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Wild Speculation: Athas, the World Without Dragons
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<blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8430586" data-attributes="member: 6937590"><p>I'm leery to go further with this tangent, but am going to push back a little more. Please view this response as being in the spirit of friendly discussion.</p><p></p><p>The Genocide in the background of Dark Sun is evil, but that doesn't inherently make its perpetrators fascist. Other extremist ideologies also perpetrate this kind of atrocity (as, for example, in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor" target="_blank">Holodomor</a>). Similarly, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences" target="_blank">personality cults</a> are not specific to fascism. And, though some of the city states are characterized by fanatical devotion to their sorcerer king (principally Draj, maybe Urik and Gulg) that never struck me as specifically nationalistic.</p><p></p><p>The cruelty and badness of the city states seems to me to share a lot more with the god-kings of ancient Egypt, or of the <a href="https://faculty.uml.edu/ethan_spanier/teaching/documents/cp6.0assyriantorture.pdf" target="_blank">famously cruel Assyrians</a> (unfortunately, I couldn't find a Wikipedia page that quite captured it). We could say that the cruelty and badness of the city states is fascistic--they meet several of the characteristics of, for example, <a href="https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf" target="_blank">Umberto Eco's definition</a>--but there are also a lot of particularly fascistic things that they lack. They don't fetishize technology, they aren't populist, they don't have a cult of heroic death, they don't believe in action for action's sake.</p><p></p><p>Dark Sun does clearly depict its societies as authoritarian and bad--it is anti-authoritarian. But there are many many kinds of authoritarian badness. Fascism is only one specific kind and, to my thinking, it's best to call the things fascist which are <em>specifically</em> fascist rather than all cruel authoritarians.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Maybe I don't follow what is meant by anti-imperialism in this context. I know a lot less about, say, postcolonial theory than I do about the history of fascism.</p><p></p><p>To my understanding, imperialism is a system where an imperial metropole dominates and extracts resources from an imperial periphery. Not all systems of authority are imperial. Nation-states and city-states aren't, unless they control colonies. So it should be possible to be anti-authority without being anti-imperial like, for example, an anarchist is, correct?</p><p></p><p>I don't think it necessarily follows that conquest leads to imperialism either (in Dark Sun or in life). When Hamanu defeats Sielba and Yaramuke, he doesn't absorb the city as a territorial possession and treat its inhabitants as having a lower citizenship status like an imperial power would do. He kills everyone, lays waste to the city, leaves it as an abandoned ruin, and projects only limited territorial control over the area afterwards. What you describe with Tectuktitlay and Dregoth also seems more to me like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_power_(international_relations)" target="_blank">balance of power politics</a> prompted by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma" target="_blank">the security dilemma</a> than it does imperialism.</p><p></p><p>---edit---</p><p></p><p></p><p>I quibbled a bit about the definition of fascism in my response to [USER=6796468]@Steampunkette[/USER] above, mostly regarding things other than the cleansing wars, but when you put that fine a point on it--"a war of extermination to try and restore an idealized, ethnically pure past"--yeeesh, that's fair enough.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="squibbles, post: 8430586, member: 6937590"] I'm leery to go further with this tangent, but am going to push back a little more. Please view this response as being in the spirit of friendly discussion. The Genocide in the background of Dark Sun is evil, but that doesn't inherently make its perpetrators fascist. Other extremist ideologies also perpetrate this kind of atrocity (as, for example, in the [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor']Holodomor[/URL]). Similarly, [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences']personality cults[/URL] are not specific to fascism. And, though some of the city states are characterized by fanatical devotion to their sorcerer king (principally Draj, maybe Urik and Gulg) that never struck me as specifically nationalistic. The cruelty and badness of the city states seems to me to share a lot more with the god-kings of ancient Egypt, or of the [URL='https://faculty.uml.edu/ethan_spanier/teaching/documents/cp6.0assyriantorture.pdf']famously cruel Assyrians[/URL] (unfortunately, I couldn't find a Wikipedia page that quite captured it). We could say that the cruelty and badness of the city states is fascistic--they meet several of the characteristics of, for example, [URL='https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf']Umberto Eco's definition[/URL]--but there are also a lot of particularly fascistic things that they lack. They don't fetishize technology, they aren't populist, they don't have a cult of heroic death, they don't believe in action for action's sake. Dark Sun does clearly depict its societies as authoritarian and bad--it is anti-authoritarian. But there are many many kinds of authoritarian badness. Fascism is only one specific kind and, to my thinking, it's best to call the things fascist which are [I]specifically[/I] fascist rather than all cruel authoritarians. Maybe I don't follow what is meant by anti-imperialism in this context. I know a lot less about, say, postcolonial theory than I do about the history of fascism. To my understanding, imperialism is a system where an imperial metropole dominates and extracts resources from an imperial periphery. Not all systems of authority are imperial. Nation-states and city-states aren't, unless they control colonies. So it should be possible to be anti-authority without being anti-imperial like, for example, an anarchist is, correct? I don't think it necessarily follows that conquest leads to imperialism either (in Dark Sun or in life). When Hamanu defeats Sielba and Yaramuke, he doesn't absorb the city as a territorial possession and treat its inhabitants as having a lower citizenship status like an imperial power would do. He kills everyone, lays waste to the city, leaves it as an abandoned ruin, and projects only limited territorial control over the area afterwards. What you describe with Tectuktitlay and Dregoth also seems more to me like [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_power_(international_relations)']balance of power politics[/URL] prompted by [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma']the security dilemma[/URL] than it does imperialism. ---edit--- I quibbled a bit about the definition of fascism in my response to [USER=6796468]@Steampunkette[/USER] above, mostly regarding things other than the cleansing wars, but when you put that fine a point on it--"a war of extermination to try and restore an idealized, ethnically pure past"--yeeesh, that's fair enough. [/QUOTE]
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