INTERLUDE:
From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation
It is altogether too easy for us, from the vantage point of almost five centuries, to look back on the old UN, the predecessor of Old Earth’s Consensus, as being nothing but a hive of corruption and villainy. Certainly there was a good deal of that, but also there were good men on the other side, as the wars began to unfold, fighting well in a bad cause. Sometimes, they even fought well in a good cause. . . .
With control of space, and no genuinely heavy manufacture anywhere on the planet in the early years—small engines, flintlocks, wooden ships, and a little surface collection of petroleum were the height of industrialization on Terra Nova for at least seventy years, and even then rare—the UN was in an excellent position to create of the planet its bureaucrats’ wildest fantasies by withholding arms from Faction X and giving them to Faction Y.
One reason it never quite worked that way appears to have been the nature of the UN, itself, being both factious and fractious. There were high ranking Muslim bureaucrats, who favored their co-religionists on planet, just as there were Catholics, Jews, Atheists, and Communists. And that was only one fault line in the UN’s colonization regime. There were also ethnic splits, with Han favoring Han, English speakers favoring “the cousins,” Spanish speakers doing no less for their co-culturalists.