The Lotus Eaters

Chapter Seven

There have been few revolutions in human history that have worked out generally for the benefit of those on whose behalf the revolutions were ostensibly launched. The first Red Tsar of Volga, for example, launched his revolution with the stated aim of uplifting the workers and peasants. (Though, in fact, his greater aim was rationalizing war production and asserting a more general societal control to serve the needs of the Great Global War.) The effect, in any case, of the Red Tsar's revolution was, at the lowest socio-economic levels, to return those same workers and peasants to the state of serfdom from which they had previously escaped. At higher levels, on the other hand, the Red Tsar merely substituted or supplemented his then existing nobility with a new nobility uplifted from Volga's previous middle and professional classes, the very same people who had, for their own interests, fallen in behind him in his revolutionary bid.

Observation of this phenomenon is not restricted to our planet and goes back not merely to Old Earth, but to ancient Old Earth. For his play, The Assemblywomen, for example, Athenian playwright Aristophanes has his proletarian heroine, Praxagora, respond to the question, "But who will till the soil?" with the simple answer, "The slaves."

Indeed, what we can tell from the scattered stories that have come down to us, from those who came to our planet at the very end of the wave of immigration, is that on Old Earth the largely peaceful revolution that gave that planet a world government also had the effect of reducing more than ninety percent of humanity there to a state of servitude.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

Historia y Filosofia Moral,

Legionary Press, Balboa,

Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468