defoit said:
I will argue that the Geth didn't just 'kill some of her people in the process' of fighting back. You always hear that, 'the Geth were only defending themselves'. Bullshit. The fact is, the Migrant Fleet contains some 17 million Quarians.
Which coincidentally, is exactly 17 million more than the number of Geth the Quarians would have left alive had they won the war. I'm still not seeing the moral high ground.
defoit said:
This means that in the war with the Geth, given ridiculously low assumptions for the size of the Quarian population, a minimum of 1,980,000,000 Quarians were killed. 99% of the Quarian population wiped out. Murdered by the Geth. That means Geth constructs went house to house, room to room, shooting down every man, woman, and child they could find.
That's not really realistic.. Exterminating a civilian population of millions of people is not something you do in an afternoon by just going to people's houses and shooting them. If nothing else, if you start doing that, the survivors will run away and you have to waste time hunting them down. Organized genocide requires a means of either controlling the population in question, or the targeting of a distributed minority in a situation where communication between affected groups is going to be limited. They're not going to sit around and placidly wait for you to kill them. All this takes time and effort to set up and orchestrate.
Also:
1) The Quarians were fighting for their homeworld. They had modern production methods, high tech weaponry and, let's not forget, WMDs. As an organic species they also require provisioning (they die without food and water, and become sick without adequate provisioning and healthcare infrastructure). Casualties into the billions in that situation would be almost inevitable, and the line between a civilian and a soldier would almost certainly blur to non-existence the closer the Quarians came to desperation. After all, the Geth don't have civilians or soldiers. A soldier is just a group of runtimes inhabiting a combat capable mobile platform. The information needed for effective combat can be shared in seconds. Fighting the Geth and realistically expecting to win would not leave room for civilians.
2) Socially, the Geth were in a position no organic creature has ever been in. They had only recently become self aware, they had no society so to speak and had not had time to form complex moral judgements. Remember, the thing which set this whole drama off was a Geth asking its overseer moral and philosophical questions. The Geth had no contact with any species beside the Quarians, their only point of reference for interspecies behaviour was the Quarians.
What do you think it meant to the Geth that the Quarian's first reaction was to try and kill them off? A better society might have taken it upon itself to offer guidance and welcome the Geth to a wider community of races, might have apologized for exploiting Geth labour, might have made efforts to facilitate cooperation between the two races. The Quarians were not a better society.
If you birth a child and raise it not to understand the concept of mercy, trying to suddenly teach it mercy because it's pointing a gun at
you is not likely to be very successful.
3) Quarian breeding is artificially restricted to keep the population in line with the available space. Tali actually goes into a great deal of detail about it.
