Chunderban Desai and Ivar Frederiksen are the viewpoint characters of their respective passages until they meet when it has to be one or the other so it is Desai, signaling the triumph of his point of view. When Desai is trying to have the fugitive Ivar apprehended, which of them do we identify or sympathize with? Perhaps each as we read about him. Poul Anderson shows the Terran Empire as good guys or as bad guys in different instalments of the Technic History. Issues become ambiguous when Dominic Flandry participates as chief of Intelligence in the conquest of Brae.
The good guys-bad guys issue needs to be explored through historical fiction, e.g.:
a German Nazi versus a Russian Communist during World War II
a Native American versus a settler
a Cavalier versus a Roundhead
Trilogy: Cavalier as hero of Volume I; Roundhead as hero of Volume II; Volume III?
Poul Anderson has a Cavalier hero in an alternative history.
The issue here is not where our sympathies lie but what is our understanding of both sides. Garth Ennis wrote a war comic in which a Spanish Republican, an English socialist, a Luftwaffe pilot and an Irish Fascist, none of them armed, swap stories while sheltering in a bomb crater during a battle of the Spanish Civil War and I did not expect to wind up writing about that.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And my sympathies would be with Desai and the Empire he served. Not too terribly bad is always better than an impossible perfection.
I agree about ambiguities like Brae. Which reminded me of what Stirling said, using the British Empire as an example, any large domain is going to have both bad and good things happening. What needs doing is trying to reduce/penalize such incidents, not smash up everything.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
No, don't smash up everything...
Paul.
One thing that has to be kept in mind is that the entire world (with some minor exceptions on recently-settled islands) is a palimpsest of endless conquests and migrations.
Eg., in 1876 the US government took the Black Hills in South Dakota from the Sioux by force.
In 1776, the Sioux took it from the Cheyenne, also by force.
"Sioux" is an English mispronunciation of a French mispronunciation of an Anishinaabe word meaning "Treacherous Little Snakes", which was their term for the Sioux/Lakota, who they drove out of the Great Lakes country.
So it goes, so it goes, so it goes.
Humans aren't indigenous to anywhere except Africa; we're an invasive weed species. And nobody is native to anywhere except the place they're born, and nobody born in a place is any more native than anyone else born there.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: The problem, however, is how so many radicals want to do just that, smash everything, regardless of the agonies and chaos that always comes from a violent smashing of an old, long established regime. And regardless of how often a successor gov't turns out to be worse than its predecessor.
Mr. Stirling: Human beings are warlike, aggressive, quarrelsome. And I've seen no reason to expect that to change.
Ad astra! Sean
We, hopefully, have an indefinite future of social and technological development ahead of us. Of course things will change. As conscious, volitional beings, we have some say in the matter.
If you list "warlike, aggressive, quarrelsome," then you also have to add "peace-making, cooperative and compassionate." Otherwise, your account is absurdly one-sided.
"smash everything, regardless of the agonies and chaos that always comes from a violent smashing"
See what Trump and his supporters want to do.
It's worth looking at regulations and gov't departments and thinking about which do more harm than good, but wholesale dismantling is probably a bad idea.
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: I agree both sets of qualities exist within many human beings. I would note that cooperation to make more effective use of violence also occurs.
Jim: Millions of Americans are furious at the Democrats and their bungling or insane policies. That encourages exaggerations like "draining the swamp."
That said, I was talking about actual violence, of the kind seen in bloody revolutions and civil wars. Like the hideous French and Russian revolutions.
Like it not, Trump will have to work within the US political system. More than one President has lamented how hard it was to get things done.
Ad astra! Sean
In Russia, most of the violence was in the Civil War after the Revolution.
Kaor, Paul!
I disagree, the Russian Civil War was a part of the Revolution. Even in as early as November of 1917 opposition to the monstrous Lenin, in both right and left, was taking shape. And Lenin's dictatorial ambitions were plain as early as December, when the first Soviet secret police "organ," the Cheka, under "Iron Feliks" Dherzinski, was set up. The Bolshevik suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 was the signal for armed resistance to the new tyrant.
Unfortunately, the enemies of the Bolsheviks, in left and right, made political and military mistakes nullifying the early advantages they had against them. By the time a really able leader arose in early 1920 to command the White Russians, Peter Wrangel, it was too late, despite the sweeping political, social, and diplomatic reforms and concessions he made. Even so, it was still a tough fight, with Wrangel even driving back the Bolsheviks for a time.
And Wrangel's evacuation of Sevastopol and the Crimean peninsula in November 1920 was a military masterpiece, despite the inferior resources available to him.
Ad astra! Sean
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