This is part two of our show with Ian Toll, author of the Pacific War trilogy. Here’s part one.

In the second half of our conversation, we discuss…

• The various command styles that shaped US military strategy in the Pacific,

• How General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey became media darlings —controlling public opinion and war politics in the process,

• The evolution of submarine warfare and Japanese defensive strategy,

• Counterfactuals, including a world where the Allies invaded Taiwan,

• Broader lessons for the future of warfare, especially in the Taiwan Strait.

Cohosting is Chris Miller, author of Chip War. Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app or watch on YouTube.

“What Becomes of a General?”

Jordan Schneider: Let's talk about the generals and admirals, starting with Chester Nimitz. You have this wonderful opening of him taking this secret train ride across America and reflecting on what he’s about to do. He’s trying to relax and play poker with his buddy, but at the same time, he understands the gravity of the situation.

Chris Miller: I was struck by the extent to which Nimitz has now been largely forgotten in American public discourse, but in your telling he emerges as probably the most important strategic thinker of the war in the Pacific. The contrast between him and MacArthur was striking to me, given that MacArthur is the one who’s remembered.

Ian Toll: One of the things that I always find very striking when you look at the admirals and officers, the leadership in the Navy during WWII, is that you have a group of men who have lived parallel lives since the age of 17 or 18 when they entered the Naval Academy. They have been shaped by a culture, by a context, a profession that had rigorous ideas about what leadership should look like. Yet when they reach the pinnacle of their careers, you realize these guys are very different. They have different personalities, different styles, and different ways of making decisions. They present themselves differently.

The full range of personalities comes through in the way that the leadership class — this is true in the Army as well — approached winning this vast, unprecedented war that they had been preparing for their entire lives.

Nimitz was the handpicked choice of FDR. FDR was not just confident in the role of commander in chief, but in particular, he had a parochial feeling about the Navy because he had served in a sub-cabinet position earlier in his career and because he had been president for such a long time and had personally pushed through and run a vast expansion in our Navy, the Two-Ocean Navy Act, which had occurred before the beginning of the war. FDR was very involved in personnel decisions at the highest level of the Navy. He selected admirals. Nimitz was his choice.

He had first offered the job of Pacific Fleet Chief to Nimitz nine months before Pearl Harbor. Nimitz had demurred. He said he thought he was too junior an admiral to take the position, and that for him to accept that command would arouse opposition and resentment among some of the other admirals, and he thought it was a bad idea. They gave it to Husband Kimmel instead.

When the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, when all of our battleships were knocked out of action in the first 15 minutes of the war, when Husband Kimmel was made to perform the role of the scapegoat for that, Nimitz was first to understand that it could have been him. It would have been him most likely, if he had been there. We would have remembered Nimitz very differently. That’s a snapshot of how historical contingency can cast such a long shadow down the decades. Nimitz could have been in the position of Husband Kimmel, a person that we remember solely because he suffered a terrible defeat.

But Nimitz’s great strength was that he had a gentle touch. His leadership style was based on personal warmth. After the trauma of Pearl Harbor, he showed up in Hawaii. He had a fifth of the Earth’s surface within his theater command. It was an enormous command of not just the Navy, but the Army, the Marines, the Air Force in his theater. He’s able to preside over this fractious group of people who are arguing over how to fight this war and to get them to work together and to forge a team out of what was a somewhat dysfunctional system managing inter-service operations in the 1940s.

He was the right man for the job. You said that you thought he was forgotten today. That’s true, but even more true of Ernest King, who was his direct superior. He was the Chief of Naval Operations. He is forgotten even by people who are interested in military history and the history of WWII.

But if you look at the major decisions that were made on the way that we would fight and win the Pacific War, the way that we would pick up the pieces after Pearl Harbor and put together an offensive, which less than four years later would force the surrender of Japan, it was Ernest King more than anybody else who had a blueprint in mind for how we would do that and who was in a position to impose that imprint on the rest of the Navy and all of the military services.

Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about the contrast of thinking styles that the admiralty ended up having to employ. There are scenes of big conference room debates where MacArthur says we should go left and Nimitz says we should go right. They’re making lots of different styles of arguments — some from a logistics perspective, others from a morale perspective. This represents a model of slow thinking and deliberation.

After they decide on a course of action, you have all of these plans and logistics, and you get the boats in place. But because of the nature of carrier warfare during the Pacific War, incredibly fast-twitched decision making is required. You have imperfect information because your scout plane may have seen something, and then you have to make a split-second call.

One of the admirals described it perfectly — “These carriers are boxers with glass chins, but they have enormous left hooks, and all we're doing is deciding when to swing and hoping for the best.”

It becomes very human at both levels of thinking. With slow thinking, you have all these personal histories that are intertwined. Everyone is thinking about their reputation and trying to save their people and resources. Then with the admirals’ decisions, soldiers who haven’t slept in 48 hours have to make these calls.

There’s this other approach where one commander delegates everything because he knows he needs to be sharp and fresh for the big thinking — when he has to make these enormous strategic calls.

These flag officers have to operate in very different modes, which you explored beautifully. I'm curious about your reflection on that and what it reveals about the nature of warfare and the nature of people at this moment in time.

Ian Toll: It’s true because the planning and anticipation of how these battles would go were important. Getting those decisions right, moving your forces into position at the right time — at Midway, most famously, Nimitz had a picture of what the Japanese plan was, thanks to this extraordinary intelligence achievement of breaking the Japanese codes. He was able to move what forces he had at that point, which were three aircraft carriers, into position to do battle. But after that, everything that happened was a contingency. It was chaos. There were a lot of chances involved. That battle could have gone the other way.

You had Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher, the two American admirals, making decisions with imperfect information, feeling their way through the fog of war. In the end, winning that battle narrowly with a pretty significant contribution of blind luck. You would see this again and again in naval battles in the Pacific. If the right plan is put in place, you’re improving the odds for your side. Yet there are still fast-twitch decisions that have to be made, these opportunistic decisions, probabilistic decisions when you don’t have all of the information you need.

Those are two entirely different ways of thinking about military command. They may play to the strengths or weaknesses of different personality types. But one of the things that Nimitz did particularly well was to develop a plan and to make sure that his subordinate commanders, his ocean-going commanders understood that plan and make sure they would execute this plan in the same way that he would if he were there commanding a task force at sea.

But then once they left, Nimitz was in his headquarters back in Hawaii, in Pearl Harbor, you’ve got Halsey or Spruance or whoever the task force commander is on the scene. Nimitz, although he was often tempted, never got on the radio and intervened and started forcing decisions. He delegated those tactical decisions, even in a major battle, without interfering — trusting to the judgment of his subordinates. Most of the time, that judgment was vindicated.

Chris Miller: Nimitz seemed to me the opposite of a gung-ho military leader stereotype. You use the words “leading by his personal warmth, being gentle.” That came through in the narrative. He felt like a grandfather figure to me. But it was super effective. The one time he came down hard on a subordinate with the “where is task force 37” telegram, it was the softest criticism you could imagine.I wanted to pick up on the fog of war.

Fog of war is a metaphor and fog of war is reality with the weather playing such a critical role in almost every battle.

Ian Toll: Fog of war is a very frequent metaphor in naval warfare and often becomes a literal problem.

Chris Miller: You felt the clouds rolling in and every single battle rolling in and out. Then the typhoon you have off of Leyte Gulf is extraordinary — you’re fighting a battle and then you’re also dealing with these ancient problems of seamanship at the same time. Talk about contingency, every single battle has this uncertainty: what will the weather be like in three days? Your ability to find or be found was hugely impacted in this era when radar was not very good by what were the cloud patterns. That was a great example of the contingency at every moment.

Ian Toll: The weather is this universal thing. I quoted Joseph Conrad, who was a sea captain before he was a novelist, and he’d been through a typhoon in exactly the same waters just off Formosa or Taiwan. It occurred to me as I was reading that description by Conrad, this is the same storm. It’s five decades, six decades later, but that’s Typhoon Alley.

You have those storms going through every year, and you could pick a description if one existed from 2,000 years ago, and you’d be describing the same storm. The navy and the navies of other countries in the Pacific today have got to deal with those same weather patterns. There’s something universal across time to that X factor of weather. I think that particularly comes to bear on naval warfare.

Jordan Schneider: The suspense of not knowing where the enemy ships are is foreign to a modern mind today. The 1940s are not ancient history, but there were no satellites. Radar was just starting. There were so many uncertainties that these folks were facing.

Ian Toll: You’re relying on your planes to be your eyes too. The patrol flights become absolutely essential. It’s very easy for a plane to fly directly over a ship and not see it in overcast weather. We saw that happen again and again where you had patrol planes moving out from these task forces. They’re supposed to be the first trigger to tell you if there’s an enemy there. There was much more of a sense, particularly earlier in the war, of the fleets being blind and having to make decisions without being certain where the enemy was, if the enemy was there, how far, what direction. That uncertainty, the tension and inherently the drama of that conflict.

Jordan Schneider: If Nimitz was a gentle, modern manager, Bull Halsey was the opposite. His famous quote was: “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be only spoken in hell. Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.” The guy was living up to his caricature, and then he embraced it.

There were numerous points where the mythos surrounding him was such that he was kept in positions longer than he would have been otherwise. FDR’s view was, “We’re already going to win, and it would be a weird sign to get this guy out of command.” His ethos was much more dualistic, reflecting the brutal mindset you needed to start these operations where you knew tens of thousands of people would die over the course of a fortnight.

Chris Miller: I was struck by the fact that some of the key, really costly errors that you describe were made by him, but it also seemed you were suggesting there’s strong evidence that the people under his command really loved him. Where’s the balance sheet there?

Ian Toll: There are some caveats to that. Halsey became very controversial within the ranks of the Navy in the last year of the war. He had some severe critics, including some of the rear admirals who were the task group commanders of the Third Fleet. These were the next generation of leaders — the guys who would be promoted into the senior positions in the immediate post-war period.

The piece that I think is often missing — and it’s true when you consider MacArthur’s career as well — is just how important their public images became.

They became important because the United States is a democracy that has elections during wartime, which makes us a little different from other democracies. The political influence of a military leader can become very great in wartime.

You had a new media environment. Film and radio, the ability to run the same photographs in newspapers all across the country. Many of these technologies that we take for granted today changed the political environment. When you had leaders like MacArthur and Halsey — I’ll put them in the same category — who were very good at speaking directly to the American people and to the rank and file of the military services through the media, they became media darlings. They became people that reporters always wanted to talk to because they wanted that quotable line, that photograph. It sold newspapers. The American people started to look at the war and understand it by listening to these very colorful, charismatic figures, and that became a political consideration.

1944 was an election year in the United States, and MacArthur was seriously considering running against FDR and was implicitly threatening to do that. At the same time, FDR was faced with the decision of whether to return to the Philippines. Halsey was making significant mistakes, most significantly in October 1944, when he made a mistake that could have led to disaster and only didn’t because of blind luck. It was well understood within the Navy that he had made this inexplicable error. There was a feeling that he should be held to account — that he should not be running the Third Fleet anymore, that he should be relieved of command, maybe put into a different position. But his political popularity, his profile with the American people as the unofficial face of the US Navy became a factor in the decision to keep him in place.

The interplay of politics, publicity, media, and the way that all of that influences the major decisions being made at the height of the bloodiest war in history — that is a fascinating story that hasn’t received as much attention in historical literature.

Chris Miller: I love the description of MacArthur’s press team as “the most well-oiled press team outside of Washington.” I learned a lot from that.

Ian Toll: MacArthur’s emergence as the principal hero — I don’t think it would be going too far to say that to the American people during the WWII, MacArthur was on a par with FDR as a national figure, a leader, a symbol. All of that happened extraordinarily fast. This was a lesson about the way media can work in wartime.

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor — I’m talking four or five days after Pearl Harbor — you had a sense of rage among the American people, anger at the Japanese, but also at our own military leadership, our Navy leadership in particular. How could you let this happen? How could we be blindsided like this in the heart of our fleet base? There was a sense of shame, a sense that we’d been humiliated. It was inexplicable.

Then, almost immediately, another storyline emerged from the Philippines, where the Japanese are invading and the Philippines’ beleaguered army is outmanned, outnumbered, and too far away for us to support them because of what had happened at Pearl Harbor. They’re fighting for their survival. MacArthur stepped in with a very aggressive and effective media strategy to shape the way that story was told and give the American people another storyline — a heroic storyline.

People who had been conditioned by movies to understand complex events through heroic narratives — MacArthur was stepping right into that and very effectively using media, photographs, the daily cables that he was writing describing the war, to establish himself as a singular figure. That continued right through the Korean War when he was fired by Harry Truman and almost caused a revolt within the Democratic Party. For ten years, MacArthur was able to ride that successful media strategy.

That’s interesting to me because in an authoritarian or fascist model of government, you don’t have that. You don’t have the ability of individual military leaders to challenge the political leadership by appealing directly to the people through the media and the press.

Jordan Schneider: There were a few other media beats that I thought were fascinating. One was this debate in October of 1944, just a few weeks before the presidential election, of whether or not to let the public know that the Japanese had sunk a carrier. One admiral said, “No, please don’t tell the Japanese that this carrier has sunk.” Another was saying, “There will be an enormous scandal if we don’t tell the American people the facts a few weeks before the election.”

But I think my favorite arc was with King and the press corps in Washington.

Ian Toll: The culture of the Navy had inculcated this anti-media, anti-public relations philosophy that it’s dangerous to play with the media. They can divulge your secrets. You should lie low. We should be the silent service. We’ll tell the American people what happened after we win the war. There was a joke going around that King’s philosophy of disclosure and media was, “We’ll tell the media and the American people absolutely nothing about what’s happening until the day the Japanese surrender, and then we’ll put out a two-word press release — ‘We won.’”

For a thousand reasons, that became a problematic, unsustainable approach. The Army — particularly MacArthur — was stepping into this void and shaping the way the American people understood the Pacific War to be unfolding. There was an understanding among all of the military services that as soon as the war was won, there was going to be a complete reorganization of the services. What we have today — a Secretary of Defense, a Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, a way of managing the different military services and forcing them to work together — none of that existed in the 1940s. It was understood because FDR had essentially decreed it — “We will reform and reorganize the military, but let’s get the war done first.”

The Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force — they all had their own agendas, and they were positioning themselves for this immense reform, this bureaucratic refashioning that they knew was coming. For all of these reasons, King was eventually convinced: “I can’t just ignore the media. This is a democracy. I’ve got to have some strategy.”

It was his own lawyer, who was a former reporter, who proposed: “Why don’t you start off-the-record briefings? Just get a bunch of reporters together in Washington. We’ll meet somewhere — not at your office, but at my house. We’ll get these guys together. We’ll have ground rules.” It would be what would today be called a deep background briefing, meaning you’re not going to use any of what’s disclosed. None of it’s going to be written up into any article. You’re not going to source anything. You’re not going to quote King, but it’s going to help you understand what’s happening. That will contribute to the way that you write the stories that you can write.

King thought this was crazy. “Why would you trust a bunch of reporters under these kinds of ground rules?” He was persuaded that if you get reputable reporters, they will adhere to these ground rules. After the first three hours of sitting with 20 reporters in Alexandria, Virginia, at his lawyer’s house, he realized, “This is exactly what I need to be doing because I’m getting these guys on side. I can then begin manipulating press coverage a little bit.” Even more than that, this was an opportunity for him to explain at a high level the strategic issues that they were dealing with to a bunch of guys who really were outsiders, but who were highly intelligent. King realized this was actually helping him to shape his own thinking in a beneficial way. For the rest of the war, he continued doing these deep background briefings.

I think that was an interesting arc. It helps us understand a little bit about who King was, but it also illuminates these issues that are unique to running a war in a democracy — different from the kind of challenges that Stalin, Hitler would face.

On Submarines and Taiwan Contingencies

Chris Miller: I was struck by the centrality of submarine warfare in the struggles that Japan faced. There have been some books on this in the past several decades, but relative to the Battle of the Atlantic, which takes center stage in histories of the war in Europe, the fact that the Japanese faced and lost the Battle of the Pacific in terms of shipping is central. I was struck by the way that you brought submarine warfare to life, with the USS Wahoo as a great case study. Upstream of that was the question of torpedoes — how do you get torpedoes that actually work, which ends up being a technical bureaucratic struggle.

Give us a bit of a glimpse into the trajectory of submarine warfare and its impact on the scope of the war.

Ian Toll: What you have in the submarine war — in any war of commerce, the Battle of the Atlantic being another example — is a cumulative way of fighting the war. You want to sink a certain amount of shipping, sink oil tankers, and little by little diminish the ability of your enemy to carry on the war. You’re attacking the economic underpinnings, the logistics underpinnings of the war. It’s a very different kind of campaign.

The war that the rest of the Navy is fighting, the Army is fighting, the Marines are fighting — you can diagram it on the map. We’re going to take this group of islands, and then we’re going to move, and we’re going to take this group of islands. We’re going to fight a naval battle here, and you could diagram the naval battle, and then you could show how that opens the way for us to make this next westward thrust, always moving closer to the Japanese islands.

Submarine warfare became death by a thousand cuts.

Sink one oil tanker at a time. There’s a cumulative effect that caused Japan’s war economy to sputter and run out of gas, and its ability to carry on the war became critical in the last year of the war.

You have to tell these stories side by side. You have to realize these were almost entirely separate campaigns. There’s very little direct coordination between these two campaigns, and they’re both important and they’re working together. That wasn’t the way the submarines had been envisioned before WWII.

An interesting part of the story is how the submarine commanders themselves came to realize: “We’re not using this resource in the optimal way if we’re using them to support fleet movements or to go out and be eyes and ears for the fleet.” This is the way fleet submarines — these diesel submarines — had been built with a very different role in mind. They were going to operate at the edges of these task forces as they went out. They weren’t going to fight the kind of long, solitary cruises where they’re going primarily to sink oil tankers and freighters.

It wasn’t until 1943 that the Navy realized we’re not using this resource the way we should. What we should do is largely disconnect the Navy submarines from what the rest of the fleet is doing and just send them out there to try to sink oil tankers. Let’s try to starve Japan of oil and other resources. Once they did that, once they fixed the torpedo problem, it became clear to the Japanese that they had nowhere to go.

Japan is a country poor in natural resources. It always has been. It has negligible oil production. It has always relied on importing oil. Their decision to attack us at Pearl Harbor was largely about oil. They had an oil stockpile, and they needed more. We had cut off the supply of Texas oil. They needed to go down to Borneo to take the Dutch and British oil fields there and replace that supply. Then they have the problem of transporting that oil from what is today Indonesia to Japan — 3,000 miles, an artery that if we could sever would cause the entire Japanese Imperial project to bleed out. That was what happened in 1944 and 1945.

You can tell this story with statistics. There were X many fleet boats that were going out. They were going on patrols of this average length for X many weeks. They were sinking X amount of ships on average. Those statistics will tell a story. But in order to bring the reader into what’s happening, you’ve got to show an individual boat and say, “Let’s imagine what it’s like to go on this cruise on the Wahoo and to see it from the perspective of those who were in the crew.” Use the example of that one very successful submarine and her career to illuminate the larger story.

Jordan Schneider: The Wahoo arc had aspects of a video game — we had to line up the shot and execute these crazy trick shots down the chute, diving while everything exploded around us. But it ties back to larger strategic questions. The bottom-up tactical innovations were fascinating, both understanding that the torpedoes were wrong and realizing we shouldn’t be going around with the carriers. We should be positioned between Japan and China to shoot down oil tankers.

One of the big themes is that technological innovation and change happened from 1941 to 1945, but more important were the failures of imagination. Starting with Pearl Harbor, there was this long evolution of understanding that carriers mattered more than battleships, then understanding that submarines were crucial, then not taking territory, and finally realizing we could skip islands without killing everyone. On the Japanese side, we’ve talked about the Kamikazes but haven’t discussed the infantry side much — going from Banzai charges 万岁突击 to honeycombing into ancient mountains. The fact that there was so much room to get better, even during moderate technological change rather than super rapid change, came through in your narrative.

Ian Toll: Japanese infantry tactics evolved, that was an important change. It happened primarily in the last year of the war when individual army commanders realized they had been using their army entirely wrong. If their goal was to exact the greatest possible price as the Americans came across the Pacific island by island, shrinking the ring around Japan’s home islands, then they needed to dig into the ground and make the Americans come to them — put five or six of their guys for every one of the Americans.

The Army abandoned the banzai charge entirely and began digging in. You saw this most effectively at Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

Jordan Schneider: The fact that you can become 50% more effective by using the same available tools in a different way isn’t something you’d expect given how many experiments were being run. Even in Okinawa, they still talked themselves into some stupid attack because of the instinctive doctrines they’d been drilled in for decades.

Ian Toll: Their sense of honor, too. In Okinawa, you had a defensive line of fortifications that crossed the island. Okinawa is a long, narrow island about 60 miles long and maybe 9-10 miles wide. At the narrowest point, they picked rocky mountainous ground in the southern part of the island and built an extraordinarily ambitious string of tunnels and caves across the island.

If they were going to hold out, buy time, and inflict casualties on the Americans, they should have stayed in that high ground to use the advantages of terrain and prepared defensive positions. But once the Americans were ashore and had taken the major airfields, they immediately started preparing Okinawa as a stepping stone to Kyushu. They would use those airfields to bomb the Japanese homeland.

This created immense pressure within the Japanese army — “we’ve got to do something about this. We can’t just stay here. We’ve got to contest what the Americans are doing with the rest of the island.” Again and again, they sallied out from these defensive fortifications, got mowed down, suffered terrible casualties, and eventually realized they had to go back to this blueprint of trying to survive as long as possible while taking as many Americans with them as they could.

It was an evolving understanding of what the ideal tactics were in these battles. But there was also a subtle interplay of politics, policy, and the way military strategic decisions were made. You see that in Japan, you see that in the US, you see it in Great Britain. That’s part of the picture that’s important to illuminate and becomes relevant when we talk about the way different countries and regimes will wage war even when they have similar tools.

Jordan Schneider: It’s hard to second-guess wartime decisions because there was so much unknown in 1941 and 1942 about what carriers could do, what submarines could do, and what the Japanese political system looked like. Coming back to submarines — if the US just 10x’ed that effort, there’s a world in which very few people have to die because Japan decides to starve. Japan ends up starving, and that’s all she wrote.

Island hopping is another live debate about whether the US could have skipped more islands, Iwo Jima being the main one that people still argue about today. What do you think is the most interesting operational strategy or broader open questions when it comes to the way the war was fought in the Pacific that you’re excited to see more historians take on?

Ian Toll: There are a number of issues. What we found as we went along with this war was that we could go much faster — we could close the ring around Japan much more quickly than we thought. This is partly because we surprised ourselves with just how quickly we were able to mobilize our economy to get ships and troops and planes out into the Pacific.

But if you were to refight the war knowing what you knew in 1945, and if you were able to deal with the political challenge presented by MacArthur, who really was a force of nature all his own and who had the ability to shape decision making because of his political influence, what you would probably do is focus essentially all of your effort in a direct attack on Japan from Hawaii, moving directly through the Central Pacific (which is one of the routes we took), but not diverting into the South Pacific.

Take islands within bombing range of Japan and focus on cutting their supply lines with submarines in particular, then establishing the ability to bomb the Japanese homeland directly, which we did as well. If you took a more aggressive “close the ring around Japan quickly” approach, you would probably see a scenario where the war ends six months earlier and without using the atomic bomb.

That’s counterfactual history, but if you went back and applied the lessons that you got from the war itself, if you were able to use that wisdom of hindsight as you were doing it, we could have seen a shorter war or more efficient war, perhaps a war with fewer casualties, and that would force Hirohito and the ruling circle in Japan to recognize their error and that they needed to surrender.

One of the — at a high level — another counterfactual within the Pacific that is often forgotten by people who are familiar with the history is that we came very, very close to landing troops in what we then called Formosa, and today call Taiwan. It was Admiral King and most of the Navy planners, at least in Washington, who believed this was the key to forcing an end to the war — taking Taiwan.

It was Raymond Spruance, the Fifth Fleet commander or ocean-going fleet commander in the Western Pacific, who took the lead in saying we should bypass Taiwan. We should take Okinawa. Okinawa was smaller. The island is large enough for our purposes, essentially to establish as a stepping stone to an invasion of Japan as an air base, but will not commit us to this enormous undertaking of taking this very large mountainous island that has been a Japanese colony for 50 years.

What if we had taken Taiwan? It’s interesting to imagine how history might have unfolded. Would that have involved us in the Chinese Civil War, for example? That’s an interesting counterfactual. But if and when China does seriously consider rolling the dice and moving against Taiwan, it’s going to encounter many of the same issues that led our military to decide not to take that step in 1944.

It’s a large, mountainous, rugged island. It would require you to establish air supremacy over the island and naval supremacy at a beachhead to be able to maintain a continuous flow of supplies over that beachhead. Taiwan is 100 miles from China. That’s five times the width of the English Channel. These are immense problems that are not unlike some of the problems that we ended up solving in the 1940s, but should probably prompt military planners in China to think very seriously about this history and the nature of the challenge.

Jordan Schneider: We’ve run two articles in the past year, one on the debate around Operation Causeway and the other Operation Sho-2Go 捷2号作戦, which is the Japanese plan to ward off the Americans. They built all these relatively similar things that you saw in the context of Okinawa and Iwo Jima with all these tunnels.

I don’t think Americans on Formosa change a lot when it comes to the Chinese Civil War. The Americans were also thinking about invading Ningbo 宁波市, in Mainland China, and using that as a base to bomb Taiwan. The Americans did show up on mainland China after the war but did not stay long.

It seems to me that even if the Americans showed up in China, we would have pulled out really fast, like we did in a lot of the rest of the Pacific. The Korean War only happens because the Chinese Civil War happens the way it does and then everyone was on edge at that. Mobilizing America to do even more than what it did, which was already a lot when it came to giving Chiang Kai-shek 讲解可 a lot of weapons to fight in the late 1940s, seems to me to be a hard counterfactual to consider.

It was the Japanese invasion in the first place, which gave Mao Zedong 毛泽东 a shot. Can you imagine the world in which America went in with Chiang Kai-shek in 1946 and 1947?

Ian Toll: No, it’s unlikely. Our military services really felt an immense sense of relief that we did not have to invade Japan and had shared a realization of how costly that operation would be. To become involved in a civil war in a vastly greater country on the mainland of Asia would have compounded all of those issues.

But counterfactuals are always going to be somewhat controversial. There are many historians who think they’re not worth discussing at all. But so much happened in those last few weeks of the Pacific War that you’re almost forced to acknowledge that things could have gone differently.

The Red Army poured across the Manchurian border on August 9th, the same day we hit Nagasaki — a sudden declaration of war. Stalin let his war machine loose in Manchuria. If the war had lasted two weeks longer, if the Japanese surrendered less than a week later, if they had held out until the end of August? Would you have had a red army in Korea in a bigger way?

Stalin ordered his army to take Hokkaido. He wanted Hokkaido. He could have gotten Hokkaido if the war had gone on a few more weeks. Then you might have seen Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, as the East Germany of Japan for 45 years through the Cold War.

All of those kinds of counterfactuals you have to take seriously, given how volatile the situation was. The real question about whether Japan would surrender, whether it would make any organized surrender at the end of the war at all, or whether the place would have collapsed into civil war and prevented any organized end of the Pacific War. Very different paths for Japan and for all of Asia in those final weeks.

Jordan Schneider: Another lesson when we’re talking about the Taiwan contingency today is that we spoke earlier in this conversation about how the die was already cast by January 1942 because American industrial might was what it was. But the balance of industrial forces plays out over longer time horizons and longer wars versus shorter wars. The importance of smaller technical decisions or point-in-time technological advantages can be amplified such that you don’t have these big national industrial tests of will.

Thankfully, we haven’t had too many of them when it comes to great powers going against each other since 1945. There’s a lot more uncertainty in the smaller wars where the national commitment level is one of the most important variables, which you’re gauging and adjusting for over time, as opposed to these scenarios where two empires are going all out to the death against each other, and then you can stack up the factor endowments and have a good sense of where it’s all going to end up.

Reading Recommendations

Jordan Schneider: You want to recommend some books, Ian? What have you read recently? Doesn’t have to be anything to do with this, but whose writing has impressed you of late?

Ian Toll: In These Times: Living in Britain Through the Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, which is a book by Jenny Uglow about Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. I have an interest in home front histories of all wars, the way societies deal with wars, the way they shape economies and politics.

Jordan Schneider: And maybe just some — are there voices or memoirs or letters? Many of these Americans and Japanese who lived through the Pacific War, they’re stylish writers. Which ones are the ones that stick with you these many years after writing this?

Ian Toll: Kiyosawa’s A Diary of Darkness. Kiyosawa was a scholar who was tarred as a liberal and marginalized in Japanese society, but he kept a daily diary through the end of the Pacific War that was superb in its observations of everyday life in Japanese at the time. He was a scholar who knew a little about politics, and his horror at the way Japanese media coverage was manipulated is recorded in the diary. The Japanese people were being lied to.

That’s a very good book that few people have read. It’s one of these books that was translated in the 1960s and published. Virtually no one read it, and today it’s almost entirely unknown. That’s one good example.

A US memoir, there are many that are very good. There’s a book by someone named Anthony Weller, who was an American correspondent who went into Japan immediately after the surrender. His book is called First into Nagasaki, and it includes a lot of the dispatches he wrote at that time, which were quashed by the American censors and never saw the light of day.

The book is partly about his visit to Nagasaki a week after the surrender, but there are also a lot of dispatches about Japan and about interviews with freed American and British and Australian POWs. It’s a terrific book. And again, one of these books that I don’t think has been very widely read, it is a neglected classic.

Jordan Schneider: Great. And I want to shout out a place. Yakushima, I ended up there in February of 2020. It’s this island off Kyushu. I was stuck because China already had COVID and America didn’t have COVID yet, and I was trying to stay in Asia.

And I’m really happy that Yakushima isn’t a place that now has to be associated like Okinawa or Iwo Jima as a horrific battle happening there. It’s one of the most magical places I’ve ever been. It’s a giant rainforest.

Ian Toll: Where the animated film Princess Mononoke was set.

Jordan Schneider: Exactly. It has enormous trees, and it’s really inconvenient to get to. There aren’t a lot of tourists, and America didn’t have to invade it because we dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we’re not in the worst of all possible timelines. The path where you have that invasion of Kyushu, where a few more million people would have died, is something that is hanging over the specter of your final book. People should all go to Yakushima and be thankful that we haven’t had a nuclear war since 1945.

Mood Music:

为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）
这世界的辽阔和美好，游荡者知道。使用过程中遇到问题，欢迎联系客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com.

【和放学以后永不失联】订阅放学以后Newsletter，每周三收到我们发出的信号：afterschool2021.substack.com 点击链接输入自己的邮箱即可（订阅后如果收不到注意查看垃圾邮箱）。如需查看往期内容，打开任一期你收到的邮件，选择右上角open online，就可以回溯放学以后之前发的所有邮件，或谷歌搜索afterschool2021substack查看。

截至目前，放学以后Newsletter专题系列如下：“在世界游荡的女性”系列、“女性解放指南”系列、“女性浪漫，往复信笺”系列、莫不谷游荡口袋书《做一个蓄意的游荡者》系列、“莫胡说”系列”《创作者手册：从播客开始说起》,播客系列和日常更新等。

大家好，本期放学以后信号塔由正在英国的霸王花木兰轮值。

继上次荷兰打工换宿《我的夏日奇遇：那些让你感觉碎掉的时刻，不是真的》后，这次我来到了英国探索新的打工换宿之旅，去寺庙咖啡馆做Volunteer。这次计划来英国有好几个原因，

首先，我的英国两年旅游签明年3月就要到期了，而我还没有去过英国，在签证剩余有效期不多的时间里，9月可能是英国天气最好最适合游荡的月份。

其次，欧洲飞英国的廉航机票常常便宜的惊人，比如我这次从伦敦飞回西班牙单程只要一两百块人民币，不出门一趟实在说不过去。

最后也很重要的原因是，我需要给自己找点事情做。也是莫不谷此前针对我的情况给的建议，尽量不要自己一个人呆着。我需要给自己找个班上，找点感兴趣，想做的事情做一做，但我也不想真的去上班。打工换宿既能够让我的日常生活建立routine，还可以通过体力活及时得到正反馈，让身体充分调动起来，还不用消耗太多精神和情绪。同时它也提供了低成本游荡的可能，我不需要花很多钱，就可以各处游荡。

所以接下来，我想分享一下这次在英国寺庙咖啡馆打工换宿的经历和体验，我是怎么发现这个项目的？为什么这个项目打动了我？我又是如何成功申请到的？面临语言不通和缺乏经验的限制，我是如何解决这些困难的？以及当我到达打工的寺庙咖啡馆后，又有哪些惊喜，意外和挑战？文章的最后，是我独自一人背包游荡伦敦的故事，还有我接下来计划探索的游荡之旅，这是我第一次来英国，也欢迎大家在评论区给我安利美丽的地方！

本篇内容有点长，可以慢慢阅读，祝大家阅读愉快！

自从我想给自己找点事情做之后，我就经常在网上冲浪，找找打工换宿，遛狗换宿，看家换宿，或者花园换宿的项目，因为在找不到生活意义和动力的当下，我想找一些自己感兴趣，要求不要太高，氛围比较轻松，风景美丽适合游荡的可能。

有一天，我就在小红书看到有个网友分享了她在英国北卡普顿寺庙咖啡馆做义工的经历，立刻被她的故事吸引了，于是利用ChatGPT了解到，Kadampa Meditation Centres （KMC）在英国多个城市招募义工，支持志愿者在咖啡馆打工换宿，还可以免费上冥想课程，心动不如行动，我就立刻对这个项目展开了研究。

我在网络各种调研，借助ChatGPT工具下申请了Kadampa Meditation Centres (KMC)在莱斯特的World peace cafe咖啡馆志愿者。

我了解了工作情况：每天咖啡馆工作6小时，可以学习做咖啡，做食物，physical work比较多，对体力要求比较高，每周工作30小时，周一周日休息，同时提供免费的吃住（因为是寺庙咖啡馆，只提供素食），也可以免费参加午餐半小时和晚上的冥想课程。

工作内容我感兴趣，工作需求我也能满足，全英文的工作环境可以顺便学习英语，体力活还可以让人动起来保持锻炼，除了可能会累一些似乎没有缺点。

而莱斯特是一个英国中部文化比较多元的小城，距离伦敦只有1小时车程，大巴也只需要2小时，不仅方便到达和离开，还很方便以莱斯特为中心探索周边各个英国城市，充分游荡下英国。

我的背景情况是，没去过英国，既没有流利的英文交流水平，也没有咖啡馆工作经验，唯一与此有关的是去瑞士游荡，在瑞士朋友Ruya开的苏黎世奶茶店体验了一两天，还不会怎么会做好吃的饭，上一次的Newslettter我分享了在荷兰host家里差点把房东厨房烧了的经历。在这个情况下，看起来不太符合对方需要的条件。

但是这些都不重要，重要的是我想申请，我想体验。所以我先思考了自己的目标：我想低成本地游荡英国，我想在全英文环境里锻炼英语，我想免费学习做咖啡，我想体验下人生副业的可能，尝试找到自己喜欢且擅长的事情。

既然有了目标，我就在官网（https://meditateinleicester.org/working-holiday/）填写了申请表，匹配对方的需求填写了信息。唯一有点难搞的是对方还需要雇主或是老师信息方便获得推荐信。这里我想坦白一下，我并没有找自己的老师或者雇主，而是为了方便找了朋友，虽然我不觉得这做得对，但我觉得在不损害原则的情况下也可以灵活一些（给自己找了些借口）。

（莱斯特World peace cafe介绍）

官网写完申请，对方联络了推荐人之后，我就收到了提醒邮件，邮件特别强调了寺庙打工换宿的重要原则，以及由于咖啡馆就在莱斯特市中心，繁忙的工作对体力要求比较高，需要慎重考虑是否能够接受。在我肯定的回复之后，对方就联系我约个WhatsApp视频通话。我很紧张地准备迎接人生第一次英文面试。

为了通过这个英文面试，我想了几个方法，第一先把自己申请内容，基本信息用英文整理出来，方便记忆和练习，第二就是找ChatGPT进行模拟练习，ChatGPT扮演面试官对我进行提问，帮我熟悉英文交流这个场景，纠正发音和问题，第三就是上网搜索更多信息，有不少网友给了我很多建议，比如咖啡馆干活并不需要很多英文交流，再比如咖啡馆经理人很友好，志愿者之间也会互相帮助，这些都给了我不少信心。

结果真的与咖啡馆视频通话后才发现，这完全不是面试，对方只是为了和我介绍工作内容，工作流程，报到和结束的时间，以及只提供素食食物，没有任何鱼和肉，问我是否能接受？我当然没问题，一个月而已，体验下素食生活又有何难。在视频通话没多久后，我就顺利收到了offer，虽然我的那些模拟练习并没有用上，但学习的英语并不会白费。

后来也了解到，另一个成功的原因是这里还是很缺人的，所以条件合适申请成功的几率也会很高，这是我来了以后才了解到的。

英国寺庙咖啡馆打工换宿实际是我在出发荷兰之前申请的，但没想到我在荷兰也顺利体验了打工换宿，而这八九天的换宿经验对我非常有帮助，不仅强化了英文的日常沟通交流，而且第一次体验了与外国人相处的生活，给了我很多信心。

8月中旬，我结束了荷兰的游荡之旅，回到了西班牙，此时距离出发英国还有两周的时间，我可以做很多准备工作，特别是自己担心的语言沟通和缺乏咖啡馆经验的问题。

如果用一句话总结解决的方法，那就是主动学习能解决绝大部分的问题，剩下的去实践就好。

关于语言沟通，我用了这几种看起来笨拙但有效的方法

第一，我把咖啡馆英文菜单背了下来，我让ChatGPT帮我翻译整理菜单的意思和发音，在notion专门搞了个文档记录，每天都复习一遍，做到能够把菜单熟记背诵的程度。好在这个素食咖啡馆菜单并不多，学习量不是很大。但我还特别找了食物过敏，素食相关的高频重要词汇记忆。

第二，我把咖啡馆工作常用英语表达背了下来。网上搜索发现有非常多的资源，都是关于如何在咖啡馆用英文点单，以及如何用英文咖啡店打工，特别是很多在澳洲新西兰通过whv签证去咖啡馆工作的人，甚至会录制自己上班英文沟通的视频，帮助自己复盘check。我想了下自己如果是负责点单、服务最常用的表达是哪些，梳理了出来，也和菜单一样每天复习。常用表达其实很基础也简单，经常复习练习最大的效果就是能迅速说出来，说出来不结巴。

第三，我找了8分钟简单英文视频跟读练习。这个视频名字就叫“English learning methods How to speak english fluently”，特别简单，不仅适合跟读练习，还能如标题学到英语学习的方法，最后还能在每天跟读的时候获得很多信心。这篇文章里分享了7个简单有效的英文学习方法（这里安利下莫不谷在游荡者专门写了语言学习的攻略文章，是付费注册游荡者后后台就可以查看的内容）：

• listen to english everyday每天听英语；

• speak everyday even alone即使独自一人也每天说英语；

• dont be afraid of mistakes不要害怕说错；

• learn and use small sentences学习使用小短句；

• copy and repeat after native speakers和母语者跟读重复；

• think in english用英语思考；

• talk with others and record yourself和别人用英语聊天然后记录下来。

俗话说，学习方法和道理都懂，但就是做不到。一提学习就累就厌学的我是咋做到的呢？因为马上就去英国游荡，马上就去咖啡馆打工，基于短期实用目标的学习，就很容易启动，不需要学得多难多复杂，学习压力也不大，还不用怀疑学习的意义，因为学了就能用，所以厌学者学习的一个方法就是，找个感兴趣的目标。

第四，我找ChatGPT每天陪练，我就让ChatGPT模拟各种需求的顾客点单，我来招待顾客，再让ChatGPT帮我纠正发音和表达，不花钱的专业教练，用起来方便有效！

除此以外，我还找了各种英国、伦敦相关的电影电视剧，按照原速播放，尝试跟读练习，一边看电影一边磨耳朵一边磨嘴皮，还能对马上要去的英国有更深入的了解，比如《fleabag伦敦生活》《帕丁顿熊》《哈利波特》《唐顿庄园》《诺丁山》《莫里斯的情人》。

也许大家看到这就累了，觉得太费劲。我觉得有一点很关键，你不需要英文很好才能出发和开始，你出发和开始之后，英文会变好，实在听不懂，跟着学，跟着看，就会做了。

另外关于缺乏咖啡馆工作经验的部分：

虽然我经常喝咖啡，但我并不知道如何制作咖啡，也不会使用咖啡机，想象了一下咖啡馆给我用英文讲解咖啡机如何操作我就担心自己头大，所以我又想了几个方法：

第一，我把咖啡馆咖啡机型号找了出来，让ChatGPT直接识别图片，然后再找到对应的YouTube视频，看看咖啡机都是怎么使用的，咱们做些预习工作。

第二，我把基础咖啡的区别和制作方法找了出来，了解了拿铁、卡布奇诺各种咖啡到底差别在哪，用英文如何表达，先有个基础印象，学起来也就容易一些。

第三，我把咖啡馆所有关于志愿者工作的内容全部仔细研读了一遍，可以说事无巨细地了解了工作要求和注意事项。

第四，我把咖啡馆的谷歌评价全部看了一遍，了解顾客好评，差评，觉得哪里有问题，比如志愿者搞不清食物成分和过敏的问题，制作速度太慢的问题，基本上就能了解咖啡馆运营情况。

第五，我把咖啡馆海内外社交媒体都找了出来，方便了解工作环境，甚至还在YouTube找到了一个志愿者拍摄的vlog，我这个调研的程度可以去做狗仔了（不是）。

所以通过学习视频还有充分调研，我基本上对工作有了了解，减少了很多想象的恐惧和担心。

除了语言沟通和工作内容，我还对咖啡馆的背景做了调研了解，本身我对宗教和冥想没有兴趣，但咖啡馆是宗教背景下的，所以我就又去网上学习和了解，然后发现，这个宗教Nagarjuna Kadampa是有点问题，最大的问题是教义理念的封闭，教派管理的不透明，这就会限制人们有独立自主的思考和公平正当的权利。

所以从宗教层面来说，我个人对此不赞同。从冥想方法来说，我认为这和深呼吸，做瑜伽一样是一种放松的方法。从咖啡馆志愿工作来说，我只需要把我感兴趣，想学的体验到就好。

带着前面做的准备工作，我有些激动，兴奋，略微紧张的出发英国，先在伦敦玩了两天，然后坐大巴来到了莱斯特的world peace cafe，昨天是我第一天报到，今天是我第一天上岗，所以正好可以分享下寺庙咖啡馆打工换宿实际体验如何。

首先说下报到情况

第一天到莱斯特的初印象是小巧、干净、安静、舒适的城市，第一印象很宜居，又因为这里有莱斯特大学和印巴移民，相对多元化，饮食也丰富，非常期待即将在这里为期一个月的旅居生活。

到达咖啡馆后，工作人员John让带我把房间里里外外以及日常工作生活注意事项事无巨细地讲解了一遍，非常耐心。我工作的咖啡馆就在莱斯特市中心大教堂正对面的一栋楼，一楼是咖啡馆和冥想厅，二楼是志愿者住宿，负一楼是中央厨房、志愿者专用厨房、储藏室等等。

我和另外两个女生志愿者一起同住，一位是18岁高中毕业后选择gap的新西兰女生（她用自己在subway兼职两年攒的钱和认识8年的朋友背包从新西兰飞到欧洲环游，从5月到现在，已经4个月），另一位是完成英国本硕申请毕业生两年签证，留在英国寻找工作同时体验打工换宿的中国女生。

（来自世界各地的志愿者，令人惊讶的是来自中国的也好多）

顺利报到完毕，早已饥肠辘辘的我立刻去吃桂林米粉，据说非常正宗，我点了一份招牌卤味粉，吃到三分之一再加汤加醋，一粉两吃，嗦上这口粉，我感觉一秒穿越回到了广西，虽然我从没去过。

（好吃的桂林米粉，我打算每周末改善我的伙食！）

接着就迎来了第二天正式上岗

说实话，早上在中央厨房集合，Manager布置任务的时候我有不少单词都没听懂，加上说的快，我又不熟悉情况，有很多一头雾水。好在我是新手，先跟着18岁的新西兰女生学习在厨房烧烤备菜，再上楼去吧台跟着中国女生学习制作三明治、卷饼、沙拉，接着学习如何刷碗整理、送单打扫，再到下午结束前的全部物品清洗，打扫卫生，准备次日食材。

一整天下来，要学习的细节操作很多，但熟悉了上手也快，客人少的时候略感无聊，客人多的时候忙的头疼，但直到下班做清洁的时候，我有些惊讶一个简单的素食咖啡厅，没有任何油污，清洁的工作量都这么多，店里5个人都忙的头晕，到最后我已经进入神游状态，无比期待赶紧结束休息。

不知道是因为第一天新手，所以觉得劳累，还是因为真的累，但我想到国内营业很长时间的咖啡馆、奶茶店可怕的工作量，我都不知道别人怎么做下来的，反正英国这个志愿者工作都给我累的不轻。

（午餐Vegan delight，我做的时候都觉得素食主义者肯定开心，因为健康又好吃）

第一天上岗有意思的部分是制作食物，给顾客送餐，思考中午要点菜单哪道食物，以及每天两杯免费饮料喝什么，还有就是和同事们的英文交流和文化交流。

第一天上岗最有挑战让我灵魂出窍怀疑人生的部分是清洁洗手间，女士和客人专用洗手间都还好说，清理男性洗手间的时候我真的想逃。虽然客人都很有素质，卫生间已经干净的像是被打扫过的一样，但在这个基础上做清洁我还是心理障碍很大，18岁的新西兰女生一脸平静带着我打扫的时候，我当时脑海里冒出来的是：“我是谁，我在哪里，我在干吗？”

如今也终于理解了康熙来了Melody的那句经典发言：“可是康永哥，他叫我洗马桶哎！”

来到莱斯特之前，我提前两天到了伦敦，想着趁机会游荡下伦敦。第一天到达伦敦已经是凌晨三点，由于飞机延误，又被英国海关严格盘问，坐上机场大巴到市区的时候，看到了伦敦的夜晚。

我很讶异凌晨的伦敦交通还这么繁忙，一路的汽车红灯，街上的行人和尚在营业的店铺都让人觉得它仿佛是24小时无需休息的不夜城。有趣的是看到了瘦瘦但四角圆润的红色双层巴士，非常像哈利波特电影里，小天狼星帮助哈利主动叫的巫师紧急巴士，可以快速穿梭在街道，还能够变得非常狭窄从两辆巴士中间穿过。宛宛类卿，这种熟悉的亲切感让人不自觉便为伦敦添上一份喜爱的滤镜。同时也能理解为什么伦敦能是第一个建设地铁的都市，既然地面已经不够，那就挖掘地下的可能。

早上醒来迎来了伦敦的白天，入乡随俗，我去莱斯特广场体验了一份经典的英国早餐，煎蛋、培根、薯饼、烤番茄和鹰嘴豆酱，不仅意外的味道不错，而且相对健康低脂。接着我便开启了暴走模式，去唐人街买上唐人饼家现烤的迷你鲷鱼烧，再打包一份香葱肉松面包，好去大英博物馆游览。

大英博物馆最美的是有着蓝色穹顶和窗户的阅览室，与暗红或棕色的的书籍搭配起来，像是一幅沉静的静物油画像。大英博物馆最震惊我的是有着数量众多，种类丰富的埃及木乃伊和展品，多到让我觉得比埃及本土还多。这个有着800多万件展品，实际展出8万多件像是收藏了世界文明史的博物馆，从成立之出就明确为了公众知识传播，永久免费进入，伦敦寸土寸金，消费并不便宜，但像大都市纽约一样，它有太多免费的精神养料。

大英图书馆距离博物馆不远，在结束博物馆游览后，我便来到了图书馆，比起平平无奇的图书馆，更令我惊讶的是旁边夺人眼球的圣潘克拉斯文艺复兴酒店，这栋1868年建成的红砖哥特式的建筑，有着气派的尖顶、拱门、精美的雕刻，矗立在现代化的街道之上，让人无法忽视。

恰巧，这旁边就是国王十字街站，《哈利波特》9¾站台（Platform 9¾）的拍摄地。出发前已经重温三集哈利波特的我又怎能错过呢，到了站台才发现，想要合影留念的人已经排了大长队伍，我便没有加入这个热闹，从边边拍一张已经心满意足。打卡点旁边便是哈利波特周边商店，虽然我没有任何想买的，但走进这个店里，就好像穿越进了哈利波特的电影里，看送信的海德薇，自由的多比，会蹦出青蛙的零食，杰克罗琳创造了魔法世界，也用创造给人们带来了对欢愉、勇气和自由的向往。

走出魔法商店，已经是下午四点钟，疲乏的我便决定坐车去伦敦桥，吃碗担担面休息补充下，再继续游荡一下。而我最推荐的citywalk路线是从伦敦桥一路沿着泰晤士河边，走到泰特现代艺术馆，吹风，看河，看落日余晖，也看散步休闲的人，沿着这条路走，还能路过莎士比亚环球剧场，只要5英镑就可以买到站票看一场精彩的莎士比亚戏剧演出，演员还会和场下观众互动，据说是感受英国文化非常值得的体验，暴走已经疲惫无力再站着看剧，以及英文水平还不足以理解剧情的我选择继续沿着泰晤士河散步回家，等不到日落便倒头就睡，在睡眠里消解日行三万步的疲惫。

离开伦敦的早上，我五点多便醒了，趁着10点退房前，我走去海德公园散步，看看伦敦的清晨。海德公园并没有想象的丰富美丽，但你走进去也不会感到后悔，看着海鸥、乌鸦、天鹅沐浴清晨，灰松鼠在阳光的缝隙里跳来跳去，湖边还有指示牌画出这个公园生态小自然里各种各样的动物，甚至还有猫头鹰、老鹰和狐狸，心里便不自觉柔软许多，对海德公园也生出更亲近的感情。

从海德公园散步回来，卡文迪许公园终于在8点开了门，不用走得很近，远远看到鲜花堆放的椅子，就知道那是大S的纪念长椅。就像莫不谷在《这个世界可爱的人不多，你是其中重要的一个》写到那样：

“请你们不要被噪音遮蔽，这个世界有真心的人，很多都在爱你们，或明或暗，常常地想念你们。”

我把大S照片上的灰尘拂去，把莫不谷写的文字转述，把关心和想念表达出来。To remember her is to love her.

从卡文迪许公园出来，走着走着，我的内心突然涌起一股情感，突然感到了自由的价值。现在我没有上班，也没有拥有很多金钱，未来的方向也还没有明确，但我有了宝贵的自由的时间，可以通过打工换宿探索低成本游荡世界的方式，即便是寸土寸金的伦敦和纽约，我也可以像来看望大S一样，去到我想去的地方。想到我此刻拥有的自由，和还可以探索的未来，我有些兴奋和激动。

9月是伦敦的初秋，我感觉自己在英国最好的季节来到了这里，天气温和凉爽，梧桐叶落满地，有时候一起风我也想被吹到云朵里跳跃飞舞一下。

我把这一刻出奇的激动和兴奋记录在Notion人生乐事lists，当虚无和沮丧敲门之时，我想把它拿出来作为呼神护卫，对未来生活美好的想象就是我的魔法咒语，用以对抗摄魂怪的来袭。

结束了短暂的伦敦游荡，接下来我将探索莱斯特这个小城，然后在周日和周一休息的时候坐flixbus去英国其它的城市，诺丁汉、林肯等等游荡，和我一起工作的中国女生邀请我一起去谢菲尔德，她要带我游览这座城市。

最后的最后，是伦敦游荡一系列图片分享！

为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）
这世界的辽阔和美好，游荡者知道。使用过程中遇到问题，欢迎联系客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com.

【放学以后文章&书籍&其它】

解锁放学以后《创作者手册：从播客开始说起》：https://afdian.com/item/ffcd59481b9411ee882652540025c377

解锁莫不谷《做一个“蓄意”的游荡者》口袋书：
爱发电：https://afdian.com/item/62244492ae8611ee91185254001e7c00微信公众号：《放学以后After school》（提示安卓用户可下载“爱发电”app，苹果用户可把爱发电主页添加至手机桌面来使用，目前爱发电未上线苹果商店）

Newsletter订阅链接：https://afterschool2021.substack.com/（需科学/上 网）

联系邮箱：afterschool2021@126.com （投稿来信及合作洽谈）

为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）

小红书：游荡者的日常

同名YouTube：https://www.youtube.com/@afterschool2021

同名微信公众号：放学以后after school

欢迎并感谢大家在爱发电平台为我们的创作发电：https://afdian.com/a/afterschool

播客收听平台：【国内】苹果播客（请科学/上网）、爱发电、汽水儿、荔枝、网易云、小宇宙、喜马拉雅、、QQ音乐；
【海外】Spotify、Apple podcast、Google podcast、Snipd、Overcast、Castbox、Amazon Music、Pocket Casts、Stitcher、Radio Public、Wordpress

A guest post by Professor at American University as well as the author of the new Xi Zhongxun biography and a book exploring succession politics in the USSR and CCP.

September 3 will mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and Xi Jinping will host Vladimir Putin in Beijing for a military parade to mark the occasion. For both men, it will be an opportunity to assert the civilizational agendas they are pursuing.

Xi and Putin see themselves as men who inherited a baton from their forefathers to continue a struggle against outside enemy forces who have always wanted to eliminate their countries’ distinct national characteristics and subjugate them.

For both, the war was personal. During World War II, Xi’s revolutionary father Zhongxun concentrated his energies against the Nationalists and was never near Japanese forces. Yet Jinping’s mother Qi Xin personally witnessed the Japanese seizure of Beijing, was nearly killed by enemy cavalry, and witnessed atrocities committed by imperial forces. Xi Jinping even lost a first cousin, only an infant, to the fires of war.

Putin’s family also suffered. His father was severely wounded in combat against the Nazis and survived the Siege of Leningrad, where an elder brother died. His maternal grandmother was slain by Nazi occupiers.

For both Xi and Putin, victory then was costly, but incomplete. Although the war concluded before they were born, it resonates with them differently from other contemporary world leaders. Xi and Putin believe that “hegemonic forces” still want to impose a foreign model upon them and block their rightful place in the world. Now, they want to use the memory of the war to inoculate future generations against Western values and legitimate the global order they envision.

Having witnessed the chaos their nations faced for much of the twentieth century, both are deeply preoccupied with the question of political order. Xi Jinping was incarcerated and exiled during the Cultural Revolution and feared state collapse during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Vladimir Putin famously saw the collapse of Soviet power in East Germany as a young KGB officer. Both Xi and Putin believe that their rise to power stopped centrifugal forces, supported by the West, that threatened to tear their nations apart before they came to power.

Commemorating World War II serves that mission. Both men clearly believe that their nations need a sense of idealism, sacrifice, and commitment to survive. History as moral education is a powerful tool for that purpose. World War II was a moment that showed their nations could achieve extraordinary victories.

Xi and Putin see the suffering their peoples experienced as something that deserves only the most profound respect both at home and abroad. The anniversary has been turned into an instrument to instill loyalty to the state among a younger generation. That message is especially significant for their militaries, as Russia continues its war against Ukraine and China prepares the People’s Liberation Army for a possible war on Taiwan.

It is also a time to remind the outside world what China and Russia think they deserve as major contributors to victory in World War II. At the war’s end, both nations were recognized as major powers. For Putin, Yalta meant Russia was given special rights in its so-called “near abroad.” For Xi, the defeat of Japan meant Taiwan should rightfully return to the Chinese mainland. Beijing and Moscow see American activities in their neighborhoods as a return to the power politics that led to war decades ago.

That is why Xi and Putin obsess over a perceived grievance that diminishes the contributions of the countries' role in the war. Control over history is literally a matter of regime security and strategic imperatives.

The Chinese Communist Party opposes any attempts to deny the Nanjing Massacre and the horrific biological and chemical warfare experiments on human beings at Unit 731 in Manchuria. Two movies, one on each of those topics, are being released this year in China. The party also opposes the largely accurate narrative that the communists sat out much of the war against the Japanese.

In Russia, former Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky used the words “human scum” to refer to anyone who debunked the legend of Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen, who allegedly all died fighting off the Nazis outside Moscow.

Yet questions remain about the long-term efforts by Xi and Putin to immortalize their regimes and their use of the memory of World War II for that purpose. The story of Chinese and Russian history is often one of unintended consequences. Mao Zedong launched his Cultural Revolution to prevent capitalism from appearing in China. It was such a disaster it triggered Reform and Opening. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to save the Soviet Union destroyed it.

Putin sees the war against Ukraine as a sort of sequel to World War II that can help him recast another generation of Russians according to his vision. He sneered as young people fled the country to avoid the draft, describing them as “scum and traitors” that Russians would “simply spit out” “like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths.” He seeks to politically empower veterans – for instance through his Time of Heroes program to get them elected on his party’s ticket. Patriotic education has contributed to the militarization of society. The economy is now hardened against sanctions and geared to fight a long-term war. Yet what will Russia do without its most talented young people if they flee or die on the battlefield? Will Russians become exhausted by the war? And how long can prolonged competition with the West last with an economy whose future has been mortgaged on the war?

Xi can only use the memory of war and the possibility of potential war in the future. He uses the revolutionary legacy, of which the war against Japan was a part, to achieve what he calls “self-revolution.” It is a call to vigilance, a call to “eat bitterness,” a call to yet another young generation of Chinese to devote their lives not just to themselves but also to national rejuvenation. Yet Xi does not want his relationship with the West to go completely off the rails. Unlike Putin, he wants to benefit from economic, financial, and technological ties while he can. The question is whether Xi can achieve both struggle and pragmatism at the same time.

As for the international community, the commemoration in Beijing will likely not fundamentally change any feelings in the West towards Russia or China. No Western nation is convinced that the Ukrainians are Nazis, as Putin falsely alleges. And although China has sought to avoid economic and reputational costs, it has unambiguously been a major facilitator of Russia’s war machine. The military parade, along with the recent treatment of Japanese citizens and military exercises around Taiwan, might frighten China’s neighbors more than win them over with the memory of China’s role in the defeat of Imperial Japan.

No historian can deny the contributions of China and Russia in the defeat of fascism in World War II. But the war’s role in justifying authoritarianism at home and expansion abroad is not a tribute that will inspire everyone.

For more with Joseph Torigian, check out our podcast on his first book on CCP power struggles.

And the two-part five hour epic we did covering his monumental biography of Xi Zhongxun.

大家好，今天是9月1日，美国劳工节。北京时间已经是9月2日。再过一天，北京就要阅兵了。据说，是为了庆祝抗日战争胜利80周年。

日本签订投降书是在1945年9月2日。美国和大部分盟国是把9月2日这一天叫“对日战争胜利日”（Victory Over Japan Day, 简称V-J Day），日本也是把9月2日称为“战败纪念日”或“投降纪念日”。但当时的中华民国和苏联，把对日战争胜利纪念日，定在签署投降书的第二天，即9月3日。

中共夺取政权后，于1951年把9月3日确定为“抗战胜利纪念日”，但并不大张旗鼓纪念。直到1991年，中国国务院重新把9月3日确定为“抗战胜利纪念日”，当时中国政府的宣传基调已经从中日友好，开始转向打反日爱国牌，宣传喉舌重新把抗战和钓鱼岛拿出来炒作。

2014年，中国人大常委会正式把9月3日确立为“中国人民抗日战争胜利纪念日”，当时反日爱国已经成了定期上演的政治表演节目。第二年，也就是2015年9月3日，中国元首在北京阅兵，庆祝这个纪念日70周年。10年后，同一位中国元首，要在北京再来一次，而且规模更大，调门更高。

这期节目，我们就在看一看，在一层被精心编排的政治光环之下，历史的真相究竟是什么？一个政权，是如何一步步把那场不属于自己的胜利，篡改成了为自己权力加冕的政治仪式的？

1945年8月15日，日本宣布无条件投降。1945年9月2日，东京湾，当地时间上午8时，美国海军的密苏里号战舰升起星条旗。日本海军偷袭珍珠港时，那面国旗悬挂的白宫的旗杆上。8:05，尼米兹海军上将乘坐小艇抵达密苏里号；8:15，中华民国代表徐永昌上将及随行5人抵达；其后，分别代表英国、苏联、澳大利亚、加拿大、法国、荷兰、新西兰等国家的代表，陆续抵达。8:43，美国远东陆军司令麦克阿瑟将军登上密苏里号；8:53分，日本投降代表团11人抵达。5分钟后，美军牧师引领受降仪式前的祷告。

当地时间9:00，受降仪式正式开始。一张水兵用的餐桌上，铺着绿色军用毯子，毯子上摆着投降书和一个自来水笔架。麦克阿瑟将军发表了简短的讲话，站在他身后的是密苏里号舰长Albert Kaiss将军、美国陆军的Jonathan Wainwright将军和英国远征军的Arthur Percival将军。Wainwright将军和Percival将军都曾做过日军的战俘。

讲话结束后，麦克阿瑟将军指示日本代表在《投降书》上签字。代表天皇和日本政府签字的是外相重光葵。1932年春天，重光葵在上海虹口公园爆炸案中，失去了一条腿。他拄着拐杖走到桌子前，拿出自来水笔，准备签字，却发现笔没有墨水。他向盟军代表借了一支笔，在投降书上签下“重光葵”三个字。随后，日本陆军参谋总长梅津美治郎代表日本军方签字。

9:08，麦克阿瑟将军代表盟军和同盟国签字受降。他先后用了6只笔。他把第一支笔和第二支笔，赠送给曾经做过日军战俘的Wainwright将军和Percival将军，把另外几只分别赠送给西点军校、美国海军学院、他的太太和他的副手Courtney Whitney将军。麦克阿瑟之后，尼米兹上将代表美国签字；徐永昌上将代表中华民国签字。另外7位来自英国、苏联、澳大利亚、加拿大、法国、荷兰、新西兰的代表，陆续签字受降。

在亚太战场上，对战胜日军起决定作用的是美国，付出最大牺牲的是中国，不是后来的那个红色中国，而是被红色中国推翻的那个中华民国。在实力悬殊的情况下，国民政府领导抗战，“地无分南北，人无分老幼”，苦撑8年，军人伤亡高达322万人。

80年后的今天，这段本来十分清晰的历史，在红色中国，却被系统性地模糊、涂抹、颠倒、篡改。当年躲在陕西边远地区窑洞里，“一分抗日，二分应付，七分发展”的那股政治势力，如今却做出民族救世主的姿态，自诩为抗战的“中流砥柱”。更具讽刺意味的是，它的元首十年前开始以抗战胜利者的姿态，在北京检阅那支为打内战而生，趁日本侵华而坐大的军队。明天，这出自编自导自演的无厘头剧目要再上演一遍。

130年前，严复曾经写下一段话“华风之弊，八字尽之。始于作伪，终于无耻”。这80年，中国共产党的几代领导人，从小心翼翼地回避那场胜利，到遮遮掩掩地改写那段历史，再到毫无心理负担地炫窃取的胜利，用偷来的皇冠为自己政治加冕。这条脉络清晰地勾勒出了一部始于作伪、终于无耻的政治神话编造史。

Read more

For the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan, ChinaTalk interviewed Ian Toll about his Pacific War trilogy, which masterfully brings America’s bloodiest war — and the world’s only nuclear war — to life. Ian’s detailed scholarship creates a multisensory historical experience, from the metallic tang of radiation after the bombs were dropped to the stench of Pacific battlefields.

Ian’s forthcoming book, The Freshwater War, will explore the naval campaign the US fought against Britain on the Great Lakes between 1812 and 1815.

Today our conversation covers….

• How Ian innovates when writing historical narratives,

• Whether Allied victory was predetermined after the US entered the war,

• Why the Kamikaze were born out of resource scarcity, and whether Japanese military tactics were suicidal as well,

• How foreign wars temporarily stabilized Japan’s revolutionary domestic politics,

• How American military leadership played the media and politics to become national heroes,

• Lessons from 1945 for a potential Taiwan invasion.

Cohosting is , author of Chip War. Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

The Pacific War — A Writer’s Guide

Jordan Schneider: I want to start with your closest scholarly forebearer, Samuel Eliot Morison. He was FDR’s buddy who ended up getting presidential approval to be embedded in the fight in the Pacific. Over the next 20 years, he published a 15-volume, 6,000-page history of United States naval operations in World War II.

For this show, aside from reading your 2,000 pages, I also read a few hundred pages of Morison, which — while there are echoes — feels like it was of a different time, era, and audience. When reflecting back on where you chose to spend your time in research and pages, compared to what he thought was most interesting and vital, what were the things that you both agreed needed the full treatment? What were things that you felt comfortable writing in the 21st century that you could spend less time on? What were some of the themes that you wanted to emphasize to a greater extent than he did in his book?

Ian Toll: Well, Morison will always be the first, if not the greatest, historian of the Pacific War. It’s an unusual case because Morison pitched the president of the United States — who was himself a former assistant secretary of the Navy — this idea. FDR ran the Navy day-to-day during the Woodrow Wilson administration and was fascinated with naval history going all the way back to the American Revolution. He was a collector and an antiquarian.

FDR was unique as a president in anticipating the importance of research and writing to document the history of this war, even before it began to unfold.

Samuel Eliot Morison, a historian at Harvard who was well-established in the field, said, “Why don’t you just put me in charge of this whole project and let the Navy know that I get an all-access pass to the Pacific War as it’s happening? I will produce a multi-volume official history — but really a history written by me, Samuel Eliot Morison, with all of my strongly opinionated views, having witnessed many of these events, in some cases from actually being aboard a ship in a task force as it went into battle.”

Morison’s concern was to write the first draft of the history, and he did a remarkable job. He had access in a way that no outsider could possibly have had. He became personal friends with many of the admirals who fought that war and was a direct witness to many events. That was true in Okinawa, where he was aboard a ship in the task force and could work his personal impressions into the narrative.

All of that is very unique. Morison was seeing the war through the eyes of his contemporaries. He was very much involved in the debates that the admirals had as they were rolling across the Pacific. He was probably less interested than I am in the way that the war was experienced by the ordinary sailor, soldier, and airmen, and more interested in grand strategy.

I like to pull those together — the way the war unfolded in the eyes of those who fought it, but then also returning to the conference rooms where the planning unfolded. I wanted to understand how the politics of inter-service rivalries in the US military affected decisions — that was an important story unique to the Pacific because of the divided command structure.

This Solomon-like choice to say the South Pacific will be MacArthur’s domain — the US Army will be in charge of the South Pacific, the Central and North Pacific will be Nimitz’s domain — meant we were really going to divide this enormous ocean into two theaters. We were going to let the Navy have one, let the Army have one. That was to establish peace within this large and fractious military.

In some ways, that was a suboptimal decision. In other ways, it seemed to work out fine because the United States had the ability to mobilize such an enormous war machine, such that we could fight two wars in the Pacific.

We fought two parallel counteroffensives — one south of the equator, one north of the equator. Because we had the ability to do that, the Japanese really were unable to concentrate their diminishing forces to meet either prong of this two-headed offensive.

Jordan Schneider: As you’re thinking about how to devote your research time and the pages that you allocate to these stories, can you reflect a little about your process of having all these simultaneous strains of the experiences of these individual soldiers, as well as these grand debates between MacArthur and Nimitz and the president about how to put all the pieces on the chessboard? What was both the research as well as synthesis process for you in this comprehensive history?

Ian Toll: My process, from when I first began doing this about 25 years ago, is to read everything. Now, with the Pacific War, you can’t literally read everything. The first book I wrote, Six Frigates, about the founding of the US Navy, I felt at times I was touching almost everything that had been written. That will never be the case with a war this big.

But to read very, very widely — histories, the original documents, the planning documents, the action reports, the memoirs, the letters, the letters of the military commanders and the lowest ranking soldier and sailor who experienced these events. Casting a wide net and spending years. before sitting down to write, going out and gathering up an enormous amount of material, and looking at the subject from every different angle.

Then there’s a middle step, which is important and often neglected by a lot of historians, which is to take all of that material and file it in a way that when you come back to the part of the narratives that you’re writing, you can immediately put your hands on that source to work it in. It is an information management issue, which requires a lot of thinking about how to do the research initially and how to organize it so you can then use it in the writing.

Eventually, it just becomes many thousands of documents organized in a certain way, a narrative that is going to unfold. The narrative is iterative in the sense that I may go down a blind alley and decide I need to throw that out. I throw hundreds of pages out. I’m doing it again with the book I’m writing now. To try to give the reader a sense that you’re shifting between different perspectives constantly — the perspective of Nimitz and his staff at Pearl Harbor planning an operation, then shifting immediately to the perspective of Marines in the Fifth Regiment who are landing on a beach and then carrying out the operation that you were just seeing how this was planned, then shifting to the Japanese perspective and shifting back to the US home front.

It’s a constantly shifting narrative, in which you’re looking at the same subjects from a different point of view, but then integrated into a narrative that unspools a little bit the way a novel would.

Chris Miller: How did you learn to do that, shifting perspective so smoothly? Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, shift from Nimitz’s room where he’s looking at the map, then shift to Iwo Jima.” But you do that in a way that few narrative histories do. Jordan and I both agreed that we’ve never read a 2,000-page history and wanted another page until we read yours. How do you learn that scene shifting? What were you looking at as examples? What were you reading that gave you a model for this type of vast, sweeping narrative history?

Jordan Schneider: To give a sense of what Ian does — one of my favorite scenes was Hirohito’s surrender speech, which covers 30 pages. First, there was a debate over whether or not to surrender in the first place. Then 10 pages of incredible palace drama — is there going to be a coup? Then, there was a coup, and it failed. Then the scene moves to NHK, and the phonograph is being placed, and the guy bows at the emperor’s photograph. Then you have these scenes all across Imperial Japan of different people responding to hearing the emperor’s voice in different ways.

The speech was in archaic Japanese, so people didn’t even know what it was saying. Some people decided, “Okay, if we’re going to surrender, then that means I need to do my final Kamikaze run.” Other people were saying, “Oh my God, thank God.”

It sounds overwhelming and kaleidoscopic, but it is actually one of the most incredible pieces of literature that I have consumed. Where does that all come from? How do you develop this skill?

Ian Toll: Well, I really appreciate the praise. It’s praise that keeps me going because this is hard work. I’ve been doing this full-time since 2002. That’s when I signed my first book contract. That’s 23 years, and I have four books to show for it. Part of the answer is that I take a lot of time. I throw a lot of work out. Probably a lot of that work is good, but it doesn’t work within the narrative pacing that I was going for. It’s a lot of following instinct.

I said in an author’s note that there’s room for innovation in this genre of historical narrative. It’s been a genre that has been trapped within certain ideas about narrative conventions — the idea that if you use the storytelling techniques of a novel or even a film, you might be compromising the scholarly purpose of the work. I don’t believe that’s true.

You can borrow from the techniques of novels or even films, in a way that may illuminate certain issues that you’re writing about, that may bring the reader closer to the way it felt for the participants to be there. I use research that I’ve accumulated over many years and have cast a very wide net to try to find material that hasn’t received as much attention as it should have in previous works.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about that filmic quality.. There are these moments of terrific awe-inspiring beauty that you point to — these ships blowing up and these massive artillery barrages, the sunrise over Mount Fuji that the admirals see as they’re pulling into the harbor, about to accept the surrender of the Japanese and the way that they see that as this flag that they’ve been fighting against and finding on people’s corpses for the past six years.

Your book made me watch some more World War II Pacific movies, and I was disappointed, honestly, with what I saw relative to the incredible Technicolor visions that you and your narrative painted in my head. How did you develop that sensibility and when did it become clear to you that you needed to make sure that your readers have some of the images that were in these soldiers’ heads in ours as well?

Ian Toll: As I’m coming through these sources, I often zero in on these images, descriptions of images. One of the things you’ll find if you start reading Pacific War narratives again and again is that you will have an American from Illinois who had never traveled beyond a few miles where he was born, seeing these extraordinary things in the Pacific, this exotic, remote part of the world.

Often they’d describe the sunsets, and you’d get a sense that they are having a sublime, ineffable experience seeing these things. That grabs my attention when I see it. Then I want the reader to see that image, but then also get a sense of how that felt for people who had not traveled widely before being thrown into this extraordinary war.

On that subject, there’s a whole genre of wartime art. You have talented watercolorists working on a destroyer who took a sketchbook along and brought back images, which are particularly important because you weren’t permitted to take a camera with you in the Pacific War. You had to have special authorization to have a camera. The art sometimes is useful to see the war through the eyes of the people who were there.

Those aspects of the Pacific War narratives always jumped off the page for me. Then I tried to in turn weave them into the narratives.

Jordan Schneider: There’s beauty and there’s also horror. You spend a lot of time describing deaths. Even when people aren’t literally dying, the smell of some of these battlefields and the smell of the corpses is another thing that’s going to live with me for a while. That contrast struck me — these incredible sunsets and these spectacular displays of mechanical might and fleets that are extending farther than the eye can see. Then every once in a while, they blow up and people die horrific deaths because of what all these machines can do. How did you try to do justice to that as well?

Ian Toll: In the case of the Pacific War or any other war, really any other aspect of World War II, there’s plenty of carnage in the historical record. These things happened. The challenge becomes describing those in a way that gives the reader a sense of what it was like to be there. You’re right about the smell — that’s another thing that just jumps off the page. If someone describes a smell, whether it’s the awful smells that you get on a battlefield or even the smell of flowers on a beach, those tend to leap out at me, and then I try to find a way to work those in.

We have five senses. If you can get three out of four of the physical senses into a description of a battle scene, you’re able to reach the reader through more than one route. Those images, those impressions, tend to build on themselves. If you can get many of them into a narrative — not doing what a novelist does where you make it up, you need to pull these details from first-hand accounts that are reliable — but if you get many of them, that tends to build to where the reader gets a sense of what it was like to be there.

Jordan Schneider: This is my big note for the Chip Wars revised edition. Chris, we need more smell in it.

Chris Miller: You know, the place that really stood out for me in the book was on Iwo Jima, which everyone knows is this absolute bloodbath. But the discussion of the sulfuric volcanic ash all around in these subterranean caves — you got smells and also tastes, talking about the water being sulfuric in its taste. It felt like I was walking into Mordor, but it wasn’t made up in Tolkien’s mind. It was a hellhole on Earth.

Jordan Schneider: The smell and the taste that’s going to live with me forever is the Enola Gay dropping the bomb and the pilots tasting metal because of the radiation. They hadn’t looked back, but they knew that the bomb had gone off because they felt it in their molars. What more can you ask for from a historian?

Ian Toll: That detail really grabbed my attention too. That’s in one of the pilot accounts, I believe. You had this electric taste in your mouth from the explosion, from the bomb. They noticed that at the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico, as well.

Chris Miller: You have these juxtapositions of extraordinary heroism and extraordinary barbarism on both sides. A lot of military histories tend in one direction or the other and don’t balance out both. You show them both being constantly present in different ways, competing impulses. Can you walk us through the ethics of what you’re recounting and how you, as a historian, try to properly balance these two competing impulses?

Ian Toll: You mean the impulses to acknowledge the humanity and suffering of the enemy — it’s part of what makes good war histories memorable, is that you have a situation in which it’s impossible for people on the battlefield not to feel a sense of hatred toward the enemy. This is murder on a mass organized scale. Then you have a war like the Pacific War, where, in some ways, that hatred reached a pitch that we haven’t seen, at least in any other American war — this dehumanization and hatred that was felt. Much of it was justified, honestly.

To evoke that for the reader, that sense of hatred, that sense that many Americans had that the Japanese were somehow less than fully human and that this justified wiping out their cities — to feel that in a visceral way for the reader because of the way you’ve shown how the war was experienced by the Americans who experienced it, by the POWs, by the civilians who were caught in the war zone in the way of rampaging Japanese armies. But then at the same time to acknowledge, to fully understand the humanity of the Japanese and the suffering of the Japanese.

It comes down to weaving these different perspectives together into one integrated narrative. Many others have done it well — such as John Toland’s book, The Rising Sun, which I recommend. He was one of the first to write the history of that war from the Japanese perspective in a way that was broadly sympathetic to the Japanese people and their suffering, while acknowledging that the Japanese militarists had tyrannized and abused that country and eventually brought on the immense suffering of 1944 and 1945.

The Kamikaze — A Problem of Scale

Jordan Schneider: The kamikaze dynamics that we get into in 1944 and 1945 are some of the most artful sections. The training system for Japanese airmen was incredibly selective, where a thousand people joined and only a hundred made it out the other side.

That led to this very elite core of fighter pilots, but ultimately, they were short of decent pilots such that pilots were so useless by 1942 and 1943 that the most efficient tactical maneuver to spend the least steel to deal the most damage on American ships was to use pilots as the 1940s version of guided homing missiles. It’s much easier to teach someone to fly into a plane than it is to dogfight with a Zero.

On one hand, it makes sense. On the other hand, you’re sending people to their deaths. On a lot of these missions, which aren’t literally suicide missions, you have Americans who are at some level doing the same thing, with flights that go off carriers where 12 planes go out and one or two make it back. But there is something that is particularly resonant and horrific about Kamikaze flights. My guess is, 500 years from now, if people are talking about anything when it comes to the Pacific War, the Kamikaze flights are going to be one of the three lines that people still remember.

How did you approach that? What are the different aspects of the story that you wanted to hit as you were describing the different parts of the Kamikaze story?

Ian Toll: The Japanese had trained what may have been pound for pound the best cadre of carrier pilots in the world at the beginning of the war. They were superb. There had been a national selection process, extremely difficult — tougher than getting into Stanford today — for getting accepted to naval pilot training in 1939-1940. Then they went through this extremely rigorous pilot training process that built these superb pilots. But they never thought seriously in Japan about the problem of expanding that training pipeline to produce many more pilots in order to fight a war on the scale of the Pacific War.

When their first team of pilots was killed off in 1942-43, with few left by 1944, they did not have a next generation of pilots to come in and carry on the fight. The decision to deploy Kamikazes on a mass scale was tactically correct in a sense. If you have pilots who you cannot afford to train — you don’t have the time, the fuel, the resources to train pilots to effectively attack ships using conventional dive bombing attacks, conventional aerial torpedo attacks, the kinds of attacks that the Japanese had used effectively in the early part of the war — then maybe what you do is train the pilot to fly a plane with a bomb attached to it into a ship like a guided missile. Maybe that’s simply the best tactical use of the resource that you have.

That is ultimately what persuaded the Japanese to go ahead and deploy Kamikazes on basically their entire air war — their entire air war was a Kamikaze war in the last year of the war. Then you have, on top of that, this question of the morality of sending 20-, 21-, 22-year-old men to their certain deaths in this situation.

The part of the story that has been neglected and forgotten in the West is that this was immensely controversial, even in Japan. The Kamikazes came to be revered. But at the outset, even within the military, within the Navy — the Navy was mainly the Kamikaze service that launched the Kamikazes — there was immense opposition to this within the ranks of the Japanese Navy. It took time for this to be accepted, but this was the way they were going to fight this war.

Trying to understand what it was like to be a Kamikaze pilot, to draw upon these letters and diaries that have been published, many of them in English, but then also what it did to the crew of a US ship to know that they were under this kind of attack. The unique sense of horror that they felt operating off of Okinawa in particular — the height of the Kamikaze campaign — where 34 ships were sunk, and many more were badly damaged with US Navy casualties running well into the thousands. Certainly, more Navy personnel were killed than Army or Marines at the Battle of Okinawa, as bad as the ground fighting was. That unique sense of horror and loathing that they felt as these planes came in making beelines, flying suicide runs, and doing terrible damage.

Chris Miller: I was struck by the other facet of how the Kamikazes emerged. There’s the logic of how you most efficiently use your limited number of airplanes and pilots to sink ships. But it also seemed like the Japanese army and all of its island defenses were pursuing a Kamikaze strategy. In all these island campaigns, 90% plus of the Japanese garrisons were killed. They would start the battle knowing they would lose, but trying to exact as much punishment as they could, which at a strategic level is rational, but tactically a brutal way to fight a campaign.

I found myself wondering, did the Japanese army have its own version of the Kamikaze mentality? Was the entire war effort on Japan’s side suicidal after 1942? It was obvious to everyone that the production differences were large enough that Japan would definitely lose. Is there something to that analysis?

Ian Toll: Absolutely. You could say that Kamikazes are a metaphor for the entire project of Imperial Japan, particularly after Midway and Guadalcanal when we reached the second half of the Pacific War, when it was clear that Japan was going to lose the war. Whatever that meant — losing could be many different versions of losing the war. But historians have traced a cultural change that occurred in the Japanese military after the Russo-Japanese War and then after the First World War, in which the Japanese Army leadership convinced itself, “We have got to do something about this problem of our soldiers surrendering. That’s not acceptable.”

They actually altered the military manuals and the standing orders to say, “You shall not surrender in any circumstance. There will never be any surrender in the Japanese Army.” That was a very fateful decision because once you’ve put your soldiers in that situation, which they know they’re not going to survive, that they’re going to fight to the last man, that alters the psychology on the battlefield and leads inevitably to a much more brutal environment.

On one island after another, starting most famously on the Aleutian island of Attu in the spring of 1943, you had entire Japanese garrisons fighting and dying to the last man. This being celebrated in Japan by a press that was being very closely guided and censored by the regime, building in Japan a sense that this is an extraordinary act of bravery, of commitment, of fanaticism that the allies, the Americans, would never be able to match.

This was going to be the secret weapon for the Japanese, showing that they were willing to make much greater sacrifices than their enemies were.

As the war went on and US forces drew closer to Japan, the story changed to, “This is how we’re going to protect the homeland. We’re going to show the Americans that the cost of invading our homeland, of trying to occupy our homeland, is so great that they won't want to pay it.” It became a question of whether they could force the Americans to the negotiating table to resolve this conflict in a way in which Japan would have to acknowledge its defeat. That would mean giving up some portion of its overseas empire, but preserving its emperor system and keeping American and allied troops out of Japanese territory. That became a driving obsession of the Japanese leadership in the last year and a half of the war.

These fanatical demonstrations, fighting to the last man on one island after another, the Kamikazes, all became a kind of theater. A way of showing the Americans, “This is what you’re dealing with. We’re different from other people. We’re willing to die — the whole country will die to the last man, woman, and child if necessary.” Wouldn’t it be better to sit down and negotiate some solution to this war, which leaves us with some vestige of the Imperial project intact?

Inside Japan’s Imperial Project

Jordan Schneider: There’s of course the irony that by the time the Americans land, MacArthur says, “Actually, when we got here, we were taking a big bet that they wouldn’t want to fight anymore.” Somehow, someone snapped a finger and the rebellion turned off, or we would be in trouble. We didn’t have enough troops to do this. But the fact was, once the war was done, the war was done. The only people still fighting were five guys in the hills of the Philippines who just didn’t get the message or something.

Another contrast is why Nazi Germany took it to the end and why the Japanese took it to the end. With Nazi Germany, it was one guy and all the generals. Definitely by late 1944, you had a whole plot. Everyone saw the writing on the wall, and there was a wide consensus — enough to have a whole conspiracy. You had these back-channel feelers to the English. But because of the lack of a focal point and because you had a consensus, even though you had dissenting voices, they weren’t able to mobilize even as much as the Operation Valkyrie folks were.

You have this thesis in Japan of, “If we just show them how crazy we are, then they’ll come to the negotiating table.” But they never really tried to do the negotiating in the first place, aside from this conversation with the Soviets, which anyone really could have seen wasn’t actually going anywhere.

Let’s talk about elite Japanese politics as well, starting in the second half of the war. Even though everyone was doing these suicide missions, even though everyone knew they were on this national suicide mission by 1943, a few million more people had to die before we got to the inevitable conclusion. Why is that?

Ian Toll: To understand what was happening in Japan’s ruling circle in the last year of the war, it’s necessary to go back to the beginning of the 1930s and understand how Japan descended into militarist tyranny. The story is one of extraordinary turmoil, chaos, revolutionary energy, assassinations, uprisings, and almost a complete breakdown of discipline within the ranks of the army, but also the Navy.

Again and again, hot-headed extremist officers and factions of younger mid-ranking officers threatened the Japanese leadership at gunpoint, forcing a much more right-wing, fanatical, imperialist, and aggressive foreign and domestic policy. Increasingly, the generals and admirals were running every aspect of military, foreign, and domestic affairs. The army took over the Japanese education system in the 1930s.

What happened with the China incident — the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 — and then the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war with Great Britain and the US beginning in 1941, was that these large foreign wars tended to heal, or at least stabilize, this domestic turmoil within Japan.

The leadership saw war as a way to maintain a fragile peace and stability within a society that was in many ways very revolutionary.

As you approach the end of the Pacific War, the problem isn’t whether to surrender or not. The problem is that whatever Japan did as a country — if they surrendered, if they initiated negotiations, if they tried to use diplomacy to get out of this war — there was the threat of a resumption of these assassinations, a civil war. You could have a civil war between different elements within the Army. You could have fighting between the Army and the Navy. This was seen in Japan as a real danger.

To complicate the picture even more, in the US we had a window — imperfect, but we had a window — into what was happening within the ruling circle in Japan because we were reading their diplomatic mail. We had broken their codes, communications between the foreign ministry in Tokyo and Japanese embassies throughout the world. We were intercepting those messages, decoding them, and reading them.

We were aware that the Japanese, by the spring of 1945, had seen their last hope as bringing Stalin and the Soviet government in to mediate between the US and Great Britain. The Japanese had a historical precedent for this. The end of the Russo-Japanese War ended with a negotiated peace between Russia and Japan, which had been mediated by the US. Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for Peace for that mediation.

They were trying to replicate what they had seen as the acceptable end to the Russo-Japanese War — a negotiated settlement which allowed them to maintain and build their empire. Here, they would like to try to negotiate a truce. They were deeply divided within the ruling circle over what such a negotiated arrangement might look like. But the point often forgotten in the West is that it wasn’t just a division — it was a fear of a descent into complete chaos and civil war, which would make it impossible for the Japanese government to do anything in an organized way.

Our leaders understood enough of that dynamic that we saw the necessity of strengthening the peace faction within the ruling circle, and neutralizing the Army in particular, which wanted to fight on. The atomic bomb became a means to that end.

Chris Miller: But the violence of Japanese politics in the ’20s and ’30s ends up seeming like a really important driver of the violence of Japan’s war effort and even the suicide dynamics that we just discussed. You get some of that in Japanese army politics in the ’20s and ’30s as well. It’s almost as if the Japanese army took over the entire country not just in terms of running the schools, but in terms of running the culture to a substantial degree.

Jordan Schneider: Yamamoto famously was doing his best to talk everyone out of bombing Pearl Harbor. But then at a certain point, he says, “All right, you guys are dumb enough to do it. Might as well do the dumb thing the smart way.”

The thing that strikes me about the tension of this narrative history is that once you get to Pearl Harbor and the American political reaction to it, that is your turning point — America’s decision to fight this war in the first place. Regardless of whether Midway had gone this or that way, if the Marines had gotten kicked off of Guadalcanal, you have such an enormous material imbalance between the Americans and the Japanese.

If, because of Japanese politics, you’re taking off the table Japan ever wanting to cash in their chips and negotiate, then it seems like a US victory was inevitable. What do you think about that inevitability question? If it’s all inevitable, aside from the human drama of the smells and the visuals, what is the point of spending so much time and energy studying the Pacific War?

Ian Toll: It’s an issue that will never be resolved. It’s the question of whether we want to take a determinist approach to understanding WWII. I probably lean a bit more toward the determinist way of thinking about it.

Winston Churchill, in his post-war memoir of WWII, had a famous passage in which, as soon as he had heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, “So we had won after all.” Meaning that this entire conflict, including the conflict with Nazi Germany, was now going to be settled. It was just a question of the proper application of military power. Now, that was written many years later. I think it was deliberately provocative in that mischievous, Churchillian way. But I do think it is true that before the attack on Pearl Harbor, you had a deeply divided political situation in Washington in which the isolationist movement was perhaps gaining strength in the fall of 1941.

This is a movement that had strength in both the Democratic and Republican parties. It had strength in every region. It was a formidable force in our politics, a sense of real moral fervor around the idea that we were not going to be dragged into a global war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, that movement collapsed overnight. When I say overnight, I mean literally overnight. FDR asked for a declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It passed both houses of Congress. I think there was one dissenting vote in the house. There was a unanimous vote in the Senate.

It does not go too far to say that this one decision the Japanese made to attack and launch a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor completely altered the domestic politics around going to war against Japan. Three days later, Hitler made the curious decision to declare war on the United States when we hadn’t declared war on him.

Then it was a global war, and the largest economy in the world — the economy with the greatest latent military power — was a combatant.

Not only were we combatant, but we had the broad public political consensus that we needed to quickly mobilize our economies for war, which we did. I think that was the turning point. It was the attack on Pearl Harbor and the reaction — the political reaction within the US — that really made it inevitable that not just Japan, but Nazi Germany would be finished within three to four years.

The one other major contingency is that the Soviets were able to stop the German attack on the Eastern Front and stabilize that war and survive long enough so that Allied supplies could get in, allowing them to turn the tide. If there had been some surrender on the Eastern Front, that could have taken the entire war, including the Pacific War, in a different direction.

“What Becomes of a General?”

Jordan Schneider: Let's talk about the generals and admirals, starting with Chester Nimitz…

Paid subscribers get early access to the rest of the conversation, where we discuss…

• The various command styles that shaped US military strategy in the Pacific,

• How General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey became media darlings —controlling public opinion and war politics in the process,

• The evolution of submarine warfare and Japanese defensive strategy,

• Counterfactuals, including a world where the Allies invaded Taiwan,

• Broader lessons for the future of warfare, especially in the Taiwan Strait.

Read more

亲爱的读者周一好～ 9 月的新书讯回望上一次冷战。

花絮和主线

旧冷战真正的主线是苏联实力（相较于美国）的涨落。

人们常被花絮迷了眼睛，忘记观察长期趋势和结构变迁。

旧冷战有太多花絮“大事件”：中国内战、捷克事变、柏林危机、朝鲜战争、第二次柏林危机、苏伊士运河危机、古巴导弹危机、越南战争、布拉格之春、智利政变、安哥拉内战、阿富汗战争……纷繁剧目迷人眼。

可冷战最重要的不是这些事件，而是它们背后的结构 —— 制度竞赛——美国和苏联两类政体、两个社会、两种生活方式之间实力、绩效和人心的比拼。

图片：1970 年冷战局势

苏联实力在 1960 年代末渐至高峰，而此时西方社会动荡、民主自信不足，双方实力较为均衡。

随后苏联实力从高峰一路衰退，经济增速放缓，消费品生产受困，社会倦怠，人心消沉；同期技术革命和第二次全球化推动西方经济、技术、社会和文化在 1980 年代达至前所未有的繁荣。西欧压倒东欧，日韩港台压倒中朝越柬……邓小平形象地总结为：“跟着美国跑的都富了，跟着苏联跑的都穷了”。

行至 1980 年代晚期，苏联老一代领导一一死去，苏联深陷经济困境、社会停滞和信仰危机。天平倾倒，胜负已分。最终，新生代领导人用心急的改革为计划体制和苏联帝国送了终。“理想信念动摇了……戈尔巴乔夫轻轻一句话，宣布苏联共产党解散，偌大一个党就没了……最后，竟无一人是男儿，没什么人出来抗争”。

“狐狸知道很多事，刺猬只知道一件大事”。

冷战通史，有狐狸版，也有刺猬版。

文安立：《冷战》

文安立. 冷戰：從兩強爭霸到全球衝突，當代地緣政治的新世界史. 陳柏旭、林書媺譯. 臺北：聯經出版, 2023.

Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A World History. Basic Books, 2017.

狐狸版冷战史。

文安立把冷战视为国际体系，观察它的全球影响。美苏之外的次级角色，甚至传统上被忽视的边缘角落也一一被照亮。中国得到了相当大的篇幅，非洲和拉美更是重中之重。

整本书精彩纷呈，大小事件一个不落，文安立充分展示了自己的广博，把冷战史写成了世界史。

《人心之争》

莱弗勒. 人心之争：美国、苏联与冷战. Translated by 廖蔚莹. 上海: 华东师范大学出版社, 2012.

Leffler, Melvyn P. For the soul of mankind: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Macmillan, 2007.

刺猬版冷战史。

Leffler 紧盯美苏之间的制度竞赛，以“人心得失”为利刃，划破纷繁花絮，刨出冷战真正的内核：哪一种政体更能满足人民需求，创建更好的世界？

我喜欢这本书。

The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991

Zubok, Vladislav. The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991. Random House, 2025

兔子版冷战史。

祖博克首先是苏联人，然后是一位“温和俄国人”，这是他此生不易的精神底色，无论住在莫斯科、费城还是伦敦。

温和俄国人收集大量母语史料，书写冷战史，烩成一锅杂菜汤，自带暧昧的风味。

阅读它请自带餐具——Critical Thinking.

《权力优势》

莱弗勒. 权力优势：国家安全、杜鲁门政府与冷战. Translated by 孙建中. 北京: 商务印书馆, 2019.

Leffler, Melvyn P. A preponderance of power: National security, the Truman administration, and the Cold War. Stanford University Press, 1992.

冷战的开始。

对于冷战起源的经典分析。1992 年的老书，至今仍在不断被阅读。

作者提出，杜鲁门政府的冷战战略有一个坚固的内核就是要控制世界主要工业区，把苏联隔离在外。其次才是和苏联争夺工业区的外围：西欧工业区的外围是中东，日本工业区的外围是东南亚。

这是一道思想闪电，帮助我们思考冷战起源中的诸多谜题。

比如：美国为何拒绝苏联参与日本占领？美国为何对防守中国（国民政府）并不热心？

Kotkin: Armageddon Averted

Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon averted: the Soviet collapse, 1970-2000. Oxford University Press, 2008.

冷战的结束。

Kotkin 认为苏联不是他杀，而是自杀。自杀的原因是体制沉疴亟需改革，但这体制还经得住大手术吗？

不改革可以拖延，拖延死得慢，峰值已过的政权 可以 拖着漫长的余晖苟延残喘，耗散掉一代又一代人的希望。

鲁莽的医生反而会加速病人的死亡。正因为戈尔巴乔夫是一位真诚的苏联“救党者”，天真地以为苏联体制可以通过改革的手术刀来挽救，所以他才让苏共暴死在了手术台上。

戈尔巴乔夫治死了苏共，因此 Kotkin 称赞他是一位伟大的改革者: 一个不得人心的政权能够死得又快又稳，人类值得为此欢庆。

Kotkin 自己爆料，中共中央党校曾经盗版翻译了这本书，作为内部教材使用。你猜，他们从中学了什么？

给进阶用户

不安于做个读者，我想尝试研究研究冷战史，该如何开始？

请关注两部手册、两本期刊和三套书系。

两部手册

入门手册：Understanding the Cold War

O'Riordan, Elspeth. Understanding the Cold War: History, Approaches and Debates. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

给历史系本科生使用的参考书，历史学家手把手教你如何“入行”。

进阶手册：三卷本《剑桥冷战史》

Leffler, Melvyn P., and Odd Arne Westad, eds. The Cambridge history of the cold war. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

文安立和 Leffler 联合主编，汇聚全球一流冷战史学家呈现当前研究进展。

两本期刊

Cold War History Journal

曾长期由文安立主编，聚焦“冷战全球史”，不过现在也能读到传统思路的论文。

Journal of Cold War Studies

长期由 Mark Kramer 主编，专注美苏冷战主线。比如 Kramer 的长篇论文：The collapse of East European communism and the repercussions within the Soviet Union.

另外 CWIHP Bulletin 虽然早已结项停刊，但仍值得回顾。

三套书系

北卡罗纳大学出版社： 新·冷战史书系 New Cold War History

斯坦福大学出版社：冷战国际史书系 Cold War International History Project

哈佛大学出版社：冷战研究书系 The Cold War Studies Book Series

结语

在新冷战的开端阅读旧冷战，别有一番滋味在心头。

时间单向向前，历史从不重复。它只是偶尔押韵，让我们产生历史在重复的错觉。

新冷战不会重复旧冷战，正如二战并未重复一战。它走向哪里，剧目如何展开，最终持续多久，会如何结束，无人能够准确预测。

如果旧冷战教会我们点什么，那就是：不同于热战，冷战是漫长的制度竞赛。它比拼的是两类政体、两个社会、两种生活方式，谁能创造更好的绩效、更好的生活、更多的希望。人心日久酝酿，结构缓慢变迁。

放平心态，保持耐心。

努力做工，认真生活。

不急躁，不悲观。

见证，记住。

感谢阅读。如果喜欢，请分享给亲朋好友：

上周有期节目，介绍诺贝尔经济学家阿西莫格鲁对中国经济的诊断。大家对这个话题比较感兴趣，已经有24万人观看，也引来大量五毛。五毛分两类，一类是有组织的水军，一类是没组织的自干五。有组织的，有些是学校毕业找不到工作，干拿钱发帖的合同工，有的是监狱囚犯，发帖减刑，换牢饭。

认定有组织的五毛比较容易，他们一般没有污言秽语，因为组织对他们有要求，污言秽语，会被YouTube直接过滤掉，干了白干，领不到钱，也减不了刑。他们的帖子千篇一律，都是复制剪贴，改几个字，绕过YouTube的自动过滤功能。

另一类五毛就是自干五，这是中文世界最愚蠢的一个群体，党国不拿他们当人，但他们自愿当党国的免费肉喇叭，拿不到钱，也没有刑好减，只是因为从小被教育夹头，把脑袋夹扁了，成年以后也不能恢复原状，到处顶着个扁瓜脑袋，杠来杠去，像些动画片中的异形。

每个人的时间都有限。要做事，最重要的就是知道怎么安排时间，把时间花在值得做的事情上，不在不值得做的事情上浪费时间，更不在不值得的人身上浪费呼吸。我刚开始上社交媒体的时候，浪费了很多时间，后来经过学习，知道必须迅速分辨信息有没有价值，及时过滤。现在，不管多长的帖子，基本读第一句，就立马判断有没有价值。尤其是五毛帖，每个字都散发着五毛味，看第一句，就知道怎么回事，一秒之内，拉黑隔离，不给他们回来再浪费另一秒钟的机会。

有播主说，五毛来起哄，也会增加流量，提高油管推荐权重。可能吧，但留言区垃圾太多，会埋没听众有价值的留言。我是把留言区当成节目的延伸，是听众对节目的再创作，不只是反馈。我爱读听众讲自己的故事，说自己的感受，谈自己的感想。留言的价值不在长短，不在数量，有价值的留言，哪怕只有几个字，只有一句话，也会像金子一样闪光，让人眼前一亮，让人产生共鸣。不想让这些宝贵的留言淹没在五毛倾倒的垃圾中。

那期节目在录制的时候，没有想到会有这么多观众来看。阿西莫格鲁的书《国家为什么会失败》，十年前就被介绍到中文世界，记得第一次看到中文学者介绍这本书，是在包刚升老师那里。包老师是位很有眼光的学者，他带着问题讲《国家为什么会失败》，能讲到点子上，不像一些青年才俊，背诵一堆概念短语，说话一头雾水，不知道他们的问题是什么。

3年前，阿西莫格鲁发表那篇短文《中国经济从头部腐烂》，用他的理论，分析中国的经济。有人说他片面。说这种话的才俊，根本不知道理论是什么东西——任何理论都是片面的，都在特定的前提下，才能成立。说谁的理论片面，谁的观点片面，跟说球太圆了一样，等于什么也没说。

理论要解释世界，同一种现象，可以由不同的理论解释，但每一种理论的解释力不一样。有些理论解释力强，符合现实发展的趋势，让人觉得有道理；有些理论解释力弱，很快被现实证伪，让人觉得鼠目寸光，只能糊弄一时。

我之所以把阿西莫格鲁3年前那篇文章《中国经济从头部腐烂》，介绍给大家，是因为这3年中国经济，基本上是按照那篇文章中说的运转。党国的五毛组织是把它当成了崩溃论。这说明无毛和他们的领导都是些白痴，根本没听明白那期节目在说什么。阿西莫格鲁不是中国崩溃论患者。他分析的大部分失败国家，都有过短期成功时段。短期成功过后，大都陷入长期停滞，死水一潭。那不是崩溃，而是溃而不崩。读阿西莫格鲁，很容易得出这种结论。

一位读过阿西莫格鲁的听众，指出了这一点。他留言说：“《国家为什么会失败》刚出中译本的时候，就买来看了。序言部分写的更是精彩，在朋友圈也推荐了这本书。我猜中国经济的未来很可能是后一种情况，即“溃而不崩”，但这种情况的杀伤力更大，因为持续时间会很长，至少20-30年，那么一整代人的人生就完全毁了。当仔细思考中国的模式为什么难以短期内、非激烈模式改变的原因后，就会明白，中国的落后是思想和文化的落后，比前苏联真的差太多了” 。

这位听众的评论一语中的。顺便说一句，就是要记住一种理论的主要原理并不难，初中生都会背，难的是能用一种理论分析现实问题。这是最难的，很多人念完博士，还不会。这位听众很难能可贵的是，不只是读阿西莫格鲁，准确地把握了《国家为什么会失败》的理论精髓，而且能用其中的理论分析中国面临的困境，做出很有洞察力的判断——“溃而不崩”。

我赞同这个判断。

“溃而不崩”是大部分失败国家的常态——内部持续腐烂，但作为物理实体仍然有很强的韧性持续下去。国家温水煮青蛙，可以煮好几代人。跟很多人想像的不一样，那种前苏联式的瞬间崩塌，发生结构性解体，是失败国家的例外，不是失败国家的常态。失败国家的常态是“溃而不崩”。

Read more