"'No, sir, not exactly, but -'
"'Not exactly? You know better'n that. They aren't! Not even all men are. Never have been.'"
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Five, p. 49.
Dominic Flandry's real education, or at least his preliminary instruction by Max Abrams, begins.
Michael Scott Rohan proclaims the brotherhood of man:
"If ever I doubted the brotherhood of man, I saw it paraded before me that night..."
Michael Scott Rohan, Chase The Morning (New York, 1992), CHAPTER NINE, p. 262 -
- then kicks us in the teeth with it:
"...- at its worst and darkest. Kinship is a terrible thing when it lies in cold, devouring looks, merciless, ruthless, utterly selfish or actively malign, weighing us up like prospects for a show. I could imagine Romans looking that way at captives in the arena..." (ibid.)
Our old friends the Romans again. All fiction can refer to them and time travelers can get back there among them:
"I'll never be fond of the Romans, but they do bring other things with them than slave traders, tax farmers, and sadistic games."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 16, p. 604.
16 comments:
This exchange illustrates why utopians usually turn into the worst tyrants when they get political power: they don't actually like human beings as they actually exist. They're in love with an imaginary non-existent type of human being.
They think they can usher in a Bright New Dawn, and when reality (and human beings) get in the way, they end up with gulags and killing fields and Great Leaps Forward. It's happened over and over again since the "long 19th century" ended in 1914.
For that matter, the French Revolution was a preview of the same phenomenon -- starting with the Rights of Man and ending with baskets full of heads, the Terror, purges and counter-purges and genocide in the Vendee and twenty-five years of slaughter that left death and famine all the way from Cadiz to Moscow.
Sadists get tired, greed gets satiated, but idealism -- that'll keep the blood flowing indefinitely.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I absolutely agree! Vastly more harm has been done by idealists, esp. fanatical idealists! Give me an utterly disillusioned realists as leaders any day of the week.
I far prefer poor kindly, well meaning Louis XVI to Robespierre. Or Nicholas II to Lenin or Stalin. Or Pres. Trump to Joe Biden and his puppet masters!
Ad astra! Sean
I think that Stalin was not applying ideals but accumulating capital to compete militarily against the US: "primitive accumulation of capital," as in enclosure or the slave trade.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree Stalin had nothing of IDEALISM in him, being an utterly ruthless monster, but he was still a disciple of Lenin and Marx. And he certainly did restore, de facto, the serfdom abolished by the Tsars, in a vastly harsher and more ruthless form!
And using a command economy for accumulating that capital for competing first against Germany and then the US was a crude, cruel, and wasteful means of doing so.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
It was.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Another thought I had was to wonder what your view is of the "Brotherhood of Beings" philosophy we see in the Empire? And what did you think of Abrams' criticisms of it? For what it's worth, I'm more likely than not to agree with him!
I also remember how he criticized pacifism in the last chapter of ENSIGN FLANDRY. Briefly, Abrams considered pacifism to be not just wrong, but actually evil. He argued that since the world/universe and the races living in it were plainly flawed and imperfect, violence (including war) was sometimes going to be an inevitable means of resisting greater evils.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Perhaps I subscribe to a conditional BoB philosophy, i.e., be prepared to treat other beings as brothers but also be prepared to respond appropriately if they do not see it that way. I am contemplating a post on how members of different species cooperate given their different motivations in works by Anderson and Niven.
Absolute pacifism as Abrams condemns it is clearly evil and counterproductive but it is easy to condemn the most extreme version of someone else's position. Abrams strikes me as the kind of man who defends his own society uncritically. "King and Country, sir, right or wrong!" "America, love it or leave it!" If I were in the Terran Empire, then I would probably want to make some internal changes to it and therefore might be regarded by someone like Abrams as an enemy within or as a sixth columnist for a foreign power - even though I might be even more critical of that foreign power.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think Commander Abrams would disagree with what you said in your first paragraph.
No, I never got the impression Abrams was uncritical about the Empire. He repeatedly said things like how it was "sick," and knew it was plagued by either fools or bad men a la Aaron Snelund.
Considering how big and huge the Empire was, I have my doubts people like you could make more than cosmetic "changes." Simply governing the Empire in a not too bad way would be a VAST achievement.
I think Abrams would disagree with some of your EMPHASES, but not with everything you said here. Unless he thought some of those "internal changes" you might advocate would be either unworkable or bad. What might some of those "changes" be?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I don't know. I would have to learn more about the Empire! This was just a hypothetical discussion. If living on Terra, making sure that local administration was as democratic as possible. If living beyond the Solar System, remember that it is possible for a colony planet to have any internal social arrangements as long as it pays modest taxes and does not disrupt the Empire, so any sort of attempt at alternative communities, life-styles etc would be theoretically possible. That might be as much as we could hope for.
Paul.
Having studied Stalin somewhat, I think he was a sincere believer in the Leninist form of Marxism. He was also a consummately bad man personally, but the setup of the Bolshevik party made it pretty well essential to be a psychopath to succeed.
The careerists came in later -- Stalin had been a Bolshevik when it was dangerous and not a route to power or security.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, I should have remembered that even a monstrously bad man can actually and sincerely believe in some things! The example I thought of being your own Count Ignatieff, from THE PESHAWAR LANCERS. Ignatieff was a monster, but also a DEVOUT worshiper of Satan.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
How was Terra herself administered, both during and before the Empire? I recall some of the Polesotechnic League stories set during Solar Commonwealth times mention things like "Chicago Integrate" or "San Francisco Integrate." And, near the end of "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," it was mentioned that the San Francisco Integrate was headed by a governor, who was probably elected to that office. I see no reason why the Empire, after it arose, could not have kept those Integrates and have them headed by elective officials. And A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS has Kossara Vymezal mentioning the Inner Empire having congresses, even if many of them had faded away in real power by her time.
Besides Integrates, Terra probably had smaller units generally classified as various kinds of "cantons." Some might have been administered by Imperial peers, such as the Mayor Palatine of Britain. But, I would not be surprised if some kind of legislature existed in Britain and other "cantons" of Terra.
I agree that the Empire would tolerate many humanly colonized planets having very varied ways of running themselves, as long as certain conditions of the kinds you listed were met. Aeneas, Vixen, Hermes, Dennitza, etc., being some examples.
And we should not forget the non human races within the Empire! Here, I've long had this bit from Chapter III of THE REBEL WORLDS in mind (Flandry speaking):
"...A hundred thousand planets, gentlemen, more or less," he said. "Each with its millions or billions of inhabitants, its complexities and mysteries, its geographies and civilizations, their pasts and presents and conflicting aims for the future, therefore each with its own complicated, ever changing, unique set of relationships to the Imperium. We can't control that, can we? We can't even hope to comprehend it. At most, can try to maintain the Pax. At most, gentlemen."
The next paragraph should also be quoted: "What's right in one place may be wrong in another. One species may be combative and anarchic by nature, another peaceful and antlike, a third peaceful and anarchic, a fourth a bunch of aggressive totalitarian hives. I know a planet where murder and cannibalism are necessary to race survival: high radiation background, you see, making for high mutation rate coupled with chronic food shortage. The unfit must be eaten. I know of intelligent hermaphrodites, and sophonts with more than two sexes, and a few that regularly change sex. They all tend to look on our reproductive pattern as obscene. I could go on for hours. Not to mention the variations imposed by culture. Just think about Terran history.
Like Flandry, I could go on, but this is enough for now!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The Terran Empire is much more varied than we realize.
Mr Stirling,
I don't know as much about Stalin himself but there were good people who supported the Revolution and who went right on supporting the Soviet Union long after it should have been universally obvious that it had become a brutal dictatorship with workers' democracy first lost, then suppressed. I have known people involved in left politics who are not Stalinists but who could become such given similar conditions.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
It was, what you said about the Empire! And I did have some idea of how varied it was because of remembering texts such as the ones I quoted from THE REBEL WORLDS.
The USSR was a brutal dictatorship from its very beginning, from Lenin's seizure of power from the Provisional Gov't. It was not corrupted or perverted by Stalin--who merely extended and completed what Lenin began.
And why "workers democracy," whatever that means? In 1917 Russia was an overwhelmingly peasant and rural based nation. Advanced industry and the people working in factories were limited to the major cities.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Workers' democracy is easy enough to understand: workers electing a committee in each factory or other large workplace and sending delegates to local and regional councils and a national congress but the two factors that overwhelmed it were the smallness of the working class as you said and the devastation caused by the World War, the Civil War and the armies of intervention. There was no urban working class after that and, by the time it was revived, it no longer exercised political power. In fact, the bureaucrats had to suppress it in order to maintain their own power.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I deny there can be any real "democracy" in such a setup if only factory workers held power or voted and held public offices. To say nothing, of course, of how Lenin himself emasculated and crushed the "Soviets." A real democracy has to be open to everybody, including those who don't believe in "Soviets."
Ad astra! Sean
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