Choice of Rebels Part 1 WIP thread

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An ignorant mob venting its anger at a corrupt and dysfunctional government can cause great damage to important infrastructure, often hurting themselves greatly in the process, regardless of whether a caste system exists or not. IMHO, you’re reading the wrong lesson into this. Smashing a caste system will not in and of itself prevent disasters like this in the future, in fact your Maoist revolution will in all probability precipitate several of them.

The sheer scale of the death and destruction your revolution will bring leaves me horrified. I hate to say it, but far fewer helots will die, never mind the aristo’s and everyone else, if the current regime continues, terrible as it is, than if the maoist-style pursuit of your seemingly impossible ideals succeeds in bringing the existing system crashing down.

Uggh. Stalin and Mao between them, starved tens of millions to death, and most of those tens of millions starved to death were the very same peasants they were supposedly attempting to uplift.

Are you talking about socialism in the classic sense, as defined by Marx? wherein there is no individual ownership of land or enterprise and which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be a complete failure? Or are you talking about the more modern European-style “socialism” of today? which as part of a social contract in a democratic society actually embraces capitalism and private enterprise then taxes them in order to pay for a generous safety net? The former is impossible, and the latter is probably about as likely as turning Iraq into Finland. :stuck_out_tongue:

As for Mohism, that strikes me as easily corrupted since it idealizes an authoritarian monarchy that the people do not have the right to question. The societal values of frugality and social responsibility turn into an excellent method for a tyrannical government to justify the extraction of even more in the way of taxes from the peasant laborers slaving away at the bottom of the Mohist hierarchy. I don’t see how this is any better than the Shayardene monarchy of old.

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No, however thoroughly smashing it is a prerequisite for ever getting those on the bottom of it anywhere near a fair deal in whatever comes after.
Mao, Stalin and various other communists movements, @Havenstone can probably tell us all about the Afghan one, whatever their many failings, did succeed marvelously at smashing ancient feudal caste systems to the point where returning to them was no longer possible.

It’s not primarily a utilistic question about how many will die, progress will cost what it will cost, it’s about making sure that whatever comes after is more equal for all and free of the Xthonic caste system.
Progress in the Hegemony is not achieved by incrementalism that can all too easily backslide, like what’s happening in India, or meekly accepting whatever fate (and zero income, zero influence position) the aristocracy deigns to consign one to afterwards, it can only be achieved and made lasting by drastic measures.

Didn’t I say I had to find a way to be smarter about the famines than Chairman Mao?

It will take a blending of philosophical currents, not merely adopting one school of philosophy wholesale to come up with some workable theoretical concepts, still I do think something like Mohism can begin to provide a conceptual framework about how to transition society away from the decadent Hegemony into something more equal, and yes greater equality comes at the cost of redistributing the wealth, so it makes some sense that it would look more frugal and austere compared to the heights and excesses of the Hegemony.
And, Yes everything can be corrupted, however the current Xthonic framework doesn’t even try to provide things like equality (under the law), justice and a decent standard of living for most of the population.

Then again Marxist socialism has never had access to functional magic, or computers for that matter, both potentially great tools to organise your resources better. Who knows maybe the existing merchants guilds can provide a model to transform into some sort of syndicalism.
The answer will be that it will most likely depend on what my character can cobble together from in-game sources, however since the game-world, or at least our part of it, has almost no experience with functional, one person one vote, democracy it will likely come out on the more authoritarian side.
Ultimately the truth is that the exact form it takes will, inevitably depend on too may variables that are as of yet unknown.

But if Hera could impose her vision of society on most of the realms centuries ago through magic then there’s still some chance my character could repeat that feat to impose a different society.

It remains to be seen what that benefit is exactly and I doubt helots will derive equal benefits from it compared to aristocratic characters.

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I can only speak to Afghanistan a bit and their caste system, such as one existed that could apply to the entire country (I don’t think so) is virtually unchanged. The Pashtuns in particular are a tradition oriented people. I would say the only major change is one of recent making where the imams and those of religiously significant heritage could whip up more support than the traditional hereditary titles like khan or hetman. Still a village elder will normally originate from a family traditionally in leadership. At the same time governance of an Afghan tribe and of people as staunchly opposed to anyone telling them what to do as the Pastuns is largely by consensus.

Marxism was a bad fit for Afghanistan to begin with imho, and other than the destruction it wrought, left little cultural impression.

I’m sure @Havenstone can point out where I’m full of crap but that was my impression.

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Huh. That’s rather suboptimal. Though really, with hindsight, I should have realized it myself - since “set var -x” actually subtracts x rather than setting it to negative x, the interaction with negative values is clearly quite limited.

I suppose, given that, the next logical approach would be something along the lines of what you’ve said; initialize the variables at something other than zero, say 10, then set them lower when the person joins the band normally, and higher if they’re imprisoned or dead. Or vice versa, of course. Then you could check for presence with s_rel < 10, and imprisonment with s_rel = 15 (or whatever value).

Not that making such a change at this juncture would be likely to be a good use of time.

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Yes, a “not yet thanks” that emphasizes that the MC doesn’t decline politely but wants a stronger confirmation, possibly implying that Linos should look out for more similar-thinking priests.

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In Afghanistan it was more feudal rule that was smashed than the caste system, despite some nostalgia for it among certain elements of the Afghan population, to this day, I believe, there’s no going back to “friendly feudalism” now.
Still the caste system in Afghanistan, in so far as it existed beyond mere tribalism, was I’ll admit hardly the worst, unlike in India where there is a history of lower caste people trying (often unsuccessfully) to convert to Islam, or less often Buddhism, just to escape (from their place in) the caste system.

Well, maybe not Marxism per se, just the heavily centralised Soviet variety, it would seem more easy to convert a society with strong tribal elements to a less centralised form of socialism with more focus on the countryside, as Afghanistan also didn’t have a particularly significant industrial proletariat.

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3310

Feudal authority was as tenuous as any historical central authority in Afghanistan. In some ways you can draw comparisons to the current system and Afghanistan’s monarchy.

I would call it typical of Pashtun tribal politics to select a morally acceptable but militarily weak leader to provide enough unity for collective defense but not so much as to have will imposed from Kabul in the countryside. Many in Helmand would agree that the President of Afghanistan is no more than the “Mayor of Kabul.” In an attempt to centralize the country the system is something like “electoral feudalism.” The national election determines the president who then appoints the provincial governors who in turn appoint the district governors. So executive power (on paper) in the entire country for the most part flows entirely from the president. Now out in places like Marjah what an appointment from Kabul really means is a matter of consensus and who has the most Kalashnikovs…

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3311

On feudal authority in pre-Communist Afghanistan, this article from 1981 is worth reading, even if it’s very much of its time and ideological niche:

http://www.marxists.de/middleast/neale/afghan.htm

My impression is that the khans used to have a lot more power – many were unchallengable in their fiefs – and the Communist revolution (and even more so its chaotic aftermath) was devastating for that traditional power structure. It’s true that the structure of authority in Afghanistan remains local rather than centralized, but the decades of civil war meant that those khans who survived the PDPA’s purges and land reforms were suddenly vulnerable to any local shopkeeper’s son who went off to university to study engineering, found some ideology and US-funded guns, and came back as an Islamist militia leader.

This left the country far more fragmented; while the old system didn’t have a strong central authority, it did have a center with greater capacity to manage the local constellation of traditional authorities, which post-1979 governments have struggled to duplicate.

To take Helmand as an example, until the 1980s the Akhundzada family were just a household of no-account mullahs from Musa Qala, barely worthy of the notice of the khans of the Zamindawar area. But by turning themselves into the local opium kingpins, they rolled back the old khans and (eventually) pushed the government out of the big US-funded irrigation systems. The khans fled into the arms of Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, the Akhundzadas’ main competition… but the Hizb-i-Islami leaders in Helmand were not mainly drawn from the old feudal upper caste. As often as not they were the aforementioned shopkeepers’ kids.

@idnlun, the people who suffered most under the rule of the khans were generally those who suffered most under the anarchy that followed. It didn’t take long for a weary nostalgia to set in – similar to how, post-Taliban, people soon reminisced about how secure they felt under Taliban rule (much as they had chafed under it in other ways).

In XOR, you’ll have to keep the anarchy threshold low if you don’t want to inspire nostalgia among all classes – even, potentially, the helotry – for the good old days when the shames and dangers were predictable and life was less characterized by terror, pain, and humiliation. (Yes, I think anarchy is even worse – for most people, most of the time – than the nightmare totalitarian state I’ve written for XOR.)

For more on the Afghanistan stuff, I see that used copies of my book are still plentifully available for a penny plus postage on Amazon. :slight_smile:

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The the idea that the helots would be nostalgic for the former order is going to need some development imho. I just don’t see it. They are at the point where the only thing they have to lose is their life and since their fate is already so horrible I don’t see how dying in battle or of starvation could be worse. Now it is possible for the order that replaces it to be worse “a la Astapor,” and I’m sure the lot of a city or household helot, depending on their owner, is probably much better than what we have seen so far, still I don’t see how the multitudes of country helots will be particularly disenchanted with watching the world burn for a bit.

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With regards to Afghanistan - the history, culture and religion of that region goes back to before Alexander the Great and has been a secular/religious mishmash of people that all add to the mix to make their mark but it will be uniquely its own. There were settlements not touched for hundreds of years before the Soviet regime in Kabul and even after all the intervention since the Afghan mix will not be reflective of any outside power.

@Havenstone says it long-winded and I say it concise but we say the same thing.

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With regard to Afghanistan though don’t you think the drug trade has had a more significant and long lasting impact than the communists did? I always felt that the power structures were never tied to the piece of dirt the people happened to be living on. They seemed to transcend geography.

Probably just Marjah talking…

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Vivan las cadenas! That’s what Spanish commoners shouted to the Napoleon army that in fact we’re giving more rights and democracy to commoners. But we didn’t give a crap and defend until almost last poor people a regime that makes them poor. Nobles were hiding or helping french. Except a few that were elevated to a hero status even nowadays. So It’s really possible Helots fight for a regime that oppressed them. Religion helps that. And the fact they feel the order is received from god. In Spain we rebeled against Napoleon for pure stubborn nacionalism. We preferred being oppressed by our people than being oppressed more fairly by strangers

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3316

The drug trade has always held that position but what the communists destroyed was the basic foundation to culture and society that had existed since Alexander.

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But in this case the French are the Karagons.

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@Zolataya, well, I certainly won’t argue with the long-winded. :slight_smile: But I’m allergic to analysis of Afghanistan that traces too many things back to Genghis Khan, let alone Alexander. (The coming of Islam was no mere tweak to the pre-existing culture, for one thing). It’s a country that combines tremendously isolated mountain areas with lowlands, valleys, and passes that have been anything but isolated – constantly engaged with the outside world, not infrequently conquering it. (And some of the bits you’d expect to be most isolated have in fact been seats of regional empire, notably the inexplicable Ghorids).

The Afghan mix is constantly affecting and affected by outside powers. It’s true that no outside power will remake Afghanistan purely in its own image; but of how many places in the world is the opposite actually true?

@cascat07, we’ll just have to see whether I can depict the starvation, pervasive insecurity, and “man is wolf to man” of anarchy in a way that makes it plausibly worse than being at the bottom of a caste system that eventually harvests your blood.

Edit: I think the Communists created the vacuum within which the opium trade could boom as it did. And I think in most bits of the country, the drug trade has not been as fundamental a shaping force as it has been in e.g. Helmand, Balkh, and Nangarhar, whereas the PDPA purges managed to reach (and piss off) a remarkably high percentage of rural Afghanistan.

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Well, this Helots aren’t Spanish people lol. They would be considered too shy and not enough blood thirsty. But few people could be as salvage as my compatriots were. we make Napoleon considered us a inferno, those Helots are more peaceful

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Haha yeah Afghanistan hasn’t changed since Alexander and Genghis Khan…

There was something in there about some monotheistic religion I think… probably not important!

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The key word here being “plausibly”. Everyone’s going to have different opinions on what’s worse: a free, but dog-eat-dog, starving scrap of a life, or a predicable and quiet death and oppression, where everyone pretends to look the other way.

Like human morality and psychology, there’s no real right answer. Just what it is. Which, in the case of the MC, is piss. Both options are piss. Everything is piss. That’s humans for you.

War, fighting and rebellion simultaneously bring out both the best and worst in people, human society and nature, always.

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@cascat07 - That isn’t what I said. But history did not begin in 1979 in Afghanistan and your discarding of things prior to the Islamic invasions and events pre-modern lead to mistakes which we are currently experiencing with NATO and the US right now, today. Its the same type of mistakes the British originally made in the years of their empire building.

@Havenstone - It has not happened but in a few places; where it has it has been era-changing. The Ghorids and the earlier Ghaznavid expansion in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries have all their roots and backgrounds to give them the expansionist powers they had. Same with your current Overlords. They are not going to “win” just because they have air power like some in this thread believe they will. At least I see nuance. Perhaps the others in this thread are right, I guess I’ll see.

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I think Afghanistan’s ancient history is important for those trying to develop a cultural understanding of Afghans and their modern motivations, but I think it pales in importance to recent history and current events for those trying to understand and do something about what is happening on the ground today.

NATO, the West, and the Afghan government’s pooing in the bed has nothing to do with an insufficient understanding of Afghanistan’s ancient history. It has everything to do with schizophrenic policy and projects and an overall lack of “give a shit.”

As to XoR I don’t think therugy assures victory I just don’t think a rebellion can succeed beyond the banditry and criminality stage without it.

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