Cities in Flight

The myth makes it appear that a small number of Earthmen were unaccountably able to prevail over a vast and enormously powerful “tyranny” which deserved to be completely destroyed. The fact must surely be that the Vegan Civilization was in the last stages of its Final Political Form with the concomitant “enfeeblement … of the imperial machinery against young peoples eager for spoil, or alien conquerors” [Spengler, I, Table iii; cf. the table with this essay]. Though outnumbered a million to one in total population, the Earthmen may well have been able to muster nearly as many fighting men as the Vegans at any given place and time, and they must have come into interstellar space with superior weapons or tactics or both—and with ferocity such as the Vegans had perhaps never experienced but for which there are precedents aplenty in the history of Earth, itself, the most cogent being perhaps the destruction wrought in Persia and Mesopotamia by the Mongols of Hulagu. And it was not only Vega II that felt the ferocity of the Earthmen, nor only the Vegans: “In 2394 one of the cities … was responsible for the sacking of the new Earth colony on Thor V; this act of ferocity earned for them the nickname of ‘the Mad Dogs,’ but it gradually became a model for dealing with Vegan planets”. In sum, at the close of the Vegan War the Earthmen had to choose whether they would be proud or ashamed of what they had done. Their shame brought about the trial of Admiral Hrunta—the great figure of the hundred-year war, its Agamemnon, its Charlemagne, its Arthur—for genocide; their determination to be proud resulted not only in the establishment of the Hruntan Empire but also in the birth of the Earthmanist Culture.

The attempts of the Bureaucratic State to bring Hrunta to justice culminate in the Battle of BD 40° 4048’, which is said to have been “indecisive”, but which is quite decisive in that it proves the State incapable of controlling more than a very limited volume of space. Since Hrunta’s empire is only “the first of many such gimcrack “empires’ … to spawn on the fringes of Earth’s jurisdiction”, we can put down the year of the Battle, 2464, as marking the beginning of the feudal order. Up to this time such Earthmen as have not been under the direct control of the Bureaucratic State have presumably been organized simply as tribes or war bands, each man acknowledging his military superiors only as temporary leaders and feeling loyalty only to the abstract concept of Earth; but now the temporary becomes apparently permanent, and loyalty finds concrete object in this or that leader or “emperor.”

In 2522 the Bureaucratic State collapses, the new Earth government proclaims a general amnesty, and the “Empty Years” begin; the Earthmanist Culture is thus free to develop in its own way. Admiral Hrunta is poisoned in 3089, and his death is followed by the “rapid Balkanization of the Hruntan Empire, which was never even at its best highly cohesive”; in 3111 Arpad Hrunta is installed as “Emperor of Space.” Here we seem to have the Interregnum which, according to Spengler, occurs in every culture and “forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class state” [II, 375]. Since Hruntanism is a religion as well as a dynastic principle, and since periods of religious reformation coincide with the transition from feudalism to the aristocratic state [II, 386], we are perhaps justified in listing Arpad Hrunta in our table as a religious reformer.

In an aristocratic state the king’s authority depends for its existence on the power of one or another of the aristocratic factions. The “absolute” state emerges when the king allies himself with the bourgeoisie and thus finds strength enough to suppress aristocratic disorder. In Earthmanist society as a whole, Earth is king, the various empires, duchies, and republics are the aristocracy, and the Okie cities are the bourgeoisie. Here the development into absolutism seems to culminate in 3602 with the “reduction” of the Duchy of Gort, the death of Arpad Hrunta, and the “dissolution of the Empire,” all brought about by the “recrudescent Earth police”, for we now have a galactic society in which the Earth police keep the spacelanes clear for Okie commerce. Since the Duchy of Gort represents an extreme form of Hruntanism, and since puritanism is a concomitant of the effort to preserve the aristocratic state [Spengler, II, 386n, 424], we can perhaps list the Duchy as an instance of puritanism.

When aristocratic factionalism has been suppressed, the king and the aristocracy become allies against the rising power of the bourgeoisie, who soon become ripe for revolution, as do the Okies after the “collapse of the germanium standard” in 3900. The gathering of the mayors aboard Buda-Pesht and the March on Earth that follows, even though it results in apparent defeat in the Battle of Earth, can be regarded as the 1789, and the passage of the anti-Okie bill in 3976 as the 1815, of Earthman history.