Dispossessed by Le Guin Ursula K

Author:Le Guin, Ursula K. [GUIN, URSULA LE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473206069
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

The birdseed paper was excited into its largest type-face. Spelling and grammar fell by the wayside; it read like Efor talking: “By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti and pushing army hard….” It was the verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged, unstable present tense.

Shevek read the papers, and looked up a description of Benbili in the CWG Encyclopedia. The nation was in form a parliamentary democracy, in fact a military dictatorship, run by generals. It was a large country in the Western Hemisphere, mountains and arid savannahs, underpopulated, poor. “I should have gone to Benbili,” Shevek thought, for the idea of it drew him; he imagined pale plains, the wind blowing. The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale. Its reports, and those of the official telefax in public rooms, were brief and dry: a queer contrast to the popular papers, which shouted Revolution! on every page.

General Havevert, the President, got away safe in his famous armoured airplane, but some lesser generals were caught and emasculated, a punishment the Benbili traditionally preferred to execution. The retreating army burned the fields and towns of their people as they went. Guerilla partisans harried the army. The revolutionaries in Meskti, the capital, opened the jails, giving amnesty to all prisoners. Reading that, Shevek’s heart leapt. There was hope, there was still hope…. He followed the news of the distant revolution with increasing intensity. On the fourth day, watching a telefax broadcast of debate in the Council of World Governments, he saw the Ioti ambassador to the CWG announce that A-Io, rising to the support of the democratic government of Benbili, was sending armed reinforcements to President-General Havevert.

The Benbili revolutionaries were mostly not even armed. The Ioti troops would come with guns, armoured cars, airplanes, bombs. Shevek read the description of their equipment in the paper, and felt sick in his stomach.

He felt sick and enraged, and there was nobody he could talk to. Pae was out of the question. Atro was an ardent militarist. Oiie was an ethical man, but his private insecurities, his anxieties as a property-owner, made him cling to rigid notions of law and order. He could cope with his personal liking for Shevek only by refusing to admit that Shevek was an anarchist. The Odonian society called itself anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists, whose social order functioned without apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbour states. When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would either wake up to reality, or be wiped out. The Benbili rebels were waking up to reality now: they were finding freedom is no good if you have no guns to back it up. He explained this to Shevek in the one discussion they had on the subject.

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