War in the imperium / War in Iraq

[campbell]

tyranny noun
1 government by a ruler or small group of people who have unlimited power over the people in their country or state and use it unfairly and cruelly

Tom Kalbfus said

MY REPLY
You cant have an Empire without being Tyrannical

it is possible to be a good and benign emporer just as it is possible to be a corrupt and bad president eg nixon + clinton

 

[marginaleye]

The analogy is not 100 percent. The Imperium can't be based solely on personal relationships. There has to be civil servants. The forms are fuedal, but it still has to be a modern government, there is mass media and so forth. People are for the most part literate and most people in the Imperium aren't Peasant tenant farmers working the land for a manor lord. For one thing they'd produce too much food to be eaten with modern technology agriculture.

Sure, there are plenty of bureaucrats and civil servants, but all the really significant decisions (at least at the interstellar scale) are made by the aristocracy (as such), or by people who hold positions of great authority because they are, or are connected to, aristocrats. Planetary society may be egalitarian / democratic / meritocratic, but there is a "glass ceiling" that very few low-born / un-connected / planet-bound people can penetrate. Everybody knows that, unless you're the child of a duke, you're unlikely to become an admiral, and that unless you're a member of one of those ancient Vilani families, you're unlikely to become a senior executive with Sharurshid or Zirunkariish (yes, there are exceptions, but they're rare). So the average citizen probably has a pretty well-developed sense of his place in the social universe, and what he's likely to be able to achieve, so it seems unlikely that he will feel much of a "patriotic duty to serve the Imperium." So the average citizen probably doesn't draw much of a moral distinction between actual Imperial soldiers and mercenaries, and (unless personal relationships are involved) probably doesn't worry too much about them getting killed.