LaFlamme having finished his statement, Schneider turned her attention to him again.
"You bring up some legitimate questions, general, and I would like to address them.
Although the events you describe now lie many years past and predate my time in the Guild, I'm quite familiar with the history, but please correct me if you believe I am misrepresenting anything.
When the minefield was breached and the Council took refuge in the Barrier, the Guild felt compelled to assist a group exiled by the ravages of civil war and tyranny from a house we knew nothing about. That is a matter of deeply held ideological conviction for us, since the Guild's raison d'être is to accommodate those who wish to leave the sphere of the houses. Though, I don't think any Guildsperson saw it as taking sides in a conflict we had only just learned about - simply an outreach to a people under duress.
And to give indirect support to those fighting the invasion, Crayter and Council alike, came naturally as well - ultimately, despite how things turned out, we were always opposed to the imperialist motive and would have rather seen the invasion stopped than succeed.
But although we certainly weren't happy about the administrative controls the Kingdom enacted on our Tau stations, they did not affect our day-to-day business of mining in any major fashion, and the level of involvement we held before - affected, but distant, with an interest but without participation - certainly changed with Aland."
She sighs deeply before continuing, her brow furrowed.
"No matter how we had chosen to act in that situation, it would constitute a level of involvement we did not previously have. Whether we agreed to give up the shipyard willingly for the war effort, or, as we ended up deciding, resisted the annexation openly, we would be a participant on a greater level than before. Now, you can criticize us for the decisions we made, but for all we knew Bretonia could have been days away from unconditional surrender and we would have lost the entirety of our Tau holdings to a victorious Gallic Crown, had we yielded.
Hindsight is perfect, Mr LaFlamme. I can't really comment on accusations of Stockholm syndrome, I don't have the psychological education for that level of analysis, and I don't think it would help us advance the current peace effort anyway. As the conflict continued we acted with the strategic information we had, as we judged to be the best for our survival."