Quote:
Originally Posted by jason taylor
Of course a government is just people,(perhaps even "notably ungoverned" to continue the quote). Governments, corporations, classes, and ideologies don't really have a hive mind. They do have a pack instinct that resembles one and that has both good and bad aspects but it is not the same thing.
I doubt every single Terran who was part of The Government(which, given the draft and the Military Diaspora caused by the war was really most Terrans) was thinking in those terms. Perhaps a FACTION of the government was; in fact probably. But that is different.
Or to be closer to home, I am a library volunteer. Therefore I am a part of "The government." However if you say "The government cares about nothing except it's own power and ability to exploit", I would beg leave to point out that I am rather disappointed in being exempted from all that wonderful power.
Also much of the Terran conquest ran on inertia like most famous conquests. There seems to be times when the TC government would actually have preferred to halt it, but it just wasn't. The Free Traders for instance were often in defiance of the TC.
To say the government had ulterior motives in spreading propaganda is a truism; everyone has ulterior motives for everything they do. However the idea that the government in general were consciously acting cynically against their own actual beliefs is unlikely. Some might have been doing so. Certainly they exagerrated how evil the Vilani were; they were no worse then a typical Terran hydraulic despotism. However they were right that the Vilani were a great threat. Moreover to say that the anti-vilani propaganda comes from the government ignores the fact that most of it probably came from private sources acting on their own and the fact that their would have been times when the Terran Government(or rather key members of it) would have wished to downplay the threat.
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You seem to be arguing against positions I haven't actually taken. I never said that the TC was a monolith, or that policies never varied. I simply described an overall trend.