SPOILER end of the MA

Austria did have a choice in the matter since they voted to be annexed by Germany. They weren't even really a country between 1938 and 1945. Austrians supported the Nazis and the war until Stalingrad and once they became targets strategic bombing. Poland and Czechoslovakia doesn't make sense to me as an analogy since they conquered by Germany. They didn't ask to join. Everyone in the Solarian League Core joined up. Everyone in had the right to Secede. So they definitely should accept some of the blame.

Annachie wrote:What are you saying.

Of course Torch is a serious navy. They're in a state of war.

The Somali Navy is a serous navy too, since they are fighting with an Islamic insurgency and piracy. It's about the same size as the Torch navy. And it would be crushed like a bug by the US, Russian, Chinese, French or British navy if they decided to do so.

No, it's not a serious navy. It's like the typical SL SDF. How many SL cruisers would it take to utterly destroy the Torch navy? Could it handle a single SLN BC?

kzt wrote:

Annachie wrote:What are you saying.

Of course Torch is a serious navy. They're in a state of war.

The Somali Navy is a serous navy too, since they are fighting with an Islamic insurgency and piracy. It's about the same size as the Torch navy. And it would be crushed like a bug by the US, Russian, Chinese, French or British navy if they decided to do so.

No, it's not a serious navy. It's like the typical SL SDF. How many SL cruisers would it take to utterly destroy the Torch navy? Could it handle a single SLN BC?

It does depend on your definition of serious, doesn't it? The one I am using is that your navy is strong enough to make potential agressors think twice about attacking you. That doesn't mean you are able to stand off the premier navies like Haven, Manticore and the League, but that you can claim parity or close to it with potential hostiles in your own neighborhood.

By that measurement, Torch isn't there yet even though they are taking the subject seriously. THE Mesan System Navy, by way of contrast could be regarded as "serious" with their 25 bcs prior to Henke and Tourville's arrival. It merely happened to be their misfortune to be up against the galaxy's two premier navies... compared to whom they weren't serious at all.

Don

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ywing14 wrote:Austria did have a choice in the matter since they voted to be annexed by Germany.

Did they really? Or did the Germans invade before a vote?

They weren't even really a country between 1938 and 1945.

Neither were the newly independent core and shell systems during the war with the GA.

Poland and Czechoslovakia doesn't make sense to me as an analogy since they conquered by Germany.

Kept in by force as the Mandarins did with systems that wanted to leave and made it pretty obvious. Just because the League's members weren't conquered doesn't mean they were not kept in line by force or the threat of force during the war.

Everyone in the Solarian League Core joined up. Everyone in had the right to Secede. So they definitely should accept some of the blame.

And everyone knew what would happen to them if they decided to leave... they would get a visit by the SLN and an offer of protection until the remainder of hostilities with a convenient change of government. The Mandarins took it one step further then anyone expected but the initial threat was well known.

Sigs wrote:

ywing14 wrote:Austria did have a choice in the matter since they voted to be annexed by Germany.

Did they really? Or did the Germans invade before a vote?

They weren't even really a country between 1938 and 1945.

Neither were the newly independent core and shell systems during the war with the GA.

Poland and Czechoslovakia doesn't make sense to me as an analogy since they conquered by Germany.

Kept in by force as the Mandarins did with systems that wanted to leave and made it pretty obvious. Just because the League's members weren't conquered doesn't mean they were not kept in line by force or the threat of force during the war.

Everyone in the Solarian League Core joined up. Everyone in had the right to Secede. So they definitely should accept some of the blame.

And everyone knew what would happen to them if they decided to leave... they would get a visit by the SLN and an offer of protection until the remainder of hostilities with a convenient change of government. The Mandarins took it one step further then anyone expected but the initial threat was well known.

Poland and Czechoslovakia still doesn't make sense. Because they were forcibly annexed and had no say in the system. The Core Worlds had a say in the system. Characters in the book repeatedly talk about how rotten the system was even though they'd all been in it for years. they all had the option to secede, Poland and Czechoslovakia didn't have a choice to join or leave. So the Core Worlds complicity in the face of what was occurring in the protectorates and then they decide maybe we should leave once the "war" started going badly for the SL means you think they should all get a pass and the GA should trust them and sell them SD(P)s?

Actually, the complicity argument is a bit like a gordian knot with no sword to cut cleanly through. I can see both sides of the argument. Sometimes things arrive at the point where you have to lay aside as to who is to blame for what and move on.

I have been wondering about the thrust of the discussion up here on the forums. It is as though we think that having the galaxy awash in a sea of warships is going to enhance everyone's security. I realize that the logic is unassailable when perceived as "having effective clubs to beat off the barbarians." After all, is every problem is a nail, then what is needed are lots of bigger hammers.

But when you step back and look at the situation, is this really the best approach to security? Looking at it from a wider perspective, is having everyone armed to the teeth going to make anyone safer? I doubt it...

Don

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This post's quotes are way too scrambled for me to sort out, so I'm just going to start from scratch and say that ywing is closer to correct than Sigs about how much responsibility the Core Systems bear for what happened during the war. At the same time, I don 't think anyone in this discussion has quite nailed the nature of the relationship between the Core Systems and the central government of the Solarian League.

What follows started out to be a fairly short post to address the point under contention between ywing and Sigs . . . then growed. Sorry about that!

Following the Final War, Beowulf and other major star systems involved in the rescue attempt to form an equivalent of the EU, primarily to regulate interstellar trade and commerce in the wake of the Warshawski sail. They deliberately design a weak central authority (since it's primary goal is to regulate in interstellar matters, not to govern member systems internally.

To make sure the central government represents their joint interests and desires, they give it the form of an elective government, complete with legislature and executive branch.

To make sure the central government doesn't grow big enough to encroach on their system liberties, they set up a funding mechanism based solely on use fees and import duties generated by the activities it is designed to regulate. This will keep it starved of the cash it would need to become more intrusive where their internal affairs are concerned.

To prevent the central government from breaking out of its designed parameters by passing additional enabling legislation or constitutional amendments (and to convince more reluctant star systems to join), each star system is granted an effective veto over any legislative act. This does not prevent laws from being passed; it simply makes it very difficult and guarantees that the law code will be minimalist.

As a final protection for each star system's internal sovereignty, each member star system retains the right to secede from the League.

The need to provide for the common defense and to deal with extra-League polities is inherent in its designed function, so the SLN is created and the elective government is given responsibility for formulating a League-wide foreign policy.

Every single member system of the SL, both its initial founders and later members, joins voluntarily and has the constitutional right to withdraw at any time.


Now.

The genie got out of the bottle in terms of the central government's power because there were insufficient ballot-based safeguards to control its policy (meaning that it's titular political leadership was outflanked by its regulatory/bureaucratic managers) and it found increasingly inventive ways to extract "fees" from both its member systems and (eventually) from the Protectorates. The amounts exacted from the member systems represented a relatively small slice from a very large cash flow and so had minimal impact on the voting members of the League. The amounts exacted from the Protectorates . . . not so much.

The concentration of power in the hands of non-elective bureaucrats who might originally have been responsible to elective oversight (but had slipped into a role in which they were truly responsible to no one centuries ago) created all manner of opportunities for graft and corruption at all levels and led, inevitably, to mutually profitable collusion with the very entities the SL was supposed to regulate: the transtellars.

The nature of the SL constitution (and the bureaucrats' awareness that their position depended, ultimately, on the indifference of the Core systems) meant that the individual member systems were effectively sovereign powers within the limits of their own systems. This meant that the typical Solly citizen equated his experiences in his home system with the experiences of all citizens of the League. It also meant that he tended to extend the effectiveness of his ballot in controlling local government to how he understood the central government to work. That is, all but the minority who actually worried about the League's "international" policy, never thought very much about its policy (or how that policy was controlled) in general. It simply wasn't relevant to the lives of the vast majority of Solarian civilians who, accordingly (if not very nobly) adopted a "not my monkey, not my circus" attitudes towards the League's foreign policy. To add to this, the interstellar news media were largely (indeed, almost completely) complicit in how interstellar news was reported within the League. Most member systems had robust and energetic domestic news services, but the interstellar news they received was filtered through the SL bureaucracy's lens and routinely repeated/supported the "party line." (I might add that the very ubiquity of domestic news tended to lead the typical Solarian citizen to conclude that the interstellar news being delivered to his account every day was equally accurate and reliable.

Beowulf was an exception to the news cycle in the paragraph above because it was iterally a day trip from Manticore and less than two weeks from the Sol System. This means it was far more aware of (and sympathetic to) what was happening in Manticore and close enough to Sol to be an active advocate for the SEM (and for sanity).

The entire active period of military operations, from the New Tuscany incident through Honor's visit to the Sol System, lasted only from November 1921 through January of 1923, which was only fourteen months. Even allowing that the upsurge in tensions between the SL and the SEM began with the battle of Monica, that moves the starting point only to January 1921, so the entire crisis and its resolution spanned no more than two years at most.

When the wheels started coming off vis-a-vis the SEM and the GA, every single member system had the legal right to follow Beowulf's and Hypatia's lead and secede from the SL.

What all this means is that:

(1) no one had ever been compelled to join the SL by force;
(2) prior to Beowulf's decision to vote on secession, no one had ever even attempted to secede;
(3) there was massive initial indifference in the Core Systems to SL foreign policy (they didn't care what their government had been doing in the Congo as long as things were fine at home and their rights hadn't been impacted);
(4) even the various Core System governments failed to grasp what Manticore's ability to effectively shut down interstellar commerce would mean to their economies;
(5) there were no effective legislative levers to control the bureaucrats' actions/decisions (and hadn't been, literally for centuries);
(6) because of the above, there had been no effective resistance to the creation of the Protectorate system and no one paid much attention to the tensions with neobarb star nations like the SKM when the Mandarins started off the rails;
(7) Manticoran protests were largely ignored/discounted even by Sollies who heard about them to begin with, especially when their own government assured them "nothing to see here; move along");
(8) the consequences of the Mandarins' policies were largely invisible to the typical Core World citizen (Most Core System economies took a relatively mild hit from Lacoon; it was the interstellar cash flow funding the government that dried up virtually overnight. And despite the SLN's massive casualties, the SLN was so small in relationship to the size of the Solarian League that those casualties were scarcely noticeable in any given Core System even before they were systematically underreported by the Mandarins and by the interstellar news services which toed the line laid down by Malachai Abruzzi.);
(9) the realities of Buccaneer were concealed from the Solarian news channels by the Public Information, which simply lied about both the SLN casualty totals and about the reasons for and nature of the operations carried out.

It's important to remember the initial totality of the typical Solarian's indifference to affairs outside his own star system; his isolation from the reality of SLN casualties; his ignorance of Buccaneer's nature; and the brevity of the actual hostilities. That indifference meant most people (outside systems which possessed close prewar relationships with Manticore) were prepared to accept their own government's version of what was happening and to conclude that if that version differed from the GA's, then it must be the Grand Alliance which was lying. (Even those who realized how . . . unrestrained by reality PubIn was were prepared to mirror-image the GA and assume that the GA's version was equally self-serving.) So aside from systems like Beowulf and Hypatia (who knew what was really going on) there wasn't really much time for secession movements to form and gather steam. The Mandarins were clearly worried that more of them would form, however, which was the reason for their decision to make sure Hypatia didn't . . . and to make a pretty savage example of Hypatia to discourage any other secessions.

So it's incorrect to compare the member systems of the League to Czechoslovakia in 1938 or to any other conquered territories. All of them joined voluntarily. And while a substantial proportion of their legislative delegations supported Beowulf following Second Manticore, that proportion was a distinct minority of the complete Assembly not only because of corrupt deals with the Mandarins but also because of genuine ignorance of/apathy towards the basis for the confrontation with Manticore in the first place. Internal opposition to the war was growing steadily, however, as the truth began to seep ever so slowly into the awareness of the Solarian public . . . until the crescendo of Operation Houdini, at which point the GA's public image took a massive hit. The opposition just hadn't had a lot of time — only about 8 months from the Battle of Spindle to Operation Fabius — in which to grow. Detweiller's final action, however, reversed that trend sharply, especially where Core World opinion was concerned.

From the outset, the GA's objective had been to end the war with as few casualties (Solarian, as well as GA) and as little destruction as possible, and that strategy was succeeding nicely prior to Houdini. Support for the war was eroding, the Mandarin's fiscal situation was collapsing, and the opposition of the SLN's new commander (Kingsford had been CNO for less than 6 months before Operation Fabius was launched) to the war was growing. Houdini was what the Mandarins' figured would both justify Fabius against Beowulf and lead to the constitutional amendment which would allow them to levy direct taxation . . . all without any other major political reform.

Fabius — and the massive casualties associated with it — pushed the GA into a much more aggressive response. Which was what brought Honor to Sol with the mission of driving home the realities in a way not even Solly news services could spin. The GA could have done that at any time but had chosen not to because of the potential for revanchism on the SL's part. Post-Fabius, that was no longer part of the GA's calculus; the war simply had to end before more millions of civilians were killed. So Honor made the SL's unpalatable options clear in a way the protected, complacent, indifferent Core Worlds could no longer ignore. At which point the SL's entire constitution went into history's circular file and the League itself was fundamentally restructured.

n7axw wrote:But when you step back and look at the situation, is this really the best approach to security? Looking at it from a wider perspective, is having everyone armed to the teeth going to make anyone safer? I doubt it...
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No, what we really need is for the central government to strictly control all the weapons and ensure that only very carefully checked and verified people who have a real need can get them. Just like Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil do.

n7axw wrote:Actually, the complicity argument is a bit like a gordian knot with no sword to cut cleanly through. I can see both sides of the argument. Sometimes things arrive at the point where you have to lay aside as to who is to blame for what and move on.

I have been wondering about the thrust of the discussion up here on the forums. It is as though we think that having the galaxy awash in a sea of warships is going to enhance everyone's security. I realize that the logic is unassailable when perceived as "having effective clubs to beat off the barbarians." After all, is every problem is a nail, then what is needed are lots of bigger hammers.

But when you step back and look at the situation, is this really the best approach to security? Looking at it from a wider perspective, is having everyone armed to the teeth going to make anyone safer? I doubt it...

Don

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Probably not going to make the situation but I would think most systems would want to feel some measure of security in their own system.

runsforcelery wrote:...So Honor made the SL's unpalatable options clear in a way the protected, complacent, indifferent Core Worlds could no longer ignore. At which point the SL's entire constitution went into history's circular file and the League itself was fundamentally restructured.

Thanks. That’s kind of what I was thinking, but much clearer.