Subject: (urth) Le Guerre

From: Robert Borski <rborski at coredcs.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 00:19:15 +0000

Question to General (Five Star) mantis:

You seem to have given much consideration to the war which has taken place
on the sisterworlds of Sainte Croix-Saint Anne. I still say the
Nine-Eight-Six was a penal colony ship, but will honor your more obviously
militaristic background when you argue it was merely following a series of
war-mongering bellacitous first-strikers. You're the one with the purple
heart, after all (whereas mine is pacemaker-driven) and I don't need guns
now that I have Viagra. 

Perhaps, as a scholar of interplanetary war (I hear you were ASTEROIDS
champ in 6th grade), you'd care to comment on any of the following:

Do you attach any significance to the antebellum occupational forces on
Sainte Anne excluding the defeated French from helping to form a new
regime, but the same a.o.f. on Sainte Croix allowing it?
Specifically, what does this tell us about the war's victors--have Sainte
Anne and Sainte Croix been divied up like Berlin by some sort of
interplanetary Allies/UN conquering nexus? Or might, say, something like
the Vichy Resistance been operational on Sainte Croix, helping to undermine
the other French Croixians?

You see, I'm trying to account for some reason the sisterworlds were
allowed to develop differently once they were defeated--especially since
everything we're led to believe from Annese accounts the victors in the war
were simply English and not the Barsoomian Allied Megaspace Command.

I'm counting on you to fill me in, of course.

Don't disappoint me, Little General.

Saluting respecfully,
Pfc. Robert Borski 

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 15:01:00 +0000

Robert,

Re: the French/English war aftermath.  I'm guessing:

(1) The French (or pseudo-French) initially colonized St. Croix
because St. Anne already had people on it (abos).

(2) As a result, St. Croix became the "urban" planet and St. Anne
became the "rural" planet.  The majority of the French population
lived on St. Croix.

(3) Thus after the war, the new owners of the urban planet needed
"collaboration" with the previous regime to win the peace and secure
the transition.  The few French farmers on rural planet owed their
alligence to the French on St. Croix, so they were covered with the
same blanket of collaboration, and St. Anne is merely flooded with
penal colonists to secure its empty lands with people.  (In fact, do
we have evidence that St. Croix got a lot of settlers from Mrs. B's
ship?  If they had a semi-military mission, maybe it was to build a
base on St. Anne from which military strikes against sisterworld
could be launched?  A sort of "Airstrip One" plan.)

(4) Text tells us that because there was such a labor crisis on St.
Croix after the war, slavery was introduced (just to make it
Louisiana <g>).  This might mean that there were very few initial
English settlers for St. Croix.

So the germs of difference were in place: a former rural planet now
more urbanized and largely "English," where slavery is not allowed; a
former urban planet now decaying (houses are all old, population
down), with French culture and slavery.

I agree with you that the victors (aside from V.R.T., that is) were
not a multinational space team.  (Then again, come to think of it,
"English" might mean "Anglophone" . . . but nah, let's keep this
simple whenever possible.)

Taken at face value, Roy T's Irish eyes and hair, and supposed
"Frenchness by way of the Napoleonic Wars" is a reminder about how
the ethno-national identities shift and blend over time; the
Napoleonic being another case of French versus English (coalition
forces that time); the Irish being a remnant of the Celts who used to
own the whole region being fought over by the French and English.

The loss of the records of the first French expedition, if it wasn't
an accident of war, sure makes it look like the regime had something
to hide from the new comers.

This is my thinking at this time.

=mantis=