Lorenzo de Conti tells Manfred von Einbeck (Manse Everard) that Pope Innocent has:
"'...preached a fresh crusade against the House of Hauteville. We'll cast it into the sea and bring [Sicily] back to Christ.'" (p. 333)
Everard reflects:
"To the Inquisition, when it gets founded. To the persecution of Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians. To the burning of heretics." (ibid.)
This is the history that the Time Patrol guards.
Lorenzo aspires to become a knight of a new Charlemagne whereas Everard reflects that Charlemgne:
"...massacred the Old Saxons with Stalin-like thoroughness. But the Carolingian myth has taken hold." (p. 334)
Circulating stories and ballads will become the Chanson de Roland and Carolingian romances. Anderson contrasts the history with the myth.
8 comments:
The Saxons kept rebelling against Charlemagne after he conquered them; massacre was the standard treatment for people who did that at the time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that mention of Stalin reminded me that was exactly how Lenin and Stalin crushed opposition to Marxist-Leninism.
Ad astra! Sean
What Stalin was defending was not Marxism!
Kaor, Paul!
Wrong, all Stalin did was to extend and complete what Lenin started. You are in denial about the bloody history of Marxism.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Wrong. I am not in denial about the bloody history of dictators, including Stalin. Marxism is about the collective self-emancipation of the working class, not about their exploitation and oppression by a tyrant. Workers' councils began an emancipatory process in 1917 but it was crushed by backwardness, isolation, civil war and wars of intervention, leaving a bureaucracy which had lost any democratic basis and which then stifled any remnant of workers' democracy in order to preserve its own power. Stalin murdered Bolsheviks and reversed their policies. What he did was not a continuation of what they had tried to do or of what I would have tried to do if I had been there then. We should recognize each other's actual beliefs and intentions, not continually tell someone that he is doing the precise opposite of what he clearly is trying to do!
Paul.
Lenin did exactly the same things as Stalin -- he deliberately caused the Volga famine of 1921-22, for example, which killed 5,000,000 people.
He sent people to concentration camps and had them tortured by the Cheka and rounded them up for forced labor.
See Trotsky's defense of forced labor, for example.
"... we are making the first attempt in world-history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself. This, however, does not exclude the element of compulsion in all its forms, both the most gentle and the extremely severe. The element of State compulsion not only does not disappear from the historical arena, but on the contrary will still play, for a considerable period, an extremely prominent part."
Lenin just didn't have as much time in sole authority as Stalin did.
In haste. If Lenin deliberately caused a famine, then obviously I do not support that or make any excuses for it. Torture also I regard as completely unacceptable.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't believe a word of what you said about Marxism, which has never worked out as you keep claiming it does. You are clinging to a failed and discredited ideology.
Ad astra! Sean
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