They DO need a place to return to after all.
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So⌠no indecision, but letâs not do it yetâŚ
mmmhm.
Before Shakor, we had built up from nothing to an independent Republic of high technological achievement, while also diverting resources into building a secret fleet, in less than 120 years. That is hardly stagnation. Even if you think the current government then was failing, the system obviously wasnât.
In addition, your statistics are based on spaceside data, which is under heavy development due to capsuleer era. If you want to use capsuleer-influenced data as proof, then please include the fact that indie capsuleer trade went from excatly zero in YC102 to multiple active trade hubs during Midularâs prime-minister-ship. That is quite a lot of growth, even when obviously such a new economy was far less stable. (Of course, most capsuleer-induced growth is not the governmentâs doing. But its existence has to be taken into account for both, or neither.)
The economy is doing well. This is great. How much of it is attributable to the coup is less certain.
In addition, we are now bleeding resources of that growth into the militia war. As a war that must be fought but cannot be permanently won, it is by nature a war of attrition. In a war of attrition, the smaller party, even if superior in absolute, will lose proportionally more. We are becoming weaker relative to what matters - the Amarr Empire.
Karin Midular tried to bring Nefantar closer to us, but was opposed by shakorites because it was being âa traitorâ. The Starkmanir discovery predates the coup. Read my history lesson, linked above.
These developments started before the coup. Shakorâs taking glory for something that was not his doing.
This line of thought on history never ceases to amaze me. How would a foreign nation have bestowed anything on Minmatar tribes who had just fought a rebellion and won? we were hardly weaker then than we are now. While we took influences from others, and what clever young nation would not, in the end surely it was the Tribes who decided?
While as I explain above the rest of your strength arguments are while factual not convincingly due to the coup, this one I think rings true.
If we (the Sebiestor) win the popular vote repeatedly despite not having any sort of population majority, then I suppose it is indeed better for those less popular ones to have a mass murder and a coup rather than risk an honest re-election.
It is rare to see anyone put it in as clear terms as you do. I appreciate the honesty.
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Iâm as cynical about power struggles as anyone out there, but when thereâs a genuine crisis on your governmentâs hands, sometimes a power struggle serves an actual purpose. Most of it is vanity, but sometimes you can find some substance when the⌠how does the ancient saying go⌠rubber hits the road.
All that said, while I think Midular was either incompetent, or working within a fundamentally flawed governmental model, I do think she got served one hell of a raw deal and was stuck pretty much unable to control her own perception for years, and didnât seem like such a bad person as far as politicians go. Which might be why she was eaten alive at every turn.
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That is quite a lot of literally inevitable growth that wouldâve happened, by definition, under anyoneâs leadership. When you go up from zero, you can see infinite growth, actually, and use that to make whoever happened to be holding the wizard hat, look good. When in reality, the reason that growth happened was the Yulai Convention itself and the creation of the capsuleer⌠not Karin Midular, not Maleatu Shakor.
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Take it from a half-Gallentean, raised in the Federation, who has been somewhat disgusted with the Federation for some time: The Federationâs greatest asset is its ability to feed you ideas with very little actually said by them officially, and then letting you think it was your idea the entire time. It is the most tried and true tactic in their playbook, theyâve used it on civilization after civilization.
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Yes, that was my point: if you include capsuleer-influenced data, your results are going to be borked, and observations not attributable to the current governments.
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Certainly.
But the argument is not that the Federation influenced us, it is that we were forced, and a coup is legitimate to cease power back.
Now, I am not against more tribal autonomy or a Chiefâs Council as the highest form of government. I am freeborn Seb from a high-class urban clan on Mikramurka, Matar. That is how I am used to having things run, on a smaller scale.
I am opposed to mass murders of officials without trial, and a conspiracies posing as Elders to gain legitimacy, and sham elections with just one candidate, and changing forms of government without going through the established legal or traditional ways.
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How much choice do you have when it comes to the massive amount of economic and cultural soft power, not to mention the massive âYOU OWE MEâ elephant in the room?
I have an easier time believing the tribal governments that existed when Minmatar were independent of outside influence are the true âchoiceâ of the Minmatar rather than any decisions they make very soon after such events as the ones that tied the Federation and the fledgling Republic at the hip, in a not exactly equally beneficial relationship.
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Yes, but what do we in reality know of those governments? I know the Shakorite movement lays claim to knowledge of what it is to be True Minmatar above and beyond of archeology and living tradition, but I find such claims pretty bogus. What we know comes from archeology and legends.
I come from a clan who has been free since the Rebellion, and with some contact to their heritage before that. Our history prides us as having been âthe first to pick up arms, the first to lay them downâ. I know something - not personally, but from fairly recent clan history - about building up on shoddily preserved ways and customs.
And trust me, if you want things to work in a particular way, it is not very hard to come up with an explanation for why it is actually more trad.
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You mean the ones a millennium ago? Uhm⌠ok. But even if we could reconstruct enough information to use them⌠those were the true âchoiceâ of the Minmatar⌠before the Day of Darkness. Ever since then, no Minmatar government has existed independent of outside influence.
Hate is still influence.
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Here is a question thatâs mostly been tangentially addressed so far:
Would the Republic be better off without the Parliament attack having happened?
Also known as: What do you think the Republic would be like now?
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Mired in bureaucratic corruption, weak institutions, and no sense of direction.
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That depends entirely what the election results would have been.
Nevertheless, I believe the answer to this is yes. Without trials and with the impossibility of even post-hoc neutral review of the evidence, we live now in a state where you have reason to fear government assassins if you are labeled traitor by the same government. We live now in a state where you cannot trust that laws will hold, or that another tribe will not take matters in their hands if they see a member of yours a threat.
Traitors or not, all those dead in the murders were someoneâs kin. And outsiders murdering one of yours without prior contact or trial is not just an execution, it is also a threat and a statement of oppression. It says: âWe will not respect your autonomy if we think action against them is necessaryâ. That is not a deed worthy of a Minmatar Tribal Nation; it is a decidedly Amarrian way of thinking.
Such a situation is not conducive to open and honest political discussion or representation.
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Yes. Its birth cry wouldnât be tarnished with senseless mass murder of our own kind.
Largely the same as it is now, sans a dark stain on our collective past.
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Yes. Iâd like to consider the event in isolation⌠but I canât. Itâs too wrapped up in what was happening before, and what has happened since. Government officials, from municipal leaders to members of Parliament, were killed (murdered or executed depends entirely on your perspective), and the only real proof we have that this was in any way justified was that provided by the killers. The authorities made no independent verification because in the immediate aftermath, the killers became the authorities.
A massive breakdown of the social order was perpetrated by those who immediately declared themselves the guardians of social order. And it was never explained, if they could contain all of those âenemy agentsâ and dispatch them, without police or security forces preventing it⌠why they couldnât detain those same individuals⌠or even the entire Parliament if needed, while independent investigation of the evidence went forward.
âOh, there was no timeâ is ludicrous when it was clear that an immense amount of time went into the planning of the attackâit had to, or it couldnât have succeeded.
Would we be better off without the establishment of âScrew due process, kill peopleâ as what amounts to de facto legal precedent for addressing government corruption?
Is that a serious question?
I donât know what weâd be like today. We might be mired in indecision. We might be crippled and hamstrung. We might be even stronger than we are. Certainly, in the aftermath of the killings, there was a lot of mistrust between us. Even if all of the charges were legitimate⌠was that all there was? Did anyone escape, or was this the universeâs first perfectly successful example of counterintelligence operations spanning dozens of worlds and trillions of people? After all, there was no way to interrogate any of the accused to see if anyone had slipped the nets.
What would the Republic be like now? Maybe, as Parliament had already been dissolved when the killings happened four days later, weâd have exactly the same governmental structure we have now. We canât ever really have any idea what weâd be like.
But yes, weâd definitely be better off without the Sword of Damocles having been established as a way to get what you want, without any repercussions. And as long as no investigations are done, as long as none of the killers are brought to justiceâvigilantism is still a damned crime, after allâthen âkill your rivalsâ will always remain on our books as an accepted alternative to the rule of law.
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We are stronger, because we arenât a weak copy of the Gallente. We arenât trying to model ourselves around their culture or government, our Tribal Republic has been designed to stand on itâs own traditions our own traditions, which we alone have the ability to control. The Sanmatar gave us the strength and courage to pursue this path, while also having the loyalty to the Tribes to return the power to them, when he could have monopolized it around himself should he have desired to do so, which would have made us a weak copy of the Amarr.
We are strongest when we stand alone for our own traditions, our own nation, our own cultures. Not adopting Gallentean or Amarrian values. I donât even think the material conditions matter when compared to such things, and empowering the Tribes to govern was the right step toward that goal.
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We werenât a copy of the Gallente when it happened, either. Parliament had already been disbanded. The wheels were already in motion without a bloodbath where a cabal of power-hungry criminals dispensed justice the Tribes had not authorized them to dispense.
Our traditions? Our traditions werenât âkill one another to get aheadâ. You want that, go talk to the Amarr and the Khanid. Our traditions include the longest period of internal peace the cluster has ever known.
Empowering the Tribes, sure. Slaughtering municipal leaders, regional leaders, when they could have been arrested? Thatâs not âempowering the Tribesâ. Just the opposite. The Tribes didnât get the chance to judge those people. They had that stolen from them by the man who âgave us the strengthâ to do what was already happening.
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Technically it was the Elders that past judgement on the criminals, collaborators and traitors not Shakor.
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Thatâs the story, isnât it? But like I have said before, before it became really convenient to pin stuff on them, no one I know had really heard them speak for a long time. Malaetu Shakor we knew. Karin Midular we knew. The Parliament, the Chiefs, our local officials, those we knew. But I had never personally spoken to an elder or heard one say a thing about these matters of governance; I figured they are a spiritual order at best, mostly up-keeping certain traditions, without political sway.
And suddenly they show up with a Fleet built on money supposedly no one in the actual government had noticed was missing for a full century, and their first deed after revealing themselves as a major force on the political field is mass murder, and we are supposed to go âok fine then, because Eldersâ?
Sorry, but smells like a conspiracy to me, and more false-patriotic twisting of traditions to support your own credibility.
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