cthia wrote:Wait a minute. Beowulf is building the Mark 23? Building and supplying missiles to the enemy?
Why, that's... that's... that's... that's treasonous!
n7axw wrote:There is no doubt but what it is at least odd. It was going on or at very least being set up prior to the plebicite or Hadley's speech in Old Chicago announcing the plebicite. I wondered a bit about that when I read ART.
Don
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cthia wrote:Wha!
Nor, I suppose, have they shared the fact that they're doing all of that with their former lovers. And that they haven't just begun to do so, but been doing it all along since the Yawata Strike. Clearly long before the divorce from Kong is final.
The treasonous acts aren't even seasonous. A few KEWS is definitely reasonous.
Member systems of the Solarian League are under no requirement to share their tech with the SLN. They very often do, but they are not
required to for two reasons.
One reason is that the
assumption has always been that the SLN has the best and baddest weaponry in the galaxy, so
of course the mere system defense forces of places like Beowulf have nothing to teach the Invincible Solarian League Navy™. Nor does the SLN always share its latest technology with the system defense forces of the League's member systems. It isn't required to, and if the Powers That Be take a dislike to you, you get frozen out of the hardware goodies. Sometimes this is actually based on genuine principle: your current system government is suspected of planning to be a bad actor, so we're not going to give you any bigger clubs until we are convinced you aren't.
Prior to Manticore's declaration of war, following Operation Raging Justice, there was no declared state of war, either. In fact, the League (in the person of the Mandarins) consistently denied that it was at war with the Grand Alliance at all, because a formal declaration would have required a vote in the Assembly and a single veto (i.e., a single voice of sanity) would have prevented it. Because Beowulf was not at war with Manticore (since
nobody in the League was at war with Manticore, remember?), Beowulf retained its traditional legal autonomy where its military forces and manufacturing capacity were concerned. (It can build anything it wants for anyone who can pay for it, which includes munitions of war. As long as it's not doing so for a
declared enemy of the League during a
declared state of war.) Eventually, of course, Beowulf is going to leave the League (because the League, in the person of the Mandarins, has run so far off the rails), and everyone in the League knows it. Therefore, this exercise of well-established legal prerogatives suddenly becomes "treason" in the eyes of the Mandarins and their friends and allies.
The second reason the system defense forces are under no obligation to share their tech with the SLN, however, is something which is also at play here, in a legal/constitutional sense but may not have been made clear in the earlier books.
The original drafters of the Solarian League's Constitution
specifically mandated that system defense forces were under the command of the systems which built and manned them and
not under the command of the Solarian League Navy except in time of war when called to "national service"
and signed off on by the system government. (That is, even in time of war, the system defense forces could choose to stay home and protect their sovereign territory rather than assisting the SLN in offensive operations or even the defense of other member systems.)
In case it isn't clear, the drafters of the League's Constitution were as paranoid about the possibility of a coercive central government as the American drafters of the Articles of Confederation. Some of that American paranoia carries over in the Articles replacement's Tenth Amendment (which any historian of the U.S. Constitution will tell you was written in late eighteenth/early nineteenth century terminology to preserve all but very limited powers in the hands of the states, not the federal government). The drafters of the Solarian Constitution (having seen how well that worked out in the US's case) crafted a system in which the central government was
specifically barred from certain actions/powers rather than relying on a mere "all powers not granted to the federal government are reserved to the states" language.
Now, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. At the moment in the League's life we are currently observing, it is a
very bad thing, because the way in which the federal authority was deliberately emasculated to prevent it from
threatening its member systems' autonomy precluded effective legislative control. This is what produced the bureaucratic system of the Mandarins. At least in the early days of the process, it was simply a matter of predominantly ethical and moral individuals finding ways to do the jobs they were charged to do when they'd been denied the means. Because those means were quasilegal and never submitted for approval by the Assembly, they were also doomed to become a source of abuse and personal aggrandizement.
Don't forget how long the League's been around, though, or the fact that for at least two or three hundred years it gave good governance. The fault is in the design of a system in which the federal legislature
started out by resigning its powers into the hands of the League's bureaucratic organs. The drafters thought they could get away with this because they had set up a system in which the federal government would be so starved for funds that the damage it could do at any given moment would be limited. They failed to allow for the possibility that the feds, who really and genuinely
needed funding for core services, would find a way to burrow through the no-funding wall and acquire a source of funding which the legislature had never been given the power to cut off.
In Beowulf's case, however, what this means is that unless Beowulf actually initiates combat against the Solarian League
or provides the weapons used by someone
initiating combat against the Solarian League, it is not guilty of treason under the League's own law. Needless to say, the Mandarins aren't real likely to go very far out of their way to explain this counterintuitive aspect of their own legal code to their citizens.
I am shocked,
shocked, to discover that there is hypocrisy in Old Chicago!
