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- Penn
Dunno if Theismann would call them extreme.
Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington
- Thread starter The Victorian
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Dunno if Theismann would call them extreme.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Dunno; depends on which incident you're talking about and the precise nature of the atrocity or 'atrocity' being discussed.
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- Penn
Her threatening to kill him and everyone on board if they purged their ships computers when surrendering, which is a war crime both way. And it wasn't even like there was a pressing need for the data or anything to 'justify' it. It was just a war crime coming and going.
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Oh, you meant Tourville!
I won't dispute that it was a violation of the laws of war.
However, you used the word "atrocity," so I just assumed you were talking about something Harrington did that had an actual body count attached to it. As opposed to simply a horrifyingly large threatened body count that would have materialized if Harrington had given the order to massacre prisoners. Which she would have to do after the fact, since she could not know whether the computers had been purged without boarding the ships.
More generally, I will observe that major breaches of the laws and customs of armed conflict are far more common under circumstances that strain the customary practices of warfare at the rivets. Having a gigantic fucking battlefleet larger than any other in history roar down on the homeworld, with fleets jumping around like crazy in a desperate attempt to lay enough firepower on the enemy doomstack to stop it, with most of the home defense force and mobile reserve force just being utterly annihilated by the doomstack's overwhelming barrage fire as it rolls irresistibly into the capital system of a nation that's been struggling to defend itself through vicious wars for most of the past twenty years...
Well, it's the kind of situation where tensions do rise and people do give genuinely bad orders because they think they have to, or because they're mad about losing a lot of friends, or because they're scared and trying to secure any advantage they can for fear that the enemy has even more doomstacks or new weapons or whatever to pull out of their hat.
The ideal military officer is a consistent, highly reliable Geneva-bot who can be trusted to never break those rules and customs. Honor failing to live up to this standard under extreme conditions (such as the Battle of Manticore) is disappointing, but not entirely surprising. Quite frankly, I feel as if it's a bit misleading to describe that in terms that suggest she's got a persistent, ongoing habit of committing "atrocities" (strongly implying a body count, or torture, or the like).
...
This is not to say that the act of threatening millions of enemy military personnel with death if their leader fails to meet an unusual, customarily held to be unreasonable surrender demand is objectively justified under the circumstances, or a permissible action that could or should be repeated. Honorverse warfare is surprisingly collegial on that point, probably a holdover from Weber copy-pasting Age of Sail conventions and customs, so Harrington is breaking some fairly important rules here.
- Location
- Rex, NC, USA
So, they're basically Space Kahanists?
Not really. As I noted elsewhere, taking Jesus out of Christianity does not result in Judaism, there are fairly important fundamental differences between the religions. And while the Kahanists are odious, their extremism is more a political than religious issue (that is, they're religious extremists, but they're not as far from the Jewish Orthodox theological mainstream as the Masadans are from the Christian one) and other parallels are slim.
Honestly, in some ways a better Jewish parallel to the Masadans might be some of the more exyteme haredi groups (maybe with a dash of the Kahanists' militancy). But overall I'd say the nearest real-world equivalent, despite the different religions, are the Taliban.
I know this thread is old but I'm currently reading the second to last book in the main series and
Anyone else find it freaky as hell that the conflict with the Solarian League is disturbingly like the war between Russia and Ukraine?
Anyone else find it freaky as hell that the conflict with the Solarian League is disturbingly like the war between Russia and Ukraine?
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
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I don't recall Ukraine being an aggressive imperial power run by immortal aristocrats that started the war and invaded several neutral polities. Also distinctly fewer threats to kill a million POWs out of spite.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
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- AZ
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- He/Him
If the war between Russia and Ukraine more closely resembled the later Weber conflict-
-Ukraine would be coming off a series of wars with Belarus but rather than being exhausted their military is stronger than ever
-in fact Ukraine has one of the most advanced militaries on the planet
-tensions between Ukraine and Russia lead to Ukraine using their navy to close off the Black Sea and halt all shipping thus singlehandedly threatening to crash the world economy; Russia is helpless to prevent this
-the Russians try to invade by launching a force at Kyiv that gets slaughtered within hours
-Belarus joins Ukraine and meanwhile Crimea secedes from Russia and it turns out all of them now have advanced Ukrainian military technology because they all made friends over their loathing of unelected bureaucrats
-Russia gets counterinvaded and tanks go rolling down Moscow streets within a few weeks
-also the whole conflict turns out to have been instigated by a shadowy wide-ranging (possibly 'global' if you will) conspiracy
But instead of an Ace Combat plot where even Belka would say 'tone it down', what we actually get is...well, as Billy Joel sang, 'Russians in Afghanistan'. Turns out invading a smaller nation is less easy than the US and coalition made it look in Iraq. And while nobody anticipated just how clownshoes the Russian operations would turn out to be, they're still working under the same man who ordered a big showoffy military exercise when he came to power that led to the Kursk disaster (and the mismanagement thereof); it would appear that the problems in the Russian military have not been addressed and have probably gotten significantly worse.
-Ukraine would be coming off a series of wars with Belarus but rather than being exhausted their military is stronger than ever
-in fact Ukraine has one of the most advanced militaries on the planet
-tensions between Ukraine and Russia lead to Ukraine using their navy to close off the Black Sea and halt all shipping thus singlehandedly threatening to crash the world economy; Russia is helpless to prevent this
-the Russians try to invade by launching a force at Kyiv that gets slaughtered within hours
-Belarus joins Ukraine and meanwhile Crimea secedes from Russia and it turns out all of them now have advanced Ukrainian military technology because they all made friends over their loathing of unelected bureaucrats
-Russia gets counterinvaded and tanks go rolling down Moscow streets within a few weeks
-also the whole conflict turns out to have been instigated by a shadowy wide-ranging (possibly 'global' if you will) conspiracy
But instead of an Ace Combat plot where even Belka would say 'tone it down', what we actually get is...well, as Billy Joel sang, 'Russians in Afghanistan'. Turns out invading a smaller nation is less easy than the US and coalition made it look in Iraq. And while nobody anticipated just how clownshoes the Russian operations would turn out to be, they're still working under the same man who ordered a big showoffy military exercise when he came to power that led to the Kursk disaster (and the mismanagement thereof); it would appear that the problems in the Russian military have not been addressed and have probably gotten significantly worse.
Ironic seeing as knocking over governments and trying to make them client states for corporations to exploit in "police actions" seems more of a US thing. Plus the whole getting around legislative gridlock because all it takes is one guy objecting to things to shut it down through legal wrangling.
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In what manner do you believe this to be true?
The obvious one is "larger, more numerous ruthless aggressor fails horribly due to ridiculous amounts of corruption, incompetence and arrogance". Heck, while I've not seen this specific series come up, I've heard a fair number of people comment how in general terms this conflict really makes the old accusation of "strawman incompetent villains" a lot harder to make. It turns out, the bad guys really can be that incompetent.
Just like in discussions about fiction the Nazis have often served as an answer for "nobody can really be that evil", I suspect the Russians are in the future going to be an answer for "nobody is really that incompetent".
I think there's supposed to be a bit of "Imperial China" and it's tributaries in regards to the OFS thing ,and I think that the closest historical allegory for the "Solarian War" is the Opium Wars (except the British and French are the good guys).
In the lead up to their attempted invasion of Manticore they kept insisting that when they showed up Manticore would just surrender without a fight and it's apparent this was the key to their entire strategy and that the wheels will fall off if it doesn't happen.
Aka the same assumption Putin built his invasion around with the same level of the wheels fall off when it doesn't happen.
Also the whole military force people see as a dangerous opponent turns out to be a paper tiger thing.
There also seems to be shades of the textbook shitty Earth first colonies never thing that occasionally crops up in sci-if with a side order of the usual crumbling democracy entering its fail state.
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Man, too bad the main series went off the deep end with all the illuminati type stuff and power creep. The initial books were great, but the later ones read like a Microsoft excel after action report, except with conspiracy theories that are actually true (plot twist!)
I still say Weber should have retired Honor after she became second super admiral or whatever and brought in some new characters.
I still say Weber should have retired Honor after she became second super admiral or whatever and brought in some new characters.
Plus it besides the reprinting while sections of previous books and being more reliant on reading the two side series and some of the short stories to know what the fuck is going on they seems to devote time to stuff that used to just get a brief explanation so they start slowing in places.
I think he shouldn't have had as many time skips as he did and kept things from escalating to Legend of The Galactic Heroes anyone who isn't a flag officer or hangs around flag officers doesn't mater levels.
Also I'm starting to think things wouldn't have had to go that way if like the prequel books Battlecruisers where the biggest thing anyone had.
Also none of that Harrington gets rich and elevated to the nobility stuff, or at the very least make that happen way later in the series.
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I'm pretty sure that in the prequel books, real industrial powerhouses have battleships. It's just that in the prequel era, nothing in the Haven Quadrant/Sector/whatever qualifies as an industrial powerhouse.
The Manticore ship crew that saw the one the Andermani managed to build seemed to react to it like it was an entirely new concept especially since Manticore had been visiting Haven back in its golden age so they would have been able to afford at least one or two.
VhenRa
MechWarrior
- Location
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Pretty sure they directly say that only the Solarians have them in the scene where they see it.
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Found direct quote from book
Edit:
Found direct quote from book
A Call To Vengeance ch 29 said:
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That last is just Weber being Weber; he likes writing stories with ancient and powerful conspiracies. The Dahak books had not one, but two ancient conspiracies that had been fighting each other on Earth for thousands of years, for example.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
The point of the Solarian invasion was not for the Manticorans to surrender without a fight. The idea was that a massed Solarian battlegroup would crush the main Manticoran fleet and take out their entire war industry, thus forcing a surrender.
They failed not because going for the head of the snake didnlt work, but because they somehow didn't notice that Msnticore had invented super-ytech.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
Admittedly the Russian plan also seemed to be "have one big fight against Ukraine's military that we just crush, and then police the cities afterwards", but it should be noted that the Ukraine didn't actually give them that fight, while Manticore did just straight up destroy the Solarian battlegroup.
... which kind of means in retrospect it might have worked better if there had been a way to trade space and supply line raid the Solarian forces, who would not be prepared for the new Manticore missile systems and drones that let smaller forces take out the vulnerable parts while the old and poorly maintained Solarian vessels had issues getting to the main parts of Manticore.
However, from my understanding the layout of the available movements in these books wouldn't allow for that kind of parallel to the conflict currently happening decades (is it decades?) after their release.
I'm pretty sure most of the Empires war industry was already destroyed. And that the Leagues plan was more or less that they'd thought that Most of Manticore's defenses were already destroyed and that they'd give up out of sheer despair.