Jaroth: I'm pretty sure he was being critical. As in, using "guts" to mean "audacity."
Petroff Northrup, on 26 June 2012 - 09:19 PM, said:
If you have a member of a sibko which believes something incorrectly do you purge it? Do you completely remove it from existence or do you attempt to reeducate it , make sure it learns the proper way and if failing that send it to a lower caste? The spheroids leaders must be punished but almost all of them are little more than sheep at this point, we will take these sheep and become their shepherds, some may wish to fight against the truth of the clans but you do not decimate the herd for the wrongs of a few, if necessary some are culled to keep the flock safe but you Crusaders use violence as a threat, a promise, a constant part of their lives when they are largely simple laborers, not warriors. Death will happen, this is inevitable with such a drastic change but it must be simple. clean, and a consequence used only on those responsible in a measured amount. Give most of the people the illusion of freedoms they want and they will fall in line willingly, to them nothing will change but the flags over their capitols.
If you promise death, rain fire down then it will harden the hearts of every man capable of holding a rifle while if we do not waste live, take measured steps to help the conquered spheroids then they will in time welcome us and the utopia we bring to them with the return of the Star League. For it is both our duty and our destiny to bring about the Star league once more but if in the process of doing so we destroy all the Star league once stood for then the point is wasted and as clanners nothing can be wasted.
There are several areas in which your misplaced hopefulness betrays you, Petroff.
First: A Spheroid is not a sibkin. They are not our children. Both we and they came from the same stock, at some point. But time has shown us who carries the true legacy of humanity on its shoulders. The Exodus was a watershed, a culling that distanced those who will ascend to the heights of glory from those who would root in their own waste for the mere thrill of experience. Why do you think we have developed such a focus on genetic legacy? I know you are well aware of the logic behind it, but this is not what I ask. I ask you, why do you think that line of logic commenced in the first place? Because innately we knew that there were only two kinds of people, come the Exodus. Those who joined Kerensky, and those who did not. Like breeds like, and those who did not join him due to their own selfish pride, bred selfish children. Who breed selfish children of their own. And without the presence of those noble warriors who would sacrifice even themselves to preserve virtue, those who left with Kerensky, their selfishness was allowed to run unimpeded. All goodness had left the Inner Sphere, and there was no check on the misanthropy that followed.
We must go back for this reason. We need to. The Spheroids will destroy themselves if we do not. By invading them, we can save them. Isolating ourselves will do nothing but allow us to pat ourselves on the back for not letting ourselves be touched by their deviant ways. But as we do so, we run the risk of failing to notice their slow expansionism towards our own worlds, until it is too late, much as a frog can be made to not notice his own being boiled alive. I assure you, when we enter their realms, the Spheroids will pay no mind to our words of honor, restraint, and purity. These concepts are as a foreign language to them. The only language they now understand is that of destruction. And they must be made to understand The Way.
Second: A Spheroid is not miseducated. They have all the same mental capabilities we do. They have shown, time and time and TIME AND TIME again, throughout their entire history, from before the Exodus all the way through to this very day, what their beliefs and ways are. What they hold to be desirable. Our cultures can not be brought together without our own culture losing its purity in droves. This is the very nature of purity. There is no such thing as "somewhat pure." Once contamination occurs, it is definite. Both Wardens and Crusaders understand this, but the difference is that Wardens somehow believe that we can avoid contamination by refusal to engage. Starry-eyed nonsense. The Sphere will reach us. It is inevitable.
Unless we reach it first. The only difference between a Warden and a Crusader is that the former allows fate to control it. The latter
forges its own fate.
The desire to invade the Sphere and educate it in "peaceful" ways strikes me as a Crusader mentality, Petroff. A Warden does not want to influence the Sphere. A Warden does not want to touch, or in fact even imagine to be existent, the Inner Sphere. But let us set that aside for now. Let us say we go to the Inner Sphere, and attempt to re-educate them according to your terms. And let us even say that, unlike my previous assertion, they are even willing to listen. What makes you think that we would not listen to them in turn? Discussion is never, EVER one-sided. This is simply not possible. Educating them with words means mingling our words with their own. Our thoughts with their own. And those thoughts, those ideas, will influence us. No matter how pure we may be. Purity and virtue are absolutely not self-sustaining phenomena. This is why they are so precious - they require immense amounts of dedication to maintain. It is not in their nature to remain untouched. Even the physical universe itself verifies this, via the phenomenon of entropy. It is the nature of corruption to encroach on all things. It does not require an originating source. It does not require a mastermind directing its path. It encroaches, of its own accord, directionless, leaderless, and endlessly. And so will it be if we intermingle with the Spheroids. This is why the language of war is preferable to the language of thought, in our trade of philosophies with the Sphere. Here, we can choose to accept what we "learn" from them -tactics, weaponry, what have you- or choose to reject it if it does not suit our current ways. With words and ideas, the influence occurs as soon as the encounter itself does. Battle provides a buffer zone, a sort of gate to which our own ideals are the keymaster. And unless we so decree, no freebirth corruption shall enter.
Third, if your sibkin believes something that is in conflict with Kerensky's ideals, and he cannot be learned, he should most certainly not be removed to a lower caste. Where he can influence his castmates with his vile thoughts. And result in inner conflict for the Clan. He should be banished. An outcast. A Clan has no room for error. Our survival depended, for a very long time, on being able to barely scrape by with whatever few meager resources we were able to scrounge up from the unforgiving realms we inhabited. The presence of even one person who threatened the delicate balance would have been unacceptable. Even today, we do not share the luxury the Inner Sphere enjoys. Our ways were forged via trial by fire, and there is good reason for all of them. The ways of the Spheroids were determined by having more wealth than they knew what to do with, and like most rabid beasts, they could not bear to see beauty without suffering an incommensurate urge to violate and destroy it. And because they had such wealth in the first place, they enjoyed all the more ability to wreak so much havoc... We WILL enter the Inner Sphere. We will do so with our arms blazing. And we will watch them cower before us, accepting the error of their ways, as evidenced by the weakness of their culture. Or we will watch them die. The choice is theirs, but The Way is set.
As a final point. We cannot destroy all that the Star League once stood for. I do not mean that I agree with you, in saying that we must not do so - although this is certainly true, it goes without saying. What I mean, is that it is simply not possible for us to destroy it. We are not capable. Even if we wipe out every piece of scum occupying Terra, and the rest of the Sphere, we still would not have destroyed all that the Star League once stood for. We would have destroyed all that betrayed the Star League in the first place. Our own legacy already carries the values of the Star League with it. We are not the League, yet, but we are its inheritors. We will bring the League anew, this has already been determined. It will be so. The only thing the freebirth Spheroids get to decide is whether they will respect the reborn Star League, or oppose it.
Edited by Bloodweaver, 28 June 2012 - 10:21 AM.
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