(Actually) Interesting Ideas for Ending the Amarr-Minmatar Conflict

If there is no conflict… and if u dont fight for your principles than peace is meaningless…

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I don’t understand. If there is no conflict with your principles then why would you fight? You only fight if there is a conflict. So if there is no conflict with your principles, and you don’t fight to uphold those principles, because you don’t need to, then how is peace meaningless?

I’m sorry, but your statement is a bit confusing.

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Its a bit philosophical… the thing is there are always two oposite factors wich are always fighting each-other… they are oposite in nature but can’t exist with one onother. You cant have war without peace nor peace without war…conflict is what keeps the balance between these two. No matter what side you choose there will always be an oposite reaction of that.
Long story short… you cant have peace between amarr and minmatar… they are meant to fight eachother…
War is what keeps the engine of life working. Peace is a temporary cooldown… learn to accept war the same way you accept peace. One you accept both sides equaly only than you will find peace and harmony in yourself…

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How do you know this this to be true?

you cant have peace between amarr and minmatar… they are meant to fight eachother…

Again, how do you know?

War is what keeps the engine of life working. Peace is a temporary cooldown…

I don’t accept this philosophy because I don’t think it’s true. What makes you think this is the truth?

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We all have our beliefs. You have yours. I have mine. These are concept I have read mostly from eastern philosophers, which I agree with their point of view. The thing is the lore of this game is based mostly on this conflict. Minmatar - Amarr and Gallente - Caldari. Ending it means ending the main game lore. The PvP faction warzone would die and I doubt the developers wat this. Most PvP players start their carreer there.

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Did you literally say that conflict is what keeps the balance between conflict and peace?

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No u missunderstood. Conflict is the transition between war and prace.

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God… I should’nt go too deep on these discusions…

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But that’s what makes them fun.

It’s an interesting idea, that war and peace are sort of functions of each other. I agree that if we didn’t have war, we might not have “peace” as a concept in quite the same way (though probably we’d still have a similar term to describe stillness and quietude).

But … it’s not like war is a universal thing. Not a lot of species really do such a thing, actively trying to kill each other over whatever. I think it’s mostly kind of us and ants; maybe a few others. There’s usually predation, but, that’s not really the same thing-- rabbits don’t really “war” with wild dogs.

It seems to me, maybe, that it’s more like light and dark-- the presence of a thing, and its absence. Maybe we wouldn’t have a word for “dark” if we didn’t have visible light and we all lived by finding our way around with echolocation or something. Maybe “peace,” as we usually use the word, basically just means, “the absence of war.”

But I don’t know if “war” disappearing to the point where “peace” lost its meaning as “the absence of war” would be a bad thing.

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War is, by definition, conflict. I believe wars are usually fought over resources due to scarcity, real or artificially induced, or ideologies.

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The Minmatar were enslaved for something close to a millenia. The Republic has existed for roughly 120 years. The majority of the Minmatar peoples were enslaved for between eight and ten times as long as a free, diplomatically recognised Minmatar nation-state has. Within that time, of the seven Minmatar tribes that history records, one of them was subjected to an entirely successful genocide, one of them had its culture rewritten so vastly that it’s become nigh-unrecognisable and a third was driven into partially-self-imposed nomadic exile to escape the brutality. Even those who are free are, by proxy, subject to the results of 800 years of genetic tampering, cultural and social repression, emotional, physical and sexual abuse and all the other trappings of religiously-motivated racial supremacy.

That sort of legacy doesn’t vanish within the space of a couple of human lifetimes - and on that note it’s relevant to note there are Minmatar still alive today who remember not only the rebellion, but what it was like before the rebellion. This isn’t ancient history. Given the lifespan of Amarrian nobility, this hasn’t even stopped being contemporary yet; consider that up until Catiz Tash-Murkon’s coronation, the man upon whose order the Starkmanir Genocide was committed was still alive.

The Minmatar endured unimaginable hardship just to found the Republic. When CONCORD was founded, the Empire initially attempted to keep them out of it. At almost every juncture, the Empire has treated even the slightest diplomatic indiscretion - things as petty as the wearing of a Khumaak pendant - as greivous insults and slights, as if they weren’t personally responsible for 800 years of brutal repression and genocide. They still hold two thirds of the Minmatar population in bondage, as if they ever had any right to do so, and yet stubbornly refuse to understand why the Republic seems so reticent to approach them reasonably.

Was the Empyrean Incident justifiable? In a perfect world, perhaps not, but in a perfect world they’d never have been driven to such an extremity. Were the Elder Fleet in the wrong? It’s a possibility, but there is no nation in the cluster in a suitable position to cast moral judgements upon the Minmatar. The Federation has its own ugly history of brutality and repression. The State’s hardly got room to criticise insurgency or extreme action.

Are there some Minmatar who will never accept peace? Who won’t rest until the Amarr have suffered a millenia of torment, and some cosmic scale of misery is balanced? Who refuse to tolerate the mere existence of the Empire in any form? Of course. But while I’m not a Minmatar and I haven’t experienced their struggle firsthand, I feel fairly confident in assuming that if their people were not in bondage and they were relatively certain the Empire wouldn’t attack them again, they’d be amenable to peace. The problem is, while they still dwell next door to a nation that believes its ruling ethnicity has been granted stewardship of all creation, and is at least notionally willing to enforce that belief through slavery and genocide, peace can’t exist.

The Minmatar Republic need undergo no fundamental change for peace to exist. The Empire, on the other hand, at some point has to accept that what it did to the Minmatar Republic was inexcusable, unwarranted and most importantly, wrong. And I don’t know if the Empire can admit that without some sort of cataclysmic realignment of its own values and beliefs.

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Doriam II’s coronation. Lord Idonis committed Shathol’Syn in YC105.

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Oh yeah, I always forget that Doriam II existed.

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Nearly successful genocide. The Starkmanir bloodline endured, apparently sheltered by the Nefantar (some of whom claim their boot-licking reinvention as the Ammatar was done expressly to hide and protect Starkmanir families), even if their culture was all but obliterated. They’re working on reconstructing what they can of it.

Otherwise, yeah, pretty much that stuff.

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That doesn’t even make sense. The birth of the Ammatar occured centuries before the Starkmanir Genocide.

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As time passes, I find myself getting less able to stomach this line of argument. The Empire’s not some monolithic thing that moves forward blindly like a natural disaster; it’s a living, breathing thing (with several trillion pairs of lungs). There’s a lot of variety to what “it” believes.

One thing that’s nearly universal, though, is a deep sense of pride. Time and the turns of history might be a good teacher to the Empire, but they’re not going to listen to a bunch of heathens about this stuff … not to you, not to me. It’s easy to be glib and say stuff like, “Well, then we’ll just have to make them,” but history doesn’t suggest it’ll be so easy.

The Gallente made their ultimatums to the Caldari. The Caldari spat in their face. The Caldari were in a far weaker position at that time. The resulting war lasted eight decades and solved nothing. The Caldari were determined to remain themselves, but wound up defining “themselves” largely in direct defiance to Gallentean wishes.

(Did the Raata really have so little use for art?)

There are quite a lot of significant differences, of course, but, I see a lot of the same pride, here in the Empire.

I don’t see a lot of happy endings down this path. Increasingly, it feels like, if I’m sympathetic to the Matari, I’m just making more enemies I’ll have to face, encouraging people to stand up against something I’ll have to stand for, regardless. Understanding the Matari position doesn’t change my duty, and my sympathy’s not so deep that it’ll spare a life I need to take.

I don’t think threats are going to work, Mr. Ixiris. Maybe they’d encourage the Empire to let go of Sarumite militarism if Sarumite militarism were really in charge right now. But, it’s not. It hasn’t been since basically Vak’Atioth. … It’s more likely that taking a hard line, now, will cause the Empire to let go of Heideran VII-style peacemaking, and gird again for war. The Empire’s ships might be old, but, it can always build new ones.

And worst of all will be if doing that, works for them. Which it might. A feudal social structure is always military at its root. Remembering that martial pride really might be good for the Empire. Maybe bad for the rest of us, though.

There’s a thread of thought, here, that maybe slavery was a mistake all along. There’s another that the mistake was accepting the Minmatar Rebellion’s outcome. It’s not clear which, if either, Empress Catiz subscribes to.

It might be good to be careful which you encourage.

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I like how you pretend the Reclaiming isn’t an immutable core of their very identity, just like their divine mandate to carry it out. It’s kind of cute, in that baby seal walking into a club kind of way.

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Some Ammatar had a change of heart after witnessing the destruction of Starkman Prime, deciding to protect what’s left of them. There are still plenty of genuine traitors left, the Ammatar Mandate certainly didn’t collapse overnight just because some of them decided to rejoin the Republic as Nefantar.

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The Reclaiming is, on the face of it, such an insane and impossible objective, though. Since the political picture stablised with the founding of Concord, has the Empire managed to either conquer or peacefully convert even a single world?

The State allied with them solely to preserve our self-determination - we wouldn’t have done so if we thought that they were a bigger threat to that self-determination than the Federation.

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Yes. Several worlds in fact.

And I’m not talking about the Militia Wars.

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