Intergalactic Summit

Just as it was only an actual few (not even "comparative" - an actual few!) that I killed. But they are all that is remembered. All of the people freed by my actions are forgotten altogether.

Don't expect your slaver queen to receive any better consideration than I did, especially given that your Empire still holds billions.

When you're speaking on the order of 700 million or so "freed", Kernher, even a "comparative few" is a substantial number of people.

Again, if Sarum had been so concerned about the ultimate welfare of those "newly freed imperial citizens" she'd have understood the possibility that some of them would wish to emigrate to the Republic or Federation and planned accordingly, i.e. spoken with our respective governments beforehand to ensure that those leaving the empire would have proper housing, training, medical care, employment opportunities, etc. in their new homeland. The fact that this didn't happen would seem to indicate that your empress' intentions weren't as pure as you claim.

Or maybe your divinely appointed ruler just didn't have a clue about the consequences of her decree. I guess I shouldn't be quick to ascribe malicious intent when plain old incompetence is likely the correct answer.

Nah, I don't think Sarum's incompetent. She knew exactly what she was doing. She just didn't care.

Nice job bringing this strawman into an unrelated argument, but the Federation haven't wanted to destroy you for a century. In fact, with all the rhetoric running around about how poorly the Minmatar have treated the Empire and how many treaties were broken, it was in fact the State who broke their treaties, invaded our territory, butchered millions of our navymen, threatened the genocide of an entire planet so they could get another one back and then tried to seize control of two regions of our space when it turned out that getting your homeworld back wasn't enough for you. Despite the fact that we could have very easily seized total control of your planet a second time, we negotiated because we honestly don't care about that planet - we care about the citizens of our nation who still live on it. That's why we negotiated with Ishukone.

Since I don't want to completely humiliate you in front of everyone, I'm going to do you a favour by not addressing the fact that a Caldari of all people is calling someone else "culturally xenophobic." And I won't spend too long dwelling on the fact that it's certainly not the Federation who owns the loyalty of a certain capsuleer persistently screaming themselves hoarse for the destruction of an entire nation, either.

If the Amarr are allowed to pull the "we've done some terrible things but we weren't the aggressor this time!" card, the Federation sure as hell are as well.

I am sorry but this is completely untrue.

Between six and seven hundred million slaves were freed by the Empress's announcement. All of them either of the ninth generation or higher as well as Matari academics and religious figures. These people were not 'millions of unwanted people' They were specialists, academics, Shamans, and skilled workers.

"The numbers of trained and educated refugees we've been seeing are surprisingly high," reports Tjaard Mtaki, one of the career advisors employed by the integration facilities. "All of those immigrants who served on stations and ships have a high level of education in fields such as mathematics and physics. We've seen expert mechanics and engineers who can't read or write a word, but they can accurately explain the finer points of essential systems maintenance. We're finding the gaps in their education and helping to fill them."

The concern was not if the Republic could support them, it was what would happen to the Empire's economy when such a large number of skilled workers were removed.

"Who knows what crises that’s going to cause for the Empire? How they intend to replenish that kind of work force is beyond me. And, I mean, these aren’t glaive-collared factory drones, these are educated people, these are specialists. This is a brain trust we're talking about here.”

An actual problem encountered was that while the Empress decreed that they should be freed she failed to specify anything further. This resulted in many slaves simply left out on the streets with a citizenship and an open door to the Republic.

"The corporation released Onyeka’s entire family, forcing them to fend for themselves. ”It was before the Sisters [of EVE] started their work. We couldn’t afford to leave,” Inevne Djekatro, her mother, explains. ”We were told to leave the workers’ housing, but where are we going to go if there’s nowhere else?” With nowhere to go, the family was forced to take menial service jobs on the station in order to pay for lodging and food.

”We thought life would get better at first,” says Onyeka, ‘But it only got worse. We saved what we could, but it was months before we had enough for a place on a shuttle.” At the expense of reduced power to the family of eight’s single room apartment, they saved enough to send Onyeka to the Republic to begin a new life.

"One of the problems we encountered early on was that Holders who opted to send their former slaves to the Republic were reluctant to pay for passage further than was absolutely necessary," stated Immigration and Resettlement Officer Rais Ephrintak. "Oftentimes, ships would simply leave entire families there without any support. The stations in Rens simply weren't designed to handle such a mass influx of people."

Eventually, the Sisters of EVE offered offices and temporary housing space in their stations orbiting the moons of Rens VII. "It really was the best windfall we could have hoped for, under the circumstances," Ephrintak enthused. "Just having the stations to work from has made integrating the refugees much easier."

And this is the source of the myth of an 'overburdened' Republic. When the Empress made her announcement she failed to give an forewarning for any humanitarian or logistical preparation. Rens is the main immigration facility but like any orbital is designed to hold a finite amount of people. The Sisters of Eve solved the problem by providing free transportation out of the Empire as well as their donation of space for the initial overflow of people.

The Republic pays for the education, counseling, and substance of every single returnee for months, until they are able to be self sufficient. Unless complications arise, such as medical issues or an extreme unwillingness to incorporate, the new arrivals are moved within the first week to housing programs, where they receive further support and work placements or education.

"There were many tests," she says. "They wanted to see where my skills are, and there's so much to write! They want to know everything and more." In addition to basic aptitude examinations, all arrivals are given a basic medical scan and inoculations. Interviews are conducted in order to arrange suitable work placement and provide emotional support, if necessary.

I can go on but I will not.

What Ayallah said. There was actually a lot of incentive to move to the Republic even in spite of the discrimination towards the faithful. In the Empire, emancipation entailed citizenship and some help getting established from organizations like the IAIR. Usually, Holders either require moving out of slave quarter housing within a certain timeframe, or in some cases continued use of the space under a lease. For high generation houseborn the places we had were usually too expensive to be able to afford the rent immediately after emancipation, so you were pretty encouraged to move to someplace cheap.

Then you'd have the problem with jobs. As a slave, you're put where you need to be, with some limited options based on your skills, desires, and what's available. But you always have something to do, even if it's just custodial work for someone's home or a place of business. Once free though, you're competing for the rather few positions available that aren't filled by other slaves. Most of those positions end up getting occupied by True Amarr commoners, or by Ni-kunni families that have had a few generations to get established to free life.

With the Republic, there was the incentive of free transportation, free housing, free benefits, work placement, and immediate citizenship (which was the main reason why some of us chose to emigrate to the Republic even though the Federation probably would have been more accepting of our beliefs). That kind of open door policy is what does more to fill the Republic with Amarr faithful matari than any Imperial emancipation decrees, because it's that open door policy that provides practical benefits and incentives even to Amarr faithful to actually move instead of stay in the Empire. Without it, it'd be mostly just the zealously anti-Amarr/pro-Minmatar type who would move.

Now the reality of it wasn't quite as good, of course, because the free housing is poor, the citizenship is limited until you get full tribal membership (though at least you were never at risk of being deported), and the work placement is no better than in the Empire as the slaves are competing with lots of other freed slaves and with established Republic families and so there are few positions to go around. And then of course there's the discrimination, which is represented quite clearly in this thread: The belief that former slaves are a burden, that former slaves are stealing jobs, that former slaves are vagabonds and tramps and squatters. And most of all, that former slaves are Amarr-lovers, sent to twist and convert "real" Matari, even though most of us just kept it to ourselves.

But in spite of the problems, it all at least looked like a very good deal. The thought that those of us who moved had was that it would be easier to get established in the Republic than in the Empire because of the welfare programs and because the Republic is still a growing nation that's likely to experience regular expansion of the job market. Any ideas of converting the populace was on the mind of very, very few people, because we had a lot of other stuff to worry about.

Frankly it was difficult no matter where you went. No matter how much help you received, it was still harder than life before emancipation.

It has in the past been the case that some holders or heirs have directly released slaves to the Republic. His Holiness the late Doriam II, may he be at peace with God in Heaven, was one such example.

That is not the case for all such releases, but it is the case for some. There is also nothing in that statement to make the assumption that no option whatsoever was given.

The Emancipation Decree as a whole however did not include a mandate-to-move, as many stayed in the Empire.

So if all the rest were freed today, would you still be so hypocritical?

I have no idea what you're mewling about, slaver. What was hypocritical in what i stated, exactly?

There's enough bullshit in your statement to run an angricultural juggernaut, but let me focus on one specific statement in particular:


On behalf of literally every Intaki: **** you, Pieter.

The thing I am most sick of is people from outside the Federation presuming to speak for the Intaki. Perhaps you will say that I cannot speak for all Intaki - but I'm sure as hell more qualified to speak for the Intaki than you. Inevitably - and I do mean inevitably - if my people are mentioned in a conversation about the Federation, we are always a stick with which to beat them. My people are spoken of as ignorant dupes, abused wretches or willing collaborators, depicted as brutally oppressed, wilfully neglected or mercilessly exploited all depending on the narrative a critic of the Federation feels is neccessary to push. Whenever "the plight of the Intaki" is brought up, it is almost never out of genuine sympathy for our people - it is a pretext for denigrating the Federation.

This is the most intolerable of insults to my people. We are robbed of personal agency by those crying crocodile tears on our behalf, portrayed as weak, impotent and powerless victims of an oppressive Federation intent on running us into the ground. We are endlessly white-knighted by those who want to recruit us as allies in a fight against the only friend, inconstant or not, that our culture has ever had. We founded the Federation alongside the Gallente, the Mannar and the Caldari. Despite what idiots like Mentas Blaque say, we Intaki made the Federation great. We continue to serve with distinction in every branch of its government and military. This is as much our nation as it is the Gallente's.

The great irony is that you Caldari are most often the ones who seek to tell us how mistreated we are, and the truth is, what you really want to be is at war with the Federation without being at war with us, but you refuse to accept that it's impossible. You declared war on us the moment you declared war on the Federation, because we are a part of it. Do not pretend it is the Federation's "fault" that our world is under threat - you are the people who are threatening it, like a schoolyard bully telling his victim it's his big brother's fault he didn't protect him better. If you don't want to be at war with the Intaki, sue for peace with the Federation. It is not the Federation that, without a thought for our people, auctioned off development rights to our systems, our worlds, our homes. Never mind the Federation for a moment - those rights belonged to us, and they were never yours to sell. Your people sold our homeworld - do you not see the disgusting irony in that perverse act? Or was it acceptable collateral damage?

When outsiders to the Federation speak of giving us "freedom," we Intaki - loyalists to the Federation or not - know what they actually mean. What they mean is that they want us to have the freedom to take their side. The truth of the matter is that the one possibility that no critic of the Federation will accept - can accept, for it eats at the very core of their worldview - is that we Intaki stay with the Federation, despite its faults, of our own free will. We stay with it because although the Federation has not always treated us with the dignity and respect we deserve, the outsiders who feign sympathy and candor on our behalf have shown us none.

And one more thing, for any other commentator who might, in a fit of mental ineptitude, feel obliged to comment on this statement - if the Intaki were to secede from the Federation, if we were to find the "freedom" from the Federation so many people seem to think we're desperately in need of, it would be on our own terms. If we were to rid ourselves of the Federation, we would most certainly not gain that freedom just to bow to the State or the Empire. This is why even Intaki secessionists are wont to stay away from your toxic "sympathy" - we know that you merely imagine yourselves in the place of the Federation.

It is upon Federal ground you tread when you walk the soil of our beloved homeworld. It is Federal blood that was spilt when the jackbooted thugs of your CPD murdered our people. It was Federal riches you took when your corporations plundered the wealth that rightly belonged to Intaki citizens. You cannot be at war with the Federation without being at war with the Intaki. You cannot oppose the Federation without opposing the Intaki. You cannot be enemies of the Federation without being enemies of the Intaki. You cannot negotiate with the Intaki without negotiating with the Federation. We are the Federation, just as much as any Gallente - and every single shoulder-chipped Caldari pundit on the IGS had sure as hell better get used to that.

And Pieter, after the tirades on Caldari Prime I've seen from you, do not presume to tell me how my people should feel about our homeworld ever again. The Intaki people have weathered many injustices with grace and dignity. We will not consent to being used as weapons against our friends.

And you - do not dare compare my people to slaves. That is, again, an insult not only to us but to the Federation we serve.