this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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The part I don't get is the response - flee, fight, infiltrate, asimilate, but hiding from us aggression isn't possible. Plus, like... the US can't do what happens in TBP. Murder and genocide, yes, but the fickle, unstable, easily bored empire is constantly getting pushed back or defeated by nations that are vastly weaker on paper.
If tbp is supposed to endorse trying to "hide" from America all I can really come up with is that the author grossly and terrifyingly fails to understand the source and goals of american aggression.
And another thing - the trisolarans are fucked. They're fleeing their ultra-hostile home system where their annihilation could happen at any moment due to the orbital pattern of their stars. They need to leave, and once they leave they need to conquer earth because they have no where else go go.
The USA is very much the opposite. It's a natural fortress that has all or almost all of the resources needed to maintain itself indefinitely located within it's own borders. US imperialism is premised on the Capitalist drive for infinite profit. We're after cheap resources and cheap labor. If it weren't for the US's imperialist ideology the US could quite comfortably fort up in North America for a very long time.
The Trisolarans aren't an Imperialist power the way such powers exist on earth. There have been a few armies of exiles that have shown up somewhere, wrecked the place, and taken over but that's not the state of politics on earth and never was on any scale. The Trisolarans have a survival imperative that provides a justification within the story for their zero-sum, all or nothing invasion of Earth.
The equivalent of that in America is the
infesting our leadership, not any actually existing material problems. The only real barrier to, if not some utopian friendship, at least peaceful coexistence with China is our economic system. We overthrow capitalism, the primary motivation for conflict falls away.
The author doesn't care about the source or goals of american aggression. The author is more concerned about the effects of american aggression on his country. The author is Chinese and familiar with Chinese history, and is also aware of what happened to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn't want that devastation visited upon his country, so he wrote a sci-fi parable about the wisdom of Dengist foreign policy and the dangers of discarding that foreign policy and attracting american imperial attention before military technological parity was achieved.
I'm sorry, this turned in to a diatribe. I'm really, really, really frightened and it mostly stays buried under a layer of cynicism and irony and distraction, but it broke through here. I'm terrified of this awful country.
Original post follows;
It is essential to victory to understand what your enemy is doing, why they are doing it, and why they think they are doing it.
America's aggression is not based in what most people would consider rational thought. Americans are so utterly, blindly, deludedly convinced of their natural and divine superiority that most of them are not able to conceive of "military parity". MAD was only barely able to contain US aggression and avert a general nuclear exchange. If even a few dozen government and military positions had been occupied by different men America would have committed to a full launch and considered the destruction of most of America's population and much of the world an acceptable price for destroying the Soviets and Chinese.
America cannot accurately perceive China's defensive capabilities. It cannot accurately perceive it's own vulnerabilities. It will launch in to a war it can't win out of sheer arrogance and bloodlust. Normally an enemy like that would be easily defeated, but America's second strike capability and outright insanity makes defeating America in open combat suicidal. China might reach a point where they could destroy the us carrier fleet, there's a good chance they already can. But if they can't kill the entire nuclear triad in an overwhelming first strike they're flipping coins on annihilation.
America is something new in history - the blind mad bloodlust of fascism armed with a nuclear second strike capability that could destroy every major population center in china.
So that's what i don't understand. How any of the attitudes and actions in tbp could constitute a defense against America. I get that this is an old book, and with Obama coming on to the stage at that time it was easy to be misled about the beast and maybe think that change was possible, but it seems hopelessly naive. America doesn't kill for self defense, or for resources. Killing is what America is. It's a self sharpening weapon with no master that destroys because that is it's nature. You can't hide from that, or turtle up behind walls. If defense is even possible you must infect it with something that will cause it to rot from inside and collapse, and hope that in collapsing it doesn't crush the whole world, or else kill it completely in a single moment of overwhelming violence that leaves nothing left alive to retaliate. I don't see any wisdom or strategy in what Liu Cixin is discussing. It's all premised on game theory, rational self interest, and that does not apply to America. This is a strategy for dealing with a wolf, but they're facing a rabid dog.
I don't know if you live here, or deal with Americans, but the thrill and the joy in their voices when they, unprompted, begin talking about how many hundreds of millions or billions they could kill if only they could destroy the Three Gorges Dam or interdict the Malacca Strait is horrifying. I don't have words for it and I'm terrified that the rest of the world doesn't understand what we are.
Saw your edit. Hey, it's ok. I get it. We live in the middle of the coin flip of history and not knowing which side it'll land on is scary.
All we can do is do what we can.
Thank you for being kind.
Yes, very good, except that I don't think the sci-fi author is directing foreign policy here, he's just writing about his own fears of the future of his country into his fiction.
If this were true we'd all be radioactive dust right now. Ask yourself: what would China going to war with America achieve? Especially at any point in history prior to the present day, when China had less military and economic capabilities than it does now? Is China's continued existence as an independent nation not, at the very least, a nod to the efficacy of Deng's "keep a low profile" foreign policy, at that particular historical context? Is it so strange that Liu Cixin would want a continuation of that?
Being a leftist means you believe that a better world is possible. Americans are just like everyone else: people bound by their material conditions. Which means that when those material conditions change, people can change too. Any other belief is hyperbolic idealism and not historical materialism.
I don't live in America, and I don't deal with Americans in my day to day life. But it seems to me that you're the one who doesn't understand the rest of the world, of it's resilience and bravery.
Very good points, thank you for replying. I suppose I need to go pick up some of the CPC's publicatons and Xi's books.
The Trisolarians are not the Americans. They are a metaphor for Imperial Japan (only 4 light years away), a weak imperialist power in a sea of even stronger imperialists who are trying to wipe each other out. (Note: in China, it is not controversial at all to see the Soviet Union as “imperialist”. That’s just how it is commonly perceived as part of the SIno-Soviet relationship, as China sees itself as being stuck in a global confrontation between the US and the USSR. This is why I said, this is a story that is written from the Chinese perspective, not from a Western imperialist perspective like many others.)
质子 (proton) is pronounced exactly the same as 智子 (sophon, or Tomoko, a Japanese female name) gave it away.
Japan underwent modernization in the late 19th century, narrowly avoided the fate of being colonized by Western powers and instead found themselves among the ranks of imperialist powers, driven by the need of resource expansion to colonize China.
Once again, you are trying to take everything at face value rather than exploring the deeper meanings of the story and the philosophical questions that the author is trying to provoke. This is not something you can get from just reading wikipedia pages lol.
One of the most important lines in the Dark Forest:
This was how it was translated into English:
I don’t know how well the translation went over people’s heads, but the point it is trying to provoke is, what is Humanity? If the universe is a hostile Dark Forest state, do we prioritize survival even if it means losing our Humanity? The author has his own predilection, but it doesn’t make the questions less provocative.
If the only way to survive in the world of harsh capitalism is to join the imperialist ranks (that includes the Soviet Union from the Chinese perspective, mind you, though I don’t agree with that labeling), then what is better: to survive at the cost of Humanity that defines us in the first place, or to preserve Humanity at all cost, even if it means this will lead to our own demise?
The title of Book 3 is translated as “Death’s End”, but in Chinese it is called 《死神永生》, which more accurately should be translated to something like “The God of Death is Eternal”.
spoiler for Book 3
The third book went much further that spanned the entire timeline until the end of the Universe. Big fish, small fish (big imperialists, small imperialists) - at the end of time they are nothing more than a speck of dust in the universe. Nobody can escape the God of Death.
And if that’s the case, is there a point to prolonging our survival, at the cost of all the traits that define us as Humanity to begin with?
So, make time for civilization, for civilization won’t make time.
Again, you cannot just read wikipedia and say that you know it all. It’s just fiction at the end of the day, but the point is to think about the questions it’s trying to provoke.
Huh, that is a really interesting reading. Maybe the Trisolarans can be used as a more generalised metaphor for imperialists then?
Is it accurate to say that the books can be read as an interrogation of recent Chinese history (from a modern, maybe somewhat liberal perspective), and it's trajectory? I haven't read books 2 & 3 to comment on them further.
The Trisolarians are Japanese in the sense that they are most relatable to a Chinese audience given its historical context, but the first book was written in the early 2000s, in the wake of the worst US-China relations that followed the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Yugoslavia and the 2001 Hainan Island incident, which nearly sparked a war between both countries (people old enough will remember how close we were at war back then, not to mention that China was far weaker than it is today) only to be averted by 9/11 attack later that year, as the US shifted its attention away from China to the Middle East for the next decade, followed by the 2009 financial crisis and spared China from immediate threat for almost 20 years.
So, yes, Trisolarians can be seen as a metaphor that combines former (Japan) and current oppressors (America), although many references about the Trisolarians in the books hinted strongly at Imperial Japan. It’s fiction at the end of the day and I don’t know why people are trying so hard to see a 1:1 reference to the real world, rather than extracting the meanings and exploring the questions the story itself provokes in relation to the real world.
Books 2 and 3 went further into the Earth-Trisolaris conflict but the point I want to make is that even though the author has his own predilection (and it shows in the novel, and ones that I don’t necessarily agree with), the reason why the books are so great is that it prompts questions that provokes further, deeper thoughts, rather than just the author unloading on you his own beliefs and ideology.
I won’t spoil Book 3 here, but there is a huge plotline in that book that goes into decoding and extracting meanings from what appears to be just a typical story. The author literally hinted that there are deeper layers of meaning to be decoded in all 3 of his books.
I guess there are people who read the novels and just want to be handed the messages at face value, and people who read the novels but also try to contemplate and explore the deeper meanings especially in contemporary context.
Yeah, I had vague recollections about this, along with Deng's foreign policy which is what I based my reading of the book on.
Yeah, in this thread I was trying to simplify and make the analogies as obvious as possible but what you said is true, we should be focusing on the questions the books provoke.
Sounds about right tbh
Its really amazing how Liu can accomplish conveying such thought provoking, heavy themes, while at the same time making his novels addictive to read.
Okay, true, frequently encountered issue with trying to portray America realistically in fiction.