TRIGGER WARNING: I have been informed that the first paragraph which follows after the title is unsettling and may be triggering for some. If non-descriptive facts about historical genocides are triggering for you, feel free to skip the first paragraph that follows the title line. Otherwise it is necessary to understand the meaning and connotations of a term we like to use and not think about, a dichotomy that is quite impossible to cater to for the purposes of this discussion.
Intended/Attempted genocide in the Earth-Minbari war? An objective analysis.
Literally, geno-cide breaks down to genos = race or species[1], and cide = killing of. We have expounded upon definition with numerous examples, and so when we say "near genocide", or "attempted genocide", or "almost committed genocide", we tend to flash back to actual (rather than 'they thought about it') attempts to exterminate entire peoples in our history. Like the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jewish people (ending in the systematic murder of over 2/3 of the European Jewish population), and possibly the Slavic races as well (and if they were races rather than classes, we could add to that all the Nazi's political opponents, homosexuals, etc). Like the atrocities committed by European settlers in America against the natives of said continent, (which, in North America ended in the systematic murder of 95 to 98.3% of the Native population, with only around 250,000 survivors of a starting population between 5 and 15 million). Oh, we like to say it was an accidental we-don't-want-to-say-genocide as a side effect of land conquest, but I - a white American, mind - am calling Bulls*** on that one. Canada and New Zealand, and a good number of former Commonwealth nations had conquest and land grabs, and new diseases from Europe, without the degree and persistence of mass murder on a scale that we did here. Former Commonwealth nations wanted fiefdoms and to rule the (insert condescension here) natives. We wanted a country of our own. The rest is history.
If I tried to list every actual genocide in history (attempted or successful), we'd be here all week, I'd likely miss several, and more than a few of us might actually die of horror.
Compare this to a grand total of about 250,000 -260,000 human casualties of the Earth-Minbari war (all military as far as canon says, e.g. In the Beginning) in a time when to be sure the Earth population will be well over 10 billion humans, and that's not counting how fast we're likely to populate given new places to colonize (instead of a planet with only so much space to go around).
This figure is canonical. We get it several times, from no less than four different sources with as many different political backgrounds. We have Franklin in "A Late Delivery from Avalon", we have Lennier some time in the second season, we have the reporter in "And Now for a Word", and we have Molarri in "In the Beginning.", all confirming the exact same figure.
Less than 0.0026% of the human race is actually killed by the Minbari, and we call this "genocide"?
Well, it's certainly not genocide actually committed. As for attempted or intended? Let's examine those possibilities (for the rest of this discussion).
We tend to say the Minbari overreacted for the murder of Dukhat (which was not the whole story. To wit, Neroon himself in TDICOS ("To Dream In the City Of Sorrows") "The course of our holy war was not determined solely by that one grievous incident, even as abhorrent as that crime was. No, our anger grew and grew, and our actions were justified, because of the universal tactics of dishonor, cowardice, and murder that we saw used by humans in almost every encounter during the war.")- but does anyone want to even think about what any of our countries would do if some foreign power came and assassinated one of our leaders, "misunderstanding" or not?
We (Americans) invaded Iraq, killed approximately 600,000 Iraqis (Lancet report, et al), of which approximately 550,000 were civilians - and this adds up to about 2.5% of their population - a THOUSAND times more deaths, per capita, and largely civilian - within the first two years of our seven year war against them (not counting secondary deaths due to disease, civil strife and the infrastructure we ruined, to say nothing of the somewhat radioactive DU we've littered the place with ), on the fear that they might become an adversary, or alternatively because we didn't like their internal affairs. No actual assassinations or murders, or even fatal misunderstandings costing American lives, necessary for us do that. And we called it a "civilized war". Seriously, that is the state of affairs of "civilized war", and humanity in general, in our day and age.
Let's not even go to what we'd do if a single leader of ours (respected or not) was actually killed.
Every death is a tragedy, that is without question, but in comparison to EVERY war humanity has ever waged in its entire history, 260,000 military deaths in the 2250's is a slap on the wrist.
Name a single war we've ever fought (and the majority of those are nowhere near genocidal) that has ever had 1) only 260,000 casualties overall, and 2) essentially no attacks on civilians? I can't.
We killed about four times that number in just two bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - again mostly civilian - and all we can say is, for the most part, "it had to happen". The Nazis killed more than that number in a single day at Stalingrad, among many such slaughters all over the Eastern Front, and we're supposed to believe the Minbari attempted genocide when with all that massive technological imbalance in their favor, it took them two years to kill that number (of soldiers and only soldiers) and were sick of it by the end?
From the start, everybody has been talking about genocide but there just haven't been the actions necessary to back it up. Molarri warns the EA, while they're celebrating the disastrous Earth-Minbari First Contact (before they realize it's going to backfire) that it's a wake for the human race, but there, as it so happens, is no precedent for the statement. I mean, the last species to piss off the Minbari were the Stribes, and (whoops), they're not in fact extinct. More so, apparently the "depth of their mistake" was not made well enough understood (Minbari humor, snort), to them, since they were up to the same behavior later, with a species that was officially allied with the Minbari. That said, Mollari's statement certainly might have been reasonable from a Centauri perspective, given what the Centauri had themselves gotten up to on Narn, etc. And with what they did to the Narn, and the Minbari a far more dangerous species than Centauri - and with Centauri romanticism centered around futile last stands - the conclusion is quite logical, from the Centauri perspective.
The humans who spent the entire war saying they were going to be exterminated certainly did not have any actual declarations of intent from the Minbari, because they didn't have any declarations of anything from the Minbari who met every communication for the entire duration of the war with stony (err bony?) silence. They likely interpreted the fact that the Minbari didn't accept surrenders from human soldiers, and just killed them anyway, as intent to commit genocide, but coupled with the fact that the Minbari also basically ignored the civilians they came across, it would be a less-humano-centric and more logical assumption to conclude that Minbari warriors literally couldn't wrap their heads around a warrior at war not engaging in it as long as he has breath in him/her to do so.
Finally, the Minbari, ah, the Minbari. Thing with them is that while they don't lie (except to save the honor of another - and in this case they apparently can and will lie completely, ie "There all the Honor Lies"), and maybe because they don't lie, they make sure to use language very carefully. Necessitating one to listen exactly as carefully to what they do and do not say. When they are not being incredibly specific, one must tread with extra caution, because odds are? They're being non-specific for a reason.
Among Minbari, we have four sources. One is Satai Delenn, a second is Alyt Neroon on four occasions. The third and fourth are Morann and Coplann, both Warrior Caste Satai during the war.
Of these four, Morann and Coplann are likely the most damning, with Coplann saying, after EarthGov realized the Minbari were serious and seriously furious, and offered to turn over Jankowski to the Minbari, "This isn't about justice. There is no reason to assume that this Earth captain is in any way unique or an aberration, and there is every reason to assume just the opposite! Furthermore, the humans only offer us this accommodation because of fear. If we were a race weaker than they, or, for that matter, were they to encounter any new races who could not stand up to them, they would continue their barbaric ways unabated!. Would you negotiate with a hive of stinging creatures if they offered to expel one of their company? No! You would burn the hive away, remove it as the danger that it is! And so must it be with Humanity!". [ITB(In the Beginning)]
Ironically, he was spot on in his assessment of EarthGov's motives on this one, which is to say that as long as they thought the Minbari weren't strong enough to pose a threat, they were perfectly (morally) fine with being bullies:
"Oh, the champagne was flowing at Earthdome. A gathering was being held in the main reception hall to celebrate the great victory which had been achieved by the Prometheus... There was General Lefcourt, moving from one dignitary to the next, nodding, smiling, accepting congratulations. Never far behind him was Captain Jankowski, likewise accepting all the praise that was being offered him.
Several times throughout the course of the evening, the visual log from the Prometheus was run on a large screen. Every moment, from the move out of hyperspace, to the first contact with the Minbari cruiser, to the open assault, hurried battle, and escape, was played out in loving detail. There was even applause... "Hell of a job, Captain," Hastur, the presidential aide, was telling him. He clapped Jankowski on the back and winked approvingly at Lefcourt. "Clearly, General, you picked the right man for the job. You're to be commended."...
"We attacked and demolished an enemy whom the Cen-tauri claimed was vastly superior" was Jankowski's arch reply. "We brought back telemetry and information on the Minbari vessels, albeit-I admit-limited. And we let yet another race know that Humanity is not to be taken for granted.""[ITB]
- Really, the Earth Minbari war wasn't started by an accident. Literally. Jankowski didn't trip and fall on his firing control, and put another way, it was more tragedy than mistake (to borrow a distinction from Lennier when he's railing at Ashann), given that the mistake, from EarthGov's perspective, wasn't firing first on a vessel that wasn't actually fighting. It was doing it to someone who could fight back.
But, irony aside, the stinging insect in Coplann's analogy is a human military officer. Logically the hive is the human military and government, of course, that is in charge of it. And I'm not debating that the Minbari might well have had it in mind to kill off the entire human military, nor am I debating the tragedy such would have been, because "valid" military targets certainly encompassed a lot of good people as well as the warmongers and power-greedy.
Terminologically, though calling an armed human a stinging insect makes sense. Calling an unarmed human such, less so. Insects, maybe, if they were feeling particularly speciesist (which they probably were). If all humans, armed or not were stinging insects, with no distinction being drawn between military and non-military, if "with Humanity" is not simply a contraction within the analogy, then it makes no sense why the Minbari would leave the civilians entirely alone, theoretically to come back later to kill them later. No distinction is no distinction. What we got in fact is "They are moving methodically through the outer colonies, wiping out our defense structures, leaving the colonies vulnerable. Civilian structures are being left alone for now".[ITB]
Right before the Battle of the Line, we have this exchange between Delenn and a visibly exhausted and disheartened Morann:
"Morann: "We are almost within range of the homeworld of the humans. The Grey Council should be assembled to see the end of our great campaign."
Delenn: "What glory is there in eliminating an entire race, Morann?"
Morann: "Glory? Not as much as in the beginning. It has been a long road, Delenn. But we are nearly at the end of our holy war."
Delenn: "Yes ... but are we any longer holy?"
Morann: "Why is it, whenever I see you, you never speak other than to ask questions?"
Delenn: "Because questions are all I have left. After today, I think they are all I will ever have."
Morann: "Then at least bring your questions to the Council. We must all be there at the end." [ITB]
Interestingly it's Delenn who speaks of the elimination of an entire race. Her perspective will be addressed shortly, but Morann never actually says "the extermination of humanity" as, say, part of a plan. He also pointedly doesn't correct her, so she could be right, but he also did not correct her when she assumed he'd tortured Sinclair out of spite, not long after, which most certainly was not what happened, and I am not sure whether or not that is a Minbari thing - about not seeing the need to spread around information that's not expressly needed - or a symptom of ingrained inter-caste tensions, even then, with the Religious Caste tending to assume the worst of the Warriors, and the latter not seeing a need, or a point to setting the record strait. Heck, maybe it even worked to their advantage.
Now, on the topic of Delenn. Delenn certainly was convinced that the Earth-Minbari war would end with a genocide of humans. This is made clear twice. The first right before she recruits Lennonn, then AnlaShok Na, to negotiate peace with the humans, while being updated by Morann on the war to date, (which, to be clear, had cost between fifty and sixty thousand human lives at that point, all military):
Delenn: "Dukhat would never have approved of this slaughter."
Morann: "Perhaps. We will never know, because the humans murdered him. This is simple retribution."
Delenn: "This has gone beyond retribution, Morann. This is madness. It is genocide." [ITB]
Except, "genocide" is certainly the wrong description for the war to that point, or for the report he was bringing her. Not for such a tiny percent of the population, not for the complete lack of civilian deaths. It simply is incorrect. A fact that has less to do with Delenn being unnecessarily dramatic and more to do with the crippling guilt that'd been eating at her the entire war - for casting the deciding vote - and was indeed what she had been dwelling on right before this particular conversation.
In that light, and in light of the fact that she had spent the majority of the war drowning herself in guilt (her statement about Branmer staying a priest inside even though a War Leader outside could equally apply to her) and essentially in self-imposed isolation from the rest of the Grey Council, (to say nothing of the actual War Leaders), - "In Delenn's quarters, a single candle provided illumination. Over the last two years, Delenn had descended further and further into darkness ... literally. It was a reflection of what she was enduring spiritually. When the door opened, she did not even have to bother to turn to see that it was Morann. These days, he was the only one who ever came to see her, and then it was only to provide her with updates as to the battle." [ITB] -, and was neither a War Leader or Warrior Caste, to give her at least a position as part of the actual tactical team, she can hardly be considered a factual source of information.
Finally, despite her many excellent qualities, Delenn herself is a somewhat unreliable judge of character when it comes to matters of Caste differences and stereotypes. Especially for the Warrior Caste.
Much like Neroon, she makes strides in working to move past it, at least by the time they come together to end the Minbari civil war (though by far not complete), but it is certainly not the case initially.
Apparently, becoming deeply attached to a mentor is a Minbari thing - Delenn and Dukhat, Lennier and Delenn, Neroon and Branmer - but Delenn can't see the parallels between herself going against Dhukat's wishes in her grief for him, and Neroon going against Branmer's for much the same reasons.
Delenn takes measures to fix the Branmer issue, and chalks Neroon's actions up to ego, militarism, and lack of respect, without being able at all to empathize with just how deeply in mourning he is, and this, despite her own words" "Neroon... would have died for Branmer. If Branmer gave an order, he would follow it, without question" ["Legacies"] - and since the order in question was the surrender order which the Warrior Caste hated, it's clear just how devoted Neroon was to his mentor.
Seriously, all anyone has to do is look at Neroon when he arrives with the cortege. He's got black circles around his eyes, takes forever to track from one face to the next when he gets on B5, and ends up floored and pretty winded in a few seconds tussle with Sinclair, in which Neroon seemed pretty uncoordinated from the start. Now, we know from TDICOS that Sinclair is not trained enough to be able to hold his own against a Minbari Warrior (and Sech Durhan was only testing him out), we know what Neroon was able to do to Marcus in "Grey 17 is Missing", and what Marcus could do to a roomful of human thugs in "Ceremonies of Light and Dark", so the only logical explanation for the outcome of the tussle in Legacies, was that Neroon was going through the whole Minbari mourning process of not eating or drinking, and apparently in his case, not sleeping. Not much of a surprise, given that Branmer died of natural causes, rather than fighting an enemy that can be fought, so the helplessness of watching someone so significant to him wither and die must have been especially galling to a Warrior.
That lack of understanding is - to my mind - further proven at the end of Legacies, when Neroon seems so moved by Sinclair's words, even going so far as to try out a human gesture, a big thing for:
1) how much he personally seems to hate humans (it doesn't just seem only like speciesism from him, he acts like it's personal, and lets face it, with how tight knit clan and Caste is, it probably is personal . I mean, even Lennier lost family on the DralaFi ["There all the Honor Lies"] , so it's no stretch to guess that Alyt Neroon of the Star Riders might have had close relations on the flagship too), and
2) how much Minbari, in general, don't seem to like touching strangers.
One thinks, at first, that he might have respected Sinclair a bit by the end of Legacies, and he well might have, despite his vitriol towards the man when he came to Minbar, since the latter does nor rule out the former. After all, Sinclair was framed for planning a murder of a leader who despite being Religious Caste, Neroon actually seemed to like and respect very much - not really a great way to meet - and since surely Minbari default to seeing humans as deceptive in general, Neroon likely couldn't see past the accusation, certainly was not going to take Sinclair's word for it, which was the only thing Sinclair had in his defense, and if he liked Sinclair at all before that mess, he probably felt like an idiot, and felt betrayed, and thus was triply vengeful.
But I digress. In retrospect, Neroon's conversation with Marcus at the end of "Grey 17 is Missing" was about respect. It's in part about Neroon having a revelation, but it's also the first time that we see him look at a human as a literal equal. "Perhaps Delenn was right, that we are not of the same blood, but we are of the same heart.". That's a huge crack in Neroon's speciesism, whether he knows it or not, at the time. And possibly an indication that his colossal problem is in large part an abiding personal anger than through and through bigotry, since actual bigots - and boy oh boy couldn't we write a annotated encyclopedia on those and open a gallery- tend to essentially refuse to process any and all facts and events that challenge their better-than-thou beliefs, even when said facts or individuals hit them in the face. Literally, in this case ... with a denn'bok.
Anyway, Neroon doesn't just say that Marcus talks like a Minbari. For the first time, he's literally considering that Marcus is equivalent to one, in the way that matters most to his kind, after all, we know how much stock the Minbari place on the "calling of their heart". By contrast, Neroon's conversation with Sinclair at the end of "Legacies" is, I think - by comparison - more about the need to grieve, and for that grief to be understood. Sinclair's offer of his testimony in memorializing Branmer acknowledges Neroon's need to remember Branmer as a Warrior. The fact that Neroon latches on to it so desperately may well say less about kindred spirits and more about how much Delenn just could not acknowledge, or likely understand. Neroon's crew likely did, but as their Alyt, that likely mattered little. It is loneliest at the top after all.
In fact, Sinclair's next words to Neroon said very much the same thing Delenn did. That Branmer was not only a War Leader, and that in fact, who he really was did not have anything to do with war. He, however, also acknowledged the need of the Warriors to remember Branmer as one of them, and the very fact of how stricken Neroon was at hearing that illustrates, to my mind at least, just how deep was said grief, and just how desperate Neroon was to be understood in this.
All of which boils down to my point about Delenn being herself blindsided by the inter-caste differences, and missing, just how much the Warrior Caste is part of Minbari society.
Moving on from "Legacies", to "Rumors, Bargains, and Lies", when a Warrior Caste dissident tries to murder Neroon, for fear he'll give in to the Religious Caste, Delenn concludes, without a flicker of a doubt: "Incredible. Only the Warrior Caste could actually turn on one of their own. They have always been erratic.".
Then when Lennier ends up being poisoned by something that would have killed everyone on board without his intervention, and needing emergency surgery, Delenn doesn't even dream of the Religious caste being involved. Literally never can contemplate it, which spares Lennier having to outright lie to her:
Delenn: "You sure it wasn't sabotage? I've been wondering if some of the Warrior Caste might have been involved."
Lennier: "No. I think we can be fairly certain the Warrior Caste was not involved." ["Rumors, Bargains, and Lies"]
But it also says a lot about Delenn that she is still being blindsided by the inter-caste rivalries. After all, the Religious Caste has more recent cause to be angry, desperate even. They actually have been loosing people in the civil war, such, at least, is motive. But she literally can't contemplate suspecting them, a mindset that makes it only too easy for anyone to assume the worst of the group that is other.
And one that is doubly ironic given that it's a pretty big thing that she misses. The Warrior, at least, tried to kill Neroon alone. He also acted alone, and despite the implicit stereotyping of Warriors by the Religious Caste as, well, brutes, the other Warriors didn't seem to be scandalized or even mocking when Delenn told them, regarding the would-be-killer: "there are other ways to solve disagreements than violence.".
On the flipside, the Religious Caste Minbari, in turning on their own leader, worked together, several of them, and were willing to kill everyone on the entire ship. That, considering that Delenn brought her own Sharlin cruiser, is what?, a crew of 600 or so, plus bridge staff, according to the screen info in "Legacies" for the Sharlin? And worse, since the ship was going to just disappear, rampant supposition could have inflamed things back on Minbar a lot worse than one murdered Alyt, killed by his own subordinate.
Lastly, Neroon. Who, as I've mentioned before, seems to hate humans with a personal level of anger that goes beyond the "you're all insects to me" mentality of straight up speciesism.
We have two (both hostile) conversations between Neroon and Sinclair on Minbar:
First, when Neroon has just found out that a human (horror, oh horror, to his mind) is going to be made Entil'Zha (Sinclair ends up becoming AnlaShok'Na instead), the Rangers are going to be re-commissioned (a waste, according to the Warrior Caste), with their ranks opened to Minbari who are not Warrior Caste, and worse, to humans too (can Minbari get aneurisms?), and is in full-on rant mode - "How many more outrages can we expect you and your kind to heap upon us? In less than a lunar cycle you have promoted the most hated and dishonorable of humans to the command of Babylon 5, attempted to kill our new Chosen One, and now wish to usurp the sacred title of Entil'Zha and defile the names of Valen and the Anla'shok." Neroon spun on his heel and walked back to the Caste Elders. "I say he should be removed from our presence and deported back to the depraved world from which he came." ... and then Sinclair defends Sheridan and Neroon is truly beside himself, we have this exchange:
Sinclair: "You talk of honor. Where is the honor in your willingness to commit genocide over a single death mistakenly inflicted?"
Neroon: "The course of our holy war was not determined solely by that one grievous incident, even as abhorrent as that crime was. No, our anger grew and grew, and our actions were justified, because of the universal tactics of dishonor, cowardice, and murder that we saw used by humans in almost every encounter during the war, including the actions of Sheridan." [TDICOS]
Later, when Sinclair is to be finally made Entil'Zha by Jennimer's last request, Neroon, now a newly made Satai who is still seething over being told that humans and Minbari share souls, is the one privately tasked with making sure it happens, and decidedly bitter about the fact ("I do not know why our departed leader chose me for this unhappy task"), which leads to Sinclair pointing out (and scandalizing two Minbari Satai) that since only Neroon knew of Jennimer's last request, why say anything? leading up to this:
"I honor our leader's last request because it is my duty to do so. Because I had come to respect the Chosen One as a person of will and strength, all the more impressive because of his physical frailty. And because I am told, whatever else you may be or represent, that you do not believe this outrageous falsehood about the transference of our souls to your Human species any more than I do. Yes, I was told the story when I joined the Grey Council. Had I been told at the Battle of the Line that this was the reason we were surrendering, I would never have stopped fighting."
"And you're proud to say that?" Sinclair asked. "Proud to admit you would have carried on with genocide? Even now?"
Sinclair wondered if he didn't see just a trace of uncertainty in Neroon's eyes.
"The past is dead. What concerns me is the present and the future. And if the Rangers," Neroon emphasized the English word disparagingly, "are to be mostly Human, I see little harm in a Human Entil'Zha. As long as he does not fancy himself to be Minbari, or covet any position of power among my people. But know that we will be watching carefully." [TDICOS]
At around the same time, when Delenn is summoned to the Valen'Tha, we have Neroon, arguably at his most deliberately verbally cruel and condescending throughout the conversation, and Delenn (who he's seeing for the first time after the Chrysalis, looking somewhat human, and we know how he feels about humans) having this exchange:
Delenn: "The Warrior Caste cannot be allowed to set policy!"
Neroon: "Have you done any better? When I was inducted into this circle I was finally told the reason we were ordered to surrender.
I didn't know whether to laugh or weep! If we had been told the truth then, we never would have surrendered!" ["All Alone in the Night"]
In all three cases, Neroon never actually says genocide. Never says "We would have finished killing you all" , or "We would have been justified in eliminating your species", to Sinclair, or "we would have ended the human race for good" to Delenn - or even "should have" in all these cases.
Yes, he says their actions were justified. Literally, the deeds they actually did. Actions, not hypothetical intentions, and it has been established that said actions led to a miniscule (historically and per capita) number of strictly military human deaths. Hardly even an effort at genocide.
"I would never have stopped fighting.", and "we never would have surrendered ", he says, but the Minbari had been fighting till the surrender, and we still had no evidence of an actual or attempted genocide, and there is an enormous distance, in theory and practice, between the Minbari surrendering to humans and exterminating Humanity.
There's literally everything from armistice to completely eliminating Earth's military (what I suspect was the actual objective of the Minbari by the time their wrath reached its full development), to holding a subject world (not likely) , etc. He doesn't say they'd have escalated. He doesn't even defend escalation, just carrying on as they had before (positively humane by our human standards, now, and in the B5 universe as per Clark and the human desire to develop and use bioweapons to...oops... exterminate the Minbari, because that's what plagues do, and that while the human body count was still around 50-60 thousand, still all-military, and there was still hope of an armistice), and when pressed by Sinclair on the matter of genocide, he still won't defend that.
He also, yes, does not deny it, very much like Morann in our previous example.
But this is interesting for two reasons.
One, Neroon is brutally frank, even by Minbari standards, and shows no interest in being politically correct or sparing anyone's feelings.
Even as adversaries on Minbar, Sinclair notes and respects this.
On the Valen'Tha, Neroon doesn't mind deriding the entire Gray Council for having "floated among the stars, isolated from its own people"["All Alone in the Night"], and this as he's been reminded that Satai can in fact be removed from office for, essentially, disrespecting the council. The amount of derision he's managed to cram into 'floated' is simply stunning.
He also, however, (and this may in fact be his greatest strength, after the fact that he's capable of realizing he's wrong even when it shatters his extremely strong convictions, however painful that proves to be, and then evolving from the fact) is equally as frank when it comes to admitting -in full, however scandalous - his own failings, both to Marcus "To see a Human invoke the name of Valen, to be willing to die for one of my kind when I was intent upon killing one of my own. The rightness of my cause disappeared. Strange that a human in his last moments should be more of a Minbari than I. Perhaps it is true what Delenn said: That we are not of the same blood but we are of the same heart." ["Grey 17 is Missing"], and later - perhaps even harder given everything that has happened between them - Delenn herself: "In the time that we have known each other, I have not always spoken well of you. I assumed your behavior was prompted by a sense of your own superiority, your ego, the usual fanaticism we have come to expect from the Religious Caste. In the last year, I've begun to realize that I was wrong. Dukhat chose you above all to follow him. Slowly, dimly, I begin to understand why. I do not know what lies ahead of us, Delenn, but I do know it is right that we are here together." ["Rumors, Bargains, and Lies"], at which point the amount of self-depreciation he manages to cram into 'dimly' is equally stunning.
My point, in brief, is, that Neroon has no interest in sparing feelings or reputation, his own or anyone else's, and thus never any reason to not advocate genocide if there was such a plan at all - especially with how enraged he still is when these conversations about genocide actually take place, one before he is even Satai (and potential cause for a political incident), and while: a) Sinclair is convinced anyway and pretty much cut off from Earth, while soon to be entirely so, as Ranger One, not Ambassador Sinclair... and b) the entire Earth, and maybe galaxy is apparently convinced too.
Neroon is also extremely specific. To be fair, that's a Minbari thing for how they cope with their own strictures on truth, e.g. the highly amusing exchange between Warrior Sech Durhan and Religious Sech Turval at the training compound:
Turval (to a Warrior Caste Ranger trainee who is meditationally challenged): "We'll worry about thinking once we've cleared away all that Warrior caste nonsense.",
Durhan (who just walked in to hear the end of that): "Nonsense, Sech Turval? "
Turval: "Apologies. The choice of words -"
Durhan: "Was unfortunate? In error?"
Turval: "Untimely, Sech Durhan." ["Learning Curve"]
Or this one on B5:
Sinclair: "It's just there's a 24-hour period in my life that I can't account for. It happened during the war with your people. You wouldn't be holding anything out on me, would you, old friend?"
Delenn: "I would never tell you anything that was not in your best interest." ["The Gathering" ], which sort of sounds like an 'of course not', but specifically literally, says, yes there's something I am holding out on you, and don't ask.
Neroon is very good at this. In "Legacies", when Neroon's giving his (Satai-mandated) apology to Sinclair, he manages to do it without any actual lies, exactly by being specific: "There was no cause for me to attack you. Even less for me to threaten this station.", he says, not "I shouldn't have" or "I'm sorry". Just that there was literally no cause, since Sinclair, and the (let's face it, human) contingent of B5, had absolutely nothing to do with the disappearance of Branmer's body. "I am ashamed that my feelings for the Shai Alyt led me to act improperly". Improperly, he says, not 'regrettably', not 'mistakenly'. Improperly, and we can certainly agree that he pretty much stepped all over every sense of propriety, with Sinclair definitely (maybe even with how he handled Branmer's funeral, though that's a bit more of a stretch for him to admit, while still so personally invested). In other words it was a technical apology, but it's doubtful that he felt particularly sorry about the fact, and was not going to lie and say he was.
Point here: when Neroon is being specific, he means exactly what he says, and not a word more or less.
When he says 'improperly', we can't conclude that he's sorry. When he says that the wartime actions of the Minbari were justified, we can't conclude that he's justifying anything outside of said actions. When he says he'd have continued fighting, or wouldn't have surrendered, we can't conclude that he'd have escalated (to, say, the wholesale slaughter of civilians), especially when despite everyone knowing the Battle of the Line would be the last space battle, Earth had, no doubt, as per usual, more GROPOS than spaceforce(?) (every military does, mostly because there are logistical problems with manufacturing transports to move the majority of one's troops, and there's no way 260,000 casualties adds up all the infantry a planet of 10 billion can muster), and no doubt a majority of those were exactly where they needed to be to defend the human homeworld. therefore there was still fighting to be done, against human troops after the Line.
Though since we're talking about the Line, and Neroon, and his horrified-shocked-vehement (name it) refusal of the very concept of at least some humans sharing Minbari souls, and the fact that impossible justification turned the surrender from barely tolerable to unacceptable.
It is interesting to ask, before the fact, why exactly did Neroon think they surrendered?
Workers might have seen a practical value in keeping human trade around, though they seemed to look at it as an economic threat before, but nobody listened to them anyway, and they never seemed to care to make anyone listen.
Some Minbari said that they'd need the humans as allies, eventually - namely some in the Religious Caste who happened to be speaking to Vorlons - , but even if this sentiment was ever implied, the Warrior Caste in general, and Neroon in specific, (especially before the denn'shah) had only the most complete contempt for humans, not only because of their "universal tactics of dishonor, cowardice, and murder", as per Neroon, but also because the only victory the humans ever won was their destruction of the DralaFi, and that sole victory fell under the label of the former anyway. There's no way Neroon and his kind were even able to consider humans as potential allies, or even potentially good for something, anything, really. And if Neroon was going to defer to anyone's judgment on that, in spite of his own convictions, maybe he'd have listened to his own Caste leaders.
But the surrender was handed down by the Religious Caste - at apparently enough of a public variance (yes, we know that after the "oops, he's Valen" incident with Sinclair on the Valen'Tha, the Gray council acted together as always, but apparently the Castes directly below that were divided) with the Warriors who had done most or all of the actual dying, to have left lasting fissures that eventually mushroomed into the Minbari Civil War, 14 years later - from whom Neroon could only have expected two things: One, a metaphysical explanation, or two, simple compassion, and since we know he can't cope with version one - he doesn't trust the Religious Caste to interpret prophecy and finds the reincarnation angle to be simply inconceivable - he had to have concluded that it was option two all along. Besides which, sympathy or compassion is exactly what Morann assumes is Delenn's motivation each time she expresses doubts about the war overall, so there's precedent in figuring that's what a Warrior would assume of a Religious.
So the really interesting bit is that as long as Neroon (probably) thought that their surrender was about exercising compassion, he never once said that they shouldn't have done it. Sure he's not happy, of course he isn't. I mean, hell, they surrendered. They didn't make an armistice or truce or just disappear into the night with a 'consider your kind duly warned'. They surrendered. That had to be a giant slap in the face, but not giant enough to make him viscerally regret it. That likely says a lot too.
Off the topic of hypotheticals, or maybe still on it, when Neroon is talking in the negative, or in the hypothetical, things get a lot trickier. For one thing because he's choosing to not say something, to not be specific, and leaving things open to interpretation. If a specific fact is something he wants to impart, he does it in the most straight forward manner possible, so it is logical to assume that when Neroon isn't being extremely literalhe's still not actively lying, but he doesn't want to convey the full picture all the same. Which is where he makes very precise use of word choices and takes full advantage of the obvious interpretations.
"Not bad, for a beginner", Neroon tells Marcus while trying to avoid accepting the denn'shah, even though he likely already recognizes the similarities in their styles borne of having trained under the same Sech. Because he doesn't want Marcus thinking it is a good idea. He doesn't want Marcus pressing the challenge, and whether the viewer thinks this is to avoid unnecessary death or to save time is irrelevant. What matters is that Neroon wants to discourage Marcus from engaging, and so he picks his words very carefully. They are meant to be received as a statement that Marcus is utterly outclassed to the point of folly, not only by their biological differences, but also because being compared to a beginner generally is received as a statement that one fights like a beginner, even if a promising one.
But the literal interpretation of the words, broken down into logical structures is very different: Performance that is "not bad" for an advanced student is also "not bad" for an intermediate student, and very certainly "not bad" for a beginner.
When three facts are true, stating only the one does not make the other two false unless they are expressly negated.
E.g. My apple is red, sweet, and crunchy. Just because I only say red does not
mean it's not sweet and not crunchy, though I could certainly imply it, without factually
lying and without contradicting the truth: "How's the apple?", "Its, ah, very ... red"
"Not bad, for a beginner",cannot be interpreted to exclude "not bad for an intermediate student" and "not bad for an advanced student" at the same time, unless one says: "not bad for a beginner, terrible for an intermediate student" (anything higher is obvious), which Neroon doesn't. Because that would be a lie, and he's not in a position where he can lie, and retain honor. Helping another draw their own (erroneous) conclusions is a much finer point. Draal would probably have a fit. Or maybe not, considering his own evasiveness when he visits Delenn on B5 and tries to avoid telling her it's goodbye.
At the end of "Legacies", Neroon tells Sinclair, very wryly, with a brand of barbed humor that's all his own: "You talk like a Minbari, Commander. Perhaps there was some small wisdom in letting your species survive.".
That right there might be taken as the best indication for a planned genocide of anything ever said, but again, the obvious (and likely intended) interpretation has a different logical structure from the strictly logical interpretation, and the obvious interpretation by necessity is predicated on the very conclusion it points to.
Maybe the easiest way to examine the logical structure of this is to think of a person who, say, takes a career path prescribed by social expectation, and does so convinced that it is supremely unwise. Then ten years later, in response to some small shift in their circumstances, they are left to conclude that maybe it wasn't quite so unwise. The fact of such a conclusion is not logically or materially equivalent to a conclusion that they would have done differently or even in their own assessment should have done differently.
To the majority of sentient beings, unwise is by far not the worst description for an action, nor is it a particularly reliable deterrent against a particular action, compared with, say, unprofitable, unbearable, untenable, unacceptable, unconscionable, etc.
Soldiers frequently follow orders they personally feel are unwise, for the simple reason of their duty. Every day, you, I , and every single person around us complies with at least one social or behavioral norm or obligation - filial or social - that we find unwise, because there is a very very far way from unwise to the level of unacceptable that's worth anything along the spectrum of conflict from verbal strife and social unrest to war and death. And most treaties, from the trickiest armistice down to the most innocuous trade deal, have at least a few clauses each side will find unwise at best (if they're fair then both sides are equally disgruntled), all the way to bitterly humiliating and damaging at worst, but yet that they will ratify and abide by all the same because of the capacity for individuals and collectives to satisfice, to settle for an imperfect solution, that is, depending on the practical, moral/cultural, and perceived-risk values of the available alternatives.
In the precise case of Neroon's statement to Sinclair, "Perhaps there was some small wisdom in letting your species survive." does not literally or logically translate to "I/we planned to stop your species from surviving". What it correctly translates to is: I/we considered letting your species survive to be utterly unwise. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't quite so unwise as I thought.
Unless one is willing to defy all rationality and assume that "unwise" is a exact synonym for "unacceptable to the degree where slaughtering billions is preferable", there is no way to factually and logically interpret the statement as evidence for the intent to commit genocide.
Simply stated, the only way to interpret that statement as proof of intent and willingness of the Minbari to commit genocide for reasons of their ever-growing anger, is by inventing as established fact the intent and willingness of the Minbari to commit genocide for reasons of "wisdom", realistically a far poorer motivator than anger or revenge, and a practically nonexistent one, as we will see, for Minbari.
Given that the Minbari had essentially become convinced by the end of the war that humans could be summed up as dishonorable murdering cowards (really, the worst combination of ills from a Minbari perspective), it's hardly surprising that they'd find no redeeming qualities in humans. And given their correct assessment of EarthGov's political reaction to the disastrous First Contact, namely that we'd happily start wars and kill without reason as long as we can win them (we Americans, today have a very disturbing saying, post Iraq: "War isn't about dying for your country, it's about making them die for theirs"), it is supremely unwise, putting those two facts together, for the Minbari to let humans exist to become a problem in the future.
Thing is? Enforcing "wisdom" on the Universe isn't in the job description of the Warrior Caste They don't even dwell on it much, if at all, probably because such a nebulous virtue, that everyone defines differently, is a literal waste of time for people who live, die, and fight based on concrete information.
To many humans, both wisdom and honor are frequently equally undefined, sure, but it is established repeatedly that to Minbari, honor is not nebulous at all. It has very specific behavioral strictures, that are in fact many and widespread. Some are obvious and explained to us in detail. Some are less obvious in that they go without explicit mention or explanation but can be easily observed from behavioral quirks of the Minbari species/culture (which could fill a book once one starts analyzing them, but I'll only look at in the scope of POW treatment, later).
Honor, now, is literally the highest virtue for Minbari, and the same holds for Warriors in a much more interesting way, particularly because in their precise case, considerations of honor can carry a higher price, as it is essentially a handicap in a war.
Consider a war where one cannot use snipers, biochemical weapons, minefields, infiltrators, false flag operations, spies, Trojan-horse tactics, etc, because such tactics are deceptive - and therefore dishonorable... in a universe where everybody else happily does. Honor, in such a case, would carry an extremely high price tag, in lives lost, for those who abide by it, and are fighting a foe that is even close to equal, let alone more numerous, more advanced and all around deadlier. From the little we see of the First Shadow war in canonical sources, for example, the Minbari stuck to their honor despite the fact that they could hardly afford such against the biggest, deadliest and most advanced foe they could possibly face, and paid an extremely steep price.
While fine with dying, it should be noted, the Warrior Caste are not fanatics or wannabe martyrs. Dying stupidly is just that: stupid, and they are not overly keen on that. Take for example Morann's complaint regarding the suggestion of reaching out again to the Vorlons: "Over the last hundred years, we have sent a dozen ships to Vorlon space. None have returned. To send more is a waste of time and effort and lives.", [ITB]. Twelve ships presumably destroyed with all hands aboard is plenty, a thirteenth is just stupid, and since it's clear the Warrior Caste is singularly unimpressed by that kind of loss of life, it says a lot about just how important honor is to them, when they will die for that - even in cases where the rest of the universe would find it stupid.
" Three Castes: Worker, Religious, Warrior.
They build, you pray, we fight." -Neroon ["Grey 17 is Missing"]
"If I am asked to lay down my life for my people, for my friends I would do so in an instant"- Rastenn ["Learning Curve"]
" It was the Warrior Caste who died in the war against the Earthers. Warrior Caste who have defended our world for centuries while the Council floated among the stars, isolated from its own people." -Neroon ["Alone in the Night"]
Simplistically, Warriors fight. They defend Minbar and the Minbari people, and they'll die before ever backing down. Defend, I'll clarify, because they don't start wars. So far, so obvious. Why it belongs in a consideration of virtues, is, that as what defines their caste - and therefore to a Minbari, their identity - it's not just a job, it is everything they are, and it has to define them in a way that's consistent with honor.
As for other for other virtues, most are already encompassed by a definition of honor that covers very strict behavioral standards anyway, and thus need no further mention. We can glean a few, though, in addition, that are significant to the Warrior Caste:
"This was the greatest of us.", says Neroon of Branmer: "Warrior! Leader! The hero of the Line! He fought with honor, bravery, and with vision. Now he belongs to the ages." ["Legacies"]
From Delenn, on the same, in regards to his time as a Warrior, we have: "He was a brilliant tactician, and he believed in the rightness of the war. He fought because it was a matter of conscience ..." , and again, " As I told you, he was a reluctant hero. He only became a War Leader because he felt it was necessary for the sake of the Minbari people." ["Legacies"]
From Sech Turval, not himself Warrior Caste, but certainly extremely familiar with them, and the Warrior Caste framework upon which the Rangers are built - he certainly understands them a lot more than Delenn, say, we have "For a Warrior, misperception, willful blindness, or wishful thinking can lead to death for himself and others."[TDICOS], which neatly synopsizes the definition of "vision".
And from the very same, with the approval of (Warrior Caste) Sech Durhan, and tailored to the perceptions of a young Warrior Caste Minbari turned Anla'Shok trainee who didn't throw himself headfirst into some random human squabble on B5 (to his mind the 'stupidly' part in dying stupidly) and is now blaming himself for the injuries suffered by his fellow AnlaShok trainee who did, we have this conversation:
Rastenn: It could have been something foolish or trivial or stupid. If I am asked to lay down my life for my people, for my friends I would do so in an instant, but I felt that -
Turval: You were afraid of dying without reason.
Rastenn: Yes. Death in a cause is one thing, but death without meaning?
Turval: If I told you to climb a mountain and bring me a flower from the highest point and you will die after completing your task would that be meaningless?
Rastenn: Of course. It's trivial.
Turval: And if there are a million people waiting at the base of that mountain to whom that one flower was a symbol of their freedom and they would follow that symbol and your death into a struggle that would liberate half a billion souls would that have a meaning?" ["Learning Curve"]
Given that the last example from Sech Turval does get a nod of agreement from the student with the background he has, we can also infer that Warriors appreciate freedom, in perhaps a more universal way than might be expected, given that Turval says people, in general, not 'our people' in specific.
So, in completely unsurprising summary, we have found that honor, bravery, vision (which likely encompasses tactical brilliance and a lack of misperception, wishful thinking and willful blindness), and self-sacrifice, are traits that Warriors find eminently praiseworthy.
Defending Minbar, conscience, the good of the Minbari people (which was why they retaliated against Earth to the exact extent they actually did), and freedom, are similarly, accepted as (valid to vital) motivators for the Warrior Caste.
'Wisdom' isn't entering into it. Had Neroon said that letting the human species survive was dishonorable, that would be cause for every human to worry, deeply, but he didn't. It was just 'unwise', and in matters of practicality and decision making, 'wise' and 'unwise' are not really the Warrior Caste's area of concern.
We never hear any Warrior justifying anything on the grounds of "wisdom", and if they had been inclined to make enforcing the wisdom of particular species' survival their business, then all the same descriptions of unworthiness that they happily applied to humans would certainly apply to the Centauri (with their ingrained politics of (dishonorable) poisoning, blackmail, extortion, deception and treachery, coupled with exactly the same trait of starting unprovoked wars of conquest and killing without reason), to the Stribes, for certain, who also were dumb enough to piss off the Minbari, and to a very large extent to nearly every younger race across the galaxy at one time or another. If the survival of a race being unwise by those very standards was sufficient cause for genocide to the Minbari Warrior Caste, they'd have had a very different history, namely that of starting wars all the time to "fix" the universe instead of their actual behavior of never starting any wars and pretty much stonily ignoring everyone.
Moving on to the Anla'Shok, whose principles should be expected to overlap with those of The Warrior Caste to some extent,"Valen created the Rangers to be a fighting force made up of warriors from all of the military clans. They were trained in customs and traditions that were drawn from all of the clans, but recast into a form unique to the Rangers." [TDICOS], as Sech Turval explained to Sinclair, we have that every Ranger must be "The embodiment of what is best in an intelligent being, the embodiment of delight, respect, and compassion." -Turval [TDICOS]. Now, granted, that's a funny fit with their Warrior roots. Not so much the respect and compassion part as I'll explain later, as they have those, after a fashion, but, well, they really don't seem a delightful lot.
But then of course we haven't seen much of them under non-hostile conditions, and as Marcus found quickly at Tuzenor, there is delight in mastering a skill, etc. Either way, it's a moot point, wondering how much of that was Warrior, and how much was cross-pollinated from Religious, or introduced by Valen, since the principle we're hunting for is wisdom, and there's no mention of it here anyway.
Moving further out to Minbari in general, we have service added to honor. " You must understand, captain that there is no greater honor among my people than to serve." - Delenn ["There all the Honor Lies"], Which can be reliably applied to Minbari of any caste, each of whom serve in their own way, but we still have no claims to wisdom.
Branching off entirely to the Religious caste, finally, finally, we have someone talking about wisdom. Trouble is? Even then, it's not being taken very seriously. After all, 'wisdom' is wise to the one expounding it. Usually everybody else? Not so impressed.
Sech Turval, when asked to accompany Sech Durhan to B5 says "It's good to know that at my advanced age there is still respect for wisdom and perception.". Sech Durhan's response? "Everyone else was busy." ["Learning Curve"]
Then, when Delenn is chosen by Dukhat as his aide, he tells her "We'll begin your training tomorrow after the Council has once again explained its wisdom to me." ["Atonement"]- and the amount of sarcasm he's managed to cram into 'wisdom' could cut through the deck.
Finally, when after the murder of Dukhat, Morann reports to Delenn that the Minbari have destroyed the ship responsible and the military base it returned to, for starters, Delenn debates that maybe this is retaliation enough. "No mercy, as they showed us no mercy", he says. "No mercy, but perhaps wisdom." ["Atonement"], she counters. Morann? Is not impressed. Wisdom? ffff
Back, finally to Neroon's statement to Sinclair, it's safe to speak in the past hypothetical without having to commit to something or even really defend it. How it's meant to be interpreted is obvious, certainly, but that's been true of Neroon's statements more than once. In that very same time aboard B5, Neroon threatens the he "may find it necessary" to have the Ingata take the station apart, but when his anger and suspicion of humans does boil over, the worst he gets up to is breaking and entering, and we could maybe even say assault, though even with him not at his best, the fact he didn't go for a weapon probably says he was not actually trying to do damage. Of course, though there were sure to be repercussions had Neroon gone any further, he seemed far too personally invested to think about any of those, till Delenn pulled rank, with all the subtlety of a tsunami. More significantly, and at a greater parallel with Neroon's comment to Sinclair, are Neroon's comments to Marcus when they first meet in DownBelow:
"During the war, I killed fifty thousand of you. What's one more?".
The obvious interpretation is that one more is not a problem, but as is so happens, apparently it is. Despite his statement, when it comes to actions, Neroon seems to have a vested interest in not killing anyone - even one more human - that he doesn't have to, and while one could conclude that at first dealing with Marcus is simply a waste of time he does not intend to spend, by the time he tries convincing Marcus to stand down for the second time (and just generally not be involved for the third time), Neroon arguably spends more time in the effort to convinceMarcus than it would have taken to just kill him, given that by the time he tells Marcus "This is foolish! A waste of material. Once denn'shah is invoked, I cannot surrender. But you, you are not Minbari. Step aside and I will pretend that you ran away, changed your mind. No one will know.", sounding more than a little aggrieved, Marcus has been visibly flagging for a bit and is down for the count, momentarily too exhausted and injured - likely concussed - to continue, and Neroon simply isn't. Sure, that buys Marcus the time to recover enough (and get angry enough at the affront) to surprise Neroon with a pike to the face, but it's only because of that breather that the fight even lasts just under a minute after the fact, which doesn't not change the outcome that had been evident before that last segment anyway.
And this reluctance to just take his opportunity and kill Marcus is before Neroon gets his 'revelation'.
Before a human facing death calls on Valen. Before Neroon has to look at this one as an equal - or better, more of a Minbari than he - and realize just how much of a mistake he's been set on making.
It is before that moment of revelation, or those of transition that ensue, that apparently one more death is a problem, despite the implications of what Neroon said, even though in this case, there are likely political ramifications to Neroon not killing Marcus. Also, and if actions aren't enough, there are some interesting cultural facets coming into play.
Despite not actually killing Marcus, (though Neroon seems to want Delenn to assume he has - he has a thing for wanting to make people assume the worst), this harm done to this human literally, culturally, does not disappear into the fifty thousand Neroon implies will eclipse even his death. "There is now blood between us.", he says of the fact, "And there is blood between the Warrior Caste and the humans.".
Now! there is blood between the Warrior Caste and the humans. Now, because this one is the problem isn't it.
Because Marcus isn't Earthforce military now and there isn't a war on now, so this one human actually counts and fifty-thousand do not, because they were valid military targets in an actual war, and it says a LOT that Neroon makes the distinction. A distinction that isn't personal to him - or to his revelation that he's probably still processing anyway. He clearly expects every Minbari in the room to understand it.
That is actually a good reason why the theory that the Minbari intended to basically finish the war, and then go back to kill off all the human civilians they'd stubbornly spared till then, just doesn't make sense: Because enemies killed inside a war isn't at all problematic, and if they'd decided to consider every single human they encountered - instead of only military ones - as a valid target, then perhaps killing them while there was an actual war going would not be problematic either.
But they didn't. Didn't consider civilian targets as valid targets to be destroyed. Didn't actually kill all those humans who were utterly defenseless, and in easy reach, in the duration that bloodshed was apparently considered to be washed clean by the fact of being at war.
Spilling the blood of just one human outside war is, apparently, culturally problematic for the Minbari.
It counts, and not in a positive way, so does it even make sense to think that they'd intentionally left any actual acts of genocide for when it would be most problematic, culturally speaking?
These essentially wrap up our consideration of spoken sources for an intent to commit genocide on the part of the Minbari.
A little logical analysis:
1: If the Minbari did intend to commit genocide, then we have two options:
1a) either they are ashamed of it, in retrospect, in which case they actually, individually, can lie to let the rest of their
species save face (remember, this is the one case when Minbari do lie, and by lie, I don't mean split hairs, prevaricate,
or deflect, but rather properly lie as Ashann did in "There All the Honor Lies") and just deny it. Likely, they'd feel they
had to given the amount of face saving every single clan would need to escape a very serious variety of dishonor.
But they don't.
Or,
1b) they had no qualms about it after the fact, then they would have no reason not to just come out and
very specifically say it, for reasons of tactical value as I'll argue in a bit. Something that they also don't.
2: If, on the other hand, they did not intend to commit genocide, well, we've had examples of Minbari, particularly Warriors, who let erroneous assumptions stand, either because they don't feel the need to provide information that nobody is asking for, not even to personally save face, or perhaps, because - as we have also seen on numerous occasions - they can't lie to create a certain perception, but they can and frequently do encourage erroneous assumptions that are incredibly convenient for them.
After all, "If you can create sufficient fear in your enemies you may not have to fight them. Always remember that terror is also a form of communication." from none less than Dukhat himself. ["The Paragon of Animals"]
Considering, especially, that the Stribes pissed off the Minbari but continue as a species, on their homeworld, no less. The Dilgar pissed off the humans and ended up extinct (sure, they pissed off plenty of the Non-Aligned worlds, but it was the humans who pretty much ended them), suddenly there's a very credible reason why the Minbari have a vested interest in keeping certain assumptions alive and well. Humans, like a lot of species, are happy to go to war if they think they can win. Humans, we know, plenty of them in high places, no less than ten years after the Earth Minbari war kept insisting that if it happened in their day, Earth would have won. Unless one wants to invite a rematch, it pays dividends to maintain a reputation that is as terrifying as possible, especially if there are no considerations of lost honor to worry about (as in if plans of genocide were factual).
The Minbari definitely aren't doing what would be expected in scenario 1a or 1b. They may well be doing exactly what is to be expected in scenario 2. There are however much more ways to look at this aside from logic, and the subtleties of Minbari communication.
Let us say that in the final analysis, terror can be earned, not only by misinterpretation. Granted, splitting hairs over what precisely someone did or didn't say is insufficient proof of their innocence, and in particular, though apropos for Minbari because of they way they handle communication, a slippery slope for humans. How many times, after all, have we seen a bigot among us raise followers to violence, then wash their hands of the crimes they incited by saying "well, I didn't exactly tell them to do it.". When such a defense is made, it cannot be considered sufficient if there are actions which contradict the words, so let us examine actions.
In the case of the Minbari, I would maintain that the argument regarding their actual lack of a policy or plan of genocide is correct, because of the complete lack of actions taken by them in accordance with such a plan. And because it is actually fair to argue that despite their being very good at violence, they have an unusually low tolerance for perpetrating it.
Genocide is, after all, the very worst form of Ethnic Cleansing. It's willing and acting to make a specific race (or in this case species) extinct, not just within a particular region, as would be the former, but from all existence. As such, all the usual horrors of the latter invariably apply to the former. When one intends to commit genocide, or its lesser variant, one does not leave the civilians of the target population unharmed. What one does is say what we said about the Native children in this continent: "Kill them all. Nits make Lice" and then actually do so. And maybe, along the way, one puts them in labor camps because they need slave labor, or in concentration camps to satisfy one's need to be monstrous and ensure that each mass murder is 100% successful, or uses them as a hostage population, or most effectively and horribly of all, as a means of psychological warfare to cripple the will of those left to fight.
The Minbari did exactly none of these, not even the versions of them that could be eminently useful in 'communicating via terror'.
And it is not equivalent - tactically - to just up and do it later. Civilian populations are not something one can simply ignore in war. Even if not direct military threats, they are a population from which will inevitably spring new soldiers and guerrillas (something the Minbari would comprehend since they had exactly that among themselves, with non-Warriors changing caste to become Warriors in the very same war). They are a potential source of materials, if outside one's front lines (that's why we incinerated Dresden after all. It was essentially a strictly civilian target but also a source of material for the Nazis so we decided it was justified), and even more dangerously, if behind one's front lines, intelligence.
They are also a camouflage for enemy special forces operating behind one's own lines, and we know the Minbari had more than a small (and very ugly) problem with that. More on this later.
Assuming that the Minbari did intend to commit genocide leaves us with an insurmountable logical contradiction to everything they actually did.
They took no prisoners as a rule. Civilians they left alone, and military they killed instead of taking prisoner even surrendering soldiers. We consider this a war crime, sure, but the flipside to it is that this also guarantees a complete lack of the torture, rape, degradation and, at times, experimentation on sentient beings that characterizes our every POW (military and civilian) situation without fail. And characterized the human treatment of Minbari prisoners in the Earth Minbari war.
"During the war I once took seven days to kill a Minbari.", says one of the Human ex-special forces (behind enemy lines, see the problem with this now?) who has taken Delenn and Lenann hostage in "Ceremonies of Light and Dark", "First you tie off the fingers one at a time. Then you slice off the fingers. Then the feet ... the hands ... the arms ... the legs. You should have seen it."
The response from his present boss?: "Don't worry, we will.", and this present intent, for two Minbari prisoners who are about as far from Warrior as one can get, and outside a war, no less.
Also, in the very same, "I picked up your language from some POWs I took during the war. It came in real handy when I told them to start digging their own graves.". Considering that pretty much certainly Delenn and her fellow Religious Caste Minbari are talking in Adronato, not Fik[2] (and Warrior prisoners would have probably stuck to Fik, assuming their fellow prisoners were also Warriors), the fact that he understands them might be a lot more disturbing than initially apparent.
But, likely, not that surprising. Certainly, despite war being the exclusive domain of the Warrior Caste at the time, we could expect to have some kind of civilian presence in Minbari lines. Workers to do repairs, and Religious for funeral ceremonies and the likes. The latter certainly are part of Branmer's funeral in "Legacies", and since that was done in spite of the wishes of the Religious Caste, they probably aren't present just for kicks. Also, in "There all the Honor Lies", it falls to Delenn to have Lavell's body - A Warrior's body - prepared for funeral rites in the manner appropriate to his clan, instead of just sending it on home and letting someone on Minbar handle it, which at the very least suggests a cultural imperative for the Religious Caste to perform these rites as close as possible to the time and place of death, lending further probability to the presence of Religious Caste (at the very least) prisoners among those tortured and killed by humans.
Not that we could have reasonably expected there to be many. Probably once the Minbari figured it out, they'd have closed ranks, or at least tried to. And one could expect it to be hypothetically pretty successful for the safety of Religious Caste Minbari at least, since ceremonies are probably moveable. Who knows about Worker Caste, since damaged ships and materials are frequently less so.
But, again, I digress.
In "In the Beginning", we have Captain Sterns of the Lexington telling his XO, Sheridan, in response to the latter's inquiry as to his CO's desire not to outright destroy what appears to be a damaged Minbari transport, and the risk he's taking to do that: "We've shown the Minbari that we're capable of striking first... We've shown we can be merciless . . . there are rumors, I've heard, rumors of captured Minbari being tortured and killed. Now what we have to show them ... is that we can be compassionate. It is my intention to capture the transport, with all hands alive, if possible."
The very fact that he - previously established as a through-and-through soldier with a very level head - needs to go to great risk to prove such a point to the Minbari, the very fact that he needs to do so to counteract humanity's reputation - and the killing part probably wasn't the problem, whether the Captain knew it or not, but the torture, as per one of the perpetrator's very own description very likely was - indicates plenty. Historically, among humans, by the time anyone at the command level starts to admit their troops have a problem with torturing prisoners, it's a very widespread and ugly one indeed. That he needs to take such drastic action against the precedent says even more.
Speaking of reputation, we have yet another Minbari in "There All the Honor Lies", who for all his sneering uncooperativeness has literally no cause to lie about his perception of humans, and wasn't part of the plot against Sheridan anyway:
Garibaldi: "So if I ask you if you might know who did see the incident with Captain Sheridan you'd have to answer truthfully. "
Minbari: "Or not at all, Unless it is your intention to beat it out of me. That is how your race operates, is it not? "
Unfortunately there's no reason to think that these events refer to incidents that were in any way exceptional. Apparently humans did take prisoners where they could, and if there was an exception to the aftermath of such a venture, it was what Sterns was so nobly trying to achieve, rather than the alternative. Meanwhile the historical precedent for human treatment of prisoners in wartime does not counter this assessment, given that said history is a rather sordid ugly affair of widespread deliberate (outright or tacitly sanctioned) torture, rape, mutilation, and frequently experimentation, on captives, with the frequency and severity of the offenses increasing in direct proportion to the level of dehumanization applied to the prisoners by their captors. We hardly need Ashann's vitriolic "He was not a man, though, was he? He was Minbari" comment (yes, Ashann does lie about the facts, to save face for Lavell, but he has again literally no motive to lie about his opinion of the human opinion of Minbari) to know that Minbari prisoners of course would have been treated as a lot less human than all the humans we've historically tortured, raped, mutilated, experimented on, and killed, because they were literally not human, while with the inevitable curiosity engendered by their their alien-ness, comes a whole new set of reasons to, say, experiment, vivisect, etc. And of course, lest anyone think we've evolved so far by the 23rd century, one need only look at the Human-on-Human violence in the B5 universe to know that such is not the case. Clearly torture and all the associated ills are alive and well on Earth by then.
Since, as a rule, every real-world study done on survivors of such treatment concurs that killing them outright would have been far more merciful, that their dead comrades are the lucky ones, and that what those of us who haven't lived through such treatment can't understand is that such prisoners never do leave captivity, never are truly free of what they have endured once the torture has gone on long enough to damage the psyche - and that happens fast and permanently when it is deliberate and premeditated, because the fact of it adds to the overall horror of being transformed from sentient being to a disposable thing that only exists to amuse the torturer with its suffering - it is essentially impossible to prefer human conduct regarding prisoners in the war.
Yes, Lennier says Sinclair was tortured, a piece of information that pretty much began with Delenn, but again, her assessment was based on an assumption, considering that she was not there when the event happened, and didn't ask after the fact. In full, when at the Line, the Minbari picked up Sinclair to get information from him, they had no interest in torturing it out of him. For one thing, there was a language barrier.
For another, it was unnecessary, considering the Triluminary was apparently expected to give them a full look inside his mind (without any ill effects), and let's not forget they had some pretty powerful telepaths besides. Though quite certainly planning to kill him, they also apparently had no interest in making any of it any messier than it needed to be, drugging Sinclair as soon as they cracked the hatch of his starfury - and considering how many had gone to retrieve him, if they were feeling sadistic, they could have satisfied that impulse to greater effect by beating him almost insensate instead of drugging him to that point. But no, he wasn't injured at all. That bit happened after he took one look at the Triluminary in Morann's hands, decided it just had to be a torture device - why else does someone stick a triangle in one's face- , and since he wasn't particularly keen on finding out what it did, punched the most sacred relic of the Minbari right out of a Satai's hands. Eeeesh.
"So disoriented and drugged was he that he did not even feel the first blow that landed upon him. The second blow, however, definitely registered, as did the third and fourth. The gray-clad Minbari, clearly infuriated at the offense, clubbed Sinclair several more times while one of the others picked up the triangle that Sinclair had so cavalierly knocked to the floor.
From the reverential manner in which they treated it, it became quickly evident to Sinclair-even in his drug-induced confusion-that this was something incredibly valuable to them. He had no idea what it was or why they considered it vital, and he didn't care. Hurt them hurt them hurt them tumbled through his skull, and curiously it was accompanied by a second thought, namely, Why? Why? Why? What do they want? Who am I?
Apparently deciding that sufficient recriminations had been made for the sin of striking down one of their most sacred relics, they attached him to the crossbar, which then held him helpless. The cold glare of twin lights shone down upon him. The gray-clad Minbari held the triangle up to Sinclair once more. Sinclair's arms and legs strained against the bonds, as he fought against his body's own weakness, but he wasn't able to manage any sort of offensive action other than to spit in the Minbari's general direction. It landed on the floor, and the Minbari paused, looking at it with curiosity. As a sign of disrespect, it was not especially successful, since the Minbari were not familiar with it as such. The Minbari likely considered Sinclair's grand gesture of defiance to be little more than a sort of biological curiosity.
The gray-clad Minbari held up the triangle, uncaring of anything that Sinclair might have to offer by way of further truculence. It glowed ..." [ITB]
And of course, the rest is history. Whatever Morann saw declaring Sinclair to be Valen, he practically ran to get the entire Gray Council to check his revelation - or maybe his sanity -, Delenn guessed that Sinclair's injuries were the result of deliberate sadism instead of momentary anger "Delenn saw the bruised and battered human hanging there and wondered why in the world he had come to that state. A probe by the Triluminary should have been painless. Had Morann simply beaten him up out of a sense of revenge? In Valen's name, how much revenge did Morann need to exact?"[ITB], and since Morann never explained his side of things, even when minutes later, Delenn said "Look at what we have done. Broken our most sacred law to a degree not even imaginable. Tormented and tortured the physical carrier of the soul of Valen. Of Valen!" [ITB], the assumption stuck.
And of course sometime in the ensuing deliberations of a bewildered and panicked Gray Council, Sinclair finally gets out of his drugged haze to start figuring he's probably going to be tortured - he has no idea that at this point it's literally the last thing that can happen, only that he's the center of all their attentions - and starts giving the bewildered Minbari the name, rank, and serial number litany, an action that they also don't get, probably lacking historical precedent for why he's doing it, and finally chalking it up to some kind of bizzare human ritual. If only they knew.
Granted, it is yet another slippery slope to try to quantify torture. But generally torture needs to be premeditated and deliberate and carried on, or at least intended to be carried on over a span of time, usually for a purpose - information, confession, psychological warfare, or, let's face it, sheer sadism - that goes beyond brief flare-ups of (a well established and admittedly impressive) temper. This was none of the above.
The only other prisoners ever known or implied to be taken by Minbari was after the failed armistice talk with Lennon. Namely, Sheridan and Franklin, with G'Kar along for the ride as something of an unwilling guest. The interesting thing here is that Sonovar, the Minbari who decided to break with precedent and take them prisoner basically did so because despite his hate for them, he couldn't bring himself to kill, up close and personally, two defenseless Earthforce Officers and so decided to make it some other Minbari's problem - probably Delenn's.
"Indeed, the compulsion to kill the humans was a sizable one in any event. This was, after all, the race that had slain Dukhat, and was also apparently now responsible for the death of Lenonn... humans were to be killed, slaughtered, regardless of whatever the circumstances surrounding their capture. "No mercy" had been the battle cry of the war. "No mercy." And there was no reason to extend it now.
"Shall we execute them?" a Minbari standing behind Sonovar inquired...
He looked at his helpless victims . ..
Helpless.
Sonovar was momentarily annoyed with himself. The humans had been helpless during much of the incursion against them, but it had been so easy to just blast their ships out of space. To see them face-to-face, to kill a barely conscious Human, or another who was clearly unarmed and nonthreatening . . .
But they had to be executed. No mercy.
... "We take them back with us," Sonovar said decisively. His voice hardened. "Those closest to Dukhat, such as Satai Delenn, have never had a chance to look upon the creatures who took Dukhat from us. Perhaps they will wish to ask questions of them. Perhaps they would like to simply see the faces of a race who would take the greatest among us away. They can always be killed. Bringing them back to life after they have been killed is more of a problem." He looked sadly at Lenonn. "Let us bring Lenonn home. . . . and give those responsible for his death a short moment of hope before we kill them."" [ITB]
For all the newly stoked rage and hate that flares up among all the Minbari present, including Delenn (until she finally gets Lenonn's dying message), none of them have any particular interest in engaging with the Human prisoners, even to torture them. Surely said prisoners are definitely going to be executed, but there isn't any real sadism to be found in the default plan, considering that a sadistic execution is the specialthreat reserved for Sheridan in specific (though at that rate, he'd have ended up with his neck snapped like a twig when Sonovar's temper hit critical mass), because he won't stop talking about Dukhat (doubt any Minbari thought it was complimentary), and though every time he says "Dukhat", Sonovar flips out and whales on him, this particular human just won't. shut. up.
" Sonovar had not understood what Sheridan was trying to say. But one word had leapt out at him, or to be more precise, one name. The name of Dukhat. To hear that most revered of names uttered by one of the race that slaughtered him . . . the mere act was an obscenity. Having struck Sheridan a flurry of blows, Sonovar snarled, "You dare even speak Dukhat's name?"
He expected Sheridan to say nothing, to lapse into respectful silence. But Sheridan hadn't understood Sonovar's words, and I doubt it would have made any difference if he had. "I know-" he began to say, and again Sonovar struck him. ... "Say his name again," Sonovar warned, "and your death will be terrible beyond description."
Sheridan looked up at Sonovar with an expression of pure frustration. What the hell is this guy's problem? he wondered, having no idea what it was that was angering the Minbari. With every ounce of will, he said, "I know . . . what is in . . . Dukhat's sacred place ... I know . . ."
With a roar of fury, Sonovar reached for Sheridan's neck, and there is every chance that he might have ripped the Human's head clear off his body. But that was the instant that Delenn suddenly said, "Stop!"" [ITB]
And we know how that ends. Delenn decides to spare these two, Sonovar - now that he can't kill them - decides that killing them sounds like a much better idea than it actually did to him (I have said it's always easier to argue in the hypothetical), debates doing it, scares the heck out of them ... and ultimately doesn't, returning them with no further violence to the planet where the Minbari picked them up.
Now, granted, certainly Sonovar's temper is on a hair-trigger set to certain cultural definitions of sacrilege, and granted, he is likely the last person they wanted to get a ride from. But the fact is that someone who truly wants to cause pain, to torture, maim, and kill, will perceive even the inoffensive and coincidental as provocation, very much like we saw Jankowski's convoluted self-contradictory reasoning twist the facts, even of his own stated intentions, internally justifying his choices that tragically began the Earth Minbari war. The fact is that for all Sonovar's apparent menace, he was more confused than hell-bent on making them suffer: " It seemed as if he was just glaring at them, but there was more to it than that. He was trying to figure out just what it was about them that had prompted Satai Delenn to release them. He could not see anything special about them. In fact, they seemed rather pathetic."[ITB]. And for all the times he struck Sheridan, who had his hands tied behind his back and was completely unable to shield himself from harm, the latter ended up alive and well after being stranded on an inhospitable planet for several hours - plenty of time for an internal injury to become fatal - so we can probably infer that for all his temper, he probably wasn't all that committed to doing damage. A human, after all is amply equipped to cause terminal internal injuries. A Minbari Warrior, with both greater strength and training, doubly so.
At no other time than precisely every time Sheridan says the name of the last Minbari any human could ever be welcomed to speak, under the circumstances, does anyone lay a finger on Sheridan. Franklin certainly was spared entirely, and though we can rightly castigate Sonovar for prisoner mistreatment, and once again a bad temper, it's again in response to (completely unintentional) sacrilege of the highest order. And absolutely nothing, no violence or torture of any kind, for anything else.
Hardly the actions of a species that tortures, or any of the associated ills. Hardly the actions of a species capable of matching established human behavior for sheer sadism, considerations that likely lend a whole new dimension to Neroon's labeling of humans in general as: "dishonorable, cowardly, and murderous". Even if we chalk up the first two to simply different cultural standards of military ethics, they do not predicate the third.
As much as the Minbari hate Sheridan for the DralaFi, as much as it galls them that he destroyed their flagship essentially with hidden weapons (there is a line between a trap set with enemy vessels that are recognized as the threat they are, and asteroids that are not, a fine point people frequently miss), and call him StarKiller, I can think of no time when they call him "Murderer". Every soldier is a killer. But murderer is a different kind of a label.
We have established that military deaths, inside a war, don't count as blood spilled, don't count as murder.
Neroon makes this clear in "Grey 17 is Missing". Apparently, given the lack of the adjective "murderer" being hissed in Sheridan's face or appended to his name along with "StarKiller" and "without honor", military deaths - the deaths of Minbari Warriors - even those that are caused "dishonorably", still do not count as "murder", though hilariously, ironically too, coming from this particular human more than any other, Sheridan does not reciprocate with that distinction. "They were on a mission to murder the remaining crew of the Lexington."[ITB], he says, of the DralaFi, to the entire listening planet Earth.
Since the Minbari do not understand the concept of a Warrior surrendering, and do not therefore consider, legally and culturally, executing soldiers even under those circumstances as murder either (even if individually, they have less inclination to be violent then they are allowed to be,- yet another deviation from humans who, as per our history, constantly push the limits of the strictures that are to hold our violent tendencies in check), they're definitely not complaining about humans executing Minbari Warrior prisoners, (though they likely would be furious over what was done to them up to that point), and since it was made clear that a single murder, even one as shocking as that of Dukhat, was not at issue in the generalization... and it was not everything else we've crossed off so far, one wonders what were the human 'universal tactics of murder'? My money is on torturing and killing Minbari of other castes who happened to get caught, but yes, that's only a guess, albeit one that seems reasonable.
Back to the topic of Minbari wartime behavior. Since the Minbari had no interest in prisoners for any purpose (labor, sadism, psychological warfare, leverage), and also had no interest, in a Holy War, of seizing either material gains or control over populations (much to Shakiri's derision in "Moments of Transition"), or any of the usual reasons for ground warfare - and more than enough firepower to obliterate every colony they came across just as they did with every military outpost and base they came across, it begs the question of why, oh, why they ever engaged in ground warfare, at all?
With no tactical reason, no resources or prisoners to take, or populations to annex, why ever risk their lives, why risk their people to torture and degradation (since death wasn't the biggest problem) and a host of other crimes they clearly took very personally, and get bogged down in ground wars which are a lot slower than bombardment, when the Minbari could have just destroyed from orbit the colonies just as they did the bases? Have I mentioned dying stupidly is just stupid, and not a Warrior Caste pastime?
One might guess that it had to do with cultural necessity, with rules of engagement, but that would be wrong.
The Minbari, in fact, didn't feel bound by their rules of engagement to board a space-station, or land in an outpost to kill everyone there.
Their enemies had to see them coming as warships, not rigged asteroids or Trojan-horse-esque cargo vessels - that's part of the Minbari honor thing - , but they didn't have to see them coming at literal walking pace. Bombardment was just fine, as evidenced by exactly what the Minbari were getting up to in the first phases of their war, every time they hit a military colony, base, space station, or fleet:
"Jericho 3 was the base for the fleet Captain Jankowski had led into Minbari space. Several Minbari cruisers were clustered around the colony, and they were ripping into it with the same ruthless efficiency that they had used upon the hapless Euripides. While two of the vessels were busy slicing through the colony's defenses as if they were not even there, a third targeted the reactor and blew the place to bits. At least those living there did not suffer for a particularly long time...
"The incidents you have just seen have been repeated at half a dozen bases in just the last few days. Where the Minbari strike, nothing is left alive. Even ships no longer capable of fighting are targeted and destroyed. ... They are moving methodically through the outer colonies," Fontaine continued, "wiping out our defense structures, leaving the colonies vulnerable. Civilian structures are being left alone for now."[ITB]
So, since the Minbari didn't need or want any prisoners, hostages, slaves, materials, territory, annexed populations, or even just victims to exert their essentially nonexistent sadism on, it begs the question why they didn't do exactly this to the larger colonies they hit later, those closer to Earth and large enough to have military bases and targets in them, but also sizeable civilian populations.
If they had, we'd have had a human casualty count orders of magnitude greater than what actually came out of the Earth Minbari war, because the civilian population on any colony that's actually a colony, not an extended base, is orders of magnitude greater. But they didn't.
So: why land at all? Certainly it was not necessity.
The DralaFi was a one-off, no-one in Earthforce ever had any consistent luck downing Minbari ships, and if they had, considering a crash would be from space, not the upper atmosphere, the Minbari would have essentially hit ground as a meteor shower, especially since the craft complement on the Sharlins was nowhere near enough to evacuate more than a fraction of the crew. So why deliberately land and bring in ground troops, when it is safer, more efficient, and frankly less traumatic (see Sonovar above) to just exterminate everybody from a nice efficient distance.
It wouldn't even take much firepower since surely every such colony had several reactors, and just blowing those would have killed most everybody on the spot and the rest via radiation poisoning, and had Earth tried to send rescue ships, well, more easy pickings for the Minbari, considering the finest of Earthforce were falling before them like dandelions in front of a weedwhacker.
Seriously. Most colonies wouldn't have had breathable atmosphere outside domes and domes are ridiculously easy targets. One fusion-cannon shaped hole in each of those and most of the civvies suffocate, and then there's the bonus of no fallout on the ground if you want to use it as a staging area, but really, the Minbari had Starbases a thousand years earlier. Why build a staging area when you can just bring one that's literally equipped for everything.
The fact is the Minbari didn't.
They had no use or desire for a prisoner population, no enjoyment in seeing anyone dying, up close, no desire for a long exhausting costly war, and certainly no desire to be caught by those 'savage and primitive' - to their minds- humans and get tortured, and who knows what else (again, sorry, we can't stop setting precedent and it's an ugly one) but they still engaged in ground combat that had exactly zero benefits and no tactical value and instead a massive cost in terms of lives, material and time.
The only reason. The only reason to engage in ground combat, when you aren't building labor camps, concentration camps, torture camps, an empire, and aren't saying surrender or we kill them all... is to spare civilian lives.
Landing to fight instead of just bombarding everything on their path was certainly not an oversight. It was certainly not a convenience. On the contrary, it was deliberate and carried out through the war despite the cost.
This isn't the conduct of a species hell-bent on genocide.
How many of our own Air Force pilots, from every country, know that at 30,000 feet, a target is a target, and you can't tell if the thing in your crosshairs is a preschool or a military planning facility.
How many of our own know that even if you have good intelligence and you can tell school from mil/gov compound, frequently the firepower you need to level the valid target will have massive civilian casualties in the vicinity, and then it's a tossup whether whoever is in command decides that particular target is worth sacrificing all those civilians who are just in the way.
It wasn't accidental that Minbari didn't simply wrap up the war as they so easily could have. It wasn't efficient, or cheap in terms of Minbari lives, or time, or their resources (JMS mentioned that the war pretty much devastated the Minbari economy, because all of it was going to keeping their fleet in top condition, and ironically bolstered the Earth economy because they had expanded industry and shipyards massively which paid dividends after the fact and lost very few people overall).
It wasn't tactically reasonable, effective, or convenient to their own well being, physically or psychologically, to not just do all their killing from a nice clean distance where there are only targets and no suffering is seen -And to go back after the fact and slaughter the civilian majority of the human race, we have established, could only be even more problematic, as bloodshed outside of war is considered murder.
Simply stated, the way the Minbari waged war, at significant cost to them that could have been entirely avoided, for the entirely of the war, is permanently and utterly irreconcilable with the actions of a species that is willing to commit genocide, much less actually planning to carry it out.
That shouldn't be a surprise, in the final consideration. They had, thanks to the WindSwords, "terrible weapons", probably bioweapons given that the Dilgar DeathWalker was that kind of a monster, but these clearly were never authorized for use by either the Gray Council or the War Leaders.
Why not? - if they intended genocide. Maybe one could argue that using those would be a breach of accords of war (if they were, though it certainly didn't stop humans from trying to develop exactly those for deployment against the Minbari) but guess what? Genocide is such a breach too, and if they were ok with that, how they did it is hardly significant. To say nothing of the fact that in Holy Wars, at least in our human application of the term, the first thing to be discarded is rules of engagement.
Who needs mortal laws when one has divine sanction, after all?
For that matter, why ever care about the locations of Earth defenses at the Battle of the Line? Human targeting systems never could lock on to Minbari ships - ever, that's why Sheridan knows something is wrong when the Trigati is there and human tech can get a target lock - so whether said systems were on destroyers, satellites, or the ground makes little difference to the minimal threat they posed anyway. Meanwhile, if the Minbari were there to commit genocide, all the information they needed was the locations of the largest landmasses, and they could see those from space. It hardly would have taken that much firepower to practically obliterate the human race. Clark had that all set to go with human weapons, and Minbari weapons were that much more destructive, - and if they wanted to be efficient and say pinpoint enough reactors to just poison the entire planet and save firepower, well, that's very different intel from what they actually wanted. They planned to pry information on defenses out of Sinclair's mind, not targets.
Back to the WindSwords, it's only semi-canonical that the Trigati was largely WindSword. The closest connection we can get to is in some tie-in media for Crusade, the Trigati is the name of a WindSword colony, and if the ship was named after it, well, odds are it was. If it was, they had access to DeathWalker's weapons.
Even if not, the self-exiled Trigati still had ties to upper echelons of Minbari society, and it is not a stretch to think that they, arguably militant extremists (by Minbari standards, more on this later) would have, or be easily able to cultivate ties with the incredibly militant WindSwords. So they either had or could have likely accessed those weapons.
"At the end of the war when our ships were ordered to surrender, one of our war leaders, Sineval, took his own life rather than obey and became a martyr to his own crew. Kalain assumed command. And as a final act of protest, they and the cruiser disappeared into self-imposed exile."- Rathenn, on the Trigati["Points of Departure"]
Clearly they were not in agreement with the surrender order. Clearly they were the most enraged of the Warrior Caste, enough so to cut themselves off from homeworld, clans, caste, families, name it, and eventually commit mass-suicide, in their abiding wounded fury.
If there were plans to exterminate the human race, why do we never have this rogue ship break ranks and fire on the humans anyway, just to take out as many as they can before their own side stopped them? If the Minbari overall were acting to commit genocide over their martyred leader, Dukhat (and everything else they were furious at humans over in the war), is it not reasonable to expect the crew of the Trigati to at least give genocide their very best shot and attempt some mass murder over their newly martyred War Leader Sineval (lower rank but far more personal), in addition to all the prior, and the humiliation and feelings of betrayal that the surrender order elicited in them?
Why not, sometime in their exile, cut off from their chain of command and invisible even to their own fleet, finish the war (as we assume the Minbari intended to finish it) and actually make a damn effective effort to exterminate the human race since bioweapons are a hell of a hellish force multiplier? If the Minbari were going to commit genocide and that is what was denied the angry crew of the Trigati, they probably could have found a way to make a proper effort of it.
And sure, maybe it would have been a suicide mission, being alone and all, though one Sharlin cruiser is plenty of threat, and the Trigati was respected among Minbari, at least as such, but clearly suicide wasn't a deterrent for them anyway.
In the final summation, the Minbari, despite their reputation - that we can attribute as much to inter-caste misunderstandings (and the fact of which caste and which individuals of said Caste reached out to the universe as representatives of their planet), as we can to their stubborn stony silence on most things, "We have no desire to explain our ways to you"- Neroon ["Legacies"], as we can to what they might have carefully cultivated (or conveniently appreciated) as a means of deflecting potential trouble in a universe where actual genocides are in plenty * - are shown by their actions to have a paradoxically low investment in committing acts of aggression despite having an exceptional talent for them, at the exact same time.
* In B5, off the top of my head, we have Dilgar atrocities beyond description, and numerous genocides by them - some strictly for the
sake of sick experiments-, the genocide of the Dilgar, the Markab extinguished by their own dogmas, the Ikkarrans victims of genocide by
their own supersoldiers, the ultimately genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Hyach-Doh by the Hyach - with a body count of fourty million
massacred civilians, and this in turn leading to the guaranteed extinction of the Hyach - , Vorlon and Shadow planet-killers, etc
In terms of military capability, it would be accurate to say that the Minbari certainly possess the power to throw their weight around. Simply stated, they are preeminently capable in warfare. They came in second only to the First Ones in their contributions to the last Shadow war, and to look at more current events, well, the Centauri were master conquerors but even in their heyday would not dream of going toe to toe with the Minbari.
The Narn barely survived the Centauri, and the Dilgar decimated the Non-Aligned worlds but Earth defeated them, and we know how Earth fared against the Minbari, so certainly the Non-Aligned worlds wouldn't have a chance, ever, against the Minbari themselves. Finally, before the second Shadow war, the Vorlons were even more stubbornly isolationist than the Minbari, with literally no interest in what anyone else was doing, whatever the casualty count, and as a species that had almost disappeared into myth, had certainly no bearing on the average Minbari, while the Shadows and co. were unknown. After that, both, together with the rest of the First Ones, are literally a non-issue.
Despite this lack of a military counterbalance to their power, throughout the B% universe, the Minbari are also known by this rule: "If you do not bother them, they will not bother you."
This is an extremely unusual combination in a species. Any species: to have such capacity for violence and simultaneously what boils down to very little actual enjoyment or even tolerance of it. And since I'm sure this will be a point of contention, let's give it a bit of a look.
We've already looked at actual conduct of the Minbari in the context of the war.
In the context of the strained relations between the Minbari, specifically the Warrior Caste and humans - a situation sure to bring out the worst in the relevant parties - we have a couple interesting incidents. Interesting because the only people the Minbari are killing is themselves:
"Lavell is a martyr. He sacrificed himself to remove Sheridan." - Ashann ["There all the Honor Lies"]
When Lavell decides to take Minbari protests to a whole new level, regarding Sheridan's appointment to B5, he arranges to die. And if one is going to all that trouble to make such a setup and lie about it. And if one hates the intended target as much as they hated Sheridan, and as much as Lavell in particular hated Sheridan, apparently... well, let's just say it's interesting that, given he'd already set things up to look like Sheridan was the aggressor, to not actually kill the man or at least maim him a bit in self defense. Given that the Minbari then recalled their witness, it appears they were gunning for Sheridan's career, not his life, in any case. But the fact that the actual dying is done by the Minbari is still interesting. Less surprising, though, in the context of Neroon's statements "There is now blood ... between the Warrior Caste and the humans. " after the (incomplete) denn'shah, from which we concluded earlier, that outside of a war, (and even in the case of Sheridan, however much they hate this particular human), the Minbari literally can't just blithely off said human, even when they can get away with it. Oh, no reason to think it's forbidden, like Minbari killing Minbari is. But there's apparently a certain cultural aversion to it.
And this holds true also in the Trigati incident. Oh, we say that the Trigati was trying to restart the war, but that is inconsistent with what they did for several reasons:
First, Kalain commits suicide in a way that everyone on Earth and Minbar would conclude that his death was just that, voluntary suicide, and humanely, non-lethally stuns the security guard instead of committing suicide by cop, that could have given his crew cause to say that he was murdered by humans being trigger happy.
Second, he threatens no less than two Satai, but doesn't actually kill either of them, though he certainly, very effectively has gotten his government's attention (more on that later), and by threatening Rathenn, he has guaranteed that Sheridan is informed that the Trigati is coming, and that official assistance from the Minbari government is also coming. Not a good way to try to spook a human into a stupid move. Sheridan knows that the Trigati is rogue and hunted by their own instead of just having a Minbari war cruiser come right out of his most desperate memories and breathe down his throat.
Speaking of spooking humans, Sheridan was known, even commended for, his level head, and the Minbari knew enough of his military record even twelve years backs. Even calling his actions, in destroying the DralaFi dishonorable, it's a matter of military intelligence, not approval to know that Sheridan pulled it off because of his level head and steel nerves, so despite personally hating the man, if the Trigati wanted to restart the war, they'd have gone and provoked one of the many ships they spooked in recent times, especially by tracking down one with a commanding officer who was trigger happy, stupid, and with a maneuverable and heavily armed destroyer instead of a barely armed sitting-duck of a space station, which would give Sheridan all the more reasons to wait for the Minbari to come and fix their problem rather than being provoked into a fight he certainly could not win.
Also, if they had hoped to spook Sheridan into firing, it would be far more effective to leave their stealth systems active, bring him back to the fear that likely haunted every human veteran of the Earth Minbari war, namely that their targeting systems had no chance - the fear of the technologically superior enemy -thereby increasing the menace of their threat, and thus the desperation of the recipient.
And if they had wanted to escalate the situation long enough to destroy Babylon 5, with or without the excuse that they "had" to, they would have just come out of the obscurity they had managed to keep for twelve years, suddenly, to threaten Babylon 5. Without having alerted both Minbar and Earth first over a significant amount of time, thereby ensuring that they'd be stopped by one side or the other. "All that remains now is honor and death", said Alyt Deeron, highest ranking officer of the Trigati at that point , and that is apparently exactly what she meant.
No doubt their coming out of exile and to Babylon 5 after intentionally warning everyone was in protest to Sheridan's command of the peace post.
But it wasn't likely meant for the humans that they likely considered beneath understanding honor - and the death was theirs, as they had ensured with everything they did. Most likely, they were always going to self destruct, and wanted at least a couple of the Grey Council there to watch. There, in Babylon 5 space, as protest to the change of command of said station that had finally, to their perceptions, finally tipped the scales of their surrender to the humans from what they could not forgive to what they could not live with.
" They believe that they have been betrayed by their own world and yours."["Points of Departure"], says Satai Rathenn, looking more worn than we have ever seen him, a heavy accusation for a species so focused on honor and on their world above all things.
Betrayed by the human choice of commander for Babylon 5, they certainly did feel, but it might have been too far a stretch to think that the humans would care about their suicidal protest.
Instead, most likely the protest was meant for their own government, for not doing enough to somehow prevent the "Starkiller" from taking charge of Babylon 5, a peace post the Minbari had helped build, or maybe for ever making them surrender to a species that would undiplomatically elevate such a hated human to a diplomatic station, or maybe ... or maybe.
It hardly matters.
What matters is the fact that the Trigati hamstrung itself in any real chance to destroy Babylon 5, or start a war, and the whole incident boiled down to an elaborate guilt trip for their own government which they felt had betrayed them in the worst way. What they ensured was that it wasn't a real chance to do any damage, but rather a protest by mass suicide.
Lastly, outside even the context of these engagements, we can look at the Minbari in their natural behavioral patterns:
Before the war and all the bitterness that it created, it's interesting that one of the Warrior Caste's complaints to Dukhat about humans as a potential ally is that they are violent by Warrior Caste standards.
Coming from the Warrior Caste whose members literally exist to fight, that probably sounds odd, at first. But it really isn't. Their entire planet is a society without murder or violence among their own, in a thousand years, and by contrast look at us right now (about two centuries before B5 is set). In 2002, every minute, someone on this planet was murdered by their fellow humans and every hundred seconds, someone died in an armed conflict with about 20-40 in the relevant period being wounded for both cases. In 2013, every 9 seconds, a woman in the (civilized, educated) USA was battered by her partner, and every minute, one was raped. [3]
In 2016, we, Homo Sapiens = 'man the wise' are seven times more likely to murder another member of our own species than any non-primate animal on this planet. Now think that this figure includes hyenas, grizzlies, sharks, and Doberman Pinschers. That's problematic.
Sure we can accredit this lack of similar violence in Minbari culture to Valen, rather than the Minbari temperament, but that would be simply naive on a level past believing in fairies and unicorns, considering that we have literally had more Holy Men, Prophets, Visionaries, Leaders (of peace and war), Messiahs, Society Founder, and Gods tell us not murder each other, than can be easily counted, and that has never been enough to stop us for a day, let alone a thousand years. Not within the sphere of influence of any one of these figures, and not within the collective wisdom of all of them.
This trait in Minbari, rather, boils down more to something very different.
In the "Dark times", a million Warrior Caste deaths at Tuzenor is enough to shock and horrify the warring parties at the brutality and futility of it all, into making peace, and setting the precedent for others to do the same.
"I am as horrified by what is happening back home as you are. But we are two against a world gone mad."["Rumors Bargains and Lies"], says Neroon to Delenn about a barely started civil war and the associated civilian casualties, and that's enough intraspecies violence to pass the madness threshold and to horrify Neroon, about as much a Warrior as a Warrior can be, into taking drastic action to prevent it from getting worse, and to finally forge a meaningful peace - and the beginnings of a friendship - between himself and pretty much the last adversary on the planet one might have ever expected.
When, ever, have a million deaths (even though ours are usually civilians to a tragic degree) on any battlefront on any day horrified both sides enough to realize the pointlessness of it all?
When did over a hundred million deaths truly change anything?
We like to say 'never again' about the bloodbath that was WWII, along many lines, but continue to cultivate the same behavioral patterns and prejudices that lead to such waste of life and senseless monstrosity, because we haven't been able yet to understand, in great enough majority, the horror and futility of it.
We're getting there ... I hope...
But in the meantime, I suspect that the main difference in what we tend to easily understand here and now (and in the B5 universe) and how the Minbari of B5 operate as a culture and species - the fact that they had a society essentially without murder and violence, the fact that they didn't start wars, didn't massacre civilians, didn't torture and so on - can be summed up by this exchange:
Neroon: "Is it wrong to value life? I thought that is why we fought."
Shakiri: "We fight because it is our nature." ["Moments of Transition"]
Both mentalities certainly exist and will continue to exist in every culture, certainly, but the degree of their prevalence makes all the difference, and off conduct alone, it is evident that the Minbari, as a culture and perhaps species, have far more of the former than the latter.
It is Shakiri who is breaking with Warrior Caste and Minbari precedent, and is the aberration.
It is he who has started a civil war in a society that hasn't had intraspecies violence in a thousand years.
He who would break with tradition and call for wars for "practical gains", wars of conquest, that is (that Minbari don't engage in, ever) and on both counts proves himself to be the (very dangerous) exception rather than the rule.
On a last note, there is little doubt that even given their low tolerance for violence, some particularly angry and bitter Minbari, at some point thought about exterminating the humans, even wished for it, talked about it, (particularly in retrospect when it was a safe discussion because they very well couldn't time travel to be called on to deliver - there's been an issue with them wanting to deliver, as we've seen) and ultimately really didn't even plan for it, much less attempt it. But even if we choose to ignore that last part, talking and wishing alone is not enough to consist of "intended genocide", "attempted genocide", much less one comitted.
Because not only is such a conclusion irrational and unfounded, but also then we would have to apply the same measure to humans in the Earth Minbari war.
Humans some of whom wished for, planned for and tried to enact a genocide of the Minbari (stopped only by the morals of one Dr. Franklin and the fact that without his cooperation and specific expertise, they just didn't have the time or resources to make said plans work), in a war that humans started, and we would thus also have to accuse ourselves, with better reason, of genocidal impulses
Notes: This section will expand significantly in the revision, but for now
[1]: When referring to the biologically different populations of different planets, I am using species rather than race, speciesism rather than racism, etc, despite "speciesism" being a pain to say, and it's not to be a prat.
Yes, species and speciesism are more accurate, biologically speaking, but more importantly, they're less potentially disrespectful to victims of racism.
Races are subgroups of a species that are genetically compatible, and in fact show very little variance from one to the next, despite the claims of those who like to say otherwise. We have confounded the definition by (correctly) realizing that with less than a tenth of a percent of genetic variability on average across races, we might as well all be members of the human race, rather than using subcategories. But when we are comparing ourselves to another alien species, or even to the non-human life we share this planet with, the correct term is species, not race.
As much fun as we have saying "That's Racist!", (I think we can thank Doctor Who for that) about different species, it's NOT the same thing. Race carries a long and sordid history of being used to justify discrimination and persecution of our very own with lies. Saying "Caucasians are simply smarter than people of Color" is a lie (the studies that perpetuate this one conveniently ignore variances in educational opportunity) , and then one has to ask in the service of what?
When humans compare behavioral quirks with other humans, it's cultural, not their biological nature, however much we like to categorize other "races" for being "wired" for certain behavior.
Saying "Vorlons are simply smarter than humans", say, or here and now, "Humans are simply smarter than monkeys" isn't a lie, thus need not be in the service of anything, though it is still as abhorrent to decide that the former have more right to live than the latter (despite the irony of the fact that we can't be troubled to not blithely destroy the other species on this planet).
When different species compare behavioral quirks, it might be cultural but also might be literally their biological nature, as a species, to be wired for certain behavior.
If we equate speciesism with racism, we risk implying that vaunted differences in fundamental characteristics between races are as real as those between species, so I apologize in advance to my readers for the tongue-twisters, but I'm keeping them.
[2]: I am assuming the generally recited order of Worker, Warrior, Religious can be mapped over to Lenn'Ah, Fik, and Adronato. Without info to the contrary, therefore, I assume Fik is the language of the Warrior Caste. It could be Lenn'Ah (and if anyone knows, please tell), but it doesn't change the content of the argument.
[3]: a) news/a-murder-a-minute/
b) Original article here:
. /violenceagainstwomen/publications/hate-crimes-rape-every-minute-thousand-corpses-every-year
Easy access here: article/rape-minute-thousand-corpses-year/
[4]: us/blog/the-new-brain/201610/humans-are-genetically-predisposed-kill-each-other
A/N: One can disagree on the reasons for this trait. I certainly believe that education and culture play at least a large a part as nature, but one can't disagree with numbers.
A/N: I have recently been re-informed that canonically, in the Earth-Minbari war, the Minbari committed genocide. "The canon genocide they did", as I read in an out-of-universe commentary on a fanfic site, and for the thousandth-or-so time overall.
Now strictly speaking, this is inaccurate. The in-universe human perspective of B5 is: genocide that the Minbari probably intend or intended, which is certainly different - practically, though not morally - from committed. But the statement is an accurate description of fandom established "fact" by sheer virtue of repetition. We in the fandom have being saying it to each other for over two decades now, affirming it to ourselves for as long, and we literally are unable to think outside this established "fact", or really examine it. We may become annoyed when someone dissects it, scientifically, because to question the obvious and established is, at the very least unsettling, and at most, we question their motives.
To give an example, bats are blind, Romans used 'Vomitoria' to purge in so they could go back to the feast and eat more, a spacing victim's blood boils inside them, sharks are driven to an attack frenzy by blood in the water. We've heard them so often and so long that we never doubt them, much less rigorously examine them. We predicate decisions and shape our worldview based on facts so established every day. As it happens, all of the above are false - food for an entertaining web search at the very least - but these errors, at most, leads to inconveniences. When such "established facts" are the kind that prop up bigots -the twisting of history, say, or claims about certain kinds of racial membership or gender equaling inferiority - the cost of believing without examining is much higher. Tragically so. And yet even in this age of information, the number of people who genuinely believe such fallacies are surprisingly high, because they hear it from their parents, elders and leaders, even sometimes their teachers and media, long enough and often enough to not question. Once something is rooted that deep into a foundation, it becomes truly difficult for us to look at, objectively.
In the case of this meta, SciFi is hardly world-changing, whatever the fact-by-repetition. But the use of real-world concepts, that are indelibly tied to our history, to describe fictional events they may not fit has implications for us as fans and as people in the real world. Applying the term 'genocide' incorrectly not only distorts the entire B5 universe and mythology - of which the Minbari are an integral part -, but worse, to my mind, it somehow dilutes the tragedy, and the lessons of what we can only understand the term in relation to: our history.
I have also been reliably informed that discussion of historical genocide is deeply unsettling, I fully agree. To me, though, even unsettling discussions have merit - because how can we tacitly be more comfortable with an event - in letting it go without learning it's painful lessons- than we can be with talking about it?
This work is the result of two sleepless nights of exhaustive research (to ensure I circumvent errors of recollection) and compilation in an attempt to objectively answer this question. My research is exhaustive, however this is far from a polished work, and when I have time (two jobs, both academic) I will return and create a better version that is split into chapters by topic and is easier to follow and contains some more material, as well as improved handling of citations. I welcome dialogue, and will be happy to discuss, objectively and factually, the matter at hand as my time permits.