Comments on: Mission Of Honor – Snippet 02

By: robert

robert — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:35:40 +0000

@24 Maybe DW did know about the Polish-Lithuanian government because of his involvement with Eric’s 1632 series. There’s a thread in the Grantville Gazettes that is involved with that government and the Russian government. I am going away now to read about that in one of our old college European history books. Which bookshelf was that…

By: wyrm

wyrm — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:25:32 +0000

(21) robert, (22) Summercat, (23) Drak

Weber has always been big on taking ‘examples’ from history. However, IMHO you are both missing a key element in the model for the SL. During the 17th and early 18th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest European countries, and if DW was not previously aware of the Commonwealth (which I would find surprising), he would have come across it when looking for models for the Honorverse. I know that it ‘died’ just before Napoleon got started, so it is not strictly contemporaneous with revolutionary France but it was a close temporal neighbour and, for over a century, a major European power. Significantly, in the 17th & 18th century Polish kingdom’s sejm (parliament) unanimity was required, so nothing ever got done – exactly as we are told occurs in the SL. The country’s neighbours (Prussia, Austria & Russia) took advantage of this institutional activity to slice pieces off the Kingdom in the latter half of the 18th century – very similar to Honor’s proposal for handling the SL. There are a number of other similarities. It’s worth reading about the Commonwealth, and seeing for yourself whether the analogies I draw ring true.

By: Drak Bibliophile

Drak Bibliophile — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:22:38 +0000

Summercat, DW has said that there is no exact counterpart to the SL in Earth’s history.

However, I agree that there are similiarities to the SL and Imperial China.

For one thing, the Chinese bureaucrats were the real power in China not the Emperor.

By: Summercat

Summercat — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:10:52 +0000

I always thought of the SL as Qing China.

By: robert

robert — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:29:08 +0000

It strikes me that the SL is a slightly more advanced version of an international quasi-governmental organization kinda, sorta like the U.N. but with more denture (e.g., a navy). The mainline ‘states’ (think U.S., Russia, China, etc. per the UN Security Council) don’t want to give up their sovereignty and have veto power, so the organization does not function well as a government, but it is OK as a policeman. All the non-mainline states (think UN General Assembly) don’t have much to say. And, indeed, the bureaucrats run the day-to-day operations. And there is corruption–they are human beings, still, some decent, some venal, some competent, some useless.

By: Mark L

Mark L — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:22:49 +0000

Well, both heaven and hell are said to be absolute monarchies. But on this side of the grave I would bet that hell’s form of monarchy is more typical of what is experienced long term with an absolute monarchy than heaven’s monarchy.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:31:24 +0000

The benevolent dictatorship saying is actually by Gibbon who used it to justify his passion for the alleged Five Good Emperors, a name actually first sued by Machiavelli.Sadly the Five Good Emperors do not really stand up to scratch as a test case for Gibbon’s claim.

By: Daryl

Daryl — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:47:54 +0000

An old saying is that the ultimate government is a benevolent dictatorship, and you can substitute king/queen for dictator or president for life or whatever term you want for the supreme leader. I personally don’t agree, but acknowledge that many so called democracies are anything but and hopeless as well. Just possibly the ultimate government is actually a well trained constitutional monarch heading up a parliament elected by well informed voters all of whom have long enough lives to gain wisdom (or Manticore, eg an idealised future Britain). In modern warfare (or international conflict) it does appear the the most efficient and most inclusive (use all citizen assets) states will prevail over the others even if they seem to be the more warlike and testosterone driven. Check Israel and the Arab states.

By: robert

robert — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:45:27 +0000

@16 RH, I think the Apocalypse Troll was a completely different kind of book. There was no politics in it, if I remember correctly. I read it a long time ago and it was only memorable for the battle stuff. It was shallow, not very textured and nowhere near as well done as any of the Honorverse books. More like a Kratman book, cardboard characters set up so the battle stuff can go off the way the author wants it to.

By: RobertHuntingdon

RobertHuntingdon — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:50:29 +0000

@14, well Robert, there is one exception: The Apocalypse Troll. We never found out much about the “original future” government type, and the “near future” version he came up with for his setting was pretty heavily democratic.

And come to think of it the Hridani weren’t a monarchy, were they? Maybe they were headed that way, but they weren’t really there “yet”.

But most of the rest of the time, yeah, he does. And I don’t really have a problem with that. I mean, every fictional story is going to have some bull crap in it. And the idea that you can maintain a monarchy as a stable, benevolent system for significantly longer than you can any other is, well, bull crap. (Not that any other system is really going to be benevolently stable much if any longer either….) But if it makes it easier to tell a good story, I’m all for it.