Bandit LOAF said:
We know that Eisen does go there, though, and that he arrives by the time Blair is able to give his speech. Again, this is silly hero worship -- we don't know by any means that Blair is the only person who could possibly talk to the Senate. After four decades of war there have got to be plenty of war heroes and politicians lying around...
Who is workshipping Blair? I just think he was a good pilot, a good guy who did a good job. That's about the exent of it. And half the time he had important missions just thrown at him, it's not like he was searching for it.
The only thing truly exceptional about Blair is provided by the movie, and it's not something I particulary care about.
Because he is the Player Character he gets to play the most important missions in the war, gets to be one of the best pilots, and has the highest score in killing aces. The guy gets to be a celebrity even amongst his enemies, what is kind of cool. But I think you are reading me wrong. The Kilrathi have more reference to Blair than I do.
But I really like what Blair did on WCIV. Could someone else do it? Of course. Blair is not a religious figure. He's not the "chosen one", there was no prophecy around him, and that's one of the things that make WC great, it doesn't require such narrative devices to make the the protagonist interesting. Blair starts bland, but the character builds up in time into someone interesting in the end.
And as a protagonist of an action adventure story, I admire the fact that he is able to present his case by talking instead of simply shooting stuff. I now the debate is just a gimmick, but I appreciate that the final battle was between ideas. Not guns, or ships, not blowing things up. And not empty rethoric, which Blair was able to cut right trought.
Blair has moral fiber. The scene where he faces the firing squad is great. He makes the soldiers respect him. He faces it standing up, without blindfolds.
But he's just a guy. Who wanted to be a farmer. Like Cincinatus. Only he was happier as a simple soldier.
It’s not like he never screws up. He should have let Dekker handle Tolwyn on WCIV. No Mr. Nice guy interrogation.
Well, first, in point of fact the Confederation declared war.
Right. But we can agree that the Kilrathi caused the conflict. Or now Confed is the bad guy?
Second, though, the fleet was a coincidence.
Yes, but you don't know for sure that they would use the T-Bomb if they could win the war in a conventional way. Besides, coincidence or not, the fleet was there, and that's what matters. More importantly, Blair doesn’t see the point of the mission until he finds out that it would effectively destroy the Kilrathi fleet.
Really? Because I'm hard pressed to come up with a significant conventional campaign that the Confederation *lost*. Deneb, I suppose, out of two dozen I can name.
Confed had solid reasons to believe they were goint to lose the war and there was no way of stopping the Kilrathi fleet. And that was a major plot point. We know for a fact that if Kilrah is not destroyed, the Kilrathi destroy Earth, because that's how the game plays. The story makes it clear that Confed lacked any alternatives.
How many times was Blair told that the mission he was about to fly would be the most important of his career and that he would be saving the Confederation?
"Most important of his career" - a lot
"Saving the Confederation" - not that often. in that case it was literal.
That's why no one ever debates the atomic bombings of Japan, right?
Not the same thing. Japan was losing the war. The US was winning it. Japan had no hope of winning. Japan did not have a fleet about to wipe out the US from existence. There were other ways to win the war.
I'm not aware that Seether had any command over weapons development -- he was leader of four fighter wings and (nominally) an infantry battalion.
He was the "commander" of the Black Lance, wasn't he?
The formal position of Seether is irrelevant. He doesn’t act like a normal Confed officer, but like a gangster, killing even a Confed official for failing him. That might be acceptable on the Kilrahi Navy, no not in Confed.
Can Seether be reasonably expected to know this? There's no expectation that the soldier on the battlefield question the overall strategic value of the hill he's being asked to take (rather, the expectation is that such an order will specifically *not* be questioned).
That’s not a good comparison. Seether was not an average soldier in the battlefield given illegal orders. He was one of the top commanders of a conspiracy. He was one of the leaders of a renegade faction that was carrying out terrorist attacks against both Confed and the Border Worlds. Of course he knew all that. He's the second main bad guy of the game.
Tell that to the factory workers who died at Speradon. The Border Worlds aren't the unequivocable good guys.
The established plot point is that the conflict was caused by elements within Confed, namely the renegade faction lead by Tolwyn. The terrorist actions were perpetrated by Tolwyn and Seether, not the Border Worlds. It's they who blew up Confed bases and civilian transports.
Given the chance to strike the Confederation they were happy to seize territory, installations and to slaughter civilians.
Yeah, so Tolwyn was right, he should've used bio-weapons against the barbaric inferior races after all.
Or maybe they were just trying to find a way to defend themselves. War has civilian causalities. But that doesn’t make it moral equivalent to the specific targeting and assassination of innocent people.
That's an erroneous assumption on your part. In fact, we know that there were military forces at FT957... the local garrison is happy to try and shoot Blair down if he arrives flying a Lance.
How does that justify using bio-weapons against it? What kind of threat did the garrison at FT957, three guys with guns, pose to Confed security? And they didn't try to shot Blair, they were pretty much calm after what happened. It has no strategic value, and that’s why it was selected.
Seether is a criminal? That's news to me - I believe you have to be convicted of a crime to earn that title.
Oh, semantics. That’s a purely legalist terminology. I was of course mentioned the fact that he committed horrible crimes, even tough he was killed before he could be tried.
You know, since the legality of war crimes tribunals is almost universally put into question, you could arguably claim that war criminals doesn’t exist. What that would accomplish, I wonder.
I think that charge can be levied at elements of any human conflict ever... but we don't go declaring all soldiers war criminals.
Not all soldiers use bio-weapons against innocent people, or execute an unarmed prisoner (in singular!).
You're completely misrepresenting the situation, though, because - and this is key - Seether is *not* prosecuted. He is *not* declared a criminal... Tolwyn is.
That's if you cling to the formalist definition of the word "criminal", since it can be used to refer to people who knowingly committed a crime. Seether is not really a "suspect", we know for a fact that he committed actions that later were found to be of criminal nature in a court of law.
We know that the man *giving* the orders was a criminal, but there has been no such declaration about the men who were required to follow them.
Seether was, however, a commanding officer. He was no mere follower. That can be saind about, perhaps, the rest of the Black Lance, but not him. And you are assuming Tolwyn ordered him to kill Paulsen?
(And it is *very much* an example of the winners writing history -- you don't prosecute Blair for winning at Kilrah or here... but you *could*.)
You *could* potentially prosecute Blair, or anyone involved in the military for that matter, but that doesn't mean there's a moral equivalency between destroying Kilrah and using Bio-weapons on Telamon.
At the same time, we demonize strategic bombing and find Napoleon's "whiff of grapeshot" rather romantic.
I don't. Strategic bomber might be a necessary evil or justifiable action in some situations. Napoleon was a criminal, in the same sense of Stalin, Mao, or other dictators who commit horrible crimes, but are never tried. (Napoleon was sentenced to exile, but that doesn't matter much).
Hey, since criminal bugs you for the formalistic approach, just change it to murderer.
(And let us admit, the allegory intended in the 't-bombing' of Kilrah is decidedly not America's awkward, good faith attempt at bombing German factories...)
The allegory intended is the Death Star, trench run and all. A military target! Even if you mean the nucelar bombings in Japan, the situation is very, very different. Confed was about to lose the war. The US was not.
That's an awkward distinction because we can be sure that the civilians in Berlin didn't resist either. We know that there were garrison forces at the planet -- they were happy to try and shoot down Blair... I even seem to recall civilians with guns being willing to shoot Blair when he landed.
Telamon was not a valid military target. The whole point was to test a bio-weapon on innocent people. If the US was bombing Berlin for the sake of killing helpess german civilians, it would be a crime indeed. But that was not the case.
"The Admiralty Court has ruled that the rebels have rejected the Confederation's authority. Therefore they are not entitled to the privileges of citizenship."
If you murder someone who is not a citzen, it's still murder.
Tolwyn himself acknowledges that. His response is not "Hey, the people there were not citizens, I had a legal right to kill them".
There's no way the use of bio-weapons against civilians would be legal. Tolwyn has right to order Seether to kill Confed pilots, destroy civilian transports, and bomb Confed stations?
An attack with no actual goal other than testing a new weapon, I suppose I can see that. So, what you're saying here is that were we to assume that in the case of an independant Border Worlds that Seether destroying FT957 was legally and morally more like, say, Blair destroying Hyperion?
Hyperion was purely military target. Blair did not use a bio-weapon against it.
There's no moral equivalency between Hyperion and FT957, not even from a purely rhetorical point of view.
This moral equivalency rhetoric games can be fun, but that doesn’t really work that well.