If you have found yourself struggling to understand the key nature of the Minmatar or wondering why the Liberation Games, I sincerely suggest you watch this:
A masterpiece in evocative imagery and rising words by Grar’Olro Lightpainters and Sanmatar Maleatu Shakor, it very effectively captures what we are. We pride ourselves on our history of peace, but we are a people of war.
Everybody serves. There are few adults, young or old, who cannot pick up a gun in a pinch. There is no child who does not know who The Enemy is. There is no respectable clan who cannot respond to ‘how will your livelihood serve in a war’. Signs that everybody knows - whether they like them or not - are the bloody hand and the raised fist and the lifted Khumaak. Calls we all recognize and are taught to heed are ‘never again another Long Night’ and ‘we come for our people’.
For us, as a nation, peace is dear, but it is also largely history. It is legend. Where individual clans or worlds find peace, it is temporary, a shelter in a winter storm rather than the sun of spring. For we were burned to ashes by the Days of Darkness and re-forged: in centuries of preparation, in years of Rebellion, and in the decades of Vindication Wars. The one short attempt at peace we have had post-Rebellion almost led to a civil war. A civil war that in the end, eventually, even the most stubborn and hotheaded of us would have to admit we cannot afford.
We can kneel, but only to bide time until it is time to raise the Khumaak. We can run, but only to live to fight another day. We can hide, but only to gather our forces and strike again. We can live in peace, but only as long as the peace serves the one duty as well as or better as open war. And as the Liberation Games remind us, the defense of the Seven Tribes is the duty of us all.
You do not have to like what we are. But this is what we are. Ally or Enemy, Triglavian or human, this is what you have to deal with, when you deal with us. Strike the shield, expect the sword.