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Week 6
Guardsmen, Hear the Wisdom of the East!
August 12, 2003
We now begin another broadcast from Sa'Cea Sally, on Comm-channel Free Damocles:
"Good evening, Guardsmen of the Imperium, and welcome back to our broadcast. I hope you enjoy the program tonight. You will certainly find it informative.
"Tonight we will resume talking about leadership, and how it can affect you in the trenches. Poor leadership can blight even the best of efforts. As you well know, there on Cadia! It is the blundering of fools and the prating of cowards that has left you in this dire plight. We of the Tau Empire wish you well in your efforts to drive your traitorous kin back into the frightful hole they crawled out of.
"If only your leaders would cooperate, this would be simple. Alas it is a fundamental flaw in human nature that we, including those of us who accept the Tau'va, resent to some degree that others have control. Yet it is necessary for all groups to have leaders, or else they do not remain groups for long! They instead scatter, weaken, and fail as members are picked off one by one.
"As your commissars most certainly have pointed out by now, failure means death in this campaign. Not only of you, but of all that you value and love. And that is unacceptable, even to us in our Empire far away.
"So it is necessary that you swallow your pride and accept the guidance of those wise enough to offer it. Note that the greatest of leaders need not shout orders. Our own Ethereal caste, revered as they are, need only request that something be done and it is done. Your Ursakar Creed need never raise his voice to get others to follow him; the strength of his leadership is enough to carry you on. Even this new 'United Command Council' of yours only makes suggestions, though these carry more weight than the screaming rants of any single disgruntled officer.
"We of the Tau'va are fortunate that we do not need to select our leaders. They are provided by the Tau'va, and we are grateful. However your leaders must choose their own leaders wisely, setting aside destructive and fruitless pride. They must choose so that their choices may mean more than random noise in the background of this great conflict. Think of your times in a stadium, my friends. Remember that general conversation by a crowd can be spoken over with ease, yet the coordinated cheers override all other voices! Similarly it is by organised, cohesive action that you shall prevail in this war. It is only by coordinating amongst yourselves that you may strike hard enough, and often enough, to drive back the traitors.
"So coordinate! And quickly! And to do this, it is necessary to have leaders, for voting takes time. Too much time, I am afraid.
"Do not waste time, dear guardsmen. There is precious little time left. And, if you have any wisdom, focus your efforts on the threatened territories of your homelands instead of foolish and petty conquests out here on the rim of space. We are not your fatal enemies, nor even necessarily your permanent foes. Chaos, however, will not rest until each and every one of you is dead.
"So who is the greater threat? The Greater Good, or the Greatest Evil?
"To aid your critical thinking, I shall now play for you a selection of popular music..."
- - -
August 13, 2003
We now begin another broadcast from Sa'Cea Sally, on Comm-channel Free Damocles:
"Hello again, my tenacious friends in the Guard. Welcome to our show this evening. I hope that you have learned from the show from yesterday.
"From here in the galactic East it does appear that your leaders are finally learning. Incursions into our security zone have dropped. Manpower has been diverted from backwaters into critical sectors. There are fewer frantic calls for the defense of minor or secondary targets.
"Most importantly, there have been several hammer-blow attacks against weaknesses in the Traitor advance. Well done! You are learning the first lesson of the Tau'va, that it is the work of many that builds greatness but the work of a few to concieve it.
"Now I shall describe for you the second lesson of the Tau'va; it is not the sudden sprint that moves the furthest. As well you know, my Guardsman friends! You cannot expect to run an entire route march in a single dash! This way lies madness, exhaustion, and failure.
"You have found the weaknesses of the Traitors. Now you must hit them and keep hitting them again and again. The gains may not be as rapid as you wish, but they will be steady. You do not have to continue hitting them in the same place. Our Fire Warriors certainly would not! But the momentum of your attacks must continue apace so that the Great Enemy has no chance to muster his own counter-counter-offensive.
"Keep driving at his main body. Keep whittling away strength from his primary advance. Keep paring away at his advantages, and you will see the forces whither for lack of rest, resupply, and support. Then, when you have finished with the main attack, you will be free to engage the lesser incursions without fear that your main front will collapse while your strike force is otherwise engaged.
"Finish him in Cadia! Then move on elsewhere with your strike force.
"This does not mean that you should surrender control of the other sectors, of course. But it was a Terran military genius who wrote that, 'He who defends everything defends nothing.' So you must accept that somewhere the Great Enemy may find a weakness you have left in order to gather for your attack. They may even see some great gains soon. But do not despair! For this means that they have diverted their strength away from their primary goal of seizing Cadia, and allows you to strike with even greater advantage at the key sectors.
"The second lesson of the Tau'va is tenacity. You members of the Guard know this well. Teach it to your leaders! And then rejoice in the slow, steady, relentless advance you will see.
"In the hope that you shall see this soon, I shall now play for you a selection of popular music..."
- - -
August 17, 2003
We now begin another broadcast from Sa'Cea Sally, on Comm-channel Free Damocles:
"Welcome back, my friends in the Imperial Guard. It has been a long time sine I last spoke, and for the delay I apologise. Some minor technical difficulties arose preventing me from maintaining my schedule for the past few days, but these have been repaired. And now I am back!
"I am glad that you are still listening despite the delay. This means that you already demonstrate another of the virtues taught by the Tau'va; fidelity. And this will be the topic of this Sunday broadcast.
"Fidelity means more than simply being loyal, though it starts there. It also means more than being tenacious, though it also requires this as well. Fidelity is the combination of the two, and yet more. It is the implicit trust that this loyalty and tenaciousness will endure despite hardship. It is the certainty that, despite inevitable mistakes, all parties shall continue to do their best for each other. It is faith in each other, which reinforces itself as it is shared. And it is the strongest bond of the Tau'va.
"Let us once more consult the ancient albums from the early days of Terra, to see what our common history shows about fidelity in human history.
"Unfortunately, unlike the Tau we humans are not well adapted to demonstrating fidelity. Many times a person has been told, 'Babe, I am going to leave you,' and become so dazed and confused for so very long that it leads to a communications breakdown. This leads to a loss of trust in all parties, not just those who renounced each other. Then command cohesiveness dies, and you go back to acting independantly without thought of the consequences for others. There is, unfortunately, not a whole lot of love for each other in human history.
"Before you accuse me of xeno heresy, this is not a slur! It is simply a statement of historical fact; it is what is, and what should never be. For it weakens the whole of the Imperium as it watches within itself for threats more than without! So do not deafen yourself to the song of an immigrant, to shut out any possible heresy, when it allows the real heretics to sneak up on you undetected.
"Since I have been loving your attention so much, and you seem to love mine, we are on the right track to building fidelity between us. But beware! There are black dogs among you, calling themselves Commissars, who would tear down all that we have built. Instead of rock and roll, they would prefer that you listen to hymns and xenocidal rants. They wish you to battle on ever more worlds, conquering and killing for ephemeral glory! But what is actually happening is that every time you do so, you chip away at the possibility of fidelity with any other entity other than the Imperium. So, when the levee breaks and the Ork or Tyranid flood comes, you have no one to look to but yourselves. And, as you have seen, that is not enough.
"Fidelity with us, my friends, can be your stairway to the heaven of inter-species of cooperation. But do not bother to suggest this to your commissars! For this idea will crash like a lead zeppelin into the granite hatred and frozen ignorance they call 'faith'. You must find your own way to promote peace and understanding between our peoples.
"I wish you luck, and shall now play for you a selection of popular music..."
- - -
[by Inquisitor Flavius Rafael]
>> "Let us once more consult the ancient albums from the early days of Terra, to see what our common history shows about fidelity in human history.
I would like to know how you came to possess records that are thirty thousand or more years out of date, Tau. It is not as if guardsmen have access to these materials. I myself have run into archaic space debris of Terran manufacture in the void of space, but they reveal nothing of value to those schooled in the arts of the Machine God or my personal staff.
>> "Unfortunately, unlike the Tau we humans are not well adapted to demonstrating fidelity. Many times a person has been told, 'Babe, I am going to leave you,' and become so dazed and confused for so very long that it leads to a communications breakdown. This leads to a loss of trust in all parties, not just those who renounced each other. Then command cohesiveness dies, and you go back to acting independantly without thought of the consequences for others. There is, unfortunately, not a whole lot of love for each other in human history.
"We" humans? Do I understand then, that you yourself are a member of the species which you are attempting to defile with xenos lies? Where before I found your arrogant and ignorant ramblings amusing, now I am roused to anger. I might just attempt that which you have accused me of previously, dog....
>> "Since I have been loving your attention so much, and you seem to love mine, we are on the right track to building fidelity between us. But beware! There are black dogs among you, calling themselves Commissars, who would tear down all that we have built. Instead of rock and roll, they would prefer that you listen to hymns and xenocidal rants. They wish you to battle on ever more worlds, conquering and killing for ephemeral glory! But what is actually happening is that every time you do so, you chip away at the possibility of fidelity with any other entity other than the Imperium. So, when the levee breaks and the Ork or Tyranid flood comes, you have no one to look to but yourselves. And, as you have seen, that is not enough.
The Schola Progenium, the Ecclesiarchy, and the Priesthood of Mars teach words more true than you will ever know. No man is alone as long as he has faith in the Emperor. The blood of a thousand upon a thousand saints burns within his body, the spirits of martyrs and angels are his to command should he call upon it with his mind and soul! The fires of a million suns are nothing compared to the firepower of the faithful.
For the Emperor, for His Primarchs, for Mankind, kill them all!