Dominic Flandry reflects:
"...revolutions don't originate with slaves or starveling proletarians, but with men who have enough liberty and material well-being to realize how much more they ought to have." (p. 125)
Yes. But maybe their well-being and liberty must be threatened before they are motivated to demand more? But well-being and liberty are periodically threatened. And such men and women can give a lead to slaves and starvelings if there are any such. We do not expect to find an informed discussion of the conditions for revolution in American sf but we find everything somewhere in Poul Anderson's works.
If Biocontrol is not overthrown, then eventually it will fail and everyone on Unan Besar will die. And, until then, everyone must pay hard-earned silvers for antitoxin pills that really cost just half a copper. Anderson has imagined a situation where TINA becomes TIARA.
22 comments:
As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, the worst and most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts -trying- to reform. Very easy to lose control of that process.
As both Louis XVI and Gorbachev found out.
And the most dangerous revolutionary sentiment is frustrated expectations. Despair makes people quiet. A feeling that they could/should get something is the spur to action.
Note that the Irish Famine wasn't a revolutionary episode; people who are actually starving to death or realistically in fear of it focus on the immediate and the personal.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I disagree with what you said re TINA and TIARA. In a set up like that of Unan Besar under the misrule of Biocontrol, TIARA is not a realistic possibility. Something like Flandry arriving there would be needed to turn TINA into TIARA. Otherwise, NO, it would be criminally wrong to urge people to revolt if that only gets them the cage.
Mr. Stirling: For many years I've had sympathy for Louis XVI, a kindly, decent, well meaning man who wanted to bring reform to France. But, somehow, all his efforts to do so only ended in the bloody horrors of the French Revolution, the dictatorship of Napoleon, and 22 years of wars. What did he do wrong? What could the king have done that might have had better results?
I recall Saul Padover commenting in his biography of Louis XVI that he knew how to die with courage and dignity, but not how to survive with skill.
Btw, I have read Alexis de Tocqueville's THE OLD REGIME AND THE REVOLUTION.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean,
By "revolution," I mean a change of power relationships, the overthrow of Biocontrol. This has to be brought about not the internal process of an uprising but by an external process, the arrival of Flandry.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
That clarifies what you meant. And it would need something like the arrival of Flandry for there to be any chance of overthrowing Biocontrol in a way that would not kill everybody on Unan Besar.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: Louis' problem was basically that he was weak-willed and a well-meaning idiot.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Most biographers agree Louis XVI was no idiot. They tend to also agree he was weak, or at least indecisive.
I would still prefer him to Robespierre or Napoleon!
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: idiot in the functional sense -- did stupid things. He probably often knew, at some level, that they were stupid, too.
I would prefer Louis as a ruler too; the problem is, I wouldn't bet on him to win a fight with Robespierre or Napoleon, either. I certainly wouldn't want him in charge during a struggle with either.
And politics is a fight. People like Louis have no business trying to play that game.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have to mostly agree. The partial caveat I have being I'm not sure Louis XVI realized he was making mistakes at the times he made them.
I agree that king did not have the ruthlessness necessary for destroying a monster like Robespierre or an ambitious would be despot like Napoleon.
Louis XVI should have lived and reigned as a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth II.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: the evolution of the British constitutional monarchy was a long, erratic process -- and a lot of it was "just happened by chance" stuff, too. For France in the 1790's, not a likely outcome.
Even George III thought it was his responsibility to -rule-, not just reign. He managed to do that for a while, too: his screwups (and descent into madness) were a fairly substantial element in the aforesaid evolution of constitutional monarchy.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, many of the reasons and factors allowing Great Britain to evolve into a stable constitutional monarchy happened by pure chance and accident.
Still, something similar might have happened to France as well, if the Estates General had not fallen into disuse after 1614. If that legislative body had continued to meet, that might have guided France into evolving better ways of handling politics.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: France was bigger and more regionally divided than England, and that had a lot of knock-on effects.
It was also a Continental country, with enemies on its own frontiers. The fact that England was on an island -- and dominant on that island -- made, for example, a small army possible, which had very large political consequences.
Note that the other regions in Europe that developed somewhat democratic institutions pre French revolution, also had some geographic feature that favored defense, the polders for the Netherlands & the Alps for Switzerland. Not as good as the English Channel, but better than most parts of Europe.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: And the greater size of France on mainland Europe and those enemies tended to make the Estates General less important there than Parliament was in England? Because the kings of France generally had a more urgent need for larger armies than English monarchs did?
Still, up to 1614 Estates DID meet quite often in France.
Jim: I am not so sure geography mattered that much for whether parliaments existed in other European nations. The mountainous Iberian peninsula had cortes in Portugal, Castile, Aragon, etc. The Holy Roman Empire had the Imperial Diet. Poland, with its wide open, nearly indefensible plains, had a powerful parliament or "sejm." More important factors determined the strength or effectiveness of such institutions.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: the equivalents of the Estates General/parliaments were general in Europe in the medieval period. The problem was that they tended to hinder the sort of centralization that was essential for survival in an age of standing armies, cannon, and muskets. That stuff was -expensive-, and required an elaborate bureaucratic system to sustain it; and if you didn't sustain it, your neighbors would eat you.
It's very likely that Britain was the reason Europe wasn't consolidated into a single "gunpowder empire" in the early modern and modern periods. Britain from Elizabeth II's time on followed a consistent policy of organizing and allying with the weaker powers to stop the stronger.
People tried to conquer and unite Europe, and it happened repeatedly -- the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, Napoleon, Germany. Britain, and then Britain and its American offshoot, stopped them.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, local rulers tended to sidestep, ignore, or get rid of parliaments who got in the way of the modernization needed for bare survival. Poland was a notoriously grisly exampled of what could happen if a parliament got in the way of what needed to be done for the State's survival. The 224 years following the extinction of the Jagiellon dynasty in 1572 saw Poland becoming steadily weaker and helpless, precisely because of its parliament refusing to agree to the measures needed for survival. End result: Poland was devoured by is neighbors.
Yes, England tried its hand at setting up a European empire, when it attempted to conquer France during the Hundred Years War.
All the same I regret how the Estates General fell into disuse after 1614 in France. However tiresome it would be for the king and his ministers to argue with or cajole 600 or 700 politicians, I think that would have been better for France.
Merry Christmas! Sean
My understanding is that the problem in Poland was the requirement for a *unanimous* vote in the Parliament (Sejm IIRC) for many measures, so one recalcitrant (likely bribed by a foreign power) MP could scuttle any sensible measure. A bare majority or 2/3 majority to pass a law would have solved most of the problem.
Another drawback to the Polish setup was that it very much an *oligarchic* republic in which those with a vote were a small fraction of the population.
Kaor, Jim!
Exactly! So much power had been gained by the Sejm that a single nay vote could kill any substantive measure.
Also, after 1572, Poland became an elective monarchy in which succeeding kings had to agree to concessions that steadily weakened the Crown's power and increasingly unable to take effective actions.
Merry Christmas! Sean
But an equally powerful Sejm with sensible rules like 1/2 or 2/3 majority, rather than unanimous consent, to pass a measure, would have allowed Poland to remain a great power.
Kaor, Jim!
But that did not happen. All attempts at enacting sensible reforms for both the Crown and the Sejm could be vetoed by a single vote.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Kaor, Jim!
I should have added that after the First and Second Partitions of Poland there was a belated and desperate attempt by some Poles to reform the State, so that it would no longer be suicidally cutting its own throat, resulting in the Constitution of 1791. But it was too late, an implacable Catherine II of Russia would not tolerate the remnant of Poland escaping her clutches. The result was the Third Partition, in which Russia and Prussia divvied up the rest of Poland, extinguishing the old Polish State.
Merry Christmas! Sean
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