"Trevelyan saw that the fliers had a heavy retractable rifle in the nose and machine guns and missile tubes in the air fins.
"Earth thought it had achieved peace, said his mind grayly, and now this has bloomed again between the stars." (p. 51)
Must it be like that? An expanding volume of peaceful space but with a frontier where at least precautions against violence remain necessary? The Nomads are explorers and traders, not pirates or conquerors, but they have learned to travel armed. A peaceful civilization with a permanent frontier might be the best deal that mankind can get from the universe.
2 comments:
Thing is, it takes the united will of two to make peace, but only the will of one to make war.
If someone decides to make war on you, you're at war utterly irrespective of your own wishes, desires or beliefs -- the only question now is who wins and who has to submit to the will of the victor.
And of course the easiest way to end up at war by someone else's choice is to look like an easy victim.
Hence the Roman saying: 'Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.'(*)
"Therefore let him who desires peace, prepare for war."
There is (usually) no war within the boundaries of a sovereign State, but that's because the State is the institution which claims and enforces a monopoly of organized violence within its territory; and as Max Weber put it, violence is always the -ultimately- decisive means of political action.
Essentially, war and politics are simply aspects of the same thing, and there is and can be no human existence without politics, because we're a social, hence political, animal.
(*)by Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus
Kaor, Paul!
Mr. Stirling's comments above were far superior to what I had been planning to write. Briefly, a civilization could be peacefully expanding, and it could still end meeting aggressive and hostile outsiders. And it makes ordinary, simple SENSE for the scouts and explorers of that civilization to be armed, just in case!
So Trevelyan Micah was being naive.
And I liked how Stirling quoted from Flavius Vegetius' DE RE MILITARI, which I too have read.
Ad astra! Sean
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