In defense of WatchmEn, Severian

Andy Robertson · 23 Mar 2005, 00:30 · from 2005-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: andywrobertson at clara.co.uk (Andy Robertson)
Date: Wed Mar 23 00:30:41 2005
Subject: (urth) In defense of WatchmEn, Severian
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370503222247471e36df at mail.gmail.com>
References: <BAY102-F11A4CFB410ED53E71165FA864D0 at phx.gbl>
	<4240C4E6.6040307 at gmail.com>
	<023f01c52f50$4dd3ea30$2423d2d1@VALUED7B9600FA>
	<1f7617370503222247471e36df at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <E1DE1G9-000IFX-OG at oceanus.uk.clara.net>

> 
> Yeah, I'm being disingenuous. 
> 
> But ST facist? A book that clearly opposes racism among humans? That
> takes a stand against military conscription?

You are still joking, I take it, but in case you are not, I will point out 
Fascism is clearly definable as an evolutionary strategy. 

Fascism = the good of the genetic collective must supercede that of the 
individual within it, ((in order that that collective may have victory over 
other groups or at least survive)). 

TDKR is a comic book 

WATCHMEN is focussed on the rueful observation that fascism is **necessary** 
for group survival even if it is horrible and the people who are the active 
levers of it are not nice.   There are plenty of not nice people there who 
are not fascists, incidentally - Rorshac being one. 

V FOR VENDETTA is a much nicer but much inferior work, for the simple reason 
that it does not acknowledge that fascism is necessary.  The fascists are 
simply nasty, bad, people. 

ST is very simply fascist, on the level of the collective human race vs the 
other nonhuman races.   It has no doubts about its message which is why it 
is not much fun to read. 

All classical societies were fascist.   All the classical virtues were 
fascist.  Fascism was merely necessary morality. 

Fascism is not necessarly bad: all pagan religions (and Judaism, but not 
Christianity or Islam) were fascist.  The real worldwide (or universewide) 
genocides come from group centered fascists but from those who want to 
impose some Universal Plan on humanity for its Good: and the DUNE sequence 
is about this, the metamorphosis of a group from the dull normality of 
believing they are the Chosen People to one of believing that they have a 
mission to transform all of humanity to the Golden Path. 

Wolfe is not fascist in any of his stories, because as a Christian he 
believes in a collective of the spirit not of the genes. 

Unsurprisingly there is a lot of genocide in his books  ;-) 

.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net