I agree that Alex Kerensky can be viewed thru a number of lenses. (Abou’s alternate history where Kerensky and the SLDF create a military junta in the Terran Hegemony is an interesting one.) But we should keep the facts straight.
He suppressed the uprisings in the Periphery, forcing free people to accept the rule of the distant Star League.
These weren’t uprisings. They were secession movements. Each of the four major Periphery realms had joined the Star League as Territorial States during the Reunification War. Their peoples had not been “free” of Star League rule for nearly 200 years.
It’s also important to point out that Amaris largely manufactured the crises that created these secession movements and then fueled them with weapons and personnel from bases hidden in the Deep Periphery. The worlds of the Periphery had lots of reasons to secede from the Star League. But these Periphery worlds were more Amaris’s pawns to lure the SLDF away from the Terran Hegemony than free peoples exercising their free wills.
When Amaris usurped the throne of the First Lord, Kerensky lead his army in a wasteful vengeance campaign that lead to the destruction of the Rim World's Republic, when he could have used those resources to expedite the liberation of Terra.
The SLSB is pretty clear that the SLDF needed a base from which to prepare for the campaign on the Terran Hegemony and moved against the Rim Worlds when none of the Member States would provide sanctuary. It was a necessary move, not a wasteful one, especially given the very limited forces left behind by the Rim Worlds military.
He ordered the execution of Amaris (which made sense) and his entire family (again, just vengeance).
It’s shocking to our 21st century mindsets and forms of government, but this is par for the course when dealing with hereditary rule. It’s not enough to remove a ruler from power. You have to remove his entire family line or else his children, siblings, nephews/nieces, or even in-laws (depending of the rules of succession) will claim the throne.
If Kerensky had backed one House Lord (be honest - Steiner or Davion), the succession wars would not have occurred.
Richard Davion was quoted as saying that the Star League has no potential and therefore no value — that he couldn’t even buy breakfast with it. His successor, John Davion, took worlds from the Terran Hegemony and entire divisions from the SLDF.
When the SLDF left the Rim Worlds, Robert Steiner II sent his forces in. His successor, Jennifer Steiner, also took worlds from the Terran Hegemony and entire divisions from the SLDF.
No leader of the Great Houses was interested in keeping the Star League or the SLDF intact.
Instead, he ran off with half the SLDF thus guaranteeing centuries of war that cost billions of lives and the loss of technology and civilization itself. Everything else is pretty much forgivable, but he could have prevented the Succession Wars, and chose not to.
The leaders of the Great Houses were on the path to war. They dissolved the Star League, not Kerensky. It was just a question of how bad those ensuing wars would be. The Great Houses were already picking the SLDF apart. Had the bulk of the SLDF’s manpower and weaponry remained in the Inner Sphere, the Succession Wars would have been that much worse.
The leaders of the Great Houses were acting like spoiled children. The SLDF was a giant loaded gun. You don’t leave loaded firearms in the hands of children...
