SOFRAM
Moderator: Spectrum Strike Force
The question is this. What were the aims of SOFRAM – the Solar Organisation For Revenge and Murder*? I know the easy answer is domination of the universe (which at the time was regarded by most kids of my age as synonymous with the Solar System) by violent means, but to be realistic that won’t do as an explanation. It’s very easy to dismiss any such group as “terrorists”, but that’s just a way to avoid acknowledging to your own side that they have aims. Robin Hood (at least as he’s described in legend) would certainly have been dismissed as a terrorist by the Sheriff of Nottingham, but if you asked him to classify himself, he’d probably say he was a freedom fighter who was attempting to liberate an oppressed English population from an occupying army of Normans. So who or what would SOFRAM consider themselves to be fighting for? Most terrorist organisations are armed factions of ethnic/religious groups who consider themselves to have a grievance – which suggests to me that SOFRAM are supported and financed by a larger group who share their aims but aren’t prepared to resort to violence to attain them. The problem is… where do you find such a group in a unified world?
The obvious place to look would be a rogue state, e.g. Bereznik. The problem with that is that it seems to me most unlikely that a rogue state (unless it was a very large rogue state) could afford to finance a terrorist organisation to forward its aims. In fact, I do wonder whether a rogue state could actually exist at all in a unified world. Unless it had a valuable commodity to sell (e.g. oil), nobody else would want or need to trade with it – and the end result would probably be that it would end up either bankrupt or seething with popular discontent leading to a revolution.
As an alternative scenario, would it be credible to suppose that there might exist highly-placed elements within the World Government who consider themselves overlooked in the pecking order, and therefore prepared to finance a clandestine organisation whose ultimate aim is the elimination of the global régime, and its replacement by a neo-fascist oligarchy with themselves in charge of it? That makes more sense to me – and it would also make sense of the need for the leaders of it to maintain strict anonymity, which was another feature of SOFRAM's high command.
As anyone else got any views on this? [I've a reason for asking – and that reason is connected with the name of this section of the forum.]
[* As an aside, it would be daft to believe that the organisation would refer to itself by that acronym. Their own name for themselves would be far more complimentary to their aims, whatever they were; the term SOFRAM would almost certainly have been coined by their enemies, i.e. the Universal Secret Service.]
DocBrown
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