Thread by @scottlynch78, So, the flu ravaged our house for a couple weeks, and it's [...]

So, the flu ravaged our house for a couple weeks, and it's been hilarious fun. Get your shots, kids. In search of comfort reading, I turned, as I often do, to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin sequence (spoilers for said books, CW for torture, whee!) (1/some)

Not that I need to be sick to read these things. There are particular scenes I return to over and over. I must have read the bit where Jack is made post about two hundred times.

(2/some)

Anyhow, in the third book, H.M.S. SURPRISE, an act of idiocy by a government minister exposes Maturin's role as an anti-Napoleonic agent of British intelligence. On his next mission, he is taken into custody in Mahon, and then viciously tortured by French officers.

(3/some)

I mean, starved, beaten, stretched on a rack. Scarred, fingernails pulled, hands all but wrecked. Long, intensive sessions of bodily destruction.

(4/more)

After his rescue, Maturin confesses to a friend that the most hurtful part of the affair was to be so treated by servants of France, the nation he "loves most in the world," for its arts, culture, sciences, etc.-- it is Napoleon, not France, that he detests.

(5/yet more)

Maturin then laments that the two men who tortured him were not "new men," not young Napoleonic fanatics, but old professionals, long in uniform, veterans of the time long before Napoleon, in other words, the sort of men you'd least expect to be so inhumane.

(6/still more)

When I first read this, years ago, it was merely an interesting detail in a book crammed cover to cover with them, but reading it again in 2019 that disquieting observation of Maturin's leapt out at me.

(7/more)

I have had more time since my first read to study the patterns of history, and we have all had more time to see them repeating in front of our faces. There is a pattern, it does repeat itself, O'Brian saw it clearly and wrote about it nearly fifty years ago.

(8/more)

Institutional standards and cultural norms don't defend themselves. They must be asserted and actively defended. "Don't worry about that extremist who just took power, the moderates around him will hold him back," isn't a self-defense plan. It's a comforting illusion.

(9/more)

It's astonishing how quickly the unacceptable becomes expedient routine in an authoritarian environment. Astonishing, yet normal... so normal that we've been analyzing and recording and writing about it in precise and recurring detail for centuries now.

(10/just a few more)

Try to catch yourself every time you start to say: "Don't worry about this, someone will stop it, someone reasonable must do something, THEY surely would never allow things to get so bad, THEY surely would never go along with it..."

(11/nearly there)

Because a great many of the people who will come to do the dirty work when all normalcy is banished are those unexceptional, reasonable, seemingly decent sorts you were previously assuming would quietly hold the madness back.

(12/13)

That's all, really. Just a reminder that we've seen this shit before, you're not fucking crazy. Keep making the noise you're making and fighting the fights you're fighting. Keep defending yourself and others.

Also, read Patrick O'Brian.

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