As briefly discussed in Chapter 5, the situation on Mawr had grown out of hand. A fraction of the army had mutinied, joining and arming rioters in opposition to the Necrotic Reforms. Garrison General Tonnisey “Nicholeyevish” Michael instituted a strict martial law that only further inflamed passions. After the rebels ambushed a group of soldiers in the streets of the planetary capital, General Nicholeyevish made a tactical retreat into the spaceport to siege the planet.
Nicholeyevish’s choice to retreat was a critical error. He had severely underestimated the degree to which the Necrotic Reforms had weakened the military structure. Upon calling for reinforcements, it took him nearly twelve hours to get in contact with anyone able to help him. Once he did, other generals were only willing to spare a handful of units to reinforce him. All were either worried (or dealing) with unrest on their own or biding their time to see whether or not they could play kingmaker – something they would be unable to do without a large army at their disposal.
Unable to get any significant assistance from outside, Nicholeyevish had just left an entire planet already in rebellion on its own with several days to consolidate and prepare itself. When he sent a couple of scouting ships to find a secure landing position, Nicholeyevish got a nasty surprise: the rebels, with the help of some mutineers, had hacked into the planet’s anti-spacecraft weapons. Unless he tried something drastic or was willing to risk a large percentage of his army perishing in the descent, Nicholeyevish had stranded himself off Mawr.
It wasn’t all bad news for General Nicholeyevish though. In the rebel camp, schisms were already developing. The initial rebels had been a combination of students, radical workers, and small business owners. With Nicholeyevish’s retreat, the rebels were joined by the planetary elites who were less willing to join in open warfare but had always resented the military. This popular alliance was successful in capturing the anti-spacecraft weaponry, but began to fracture almost immediately afterward.
The issue was that no faction on Mawr trusted any other. The radical workers were opposed to the business owners, both large and small, both for obvious reasons of class warfare and the more specific grievances that many of the ancestors of the elite had collaborated with the military to bring an end to the coronation strike. This left the radical workers in an alliance with the students and it was often difficult to tell which of them was taking the lead.
Meanwhile, the small business owners were shut out from seeking the support of the radical workers and their interests were just enough out of alignment with the elites to breed resentment. The resentment felt by the small business owners toward the Mawrian elites was of a different kind than that was felt by the radical workers though. Rather than a sort of justified rage at a perceived class war, the small business owners were far fuzzier in their complaints. There was a feeling that the elites were lording their power over them, that they had cheated. The small business owner worked long, hard hours and was barely able to earn a living, while being beset on one side by union organizers who refused to accept that they deserved a profit too and on the other side by the elites who were conspiring against them. That was how many of them saw it at least. The popular front had split into three factions, all vying for power – and to select their delegate.
The problem the small business owners ran into was that they lacked power. The elites had capital they could throw around, the worker-student alliance had numbers, while the small business owners had neither. They had a choice then: they could either pick a side to support, a support that would most likely prove decisive from any confrontation, or they could try and find a new source of political power. The small businesses picked the latter. They roused the Pandora’s box of the unradical workers.
Speeches were made on street corners, videos were broadcast across the planetary Internet, and fliers were pasted on every door. The so-called radical workers would destroy your job and lead to totalitarianism (this claim was not helped by a couple of the students seeming to call for just that) while the elites were already now conspiring to sell out the rebellion to General Nicholeyevish. A middle path was needed! Lacking capital or numbers, the small businesses had resorted to demagoguery.
This briefly had the desired effect. The planet was already in a tense mood and had an itchy trigger finger. Even without fully believing them, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves on the streets at marches rejecting any return to authoritarian rule, whether it be led by generals or professors. For a moment, the small businesses were ascendent.
It was only for a moment though. While the leaders of their movement were in the middle of a conference to decide on Mawr’s delegate, the streets turned to unrest. The division between the radical workers and unradical workers was not nearly as clean cut as any capitalist may have desired. A “radical worker” was typically friends with at least a half dozen unradical ones. And while they were unable to convince every unradical that they had been duped, even the workers suspicious of unions were similarly suspicious of their bosses. The mood on the street was changing rapidly, and cheers in favor of democracy and against the academic wreckers were quickly turning to cheers against the bosses.
How widespread this was shouldn’t be exaggerated. Certainly a majority of the crowds were still cheering the old line. But it wasn’t negligble either. Auruthur Hents’ excellent and extremely detailed monograph on the early revolution in Mawr estimated that roughly 15% of the marchers had turned against the march’s original leaders. Even that number doesn’t fully capture it though, because the marchers that had turned were also far more willing to engage in militarism than the ones who hadn’t. This isn’t entirely unsurprising, the radical workers started by trying to convince the workers who were already politically the closest to radicals, and thus the most likely to be open to weapons in the first place.
The first shots of the Mawrian Civil War erupted as night fell. It isn’t even clear where in the city the first shots were fired, but over the next week thousands left the city. The capital became a battlefield between worker-student aligned militias and small business/anti-authoritarian aligned ones. The elites fled the city and rather than allying with the Imperial military as everyone assumed they would, managed to peacefully perform a coup d’etat in Mawr’s second city, fortifying themselves within it. With this chaos, the military was able to get a foothold (although only a foothold – while they were distracted, all sides mostly left the anti-spacecraft weaponry alone, preventing major fleet movements. Everyone knew it was in their interest to avoid letting the military in, they simply weren’t trusted enough to attempt an alliance). The intense four sided civil war had begun.
It was from these four factions that four of the five delegates who arrived at the Symposium were selected. The fifth was from an organization that had formed in the opening hours of the war known as the Mawrian Peace Alliance, a group of moderates from all factions (except the military) that advocated peace as soon as possible.
Colonel Adrien Napoleon was the first to arrive on the morning after most other delegates had arrived. A fat man with a large beard, Napoleon was General Nicholeyevish’s second-in-command and selected because of good temper and ability to get along well with others. Compared to Nicholeyevish’s iron fist and strict discipline, Napoleon was much easier to get along with. During the occupation, elites who were trying to get in the general’s good books would often approach Napoleon first. Nicholeyevish’s choice of Napoleon indicated that he hadn’t totally divorced himself from reality; he recognized that the situation was poor and he needed to be building bridges rather than presenting with stubborn bluster. He was hoping to use Napoleon’s amiability and charisma to garner support for the military, even from non-military delegates.
Before Napoleon was able to make much headway though, two other delegates arrived at nearly the same time: Venice Ghurka, representing the worker-student alliance, and Peng Barahata, representing the elite. Ghurka and Barahata were nearly polar opposites. Ghurka was short and stout, while Barahata was tall and slender, his contemporaries describing him as “wraith-like.” Ghurka kept herself meticulously groomed, making sure that not a single hair on her body was out of place and that she was always the most well dressed person in the room. Meanwhile, Barahata was disorganized and dishelved, always looking like he had just woken up. And yet, despite their differences in both appearance and ideology, the two of them got on remarkably well. The two had known each other for years and been friendly on Mawr despite their different stations and even with the strain of the civil war that friendship hadn’t been broken. While it would be inaccurate to say that the radical delegate and elite delegate were in an alliance, they certainly had a closer working relationship than any of the other Mawrian delegate claimants.
With the arrival of Ghurka, Barahata, and Napoleon, the symposium delegates started to get concerned. Vestin Vestowski, still thinking he had all the power, immediately pushed for Napoleon to be recognized as the official delegate from Mawr. Legally speaking, Vestowski was probably correct. The planet was still officially under military occupation and as the official government of Mawr it was legally the military’s right to decide on the delegate. The issue for Vestowski was that while the symposium may have been willing to accept that reasoning two days ago, his aggressiveness and willingness to override the less experienced delegates had worn their patience thin. Now it didn’t matter that Vestowski may have technically been correct, a faction in opposition to Vestowski had been organizing during the night and were ready to flex their muscles.
The faction, never as formally organized as the later factions of the revolutions, is known in history as the Anti-Imperials. That name is a bit of misnomer because many of them weren’t really opposed to the Empire or Emperor, they were just opposed to Vestowski’s pro-Imperial absolutism faction and in favor of a more democracy symposium (it’s worth noting how far already the concept of a “symposium” has left its original definition. A democratic symposium doesn’t make any sense, in a normal symposium there are no votes, it’s simply a place for conversation and debate. Here it is easy to see how Vestowski’s clawing for power and ideological purity was creating the space to doom the project he supported).
The Anti-Imperials were led by a delegate from Sula named Q Loakh. On Sula, Q had been the head of police and had been elected on a genuinely popular ticket after running a charismatic campaign. They were legitimately popular at home and that popularity and charisma translated to the early stages of the revolution. But there was a darker side to Q, one that would lead them to their eventual fate. They were an inveterate plotter, constantly working in the shadows to subtly move things in their direction. While part of their election had been a genuinely popular ticket, it would come out after their death that Q had blackmailed the only person who could have been a threat out of running to be delegate. They weren’t just charismatic, they were manipulative; they weren’t just competent, they were controlling. These were all skills in the early revolution, especially when they seemed valuable to nearly every other delegate who wanted to oppose Vestowski, but as the revolution heated up, the early moves and promises Q made would come back to bite them.
Of those promises, none was more important for securing the anti-Vestowski alliance than the one to never favor any group or class over another. While it seems obvious in retrospect that Vestowski had organized a voting bloc to strongarm through ultra conservative policies, it’s important to remember that nearly none of the delegates had any experience with democracy in this way, either because they didn’t live in democracies or because they weren’t politicians in the democracies that they did live in. There was a lack of political knowledge and experience. The ones who had picked up on this fact and were scrambling to put up an opposition were from all different stripes, most of them having gained experience in politics in a different way: a few in actual legislatures, some like Q in the criminal underground, some in corporate wars, and some like Ghale Thusif in unions (Thusif was not involved in the earliest stages of the Anti-Imperial planning, but he was a minor member by the time Ghurka and Barahata arrived). This meant that the class of delegates politically knowledgable enough to organize an opposition came from drastically different backgrounds and had drastically different interests. Q’s solution to this was to simply declare that this bloc, and Q themself as the leader of the bloc, would not pass policies solely for the sake of a single group. While it is likely most delegates involved, including Q, understood that this would only push a confrontation between unworkable ideologies down the road, it was seen as a necessary fiction in order to attack the Imperials, who they were all strongly opposed to.
When Vestowski called for a vote to confirm Napoleon as Mawr’s delegate, he was met with a surprise: a majority denied to confirm Napoleon was a delegate. As the vote was being made, Q rose and began to shout at Vestowski, accusing him of being a reactionary and rejecting the will of the Emperor by imposing his will on the symposium. In response, Vestowski, physically much larger than Q, ran across the room to confront them. Multiple sources describe a beet red Vestowski staring down at Q, defiantly looking up. Someone, it’s unclear who, took a picture of the interaction and it quickly became the most enduring image of the first days of the revolution. After a few moments, Vestowski was able to compose himself and retreated to conspire with his colleagues. Q returned as well and the Anti-Imperial bloc began discussions about whether to accept Ghurka or Barahata as Mawr’s delegate, with the other being given the assistant role that everyone was used to by now.
Before any decisions could be made though, another wrench was thrown in the works: 2 more delegates arrived in quick succession. The first was Halph Tromwitz, a representative of the Mawrian small business community. Tromwitz had been one of the best demagogic speakers, preaching the dangers of authoritarian rule and the virtues of the Mawrian democracy that had been destroyed by the Coronation Strike. He was personally cool toward Ghurka and Barahata, but able and willing to work with them.
While Tromwitz’s arrival ruined the Anti-Imperials’ ready solution, it was the arrival of the Peace Alliance delegate Ithic Illian that really destroyed things. In theory, Illian should have been the perfect candidate. With Mawrian society disintegrating into civil war, an organization genuinely made up of a cross class alliance presenting a candidate who would be workable to all sectors would be the obvious solution to the problem. But Ithic Illian was not a candidate acceptable to all sectors, because every single other delegate from Mawr hated him and every other delegate at the symposium quickly grew to hate him too. On a personal level, he was rude, demanding, and showed absolutely no regard for anyone other than himself. He was absolutely unable to work with anybody who did not defer in every way to his pettiest desires and even then he had a habit of blowing up in fits of rage. Historians are baffled to this day as to why the Peace Alliance would send someone so ill fitted to represent them and the only two conclusions that have any acceptance is that Illian either had large amounts of blackmail or that the Alliance never thought their candidate would be seriously considered and just wanted to get rid of him. Either way, it was a disastrous political move that probably doomed their mission before it even got a chance to start.
Upon interacting with him, Illian was nearly immediately ruled out as a possible delegate. Tromwitz however presented a greater difficulty. While the Anti-Imperials were too hostile to the conservative military to ever consider Napoleon, to them Ghurka, Barahata, and Tromwitz all seemed to have an equal claim. While Tromwitz had his accusations of demagoguery and authoritarianism, neither Ghurka nor Barahata were personally demagogic or authoritarian. Without the ability to quickly communicate with Mawr (and lacking the time to do so too), the Anti-Imperials had no reason to discount either of them. They were left with a collection of three individuals each representing a different sector of Mawrian society and no reason to select one as the delegate over the other.
This presented a serious issue to the burgeoning Anti-Imperial coalition. As a coalition that explicitly rejected class interests, making a delegate selection would explicitly require them to favor a specific class interest. To make this selection would seriously compromise and potentially doom the coalition, creating a vacuum out of which anything might form, most immediately concerningly a resurgence in the so recently beaten back Vestowski. In order to maintain the stability of the coalition, a compromise would have to be found.
After an hour of deliberation, it was Colonel Javier Simsek who proposed the solution. Colonel Simsek had been assigned as a staff officer to Voltos, an obscure dependency entirely under military rule. He had served his duty well and been chosen by his commanding officer to represent Voltos at the symposium. Unlike most military delegates however, Simsek personally held quite unconservative views. While he was able to repress his views for the sake of the military, he found the culture of the institution to be stultifying and needlessly reactionary. He was one of the first delegates to join Q’s Anti-Imperial bloc and would remain shockingly prescient, able to foresee the turns of the revolution before they happened and move with the times where so many delegates could not.
Colonel Simsek’s solution was simple: Ghurka, Tromwitz, and Barahata would all be 1/3 of a delegate. In order to make any decisions or to speak as a group, two of them would need to be in agreement. This way, no single faction would be placed above any other and an alliance for what was taken to represent the majority of Mawrian civil society would make the decisions.
Upon being recommended, Simsek’s suggestion was highly controvertial. There was a reason so many conflicted planets had sent two people, one as the official delegate and one as their “aide.” The Emperor’s decree had been pretty clear that each delegate was supposed to be a single person. Simsek’s proposal would abstract that away, turning the “delegate” into an abstract idea which could be split into pieces. While most of the Anti-Imperials were willing to personally accept this idea, there was significant concern that the Emperor would not. Any choice they made they knew could risk angering the Emperor and that was a confrontation they were certain they would lose. To ignore the clear instructions of the Emperor was exactly the sort of risk the Anti-Imperials were worried about.
The problem was they could see no other way. None of them wanted to pick one of the other and the other two options of military or Peace Alliance were both unacceptable. It would have to be one of the rebel factions and over the course of several hours the Anti-Imperials slowly came to understand there was no other solution they could accept. They voted among themselves and an overwhelming majority were in favor of the Simsek plan.
When informed of the plan, all three of the proposed delegates were open to it. All three of them could work with each other, even with the bad blood back on Mawr. With a little wrangling, the Anti-Imperials were able to get a majority of delegates to the Symposium to approve the plan as well. Vestowski fumed over it, but his power was broken. He rested his hopes that when the Emperor arrived he would be able to reclaim his former prominence, but his treatment by the Emperor would be much different than he expected. The Mawr Dispute was not a temporary setback, the moments before it began would be his peak.
There were unforeseen consequences to this resolution. Notably, none of the Anti-Imperials had thought about how the Mawrians back on Mawr would feel about it. A very common theme of the revolution was that the delegates in the Vaird would fail to fully consider the impact of their policies on the planet they were ruling or representing, a problem that would become more acute over the course of the revolution as events outside the Varid moved more quickly and the delegates veered farther and farther from representing the interests of those who elected or selected them. The reaction back on Mawr to the resolution of the dispute was the first example of this.
On Mawr, the student-worker alliance was in a shooting war against the alleged anti-authoritarian forces. The elites had to flee their homes in response to the fighting and perform a coup in the second city of the planet. It was not just bad vibes or tensions on Mawr that was driving people apart, it was civil war. Friends were dying in each other’s arms, families were being murdered, and the streets were literally red with blood. The news that their representatives at the Symposium were all getting along and in alliance did not stop the fighting, it only made every side in the conflict expel their representatives. The triumvirate of Ghurka, Tromwitz, and Barahata would stay in the Vaird and remain active in revolutionary politics there, but they no longer represented any actual interests in the Empire. Their constituents were killing each other.
The other isuse was that the Symposium had totally sidelined Colonel Napoleon. To them this seemed obvious, he was trying to be forced on the Symposium by the reactionary Vestowski. But importantly, Napoleon did have the best legal claim to represent Mawr. It had been under military occupation, the military was legally in charge of the planet and legally had the right to select the planet’s delegate. It was not the triumvirate the Emperor would have issue with – it was that the Anti-Imperials had accidentally declared that the Symposium had the right to unilaterally overrule the laws of the Empire. A confrontation was made inevitable.