With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

This really does seem like the perfect crossroad for the Justice League to reexamine it's role and place in the world. On one hand, I can understand why there needs to be a distinction between fighting criminals and participating in a country's "internal political affairs". On the other, the Justice League was formed, at least in part, to combat meta-human threats that conventional law enforcement and governments cannot do so effectively, and hundreds of meta-human insurgents almost certainly would constitute the same.

This, I'm sure, is simplifying things significantly, but if all it took was "enough people getting involved" to no longer be considered a crime but a political protest, even if they break conventional laws doing so, what's stopping the Light, or other similarly large collections of super-villains, from claiming the same? Sure, they've killed thousands, maybe even millions, but it could (very flimsily) be argued that it was to have Earth take "its rightful place at the center of the cosmos".

On that note, how would the Justice League square interference in Ocean Master's coup with their policy of non-interference? I seem to recall that only the Team was involved in combating Ocean Master, but if they were not there, would the League actually be able to interfere?

 

The lanterns could defeat the tribe by creating constructs that spray them with knockout gas, or OL could jusr attach a filament to each tribesmen and teleport them to another location like he did with that Karnan woman.

 

Yeah? Where are they going to deploy them? Exactly? Just spray everything they have over the worlds largest jungle and hope they get nomads? Nomads who have super powers...

 

For Greenies, sure. But Greenies aren’t allowed.

For actual Orange Lanterns, they have to want a thing. OL got bored of saving the lives of injured children at one point. How much should he care about this? How many scry-and-die attacks do you think Ragnar wants to join in on?

Non-Lantern tech could do it, but Dox already told off Paul for wasting his manpower when it bought an entire planet.

 

Maybe there was a class covering Hugo Danner. And they're all familiar with how badly it went last time.

 

If nothing else, Aquaman could probably ask e.g. his personal friend and diplomatic colleague Wonder Woman to help him out with a state military operation without invoking the Justice League charter or, indeed, rules of engagement, same way the President here appealed to the Orange Lantern Corps as an independent entity.

So in my head, the question is, how many Justice League members need to be involved in their capacity as private individuals before the UN says, "No, that's a combat quorum"?

 

This is getting exciting. I certainly don't see an easy way out of this situation, and I am just interested in the shenanigans.

 

Of course what OL is avoiding mentioning is that once the fighting actually starts and it becomes clear that the Danner Tribes are working together to destroy multiple countries they'd be labelled a terrorist group and the League would have to help

Plus even if they didn't it's very likely that the League would provide some discrete help since if the Tribes win millions of innocent people suffer for it

 

It's a little weird that the Brazilians didn't call him out on that, really. I mean, by the metric OL is using the League of Shadows could be called an "internal political matter" of whatever country they happen to be in at the time: after all, one of Ra's stated goals was to restore the rainforest too.

 

He's going kinda Greeny. That was the stated reason why the Green Lanterns didn't roll over the League.

 

I suppose the difference is that OL hasn't told them that the tribes are going to attack other countries as well so as far as the Brazilian government is concerned it is a civil matter, but once it becomes clear that it isn't they'll get the tribes instantly declared a terrorist group and have the League on them like white on rice

 

Point of order, during the Roanoke incident rescue & cleanup, its not that he got bored of helping, its that he was eventually so emotionally burnt out he couldn't dredge up the emotional investment to do anything and was told to rest.

But yes, unless the OL Corps Lanterns can find personal investment or otherwise ultimately self serving reason to help most of them won't be able to do much beyond the basics.

 

The difference is that Ra's wasn't trying to create his own nation and had little if any claim to sovereignty.

I also find the argument "it affects multiple countries = not a civil war / internal issue" very strange. The tribes occupy territories of a number of countries. From their perspective they are fighting for their independence.
Basically, would you call Poland resistance fighters fighting against both Soviet and German occupation "an international terrorist organization"? What about people agitating for reunification of Germany? Just because mutliple nations are involved does not make it not a civil war.

 

Would they be terrorists if they only target military infrastructure and stuff? They're not, ya know, trying to terrify people. It's in the name.

 

Yeah but when one of their goals is the destruction of all industry that also involves attacking civilian targets

Except it kind of does, a civil war is an entirely internal affair and once one of the sides attacks another country it stops being internal, like if the Confederacy had attacked Canada or something

The excuse that it's just multiple tribes fighting their own civil wars is paper thin since there is clear cooperation, communication and a shared end goal between them, it's no different than a terrorist group operating in cells

Also, what the tribes believe they're fighting for doesn't matter and you're drawing a false equivalency, the examples you gave were people fighting against soldiers who were actively occupying their homes, what the tribes are doing is fighting against people that have been here for generations, most of whom are completely innocent, and forcing them out of their homes

And yes I get the irony that that's what their ancestors did to the the tribes but two wrongs don't make a right

 

Euanthe will likely be happy to enforce whatever treaty they end up with.

 

Right and Wrong don't really enter into the negotiations at this stage.

The question is what are you willing to give up?

The tribes have power, but the Brazilian government will be able to call in allies eventually. Neither side here can keep everything they want, even going to war and winning means they loose people, resources, land, and increased odds of less than sympathetic interventions.

That said both have lines in the sand.

The tribes are certainly not going to tolerate any more logging or clearing they aren't in charge of, while the government can't afford to displace major cities.

 

And....OL seems okay with all of this?

OL, the guy who yelled at a hippy for being a hippy, is perfectly okay with progress being smashed back into jungledom?

And when the other nations of the world, ones with larger and more powerful militaries than Brazil take notice because have stakes in the global industries that Brazil takes part in and decide to carpet bomb the Danners to death? Because that's all I see happening.

 

Clearing the rainforests for more cattle ranches isn't progress.

 

I think the point Maxx is getting at is that the tribes want to completely deindustrialise a huge amount of the continent which is anathema to everything OL believes in

Though I I would say his desire to shout at them is probably being suppressed by the fact that they're Danner Enhanciles and encourage other people to start looking into enhancement which is progress of a different sort, he's not in the best position with them right now and he's probably thinking that it would be smarter to wait until after negotiations to start giving them shit

 

I would like to see Blue Lantern and Wonder Woman get called in, even if it's in the aftermath of this crisis, just to have a heart-to-heart with Hugo Danner over what went down; I'm assuming at this point that the latter knows the timeline of the disbandment of the All-Star Squadron and can at least guess that they had issues with what they did in Brazil.

I echo some people's sentiments about cattle ranching and deforestation not being happy indicators of progress, and I believe even twenty years ago (in case this is a political issue rather than a factual economic report) that Brazil had one of the highest income inequality rates in the world, though I don't immediately know if that's a common trait with the other South American countries in the line of fire. I'm happy and ultimately rooting for a peaceful resolution to this crisis, but there needs to be active political will for decolonization processes, and sadly physical force is often the most common resort for groups that have been systematically ignored and marginalized for generations, even if isn't the most effective.

If you want to talk about technological progress, the negative ramifications of which the tribes have likely intimately experienced, and also have the bonus of narrative pay-off, I'd like to offer another suggestion (which might have already been discussed, but I haven't been fully keeping up with the thread). Way back when Swamp Thing overtook Gotham, Paragon lamented the fact that no one there would be interested in pioneering plant magic-based technology and infrastructure that could in many ways replace existing ones. I'm not sure if Doctor Isley is free or not but she's sane now and might be able to provide assistance of some kind; hopefully she's been thinking of ways for plants and people to peacefully coexist and flourish. We could have a whole paradigm-shift in the rainforest where the innocent (or rather, unintentionally complicit) citizens of these Latin American countries, possibly along with the tribes, could have access to fundamentally eco-friendly technologies. In the early stages it would probably require literal divine intervention and maybe even Swamp Thing himself (the Parliament of Trees is relatively nearby, and even if they likely don't care about human tribal rights, they'd probably like more rainforest too), but if fictional gnomes being oppressed by a dragon get help and assistance then the fictional representations of real-life peoples deserve them too, and if Euanthe (and maybe Wonder Woman) can convince dryads or local nature spirits to help, mediating with Isley and sensible and sympathetic environmentalists, scientists and politicians, then I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility.

 

Euanthe would barely comprehend what a treaty is, let alone how to enforce the presence of a line that doesn't literally exist.

She started it.

So long as they were prepared to nuke friendly cities, that approach could certainly work.

 

I wanna point out that there are diseases you can't vaccine against and that the regular flu vaccine is only valid for six months in the best of cases. And it only vaccinates you against the flu strain that's around the area you live.

All OH EL would hve to do is infect them with a flu strain from the other side of the world and the mighty army would be severely weakened. Also they do lack modern medicine facilities save for what they use to get vaccines.

 

While not immune to disease, Danner enhanciles are extremely resistent to symptoms.

 

Not sure why OL is pretending this is an internal national matter, when he knows full well that it isn't. He doesn't seem to stand to gain anything by lying.

Also, the justice league not doing anything would look real bad to america, given that america has it's own salty native population.
People aren't going to like the implication that if they managed to rustle up a super-army and declared war on the USA, the Justice League wouldn't do anything about it.

I mean, the obvious solution would be to put a physical line on it.
Plant a specific genus of trees along the borderline or something.

That said, I don't see Euanthe caring about treaties or limits, so she'd probably want to grow the rainforest to cover anything it can cover, with little regard for what the humans think.

 

That would explain why they failed to notice they were sick until they started to fall like flies to bug spray.

 

As a Brazilian, i say Frack the indians.
Morality dont enter in the equation, if some superpowered guy whant to take everifing you have, you give in our you fight, and fore what i see in the story, the tribes whon't assept a lesser price...
Edit: One mor fing...

 

my read is he's attempting to de-escalate and minimize the chances of doing something stupid-
panicky politicians often...have a tendency to make regrettable/unwise decisions on impulse when under heavy stress/pressure- and to be fair, "doomsday Luddite cult announcing they intend to destroy the entire nations infrastructure and leave the population to starve/dehydrate/die of exposure, with the means to practically do so" is one HELL of a valid reason to panic....

offer them a hammer (the potential to request aid military/superhuman aid from the league against a massive, ethnically-motivated terrorist attack against multiple countries with a potential death toll in the millions/complete collapse of local society) and they might start panic-smashing anything that looks remotely nail-like..


.. and i mean, they...wouldn't be entirely in the wrong- the tribes STARTING offer was "let us force you out of where you've lived your entire lives, or we'll shut off your life support and let you starve/choke with your children/partners..after all, it'd be YOUR fault for not magically adapting to a lifestyle/living conditions you've never had any reason to expect!"

i hate moral playing calculus as much as anyone else, but.. a few hundred enhanciles with an UTTERLY warped perspective of their own importance/power on a global scale AND a complete lack of regard for causing civilian casualties as long as they can rationalize that they didn't literally get blood on their hands, so leaving kids to starve is fine-
push comes to shove, its an easy choice..

 

If they know that the outbreak of open hostilities would result in the League coming down on them like a bag of hammers then they would never even consider negotiating. Nevermind that the tribe would inevitably kill hundreds of people at best, thousands or tens of thousands if they hit a city first, or that an army of Danner Enhanciles could very well kill some of the League, they would say "Fuck the natives, kill them all" and any hope for a peaceful resolution would be lost.

Plus, OL's been trying to get people to adopt transhumanism like Dannering since shortly after he arrived. The recipe is out there now, so if the natives are successful every oppressed minority with any long term planning ability at all will rush to have their new generation Dannered. Similarly, every oppressor will be seriously considering doing the same.

If this works then transhumanism won't be just theoretical, it'll be official government policy. That's one of OL's primary goals met, all for the cost of a moment of lies by omission.

 

I don’t know about OL, but if I was trying to deprogram a nazi kryptonian I’d probably avoid outright supporting colonial descendants in suppressing the indigenous population without having a better reason than “our idea of civilization is superior to theirs.”