The Gaean usurper of Skyholm:
"I, having lived through war, am a man of peace. But, if I threaten war, and am defied, I shall have to wage it. Why? How did all this happen? What has gone wrong?
"He squared his shoulders. Pain and death were among the workings of the Life Force, which he served. Let him never forget."
-Orion Shall Rise, CHAPTER TWENTY, p. 347.
This is a self-proclaimed man of peace who has seized power by force. An abstract appeal to "the Life Force" could be used to sanctify the infliction of any pain or death. A man who claims that he has killed rightly or justly must present a much more specific defense of his action.
I have posted extensively about the villain of Anderson's The Avatar, Ira Quick.
Lewis precisely captures the mental processes of self-deception. See the quotation in Ellis Nordberg. And here is Lewis's character, Curry:
"It was automatic for Curry to look very thoughtful, though he had never heard of Laird, and to say, 'Ah, Laird. Just remind me of the details of his academic career.'"
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT CHAPTER 4, 7, p. 441.
"The fantastic suggestion that he, Curry, might be a bore, passed through his mind so swiftly that a second later he had forgotten it forever. The much less painful suggestion that these traditionalists and research beetles affected to look down on him was retained." (ibid.)
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Reprehensible indeed! Give me a reluctant usurper like Hans Molitor, who only seized power after "...the legitimate order of succession had dissolved in chaos"! And that had NOT been the case with the Captaincy of Skyholm. Jovain disrupted the procedures for selecting a new Captain.
Ad Astra! Sean
Also, of course, even viciously aggressive rulers don't usually want war.
As Napoleon said, he didn't want war; he wanted -victory-. That is, he wanted to impose his will... and would prefer to do it by threats, because war is expensive and the outcome never certain.
The war often happens because one party expects the other to give in to threats and they don't.
WWII started that way; Hitler expected the French and British to chicken out and desert the Poles, just as they had before over the Czechs, but they'd had a bellyfull and were determined to carry through this time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Napoleon could not have the kind of victory he wanted because he was never able to wholly crush or defeat the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, British, or even the Spanish! That should have told him that he would need to change his tactics to achieve his goal of European hegemony.
Yes, the UK and France had their full of appeasing Hitler after the shame of Munich. Hitler pushed his luck too far at a time when it would have been wiser to pretend to be mild for some years, as he consolidated his gains.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Hitler was racing the clock.
He'd started rearming first, but the French (and still more the British) were catching up fast.
The last person to seriously rearm has an advantage -- Italy started before Germany, and in 1939 had lots of weapons that would have done nicely in 1935 and were obsolete junk by then.
And the Soviets, his ultimate target, would eventually recover from the self-inflicted wounds of the army purges.
His fallback position if the Allies did go to war after he attacked Poland (which he did because the Poles turned down his offer of an anti-Soviet alliance) was to crush France, something he thought would have to be done eventually anyway, and then offer the British a deal they couldn't refuse.
That worked, until Churchill refused to make a deal -- much to nearly everyone's surprise. That was when the wheels came off.
This is an example of the importance of individuals. Almost any of the other prospective post-Chamberlain PMs would have made a deal.
If he'd been able to stay in office (and wasn't dying of cancer) Chamberlain would have made a deal after the fall of France too.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very interesting! Another factor I read about was Hitler declining the advice of the General Staff to postpone any war until 1943, because it was the Staff's position that Germany would not truly be ready for war until then. Was Adolf right or wrong to refuse postponing a war?
Yes, Winston Churchill was a CLASSIC example of the IMPORTANCE of the individual, of the UNPREDICTABILITY factor. I agree it was almost a dead certainty that any other PM would have made a deal with Hitler after France surrendered in 1940.
Btw, whatever his disagreements with Chamberlain, Churchill personally liked and respected him.
Ad astra! Sean
Chamberlain meant well; what he couldn't understand until too late was that Hitler did NOT mean well, and didn't share his disgust at the thought of another war. Hitler -enjoyed- WW1, after being in the thick of it for 4+ years.
No accounting for tastes... 8-).
The General Staff wanted to delay war until 1943 because they didn't want a war at all; and by then it might not be practical to start one.
Nobody's ever completely ready; the question is whether waiting to be -more- ready will improve your -relative- position.
Eg., Germany in 1914 was still assimilating the army personnel and budget increases of 1912-13, and would be stronger in a few years.
The General Staff then wanted war because they thought that the Entente (and particularly Russia due to its "great program") was getting stronger -faster-, and thus Germany's -relative- position was declining.
If someone else has more resources than you, you can still beat him if you use a greater -share- of your resources for war preparations than he does.
50% of 100 is still bigger than 10% of 400.
But there's a limit to that. It's easier for a big guy to exert more force of his potential force than it is for a little guy to increase his potential.
The Union never mobilized as much of its resources as the Confederacy did in the American Civil War... but its population and economy were so much bigger that it didn't have to to overmatch the CSA decisively.
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