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Comment by ReptileMan | Hacker News Reader

>Han supremacy has all the markings of other supremacist movements and will unfortunately need to be confronted.

Are you willing to sacrifice your life for the freedom of Tibet? I am not

I am not sure why this is downvoted. Almost all such regimes in human history had to be confronted via war. I do not feel like my family, friends, and countrymen need to fight,die, or pay for for tibet.

You think they will stop with Tibet? The CCP wants China to be the new world hegemony. They think that their illiberal system is the only way and they want to spread it to every corner of the world. War is not the answer because it would be inconceivably horrific. But the world needs to stand up to China and stop putting up with their crap. Stop buying their crap. Start calling them out for their imperialism.

Citation?

The US has a record of wanting to be hegemon and specifically wanting to export our ideology. China, not so much outside of their borders and immediate sea lanes.

Are you just assuming they want to do so because that's what we do?

That's easy if you just unilaterally decide that anything you want is an "inalienable part" of your territory regardless of cultural, linguistic, historical, etc. differences. To say nothing of the local desire to be part of that inalienable territory and ruled by the CCP.

The US has a record of not wanting to get involved with anybody far away, until the rest of the world causes such a mess they have to get involved. Unless of course you think Nazis and Soviet Russia were no big deal. China is a nationalist ethno-state and they want to own Asia.

Honestly I think the best bet is we let Taiwan go nuclear. Oh, CCP says it will invade, but that's not really going to happen if they'll lose all their major cities.

It's all lies. I used to believe this line of thought about China. "We aren't expansionist like the US, we just want to do things our way inside of the country". It's not true.

China as a unified country has never been as large as it is today. They are actively taking over parts of Nepal, they have taken pieces of land from India, they invaded and took over Tibet, the are nearing genocidal strategies to eradicate any semblance of culture or different-think amongst the Uyghur and people of Inner-Mongolia (bet you haven't even heard of that suppression! They have banned the Mongolian language in schools and nomads are no longer allowed to _ride horses_ as of a few weeks ago!). Not to mention what happened in Hong Kong.

If not for India, they would have already taken over Bhutan. If not for their fighting spirit, they would have tried to take over Vietnam. They are building islands and taking over the South China sea. They are practicing debt trap diplomacy in Africa.

They are the most expansionist, imperialist regime in Modern times second only to USA. Chinese people feed us this line, that they aren't expansionist, that they aren't imperialist, that they are only inward looking. For some reason we in the West take them at their word. Look at their actions, the picture is not so rosy. As much as I hate Trump, his pressure on China has been a welcome policy shift.

Now I know you are lying! The Qing dynasty was far larger than China is today; in fact, it included Bhutan: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Qing_dynasty_...

They're not lying, most likely, just uninformed.

Most Americans know literally dick-all about Chinese history and substitute a combination of Cold War and WWII history where we're the good guys and the antagonists are the bad guys.

Please stop breaking the site guidelines. You've done it a lot, we've asked you repeatedly not to, and I do not want to have to ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

DAMN! What a beautiful curb your ____ moment!

The British did more empire building in 2-3 hundred years than the Chinese did in a millennium!

All that without a shot fired!

Imagine if they actually had a military as active as the US, NATO, or the Russians. Where do you go from here, rhetorically?

That's what the US said in WWI and WWII. It then had to sacrifice a bigger number of people. A supremacist globalist empire will not stop at its neighbors. Its plan is to invade the whole world.

Why were our grandparents willing to sacrifice their life for the Europeans?

We didn't enter combat of WWII until we were attacked via Pearl Harbor.

Also they hadn't been through nearly 30 years of constant war before hand. A nation can get weary from war.

Well they weren't. It took great deal of effort to get involved in both wars. The US has traditionally been isolationists on matters in the eastern hemisphere.

And it took world wars - here we are talking about internal china problem which is harder sell. China invading someone US cares about - like Japan may convince the US public to pay the nuclear butcher bill, but what they do on their own territory is not

Worth noting that there weren't any 'good guys' in WWI like the story we're told about WWII. It was just a slugfest between colonial powers who were all doing awful stuff.

WWI is truly the most depressing war. International solidarity among the working classes folded like paper in the face of imperial force, leading to some of the most brutal and pointless combat in human history.

They eventually were, because they died.

I wish grandchildren of your grandparents today would be less willing to sacrifice their lives for anyone in the world by playing the worlds' government, lawmaker and policemen.

The world would be much safer and peaceful place.

Do you think the world would be a safer and more peaceful place if nobody stopped nazi germany?

No, but it honestly probably would have been if the Central Powers had won WWI. American entry into that war was made possible the sinking of the Lusitania, which was secretly carrying war munitions. There is some evidence that the British enabled the event although this is admittedly a minoritarian view among historians (last I checked). It was undoubtedly beneficial for the Allied Powers though.

The British Empire are pretty much the "bad guys" of world history insofar as such a designation makes sense. The punitive measures they arranged after WWI were directly responsible for the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany.

Yeah, life would be just peachy if half of Europe lived under the Germans or the Ottoman Empire. What? Why do people from large countries act like no one else exists? Would you like to live in a country run by someone who forces their language and culture on you?

What makes you think the Central Powers would have permanently occupied the nations it defeated when the Allied Powers did not? What makes you think Imperial Germany would have forced its language and culture on e.g. France when it would have been happy to simply install a friendly government?

WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.

I'm not talking about territories invaded during WW1 like France or Belgium. I'm talking about new countries emerging from the collapsing empires. The people have lived there the whole time, they just didn't have a nation state of their own. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Armenia. The Kurds are still fighting to have their own country today. You get the picture. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine emerged from the collapse of the Russian Empire.

All of these people didn't work towards independence by accident. There were good reasons to, depending on whose empire you lived in, the ruling group was given preferential treatment, or maybe the minorities would be penalized for using their own language. Higher education and government services would often be provided exclusively in the ruling nation's language.

>WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.

The Armenian genocide sounds bad enough to me.

And of course these things happened even in the Entente empires, it's just easier to declare independence from an empire that just lost and can't do anything about it.

How did we go from 'more lenient war indemnities' and 'false flag operations are bad' to German and Ottoman occupation?

Yes. It wouldn't have been nicer probably since being populated only by ayrians would get boring, but once you are finished with genocide it would be peaceful and strong authoritarian states usually are safe.

Keyword: world

Could be safe internally, but that is utterly irrelevant to its neighbors, and the geopolitical order of a world in which the nazis weren’t crushed, the winning empires weren’t dismantled, and the US isn’t the guarantor of global trade and European security in order to combat the Soviets.

If Nazi Germany wasn't stopped we would be living in Man in the high castle world where japanese empire rule over asia, Italy over afrika and germany over all the rest with split of americas. It is potentially peaceful and safe world. Just not nice.

It’s not consistent with any of the myriad approaches to international relations either, and quite frankly, how agreeable you find a fictional world order isn’t worth discussing.

If you’re interested in geopolitics reading outside of Philip K. Dick, an accessible but satiating piece I always recommend is World Order: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821140

It’s written by a highly respected war criminal (how many fields can say that!)

Because socialists failed to stop the senseless massacre that was WWI. I don't know if "willing" is the right word, but nationalist propaganda certainly triumphed over international solidarity among the working class, sadly.

The rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany was a direct consequence of the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles.

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