[Politics] AFS Calls for Council Seat Removal

AFS Calls for Council Seat Removal

The past week has seen a sharp increase in protests across Citadel Space as the Political Action Committee “Accountability For Sur’kesh” has questioned the legitimacy of the salarian Council membership.

“A Council member’s duty is to protect Citadel Space as a whole,” explained Takus Tran, event coordinator for AFS. “Where was the Union during the Reaper War? Where was it during the single most important threat the galaxy has ever faced? Nowhere, because Allied forces wouldn’t pander to their little games.”

The tone was similar at the Presidium protest, with over 400 members of various races calling for the salarians’ removal from the Council.

“[The salarians] can’t even feel our pain,” argued guest speaker Opheus Lonad (H-Tier 14, Palaven). “Out of everyone in the galaxy, they’re the only ones with an intact homeworld, the only ones with a fully functioning industry. They should have been spearheading that war, but they could barely send a token resistance.”

While many protesters stayed “on-message” throughout the event, several members had their own to make. One salarian protester, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated that he was there as a reminder of his own species’ dissent from his government.

“What I want is for our political caste to take a hard look at themselves, and spur my people into limiting our Dalatrasses’ power,” he said.

The protests were largely ignored by those uninvolved, though the Salarian political body has expressed mild contempt for the movement. Dalatrass Mendon (Miscigle, Jaeto) in particular noted covert actions taken throughout the war and afterward a statement condemning the protests.

“This is an outrage,” she said. “If you think we just sat there during the war and did nothing, you are grossly mistaken...We kept the galactic economy running, and overtly supported our allies as best we could. We were conducting thousands of simultaneous operations to give us an edge on the Reapers, and the worst simply came to worst.”

Mendon declined to comment on the Union’s wartime operations, citing operational secrecy, though she further noted the salarians' involvement in galactic reconstruction.

“The Council’s duties are not solely based in waging war,” she stated.

Further protests are scheduled for this week.

As I find more stuff with a basic search, I'll let you know.

Yes, because "relays are a lot older than we thought" totally translates to "Mechanical godsquid are coming to slaughter us all."

Bitch blew up a system and shot any believability she had in the fucking foot. Even before that shit she was running around with a bunch of fucking cerbies of all groups (you know those guys right? took over O, nice big long history of trying to fuck everyone else from behind). And then told everyone that godsquid from between the galaxies were going to eat everybody.

Totes credible. Fuck, take her out of that armor and put her in some rags and she would sound like any other crazy on the street corner. Had about as much proof too.

Point is, it's easy to say that you totally should have seen it coming after the fact. Before? Fucking hells, I'm willing to bet that even you didn't buy into Shepard's whole schtick.

This holier than thou thing you've got going on is so spiritsdamned stupid cause really? Doesn't work. You don't look like the mature one, you just look like a bitch with a bit of a complex who can't grasp the fact that "oh noes I might not know everything". And if even I can see that, then you know you've got a problem.

So yeah, fuck you and fuck the ship you came in on.

I find myself in agreement with those pointing out how Shepard came off as a total psychopath before the Reaper invasion, however I also find myself agreeing with those who criticize the Council as an ineffective and terrible government. It's overly bureaucratic, too detached from the people it's governing, and frankly the Councilors seem to eventually end up just parroting one another. A solution to this is to make it so all intelligent species involved in the war effort a Council seat, alternatively, we could implement a quarian-style system where one branch of government is capable of overrulling the other but with limitations as to keep it from being abused.

Or I could just be talking out of my butt, politics has never really been my strength.

Y'know what would have helped Shepard, though?

If the asari councilor had said "Yes, you're right, we are in danger."

Which she knew. Which asari leadership had known for literally thousands of years.

Every time this comes up, people seem to ignore it, but it's still true and I don't understand how anybody can have any confidence in leaders who outright ignored an imminent threat that they'd known about for thousands of years and been told by about one of their own agents.

No offense but I think the asari already suffered more than enough for that mistake, disproportionately so...

So it's perfectly acceptable for my people to be thrown to the varren but not the asari?

Uh, I'm one of the people agreeing that the hatred the salarians are garnering is stupid, so, I don't know how to respond to that.

No. But it is irritating reading this thread and seeing individuals blaming my people for "not seeing it coming" when the asari, as Techoptryx said, had a Prothean beacon with all of sorts of information on it.

I think you're misinterpreting the criticism, they're being critical of the salarian government's perceived inaction during the Reaper War, and as I've said I think throwing individual species under a bus over this sort of stuff is hypocritical at the least - pants wetting blind ignorant stupidity at worst. Every Citadel state is guilty of obstruction, inaction, and all-around being worthless more often than not. It's telling that the most efficient forces associated with said governments tend to have a minimum of oversight from the civil government, but hey, emotional lashing and scapegoating seems to be the norm for civilian politics these days. It seems like people just have a desire to complain and crusade; be it about the salarians, the geth, or the Alliance (just going off of what I see to be most commonly reported on).

The Union is relatively whole, happy, and healthy (at least in comparison to governments like, say, the Hierarchy who are still years away from a complete recovery). It's therefore easier to cast blame upon the salarians versus the Republics, because as our friend so kindly stated up above "asari already suffered more than enough for that mistake".

Frankly both approaches are more than slightly ridiculous: any personal feelings that one might have aside, it is utterly insane to try and deliberately alienate the best economically situated government in Citadel Space; additionally totally absolving the matriarchs of willfully closing their eyes to an obvious threat solely on the basis of such subjective metric as "they've suffered enough" makes a mockery of anything even approaching "accountability".


Ah yes, painfully obvious irony aided and abetted by a total lack of self awareness. Don't worry, you're in good company.

Rubbish. In that case, the volus would have had a seat based on their financial contributions alone. Council membership, from its inception, was predicated on the ability of Council species to uphold the most important principle of the Citadel system: that of collective security, the measure of which, in rawest form, has always been conventional military power. Capital ship tonnages were not fixed the way they were at Farixen, in favor of the council members, for no reason. It was done with concious intent because they were expected to bear, fiscally, morally, at the expense of their own blood and treasure, the greater burden of the defense of Citadel space.

To say that the salarians are relieved of this obligation simply because their armed forces were less capable than the turians or humans is a flimsy excuse. Based on such protestations, one would imagine that the Salarian Union was an absolutely toothless entity in military terms, incapable of making any meaningful contribution outside of its ability to provide for in the higher realms of intelligence. This is patently false: the Salarian Union was easily possessed of the third or fourth most powerful battle fleet in Citadel space, depending on the measure used. Yet during the war we witnessed a relatively bigger material and 'human' contribution to the war effort by the associate members. The salarians could have- indeed, by virtue of their position, were obliged to- do more in absolute military terms, but this they did not. What they did end up doing was paltry by the standards they were legally and morally expected to meet.


More falsehood. All the Citadel militaries have been preparing to fight another large conventional conflict since the end of the Krogan Rebellions; something which they have rehearsed for on a regular basis, in concert with each other, for the last 1500 years. Most recently the threat scenario envisaged was of an invasion of the Attican Traverse by the armed forces of the Batarian Hegemony. This eventuality was planned for obsessively by the general staffs of every major Citadel state, fought and refought on paper and in large-scale peacetime maneuvers by their combat forces and those of the other species. Interoperability, doctrinal mismatch or lack of preparedness are not valid excuses, and even if it were so it would only strengthen the case of those who want to remove the salarians from their seat, since it would be evidence that they had been, contrary to the demands of Council membership, remiss in their obligations towards preparing to contribute to collective security.

The example brought to mind from our own experience is an instance from exactly two centuries ago (I can already imagine the looks of disgust crossing the faces of the crowd that is always complaining about the purported lack of applicability of lessons from "human history," but since it concerns solely difficulties of inter-alliance politics devoid of their cultural baggage, it can be transposed into the contemporary situation mostly intact.) In that year a dictator by the name of Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, a country adjacent to his. The use of such blatant force to repudiate the sovereignty of another independent state, and the precedent it set, posed a clear threat to the international order that the leading powers of the day hoped to construct, and therefore could not be countenanced, so they immediately imposed sanctions on Saddam and began assembling a military coalition to evict his army from Kuwait.

Halfway around the world from where these events were taking place was another country called Japan, which, though removed from the actual theater of hostilities, had a direct stake in ensuring the stability of the petrochemical economy of that region, on which every country at the time and Japan in particular was reliant. Although not one of the aforementioned leading powers, Japan was by no means insignificant- it had, at the time, the second-largest economy and seventh-largest population on Earth. While the total military strength available to it was relatively small in proportion to these other endowments, its armed forces were reasonably professional, well-equipped and more importantly, not tied down by any security commitments in other parts of the world, thus making them available- even desirable- for combat operations in the Gulf. Sound familiar?

By virtue of these factors, by the prominence it enjoyed in the global state system, and as the nation that benefited the most from the undisrupted supply of energy from Kuwait and the Gulf region, the rest of the world expected Japan to make a commensurate military contribution to the international war effort. Japan's leaders themselves recognized they had to do so, or else risk irrelevance. The problem, however, was that as part of the peace settlement from the last war it had been involved in, Japan was constitutionally forbidden to employ military force in an offensive capacity or outside its own borders. These legal restraints had also, in the half-century since, cultivated an extremely pacifist mindset in Japanese society that would have made any such unprecedented large-scale overseas deployment of troops domestically unpopular.

So Japan's leaders dithered and vacillated, and in the end went for their checkbooks. They underwrote a huge amount of the coalition's expenses- something to the tune of a fifth of costs incurred by military operations. But the damage to their reputation that this inaction and unwillingness to take the visible and psychologically important step of putting their own people in harm's way was already done. In spite of their immensely important financial role, Japan was roundly condemned for failing to contribute even a token dispatch of personnel to the multinational force that eventually liberated Kuwait. After the conflict, when Kuwait thanked a long list of nations for their help, Japan was conspicuous by its omission.

Diplomatically the Japanese were never able to live down this failure. At the beginning of the decade, they had been believed by many to be one of the countries that would go on to be preeminent, if not actually dominant, in the new international order that military victory in Kuwait secured. What happened instead was that Japan was relegated to the second rank of powers for what it did- or more accurately, what it did not do- when it was called on to exercise responsibility equal to its global presence. And there it has languished since.

If I sound unnecessarily harsh on the Japanese, allow me to be even more so on the salarians whom their example parallels. The latter has even less of the extenuating circumstances that Japan faced 200 years ago. The Gulf conflict of 1991 was not the existential crisis for the world that the Reaper War was for our galaxy. Neither was Japan legally obligated, unlike the salarians, to participate, and any hypothetical military involvement by them would ultimately have proved unnecessary, since in the end the coalition managed to accomplish its objective at minimal cost to itself. We survived the recent war, too, without much commitment from the salarians. But anyone with eyes can see for themselves how much we lost comparatively as a result. A cynic could point to the disparity in physical damage suffered and to the salarian inaction, connect the two, and come to the conclusion that an element of premeditation was involved in engineering the current situation. It's an extreme but increasingly popular view.

I personally don't believe it necessary to revoke the salarians' council seat as punishment. They will more than carry the moral penalty of having stood by and done less than what was required of them for at least the next few centuries- many, many generations for them. It will taint everything it touches- international relations down to personal ones. I think that opprobrium alone will be enough to keep them honest- they'll be too busy trying to be readmitted to the association of civilized races to be capable of exploiting our present weakness.


A cursory reading of the article appears to point to some turians at least sharing said obsession.

How the fuck would you know? Isn't one of the main points of contention that all the records are suppressed for like, the next three asari lifetimes? If you have the evidence she provided to the council, post it, because it would be the leak of the fucking century.

Cause sight-unseen, It's amazing that you know it wasn't good enough for the STG to believe, despite the fact that she was right.


...The Godsquid Sovereign/Nazara had already tried to eat them and they had pieces of it in their secret labs. So her evidence was, at very least "HERE ARE PIECES OF A DEAD REAPER THAT I KILLED FOR YOU".

Geth Dreadnaught my ass. The Geth actually pulled their weight.

This is the most retarded argument I've ever heard. I get Albert's company-man thing, but what the heck is up with you?

And until the humans and the reapers came along, they were first in line to become members. It was merely a matter of time – though the circumstances of your own joining have probably cost them centuries.


And if that were the only criterion for judgment, then the turians would have thrown us out over a thousand years ago. Luckily, they understand that it is not, nor should it be.


Which it was actively using to defend one of the few industrial dynamos left in the galaxy: our own. Without our productivity, the galactic economy would have collapsed six months ahead of schedule, sending you even further into the shitter than you were.


They are easily valid when it when your methods of preparation are social, scientific and political, and the enemy suddenly becomes something that dwarfs you in one and couldn’t give a shit about the other two.

Your analogy fails on every level.


On the contrary, Capice. How do you? You are entirely willing to condemn us and our government because they might be lying about intel and operations about a force that is still around and may or may not decide to start slaughtering everything you know and love.

You’re the conspiracy-lover. Haven’t you heard about the one that says they’re just fattening us up for the harvest in thirty years?


You’re right. Geth Dreadnought your ass. Maybe you should ask why the asari, turians and humans dragged their feet on it as well. Or did you forget that the Alliance (the military that gave us ~Commander Shepard!~) was just as happy to state that it as a geth ship as the other races?

I’m pissed off because everyone is happily willing to condemn us all for information that seems obvious in hindsight but which everybody and their sister was happy to dismiss as the ravings of a madwoman. Congratulations for believing that particular conspiracy theory (amidst all the other ones you subscribed to) and it turning out to be true – would you like a gold medal?

...I bet the salarians would have done some magnificent things with the knowledge from that beacon. Give a race like that a few thousand years to prepare and the Reapers wouldn't know what hit them.

Hell, the batarians probably would have made a good show of it too, given how paranoid they are to begin with.

Humans are quick learners and ambitious, krogan or vorcha could literally overwhelm them with their own bodies, drell would memorize the entire beacon and know exactly what to expect...

What I'm getting at is that basically anybody except the 'wisest' species in the galaxy would have been a better recipient.

Seriously, why is everybody so hung up on the salarians?

Maybe because salarians aren't on every other cover of Fornax?

Because people are irrational. They view the devastation of Thessia as "just punishment" for the Matriarchs' actions, despite the fact that their inaction was far worse for the galaxy than the salarians'.

You're the one blaming Shepard for not making it obvious enough for the Intelligence geniuses of the STG.

You heard the one where the STG is kidnapping sentients and experimenting on them? You're just pissed because you know damn well why people dislike the Union.

And you're the one saying that she had evidence to follow.

Oh that's fan-fucking-tastic.

Do you really think that we got where we are based on our good looks alone? That it gave us some kind of political advantage? The Republics fucked up. Yes, they fucked up in a way that the full repercussions won't even be visibly apparent for a few thousand years, but to say the reason that they weren't called it was their sexual desirability is the most shallow insult I've ever heard directed at the Asari in a couple of decades.

Goddess.