Pacem Appellant

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

“The best approach to peacekeeping is the sophont-friendly one.

“This is standard doctrine. Most sophonts resent being policed by machines – unfeeling, uncaring, unstoppable. They can’t be negotiated with; can’t empathize; can’t offer even a moment of understanding. A mailed fist without a velvet glove. Thus, our peacekeeping brigades, providing the essential sophont touch.

“This doctrine is supported by every memetic and sociodynamic study that has been done on the topic. The Empire knows this: it produced most of them. Don’t ever think that they don’t know this.

“They just don’t care.

“Should you find yourself cross-assigned with the Imperial Navy on one of their rare peacekeeping operations, you will find that the opinion of their hainadar is that all the peacekeeping in the world isn’t worth one drop of indigo, white, or any other color of blood, and that the people being peacekept stopped deserving such consideration at the moment when they started being people who needed to be peacekept. They keep the peace from high orbit, with surveillance dust and KEWs and standard-issue war drones cruising through the streets with smart hunter micromissiles. Zero risk.

“If it takes a little longer, costs a little more in blood and treasure on the other side… well, it’s all going on their account in the end, isn’t it? Just as it would in their domestic law. No friend ever did an Imperial a favor without being repaid in full, so goes the saying, but on such a secondment, never forget that it goes both ways, to the last duodecimal.”

– excerpt from a lecture given by General Toris Politeran at the Echelonic Battle Scholium, Sentrivass (Moerid Nest)

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2018/08/28/pacem-appellant

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

Comments migrated from WordPress:

@Dinode <matthewdinode@gmail.com> on 2018-08-28 13:57:58 wrote

It’s nice to see the perspective of other major space farers like this.

@MirrorField <mirrorfield@gmail.com> on 2018-08-30 04:53:06 wrote

Which, I suspect, is one of the points hampering diplomacy with the Empire: The Extreme version of “Fiat justitia ruat caelum”. It’s a good thing as long as you win, but there is a significant danger of “Galaxy on Fire” with tit-for-tat escalation somehow, somewhere, having made peace impossible (“We can’t agree to peace treaty, the blood of fallen calls for balance.”)

Basically the inverse of why the Culture cannot be trusted to keep it’s bargains (to paraphrase “somewhere there is a Mind running calculations and if those calculations predict more people will be saved by breaking diplomatic agreement, the agreement goes down the drain that millisecond”).

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-08-30 08:35:23 wrote

On the one hand, that’s certainly true to an extent, although while the resolution must be balanced, there’s no requirement that it be balanced in any particular way. (Why “weregeld” exists in the legal system, for example.)

On the other hand, the Ministry of State and Outlands would point out that one of the chief causes of trouble in international relations, as in domestic law, is uncertainty - and while democracies change their minds with every election, and pragmatists are only as reliable as their self-interest, the Empire’s foreign policy is highly predictable and constant as the northern star. You are very unlikely to get into trouble that you couldn’t have known you were getting into.

(On the gripping hand, the biggest thing hampering diplomacy with the Empire remains the lack of any there, there. When your entire trade and immigration policies can be summed up as “Sure, go ahead, why are you asking us?” and many types of treaties we’d be familiar with off-limits as ultra vires, there’s not all that much non-routine diplomacy left.)

((On the other gripping hand, in this particular area, the MoSaO would point out that the Empire’s peacekeeping policy is exquisitely crafted to deliver one thing: almost never having to do it.

One of the problems of being a Great Power, as history on Earth demonstrates more than adequately, is that everyone who isn’t wants to drag you into their local squabbles one way or another. Unlike the waserai, the Empire likes to counter this with a healthy dose of “don’t make us come over there”, in the form of making Imperial interventions about as desirable as having Black Surtr and his army of fire giants stop by your planet on the way to Ragnarok.))

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2018-09-16 09:31:43 wrote

And this line of thinking is precisely why I question the eldrae’s claim to hold the moral high ground – or, indeed, their claim to themselves being sane.

(Given that discussions along this theme have tended to get… explosive in the past, that’s all I’m going to say.)

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-09-16 12:59:37 wrote

The trope you are looking for is here.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-10-03 01:56:16 wrote

To reply less irritably:

The other line of thinking here which General Politeran does not point out is that the soft approach produces false positives.

Everyone’s nice to, and in the presence of, an external force with a velvet glove of +5 empathy and a big stick. Obvious example: pretty much any of the many domestic abusers who seemed like such nice, quiet people who would never dream of doing such a thing. Doesn’t tell you a damn thing about who they are when you’re not standing over 'em or what they’re going to do when you leave.

The Imperial approach, on the other hand, is that if they don’t behave like civilized chaps in the dark, when [they think] no-one’s watching, and without anyone praising them for doing it, then they haven’t learned a gorramn thing. You’re supposed to do the right thing even when it hurts, and/or it costs you, and/or it won’t ultimately matter, and/or when no-one will ever know, and the closer you get to that scenario, the more reliable your test cases are.

When the former enemies are spontaneously helping each other with no external reward save a continuing lack of being exploded by a passing Murderbot 9000, then you can call it.

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

This came to my attention today, and there are a couple of other relevant thoughts I might have had at the time, but didn’t:

One: as has been said elsewhere, the Empire doesn’t have a mass army suited to peacekeeping, or occupation in general of which peacekeeping is a subset. (The Legions are more like the Marines in this respect, and you shouldn’t use them to peacekeep either.) It hasn’t had one of those since late in the Consolidation, and even then, it was an incredibly lightweight one predicated very much on the idea that people and populations who surrender honorably can be trusted to keep their word.

Which is mostly true. If you’re on Eliéra.

(To properly analogize this for the Terran reader, imagine that if at the close of the Second World War the occupation of Imperial Japan had involved, sure, a few regiments of military police to deal with the rare exceptions, but was largely carried out by a massive force of civil servants, chefs, and repair technicians.)

Which means any peacekeeping you ask them to do will be carried out by a force hilariously maladapted to the job.

Two: And also, since needing to be peacekept in the first place means eo ipso that they aren’t the sort of people who can be trusted to keep your word without someone watching them every minute, you aren’t going to be improving the situation by exposing them to unmediated Imperial opinions of them, which probably start out at “not the sort of people you invite to dinner, lest they steal the silver, kick the cat, and shit on the table”, and work their way downhill from there.