Joseph Riggs wrote: > Unfortunately, the story goes that he fell in love with the daughter of a Tory > (British loyalist), and ended up attempting (and failing) to help the British > seize West Point.
Well I don't know much about American revolution. West Point is 45 mins north of here, looks to me like a pretty legit military target. I think even traitor Arnold wouldn't help the Brits if he thought they would mass murder every single Yankees in there. The things that happened in Zeta is a whole different scale. I think I can find an example that one-up Arnold. In the spring of 1644 the Ming dynasty was collapsing. Various local rebellions and the external Manchurian invasion all poise to seize the empire. One Ming general, Wu Sangui, had guarded the Great Wall against the Manchu threat for years up until the defeat of the Ming Emperor by the local Han rebels led by Li Zicheng. Wu, a Han himself like the majority of China, supposingly enraged by Li taking his concubine, opened the gates of the supposingly impenetrable Great Wall and let the supposingly barbaric Manchurians hoard into Peking and eventually hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese died at the hoofs of the invaders and China suffered a humiliating 268 years of foreign rule. To this day, every Chinese kid over 5 years old knows and curses the name of Wu Sangui. Perfect counterexample to my argument right? Except that historians know better than 5 year old kids, and by historians I really mean high school teachers. There were plenty of selfish and non-selfish reasons for Wu to ally with his former enemy, from his POV, the Manchurians were intelligent, organized and respectful of the Han culture. Li looks to him uneducated, violent and probably as greedy as the corrupt ministers and eunichs who caused the collapse of Ming. In fact a long string of Ming officials and generals surrendered or joined the Manchu without involving women. And even if Wu had allied with Li they probably could not repel the Manchu who had been preparing for the invasion for three decades. Pinning the whole blame on one jealous general is great for jingoistic operas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Yuanyuan) but has almost nothing to do with reality. In fact some even describe the concubine story as legend (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%90%B3%E4%B8%89%E6%A1%82). For something more reliable than Wikipedia, in Jonathan D. Spence's 870+ page book "The Search for Modern China", he used the phrase "according to popular tales" in the account of the concubine (p. 33). The Han nation (not just the Ming government/royalty) had became arrogant, complacent and corrupt from centuries of wealth and success. It didn't get defeated because of one jealous traitor. And I was thinking someone would bring up Helen of Troy ;-) > provide. There aren't any national boundaries between the two sides, and the > series doesn't emphasize any real cultural differences. So it's possible for > someone who's not fanatical about their side to have second thoughts if > presented with a big enough temptation. Ehhh... national boundaries? Cultural difference? Did we change topic all of a sudden? > The question is, how big of a temptation would be required in order to bring > the individual around? If I give you a billion dollars and 10 most beautiful women of the world would you help drop a colony on your own country? Or even on some Central Asian nation you've never heard of? I just might have more faith in human nature than other people (may have a lot to do with me not believing the existence of Satan). Greed and jealous make people do a lot of _bad_ things (thieving and murders), but _evil_ things (war and mass murder) don't happen without moral justification of some kind. The moral justification might well be narcissism, libertinism or something but it's still a moral choice not puppy love/lust/jealousy. -- Dr. Core -------------------------------------------------- The Gundam Mailing List MK-II [email protected] Archives: http://www.gundam.com/gml Help: Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this in the BODY: help list
