SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! Mesa and South Africa

Okay, I think it's fair to state that no analogy is ever perfect, but it seems to me that Mr Weber drew quite heavily on what conditions were like at the height of the police state years (the late 1980s) in Apartheid South Africa, when he wrote Cauldron of Ghosts.

I've always wondered what the Security Cabinet's meetings had to be like during those years, when it became clear that the situation in the black townships were becoming out of control, and the scenes of the Mesan Directorate's meetings remind me very much of how I imagined those meetings to have been.

Plus, of course, the seccie neighbourhoods are deeply reminiscent of the conditions in our townships during the height of Apartheid - the abject poverty, general despair and desperation and the deep anger and bitterness.

Not really. In the RSA the ratios were far worse.

hanuman--I think that since the book has been out over a month now, Spoilers are not necessary--you can check with Duckk or the Forum rules thread.

Now, as to your comments...

The dyspeptic kzt (well, he's been sounding that way to me for several weeks now... ) is quite right, RSA is about 10% White/Asian, 10% 'Coloured' and 80% black, against Mesa's 40% citizens, 10% seccies and 50% slaves (IIRC--do not have reference in front of me).

Still, the point you're making on 'what does the leadership do when faced with unrest by the masses' is well-taken. Fortunately we have a long history all over the planet of what they do.

It usually is either 'bread-and-circuses' or 'beat them down and keep them there'--sometimes both at the same time.

It is when neither of those two techniques no longer work that the leadership either is creative (and daring) enough to make the turnover (much like RSA) or tries to hang on to the last (which usually ends messily).

Plenty of historical examples of the latter, much fewer of the former. 2,000 years of learning probably won't change that, so things (especially on the Protectorate and Verge planets) is going to be very interesting for the Transtellars and their followers.....

Hutch wrote:hanuman--I think that since the book has been out over a month now, Spoilers are not necessary--you can check with Duckk or the Forum rules thread.

Now, as to your comments...

The dyspeptic kzt (well, he's been sounding that way to me for several weeks now... ) is quite right, RSA is about 10% White/Asian, 10% 'Coloured' and 80% black, against Mesa's 40% citizens, 10% seccies and 50% slaves (IIRC--do not have reference in front of me).

Still, the point you're making on 'what does the leadership do when faced with unrest by the masses' is well-taken. Fortunately we have a long history all over the planet of what they do.

It usually is either 'bread-and-circuses' or 'beat them down and keep them there'--sometimes both at the same time.

It is when neither of those two techniques no longer work that the leadership either is creative (and daring) enough to make the turnover (much like RSA) or tries to hang on to the last (which usually ends messily).

Plenty of historical examples of the latter, much fewer of the former. 2,000 years of learning probably won't change that, so things (especially on the Protectorate and Verge planets) is going to be very interesting for the Transtellars and their followers.....

Oh, okay. I'll keep that in mind.

As for my comments, I'm well aware of the ratio difference between Mesa and South Africa. It's just that the same GENERAL circumstances pertained - a small class of economically and politically privileged citizens and a very large class of non-citizens with no political freedoms or rights whatsoever, who are deliberately kept at a level of poverty that's meant to keep them so focused on day-to-day survival that they don't have either the time or energy to agitate for political liberation.

Of course, that didn't work down here, as the leaders of the liberation movement were clever enough to highlight that political freedom will inevitably lead to improved living conditions. And of course, the South African security forces never cracked down on black unrest quite as brutally as happened on Mesa, which is one of the reasons we managed to achieve such a relatively peaceful transition from minority to majority rule.

Still, it seems to me that a basic comparison is in order. The Security Cabinet and the rest of the National Party leadership had to get quite desperate towards the end, especially in light of Botha's intransigence. By the time things got so bad that only heavily-armoured military vehicles could enter most townships, he was STILL insisting that if only the white regime cracked down hard enough "the blacks" would quickly learn their place, and to hell with world opinion. Kind of sounds like the Manpower representative on the Mesan Directorate.

By the way, I get your point that this kind of thing has happened numerous times throughout history, and will happen many more times in future, but it's a situation I actually lived through, so I have an actual experience I can draw upon for comparative purposes.

Several points here.

First, the case of the dog that (didn't) bark in the night. We haven't seen any slaves on Mesa. None. Zip. Nada. The only slaves we've seen are off Mesa in Manpower's clammy hands, or escaped slaves on Torch, plus a smattering elsewhere.

I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm saying that drawing conclusions about what conditions on Mesa for genetic slaves is similar to speculating on what style of dancing gown the angels on the head of a pin wear. All we know is that they aren't treated as well as the ones on Darius.

I suspect a better analogy might be the old U.S., before the War to Protect Slaveholder's Rights. South Africa wasn't a slave culture. It was a culture with a whole lot of second and third class citizens.

JohnRoth wrote:Several points here.

First, the case of the dog that (didn't) bark in the night. We haven't seen any slaves on Mesa. None. Zip. Nada. The only slaves we've seen are off Mesa in Manpower's clammy hands, or escaped slaves on Torch, plus a smattering elsewhere.

I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm saying that drawing conclusions about what conditions on Mesa for genetic slaves is similar to speculating on what style of dancing gown the angels on the head of a pin wear. All we know is that they aren't treated as well as the ones on Darius.

I suspect a better analogy might be the old U.S., before the War to Protect Slaveholder's Rights. South Africa wasn't a slave culture. It was a culture with a whole lot of second and third class citizens.

Huh. South African blacks might just as well have been slaves, for all the freedom they had to make choices regarding their own lives.

I understand what you're saying, although on Mesa it was the seccie population that took the lead in the uprising, which is comparable to the events in South Africa. But your comparison also works, although I should mention that the abolition movement was primarily a Northern political movement. Also, the major cause of the Civil War was the question of whether states had the right to secede from the Union or not, not whether they could practice slavery or not. The latter was ALWAYS secondary to the former.

Perhaps not appropriate or even somewhat accurate. How about "The War Of Northern Aggression"? Or, as I was taught years ago, ... "The War Between The States". HB of CJ (old coot) Lt.Cm.

While unpaid slaves in the South could NOT quit or move away, neither in fact could most if not all poor immigrants who worked in the many various Capitalist "company towns" of the North.

Both had about the same general lifestyle and expectations. The slaves did get some "veterinarian care". The poor immigrants received none. A slave did have great value. The immigrants none. Both systems sucked. Which one was worse? I dunno.

Pick your poison. FWIW, economically, things were better for South Africa in past years under the former government than they are today. Less crime also. Kinda makes you wonder, does it not? Mesa does have a horrible system. Wonder what will happen.

hanuman wrote:Huh. South African blacks might just as well have been slaves, for all the freedom they had to make choices regarding their own lives.

You could always leave. But actually there was extensive (illegal IIRC) immigration into RSF by people from the surrounding countries. Not that RSF was a wonderful place for them under Apartheid, but it apparently beat the alternatives of living in their native Nambia, Mozambique, etc.

kzt wrote:

hanuman wrote:Huh. South African blacks might just as well have been slaves, for all the freedom they had to make choices regarding their own lives.

You could always leave. But actually there was extensive (illegal IIRC) immigration into RSF by people from the surrounding countries. Not that RSF was a wonderful place for them under Apartheid, but it apparently beat the alternatives of living in their native Nambia, Mozambique, etc.

I'm white, btw. I assume that first 'you' was a generic one.

No, South African blacks could not always leave. They were under quite severe restrictions wrt the jobs they could do, where they could live, and how much they could earn.

Also, there were some rather stringent travel restrictions applicable to them - ANY police officer could stop ANY black person at ANY time and demand to see their pass document, which contained all relevant information regarding their so-called 'homeland citizenship', identity, registered place of work, and permitted travel zones. If they were found outside those travel zones, they could be arrested and imprisoned without trial for up to three months (at first, although somewhere in the seventies it was changed to six months, if I remember correctly).

Now, given that the vast majority of black labourers were paid below subsistence-level wages (a consequence of the migrant labour system, about which more in the next paragraph), with which they had to support not only themselves but ALSO their families, anything that landed them in jail for that long meant that they would lose their jobs and therefore their ability to support their families, which was already difficult enough. Sure, towards the end of Apartheid those laws became somewhat less stringent, but during the height of 'Great Apartheid' very very few black people had the liberty to just pack up and leave.

Okay, as for the migrant labour system. Back in 1867 when diamonds were discovered in Griqualand West (the triangle between the Orange and Vaal rivers), the mine magnates (of which Cecil John Rhodes was the biggest bigshot of all) realized that white mineworkers commanded too high wages to leave much of a profit margin. At the time there wasn't much they could do about that. However, shortly after gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, Rhodes became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. By then he was already one of the leading mine owners at the new goldfields, which required deep shaft mining to extract the gold ore. Once again, this made the employment of white miners so costly as to make gold mining almost too expensive to be worth the effort.

As a solution, Rhodes came up with a rather clever (evil, but clever nonetheless) solution, namely what became known as the 'hut tax'. Essentially, the Cape colonial government levied a tax on every single hut in the Transkei (that part of the far eastern Cape that was reserved for the Xhosa-speaking Southern Nguni peoples), to be paid in cash, not goods. And since the traditional economy of the Nguni peoples was not yet integrated into the cash economy of the rest of the Colony (it was a cattle-based barter system), it meant that young men from the Transkei were forced to seek employment en masse - at the only place that was hiring huge numbers of manual labourers, the gold mines. They were paid partly in cash, but not nearly enough to support themselves while living at the mines AND pay their taxes back home, which meant that they were forced to take loans from moneylenders to pay those taxes. That drew most black mineworkers into an ever-worsening spiral of debt, as they had to make yet more loans to pay back their original loans AND pay their annual taxes. Which meant, of course, that they remained on the mines for longer and longer periods of time in order to earn more money. Some mineworkers managed to spend as little as a week or two only back home with their families, and because they earned so little, it left their families having to struggle to support themselves off an increasingly overpopulated and over-exploited land.

It was a horrible system that guaranteed those black mineworkers' continued debt slavery and laid the basis for many of the later policies that were intended to ensure self-replicating pools of cheap labour for white-owned industries in the cities. It also caused a severe dislocation of family life, with rampant crime, substance abuse and other social diseases - both back in the Transkei and on the Rand.

So, yeah, black South Africans WERE slaves in all but name. They had virtually no leeway to determine their own futures, little recourse to the courts to protest their exploitation, no voice whatsoever in the political process, and of those who did not collaborate with the Nationalist regime only a relative handful ever achieved anything close to upward mobility.

HB of CJ wrote:Pick your poison. FWIW, economically, things were better for South Africa in past years under the former government than they are today. Less crime also. Kinda makes you wonder, does it not? Mesa does have a horrible system. Wonder what will happen.

Were they really? The country's GNP is four or five times the size it was under the Nationalist regime. The budget is also much larger, with a very low budget deficit. Yes, our economic growth rate is very low (only 2.5% or so), but it is still growing, which was NOT the case for at least a decade before 1994. Yes, unemployment is still very high (25% or so), but that is still ten percentage points lower than was the case in 1994. Our national debt is under 100% of GDP. Our current account is in the black most years. These days we have a rudimentary social security web in place.

That is not to say that we do not have problems, but anyone who expects twenty years to be even remotely long enough to wipe out the impact of 350 years of institutionalized conquest, oppression and exploitation, is operating under a delusion. Remember, these days the government actually provides services to ALL South Africans, rather than just a small minority.

Perhaps not, but in fact Roth's name *is* accurate,
and *very much* appropriate.
Although I phrase it
"War For Slaveholders' Privileges" not "Rights"
because they did not have those "rights,"
they stole them!

The "aggression" that began the war was
the "Firing On Fort Sumter,"
and we all know that the CSA did that.

There were soldiers, and units, from every state in
the Union Army, and a few hundred "Northerners" in
the Confederate Army, so you were taught *lies.*
They are obvious lies, easily shown up,
and nobody over 25 years old has any excuse for believing
them, much less quoting & signing his own name to them,
no matter how much he ought to have been able to trust
the people who taught him those lies.

If you doubt whether immigrants had it worse than slaves,
simply consider how many immigrants volunteered to
become slaves, compared to the number of slaves who tried
against all odds to escape!
Hint: the number of volunteers for slavery = *NONE!*
Duh!

Old Coot, you are Old Enuf To Know Better!

Howard "True Map-addict" Wilkins, Pointy-Headed Liberal

HB of CJ wrote:Perhaps not appropriate or even somewhat accurate. How about "The War Of Northern Aggression"? Or, as I was taught years ago, ... "The War Between The States". HB of CJ (old coot) Lt.Cm.

While unpaid slaves in the South could NOT quit or move away, neither in fact could most if not all poor immigrants who worked in the many various Capitalist "company towns" of the North.

Both had about the same general lifestyle and expectations. The slaves did get some "veterinarian care". The poor immigrants received none. A slave did have great value. The immigrants none. Both systems sucked. Which one was worse? I dunno.

Pick your poison. FWIW, economically, things were better for South Africa in past years under the former government than they are today. Less crime also. Kinda makes you wonder, does it not? Mesa does have a horrible system. Wonder what will happen.