Spoilers - Toll of Honor

Theemile wrote:That time was when the RMN had strategic peers, but no strategic threats. The threats were of keeping the peace and keeping minor players from making power plays which disturbed the larger balance. The RMN was a economic and diplomatic power house and could use that weight to diplomatically solve most issues, and when not, 100+ BCs and 3 squadrons of Capital Ships were threats few wouldn't recognize. The Mission of the Day: Protect the Wormhole, Protect the Homeworlds, protect the commerce, and keep good, friendly ties with the near peers.
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Janachek was such a figure - his thinking was ossified and he surrounded himself with like minded individuals, questioning any thing antithema to his core concepts and quickly rejecting anything (or anyone) who proved him wrong.

In the whole, that was actually good. It was good for opposing thoughts to debate the virtues of expansion versus maintaining the status quo. In 1844, that definitely was a valid question. The problem, as you said, was not being able to adapt to change, plus the corruption that happened right under his nose.

Two slightly younger officers than he did have a battle of wills going back to kindergarten: Hamish Alexander and Sonja Hemphill. Both had views that they clung to for a long time and both had begun surrounding themselves with like-minded individuals. I'd say that, despite how she was portrayed initially, Sonja had the more open mind, because she was under the tutelage of Admiral Adcock and being forced to hide some of what she knew. Hamish came to see the light when it smacked in him in the face, in the form of Honor Harrington. But see it he did, as the end of House of Steel tells us:

"And yes, thank you, Sonja."

I hate politics. So much of it is seedy, and greedy, and selfish and dangerous. Everyone in the navy seems to want Pavel Young dead for his actions except Young himself. Not just charged and punished and locked up, but dead. He caused the needless death of officers. But that damn declaration of war and the big picture saves him from prosecution. What it came down to is blackmail. Plain and simple. Anyone holding up the declaration of war to save Youngs’s ass should have been prosecuted as well! Why can't they be charged with something that will stick! I know it isn't conducive to a stable government to be subject to being imprisoned or worse because of ones vote, but come on! Through it all when I read through the book the first time, I always wondered if the blackmail could have been recorded and used in a court of law. Released or leaked to the public even. Reckless endangerment! In the end, Young isn't the only one who should have received his just dessert. Darn politics.

penny wrote:I hate politics. So much of it is seedy, and greedy, and selfish and dangerous. Everyone in the navy seems to want Pavel Young dead for his actions except Young himself. Not just charged and punished and locked up, but dead. He caused the needless death of officers. But that damn declaration of war and the big picture saves him from prosecution. What it came down to is blackmail. Plain and simple. Anyone holding up the declaration of war to save Youngs’s ass should have been prosecuted as well! Why can't they be charged with something that will stick! I know it isn't conducive to a stable government to be subject to being imprisoned or worse because of ones vote, but come on! Through it all when I read through the book the first time, I always wondered if the blackmail could have been recorded and used in a court of law. Released or leaked to the public even. Reckless endangerment! In the end, Young isn't the only one who should have received his just dessert. Darn politics.

There's some selection bias in the point of views we see in the book. Aside from that reporter that worked for the Conservative Association, almost everyone we see is from the "Competent Faction" of the Navy or, in the case of Georgia, had reasons to want to get rid of Pavel.

We don't hear High Ridge's point of view, for example. He may have disliked Pavel on a personal level, but probably still thought he had use and therefore did not want him dead.

penny wrote:I hate politics. So much of it is seedy, and greedy, and selfish and dangerous. Everyone in the navy seems to want Pavel Young dead for his actions except Young himself. Not just charged and punished and locked up, but dead. He caused the needless death of officers. But that damn declaration of war and the big picture saves him from prosecution. What it came down to is blackmail. Plain and simple. Anyone holding up the declaration of war to save Youngs’s ass should have been prosecuted as well! Why can't they be charged with something that will stick! I know it isn't conducive to a stable government to be subject to being imprisoned or worse because of ones vote, but come on! Through it all when I read through the book the first time, I always wondered if the blackmail could have been recorded and used in a court of law. Released or leaked to the public even. Reckless endangerment! In the end, Young isn't the only one who should have received his just dessert. Darn politics.

To be clear, he was prosecuted. It is not clear that blackmail kept him from being executed, the court was evenly split between people that wanted Pavel out of the navy (and dead) and those felt that Honor behaved illegally in not passing on command. The ultimate compromise, saw him out of the navy and alive.

The issue of blackmail did, as you said, arise in holding up the declaration of war; until Pavel himself argued for passage. But the thing about blackmail is that the threat is there without anything overt needing to be said. So blackmail is totally different from bribery, where something concrete is exchanged.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
There's some selection bias in the point of views we see in the book. Aside from that reporter that worked for the Conservative Association, almost everyone we see is from the "Competent Faction" of the Navy or, in the case of Georgia, had reasons to want to get rid of Pavel.

We don't hear High Ridge's point of view, for example. He may have disliked Pavel on a personal level, but probably still thought he had use and therefore did not want him dead.

And there would have been people, even within the navy, who held poor opinions of Honor (if nothing else opposition Faxes had spent no little time badmouthing her over Basilisk and her actions again Houseman. Heck, IIRC even Penny thought she deserved a court martial over striking an agent of the crown for that one); which could predispose them to think Young was in the right at Hancock. (Displayed poor judgement maybe, technically in the right). And others might disagree with the legal theory of the prosecution; feeling the Young had done the wrong thing but was innocent of the actual charges against him (which even the prosecution admitted were an unusual application of legal theory)

Any of those navy folks presumably wouldn't be wishing for his death -- though even some not wishing for his death might still want him thrown out of the navy.

So, as you said, we got a very limited viewpoint.

penny wrote:I hate politics. So much of it is seedy, and greedy, and selfish and dangerous. Everyone in the navy seems to want Pavel Young dead for his actions except Young himself. Not just charged and punished and locked up, but dead. He caused the needless death of officers. But that damn declaration of war and the big picture saves him from prosecution. What it came down to is blackmail. Plain and simple. Anyone holding up the declaration of war to save Youngs’s ass should have been prosecuted as well! Why can't they be charged with something that will stick! I know it isn't conducive to a stable government to be subject to being imprisoned or worse because of ones vote, but come on! Through it all when I read through the book the first time, I always wondered if the blackmail could have been recorded and used in a court of law. Released or leaked to the public even. Reckless endangerment! In the end, Young isn't the only one who should have received his just dessert. Darn politics.

The problem is that, outside of an omniscient narrator like we get in the books, it's impossible to know why someone did something.

I don't think any of the Lords were crass (and stupid) enough to say that they wouldn't vote for war unless Pavil was found not guilty.

They all make plausible sounding statements to cover themselves (even the ones actually getting blackmailed by the North Ridge Files). Most of which seemed to boil down to, "we should talk with the new Peep government rather than attack them for the actions of a regime so hated and bad that they just got rid of it".
And then claiming that the navy's judgement was suspect when they advocated for declaration of war to gain as much advantage as possible before the Peeps recovered from their self-inflicted wounds. They were careful only to point to Pavel's prosecution as one more example of the navy's questionable judgement.

And, to be fair to some of them, some really thought that continuing the war was wrong decision and were seizing on Pavel's court martial not because they gave a damn about him but as just one more convenient stick they could jam in the spokes to try to prevent what they honestly saw as the horribly wrong path for Manticore to take.


It'd be impossible to untangle who was trying to "blackmail" the government, who was honestly against the war, and who was actually getting blackmailed by Earl North Hollow to save his worthless son's life. Even if it wasn't political insanity to try to prosecute them you'd never be able prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt.

I don't remember the public being made aware of any of it, though that would seem to be impossible. So I must've missed it. I can't imagine why the whole thing would not have been shared with the public. Even if there were those who didn't like Honor, there had to be a lot of retired naval officers and people who, at the end of the day, would know that what Young did was wrong and would demand retribution. I suppose I am subconsciously imagining a perfect world.

Question. Allison called Pavel Young a motherless bastard. Do we have any info on Young's mother?

penny wrote:I don't remember the public being made aware of any of it, though that would seem to be impossible. So I must've missed it. I can't imagine why the whole thing would not have been shared with the public. Even if there were those who didn't like Honor, there had to be a lot of retired naval officers and people who, at the end of the day, would know that what Young did was wrong and would demand retribution. I suppose I am subconsciously imagining a perfect world.

This assumes they had access to enough information to make a call. The actual details of the Battle of Hancock were probably not distributed to the media, only to active RMN personnel. If nothing else, the RMN needed to keep a lid on the performance of its sensors, defences, missiles, etc. to keep it from falling on Peep hands.

Plus, there were retired naval personnel who belonged to Pavel's clique or his father's before him, or any other similarly-aligned grouping.

penny wrote:I don't remember the public being made aware of any of it, though that would seem to be impossible. So I must've missed it. I can't imagine why the whole thing would not have been shared with the public. Even if there were those who didn't like Honor, there had to be a lot of retired naval officers and people who, at the end of the day, would know that what Young did was wrong and would demand retribution. I suppose I am subconsciously imagining a perfect world.

Question. Allison called Pavel Young a motherless bastard. Do we have any info on Young's mother?

Yeah you missed or forgot it (and don't we all have that happen on occasion). Much of chapter 6 of Field of Dishonor discusses the public and media firestorm over Hancock, the Young Court Martial, its impact on the declaration of war; and how all that focuses their attention on Honor.

Field of Dishonor wrote:The media were after all of Nike's people, rabid for any shred of a firsthand account to flesh out the Admiralty's bare-bones report of the battle and the incidents leading to what promised to be a spectacular trial, but they'd gone after Nike's captain with special fervor . . . and not just about events in Hancock. Every detail of Honor's past—and Young's, she conceded—had been exhumed and plastered across every newsfax in the Kingdom, along with equally detailed, usually inaccurate, and almost invariably tasteless analyses and speculation.

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Political analysts of all stripes opined that the Young court-martial would make or break the Cromarty Government's chance to secure a declaration of war, and there'd actually been mass demonstrations—with people waving placards with her picture on them!—outside Parliament.

The public didn't have the full information (if nothing else the actual recordings of the events at Hancock would be both classified and also closely held as evidence in a trial) but they certainly knew about it.

Oh, and I'd forgotten that Hauptman Cartel controlled newsfaxes were also attacking her (this before Klaus got over himself; and was still pissed off over the way her actions at Basilisk made him look. So presumably he instructed them to savage her reputation and judgement)


As for your question - no I don't think we know anything about Pavel's mother. In fact I don't think there's a single word about her in any of the books.

Young's father and his political allies (and those he forced to publicly side with his positions) used the requirements for officially declaring war as a way to get Pavel not to be hung and to drive various persons to support the political factions that gave him power. That and cause his political enemies pain, frustration and political damage. Not all of that was political, some of it was personal for ever so many reasons including he was a despicable person. Ok that is a personal assessment but it isn't wrong.