Like, Lenin would encourage communists to try to participate in bourgeoisie governments, but not when a whole dual power existed?
Or was it all actually just him making a dialectically appropriate alliance with non-capitalists/lumpen/petite-bourgeoisie classes the way that the Bolsheviks were willing to make alliances with, you know, Cossacks, soldiers, peasants, even Black Hundreds and even intervene in the mass executions of police by Red Guards and other revolutionaries in cases where there was an expedience of temporary alliances to build socialism?
SPOILERS
In chapter 34, "Moscow Centre must be allowed to think she has an important Circus source; Whitehall on no account must get wind of the same notion."
I call it the Whitehall filter because I assume the above means that Whitehall cannot know that Toby is pretending to be a double agent; the "lie" that Smiley refers to before that is how the Circus is creating cover for sources Merlin.
The 'Whitehall filter' means that the info that the British send over to the Russians through Toby is pretty limited in nature, right? Because Whitehall, meaning the British government, can't learn that Toby is pretending to be a mole, because it makes the government anxious and they don't understand how intelligence works.
Or is it because it could create leaks through Whitehall that result in Toby's cover getting compromised? That might be it, because Whitehall is getting such good information through Witchcraft/Merlin that you'd think they'd be okay with losing something for it.
Somehow I thought I read somewhere that the reason Whitehall went along with Witchcraft was because they didn't have to worry about losing British secrets. They felt like they were getting something for nothing.
"The first artillery shots will either blow the ultraleftists into political non-existence, or else drive them into the camp of social-patriotism, exactly like the Spanish anarchists, who, absolute "deniers" of the state, found themselves from the same causes bourgeois ministers when war came. "
Specifically "...from the same causes bourgeois ministers when war came."
Is this saying 'The Spanish anarchists were driven into the camp of social-patriotism by the bourgeois ministers use of artillery shots and/or war?'
It's the kind of construction like "The men bit the dogs, and the dogs the men."
Like, as very social creatures that would have an advantage in recognizing an individual immediately from sight rather than smell because smell takes longer, is there something about sapien anatomy that a broad "survey" so to speak indicates a preference in sapien anatomy to be, in layman's terms, "organized around" creating a unique face?
Is this what biologists refer to as "heterozygosis" or the quality of being heterozygous? Like apples are heterozygous in a similar way, they have nearly infinite ways of recombining genes in areas like size, seed size, chemical composition that contributes to flavor. Faces are like that too, right?
Example is like, the way our vertebrae, shoulders, etc. would be put together in order to optimize the uniqueness of human faces. Slight variations in the size of vertebrae can change how skull bones fuse together that can create differences in how the face bones arrange themselves in relation to the skull, optimizing the range for unique faces.
Sapkowski seems to imply that all witchers come from Kaer Morhen in a recent interview, here, and the medallion is more incidental to other causes.
But Coën was spending his first winter at Kaer Morhen in the beginning of Blood of Elves, so does that mean he underwent the trials somewhere else? Is it a mistranslation? I guess it could literally be Coën's first winter because he always went home during the winter despite growing up there. Or maybe Sapkowski just doesn't know the lore very well? Sorry if that sounds mean.
SPOILERS
After hanging most of the blue stripes commandos in Roche's path, Henselt says to Roche "What do you do with spies in Temeria, give them a medal?" and then "Where there's smoke, there's fire" to justify his behavior at Roche's protestation that they weren't technically spies themselves.
This is a reference, or inspired by, the book event where Codringher says to Geralt in Chapter 1, Time of Contempt, "You're acting like a child, Geralt. You don't hang exposed spies - you make use of them. You stuff them with misinformation and try to make double agents out of them -"
This might be a reference in turn to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Chapter 34, when Toby says to Smiley "You're not a child. Think how many operations we ran this way. We buy Polyakov, okay? Polyakov's a Moscow hood but he's our Joe. But he's got to pretend to his own people that he's spying on us..."
The "Temerian agents" didn't have a warrant when asked upon boarding the barge, so they were Rience's men, right? And Dijkstra lies to Dandelion to put pressure on him and Geralt to get them to cooperate, right?
Because in that case, the best they can hope for is cooperating as much as possible to get Redanian protection and as little heat from Temeria as possible; Foltest and other kings are looking for Ciri, if Geralt believes he killed Temerians he would be somewhat more likely to hand over Ciri (I don't think Geralt would even if they were real Temerians, but the logic is mostly sound for normal witchers).
What I got from the books was the intricacy of presenting a mutant with few emotions who has, as Yennefer describes, an "obsession with honor".
I think that is an interesting guidepost in relation to this because the question is, what real world economic forces (Sapkowski's forte) force Geralt to mine his few emotional motives when he could make a fairly successful living as a hired sword, thief, brigand or even soldier?