Intergalactic Summit

Capsuleers have been given by CONCORD quite an amount of power and quite amount of restrictions. We all know about these so-called war declarations, where capsuleers can bash each other heads for any reason they can think about. Yet unlike what we have now, these wardecs are just for kids, playing soldiers in a sandbox.

For already eight years, since Noir crashed his Nyx into our station, since Gallente started race-based attacks on Caldari peoples on Caldari Prime that was still under their occupation and were going to "Exterminate all Caldari", since Elder fleet attacked CONCORD in Yulai and invaded Empire space, we have been in a real war. In a war that wasn't limited by capsuleer combat only, and a war that is fought on a daily basis by regular people, not just crewmembers of capsule ships, but inside real "oldschool" frigates, cruisers, destroyers and battlecruisers.

It is during the system sieges by capsuleer fleets most of the casualties come from capsule ships, and they can be really staggering. But in more "calm" days it is baseline ships who hold the line, who die every day in almost any system in the warzone from all the sides. Capsuleers ambush Navy fleets, they kill guardians in military outposts, and finally, both sides engage in combat even without capsuleer's "help".

Have any one of you, capsule pilots, were on these ships? Have you seen what these brave men and women have to endure? Or have you been at least on your own ships? I mean not inside the capsule, but walking among crewmembers through the ship corridors and bays? Have you seen the drills and what happens inside the ship during combat?

Not-capsuleer ships perform way worse than any capsuleer analog and amount of crew in them is significantly larger. We can see that average lifetime of capsuleer in space isn't very great, not saying about capsuleer's ship in the warzone. But when a not-capsuleer ship meets an egger, they have basically no chance... Some of the crewmembers still can be recovered, but most of them will die in the explosion. With the power of capsuleer weapons most of fights happen way faster than anyone can reach an escape pod.

And still, these people undock daily, knowing that they might never return home, that they won't be cloned, and even if they will survive explosion they can meet the more horrible fate of being stranded in space, doomed to die from asphyxiation in the wreck if no rescue team will arrive in time. They come to fight, trying to protect their nation, their homes, their relatives. They march forward towards the death, for others to live. It is not just a competition, it is not a display of power between eggers or their chance to bash at each other head out of boredom. This is the WAR. The real War, where people are ready to DIE to achieve their objectives.

And yet some dumbheads call this war "Pendulum"...

Yes, we have lifts and falls, we can capture systems and lose them. But the war isn't about that. It is about protecting people, who live in these systems. We try to prevent the enemy from entering them to kill our "baseline" ships, we try to hold them away from our colonies, so they won't genocide our people, so they won't capture them to torture in their hidden prisons. The frontlines are mobile, different strongholds arise and fall, but our resolve - and resolve of these baseline soldiers and captains - lives on. Will we capture or lose a system - we still have to do our part, we need to protect our people from foreign invaders.

These callous persons, who call this war "pendulum" don't see the war past souvereignty changes. For them it is just system where one side takes the control, then another. But they don't see billions and trillions people dying for this, they don't see the War itself, for them it is just a dot on the map. Red dot. Or blue dot. Just a dot. Or many dots, that change color.


It is pity that they fail to understand, how disrespectful it sounds. And disrespectful not just to nations, where their parents lived, but to all these brave people who die in the war. It is quite a long war already that has claimed too many lives. All these people deserve to be recognized and remembered for what they did for their nations.

Such callousness and indifference to common not-cloneable people from certain capsule pilots is disgusting and unacceptable!

If you see a certain capsuleer using a phrase like "Pendulum War" to describe the conflict the cluster has been all these years, you should know, that you are dealing with an egger with a rotten and empty soul.

Slow day?

None. In fact, more would be lost. Do you, for one moment, believe that Kim and those like her would stop fighting if the State/Federation/Empire/Republic said to? Zealots and true believers fight for their Cause, and they fight against their Enemies, and they don't need your permission or anyone else's to do it.

That's precisely why the Empires used CONCORD to set up these bloodsport arenas: they're going to fight. At least this way, they mostly lock themselves up in a cage together first.

If you can negotiate? Well, go ahead. I'll laugh you try.

But the thread is not about that, but about the disrespect, certain pilots show to human lives, their duty and their sacrifice for their nations.

The rules of the CEWPA keep a lot of harm from being done. This is how people can live there in quantity.

The money brings in a lot of strife though. A lot of people intending to do harm that may not be there if there was no profit in it.

Take away the first and a lot of people will be killed. Take away the second and at the least the number of people killing each other will reduce. So why not at least do that?

Money. Corporations, Factions, Capsuleers, CONCORD, and the planets in the CEWPA zones all profit from the war. As long as suffering and money are all that come out, it will never end.

... profits just as much, if not more, considring the vast majority of war materiel on the Federal side is purchased in Jita, with the taxes going right into the coffers of the Caldari Navy.

A century or more. Abandoning trillions for a century or more, when their spirits and minds die every day, right now. That is the price you're willing to pay for that peace, is it? A peace gained over there simply being no one left to fight for.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable when I expect this to be understood if you've never been there, but the simple fact is that every single day there are fewer and fewer that could even survive as anything but a slave. There's a reason for these endless generations of slavery. It breaks them. It turns them away from what they are and into something else.

Waiting a century? That's not aiming for a resolution, that is plain and simple surrender and abandonment.

You'll have to forgive my scorn here, but I would without the slightest glimmer of doubt die on my feet for these people, rather than cower on my knees until they are simply not there anymore. Of course we could lose. We could fail and face utter annihilation.

... and it would be preferable to the pathetic and shameful life of a coward and appeaser that abandoned those lost spirits.

Abandon the trillions, to preserve... what? Those who would abandon and surrender. You think they would last long? Do you think the path of the appeaser can lead to anything but surrender or war? You would abandon them all, simply to postpone an inevitable defeat. A far greater mind than mine had a few things to say about this.

Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning appeaser friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then? When the Empress has told her people she knows what our answer will be? She has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. She believes this because from our side she has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better golden than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Slaver Empire didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. A great Shaman said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope for a free man in New Eden, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

We will keep in mind and remember that our people in the Empire has faith in us. They have faith that you and I and they have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.

So preach for abandonment, cowardice and appeasement if you wish. Preserve those who don't have the courage and strength to stand for something but their own pathetic desire to postpone the inevitable. I dearly and truly hope I am not around when the day comes that you'll see them fall at the hands of the enemies they strengthened through another century of inaction and temerity.

Then start shooting every Matari child yourself, right now, Miz. Because the choices as they exist now are 'try to achieve the goal of freeing the people still in chans non-violently' or 'guarantee that every Matari will either be dead or enslaved'.

YOU WILL NOT SAVE PEOPLE. YOU WILL ONLY DOOM MORE OF THEM.

We tried it your way. YOU WERE PART OF THAT. You were part of the unrestricted warfare.

Did it work? Did you free all of our people? Because looking around, I don't think you did. If we go back to your model, the only Matari who will be left will be slaves. There will be no-one to try to free them. There will be no-one to remember the ways the slaves are forgetting. And if you're good with that, if you're fine with the idea of the Matari people being utterly destroyed, nut up and kill us all yourself.

The issue is, I think, this. "How better can one die than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods."

It's not the death, it's more that the war has gone on for so long and has led to... An election where we lost a moderate opponent who, more or less, played by the rules and was sheepish when caught not doing so. In return we got, basically, a war profiteer whose minions don't care about their own rules, let alone anybody elses, and give exactly zero fraks when caught doing the kind of filthy crap that would make a Dragonaur blush.

As Arrendis has said, the kind of people who volunteer for Militia service out of loyalty to CEO and State are precisely the same kind of people who'd be the first to pick up a rifle and head for the front if a total war broke out. Most of them are less contented with the rules of engagement than Diana is and would prefer to have a fight that's less about "Points mean prizes" and more about clawing the other guy bloody and leaving his body in a ditch.

That, I think, is why we have the war that we have. Nobody, other than certain elements in the Federation and Empire, seems to actively want to bombard inhabited worlds from orbit. Most of the politicians on BOTH sides probably feel that the status quo is treating them pretty nicely.