Thread:Charles Murray/@comment-5080468-20170729135627/@comment-25309944-20170729174139

Honestly, I think this is the best justification of the use of the one species, one culture trope I've seen. Everything you have just mentioned falls under what certain parts of political and social theory refer to as biopolitics, the use of policy to manipulate the statistics given out by a population such as race, ethnicity, birthrate, religious affiliation, etc, so the means you are employing are familiar to me. Indeed, concentration camps are the most extreme form of biopolitics.

The means by which Medwedia achieved hegemony over the planet also make sense––by being the only state with nuclear weapons. However, if the post-1991 years are any indication, that would not guarantee security and hegemony, especially in a world where ethnical boundaries are so starkly drawn, and so many groups find themselves so deeply cast in indignity and despair. This is why: Mutually assured destruction only works against states.

In other words, it's easy to pacify the government of another country with the mere threat of using nukes because the fact that you have them means you can exact costs on things that that government holds dear: notably cities, productive facilities, military installations, etc. However, non-state actors like terrorist organizations, ethnicities, religions, or other identities usually have no return address. What I'm getting at is that Medwedia might be able to pacify and occupy Ærd's states through the use of nuclear weapons, but once it begins to implement policies which are clearly aimed to marginalize and destroy the former inhabitants of these states, they will likely rise up and resist, fighting a people's war of unlimited ends and unlimited means which would exact immeasurable costs on Medwedia's conventional forces and the Medwedian core's resolve and ability to continue maintaining its empire. This, without it ever being able to use nuclear weapons.

If you want a RL example of this, look no further than the second phase of the Second Iraq War. Another RL example of one ethnicity attempting to keep an entire continent in subjection by force, Napoleonic France is rich in content and lessons, and it too ended in fiery people's wars.

There's also the fact that I can't think of many ways for a state to force another to give up its nuclear weapons. This only happened once –– the case of Ukraine, and they sorely regret that now.

That is not to say that your idea isn't possible –– it is with a few small tweaks. If you have Medwedia be the first and only state to achieve nuclear weapons. Using both conventional and military superiority, Medwedia can bend all of the other states and ethnicities around it into a complex state system radiating out in concentric circles from the capital. It would be possible for the Medwdian states to absorb geographically contiguous regions around it, even if they are controlled by other ethnicities, and slowly digest them using the tactics you mentioned. It would then order the states around it into a network of disparate, divided, and shattered satellites whose artificial borders purposefully weaken their ability to function and generate power. Then, further out, you'd have the rump of powerful states which have been forced into varying degrees of subjection, alliance, dismantlement, and disarmament, though they remain independent. It would be possible for Medwedia to slowly grow and perpetuate its power over hundreds of years, waging wars and putting down rebellions to renegotiate the status of its periphery while using conquest and demographic controls to expand its core. The objective, essentially, is to control most of the globe as a hegemon, not as an occupying force.