Then I’ll keep my eyes open. I try to do that anyway, but anger has a way of making it hard to see.
And I’m pretty mad at you, False Light.
You speak as if we haven’t been waging a war for the better part of a 1000 years - a war that your masters started when they descended upon our people, destroying the very “peace” you claim to wish to protect.
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It did not though. And that was none of any outsider’s doing. The first reports of slave revolts came inside 24 hours of the Deathglow attack. There is no way any outside instigator could have acted in that time frame. As I said above; no one brought the rebellion, it was already there. We moved in when it was already going on, because it was going on.
That much is clear. For what it is worth, I am not particularly mad at at you. Your inability to acknowledge things as they are frustrates me, but I am not angry with you personally, nor do I hate you.
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Jenneth doesn’t know what she fights for. She throws herself into the warzone slinging armaments at warfighters and then claims she’s trying to protect her and hers. She, like several of her ilk in LUMEN, preach the peace mantra and are quick to point the finger at others with accusations of war mongering. The problem is that the whole “peace” and “mercy” bit is often overshadowed by the glaring issue of blind faith and loyalty. They’ll spread peace and mercy as long as there isn’t an authoritarian figure to tell them “stop helping” or “kill these people”.
Which ultimately cycles back to not knowing why one fights. The cause isn’t hers, it’s her leaders’. So, therein, the root cause of why Thebeka and Kahah and all the other atrocities occur fall squarely at the feet of the would-be enemy. Otherwise there is doubt, and where there is doubt, there isn’t loyalty.
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It didn’t stop at the deathglow riots, though, even before we started aiding them. As Elsebeth has said, you can’t create a rebellion, you can only support one that the locals chose to fight. Deathglow triggered the rebellion, but it’d have kept going regardless of whether or not we had been there. It was the match that lit the fuse, but the powder had already been laid down.
To add to my last post, part of the reason why you support these rebellions is to limit the amount of damage done to those who surrender. That’s why you give them weapons and aid and encourage the rebellion to last as long as possible and do as much damage as possible. Because the more damage they do, the more success they achieve, the more concessions they can win in exchange for peace. A rebellion too easily defeated is a rebellion that suffers the most penalties, because they have nothing to trade in exchange for their compliance. If you’re going to surrender, you want it to be a conditional surrender, not an unconditional one.
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Hm. Now that’s an interesting point. Only, I’m not at all sure that people ended up being in that kind of position at the end, Samira. It takes a lot of firepower to be able to take on armored paladins and it really didn’t seem like the Holders were in anything faintly resembling a conciliatory mood.
Also it has that kind of “more wrecked lives for fewer lives wrecked” … queasiness about it that makes me suspicious of its accuracy. It might work if you kind of keep a revolt going at a slow burn for an extended period and evade or otherwise defeat all efforts at crushing you outright, but given a one-sided battle against opponents who are more concerned with the precedent they’re setting than the damage done. . . .
And again, how would that be different from your stance of demading we look away from slavery even when the people whom it concerns want to rebel, in order to secure peace and order for yourself and those close to you? How is that not wrecking the lives of the people who want out of slavery, so that LUMEN can be “about peace”?
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I can’t make a claim to whether or not we were successful. But we did what we could to try and give them the chance.
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Alternatively:
Treason doth never prosper. What is the reason?
Why, if it doth prosper, none dare call it treason.
The difference between Kahah and Thebeka was that on Kahah the Khanid Authorities treated deathglow affected rioters as active rebels, while on Thebeka we treated them as victims and only actively treated those who persisted after deathglow wore off as rebels. I believe it is likely that Elsebeth would have been outright happier if we had repeated Chakaid’s extermination tactics on Thebeka.
As for what Elsebeth offers, it isn’t escape or even revenge. It is a dream of outright breaking Amarr power permanently. Entire planets of dead slaves would be an acceptable means to her if it meant that Amarr was no longer an active threat to the Matari Rebellion at the end of it all.
She does work to facilitate escape, as well. But those programs seem to be kept separate from her material support of banditry on Amarr planets.
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Have I made demands, Else? … as though I were in a position to do such a thing.
You’re a dedicated enemy. There’s no request I can make of you and expect an affirmative unless I maybe ask you to keep breathing (and I’m not disposed to ask you that).
I ask nothing of you, but for the pain and disruption you bring I wish you disruption and pain.
Anyway, the difference is mostly grounded in the idea that new, active, acute harms (aggravated rebellion) are normally more disruptive and therefore more dangerous than the ones that sort of plod along in the background (mistreatment of captives). The former might resolve the latter, but it’ll bring a host of new issues. The latter might be addressed and resolved alone in any number of ways, with minimal disruption.
Of course, you don’t believe that would ever happen. Right?
Besides, I expect bringing chaos and destruction to something ancient that’s hurt you might feel a little like justice. I don’t believe in evil, but I don’t assume you share that belief considering your comments on “the evil god.”
You may dislike me sounding “holier than thou,” but isn’t the one who claims to stand for good, you?
I suggest another Quick Tip for inciting future rebellions:
#8: Make them read the collected works of Aria Jenneth.
It’s more a sense of amusement than active dislike.
No, Admiral, that is an outright untruth. Whether a lie or a genuine misunderstanding, I am not sure.
As I have repeatedly said, rebellions do not work best in places where they are needed most. Desperate people fight, but they do not fight cleverly or persistently.
In many cases, both stories of a massacre and stories of the lack there-of can be used to encourage others. Where that is the case, the alternative without one is obviously better.
It could happen, but it is not something I can make happen; it would need to happen from the inside.
A mistake many make is thinking resistance by the Minmatar and work by the Amarr to change their system are mutually exclusive. They are not.
I make no such claims. I fight for the survival of my people and I help others fight for their freedom. It is you who chose to use the word “good” about that - not me. I think maybe look in the mirror again and ask yourself why.
Aria, I want to call your attention to the one thing you got right in this thread:
What capsuleer aid was there on Alkabsi? (Hint: none.)
What outside assistance was there on Alkabsi, even if not from capsuleers? (Hint: none.)
So there was just the minor deathglow riots and then everyone got back to work, right? Right? No need for a specific all-out deployment of large numbers of House Sarum forces? No need for Alizabeth to lead the Newelle ground forces on a campaign that saw her, in her own words, waist deep in blood?
Just a few riots and skirmishes, right? No desperate stands with improvised weapons, bolstered by what few modern energy weapons the rebels managed to take from the bodies of dead police and soldiers?
Right. Wasn’t all or nothing at all. No massive body count racked up by close-quarters fighting inside mines, for example.
For all you want to act like Thebeka was a bloodbath ‘because capsuleers’, the evidence presented 2 gates away at the exact same time says otherwise.
And, just for the record, on the ‘cowardice’ score:
It’s not an unwillingness to die that makes you a coward, Aria Jenneth. It’s the refusal to work to make things better. Dying is easy. Killing is easy. Standing up for what’s right and trying to improve a system, that’s less easy. It means you have to overcome fear.
See, fear is what motivates people toward ‘order and peace’, rather than just toward ‘peace’. It’s that emphasis on order—so much so that it assumes to primary position, in fact—that gives it away. ‘The existing order’ is ‘the best we can expect to do’ is another big tell. You see a system where trillions are abused, and think humanity can’t do better. You expect any alternative will be worse, so there’s no point trying. That’s fear.
You can call it cynicism, if you want, but that’d be a flawed claim, at best… and probably a self-deceptive one. It’s entirely possible to be cynical—to think that humanity’s horribly screwed up, and that the vast majority of possible outcomes to any situation will be worse—but to keep on hoping, to keep on working to improve things despite that feeling that it’s almost certainly doomed to failure.
A vanishingly small chance of success isn’t a valid excuse not to try. Refusing to try just because you’re ‘sure’ you won’t succeed?
Yeah, Aria, that’s cowardice.
The universe doesn’t have to be made for humanity’s sake. Human society, on the other hand, is. Human society exists for the sake of human beings. And human beings, no matter how unlikely it is that they’ll manage it, can absolutely improve on what we’ve already got.
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Well. There were attempts for capsuleer assistance in Alkabsi too (besides that you could argue that Ali herself was capsuleer interference), but it was over too fast for us to be of much of a use. As I said, we cannot stage a rebellion, we can only aid one that is there.
But yea, people died in Alkabsi. A lot of good people died. And a lot of them died because we were not there in time. And I suppose that one is partly on me - I hesitated before going full out on the direct military support, imagining it not my job.
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It is not cowardice to attempt mutual compromise before violence.
It is not cowardice to use one’s head before one’s heart.
It is not cowardice to wish for peace on one’s own terms.
That all said, it is also not brave to use Vesper as a scapegoat for your frustrations. She is a servant by choice, not a social saboteur by obligation, as you lot seem to believe. She is not the one to talk to about changing the Empire; that would be Holders, priests and the Royals, which revolutionaries seem to believe deserve a bullet to the brain more than the respect they deserve.
And with every revolutionary that picks up a gun, a reformist is silenced. The efforts of each are indeed mutually exclusive.
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This is not in my experience of what happens. If anything, Amarr reformists are more vocal now than they were a year ago this time.
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I believe you are confused. Reformists do not try to kill the people they are trying to change the minds of. Samira is not a reformist. The rest of us that are, are now trying to argue against her message due to the methods involved.
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No, she is a human being, in a human society. And every human being has a personal choice to make: to attempt to work to improve their society, or not. ‘Not’ is cowardice. It doesn’t matter what your position is.
No, but they might try to kill the people who’ve convinced them that those people cannot be swayed.
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