So I’ve been working on watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes since last July. I’m finally in the end game, 6 episodes left out of 110, and the political rhetoric is getting thicker by the minute.
For a little background, the show revolves around two nations of humanity out in space: the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance. The FPA is a democratic republic, often referred to as a democracy but sometimes the more accurate democratic republic, and the Empire is, well, an empire. This means that the story is really about a conflict between democracy and autocracy. I shall also use democracy as short hand for democratic republic for ease and since that’s how most people use democracy anyway.
The author appears to have taken the stance that democracy is fundamentally good and autocracy fundamentally bad. Even a bad democracy is better than a good autocracy because democracy = freedom and autocracy = slavery.
This is, to me, rather obnoxious. What this is doing is making the form more important than the substance. I, personally, think the form of government doesn’t really matter as long as you have good, just, competent rulers. And neither does it matter if you have wicked, unjust, incompetent rulers. Now, this is a matter of opinion but there are other, less opinion-based, problems with the stance taken by LoGH.
First the delusion that democracy = freedom. Really, where do people get that idea? Or where did more like. It’s been around as long as I can remember, and as LoGH is older than I am. But people seem convinced that democracy grants freedom.
Democracy, as most people know, is majority rule. That’s the key right there. Majority. Not minority, but majority. Minority groups have no power. They operate at the sufferance of the majority. The majority can strip them of their rights at any time of their choosing. They can impose their will on a minority against the minorities wishes.
As a wise man once said, democracy is just tyranny of the majority.
Another issue is that in a democracy the rulers can be corrupt and incompetent. They can abuse power. The power they are entrusted with can be used against those who entrusted them with that power. Americans, think back in the last 50 years. I’m sure you can think of presidents and other authorities that have been corrupt and/or incompetent. Doesn’t matter what your political view point is, I’m sure there are folk who you think were just plain out atrocious rulers.
LoGH at one point makes mention of how absurd it is to choose rulers based on their birth. There’s no guarantee that the person will be any good. I counter with, why is a popularity contest a better method? Really, that’s all elections are. Glorified popularity contests. Winning an election does not have any bearing on your ability to govern. Meritocracy is the only reasonable way of distributing power, however, and this is a very, very strong however, there is no truly objective way of deciding who is meritorious.
Oddly, this is reflected in LoGH by the leader of the FPA, Truniht, being an utterly corrupt politician. His personal army of enforcers hunts down dissidents. But this is rarely brought up in the show. It’s all democracy is wonderful! Democracy = freedom! Democracy, huzzah! Autocracy bad! Autocracy = slavery! Autocracy, boo!
Kaiser Reinhard, ruler of the Galactic Empire, is a charismatic, good, and just ruler. This is actually supposed to be a bad thing because it makes it easy for him to destroy democracy and establish himself as the lone, autocratic, ruler of the galaxy. The reasoning? Something could happen to change him into a despot. What about his successors? There is no guarantee of good government from autocracy.
But neither is there from democracy. Democracies can become corrupt just like anything else. Now, it generally takes them longer to change as you have to get the majority to agree, but change it can. And when it does corrupt it’s effectively impossible to expunge the corruption. Autocracy, on the hand, can go corrupt much faster much easier than democracy, but it can also expunge corruption far, far easier.
The final issue I will bring up here is that the idea of democracy being good is that somehow the majority is always right. Which is nonsense. The number of people backing a cause or ideology has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it is good and true or not.
Posted by marfresbo 
