[dogscoff]

Note I said destroy TOWNS not necessarily the people living therein.

So in other words, someone has to take all the people out of the town, filter the bad guys from the innocents, then destroy the town. If you've filtered out the bad guys, why not deal with them and let the innocents go back to their homes?

Or did you mean the population is just moved wholesale to some other region and then the empty town destroyed? What does that achieve, other than forcing the entire population into poverty and recruiting more dissidents?

Basically it depends largely on the extent of which the townsfolk are supporting the rebellious elements. If your entire community is a threat to Icara then it is neutralized.

But there WILL be innocents in there.

Basically to clear that bit up for you Icara's view is "while all human life is a work of God's art Icaran life is just a little bit more important." so in their mind it's not strange at all.

OK, if that's their attitude, then fair enough. What they do doens't have to make sense, except to them. However it does cast doubt over their claims to respect life and so on. You will have difficulty getting the average reader to feel any kind of sympathy for a people with this attitude, however.

Well yeah except for that the parents would have to attack the very schools where their children are staying in order to even remotely "free" them

If your children have already been lost to you and you have no chance of seeing them again, and now you know they are now being brought up by someone who will try to make them forget you and turn your children into nasty little clones of your hated enemy... many parents may well be driven to kill their own children, certainly to risk the lives. Desperate people will do extraordinary things for a political principle or for revenge. Just look at suicide bombers.

Besides, they wouldn't have to attack the schools, would they? They could attack some other school containing only someone else's children. Kill as many of them as possible, in order to show the Icarans how it feels to have your family torn apart. Or target the parents. Or plant bombs in shopping centres and libraries and government buildings and so on and just kill anyone who supports, even passively, the regime that destroyed your life. Keep doing it, against all odds and opposition and oppression until some concession is made to end the violence. That's how terrorism works, and why heaping oppression upon oppression does not solve problems, it just creates more people with nothing to lose.

As to why they wouldn't merely gundown unarmed and peaceful protestors its because they do try to spare life as much as possible.

But this seems wildly out of character. They don't respect life, they seem quite willing to deprive people of it at the first turn. The sanctity of life is at best a secondary concern to the stability of the Empire (personally, I suspect it's even lower down the list than that) - and as we know, politicians are always willing to label things a threat to the stability/ security of the state in order to push their own agenda. What's more, police are always willing to make the same claims in order to justify the use of the fullest extent of their powers.

As far as why they would "risk" themselves, well against unarmed protestors a brigade of FedSec riotbreakers in full body armor isn't in much danger.

As long as they *are* unarmed peaceful protestors. As soon as people see that what appear to be peaceful protestors get soft treatment and close contact with a squad of police, one of the state's many many enemies (one of the parents mentioned above, someone who has been beaten and humiliated for some minor crime, someone who is disaffected for some other reason and has no other outlet for his political frustrations) will strap a bomb to themselves, pretend to be a peaceful protestor and then wait for the police to come sauntering up with the handcuffs.

From that moment on, the police will be far less reluctant to just open fire, believe me.

Their legal system is actually very harsh only if you consider a public beating and humiliation that is considered "all's forgiven" over YEARS in jail for a relatively minor offense.

I don't think our contemporary penal systems are particularly good- the USA being one of the worst examples- but would corporal punishment be a sufficient deterrent, especially given the amount of desperate people your system produces? Look at countries and time periods where this was the norm dn you'll porbably find that it isn't particlarly effective. It certainly doesn't address the reason the peron turned to crime in the first plce. It seesm to me that punishment would rapidly escalate to death for even monir crimes: "We keep on floggin this guy and he keeps on stealing bread. He just doesn't learn. What are we going to do with him?"

Also, if everything is forgotten and forgiven immediately, surely the "humiliation" part of the punishment is meaningless..?

You say the rights of the neo-buddhists to live a pacifist lifestyle

... were earned as an act of pennance by the Empire for an act they consider a terrible shame and blemish on their record...It is enforced by tradition

This is the biggest problem I have seen so far.

You're telling me that in a militaristic, top-heavy dictatorship with what looks like a feudal power structure, where the ordinary person doesn't have a vote and can't even protest policies they don't like, so that the ruling class is totally unaccountable to the people and can change the law as often and as radically as they like with no opposition whatsoever, the people in power are going to go out of their way to 'honour' a policy that (a) must be a headache for them, because their military could be stronger without it and (b) would be deeply unpopular with Pathists at all levels of society. (Which doesn't really matter because the people don't get a say, except I'm assuming that in this society of equals the ruling classes and their families are eligible for draft as well.)

When was the last time you saw a politician keep his word on anything? Really?

And that's in a country where politicians are (ostensibly) accountable to the public! In your system, there is absolutely nothing, nothing whatsoever to stop them from going back on their word and drafting the pacifists as soon as the wind blows that way. All they have to do is cite the stability of the state which you already admitted overrides any other possible ethical or moral boundary, and it would be done. No arguments, no protests (well, there might be protests, but they would be dealt with in short order). Done.

Honour would not hold them back an instant, because clearly the powermongers in charge of this imperial machine can and will justify anything in their own minds. They wouldn't even feel they had been dishonourable- they would simply redefine honour in their own heads and- because nobody can disagree with them without being flogged- automatically be right. Remember what they say about absolute power? For example, we've already seen how their high-minded ideals about the sanctity of the human body are blown out of the water at the slightest provocation (even ignoring their casual attitudes toward killing and torturing people, the forced sterilisation policy proves that the human reproductive system- arguably the most mysterious and miraculous part of the body- is something to be casually discarded by the state, against the will of the body in question, when politically expedient) so dismissing lofty notions of "honour" would be trivial.

I'm not saying you shouldn't write about your Icarans, and believe it or not I'm not trying to pick them apart. I'm just trying to point out to you the kind of thing that will make them seem less real and less sympathetic (although the sympathy issue isn't so much of a concern- there have been plenty of worthwhile dystopian stories) to your readership.

Today's recommended reading: Animal Farm by George Orwell.