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Chapter 987 Undeclared War 3
"Benevolent monarch? I am willing to treat my people with benevolence, because they use taxes to support the royal family and officials, and also send their sons and nephews to join the army to defend the country. I am not benevolent, but repaying them.

The people here have never paid a penny to the court, and have never contributed a bit to the Ming Dynasty. Why should I repay them? Repaying evil with kindness is not a good habit, and virtue is not just a personal character.

Remember, I brought troops here to rob them. No matter how noble the excuse is, it is still robbery in essence, no different from pirates, robbers and Europeans.

Why do we need to rob? Because the Ming Dynasty needs it, it's that simple. I am the emperor of the Ming Dynasty, not the emperor of the whole world. Even if I really became the emperor of the whole world, I would lead my troops to rob another world.

If a country wants to be rich and strong, it is far from enough to rely on the hard work of the people and the integrity of the government. If the Ming Dynasty does not rob and allows the Europeans to rob, it will not take many years for the European countries to grow and develop with the wealth and population they have robbed, and then turn around and rob the Ming Dynasty.

By then, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou and even the capital may become the city in front of us. Millions of Ming people will also be killed and enslaved like them.

Do you think that by then, people will still praise me as a benevolent ruler? The people will only curse me as an extremely incompetent and tyrant ruler who allowed the country to be bullied by foreign races and the people to suffer.

The first priority of a monarch is to protect the people and the territory; the second priority is to ensure that the people are well fed and clothed. The so-called benevolence, tolerance, wisdom, and sainthood are just a number of means to accomplish the tasks. If a monarch cannot even do the most basic tasks, how can he talk about personal qualities?
The same goes for you. Don't always think about how to make me a saint. Instead, think more about how to benefit the court and the people at the same time.

You have all seen and experienced what Manila is like. Whether sincere or not, you have been praising it these days.

But do you know how many natives the navy killed on Luzon? In 20 years, almost 200,000 people, close to 40% of the original population. The number of people who died indirectly from hunger and disease is simply impossible to count, which is more cruel than the massacre. The current peace and prosperity on Luzon is all built on the bones of the dead.

By the same token, if we do not condone or even instigate the Minangkabau people to massacre the Acehnese, allowing the hatred between them to continue from generation to generation, once the army leaves, another leader will emerge within a few years and continue to hate the Ming Dynasty.

At that time, the imperial court would send a large army to attack again and then station there for a long time. This expense was saved little by little by the people of the Ming Dynasty who worked hard from dawn to dusk. As the emperor and ministers, they had to consider their personal reputations and just threw the people's money into the sea. Isn't it a shame?
Bloodlust is not the goal. If any general kills people just because he likes killing people, and I find out, I will execute his entire family in front of him to see if I really like him.

Killing people must bring benefits to the majority of people. If this premise is met, whoever kills more people will be awarded by me personally, and they will be honored in the Imperial Ancestral Temple after their death."

Hong Tao had no likes or dislikes about the massacre. In his opinion, it was just a means of warfare. Cruel? Come on, it's hypocritical to talk about kindness in a war.

War is the ultimate means for humans to solve problems, that is to say, the bottom line. If both sides have good character, war will not happen. Once a war breaks out, the only way is to fight for victory, and the process must be unscrupulous. Whoever has a lower moral bottom line is more likely to become the final winner.

After you win, whatever you say seems reasonable. If you really have no reason, you can kill the loser and put the blame on him. Anyway, dead people won't talk back to you.

This is what humans have been doing for thousands of years, but every time they do this, there are always people who come out and make irresponsible comments and point fingers from a level beyond human moral standards. But if you ask them to join the losers and not to join the cruel people, they will never go. These people are hypocritical, unable to recognize the essence of human beings, and always think that humans are nobler than animals.

Animals don't fight in groups every other day, and they invent tools in various ways to make it easier to kill their own kind. But humans do every bad thing that animals have never done at least once, and then write it down in books and try to instill it in their descendants.

Hong Tao has been trying to make students and ministers understand a cruel reality for many years: humans are the smartest in the world, but also the most morally inferior. No creature is worse or more cruel than humans.

It is precisely because humans lack kindness that they constantly pursue kindness as a shining point. If humans were really kind, no one would take kindness seriously.

Ordinary people may not understand this principle, because they do not have to choose between good and evil most of the time, and even if they make the wrong choice, there will not be too big consequences. But officials and generals are different. If they do not understand this principle, they will always be entangled in the good and evil of their actions, which will affect the formulation and implementation of policies.

"I think that places like Liaoyang have been idle for a long time due to population problems. Can we transport the people there to Jinzhou and other places by sea vessels and have the Northeast Military Commissioner supervise the farming? This can also play a role."

Although the emperor had made it very clear, some officials still could not bear to watch tens of thousands of people in a city being slaughtered. But they could not refute the emperor's theory, so they planned to save the country in a roundabout way, using immigration as an excuse to save as many lives as possible.

"You are in charge of the chemical industry. I don't blame you for being short-sighted. The strategic location of this land is relatively important. It is the western gate of Nanyang. According to the plan of the General Staff, it will be under the rule of the Ming Dynasty sooner or later.

However, their religious beliefs are quite exclusive. If they are allowed to develop, the difficulty of integration will become increasingly higher. In order to facilitate management and assimilation in the future, their royal family and religious ruling elites must be cleaned out. Killing more now will result in fewer deaths in the future.

This is also a helpless move. They are not wrong, I am not wrong, and religion is even more wrong. Everything in the world is like this. When a whale falls, everything comes to life. Even trees will compete with their neighbors for sunlight and nutrients in order to be strong. If there are gods in heaven, then killing each other is the way of heaven.

I do not need foreigners to sing praises for me, I only hope that my own people can benefit from this. When they all become citizens of the Ming Dynasty, they can eat three meals a day, live in a house that can shelter them from the wind and rain, make several new clothes every year, and their children may become respected people through hard work, they will forget all this.

Send a flag signal to the Lu Zhanwei, tell them to clean up the battlefield and leave some prisoners behind before boarding the ship. Tell them to destroy the city, not leaving any temples or related buildings, and not leaving anything with text.

My dear ministers, please do not feel sorry for the tens of thousands of people here. There is still a war in the north of the empire, and the Yarkand Kingdom is still not very stable. If you have time, you might as well think more about how to speed up the assimilation.

Compared to here, there are millions of people living there. If there is no way to change it radically, the final result may still be a river of blood. It is obvious which is more serious. "

(End of this chapter)