From: "Andy Robertson" 
Subject: Re: (urth)  "Hour of Trust"  and rape
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 18:00:15 -0000


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Andre-Driussi" 
> >The whole government side is sterile, an evolutionary dead end.
> >The trope of the rape of defeated women in war occurs elsewhere in Wolfe.
> >Mora's rape in IGJ, and "When I was Ming The Merciless", are two examples
> >that come immediately to mind.
>
> Well, yes. There is truth to what you are saying.  However, the imp in me
> is reminded of similar things done comically--was it in ZORBA THE GREEK
> that the woman determined that the way to world peace was for all the
wives
> of the military men to refuse to have sex with their husbands if they
> engaged in war?

Well, that is a comical story, while "Hour of Trust" is very realistic.


> I don't think "Hour of Trust" is a "war of the sexes" story in the company
> of such Wolfe works as "In Looking-Glass Castle" and "The Ziggurat."


No, it is a war story, with one side having been hopelessly outevolved by
the other.

The fact that women captives suicide does not make this a "war of the sexes"
story.  It simply means that their side, the winning side, has gained a
transcendent resolution, and has become able to step out of the old rules
and define new ones under which they are winning.

Government (if it is not blessed by god) becomes a predator upon the nation,
a tyrant.   Here we have a tale of the government being thrown off by the
tactic of premptively destroying all the "loot".  So it seems to me.


The rest of your points are perfectly valid, and indeed do not contradict
this.


.
>
> So War is a game with rules, as ridiculous and sad as that is.


You know Wolfe's position perfectly well.    War must be, in a sinful world.
Therefore it had better have rules. War as a game with rules is *better*
than war as genocide.

By imagining that we can avoid war, in a fallen universe, we always find
ourselves back with war-as-genocide, as the Holocaust, the Gulag, and other
equivalently sized genocides in the pursuit of Utopia show.


    hartshorn




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