The problem silver and people like him tend to have is that it's easy to adjust your mind to a racist sort of setting because that's easier to comprehend. It's simpler. Nicer. Because complexity requires lots of philosophy and thinking. So it's easy to consider the Reapers as one lump sum. In other words -- to a racist mindset, all people of a certain "type" are the same, even if the mindset is primarily depicting extremists. The case here is the geth versus the heretics. I mean, it's a painfully obvious bit of symbology to me that they're dealing with issues of racism in the game, it's kind of funny that people are thus being racist.
I mean, the geth are no different than the Muslims, or Americans, or the Irish, or any other group of people that have an extremist faction. A large factor of racism is believing that an extremist faction represents the entire group, it's easier to deal with. That way you can dismiss them as monsters and/or unwashed savages without having to think of the complexity of their society and culture as a whole.
What we're dealing with here is Silver's headcanon that the geth built the Reaper base before they built the megastructure. This is ridiculous because Legion already has stated that the megastructure was the only thing they were building and devoting resources to. But let's fight headcanon with headcanon to expose the very peculiarly racist-like mindsets. There are, at the very least, two factions of the geth. The orthodox geth, and the extremist heretic faction.
Note that the orthodox geth refer to them as heretics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy"
Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs."
The orthodox geth desire peace and cooperation with organics. They built Legion to that end. They even gave Legion adorable little wiggly eyebrows so that organics would find him more relatable. Essentially, Legion is a peace envoy who's trying to understand and make peace with any organics he's able to. But where's the Alliance peace envoy? The Council peace envoy? Or the peace envoy from the quarian peoples? Even one ambassador? Even one diplomat?
The only diplomat is Legion.
Legion is of the orthodox geth. A group of geth who consider the other faction of geth to be
heretics. Please see the definition of heresy again. Legion does not agree with the heretics nor their actions. However, to the racist mindset, the geth are all heretics, and they're all one, big happy family. This is because the racist mindset doesn't comprehend that people of another ethnicity might actually agree with them. That the people they're demonising as monsters might also find the extremist groups repugnant.
So here's the thing. Headcanon time: Who's to say that the heretics hadn't moved in on Rannoch after the orthodox geth left? Who's to say that the heretics didn't build that bunker? Who's to say that the heretics weren't just waiting for the quarian military to attack and provoke the orthodox geth so that the heretics seem more sympathetic? See, to my mind, the heretics had this all figured out, and the quarian military played right into their metallic hands by blowing up the peaceful megastructure of the orthodox geth.
This also meant that the heretical geth had the numbers now to strong-arm the orthodox geth into new opinions. Furthermore, since the orthodox geth were terrified for their very state of existence at that point, it gave the heretics more political clout. Essentially, in my headcanon, I think that the quarian military forced the orthodox geth into bed with the heretics. The heretics are as logical as the orthodox geth, they just have different motivations. As such, the heretics likely predicted that the military would make a pre-emptive strike.
Why?
The quarian military doesn't want to see the geth as anything more than one species. They're racist. They see the extremists but they blame the whole.
That would be like me blaming all of the quarian peoples for the idiocy of their military (which I don't do).
The funny thing though is because the quarians are racist, and because the quarians are familiar, it's conditioned a lot of people into being similarly racist. The same thing happens in social circles in everyday life. If your friends are all racist against a certain group of people, you're going to want to be racist too in order to fit in. You might not even agree with it at first, but after a while it settles in and then all you know is how to hate. That's fascinating to me. It stops a person from having a truly objective mindset.
And then we have war, where innocents die. Because hey! The extremists totally represent everyone.
The sad part is is that the orthodox geth only went running to the heretics because
they didn't know what the heck else to do. To look at it from the perspective of the orthodox geth, the quarian military is akin to the Reapers. The orthodox geth going to the heretics is sort of like us going to Cerberus.
Think about that for a bit.