Anderson's works are rich enough to yield new insights and enjoyments from careful rereading and are also illuminated by comparisons with the works of authors like HG Wells, Olaf Stapledon, CS Lewis, James Blish and SM Stirling, as I hope to have demonstrated in recent posts. Stirling imparts a sense of adventure from the exploration of alternative Earths, thus renewing the familiar idea of parallel universes.
In The Avatar, I have only just begun to reread Chapter XXVII of L so we will be here for a while. However, posts about passages in Anderson's texts can transport us to other works of fantasy and sf, backwards through history or outwards into astrophysics. A recent question in the combox was whether the US and the UK were right to ally with the USSR during World War II. If those governments had decided otherwise, then history would have diverged. Do all our alternative choices and their consequences exist somewhere - including the really bad ones? We exist in one universe but Anderson and his colleagues can and do imagine many others.
27 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And serious scientists such as Hugh Everett, whom Poul Anderson mentioned in one of his letters to me, think alternate or parallel universes are at least possible. See as well the foreword discussing this idea in THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS.
So, yes, it's impossible that something like the Carolingian world of THREE HEARTS and the alternate WW I of Stirling's BLACK CHAMBER could actually exist in parallel universes. And I'm strongly inclined to agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn that it was a bad mistake of the UK and US to have allied with the USSR in the WW II of our universe. All we can say for sure is that history would have been very different if the Western Allies had refused to ally with Stalin.
Yes, if parallel universes are real, then it is possible that some alternate choices can lead to some really bad consequences. Such as in Stirling's four Draka books. So I'm very glad Anderson and successors like Stirling give us their imaginative speculations on all kinds of possibilities, good or bad.
Sean
Drat! Second paragraph, first sentence, has IMPOSSIBLE, when I meant "possible." Darn!
Sean
WWII was a close-run thing.
Stalin wasn't less evil than Hitler, but he was much more cautious -- under his rule, the USSR never, not once, initiated a conflict with a Great Power that could fight back, and he built that caution into the institutional culture of the Soviet Union.
The closest he ever came was the declaration of war against Japan in 1945, and Japan was visibly already defeated then, so he could scavenge among its Asian possessions without risk.
During the Cold War, he backed down every time there was a genuine threat of hostilities with the US. His successors followed suit.
On the other hand, Hitler was a mad adventurist in the German tradition of taking insanely risky strategic gambles, only worse. We could live with Stalin on the same planet, as long as we carefully kept our guard up.
Living with Hitler was impossible, and he couldn't be deterred. There was a broad streak of nihilistic lunacy in the whole National Socialist movement and in its intellectual sources, a rule-or-ruin welcoming of fantasies of apocalyptic destruction.
So letting Hitler beat the USSR -- which would probably have happened if we hadn't helped Stalin -- would have put us in an impossible strategic position. Germany's great weakness was always its small size and resource base. A Germany dominating everything as far as the Urals was a mortal threat, and Hitler's regime had high risk tolerance built into its bones.
We made the best of a bad set of choices.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for a very clear analysis. (I expect the discussion to continue, of course.) I can see how the Draka were "better" at what they did than either Hitler or Stalin.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I actually agree with much, even most, of what you said about Stalin and Hitler. The former was a cold blooded realist who declined to push his luck TOO far. Hitler was the opposite.
My comments about Solzhenitsyn were inadequate, or incomplete. I should have added that he was not expecting Hitler to win the War if the UK and US had not allied with the USSR. His argument was that after Operation Barabarossa began, Germany was saddled with a TWO FRONT war, with first Britain and then the US in the West, and the USSR in the East. His belief was that a Germany at war in both the west and east would have lost. Because Germany was still compelled to concentrate enormous resources in men and material of all kinds for the western front, weakening what she could do in the east.
So, Solzhenitsyn's preference would have been for the UK/US to fight Germany in the West, and refuse to ally with Stalin, fighting Hitler in the east. Solzhenitsyn expected Germany to still lose in that case--but, he thought the USSR would have been so weakened that Stalin simply would not be able to grab as much as he actually did.
I personally believe as well that the UK/US could have tried harder to save more of eastern Europe from falling into the merciless clutches of Stalin. Bulgaria, for example, might have been saved if a mere few hundred US or British troops had been sent there, to make it plain to Stalin he could not have it. It was only in 1945, after all, that the USSR invaded and occupied that unlucky country.
Sean
Solzhenitsyn overestimated Russian power, IMHO.
The Germans were attempting something at the limit of their power, so they had very little margin for error, and they did make several bad strategic mistakes.
Still, the German Army in the east -- usually about 3 million effectives -- killed or captured at least its own numbers in Red Army soldiers every single year of the war -- including the part of 1945 before the surrender. The latest estimates put Soviet -military- dead alone in the 15 million range.
The Soviets lost 300,000 men (dead, not total casualties) in the Battle of Berlin in 1945, which is more than Britain or the US lost in the entire war. By the end, they were drafting 14-year-olds and Gulag prisoners.
As for Bulgaria, a threat has to be credible to work. There was absolutely no appetite for any armed clash with the Soviets in Britain or America in 1945. The Western powers conceded nothing to Stalin that he wasn't already in a position to take. He had 6 million men in eastern Europe and he didn't have to demobilize them all as soon as the war was over, and we -did- have to demobilize.
If Germany -hadn't- made a couple of bad mistakes (diversions of effort in 1941, essentially) they would probably have beaten the USSR in 1941 and then mopped up in 1942; they came almighty close to that as it was. The Soviet state started to unravel when it looked as if Moscow would fall -- "Bolshoi Drap", as it was called, the "Big Skeddadle". If they'd had to relocate to some place in the Urals, people would probably have just stopped obeying them.
That was before it sank in that Hitler was a worse bargain than Stalin, too, of course. (Hitler and Co. planned to kill about 100 million Russians and other East Slavs, and they never made much of a secret of it, either.)
Mr Stirling,
That Stalinist caution infested the Communist Party of Great Britain while it existed. The CPGB, while it still had some influence, e.g., in the trade unions, would suddenly withdraw support from a social or political campaign that it thought was going to fail - thus, possibly, ensuring the campaign's failure! They would rather cause a defeat than be publicly associated with defeat. Some of us on the non-Stalinist left believe that we should support and be seen to support a worthy cause whether or not it is likely to succeed. The CP were one large obstacle and we are better off without them.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling and Paul,
Mr. Stirling: Your arguments here were convincing. So much so, in fact, that I have to rethink Solzhenitsyn's own views, great man tho he was. I immediately thought of Yugoslavia and Greece as the distractions which diverted German forces and resources from Operation Barbarossa. Hitler had not wanted to invade those countries, after all. The felt need to reverse an anti-German coup in Belgrade and the desire to save Mussolini's face when the Greeks were beating him were the reasons for those unwanted diversions. I can see an Operation Barbarossa succeeding if it had begun a month earlier and had been augmented with the forces diverted to Yugoslavia and Greece.
And, yes, lunatic Nazi ideas about the "sub-human" Slavs and the stupid oppression of the peoples of the western USSR were big contributing reasons for why Germany lost the war. If the Nazis had had the wit to treat the Slavs reasonably humanely, I can see Germany winning and Stalin scuttling to the Urals with the Soviet state collapsing around him. I wouldn't have been surprised if either his own entourage or a military coup soon eliminated him.
What you said about the Battle of Berlin does impress me! That, even at their last gasp, the Germans still fought so well.
But I still consider the Yalta Conference a disgrace and a stain on the good names of the UK/US. I still think it would have better if the Western Allies had tried harder to lessen Stalin's gains in eastern Europe. That was Winston Churchill's own preference (given how he hoped to save one or two brands from the Soviet fire). But I agree the political mood and stamina needed for doing so was not there, regrettably.
Paul: And you need to recall that the Western Communist parties were nearly always the fronts and catspaws of Moscow. The poliical activities of the Western parties were always guided by the Politburo's calculations on how best to use the Parties to achieve SOVIET goals.
Sean
Sean,
You are right. Yet another reason to oppose those Communist Parties.
Paul.
Paul: Stalin learned his politics in a school where defeat didn't mean "not getting what you wanted". Defeat meant -death-.
"Kto kogo", as Lenin put it: who crushes who.
Sean: as my father once said to me, quoting an old saying, "Until you've fought the Germans, you don't know what war is."
Fortunately, they're much worse at winning wars than battles. Great people for doing things, terrible at deciding what to do.
Mr Stirling,
It is unfortunate that lessons learned in such a hard school were applied completely inappropriately elsewhere.
Paul.
Not completely. Success builds on itself; generally speaking (though not always) defeat does likewise. You don't win by losing, you just lose.
Stalin and Lenin had grown up with real politics, not the stylized Kabuki dance of its Parliamentary shadow.
That sort of politics can only exist in the absence of most real political disagreement and the (often unspoken and unconscious) presence of a very high degree of consensus -- its peacefulness is an indication that nothing really fundamental is at stake.
One of the perennial faults of human beings is over-generalizing from their own experience: they mistake the particular for the universal.
One really sad example is Gandhi, who advised European Jews in the 1930's to emulate his "soul-force" nonviolent tactics. He'd grown up fighting against the 20th century British, and couldn't imagine what dealing with Hitler was like; it was outside his mental horizon. "Fish can't see water", as the saying goes.
(He was also fortunate he wasn't dealing with the great-grandparents of his British opponents, who would probably have strung him up by his thumbs and used him for target practice.)
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Brace yourself for a shock. You have more in common with a true blue Tory squire in deepest, rural England or Scotland than with Marxist-Leninists!
Mr. Stirling: I can somewhat imagine how TOUGH the Germans were as soldiers from both your books and those of Harry Turtledove. What Germany lacked were leaders prudent enough not to risk everything on a throw of the dice. They needed more Frederick II's instead of gamblers and risk takers like Hitler.
Yes, parliamentary politics works only so long as everyone concerned has enough in common with each other that political defeats don't become EXISTENTIAL threats. Once that happens, parliamentary politics breaks down. And politics risks becoming the politics of Lenin and Stalin, with DEATH for the losers.
And if the British circa 1918 had had even some of the ruthlessness of their great grandparents, Gandhi would have been hanged for treason and the Raj would probably still be ruling India!
Sean
Mr Stirling,
In STATE AND REVOLUTION, Lenin wrote that, in the workers' state, any technical expert whose loyalty was in doubt would work under the supervision of "...armed workers, men not to be trifled with."
Paul.
Paul: and Trotsky's idea of encouraging zeal among Red Army officers was to hold their families hostage and shoot them if he wasn't satisfied.
George Orwell once remarked that "bourgeois morality" was Marxist jargon for "common decency".
Mr Stirling,
By the workers' state, Lenin meant a dictatorship of the newly empowered majority over the dispossessed minority (former aristocrats and bourgeoisie), thus a mass liberation rather than a new bureaucracy.
However, I am truly alarmed by what you said about Trotsky. That is Stalinism pure and simple.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And what Mr. Stirling said about the brutality of Trotsky was even more true of Lenin. Which means I don't believe a single word of Lenin's pious protestations about working for a "mass liberation."
Sean
Mr Stirling,
Could you give me a reference for that action by Trotsky? I need to assess and re-assess what I think of him.
Thank you,
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm curious too. I already knew of Trotsky's brutality from other sources, but not of this particular incident or example.
I think you have more in common with Sir Nigel Loring than you would have with Lenin or Trotsky. Sir Nigel would have treated you far more kindly and decently than they would have.
Sean
A Lancaster comrade said he read something similar somewhere - but he asked me to check the source!
Kaor, Paul!
I did find something of interest about Trotsky in Robert K. Massie's book NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA (Dell, sixth printing, October 1972) on pages 519-20. After returning to Moscow following the fall of Ekaterinburg to the White Russians during the Civil War, Trotsky was informed by Sverdlov of how Lenin and Company had ordered the murder of the Russian royal family. To quote Trotsky: "I did not ask any further questions and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient [that word again!] but necessary. The severity of the summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin...This Lenin sensed well."
The smug callousness shown here by Trotsky makes it very believable that he indeed ordered the families of Red Army officers were held hostage to ensure that these officers showed sufficient zeal.
Sean
Sean,
Thank you.
Paul.
"On 29 July 1918, he [Trotsky] announced that former officers who refused to serve would be placed in concentration camps. On 30 September he issued an order to use the hostage system to prevent the officers from betraying the Red Army. He knew that even the threat of capital punishment could not act as a deterrent to officers at the front, so he ordered that a register of officers’ families be kept, so that a would-be traitor would know that if he went over to the enemy his wife and children would stay behind as hostages."
[This is a paraphrase of Trotsky's own memoirs, "My Life". New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930.]
Likewise, Lenin knew perfectly well, for example, that the food requisitions in the Volga area in 1920 were going to produce famine, and only very reluctantly let Hoover's relief committee supply food to the starving -- and he had nearly everyone in the committee which invited Hoover in exiled or shot afterward.
If you read Lenin's unexpurgated letters -- which only became widely available after the Soviet archives were opened after 1991 -- it's a litany of blood; hang, shoot, terrorize, take away their food, etc. You can hear the grinding teeth and the lust for suffering in every line. This was a man who lived by and for hatred.
A close acquaintance of Lenin's once remarked that he regarded actual living human beings very much as a furnace operator viewed iron ore: as raw material. Trotsky referred to humans as "evil tailless apes". The 'new man' would have value: people as they actually existed had none.
Stalin did absolutely nothing that Lenin hadn't done: he just did more of it, because he was in power longer and had less internal opposition once he'd secured his position.
Basically, to be a Bolshevik you had to make a conscious decision that there was no morality except the advancement of the party's agenda, and that anything -- absolutely anything -- was justified if it furthered that aim.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you. I have read Trotsky's HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION and THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED and books about him but not his autobiography. I notice that the paraphrase mentions "hostages" although it stops short of saying that they would be killed. Still, "hostages," whatever you do with them, are not a good idea. And, if he did go over to killing them, then that would cross a clear line into the morally and politically unacceptable.
I remember a Chilean general interviewed on TV saying that anything goes in civil war. I thought then that, in the unlikely event that he ever became my prisoner in such a conflict, then he would not be tortured or summarily executed - if I had any say in the matter.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling and Paul,
Mr. Stirling: I agree, what you said about Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc., fits in what I have read myself about their cruelty, callousness, fanaticism. Stalin merely extended and completed what Lenin had started--and Trotsky would have been no better if he had won the struggle for power after Lenin's death.
Paul: but the mere fact that Trotsky ordered that lists of hostages be drawn up to know whom to have shot if any Red Army officers defected to the White Russians strongly indicates he would indeed have had them shot. Else there would be no point in having such records.
You would very likely have been shot yourself by Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin precisely because of being a genuine moderate. The only other alternative would have been to be as cruel and fanatical as they were.
I disagree with the Chilean general. Not EVERYTHING or anything should be allowed in a civil war. Precisely because civil wars can be even more ferocious than a war between two rival nations, all the more effort should be made to control, restrain, and lessen the brutality.
Sean
Sean,
I agree that lists of hostages sounds like a very bad idea. Trotskyists rightly condemn Stalin for going after Trotsky's family.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Then the Trotskyists should be consistent and condemn Trotsky for having those lists of hostages drawn up. It's very plain he was willing to threaten hostages with death to deter Red Army officers from defecting. Stalin merely did more SUCCESSFULLY what Trotsky was willing to do.
Sean
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