The enemy in "extended space": SLN or MAlign

StealthSeeker wrote:OOPS, I did that wrong, I'll try again.

SWM wrote:You are suggesting that it is a good idea to put this nation in charge of Mesa, in control of the very genetic slavers it has vowed to eradicate, governing the people that the Audubon Ballroom killed whenever they could?

Yes!

As far as I know the Audubon Ballroom had vowed to eradicate slave trade, not the slaves themselves, nor the slaves that work in the facilities that make the clones. But they are after the people that run the businesses that create the clones.

I think you missed that I said the "genetic slavERS it has vowed to eradicate".

I don't think it would be a good idea to put Torch in charge. You need someone not quite so deeply involved in the violence either as perpetrator or victim to play referee as Torch would be perceived to be, especially on Mesa. The GA, with Torch's participation will have to form some sort of interim governing committee to go to work at settling things down and facilitatating arrangements between the various groups.

Torch will be especially valuable in reaching out to the slaves and the seccies to assure them that their interests will be looked after and, after a reasonable time, their participation welcomed.

Make no mistake. This situation still has the potential to degenerate into some very ugly violence that could make what we saw in COG look like a Sunday School picnic.

Don

n7axw wrote:I don't think it would be a good idea to put Torch in charge.

Two Words: Queen Thandi

Three scary words: King Victor Cachat

StealthSeeker wrote:I will agree that any big repositories of information are all gone. But there have got to be little bits of information all over the place that will prove that the MA exists.

As Torch is the only planet actually at war with Mesa, I'd like to see people from Torch brought in to administer the occupation of Mesa. They will get lots of help from Haven, Manticore, Beowulf and others I'm sure. But having Torch in charge should give some degree of hope for change to all the slaves living on Mesa and having freed slaves as part of investigative teams should help. After all, they would be able to better help in sorting out what the "ballroom" did or didn't do on Mesa. Throw in the treecats and what help that they can offer.

No big data dumps, but there will be crumbs to define a trail.

SWM wrote:Think about that. Torch is the one star nation in the galaxy who hates the very existence of Mesa more than Beowulf. The star nation which was created by former genetic slaves. The star nation whose top military officer is the (supposedly former) top leader of the Audubon Ballroom. A star nation which experienced atrocities after the former slaves took over. The star nation which sent two people to Mesa who helped local terrorists blow up several nuclear weapons in the city. The star nation who openly declared war on Mesa.

You are suggesting that it is a good idea to put this nation in charge of Mesa, in control of the very genetic slavers it has vowed to eradicate, governing the people that the Audubon Ballroom killed whenever they could?

I am not sure that the more moderate populations of the galaxy would agree. They would say that Torch is the worst choice for overseeing Mesa. There would be rumors of atrocities and conspiracies and retribution. There would be demands that an international cooperative take control. Putting Torch in charge would cause interstellar outcry, a distraction that Manticore would not want.

Manticore wants attention on whatever it can find out on Mesa, not on a huge controversy over who takes control of Mesa.

Minor nit. The top military officer of Torch is not an ex terrorist. The top military officer of Torch in Thandi Palane - Jeremy X is her civilian superior as Secretary of War, and the discussion in CoG covered this territory. There will be plenty of oversight by the other members of the GA, but as the raid on Balescu Station showed, the members of the Torch military obey orders, even when they are mad as hell. And the vast majority of people on Mesa are either slaves or seccies, neither of which Torch has any bones to pick with.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Minor nit. The top military officer of Torch is not an ex terrorist. The top military officer of Torch in Thandi Palane - Jeremy X is her civilian superior as Secretary of War, and the discussion in CoG covered this territory. There will be plenty of oversight by the other members of the GA, but as the raid on Balescu Station showed, the members of the Torch military obey orders, even when they are mad as hell. And the vast majority of people on Mesa are either slaves or seccies, neither of which Torch has any bones to pick with.

Further minor nit. Torch is NOT a member of the GA, and I think that there are all kinds of reasons, on both sides of the polities involved, why it is wise for the near future that it remain that way. Torch is a cooperating co-belligerent where certain goals of the GA are concerned, and, astro-politically, I think that is the perfect place that Web DuHavel and Jeremy X will want them to stay. Probably even after the Erehwon - Maya "axis" hooks up with the GA...if they ever do.

You didn't think that David was going to let the politics get simple, did you? <grin>

dreamrider

fallsfromtrees wrote:Minor nit. The top military officer of Torch is not an ex terrorist. The top military officer of Torch in Thandi Palane - Jeremy X is her civilian superior as Secretary of War, and the discussion in CoG covered this territory. There will be plenty of oversight by the other members of the GA, but as the raid on Balescu Station showed, the members of the Torch military obey orders, even when they are mad as hell. And the vast majority of people on Mesa are either slaves or seccies, neither of which Torch has any bones to pick with.

Nit accepted--Jeremy X is SecWar. But "vast majority" is a bit of an overstatement. 30% of Mesa is neither seccie nor slave. That is an awful lot of people. And my point is not that Torch can't do it--my point is that the rest of the galaxy doesn't know that Torch can do it. I'm talking about appearances, how those freeborn Mesans are going to see it and how the more moderate nations of the galaxy are going to see it. It would be a public relations disaster.

But I don't see anything in CoG that discusses giving control of Mesa over to Torch. Stealthseeker is proposing to bring in Torch "to administer the occupation of Mesa".

SWM wrote:But I don't see anything in CoG that discusses giving control of Mesa over to Torch. Stealthseeker is proposing to bring in Torch "to administer the occupation of Mesa".

There's a good bit of discussion that supposes that Torch will have at least a very large role in administering occupied Mesa. I haven't got it on hand in e-format to fetch quotes - someone else surely will - but it shouldn't be hard to find.

The Torch military in totally unsupervised control over Mesa's 30% citizen class is indeed a bit of a worry for potential atrocities. They are, after all, survivors of centuries of atrocities committed by those 30% and their Manpower peers. So I'm kinda struggling to be sympathetic, or not to give the finger to the "moderate" governments who would be so terribly concerned about that 30% and have given a shrug and wrung hands to that 70% and tens of billions of genetic slaves for centuries.

But still, atrocities are bad and it's not the way to a better Mesa. And those "moderate" governments wield a lot of power and may with enough positive encouragement grow spines and consciences with some grasp on power.

No occupation is going to command adequate respect out of the 70% of Mesa who aren't citizens without Torch's participation, and the people monitoring those districts are going to be a lot more successful doing it if they've got that kind of cred. If that takes an occupation administration that's got, say, the Beowulf regular military as the senior partner with Torch, serving as the public face of the occupation for "moderates" who care about every single Mesan of the slaver class and make mouth noises about caring for their victims, fine. They'd still be handy for minimizing lynchings and helping assure that 30% that, if they're not too invested in the slave trade and are willing to accept that 70% as their equal fellow citizens, Mesa can still be their home too going forward.

JeffEngel wrote:

SWM wrote:But I don't see anything in CoG that discusses giving control of Mesa over to Torch. Stealthseeker is proposing to bring in Torch "to administer the occupation of Mesa".

There's a good bit of discussion that supposes that Torch will have at least a very large role in administering occupied Mesa. I haven't got it on hand in e-format to fetch quotes - someone else surely will - but it shouldn't be hard to find.

I just said I looked and can't find any.

[edit]I've just found what you were probably talking about. There is some mental speculation by Zilwicki that Torch would provide a good liason force to the former slaves during an occupation of Mesa. These thoughts are apparently shared by Honor Harrington and Victor Cachat.

But I point out again that a small liaison force is very different from what stealthseeker has proposed. He apparently wants Torch placed in command of the entire occupation, not merely a liaison to a part of the Mesan population. That is the proposal that I have been arguing against.[/edit]

SWM wrote:[edit]I've just found what you were probably talking about. There is some mental speculation by Zilwicki that Torch would provide a good liason force to the former slaves during an occupation of Mesa. These thoughts are apparently shared by Honor Harrington and Victor Cachat.

But I point out again that a small liaison force is very different from what stealthseeker has proposed. He apparently wants Torch placed in command of the entire occupation, not merely a liaison to a part of the Mesan population. That is the proposal that I have been arguing against.[/edit]

Right. A little later WEB has a similar speculation - well, near-certain expectation really. I'm not sure that liaison force as Zilwicki, Cachat, and WEB are thinking is going to be "small". We may be reaching a point where it's a quibble over proportions. Torch doesn't figure it has the manpower for the whole occupation, by a long shot; you and I agree it hasn't got the standing to go it alone either. (And there's no reason I know of that the Torches would disagree.)

But if you're tasked as a primary liaison to 70% of the occupied population - the 70% not represented by the government that's just been overthrown - well, if you're not in command of the occupation, if it's going to be an effective occupation, you've got to be one of the most senior and respected partners in it at least.

Referring to the "occupation" of Mesa, I picture it in three phases, the "first" part is already complete: the slave areas and secce areas each already isolated from each other, because the secce bosses are already still in charge of their areas, which are from what I can tell in a big ceramcrete doughnut shaped "cofferdam" around the "30% "freeborn". The 30% are still protected by the OPS, MISD, and "Peacekeeper Forces", except that those three have pretty much been emasculated because the GA (likely 10th Fleet) holds the high orbitals. They're vulnerable and probably close to major losses of bowel control, of course. We don't know what is going on in the "genetic slave areas".

Phase 2 is the the liberation part, and that's going to take the liason of a big chunk of Torch forces including a lot of "peacetime soldiers", under Palane's command, augmented by a lot of the better secce bosses. The exact analog is the occupation forces in Japan 1945-1948, something I understand pretty darn well because my father was one of them. I later lived in Japan btw, and met folks in rural Japanese communities who thanked me for being an American because of the example of my dad. They've even got their WMD two destroyed areas.

That's when the hell holes get cleaned up also. Lower "Radomsko" gets subdivided between Neu Rostok and the Hancock survivors and all the gangs there are pretty much wiped out. It's also when the Mesan forces are disarmed by the GA, and the process of criminal prosecution and for the lack of a better word "de-superiorization" is going to take place. That's not going to be done under Torch control, duh. That's the "MacArthur" role.

Speaking of which...I wonder if RMN investigators find the rest of the paperwork from Mesa Pharmaceuticals which announce why "Verdant Vista" didn't shift to automated production to begin with... aka because the MAlign told them not to. They get into the Jessyk Combine and Axelrod's "books", etc. and discover the who, what, and why all the way in terms of corrupted individuals in Silesian and SL systems, all the way back to before Edward Saganami. Etc...

Meanwhile 60% of the planetary population is... going to be co-opted by Torch to not go into mass destruction mode against their former overlords because said overlords are in the process of being turned into paupers, jailed, hung or shot by firing squad, and maybe the rest resettled in migratory chunks off world where they can do no harm. I dunno. Who is going to do that? forces under the control of... Thandi Palane.

Then you have the final phase: withdrawal, and that's not going to happen until the two big groups (slaves and secces) are playing nicely with each other, there's a functioning constitution that guarantees human rights a la the Beowulf / Haven / Maya / Manticore satisfaction level, and the GA is ready to head off because the freeborn are defanged, demilitarized, and de- "in-charged".

That's when I personally think Mesa becomes the 2nd Planet in the "Kingdom of Torch", because it removes the star system from MAlign control forever, and because again: Berry Zilwicki has the loyalty of ALL of the major important players and personalities, and NO ONE ELSE can get it. Under that scenario, ALL Mesan Alignment ships get taken over by who? the RTN navy, of course, ably abetted by... the Maya/Erewhon alliance. Once a new MSDF is in play, the newly enlarged RTN then goes after ALL of the Manpower depots in the rest of the galaxy from their "second headquarters planet". I think Thandi's home planet becomes the third member of Berry's allied systems, btw.

Of course, since I'm not the author, YMMV [which I finally figured out to be "your mileage may vary"].