Great Quotes II: Source and Context are Key

[classical_hero]

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

 

[Borachio]

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

Montaigne

 

[Arakhor]

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

That statement is apocryphal. Sorry.

 

[Borachio]

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.

Montaigne

 

[classical_hero]

That statement is apocryphal. Sorry.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/04/good-men-do/
Well it has been attributed to him by so many people that the source I got it from is normally reliable. It seems the first person to say it is a Pastor who looks likes heard it from someone. Even President Kennedy attributes it to Burke, so it has been associated with him for a long time. It looks the modern saying has morphed from this.
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
So maybe someone had read that and then put their own spin onto it and like Chinese whispers the saying we have now got.

 

[Arakhor]

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Burke's original saying is less quotable, but more nuanced, I think.

 

[Dachs]

Going by my trend of Star Wars book excerpts, here's a section from the excellent Essential Guide to Warfare, by Jason Fry and Paul Urquhart. According to the endnotes, posted by Fry on his blag, Urquhart was primarily responsible for this segment, although Fry and editor Erich Schoenweiss, among others, also had some input.

The Essential Guides are basically reference material for Star Wars canon, written from an in-universe perspective, that also include new material (whether in the form of retcons, canonical amalgamations, or little highlight sections that show certain Star Wars events in a different way), excellent maps and pictures, and so on. I highly recommend them.

This particular segment describes the Yuuzhan Vong war, a five-year conflict that pitted the New Republic, along with the rest of the galaxy, against a vast group of extragalactic invaders. It was unarguably one of the most cataclysmic events in Star Wars canon.

The segment has a somewhat unusual preface. It is described as an anonymous circular that made the rounds in military circles during the Corellian secession crisis fifteen years after the Vong war, with authorial speculation ranging from Admiral Daala to Jacen Solo to a member of the Imperial Council of Moffs. It's clear that the author has an Imperial bent of some kind, especially considering the repeated reference to "Rebels" (otherwise, an authorship of Wedge Antilles or even Garm bel Iblis would've made sense), although he or she is also fairly sympathetic to the Jedi (unlike Daala). To my knowledge, Fry and Urquhart have not stated who the author is.

Anyway. Here we go. I have footnoted it for extra information not necessarily available to people who aren't total Star Wars nerds like myself.

Spoiler this is super long :

In 25 ABY¹, alien invasion fleets attacked several remote systems in the northern quadrant of the Outer Rim. At Artorias and Vonak, they enslaved whole civilizations.

In response, the New Republic Defense Force let them advanced unopposed, allowing them to conquer countless unprotected worlds and enslave as many beings as they wanted.

Seen from the clean decks of the Admiralty, the doctrine made sense - don't waste troops and ships in pointless battles; hold back your forces, build up your power, lead the enemy to a battleground of your own choosing; then fight a decisive battle from a position of strength, and destroy your enemy. That was how the Rebel fleet destroyed the Empire, and variations on the same theme had served the New Republic well.

The top flag officers seemed to know what they were talking about. The new Supreme Commander [after Ackbar's retirement] was Admiral Sien Sovv, a Sullustan with a tenacious reputation as a task-force commander. His chief of staff was a dashing cruiser captain, Commodore Turk Brand.

But neither of them knew how to fight a war. They had no experience in large-scale fleet command, and their campaign thinking was learned from scandocs. Their key aides were specialists in tactical analysis and logistics rather than actual combat veterans, and many of them fetishized military discipline and pride to the point of obedient conformity.

Etahn A'baht, the only fighting admiral to retain a senior role, repeatedly called for a change of plan, but he was marginalized by Sovv and Brand, and resigned his commission less than a year into the war. He went off to take charge of the Dornean Navy in his home sector, and fought the local Vong to a standstill.

Sovv and his team were honest by their own standards, and took no pleasure in the duty of sending troops to fight and die. Necessary was a word they used a lot. Heroism, they said, usually cost more lives than it saved. At least that was what their books had told them.

In practice, though, their war plan made the Defense Force seem weak, and made the enemy seem unstoppable. And on a level that really mattered, this weakened the New Republic's fighting ability. Among civilians and low-level military personnel, panic spread without restraint. Most front-line troops went into battle expecting to take a beating from the galaxy's new apex predators.

Thus, the war assumed a grim, depressing pattern - a series of attempts by the military to lure the invaders into a decisive battle, which looked to everyone else like retreats and botched holding actions.

It didn't have to be that way. At Ithor, the Imperial Navy stood and fought, with Bothan and Jedi support.² They didn't wait for Sovv's permission before they forced the battle, and they destroyed the Domain Shai warfleet with minimal casualties. Perhaps if Sovv had given them more support, fixed defenses would have been in place, and the Vong wouldn't have burned the jungle as they went down.³ But it was the Jedi and the Imperials whose reputations were tarnished, leaving Sovv in firmer control of the war.

By now, the admiral and his aides had a good picture of enemy strength and intentions, and believed they could lure a major part of the Vong fleet into battle. They put their plan into action - and their opponents manipulated them every step of the way.

The New Republic laid their trap at Corellia - and the Vong fell on the undefended Fondor shipyards. Only the desperate firing of Centerpoint⁴ prevented the complete annihilation of the New Republic Defense Force. This time, the Corellians took the flak because half the Hapan fleet was caught in the Centerpoint backblast, but the shock of what Centerpoint did overshadowed the fact that the Defense Force had caused itself even more damage that day, and in a straight fight. The First Fleet was obliterated, the Third and Fifth mauled by enemy minefields, and the New Republic's second-largest shipyard was out of the war.

Now the Vong warmaster took personal command of the invasion armada - Tsavong Lah, 150 kilos of armored muscle, a grinning face all slashed up with scars, and a military brain as sharp as a lightsaber. In three months, he conquered the Hutts and advanced to Duro, on the edge of the Core.

Then he stopped, and offered Sovv a cease-fire.

Sovv accepted. He reckoned that the Vong decision to take the longer southern route through Duro meant that the New Republic defenses around the northern Core were impregnable, and he calculated that a pause in hostilities would favor his shipbuilding and recruitment statistics more than the Vong's.

The Jedi Knights - seen by the military as undisciplined amateurs - were allowed to be hunted like animals.⁵

And the Jedi weren't the only people the High Command sacrificed to the enemy that year. The Vong had spent decades infiltrating the Empire and New Republic, laying the seeds of a thousand brushfire conflicts - resentments that festered like infected wounds, ready to flare when they were scratched. Combined with the biggest refugee crisis in years and the looming presence of insane alien conquerors, civilian confidence in the ability of the New Republic to maintain peace and justice collapsed. Hundreds of undefended local governments surrendered to the Vong.

The Defense Force ignored it all. They prioritized shipbuilding, munitions factories, and recruitment. They told themselves it was necessary, and that giving in to emotions was a dangerous weakness.

But they were already losing the war. In the northern and eastern quadrants, the Yuuzhan Vong now ruled.

No one knows if the skirmish at Yavin 4 was a deliberate provocation, Tsavong Lah's way of finding an excuse to restart the war. It doesn't matter. A group of smugglers and rogue Jedi apprentices liberated one of the invaders' largest slave plantations.⁶

There's a holo of Han and Leia's three kids standing on the dirt strip with lightsabers drawn, and Talon Karrde's ships coming in to land behind them to free the slaves. That marked the resumption of the war - but perhaps more important, it served as an example of what the Defense Force was failing to do.

The Vong now showed their hand, using their Duro base to move west through undefended space-lanes to Yag'Dhul, then bringing up new fleets to smash the Core defenses on the other side, Sovv's impregnable Northern Line - thrusting through Bilbringi and Borleias, until they were standing right on top of Coruscant.

By now the Jedi were gearing up to fight their own war on their flank - starfighter raids, refugee support, all the stuff the New Republic wasn't doing. To draw them off, the Vong feinted at their own private psychological flank - with a project to create Force-hunting monsters at Myrkr.

The Jedi fell for it, sending off their best young Jedi Knights on a pointless suicide mission.

Sovv, meanwhile, concentrated his three fleet groups at the capital, anticipating the decisive clash, or planning to destroy the enemy units before they could combine. It almost worked - with a little help from Han Solo, he caught the second-largest Vong fleet near the Black Bantha protostar and won a crushing victory - but their main force converged too quickly, and Sovv was forced to fight in the sky above Galactic City, with his back to the planetary shield.

The Battle of Coruscant⁷ was the blackest day in New Republic history, and the nadir of Sien Sovv's career. At the start of the main battle, Chief Fey'lya⁸ tried to fire him, so he surrendered the tactical initiative to ensure the support of influential Senators and evacuated the Admiralty and NRI⁹ halfway across the galaxy to Mon Calamari.

After Coruscant, the Vong ruled the capital and had consolidated their grip on the Core and most of the Inner Rim, taking tribute from systems that had surrendered, and conquering the remaining New Republic bases.

Relatively quickly, however, the Defense Force put forth a new analysis: the Vong had suffered massively from their loss of ships and troops above Coruscant, and were now committed to fortify[ing] exposed positions in the Core. This received more emphasis than the enslavement of a trillion beings and the New Republic's obliteration as a functioning state.

Sovv spent the next few months calmly reorganizing the military, training recruits and building new ships, regrouping battle groups that had escaped intact from the rout, and sending them out on meaningless skirmishes to temper them for battle - a tactic the Vong had employed early in the war.¹⁰ Their first offensive move was an Intelligence-led raid to assassinate the Vong monarch at Obroa-skai. It was the sort of offer you couldn't really pass up, and perhaps the first smart move they'd made in the whole war - but it was deemed a failure. The Alliance had been fed false intelligence, and the Yuuzhan Vong had sacrificed a spare worldship to sneak the real Supreme Overlord through to Coruscant.¹¹

Then, a few weeks later, Sovv¹² managed to force another decisive battle. With Imperial help, he finally lured the enemy fleet into a trap at Ebaq 9 in the Deep Core, and threw everything he had at them - smugglers, mutineers, conscripts, even Jedi.

And won.

Tsavong Lah's ships were surrounded and besieged, trapped in low orbit under New Republic guns. The warmaster was killed in a brutal lightsaber duel with Jaina Solo. Sovv, at last, had his decisive victory.

Decisive victory, however, proved to have no major effect on the wider flow of the war. The defenses of the Vong occupation zone proved rather more resilient than the Northern Line had been - or else Sovv was content to allow half the galaxy to remain enslaved while he played with his statistics. Kashyyyk, halfway to the void, was now the First Fleet's forward base - supported by a chain of systems stretching back toward Mon Calamari, rather than a linear frontier. The rest was given to the Vong.

The leading Jedi Masters were still regarded with polite disdain because they wouldn't join the Defense Force and had blocked the use of genocide weapons.¹³ So they were allowed to launch a mystic quest into the Unknown Regions in pursuit of Zonama Sekot, a legendary living world that figured in the Yuuzhan Vong mythology.

Meanwhile, attempts were made to acquire expendable troops from neutral powers - the entries of the Hapans, Imperial, and some Chiss elements into the war were hailed as a series of diplomatic triumphs for the Galactic Alliance, the powerless new government-in-exile that had come into being alongside the High Command.

Finally, after another year of preparation, the Alliance fleets began to lumber into action. Sovv and his aides devised a complex series of feints and strikes, designed to conquer staging systems for an assault on Coruscant. This Trinity plan proved a disaster. It reminded the Vong that the Alliance systems were more than a series of game preserves for hunting wild infidels. In response, they went on the offensive against New Republic shipyards, overrunning Kuat and Hakassi before moving on to Mon Calamari.

Mon Calamari was barely saved when Zonama Sekot came out of hyperspace near Coruscant - the mythical world turned out to be a living battle station, a forest-covered Death Star that could summon Force lightning superlasers from its treetops to destroy Vong dreadnoughts. This made the Vong panic. They recalled their entire fleet to face their crazy mythological enemy.

The Defense Force had avoided another pointless mauling at Dac¹⁴, and now the Vong simply gave them the opportunity that years of campaigns had failed to create. Thanks to Sekot, the enemy's military strength was concentrated in one place - Coruscant - and Sovv had another chance to win a decisive battle.

The battle didn't happen the way Sovv planned. Instead, it split into multiple distinct engagements in different parts of the system. Hapan Battle Dragons defended Sekot against one Vong force, while Imperial Star Destroyers and TIEs established local air and space superiority above Galactic City to support the ground assault, and in a third battle, the Galactic Alliance was thrashed by the new warmaster, Nas Choka.¹⁵ It was all rendered irrelevant by an uprising, secured by oppressed heretics, antiwar factions in the Vong elite, and a few veteran Rebel operatives who'd wound up in the undercity by accident.

The destruction of the Supreme Overlord's flagship by Jedi Knight Jacen Solo provoked the enemy's surrender, but in retrospect, that may have been less significant than it seemed - the Vong had lost Coruscant, and the fleet battle was basically a brutal draw already. They didn't have the strength or will left to fight anymore.

Under Jedi pressure, the surviving Vong were resettled in the Unknown Regions without further punishment, prompting Sovv to haul down his flag in protest; but the civilian government proved unable to function without him, and he was soon reappointed as Supreme Commander.

In hindsight, it seems clear that the Vong's success owed a great deal to New Republic and Galactic Alliance failings. The Defense Force commanders surrendered territory and worlds to chase the mirage of a decisive fleet battle.

They also neglected commerce raiding, pinpoint attacks, and local defense - tactics that had been instrumental for the Rebellion. Above all, they didn't allow local commanders much freedom to maneuver. Tsavong Lah was more than half monster, but at least he rewarded initiative, whereas Sovv sidelined and court-martialed people for it.

That's not the whole story, though.

It's all very well to say that Sien Sovv and Turk Brand sacrificed unnecessary lives to the dark gods of logistical discipline. It's probably true.

But no one stopped them, either. A lot of ordinary people saw what they were doing - and let them do it.

And that, I suppose, is what's really meant by the banality of evil.

Spoiler Footnotes :

¹ = After the Battle of Yavin. 25 ABY means that it started twenty-five years after Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. That's twenty-one years after Lando Calrissian and Wedge Antilles blew up the second Death Star.

² = Actually, that "Bothan support" was a New Republic contingent. But the admiral was Bothan. And it was still not nearly as much as Sovv and Brand theoretically could've sent.

³ = The Mother Jungle of the planet Ithor, apart from being an ecological wonder, was home to a species of tree that produced a certain kind of pollen. This bafforr tree pollen was uniquely reactive with the biological components that made up most of Yuuzhan Vong technology. It was basically a ready-made anti-Vong superweapon. At the Battle of Ithor, the allied fleets annihilated the Vong fleet that had hurried to the planet, desperate to destroy the primary source of bafforr trees. Then the Vong commander was lured into ritual combat against the Jedi Corran Horn and lost. As the Vong fleet went down in flames, his subordinates deployed their own biological weapons against Ithor's surface and effectively destroyed the Mother Jungle, an ecological catastrophe of gigantic proportions that doubled as a propaganda blow and a severe black eye for the Jedi, even though they hadn't done anything wrong.

⁴ = Centerpoint Station was a massive ancient alien space station in the Corellian system that possessed gravitic manipulators of immense power. These manipulators could be used for various purposes, such as the creation of a mass shadow that would effectively prevent hyperspace travel over a wide area, or firing a repulsor beam of immense power that could do things like induce supernovae or wipe out enemy fleets. Centerpoint was destroyed during the secession crisis of 40-41 ABY.

⁵ = Growing numbers of people in the galaxy blamed the Jedi for the Vong's success, partly because of simmering resentment because they were special, partly because of overflow from Palpatine's New Order-era anti-Jedi propaganda, and partly because Luke Skywalker was kind of bad at making sure his new Jedi Order remained disciplined. He had some pretty high-profile teaching failures, and teaching failures with Jedi can mean anything from garden-variety murder sprees to entire star systems being completely destroyed. So the Vong used the truce period to launch their own Jedi-hunting campaign, because they rightly saw the Jedi as some of their greatest potential foes, and organizations like the Peace Brigade helped the Vong out from inside galactic society.

⁶ = Yavin 4, the jungle moon that served as a Rebel base at the end of Episode IV, was the site of Luke Skywalker's Jedi academy during the period of the New Republic. As such, it was an excellent target for the Vong, and since Sovv et al. had demonstrated that they were uninterested in defending the Jedi, it was also an eminently takable one. Skywalker evacuated most of the academy successfully, but several students and apprentices were forced to flee into the jungle as the Vong set up shop on the moon. Eventually, most of them were rescued by the aforementioned smuggler-Jedi group, and the Vong were driven off.

⁷ = Well, the first Battle of Coruscant.

⁸ = Chief of State Borsk Fey'lya. In the actual novels that this account is based off of, Fey'lya is generally portrayed as a villainous character, the guy backstabbing the Jedi and the troops on the front lines, to the detriment of the war effort and galactic society. Sovv gets off easy in most of the books, despite obviously making most of the decisions that doomed trillions of lives. Fey'lya just let him have a free hand to do it.

⁹ = New Republic Intelligence.

¹⁰ = Also a tactic the Rebel Alliance used extensively, although one could make the argument that due to its paucity of resources, there was no such thing as a "meaningless" skirmish for the Rebels.

¹¹ = In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Coruscant, Wedge Antilles gathered a motley command of forces around the Super Star Destroyer Lusankya and captured Borleias from the Vong. Around Borleias, he, along with the Heroes of Yavin and a few other Jedi and Republic soldiers of renown, orchestrated a brilliant campaign that bloodied the Vong very badly and tied up their maneuver elements for several months before he finally abandoned the system, having suffered low casualties (except for the deliberate destruction of the Lusankya), and fled for Mon Calamari. He did this in direct violation of Sovv's orders, as well as those of the remaining New Republic politicians. The Imp author does not mention the Borleias campaign, oddly, even though it largely corroborates his or her main point: the fighting soldiers of the Defense Force knew what they were doing, but Sovv and Brand insisted on trying to throw away the war by chasing after the mirage of a decisive battle. Perhaps he or she did not wish to belabor an obvious point.

¹² = Actually, Ackbar came out of retirement to develop the Ebaq 9 plan. Sovv and Brand were the ones to implement it. Ackbar died shortly thereafter of natural causes.

¹³ = NRI developed a toxin designated Alpha Red from bafforr pollen and test-deployed it against Vong in the Outer Rim at various stages late in the war. When the Jedi found out about it, they managed to prevent its open use and destroyed what samples they could. NRI managed to keep making it in secret and attempted to use it against Vong bases in the final campaigns of the war, with nearly disastrous results.

¹⁴ = Dac was another name for Mon Calamari.

¹⁵ = While more or less correct, the author's language choice regarding the GA fleet is illuminating.

The first time I read that piece, I got chills.

 

[Borachio]

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

Montaigne

 

[Phrossack]

Going by my trend of Star Wars book excerpts, here's a section from the excellent Essential Guide to Warfare, by Jason Fry and Paul Urquhart. According to the endnotes, posted by Fry on his blag, Urquhart was primarily responsible for this segment, although Fry and editor Erich Schoenweiss, among others, also had some input.

The Essential Guides are basically reference material for Star Wars canon, written from an in-universe perspective, that also include new material (whether in the form of retcons, canonical amalgamations, or little highlight sections that show certain Star Wars events in a different way), excellent maps and pictures, and so on. I highly recommend them.

This particular segment describes the Yuuzhan Vong war, a five-year conflict that pitted the New Republic, along with the rest of the galaxy, against a vast group of extragalactic invaders. It was unarguably one of the most cataclysmic events in Star Wars canon.

The segment has a somewhat unusual preface. It is described as an anonymous circular that made the rounds in military circles during the Corellian secession crisis fifteen years after the Vong war, with authorial speculation ranging from Admiral Daala to Jacen Solo to a member of the Imperial Council of Moffs. It's clear that the author has an Imperial bent of some kind, especially considering the repeated reference to "Rebels" (otherwise, an authorship of Wedge Antilles or even Garm bel Iblis would've made sense), although he or she is also fairly sympathetic to the Jedi (unlike Daala). To my knowledge, Fry and Urquhart have not stated who the author is.

Anyway. Here we go. I have footnoted it for extra information not necessarily available to people who aren't total Star Wars nerds like myself.

Spoiler this is super long :

In 25 ABY¹, alien invasion fleets attacked several remote systems in the northern quadrant of the Outer Rim. At Artorias and Vonak, they enslaved whole civilizations.

In response, the New Republic Defense Force let them advanced unopposed, allowing them to conquer countless unprotected worlds and enslave as many beings as they wanted.

Seen from the clean decks of the Admiralty, the doctrine made sense - don't waste troops and ships in pointless battles; hold back your forces, build up your power, lead the enemy to a battleground of your own choosing; then fight a decisive battle from a position of strength, and destroy your enemy. That was how the Rebel fleet destroyed the Empire, and variations on the same theme had served the New Republic well.

The top flag officers seemed to know what they were talking about. The new Supreme Commander [after Ackbar's retirement] was Admiral Sien Sovv, a Sullustan with a tenacious reputation as a task-force commander. His chief of staff was a dashing cruiser captain, Commodore Turk Brand.

But neither of them knew how to fight a war. They had no experience in large-scale fleet command, and their campaign thinking was learned from scandocs. Their key aides were specialists in tactical analysis and logistics rather than actual combat veterans, and many of them fetishized military discipline and pride to the point of obedient conformity.

Etahn A'baht, the only fighting admiral to retain a senior role, repeatedly called for a change of plan, but he was marginalized by Sovv and Brand, and resigned his commission less than a year into the war. He went off to take charge of the Dornean Navy in his home sector, and fought the local Vong to a standstill.

Sovv and his team were honest by their own standards, and took no pleasure in the duty of sending troops to fight and die. Necessary was a word they used a lot. Heroism, they said, usually cost more lives than it saved. At least that was what their books had told them.

In practice, though, their war plan made the Defense Force seem weak, and made the enemy seem unstoppable. And on a level that really mattered, this weakened the New Republic's fighting ability. Among civilians and low-level military personnel, panic spread without restraint. Most front-line troops went into battle expecting to take a beating from the galaxy's new apex predators.

Thus, the war assumed a grim, depressing pattern - a series of attempts by the military to lure the invaders into a decisive battle, which looked to everyone else like retreats and botched holding actions.

It didn't have to be that way. At Ithor, the Imperial Navy stood and fought, with Bothan and Jedi support.² They didn't wait for Sovv's permission before they forced the battle, and they destroyed the Domain Shai warfleet with minimal casualties. Perhaps if Sovv had given them more support, fixed defenses would have been in place, and the Vong wouldn't have burned the jungle as they went down.³ But it was the Jedi and the Imperials whose reputations were tarnished, leaving Sovv in firmer control of the war.

By now, the admiral and his aides had a good picture of enemy strength and intentions, and believed they could lure a major part of the Vong fleet into battle. They put their plan into action - and their opponents manipulated them every step of the way.

The New Republic laid their trap at Corellia - and the Vong fell on the undefended Fondor shipyards. Only the desperate firing of Centerpoint⁴ prevented the complete annihilation of the New Republic Defense Force. This time, the Corellians took the flak because half the Hapan fleet was caught in the Centerpoint backblast, but the shock of what Centerpoint did overshadowed the fact that the Defense Force had caused itself even more damage that day, and in a straight fight. The First Fleet was obliterated, the Third and Fifth mauled by enemy minefields, and the New Republic's second-largest shipyard was out of the war.

Now the Vong warmaster took personal command of the invasion armada - Tsavong Lah, 150 kilos of armored muscle, a grinning face all slashed up with scars, and a military brain as sharp as a lightsaber. In three months, he conquered the Hutts and advanced to Duro, on the edge of the Core.

Then he stopped, and offered Sovv a cease-fire.

Sovv accepted. He reckoned that the Vong decision to take the longer southern route through Duro meant that the New Republic defenses around the northern Core were impregnable, and he calculated that a pause in hostilities would favor his shipbuilding and recruitment statistics more than the Vong's.

The Jedi Knights - seen by the military as undisciplined amateurs - were allowed to be hunted like animals.⁵

And the Jedi weren't the only people the High Command sacrificed to the enemy that year. The Vong had spent decades infiltrating the Empire and New Republic, laying the seeds of a thousand brushfire conflicts - resentments that festered like infected wounds, ready to flare when they were scratched. Combined with the biggest refugee crisis in years and the looming presence of insane alien conquerors, civilian confidence in the ability of the New Republic to maintain peace and justice collapsed. Hundreds of undefended local governments surrendered to the Vong.

The Defense Force ignored it all. They prioritized shipbuilding, munitions factories, and recruitment. They told themselves it was necessary, and that giving in to emotions was a dangerous weakness.

But they were already losing the war. In the northern and eastern quadrants, the Yuuzhan Vong now ruled.

No one knows if the skirmish at Yavin 4 was a deliberate provocation, Tsavong Lah's way of finding an excuse to restart the war. It doesn't matter. A group of smugglers and rogue Jedi apprentices liberated one of the invaders' largest slave plantations.⁶

There's a holo of Han and Leia's three kids standing on the dirt strip with lightsabers drawn, and Talon Karrde's ships coming in to land behind them to free the slaves. That marked the resumption of the war - but perhaps more important, it served as an example of what the Defense Force was failing to do.

The Vong now showed their hand, using their Duro base to move west through undefended space-lanes to Yag'Dhul, then bringing up new fleets to smash the Core defenses on the other side, Sovv's impregnable Northern Line - thrusting through Bilbringi and Borleias, until they were standing right on top of Coruscant.

By now the Jedi were gearing up to fight their own war on their flank - starfighter raids, refugee support, all the stuff the New Republic wasn't doing. To draw them off, the Vong feinted at their own private psychological flank - with a project to create Force-hunting monsters at Myrkr.

The Jedi fell for it, sending off their best young Jedi Knights on a pointless suicide mission.

Sovv, meanwhile, concentrated his three fleet groups at the capital, anticipating the decisive clash, or planning to destroy the enemy units before they could combine. It almost worked - with a little help from Han Solo, he caught the second-largest Vong fleet near the Black Bantha protostar and won a crushing victory - but their main force converged too quickly, and Sovv was forced to fight in the sky above Galactic City, with his back to the planetary shield.

The Battle of Coruscant⁷ was the blackest day in New Republic history, and the nadir of Sien Sovv's career. At the start of the main battle, Chief Fey'lya⁸ tried to fire him, so he surrendered the tactical initiative to ensure the support of influential Senators and evacuated the Admiralty and NRI⁹ halfway across the galaxy to Mon Calamari.

After Coruscant, the Vong ruled the capital and had consolidated their grip on the Core and most of the Inner Rim, taking tribute from systems that had surrendered, and conquering the remaining New Republic bases.

Relatively quickly, however, the Defense Force put forth a new analysis: the Vong had suffered massively from their loss of ships and troops above Coruscant, and were now committed to fortify[ing] exposed positions in the Core. This received more emphasis than the enslavement of a trillion beings and the New Republic's obliteration as a functioning state.

Sovv spent the next few months calmly reorganizing the military, training recruits and building new ships, regrouping battle groups that had escaped intact from the rout, and sending them out on meaningless skirmishes to temper them for battle - a tactic the Vong had employed early in the war.¹⁰ Their first offensive move was an Intelligence-led raid to assassinate the Vong monarch at Obroa-skai. It was the sort of offer you couldn't really pass up, and perhaps the first smart move they'd made in the whole war - but it was deemed a failure. The Alliance had been fed false intelligence, and the Yuuzhan Vong had sacrificed a spare worldship to sneak the real Supreme Overlord through to Coruscant.¹¹

Then, a few weeks later, Sovv¹² managed to force another decisive battle. With Imperial help, he finally lured the enemy fleet into a trap at Ebaq 9 in the Deep Core, and threw everything he had at them - smugglers, mutineers, conscripts, even Jedi.

And won.

Tsavong Lah's ships were surrounded and besieged, trapped in low orbit under New Republic guns. The warmaster was killed in a brutal lightsaber duel with Jaina Solo. Sovv, at last, had his decisive victory.

Decisive victory, however, proved to have no major effect on the wider flow of the war. The defenses of the Vong occupation zone proved rather more resilient than the Northern Line had been - or else Sovv was content to allow half the galaxy to remain enslaved while he played with his statistics. Kashyyyk, halfway to the void, was now the First Fleet's forward base - supported by a chain of systems stretching back toward Mon Calamari, rather than a linear frontier. The rest was given to the Vong.

The leading Jedi Masters were still regarded with polite disdain because they wouldn't join the Defense Force and had blocked the use of genocide weapons.¹³ So they were allowed to launch a mystic quest into the Unknown Regions in pursuit of Zonama Sekot, a legendary living world that figured in the Yuuzhan Vong mythology.

Meanwhile, attempts were made to acquire expendable troops from neutral powers - the entries o the Hapans, Imperial, and some Chiss elements into the war were hailed as a series of diplomatic triumphs for the Galactic Alliance, the powerless new government-in-exile that had come into being alongside the High Command.

Finally, after another year of preparation, the Alliance fleets began to lumber into action. Sovv and his aides devised a complex series of feints and strikes, designed to conquer staging systems for an assault on Coruscant. This Trinity plan proved a disaster. It reminded the Vong that the Alliance systems were more than a series of game preserves for hunting wild infidels. In response, they went on the offensive against New Republic shipyards, overrunning Kuat and Hakassi before moving on to Mon Calamari.

Mon Calamari was barely saved when Zonama Sekot came out of hyperspace near Coruscant - the mythical world turned out to be a living battle station, a forest-covered Death Star that could summon Force lightning superlaseres from its treetops to destroy Vong dreadnoughts. This made the Vong panic. They recalled their entire fleet to face their crazy mythological enemy.

The Defense Force had avoided another pointless mauling at Dac¹⁴, and now the Vong simply gave them the opportunity that years of campaigns had failed to create. Thanks to Sekot, the enemy's military strength was concentrrated in one place - Coruscant - and Sovv had another chance to win a decisive battle.

The battle didn't happen the way Sovv planned. Instead, it split into multiple distinct engagements in different parts of the system. Hapan Battle Dragons defended Sekot against one Vong force, while Imperial Star Destroyers and TIEs established local air and space superiority above Galactic City to support the ground assault, and in a third battle, the Galactic Alliance was thrashed by the new warmaster, Nas Choka.¹⁵ It was all rendered irrelevant by an uprising, secured by oppressed heretics, antiwar factions in the Vong elite, and a few veteran Rebel operatives who'd wound up in the undercity by accident.

The destruction of the Supreme Overlord's flagship by Jedi Knight Jacen Solo provoked the enemy's surrender, but in retrospect, that may have been less significant than it seemed - the Vong had lost Coruscant, and the fleet battle was basically a brutal draw already. They didn't have the strength or will left to fight anymore.

Under Jedi pressuree, the surviving Vong were resettled in the Unknown Regions without further punishment, prompting Sovv to haul down his flag in protest; but the civilian government proved unable to function without him, and he was soon reappointed as Supreme Commander.

In hindsight, it seems clear that the Vong's success owed a great deal to New Republic and Galactic Alliance failings. The Defense Force commanders surrendered territory and worlds to chase the mirage of a decisive fleet battle.

They also neglected commerce raiding, pinpoint attacks, and local defense - tactics that had been instrumental for the Rebellion. Above all, they didn't allow local commanders much freedom to maneuver. Tsavong Lah was more than half monster, but at least he rewarded initiative, whereas Sovv sidelined and court-martialed people for it.

That's not the whole story, though.

It's all very well to say that Sien Sovv and Turk Brand sacrificed unnecessary lives to the dark gods of logistical discipline. It's probably true.

But no one stopped them, either. A lot of ordinary people saw what they were doing - and let them do it.

And that, I suppose, is what's really meant by the banality of evil.

Spoiler Footnotes :

¹ = After the Battle of Yavin. 25 ABY means that it started twenty-five years after Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. That's twenty-one years after Lando Calrissian and Wedge Antilles blew up the second Death Star.

² = Actually, that "Bothan support" was a New Republic contingent. But the admiral was Bothan. And it was still not nearly as much as Sovv and Brand theoretically could've sent.

³ = The Mother Jungle of the planet Ithor, apart from being an ecological wonder, was home to a species of tree that produced a certain kind of pollen. This bafforr tree pollen was uniquely reactive with the biological components that made up most of Yuuzhan Vong technology. It was basically a ready-made anti-Vong superweapon. At the Battle of Ithor, the allied fleets annihilated the Vong fleet that had hurried to the planet, desperate to destroy the primary source of bafforr trees. Then the Vong commander was lured into ritual combat against the Jedi Corran Horn and lost. As the Vong fleet went down in flames, his subordinates deployed their own biological weapons against Ithor's surface and effectively destroyed the Mother Jungle, an ecological catastrophe of gigantic proportions that doubled as a propaganda blow and a severe black eye for the Jedi, even though they hadn't done anything wrong.

⁴ = Centerpoint Station was a massive ancient alien space station in the Corellian system that possessed gravitic manipulators of immense power. These manipulators could be used for various purposes, such as the creation of a mass shadow that would effectively prevent hyperspace travel over a wide area, or firing a repulsor beam of immense power that could do things like induce supernovae or wipe out enemy fleets. Centerpoint was destroyed during the secession crisis of 40-41 ABY.

⁵ = Growing numbers of people in the galaxy blamed the Jedi for the Vong's success, partly because of simmering resentment because they were special, partly because of overflow from Palpatine's New Order-era anti-Jedi propaganda, and partly because Luke Skywalker was kind of bad at making sure his new Jedi Order remained disciplined. He had some pretty high-profile teaching failures, and teaching failures with Jedi can mean anything from garden-variety murder sprees to entire star systems being completely destroyed. So the Vong used the truce period to launch their own Jedi-hunting campaign, because they rightly saw the Jedi as some of their greatest potential foes, and organizations like the Peace Brigade helped the Vong out from inside galactic society.

⁶ = Yavin 4, the jungle moon that served as a Rebel base at the end of Episode IV, was the site of Luke Skywalker's Jedi academy during the period of the New Republic. As such, it was an excellent target for the Vong, and since Sovv et al. had demonstrated that they were uninterested in defending the Jedi, it was also an eminently takable one. Skywalker evacuated most of the academy successfully, but several students and apprentices were forced to flee into the jungle as the Vong set up shop on the moon. Eventually, most of them were rescued by the aforementioned smuggler-Jedi group, and the Vong were driven off.

⁷ = Well, the first Battle of Coruscant.

⁸ = Chief of State Borsk Fey'lya. In the actual novels that this account is based off of, Fey'lya is generally portrayed as a villainous character, the guy backstabbing the Jedi and the troops on the front lines, to the detriment of the war effort and galactic society. Sovv gets off easy in most of the books, despite obviously making most of the decisions that doomed trillions of lives. Fey'lya just let him have a free hand to do it.

⁹ = New Republic Intelligence.

¹⁰ = Also a tactic the Rebel Alliance used extensively, although one could make the argument that due to its paucity of resources, there was no such thing as a "meaningless" skirmish for the Rebels.

¹¹ = In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Coruscant, Wedge Antilles gathered a motley command of forces around the Super Star Destroyer Lusankya and captured Borleias from the Vong. Around Borleias, he, along with the Heroes of Yavin and a few other Jedi and Republic soldiers of renown, orchestrated a brilliant campaign that bloodied the Vong very badly and tied up their maneuver elements for several months before he finally abandoned the system, having suffered low casualties (except for the deliberate destruction of the Lusankya), and fled for Mon Calamari. He did this in direct violation of Sovv's orders, as well as those of the remaining New Republic politicians. The Imp author does not mention the Borleias campaign, oddly, even though it largely corroborates his or her main point: the fighting soldiers of the Defense Force knew what they were doing, but Sovv and Brand insisted on trying to throw away the war by chasing after the mirage of a decisive battle. Perhaps he or she did not wish to belabor an obvious point.

¹² = Actually, Ackbar came out of retirement to develop the Ebaq 9 plan. Sovv and Brand were the ones to implement it. Ackbar died shortly thereafter of natural causes.

¹³ = NRI developed a toxin designated Alpha Red from bafforr pollen and test-deployed it against Vong in the Outer Rim at various stages late in the war. When the Jedi found out about it, they managed to prevent its open use and destroyed what samples they could. NRI managed to keep making it in secret and attempted to use it against Vong bases in the final campaigns of the war, with nearly disastrous results.

¹⁴ = Dac was another name for Mon Calamari.

¹⁵ = While more or less correct, the author's language choice regarding the GA fleet is illuminating.

The first time I read that piece, I got chills.

That... was actually pretty awesome. I used to be a Star Wars nerd, and was positively raised on the stuff. I ought to get back into it sometime.

"Don't worry, I'l buy each of them a new pair of shoes."

-Said to his brother Abel just before Abel had him arrested and murdered. Erik was deep in a chess game when Abel angrily reminded him of how Abel's daughters had been forced to flee Erik's enemies barefoot through the snow.

 

[Mouthwash]

"You can crucify me, but you can't crucify my swag" -Jesus Christ

 

[Dachs]

lol swaggots

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

After the yacht Australia II won the 1983 America's Cup, a jubilant Prime Minister Hawke memorably stated: ‘Any boss who sacks a worker for not turning up today is a bum.’

 

[classical_hero]

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." Albert Einstein.

 

[Borachio]

"You can crucify me, but you can't crucify my swag" -Jesus Christ

Isn't that Bardock Obama?

 

[Arakhor]

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." Albert Einstein.

That's an entirely unsourced 'quotation' from Albert Einstein. If he said it at all, he may have been paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes or Baruch Spinoza or he may simply have been talking about string theory/quantum physics.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

“If facts conflict with a theory, either the theory must be changed or the facts.”

 

[Traitorfish]

I think there could be something to it, actually, if you take him to mean that theory is productive of facts, that "facts", rather than being discrete empirical truths, are the products of observations made within a certain theoretical framework. Which makes sense, when you consider that Einstein's theories entailed thinking about things like mass and space in very different ways than we were used to, and so lead to observations being made (and thus "facts" produced) that differed from what had previously been the case.

Not that I think it is real, mind, just that I think we can get a bit more out of it than "lol jüdische physik".

 

[madviking]

In addition, there was an instance of Einstein obvious fudging his theories (which, somehow, didn't turn out to be a fudge at all).

 

[Traitorfish]

“You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.”

-Bob Black

(Contrived alliterations make my skin crawl, but I support the sentiment of it.)

 

[madviking]

Beer must be made by food companies. It makes you wander the streets at 3 am looking for things to eat. "What's that, is it moving, get it!! It's a nun! FRY HER!! FRY HER!"

Vodka is a very deceptive drink, because you drink it and you think, "What is this? This is pointless! It's - you can't taste it, you can't smell it... Why did we waste our money on this, bloody- why are we on a traffic island?"

- the esteemed Dylan Moran

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

"I do not believe that things will turn out well; but the idea that they might — that is of vital importance." - Theodore Adorno