Why I dislike the Alliance government and military

The way I figures it, if your government starts killing off entire planets, then whether or not there's a "whoopsadaisy" involved in there, they're probably not fit to govern. If the military doesn't object to those orders, they are not fit for service.

The Alliance has instances of both intentional planet destruction (Shadow), that they even admit to and claim they were in the right, and unintentional destruction they don't admit to (Miranda).

How is it even possible there's enough instances of planet-wide destruction going on here that I have to specify different TYPES that happened? Wow. Even the Galactic Empire of Star Wars, which was depicted as irredeemable, only ever managed to blow up ONE inhabited planet.

In short, the Alliance and its military sucks. And whatever misgivings I have about the browncoats and their motivations and who was backing them and corruption among those ranks, it does nothing whatsoever to change the fact that the Alliance is a completely terrible government, and the people in its military, good or bad, enable it.

(I wrote a reply to this earlier, but it doesn't seem to have posted properly )

I agree. This kind of behavior is just SO egregious that it seems to me that it would not be tolerated by reasonable people.

That's why in my headcanon I have modified the scenarios somewhat. Miranda (the unintentional destruction) was covered up so that most people (including most of the government) do not know about it. Delibrately falsified reports were presented to Parliament, representing the disaster as a terraforming accident, with false or incorrectly interpreted scientific data presented to justify this conclusion. Only a select secret subcommittee of Parliament knows the truth. Shadow (in my headcanon) was not destroyed deliberately. Rather, it was bombed deliberately (during the war), and the bombing led unintentionally to the destabilization of the terraforming. The sudden collapse of the terraforming rendered Shadow uninhabitable. Since then, the whole issue of liability has been tied up in the courts, and the case is complicated by the government's view that it was a world in a state of rebellion at the time of the incident. I set things up this way in my headcanon because I think that decent people would find a government that willingly participated in such planetary destruction and genocide to be intolerable, and would overthrow it, whether via the ballot box or violently.

By making these modifications in my headcanon, the Alliance and its military are able to continue as some shade of grey (with some darker and some lighter portions and persons) rather than all black. I don't have much use for black and white in my fic, but shades of grey make excellent fodder for stories.

I think the only reason people tolerated it was for the same reasons Americans accept that attacking the civilian centers of Japan with firebombs and later atomic bombs was the right thing to do. I don't see any indication that the Alliance has tried to hide what they did to Shadow and nearly did to some of the other resisting planets. But people can justify all kinds of things if they can be convinced that the other side in a war is dangerous or inhuman, or that continued fighting would cause too much damage. Even if the fighting does go on afterward anyway. Even if the retaliation does even more damage, unthinkable amounts of damage.

This is just one way that war makes otherwise decent people absolutely crazy. Kinda like what people say about the middle east and muslims. People can have horrible and unjustifiable ideas, and still be fairly normal and even otherwise good-hearted.

Wartime propaganda has always included an element of dehumanizing the enemy. If they are "people just like us" then soldiers have a hard time killing them. Probably no war in human history has been fought without offensive and degrading nicknames for the enemy. Recognition of common bonds of humanity is subversive to war. "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." -- Strange Meeting, Wilfred Owen.

True. Which means there's also always someone ignorant yelling "let's nuke those bastards into glass."

I hear a lot of that directed at the middle east.

Well, the notions we have about the Alliance are fairly vague even now - but, most especially since the BDM, they are obviously the villains of the verse. the original intent (i gather) was to portray a sort of shadow-version of Star Trek's Federation (ignoring Deep Space 9 which was self-questioning at times) as it exists in the popular imagination. But then, clearly, they LOOK like Imperials from Star Wars. Very similar attire; e.g. Bushwacked. The teaching sections of the BDM go along with this.
On the other hand, supplementary info and the comics have filled in details of terrible things done which, clearly, incompetent and evil and not fit for purpose.

How much do we know about the structure? Not a lot most likely, nor the chain of command.

In a given reversal would the Independents have done/or do the same? Well, maybe - not if they were allowed to be independent obviously but in order to GAIN their 'freedom?' Maybe so - albeit more primitively since lacking the alliance resources for skulduggery.

As with turning rim-world inhabitants into slack-jawed yokels, it's hard not to turn Alliance types into stereotypes, bureaucratic or military and hell, sometimes a cartoon does suit a specific narrative. But it's hard to balance when fic writing - and i sort of moved away from doing so except on an individual or small scale basis as my scribbling developed.

I do enjoy trying to see another point of view though.

But - FFF.N shows what a Reaver-like rage such topics can unleash.

i do think there's always a certain creative tension when Whedon and Minear work together. It's a good thing. They are such opposites in many ways as people.

when the issues get too muddy, there's just mud. (see Buffy 7 and 8 )

Well, that and Blue Sun. Joss seems to really hate him some corporate-government corruption. Not that you can really blame him, because certain forms of that resemble totalitarian fascism.

shadow-version of Star Trek's Federation

And did a pretty good job, I think. Most portrayals of the Federation were far too optimistic.

>Independents have done/or do the same?

There were terrorists and unsavoury types, definitely. Browncoat named Declan bombed a factory on Verbena.

Blue Sun was playing both sides, then ultimately propped up the Alliance. Some seedy Blue Sun sponsored programs would have been transferred over to the Independents Confederate government system if the Alliance was beaten.

But the Alliance had caused Miranda (with Blue Sun help) just before the war. So even before the war started the Alliance was pretty bad. Perhaps the concern is that since the Independents didn't know about Miranda, some local governors might be convinced by Blue Sun to try the PAX. Magistrate Higgins seems like a very possible one, if he stayed in power through the transition, and there are very likely others.