yes it is, though I as a compassionate person, it quite hard to do that. my plan is to make them feel as if they’ve been liberated but they still slaves as the only reason I have to have them still slaves is that I’m pro Nobel
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Slavery has absolutely nothing to do with being pro nobles. They could be free peasants like in Medieval Europe. or imperial china.
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I guess your right, though one of my MCs would disagree. my pro shayard pro pre-kargon nobility Mc would agree
Compassion and slavery are mutually exclusive at the governmental level. If human beings can be the property of other human beings than there will always be some owners who -legally- starve, beat and/or murder their slaves without facing any sort of punishment, and should those slaves escape, the law will chase after them and send them back to their heartless owners to face death or worse.
Both my noble and my helot fully intend to do away with the helotry as ancient Shayard had no helots. Land will thus be stripped from those who fight the revolution and given to helots who will be upgraded to yeomen. Those nobles who support the revolution on the other hand will be allowed to keep their lands.
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Lol I can’t believe You and Mara wants the same.
This goes for the Karagond caste-based nightmare religion as well. The faithful cannot both see helots as fully human and deserving of all that entails while keeping the caste based fiction that helot telos is to be servile, to breed and to like being abused.
Not that this will change much even if formal slavery is outlawed, particularly if the caste system is retained. There will at the minimum be a Shayard/New Hegemony version of Jim Crow or the implementation of close derivatives of slavery, such as serfdom. This would make most “rights” the newly free helots might gain largely theoretical in such a system.
Even modern India has a distinct lack of interest in enforcing things on behalf of its former “untouchables” after all and that is the 21st century. The Hegemony with the Xthonic religion intact enough would look more like India just prior to British colonization when it comes to brutality against the lower castes, legal or otherwise.
This assumes the family farm would be a viable way of feeding the now vastly expanded population and I don’t think that it is. Certainly the large rural estates need to be re-organized into either collective or preferentially farming cooperatives, but particularly if you are also keen on spreading more of the non-magical techne those are probably going to end up needing even less labour then what Hegemonic agriculture uses today.
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As Elect, my MC fully intends to cut the cancer that is Karagond’s heresies out of the church and its canon. Ancient Shayard had no helots, and it was Xaos-infiltrated Karagond that violated the telos of not just yeomen, but also of some nobles, unjustly disregarding their telos in order to expand the corrupt blood economy by turning them into helots.
So yonder helot probably descended from yeomen, and possibly even nobles, but only time and their actions will tell what their telos actually is once the tyrannical and order-defying yolk of Karagond is removed. I fully intend to find a doctrinal basis for and then set an orderly precedent for social mobility. Who knows, as elect, my MC may even pen a new book to the canon if @Havenstone gives us that option.
The caste system needs to be shaken up, with the bottom slave caste eliminated and greater social mobility enabled between the others. I intend for my MC to reform and transform the church pinning all the evil stuff on Karagond and its Xaos-corrupted false canon which will then be eliminated as will those who have sold out to the Thaumatarch, which I suspect will be an overwhelming majority of the ecclesiasts, so they will need to go too. But that’s fine because those brown-nosing peacocks are not the real church. It is the helots, yeomen, merchants and nobles who sit in the pews that are the church, and it is the honest and compassionate village priests like Olenna who should guide it. My MC will then appoint new Ecclesiasts more in line with his views from those faithful village priests the helots love most, and then use them as a tool to promote the social change he desires.
This is a more complicated issue because the original territory of Karagond has a very, very large professional class living off the blood of Shayardene helots. Shayard can feed itself, and forgive me if I sound a bit cold, but I have little sympathy for the murderous oppressors in Karagond, and the present farming system does not appear to be sustainable even with obscenely large numbers of helots regularly slaughtered to sustain it. My MC is open to alternatives that keep the people of Karagond from starving, but breaking Karagond’s back does not sound like a bad thing to my MC.
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Technically India did legally eliminate the bottom caste and abolished all caste requirements and restrictions. The practice is a whole other story and the lower caste still very much exists and continues to be oppressed on caste based grounds and in India it is only getting worse at the moment, not better.
Laws don’t mean much unless there is a mostly non-corrupt government willing to ruthlessly enforce them if and when necessary.
You see value in the corrupt(ed) church as a tool, my mc doesn’t. Depending on how things go he might be content with outlawing the Karagond Codex and making (slight) edits to the Shayardene one and allow the church to fragment and tear itself apart. But then if he could my mc would probably treat religious policy like anti-trust law and promote both Skepticism and as many other (new) religions as possible in order to create a competitive religious market and if one of the new Xthonic churches looks like it is getting too large and powerful again an old Karagond Codex can always be “found”, the church broken up and its leaders tried as unreconstructed adherents of the Karagond Canon.
Doubtful, considering what @Havenstone has more recently said about deteriorated and deteriorating soil quality in Karagon and only our most advanced prototype of vertical farm with airponics might come anywhere near the volume of Karagond’s seven harvests each year in volume.
So you are pursuing a more nationalist, Shayard centered vision then because for my mc controlling the former Karagon home province and its industry and knowledge is vital and while he has even less problems with letting the Karagond nobility suffer, that is probably not a large enough population to make a significant dent in the food requirements, while all of their former helots and drudges are valuable in order to expand his base and make it as broad as possible with helots, drudges, yeomen and merchants from all the provinces, including Karagon. It’s a little difficult to win their hearts and minds when letting them starve in favour of Shayard though.
Of course my mc probably need those hearts and minds more than yours does since he foregoes Shayardene noble and church support, since they are not worth the trade-offs to him and he cannot be ideologically reconciled with any version of the Xthonic religion continuing to serve as the official state church.
More generally I think you break Karagond’s back by breaking its ruling class, not its own masses of oppressed helots and drudges since violence against them is already so common it won’t break much of anything.
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That’s why I plan to have a lot of ex-helots in both the police and the mi!itary. In fact I expect them to be the majority of the grunts, and present in if maybe not a majority of the officer corps.
Faith can move mountains and I intend to use that faith to cut roads through the mountain that is Karagond’s caste system. So yes, I have a much more positive view of the church’s utility once reformed as a tool in promoting not just order (aka stability), but also social justice. The Xthonic faith’s biggest flaw is its prioritization of order above all else, and the resulting ease with which a totalitarian state can present itself as the champion of order. Nevertheless, a more benevolent state can take advantage of that same inherent preoccupation with order as a totalitarian one, as all governments benefit from orderly implementation and following of laws, and when the laws and those enforcing them are just, so too do the people.
@Havenstone has already mentioned this. Karagond can not feed itself. Wendiej can not feed itself. OTOH Shayard as the hegemony’s breadbasket can feed itself without theurgy as long as it only needs to feed itself, but not the rest of the hegemony and the abhumans too. So it’s workable as long as you’re willing to let the oppressors starve. I’m more inclined to sell any excess food that Shayard produces to Wendiej then Karagond or the Abhumans.
Perhaps @Havenstone can elaborate more on this, but I got the feeling that central Karagond doesn’t have the masses of oppressed helots that Shayard does. What Karagond wants to be continually reminded of the price of their wealth and opulence by staring at dirty, uneducated helots? That ugliness is best moved to the outlying provinces where their labor can be put to good use until it is time to butcher them. And you can’t randomly butcher factory workers the same way you can farmhands without disrupting production.
Rome was filled with slaves. You need servants, cleaners, forced workers in palaces and fountains and gardens. Like sexual entrepreneurs etc… You can’t be rich without a lot of people working for you and people love abuse slaves. Karagon will be filled with slaves
I didn’t say there would be no slaves in central Karagond, just that they’d be fewer in number and more specialized, making them more expensive and time-consuming to replace, to the point that I bet a significant chunk of them would be dressed nicely and protected from harrowing as long as they continued to obey.
Choice Of Rebels Word Index has this info:
Cleruchy: a colony city of Karagon, where Karagond settlers dominate and the entire indigenous population has been reduced to the status of helots and drudges. Reserved for areas where the native ruling class refused to accept Karagond rule
…is this useful?
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Oh I think they keep the drudges well out of sight, but since the Karagonds won’t move industry to the provinces I think they still have lots of factory drudges and some slaves to do the truly menial labour.
Mara has already said most of what I was going to elaborate on, so I’ll just repeat that.
The truly wealthy parts of any society including modern America also have lots of poorly paid servants at the minimum and their masters/employers tend to be very good at generally ignoring and generally being blind to them.
Maybe this how they rule previously defeated Karagond city states who fell to Hera’s more bloodthirsty and cruel line too. If they are I bet that’s where the industry is located even if they do enslave their countrymen to run it, eschewing provincials.
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i shall retract my opionion on the compassion and slavery cause I do agree with you all, my previous thing was that when I suggested the yeoman upgrade, linoes or horion I don’t remember Said that would get the nobels against me, and I wanted a nobel supported revolution, but I think I could make it work for having the yeoman system that I want
First, @Havenstone has made it clear that the hegemony is highly corrupt. Second, Karagond is filled with people who have more power and influence than the rural nobility of Rim Square. As a result I expect that a lot of powerful people inside Karagond are able to protect their helot beauticians and cooks from harrowing, not because they love them, but because losing them would bring disruption and disorder to their lives, Xthonis forbid, and replacing them would be a giant pain in the derriere. Similarly, factory owners would have great incentive to protect their more valuable employees, not because they care about them, but because they wish to avoid disorderly disruptions in production that will cost them large sums of money.
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Many romans directly kill they more expensive slaves in parties or in orgies acting like heroes or other stuff. Is famous The guy who killed several slaves introduce them in a special pool with a very rare fish We called lamprea is a terrible dead… They were killed because they broken several glasses that were expensive.
When you are millionaire and doesn’t respect someone as human waste or destroy them is a way to show your riches and power.
Here the fish
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When you are a millionaire you don’t want other people taking and breaking your most valuable toys without your permission. They’re --your-- toys to break.
Except you forget that the Hegemony according to Havenstone also boasts a respectable population of poor but free “citizens”. I suspect they fill the servant roles that actually require a significant amount of interaction with the nobles and other upper castes. Kind of like India’s old servant caste and in the Hegemony they would be the beauticians and head chefs, not helots. Helots do the really dirty work.
I suspect the valuable and supervising employees of those factories are also free citizens and if a drudge drops dead at some assembly line it is merely a loss of blood as the labour is easily replaced and I suspect the overseers in such factories are always on the lookout for sick or weakened drudges so they can quickly be harrowed in order not to waste their blood. Which to the Xthonic caste system is the only thing of worth helots and drudges possess, aside from their effort at menial labour.
And there are presumably a great number of owners in Hegemonic society, which far surpasses the ancient Romans in cruelty, which is no mean feat, who do just that on a daily basis.
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Yet this contradicts Mara’s Rome analogy which you agreed with earlier as Roman nobles made heavy use of highly skilled slaves, from cooks and beauticians to scholars. More importantly this supports my original point that Karagond is unlikely to have the masses of helots that Shayard does. It doesn’t need them the way the giant plantations in Shayard do, just as the much more heavily industrialized American North had less use for them than the plantations of the American South.
Again, this supports my original point that fewer helots will be found in Karagond than Shayard. Karagond’s cities just don’t need as much unskilled labor as Shayards massive plantations. I expect that visiting central Karagond for the MC will be like stepping into a different world.
How cruel they are is immaterial to our discussion, the overwhelming majority of them still won’t like the government taking their toys any more than they do the government taking their money. It’s human nature.
Karagond still needs masses of industrial drudges and its population needs lots of street cleaners, sewer muckers, housekeepers, boot polishers, gardeners and lots of other menial servants.In short they’d do all of the jobs even poor free people do not want to fill. Much like you see with illegal immigrants in the US and other developed countries, only even more cruel since they are not merely illegal but actual slaves without even basic human rights. Since there is a heavy natalist drive and helots and drudges represent a strategic blood reserve in addition to their labour I think that both the government and the private owners use far more servants then they technically need as they represent not just labour but capital in the blood economy too.
Hmmm…for one thing even Karagond factories are probably far more labour intensive by design then necessary given their technology just to use more drudges.
At the moment the powerful Karagond nobles are the government as the provincial governments and nobility seem to be mere quisling type puppets.