Thursday, August 02, 2007

Quote of the Day

In literature and cinema there is a concept, the idiot plot, a scenario that only occurs because one or more characters behaved like idiots.

Of all the worlds of the Human Union one world had the industrial might, and thus the potential to create military power, to stop the Freyani.

March1, the oldest and most populous of the Human colonies, the capital of Humanity in the post-Yellowstone2 era, did nothing.

Nothing was done when the Freyani secretly build a navy and cut loose from Humanity.

Nothing was done when the Freyani and their Objectivist allies hunted down and murdered the Progressive activists and the Gordonian3 warriors who liberated the planets Konkin and Eos from capitalist oppression.4

Nothing was done when the Freyani sent the fleet carrier Victorious across Human Union space -- unimpeded -- to commit the Gordonian Holocaust.5

Nothing was done when the Freyani mercilessly crushed the Republic of Aurore.

When Oliver Richard Kaiser, and the last and greatest leader of Humanity, tried to rouse the people to resist the Freyani, it was too late.

Because the leaders of the planet March and Humanity in General refused to act a new dark age has descended upon us as we now live under the grinding oppression of the Freyan Empire.6


-- Anthony Ellsworth, The Empire of Greed

Sounds like the fellow is a bit biased...


1. Alpha Centauri A-Three. Named for President John March, the successor to President Dick Cheney and founder of the Omaha Pact.

2. Extinction event. The super volcano in Yellowstone National Park erupted on September 4, 2182, burying most of North America in ash, and effectively terminating agriculture on the planet for at least five years. Roughly 99 percent of the Human Race died in the subsequent disorders.

3. A morally darker version of the Dorsai.

4. Needless to say the folks on Eos and Schwartz (the renamed planet Konkin) have a different view of the relevant events.

In the decades following the Yellowstone Event a practice had evolved where if a resource extraction firm could not obtain a sufficiently favorable deal from a local government they would invent a "liberation front" -- usually a handful of crackpots in the back room of a leather bar -- and hire a Gordonian military contractor to put the liberation front into power.

Armand Marteau, the owner of Spinward Mining, wanted control of lanthanum deposits on Eos, a planet settled by descendants of the Peikoff Faction of the Objectivist Movement. Because his agents could not create a front on Eos, they instead created one on the planet Konkin, a Libertarian Anarchist colony named after Libertarian Anarchist author Samuel Edward Konkin III. The new "sovereign" state then staged a "liberation" of Eos.

The first Freya Pact, an alliance of three worlds -- Freya, Galtswelt, and New Texas -- carried out the liberation of Eos. The red stooges were hunted down and given no quarter. On the other hand the Gordonian mercenaries immediately surrendered and attempted to redeem their repatriation bonds.

The Interim Committee that governed Eos refused to the honor the bonds. In their view the mercenaries were not soldiers of a legitimate state but were instead paid members of a homicidal conspiracy. In other words, they were willing capital criminals.

The ground troops from Freya and Galtswelt carried out the order to execute the mercenaries. The contingent from New Texas refused to carry out the execution of mercenaries in their custody. The New Texas forces and their prisoners were then ordered off the planet Eos. Thus breaking the first Freya Pact.

To this day the Eosians see the government of New Texas as accessories after the fact of the mass murder of Eosian citizens.

The remnant of the pact forces went on to liberate the planet Konkin.

5. The Gordonian private military contractors and their corporate sponsors carried out a vendetta against Eos and the remaining members of the first Freya Pact through legal and other means.

It was after the judicially staged murder of two members of the Eos Interim Committee, who were on a diplomatic mission to March, that drastic action was taken.

A chain of fuel caches was secretly created which allowed a task force centered on the newly built light fleet carrier Victorious to make on unimpeded transit to Gordonia and carry out a high yield nuclear bombardment of the planet's industrial and population centers.

This effectively terminated the vendetta.

6. Riiiiigt. The Society of Consent is sooooo oppressive to some people...
_

2 comments:

Mark said...

"President Dick Cheney" is enough to put some nutroots into cardiac arrest, if we're lucky. :-)

"A morally darker version of the Dorsai." was the part that set me a twitching.

Leslie Bates said...

The other important date on this timeline is September 4, 2008.

Terrorist nuke goes off in St. Paul, Minnesota on the last night of the Republican National Convention.

I'm assuming that the Vice President was in an undisclosed location that night.