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Lun's Beliefs... ideals or something.

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Apr 19th, 2014
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  1. ''Lun'' is an Anarchist Communist. She is also a capable ship commander...
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  3. First and foremost, Lun is a believer in the Communist dream, in a world where 'Each to his need' is the rule of society. She is, however, deeply cynical of the Soviet system. She has seen both sides of the Soviet Union, both the wild science and creative nurturing that brought a craft such as herself into being, and the decay and politicking that caused her to sit and rust for decades before being recovered.
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  5. She harbours a special hatred for the dictators who preach 'communism', using its promises as a cloak to prop-up their own self-serving regimes and dirty it's name in the process. The Communism of Mao, Lenin, Stalin and Pol-Pot is not the Communism of Lun.
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  7. Her belief is that all Communist revolutions, no matter how well intentioned, are doomed to fail because of how they are started. They are all formed around the one vanguard party, with one leader and it is on that party with all it's human failings that the hope for the future rests. And as the existing order is overthrown, and the new Party installs itself, it's forced to fight for its survival as the loyalists to the old regime take up arms in return. It's forced to compromise. It's forced to make 'hard decisions'. It's forced to believe that the 'ends justify the means', until eventually the maintenance of the Party and its position becomes the key purpose of the Party, with the ideals of the revolution that installed them coming a distant second.
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  9. Thus, all Revolutions are doomed to become Regimes in course.
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  11. And all Regimes are doomed to rot themselves to self destruction. To be replaced by another revolution. Not necessarily communist. Not necessarily violent. But ultimately with the same end.
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  13. Lun is trying to create a revolution without leaders, without a vanguard. She doesn't seek to impose a system of changes from the top down, but to encourage people to join her and travel along with her. She wants to create a Revolution of equals, a revolution of fellow travellers, not an Animal Farm. She holds no romance about her chances, but believes it's important that she try nonetheless. Because amidst the decay of the Soviet Union and it's ending, she still witnessed the kernel of something the could have beautiful, of the squandered potential of what might have become.
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  15. Lun's biggest fear is that, some day in the future, she will find herself on the wrong side of firing squad, that she will be the one with her finger on the trigger. Because then, she will have betrayed her ideals in the name of her ideals - committing the same sin that set her on the path in the first place.
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  17. Instead, Lun is trying to grow a society from scratch, to create rather than impose. A society that will grow organically to meet the challenges it faces while still at the core being a society of equals. Lun is aware, ultimately, that there're situations where someone will need to lead, or take responsibility, or represent the rest of the group to other groups. She hopes to create a society where this is culturally imposed as a responsibility and seen as a burden, rather than position of status and privilege. The burden of Command should sit heavy on the shoulders.
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  19. Her model for this is a ship at sea. Each crew member has a specific position, a specific contribution to make to keep the ship functioning and sailing. The engineer, the cook, the loadmaster, the navigator, the pilot and the Captain. And while they all have different functions within the ship, they are all equally important. Without one, the ship's function is crippled. And while the ship's Captain gives authority over the crew, at the same time the Captain is also responsible for the crew, for getting them and the ship home safely and completing their mission. And, in the deep and wide ocean, the Captain's authority lasts only as long as the crew allows it to..... while the law at home might have things to say about a mutiny afterwards, there is no law at sea, far from government and law enforcement, beyond that which the ship's crew permit. A good Captain will remain so long as they retain the respect of the crew. A bad captain, will soon find themselves with a lifeboat to themselves. (I really hope this makes as much sense as it did in my head at the time....)
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  21. Ultimately, the final result may well be a Sovietic council democracy, on similar lines to what the VVS are attempting, but achieved through a different method, through the back-door rather than the front. And possibly much slower in the process.
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  23. While she wishes the VVS the best of success, and hopes that they come to a different end than all other such historic attempts, Lun worries that, so long as they follow a leader (of any sort), they are still vulnerable to that leader. No matter what the good intentions of that leader may be, what they're desires may be, they're still one personal tragedy, or one well-intentioned compromise, or one mis-step away from the same path to hell that all such revolutions have trodden.
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  25. Lun has started with a swimming pool. She started digging it herself, asking others to join in. Until eventually, it was completed with no-one actually being aware of who had started the project in the first place. Lun, hadn't told anyone she was the only person working on it at the time. Lun's hope is to build a small core group at first, to start a small settlement, first in one of Frigga's abandoned caverns where they can create food and other resources to trade, with the aim of growing slowly to the point where they can either begin their own settlement, or start an offworld colony.
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  27. There're problems that Lun doesn't know the solution too... but she believes that they'll be solved naturally. Either by limiting the visibility of the group to keep from attracting members at times where they can't handle them, or by many minds coming up with concepts she hasn't thought of.
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