From: "Andy Robertson" 
Subject: Re: (urth)  "Hour of Trust"  and rape
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 18:58:46 -0000

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Andre-Driussi" 
> >
> >No, it is a war story, with one side having been hopelessly outevolved by
> >the other.
>
> You are banging that evolution gong again.  This is where we disagree: I
> see kamikaze pilots as devolutionary to both sides.


Oh dear, this is my fault.  My background thinking is steeped in
Evolutionary psychology.

I didn't mean "evolve" as in "get better".    That is not an idea much
countenenced today.  It is simply a new winning group competitive strategy.

Morally it is indeed far worse - Wolfe is not portraying the rebels as
"good", but simply as winners - but I think there is some hint that a new
hope may be possible after the rebels have won.


> Your other point about women as chattal, spoils of war, and reproductive
> strategies begins to fall apart when it must be made plain that
> reproduction is for the living, colonizer and colonized alike.


Yes, but the rebel girls do not kill themselves when they are having orgies
with their commune mates, of course.   And only a few of them kill
themselves.  These few are soldiers - sacrificing themselves for their
tribe.

Their suicide is a political statement directed at the government troops

**WE ARE ABSOLUTELY SERIOUS.  EVEN IF YOU WIN YOU WILL GET NOTHING.   OUR
RESOLUTION IS TOTAL.   HERE, I WILL DEMONSTRATE**


> >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.
>
> This is the opposite of Gandhi's Tactic, which was truly a military
> evolution, and highly successful.


Agreed,



>
> >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.
>
> Now I get confused--I thought you were saying that breaking the rules
> (waving a white flag, etc., to lure soldiers to death) was =evolutionary=.


Once more "evolved" in this usage is not the same thing as "good" but rather
is "winning".

But perhaps I should have defined my terms more closely on this list, with
Tieilard de Chardin lurking ever in the background!  My fault.


    hartshorn




--