Vandal, on 21 June 2012 - 05:48 AM, said:
It's not really propaganda, people like to think of the Federated Suns as this bastion of freedom and enterprise, and the jewel of the inner sphere, but it's a straight up feudal state with a majority of the populace being illiterate, uneducated peasants worked into the ground by the aristocracy.
If you aren't high up in the social ladder, and you happen to be a natural born citizen of the federated suns, chances are damn high that you can't read. Even House Steiner has a higher rate of social mobility and it's a constitutional monarchy!
The novels may have granted Davion apotheosis, divine right over every other Great House, but the actual sourcebooks lay out each house in pretty neutral terms, and they're all right jerks with major problems.
I would say that you are well and truly overstating the case. The source books have always said that the Federated Suns was an Absolutist State with feudal trappings that were a hold over from an older age. Something like 19th Century Germany or Georgian England as oppose to feudal France. Here is a direct quote from the original 1988 House Davion Source Book.
"The Prince, aided by his family, holds enormous power and generally receives the wholehearted support of most of the population. In return for their support, the common people expect to enjoy certain personal freedoms on the local level. By laws and unwritten greements, the common folk in the Federated Suns may participate in the decisions of their local governments. This protects the average person against possible excesses of the local nobility, which would affect them more directly than the larger questions occupying the minds of the
Davions on far-off New Avalon. With this compromise, the Davions and their people have created a political system of semi-independent planetary governments bound to the actions of the FirstPrince by a harness of nobles."
It's obvious from the original source book that Hanse Davion was intended to be an enlightened Dictator who rule the realm with the interest of the citizens in mind because it was in his best interest. He was never supposed to be an out an out good guy but a more Machiavellian "Great and Terrible" man.
So the image of feudal manors and serfdom just isn't appropriate
The other thing the source books seems to imply is that education in the Federated Suns is not so much poor as uneven. If you live in the wealthier part of the Federated Suns then education is readily and widely available to everyone. It's on the border worlds and periphery worlds that education is bad and this has more to do with a lack of resources and the disruption of effective civil authority on these worlds then anything else.
My overall feel is that the Capellan's have a better basic education system, but that were it matters (i.e in the industrial and political centres) that the education is better in the Federated Suns.
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