Defensive.
Sometimes Pieter that sardonic sense of humor of yours is hard to differentiate from a contrived if not disingenuous take on realpolitik.
I won’t engage in the same old same old. But Please…
People who’ve been driven out of their homes can see a whole lot of aggression as ‘defensive’ in a kind of retroactive, ‘taking back what’s ours’ sense.
It’s not like we don’t see attacking Amarr holdings to liberate slaves as defending those slaves from the ongoing aggression the Amarr are engaging in.
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I am sorry, was a speaking with you Ma’am?
Were you born on Caldari Prime? I don’t think so.
If so then at your age… your a Federal citizen.
Meh. I’m not going to deny that toeing the party line in public can be very good for one’s profile. We both know how that game works.
But I’m also absolutely serious that Highlander was avoidable, that the Federal Navy’s action turned a tense situation into a crisis and that their drive to destroy a ship that was not in position to fight back and, in fact, essentially stood itself down during the engagement was… well… it wasn’t becoming a culture that likes to portray itself as benevolent.
Moreover, the action taken to restore Federal control over space that they could claim to be theirs, at all costs, does nothing more than legitimise actions taken by the Provists to restore Caldari control over space that they could claim to be theirs, at all costs.
In the end, the scales were balanced by Heth’s extreme action to retake the planet and then put back out of balance again by Operation Highlander. I think that the Senate finally recognised this, and that’s why they took a series of positive steps to show that negotiation could lead to good outcomes. I applaud them, and the Federation, for these actions.
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Indeed so, we all play the roles… prescribed to us.
You know my mind on the matter better than most.
Yes, indeed. It matches mine very well.
A little space, some time and some respect would do wonders. It wouldn’t be a panacea, but the older I get the less I see anything good coming from this eternal tension.
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Internal cohesion, my friend. Denied an external enemy, human societies tend to manufacture internal ones. We’re still just simple primates with very complex tools.
We make and maintain social bonds with under 200 distinct individuals, and beyond that we need a shared identity. That shared identity only has cachet if there’s a larger context where someone else doesn’t share it, and that other group is significant enough to make being part of the shared identity significant.
Without international tension and opposition, each of the empires would have more time to notice their internal differences, and put more emphasis on them. They’d begin moving toward fracturing. It’s human nature: we define ourselves as a response to outside stimulae, because utlimately, that’s what we are: the aggregate response to all of the stimulae across our lifetime.
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Indeed so.
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What would you envision as a solution? Endings seem difficult to find.
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I’m Caldari, so I’d like to see us get our homeworld back. I understand the problems that the Federation have with that, but understanding them doesn’t mean I agree with the theft of the Homeworld.
At the end of the day, some sort of power sharing is necessary in the Luminaire system - perhaps as a demilitarised zone to stop it from being such a security problem. A phasing out of Federal control over populations centers and a phasing in of Caldari law and administration - as has been happening.
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It isn’t just “the Federation” that has a problem. You consider Caldari Prime “Home,” according to deeply held spiritual and cultural beliefs, which ought to be respected. I was born there. I still have family there, though fewer than before Heth’s invasion. Families like mine, with both Gallente and Caldari heritage, have been living together on Caldari Prime for centuries. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their homeworld first.
We’ll probably never see eye to eye on our people’s history. My view will probably always be that the Secessionist Megacorps started a civil war because they preferred unfettered exploitation of the populations of their illegal colonies to letting them have the civil rights guaranteed to citizens of the Fedaration. You probably lay fault for the whole thing at the feet of gallente cultural imperialism. What we ought to be able to do, despite our disputed history, is allow for a future of self determination for both peoples.
Right now, Caldari Prime is an example of Gallente and Caldari populations governing themselves according to their own will. It should stay that way.
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I’m not entirely unhappy with the current solution - certainly not upset enough to go to war over it.
The big disagreement seems to be the degree to which those who are descended from the prior inhabitants deserve a say in the future of the planet. You, quite clearly, feel that those who live there now should have the final say - people like myself are obviously unhappy that our ancestral homeland has had the deck stacked with settlers from Gallente (and a couple of centuries of Federation propaganda).
I suspect we ought to have a couple of centuries of home rule and free immigration before a final referendum.
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Entertaining to hear you of all people speak of referendum. Perhaps if the Secessionists employed that method centuries ago instead of murdering their more moderate political opposition things would have turned out differently.
It is the home of everyone living there right now, in fairness. That should weigh more then the sentimental value the planet has to people who mostly seem to want it as one desires a trophy.
Honestly the fact that anyone wants to reach a settlement and find a solution that benefits everyone is already beautifull.
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And if your people had employed it, instead of murdering helpless civilians and bombing cities from orbit, maybe our two peoples could have parted ways civilly and without two centuries of pointless and tragic conflict.
There is plenty of blame, Rinai, and plenty of crimes to take vengeance on. There are more graves on our mutual homeworld than there are bodies to fill them.
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And as is inevitable when discussing Luminaire VII on this medium of communication, it seems that discourse on the subject will always degenerate into a perverse blame game regarding the justifications for the First Caldari-Gallente War and for the current status of sovereignty over the world. Or to use whatever example within the litany of atrocities committed by both sides two centuries ago that increased in barbarity and frightfulness, one after the other. No amount of hindsight or tit-for-tat responses will lessen the gravity of the mistakes, nor increase one party’s responsibility at the expense of the other.
I’ve probably said this before, but despite Home being the progenitor and cradle of our civilisation, it is important to remember that we collectively made the decision out of necessity to leave and forge a new destiny for our people amongst the stars. The Federation rebuilt Home with their finances, repopulated a nearly deserted world (aside from those that chose to remain), and acted as its caretaker for two centuries. The treaty that brought an end to the First War ceded sovereignty of the world in perpetuity to the Federation, a facet which we accepted. Contrary to the bleating of some vocal elements of Caldari society pleading their case of irredentism, in my opinion we as a people do not need ownership of a single world regardless of its significance to reassure us of the validity of our identity or the strength of our culture. Nor do we need to inflict the misery of evicting those that chose to make Home their own too, just as their ancestors did during the centuries of peaceful co-existence with the civilisation on Gallentia.
Home has seen enough conflict fought over it to last a few generations in the last decade, let alone the past two centuries. Let’s not make it a sticking point for arguments on the forums, eh?
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My statements were in response to claims that laid the blame specifically at the feet of one side in the conflict, Edward, and were not in the spirit of “tit-for-tat” which would require me to attempt to completely indemnify our ancestors of their share of the blame.
You might want to read the entire statement before crafting a response, next time.
I’d also question whether we truly made a decision to find a new life and build a new society elsewhere - or whether we shifted our seat of government to a more defensible center in an attempt to preserve our existing way of life. Finally, it is not out of some deep-seated insecurity that we chase after Home - it is because the very geography of the world is a part of our culture.
I’m speaking more to onlookers than to you, yourself, when I point out that there are forests and mountain peaks that are the symbolic homes of spirits such as Cold Wind and Heart of the Forest that are major parts of Wayiist thought and history. Perhaps you can forego physical access to and possession of these sacred places, but my own opinion - that they should be carefully preserved and enshrined by the people to whom they are so important, is hardly that of an outlier. It is not bleating, it is the voice of the State, kirjuun, and you ought not to dismiss it so lightly or with such derision.
I really ought not to have to explain that Guestright ceases to apply to a guest that seizes your home and makes it their own. Nor that the Gallente gain no sort of moral claim to the world through repairing the damage that their Navy inflicted upon it - you make many good points for moderation in your argument, but these are not among them, in my opinion.
You are right that Home ought NEVER to be the site of armed conflict again and you are doubly right that it should not have been the site of conflict in the past. Much misery has been inflicted and much damage that can never be repaired - but conflict is exactly what our Home will see again if a proper peace is not built.
By ‘proper’ you should note that I do not mean an expedient truce or an enforced ceasefire forged with the intention of breaking it - I mean a true peace that addresses the root causes of the conflict within the hearts of both peoples. In your heart, Edward, do you really feel that the people of the State are ready to surrender their Homeworld? I’m younger than you, but my creche still had the ritual of “Haakinen K’len” on Sobaseki day and when I used to patrol the bars in the Prole Sector, that was still the toast for the last round of the night. We will return.
Perhaps that return can be delayed and reshaped to mean a return through treaty as part of a lasting peace to bring a conclusion to all the wars. It can even be a return to sharing the world with those who have made their homes upon it. I don’t think we need to pursue such a narrow definition that our inflexibility becomes the cause of prolonging the conflict and keeping it unwinnable - but to walk away from our past and our traditions?
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Well, it is a conundrum that does not lend itself to compromise.
The idea that people who have never see the planet have a greater claim to it than someone born there is difficult to understand.
Though I can empathize with my Caldari friends perspective considering the nature of the… initial dislocation.
Even I can envision one day some type of accomidation to the planetary problem given the right settlement.
The idea that the Federation might ever share or in any way abrogate is absolute sovereignty over the Luminaire system is however, unthinkable.
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I suppose you have to use your imagination, James. Imagine Liberty was a goddess in your culture and that she had a physical home. Now imagine that this home was on a planet that had been conquered by the Caldari.
Living space isn’t really the issue. New Caldari Prime is actually a nicer world than Caldari Prime, in terms of the climate and so forth - in face we have many worlds in Caldari space that are nicer than Caldari Prime - it’s a cold and inhospitable place to be. We’ve managed to transplant Kresh trees, so that we have a good supply without needing to raid Caldari Prime for them - and Kresh is about the only resource that was native to Caldari Prime that we can’t find elsewhere.
The need for home is not pragmatic at all - the planet contains nothing that we don’t possess elsewhere - it is firmly based on romantic tradition. I think you can lay the blame firmly on us being forced to transition from a single home planet to multiple systems too quickly. Perhaps if the process had taken longer, you’d have wound up with all the traditionalists living back home on Caldari Prime and happy to pay taxes to whoever, and all the people who think self-determination is more important than tradition in the State?
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See, and to think there are some who think you don’t have the soul of a poet.