Help, help, I'm being repressed.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_yeats.ucc.ie>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 00:09:13 GMT


bjm10_at_cornell.edu:
> The grounds upon which it has been denied that the Kralorelan government
> is oppressive are specious and based entirely on only one model of
> oppression, the 20th-century Western totalitarian method. There are
> other methods.

Yes, but the point was that those were the comparisons being made, and which are not really very valid ones. No-one is suggesting 'Kralorela is all sweetness and light'. (Well, except that it is of course: the mandarin just told us all so, after all.)

> The tolerance of Immanent Mastery again says nothing about tolerating
> outright Orlanthi worship becoming widespread in K. for example.

The example is somewhat too hypothetical to be answerable in practice. In what way would Orlanth worship be especially worse than worship of this or that other god, and in particular, why would it be worse than the PoIM?

> Immanent Mastery is a stupid and offensive practice, but it is a stupid
> and offensive practice that is from people one EXPECTS to be stupid and
> offensive

> --your peasants.

Oh yeah, them. Well, partly so, but the Empire does trouble itself to persecute some peasant cults, but not this one. (So on that aspect of the point you were making, as I understood it, you're quite correct.) Officially, this is as a moral lesson; cynically, it might be claimed to be for the pragmatic reason that they make darned useful cannon-fodder.

> Likewise, it is a stupid and offensive
> misunderstanding of the truth, not a stupid and offensive denial
> therefrom. Obviously, we tolerate Immanent Mastery because the peasants
> who practice it are simply incapable of doing any better.

The distinction here seems slender, and not really very accurate. The mandarins will tell people long and hard about the untruth of the Immanant Path, so there's little excuse for misunderstanding. Most peasant _do_ do better, so why would those that do simply be written off?

> The fact that K. governors tolerate things that Western European
> governors wouldn't in an authoritarian state makes them no less
> authoritarian. They just think other things are more important to exert
> utter control over.

That I'll broadly agree with. Understanding Kralori policy is complicated by a similar factor as in the Lunar case: it's run by a bunch of squirrelly mystics, operating to some obscure agenda of their own which doesn't necessarily always make sense in any obvious, mundane way. (Which isn't to say that the motives of the scrollshuffling  Kralori bureaucracy, as much as the staid Yelmic and "post-  nobility, aren't sometimes painfully obvious.)

Cheers,
Alex.


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