GabrielKnight, on 26 November 2012 - 10:28 AM, said:
There was a time in my wayward youth when I was a Clanner at heart, but after a few years away from Battletech I've come back to this game and frankly...the clans repulse me. Institutionalised racism, caste based society, eugenics, disregard for sound military tactics... No thanks.
I'd rather be freebirth scum these days! Maybe I've grown up a bit.
What draws you to the Clan way?
Disclaimer: This is meant to be a lighthearted post. Please don't degenerate into flames.
No flames here! I don't make any promises for the Clanners, though.
The Clans are attractive to many players because of their technological superiority. These are the same people selling their Ravens in droves since the patch (nyah-nyah, jerks!) For others, I think the main draw is the illusion of moral standards and rectitude - the rigid honor system; the ritualized warfare which minimizes collateral damage; things like that. The problem is that they're racist, fascist eugenicists - and that's Bad News. We had enough of that crap after about 1945 - remember, eugenics is the pseudoscience which led directly to sterilization of "undesirables," such as the handicapped - oh yes, and the Holocaust. Thus far, the Clans' honor system and their resort to successful genetic augmentation to support their eugenics have succeeded (to various degrees) in limiting such things in their own culture, but that's not going to happen for long if they were to win - because they're also fascists.
The really scary thing about fascism is that it requires an enemy both as a justification for its authoritarianism and as an outlet for the social stresses generated by that authoritarianism. This enemy must be both perceived as a danger and fought against. The clan prejudice against "freebirths" provides some outlet, but they're a tiny fraction of society and serve the additional purpose of "proving" the superiority of "trueborn" Clanners. So the focus of the last
four hundred years, give or take, of Clan political history has been the return to the Inner Sphere and the reconstruction of the Star League - with the enemy needed for their regimes provided by the Inner Sphere's defenders, and rival clans as short-term surrogates. This long-term goal is one of the major underpinnings of the Clans' doctrine of restricted warfare - and if they were to actually win, that support is gone. Victory in their war of aggression would have been the worst thing that could happen to the Clans.
Without the Inner Sphere to focus their agression, the Clans no longer have a grounding for their constant wars. Before, combat as a way of life ostensibly existed to refine the Warrior caste for its inevitable triumphant return to Holy Terra. With victory, that veneer is stripped away, and only the old reasons remain: wealth, population, resources, honor, ideology - power, in a word, both over other Clans and over a Clan's own population. After all Warrior Castes's centuries-long junta has been justified by the necessary preeminence of Warriors in reconquering the Inner Spere. The Warrior Caste
has to fight in order to maintain the self-worth of its members and their preeminent place in Clan society - their victory over the Inner Sphere leaves no honorable opponents but each other.
Additionally, the mixing of Inner Sphere populations with Clan civilians will result in massive social upheaval on both sides. Revolutions are never directly caused by conditions - they're caused by the failure of conditions to match people's expectations. Clan civilians have always been raised in an ideological vaccuum, force-fed Clan ideology. Now they're going to be exposed to Inner Sphere ideas directly for the first time, and they're going to start questioning their system.
Now consider the problems of "pacifying" the inevitable resistance of the Inner Sphere to the forced implementation of Clan culture. Not only have the citizens of the Inner Sphere been summarily relegated to the status of third-class (or probably fourth-class; they're not just "freebirths," they're
ungrateful, Inner Sphere "freebirths") citizens in their own culture - they're told that the raising of their children is to be taken from them, and that keeping and loving your own child is a shameful thing. Once the Clans get around to mopping up the Inner Sphere polities shattered by their sneak attack and start trying to stamp out real society, their subjects are going to explode. This will inevitably lead to "civil" war between the enslaved civilian populations and the Warrior Caste, some of whom have proven
quite willing to resort to orbital bombardment to subdue rebellion. Initially, the Clans might not resort to such measures, and might even be inclined to take a more long-term approach (thought that's not going to stop people who are literally fighting for their children.) However, their patience is going to be stretched thin due to the upcoming general Clan civil war.
Without the destroyed star nations of the Inner Sphere to focus their aggression, and facing internal strife from captured civilian populations, it is inevitable that a general state of open warfare will develop among the clans, similarly to how they behaved when still in "exile" with a very important difference. This time the Clans must deal with resistance from captured Inner Sphere populations at the same time some their own civilians are asking pointed questions about "where we go from here," at the
same time that other Clans are beginning to examine the spoils claimed by the invader Clans - with an eye for weak defenses. This cycle of war may start slowly, but as increased internal strife, escalating external threats, and lack of a long-term, non-Clan enemy take their toll, something's going to break - and from that point, it's a short, vicious cycle to the collapse of the Star League and the general warfare that smashed the Inner Sphere in the first place. The Clans' prohibitions on attacking infrastructure are already actually less stringent than those of the Inner Sphere (because the Clans still have their full tech base from which to rebuild,) and the Warrior Caste will become more and more vicious as the situation becomes more dire, with internal strife prompting attacks from enemy Clans and distracting Clan warriors from pacifying the internal strife. When every threat is increasingly seen as tantamount to a Trial of Annihilation, many of the more aggressive and pragmatic clans will take the position that you have to
still exist to have honor. The ritualism that marks Clan warfare, Zellbrigen, will begin to erode.
One or two "moderate" Clans won't really do much for this - if they insist on attempting to mediate, they'll offend the honor code of the Clans by "interfering" in their Trials of Whatever. If they simply hang back from the general melee, they'll be viewed as a threat. Eventually, everyone will be drawn into the vicious cycle - because without the need to prepare for the Invasion of the Inner Sphere, there's not
limiter on the Warrior Caste's lifestile of ritualized, avaricious conquest.
In the end, one of two things will happen: the Clans will either stop short of the abyss and avoid destroying the tech base as did the Succession Wars, or they will replicate that result by different pathways and become the "Inner Sphere surats" which their society has been raised to despise for four hundred years. In either case, Clan culture will not survive - without a unified front to stamp out Inner Sphere culture, the Clans will absorb much of the dominant cultures of their captured areas, to some degree - and the constant warfare will have eroded the Clan honor system to the point where it is equivalent to that practiced in the Draconis Combine.
If you want to destroy the Clans for good and all - let them win at Tukkayid.
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