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.
19 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
Sean,
I do not believe a word of what you have said against Marxism. Marxism is the theory and practice of proletarian self-emancipation. Read its founding documents.
I am not clinging to a failed and discredited system. As I have explained before, only one workers' revolution so far, the Russian Revolution, has been led by Marxists. That revolution was stifled for reasons that I have explained so you cannot say that Marxism has NEVER worked out as if it had been tried many times. There is no "bloody history" of Marxism. There is certainly a bloody history of imperialism and colonialism which Marxists oppose. I get the impression that you are not engaging with arguments and evidence but repeating stock phrases because you are clinging to an economic system that has been very dynamic but is now in long term decline and that cannot be propped up forever.
Maybe I should not have quoted Anderson's reference to Stalin? (But I have to be free to quote Anderson!) The mere mention of Stalin's name unleashes a knee jerk denunciation of all Marxism and I certainly have to disagree with that so we go through the motions of an argument yet again as if we had never been through it before. Can we at least agree that mere historical references to "Stalin" will not unleash this argument yet again?
Paul.
I have read about the Volga famine and would need some persuasion that Lenin deliberately caused it.
Kaor, Paul!
I care nothing about those "founding documents," what matters is how Marxists behaved after seizing power: cynically, brutally, and tyrannically. Lenin never believed in those "noble" slogans. And it was Lenin himself who did that "stifling." Marxism has been vastly more bloody than European colonialism has ever been.
All we have ever seen from Marxism anywhere has been State socialism: an autocratic and despotic regime incompetently trying to run an economy from the top down thru a bureaucracy and secret police. Socialism has always turned out like that. Marxism: failed and discredited.
Like it not Stalin is always going to remind me of his fellow monster, Lenin, who founded the USSR. Stalin was as brutal and cruel as Lenin, all the former did was to extend and complete what Lenin started.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But I keep telling you that there has only been one revolution led by Marxists and that that one was stifled not by one individual but by objective circumstances, backwardness, isolation, civil war and wars of intervention. Socialism is not bureaucratic state control but democratic workers' control and how often has the latter been tried?
You will not even read "founding documents" (quote marks again?) We are talking not about three individuals, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, but about Marx, Engels and very large numbers of people who are Marxists and who certainly oppose what Russia became.
Stalinism (not "Marxism") has been bloodier than colonialism? I don't think so. Not bloodier, just as bloody.
You are saying that any and every historical reference to Stalin will revive this argument again? There is no point in that.
Paul.
Basically, the Bolsheviks confiscated food from the farmers without compensation to feed the urban population. The farmers then ran down their stocks and stored less because there was no point in using labor to grow crops that would be taken away.
Then the crop failed -- and the Bolsheviks confiscated food nonetheless. So millions starved.
From SM Stirling:
Basically, the Bolsheviks confiscated food from the farmers without compensation to feed the urban population. The farmers then ran down their stocks and stored less because there was no point in using labor to grow crops that would be taken away.
Then the crop failed -- and the Bolsheviks confiscated food nonetheless. So millions starved.
Something hard to fathom went wrong here. I saw SM Stirling's comment but it disappeared, from my screen at least, when I tried to respond to it so I copied it from the combox into the combox. Now it might appear twice?
My response:
I agree, a bad situation leading to bad actions with catastrophically bad consequences. I do not know what could have been done. If I had been there, I would have been asking for some sort of joint action between town dwellers and farmers to address the crisis together. But I expect that I would have been shouted down. (That can happen in far less serious situations.)
I have realized what had happened. The comment to which I was responding was earlier/further back than I had thought.
Or something. (The comments seem to keep moving around.)
Paul: the main reason the famine wasn't -worse- was that Hoover mobilized international aid.
Lenin delayed acceptance of the aid as long as he could, and when it was over he arrested or exiled all the members of the action committee that had invited him in.
OK. I have read some of that elsewhere. I am not committed to defending Lenin, Trotsky or anyone else from any criticism. Quite the contrary.
We hope to build a better society in more favourable conditions although the present environmental degradation might rob us of that.
I know people who are on what I regard as the right side now but who would certainly become dictators if they wielded power in emergency situations. We have to have a lot of people taking action to affect the situation - e.g., Kornilov's coup failed because it was not supported. It is not enough for us just to get particular individuals into positions of power. We have a lot of experience to tell us that that alone is nowhere near enough.
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