[vietnamnet] Vì sao Nhật Bản và Thái Lan giữ được chủ quyền trước phương Tây?

1. Ấn độ có xung đột tôn giáo và sắc tộc trước khi bị thuộc địa hoá, nhưng ở mức độ nhẹ, vì đơn giản lục địa ấn độ và lãnh thổ ấn độ bây giờ trước khi bị Anh đô hộ bao gồm nhiều nước, mỗi nước một tôn giáo và sắc dân, văn hóa, ngôn ngữ, chữ viết, hệ thống chính trị riêng. Anh biến cả lục địa ấn độ thành thuộc địa và cố gom nó vào dưới sự cai trị của nữ hoàng anh, nhưng hệ thống cai trị British Raj cực kỳ phức tạp (500 tiểu quốc nhỏ) và như lò thuốc súng, lúc nào cũng chực chờ nổ, mà đỉnh điểm là Ấn độ giành độc lập và chia đôi luôn làm ấn vs pakistan. Hai thằng này không chia theo sắc tộc hay lý tưởng mà chia theo tôn giáo, và đến giờ vẫn thù nhau. Nó chẳng phải thỏa mãn nhất hay tính toán gì mà do tình thế bắt buộc, vì 2 thằng đòi tách là 2 đảng lớn nhất có công giành độc lập cho ấn độ.

Nhân tiện, chủ nghĩa dân tộc và khái niệm "quốc gia" hiện đại là khái niệm khá mới, chỉ xuất hiện vài trăm năm trở lại đây. Tiểu lục địa ấn độ vốn là nhiều quốc gia khác nhau về văn hóa, sắc tộc bị đô hộ dưới một chủ anh, nhưng chính vì chung một chủ nên mới dần định hình dân tộc tính ấn độ, làm nền bồi dưỡng chủ nghĩa dân tộc, hình thành các nghiệp đoàn chính trị lớn để đi đến độc lập thành nước ấn hiện đại. Hệ quả là Ấn Độ hiện đại là quốc gia đa văn hóa, đa sắc tộc nhất thế giới, đi cùng hệ thống chính trị liên bang khá uyển chuyển để thỏa mãn được nhu cầu của vô số nhóm lợi ích. Nó cũng là lý do Ấn không thể tập trung được nguồn lực toàn dân bật lên như thằng Tàu.

2. Có nhầm WW1 với WW2 không? Vì trong WW2 Roosevelt chủ trương bán vũ khí cho phe đồng minh ngay từ khi chiến tranh bắt đầu, và lend-lease là gốc của câu "Thắng ww2 = máu Nga, tiền Mỹ và tình báo Anh" (câu này chắc là của Anh để bon chen dây máu ăn phần thôi, chỉ cần 2 vế đầu).

Spoiler

Quite apart from these facile German explanations, many Westerners quickly forgot the enormous contributions that the Soviet peoples had made to the Allied victory. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, a U.S. news magazine featured a cover photo of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was labeled as the man who defeated Hitler. If any one man deserved that label, it was not Eisenhower but Zhukov, Vasilevsky, or perhaps Stalin himself. The Red Army and the Soviet citizenry of many nationalities bore the lion’s share of the struggle against Germany from 1941 to 1945. Only China, which suffered almost continuous Japanese attack from 1931 onward, matched the Soviet level of suffering and effort. In military terms, moreover, the Chinese participation in the war was almost insignificant in comparison with that of the Soviets, who engaged and absorbed well over half of all German forces.

From June until December 1941, only Britain shared with the Soviet Union the trials of war against the Germans. More than 3 million German troops fought in the East, and less than 1 million served elsewhere, occupied conquered territories, or rested in the homeland (see Table N in the Appendix). For the following year, through November 1942, over 9 million troops on both sides fought in the East, but the only significant ground action in the western theater took place in North Africa. There, relatively small British and Commonwealth forces engaged Rommel’s Africa Corps and its Italian allies. In November 1942, the British triumphed at El Alamein, defeating four German divisions and a somewhat larger Italian force and inflicting 60,000 Axis losses. That same month, around Stalingrad the Soviets encircled the German Sixth Army, damaged Fourth Panzer Army, and smashed Romania’s Third and Fourth Armies, eradicating over 50 divisions and 300,000 men from the Axis order of battle. By May 1943, the Allies had pursued Rommel’s slightly enlarged panzer army across Africa into Tunisia, where, after heavy fighting, the German and Italian force of 250,000 surrendered. Meanwhile, in the East the Red Army finished off German Sixth Army, severely mauled another German army (the Second), and destroyed the Italian Eighth and Hungarian Second Armies, more than doubling Axis losses in Tunisia.

By 1 October 1943, some 2,565,000 soldiers—63 percent of the Wehrmacht’s total strength—were fighting in the East, as were the bulk of the 300,000 Waffen SS troops. In the meantime, far smaller German forces had stalemated the British-American advance in Italy. On 1 June 1944, a total of 239 German division equivalents, or 62 percent of the entire force, were on the Eastern Front; the Germans still considered the West to be a semirest area.26 Even in August 1944, after the Allies opened a Western Front in Normandy, the Germans still had 2.1 million soldiers in the East as opposed to 1 million in France.

Relative casualty figures reinforce this image of the Eastern Front as the principal German theater of war. Between 1 September 1942 and 20 November 1943, the German Army lost 2,077,000, or 30 percent, of the total force committed, as killed, wounded, or missing in the East (see Table O and Table R in the Appendix for Soviet weapons production, strengths, and losses during wartime). From June through November 1944, when Germany was losing on both fronts, 903,000 (62 percent) of the 1,457,000 irrevocable losses were again in the East.27 Finally, after losing 120,000 men to the Western Allies in the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans suffered another 2 million losses, two-thirds of them at Soviet hands, from 1 January to 30 April 1945.
For the war as a whole, total Wehrmacht losses to 30 April 1945 amounted to 11,135,500, including 6,035,000 wounded. Of these, almost 9 million fell in the East. Total German losses including prisoners number 13,488,000 men, representing 75 percent of all mobilized forces and 46 percent of the 1939 adult male population of Germany. Of these, 10,758,000 fell or were taken prisoner in the East.28 Today, the stark inscription “Died in the East,” carved on countless thousands of headstones in German cemeteries, bears mute witness to the carnage in the East, where the will and strength of the Wehrmacht perished.

Both during and after the war, Soviet officials complained bitterly about the absence of a true “Second Front” before June 1944. The suspicion that their allies deliberately allowed the USSR to bear the brunt of the war helped limit popular criticism for the terrible casualties involved, and this suspicion about the West endures even in the post-Soviet Russian Federation. Yet, the Allies had ample reason to defer that invasion. The botched Canadian-British raid on Dieppe (in August 1942) and the American defeat at Kasserine Pass (in February 1943) indicated that the Western Allies were not ready to operate in France until at least mid-1943, and in any event, there were insufficient landing craft and other equipment available before 1944. Even the June 1944 landing was a close call, with victory due in part to major German misperceptions. Once they landed and then broke out of Normandy, the Western Allies inflicted grievous losses on the defending Germans—100,000 at Falaise and a total of 400,000 Germans by the end of 1944. In the subsequent Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 to 31 January 1945), the Germans lost an additional 120,000 men.29 These losses in the West, combined with more than 1.2 million lost in the East during the same period, broke the back of the Wehrmacht and prepared Germany for final destruction in 1945.

The Allies did, of course, contribute to victory in ways other than ground combat. The Dieppe raid and the Sicilian invasion seemed like pinpricks, but they prompted Hitler to redeploy valuable units to the West, indirectly aiding the Red Army. As remarked earlier, the Allied strategic bombing campaign of 1943–1945 first drew the bulk of German airpower and antiaircraft guns home to defend the Reich and then shattered the Luftwaffe fighter force irrevocably. The same bombing campaign also did significant damage to German industrial strength and civilian morale, although Germany was limited more by labor and material shortfalls than by available machine tools.

Equally disastrous for the Germans were the losses of tactical fighters in the bombing campaign and in combat in France in 1944. These losses were so devastating that the Luftwaffe was no longer a factor in the East after mid-1944.
Another controversial Allied contribution was the Lend-Lease program to supply the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, Soviet accounts consistently understated the significance of this program for the Soviet war effort.Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make a major difference between defeat and victory in 1941 and early 1942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet peoples and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates. As the war continued, however, the United States and Britain provided many of the implements of war and raw materials necessary for Soviet victory. Without Lend-Lease food, clothing, and raw materials, especially metals, the Soviet economy would have been even more heavily burdened by the war effort. In particular, Lend-Lease trucks, railroad engines, and railroad cars sustained the exploitation phase of each Soviet offensive; without such transportation, every offensive would have stalled out at an early stage, outrunning its logistical tail. In turn, this would have allowed the German commanders to escape at least some encirclements, and it would have forced the Red Army to prepare and conduct many more deliberate penetration attacks to advance the same distance. If the Western Allies had not provided equipment and invaded northwest Europe, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht. The result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers would have waded at France’s Atlantic beaches rather than meeting the Allies at the Elbe. Thus, although the Red Army shed the bulk of Allied blood, it would have bled even more intensely and for a longer time without Allied assistance.

As indicated in Tables P and Q in the Appendix, the Great Patriotic War cost the Soviet Union at least 29 million military casualties. The exact numbers can never be established; some revisionists are trying to put the number as high as 50 million. Uncounted millions of civilians also perished or suffered permanent injury; the dislocation of the Soviet population was comparable to the effect of an enemy occupation of the United States from the Atlantic coast to west of the Mississippi River. Millions of soldiers disappeared into German detention camps and slave labor factories, where they died at a rate higher than that suffered by German POWs in Siberia. Millions of other Soviets suffered permanent physical and mental damage.

Economic dislocation was equally severe. Despite the prodigious feats of moving factories east of the Urals, the losses in resources and manufacturing capacity were catastrophic in western Russia and the Ukraine. The heavy industry in the Donbas, Leningrad, Kiev, and Khar’kov regions fell under German control, along with key mineral deposits and most of the Soviet Union’s prime agricultural regions. This stark context underscores the importance of Lend-Lease.

Coming on top of World War I, the Russian Civil War, forced collectivization, and the purges of the 1930s, this staggering butcher’s bill left the Soviet population and economy weakened for decades to come. Working seventy-four-hour weeks, the Soviet worker did not regain the 1940 standard of living (for a much smaller population) until at least 1952.31 Understandably, the Soviet government and population were determined to eliminate any possibility of another such catastrophe. This fostered a paranoid concern with national security that ultimately contributed to the bankruptcy and destruction of the state.

(When Titan Clashed,David M. Glantz, bản 2015)