Everything you wrote is true? I'd be surprised if less than half of it was mental masturbation by what is clearly an ignorant little twit pretending he's something he isn't
:lamo dude. people on this board have known me for abouuutt... well gosh, some of them probably about 6 ish years now. my history is pretty "out there", and my service is under my user name. but whatever
it's not exactly like i have to worry about proving myself to people who wouldn't even know that me saying SIR-FIRST-FEMALE-MARINE-IS-OPHA-MAE-JOHNSON-SIR is all the evidence I need.
Tell us about a single state that has ever needed mercenaries to defend itself and is now standing?
The United States of America - you may have noticed it's written into our Constitution about issuing letters of Marque? you didn't think that all those folks out in the Revolution were strictly in it for the nobility of the Cause?
Oh. The Vatican. Has used mercenaries (the Swiss Guard) for centuries now. As I recall it was the same (or a brother) unit that defended the French Kings as well, until Louis 16 panicked and ordered them to turn themselves over to the Parisan mob (at which point they were torn to pieces). But their defense there is one of the great siege stories in history - tens against thousands kind of stuff.
Britain. Has used the Ghurkas for gosh - two centuries?
You are fighting a strawman anyway. nobody ever argued that we should or do
need mercenaries, simply that we can
use them.
The point of uniting China was not to maintain a single dynasty.
really? i'm pretty sure that the Chin would have been surprised to hear that, given that was, in fact, precisely their goal.
no, i'm
sure they
meant all along to get overthrown by the Han... :roll:
It was to end political instability caused by uncontrollable states (ie establishing a state). This is model still followed today even by the supposedly Chinese 'communist regime'. Seriously do they teach you ANY military history?
actually i learned about this period when i studied it in undergrad. the period you are describing is known alternately as the "latter" or "Western Chou" and the "Warring States", although "Latter Chou" is used more generally by scholars to refer to the pre-Warring States (but still states at war) period known as the "Spring and Autumn" period. I'm using Chou, yes, instead of Zhou, that's because I have a bad habit of switching back and forth between Pinyin and Wade Giles (which, you no doubt are aware are the two main transliteration systems for Chinese). It was during S&A, for example, that Confucius lived and taught. It's also when Lau-tsu wrote the Tao-te-chung. The Waring States is the latter period, and it is when The Art of War was compiled. I say compiled, because we aren't really sure that a Sun Tzu lived
and wrote the whole thing - much of what we have comes to us from a Han guy named Cao Cao (pronounced Chow-Chow); and it seems more likely to be the result of multiple attestations and later redactionary work.
The Chinese
today utilize
some of the system of governance first set up by the
Latter Han - to distinguish it from the Early Han, who took over from the Ch'in, who were Legalists (Han were Confucian). It was the Latter Han which originally set up what would flower under the Tang as the fully - grown civil service corps, complete with the famously rigorous examination system that would last in purity preeetty much until the Self-Strengtheners got modern engineering added in in the late-19th Century. Then they got their butt kicked by the Japanese on the Liao-dong peninsula, and Empress Tsu-Xi screwed them over by throwing her lot in with the Boxers. After that it was all she wrote - but it was
THAT tradition that maintained continuity through multiple Dynasties, including the foreign ones. Not Sun Tzu. The tradition of the local uber-competent bureaucrat lived on somewhat through the Warlords Period after the collapse of the Dynasty in 1911 - generally whoever was local and in charge became even more local and even more in charge. After the Reds took over in the 50's, it wasn't hard to take that same tradition of academic rigor for governance and try to pour it into the dialectic. (mind you,
first Mao went with the Thousand Flowers campaign - but that was because he was a sneaky little bastard, not because he thought that was the best way to take advantage of China's academic traditions). Other than that echo, however, much of the system itself was destroyed as relics of an Imperialist Past that was No Longer Part Of The New Future etc.
Or did you pick up even a single book on the matter?
oh, one or two...
And we are done with this. Back on topic.
