Please note this is only the first half of part #325. The rest will come in a fortnight's time as we finally complete volume IX of Look to the West.
Part #325: Blackout
“SEE THE EMPIRE FOR A DIXIE A DAY!*
The Rattlesnake Railcard – FOR AMERICA’S FAMILIES
From CHARLOTTE to CHURCHILL – From JAMESTOWN to JOHNVILLE
Step onto a train beneath the GLITTERING STEEL TOWERS of CHICHAGO and, after a night of comfort, alight beneath the STONE TOWERS of the NABEEHO![1]
Embrace the American Adventure – order yours today at any Imperial Railways kiosk!”
*Disclaimer: Rattlesnake Railcard subscription for a family of 4 costs I 1400.0.0 per annum, Imperial Railways operates a full service 358 days a year. No refunds.
– Advertising poster in Washington Railway Station, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Taken and transcribed by Sgt Dom Ellis, December 2020
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
It seems our time here is drawing to an end…um…you should receive that update from the Captains soon… (Mutters inaudibly to self) In the meantime, it is high time we draw a line under the so-called Electric Circus era, entertaining though it has been. Sadly, this world began once again to revolve, with a numbing inevitability, towards war. I’ll give a brief (coughs) I said brief, rundown of how it got there, though we may have to save some details for the next set of updates, once we have arrived – anyway, as I was saying…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “Europe and the Second Interbellum” by Prof Dr Erich Möller and Magdalena Middleton, recorded October 14th, 2020—
It’s that curious thing, nein? You Americans are always so ready to say that the mother country means nothing to you, that you long surpassed them, that you are a better version of what they once were? And yet whenever your gaze crosses the Atlantic, where does it always land first? England. (Audience murmurs) What is your English phrase? Blood is thicker than water.
Maybe there’s some truth to that, Herr Doktor Professor…not that we would ever admit it! (Audience chuckles) So by all means, go on. You had just got up to when Stuart Lightfoot won the election of 1934?
Ja. Well, the English would insist that no one man wins or loses an election, of course…but that is of no important. Herr Lightfoot and his Democratic Party had secured a majority together with their Trade Union Alliance allies. Frederick Osborne was out, and for the first time in a third of a century, the Anglian Party that had dominated English politics ever since the Third Glorious Revolution was out, how do you say, on its ear.
So what happened then?
Well, Herr Lightfoot had been leading the opposition to the Anglians for a decade, having been the locus for English discontent during the Black Twenties. He had had plenty of time to decide on a plan for government, and he ruled the Democratic Party with unchallenged control. Of course, he also had to appease his, ah, TUA allies. He did so by making the TUA leader Russell Atkinson Secretary for the Interior and almost giving him a free hand over domestic affairs. His own interests lay more in the field of foreign policy, and so matters were carefully balanced.
How did that go down with the rest of the Democrats?
As I said, Herr Lightfoot had almost absolute control, at least at first, although discontent eventually grew among some of the Democrats who identified more with the old Watsonite Moderates from before the Revolution. At first, Lightfoot enjoyed popularity simply because he had finally removed the seemingly invincible Anglians from power, however.
There’s a story that Paul Lovett, then the Deputy Finance Secretary, was criticising the position in the House of Burgesses, only for Lightfoot to unexpectedly walk into the chamber and…well, let’s just say Lovett insisted afterwards that it had only been the sound of his cushion squeaking as it scraped the marble benches. (Audience laughter)
A crude anecdote, Fräulein Middleton, but it gets the point across, I suppose. (Coughs) While Atkinson and the TUA took revenge for President Howard’s ham-handed response during the 1928 Strike Wave and reformed workers’ rights, Lightfoot’s focus was overseas. He had a vision for England’s place in the world. He was heavily influenced by Douglas Bell, a Scottish geographer and historian who had been a disciple turned critic of the Belgian, Hendrik Wiegel.[2] While most Scots stuck to the patriotic line in celebrating their country’s independence since the Third Glorious Revolution, Bell courted controversy by critiquing the official narrative.
Now I think there were other such critics, but most focused on economics?
Ja. The fact that the Scottish government had had to scale back pensions and state welfare programmes after the Panic of 1917. Perhaps more relevant to the average person, but Bell was focused more on foreign affairs. He pointed to the fact that an independent Scotland had found it more difficult to avoid being subordinated as part of French-led alliances – as opposed to her more populous and economically weighty neighbour England, which had begun to assert herself more. Bell even claimed that Scotland would have ended the Black Twenties with nothing without England’s intervention – of course she gained authority over Rusa, a neighbouring town in Old Prussia to England’s Conisbrough.
Not much, but a prize of a sort at least.
It certainly upset the Bundeskaiser – but then, what didn’t? (Laughs to himself, audience doesn’t join in) But Bell wasn’t just a contrarian. He did not blindly idolise the past, when Scotland had been part of the Kingdom of the Britons, and before it the Kingdom of Great Britain. When he wasn’t getting his house burned down by an angry mob, he was analysing where, in his view, Britain had gone right as a country and where it had gone wrong. That grammar is, I’m sorry…
That’s aydub, Herr Doktor Professor, go on.
Danke schene. Bell was considered an iconoclast in the field of colonial history. At a time when European academia was split between either loud, post facto defensive declarations of the alleged civilising effects of colonialism, or else condemnation of it from a position increasingly influenced by natives of the colonised lands, Bell was something of a throwback. Some said he had been born in the wrong century and would have fitted in if he had been alive a couple of centuries prior. Bell was a ruthless mercantilist. To him, the purpose of colonialism, no, the purpose of all foreign policy, was simply to create wealth for the state in order to improve the lives of its own people. Bell argued that Britain, a thalassean island nation, had succeeded best when she had planted trade outposts across the world and then used her then-powerful navy to destroy any competition for them. He said that the rot had crept in when she tried to conquer and settle on land. Taking over Bengal had been a mistake not because of any suffering of the Bengalis, but because it embroiled Britain in a series of mainland problems – and never-ending frontiers – that had nothing to do with filling her coffers. (Some vague sounds of audience agreement) America had been a mistake – (Mixed audience laughter and sharp disagreement) – because its colonies just became another source of problems for Britain, never lived up to her hopes of tax revenue, and eventually became their own nation and effectively subsumed Britain. (Some sounds of agreement) In Bell’s world, colonial projects and military power projection should have no goal beyond moneymaking, and the role of government policy should be to rein in groups like the old East India Companies before they unilaterally exceeded that mission.
So did Mr Lightfoot feel the same way?
Not entirely. He did not share Bell’s zero-sum worldview. But he did agree that Britain, now England, was strongest when she focused on her advantages as an island nation, relying on her navy to join up and defend a series of isolated outposts around the world. Of course, the world was very different to what it had been in the 1700s, the era Herr Doktor Bell was writing about – and, to some, the era he was mentally living in, too! England could no longer claim to dominate the seas, and nor did she possibly have the resources to compete with powers like the Societists or indeed this ENA. (Loud audience reactions) But Lightfoot believed England could dominate one sea, one at a time, if she built and maintained her navy properly and focused in the right places. Every British and English government since 1807, even the Populist ones that had been sharply against a standing army, had been driven by a sense of paranoid introversion, a fear that one day England would be invaded again. As, indeed, some said the French had in the Third Glorious Revolution. But Lightfoot was the first to stand up and declare that he believed it was time to focus on using a newly reimagined navy to project power outwards, not simply defend the homeland. And with that power projection, he believed England could exercise disproportionate power against seemingly greater opponents.
Was he right?
In a sense. I should say that often popular histories speak – what is that word you used yesterday?
Er, bunkum?
Ja. They speak bunkum about Lightfoot. One often hears that he was the first English President to engage in the Mediterranean Sea east of Gibraltar. That started way back in 1867 when the British government of the day chose to support the Sicilians in the Peninsular War.[3] But it is true that Lightfoot, hmm, kicked it into high gear. In a time of peace, he expanded the Royal Navy considerably, focusing not on large ships but on medium-sized cruiser-frigates that meant there could be an English presence almost everywhere.
This was also the era of the Lineship Wars, wasn’t it?
Ja. Even here in the ENA, where you had helped pioneer hiveships yourself and seen how devastating they had been in Societist hands, you still had conservative admirals clinging to lineships for a while. Well, imagine how much worse it was in Europe, where hiveships had not been involved in the fighting in the Black Twenties. In my own Germany, the Admiralty refused to countenance the switchover. It became yet another political shibboleth for the French to be partisan about, whilst their two parties continued to have no coherent divide on anything actually important. Only the Romulans in Italy truly embraced hiveships, and thanks to their rocket mania they usually tried to fly rocket dromes off them…all the images of burning, sinking ships didn’t exactly sell the idea of hiveships to other nations, either.
So England was the exception?
Ja. England, North Belgium, Scandinavia. They were the only European nations that truly embraced the hiveship. Meanwhile the Societists had plenty in Spain. When one thinks of how close we came…
But you were talking about England. Didn’t England form an alliance with Belgium?
Was? No, that was later. As I was saying, while Atkinson reformed domestic policy, Lightfoot focused on foreign affairs.
With Eric Stafford as the titular foreign secretary…though they always say he was just a cipher for Lightfoot.
In that era, perhaps, though I will always defend gentlemen who share my name. (Chuckles) Stafford was either Lightfoot’s placeman or his protégé, depending on whom you ask. Anyway, with his Bell-influenced thesis, Lightfoot wanted to find a diplomatic way to withdraw from Natal, England’s last major colony, without losing face. As you may know, that didn’t happen in the end until the 1950s, but the groundwork was laid under the Lightfoot ministry.
Lightfoot led England into the ASN as well, didn’t he?
Yes, England was an early member. Stafford attended the Toulon Conference in 1941 and England joined soon afterwards, then hosted the follow-up Portsmouth Conference in 1942. Lightfoot had set England on the path he wanted by the time he retired in 1943 on health grounds. Stafford became President, though struggled to hold the coalition together. The opposition Anglians had begun to compare Atkinson and the TUA to the ‘Clackists’ of the old regime. In fact Atkinson did embrace the image of the old Populists of the 1830s and 40s like Llewelyn Thomas, which was a divisive decision with some voters. So long as the strong personality of Lightfoot was at the top, the Anglian attacks had not landed with voters, but Stafford was seen as a weaker figure. At the 1945 general election, the coalition lost its majority and the Anglians were the largest party.
But that didn’t last long, did it?
No. Robert Austin struggled on for eighteen months without a majority, but he was unable to shift England off the course that the coalition had set her on. The Anglians were also struggling for identity, no longer the, how do you say, large, you know, marquee–
Big tent?
Yes, no longer a big tent party, but trying to become a more coherent doradist party without alienating any of their current voters. An impossible task. Unable to govern, Austin called an early election in 1947 – and lost. The Democrats had taken the unexpected step of choosing a female leader, former Education Secretary Deborah Green. Here as elsewhere, the influence and image of Madame Mercier had been crucial, and now the English people were willing to accept the idea of a female President. The Democrats had chosen Mrs Green in place of the more doradist Paul Lovett whom you mentioned before.
Oh yes, old squeaky-
Yes, him. He wasn’t happy, of course, and Mrs Green had to appease him and his Watsonite faction by giving him the Finance Ministry. That also meant that, somewhat unexpectedly, the Foreign Ministry went to a TUA member, Kenneth Sefton. (Sounds of audience recognition)
One of the diplomatic superstars of the 1950s.
As you put it. It was Mr Sefton who was responsible for forging the alliance with Belgium and California, and for finally bringing English rule in Natal to an end. He gave England a new and coherent, if frankly hypocritical, geopolitial position of claiming to support the rights of small nations against domination by larger neighbours. By selling them weapons.
Of course, they were scarcely alone in that…
Quite. Domestically, Mrs Green brought back Mr Stafford, in the role of Interior Secretary. He was responsible for the controversial constitutional reform that shifted English House of Burgesses elections over to the Single Preferential Seat system.[4]
A peculiar one that – single-member seats would never fly here in the Empire, other than for the odd isolated island and so on…
Of course his motivation was to try to prevent conflicts between the sometimes-fractious Democrats and TUA when they refused to stand down for each other. The Anglians had won several seats in 1945 off the back of such a split three-way vote. Theoretically, preferential voting would prevent this problem. Naturally, the Anglians saw it as a corrupt power grab and protested. But the government made great use of the Communal Motoscopy that Mr Atkinson had begun to set up in the early 1940s…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Media Revolution of the Electric Circus” by Jason Willis and Elizabeth Blackmore, recorded November 9th, 2020—
We’ve already looked at how significant of an impact the Electric Circus era had on how people consumed media, and how much – a trend spreading from richer countries to poorer ones, and to a wider audience of more modest means within countries, too. To briefly recap, so far I’ve talked about quality asimcony became more affordable for the average person and colour asimcons became the norm in the 1940s.[5] Relatedly, I also talked about how newspapers became cheaper and more accessible and were joined by a wider variety of magazines, and that same advancement of colour asimcony and printing suddenly made the world explode into colour. The same was true as colour films became the norm, both phanty-films and simmy-films, and soon the era of the soundless film was a vanished memory of the older generation.[6]
Let’s not forget that music is part of this as well, with more advanced parvogroove tapes and discs continuing to compete with each other. Better phakophones and augmentophones meant that a wider range of music could be captured, and process-produced grooveplayers could be sold to a wider audience. Suddenly there could be mass world music phenomena like zig-and-zag, lammens, Murria, Zachod Polka, Carnatique, Geli-gequ[7] spreading across the globe, a sharing of ideas like none before. (Audience murmurs) Some saw that as a threat, the first step down the road to Societist homogeneity, but the Societists themselves fruitlessly tried to keep out the influence of these wild musics on their young people. Yet Photel, which also had become ubiquitous, could not be kept out. Corruption of transmissions only went so far. If only there was a way, the Combine lamented, to keep the so-called unhealthy emissions of the ‘nationalistically blinded’ away from their pure population. (Mixed audience chuckles and oohs) Which, ultimately, brings us to the greatest media breakthrough of the age – Motoscopy.
Yes. Today we take Motoscopy for granted. It is just a natural part of our world, a part of the furniture, and to almost everyone here tonight, it always has been. It’s hard now to recognise just how profoundly the Motoscope changed our society. Probably some of you are here tonight because you remember my late father’s celebrated series, “12 Inventions that Changed the World”, over thirty years ago now. (Sounds of audience acknowledgement and a few muted cheers) The final invention that my father, and his collaborator Jennifer Hodgeson, covered in the series was the very medium on which it was being broadcast – the Motoscope. Now, I can only hope to follow in their footsteps!
The concept of Motoscopy is ancient. I don’t know when, or who, first speculated about the idea of moving images being sent great distances to be seen by viewers far away. But it was probably centuries or millennia ago. One could argue that the beginnings of Motoscopy even predate Photel, in a sense. In the 1820s, Isambard Brunel’s Le Colosse had been the talk of Paris.[8] Some of you may have seen the modern replica. It was a giant grid of shutterboxes capable of displaying a rather low-resolution image, based on data sent across the Optel grid. Something less showy and more practical would form the basis of sending early images across nations, split up into many small squares and then reassembled to be printed in newspapers.
Somewhat ironically, Brunel was ahead of his time here, because this was using discrete logic, before the surfinal world even! It was a code that was transmitted and reassembled. In that sense it resembles the direction Motoscopy is taking today, in favour of discretion and away from a pure analogue system.[9]
Perhaps. There have been many false starts in the field of Motoscopy, as in so many inventions. While encoded images were, similarly, sent over Lectel rather than Optel after the Telegraph Wars of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, no-one ever seems to have seriously speculated about the idea of sending moving pictures over Lectel. The concept of moving pictures at all was still a new one,[10] and did not seize the popular imagination until the advent of film – which is a totally different technology. Odeons projected images from film, either captured from real events with a simmy-camera or drawn by a phanty-artist. But the only way to show those images in multiple cities across a nation at once was to make multiple prints of that film, distribute it and have it shown in odeons simultaneously. Inevitably, even in the eras where film rage was at its height, one could not reach everyone. This process also took time, meaning there was inevitably a delay between an event being filmed and then being broadcast to the people. People of the 1920s, 30s, 40s were used to the idea that a newsreel was always in retrospect. Newspapers gave a much more current picture of what was happening, and for those who could afford it, Photel carried the lure of instantaneous information. But a newsreel was what one watched to see pictures of diplomatic superstars moving around at the latest conference, after the treaty had already been signed, read out on Photel and published in the newspapers. It added visceral reality to events but could never be the herald of them.
But the popularity of Photel and film naturally awakened the speculation that the two technology could be conceptually combined – that moving pictures could be broadcast as instantaneously across the nation as sound was. Scientific romance writers added it to their portfolios, and simulated Motoscopy broadcasts – even two-way interactive ones, a technology we still don’t have today! – can be seen in the 1942 sci-rom classic Ypolis by Dennis Frankleigh.
But how to achieve this technological wonder? Some inventors indeed became too fixated on making it work with the then-current film technology. I won’t go through all the dead ends, because really there were so many – even compared to other inventions. The number of brilliant minds working on the Motoscopy problem across the world meant that there were several different developments. Here in America, for example, in Mount-Royal, the Italian exile Federico Rosetti invented the first mechanical Motoscope as early as 1933.[11] Rosetti’s design used a giant rotating wheel with holes in it, which samples a scene one dot at a time – not the same as modern iotas! – and converts it into a transmission. This is then interpreted by a receiver with the same rotating wheel, which filters the display so that one scan-line, to use today’s terminology, is displayed at a time. The human eye and brain stitches the disparate lines together into a single moving image, with the smoothness of the motion related to the speed of the wheel’s rotation.
Rosetti’s design was a technical marvel but yet another technological dead-end. Nor did it come out of nowhere – it was built on the earlier work of others. Rosetti enjoyed some success as a novelty in Cubwick and parts of New York, but the high expense and low image quality stymied the success of mechanical Motoscopy. At least, in the free world. Behind the Frontier, in the Zones, Societist inventors continued to work on perfecting mechanical Motoscopy. Their systems used drums rather than wheels, allowing larger screen displays, and would eventually be refined to use photo-biodes that shone by their light rather than holes, allowing a much brighter display.[12] They took advantage of the refinement of small mechanisms that had been focused on in the Combine, in a fruitless attempt to make on-board mechanical ypologists work with rockets. Societist mechanical Motoscopy was nonetheless almost always inferior in quality and expense compared to the dominant SBT, or surfinodic beam tube , which became the basis of most Motoscopy in the free world.[13]
But this was not important compared to the Societists’ main aim. If our SBT broadcasts ran on a totally different principle to their mechanical ones, then their people could not intercept our Motoscopy broadcasts as they sometimes did our Photel ones. (Audience murmurs) Naturally, the Societists put out a propaganda message that Motoscopy was the future and Photel was atavistic, encouraging their people to abandon Photel sets in favour of Motoscopes. While we tend to associate Societist Motoscopy with dreary VoxHumana broadcasts, they did also provide extensive music, comedy and drama programmes to help encourage uptake, while severely reducing Photel output. Even the popular scientific romance film series Navis Estela eventually moved to Motoscopy, though this didn’t happen until the late 1960s when Motoscopes had entered more Amigos’ households.[14]
As for the free world…it’s only in the last few years that slim-form alternatives to SBT Motoscopes have come down in price enough to be purchased by the average family, and SBTs are still the norm in most countries. Your Motoscope works by aiming a small particle gun right at your face… (Audience reaction) Maybe the Sutcliffists are right, eh? The beam of surfinos comes from a surfinode at the back of the tube and a magnetic field bends it very precisely to sweep back and forth across the screen seventy-five times a second – on the American Motoscopic standard it’s 75, at least, back home in England it would be sixty-five. (Audience reaction) Yes, well, we have 720 lines on our screens to your 600, so shut up! (Audience laughter and catcalls) As the beam goes, it lights up the phosphors on the screen, varying the beam strength and therefore the brightness to match the image that was transmitted to the Motoscope via Photel-type transmissions. From this, the image is assembled and redrawn many times a second, far faster than the human eye can see. To use, it looks like smooth motion. I won’t go into how colour Motoscopy works, as that’s slightly more complex, but it’s the same principle.
SBTs were first developed on an economic scale in Germany, and Germany was the first country to begin a mass state roll-out of home Motoscopy broadcasts from 1945 onwards. In Europe, most of the Motoscope broadcasters were state-owned. France belatedly got on the bandwagon in 1949. But strictly, the English had been there before both, in 1943 – just not using SBTs or Rossetti’s mechanical Motoscope. The DUP government at the time had seen the potential for Motoscopy for public communications – some would say propaganda.[15] Russell Atkinson, the main political driver for the project, knew of the power of newsreels in odeons, but that they came with delays, and also was well aware that most English people would discuss politics in their local pub. (Some murmurs and chuckles) Not all stereotypes are false. Atkinson realised that if an odeon could be married to a pub, with a small screen displaying live broadcasts, it had the potential to set the tone of the nation’s political conversation. The first English Motoscopes were really small back-projectors, using an elaborate encoding and mask-filtering system to convert Photel-based broadcasts to images. The technology is quite interesting, but we don’t really have time to go into it here.
There were all sorts of problems with the English system – complexity, low resolution, prone to breakdowns or even setting light to pubs. But the novelty had hit home at the right time. The Communal Motoscopes helped change sceptical public opinion when the government wanted to change the voting system in 1948. Of course, concerns over abuse of the system by one party led to the setup of the neutral English Broadcasting Authority in 1952. Technology would improve, and eventually England would adopt Germany’s SBT-based system, but Communal Motoscopy was firmly established. Home Motoscopes would not be adopted in large numbers in England until the coronation of Queen Charlotte in 1965. Communal Motoscopy would also provide an example to poorer countries such as Guinea, Matetwa and Bisnaga, as well as the more rural and backward parts of lands like China and Mexico, where the tradition would persist long after it had ceased to be the primary way of Motoscope-watching in England.
Other nations approached Motoscopy differently. Here in America, perhaps because of Rossetti’s failure, initially there was public indifferent to Motoscopy. That one journalist on the New York Register, Augie Patterson, got into trouble for claiming Americans didn’t have the attention span to sit still and watch a box for half an hour. (Audience laughter and oohs) Well, quite. Motoscopy slipped in under cover, however, and by 1952 there were a dozen private broadcasters. The government was late to the party in regulating them. This, together with this nation’s huge size and diversity, is why you’ve never had the same kind of central, national broadcasting as most countries. The same was true in China at first, but the state seized control of their regional broadcasters in 1967.
Russia initially tried to ban Motoscopy, and there’s some evidence that the Tsar’s men even looked into trying to set up a wired alternative to the system, like the wired Dalekodeons they had used for some time in place of Photel. But, just as that system had ultimately been abandoned, eventually Motoscopy had to be let in. The Romulans in Italy tried to use it for propaganda in a way similar to the Societists and English – the Societists also used Communal Motoscopy in the early days – but much less successfully, not helped by their administrators frequently embezzling the budget.
And, of course, the English voting reform was not the last big political issue on which Motoscopy made a big difference. Not by a long shot. In fact, some have argued that without the visceral scenes in Prague broadcast worldwide on a relatively short delay, unlike the polished after-the-fact newsreels, the Sunrise War might not have started at all…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “Siam’s Ugly Secret: The Unending Fight for Freedom” by Awar Po and David Lemand, recorded October 25th, 2020—
...but now we’re coming to a controversial topic, aren’t we? If we’re talking about the end of the Electric Circus, we need to tralk about Binhminh Tran.
Are any of the topics we’ve discussed not controversial, David? (Audience laughter) At least according to the Ayutthais, who petition the ASN to create a Heritage Point of Controversy every time one of their bullyboys shoots a Cham child or throws a brick through the window of a mosque and they deny it. (More mixed audience reaction) But you’re right. Everyone in Indochina has an opinion about Binhminh Tran, and they are likely to causefights – verbal or physical – around the dinner table at Songkran.[16] To the Viets of Annam, those who fight for freedom like my sisters and brothers of Champa, he is a particular conundrum. Was he a hero who humiliated the Ayutthais, or a craven who joined their side? Now that is a real Heritage Point of Controversy.
I think we’ve all probably heard the name of Binhminh Tran in passing, but I doubt many of the ladies and gentlemen here have an in-depth knowledge of his life. Could you please give us a brief summary?
I don’t think the Viets would be too happy about me doing that, either. (Laughs to herself) But yes, I’ll do it, and try to be as balanced as I can. Now.
Tran Binh Minh – or Binhminh Tran as he is often called in Western sources, as you said – was born around 1892 in a village in Tonkin, not far from the coastal city of Mau Le.[17] The early details of his life are not recorded, he was simply one more anonymous peasant from one more anonymous peasant family. Tran’s father was conscripted into the Pandoric War and died fighting the Chinese. When the Chinese defeated the Ayutthais in 1898, they turned Tonkin into their province of Jiaozhi and imposed their own ideas about governance. The Tonkinese Viets were a people caught between two careless giants, collateral damage. I am a Cham, and part of our history is resenting the Viets for conquering us and forcing their culture on us in the same way, centuries earlier. But I do not revel in what has happened to the Viets under Ayutthai rule, or gloat and call it poetic justice. It is always a tragedy when a culture is crushed in this way, no matter whose culture it is. (Murmurs of agreement from audience) You can see why we are so keen to ensure that the Ayutthais can no longer get away with claiming to be such valiant fighters against Societism when they themselves—
Er, yes, I see your point, Miss Po, but can we get back to Binhminh Tran.
Yes – yes. Later. Well, the fate of the northern Viets was mixed. Many remained under Chinese rule and simply got used to being lectured at in Chinese rather than Ayutthai. They had always been second-class subjects; what was the difference? Others were not so fortunate. The Chinese happened to select Tran’s village as part of an area which they bulldozed and built a military base there. Tran’s surviving family was evicted overnight and became part of a column of refugee stragglers fleeing south. Can you imagine being a seven-year old boy thrust into that nightmare, clinging to a weeping mother who is trying to remain strong, helping keep his two younger sisters alive? (Audience reactions) It’s small wonder that it had such a powerful effect on Tran. His mother poured all her remaining strength into getting them safely south to Hue, and passed away herself in 1904, when Tran was only twelve years old. He was forced to not only fend for himself, but to continue to protect his sisters. In this process, he fell in with a criminal syndicate in Hue which consisted mostly of members of the Red Sash Brigades who had been driven underground.
The Red Sash Brigades were...
A group of angry young men furious at their government, and its workshy aristocrats, for dragging them into the war and then losing it. They were mostly Ayutthais and no friends of me or mine, though there were some from the captive nations. The Emperor and Front Palace had cracked down on them and bought off public anger with some symbolic punishment of those aristocrats.[18] Many of the more extreme Red Sash stalwarts were sent to fight the Societists in Sumatra and the other islands. Others escaped the crackdown and turned instead to organised crime. Tran fell in with one such group, as I said. But though he was a capable thief, he always had a strong moral sense and was disgusted with the work, seeing it only as a necessary evil to fill his belly and those of his sisters’. He had strong memories of the refugee column being plagued by bandits, and hated to think he had become one himself. He always had a firm respect for strong men who only fought those who were also strong, and a visceral contempt for those who preyed on the weak and vulnerable.
I see. Which I suppose...
In 1908 he turned sixteen. He had managed to find his sisters positions in the household of a charitable Viet minor nobleman who had employed them as junior maids, a good man whom he could trust not to abuse them or marry them off against their will. Freed of his responsibilities – though he would continue to send money home to them – Tran decided to cut ties with the syndicate. In the reverse career pathway that many of its members had been on, he would join the armed forces, lying about his age.
You would think he wouldn’t have the best opinion of...
No, I know what you’re going to say. It was an act of necessity. A reliable job in which he could use some of the skills he had learned in a more respectable and legitimate – as it was seen – craft. That didn’t mean he particularly liked it. Some of those bandits who had raided his family’s refugee column had been demobbed soldiers, for a start. So were some of the criminals he wanted to get away from. And he had often expressed contempt for the Ayutthai soldiers who had failed to defeat the Chinese and led to his family’s eviction, though that’s confused his biographers because he said inconsistent things over the years. Remember his father died in the conflict, and he may have blamed that on the orders of an Ayutthai officer.
Regardless, whatever his reasons, Tran joined the Imperial Siamese Army in 1908. That was around the time that the Societist victory in South America had become apparent.[19] But there were still question marks over what would happen to the old Batavian Republic, which was in the process of collapsing into civil war. With Meridian Hermandad power removed and the fragile hierarchy of exilic Dutch rule coming apart, the Republic’s corpse was ready to be carved up by forces including the greedy Ayutthais, the vengeful Sulu Sultanate, the rebellious Mataramese, the opportunistic Filipinos, the French, the Belgians and, of course, ultimately the Societists.[20] The Societist Doctrine of the Last Throw was experienced in the Nusantara long before you would witness it in the world beyond. (Audience murmurs) After all those forces weakened each other, the Societists were able to sweep in and defeat all of them. All except the armies which are recorded in your history books as ‘Siamese’ but which included many non-Ayutthais like Sergeant Binhminh Tran.
He rise to a higher rank than...
Eventually, yes, but his worldview was shaped by his experiences as a noncom. He fought alongside fellow Viets as well as Chams like myself, Cambodians, Mons, Hmong, Malays, exilic Javanese and many more. And, yes, Ayutthais as well. While he had a reputation for featuring on battlefields where certain aristocratic Ayutthai officers who had got their men killed mysteriously turned up with a bullet in the back of their necks, (Audience reaction) there were other Ayutthais whom he respected. That’s another reason why he’s a complex figure. He was a great man and a great Viet, but can he be held up as a symbol for Viet freedom, especially as his own people from Tonkin have largely refused to join our crusade? But I won’t get into that.
That’s good, because...
No, Tran fought for almost a decade in the Nusantara islands. A little in Java, some in Sumatra – which was eventually a victory for the Ayutthais, so perhaps he might have turned out differently if he had stayed there. But instead he was assigned to a particularly unforgiving campaing. The isles of Bankga and Belitung, off the coast of Sumatra. They were sharply contested by the Societists, especially as the Sea Celatores became more and more experienced with their island-hopping tactics and use of small groups of elite Spekulador troops.[21] They learned from the Sea Dayaks, but adapted their raiding strategies for more modern technologies like celeriboats, minicings and even aerodromes. Some say Tran might even have fought Markus Garzius in his early days, learning his own craft on the other side.
The islands of Bankga and Belitung were desirable both because they were a potential hop-off point for an invasion of Palembang to open another front against the Ayutthai forces in Sumatra, and more importantly because of their precious tin reserves. Tran and his men fought in bitter conditions, easily as bad as those your own American soldiers and the Russians had a few years before in Noochaland, for about three years from 1914 to 1917, a time when most of the world seems to think peace reigned supreme. But not for Tran and his men. He saw good men, friends he had fought alongside for years, dying of disease in the mangrove swamps for the sake of tin. Tin!
I suppose that really would change your perspective on...
Then in 1917 came, well, the Panic of 1917. The Emperor, the Front Palace, even the new Grand Sapha parliament – dominated by Ayutthais of course! – they were certainly all in a panic. The economy had tanked and even the soldiers’ pay packets were in doubt. If the army mutinied, all was lost. So paradoxically the Front Palace recalled those same ‘unreliable’ soldiers who had been sent to fight the Societists in the Nusantra, the criminals, the conscripts, the Red Sash fanatics, in the hope that they could now be trusted more than the furious regular Ayutthai army on the streets of Ayutthaya.
...Did it work?
In a sense. But while some of those men thought no farther than their next meal, Tran was furious. Once his men were withdrawn from Bangka, of course, the Societists moved in without a fight. All their sacrifice had been for nothing. For now, Tran did his job, as he saw it. He put down discontent – another reason why we are reluctant to celebrate him today. But he remembered.
In the short term, the Emperor and the Front Palace were rescued when France decided to provide financial support to stabilise the economy, effectively bribing them into remaining neutral against China during the Black Twenties conflict. The French got their way, but then China turned around and refused to fight Russia, as you probably know. (A few audience murmurs) Tran was furious at this outcome, because the Treaty of Guiling effectively settled for reclaiming part of Tonkin whilst the rest – including his former village – remained under Chinese rule. He was angry with the French, with the Chinese, but most of all with the Ayutthai despots who had cravenly settled for such a deal and proclaimed eternal peace. Siam remained neutral throughout the Black Twenties, other than the ongoing low-level fight with the Societists.
The tempo of that conflict had reduced, hadn’t it? There was an unofficial conclusion that Sumatra would be Siamese and...
Yes, but I don’t want to overstate that – there was still plenty of skirmishing, raiding and proxy conflict well into the Second Interbellum. Anyway, as I was saying, scientists in Siam – including many non-Ayutthais who did not receive fair credit, of course – played a crucial role in the study of the plague and the development of some of the first vaccines.[22] That was a remarkable piece of prestige for the Emperor and the government. But it did not entirely paper over discontent behind the scenes. French money had bought off the immediate problems of the Panic of 1917, but now France had bigger problems. Ultimately, the people were unhappy. They chafed under plague quarantine, however necessary, and there was a sense that there was one rule for the Ayutthais – no, to be fair, the wealthy Ayutthais – and one for everyone else.
Er, so men like Tran remained in demand?
Men from a similar background as Tran, yes, enforcers of the Emperor’s will. But he was not cut from the right cloth to be a bullyboy enforcer for ever. In 1925 he helped save a Cambodian village that had been abandoned by the local authorities, cut off and expected to starve. He commandeered some aerodromes – and remember, Siam’s aero force was considered the best in Asia at the time[23] – and used them to safely drop supplies to keep its people alive. Tran was fêted as a hero, which made him a potential threat to the authorities. Of course, they could not openly punish him given his popularity, but what they did was still understood by the people for what it was. A lot of people have suggested that this was the original kernel of resentment among the Cambodians which led to a national awakening and means that their brave fighters for freedom have now joined us against the oppressor, and one day, inshallah, will—
Isn’t the start of the Cambodian national awakening usually attributed to the visit of Eljiso, about thirty years later?
To you in the western world, perhaps – but then, you can never concede that we have agency for ourselves, there must be a saviour from without. (Audience murmurs) Regardless, Tran was effectively kicked upstairs by being appointed a military attaché in the diplomatic corps. He was first assigned to Mexico, just in time for the War of 1926, and joined Guatemalan troops on the front lines against the Societists. Supposedly neutral, he shared with them the tactics he had learned fighting some of the same Celatores a decade before. The regime’s tactics had backfired, because Tran’s legend was kept alive, with the Guatemalans awarding him a medal for his work. He was then hastily reassigned to Spain, but that country had effectively ceased to exist by the time he arrived. Once again he helped oppose the Societists, this time by advising the French. Much as he had dislike for some French government policies after the Treaty of Guiling, his opposition to the Societists came first.
As it should...
He was sent on to Italy in 1929 almost as an afterthought and served as military attaché at the Siamese Embassy in Rome for twelve years, his longest stint anywhere. During that time, he witnessed the transformation of Italy by the Romulans.
Some people say he was inspired by their practices in how he...
Then some people are fools. The Romulans were nothing more than an inferior, European reflection of the Red Sash movement, which Tran was already more than acquainted with. How many times did he have to disparage the Romulans in his letters before you people will believe the contempt in which he held them? But that’s not important. Tran saw the money they wasted on prestigious rocket programmes or attempts to control the people through Motoscopy.[24] He saw how they seemed to be under the control or influence of Russia, behind the scenes. (A few audience murmurs) That Italy was being used as a proxy by Russia, a testbed both internal and external – was it worth trying to launch artimoons into orbit? Could the people be controlled in this way? Would the Alexandrine Empire collapse if challenged? Whilst smiling Strange Aleks and the Imperial Soviet made noises about peace and prosperity, behind the scenes other forces were already planning for the next war.
Didn’t Tran guess that the Russians were also...
Yes, exactly. He knew the Russians had been selling arms to recoup some of their earlier losses and get rid of some obsolete arsenals. In particular, whether by chance or design, many of the countries they sold weapons to were neighbours of China.
It’s still debated whether the Russians were knowingly trying to build an anti-Chinese alliance or not. All the records were lost when...
Conveniently so, yes. But if you ask me, no they did not do it intentionally. The whole Russian government suffered from Legion-syndrome, which no single central strong figure as it had been designed for. Their right hand did not know what their left hand was doing. But Tran realised he could use this to his advantage.
Didn’t he get himself reassigned to...
Initially to the Siamese consulate in Kiev, yes, in 1941. Then the consulate in Moscow in 1943 and finally to Petrograd itself in 1946. He made all the contacts he needed there. The Russians never realised how much they were being manipulated.
So this accidental anti-Chinese alliance became...
A real one. And he used other contacts he had built as well. Panchala ended up being armed by both France and Russia at the same time. Some people say it was an act of spite, French doradists who had opposed decolonisation now arming one of Bisnaga’s enemies after Bisnaga finally became independent in 1951. But it wasn’t. All of them were manipulated by Tran, on a global scale. Not bad for a refugee turned thief from a tiny village.
Well, that’s what some people claim...
He finally returned to Siam in 1953. All his enemies’ attempts to deal with him had failed, for his legend had been kept alive and he was more popular with the people than ever. Just in time. For soon the Crash of 1955 would come, and the new Red Garuda Party was looking for a charismatic leader to reawaken the public anger over inequality and lead them to victory. Victory, and then war with China to avenge the humiliation of Guiling...
[1] ‘Charlotte to Churchill, Jamestown to Johnville’ is a well-established advertising motto intended to take in all the territories of the ENA. Charlotte is the city in what was once the Province of North Carolina, also known by that name in OTL; Churchill is the outpost on Hudson’s Bay (in OTL Manitoba), named for the first Duke of Marlborough, and is intended to evoke the frozen north; Jamestown is chosen not only because it is on the east coast but because it evokes the founding of the American colonies that became the ENA; Johnville is a town on the Cygnian coast that was founded by Surcouf’s Jacobins (as Jeanville, near OTL Margaret River, Western Australia) but has recently grown and become a wealthy technology centre in TTL – it evokes the future of the country in contrast to Jamestown’s past. Note the highly characteristic TTL American habit of acting as though Cygnia is almost physically attached to North America’s west coast rather than separated by the Pacific. The Stone Towers of the Nabeeho (Navajo) are what we in OTL call Monument Valley.
[2] See Part #269 in Volume VII. Recall that Wiegel was responsible for the creation of something similar to OTL’s ‘World Island’ or ‘Heartland’ hypothesis by Halford John Mackinder.
[3] See Part #210 in Volume V.
[4] Referred to variously as Alternative Vote (AV), Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) and other names in OTL.
[5] Colour asimcony (photography) has moved at a more rapid pace than OTL, in part due to the influence of the advanced Meridian chemical industry in the nineteenth century.
[6] Recall that phanty-films means animation and simmy-films means live action – see Part #267 in Volume VII.
[7] Zachod Polka (a corruption/contraction of Zachodnia Polka, meaning Western Polka) is a term sometimes used for the popularisation of Polish and Czech music across much of the western world in this era – the original artists typically being refugees from either re-Germanised Bohemia or devastated and divided Poland. There was a particular group of of Zachod musicians associated with the Paris cultural scene in the 1940s.Carnatique refers to a form of music based on traditional southern Indian (Bisnagi) music which also entered European knowledge via France, and then developed further in France thanks to the work of both Bisnagi and French musicians. In TTL Bisnagi and Bengali music is much better known worldwide than that of northern or western India. Geli-gequ, ‘Songs of Isolation’, is a Chinese solo music style that developed during long periods of plague quarantine in 1920s and 1930s China. NB not all these were popular at the same time, there were repeated waves of fashion throughout the three decades of the Electric Circus era.
[8] See Interlude #16 in Volume IV.
[9] ‘Discrete’ or ‘discretion’ are the terms typically used instead of ‘digital’ in TTL, as opposed to ‘analogue’ (which is still called ‘analogue’). As in OTL, the distinction refers to whether the transmission or storage system directly captures an analogue of the original picture/sound/etc. or whether it first converts it into a data code and then back again.
[10] Remarkably – as mentioned in Part #267 – there is no evidence that flick-book animation existed (in OTL or TTL) until the nineteenth century, when it seems like the kind of invention that could easily have happened much earlier. The very concept of animated motion, though certainly not completely unknown (some have even argued that cave paintings use a simple form of two-frame animation!) seems to have been less obvious than it seems to us today.
[11] This is similar to John Logie Baird’s mechanical television from OTL (which first underwent test broadcasts in 1925).
[12] In OTL, drum-based mechanical television was tried by Léon Theremin (better known for his invention of the titular musical instrument) in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Similar, but more advanced systems, have since been produced by hobbyists in OTL using LEDs; ‘photo-biodes’ is the term in TTL for LEDs (light-emitting diodes). Note that LED technology in TTL is ahead of OTL – though electronics is usually behind, the limiting factor for developing blue LEDs (allowing white light and the RGB light pallette) in OTL was primarily metallurgical and chemical rather than electronic.
[13] The surfinodic beam tube is the TTL term for what we would call a cathode ray tube or CRT.
[14] See Part #287 in Volume VIII for more on Navis Estela.
[15] The speaker is being anachronistic here, as this is some years before the Democrats and Trade Unionist Alliance merged to form the Democratic Unionist Party.
[16] Songkran is the Thai new year celebration, which traditionally took place in April according to the Thai calendar. In OTL it was eventually moved in 1940 to coincide with the Gregorian new year on January 1st, but this hasn’t happened in TTL. Note the implication that Songkran has been imposed on other subject peoples part of the Siamese Empire, who traditionally would have celebrated a lunar new year like China or an Islamic new year in summer.
[17] Today in OTL called Hạ Long.
[18] See Part #255 in Volume VII.
[19] See Part #253 in Volume VII.
[20] See Part #267 in Volume VII. Note that the scale and role of these groups varied considerably – the Belgians in particular were only there because they had been ceded the already barely-notional German colony in New Guinea, and struggled to hold on to that even before the Societists eventually pushed them out, rather than being any kind of serious contender for expanding into more lands.
[21] See Parts #295 and #297 in Volume VIII for more on the Sea Celator tactics developed during these wars for control of the Nusantara.
[22] See Part #285 in Volume VIII.
[23] Because China had begun to lag behind in the late nineteenth century, see Part #269 in Volume VII.
[24] This is anachronistic as Italy had not rolled out Motoscopy by the time Tran left. He may well have seen them trying to do it with Photel (radio) though.
