The secret organization which destabilized the "known galaxy" and then faded into total obscurity without ever capitalizing on their events had insignia?
It was a de facto attempt to create a novel culture via a fusion of cultures. By that logic, wouldn't any attempt to create something new be genocide by dint of having to replace what was already there? If an area is supremacist and xenophobic, isn't the attempt to soften those views also genocide?
If you move Combine culture off of planet A to planet B and leave Combine culture on Planet A and you now have it on Planet B, is that genocide?
Homogeneity
GenocideIf we're going to sling those kind of words around, it's good idea to have the same definition or the discussion goes straight into the toilet after only a few posts.
VoluntaryCoercionConsentNow, generally speaking, if you're using the military to enforce a policy on civilians, that's not going to fall under 'Voluntary' or 'Consent'. That's going to fall under
Coercion. If they'll shoot you for saying 'no' then saying 'yes' is meaningless-because that 'yes' is coerced or obtained by coercive means, as in it ain't based on consent, it's based on not wanting to be beaten, imprisoned or executed.
The Relocation "Plan" that requires military force with the express purpose of degrading or erasing ethnic identity? Yah, kids, that one would fall under the dictionary and legal definition of attempted genocide, as well as the definition of Ethnic Cleansing. We generally associate both terms with negative moral motivations, but guess what?
The justifications used historically for such policies have often used weasel words and ad copy to try and sell it as a moral
good.
The old saw about good intentions being the road to hell, is rooted in this denial of a basic concept that the means you use, decide the ends you get. It's much easier for armchair philosophers and political activists to insist that the ends justify the means.
Even when the means make those noble ends physically impossible.
HOW you do something DOES decide whether or not it works. this goes as much with people and nations, as it does with automotive mechanics-you can use a band saw with a metal cutting blade to take the head off your motor, but it's going to damage the block and the head, so that's not going to let you reassemble it into a hot-rod without significant amounts of extra work and tooling that might not actually work to repair the damage you did taking the heads off, and 'thumb torque' isn't going to reliably work as well as a properly calibrated torque wrench.
History is FILLED with examples where forced relocations did not result in domestic peace between ethnic subgroups. When people come together on their own, it's far more effective than when men with hard boots and guns show up to force them. again, if you want an example of integration failure, look up what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and what led up to that-Tito tried to erase ethnic identity by forcing people to integrate at gunpoint, and soon after he died, it fell apart because it was
coerced, with the result of some of the nastiest fighting in recent memory, including such euphemisms as "Ethnic Cleansing" in that multisided civil war.
When we look at MWDA, we see exactly the same outcome-once Devlin Stone wasn't there to hold it together, his forced homogenization policy led to a multisided civil war as soon as a crisis popped up that could prevent the authorities from stopping it.
The intention was noble, the outcome predictable, the defect, was a belief that any means to achieve a noble end was acceptable and a denial that the means used, would cripple the intended outcome.
The chief problem with the Republic, was that they let the Idealists set not only the policy, but the execution, without listening to the Pragmatists.
This too, is neither unusual, nor unprecedented. idealists OFTEN screw themselves by 'getting ruthless' when they needed to get sensible.
In the book "
Anatomy of Revolution" the author noted that what happens all too often in failed revolutions, is that the radicals get in charge and force-feed red hot revolutionary ideals to a population who don't WANT it, with a rather predictable pushback. The People wanted a
small amount of change, some reform, not to have their lives and existence disrupted and their history and culture treated as invalid, thus, when the mechanism needed to exert strong central control was busted (gray monday/Clarion) the whole thing started to implode with body-counts, coups, and civil war.
