Ground Zero Games schrieb:
> Hello all,
> How do folks feel about "rewriting history", not in the Stalinist
;-)
My basic problem with the future history is that it contains various wars on
Earth that result in the conquest and annexation of whole continents in fairly
short timespans, notably of Latin America by the NAC and India by the ESU. If
you look at recent history, the trend is going in the oposite direction.
Technical, poilitcal, cultural and communications trends make
it harder and harder even for a superpower to hold onto relatively small
territories (see the Russians in Chechenia, or Afghanistan and Iraq) conquered
by force. So any massive military conquests need a massive reorientation of
those trends that need explaining. Territorial shifts nowadays either come
about due to fragmentation of larger entities (Sowiet Union) or through the
voluntary merging of smaller entities (the EU). Most of the shifts in the
Tuffleyverse apperently happened via voluntary
union, so I am OK with that. The NAC came about in extremly unusual
circumstances and I am willing to accept that, too.
But I would suggest to allow the Latin American LLAR to exist on Earth, and
that India, shose importance is growing, to remain independent, perhaps having
absorbed Babgla Desh, Ceylon and sundry smaller stated in
the neighbourhood.
India would also make for an interesting new power.
Greetings Karl Heinz
textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative
It's always been a problem to conqurer a hostile land. England could not
conqurer a hostile afghanistan 100 years ago. Even the Norman conquest of
Saxon England too hundres of years and relied on a commitment to stay and
intermarry with the local noble houses to breed out the original inhabitants.
The british colonial strategy was to back a minority and give them support
into positions of power, they then knew that if the regime ever fell they
would go back to the bottom of the pecking order.
That strategy was copied on the back of the Roman legion model of ally with
one tribe against it's enemies.
One thing I don't understand is why would Texas invade Mexico? That's like a
hundred fold expansion in their welfare programme. I can see why Mexico would
want to invade Texas because there's a lot of wealth there. If you look on
population movements as invasion then the central ameras have been invading
the US successfully for years. If War is essentially state sanctioned armed
robbery then robbing the poor to give to the rich doesn't really work.
There is also now a significant Muslim minority in most of the EU countries
(witness the number of mosques being built) there is no corresponding shift of
westerners to arab countries.
I'm not sure that the unification of the Arab world under a Saladin type
figure is any more likely that the unification of the Christian world under a
new Holy Roman Empire.
Beth posed some interesting scenarios about wars over water. Looking at NZ
agriculture water use is proportional to intensity of farming and there is
even concern about how water is used and the impacts of farming on waterways.
Dairy farming is particulary bad as there is a lot of polution of waterways,
intensive crop farming needs lots of water and nutrients to support the high
density of farming. So I'm not sure that you can wave a magic wand and say
"make farming less dependent on water".
If by invasion you mean political control of the country, then you could argue
that Greece has been invaded by a German, Belgian, French alliance. With local
greek policies now being determined by overseers in Berlin and Brussels all
without having a shot fired and now the Greek puppet regime are doing their
masters work and oppressing their own populace.
I can see potential wars over big unpopulated resource rich areas (Siberia
comes to mind) all it would need would be to discover significant minerals,
oil or gold or crashed spaceship in Antartica and then it's all on. Especially
if it was discovered in an area claimed by more than one country or by a
country that can't defend its claim.
Same for other hotspots. if there's ever commercially viable oil discovered in
the Falklands then that could be another hotspot that takes off again.