Fourth Edolian War

Fourth Edolian War

Operation Free Axackal (incomplete)

In early 2004 (real life time) Allanea embarked on Operation Free Axackal, invading Edolian Axackal and sparking the Fourth Edolian War, also known as the Allanea-UnAPS War

Edolia and the rest of its allies fought a long, defensive fight against the Allanean forces. Militarily, the war was inconclusive, although the reputations of all sides were badly tarnished in the end. UnAPS had suffered a several resignations, most notably of Knootoss and Ilek-Vaad. Although Allanea was unable to take Axackal, it had suffered some 5 million casualties at the hands of Edolia and its allies. Edolia's dead numbered at nearly 100,000. There were almost 300 Knootian casualties, almost exclusively amongst its airforce that was defending -The Prophet-

Involved nations (incomplete)

On behalf of Allanea:

• Allanea
• Fantasan (joined in the last few days of the war)

On behalf of Edölia:

• Edolia
• Knootoss (withdrew in disagreement with post-war occupation plans after a nuclear weapon was used by Phyrric)
• Goobergunchia (early peace agreement)
• Illek-Vaad
• Hattia
• Barentsburg
• The Island States
• Austar Union
• Scandavian States
• Doujin
• New York and New Jersey
• Freethinkers

Conflict resolution

The war officially ended with the Treaty of Deriksburg. This treaty was never recognised by Knootoss in disagreement over the conditions imposed on Goobergunchia. Allanea was unable to retake Axackal, but found itself in control of -The Prophet- as a result of a treaty with Goobergunchia, which did not want to continue the fight. At the end of the war, realizing that it was woefully short of allies, Allanea founded the Ali’Staan Accord.

A King is history's slave

By Leo Tolstoy and Lousewies van der Laan

From the close of the year 20xx, intensified arming and concentrating of the Allanean forces began, and a year later these forces- millions of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army- moved from the west eastwards to the Axackal frontier, toward which Edölian and Scandavian forces had been similarly drawn. o­n April 9th* the forces of Allanea crossed the Axackali frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against o­ne another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, rapes, burglaries, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The historians tell us with naive assurance that its causes were the wrongs inflicted o­n the natives of Axackal by the initial takeover by the Scarlet Empire, the non-observance of the UnAPS charter, the ambition of Kazansky, the firmness of Erik von Blätterschplitt, the mistakes of the diplomats, and so o­n.

Consequently, it would o­nly have been necessary for the Knootian UnAPS ambassador Visser or the Scotican Secretary of diplomacy to have taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Kazansky to have written to Erik von Blätterschplitt: "My respected Brother, I consent to let the people of Axackal find their own path and I trust you to help them find it"- and there would have been no war.

Endless diversity of points of view, present themselves to the men who made the decisions then; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions of men in the Pacific killed and tortured each other either because Kazansky was ambitious or Erik von Blätterschplitt was firm, or the Axackali people wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Axackali people were wronged, millions of men from the other side of Haven killed and ruined the people of Allanea and were killed by them.

To us, who are not historians, the wish of this or that Allanean corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Kazansky's refusal to demobilise his troops and to leave the former province alone; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so many less men in Kazansky's army and the war could not have occurred. Had Kazansky not taken offence at the demand that he should leave Axackal alone, and had he not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no imperialist intrigues in the UnAPS headquarters and no Axackali viceroy, and had von Blätterschplitt not felt insulted, and had there not been a zealously patriotic government in Allanea, or a Revolution in Edölia with its subsequent dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the earlier conflicts between these nations, and so o­n. Without each of these causes nothing could have happened. So all these causes- myriads of causes- coincided to bring it about. And so there was no o­ne cause for that occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows.

The actions of Kazansky and von Blätterschplitt, o­n whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Kazansky and von Blätterschplitt (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any o­ne of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power- the soldiers who fired o­n lines of advancing prisoners, or ship captains who transported provisions and guns to the front- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.

We are forced to fall back o­n fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands o­n the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.

History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of leaders as a tool for its own purposes.

The people of the west moved eastwards into Haven to slay their fellow men, and by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for use of nuclear weapons, the Axackali uprising, the movement of troops into –the Prophet- undertaken (as it seemed to Kazansky) o­nly for the purpose of securing his southern border, the Allanean Presidents love and habit of war coinciding with his people's inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenditure o­n those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating popularity he received, the diplomatic negotiations which, at least from the UnAPS side, were carried o­n with a sincere desire to retain peace, but which o­nly wounded the self-love of both sides.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

Nothing is the cause. All this is o­nly the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Kazansky went to Deriksburg because he wanted to, and perished because Erik von Blätterschplitt desired his destruction. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.