Jonathan_S wrote:cthia wrote:I have essentially been trying to make this same point since my early participation in discussions re the MAlign. Accurate or no, the MAlign strikes me as the Honorverse equivalent of Adolf Hitler and his master race. There was brilliance in some of Hitler's planning and thinking as well — somewhere at the fringes of his insanity. A master race, indeed. Earth of present continues to remain stymied by this Aryan concept of superiority.
Make no mistake. At its fringes is a maelstrom of madness -- born of a delusion that blinds and focuses the vision to that one goal. Centuries of planning and deception to achieve this end, does not imply intelligence or cough circumscription; it is a paragon of psychosis.
After centuries of planning, would the MAlign stop short of Eridani Edicts if it is determined to be their only path to success?
Surely... Hitler stopped short of mass genocide — the end shall justify the means.
If they believed it was the
only path to victory, then maybe. But even Hitler refrained from using chemical or biological weapons against the Allied powers. They
might have helped him, but the likelihood of similar retaliation made it too risky.
Similarly in the Honorverse its too easy to kill planets. The Eridani Edict really serves two purposes: it discourages people from making such attacks (by attempting to guarantee that they'll gain nothing long term from them) and provides a framework for response to any that
do still occur other than retaliatory strikes.
But the absense of the SLN to enforce the edict removes both halves of that equation. Yes, they may not come in overwhelming force to seize your government and parts of your military and convict them all of crimes against humanity. But it means your victim won't necessarily feel restrained from launching even a suicidal retalatory strike (if/when they ever figure out where you are). The fear of mutual destruction should still keep most people from launching such strikes.
Now the MAlign might feel that since Darius is secret that they have no fear of retaliation. Which seems true enough, at least in the short term. But the collapse of the League is unlikely to change how people feel about someone who would deliberately carry out an Edict violation. The MAlign has to worry that if it comes out in the future that they did that, that could unify the rest of space to temporarily put down their grievence and mistrust until they collectively deal with the threat of a government/movement/military that embraces planetary genocide...
So there's a very large long term risk to using that particular tool to help fracture the League.
In Hitler's time, biological or chemical attacks would not have been decisive at the time he needed them because he lacked air superiority. It would have been devastating but not ultimately decisive and there was just too much trouble and self-danger associated with the use of such weapons. Besides, there was no need of such attacks when conventional weapons were doing just fine. Moreover, "the Germans did not use gases during their offensives on their neighbors because gas is basically a siege weapon, intended to root out troops dug into trenches and fortifications, and the German Blitzkrieg was war of rapid mobility. Gas could hamper the attacker as much as it hurt the defender." [1]
Hitler was also, IMO, afraid of tit for tat -- retaliatory gas strikes -- having been gassed himself...
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made it very clear to Hitler that if Britain were attacked with poison gas, the British would saturate German cities with gas in retaliation. The Allied strategic bombing force was much stronger than Germany's; the Allies were gaining air superiority over Germany; and Hitler had every reason to believe that if he used nerve gases on Britain, the Allies would strike back ten times as hard. Both the Germans and the British believed they held parity in gas warfare, and neither Churchill nor Hitler realized that Germany had the upper hand.
In fact, Churchill himself almost gave away the game. He had little squeamishness over poison gases. To him, they were just another weapon, despite the fact that Britain had signed and ratified the Geneva Protocol. During the desperate days of 1940, when Britain was facing a German invasion, Churchill had energetically built up an arsenal of gas weapons to greet German troops landing on England's shores. Even after the threat of invasion faded away, the British continued heavy production of chemical weapons. [1]
This is from a World War II magazine...
When it came down to it, Hitler was a man who knew no limits, and who made his decisions relatively free of moral considerations. Sarin didn't strike him as particularly inhumane or ghastly. It just seemed… ineffective.Many countries had their own form of an Eridani Edict in response to weaponized gas...
"...gas warfare continued in secret, in public it was made illegal through a series of international treaties that culminated in the Geneva Protocol of 1925. 38 countries signed the protocol, renouncing the use of chemical weapons, though the treaty was not ratified by the US and Japan."
[1]
http://greyfalcon.us/A%20History%20of%20Chemical.htmNone of which are fears regarding a MisAligned willingness to deploy an option of an edict violation. As you say, they're hidden. I'm not convinced that they won't
remain hidden even in the light of their unlikely success -- even without a history and reputation of having mass murdered millions upon millions of innocent civilians on a whim. Why should they ever come out of hiding, even after their end game, after victory and all is said and done? There will always be a scorned enemy left somewhere to rise from the ashes to seek vengeance and serve it cold.
Again, the MAlign doesn't strike me as being sane. And being hidden eliminates the possibility of the old misquoted adage of "done unto others as what hath been done unto you."
Besides, I always thought the MAlign would eventually open that can of worms but in a cowardly fashion that framed someone else, likeso...
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6347&hilit=point+of+view&start=190.
