Of Americans who as private citizens affiliated with China, none was more enthusiastic than Agnes Smedley, perpetual seeker of the just polity. Having survived childhood hardships, she gravitated to American radicalism, then later to the idea of revolution exemplified by Mao’s Shaanxi outpost, Yan’an. Profoundly nonconformist, this non-doctrinal leftist had persevered in China since 1928. Her future and China’s were never more entwined than after Japan invaded. She stayed on until infirmity obliged her to leave in spring 1941. “I could not imagine spending my life outside of China,” she afterward said. To that avowal, she added as a matter of fact, “I always forgot that I was not a Chinese myself.” Meanwhile, bereft of reliable domestic allies and unable to repel Japan, Chiang Kai-shek sought help where he could. This reposed partly in an unlikely military air war adviser, former US Army officer Claire Lee Chennault.

This chapter estimates the distribution of cases among the categories of stasis established in Chapter 9, as well as two additional subcategories, using a blend of qualitative and (especially) quantitative analysis. Broadly speaking, it shows that only a miniscule minority of staseis involved the most extreme type of violence (internal war); that a larger minority involved less-extreme-but-still-bloody forms of violence, such as mass executions and battles; and that a majority relied exclusively on types of violence that limited the number of fatalities, such as assassinations, betrayals, and expulsions.

This chapter compares stasis to the modern conceptual category with which it is most commonly associated: bellum civile, or civil war. It focuses primarily on the “original” civil wars of the first century BCE but also considers subsequent cases that are similar in scale, duration, and the types of violence involved. Against existing scholarship, which tends to conflate stasis with modern conceptual categories, including but not limited to civil war, it argues that stasis was a historically distinctive phenomenon that differs fundamentally from its analogues in both ancient and modern societies.

In tandem with German restoration, all Europe would benefit, claimed Nazi votaries. Wielding shield and sword, Hitler would protect the deserving from scheming Jewry, Soviet menace, and Marxist nihilism, a proposition eventually winning adherents abroad. These included some US citizens, such as the designer and architect Philip Johnson. In July 1944, Wehrmacht officers tried to dispose of Hitler. By this action, they also hoped to retrieve Germany’s reputation and their personal honor. The martyrdom of Claus von Stauffenberg and associates after the coup’s failure was a sacrifice to idealism, ultimately conducive to Germany’s moral rebuilding. More regenerative than belated efforts by military men were the doings of the Kreisau Kreis, the White Rose students, and the Red Orchestra. These groups testified by their deeds to moral laws, survivable even in the Third Reich. Scholarly Mildred Fish-Harnack, an American in Germany, joined the anti-Nazi underground in the 1930s. Fish-Harnack’s decision to resist cost her life. Arrested in late summer 1942 with her German husband, Arvid Harnack, she was guillotined in Berlin’s Plotzensee Prison on 16 February 1943.

This chapter presents a set of stasis-narratives that flesh out the abstract discussion provided in Chapter 1. The narratives focus on the poleis of Plataia, Elis, Rhodos, Thebes, Tegea, Argos, and Telos, and are based primarily on the following sources: Thucydides (Plataia), the Oxyrhynchus Historian (Rhodos), Xenophon (Elis, Thebes, and Tegea), Aineias the Tactician (Argos), and IG XII.4.132 (Telos).