Rate the competency of the Indian military compared to their IT flagships
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Date: May 14th, 2018 4:51 PM Author: Adventurous Ticket Booth
The Prussian Army recruited heavily among the Poles, Belarussians, Lithuanians and other Slavic groups. Slavs were excluded from Prussian institutions, which worked out very nicely, guaranteeing recruiters a steady supply of men of military age with no other option. And if they didn’t speak German, they could be taught by the rod.
That’s the horrible logic of recruiting the lowest of the low: The worse their lives become, the easier it is to sign them up as cannon fodder. If you look into the history of the most famous, illustrious military units, you find their origin in a minority ethnic group that’s been brutalized, walled off from the civilian economy, and then offered a chance to take the king’s shilling. Since European armies loved elaborate uniforms, these units would be “honored” with headgear or some other ethnic marker. And sure enough, whip-sawed by desperation and flattery, these units performed heroically, generating more flattery and a tradition of joining up, making the recruiter’s job even easier.
Which is why certain highly-decorated British regiments wear kilts. The Highland Scots, now extinct, scared the life out of Britain in 1745 by wading through better-equipped regular-army units staffed by English soldiers at Prestonpans. The Highlanders weren’t cute, quaint, or beloved in the minds of the London elite, when they heard how the Scots had charged out of the fog, swinging huge broadswords and screaming in Gaelic. The Highlanders were alien monsters—and Papists to boot, the worst crime of all in 18th-c. Britain.
After the inevitable defeat of the small, disorganized, half-armed Scottish invaders, the Empire pursued a classic two-phase plan. First, the extinction of the Highland Scots’ culture. The Earl of Cumberland, in charge of this phase, issued a classic “No prisoners!” order covering all Gaelic-speaking men of military age, armed or not. Anything associated with the rebel ethnic group was banned. Wearing tartan and playing the bagpipes were capital offenses in Scotland in 1746.
So how did it happen that this brutalized ethnic minority ended up marching in the Empire’s parades, decked out in tartan, with the pipes blaring, all through Victoria’s long century? That was phase two, and it worked very well, as it usually does. Once the insurgent ethnic group has been destroyed, it can be made quaint. Its markers—tartan, the pipes—can be used to flatter young Highland men into taking the king’s shilling. And best of all, the utter devastation of their homeland gives them no other options. And that’s always been the bottom line for getting good-quality cannon fodder: Make sure they have no other options.
You’ll find that grim sequence behind every military unit recruited from a crushed ethnic group.
Americans, fixated on skin color as a “racial” marker, tend to understand what the empires did (and do) to non-European groups like the Sikhs but miss how the technique—crush’em, then recruit’em and flatter’en—worked on other “white” European minorities just as well. “Race” in Europe never meant skin color. In fact, some of the targeted groups, like the Highland Scots, products of centuries without sun, were whiter than white, downright phosphorescent. That didn’t make the Empire any more squeamish about crushing and then recruiting them.
A century later, the same Empire used the same technique to crush and recruit another rich vein of cannon fodder from another pale, Gaelic-speaking group of desperate paupers: The Irish peasantry. In the mid-19th century, Ireland was systematically depopulated by artificial famine, emigration, and epidemics, eliminating another despised and feared source of Papist insurgencies. Once that group was thoroughly destroyed, survivors were recruited by the Empire, using the same old techniques: denial of any alternative to military service and sentimental flattery for the alleged bravery and “fighting spirit” of the despised group. It’s a sad joke to think of all the Midwestern Notre Dame fans cheering “The Fighting Irish,” with no clue that the whole concept of Irish military prowess was a recruiting gimmick by an Empire always hungry for cannon fodder.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3972133&forum_id=2#36049538) |
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Date: May 14th, 2018 4:52 PM Author: Adventurous Ticket Booth
Recruiting songs, wartime flattery for a despised ethnic minority. “…Tipperary” begins with one of the old jokes about a dumb mick:
Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly-O, Saying “If you don’t receive it, write and let me know…”
The recruiting songs aimed at Paddy often featured the traditional slurs, before adding flattering. Empire welcomed the survivors into its army with the legend of the “fighting Irish” like the one that concedes that Paddy is “foolish and very often wrong,” before buttering up his martial valor by concluding that, whatever else is wrong with Paddy, he’s brave: “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows.”
And don’t even get me started on how the Raj flattered the Sikhs. It’s the Sikhs who are the saddest of these stories, because they were this magnificent new thing in world history, and could have turned Southwest Asia into a glorious civilization, instead of the sad, gory mess it is now. If you want a quick look at the Sikhs’ wondrous origins, military success, and fatal encounter with the Raj, you can read an article http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-classic-in-praise-of-sikhs-the-coolest-warrior-tribe-around/ I did on it, but it’s heartbreaking stuff.
The Sikhs had the bad luck to butt heads with the British Empire circa 1840, and if you met the Empire back then in any posture but total surrender, you were in for a very rough time.
And once the Empire destroyed your culture, it would assess you as recruiting material, and switch to flattery. So, after two brutal wars against the Raj, the Sikhs were courted as good soldiers, flattered and offered a place in special Sikh units with fancy Sikh-insignia uniforms. It worked, of course. It always does. A few decades later, Sikhs were winning the Victoria Cross—posthumously, as a rule.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3972133&forum_id=2#36049548) |
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