Except I never said an autocrat couldn’t. Necessary for the greater good is not the same as a ‘good’ act. That’s the disconnect you seemed to have with both me and Else. Answering necessity is necessary… but that doesn’t make what’s necessary good.
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I don’t get caught up on moral quandaries about necessary things, but sure, let’s go through this again I guess.
If it’s necessary to help my people (in the long run, ie. it’s not shortsighted), it’s good, most of the time.
I don’t judge goodness by if it makes me feel warm and fluffy, I judge goodness by the consequences, and to a much smaller extent, intent.
I can’t really claim to have higher moral standards than that and not be a massive hypocrite given my occupation and the crass attitudes of capsuleers in general (including myself) with regards to the collateral damage generated by our war games.
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Well, yer a doofus. So there!
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Mhm. See?
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Grief dammit, now I’m gonna spend all night staring at multicolored dancing birds…
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To your knowledge. Your opinion. Your baseline, third party read of the situation based on what was reported.
Evidence can be fabricated. And when the fabricators are the ones who get into power, the truth of matters becomes very suspect indeed.
I mean, just look at Jamyl.
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But who verified it was genuine? There were no trials, there were no open due process. There were no open or unbiased checks. The people who benefited from the purge checked it and said yea it’s cool.
There were voices who asked questions, but they were ignored or shushed. You are right, there was no huge stink.
But there should have been.
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I am pleased. Thank you for this post.
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Oh, bubie, you do not want to open up the can of predestination. It leads to a place your entire faith is desperate to hide from.
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So since there have been a few replies, I guess I’ll keep playing Deceiver’s Advocate here.
Fabricating such a large amount of evidence on so many people in the midst of an unpredictable, unforeseen crisis would present a considerable challenge from a logistical, time, resource and manpower perspective. And as with all conspiracies, the more people you involve, the greater the risk of a leak. I simply find it less plausible to believe in that sort of conspiracy theory, given the timeline and the unpredictable nature of what was happening at that time. If this had been something people had known about beforehand, ie. the Elder Invasion, the chaos and disunity of the Parliament culminating at exactly the perfect moment for such an action to be feasible, Midular’s dissolution of Parliament just moments before the purge… it just sounds odd to me. Especially when you consider Teinhyr’s political assassinations theory. If these were assassinations, and there were no spies, honest guvnah, why was Midular nearly assassinated by her own guards, rather than by Yun’s men who actually saved her life? Why wouldn’t Yun have killed Midular, if this was a Tribal takeover? Midular had for years been the face and indeed the primary actor on behalf of the Gallentean democracy vision of the Republic, wouldn’t she be the primary target? It seems like a major misstep for them, if their intent was to silence all opposition, to leave the leader of the opposition alive. Unless you think the guards were basically paid off by Yun’s men to serve as fall men, die in a false flag attack on Midular, so Yun’s men could come in, be the heroes, and have legitimacy. Which is quite a big ask to expect me to believe that with no evidence.
So I see issues with the theory that this was primarily falsified evidence planned ahead of time, and that this was primarily a set of political assassinations. Do I think a few innocent people who were simply old political enemies might have been killed? Yes. Do I think that purge was primarily a pre-meditated political one? No. And if the evidence is fake, it would have had to be premeditated. It’s quite possible that we are looking at a both and. Yes, most of those killed were of the democracy faction, and it’s quite possible that a large number of the democracy faction was paid off. It might have been both political assassination and the purging of spies. For this not to be the case, there is simply a lot of speculation involved as to how the Shakorites managed to build their cases and act so quickly, and then there’s the issue with the treatment of Midular.
As to me being a ‘third party’ and somehow an unreliable person to comment, I’m again of Sebiestor lineage, most of those killed were Sebiestor, who were pushing for a Gallentean democracy. Blood runs thicker than the water of whatever world you’re born on, and if anything, based on my upbringing and kin ties, I have every reason to believe that the purge and displacement of the Sebiestor faction was against my interests and take a stand against it. Yet I am not going to do that because I simply don’t see a degradation in the state of the Republic since those events, I think the Republic is stronger now than it was then. Not to say it doesn’t have problems, to dispel Else’s lazy and incorrect ‘hot take’, but I do think the Republic is stronger for having cleaned house.
And if I wanted to reply to your ad hominem in kind, I could point out that you pledge fealty to the Amarr and are thus exactly and completely unqualified to weigh in, in good faith, on the Republic especially regarding an event that removed a large amount of Amarrian spies from Republic government. But ad hominems are just low, aren’t they? 
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I suppose that’s where my work has provided me with additional blessings of the armor. There is no heresy where I mission, and so I hear questions and concerns that would make many of my colleagues in our home space blanch. It’s good exercise for the soul!
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Yes, there were voices who asked questions, but I am not sure they were asking the right ones. Why where these traitors there? how did the disease manage to infiltrate the heart of the Republic’s institutions?
I would like to clarify that I am not implying that the Ray of Matar was complicit. But it does highlight why the change of government was so necessarry. She was weak. I am not sure if this is a fault of her own, or if she was bounded by the institutions which she served (I personally believe the latter, as given evidence from her dissolution of the parliament) but the Republic’s economy was stagnated, there was massive exodus into the Federation, and worst of all, there were policies of appeasement.
Were the deaths without trail heavy handed? yes. Where they necessary? Also yes. The purge served to rid the Republic of this weakness, and the Institution of the Tribal Council and the office of the Sanmatar serves to uphold our new strength.
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I lived in the Republic, in full standing with the Sebiestor Tribe, voluval on my back and marks on my face, when the purges happened. As a faithful Amarr, I was the kind of person who was vulnerable to rising anti-Amarr fervor stemming from Shakor’s nationalist movement. As a Salvationist, it was brothers and sisters of my faith who were murdered by that sentiment.
So, yeah, I do think I have some merit in weighing in on this discussion.
What I am not capable of, and what my point was about you not being capable of, is having any concrete facts on what actually happened. We have no idea if it was genuine. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. All we know is what was reported. Calling people ignorant of history just because they have doubts about the validity of the evidence is inappropriate. You have no more knowledge of the truth than they do.
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That’s not why I called them ignorant of history. I called them ignorant of history because of a specific claim.
That wasn’t what historically happened, this was not a witch hunt where people were killed just from being called out/accused. There was evidence that was left for everyone to find, analyze for evidence of tampering, and publicize. Whether or not it was genuine is just speculation, but I was calling her ignorant of history because she claimed implicitly that no evidence to back the accusations existed, merely the accusations.
Regarding the gatekeeping thing, you, and others before you, flung it at me. I don’t engage in gatekeeping except in extreme cases of known enemies of a government commenting on it, and even then, it’s just to put it into perspective. I am not an enemy of the Republic and I have blood ties there. You and others have thrown this gatekeeping in my direction, and then you criticize nationalism. It’s actually hilarious.
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Lots of Minmatar politics here lately.
So much I made a separate thread. Despite starting from a specific question I welcome all comments from the tribes there:
(Jason, will you stfu about “gatekeeping” already? Just because people disagree with you or misunderstand you does not mean they don’t think you can talk.)
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Last one’s admittedly not a call for me to stop commenting on it because I’m not “one of you” but it was a continuation of the whole “You’re an outsider” theme. It’s gatekeeping and several people did it.
None of it is particularly threatening to me because I can damn well say what I like regardless of what you, Samira and Teinyhr think about it, but I’m not going to let you pretend that nobody told me to stop talking about it because I’m “not qualified”, or something.
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You claimed tribe heritage earlier. When I welcome comments from the tribes, that then includes you. Or was your claim false?
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I was not gatekeeping, or even calling you an outsider. I was saying, you do not have a definitive understanding of the truth. None of us do. Therefore, none of us can claim authority on the truth. Third party was meant in the sense of, an observer. That would apply to me, Elsebeth, Teinyhr, and everyone else here, too. None of us are members of Republic parliament. None of us are Republic police involved in any investigations into the allegations, none of us are people involved in the coup, or personally know the victims. All we know is what we were told, and therefore we cannot speak definitively on the truth.
If I have given the impression of gatekeeping, or saying that you could not participate in the discussion, then I apologize.
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