Whacky monarchy stories

The Internet confuses and yet amazes me at the same time. In my last post, I said that monarchy is stupid and sort of embarrassing, and I believe that's true. I also said that I consider the Dalai Lama an imposter, a monarchist who found populism only after being dethroned, which I also think is true. I had been quite a bit prepared to respond to supporters of the Dalai Lama who were offended at me pointing out his feudal past and the class-based repression of the Tibetan state before modern Chinese rule.

What I got instead was the Radical Royalist. So, instead of getting the reasonably common defense of the Dalai Lama, I got this nutjob who thinks that monarchy is preferable to democracy. I mean, WOW!

Or, as he puts it, himself, "These are troubled times, but I guess monarchists have something to say and something to offer as a possible solution for many problems that shake the world. That's why I call myself "radical royalist" because I am unashamedly in favour of a monarchy - anywhere!"

So, I will give you my FAVORITE MONARCHY STORY.

Around about 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand got assassinated by anarchists from Serbia. He was the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was basically the rump state of the Holy Roman Empire. By the early 20th century, it was also in serious decline in relative power, the wars of the late 19th century proving it to be politically, economically and militarily decadent. So great was the misrule of Austro-Hungary that there was widespread low-level civil strife throughout it, and eventually some (reasonably incompetent) anarchists managed to blow him away.

Obviously, Austria was pretty pissed about this. So, they asked Germany, ruled by Kaiser Wilhelm II . . .

OK. Let me back up. Willie the Second was what is technically called "an idiot". One of his more odious habits was a deep love of dressing up in military uniforms. It was observed during his own life the reason he increased the size and power of the German Navy was because he wanted to wear an admiral's uniform. He also decided to throw out Bismarck, amongst the most brilliant (if evil) politicians of the 19th century, and all-in-all believed that he was German Emperor because of God's personal intervention, and proceeded to act as though his least whim was therefore divine. Which largely meant provoking European powers. An idiot with unimpeachable authority that was literally claimed to be divine. (Think about that the next time some Western power accuses somewhere else of being backwards - not too long ago European monarchs were claiming absolute divine authority. Maybe I'll follow this blurb up with something about Leopold II of Belgium.)

So, Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, asked Willie the Second if they could attack Serbia, from where Ferdinand's assassins came. Germany, thinking it would be a brief war, said, "Sure, go ahead."

However, unbeknowns to anyone, Peter I of Bosnia - another hereditary monarch - had a deal with the Russian Czar Nicholas II. They had a secret defense pact.

OK, a brief word about Nick the Second. Also an idiot. He was a weak man ruled by his wife (I don't mean that as sexism, but kings can't afford to be ruled by anyone) who was in turn largely ruled by Rasputin who had power over the the Russian heir, Alexei, who was a hemophiliac due to aristocratic inbreeding. Rasputin seemed able to control Alexei's suffering, which endeared him to the Tzarina, who in turn had immense power over Nick the Second.

Nick the Second's misrule had, by 1914, already been clearly demonstrated through many bone-headed plays, including the Russo-Japanese War (which was deeply humiliating for Russia) and the 1905 Revolution.

So, this idiot had a secret defense treaty with Serbia, saying if Serbia was attacked that Russia would come to Serbia's aid . . .

OK. Think about that for a second. Secret self-defense pact. Now, who in their right mind makes a secret self-defense pact. What fucking good is a self-defense pact if no one knows about it?! The whole point of deterrence is that your presumptive enemies know that you've got a big stick! But, no, the idiot Nick the Second of Russia and Petey the First of Serbia decided what would be really clever was to hide the fact if you attacked Serbia you'd also be attacking Russia.

So, the Austrians attack Serbia - thinking that they'd have a jolly little war, teach those Serbs their place and be home by Christmas - but it activates the secret self-defense pact that Serbia had with Russia, which activates the treaties that Austria had with Germany, which activated the treaties that Russia had with France . . .

And now you've got World War I.

But, really, monarchy is the solution to the world's ills.

My favorite "not a gang" - the CIA

My favorite "not a gang" is definitely the CIA. In 1996, a San Jose Mercury News reporter by the name of Gary Webb wrote an expose of the CIA using Nicaraguan contras to run drugs into Southern California in order to fund CIA activities in Nicaragua. Yes, you read that right - the CIA were drug runners. They did this because their funding for Nicaraguan black ops had been defunded but it was a priority of the Reagan administration to support the Contras. Very ugly, very nasty stuff.

Gary Webb's career was destroyed. He was called a conspiracy theory nutjob. He couldn't get work. In 2004, he committed suicide after deep depression stemming from, in part, how his work was viciously attacked and he was forced out of a job.

However, eventually, almost every conclusion that Webb reported about was found to be correct by the CIA Inspector General Fredrick Hitz. The Hitz report talks about how the CIA protected over 50 Contra drug dealers who sold crack cocaine in Southern California and how money from these drug deals were laundered and used by the CIA for their illegal Nicaraguan operations. Rep. Maxine Walters had entered into the Congressional Record a memorandum of understanding between the CIA and Justice Department where the Justice Department said the CIA would be free of any legal culpability arising from their drug trafficking operations - the mechanism through which the CIA was able to protect those Nicaraguan drug dealers. Pretty much everything Gary Webb said about the CIA drug dealing was correct - but his career was still destroyed.

However, it is without a doubt that the CIA was one of the biggest crack cocaine distribution gangs in the 80s, their drugs and money fueling not only war in Nicaragua but also in the streets of LA and my hometown, Las Vegas, as gang wars spilled over into neighboring communities.

Interesting to note, too, that out of these investigations, absolutely no indictments were handed down, much less trials and jail time for the CIA gangsters that distributed massive quantities of crack cocaine to Southern California.

I suspect in the not too distant future, we're going to learn a lot about the CIA's activities in Afghanistan concerning heroin. Because no serious accounting has been done to find and persecute the drug dealers of the 80s (or how Air America - the CIA's air program during the Vietnam War - was used to smuggle heroin out of Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s), I think anyone who doubts that the CIA isn't smuggling black tar out of Afghanistan right now is being intensely naive. It's almost impossible to find a conflict in the past 50 years where the CIA has been involved where they haven't smuggled drugs.

Thoughts on Fantasy and Historical Fiction

I am finding it reasonably challenging to write long projects like Simon Peter. Yeah, I know, I know, who knew that writing a novel might be hard work? One of the biggest problems I face is getting tired of the situation and characters and start to think about different situations and characters. So bad is this that I largely have to avoid reading too many novels, especially in fields different than what I'm writing about, because it can completely destroy my will to write what I need to write -- but to some extent it happens anyway. This post is largely working out this idea that's been getting in Simon Peter's way so I can focus back on that without distractions for a while.

Tho' Simon Peter is definitely a historical fiction, and I am enjoying writing historical fiction, I still primarily regard myself as a science-fiction and fantasy writer, but I've been having a lot of conceptual problems with fantasy for a while, now. The root of the "problem" comes from the reality that most fantasy is, explicitly or not, basically Western Europe in the High Middle Ages with some "system of magic" and a number of monsters fairly crudely slapped on. The magic is generally not particularly well integrated into the social fabric of society, and I find it reasonably tedious (even as I have largely done it) that fantasy "societies" are inevitably some real human culture (or, more often, a pastiche or parody of it).

This creates what a friend of mine coined, to my knowledge, as the generic fantasy template. We all know it. The story takes place in a parody of a Anglo-French feudal monarchy, there are elves in the forests, dwarves in the mountains, and guys in pointy hats know magic. Slight variants of the generic fantasy template rule fantasy with an iron fist.

For a while, now, my mind has been trying to pick out why this is the case. Some of it is enculturation, laziness and expectations. Most fantasy writers I know are, after all, members of what we loosely call Western civilization, so they're inclined to write about things with a Western motif, it's easier to write about Western motifs than to research outside of your culture or come up with something new, and . . . in the end most fantasy audiences expect it and want it.

The same goes with the poor integration of intelligent non-humans and magic into the setting, with some slight twists. For instance, in the GFT, elvish civilization is more advanced than human civilization in all ways -- technologically, magically and culturally. But no fantasy writer I know of writes about human civilization being an aspect of elvish colonization, even when humans actively ape elvish culture and civilization. (I've actually considered writing a fantasy novel where it would be largely about humans trying to free themselves of the thousands of years of elvish cultural imperialism and colonization as a kind of post-colonial fantasy novel and going all out. Y'know, the reason why people think that blond, blue-eyed people are more beautiful is due to their resemblance to elves, and the heroes are all "ugly" people because they're thick-bodied and with dark hair, skin and eyes, with the Aryan aristocracy emplaced by the elves keeping down the non-white humans, armed with elven weapons and such to do it.) But that doesn't happen, just as it never happens that people consider the justice behind, say, slaughtering goblins or orcs, or even the moral and legal issues of attacking a dragon.

Magic is equally poorly grafted on most of the time, without real social consequences. If you can magically heal someone, I mean, that's probably what you'd spend all your time doing, right? Or blessing fields or whatever. It is rarely integrated well into the setting.

(This is not universal, of course. Indeed, I wouldn't mind people giving me novels where all of this is false! I'm all down with people pointing me in the direction of cool books.)

So, I was thinking about how to settle these issues for myself, unique to myself as an artist. What I was tending towards was to write historical fiction with a fantasy element, with the magic and monsters being subtle enough that it might be objectively impossible to say "that was magic" . . . though I found myself then wondering why I wouldn't just write historical fiction. I wasn't sure that the distinction between historical fiction and historical fantasy would be interesting enough to make me write historical fantasy -- I might get too interested in the history.

But I was recently talking with a friend about fantasy role-playing games and what I disliked about a lot of gaming settings, and the same is roughly true of fantasy literature (even a lot of stuff that isn't the GFT). Specifically, we were talking about the Dungeons & Dragons setting of The Forgotten Realms. Forgotten Realms basically defines the generic fantasy template, really, and cranks it to 11. There are wickedly powerful wizards, awesomely powerful supernatural creatures, thousands of years of advanced non-human civilizations and loads of literally divine intervention, but human society managed to look superficially like northwestern Europe, and is the politically dominate force in the setting.

Part of what drives me batty about the setting is how it tries to ecologically justify things. A monster is never a freak of nature that exists, as they often did in mythology, for instance, on a remote island or as a single creature -- but there are whole species of them, with mating habits, society, culture. Which just worsens it all, because they're all these little independent things that have little bearing with each other, each considered in a weird vacuum!

During the course of the conversation about fantasy settings, I opined that I'd much prefer that monsters be freaks of nature one-shots -- and given the structure of D&D where there are literally hundreds of different monsters and scant reason to reuse most of them, this isn't even a problem -- or having a small number of them living in some remote location than try to justify a global ecology and economy and political structure as poorly as Forgotten Realms does it, constantly drawing my attention to how very stupid the setting is on whole.

So, I started to think about a setting where the world doesn't have the same base presumptions of our own world. What came to my mind was a game my wife ran for a while set in the Dreamlands (the one invented by H.P. Lovecraft). In the Dreamlands, you never worried about how things "really were". Why was there an ancient city in the jungle? Because ancient cities in jungles are . . . dreamy. You don't have to even try to follow the logic present in the material world. The Dreamlands follows dream logic.

Which got my mind working about a setting where, well,the operating principle wasn't what the various laws of physics might decide would happen, because there aren't any objective physical laws, but the universe would reward people for creating interesting narratives in the same way that our universe rewards people who tease out "the way things work".

So, a merchant who tried to prosaically find the wind and wave to create a reliable trade route would fail, or come back with paltry pickings, but the person who sailed off to explore the strange worlds beyond the edge of the ocean would come back laden down with loot. The same would be true of everything. An architect would try to make every building a statement because, well, that's more interesting than identical, prosaic buildings -- the universe would find that less interesting than a unique structure built of great passion.

And then I imagined that there would be ancient and alien narratives still hanging around. That the narratives of the protagonists -- which would be largely human narratives because I am a human -- might act in opposition to these alien narratives that are much older and, potentially, of greater significance than what humans think is interesting.

I acknowledge that there is a metafiction element to this. What determines "what should happen" is literally my thoughts about what constitutes "interesting" to the audience, that the narrative logic is an artificial construct of interesting determined by my private interpretation of modern American culture. I'm feeling terribly modern, hehe. I'm also thinking that . . . this has been coming for a while, artistically speaking. In some ways, I'm creating a justification to write like superhero comic book writers -- where "what would really happen" almost always comes in a distance second to "what is interesting to happen".

I've also been realizing that part of the function of human consciousness will create a narrative out of any facts that are presented. Consider conspiracy theory. A conspiratologist will take statements (many of them not facts, even) that are logically unrelated to each other and create a narrative out of them. Thus the innumerable bizarre theories concerning the assassination of John Kennedy, or even the American public's initial acceptance of the administration's narrative that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" even over the objections of the UN arms inspectors that were in the best position to know. Statements were presented in proximity to each other and people's minds just created a narrative. Meaning is something humans insert into a narrative. So, by presenting a number of statements in proximity to each other, I hope to create a compelling fantasy narrative despite the proposed narrative making no real sense at all.

So, when I'm done with Simon Peter, I suspect I'll be writing a couple of proof of concept stories to see how it works out.

CIA Admits Secrets? I Do Not Hold My Breath

The CIA is going to reveal years of misdeeds from the time period from the 50s to the 70s. The article specifically talks about assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments. Most watchers of the CIA, even such dilettantes as myself, have known about many of them. If it's honest, the accounts will be grim. CIA chief Michael Hayden said that the time period was "unflattering".

Here's the gig, though. This is pure public relations. By revealing what happened no later than the 70s, they're shifting blame for historic CIA misdeeds to people who are either dead or secure in their retirements, and will indict no living Presidents. While I do await the release with some interest, what I'm even more interested in is extraordinary rendition. The treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are still deeply unresolved issues concerning Iran-Contra scandal or the CIA's role in the murderous wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The difference between these misdeeds and the ones from the 70s backwards is, well, chief amongst them is that the people who perpetrated them are still alive and could be held accountable, and many of them are in positions of power and influence. That other stuff? The main players are safely dead. The other main difference between older CIA misdeeds and newer ones is that some of the newer ones are still ongoing, of course, such as the case of extraordinary rendition, which is the policy of kidnapping people and sending them to be tortured in other countries, or the open question of how many illegal prisons has the CIA run, who was there, and what happened in these prisons.

To my eyes, the main purpose behind this CIA admission of historical guilts is to say that today we have a kinder, gentler CIA. A CIA that admits it's mistakes, see, they're admitting their shameful misdeeds -- but they're not like that anymore. In the words of the great Chuck D, don't believe the hype. This is a snow job. While I am interested in the historic crimes of the organization, I think it's even more important to keep in mind that these sorts of crimes aren't in the past. The CIA is has a continuity of abuse of power. These things are not in the past. Torture, illegal human experimentation, assassination, human trafficking -- this is not the CIA's past, it is very much it's present as can be seen, obviously seen, from its secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, and the numerous torture scandals of the past couple of years.

Post-colonialism and Post-theism

(Hat tip to Atheist Hussy for grooving me onto the interview with Christopher Hitchens.)

Truthdig.com just did an interview with Christopher Hitchens concerning his new book God is Not Great. It is the latest in a series of best-sellers whose success motivates me to write Simon Peter faster so I can point to all the recent books directed at atheists that have sold a million copies. Beyond that, and the proximate reason for this post, is that Hitchens said something clever:

Wiener: The final killer argument of your critics is that Hitler and Stalin were not religious. The worst crimes of the 20th century did not have a religious basis. They came from political ideology.

Hitchens: That’s easy. Hitler never abandoned Christianity and recommends Catholicism quite highly in “Mein Kampf.” Fascism, as distinct from National Socialism, was in effect a Catholic movement.

Wiener: What about Stalin? He wasn’t religious.

Hitchens: Stalin—easier still. For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you’re Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you can’t exploit the pool of servility and docility that’s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

This put me in mind of post-colonialism. For those not in the know, post-colonialism grapples with the legacy of colonial rule. Stuff like why is that Haiti is the amongst poorest nations on earth despite being one of the first modern democracies and despite having a massively profitable export product? Post-colonialism argues that it is the legacy of dependence created by the colonial system that keeps places like Haiti poor - that even after Haiti was technically independent of France's rule, most of the property in Haiti was still owned by people who had deep ties to France and who served the interests, largely, of France. Not to mention the brutality of slavery, the trained obedience to white prestige and privilege, things of that nature. The same is true in most former colonies. This ongoing legacy needs to be dealt with before a country can come into it's own. Haiti, having been particularly brutally colonized, is having a particularly hard time coming out of it's post-colonial period. Whereas China, which was far less colonized than Haiti, for less time, and with a far more robust culture than Haiti, has almost entirely put its post-colonial legacy behind it. And it is then unsurprising that the first Asian nation to come into it's own on the world stage was Japan - a country that had never suffered colonization by European powers.

So, when Hitchens said Stalin was able to take advantage of centuries of servility and docility that had been hammered into the Russian people by the Russian Orthodox Church, my mind made the connection between the legacy of religion and post-colonialism. It made me think that we're living in a post-theist society. God is dead, but as Nietzsche noted the shadow of god will continue to trouble our days for centuries to come. So, while Stalin was certainly an atheist, and a madman, the groundwork for his atrocities were laid by brutal theism of the Russian Orthodox Church in the same way that the brutality of Papa Doc Duvalier were laid by the colonial horrors of the French. The brutality of Stalin was not contextless. It was able to happen for a reason and part of that reason certainly was the habits indoctrinated into them by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Czar.

Some other examples of post-theism might be found in, say, Great Britain where the Church of England still has seats in the House of Lords. Despite the overwhelming majority of the British being a-religious, British laws are still in part shaped by the Church of England. It's absurd, but it's true. And in the United States, it is de rigeur for virtually all political candidates to publicly repeat ad nauseum their "born again" status - even though, on paper, the US is one of the least religious countries in the world. We don't have an official religion. We never have had an official religion. But so powerful is the lingering influence of theism that candidates must nevertheless acknowledge some silly born again state in order to get elected into office. A third example might be found in the Vatican City. Why on earth is a couple of blocks in Rome a separate nation? It's preposterous, but there it is, not to mention the absurd level of influence this decadent and dying religion continues to have on the modern Italian state.

Most of the world is in a post-theist phase - there is no enforcement of a state cult in most countries and religious leaders have little formal authority in most places. Yet, I think that it is important to realize that just because a society might not be religious doesn't mean the effects of religion mystically vanish from that society. After literally centuries of basing one's laws and culture off of various religious authorities these cultural habits remain ingrained into our society and person even if we have rejected the religion. Much of who we are, culturally, socially, is so deeply entwined with religion it will be a very long time before we're free of the malady of religion. Religion is a fever that has broken, but we are still a long way of having our full strength.

But we will. Skepticism is the fastest growing belief about religion in the world today. I don't figure this will change.

Science and Secularism

I was reading PZ Myer's blog. In a recent post, he did something he frequently does, and that many atheists do, which is give this universal primacy to science in the scientific method. Says he: "Faith says that the way to get answers is by revelation, accepting authority, and dogma. Science says that the way to get answers is by examining the evidence critically, testing hypotheses with experiment in the natural world, and by constantly reevaluating and revising our ideas to make them more accurate."

Indeed, he was responding to this: "The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths."

Both of them conflate reason with science. Anyone with passing interest in my blog and writings know that I am very pro-science, but I think that . . . well, I understand that the theists do want to try to limit the damage that the secular world is doing to them. But I am finding it increasingly disturbing that the atheists approach the subject of addressing religion in such a one note way. As if the fight is a brawl over scientific facts, alone!

But it isn't, and science is not the only field to use reason and philosophical materialism to address it's subject matter. Another area -- and this is another key area when discussing matters religions -- is history. History attempts to explain human events without the slightest hint of the supernatural. It is not a science, but all the core elements of history are similar to science, and they are based on the same sort of philosophical materialism of science. You look for data to create an increasing accurate view of the past, and ideas that aren't supported by the data are generally discarded.

History is also one of the most powerful tools that an atheist can use -- and secular historians are definitely under a sustained attack by religious people. Still, it is useful to be able to debunk religion by pointing out not only how none of the supernatural events of various religious works are supported by historical works but also all the other religions that are dead, to be able to talk about how religions are formed and die, the plethora of would-be messiahs and gods whose works have been exposed as frauds, and often the complete lack of a historical record about the existence of these people, and how that record is at variance with religious works.

I know this is true for me. I can be talking with a Christian about Simon Peter and they'll be disturbed at what I'm writing about. That is, after all, part of the point of me writing it. They'll get disturbed and say that I'm factually wrong about things and they'll use what as their sole reference? If you didn't guess "the Bible" then where do you live so I can go there where it isn't know that Christians have a grand total of one reference about everything, hmm? Yes, the Bible. So, I can start talking about historical events and other religions of the period and I'll almost always draw a blank stare. So, you say that Christianity is just Roman Mithraism with a Jewish coat of paint, and that various solar religions with stories similiar to Christianity were all over the area for centuries, Roman, Persian, Greek and Egyptian, the general response I get is a blank stare. Despite Mithraism being the official cult of several Roman legions, including some in the area, and Mithraism's similarity to Christianity, and it predating Christianity by about 200 years, Christians are ignorant of Mithraism.

And that's just one of the gems that can be dropped on Christians from history. The Christian narrative, like all religious narratives, simply can't stand up in the face of the historical record. When a person is able to contextualize a religious story in the broader panoply of history, the stories don't seem as urgent. A Christian reading the Bible can easily feel that what is going on in those stories must have been the most important thing in the universe -- but when compared to the larger story of the Jewish world, the Roman Empire and it's struggle with Persia, the vastness of Indian and Chinese history, all occurring at the same time, it becomes a lot less impressive.

Of course, history isn't even the only additional discipline. Politics is another. Now, politics won't be able to combat the truth or falseness of religion, but when a person has studied politics in any capacity, it becomes painfully obvious that the best sorts of governments are those without church interference. The correlation between a secular government and the well-being of the people under that government is nearly absolute. It is harder to promote religion in society when a person has a good knowledge of politics.

Of course, all of these things are related to some extent. Science and religion share many techniques, and politics and history have interesting interconnections, and they all make use at various stages mathematics and statistics. But the notion that science is the only way to addressing the foolishness of religion is something that needs to stop, I feel.