Lessons Lost in Time

China does not remember war the way the West does.
For China, war is not an event. It is a condition.

The twentieth century did not arrive there with optimism or industry. It arrived with invasion, starvation, and a country already tearing itself apart. Japan did not interrupt a civil war. It poured gasoline on one that was already burning. And when the foreign enemy finally left, the killing simply changed direction.

This is the part that gets smoothed over. Sanitized. Labeled as separate conflicts to make the story easier to digest. But on the ground, there was no pause. No reset. Just an unbroken stretch of violence where enemies overlapped, alliances lied, and survival mattered more than ideology.

Nationalists fought Japanese troops while quietly preparing to fight Communists. Communists fought Japanese units while conserving strength for the real war they knew was coming. Warlords hedged. Civilians paid. History was decided by who could bleed the longest without breaking.

Out of this chaos came modern China. Suspicious of weakness. Obsessed with unity. Intolerant of disorder. A state that learned, the hard way, that fragmentation invites annihilation and memory is a weapon.

Nanjing. Yan’an. Chongqing. The Long March. None of them stand alone. Together they explain why power in China is centralized, why dissent is feared, and why history is guarded like a loaded gun.

This is not a story about heroism. It is a story about endurance, brutality, and the price of survival.
If you want to understand China today, you do not start with economics or diplomacy.
You start here, in the war that never stopped.

Today’s guest is one of the heavyweights. Hans van de Ven is a historian who went looking for China’s twentieth century where it actually lived. Not in slogans. Not in memoirs polished for export. In the archives, the war rooms, the bureaucratic back alleys of a country tearing itself apart.

Trained at Leiden and Harvard, now a professor at Cambridge, he’s spent his career dismantling the myths around China’s wars from 1937 through the end of the Korean War. His work on the Chinese Communist Party and China’s war against Japan rewired how historians understand power, violence, and survival in modern Asia.

You might know his books From Friend to Comrade or China at War, works that refuse to romanticize revolution and insist on treating war as it actually was.

These days, he’s still at it, pushing Chinese history back into the center of global war narratives where it belongs. This is not armchair history. This is history with scars. This is Hans van de Ven.
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Smoke curls through the alley. The air stings—metal, burning tires, sweat, tear gas stings the nose and eyes. Shouts bounce off concrete walls, almost deafening. People push past each other, running, yelling, trying to be heard over the chaos. Somewhere, a phone records it all. Someone else is taking a breath that tastes like fear and defiance at the same time. You’re here, in the middle of it, and it’s not just a protest—it’s survival.

Iran knows this better than most places on Earth. Since 1979, its people have taken to the streets more than 400 times. That’s not history. That’s a pattern. A 47-year argument between a people who refuse to stay silent and a government that refuses to listen.

The revolutions that promised change, the uprisings that shook the streets, the moments that left scars you can still feel today. Why people keep risking everything, and why the world can’t just look away.

Because right now, the streets are alive again. Ordinary people are standing in the smoke, facing down the impossible. Every chant, every step forward, every brick thrown—it matters. It’s not just about Tehran, or Isfahan, or Shiraz. It’s about a people testing the limits of power, courage, and history itself.

You’re about to see the streets of Iran in a way most of the world doesn’t. And if you think this is another story you can scroll past—you’re already behind.

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A generator hums, dragging life into a street that shouldn’t need it. Kids kick a tattered ball, their laughter sharp, brittle against the heat, carried over the scent of diesel and frying arepas. Bolívar stares down from a mural, paint peeling, eyes split like the city itself. Lines curl around the corner for fuel, people shifting on cracked sidewalks, umbrellas doing double duty against the sun and the dust. The air is thick with waiting, impatience barely held in check, and even the dogs move slowly, like they know something’s off. Not war. Not yet. Just a country pretending the ground isn’t sliding out from under it, every heartbeat a quiet act of defiance.

This is the Venezuela that rarely makes headlines anymore. The collapse did not happen in an explosion. It happened in exhaustion. Currency that loses value by the hour. Hospitals overwhelmed not by war wounds but by neglect. Politicians who shake hands on television while militias patrol the outskirts after dark. And beneath it all, a quiet resentment that is starting to find direction.

The United States feels the pull whether it wants to or not. A flood of migrants crossing borders into Latin America and the Caribbean, putting pressure on nations that don’t need another crisis to worry about. Cartels and foreign powers carving influence in a region once considered firmly within Washington’s orbit. Oil reserves that still tempt, even after decades of mismanagement. And a government in Caracas that believes survival justifies any bargain, any ally, any escalation.

This is not a story about good intentions or bad actors. It is about a moment when desperation meets geopolitics. When a collapsing state starts creating consequences far beyond its borders. When the United States realizes that distance is not the same thing as insulation.

Today we dive into the questions nobody wants to say out loud: will the United States go to war with Venezuela, and what went wrong inside Venezuela to bring us to this moment?

Because if you think war sounds unthinkable now, living with a failed state Venezuela may be a more difficult choice.

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Further Reading
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/venezuela-crisis
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/venezuela/grand-bargain-venezuela
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/venezuelas-fragile-revolution/

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You can still feel that wind off the Liaodong Peninsula if you listen hard enough, it carries the ghosts of Port Arthur, Mukden, and the empires that thought they were too big to fail. One bled out. The other walked away with a victory that cost it its soul.

This was trench warfare before Europe even knew the word. Six hundred thousand men fed into a grinder that proved industrial war didn’t care about flags, prayers, or imperial fantasies. Japan thought victory would earn respect. Russia thought size meant destiny. They both walked into a century that would break them.

And the West? It applauded, took notes, and learned absolutely nothing.

If you want to understand how the 20th century actually started, this is for you. With ghosts, rust, barbed wire, and two empires testing how much suffering they could inflict before something inside them snapped.

This week on Lessons Lost in Time, we go deep into the war that rewired global power.
If you’re into history that punches you in the chest instead of patting you on the head, click the link and listen now.

FURTHER READING
https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/nwc-review/article/2203/&path_info=The_Russo_Japanese_War__Primary_Causes_of_Japanese_Success.pdf

https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6906/1/Aspects_of_the_Russo-Japanese_War.pdf
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Japan. An island chain born of fire and salt, where mountains plunge into restless seas and the air smells of cedar, smoke, and ambition. A place where beauty comes with an edge and tradition carries the weight of centuries. This is not just a country. It is a code carved into the bones of its people. From the silent discipline of the samurai to the divine winds that smashed Mongol fleets, Japan’s identity was forged in isolation and hardened by the belief that sacrifice is the highest form of honor. For generations, it guarded its shores like a temple gate. When it stepped beyond them, it came as a storm.

By the early 20th century, the Rising Sun was not content to rise. It wanted to blaze across the Pacific and claim it as its own. Pearl Harbor was not a mistake. It was a statement. A flash of steel meant to break the spine of an empire before it could even reach for a sword. And yet, precision can breed overconfidence. The same discipline that gave Japan its strength kept it from bending when the weight of war demanded it. From the jungles of New Guinea to the black sands of Iwo Jima, from the firebombed heart of Tokyo to the blinding light over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nation that had sworn never to bow found itself forced to its knees.

Today we are talking about the war that began with a war against China, then an invasion of the South Pacific and Hawaii and ended in an atomic dawn. We will look at the admirals and emperors who gambled everything, the island battles that bled armies dry, and the cultural collision between two powers that could not see the world the same way.

This is not about heroes and villains. It is about nations that believed they were chosen by history, locked in a fight where surrender was not just defeat, it was the death of the soul.
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