Isegoria

Gordon Tullock read an account of a visit by Japanese veterans to Malaya:

The American reporter was astounded at the statements by these veterans that they had liberated Malaya. In fact, the native populations generally greeted the Japanese with enthusiasm, although the Chinese immigrants didn’t like them because of the invasion of China. They set up governments that the American press referred to as puppets, and which were certainly, not completely self-governing, but the natives were certainly more in control of the government than they had been under the former empires.

Consider the situation in France, Belgium and Italy when large allied forces were present. The local governments had varying amounts of autonomy ranging from France, where DeGaulle was hard to control to Italy where the Royal government was quite weak. The same could be said in the territories to their south occupied by Japan. In general, the governments that we regarded as puppets seem to have been accepted. After the war the leaders of these governments were not punished by the natives, and in most cases remained in or returned to power, which is fairly good proof that they were not regarded locally as merely puppets.

Long after the war, when these countries discovered that they could get funds out of Japan by complaining, the history of the wartime period was revised. Japan paid some reparations, possibly in part because the industries providing the exports to that area wanted them.

Most people call it the American Revolution, some call it the American Secession, but Gordon Tullock calls it the War of the American Revolution:

In fact it was a world war with major naval battles in the Indian Ocean, and almost the whole of Europe involved. Militarily the American theater was a sideshow. Further, what little fighting there was in that theater normally resulted in American defeats. Washington was a very good strategist, but a poor tactician and our troops rarely stood up to a British bayonet charge.

[...]

It occurred to France that since a third of the English lived on the west shore of the Atlantic, it might be possible to stir them up so that they became independent, thus greatly weakening England. Agitators, money and arms were employed to this end. Whether the American colonies would have revolted even without this support is unknown. Certainly their success would have been dubious.

In any event the uprising was apparently popular. The elected colonial legislatures everywhere supported it and, apparently local governments did so also.

Further, the British were unable to place small garrisons in the countryside, which made it impossible for them to get the area under their control. Their experiment in New Jersey led to the small garrisons in Princeton and Trenton being beaten by Washington’s army. This was, incidentally, his only real victory before Yorktown. His strategic ability, which led him to realize the importance of an army in being which made it impossible for the British to divide their army up into small local garrisons was vital.

[...]

In Yorktown [Cornwallis] was in a familiar position for a British general, in possession of a port and awaiting the Royal Navy to reinforce or evacuate him. Washington, here demonstrated his fine strategic sense He arranged for De Grasse to come up from the Indies, thus interrupting his campaign to reclaim the sugar isles, and with Rochambeau he marched south, managing to get away from New York without fighting. The march was uneventful except that the American troops refused to go on until they had been paid. The French provided the money.

The joint army at Yorktown was almost 4 times as large as Cornwallis’s force. Further, although Cornwallis might have been willing to take on an American force larger than his, half of them were French. Meanwhile, the other part of Washington’s plan brought DeGrasse’s fleet to blockade Yorktown. A British fleet under Graves met DeGrasse off the Virginia capes, but after a brief cannonade, withdrew, Cornwallis was doomed. This tiny naval action should be listed as one of the decisive battles of history, but normally is not.

After Cornwallis’ surrender the war continued, mainly without much fighting in the American Colonies, but with active naval campaigns.

[...]

The independence of the American colonies, which was the principal French objective, was achieved. It seems likely that had the French revolution not broken out, they would have been partitioned by the European powers. Certainly the Continental Congress was worried enough to make Hamilton a lieutenant General to organize their defenses.

The open secret of the Korean War is that the US limited the South Korean army to just 100,000 men and didn’t allow them an air force:

[South Korean President Rhee] wanted Korea to be united and one of his favorite slogans was “March north”. The Northerners also wanted it united, but under other auspices. This led to a number of armed clashes along the 38th parallel. The Americans were concerned about his starting a war with the Chinese and perhaps the Russians involved and hence kept his army small (100,000 men with no air force). At the time this wasn’t a bad idea if it was assumed that the small size of his army, together with the fact that he was not given decent anti-tank weapons prevented his “March North”. Unfortunately it gave the north a wonderful opportunity of which they took advantage. The poor state of the American occupation army in Japan together with an almost pathologically stupid intelligence chief who consistently underestimated the northern forces led to the early success of the Northern armies.

Diplomatically the Communists negotiated an agreement, now publicly available, between Stalin, Mao, and Kim under which the invasion would start, China would enter and Russia would provide air cover. Their air cover, incidentally, led to almost the only time that American and Russian military men exchanged shots in the whole of history. After the start of the war, the Russians provided aircraft and training to air forces for both China and North Korea, and when their air forces were adequate for the rather minor operations intermittently carried out south of the Yalu, the Russian air force, which had been badly shot up, withdrew. All three of these air forces operated out of airfields in Manchuria, which we did not bomb. We prevented the ROK from having an air force until well after the armistice.

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Oddly, we kept the restrictions on the ROK army. President Rhee introduced conscription and put a lot of men in camps, but we refused to arm them. As mentioned above, he wanted 2,400,000 men in his army, which would be about the proportion of the adult population that France, England, Germany and Russia mobilized for World Wars I and II. We kept him to 100,000 legally although General Van Fleet cheated on his orders from Washington and got it up to about 120,000. This restriction on the ROK army is the open secret of this chapter. It is almost entirely unknown in the United States. The North with a much smaller population put about 4 times as many men into combat.

Our intelligence listed the North Korean army also as about 100,000. It could have hardly been more wrong. Nevertheless, on the basis of this poor guess, our pre-war policy was not hopelessly stupid. I should, however, say that in my opinion the estimates were formed to support the policy, not the policy based on the estimates.

But when the war broke out and the superiority of the northern forces was obvious to every newspaper reader, we stuck to our policy and G2 stuck to their 100,000-man estimate for several weeks. At the time I was studying Chinese at Cornell, and when the newspapers said that Chinese soldiers had been captured in Korea, I realized that the Chinese were in. Thus beating G2 by several weeks. G2 took the view that they were “stragglers” although what they were straggling from was not stated. This error was one of the major reasons why MacArthur disposed his troops in the north in a formation with his right flank uncovered. Peng Te Huai took advantage of the gap.

The southern army remained limited to 100,000 men. General MacArthur asked for arms to raise it to 225,000 and Washington replied that they just couldn’t find the necessary arms. This absurd statement was believed, not only by the American press, but also, surprisingly, by General MacArthur. Further, when the Russian air force entered the war, G2 briefing officers made major efforts to convince the press that they were Chinese and Korean pilots who had been trained by the Russians and hence always used Russian on their radios. The Russians did eventually withdraw their air division that had been badly shot up. In the later part of the war Chinese and Korean pilots, using Chinese and Korean on their radios, took the casualties inherent in flying the Migs. We continued to prohibit the development of a ROK air force.

One of the extraordinary features of this situation is that there was little press criticism, or even mention of it.

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Many years after the end of the war I met a former colleague in political section of the American Embassy in Korea at a Far Eastern Society meeting. I remarked that it was astonishing that most historians seemed to leave out this restriction on the ROK army. He responded, “Of course, he would have marched north”.

The restrictions remained on for a long while. The air force was kept weak to non-existent and post armistice precautions were taken to make sure that the petroleum supplies in Korea were very small. The ammunition supplies were also limited. Altogether the bad relations between the Republic of Korea and us continued.

As someone who was in Tientsin as a Vice Consul at the time it was taken by the Communists, Gordon Tullock can explain the collapse of Nationalist China:

The Nationalists led by Chiang Kai Shek and with much Russian aid drove north from Canton and took the lower Yangtse Valley. It should be emphasized that not only was the Nationalist army given much aid by Russians, but also it was then allied with the Chinese Communist Party. Further, much of the territory nominally under control from Nanking was actually ruled by local warlords, some of whom rejoiced in formal commissions as local governors.

At this point, Stalin revealed his normal paranoia. He ordered the Communists in China to overthrow the then national government and take formal power. This was very badly timed and planned with the result that the Chinese Communists were literally beheaded on the mud flats outside Shanghai. There were a few high-ranking Communists who were safe in Moscow, and some lesser Communists holding small areas in south central China. Among these later was Mao Tse Tung.

The Communists in south central China made their way to the poor, lightly populated area around Yenan, near the Russian border:

The Communists stayed in Yenan, and the Japanese, who talked about anti-Communism, made no real effort to eliminate them. Presumably they knew that the sensible thing to do when your enemies quarrel is to help the weaker side.

The Japanese left many large pockets of China, between the railroads and the rivers, to the Chinese:

These areas remained under Chinese control and the Communists seized some of them. Incidentally, the western press referred to the Communists as guerillas and either did not mention the other Chinese forces in the other unoccupied areas or called them bandits.

The Communists and the “bandits” mainly left each other alone. Both types of Chinese, after December 7, thought that the United States would win the war for them and hence did little fighting with the Japanese.

As Japan collapsed, the Communists moved into Manchuria, where the Russians supplied them with Japanese arms:

The Nationalists then moved north and invaded Manchuria. The Communists tried to stop them and at Su Ping Kai the Nationalists won a major victory. The United States quickly slammed an arms embargo on the Nationalists. What led General Marshall to do this has never been explained. Its ostensible objective was to force the Nationalists to form a coalition government with the Communists. At this time, preventing such coalitions in France and Italy was a major objective of American foreign policy.

Since they opposed the “corrupt” regime, the Communists were obviously all right.

Sam Harris interviews Jocko Willink — who’s largely incredulous that people make some of the arguments Harris describes:

That’s very strange to me, you know? I guess in the SEAL community, you get used to people having at least somewhat of the same, similar viewpoint, maybe on different ends within some kind of spectrum.

You take a little girl in danger and some person that knows where she is, and we can save her from his knowledge, that guy would definitely give information, and smacking him around would just be getting warmed up, in my opinion.

That’s in response to Harris’s slightly misremembered real-life example from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, justifying (mild) torture:

Height of the antipodean summer, Mercury at the century-mark; the noonday sun softened the bitumen beneath the tyres of her little Hyundai sedan to the consistency of putty. Her three year old son, quiet at last, snuffled in his sleep on the back seat. He had a summer cold and wailed like a banshee in the supermarket, forcing her to cut short her shopping. Her car needed petrol. Her tot was asleep on the back seat. She poured twenty litres into the tank; thumbing notes from her purse, harried and distracted, her keys dangled from the ignition.

Whilst she was in the service station a man drove off in her car. Police wound back the service station’s closed-circuit TV camera, saw what appeared to be a heavy set Pacific Islander with a blonde-streaked Afro entering her car. “Don’t panic”, a police constable advised the mother, “as soon as he sees your little boy in the back he will abandon the car.” He did; police arrived at the railway station before the car thief did and arrested him after a struggle when he vaulted over the station barrier.

In the police truck on the way to the police station: “Where did you leave the Hyundai?” Denial instead of dissimulation: “It wasn’t me.” It was—property stolen from the car was found in his pockets. In the detectives’ office: “It’s been twenty minutes since you took the car—little tin box like that car—It will heat up like an oven under this sun. Another twenty minutes and the child’s dead or brain damaged. Where did you dump the car?” Again: “It wasn’t me.”

Appeals to decency, to reason, to self-interest: “It’s not too late; tell us where you left the car and you will only be charged with Take-and-Use. That’s just a six month extension of your recognizance.” Threats: “If the child dies I will charge you with Manslaughter!” Sneering, defiant and belligerent; he made no secret of his contempt for the police. Part-way through his umpteenth, “It wasn’t me”, a questioner clipped him across the ear as if he were a child, an insult calculated to bring the Islander to his feet to fight, there a body-punch elicited a roar of pain, but he fought back until he lapsed into semi-consciousness under a rain of blows. He quite enjoyed handing out a bit of biffo, but now, kneeling on hands and knees in his own urine, in pain he had never known, he finally realised the beating would go on until he told the police where he had abandoned the child and the car.

The police officers’ statements in the prosecution brief made no mention of the beating; the location of the stolen vehicle and the infant inside it was portrayed as having been volunteered by the defendant. The defendant’s counsel availed himself of this falsehood in his plea in mitigation. When found, the stolen child was dehydrated, too weak to cry; there were ice packs and dehydration in the casualty ward but no long-time prognosis on brain damage.

(Case Study provided by John Blackler, a former New South Wales police officer.)