Talk:Foresight/@comment-36269586-20180726110751/@comment-45.56.46.26-20180727165838

There are some people who feel that Foresight as a whole is guilty and that's that.

I feel that the blame has to lie with Jircniv. Sure, if not for him deciding to use the workers to wage war against Nazarick just to see what would happen, they might have taken some other shady job and ended up badly. But that would be on them.

Ultimately, Ainz can't go exact justice on Jircniv personally without causing a lot more harm to a lot of less guilty parties. So he crunches up over a hundred of the Empire's knights etc. and then scares the shit out of the rest. Sure, Jircniv suffers from that, but compared to what he did, it's nothing.

But that's how it goes in war. Trying to be absolutely just and fair doesn't work in a war, no matter how much military might you can bring to bear. You have to face the fact that when a ruler does bad things, it can cause suffering for the entire nation and there are no options to avoid that entirely, only whether you'll make everyone suffer even more or whether you'll pick the option with the fewest total casualties.

Consider the case of the Holy Kingdom. What Ainz is doing there is terrible. But what would happen if the Sorcerous Kingdom annexed the Abelion Hills and came up right to the Holy Kingdom's borders? Calca might not wish it, but it would inevitably result in open war. And there is only one way that war would ever end, with full occupation and the imposition of a strict regime of terror for at least a full generation so that the survivors were left incapable of even thinking of rebellion without shitting themselves.

Not that just fighting an endless war isn't an option. That's what the U.N. decided to settle for with regard to North Korea. Have the North Koreans really been better off as a result of that?

Who knows?

Ainz saved thousands of people in the Empire from suffering the consequences of Jircniv's folly. But he couldn't save everyone, and among the people he couldn't save were the workers sent to start the war.

He's probably saved many hundreds of thousands from the effects of an open war between the Sorcerous Kingdom and the Holy Kingdom of Roble. But there were a few hundreds of thousands who weren't saved, and probably some of those who weren't saved could have gotten lucky and avoided the brunt of open war with the SK. But someone else would have borne it in their place.

Demiurge is acting in accordance with Ainz's order to make it possible for the surrounding countries to be conquered with the least possible damage. But it's still Demiurge interpreting those orders. Does Ainz have a better candidate for the job? It's hard to say, Nazarick is stretched kinda thin. Maybe they should turtle up...but that would just give time for the Theocracy to put together Jircniv's 'great idea' of a grand alliance that would be slaughtered mercilessly (and every bit as 'unjustly' when you looked at many of the individuals killed).

Me...I would have let the grand alliance happen, and the grander the better. Because I like things simple. But ending up ruling over corpse-strewn rubble is also simple.

Ainz doesn't want that, but avoiding it involves some complexity.