His legal rights are removed by the declaration of martial law, he is physically restrained, the sf device of an infallible lie detector is used to extract the truth and he disappears from the narrative. The atrocities that this man has ordered are so sickening that many readers probably enjoy reading about the measures taken against him. While agreeing that, in such circumstances, the measures would be necessary, I nevertheless found the account distasteful, anti-climactic and somewhat implausible. I would expect less unanimity in a political assembly. There would be oppositionists who were not involved with terrorism. Of those, some would back the emergency measures while others would not. Senators would, with equal confidence and appeals to evidence, argue for flatly contradictory versions of the facts in the case. Politics is like that: complicated and uncertain. In emergencies, it is necessary to cut through a great deal of confusion but the confusion would exist in the first place.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Now that you pointed it out, I agree the Spartan Senate showed a little too much unanimity a little too quickly once the crisis point of having to make a decision NOW came on them. There would indeed have been some Senators who would have supported the terrorists political front man no matter what, from either fanaticism or unwillingness to accept hard facts. In other words, confusion.
It's been a long time since I read either GO TELL THE SPARTANS or PRINCE OF SPARTA, but I did not think the lie detector machine being used that implausible. If my memory is correct, it seemed simply a more accurate version of the polygraph machines we have now (which also measures how one's body reacts to answering questions falsely or truthfully). It's my understanding that even our current polygraph devices are very accurate when skillfully used by experts.
Sean
From the Wikipedia article on the 'polygraph'
"Assessments of polygraphy by scientific and government bodies generally suggest that polygraphs are highly inaccurate, may easily be defeated by countermeasures, and are an imperfect or invalid means of assessing truthfulness."
That said, it seems plausible some future development might result in a way to determine whether what someone says it what s/he actually believes. Which isn't of course necessarily what is actually true.
Kaor, Jim!
Now I'm uncertain. I THOUGHT a well designed and used polygraph machine could give accurate results, these days, more often than not.
I agree with your suggestion, advances in technology had made polygraphy more accurate by late Co-Dominium times. Allowing for your caveat that the person being interrogated might be in error in what he thinks is true.
Ad astra! Sean
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