wastedfly wrote:Highjohn wrote:Read please
Take your own advice?
Play nice, please, guys.
Politics is bound to rear its ugly head. After all, I put a lot of politics into the books. I would like to see civil discourse on the forums, however. Whatever happens in Real Life, where civility (alas) is not precisely at a premium.
For what it's worth, my own view is that the "
good Peeps" were, in fact,
good Peeps trapped in a bad system. That, in large part, is what the People's Republic of Haven was all about when I started writing the books. It is both unrealistic and, frankly, unreasonable to demand that the members of a military organization who have taken oaths to follow the lawful orders of those set in authority over them, and who are (for the most part) genuine patriots, whether or not they approve of their current government's policies, refuse to follow orders when they are given by those same lawful superiors.
There's been a great deal of talk about the legality or illegality of war, not just in this thread but in real life. The simple truth of the matter, though, is that even if "that sort of thing isn't done in the 21st century," and even though there are all sorts of solemn international treaties and covenants about what is and is not permissible in time of war, wars — by their very definition — are extra-legal operations. They represent the use of force — not international covenants, not international treaties, not international debating bodies, but
force — in the resolution of differences between two or more sovereign states. Sometimes one side or the other is not a
recognized sovereign state, of course, but in essence it is a resort to violence because the objectives of the combatants are mutually incompatible and of sufficient importance that neither side is prepared to surrender its own objective to the other.
When you volunteer to serve, or even when you are conscripted to serve, in your nation's military, you become a part of your nation's policy enforcement tools. You may be sent in to recover a hijacked freighter, you may be sent in to secure a friendly government's stability at its request, you may be sent to invade another country because the national command authority has decided that country needs to be invaded. In all of those cases, you are obligated to follow your legally given orders until and unless you are given an order which is illegal
under your own nation's code of military conduct. You may be held accountable by someone else after the conflict, assuming that your side loses, and it has been established at least since the end of World War II that simply saying "I was following orders" is not considered a sovereign defense by the victors. Military personnel, however, do not get to hold up "timeout cards" once they have been ordered into a combat situation. In some instances, resignation may be an option — for an officer — but not "in the face of the enemy" or while on active operations in the field.
Wars happen, and the people who fight them almost always find themselves in ambiguous positions sooner or later. When they do, they rely, as best they can, on their own internal moral compass to navigate, as best they can, within the systemic constraints which bind them. That's all they can do, and to accuse someone like Thomas Theisman of participating in "acts of murder" because the war he was sent to fight was "illegal" is, in my opinion, very unjust. In my opinion, also, it is unreasonable for Honor, or Elizabeth, or Anton or Helen Zilwicki to blame someone like Thomas Theisman because he carried out his orders to the best of his ability. Now, whether or not Anton and/or Helen
will blame Theisman for the death of Helen the Elder and refuse to shake his hand, spit in his face, whatever, is — you should pardon the expression — up to them, and I really haven't made a decision one way or the other yet. But you might want to bear in mind that every single one of the Manties I just mentioned here has blood on his or her hands, and if you asked any one of them if every person they killed "deserved" to die or if there was no question in their minds as to whether or not their actions had been justified, you would probably find that their answer would be either "no" or "I don't know."
In specific reference to the convoy attack in which Helen the Elder was killed, there was never any question in Theisman's mind that it was a legitimate military target, and he was entirely correct. Captain Zilwicki was the military escort of a
military convoy.
I quote from page 184 of the hardcover: "Two of her huge, clumsy ships were combination freighter-transports, bound for Grendelsbane Station with vitally needed machine tools, shipyard mechs and remotes . . . . and over six thousand priceless civilian and Navy technicians and their families."
From page 181, "Theisman didn't like his present mission, partly because he disliked both Commodore Annette Reichman and her proposed tactics. Given his druthers, he would have moved to catch the convoy six light-years farther along, when it would have had to transition between grav waves under impeller drive. . . . He was also a naval officer, with a naval officer's innate instinct to
protect merchantmen, and the fact that two of the squadrons targets weren't really freighters at all only made it worse. But he'd been asked to do a lot of things he didn't like in his career, and if he had to do it, he might as well do it right."
Thesiman's star nation was going to war, and he knew it. The target he'd been sent to attack was a
military target. Do I mean to suggest by this that the People's Republic was conducting itself in an honorable fashion? Of course I don't. But Theisman was a serving officer — one who'd already put his career on the line to do the "decent" thing in informing Honor about the survivors on Blackbird — who'd been given
legal orders by his
legal superiors. Moreover, the war in question was one which had been building for 50 years, against a military alliance
specifically and avowedly created to oppose his star nation.
This was a man who loved his country, however imperfect it might have been at the moment, and who was dedicated to making it be the best it possibly could be. He was a relatively junior officer, not yet in a position to do anything about the system whose corruption he recognized full well. When he acquired the seniority and was able to create the opportunity to do something about it, he definitely did. I realize that this is my fictional world, and that my value judgments will underlie and inform the judgments my characters make. I also realize that readers will — and have the right to — make their own moral judgments of the characters I portray. I find it interesting, however, that my Manticoran characters are so well aware of the risks which the Havenite reformers ran —
even during the period of active hostilities between their star nations — while apparently some of the readers are not.
Would Honor have attacked the same sort of convoy Thesiman attacked if she had been ordered to? Damn straight she would have. Would she have been
happy about it? No, she would not have. Would she have remembered her oath to obey her lawful superiors? Yes, she would have. Would she have done everything possible to minimize the loss of human life aboard the ships of the convoy? Of course she would have. For that matter, so would Thomas Theisman. Every one of those unarmed vessels would have been given the opportunity to surrender, and had they surrendered, they would have been returned to Haven as prizes with their crews and personnel intact. Had they refused to surrender, things would have changed, and even Theisman would have pulled the trigger in that case, just as countless submarine commanders — Axis and Allied — fired their torpedoes during WW II.
I recommend William Tecumseh Sherman's definition of war to your attention.
