The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[Darth Wong]

Yeah, the surviving demons benefit from Hiroshima syndrome, ie- "we fucked 'em up real good, so our vengeful bloodlust is satisfied". The countless deceased demons didn't find us too compassionate at all.

Similarly, I imagine angels will find some mercy at our hands ... once we've killed enough of them to feel that we've exacted our revenge. It doesn't mean we're downplaying or forgiving anything; it just means that we want our vengeance but we're willing to stop once we've taken it.

[w34v0r]

Over the past two thousand years, incalculable amounts of suffering have been inflicted upon humans by each other in the name of Yahweh and his fraudulent teachings. How does that factor into your calculation?

Religion used just as an excuse to do whatever they wanted. Had there not been any Abrahamic faiths, there'd still be wars and killing, maybe just slightly more honest ones. Not everything evil can be traced back to religion, there will be assholes no matter when or where you are.

Maybe not the Crusades so much though.

And as you said yourself, Yay-yay didn't kill those people, people killed those people. If someone tells you to kill someone, and you do it. Who's to blame, you, or some bum off the street talking out of his head, that you just so happened to listen to, and who's rantings you followed through?

[Tanskanen]

I can't resist the temptation to make my thoughts known, so I'll toss in my two € cents.

I occurs to me that if Michael really wanted to "win" the war on humans (I'm assuming he has good intel on earth's economy & military capacities), he wouldn't attack heavily fortified & defended targets, but would start quick portal in - strike - portal out campaigns against highly vulnerable strategic assets.

Targets such as oil refineries, gas-pipes, oil-pipes, oil rigs, oil tankers, cargo ships, power plants, HV-power transport facilities (power lines and electrical transformers), water plants, sewage facilities, and chemical industry.
Factories don't work without power & supplies and high-voltage lines are just wayy too long to effectively defend and are easily wrecked. Seagoing cargo vessels and oil tankers are also a soft target, if a ragtag bunch of somali can do it, angelic pirates would have it easy. (Is there even an end to all the nasty things one could do with portals, a hi-jacked LNG (liquefied natural gas) transport ship and a truly evil mind?)

Can you imagine the effect of our society's wheels grinding to a halt would have on the people?
Sure, it wouldn't effect immediately, but the end results would be devastating and given long enough time, would cripple most large-scale military operations.
This is how I would do it, if I were in his shoes. After all, Michael isn't trying to occupy earth, that would be a guaranteed failure. (Angels are too few in number, and humans beat them hands down in procreation rate. The numbers are just too stacked against such attempts.)
As I read it, his objective isn't so much to make battle with humans but to keep us from storming heaven's walls and bringing wholesale slaughter upon angels.

-Tanskanen

--
Aye, it does become easier to get a bit of the "heave-ho" wit' the grog-goggles in place. Mostly 'cause the grog's 10%
methanol: temporary blindness is a blessin' to those of us of the less genteel faces.
-DeasIreae

[Darth Wong]

Over the past two thousand years, incalculable amounts of suffering have been inflicted upon humans by each other in the name of Yahweh and his fraudulent teachings. How does that factor into your calculation?

Religion used just as an excuse to do whatever they wanted. Had there not been any Abrahamic faiths, there'd still be wars and killing, maybe just slightly more honest ones. Not everything evil can be traced back to religion, there will be assholes no matter when or where you are.

Maybe not the Crusades so much though.

And as you said yourself, Yay-yay didn't kill those people, people killed those people. If someone tells you to kill someone, and you do it. Who's to blame, you, or some bum off the street talking out of his head, that you just so happened to listen to, and who's rantings you followed through?

So what do you think of the Hitler example? Is he OK, since he never actually killed or tortured anyone, he just convinced others to do so, and created an ideology which encouraged it? By your logic, should we assume that if there were no Nazism, the same number of deaths would probably have occurred anyway, since people always find excuses to kill each other?

[Simon_Jester]

But yes, this is very true. However, there's still an essential problem: if an entire nation or species of beings act like monsters, how much of that can you shrug off as "well, you had bad leaders?"

Quite a lot, if you know perfectly well that your own group is equally capable of such atrocities when given the right ideological leadership.

At the beginning of WW2, FDR made a point of saying that innocent civilians should not be bombed, and it was widely understood in our society that only the "Huns" would do that. We civilized people would not; it was simply unconscionable and immoral. But by the end of the war, we were using incendiaries and nuclear weapons on civilians, and patting ourselves on the back for doing it. There is a very thin line that separates us from savages at any given time.

I know. I don't think we should be self-congratulatory about how we "didn't stoop" to committing any given horror and thinking of ourselves as vastly better than those who did. Because as you say, we could have done the same things. We could have been that bad, but for the grace of... well, call it fate.

But there's a more important point that starts from there. Assume that we can and should find some forgiveness after the fact for people who did really horrible things. Given that we can forgive them, we should be equally prepared to forgive people who did less horrible things. If we're fighting enemies X and Y, and Y is less brutal than X, we should not be more brutal to Y than we were to X.

Satan came out and told us what the score was. For all his evil, he stabbed us in the front. By contrast, in the context of the story Yahweh was the accessory masquerading as a good guy who stabbed us in the back. In a sense, I think there's a feeling that if Yahweh had been up-front about the whole thing, we'd be irritated, but because he wasn't, we're furious. In essence, we'd be less angry if he'd taken the Greek pantheon's route.

That's the reasoning, but it still bugs me. I don't consider lying about what a bastard you are to be as great a crime as actually being that great a bastard, let alone being a far worse bastard and pleading "but at least I'm honest!"

Now, in this setting I consider a cruise missile to the face to be a perfectly reasonable punishment for Yahweh just as for Satan. Fine by me. But to take an example, vaporizing the Celestial City when we didn't vaporize Dis would be... too extreme, I think.

What disturbs and confuses me is the idea that this is worse than the actions of the beings he handed people over to. He's a grand-scale fraud and an accessory to mass torture and murder; how is this worse than being a torturer and murderer?

Over the past two thousand years, incalculable amounts of suffering have been inflicted upon humans by each other in the name of Yahweh and his fraudulent teachings. How does that factor into your calculation?

Remember that Adolf Hitler did not personally torture anyone: he just inspired others to do so. Yet for that, we consider him one of history's greatest monsters. Why does Yahweh not qualify for similar criteria?

Ah... I wrote that, not him.

Anyway, he certainly qualifies. I have no problem with him being blown to bits. He's earned it, fair and square. But I have this premonition of the human attitude towards Heaven in this story being "leave no stone standing atop another, then sow the fields with radioactive salt." That's the possibility that disturbs me, because it involves being more brutal to our lesser enemy than to our greater one.

Even factoring in the suffering humans inflicted on each other in his name, I still think that's true- the angels collectively bear responsibility for less evil than the demons collectively. Because even factoring in the absolute worst humans could do to each other over all that time, horrors even greater than the ones that really happened... we still couldn't have done each other as much harm as the demons did to our dead. If nothing else, trying to do that much harm would have killed living humans before they could suffer anything compared to millenia in a river of burning pitch.

Now, looking at the case, Yahweh is personally responsible for more than enough evil to deserve death; a similar case can be made for most of his henchmen (certainly including Michael). I'm only against spreading that "they deserve to die" argument to the whole population of the place, given that we didn't spread it to the population of Hell.

[w34v0r]

Wong,
I'm going to try and not Godwin this thread anymore than necessary.
But here goes...

Most people think Europe would have had another war regardless of who was put in charge of Germany. In fact, had the Communists taken hold, who knows what kind of havoc that would've brought? Yes, the Holocaust gets trotted out time and time again as some kind of unique event in human history. It wasn't though. If anything, it was just business as usual when it came to war. The Germans had a 'slave' population that they used for labour, and killed those that they weren't using. Why no such rage for Stalin, Mao, Dafur, or Cambodia? PR, that's why.
I'm not saying what they did wasn't horrible, but it wasn't as special a case as people make it out to be.

To answer your first question of who's worse, the General who orders his soldiers to kill, or the soldiers who do the killing?
Well, in a military force, disobeying an order doesn't usually have positive consequences. So the soldier is in a lose/lose situation. So what will he/she do? Cover their ass. They might not want to do it, but if it comes down between some poor smuck and yourself, most people will choose to save themselves. Though that doesn't exactly absolve them of guilt in a legal sense. (Abu Ghraib)
The originator of the idea/order at the very least is guilty of incitement, but since we tend to hold those in power to a higher standard, they'd (normally) bear the brunt of the guilt. So if an officer ordered one of his troops to do something against the law, they'd be punished more severely than the person who actually carried out the order. (at least in a perfect world)

[Bakustra]

Wong,
I'm going to try and not Godwin this thread anymore than necessary.
But here goes...

Most people think Europe would have had another war regardless of who was put in charge of Germany. In fact, had the Communists taken hold, who knows what kind of havoc that would've brought? Yes, the Holocaust gets trotted out time and time again as some kind of unique event in human history. It wasn't though. If anything, it was just business as usual when it came to war. The Germans had a 'slave' population that they used for labour, and killed those that they weren't using. Why no such rage for Stalin, Mao, Dafur, or Cambodia? PR, that's why.
I'm not saying what they did wasn't horrible, but it wasn't as special a case as people make it out to be.

In the first case, Stalin and Mao's deaths were by no means on the same order as the Nazis. Most of the deaths caused by them were from shortsighted or negligent policies. The Nazis deliberately acted to murder as many people as possible, and killed over 50 million people. In all of human history, the only thing which approaches this in terms of sheer scale is the destruction of Native American populations, and I use destruction because the majority of said deaths (which extent is still being debated today) were due to disease from the Spanish conquistadors, a factor outside of the Spanish's control. Many of the other deaths were again due to neglectful and shortsighted policies. The largest-scale genocide would be the Spanish on Hispaniola, where they killed perhaps one million of the island's inhabitants due to starvation, disease, and overwork. This was an unintended consequence if Columbus' diaries can be trusted. This is half the death toll for Democratic Kampuchea. In the second case, people didn't particularly care about the Holocaust either while it was still happening, until they came face-to-face with the reality of the death camps.

[GrayAnderson]

I think one thing that has, to at least some extent, been set aside is this: In Hell, we knew that everyone from the past thousand years (give or take) was somewhere in there...as were likely the vast majority of those from before then, though the latter bit is just guesswork. In essence, I could see a self-justification that there were humans throughout Hell who would be known to the living, and on top of that we had a clear operational advantage...until they started dropping lava on cities, there was at least some degree of an ability to take things at whatever pace was felt necessary, and even then they only pulled that off twice (and with mediocre intelligence at that). In the case of Heaven, they could keep dropping rocks into rivers or onto cities (open a portal up a few miles above NYC, throw a loose pallet of bricks through, and see what happens), and they could also probably throw rudimentary explosives through quickly-opened portals in the right circumstances.

Bakustra, while I can agree on Mao to a very large extent, Stalin is his own kettle of fish (or rather his own bucket of blood): Between the Ukrainian famine (which was at least exacerbated by government policy) and the massive scale of the purges, I have a hard time giving him a pass. At least some of the deaths are hard to estimate because Hitler knocked down the door and started killing people (and Stalin was likely able to pass some of the body count over), but with Stalin a large amount of it was deliberate. Most of Mao's killing was simply the mess of the Great Leap Forward (bad policy, as you said).

[Darth Wong]

Wong,
I'm going to try and not Godwin this thread anymore than necessary.
But here goes...

Most people think Europe would have had another war regardless of who was put in charge of Germany. In fact, had the Communists taken hold, who knows what kind of havoc that would've brought? Yes, the Holocaust gets trotted out time and time again as some kind of unique event in human history. It wasn't though. If anything, it was just business as usual when it came to war. The Germans had a 'slave' population that they used for labour, and killed those that they weren't using. Why no such rage for Stalin, Mao, Dafur, or Cambodia? PR, that's why.
I'm not saying what they did wasn't horrible, but it wasn't as special a case as people make it out to be.

That is the start of a potentially interesting debate, but it's totally irrelevant to my point. I never said the Holocaust was unique in human history. Do you sincerely not understand the point I was making?

You were claiming that you can't blame religion for religious atrocities or sectarian violence because people do bad things anyway. I retorted by saying that this is like saying you can't blame Nazism for the Holocaust. It's totally irrelevant whether other great atrocities have occurred in human history. The point is that you can blame Nazism for the Holocaust, and you can blame religion for religious violence.

[GrayAnderson]

Respectful suggestion: Could we split a discussion off on this topic? We're handling this debate well enough, and I wouldn't mind labeling it in a way so as not to attract trolls (perhaps just as a coded "Topic divided from TSW:Pantheocide thread" title), but it's also sort of off topic for here. Wong, thoughts?

[Edward Yee]

I'd welcome an overpowering enemy whose abilities are to the humans' as theirs are to the angels and demons here, anyway. The great flaw of this setting is that it consistently presents very weak and incapable antagonists. While that fits the point that science defeats religion, there's nothing to suggest that 'Devils' shouldn't have technology of their own thousands of years beyond humans - they're clearly not synonymous with demons, after all.

That's entirely possible in-universe, but has yet to be explored; then again, for the demons to still be shit-scared of devils well after the curbstomping by humans suggests either remaining residual fear... or devils still being fearsome, even relative to human military force.

[JN1]

In the first case, Stalin and Mao's deaths were by no means on the same order as the Nazis. Most of the deaths caused by them were from shortsighted or negligent policies.

Oh, boy, when Stu sees that things could get interesting.

[Edward Yee]

Someone PM that quote to Stuart! DO IT! DO IT NOW!!! The last time he got pissed he gave us the dirt on the IDF, I wanna see what happens here!

Hey, guys. Imagine the shitfit the internet will raise when Stuart writes Jesus leading the army of Heaven and getting shot in the face and killed. Jesus. Can you imagine the uproar and furor? Christ!

Have the Vatican brigade kill him, for added irony. Hell, have a Muslim division kill him - just after the Iranian's Army Imam declares him a False Prophet and excises him from the Koran.

If I recall correctly... we've never seen the in-universe Jesus himself, just Michael-lan's own description of him, but I distinctly remember the Papal declaration of Yahweh's excommunication still revering Jesus and the teachings attributed to him, simply recognizing Yahweh as "not OUR God."

[Edward Yee]

If he was just trying to save his own ass, he'd just surrender, give the Humans the key to Heaven, and retire in Vegas. You could see it as a power grab, but I doubt he'd have much power even being in charge of Heaven, since I'm sure the Humans would just make it a puppet state like Abigor's Hell is now.

Once upon a time he might have had ambitions of ending up like Abigor, who went from the defeated and humiliated ex-Grand Duke forced to commit a suicide attack... to President of Dis. Sure, there might have been less undead competition for territory/power, but perhaps Michael's pride wouldn't have allowed him to hold office only at the pleasure of Yamantau and the HEA?

ps - Is it me or have the Humans never really been given a serious defeat? The worst thing about the invasion of Hell was the logistics, and while the Angels have a better bodycount, it isn't very impressive. There's been no real destructive attack that's, IMHO, brought any sense of danger to the human side. (OH NOES THE NIÑO) Maybe in the third book they open a gate to R'lyeh and things actually get serious.

I think part of the point of Armageddon???? was that it was (nigh) impossible for the demons to seriously defeat humanity.

EDIT: Also, SGT Links has a CMOA entry now.

[Simon_Jester]

Once upon a time he might have had ambitions of ending up like Abigor, who went from the defeated and humiliated ex-Grand Duke forced to commit a suicide attack... to President of Dis. Sure, there might have been less undead competition for territory/power, but perhaps Michael's pride wouldn't have allowed him to hold office only at the pleasure of Yamantau and the HEA?

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, sort of thing?

I think part of the point of Armageddon???? was that it was (nigh) impossible for the demons to seriously defeat humanity.

Yes, and this is also the thing that creates the greatest artistic challenge in the story- writing an interesting war story where you knew who was going to win by the time you're 15% of the way through the first of two novels.

[I say two because we may see fiercer antagonists in Lords of War.]

[CaptainChewbacca]

I am curious, exactly WHERE are the fifty permanent earth-hell portals located?

[Valiran]

On the other hand, if Yahweh is the party you're referring to, that's...he's a little bit more convoluted and headache-inducing for me. For one, I think I could direct a decent amount of anger at the clear case of false misrepresentation which he engaged in. For another, there's the whole handing-sentient-beings-over-to-be-tortured-and-or-lunch issue...yeah, there's a lot to be steamed at there, and it's not like he gave a clear indication of how one should go about avoiding that fate.

There's a lot to be steamed at. What disturbs and confuses me is the idea that this is worse than the actions of the beings he handed people over to. He's a grand-scale fraud and an accessory to mass torture and murder; how is this worse than being a torturer and murderer?

Satan came out and told us what the score was. For all his evil, he stabbed us in the front. By contrast, in the context of the story Yahweh was the accessory masquerading as a good guy who stabbed us in the back. In a sense, I think there's a feeling that if Yahweh had been up-front about the whole thing, we'd be irritated, but because he wasn't, we're furious. In essence, we'd be less angry if he'd taken the Greek pantheon's route.

Of course, some of this stems from bad misreadings and misunderstandings on our part, but it's still the source of our indignity, if I had to guess...and a good part of that also stems from the light in which Christianity was presented from the get-go (and yes, I've read the Didache...)

You have a point there. It kinda reminds me of some lines from Homeworld: Cataclysm.

Commander: Yes, yes, you will not be bound, whatever that means. Well guess what, we won't let you go! It doesn't matter how we die. One ancient monster is just as good as another!

Bentusi: We...are..not...monsters.

Commander: Aren't you? Look around. Look what you've done to our fleet, all because we dared to get in your way. Look at yourselves – the aloof, the mighty Bentusi slaughtering those who asked for their help! You're worse than the Beast, at least the Beast doesn't pretend to be righteous!

Let's face it, if you just try to slaughter us, we'll be pissed at you and fight back. But if you're a holier-than-thou asshole who acts as if everything you do is beyond reproach and that we somehow deserve the monstrous acts you've committed against us, you will immediately earn our undying hatred.

[GrayAnderson]

I know there's one in Bermuda (naval), one in Saudi Arabia/Iraq (the "big" portal), and one outside of Dover. I would expect there would be at least one or two more in the US (makes logistics easy)...but beyond that, it's mostly speculation.

By the way, a random on the earlier "black portal" point...all "no color" means is that it blocks a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

And on Michael: I think he wants power for himself. He could probably, at any point, have switched sides and gained immunity and a comfortable position on Earth, in Hell, or in post-war Heaven in exchange for access to Heaven. Hell, if he brought Jesus in on it and managed to build a compelling and at least partly consistent narrative, he'd probably have been able to come across as a bit of a hero for doing so and a victim with regard to the previous situation. However, he also clearly didn't want that...he does want to rule something afterward.

Part of the hangup is that there's a not-indecent chance that even if he managed to switch sides, Yahweh could have had someone portal in and kill him. In Abigor's case, Satan expected him to be dead, not to switch sides. Yahweh has enough people on staff who might be competent enough to exact revenge that pulling such a move isn't quite as doable as it would be otherwise. He'd at least need to cause trouble for Heaven on the way out.

There's also the fact that he seems to genuinely want to preserve his species, and given their low reproductive rate, a full-out invasion could (as noted earlier) be a species-killer. Kind of a hollow win if you end up ruling over a species that's dying out, you know...

[Edward Yee]

Once upon a time he might have had ambitions of ending up like Abigor, who went from the defeated and humiliated ex-Grand Duke forced to commit a suicide attack... to President of Dis. Sure, there might have been less undead competition for territory/power, but perhaps Michael's pride wouldn't have allowed him to hold office only at the pleasure of Yamantau and the HEA?

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, sort of thing?

Yep. To add on to what Gray Anderson said, he furthermore seems to want real "power," in a way that merely being able to maintain his Montmartre Club and sensing internally that he's "the power behind the throne" doesn't give him... nor, presumably, would ruling at the humans' behest. While Abigor is nominally the human-installed puppet, that almost certainly will change as he puts demons to work to buy human sympathy.

Heck, maybe he's pissed that he can't openly have his cake and eat it too?

[Simon_Jester]

I know there's one in Bermuda (naval), one in Saudi Arabia/Iraq (the "big" portal), and one outside of Dover. I would expect there would be at least one or two more in the US (makes logistics easy)...but beyond that, it's mostly speculation.

By the way, a random on the earlier "black portal" point...all "no color" means is that it blocks a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Yes; we'd already worked that out, I think. Damned if I can figure out how that's consistent with us being able to lay fiber-optic cable through it, though.

[GrayAnderson]

I know there's one in Bermuda (naval), one in Saudi Arabia/Iraq (the "big" portal), and one outside of Dover. I would expect there would be at least one or two more in the US (makes logistics easy)...but beyond that, it's mostly speculation.

By the way, a random on the earlier "black portal" point...all "no color" means is that it blocks a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Yes; we'd already worked that out, I think. Damned if I can figure out how that's consistent with us being able to lay fiber-optic cable through it, though.

For that I think we would have to ask a power greater than ourselves.

Stuart?

[Buritot]

I know there's one in Bermuda (naval), one in Saudi Arabia/Iraq (the "big" portal), and one outside of Dover. I would expect there would be at least one or two more in the US (makes logistics easy)...but beyond that, it's mostly speculation.

By the way, a random on the earlier "black portal" point...all "no color" means is that it blocks a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Yes; we'd already worked that out, I think. Damned if I can figure out how that's consistent with us being able to lay fiber-optic cable through it, though.

To hazard a guess, the spectrum used in fibre optics isn't visible light but IR and others frequencies, depending on the material of the fibre. Or to alleviate, there could be medium powered laser emitter/receivers stationed directly at the portal. In effect fibre optics => laser emitter => portal crossing => laser receiver => fibre optics. This could be reasonably shortened to "We've got fibre to Hell!"

I am curious, exactly WHERE are the fifty permanent earth-hell portals located?

That's a nifty questions. It's most likely at places of high production and transit. Close to industrial complexes comes to mind, as well as at high-traffic harbors since these already have the facilities to accommodate a high flux of wares. (Hamburg, Rotterdam, Shanghai, Kobe, Hong-Kong, Dover). The need for intercontinental container ships is essentially down to zero. Furthermore these portals re more likely to be on land to funnel containers as quickly as possible through them, probably by train or truck. This means criteria to look for are high transit train stations, at best close to industry (Zurich, Bailey Yard, Maschen, Sentrarand). Proximity to military bases to enable huge troop movements also has to be taken into consideration.

[Saint_007]

I like where this is going, though I'm worried the meaning of the Seventh Bowl is that *all* major cities get targeted. "And the nations of Man were no more" and all that. But one thing irks me.

Too many people want Michael to survive. As in "more than zero".

So Mike's funny, good for a laugh, and pretty intelligent. He should live, right?

Hahahahahahaha - fuck no. He should get a cruise missile to the face.

Why, do you ask? Simple. For the HEA's victory to be final, we need to finally let it get through to every last demon and angel that they can hold out for as long as they want once Yahweh and Satan are dead, but in the end, there can be absolutely no illusions about superiority. Whatever assumptions the baldricks and angels had about the role of humans in the "Great Design", it's over; humans can and have killed both angels and demons with contemptuous ease, and the only thing preventing them from simply going Auschwitz on them is because the humans got sick and tired of bloodshed. And we've grown saner, so we as enlightened people don't go around massacring for the hell of it.

Michael-Lan has to die simply because, even in the face of crushing human superiority, he regards humans not as equals but as pawns. First step to getting your ass flattened is to arrogantly assume your enemy is inferior. Mike doesn't regard humans as inferior, but he still considers humans as peons - to wit, read back to Chapter 40 where Michael-Lan crudely brushes off the Myanmar junta, and his inner monologue. The junta absolutely deserved it, but it doesn't make Michael-Lan any less deserving to die.

If he wants to survive, he better accept the fact that humans are going to be the new boss. Abigor did, Satan didn't, and now Satan's dead and Abigor is a president on a string. And given the treachery the angels have shown the humans, I doubt the humans would want anything less than utter surrender or utter annihilation of the Angels.

As a footnote, I want Lt. Yitzhak to get caught in Hell and made to sing like a canary. It's the least the people of Tel Aviv deserve.

[Bakustra]

In the first case, Stalin and Mao's deaths were by no means on the same order as the Nazis. Most of the deaths caused by them were from shortsighted or negligent policies.

Oh, boy, when Stu sees that things could get interesting.

Are you going to claim that the Purges and Gulags caused as many deaths as the Nazis? Or do you wish to claim that the famines in Ukraine were a deliberate attempt at genocide, rather than the consequence of an idiotic agricultural policy and corruption within the local administrations? Similarly, are you trying to claim that the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were deliberately targeted at the Chinese populace to kill them all? Then they are not equivalent to the Nazi's attempts to wipe out Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, and Slavs, are they not? But hey, don't let me stop you from sniping from behind Stuart's coattails. After all, Communists are functionally equivalent to Nazis in all respects, right?

[Simon_Jester]

To hazard a guess, the spectrum used in fibre optics isn't visible light but IR and others frequencies, depending on the material of the fibre. Or to alleviate, there could be medium powered laser emitter/receivers stationed directly at the portal. In effect fibre optics => laser emitter => portal crossing => laser receiver => fibre optics. This could be reasonably shortened to "We've got fibre to Hell!"

[slaps forehead again]

Dammit, you're right; that's actually what Stuart said, too. And I forgot about it. Again.