mjwest wrote:Nerroth wrote:It would depend on the context.
Comparing the ISC to the other empires isn't my point. I have no illusions of the "goodness" of any of the empires, including the Federation. My point is just that the ISC is no better than the rest, and deserving of no particular honor.
Yet the Federation gets a number of honors which echo aspects of the United States - G for the National Guards, rather than the L everyone else gets, for example - and even the Hydrans get 'HMS', despite their internal organisation being somewhat removed from that of the United Kingdom.
Which kinda makes my point for me. Let me reword it a bit:
"If the Gorns were smart enough to submit to their betters, things would progress smoothly. If, however, they insisted on their own views or own independence, well, let's just say some 'convincing' would be necessary."
That is not my point at all.
I was at no point saying 'the ISC would try to strong-arm the Gorns into joining the Concordium' - though demographically, they would be a significant player if they did.
What I was saying was that if the first contact with the Gorns went as poorly as that between the Gorns and Federation - i.e. had a brash, young Gorn captain vaporize an ISC colony without warning - it might have taken longer than it did between the UFP and Confederation historically for the resulting tensions to simmer down.
(The Feds, with a lot more exposure to rival stellar empires, were not exactly thrilled with the events at Cestus III, but were less shocked than the Concordium body politic would have been in the same type of event.)
However, should first contact go smoothly, there's no reason that the ISC wouldn't have been happy enough to establish at least cordial relations. While they might offer Concordium membership should the Gorns want it, that wouldn't mean they'd take it the wrong way of the Gorns declined.
Oh, let's see. The ISC object to the neighbour honoring their mutual defense treaties, yet the ISC have no qualms about declaring war on everyone because they don't hold the same beliefs as the ISC.
Sure. OK, why not?
Well, when a UN peacekeeping force is sent into a conflict zone, or deployed between two armed camps, does that count as the countries sending those peacekeepers declaring war on the powers in question?
If it does, Canada (and Ireland) would have a somewhat different set of history books than they do at present.
And even then, the example of Canada is perhaps a useful one. While Canadian forces only deploy under operations with a UN remit - hence the reluctance to go to Iraq - there is a difference between the more 'keeping the peace' deployments, such as those on Cyprus, and the more combat-oriented roles Canadian soldiers took part in during the Korean War and now in Afghanistan. Similarly, while there were a few 'combat-oriented' engagements that the ISC took on, such as the targeting of the Hive Ship, the bulk of the deployments were more of the keeping-rivals-apart sort of thing.
And if the part about the Organians 'inviting' or 'facilitating' the Pacification has any sort of truth to it, well it's not quite as good as having a UN mandate, but it's better than nothing.
And, what is wrong with just keeping their noses out of a conflict that isn't their's? If they feel compelled to offer 'sophont assistance' (I would call it 'humanitarian aid', but there are no humans here), great. But, no, they instead decided the only possible choice was to make war on everyone.
If the ISC were making war on everyone, as in following the examples set before, during and after the General War, they'd have been trying to conquer the Octant, not go to all of the trouble to try and keep the Alliance and Coalition apart.
Did some, or maybe all, of the locals see this as an intrusion? Governments and navies, maybe - but then, the Taliban don't want UN forces in Helmand province either.
Would the rights of those civilians on worlds which would have been caught in the crossfire of a second General War - or the slave/subject/pre-warp worlds which had no say on what their masters, or their masters' enemies, had in store for them - been better served had the Concordium not intervened?
I'm not saying that the the Pacification Campaign was the greatest of ideas, or indeed that it's something the ISC had to do (if even the Romulans have the dovish Antreidies, surely the Concordium would have had many who would have voiced their disapproval for the plan) but if the goal of those who did run the Pacification was to try and 'keep the peace', there should be at least some scope for taking them at their word, rather than writing them off as yet another set of would-be conquerors.
You know, I had no intention of making any defense of the Federation POV, but to make any equivalency here is just silly. The Feds declared a border that included disupted areas. Yes, that was a dirty trick. Yes, it was underhanded. Yes, it lead to some long running conflict. But, despite all of that, how can you make any comparison between that and declaring war on everyone? They aren't even in the same realm!
As I said, the Pacification was no ordinary campaign - and the ISC, unlike the Federation, were not doing this to try and increase their own core territory.
The closest thing to that the ISC did was the expansion into the outmost ring of provinces in 2568-2572, and those weren't occupied or claimed by anyone at that time - potential spoiling efforts aside.
Even the short-term occupations which went on during the Pacification, such as that of Tibernia IV or Dionaea, were not intended to say 'hey, locals, you now have the privilege of joining us' - the way that, for example, Cygnus was as a consequence of the Border Declaration.
Of course, you could argue that Cygnus and others in the area were better off under Federation influence - but was the way in which this happened an example of Federation
noblesse oblige, or the consequence of raw territorialism?
To a certain extent, they were. But, you must always remember: The Romulans shot first, and didn't stop shooting. The Federation was well within reason to fight the war in such a way as to try and ensure the Romulans would stop shooting for a while after the war.
Including committing a horrendous act of xenocide in the process?
For those of us familiar with the Federation side of things, of course it's clear that the Remus incident was a terrible accident - Star Fleet did not send a ship with the express purpose of commiting mass murder on such a scale.
However, if you are looking at these events from the point of view of a relatively new (in the context of being exposed to the wider Octant) power, which is wary of its neighbours, struggling with the issue of how the peace they had taken to be for granted is in such short supply elsewhere, and not exactly being in a position to trust the good intent of anyone (including the Federation), how would the loss of Remus look to you?
Nothing in their history would have prepared them for a sight like this - and the consequences in terms of being able to accept the Alliance at its word in future endeavours even lower than it may have been already.
Which is, again, totally different that what the ISC did. Again, just to be clear, the ISC declared war on everyone. And they hadn't even been shot at! (Sorry, I don't include border disputes here. That's gonna happen.) No one ever actually invaded the ISC or declared war on them. No, instead they just decided everyone was "insane" (i.e. didn't agree with their deeply held philosophies), and attacked. This wasn't to defend themselves, or even secure border regions. Instead, they went as far as they could to impose their beliefs on everyone they knew about.
Again, it's not as simple as that.
Even leaving aside the issue of Organian involvement or not (which probably didn't matter much anyway) they were 'forcing' for the most part only so much as to try and keep one set of forces from trying to kill the other.
If they really wanted to uphold their philosophies, they would have gone all-out to knock off at least those 'tyrannical' governments which acted against the interests of their subjects - like the Lyrans and Kzintis (you can't get more 'against the interests' of a subject people than
eating them!) - but they didn't.
Should they have perhaps tried to do things a different way? Probably.
Would they have regrets over the choices made? Some of them, yes.
But were they all-out to impose their views on all and sundry? Not quite to the extent that you might put it.
Whoa, again, I am in no way defending any of the other empires, whether the Federation, Klingon, or the sophont-eating felines. I am simply putting forth that the ISC ain't that great, either. Their flaws are just different.
But that's just it - the ISC, or at least those in Concordium society who would have been in favour of the Pacification, would have made their own decisions in the context of the very powers they would be sending their ships, bases, officers and crewbeings to try and keep tabs on.
If having security stations on ships to watch over second-class subject species, serving up roast Hydran for dinner, or having an officially-sanctioned goal of total galactic dominance don't count as worse flaws than what you might find in Concordium space, what would?
Had the rest of the Octant been as peaceful as, say, the Gorn-Federation border - or, indeed, had the ISC made contact during the less blood-soaked Middle Years - there likely would have been no Pacification.
All through history there have been positive and beneficial results from bad, evil, and wrong actions. That doesn't mean that the actions were not bad, evil, or wrong.
But even then, are are degrees of such - even if the Pacification was a terrible mistake, it was not even close to being as bad as some other things one might find in Alpha history books.
I perfer to think that the ISC were just beaten down to the common mean, rather than "learning their lesson".
I wouldn't necessarily take any sense of
schadenfreude over the ISC's brush with Andromedan-themed death, but then you might have guessed by now that, issues over the Pacification aside, I have an affinity with them setting-wise.
(Indeed, they were the ones who inspired me to take the leap into the Star Fleet Universe, back in the day - after being exposed to Taldren's take on them in
SFC2.)
But leaving that aside, the most prominent outlook could have remained the way it had been at the time of the Pacification - and there are empires out there who kept their hatreds and long-term goals even after the Andromedan onslaught - but instead, they took a different path.
That has to count for something.
I am am not saying they are "really bad", or even worse than anyone else. I am simply saying that they were never better than anyone else. Their flaws were just different.
If anything, I'd peg them (in the overall run of history, from the Early Years through the end of Operation Unity) as being broadly on the same level as the Feds and Gorns, in terms of how life is for your average Concordium citizen.
I sure as hell wouldn't think that life with the Kzintis or Lyrans would be any better, even if I were a Kzinti or Lyran!
Or live on a world under Andromedan occupation or Souldra scouring, for that matter.
And, for an additional point, I like that from a literary point of view. I like that the ISC have multiple levels to them, that they are not just 'noble' or 'pacifists' or something. They have nuance. They have some depth. They have some darkness. That is good for the narrative, and good for the SFU.
If you've seen the kind of stuff I've been trying to get published for the ISC, you'd see that I agree with you, in terms of adding flavour and nuance and so forth to the Inter-Stellar Concordium.
But that does not mean I'd go so far as to make the 'dark' aspects as low as they are for many others.
Misguided (for a time) or not, they are still one of the more hopeful aspects of the Star Fleet Universe, at least in my mind - proof that the SFU Federation, unlike the way the UFP has often been shown on TV Trek, does not have a monopoly on building enduring multi-species partnerships.
And I like it that way.
