There are few historical events as difficult to discuss as the galactic chaos that started in the late 11240s and climaxed in the mid-11250s. Even naming exactly what happened is difficult and tends to show more about the biases of the historian than lead to any objective description of the conflict. Most sources have settled on the “Imperial Revolution” to describe the first few years, but the broader conflict that opened up has as many names as stars in the skies. The Wars of Liberation? The Neo-Imperial Wars? The Oxalite-Khalasite Conflict? For the purposes of this book, “Revolutionary Wars” will be used as an attempt to avoid nominative judgment and because it represents most clearly what happened (for it was clearly a constellation of wars, rather than simply a vague conflict) and its proximate cause (the revolution).
If scholars are divided on what even to name the violent conflicts that erupted from the Imperial Revolution, that should give the uninformed reader an indication of just how fraught the historiography of this period is. The centuries immediately following the revolution were dominated by historians sympathetic to the so-called Oxalite faction, although over the past 150 years a new breed of historians with Khalasite sympathies has arisen. This book draws on sources from both camps, using them to look at a crucial figure of the revolution – one of the very few that neither side has attempted to revise the popular view of thus far.
Premier Ghale Thusif is arguably the single most important character of the Imperial Revolution. Even while he only officially held power for the last year of the Empire, his shadow stretches long across nearly the whole revolutionary period. In the books the author read while researching, he had been credited (or blamed) for nearly every single major event of the period. Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but it hits at a central truth: Thusif had a lot of influence. And it is entirely because he had so much influence that his historical reputation has suffered for it. Oxalite historians refuse to even mention his name without referring to him as “the traitor.” The most prominent Khalasite-aligned historian, Chynn Ju Lingfrey, described Thusif as “the man who, more than any Oxalite separatist or reactionary deputy, doomed the Confederation. It takes only a little exaggeration to extend that failure to the human project itself.”
Is all this true?
If it is, it certainly presents a puzzle that the historians so far have not confronted. If Thusif was such a traitor, if he was so responsible for the events that led to disaster, then why was he invested with so much power in the first place? Why did the Oxalites carry out such extensive negotiations with him even though nearly all of them had already made up their minds on succession? Why did factions of the Khalasites stick with him until nearly the last moment? In short, if Thusif was such a terrible leader, why did everyone around him want to deal with him? Why did he even have a base of support?
Readers who have already formed an opinion on Thusif likely are developing their rebuttals to these questions. Those readers are requested to read forward with an open mind. There is another perspective on the life of Ghale Thusif that has for too long been hidden away in the shadows. A side revealing a highly ideological man who was still pracitcal, making alliances and compromises in every way he could imagine to save the Confederation. Even when almost every other faction of the revolution had given up on the Confederation, Thusif, with herculean effort, managed to hold it together for a little while longer. He was a man struggling against forces more powerful than himself who nevertheless managed to pull them to a draw for a few months. This book will attempt to show that side of Ghale Thusif to readers.
It will not hide his failings or shortcomings, but it will not dwell on them either. Thusif was a complicated man no matter who is telling the story, this account is simply an attempt to come at it from a different, more sympathetic perspective. And hopefully, when readers finish this biography, they will read Thusif’s final days not as the ironic justice that so many portray it as, but rather as one of the great tragedies of history.