penny wrote:I never understood Janacek. How can he have made First Lord of the Admiralty and not care about the future of the Star Kingdom by allowing petty history with Hamish and other small matters like Young impede his judgment?
In his mind, that's not what he was doing.
Janacek didn't think a war with Haven was likely. That was a firmly held belief going all the way back to when he was just a Commander, as seen in
House of Steel. He thought if anything was going to provoke Haven into attacking was the military build up that Manticore had undergone or any aggressive actions like annexing Basilisk or signing a treaty for an advance base with Grayson. He thought that if Manticore stayed irrelevant to Haven, then no war would come.
At least not in the foreseeable future. He may have seen that Manticore technology was keeping an edge over Haven's and increasingly so, so postponing the war as much as possible would be a good idea for when it eventually came. He would have been right: if the war had come a decade later, Manticore would have had several squadrons more of SDs and DNs (though probably not pod-laying ones), would have had CLACs and LACs. It might not have been as easy as Buttercup, but it would have been much easier than it was in 1905. Plus, one assumes that in this scenario, Haven attacked directly and there was no way the House of Lords could withhold the declaration of war.
But that's giving Janacek too much credit. I don't think he thought what I wrote in the previous paragraph. He probably thought it wasn't going to happen for a long time, that diplomacy would succeed in turning the Havenites away, and it would be Someone Else's Problem in the long run.
As for his beef with White Haven, he probably simply didn't think Hamish was that good, so benching White Haven would be no problem. He couldn't conceive of someone who wasn't leaps and bounds a better tactician and strategist than himself. Therefore, if Hamish disagreed with him, then by construction Hamish was wrong. This means, in his mind, he's not hurting the Kingdom by moving White Haven away, but in fact helping it.
And when he did eventually bench White Haven, during the High Ridge Government, they didn't actually
need White Haven to win the war. I'm sure Santino could have followed the checklist all the way to Nouveau Paris at that point in time.
The fact that he committed suicide after he came to terms with his incompetence might seem to suggest that he loved his Star Kingdom. Unless, of course it was simply the embarrassment alone that drove his suicide.
I read as the latter case. Plus, it was shown that his Second Lord was actually hiding information that would have changed the decisions, in particular the reports that would lead to existence of the SD(P) and CLAC ship types in the RHN's order of battle. All of that happened under his watch: he selected Francis Jurgensen to head the RMN intelligence services, after all. At this point, there was also talk about bringing Jurgensen and High Ridge up on criminal charges, so Janacek would probably see the writing on the wall and choose the easy way out. He'd know the Conservative Association couldn't help him get out of it.
At any rate, since Janacek was not a stranger to ONI and intelligence, is it conceivable that he could be that wrong about Manticore's tech advantage, or did he simply not care that he was shooting the SK in the foot?
As I said, that's the wrong question to ask because the answer is "neither." He did never see his actions as shooting the SKM in the foot.
Aside from some very few characters, like during King Roger's assassination or like Elaine Descroix, the majority of people aren't not double-agents, not even unknowingly so. Neither High Ridge, nor Janacek, nor Countess New Kiev, nor Jurgensen did anything that they did with the intent to harm the Kingdom. They were all (in hindsight) extremely ill-advised, and some of them knew that some of what they were doing was so at the time (Jurgensen in particular). But between their corruption and their world (or Galaxy) view, they thought that what they were doing was the best.
In my opinion, that makes for a good story, when the villains aren't just out there for villainy and dastardly plots, but have well-reasoned (if faulty) thinking. In ToH, we do have the point of view of that reporter who was in the Conservative Association's pocket: at no point is he thinking he's doing harm, quite to the contrary.
