Part #260: As the Sparks Fly Upward
“Crocus Vale to White Gate. Please confirm, authorisation level GALAHAD, Greenwich Abbey Lewisham, GALAHAD...understood. Documents, Finchley Rainham. Individual, Finchley Rainham. Code name: DESCARTES. Deptford, Ealing, Southwark, DESCARTES, confirmed. Crocus Vale personnel to meet DESCARTES and escort to Gold Dolphin. Confirmed...”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
*
From: Motext Pages SX211K-M [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pagse are listed under “SSAAX Foreign Literature Revision: Syllabus A”. The additional ‘S’ does not appear to be a typo but a different acronym, possibly standing for ‘Special’ from context.
It should also be noted that this page was encrypted and would theoretically require a code to be entered to decipher it, although the code was a relatively simple cipher method and was easily broken by Thande Institute computers by the method of brute force attack.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
“Refugiado Literature” is a phrase you will frequently encounter in studies of literature in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Frustratingly, though, the term has two very different meanings! Firstly, it can refer to writings, usually in Meridian Spanish originally, made by the “refugiados” who escaped the Pandoric Revolution. Secondly, it can related to works written by people in other countries who feature such refugiados as characters. The latter is often subject to stereotypes that it applies particularly to low-grade, sensationalist ratiocinic novels and sequents. It is certainly true that the Meridian Refugiado was a frequently-applied character archetype in these tales, a mysterious foreigner with something to hide. Often the Refugiado is not the murderer in the tale in question, but are instead an “aniseed rag.”[1] Their secret is not relevant to the case, but involving the fact that they are not a dispossessed wealthy scion of a corporate oligarch, but rather a con man or woman from a humbler background, pretending to have that romantic identity in order to worm their way into higher society for criminal purposes. This is a cliché, but clichés start for a reason, and newspapers of the era in many countries do record examples of both genuine and fake Refugiados moving through society.
Despite the stereotype, Refugiados also regularly appear in more respectable literature from this era. They are a reflection of the spirit of the age of the Flippant Era, a reminder (like the equally frequent archetype of the ‘crazed’ Contrasanchezista with his First Black Scare pamphlets) that serve as reminders of the threat of the Revolution, beyond the horizon of the superficial world of groovetapes, cocktail parties and celebrities. Of course, precisely how these two character archetypes are treated is often highly diagnostic of whether a piece set in this era was written at the time or in hindsight!
But English Literature is a field open to all; you elite students are here for rarer treats. Let’s go back to that first definition of “Refugiado Literature”, the works written by refugiados themselves. This term may itself be misapplied, if you were worried things were not complicated enough(!) Properly, there should be a distinction between “Antebellum Meridian Literature”, describing works written during the Long Peace period in the leadup to the Pandoric War, and Refugiado Literature. You might think that these two are easy to separate, but in fact they’re not.
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Plenty of Antebellum books survive, though sadly often in either imperfect translated form, or else in genuine Spanish but subject to the censor’s scissors of the Internal Security Bureau in Mexico or the Office for Public Decency in Spain. Often no trace remains of the original, expurgated versions originally sold to readers in the free UPSA. The Biblioteka Mundial may well have held these in its fabled Grey Archive, whose contents were allegedly open only to a single figure number of senior Societists, and which (according to rumour) was manned by illiterate archivists in order to avoid polluting their minds with ideologically unsound writings. However, if this Archive truly existed, it was unquestionably destroyed in the Last War. We can choose to decry this loss of heritage, or resolve to treasure what remains.
There are rather fewer Refugiado books, as one might imagine; not that many potential writers were able to flee the Revolution, after all. The problem emerges in how we define what constitutes a Refugiado book. Many people described in biographical dictionaries as Refugiados were not, strictly, fleeing from what had been “the UPSA”. Instead, before the Revolution, they had dwelt in other Hermandad member states. Some had had Meridian citizenship and merely lived abroad, whereas others were strictly Pernambucanos or Peruvians or whatever. In those early days before the ASN’s rules, the distinct identities were not strictly enforced, and besides, a Refugiado would get more respect if he described himself simply as a Meridian. With the strength of the Hermandad, many outside the Novamund did not draw strict distinctions between the people of the UPSA and of their vassals.
The second complication involves the fact that the Revolution did not spread across South America in a matter of days, no matter what the opening narration of a dozen sensationalist films might suggest! It’s important to understand what exactly was going on in the former Hermandad states from which many of the Refugiado writers were drawn. All the states in South America that were not part of the UPSA, with the exception of Portuguese-Brazil, were sometimes called “Los Ecuatoriales,” or even “Los Ecuadores” for short, meaning ‘the equatorials’. From west to east, these comprised the Kingdom of Peru, the Kingdom of New Granada, the American-controlled Kingdom of Venezuela, the Republic of Guyana, the colonial outpost of French Guyana, and finally the Republic of Pernambuco. All of these were effectively under the control of the UPSA with the exception of Venezuela and French Guyana, but this was not to say they were the same. There was a great diversity of culture and practice in these states that was lost to the world, and even the most fervent Diversitarians today will frequently forget that they were not just another part of the antebellum UPSA.
Paradoxically it was Peru, which had been part of the UPSA between the Second and Third Platinean Wars, which was most fiercely defensive of its independence, and followed orders from Cordoba on a more transactional basis. King Gabriel II was a reformer who, if his reign had not been interrupted by war and revolution, might have done great things for his nation. Peru’s participation in the Pandoric War was always rather reluctant and half-hearted, sending artillery to Carolina and ships to battles in the Pacific. The criollo people of Peru were very cautious of Alvaro Monterroso’s election victory in the UPSA at the start of the war, fearing (accurately) that given the chance, he would wish to reclaim Peru for the UPSA. This was an ancestral fear for Peruvians, whose patriotic songs and stories emphasised how dreadful it had been for proud Lima to be ruled from upstart, distant Cordoba (and unaccountably never mentioned that it had formerly been the other way around). Gabriel kept his throne in part because he was seen as a bulwark against Meridian rule, and any radical revolution to overthrow his sleepy regime might end with Fuerzas Armadas troops on the streets and Peru reduced to a handful of provinces in someone else’s country.
Monterroso was also particularly feared by Peruvian criollos because he enjoyed support from the Aymara and other native peoples within the UPSA (helped by his key political ally Katari Martinez). This put fuel on the flames of the ever-present fear of the Meridians helping the Tahuantinsuya revolt again. The Tahuantinsuya had been granted more civil rights by Gabriel II compared to the oppression of his father, but many of them still dreamed of the days when they had had full autonomy within the UPSA, ruled by an openly-proclaimed Sapa Inca.
One might imagine that Peru’s national spirit therefore burned hotly against the Societists, but this was in fact not the case. Societists were already tolerated within Peru before the Pandoric War, and surviving eyewitness accounts suggest that they were somewhat more visible there as a mass movement than in the UPSA. As has so wearyingly been the case throughout the twentieth century, when Societists preached the idea of homogenising all cultures, the Peruvian criollos imagined that the result would look more or less like what they already had, whilst eliminating the troublesome Tahuantinsuya as a people. It was portrayed, effectively, as a more humane alternative to the paleo-Jacobin ideal of exterminating ‘lesser’ peoples, without all of that inconvenient blood on one’s hands and phlogisticated bodies to dispose of. This was very much not the ideal of Sanchez, but it was politically convenient for a movement seeking support. The leadership of MaKe Lopez (Markus Lupus), a Gwayese professor at the University of Lima who had been one of Sanchez’s first converts, illustrates the fact that this was a knowing deception rather than a sincerely-mistaken alteration of Sanchez’s ideas.
Lupus’ influence was part of the reason why Peru was the nation beyond the UPSA which was most closely involved with the initial phase of the Revolution, despite its distance. Societists staged a coup in Lima shortly after word of the Scientific Attack arrived. Crucial government institutions were in Societist hands, and pseudo-Societist ‘militias’ (not Alfarus’ later Celatores) defending them against alleged cobrist and Septentrophile revolutionaries plotting to overthrow the King. Gabriel II, bereft of genuine supporters in the sudden absence of an external threat, was forced into an unquestionably difficult position. He met with the local Societist leader Raphael Quinones[2] (later Rafolus Quinonus) who was also the brother-in-law of Lupus. Following this meeting and discussions elsewhere, Gabriel announced he would abdicate from the throne, but his son the crown prince Francis (Francisco) would be made a Zonal Rej by the Societists under the name Franziskus Borbonus. Lima would become the capital of its own Zone, and would explicitly not be ruled from Cordoba (or Buenos Aires a.k.a. Zon1Urb1). This agreement was honoured by the Societists, but in practice under Alfarus the Zonal Rejes were rather less powerful than they were on paper.
The Refugiado writings of former Peruvians are dominated by the question of how they portray Gabriel, either directly or in passing by implication. A minority fall into the category called ‘Gabriel the Good’ by analysts, in which the king is portrayed as a man making a bitter decision to spare his people conflict at the cost of their national soul, and who washes his hands of the decision like Pilate through his abdication. The others, conversely, castigate him for his ‘capitulation’ and suggest that it was the Societists who forced him to abdicate, rather than it being a principled decision on his part.
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The Kingdom of New Granada was also part of the Empire of New Spain, but lacked Peru’s unique history. It was far distant from the centre of political gravity in the City of Mexico, but lacked Peru’s drive to operate independently. The degree of vagueness and drift in New Granada’s rule was illustrated by the fact that President Studebaker of the ENA had managed to successfully split off rebellious Venezuela in 1862. Following the defeat of New Granadine forces at the Battle of Barinas, the country fell into the orbit of the UPSA via the Hermandad. However, with the accession of King Diego to the throne in 1889, matters changed somewhat. Diego saw the reclamation of Venezuela as being the key victory needed that would allow New Granada to assert herself once more and throw off the Meridian yoke. He began reorganising and building up the New Granadine armed forces accordingly, being one of few leaders (royal or otherwise) to accurately predict that the Long Peace was coming to an end. Of course, this is not to portray him as a great prophet who foresaw a global war—surviving writings suggest he merely expected that Venezuela would collapse on the death of King Albert if not before.
When the Pandoric War came in truth, Diego attacked Venezuela, but was surprised by the strength of the Venezuelan resistance. The country only fell after ove a year of resistance, and the final collapse was largely driven by a small but modern Meridian army under Juan José Pichegru. Pichegru, the grandson of (Jean-)Charles Pichegru, was a man whose military decisions were usually better than those he made in civilian life. From a storied military family known for their adherence to the old Colorado Party, named for the controversial Castelli, J. J. Pichegru had instead become a rather conservative Adamantine Party member and close to many corporate interests. Some have suggested his decision was motivated by the cynical notion that traditional Colorado interests had become irrelevant to the calcified political landscape. Equally, he may have gone into the Fuerzas Armadas because it was expected of him, and because it seemed that peace would never end. If his decisions were truly motivated by those assertions, they were very badly timed. War broke out and Monterroso won the election. Someone like Pichegru was an awkward inconvenienceto Monterroso; he did not fit the narrative. However, Pichegru was also a reasonably effective commander whom Monterroso did not want to waste. The Venezuelan front was the ideal solution, being somewhat important, but safely a long way away from core Meridian territory or the crucial Carolinian front where the war journalists were.
There was bad blood between Pichegru and King Diego following the fall of Caracas, which continued as Pichegru (on Monterroso’s orders) continued to run a military occupation rather than handing over Venezuela to Santa Fe [Bogota]. Pichegru was far from unique; his army, in fact, seemed mostly comprised of the sort of officers who were good at their jobs but had been a bit too close to the Priestley regime and its corporate backers. Even as the war turned against the UPSA, Monterroso was in no hurry to bring them home.
Following the Scientific Attack, the Societists infamously sent Jorge Suarez to the ENA with a gold ransom for Venezuela. Already an audacious move, this becomes even more of a bluff when one realises that Venezuela was not even under Societist control at the time. Pichegru was still military governor. In order to understand the following dynamics (and their influence on Refugiado Literature) we must now broaden our scope to the east.
The French-led International Expeditionary Force (IEF) landed in Recife in 1901 and took over the former Republic of Pernambuco, which had been held by rather confused Meridian and Auxiliary[3] garrisons. The Duc de Berry approached the governments of the other Ecuadores for support. It must be remembered that his mission was not to crush Societism and restore the UPSA, but to secure and safeguard French interests in South America. Stadtholder Anthonius Verbeek and the Lords Nineteen in Belem swiftly responded to Berry’s envoys, signing agreements that the Republic of Guyana would maintain the Hermandad’s pre-existing agreements with France and protect those French subjects resident in Guyana. This is often portrayed in Refugiado Literature as a hypocritical move, but it is unlikely Verbeek would have seen it this way. Of all the Ecuadores’ leaders, Verbeek was probably the only one to actually have any in-depth knowledge of Societism, having read and admired Sanchez’s works. Some previous Stadtholders elected by the people of Guyana (those few who had the right to vote) had sincerely believed that one day the Dutch Republic might be freed from Flemish tyranny and they could return. But Verbeek believed that was now an atavistic dream, and his role was to secure the best and most profitable place in the world for his people and himself. He was no longer particularly wedded to Dutch language, culture or religion, and saw Societism as a path that could deliver peace and prosperity. Unlike Gabriel of Peru, Verbeek unquestionably knew what he was getting his country in for, which makes his actions all the more damning in the public narrative.
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Berry’s envoys also came to Diego of New Granada, who hemmed and hawed over them, and Pichegru in Venezuela, who angrily rejected them. Pichegru regarded himself as a Meridian patriot and declared himself appalled by the French’s intrusion into Meridian and Hermandad territory. His actions may have been driven by the fact that, as a third-generation French immigrant, he came from a family used to having to proclaim their loyalty to the UPSA and rejection of being French cryptic reservists [fifth columnists].
This left Pichegru isolated, a situation which led to many later American critics attacking President Faulkner for not intervening at this point to take back Venezuela. Some of Faulkner’s defenders argue that the full details of the situation there did not reach Fredericksburg until the moment had passed, but the reality is more likely that Faulkner was simply indifferent. Nonetheless, the ‘betrayal’ became a cause celebre of Princess Daniele’s exilic Venezuelan community in the ENA.
If Faulkner would not take advantage of Pichegru’s isolation, Diego would. In a move that generations of schoolboys and –girls read about whilst slapping their foreheads in disbelief, Diego ignored the shadow to the south and attacked Pichegru’s forces. He cared only that the UPSA was no longer around to protest. Of course, this is only how it seems in hindsight. At the time, almost no-one realised the full implications of the Pandoric Revolution.
Pichegru fought the New Granadines for six months. Berry refused to respond to Diego’s appeals for assistance; his role here was to promote peace, not war. Diego angrily therefore rejected calls to join the Marseilles Protocol, at a time when French protection might have saved New Granada from the Threefold Eye. Following the successful conquest of Venezuela, Pichegru and many of his officers fled overseas via Guyana (willing to help anyone with money). Pichegru became an important Refugiado voice himself, pointedly not in France (where many Refugiados went) but in that old nominal ally of the UPSA, Russia. The third country to see many Refugiados arrive was the Philippine Republic, now aligned with Siam, the country that had arguably dragged the UPSA into the Pandoric War in the first place. The Philippines was the only nation where Meridian Refugiados arrived in sufficient numbers, and from sufficiently powerful backgrounds, that they had a large impact on its politics and culture. It is likely this success we have to thank for the fact that the Combine, in the radical 1930s, rejected an ambitious (but very ideologically heterodox) proposal to use mass armies of assassins to hunt down and kill every last self-declared Meridian exile in the world, deleting the last trace of the UPSA identity. The Philippine example convinced the Rejes that there were simply too many to kill.
Meanwhile, Verbeek had approached the Combine government in Zon1Urb1 with his proposals for Guyana to join the Combine. Although it is believed Alfarus suspected a trap, secret treaties were signed. In 1906, with the IEF intervention having come to an end in name and almost in reality, the Republic of Guyana formally announced it was dissolving and would voluntarily become part of the so-called Liberated Zones.
1907 saw the French presence in South America once again reduced to French Guyana, which had been guaranteed by the Republic of Guyana as part of the agreement with Berry. Though the Combine would obviously not recognise a treaty signed with a nation (or the continued existence of national territory) as legitimate, this was allowed to stand de facto. The continued existence of French Guyana fit well with informal agreements that French subjects in Combine territory could retain their property. Having made those agreements, the Combine could then turn the screw on its laws to pressure those French subjects to leave its territory and go to French Guyana as a sort of enormous refugee camp. Many Frenchmen and –women living in what had been the UPSA thought twice about their decision to stay when speaking or writing their language became a legal offence, for example.
At the start of 1908, aside from the aforementioned French Guyana, the only remaining non-Combine territory in South America was part of New Granada. Having had his famous army worn down through the conquest of Venezuela, King Diego then proceeded to lose it. This came by a combination of Guyanese-aided Kleinkrieger activity, followed by Celator armies. These openly moved in following Mercier’s victory in the 1905 French elections and the drawing down of French and IEF forces. By now, the Celatores had swapped their pre-war surplus blue or tan uniforms[4] for new bright white ones, at least when on parade. This aligned with Pedrus Dominikus’ rhetoric that the Celatores would be ‘spotless’, and any who committed the unforgiveable crime of slaying another human being would have permanently stained his uniform with blood, the mark of Cain that would lead to his (very, very delayed) execution. In practice, even when the impractical white uniforms were actually used in combat, well, those former PAWC chemists working on improving the Scientific Attack death-luft would have to find time to make some very, very good new stain removers.
Venezuela was lost, and then much of antebellum New Granada, with former-Peruvian celatores conquering (and removing from the map) the provinces of Guayaquil, Quito and Loja. Santa Fe itself fell in the sweltering heat of July 1908. The New Spanish Emperor Charles VI, along with the Mexican and Guatemalan Kings Antonio III and Felipe, urgently pressured their Bourbon relative to allow them to appeal for help from President Faulkner and the ENA. It is doubtful whether they would have succeeded in any case, but Diego angrily rejected the call. He had become paranoid from his experiences, increasingly reluctant to rely on any of his ministers, seeing traitors everywhere. Gabriel had thrown in with one foe, he argued, while the rest of them had thrown in with another, and he had no more desire to be an American puppet than a Societist Zonal Rej. New Granada, his increasingly histrionic rhetoric stated, had thrown off her Hermandad shackles, and now she would stand or fall on her own merits.
And she fell.
Diego, it is believed, was killed in the ruins of San José, dying in almost the proverbial last ditch. This did not prevent many imitators claiming to be him from appearing in subsequent years of course. Such con men almost represent a separate genre of the Meridian Refugiado stereotype!
Though the criticism of President Faulkner is often excessive and driven by hindsight, even his defenders will concede it was a mistake to allow the entirety of antebellum New Granada to fall into Societist hands. For that included the province of Panama, meaning that the divide between the ‘Liberated Zones’ and the free world would not lie at the edge of South America, but a little way along the isthmus. And that would have a remarkable consequence in the leadup to the Black Twenties...
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So you can see that the literary works created by the Refugiados from these different nations will have been driven by different factors. The enthusiastic embrace of the Fever Dream by Verbeek (and Guyana’s existing Dutch distinctiveness), the grim acceptance of Gabriel, the violent independence of Pichegru, the quixotic foolishness of Diego. All of these factors coloured the writings of the Refugiados from these lands of the Ecuadores, who so often are unthinkingly, crassly lumped in with ‘the Meridians’.
This is not to say they always worked alone. Though their cultural work was not strictly literary, a great collaboration was seen at the Munich Declarations of May 4th 1909. The Pandoric War had ended a number of multinational celebrations and competitions, including both the Global Games and the WorldFests. The Munich Declarations were a joint effort by the governments of the Kingdom of Bavaria, the United Kingdom of Italy and the Scandivanian Empire (formally the Nordic Empire). Italy and Bavaria had grown discontented with the Marseilles Protocol after the failure of the IEF intervention, while Scandinavia was becoming increasingly nervous about its increasing subordination to Russia. The three countries united, not to proclaim a political alliance, but in a global call for a ‘return to normalcy’. Nonetheless, the subtext was clear, and it was from that day (now Multinational Day of Nationhood) that the Marseilles Protocol ceased to have much meaning outside of France’s most immediate vassals. The Governments of Bavaria, Scandinavia and Italy pledged funding to restart the dormant Global Games and WorldFests, as well as calling for new treaties to prevent the worst excesses of warfare from reoccurring. The latter became the Ratisbon Conventions, which among other things banned the use of death-luft in warfare, and codified protection of medics and journalists.
It transpired later that while the Global Games revival was largely driven by Italian Marcello Portoghesi (and the first new games, in 1910, were held in his home city of Milan), the WorldFest programme was masterminded by two Ecuadores’ Refugiados. These were Piet de Groot of Guyana and Miguel Montoya of New Granada. Though the first restarted WorldFest (in 1911) was held in neutral Bavaria, in Munich itself, soon other countries were once again becoming involved in competing with one another for more and more ambitious hostings. In 1915, despite attempts at sabotage by Combine agents, France pointedly held a WorldFest in Bordeaux that was symbolically hosted by ‘absent friends’. The architecture and design of the WorldFest was unmistakably Meridian, and it was fronted by the Refugiado sculptor Rodrigo Campos, who had recently built his
Telegraphy Enlightening the World statue.[5] Many theorists trace the beginning of Diversitarianism itself to this event, born from a combination of spite over the failure of the IEF, and growing concern over what was happening deep in the Combine.
Alfarus and his dwindling number of yet-unpurged allies decided that this insult could not go unavenged. France had also volunteered to host the Global Games in 1916. Therefore, in an action that many commentators mistook for a return to antebelum normalcy merely under a different regime, in 1916[6] the Combine took the unprecedented step of sending athletes to compete...
[1] “Aniseed rag” is the term used in TTL in lieu of “red herring”. Both phrases ultimately stem from the analogy that they were used to train scent hounds to follow a scent (or by hunt saboteurs to throw them off the real scent) but are not the actual intended prey of the hounds. In the same way, a ‘red herring’ (or ‘aniseed rag’) is a misleading clue in a detective (ratiocinic) novel that points the wrong way. In OTL ‘red herring’ was first popularised in a metaphorical sense in connection with an alleged defeat of Napoleon being incorrectly reported by the news in 1807.
[2] NB this should be spelled Quiñones, but the Motext is not capable of displaying the tilde.
[3] I.e. half-mercenary troops recruited from all over the Hermandad.
[4] Traditionally the UPSA used blue uniforms, which by the time of the Great American War had become a sort of faded ‘horizon blue’. In the Pandoric War they used newer tan uniforms for better camouflage on many fronts, but many soldiers in non-frontline positions were still using the older blue ones.
[5] See Interlude #16 in Volume IV.
[6] See “Interlogue: Silence in the Library” from Volume V.
