Ken Brown: > Also US forces (in the guise of military advisors to the Chinese, > "Flying Tigers" and so on) had been involved on a small scale in the war > against Japan for some years.
Yes, but they couldn't get them to fight. Kai-shek was just interested in fighting Mao, rather than cleaning house. Mao wasn't interested in fighting the Japanese, either. Both figured the U.S. was going to win and prepared for a post-war showdown. Kai-shek manipulated us through diplomatic extortion. General Stilwell couldn't get anybody to listen to him. Chiang knew how to manipulate both the service (dependent on translators) and the diplomatic environment to play for time -- *his influence in the U.S. was good*. Mao knew his bargaining position was getting better all the time, fueled by the abuses of Kai-shek's regime, the terror that was his army, and some suspiciously easy raids on Soviet-guarded ammunition dumps. Stilwell (correspondence to Marshall): "...Kai-shek has no intention of making further efforts to prosecute the war....believes he can go on milking the United States....He has no intention of instituting any real democratic regime....I believe he will only continue his policy and delay, while grabbing for loans and postwar aid, for the purpose of maintaining his present position, based on one-party government, and reactionary policy, on the suppression of democratic ideas with the active aid of his Gestapo." Stilwell was replaced for having the courage to stand up to diplomatic winds, in part fueled by what some think were powerful U.S. Chinese interests. While the factors were certainly more complicated, I think it stands for the proposition that people that promote foreign agendas, wittingly or unwittingly, deserve closer scrutiny. I've heard allegations that that recommendations for action have been de-railed by powerful interest groups -- especially in the Middle East. If true, I can't imagine the privately-voiced disillusionment of some public servants that find themselves vetoed by "Inc." What does it say when many of our intelligence resources have something in common with interests deemed to be "subversive" (anti-corporate) in the United States? I believe that the U.S. has an interest, and a duty, to prevent and monitor subversion via corporate "active measures." What is the difference between the CPUSA and XYZ, Inc. if they are both doing the same damn thing? The "alienation" index is stable, but polls suggest that Americans don't feel disaffected, they feel displaced -- that's a class struggle, different from the 60s and 70s. I look at the indicators of past revolutionary change, and we have them, although it's different than much of the world experience -- but so are we. In the main, we see it as the sickness of criminality, rather than a symptom of general unrest exposed at the fringe. While revolutions often take generations, I fear our kettle is starting to boil. In my reading, I always notice one thing common among dead nations and ousted occupiers: the failure to validate and legitimize conflict, because it's deemed unpatriotic. (They are never revolutionaries, they are always "bandits" -- with minimal public sympathy, and soon to be quashed. It's repeated so often, it's comical.) Moreover, there's always somebody that has the virtue and courage to stand up and point to the problem representing a failure of perception, in the bound interests of the nation and the regime. Their fate: embarrassment, replacement, banishment, mutilation, incarceration, torture, death -- many combinations. What is the word for that poor SOB? I don't think "whistleblower" does these people justice, because other people have already blown the whistle, and everybody heard it, but refused to acknowledge it. Some kind of canary, maybe? Many would have saved nations, and averted the most historic of tragedies. Surely, there is a "special word" for these people, yes? What? ~Aimee "It is not without any basis, not without good reason, that the Greeks had in the past a natural tendency towards freedom, or now towards servitude. There then existed something, an element in the spirit of the people, which today there is no more, but which in those days overcame the wealth of Persia and led Greece to freedom, which was never defeated in battle... but whose loss now has brought everything to ruin.... Yet warships and men and supplies of money and materials, and everything which would be judged to contribute to the power of cities, are present in greater numbers and abundance now than then. But it is all rendered useless, ineffective and without value by venality." ~Demosthenes, on why Athens fell to a tyrant
