02-23-2020, 01:01 PM
(02-23-2020, 11:19 AM)Camz Wrote:(02-21-2020, 09:31 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(02-21-2020, 09:03 AM)Camz Wrote: I just hope the culture isn't too lacking in creativity, and I'm not dead by the next Crisis.The 2020s crisis, or the 2100s crisis? One of the things about Adaptives is that they tend to have very high crisis mortality - to the point that some of the most famous are the ones that don't survive, like Anne Frank.
2100s! I'd like to see history unfold as much as possible.
Adaptive/Artist generations tend to be either children or elderly during a Crisis -- and as such the most vulnerable people during a Crisis Era. Children are unlikely to have developed the survival instincts necessary of their protectors are separated from them. Less likely to have reserves of body fat, and with less-developed immune systems, they are more vulnerable to famines and epidemics. Only rarely (as with Anne Frank) do they develop the intellectual sophistication necessary to express their plight. Someone else tells the story (Hansel and Gretel). The very old often lose their mobility and wits and cannot get out of a dangerous situation; in good times people might protect the elderly, but when things get very bad -- well, what do you expect to happen to someone over 80? The very old may no longer be able to express their plight due to senility.
We do have the remarkable and inimitable Diary of a Young Girl, now one of the most widely-read pieces of literature. But this is a rarity in itself, and what makes it so precious. Oddly we have no parallel story of some Jew born in the 1850's who perished in the Holocaust, no "Diary of a Great-Grandfather"; we expect people in their eighties to die, anyway, whether by heart failure, cancer, or some strange accident. Maybe if the Nazis found a chronicle by some elderly Jew they of course destroyed it as sentimental Schund, abominable enough to a Nazi mind for being the work of a Jew. Who knows what all the Nazis destroyed along with communities such as Jews, Roma, and well-educated Poles.
We have yet to see how this Crisis will unfold. Eighty years ago, the Nazis were brutalizing Poland while plotting to take over most of western Europe through undisguised aggression while making assurances that they were doing nothing of the sort. Anne Frank's family thought that they were safe in Holland, a country that Imperial Germany had not invaded during World War I and in which antisemitism was discreditable. Hitler obviously hated Jews, but he had no coherent plan for their extermination. History would move fast during the latter five years of the Crisis. Ask me again in June 2020 about what the prospects of the world looked like as Europe seemed to be destined to be a very bad end:
Quote:....However matters may go in France or with the French Government or with another French Government, we in this island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have been suffering, we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye. And freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands—Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, all who have joined their causes to our own shall be restored.
What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over... the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth[e] last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
-- Sir Winston Churchill, 4 June 1940. Such is the craziness of desperation, of people recognizing the irreversible and inevitable tide of history. Satan Incarnate (you know who!) must have thought such a speech insane. The "wise" thing for the British to do would have been to surrender, set up a government willing to conciliate with Hitler (with Oswald Moseley as a key leader), adopt the Nuremberg Laws, and join in an Aryan commonwealth in which a people of Celtic, Germanic, and Scandinavian stock could be partners in a racist New Order. Such would make unnecessary any ugliness of destructive bombings by the Luftwaffe as of Warsaw or Rotterdam.
We now know how that story played out, but who could have foreseen Hitler blowing his brains out as an enemy army advanced into Berlin?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
