A quote.
A quote from safiiru that I asked permission to repost, because I think it does an extremely good job of laying out Harmonia's former perspective on war:
I'm kind of thinking of something along the lines of "we want peace, and if you want peace too then of course you'll want to work together with us, but if you're hostile to our goals of attaining peace then we're going to go to war someday, because clearly you won't be able to keep the peace in your own lands if you aren't peaceful enough to be our ally and let us do what we need to for the sake of peace". Said by people who really and earnestly believe this, of course, not as a veiled threat.
Naturally, this is only one side of things. There are valid reasons people were unwilling to ally with us. And none of this is a justification for going to war. It is, however, a description of Harmonia's attitudes from Harmonia's point of view. We did terrible things, but we were not monsters. We were just people, hoping, as most people do, to craft a better world. We were merely shortsighted and ignorant in our choice of methods, and our belief that the method did not matter nearly so much as the outcome.
I'm kind of thinking of something along the lines of "we want peace, and if you want peace too then of course you'll want to work together with us, but if you're hostile to our goals of attaining peace then we're going to go to war someday, because clearly you won't be able to keep the peace in your own lands if you aren't peaceful enough to be our ally and let us do what we need to for the sake of peace". Said by people who really and earnestly believe this, of course, not as a veiled threat.
Naturally, this is only one side of things. There are valid reasons people were unwilling to ally with us. And none of this is a justification for going to war. It is, however, a description of Harmonia's attitudes from Harmonia's point of view. We did terrible things, but we were not monsters. We were just people, hoping, as most people do, to craft a better world. We were merely shortsighted and ignorant in our choice of methods, and our belief that the method did not matter nearly so much as the outcome.