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NewMars posted:Maybe we should establish a rota system for where the congress goes? Hell, maybe we should establish a travelling presidium complex? some kind of mobile liberation fortress?
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Aug 22, 2023 05:44
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 15:12 |
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Floating communism palace
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Aug 22, 2023 07:09
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A 'peace moon' of some kind?
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Aug 22, 2023 08:01
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Fear will keep the local capitalists in line.
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Aug 22, 2023 09:00
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It's been, uh, a while since I made the bill, but iirc the idea was that the complex would basically have a giant 'embassy' section where councilors/emassadors/representatives will be stationed full-time to facilitate diplomacy and such, but the actual People's Congress is still to take place out among the various polities. We're not building an Ivory Tower to sequester ourselves away from the rest of mankind, which is why there was a section in the bill about frequent rotation of all personnel/order to go home and touch grass frequently.
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Aug 22, 2023 13:41
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Yes, it worked! We've established a presence on Venus AND tied up Japan's TNE economy for the foreseeable future building useless balloon cities. And they're happy about it! 
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Aug 22, 2023 14:29
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...Congress train...
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Aug 23, 2023 00:58
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paragon1 posted:...Congress train... Give it a jazzy name, like Ice Penetrator, and have comrail create a trans Siberian rail bridge. The party never stops!
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Aug 23, 2023 06:02
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So is this may 1st when we clobber all remaining capitalist nations until they go full commie with us?
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Aug 23, 2023 20:12
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Affi posted:So is this may 1st when we clobber all remaining capitalist nations until they go full commie with us? No, May 1st is when the oppressed workers of those nations rise up and and overthrow their masters in a way that has no visible connection to us.
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Aug 24, 2023 06:30
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Cool LP. If the comment about the Venusian aerosat colony needing a name was a request for one and assuming it isn't going to be named Theseus because it's the same one from the flash-forward, I nominate Anchises, one of Aphrodite/Venus's mortal lovers.
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Aug 26, 2023 03:57
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I propose Lucifer, Venus being the Morningstar
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Aug 26, 2023 18:38
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President Ark posted:...I nominate Anchises, one of Aphrodite/Venus's mortal lovers. I like this name too!
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Aug 28, 2023 02:49
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even in the gay space future we cant escape eurocentrism in our naming 
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Aug 28, 2023 02:52
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While Miyazaki may not ever get to make it in this universe, I still like the idea of a Japanese aerosat called Laputa.
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Aug 28, 2023 18:41
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Grizzwold posted:While Miyazaki may not ever get to make it in this universe, I still like the idea of a Japanese aerosat called Laputa. Naming ones after paradises sounds like a fantastic theme, if potentially able to backfire later. Xanadu, Shambala, Quivira, Norumbega...
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Aug 28, 2023 23:25
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I had a very strange thought, as we finally drove the first pilings into the deep bedrock. We are building for forever. It hit me so hard I had to call my lunch break early. My foreman was far from happy, but when he saw the look in my eyes, he didn’t ask any questions. Forever. Since the end of the War I’ve laid a thousand foundations, from driving bamboo logs into the ground for traditional farmhouses, to pouring concrete for the base of the Victory Tower in Da Nang. If you can name an architectural style, I’ve built it with my hands and my own sweat. It’s a very physical legacy, even if you’ll never see my name on most of those buildings. But even if it was never said, it was always understood – this won’t last. Time and nature eventually destroy everything, and the shifting needs of society mean that very few buildings last longer than a lifetime, maybe two. Even without capitalism this holds true. You don’t design a house with a thatched roof in the modern age because you’re backwards and ignorant, you do it so it’s easier to replace when a typhoon blows the whole thing off. You don’t double the support pillars in an office block to be inefficient, you do it so an earthquake can’t knock it over. But eventually, whether in twenty years for the farmhouse or fifty for the office block, either you wind up replacing most of the whole thing, or you tear it down and start from scratch. But the Arcology was different. It wasn’t just the scale – the biggest thing ever built in Vietnam, yes, but to a worker putting the pieces together, the scope of the weld, pour, or cut in front of you doesn’t change. It was the intent, and you could read the intent through the materials. Duranium-alloy pilings, each one having needed more effort just to forge than most houses in Ho Chi Minh City took to complete. Neoroman concrete, twice as expensive since it couldn’t be poured, to pay for the ability to keep water out for a thousand years. Titanium electro-plating on the steel elements, to hold off corrosion. It sunk in more every step we laid, going upwards. The cost was unimaginable – but the return was expected to be just as great, spread out over more years than anyone could count. The scale was larger than anyone could imagine Ho Chi Minh City ever needing – but if the future would need it, they wanted it built now, rather than added on later. All those “modular building” sockets added to make it easier to adapt in the future, in a way that most buildings never even think about. If I’m being honest, it rattled me. I almost couldn't comprehend it – and I didn't like that. It’s why I moved into the Arcology as soon as I could find an open space. I had to be close to it, to watch it grow, to watch forever build up around me and my children. Watching this mountain grow on the outskirts of the city. And it’s why I’m here now, too. I know how to build forever – and I want to know how to think for it, as well. -Tạ Thu Loan, construction worker, mother, and aspiring architecture student, Ho Chi Minh City
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Aug 29, 2023 22:17
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Fleet Admiral Josef Radetsky watched the little boats crawl across the harbor below, matching the pace of the idle thoughts crawling through his head. The International People’s Navy had very few facilities to call its own – a side effect of being barely two years old as a service. He’d spent his first year as Admiral of the Navy of the Socialist World – a position that would have carried unparalleled power when he was a boy – in a spare office in the old Admiralty Building in Leningrad, with linoleum floors, flickering lights, and cadets constantly tramping down the corridors outside. The building he sat in now, the IPN’s new headquarters, was all its own, but even then, it had been started as new office space for the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture. Castro had gifted it to the IPN “in lieu of a navy, which we have none to give”, but it was still a hand-me-down, in a way. But for the grace of Congress, some Cuban corn-counting bureaucrat would have the incredible view across Havana Harbor that he now enjoyed, sitting in an armchair, watching the little fishing boats crawl along. Radetsky knew it bothered much of his command. The feeling of being given hand-offs and unwanted junk, treated like an afterthought, particularly in an arm that would have been glorious twenty years ago – ten years ago. All the glory was headed out to space, now, to the black seas above, and it somehow became easy to forget about the blue ones below, which had been with humanity since its birth. He smiled, eyes shifting to a particular, distinctive ship on the far side of the harbor. It is good that it bothers them. It shows how far we have come. Not so long ago, socialist sailors had been desperate just to exist, let alone claim the glory. Radetsky’s father had been one of the first Soviet sailors. The stories his papa had told him of the struggles of the early Red Fleet seemed like epics from a mythological past, of mere men grappling with titans in the face of apathy and hostility from their supposed allies. In his first year with the fleet, he’d watched October Revolution, the dreadnought battleship that the Soviets had themselves “inherited” from the Tsars, make her last voyage under steam, still looking grand and terrific as she went to the breakers despite the years of neglect and heavy use. But you were there the whole time, no? Before me, or my father, or even the Revolution. On the far side of the harbor, the service ship Kommuna lay at anchor amid a swarm of small boats, taking on supplies for the next leg of its journey to the Pacific Ocean. Like the dreadnought, the Soviets had “inherited” her from the Tsars; unlike it, she was still in service, and probably would be forever. The Red Fleet swore she did not rust. The Kommuna remained useful, finding a new role every time her old one outgrew her, refusing to let age or neglect or budget cuts threaten her. She was why the thought of “hand-me-downs” did not bother Radetsky, as it bothered the IPN’s younger officers. We have always been working with what the past has deigned to give us, he mused, watching the tiny specks of summer-uniform white move around on Kommuna’s distant decks. The Soviets worked with the hand the Tsars dealt them, and many of those ships – and men – showed that they could advance the cause no matter their “birth”, as it were. There is glory in that. If we have no new ships yet, well, ships built by dead empires have stopped fascisti before. Not that we cannot leave our own stamp on the matter, he chuckled to himself, getting up. His shoes clacked on rich wood as he walked over to the office door; teak floorboards were hardly part of Cuban standard construction, and a great expense for a shoestring-budget force, but Radetsky had allowed himself the indulgence. Teak was an appropriate wood for an admiral’s floor, after all, and being indoors rather than on the deck of a warship, the floor would probably outlast him. Like the great window, it gave a strong first impression, and first impressions tend to stick. He reached the door just as there was a knock at it, pulling it open. There were two people on the other side. One of them he knew immediately – his “partner in crime”, Rear Admiral Bertram Everich, the master of supply. Everich lowered his hand, shaking his head and smiling. “Never know how you do it, Sir.” “Simply keeping to schedule, Everich. It is the least I can do.” Radetsky returned the smile, before turning his attention to the other man, who’d been far more surprised by the Admiral’s timing trick. “This is him?” The man was old and fairly short, seeming a small presence in the hall next to the long, lanky Everich. What hair he might have had was hidden under a peaked naval cap that matched the dress uniform beneath; Radetsky didn’t recognize the insignia immediately, but the layout set off alarm bells in his head he’d never forget. British. Or Commonwealth, more likely. Not quite right. Wearing an old Commonwealth naval uniform in this day and age was its own statement. Everich nodded, gesturing with his left hand – Radetsky suddenly noticed that his right was bowed out from his body, holding a big stack of manila folders. “Yessir. Admiral Stanley Wilson of the Cascadian Workers’ Collective Navy.” “Retired, sir.” The old man’s voice was wavering slightly from age, but it had deep foundations. He held out a hand, and Radetsky shook it; most of the strength was likewise gone, but the grip was sound. “Thank you for clearing a spot in your schedule so quickly.” “Of course, Comrade Wilson.” Radetsky gestured inside, walking over to his desk with its harbor view; the other two followed him in, with Wilson taking a seat across from him. The sparkle of Wilson’s rank insignia caught Radetsky’s eye as he walked under the ceiling lights. The gold admiral’s leafs on the old man’s shoulders sat on boards newer than the rest of the uniform; the flag officer rings on the arm had clearly been added with a much less steady hand to a lesser rank. Everich set down the stack of folders on a side table with some relief, but remained standing. Once he’d settled himself, Radetsky continued. “Any nation offering to donate assets to my service is worth as much time as I can give them. I will admit, I was not expecting to get such a message from pacifist Cascadia, however.” “Well, if we weren’t pacifists, sir, I doubt we would have had anything to message you about.” Wilson removed his peaked cap; the hair on his head was silver-grey and thin. His face was long, as though years in the sun had melted it, but still with sharp points to the features. “We really should have submitted this offer last year, when the IPN was set up, but it barely even occurred to anyone then. And at any rate, things take time in the Collective.” “No doubt,” Radetsky agreed, tapping at a small packet of paper on his desk. It bore the CWC’s stamp. “I was under the impression that we had already consulted with you, however. We got a full inventory last year in joint with the Californians, unless something is amiss.” He suddenly noticed that Everich was grinning like an idiot. What haven’t you told me, Bert? Wilson shook his head. “No, Admiral. That was the American ships, the ones from their fleet reserve and which were docked in Bremerton and Seattle. We did sell and send those back to California, but they weren’t ours.” He looked back up. “We kept ours. The Canadian Pacific Fleet.” There was a moment where no-one spoke, and the only motion was the light playing off the harbor beyond as the little boats shuffled to and fro. Then there was an audible scrape, as Radetsky leaned in, his chair sliding over the teak. “Now you have my attention, Admiral. A whole fleet?” Wilson swallowed, noticeably. Radetsky was hardly hostile, but there was a fierce intensity in him that was now focused entirely on the Cascadian officer. “Mostly. We don’t have Bonaventure or its escorts, the MacKenzies. They wound up in Hawaii and the Hawaiians run them now. But the rest of the Pacific Fleet was in port at Esquimalt.” He nodded, half to himself. “The government called it all back to port in October of 1972. They were very nervous about communists in the fleet with the US tearing itself to pieces, and wanted it there to keep the Californians in check. Then, well…” He waved a hand. “The rest of 1972 happened. When the Soviets struck the US missile silos in the Dakotas, they knocked out the supply lines to the silo farms, and that cut the trans-continental railway across the Cascades. With the American railways cut as well, Cascadia was isolated.” He smiled. “And, well, there weren’t communists in the fleet. But there were a lot of us who were sick of it all, and plenty of anarchists and union men across the region. So we called for the old order to step aside, and it didn’t have any real way to tell us no. We had the guns. And then we didn’t have anything to do with them, with California to the south… but we didn’t want to just get rid of the ships.” Wilson seemed to swell with pride; the man who’d seemed old and small when he walked into Radetsky’s office now truly looked the part of the Canadian sailor. “Most of them were built in Vancouver, even! They were ours.” Radetsky nodded. Now Everich’s stupid grin was making sense, as he recalled the conversation they’d had in January about every other fleet being unwilling to give up its small ships. “So you put them in mothballs.” “Yes.” Wilson shrank back a bit, returning to the present. “With California’s help; they had a lot of experts from maintaining the Fleet Reserves. They’re all too big for what we use our Navy for, we haven’t had need of anything bigger than a cutter since founding, what with California just to the south. So, we put them up in the old refitting docks at Burrard.” He gestured towards the stack of folders. “They’ve been out of the water on blocks, mostly. Shifted around to make sure they don’t break their own backs from the weight, kept the rust off, but… just kept there, really. In case.” Radetsky took a deep breath, let it out… and then smiled. “Well, Admiral Wilson, I must deeply thank your Cascadians, then. Keeping something that extensive and expensive around for the sake of sentiment is not something done lightly.” “I won’t lie, Admiral.” Wilson grinned. “We’re a sentimental bunch.” “Indeed.” Radetsky shuffled back, returning to his sitting position. “Back to the business, though. What exactly ARE we talking about here?” “Surface craft and crews, like you said you needed. Escort craft.” Everich moved the big sheaf of folders over to his desk from the side table; there were ten in all. The one on top bore a Polaroid paperclipped to the front; it showed a ship of a type Radetsky had never seen before, which was saying something. Modern design, radar-fouling blocky in shape, but of decent size by the coastline behind it. The black block letters along the folder’s top read HMCS HURON. “Except the two, that is. Huron and Provider. Calling the whole thing a fleet was always a little grandiose, but it was quite the achievement for Canada.” Radetsky pulled the top folder off the stack to leaf through it; the one under it read HMCS TERRA NOVA, and featured a considerably less substantial-looking ship. Wilson continued as he looked through it, his tone going businesslike. “The Huron was barely completed when it shipped over to Vancouver. The old Government rushed her construction out because of the War, she arrived basically just in time to get put up on blocks. She’s the only true missile destroyer of the lot, 5100 tons.” Our smallest cruiser is only half again as large as that, Radetsky thought, unbidden. Wilson paused, looking apprehensive. “We have her specs in there, but to be honest, I don’t know if they’re reliable. Like I said, she was badly rushed. She’s barely even seen a shakedown cruise, let alone patrols or combat action, and the crew told me things kept shorting on the way up from Panama. The hull is sound and the engine turns over, but I can’t vouch for the weapons or other systems.” “You should see what some of the cruisers we’ve gotten look like, Wilson,” Everich offered with a grim chuckle. “Having a sound hull and engine is a huge head start already.” Radetsky just nodded, continuing to read. Wilson nodded back, gesturing to the rest of the stack. “The bulk of them are escort-rated destroyers, 2500-3000 tons depending on load. Mostly Restigouche-class, built in the mid-1950s and commissioned late in the same decade. They’ve all seen a good ten-fifteen years of service depending on which one you ask about.” He flexed his fingers. “There’s all kinds of equipment on them. Main armament is a 3”/70 Vickers twin mount on the front. There’s an ASROC octuple launcher, there’s a Limbo ASW mortar, there’s two Mark 32 triple torpedo launchers. They even have anti-missile systems, but those are old 103mm Bofors illumination rockets, so they might not be good against much anymore.” “They probably work against anything we are likely to fight soon,” Radetsky replied, closing the file. “Electronics?” “Better than you might think. The whole class got upgraded just before the GRW broke out to improve their anti-sub capacity.” Wilson reached into the stack, pulling out another folder labeled HMCS SAGUENAY. The ship on the front looked very similar to the TERRA NOVA photograph; Radetsky took it, quickly flipping through the contents. “There’s also two of their half-sisters, the St. Laurents, which are slightly older, but were converted to DDHes for helo use in the 1960s. The Restigouches got the ASROCs and their VDS sonar package at the same time.” “That we can definitely use,” Radetsky offered, returning the SAGUENAY file to the stack and passing the HURON one to his colleague. “Everich, contact the British yard collectives. I do not expect any of the Huron’s blueprints are left anywhere we can get ahold of them, but the British yards might have the best idea of how to work with this design lineage.” Wilson bristled. “The Iroquois-class were entirely Canadian-designed and built, Admiral. There’s more American equipment in there than British, and more Canadian than either.” Radetsky paused, then nodded. “I see, Admiral. Apologies. Everich, ask the British nonetheless, but contact the Californians first. They have the most advanced yards left on the continent.” “Sir.” Everich nodded, then strode out of the room. Wilson seemed to settle down at that, and Radetsky shuffled most of the folder stack aside. “This sounds exactly like what we need, so far. What is Provider, then?” “She was a replenishment ship.” The folder on the bottom of the stack read HMCS PROVIDER / CPWS PROVIDER, in fresher letters than the other ones; the photograph showed what looked like a cargo ship at first glance, with the cross-deck cranes and aft superstructure, but the lines on the stern-mounted helipad betrayed it – too sharp, too military. The whole thing was painted Cascadian pinetree green, with the upperworks mountain gray. “7300 empty, capable of 22,000 wet. Only five years old when the ‘Revolution’ happened. Unlike the others, she hasn’t been laid up – too big, and too useful. We’ve had her working as a cargo ship down to the California route, but we can get another cargo ship. We can’t build you another dedicated refueler and resupply ship.” Wilson gave a little shrug. “So she’s not as pristine, she’s been working for her keep for the last fifteen years, but we do our best to keep her in good order. We’re willing to send her along with the fleet.” “We are more than willing to take her, I assure you,” Radetsky nodded, already doing the math in his head. “Having a resupply ship all ready to go is ideal for long-term escort work.” He looked back up from his calculations. “And you mentioned crews?” “Oh, yes. Not me, I must say.” Wilson chuckled. “I’m too drat old. Most of the officers are, too. But all these ships were crewed when the Revolution hit, and all those crews were in Cascadia with them. When we realized what we had on hand, we asked around the councils how many of them would be interested in getting the ships into your hands on one last voyage.” He raised his eyebrows. “Three in every four said, to hell with one voyage, sign me up again, Sir! Which I don’t think any of us were expecting.” Radetsky stroked his mustache, surprised. Wilson continued, waving a hand at the folders. “We’re not a violent people, Admiral, but we know how good we have it. And we do know how much of that we owe to other people keeping us safe – the Californians especially, but also your Soviets, the Minnesotans, the whole Comintern. I don’t think any of us would feel comfortable serving on a missile submarine or that battleship, but those are for attack. The Fleet was always for defending things. Defending people is why we called for the Revolution in the first place. So I think all the old sailors figured, this sounds like what I’m supposed to do.” “I think they may be right, Admiral,” Radetsky nodded. “I can hardly say no to any of that.” He paused for a moment, then shook his head. “I will say, though, I would probably want them to train new sailors to do what they did, instead. Your men have to be in their 40s and 50s by now, it would not be right or sensible to ask them for long consignments.” “Well… maybe you’re right on that.” Wilson seemed to deflate a little. Radetsky straightened up. “That is no criticism, Admiral. It is a huge step up for the fleet to have that knowledge available, and they will see service nonetheless. We need those ships immediately.” He nodded. “Or as soon as you can have them to us.” “We thought you’d say that,” Wilson replied, returning to his form and smiling. “We’ve been working to get them back in the water and crewed up. It might still take a while before they’re all ready to sail, but we’ll have them in Havana as soon as you say the word.” “Then consider it said!” Radetsky rapped a fist on the desk, triumphant, and reached out a hand. Wilson shook it, as he smiled. “The International People’s Navy owes Cascadia a great debt, Admiral Wilson. This is an important time for us as a service, and you have given us a great boon. With these escorts we can start a good half of our cruisers patrolling the Caribbean immediately. That will be a great boon to all the countries around the Gulf and Caribbean, and clear the routes to the Panama Canal.” The smile turned into a grin, as he stood up. “It may well be that your ‘light ships’ have smoothed out trade in the entire western hemisphere, by end of year.” Wilson froze midway through standing up, gobsmacked. “That… I hadn’t thought it could be THAT influential. You’re sure?” “I think so, yes. But it does not surprise me, either.” Radetsky grasped the old admiral’s shoulder as they walked over towards the big harbor window. “The Comintern is a story of things being more important than anyone imagines.” quote:TO: RAdm. B. Everich (admacquire@ipn.com) Redeye Flight fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Sep 1, 2023 |
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Sep 1, 2023 00:19
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Oooh, neat post.
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Sep 1, 2023 00:49
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One more for the moment, to ship out more of the stuff I've had sitting around. It seems like an appropriate time for it. = = = = = [Excerpt from Third Time’s the Charm?: A Study of Three Attempts at International Cooperation. Oleg Orlovsky and Niles Vandergluit, 1987. Berlin: Barn Burner Press.] It must be asked, then, both if the Comintern IS succeeding, and if so, what sets it apart from the League of Nations and the United Nations? Why should this organization succeed when the others have failed? It must first be said that the modern Comintern is not truly out of the woods yet. Both the League and the United Nations existed for approximately fifteen to twenty-five years before they ran into problems they could not solve and which destroyed them as viable, recognized international organizations. The modern Comintern, or “Fifth International”, was organized in 1971 as the full scope of socialist success in the Great Revolutionary War began to become apparent – it is well within this “danger zone” and has a good decade left before it can truly be said to have lived past the point where the League and the UN “died”. It must also be said, of course, that both the League of Nations and United Nations did not utterly “fail”. As has been studied by the Chinese sociologist Song Yuxuan, both the League and UN caused great shifts in the global perception and acceptance of internationalism, establishing paradigms, concepts, and entire institutions that are still in use today, or have been used as models to that end. The United Nations, of course, is also not fundamentally defunct in the way the League of Nations is – while greatly reduced and no longer regarded as a global authority as it was at its founding, the UN still counts around a third of the world’s population among its member-states and continues to conduct semblances of its former operations. Having said that, it cannot be denied that both organizations are far from the global authorities and forums they were designed to be, and given little regard by much of the world. Why is this, and what may make the Comintern different? The crux of the matter for the first two organizations was the United States. Both the League and the UN were the brainchildren of American Presidents – Woodrow Wilson for the League, and Franklin Roosevelt for the United Nations – seeking to establish an international mediating body to prevent the kind of hellish conflicts they had just emerged from. However, in both cases, the Presidents in question struggled to get the United States as a country and a people to buy into the idea. Woodrow Wilson famously could not get the isolationist United States Congress of the 1920s to ratify the League of Nations whatsoever, effectively making it dead on arrival as it lacked the participation and thus authority of and over one of the world’s pre-eminent industrial and colonial powers. This made the League toothless, relying for strength as it did on powers exhausted and shaken by the effort of the conflict of the First World War, and unable to fundamentally oppose the expansionist actions of Italy, Germany, and Japan, to say nothing of the actions it chose not to condemn from nations it liked more. As both Italy and Japan were members of its permanent council, as well, their withdrawal from the body to pursue their own objectives effectively split its power base in half and set the halves against each other. The United Nations, comparatively, had the United States on it from the beginning as a permanent member – but ran into the opposite problem. The design of the United Nations lacked any methods of enforcement for its dictates and ordinances without the member states choosing to participate in them, as the United States frequently did not. Many international treaties and policies either died on the table or were effectively useless because the US Congress or President refused to ratify them and thus acknowledge a foreign authority above that of the USA – even an authority composed of its peers and equals – thus making them unenforceable. This problem also showed itself with the other permanent security council members – the French and British were frequently recalcitrant on anything that threatened their tottering empires, notably – but was most frequent with the USA. Both the UN and the League of Nations also suffered from having councils of authority with overwhelming power and no recourse for other member states. In both cases, this was due to the organizations being established in the wake of massive wars by those wars’ victors, who placed themselves in positions of control. In the case of the UN, this design was a deliberate choice by President Roosevelt, who desired the UN’s permanent Security Council members to act as “global policemen.” This desire was created by watching the fascists of the 1930s go rogue and run roughshod over the League of Nations, which ultimately had to be stopped by force. However, this shockingly naive move by the otherwise politically savvy Roosevelt meant that a Security Council member was effectively untouchable in whatever they chose to do. With no mechanism to remove them from their seat, they could dictate global security matters to their whim with no real counter from any country except the other four permanent members. Having an absolute veto (which, it must be said, was a feature demanded by the Stalin-era Soviet Union for its participation rather than part of the American design) also meant the Security Council had total control over affairs of the UN, and the ability to stop any attempt to rein them in in its tracks. It also led to gridlock and repeated stalling on many international issues, such as decolonization. So, what makes the Comintern different? The first fundamental difference is in its foundation. Like the League and the UN, the Comintern owed its existence to the victors of a World War, namely the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (“Soviet Union”) and its allies. However, the Comintern was not originally designed to be a global authority – it was originally a purely military concept, a defensive and cooperative pact between the nations involved in it. As such, while the Soviet Union can conclusively be said to be the Comintern’s founder and the leading authority in its early days, structurally, it was not set in stone as the absolute leader -- while the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union may have insisted on such a thing and seen the effort collapse, the Young Internationalists understood that movements like the French student revolution, the New Afrikan Black Panthers, and the California Republic's people-power movement would sooner stand alone than be dictated to. The Soviet Union’s ability to ensure control of such a pact was predicated on being able to orchestrate unbeatable voting blocs via its constituent Soviet Republics and its network of satellite countries in the Warsaw Pact. In practice, however, the runaway success of global socialism in the face of the Great Revolutionary War quickly undermined this concept on three fronts. Firstly, the rise of small, vigorous socialist countries across the globe drowned out the established Soviet bloc in a chorus of voices, none of whom could realistically be denied an individual voice and vote while the Soviets were attempting to get equivalent vote counts out of Estonia and Armenia. As such, the narrative in the Comintern Congress rapidly became swayed by its smaller members and international groups, making it impossible for Moscow to run global socialism by remote as they had tried to do in the past. Secondly, the Warsaw Pact itself suffered tremendously in the Great Revolutionary War, splintering that source of votes. The Pact’s strongest non-Soviet member in East Germany collapsed completely, reforming as part of the ferociously socialist but far less pliant German People’s Republic, while other members such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania – already contentious with Moscow on various issues – became far more concerned with the needs of survival and reconstruction than with lockstep political unity. Thirdly, and importantly, the Soviet Union itself was badly drained by the Great Revolutionary War, in a way that the United States very much was not by the Second World War. Tremendous loss of life and materiel in the armed forces combined with scattered destruction across European Russia and Ukraine left the USSR in an “exoskeletal” position – its exterior strength, while very real, had shocking weaknesses behind it. As a result, the brute-force methods used on Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep them in line politically did not, and perhaps could not, appear in the post-GRW era. Attempting to turn around from fighting the capitalist NATO bloc to try and muscle all of its new allies into line was seen by the Young Internationalists as both physically and politically impossible, more likely to shatter the alliance and even the USSR itself than to produce a Global Soviet Republic led from Moscow. This also had the knock-on effect of dramatically weakening the authoritarian, uniform nature of communism pioneered by Stalin during his rule, in favor of a much broader tapestry of worldwide socialism, but in terms of the Comintern alliance, its most direct effect was to drastically reduce the Soviet Union’s ability to assemble unbreakable voting blocs to dictate issues. Thus, these three fronts combined to ensure that unlike with the League of Nations and United Nations, the major powers of the Comintern’s victory – the USSR most strongly, but also China, France, Cuba, and California – could not take the same kind of baked-in dominant role, and thus could be kept in check by their fellows in a way the Security Council’s “global policemen” never could. This is the first fundamental difference. The second fundamental difference is that as a primarily military alliance, the Comintern has its own teeth. Rather than strictly relying on its member-states for muscle (though at this point it still very much does), the Comintern has – by law – its own internationally independent military force, and its own international ministries and commissions to oversee the alliance’s activities and their interaction with countries outside of the Comintern alliance. We have even begun to see elements of an international judiciary forming, and vast international infrastructure projects undertaken by the alliance itself rather than its constituent states (though still with their explicit approval via the Comintern Congress). None of these things were true of the UN or League, which were completely dependent on the strength and willingness of their great power participants to function, and as a result became seen as no better than extensions of those powers’ will instead of organizations to be respected in their own right. The Comintern, so far, has avoided this. Indeed, many of the things that the Comintern does, it can be argued that no one of its member states could do individually, even the great powers among them. Global TNE extraction and processing in particular, to the degree required for any serious industrial production as seen in the modern world, is all but impossible on a single-country scale. Simply developing the technology to do so was the work of a combined global scientific effort from thirty-five countries which only the Comintern as an international organization was in the position to finance, organize, and coordinate, and TNE mining and processing remains the work of global supply chains organized by Cybersyn on a level no one member nation can manage. The importance of this is difficult to understate. Some degree of independent design is possible as seen with Japan’s vigorous efforts, but the limited geographic, economic, and industrial scope inevitably means they produce limited and narrow-field results, and at a much slower pace. Without TNEs, restoring the world from the Great Revolutionary War would be a far slower, more laborious process, and the Gladio Crisis may have been unresolvable, resulting in further millions of deaths. Thus, the Comintern has made itself essential to its member states in what it provides, in a way that the UN and League of Nations never were or could be by design. The third fundamental difference is less concrete, but no less important – that of intent. The League of Nations and United Nations both theoretically had the same, unified objective in their foundation – to prevent another devastating World War through fostering international cooperation. As is common, however, this is a “simple” high-level summary of an extremely complex issue, and the how of preventing another World War was not agreed upon. Indeed, many of the goals of the League and UN’s key founding members were dramatically different – and in some cases, even diametrically opposed. The United States, for instance, was aggressively anticolonial, but was hampered in making this a foundational tenet of the UN by the involvement of the colonial empires of Britain and France. Similar attempts by Imperial Japan in the League of Nations were hampered for exactly the same reasons, though Japan’s objectives in that instance were less optimistic or idealistic. The Soviet Union absolutely refused to participate in any global economic system with a capitalist foundation, something that the World Bank’s exploitation of Africa would prove foresighted but which meant that the United Nations could have effectively no economic or industrial regulatory power, with two of its five key members operating under a completely different system. Old bigotry even played a role – Churchill’s almost unbelievable racism against the Chinese and Indians meant British cooperation or consent in advancing or acknowledging the rising power of the Asian nations was a complete nonstarter. The Comintern, on the other hand, was founded as a much simpler military defense pact, and retained this core tenet throughout its life into the present day. Its Constitution is a simple, flexible document with unwavering core tenets for socialism, against monarchism and fascism, and little else, allowing for a vast variety of political systems to achieve the first step of joining the alliance with little issue, intent on the common military objective. This created a strong unified intent of internationalism, led by the banner of the Young Internationalists and upheld by the Comintern’s smaller members, rather than emphasis on the preservation of existing world orders or causing minimal shakeup therein – the shakeup was already happening, after all, and could not be avoided. At the same time, this produced a much more limiting scope than either of its past counterparts. The requirements of demonstrable adherence to the promotion of socialism, the ironclad prohibition on monarchy, and the mandate for codefense guaranteed that all the Comintern's members would have common ground to work from and common causes to share. The League of Nations and United Nations had far fewer restrictions on membership and thus struggled to deal with clashes between their member states, such as the Two China Problem, or the invasion of Ethiopia. While this has led to friendly nations like Spain and Hawaii being limited in their participation, it has overall succeeded at keeping the alliance pointed in a common direction. None of which is to imply that the Comintern’s members think in harmonious lockstep, of course – far from it. The Khmer Rouge incident, the Japanese diplomatic push of 1982, and the debates over nuclear disarmament all illustrate that the alliance is far from one with no divergent viewpoints. It also should not be taken to imply that the Comintern's members also lack divergent objectives and opinions -- the pacifistic aims of the UAWR and the CWC, or the federalist focuses of Germany and Britain, differ widely from the aggressive vanguardism of Appalachia, the strident internationalism of the new France, or the pragmatism of the classic Marxist-Leninists. However, they all ultimately do share the objective of a brighter future under socialism – one freed from the agonies and woes of the past capitalist eras – and have consistently placed this objective above others when part of the group is threatened. When put to the acid test, the Comintern's members have been willing to stand together to maintain it, whether in the face of military assault as in the GRW, or more sinister methods such as the Gladio Crisis. This is more than either the League of Nations or the United Nations demonstrated when put to the test in their day. Whether it will continue to stand the test, is a different question entirely, and one that no book without a crystal ball attached can answer. Redeye Flight fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Sep 22, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 00:03
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Redeye continues to be an excellent loreposter 
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Sep 6, 2023 04:14
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Hopefully it'll all hold up as of the disarmament conference..
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Sep 6, 2023 05:22
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Excellent post, Redeye
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Sep 12, 2023 02:26
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Chatlog, irc.fuber.net, #ChatAllNite (Eng. trans.) As the result of some discussion about European Forum politics, LePenseur has made the somewhat foolish mistake of asking resident historian and text wall architect RepeatingMyself to explain what the hell is going on with Britain. We now join after the initial mental breakdown and recovery. RepeatingMyself: God RepeatingMyself: Okay, Britain. RepeatingMyself: Where do you even loving start? NETENCARTA posted:FULL TITLE: The British Laborers’ Socialist Republican Union of England, Wales, Scotland, Northumbria, Midlands, Wessex, and Cornwall SkyrocketsNFlight: The name might be a good start Pacattack: ugh UGH LePenseur: Won’t lie, RM, the name looks incomprehensible to most other countries. RepeatingMyself: I mean it’s not much better for us. RepeatingMyself: Maybe I should just start at the start. You know, as you do. CherryRye: So I’ve heard yeah RepeatingMyself: So, France. France is known for being disorganized, but it has unifying factors that made it a viable socialist country. The trade unions, and the student revolution. LePenseur: Correct. Relevance? RepeatingMyself: We’ll get there. That’s France. Germany had the 68er-Bewegung. Chicago had the Rainbow Coalition. New Afrika had the black civil rights movement and the Black Panthers. These are core poles that a society can form itself around. RepeatingMyself: Britain had none of those RepeatingMyself: Or rather the ones it had were deliberately broken. SkyrocketsNFlight: God. I thought MI5 just attempted a coup? RepeatingMyself: I can unpack a book out of that sentence, is the thing. MI5 were loving bastard cunts but they weren’t imbeciles, they knew how to topple governments. So they just tried to apply it to their own. RepeatingMyself: Which is why the coup is the start; what they DID in the coup created a crisp hard line between Great Britain and what came after in a way you don’t see in a lot of the post-GRW countries. It came out of bloody nowhere in a way the more organic revolutions did not, because it was entirely caused by secret commando ops bastards deciding they wanted to dictate to the country how to think. RepeatingMyself: So the coup involved ripping the guts out of the British government by storming Parliament with “loyalist” troops and seizing literally hundreds of MPs. Most of them have just disappeared, we haven’t even found their bodies. They also seized most of the government offices in London, all the train stations, and the BBC headquarters, so, all the mass media but the papers and the main transport lines. Grabbed the heart of Britain and tried to squeeze it in a fist. LePenseur: Baise-moi. That makes sense, if you’re thinking like a reactionary piece of poo poo looking to topple a government. Pacattack: rest of the country got a lesser dose of the same Pacattack: assassinations, disappearances, attempted seizures, all that poo poo Pacattack: tried to sell the country on labour being “””””traitors””””” CherryRye: But they failed. RepeatingMyself: They succeeded in shattering the loving thing like a Christmas bauble. They caused a horrific amount of confusion and disorganization by basically pulling the wires out of the entire national government down to the county level, but they must have assumed the military would go along with them. RepeatingMyself: Ra-ra anticommunist brainrot poo poo RepeatingMyself: In fact the military cracked right down the middle and turned on itself, with the larger parts AGAINST the coup, because they noticed that these fuckers had just massacred Parliament and were busily pissing on five hundred years of unbroken democratic tradition RepeatingMyself: Which they had kind of sworn an oath to protect, and all that. The hypothetical communist destruction of democracy pales when the fascists are actively machine-gunning it down in front of you AlleMAN: Most of the time. RepeatingMyself: Most of the time. It did this time, anyway. It stopped the country from going full fascist but it meant now we had no military and the entire place went up in arms. RepeatingMyself: Thankfully WW2 killed off a ton of the literal nobles in the military command but the ones that it didn’t get all sided with the coup, obviously. RepeatingMyself: Mountbatten tried to flee to the Commonwealth and the Irish fed him a cruise missile for his trouble, the Queen vanished and haunts us to this day, PM Wilson almost certainly murdered, government in ruins, chain of command destroyed. RepeatingMyself: Absolute chaos in the span of a month quote:SEE ALSO: Pacattack: loving papers of all things did it Pacattack: except the heil, because it was the heil CherryRye: ? RepeatingMyself: Daily Mail, the most rabid reactionary of the old papers Pacattack: right, i said the heil Pacattack: anyway, the non-heil papers didn’t truck with this piss whatsoever, even the stodgy bastard ones like the telegraph Pacattack: fleet street said yes sir absolutely sir when they came asking, then basically fortified itself and went into overdrive because the stupid MI5 bastards focused on the government and the military Pacattack: a fuckin soviet front army would struggle to stop every road out of london, so they got papers out on trucks in the night Pacattack: fascist bastards really believed their own propaganda i guess, thought the people would just fall in line because sheep LePenseur: That happened a LOT worldwide in the Cold War and GRW. Symptom of seeing the world through only one lens. When everything is communism or anticommunism, you forget there are other reasons people object to you sponsoring child-butchers and nun-rapists besides “being Soviet plants”. SkyrocketsNFlight: Not a problem socialists are immune to, either. LePenseur: Sadly. Pacattack: anyway it really cut the legs off the coup when their captured BBC radio broadcasts spewing bullshit were met with wall-to-wall newsstands across the country the next day screaming about pogroms in the east end and machine guns on the roof of the BBC and how everything was being murdered Pacattack: fleet street got run over pretty quickly after that but enough of them got out to keep screaming and basically never stop Pacattack: it basically killed the papers that were actually based out of london in the sense of having their printworks there but it turns out all the left wing papers were already printing in manchester and birmingham and liverpool anyway, so really it just hurt their propaganda even more Pacattack: also that the stupid cavemen stopped some of the presses literally by breaking them, so now they couldn’t use them for their own ends Pacattack: absolute whacking geniuses RepeatingMyself: The unions rose up to try and defend the people when it became clear the military was killing itself, but MI5 completely gutting Labour had ripped out the spine of the left. Not that Labour and the TUC were ever formally interconnected, but there was a lot of overlap in people who were important to union groups and culture, and people who were prominent Labour PMs, pols, and bureaucrats. Pacattack: so imagine the USA situation but instead of like three governments, ten breakaway states, and a bunch of chaos, you have none breakaway governments and all chaos Pacattack: Second British Civil War, nutshell AlleMAN: Sounds familiar TBH AlleMAN: But like you said, we had the protest movements already whipping people together. RepeatingMyself: Yep, and the British had none of that. MI5 went after any possible student organizers in their first wave of pogroms and assassinations; they had paid attention to how France went. The unions had lost so much of their upper leadership that they couldn’t do national organizing. It all fell back to local poo poo and never recovered. RepeatingMyself: Well, “never”, it did recover but it took two bloody decades, and didn’t recover anywhere close enough to keeping any of the old Britain together Pacattack: silver lining being that none governments means none assholes trying to force reunification under their jackboot Pacattack: no chiefs or feds or gnats being actual threats at large, which is why the british GIE was such a joke – literally no power back home instead of barely any RepeatingMyself: Wales and Scotland kept cohesion, barely. Benefit of local-power political movements and also Wales being basically run by the NUM. Everywhere in England fell apart, we hadn’t seen some of those divisions in centuries. People shooting people from the next village over. Insanity. RepeatingMyself: The Army lasted long enough to kill every member of the coup it could reach before collapsing, either dissolving into the population or turning into local powermongers. The Royal Navy blew itself to kingdom come and Thatcher and the rest of the Tory bastards took basically all that was left to run to Japan, left the rest of us to fight it out and try to survive. CherryRye: Rest in fuckin’ pieces, Thatcher, may we send Kissinger and Westmoreland to join you soon. Pacattack: Rip AlleMAN: Rip quote:FOUNDATION DATE: 1982 LePenseur: Well, that’s the history lesson. SkyrocketsNFlight: Lol SkyrocketsNFlight: You asked RM a question, that was the entry fee for an answer RepeatingMyself: Ugh, piss off AlleMAN: Lol Pacattack: lol SkyrocketsNFlight: But yeah, back to the point. That’s why there’s seven countries in the name then? RepeatingMyself: And all the rest of it, I said we’d get there. We’ve covered Labour, and we’ve covered the TUC, and we’ve covered the military. Three big pieces to it. But there’s one more. RepeatingMyself: See, the thing that RepeatingMyself: God I already know how this is going to look LePenseur: Oh, this’ll be good. RepeatingMyself: The thing that reunified the country was the guilds. AlleMAN: Ahahahahahah SkyrocketsNFlight: You’re loving joking me LePenseur: RM. Guilds? In 1985? NETENCARTA posted:GOVERNMENT TYPE: Federal bicameral modified-syndicalist parliamentary republic Pacattack: okay Pacattack: so to be clear AlleMAN: Hahahahaha Pacattack: shut up Pacattack: God, fine, you made me sit up properly for this LePenseur: Red alert! SkyrocketsNFlight: Rare sighting of Pacattack not chatting poo poo 24/7 Pacattack: Bask in my true presence Pacattack: Anyway while RM is dying of embarrassment, the guilds were NOT the only thing that reunified the country, though I will admit they were part of it Pacattack: Without what was left of Labour and the big unions there would have been loving nothing to reunify Pacattack: All those local chunks were big stones that could be a building if you could pull ‘em together Pacattack: The guilds were the rope RepeatingMyself: So MI5 didn’t target the guilds the way they did Labour and the unions, because who the gently caress would think a guild wouldn’t go along with a reactionary coup? It’s a GUILD. Literally a medieval institution. AlleMAN: There is no way in hell you’ve got an “aber” in there RepeatingMyself: Oh but I do. <Signora-di-Calabria joined.> LePenseur: Welcome back! RepeatingMyself: Siggy! Pacattack: wb Siggy Signora-di-Calabria: Eyy, what’s good? Back from Vietnam. Signora-di-Calabria: So you can all stop mourning my absence <3 SkyrocketsNFlight: Pff, dramatist. Signora-di-Calabria: So what’s on? LePenseur: I asked RM to explain Britain. Signora-di-Calabria: PFFT Signora-di-Calabria: How many hours have I missed already? RepeatingMyself: I’ll send you the log, one second. Just covered the recent history. RepeatingMyself: So to GREATLY simplify, a British guild, or at least at the time of the collapse, is a cross between a trade union and a regulatory body. This covers both the ACTUAL liveried guilds and all the organizations that are BASICALLY guilds but don’t have the recognition. LePenseur: Hold on. Liveried? RepeatingMyself: Medieval organization, remember? Guilds have their own heraldry, no joke. I mean, it’s a joke in that it’s WEIRD, but they do. AlleMAN: Goddamn antique country RepeatingMyself: So they’re regulatory in that if you don’t belong to them, or didn’t, then you just didn’t get into that field. This was literally backed up by law in old Britain in some cases. With exclusivity, they ensure/d that conduct and goods production were up to standard, etc. Proof of quality, anyone who tries to work non-guild in their industries is painted as untrustworthy even before they get going, and they either hold that standard up to snuff or lose their own reputation and position. Pacattack: You know that goofy gold seal Nintendo puts on their games nowadays? Pacattack: That but with actual teeth LePenseur: I have no idea what Nintendo even is. Some of us don’t spend all our discretionary income on Pac-Man, mon ami. Pacattack: Rude. Signora-di-Calabria: Christo, Pacattack used a period. Watch yourself Pens. RepeatingMyself: ANYWAY RepeatingMyself: So the guilds look like ancient relics and have weird practices that range from “wacky” to “genuinely crap” but, fundamentally, are organizations of labour. And almost all of it is lifetime, technical labour. Pacattack: RM showing just a TOUCH of bias as an academic type here Pacattack: Guilds are traditionally insular and very goddamn bourgie, there’s a reason MI5 riddled the unions with gunfire but didn’t even think to touch the guilds Pacattack: RM avoided saying SKILLED labor there, good on him to catch himself, but guilds have always thought of their fields as skilled and everything else as not Pacattack: There’s no Company of Miners and they only let the Farmers have one in ‘52 Pacattack: Keeping in mind that the oldest guild was started somewhere in the 1300s RepeatingMyself: Very true. Guilds are merchants, bakers, ironworkers, clothiers, that kind of thing. Traditional fields of lifetime careers. Pacattack: Emphasis on traditional Pacattack: Your pre-collapse guild had apprenticeships and poo poo, getting into the profession required getting drenched in their inside culture and bowing/scraping to the existing Masters for years. If they don’t like you enough, gently caress you, you did all that for nothing. RepeatingMyself: Emphasis on pre-collapse. Pacattack: Man CherryRye: Pacattack’s using more periods. This sounds personal, Pac – experience? Pacattack: Nah Pacattack: Not myself at least, my field was too new and fangled to have a guild OR a union for that matter Pacattack: At least until the NUM picked us up Pacattack: But I had friends who had their whole life’s dreams derailed due to this stupid primary school bullshit LePenseur: This sounds like a loving awful thing to build a socialist country around. RepeatingMyself: Well, as most of you know firsthand, you work with what you’ve got. And while a lot of people think of England as a country of antiques, things DO change. NETENCARTA posted:VOTING MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF UNIONS: 179 Pacattack: So the other thing about the guilds to understand how this worked at all is that they’re VERY London RepeatingMyself: Very urban, which in Britain has always meant very London. This is the real unifying thing among all the old guilds – they’re professions that you find in cities. RepeatingMyself: Not that there aren’t blacksmiths or winemakers in the countryside, but there’s no mines in the middle of London, say, or farms Pacattack: Well, were RepeatingMyself: Yes, but the emergency parks farms don’t count Signora-di-Calabria: I see. But they ARE national? RepeatingMyself: Yes RepeatingMyself: The guilds are literally built into London’s government structure, centuries of fascinating history there that I won’t get into, but they applied to the whole country. RepeatingMyself: What that meant for Britain was that the Guilds basically wound up back in control of London after MI5 was fully ratted out, since MI5 had gutted most of the other things that could act as government over there. Reversion to type. London had and still has all kinds of polities in it but the guilds had the knowledge and the systems in place to actually keep the infra going from day one, so they did. RepeatingMyself: Being in control of London, even the worked-over London that was left, is enormous. Britain was built around London. It’s not quite as crucial as Paris is to France, but it’s the country’s largest port, it’s the heart of the whole rail system, it’s the largest population center. It’s a very big center of gravity. LePenseur: But since the Guilds were also national, that meant they had a presence all across Britain where all the other bombed-out institutions didn’t. RepeatingMyself: Exactly! RepeatingMyself: So they had some control of the power center, if nothing outside it, and “in” routes to everything else on the island. Every member of a trade who’d survived the Civil War was a potential guild “in”. RepeatingMyself: Which, of course, they didn’t do anything with at first for years, because they were still the guilds and had all their old structural crap holding them back. RepeatingMyself: But the BCW killed a LOT of the old guard just through the gutting of the political class and the subsequent ongoing violence, which meant massive drops in guild membership, unsustainable ones. RepeatingMyself: So it forced them to change, bring in big blocks of recruits to keep the knowledge bases they were shepherding from slipping out of their control – or dying out completely. They couldn’t individually vet recruits or force them through one-on-one apprenticeships when some of the guilds were literally down to a dozen surviving Masters in the whole country. RepeatingMyself: There’s a world where they never did change and never did anything and died as mad reactionary relics. RepeatingMyself: But this isn’t that world, and in this one the recruits changed the culture, because all the young people left in the country were leftists in various states of radicalization after watching the conservative culture and institutions commit fratricide. MI5 gutted the Labour Party, but it couldn’t kill LABOUR. SkyrocketsNFlight: Basic loving fundamentals that reactionaries do not understand despite infinite examples. You can’t oppress your way out of a reaction to oppression, only bottle it down, and that just makes it more determined CherryRye: Amen. RepeatingMyself: This took time to happen, but it started happening very early. Once it DID happen, the guilds turning pink and red, well, they’re social institutions already. They’re literally about knowing people. So they were able to drag their way through their social connections across the borders of all the piecemeal little states left in Britain and actually get things started. Pacattack: Benefit of the branding Pacattack: The unions were fewer and bigger, so more stuff under the tent, so harder to keep it all together, especially without a royalist/loyalist enemy to focus on Pacattack: People are more loyal to their local branch than the big organization on top, just how it is Pacattack: But all guildies are guildies no matter where in Britain you were Pacattack: Lots and lots of downsides which is why unions exist and actually did things throughout the last two centuries, but Britain fell into a weird edge case situation Pacattack: Which of course it did, it’s Britain RepeatingMyself: So they were able to get people talking to each other again and patching over the cracks. Not completely, but we’re here now. [. . .] RepeatingMyself: So to go all the way back to “let’s start with the name” LePenseur: Which you did not do… RepeatingMyself: And explain each chunk individually? We’d have been here twice as long. RepeatingMyself: “British” speaks for itself, the country is the island of Britannia proper and the smaller outlying. “Socialist” also speaks for itself – and it’s a solid top wrapper since a bunch of the constituent pieces are different flavors of socialist, they’re not ALL union-syndicalist. CherryRye: Bri’ish Pacattack: bri’ish CherryRye: Borschtit sits up on vacation, sad over missing the chance to troll RepeatingMyself: “Laborers’” is just “Workers’”, of course, but the older language was a deliberate choice. Useful at the time to help cover both the unions and guilds. Highlights them both since they replaced the Lords and all their pompous royal crap as the other side of the government. SkyrocketsNFlight: Right, I THOUGHT I remembered the title being “Workers’” at one point. Pacattack: yeah that was the first version of the idea, started in Derby in ‘82 before the guilds gave it national reach RepeatingMyself: As for “Union”, the BLR isn’t TECHNICALLY a single country, it’s a federated state. All the sub-countries still exist under the wrapper, from Scotland right down to the Union of South and Central London Soviet Socialist Republics and the North Berkshire Public Council. AlleMAN: What really? SkyrocketsNFlight: They ARE still on the voting rolls for the Comintern. They were the first member applicants from the British Isles even before Ireland, kind of a big deal. I thought they’d both disbanded or reorganized or something, though. RepeatingMyself: I live in Oxford, I don’t know firsthand. Only the seven big ones got their names in the legal title but there’s a few dozen other smaller states in there. RepeatingMyself: The seven big states have devolved local power, and get to send members to the House of Unions, among all the other ways they get their bit in. LePenseur: Explains the countries, then. So the federated aspect is “Union?” RepeatingMyself: Federated and also syndicalist. Well, syndicalist-ish. And the New Parliament democracy is the “Republic”. LePenseur: You were definitely “taking the piss”, then, that was much simpler than the hourlong history lesson. Pacattack: lol Pacattack: i mean in RM’s defense you really did need that Pacattack: Unironically, I’m actually serious Pacattack: there’s no other way to grok just how much of a disaster Britain is always and forever Pacattack: explaining the bits will tell you what the government is structured like but not what it IS Pacattack: wouldve just wound up trying to explain that after the fact instead of before NETENCARTA posted:COMINTERN CONGRESS VOTING MEMBER: NO RepeatingMyself: The Union also hasn’t applied to be a Comintern voting member, at least not yet. The whole shambles is barely over a year old and all the sub-countries still like keeping their Congress votes and voices. SkyrocketsNFlight: THAT will be a problem, guaranteed. The Politburo is going to throw a shitfit if the Brits can keep all their little votes but they get poo poo for having votes for the Soviet republics RepeatingMyself: I mean I can’t speak for everyone but I drat well hope it doesn’t last. The whole reason behind pushing to get the country back together at all is that none of the subcountries were long-term viable on their own, even Scotland or Wales. Pacattack: at least not as modern states Pacattack: hell, even with all the people the civil war killed the island still isn’t food independent Pacattack: if you’re landlocked on Britannia then first off, wow, that’s a feat Pacattack: and second off good loving luck surviving some of the winters we’ve had recently without a port Pacattack: If you somehow manage that and you want, say, a tractor or a lightbulb or god forbid a computer? Pacattack: can’t build those in a shed in the midlands RepeatingMyself: Which was ultimately what pushed all the pink and other elements into line with the Comintern, to be frank. That Socialist Aid Program is one hell of a carrot. RepeatingMyself: Ideally as time goes on, the smaller countries will merge into each other and with the bigger ones and we can actually start DOING things again instead of being the punchline disaster child of Europe for twenty years while everyone else does respectable things. Signora-di-Calabria: For what it’s worth, RM, we respect YOU. LePenseur: Agreed. CherryRye: Yeah SkyrocketsNFlight: Very much so [. . .] Pacattack: Oh I see how it is. AlleMAN: Hahahaha AlleMAN: Serious though, and you, you Welsh kobold bastard AlleMAN: We all know plenty well that just because you usually fire random shots into the conversation doesn’t mean you’re stupid LePenseur: If you were just a troll we’d have kicked you ages back, Pac. Pacattack: well Pacattack: drat Pacattack: hard to keep an ironic veneer up in the face of that SkyrocketsNFlight: Lol RepeatingMyself: Thanks, everyone. quote:Thus no matter whether the most hardline Marxist-Leninist, the most radical anarcho-syndicalist, or the most mild-mannered republican is asked, they can all find some piece of British history – Wat Tyler, the Levellers, Cromwell, the Diggers, Peterloo, Cable Street – that they can now truly try to embody, rather than merely append to the trappings of monarchy and old social class. Whether the British Republic will succeed or collapse will, ultimately, be up to the people of Britain – the first time her people have truly had such a say in hundreds of years.
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Oct 15, 2023 11:04
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Redeye Flight posted:Chatlog, irc.fuber.net, #ChatAllNite (Eng. trans.) A very good and fun read! No netsplits taking out half the channel though.
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Oct 16, 2023 20:10
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Mmmm now that's the kind of both world building and irony that sates my appetite
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Nov 6, 2023 09:50
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May 1, 1987 12:01 AM There had been some argument about how to begin. It’s a big moment, after all, an auspicious day. It can’t just start like any other. It can’t even start like any other May Day. This is the big one, the biggest one since ‘68. For a third and hopefully final time we begin a revolution on the first of May – this one a revolution not against capitalism or imperialism or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, but against nuclear annihilation. Today we are putting the genie back in the bottle, closing Pandora’s box, breaking the sword of Damocles. People thought it should feel big, feel important. It shouldn’t feel like any other day. But what to do? The annoying reality of the situation is that, in practice, it’s mostly boring. Thousands of nuclear warheads and delivery systems – gravity bombs, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, torpedoes, artillery shells, sea mines, all the myriad ways humans have come up with to deliver atomic fire – need to be secured, made safe, and transported to staging areas, before shipment to the final staging area at Baikonur and, finally, offworld. It is mostly going to be days – weeks, realistically – of winches, cranes, forklifts, trucks, trains, ships. Lift, stack, load, unload. And paperwork – piles of paperwork, paperwork at every step of the process, every sheet triple-checked and signed off and handed off to an inspector for cross-referencing and signed off again. And it will be so maddeningly slow. Everyone remembers the sirens, the stolen shuttle burning suborbital, the double-flash in the sky. Never again. We’re never letting it happen again. We’ll know exactly where every single one of these bombs is, every step of the way, and they won’t move an inch without eyes directly on them, and no one will get within five hundred yards of them without the permission of our armed guards. It’s the guards who are roused first. This will be the first real test of the new International People’s Army, its first proper operation outside of training. Small cadres of IPA and Navy personnel have been dispatched to every nuclear-armed member state, stationed at every target facility, with a full briefing and a go-code. Last night they were ordered to standby and told to expect that go code at exactly 12:01AM Ascension Standard Time. So, how to begin? It begins like this: Ten thousand pairs of eyes gaze intently at ten thousand screens. On all of them, at the exact same moment, a few lines of text appear. EXECUTE RESOLUTION A-151. USE WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY. FOR THE REVOLUTION. At 12:02AM Ascension time, the global Emergency Broadcast System starts kicking in, and radio broadcasts, television programs, even Internetwork chatrooms are preempted. One verse of L’Internationale, in instrumental, rings out across the worlds. A simple recorded message follows, drafted by committee and recorded in multiple languages by multiple anonymous functionaries. “In accordance with the will of the people, and as mandated by the People’s Congress, full nuclear disarmament is now in effect. Operatives of the General Inspectorate of the Comintern Judiciary, in cooperation with the International People’s Army, will be carrying out this directive imminently. Remain calm, do not impede their work, and rest assured that normal activities will resume shortly. The era of nuclear war is over. Workers of all worlds, unite.” With that, normal programming resumes. The message is a one-two punch. Nuclear disarmament, yes. Who is doing the disarming, too. This is the first test of the army, sure. It is also the first test of GIJOE, the General Inspectorate Judicial Operatives and Enforcers, the Comintern’s brand new shiny civilian law enforcement agency. The Army will maintain security and ensure that no one disrupts the process, but it’s the GIJOEs who will actually, formally take possession of the weapons, lay eyes on each and every one, and order them sent on their way. Only five months old, the organization doesn’t even have a uniform or insignia yet, and there is much debate about whether or not one will ever be established. What they do have, every last one, is a card in their pocket, a card which empowers them to act on the authority of JUCOM, the equally new Comintern Judiciary, and granting them broad powers and immunities when acting in this capacity. To impede one in the discharge of their duties is to carry out an act of rebellion against the Comintern itself. In Appalachia it’s a kindly old woman, a miner’s widow, who killed her first policeman during the 1921 miners’ uprisings and is highly amused at the thought of being one herself now. In Murmansk it’s a retired KGB officer in the old uniform. In Paris it’s a tattooed punk, spiked denim vest and spiked hair. In Germany it’s a Cydonia survivor. All of them are agents of the Comintern. All of them act at once. There was prior warning, of course. It’s a piece of legislation, it’s not secret, and the debate leading up to it had been ongoing for years before it was finally enacted. Even so, even up until today, there were people who were convinced it wouldn’t actually happen. They wouldn’t actually go through with it, they wouldn’t actually take the nukes, and if they did, it would happen at some nebulous far-off point in the future. We don’t have to be ready now, right? We can drag our feet a little bit longer, a few weeks, a few months, a few years, until they change their mind or forget about it. There were others who were more than ready, eager, thanking whatever higher power they chose to thank that the Bomb wasn’t going to be their problem anymore. The eager and the reticent alike, all will turn them over in the end. The decision has been made, and to oppose it would be to go against most of the world, most of the human race, all of its military and economic might – and to do so alone, separately, in an increasingly large and scary universe. There are voices of protest, complaints and grumbling, but no action. The paranoid among the Comintern’s agents think ‘no action publicly, no action yet’. A few seconds after word goes out on Earth, it reaches the Moon. A few minutes later, Venus. Nearly an hour later, Mars. It will reach the Krusenstern in about a day. The railguns, on Earth and in orbit, are placed on high alert, just in case the Americans, or what’s left of GLADIO, decide to try something stupid. 12:00PM Everyone realizes, after a while, that they’ve been holding their breath a bit, waiting for something bad to happen, for something to go wrong. Maybe something dramatic – an attack, an act of sabotage, an accident – or maybe just somebody trying to stop them, somebody denying them access to a site, refusing to turn over a warhead. It hasn’t happened yet. Oh, there have been delays, sure, but at the end of the day the GIJOEs, with their escorts in sky-blue dress uniforms, have been permitted to go where they wish, shown the things they wish to see. Nothing is missing so far – though, of course, it will take days to catalogue every weapon, to confirm every one is actually where it is supposed to be, and there may well be some missing, and we will have to cross that bridge when we get there. The laws are public record, the debates over those laws televised, and everyone knew this was coming. The arguments continue, and likely will continue, and there is not unanimity in the response to these changes. There is anger, bitter anger, from those who believe the Comintern is taking away their means to defend themselves, leaving the world open to capitalist attack again, sacrificing all the gains we have fought and died by the tens of millions for. There is disagreement over the loss of sovereignty, what that means, whether it’s good or bad. There are crowds gathering outside of some of the military bases – some of them are crowds of protesters, some of them are crowds of supporters waving Comintern flags and Nuclear Disarmament banners and peace signs, some are just...watching. In Berlin, a woman who has been blind since her eyes were seared by nuclear fire stands in front of a crowd, speaking into a megaphone to celebrants at a May Day event, calling it the greatest day of her life. In PRCal, an angry man speaks into a megaphone of his own, holding it in his one remaining arm, his left having been burned off by napalm during the Great Revolutionary War, about how Kissinger and Agnew and the Joint Chiefs aren’t giving up their nukes, and it’s suicide to give up ours when the war still isn’t over. In the Orbital Defense Command bunkers, across the world, nervous operators stare at the sensors. At the railgun batteries, the technicians monitor and check and recheck, the gunners stand ready. In orbit, the FESTER sensors watch, DOROTHY listens, MOSA’s cosmonauts wait. France goes first, in the end. Of course they do. They went first in 1871 and first in 1968. Only in 1917 did the Russians beat them to the punch. They were ready for this. They already had their bombs packed up, ready to load. At every base where they were stored, near simultaneously, they’re loaded directly onto the trucks, and, near simultaneously, they set out under heavy armed guard, a silent, stoic May Day parade. From polling, right up until yesterday, most people in the Comintern still assumed there would be another nuclear war someday, that so long as they existed it was an inevitability. Maybe that’s why the proposal passed so easily. Maybe that’s why no one is trying to stop it now. Maybe people aren’t willing to accept that anymore. Maybe one apocalypse is enough. 7:00PM Academician Klaus Fuchs spent nine years in a British prison. In 1943 Fuchs, an exiled German communist and a doctor of theoretical physics, had joined the Manhattan Project, and from then until 1949, had passed information to the Soviet Union. Upon his detection and capture, he was convicted of espionage, served out his sentence, and immigrated to what was then East Germany, where he resumed his scientific career as easily and successfully as though it had never been interrupted. Now 75 years old, he is mostly retired, but still highly respected in German academia. He doesn’t talk about it much – the Project, the prison, the spying. He prefers to focus on his work after he got out of prison, on the latest developments in Trans-Newtonian physics, on their implications for the field as a whole. Today, at the May Day commemoration in Berlin, he stands at the podium and says he would do it all again, that if we hadn’t had the Bomb then, the capitalists would have burned the Earth to ash – but that we don’t need it anymore. 11:00PM Disarmament is a bit of a misnomer, of course. The bombs will still exist, they will just be kept offworld, and pointed outward, against...whatever might be out there. There are, after all, clearly others out there, and they are clearly not all on the same page. Some of them are friends, though. The Krusenstern expedition has been teaching our friends, and learning from them, and we now have a shared alphabet, a script that can be used to communicate via text and a standard encoding for that script. From that we are developing a shared lexicon, and more and more complex words and sentences every day. We’ve started talking basic concepts of governance, economics, and politics, and trying to explain what body is speaking to them and who they represent, and attempting to learn the same about them. A regularly scheduled status update message includes the latest conversations with them, the most detailed yet. quote:The (untranslatable – Council? Senate? Some sort of group separate from the whole) wishes the people of the third planet well on their (holiday – literally ‘large day’ which is probably a colloquialism) in celebration of (probably ‘revolution’? literally ‘exit’ or possibly ‘escape’), and from our (untranslatable – definitely referring to a place, but not the same word they’ve been using) ask a time of (sadness/mourning?) in memory of the failure of our own. We are not from here and are not here by choice, and are no longer (untranslatable – something related to music/singing?), but are glad we are not alone. We eagerly anticipate meeting (face to face – literally ‘with lights’, probably referring to bioluminescence). Right, space, then. The Mission Control team tear themselves away from the televisions, still reporting on the Big Events of the past day, and get back to work.
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Dec 14, 2023 09:42
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It would not be remiss to say that the entire Deutsche Volksrepublik holds its breath that day. Germany's stance on the bomb and its disarmament is, of course, well on record. But a nation so cavalierly bludgeoned by nuclear weaponry is always going to wince, and brace itself for disappointment. Why would anyone who hasn't experienced this take the hard road? Herr Fuchs' statements also cause quite the tizzy, regardless of his ultimate conclusion -- there is an unfortunate tendency in German thought to learn the lesson of the past but forget the context, and thus a statement that the bomb was ever good is hardly universally popular. It is an incredible relief when news comes that the French are all-in. Nuclear weapons meant everything to France before the revolution, as a symbol of independent might, and Germany has not forgotten that. But this France is not that France, and to see them leading the charge is the first true sign that this is, in some way, a different world. Half a world away, at the same time, you can bet that the Japanese let out a very similar breath. Mister Bates posted:The (untranslatable – Council? Senate? Some sort of group separate from the whole) wishes the people of the third planet well on their (holiday – literally ‘large day’ which is probably a colloquialism) in celebration of (probably ‘revolution’? literally ‘exit’ or possibly ‘escape’), and from our (untranslatable – definitely referring to a place, but not the same word they’ve been using) ask a time of (sadness/mourning?) in memory of the failure of our own. We are not from here and are not here by choice, and are no longer (untranslatable – something related to music/singing?), but are glad we are not alone. We eagerly anticipate meeting (face to face – literally ‘with lights’, probably referring to bioluminescence). Thoughts on this statement: This is one of the most comprehensive messages we've yet received and a very (fittingly) illuminating one. The possibility does exist that we have perfectly conveyed the political notion and we are, in fact, speaking to proper comrades, but in particular I'm looking intriguingly at 'exit/escape'. Our knowledge base and overall picture of the space situation is not perfect, but we do have enough to draw some reasonable conclusions. What this reads to me is that Minerva 7 was used by the Roswells as a prison planet. We already surmised something of that sort; now we can basically confirm it. The Minervans are not native to it, and are likely a species held in servitude, vassalage, or some other kind of oppressive relationship by the larger Roswell polity. These Minervans specifically attempted an "escape" -- a revolution to throw off their chains of control -- and were imprisoned here as punishment. They're definitively cut off from the rest of their species -- I read the music/singing related bit as kind of a "greater harmony" reference to their larger species. Whether they've actually formed a similar kind of socialist society is uncertain -- they have some kind of local system. However, they can tell that whatever the specifics are, we undertook a similar "escape" from a controlling polity and thus are, at least, kindred spirits. They certainly don't seem to expect to be exchanging one jailer for another.
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Dec 14, 2023 11:35
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Posadism is a truism -- but we ARE the aliens. Species of the Universe, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
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Dec 14, 2023 15:24
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Congratulations on global nuclear disarmament! Now we can get to work rearming with something better  Also, thank you for your kind words, jellyfish-monsters from beyond the moon, we can't wait to finally meet you in person on Medusa. Hm, should we bring a fruit basket or something? We should ask if they want anything. Sorium, obviously, but maybe some fun cultural artifacts.
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Dec 14, 2023 15:46
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PRCal, being largely an inheritor of the old American political traditions had a strong view on free speech. Even more so since student protests had triggered the overthrow of Reagan's government. So it was little surprise that there were protests about disarmament. And counter-protests to those protests.Mister Bates posted:In PRCal, an angry man speaks into a megaphone of his own, holding it in his one remaining arm, his left having been burned off by napalm during the Great Revolutionary War, about how Kissinger and Agnew and the Joint Chiefs aren’t giving up their nukes, and it’s suicide to give up ours when the war still isn’t over. Despite the angry words the people mostly remain peaceful and the Guardians of the Peace (inspired by and named after Ireland's Garda Síochána) are able to dissuade the few hotheads inclined towards more than words. California's weapons are swiftly removed, and most everyone breathes a sign of relief. The memory of the near-attack on Vandenburg is remembered, as well as the fact that it wasn't more nuclear weapons that averted that threat. Nevertheless, there is apprehension about the capitalist forces both east and west and hope that they will soon be disarmed as well.
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Dec 14, 2023 16:45
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I should note something: we do not know what the Minervans were for, or against. Yet, before we make any assumptions we must return to the original foundation of Marxist thought: material conditions create economic and political systems. We do not know how this applies to the Minervans, or indeed, any aliens, yet. For all we know, their politics could be as alien as their biology, stemming from vastly different physical needs and environments. Let's not try to square-peg-round-hole this thing.
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Dec 14, 2023 17:15
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quote:wishes the people of the third planet well on their (holiday – literally ‘large day’ which is probably a colloquialism) One might even call it... A big day. For something.
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Dec 14, 2023 18:20
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I wouldn't read too much into the Minervan message besides the fact that they're trying to be friendly and butter us up. I mean, they're stranded completely at our mercy on an energyless pebble in the rear end end of deep space. They'd have to be pretty dumb to not just make approving noises at whatever we told them even if they're all secret turbo-fascists imprisoned here for crimes against the galaxy. But it is a good sign that we continue to develop a rapport, and I'm inclined to believe they probably aren't turbo-Hitlers based on the surrounding evidence. Just... the giant glowing jellyfish from outer space probably have a socio-political structure that doesn't neatly fit into the framework of 1860s European political thought.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:16
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Crazycryodude posted:I wouldn't read too much into the Minervan message besides the fact that they're trying to be friendly and butter us up. I mean, they're stranded completely at our mercy on an energyless pebble in the rear end end of deep space. They'd have to be pretty dumb to not just make approving noises at whatever we told them even if they're all secret turbo-fascists imprisoned here for crimes against the galaxy. Very much this. Whatever their political affiliations were originally, they're likely willing to at least appear amenable to whatever we, the local major potentates, are into. They likely know as much about our political situation as we do about theirs, and saying "Congratulations on your revolution against whatever thing you successfully rebelled against" is a pretty noncommittally good thing to say in general. At this point they're probably thankful they haven't somehow accidentally provoked us into annihilating them and taking their technology from the wreckage. I mean I know we wouldn't do that, but they don't.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:35
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Much of the USSR spent the day in a muted, quiet disbelief. The newly enlarged party and attendant changes up the chain to the real decision makers wouldn't really change anything fundamental. The USSR wouldn't really give up the most decisive quantitative and qualitative military edge that made it a giant astride the world, now with no equal. The leadership might say they're listening and the people were truly in charge now, but surely that doesn't mean ideals wouldn't remain secondary to the maintenance of power. It's Slavic politics after all, and happy endings are banned. Yet, the debates had been held. A decision reached and enacted, and the same process repeated in the People's Congress. The nuclear weapons would be removed, the rocket forces dismantled, and any production facility not able to be repurposed to energy generation shuttered or under extremely closely monitored maintenance (in case we need more warheads for a space based threat, says the Party spokesperson, no one really believes him). And the day came, and the trucks were loaded, with barely a word of protest or delay, sometimes by the very same men who were responsible for keeping the weapons working for decades. And no one could quite believe it. And then the day went, and the weapons were gone. The world had truly changed, and the people of the USSR had no choice but to really believe it. And a chorus of voices rose to ask, not with a weary determination to endure, but hope, "What next?"
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Dec 14, 2023 20:40
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Asterite34 posted:Very much this. Whatever their political affiliations were originally, they're likely willing to at least appear amenable to whatever we, the local major potentates, are into. They likely know as much about our political situation as we do about theirs, and saying "Congratulations on your revolution against whatever thing you successfully rebelled against" is a pretty noncommittally good thing to say in general. "We mourn that we weren't able to do the same, which is why we're stuck here" isn't though, that's the more specifically interesting part.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:52
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In the UAWR, the mood is different from elsewhere. Technically speaking, the UAWR does have an arsenal, or did: of the five weapons produced by the commonwealth of Australia, only three are accounted for. One of them detonated accidentally in Canberra, shattering the old government. One was found in a Western Australian arsenal, a second in a bunker in Sydney one year ago. The other two are still missing. With disarmament in the spotlight, both Comintern and local operatives are scrambling to find them, two needles in a haystack the size of the entire world.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:57
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Archive file: Speech of Chairman Stanislas Petrov to the Soviet Union, 1 May 1987 posted:Comrades! Redeye Flight fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Dec 16, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 23:06
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Kalmar's physical contribution was relatively modest, a handful of half-finished nuclear warheads and a few nuclear reactors heading for disassembly or refurbishment, aided by a larger than expected contingent of volunteers for GIJOE. For a polity that never deployed nor suffered direct impact from nuclear weapons, vox populi polling from all over the union could be summed up as "good riddance" as went about a largely unchanged may day celebration. For the diplomats and politicians it was a much bigger celebration, the capstone to the effort laid down the last decade, if not longer. Messages of congratulations and thanks were sent all over the CI, hundreds upon hundreds of electronic messages, to the many dedicated and talented individuals, organizations and polities who had been essential to making the day's events a reality. When later asked about their feelings, many chose to quote the speech made by the elder statesman and lifelong communist, Knut Olsson, that he made during the may day ceremony in Stockholm "When my time comes and I pass from this world, I will do so with the peace that comes from knowing the children born today are spared the terrifying specters of nuclear war."
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Dec 15, 2023 23:19
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