Ensign Flandry, CHAPTERs THREE and ELEVEN.
At a Merseian family gathering:
"Everything dissolved in shouts, laughter, pounding of backs, twining of tails, music from a record player and a ring-dance over the floor."
-THREE, p. 28.
Just when we begin to think that they sound too human, we read "...twining of tails..." But they do sound very human. Will some readers think, "They can't be all bad..."? If we saw Nazis enjoying a party, we would have to remember that they were Nazis. I remember my mother looking at a photograph of Russians sharing a joke on the street and saying, "They can't all be devils." Who said they were?
Later, Dominic Flandry, while on Merseia, learns that:
"The Merseians were not the antlike monsters which Terran propaganda depicted. They'd never have come as far as this, or be as dangerous as they were, had that been the case."
-ELEVEN, p. 107.
So the Terran Empire is badly misinforming its citizens.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I would not believe all Merseians are personally evil monsters! Not even all of Stirling's monstrous Draka are like that. But that doesn't mean there can't be evil ideas and beliefs informing or shaping cultures.
The Terran propaganda mentioned here is probably be what is to be expected at the lower end of information campaigns. I've seen anti German propaganda of WW I times just as ludicrous. Needless to say, I'm sure there were Terran critiques of Merseia which were just as hard hitting when necessary, but also far more nuanced and thoughtful.
Ad astra! Sean
Identity requires opposition — there is no “us” without a “them”, those who are “not us”.
I’ve made a study of ethnonyms, the titles people give their own group.
The commonest single one is “the People” — meaning, us People, you Not-People. Dinneh, which is what the Navaho and Apache call themselves, means exactly that: so did “Deutsch”, originally.
A close runner-up is something meaning “Friends, allies” (as opposed to “enemies”) — the Welsh and Sioux both call themselves words meaning that (Cymry and Lakota, respectively).
Then there are the boasts and preening: Aryan means “Free, noble people” (as opposed to “you base slave people”). French is from Frank, which means exactly the same thing — “free people”. Saxon means “guys with big knives” (so don’t try to screw with us, you wimps).
Further down the lists come geographical descriptors: “people from X”.
Group names for the neighbors, on the other hand, are almost always gross insults: Welsh is from an Old English word meaning “slave”; Apache is a Zuni word and means “the enemy”; the Slavic word for German-speaker is literally “the tongue-tied babblers”; Sioux is an English mispronunciation of a French mispronunciation of a Ojibwa word (roughly, nadiwisioux) meaning “treacherous snakes”; Eskimo is a Cree word meaning “disgusting raw meat eaters”, and so forth and so on.
Mr Stirling,
I think that "barbari" (barbarians) originally meant people who spoke neither Greek nor Latin and therefore sounded as if they were saying, "Bah-bah-bah."
We have become most familiar with geographical identities although there are social antagonisms within each territory.
Paul.
Paul: primary-group identifications have become steadily bigger over historic time, because the speed and frequency of contacts has gotten bigger.
When primary groups were small — little bands, clans, tribes — things like language were often not used as group identifiers because there was little consciousness of people who -didn’t- share those characteristics. Not enough contact.
An English traveler in a very remote part of the Hungarian Carpathians in the 1930’s ran across an old shepherd who asked his traveling companion (a Hungarian) why the stranger talked funny (the Englishman’s Magyar was elementary). The dialogue went roughly:
“He’s not a Magyar.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s a foreigner.”
Pause for thought, then: “What’s a foreigner?”
By then that was exceptional even in a very, very isolated part of Eastern Europe, but the further you go back the more common it would be.
Over time primary groups have gotten larger because that means they can compete better and because the interaction sphere gets larger so that they need to, but stretching it makes it more unstable.
BTW, the “Barbarian” thing originally applied to all non-Greek-speakers; the Romans more or less forced the Greeks to include them, much against their inclinations.
Greeks were notoriously reluctant to learn other languages — Cleopatra’s Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt for centuries, but she was the first member of it ever to learn to speak Egyptian (and a number of other languages, including Latin) and was considered an eccentric prodigy because she did.
In the Roman Empire, Latin aristocrats were all bilingual in Latin and Greek — they found Greek-speaking pedagogues to teach their children young. Greek-speakers rarely returned the favor, unless they absolutely had to.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I was amused by how "Saxon" meant "guys with big knives"!
Cleopatra might have have been the first of the Ptolemies to learn the Egyptian language, but her forebears were not indifferent to the need to be conciliatory to Egyptians. The Ptolemaic kings were careful to stay on good terms with the Egyptian priests and Ptolemy V was the first of his dynasty to be crowned according to the Egyptian style and form.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it’s derived from “seax” — literally, “large dagger, short sword”, the Saxon national weapon, rather like a Bowie knife.
There’s an old story, quite possibly true, that Hengist (founder of the first Saxon kingdom in England-to-be, in Kent) took the British/Welsh leader Vortigern prisoner at a supposed peace conference. The Saxons had come supposedly unarmed, but each had his Seax under his cloak. At the appropriate moment, Hengist shouted “Show them our Saxons!” Out came the knives...
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