Offensive and Defensive Liberations
By Lord Dominator
By Lord Dominator
| Lord Dominator has written three Security Council resolutions and one General Assembly resolution, as well as being the maintainer for the "Passed Security Council Resolutions" thread on the NS Forums. Having much expertise in liberations (and especially those of the offensive kind), Lord Dominator has passed resolutions such as "Liberate Confederation of Corrupt Dictators", which has become one of the most widely-known offensive liberations in the modern landscape of the game. |
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a distinct hatred of La Navasse for inventing the term ‘neoliberation’ to refer to the recent trends of using liberations to force open regions for the purposes of fashbashing. As is known, I prefer to call them offensive liberations, and will bash people over the head until they do the same. However, I’ve only recently thought about what this implies about liberations in general. Thus, a short essay on the subject.
Offensive liberations obviously refer to liberations being used as an offensive “weapon” so to speak. That is, an offensive liberation refers to situations when liberations are used on regions that don’t desire regions, and aren’t meant to protect any native population. Most typically, this means against fascist regions or regions harboring similarly distasteful ideologies. The notable extant offensive liberations bear this out – all three are against regions accused of harboring and/or recruiting distasteful ideologies and hate speech. Perhaps in the future, offensive liberations will be used against other regions, such as founderless raider regions as a form of revenge from natives, but at the present time this isn’t the case and isn't likely to become the case (if nothing else, due to the lack of notable raider regions likely to go founderless anytime soon).
Interestingly, the existence of an offensive form of liberations implies a defensive form. While it may make sense to think that this would mean some new, yet to be thought of use for liberations, the more likely answer in my mind is simply that defensive liberations are what we usually use liberations for: protecting native populations (that desire it, at least).
In other words, offensive liberations are simply the inverse of standard liberations (actually defensive liberations, in this conception) because they exist at precise cross-purposes in usual conception – we apply defensive liberations to protect native populations if they do desire, while offensive liberations are designed to harm native populations against their will when regular military force isn’t an option.
