Mesa occupation

Relax wrote:And way down on the list... Third of all some of those ships can be used as trojan horses against the rest of the slavers in the HV.

Yeah. The ballroom would love known slaver ships!

Regarding boat bays--the bays themselves cannot be pressurized, because they do not have doors that close. They are on the underside of the ship (except in a few odd cases like the Tepes), and permanently open to vacuum.

Setting up a series of local police forces on Mesa from Seccies and or slaves is going to take a while. Very few of them are going to have any actual training except perhaps members of the various underworld gangs and that isn't going to much beyond security and enforcer experience.

A better option is going to be the Peaceforce overseeing essentialy martial law untill arrangements are sorted out. That also means keeping both sides from killing the other in the citizen vs seccie/slave fighting.

Martial Law changes the entire situation and puts local control in the hands of people who should be able to follow orders and enforce (mostly) the seperation of the factions and keep the worst of the fighting from breaking out.

It also presumes that something can be cobbled together as a workable form of government which will get things actually working on the ground as far as logistics to keep the population feed, and real order. There are going to be a large number of problems including dealing with all the people in the former Mesa Government who have been deeply involved with both the slave trade (or genetic slavery in general), members of the Alignment, or who have been committing crimes under the former Mesan laws or in the bloodshead following the Alignment terror attacks covering Houdini- and at this point, very few people who know about Houdini and what was involved are either still on Mesa or alive.

Ultimately Mesans are going to have to put the planet and local government back together and deal with the truly monumental mess of cleaning up Manpower and related people.

Brigade XO wrote:A better option is going to be the Peaceforce overseeing essentialy martial law untill arrangements are sorted out. That also means keeping both sides from killing the other in the citizen vs seccie/slave fighting.

So, how many of them were still alive at the end of the book?

kzt wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:A better option is going to be the Peaceforce overseeing essentialy martial law untill arrangements are sorted out. That also means keeping both sides from killing the other in the citizen vs seccie/slave fighting.

So, how many of them were still alive at the end of the book?

There weren't that many to begin with, IIRC the PPF 12 brigades totaling 34000 men not counting support units. The PPF suffered around 11000 casualties. They would be a good start in converting them to a police force. The other agencies namely the OPS and MSID would most likely have to be disbanded due to the overwhelming mutual distrust and hatred between them and the seccy and slaves. The big reason the PPF would be a good start is primarily that they had little contact with the seccy and slaves prior to the battle of Mendel.

saber964 wrote:There weren't that many to begin with, IIRC the PPF 12 brigades totaling 34000 men not counting support units. The PPF suffered around 11000 casualties. They would be a good start in converting them to a police force. The other agencies namely the OPS and MSID would most likely have to be disbanded due to the overwhelming mutual distrust and hatred between them and the seccy and slaves. The big reason the PPF would be a good start is primarily that they had little contact with the seccy and slaves prior to the battle of Mendel.

IIRC, the total population of Mesa was never stated, but let's assume 6 billion. If we assume there are 60,000 PPF (counting support etc), that provides one per 100,000 population. As that give Chicago a police force of 30 guys, I think these numbers are far too small to be an actual police force. The typical US figure is about 1 per 1,000 population.

To occupy and control Mesa you would need somewhere between 2 soldier for every 1000 occupants (US post WW2 Germany) to 150 troops per 1000 occupants (2003 Chechnya) based on 20th century numbers. So Manticore needs to deploy and supply somewhere between 12 million and 900 million troops to establish and maintain control.

Good luck with that.

SYED wrote:In their constitution, slaves have actual legal protection. The thing is that it was simply never enforced. I bet their own databases is filled with evidence, security recordings or reports, as well as over seventy percent f he pupulation eager to testify.
They could also raise new security and police forces from the slaves and their descendants, that could quickly out number any free citizen force.
To stem the bloodshed offer the citizens a chance to escape Mesa, they could think it is merely temporary but at least gets them out of the way.

Syed, we obviously do not have enough textev to give a comprehensive understanding of the legalities involved, but it seems to me that Adm Gold Peak will refrain from authorizing any prosecutions of violations of slaves' rights contained within the Mesan Constitution.

To do so would validate slavery as a legitimate institution, which is contrary to the formal provisions of both the Manticoran Constitution and the Cherwell Convention. Elizabeth wouldn't stand for it, and neither will Michelle herself, I suspect. And the Manticoran public will be incensed by any such move. Slavery is a sufficiently emotional issue that such a move could very well lead to the fall of the Grant ville government.

What Michelle can and should do is to issue a decree that the entire institution is a violation of interstellar law on human rights, and that anyone on Mesa who owned or employed a slave will be liable to prosecution for violating that slave's human rights. Individual slaves should be allowed to enter additional charges of maltreatment, but humane treatment should be considered for possible reduction of sentences. That, I think, would be a fair resolution.

The thing is that, without taking away anything from the pure evil and immorality of a hateful institution such as slavery or, for example Apartheid, one cannot categorize every person who benefits from such an institution as evil or criminal.

Often, individuals simply live as they always had, as active participants in an institution of such a long-standing and all-encompassing presence that it becomes almost impossible to even hear the objections against the institution. It can also be dangerous to object too loudly, both for an individual and their family and close acquaintances, because of official persecution of any opposition to the system. Frequently, such an institution is such an entrenched part of a society that it is simply impossible not to participate therein, no matter how hard one might object to the system.

And lastly, we should consider the matter from a collective viewpoint. For those born into the dominant class - often a relatively small minority - there is always a paranoid fear not just of 'the Others', but that the oppressed class will someday rise up and retaliate against ALL members of the ruling class. In that instance, many of the latter might simply choose to maintain the status quo rather than risk anarchy and bloodshed.

hanuman wrote:

SYED wrote:In their constitution, slaves have actual legal protection. The thing is that it was simply never enforced. I bet their own databases is filled with evidence, security recordings or reports, as well as over seventy percent f he pupulation eager to testify.
They could also raise new security and police forces from the slaves and their descendants, that could quickly out number any free citizen force.
To stem the bloodshed offer the citizens a chance to escape Mesa, they could think it is merely temporary but at least gets them out of the way.

Syed, we obviously do not have enough textev to give a comprehensive understanding of the legalities involved, but it seems to me that Adm Gold Peak will refrain from authorizing any prosecutions of violations of slaves' rights contained within the Mesan Constitution.

To do so would validate slavery as a legitimate institution, which is contrary to the formal provisions of both the Manticoran Constitution and the Cherwell Convention. Elizabeth wouldn't stand for it, and neither will Michelle herself, I suspect. And the Manticoran public will be incensed by any such move. Slavery is a sufficiently emotional issue that such a move could very well lead to the fall of the Grant ville government.

I disagree. Vehemently.

As I said toward the beginning of this thread, nothing with the slaves will be settled until Jeremy X arrives on scene. Anybody with two brain cells more than God gave a hexapuma understands that - including most of the population of Manticore, Haven and Beowulf.

What Gold Peak will do is:

1. Isolate Manpower's off-world operations by destroying all slave ships and taking other actions.

2. Immediately honor Victor Cachet's promises by eliminating second class citizenship (seccies) and bringing the crime bosses into the interim government.

3. Announce that, as an interim measure until Jeremy X and the Beowulf delegation arrives, the provisions in the Mesan constitution guaranteeing good treatment for genetic slaves will be enforced to the degree possible. The interim government will be charged with making it happen.

4. Once she discovers that there are about a million "Mesan Alignment" members who have nothing to do with the Onion or the Detweiller Plan, she's going to task them with spearheading the necessary long-term cultural changes. They're basically the only group of free citizens who think the genetic slaves are human and deserve whatever civil rights they can handle.

The thing that hasn't been discussed up front is that Mesa, as a society, is based on genetic inequality - different lines are capable of doing different things well. It's even worse than most Mesans think, because they don't know about the clandestine "uplift" program that resulted in the Mesan alpha, beta and gamma lines. Trying to impose a government and political ideology that doesn't take this into account is not going to go well. That's why she's going to wait until Jeremy X, the Ballroom and the Torch delegation arrives. They grew up with that as a background cultural assumption, they'll have a much better idea how to handle it than anyone who is essentially an outsider to Mesan society.

It's a mess, and the worst thing will be to let the ideologs handle it. That goes nowhere, at high velocity and extreme loudness.

kzt wrote:

saber964 wrote:There weren't that many to begin with, IIRC the PPF 12 brigades totaling 34000 men not counting support units. The PPF suffered around 11000 casualties. They would be a good start in converting them to a police force. The other agencies namely the OPS and MSID would most likely have to be disbanded due to the overwhelming mutual distrust and hatred between them and the seccy and slaves. The big reason the PPF would be a good start is primarily that they had little contact with the seccy and slaves prior to the battle of Mendel.

IIRC, the total population of Mesa was never stated, but let's assume 6 billion. If we assume there are 60,000 PPF (counting support etc), that provides one per 100,000 population. As that give Chicago a police force of 30 guys, I think these numbers are far too small to be an actual police force. The typical US figure is about 1 per 1,000 population.

To occupy and control Mesa you would need somewhere between 2 soldier for every 1000 occupants (US post WW2 Germany) to 150 troops per 1000 occupants (2003 Chechnya) based on 20th century numbers. So Manticore needs to deploy and supply somewhere between 12 million and 900 million troops to establish and maintain control.

Good luck with that.

The MOF would only need to occupy the citizen areas and protect them from vengeful slaves ala Verdant Vista aka Torch and the citizens only account for 30% of the population. With the Seccies acting as liaisons and screening force to the slaves.

saber964 wrote:The MOF would only need to occupy the citizen areas and protect them from vengeful slaves ala Verdant Vista aka Torch and the citizens only account for 30% of the population. With the Seccies acting as liaisons and screening force to the slaves.

What makes you think the citizens need protecting from the slaves? They saw the Torch snuff porn movies that got distributed across human space and are likely to take appropriate steps to prevent that.