Kinds of Regimes
democracies or dictatorships
real or sham democracies
flexible or inflexible regimes
Poul Anderson's Merseian Roidhunate and SM Stirling's Domination of the Draka cannot change their basic policies. The Roidhunate regards diplomacy as war by other means. Thus, in war or peace, the goals remain racial supremacy and galactic domination. Clearly, Terrestrial Intelligence needs to know this. If Merseian peace negotiators were honest, then they would require a reciprocal response. However, Anderson shows us that such an approach to the Merseians would be fatal. But this is fiction. In real life, how many intelligence services learn their enemies' real motivations and how many instead are driven by the ideological presuppositions of their own ruling elites? I suspect that there are more of the latter.
The Draka cannot invade North America immediately. Therefore, they expect their grandchildren or great-grandchildren to do so, and plan accordingly. There is no way that any vote in the Draka Assembly will change this:
"'...if there's one thing the Eurasian War showed so's even a Yankee couldn't miss it, it was exactly what the Domination is an' what we intend. The Alliance will hold; we may be able to convince a few useful idiots of our peaceful intent, but not enough to matter. Pity.'"
-SM Stirling, Under The Yoke (New York, 1989), p. 115.
Useful idiots? Knowing that that was what they thought would certainly harden positions against them.
On Merseia and in Drakia, education incorporating military training is one practical application of a supremacist philosophy, the only difference being that Merseian females do not fight...
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I am flattered that my essay "Was The Domination Inspired By Merseia?" had so much influence with you! Yes, for Merseia diplomacy was indeed simply a means of waging war by other methods when it wasn't prudent to openly attack the Empire. That idea goes straight back to Carl von Clausewitz's classic ON WAR. Diplomacy is the means chosen by strong powers for advancing its interests when open war was too costly.
There are two kinds of Great Powers: status quo powers or revolutionary powers. That is, a Great Power which is trying to preserve some kind of international order and another Power striving to upset that order. The US has been the Hegemon of the Western world since WW II, and till the disastrous administration of Obama, had mostly managed to maintain some kind of order in a chaotic world. The USSR and now Putin's Russia has been trying to upset that order, to advance their own ambitions. And other revolutionary powers are Iran, fanatical Muslim jihadists in the Islamic State, China, etc., also desire to upset the order maintained by the US.
Yes, I agree, given the dominant philosophies or ideologies we see in the Roidhunate and the Domination, no true peace was possible with them. Recall how Commander Abrams said in ENSIGN FLANDRY that the best the Empire could do was to hold the line against Merseia, to refuse to let its aggression go unchallenged, to gradually wear down Merseia. That was the policy the Alliance for Democracy should have followed in Stirling's Draka books.
Unfortunately, there ARE real world useful idiots who denied or minimized the dangers we faced from Hitler's Germany, the USSR, Putin's Russia, fanatical jihadists, etc. And Poul Anderson has useful idiots in his Terran Empire stories who persistently denied or minimized the danger posed by the Roidhunate. Lord Hauksberg, whom we see in ENSIGN FLANDRY, being one of them.
While it is possible a nation's intelligence service's analysis of what it discovers about other powers might be warped by the ideas and beliefs of their leaders, I don't think that is always the case. The USSR's global ambitions, at least till the death of Brezhnev, were very real and no secret. And Iran's rulers have openly and repeatedly said their goal is the destruction of the US.
I don't know if you are aware of this, but it has been revealed over the past few weeks that the Obama Administration PRESSURED its intelligence services to revise analyses in ways that fits in what the President desires, and NOT what the intelligence services tried to report what it believed was actually going around the world. Iow, the President wanted his spies to LIE to him!!!
Sean
Meanwhile I would regard anyone opposing nuclear power as a useful idiot for tyrannical regimes that get much of their income from exporting fossil fuels, eg: Putin's Russia & before that the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia & Iran etc.
To the extent that we use fossil fuels for things that are hard to do with anything else, I am inclined to agree with the author of 'Ethical Oil' that we should get it from democratically run regions, his example being Alberta Canada.
As for Obama pressuring the intelligence services to 'lie to him'. I hadn't heard that, but I did later hear that about Trump.
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