Article 29: GA Wars
There is a saying around much of the galaxy that if the Golden Alliance is taking part in some galactic conflict, they're at least 51 percent responsible for that conflict. How accurate that saying is is incredibly subjective, but it is true that GA forces have been primary players in nearly every large fight that's gone down in the Milky Way. A summary of these fights, the GA's part in them, and why many feel the faction is responsible will help anyone who wants to understand why it has been saddled with this reputation, and we'll start at the beginning.
From the GA's formation, one of their primary goals has been to find new civilizations and add them to the cultural mixing bowl that is Golden Alliance society. While many of these early discoveries were willing to join the Alliance, it should be noted that some planets needed to be persuaded by forceful means to adopt GA standards. Ama, for instance, held strictly isolationist policies until a notable ship captain, stranded on the planet, managed to win Amazon society's highest position in a tournament and used the influence to force it to join up. Even more notable is Uruseiya, which for decades acted as an antagonistic force against early GA diplomatic efforts and only acquiesced when the GA was able to bring superior firepower and numbers to bear against the false gods' home planet. While these were often battles on a much smaller scale than the "wars" that would later be fought, it's still worth noting that the GA has shown no qualms against using force to achieve their goals.
The first and most obvious galactic-scale conflict the GA found itself involved in was the Great Legion War. Through the entire decades-long campaign, the Golden Alliance was at the forefront of the battle lines, slowing the spread of Legion as a faction at great cost of lives and supplies. Near the end of the Legion War, the Golden Alliance began to dip into truly cruel methods of warring, including the use of slaves, complete ecological destruction of target planets, and the creation of an array of superweapons, most of which were thankfully never brought to bear. It's hard to fault them for such desperate measures, but many consider the GA to be the culprits behind this war not only because the first Legion arose as the result of an experiment carried out by a GA-aligned corporation, but also because the GA knew about the potential risks long before anyone else and merely stood by and watched as the first few dozen planets were taken by Legion hives.
As has been described in nearly every Golden Alliance history book, the Legion War's end led to those who felt abused by High Command during the war to defect and create their own new faction. When the mutinying systems first began to leave, the reaction was knee-jerk, and vessels that fought together in the war often turned on one another. This near-war against the still-forming Castaways Treaty Systems was so publicly despised by the GA's own population that the entire High Command structure was dumped and reorganized before the Castaways Treaty was even written. Very few would argue that the blame for this conflict laid anywhere but at the feet of the Golden Alliance.
The next major conflict was the Deviling Incursion starting after scout ships disappeared in AD483. Due to disruption of the various governments and infrastructures on the worlds affected by the Galactic ANarchists, it was largely assumed that the GA was entirely innocent in what was going on, but the GAN members themselves claim that their reaction was in response to Golden Alliance scouts attempting to force democracy onto the unwilling population of Pharadon and its neighboring systems. While whether that serves as justification to blame the GA itself for what then happened is debatable, the ensuing creation and dereliction of Mecha in the following centuries is less so, and it's widely believed that the Devilings were allowed to pillage the less well-off GA worlds freely in order to justify the GA High Council's need for a larger space fleet and there was no reason for the conflict to drag on until the twelfth century.
After two centuries of only minor skirmishes between the galactic factions once the Angelic Protectorate had asserted itself as the police force of the galaxy, the disruption of subspace and sudden appearance of Shape-Shifters began another "war" by the GA in order to try and imprison those affected. Only the formation of the Elemental League prevented them from outright invading a series of planets. This one is also considered pretty unjustified.
The most recent large-scale conflict, and another one which can be blamed entirely on the GA, was the creation and subsequent rebellion of the Demi-Humans. When they joined the CTS, this emboldened them to create large numbers of reclaimer fleets in an attempt to take back artifacts and, on occasion, entire planets that had been stolen from the CTS's constituent races centuries or even millennia ago. Nowadays, we have what's called peace in the galaxy, but only because battles are rarely larger than a single system going up against another system. Battles are kept to this scale specifically to prevent full-on war, but there's no guarantee of a completely peaceful life anywhere in the galaxy. At any moment, your planet could be held hostage by pirates, blockaded by an EL corporate order, suddenly need "liberation" from the GA, be the target of a rogue Legion Queen's desires, suddenly declared ancient property of the CTS, or considered a source of proto-demonic corruption by the AP, and many consider the GA's tendency to get their way at swordpoint to be the basis of all of this.
