Earth is still divided into armed nation states and one of them might acquire a monopoly of superior alien technology. A US Colonel says:
"'...if I had my druthers, America would acquire the monopoly. I think we can better be trusted than anyone else - maybe because I feel more at home among Americans.'" (p. 66)
Non sequitur. Of course the Americans, or any other country, can be trusted to use military superiority to ensure their own economic and strategic dominance.
Doctor Who began as a children's TV series but came to be watched by University students. The Brigadier (see image) once said that one single country had to be entrusted with strategically crucial information and of course Britain was the most trusted country. University students laughed. School children probably didn't. Was this nationalist propaganda for children, satire for students or both?
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I have some sympathy for the US Colonel and the UK Brigadier! Compared to the grim despotisms in Russia or China, I would far prefer either the US or UK to have this kind of monopoly. However flawed and imperfect we are, I still argue the regimes in those countries are at least more PREFERABLE than the others.
Sean
Sean,
The democracies have allied themselves with some horrendous tyrannies and have waged some very destructive wars.
I do not agree that comparing ourselves with the worst is the right way to assess our own performance. A local man has been convicted of murder. I have not. But I have performed some very wrong actions, nevertheless.
Paul.
Basically, everyone -should- trust their own tribe first. Not least because other members of your tribe will be more concerned for you than for strangers, so it makes excellent practical sense.
Kaor, Paul!
It is too true that the UK and US allied, for example, with the monstrous Stalin during WW II. Mr. Stirling convinced that, at least in this case, our two countries really didn't have much choice except to choke down the alliance with Stalin.
And I still disagree. It is legitimate to compare ourselves to the worse, not only to show how much less bad we are, but also to remind ourselves of the need to be better. Unlike Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the UK/US did not exterminate people by the millions in order to be ideologically pure. That should still count for something.
Sean
Sean,
I had in mind more recent alliances and wars.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I would argue the same reasoning applies. While the successors of Stalin were less intensely blood thirsty, they were still a grim, callous lot running a monstrous regime claiming, at least formally, the right to conquer the world for Marxism. They still engaged in a rivalry with the US and its allies up to and including proxy wars fought by their respective clients.
Were some of the clients of the US unsavory? Yep! And a US which felt herself threatened by the USSR concluded it didn't really have much choice except to accept some unsatisfactory allies if that was what it needed to do to counteract Soviet intrigues. It was not until Brezhnev died and Ronald Reagan's own policies began to take effect that the Soviet pressure finally slackened.
Sean
"High Stalinism" was unsustainable; it was quite literally reducing the population of the USSR. And it was too high-stress for the ruling elements, the nomenklatura.
The first thing they agreed on (after Beria was overthrown and shot) was that in future the upper echelons wouldn't kill each other. Losers in scuffles at the top would get a posting to Outer Mongolia or a retirement dacha in the Crimea.
They also gradually disbanded the Gulag. The Soviet regime remained brutally oppressive and sometimes quite arbitrary, but after the mid-1950's the sort of wholesale "actions" that had been a feature of the 1920's and even more the 1930's and 40's were discontinued.
Stalin didn't send opponents to insane asylums; he just tortured and killed them, and millions of possibly-might-be-opponents, on the "death solves all problems; no man, no problem" maxim.
But by no coincidence, as the mass terror faded, so did the system's ability to get anything done, and the always-present corruption got completely out of hand. By the 1980's, satraps in Central Asia were building themselves grotesque palaces and throwing their personal enemies to tigers in pits, and everything was for sale.
One of the extraordinary features of humanity is the ability to do great evil in the name of great good. Thus:
burn people in the name of Christianity;
torture and kill and build grotesque palaces in the names of peace, democracy and equality, meanwhile addressing each other as "Comrade."
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling and Paul,
Mr. Stirling: I agree with your description of the post-Staling USSR. And that the Politburo and nomenklatura agreed on setting limits on what would happen to the losers of power struggles. My only caveat would be that the gulags, continued, even if on a reduced scale.
But I had not known that Party bosses, in the later years of the USSR went in for such Roman style grotesqueries as throwing people to tigers!
Paul: and it's PRECISELY because human beings find it so easy to do great evils in the name of great goods that I am so skeptical of dreams and plans for an "ideal" society.
Sean
Sean: to be 'fair', that sort of thing only happened in out-of-the-way and non-Slavic corners.
One of the things the Soviet regime was good at was imposing a surface uniformity. When it began to break down, things that had been there all along came back to the surface.
Central Asia is an illustration of this.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Understood, it was in non-Slavic, out of the way corners of the Soviet empire where Party bosses went in for grossly grandiose palaces and throwing people to tigers. I assume the bosses in the Slavic parts couldn't QUITE bring themselves to do such things. Not because they lacked the evil necessary to do so, but because it was too PUBLIC.
Sean
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