Saturday 31 August 2013

Mahan on Turgot

One of the wisest French statesmen of that day, Turgot, held that it was to the interest of France that the colonies should not achieve their independence. If subdued by exhaustion, their strength was lost to England; if reduced by a military tenure of controlling points, but not exhausted, the necessity of constant repression would be a continual weakness to the mother-country. Though this opinion did not prevail in the councils of the French government, which wished the ultimate independence of America, it contained elements of truth which effectually moulded the policy of the war. If benefit to the United States, by effecting their deliverance, were the principal object, the continent became the natural scene, and its decisive military points the chief objectives, of operations; but as the first object of France was not to benefit America, but to injure England, sound military judgment dictated that the continental strife, so far from being helped to a conclusion, should be kept in vigorous life. It was a diversion ready made to the hand of France and exhausting to Great Britain, requiring only so much support as would sustain a resistance to which the insurgents were bound by the most desperate alternatives. The territory of the thirteen colonies therefore should not be the principal objective of France; much less that of Spain.

Mahan

¡Caciques al GULAG!

Workers of the World, Unite!

¡Reciprocidad! ¡Repatriación! ¡Revolución!

http://comitespartaco.blogspot.com/

Mahan in Syria

The meat grinder Grand Strategy and the Revolution.

The dispatch of the USS Mahan to the Eastern Mediterranean, in preparation for a punitive campaign against the Nazi regime in Syria, is a symbolic act steeped in classic strategic meaning and sea power know-how that transcends the most immediate imperialist objectives of the American and European elites by recruiting their military strength in the service of the revolution.

Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, that American 'Clausewitz of the Seas', reminds us in his 'The Influence of Sea Power Upon History', of the dialectical intricacies and objectives of a 'Turgot doctrine' that advocated the maintenance of revolutionary conflict in benefit of France and injury of Great Britain, during the American War of Independence and Revolution. It is a version of this 'Turgot doctrine', wisely applied by Russia and China in Afghanistan against NATO, that confronts America and France, those revolutionary allies of old, in Syria today.

Battered and exhausted by her loses in the seas of sand of Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain has deserted the battlefield in a strange twist reminiscent of her American past, demonstrating in the process the accuracy and wisdom of the predictions of Turgot's strategy, 'two' hundred years later.

In a revival of their old alliance and strategy, America and France are about to create, if they maintain their nerve, a giant 'meat grinder' in the Middle East, a 'processor' in which the energies, resources and men of the tyrannical, oligarchic, imperialist and theological regimes and groups of the area and beyond, will be systematically reduced, creating, like in the past, the necessary conditions for the promotion and advancement of real revolutionary options... not only in Syria.

¡Caciques al GULAG!

Workers of the World, Unite!

¡Reciprocidad! ¡Repatriación! ¡Revolución!

http://comitespartaco.blogspot.com/