This is the first paragraph of Chapter 36:
I was adamant: I wasn’t going to kill these men. I reluctantly agreed to bribe or frame them. It had nothing to do with their being white Europeans. (page 280)
John, you can claim that race has nothing to do with your restraint all you want, but it will not stop people from thinking that you are a racist. In fact, I might not have suspected anything if you had not pointed this out. This is why anyone who begins their sentence with “I’m not racist, but…” invariably goes on to say something terribly racist.
Why do I bring this up? Because now, our alleged heroes are finally going to try to stop the First World War. (Of course we know that they, being Sues, will succeed with no effort. Rummel, it is something of a problem if your readers never once question whether your heroes will succeed in their goals.1) The First World War led directly to the second, and from there to the Cold War and thus, most of the wars and democides which Rummel’s leads wish to prevent from happening. If people like Pancho Villa or Yuán Shìkǎi caused enough suffering that Rummel judges that they needed to die, then, just in order to be consistent, he would need to cast that same judgment on the instigators of one of the most destructive wars in human history. But since those people were white, the main characters are willing to give them a second chance which they denied to would-be dictators of color. Isn’t unintentional racism just precious?
Mind you, I’m not saying that those people would necessarily have to die; what I am saying is that since Rummel has already decided that those who committed crimes of similar magnitude deserve the death penalty, then so should these warmongers just for the sake of narrative consistency. Thus, I am not contradicting what I said two installments ago.
Getting back on topic, I should remind everybody that at best, John and Joy have two years to stop the war. Realistically, there is no way that they can pull this off, and it is entirely their fault for waiting so long to do anything instead of working on this from the moment they arrived in the past. So watch as Rummel stretches the suspension of disbelief to the point of absurdity!
Rummel has John tell the readers that the war killed about nine million people and was possibly responsible for the infamous influenza outbreak that killed anywhere from twenty million to forty million more. I am sure that most people who are reading this book already know this. He also points out that the war indirectly allowed the Bolsheviks to take power in Russia and thus start the Cold War, meaning that even if all of their other missions failed, John would consider their trip through time a success if they succeeded in stopping the war. I have already stated that the only reason they succeed in this endeavor is because of authorial fiat, so let me point out that even if Russia never goes communist, our heroes would still need to stop the tsar.2
Rummel thinks that just because John and Joy had a conversation about the war back in 1908 that means that they’ll be able to prevent it, but it doesn’t matter how much money they spend promoting pacifism, because the war was caused by entangling alliances. Furthermore, most people before 1914 weren’t pacifists precisely because most people were unaware of how destructive war really is. At that time, all their military expeditions were going on in faraway colonies and the people would not have cared even if they were closer, because, you know, the other side was made up of brown people. John and Joy even create multiple secret societies devoted to ending war, but we never see any of them. What a waste.
Now, I am not saying that the population’s attitudes towards war could not change through nonviolent means, but I am saying that Rummel has this happen way to quickly. This would not have been necessary if he had sent his characters further back in time than 1906.
Even John hangs a lampshade over how unrealistically fast their progress is:
I was once concerned about how two people could ever influence grand historical events. Now I was growing concerned about how much two people could influence such events. (page 281)
Yeah Rummel, maybe this is a sign that you should have rewritten the story to better explain why things happen the way they do. The “great man” theory of history has been obsolete for a long time, so if you still hold to it, Rummel, that makes me doubt your ability as a historian.
Rummel handwaves this away by claiming that since politically lobbying was rare in the early twentieth century (a claim that, by the way, is bullshit) his protagonists are able to be unusually successful at it. He does acknowledge nationalism, but vastly underestimates how much influence the idea had. For some reason, he also blames Nietzsche, though he was quite reviled at this time, for the upcoming war, as well as Darwinism, even though Darwinian evolution has nothing to do with the outbreak of the First World War. If Rummel means Social Darwinism, (which would better be named Spencerianism) he should have said that, instead of this bogus “challenge-and-response theory” he claims is a part of evolution. In fact, the challenge-and-response theory is a theory of history, not biology, and was not formulated until 1934, by Arnold Toynbee. I don’t know whether that means that Rummel Did Not Do the Research of if it means that he subscribes to that theory, but if it’s the latter, let it be known that very few scholars take Toynbee’s views seriously. Since I myself have studied biology, let me just say that Rummel has no clue what he is talking about.
On the other hand, John admits to Joy that they will probably be unable to prevent the minor wars in the Balkans, but puts the blame for those entirely on the Ottoman Empire. Thus, John says that they should make an intervention in Turkey, but I do not recall them ever doing this.3
What surprises me is that Joy finds John quite the pessimist after he says that they won’t be able to stop every war, even though I would think that she is the pessimist for using assassination as a first resort.
By the time 1914 rolls around, the UK and Germany somehow magically get over their differences and become strong allies. The readership is expected to believe that this is all due to John and Joy’s actions. I call foul. Great Britain and Germany were fierce rivals; anyone proposing friendship between them would have come under suspicion. Furthermore, the First world War was not about Anglo-German rivalry, at least not in the beginning. It started when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and escalated when Germany attacked France, because of the Gordian knot of political alliances. Even assuming that the Triple Entente still exists after the UK “betrays” it by allying with Germany, all that would happen would be that Britain would remain neutral. The war would still happen in Continental Europe. How did Rummel overlook this?
Meanwhile, our protagonists manage to get a pacifist party elected to the French legislature, even though before 1914 France was arguably the biggest warmongering nation in Europe. At no point is it explained how they do this; it just happens because they are that awesome.
As for Germany and Russia, the duo plans to nonviolently dispose of the militaristic politicians who escalated the war to begin with. Now the opening paragraph finally makes sense, but, in a shocking display of apologetics for absolute monarchy, Rummel absolves the emperors of Germany and Russia of any responsibility for the war, and places the blame entirely on their advisors. This is exactly the behavior that corrupt monarchs throughout history have engaged in order to prevent their subjects from overthrowing them. It is rather distasteful that Rummel, the champion of democracy that he is, is succumbing to this.
After a line break, John and Joy sail to Europe to deal with the militarists. John, as has already been said, wants to bribe them into compliance. However, Joy, being the sociopath that she is, wants to have them killed. She points out exactly what I did at the beginning of this installment; namely that John had no problem with the deaths of Hispanics and Asians, but wants to save the lives of people who were just as cruel, but had the good fortune to be born in Europe. Damn it, why must I become Joy’s mouthpiece again?
John is hurt by the accusation of racism and claims it is unwarranted. He says that though these men caused the deaths of millions through their actions, they did not directly execute anybody and did what they thought was best for their country. John, every dictator (except maybe Stalin) did what they thought was best for their country. It’s just that their idea of what is best is vastly different from what ninety-nine percent of people would think is best. That does not excuse their actions.
“Oh, is that right. What about General Yüan Shih-k’ai and Chiang Kai-shek? They were not like Mao, and were responsible for war and deaths only by virtue of the decisions they made. Like these Europeans.” (page 283)
GOD DAMN IT, JOY, WHY MUST YOU MAKE ME AGREE WITH YOU?!
John says that those two are not good counterexamples because they actually ruled their countries, while the militarist politicians never had absolute power. This doesn’t change the fact that they were responsible for the war, and were fascists in all but name. In fact, many of them joined the fascist movements that sprang up after the war. Joy objects, but John has had enough and blows her off. Much to my amazement, Joy lets the subject go. They actually aren’t going to kill anyone this time; aren’t you astounded?
What they do instead is ruin their targets’ lives. Somehow our protagonists distribute photographs of the Austrian Chief of General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, in bed with a young Russian girl. Conrad4 claims the photographs were fake, which is completely true, but our so-called heroes paid the girl from the picture to state otherwise. The ensuing scandal results in Conrad losing his job, and the emperor replaces him with a moderate. What a coincidence, huh? It’s not as if John and Joy would have any influence in whom the emperor appoints to positions.
A week later, the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold, resigned and fled the country because John and Joy spread rumors that he is homosexual, though they have no proof whatsoever. It is never said with whom the emperor replaces him. Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov gets rushed to the hospital with a serious illness, one that he did not have in the original timeline. Now, I can accept our heroes pressuring officials to resign, but to actually cause someone to get sick? That crosses the line. It is still up for debate whether Sazonov was greatly responsible for Russian involvement in the war. Conveniently, the tsar replaces him with someone less hawkish. The way this paragraph is written implies that John and Joy had nothing to do with it, but remember that this book is under the conceit that John wrote it.
As for Gottlieb von Jagow, the Foreign Minister of Germany, our heroes outright frame him for child molestation. He kills himself a week later, thus causing John to believe that they may have gone too far. Yet he doesn’t have any lasting regrets about killing anybody else. Perhaps he is indeed a racist. Joy feels no remorse for the suicide at all. Now, Jagow’s Wikipedia article does not say to what extent he was a militarist, merely that he was involved in negotiations prior to the war.
Now, as though this had not already been made clear, I do not think that the heroes of a story should be so blasé about killing people. In this case, I do think it would be kind of pointless, since final authority in Germany, Austria, and Russia rested in their respective emperors. If the monarchs wanted a war, there would have been a war, no matter who their foreign ministers were. If the characters successfully prevent the war, and I am sure they will, then all of Eastern Europe will still be ruled by absolute monarchies, and countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland will never get their independence. Rummel ignores this.
In any case, John doubts the essential goodness of his mission for the first time in years, and has a dream about Jimmy Wilson (the founder of the Survivors’ Grammatically Challenged and Dubiously Benevolent Society, remember), and his experiences in the trenches. You know what this means, don’t you? We’ve got another Very Special Flashback Sequence.
SFKHNSOKNFBGT AREWIGIOR IADJ FGIA QAJRWBG
I thought we were through with these!
Half squatting, Jimmy leaned against the side of the muddy trench, the toes of his boots invisible in the muck at the bottom. Jimmy was a short, skinny fellow, with a frame on which not even his military training could put muscle. His baggy uniform now rippled like a sail in a crosswind. His helmet hid his short brown hair, except when his shaking tipped it forward over his eyes and a few strands escaped. (page 285)
Jimmy is one of the very few characters in the book to get a physical description. We learn that he grew up in Bristol and that, even at eighteen, he had never gone on a date with a girl. I don’t know why this information is important enough for Rummel to devote a paragraph to it. Apparently he was smart enough to get into college, but since nobody less well-off than upper middle class is allowed to have a stable family life in these kinds of stories, his father didn’t pay the bills and eventually abandoned them, meaning that Jimmy had to get a job at a warehouse instead of furthering his education.
Jimmy winds up in the army when war breaks out and already knew most of the soldiers in his unit, thanks to the army policy of grouping recruits from the same town together. By the time of the Battle of the Somme, most are dead, including his two friends and his cousin. He has to drag his cousin’s body out of the trench, and becomes convinced that he will die out there, too. Of course, we know he won’t since this is a Very Special Flashback Sequence.
One of his trenchmates, George Finch, asks him to deliver a message to his mother if he dies. We all know what’s going to happen now, don’t we? Just once, I would like to see a writer subvert the Fatal Family Photo trope.
The barrage of shelling stops, and Jimmy’s commanding officer orders his unit to advance through no-man’s-land, in a futile attempt to take over the German trench. Of course, only Jimmy makes it that far, even though he lets his guard down for a few seconds, which realistically would get him blown up. He gets hit, and knocked unconscious, but somehow survives thanks to his helmet. An explosion wakes him up, and he sees his commanding officer with his guts spilling out. Well, at least Rummel is capturing the horrors of war. I am not sure where Jimmy is right now. No mention is made of him being at the German trench. I can only assume he is still in no-man’s-land, which was called that for a reason.
Jimmy was shot in the arm, and so tries to make it back to the British trench and what meager medical attention he could have received on the western front. Somehow he makes it back without trouble, and he survives the Battle of the Somme, though of course we knew he would. His right arm is amputated, though.
It should be pointed out, and Rummel does this, that that one battle lasted for three months, and 600,000 soldiers died, and ultimately achieved absolutely nothing. If Jimmy was wounded at the beginning, I am not entirely sure that he would have sat out for the entire remainder.
In the hospital, Jimmy sees that others were far worse off than he, and learns that he will be sent back to England. Thus, he makes plans to go to college, and decides right then and there to try to prevent future wars. Yet for some reason he chooses to study business instead of international relations, and so makes little progress. But as was told to us much earlier, Jimmy moves to the United States, becomes a millionaire, and founds the society that would become Tor’s groupies. And with the conclusion of the Very Special Flashback Sequence, which takes up four and a half pages, the chapter ends.
Footnotes
1 The only exception to this rule is if your work is something like Gurren Lagann, and this novel is clearly nothing of the sort.
2 I don’t know why, but for some reason people on the right wing, even ordinary conservatives like Rummel who presumably aren’t monarchists, think that the tsar couldn’t possibly have been a dictator because his replacement was totalitarian. This line of thinking would force one to claim that the Nazis couldn’t have been that bad because, at least in East Germany, they were replaced by the Stasi. It is this kind of negligence that would make the New Universe collapse the moment its history ceased to be guided by Rummel.
3 It also should be pointed out that in real history, Turkey modernized precisely because it was defeated in the World War, thus causing the Ottoman government to be unpopular enough that it was overthrown. Without the war, the rather stagnant and reactionary Ottoman Empire would continue to exist.
4 That was his family name, not Hötzendorf. Rummel is inconsistent about this, but that’s what Wikipedia says.
swenson on 21 May 2013, 19:50 said:
The fact that he brought this up at all indicates that this is a factor in some way. If it was utterly unrelated in his mind, he never would have mentioned this. Does he offer a supposed reason, by the way? Or just say “IT TOTALLY WASN’T BECAUSE THEY WERE WHITE” and skip off on his merry way?
Yep. He was incompetent and didn’t seem to care about the people much at all. He gets a much worse rep than he perhaps deserves, but still—some rather nasty stuff happened during his reign, and he didn’t really make things better. Now, the Bolsheviks were pretty awful, let’s not deny that. But Nicholas II wasn’t a good leader at all, and stopping the Bolshevik Revolution would only have caused a different revolution to arise. It was the second revolution in Nicholas II’s reign, after all—I have little doubt there would have been a third, had it not succeeded.
In short, WWI was not the reason the Bolshevik Revolution happened, even if it is the reason it succeeded.
The concept of pressuring or bribing government officials to do something is as old as government, I suspect. It certainly predates medieval times, but even then the majority of a king’s time (especially in the early medieval age) was pretty much spent pacifying various powerful nobles whose support he needed to keep power. And the Constitution was specifically designed to keep any particular non-governmental faction from having undue influence. Different forms, perhaps, but the idea is still there.
Why is it that a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings on the Internet understand aspects of history better than a history professor does?
…please tell me there’s more to it in the book than this. Please. Please tell me there’s at least one chapter actually showing this.
…
He just declares this and shows absolutely no proof of it, doesn’t he?
Sighhh….
To be fair, that’s actually consistent with her character. If she’d suddenly been all on John’s side, I would’ve called foul.
Ughhh this book is so stupid…
Fireshark on 22 May 2013, 01:25 said:
Did they just avert one of the largest wars in history via nasty gossip and photoshop?
Lone Wolf on 22 May 2013, 03:09 said:
To be fair to him, Nicholas II, in his only semi-decent initiative, attempted to promote a degree of pacifism and concordance to European international relations, so I guess Our Heroes could play on it. Of course, Nicholas II was also a weak-willed schmuck, so whatever pacifism he had could easily be beaten out of him by someone with a stronger will.
Plus, of course, objective conditions, blah blah blah.
Oh, and of course “in the name of a greater civilization, we curse those who for the sake of their ambitious dreams, brought about the massacre of so many young lives. No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of its heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture” and all that.
Tim on 22 May 2013, 06:05 said:
Well, not so much that as because the government controlled context; they could decide how photographs were captioned and later how newsreels were commented on. The big change for anti-war campaigns was the unrestricted journalism of Vietnam which often broadcast images with no context at all to a public under no obligation to find out what the context was, so it appeared to many that the war consisted entirely of motiveless acts of brutal violence.
It’s even more ridiculous than that, he thinks at the height of the Dreadnought race a Prime Minister would think slashing funding for shipbuilding a good idea. At a time when people still sang Rule Britannia and meant every word of it.
Not very well, mind you, you’re missing out on such deathless prose as
Except with, you know, bodies still in them. I guess WW1 doesn’t have enough rape to hold Rummel’s attention for long, creepy old bastard that he is.
To those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Rummel has a very high Herbert Index (tendency for an ongoing series to gradually reveal more things you never wanted to know about the author’s fantasy life) and any scene of a woman being tortured is guaranteed to merit at least twice as much description as a similar one with a man.
Regardless, I find it odd to read any account of WW1 that doesn’t emphasise that the primary constituent of No Man’s Land was a substance so far removed from any form of mud that exists upon the earth or ever did that it’s not right to call it that.
It’s kind of amusing that Rummel clearly forgets this himself come the second book War and Oh Shit I Forgot To Kill Any Muslims In The Last One where everyone is totally “rah rah rah team J&J” and never mentions the guy who did all the heavy lifting.
Though given what happens in the rest of the series, it’s probably for the best. Especially what happens at the very end, I bet he was really glad to have put in all the effort to reach that conclusion.
Fireshark on 22 May 2013, 09:03 said:
Do you have a link to something about this? I couldn’t find it with a search because so many pages have “index” in the name.
Tim on 22 May 2013, 09:12 said:
Oh, Herbert index after the writer of Dune, which got a particularly bad case of that later on. Not that many people soldier through the breezeblock-sized God Does This Book Ever End of Dune to find out.
swenson on 22 May 2013, 10:24 said:
I must confess I only made it through the fourth book. I like the series (because there was only ever one series, anyone who says otherwise is clearly delusional, just like there was ever only one Matrix movie and the Deus Ex series only has two games in it), but there is a whole lot of wat in it.
Brendan Rizzo on 22 May 2013, 10:27 said:
Ah, yeah, by that point I had become so inured to Rummel’s Beige Prose in Very Special Flashback Sequences that I didn’t pay much attention to how he described the war front. It’s really quite boring.
LoneWolf on 22 May 2013, 11:36 said:
I recall that John & Joy also paid large amounts of money to Lloyd George so that he would become anti-war?
Brendan Rizzo on 22 May 2013, 17:34 said:
Pretty much. I don’t think that would be very realistic either.
Tim on 22 May 2013, 18:20 said:
Funnily enough, my copies of Messiah and Children of Dune (1978 printings my uncle gave me) both say Children is the conclusion to the series, meaning he was never planning to write The Brick to begin with. So no two million pages of Leto complaining about how turning into a sandworm is haaaaard :(
Finn on 23 May 2013, 21:02 said:
Have you ever seen the anime FullMetal Alchemist: brotherhood? It’s not technically subverted, though, I suppose…But it does do something rather interesting with it.
Though it’s so awesome you should watch it anywaysEpke on 28 May 2013, 20:18 said:
Bwaahahaha-… wait, you’re serious? Wow. Aside from Dr Manhattan stepping in, that’s impossible.
Only now? ;) History never lies, historians however…
… What. That’s about as logical as saying that Michael Moore caused the Iraq war.
Again: WHAT. There’s no possible way that would happen!
Honourable, mhm :/
In that day and age, that’s a death sentence. Why didn’t they just dip him in acid instead?
Wouldn’t put it past them – they did trick three young men into thinking they had injected them with a lethal substance, in order to control them.
And these are our protagonists… are we supposed to root for them or the dictators?
Poor Kolyan, eh? I think a lot of the “Oh, it wasn’t the tsar’s fault!” mentality is wrapped up in two things: the pedestal we put royalty on, and the execution of the Romanovs and the (then) mystery of Anastasia and Alexei: it added romance to the tale and made people soften their view of him and his reign.
Smile, Van Hohenheim.
A Real Libertarian on 21 July 2013, 11:31 said:
Epke,
They didn’t dip him in acid because if they did, then even the dumbest “We must save freedom by killing anyone who thinks different then us” style neo-conservative would go “hey wait a minute… are John and Joy Supervillains?”
If you’re reading this Rudy then the answer is YES!!!