As always, interesting conversation between the two, I don't know how you clever writers do it but it entertains me to no end.
What I find lacking in every fanfic where 'politics' are discussed between Illya and Napoleon is a real understanding of the differences between the governments of the USA and USSR in the 1960's. This difference always seems to be understood on economic systems only. Communism, even if Illya is portrayed as believing the more idealistic Trotsky version, was and is an economic system as well as a government system. The government system of Communism is statism. The USA government is a republic. For over 400 years, American's prefered economic system has been capitalism.
We have to remember that WWII was over for only 20 years or so when MFU was conceived and aired, and American citizens were well aware of the dangers to our freedoms that statism threatened. Napoleon of all people would have argued on the basis of republican government verses statism.
Illya was correct in saying that a dictatorship is the better system of government. And if Napoleon was Catholic, as often portrayed in fanfiction, he would have readily agreed with Illya, as any Catholic of the 1960's was aware of this fact. Like any informed Catholic, Napoleon would have pointed out that a perfect dictatorship requires a perfect human, and the only perfect human is Jesus Christ. Illya, his Russian Orthodox rearing being the basis of his life philosophy, and having lived through the Stalin 'purges' seeing them clearly as government mass murder, would have agreed.
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Date: 2014-04-11 10:05 pm (UTC)What I find lacking in every fanfic where 'politics' are discussed between Illya and Napoleon is a real understanding of the differences between the governments of the USA and USSR in the 1960's. This difference always seems to be understood on economic systems only. Communism, even if Illya is portrayed as believing the more idealistic Trotsky version, was and is an economic system as well as a government system. The government system of Communism is statism. The USA government is a republic. For over 400 years, American's prefered economic system has been capitalism.
We have to remember that WWII was over for only 20 years or so when MFU was conceived and aired, and American citizens were well aware of the dangers to our freedoms that statism threatened. Napoleon of all people would have argued on the basis of republican government verses statism.
Illya was correct in saying that a dictatorship is the better system of government. And if Napoleon was Catholic, as often portrayed in fanfiction, he would have readily agreed with Illya, as any Catholic of the 1960's was aware of this fact. Like any informed Catholic, Napoleon would have pointed out that a perfect dictatorship requires a perfect human, and the only perfect human is Jesus Christ. Illya, his Russian Orthodox rearing being the basis of his life philosophy, and having lived through the Stalin 'purges' seeing them clearly as government mass murder, would have agreed.