isaac_newton wrote:Dr. Arroway wrote:Quite a few points raised, and even by RFC himself, which again makes me guilty of "robbing" him of precious time
Sorry folks and RFC (even though I'm sure you follow the boards out of passion!).
First of all: maybe I should have chosen my words differently. SNIP
I have to say that I have some sympathy with Dr A, even given what RFC has said.
I'd point toward Amos Parnell and Eloise P in particular.
Throughout the cannon, AP is seen as a good 'soldier' and a good man. However I'd recently re-read OBS and the prologue in particular and it rather struck me that he was clearly laying out how to conquer other systems large and small for the benefit of the Peeps, knowing full well what he was delivering those populations to and showing no particular remorse or regret.
This is the topmost soldier and right at the top of the Legislaterist tree... if not him then who else could have changed things.
I know that he paid a bitter price later on, but all sides seem to highly respect him even before that was known, and I can't quite see that's right.
On Eloise - well I'd just point out that she was a highly regarded [by St Just] & feared State Sec commissioner. Given the competition amongst that group, that seems to suggest that she must have willingly purged many navel people and their entire families, and probably many other innocents in the general population, committing them to pain, grief and death.
I do like her, but... somehow that seems to be glossed over. I try to think of similar cases, say among the SS or the NKVD, and wonder if we would think the same?
I don't think that you can put Parnell and Pritchart in the same basket, for several reasons.
Let's look at Parnell first. Parnell was the senior uniformed officer of the Peoples Navy, a member of a prominent Legislaturalist family, and the architect of at least two decades worth of "Conquistador" campaigns. He was very, very good at his job — he's the guy who got a huge chunk of his fleet out of a trap set by none other than Hamish Alexander at Yeltsin's Star — and he was still in a sufficient state of shock following the opening campaign that he didn't mount any credible resistance to Rob S Pierre and the Committee of Public Safety.
Before he was discovered alive on Cerberus, he was respected by his adversaries not because he was considered to be a great humanitarian, but because he was acknowledged as a skilled and capable strategist and tactician. During World War II, many Allied commanders respected Sepp Dietrich as a combat commander despite the fact that he was a member of the Nazi party and a personal confidant of Adolf Hitler. That doesn't mean they liked him, that they trusted him, or that they had any intention of inviting him to high tea anytime soon. It simply means that they recognized his capabilities and regarded them with the respect — and caution — they deserved.
After Parnell was discovered alive on Cerberus, as you say, he'd paid a terrible price, and he'd learned several terrible lessons. Note that even then, he couldn't "go over" to Manticore, but neither could he return to the People's Republic before Saint-Just's death. Whether he could return now, to the restored Republic, is an interesting question and one which has not been explored in the books. However, it would be a mistake to equate the Manties' current respect for his willingness to publicly denounce and oppose Saint-Just and StateSec — thereby making himself a target for assassination by StateSec — and to admit what amounted to war crimes committed by the People's Republic with their attitude towards him while he was still commanding the Peoples Navy.
Now, let's look at Pritchart. She wasn't named to her position for denouncing lots and lots of naval personnel. For that matter, she wasn't named to her position for denouncing anyone. She was considered a prize catch by Saint-Just because of her pre-Pierre affiliation with the Aprilists. The Aprilists were considered a "terrorist organization" by the Legislaturalists, but were well known for the selectivity of their targeting, which eschewed terrorist attacks on civilian or "soft" targets. They were, if you will, the "white knights" of the anti-Legislaturalist Resistance, and Pritchart was the most respected of their commanders during that time period. Think of her as the equivalent of one of the senior leaders of a successful national liberation movement who managed to conduct her war without atrocities or acts of overt terrorism and then think about how the citizens of her nation would have regarded her following the success of the liberation movement. (Perhaps a workable [although very imperfect] parallel would have been to compare her and Saint-Just to Trotsky and Lavrentiy Beria.) The point, however, is that because of how deeply she was respected by the majority of the People's Republic, Saint-Just wanted her onboard with StateSec in order to "legitimize" the SS.
Pritchart, unlike some of her more dewy-eyed fellows who believed the Promised Day had arrived, realized from the very beginning who and what Oscar Saint-Just actually was and also recognized that Pierre was probably going to resort to terror tactics. She certainly realized that the Navy had had nothing to do with the attacks on Hereditary President Harris and the rest of the Legislaturalist government but that because Pierre had fastened the guilt on the Navy, he was necessarily going to be forced to completely break the old officer corps and rebuild it with one firmly under his thumb. So when Saint-Just began "courting" her in the days immediately after the coup, she was wise enough to allow herself to be recruited. The reason she ended up as a people's commissioner in the Navy was because (1) Saint-Just genuinely believed that she was in his corner (i.e., he trusted her) and (2) the Navy quickly realized it could trust her to at least get things right, which was more than it ever trusted the vast majority of Saint-Just's people's commissioners. Because she was willing to work with the Navy, units to which she was attached had much higher success rates than other units, which meant that she didn't need to denounce naval officers or ratings to satisfy Saint-Just that she was Doing Something. The fact that she and Javier Giscard already knew one another before the coup had a lot to do with her request for service as a people's commissioner in the Navy in the first place.
This is not to say that Pritchart never denounced anyone. If, however, Saint-Just had ever carefully analyzed exactly who she was denouncing, he would have discovered that the vast majority of them — indeed, all of them — were the scum of the earth. Quite a few of them would have made good StateSec enforcers in their own rights. In fact, almost a quarter of everyone Pritchart denounced — with meticulous documentation — were StateSec personnel. In other words, she was using her position to protect and shield men and women she knew were honorable members of the military while simultaneously systematically attacking and eliminating the worst abusers of the new system.
One of the main reason she got away with it was that for all of his willingness to resort to terror and his amorality where "pragmatism" was concerned, Oscar Saint-Just was actually something of a Puritan. I believe that Victor Cachat has remarked on this at least once or twice in the books, but the fact that Pritchart was busting StateSec personnel didn't bother Saint-Just because he recognized that the people she was turning in were guilty of personally abusing their positions of power.
I trust you can see why I don't think that Parnell and Pritchart fit in the same pigeonhole either in their own lives or in the fashion in which they are regarded by their previous enemies.
)
But then, that's authorial privilege. 
