Thursday, August 13, 2009

All Is Grist for the Mill

I got into a lengthy and rather heated discussion on issues of race and privilege when I really should've been working on Children's Crusade, and as it rapidly went south, I realized that it's quite possible that some of these same patterns will come into play in the huge discussions after the Lankhidzist Revolution about the proper role of the various clones, especially those of Stalin's henchmen.

I can completely imagine Kolya Vornosky, faced with someone harping at him about the terrible crimes of Nikolai Yezhov and privilege derived from Yezhov's role in Stalin's crimes, firing back, "And what am I supposed to do about it?" And the other person becoming angry about his even asking, treating it as just this sort of affront, a presumtious demand based upon privilege, and assuming that he is acting in bad faith -- which is of course going to succeed only in getting his back up and ensuring that the discussion will devolve into an ugly confrontation that will resolve absolutely nothing and lead to even worse bad feelings.

The biggest question is whether this happens before or after his biggest and messiest political antic.