Intergalactic Summit

I concur, there are still what I call "regressive" holders within the Empire. The Universe sadly does not exist in clear black & white on the issue. There are even those whom are indeed every bit as vile as the Minmatar paint them to be. Yet as our society grows and evolves this habit of relying on slaves as menial labor must give way to remembering our ultimate goal of lifting them up from barbarism and into the Light of God. In the end, we holders must accept that our goal is in fact to liberate the slave by raising them above their origins. As our Empress herself has established the doctrine of freeing slaves of 9th generation and beyond, as well as those involved in intellectual work, we must follow in stride. Many of these people have been part of our culture & society for centuries. Their Faith is true and their hearts are as Amarrian as any of us. In the light of this knowledge should they not be standing beside us as equals?

In fact, many already are. It is absurd to think that any freed slave would immediately abandon their homes, families, friends & loved ones to hop on the nearest transport to whatever world their ancestors came from over three centuries ago. Most, in fact, find themselves still working the same jobs as they did before - only now they collect a credit slip every month & pay their own ways through life with it. How many can one honestly believe are going to want to immediately sign up with some terrorist group and start trying to kill the very same people that they spent their entire lives growing up with? I say any holder who was so cruel to his slaves that he or she finds themselves in such a situation has only brought it upon themselves.

I am not going to debate the morality of what was done in the past. Yes, we conquered worlds and took in slaves. Yet all those conquerors and all of those slaves taken have long since passed away. We now live in the present and these people now call this place home. Why shouldn't they? This is where they were born. This is where they grew up. These are our people. If we, or anyone for that matter, were still sending out fleets to conquer and enslave people there would indeed be room to debate the morality of such actions. Yet this is not the case. In modern times new slaves come primarily from the judicial process - criminals & their ilk, and no one can say that their society does not have a system for punishing such individuals, though their methods certainly vary. Professional slavers are a dying breed that have more in common with bounty hunters and marshals than the brute harvesters of ancient times.

When one looks behind the rhetoric of the Republic what we really see as the true underlying motivation isn't morality or compassion. It's a military goal, plain and simple. They wish to take labor power away from the Amarrian people and add it to their own. The top echelons of their government could not care less about freedom. Their real goal is nothing more than the enlargement & empowerment of their own Republic military at the expense of our entire Empire as a whole. They simply see "liberation" as way to tip the balance in their favor in their grand scheme of conquering & ultimately exterminating all Peoples of the Faith.

Sadly, I expect that we will see only more mindless bloodshed when they start coming face-to-face with the reality of our people. They'd like to believe that any person in the Empire with a drop of Matari blood in them will, once "liberated," come flocking before their war banners & take up arms against their own brothers & sisters back home. As my niece can attest, this is not the case. More & more often they come looking for conscripts and walk away in frustration, leaving behind only the piles of bodies of those who adamantly refused to join. Many of those who are "liberated" against their will are often forced to work at gunpoint in conditions far worse than the slavery that they've been "freed" from - not that the Republic will ever question the morality of their own methods of enslavement, of course.

Ultimately, if they plan to exterminate our people, they will have to exterminate all of our people - regardless of their ancestry. It troubles me that they seem to have no qualms about doing so, either. Such is the magnitude of their love for murder and bloodshed.

Nice little bigoted screed there Pilot Devonshire. It's full of sweeping generalizations, fallacies and straight out lies. Unlike your own government, whose stated goal is the "reclamation" of the whole of civilization, the Republic's goals have nothing to do with genocide, cultural imperialism, mass kidnappings or forced religious conversion.

You really should be more careful whom you refer to as bloodthirsty and savage.

A cage is only a cage if you see it as a cage. What some people see as limitations, others see as blessings. Everyone has been brought into this world has been given limitations by God. The heaviest chains are those that shackle your soul and not your body ms. Rella.

Incorrect Pilot. In the distant past the Tribes fought each other for resources, for example. However the Tribes, while they did peacefully compete with each other on various levels, were not involved in open warfare at the time of the Amarrian invasion. We were at peace with each other and were literally reaching for the stars before our progress was destroyed by your ancestors.

And what of that block of space known as the Khanid Kingdom? Are you telling me that, despite ALL peoples having a history of internal disputes, your people are perfectly clean in this regard? Just because your little Holder-wars aren't talked about doesn't mean they don't happen. That's actually yet another reason the Matari people rebelled: they were tired of slaying their kin in the name of a false god and corrupt masters waging pointless property wars.

Keep riding the high horse, Amarr. Your noble mount is made of lies, blood, and no substance whatsoever.

Who's your hair-dresser?

What nonsense is this? Verify your sources. Find an official document or legal case. An audio recording, perhaps. These claims are nonsensical and can be quickly disproven by even the most cursory analysis of Minmatar lifestyles.

For one, each Tribe differs in general attitudes in regards to the rest of the races. Furthermore, each Clan within any given Tribe may also differ on opinion. So there may literally be thousands upon thousands of ideological combinations that could all validly be called "Matari". While the story concerning your mother is tragic, have you considered the possibility that those particular people that took her were racial supremacists and extremists? Of course, this is already known; you used the word "terrorist" to describe them. And not all Minmatar people are terrorists, just as I'm sure you'd agree not every Amarrian Holder is a profit-hungry sack of lard with one hand on his whip and the other shoved down his pants. See how that works? If you present only the worst caricature of a group of people, everyone in this cluster is pretty damned horrible.

Secondly, there are huge numbers of Matari who are nomadic. Large elements of the Vherokior Tribe along with virtually one-hundred percent of the Thukker Tribe are nomadic, moving from place to place. How, pray tell, could such a people hope to "dominate" the entire cluster when they do not even have a lifestyle involving fixed locations as homes? A nomadic people wouldn't strike down an entire planet and dominate it. Why? Because they don't need it! It's really that simple. People on the run don't dominate. So even if there were any substance to your idea of "all Minmatar want to dominate the cluster", the "all" bit is clearly invalidated by the above reasoning.

Thirdly, you forget how survival-oriented the average person is. Perhaps you've been a capsuleer living in posh conditions for too long? The average person, of any culture, isn't hellbent on dominating all of known space. They're too busy doing regular things like getting to the factory on time or filing all of the portfolios or whatever, just so they can put bread on the table. Do you honestly believe the average Minmatar person thinks about dominating every other ethnicity before falling asleep at night? I know I sure don't.

Again, sorry about your mum and all, but you're extrapolating far too much about a group of people that numbers in the billions, all from a single incident instigated by what probably was a group of fanatics.

You make good points. What's funny is that some of our Elders even warned against such a destructive path. "Seeds cannot grow in a soil of ash", as was said in the Elder's Tome. This seems to have been ignored by many, unfortunately. I agree with my Tribe's historical approach to the entire issue: stay on the move, and you cannot be captured for enslavement. In this manner, we have both preserved our way of life for generations while simultaneously avoiding brutal, deadly conflict and enslavement. This is not everyone's path and way of life, but I believe it to be optimal.