Sandra to Eric, en route to Mirkheim:
"'In history, comic operas have had a way of turning into tragedies.'" (p. 112)
That sounds familiar but it is not the same remark:
Two of Marx's most recognizable quotes appear in the essay. The first is on history repeating itself: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". The second concerns the role of the individual in history: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
-copied from here.
I cannot comment on historical comic operas, tragedies or farces but I fully endorse that further comment: men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. David Falkayn did not choose to be alive at the time when his home planet, Hermes, was occupied by mercenaries employed by Baburites but he made history by his role in the resistance.
13 comments:
Marx was thinking of Napoleon I and Napoleon III. But that was an unfair comparison; Napoleon III was a very able ruler, and did a great deal for France -- under him, economic growth was more rapid than it had been before, or was to be again until after WWII. He was deeply concerned with technological progress, and had a better understanding of it than nearly any other European ruler of the time.
What Napoleon III wasn't was a great -general-. And he let himself get diplomatically outmaneuvered by Bismarck, but then, who didn't?
And Bismarck was at his peak in the late 1860's, while Napoleon was well past his at the time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Intriguing, these comments about Napoleon III. But I think he made a bad mistake trying to turn Mexico into a client state, with Archduke Maximilian as Emperor there.* That angered the US, which considered the Americas as being in its sphere of interest. If it hadn't been been for the overwhelming distraction of its Civil War, the gov't of Pres. Lincoln might well have taken forceful action against France.
Ad astra! Sean
*Maximilian's brother, Emperor Francis Joseph, disliked and opposed his brother's decision to accept that dubious offer of the Mexican crown.
Well, in common with many European politicians, N.III thought the South was going to win and hence that the Monroe Doctrine was a dead letter.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Such as, notoriously, William Gladstone in the UK, who also thought the Confederacy would win.
I've also wondered what might have happened if there had been another Bourbon restoration after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Which nearly happened!
Ad astra! Sean
"...thought the South was going to win"
So why was that such a common opinion?
With hindsight, the common opinion is that the only chance for the south was, the Union deciding it was more trouble that it was worth to fight to keep the South in.
Kaor, Jim!
Because, at first, the war went badly for the Unionists. A series of inept generals, at least in the eastern theater, kept ignominiously being defeated by the Confederates. The tide only started turning with the fall of Vicksburg and Lee's defeat at Gettysburg.
Yes, the gross disparity of strength between the US and the CSA did mean that as long as the will to conquer did not fail the Unionists would crush the Confederates. Jefferson Davis' strategy was to make the war so costly the US would give up.
Ad astra! Sean
If the US had had anyone but Lincoln as President, the South probably -would- have won. Seward, for example, thought that starting a war with Britain would make the South rally 'round and rejoin the nation.
For that matter, as Harry Turtledove has pointed out if Lee's "Order 191" hadn't been lost by a courier -- and then by a series of equally unlikely coincidences, brought to McClellan's attention and believed by him -- Antietam wouldn't have happened.
And the British and French were preparing to present a joint note to the American government demanding a negotiated settlement acknowledging the CSA's independence.
Antietam convinced them to wait. If McClellan hadn't gotten his hands on that order, the probable result would have been a Confederate victory in Pennsylvania, an Anglo-French offer of "armed mediation", and Confederate independence.
Jim: nobody has infinite morale. Look who -nearly- won the 1864 election in the US on a peace platform.
I just looked up that election. It underscores the weirdness of the Electoral College.
Lincoln got 55% of the popular vote, but 212 out of 234 (valid) EC votes.
Though I suppose it isn't *that* much odder than 1st past the post parliamentary elections where a party can get a majority of seats with a plurality of the popular vote.
In US elections 55% seems to be considered a very solid victory. A bit odd that.
I understand the 1st Battle of Bull Run was actually fairly close. Has anyone written an alternate history in which the Union won that battle? Would both sides have accepted a peace in which the South kept slavery but slavery was not allowed outside states in which it was already law?
Something that struck me as odd when reading the history of that period is that both pro and anti slavery people thought slavery couldn't survive if it wasn't able to expand.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: I agree, without a President with the unique talents and unbending determination of Lincoln, the CSA very likely would have successfully broken away from the US.
Seward's suggestion of picking a fight with the UK to reunite the US seems very odd. It seems more likely to mean having the US fighting both the CSA and the British Empire. Which makes no sense.
Yes, I forgot how the accident of Lee's Order 191 falling into McClellan's hands was crucial. It enabled him to thwart Lee's invasion of PA (with the goal of cutting off and capturing Washington, DC). Altho tactically a draw, Antietam was just enough of a victory to dissuade the UK and France from intervening in the war.
But McClellan was soon removed from command of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln was fed up with McClellan's excessive caution and unwillingness to take rapid and aggressive action against the Confederates.
Jim: The Electoral College was one of the compromises agreed to at the often contentious Constitutional Convention of 1787. It's designed to prevent the largest, most populous states from completely dominating and steam rolling the smaller, less populous states.
And it has succeeded in doing that. It has forced both major parties to focus on building up a nation wide for ideas and policies they want to enact. Compelling them to back down from their more radical ideas if they wanted to win elections.
Much to the frustration of the Democrats! Ever since Wilson's Presidency the Democrats have expressed anger at things like the EC and every state having only two Senators, regardless of population, as chains and balls preventing them from enacting the worse of their bad leftist ideas.
Interesting, what you said about first Bull Run. I don't recall any writer speculating as you suggested. But in the Presidential campaign of 1860 Lincoln had repeatedly promised he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed. But the secessionist fire eaters in the South did not want to see if he would honor that promise.
By the 1860's I think slavery was becoming more and more of an economic liability due to advances in technology.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Jim!
Your comments (and Stirling's) reminded me of how Judah Benjamin, one of the shrewdest of Davis's cabinet Secretaries, opposed the decision to attack Fort Sumter in April 1861. That decision was made in the hope of jarring other states, esp. Virginia, into declaring for the Confederacy and joining it. The special convention in VA to decide on secession had been deadlocked for months between the pro and anti-Union factions.
Benjamin opposed the attack on Fort Sumter because that would likely break a similar deadlock in the North about what to do about the secessionist states. As long as no overt violence was done to the US many people were willing to let the CSA go. Any attack on Fort Sumter would give Lincoln a casus belli for declaring the CSA in rebellion against the US and raising armies to coerce the rebel states back into the Union.
Judah Benjamin believed it was better for the CSA to be satisfied with what it had and leave the onus for starting a war on Lincoln. The longer the Confederacy lasted de facto without a stunned US doing anything effective about it the harder it would be for the US and other nations to withhold de jure recognition of it. That was better than gaining a few states and starting a war the CSA was not likely to win.
Ad astra! Seam
OTOH
It appears the confederate leaders would not have tried to secede if Lincoln had not been elected.
A criticism I have seen of the electoral college is that presidential candidates end up campaigning only in swing states and Republican voters in predominantly Democratic states or Democratic voters in predominantly Republican states get effectively disenfranchised.
"slavery was becoming more and more of an economic liability"
I do recall de Tocqueville writing a few decades earlier about the slave states being economically less developed than the free states.
Kaor, Jim!
But Lincoln was elected, largely because the secessionist crisis split the Democrats into warring factions with rival Presidential candidates. That's why the Republicans won.
And not everybody in the South agreed the legal and constitutional election of Lincoln justified something as radical as secession. They resented how South Carolina forced matters with its secession in December 1860.
No political systems are going to be perfect. The most successful regimes are built on compromises, either overt or implicit. The Republicans and Democrats you mentioned will have to accept, as I do, being "effectively disenfranchised."
And Tocqueville was right, slavery was a drag hindering the more efficient development of the South. Absent secession and civil war I think slavery would have died out by 1890.
If Tsarist Russia could abolish its form of slavery, serfdom, in 1862, without fighting a civil war, the US should have as well!
Ad astra! Sean
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