Since Imperial Japan was in the habit of taking what they wanted thru force, why would you assume that they would stop invading their neighbors simply because they had created a defensive perimeter? Force worked before, force will work again.
Yamamoto didn’t want a war with the U.S.. However, Yamamoto did go to war against the U.S. didn’t he? He did was he was ordered to do. Yamamoto’s mindset was NOT the prevailing attitude of the Imperial military. Even after Yamamoto’s warnings of needing to invade the U.S. to win the war, the Imperial military still chose to go to war with the U.S..
The Imperial mentality was that they could defeat anyone. If they didn’t believe they could defeat the U.S. or British or French or Chinese, they wouldn’t have attacked them in the first place. Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam all came under Imperial control. The more they won, they more they wanted. To think that they would have stopped on their own is absurd. They only stopped when they were forced to.
Armed civilians everywhere forced Imperial forces to spend time and manpower controlling what they had already conquered. Manpower that might have made a difference in frontline actions.
Oh, come on. There’s this huge long argument about individual cases, and what precisely those individual cases mean, and I answered the freaking question back in post 109 using the whole freaking world as my sample. The answer is no. There is no evidence that [civilian] guns prevent tyranny.
Frankly, it’s a ridiculous idea to start with. Sure, the Afghan insurgency is a pain to deal with, as was the Iraqi insurgency. But do you really think that some tyrannical dictatorship that took over the county in a coup and was militarily dominant would restrict itself in the same way that the US did in those countries? Don’t think Afghanistan, think Syria. Or Libya pre-intervention. Or about a hundred countries that you don’t remember had insurgencies because the government suppressed them easily. The protection that democracy has against a military takeover isn’t a bunch of quasi-trained, poorly-armed civilians, it’s the fact that the vast majority of military personnel simply would not be willing to participate in a coup or do the nasty things to civilians that they would need to do to keep power.
Also, a guerrilla insurgency never faces the army directly — it uses sneak attacks. That being so, do you really think a guerrilla insurgency that has enough capacity to topple the government (and there are historically very few of those) will not have enough capacity to smuggle in weapons anyway? It just isn’t realistic.
You so many assumptions and oversimplified the entire discussion in that post that it doesn’t matter if your “ran the numbers”
Also note you didn’t share the results, and like the OP you assumed that it was a single factor, only the presence/lack of civilian ownership of arms that prevented the tyranny.
You also were doing math against an arbitrary index that only measures recent past, the same index that I showed was absolutely worthless to predict how likely a country is to suffer tyrannic fates in the future.
So yes, I do see you made your claim but to say it closed the matter is incorrect.
Of course, by that argument Japan was wholly justified in pre-emptively taking the fight to the British Empire…or the French, Dutch and American colonial empires of course. How d’you think Guam and the Philippines were in American hands in the first place ? Japan would have been next OMG !
Empires grow to the limits of what they can control, to the limits of costs/rewards. It’s neither good nor evil - it’s just what they do.
Whether Japan would have stopped at their planned conquests in the fullness of time is neither here nor there (although the dawn of atomic bombs pretty much put the kibosh on further empire building) - but your assurance that they had their eyes set on conquering the mainland US is abysmal, irrealistic (even to them) and pulled straight out your bottom. They didn’t have the ships. They didn’t have the men. By jingo, they didn’t have the money too. And they knew that, even the most optimistic ideologues of Glorious Nippon.
Nor had they any demonstrable intention of it, and why would they have ? Why mount an invasion across the largest ocean in the world, when they were still struggling with their chunk of China ? When India, Siberia, Australia were much closer, much more practical “next ups” ?
Yes. To remove the US from what they considered to be their sphere of influence. It does not follow that they ever wanted or intended to butt into yours.
Yes.
No. Their grand strategic goals never expanded over the course of the war. You’re engaging in demonizing propaganda, for a war fought over 60 years ago no less.
Yamamto felt it was necessary to warn the Imperial military what they were in for. Why? Because world conquest was on some of their minds. He was suggesting that they think twice before undertaking such an endevor.
“IF” Imperial Japan had been successful in their original attempts to control the countries in Asia. “IF” no one had been able to stop them. Why would you think that Imperial Japan would have been satisfied with their conquests?
With the expected increase in raw materials and petrolium, an even larger military would have been built and used. Conquests begat more conquest.
Why were the British, French, Americans, Dutch and Portuguese satisfied with theirs ?
Which is why the Roman Empire conquered the whole of Eurasia, from seaaa to shiny seaaaaaaaa.
Two words: diminishing returns. Something akin to the inverse square law at work in regards to the manpower, supplies and logistics needed to keep control of and defend each new addition to the Empire, both from its locals and from other would-be conquerors (particularly in the case of empires built upon ethno-racial dividing lines, like the colonial empires were).
All empires stop “on their own”, in the sense that they can’t conquer more. Not as much because of any outside opposition, but because they’re stretched to their internal limits already.
Just as there weren’t enough Romans to keep a grasp on much more than the Med, and even that took hundreds of years of dutiful building up to ; there weren’t enough Japanese alive in in the '40s to control more than what they’d planned on seizing (and actually, even that was wildly optimistic, as history went on to demonstrate).
No you can’t. I heard someone else attribute those very quotes to Jefferson and Washington. **Deeg **didn’t make them up. Prove us wrong.
(That is not how quotes work :smack:)
No, unsubstantiated means there is no evidence for it. That it doesn’t mean it is 100% for certain false means nothing; it is difficult if not impossible to prove a negative. I’ll give you an example: It is said that Yamamoto felt a poster in the future named doorhinge was a child rapist. It’s unsubstantiated, but this doesn’t mean it is false.
Clearly you are unfamiliar with Hitler’s expressed war aims, both public and private, along with the state of German development into nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles. Germany was years behind the US and UK on splitting the atom and ICBMs weren’t developed until the late 1950s even with all the captured data of German testing with the idea during the war.
Reality? As wild eyed as they were in thinking they could break America’s will in a war of attrition, they planned on doing it by establishing a defensive perimeter. As for force working before, you might want to look into why Japan went to war with the Allies. They were bogged down in a war in China that had been going on openly since 1937, and without a source of oil they were going to be unable to continue it.
You’re still not getting what he said. The Japanese decision makers thought they could defeat the US because Japan had a greater fighting spirit and could overcome material inferiority with it and break the American will to continue taking casualties. Yamamoto was telling them that idea was a pipedream; that it would “not [be] enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco.” I’ll note that Hawaii and San Francisco were also totally unrealistic objectives and Yamamoto and everyone in Japan was aware of that as well.
Again, you might want to look into the history of the war, the reason the Japanese went to war with the US and Britain, and what they hoped to get from it. They were bogged down in a war in China and were facing economic strangulation from the oil embargo imposed by the US if they didn’t quit China. Defeating the US most certainly didn’t involve invading it.
Cite? I certainly hope you’re not going to say Mao and the communists in China as they were an actual army that had been fighting Japan since 1937 and the government of the KMT since 1927, not armed civilians. Equally I hope you’re not going to say Philippine guerillas since they were based on the pre-war Philippine army and supplied and directed by the US during the war. I also hope you’re not going to say the Viet Minh, who had been fighting the French long before the Japanese showed up and could hardly be called ‘armed civilians.’
HAHAHAHA. You’re a hoot. Is that the best you got?
Unsubstantiated means it hasn’t been substantiated. If the pope of Pearl Harbour history thought it was “false” he would have said it was false. Thanks for playing.
And substantiated means “proven”. Well, I lie: it really means “given substance”, which itself means “given physical matter”. Without that, all you’ve got is… hot air.
The null assumption is that *nobody said anything. You want to assert X said Y, you have to point to the book, the letter, the TV show, or at least the newspaper interview where he said that. The burden of proof is on the one claiming to quote. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to put your words in dead men’s mouths, and that’s kinda creepy.
albeit less so than putting your … yes, I’ll shut up now.
It’s all I need. Lord help me I didn’t think it’d be necessary to do something this asinine, but here’s a dictionary definition to help you out: unsubstantiated
I hate to have to inform you that there is no pope of Pearl Harbor to say something is false and that one is not needed. There is no evidence that Yamamoto said any such thing.
If you’re through dancing around the meaning of the word unsubstantiated, perhaps you could substantiate these armed civilians that you claim tied town the IJA.
And by the way, it’s Pearl Harbor, not Pearl Harbour no matter where you live, it’s a proper name.
The Japanese 14th Army was formed to invade, conquer, and occupy the Philippines. The guerrillas, which included civilians, increased in number thru out the occupation. The guerrillas were not exclusively pre-surrender or escaped military.
*There were many guerrilla organizations operating throughout the 1,000 mile long Philippine Archipelago…
…In all, some 260,715 guerrillas in 277 guerrilla units fought in the resistance movement as organized, armed, and tactically employed units.*
These guerrilla groups kept the entire 14th Army tied up in the Philippines instead of being able to hold the island with a small occupation force and reassigning the majority to other invasion forces.