PeterZ wrote:n7axw wrote:
If you are sending them the North Harchong, you march them back the same way they came... One would think they would know who their families were along with what village they come from. In my scheme you keep them together as an army until you knew that they could be safely mustered out.
If you send them to S Harchong, reuniting the families would have to be the price the north paid to send their vets elsewhere. As for what happens when they get everybody south, maybe Peter's proposal of absorbing them into the workforce would work. I am a bit less optimistic about that, however. I find myself thinking that they could be put to work terraforming unconsecrated ground in an unsettled area to establish new communities that could be eventually self sustaining.
Don
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Embrace the power of *and*. Green Tree Island has unconsecrated land. Not sure the ecology of the Baren Lands, but consecrating that land mass is a good project. I just doubt the MH will be allowed to retie in peace. Their skills will find useful employ.
I can see the governor of Queiroz encouraging many of the families to relocate their and use that as an excuse to expand his tereritory peacefully. Even of MH remains intact, their families can relaocate to Green Tree and still make Queiroz much richer.
Upon further consideration, Green Tree Island will likely remain independent of Harchong. I can see Charis supporting the residents desires NOT to be subject to Harchong's serf laws. Perhaps the Island will form a government around a core of SSK members leaving the Abbey to form a secular government. I can see all parties going for that.
Again people, Green Tree Island might not be as big as you think. All the islands of Hawaii boast a population of may be 1.5 million, and that is today, with a modern, industrialized society with modern medical care. It would take months to terraform any such island and further months still until the crops ripen, and this all assumes the land is good for farming and that there is enough to feed 2-3 million soldiers enough to sustain them. Remember that RFC has repeatedly stated, throughout all of his writing, his aversion to sweeping, simplistic solutions to complicated problems. This is no different.
The portion of the MH that care from South Harchong will be allowed to return home. If North Harchong is willing to give up on all of its soldiers in MH, even now in the post-Jihad period they have to be worried about the security of their borders with Siddarmark, the Border States and even their coastline (in the absence of any naval power). They can't simply toss aside such a fighting force, no matter what reservations they have regarding is reliability and loyalty (or lack thereof). Most dictatorships today have a very difficult relationship with their military. While it is the one force capable of challenging the regime, it also the force capable of defending the country from foreign threats. So Harchong can't simply disband the MH or else send it down to South Harchong and hope to keep it busy with an invasion of Desnair. Nor do I believe that Harchong is willing to hand such well trained troops to its southern lobe, given the vast cultural and economic differences between the Empire's two parts (and perhaps the South's desire for independence from the Empire).
Nor do I believe that Duchairn would simply let Desnair and Harchong have at it even a few years after the Jihad. Magwair would almost certainly insist on maintaining at least nominal numeric parity with the forces Siddarmark and Charis can field in order to maintain at least some deterrence against Charisian or Siddarmarkian "adventurism". The Church simply cannot afford internal squabbles at a time when at least half of the planet's surface is outside of its control. I know some here had argued that Harchong could become stubborn on this issue and demand that Mother Church acquiesce on this issue upon the threat of schism between them and the Church. In theory, they could perhaps get away with such a threat, but in practice it would put them in the position of waging war against Mother Church, with the MH probably joining forces with the AOG in order to "liberate" their homeland. And if the MH were already sent down south, the South might fail to support the MH logistically, if only because a war with Desnair would be detrimental to their business / mercantile interests.
What we are likely to see in the next 20 years is a new cold war, with serfdom and slavery becoming the hot button issue that divides the Church from the "heretical" realms. Serfdom and slavery are an essential component of feudalism, as one of the functions of the central religion is to enforce compliance despite the inequities of society, by appealing to people's belief, that their nobility rules by God's grace (and one cannot rebel against God's chosen one). With the Church's universality shattered, coupled with the industrialization every realm will have to embrace, if only to remain within shouting distance of Charis and Siddarmark in terms of military and economic power, and the issue of slavery and serfdom is likely to become both cultural and religious. Remember that for all the southern states' protestations that slavery was essential to their economy, in reality they had fought to maintain the "peculiar institution of slavery" because it was part of their social makeup, meant to maintain their sense of social superiority.
So if the Charis and Siddarmark stand firmly for abolition (which the former did even during the Jihad and latter didn't ever seem to have slavery or serfdom) while the realms still under the Church's control continue to maintain the institutions of serfdom and slavery, Duchairn will find himself in the untenable position of ostensibly supporting the abolition of slavery and serfdom while turning a blind eye to Harchongese and Desnairian serfs and slaves (I doubt a man of his "saintly" image would actually support it, even in private).
