Christopher G. Nuttall's Blog, page 44

Gennady’s Tale (Schooled in Magic Novella)

Hi, everyone

Gennady’s Tale is the second Schooled in Magic novella, set roughly ten years before Schooled in Magic itself.  It’s a submission for the Fantastic Schools anthology, so any comments, suggestions, death threats, etc would be warmly welcomed (except the death threats, which will get a frigid reception )

You can start reading the series itself here – http://chrishanger.net/Published/SIMseries/SIMindex.html

Fantastic Schools – https://www.superversivesf.com/fantasticschools/fantastic-schools-anthology/

Now read on …

Chapter One

“Clubfoot!  Clubfoot!”

Gennady stayed low as he ran into the undergrowth, trying to put as much distance between him and his father as possible.  The man had come home blind drunk, as always, and would beat Gennady to a pulp if he caught him before the drink finally sent him into a drunken stupor.  He’d been drinking more than usual lately, ever since Huckeba – Gennady’s elder brother – had married some poor girl from the neighbouring village and moved into her shack with his in-laws.  Someone had probably reminded him that his son was a cripple, a disabled boy in a world that cared nothing for disabled boys, and he’d gone home to take out his frustrations on his son.

He gritted his teeth as his ankle started to hurt, a grim reminder of why everyone – even his parents – called him Clubfoot.  It wasn’t a real clubfoot, he’d been told, but it was quite bad enough.  Gennady could barely keep up with the women, let alone the men.  He was weak, too weak to handle everything from farming work to late-night drinking and fighting that occupied the men when they weren’t working in the fields.  There was no way he’d ever be allowed to marry, let alone have children of his own.  His father would probably disown him, sooner or later.  There was no way he could pass the family’s tiny shack to a cripple.  Gennady’s younger brother would kick him out even if their father didn’t.  And no one would say anything about it at all.

The bitterness welled up, again, as the shadows grew and lengthened.  It wasn’t fair.  He hadn’t chosen to be a cripple.  He wasn’t one of the idiots who tossed axes around for fun and accidentally cut off their own legs.  He hadn’t done anything to deserve being the runt of the litter, the laughing stock of the village … he hadn’t.  His bones ached as he stumbled to a halt, gasping for breath.  The louts had beaten him yesterday, chasing him from the vegetable gardens and into the forests surrounding the village.  No doubt they’d hoped he wouldn’t come crawling back.  Gennady himself wasn’t sure why he hadn’t simply walked away and allowed the forest to kill him.  No one in their right mind ventured out of the village after dark.  The night belonged to the other folk.

He stumbled to a halt, feeling sweat trickling down his back as he looked around.  His father’s voice was stilled.  Gennady knew what that meant.  The old man had probably gone back to the shack, to take his anger out on his wife instead.  He felt a pang of guilt, mixed with relief that it wasn’t him getting the beating.  He knew he should be ashamed of himself for letting it happen, for doing nothing, but … he couldn’t help it.  He’d been beaten down so often that he knew he had little sympathy to spare for anyone else.

Why should I, he asked himself, when no one has any sympathy for me?

He forced himself to look around, warily.  Few people came this close to the Greenwood, save for the lonely, the lost and the desperate.  The tangled branches and undergrowths up ahead were an impassable barrier, even to a strong man with an axe.  No one in their right mind would try to get in, not if they knew what was waiting for them.  The other folk lived there, in a realm so overgrown the sunlight never shone.  They’d kill anyone foolish enough to enter their world.  Gennady forced himself to start moving again, giving the Greenwood a wide berth.  There were times when he thought he could hear a call, urging him to walk into the alien realm.  He knew if he did, he’d never come out again.

Birds flew through the trees as he kept walking, despite the growing pain in his ankle.  He forced himself to keep looking around, noting the mushrooms growing near the taller trees.  They didn’t look ripe, not yet, but they were edible.  If he was desperate … he promised himself he’d come back later to pick them, to take home for his mother’s stew.  If he could get them home, without having them stolen by one of the village louts, his mother might be pleased with him.  No.  He knew better.  She could never forget what he’d done to her, simply by being born.

It wasn’t my fault, he told himself.  It wasn’t his fault that the village woman had cracked jokes about Gennady’s mother lying with the other folk, before his birth.  It wasn’t his fault that her husband had come very close to kicking her and her cursed child out of the shack, throwing them into the cold to die.  I was just a child.

The thought didn’t comfort him.  How could it?  He was a cripple.  There was no place for him in the village, no place anywhere.  It was only a matter of time until he was exposed to the elements and left to die.  The village couldn’t afford to feed useless mouths.  Gennady knew, all too well, that his father only kept him alive because he was good at scavenging.  He had to be.  There was no way he could kill a wild pig or catch a bird or do anything useful for the village.  The day he stopped bringing home mushrooms or herbs or anything else along those lines was the day he’d die.  He knew it with a certainty that could not be denied.

He flinched as he heard something moving in the undergrowth, something big.  A wild pig?  A boar?  Hogarth, the strongest lout in the village, wouldn’t dare tangle with a wild boar in the forest.  Even the court who owned the village and the surrounding region of the mountains would hesitate to don his armour and try to hunt a wild boar.  The creature was strong enough to pose a threat to anyone, save perhaps for a sorcerer.  Gennady hadn’t met many sorcerers.  He’d been kept firmly out of their way the last time the roving wizards had visited the village.  He hadn’t really cared.  Sorcerers could be childishly cruel at times.

The sound grew louder.  Gennady forced himself to turn and inch away, resisting the urge to run for his life.  The boar – if it was a boar – would give chase, if it thought he was scared. It was all he could do to casually walk away, despite the sense of unseen eyes studying his back and trying to decide if he’d make a tasty meal.  Gennady had to struggle to force himself to breathe, despite a suicidal impulse to turn and walk towards the boar.  It would be over quickly and then his family could pretend he’d never existed.  He knew what happened, when someone was exposed and left to die.  Their families never mentioned them again.

He sighed inwardly as the sound died away.  He was moving towards one of the paths, towards one of the few safe ways to walk between the villages … as long as one wasn’t a tax collector or someone else who might be quietly murdered a very long way from civilisation.  Gennady had met a couple of tax collectors, overweight men gloating as they skimmed what little they could from the village … one had laughed, openly, as the villages sweated to meet their dues.  He’d insisted he was exacting revenge for everything the villages had done to him, once upon a time.  Gennady wanted to be like him, even though he knew it would never happen.  No one would be scared of him.  He’d just vanish, somewhere in the forests, and no one would give a damn …

… And someone was moving, walking down the paths.

Gennady froze, utterly convinced his father had found him.  His father … or one of the village louts.  It didn’t matter.  He’d get a beating no matter who found him.  He peered through the trees, breathing a sigh of relief as the walker came into view.  Primrose.  A girl who’d smiled at him, once or twice.  The only person who’d ever been nice to him.  He found himself staring, despite himself.  Primrose was beautiful, with brown hair that seemed to glow with light and health.  She wore the simple smock that all village women wore, now she was old enough to wed, but she made it look like a dress.  Gennady was smitten.  He knew he wasn’t the only one.  Every boy in the village – and the surrounding villages – wanted to pay court to her.  He was surprised she was alone, outside the stockade.  The custom of kidnapping brides might be outdated, yet it persisted.  Primrose would have no choice, but to stay with someone brave and bold enough to take her, marry her and bed her before informing her parents.  She would be his …

He found himself turning and following her, shadowing her, as she hurried down the path to a small clearing.  He wanted to call out to her, to tell her he was there, but he couldn’t find the words.  He could never talk to Primrose, not when she was the only village woman not to mock him for an ugly gnome.  The others were cruel, but Primrose … she was sweet and kind and simply wonderful.  He dreamed of impressing her, of convincing her that he was the one, yet … he knew it wasn’t going to happen.  There were boys in the village who owned – or would inherit – entire shacks, tracts of land, even a handful of sheep.  What did he have that could compete?  Nothing.  Primrose’s father would laugh in Gennady’s face if he came courting.  Of course he would.

Primrose didn’t look back as she made her way into the clearing.  Gennady followed, frowning inwardly.  It didn’t look good.  The clearing was small, too small.  It wasn’t a place to rest, when walking through the trees.  It was a place for meetings between lovers … he felt ice shudder down his spine as he saw Hogarth standing beneath the trees, a look of sadistic anticipation on his face.  The brute was waiting for Primrose … Gennady shuddered again, realising that he was looking at an ambush.  Hogarth was waiting for her and … Gennady’s mind shut down.  He couldn’t force himself to face what was coming.  The thought of Primrose being married to Hogarth …

He felt sick.  The village louts were big and bad, but Hogarth was the biggest and baddest of them all.  A walking slab of muscle, too dumb to count past ten without taking off his boots … and sadistic enough to beat up anyone who got in his way, even the older villagers.  Gennady had felt Hogarth’s fists often enough to know the bastard took delight in hurting people, in picking fights with people who couldn’t fight back.  The bitterness threatened to overwhelm him, once again.  It just wasn’t fair.  People like Hogarth had everything.  What did intelligence matter when it could be smashed down at will?  Why …

His stomach churned as Hogarth stepped forward, took Primrose in his arms and kissed her.  The sound was loud, possessive.  Hogarth held her tightly, his arms inching downwards … Gennady fumed with envy and hatred and bitter fear.  Primrose didn’t look happy, from what little he could see, but what could she do?  Hogarth was admired and feared by the entire village.  She didn’t want to marry him, but so what?  If Hogarth asked for her hand in marriage, his father would give Primrose to him.  What else could he do?

Hogarth looked up.  Their eyes met.

Gennady froze, suddenly unable to move.  He was too scared to try, too scared to even think as Hogarth pushed Primrose to one side and bounded towards the undergrowth.  Hogarth was the kind of person who’d make it hurt all the more, if Gennady tried to run … not that he could run.  Hogarth could run like the wind.  Gennady would start limping within a few seconds if he tried to run.  He heard Primrose say something, but it was too late.  He hoped she’d have the sense to run herself.  Hogarth would beat her for interfering with his fun.

“Clubfoot,” Hogarth snarled.  “You little …”

Gennady whimpered, trying to raise his hands to protect himself.  But they felt as if they were too heavy to move.  Hogarth was too close, his face a mask of hatred.  Gennady stumbled backwards, too late.  Hogarth punched him in the chest, the pain making him retch as he doubled over.  A second blow – a fist, a knee, he didn’t know – smashed into his face.  He thought he felt his teeth coming lose as he hit the muddy ground, instinctively trying to crawl into it.  But it was impossible.  A hand grasped his neck and yanked him upwards.  He found himself staring at Hogarth’s face.  He knew, with a certainty he couldn’t deny, that it was going to be the last thing he saw.

“Little filthy spy,” Hogarth said.  He drew back his fist.  “You wretch …”

Gennady barely heard him.  The pain was all-consuming.  He would have curled into a ball if he wasn’t being held upright, dangling from Hogarth’s hand like a cat might carry a mouse. It wasn’t fair.  It really wasn’t fair.  The thought pounded through his head, bringing stabs of pain and grief and something with it.  He couldn’t think.  He felt as though he was far too close to the Greenwood, to the other folk.  Blue sparks flashed at the corner of his eyes as Hogarth tightened his grip.  The world seemed to blur …

“This is it,” Hogarth said.  Gennady believed him.  He was going to die.  He was finally going to die.  And it wasn’t fair.  “Goodbye.”

His fist started to move.  Blue sparks flashed, a surge of twisted power flowing through Gennady and into Hogarth.  The bully screamed, his face contorted with pain.  Gennady stared, unsure what was happening as the blue light grew stronger.  His awareness came in fits and starts.  There was a blinding flash of light.  He was flying through the air.  Pain, pain, pain … and a sense of power that almost overwhelmed him.  Primrose screamed, the sound dragging him back to himself an instant before the darkness swallowed him.  Gennady opened his mouth …

… And the world went black.

He tried to think, but it felt as if he was trapped in mud.  Darkness crawled around him, as if he was on the very edge of going to sleep but somehow unable to shut down completely.  He heard voices mumbling, their words growing louder and louder … he heard his father’s voice, the shock yanking him out of the unnatural slumber.  The real world crashed around him as he sat upright, realising in horror that he was lying on a blanket in the hovel.  His mother was staring down at him, her stern face unreadable.  For a moment, Gennady thought he’d dreamed everything.  But the throbbing power within him was undeniable.

A face came into view.  A man, a stranger … short black hair, clean-shaven … Gennady winced inwardly, fearing the mockery that would be directed at someone unable or unwilling to grow a beard.  And dressed from head to toe in black … sorcerer’s black.  Gennady started, trying to sit up but unable to do even that.  Cold terror washed down his spine, mocking him.  He had to show proper respect or … he’d wind up being cursed or … or something.  And yet, his body refused to obey.  The dull pain was threatening to drag him back into the darkness.  He felt as if his body had been turned to mush.  Maybe it had. There was a sorcerer standing over him.

He felt his heart twist as his father stepped into view.  The man looked as if he’d sobered up the hard way, his hands twitching as if he was in desperate need of a drink.  Or to work off his frustrations by hitting someone.  Gennady frowned, inwardly, at the look in his father’s eyes as the old man peered at his son.  Fear.  Real fear.  It attracted and repelled Gennady in equal measure.  It felt good to have someone be scared of him, for once.  It felt good to have someone grant him respect, even though fear.  It felt good …

… And yet, it didn’t.

The sorcerer removed a gourd from his belt and held it to Gennady’s lips.  Gennady didn’t want to sip, but he had a feeling he didn’t have a choice.  The liquid tasted unpleasant, worse than the brackish water he’d been forced to drink over the winters, yet … he felt an odd surge of energy flowing through him.  His body tingled, jerking uneasily as he sat upright.  The discomfort would pass.  He knew it would.  He was far too used to pain.

“Gennady.”  The sorcerer sounded odd, as if he’d learned the language by rote.  It was very clear he’d been born and raised somewhere very far from the Cairngorms.  “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”  Gennady saw his father pale.  He’d forgotten the honorific.  The entire family would be cursed if he didn’t fix it, quickly.  “Yes, My Lord.”

The sorcerer nodded, sternly.  “How much do you remember?”

Gennady forced himself to think.  He’d been in the forest.  He’d seen Primrose.  Hogarth had attacked him.  Hogarth had nearly killed him.  He’d …

“Power,” he said.  Blue sparks seemed to dance in the shadows as he remembered Hogarth screaming.  The brute had deserved it.  And worse.  Gennady liked the thought of making Hogarth suffer.  He’d done it.  Yes, he’d done it.  “I remember power.”

“Yes.”  The sorcerer smiled, very briefly.  “Power.”

Gennady swallowed, hard.  “What happened?”

“Magic,” the sorcerer said.  Behind him, Gennady saw his father flinch.  “Gennady, you’re a magician.”

Draft Afterword – Class Privilege

Hi, everyone

This is another draft afterword – thoughtful comments, critiques, etc, warmly welcomed . I’ll include links and a handful of references in the final version.

Chris

Afterword on Class Privilege

I’m going to start with a question many people will find, for all sorts of reasons, highly controversial.  Bear with me a little.

Does ‘white privilege’ even exist?

It seems to, based on the sheer number of thinkpieces published in a vast number of reputable (and not so reputable) journals and suchlike arguing that it does.  There are no shortage of people telling other people that they have privilege, then offering to run courses training them to acknowledge they have privilege and then … and then what?  There is no clear answer to that question, largely because the people who run such courses don’t want to put themselves out of business.

First, let me try to answer my original question.  Does ‘white privilege’ even exist?

My answer is rather nuanced.  I have indeed experienced a degree of ‘white privilege.’  But I had that experience in Malaysia, which is not – by any reasonable measure – a white-majority country.  Whites make up a very small percentage of the overall population, smaller still outside the bigger cities.  (When I lived in Kota Kinabalu, I was the only white person in the apartment block.)  This ‘white privilege’ came with a price, literally.  When I shopped alone, in places where there were no price tags, the price was generally higher than when my (Malay) wife and I shopped together.  Whites are generally assumed to be wealthy in Malaysia, which is one of the reasons the whole ‘beg-packing’ phenomenon is regarded with a mixture of bemusement and annoyance.  It’s also true that I got more respect from the local police than other immigrants, who seemed to believe it was unlikely that any white person in Malaysia would be anything other than a perfectly legal immigrant.  I was allowed to walk through a checkpoint for illegal immigrants even though I do not look remotely Malaysian.

In Britain and America, however, the question of ‘white privilege’ is a great deal more thorny.  By definition, a racial (or sexual or religious or whatever) privilege must apply to the vast majority of people who fit the bill.  White privilege can only exist if the vast majority of white people have it (in the same sense, perhaps, as men can be said to have ‘penis privilege’ and women can be said to have ‘vagina privilege’).  And it is by no means apparent that the vast majority of white people possess privilege.  It certainly doesn’t seem to provide them with any real advantages.  Indeed, in some ways, it provides quite the opposite.

The ‘privilege-checkers’ are fond of citing Peggy McIntosh’s famous 1989 essay, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.’  McIntosh lists 26 of what she calls the daily effects of white privilege in her life, putting race ahead of any other factor.  However, the list is deeply flawed.  Not, perhaps, because it is inaccurate in her case, but because it is inaccurate for so many others.  We might break down her 26 effects as follows:

True (of the vast majority of white people): 6, 9, 17, 20

False (based on non-racial factors): 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 13, 15, 21, 23, 25

Dubious: 5, 7, 12, 14, 18, 22, 26

Flatly Untrue: 10, 16, 19, 24

Many of her effects – the false or dubious effects – are oddly slanted, drawn from her personal experience rather than more generalist experiences.  #8 – “if I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege” is laughable from almost any other point of view.  Finding a publisher is not easy and only someone who’d spent most of her life in academia would argue otherwise.  #19 – “if a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race” – is odd because it is quite difficult to see who is driving a car or written the tax return until the drunkenly-driving car is pulled over or the auditor checks to see if the person claiming a million-dollar income is really drawing in so much money.  In both cases, there can be ample grounds for suspicion long before the person’s race is clearly recognised.

Others are flatly untrue, depending on personal conditions.  There is no way #1 fits me unless I cut my wife, my mixed-race children and all my in-laws out of my life.  The only way someone could fit #2 is through having vast amounts of money and a certain amount of social clout.  And really, one doesn’t need to be a different race to have neighbours who are not friendly or even neutral (#3).

It is fairly easy to believe, therefore, that McIntosh was simply wrong.

John Scalzi, the well-known science-fiction author, had a different way of looking at it.  He put forward an essay entitled ‘Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,’ in which he compared growing up a ‘straight white male’ to playing a computer game on a very easy setting.  This is a more solid argument than the invisible knapsack, as it is less tightly bound to specific advantages, but it suffers from a number of flaws.  Most notably, the obvious response is something that boils down to “I’m a straight white male and my life has been anything but easy and therefore Scalzi is wrong.”  This isn’t really helped by the simple fact that most ‘easy’ settings are really easy.  I tend to agree with this: my life wasn’t easy, even though – yes – I am a straight white male. 

It might be better to say that the advantages of being a straight white male are negated by being a friendless nerd with poor social skills, no gift of the gab and a shortage of money.  Indeed, one can even argue that ‘friendless nerd’ is right at the bottom of the social hierarchy.  Scalzi’s argument is better, as he’s talking in general terms, rather than specifics, but it still has problems.  People don’t think in generalities when they’re suffering and react badly to people who say they should.

In a sense, both McIntosh and Scalzi are talking from a position of privilege.  They recognise their own privilege, their own advantages, but they don’t realise that other white people – straight or not – don’t share their advantages.  (Scalzi did address this point in his ‘Double Bubble Trouble’ essay.)  This lack of empathy leads to problems when they both fail to realise that other white people face other problems and don’t, in any real sense, have privilege.  It’s quite easy to reap the benefits of certain issues – immigration, globalisation, etc – without realising that others, the people you don’t see, are suffering the disadvantages.  It is easy, for example, to push eco-friendly power plants if you’re rich enough to pay the increased bills.  If you’re poor, if you’re already spending money you don’t have just to stay alive, why would you support anything that raised your costs? 

And, when activists ask white people why they deny their privilege, could it be that they don’t have any privilege?

It is true enough that most power and wealth in the Western World rests in the hands of white men.  They make up the majority of political leaders, corporate directors, etc.  However, it is also true that the political-financial elite is a very tiny fraction of the whole.  The wealth and power they hold is not shared amongst the remainder of the straight white male population, let alone the entire population.  One may argue that wealth and power can be averaged out and so there is an even distribution of such things, but this doesn’t work in practice.  It is true, to use a simple analogy, that some writers make fortunes (JK Rowling, George Martin), and this suggests that all writers make fortunes, yet this isn’t actually correct.  The vast majority of writers cannot sustain themselves by their writing alone.

From the outside, looking in, this may not be obvious.  But from the inside, it is so painfully obvious that any practically any writer who heard a suggestion he’s one of the super-rich would laugh hysterically … and then dismiss the speaker, on the grounds the speaker is too ignorant to be taken seriously.  And he’d be right. 

It is this lack of perspective that gives rise to identity politics and the problems they bring in their wake.  A broke white guy, suffering the sort of poverty and deprivation that is commonly associated with the Third World, is not going to accept the suggestion he’s privileged.  And why should he, when he isn’t?  A writer struggling to enter the field and make a career for himself is not going to like suggestions that writers should be published on any other basis than writing skill.  Why should he, when it works against him (even if he appears to be given an unfair advantage)?  Indeed, one of the most ignorant statements I had to deal with was a suggestion that I was privileged for attending boarding school.   The school in question was deeply deprived, lacked the facilities to offer more than very basic classes (to the point that certain career options were foreclosed before I knew I wanted them), and was infested with bullies.  If being beaten up and/or insulted just about every day is privilege … I can’t take anyone who makes that argument seriously.  And why should I?

This leads to bitter resentment.  People who don’t have any privilege, in any real sense, resent it when they’re told they do.  People struggling to survive and build a career for themselves hate it when they’re told they have to work harder than others, as compensation for crimes they didn’t commit (and weren’t, in many cases, committed by their ancestors).  The idea that victimhood justifies further rounds of victimisation is bad enough, but when it’s aimed at people who didn’t commit the original victimisation it is considerably worse.  Why shouldn’t it be resented? 

Perversely – but unsurprisingly – the growing awareness of ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ fuels racism.  The more people are aware of different groups within society, the more they draw lines between themselves and other groups.  The more people see other groups as having an unfair advantage, one that comes at their expense, the more they hate and resent it.  And the more inclined they are to believe that other groups bring their misfortunes on themselves, rather than being the victims of forces outside their control.  People who feel they’re being nagged and pressured into making endless concessions resent it.  Of course they do.  And when they feel they’re being treated unfairly, they want to push back.

And they do, by arguing that other groups have privilege too.  Male privilege is countered by female privilege.  White privilege is countered by black privilege.  Christian privilege is countered by Muslim privilege.  Etc, etc … it’s all a terrible mess that promotes tribalism and encourages a cold war between groups that ensures old wounds will never close, with an endless series of ‘atrocities’ to keep the cycle going. 

Or, as someone more cynical than myself put it, divide and conquer.

***

But there is, it should be noted, a very real form of privilege.  Class privilege.

Indeed, pretty much all of the time, the person discussing ‘white privilege’ is actually talking about ‘class privilege.’  A person born into a higher class has more privilege than a person born into a lower class, regardless of the colour of their skin.  Obama’s daughters will have more privilege, for the rest of their lives, than a random white guy born in flyover country.  If you look back at the Invisible Knapsack essay, you’ll note that most of the effects credited to ‘white privilege’ are actually due to ‘class privilege.’  They would actually be true for someone born to wealth and power, who would be – in the West – almost entirely white.

A person with ‘class privilege’ has more than just money.  He has connections.  He grew up knowing the movers and shakers – and the next generation, who would become movers and shakers in their own right.  He probably met hundreds of celebrities, media personalities and many more, people who are either important or think they’re important.  The upper classes are a de facto aristocracy.  They marry amongst themselves; they rarely interact with people who are lower than themselves.  People like George W. Bush would probably not have risen so high if they hadn’t been able to draw on their family’s connections.  They can also count on the unspoken support of their fellows, even those who are technically on the other side, as long as they’re not too poisonous.  Class protects itself. 

One of the few things I will agree with the privilege-checkers on is this: the person at the top, however defined, often doesn’t realise what it’s like for the people at the bottom.  It is easier, from one’s lofty vantage, to divide people into subsets (race, gender, etc) than recognise that each and every person is an individual in his or her own right.  However, this also has the massive downside that the people at the top are often unaware of their own ignorance (like the person who insisted that going to boarding school was a sign of privilege) or how their well-intentioned words and deeds come across to others.

The point is that, if you’re on the top, it is easy to do a great deal of damage to the people at the bottom even if you have the best of intentions.  If you are well aware of your own ‘white privilege’ – which is actually ‘class privilege’ – and not a particularly deep thinker, you might assume that everyone who happens to share your skin colour also shares your privilege.  A moment’s rational thought would be enough to put the lie to this, but such people are rarely deep thinkers.  They grow up in an environment that does not encourage it.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that a wealthy – and liberal-ruled – suburb wants to embrace renewable energy.  The environment will be protected, but the costs of electric power will go up.  This is not a issue for the wealthy, who don’t mind paying an extra £100 per month, but a serious problem for the poor.  They don’t have the money to pay for power, leaving them powerless … collateral damage of a well-meaning, yet seriously misguided attempt to help.  If you lack the experience to realise that other people are different from you – and not just poorer than you – you will wind up accidentally hurting them.

            Percy: Oh, come now, Baldrick. A piffling thousand?  Pay the fellow, Edmund, and        damn his impudence.

            Edmund: I haven’t got a thousand, dung-head!  I’ve got 85 quid in the whole world!

If you live in a bubble, and most people with ‘class privilege’ do tend to live in a bubble, it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing people by their group, rather than as individuals.  It requires close contact to separate the members of a different ‘tribe,’ for what of a better term, into separate people.  If you don’t have that contact, it’s easy to start thinking that ‘all X are Z’ and other fallacies that are strikingly hard to lose.  It’s also easy to start hurting the people who lack your ‘class privilege’ – and to feel, when they object, that they’re in the wrong.

The average senior politician, for example, has a great deal of ‘class privilege.’  He or she also has a great deal of protection.  So do the very wealthy.  People like Bill Gates can afford to live in giant gated communities, places where they never have to come into contact with the great unwashed.  They enjoy a degree of safety that someone living in a poor and deprived community does not share.  A member of the protected class, as Peggy Noonan put it, is protected from the reality of the world he/she helped create.  They can argue that a serial killer shouldn’t be executed, on the grounds that the death penalty is immoral, but they’re not the ones at risk.  The ones who are at risk – the unprotected; the poor, the people who cannot afford private security – feel otherwise.  And then they’re insulted by the protected, who cannot understand their point of view.

This tends to lead to amusing moments of naked hypocrisy.  The wealthy are all in favour of immigration, diversity and suchlike as long as they don’t have to endure the downsides.  If they do – if there’s even a chance they might have to endure the downsides – they change their minds very quickly and shout “NIMBY!”  This hypocrisy rapidly becomes sickening, which is at least part of the reason Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016.  The three main candidates for the Democratic nomination for 2020 – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden – all live in areas that cannot, by any reasonable sense of the word, be termed ‘diverse.’  Indeed, they’re pretty much majority-white … and expensive enough to preclude the average Trump voter from moving there.

Unfortunately, merely exposing the hypocrisy is rarely enough to stop it.

In theory, we live in a meritocracy, in which a person with sufficient merit can rise to the top.  In practice, we live in a world where people lucky enough to have the right parents have a genuine edge over the rest … an edge so pronounced that they are rarely aware of what life is like for people at the bottom.  This breeds contempt for the lower classes, a contempt that is being increasingly returned.  This is not a good thing.

Throughout history, there is a pattern that tends to repeat itself.  A very competent man, someone who climbs to the top, will be followed by a son or grandson who is foolish enough to fritter away everything his ancestor built.  In Britain, for example, there was a long string of very competent monarchs being succeeded by fools or weaklings.  Why would this happen?  Put bluntly, the competent monarchs had to struggle to earn their power and, by the time they were secure, they understood the limits of their power.  Their successors, born to power and privilege, lacked that awareness.  They pushed the limits too far and often got their fingers burnt.  But very few of them truly suffered for their crimes.  They had ‘class privilege.’

***

This is the crux of many of our modern-day problems.  On one hand, our political-financial-media-etc elites have become disconnected from the real world and consumed with a distrust, even a hatred, for those who do not share their views and the wealth that insulates them from the consequences of their own actions.  On the other, society has become infected with the virus of ‘identity politics,’ which makes it impossible to put the past in the past and, perhaps more importantly, focus on what’s important.  On one hand, we have a steady move towards a de facto aristocracy that cares as little for the ‘commoners’ as any of their more formal processors; on the other, we have a rise in nationalism and radicalism that could easily lead to disaster. 

Why?  Well, I’d like to put forward a quote that – I think – explains the growing problem.

“And when Johnny doesn’t get the job and gets frustrated and complains about it he’s told that he shouldn’t be bitter because he has all the advantages and privileges of being a white male. So here he is at age 22 or 23 wondering exactly which advantages he’s had all along here because for every major event he’s had in the last 5 years, he’s been shot down because of his race and/or sex.

“If he’d been passed over at one stage by 1 point, people like Johnny would probably shrug it off. But after a while when you see people stepping in line ahead of you at every line you go to, at some point Johnny has to start wondering when he gets to compete on even terms. But the answer to that from affirmative action advocates is “never”.

“You saw it happen once and you kind of shrugged it off which, I think is pretty normal. Would you have the same response be if that was the 30th time you’d seen it? And what would be your response if each time you saw it happen was a building block towards another future event? Isn’t that what we refer to as “systemic”?”

There are people who will say that the above quote is nonsense, that it isn’t true.  But that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that people believe it.

If you were born in some really high-class area and you happen to be white, there’s a good chance that you have a lot of privilege.  But if you happen to be born white in Hillbilly Elegy country, you might reasonably ask why you don’t have white privilege?  And then you might ask why people who have never worked a day in their lives insist that you do have white privilege?  And then you start thinking that these people are, at best, as ignorant and stupid as the person I mentioned above … and, at worst, that they are racist class warriors out to destroy you.

Is it any surprise that people like that voted for Donald Trump?

The point most privilege-checkers forget, I think, is that most people are self-interested.  They may not be selfish, not in the sense they will gleefully steal candy from children, but they will put their self-interests first.  Why would anyone vote for policies that will make their lives harder?  It’s not easy to get a job at the best of times.  Why would anyone want to make it harder?

But it gets worse.  The curse of identity politics is that it encourages people to think in terms of their identity – and ‘white male’ is an identity.  Instead of coming together as a united human race, we are being divided into tribes and judged by our tribes.  What may seem, to the people at the top, a scheme to redress historical disadvantages scans very differently to the people at the bottom.  They see it as nothing more than racism.  Not reverse racism, racism.

If you stack the deck against one group, for whatever reason, you are engaged in racism.  Whatever excuses you use, whatever historical justifications you invent, you are engaged in racism.  Instead of dampening racial tensions, you are inflaming them.  You are harming the people least able to cope with it, pillorying them when they dare to protest … and then acting all surprised when they vote against you.  Drowning men will clutch at any straws!

Look, I am a student of history.  I know that injustices have been perpetrated throughout history.  I know that people have often gotten the short end of the stick because of things – skin colour, gender – beyond their control.  But one does not redress such injustices by perpetrating them on someone else.  That merely makes them worse.

As a writer, I am not scared of even competition.  If a writer outsells me … well, good for him.  But if that writer has an unfair advantage that isn’t connected to writing – being black or female or whatever – it bothers me, because I can’t compete.

I’ve been told that, throughout history, writers were largely WASPs.  That might be true.  But it isn’t my fault, nor is it the fault of everyone else like me, and there is no reason that we should be made to pay a price for someone else’s misdeeds.  And, for that matter, it is not fair on non-WASP writers to have to face the suspicion that the only reason they were published was to fill a quota.  Why should they have to pay a price because someone with more power than sense thinks that quotas are a good way to rectify historical injustice?

As a historian, I am well aware that women generally got the short end of the stick throughout history.  But, as the father of two boys, I don’t want programs that profess to rectify this injustice by piling injustice on my sons.  Why on Earth would I want them to be at a disadvantage? And, if I have a daughter at some later date, I don’t want her to suffer a disadvantage either.  And everything I know about history – and human nature – tells me that she will.

Coming to think of it, my kids are mixed-race.  Do I want them to go through their lives unsure where they really belong?  Or if they don’t have a tribe of their own?  Or to have to waste their time calculating precisely where they stand on the indemnity politics roster?

A few years ago, I saw a marriage come to an end.  And the reason it came to an end, from what I saw, was that both the husband and wife were fond of dragging up the past, from minor to major offences, and neither one could move past it and travel into the future.  All relationships go through bumpy patches, but it is immensely frustrating to have the past dragged up and thrown in your face time and time again.  At some point, people just stop caring.  They get sick of being told that they cannot put it behind them and move on.  And so they get bitter and they end up curdled.

And they start saying “why should I care about the injustice done to them when no one cares about the injustice done to me?”

We need to put quotas – and suchlike – behind us, once and for all.  The past must remain in the past.  We need to ensure a level playing field, with everyone having an equal shot at everything from education to jobs; we need to ensure that the laws apply to everyone; we need to prove, as best as we can, that the best person for the job got the job.  I don’t say it will be easy, because it won’t be easy.  But it has to be done.

I’ll let Dale Cozort have the last word:

“If you look around the world you’ll notice something.  The real dead-end basket case countries and regions are usually the ones where old injustices or perceived injustices are most remembered and most important to people.  [SNIP]  None of this is to say that ignoring history is good, or even that ignoring old injustices is good.  The reality though is that both the villains and the victims of history are for the most part dead, or have one foot on the banana peel … [SNIP] … The other reality is that dwelling on those old injustices tends to lead to situations where the guys who would normally be holding up convenience stores end up running around with AK-47s and RPGs in the service of one side or the other in the dispute. 

“When that starts happening on a major scale, anyone with brains and/or money heads for the nearest exit.  You end up with a downward spiral as jobs evaporate and people fight ever more bitterly over the remaining scraps of value.  And of course a whole new generation of injustices are created, which will undoubtedly be used to justify the next round of victimizations.  ‘Get over it’ isn’t the perfect answer.  It does have some downsides, but it does work.”

Christopher G. Nuttall

Edinburgh, 2020

Merry Christmas

Hi, everyone

First, if you haven’t seen it already, the Christmas promotion is up and running. The books are free until the 26th, so feel free to download before then . 

[image error]

Second, I’ve completed the first draft of Debt of War today.  That’s either the eighth book in the Kat Falcone series or the third in the Embers of War series, depending on how you look at it.  The first book is currently up for pre-order here.  Sorry it took so long – cancer got in the way.

And I also have a story in Chris Kennedy’s anthology here.

That said …

All things considered, 2019 was a LOT better than 2018.  I spent much of the previous year honestly unsure I’d see 2019, let alone December 2019.  I actually ordered presents for my family early, just in case I wouldn’t be around to give them personally.  It was, as you can imagine, a huge relief to be told the remaining growths aren’t live – and may just be dead flesh.  I’ve got another CT scan scheduled for January, which will hopefully say I’m completely clear.  Lymphoma can come back, unfortunately, but I’ll pray that it doesn’t.

And my sons just celebrated their birthdays in November and December respectively.  I think they’re suffering present-shock.  But they’ll have to wait eleven months for more.

Writing has picked up speed again, although I’ve had more down days – days when I just couldn’t do anything – than before.  The Family Pride and Favour the Bold did very well – Their Last Full Measure and The Right of the Line also did well.  Thank you to everyone who reviewed it – I’m hoping to do more next year, naturally.

I’m also hoping to explore some other universes, for various reasons.  Some of the ideas are just concepts I can’t explore in the current ones, others are larger storylines – maybe not quite Game of Thrones or Safehouse scale, but pretty big.  That said, I don’t know if my style lends itself to endless novel-sized chapters and I’m not particularly fond of them in any case.  We shall see.  I’ll post a list of ideas later, see what people have to say.

I do intend to write an essay on civilisation for new year, but we will see about that too.

General Series Updates

The Empire’s Corps

I haven’t decided, yet, if I want to write Knife Edge, the direct sequel to Favour The Bold, or Bread and Circuses, which is another side story.  There will be at least one more FTB book in the series.  Beyond that, I’m not sure yet.

Schooled in Magic

I intend to write Gennady’s Tale – a novella – next, for the Fantastic Schools anthology.  After that, there will be The Artful Apprentice, Oathkeeper, The Right Side of History, The Face of the Enemy and Lone Power.  That concludes the original planned arc.  I do have ideas for future books, but we’ll see.

The Zero Enigma

I intend to write The King’s Man soon, followed by either The Lady Heir or Kingdom of Ghosts.  I’m still trying to work out the big story plot, starting with a return to Cat.  I may also do a story following Isabella/Akin, maybe as a test run before doing a multi-hero story, but that might gobble up ideas for the big series.  (Of course, it would establish the status quo for Isabella before tearing it down.)

Ark Royal

There’s one more trilogy in the series, which I intend to start next year.  It’ll start with The Lion and the Unicorn.  I haven’t decided on the second and third titles yet.)

There’s also a short – 18’000 words – novella, which will be hopefully included in Chris Kennedy’s Chris collection (all written by authors named Chris (or close to Chris).  It was originally going to be part of the first book, but it was too early in the overall storyline.  That should be published before The Lion and the Unicorn.

A Learning Experience

For the moment, this series has concluded.  I do intend to start again, later on, but that’s going to have to wait.

Angel in the Whirlwind

The three Embers of War books are now done (save the editing, for the last.)  I’ve left myself room for more books so we’ll see.

Let me know – please – what you’d like to see.

Chris

FREE BOOKS for XMAS!

FREE BOOKS!  (And, now I’ve got your attention, FREE BOOKS!)

Hi, Everyone

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

As a treat to my readers, and hopefully new fans, I’ve put a handful of books – all the first books in ongoing series or trilogies – up for free, between 24th and 26th December.  Check out the cover blurbs and details below, then download for free from Amazon!

(Please feel free to share this post as widely as possible)

[image error]

The Empires Corps (The Empire’s Corps I)

You Should Never Speak Truth To Power…

The Galactic Empire is dying and chaos and anarchy are breaking out everywhere. After a disastrous mission against terrorists on Earth itself, Captain Edward Stalker of the Terran Marine Corps makes the mistake of speaking truth to power, telling one of the most powerful men in the Empire a few home truths. As a result, Captain Stalker and his men are unceremoniously exiled to Avalon, a world right on the Rim of the Empire. It should have been an easy posting…

Well, apart from the bandits infesting the countryside, an insurgency that threatens to topple the Empire’s loose control over Avalon, and a corrupt civil government more interested in what it can extort from the population than fighting a war. The Marines rapidly find themselves caught up in a whirlwind of political and economic chaos, fighting to preserve Avalon before the competing factions tear the world apart. They’re Marines; if anyone can do it, they can.

The battle to save the Empire starts here.

Click here to download a free sample, and then buy it from Amazon here!

Ark Royal (Ark Royal I)

If you wish for peace, prepare for war.

-Royal Navy Motto

Seventy years ago, the interstellar supercarrier Ark Royal was the pride of the Royal Navy.  But now, her weapons are outdated and her solid-state armour nothing more than a burden on her colossal hull.  She floats in permanent orbit near Earth, a dumping ground for the officers and crew the Royal Navy wishes to keep out of the public eye. 

But when a deadly alien threat appears, the modern starships built by humanity are no match for the powerful alien weapons.  Ark Royal and her mismatched crew must go on the offensive, buying time with their lives  And yet, with a drunkard for a Captain, an over-ambitious first officer and a crew composed of reservists and the dregs of the service, do they have even the faintest hope of surviving …

… And returning to an Earth which may no longer be there?

There is a large sample of the text right here, then you can buy it from Amazon here.

Storm Front (Twilight of the Gods I)

In 1941, Adolf Hitler didn’t declare war on the United States.  Now, in 1985, the Third Reich stretching from the coast of France to the icy wastes of Eastern Russia, appears supremely powerful.  With a powerful force of nuclear warheads and the finest military machine on Earth, there is no hope for freedom for the billions who groan under its rule.  Adolf Hitler’s mad dreams have come to pass.

And yet, all is not well in the Reich.  The cold war with the United States and the North Atlantic Alliance is destroying the Reich’s economy, while a savage insurgency in South Africa – a war the Reich cannot win and dares not lose – is sapping its military strength.  And, while the Reich Council struggles to find a way to save the Reich from its own weaknesses, a young German girl makes a discovery that will shake the Reich to its core.

But the Reich Council will not go quietly into the night …

Download a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase the Ebook from HERE!

Outside Context Problem (Outside Context Problem I)

When a UFO crashes near a top secret military base, the American Government realises that aliens have been spying on the human race for years.  But even as they rush to unlock the technological secrets in the alien craft, the aliens launch the first step in their plan to invade the Earth and enslave the human race.  With a giant mothership approaching the planet and the inhabitants promising peace and plenty, humanity must defeat a vastly superior foe with uncertain motives or lose its freedom forever.

On one side, a powerful alien force…

On the other side, a divided humanity…

The battle for Earth has begun.

Download a Free Sample and then buy it from Amazon here!

The Zero Blessing (The Zero Enigma III)

Caitlyn Aguirre should have been a magician.  Her family certainly expected her to be a magician.  But by the time she reached her twelfth birthday, Caitlyn hadn’t even managed to cast a single spell!  In desperation, her parents send her – and her magical sisters – to Jude’s Sorcerous Academy, her last best chance to discover her powers.

But as she struggles to survive her classes without a single spell to her name, Caitlyn starts to uncover an ancient mystery that may prove the key to her true powers …

… If she lives long enough to find it.

Download a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase from Amazon here – US, UK, AUS, CAN

Out Now: Their Last Full Measure

[image error]

Humanity has won a great victory, shattering the alien fleet that would have destroyed the Solar Union and exterminated the human race.  But the war is not yet over.  The Tokomak still have a huge fleet and an immense industrial base, large enough to crush the human race once and for all if they have time to bring it into action.  The war may still be lost.

There is only one way to win.  Admiral Hoshiko Stuart and her fleet must take the war deep into enemy territory, to the very heart of the Tokomak Empire.  But with the Tokomak gathering their forces and rallying their allies for one final battle, the outcome still hangs in the balance …

… And whoever wins will dominate the galaxy for thousands of years to come.

Download a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase copies from the links here: Amazon US, UK, CAN, AUS, Draft2Digital (more publishing links being added all the time).  And read the Afterword here.

Their Last Few Measure is out, but …

I’ve been trying to update the website, but there’ve been some problems with the host. I can’t put up the samples and links now. I’ll do that as soon as the problems are fixed – I hope – but for the moment you can purchase Their Last Full Measure from Amazon and Draft2Digital now.

Amazon US, UK, CAN, AUS, Draft2Digital (more publishing links being added all the time). 

I’ll post again when the samples are up.

Draft Afterword: Socialism

Hi, everyone

This is a draft afterword – it isn’t finalised yet.  Comments and thoughts would be welcome.

Afterword for BAC

Anybody else could have told me this in advance, but I was blinded by theory … I had allowed myself more of a creed than scientific intelligence can justify.

-Bertrand Russell

Why did Chernobyl explode?

I could give, if you like, a complex technical explanation of what people think went wrong, inside the reactor, on that fateful night.  The story of precisely what happened, from a scientific point of view, is quite interesting.  But, as a writer, I’ve always been more interested in the social-political explanations.  Why was the disaster – or something like it – practically inevitable?  And why did things go so badly wrong?

There were, as I see it, five interlocking factors that ensured there would be a disaster and, worse, that the system would be unable to handle it.

First, the reactor design was very poor.  The Russians skipped over better designs, both home-grown and stolen, in order to produce a beast of a reactor capable of provided unprecedented amounts of power for the Soviet grid.  This was at least partly a recognition of shortages within the Soviet system – they cut production costs wherever possible – and partly a belief they needed the reactor up and running as quickly as possible.  They failed to learn lessons from earlier accidents, even ones that had taken place outside the USSR, and ensured eventual disaster.

Second, the construction itself was very poor.  Components from the factories would arrive in very poor condition, forcing the construction crews to tear many of them down and put them back together again.  Specialised equipment was lacking at all levels, ensuring the operators couldn’t react quickly when placed under stress; poor construction ensured that the early problems led rapidly and inevitably to a string of failures that caused disaster.

Third, the operators themselves were poorly trained – they barely knew how to control the reactor, let alone the underlying rational behind their instructions – and not encouraged to learn anything outside their fields.  There was no comprehensive attempt to learn lessons from earlier accidents, even ones that had happened to comparable reactor designs.  This was pervasive at all levels.  Even Anatoly Dyatlov, who was supervising the fateful test, admitted there were things he didn’t understand about the reactor (although that might have been in hindsight).  When faced with an unprecedented situation, the operators made a string of mistakes that led to disaster.

Fourth, the plant and crew were under immense pressure to deliver the goods – i.e. power – to the local grid.  Production quotas were high, with too many workers being heavily overworked and the test itself delayed repeatedly until the operators on duty were tired and unable to think straight.  To make this worse, the managers were also under pressure and forced their subordinates to press ahead even though events were already spiralling out of control.  (The real-life Dyatlov wasn’t as bad as his HBO counterpart, but he did force the operators to continue with the test or risk losing their jobs.)  And so they plunged down the road to disaster.

Fifth – and perhaps the most dangerous of all – there was a culture of lies woven into the very roots of soviet culture.  Head Offices would set impossible quotas, which managers would claim to meet; Head Offices wouldn’t look too closely for fear of uncovering problems that would make them look bad.  Everyone lied, to the point the KGB had to use its spy satellites to monitor crop production right across the USSR.  People who tried to tell the truth were ignored or silenced.  Indeed, after the first explosion, there were government officials who honestly believed the whole disaster was a minor hiccup and that Reactor Number Four would be back in action at any moment.  Given that Reactor Number Four was in pieces, with the remains of the core burning with a radioactive fire, this appears unbelievable.  But it remained true for far too long.  Without proper information, the government couldn’t make proper judgements and thus couldn’t cope with the disaster.

Even after the true scale of the disaster had been recognised, the soviets kept lying.  They tried to cover up the disaster, then minimised it even after the first traces of radioactivity had been detected outside the USSR.  It rapidly became impossible to take their word for anything.  Their own people were convinced – rightly – that they were being lied to, that the disaster had been far greater than they’d been told.  And, when things had finally calmed down, the soviets kept lying.  The story they told about how a simple test had gone so badly wrong was, at best, dangerously incomplete.  It wasn’t until after the Cold War had finally come to an end that the world realised how close the Russians had come to total disaster.

It’s easy to say that these factors were inevitable themselves, and the Russians simply got very unlucky.  But what made these factors inevitable was communism itself.  The system was steadily strangling the life out of the Russian people.  Living in an environment where honesty was punished and lying was rewarded, there was no incentive to rock the boat by raising concerns … indeed, even trying to alert the authorities to the potential for disaster, or discuss the problems with communism itself, could be fatal.  The bureaucracy had taken on a life of its own.   Unaccountable, practically uncontrollable, it ensured disaster would strike and, when it did, that the system would be unable to cope with it.

And all of these problems were rooted in a single factor: communism itself.

***

There is a saying, attributed to various different people, that goes like this.  “He who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but he who is still a socialist at thirty has no brain.”  There is a great deal of truth to this.  On paper, socialism (which leads to communism) appears a great idea.  A more equal distribution of production seems idyllic.  And yet, every attempt to impose a socialistic system on anything other than a very small scale – where everyone can verify for themselves that the system is indeed equal – has failed spectacularly.  Where people can, they walk away; when they can’t escape, they grow bitter and disillusioned and effectively stop doing more than the bare minimum to survive.

This is perhaps unsurprising.  The basic building blocks of socialistic thought were devised by intellectuals – Karl Marx was a university professor as well as a radical – who had relatively little experience of the outside world.  Their theories took everything into account, apart from human nature itself.  They had no laboratory to test their work – or chose to ignore examples from earlier eras – and thus were unable to grasp the problems, let alone deal with them.  And, as later socialists tried to put theory into practice, they discovered the only way to get vast numbers of people to cooperate in their own destruction was through force.  It isn’t a coincidence that building socialism in Russia and China required mass murder on a scale that made Hitler look like an amateur. 

The core of the problem with socialism/communism lies in human nature.  People are not selfish, by and large, but they are self-interested.  They work for reward and they expect, when they work at a higher level, that they will receive a higher level of reward.  A farmer who grows extra crops, for example, wants to sell them for a little extra profit.  If that incentive is taken away – and it is, under communism – the farmer has no reason to grow more than he needs to satisfy his family.  This problem pervades socialistic and communistic societies.  When there is no link between hard work and reward, workers stop working.  Worse, if it looks like a lazy worker gets the exact same reward as someone who works overtime five days a week, it starts wearing down the social contract.  The lazy worker doesn’t work, while the overtime worker loses any desire to continue.  And so production steadily starts to drop.

This leads to further problems that are not immediately apparent.  An engineer who comes up with a new widget expects recognition and reward.  He loses all incentive to continue innovating when his company steals the patent (and the credit).  The Soviet Union lagged behind the United States, at least in part, because innovation was not always rewarded.  This ensured that Soviet engineering would always be primitive, thus the joke about the only truly brilliant product of the Soviet Union being the AK-47 (which is a remarkably simple weapon, which is why it sells so well).  Like most such jokes, it’s funny because there’s a great deal of truth in it.

Worse, the development of socialism requires a massive bureaucracy.  Bureaucrats rarely know anything like enough about industries to govern them effectively … and the USSR bureaucracy was trying to govern an entire country!  The planners couldn’t have hoped to rationalise the entire economy, even if their subordinates hadn’t been lying to them.  They set targets, rather than giving the producers their heads and allowing them to compete openly; they rewarded mythical successes and punished what failures came to their attention.  The net result was massive shortages of just about everything, from food and housing to computers and vital components, and a pervasive corruption that was summed up by a truly cynical saying: “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”

If all of this wasn’t bad enough, bureaucracies are very bad at admitting their mistakes, even as they try to expand their power.  As Mike Williamson put it “any government-supported system is by definition government controlled and therefore authoritative and subject to abuse without possibility of objection.”  The idea that someone might object to becoming part of a socialistic society is unthinkable to them, at least in part because an example of a working non-socialist society will lure away the people the socialist society desperately needs (even as it brutalises them).  Socialists, faced with the choice between accepting dissent and crushing it, inevitably move to crush it.  Independent businesses and farms will be forcibly collectivised, state-run unions will control the workers, the media will be censored, ordinary people will be disarmed and the net result is utter devastation.  The famines that killed millions in Russia and China occurred because the government bureaucracy destroyed all incentive to produce food.  It’s quite notable – at least to those who care to see – that Chinese production skyrocketed when they made genuine reforms.  The Soviet Union, which had enough farmland to become a net exporter of food, was forced instead to import grain from the class enemy (i.e. America.)

Put bluntly, socialists injure the golden goose – and communists kill it – and then wonder why gold production has fallen or stopped completely.

But this isn’t the worst of it.  A socialist party may start with good intentions.  However, the methods they may have to use to get into power – and then implement changes that are obviously destructive and therefore resisted – will lead to corruption.  The temptation to use force will get stronger and stronger – and, once that line is crossed, it will become easier to cross it again.  The party will need security forces to secure its rule, spies and counterintelligence agents to deploy against enemies foreign and domestic.  This puts incredible power in the hands of the enforcers, power that an ambitious man can use to make himself unquestioned ruler of the state.  Stalin became a dictator because he worked his way up, carefully manoeuvring until all real power rested in his hands; others, too, have taken advantage of socialist weaknesses – and the urgent need to build enforcement arms – to make themselves masters of all they surveyed.  It is no coincidence that the true believers tend to be the first ones purged, when the dictator takes control. They’re the ones who might be able to challenge him on a legalistic level, threatening to turn the party against him.  But most of them don’t realise what they’ve unleashed until it’s too late. 

It is often argued that communism simply wasn’t done right.  This is, in one sense, true.  But it is also true to say that communism cannot be done right.  Human nature precludes it from working on anything other than a very small scale.  The bigger the system, the greater the chance of the rulers forgetting what’s important and thus corruption eventually bringing the entire structure crashing down.

It’s often alleged that socialism and communism are morally superior to nationalism and fascism.  But, in truth, the only real difference between communism and fascism is the lies told to maintain the system.

And when people stop believing those lies, they stop believing in the system too.

***

With all of this in mind, it seems incredible that anyone could believe in a socialist system, let alone work to impose one.  In the early days of the USSR, western intellectuals could – perhaps – be forgiven for not realising the truth behind the Potemkin Villages they were shown.  One might also accept that the US government needed to convince the population to support the USSR during World War Two, thus the acceptance of blatantly-false misrepresentations of life in Soviet Russia in Song of Russia and other motion pictures.  The Soviet Union was not a common tourist destination – and tourists were often carefully steered so they only saw what their minders wanted them to see – and there was no shortage of apologists ready to explain or gloss over things that might have unsettled people (the invasion of Finland in 1939, for example, or the brutal suppression of freedom in Eastern Europe).  And yet, now the Cold War is over, socialism appears to be on the rise?  Why?

One possible answer, of course, lies in intellectualism.  The loudest proponents of socialism – the ones who see themselves as the natural leaders, although they don’t put it that way – have little experience of life outside a university campus.  They see socialism as an ideal system and don’t see the downsides, ironically using the fruits of capitalism – the internet, smartphones, etc – to spread the word.  The older ones veer between being true believers and cynics who exploit their followers.  It’s often fairly easy to see they don’t believe their words.  On one hand, many of them are immensely rich; on the other, they insist the government is inherently racist and sexist (etc), but want to give the ‘evil’ government more power.  And a handful of them see socialism as the key to power.  They’ll mouth support for socialism as long as it is politically convenient.

In short, supporters of socialism and communism are either power-hungry, intellectual or desperate.  The first will kill the second and lord it over the third when they take power, making things worse for them.  (And also making it even harder to rebel, as – on paper – the workers have all the rights they want.)

Another answer, of course, is that socialism often looks good.  There are strong intellectual arguments in favour of it, deliberately weighted to make anyone who disagrees look bad.  A person who argues against giving money to beggars may be quite right to say it doesn’t really help them, but he’ll come across as a heartless bastard even if he’s telling the truth!  The socialists are good at arguing, right up to the point they get their hands on real power.  And then they start killing dissenters instead.  It can be quite hard to find one’s way out of an intellectual web, even if one feels – emotionally – that the web is gossamer-thin.  As 1984 put it:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.”

It’s easy enough to spot a problem and call attention to it.  And it’s easy to say ‘the government will fix it if we just give it the power.’  But – at best – the more you ask your government to do for you, the less it can do for you.  It will rapidly develop layers upon layers of bureaucracy as it loses touch with reality, trying to apply a ‘one size fits all’ solution to everything from education to the military and welfare payments.  The answer to the question of why Jonnie can’t read is that the important thing – kids having good teachers – has been replaced by bureaucratic bovine faecal matter.  Bureaucrats cannot make individual judgements.  Centralising decision-making leads to endless problems and eventual disaster.

And, at worst, you open the door to dictatorship.

I don’t pretend that capitalism is perfect.  Unrestrained capitalism can and does lead to problems, particularly when successful companies start warping the law and manipulating the government to make life harder for newer competitors … something that also kills the golden goose.  But the results of capitalism are so far superior to communism that there’s simply no contrast.  The only thing communists are better at is telling lies.  Their system gives them a great deal of practice.

But – eventually – the tide goes out.  Economic reality hits.  And, as Warren Buffett said, you discover the emperor is really naked. 

And by then, it is often too late.

Life During Wartime (Ark Royal Short) – Snippet

This is a different sort of character from the usual Ark hero/heroine. Let’s see how it works.

Chapter One

“Richard!”

Richard rolled over, glanced at the sunlight beaming
through the window blinds and closed his eyes. 
It couldn’t be that late,
surely.  He’d been up half the night
playing Naval Command on his datanet
terminal and he’d only gone to sleep a few short hours ago.  He wriggled against the lumpy mattress,
trying to get comfortable again.  His
mother had taken his old mattress for the guests, two weeks ago, and hadn’t
bothered to replace it.  He had a feeling
she was hoping he’d forget that he’d ever had an older and softer mattress.

The door crashed open. 
“Richard Tobias Gurnard,” his mother snapped.  “Get out of that bed at once!”

Richard opened his eyes again.  There were worse things to see on waking, he
was sure, but his mother in a foul mood was probably worthy of a honourable
mention or two.  It was hard to see,
sometimes, why his father had married her. 
Richard loved his mother, but … they had very little in common.  There were times when he understood why his
father had joined the navy, putting dozens of light years between him and his
wife.  If he’d lived …

“This is my room,” Richard protested.  “You shouldn’t come in …”

“You are seventeen years old and on the verge of being
late for school,” his mother informed him. 
She rested her beefy hands on her ample hits, her eyes never leaving his
face.  “Believe me, I do not want another call from the
headmaster.  I certainly don’t want to sign another punishment slip.  If it happens again, I will …”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Richard said.  He glanced at the clock.  Eight o’clock.  Stupid o’clock, really.  “I’ll be down in a moment.”

“You’d better, or your sister will have eaten your
porridge,” his mother thundered.  “And if
you go to school without breakfast, you’ll be starving until lunch.”

She turned and stamped out the room, slamming the door
behind her.  Richard sat upright and
sighed, wishing – again – that his family were wealthy enough to hire a private
tutor.  He learnt so much more from private lessons than formal schooling,
caught between apathetic teachers and fellow students who spent half their time
goofing off and the rest picking on him. 
Richard wondered, sometimes, why his father had insisted Richard carry
his name.  He hadn’t been a sadist,
surely.  Didn’t he know how easy it was for someone to make fun of the name?

Dad was a strong
man, Richard thought.  He’d seen his
father’s medals.  Anyone who laughed at him would be duffed up good and proper.

He stood and dressed, hastily.  The school uniform felt as crappy as always,
even though it was the last day he’d have to wear it.  Grey trousers, grey shirt, grey jumper, grey
socks … he’d rebelled, just slightly, by wearing black underpants.  Rumour had it the girls wore all sorts of
underclothes under their jumpers, but Richard didn’t believe it.  Wearing the wrong uniform wasn’t a harmless
little prank like plagiarism, bullying and drawing insulting caricatures of the
headmaster in the bogs.  It was
serious.  Any girl who wore the wrong
underwear would be lucky if she was merely
sent to a borstal.

His reflection looked back at him as he gazed into the
mirror, feeling a twinge of disgust at his appearance.  He was just a little overweight, enough to be noticeable; his blond hair fell
over a pudgy face that had yet to lose its baby fat.  He was condemned to six hours of PE a week,
thanks to the school-to-military pipeline, but it hadn’t done much for his
weight.  Richard was honest enough to
admit it hadn’t put much effort into it, yet … he’d never felt the urge to
engage in any sporting
activities.  What was the point?

He walked downstairs, telling himself that today would be
different.  He was getting his exam
results, the exam results he’d slaved so hard to get.  He’d already applied to a set of proper universities, places where
intellect was respected and barbaric physical sports simply didn’t exist.  He’d meet people who actually understood him, he told himself; he’d
meet intellectuals who could actually challenge
his thinking.  And, most importantly
of all, he wouldn’t be conscripted into the army.  He wouldn’t be called upon to fight in the
war.

The radio was blaring loudly as he stepped into the
kitchen.  Something had happened … he
caught snatches of babble about places he’d never visit and things he’d never
see as he picked up a bowl and filled it with porridge.  His sister Elizabeth was seated at the table,
reading a datapad as she finished her breakfast.  She was two years younger than him, with long
blond hair that was strikingly attractive when she wasn’t wearing the school
uniform.  He hoped she’d be fine, once he
left for university.  She was smart.  She’d have a good life if she didn’t let
someone sweep her off her feet.  Richard
sometimes wondered if that was what had happened to his mother.

“Better not be late today,” Elizabeth advised.  “You know how the Beast gets when someone’s
late for assembly.”

“Better to skip it altogether,” Richard said, as he sat
down and started to eat.  “It’ll just be
another boring lecture about who died and brought honour to the school.”

He ate quickly, knowing better than to press his
luck.  The Beast – Headmaster Gordon –
was a former military officer who had no qualms about meting out harsh
punishment to boys and girls alike.  Some
people claimed he’d been kicked out of the army for unacceptable
brutality.  Richard didn’t believe
it.  He’d always thought that
unacceptable brutality was the way people got ahead in the army.  Richard
had once spent several hours trying to match the headmaster’s name to the army lists,
only to draw a blank.  He had a private
theory the headmaster was a Walt, a poser, but he’d kept it to himself.  The Beast wouldn’t have hesitate to beast him
if he’d heard even a hint of the
theory.

“Don’t forget your bag,” his mother shouted from up the
stairs.  “And go now!”

Richard groaned, grabbed his coat and bag and hurried to
the door.  The black mark on it signified
that someone in the family had made the ultimate sacrifice and given his life
for his country, but no one outside the family itself seemed to care.  Too many men – and women – had given their
lives in the last five years of war. 
Richard wanted his father back, not a meaningless medal and a fatherless
life.  His greatest fear, the one he
wouldn’t admit to anyone, was that he would end up just like his father.

Elizabeth joined him as they half-ran onto the streets
and joined the others heading to school, a stream of grey-clad teenagers who blurred
together into a single mass.  Richard
tried not to react when he spotted a handful of sporty kids amongst the throng,
chatting happily as they tossed a ball during the walk to school.  He’d long since grown used to being picked
last for teams – he’d never liked sports – but he would have been happier if
they left him alone.  They actually liked school, somehow.  They saw sporting careers as their only way
out of poverty.  Richard had looked it
up, when one of the school bullies had bragged he’d be playing for a famous team
within the year.  The odds of him
suceeding – of anyone suceeding – were lower than the odds of winning the
lottery.

The throng grew larger as the school came into view.  Richard glanced at his sister, then waved
goodbye and headed towards the boys side of the playground.  The handful of climbing frames looked as
cracked and broken as ever, despite endless promises from the council to repair
them.  He’d never dared climb to the top,
not when there was no shortage of wankers who’d try to pull him down.  The concrete below the frame promised a hard
landing and a week or two in hospital for anyone unlucky enough to fall.  Richard had heard PE teachers claim that
suffering built character, but he wasn’t going to risk it.  He already had quite enough character.

A couple of boys kissed their girlfriends, then ran
towards the growing lines as the school bell rang.  Richard felt a stab of envy, mingled with an
odd sense of disdain.  He’d promised
himself that he wouldn’t remain trapped in the grim town, that he’d find a job
and build a life for himself somewhere else. 
London perhaps, or Edinburgh.  Or
even Manchester, somewhere where there were jobs for intelligent students too
smart to waste their time playing games. 
He joined the line as the whistle blew, ducking his head to avoid
catching the teacher’s eye.  The teacher
at the door was already holding a datapad, ready to record the names of anyone
who came late.  They’d be for the high
jump at the end of the day.

It’s the last day
of school, he thought, as the line began to move.  Can’t
they give us a break?

The door loomed up in front of him, a solid metal
structure that looked as if it belonged in a prison.  The school really was a prison … he winced
as he pressed his hand against the bioscanner, trying to ignore the prick of
pain as the scanner sampled his blood and pronounced him clean.  He’d always wondered what would happen if the
scanner reported he did have the
alien virus, although he was pretty certain it was just security theatre to
keep the proles under control.  The virus
was airborne.  If he had it, he’d have infected
the entire line of prattling boys by now. 
He’d read as much on the dark web. 

Richard tried to breathe through his nose as he stepped
through the door, into the school, and walked down the corridor to the assembly
hall.  The school stank of stale cabbages
and quiet desperation, the sense that most of the students wouldn’t go on to
long and prosperous careers.  The smell
grew stronger – the stench of too many sweaty bodies in too close proximity –
as he found a place to sit in line and sat down.  There were no seats in the hall, not even for
the older students.  He’d heard the
teachers were scared of having chairs hurled at them.  He would have liked to believe the rumour,
but it was probably another cost-cutting measure.  The assembly hall did double duty as the
indoor gym.

A figure sat down next to him and sniggered.  “Hey, dickhead!”

Richard groaned, inwardly.  Colin. 
He hated Colin.  The asshole didn’t have a single working
brain cell, as far as Richard could tell, but that didn’t stop him leading a
charmed life.  Girls loved him, teachers
made allowances for him … he wouldn’t have been allowed to get away with so
much if he hadn’t been a star on the sports field.  Richard was sure Colin would have been expelled by now if he hadn’t brought in
the medals.  Colin was too stupid to know
it, but his charmed life wouldn’t last. 
He wouldn’t go on to fame and glory, not if there was any justice in the
world.  Or so Richard told himself.

He did his best to ignore the taunts as the remainder of
the students filed into the vast chamber. 
Really, did Colin think he was the first
person to remember that Dick was
short for Richard?  Or that dick was slang for penis?  He probably did.  He wasn’t smart enough to realise the joke
was older than the Beast himself, older than the oldest person still
alive.  Richard hated his name, more than
he cared to admit.  He intended to change
it as soon as he got his majority.

The Beast stepped onto the stage, his mortar board so
perfect he could have stepped off a recruiting poster for schoolteachers.  He was a sour-faced man, his long black robes
cut to hint at his powerful body. 
Richard did his best to pretend to pay attention as the headmaster
started to speak, praising the former pupils who’d given their lives in battle
against the alien foe.  Richard winced,
inwardly, when the Beast mentioned a handful of familiar names.  It wasn’t common to know students who were
more than a couple of years older or younger than oneself, but he’d known a
handful of older boys on the block.  Two
of them were now dead, according to the Beast. 
Richard would have liked to think he was lying.  It wouldn’t be the first time the headmaster
had lied to the school.

The speech went on and on, to the point that even the teachers started to look bored.  Richard amused himself by mulling over the
Beast’s military credentials, wondering if the headmaster really had been in the army after all.  If he’d been a high-ranking officer, surely
he would have kept the title … right? 
He’d openly claimed to have killed men in combat.  Maybe he’d just been a cook, a cook who’d
poisoned the poor bastards who’d had to eat his food.  He’d seen that joke in a TV series that had
been banned long ago.

He was relieved beyond words when, after a cursory and
compulsory rendition of God Save The
Queen, the younger students were dismissed. 
The older students waited, shuffling uncomfortably as the Beast informed
them that their exam results had been returned from the board and some of them had interviews with guidance
counsellors.  Or consolers.  Richard groaned at the pun, then managed a
fake titter with the rest of the students. 
The Beast had earned his nickname, whatever the truth behind his
military service.  It wouldn’t do to draw
his attention on the final day of school.

“And I trust, when you have made something of yourselves,
that you will remember what made you,” the Beast said.  “Dismissed.”

I’ll remember you,
all right, Richard thought, as he stood. 
The headmaster had no shame.  It
was really too early to start hitting them up for donations.  And
I’ll donate a rusty penny if you try asking me for money.

He held back as the students tried to cram themselves
through the doors and push their way into the lobby.  There was no point in running, not when he was
already in the midst of the crowd. 
Instead, he forced himself to calm down as he followed the rest of the
students up the stairs, past classrooms they’d never have to enter again and
down a corridor to the notice boards. 
The building really did look like
a panopticon prison.  A man standing on
the top could look down at the lobby, without being seen by the people below
him.  But there were laws against
treating prisoners so badly.  Richard had
once considered trying to make a formal protest.  Being sent to school in such a building
probably constituted cruel and unusual punishment.  He hadn’t bothered, in the end.  It was unlikely that anyone would pay more
than a moment’s attention to him.

He felt his heart twist as he made his way down the
corridor.  It would have been nice to have friends, it would have been
nice to have someone he could be
himself around … he shook his head.  It
would have been nice, yes.  And while he
was wishing, he’d like a pony.  He
glanced up at the library, his hiding place while classes were out of
session.  He couldn’t wait to go to university.  He’d sell his soul for the chance to actually
make something of himself.

Colin waved at him. 
“I’m going to the army!  And I’m
going to shoot assholes like you!”

Richard bit down the reply that came to mind.  Colin was good
at mindless brutality.  No doubt he’d
fit right in.  Richard was a more sensitive soul. 
He ignored the whoops and cheers as Colin and his friends headed for the
exit, ready to spend a week of freedom before they reported for training.  They didn’t matter.  All that mattered, right now, was getting out
of the dump before the poverty sucked him back in.  He told himself, firmly, that he’d made it.

He found the exam results and skimmed through to find his
name.  A student needed 95% – whatever
that meant – to go to university. 
Richard had already filled in the paperwork and filed it, but without
the result he’d get nowhere.  He passed over
a handful of names – he felt a flash of vindictive glee as he noted Colin had
only scored 15% – until he found his own. 
He could hardly bare to look.

His heart skipped a beat. 
94%.

Richard stared, feeling his legs start to sway.  He barely caught himself before they buckled
and he hit the floor.  94%!  He was dead. 
He was … his head swam.  He was
going to join the army and do his national service and … probably get killed,
blown away by his squadmates before the infected zombies ever got a shot at
him.  Colin had made it clear, time and
time again, that he’d kill Richard if he ever got a chance … Richard told
himself that he must be mistaken, that Colin was merely being an asshole who
made normal assholes look bland and boring, but he couldn’t believe it.  He was dead. 
The tiny note ordering him to see the guidance counsellor mocked
him.  The man was probably going to
measure him for his coffin.

He thought, briefly, about skipping the meeting and going
home.  Perhaps there were other
options.  Perhaps … he couldn’t think
of any.  There were stories about
underground organisations that claimed to help draft dodgers, but he didn’t
have any contacts.  And the rackets
wouldn’t help him either.  He didn’t know
who to ask …

… And he was too much of a coward to try.

Helplessly, tasting bitter defeat, Richard made his way
to the guidance counsellor’s office.

Rich Kid Follies

I was in a cranky mode when I wrote this, but I think it’s still true.

When I was a child, it was a simple fact of life that
there were kids at my school who came from more affluent families than my
own.  These kids – more accurately, their
parents – either had more money than mine or were prepared to spend money to
give the impression they had
money.  The gap between rich and poor at
my primary school was not, however, that apparent.  It consisted of little things like who got
the most pocket money – there was no concept, back then, of giving a child a
credit card – and who had the most advanced video game consoles.  There was no one, as far as I know, whose
family was really that rich.

I didn’t meet genuine
rich kids until I went to university and, given where I went to university, I didn’t meet many
of them.  (In hindsight, I don’t think
any of them came from mega-rich families.) 
They were different.  It wasn’t
just that they had more money, although that was a big part of it.  It was that they had very different social
attitudes to kids who had to work to earn money to go to university.  I was painfully aware, at that age, that I
could run out of money.  I worked every
summer to earn money to keep myself at university (in hindsight, again, I
should have just kept the money).  They
didn’t have to work.  They had more
money, each month, than I had in a year. 
There was even a person I knew who boasted that his parents gave him
thousands of pounds each money as drinking money.  (Given how much he drank, this might actually
have been true.)

The worst part of their attitudes, however, was their
belief that money could fix everything – and that they’d never run out of
money.  When they had problems, they
would call on the Bank of Mum and Dad to fix them.  If they had medical problems, they’d pay for
private treatment; if they had legal problems, they’d pay for the finest
lawyers in the land.  People would make
endless excuses for them, just because they didn’t want to get frozen out of
the benefits of having rich friends.

It took something really
serious for them to have a brush with reality, at which point all their
money couldn’t save them. 

When I first heard of the ‘Affluenza Defence,’
I thought it was a joke.  It was, I
should note, in the context of an American teenager,  Ethan Couch, essentially getting away with
killing four pedestrians and injuring eleven more (as well as DUI and stealing
his father’s car).  Couch’s lawyers
argued, apparently successfully, that Couch ‘was unable to understand the
consequences of his actions because of his financial privilege.’  Others, people who lived in the real world
(instead of whatever world his high-priced lawyers inhabited) insisted that
this was nonsense.  Couch was perfectly
capable of realising that he was doing wrong. 
The sentence was an insult to his victims.

And yet, there might be something to it.  If you grow up in an environment where all
your mistakes can be fixed by shovelling cash like snow, why should you learn from your mistakes?  Why should you fear consequences when you’ve
never had to face them?  Why should you
fear being poor when you have so much money you can spend it like water and
never run out?  Why?

The answer, of course, is that sooner or later you will do something that all the money in
the world can’t fix.  But why should you
believe that when your entire life experience suggests otherwise?

And why, you might ask, am I talking about this now?

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating
again.  One of the problems facing us in
the West today is that the political class, a subset of people – the political,
corporate/financial and media elites – has effectively lost touch with
reality.  This is what tends to happen,
it should be noted, when there are no serious consequences for mistakes.   Inside the bubble, mistakes can be laughed
off or simply ignored; outside the bubble, the rest of the world steadily grows
to hate and resent – and hold in contempt – the political class.  They have become, collectively speaking, a drunkard
in command of a car.  The results have
been, more or less, what you might expect.

In Britain, the political class is caught in a web of its
own making.  There is no clear split
between ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ factions within the Houses of Parliament.  None of the mainstream political parties can
be said to be wholly for ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave.’ 
This creates a tangled political web in which the British people voted
for BREXIT, but have been – at least in part – denied their democratic right by
‘Remain’ politicians.  It does not seem
to have occurred to the politicians that they are doing vast damage to
Britain’s political infrastructure.  They
do not seem to have realised that the bills will eventually come due.

In America, the political establishment is caught in a
morass it created for itself.  It isn’t
clear, from what I’ve seen, that President Trump did anything for which he
could reasonably be impeached.  Given the
stakes, and the endless string of Trump scandals that turned into
nothingburgers, it is obviously vitally important that any impeachment
proceedings should be utterly beyond reproach. 
And yet, the attempts to build a case for impeachment have not even come
close to being beyond reproach.  This ensures that large numbers of American
citizens will not accept an impeachment, should it take place.  Why should they?

There is, in fact, a further problem.  The United States is in trouble, for all
sorts of reasons.  Trump was elected, at
least in part, because his supporters realised that the US was in trouble and
needed strong medicine.  (Victor Davis
Hanson compared Trump
to chemotherapy, which I can testify from personal experience is thoroughly
unpleasant.)  However, the constant
political attacks on Trump – and endless media pressure – makes it obvious to
the fair-minded voter that Trump is being treated unfairly.  The impeachment, from this point of view, is
yet another dubious attack on Trump – and, through him, the American system
itself.  On one hand, this gives Trump a
ready-made excuse for not fulfilling his campaign promises – and there will be
plenty of truth in it – and, on the other, it suggests Trump’s enemies have
lost sight of reality themselves. 
Instead of trying to find a reasonable candidate to face Trump in 2020,
they’ve set their sights on tearing down the rules in order to take down Trump.

This is classic rich kid behaviour.  Nothing has ever gone wrong, they reason, so
nothing can go wrong.  There are no consequences, no matter how
badly we behave, so there never will be
consequences.  We’ve never been punished,
so why should we fear punishment?  Really
… punishment?  What’s punishment? 

The problem in both Britain and America is that both
political classes are engaged in rich kid behaviour.  Poorer kids, kids who are aware there are
limits on what they can spend and, in some ways, on what they can get away with
tend to be more reasonable.  The average
citizen, on a budget, understands that there are limits, that you cannot buy
the ‘nice to have’ items ahead of the ‘must-have’ items unless you want to
starve.  Sensible people understand that you cannot change the rules of the game,
even if you’re losing, because it will ruin the game beyond repair.  If you don’t honour the rules, why should
anyone else?  But rich kids – brats, more
like – are quite happy to smash the gameboard if they don’t come out
ahead.  It never seems to cross their
mind that they’re building up a store of resentment and contempt that will one
day overwhelm them. 

The problem is not that there are bad apples in the
political bunch.  That’s true of just
about everywhere.  The problem is that
the political elites have reached a position of supremacy, assumed that they
will remain supreme and started –
deliberately or not – tearing down the structure that sustains them.  Legitimacy requires a degree of respect for
the rules, even if it’s just lip-service. 
Once you lose popular respect, and the popular belief that you won
fairly even if vast numbers of people hate you, you’re on the way to
disaster.  On one hand, that is why so
many talking heads chatter endlessly about Trump losing the political vote (and
why his supporters insist that Trump would have won that too were it not for
voter fraud); on the other, the ‘rich kid’ behaviour of politicians who do not
appear to have anything at risk is destroying their legitimacy.

This is a crisis. 
And one I don’t know how to solve.

Updates …

Hi, everyone

Good news first – I’ve finished the first draft of Their Last Full Measure (A Learning Experience 6).  I’m hoping to have it up for sale by the end of the coming week, but – as always – it depends on editing and suchlike.  A paperback edition will hopefully be along in a month or so following eBook; audio will be coming, but I don’t know when yet.

I’m currently planning to write a mid-sized story –
projected at around 18’000 words – for a Chris Kennedy anthology, provisionally
entitled Life During Wartime.  It’s going to be an intro episode for a
character for the final Ark Royal trilogy,
stuff I wanted to put in the main books but couldn’t without really unbalancing
the story.  I’ll probably put a snippet
up, but the remainder of the story will have to be held until the anthology comes
out.  (Probably before the trilogy
itself).

After that, I intend to write Debt of War, which is the projected end of the planned Kat Falcone
books.  I can’t post snippets from that,
as the first book isn’t out yet, but hopefully it will go smoothly.

In other news, my son John was two years old yesterday
and growing with terrifying speed.

Chris