feotakahari

Still reading Angel in the Whirlwind. In this setting, the Believers seem to be the last remaining Abrahamic religion. People in the Commonwealth make occasional Christian references (see title), but it’s like an American making references to Greek mythology. It’s no longer a major presence as something people actively follow.

The Believers argue that those who came before them all fell into the trap of expecting God to bless and protect them for their faith alone. (Which doesn’t sound to me like a Jewish thing at all, but whatever.) The Believers say that you need to act in your own defense, not just hope God will handle everything.

They started a war without being ready for it, because they thought it was what God wanted. They’re steadily losing, but they’re having a hard time admitting it, because God wouldn’t let them fail, would he? They never really internalized the lesson, and thus does history repeat.

I’m reading a military sci-fi series called Angel in the Whirlwind, and it does a really good job of showing how powerful countries create justifications for why they have no power. The Commonwealth wants to conquer Cadiz to make it easier to invade the Theocracy, and the Theocracy wants Cadiz to make it easier to invade the Commonwealth. Obviously, there’s nothing the Commonwealth can do except invade Cadiz before the Theocracy does, right? The locals fight back with suicide bombs and smuggled surface-to-air missiles, so obviously the Commonwealth needs to conduct invasive searches for weaponry, right? And when someone is caught rebelling, there’s nothing the Commonwealth can do except imprison or execute them, right? And when corporations loot the Cadiz system’s resources, well, that’s just the free market. It would be improper for the government to step in and stop them, right? So you have Cadiz rebelling harder and harder against oppression, and the Commonwealth clamping down tighter and tighter, and it’s obvious this is going nowhere good, but none of the people maintaining the situation can conceive of another way of handling things.