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Posted by: anton1792
You are missing the point. Regardless of whether the act could have been taken as an act of war, there is absolutely no reason for the genocide the Forerunners conducted. The whole thing about them finding out about Humanity's plight only afterwards (Which I think is plain stupid but I digress.*) is entirely besides the point, and comes into play after the war when they fine well knew about it all but did not try to undo the damage that they did to Humanity. That above all else shows how corrupt their leadership were, how the war was driven by anything but righteous self-defence, and how arrogant and short sighted - utterly naive - the Forerunners were as a people in buying into the decisions of their leadership to commit to a full blown genocide like that.
[* The Forerunners, with all their resources and reach, could not find evidence of the Flood? Humanity, who were being beaten back by the Forerunners, never once thought to try to hand the Forerunners some samples as proof? I think they must have, it would be stupid otherwise, and I just do not think that the Forerunners were interested in looking at the evidence or looking for their own evidence. The Forerunners, who were also apparently unwilling to indulge in these claims about the Flood, claiming that it was an excuse made up by Humanity, indulged in them anyway after wiping out Humanity by building 12 super-weapons of mass destruction? Seems blatantly obvious to me that they wanted the competition gone. They are worse than the Covenant races.]
I believe they were entirely justified in attacking humanity, killing millions of Forerunners would be a heinous crime, no matter which way you look at it. But the near complete extermination was probably a result of "oh, we have an excuse to wipe out our only (known) threat! Sweet!" War would have been acceptable, but that escalated to extermination, admittedly, due to the Forerunner's prejudice of the ancient humans. In this way, one can only assume that ancient humanity have been anything but friendly, in all likelihood they were just as bad as the Forerunners.
And even then, in the end, the Forerunners saved humanity, and all other sentient races in the galaxy, while they themselves perished. And in any case, the rings were built to be one final, last resort to stopping the flood. Not a galaxy-wide extermination weapon, least of all to kill their inheritors.
As for the "worse than the Covenant races"... Perhaps. Besides the San 'Shyuum, apparently the most conceited race in the galaxy."
I'm not saying that the Forerunners were the friendliest bunch. I'm just saying that they're not the warmongering terrors you seem to be making them out to be.