Reviews Literature / Out Of The Dark

You were actually expecting realistic human behavior in a work of fiction?

I expect consistency, this is the same author as Honor Harrington, and in that series the mere threat of orbital bombardment is enough to get most human worlds to surrender. And let's be honest, 21st century humans would dismiss a threat to drop rocks on us from orbit as a hoax unless the invaders were hovering within visible distance of our major cities, and that's evidently beyond the Shongairi's technology seeing as their Drop Ship's use air-breathing jet engines.

Feudalism persisted because the majority of the people were uneducated and the economic system didn't allow for much of a middle class. Even then, peasant rebellions were not uncommon, even after the knights routinely showed up to put the rebellions down. Feudalism came crashing down once economics reached a point where the local lords were no longer the focal point of regional power. Dictatorships generally survive through establishing power to a degree that the population cannot seriously resist, but even those are tenous and don't last forever. Look what happened to most of South America's dictatorships, the Soviet Union, and recent uprisings in the Middle East, and so on. Hell, not even Iran can keep a lid on their populace. The only way to maintain a dictatorship is through long-term indoctrination, media control, and omnipresent military power, such as what North Korea does, and people are still trying to resist in that country, if only to escape.

The Japanese surrender was not solely due to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, the IJA suffered a tremendous, crushing defeat when the Soviets initiated August Storm and effectively obliterated the majority of the IJA military capability in a single week, on top of a continuous series of defeats by American forces over several years, and even then elements the IJA leadership were trying to prolong the war and the IJN was pushing to send all its remaining ships out to battle and be destroyed in a blaze of glory.

Now, on the other hand, one simply has to look at any resistance or guerilla movement in history to see how humans react when pressed by superior outside forces, particularly ones that involved dramatically different cultures. Look at barbarian tribes fighting Rome, Greek armies fighting Persia. Look at Skanderbeg. Look at the Soviet partisans, the Warsaw Uprising, the French resistance. look at the Zulus fighting the British Empire, or at the Vietcong fighting the US, or the mujahadeen fighting the Soviets, or at the current conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. All of these are examples of humans fighting humans with manpower, technology, and materiel far in excess of their own and prolonging fights that they have no hope of winning militarily. And you think humans wouldn't fight just as hard and just as irrationally against alien powers?

So long as both will to resist and capability to resist remain, humans are going to fight back against oppressors, and they possess plenty of both in the book.

The concept of a built-in submission instinct is clearly absurd— why would anyone stop fighting just because they were hopeless outclassed. Like the last guy said, even in the example you mention, some of the Japanese still wanted to fight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_military_coup_d.27.C3.A9tat_.28August_12.E2.80.9315.29

And I mean, to be frank, if I was sitting in Afghanistan when DC got annihilated, and everyone I ever cared about was incinerated, I probably wouldn't surrender. Who the fuck cares at that point? That much of Weber's halfassed psychoanalysis I'd buy into.

But f'real, people are always fighting somehow.