Shinju no Nectar - Ch. 107 - The Emperor of Koenig

[Salfaro]

"Empires will always fall, Ludwig! It's in the nature of their over-extension!"
"But have you considered, Kai...?"
"What? ...No...!"
"That's right. What if the empire was really, really big? A flawless plan!!!"

 

[Tsumi]

So uh... Can someone summarize what was kai and the emperor talking about? Politics make my head spin. Explain it as simple as you can please

Basically, the emperor has the grand delusion that if he united (really, forcefully subjugated) everyone under his ironfisted rule, there will be world peace. His reasoning is that wars occur because different nations with different priorities exist, and if everyone was in one nation with the same priorities there wouldn't be war. He doesn't care how many people have to die for it- the ends justifies the means. Kai basically just says no and that he will oppose the emperor with everything he has.

 

[Tsumi]

Guy wants to do what is obviously not going to work. No one man can have power over the globe. Not a single one. Should've just beaten budget Hitler down on the spot rather than letting him walk.

Kai is generally physically weaker than the natives of this world. It's only with the nectar that he becomes powerful.

 

[talisay999]

a lot of reading ugh

 

[Iskarioth]

The emperor himself never explicitly says anything about supplanting, suppressing, or exterminating different cultures. Koenig military officials have definitely shown a common belief in their cultural superiority, but Ludwig himself hasn't, including in his previous meeting with Kai in the dwarven lands. He only seems to be interested in military and political dominance. The key here is on page 19, he says "all nations move as one, gathered under one single banner, governed by one single ruler," crucially not "all people united as one nation" or anything of that sort. There's also nothing about "Koenig ruling the world," only him ruling it.

Granted, based on what Monroe deduces his plans for Huang Lia are in chapter 93, he definitely doesn't care about preserving culture either. There just isn't any evidence he cares about cultural identity at all, just in his own individual superiority.

Sure, what I said is conjecture based on his little speech but I doubt he's simply going for a Hitler 2.0 since he apparently knows Earths history somehow. So as he alluded too, he knows how those Empires based on simple conquest and domination ended. He wants to do it differently, even suggest that there's not gonna be any more wore when everyone is part of the same empire.

 

[Tsumi]

Sure, what I said is conjecture based on his little speech but I doubt he's simply going for a Hitler 2.0 since he apparently knows Earths history somehow. So as he alluded too, he knows how those Empires based on simple conquest and domination ended. He wants to do it differently, even suggest that there's not gonna be any more wore when everyone is part of the same empire.

He's not really doing it differently though. The only difference is rather than justifying it through some sort of cultural, religious, or economic cause, he's using world peace as his justification. The method is still use of deadly force on anyone that dissents or resists. Softening up nations by encouraging devastating civil wars is part of the strategy.

 

[Meijin]

It's always ze not!Germans up to these ploys. I would not be surprised if his marebito was at least a century further down from Kai's time given that ray gun the dark elf dude had. I predict that while the war is kicking off in China, the Germans and the Romans will team up to divide and conquer the region. England will order Kai to stay the fuck away from the mess and I'm guessing the dwarves will become the next target for their production lines. I hope this ends in Kai having to fight a nuclear armed jet.

 

[zuflis11]

so many big and long pep talk only to end up with classic textbook tyranny: "everything, everyone under one rule, which is me."
if the world only consist of one pangea with relatively same condition from end to end, maybe sure.

also what the author mean by no one ever taken that path? no one ever succeed, thats more like it.

 

[ChaosAndBunnies]

All very dramatic but didn't make much sense. He's saying autonomy is bad, and then he argues that globalization destroyed Earth. How is globalization the end result of autonomy? It's the end result of oligarchy and denying self-determination. Also the world united under a single ruler has never been done? Alexander, Rome, Gengis Khan, Britain.

Yeah, basically every example of something resembling a "world-spanning empire" has two things in common; they become massively corrupt, or shatter immediately. His plan isn't just arrogant, it's naïve.

On the whole, chasing a perfect system in the first place is a fools errand, since every system is always going to be both made and run by imperfect humans. The only thing we can do is iterate on as many different systems through trail and error to create gradually less-flawed systems, because the world is just too complex to account for with just ambition and idealism.

The history of the world is just an ongoing science experiment trying to discover the least-terrible way to make a functioning society, and all he's really doing is pausing all testing for 20-100 years.

 

[Ruhrpottpatriot]

But Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40k worked

Pfff... The Imperium of Man """works""" because it's anything but a unified state. It's ridden with internal strife, civil wars, inefficient, cruel and beleaguered with all kinds of external enemies. It """works""" because the mass of it's rotten corpse is still on a trajectory set by the Emperor in 30k and we all know how his grand dream of a unified mankind turned out. And that happened even though you had the most capable and powerful ruler mankind had ever (and will ever) seen.

Also I dont think he Emperor is right because the issue is ... he is mortal and no matter how good and capable ruler he is, it will eventually break apart, a unification needs to come from a strong desire like what happened in Italy and Germany or from a system that gets too complex and useful to be torn down, the the EU.

That goes exactly into the direction Yang Wenli makes in LoGH. No matter ho great of a ruler Reinhard is, he is just a man and therefore mortal and nobody knows if the next ruler is as wise or capable as the previous.

Democracy combined with republicanism have the advantage that it divides power and control over said power onto many shoulders. This removes the single point of failure (even if Ludwig is eternally young, he can still be assassinated) and makes sure that at least somewhat capable people are ruling and that inept rulers can be ousted.

And before someone comments: No democracy and republicanism are not the same, the latter is the ideology, the former is the source of said ideology. You can have a democratic monarchy (the UK) and you can have an dictatorial republic (the Roman republic at certain times).