Work Text:
The first thing that Obi-wan learned on Melida/Daan is that sentients can be selflessly cruel.
In Obi-wan’s introductory economics class, they taught about supply and demand. The price of a thing, its value, is determined by the available quantity of a resource compared to how much of it is needed. There have been many atrocities committed in the name of profit, of greed. People can be ruthless in wringing as much use as possible from the things they have, or wringing as much profit as possible from the things they sell.
In war, people often talk of lives being cheap. Of how easy it is for powerful leaders to spend the lives of their poor for their own gain. But the Melida and the Daan had no spare hordes of starving peasants standing idle in their fields. The planet had been at war for generations, and the population had collapsed almost entirely. There was not a single human endeavor there, be it farming, medicine, infrastructural upkeep, that was not critically understaffed if not abandoned entirely. It was not as though they did not know this. The generals were aware that their society was not so much collapsing as collapsed, and that survival required that people be available to work to keep all of them alive. And in this war of the Melida and the Daan what was there to be gained? The planet was a bombed out wasteland. There was nothing left for them to take. There was no material difference between a Melida/Daan where one of them ruled over or had wiped out the other and one where they lived peacefully side by side. By all laws of economics, sentient life on this planet should have been at a premium.
And yet they continued to throw lives away, as though they were worth nothing. They continued to speak of the sacrifice of the individual for the glory of the whole. They continued, steadfast, in the destruction of their people. They wanted vengeance, they wanted destruction, more than their own welfare, let alone their children’s. Their cultural imperative to devalue human life was stronger than their self-interest.