Quoted By:
The Union Party, and much of the Republic’s more jingoistic population, already had an answer they wanted. The upcoming 1920 Summer Report wasn’t meant to sway them, but the members of the minority party coalitions. A rather hefty majority vote was necessary for any declarations of armed conflict, after all, and the Union Party was not so powerful as to decide that out of turn, even if they themselves were still in debate not about whether there would be a war, but what the goals of such a thing would be. Goals that would be defined by you and your office.
Firstly, you read through an assessment of Holherezh- the country that any interventions would be taking place in, as it directly bordered Trelan. No matter what, if there was a war, it would go through this neighbor.
Holherezh was not a rich country, or possessed of a flourishing culture or intellectual influence beyond its place in the world. Its people were farmers and ranchers, who grew beets and greens and roots. The notable outlier crop being a strange sort of plant called a Cow Poppy, an ancient bulbous-bottomed cultivar that grew more strongly than its typical cousin, though was grown for the same secretion. Its trade was in cattle and opium, in iron and coal, though most of it went elsewhere as its own industrial capabilities were small. The Holherezhi people were a culture either raised to the saddle or tied to the land, the two castes no longer legally officiated but still deeply culturally bound. The ranchers and horsefolk made up the more prestigious, martial class, and to be a grown adult amongst them meant to take from another whether one was a man or woman, so raiding and looting was common both within and on the edges of the country. Great pride was taken in multicolored alternating bands of beads and knit weavings, each material and color a separate accomplishment of pillage or triumph, the best amongst them striped like tigers. Their internal relations were fractious and competitive, but the bluster and brawling hid deeper connections amongst blood and clan, where newcomers were readily accepted, but few thought of, or were even allowed, to leave. A fierce people, that the Nief’yem looked down upon seeing them as unexceptional from other Pohja, but at least Trelan’s contempt for them was rooted in wrongs committed over centuries by their wanton culture.
