Intergalactic Summit

That's pretty much what produced the Pax Amarria to begin with, I think, Ms. Vess. (It's kind of a recent thing, historically speaking.)

(You do know I'm not Amarr, right?)

The amount of capsuleers even among the loyalists that don't know the origins of Pax Amarria is ridiculous, if we're to go by these fora and other public venues. I've seen them be referred to as the Scriptures. It's a sad combination of tragedy and horror that these people are so indoctrinated that they'll fight tooth and nail for something they haven't the faintest understanding of, even after supposedly being educated Capsuleers.

I suppose allowing these people to be kept in the dark rather than risking them rejecting it if they understood it is easier.

Uh ...

Mr. Ronin?

So-- it seems like you're going to have a problem with any kind of distinction being drawn between degrees and gradations of slavery, being as you'd kind of like to focus on the absolute worst and act like mentioning any other option is sugar-coating it. And, actually, I guess there are probably a few thousand exhausted agricultural or industrial laborers for every enslaved lawyer, so, fair enough, maybe.

Something I'd like to see is a conversation on this subject between you and one of the recently-repatriated Matari practionerers of the Amarr faith-- a recently-freed local priest or community leader, ideally, someone your anger won't just knock flat.

If you have such a conversation, I'd kind of like to be present, if possible. It seems like such a person would have some interesting things to say, possibly to both of us.

Oh gods.

Ms. Hanaya? He was a slave. Apparently under kind of problematic conditions. Hence the fury.

(Though I get the feeling he's upset over more than just what was done to him, personally.)

How comes he isn't a slave then anymore? Someone made a terrible terrible mistake releasing him that early! It is the same as sending a toddler to an university and wondering why they don't understand the sciences.

I will pray to God for him to eventually return back.

You would be surprised no doubt to discover that the tiny amount of enslaved lawyers would have grievances far greater than mine because they have to bow and scrape in a legal system that has no basic justice for Matari built into it everyday.

Pilot Jenneth human slavery is an abomination, taking all of a person's freedom and choice away is not something that can be discussed in degrees of difficulty. True some labors are physically harder than others, and some slaves are used as canon fodder in suicide combat missions. Yes I was a Kaimeira so I know firsthand of what I speak.

Imagine if someone placed a slave collar around your neck to inject pain and addictive drugs to control you, would it be better because you were a white collar domestic slave laboring in a fine dining establishment or a blue collar slave toiling in the bottom of an unsafe mining shaft? I need you to understand the totality of the wrongness of human slavery instead of trying to shave off and focus on the shinier pieces as if they were the whole.

For either you or me to sit down and have a long discussion with someone who while in the belly of inhumane slavery cult embraced the concept of deity worship and was not allowed to practice anything other than the approved cult version would prove a depressing experience for us both. We would immediately see how tragic self loathing taught and reinforced by a barbaric society to keep their labor force mentally shackled to an inferiority complex is as brutal as a slave collar and more insidious than forced drug addiction. They make people start to believe God finds them unworthy and less. The most horrific form of mind control imaginable for people of faith like you or I.

You seem to mistake my passion for human freedom as merely anger against the foolish selfish apologists or the intensely corrupt slavery cultists. I rage against the injustice they inflict upon all of humanity with their sickness pretending to be a religion because every second it is in existence it is destroying innocent human lives.

Love of humanity and justice is the engine that moves me not anger at the evildoers.

I pray for the day when the slavery cultists 'reclaim' for themselves true faith in a just true God and become a force for good in the universe instead of being the embodiment of evil they are today.

It's been happening many places, indeed. The hostility becomes inevitable when the 'repatriated' largely turns out to be a reclaimer with - perhaps entirely honestly and well meant - the goal of spreading Imperial 'glory'. Motivations aside, it is merely a more insidious version of the more overtly hostile act of planetary conquest, with the same goal of cultural eradication and destruction.

It should come as no surprise that such acts of hostility are met with hostility.

Perhaps we should talk about this somewhere else, kindred. Where the public gaze doesn't warp things beyond description.

Well, forget what I said about things being able to change, I guess.

Though I don't know where this idea of purchasing anyone comes from.

So-- I kind of get this, Mr. Ronin, and you might have noticed in my "wispy" descriptions of the prospect of being enslaved that I didn't exactly look at it as a good thing.

That's understatement, by the way. You tend to describe it as downplaying.

But there's another issue in play, here, Mr. Ronin: my experience with slavery has (ironically, given where I live) mostly been with people who've been captured by the Blood Raiders or bought by Mr. Nauplius-- cases where the violence and horror would be hard to overstate.

(He's been better lately?)

See, the thing is, you talk about slavery as something awful by its nature, and I think you're not wrong, and then you talk about the Amarrian belief that they're helping their slaves as pure delusion and propaganda to cover up the brutality, and I think you're not quite right about that.

I've seen brutality in Amarrian slave-taking and management that made me grit my teeth, but I've also seen Amarr get angry at the same things. It's a betrayal, to many Amarr, of what they see as a sacred trust.

And then I see how the Sani treat their slaves. ... so far, I've never seen an Amarrian drinking blood from a captive with a sippy-straw. The basic rule is: the captors have won the right to do absolutely anything they want to by the simple fact that their victims don't have the power to stop them. That's not a subtext. It's not a nasty undercurrent showing its face in more or less subtle ways. It's the rule.

And then there's Mr. Nauplius, who, historically, has tried to put his captives through hell as literally as possible before (in his mind) sending them to the real one.

That's a distortion, you might say. A distraction. That's not what most slavery is. That's a fringe case, an extreme example that isn't representative of the real, banal horrors of slavery.

That's true. But it's also most of my contact with slaves-- tens of thousands of people recovered from Nauplius, most of them too wounded in body, mind, and spirit to probably ever return to normal life, in the Empire or anywhere else.

When I think of "Amarrian slave," I imagine someone who hasn't been subject to someone who uses an abolitionist's writup on the horrors of slavery as a "to do" checklist. Maybe that's distorting. Maybe I can't see clearly because of it. And I'm not particularly a fan, anyway. (Understatement, again.)

But that's my experience, Mr. Ronin. Maybe I haven't seen enough of how the Amarr practice slavery, but I've seen plenty of how others do.

It makes it a little hard to look at the Holders I know as some kind of avatars of ultimate evil.