Reddit reviews Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

As an addiotion to OP's comment if anyone reading this wants a good taste of French fuckery after WW2 you should check out the book : Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 it's where I first really read of how much of a fucking headache the French managed to cause basically everyone else in the West.

The British in Malaya were successful for a number of reasons.
They were mainly fighting against ethnic Chinese and had the support of a large portion of the local Malay population. If ethnic Chinese were suspected of being/supporting the rebels, the British simply deported them back to a China they had little or no connection with.

The British also had the extremely charismatic General in charge of the operation who had the respect of friend and enemy alike. Ethnic Malays also had Tunku Abdul Rahman, who was widely respected as a Malay nationalist and not seen as a stooge of the "imperialist" west. He continually negotiated with rebel leader Chin Peng, who according to author Michael Burleigh "[Peng's] pride would not permit him to recognize that the Tunku represented a genuine national movement that was achieving independence".

The "hearts and minds" strategy employed was also very successful at getting rebels to surrender and be "rehabilitated". These former rebels would then help the British track down their former comrades. Ethnic Chinese were also encouraged to join the Malayan civil service, which had previously been dominated by the Malays.

Burleigh leaves his section in Small Wars, Faraway Places a bit open ended:

"Was the Malay emergency really won through the 'hearts and minds' and the herculean efforts of a charismatic general? Or did victory result from prior establishment of population and spatial dominance through military force, with hearts and minds warfare as a parenthesis before the democratic co-option of Chinese elites? Few of the basic conditions in Malaya were evident in Vietnam, whether under the French or or later the US and its local ally, so its vaunted lessons are not really applicable"


Sauce:

Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh

>That's an interesting read because the book I read on the subject seemed to make the argument that the brutality was quite effective.

>https://www.amazon.com/Small-Wars-Faraway-Places-Insurrection/dp/0143125958

Well yeah, the brutality was effective because as I said, you cause enough casualties, it's going to have an effect. The brutality goes beyond torture to mass killings and rape. I mostly know Burleigh for his stuff on Nazi war crimes, didn't realize he had anything recent. Even there he talks lot about the immorality of Nazi tactics.

>This is all good if the crux of my argument was the overall effectiveness of torture or the programs.

>However it isn't. The crux is that in either of these operations at some point torture CERTAINLY provided correct information. And even if it literally only happened ONCE it would disprove the original statement, and that is all that my argument hinges on.

No? Your error rate is so high that any given piece of intel derived from torture is likely wrong so you cannot know that it's accurate and rely on it without confirmation. It's hard to operate on intelligence derived from torture. The whole data set is unreliable. You might as well guess. If it happens to be right once, great, but even then, the information would be accurate despite the use of torture, not because of it.

I will give you that in the moment during an ongoing situation, torture can be effective to get intelligence quickly to end the situation. However in a protracted setting, it's not. And even in an emergency situation, asking directly and being nice to the subject will typically yield better and more reliable information, as well as prolong the subject's usefulness.

Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965