[Earth] “District, No More” Asks Vietnamese

"District, No More” Asks Vietnamese

by Anita Wu, Vox Populi

EARTH - Placards, posters, and pickets have defined life just outside the the Alliance’s regional administrative zone in the port city of Haiphong, the center of SATAE’s provisional authority in Vietnam. Every day, the thirty nine soldiers guarding its’ single checkpoint look out at an ever-growing crowd of students, veterans, and nationalists waving signs boldly condemning Hackett, condemning the Systems Alliance, and demanding that SATAE’s military administration in the region be disintegrated.

“No one was asked. No one was consulted,” said an anonymous former civil servant, as he aired out his frustrations with Vox Populi. “Vietnam liberated Vietnam. When the Reapers came, the Alliance did not rescue us. When we fought, we fought for a nation, and as a nation. On our own blood, sweat, and tears. And when the war came to an end, it was only then that the Alliance came with troops and tanks, and only then to make our decisions for us - to unmake the nation we thought we were fighting for.”

Despite that, the Alliance has not budged; and business continues as usual, unmoved by mounting discontent just outside the gates of the city’s administrative zone and throughout the former nation.

“I know how they must feel, and it’s regrettable, but we can’t just pack up and leave. Hanoi is still a complete mess, and we’re still pulling out bodies from Ho Chi Minh City. Expecting them to recover without Alliance resources is insane,” said Staff Commander Nguyen Quan when asked for a statement.

“They keep saying five more years, five more years. Why do we need to wait?” Phan Thị Yin complained - a veteran of the Reaper War, who’d spent five months engaged in the costly urban war in Hanoi. A war she firmly believes was fought by the Vietnamese People’s Army. “Why should we believe them? They think we’re children, unable to take responsibility for ourselves, unable to make our own decisions. Every day, people wake up, look out their apartment and they don’t see Haiphong, they see a district. If we want to go it alone, why should they stop us?”

Okay, since Sandman put actual work into his response (aside from being the only one to respond to me), and they were summarily ignored by pretty much everyone else, I'll tackle his points first.

So, what you just gave me was a false dilemma. Why is either? I don't know why you expect me to pick a or b and I don't see why I should. All of this hinges on expectations and assumptions you have or have made. What if Vietnam's possible failure (if SATAE recognized its' sovereignty) convinces some less thrilled nations that SATAE is the right way to go? I don't see how that's any more or less likely than 'everyone hates SATAE for ceding to Vietnam's desire for independence'. Regardless, I object to the entire premise of this dilemma because most of this pretends the entire system precipitates on some rather broad assumptions. I shouldn't have to tell you that Vietnam is not Great Britain and it's not Russia. It doesn't have the same kind of relationship with SATAE and definitely don't have the checkered history motivating the nationalism inherent to the demand for independence like Vietnam does. And they understand that as much as you probably do (or should). Especially in that, unlike Vietnam, they benefit most directly from SATAE's five year plan. It's an administration built on priorities and those priorities don't reflect kindly on less privileged parts of Earth.

The nations that are going to be the most 'threatened' by a streak of independence inspired by a break in formation are probably going to be the countries that either weren't really benefiting from SATAE in the first place or never wanted it in the first place, regardless of how pragmatic or how much better or worse their efforts in reconstruction would be without them.

I'd like to know which 'resources' would be 'sapped' by less mouths to feed. Everything that you suggested in either scenario is a purely political scenario. Yes, I get that it may put strain on SATAE's stranglehold on Earth as a political authority. Please inform me, then, how this directly translates to whatever returns in relief and reconstruction materials and aid being equally strained and depleted. I actually cannot manufacture a reasonable scenario where Vietnam cedes from SATAE and inexplicably SATAE has more mouths to feed or houses to rebuild in Great Britain.

I think everyone is aware of this, and I think nobody cares. SATAE is synonymous with the Systems Alliance. It is a fundamental aspect of it that shapes the entire system as it is. Almost any policy that the Alliance has exercised over the colonies or wherever else is directly related to the System Alliance's priorities, namely SATAE and their investment on Earth. There's nothing incorrect about equating SATAE to so much of what the Alliance has been doing everywhere else because everything ties back into SATAE. It's semantic bullshit at it's worst.

It's kind of a leap to directly equate 'put up a fight' to 'violent revolution'. I'm pretty sure I read it exactly like a point I made earlier - people need to be dissatisfied with the system, people need to show the administration that they're fast wearing out their welcome. If we were all like our friend CitadelChef insisting that no one 'drag the government through the mud' (because extranet discontent is so awful) and complaining about how horrible the media is treating the Systems Alliance (hahaha) and dismissing any concerns about their motivations and their leadership, all we would be doing is inviting the status quo. People need to speak up, and the Alliance needs to understand that whatever it has going, it's fundamentally untenable - to stick to the promise of the Five Year Plan.

So yeah. You jumped the gun there.

Because the words of a private citizen obviously stand for an entire political entity. Especially someone who is in civilian employment.

Subversive Agitators everybody. Need I cite any more examples of why you shouldn't trust them?

And so begins

The Quote Ladder: Redux


Point taken, and honestly I don't fundamentally disagree with you. The nations that would be most at risk are those who are experiencing the most discontent for whatever reason (political history, strong national identity, neglect by SATAE, etc). My main point is that if SATAE can't even keep the least (speaking in terms of prewar economic prosperity, relative material value, and infrastructure rather than disparagement, no offense intended) of their administrative districts under their control, if they can't stop a nation like Vietnam from leaving the fold nor convince them to stay, it reflects extremely poorly upon them and their authority.

The least district of SATAE is still part of SATAE. They must conduct themselves as any other government for the interim because that is what they have claimed to be. Branching off of this


Politics imitate reality and reality, in turn, imitates politics. SATAE is as much a construct in the minds of the individual people who support it as it is a functioning governing body. The prevalence of passive support, the existence of active resistance, levels of discontent in the region, each is tied to the perceived legitimacy of the institution itself. And said legitimacy is tied back to the perceived effectiveness of the organization in question.

Effectiveness is challenged (be it through a nation succeeding, failing, serving as a lesson, etc. the core of the matter I think is that it truly doesn't matter which, only that whatever they did they did without SATAE), legitimacy is shaken, and suddenly tasks involving interaction with your constituent body (that is to say, most tasks) become increasingly difficult as you now have to combat the idea that you are no longer suitable to lead. That maybe the benefits you are providing aren't quite worth the costs.


And I think that people should care. Mostly because it is a shorthand way of boiling a large and complex group into only one (if highly significant) institution. It's lazy. And indicative of a manner of thinking that, in all truthfulness, serves few except those intent on setting up the "Big Bad SATAE" strawman.

Are there legitimate issues with the system?

Yes.

Should these flaws be examined and challenged?

Yes.

Should they be done so through the medium of "I'm going to equate this one aspect of the organization with everything that it wrong with the group as a whole, regardless of whatever good it does"?

No. Because that also serves no one.


And once again I agree with you. There needs to be discourse and a measure of discontent to keep stagnation and corruption at bay. There needs to be challenges and critical eyes.

But, by the same token, civil discourse has to respect certain political and material realities. Even for the sake of argument.

One being that the Alliance simply can't afford to let the districts go. Not for the time being.

The other being that, taken in context of the quoted sentence the man I quoted is both strongly implying that he favors the concept of violent revolution and an idiot.

Please stop helping.

First of all I approve of the solution the vorcha propose, a fight would be a good (or at the very least entertaining,) way to settle this bickering.

To the matter at hand, I will not try to reiterate most of the points and counterpoints made by everyone but I do wish to point out that even if Vietnam would be able to stand on its own (which I doubt,) we still need a presence there to keep the rest of the region safe and help those regions rebuild.

In short it feels a bit selfish and shortsighted for the Vietnamese to try and push the Alliance out after they have been helped without thinking that the Alliance needs to help others outside of Vietnam too. The reason they got on their feet like they did was because they were 'first pick'; they got stabilized and rebuild first then the SATAE could use them (and other places like them,) as a 'beach-head' to rebuild the larger region.

You can see the same pattern happening in other places, first stabilizing/rebuilding a small area and then working from that to rebuild the areas around it.


Addendum: I call the Vietnamese shortsighted in for the simple reason that it is hard to trade with your neighboring countries if they live in rubble.

I have a question for the pro-nations people: If some country was going to split off, who draws the borders? Who's in charge of managing it if people start stampeding over said border (in either direction)?

Plus, nations fight...and create all kinds of screw-your-neighbour incentives you don't get with a unified state...yeah, no, I don't see the point of this.

Everyone seems to assume that if tomorrow SATAE packs up and leave vietnam the locals will just elect some president and it will be all fine and dandy. I'm pretty sure that they don't have the organization or infrastructure do that properly yet, and the only ones who do are organized crimes and former resistance warlords, like what happened on the batarian confederacy. I'm not sure that's what we want.

The first good news in many a long month, where good news has been few and far between. Uncle Ho would be proud.

Không có gì quý hơn độc lập tự do, as the saying goes down south - and as we ourselves have learned on not a few occasions, to our great sorrow. Our countries may have their differences in the past, but the struggle knows no borders.


Nations have existed long before there was anyone to watch over them. I'm sure they'll find some way to manage.

Resistance warlords? Really? Oh all those people who stood up and fought the Reapers, their leaders were warlords. How dare they? I bet they ate children and put severed heads on stakes outside their front doors! Why couldn't they have just laid down and died like decent people?

You're an idiot. Resistance leader does not equal warlord. And do you know why former resistance leaders would end up in charge? Because they proved themselves to the people they led. They proved themselves to be worthy of trust and of leadership. Your use of the word 'warlord' is an obvious attempt to draw parallels between resistance leaders on Earth and personalities in the pre-war Congo, or Afghanistan, or the areas of the Terminus where society utterly collapsed and they were unlucky enough to end up with a leader more concerned with personal power than the people he led. By the way from what I've managed to dig up on the subject your so called 'resistance warlords' are almost entirely nonexistent.

Your analogy is false, misleading, and a tremendous insult to every civilian who took up arms to defend themselves, their families, and their communities against the Reapers.

Uh, first off there were stable government lines prior to occupation and I would hope (though otherwise wouldn't surprise me) that if anything national borders would return to pre-war state. Or maybe even a better version of the pre-war map. Hell, It'd likely come up from the sub-administration levels which aren't necessarily military.


Second, your other point is fairly wrong since I work in that field. We don't have crime issues on Earth the scale of the Blinks over in the confederacy, nor do we have a warlord issue outside of some nutjobs living in the mountains of god-knows-where.


Besides, if people start killing each other over that kind of shit it might actually work out better. If they're so stupid to be fighting now then they can gladly remove themselves from the gene pool. No sweat off my back.

Christ, you're making me agree with the agitator.

This is going to take some work.

And if SATAE can't keep even the least district of SATAE from leaving the fold, why is SATAE keeping them there. You seem convinced it will reflect poorly on them or make it more difficult to them to serve their objective, but if the government and the country is allowed to reconstitute itself through the proper channels - the people decide through a referendum, then what SATAE just did was their job. I can't see how letting the people decide the trajectory of their nation by themselves betrays the expectations of their mission on Earth.

What they've claimed to be is not a government. They are explicitly a transitory administration ostensibly there to fill in a sudden power vacuum. You know what I think reflects poorly on the Alliance? It's unwillingness to accept or allow that transition to happen.

Fair enough. Hearts and minds, and all. However, I will contend this point by drawing your attention back to a point I made earlier: the nations (regions) that would be most inspired to follow Vietnam (or whatever), the ones most in threat of brewing enough discontent to actively sap resources would be the ones that were not enjoying the vast majority of the benefits of SATAE's reconstruction program or the ones that never wanted help imposed on them in the first place. Nations that... share in Vietnam's experience, on some level. They never had many hearts and minds to lose.

However true or not, 'SATAE' is easier to regularly type than 'Systems Alliance', reads better than 'SA' and people usually understand what you mean when you say it despite anal retentiveness.

You keep saying this and I keep wondering.

He never said he wanted it. He said 'if they keep this up', they'll meet violent resistance. I mean, it sounded really pretentious (and I know pretentious rhetoric) but that's not untrue. The Alliance hasn't met a lot of active resistance on Earth, but that will quickly change if they don't keep their promises.

Yeah, it's a hard question, I'll tell you. When the Reapers came, every map concerning the political geography of Earth disintegrated. No one knows why it happened, but it did. No one remembers about the borders that already existed before. You act like this whole nation thing is this new idea that humans have got into their heads and they haven't figured out how it works yet.

I'll give you a point: Vietnam has spent centuries being ruled by foreign powers they have had no ability to resist. It's fostered a strong sense of national identity, pride and motivation. Under the Alliance's administration, the nation was cut into a series of districts organized under a series of provinces organized under a series of regions. It doesn't exist according to SATAE. You don't see anything valid about this desire?

And yeah, I remember back when Earth was a bunch of nations, oh, like two years ago. I sure remember all the violence and war going on because apparently that's just what nations do. Especially nations like Vietnam, a country defined by how often they've found themselves on the wrong end of an unprovoked occupation of their country.

I shouldn't expect someone like you to have done their homework (I guess it's unreasonable), but whoever this is:

Oh noooooo.

I know my last name is pretty obviously Hispanic, but this boy comes from the whole shebang of Earth peoples. And let me tell you, I actually do care where I came from and occasionally listened to the ramblings of my elders. From what I heard, Vietnamese "Independence" wasn't so at least Pre-SF. China basically ran the damn Country, even after the war with the Old U.S, and shockingly a civil war won by a freaking Communist Regime didn't do much to really unite the peoples of the North and South. You may notice this is why a shitload of them packed up and moved to the aforementioned "foreign power" and they became just another ingredient in the melting pot. And not a lot of them were a fan of Ho Chi Minh either.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure people understand that. This is the crux of why so many in Vietnam don't like SATAE in charge. It's history has been defined by a series of occupations by foreign powers.

And they didn't like them and the way they treated their people either.

A division effectively created by the 'old US' (and its' counterpart during the time). After it gave Vietnam back to yet another foreign power who, historically, exploited it and its' people for all it and they were worth. It's hardly 'shocking' it'd be hard to properly reunite the two halves after those foreign powers enforced that division and fought to keep it for two decades.

So what you're saying is that they're not in Vietnam anymore, and they haven't been for more than two centuries.

And... as you just said, quite a few of those that weren't bailed when the country became one again. And let's not pretend that those who put Ho Chi Minh in high regard were somehow a minority.

If I wanted to be honest, I don't really have any idea what you're trying to argue for or against.

Fundamentally, it's something between the clans on Tuchanka, and the city states on Thessia. Whatever faction has the most power (politically or militarily) will usually gain the upper hand and decide. Whether they use history, resources, or some other system as the method whereby they justify it, it usually ends the same. Establishing the government will usually fall to the resident group (or alliance of such groups) that holds power and they'll decide how they want to manage everything.

As for the borders, well, Vietnam is no stranger to "boat people" if the extranet is an accurate source on history.

The nations don't like being bossed around by a "super government" which they've got no say in. Humanity doesn't exactly have a good history of playing nice with itself, much less being unified behind a single group. Right or wrong, they aren't going to play nice with the Alliance, nationalism has been a big part of humanity for a long time. Defy that at your own risk.

SPEAKIN'A WHICH

dis is how I'D draw a map'a da urf

Oooh...I like that! It's sort of pretty!

Okay, humanity.

Dwick managed to draw an asthetically pleasing map of your planet.

I'd never thought I would say something like that or even use the words Dwick and aestetically in one sentence.

Technically you still haven't. "Aesthetically" is the correct manner of spelling it, since you can't seem to bother using a spellcheck.

...huh. Been back a moment, and I'm already correcting everything in sight. My language teachers would have a laugh at the irony.

Modern English standards suggest that you place a comma after the word "technically," user: Blacksun.

There. I knew my standards of literacy were still subpar! Man, that's reassuring. Wouldn't want to have to leave the benefits of being a soldier of fortune for encouraging higher education.

I'll leave it to you, lamphead. Having a built in grammar checker makes you perfect for it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, when you guys throw personal insults instead of actual arguments you don't like edgy cool kids, you look like pyjaks throwing mucus balls.
Now, I understand how offensive the warlord label sounds, but I meant in the original term. Those are people whose organized military was disbanded and unreachable, so they made do. They were heroic and made the reaper's "lives" more complicated, and should be honored for that.
But not given the keys of the country, no questions asked! If they want to lead the country, they need to win what we like to call "elections". And those take time to organize.

Now I'd like to bounce back on a point that Songbird made several time, that it was justified from the people to express that they really want their countries back, not just wait and see if SATAE will really deliver. It's a very fair point, but my issue more with what they ask. For instance I think it would be clever to ask for milestones to show that we're really on our way to independence, like electing mayors for instance. What I feel is stupid and non constructive is "SATAE packs its bags and leave RIGHT NOW", because it's very unrealistic and very shortsighted.


Come on man, spellcheck in the middle of a debate? :/ Let's not do that.