Flandry sells the Terran Empire to a disaffected ally of Scotha:
the Terrans "'...treat their subjects decently...'" (p. 268);
Sviffash can verify this by sending a covert commission of inquiry;
Terrans have learned that racial prejudice is counterproductive;
subject races retain their autonomy except in matters like defense and commerce where uniformity is universally beneficial;
as it is well outside the Imperial border, Sithafar is more likely to be an ally than a client;
other Scothan allies want to revolt;
more will join once a revolt has begun;
Flandry can tell Sviffash whom to contact...
...and doesn't it all sound too good to be true?
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
By and large, I don't think Flandry strained the truth too far. Not when that commission Sviffash would send investigates the truth of Flandry's assertions.
And as we will find out later, even in those matters where some uniformity was desirable, there were exceptions. Dennitza, for example, was allowed, under the treaty of annexation, to retain a fairly large fleet of its own.
I don'r think it was necessarily all "...too good to be true," if you mean the plausibility of Flandry's intrigues on Scotha. A jerrybuilt empire, with short sighted leaders, and disaffected vassals and allies, might well be taken apart the way we see Flandry doing.
Ad astra! Sean
And the Scothians haven't learned that bad Public Relations can cause real-world consequences.
As Winston Churchill once said, "Even if you may have to kill a man eventually, it costs nothing to be polite in the meantime".
This is a profoundly sophisticated insight, by the way.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The disdain the Scothans had for their non-Scothan "allies" was very bad public relations!
And Churchill's maxim can be hard to live up to, requiring as it does subtlety and self restraint.
Ad astra! Sean
There's a book on the role of ceremony in the British Empire called "Ornamentalism", which is worth reading -- goes a bit far, but there are some insights.
British colonial officials, especially from the Victorian period on, often delighted in honoring rajas, nobles, chiefs and so forth -- and doing so elaborately and in public.
This wasn't purely instrumental, governing on the cheap by coopting local bigwigs.
A lot of people went into the colonial service precisely because they didn't like the progressively more modern, meritocratic atmosphere of industrial-era Britain.
They had a romantic love of nobility and feudalism (and they were often from aristocratic or gentry families, or middle-class ones caught up in the mythos) and delighted in pure forms of it encountered abroad.
Sometimes it went as far as colonial officials at a local level covertly (but strongly) discouraging commercial development, because they wanted to preserve "pure" local customes.
Eg., I recall one District Officer in British Tanganyika furiously uprooting a patch of cotton that his subordinate had planted while he was on leave. Cotton meant money and Indian merchants and store-bought goods; he wanted the local tribe to stick to the ways of their ancestors.
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