Joshua Coffin:
"O God, help me do that which is right.
"But what is right?
"I should wrestle with Thine angel until I knew." (p. 65)
This is yet another Biblical reference embedded, almost concealed, in a Poul Anderson text. Further, the reference is to a mysterious incident in Genesis when the name, "Israel," is bestowed. See here.
This incident:
has Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Marxist interpretations;
has been compared to the Greek myths of Achilles' duel with the river god, Scamander, and of Menelaus wrestling with the sea god, Proteus;
might be based on an Egyptian myth of the struggle between Osiris and Set.
Follow every reference in Poul Anderson's works and you will not be disappointed.
40 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I would expect a devout Protestant like Joshua Coffin to be intimately familiar with the Bible, easily capable of making use of similes and metaphors taken from it.
Finished the last few pages of rereading Solzhenitsyn's LENIN IN ZURICH, and I can only conclude yet again: what a loathsome, vile, contemptible, vicious creature he was! Fanatical, obsessed with "splitting" into ever smaller factions in his sectarian quarrels with other socialists, contemptuous of all who dared to oppose him, all too willing to betray Russia and start civil wars in his lust for seizing power, etc. What a HORROR he and the regime he founded was!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But a novel is not the way to find out about a historical figure.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Considering how thoroughly and carefully Solzhenitsyn researched his novels, I still disagree. His portrait of the ghastly Lenin rings TRUE.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I don't doubt that Solzhenitsyn's research was meticulous. "Rings true..." means it confirms what you already believe on other grounds. I have yet to read the book. Lancashire Library Service has done a marvelous job of sending a copy to the wrong Library, then sending it back where it came from and not getting it to me yet.
There are political sectarians who simply disagree with everyone else and who remain an ineffective minority. There are political theoreticians who clarify their ideas and, in some circumstances, are able to lead mass movements that make a difference. A hostile observer sees no difference between these "sectarians" and "theoreticians." I have known some of the latter. Because of their efforts, Nazi organizations have so far been knocked back in Britain. Unfortunately, that is only a negative achievement as yet.
Paul.
My point being, of course, that, if Lenin were alive now, then we would find out in practice which of these two groups he belonged to. He would have to pass the test of practice like everyone else. From what I know of his writings, he would expect this and nothing less.
Kaor, Paul!
Your comments here puzzles me. By conceding Solzhenitsyn's accuracy and meticulousness about his research on Lenin, you have to tacitly concede to the truth of the things that made him such a bad man.
Lenin was both a fanatical sectarian and a "theoretician," on the ways and means for grabbing power if a political vacuum occurs. Which is exactly what happened in Russia after the collapse of the Tsarist gov't. I see no contradiction between the two.
We don't NEED to hypothesize about how Lenin might behave now if he was alive right now. We already know what he did in 1917-24. He was a fanatical sectarian who founded a brutal and evil regime. Solzhenitsyn included a note in LENIN IN ZURICH listing those of Ulyanov's which he used as the sources for showing us how he thought and spoke. And Lenin's behavior during and after 1917 shows him behaving in exactly the same ruthless way: promise and do anything necessary for grabbing power (and then betray them), the mass arrests, imprisonments, executions of the Red Terror, the founding of the Cheka and the Gulags, etc.
All this is borne out in Lenin's own works and the writings of sober historians. I esp. recall how often Solzhenitsyn quoted from Lenin in Volume 1 of THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, showing how deeply involved in laying the foundations of the Gulags.
Dismiss all lingering hopes of Lenin being a GOOD man!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I also am puzzled. I have not read LENIN IN ZURICH yet so I am not able to concede anything about it. It is perfectly possible for two writers of opposite political positions to do meticulous research and yet to reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the same subject matter. Surely we realize this? Contentious political issues are far too complicated (and contentious!) for a merely factually accurate account by a single writer to settle an argument one way or the other. I have read some Lenin and some works about Lenin and will read this book when I finally get hold of a copy.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I have to agree, in principle, that two equally careful and meticulous writers studying the same person can arrive at opposing conclusions about him. But, I don't see how any honest author can come to a positive evaluation of such a man if he was as bad, cynical, opportunistic, ruthless, etc., as Lenin had been.
It might have been quicker and easier if Andrea's brother, proprietor of The Old Pier Bookshop, had found and sold you a copy of LENIN IN ZURICH.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But honest authors disagree. I have read accounts that emphasize Lenin's politics, not his personality, although obviously they are connected - focused, motivated, principled, often needing to argue his case, not able simply to impose his will.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
In principle, I agree. But I still believe no honest evaluation of Lenin can be positive. As far as I'm concerned, he was "principled" in the say Count Igantieff was in Stirling's novel THE PESHAWAR LANCERS. And Lenin certainly did his best imposing his own will as much as possible after seizing power in Russia.
Ad astra! Sean
Drat. I meant "way" not "say" in the third sentence of my comment immediately above.
Sean
Sean,
Yes. What happened after they, not just he, came to power was very problematic. I know people who I think are honest and who have positive views of Lenin.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Far more than merely problematic, the rule of Lenin and his henchmen was sheerly EVIL.
One Jewish Russian I sometimes talk to online considered Reed's book TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD good entertainment but bad history.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
A lot of people, including me, have appreciated Reed's eye witness account. I think that Trotsky's HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION spells out in detail what really happened. That HISTORY was followed by Trotsky's REVOLUTION BETRAYED and Tony Cliff's STATE CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA. After reading these works, you might understand an alternative point of view while (of course) continuing to disagree with it. Much that happened in the total situation was EVIL.
But we know by now that, whatever I say, you will reply in some way and, beyond a certain point, I will want to cut short the repetition. We have been through all this before. It restarted this time because I queried citing a novel as a historical source but I do accept that that novel, which I still have not read, was well researched by its author.
Paul.
Trotsky was the one who commented that people alive in his time were just "evil tail-less apes" whose only value was to produce the New Socialist Man.
He said that in the context of a policy of keeping Red Army officers' families hostage and shooting their wives and children if they deserted. He was running the Red Army at the time.
Mr Stirling,
I would be interested in the reference for the "evil tail-less apes" phrase so that I can read it in context.
I read Trotsky's autobiography but didn't find any mention of the threat to shoot hostages.
Paul.
Paul: well, it isn't the sort of thing people would put in an autobiography that they want to sway people politically, is it?
From Trotsky's autobiography: "So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements — the animals that we call men — will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear."
-- this was in the context of the Red Army's "blocking units", which were ordered to summarily shoot down soldiers who retreated.
Further: "commissars are obligated to keep track of officers' families... when it is possible the seize their families in case of treason."
And in an order of September 30th, 1918 Trotsky wrote:
"Let the turncoats realize that they are at the same time betraying their own families-their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children.
I order the headquarters of all the armies of the Republic, and also the district commissars to supply by telegram to member of the Revolutionary War Council Aralov lists of all the members of the commanding apparatus who have gone over to the enemy camp, with all needful data about their family situation. I entrust Comrade Aralov with the responsibility for taking, in co-operation with the appropriate institutions, the measures necessary for arresting the families of deserters and traitors."
No. It's not in the biography. But have you got a reference for it? I asked a friend to do a search and he didn't find it.
Thanks. I think you have given me the tail-less apes quote before. And I have read MY LIFE so I would have read it there. I took it to be an ironic comment on all of us, our whole species, not of contempt towards present mankind that would be forcibly transformed into future mankind.
Trotsky's Testament:
"Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, violence and oppression and enjoy it to the full."
OK. I am with it now. If an officer's loyalty was suspect, then he was less likely to defect if his family had been kept in the country but I do not think that any of the families were shot. If they were, then that would have been an atrocity.
Kaor, Paul!
I have not read the Trotsky books you cited, but Stirling's quotes from Trotsky himself CONVICTS him. And he certainly approved of the Terror, arrests, imprisonments, and executions decreed by Lenin.
And whether or not any of the families of Red Army officers who were seized (NOT merely kept in the country) as hostages is not the point. The point is Trotsky THREATENED death to these officers families if they tried to defect to the Whites during the Civil War. That made him as morally culpable as if they had been slaughtered.
And I have read books on Russian history: Bernard Pares' THREE WHO MADE A REVOLUTION, Robert K. Massie's NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, Edward Crankshaw's THE SHADOW OF THE WINTER PALACE, and Solzhenitsyn's overwhelming THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. And others I would need to check to be sure of their titles and authors.
I continue to regard Lenin and his gang with only scorn and contempt!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Did he threaten death to those families?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course! To seize as hostages the families of officers in the Red Army so as to discourage them from defecting to the Whites IS to threaten them.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
To detain an officer's family in order to discourage the officer from defecting is not in itself to threaten to kill the family if he defects. Unless there is definite evidence that Trotsky issued this threat, then I will continue to assume that he did not. If he did, then I agree in condemning him for it.
I think that your root and branch approach is over the top. The Russian Revolution was wrong/evil, therefore everyone and everything connected with it in any way must be condemned in the strongest terms? The widely admired John Reed must be maligned as a bad historian? Surely not. Unnecessary, certainly. I have read that the English children's writer, Arthur Ransome, was in Russia at the time and initially supported the Revolution because he saw how it was involving the Russian people and what it was starting to do for them. If, as I hope, he later questioned and criticized how that early hope was soon lost, then I applaud him for that.
Paul.
Oh, and here's Trotsky's reply to the Menshevik denunciation of forced labor:
"Without forced labor, the whole socialist economy is doomed . . . there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center. . . . ”
Trotsky, further, at the Third Congress of Trade Unions:
"Coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor are no mere emergency measures; the workers’ State normally has the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at anyplace of its choosing.”
He also praised the results of slave and serf labor in the same address.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you. Can you quote the passage about slave and serf labor?
Personally, I would agree with coercion, regimentation and militarization only as emergency measures in very extreme circumstances. In a "workers' state," the workers collectively are supposed to exercise direct democracy and to be able to recall elected delegates and reverse their policies. Of course, phrases like "state" and "democracy" can be and are used in all sorts of ways.
Paul.
Paul: right after the Bolshevik takeover, a fair section of Russian urban industry was run by factory committees composed of and elected by the work-force. The regime, with Trotsky to the fore, crushed this by force and imposed coercive discipline.
Let's see, to quote Trotsky: "We may say that man is a lazy creature. As a general rule Man strives to avoid work. The only way to attract the labor power necessary for economic tasks is to introduce compulsory labor service.
When the Mensheviks in their resolution say that compulsory labor always results in low productivity they are the captives of bourgeois ideology and reject the very foundations of the socialist economy. In the era of serfdom, it was not so that gendarmes stood over every serf. There were certain economic forms to which the peasant had become accustomed, which at the time he regarded as just. It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center."
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I still disagree, for Trotsky to order the arrest of the families of Red Army officers to prevent them from defecting was definitely threatening, and everybody would have understood it that way. And Stirling has been quoting TROTSKY himself on precisely that.
Yes, I condemn both of the Russian Revolutions of 1917, root and branch. They were both catastrophes for Russia, albeit something reasonably tolerable might have succeeded the Provisional Gov't if that monster Lenin had not seized power.
Lenin did not merely illegally seize power from the Provisional Gov't, he set up an utterly brutal and evil regime. The mass arrests, imprisonments, executions ordered by Lenin during the Red Terror is alone enough to condemn the Soviet regime. And not only these purges, Lenin also laid the foundations of the Gulag system of mass forced labor. All Stalin did was to extend and complete what Lenin started.
If you really wish to admire somebody from Russian history who was beneficial, I suggest investigating Peter Stolypin, PM from 1906-11. The drastic reforms he introduced would have TRANSFORMED Russia for the better if WW I and the 1917 revolutions had not aborted them.
A correction: it was Sir Bernard Pares' HISTORY OF RUSSIA which I read. It was Bertram Wolfe who wrote THREE WHO MADE A REVOLUTION.
Mr. Stirling: One conclusion I drew from your quotes from Trotsky was that Lenin and his gang REVERSED all the reforms and advances Russia had been making since the accession of Alexander II in 1855.
Ad astra! Sean
Mr Stirling,
Over breakfast before driving to Liverpool. Unalienated labor is the realization of human potential. Trotsky made a virtue of a necessity: adopted emergency measures in an extreme situation, then exalted those measures as the right way forward from now on. Right after the Bolshevik takeover, workers' control, which I would support, began to be implemented but was soon crushed. We need to understand why and by whom. Russia soon became a brutal dictatorship to be opposed, not supported. Workers' movements around the world were misled into continuing to defend and support it. The twentieth century was a tragedy from start to finish and the twenty-first looks worse.
Laters,
Paul.
Sean,
I am not trying to get you to agree, just trying to clarify the issues a bit. Can't respond any further now.
Paul.
Paul: Bolshevik support for worker's control was purely tactical and was reversed as soon as the Party was in a position to do so, in line with their theory that the vanguard party "represented" the workers whether the workers thought so or not.
Hence the dictatorship of the proletariat was the dictatorship of the party, and true "workers democracy" involved dismissing (and usually arresting and killing) elected workers' representatives and replacing them, in trade-unions and factory committees, with Party appointees.
Trotsky's speeches, as quoted above, indicate this quite clearly, as does his reference to "industrial armies" (quoting Marx and Engles there, btw.) under military discipline.
"War Communism" wasn't called that when it was in force; it was just called "Communism". It wasn't adopted as an emergency measure; it was intended to be permanent, but failed so badly that policy had to be altered for the regime's survival. The measures implemented under War Communism were intended to be permanent, and were the ideal to which the Bolsheviks aspired.
The NEP was a tactical retreat, equivalent to the initial Bolshevik support for workers' control.
It was never intended as anything but temporary.
Stalin's reversal of it was always planned. The only dispute in Party circles was over -when- the NEP would be reversed and full top-down administrative control restored.
Kaor, Paul!
I understand, but your attempts at clarification both puzzles me and leaves me unconvinced. No offense is meant, but they look like attempts at defending men I consider to be tyrants, like Lenin and his assistant in tyranny, Trotsky. The Soviet regime Lenin founded immediately started becoming tyrannical from the moment he seized power.
And it's impossible to have socialism without the kind of forced labor and coercion Trotsky praised. I have to give him credit for being candid on what it takes to make socialism "work."
And I don't believe in so called "workers control" of industries, because it's simply not practical or workable. You seem to think it's possible for ordinary line workers at, say, a car factory (and so on), to also be able to do administrative work, carry out financial analyses of markets, determine how much and what kinds of raw materials, etc., a plant needs. Sorry, not possible, not going to happen.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But you can't be puzzled to be disagreed with. The world is full of disagreements. We are now repeating things that we have said before.
There are currently groups that believe in workers' control and that do not preach it merely as a cynical ploy to get themselves into power. But the main issue right now is that the world is rapidly going down the drain anyway.
Paul.
The lap top is going a bit low so I am trying to be brief and to get something at least posted.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, the world is, notoriously full of disagreements. I simply have fury for how Lenin and his gang ruined and debased Russia. And I think it's significant that Vladmir Putin came to maturity as a KGB officer. He's certainly behaving like one!
And people who talk about "workers control," never seem to be SPECIFIC on what that means in an actual, practical, and legal sense. If not the state seizing the means of producing goods and services, then how??? It all looks like vague talk and mere dreaminess.
If we have to think in terms like that of the TITANIC in 1912, then I hope Elon Musk manages to first get some "rowboats" to Mars!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that workers' control can be made more specific but my only point here was that those who talk about it are not all using it as a deception to get themselves into power.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Granted, despite my deep skepticism about its realism and practicality. But I strongly suspect some still use talk about "workers' control" as a Leninist means for grabbing at power.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Sean!
Commenting late, as usual. I agree with you about what was and would be necessary to make state socialism work, and also about the moral characters of at least some of the Bolsheviks. I’m not sure whether they were all as bad as Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, but anyone burdened by a conscience in an environment like that would likely end up losing the power struggle. The behavior of men like Lenin was appalling by the standards of a conservative Catholic like you, a classical liberal like me, or the kind of sincere and well-intentioned Socialist who ended up in the Gulag or the Lubianka.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
Exactly! It is my conviction, borne out by historical experience, that socialism is an impossibility and cannot "work" unless imposed by a ruthless regime. I agree not all of the socialists of that time (1917) in Russia were as bad as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. A fair number recoiled from their methods. People like the Mensheviks, for example.
Ad astra! Sean
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