Es Geloybte Aretz - a Germanwank
- Thread starter carlton_bach
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I would not dismiss the PU simply as an evil organisation.
Sure they commit things that others would call atrocities.
But within Russia the PU is an organisation that drags the country forward. It will be the people that will lead the organisation in the furture that will determine its ultimate fate.
Indeed if valentina rises through the ranks and keeps "the good of the people" in her mind she can achieve much good through the PU, unless she gets corrupted and/or fanatic in her rise...
Sure they commit things that others would call atrocities.
But within Russia the PU is an organisation that drags the country forward. It will be the people that will lead the organisation in the furture that will determine its ultimate fate.
Indeed if valentina rises through the ranks and keeps "the good of the people" in her mind she can achieve much good through the PU, unless she gets corrupted and/or fanatic in her rise...
Remember that a lot of bad things have been done in history in name of the good. for example the spanish inquisition.
The exact same could be said of OTL's All-Union Communist Party. I suspect that's part of the point.
Seeing as to how the rigorous examination of testimony and evidence in the Spanish Inquisition helped promote civil procedure and strict evidence rules throughout Europe, surely one could argue that in the grand historical scale, they were more of a net positive?
tell that to tens of thousands of non-catholics that were butchered by them.
are you apologetic to religious ethnic cleansing? because that is what they did in the low countries, butcher protestants.
As far as she is concerned, there is no better cause than her nation. Until two years ago, she didn't know she had one.
Nothing too fancy, but at the same trime, far in excess of what a woman like her could have expected in the past. The PU is not the CPUSSR, they don't let workers and peasants into the corridors of power. But they will allow people like her to rise to positions of authority on a smaller scale. I am currently envisioning her ending her career as a rayon commander of the Patriotic Union Women's Volunteer Corps, in charge of several charity schools, cottage clinics, an orphanage and a bevy of caseworkers doing the good work. Not a real powerbroker, but someone with a real budget and serious local clout.
If you are an ethnic Russia, the PU is almost always a good thing. Unless you are their political enemy, and there aren't many left.
One could argue she already is a fanatic. The quiet, dedicated kind who sees no problem with devoting all aspects of their life to The Cause. She has no private life, and effectively never will. She will have neither husband nor children, know no man's love and never spend more time away from her duty than is strictly required for recovering her strength. At the end of her life, she will die happy, her only regret that so much is left undone.
Someone has to do it if Russia is to remain a credible threat.
This is one of those topics where definitions matter because facts get obscured by all kinds of legendry. When we say 'Spanish Inquisition', what we usually mean is the royal inquisition (placed under direct state supervision by papal decree) in the kingdom of Spain. This institution was indeed far less bloodthirsty and random than tradition has it. It was still a bureaucratic nightmare, but its reality is farther from 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and closer to late-GDR Stasi. However, that was not the only inquisition in Spanish-ruled territory. THe inquisition in the Netherlands was episcopal, close to the model in the Holy Roman Empire, and subject to far less supervision. People had something to prove - you could show your loyalty by burning the most heretics. The worst excesses, though, were carried out by army, not the inquisition. At the receiving end, one clergyman is as bad as another, I suppose, but these are distinct hierarchies and chains of command.
That somehow reminds me of my fathers aunt - who was a nun...
@carlton_bach great update!! But maybe you could have an update on Siam or South East Asian Countries. AFAIK I don't see any post from it. I want to add some info in the Dutch East Indies during OTL WW1 get November Belofte for enhancing autonomy and promote the Priboemis ( I know some because I live in Indonesia, but if there's someone know more please revised). But after 1914 the Dutch forget it and do more oppression on them. Thanks for this great TL!
yboxman
Banned
The Valentina posts are my favorite, though I have a thing for "Evil Empires".
I know you've been asked the question before (I believe you said that an allohistorical *Russia could be a better place to live, or more powerful, but not both) but can you conceive of any way the *Russian Empire could modernize and/or politically mobilize a significant fraction of it's working class population to the task WITHOUT:
a. Alienating non Russians/East Slavs/Orthodox subjects and making them targets for mass violence by the mobilized population (and be pressured to officially discriminate against them).
b. Writing off more representative local government.
c. Setting up the ground for secession by Non-Russians.
d. Setting up the ground for a populist coup by the mobilizing organization.
?
"a" and "c" seems to be less of an issue in post war Russia since the Poles, Balts, Finns and the more Western (and protonationalistic) portions of West Belarus and Ukraine are gone and the remaining minorities are not yet nationally concsious (with the exception of the Volga Tartars) and are essentially ruled under a colonial type administration. But are #b and #d still an issue?
It seems odd to me that "populist" is apparently equated with "barbaric and rabid" nowadays. Is that consensus--that the more a movement claims the mandate of the common people and genuinely appeals to them, the worse it will be? Or that there is no such thing as genuinely populist, any more than a movement that claims to be about holiness and high morals can be trusted for two seconds? I believe the latter, but not the former, but there seems to be a sort of fashionable hipster sort of scorn for the possibility that a movement actually cares for, and is run by, common people who want to resolve conflicts of elites against the common good in a fashion that leaves the commoners better off, can possibly be genuine, well meaning, and do well.
It's almost like people don't actually believe in democracy or something.
I grew up reading a lot of SF authors who I now judge to be pretty reactionary, such as say Poul Anderson, who gravitated toward this theme and seemed to deeply and sincerely believe it--that there is a true and noble and good populism, a Tolkienesque way of decent common folk living decent common lives and standing for the decent common good, and they are never ever championed by people who claim that mantle and say so, instead these salt of the earth good people always back aristocrats and plutocrats and the rights of the very rich and privileged to do their literally noble best. Then others like say Jerry Pournelle lose even the sense of the Hobbit-like common decency and figure the real heroes of the working class are Nixonesque black operators and military dictators. Same sort of vibe from Tom Clancy and a whole lot of popular culture. If someone claims to be a democrat and person of the people, be sure they are even more wicked than the manifestly corrupt politicians, cops, and criminal gang leaders.
So--seriously, populist=bad, is that the consensus?
Surely I know of many populist movements with dark sides. But I still think there is more hope in reforming and evolving the common person mentality than in relying on the good will of elites who know their status is privileged and based on the majority being losers.
Am I alone in thinking every political category one might identify with has its own form of deep rottenness, and most if perhaps not all have a potential bright side?
I do believe that if perhaps the Bolsheviks themselves were fatally tainted by their willingness to submit to central dictatorship and their doctrines that set themselves up for ruthless power with no checks or balances on them limiting the level of violence or mendacity they were willing to embrace to silence all questioning and criticism, then still the general and broader Russian radical tradition held out real hope for a more enlightened and humane outcome. For Russia to be any sort of better place to live, I'd bet everything on the right kind of Russian populist, and despair of any other sector. I think if the sort of benign revolutionaries I could believe in could get traction they also could deliver a powerful as well as humane state as well.
yboxman
Banned
I did not make that far reaching claim. In this specific case the issues, in regards to an entrenched old regimen (Theoretically absolute monarch surrounded by a clan of interrelated nobility and officials drawn from a narrow social background) lacking popular support or the habbit of appealing to it, is whether:
a. It can mobilize (Russian-Orthodox) populist nationalist sentiment without automatically alienating anyone who is not a Russian (Or not nationally conscious Ukrainian/Byelorussian) and designating them as legitimate targets for violence and harrassment.
b. It can mobilize this sentiment, and advance such an organization which is made up of people from a much more diverse background, without those people turning on the regime which backed them (as Mussolini did on his backers) in order to sieze and redistribute power amongst the leaders of the mass movement.
IOTL The Tsarist regime avoided going all the way with this option primarily out of fear that #b would occur. ITTL, #b was nullified, at least temporarily, by the more radical faction of the PU being decapitated by the moderate faction of the regime with the end of the war acting as a catlyst and the more "moderate" faction of the PU playing along with it. But the minorities, of course, still either got the ax, or bolted, or both.
What I'm asking is whether there is any alternate path in which the monarchial regime (not a republican successor state of any ideological flavor) could have conceivably created a controllable nationalist mass movement WITHOUT #a.
I remember Apollo 8 in lunar orbit. I had hoped that would give us some shared experience.
Not nowadays. It has been equated for 2500 years.
The common people are called common for a reason.
The common people lack the economic means that would allow them to be trusted to sustain the superstructure.
People believe in all kinds of things.
I took me a while to realize your alias is from Ursula K. Le Guin.
@Shevek23, please, if you do nothing else, please read the Wikipedia entry on the Kyklos, and give me a like for acknowledgement, even if you detest my opinions. Please.
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yboxman
Banned
As to the broader issue you raised:
I would say that the current political climate, and the ability of a number of prominent leaders most educated-upper middle class (Liberal left to be sterotypical) people consider "bad" to achieve and maintain power based on disproportionate support amongst the lower middle class of their respective "tribe" and of others to advance "bad" policies or challenge established political systems in what seems to be a non constructive way based on the same support has indeed made members of this class more skeptical of the virtues, and more concerned about the vulnerabilities, of democracy. Among the hard left, who often feel betrayed by the working class of the majority tribe, and who contain a strain which views democracy as essentially instrunmental, I would say that these sentiments are more widespread.
I would say that both approaches are vulnerable to abuse and that one needs to "choose" on a case by case basis. There are a number of historical examples I can think of where gradual reform by elites, and the social-economic dynamics unleashed by stability and economic prosperity resulted in relatively optimal democratic results (South Korea, Taiwan... even Turkey before Edrogan) but there are just as many cases where entrenched elites basically screwed the national economy, mining it to enrich their own coffers and then scramming when the going got tough. I'm rather more hard pressed to think of examples where a revolutionary movement led and composed by the working class was able to sieze power and then do a good job building the state- but of course, by the time matters came to revolution the state was already screwed up badly, so it's not a fair comparision.
Our perception is colored by the fact that almost every successful revolution post 1917 followed the Bolshevik model (since the USSR was providing advisers and funds)- so we there is almost no way to consider the dynamics of a non centralized dictatorship socialist revolutionary regime. A more fundamental critique of your belief is that revolutionary dynamics ineveitably favor the "survival of the fittest" and that those who are most fit in a revolutionary struggle are those who adopt the centralized dictatorship model. and once you adopt that model to topple the old regimen it's difficult to jetterson once you have power.
I would say that the current political climate, and the ability of a number of prominent leaders most educated-upper middle class (Liberal left to be sterotypical) people consider "bad" to achieve and maintain power based on disproportionate support amongst the lower middle class of their respective "tribe" and of others to advance "bad" policies or challenge established political systems in what seems to be a non constructive way based on the same support has indeed made members of this class more skeptical of the virtues, and more concerned about the vulnerabilities, of democracy. Among the hard left, who often feel betrayed by the working class of the majority tribe, and who contain a strain which views democracy as essentially instrunmental, I would say that these sentiments are more widespread.
I would say that both approaches are vulnerable to abuse and that one needs to "choose" on a case by case basis. There are a number of historical examples I can think of where gradual reform by elites, and the social-economic dynamics unleashed by stability and economic prosperity resulted in relatively optimal democratic results (South Korea, Taiwan... even Turkey before Edrogan) but there are just as many cases where entrenched elites basically screwed the national economy, mining it to enrich their own coffers and then scramming when the going got tough. I'm rather more hard pressed to think of examples where a revolutionary movement led and composed by the working class was able to sieze power and then do a good job building the state- but of course, by the time matters came to revolution the state was already screwed up badly, so it's not a fair comparision.
Our perception is colored by the fact that almost every successful revolution post 1917 followed the Bolshevik model (since the USSR was providing advisers and funds)- so we there is almost no way to consider the dynamics of a non centralized dictatorship socialist revolutionary regime. A more fundamental critique of your belief is that revolutionary dynamics ineveitably favor the "survival of the fittest" and that those who are most fit in a revolutionary struggle are those who adopt the centralized dictatorship model. and once you adopt that model to topple the old regimen it's difficult to jetterson once you have power.
No you are not alone. Polybios, Montesquieu, and a majority of the Framers would have agreed with you.
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Meaning no personal offense, I'd call all that classic reactionary and am glad not to be on that team.
I'm not a "kill all the toffs" populist--I'm a "fix the problems that make our lives miserable by fair and honorable means" populist. It is no skin off my nose if others are doing better than me, but if they make my life painful I owe it to myself and others like me to try to do something about it. If I recognize I am in that same relation to other people in the world--people I might have been conditioned to treat with racist disdain and dismissiveness, another sex I have been told I should try to lord over, foreigners (and fellow citizens) whom my ruling elites who pass some benefits on to me have conspired or persisted by trained reflex to oppress for our collective profit--I am morally tainted if I just accept the privileges without protesting on their behalf and trying to do something to level the field.
If one instead defines civilization and progress as the unleveling of the field, of raising up some at the expense of others...well, I don't call that good, not when I hope shared win-win is an option for our species instead.
So I don't actually object to knowing someone who seriously champions the privilege and power of the few openly. It is refreshing you recognize your viewpoint for what it is and don't rationalize it as something else entirely, which is the common situation.
But yeah, I perceive a hard slap in the face of everything I think is progressive and hopeful about our species, and think it is only logical, given our current technological abilities in a wide range of fields from nuclear engineering to bioengineering by way of advanced chemistry as well, that if we all acquiesce to this wisdom of the (elite-backed--we don't hear so much from the more populist types who gainsaid them save through their edited accounts of their populist foes) ancients, then we are pretty much doomed to destroy ourselves. That world view includes the inevitability of combat and struggle among the elites after all, and sooner or later some one of them will push some big red buttons when they see they are losing. It may seem fitting to you that the ones who do that in Dr. Strangelove are the Reds. When one side pushes the red buttons, the other side will immediately follow and devastation will take us all. Nor is nuclear war the sole channel of death--we have plenty of other stuff (wacky organic chemicals incompatible with our ecosystem; deliberate biowar agents, evolutionary responses such as the rise of anti-biotic resistant disease, etc) to trip on on our way falling down the stairs. We probably wouldn't be totally exterminated, but the tottering on of our species on these terms that seem so dark to me would be a sort of drawn out Night of the Living Dead epilogue to the failure of our best hopes.
With the hope of human progress in the form of elevation of the common condition, there is no guarantee of survival on better terms, but there is at least a chance--a chance that a win-win mentality can produce palliatives and maybe cures for some of these ills, and motivate balance and restraint where otherwise despair may rule. I actually think we've seen a bit of that at work in OTL, it helps explain why the nuclear balance of terror works for instance. Take it away, and I ask you, what is the point then of the human story? If one is a theist and believes this is all some prequel to lives in Eternity, perhaps it squares--but of course the dominant Abrahamic theisms make all mortal privilege and elevation the play of children in the eyes of God, whom Jew, Christian and Muslim alike assert created us all to love Him and one another. And keep the law. So conservatism and theism seem logically to me to go hand in hand, but of course the modernist conservatives (post 1800, roughly) have tended to be as atheist as any Marxist, and lack the faith in the quasi-pantheism of the Dialectic and all that, and fight to preserve tradition as a set of myths for the foolish commons to take for boundaries and guides to the only order there is, that imposed by the strong and willful. But to what end, if not the kinship and love of all people and all that hippie stuff?
What is the point, if the purpose of power is power?
Yo, hairy hippie commie from a poor dry colony planet here. Numbered 23 because I am a far inferior epigone of Shevek II of the novel, or Shevek 1,a woman who made a useful kind of nut. But these are the ones I admire and speak for.
Note that LeGuin's Ambiguous Utopia shows that even her happy and helpful Annaresti with all their fine Odonian talk about the Social Organism slip into bureaucratic elitism and need to be shaken up by permanent revolution.
I can live with two principles warring forever, in a yin-yang sort of overturning balances, but someone has to be for each or it is game over. It seems natural to me those on side think they can do without the other.
Well, I generally only give likes when I like it a lot--when things seem said well and I like what is said. Very good writing doesn't get it from me because I don't want to be taken for endorsing a nasty turn of events, even if it is vital to a plot I love.
Since you ask nicely I'll give you one. I enjoy seeing them for me, but I don't count them.
As for the entry--haven't read it in detail yet but it's an old idea to me. You saw my references to Anderson, right? Does his work translate well into your language? I figure you'd mostly like his stuff, its got tons of this cycle of history stuff in it and later I read some Toynbee because critics related Anderson's Flandry / Fall of Terran Empire stories to these cycle historians.
Anyway taking the cycle as a given and unbreakable aspect of human life, as you seem to be urging, seems like a counsel of despair to me. If we can't understand and master the mindless forces that rule us, what is the point of our struggle? I ask again. If we are self-evolved emergences of the potentials of matter in this Universe, why should we not be able to do this, and if we are guided and ruled by some sort of supernatural order that is the true foundation of the order we observe--then it would be foolish to fight it I suppose, "mysterious are the ways of the Lord " and all that, but my personal perspective disbelieves it. Anyway I figure all these ancient philosophies of endless cycles and the inevitability of elite rule and so on (as preferable to mob rule which is worse, if you believe it) are pretty Godless themselves. There's no narrative of justice and progress to be found there either; better we believe we can strive for that ourselves, with good will, than that we must be chained to this wheel of Karma and our only recourse is to escape it somehow, or embrace it. Which is ever so much easier to do on the top of the Wheel of Fortune than on the bottom!
The going has gotten tough. Still I take the revolt against the dirty stupid commons as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know about you, but on American terms I am pretty much a peasant. And of course Americans in general are caught in the dilemma--we are supposed to be Of the People, By the People, For the People--does this mean just our own fellow citizens though or doesn't the logic indicate we should seek peace and justice with all people, everywhere, just as the logic led the man who said that to free people perceived by all and sundry in his nation including himself as some Other kind of people? I am a peasant in my own country but my country is collectively a global Lord. Which side are we on then? If we uphold privilege we justify our collective wealth, but also the continual hoarding of it by a not particularly inspiring class of Leaders. If we uphold equality we have to recognize our collective privilege and face surrendering much luxury and even security we think we are entitled to--but if we recoil selfishly both our security and our luxury erode rapidly anyway.
I have taken a lot of comfort from the notion that the mob is generally misrepresented, caricatured, and maligned unfairly.
In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen cites quite a few surveys that show that the sorts of attitudes often projected on the poorest sectors of American society actually are more characteristic of people some distance up the social ladder--people who have something to lose in fact. On many hot button social issues of the late 60s, it turns out that poor white Americans actually held considerably more progressive views than the media attributed to them--were less likely to be racist than their social betters, were less likely to support the War in Vietnam, and so forth. The ruling elites have a long developed art--Stehndal says 2500 years, I'd go him better by a thousand years or more--of misrepresenting their opposition and projecting their own moral faults onto them. I know darn well that one does not just go to the poorest part of town and start preaching Red Revolution. The folks at the bottom have it deeply pounded into their heads just how helpless and vulnerable they are, and everyone still has something left to lose after all. But I take Loewe's sample of the myths versus realities of the later 60s in American consciousness, backed up by his whole corpus of writing which largely documents the way the myths of race and the Glorious Lost Cause of the Confederacy have been shaped by wholesale neglect of the ruling elites of the value of simple honesty, as evidence that if one opts for the poor and disfranchised, one is probably opting for people of clearer moral compass, if often counselors of despair.
So in this current cycle of reaction--you yourself did point out, it is the "lower middle" people the elites despair of. The lowest generally don't count for reasons of course--being low is by definition powerless and uninfluential after all. Perhaps the worst counsel of despair is that the clearer people's vision of their true situation seems to be, the more deranged and powerless they tend to be--that success and glory seem strongly linked to passion adherence to plain demonstrable falsehoods.
I still have faith in the basic decency of the human masses--if perhaps never as "masses" then as people taken one by one--and that the trick is to keep integrity and build power based on respect honestly earned. Such people will deal with power reasonably and judiciously.
And if you want decent, foresightful, considerate behavior out of some immovable ruling elite--the masses should scare the hell out of them. Best if the fear is largely based on moral guilt, the kind Jefferson felt contemplating the position of African-Americans he knew he did not have the courage or conviction to try and free yet recognized their moral case all too clearly--"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." Anyway a glance back at 19th and 20th century history seems to show me the elites are on their best behavior when they see that the mob seems to be perhaps waking up and might want to start doing something about their miseries, and might have the brains and courage to do it too. Then you get your reformers, your Progressives, your conservative welfare states in Bismarck's Prussia and the Tories of Britain's 1930s. They will love it if people then give them the credit for their compassionate wisdom and roll their eyes at the dirty and imperfect mob, but I am noting the Populists and Social Democrats and Labourites mustering in the shadows and poking out into the sunlight and thinking at least some of the credit is due to them.
Vice versa, my perception is that in my own lifetime, in the USA and it seems now increasingly in Europe as well, true populist organizations and causes have been pretty effectively preempted by Astroturf movements like the American New Right (organized from above by corporate funded think tanks) and real people with genuinely popular grievances have been slinking off into the shadows, the majority of us seeking refuge in various kinds of fantasy worlds our ration of globally plundered luxury affords us very generously. We are off on various apolitical tracks, many of us taking pleasure in discerning hidden political messages that however do not lead to any organization or action.
And lo, this is a generation where the real earnings of workers are stagnant and decoupled from productivity growth--or rather, when the latter takes a downswing wages go right down with it, but when it trends up again they are slow to follow and do nothing more than rise to a previous level, in real terms equivalent to 1970 or so.
Which is cause, which is effect? Will the commons come to rally again if our incomes rise, or will that only happen if we rally first?
There is much to despair in the modern world. But the biggest thing I regret about modern times is the loss of faith in the common person, and this I think was never so much earned by our failings as the successful outcome of a massive program of coordinated propaganda and repression. We are very bad at politics, is what I think, not that we are very bad.
And since we pose less and less threat to the elites every year, they are free to indulge their narrower self interest and engross more and more to themselves, without fear of consequence--therefore if other societies have been improved by wise seeming leaders in the past, it is because they were under pressure to do so, whereas now with no such pressure brought to bear, we can expect only the worst.
Step one it seems to me is to uphold the dignity and rights of the people and appeal to democracy and not be dissuaded by goblins.
It is [indeed] for us the living [goblin ?] to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced.
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