Horatius Caul
Kitzless
188
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Posted - 2013.01.19 23:36:00 -
[1] - Quote
Bienator II wrote:
the problem with amarr is that slavery in such an advanced society is so evil that you have to find something very good to be still able to relate to that faction. And right now its very difficult IMO.
I don't think you understand what the purpose of slavery is in the Empire. I'm not going to make excuses for it, because from a modern moral perspective it's vile, and many of the practices revolving slavery in the Empire are horrifying. However, slavery to the Amarr is fundamentally different from slavery in the real world - historically and currently.
The Amarr Empire is culturally monolithic. There is no room for wildly different cultures to co-exist, because that would harm the internal order of the Empire. In the Empire you don't see cultural splits like the one that forced the Caldari to leave the Federation. You may occasionally see conflict driven by the personal desires of feudal lords, or political shifts to better ensure the stability of the realm, but such issues are passing - because in the end everybody has the same core priorities. The Empire has no separatists or rebel factions.
Throughout the Empire's existence, I'm certain that slavery has been one of the most crucial tools to ensure this unified culture. Slavery is not a method of subjugation or industry - it is a method of integration. To us as modern humans enjoying life in nationstates with respect for multiculturalism, this seems foreign and aggressive, but ask a Ni-Kunni if he thinks slavery was bad for his people.
For people like the Ealur and the Ni-Kunni, the arrival of the Amarr meant that they were uplifted. But instead of treating them like equals and giving them technology, risking a costly war and countless unnecessary deaths, the Amarr took on their races as apprentices to learn from serving their masters - keeping these new members of the Empire low on the ladder until everyone could understand the structure of it all, then giving them opportunities to work their way up.
Ideologically, slavery is a first step on the road to knowing God. Politically, it is a tool to safely integrate new people into the realm without destabilizing it.
Now, enslaving the Minmatar was a mistake. The Empire had never enslaved a people who were technologically advanced and broadly educated. It's easy to scrub away a culture when it's a stone-age or feudal civilization where most people can't read or write, or know the least thing about the world. The Minmatar however were a global space-age civilization, probably comparable to where we are today, and there were so many of them. The whole Minmatar civilization was basically an out of context problem for the Amarr. They kept struggling, so the Amarr kept pushing them down. The most cruel of their methods, like vitoc, probably came during this era, and the rebellion would have not only tarnished the pride of every slave-owning holder but also made them terribly afraid of what might happen and push even harder, continuing a spiral of hate and cruelty.
I don't think Amarrian slavery is inherently evil, but its practices have become debased and abhorrent in many cases. Therein lies a problem, because people will have a gut reaction against these bad practices and condemn everything related to slavery in the Empire, because they cannot separate the two things. And I think the same goes for a lot of things in the EVE factions.
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