[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

importance. In the Earthmanist Culture, where again only the military myth-the
Vegan War-has survived in any detail, the opposition seems to be of even less
importance in that the myth seems to have been overwhelmingly military rather
than priestly. Even so, its purpose would seem to be primarily religious in
that it has evidently developed as a means of relieving the Earthmen of a
great burden of guilt.
The myth makes it appear that a small number of Earthmen were unaccountably
able to prevail over a vast and enormously powerful "tyranny" which deserved
to be completely destroyed. The fact must surely be that the Vegan
Civilization was in the last stages of its Final Political Form with the
concomitant "enfeeblement ... of the imperial machinery against young peoples
eager for spoil, or alien conquerors" [Spengler, I, Table iii; cf. the table
with this essay]. Though outnumbered a million to one in total population, the
Earthmen may well have been able to muster nearly as many fighting men as the
Vegans at any given place and time, and they must have come into interstellar
space with superior weapons or tactics or both-and with ferocity such as the
Vegans had perhaps never experienced but for which there are precedents
aplenty in the history of Earth, itself, the most cogent being perhaps the
destruction wrought in Persia and Mesopotamia by the Mongols of Hulagu. And it
was not only Vega II that felt the ferocity of the Earthmen, nor only the
Vegans: "In 2394 one of the cities . . . was responsible for the sacking of
the new Earth colony on Thor V; this act of ferocity earned for them the
nickname of 'the Mad Dogs,' but it gradually became a model for dealing with
Vegan planets" [ALFTS, 170]. In sum, at the close of the Vegan War the
Earthmen had to choose whether they would be proud or ashamed of what they had
done. Their shame brought about the trial of Admiral Hrunta-the great figure
of the hundred-year war, its Agamemnon, its Charlemagne, its Arthur-for
genocide; their determination to be proud resulted not
only in the establishment of the Hruntan Empire but also in the birth of the
Earthmanist Culture.
The attempts of the Bureaucratic State to bring Hrunta to justice culminate in
the Battle of BD 40°4048', which is said to have been "indecisive" [ALFTS,
170], but which is quite decisive in that it proves the State incapable of
controlling more than a very limited volume of space. Since Hrunta's empire is
only "the first of many such gimcrack 'empires' ... to spawn on the fringes of
Earth's jurisidiction" [TTOT, 469], we can put down the year of the Battle,
2464, as marking the beginning of the feudal order. Up to this time such
Earthmen as have not been under the direct control of the Bureaucratic State
have presumably been organized simply as tribes or war bands, each man
acknowledging his military superiors only as temporary leaders and feeling
loyalty only to the abstract concept of Earth; but now the temporary becomes
apparently permanent, and loyalty finds concrete object hi this or that leader
or "emperor."
In 2522 the Bureaucratic State collapses, the new Earth government proclaims a
general amnesty, and the "Empty Years" begin; the Earthmanist Culture is thus
free to develop in its own way. Admiral Hrunta is poisoned in 3089, and his
death is followed by the "rapid Balkaniza-tion of the Hruntan Empire, which
was never even at its best highly, cohesive" [ALFTS, 171]; in 3111 Arpad
Hrunta is installed as "Emperor of Space." Here we seem to have the
Interregnum which, according to Spengler, occurs in every culture and "forms
the boundary between the feudal union and the class state" [II, 375]. Since
Hruntanism is a religion as well as a dynastic principle, and since periods of
religious reformation coincide with the transition from feudalism to the
aristocratic state [II, 386], we are perhaps justified hi listing Arpad Hrunta
in our table as a religious reformer.
In an aristocratic state the king's authority depends for its existence on the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]