YMMV / Darkness at Noon

• Strawman Has a Point: Gletkin responds to Rubashov's complaints that workers at the Aluminum Trust were fired and blacklisted for minor lateness by pointing out that, unlike the aristocratic Rubashov, many of those workers were peasants who had not learned how to tell time—much less that hours and minutes even existed—until they started those jobs and that there wasn't time for the state to be patient.^note This becomes more of a point with time. After the novel was written, the Germans invaded the USSR, and one can imagine the counterfactual of how easily the Wehrmacht could have overwhelmed the Red Army if the latter did not have an equally strong industrial base