<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Remember the people in B5 who seemed incapable of admitting that the Minbari almost annihilated the human race.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Most of the Human race doesn't
know that they were almost annihilated. They don't know Minbari simply surrendered at the Battle of the Line for reasons of their own. Even Carolyn Sykes in the pilot says that we stopped them at the Line - Sinclair has to correct her.
After the Minbari surrender the official story from EarthGov is that the Line had indeed held the Minbari and - despite its own losses - inflicted such crippling damage on the Minbari Fleet that they sued for peace. Sinclair, McIntyre and the others were given special medals for the Line,
not for their heroic willingness to sacrifice themselves but for
winning the battle. That is one of the reasons that Sinclair feels like such a fraud as a "Hero of the Line", and only makes his "survivor's guilt" seem worse.
When Sheridan speaks of "losing a war" to the ISN reporter - and she corrects him - it is a slip of the tongue. Within the military it is pretty well-known what really happened, but the population at-large still thinks we won. That's why Sheridan just looks a little embarassed and agrees with the reporter that "we won." He had almost given away what amounts to a state secret.
There is a good chance that EarthGov instituted some kind of military censorship of the news during the Minbari War. This seems to be implied in
In the Beginning. The people of Earth and the colonies only know what the news tells them, and the news only reports what the government wants them to know.
Do you think the people of Iraq today know that their country invaded a neighbor on no provocation and that its vaunted military got its collective ass kicked? Or that military units were trying to surrender to U.S. news crews? Hell, no.
The Iraqis have probably been told that the attack on Kuwait was a limited purpose "punative expedition" rather than an annexation, and that their troops left on schedule. There would be no mention of a coalition involving many Arab countries united against their invasion.
Desert Storm was doubtless explained as an unprovoked U.S. invasion of
Iraq aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein, which the heroic Iraqi Army stopped - and therefore a victory for Saddam. Now, if you're an Iraqi citizen, and the only news you can
get is state-owned radio and television, that's what you believe.
Same with the Humans. Most of them think that in the final battle we
beat the Minbari, and therefore they have a very exaggerated sense of our place in the universe.
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net