28 Dec 2024 2:18 pm
Cannonpointer » 28 Dec 2024, 9:33 am » wrote: ↑ By the way, you should investigate Qin Shi Huang. He was the emperor that gave Mao his inspiration for a "do-over."
Mao intended to build a new China - and let's be honest: He pulled it off quite prodigiously. His methods DID work, and modern China is the proof of it. Less than a century ago, virtually all knowledge of the arts and sciences was utterly erased from the country, and it went into hermit mode. There was nothing left except illiterate peasants and the government - the entire intelligentsia was deleted, and with it, all of the old ways, all of what Mao saw as the western corruption and degeneracy.
Thousands of years prior, the emperor Qin Shi Huang had pulled a very similar stunt. Many scholars believe that he killed half the population of China. And just to give you a sense of what his brutality accomplished, the word China come from his name - Qin, which is pronounced Cheen.
At the time of his ascension to power, China was a confederation of villages and cities that were ruled over by war lords. There were segments of the Great Wall already built by individual war lords, but there was no intention by anyone to link those sections. Every war lord governed peasants who used slightly different pictographs. There were canals and barges of various sizes, coins of varying values, weights and measures for one area that were different than the weights and measures of adjoining ones. Qin established uniform weights and measures, uniform canals, uniform pictographs, uniform canals and barges. He built the Great Wall, incorporating the existing sections. He built one China, with one pictographic language, one monetary system, and one uniform set of weights and measures.
That *** was willing to break a lot of **** eggs to make his omelet.
So we can do the same. No difference when building a nation/empire. Kill whatever is in the way. Good.