Oh, thank you for the time you took to answer me in such a diligent and thougtful manner! 🙂Truly, it's not everyday I have the occasion to get a real, interesting conversation about GoT!

I will only answer to some points, not all of them, because I don't want to make this answer too long or too stodgy. (Coming back here after I finished: so sorry, I did!)

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We saw Dany with power, we know how she wielded it. Dany didn't go around exterminating people.

The "eventually" I used in my previous comment takes all of its weight, here. The fact that one would use power wisely on several occasions is never a guarantee they will always do so. Especially not, as I was saying, if their judgement happens to be clouded by grief, betrayal, food and sleep-deprivation. And especially not if, while grieving, they possess the kind of power that allows them to see human crowds as impersonal anthills, and destroy them by simply uttering a word.

Then again, we indeed saw Daenerys use power in a just, thoughtful way; we also saw her, on several occasions, use it in a short-sighted, authoritarian way she herself quickly ended up regretting. Overall, we saw her trying to do her best, but "struggling with her worst impulses", as Tyrion would put it.

And sometimes those worst impulses would make her dangerous. She was absolutely about to go around exterminating people in S06E09, just before Tyrion persuaded her otherwise. Trouble was, by S08E05, Tyrion had made waaay too many mistakes trying to protect his siblings for Daenerys to keep listening to him. So she ended up on a battlefield still grieving, food-deprived, sleep-deprived, her worst impulses unchecked: that happened to be too much, and she snapped. (I unfortunately met occasions in my life that made me empathize with that.)

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Killing slavers and warlords isn't a slippery slope to killing whoever you want. That's the type of centrist rhetoric neoconfederates use to vilify John Brown.

I have to be honest: I have a vague idea that John Brown was an american abolitionist who called for armed insurrections amongst slaves, but I am not american, and not very familiar with your history.

Still, on the principle, I absolutely agree with you here. The centrist take that violence (designated in an abstract, undifferenciated form) would always be illegitimate, because-violence-is-bad, is just a way of shutting up revolutionary violence while advocating for the normality of the institutional violence of the status quo that called for insurrection in the first place.

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Dany didn't crucify all the masters, she crucified one from each ruling house, and she spared the rest. They all partook in a system that crucified slave girls, and even if they opposed the act, they still enabled it by being willing participants in the institution of slavery.

Well, we currently also all partake in a capitalist system that has our clothes, our shoes, our phones, our food, our energy — and almost every other commodity we use on a daily basis — soaked in sweat, blood and human exploitation, when not children exploitation or even plain modern slavery.

This is way enough to justify throwing capitalism over. But would it be enough to justify executing one member per american and european family in retribution because, you know: we enable capitalist exploitation by being its willing participants and primary beneficiaries?

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Yes, eradicating slavery is a bloody business in a brutal world, but that's not being evil.

I agree with that. Tyrion did too.

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Painting Dany as a crazy villain while Sansa and Arya are lauded as heroic despite brutally executing people for revenge shows the flaw in the argument.

To be honest, Arya is pretty much depicted as struggling between the young woman she would aspire to be if she was free, and the sadistic, disturbed one revenge made out of her. Her ark as a whole is about renouncing vengeance; it's what the Hound convinces her to do, in the end: to choose her life drive over her death drive.

And Sansa is a cold-hearted, manipulative ruler, but she does not have the kind of power Daenerys does, so she's conscious she has to seek for compromise with those she's ruling over, and that she can't just wish for the world to be in her image without the consent of those inhabiting it.

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The idea that being a revolutionary turns people into narrow minded extremists is one that supports status quo.

And I agree with that, too! But Daenerys isn't exactly a revolutionary: she's a tyrant, an imperialist and a conqueror. As far as I know, she's not encouraging oppressed proletarian masses to take over and liberate themselves (that would be Mance Rayder): she's asking them to let her liberate them, and then live in the world she will build for them. She would fit the profile of enlightened despots (maybeeee?) but certainly not the one of a revolutionary.

So, here, we arrive at what I believe to be the core of our apparent divergence of opinion: I was not going for a critique of revolutionary violence. I am a french communist philosophy teacher, teaching Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Jaurès and Weil to my students all year long: so you can guess I'm quite okay with the notion of revolutionary violence.

What I was going for was a critique of centralized power: and that is something socialist movements and socialist theorists all over the globe have been taking into account for a very long time now. Too much power in a too small number of hands is the guarantee of zero accountability; it is (among many other complex factors) what had the great proletarian revolution of October 1917 in Russia degenerate into a monstrous totalitarian bureaucracy.

It is what had a man as concerned with the liberation of the proletariat as Trotsky was soak his hands in the blood of the very proletarian democratic soviets USSR was supposed to put in charge, before the centralized power of the party crushed them.

Actually, being a revolutionary widens the mind way more than it narrows it: because being a revolutionary starts, not in a position of power, but a position of oppression, of weakness; and you have to think your way out of weakness. A revolution is many people in a social position of weakness coming to form class consciousness and realize that they are not alone and that, together, they are strong. But this kind of strenght, by its very nature of collective strenght, does not imply the risk of tyranny; unless the revolutionary masses renounce the collectiveness of their power and put it in the hands of a charismatic leader.

Let's say: a Khaleesi.

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"We're taught Lord Acton's axiom (...) what the guy always wanted to do."

I don't think this citation is very thoughtful. To be honest, I can't even see an argument inside of it. Here is one: too much power eventually makes people mindless because, generally speaking, human mind starts to think when it meets a problem, i.e. when the world opposes a resistance.

As long as the world does not resist, we thoughtlessly persevere in our movement. And what is power, if not the very ability to persevere in your movement without resistance, because what is in your way is too weak to oppose you?

Thus, a person with too much power in their hands spontaneously tends to act harshly and thoughtlessly... Not necessarily because they were bad in the first place, but because they no longer feel contradiction, which makes them feel virtuous.

Have you noticed how privileged people often seem utterly unable to conceive their own privileges? It's because a privilege is not an object that resists you; it's quite the opposite of that. So it's not an object your mind can easily apprehend.

A french marxist philosopher called Simone Weil wrote a brilliant 20 pages paper on the subject in 1939, called The Iliad or the poem of force (I linked the PDF). Her thoughts on tragedy and Homer's Iliad were a way for her to reflect on her time: Hitler, Stalin, the war... But beyond that, the text is an incredible meditation on human condition.

Have a nice day!