I can smell the lavender Kora hair dye and the utterly atrocious food from here. Your belief that Koinon is the "hopeful," the "brightest light," that Koinon "might" be bad, and that Harmony's deeds are "wicked" is just one interpretation of what has been presented so far. Here's mine. Koinon is a country of cheaters who made pacts with the archenemy and who do not just get to be morally superior and happy after what they have done.
You need to get off the Face Realism boards lol.
I think people see the rhetoric of revolution and a just defensive war and project a lot onto a state that isn't there. You chose not to interact more with Pandora so it's obscured, but even aside from that, this is a country that has been using slaves in every section of its war-machine and has not stopped doing that as the Commonwealth.
I mean that's the problem isn't it, it is a just defensive war and a revolution now, rather than empty (or emptier) rhetoric. Moral ambiguity over who was in the wrong in this conflict died when we shot Hyperion in the face after he offered peace. While war might be hell, and it was a game of atrocity bingo on every side till that point, there was a very real inflection there. A point to step back from the edge and accept an offer made in good faith for peace which was denied and culpability which came with it.
Koinon entered this war to stop the Bronze King from crushing their allies in an unjustified war of aggression born from a diplomatic incident. After Cybaris got an effective out the Bronze King they whirled on Koinon and killed 20% of the population between the march of Titanic footsteps and the depredations of the Green Kora. They experienced basically moral chemotherapy as some of the worst parts of their society literally died and the elite made a genuinely admirable sacrifice for the sake of the nation.
And even putting that aside, I don't know how it can't be expected that the monster of national awakening is also going to birth the monster of national defining, which includes, yes, attempting to draw lines as to who is and who is not part of the nation. Neither should it be a surprise that a culture which buries Koras up to their scalps and farms their hair has not always had an uncomplicated, nuanced view on Koras. They are not an uncontroversial part of the national polity, I am afraid, and these calls are just that - calls. They are signs of how, under pressure, high-minded ideals can immediately come under attack in fear and panic and bubbling bigotries rooted in centuries of conflict.
Your own pessimistic viewpoint on where it leads is your projection as to the infallible power of the Immaculates to ruin everything. You are pessimistic about the ability of Koinon and Koras to co-exist, because they have been killing Koras, and burying them, and slaughtering them, and gassing them, and dropping petriform rockets on them that they promise wasn't their fault. And it is also underlined by the fact you are, in fact, a bigot who barely grasps that Strangers in the Progeny are people deserving of rights, even as you are entirely willing to extend that to foreigners.
While our internal pessimism and Koinon's flaws are be expected its also put in very awkwardly when you have things like "the Immaculates have won too - in breaking the chain between their national Koras and nation, and turning new suspicion, to the mimics who dared to dream they belonged to commonwealth." and we're looking back from the present it comes off less as pessimism and more a description of what has happened. Especially when its being edited in after the fact, drawing the attention to the addition and making it seem more like a correction rather than subjective opinion.
It just seems like an awkward addition, both due to context and history. The deaths of Gorgon and Eleusia are wounds which are months fresh and baked into the formation of the national mythos. Koinon got its shit beaten in so hard that the elite sacrificed themselves and the nation pledged itself to manmade gods in perpetuity along with the ideals that made them up. So its weird for this sudden panic (boiling over from older concerns or not) to develop in a people who have already been savaged so much, even if it reveals that the Prime Souls aren't a complete auto-win button. If it doesn't result in anything substantial then its a question of why it was edited into the original text, if it does then its pretty illogical given the recent history.
Koinon are a horrific slave state based upon centuries of imperialistic ambitions, assimilation and worse. They're doing the equivalent of the Red Army's mass slaughter, rape and theft of Germany and the Axis powers high off of revenge and feelings of righteousness even as they commit atrocities. But that doesn't mean that some evils make sense for them to commit in context.
In many ways, the story of the three warring states is the story of rise, apex, and fall. Koinon appears rising - and so its idealism is clearest, and its negative features can be obscured, written off as somehow unconnected, because its ideology seems so attractive and magnetic at the literal birth of a founding myth.
I'm not sure this tracks though? The idealism of Koinon shined brightest and clearest when they were at their worst and doom came for them and liberty was being offered to all as incentive as they died for the hope of it. We had several updates describing their societal reformation, the changes capped off with a literal historical rewriting and penning of a new social contract. More wounded than ever before even as through the Prime Souls they rose to a dominating strategic position, but still in that moment offered peace.
The national rebirth they have done was an acceptance of the sins of the past and an absolution willingly paid for in blood and breath. They didn't accept all their sins, but damn if it wasn't a change for the better.
But these narratives obscure the rot that is inherent in all Empires, that were there in the beginning and are there at the end. No state is your salvation, and no culture or people are beyond redemption.
I mean...Chaos. In 40k its entirely possible to damn a society such that daemons are going to be feasting on you forever, and even if you're a conscientious objector you might end up having to put your soul in a stone to avoid being eaten. Collective guilt is magic, sad to say, and for groups like the Eldar only the possibly doomed hope of Ynnead remains as a hope for peace in death. Even species that haven't accidentally birthed a Chaos God can find their societies so taken over by it and be damned irrevocably, as we so recently nearly were. The state can be salvation from corruption irreversible, even as its a self-destructive diseased leviathan of fascist intolerance and hate, so long as you abandon hope in an age which has abandoned it.
Thankfully we live in 30k on the Last Light instead of that awful place then.
Just as its possible for a state to be the damnation of those within its possible for it to be salvation, a project which holds against the Hydra and the innumerable threats of the world and seeks accord with others. That's not to say Koinon is there, it has a long long long way to go with all the flaws they have. But for the first time since the fall of Carnosa there's hope for a state that leads to the liberation of all rather than the chains of subservience.
