Whereas Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry is the titular character of Agent of The Terran Empire:
"Entire companies of the Emperor's most diabolical soldiers - trolls, giants and worse - were tasked with [the wolf's] capture or destruction."
-Bill Willingham, Fables: Legends in Exile (New York, 2012), p. 130.
- and:
"'There's thirty, forty men with guns all coming for us. Imperial soldiers, what's more.'"
-Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (London, 1998), 14, p. 308.
So which side are we on? Usually, when reading fiction, on the side of our hero but which side is he on?
"'Why do you stand with Josip? You know what he is.'"
-The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 475.
It is possible to appreciate Anderson's fiction while not always agreeing with his heroes. And, meanwhile, we have to take sides in real life with no author to point the way.
13 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And we already know why Flandry remained loyal to Josip, despite his private contempt for that Emperor. He was standing by a principle which can take different forms and which I discussed in much greater detail in my article "Political Legitimacy In The Thought of Poul Anderson." And I agree with that principle!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Once hostilities started, if I were an Aenean, I would have supported MacCormac.
It seems that Josip committed treason if he connived with Snelund as described but proving it would have been a different matter.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I hope I would not, and make the same choice as Admiral Pickens, to remain loyal to Josip. The urgent need would have been to defend the principle of legitimacy.
I see what you mean about Josip, and another point to consider is how much of what Snelund was doing was even understood by him? Josip is often described as being not very intelligent, to say the least!
Last, I'm sure many quietly hoped that whoever was Josip's heir presumptive would make a far better Emperor, even tho his name was never mentioned in the stories. Alas, as we know from A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS, "the legitimate order of succession dissolved in chaos" soon after Josip's death.
Ad astra! Sean
One aspect of the decay of empires is that they often compel people to tolerate things (and people) that they really don't want to.
You might describe the "big cosmopolitan empire" and the "nation-state" as two phase-states of matter which can shift rapidly -- and violently -- between one and the other.
Eg., the decay of the Ottoman Empire was accompanied by drastic ethnic-religious "sorting", usually accomplished by massacre and expulsion.
There used to be a joke that if you put a chameleon on a color-coded ethnographic map of the area between the Baltic and the Bosphorus, the poor beast would explode from the stress of trying to take on the colors beneath it.
That isn't the case anymore.
Eg., Greeks were a minority group in what's now Greece in 1820, when the wars of independence began; more Greeks lived in Anatolia then than in what's now mainland Greece... where as of today, the population is about 98% Greek.
Likewise, in the early 20th century Anatolia was around 40% Christian (mostly Armenian, Greek and Chaldaean); currently, less than 1%.
What's now the Republic of Armenia is 99% Armenian (including Nagorno-Karabakh and the stretch of connecting territory taken from Azerbaijan in the 1990's). That proportion was less than half a century ago.
Empires stop people from doing what they want -- and it turns out one of the things they really, really want to do is kill the neighbors they don't like.
Eg., when the Greek revolt against their Ottoman oppressors started in 1820, it was widely noted that one of the first things Greeks did when they didn't have to worry about Ottoman troops any more was to pick up a gun, or knife, or scythe, or just a rock, and spontaneously run to kill the nearest Turk (or Muslim of any description).
The Muslims were perfectly aware that this was what the Greeks would do: at the first sign of Ottoman weakness, they stampeded for the nearest fort.
The only place where the old street-by-street, village-by-village "coexistence" of Greeks and Turks remained was in Cyprus, where British imperial power directly succeeded Ottoman imperial power. When that broke down in the 1950's, Greeks and Turks immediately started killing each other.
That ended only with the Turkish invasion of 1973, when the island was partitioned... and all the Greeks ran out of the Turkish zone (or were killed) and all the Turks ran out of the Greek-Cypriot zone (or were killed).
Plenty of other examples from everywhere under the sun -- India in 1948, for instance.
Oh, and another example of the same thing: in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Austrian imperial power directly succeeded Ottoman, the pre-independence Balkan mixture was preserved, and then it was succeeded by the Yugoslav mini-empire.
When that finally broke down in the 1990's, it freed the locals to do what they'd always wanted -- kill until there was nobody left in the neighborhood but people like them, as had happened in Greece and Serbia proper and Bulgaria much earlier.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
if the Austro/Hungarian and British empires, Yugoslavia, and even (sometimes) the brutal Ottomans kept people of opposing faiths and nationalities from killing each other, that was a good thing! And I regret how the Greeks of the war of Independence showed so little mercy to their Muslim oppressors. Christians should be better than that!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that's the orthodox approach.
OTOH, the result of the Greek-Turkish mutual expulsions (called a "population exchange") that culminated in the 1920's has been a century of profound peace.
The only place Turks and Greeks kept killing each other was Cyprus -- and that stopped when a similar arrangement was imposed in the 1970's, following which there has been... peace.
Likewise, after 1945, 11,000,000 ethnic Germans were expelled from eastern Europe into what became east and west Germany, and probably another million or so were massacred in the process. At the same time, Poland was shifted west, and became 98% Polish (as opposed to about 60% in 1939), and similar things took place throughout the region.
The result? Also peace.
There are many situations in which moving the people is the least bad solution. Trying to make groups that hate each other live next door may work under an empire -- which usually involves one group -dominating- the others -- but it rarely works well in an era of mass politics and nation-states.
Eg., when Bulgaria became independent in the 1870's, it started with a Bulgarian uprising against the Turks -- accompanied by the Bulgars, who'd been treated like dirt for centuries, killing any Turk or Muslim they could.
The Turks responded by massacres of their own (accompanied by plunder and rape), often carried out by Circassians, Muslim refugees from the Caucasus expelled by the Russians and settled in Bulgaria by the Turks.
This became widely known in Europe as the "Bulgarian Horrors"; Gladstone revitalized his career by agitating the issue.
The Russians intervened (the Ottomans were quite capable of suppressing the Bulgarians on their own) and the cycle continued until the Balkan Wars, each increase in Bulgarian territory or independence accompanied by more ethnic cleansing.
Bulgaria under the Ottomans was 40-50% Muslim; the existence of a Bulgarian nation-state simply wasn't compatible with that demographic balance.
About 40% of Turkey's population today is composed of descendants of refugees driven out by the resurgent Christian nationalities during the Balkan Reconquista of 1820-1920 -- and of course the same thing had happened in Spain during the Reconquista there.
Trying to make people who hate each other live next to each other is sort of futile.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As always, your comments are interesting and thought provoking. And I do see the point that if different kinds of people hate each other so much they REFUSE to live together in peace, separating one or the other is probably the best solution. The problem being that this separation of peoples is so seldom VOLUNTARY, that it is usually done via brutal genocides and expulsions a la the Bulgarian Horrors or the Armenian Genocide. Since I recoil from such methods, I'll settle for an empire like, say, Austria-Hungary or the British Raj in India enforcing peace on everybody. An imperfect solution is better than massacres!
Ad astra! Sean
Paul, Sean, Mr Stirling,
I'm always presenting myself as a Swede on this blog, but my dad was actually from Spain. To my mind, and despite it's often brutal history and recent troubles, Spain is the proof that it is perfectly possible for different nationalities to live in peace together, as long as they are not infected with nationalism.
I would argue Spain is not a nation-state, but a State of nations. It began from the outset as a multinational state, melded together by dynastic union and unfied on the basis of religion, rather than imposed nationality (as was the case with most European nation-states).
Of all the component nations, it was only Catalonia that became increasingly unhappy under the Crown of Spain, but this turned violent only in the XVII century, and their grievances were mainly (as they are today) economic. There was no ethnic opression (except against Jews and Moors in the XV-XVII centuries) in Spain until the XX century. In contrast, and perhaps surprisingly so given the later troubles, the basque's relationship with the Crown was harmonious up until the mid XIX century. When civil wars erupted (between liberals and conservatives) at first in the XIX century, the basques and Navarrans were among the most conservative monarchical supporters. Likewise another ethnic group, the Galicians.
The rot began in the mid XIX century with the spread of the nationalist ideology, the idea that each ethnic group must have a nation of its own. Then the basques began chafing, the Catalans started dressing their grievances in ethnic terms and the dominant Castilians themselves started to think for the first time about imposing their culture on others. Still, Spain's civil wars were mostly ideological, between left and right, liberal and conservative, socialist and fascist during the XIX and XX centuries, even if there was an nationlist dimension to the 1936-39 civil war.
Only after that war, under Franco, who was BTW a Galician, although he ruled like a Castillian supremacist nationalist, did ethnic oppression occur in Spain, never before, and it continues to this day although since the death of Franco mainly of minorities against majorities. It is in Catalonia and the Basque country that the local language is imposed by force against Castilian-speakers, not the other way around. But even so, the fantastic variety that is Spain remains, as do the good relations between most of the composing nationalities, Catalans remaining the main exception and the basques to a much lesser degree.
Without the poisonous ideology of nationalism, there is no reason to suppose the previous harmony could not have continued.
All countries of Europe, the present "nation-states" like France, Italy or Germany, were once more or less like Spain, with many nationalities living mostly in peace with each other. In each those countries the nation-state project crushed these nationalities to impose a mostly artficial common national culture on each, and added to insult to injure by later pretending these construct nationalities are ancient and natural. IMHO, Europe is much the poorer for it.
Kaor, Johan!
I did wonder about your name "Ortiz," which did not seem very Scandinavian to me! (Smiles)
Yes, what we call "Spain" began as largely a confederation of once independent states united by a common loyalty to a single sovereign. Even Catalonia, once called "Aragon," had multiple states: the Kingdom of Aragon, the Principality of Barcelona, and the Kingdom of Valencia. What united them was the crown of Aragon, with the individual parts retaining their own laws and parliaments.
I agree that attempts to enforce a common "national" culture on different peoples in countries like Spain, France, et al, is more likely to do harm, not good.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Sean!
I'm going to have to correct you on one thing though, "Aragón" is not an old name for Catalonia, The County of Barcelona is. Aragón was a much larger Kingdom centred on the current province of Aragón, with it's capital in Zaragoza. It was always, and is still Castilian-speaking. And we Ortizes hail from there originally! :)
It's worth mentioning to underscore that even the Castilian-speaking parts of Spain are not culturally homogenous. There is as much difference between Asturias in the North and Andalucia in the south as between, say Conneticut and Alabama.
Kaor, Johan!
Thanks for the correction re "Aragon." I did know the union of Aragon and Barcelona came from the daughter of the king of Aragon marrying the Count of Barcelona. Valencia came later, during the Reconquest from the Moors.
Certainly, I would expect some differences among the Castilian speaking parts of Spain: Galicia, Asturias, Old Aragon proper, Castile itself, Andalusia, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
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