Part #323: No More Heroes?
“WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALL OF THE HEROES?
NOT TO MENTION THE VILLAINS!
From Julius Caesar to Michael Chamberlain – From Pontius Pilate to Jean de Lisieux
Experience HERR DOKTOR TANNHÄUSER’S WEIRD WORLD OF WAX like never before!
From Handel to Debutante – From Shakespeare to Havemeyer
Don’t forget the WORLD-(IN)FAMOUS KINDERHALLE!
Kids, can you escape the evil MANIC-KIN WAX AUTOMATA, or will they add you to their collection…?
Tickets on sale at I6-d0-c0 each, or I10-d5-c0 for family tickets!
Buy a season pass for I20 and get our Henry VIII playset with all six wives free!”
– Advertising leaflet in tourist stand in Lewisborough Railway Station, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Taken and transcribed by Capt Ben MacCauley, December 2020
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(Ensign Cussans’ note)
While my esteemed colleagues argue about the best way to summarise the leadup to the Sunrise War, I thought it’d be a good time to look into the backstory of a figure who’ll be crucial in it. This will require me to pull together parts from a few lectures, and some may be lost in translation, but I’ll do my best. After all, history is more than just blind tides of economics...history is kings and dates and battles too...
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Extract from recorded lecture on “Eljiso: The Electric Circus and the Last Hero” by Janice Rackham, recorded November 13th, 2020—
It’s hard for us now, when we’re so used to one titanic figure symbolising a particular era of history, to think back to how people thought at the time – let’s say, around 1935. In 1935, historians knew where they stood. The science of historiography, if we can call it that, had come on leaps and bounds. No longer were we in the days of Herodotus or Livy. Yes, part of that was being more sceptical of sources, applying critical thinking, not taking accounts on trust.[1] But there was also the criticism of the ‘Central Character Hypothesis’ of history, which had been taken almost as-read in the past, especially in the self-congratulatory Long Peace era of the nineteenth century.[2] I mean the notion that history turns on the actions of larger-than-life figures, great men – and women – who change the path of the world by their actions, while the rest of humanity trails in their wake.
To an historian of the 1880s, it seemed natural to conclude that if Cugnot had blown himself up in his workshop, then we would never have had steam-mobiles. (Audience reaction) Few would point out that many other engineers in the late eighteenth century had also been experimenting with steam engines and applying them to vehicles. Nowadays it seems naïve to suggest that asimcons would not exist without the individual achievements of Paxman, or that no-one would have discovered the planet Dionysus without Messier. The same approach was applied to politics and war. Would Persia have conquered Greece without Leonidas? Would the Jacobins have taken Vienna without Mozart? In the 1880s, the answer would have been a resounding ‘yes’ – at least from most historians.
So, fifty-five years later or so, why had historians become so negative towards this model of history? The most likely reason was the fact that they had lived through two world-shattering conflicts like none that had been experienced before, the Pandoric War and the Black Twenties. These were people’s wars, wars fought not by small bands of soldiers where individual heroic actions could win or lose battles, but by vast professional armies grinding each other down in the misery of trench warfare. Chivalry, it was argued, died along with the cavalry it was so often associated with, cut to pieces by cingular gun fire, crushed beneath the chain-tracks of steam-belching protguns. (Audience reaction) Well, you understand the point. Victories in such wars were relative, a case of killing more of the enemy than one’s own side. When advancement was possible, it was the result of a vast, well-oiled machine in which every cog was a man. No-one, even the commanding general, could be held solely responsible for the vastly complex operations that modern technology and numbers required.
I said each cog was a man, but some would also be women. And not all the men were in uniform. Those huge armies were backed up by the unprecedented mobilisation of the whole of civilian society towards victory on the battlefield. Courtenay said that in those two wars – and those that followed – battles were won as much by factories as by artillery. Economics had always played a role in warfare, but now war seemed almost a continuation of international economic struggle by other means. Thalbach, the German historian, named it Wirtschaftskampf, a term you may have heard. (Audience reaction) Yes, it has been allowed to enter the language.
I could talk about this subject for hours, but for our purposes, suffice to say that this vast, anonymised form of warfare felt like the death knell for the Central Character Hypothesis. Individual acts of heroism now mattered only to the individual – the soldiers whose lives might be saved by their comrade’s valiant acts – and, perhaps, so that soldier could be turned into a propaganda symbol to inspire the nation as a whole. (Audience murmurs) But a battle, much less a war, could not be won or lost by one man’s actions on the battlefield. A decision made at a higher level could matter, such as General Fioravenzo choosing to keep Italy’s rocket programme secret until it had reached the numbers and sophistication needed to make a real difference on the battlefield.[3] That helped change the course of the war in Poland. But it was still just the pebble tossed that began the avalanche of change, which required the actions of many others to achieve it.
Furthermore, let’s not forget the plague. The Black Twenties were a stark reminder of that same lesson that the world had learned in past pandemics; that disease was no respecter of persons. A man as significant and admired as the Duc d’Orléans could still be struck down by an anonymous animalcule. The common soldier in the trench, or the factory worker back home, faced the same deadly equation as kings and consuls. And consider the impact of the plague on the battlefield itself. Because more specialised weapons like protguns and dromes needed specially-trained crews, the random plague affected them far more than ordinary infantry and artillery divisions. And so, the war was reduced even further to a struggle of anonymous common soldiers, rectangles on a map facing one another. The dubious glamour of the drome pilot disappeared – for a time, at least. (Audience murmurs)
So, as the world emerged, blinking, from the shadow of the Black Twenties and into the new artificially-lit age of the Electric Circus, historians decided that they now knew how the world worked. History was not driven by the colourful figures that their childhood history books had so romanticised. It was the product of crude numbers. Wars were won because one nation had more coal, more factories, a larger population to conscript than its opponents, not because of any heroism or adept leadership. Materialist theories, even deterministic ones, abounded. The world was reduced to grey inevitabilities, or random probabilities. Man had no more agency to be a hero against this blind tide of history than he’d had in Calvin’s worldview, centuries before.
I am making these men, and a few women, sound rather unattractive, aren’t I? (Audience chuckles) But they were not necessarily bad people, far from it. Many of them, such as Sasha Reynold of California, argued that their ‘rational’ appraisal of international relations was the key to world peace. Rather than the nihilistic self-immolation of identity that the Societists preached, they proposed that if the materialist balance of nations was universally recognised, no-one would ever start a war. It would be clear from the start who would win, and it would also be clear that the winner would nonetheless find themselves in a worse position overall than when they started. Wars are expensive. And bad for business.
In some ways this was similar to the arguments during the Long Peace that economies were now too interconnected to risk war, and we all know how that ended… (Restive sounds from audience) Alright, alright! Aydub. I know you want me to get to the good stuff. (Audience chuckles) But to understand just how earth-shaking it was when he arrived on the scene, you first need to understand just how much historians – and, to some extent, the general public as a whole – had written off the idea of a Central Character. A true Hero.
Some might concede that such men had existed in the past, even the recent past. The Benyovskies and Molnárs, the Leo Bonapartes and the Horatio Nelsons, the Liam Wesleys and the Great Racers.[4] But if such an archetype had ever existed, they thought, the Pandoric War had killed it and the Black Twenties had nailed down the lid of its coffin. The closest thing that the 1930s had to a world-bestriding figure was decidedly more on the villainous side – Amigo Alfarus. (Audience murmurs) And soon enough, he too was turned on by his own, who did their best to write him out of history. Soon they were claiming vaguely that the original Pandoric Revolution had been led by – well, no-one at all, the same anonymous tide that the Rational Materialists argued for. Not that I am suggesting any connection between them and the Societists, of course. (Audience murmurs)
But you take my point. If history-changing heroes had ever existed, they were gone. The closest thing that the Naughty Forties seemed to offer were celebrity film actors and zig-and-zag singers, or, a little more seriously, civil rights leaders. The world had moved on.
And then he arrived on the scene. Eljiso.
His early life – and, let’s be honest, a lot of his later life – is shrouded in mystery. That’s not exactly unusual for someone who, we are fairly certain, was born under Societism. Or, at least, had some childhood formative years under Societism; not even that part is entirely clear. Lithuania and the Eternal State have both tried to claim him as born there, but most biographers now agree that he was from Spain, born in Spain. Probably born not long before the Societists overran most of the country after 1926. Nobody knows what his birth name was. The sole, mononymic name he chose reflects the three nations he spent his early life in, combining the male pronouns of Spanish, Lithuanian and Turkish. Some have suggested that this was a rejection of the local Spanish Societist authorities trying to enforce a new gender-neutral form of Novalatina during the Konkursum ad Kultura, but there’s no evidence for this, and it would be out of character for a Zonal Rej in this era to do something like that unilaterally. We’ll probably never really know the true reasons. A lot of people have noticed that it resembles the name ‘Elijah’, however, and Eljiso would certainly go on to work similar miracles on behalf of the oppressed held in bondage to a false religion!
We can only speculate about what his earliest life under Societist rule in Spain might include, but whatever the details, it is clear that living through the conquest and then the brutality of the Silent Revolution was sufficient to make this man an implacable foe of the black flag. (Approving audience sounds) Some have claimed that he actually grew up not far from Salamanca, the city of Pablo Sanchez.[5] We don’t know that for sure. Real life is rarely so deliciously ironic! But it is true that his whole identity was clearly shaped by those experiences. Markus Garzius, who was still around for most of his earlier career, half-sarcastically described him as ‘the youngest son of the Societist Revolution’, as defined by it as Garzius was himself, merely in a different way. Garzius was embittered and viewed the Combine’s then-current leadership as betraying that revolution, and implicitly suggested that Eljiso was merely being more honest in his opposition to all that Sanchezism-Alfarism stood for than the post-Silent Revolution regime was. Any implied respect was not reciprocated, as Eljiso is known to have plotted to kill Garzius at one point, though the plan was never realised. (Audience reaction)
It’s important to understand that the fame and legacy that attached itself to him was not, as is sometimes implied in popular culture, merely the result of countless victories against the odds in his chequered and globe-spanning career. He certainly had plenty of those! But he also had many defeats and reversals, yet always picked himself up and fought another day. That is what truly makes him an inspiring figure to this day. The man who has never known failure is no hero, for we do not know how he will react when it inevitably comes. (Audience murmurs) No man ever knows his character until the lights go out and no-one is watching. Eljiso had many such times throughout his life, but he kept going. That’s what makes him a hero, a great man – if not always a good man – in a world that had seemed to no longer have a place for them. An anachronism, some said, a Spartacus, a Genghis, a Hiedler impossibly transposed to the days of electric lighting and surge engines. But very real.
In 1941, at the height of the Silent Revolution’s purges, Eljiso and his mother managed to flee from Societist Spain – not through the Spanish March to France, but on a ship travelling to the Eternal State. At this point, the status of the latter was still sufficiently ambiguous that some Combine ships were going there. According to most accounts, though he was notorious for changing his story to suit the current person he was talking to, Eljiso and his unnamed mother smuggled themselves via a Standard Crate in the cargo hold. He was silent on how they then made their way from the Eternal State to Lithuania, saying that he was a child at the time and could not remember, or else that he did not wish to endanger the lives of sympathetic individuals who had helped shelter them. You can imagine how frustrating it is for us historians to try to reconstruct his life given these multiple, contradictory stories! (Audience murmurs)
Regardless of how they managed it, Eljiso and his mother arrived in Lithuania before the end of 1941. His mother appears to have died soon afterwards, though again we are not sure. Two nameless refugees…Eljiso, using the assumed Lithuanian alias of Henrikas Eidimtas, finally appears on the Grand Duchy’s records in 1942. His age is given as 18, but this is only an estimate. He worked manual labour jobs, including in the iron mines, which was largely responsible for giving him his impressive muscular physique, as you can see in this slide. (A few feminine sounding whistles from the audience, followed by laughter) Yes, well, it is a bit of a flattering asimcon.
To be honest, given how hazardous the work was, he was lucky not to be crippled for life, even if he was only there for a couple of years. Throughout that time, so he said later, he was filled with a burning desire for revenge for the death of his mother and the loss of friends and family members in the Konkursum ad Kultura. He dedicated his life to a one-man fight against the Societist menace. (Audience murmurs) Did I say one man? No, ironically like Caraíbas before him – in reverse – he went from humble and alien origins to being a natural leader of men…
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(Ensign Cussans’ note)
For a bit of context, here’s some historical background on Lithuania at the time Eljiso was growing up, which I took from another lecture…
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Extract from recorded lecture on “Eastern Europe: The Twentieth Century’s Battlefield” by Maj. Gerald Linacre, recorded November 10th, 2020—
In the 1940s, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not the place it had once been. To explain this, I have to go back a bit. Before the Partition War in 1767, Lithuania and Poland were united as the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which you may remember from that – somewhat romanticised – film The Vienna Hussars. (Audience cheers and cries of ‘Freedom!’, followed by sigh from speaker) Well, I don’t have time to explain how that’s all wrong…suffice to say that Lithuanian-speakers only made up about ten percent of the population of the Commonwealth, and were a minority even in their own component, outnumbered by Ruthenians. The Lithuanian nobility had also become Polonised, that is, adopting the Polish language and ways as they were considered more prestigious at court. (Audience murmurs) All of that began to change when Tsar Peter III and the Prussian king signed a treaty splitting up the increasingly-dysfunctional Commonwealth. Broadly, the Prussians took Poland and the Russians took Lithuania. Both states directly annexed parts of their lands, notably the Russians taking Podolia and a number of other Ruthenian-speaking lands. However, Ruthenian-speakers still outnumbered Lithuanian-speakers in the new Grand Duchy under the Tsar’s son Paul – or ‘Grand Duke Povilas’.[6]
Given Russia’s later history, one might expect the new regime to favour the Ruthenians, promoting Slavicism and the Orthodox Church. However, this was a time before the Potemkin Revolt, when Peter and Paul were often considered western-looking Germans ruling over Russian stock (Audience murmurs) and before Slavicism was devised as a counter to the nativist, Muscovite sentiments that the Potemkins had whipped up. Paul saw Lithuania as his own personal power base, and understood that he could both usurp the authority of the old Lithuanian nobility and win the favour of the Lithuanian peasantry directly if he promoted the Lithuanian language. He also limited the activities of the Orthodox Church to avoid alienating the Catholics, with the Orthodox Church instead mostly focusing on attempting to reclaim the Ruthenian Uniates, whether by evangelism, subtle pressure or brute force.[7] The Lithuanian identity was also boosted by the establishment of grand flag-flying projects, most obviously the Patriotic Fleet, with its visit to right here in the Empire in 1788. It also led to the establishment of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company. The colony that eventually became Povilskaja in Africa was also presented as Lithuanian first, whatever the reality. The Lithuanian identity had the highest prestige it had had since the days of the Jagiellonians.
When Paul became Tsar after the Potemkin Revolt, he was succeeded as Grand Duke by his son Peter – Petras I – who was also very popular with the Lithuanian people. When Petras in turn had to move on to being Tsar in 1829, it wasn’t a popular move – and then he died only two years later, in a railway crash. Many furious Lithuanians claimed it was a deliberate assassination, and that the backward Russians had turned on a man they saw as half-Lithuanian and an alien influence – and it is true that Petras, or Peter’s, reformism had made him enemies.[8] Petras’ own son Konstantinas I, who was already Grand Duke, now refused to become Tsar. After a brief and farcical civil war, the Russian throne passed to his brother, and now the two Romanov branches had separated, each country having its own succession.
Konstantinas, mindful of the feelings of his people, warned his brother Fyodor that he would assert Lithuania’s independent agency and no longer follow Russia automatically into wars. It was more rhetoric than reality in some ways, with Lithuania adopting a pro-Russian neutrality in the Swedish Civil War that probably helped Russia more than active alliance would have.[9] Over the following years at the beginning of the long peace, the Lithuanian assertion of independence took on more reality, much to Russia’s displeasure. In practice, the two countries were still linked through the RLPC and their colonies. But as time wore on the Russian state also tried to deepen its control of the RLPC – reaching a head when it seized direct control of Yapon and Russian America after the 1878 revolt. A fully independent Lithuania was an unwelcome variable in the struggle for Eastern Europe, for all that it was being fought mostly with money and diplomacy throughout the Long Peace.
Konstantinas died in 1858 at the age of fifty-one and was succeeded by his son Jonas IV. Jonas was the most full-heartedly Lithuanian nationalist of any of the Lithuanian Romanovs, and explicitly and pointedly explored anti-Russian alliances with his neighbours, including the hated Scandinavians. Petrograd – as it had recently been renamed, from St Petersburg – grumpily tolerated this while Fyodor IV was still alive, out of respect for his deceased brother and his nephew. However, when Fyodor was succeeded by Paul II in 1872, things changed. Paul had little awareness of Russia’s wider empire, but was determined to assert his will in what he saw as Russia’s front yard. He was particularly incensed by the Lithuanians’ refusal to support Russia during the recent Euxine War or the expansions into Tartary that they were now planning. An example must be made.
A year later, the Russians were able to exploit a poor harvest and restless subjects in Lithuania as an excuse to militarily intervene ‘to restore law and order’. The childless Jonas was effectively forced to abdicate in favour of his more pliable brother Petras II, and died in mysterious circumstances not long afterwards. The Lithuanian colonists and RPLC members were naturally angry about this, and it’s thought that some of them may have deliberately aided the Hanran Yapontsi revolt I mentioned, just as a way to take revenge on the Tsar. Others defected to the Coreans in the south of the islands, or joined the UPSA corporate empires.
Tsar Paul II was hardly the man his better-known namesake was. All his intervention had achieved was to shock and alienate Lithuania’s neighbours. It was the falling domino that drove formerly-neutral Poland into the arms of Germany and Danubia, forming the Pressburg Pact and ensuring that their lands would be fought over three ruinous times in the Pandoric War, Black Twenties and Sunrise War. (Murmurs) Nor was he successful in turning Lithuania into a well-behaved little brother in the Balto-Slavic family that was the Vitebsk Pact.[10] Petras II’s son Petras III was another strong ruler who exerted Lithuanian influence in a different way; rather than trying to escape the Russian bloc altogether, Petras instead made himself a player in internal politics. In the Pandoric War, he was responsible for the logistical breakthroughs that turned the tide against the Ottomans and allowed the Russians to conquer Trebizond.[11] A quarter-century later, he was the one responsible for negotiating the Treaty of Vienna that ended the Black Twenties.[12]
But Petras III was not quite as clever or as capable as he thought himself. Negotiating the treaty won him no favours, and he was forced to give up Karaliaučius to the English as Conisbrough, in order to avoid accusations that he was favouring Lithuania at the expense of Russia. This only alienated both nations. Petras’ attempts to get involved in the shadowy struggle to be the power behind the throne of the weak and underage Tsar Fyodor V – his role in the faraway negotiations meant he was about the only major player in Vitebsk Pact politics who wasn’t accused of being involved in Paul III’s death. (A few chuckles) Paradoxically, in the eyes of some seasoned veterans of Russian court politics, that made him look weak and opportunistic, not incorruptible. Petras backed the wrong horse, gambled poorly and was shut out of influence along with Dowager Empress Anna and General Pichegru. He might have made a comeback after the Pendzhab debacle and the disgrace of Alexander III of Courland, but by that point he had already passed away, in 1932. An anticlimactic end to a generally successful career.
Petras was succeeded as Grand Duke by his son Konstantinas II, rather daringly named for the predecessor who had triggered the first break with Russia. But the younger Konstantinas faced a world quite unlike the one his ancestor, a century earlier, had. As Russia modernised her technology and adopted Photel broadcasts, film and centralised propaganda, there was a drive to push a single message, a single culture, throughout the Vitebsk Pact. Konstantinas fought back against this, citing the example of Finland, which had remained loyal to the Pact in the Black Twenties because its people had been allowed to freely continue to use their own language and culture – arguably the beginnings of Russian Diversitarianism. (Audience murmurs) Konstantinas saw the example of Livonia, which had been under direct Russian control and forcibly Slavicised for years, and feared that Lithuanian language, literature and religion could also be driven underground. Like his predecessors, his concerns were partly driven by genuinely identifying with the Lithuanian cause, but also because he knew that no ruler associated with an alien ruling class could hope to keep his throne in the long run.
By the 1940s, Lithuania was a tense and complex society. The nobility, those same who had once embraced Polish culture, now fiercely resisted Russification. The common people made common cause with them, whilst viewing the Ruthenians with suspicion as alleged crypto-collaborators with their fellow Slavs. The remaining Polish and Jewish minorities were targeted by all sides. It was into this toxic mix that one of the twentieth century’s most colourful characters, Eljiso, first entered history…
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Extract from recorded lecture on “Eljiso: The Electric Circus and the Last Hero” by Janice Rackham, recorded November 13th, 2020—
The biographer Rudolf Leiter once opined that ‘Eljiso might as well never have come out of those shadowy mines, his Platonic cave’. To the world, he is not a man, but a blank silhouette upon which we can project whatever we please, whatever epitome of heroism. It was certainly in the darkness that he first rose to prominence.
Mining is a tough job even today – we’ve all seen the news headlines about tragedies – but it’s as nothing compared to what it was in 1940s Lithuania. It didn’t help that the bosses exploited internal divisions among the workers to their own benefit, like some parody of Societist propaganda. (Murmurs) Trade unions found it hard to organise when Lithuanian-speakers wouldn’t speak to Ruthenian-speakers, threadbare scions of noble blood wouldn’t speak to peasants, and Catholics wouldn’t speak to Orthodox believers, much less Uniates or Jews. It’s similar to the historical strategies that were employed in other countries, like the ‘pillars’ of Belgium. The Naughty Forties saw a tide of social change that partly toppled these power structures – in most places. Lithuania, behind the Frozen Front, lagged behind.[13] Until Eljiso stepped in.
For some men, creating and founding a mixed trade union that fought for the rights of all workers in Lithuania would be the apex of their lives, not something they did in their early twenties as a mere prologue to their careers. After the mine companies had failed to subdue the strikers and Eljiso had become a publicly celebrated figure, Grand Duke Konstantinas stepped in personally before the situation could escalate to the point that the troops were called in. Recognising both Eljiso’s charisma and his burning hatred of the Societists, Konstantinas – in a play to appeal to Russian court interests – proposed that the workers would receive pay rises and improved rights, but only in exchange for Eljiso agreeing to lead a team of volunteers to help raise an anti-Eternal State revolt in occupied Servia. This was a cause célébre to the Russians and could, presumably, help Konstantinas start to claw back some of the influence his father had lost.
Or it would have, if Eljiso had not had other ideas. He took his group of volunteers, but refused to go to Servia. Instead, he went to Romania, gathered more followers and sought to raise a revolt in Danubian-controlled Transylvania and Muntenia. That was 1944, I should say. Eljiso had overestimated his chances. Perhaps it was that his charisma and successes up till now had made him overconfident. His army was defeated in a week and he was held captive by the Danubian Societists, while both Petrograd and Vilnius denied all knowledge of him. It seemed as though his legend would be snuffed out early on, but he staged a daring escape which also managed to recover most of his men, including all his surviving early supporters from the Lithuanian mines. They defied the odds to escape across the border to the Eternal State (ironically). Rather than rousing Servs as Konstantinas had hoped, Eljiso lay low in the city of Thessalonica and ‘only’ had time to free an exploited community from a local criminal gang, leaving them with a new church and school.[14]
We can see here that Eljiso’s hatred of Societism was always tempered by his sense of morality. Helping others always came first, even ahead of burning the black flag and poking the Threefold Eye. (Assenting murmurs) He had lived in dire straits of one kind of another for all his young life, and now he had the power and ability to help others lift themselves out of such situations, he would take every opportunity. In 1945, he destroyed an Armenian militia that had been operating out of the Tarsus Salient and harrassing local villagers on the Eternal State side of the border. Some claimed he was taking revenge on the Russians (via their Armenian allies) for disowning him, but no; it was merely that he saw the militiamen as exploitative thagis who gave other anti-Societist fighters a bad name. It is worth noting that a few men from that militia of better character, and other local Armenians, went on to join Eljiso’s entourage; he was certainly not prejudiced against the Armenian people. Indeed, he put the lie to Societist claims that nationalism led inevitably to conflict, by being a champion of Diversitarianism who loved all nations.
It is unclear exactly what happened in the next few months before he next popped up in Crete, acting to put down a Societist revolt that may have been sponsored by either the Eternal State or Societist Spain, or both. Regardless, he won the favour of Fawzia Sultan, better known as Cleopatra, de facto ruler of the Alexandrine Empire. She made him effective Governor of Crete for a year, and he obtained such adoring popularity from the Cretan people – again, able to unite disparate and formerly warring groups – that they became to call him King. Perhaps concerned that he might act on such an opportunity, Cleopatra then asked him if he would help fend off the Romulan Italians who had taken over Tunis and kept periodically trying to take Tripoli.
He led an army from Alexandria in 1947 and defeated the Romulans, but then promptly kept going. Having secured the loyalty of his army – which included many Ottoman troops as well as his own supporters – he travelled south to Darfur, then fought the Celatores of Barkalus’ African empire in central Africa. Barkalus was still in South America, quelling or taking ownership of the Silent Revolution, depending on who you ask. In his absence as the central controlling figure of Societist Africa, his subordinates scrambled to respond to Eljiso’s Kleinkrieger tactics.
After finally rousing the Societists to mobilise huge armies to oppose him, he retreated to the city of Kitega, which had been taken by Barkalus some years ago. He fought what should have been merely a filmish last stand, but actually defeated the Celatores and was able to retreat into Zanguebar – humiliatingly setting back Societist progress for years, only months before Barkalus died and was succeeded by Ismaelus Zuzandus. He had tainted Barkalus’ legacy, in the Societists’ eyes, and made an enemy of the whole of the so-called Liberated Zones! But his job was far from finished.
It is thought that Eljiso married for the first time in Zanguebar, to the daughter of a family of Portuguese colonists who had managed to survive all the political changes in eastern Africa since the collapse of the Portuguese empire almost a century before. The marriage did not last, however, and we know little of his first wife. Naturally, there are many who later claimed to be a product of that marriage, with little evidence for their claims.
Again, we are not sure what Eljiso spent the next few months doing, before popping up again in 1949 on the Franco-Belgian border. The French Prime Minister, François Bouquin, nursed an obsessive dislike of him for the rest of his life, apparently stemming from a – seemingly groundless – accusation that he had been involved in stirring up trouble in Bisnaga. There is no evidence that he had visited India at this point of his life. Rather, his army of supporters were engaged in keeping the peace for King William of Belgium, who was struggling due to the restrictions placed on his army by the Treaty of Vienna. Indeed, Belgian criminal gangs had been operating over the border and affecting French cities as well, including smuggling in opium from the IGR. But the intransigent French authorities had refused to approve an expansion of Belgium’s military police forces lest it be cover for general rearmament.
Instead, Eljiso’s men were called in by King William in an unofficial capacity. Bouquin insisted that Eljiso had fought a street battle in the Belgian city of Charleroi (formerly Wittelsbach) that had wounded French inspectors and troop escorts stationed there. In reality, it seems, he hardly fought there, and was merely hunting down some of the aforementioned criminals. Drugs, and those who traded them, became a particular enemy of Eljiso, who had seen how they ruined lives. On at least one occasion he spared the life of a Societist Agende because the man had been involved with the destruction of illicit coca plantations in South America and the purging of the administrator who had looked the other way.
Told to keep to his side of the border by an indulgent King William in response to Bouquin’s claims that he had crossed it, Eljiso, with typical ingenuity, adopted other tactics to ensure that the cross-border gangs could still be hunted down. He founded a settlement known as ‘Little London’ or simply ‘London’, near the western border town of Ieper, recruiting Englishmen to his cause. He was already a popular figure in the English popular imagination and received many supporters. His logic was that the French would be reluctant to potentially fire on subjects from a neighbouring power that largely remained their ally, but was now gradually rising again in its own right. His tactic came with its own problems – he was criticised for recruiting from a politically extreme English republican group based in Belgium – but evidently the Crown was willing to forgive and forget, as a few years later in 1955 he was favourably received at St James’ Palace by King Edward VII. On that same trip he married his second wife, an Englishwoman, in London – the real London.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us return to 1950. By this point, Romulan Italy had launched Sol Invictus 1 and, not unrelatedly, François Bouquin’s government had fallen, replaced with that of Madame Mercier’s protégé Pierre Lesterlin. Lesterlin, his English counterpart Eric Stafford, and William of Belgium eventually agreed to ask Eljiso and his supporters to go to Germany. They had effectively become a modern form of the kind of mercenary companies that had dominated parts of Europe during past conflicts like the Thirty Years’ War, or perhaps the Vikings of an earlier age who had needed paying off. The difference was that Eljiso had a rather stronger sense of morality than either. For example, when both Bundeskanzler Johannes Althaus and his estranged monarch Christian II asked Eljiso to put down Slavic unrest in Bohemia, making vague claims about Societist Agendes, Eljiso spent only a few weeks there before tendering his resignation in disgust. He was unwilling to serve the unfair and unjust German Kulturkrieg policies, as he saw it, which were themselves feeding both Slavic nationalism and Societist activity. That was in 1951; Eljiso’s move undoubedly had significant consequences for what happened in Bohemia less than a decade later.
At this point, Eljiso and his men embarked on one of the most important parts of his career for impact on world politics. Disenchanted after the Bohemia incident and effectively needing work, Eljiso accepted a task from a mysterious benefactor, working through his contacts in the Alexandrine Empire, which encouraged him to travel to Tartary and fight for the various Tartar groups still resisting Russian occupation. Precisely who this benefactor was remains an unanswered question to historians, but they were clearly aware that Eljiso still nursed a grudge against the Russians and, perhaps, would ask fewer questions than normal. The most common theory today is that the Persian Shah-Advocate was behind it all, attempting to draw away and neutralise forces in preparation for a rebellion against the Russians occupying his own country. At the time, however, the Russians accused the Chinese (or individual Chinese politicians) of being behind it after Eljiso and his Tartar allies won a victory over a regular Russian army at Pishpek in 1952.[15] The commanding general was Nikolai Zamotin, protege of Marshal Kobuzev, and the humiliating defeat led to Kobuzev’s political downfall. He had been the most significant figure in Petrograd politics for a decade, as opposition was marshalled against him, and now Tsar Theodore IV found himself isolated and increasingly pushed around by the Imperial Soviet. So Eljiso had a huge effect on the course of world affairs, as Russia’s priorities shifted and China became seen as hostile.
Eljiso himself, however, felt betrayed and isolated, much of the promised help not turning up. He became fixated on the idea that the real force behind his mysterious benefactor was the Societists, trying to send him to his death and trap him there. There’s little evidence for this, but Eljiso was certain. After his impressive victory, knowing that he could not fight on, he retreated from Pishpek to Kabul. There his army was captured and forced to surrender by Wazir Abdullah Khan, a leader of the Fedayeen-e-Umma jihadist group that was trying to overthrow Ali Shah Durrani.[16] By this point, fortunately, Eljiso’s story had attracted so many admirers around the world that his fan club raised the ransom money so that he and his entire army could be freed. They marched into Pendzhab and, for the last stage of their journey, were able to use some of the new railways now being built in the Concan Confederacy by Bisnaga (which had finally achieved full independence in 1944). Though Eljiso’s admirers adoringly published asimcons of the march in magazines around the world, Eljiso himself saw it as a humiliation. He was furious. He published a monogramme noting that this was the first time he had ever visited India (twitting Bouquin, who he dismissively described as ‘a French tourist, obsessed with the details of my itinerary’) and that the Societists would pay for what they had (allegedly) tried to do to him.
Nonetheless, to Eljiso, helping the vulnerable came first. He had heard from people in the Concan Confederascy of the plight of Orissan (or Odiya) speaking peoples in Bengal, who were discriminated against...
*
(Ensign Cussans’ note)
Another brief bit of relevant information taken from another lecture.
*
Extract from recorded lecture “Revolt and Ramification” by Dr Adrian Radley, recorded November 24th, 2020—
Language in Bengal changed as a result of the new sense of national identity that arose when the people (including the English-derived minority) pulled together to resist the Great Jihad, defining itself in more native and local terms and rejecting some practices now associated with the Mughals. By the 1930s, English and Bengali were considered the primary languages of discourse in Bengal and are what were primarily taught in schools. Though, I should say, I shouldn’t forget the 'Anglo-Bangla' business pidgin that has grown increasingly respectable. Once considered an uncouth traders’ tongue, nowadays it has its own dictionaries.
Persian and Arabic had long been used as languages of state documentation in Bengal, but this was no longer the case by the 1930s. Persian was still known and taught to some extent, but explicitly only as a scholars' tongue like Sanskrit. It was not associated with the living Persian of modern Persia. Arabic had become somewhat stigmatised due to association with Arab mujahideen who joined the Great Jihad and were (rightly or wrongly) associated in the Bengali popular imagination with crimes de guerre. (Audience murmurs) Other local languages, like Odiya, were considered less prestigious and whether they were taught in schools was variable.
This was quite controversial. It is the same problem that was seen later in Bisnaga. Disparate groups of people had been able to unite against the outsider colonial power as a common enemy. But once it was removed – as it effectively had been in Bengal, years ago – people from minority and frontier regions then realised that they were having the language and culture of the wealthiest, most numerous and most central parts of the new post-colonial state forced on them. That was an important influence on the development Diversitarianism. Diversitarianism is anti-colonial, yes, but that is not to say it blindly praises post-colonial states merely because they are post-colonial. Indeed, some of them have been responsible for some of the worst crimes against diversity outside of the Combine itself, trying to artificially force homogeneity on a varied populace. (Audience murmurs)
By the 1950s, the treatment of Odiya-speaking peoples in southwestern Bengal was becoming something of a recognised cause around the world, purloined by those in countries like Scandinavia as a talking point for why they should try to hold on to their own colonial empires, for example. But, of course, that was also when they came to the attention of the legendary Eljiso...
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Extract from recorded lecture on “Eljiso: The Electric Circus and the Last Hero” by Janice Rackham, recorded November 13th, 2020—
Of course, Eljiso did not seek to use his army. Bengal, by this point, was a powerful nation with a strong, united armed forces and could easily crush a mercenary force, even one led by such a remarkable figure as he. Instead, Eljiso taught the Orissans the same tactics he had used as a union leader in Lithuania, emphasising peaceful protest and nonviolence, forcing the other side to escalate or blink. Eljiso also gave the Orissans another advantage: his own fame. The Court of Directors and the Bengal Army might have been willing to consider using wooden riot bullets on a purely Orissan protest, but no-one dared be the one to risk blinding this figure of global prominence, who had just been rescued from Afghan captivity purely by financial support from his transoceanic army of admirers.
In the end, the Bengali government was forced to concede that Odiya and some other minority languages would be considered semi-official, taught in schools where appropriate and supported by central taxation. This constitutional policy is considered one of the defining moments in Diversitarian history, and ironically today’s Bengali government often takes credit for it – as though their predecessors had done it of their own accord! (Audience chuckles)
But, having changed history once more, Eljiso could not stick around for long. He had helped other causes, but now he had his own. He was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that it had been Agendes of the Combine who had sent him to Tartary and left him and his men to die. Now, he would take his revenge. Ironically, of course, if he had stayed where he was, he could have become involved in the Guntoor Crisis. But instead, he took his fight to the enemy.
The next year was the most controversial in Eljiso’s whole career, and is the reason why, to this day, many still hesitate to call him a hero. (Murmurs) With typical audacity, he did not merely travel to the Nusantara or the Spanish March and fight the Societists along a disputed border. No, he and a handful of his closest supporters infiltrated themselves into the Combine itself, while the remainder of his army was sent to Guinea. It was led by Dimitar Borisov, a Bulgar who had worked with him from the start in the mines, and whose similar muscular frame meant he could pass for Eljiso from a distance. It helped that, despite his global fame, Eljiso was notoriously camera-shy and rarely could be clearly glimpsed in asimcons. That probably also helped his audacious infiltration.
Eljiso spent most of 1953 waging a (near) one-man war against the Societists in their own backyard. As I said, this was easily the most controversial part of his career. He lost some of his admirers from his brutal tactics, which some compared to that of a serial murderer. Ostensibly, the shocking and public fates he wrought on Societist administrators was to seek justice for those they had oppressed – the corrupt, the sadistic, the abusers. In practice, some of the stories he sought from ordinary Amigos and Amigas to select his targets seem to have been a little thin, though there were certainly plenty who had abused their power, especially in the recent Silent Revolution period. Many have accused Eljiso merely using that as an excuse to indulge his own lust for vengeance against Societism, and not much caring whom he cut to pieces providing there was a Threefold Eye on them somewhere. For years later, Amigas would use stories of him to scare misbehaving children, though using the name ‘Eljiso’ was banned and they mostly just referred to ‘him’. Even this incensed the Societist authorities, who tried to control things like cultural references and stories and did not want them arising organically.
The number of deaths Eljiso wrought in Platinea, or Zone 1, the centre of Societist power, is still unknown. We do know that the Celatores were close to catching him a number of times, though perhaps not so many as suggested in that one motoscopy show, what was, it, Terror, from a few years ago. (Sounds of recognition from audience) Not exactly a documentary. Anyway, we do know that a Societist court convicted him in absentia of ‘crimes against humanity’, their version of crimes against the nations. (Murmur) Some of Eljiso’s supporters were taken and executed, but the man himself always escaped.
Perhaps eight months after his arrival, Eljiso left the Combine. Afterwards, he claimed he had simply been sickened too much by what he had seen and done there, but it’s possible he saw he was unable to evade the continent-wide manhunt that had been organised against him. He escaped back to Guinea and rejoined Borisov and the main part of his army. Though Borisov had done good work in fighting against the Societists along the border with Barkalus’ old empire, repeating the same feats their force had achieved a few years earlier in another part of Africa, Eljiso became discontented with the Guinean government...
*
(Ensign Cussans’ note)
And another little excerpt for background information.
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Extract from recorded lecture on “The Forgotten Continent” by Dr Sizwe Unzuza and Robert Starkey, recorded October 20th, 2020—
Guinea in the 1950s was at a crossroads. Almost five decades before. the ramshackle assemblage had been transformed by a series of events. England had broken with America, and America had come under the government of Lewis Faulkner, who was disinterested in holding on to large colonies which had formerly been shared between the two nations. Furthermore, Guinea, like Bengal, had already increasingly been treated as its own corporate entity merely under Anglo-American influence. Then, C. B. Kane had established the first Grand Palaver in Zazzau in 1905, an assembly of representatives from the many states comprising the vague geographic collective known as Guinea. Initially caught offguard, the Board of Directors in Oguaa decided to send Ginger Oldman as their representative, rather than trying to suppress the Palaver altogether.[17] Eventually, the Board reluctantly came to see the Palaver as a positive development. Rather than their own, rather crude attempts in the past to balance northern Fulani Islamic interests with those of southern nations (which had led to problems such as the Nupeci revolt of 1897), now they had one body to speak to which could, theoretically, decide matters for all Guinean nations.
Problems remained. The democratic Freedes were initially rather reluctant to be involved with a body whose other representatives were largely unelected aristocrats from states such as Oyo or Dahomey, or equally unelected Islamic scholars from the Fulani. They also had their own reasons to distrust C. B. Kane, who effectively acted as president of the Palaver with an iron grip for its first two decades of existence, and continued to exert considerable influence even later. For their part, the other nations within Guinea regarded the Freedes as trying to push their own radical ideas on them, ironically often seeing them as bigger imperialists than the remaining white minority – who now mostly considered themselves ‘Guineans’ and generally avoided any awkward question that might imperil their ability to make money. When Christian missionaries travelled from Europe or the Novamund to Guinea, they often faced more opposition from the white business owners than from the local authorities themselves, fearing a backlash that (usually) failed to materialise.[18] Like Bengal, this led to some complicated alliances between different power groups, many of which were unexpected.
You keep comparing Guinea to Bengal, but there were some important differences. In Bengal, there was really only a single centre of power, and the people bought their way into it. In Guinea, there was both the corporate Board of Directors and the Grand Palaver, and Africans usually gained influence through the latter rather than buying into the former.
Though there were some African Directors by the 1930s, weren’t there?
Yes, but they were still a minority. The Board of Directors was considered a white man’s club. Trusted to control the jagun army, because no Dahomean would want a Yoruba doing it and vice-versa – and so on – but still seen as alien outsiders.
Even if, as I said, most of the whites no longer thought of themselves that way.
Well, that’s just their opinion.
We’ll...we’ll agree to disagree there. (Speaker coughs awkwardly) Ah, the Black Twenties were an important period for Guinea. It was the first time a major war had happened in which the Directorate – as it now was – was no longer automatically dragged along with the Anglo-Americans. Indeed, there were no Anglo-Americans anymore in that sense. Guinea could stay neutral. Back in 1912 she’d fixed her borders with Morocco, and now there was an informal agreement by which both neutral powers would work together to produce weapons and other supplies to sell to the warring nations. (Audience murmurs)
Yes. If the French can be vultures, why can’t the people of Guinea? Though there was some historical irony in it all, given what the Moroccans had been responsible for in the past...
Let’s...let’s not get into that, shall we? Perhaps, ah, perhaps more famously, as I think we discussed before, Guinea was responsible for producing Birline...under, ah, particular circumstances (Audience reaction) but which undoubtedly saved many lives during the plague. Many grew rich off this war production.
Well, some did. And many others, including those who worked on the plantations and in the factories and risked poisoning, did not.
Yes. Hence the contention of the postwar period, the Electric Circus...
Although it took longer for that kind of picture to get established in Guinea. Only the coastal cities, especially in Freedonia, had widespread use of electricity by the 1940s.
Yes, though Guinea also adopted spirit-based mobiles before many other nations.
Well, they had a lot of oil and not much coal, like the Societists. But it took longer for railways to get fully established as a transport network, rather than only serving the corporate needs of the Company.
That’s what I was getting on to...projects like a full railway network had become difficult, because of the two power centres and the disparate way representatives to the Grand Palaver were appointed. C. B. Kane had died in 1938 and there was no similarly powerful, unifying figure who could keep the Palaver in check. Now, ordinary people in many of the old kingdoms were starting to demand a share of the profits from the Black Twenties – along with the same voting rights as the Freedes. Tensions were running high. And then, of course, he arrived...
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “Eljiso: The Electric Circus and the Last Hero” by Janice Rackham, recorded November 13th, 2020—
Once again using the same non-violent tactics as he had in Bengal – and, as he commented at the time, feeling a lot better about it than the brutality he had inflicted on Platinea – he helped the various Guinean peoples who were campaigning for democratic representation. In particular, he helped keep the peace in the city of Bida, whose fate had been an open sore ever since the Treaty of Rabba in 1841, which had established the concord between the old Company and the Fulani.[19] The gradual establishment of the ‘Guinean Peace’ meant that the Fulani’s expansion had been artificially preserved, when most of the people of Bida were resentful of Fulani rule and would probably have thrown it off years ago. Indeed, the Nupeci revolt of 1897 had attempted to achieve this.[20]
The Directors had always been very leery about allowing such changes, risk they start an avalanche that tore the shaky unity of Guinea apart. The Grand Palaver had begun to allow some flexibility, but it was still predominantly an assemblage of the wealthy, privileged and powerful from most of the nations within Guinea. This also caused problems with projects such as the construction of railways and roads to try to link up the vast realm theoretically ruled from Oguaa and Zazzau. The desire for economic exploitation ran up against the concerns of absolute monarchs who feared allowing their people to travel freely and seek better lives elsewhere.[21] Now there was an even more important reason to construct such a transport network and push for other common systems, such as taxation – the threat of the Societists along the southeastern border. Following the shock of the attack on Princess Zodwa in 1939, Guineans had mostly accepted that they needed to pull together to resist the black-flag horde. They knew what had happened to Kongo and other states they had been aware of, and were also aware that to exert world influence at the new Concord as African states had rarely managed before, they needed to be united. But the Board and the Palaver were not well suited to interact with the needs of the people as a whole. Many of those people, at least in the major cities, were far more literate, well-read and engaged with the business of the world than they ever had been before.
Eljiso’s contribution to resolving all this was, in reality, quite small. His men helped keep the peace in disputed areas as some of the most contentious constitutional changes were made, led by reformers in both the Palaver and the Board. Most prominent amongst these were P. Hamilton Davies, Franklin Royle and Kwaku Southworth in the Board, and Oba Akitoye, Imam Ibrahim Saqr and Daniel Goudeh from the Palaver. Davies had grown wealthy off Birline production, but was also a paternalist social reformer and philanthropist, and one who genuinely wanted the people to benefit from that economic growth. Royle, a businessman, is best known for being the husband of Princess Zodwa and thus playing a role in the foundation of the Concord and Diversitarian governance. Kwaku Southworth was a director of mixed African and English ancestry. Akitoye was a Yoruba aristocrat, the son and heir of Oba Laro, who had been slain in the attack on Zodwa, and whose hatred for Societism rivalled Eljiso’s. Goudeh was an example of a coastal African who had rejected the absolutism and Fulani influence of the Kong state in which he had been born, and had instead fled to Freedonia and built a career there as a self-made man.
These leaders happily represented a range of backgrounds and were well-placed to shepherd Guinea into a brave new world. However, they still faced opposition from all quarters – ingrained power structures, xenophobia, those who feared any change would uncork a bottle and unleash civil war. Some appeals to unity transcended colour, class and creed, like mutual fear of the Societists – as always, the only unity they have ever achieved has been by uniting everyone against them! (Audience chuckles) But this is where Eljiso’s influence was important. Even if more as a symbol than anything, his approval of the Guinean reformists went a long way towards shaping world opinion. His reputation might be chequered in the eyes of some by his brutality in Platinea, but conversely it also made him a man not to cross.
Using models similar to those developed recently in Bisnaga, the monarchs were allowed to keep their titular realms and enjoy some privileges within them, while Guinea as a whole was rationalised into provinces and territories, the provinces largely treated as interchangeable and with common laws for the first time. There was still controversy in Freedonia about being fully integrated into such a structure in which Freedes were an outnumbered minority. This was resolved by giving voting weight to provinces based on electorate, privileging the Freedes who had progressed towards near-universal male suffrage. This incentivised other provinces to expand their own electorates (though this did sometimes result in corruption and election-rigging as well). Laws intended to prevent abuse, such as literacy tests for voters to avoid the illiterate being treated as a bloc vote by their village headmen, could also sometimes be used to suppress the vote.
Guinea remained far from perfect. As some had feared, the 1954 reforms did unleash new problems and divisions. We are all familiar still with the controversy over the Biafra oil revenues, and you may have heard of the Mossi jagun conscription riots in the 1960s, or the Bambara uprising of 1972 which led to substantial changes for religious freedoms in Guinea. But nonetheless, a major step towards the future had been established with the 1954 reforms, and Eljiso was there for it.
As I said before, in 1955 he travelled to England and was fêted by the King, as well as meeting and marrying his second wife, Alicia Troy. One day, their daughter would become the first female consul of the Philippine Republic, but that tale still lay far in the future. Eljiso was not a man who was content to rest on his laurels. Within the next two years, even as the world began to slide once more, inexorably, towards war, he was leading a team that attempted to diffuse tensions between American traders and the Siamese authorities in Cambodia, warning that any conflict would only helping the neighbouring Societists. Ultimately he failed, but typically for Eljiso, in the process ended up accidentally helping inspire the Cambodian nationalist movement which we still hear so much about today...
*
(Ensign Cussans’ note)
Ulp, that’ll do for now...don’t want them to catch me using the digitiser again...for the record, I still think we haven’t put enough in about the Rozwi, all right?
Besides, I’m starvin’ right now...
[1] Although, of course, many of the ancient historians did apply scepticism to accounts they received at second-hand; this is a bit of a whiggish attitude by the speaker.
[2] I.e. the Great Man Theory.
[3] See Part #295 in Volume VIII.
[4] The speaker here unusually mixes Leo Bone/Napoleon Bonaparte’s names, which may represent a recent trend in history or possibly just their personal choice.
[5] I.e. where he studied, lectured, and gave his historically important speech to rioters in 1828 (see Parts #60 and #71 in Volume II and Part #121 in Volume III ). The ambiguous language might imply the speaker is talking about Sanchez’s birthplace, but that is the town of Cervera in Catalonia, which is still under the control of the French-backed regime there (much to the Societists’ annoyance).
[6] See Part #14 in Volume I.
[7] This was also a cause célébre for the Russian Orthodox Church in OTL after the (different) Polish partitions. Note that the term ‘Uniate’ is now sometimes considered derogatory in OTL, but is still in common use in TTL.
[8] See Part #137 in Volume III.
[9] See Part #143 in Volume III.
[10] Although, of course, the Vitebsk Pact also contained nations that were not Baltic or Slavic.
[11] See Parts #246 and #247 in Volume VI.
[12] See Part #300 in Volume VIII. Note that the treaty specifically ended the war between Russia on one side and France and her allies on the other side (sometimes called the Khivan War), not ‘the Black Twenties’, a term which vaguely also takes in the War of 1926 and, indeed, the plague pandemic.
[13] ‘The Frozen Front’ is a term used to describe post-Black Twenties borders based largely on uti possidetis and artificially preserving the front lines where they stood in 1926 as the permanent borders. In this context, it is used similarly to ‘the Iron Curtain’ in OTL, but can also be applied to examples like the Tarsus Salient splitting the Ottoman Empire in two.
[14] The historical name Thessalonica is being used to avoid later arguments over which name to give it (or whether to use the Societist alphanumeric designation, which was used in the Eternal State at one point but not very extensively).
[15] Pishpek (today spelled Bishbek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan) was only founded as a fortified city in 1825 by the Khanate of Kokand, well after the POD of this timeline, but it was built on a much older existing caravan stop, and the same logic has applied in TTL.
[16] This speaker doesn’t go into detail, but the ‘West Durrani State’ (as it is usually called in English) is the last remnant of the West Durrani Empire (see part #87 in Volume II), ruling most of OTL Afghanistan. It was formerly a Persian vassal until the Black Twenties, but then became largely independent (if under Kalati influence). Later it will be known as Pathanistan.
[17] See Part #264 in Volume VII.
[18] This was often true in OTL colonial West Africa as well. Note that there was Christian evangelism in the region from at least as far back as the 15th century, so this is not solely a 19th century phenomenon as it’s often portrayed.
[19] See Part #165 in Volume IV.
[20] See Part #236 in Volume VI.
[21] This speaker is a bit biased. It’s also debatable whether some of these can truly be called absolute monarchs, as often there was also a role for an assembly of some kind in their government – just not a very democratic one – or at least powerful nobles still had influence besides that of the monarch.
