of your fellow countrymen?
The South at the time would have seen it as another aspect of Northern Aggression to be taking property that wasn’t theirs. In fact, the whole slavery issue with Georgia and other states was that the North weren’t returning their property: i.e. their slaves running off to the North even though the federal government had laws that said they must, but the Northern states often ignored the letter of the law. Besides, the South could not give up their plantations and the nobility installed upon them. The plantation masters had too much political influence, too much arrogance, to ever take a hand out from the North for their slaves and switch their ENTIRE ECONOMIC SYSTEM.
That’s like you going to the local teacher’s unions and telling them to “quit” and “stop their Democrat BS”. You think that would work. Their entire lives are based upon union salaries, and you think they would change just because somebody told them to or had cash on hand for em? The South was even more intricately woven around the plantation economy.
Switching an entire economy to something else is always traumatic and people will resist it. It’s not as easy and breezy as people wish to believe.
Reading a recent fictional story where a few high school kids visited Okinawa on a school vacation trip, I was invested in reading some more concerning the history of Okinawa.
In list of reading order, here is what I found.
Mass suicides
With the impending victory of American troops, civilians often committed mass suicide, urged on by the Japanese soldiers who told locals that victorious American soldiers would go on a rampage of killing and raping. Ryukyu Shimpo, one of the two major Okinawan newspapers, wrote in 2007: “There are many Okinawans who have testified that the Japanese Army directed them to commit suicide. There are also people who have testified that they were handed grenades by Japanese soldiers” to blow themselves up.[27] Some of the civilians, having been induced by Japanese propaganda to believe that U.S. soldiers were barbarians who committed horrible atrocities, killed their families and themselves to avoid capture. Some of them threw themselves and their family members from the cliffs where the Peace Museum now resides.However, despite being told by the Japanese military that they would suffer rape, torture and murder at the hands of the Americans, Okinawans “were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American enemy.”[28][29] According to Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power by Mark Selden, the Americans “did not pursue a policy of torture, rape, and murder of civilians as Japanese military officials had warned.”[30] Military Intelligence[31] combat translator Teruto Tsubota, a U.S. Marine born in Hawaii, convinced hundreds of civilians not to kill themselves and thus saved their lives.[32]
[edit]Rape allegations
Civilians and historians report that soldiers on both sides had raped Okinawan civilians during the battle. Rape by Japanese troops “became common” in June, after it became clear that the Japanese Army had been defeated.[6][33] One Okinawan historian has estimated there were more than 10,000 rapes of Okinawan women by American troops during the three month campaign.[34] The New York Times reported in 2000 that in the village of Katsuyama, civilians formed a vigilante group to ambush and kill a group of black American soldiers whom they claimed frequently raped the local girls there.[35]Marine Corps officials in Okinawa and Washington have stated that they “knew of no rapes by American servicemen in Okinawa at the end of the war, and their records do not list war crimes committed by Marines in Okinawa”.[36] Historian George Feifer, however, writes that rape in Okinawa was “another dirty secret of the campaign” in which “American military chronicles ignore [the] crimes.” Few Okinawans revealed their pregnancies, as “stress and bad diet … rendered most Okinawan women infertile. Many who did become pregnant managed to abort before their husbands and fathers returned. A smaller number of newborn infants fathered by Americans were suffocated.”[37]
Suicide order controversy
There is ongoing major disagreement between Okinawa’s local government and Japan’s national government over the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides during the battle. In March 2007, the national Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) advised textbook publishers to reword descriptions that the embattled Imperial Japanese Army forced civilians to kill themselves in the war so they would not be taken prisoner by the U.S. military. MEXT preferred descriptions that just say that civilians received hand grenades from the Japanese military.
This move sparked widespread protests among the Okinawans. In June 2007, the Okinawa Prefectoral Assembly adopted a resolution stating, “We strongly call on the (national) government to retract the instruction and to immediately restore the description in the textbooks so the truth of the Battle of Okinawa will be handed down correctly and a tragic war will never happen again.”[38]On September 29, 2007, about 110,000 people held the biggest political rally in the history of Okinawa to demand that MEXT retract its order to textbook publishers on revising the account of the civilian suicides. The resolution stated: “It is an undeniable fact that the ‘multiple suicides’ would not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military and any deletion of or revision to (the descriptions) is a denial and distortion of the many testimonies by those people who survived the incidents.”[39]
On December 26, 2007, MEXT partially admitted the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides.[40] The ministry’s Textbook Authorization Council allowed the publishers to reinstate the reference that civilians “were forced into mass suicides by the Japanese military,” on condition it is placed in sufficient context. The council report stated: “It can be said that from the viewpoint of the Okinawa residents, they were forced into the mass suicides.”[41] That was, however, not enough for the survivors who said it is important for children today to know what really happened.[42]
The Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburō Ōe has written a booklet which states that the mass suicide order was given by the military during the battle.[43] He was sued by the revisionists, including a wartime commander during the battle, who disputed this and wanted to stop publication of the booklet. At a court hearing on November 9, 2007, Ōe testified: “Mass suicides were forced on Okinawa islanders under Japan’s hierarchical social structure that ran through the state of Japan, the Japanese armed forces and local garrisons.”[44] On March 28, 2008, the Osaka Prefecture Court ruled in favor of Ōe stating, “It can be said the military was deeply involved in the mass suicides.” The court recognized the military’s involvement in the mass suicides and murder–suicides, citing the testimony about the distribution of grenades for suicide by soldiers and the fact that mass suicides were not recorded on islands where the military was not stationed.[45]
This covers in greater detail what goes on in Japan concerning historical revisionism and the entire purpose of it. It is not to erase the past, but to make it ambiguous. The truth, but not the whole truth. And what we call the Japanese, the Okinawans, take exception to that. That’s because Ryukyu islands are Chinese in ethnic make up, not Japanese, and that’s why the Japanese don’t consider Okinawans Japanese. That’s because the Okinawans don’t consider themselves Japanese. Assimilation has proceeded quite well over 50 years, but it wasn’t at the time.
Josef R. Sheetz
Pedro del Valle
Are two notable names.
Times magazine has a time travel article, written during the 50s at the time. Far better than the modern ones.
On Okinawa, where more than four years ago U.S. arms won a famous and a costly victory (80,000 dead & wounded), General Douglas MacArthur’s Pacific command has carried on a postwar occupation without much notice from the outside world. TIME Correspondent Frank Gibney toured the all-but-forgotten island, cabled:
The rice and sweet potato fields of Okinawa creep over the slate volcanic soil, covering the shell holes and the bloodstained caves where two great armies fought for eleven weeks. Weeds cover the charred foundations of what once were neat stone houses. Near by rise clusters of lean-tos made of cloth, battered boards and castoff American corrugated iron.
For the past four years, poor, typhoon-swept Okinawa has dangled at what bitter Army men call “the logistical end of the line,” and some of its commanders have been lax and inefficient. More than 15,000 U.S. troops, whose morale and discipline have probably been worse than that of any U.S. force in the world, have policed 600,000 natives who live in hopeless poverty. When a typhoon (dubbed “Gloria” by meteorologists) swept the island last summer and caused widespread damage, the Army finally investigated the situation. The island’s command was shaken up. Major General William W. Eagles, commander of ground forces, was replaced by breezy Major General Josef R. Sheetz, a convivial hustler who had done an able military government job in Korea. Air Force troops on Okinawa are commanded by grey, quiet-spoken Major General Alvin C. (“Ack-Ack”) Kincaid, whose slightly absent-minded philosopher’s air belies his hardheaded attention to discipline and morale. Since the change of command, Okinawa’s scandalous decline has been arrested. But Sheetz and Kincaid still have a tough situation on their hands.
Plight of the Occupation. Most American occupation families live in run-down Quonset communities that look like hobo camps. A few officers are quartered in small concrete houses (built with materials brought in from the U.S., at a cost of $40,000 apiece). The rest of Okinawa’s garrison live in hovels. Complained one young officer: “You get tired after a while of nailing the same piece of tin onto your house, watching it blow off in the typhoon, and then nailing it back.” It will take an estimated three years of building, and at least $75 million, before the Okinawa garrison will have adequate housing. (Congress has so far appropriated $58 million.)
Sheetz and Kincaid are faced with other morale hazards. Recreational facilities consisted of a few broken-down movie shacks and football fields. Okinawa had become a dumping ground for Army misfits and rejects from more comfortable posts. In the six months ending last September, U.S. soldiers committed an appalling number of crimes—29 murders, 18 rape cases, 16 robberies, 33 assaults.Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,856392-1,00.html#ixzz1Hjd9Vvvj
History of Okinawa reveal distinguished record of conquerors.
We have honor to be subjugated in 14th century by Chinese pirates.
In 16th century by English missionaries.
In 18th century by Japanese warlords.
And in 20th century by American marines . . .
But Okinawans most eager to be educated by conquerors.
Deep desire to improve friction.
Not easy to learn.
—Sakini, in The Teahouse of the August Moon.
AT the bitter end of World War II, the U.S. captured Okinawa in the bloodiest engagement of the Pacific, and for four years the despondency of devastation settled over the island. On its fields, supplies—stockpiled for an invasion of Japan that never happened—moldered and rotted. Okinawa became “the junkyard of the Pacific,” the outpost of the outcasts, the place where old jeeps and obsolete colonels went to rust away under the gentle melancholy of the August moon.
There was even talk of returning it to Japan forthwith.
But in the U.S. awakening that followed the Communist conquest of China and the invasion of Korea, U.S. strategists discovered that Okinawa could be a valuable outpost for more than teahouses. At that point, Okinawa too awoke.
http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2011_02_27_archive.html#4376333219424646886
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2011/02/16/is-it-hate/
Forrest was born poor, and received little education. Yet his native intelligence and spirit allowed him to win a fortune before the war. He never received a military education like most of the Confederate generals, so when the war broke out he enlisted as a private — and worked his way up to Lieutenant General.
He formed his own cavalry units and fought them with such brilliance and insight that a number of his methods fundamentally reformed the training and doctrine for the U.S. cavalry for decades to come. As motorized units came into play later, they became the foundation of our understanding of maneuver warfare: the kind of warfare still practiced today. US Army and Marine Corps front-line combat units take pride in their distinction as “maneuver units,” a distinction that we really owe to Forrest.
At Brice’s Crossroads, Forrest destroyed an enemy army more than twice the size of his own, using tactics that he invented without any formal training.
In other news, a dissenting view.
Z:A large number of African Americans lived under Jim Crow, and were denied equal opportunities in education and jobs, and felt first-hand the sting of bigotry and discrimination. These are not historical slights, but living memory. Some people are still bigots. Others are just incredibly insensitive (such as considering Nathan Bedford Forrest for a license plate in Mississippi). The new generation is more able to rise above these divisions, but they still remain.
Hmmm
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mscivilw/wizards.htm
The link won’t help out Zach, cause he refuses to learn anything that might contradict his assumptions, but for those of Southern born or Northern inclinations, read some of the material in the link about cavalry tactics to better understand why Nathan Bedford Forrest is known as one of the greatest military leaders of the US Civil War.
Then read the wiki pedia article, easily found online, concerning NBF.
It is no mystery why the South respects him. And there is no question that the Left hates him. Then again, the Left hates many people that got in their way, including Bush, Palin, the last Shah of Iran, Diem of South Vietnam, Batista, the white rulers of Rhodesia, and of course… the Chilean benevolent dictator that is called by the name “Pinochet”.
Never, ever, believe at face value the lies the Left says about historical figures. They are never telling you the whole truth. They aren’t interested in telling you the whole truth. That is not what they are paid for.
For a short summary of what NBF was:
Forrest started from uneducated origins and got rich by taking risks. He became a major planter of the South, owning and selling slaves, given that the Southern economy was based upon cotton, mostly. And cotton required slaves. He enlisted in the war to fight the Union as a private, when at the time major planters were “given exemptions” on being drafted into the army. Yea, you guessed it right. The huge plantation owners, the slave masters de jure, those who benefited most from winning the war, were in fact the ones ordering everybody else to suffer and die, while they sat safely. Until the Union came for them, at least. Forrest is a killer. He’s brave. He’s undaunted. He is very charismatic. He had a pure, unrefined, quality that allowed him to ignore social status and get right to what’s importance. This quality is part of his charisma. And it’s why he didn’t even think of himself as somebody exempt from war or someone entitled to a commission just because he had money and status.
In terms of personal qualities. Forrest had 90% of Democrats (here and now) already beat. For his time, Forrest was better than 90% of his fellows (of his time). In military courage and skill, better than 95%. And in certain reckless valor, better than 99%.
At the time the war was lost, this was what he said.
Civil war, such as you have just passed through naturally engenders feelings of animosity, hatred, and revenge. It is our duty to divest ourselves of all such feelings; and as far as it is in our power to do so, to cultivate friendly feelings towards those with whom we have so long contended, and heretofore so widely, but honestly, differed. Neighborhood feuds, personal animosities, and private differences should be blotted out; and, when you return home, a manly, straightforward course of conduct will secure the respect of your enemies. Whatever your responsibilities may be to Government, to society, or to individuals meet them like men. The attempt made to establish a separate and independent Confederation has failed; but the consciousness of having done your duty faithfully, and to the end, will, in some measure, repay for the hardships you have undergone. In bidding you farewell, rest assured that you carry with you my best wishes for your future welfare and happiness. Without, in any way, referring to the merits of the Cause in which we have been engaged, your courage and determination, as exhibited on many hard-fought fields, has elicited the respect and admiration of friend and foe. And I now cheerfully and gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to the officers and men of my command whose zeal, fidelity and unflinching bravery have been the great source of my past success in arms. I have never, on the field of battle, sent you where I was unwilling to go myself; nor would I now advise you to a course which I felt myself unwilling to pursue. You have been good soldiers, you can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the Government to which you have surrendered can afford to be, and will be, magnanimous. N.B. Forrest, Lieut.-General
Headquarters, Forrest’s Cavalry Corps
Gainesville, Alabama
May 9, 1865
After the war, he convinced the first Klu Klux Klan organization of self defense militias to disband, something the Democrat party never even tried since it would have required the principle of obedience to the law. Afterwards, the Democrats took over the KKK unofficially and used them to kill white Republicans and black slaves to prevent them from voting in Republican reps in the South. This caused the Republican regimes to fall, ushering in Jim Crow and “no blacks allowed” policies.
It mattered little what Nathan Bedford Forrest thought of negroes, blacks, or Union whites in the beginning of the war. Many Southerners thought poorly of Northerners. Believing that the North lacked any spine for real fighting. After 4 years of Civil War, neither side could say of the other that they lacked the guts to kill and die for their beliefs.
In line with a post written before about the Left’s need to sow weakness, this is the same issue.
Why does the NAACP attempt to stop license plates honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest? Does the NAACP lobby Congress to deny Robert Byrd official recognition because Byrd filibustered the Civil Rights Act and was actually part of the violent, mob death squad KKK as their Kleagle? If the NAACP is fine with Robert Byrd, for much of the time Byrd was alive, what makes them so hot and bothered about Nathan Bedford Forrest. Is it so hard to honor a dead enemy that fought with valor and skill?
It is impossible, I say, for weaklings like the NAACP or Leftist cult members to act anything other than as insecure children. Creating a better future requires personal confidence and strength. The NAACP has none of that. The New Black Panthers has none of that. The Left has none of that. If they ever got it, they would eject that person from their group for fear that the taint will spread.
Strong leaders, alphas of their pack, do not become hot and bothered over the honoring of dead enemies. They don’t begrudge people’s need to believe in a strong and glorious past. especially not when it is also part of the past of the country they are supposed to be leading. They don’t try to control how people feel by making them worship only “approved symbols”. They don’t sit around thinking up ways to make people worship the state religion’s god. They don’t use violence to win arguments. And they sure as hell don’t make up lies believing they are real.
Yet, all of these weak as hell acts are present amongst the Left. Why is that do you think?
The real story is basically that Congress cut off logistics to the ARVN and no air support from the US. Those were the two key factors. Without food, fuel, or bullets, not even elite US military units can hold out for long. Also without air support, the Chinese/Russian armored columns just could not be defeated or even appreciatively held up.
Many Americans would not like hearing it said that the totalitarian states of China and the Soviet Union had proven to be better and more faithful allies than the democratic United States, but that was in fact the case. William Tuohy, who covered the war for many years for theWashington Post, wrote that “it is almost unthinkable and surely unforgivable that a great nation should leave these helpless allies to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese,” but that is what we did.
Until the progressive and draconian reductions in assistance began to have drastic effects, the South Vietnamese fought valiantly. In the two years after the January 1973 signing of the Paris Accords, South Vietnamese forces suffered more than 59,000 killed in action, more in that brief period than the Americans had lost in over a decade of war. Considering that such losses were inflicted on a population perhaps a tenth the size of America’s, it is clear how devastating they must have been, and the intensity of the combat that produced them.
Merle Pribbenow has pointed out that North Vietnam’s account makes it clear that during the 55 days of the final offensive much hard fighting took place. This is a tribute to the South Vietnamese, who had to know at that point what the eventual outcome would inevitably be. Noted PAVN Lieutenant General Le Trong Tan, during the final campaign “our military medical personnel had to collect and treat a rather large number of wounded soldiers (fifteen times as many as were wounded in the 1950 border campaign, 1.5 times as many as were wounded at Dien Bien Phu, and 2.5 times as many as were wounded during the Route 9-Southern Laos campaign in 1971.” Pribbenow calculates that “this would put PAVN wounded at 40,000-50,000 at the very minimum, and possibly considerably higher, not the kind of losses one would expect in the total ARVN ‘collapse’ that most historians say occurred in 1975.”
The replacement of the Sassanid regime by the Arab Caliphate armies.
Read and weep for the dead, for our situation is not so different from theirs.
Although hugely successful at first glance, Khosrau II’s campaign had in fact overextended the Persian army and overtaxed the people. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610E41) drew on all his diminished and devastated empire’s remaining resources, reorganised his armies and mounted a remarkable counter-offensive. Between 622 and 627 he campaigned against the Persians in Anatolia and the Caucasus, winning a string of victories against Persian forces under Khosrau, Shahrbaraz, Shahin and Shahraplakan, sacking the great Zoroastrian temple at Ganzak and securing assistance from the Khazars and Western Turkic Khaganate. In 626 Constantinople was besieged by Slavic and Avar forces which were supported by a Persian army under Shahrbaraz on the far side of the Bosphorus, but attempts to ferry the Persians across were blocked by the Byzantine fleet and the siege ended in failure. In 627-8 Heraclius mounted a winter invasion of Mesopotamia and, despite the departure of his Khazar allies, defeated a Persian army commanded by Rhahzadh in the Battle of Nineveh. He then marched down the Tigris, devastating the country and sacking Khosrau’s palace of Dastagerd. He was prevented from attacking Ctesiphon by the destruction of the bridges on the Nahrawan Canal and conducted further raids before withdrawing up the Diyala into north-western Iran.
The impact of Heraclius’s victories, the devastation of the richest territories of the Sassanid Empire and the humiliating destruction of high-profile targets such as Ganzak and Dastagerd fatally undermined Khosrau’s prestige and his support among the Persian aristocracy, and early in 628 he was overthrown and murdered by his son Kavadh II (628), who immediately brought an end to the war, agreeing to withdraw from all occupied territories. In 629 AD Heraclius restored the True Cross to Jerusalem in a majestic ceremony. Kavadh died within months and chaos and civil war followed. Over a period of four years and five successive kings, including two daughters of Khosrau II and spahbod Shahrbaraz, the Sassanid Empire weakened considerably. The power of the central authority passed into the hands of the generals. It would take several years for a strong king to emerge from a series of coups, and the Sassanids never had time to recover fully.
In the spring of 632, a grandson of Khosrau I who had lived in hiding, Yazdegerd III, ascended the throne. The same year, the first raiders from the Arab tribes, newly united by Islam, arrived in Persian territory. Years of warfare had exhausted both the Byzantines and the Persians. The Sassanids were further weakened by economic decline, heavy taxation, religious unrest, rigid social stratification, the increasing power of the provincial landholders, and a rapid turnover of rulers. These factors facilitated the Islamic conquest of Persia.
The Sassanids never mounted a truly effective resistance to the pressure applied by the initial Arab armies. Yazdegerd was a boy at the mercy of his advisers and incapable of uniting a vast country crumbling into small feudal kingdoms, despite the fact that the Byzantines, under similar pressure from the newly expansive Arabs, no longer threatened. The first encounter between Sassanids and Muslim Arabs was in the Battle of the Bridge in 634 which resulted in a Sassanid victory, however the Arab threat did not stop there and reappeared shortly from the disciplined armies of Khalid ibn Walid, once one of Muhammad’s chosen companions-in-arms and leader of the Arab army. Under the Caliph `Umar ibn al-Khattab, a Muslim army defeated a larger Persian force lead by general Rostam Farrokhzad at the plains of al-Qadisiyyah in 637 and besieged Ctesiphon. Ctesiphon fell after a prolonged siege. Yazdgerd fled eastward from Ctesiphon, leaving behind him most of the Empire’s vast treasury. The Arabs captured Ctesiphon shortly afterward, leaving the Sassanid government strapped for funds and acquiring a powerful financial resource for their own use. A number of Sassanid governors attempted to combine their forces to throw back the invaders, but the effort was crippled by the lack of a strong central authority, and the governors were defeated at the Battle of Nihawand; the empire, with its military command structure non-existent, its non-noble troop levies decimated, its financial resources effectively destroyed, and the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste destroyed piecemeal, was now utterly helpless in the face of the invaders.
Upon hearing the defeat in Nihawand, Yazdgerd along with most of Persian nobilities fled further inland to the eastern province of Khorasan. He was assassinated by a miller in Merv in late 651 while the rest of the nobles settled in central Asia where they contributed greatly in spreading Persian culture and language in those regions and the establishment of the first native Iranian Islamic dynasty, the Samanid dynasty, which sought to revive and resuscitate Sassanid traditions and culture after the invasion of Islam.
The abrupt fall of Sassanid Empire was completed in a period of five years, and most of its territory was absorbed into the Islamic caliphate; however, many Iranian cities resisted and fought against the invaders several times. Cities such as Rayy, Isfahan and Hamadan were exterminated thrice by Islamic caliphates in order to suppress revolts. The local population either willingly accepted Islam, stayed as dhimmi subjects of the Muslim state and paid a poll tax ( jizya), or were forced to convert by the invading armies. The latter measure is usually disputed in its use though as most conversion took place primarily in the Abbasids caliphate. Invaders destroyed the Academy of Gundishapur and its library, burning piles of books. Most Sassanid records and literary works were destroyed. A few that escaped this fate were later translated into Arabic and later to Modern Persian. During the Islamic invasion many Iranian cities were destroyed or deserted, palaces and bridges were ruined and many magnificent imperial Persian gardens were burned to the ground. Persian poets such as Ferdowsi lamented the downfall of the Sassanids in their work:
Ibn Walid also took part in the conquering of Egypt, including Alexandria. The fact that there are different dates for when the Library of Alexandria burned, and one of them is during Walid’s march through Egypt, I would say the Arabs burned the Library of Alexandria given their historical behavior in the rest of their military conquests. Coincidentally, the Persian libraries were lost too. Perhaps too many coincidences happening at once.
This is a great collection of personal writings made by Bruce Lee or on Bruce Lee by his contemporaries.
Tai Chi’s an internal art. If reports are to be believed. It resulted from the Peaches Pack of three unrelated warriors of China’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms era. They swore to be brothers. Lu Bu, Liu Bei, forgot the third one.
Over generations, this produced Tai Chi, both the healing and martial philosophies.
One of the fundamental principles is using the internal body’s structure to generate and project power. By setting up the body’s alignment with the skeleton system, force can be applied to a target without it being lost via reflection. The generation of power can be termed earth based. It uses a drop in body to generate force down wards. It uses a step forward to generate power forwards.It uses rotation to redirect enemy attacks and force the enemy off balance, then using a minimum amount of force then unseat the foe from the plane of the earth.
As such, the most dangerous strikes of an internal style, which Tai Chi is part of, would include a maximum risk power translation at the weakest point on the human body using the finest targeting available so that no force is bled off. If the attack misses entirely or even partially, this would unbalance both parties. Which is why strength from the earth is important as it is involved in recovering and launching another attack. If the attack misses, then the enemy can counter. As such, I have observed that traditional martial arts usually never teach the strongest attacks first. They always teach the weakest
defenses first, then the weakest counter attacks, then the medium strength defenses, and then the low strength attacks. I was curious as to the reasoning behind the general methodology. Even if they don’t that order, it is approximate across many TMAs.
If a form is a transition to a strong attack, something is taken from the form to make it non-functional and then only added later on when the master deems the student ready.
My little theory on Secret Techniques of Chinese and Japanese schools is that there were a couple of ways they kept them hidden and unknown to outsiders.
1. There were no youtube websites back then so people couldn’t observe a Secret Technique and then keep rewinding the tape to see how it was done.
2. People didn’t have the internet, so information traveled by word of mouth. That was easy to handle, since if everyone who saw this Secret Technique died from it, there would be Word to travel by Mouth, now would there.
3. Secret Techniques were useless without the correct principles. So even if someone could emulate the form of it, the essence could not be emulated without acquiring that piece of knowledge. Since forms could be duplicated and copied easily by human observation, keeping the more complicated and core philosophy and knowledge hidden was a Final Defense.
4. Because of the onion security effect, even if the dojo was infiltrated or students left and sold their training to the highest bidder, the Secret Techniques will remain secret due to the fact that the enemy won’t have all the pieces. They may know one Fundamental block of the technique, but without the rest it is useless as a weapon.
5. The Successor of a school obtains all of that school’s secrets to pass on to the next generation. Keeping the number of people who know small, is also a requirement of keeping secrets. For every single additional person that knows a secret, the chance of it being exposed increases by a factor of 10. If 2 people can keep a secret at around 50%, let us say, then adding another person doesn’t make it 33%. It makes it 5%. Factor of 10. Well 10 should be the highest. There are lower ones, but they are all multiplicative, rather than additive.
The question of why how Tai Chi can be used in combat, necessitates that you understand what combat is, how victories are gained in combat, what Tai Chi is, and how Tai Chi accomplishes victories.
Part of the mysticism of Martial Arts (T) was that it was structured like an RPG system. The more effort you put in, the more you got out. You wouldn’t get the strongest abilities, until you had excelled at that particular art. I suppose that may have been true in China and Japan, which still have a bloody history of internal strife as early as 50 or 100 years ago, the same is not true for the US. The Last Civil War here was more than a century ago.
As a consequence, cultural osmosis created some interesting results. The ATA is one example. But of course, that may be said to be a negative one. But there are positive examples as well.
To mark this incidence, I have often times said nothing on this blog of mine. Besides relating some cursory info on the time and place where I first saw it, there’s nothing else I find particularly striking enough to write down. I wasn’t there and I didn’t know anybody that was. The story of other lives can be best related by those much closer to the subject in question. Instead, I’ll let others speak in my stead in the poetic, artistic, and philosophical sense.
Axes flash, broadsword swing,
Shining armour’s piercing ring
Horses run with polished shield,
Fight Those Bastards till They Yield
Midnight mare and blood red roan,
Fight to Keep this Land Your Own
Sound the horn and call the cry,
How Many of Them Can We Make Die!Follow orders as you’re told,
Make Their Yellow Blood Run Cold
Fight until you die or drop,
A Force Like Ours is Hard to Stop
Close your mind to stress and pain,
Fight till You’re No Longer Sane
Let not one damn cur pass by,
How Many of Them Can We Make Die!Guard your women and children well,
Send These Bastards Back to Hell
We’ll teach them the ways of war,
They Won’t Come Here Any More
Use your shield and use your head,
Fight till Every One is Dead
Raise the flag up to the sky,
How Many of Them Can We Make Die!Dawn has broke, the time has come,
Move Your Feet to a Marching Drum
We’ll win the war and pay the toll,
We’ll Fight as One in Heart and Soul
Midnight mare and blood red roan,
Fight to Keep this Land Your Own
Sound the horn and call the cry,
How Many of Them Can We Make Die!
and
Dry your eyes and quietly bear this pain with pride
For heaven shall remember the silent and the brave
And promise me they will never see, the fear within our eyes
(my eyes are closed)
We will give strength to those who still remain
So bury fear, for fate draws near
And hide the signs of pain
With noble acts, the bravest souls
Endure the heart’s remains
Discard regret, that in this debt
A better world is made
That children of a newer day might remember
And avoid our fate
(I’ve waited all day in the pouring rain, but nobody came, no, nobody came)
And in the fury of this darkest hour
We will be your light
You’ve asked me for my sacrifice
And I am Winter born
Without denying, a faith is come
That I have never known
I hear the angels call my name
And I am Winter born
Hold your head up high-for there is no greater love
Think of the faces of the people you defend
(you defend)
And promise me, they will never see the tears within our eyes
(my eyes are closed)
Although we are men, with mortal sins, angels never cry
So bury fear, for fate draws near
And hide the signs of pain
With noble acts, the bravest souls
Endure the heart’s remains
Discard regret, that in this debt
A better world is made
That children of a newer day might remember
And avoid our fate
And in the fury of this darkest hour
We will be your light
You’ve asked me for my sacrifice
And I am Winter born
Without denying, a faith in God
That I have never known
I hear the angels call my name
And I am Winter born
And in the fury of this darkest hour
I will be your light
A lifetime for this destiny
For I am Winter born
And in this moment..I will not run
It is my place to stand
We few shall carry hope
Within our bloodied hands
(bloodied hands)
And in our Dying, we’re more alive-than we have ever been
I’ve lived for these few seconds
For I am Winter born
And in the fury of this darkest hour
We will be the light
You’ve asked me for my sacrifice
And I am Winter born
Without denying, a faith in man
That I have never known
I hear the angels call my name
And I am Winter born
Within this moment now
I am for you, though better men have failed
I will give my life for love
For I am Winter born
And in my dying
I’m more alive, than I have ever been
I will make this sacrifice
For I am Winter born
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