The 9/11 catch-22; Short-shrifting the Soviets, and rightly; The trouble with sci-fi

The 9/11 catch-22

The catch-22 is that America today will not act to forestall a second 9/11 attack, absent a second 9/11 attack; it'd take a second 9/11 to move America to action on a scale which would spare us that second 9/11.

And to wait on Pearl Harbor is not only to concede the first strike and condemn its victims. The war which follows is liable to be that much bigger and bloodier for the wait, the enemy having been permitted to gather and grow and to run amok long after it might've been squelched so much more quickly and cleanly. But 'twas ever thus, and this is an argument rejected by all but a certain, Churchillian, and martial strain of rightist thought, until it's accepted universally, ex post facto.

The generation of the Hitler war was converted to Churchillianism, invoked "appeasement" as the dirtiest of words, and saved us again after that war by their proaction and peace-through-strength. But the generation of their very children unlearned their lesson. And what's worse is that so far from pushing and pulling the nation toward Churchillianism, the present national leadership are among the most defiant in their repudiation of it. It's not for nothing that among Barack Obama's early acts as president was the banishment of the bust of Winston Churchill, given the American president by the British prime minister in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Obama ordering it turned out of the White House and returned to its sender.

There's nothing now to be argued, nothing to be done; they won't learn in the abstract, won't learn from history, won't learn 'til it's too late for learning, and evidently that'll be the way 'til Doomsday.

Short-shrifting the Soviets, and rightly

I've detected a revisionism in latter-day histories of the Second World War, making out that we in the English-speaking world have been blinkered or anyway neglectful in not sufficiently honoring the Soviet contribution and sacrifice, those 20 million Soviet dead and all the rest. Well, those revisionists ought to credit their own kind for a little more: we've not been neglectful much less blinkered; we've had good cause to decline to sing hosannas for the Soviet war effort.

The Soviet Union effectively allied with Hitler in their Non-aggression Pact, joined in Hitler's conquest of Poland, and conspired with Hitler in annexing the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania, and when the Soviets did at long last take up arms against Naziism it was only after the Nazi empire had smashed into Russia and its empire and bid fair to extinguish Bolshevism. The Soviets allied with Hitler when a Nazi-Soviet pact was on offer and in the end "only killed Germans to keep from being killed by Germans", to invoke a very fine observation from Herman Wouk's Winds of War.

A goodly part of that 20 million Soviet dead is down to the incompetence, paranoia, and stupidity of Stalin, and to the madness of the Soviet system which would elevate a man to its god. Stalin had "purged" a good deal of his finest commanders before Hitler's Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin was heedless even to the extraordinary personal warning from Winston Churchill of the certain German invasion, out of mad paranoia that Churchill's warning was a piece to some Western plot. Or take the moment in 1942 when half a million Soviet forces were on the point of German encirclement, and Stalin shrugged off the sound advice to order the retreat of those troops so they might live to fight another day, so that when the Germans completed the circle the day following, the U.S.S.R. was out half a million men-in-arms.

And the coup de grace to this notion that the Soviets deserve and demand greater honor for their war effort is of course that the Soviets didn't so much liberate eastern Europe from Naziism as substitute their totalitarianism for Hitler's, and enforced their Soviet empire 'til near enough to the end of the century.

The Soviets killed Germans, and bully for them, but their reasons were the basest and had it been up to them they'd have carried on as conspirators with Hitler; their losses were in some considerable part on them; and they weren't liberators but alternate oppressors. And that in brief is why the Soviet Union is short-shrifted in our honoring of the heroes of the Second World War, and may it ever be thus.

The trouble with sci-fi

I wouldn't presume to write science-fiction -- I'm not science-minded much less educated formally or otherwise in that side of things, my fiction devolves necessarily into humor, etc. -- but I do presume to make an observation or four on the universe of science-fiction of the past half-century-and-more.

What confronts me when I dwell at all on space is the size and scale of it. And yet battle scenes in Star Wars or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or what-have-you very often are practically glorified WWI dogfights transplanted to space. My idea is that the scale of space war would be something closer to a galactic End of Days. Maybe unengineering a solar system, to bring its heavenly bodies crashing together and smashing to atoms and burning to vapor any life therein. That sort of thing.

　
And silence: they do say space is silent, and yet even the more serious science-fiction very often inserts great, thunderous bangs and booms for sound effects to accompany their explosions in space. Maybe the directors imagine that the cinematic effect of an explosion would be lost absent its SFX, but I say depicting an explosion absent the sound would if anything be more arresting for being so alien and counterintuitive. I'd run music, maybe balletic music, for a soundtrack to any explosions in space. Mightn't hurt if the video was slowed, too.

　
And no pressing of buttons. No red buttons, no flashing buttons, no booping buttons, no buttons plus keyholes, no buttons at all. Surely if these advanced beings of science-fiction can't yet think a thing into being then they'd wave a hand or some such and the machines would take that for their cues. If a fellow means for his dog to back away then he need only look at the dog and wave his hand as if to say "Back away," and the dog understands well enough. So in science-fiction it ought to be that if a fellow, say, wants his lights out, he looks in the direction of some lighting interface and gestures "Off," and it's done. Science-fiction is crammed with buttons, and they're altogether hidebound and hackneyed.

　
Also in my science-fiction that'll never be, the tech is preposterously advanced but the society is self-consciously conservative: it'd have been scared straight by the civilizational collapse that is not only the product of leftism but its purpose. Conservatism isn't ideology or tradition, since 1968, so much as self-preservation. It's one of the more historically illiterate conceits of the Left that history moves from right to left. The '80s, the '50s, Victorianism, Puritanism, etc., all were historical shifts rightward, or "rightward" as we'd conceive it. History develops in both directions and has done since well before those directions were recognizably Left and Right, so in science-fiction as in nonfiction the future might easily run rightward.