Hey everyone. I apologize for the wait; a lot of things have happened recently. Let’s just get back to the spork.
We’re up to Chapter 6 now, and it’s another pointless one.
The chapter starts with John focused only on himself. Instead of showing any real sympathy for what everybody else has been through, he’s only interested in why he was invited to their company in the first place. Admittedly, this is a fair question: all of Tor’s groupies are made out to be highly successful, and possibly in the Forbes 500 for all we know, but John is just some nobody.
…Has Rummel forgotten that John has been drugged, and should pass out soon? He won’t be the only one to pass out if the plot doesn’t start moving again.
We get to read a really confusing sentence:
I leaned forward in my chair, glanced at Joy, and saw her looking at me with the same concerned, wide-eyed, “is that a letter from the IRS?” look I would get to know so well. (page 82)
For a moment, I thought that Tor’s groupies actually did receive a letter from the IRS, and so I was wondering when on Earth this plot twist happened. But no, it’s just a mangled turn of phrase demonstrating Rummel’s incompetence as a wordsmith. It’s such a bizarre description, really. What does the International Revenue Service have to do with the situation at hand? It’s not like Tor’s groupies are part of some secret society or anything…
It turns out that Tor’s groupies produce a stack of papers going into detail about John’s personal life. They must be stalkers or something, because they even have information on his parents and friends. And yet John still has complete trust in these people. No, we the readers do not get to see any of the details of these documents, even if that would allow us to understand more of John’s character. All we get from it is John attempting to justify his perverse attractions to young students. Women easily like him? I doubt that.
I looked up at Gu, my eyes throwing daggers at her—this is the way I hoped I looked, but I had no practice. (page 83)
I’m sure John looks like a loser.
Gu, who has suddenly become the spokesperson for Tor’s groupies, tries to justify this flagrant breach of privacy by saying that they had to “make sure” that John was the right person for their little task. And then she demands absolute secrecy of him — if I were in John’s situation, I wouldn’t trust Tor’s groupies at all.
This is the main problem with this story. Rummel wants us to perceive his characters as heroes, but so far, nobody has done anything even remotely heroic. John is a pervert, Joy is bipolar, and Tor’s groupies have 1) slipped John a roofie, and 2) pried into his personal life. They’re revealed to have done even worse things later on in the book. At no point does Rummel ever say that they’ve gone out of line. Nope, as far as he’s concerned, they’re as pure as the Sun is hot.
Gu claims that if they didn’t drug John or violate his privacy, that there are dozens of tyrannical governments who are just itching to assassinate them all. Clearly, Tor’s groupies think too highly of themselves. When we finally learn their purpose, it turns out that they are little more than a non-profit organization (though of course, we do not actually see any of their operation). If Gu really thinks there is a bounty on their heads, then she’s freakin’ paranoid.
It is finally revealed to John that he has been given a roofie. Apparently, the effects will not activate for another three hours. …I don’t know of any drugs with a delayed reaction like that, but never mind. The drug will make John wake up the next morning, remembering nothing, with a note from Joy saying that the dinner was canceled. On the other hand, if John does exactly what Tor’s groupies want, they will give him the antidote in time so that he will keep his memories.
Yes. Tor’s groupies have just given John a Hobson’s choice. And they are considered the Survivor’s Benevolent Society. Never forget that last sentence. I will bring it up again and again.
John’s like, “I won’t have this!” and Joy’s just like, “You’ll thank us later.”1 So John just has to take this indignity like a man. I wonder what would happen if he tried to call the cops on them… Rummel wasn’t thinking that his characters would have cell phones.
By the way, on page 84, John claims to have a sailor’s vocabulary, but pretty much the only profanity that he or any other character really uses is “shit”. Make of that what you will.
There is a line break… which doesn’t segue into a Very Special Flashback Sequence. At least, not immediately.
“We are a secret society,” she explained (page 84)
In that case, Tor’s groupies should have no trouble paying their taxes.
Tor gets emotional for no apparent reason while Gu delievers their mission statement. Rummel seems to have a thing for the Hysterical Woman, as no matter what, whenever a female character gets into any amount of hardship, or anything that reminds her of a past hardship, she bawls her heart and soul out to the nearest man. It got kind of annoying after Joy did it for the first time, but it never stops. It just keeps going, even after the characters have gone through so much they should be desensitized to things that become trivial in comparison.
Anyway, it turns out that the Survivor’s Benevolent Society is essentially a support group for people who survived destructive wars and democides. Somehow, no matter what the cause of their original misery was, they all have developed a neoconservative viewpoint, even the members who escaped from Chile— oh wait, there aren’t any!
Yeah, that’s another thing. For a society which recruits members from historical tragedies, it seems to be rather short on numbers. Only a handful of individuals are even seen in the society, even though you’d expect their numbers to be in the thousands if not millions. Only the well-publicized democides have any representation: we have the Khmer Rouge, Red China, Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and the Holodomor.2 There is no mention of the Iranian Revolution, the desaparecidos of Chile, the civil war of El Salvador, apartheid, Timor Leste, the neverending conflict in the Middle East, or the barbarism of African warlords. (Darfur can be excused for not being mentioned because it was, sadly, a current event, and the Armenian genocide would have taken place too far in the past to really have any survivors still alive at the time of the story, but everything else is a grave omission.) In other words, if the average person hasn’t heard of it, then in Rummel’s world, it’s not worth mentioning. This man is a scholar on this issue. What’s the big idea?
Mind you, I wouldn’t want any more Very Special Flashback Sequences, but the victims of these other tragedies ought to be at least acknowledged.
However, we finally get our first inkling (aside from the summary) that there is time travel in this novel:
“We not only wish to remember the dead and through our Society build a testament to their souls, we also want to ensure that no human beings ever suffer this again. But not just ‘never again.’ We want it to be ‘never happened.’” (Ibid.)
Without any other context, John just thinks they’re delusional.
As it turns out, Tor’s groupies are fantastically wealthy. This was mentioned several times before, but the readers do not know the true extent of the Society’s wealth until now. The members are collectively worth over one trillion dollars. For context, the richest man on Earth is less than a third that wealthy. And it’s unlikely that any of them individually can rival Bill Gates or Warren Buffet… can they? Since they’re all refugees for the most part, would it even make sense for any of them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go from rags to riches like in a Horatio Alger story?3
Ach, my Sue-dometer’s going off!
Either Gu or Tor (the two are so similar that it’s difficult to tell them apart) exposit about the history of the Survivor’s Benevolent Society. We learn that it was founded in the aftermath of the First World War by one Jimmy Wilson. Even though he was likely born in the late nineteenth century, he used a diminutive form of his name in business. It wasn’t until President Carter that people were willing to take seriously a man who insisted on “Jimmy” even in professional matters.
Furthermore, Gu/Tor explains that Jimmy emigrated from Great Britain to the United States after the war in order to get a college degree. She says that he was right about his chances being better because he got into Columbia University. Thing is, though, the mere fact that he got accepted to an American college doesn’t mean that his chances of higher education were greater in America than in Britain. One does not follow the other. Upon graduation, he moved back to Britain (where his American degree would be worthless) to start his own bank, ten years after graduation. Um, ten years after World War One? About that…
Jimmy used his newfound riches (because Rummel is under the impression that the stock market is a path to free money) to found the grammatically challenged Survivor’s Benevolent Society. One of the requirements for membership is that one be committed to the Society’s goals absolutely, even above one’s own family members. This is sounding less like a non-profit organization and more like a cult.
Also, we learn that there are never more than two dozen members of the Society. How do they determine which genocide survivors are worthy? Do they hold auditions, and pick whomever has the biggest sob story?
There is some more infodumping about the League of Nations and the circumstances leading up to the Second World War, with Tor’s groupies claiming that their society was a part of it, and was able to influence the outcome of elections. Jimmy Wilson’s son Ed, who is still alive, expresses great disappointment in Neville Chamberlain, practically reciting the canard that he had appeased Hitler. In reality, Chamberlain’s poor reputation is undeserved: Britain was in no condition to fight Germany in 1938, and in reality Chamberlain bought his country valuable time to prepare. If Britain had gone all Leeroy Jenkins on Hitler, it would have been curb-stomped to death.
Then we meet an elderly member of the Society named Viktor Pynzenyk. As is expected by now, there is a real Viktor Pynzenyk. He is one of the people responsible for Ukraine’s recovery from being part of the Soviet Union. Rummel using his name makes it particularly obvious that he cannot come up with any foreign names on his own. John recalls meeting him when he was introduced to everybody, but he was never mentioned before, and will never be mentioned again after his Very Special Flashback Sequence.
Yep.
Our torture has only just begun. This exposition was only a slight reprieve.
“We also completely revised our approach. We decided to concentrate on finding a technology to help us fight war and democide—your term, John—and to seek a new international strategy. Clearly, international organizations and law didn’t work to prevent war and mass murder.” (page 86)
Two things:
Number one, notice how the text says that John Banks coined the term “democide”. In actual fact, Rudolph Rummel created the word. Yes, him. So I suppose this Freudian slip proves that John is indeed Rummel’s Self-Insert. It doesn’t get more obvious than this, folks.
Number two, note the last sentence. It should be obvious that Rummel has no faith in the ability of diplomacy to spread democracy and freedom, which kind of goes against the whole democratic peace theory. More sinisterly, I can’t help but read that as an endorsement of preemptive wars such as Vietnam or Iraq. U.S. involvement in Vietnam backfired stupendously, and Iraq is actually more unstable now. This would seem to suggest the opposite of what Rummel is implying.
It also turns out that Tor’s groupies are responsible for the Internet. I wish I were making this up; it’s just too funny. With all of the events they mastermind behind the scenes, and all the technology they spearhead, it’s a bit difficult to believe that a secret society such as this could remain hidden for long. More likely, Tor’s groupies are just taking credit for things they didn’t do. This second interpretation makes even more sense considering that the Society claims to have been responsible for preventing Mutually Assured Destruction from actually happening, AND for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, the next few paragraphs don’t cast such a good light on the intelligence of Tor’s groupies:
“Twenty years ago, one of our members was alerted to research on war that suggested the answer we sought. […] The finding was that democracies do not make war on each other. Of course, if correct, this would mean that we should promote democracy. (pages 87-88)
Two more things:
One, this implies that the idea for the democratic peace theory is twenty years old by the time these events take place. Not only is this incorrect in real life (the first paper on the subject dates to the 1960s) but John Banks is only 26 years old. If he made a lot of contribution to the theory in the world of the book as is implied, then this is an inconsistency.
Two, the way this is phrased implies that the Survivor’s Benevolent Society wasn’t particularly democratic until this point. Considering the backgrounds of the founder and original members, if they were committed to the ending of atrocities like the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges, wouldn’t they have been staunch democrats to begin with? It’s as if they didn’t understand how good democracy is until forty years afterward. What form of government did they support originally, philosopher-kingdoms?
Viktor collapses, but that doesn’t stop him from telling John all about what happened to his family during the Holodomor.
Here we go again…
John, by the way, claims to be able to remember the contents of these flashback sequences perfectly. So much for modesty.
The flashback itself is full of sentences that are awkwardly constructed. Surprisingly enough, this flashback is pretty short. All that happens in it is that Viktor’s family starves to death. Compared to the other flashbacks which went on and on about how evil the governments were, this is surprising, especially considering that the man responsible for the famine was none other than Stalin himself. This would have been an excellent opportunity for Rummel to continue preaching, but compared to the other flashbacks, it just seems brief, being only three pages long. Maybe Rummel began to bore himself with them.
Other than some exposition, nothing much happened in this chapter. But don’t celebrate just yet. We still have quite the way to go before the plot picks up.
Footnotes
1 These are not actual quotes.
2 Those last two haven’t had their flashback sequences yet.
3 Does anybody even read that guy anymore?
LoneWolf on 2 December 2012, 09:16 said:
Somehow, no matter what the cause of their original misery was, they all have developed a neoconservative viewpoint, even the members who escaped from Chile— oh wait, there aren’t any!
Good catch.
Only the well-publicized democides have any representation: we have the Khmer Rouge, Red China, Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and the Holodomor.
It’s quite… debatable whether Holodomor was a deliberate genocide or just a result of callous and careless Soviet policy, combined with natural factors. The argument for the latter seems good to me. Rummel pines for the opposite, though he does acknowledge that it was drought which brought famine to Ukraine in the first place.
Pryotra on 2 December 2012, 21:52 said:
He’s really not presenting the democratic peace theory very well. He just is assuming that everyone agrees with him, where, if this was something that someone who knew how to write had written, they would have presented the whole thing in a way that just seemed logical. As it is, I find myself looking for every single hole in his theory that I can think of.
swenson on 3 December 2012, 09:29 said:
I’ll be honest, for the first part of this chapter I’d entirely forgotten which was which…
No, they probably choose the wealthiest ones. Because, you know, poor survivors of democides (or people who have to go on living through them, and don’t get to magically escape through magicalness and end up fantastically wealthy in the United States) don’t matter much.
I completely agree with your point about this sentence undermining his Democratic Peace Theory. This time travel thing sounds like a small group making a decision for the entire world—an oligarchy determining history, that is, not the people choosing something together as in a democracy.
Hey now, that’s what Plato said was best, and that’s what I think we should all do! I think I’m going to invent my OWN political theory, the Benevolent Philosopher Dictator Peace Theory. After all, do we have any historical evidence of benevolent philosopher dictatorships going to war with one another? I thought not!
Also, just leavin’ this here…
LoneWolf on 3 December 2012, 09:33 said:
benevolent philosopher dictatorships
Do the “Enlightened Despots” of XVIII century count?
swenson on 3 December 2012, 11:11 said:
Ah, but they weren’t real benevolent philosopher whatchamacallits if they went to war with one another. That’s how I’m supposed to respond to any criticism of my theory, right?
Kyllorac on 3 December 2012, 11:17 said:
Best analogy is best.
LOL
Taku on 4 December 2012, 15:20 said:
That’s a very good point. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Honestly I’m surprised nobody’s brought that up yet.
Epke on 4 December 2012, 17:09 said:
You don’t see me toting being Emperor just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, do you? And lo, Taku won all the Internets.
I don’t get it. Is a letter from the IRS equivalent to… oh, a Howler?
Of course they are. Never mind that they seem to lack an education or come from a country (or countries) where education was sparse: they all made it to America (say it like they do in An American Tail) and through nothing but hard work, made such fantastic fortunes that boggles the mind. Never mind that wealthy foreigners are always on someone’s radar…
SMeyer did this mistake as well, with Rosalie’s story. There wasn’t a banker who would’ve thought of the Great Depression as “a rumour”. Banks closed left and right, damnit!
<throws hands up in the air and stomps out>
LoneWolf on 4 December 2012, 18:50 said:
You’re all just ‘jealous’ and are most likely Totalitarian Communist-Nazis who hate ‘War and Democide – never-again, by R. J. Rummel’. ‘War and Democide – never-again’ is a stunningly powerful chef-d’oeuvre that reveals the ‘dark depth of depravity’. R. J. Rummel is stunningly able to straddle between the genres of mainstream fiction and ‘time-travel science-fiction’ and his work shows in its complicated psychological proportions the true ‘solutions for humanity’ War and Democide – Never Again should be studied in every ‘School, University and Institute of higher learning’ around the world.
Brendan Rizzo on 4 December 2012, 18:54 said:
We haven’t even gotten to the worst of it yet. One of the wealthy businessmen who make up Tor’s groupies is from Nazi Germany. And I don’t mean a Holocaust survivor, I mean an actual German who used to be a police officer and was forced to help exterminate the Polish Jews. In the real world, if that news ever got out, his PR would be ruined and his business would go down the tubes, but that doesn’t happen here because he’s a Stu just like everyone else.
swenson on 4 December 2012, 23:13 said:
When we get to this part, I have a little quote I would like to respond to this with. But I’ll save it for then.