The Extraordinary Reign of King Ludd: An Historical Tease PDF
Preview The Extraordinary Reign of King Ludd: An Historical Tease
lite l~tMo~aai-.AtaiJ o/ ~eiqtt tH:J'IIrLI . . ~ittq Lu~~ Roy Levvis Could it have happened otherwise? This witty fantasia is woven round an ingenious rewriting of history by a supercomputer recording the candid memoirs of King-Emperor George Akbar I of Anglo-India. In 1848 the Chartist revolution in Britain and the uprisings in Europe have replaced Capitalism by the ideal socialist Utopia of which nineteenth century reformers dreamed-but is it? A Darwinian luddism has confined new inventions to a benevolent monopoly of Scientists who only release what is good-or do they? World peace. co-operation and goodwill among nations are maintained- but how? In 1949 young George. trained up to be a good constitutional and proletarian monarch, leads a popular counter revolution to restore Capitalism and give the world consumerist prosperity and happiness but does it? Does the computer's alternative history ~son show us how we could solve the me~of human aggression. class. colour and ~~derconflict, poverty. overpopulation. the ~.-~:.m.tsuse of technology. the destruction of the · Earth ? These variations on the themes of ~ho_n. Brave Ne~~World, and The Apple Can ~.dt<t~hfEl1l't}voking as well as amusing. And any historian who douhts the logic of this alternative sequence of events is invited to question the computer itself. Is ours the best of all possible Worlds? £10.25net THE EXTRAORDINARY REIGN OF KING LUDD ROY LEWIS ghe T ~~~ffiA®IRIDllRAIR lli~ll ~D o/ I[llD~ ~IDIDID an historical tease THE PATTEN PRESS First published in 1990 hy The Patten Press The Old Post Office Newmill, Penzance Cornwall TR20 4XN ® Roy Lewis 1990 ISBN 1 872229 20 4 Manufacture co-ordinated in UK hy Laserhacks 20 Shepherds Hill London N6 SAH All rights reserved. No part of this publication may he repro duced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or hy any means, electronic mechanical. photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Patten Press. Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small and white and dean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green. William Morris Socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from ... the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin in which so cialism will play the role of con temporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subse quent revolution. Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shure 1849 Indeed, it will perhaps not be long before even Antarctica will enable thousands of miners to earn an ample livelihood. F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, the Errors of Socialism 1988 ·It all came different,' the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. 'I should like to hear her repeat something now. Tell her to begin.' Alice in Wonderland AN INVITATION Could it have happened otherwise? Could history have taken a different course at one or other of its nodal turning points? Or is history determined by factors beyond men's power to exert free will, to make real choices? So that, from the beginnings of life on earth Napoleon was destined to lose at Waterloo, Britain at Saratoga, the Mencheviks to the Bolsheviks in 19 I 7? Can we ever learn from history? Was the failure of socialism in our time inevitable? Could it have succeeded under different conditions, with different leaders? Could it succeed at some future time? Could history be an experimental science, in which, with out the use of an imaginary time machine, we could recall the past and alter the givens, the data, at some crossroads of events, and study a different outcome? Could there be an Institute of Experimental History (Cliometrics) equipped with a new RISC supercomputer im plemented with qualllum well technology using gallium ar senide: so that its godlike memory could be programmed with all the facts, technical and prosopographical, the choices facing all men and women at a given juncture; be given some new inputs, and asked to rerun the consequential events of a century or so? Then we could observe what happier things, or unhappier, would have occurred: and so learn to manage our affairs more wisely henceforward. There is: here at the Institute we have input a victory for socialism instead of for capitalism in the revolution that swept Europe in 1848, and replayed history and its curious variations, from that time to this. Such a computer has, admittedly, developed its own way of presenting its findings: it has chosen to do so through the eyes, memories and vantage point of a single personage, whose life story and ordeal is told in this printout. Any historian who cavils at the computer's deductions, working from the premises loaded into its memory, is invited to formulate a question to be input for its explanation. What follows owes nothing to the caprices of fiction. It is a determined sequence of events: proof of a theorem, step by step, subject only to logical refutation.
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