See Air And Thunder. A conversation is accompanied by clinging air, rankness, wetness and thunder but what is the conversation about?
I post on this blog in order to appreciate Poul Anderson's works, not to discuss politics, and would happily focus instead on time travel, future histories, multiverses or the fabulous city of Ys! However, Anderson's texts raise unavoidable political issues.
The Devil's Game, pp. 115-116.
Julia: "'...look at the Gulag, for openers.'"
Orestes: "'Exaggerated.'"
My comment: It is not.
Orestes: "'And a nation under siege cannot afford dissent, it must have unity.'"
My comments: A besieged nation must have debate about how to fight, then unity in the fight. There must continue to be the possibility of dissent on other issues but, if there is civil war, then each side will try to defeat the other (of course). There is a problem if the only dissenters are sixth columnists but there is also a problem if any and every dissenter is denounced as a sixth columnist. Neither Trotsky nor the IWWs were German agents.
Orestes: "'The Soviet Union has been under siege by the imperialists from its very founding.'"
My comments: There were armies of intervention.
Orestes: "'Oh, I grant you, security measures have sometimes been unnecessarily harsh.'"
My comments: Sometimes? Unnecessarily harsh? No good, Orestes. That is what we hear from apologists for military dictatorships: the Generals should not have used torture because it made it harder to support them! No one should use torture period.
I am not quoting every sentence but I encourage blog readers to read or reread the novel.
Orestes: "'The enemy is the system that forces you to come down here to save your child's life at the whim of a senile lunatic, because he in his time used the people and the land for no ends except his own.'"
My comment: I agree.
Julia: "'I don't want to believe, on the other hand, that the future is the anthill you collectivists strive for.'"
My comment: Some of us "collectivists" strive for:
an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
-copied from here.
Orestes: "'Suppose...you could wave a ...wand? ...a magic wand, and bring true socialism to your United States overnight. Never mind if you consider it tyranny.'"
My comments: Hold on there, Orestes! Tell us what you mean by "true socialism." A system either is or is not a tyranny although I grant that opponents of a regime might call it a "tyranny" when it is not. People do all sorts of things with words. There is a widespread assumption that the range of possible social arrangements comprises a spectrum with a free enterprise economy at one end, a bureaucratic dictatorship ("tyranny") at the other end and various, more or less unsatisfactory, mixed economy options intermediate between the two extremes. I suggest that we must think outside this box - or at right angles to this spectrum. Technology, communications technology and education open other possibilities ("education" meaning the full development of each individual, not just training to conform to an already existing social role). If critics of free enterprise, which Orestes is, accept the "spectrum" assumption, as Orestes seems to do, then they implicitly concede that socialism is "tyranny," not individual and collective liberation.
Orestes: "'Simply admit that [true socialism] does provide universal medical care. Suppose that socialist government and nothing else [my emphasis] could save your daughter. Suppose this, for argument's sake. What would you do?'"
My comments: Julia, understandably, is distraught and doesn't know. But Orestes has given her a false choice. It sounds as if his "socialist government" is what Julia (and I) would call a tyranny. There is never "nothing else." You can suppose anything for the sake of argument. We limit ourselves if we think that we are forced to choose between two and only two bad options. We have a world to win.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I do believe a frankly socialist regime inevitably does become tyrannical or despotic. Because that is all you can expect when a regime tries to rigidly control an economy. As the former USSR and Mao's China tried to do.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And I would want popular democratic control, not rigid control. Very different processes occurred in the USSR and China. Generalizations can be unhelpful.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I was thinking of Maoist China during the lifetime of Mao himself. And he did try to use the state to rigidly control the economy. And predictably failed.
I am not in favor of any state, democratic or not, trying to minutely control the economy. It will fail and the state would have to become despotic if it kept on trying to do that.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I agree about Mao.
I also think that a different kind of "state" is possible, controlled by the population, not by professional politicians or bureaucrats.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And it's not going to be like that, because most people will never have that kind of interest in public affairs for something like that to possibly work. Nor do I think it would be practical in the real world. So we are going to continue to have politicians of various kinds (feudal barons, elective officials, professional associations, whatever) and the details of running the state will still need a civil service.
The "crony capitalism" we have seen in mainland China over the past forty years, in which the Maoist state permitted some degree of controlled "free enterprise" economics has pretty much reached the end of what is possible. A TRULY free enterprise economics also needs the right kind of state in which to flourish. That is, some kind of limited state, under whatever form, and the rule of law. And it won't be possible as long as the brutal autocracy in Peking continues in power.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
But at last during 1917-18, Lenin was, de facto, a German agent. He took money from Germany to undermine and overthrow the Provisional gov't in Russia which took over following the abdication of Nicholas II. And he had no choice but to dance to German demands and threats (until the Armistice). And that meant his cronies, including Trotsky, were themselves German agents after agreeing to Lenin taking German help.
And I only wish the armies of intervention had been successful and destroyed Lenin and his embryonic despotism. Instead they were half heartedly used for limited ends.
Ad astra! Sean
The Entente powers, with good reason, thought that the Bolsheviks were German catspaws -- which they were, for tactical reasons of their own, fully intending to turn on them when expedient.
Lenin had no problem betraying specifically Russian national interests either, as in signing a peace of capitulation at Brest-Litovsk, because he despised Russia and its people and thought revolution would happen soon in Central Europe, after which Russia would be a backward appanage, a colony of an advanced industrial Communist empire, with his blessing.
He was a truly dreadful human being, and those around him were little better.
You had to be a complete reptile to survive in the upper echelons of the Bolsheviks, and they got worse as time went on. Their basic theory of politics had nothing but contempt for human life as such, and for any form of scruple or regard for truth.
Only the "new man" of the future had value: the people of the present existed only to give him birth, and were themselves hopelessly corrupted, "evil tail-less apes", as Trotsky put it.
One of those closest to him (he had no friends) said Lenin regarded human beings pretty much as a furnace-operator regarded iron ore -- as raw materials to be manipulated with fire and hammers.
The Entente sent forces to Russia after the collapse of the Provisional government to keep Russia in the war and safeguard the massive supplies they'd sent for the prosecution of the war against Germany.
This naturally involved bolstering anti-Bolshevik forces willing to continue the war; which naturally led to supporting them after the war ended -- and nobody in London or Paris expected the war to end in 1918.
(They thought, right up through the summer of 1918, that it would continue into 1919 at least.)
Once the war against Germany was over, they also quite rightly regarded the Bolsheviks as murderous scum best disposed of (a clinically accurate analysis), but weren't willing to put much effort into it, due to commitments elsewhere and war-weariness back home, alas.
Hi,
I thought that Trotsky used that phrase ironically rather than contemptuously. He also wrote:
Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
February 27, 1940
Coyoacan
L. Trotsky
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I absolutely agree with what you said about the hideous Lenin and his vile hencemen! And I greatly appreciated how you had the Regent Nicholas Nicholaevich's Cossacks disposing of Lenin and his cronies like the scum they were after emerging from that "sealed train" in your book THEATER OF SPIES. AND of how Luz finished off Trotsky. Too bad something like that did not happen in our history!
Winston Churchill was probably the only one of the Entente leaders who had a sound understanding of how evil and dangerous the Bolsheviks were. He was probably the only one who would have relentlessly urged on the armies of intervention to destroy Lenin and his regime. But he was not PM of the UK in that period and did not have the authority to pursue such a policy. Pity!
Paul: EXCEPT you are missing how those "nice" things you quoted from Trotsky were said only very late in his life, before Stalin's agent finally managed to slam that ice ax into his skull. That cannot and should not wipe out memory of the vile acts and policies Trotsky supported and the blood shed resulting from them before Stalin exiled him. No, I have less than ZERO use for any Bolshevik!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul, Sean, and anyone else interested!
Even if a socialist state is not a brutal tyranny, one should keep in mind that it will not necessarily allocate resources in the way a particular person wishes, e.g., keeping Julia Petrie’s daughter alive at great cost. It isn’t even that it would end up being run by someone who regards breathing human beings only as construction materials for the glorious future, but that it would have to make choices: how much for National defense, how much for investment in heavy industry (or in the Green New Deal), how much for consumer goods, how much for medical treatment for people who can be cured at relatively low cost, etc.
A bureaucracy might decide, and might even rightly decide, that other medical procedures would result in more years of life for more people than continued dialysis for one little girl. Or if Miss Petrie did get treatment, someone else somewhere would not. Socialism would not eliminate the human tragedies of living in a world of limited resources and constrained choices.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Nicholas,
Limited resources? We are living in the middle of the universe. The sun and every other star radiate in every direction all the time. We need to get started on space-based solar power stations, mining the asteroids and a laser defense system against asteroid strikes. Think small for Earth but big for everywhere else.
Paul.
Kaor, Nicholas and Paul!
Nicholas: Exactly! Socialism means replacing free choices made by individuals with choices being made by bureaucrats and politicians. And, at best, the state is always heavy handed, slow moving, and cumbersome.
Paul: I agree with the items you listed. With the caveat that I would like to think big both on or for Earth as well as off Earth!
And I still advocate nuclear energy as well. Because either that or fossil fuels will need to continued being used until a space based solar energy system is built.
Ad astra! Sean
As long as "socialism" is used to mean only state bureaucracy, then I also disagree with it. I have tried to argue that a different, more democratic, kind of state is possible but I don't want to keep the argument going all the time! There will be occasions when I let the issue pass.
Nuclear energy only until a space based solar energy system is built? OK. Maybe.
Kaor, Paul!
We can't agree about socialism. So I will let that pass.
And nuclear energy is not a bad thing. If's far cleaner than fossil fuels. And will be need for both space ships and off Earth colonies.
Ad astra! Sean
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