This is the flag of the World State movement but the quoted update also lays out NehruismI've got another mass movement that's going to debut in The King in Yellow the day after tomorrow! Here's the flag, though I'll leave the details a surprise! Credit to EBR for the stars.
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-Though he had patiently declined the position of World Teacher in the 1920s, Jiddu Krishnamurti remained a valued spiritual and political leader in India until his death in the 1980s. Though only loosely affiliated with Theosophy after his turn toward political activism he insisted on including the Theosophy symbol in the new nation's flag as a testament to the religious tolerance it had been created to symbolize and which he now sought to make a permanent feature of the Union's government.
The Second Great Revolt was the last in a series of strains in Alliance-Pact relations dating back a decade or more, with the end of the India Crisis formally heralding the Entente-American split, the end of the Strange Aeon, and the beginning of the Age of Fear. An odd feature of the Strange Aeon was that although the weaponry tended to be more advanced (or at least more gruesome) there were hardly any brushes with disaster that theoretically could have ended with the mushroom cloud— nothing like the Cuban Missile Crisis or even the Korean War. Although there were plenty of very long and heavily guarded borders between the blocs and espionage was a constant concern historians tend to peg this lack of potential flashpoint events to a fluke of political geography, with each major faction either, like the Comintern, concentrated among itself or, like the other two, overwhelmingly dominant in an area with only token allies or neutrals around. Hence the Age of Fear. If the only thing stopping war was the fact that Alliance members in Asia and the Americas and Pact ones in Africa were technically aligned with their neighboring alliance structure what would the future hold in a crosshatched world of all against all? That's not for me to get into today.
The India Crisis (as it was known in the FBU) and the Bush Wars that had preceded it would have tectonic effects on the nature of the Dominion system and the Franco-British Union as a whole. There had already been a trend favoring the gradual independence of the most loyal* colonies but the Crisis had demonstrated the futility of trying to hold a restive colony of nonwhites absent good faith political autonomy, with Labour leader J.G. Ballard frequently going on long tirades about the banal and everyday horrors maintaining the colonial system was forcing on the Union even while the Africans were left to face the most visceral consequences. This bitter pill was much easier to swallow by the 70s because the administration of the colonies had by that point transitioned entirely to a loyalist native elite who stood to lose everything if their nations ever left the AfD. Guyana and Oceania had set a precedent for combining British and French colonial possessions, leading to the creation of a variety of newly independent Dominions loyal to the crown if not (de jure) subject to the Union, with the Union proper, not the component states, retaining strategically valuable exclaves as integral territory.
But what of India itself? While the ascension of Lucien I as King-Emperor in 1975 had kicked off an escalating cycle of unrest, the Second Great Revolt proper is usually dated to 1978, the year of the general strike and the high point of the mass mobilization that characterized the India Crisis. The FBU had signalled its unwillingness to stay in India any longer in the wake of the brutal slog of the Congo Crisis and the Bush Wars that had seen the Entente Armed Services deployed in combat essentially continuously since the mid-fifties and the Indian National Congress was able to declare a provisional government within the year. Nehru had not lived to see it but Krishnamurti had stewarded the independence movement ably in his absence, even commissioning a provisional constitution derived from Nehru's notes and theories before the India Crisis even began. With the discrediting of the Moderate and Irredentist factions several years before the Maximalists were firmly in control of the Congress and, with the Confederation government having successfully driven every possible other bastion of popular legitimacy to extinction, the Congress was firmly in control of the new state.
Nehruism drew from a wide variety of sources in a bid to create a third-way position hybridizing what he had seen as the benefits of both Fascism and Marxist-Trigonism and adapting the resulting amalgam to the Indian historical experience and cultural landscape. Fascism provided an excellent model for the fostering of cultural expression, with each state under the new system allocated funds to spend on the development of local styles of architecture and the arts, and also provided an excellent fiscal policy that accommodated the mixed economy of nationalized resources and private businesses the Maximalists favored. Though Vorticism was left at the door, Nehru also admired the Marxist-Trigonist policies of the Free Economy and Councilism, viewing the former as an effective way to improve the state of the economy through fiscal policy and the latter as the best method to ensure democratic accountability from the social base. Though a far lesser factor, all things considered, the state of Rational Anarchism in the Americas and Japan seems to have informed the Union's policy toward individual citizens, with a wide variety of personal restrictions abolished outright. This was seen as an essential step, with the overwhelming majority of citizens regarding the caste system those restrictions had enforced as an anachronism only retained for the privilege of elites who had done so well under Company and Confederation rule.
Once the Congress was in power these dynamics began to alter the nature of the party itself, transforming what was on paper merely the overwhelmingly dominant party in a theoretical multiparty system into a multiparty system in miniature. While American parties were strong things with subordinate labor unions that competed with one another over policy and the Comintern favored a decentralized ecosystem of language-based parties intentionally kept weak, equal to the labor unions and united around a central guiding policy**, the Congress would embrace a policy of fractionalism, with the different languages within the party empowered as separate party branches but with members caucusing across those lines and setting the party's policies through internal democracy.
Following the formation of the Indian Union the new government would stamp down on the violent but sporadic reprisals that had broken out in the wake of the Revolt, with Krishnamurti pushing for a general amnesty (barring cases of inciting or abbetting gender and ethnoreligious violence or politicide) from his position as an elder statesman within the Congress. While a majority of the former Confederation officials would take the offer, the elite classes were far more opposed to a government the saw poised to strip them of hereditary privileges and tax the living hell out of them, with the resulting Indian diaspora settling throughout the FBU and the Dominions. This "exile" community has historically provided the governments of the Union and the Dominions with some of their most stable and active support, a trend which continues into the modern day.
While the Union was absorbing or dismantling those organs of the Confederation government that helped or hindered the new state the time finally came to deal with the East India. In a widely heralded speech delivered across the nation's airwaves usually called "The Emergency" Premier Indira Gandhi made the forceful case that the Company had hindered and exploited the subcontinent since its arrival and would not be allowed to continue any further, citing the expulsion of the China branch in the Wushen Rebellion by name. As such she had ensured that although Company officials had been subject to the amnesty the Company's liquid assets had been seized pending review and its physical ones had been cordoned off or impounded. She announced on air that these assets would be nationalized or auctioned off to domestic concerns as appropriate and that no East India branch, affiliate or official would be permitted access to the nation's economy in any form. Now stripped of both its traditional bases of activity by a brutal 20th century those shattered elements of the Company that remained would be forced to consolidate in their last remaining stronghold in the Dominion of Ceylon.
-The Dominion of Ceylon had a government even more nakedly in thrall to the East India than the Confederation's had been, making it for all intents and purposes a Company special economic zone for most of its modern history. The rise of the particularly Randian Ceylon Renewal Front would see the nation renamed the Dominion of Kumari Kandam during the 80s but the Company remained secure as the power behind the ultranationalist and hypercapitalist throne.
With the passing of the Emergency the Union would undergo a diverse flowering of art, culture and societal movements, none more impactful on the global stage than the World State Movement that had been a major force pushing for independence for a generation. As in OTL Aldous Huxley had been longtime friends with Krishnamurti and had written a version of Brave New World around the same time. In this version the text ended with John the Savage accepting exile rather than embracing the downward spiral that lead to his suicide in the historical version. Living in the Confederation after the Second Clash, Huxley would publish a direct sequel in 1946. This second novel, Island, revolved around John's acclimation to the society to the island of Pala, made up of an exile community adopted into a preexisting culture influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism.
While the Palanese saw value in the World State's principles the community sought to employ them in a more fulfilling way, favoring personal spiritual development and individual choice over mind numbing Soma and fully artificial reproduction and striving to use technology for the benefit of man rather than man adapting himself to it. Island revolved around John gradually growing out of his emotional immaturity and coming to better understand himself and his place in the context of a broader society and the universe more generally, ending with the implication that he would attempt to become a World Controller to better export the more fulfilling life he had discovered in his exile. The duology would prove immensely influential, with the World State movement advocating for world peace and disarmament with the ideal of the eventual creation of a global international body marrying the reach of Brave New World's World State with the attitudes and approach fostered by the Palanese.
-The timeline's equivalent to the peace flag, the flag of the World State movement was inspired by the covers of Huxley's duology, with the globe inspired by Brave New World symbolizing the ideal of a universal international peacekeeping body and the myna bird representing the ideals of Island. The three stars represent the hope for peace between the Alliance, Comintern and Pact, and together the flag represented a world at peace among the stars.
*Read: "settler"
**"Vox Populi Vox Dei", the Comintern has such high levels of workplace and council democracy the actual positions of the bloc ebb and flow organically in response to public pressure with any factionalism, such as it is, the result of demographic differences that mirror society at large.
NGL that actually sounds like an interesting ideology for some kind of future TL
Wow, that theory is pretty out-there. Never heard of bit before now. As for the political applications of it, those all sound pretty plausible.
Both those seem pretty plausible - I also see a third possible path, which I will tentatively call "Anarcho-Unicameralism", taking the line that humanity has failed to overcome the bicameral mentality and merely replaced the gods of the past with the barely-more-real governments of the present as the voice telling people what to do. Only once we fully develop a sense of self and cast off the shackles of the bicameral mentality will we be able to overcome the problems that face us...
It was a big part of season 1 of Westworld since it's a poor model for humans but a good way to jumpstart sentience in machines
Instead of Mobutu's Authenticalism, It's Biafran Ahiara Declaration that comes out as a 3rd world anti-west, anti-commie and in this case, also anti-arab world Ideology.
I remember that theory! It certainly seems unbelievably out-there, but I suppose that it's pretty much unfalsifiable. The idea of ideologies based on theories of consciousness is interesting; I think the main issue is how to make a sufficiently large number of people actually care.
This was actually already done to some extent. In a podcast on historic Burma I listened to some years ago, they recognized both inheritance by blood and reincarnation. People were also considered to have several souls.
Finally, a term has been invented to accurately describe the philosophy of all taking place in online political discussions.
I mean, given that they're unwilling to lie about material facts, that distinguishes them from most politicians and trolls...
Thats what they want you to think!
