Look to the West Volume IX: The Electric Circus
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Well, Diversitarianism is probably a factor in the breakdown of that aspect, as for holding the territory while being democratic, the Chinese democracy could just extend to... chinese people, with their notions not extending to caring about the rest.
If the Chinese voter says 'stay in 'nam' then the Chinese will stay in nam. Democracies can be warmongering and bloodthirsty.
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
In note with the general themes of less eurocentricity than OTL, I wonder what an even more Eurocentric world with say, colonized Persia, China, anatolia and no world wars would end up - is there a world where nonwestern cultures are functionally irrelevant outside of their borders?
You’ve built a really cool and unique 20th century China. LTTW consistently succeeds in subverting the OTL narrative that a society needs to somehow “westernize” to keep apace of societal, economic, and technological growth. The Matetwa and Mauré are great examples but this China is definitely the most visible and powerful.
The burned photel towers are also a great touch. LTTW continues to captivate the imagination after 15 years. It’s an internet masterpiece.
The burned photel towers are also a great touch. LTTW continues to captivate the imagination after 15 years. It’s an internet masterpiece.
Lycaon pictus
Donor
The Mandator system sounds like it could yield either completely unpredictable results, or else be easily gamed—especially if bribery is such a factor.
Something that might regulate its excesses might be the principle of gongju or "public appointment". In outlying regions less meshed into the Chinese bureaucracy, it was thought that the local public could put forward several candidates enjoying local public esteem, and the government could appoint one of those for leadership. You decide whether this step should precede or succeed the random appointment; it could come after, with "recall" elections used against unqualified or undesirable nominees.
vgh...
Banned
Orientalism was a thing and lots of prominent English people had portraits done in "Oriental" getups in like the 1700s.
In my opinion I think that in this scenario, the representation of non-Western cultures globally would look more kitschy and in line with western frameworks of understanding things, kind of like they used to be. Also Europe invading places did sometimes provoke a European interest in their past or present cultures - see modern Egyptology.
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
Also, within imperial powers you would get (post)colonial immigration although the factors behind that are too complex to discuss
Thande
Donor
Thank you for saying so (and thank you everyone for your comments).
For the people asking for maps, I will do them at some point, I am currently focused on doing them for Volume VI as it'll be published soon (hint hint).
I was slightly aware of this and was planning to bring it in later, so thanks for the additional note.
304
Thande
Donor
Part #304: My Fellow Americans
“…THE TRUTH!...
…‘VOMERE’ = TOOL OF EURO CATHOLIC SOCEITISTS [sic]…
…LUFT BOMBARDMENT FROM ORBIT TO TURN OUR CHILDREN…
…QUISTEXT NODES CAUSE…
…GRANDE [sic] DUKE MIKHAIL’S SPEECH ON SHADOW MOTEXT PAGE…
…NO POPERY…
…KEEP SPACE MIXER-FREE! WAKE UP…”
– Remnants of a cheaply printed poster, partly torn down, seen on Jones Avenue, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr David Wostyn, October 2020
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(Dr Wostyn’s note)
If there is one constant between all timelines, it seems, it is America’s introverted obsession with its own politics and political history, whether that nation be topped by a crown or a Phrygian cap. You may rest assured that there was more than a generous choice of political lectures on offer, giving us a great deal of freedom – haha – to select the most suited to give us a rundown of the period of interest here. I then, of course, sent Sgt Ellis and Sgt Mumby to record it, which is more than they deserve after spilling the local equivalent of Bovril all over my notes…
*
Recorded lecture on “The Making of Modern American Politics” by Lady Philippa G. Bidwell, recorded October 21st, 2020—
Governess Bidwell needs no introduction. But I’m being paid by the hour so I’ll give her one anyway. (Laughter) After a brief but distinguished academic career in research biology at the University of Milwark, she was first elected to the Michigan Confederal Assembly in 1981.[1] She made the jump to Imperial politics in 1992 and represented Milwark in Parliament until 2004, when she resigned her seat to run for the Governorship. She completed two five-year terms as Governor, including the challenging period of the Hyperflu pandemic of 2012-13, when she had to make difficult and controversial decisions around curfews and the culling of poultry farms.[2] (Murmurs) On her retirement from that office, she was appointed to the House of Lords as a Lady Confederal by the grateful Confederal Assembly. (More murmurs) Who could offer more insights into our political structure, and its origins, than Lady Bidwell, someone with experience at practically all levels of government, yet also someone seen as a perpetual outsider to the Fredericksburg establishment? I want to thank you, ma’am, for gracing our humble establishment with your insights, and I know that there are many girls – and boys – in our audience who will be inspired to follow in your footsteps.
(Applause)
Thank you, Mr Baker. (Pause) So I have to be a life-changing inspiration now? That wasn’t on the form you sent me. (Laughter) Aydub. Listen, all you out there – the old, like me, as well as the young. I can tell you things from my experience that might help you, but if you want to change the world, the drive to do it can only come from you and you alone. (Smattering of applause) There’s no magic trick to it, just hard work and dedication.
Anyroad. Let’s talk about our politics, and where it came from. To do that, we have to go back to the beginning. I’m fed up of people calling America a young nation; we’ve still been electing people to lead us since the first colonists rolled off the boat four hundred years ago, which is a longer history of democracy and representative government than most places. (Sounds of approval) But at least it means we don’t need to delve too deeply into the feudal past, as I would if I was talking about a European country, or China. We can start at the beginning.
For the first hundred and fifty years after Jamestown and the Mayflower, the politics of the American colonies were mostly individualistic. Parties of a kind existed, but they were driven by religious conviction, loyalty to one place over another, financial support from one aristocratic proprietor over another back in the motherland – that kind of thing. Not ideology as we know it today, although many of our ancestors would scarcely have distinguished between their faith and their political convictions, and see us dividing them as an artifice.
This isn’t to say there weren’t political disputes, of course! Our ancestors took sides in the English Civil War, they overthrew the Dominion of New England – which included New York – when James II tried to impose it, and, of course, sadly, they warred upon the Tortolians. And sometimes each other. But most people say party politics really started after Prince Frederick, as he was then, was exiled here in 1728. You can agree or disagree with that, it’s debatable. When Frederick arrived, the main political divide was the same old traditional one from the mother country: the Court Party versus the Country Party, the innies versus the outies, if you like. (Laughter) That kind of political divide existed in all the old colonies, but the details were different in each one, we were still growing towards a unified identity. And, of course, at that time most people would have regarded that identity as including Carolina too, not just America. (Murmurs)
Prince Frederick built himself a support base here by working with, well, the outies, the Country Party. Back in England his supporters were called the Patriot Boys, a dissident faction of the ruling Whigs. That term started to catch on here, as well, eventually. Frederick’s moment came after the controversial Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which ended the Second War of Supremacy. Americans were collectively disgusted that our boys had sacrificed their lives to take Lewisborough in New Scotland and other places, only for the government in London under Cumberland to order them handed them back again.[3] So we became a nation, an Empire, and fought to restore Frederick to the throne. And we did!
As a consequence of the War of the British Succession, many former ‘Court Party’ establishments in the colonies were either overthrown or subsumed by the former ‘Country Parties’. Fused together, these formed the Continental Patriots or American Tories, the first true American political party. What scattered opposition remained were generally referred to as Whigs, sometimes Western Whigs, as frontier settlers began to feel alienated from the coastal cities.
The power of the Patriots was demonstrated during the Troubled Sixties, when they advocated for greater representative self-rule and protested against subordination to London choosing which lands could and could not be settled by Americans. After the Crisis of 1765, the North Commission was instated to draw up the framework of government that we have all heard in school: Five Confederations and One Empire.[4] The large number of the old, variably-sized, colonies were consolidated into five roughly equal ones, each with its own Confederal Assembly.[5] They would split power with the Continental Parliament here in Fredericksburg. Henceforth, Americans would fund their own internal improvements out of their own tax revenues levied by their own governments, rather than it all going through London. Only military taxation and deployment remained partially tied to the mother country.
Now, you may hear TPV people get teary-eyed about that being perfect (Laughter) but it wasn’t all rose gardens. Outside of Pennsylvania, relatively few men could vote – and practically no women. Governors were still appointed by the Crown, either by the Emperor or the Lord Deputy, and they sometimes held more power than the elected assemblies. The Confederations were intended to expand westward, but that left more and more voters distant isolated from the cis-Appalachian capital cities, what we now call the Arc of Power. That’s a problem we still face today (Sounds of agreement) in a different way, of course. But I’m talking about days before quisters, before Lectel, even before Optel here. If you lived in a distant frontier outpost, like, say, Milwark (Laughter) you couldn’t even write a letter to your MCP without worrying the messenger would be taken by bandits or Tortolians! The late eighteenth century was a different time.
And yet, it still had politics. This is the first time where were really got multiple competing parties. The old Patriots shifted from being a broad-tent party encompassing almost all public opinion, to a more partisan one defined by its loyalty to Lord Washington and his successor Lord Hamilton. The first Patriots were traditionalist, aristocratic, loyal to the mother country, somewhat economically doradist and favoured a centralisation of power. Opposing them rose the Constitutionalists, more radical in terms of pushing for more American autonomy, a little more cobrist, quite a bit more confederalist and suspicious of too much centralised government. It was this tendency which would eventually split the Empire, of course. Both parties were heterogenous masses with many competing local coalitions and priorities, especially the Constitutionalists.
Maybe there’s a version of history out there where America stayed dominated by just two political parties, but I doubt it. (Chuckles) After the Constitutionalists were first elected under James Monroe in , they began to split under their own contradictions, especially in disagreements over slavery – yes, even back then – and specifically the annexation of Cuba. Remember back then Carolina was considered part of the Empire! So an abolitionist faction of the Constitutionalists, led by Ben Rush of Pennsylvania, split off as the American Radical Party.[6] They chose that name because many English Radicals had travelled to the Empire back in 1788 in the hopes of being elected under the more liberal voting franchise here, clearly intending to use their status as MCPs purely as a pulpit to attack London politics with. Well, the voters here weren’t very impressed with being taken for granted like that. So Rush and his supporters were keen to emphasise how American they were.
This era, sometimes called ‘two-and-a-half party politics’ as the ARP were smaller than the other two, lasted until 1819.[7] The Constitutionalists were divided between northerners who were often anti-Catholic but lukewarm on slavery, such as President Matthew Quincy, and southerners who had chosen John Alexander’s push for Catholic tolerance specifically as a tool to expand slavery into former Spanish lands. The Constitutionalists fractured further and shattered altogether when General Alexander’s ‘Southron Movement’ ran ‘Constitutionalist Whig’ candidates against official Constitutionalist ones in Carolina – and also parts of Virginia and beyond, lest we forget.
The following era was the First Multi-party System, to use the jargon, when the parties were breaking and reforming and nobody was quite sure what was going on. The remnants of the Quincyite Constitutionalists reformed under Ralph Purdon under what he called the Frontier Party, but inevitably became known as the Neutrals due to their neutral position on slavery. Of course, nowadays we would call mere neutrality on slavery to be a loathsome position of moral cowardice. Yet Purdon remains a political hero of mine in spite of that. At a time when so many American politicians, even sometimes the ARP, were complacent about the restrictive suffrage and the needs of western settlers – Purdon raised a flag that said the west could not be ignored, dismissed by the Arc of Power just as those coastal cities had been dismissed by Cumberland’s London a few generations before. (Murmurs)
Of course, these were the days of first-past-the-post elections and parties running against each other, or sometimes agreeing to stand down for each other and nominate fusion candidates. Soon after their founding in 1819, the Neutrals made an alliance with the ARP to fight the Pennsylvania confederal election, and they gradually entered into cooperation nationally as well. This was helped by the fact that the parties’ support bases shared some similar goals, but rarely occupied the same geographic locations – remember, this was first-past-the-post. The ARP usually had most success in cities, especially the newer western ones, while the Neutrals drew most support from the rural west and its frontier settlers. Effectively, the Empire now had three major parties – the Patriots, Radical-Neutral alliance, and yes, the pro-slavery Whigs. At that point, running on Catholic tolerance rather than pro-slavery expansion in parts of the north, they were actually winning seats in the Empire proper, even north of Virginia, which seems unimaginable now.
But this fragile equilibrium was short-lived. Patriot President Josiah Crane dubiously tried to govern with the support of the Whigs, passing Catholic relief among less positive measures. The remaining anti-Catholics in the Neutrals broke away as the Trust Party under Arundel Ogilvy. In 1825, a scandal due to the sale of peerages – nothing changes, does it? (Laughter) – helped bring down and shatter the Patriots.[8] The Whigs ended up as the largest party nationwide then – doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? A Patriot faction under Solomon Carter then dirted their hands by helping the Whigs get into power, while a smaller Hamiltonian faction kept fighting the good fight.
Of course this meant the Whigs, under Benjamin Harrison, were in power when the Popular Wars broke out and Emperor Frederick II fled into American exile. That led to the Proclamation of Independence, but Harrison worked himself to death and we ended up with that maniac Eveleigh in charge, just in time for the Superior Revolution and the Virginia Crisis. Fantastic. (Catcalls and laughter) The Virginia Freedom League engineered the conditions that made it possible for the House of Burgesses to abolish the institution of slavery, and then we learned just how treacherous the viper in our breast had been when Carolina invaded to try to restore it. [9] From that day forth, politics had changed forever; no longer would the Whigs enjoy any support outside of Carolina, but they became dominant to the point of monopoly within it.
The turncoat Carterite Patriots were eliminated in the election held in the aftermath in 1832, and the Hamiltonian loyalists restored the unity of the party. However, the new government would not be formed by the Patriots, but by the Radical-Neutral alliance, for the first time. There were tensions, though, because the Neutrals were more numerous but the Radicals, closer to Arc of Power values and connections, held the presidency and more of the major ministries. Even when President Mullenburgh died in office, the Neutral leader Derek Boyd only became President until the Radical caucus could choose a successor. A lot of Neutral grumblings, about the government acting less in the interests of the West than its composition might suggest, began.
This was the age sometimes called the National Gloom, also called the Democratic Experiment more globally, when it feels as though we crammed several centuries’ worth of political history into less than two decades. (Laughter) Many of the Confederations moved towards more liberal voting franchises – though still excluding women, of course. (Boos) More seats were also added to Parliament to reflect the expansion of the population. In New York, partly drawing on the old anti-Catholic Trust Party tendency, a new party emerged. This party was suspicious of the establishment, immigrants and Tortolians, calling for further reform to voting and to the governance of the Empire itself. Its members felt that America was failing to live up to her potential in the Gloom when she could expand and dominate the continent, and this was the fault of a corrupt and inward-looking ruling class. Sound familiar? (Cheers) Well, this party was called the Supremacists. (Mixed boos and laughter, one or two cries of ‘no!’ or ‘shame!’) I know, what went wrong? I don’t remember Stephen Martin saying that the solution to the old corrupt ruling class was to replace it with a new one![10]
But enough partisan sniping. The National Gloom held the genesis of the Second Two-Party System that would later rule the roost from 1857 to 1927, seven decades of relative stability, but it was a troublesome birth. President Vanburen tried to weld the Radicals and Neutrals together into a true united party, and he called it the Liberals. (More cheers and a few catcalls) Well, it was no more united then than it is now, not really. A lot of Neutrals were fed up with Radicals being in the driving seat and refused to join. Some, especially those who still retained Quincyite anti-Catholic sentiments, went over to the Supremacists and helped expand their appeal to the countryside and the West. Others joined the Democrats, a short-lived cobrist national party that was spun out of Sir James Henry’s Virginia confederal vehicle, the Magnolia Democrats. Although they didn’t last long nationally, the iconography and rhetoric of the Democrats cast a long shadow over American politics for years to come.
In 1840 the reunited Patriots managed to return to power under Nathaniel Crowninshield thanks to Edmund Grey’s ‘Richmond Strategy’. But it was a bit of a false dawn, driven by how the first-past-the-post bloc vote system used at the time could mask shifts in voters. It was during these years that politics was divided by the Flag War, when there were arguments about changing the Jack and George, as we used at the time. It was typical of the Patriots that, after months of divisive debate, they decided to change nothing.[11] 1844 was a watershed election. The Liberals became the largest party, the Democrats were wiped out, while the Patriots fell to an equal position with both the Whigs and the rising Supremacists. The Whigs, by this point, now controlled every one of Carolina’s seats and none outside it. President Vanburen returned for a second term, and formed the first ‘American Coalition’ – which at the time meant a grudging coalition between the Liberals and Patriots, as those were considered the natural two parties, the Liberals being the spiritual descendants of the Constitutionalists. But, as it rapidly became clear, this was a false assumption.[12]
I shouldn’t need to go into detail about the slow, inevitable ramp-up to the Great American War; you’ve all heard about it in school over and over. (Ironic cheers) Suffice to say that the 1848 election was fought almost entirely over the driving question of Reform, with Supremacists and Liberals alike calling for different moves to create new Confederations and other major changes, while Patriots and Whigs opposed them. The parties ended up on very similar numbers, but a Supremacist-Liberal coalition could be formed – also retroactively called an ‘American Coalition’ to pursue the promised Constitutional Convention. However, as you all know, it came to bloodshed after the threat of national abolition was used in a failed attempt to stop the Carolinians boycotting the convention. Adams and Wragg proclaimed secession, and war came.
The war shaped our politics into the long-lasting landscape I talked about before. The Patriots went from the ‘party of No’ on Reform to ‘the party of peace and reunification at any cost’, while the Supremacists and Liberals were both keen to prosecute the war, even if their views differed on other matters.[13] Again, I won’t go into how complicated it got, with the Carolinian Concordat with New Spain and the French rebels in Nouvelle-Orléans, and our boys helping the Californian rebels against New Spain, and—of course—the eventual entry of the UPSA after the Second Cherry Massacre.[14]
After more than four long years of ruinous war with the UPSA, the 1853 election was a confused mess. Again, due to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, though more votes were cast for parties wanting a continuation of the war, in practice a pro-peace majority led by the Patriots was assembled. Francis Bassett (boos) would be the last Patriot President. Four years of trying to will the country back to 1848 and remove the Meridians from Carolina by wishful thinking failed, and in 1857 the Patriots were blasted down to a rump from which, this time, they never recovered. Reform, led by both Supremacists and Liberals, finally took place, and we finally broke out of our subordination to hidebound traditionalists clinging to five Confederations. The Empire had a new constitution in all but name. My home Confederation of Michigan was born.
This political landscape, which lasted in some form from Reform through the Long Peace, the Pandoric War, the First Interbellum and all the way to the end of the Black Twenties, is one I heard about a lot growing up. My grandfather remembered the last stages of it, and his father had told him more. It’s also appeared a lot in films, Motoscopy, books and plays, with a lot of commentators considering it to be a golden age for political rhetoric. I said before that it’s sometimes called the Second Two-Party System, but that’s a bit misleading. There were other parties in Parliament, different ones at different times – and always the Patriots hanging on – and many times the governments formed were minority ones. However, all the Presidents came from either the Liberals or the Supremacists, and there were no formal coalitions with smaller parties until after the Pandoric War.
There are certainly a lot of names from that period we now regard as titans of our political history. In the early days, Lewis Studebaker, who helped transform the Supremacists into a true national doradist party, and Thomas Whipple of the Liberals. The 1870s and 1880s gave us rhetoric from the Supremacist Joseph Pattison and, of course, the great Michael Chamberlain, whose decade in power forever transformed how the subjects of this country view the state and inspired many others. Not least among them was Lewis Faulkner, for many years castigated as the man who failed to confront Societism early on, yet also one whose social achievements are something many of us take for granted. (Some confused murmurs)
It’s definitely a fascinating age of politics, and a long one, but it’s not my personal favourite to study – that goes to politics in the age of the ‘Electric Circus’, as some call it, the Second Interbellum after the Black Twenties. Without being too specific about my birth year (Chuckles) I was there to see the end of it, and heard much more about it from my parents. The trouble with the Second Two-Party System is that often all the brilliant rhetoric conceals a lack of much in the way of actual principle or commitment. Chamberlain’s vision aside, there was often little to distinguish individual Supremacists from individual Liberals, or even Patriots. It was an age of calcified, complacent political consensus, a Gilded Age as some have called it, not a Golden one. When the superficial prosperity of the upper classes failed to trickle down to the common folk, like you and me. (Laughs) Although universal suffrage for men had been realised, and moves towards female suffrage began, at least on the Confederal level, in 1879,[15] our Parliament and our government was still fundamentally unrepresentative. It’s not surprising that our MCPs often seemed uninterested in improving the lot of folk outside their own class – again, with honourable exceptions like Chamberlain.
The Pandoric War had already begun to change things as men of all classes were mobilised to fight together, and women began to work in the factories and the fields. But the mobilisation required to defeat Carolina was less than expected, and after married women over 30 got the votefor Imperial elections under Faulkner, moves towards further liberalisation of suffrage the First Interbellum were stymied by President Tayloe.[16] (A few boos and one cheer) The Black Twenties were different. The supposedly-superficial Flippant generation had showed how hard they could fight against both mortal foes and the invisible enemy of the plague, women as well as men. There was a widespread recognition, in the ENA as in other countries, that things had to change.
I would be remiss if I didn’t look past my own party loyalties to give credit to LG Manders, Dame Eleanor Cross and the rest of the Blue-Gold Cythereans in the Patriots in the First Interbellum. They fought for equality for women, even if they were often classists themselves who would probably have sought to deny representation to working-class women – if working-class men didn’t already have it. (Murmurs) The Patriots and the Mentians had both beome more important after the Pandoric War, when they were part of President Faulkner’s Social American Coalition. The party system was already shifting, but it was the War of 1926 that really shattered the status quo.
I need not recap the cavalcade of failure and complacency that led to Societist Celatores landing upon the North American continent practically unopposed.[17] Again, we all learn that in our school textbooks – ‘lest we forget’. At a time when the Empire needed decisive, united leadership, the parties squabbled, fighting both against their rivals and their own internal factions – fighting anything but the Societist invaders. Liberal President Gilmore, refusing to admit his mistakes, clung to power until forced out due to death-vote attempts by the Supremacists and eventually an ultimatum by Emperor Augustus himself. The Supremacists were led on paper by Roderick Marley, but we all know that his wife Lilian was the real power in the party.[18] The Mentians continued to support their Liberal coalition partners in return for social reforms, despite the opposition of their leader, Magnus Bloom. In the end, the Mentians’ reputation would be irrevocably damaged by their association – unfair, I must say – with the Societist-infiltrated trade unions that were deliberately sabotaging Imperial transport infrastructure and slowing the movement of troops to the front line. This disruption also meant that the Liberal Postmaster-General, Anthony Washborough, (murmurs) could not return to Fredericksburg from his secret negotiations with Prince Yengalychev. This would have great implications for our political history.
We often forget today that Dame Eleanor’s Patriots reverted to the worst of their party’s historical impulses, from the 1850s, and began calling for negotiation with the Societists. The electorate, fortunately for them, also did not seem to remember. However, it did mean that many of the crustier old party grandees were now convinced that Dame Eleanor was one of them. They would receive a rude awakening when the Thirties dawned.
By the time the Celatores were approaching Fredericksburg, Gilmore had been forced out and the Supremacists had agreed to support a different Liberal President. Unfortunately, the only one who could be found was the dithering, aged Michael Briars. After the Alkahest rocket attacks on the Diamond Ring forts and the ensuing public panic and riots, Briars all but surrendered to the Societists and negotiated. Only Anthony Washborough, still trying to get back to Fredericksburg, stood firm and urged the Empire to fight on despite the odds.[19] Some people say he was simply callous, and could dare to call the Societists’ bluff because it wouldn’t be him getting luft-choked in Fredericksburg. Offensive nonsense. Washborough’s wife and children, and many of his friends and colleagues, were in Fredericksburg; are they suggesting he cared not for their lives?
No, Washborough simply had good insight, or maybe just trusted his gut. Afterwards, we learned the truth. The Societists had had no real intention, or capability, of bringing their troops as far north as Fredericksburg, Their leader, Gonzalus, simply sought a terror attack to distract and confuse our government – as though it could have become any more dysfunctional then it was! – while he regrouped to face our armies. Many of us have read Markus Garzius’ account of what really happened. Gonzalus had exactly six rockets, and two of them worked, and they happened to fall on two of the forst in such a way that made the people think they were ranging attacks, warning shots. Fredericksburg would be next, they thought. But Gonzalus had no more rockets, his Celatores were running out of ammunition and supplies, and soon a hyperstorm would wreck Alfarus’ fleet. By hook or by crook, Washborough had been right. If a different choice had been made, Carolina could have been spared sixty-five years of National Coma, and the Empire could have been spared that same sixty-five years with a Societist knife held at our throat. The people remembered.
The 1927 election was another great watershed. The Mentians were wiped out, tied to the Societist sabotage and damaged by their own infighting over support of Briars’ government. The Supremacists obtained the most seats, but only enough to secure a shaky minority with intermittent support from others. Despite Dame Eleanor’s earlier peace rhetoric, the Patriots actually gained seats. The Liberals, under Archie Cooper, were blasted down to a rump. For many years they had been considered America’s ‘natural ruling party’, the party to which the electorate usually defaulted in the absence of other events, who usually found it easier to obtain a working majority than their Supremacist rivals. Never again would they have that status. At the time, probably many expected them to disappear altogether. That has not happened – for better or for worse. (Laughter and a few boos).
But of course the most important event of the 1927 election was the founding of a new party – my party. Yes, I’m biased. (Chuckles) But even objectively, the formation of the Pioneers changed American politics forever. Washborough had taken his so-called Overripe faction out of the Liberals, leaving them with the do-nothing Thicket of Briars loyalists. Some Liberal organisers and party machines went over to Washborough, but not many. For the most part, the Pioneers had to fight for every vote as though starting from scratch. Washborough fought that first election on his record opposing the Societists and the peace which many had begun to see as a mistake, on his work to manage the disruption caused by the plague and the sabotage to the transport and communications network, and on his vision for the future. When most of the parties seemed most concerned with the fact that the Arc of Power was now potentially under Alfarus’ guns, Washborough appealed to the rest of the country, the proud men of Westernesse who had fought and defeated the Societists on the Mississippi, the women of Ohio and Michigan who had worked in factories under quarantine conditions while their husbands fought in Alyeska. Those people did not feel like they had lost a battle. They felt let down by their politicians, and the Pioneers were there to offer something new.
In that 1927 election, starting almost from scratch, the Pioneers leapt to being the second largest party, albeit a distant second to the Supremacists, outpolling the rump Liberals. One thing that became clear to Washborough was just how fragile and arbitrary majorities could be under the Empire’s voting system. There had been some movement towards introducing Modified American Percentage Representation, MAPR, at Imperial level after its successful introduction on a Confederal level in New England, way back in 1890. It had also been introduced in Cygnia in 1920, and former President Tayloe – who had blocked its adoption nationally – was now called out as a hypocrite for backing it on a level where it would favour his party.[20] The debate was already heating up again nationally even during the war, where it was one of many distractions for the Fouracre and Gilmore ministries.
Washborough’s genius was to tie the voting reform debate, which many voters found esoteric and unengaging, to the push for full universal female suffrage. This issue had become particularly acute because so many young, unmarried women had worked in the fields and factories during the war, as I was saying, and still were unable to vote on an Imperial level. By associating the two proposed reforms, Washborough – from opposition – was able to assemble a coalition that extended from New York newspapermen to farm girls in Cismississippia, from Boston professors to Dame Eleanor Cross herself. Yes, via Blue-Gold Cythereanism, even the Patriots began to back voting reform. Of course, a shift to MAPR was always something that was going to benefit them as a smaller party – as had already been seen in New England for years – but the idea was anathema to many of the crusty old party grandees. The hard-Regressive, Wyndhamite tendency in the Patriots was shocked by what they saw as Dame Eleanor’s ‘betrayal’; in their minds, the goal of any Patriot leader should be to try to revert the ENA to the ‘perfect’ form it had held in 1788. Some of the more extreme ‘Old Tory’ members even argued that cities that had not had borough status back then should be disenfranchised.[21] The fact that they were led by a woman, which would have been impossible in 1788, does not appear to have entered their tiny minds. (Laughter)
Anyway, the Pioneer identity drew on some of the parties of the past that I’ve been telling you about. There was a bit of the radicalism of the old Democrats, the rural and frontier self-sufficient spirit of the Neutrals, and they also absorbed a lot of the former Mentian vote. Maybe it was the ultimate revenge of Derek Boyd and the Neutrals; whereas they had played second fiddle to the urban Radicals a century before, under the Pioneers broad-cobrist politics would see rural voters in the driving seat. For a time, at least.
The shaky Supremacist minority government under Marley – whether the titular Roderick Marley or the actual Lilian Marley, first female President in all but name – managed to survive until 1931 before falling. At the ensuing election, Washborough’s Patriots swept to achieve a strong minority, an astonishing feat for a new party to achieve in just two elections, though as I said, a lot of our character felt like we were continuing the spirit of ancestral strands of opinion in the Empire. Washborough was undoubtedly lucky in that he benefited from an economic boom in the aftermath of the plague years, which had begun under Marley but accelerated under Pioneer rule. The spirit of the age was one of relief after all the struggles of the last decade – but, of course, it was also a popular spirit, and one which demanded a more popular government. Unlike Marley, Washborough would deliver to that demand.
Some have called the reforms of 1932 the most significant ones since those of 1857. While the lawyers can debate that, there is no argument that they unquestionably changed the nature of the Continental Parliament and American politics in general. From the beginning, Imperial provinces or boroughs had elected one or more MCPs according to the first-past-the-post or bloc vote system; you, the voter, had a list of names, and you made your mark against the names you wanted to vote for before putting your ballot in the box.[22] You had as many votes as there were seats to fill. Sounds familiar? Well, the genius of MAPR was that the actual mechanics of the voting are no different from the point of the view of the voter; it’s just that the votes are tabulated differently. Under bloc vote, let’s say you have three seats, the three candidates who obtained the first, second and third highest number of votes were elected. It doesn’t matter that those votes might only make up a small percentage of all those cast. In many seats, the three Supremacists might get 900, 890 and 880 votes each – a small seat, this is just an example! – while the three Liberals might get 870, 860 and 840, and the three Patriots might get 400, 390 and 380. It doesn’t matter that the first Liberal is only just behind the third Supremacist, only the top three get elected and everyone who voted for someone else goes unrepresented. In many cases the voters did split and elect candidates from different parties, but not always for the most honourable of reasons – such as voting only for those candidates whom they thought had the more Protestant-sounding names.
Under MAPR, as I hope you all learned in school (Chuckles) the votes for only the highest-scoring candidate of each party are tabulated and we look at the overall percentages. Then seats are assigned to the parties based on those percentages using the Cooke Formula,[23] with the first one for a party going to the highest-scoring candidate of that party. Take that hypothetical example I just gave you. We’ll assume for simplicity we just have three Supremacists, three Liberals and three Patriots – which would lead to me getting on the quister to yell at party headquarters for not contesting this election! (Laughter) Our highest Supremacist has 900 votes, our highest Liberal has 870 votes and our highest Patriot has 400 votes, so add it up, work out the percentage and that’s a 42-40-18% split. Remember that under the old system, all three of those seats would be filled by Supremacists based on just 42% of the vote. (Murmurs) But according to the Cooke Formula, we award the first seat to the top-scoring Supremacist, then divide the Supremacist votes by two to get 21, the highest percentage is now the top Liberal on 40 so she gets the second seat, and then we compare the halved Supremacists to the Patriots – the Supremacists are just ahead, so the second highest scoring Supremacist gets the third seat. If the Patriots did a little better, however, they would get it – so there is an incentive to fight for every seat, even if you would be languishing in third under first-past-the-post. Under MAPR, a party that wins over 50% automatically gets all three seats, whereas under pure unmodified APR, the formula is still applied after that threshold.
Washborough pushed through the Imperial constitutional reform alongside, finally, the Empire adopting universal suffrage at age 21 regardless of gender. The first Pioneer government would be noteworthy for many moves other than that, but it’s this that would change what it means to vote for our government forever. Many of the Confederations would also adopt MAPR in its wake, as some municipal and provincial bodies within them already had (or APR). Drakesland, my beloved Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio all voted to adopt MAPR in the 1930s. New York, more conservative, waited until the 1950s, and Virginia had to be dragged through a hedge backwards into MAPR in the 1960s, as I well remember.
Of course, there’s one Confederation I’ve not mentioned. As well as the matter of Prince Yengalychev’s Russians, another great and contentious issue under the first Pioneer government would be what exactly to do about Tayloe’s Folly – the vast and incoherent Confederation of Panimaha…
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
We will terminate Bidwell’s lecture here, as she is about to venture into areas which would overlap with events elsewhere that have not yet been covered. Or – as Sergeant Ellis puts it – (sighs) – ‘spoilers’. We will supply the rest at a more appropriate time, but first...
[1] Prior to the Great American War, ‘General Assembly’ was the most commonly-used generic term for the confederal-level legislature of a constituent Confederation of the ENA. The formal names of the original five Confederations’ legislatures were General Court (New England), House of Burgesses (Virginia), General Assembly (Carolina), and both New York and Pennsylvania had bicameral legislatures, of which the most important part was also called General Assembly or just Assembly. (Seealso Part #103 in Volume III). With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the term General Assembly was also adopted in Drakesland and Cygnia (which had internally functioned as de facto Confederations long before formal admission). However, the term began to carry negative connotations after the Great American War, when it became especially associated with mentions of the rebel Carolinian General Assembly in the news. All the other Confederations created in the Supremacist Reforms of 1857 were instead given legislatures with the formal title ‘Confederal Assembly’, as was Panimaha when it was created by the Tayloe ministry.
[2] As alluded to in Part #281 in Volume VIII.
[3] See Parts #1-5 back in Volume I. Note that part of the settlement after the assassination of William IV was that he was retroactively recognised as legal King, but Americans in TTL have a tendency to refer to him as though he was a usurper (and make comparisons to Blandford).
[4] See Part #11 in Volume I.
[5] As mentioned before, this is slightly anachronistic, but likely done knowingly so as not to confuse the audience.
[6] See Part #62 in Volume II.
[7] See Part #103 in Volume III.
[8] See Part #114 in Volume III.
[9] See Part # 124, #136, #142 and #144 in Volume III.
[10] See Part #159 and #169 in Volume IV.
[11] This is an error on the speaker’s part, as the Flag War debate mostly happened under Vanburen.
[12] See Part #173 in Volume IV.
[13] See Part #178 in Volume IV.
[14] See Part #183 in Volume IV. Note that this narrative is a little overly sympathetic to the American position, making it sound as though the Meridians’ actions were entirely unprovoked.
[15] Specifically in Pennsylvania, see Part #208 in Volume V.
[16] See Part #258 in Volume VII.
[17] A bit of a biased and inaccurate statement.
[18] Again, a bit biased (both going for a Cytherean narrative and trying to make Roderick Marley look weak) – it was more that Lilian was unofficially his equal co-leader of the party.
[19] See Part #300 in Volume VIII.
[20] See Part #288 in Volume VIII.
[21] Lady Bidwell’s use of ‘hard-Regressive’ and ‘Wyndhamite’ is employed because the original meaning of the term ‘Regressive’ (see Part #157 in Volume IV) has become diluted over time, till in 2020 it often only conveys a vague sense of ‘conservative’. Properly, a Regressive is someone who wants to revert the status of their country back to that which it held in an arbitrarily-selected earlier period.
[22] Lady Bidwell is being a bit anachronistic here, as ballots of this type were not the norm until the nineteenth century; prior to the secret ballot, it would be more common to vote by (for example) signing one’s name or making one’s mark under one candidate’s name or the other on a collective ballot paper.
[23] AKA the D’Hondt or Jefferson method in OTL. See Part #223 in Volume V.
“…THE TRUTH!...
…‘VOMERE’ = TOOL OF EURO CATHOLIC SOCEITISTS [sic]…
…LUFT BOMBARDMENT FROM ORBIT TO TURN OUR CHILDREN…
…QUISTEXT NODES CAUSE…
…GRANDE [sic] DUKE MIKHAIL’S SPEECH ON SHADOW MOTEXT PAGE…
…NO POPERY…
…KEEP SPACE MIXER-FREE! WAKE UP…”
– Remnants of a cheaply printed poster, partly torn down, seen on Jones Avenue, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr David Wostyn, October 2020
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
If there is one constant between all timelines, it seems, it is America’s introverted obsession with its own politics and political history, whether that nation be topped by a crown or a Phrygian cap. You may rest assured that there was more than a generous choice of political lectures on offer, giving us a great deal of freedom – haha – to select the most suited to give us a rundown of the period of interest here. I then, of course, sent Sgt Ellis and Sgt Mumby to record it, which is more than they deserve after spilling the local equivalent of Bovril all over my notes…
*
Recorded lecture on “The Making of Modern American Politics” by Lady Philippa G. Bidwell, recorded October 21st, 2020—
Governess Bidwell needs no introduction. But I’m being paid by the hour so I’ll give her one anyway. (Laughter) After a brief but distinguished academic career in research biology at the University of Milwark, she was first elected to the Michigan Confederal Assembly in 1981.[1] She made the jump to Imperial politics in 1992 and represented Milwark in Parliament until 2004, when she resigned her seat to run for the Governorship. She completed two five-year terms as Governor, including the challenging period of the Hyperflu pandemic of 2012-13, when she had to make difficult and controversial decisions around curfews and the culling of poultry farms.[2] (Murmurs) On her retirement from that office, she was appointed to the House of Lords as a Lady Confederal by the grateful Confederal Assembly. (More murmurs) Who could offer more insights into our political structure, and its origins, than Lady Bidwell, someone with experience at practically all levels of government, yet also someone seen as a perpetual outsider to the Fredericksburg establishment? I want to thank you, ma’am, for gracing our humble establishment with your insights, and I know that there are many girls – and boys – in our audience who will be inspired to follow in your footsteps.
(Applause)
Thank you, Mr Baker. (Pause) So I have to be a life-changing inspiration now? That wasn’t on the form you sent me. (Laughter) Aydub. Listen, all you out there – the old, like me, as well as the young. I can tell you things from my experience that might help you, but if you want to change the world, the drive to do it can only come from you and you alone. (Smattering of applause) There’s no magic trick to it, just hard work and dedication.
Anyroad. Let’s talk about our politics, and where it came from. To do that, we have to go back to the beginning. I’m fed up of people calling America a young nation; we’ve still been electing people to lead us since the first colonists rolled off the boat four hundred years ago, which is a longer history of democracy and representative government than most places. (Sounds of approval) But at least it means we don’t need to delve too deeply into the feudal past, as I would if I was talking about a European country, or China. We can start at the beginning.
For the first hundred and fifty years after Jamestown and the Mayflower, the politics of the American colonies were mostly individualistic. Parties of a kind existed, but they were driven by religious conviction, loyalty to one place over another, financial support from one aristocratic proprietor over another back in the motherland – that kind of thing. Not ideology as we know it today, although many of our ancestors would scarcely have distinguished between their faith and their political convictions, and see us dividing them as an artifice.
This isn’t to say there weren’t political disputes, of course! Our ancestors took sides in the English Civil War, they overthrew the Dominion of New England – which included New York – when James II tried to impose it, and, of course, sadly, they warred upon the Tortolians. And sometimes each other. But most people say party politics really started after Prince Frederick, as he was then, was exiled here in 1728. You can agree or disagree with that, it’s debatable. When Frederick arrived, the main political divide was the same old traditional one from the mother country: the Court Party versus the Country Party, the innies versus the outies, if you like. (Laughter) That kind of political divide existed in all the old colonies, but the details were different in each one, we were still growing towards a unified identity. And, of course, at that time most people would have regarded that identity as including Carolina too, not just America. (Murmurs)
Prince Frederick built himself a support base here by working with, well, the outies, the Country Party. Back in England his supporters were called the Patriot Boys, a dissident faction of the ruling Whigs. That term started to catch on here, as well, eventually. Frederick’s moment came after the controversial Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which ended the Second War of Supremacy. Americans were collectively disgusted that our boys had sacrificed their lives to take Lewisborough in New Scotland and other places, only for the government in London under Cumberland to order them handed them back again.[3] So we became a nation, an Empire, and fought to restore Frederick to the throne. And we did!
As a consequence of the War of the British Succession, many former ‘Court Party’ establishments in the colonies were either overthrown or subsumed by the former ‘Country Parties’. Fused together, these formed the Continental Patriots or American Tories, the first true American political party. What scattered opposition remained were generally referred to as Whigs, sometimes Western Whigs, as frontier settlers began to feel alienated from the coastal cities.
The power of the Patriots was demonstrated during the Troubled Sixties, when they advocated for greater representative self-rule and protested against subordination to London choosing which lands could and could not be settled by Americans. After the Crisis of 1765, the North Commission was instated to draw up the framework of government that we have all heard in school: Five Confederations and One Empire.[4] The large number of the old, variably-sized, colonies were consolidated into five roughly equal ones, each with its own Confederal Assembly.[5] They would split power with the Continental Parliament here in Fredericksburg. Henceforth, Americans would fund their own internal improvements out of their own tax revenues levied by their own governments, rather than it all going through London. Only military taxation and deployment remained partially tied to the mother country.
Now, you may hear TPV people get teary-eyed about that being perfect (Laughter) but it wasn’t all rose gardens. Outside of Pennsylvania, relatively few men could vote – and practically no women. Governors were still appointed by the Crown, either by the Emperor or the Lord Deputy, and they sometimes held more power than the elected assemblies. The Confederations were intended to expand westward, but that left more and more voters distant isolated from the cis-Appalachian capital cities, what we now call the Arc of Power. That’s a problem we still face today (Sounds of agreement) in a different way, of course. But I’m talking about days before quisters, before Lectel, even before Optel here. If you lived in a distant frontier outpost, like, say, Milwark (Laughter) you couldn’t even write a letter to your MCP without worrying the messenger would be taken by bandits or Tortolians! The late eighteenth century was a different time.
And yet, it still had politics. This is the first time where were really got multiple competing parties. The old Patriots shifted from being a broad-tent party encompassing almost all public opinion, to a more partisan one defined by its loyalty to Lord Washington and his successor Lord Hamilton. The first Patriots were traditionalist, aristocratic, loyal to the mother country, somewhat economically doradist and favoured a centralisation of power. Opposing them rose the Constitutionalists, more radical in terms of pushing for more American autonomy, a little more cobrist, quite a bit more confederalist and suspicious of too much centralised government. It was this tendency which would eventually split the Empire, of course. Both parties were heterogenous masses with many competing local coalitions and priorities, especially the Constitutionalists.
Maybe there’s a version of history out there where America stayed dominated by just two political parties, but I doubt it. (Chuckles) After the Constitutionalists were first elected under James Monroe in , they began to split under their own contradictions, especially in disagreements over slavery – yes, even back then – and specifically the annexation of Cuba. Remember back then Carolina was considered part of the Empire! So an abolitionist faction of the Constitutionalists, led by Ben Rush of Pennsylvania, split off as the American Radical Party.[6] They chose that name because many English Radicals had travelled to the Empire back in 1788 in the hopes of being elected under the more liberal voting franchise here, clearly intending to use their status as MCPs purely as a pulpit to attack London politics with. Well, the voters here weren’t very impressed with being taken for granted like that. So Rush and his supporters were keen to emphasise how American they were.
This era, sometimes called ‘two-and-a-half party politics’ as the ARP were smaller than the other two, lasted until 1819.[7] The Constitutionalists were divided between northerners who were often anti-Catholic but lukewarm on slavery, such as President Matthew Quincy, and southerners who had chosen John Alexander’s push for Catholic tolerance specifically as a tool to expand slavery into former Spanish lands. The Constitutionalists fractured further and shattered altogether when General Alexander’s ‘Southron Movement’ ran ‘Constitutionalist Whig’ candidates against official Constitutionalist ones in Carolina – and also parts of Virginia and beyond, lest we forget.
The following era was the First Multi-party System, to use the jargon, when the parties were breaking and reforming and nobody was quite sure what was going on. The remnants of the Quincyite Constitutionalists reformed under Ralph Purdon under what he called the Frontier Party, but inevitably became known as the Neutrals due to their neutral position on slavery. Of course, nowadays we would call mere neutrality on slavery to be a loathsome position of moral cowardice. Yet Purdon remains a political hero of mine in spite of that. At a time when so many American politicians, even sometimes the ARP, were complacent about the restrictive suffrage and the needs of western settlers – Purdon raised a flag that said the west could not be ignored, dismissed by the Arc of Power just as those coastal cities had been dismissed by Cumberland’s London a few generations before. (Murmurs)
Of course, these were the days of first-past-the-post elections and parties running against each other, or sometimes agreeing to stand down for each other and nominate fusion candidates. Soon after their founding in 1819, the Neutrals made an alliance with the ARP to fight the Pennsylvania confederal election, and they gradually entered into cooperation nationally as well. This was helped by the fact that the parties’ support bases shared some similar goals, but rarely occupied the same geographic locations – remember, this was first-past-the-post. The ARP usually had most success in cities, especially the newer western ones, while the Neutrals drew most support from the rural west and its frontier settlers. Effectively, the Empire now had three major parties – the Patriots, Radical-Neutral alliance, and yes, the pro-slavery Whigs. At that point, running on Catholic tolerance rather than pro-slavery expansion in parts of the north, they were actually winning seats in the Empire proper, even north of Virginia, which seems unimaginable now.
But this fragile equilibrium was short-lived. Patriot President Josiah Crane dubiously tried to govern with the support of the Whigs, passing Catholic relief among less positive measures. The remaining anti-Catholics in the Neutrals broke away as the Trust Party under Arundel Ogilvy. In 1825, a scandal due to the sale of peerages – nothing changes, does it? (Laughter) – helped bring down and shatter the Patriots.[8] The Whigs ended up as the largest party nationwide then – doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? A Patriot faction under Solomon Carter then dirted their hands by helping the Whigs get into power, while a smaller Hamiltonian faction kept fighting the good fight.
Of course this meant the Whigs, under Benjamin Harrison, were in power when the Popular Wars broke out and Emperor Frederick II fled into American exile. That led to the Proclamation of Independence, but Harrison worked himself to death and we ended up with that maniac Eveleigh in charge, just in time for the Superior Revolution and the Virginia Crisis. Fantastic. (Catcalls and laughter) The Virginia Freedom League engineered the conditions that made it possible for the House of Burgesses to abolish the institution of slavery, and then we learned just how treacherous the viper in our breast had been when Carolina invaded to try to restore it. [9] From that day forth, politics had changed forever; no longer would the Whigs enjoy any support outside of Carolina, but they became dominant to the point of monopoly within it.
The turncoat Carterite Patriots were eliminated in the election held in the aftermath in 1832, and the Hamiltonian loyalists restored the unity of the party. However, the new government would not be formed by the Patriots, but by the Radical-Neutral alliance, for the first time. There were tensions, though, because the Neutrals were more numerous but the Radicals, closer to Arc of Power values and connections, held the presidency and more of the major ministries. Even when President Mullenburgh died in office, the Neutral leader Derek Boyd only became President until the Radical caucus could choose a successor. A lot of Neutral grumblings, about the government acting less in the interests of the West than its composition might suggest, began.
This was the age sometimes called the National Gloom, also called the Democratic Experiment more globally, when it feels as though we crammed several centuries’ worth of political history into less than two decades. (Laughter) Many of the Confederations moved towards more liberal voting franchises – though still excluding women, of course. (Boos) More seats were also added to Parliament to reflect the expansion of the population. In New York, partly drawing on the old anti-Catholic Trust Party tendency, a new party emerged. This party was suspicious of the establishment, immigrants and Tortolians, calling for further reform to voting and to the governance of the Empire itself. Its members felt that America was failing to live up to her potential in the Gloom when she could expand and dominate the continent, and this was the fault of a corrupt and inward-looking ruling class. Sound familiar? (Cheers) Well, this party was called the Supremacists. (Mixed boos and laughter, one or two cries of ‘no!’ or ‘shame!’) I know, what went wrong? I don’t remember Stephen Martin saying that the solution to the old corrupt ruling class was to replace it with a new one![10]
But enough partisan sniping. The National Gloom held the genesis of the Second Two-Party System that would later rule the roost from 1857 to 1927, seven decades of relative stability, but it was a troublesome birth. President Vanburen tried to weld the Radicals and Neutrals together into a true united party, and he called it the Liberals. (More cheers and a few catcalls) Well, it was no more united then than it is now, not really. A lot of Neutrals were fed up with Radicals being in the driving seat and refused to join. Some, especially those who still retained Quincyite anti-Catholic sentiments, went over to the Supremacists and helped expand their appeal to the countryside and the West. Others joined the Democrats, a short-lived cobrist national party that was spun out of Sir James Henry’s Virginia confederal vehicle, the Magnolia Democrats. Although they didn’t last long nationally, the iconography and rhetoric of the Democrats cast a long shadow over American politics for years to come.
In 1840 the reunited Patriots managed to return to power under Nathaniel Crowninshield thanks to Edmund Grey’s ‘Richmond Strategy’. But it was a bit of a false dawn, driven by how the first-past-the-post bloc vote system used at the time could mask shifts in voters. It was during these years that politics was divided by the Flag War, when there were arguments about changing the Jack and George, as we used at the time. It was typical of the Patriots that, after months of divisive debate, they decided to change nothing.[11] 1844 was a watershed election. The Liberals became the largest party, the Democrats were wiped out, while the Patriots fell to an equal position with both the Whigs and the rising Supremacists. The Whigs, by this point, now controlled every one of Carolina’s seats and none outside it. President Vanburen returned for a second term, and formed the first ‘American Coalition’ – which at the time meant a grudging coalition between the Liberals and Patriots, as those were considered the natural two parties, the Liberals being the spiritual descendants of the Constitutionalists. But, as it rapidly became clear, this was a false assumption.[12]
I shouldn’t need to go into detail about the slow, inevitable ramp-up to the Great American War; you’ve all heard about it in school over and over. (Ironic cheers) Suffice to say that the 1848 election was fought almost entirely over the driving question of Reform, with Supremacists and Liberals alike calling for different moves to create new Confederations and other major changes, while Patriots and Whigs opposed them. The parties ended up on very similar numbers, but a Supremacist-Liberal coalition could be formed – also retroactively called an ‘American Coalition’ to pursue the promised Constitutional Convention. However, as you all know, it came to bloodshed after the threat of national abolition was used in a failed attempt to stop the Carolinians boycotting the convention. Adams and Wragg proclaimed secession, and war came.
The war shaped our politics into the long-lasting landscape I talked about before. The Patriots went from the ‘party of No’ on Reform to ‘the party of peace and reunification at any cost’, while the Supremacists and Liberals were both keen to prosecute the war, even if their views differed on other matters.[13] Again, I won’t go into how complicated it got, with the Carolinian Concordat with New Spain and the French rebels in Nouvelle-Orléans, and our boys helping the Californian rebels against New Spain, and—of course—the eventual entry of the UPSA after the Second Cherry Massacre.[14]
After more than four long years of ruinous war with the UPSA, the 1853 election was a confused mess. Again, due to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, though more votes were cast for parties wanting a continuation of the war, in practice a pro-peace majority led by the Patriots was assembled. Francis Bassett (boos) would be the last Patriot President. Four years of trying to will the country back to 1848 and remove the Meridians from Carolina by wishful thinking failed, and in 1857 the Patriots were blasted down to a rump from which, this time, they never recovered. Reform, led by both Supremacists and Liberals, finally took place, and we finally broke out of our subordination to hidebound traditionalists clinging to five Confederations. The Empire had a new constitution in all but name. My home Confederation of Michigan was born.
This political landscape, which lasted in some form from Reform through the Long Peace, the Pandoric War, the First Interbellum and all the way to the end of the Black Twenties, is one I heard about a lot growing up. My grandfather remembered the last stages of it, and his father had told him more. It’s also appeared a lot in films, Motoscopy, books and plays, with a lot of commentators considering it to be a golden age for political rhetoric. I said before that it’s sometimes called the Second Two-Party System, but that’s a bit misleading. There were other parties in Parliament, different ones at different times – and always the Patriots hanging on – and many times the governments formed were minority ones. However, all the Presidents came from either the Liberals or the Supremacists, and there were no formal coalitions with smaller parties until after the Pandoric War.
There are certainly a lot of names from that period we now regard as titans of our political history. In the early days, Lewis Studebaker, who helped transform the Supremacists into a true national doradist party, and Thomas Whipple of the Liberals. The 1870s and 1880s gave us rhetoric from the Supremacist Joseph Pattison and, of course, the great Michael Chamberlain, whose decade in power forever transformed how the subjects of this country view the state and inspired many others. Not least among them was Lewis Faulkner, for many years castigated as the man who failed to confront Societism early on, yet also one whose social achievements are something many of us take for granted. (Some confused murmurs)
It’s definitely a fascinating age of politics, and a long one, but it’s not my personal favourite to study – that goes to politics in the age of the ‘Electric Circus’, as some call it, the Second Interbellum after the Black Twenties. Without being too specific about my birth year (Chuckles) I was there to see the end of it, and heard much more about it from my parents. The trouble with the Second Two-Party System is that often all the brilliant rhetoric conceals a lack of much in the way of actual principle or commitment. Chamberlain’s vision aside, there was often little to distinguish individual Supremacists from individual Liberals, or even Patriots. It was an age of calcified, complacent political consensus, a Gilded Age as some have called it, not a Golden one. When the superficial prosperity of the upper classes failed to trickle down to the common folk, like you and me. (Laughs) Although universal suffrage for men had been realised, and moves towards female suffrage began, at least on the Confederal level, in 1879,[15] our Parliament and our government was still fundamentally unrepresentative. It’s not surprising that our MCPs often seemed uninterested in improving the lot of folk outside their own class – again, with honourable exceptions like Chamberlain.
The Pandoric War had already begun to change things as men of all classes were mobilised to fight together, and women began to work in the factories and the fields. But the mobilisation required to defeat Carolina was less than expected, and after married women over 30 got the votefor Imperial elections under Faulkner, moves towards further liberalisation of suffrage the First Interbellum were stymied by President Tayloe.[16] (A few boos and one cheer) The Black Twenties were different. The supposedly-superficial Flippant generation had showed how hard they could fight against both mortal foes and the invisible enemy of the plague, women as well as men. There was a widespread recognition, in the ENA as in other countries, that things had to change.
I would be remiss if I didn’t look past my own party loyalties to give credit to LG Manders, Dame Eleanor Cross and the rest of the Blue-Gold Cythereans in the Patriots in the First Interbellum. They fought for equality for women, even if they were often classists themselves who would probably have sought to deny representation to working-class women – if working-class men didn’t already have it. (Murmurs) The Patriots and the Mentians had both beome more important after the Pandoric War, when they were part of President Faulkner’s Social American Coalition. The party system was already shifting, but it was the War of 1926 that really shattered the status quo.
I need not recap the cavalcade of failure and complacency that led to Societist Celatores landing upon the North American continent practically unopposed.[17] Again, we all learn that in our school textbooks – ‘lest we forget’. At a time when the Empire needed decisive, united leadership, the parties squabbled, fighting both against their rivals and their own internal factions – fighting anything but the Societist invaders. Liberal President Gilmore, refusing to admit his mistakes, clung to power until forced out due to death-vote attempts by the Supremacists and eventually an ultimatum by Emperor Augustus himself. The Supremacists were led on paper by Roderick Marley, but we all know that his wife Lilian was the real power in the party.[18] The Mentians continued to support their Liberal coalition partners in return for social reforms, despite the opposition of their leader, Magnus Bloom. In the end, the Mentians’ reputation would be irrevocably damaged by their association – unfair, I must say – with the Societist-infiltrated trade unions that were deliberately sabotaging Imperial transport infrastructure and slowing the movement of troops to the front line. This disruption also meant that the Liberal Postmaster-General, Anthony Washborough, (murmurs) could not return to Fredericksburg from his secret negotiations with Prince Yengalychev. This would have great implications for our political history.
We often forget today that Dame Eleanor’s Patriots reverted to the worst of their party’s historical impulses, from the 1850s, and began calling for negotiation with the Societists. The electorate, fortunately for them, also did not seem to remember. However, it did mean that many of the crustier old party grandees were now convinced that Dame Eleanor was one of them. They would receive a rude awakening when the Thirties dawned.
By the time the Celatores were approaching Fredericksburg, Gilmore had been forced out and the Supremacists had agreed to support a different Liberal President. Unfortunately, the only one who could be found was the dithering, aged Michael Briars. After the Alkahest rocket attacks on the Diamond Ring forts and the ensuing public panic and riots, Briars all but surrendered to the Societists and negotiated. Only Anthony Washborough, still trying to get back to Fredericksburg, stood firm and urged the Empire to fight on despite the odds.[19] Some people say he was simply callous, and could dare to call the Societists’ bluff because it wouldn’t be him getting luft-choked in Fredericksburg. Offensive nonsense. Washborough’s wife and children, and many of his friends and colleagues, were in Fredericksburg; are they suggesting he cared not for their lives?
No, Washborough simply had good insight, or maybe just trusted his gut. Afterwards, we learned the truth. The Societists had had no real intention, or capability, of bringing their troops as far north as Fredericksburg, Their leader, Gonzalus, simply sought a terror attack to distract and confuse our government – as though it could have become any more dysfunctional then it was! – while he regrouped to face our armies. Many of us have read Markus Garzius’ account of what really happened. Gonzalus had exactly six rockets, and two of them worked, and they happened to fall on two of the forst in such a way that made the people think they were ranging attacks, warning shots. Fredericksburg would be next, they thought. But Gonzalus had no more rockets, his Celatores were running out of ammunition and supplies, and soon a hyperstorm would wreck Alfarus’ fleet. By hook or by crook, Washborough had been right. If a different choice had been made, Carolina could have been spared sixty-five years of National Coma, and the Empire could have been spared that same sixty-five years with a Societist knife held at our throat. The people remembered.
The 1927 election was another great watershed. The Mentians were wiped out, tied to the Societist sabotage and damaged by their own infighting over support of Briars’ government. The Supremacists obtained the most seats, but only enough to secure a shaky minority with intermittent support from others. Despite Dame Eleanor’s earlier peace rhetoric, the Patriots actually gained seats. The Liberals, under Archie Cooper, were blasted down to a rump. For many years they had been considered America’s ‘natural ruling party’, the party to which the electorate usually defaulted in the absence of other events, who usually found it easier to obtain a working majority than their Supremacist rivals. Never again would they have that status. At the time, probably many expected them to disappear altogether. That has not happened – for better or for worse. (Laughter and a few boos).
But of course the most important event of the 1927 election was the founding of a new party – my party. Yes, I’m biased. (Chuckles) But even objectively, the formation of the Pioneers changed American politics forever. Washborough had taken his so-called Overripe faction out of the Liberals, leaving them with the do-nothing Thicket of Briars loyalists. Some Liberal organisers and party machines went over to Washborough, but not many. For the most part, the Pioneers had to fight for every vote as though starting from scratch. Washborough fought that first election on his record opposing the Societists and the peace which many had begun to see as a mistake, on his work to manage the disruption caused by the plague and the sabotage to the transport and communications network, and on his vision for the future. When most of the parties seemed most concerned with the fact that the Arc of Power was now potentially under Alfarus’ guns, Washborough appealed to the rest of the country, the proud men of Westernesse who had fought and defeated the Societists on the Mississippi, the women of Ohio and Michigan who had worked in factories under quarantine conditions while their husbands fought in Alyeska. Those people did not feel like they had lost a battle. They felt let down by their politicians, and the Pioneers were there to offer something new.
In that 1927 election, starting almost from scratch, the Pioneers leapt to being the second largest party, albeit a distant second to the Supremacists, outpolling the rump Liberals. One thing that became clear to Washborough was just how fragile and arbitrary majorities could be under the Empire’s voting system. There had been some movement towards introducing Modified American Percentage Representation, MAPR, at Imperial level after its successful introduction on a Confederal level in New England, way back in 1890. It had also been introduced in Cygnia in 1920, and former President Tayloe – who had blocked its adoption nationally – was now called out as a hypocrite for backing it on a level where it would favour his party.[20] The debate was already heating up again nationally even during the war, where it was one of many distractions for the Fouracre and Gilmore ministries.
Washborough’s genius was to tie the voting reform debate, which many voters found esoteric and unengaging, to the push for full universal female suffrage. This issue had become particularly acute because so many young, unmarried women had worked in the fields and factories during the war, as I was saying, and still were unable to vote on an Imperial level. By associating the two proposed reforms, Washborough – from opposition – was able to assemble a coalition that extended from New York newspapermen to farm girls in Cismississippia, from Boston professors to Dame Eleanor Cross herself. Yes, via Blue-Gold Cythereanism, even the Patriots began to back voting reform. Of course, a shift to MAPR was always something that was going to benefit them as a smaller party – as had already been seen in New England for years – but the idea was anathema to many of the crusty old party grandees. The hard-Regressive, Wyndhamite tendency in the Patriots was shocked by what they saw as Dame Eleanor’s ‘betrayal’; in their minds, the goal of any Patriot leader should be to try to revert the ENA to the ‘perfect’ form it had held in 1788. Some of the more extreme ‘Old Tory’ members even argued that cities that had not had borough status back then should be disenfranchised.[21] The fact that they were led by a woman, which would have been impossible in 1788, does not appear to have entered their tiny minds. (Laughter)
Anyway, the Pioneer identity drew on some of the parties of the past that I’ve been telling you about. There was a bit of the radicalism of the old Democrats, the rural and frontier self-sufficient spirit of the Neutrals, and they also absorbed a lot of the former Mentian vote. Maybe it was the ultimate revenge of Derek Boyd and the Neutrals; whereas they had played second fiddle to the urban Radicals a century before, under the Pioneers broad-cobrist politics would see rural voters in the driving seat. For a time, at least.
The shaky Supremacist minority government under Marley – whether the titular Roderick Marley or the actual Lilian Marley, first female President in all but name – managed to survive until 1931 before falling. At the ensuing election, Washborough’s Patriots swept to achieve a strong minority, an astonishing feat for a new party to achieve in just two elections, though as I said, a lot of our character felt like we were continuing the spirit of ancestral strands of opinion in the Empire. Washborough was undoubtedly lucky in that he benefited from an economic boom in the aftermath of the plague years, which had begun under Marley but accelerated under Pioneer rule. The spirit of the age was one of relief after all the struggles of the last decade – but, of course, it was also a popular spirit, and one which demanded a more popular government. Unlike Marley, Washborough would deliver to that demand.
Some have called the reforms of 1932 the most significant ones since those of 1857. While the lawyers can debate that, there is no argument that they unquestionably changed the nature of the Continental Parliament and American politics in general. From the beginning, Imperial provinces or boroughs had elected one or more MCPs according to the first-past-the-post or bloc vote system; you, the voter, had a list of names, and you made your mark against the names you wanted to vote for before putting your ballot in the box.[22] You had as many votes as there were seats to fill. Sounds familiar? Well, the genius of MAPR was that the actual mechanics of the voting are no different from the point of the view of the voter; it’s just that the votes are tabulated differently. Under bloc vote, let’s say you have three seats, the three candidates who obtained the first, second and third highest number of votes were elected. It doesn’t matter that those votes might only make up a small percentage of all those cast. In many seats, the three Supremacists might get 900, 890 and 880 votes each – a small seat, this is just an example! – while the three Liberals might get 870, 860 and 840, and the three Patriots might get 400, 390 and 380. It doesn’t matter that the first Liberal is only just behind the third Supremacist, only the top three get elected and everyone who voted for someone else goes unrepresented. In many cases the voters did split and elect candidates from different parties, but not always for the most honourable of reasons – such as voting only for those candidates whom they thought had the more Protestant-sounding names.
Under MAPR, as I hope you all learned in school (Chuckles) the votes for only the highest-scoring candidate of each party are tabulated and we look at the overall percentages. Then seats are assigned to the parties based on those percentages using the Cooke Formula,[23] with the first one for a party going to the highest-scoring candidate of that party. Take that hypothetical example I just gave you. We’ll assume for simplicity we just have three Supremacists, three Liberals and three Patriots – which would lead to me getting on the quister to yell at party headquarters for not contesting this election! (Laughter) Our highest Supremacist has 900 votes, our highest Liberal has 870 votes and our highest Patriot has 400 votes, so add it up, work out the percentage and that’s a 42-40-18% split. Remember that under the old system, all three of those seats would be filled by Supremacists based on just 42% of the vote. (Murmurs) But according to the Cooke Formula, we award the first seat to the top-scoring Supremacist, then divide the Supremacist votes by two to get 21, the highest percentage is now the top Liberal on 40 so she gets the second seat, and then we compare the halved Supremacists to the Patriots – the Supremacists are just ahead, so the second highest scoring Supremacist gets the third seat. If the Patriots did a little better, however, they would get it – so there is an incentive to fight for every seat, even if you would be languishing in third under first-past-the-post. Under MAPR, a party that wins over 50% automatically gets all three seats, whereas under pure unmodified APR, the formula is still applied after that threshold.
Washborough pushed through the Imperial constitutional reform alongside, finally, the Empire adopting universal suffrage at age 21 regardless of gender. The first Pioneer government would be noteworthy for many moves other than that, but it’s this that would change what it means to vote for our government forever. Many of the Confederations would also adopt MAPR in its wake, as some municipal and provincial bodies within them already had (or APR). Drakesland, my beloved Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio all voted to adopt MAPR in the 1930s. New York, more conservative, waited until the 1950s, and Virginia had to be dragged through a hedge backwards into MAPR in the 1960s, as I well remember.
Of course, there’s one Confederation I’ve not mentioned. As well as the matter of Prince Yengalychev’s Russians, another great and contentious issue under the first Pioneer government would be what exactly to do about Tayloe’s Folly – the vast and incoherent Confederation of Panimaha…
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
We will terminate Bidwell’s lecture here, as she is about to venture into areas which would overlap with events elsewhere that have not yet been covered. Or – as Sergeant Ellis puts it – (sighs) – ‘spoilers’. We will supply the rest at a more appropriate time, but first...
[1] Prior to the Great American War, ‘General Assembly’ was the most commonly-used generic term for the confederal-level legislature of a constituent Confederation of the ENA. The formal names of the original five Confederations’ legislatures were General Court (New England), House of Burgesses (Virginia), General Assembly (Carolina), and both New York and Pennsylvania had bicameral legislatures, of which the most important part was also called General Assembly or just Assembly. (Seealso Part #103 in Volume III). With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the term General Assembly was also adopted in Drakesland and Cygnia (which had internally functioned as de facto Confederations long before formal admission). However, the term began to carry negative connotations after the Great American War, when it became especially associated with mentions of the rebel Carolinian General Assembly in the news. All the other Confederations created in the Supremacist Reforms of 1857 were instead given legislatures with the formal title ‘Confederal Assembly’, as was Panimaha when it was created by the Tayloe ministry.
[2] As alluded to in Part #281 in Volume VIII.
[3] See Parts #1-5 back in Volume I. Note that part of the settlement after the assassination of William IV was that he was retroactively recognised as legal King, but Americans in TTL have a tendency to refer to him as though he was a usurper (and make comparisons to Blandford).
[4] See Part #11 in Volume I.
[5] As mentioned before, this is slightly anachronistic, but likely done knowingly so as not to confuse the audience.
[6] See Part #62 in Volume II.
[7] See Part #103 in Volume III.
[8] See Part #114 in Volume III.
[9] See Part # 124, #136, #142 and #144 in Volume III.
[10] See Part #159 and #169 in Volume IV.
[11] This is an error on the speaker’s part, as the Flag War debate mostly happened under Vanburen.
[12] See Part #173 in Volume IV.
[13] See Part #178 in Volume IV.
[14] See Part #183 in Volume IV. Note that this narrative is a little overly sympathetic to the American position, making it sound as though the Meridians’ actions were entirely unprovoked.
[15] Specifically in Pennsylvania, see Part #208 in Volume V.
[16] See Part #258 in Volume VII.
[17] A bit of a biased and inaccurate statement.
[18] Again, a bit biased (both going for a Cytherean narrative and trying to make Roderick Marley look weak) – it was more that Lilian was unofficially his equal co-leader of the party.
[19] See Part #300 in Volume VIII.
[20] See Part #288 in Volume VIII.
[21] Lady Bidwell’s use of ‘hard-Regressive’ and ‘Wyndhamite’ is employed because the original meaning of the term ‘Regressive’ (see Part #157 in Volume IV) has become diluted over time, till in 2020 it often only conveys a vague sense of ‘conservative’. Properly, a Regressive is someone who wants to revert the status of their country back to that which it held in an arbitrarily-selected earlier period.
[22] Lady Bidwell is being a bit anachronistic here, as ballots of this type were not the norm until the nineteenth century; prior to the secret ballot, it would be more common to vote by (for example) signing one’s name or making one’s mark under one candidate’s name or the other on a collective ballot paper.
[23] AKA the D’Hondt or Jefferson method in OTL. See Part #223 in Volume V.
If this so-called Catholic Societism takes all the Ten Commandments seriously, including the ones which totalitarians find uncomfortable such as the one about killing, it could actually be ok enough to survive the end of the "cold war". Perhaps some aspects of it might even be appealing to those stupid kids born in the ENA after the late 80s or so who weren't properly taught how terrible Combine Societism was and don't understand that things must remain exactly the way they are in order to prevent it from returning! What is the world coming to?
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
On the other hand, it would domestically function kind of like how Integralism is supposed to work in practice with a defacto fusion of Church and State and Humanity being expressed through one particular religion (irrespective or race or language)
Very interesting. I'm curious, what kind of role does the American hereditary nobility play in the government and society in general? I only really remember the Washingtons being elevated to Dukes since they started the trend of wanting their title to be based in the ENA. Are there any other notable examples I'm forgetting?
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone.
The attempt to set up hereditary peerages in the ENA didn't really take off, with relatively few awarded and mostly in the early years. The House of Lords consists almost entirely of Lords Confederal or Representative Peers (people, usually ex-politicians, nominated for fixed terms by the Confederal governments - compare the German Bundesrat in OTL) with only a small portion consisting of hereditary peers and bishops.
Thanks for the response! On a related note, how do the American royals handle marriages? With the local peerage being so small and lacking other influences (Henry Owens-Allen was the exception to the rule, and one they'd be wary of considering where he ended up), did they ever marry foreign nobility? If they're accustomed to morganatic marriages with upper-class Americans, there might be unofficial "dynasties" similar to the United States IOTL, which reflects the more fluid class divisions that still exist even if it's a monarchy. As long as the marriage is approved, maybe they'd just both use the title of whichever partner is noble? I suppose it would be less of an issue by the early 20th century either way.
305
Thande
Donor
Part #305: Inside an Enigma
“‘Where do we go from here?’
DIVERSITARIANISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
An entire generation has grown up in a world without the Combine.
Is the Prism still relevant today? Is Iverson?
Or are we complacent towards tomorrow’s threats?
COLLOQUIUM AND DEBATE – ALL PERSPECTIVES WELCOME
Invited speakers:
The Rt. Hon. Mildred Prewitt MCP (Former Minister for Information)
Prof. Alistair Hoist (Chair of Modern History, New Corte University, Carolina)
M. Jacques Birraux (Director, French Institute of Cultural Exchange – Directeur, Institut Français des Echanges Culturels)
Go to Motext page 84V-126 to book tickets!”
– Poster seen on Bezant Street, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr David Wostyn, October 2020
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
While we have read a number of times that the ‘Iversonian’ principles of ASN member nations allegedly require those nations to permit the free discussion of Societism as an ideology, we have noticed since our arrival here that those lectures devoted to Societism – even in a critical voice – are often subject to protests. In the case of the lecture recorded here, however, this consisted of six teenagers from different ideological factions who seemed to hate each other more than the lecturer, and after the start there were fortunately no further interruptions.
*
Recorded lecture on “The Other Societists” by Dr Algernon V. Stoddart, recorded October 29th, 2020—
…thank you to security for that. (Laughs) If I had a dixie for every time that happened at the start of my lecture, I’d have (theatrical pause for thought), oh, at least four imps, three dix and fivecents. (Pause for confused chuckles from audience) Look, one time they only managed to open their mouths before they were thrown out, I’m counting that as half. (More chuckles)
So, as I was saying…
Lots of people have observed that it was the existence of so-called deviant forms of Societism that did more damage to the Combine than we in the free world ever could. Any nation expressing a Diversitarian response to the Combine, from the most nuanced Iversonians here in the ENA or in Europe, all the way down to simple Soviet censorship and thuggery,[1] could be dismissed as ‘the nationalistically blinded’, some homogenous ‘other’ not part of the so-called Liberated Zones. But the heterodox Societists offered an awkward wrinkle in such a simple worldview, shades of grey in the Combine’s picture of black against white.
So it’s all the more appropriate that Grey Societism is also the term most commonly accepted for these forms of Sanchezista belief. And yes, I said forms plural – what’s not appropriate about the term is that it gives the false impression that there is only a single third force in the equation.[2] In fact, with an irony both powerful and delicious, there are almost as many shades of alternative Societist grey as there are colours of cultural diversity in the Diversitarian rainbow. And such views were seen as far more insidious by the Combine, far harder to root out by their crude tools of internal purges and censorship. Suddenly it was not enough for a man to declare himself a Societist and proclaim his commitment to the so-called liberation of the world and the unification of the human race. Now, they had to decide if he was the right sort of Societist, if he was commited to the right sort of liberation, the right sort of unification.
This wasn’t the first time the Combine had faced this dilemma. Early on, they had had to assimilate the different ideas of the Batavian School in order to secure control over the Nusantara. But that had been in the early days, when the very idea of orthodox Combine Societism was still in flux, and it had come at a time when Alfaran pragmatism was the order of the day. It was the Second Interbellum, the Electric Thirties, which would pose a more daunting problem as ideas diverged in other lands now expressing some loyalty towards Sanchezista ideas. Alfaran pragmatism worked only so long as all Societist lands, all the so-called Liberated Zones, were under the firm grip of Alfarus himself – in reality, whatever the form of government they supposedly possessed on paper. The Viennese School was already proving itself a problem even while Alfarus was alive. But it would be the dramatic changes in the Combine after the Silent Revolution – which would, though the Black Guards would refuse to admit it, shift the Combine itself in a new direction out of step with the status quo of Societism elsewhere in the world – that would really start to cause problems.
As I said, it was clear early on that the Combine recognised heterodoxy as a greater threat than outright Diversitarianism, or I should say Contrasanchezista Thought at that point.[3] In many ways, the principle in general philosophical debate long predates Societism, and it is telling that it is from the world of religion that the best analogy comes. The eruptions in confessional disagreements within Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so contentious because they were seen as all-or-nothing. If only one Christian creed led to heaven, the argument went, then all others were not simply false, as (say) Islam was, but insidiously disguised as the true faith in a manner that would hoodwink sincere Christian believers in a way that an openly alien belief like Islam never could. ‘Better an infidel than a heretic’ was the same principle applied by earnest Combine Societists in the 1930s and beyond; the cult of Sanchez had indeed been elevated to a faith, in which only one interpretation of his words could lead to the true victory of the Final Society.
This attitude was aptly demonstrated in the Iberic War, which lasted roughly between 1925 and 1931, though it is difficult to draw the line precisely. Some scholars argue that Spain and Portugal, in different ways, were never truly quiescent throughout the years of apparent peace, with the control exerted by Madrid and Lisbon sometimes not extending into the farthest reaches of the countries, and organised crime and the like ruling the roost in some parts. I’m not going to get into that debate here. Regardless of any pre-existing undercurrents beneath the surface, open war broke out in November of 1925, when Prince José, the heir to the exilic Portuguese throne, appeared in Oporto at the head of a royalist insurgency. It’s still debated whether he was truly in charge or if he’d been all but kidnapped and used for conspirators’ own ends as a figurehead – and if those conspirators were truly royalist, if they were seeking chaos to line their own pockets or to serve Russian paymasters trying to undermine the Bouclier alliance, or if even then they were working for Alfarus. Whether the last one was true in 1925 or not, certainly some elements of José’s movement appear to have been suborned by the Societists at some point.[4]
The Portuguese Republic was shown to be a corruption-wracked hollow husk of itself when the rather ramshackle royalist insurgency defeated the army in battle, with some of the soldiers joining their side. Desperate moves by feuding consuls and generals, including ineffectual use of death-luft for terror reprisals, failed to quell the royalist advance into the Douro valley. Finally, the playboy King João VII was assassinated in France. Again, there’s huge debate over whether it had been truly ordered by the republican government, whether it was an extremist conspiracy acting alone, whether this was an act of Societist Agendes…the main argument for the latter is that the consequences of the attack certainly favoured Societist aims in the long term, but it would have been difficult to predict this at the time. The killing at the heart of France poisoned the Franco-Portuguese relations that Prime Minister Leclerc had tried so hard to build a generation before, and so the Republic was on its own as the royalist insurgency advanced – but an increasing number of the local uprisings did not seem to be royalist in character anymore.
The war became truly Iberic after the death of the popular French Regent of Spain, the Duke of Orleans, in March 1926.[5] Spain had been held together, after King Charles V had died four years earlier, only by the Duke’s vigour and perceived success in fighting for Spanish interests. Without his strong hand, the country now began to disintegrate. The French hope had been that the death of Charles would occur in peacetime, allowing King Charles XI of France to take the throne of Spain as Charles VI in personal union. However, the poor timing with the Black Twenties meant that neither in 1922 nor 1926 was France well placed to see through this succession. Plans for Charles XI to be crowned in Madrid had been pushed back repeatedly, and would never be realised. Ordinary Spaniards began to petition for the return of their troops, which had mostly been assigned to hold down occupied Belgium, as bandits and revolutionaries began to seize control of cities.
By the time those troops – depleted by plague – did make it home, it was often too late. Many deserted due to the lack of central authority (and reliable wages), instead turning to whichever faction controlled their home city or region. In the early period of the civil war, the most coherent alternative government faction was the Second Spanish Republic, which was proclaimed in Granada on April 29th, 1926 by revolutionaries led by Enrique Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez was a former Mayor of Córdoba, the city to which the republicans swiftly moved their capital, as well a well-known orator in the Cortes, for all that had decayed into a largely rubber-stamp body in the later years of Charles V.[6] However, as the crisis wore on, most power became consolidated in the hands of General Ruy Lafuente, an experienced military commander who defected to the republicans more out of local loyalty than ideological conviction, and who led a de facto military junta.[7] Lafuente became notorious for ruthlessly purging the more extreme Neo-Jacobin (and Paleo-Jacobin) republicans in the heterogonous coalition in favour of moderate (or, his critics said, pliable) Adamantines. Many of them fled to Portugal and its own, just-as-complex, civil war.
Though the most significant of the opposing factions, the republicans – generally strongest in the south – were far from the only force fighting the French and, indeed, each other. A strangely popular group, considering the esoteric nature of their beliefs, were the Felipistas, who claimed that Charles V had sired a secret son who was hiding out in the mountains with a band of followers, seeking to reclaim his rightful throne.[7] Despite the fact that the possibly-bastard son of a French-imposed king was an unlikely rallying figure for Spanish nationalists, the Felipistas enjoyed some level of support, mostly in Asturias. As there was no consensus early on about the name of Charles’ legendary son, some have argued that the name Felipe was chosen precisely because it allowed a link to be drawn with the Felipista faction in the civil war of more than a century before.[8] Again, it seemed almost irrelevant that the cause of those Felipistas had been arbitary, in service of another French-imposed king,[9] and was now irrelevant and almost forgotten – but people remembered the romantic bloodies celebrating the derring-do of fictionalised irregulars loyal to Infante Felipe. And that was all that mattered.
Yes, the people of Spain really were in a desperate situation, willing to turn to almost any cause. Probably the majority wanted some form of home-grown constitutional monarchy with a strong Cortes, but there was no consensus on who should take the throne. Many of the bandit or warlord groups occupying particular cities and regions (for example, Valladolid and Salamanca) ostensibly claimed to be part of a broader anti-French constitutional monarchist movement, but deliberately used this ambiguity to arbitrarily refuse orders when others ordered them into battle rather than looting the countryside.
French forces themselves, in the period between 1927 and 1931, mostly controlled Madrid and its environs plus important seaports such as Valencía and Cartagena. However, the French – led by Vincent Pichereau’s fractious Rubis coalition – failed to expel the Spanish republicans from Cádiz or Algeciras. These defeats fatally damaged France’s reputation as the de facto dominant party in Spain. This would have ramifications in regions of Spain where, previously, light-touch control by a few soldiers flying the flag had previously been enough to keep them quiescent; many of them now joined opposition factions, though not always the republicans. These incidents also damaged Anglo-French relations, as Prime Minister Frederick Osborne refused to allow the use of Gibraltar as a staging ground for the French – having bought neutrality from the republicans to allow English ships to pass without harrassment, in return for the republicans quietly recognising Gibraltar as English. Osborne had no interest in damaging that hard-won treaty.
Getting back to the role of the Combine Societists in all this, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that they were secretly behind the whole of the chaos in Spain. It’s certainly true that several of the anti-French factions would prove to be infiltrated by Societist Agendes and used for their own agenda – if you’ll pardon the pun. (Chuckles) But frankly, the Combine was far from the only power with an interest in destabilising Spain and disrupting French rule there. Romulan Italy had a particular interest, as did Russia – again, it’s debated just how closely they were working together. Fabio Veraldi, who had risen to power as Prime Minister by this point after outmanoeuvring the Alliance Party, was determined to openly send Italian troops to fight for the republicans. It was only the intervention of King Carlo himself which prevented this. At the time, it was generally assumed that the francophobic Romulans had merely chosen to back whichever faction they thought would provide the most coherent opposition to French rule. However, opinions would shift a few years later, when Veraldi felt strong enough to renew his confrontation with the King. In the meantime, it meant that Italian aid to the republicans would be relatively subtle.
Apologists for the Romulans claim that this vacuum provided an opportunity for the Combine to intervene. However, what’s important for our discussion here is for us to note the attitudes Alfarus and the Combine took to the different factions in shattered Spain. Spain genuinely did have home-grown Societists, not just cadres operated from the Combine; as I said, the Spanish people were desperate enough to turn to almost any group that claimed to offer a light at the end of the tunnel. But these Spanish Societists, though often influenced by books and pamphlets smuggled in from South America, had often developed their own heterodox ideas – sometimes helped by visiting envoys from Vienna. It is highly instructive – and very typical – that the Combine’s aid, whether it be Agendes smuggling weapons or Celatores in plain clothes pretending to be Spanish volunteers, was happily applied to republicans, Felipistas, royalists and bandits alike, but never to any heterodox Societists they could not control. Indeed, even those local Societists who did pledge allegiance to Alfarus and the Combine were regarded with suspicion, often viewed as ticking time-bombs that would inevitably betray them. Combine policy was aimed at ensuring Spanish Societists were sacrificed on the altar of battle, while viewing republicans or Felipistas as ‘useful idiots’ who could be safely neutralised, or even converted, later. Un-Societist ideas could be temporarily tolerated; allo-Societist ideas must be exterminated immediately.
In this, the Combine forces were more successful in Portugal than in Spain, where the elimination of local heterodox Societists was so complete that the entire war is usually presented simply as ‘royalists vs incumbent republicans, fight to a standstill, exhaust one another, then the Societists land at Setúbal, sweep in and take over’. It was never that simple, of course. Spain was large, and her terrain difficult enough, that such simplistic ideas never truly took hold even in propaganda. But in both cases, the basic Societist plan remained the same: Raúl Caraíbas’ so-called Doctrine of the Last Throw, using opposing factions to weaken one another before striking hard and fast to establish their own control.
Of course, we all know how it ended. Héloïse Mercier was elected France’s first Prime Ministress in part due to the failures of Pichereau’s government to win the war in Spain, with mounting French casualties unacceptable to an electorate still recovering from the Black Twenties. After a few months, Mercier had concluded that the war was unwinnable in its current form. She ordered France’s forces to withdraw to what later became known as the Marche d’Espagne, named after Charlemagne’s similar fortified frontier zone established more than a thousand years before against an alien-occupied Spain (in that case by the Ummayads). Initially Mme Mercier probably saw this as a temporary measure while France regrouped, as evidence by the fact that she also continued to supply the garrisons holding out in isolated ports like Cartagena. However, in time these too would be abandoned. From Santander to Vinarós, a broad swathe of Spanish territory became treated as a military frontier extension of France, perhaps motivated by a desire to keep Combine rocket missiles as far away as possible. South of that line, Iberia was abandoned to the Combine.
The purpose of this lecture is not to cover the Societist conquest of Iberia in detail, an event that was highly complex and full of enough unlikely, unverified – and unverifiable – stories to stock a few centuries’ worth of a corpus of myths and legends. I need only mention the persistent story that, after being chased out of Lisbon by the Societists invading from Setúbal in August 1929, Prince José – now the claimant King Joseph II following the assassination of his father – ended up hiding out with the Felipistas in Asturias and claiming to be the imaginary Infante Felipe. There is absolutely no contemporary evidence for this story, which was first recorded as late as 1940, but the glorious irony of one exilic monarch pretending to be another has ensured that it has persisted in works of fiction ever since. And, as the ASN will tell us, to persist in works of fiction is a level of reality far deeper than the truth that our eyes tell us. (Uncertain chuckles) In reality, the Prince, or King, merely disappeared without trace, as did so much of our knowledge of what went on in Iberia, for all that it took place in a land so close to free Europe and civilisation. Thus ended the ancient and noble House of Braganza, at least other than obscure distant cousins uncertain whether to act on a mere presumed death.
That’s one story among many. What’s important for our topic today is the Combine Societists’ particularly vicious and determined actions against heterodox local Societists. The best example of this is was Salamanca. Of course, this was the university city where Pablo Sanchez himself had been both student and professor, where he had given his famous speech attacking war, only to face an angry mob.[10] It is no exaggeration to say that it was this experience that led Sanchez to leave Spain for the UPSA and, therefore, start the world down the road to Societism in South America. As such, the city had long been something of a pilgrimage site for Societists in the late 19th century days of that ideology being one associated with lodges of peculiar upper-bourgeois men desperately interested in secret societies.[11] Just as Nazareth and Bethlehem frequently play host to some of the oddest and most obscure Christian sects, Salamanca acted as a candle flame to the moths of every heterodox interpretation of Societism. (Murmurs)
It’s important that you understand that those Societists were always a minority, more figures of fun than anything, even during the First Black Scare. As I said, Salamanca was properly under the control of one of the bandit groups ostensibly claiming to be constitutional monarchists, in this specific case led by the man who called himself, simply, El Hidalgo. His real name was Miguel Figuerola and he was a retired colonel who had served in the Belgian occupation. The Societists had no more quarrel with him than they did with any of the other minor warlords, men who could be swept aside at their leisure and, usually, quietly recycled into Celatores posted on obscure Nusantara islands in exchange for their lives. But Figuerola had the misfortune to be occupying a city with plenty of heterodox Societists in it, so his fate was sealed.
The Societists were careful not to use the Scientific Weapon in Europe, due to strategies worked up by Alfarus’ advisors intended to split French and European public opinion from the ENA’s. It was felt that using the Scientific Weapon in what the nations regarded as ‘peacetime’ would be too much of an escalation. In addition, the lack of such escalation poured fuel on the fires of American public opinion regarding France as a fading power in the Electric Circus era. (Mixed murmurs) Though partly driven by the (mostly) later French decolonisation crisis, the other factor in this was the idea that the French had effectively been defeated by the Societists in their own backyard without a direct fight, in contrast to how American soldiers had stood and fought against the Celatores a few years earlier. (Approving murmurs)
But the one exception to this rule was, of course, Salamanca. Without warning, in November 1930 Combine forces surrounded the city and pounded it with death-luft and Alkahest, mostly from artillery pieces. However, Sagrera’s epic painting Salamanca focused on the smaller number of luft-bombs falling from Societist Capybara bombers, so popular images of the massacre tend to assume it was mostly a bombing attack. Of course this also feels more of a violation, due to the global near-consensus on avoiding civilian aero bombing after Shiraz during the Black Twenties. But to the people in Salamanca, of course, it scarcely mattered if they choked to death on death-luft from an artillery shell or from a drome-dropped bomb. (More murmurs).
If the Combine Societists had hoped that they could slay everyone in the city and then hush it up through lack of witnesses, they were naïve. Attempts at outright denial failed when evidence of the use of the Alkahest leaked out; at that point the Combine had a monopoly on that wonder weapon. Eventually, the official line was that a group of ‘rogue Celatores’ had collaborated with a rival bandit, and in 1931 the Combine had a number of Celatores publicly executed to assuage European public opinion. Some of them might even have been somewhere near Salamanca when the attack happened. (Nervous chuckles) This was from the only factor that led to Alfarus becoming increasingly embattled and subject to opposition within his command structure, but it was significant.
Later, Salamanca was also an exemplar of how much the Combine has made it difficult, both intentionally and accidentally, to tease out what truly went on behind the Line. The city was resettled with ‘good Societist’ colonists from all over the Combine and a monument was erected to Sanchez, we believe in 1932. Then a few years later, during the Konkursum ad Kultura, the Black Guards decided that recognising specific historical events being tied to geographic locations, even Societist-relevant events, was itself un-Sanchezista. The first monument was thoroughly demolished and the Biblioteka Mundial ensured that all records of it were deleted along with it; it’s only due to a few fuzzy asimcons taken by French spies that we have proof it existed at all. And then, of course, a few years after that they changed their minds again and a new monument was erected – and then the BM rewrote history to suggest that it had been there since the start. This is an extreme case, but it’s an illustration in just how difficult it can be for us now to untangle the history of the Combine.
From Alfarus’ point of view, the Iberian acquisition meant that the Societists now held knives to the throats of two out of four of the world’s greatest powers, as then recognised: Carolina for America and Iberia for France. In hindsight, it is obvious that even then, Societist strategic planning looked to replicate that feat elsewhere, and so exert influence on the global balance of power and encourage infighting…
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
A few minutes of the recording are missing here as the battery in the recorder had run down and had to be quickly replaced under cover, so as not to draw attention of other attendees to our unusual-looking technology.
*
…Russia was faced with a system of government designed for one powerful ruler to sit at the top, and no-one consistently occupying that seat following the death of Tsar Paul III. The underage Emperor Theodore V was initially under the regency of Alexander III, Grand Duke of Courland. However, other powerful forces were moving at court, including the Empress Dowager Elizabeth and her mother-in-law, Anna, along with Anna’s alleged lover, the Meridian Refugiado General Pichegru.[12] At this stage, Russia lacked much of the anti-Societist attitude we associate with her today, and some Russians still saw the Societists as a de facto cobelligerent against the ENA. (Murmurs) I’m not here to talk about the Societist cadres moving in Russia herself, but I will mention how Russia’s actions in the early 1930s helped pave the way for heterodox Societism to bloom elsewhere.
Of course, the biggest and most successful group of heterodox Societists were the Viennese School, who by some definitions are the only ones ‘properly’ called Grey Societists; the fact that the term has been broadened is evidence of their impact. Danubian Societists first rose to prominence in the elections of 1918, held in the aftermath of the Panic of 1917, in which a Societist group entered government through democratic – well, semi-democratic – elections for the first time, anywhere in the world.[13] (Murmurs) Then in 1923, the Societists aided the indecisive Archking Leopold III to resist a coup by the nationalist Brotherhood of the Iron Chain, who advocated for an attack on the Ottomans in defence of Greece, but also opposed a Russian proposal to move troops through neutral Danubia to do the same.[14] In the aftermath of the defeated coup, Danubia’s shaky semi-democracy became increasingly dominated by the Societists and backed up by their street militias. There was little public opposition, largely because the Societists were credited for Danubia’s neutrality and fairly effective counter-plague response during the Black Twenties. (More murmurs)
But as far as Alfarus and the Combine were concerned, this development was not viewed as an unambiguous positive. The Danubian Societists were not under his control. Rather than attempting to remove the Archking, they had simply proclaimed him a Zonal Rej, just as Alfarus had to King Gabriel of Peru – but they had done so unilaterally. They also did not even pay lip service to the idea that, eventually, he would be rotated to a different Zone. The Grey Societists similarly only made vague and symbolic commitments about introducing Novalatina, instead focusing on universalising the primary use of Martial Latin, Danubia’s pre-existing reconstructed form of Latin used by the armed forces, at the expense of native tongues like German and Hungarian.[15] Towns and cities mostly retained their existing names, sometimes switching to existing Latinised versions of them, with ‘Zon6Urb1’ only in tiny letters below ‘Vindobona; Wean; Bécs; Viena; Beč’ on the sign.[16]
The increasing mutual distrust between Combine and Grey Societists came to a head during the plague pandemic, when Alfarus refused to share the Combine’s wonder insecticide Tremuriatix with the Danubians, seeing them as unreliable.[17] However, this was seen as less dramatic a break at the time as it was presented in historiographic hindsight, with the Combine still sharing precursor research with the Danubians. The Danubian Societists also became noteworthy for mass use of the poison Vienna Green to kill off rats and fleas (which, despite its name, was not an exclusive product of Vienna) and for acting as a hub for (selected) refugees fleeing the war and plague elsewhere in Europe.
In the aftermath of the Black Twenties, Alfarus’ paranoia and the divisions with the Grey Societists continued to deepen. Attempts to give the Danubians direct orders were dismissed with the innocent-faced objection that Alfarus had always claimed to be merely the Kapud of the Celatores, a minor figure, certainly subordinate to a Zonal Rej like ‘Leopoldus Habsburgus’. According to Markus Garzius – who is scarcely a reliable source where ‘the Kapud’ is concerned, of course – Alfarus did believe the Greys had good intentions, but needed a firm hand to set them straight. In his writings, Garzius even makes comparison to some of the letters of St Paul to wayward churches in the New Testament (which, in Alfarus’ time, still survived – in a highly edited form – as part of the corpus of the Universal Church). This positive impression does rather clash with the fact that Alfarus was perfectly willing to luft-choke thousands of civilians in Salamanca in an attempt to erase all traces of other groups of heterodox Societists, but perhaps he simply saw Danubia as too big to take over in one fell swoop.
The final straw came in 1934. The Danubian Societists, unlike the Combine, had allowed elections to continue under their rule and other political parties to still exist – not on a level playing field, to be sure, but most of those parties were nobility-backed reactionaries who had been just as happy to exert unequal pressure when they had been in power. By 1934, the warm public regard the Societists had won for their anti-plague measures was cooling, and the Hungarians were particularly unhappy with some of the Societists’ pushes for cultural homogenisation, even if far more lukewarm and voluntary than those in the Combine. The Hungarians elected a Volksrat in which the Grey Societists lost their majority – and the Societists meekly accepted the defeat and allowed a coalition of nationalists to take their place, merely trusting that their faith in Sanchez’s ideas meant that history was on their side and the public would eventually come to agree. (Murmurs)
Whether one accepts that thesis or not, the previous election was not the last time that the Hungarian people would elect a Societist-majority Volksrat. But Alfarus was enraged. The Combine was already threatened by a Societist party that had been semi-democratically voted in to power without the cleansing flame of a violent revolution. Now, that same party openly accepted that the will of the people, as expressed through ‘bourgeois-proletarian democracy’ as Markus Lupus called it, overruled the principle that legitimacy flowed from purity of acceptance and interpretation of Sanchezista historical theory. This was, indeed, a far more existential threat to the Combine than any of the nations’ armies. (Murmurs)
Now, events in Russia – almost certainly not actuated by Societist Agendes, no matter what the Soviets used to claim – would offer Alfarus an apparent opportunity to both threaten another great power and put his boot on Danubia’s jugular to ‘encourage’ them back to the ‘right’ path.
In the Black Twenties, Russia had achieved one great foreign policy goal going back centuries – the conquest and subjugation of Persia – at the expense of going backwards in many other theatres. In Europe, half of Poland and Scandinavia were lost, along with an important Baltic seaport, the puppet state of Belgium and her colonies. Across the Pacific, the entirety of Russian America was under ENA occupation. Africa had seen the loss of allies such as Abyssinia and the Matetwa Empire. Even the continent of Asia, which had seen the aforementioned Persian success and the achievement of the Tarsus salient splitting the Ottoman Empire in two, hardly played host to an unmitigated series of Russian victories. The uprisings in Tartary, which had ignited the war in the first place, were never entirely quelled no matter how many ruthless generals Grand Duke Alexander sent there to commit crimes de guerre. Important lands in Manchuria had been ceded to China to buy her neutrality at the start of the war, already alienating the influential RLPC even before the loss of the American colonies. And, most visibly, Russia had lost the colony she had built in northern India in secret throughout the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, taking advantage of the near-silence of the Jihad-devastated ‘Aryan Void’ that had persisted for years and turned news into legend and rumour. Pendzhab.[18]
In many ways, Russian control of Persia’s ports only made sense as part of a broader global strategy that included Erythrea and influence over at least parts of the Indian subcontinent, both of which were now gone. But Grand Duke Alexander, it seems, was pragmatic. With the Russian economy and military apparently having recovered after a few years of peace, he now sought to reverse as many of the losses of the war as he could. He obviously could not attack Poland or Alyeska without reigniting a general war, but the hope was that India would be treated differently by the great powers; after all, France was already facing difficulties in holding on to Bisnaga and was in no position to directly object. And so, in May 1935, a new Russian army crossed into northern India with the goal of retaking Fort Saltykov in Srinagar, and then using it as a staging post to defeat the new Sikh-led state now controlling most of the former Russian Pendzhab.
Eighteen months later, a defeated and humiliated Russian army withdrew through the Khyber Pass. I don’t have time here to discuss the Pendzhab War, but suffice to say that it had a dramatic effect on not only India, but the world as well. The successful Sikh repulsion of the Russians, helped by the Bengalis and others, catalysed a new wave of anti-colonial resistance – most famously in French Bisnaga, but also around the world. The Sikhs had demonstrated that a native force, properly trained and equipped with modern weapons, could stand up to the mainstream core of a European army and defeat it; not merely the colonial outriders that the Matetwa or the Mauré had beaten in the past.[19] There were even uprisings in Persia, though they failed to truly ignite at this time, as the Shah-Advocate knew the time was not right. Nonetheless, Kalat and Rajputana, former Persian vassals, were quietly able to take advantage of the brief unrest to secure and fortify their own borders against further Russian ambitions.
The wave of anti-colonial fervour was only one part of a complex set of falling dominoes set into motion by Russia’s failure. Firstly, and most obviously, Grand Duke Alexander fell from grace, was overthrown at court and packed off back to Courland. Initially Anna and Pichegru tried to take over, but Theodore V, now of age, had formed an alliance with Marshal Mikhail Kobuzev. The hero of the Persian conquest had had few political ambitions and had accepted Alexander’s government, but remained popular and worried that Russia would follow the wrong track under Anna and Pichegru. Ironically from our modern perspective, one of his concerns was that Pichegru was, I quote, ‘obsessed’ with the Societists as the biggest threat to the world. (Murmurs) Yes, well, quite, one can only speculate how history might have gone if his ideas had dominated in the court at Petrograd. Regardless, Theodore and Kobuzev were able to shut out Anna and Pichegru from control, and they lived out their years in a dacha in Circassia, passing away at an advanced age in the 1940s.
The brief period of internal chaos in Russia would seem to offer an opportunity for Russia’s enemies, in particular the Ottoman Empire, to recover what they had lost in the Black Twenties – the biter bit. Though Europe remained exhausted and there was little incentive for the ENA to open hostilities, the Ottomans did plan an offensive to crush the Tarsus salient. The Grand Vizier in Alexandria, Mustafa Damat Pasha, had reached an agreement with Ahmet Ismail Pasha, who still held de facto power in Constantinople, to coordinate the attack. However, Mehveş Sultan still refused to contemplate collaborating with the man she held responsible for her son’s death. Furthermore, the Alexandrine Ottoman Empire was still suffering problems elsewhere; the aftermath of al-Jizani’s Arab uprising and the Javanese refugee crisis from the ‘One-Way Hajj’; the increasing spread of Societism in Africa continuing to threaten Sennar and Darfur; and attempting to reassert control over Tripolitania (Tunis and Algiers now increasingly looking like lost causes).
So Mehveş Sultan threw out the plan in favour of a more modest naval attack staging from Crete – not against the Russians, but taking the island of Rhodes from Ahmet Ismail’s control. The fall of the island to Suleyman the Magnificent in 1522 had been an important foundational moment for the House of Osman, which Mehveş Sultan hoped to repeat to enshrine her grandson Murad XI’s legitimacy. As Ahmet Ismail had always insisted he was still loyal to the Sultan but was exercising control on the ground ‘for the duration of the crisis’, Mehveş Sultan also hoped that forcing his hand like this would make Ahmet Ismail either surrender or fight and prove himself a liar.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Greece, reduced to the Ionian islands by the Ottoman invasion during the Black Twenties, had ambitions to retake the mainland. Through the judicious use of spies, the Greeks were able to take advantage of Mehveş Sultan’s betrayal of Ahmet Ismail to land troops and mercenaries on the Morea at just the same moment that the Alexandrines attacked Rhodes, in November 1936. In the end, though the Alexandrine attack was successful, the Greeks were quickly forced to retreat. They had planned on having the support of Italian regulars posing as ‘mercenaries’, but the Romulan government got cold feet and scaled back their support at the last minute. Reprisals by Ahmet Ismail’s garrison troops in the Morea killed many Greek civilians who had supported the invasion, and the only lasting territorial acquisition by the Kingdom was the island of Kythira. The Alexandrines’ naval dominance had quickly cleared Ahmet Ismail’s ships from the Aegean, offering this minor opportunity for the Greeks.
Mehveş Sultan’s betrayal meant that the Russian-controlled Tarsus Salient survived, of course. Ahmet Ismail, it appears, had decided to surrender rather than split the empire further, fuming though he was. Ahmet Ismail, a brilliant general but an amateur at politics, had already been manipulated once by the Neo-Azadis who had killed Murad X.[20] In turning on those Neo-Azadis, he had clumsily made alliances with any other group that would back him in The City’s politics. Among these were Societists.
In the immediate aftermath of the Pandoric Revolution, Constantinople had been similar to Vienna in that it had played host to heterodox Societist thinkers. As with Danubia, the multi-ethnic and non-nationalist construction of the empire seemed to offer many opportunities for variations on Sanchezista thought.[21] However, the Constantinopolitan School had been cut short in the 1910s when they were accused of being fellow travellers with the Societists that the Ottomans were already fighting around the Moon Lakes. Several had been executed and others had fled elsewhere. Alfarus, of course, saw this as a prime opportunity; by wiping the slate clean, the Ottomans had inadvertently ensured that any future Societist movement would be entirely imported from the Combine and, therefore, under his control. New cadres had been set up almost as soon as the Grand Vizier’s purge was over, and by 1936 they had been growing for two decades. The time was ripe.
Ahmet Ismail was probably poisoned, but the exact details are unclear. Like the Neo-Azadis before them, the new Rumelian Societists seized power in Constantinople and bought the support of the people simply by offering cheap food in times of difficulty. In some ways it was, as Alfarus had thought, a great opportunity. Usually a Societist uprising in Rumelia and western Anatolia would have been living on borrowed time, with the Russians taking any opportunity of Turkish division to attack. But now the Russians were weakened and consumed with their own internal divisions and rebellions. The Alexandrine Ottoman Empire was also in no position to launch a full conquest for reunification, as Mehveş Sultan had realised. Soon Combine ships, already operating openly in the waters of the former Spain and Portugal, were travelling through the Mediterranean to challenge the Alexandrine Donanmasi’s dominance.
It was another brilliant coup for the Societist, another string to Alfarus’ bow, another shocking threat to the nations. Or so it seemed. Combine Societist administrators moved in to Rumelia and Anatolia, working with the local Societists. They knew that, not only did they threaten Russia and the Mediterranean, but – almost more importantly – the heterodox Societists in Danubia now faced a serious threat if they decided to make any more creative interpretations of the Kapud’s orders. It was only a matter of time before the Greys were crushed, wiped out of history by the Biblioteka Mundial.
Or so they thought. Few at the time would have dreamed that not established ‘liberated authority over Zones 6 and 25’. Instead, Alfarus had poured Celatores, Agendes and money into what would become an entity just as productive of heterodox Societists as neighbouring Danubia was: what would come to be called the Eternal State…
[1] Note that this is a ‘translation’ by the team transcribing the lecture, as the word ‘thug(ee)’ has not entered English in TTL.
[2] For more on Grey Societism in the First Interbellum, see Part #268 in Volume VII.
[3] See Part #273 in Volume VII.
[4] See Part #292 in Volume VIII.
[5] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.
[6] During the period of rule from New Spain (ca. 1830-1848) Ferdinand VII attempted to impose the use of the term ‘Audiencias’ for the central legislature rather than ‘Cortes’, as in the Americas the latter term had become too associated with the UPSA. However, this proved unpopular and the attempt was abandoned even before the overthrow of New Spanish rule in the Second Spanish Revolution.
[7] See Part #289 in Volume VIII.
[8] See Part #49 in Volume I.
[9] A slight simplification to make a point.
[10] See Part #121 in Volume III. Note that this skips over the fact that Sanchez was a self-funded mature student who transitioned almost seamlessly to being a lecturer due to his experience.
[11] As discussed in Part #259 in Volume VII.
[12] See Part #300 in Volume VIII.
[13] See Part #270 in Volume VII.
[14] See Part #283 in Volume VIII.
[15] To be clear, the native tongues are still in use, just typically in smaller text below the Martial Latin on posters and so on (see Mme Mercier’s diary description in Part #300 for an example).
[16] Vienna’s name is here given in Martial Latin followed by the four official languages of Danubia – Austrogerman, Hungarian, Austroslav (basically Croatian for the most part) and Austrovlach (Romanian).
[17] See Part #286 in Volume VIII.
[18] For more on the Russian loss of Pendzhab, see Parts #282 and #292 in Volume VIII.
[19] ‘Native’ here, a rather un-PC term used by older Americans in TTL, is an essentially arbitary definition used to mean anyone from a culture historically not seen as ‘civilised’, itself a definition influenced by how successful they were in resisting colonialism beforehand. So it would include the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa, but also Indians and Japanese – but not Chinese, Coreans or Persians, for instance, which are presented as ‘non-European civilisations’. Attempts to objectively define the difference have caused endless headaches because it is so obviously a product of a particular time in the nineteenth century – i.e. judging India by the passing chaos of the Great Jihad and not by having literate and advanced civilisations with an equally venerable heritage to China’s.
[20] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.
[21] See Part #268 in Volume VII.
“‘Where do we go from here?’
DIVERSITARIANISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
An entire generation has grown up in a world without the Combine.
Is the Prism still relevant today? Is Iverson?
Or are we complacent towards tomorrow’s threats?
COLLOQUIUM AND DEBATE – ALL PERSPECTIVES WELCOME
Invited speakers:
The Rt. Hon. Mildred Prewitt MCP (Former Minister for Information)
Prof. Alistair Hoist (Chair of Modern History, New Corte University, Carolina)
M. Jacques Birraux (Director, French Institute of Cultural Exchange – Directeur, Institut Français des Echanges Culturels)
Go to Motext page 84V-126 to book tickets!”
– Poster seen on Bezant Street, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr David Wostyn, October 2020
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(Dr Wostyn’s note)
While we have read a number of times that the ‘Iversonian’ principles of ASN member nations allegedly require those nations to permit the free discussion of Societism as an ideology, we have noticed since our arrival here that those lectures devoted to Societism – even in a critical voice – are often subject to protests. In the case of the lecture recorded here, however, this consisted of six teenagers from different ideological factions who seemed to hate each other more than the lecturer, and after the start there were fortunately no further interruptions.
*
Recorded lecture on “The Other Societists” by Dr Algernon V. Stoddart, recorded October 29th, 2020—
…thank you to security for that. (Laughs) If I had a dixie for every time that happened at the start of my lecture, I’d have (theatrical pause for thought), oh, at least four imps, three dix and fivecents. (Pause for confused chuckles from audience) Look, one time they only managed to open their mouths before they were thrown out, I’m counting that as half. (More chuckles)
So, as I was saying…
Lots of people have observed that it was the existence of so-called deviant forms of Societism that did more damage to the Combine than we in the free world ever could. Any nation expressing a Diversitarian response to the Combine, from the most nuanced Iversonians here in the ENA or in Europe, all the way down to simple Soviet censorship and thuggery,[1] could be dismissed as ‘the nationalistically blinded’, some homogenous ‘other’ not part of the so-called Liberated Zones. But the heterodox Societists offered an awkward wrinkle in such a simple worldview, shades of grey in the Combine’s picture of black against white.
So it’s all the more appropriate that Grey Societism is also the term most commonly accepted for these forms of Sanchezista belief. And yes, I said forms plural – what’s not appropriate about the term is that it gives the false impression that there is only a single third force in the equation.[2] In fact, with an irony both powerful and delicious, there are almost as many shades of alternative Societist grey as there are colours of cultural diversity in the Diversitarian rainbow. And such views were seen as far more insidious by the Combine, far harder to root out by their crude tools of internal purges and censorship. Suddenly it was not enough for a man to declare himself a Societist and proclaim his commitment to the so-called liberation of the world and the unification of the human race. Now, they had to decide if he was the right sort of Societist, if he was commited to the right sort of liberation, the right sort of unification.
This wasn’t the first time the Combine had faced this dilemma. Early on, they had had to assimilate the different ideas of the Batavian School in order to secure control over the Nusantara. But that had been in the early days, when the very idea of orthodox Combine Societism was still in flux, and it had come at a time when Alfaran pragmatism was the order of the day. It was the Second Interbellum, the Electric Thirties, which would pose a more daunting problem as ideas diverged in other lands now expressing some loyalty towards Sanchezista ideas. Alfaran pragmatism worked only so long as all Societist lands, all the so-called Liberated Zones, were under the firm grip of Alfarus himself – in reality, whatever the form of government they supposedly possessed on paper. The Viennese School was already proving itself a problem even while Alfarus was alive. But it would be the dramatic changes in the Combine after the Silent Revolution – which would, though the Black Guards would refuse to admit it, shift the Combine itself in a new direction out of step with the status quo of Societism elsewhere in the world – that would really start to cause problems.
As I said, it was clear early on that the Combine recognised heterodoxy as a greater threat than outright Diversitarianism, or I should say Contrasanchezista Thought at that point.[3] In many ways, the principle in general philosophical debate long predates Societism, and it is telling that it is from the world of religion that the best analogy comes. The eruptions in confessional disagreements within Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so contentious because they were seen as all-or-nothing. If only one Christian creed led to heaven, the argument went, then all others were not simply false, as (say) Islam was, but insidiously disguised as the true faith in a manner that would hoodwink sincere Christian believers in a way that an openly alien belief like Islam never could. ‘Better an infidel than a heretic’ was the same principle applied by earnest Combine Societists in the 1930s and beyond; the cult of Sanchez had indeed been elevated to a faith, in which only one interpretation of his words could lead to the true victory of the Final Society.
This attitude was aptly demonstrated in the Iberic War, which lasted roughly between 1925 and 1931, though it is difficult to draw the line precisely. Some scholars argue that Spain and Portugal, in different ways, were never truly quiescent throughout the years of apparent peace, with the control exerted by Madrid and Lisbon sometimes not extending into the farthest reaches of the countries, and organised crime and the like ruling the roost in some parts. I’m not going to get into that debate here. Regardless of any pre-existing undercurrents beneath the surface, open war broke out in November of 1925, when Prince José, the heir to the exilic Portuguese throne, appeared in Oporto at the head of a royalist insurgency. It’s still debated whether he was truly in charge or if he’d been all but kidnapped and used for conspirators’ own ends as a figurehead – and if those conspirators were truly royalist, if they were seeking chaos to line their own pockets or to serve Russian paymasters trying to undermine the Bouclier alliance, or if even then they were working for Alfarus. Whether the last one was true in 1925 or not, certainly some elements of José’s movement appear to have been suborned by the Societists at some point.[4]
The Portuguese Republic was shown to be a corruption-wracked hollow husk of itself when the rather ramshackle royalist insurgency defeated the army in battle, with some of the soldiers joining their side. Desperate moves by feuding consuls and generals, including ineffectual use of death-luft for terror reprisals, failed to quell the royalist advance into the Douro valley. Finally, the playboy King João VII was assassinated in France. Again, there’s huge debate over whether it had been truly ordered by the republican government, whether it was an extremist conspiracy acting alone, whether this was an act of Societist Agendes…the main argument for the latter is that the consequences of the attack certainly favoured Societist aims in the long term, but it would have been difficult to predict this at the time. The killing at the heart of France poisoned the Franco-Portuguese relations that Prime Minister Leclerc had tried so hard to build a generation before, and so the Republic was on its own as the royalist insurgency advanced – but an increasing number of the local uprisings did not seem to be royalist in character anymore.
The war became truly Iberic after the death of the popular French Regent of Spain, the Duke of Orleans, in March 1926.[5] Spain had been held together, after King Charles V had died four years earlier, only by the Duke’s vigour and perceived success in fighting for Spanish interests. Without his strong hand, the country now began to disintegrate. The French hope had been that the death of Charles would occur in peacetime, allowing King Charles XI of France to take the throne of Spain as Charles VI in personal union. However, the poor timing with the Black Twenties meant that neither in 1922 nor 1926 was France well placed to see through this succession. Plans for Charles XI to be crowned in Madrid had been pushed back repeatedly, and would never be realised. Ordinary Spaniards began to petition for the return of their troops, which had mostly been assigned to hold down occupied Belgium, as bandits and revolutionaries began to seize control of cities.
By the time those troops – depleted by plague – did make it home, it was often too late. Many deserted due to the lack of central authority (and reliable wages), instead turning to whichever faction controlled their home city or region. In the early period of the civil war, the most coherent alternative government faction was the Second Spanish Republic, which was proclaimed in Granada on April 29th, 1926 by revolutionaries led by Enrique Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez was a former Mayor of Córdoba, the city to which the republicans swiftly moved their capital, as well a well-known orator in the Cortes, for all that had decayed into a largely rubber-stamp body in the later years of Charles V.[6] However, as the crisis wore on, most power became consolidated in the hands of General Ruy Lafuente, an experienced military commander who defected to the republicans more out of local loyalty than ideological conviction, and who led a de facto military junta.[7] Lafuente became notorious for ruthlessly purging the more extreme Neo-Jacobin (and Paleo-Jacobin) republicans in the heterogonous coalition in favour of moderate (or, his critics said, pliable) Adamantines. Many of them fled to Portugal and its own, just-as-complex, civil war.
Though the most significant of the opposing factions, the republicans – generally strongest in the south – were far from the only force fighting the French and, indeed, each other. A strangely popular group, considering the esoteric nature of their beliefs, were the Felipistas, who claimed that Charles V had sired a secret son who was hiding out in the mountains with a band of followers, seeking to reclaim his rightful throne.[7] Despite the fact that the possibly-bastard son of a French-imposed king was an unlikely rallying figure for Spanish nationalists, the Felipistas enjoyed some level of support, mostly in Asturias. As there was no consensus early on about the name of Charles’ legendary son, some have argued that the name Felipe was chosen precisely because it allowed a link to be drawn with the Felipista faction in the civil war of more than a century before.[8] Again, it seemed almost irrelevant that the cause of those Felipistas had been arbitary, in service of another French-imposed king,[9] and was now irrelevant and almost forgotten – but people remembered the romantic bloodies celebrating the derring-do of fictionalised irregulars loyal to Infante Felipe. And that was all that mattered.
Yes, the people of Spain really were in a desperate situation, willing to turn to almost any cause. Probably the majority wanted some form of home-grown constitutional monarchy with a strong Cortes, but there was no consensus on who should take the throne. Many of the bandit or warlord groups occupying particular cities and regions (for example, Valladolid and Salamanca) ostensibly claimed to be part of a broader anti-French constitutional monarchist movement, but deliberately used this ambiguity to arbitrarily refuse orders when others ordered them into battle rather than looting the countryside.
French forces themselves, in the period between 1927 and 1931, mostly controlled Madrid and its environs plus important seaports such as Valencía and Cartagena. However, the French – led by Vincent Pichereau’s fractious Rubis coalition – failed to expel the Spanish republicans from Cádiz or Algeciras. These defeats fatally damaged France’s reputation as the de facto dominant party in Spain. This would have ramifications in regions of Spain where, previously, light-touch control by a few soldiers flying the flag had previously been enough to keep them quiescent; many of them now joined opposition factions, though not always the republicans. These incidents also damaged Anglo-French relations, as Prime Minister Frederick Osborne refused to allow the use of Gibraltar as a staging ground for the French – having bought neutrality from the republicans to allow English ships to pass without harrassment, in return for the republicans quietly recognising Gibraltar as English. Osborne had no interest in damaging that hard-won treaty.
Getting back to the role of the Combine Societists in all this, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that they were secretly behind the whole of the chaos in Spain. It’s certainly true that several of the anti-French factions would prove to be infiltrated by Societist Agendes and used for their own agenda – if you’ll pardon the pun. (Chuckles) But frankly, the Combine was far from the only power with an interest in destabilising Spain and disrupting French rule there. Romulan Italy had a particular interest, as did Russia – again, it’s debated just how closely they were working together. Fabio Veraldi, who had risen to power as Prime Minister by this point after outmanoeuvring the Alliance Party, was determined to openly send Italian troops to fight for the republicans. It was only the intervention of King Carlo himself which prevented this. At the time, it was generally assumed that the francophobic Romulans had merely chosen to back whichever faction they thought would provide the most coherent opposition to French rule. However, opinions would shift a few years later, when Veraldi felt strong enough to renew his confrontation with the King. In the meantime, it meant that Italian aid to the republicans would be relatively subtle.
Apologists for the Romulans claim that this vacuum provided an opportunity for the Combine to intervene. However, what’s important for our discussion here is for us to note the attitudes Alfarus and the Combine took to the different factions in shattered Spain. Spain genuinely did have home-grown Societists, not just cadres operated from the Combine; as I said, the Spanish people were desperate enough to turn to almost any group that claimed to offer a light at the end of the tunnel. But these Spanish Societists, though often influenced by books and pamphlets smuggled in from South America, had often developed their own heterodox ideas – sometimes helped by visiting envoys from Vienna. It is highly instructive – and very typical – that the Combine’s aid, whether it be Agendes smuggling weapons or Celatores in plain clothes pretending to be Spanish volunteers, was happily applied to republicans, Felipistas, royalists and bandits alike, but never to any heterodox Societists they could not control. Indeed, even those local Societists who did pledge allegiance to Alfarus and the Combine were regarded with suspicion, often viewed as ticking time-bombs that would inevitably betray them. Combine policy was aimed at ensuring Spanish Societists were sacrificed on the altar of battle, while viewing republicans or Felipistas as ‘useful idiots’ who could be safely neutralised, or even converted, later. Un-Societist ideas could be temporarily tolerated; allo-Societist ideas must be exterminated immediately.
In this, the Combine forces were more successful in Portugal than in Spain, where the elimination of local heterodox Societists was so complete that the entire war is usually presented simply as ‘royalists vs incumbent republicans, fight to a standstill, exhaust one another, then the Societists land at Setúbal, sweep in and take over’. It was never that simple, of course. Spain was large, and her terrain difficult enough, that such simplistic ideas never truly took hold even in propaganda. But in both cases, the basic Societist plan remained the same: Raúl Caraíbas’ so-called Doctrine of the Last Throw, using opposing factions to weaken one another before striking hard and fast to establish their own control.
Of course, we all know how it ended. Héloïse Mercier was elected France’s first Prime Ministress in part due to the failures of Pichereau’s government to win the war in Spain, with mounting French casualties unacceptable to an electorate still recovering from the Black Twenties. After a few months, Mercier had concluded that the war was unwinnable in its current form. She ordered France’s forces to withdraw to what later became known as the Marche d’Espagne, named after Charlemagne’s similar fortified frontier zone established more than a thousand years before against an alien-occupied Spain (in that case by the Ummayads). Initially Mme Mercier probably saw this as a temporary measure while France regrouped, as evidence by the fact that she also continued to supply the garrisons holding out in isolated ports like Cartagena. However, in time these too would be abandoned. From Santander to Vinarós, a broad swathe of Spanish territory became treated as a military frontier extension of France, perhaps motivated by a desire to keep Combine rocket missiles as far away as possible. South of that line, Iberia was abandoned to the Combine.
The purpose of this lecture is not to cover the Societist conquest of Iberia in detail, an event that was highly complex and full of enough unlikely, unverified – and unverifiable – stories to stock a few centuries’ worth of a corpus of myths and legends. I need only mention the persistent story that, after being chased out of Lisbon by the Societists invading from Setúbal in August 1929, Prince José – now the claimant King Joseph II following the assassination of his father – ended up hiding out with the Felipistas in Asturias and claiming to be the imaginary Infante Felipe. There is absolutely no contemporary evidence for this story, which was first recorded as late as 1940, but the glorious irony of one exilic monarch pretending to be another has ensured that it has persisted in works of fiction ever since. And, as the ASN will tell us, to persist in works of fiction is a level of reality far deeper than the truth that our eyes tell us. (Uncertain chuckles) In reality, the Prince, or King, merely disappeared without trace, as did so much of our knowledge of what went on in Iberia, for all that it took place in a land so close to free Europe and civilisation. Thus ended the ancient and noble House of Braganza, at least other than obscure distant cousins uncertain whether to act on a mere presumed death.
That’s one story among many. What’s important for our topic today is the Combine Societists’ particularly vicious and determined actions against heterodox local Societists. The best example of this is was Salamanca. Of course, this was the university city where Pablo Sanchez himself had been both student and professor, where he had given his famous speech attacking war, only to face an angry mob.[10] It is no exaggeration to say that it was this experience that led Sanchez to leave Spain for the UPSA and, therefore, start the world down the road to Societism in South America. As such, the city had long been something of a pilgrimage site for Societists in the late 19th century days of that ideology being one associated with lodges of peculiar upper-bourgeois men desperately interested in secret societies.[11] Just as Nazareth and Bethlehem frequently play host to some of the oddest and most obscure Christian sects, Salamanca acted as a candle flame to the moths of every heterodox interpretation of Societism. (Murmurs)
It’s important that you understand that those Societists were always a minority, more figures of fun than anything, even during the First Black Scare. As I said, Salamanca was properly under the control of one of the bandit groups ostensibly claiming to be constitutional monarchists, in this specific case led by the man who called himself, simply, El Hidalgo. His real name was Miguel Figuerola and he was a retired colonel who had served in the Belgian occupation. The Societists had no more quarrel with him than they did with any of the other minor warlords, men who could be swept aside at their leisure and, usually, quietly recycled into Celatores posted on obscure Nusantara islands in exchange for their lives. But Figuerola had the misfortune to be occupying a city with plenty of heterodox Societists in it, so his fate was sealed.
The Societists were careful not to use the Scientific Weapon in Europe, due to strategies worked up by Alfarus’ advisors intended to split French and European public opinion from the ENA’s. It was felt that using the Scientific Weapon in what the nations regarded as ‘peacetime’ would be too much of an escalation. In addition, the lack of such escalation poured fuel on the fires of American public opinion regarding France as a fading power in the Electric Circus era. (Mixed murmurs) Though partly driven by the (mostly) later French decolonisation crisis, the other factor in this was the idea that the French had effectively been defeated by the Societists in their own backyard without a direct fight, in contrast to how American soldiers had stood and fought against the Celatores a few years earlier. (Approving murmurs)
But the one exception to this rule was, of course, Salamanca. Without warning, in November 1930 Combine forces surrounded the city and pounded it with death-luft and Alkahest, mostly from artillery pieces. However, Sagrera’s epic painting Salamanca focused on the smaller number of luft-bombs falling from Societist Capybara bombers, so popular images of the massacre tend to assume it was mostly a bombing attack. Of course this also feels more of a violation, due to the global near-consensus on avoiding civilian aero bombing after Shiraz during the Black Twenties. But to the people in Salamanca, of course, it scarcely mattered if they choked to death on death-luft from an artillery shell or from a drome-dropped bomb. (More murmurs).
If the Combine Societists had hoped that they could slay everyone in the city and then hush it up through lack of witnesses, they were naïve. Attempts at outright denial failed when evidence of the use of the Alkahest leaked out; at that point the Combine had a monopoly on that wonder weapon. Eventually, the official line was that a group of ‘rogue Celatores’ had collaborated with a rival bandit, and in 1931 the Combine had a number of Celatores publicly executed to assuage European public opinion. Some of them might even have been somewhere near Salamanca when the attack happened. (Nervous chuckles) This was from the only factor that led to Alfarus becoming increasingly embattled and subject to opposition within his command structure, but it was significant.
Later, Salamanca was also an exemplar of how much the Combine has made it difficult, both intentionally and accidentally, to tease out what truly went on behind the Line. The city was resettled with ‘good Societist’ colonists from all over the Combine and a monument was erected to Sanchez, we believe in 1932. Then a few years later, during the Konkursum ad Kultura, the Black Guards decided that recognising specific historical events being tied to geographic locations, even Societist-relevant events, was itself un-Sanchezista. The first monument was thoroughly demolished and the Biblioteka Mundial ensured that all records of it were deleted along with it; it’s only due to a few fuzzy asimcons taken by French spies that we have proof it existed at all. And then, of course, a few years after that they changed their minds again and a new monument was erected – and then the BM rewrote history to suggest that it had been there since the start. This is an extreme case, but it’s an illustration in just how difficult it can be for us now to untangle the history of the Combine.
From Alfarus’ point of view, the Iberian acquisition meant that the Societists now held knives to the throats of two out of four of the world’s greatest powers, as then recognised: Carolina for America and Iberia for France. In hindsight, it is obvious that even then, Societist strategic planning looked to replicate that feat elsewhere, and so exert influence on the global balance of power and encourage infighting…
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
A few minutes of the recording are missing here as the battery in the recorder had run down and had to be quickly replaced under cover, so as not to draw attention of other attendees to our unusual-looking technology.
*
…Russia was faced with a system of government designed for one powerful ruler to sit at the top, and no-one consistently occupying that seat following the death of Tsar Paul III. The underage Emperor Theodore V was initially under the regency of Alexander III, Grand Duke of Courland. However, other powerful forces were moving at court, including the Empress Dowager Elizabeth and her mother-in-law, Anna, along with Anna’s alleged lover, the Meridian Refugiado General Pichegru.[12] At this stage, Russia lacked much of the anti-Societist attitude we associate with her today, and some Russians still saw the Societists as a de facto cobelligerent against the ENA. (Murmurs) I’m not here to talk about the Societist cadres moving in Russia herself, but I will mention how Russia’s actions in the early 1930s helped pave the way for heterodox Societism to bloom elsewhere.
Of course, the biggest and most successful group of heterodox Societists were the Viennese School, who by some definitions are the only ones ‘properly’ called Grey Societists; the fact that the term has been broadened is evidence of their impact. Danubian Societists first rose to prominence in the elections of 1918, held in the aftermath of the Panic of 1917, in which a Societist group entered government through democratic – well, semi-democratic – elections for the first time, anywhere in the world.[13] (Murmurs) Then in 1923, the Societists aided the indecisive Archking Leopold III to resist a coup by the nationalist Brotherhood of the Iron Chain, who advocated for an attack on the Ottomans in defence of Greece, but also opposed a Russian proposal to move troops through neutral Danubia to do the same.[14] In the aftermath of the defeated coup, Danubia’s shaky semi-democracy became increasingly dominated by the Societists and backed up by their street militias. There was little public opposition, largely because the Societists were credited for Danubia’s neutrality and fairly effective counter-plague response during the Black Twenties. (More murmurs)
But as far as Alfarus and the Combine were concerned, this development was not viewed as an unambiguous positive. The Danubian Societists were not under his control. Rather than attempting to remove the Archking, they had simply proclaimed him a Zonal Rej, just as Alfarus had to King Gabriel of Peru – but they had done so unilaterally. They also did not even pay lip service to the idea that, eventually, he would be rotated to a different Zone. The Grey Societists similarly only made vague and symbolic commitments about introducing Novalatina, instead focusing on universalising the primary use of Martial Latin, Danubia’s pre-existing reconstructed form of Latin used by the armed forces, at the expense of native tongues like German and Hungarian.[15] Towns and cities mostly retained their existing names, sometimes switching to existing Latinised versions of them, with ‘Zon6Urb1’ only in tiny letters below ‘Vindobona; Wean; Bécs; Viena; Beč’ on the sign.[16]
The increasing mutual distrust between Combine and Grey Societists came to a head during the plague pandemic, when Alfarus refused to share the Combine’s wonder insecticide Tremuriatix with the Danubians, seeing them as unreliable.[17] However, this was seen as less dramatic a break at the time as it was presented in historiographic hindsight, with the Combine still sharing precursor research with the Danubians. The Danubian Societists also became noteworthy for mass use of the poison Vienna Green to kill off rats and fleas (which, despite its name, was not an exclusive product of Vienna) and for acting as a hub for (selected) refugees fleeing the war and plague elsewhere in Europe.
In the aftermath of the Black Twenties, Alfarus’ paranoia and the divisions with the Grey Societists continued to deepen. Attempts to give the Danubians direct orders were dismissed with the innocent-faced objection that Alfarus had always claimed to be merely the Kapud of the Celatores, a minor figure, certainly subordinate to a Zonal Rej like ‘Leopoldus Habsburgus’. According to Markus Garzius – who is scarcely a reliable source where ‘the Kapud’ is concerned, of course – Alfarus did believe the Greys had good intentions, but needed a firm hand to set them straight. In his writings, Garzius even makes comparison to some of the letters of St Paul to wayward churches in the New Testament (which, in Alfarus’ time, still survived – in a highly edited form – as part of the corpus of the Universal Church). This positive impression does rather clash with the fact that Alfarus was perfectly willing to luft-choke thousands of civilians in Salamanca in an attempt to erase all traces of other groups of heterodox Societists, but perhaps he simply saw Danubia as too big to take over in one fell swoop.
The final straw came in 1934. The Danubian Societists, unlike the Combine, had allowed elections to continue under their rule and other political parties to still exist – not on a level playing field, to be sure, but most of those parties were nobility-backed reactionaries who had been just as happy to exert unequal pressure when they had been in power. By 1934, the warm public regard the Societists had won for their anti-plague measures was cooling, and the Hungarians were particularly unhappy with some of the Societists’ pushes for cultural homogenisation, even if far more lukewarm and voluntary than those in the Combine. The Hungarians elected a Volksrat in which the Grey Societists lost their majority – and the Societists meekly accepted the defeat and allowed a coalition of nationalists to take their place, merely trusting that their faith in Sanchez’s ideas meant that history was on their side and the public would eventually come to agree. (Murmurs)
Whether one accepts that thesis or not, the previous election was not the last time that the Hungarian people would elect a Societist-majority Volksrat. But Alfarus was enraged. The Combine was already threatened by a Societist party that had been semi-democratically voted in to power without the cleansing flame of a violent revolution. Now, that same party openly accepted that the will of the people, as expressed through ‘bourgeois-proletarian democracy’ as Markus Lupus called it, overruled the principle that legitimacy flowed from purity of acceptance and interpretation of Sanchezista historical theory. This was, indeed, a far more existential threat to the Combine than any of the nations’ armies. (Murmurs)
Now, events in Russia – almost certainly not actuated by Societist Agendes, no matter what the Soviets used to claim – would offer Alfarus an apparent opportunity to both threaten another great power and put his boot on Danubia’s jugular to ‘encourage’ them back to the ‘right’ path.
In the Black Twenties, Russia had achieved one great foreign policy goal going back centuries – the conquest and subjugation of Persia – at the expense of going backwards in many other theatres. In Europe, half of Poland and Scandinavia were lost, along with an important Baltic seaport, the puppet state of Belgium and her colonies. Across the Pacific, the entirety of Russian America was under ENA occupation. Africa had seen the loss of allies such as Abyssinia and the Matetwa Empire. Even the continent of Asia, which had seen the aforementioned Persian success and the achievement of the Tarsus salient splitting the Ottoman Empire in two, hardly played host to an unmitigated series of Russian victories. The uprisings in Tartary, which had ignited the war in the first place, were never entirely quelled no matter how many ruthless generals Grand Duke Alexander sent there to commit crimes de guerre. Important lands in Manchuria had been ceded to China to buy her neutrality at the start of the war, already alienating the influential RLPC even before the loss of the American colonies. And, most visibly, Russia had lost the colony she had built in northern India in secret throughout the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, taking advantage of the near-silence of the Jihad-devastated ‘Aryan Void’ that had persisted for years and turned news into legend and rumour. Pendzhab.[18]
In many ways, Russian control of Persia’s ports only made sense as part of a broader global strategy that included Erythrea and influence over at least parts of the Indian subcontinent, both of which were now gone. But Grand Duke Alexander, it seems, was pragmatic. With the Russian economy and military apparently having recovered after a few years of peace, he now sought to reverse as many of the losses of the war as he could. He obviously could not attack Poland or Alyeska without reigniting a general war, but the hope was that India would be treated differently by the great powers; after all, France was already facing difficulties in holding on to Bisnaga and was in no position to directly object. And so, in May 1935, a new Russian army crossed into northern India with the goal of retaking Fort Saltykov in Srinagar, and then using it as a staging post to defeat the new Sikh-led state now controlling most of the former Russian Pendzhab.
Eighteen months later, a defeated and humiliated Russian army withdrew through the Khyber Pass. I don’t have time here to discuss the Pendzhab War, but suffice to say that it had a dramatic effect on not only India, but the world as well. The successful Sikh repulsion of the Russians, helped by the Bengalis and others, catalysed a new wave of anti-colonial resistance – most famously in French Bisnaga, but also around the world. The Sikhs had demonstrated that a native force, properly trained and equipped with modern weapons, could stand up to the mainstream core of a European army and defeat it; not merely the colonial outriders that the Matetwa or the Mauré had beaten in the past.[19] There were even uprisings in Persia, though they failed to truly ignite at this time, as the Shah-Advocate knew the time was not right. Nonetheless, Kalat and Rajputana, former Persian vassals, were quietly able to take advantage of the brief unrest to secure and fortify their own borders against further Russian ambitions.
The wave of anti-colonial fervour was only one part of a complex set of falling dominoes set into motion by Russia’s failure. Firstly, and most obviously, Grand Duke Alexander fell from grace, was overthrown at court and packed off back to Courland. Initially Anna and Pichegru tried to take over, but Theodore V, now of age, had formed an alliance with Marshal Mikhail Kobuzev. The hero of the Persian conquest had had few political ambitions and had accepted Alexander’s government, but remained popular and worried that Russia would follow the wrong track under Anna and Pichegru. Ironically from our modern perspective, one of his concerns was that Pichegru was, I quote, ‘obsessed’ with the Societists as the biggest threat to the world. (Murmurs) Yes, well, quite, one can only speculate how history might have gone if his ideas had dominated in the court at Petrograd. Regardless, Theodore and Kobuzev were able to shut out Anna and Pichegru from control, and they lived out their years in a dacha in Circassia, passing away at an advanced age in the 1940s.
The brief period of internal chaos in Russia would seem to offer an opportunity for Russia’s enemies, in particular the Ottoman Empire, to recover what they had lost in the Black Twenties – the biter bit. Though Europe remained exhausted and there was little incentive for the ENA to open hostilities, the Ottomans did plan an offensive to crush the Tarsus salient. The Grand Vizier in Alexandria, Mustafa Damat Pasha, had reached an agreement with Ahmet Ismail Pasha, who still held de facto power in Constantinople, to coordinate the attack. However, Mehveş Sultan still refused to contemplate collaborating with the man she held responsible for her son’s death. Furthermore, the Alexandrine Ottoman Empire was still suffering problems elsewhere; the aftermath of al-Jizani’s Arab uprising and the Javanese refugee crisis from the ‘One-Way Hajj’; the increasing spread of Societism in Africa continuing to threaten Sennar and Darfur; and attempting to reassert control over Tripolitania (Tunis and Algiers now increasingly looking like lost causes).
So Mehveş Sultan threw out the plan in favour of a more modest naval attack staging from Crete – not against the Russians, but taking the island of Rhodes from Ahmet Ismail’s control. The fall of the island to Suleyman the Magnificent in 1522 had been an important foundational moment for the House of Osman, which Mehveş Sultan hoped to repeat to enshrine her grandson Murad XI’s legitimacy. As Ahmet Ismail had always insisted he was still loyal to the Sultan but was exercising control on the ground ‘for the duration of the crisis’, Mehveş Sultan also hoped that forcing his hand like this would make Ahmet Ismail either surrender or fight and prove himself a liar.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Greece, reduced to the Ionian islands by the Ottoman invasion during the Black Twenties, had ambitions to retake the mainland. Through the judicious use of spies, the Greeks were able to take advantage of Mehveş Sultan’s betrayal of Ahmet Ismail to land troops and mercenaries on the Morea at just the same moment that the Alexandrines attacked Rhodes, in November 1936. In the end, though the Alexandrine attack was successful, the Greeks were quickly forced to retreat. They had planned on having the support of Italian regulars posing as ‘mercenaries’, but the Romulan government got cold feet and scaled back their support at the last minute. Reprisals by Ahmet Ismail’s garrison troops in the Morea killed many Greek civilians who had supported the invasion, and the only lasting territorial acquisition by the Kingdom was the island of Kythira. The Alexandrines’ naval dominance had quickly cleared Ahmet Ismail’s ships from the Aegean, offering this minor opportunity for the Greeks.
Mehveş Sultan’s betrayal meant that the Russian-controlled Tarsus Salient survived, of course. Ahmet Ismail, it appears, had decided to surrender rather than split the empire further, fuming though he was. Ahmet Ismail, a brilliant general but an amateur at politics, had already been manipulated once by the Neo-Azadis who had killed Murad X.[20] In turning on those Neo-Azadis, he had clumsily made alliances with any other group that would back him in The City’s politics. Among these were Societists.
In the immediate aftermath of the Pandoric Revolution, Constantinople had been similar to Vienna in that it had played host to heterodox Societist thinkers. As with Danubia, the multi-ethnic and non-nationalist construction of the empire seemed to offer many opportunities for variations on Sanchezista thought.[21] However, the Constantinopolitan School had been cut short in the 1910s when they were accused of being fellow travellers with the Societists that the Ottomans were already fighting around the Moon Lakes. Several had been executed and others had fled elsewhere. Alfarus, of course, saw this as a prime opportunity; by wiping the slate clean, the Ottomans had inadvertently ensured that any future Societist movement would be entirely imported from the Combine and, therefore, under his control. New cadres had been set up almost as soon as the Grand Vizier’s purge was over, and by 1936 they had been growing for two decades. The time was ripe.
Ahmet Ismail was probably poisoned, but the exact details are unclear. Like the Neo-Azadis before them, the new Rumelian Societists seized power in Constantinople and bought the support of the people simply by offering cheap food in times of difficulty. In some ways it was, as Alfarus had thought, a great opportunity. Usually a Societist uprising in Rumelia and western Anatolia would have been living on borrowed time, with the Russians taking any opportunity of Turkish division to attack. But now the Russians were weakened and consumed with their own internal divisions and rebellions. The Alexandrine Ottoman Empire was also in no position to launch a full conquest for reunification, as Mehveş Sultan had realised. Soon Combine ships, already operating openly in the waters of the former Spain and Portugal, were travelling through the Mediterranean to challenge the Alexandrine Donanmasi’s dominance.
It was another brilliant coup for the Societist, another string to Alfarus’ bow, another shocking threat to the nations. Or so it seemed. Combine Societist administrators moved in to Rumelia and Anatolia, working with the local Societists. They knew that, not only did they threaten Russia and the Mediterranean, but – almost more importantly – the heterodox Societists in Danubia now faced a serious threat if they decided to make any more creative interpretations of the Kapud’s orders. It was only a matter of time before the Greys were crushed, wiped out of history by the Biblioteka Mundial.
Or so they thought. Few at the time would have dreamed that not established ‘liberated authority over Zones 6 and 25’. Instead, Alfarus had poured Celatores, Agendes and money into what would become an entity just as productive of heterodox Societists as neighbouring Danubia was: what would come to be called the Eternal State…
[1] Note that this is a ‘translation’ by the team transcribing the lecture, as the word ‘thug(ee)’ has not entered English in TTL.
[2] For more on Grey Societism in the First Interbellum, see Part #268 in Volume VII.
[3] See Part #273 in Volume VII.
[4] See Part #292 in Volume VIII.
[5] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.
[6] During the period of rule from New Spain (ca. 1830-1848) Ferdinand VII attempted to impose the use of the term ‘Audiencias’ for the central legislature rather than ‘Cortes’, as in the Americas the latter term had become too associated with the UPSA. However, this proved unpopular and the attempt was abandoned even before the overthrow of New Spanish rule in the Second Spanish Revolution.
[7] See Part #289 in Volume VIII.
[8] See Part #49 in Volume I.
[9] A slight simplification to make a point.
[10] See Part #121 in Volume III. Note that this skips over the fact that Sanchez was a self-funded mature student who transitioned almost seamlessly to being a lecturer due to his experience.
[11] As discussed in Part #259 in Volume VII.
[12] See Part #300 in Volume VIII.
[13] See Part #270 in Volume VII.
[14] See Part #283 in Volume VIII.
[15] To be clear, the native tongues are still in use, just typically in smaller text below the Martial Latin on posters and so on (see Mme Mercier’s diary description in Part #300 for an example).
[16] Vienna’s name is here given in Martial Latin followed by the four official languages of Danubia – Austrogerman, Hungarian, Austroslav (basically Croatian for the most part) and Austrovlach (Romanian).
[17] See Part #286 in Volume VIII.
[18] For more on the Russian loss of Pendzhab, see Parts #282 and #292 in Volume VIII.
[19] ‘Native’ here, a rather un-PC term used by older Americans in TTL, is an essentially arbitary definition used to mean anyone from a culture historically not seen as ‘civilised’, itself a definition influenced by how successful they were in resisting colonialism beforehand. So it would include the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa, but also Indians and Japanese – but not Chinese, Coreans or Persians, for instance, which are presented as ‘non-European civilisations’. Attempts to objectively define the difference have caused endless headaches because it is so obviously a product of a particular time in the nineteenth century – i.e. judging India by the passing chaos of the Great Jihad and not by having literate and advanced civilisations with an equally venerable heritage to China’s.
[20] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.
[21] See Part #268 in Volume VII.
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What are the odds the "obligatory protesters" at every public function are a paid front to maximize Diversity©?
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
The confirmation of Societist danubia as a sort of dominant party democracy with local non-societist parties allowed to win elections occasionally is interesting. Also the Italian leader's conflict with the king reminds me of Mussolini.
Finally, is the Eternal State supposed to be a knife against Russia and Societist Japan against East Asia/China if I am understanding correctly?
Finally, is the Eternal State supposed to be a knife against Russia and Societist Japan against East Asia/China if I am understanding correctly?
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