Re: The First Intersentient War

Noam Izenberg wrote:

> > Generals and Admirals
> > would be fighting a war for "All the Marbles"
> > with one hand tied behind their back by the
> > public's panic and fears of widescale rioting and
> > worldwide revolution and unrest.
>
> Was that ever a problem in WWII within the Allied powers - say after
> Pearl Harbor? I would think the answer is no, but with populations an
> order of magnitude higher, I suppose the three sigma groups of
> various-mongers are commensurately larger.

While they didn't give into it, there was plenty of pressure from within
the
United States to "protect the home waters" with what was left of the
fleet
after Pearl Harbor.  The civilians on the West Coast were *very* worried
that
the Japanese might come after the continental US while the fleet
carriers
were off nosing around elsewhere.  Probably the one factor that allowed
the
US Navy to avoid falling victim to that sort of panic was the fact that
Japanese codes had been broken, and that they actually had some idea of
Japanese intentions (not that they could broadcast that fact to the
public,
mind you!).  However, that panic, intense as it was, lasted a relatively
short period of time, all things considered.  The difference between
WWII and
the ISW is presumably that the humans have no friggin' idea of the
intentions
of the Kra'Vak (other than Kill!  Kill! Kill!).

Mark

>
>
> Laserlight said:
>
> > Maybe the KV think we're a subject race of the Really Bad Dudes (eg
the
> > Cthulhoid/Puppetmaster Hive) who are on the other side of us and
> > they're just going through us to get to them.  And it turns out that
we
> > should've joined the KV instead of fighting them.
>
> There was a giant robot-suit comic in the mid-late 80's called Dynamo
> Joe that had a similar plot - the first bad-but-misunderstood aliens
> were SV/hive mind types. I don't know if they ever got around to
> unveiling the uber-opponents. There are quite a few plots out there
like
> that, and an eminently reasonable twist  for the 23rd century
GZG-verse.
>