"'Mostly they belong to the aristocratic party at home and have no love for the League, considering how it shunted their kind aside and dealt instead with the Gethfennu group. You know, not many League people seem to understand what a cosmos of enemies it's made for itself over the years.'"
-Mirkheim, VI, p. 96.
It was Falkayn himself that had negotiated with the Merseians and in particular with their organized crime group, the Gethfennu. This means that "Day of Burning" joins The Man Who Counts etc (see Mirkheim Miscellania) as a direct prequel to Mirkheim. "Day of Burning," written too late to be included in the Falkayn collection, The Trouble Twisters, is nevertheless referenced in the two novels, Satan's World and Mirkheim and, of course, collected in the Earth Book.
A powerful group not understanding that it has made enemies sounds all too familiar.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
David Falkayn could have pleaded in self defense that the actions he took to both get Chee Lan released from her Gethfennu kidnapers and to get Merseians to take the Valenderay supernova seriously had been necessary. But of course I agree we should not expect everyone on Merseia to analyze the events seen in "Day of Burning" with philosophic detachment.
What if our Earth had been threatened by a similar nearby supernova and the effort needed for preparing us to survive its consequences had been given to a "consortium" of Japanese Yakuza, Colombian drug traffickers, and the American Mafia? I can easily see how MANY would be infuriated by that!
Sean
The powerful generally pay less attention to the powerless than vice-versa; it's one of the perks.
This is one of the things that Edward Said, for example, gets consistently wrong. He assumes that the people he's analyzing (British movers and shakers from the Imperial period, essentially) were just as obsessed with the subaltern groups as the subaltern groups (him, for example) were with them.
But that's not the case. The reason that the Empire is largely absent from Jane Austen, say, is not that it's suppressed as a rhetorical strategy (Said's thesis), it's just that well-to-do Englishwomen of the strata Austen wrote about and for didn't think about it much, didn't care, knew less and wanted to learn not at all.
People with particular reasons to think about it did -- people with an inheritance in Jamaica, for example, or merchants, or an officer stationed abroad, or an antislavery enthusiast. The rest, no so much. They just didn't care, apart from the odd adventure story or music-hall turn. The working classes cared about their uncle in Australia or whatever, but not about the thing as a whole. The country only really paid attention when something went wrong, like the Second Boer War.
One of the perennial complaints of dedicated imperialists like Curzon and Milner was that you just couldn't get MP's to attend a debate on Indian or colonial questions. The same narrow band of enthusiasts or people with particular interests, like Lancastrian textile manufacturers, or representatives of the Aboriginies Protection Society or the missionary lobbies, showed up. Joe Blogs, MP, couldn't give a damn, knew nothing, and didn't want to.
The weak -have- to pay attention to those with power over them.
In a conversation between A and B, there are three elements:
how A sees the world;
how B sees the world;
how the world is - much bigger and more complicated than either A's or B's view of it.
I have met more than one University graduate who thought that how he saw the world was how I saw the world and was also how the world was. In the most extreme cases, communication becomes impossible.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
I'm happy my comments sparked some feedback, esp. to get such interesting comments from both of you.
Mr. Stirling: Yes, I agree that your comments makes sense. One of the most curious things to be noticed about the British Empire was how casually, almost absentmindedly, it was gained. Aside, perhaps, from India and the Old Dominions, most Britons simply didn't take much interest in their own Empire, which seems very odd!
Paul: I'm all too familiar with the phenomenon you described. In the US, the "cultural" dominance of the left in academia, Hollywood, most of the media, the "literati," etc., is so pervasive that many react with shocked outrage on meeting opposition from Christians, conservatives, and libertarians. As you said, in such cases, communication becomes almost impossible.
Sean
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