I said in The Protectorate that I could foresee reasons for protest. Poul Anderson, always writing realistically about politics (see, in particular, Mirkheim), proceeds to show us different levels of protest.
The Egalitarians, or "Equals," are an idealistic Americam movement:
"'...who want the Protectorate converted into a representative world government.'" (p. 96)
They organize, discuss, propagandize, support sympathetic electoral candidates, attract intellectuals and are believed to include a direct action faction. Marcus denounces them as misguided stooges but cannot arrest them for anything.
Military Security did arrest Yamashita who preached passive resistance in Japan. Equals activists may have been responsible for his escape and continued preaching on the run. Trembecki thinks that the activists have arranged some murders and Abrams retorts that, e.g., General Friedman needed to be murdered because of the way he stopped protest marches in Rome. I expect generals to be assassinated but not a director of an American corporation to approve!
Carson Gannoway, a computermen's union official, has publicly deplored illegal, sometimes violent, strikes but is suspected by Abrams of having masterminded them and may also have been involved in arming the Toronto rioters...
Provisional conclusions:
actions all over the world;
we have come a long way from the revolutionary transport strike early in Heinlein's Future History (and see The Strike Of '66).
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I cannot see the "Equals" as having any real chance of converting the Protectorate into the kind of world gov't they wanted. Because too many of the nations of the world are unlike the others in too many ways for what the Equals wanted to work. It would need something like the way Prussia unified the German states to form the German Empire for some kind of world gov't to arise.
Why should you be surprised by what Abrams said about Gen. Friedman? Merely being wealthy does not mean such a person has to approve of the brutality and needless or excessive force I assume Friedman was guilty of.
Sean
Sean,
Of course not but guys in Abrams' position are less likely to approve of assassination.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Assassination is something everyone should disapprove of! Albeit there has been arguments over whether tyrannicide, in the right circumstances, could be morally allowable.
Sean
Sean,
Preferable to war, killing lots of guys other than the tyrant. SM Stirling's Emberverse characters point out that that is what war is.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And Catholic theologians have hotly debated the morality or not, the right or wrong, etc., of tyrannicide. It's hard not to think assassinating Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hitler, etc., would have been preferable to them continuing to live.
Sean
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