The Dispossessed (SPOILERS, Long)
Jordan S. Bassior
The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
SPOILERS
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I. Loaded Comparisons
It's interesting that Ursula K. LeGuin does _not_ dare to compare Anarres with
any society as free as, say, the 20th century West (even the one existing in
the early 1970's, which was in many respects more troubled that the one of
today).
There are three major nations on Urras.
A-Io, the capitalistic liberal democracy where most of the Urrasti action is
set, can best be described as a country with the social attitudes of Victorian
England, the riot control skills of Late Tsarist Russia -- these coexisting
with fusion power and interplanetary space travel. Women are barred from most
occupations. Lower-class persons _defer_ to upper-class ones. Peaceful
demonstrations are dealt with by strafing the crowd and then hunting down the
survivors for days.
(Now, A-Io is of course a fictional culture, and the author is within her
rights to make it misogynistic, stratrified, and cruel. But when she
deliberately structures the novel to invite comparison -- for instance, by
cutting from Arras to A-Io each alternate chapter -- one is bound to ask why
she picks a very _nasty_ society to serve as her example of a capitalist
liberal democracy).
Thu, the main rival of A-Io, is not described in detail, but from the clues
given is obviously a Stalinist communist dictatorship. Benbili, the country
that A-Io and Thu have a war over during the course of the book, is a chaotic
"Third World" country, normally ruled by a military dictatorship, which is
overthrown by an unconvnincingly described revolution, with the A-Iotians then
restoring the dictator to power.
Terra (Urras and Anarres both orbit Tau Ceti) has suffered a catastrophic
population collapse in her past (from 9 to 1/2 billion), and submitted to a
horrendously totalitarian regime in reaction to this die-off:
"Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins,
on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total
control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce
of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthenasia, univeral consdription into
the labor force, toward the goal of racial survival."
(a "solution," incidentally, that based on the historical evidence seems
unlikely to work: one can more reasonably assume that "racial survial" is the
excuse the rulers of the horrible culture described there uses to maintain
their dominance).
The Hainish are "total altruists" dominated by awareness of their own age and
cultural guilt for some crime: we don't learn much about them (maybe in her
other books?).
Att no point do we see a non-mysoginistic, humane, liberal democratic
capitalism -- such as the one that we live in today -- practiced by anyone. In
fact, LeGuin implicitly argues that such is impractical over the long run,
because one may presume that such a culture (ours) was at least partially
responsible for the ruin of Terra. But I submit that almost every reader, given
a choice between, say, the America of 1970 and _any_ of the cultures detailed
in the book, would have picked America in 1970. Let alone America c.2000!
II. Unconvincingly Utopian Ambiguity
For all the talk of an "ambigious" Utopia, Anarres is culturally working far
better, 167 years after the colonization, than seems likely. We're supposed to
believe that the Syndic of Initiative is the _first_ serious dissent that the
culture has ever had, that the reaction to them is the first repression that
the culture has ever known, and that Anarres is in some meaningful sense a
society perpetually "in revolution" (I'm minded of Kodos and Kang's "twirling,
twirling towards progress" when I read that line!) :)
This despite the fact that there are features in this culture that would be
obvious handles for a tyrant to grasp. For instance, the worst sins are
"egoism" and "profiteering." _Thoughts_ along these lines are bad; _expressing_
them is worse.
Now, because all humans have a strong sense of personal identity, and try to
ensure that they produce more than they consume in any endeavor meant to
constitute "work," these are "sins" which _every_ (sane) human being can be
properly "accused" of. This means that every Anarresti should know he's a
miserable sinner (or be convincable of same by a skilled speaker). This is a
tailor-made opportunity for petty tyranny.
Yet, apparently, nothing like this happened until Shevek and his pals were
born?
(We don't know, it after all could be that they never tried to find out what
happened in the past. But it's a _big_ omission, that even Shevek's slightly
paranoid friend never tried to find this out).
III. Anarrean Lethargy
At that, there are aspects of Anarresti society that don't make a lot of sense
unless we assume that their culture is not very good at identifying and
pursuing opportunities. I don't know if this was _intentional_ on the part of
the author, but here goes.
A. Tourist Lethargy - The Anarresti have and enforce a de facto non-intercourse
policy with the rest of the Universe, analogous to that of Shogunate Japan.
Their trade with Urras is grudging and restricted to vital items. Information
going in and out is censored. They ignore (!) the coming of interstellar aliens
(!!!). Shevek is supposedly the first person to travel from Anarres to Urras
for over a century, which if true argues that the restrictions used to be even
more severe. He has to avoid a rock-throwing mob in order to leave the planet.
This is a level of xenophobia the Iranian ayatollahs only _wish_ their own
people possessed.
B. Navigational Lethargy - The Anarresti have a space fleet consisting of 12
ships, which are currently capable of repeated atmospheric launch and re-entry
(they haven't lost any in some 167 years, unless they have a treaty with the
Urrasti to replace the losses), and which were originally capable of
inter-lunar flight (these ships are how they got there).
This means that the Anarreans, at least theoretically, could go anywhere
in the system -- if you can reach the orbit of a terrestrial planet, you're
"halfway to anywhere" (Pournelle's famous phrase). Unless Tau Ceti has a very
weird system, it's gotta have more than the twin Anarresti-Urrasti planet.
Yet the Anarresti can't think of anything better to do with their ships
than to arm them and use them as a patrol against (apparently non-existent,
because there's no mention of even attempted smuggling anywhere in the story)
alien incursions. Given that their ships are over one and a half centuries,
old, and that the Urrasti have been updating their own spaceflight technology,
they would presumably be as useful against an Urrasti invasion as war junks
against ships of the line.
Now, you could argue that the Urrasti don't let the Anarresti colonize
anywhere else in the Cetan system. You could -- except that nobody mentions
this, not even the paranoidly anti-Urrasti who oppose the Syndic of Initiative.
You'd _think_ that if the Urrasti were so restricting the Anarresti, that this
would be a sore spot with the Anarresti patriots, wouldn't you?
Heck, it doesn't even seem to occur to the Anarresti that they have what
amounts to 12 capacious suborbital transports -- all Anarresti air
transportation seems to be accomplished by _dirigible_! The limitation of their
most valuable craft to "defense" against a non-present "enemy", who would be
overwhelming if he ever came, is profoundly irrational, and creepy in terms of
the level of implied paranoia.
C. Industrial Lethargy - The Anarresti have a metal-rich planet. This is, in
fact, the whole _basis_ of their interplanetary economy. Yet, at the same time,
they have so little heavy industry that the construction of a single oceanic
barge will consume a good portion of their whole industrial capacity for a
year, according to Shevek. Why?
D. Commercial Lethargy - The Annaresti metals output includes _gold_. Yet, for
some reason (probably their horror of "profiteering"), it doesn't occur to them
to increase their gold output, develop a foreign exchange surplus, and use this
to purchase heavy durable goods from Urras to improve the standard of living on
Annares. Instead, they limit their trade to what sounds like a mutual tributary
arrangement; the sort of thing the Egyptians and Hittites had with each other
on the royal level.
(They _do_ primarily import high-tech machinery and biotechnicals from Urras,
in fact, but they don't seem to be cutting very good deals. My opinion is that
the Urrasti are probably sharping them for everything they can).
E. Maritime Lethargy - Anarres has a very sparse, very fragile land ecosystem,
but a much richer and more complex oceanic ecosystem. So what do the Anarresti
do?
They live on the plains and mostly ignore the oceans, though at the point of
the story, they are just beginning (!), under the lash of famine (!) to
research the possibility of fishing and aquaculture. Um ... duh?
F. Biological Activity - There is one thing that the Anarresti do a lot of,
though it's described by Ursula with all the eroticism of a musketry drill.
That's have sex.
Unfortunately for the Anarresti, they make motherhood _real_ easy -- free food,
and free creches and education for the children. With the predictable result.
Anarres is overpopulated. BADLY overpopulated.
"What!" I hear you cry. "But there are only a few million Anarresti!" How can
they be _overpopulated?_"
The answer is that "overpopulation" is a problem of the ratio between energy,
food, and other economic resources, on the one hand, and people on the other. A
wealthy, crowded city is _not_ overpopulated. A poor community living dispersed
on an arid plain may well be overpopulated.
We know that Anarres suffers from severe overpopulation because they have
evolved a way of lie (farming on an arid planet vulnerable to years-long
droughts) which _should_ require immense food surpluses be laid up in granaries
and other storehouses. Instead, everyone can take food as long as there is no
_extreme_ shortage. (This is _explicitly_ stated by Shevek in the scene with
the laid-up train).
Thus, the accumulation of large food surpluses is impossible. (Heck it would be
"profiteering" to even try!) And, when the drought hits, we witness an
atomic-powered industrial civilization suffering from the sort of famine that
the Pharoahs of Egypt had managed to avoid with a muscle-powered agricultural
one.
Good going, Odonists. Circle of Life, and all that. *snicker*
IV. Weird War Tales
A. The Benbilian revolutionaries overthrow an armed military dictatorship --
presumably, they defeat his troops. Yet, when the A-Iotians invade, one reason
the A-Iotian forces can conquer so easily is that most of the revolutionaries
are unarmed. Huh? All I can say is that the Benbilian Army must have made the
Tsarist Russians look competent by comparison.
B. Shevek, master of military strategy, floors an Urrasti in debate by pointing
out that military hierarchy is unnecessary, since, after all, guerillas manage
without such things. Apparently, LeGuin had never troubled herself to learn
anything about guerilla warfare, which is especially funny given that America
was actually involved in a guerilla war at the time that she wrote this book.
C. The climatic A-Iotian riot scene involves a crowd of a hundred thousand or
so workers being strafed by helicopter gunships (the _Blue Thunder_ approach to
riot control, apparently). After this, the crowd is broken up by troops
supported by armored cars (apparently, riot police weren't an Urrasti
invention). THEN, the A-Iotian military tries to hunt down and kill the
survivors.
Why? Are the A-Iotians utterly determined to decimate their own workforce?
What's the point of hunting down _defeated_ demonstrators, anyway? And how,
incidentally, can the troops tell rioters from other people in the city. It
looks to me as if the A-Iotian army is sacking its own capital!
Conclusion
_The Dispossessed_ is a good book, but very deeply flawed. Ursula K. LeGuin
intended to compare and contrast Anarres with the real world, but did so only
by loading the balance scales -- the "real world" shown is a combination of the
worst of capitalist societies; Anarres is an idealized anarcho-socialist utopia
with very managable problems. At the same time, many of the problems are "the
planet ate my work" type problems, supposedly due to the harshness of the
environment, but clearly (to me, anyway) due to Anarresti lethargy in
exploiting their opportunities.
It is peculiarly a book of its times -- c. 1970, when many intellectuals felt
that America was fundamentally flawed, and that there was something alien, and
better, that could be built. As such, I don't know if it will last, save with
the support of nostalgiac teachers.
--
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
--
"To urge the preparation of defence is not to assert the imminence of war. On
the contrary, if war were imminent, preparations for defense would be too
late." (Churchill, 1934)
--
Gareth Wilson
> jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
> <snip>
>
> Jesus, Jordan; 282 lines to point out that LeGuin was never a very
> good SF author? :-)
Did anyone read the essay where she complained that vegetables didn't
get enough attention in SF?
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gareth Wilson
Christchurch
New Zealand
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
thomas...@bluetail.com
jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) writes:
> [long discussion on Dispossessed]
Interesting reading. _The_Dispossessed_ fell from my nerveless grasp
as the first chapter ended, so I won't be able to say much more;
except that I'm not sure why it's considered such a classic. Sounds
like a utopia on par with that of _The_Iron_Dream_.
Thomas
--
Thomas Lindgren thoma...@alteon.com
Alteon WebSystems
Jordan S. Bassior
>Did anyone read the essay where she complained that vegetables didn't
>get enough attention in SF?
Mm ... on what basis did she make this claim?
david carlton
> For all the talk of an "ambigious" Utopia, Anarres is culturally
> working far better, 167 years after the colonization, than seems
> likely. We're supposed to believe that the Syndic of Initiative is
> the _first_ serious dissent that the culture has ever had, that the
> reaction to them is the first repression that the culture has ever
> known, and that Anarres is in some meaningful sense a society
> perpetually "in revolution" (I'm minded of Kodos and Kang's
> "twirling, twirling towards progress" when I read that line!) :)
Do we know that it's the first serious dissent? I don't recall that
being said anywhere in the book, though I certainly could be wrong.
I do think it's wrong that the reaction to them is the first
repression that the culture has even known. In the book, before the
Syndic of Initiative is on the scene, we see a man separated from his
wife for four years, being prevented from teaching and publishing the
material he wants unless he submits to the appropriate authorities,
and we see somebody sent to a mental hospital because of his protests
against the government. I don't know if the first of those is exactly
repression per se, but it sounds pretty awful to me; the second of
those probably qualifies repression, and the third unquestionably
does. (And there's the way Shevek was treated as a kid, too.)
And I don't see any reason why we're supposed to think that similar
events haven't occurred in the past. None of the above repressive
behavior was present as the work of rogue agents, or anything: they
were working within the system.
david carlton | <http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/>
car...@math.stanford.edu | Go books: <http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/go/>
I guess we can live on his POT FARM in HADES!!
Jordan S. Bassior
>Do we know that it's the first serious dissent? I don't recall that
>being said anywhere in the book, though I certainly could be wrong.
That's a good point -- _Shevek_ seems to think that it's the first time, but
then Shevek strikes me as pretty naive. I think it's possible that LeGuin meant
him to be naive, too, since several times in the story others of his age cohort
realized Shevek was headed for touble on Anarres before Shevek did.
>I do think it's wrong that the reaction to them is the first
>repression that the culture has even known. In the book, before the
>Syndic of Initiative is on the scene, we see a man separated from his
>wife for four years, being prevented from teaching and publishing the
>material he wants unless he submits to the appropriate authorities,
>and we see somebody sent to a mental hospital because of his protests
>against the government. I don't know if the first of those is exactly
>repression per se, but it sounds pretty awful to me; the second of
>those probably qualifies repression, and the third unquestionably
>does. (And there's the way Shevek was treated as a kid, too.)
That's a good point. Both these struck me as examples of repression.
>And I don't see any reason why we're supposed to think that similar
>events haven't occurred in the past. None of the above repressive
>behavior was present as the work of rogue agents, or anything: they
>were working within the system.
That's very true.
Also, and this is a serious gripe I have with the plausibility of the
background, it was never exactly explained how these were enforced. What, in
particular, prevents dissidents from poltiically organizing? The Syndic of
Defense doesn't seem competent enough to "enforce" anything. What, exactly,
would the Annaresti "establishment" do if someone organized an alternate Syndic
of Labor and picked their own assignments?
Gareth Wilson
> Gareth Wilson said:
>
> >Did anyone read the essay where she complained that vegetables didn't
> >get enough attention in SF?
>
> Mm ... on what basis did she make this claim?
She said that plants in general were an important part of the world but didn't
get as much attention from SF writers because they couldn't be replaced with
machines. "You can replace an ox with a tractor, but whoever heard of artificial
corn?" (This was published before GM food was developed, of course.) Doesn't make
a lot of sense to me, but it was amusing. She also praised the film _Silent
Running_ for including more plant-related material...
Jordan S. Bassior
>She said that plants in general were an important part of the world but didn't
>get as much attention from SF writers because they couldn't be replaced with
>machines. "You can replace an ox with a tractor, but whoever heard of
>artificial corn?" (This was published before GM food was developed, of
course.)
Not only that, but "corn" itself is _already_ "artificial corn." The "corn"
(maize to Europeans) that sits on our dinner tables bears only a vague
resemblance to the wild plant that the Mesoamerican Indians originally
cultivated. The same is true of almost all domesticated plants.
Having said that, LeGuin has a point. Plants are very important to all human
cultures, and (futuristic versions of) plants will probably continue to be
essential to humanity for a good long while to come. The ships and habs that we
pollinate the Universe with will almost certainly contain hydroponics modules.
(ObVideoSF: _Andromeda_, in which one of the lost Commonwealth treasures that
the title ship bears are a kind of flower which is enormously efficient at
producing oxygen, and was exterminated in most of the former Commonwealth
during the Nietzschian Wars).
Phil Fraering
> She said that plants in general were an important part of the world
> but didn't get as much attention from SF writers because they
> couldn't be replaced with machines. "You can replace an ox with a
> tractor, but whoever heard of artificial corn?" (This was published
> before GM food was developed, of course.) Doesn't make a lot of
> sense to me, but it was amusing. She also praised the film _Silent
> Running_ for including more plant-related material...
Well, there's also the old Star Trek's "The Trouble With Tribbles."
--
Phil Fraering "Do you like country music? So do I, and I
p...@globalreach.net sure do miss it..." -KBON radio announcer
thomas...@bluetail.com
Guy Gordon <gor...@NOSPAMwhite-crane.com> writes:
> thomas...@bluetail.com wrote:
> >
> >jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) writes:
> >
> >> [long discussion on Dispossessed]
> >
> >Interesting reading. _The_Dispossessed_ fell from my nerveless grasp
> >as the first chapter ended, so I won't be able to say much more;
> >except that I'm not sure why it's considered such a classic. Sounds
> >like a utopia on par with that of _The_Iron_Dream_.
>
> I'm *sure* she'll be pleased to hear you say so. ;-)
Er, well, sorry. Still, I got the "happy campers in North Korea" vibe,
and done in earnest too. It sounded from the above like it kept going
in that direction, for quite a while.
Does it work as a satire/attack on the decadent west? Not better than
_Space_Merchants_ or _The_Sheep_Looks_Up_ surely?
Jordan S. Bassior
>Er, well, sorry. Still, I got the "happy campers in North Korea" vibe,
>and done in earnest too. It sounded from the above like it kept going
>in that direction, for quite a while.
I got this vibe too. It was seriously creepy, considering that she wrote it
within a decade of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and at a time when
Southeast Asia was about to go down with the slaughter of millions of
civilians. Sort of like someone, in the America of 1940, writing about how
wonderful things would be in a hypothetical society in which "racially
predisposed parasites" had been eliminated, or something like that.
But I'll give LeGuin the benefit of the doubt -- I'll assume that she didn't
know what was going on in East Asia.
>Does it work as a satire/attack on the decadent west? Not better than
>_Space_Merchants_ or _The_Sheep_Looks_Up_ surely?
Especially since she tipped the scales heavily, by giving _the most
sympathetic_ nation on Urras (A-Io), a combination of a 19th century British
attitude towards women and the lower classes with a 20th century Latin American
attitude towards internal security and riot control. This of course served the
purpose of making Anarres look better, by comparison.
Mark Atwood
>
> Er, well, sorry. Still, I got the "happy campers in North Korea" vibe,
> and done in earnest too. It sounded from the above like it kept going
> in that direction, for quite a while.
There was a lot of the vibe going around then. If you want *creepy*,
read some of the "Rah rah rah Red China" articles in places like early
70s issues of Whole Earth and CoEvolution Quarterly[1], and similar
publications.
People *really believed* that crap. And what's even weirder, they
really belived that their "really believing" it would make it "really
real"!
Really.
[1] Collecting WEC, WER, and CoEq is a hobby of mine.
--
Mark Atwood | I'm wearing black only until I find something darker.
m...@pobox.com | http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Mark Atwood
> sympathetic_ nation on Urras (A-Io), a combination of a 19th century
> British attitude towards women and the lower classes with a 20th
> century Latin American attitude towards internal security and riot
> control. This of course served the purpose of making Anarres look
> better, by comparison.
Not by very much. When a group of people are burning down your house
and beating you to death in a back alley, does it matter all that much
at the moment whether they are a "mob" of your "peers", or are wearing
police and army uniforms?
david carlton
> That's a good point -- _Shevek_ seems to think that it's the first
> time, but then Shevek strikes me as pretty naive. I think it's
> possible that LeGuin meant him to be naive, too, since several times
> in the story others of his age cohort realized Shevek was headed for
> touble on Anarres before Shevek did.
When reading _The Dispossessed_, I think it's important to treat
Shevek's impressions as potentially unreliable. For example, we're
supposed to believe that Shevek far prefers Annares to Urras; but
we're also supposed to believe that most people on Urras would far
prefer Urras to Annares. And when Shevek is on Urras, he actually
really likes what he sees for a while, when he's at the university,
but then sees some horrible things once he ventures further away; so
clearly this signals to us that we shouldn't accept university life as
a portrait of what Urras is "really" like, but I don't see why we
should accept Shevek's later experiences as a portrait of what Urras
is really like, either. Or, for another example, everybody on Annares
agrees that Urras is awful, but their information almost exclusively
comes from sources from the founding of Annares; I don't see why we
should believe that those sources were accurate even when they were
written (since, after all, most people on Urras didn't chose to leave
to go to Annares) and I certainly don't see why we should accept them
as accurate a century and a half later.
Mind you, I'm not arguing that Le Guin doesn't stack the deck.
david carlton | <http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/>
car...@math.stanford.edu | Go books: <http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/go/>
Mr and Mrs PED, can I borrow 26.7% of the RAYON TEXTILE
production of the INDONESIAN archipelago?
Jordan S. Bassior
>When reading _The Dispossessed_, I think it's important to treat
>Shevek's impressions as potentially unreliable. For example, we're
>supposed to believe that Shevek far prefers Annares to Urras; but
>we're also supposed to believe that most people on Urras would far
>prefer Urras to Annares. And when Shevek is on Urras, he actually
>really likes what he sees for a while, when he's at the university,
>but then sees some horrible things once he ventures further away; so
>clearly this signals to us that we shouldn't accept university life as
>a portrait of what Urras is "really" like, but I don't see why we
>should accept Shevek's later experiences as a portrait of what Urras
>is really like, either.
Good point. Shevek, after all, wanders into the orbit of revolutionaries, who
then take him to what is probably the worst riot A-Io has had in years. (It's
difficult to see how the A-Iotian economy or society would function if riots
like that were common!)
On the other hand, LeGuin has him "stump" _highly eductated_ A-Iotian listeners
by asking questions to which the answers should be _obvious_, if Odonism has
been at all active on Urras since the founding. This is implausible.
>Or, for another example, everybody on Annares
>agrees that Urras is awful, but their information almost exclusively
>comes from sources from the founding of Annares; I don't see why we
>should believe that those sources were accurate even when they were
>written (since, after all, most people on Urras didn't chose to leave
>to go to Annares) and I certainly don't see why we should accept them
>as accurate a century and a half later.
Also true. It's notable that, out of a planetary population of billions, there
were only, what, a few hundred thousand willing to go to Anarres and be
Anarresti. Of course, Odo made this harder by _forcing everyone to speak a new
language!!!_
Del Cotter
Jordan S. Bassior <jsba...@aol.com> said:
>Introduction
>
>The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
>re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
Thank you very much for this, Jordan, it was excellent reading. Not to
say I agreed with it all :-)
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
thomas...@bluetail.com
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> writes:
> When a group of people are burning down your house
> and beating you to death in a back alley, does it matter all that much
> at the moment whether they are a "mob" of your "peers", or are wearing
> police and army uniforms?
Taking the meta-perspective, I'd put that part in the 'good'
column[*]. Le Guin does show there may be problems ("ambiguous utopia"
indeed), which is more than earnest utopians tend to do.
Thomas
[*] As I said before, my knowledge is limited since I bounced almost
immediately, but the stoning incident at least is in the first
chapter.
Robert A. Woodward
jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
> Introduction
>
> The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
> re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
Thanks to an especially notworthy example of propagation problems, this
June 11th post didn't reach my newserver until June 17th.
The map in my copy of _The Dispossessed_ shows more nations than that;
but only 3 are named (but some of the rest look about as large).
> A-Io, the capitalistic liberal democracy where most of the Urrasti action is
> set, can best be described as a country with the social attitudes of
> Victorian England, the riot control skills of Late Tsarist Russia -- these
> coexisting with fusion power and interplanetary space travel. Women are
> barred from most occupations. Lower-class persons _defer_ to upper-class
> ones. Peaceful demonstrations are dealt with by strafing the crowd and then
> hunting down the survivors for days.
>
<snip>
>
> Thu, the main rival of A-Io, is not described in detail, but from the clues
> given is obviously a Stalinist communist dictatorship. Benbili, the country
> that A-Io and Thu have a war over during the course of the book, is a chaotic
> "Third World" country, normally ruled by a military dictatorship, which is
> overthrown by an unconvnincingly described revolution, with the A-Iotians
> then restoring the dictator to power.
And note that both A-Io and Thu were major powers back when Annarres was
settled by the Odonists. I find that somewhat strange. Powers rise and
fall.
<SNIP>
> III. Anarrean Lethargy
>
<SNIP>
>
>
> C. Industrial Lethargy - The Anarresti have a metal-rich planet. This is, in
> fact, the whole _basis_ of their interplanetary economy. Yet, at the same
> time, they have so little heavy industry that the construction of a single
> oceanic barge will consume a good portion of their whole industrial capacity
> for a year, according to Shevek. Why?
>
Capital problems, I suspect (who has the resources for investment?).
>
<snip>
>
> E. Maritime Lethargy - Anarres has a very sparse, very fragile land
> ecosystem, but a much richer and more complex oceanic ecosystem. So what do
> the Anarresti do?
>
> They live on the plains and mostly ignore the oceans, though at the point of
> the story, they are just beginning (!), under the lash of famine (!) to
> research the possibility of fishing and aquaculture. Um ... duh?
Were any fishermen Odonists? This is a non-trivial skill.
<re: Annarres overpopulation>
>
> "What!" I hear you cry. "But there are only a few million Anarresti!" How can
> they be _overpopulated?_"
>
<snip>
>
> We know that Anarres suffers from severe overpopulation because they have
> evolved a way of lie (farming on an arid planet vulnerable to years-long
> droughts) which _should_ require immense food surpluses be laid up in
> granaries and other storehouses. Instead, everyone can take food as long as
> there is no _extreme_ shortage. (This is _explicitly_ stated by Shevek in
> the scene with the laid-up train).
>
I have problems with the concept of planetary wide droughts. Unless the
place gets significantly cooler; the total amount of evaporation from
the oceans and thus the total precipitation shouldn't change much. I
suspose that they could have settled in the one sweet spot on the whole
moon and the "drought" is really a shift of rainfall to areas that are
inconvenient.
<SNIP>
--
robe...@halcyon.com http://www.halcyon.com/robertaw/
rawoo...@aol.com
Jordan S. Bassior
SPOILERS for The Dispossessed
*
*
*
*
>> There are three major nations on Urras.
>>
>
>The map in my copy of _The Dispossessed_ shows more nations than that;
>but only 3 are named (but some of the rest look about as large).
That's a good point. While A-Io and Thu are clearly the most important, there
may be several nations as important as Benbili.
>And note that both A-Io and Thu were major powers back when Annarres was
>settled by the Odonists. I find that somewhat strange. Powers rise and fall.
In general, Urrasti history is weirdly stable -- cultural movements that we go
through in decades seem to take them centuries. That _may_ be a racial
characteristic (the Cetans are humanoid but not human).
>> C. Industrial Lethargy - The Anarresti have a metal-rich planet. This is, in
>> fact, the whole _basis_ of their interplanetary economy. Yet, at the same
>> time, they have so little heavy industry that the construction of a single
>> oceanic barge will consume a good portion of their whole industrial capacity
>> for a year, according to Shevek. Why?
>
>Capital problems, I suspect (who has the resources for investment?).
Well yes, but why? Given the situation on Anarres (in which the best of the
ecosystem is oceanic) one would expect the Anarresti to be a good deal more
sea-minded (despite their small seas) than is shown in the story.
I would speculate that the problem is that Anarresti anarchism is lousy at
coordinating any task as large as building a freighter. But that's just
speculation, and you'd think that it would scale-up from fishing boats
(assuming they have them, and I think there was a mention of such craft in
passing in one section).
>> They live on the plains and mostly ignore the oceans, though at the point of
>> the story, they are just beginning (!), under the lash of famine (!) to
>> research the possibility of fishing and aquaculture. Um ... duh?
>
>Were any fishermen Odonists? This is a non-trivial skill.
That's a good point, but they've had 160-something years to learn the skill.
And you'd _think_ there'd be at least a _few_ fishermen, given the fairly large
size of their initial population (a few hundred thousand).
>I have problems with the concept of planetary wide droughts.
I do too. Where's the water going? The timescale is much too short for this to
be an astrophysical event.
>Unless the
>place gets significantly cooler; the total amount of evaporation from
>the oceans and thus the total precipitation shouldn't change much. I
>suspose that they could have settled in the one sweet spot on the whole
>moon and the "drought" is really a shift of rainfall to areas that are
>inconvenient.
It's possible -- and this is why my points about fishing boats and freighters
become so important. The _smart_ thing for the Anarresti to do would be to use
fishing boats to get more food, and freighters to transport existing food where
needed.
And you'd think that, even if they colonized plains for farming purposes, and
mountains for mining purposes, they would have also set up things so their
ports were linked to these via their rail net. Right?
Jordan S. Bassior
>jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
>
>>I got this vibe too. It was seriously creepy, considering that she wrote it
>>within a decade of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and at a time when
>>Southeast Asia was about to go down with the slaughter of millions of
>>civilians. Sort of like someone, in the America of 1940, writing about how
>>wonderful things would be in a hypothetical society in which "racially
>>predisposed parasites" had been eliminated, or something like that.
>>
>>But I'll give LeGuin the benefit of the doubt -- I'll assume that she didn't
>>know what was going on in East Asia.
>
>Leftists *always* get the benefit of this doubt.
>It seems to be some sort of unwritten rule.
I realize I'm being way too nice to her about this, granted ...
Mark Atwood
> wonderful things would be in a hypothetical society in which "racially
> predisposed parasites" had been eliminated, or something like that.
_Lovecraft's Book_
Just saw it at the bookstore yesterday.
Per C. Jorgensen
> In general, Urrasti history is weirdly stable -- cultural movements that we go
> through in decades seem to take them centuries. That _may_ be a racial
> characteristic (the Cetans are humanoid but not human).
Maybe it's a bit LedGuin'ish as well. When I read _Four Ways to Forgiveness_
I wondered about the planetary setup where one race had subjugated the
other(s) and kept a lot of them in abusive plantation slavery for what?
2-3000 years. The only upheavals we hear about is after the colonisation
of another planet in the system, the slave revolt there and contact with
other humanoids.
Strangely uneventful history to me.
I also wondered about the stability of the ruling race's military setup,
in which not just belonging to NCO or officer corps but also the rank
in it was hereditary (well, ok, LeGuin mentions that the jobs themselves
were not hereditary, so that you could be a colonel-equivalent and
still not have a regiment to command).
-- Per
Jordan S. Bassior
>I also wondered about the stability of the ruling race's military setup,
>in which not just belonging to NCO or officer corps but also the rank
>in it was hereditary (well, ok, LeGuin mentions that the jobs themselves
>were not hereditary, so that you could be a colonel-equivalent and
>still not have a regiment to command).
You've gotta wonder just how competent the NCO's and officers would be towards
the _end_ of those three millennia, especially if they didn't have to actually
fight much. I'm envisioning a very comic-opera sort of army now, the kind that
real troops would cut right through without even breaking a sweat.
Bernard Guerrero
> Introduction
>
> The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
> re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
>
>
Nicely done, Jordan. Of course, the target's a bit of a "gimme". :^)
Bernard
Shane Stezelberger
wrote:
>Guy Gordon said:
>>jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
>>
>>>I got this vibe too. It was seriously creepy, considering that she wrote it
>>>within a decade of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and at a time when
>>>Southeast Asia was about to go down with the slaughter of millions of
>>>civilians. Sort of like someone, in the America of 1940, writing about how
>>>wonderful things would be in a hypothetical society in which "racially
>>>predisposed parasites" had been eliminated, or something like that.
>>>
>>>But I'll give LeGuin the benefit of the doubt -- I'll assume that she didn't
>>>know what was going on in East Asia.
>>
>>Leftists *always* get the benefit of this doubt.
>>It seems to be some sort of unwritten rule.
In one of the essays collected in _The Language of the Night_, I
think, LeGuin takes a long swipe at Richard "Seagull" Bach. She
mentions Cambodia as the sort of nasty thing that Bach chooses to
ignore in his... fiction.
Here is the excerpt, from "The Stalin in the Soul" (1973-7). Much of
the essay relates the life and times of Y. Zamyatin; I hace not reread
the whole thing in quite some time, but here we go:
"The recent fantasy best-seller _Jonathan Livingston Seagull_ is a
seious book, unmistakably sincere. It is also intellectually,
ethically and emotionally trivial. The author has not thought things
through. He is pushing one of the beautifully packaged Instant
Answers we specialize in in this country [Ed. Note: the United
States]. He says that if you think you can fly very fast, why, then
you can fly very fast. And if you smile, all is well. All the world
is well. When you smile, you just know that that man dying of
gangrene in Cambodia and that starving four-year-old in Bangladesh and
the woman next door with cancer will fell ever so much better, and
they'll smile too. This wishful thinking, this callous refusal to
admit the existence of pain, defeat and death, is not only typical of
American writing, but also of the Soviet writers who "succeeded where
a Zamyatin "failed" -- the Stalin Prize winners, with their horrible
optimism. Once you stop asking questions, once you let Stalin into
your soul, you can only smile, and smile, and smile."
LeGuin was probably not clueless about the horrors of the Cultural
Revolution or the Khmer Rouge when she wrote _The Dispossessed_. By
all means, chew thoroughly the book's many social-studies postulates.
However, please do not pigeonhole her as some sort of Lillian-Hellman
fellow-traveller apologist. After all, how many denunciations of Mao
or the Khmer Rouge did Pournelle or Bova include in their writings
(fiction or nonfiction) in the mid-1970s?
--
Shane Stezelberger
sstezel at erols dot kom
Laurel, MD
Dan Clore
Especially if you play by rules that allow you to make up
any damn thing you want to about the book, with no concern
for accuracy.
--
Dan Clore
mailto:cl...@columbia-center.org
Lord We˙rdgliffe:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Dan Clore
I'm on your side in this, so don't take this the wrong way.
I have to take issue with your mention of the Khmer Rouge,
purely as a matter of factual accuracy. LeGuin's essay
appeared in 1973, two years before the Khmer Rouge took
power, and at a time when the American attack and carpet
bombing of Cambodia was reaching a peak. That has to be what
LeGuin was referring to -- hundreds of thousands of
Cambodians were killed for no apparent purpose, with
millions becoming refugees and the economy of the country
almost completely destroyed.
Also, at this time, practically nothing was known about the
Khmer Rouge in the West. It was normally assumed that they
were essentially like the Vietnamese communists -- which was
true for many (especially in the Eastern Zone), but not true
for the Pol Pot clique that eventually seized power.
Jordan S. Bassior
>Also, at this time, practically nothing was known about the
>Khmer Rouge in the West. It was normally assumed that they
>were essentially like the Vietnamese communists -- which was
>true for many (especially in the Eastern Zone), but not true
>for the Pol Pot clique that eventually seized power
The Vietnamese Communists killed what, half a million South Vietnamese when
they marched in? They were hardly nice guys either -- they just weren't as
utterly raving mad as the Khmer Rouge.
Jordan S. Bassior
>Bernard Guerrero wrote:
>> jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote in message
>news:<20010611144246...@ng-fl1.aol.com>...
>
>> > Introduction
>> >
>> > The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
>> > re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
>> >
>> (snip beating of LeGuin about the head and neck area)
>>
>> Nicely done, Jordan. Of course, the target's a bit of a "gimme". :^)
>
>Especially if you play by rules that allow you to make up
>any damn thing you want to about the book, with no concern
>for accuracy.
I didn't make up a thing. If you want me to, I could give you page by page refs
for most of the points I raised.
Dan Clore
> Dan Clore said:
> >Also, at this time, practically nothing was known about the
> >Khmer Rouge in the West. It was normally assumed that they
> >were essentially like the Vietnamese communists -- which was
> >true for many (especially in the Eastern Zone), but not true
> >for the Pol Pot clique that eventually seized power
>
> The Vietnamese Communists killed what, half a million South Vietnamese when
> they marched in? They were hardly nice guys either -- they just weren't as
> utterly raving mad as the Khmer Rouge.
I have no idea where you get such a figure from. Most of the
estimates I I have seen range from tens of thousands
(reasonably credible sources) to one or two hundred thousand
(mostly right-wing loonies, but occasionally a credible
source as well). No doubt many of them were wholly innocent,
but it's also worth bearing in mind that very many of them
had been working for a totalitarian dictatorship installed
by a foreign invader that had slaughtered millions and
turned the countryside into a moonscape.
And no, I'm not interested in debating whether the US had
been "invited" by the puppet dictator it had installed for
the purpose, and subsequently murdered and replaced with
another puppet dictator, who in turn was murdered and
replaced with another puppet dictator....
Dan Clore
> Dan Clore said:
> >Bernard Guerrero wrote:
> >> jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote in message
> >news:<20010611144246...@ng-fl1.aol.com>...
> >> > Introduction
> >> >
> >> > The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
> >> > re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
> >> >
> >> (snip beating of LeGuin about the head and neck area)
> >>
> >> Nicely done, Jordan. Of course, the target's a bit of a "gimme". :^)
> >
> >Especially if you play by rules that allow you to make up
> >any damn thing you want to about the book, with no concern
> >for accuracy.
>
> I didn't make up a thing. If you want me to, I could give you page by page refs
> for most of the points I raised.
I think we went over it well enough last time. Your recent
review was a decided improvement, but still pretty bad.
--
Dan Clore
mailto:cl...@columbia-center.org
Lord Weÿrdgliffe:
Jordan S. Bassior
>I think we went over it well enough last time.
I didn't review it last time.
>Your recent
>review was a decided improvement, but still pretty bad.
And the points you wish to refute are?
Jordan S. Bassior
>No doubt many of them were wholly innocent,
>but it's also worth bearing in mind that very many of them
>had been working for a totalitarian dictatorship installed
>by a foreign invader that had slaughtered millions and
>turned the countryside into a moonscape.
The South Vietnamese government was not "totalitarian," it was "authoritarian."
It was a native growth, it was at the time an internationally recognized
government, and it was defending itself against the invasion from the North.
Killing people simply for working for their own country, and doing so _after
the war was over_ is generally considered a war crime.
Nancy Lebovitz
Shane Stezelberger <sst...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>In one of the essays collected in _The Language of the Night_, I
>think, LeGuin takes a long swipe at Richard "Seagull" Bach. She
>mentions Cambodia as the sort of nasty thing that Bach chooses to
>ignore in his... fiction.
>
>Here is the excerpt, from "The Stalin in the Soul" (1973-7). Much of
>the essay relates the life and times of Y. Zamyatin; I hace not reread
>the whole thing in quite some time, but here we go:
>
>"The recent fantasy best-seller _Jonathan Livingston Seagull_ is a
>seious book, unmistakably sincere. It is also intellectually,
>ethically and emotionally trivial. The author has not thought things
>through. He is pushing one of the beautifully packaged Instant
>Answers we specialize in in this country [Ed. Note: the United
>States]. He says that if you think you can fly very fast, why, then
>you can fly very fast. And if you smile, all is well. All the world
>is well. When you smile, you just know that that man dying of
>gangrene in Cambodia and that starving four-year-old in Bangladesh and
>the woman next door with cancer will fell ever so much better, and
>they'll smile too. This wishful thinking, this callous refusal to
>admit the existence of pain, defeat and death, is not only typical of
>American writing, but also of the Soviet writers who "succeeded where
>a Zamyatin "failed" -- the Stalin Prize winners, with their horrible
>optimism. Once you stop asking questions, once you let Stalin into
>your soul, you can only smile, and smile, and smile."
>
and possibly worse. In _Jonathan Livingston Seagull_ and subsequent
books, he seems to be saying that *all* problems can be escaped/
dealt with by thinking right enough to get into a better universe.
OBgenreSF: Scarborough's Folksinger books.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Pete McCutchen
<gor...@NOSPAMwhite-crane.com> wrote:
>Jesus, Jordan; 282 lines to point out that LeGuin was never a very
>good SF author? :-)
I thought it was an excellent post. It didn't avoid political and
economic matters, yet it filtered its discussion through sf
literature. Good one for Jordo!
Oh, and I disagree: LeGuin was a _great_ sf author. How else could
she make readers believe such an obviously implausible society?
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<gr...@ext.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>She said that plants in general were an important part of the world but didn't
>get as much attention from SF writers because they couldn't be replaced with
>machines.
In one of George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories (which I still
find amusing, darn it!), an Idiot Director goes to the station's "air
plant" expecting to find smoothly humming machinery. Instead he finds
a "bunch of weeds," which he has cleaned out.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<gr...@ext.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>> Jesus, Jordan; 282 lines to point out that LeGuin was never a very
>> good SF author? :-)
>
>Did anyone read the essay where she complained that vegetables didn't
>get enough attention in SF?
Vegetables? You mean as in sentient vegetables, or as in broccoli?
What does she think of _The Day of the Triffids_?
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>On the other hand, LeGuin has him "stump" _highly eductated_ A-Iotian listeners
>by asking questions to which the answers should be _obvious_, if Odonism has
>been at all active on Urras since the founding. This is implausible.
It strikes me that this reflects little more than LeGuin's ignorance
of and lack of empathy for a private property free market society.
Her listeners couldn't answer because, well, LeGuin herself didn't
know the answer. Maybe she should 've collaborated with Jerry
Pournelle, having him write the parts depicting the liberal capitalist
society.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<robe...@halcyon.com> wrote:
>> C. Industrial Lethargy - The Anarresti have a metal-rich planet. This is, in
>> fact, the whole _basis_ of their interplanetary economy. Yet, at the same
>> time, they have so little heavy industry that the construction of a single
>> oceanic barge will consume a good portion of their whole industrial capacity
>> for a year, according to Shevek. Why?
>>
>
>Capital problems, I suspect (who has the resources for investment?).
Plus no mechanism to concentrate resources. Anybody who tried would
be accused of propertian-ist behavior. Rightly so, of course!
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>> I didn't make up a thing. If you want me to, I could give you page by page refs
>> for most of the points I raised.
>
>I think we went over it well enough last time. Your recent
>review was a decided improvement, but still pretty bad.
Another assertion, wholly unsupported by any examples.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>Bernard Guerrero wrote:
>> jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote in message news:<20010611144246...@ng-fl1.aol.com>...
>
>> > Introduction
>> >
>> > The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
>> > re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
>> >
>> (snip beating of LeGuin about the head and neck area)
>>
>> Nicely done, Jordan. Of course, the target's a bit of a "gimme". :^)
>
>Especially if you play by rules that allow you to make up
>any damn thing you want to about the book, with no concern
>for accuracy.
Well, Danny, you could dig up your copy _The Dispossessed_ and go
through, explaining, point-by-point, how Jordan misread the book.
Simply accusing him of having no concern for accuracy doesn't move the
discussion along much. You said you wanted to reduce the amount of
off-topic political chatter. Well, OK; here's your chance to be
on-topic while at the same time advancing your kooky political views.
Or should I just plonk you again, and be done with it?
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>>Your recent
>>review was a decided improvement, but still pretty bad.
>
>And the points you wish to refute are?
Jordan, you're so unfair, asking Clore to actually support his claims.
--
Pete McCutchen
Jordan S. Bassior
>Jordan, you're so unfair, asking Clore to actually support his claims.
I know :)
Jordan S. Bassior
Actually, that would have been a good idea (though I don't know if Pournelle,
in particular, was yet an active sf writer). If she'd done that, then Urras
might have rung truer.
Basically, my point is that she was assuming that the A-Iotians had never been
challenged by anyone on the assumptions their society was based on. But if
Odonism were alive on Urras -- heck, for that mattter if Thuism were an active
ideological force -- you'd _think_ that the A-Iotians would have heard such
challenges before and formulated answers to them.
An American college professor could, for instance, have defended liberal
democratic capitalism. Why couldn't an A-Iotian?
Jordan S. Bassior
>Oh, and I disagree: LeGuin was a _great_ sf author. How else could
>she make readers believe such an obviously implausible society?
Actually, I thought she was at _least_ a good writer, too. The flaws in _The
Dispossessed_ are only obvious to me, now, because I've devoted a good part of
my intellectual life to thinking about liberal democracy and capitalism and how
and why they work.
The first time I read it, at around age 12, it all seemed perfectly reasonable.
Jordan S. Bassior
>Vegetables? You mean as in sentient vegetables, or as in broccoli?
Ob(Cartoon)SF: The Power Puff Girls :)
Jordan S. Bassior
>Plus no mechanism to concentrate resources. Anybody who tried would
>be accused of propertian-ist behavior. Rightly so, of course!
Actually, that's a very good point.
Thinking about it, the Anarresti probably don't build something as large as an
ocean-going freighter until the consequences of a lack of sea transport
capacity become acutely obvious, to the point that the social leaders of the
shipbuilding community are besieged by requests to build one. This means that
they probably have no real reserve shipping capacity -- their existing ships
are steaming fully laden at all times -- and when a _real_ emergency (like the
famine) hits, there is no way to transport grain except by skimping on
something else almost equally vital.
This sort of "only when we absolutely _need_ it" thinking probably permeates
all other aspects of Anarresti capital formation, with the result that nothing
big ever gets done in time, and there are perpetual infrastructure shortages.
Mark Atwood
>
> Killing people simply for working for their own country, and doing so _after
> the war was over_ is generally considered a war crime.
Unless the killers are leftists, of course. This is yet anther "benefit
of a doubt" that they are constantly granted.
--
Mark Atwood | I'm wearing black only until I find something darker.
m...@pobox.com | http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Jordan S. Bassior
>jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) writes:
>>
>> Killing people simply for working for their own country, and doing so
>_after
>> the war was over_ is generally considered a war crime.
>
>Unless the killers are leftists, of course. This is yet anther "benefit
>of a doubt" that they are constantly granted.
And, before someone brings this up, the North Vietnamese were not excecuting
the South Vietnamese equvialent of einsatzkommandos. They were executing
regular officers, civil servants, and intellectuals.
They also killed a bunch of former Viet Cong who took the North's promise of
"freedom" a bit too literally. Heh-heh-heh, couldn't have happened to a nicer
bunch of guys :)
Dan Clore
If anyone is interested I will do so. By "anyone" I mean
someone who has the intellectual capacity to understand what
I write -- which leaves out Jordan and Pete. But if anyone
else is in fact interested, I will do so. Otherwise, the
material available at googlegroups (formerly deja.com)
should be more than enough.
Dan Clore
Yes please. You are invariably a complete waste of time.
Dan Clore
> Dan Clore said:
[Some snippage restored for context. Note that Jordan makes
no attempt to support his (false) claim, instead attempting
to change the subject.]
>
> > > The Vietnamese Communists killed what, half a million South Vietnamese when
> > > they marched in? They were hardly nice guys either -- they just weren't as
> > > utterly raving mad as the Khmer Rouge.
> >
> > I have no idea where you get such a figure from. Most of the
> > estimates I I have seen range from tens of thousands
> > (reasonably credible sources) to one or two hundred thousand
> > (mostly right-wing loonies, but occasionally a credible
> > source as well). No doubt many of them were wholly innocent,
> > but it's also worth bearing in mind that very many of them
> > had been working for a totalitarian dictatorship installed
> > by a foreign invader that had slaughtered millions and
> > turned the countryside into a moonscape.
> >
> > And no, I'm not interested in debating whether the US had
> > been "invited" by the puppet dictator it had installed for
> > the purpose, and subsequently murdered and replaced with
> > another puppet dictator, who in turn was murdered and
> > replaced with another puppet dictator....
[Please re-read this paragraph until it sinks in.]
> The South Vietnamese government was not "totalitarian," it was "authoritarian."
Ppmmmpffff....
> It was a native growth,
Installed by the United States with no significant popular
support in Vietnam.
> it was at the time an internationally recognized government,
Recognized by the United States and the allies of the United
States. That a puppet dictatorship is "internationally"
recognized by the country that installed it should impress
no one; the fact that the US then had the puppet dictator
assassinated and replaced, and then had the second puppet
dictator assassinated and replaced, shows the level of
sincerity of the US's recognition of these regimes.
*If* you believed that the South Vietnamese regime had any
legitimacy, *this* would be the focus of your outrage. It is
obvious that you do not believe what you claim to.
> and it was defending itself against the invasion from the North.
Read the _Pentagon Papers_ and learn something about what
actually happened, already. The "invasion" from the North
consisted of (1) the population of the South resisting the
imposition of a foreign-sponsored puppet dictatorship; (2)
support from the North for the population of the South in
this resistance; and, which should not be forgotten, (3)
some plain old power-grabbing on the part of the North
taking advantage of this situation.
> Killing people simply for working for their own country, and doing so _after
> the war was over_ is generally considered a war crime.
So you not only consider "working for their own country" to
be synonymous with working for a foreign invader, you
consider it a "war crime" to hold those who committed human
rights abuses responsible for their actions. Most
interesting.
I think it's time to killfile Jordan, since these debates
inevitably lead nowhere.
Pete McCutchen
<cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>> Or should I just plonk you again, and be done with it?
>
>Yes please. You are invariably a complete waste of time.
The feeling's mutual, Danny.
*Plonk*
--
Pete McCutchen
Mike Thoma
>
> Well, Danny, you could dig up your copy _The Dispossessed_ and go
> through, explaining, point-by-point, how Jordan misread the book.
He could, but I truly hope he doesn't. This thread was moronic the
last time it was here, and this one isn't looking better. The people
who agree with Leguin politically will defend her no matter whether
they understand her or not. Those who disagree with her politically
will attack her, again no matter what. When you take away cant and
rhetoric, it all reduces to "liked it, didn't like it".
I look at a "Leguin was nuts in Dispossessed" post the same way as I
look at a "Heinlein was a fascist in Starship Troopers" post.
Another one of these - great, because we all learned so much the
last time.
Jordan S. Bassior
>If anyone is interested I will do so. By "anyone" I mean
>someone who has the intellectual capacity to understand what
>I write -- which leaves out Jordan and Pete.
So, you're claimng I'm wrong -- but that it is based on some ineffable
knowledge which cannot be shared with a peon such as myself?
But alas, Dan, you're wrong -- and I'd explain to you why, but it is based upon
ineffable knowledge which cannot be shared with a peon such as _yourself_.
See the problem with polylogism?
Jordan S. Bassior
>I think it's time to killfile Jordan, since these debates
>inevitably lead nowhere.
... and since you can't make a rational rebuttal of the points I raised
regarding _The Dispossessed_, killfiling me fulfills the important function of
allowing you to claim you can't hear me, hence have nothing to rebut.
I understand you, Dan. We _all_ understand you.
That's your _problem_.
Gareth Wilson
>
> If anyone is interested I will do so. By "anyone" I mean
> someone who has the intellectual capacity to understand what
> I write -- which leaves out Jordan and Pete. But if anyone
> else is in fact interested, I will do so.
I'd like to see it.
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gareth Wilson
Christchurch
New Zealand
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Clore
Well, for what it's worth, I don't agree with her
politically, but I ended up "defending" her just because I
believe that the book says what it says, and not something
else. Unfortunately, her detractors disagree with that
theory, so the debate was pretty pointless.
Dan Clore
> Dan Clore wrote:
> > If anyone is interested I will do so. By "anyone" I mean
> > someone who has the intellectual capacity to understand what
> > I write -- which leaves out Jordan and Pete. But if anyone
> > else is in fact interested, I will do so.
>
> I'd like to see it.
I should have known someone would. I'll try to get to it in
the next couple days. (Don't expect me to be very fast about
it, since I'll go over the whole review.)
Bernard Guerrero
>
> If anyone is interested I will do so. By "anyone" I mean
> someone who has the intellectual capacity to understand what
> I write --
Oh, please do! You've piqued my interest... :^)
Bernard "can't wait to test out my intellectual capacity" Guerrero
Pete McCutchen
<mike....@moh.hnet.bc.ca> wrote:
>Pete McCutchen wrote:
>>
>> Well, Danny, you could dig up your copy _The Dispossessed_ and go
>> through, explaining, point-by-point, how Jordan misread the book.
>
>He could, but I truly hope he doesn't. This thread was moronic the
>last time it was here, and this one isn't looking better. The people
>who agree with Leguin politically will defend her no matter whether
>they understand her or not. Those who disagree with her politically
>will attack her, again no matter what. When you take away cant and
>rhetoric, it all reduces to "liked it, didn't like it".
Jordan, who is so often off-topic, gave very specific examples of his
criticisms. Obviously, his discussion was informed by his political
views, but his argument was a lot more extensive than "didn't like
it."
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<gr...@ext.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>Dan Clore wrote:
>
>>
>> If anyone is interested I will do so. By "anyone" I mean
>> someone who has the intellectual capacity to understand what
>> I write -- which leaves out Jordan and Pete. But if anyone
>> else is in fact interested, I will do so.
>
>I'd like to see it.
If he says something interesting or worthwhile, let me know.
--
Pete McCutchen
Michael S. Schiffer
<3b2ff6eb...@news.erols.com>:
>On 18 Jun 2001 15:53:16 GMT, jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior)
>wrote:
>>Guy Gordon said:
>>>jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
>...
>>>>But I'll give LeGuin the benefit of the doubt -- I'll assume that
>>>>she didn't know what was going on in East Asia.
>>>Leftists *always* get the benefit of this doubt.
>>>It seems to be some sort of unwritten rule.
>In one of the essays collected in _The Language of the Night_, I
>think, LeGuin takes a long swipe at Richard "Seagull" Bach. She
>mentions Cambodia as the sort of nasty thing that Bach chooses to
>ignore in his... fiction.
>Here is the excerpt, from "The Stalin in the Soul" (1973-7).
>...
>...When you smile, you just know that that man
>dying of gangrene in Cambodia and that starving four-year-old in
>Bangladesh and the woman next door with cancer will fell ever so
>much better, and they'll smile too. ... Once you stop asking
>questions, once you let Stalin into your soul, you can only smile,
>and smile, and smile."
>LeGuin was probably not clueless about the horrors of the Cultural
>Revolution or the Khmer Rouge when she wrote _The Dispossessed_. By
>all means, chew thoroughly the book's many social-studies
>postulates. However, please do not pigeonhole her as some sort of
>Lillian-Hellman fellow-traveller apologist. After all, how many
>denunciations of Mao or the Khmer Rouge did Pournelle or Bova
>include in their writings (fiction or nonfiction) in the mid-1970s?
Given the 1973 date, it seems at least as likely that she was thinking
of the child as a victim of the US bombing campaign in Cambodia. The
Khmer Rouge didn't take over Cambodia till 1975, while the bombing
loomed particularly large within the anti-Vietnam War movement.
In any case, it seems almost certain that she was ignorant of the
horrors of the Khmer Rouge at the time she wrote _The Dispossessed_.
The memorable horrors of their rule hadn't happened yet when it was
published in 1974, let alone when she was writing it (in 1973 or
earlier, presumably). (I don't know what she knew about the Cultural
Revolution, or how she reacted to it. Being anti-Stalin and pro-Mao
wasn't unheard of, but I don't know where Le Guin's opinions lay.)
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS If reading in an archive, please do
ms...@mediaone.net not click on words highlighted as links
msch...@condor.depaul.edu by Deja or other archives. They violate
the author's copyright and his wishes.
Mike Thoma
>
> Jordan, who is so often off-topic, gave very specific examples of his
> criticisms. Obviously, his discussion was informed by his political
> views, but his argument was a lot more extensive than "didn't like
> it."
Pete, I'm not taking Jordan to task on what he said. I like what
Jordan has to say, even when I disagree with him. I wish he hadn't
restarted this, though, because I just don't want the Firebug-Clore
debate to get started again. What could there possibly be to say
that they didn't say the first time?
Michael Brazier
wrote:
>Pete McCutchen wrote:
>>
>> Well, Danny, you could dig up your copy _The Dispossessed_ and go
>> through, explaining, point-by-point, how Jordan misread the book.
>
>He could, but I truly hope he doesn't. This thread was moronic the
>last time it was here, and this one isn't looking better. The people
>who agree with Leguin politically will defend her no matter whether
>they understand her or not. Those who disagree with her politically
>will attack her, again no matter what. When you take away cant and
>rhetoric, it all reduces to "liked it, didn't like it".
I thought Jordan's remarks contained a good deal of straight analysis of
_The Dispossessed_. The section on "Anarrean Lethargy" contains nothing
but that -- and I'm morally certain that the pattern he describes there in
Anarres' culture is in the book deliberately.
--
Michael Brazier But what are all these gaieties to me
Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
X^2 + 7X + 53 = 11/3
-- Lewis Carroll
Mark Atwood
I want to see what Clore can say when he can't retreat by saying "Read
The Book".
Jordan S. Bassior
>I want to see what Clore can say when he can't retreat by saying "Read
>The Book".
And I have "the book" handy right next to my computer, in anticipation of the
event.
I think I'm going to read LeGuin's other "Hainish novels" too. Her universe
sounds interesting. Currently, I'm in the middle of reading the whole Dune
series for the first time -- I'd read it through _God-Emperor_ before, but not
_Heretics_ or _Chapterhouse_. Are there any others, aside from the recent
non-Herbert _House Atriedes_?
Robert A. Woodward
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:11:21 -0700, "Robert A. Woodward"
> <robe...@halcyon.com> wrote:
>
> >> C. Industrial Lethargy - The Anarresti have a metal-rich planet. This is,
> >> in
> >> fact, the whole _basis_ of their interplanetary economy. Yet, at the same
> >> time, they have so little heavy industry that the construction of a single
> >> oceanic barge will consume a good portion of their whole industrial
> >> capacity
> >> for a year, according to Shevek. Why?
> >>
> >
> >Capital problems, I suspect (who has the resources for investment?).
>
> Plus no mechanism to concentrate resources. Anybody who tried would
> be accused of propertian-ist behavior. Rightly so, of course!
Actually, I think there is a potential mechanism. The central syndic of
syndics (if that is the right title, it has been years since I read it)
could assign people to work on major projects (by shorting every other
project), but it would be politically difficult and contentious.
--
robe...@halcyon.com http://www.halcyon.com/robertaw/
rawoo...@aol.com
Dan Clore
> sst...@erols.com (Shane Stezelberger) wrote in
> <3b2ff6eb...@news.erols.com>:
> >On 18 Jun 2001 15:53:16 GMT, jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior)
> >wrote:
> >>Guy Gordon said:
> >>>jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
> In any case, it seems almost certain that she was ignorant of the
> horrors of the Khmer Rouge at the time she wrote _The Dispossessed_.
> The memorable horrors of their rule hadn't happened yet when it was
> published in 1974, let alone when she was writing it (in 1973 or
> earlier, presumably).
1971-73, IIRC.
--
Dan Clore
mailto:cl...@columbia-center.org
Lord Weÿrdgliffe:
Dan Clore
My thoughts exactly, but notice how I got flamed for saying
so.
Bertil Jonell
Jordan S. Bassior <jsba...@aol.com> wrote:
>An American college professor could, for instance, have defended liberal
>democratic capitalism. Why couldn't an A-Iotian?
Because the writer thought it was indefensible?
>Jordan
-bertil-
--
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
exercise for your kill-file."
Pete McCutchen
<mike....@moh.hnet.bc.ca> wrote:
> What could there possibly be to say
>that they didn't say the first time?
We could talk about the book?
--
Pete McCutchen
Jordan S. Bassior
>Jordan S. Bassior <jsba...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>An American college professor could, for instance, have defended liberal
>>democratic capitalism. Why couldn't an A-Iotian?
>
> Because the writer thought it was indefensible?
Yes, but the writer could have found out what sorts of defenses people in favor
of the ideology employ, simply by asking somebody. By simply having the
A-Iotian be stumped, implying that nobody had ever challenged the ideology and,
once challenged, there was no conceivable defense, LeGuin damaged the
verisimilitude of her world.
Hey, Poul Anderson's socialistic villains could have defended their actions.
And did, frequently, when challenged on them.
Jordan S. Bassior
>Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>
>>I have no idea where you get such a figure from. Most of the
>>estimates I I have seen range from tens of thousands
>>(reasonably credible sources) to one or two hundred thousand
>>(mostly right-wing loonies, but occasionally a credible
>>source as well).
>
>Isn't *this* a humourous juxtaposition?
Which? Dan's assumption that if the North Vietnamese "only" murdered several
tens of thousands to a couple hundred thousand civilians under their control
that this is nothing particularly objectionable, or his assumption that by
definition right wingers are non-believable loonies?
Jordan S. Bassior
my point-by-point critique of the novel, and is instead focusing on my passing
comment that the book is "creepy" when viewed in the light of the Communist
murders in Southeast Asia?
Jordan S. Bassior
>Actually, I think there is a potential mechanism. The central syndic of
>syndics (if that is the right title, it has been years since I read it)
>could assign people to work on major projects (by shorting every other
>project), but it would be politically difficult and contentious.
... which would mean that they wouldn't build freighters until the demand for
transportation capacity became so pressing as to cause a _lot_ of syndics to
suffer.
Which, in turn, would mean that cargo transport infrastructure would tend to be
under-constructed.
(unlike passenger transport infrastructure, where you would have _lots_ of
people complaining at its lack, most people wouldn't notice the lack of cargo
transport infrastructure directly, they would instead notice shortages of
desired goods).
Jordan S. Bassior
Yes! Read the book! :)
Jordan S. Bassior
>> In any case, it seems almost certain that she was ignorant of the
>> horrors of the Khmer Rouge at the time she wrote _The Dispossessed_.
>> The memorable horrors of their rule hadn't happened yet when it was
>> published in 1974, let alone when she was writing it (in 1973 or
>> earlier, presumably).
I didn't say that she was aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
What I said was that the book was "creepy" given what was _about to happen_ in
Southeast Asia, the same way that a book extolling eugenics and the suppression
of the "inferior" would have been in 1940, given what was about to happen in
Eastern Europe. For the benefit of those who don't know much about the history
of the Holocaust, it mostly started in 1941-42, and thus from the POV of
someone in 1940 hadn't happenede yet.
Jordan S. Bassior
Communism wasn't going to be a big happy lovefest. Mao had already bagged most
of his human game (some 30-80 million of them, depending on which estimates you
believe), the Korean War was 20 years past, and the Vietnam War was ongoing.
The North Vietnamese had already shown their true colors. Quite aside from the
fact that they'd invaded South Vietnam in the first place, they'd also murdered
tens of thousands of their citizens in the North, and the Hue Massacre was
committed in 1968. So someone trying to claim that they were just virtuous
noble peasants was already arguing into the teeth of the evidence, and against
the ghosts of their victims.
Mike Thoma
Yes, that would be an original approach.
mstemper - emis . com
response to the lengthy thread of about two months back. By the time
that I was done, I became convinced that it was Urras, not Annares,
that was the titular "ambiguous Utopia".
There's absolutely nothing Utopian about Annares in LeGuin's presentation
of it. On the other hand, when Shevek first arrives on Urras, it seems
to be an absolutely marvelous place, until he starts poking into its
corners and cracks.
Annares was the simple, mostly comfortable home. Urras was the place
that the outsider came to: a place that looked WOW ZOWIE at first, but
soon showed its unsightly blemishes.
In the traditional presentation of Utopias, that makes Urras the Utopia
that LeGuin referred to. Given her (alleged) political leanings, this
makes sense. She would want to show that the shiny, superficially
marvelous capitalist society wasn't so great after all.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding;
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.
Jordan S. Bassior
>Yes, that would be an original approach.
Hey -- I just did it. AT LENGTH.
Mike Thoma
>
> Guy Gordon said:
>
> >Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
> >
> >>I have no idea where you get such a figure from. Most of the
> >>estimates I I have seen range from tens of thousands
> >>(reasonably credible sources) to one or two hundred thousand
> >>(mostly right-wing loonies, but occasionally a credible
> >>source as well).
> >
> >Isn't *this* a humourous juxtaposition?
>
> Which? Dan's assumption that if the North Vietnamese "only" murdered several
> tens of thousands to a couple hundred thousand civilians under their control
> that this is nothing particularly objectionable, or his assumption that by
> definition right wingers are non-believable loonies?
>
Pete,this is what I meant. Jordan is probably more correct than the
D-man, but we aren't talking about the book anymore. That took what,
12 hours?
And now we're going to regurgitate the rest of it. I'm expecting
Noam Chomsky through here any minute.
Pete McCutchen
<mike....@moh.hnet.bc.ca> wrote:
>> Which? Dan's assumption that if the North Vietnamese "only" murdered several
>> tens of thousands to a couple hundred thousand civilians under their control
>> that this is nothing particularly objectionable, or his assumption that by
>> definition right wingers are non-believable loonies?
>>
>
>Pete,this is what I meant. Jordan is probably more correct than the
>D-man, but we aren't talking about the book anymore. That took what,
>12 hours?
OK, I see your point.
But it wasn't _me_, this time!
--
Pete McCutchen
Jordan S. Bassior
>There's absolutely nothing Utopian about Annares in LeGuin's presentation
>of it. On the other hand, when Shevek first arrives on Urras, it seems
>to be an absolutely marvelous place, until he starts poking into its
>corners and cracks.
>
>Annares was the simple, mostly comfortable home. Urras was the place
>that the outsider came to: a place that looked WOW ZOWIE at first, but
>soon showed its unsightly blemishes.
>
>In the traditional presentation of Utopias, that makes Urras the Utopia
>that LeGuin referred to. Given her (alleged) political leanings, this
>makes sense. She would want to show that the shiny, superficially
>marvelous capitalist society wasn't so great after all.
That's a very good point. And, in the classical Utopian / dystopian tradition,
Shevek only realizes what's wrong with Urras bit by bit.
But, ironically, what's wrong with Urras has very little to do with
"capitalism." A lot with _statism_, though. You could use Urras as a poster in
support of anarcho-capitalism as easily as you could in support of
anarcho-socialism. The more so because Anarres shows a lot of what's wrong with
the "socialist" part of "anarcho-socialism).
(and no: I am _not_ an anarcho-capitalist).
David Johnston
>
> Guy Gordon said:
>
> >> In any case, it seems almost certain that she was ignorant of the
> >> horrors of the Khmer Rouge at the time she wrote _The Dispossessed_.
> >> The memorable horrors of their rule hadn't happened yet when it was
> >> published in 1974, let alone when she was writing it (in 1973 or
> >> earlier, presumably).
>
> I didn't say that she was aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
>
> What I said was that the book was "creepy" given what was _about to happen_ in
> Southeast Asia, the same way that a book extolling eugenics and the suppression
> of the "inferior" would have been in 1940, given what was about to happen in
> Eastern Europe. For the benefit of those who don't know much about the history
> of the Holocaust, it mostly started in 1941-42, and thus from the POV of
> someone in 1940 hadn't happenede yet.
Does "The Dispossessed" have a favourably portrayed dictatorship which
would be capable of Khmer Rouge-style atrocities? Although I've never read
it, it sounds like they wouldn't be organised enough from what people have
been saying.
Incidentally, I forget, were we ever told by E.E. Smith how Civilisation's
political leadership is chosen?
Mark Atwood
> Incidentally, do you find it as amusing as I do that Dan is unable
> to deal with my point-by-point critique of the novel,
Wish I could *read* it. I'm seeing the whole aftermath thread, but the
actaul review never showed up on my spool.
Michael S. Schiffer
> Guy Gordon said:
Actually, I wrote:
> >> In any case, it seems almost certain that she was ignorant of the
> >> horrors of the Khmer Rouge at the time she wrote _The Dispossessed_.
> >> The memorable horrors of their rule hadn't happened yet when it was
> >> published in 1974, let alone when she was writing it (in 1973 or
> >> earlier, presumably).
> I didn't say that she was aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
No. But I was replying to Shane Stezelberger, who indicated that she
might have been, based on a 1973 essay. (See
<http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=Xns90C6B198C4198mss2mediaonenet%40209.155.56.82>
for my original post.) I was just pointing out that her reference to
"that man dying of gangrene in Cambodia" probably wasn't talking about
a victim of the Khmer Rouge holocaust, since it hadn't happened yet
when the essay and _The Dispossessed_ were written. Whereas the US
bombing campaign in Cambodia was a big issue for people of Le Guin's
political bent, and thus, IMHO, a more likely explanation for violent
death in Cambodia being in her mind.
Jordan S. Bassior
>jsba...@aol.com (Jordan S. Bassior) writes:
>
>> Incidentally, do you find it as amusing as I do that Dan is unable
>> to deal with my point-by-point critique of the novel,
>
>Wish I could *read* it. I'm seeing the whole aftermath thread, but the
>actaul review never showed up on my spool.
Ok, I'll repost it. If you _still_ can't read it, maybe I'll repost it from
another account.
Introduction
The debate a few months back over this book got me to dig out my copy and
re-read it. Here's what I took out of it:
SPOILERS
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
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*
*
*
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*
*
I. Loaded Comparisons
It's interesting that Ursula K. LeGuin does _not_ dare to compare Anarres with
any society as free as, say, the 20th century West (even the one existing in
the early 1970's, which was in many respects more troubled that the one of
today).
There are three major nations on Urras.
A-Io, the capitalistic liberal democracy where most of the Urrasti action is
set, can best be described as a country with the social attitudes of Victorian
England and the riot control skills of Late Tsarist Russia -- these coexisting
with fusion power and interplanetary space travel. Women are barred from most
occupations. Lower-class persons _defer_ to upper-class ones. Peaceful
demonstrations are dealt with by strafing the crowd and then hunting down the
survivors for days.
(Now, A-Io is of course a fictional culture, and the author is within her
rights to make it misogynistic, stratrified, and cruel. But when she
deliberately structures the novel to invite comparison -- for instance, by
cutting from Arras to A-Io each alternate chapter -- one is bound to ask why
she picks a very _nasty_ society to serve as her example of a capitalist
liberal democracy).
Thu, the main rival of A-Io, is not described in detail, but from the clues
given is obviously a Stalinist communist dictatorship. Benbili, the country
that A-Io and Thu have a war over during the course of the book, is a chaotic
"Third World" country, normally ruled by a military dictatorship, which is
overthrown by an unconvnincingly described revolution, with the A-Iotians then
restoring the dictator to power.
Terra (Urras and Anarres both orbit Tau Ceti) has suffered a catastrophic
population collapse in her past (from 9 to 1/2 billion), and submitted to a
horrendously totalitarian regime in reaction to this die-off:
"Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins,
on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total
control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce
of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthenasia, univeral consdription into
the labor force, toward the goal of racial survival."
(a "solution," incidentally, that based on the historical evidence seems
unlikely to work: one can more reasonably assume that "racial survial" is the
excuse the rulers of the horrible culture described there uses to maintain
their dominance).
The Hainish are "total altruists" dominated by awareness of their own age and
cultural guilt for some crime: we don't learn much about them (maybe in her
other books?).
Att no point do we see a non-mysoginistic, humane, liberal democratic
capitalism -- such as the one that we live in today -- practiced by anyone. In
fact, LeGuin implicitly argues that such is impractical over the long run,
because one may presume that such a culture (ours) was at least partially
responsible for the ruin of Terra. But I submit that almost every reader, given
a choice between, say, the America of 1970 and _any_ of the cultures detailed
in the book, would have picked America in 1970. Let alone America c.2000!
II. Unconvincingly Utopian Ambiguity
For all the talk of an "ambigious" Utopia, Anarres is culturally working far
better, 167 years after the colonization, than seems likely. We're supposed to
believe that the Syndic of Initiative is the _first_ serious dissent that the
culture has ever had, that the reaction to them is the first repression that
the culture has ever known, and that Anarres is in some meaningful sense a
society perpetually "in revolution" (I'm minded of Kodos and Kang's "twirling,
twirling towards progress" when I read that line!) :)
This despite the fact that there are features in this culture that would be
obvious handles for a tyrant to grasp. For instance, the worst sins are
"egoism" and "profiteering." _Thoughts_ along these lines are bad; _expressing_
them is worse.
Now, because all humans have a strong sense of personal identity, and try to
ensure that they produce more than they consume in any endeavor meant to
constitute "work," these are "sins" which _every_ (sane) human being can be
properly "accused" of. This means that every Anarresti should know he's a
miserable sinner (or be convincable of same by a skilled speaker). This is a
tailor-made opportunity for petty tyranny.
Yet, apparently, nothing like this happened until Shevek and his pals were
born?
(We don't know, it after all could be that they never tried to find out what
happened in the past. But it's a _big_ omission, that even Shevek's slightly
paranoid friend never tried to find this out).
III. Anarrean Lethargy
At that, there are aspects of Anarresti society that don't make a lot of sense
unless we assume that their culture is not very good at identifying and
pursuing opportunities. I don't know if this was _intentional_ on the part of
the author, but here goes.
A. Tourist Lethargy - The Anarresti have and enforce a de facto non-intercourse
policy with the rest of the Universe, analogous to that of Shogunate Japan.
Their trade with Urras is grudging and restricted to vital items. Information
going in and out is censored. They ignore (!) the coming of interstellar aliens
(!!!). Shevek is supposedly the first person to travel from Anarres to Urras
for over a century, which if true argues that the restrictions used to be even
more severe. He has to avoid a rock-throwing mob in order to leave the planet.
This is a level of xenophobia the Iranian ayatollahs only _wish_ their own
people possessed.
B. Navigational Lethargy - The Anarresti have a space fleet consisting of 12
ships, which are currently capable of repeated atmospheric launch and re-entry
(they haven't lost any in some 167 years, unless they have a treaty with the
Urrasti to replace the losses), and which were originally capable of
inter-lunar flight (these ships are how they got there).
This means that the Anarreans, at least theoretically, could go anywhere
in the system -- if you can reach the orbit of a terrestrial planet, you're
"halfway to anywhere" (Pournelle's famous phrase). Unless Tau Ceti has a very
weird system, it's gotta have more than the twin Anarresti-Urrasti planet.
Yet the Anarresti can't think of anything better to do with their ships
than to arm them and use them as a patrol against (apparently non-existent,
because there's no mention of even attempted smuggling anywhere in the story)
alien incursions. Given that their ships are over one and a half centuries,
old, and that the Urrasti have been updating their own spaceflight technology,
they would presumably be as useful against an Urrasti invasion as war junks
against ships of the line.
Now, you could argue that the Urrasti don't let the Anarresti colonize
anywhere else in the Cetan system. You could -- except that nobody mentions
this, not even the paranoidly anti-Urrasti who oppose the Syndic of Initiative.
You'd _think_ that if the Urrasti were so restricting the Anarresti, that this
would be a sore spot with the Anarresti patriots, wouldn't you?
Heck, it doesn't even seem to occur to the Anarresti that they have what
amounts to 12 capacious suborbital transports -- all Anarresti air
transportation seems to be accomplished by _dirigible_! The limitation of their
most valuable craft to "defense" against a non-present "enemy", who would be
overwhelming if he ever came, is profoundly irrational, and creepy in terms of
the level of implied paranoia.
C. Industrial Lethargy - The Anarresti have a metal-rich planet. This is, in
fact, the whole _basis_ of their interplanetary economy. Yet, at the same time,
they have so little heavy industry that the construction of a single oceanic
barge will consume a good portion of their whole industrial capacity for a
year, according to Shevek. Why?
D. Commercial Lethargy - The Annaresti metals output includes _gold_. Yet, for
some reason (probably their horror of "profiteering"), it doesn't occur to them
to increase their gold output, develop a foreign exchange surplus, and use this
to purchase heavy durable goods from Urras to improve the standard of living on
Annares. Instead, they limit their trade to what sounds like a mutual tributary
arrangement; the sort of thing the Egyptians and Hittites had with each other
on the royal level.
(They _do_ primarily import high-tech machinery and biotechnicals from Urras,
in fact, but they don't seem to be cutting very good deals. My opinion is that
the Urrasti are probably sharping them for everything they can).
E. Maritime Lethargy - Anarres has a very sparse, very fragile land ecosystem,
but a much richer and more complex oceanic ecosystem. So what do the Anarresti
do?
They live on the plains and mostly ignore the oceans, though at the point of
the story, they are just beginning (!), under the lash of famine (!) to
research the possibility of fishing and aquaculture. Um ... duh?
F. Biological Activity - There is one thing that the Anarresti do a lot of,
though it's described by Ursula with all the eroticism of a musketry drill.
That's have sex.
Unfortunately for the Anarresti, they make motherhood _real_ easy -- free food,
and free creches and education for the children. With the predictable result.
Anarres is overpopulated. BADLY overpopulated.
"What!" I hear you cry. "But there are only a few million Anarresti!" How can
they be _overpopulated?_"
The answer is that "overpopulation" is a problem of the ratio between energy,
food, and other economic resources, on the one hand, and people on the other. A
wealthy, crowded city is _not_ overpopulated. A poor community living dispersed
on an arid plain may well be overpopulated.
We know that Anarres suffers from severe overpopulation because they have
evolved a way of life (farming on an arid planet vulnerable to years-long
droughts) which _should_ require immense food surpluses be laid up in granaries
and other storehouses. Instead, everyone can take food as long as there is no
_extreme_ shortage. (This is _explicitly_ stated by Shevek in the scene with
the laid-up train).
Thus, the accumulation of large food surpluses is impossible. (Heck it would be
"profiteering" to even try!) And, when the drought hits, we witness an
atomic-powered industrial civilization suffering from the sort of famine that
the Pharoahs of Egypt had managed to avoid with a muscle-powered agricultural
one.
Good going, Odonists. Circle of Life, and all that. *snicker*
IV. Weird War Tales
A. The Benbilian revolutionaries overthrow an armed military dictatorship --
presumably, they defeat the dictator's troops. Yet, when the A-Iotians invade,
one reason the A-Iotian forces can conquer so easily is that most of the
revolutionaries are unarmed. Huh? All I can say is that the Benbilian Army must
have made the Tsarist Russians look competent by comparison.
B. Shevek, master of military strategy, floors an Urrasti in debate by pointing
out that military hierarchy is unnecessary, since, after all, guerillas manage
without such things. Apparently, LeGuin had never troubled herself to learn
anything about guerilla warfare, which is especially funny given that America
was actually involved in a guerilla war at the time that she wrote this book.
C. The climatic A-Iotian riot scene involves a crowd of a hundred thousand or
so workers being strafed by helicopter gunships (the _Blue Thunder_ approach to
riot control, apparently). After this, the crowd is broken up by troops
supported by armored cars (apparently, riot police weren't an Urrasti
invention). THEN, the A-Iotian military tries to hunt down and kill the
survivors.
Why? Are the A-Iotians utterly determined to decimate their own workforce?
What's the point of hunting down _defeated_ demonstrators, anyway? And how,
incidentally, can the troops tell rioters from other people in the city? It
looks to me as if the A-Iotian army is sacking its own capital!
Conclusion
_The Dispossessed_ is a good book, but very deeply flawed. Ursula K. LeGuin
intended to compare and contrast Anarres with the real world, but did so only
by loading the balance scales -- the "real world" shown is a combination of the
worst of capitalist societies; Anarres is an idealized anarcho-socialist utopia
with very managable problems. At the same time, many of the problems are "the
planet ate my work" type problems, supposedly due to the harshness of the
environment, but clearly (to me, anyway) due to Anarresti lethargy in
exploiting their opportunities.
It is peculiarly a book of its times -- c. 1970, when many intellectuals felt
that America was fundamentally flawed, and that there was something alien, and
better, that could be built. As such, I don't know if it will last, save with
the support of nostalgiac teachers.
Jordan S. Bassior
>Does "The Dispossessed" have a favourably portrayed dictatorship which
>would be capable of Khmer Rouge-style atrocities?
No.
But it _is_ a pro-socialist book, written a few years before one of the great
socialist massacres of the 20th century.
>Although I've never read
>it, it sounds like they wouldn't be organised enough from what people have
>been saying.
Hard to say.
Anarres is more organized than it appears on the surface.
But I don't think the Anarresti are _malevolent_ enough to do that. Odo was no
Pol Pot, nor even a Ho Chi Minh.
>Incidentally, I forget, were we ever told by E.E. Smith how Civilisation's
>political leadership is chosen?
On the Earth, by the free election of democratic representatives, at least at
the time of _First Lensman_. It is mentioned in parts of the series that
Civilization is "democratic" and "free," so presumably analogous events occur
on its other constituent worlds. (For instance, part of _Masters of the Vortex_
involves cleaning up politics on Tominga).
Though I'd imagine that the _details_ might be _vastly_ different when you're
dealing with very aliens and aliens. Palanian politics, for example, is
probably as convoluted and conspiracy-ridden as Herbert's CHOAM. The apathetic
Rigellians probably find it very difficult to find anyone competent willing to
function as a "national leader." The hyper-active Vegians probably run
campaigns frentic beyond all human endurance. And so on ...
David Johnston
>
> David Johnston said:
>
> >Does "The Dispossessed" have a favourably portrayed dictatorship which
> >would be capable of Khmer Rouge-style atrocities?
>
> No.
>
> But it _is_ a pro-socialist book, written a few years before one of the great
> socialist massacres of the 20th century.
Is that really relevant of the socialism in the book and the socialism of
the Khmer Rouge are radically different?
>
> >Although I've never read
> >it, it sounds like they wouldn't be organised enough from what people have
> >been saying.
>
> Hard to say.
>
> Anarres is more organized than it appears on the surface.
>
> But I don't think the Anarresti are _malevolent_ enough to do that. Odo was no
> Pol Pot, nor even a Ho Chi Minh.
>
> >Incidentally, I forget, were we ever told by E.E. Smith how Civilisation's
> >political leadership is chosen?
>
> On the Earth, by the free election of democratic representatives, at least at
> the time of _First Lensman_. It is mentioned in parts of the series that
> Civilization is "democratic" and "free," so presumably analogous events occur
> on its other constituent worlds. (For instance, part of _Masters of the Vortex_
> involves cleaning up politics on Tominga).
Yes, I know that Earth elects it's local government, but I was wondering whether
Civilisation had a legislature, an popularly elected executive or what? Or is
it just an alliance following general rules set down originally on Earth and never
changed?
Gary Weiner
"Jordan S. Bassior" wrote:
>
> Bertil Jonell said:
>
> >Jordan S. Bassior <jsba...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> >>An American college professor could, for instance, have defended liberal
> >>democratic capitalism. Why couldn't an A-Iotian?
> >
> > Because the writer thought it was indefensible?
>
> Yes, but the writer could have found out what sorts of defenses people in favor
> of the ideology employ, simply by asking somebody. By simply having the
> A-Iotian be stumped, implying that nobody had ever challenged the ideology and,
> once challenged, there was no conceivable defense, LeGuin damaged the
> verisimilitude of her world.
>
> Hey, Poul Anderson's socialistic villains could have defended their actions.
> And did, frequently, when challenged on them.
What about Rand's socialistic villains. Did they have any halfway
reasonable defense of their positions?
--
Gary J. Weiner \ "When you can balance a tack hammer on
webm...@hatrack.net \ your head, you will head off your foes
http://www.hatrack.net \ with a balanced attack!"
"Hang Your Web With Us!"\ -The Sphinx "Mystery Men"
Kyle Haight
Gary Weiner <webm...@hatrack.net> wrote:
>
>> Hey, Poul Anderson's socialistic villains could have defended their actions.
>> And did, frequently, when challenged on them.
>
>What about Rand's socialistic villains. Did they have any halfway
>reasonable defense of their positions?
One might be able to make a case for Ellsworth Toohey. Gail Wynand had
plausible reasons for his decisions, but he isn't so much a villain as
a victim (and he definitely isn't socialistic).
In _Atlas Shrugged_, the only candidate who comes to mind is Robert
Stadtler.
--
Kyle Haight
kha...@alumni.ucsd.edu
Jordan S. Bassior
>Yes, I know that Earth elects it's local government, but I was wondering
whether
>Civilisation had a legislature, an popularly elected executive or what? Or is
>it just an alliance following general rules set down originally on Earth and
>never changed?
There was some sort of council, but I forget what it was called. Civilization
was either a tight alliance or loose federation, closer to NATO or the EU than
to (say) the USA in its structure. The Galactic Patrol only asked for a very
small percentage of planetary production save in times of extreme crisis (I
think it was a 1% flat income tax) and regulated very little beyond matters of
interplanetary commerce and mutual defense against malevolent interplanetary
organizations.
This was pretty much necessary, as the constituent cultures differed widely,
and it's hard to see what detailed regulations devised by, say, Tellurians,
could have applied to the lives of, say, Rigellians. Even among human or
humanoid cultures there was considerable diversity -- note the Chickladorians,
Manarkans, Tellurians, and Tomingans, for instance. So the degree of
standardization of local law was very limited, and it would have taken a rather
tyrannical culture (like the Boskonian) to enforce the same.
Dan Clore
> "Jordan S. Bassior" wrote:
> > Guy Gordon said:
> > >Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
> > >>I have no idea where you get such a figure from. Most of the
> > >>estimates I I have seen range from tens of thousands
> > >>(reasonably credible sources) to one or two hundred thousand
> > >>(mostly right-wing loonies, but occasionally a credible
> > >>source as well).
> > >
> > >Isn't *this* a humourous juxtaposition?
> >
> > Which? Dan's assumption that if the North Vietnamese "only" murdered several
> > tens of thousands to a couple hundred thousand civilians under their control
> > that this is nothing particularly objectionable, or his assumption that by
> > definition right wingers are non-believable loonies?
This is a good example of why I decided to killfile Jordan.
I have never made either of the assumptions that he
attributes to me here. It is pointless to debate with
someone who not only completely fails to offer a shred of
evidence for his own claims, but continually attempts to
change the subject whenever their falsehood is pointed out,
by attributing straw man arguments to his opponent.
--
Dan Clore
mailto:cl...@columbia-center.org
Lord We˙rdgliffe:
Dan Clore
The answer to your question is no. The book clearly
differentiates authoritarian socialism, as represented by
Thu (basically a stand-in for the Soviet Union), from
libertarian socialism or anarchism, as represented by
Anarres. The confusion of the two (which is necessary to
find the book "creepy" on the grounds cited above) is an
error impossible for anyone who has read the book to make.
Jordan S. Bassior
>This is a good example of why I decided to killfile Jordan.
>I have never made either of the assumptions that he
>attributes to me here. It is pointless to debate with
>someone who not only completely fails to offer a shred of
>evidence for his own claims, but continually attempts to
>change the subject whenever their falsehood is pointed out,
>by attributing straw man arguments to his opponent.
And thus, you squirt ink to cover your own inability to debate any of the
_serious_ points I raised about _The Dispossessed_.
I've (re)-read the book, Dan. Just like you kept squawking that I should.
Interesting that, now that I've had, you're totally silent on the _points that
I made about Anarres and Urras_, instead choosing to focus on the Vietnam War
and its aftermath, which is only peripherally relevant to the topic.
Incidentally, Dan, I have a _lot_ of material on North Vietnamese atrocities,
but I'm trying to avoid the topic. I'm trying to stay _on_ topic, which is to
say -- on science fiction.
Jordan S. Bassior
>The answer to your question is no. The book clearly
>differentiates authoritarian socialism, as represented by
>Thu (basically a stand-in for the Soviet Union), from
>libertarian socialism or anarchism, as represented by
>Anarres. The confusion of the two (which is necessary to
>find the book "creepy" on the grounds cited above) is an
>error impossible for anyone who has read the book to make.
I did not confuse the two, and it is not necessary to confuse the two to find
the book "creepy" on the grounds cited. I'll note that even voluntary eugenics
programs were considered rather "creepy" in the years following World War II,
and for the same reason.
Mike Thoma
>
> Mike Thoma wrote:
> > "Jordan S. Bassior" wrote:
> > > Guy Gordon said:
> > > >Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>
> > > >>I have no idea where you get such a figure from. Most of the
> > > >>estimates I I have seen range from tens of thousands
> > > >>(reasonably credible sources) to one or two hundred thousand
> > > >>(mostly right-wing loonies, but occasionally a credible
> > > >>source as well).
> > > >
> > > >Isn't *this* a humourous juxtaposition?
> > >
> > > Which? Dan's assumption that if the North Vietnamese "only" murdered several
> > > tens of thousands to a couple hundred thousand civilians under their control
> > > that this is nothing particularly objectionable, or his assumption that by
> > > definition right wingers are non-believable loonies?
>
> This is a good example of why I decided to killfile Jordan.
> I have never made either of the assumptions that he
> attributes to me here. It is pointless to debate with
> someone who not only completely fails to offer a shred of
> evidence for his own claims, but continually attempts to
> change the subject whenever their falsehood is pointed out,
> by attributing straw man arguments to his opponent.
>
Dan, you have my name as the poster, but not one word you quoted
came from me.
Also, you hijacked this thread. It was meant as a one-time post on
why it's best not to write posts that will inevitably a) pull the
usual suspects into the thread and b) get off topic within four
posts.
Captain Button
> David Johnston said:
[ snip ]
>>Incidentally, I forget, were we ever told by E.E. Smith how Civilisation's
>>political leadership is chosen?
> On the Earth, by the free election of democratic representatives, at least at
> the time of _First Lensman_. It is mentioned in parts of the series that
> Civilization is "democratic" and "free," so presumably analogous events occur
> on its other constituent worlds. (For instance, part of _Masters of the Vortex_
> involves cleaning up politics on Tominga).
> Though I'd imagine that the _details_ might be _vastly_ different when you're
> dealing with very aliens and aliens. Palanian politics, for example, is
> probably as convoluted and conspiracy-ridden as Herbert's CHOAM. The apathetic
> Rigellians probably find it very difficult to find anyone competent willing to
> function as a "national leader." The hyper-active Vegians probably run
> campaigns frentic beyond all human endurance. And so on ...
Aren't the Rigellians the ones who are all incorruptible? I'd think
that politics and leadership would be much easier under such conditions.
--
"Gee, who'd a thunk it? Turns out alien superintelligence is
no match for our Earthly can-do spunk." - Jane Lane, "Daria"
Captain Button - [ but...@io.com ]