cabinet
edgar snow on mao’s love of spicy food and the revolutionary nature of the chilli
If you live in an imperialist state and are considering international political matters, or if you live in an oppressive colonialist police state and are considering domestic matters, one of the most dangerous impulses you can have is “well we have to do something!” In almost every single case, with vanishingly few exceptions, a problem will not be improved by intervention, from, say, the United States government.
Whether it’s the war in Ukraine or gun violence or any other incredibly complicated issue, if you’re thinking about political solutions then your first thought needs to be “will a white supremacist dictatorship of capital that only ever pursues its own interest improve this situation by acting on it, or will it only leverage the crisis to further its own control and goals?”
the new pornbots’ url game is INSANE. complicit-rotting and warmmourning you would have done numbers if you were real
Silla Kingdom gold crown excavated from the Geumnyeongchong Tomb in Korea, 5th-7th century AD
from The National Museum of Korea
Source: museum.go.kr
Say what you will about the politics of A Song of Ice and Fire, 'a feudal army marching through the countryside doesn't become any less horrific, abuse-filled and starvation-causing for the local peasantry just because they're the Good Guys' is really a point that like 90% of epic fantasy that's trying have any sort of serious/coherent morality could stand to learn.
Not just epic fantasy and not just feudal armies, I think ANY marginally serious depiction of pre-modern* warfare should reflect that, and if it doesn't, the author is either a coward or a moron. Ignorant git at best. I have ZERO chill about this.
That Devereaux article about foraging (which I'm guessing inspired this post, right?) should be required reading.
* Not that modern warfare doesn't have that shit, it's just not always a logistic necessity.
As for ASOIAF, I find that a good chunk of the criticism it gets for excessive violence of all sorts completely misses the point that said violence is described as the result of war, not as the normal state of affairs. "If civilsation has an opposite, it is war", quoth Ursula Le Guin, and that's exactly what Martin is saying here. I got some criticisms myself for his execution, but his goal is
- crystal clear
- absolutely admirable
And the War of the Five Kings is not any war. It's an especially destructive one, which lasts too long and spreads too far and involves way too many people, and so by sheer scale it doesn't only take lives and ruin livelihoods, but also demolishes social norms.
We've seen some wars like that in real life. For the peasantry, a marching army was like a plague of locusts: absolute disaster, but at least, under normal circumstances, it's only gonna happen like once in your lifetime. But sometimes armies wouldn't come and go. They would come and come again.
They'd stick around for months, and come again next year, and again the next month, and now it's another army, and another one, and aren't these supposedly on your side?, and now here come the disbanded soldiers, and here come the mercenaries let loose, and here come the bandits from the mountain / the woods / the maquis, and isn't that Jacques from the next village?, he was such a jolly fellow and now he's wearing a necklace of ears, and for years no one is safe and everyone's uprooted, and some people eat cats and dogs, and others have resorted to cannibalism, and at this point joining the bandits from the maquis sounds like an excellent way to stave off hunger, and did you see what the once peaceful farmers did to that soldier they caught with his pants down? oh it was GNARLY, but I suppose it's payday, and now it's every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, any notion you had about taboos (you shouldn't steal this, you shouldn't defile that, you shouldn't hurt them, surely infants are off limits) is just GONE, obliterated, no one cares about that any more, people don't even care to bury their dead, there are no more transgressions because there's no boundary left to transgress, and everywhere you look it's dead bodies severed limbs violence blood gore death death death death.
The above is not from ASOIAF, and I didn't make it up. It's mostly from the Hundred Years' War. ASOIAF's violence is sometimes… off, mostly because Martin gets inspiration from fiction rather than up-to-date historical research (and also because it's literature, not an essay). But excessive it ain't.
