In the eyes of many, the current Grand Commander of Noxus, Darius, could be considered the "spiritual successor" to his predecessor, Swin.
The two were like brothers born of different parents, holding many similar political beliefs. In a sense, they were practically cut from the same cloth.
There was nothing particularly wrong with this assessment. Both Darius and Swin were staunch believers in the Noxian spirit. They believed Noxus was great because it never divided people according to the circumstances of their birth, and both held that "worldly power makes people kneel, but Noxus makes them stand."
Because they held this belief, they were willing to wage war to defend that spirit. In the eyes of many, this made them "warmongers."
But when it came to war itself, Swin and Darius still differed in many ways.
Swin thought more like a politician. To him, war was a means and a tool for solving problems. Victory or defeat in a war did not necessarily determine whether its goals had been achieved. War was an extension of politics.
Darius, a soldier by upbringing, had worked hard to improve his political skills after becoming Grand Commander. But whenever matters came down to war itself, his instinct was still to make victory his foremost objective.
Take the current cooperation with the Freljordians.
Even if Swin had chosen the same plan as Darius and agreed to a limited alliance with the Freljordians—setting aside the possibility that he might have come up with a more ingenious plan—his choices would still have differed from Darius's.
Even if he had sent troops to the Lakstak Plains, he would first have carefully weighed his resources and calculated the cost of the operation.
He would have placed the lives of a hundred thousand miners on the scales of his conscience