see below
Clearly a quote from something. Thanks to the reader (Danderns?), who identified it. 8bit video game!!!
'ov' or 'oi'?
Love the real life (iTTL) adventures of a Flashman-esque character.
Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Love the real life (iTTL) adventures of a Flashman-esque character.
Thande
Donor
Should be Dolgorukov. I got momentarily confused because I first came across the name via Boris Akunin's books, and he changes it to Dolgorukoi (I think for 'transparent fictitious stand-in' reasons).
I've got ideas for another update and will write it when work permits. Meanwhile Volume I of LTTW is scheduled to come out on Sea Lion Press next Sunday barring delays.
I remember there were some questions about where the UPSA could get their coal from a while back. Apparently the southernmost bit of Brazil has a lot of coal (low quality coal, but that's fairly true of German coal reserves these days too). I forget if that part of Brazil was actually annexed or not, but it's accesable either way.
I'm not sure that needs to be stated as a matter of personal taste. Wasn't the core premise of the character that he was just a flat out terrible person who somehow never got what he had coming?
I suppose it is a love-to-hate situation, though.
Edit: Whoops! I'm not the first.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_Brazil
"Brazil's coal-mining region is located in the southern part of the country, and the reserves are distributed among the states of Paraná (1 percent), Santa Catarina (46 percent), and Rio Grande do Sul (53 percent). The southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul has majority of the coal reserves, but Santa Catarina is the largest producer of coal. The total Brazilian coal production in 2007 was 12,144,564 short tons, with the state of Santa Catarina producing 7,228,895 of those. The coal mining industry is of tremendous importance to these regions given the rapid expansion of Brazil’s national economy. It is also important in reducing reliance on hydropower from other regions."
"Brazil's coal-mining region is located in the southern part of the country, and the reserves are distributed among the states of Paraná (1 percent), Santa Catarina (46 percent), and Rio Grande do Sul (53 percent). The southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul has majority of the coal reserves, but Santa Catarina is the largest producer of coal. The total Brazilian coal production in 2007 was 12,144,564 short tons, with the state of Santa Catarina producing 7,228,895 of those. The coal mining industry is of tremendous importance to these regions given the rapid expansion of Brazil’s national economy. It is also important in reducing reliance on hydropower from other regions."
Thande
Donor
I swear you lot are psychic - you have to make comments NOW that contradict the matter of the update I was just about to post...well, a quick bit of editing later and here we are. Actually I'm not annoyed because I was worried the status quo had too much handwaving in how the UPSA can be an industrial power, so your findings ultimately make the TL better. However, I think it still works as is for this.
Part #214: An Angry Young Man
“On second thoughts Mary better make that TWELVE tanduree meal deals for 4, and quist the Bengali Mahal a couple of hours in advance to give them time to prepare them—I forgot Dick(head) Polton is sending his activists over to sponge off our goodwill as well. Because apparently they still haven’t reached their diversity quotas yet in Beckenham and he’ll be blowed if he’ll give ’em meat pies (or anything else paid for out of his own pocket). All right for some with their safe seats, isn’t it? Thanks.”
*
From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—
Raúl Caraíbas is, largely through his own deliberate efforts, one of the most frustratingly enigmatic significant figures of the nineteenth century. Indeed, at every step he sought to downplay his own significance and, when his background was queried, he relied upon vague generalities that shifted subtly depending on his audience. Nonetheless we cannot afford to ignore him. Regardless of what the Biblioteka Mundial might have us believe, Caraíbas was a hugely important figure for the development of Societism. Some controversy-seeking historians have even argued he played a larger role in the ideology as we know it today than Pablo Sanchez himself.
It is believed that Caraíbas was born ca. 1834 in one of the West Indian islands, probably one then under Carolinian control. He was visibly and unquestionably of a mixed racial background, at least one-eighth black (an octroon, to use the terminology of the day) and with considerable Novamundine Aboriginal[1] blood as well as both Latin Criollo and Anglo American influence. One can only guess the family background behind this mix, but judging by how Caraíbas spoke of his early years (however vaguely), it is likely to have had tragic aspects. Though Caraíbas’ personal diversity was hardly unique in the Americas, it undoubtedly played a major part both in his later embrace of Societism and the fact that he was swiftly regarded as a natural advocate of the ideology—though we should not understate his own personal qualities and skills.
Caraíbas may have been born a slave: under Carolinian ‘one drop’ racial law he should have been considered as such, although in practice he could likely have passed for sufficiently white to avoid that fate—particularly given the increasingly complex situation in the islands with people of Latin background receiving full citizenship and their own pedigrees not being examined too closely. We do not even know what name he bore as a child: ‘Caraíbas’, of course, was a name he took for himself later and merely describes the region he originated from. Whether he escaped a blighted state or left the islands of his own accord, he next emerges in the historical record as a teenage labourer in the Guyana Republic. According to Caraíbas himself, he was working to earn enough to buy passage to Buenos Aires, which he regarded as a land of opportunity. However, the Great American War intervened and Caraíbas found himself pressed into service on the Guayanese freighters supporting the Concordat war effort (unofficially) and then the Meridians (openly). Shortages of garrison troops, as both Carolinian and Meridian soldiers were channelled desperately towards the front lines, meant that the still underage Caraíbas was then conscripted into the ramshackle Guayanese army and made part of a company allegedly protecting the Georgian town of Wentworth.[2]
Caraíbas began as a private, but a combination of troops being spread ever more thinly, dead men’s shoes and his own unexpected leadership skills meant that he was rapidly promoted. On one occasion a group of ex-slave black rebels attacked the town, trapping most of Caraíbas’ company (and the city council) in the fortified couthouse and then seeking to fire it. Caraíbas found himself outside the courthouse with a few men, and displayed quick thinking and guile by having them bring up a small artillery piece loaded with grapeshot—while concealing their faces with the sun hats common to the area and loudly shouting the name of the rebels’ spiritual inspiration Caesar Bell. The deception was thin but caused just enough doubt on the part of the rebels for the gun to get into position and work its bloody havoc upon them. Caraíbas ended the skirmish as a sergeant thanks to his grateful superior Captain Pineda, but official recognition was slim and he was left sickened by the experience of watching the rebels torn apart by grapeshot—allegedly something that would trouble his dreams for the rest of his life. It was not simply the loss of life, but the fact that Caraíbas felt the ex-slaves had the moral high ground and that if he had remained in the West Indies, he might have been a member of such a group himself. He had acted as he felt he had to, to protect his friends in the company trapped in the courthouse, but he felt that did not justify his actions. Furthermore, the townsfolk of Wentworth were thoroughly ungrateful, with dark rumours circulating even about the activities of Meridian officers of a Criollista background, never mind those who visibly possessed some black ancestry. On at least one occasion there was an attempt to prosecute Caraíbas for a (probably) entirely fictitious tryst between himself and one of the young women of Wentworth, and Caraíbas was only rescued by Captain Pineda’s intervention.
He was thence tactfully posted elsewhere, including to Ultima where he came close to the front lines of the war and saw the real scale of (then) modern industrialised warfare. Caraíbas ended the war with officer’s rank, titularly an ensign but in practice doing the job of a lieutenant on the rare occasions when he was not effectively gazetted as captain. Many who encountered him said later that they noted both a suppressed, passionate fire in him and excellent leadership skills—whether this was given as a compliment or not depended on who was saying it. A persistent rumour remains that then-Governor Wragg, on seeing Caraíbas in action, commented “If this be victory, I dread to think what defeat would look like”. However, while the quote is apparently genuine, there is no evidence it was Caraíbas rather than another Meridian officer of mixed racial background.
Although discrimination had doubtless cheated Caraíbas out of much of the pay he was due, he nonetheless concluded the Great American War with sufficient wages to pay for his passage to Buenos Aires. In practice he was able to piggyback on a vessel carrying Platinean soldiers home, using some ‘creatively edited’ papers, so he was able to use his money for other purposes. After a short period working in the factories of the slowly growing city of Montevideo, he took advantage of an offer to go north into the former Brazilian lands. This was the era of increasing corporate power in Meridian affairs, and though the Brazilian interior development companies could not compare to Priestley Aereated Water or the Ocampo and Franco shipping empires, in the areas they sought to exploit their word was law. The UPSA was in the unusual situation of being a rising world power at a time when industrialisation was increasingly synonymous with that status, yet lacking much in the way of coal resources to power that industrialisation in its pre-Popular Wars territory. More coal reserves were eventually discovered in the formerly Brazilian territories annexed after the Brazilian War, but this took time and was the province of a different set of intrepid workers to the ones who played a role in Caraíbas’ life.
Other solutions to the Meridian coal shortage included both the local development of more efficient steam engines and the discovery of alternative power sources such as natural gas and hydroelectricity. However, in the short term, other options were tried such the use of charcoal. What the UPSA did have was a lot of trees and an ever more intricately interconnected system of inland waterways both natural and artificial. Some of the companies set up factories close to the exploited forests (in practice designed to be disassembled and moved as the forests shrank) and conveyed manufactured goods downriver to the cities. However, a more common practice was to transport the charcoal itself to factories in the River Plate region, driven by (this time internal) tariffs signed off by mayors and deputies desperate to avoid riots from unemployed urban poor. The economic situation changed rapidly as the presidency and Cortes were controlled by different parties and foreign relations cooled or warmed. For example, there was a brief movement towards setting up factories in Carolina (or to be more accurate the Cherokee Empire) to take advantage of the lignite deposits there. However, following the Carolinian revolt of 1864, this was then rapidly reversed in favour of enforced policies of deliberate deindustrialisation of Carolina. Some lignite was exported, but given its low quality economics meant that it mostly remained in the ground until the warming of relations between the UPSA and ENA allowed cross-border trade.
But it was in the South American interior, in Asunción Province and the so-called “New Territories” of Mato Grosso—won from Portuguese Brazil in the Brazilian War a generation before—that Caraíbas found himself face to face with the ugliness of corporate exploitation in the 1850s and 60s UPSA. His service record as an officer bought him a middle manager position with the ironically named Arcadia Company operating out of Asunción, though in practice his background meant he was often looked down upon by his fellows and superiors. The Arcadia Company, founded by the brothers Pedro and Angel Cabrera a decade before, sought to establish new charcoal burning plants near unexploited forests and link them to the burgeoning interior transport network to supply the hungry Platinean factories. Caraíbas was not the only man to be shocked by the misery this process inflicted on natives, workers and the natural environment: if the Meridians of the nineteenth century had been a little more forward thinking, Caraíbas’ ideological descendants would not have so many environmental catastrophes to hush up. Though some written exposés of the forest exploitation helped inspire the Neo-Franciscan movement, Caraíbas’ later account would ultimately have far more impact on world history.
Despite his semi-privileged position, Caraíbas was not above rolling up his sleeves and leading his men from the front, braving the same dangers as them when felling trees and working in the ramshackle temporary charcoal-burning factories. The latter task was particularly dangerous and left men exhausted and blackened. According to urban legend, Caraíbas remarked to a fellow manager that at least he didn’t have to worry about his men sniping at each other because of their different races—a few hours burning charcoal and nobody could tell them apart. The unnamed manager laughed and said Caraíbas sounded like Pablo Sanchez, a name which Caraíbas had not heard. The curious Caraíbas obained a dog-eared copy of Sanchez’s book Unity Through Society (possibly from the same manager) and read it cover to cover. It is believed that he was only functionally literate before this, and just as many people have taught themselves to read with a Bible, so Caraíbas did the same with Sanchez’s first major work. This, perhaps, explains a lot.
It is significant that Caraíbas therefore learned and even applied Sanchez’s earlier work without necessarily being aware of the different directions the writer had taken thanks to his experiences in observing the politics of the Great American War: this helps explain the deviations from Sanchez’s core ideas as Caraíbas struck out on his own. Later on, when Caraíbas did know of the later works such as Pax Aeterna and The Winter of Nations, he typically picked and chose whatever he independently agreed with and ignored the rest—leading to some editing headaches for the Biblioteka Mundial years later. Caraíbas’ version of Societism is noticeably far more consistent with Unity Through Society alone than any of the later books and pamphlets.
Caraíbas’ unnamed manager friend had apparently seen Sanchez as a bit of a joke, a half-baked visionary whose readership consisted of a few middle-class idealists in Buenos Aires before they found something better to do with their time. This was, it should be made clear, unfair: even before Caraíbas appeared on the scene, Sanchez enjoyed wider support than anyone (including himself) had expected, his works appealing to the anger many felt over the pointlessness and hypocrisy of the Great American War and what had followed. However, this is not to impugn the vast transformative position Caraíbas would go on to enjoy as ‘The St Paul of Societism’. Regardless of how Sanchez was seen at the time, Caraíbas found Unity Through Society to resonate strongly with his own life experiences. He had faced discrimination because of his racial background, but it had been fundamentally inconsistent due to him awkwardly an ambiguous place in different racial classification systems. Whether he was taken as white or not could depend on the lighting, the weather and the context, and he might receive a radically different reception from the same man depending on these minor factors. It was one thing to argue that racial divisions were arbitrary and meaningless when living in a society where racial status was rarely ambiguous, as in Carolina; but Caraíbas was living proof of this assertion. Sanchez’s message of meritocratic governance also appealed to a man whose boldness and ingenuity had never been rewarded as well as they deserved.
Unity Through Society did not merely speak to Caraíbas on a personal level. He managed a team of workers from diverse backgrounds, including some poor Meridian or Brazilian Criollistas and European or Carolinian immigrant whites, a small number of blacks and Novamundine Aboriginals and a what seemed like every possible combination of these three. Caraíbas did not write a journal at the time but later recounted some of his experiences in his speeches (likely carefully edited to support his point). He spoke of two Italian immigrants who had had a fistfight over the virtue of Princess Carlotta Dorotea—something which neither of them had any control over or stake in. There was the tale of the Carolinian immigrant who was good friends with an Aymara man and refused to speak to the black man he often found in the same room; he was unaware that the two were in fact brothers, and it was simply that the genetic lottery had favoured the Novamundine Aboriginal traits in the former and the African ones in the latter. There were Meridians who would not work with other Meridians from neighbouring cities who had beat their team in a disputed H-ball match three years before. (Likely an example of Caraíbas’ creative editing, as H-ball did not catch on in the UPSA until a generation later). Most of all, there were the Germans. Some of them were dutiful enough workers and didn’t cause trouble, Caraíbas said, but there was always the minority who decided to get political.
This was unquestionably an era of worker exploitation by their corporate masters, who rejoiced in a climate in which President Varela and the Cortes Nacionales was leery of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and thus tended to look the other way. One perceived advantage of the logging and charcoal-burning process was that it created new farmland. The workers signed contracts which awarded them their own slice of this farmland after five years: a rich prize for poor men whom under other circumstances could never have afforded land. However, the contract included a clause that if a worker died before the five years were up (or had to forfeit his job due to injury) then it reverted back to the company pool. Therefore, the companies had no incentive to keep their workers safe—quite the opposite, considering the apparently never-ending supply of replacements from the cities and immigration. The result was an almost deliberately hellish and hazardous existence.
Under other circumstances, in other countries, it seems obvious that Cobrist forces should have been strengthened by this. And perhaps if Caraíbas had lived in one of those countries, he would have become a radical Mentian, and history would have been very different. But he lived in the UPSA, and in the UPSA the Cobrist interest had been hopelessly divided for years. This de facto split was finally formalised in 1854, the year Caraíbas arrived on the Arcadia site. The core of the old Colorado Party had become obsessed with Neo-Jacobinism, idolising Juan José Castelli while taking their views far beyond what the old President would have countenanced. They regarded the bloody tyrannical regime of the Portuguese Latin Republic as something to be emulated, and spent most of their time constantly arguing about esoteric racial classifications using jargon-heavy terminology that anyone outside the party treated as a joke. Whereas the Noir Party in France was at least considered somewhat sinister and people spoke nervously of what might happen if they ever took power, the Meridian Colorado remnant was regarded with nothing more than contemptuous laughter by the people they claimed to represent.
The other half of the split, the old ‘Germanophile’ faction of the Colorados, had become the Mentian Party. Allegedly seeking to unite all people, in practice it only obtained the votes of German immigrants and was regarded as a narrow ethnic-interests party (and a potential threat by many Meridians, not least the Neo-Jacobin Colorados). But though the Mentians claimed to reject many of the negatives of the latter, they shared one important point—constant discussions over irrelevancies, often centri ng around whose father had supported which Schmidtist faction in the Popular Wars. Caraíbas disliked both of these groups but had a particular enmity for the Mentians, who he regarded as trying to organise workers not for the workers’ benefit but merely due to being power-hungry and wanting to lord it over their fellows as union leaders. They were often the bane of his existence when trying to do his job, creating controversies where none existed and giving Caraíbas’ bosses an excuse for crackdowns when Caraíbas was trying to negotiate a better deal for his own workers.
According to Caraíbas, his final breaking point was when a rickety charcoal plant collapsed during an inspection by one of Caraíbas’ superiors. He along with two other men failed to escape: a German immigrant and a Meridian supporter of the Neo-Jacobin Colorados. Caraíbas heroically dived into the flaming wreckage and managed to rescue all three men, each in turn. Every time he emerged again from the flames bearing new burns and blisters, he found a group yelling at him that he could stop, because he had found the only one of the three they cared about. As he brought the third and final form from the flames, he came across an argument between Meridians and Germans, who it transpired had mistaken each other’s man for the other and only realised their mistake when they began to scrub away at the soot on their faces. “You would have abandoned your own brother to the flames because you can’t tell him from Adam!” Caraíbas yelled at one of the Germans. “What if we’re all sons of Adam? What if we’re all human beings and all of our lives matter?”
Caraíbas’ charisma was such that this incident was not forgotten, as it easily could have been. He began to organise Arcadia’s workers on Societist lines, or at least his version of Societist lines. Crucially, he also brought his fellow managers into the organisation. “The boss is nothing without his workers: the worker is nothing without a boss. Only together, as equal parts of a sum, can they achieve great things,” he said, paraphrasing Sanchez (and, characteristically, more snappily). Caraíbas introduced all sorts of schemes such as rotating workers between different sites to build more camaraderie and discourage cliques, establishing new transport links to allow workers to enjoy weekends off in the nearest towns, and standardising safety procedures to prevent more disasters. His own immediate managers supported him in the wake of one of them almost losing his own life. A year after Caraíbas had begun, in 1861, productivity on his part of the Arcadia lands was way up and deaths and injuries were down.
At which point, of course, there was an intervention by the Cabrera brothers themselves that fired Caraíbas and many of his supporters. They had no interest in such minor issues as concern for human life interfering with their profit margins, and their business model effectively relied upon a certain mortality rate. Caraíbas, enraged at this, took his wages and returned to Buenos Aires (along with some of his supporters) where he took over a factory and ran it on his experienced-refined principles. In his spare time he became an orator who spoke in favour of Sanchez and fierily attacked Arcadia and similar companies. He first met Sanchez in 1863, only five years before the latter’s death. Sanchez was impressed with the passionate young man but a little nervous by where he had taken his own theories.
Though he had known tragedy in his past, Sanchez’s work had always had overtones of being an academic theory rather than something planned for direct implementation in the real world. He was both awed and shocked by what Caraíbas had done. There are often claims that Sanchez was a hypocrite who, after all his writings, was repelled by Caraíbas’ proletarian and racially diverse background. These, however, appear to originate solely from twentieth century Russian propaganda. Where Sanchez did take issue with Caraíbas was with how the latter had worked to effectively fill the gaps in many of the more vaguely-described aspects of Societism. It was Caraíbas, not Sanchez, who created the idea of Zones with rotating Zonal Rejes—something carefully purged by the Biblioteka Mundial, befitting Caraíbas’ own habit of attributing his own ideas to Sanchez after the latter’s death. Better known is the fact that Sanchez had indistinctly envisaged a single worldwide decisive revolution—or ‘moment of decision’ might be more accurate—in which the peoples of the world would finally realise the absurdity of war and division and embrace unity. The harder-headed Caraíbas recognised that even if this was possible, those with a vested interest in division and conflict would act to prevent it. He, more realistically (as it turned out) foresaw a world where Societism could come to power in just one country and then seek to expand, while constantly faced by opposition from its neighbours. Whereas some other Societist thinkers in Caraíbas’ stable argued more aggressively, Caraíbas—who had the same horror of war as Sanchez after his experiences, but was more realistic about it being a necessary tool to eventually bring peace—instead outlined his ‘Doctrine of the Last Throw’. In this doctrine, the hypothetical Societist regime would not make aggressive moves that would only unite its neighbours against it, but would remain peaceful and allow them to fall out with each other, then wait for the ‘last throw’ of the war in question before intervening to expand at the expense of the weakened neighbours. This was the doctrine eventually adopted by the Combine when it made the leap from hypotheticals to reality, and it is telling that despite Caraíbas openly publishing it (under Sanchez’s name), nations still keep falling for it.
Caraíbas also foresaw the idea of a universal religion to go with Sanchez’s universal language. Sanchez had never been entirely clear on the role he saw for religion in the future and his few statements on the subject in general are frustratingly inconsistent: summed up by one biographer as “I don’t believe in God, thank the Blessed Virgin”. Caraíbas drew upon old Catholic ideas of a return to a universal church, but, influened by the Jansenist creed of the UPSA, without a single Pope. This would be developed further following the Last Revolution.
The ambiguous nature of Sanchez’s ‘moment of decision’ had always rendered it unclear whether Sanchez saw the unity of Societism as embodied in a single global state or an anarchy in which the state had become obsolete. There is evidence for either point of view, but in reality the less than practical Sanchez probably never even considered the question. A persistent rumour is that Sanchez fell into the anarchist camp, but this again appears to be propaganda aimed at the Combine and is ultimately derived from the weak connection that Sanchez’s friend Luis Carolos Cruz’s nephew Esteban was one of the intellectual founders of Anarchist Societism. The latter group still exists to this day, using a grey and white chequered flag, and their role in some of the Old World Societist powers remains a thorn in the side of the orthodox State Societists who dominate the core of the Combine.
Speaking of flags, though Caraíbas did not invent the Black Flag and Threefold Eye symbol, it was under his leadership that they were popularised throughout the movement. The black flag was originally intended to be a simple empty field to signify a rejection of nation and all other division. However, not least because plain black flags were already used to signify other things, it was eventually emblazoned with the Threefold Eye symbol which had been created elsewhere by a certain nascent Societist secret society within the military. Sanchez, of course, would have been appalled by the idea of a symbol for Societism—anything that had a symbol had a defined identity and therefore an opposite which other people could follow, whereas he looked to a future in which such a concept would be meaningless. The Threefold Eye was itself a combination of two things: the Eye of Providence, used as a near-universal symbol of good fortune, and a popular puzzle in which three short sticks, none of which were long enough to bridge the rim of a cup, could be interlocked in a triangular shape to stretch across the cup and support a marble atop them.[3] The symbolism was obvious: what individuals could not do separately, they could achieve together. The ‘marble’ doubled in the Threefold Eye as the pupil of the Eye, and is often also depicted as the globe of the world supported on the interlocked strength of its people.
Another significant difference between Sanchez and Caraíbas was that the latter was not so dismissive of electoral politics. Indeed, it was the sudden attention from the Meridian media when the ‘Societist Party’ first contested elections in 1869 (two years after Sanchez’s death) that likely elevated Caraíbas’ faction above the others and helped make him the uncontested leader of the movement, particularly following Luis Carlos Cruz’s own death the year after. This young, charismatic, enigmatic orator with his rough-and-ready phrasing and his hero worship of ‘Señor Sanchez’ captured the attention of many, for good and for ill. Caraíbas campaigned largely on his experiences of the corporations’ abuses on the frontier and the government turning a blind eye to it, prompting attention from investigative reporters, an embarrassed and castigated government, and eventually action against the corporations. Caraíbas had the last laugh when, in 1872, the newly-elected Adamantine government of Augusto Araníbar bowed to public and media pressure by putting the Cabrera brothers on trial and seizing portions of their assets to pay off the families of the workers who had fallen to their deliberately unsafe policies.
For the present, Caraíbas’ ‘Societist Party’ would be nothing more than a footnote to Meridian elections. In the long run...what chance did the petty infighting Colorados and Mentians have of competing with it?
The story of Raúl Caraíbas was far from over.
[1] A term used by some academics in the era this book was written to describe all the native peoples of the Americas: it did not become widely accepted.
[2] OTL Perry, Georgia.
[3] This puzzle does not appear to have a single well-known name but it has a longstanding existence in OTL. The Eye of Providence can be found, among other places, on a United States one-dollar bill.
Part #214: An Angry Young Man
“On second thoughts Mary better make that TWELVE tanduree meal deals for 4, and quist the Bengali Mahal a couple of hours in advance to give them time to prepare them—I forgot Dick(head) Polton is sending his activists over to sponge off our goodwill as well. Because apparently they still haven’t reached their diversity quotas yet in Beckenham and he’ll be blowed if he’ll give ’em meat pies (or anything else paid for out of his own pocket). All right for some with their safe seats, isn’t it? Thanks.”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
*
From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—
Raúl Caraíbas is, largely through his own deliberate efforts, one of the most frustratingly enigmatic significant figures of the nineteenth century. Indeed, at every step he sought to downplay his own significance and, when his background was queried, he relied upon vague generalities that shifted subtly depending on his audience. Nonetheless we cannot afford to ignore him. Regardless of what the Biblioteka Mundial might have us believe, Caraíbas was a hugely important figure for the development of Societism. Some controversy-seeking historians have even argued he played a larger role in the ideology as we know it today than Pablo Sanchez himself.
It is believed that Caraíbas was born ca. 1834 in one of the West Indian islands, probably one then under Carolinian control. He was visibly and unquestionably of a mixed racial background, at least one-eighth black (an octroon, to use the terminology of the day) and with considerable Novamundine Aboriginal[1] blood as well as both Latin Criollo and Anglo American influence. One can only guess the family background behind this mix, but judging by how Caraíbas spoke of his early years (however vaguely), it is likely to have had tragic aspects. Though Caraíbas’ personal diversity was hardly unique in the Americas, it undoubtedly played a major part both in his later embrace of Societism and the fact that he was swiftly regarded as a natural advocate of the ideology—though we should not understate his own personal qualities and skills.
Caraíbas may have been born a slave: under Carolinian ‘one drop’ racial law he should have been considered as such, although in practice he could likely have passed for sufficiently white to avoid that fate—particularly given the increasingly complex situation in the islands with people of Latin background receiving full citizenship and their own pedigrees not being examined too closely. We do not even know what name he bore as a child: ‘Caraíbas’, of course, was a name he took for himself later and merely describes the region he originated from. Whether he escaped a blighted state or left the islands of his own accord, he next emerges in the historical record as a teenage labourer in the Guyana Republic. According to Caraíbas himself, he was working to earn enough to buy passage to Buenos Aires, which he regarded as a land of opportunity. However, the Great American War intervened and Caraíbas found himself pressed into service on the Guayanese freighters supporting the Concordat war effort (unofficially) and then the Meridians (openly). Shortages of garrison troops, as both Carolinian and Meridian soldiers were channelled desperately towards the front lines, meant that the still underage Caraíbas was then conscripted into the ramshackle Guayanese army and made part of a company allegedly protecting the Georgian town of Wentworth.[2]
Caraíbas began as a private, but a combination of troops being spread ever more thinly, dead men’s shoes and his own unexpected leadership skills meant that he was rapidly promoted. On one occasion a group of ex-slave black rebels attacked the town, trapping most of Caraíbas’ company (and the city council) in the fortified couthouse and then seeking to fire it. Caraíbas found himself outside the courthouse with a few men, and displayed quick thinking and guile by having them bring up a small artillery piece loaded with grapeshot—while concealing their faces with the sun hats common to the area and loudly shouting the name of the rebels’ spiritual inspiration Caesar Bell. The deception was thin but caused just enough doubt on the part of the rebels for the gun to get into position and work its bloody havoc upon them. Caraíbas ended the skirmish as a sergeant thanks to his grateful superior Captain Pineda, but official recognition was slim and he was left sickened by the experience of watching the rebels torn apart by grapeshot—allegedly something that would trouble his dreams for the rest of his life. It was not simply the loss of life, but the fact that Caraíbas felt the ex-slaves had the moral high ground and that if he had remained in the West Indies, he might have been a member of such a group himself. He had acted as he felt he had to, to protect his friends in the company trapped in the courthouse, but he felt that did not justify his actions. Furthermore, the townsfolk of Wentworth were thoroughly ungrateful, with dark rumours circulating even about the activities of Meridian officers of a Criollista background, never mind those who visibly possessed some black ancestry. On at least one occasion there was an attempt to prosecute Caraíbas for a (probably) entirely fictitious tryst between himself and one of the young women of Wentworth, and Caraíbas was only rescued by Captain Pineda’s intervention.
He was thence tactfully posted elsewhere, including to Ultima where he came close to the front lines of the war and saw the real scale of (then) modern industrialised warfare. Caraíbas ended the war with officer’s rank, titularly an ensign but in practice doing the job of a lieutenant on the rare occasions when he was not effectively gazetted as captain. Many who encountered him said later that they noted both a suppressed, passionate fire in him and excellent leadership skills—whether this was given as a compliment or not depended on who was saying it. A persistent rumour remains that then-Governor Wragg, on seeing Caraíbas in action, commented “If this be victory, I dread to think what defeat would look like”. However, while the quote is apparently genuine, there is no evidence it was Caraíbas rather than another Meridian officer of mixed racial background.
Although discrimination had doubtless cheated Caraíbas out of much of the pay he was due, he nonetheless concluded the Great American War with sufficient wages to pay for his passage to Buenos Aires. In practice he was able to piggyback on a vessel carrying Platinean soldiers home, using some ‘creatively edited’ papers, so he was able to use his money for other purposes. After a short period working in the factories of the slowly growing city of Montevideo, he took advantage of an offer to go north into the former Brazilian lands. This was the era of increasing corporate power in Meridian affairs, and though the Brazilian interior development companies could not compare to Priestley Aereated Water or the Ocampo and Franco shipping empires, in the areas they sought to exploit their word was law. The UPSA was in the unusual situation of being a rising world power at a time when industrialisation was increasingly synonymous with that status, yet lacking much in the way of coal resources to power that industrialisation in its pre-Popular Wars territory. More coal reserves were eventually discovered in the formerly Brazilian territories annexed after the Brazilian War, but this took time and was the province of a different set of intrepid workers to the ones who played a role in Caraíbas’ life.
Other solutions to the Meridian coal shortage included both the local development of more efficient steam engines and the discovery of alternative power sources such as natural gas and hydroelectricity. However, in the short term, other options were tried such the use of charcoal. What the UPSA did have was a lot of trees and an ever more intricately interconnected system of inland waterways both natural and artificial. Some of the companies set up factories close to the exploited forests (in practice designed to be disassembled and moved as the forests shrank) and conveyed manufactured goods downriver to the cities. However, a more common practice was to transport the charcoal itself to factories in the River Plate region, driven by (this time internal) tariffs signed off by mayors and deputies desperate to avoid riots from unemployed urban poor. The economic situation changed rapidly as the presidency and Cortes were controlled by different parties and foreign relations cooled or warmed. For example, there was a brief movement towards setting up factories in Carolina (or to be more accurate the Cherokee Empire) to take advantage of the lignite deposits there. However, following the Carolinian revolt of 1864, this was then rapidly reversed in favour of enforced policies of deliberate deindustrialisation of Carolina. Some lignite was exported, but given its low quality economics meant that it mostly remained in the ground until the warming of relations between the UPSA and ENA allowed cross-border trade.
But it was in the South American interior, in Asunción Province and the so-called “New Territories” of Mato Grosso—won from Portuguese Brazil in the Brazilian War a generation before—that Caraíbas found himself face to face with the ugliness of corporate exploitation in the 1850s and 60s UPSA. His service record as an officer bought him a middle manager position with the ironically named Arcadia Company operating out of Asunción, though in practice his background meant he was often looked down upon by his fellows and superiors. The Arcadia Company, founded by the brothers Pedro and Angel Cabrera a decade before, sought to establish new charcoal burning plants near unexploited forests and link them to the burgeoning interior transport network to supply the hungry Platinean factories. Caraíbas was not the only man to be shocked by the misery this process inflicted on natives, workers and the natural environment: if the Meridians of the nineteenth century had been a little more forward thinking, Caraíbas’ ideological descendants would not have so many environmental catastrophes to hush up. Though some written exposés of the forest exploitation helped inspire the Neo-Franciscan movement, Caraíbas’ later account would ultimately have far more impact on world history.
Despite his semi-privileged position, Caraíbas was not above rolling up his sleeves and leading his men from the front, braving the same dangers as them when felling trees and working in the ramshackle temporary charcoal-burning factories. The latter task was particularly dangerous and left men exhausted and blackened. According to urban legend, Caraíbas remarked to a fellow manager that at least he didn’t have to worry about his men sniping at each other because of their different races—a few hours burning charcoal and nobody could tell them apart. The unnamed manager laughed and said Caraíbas sounded like Pablo Sanchez, a name which Caraíbas had not heard. The curious Caraíbas obained a dog-eared copy of Sanchez’s book Unity Through Society (possibly from the same manager) and read it cover to cover. It is believed that he was only functionally literate before this, and just as many people have taught themselves to read with a Bible, so Caraíbas did the same with Sanchez’s first major work. This, perhaps, explains a lot.
It is significant that Caraíbas therefore learned and even applied Sanchez’s earlier work without necessarily being aware of the different directions the writer had taken thanks to his experiences in observing the politics of the Great American War: this helps explain the deviations from Sanchez’s core ideas as Caraíbas struck out on his own. Later on, when Caraíbas did know of the later works such as Pax Aeterna and The Winter of Nations, he typically picked and chose whatever he independently agreed with and ignored the rest—leading to some editing headaches for the Biblioteka Mundial years later. Caraíbas’ version of Societism is noticeably far more consistent with Unity Through Society alone than any of the later books and pamphlets.
Caraíbas’ unnamed manager friend had apparently seen Sanchez as a bit of a joke, a half-baked visionary whose readership consisted of a few middle-class idealists in Buenos Aires before they found something better to do with their time. This was, it should be made clear, unfair: even before Caraíbas appeared on the scene, Sanchez enjoyed wider support than anyone (including himself) had expected, his works appealing to the anger many felt over the pointlessness and hypocrisy of the Great American War and what had followed. However, this is not to impugn the vast transformative position Caraíbas would go on to enjoy as ‘The St Paul of Societism’. Regardless of how Sanchez was seen at the time, Caraíbas found Unity Through Society to resonate strongly with his own life experiences. He had faced discrimination because of his racial background, but it had been fundamentally inconsistent due to him awkwardly an ambiguous place in different racial classification systems. Whether he was taken as white or not could depend on the lighting, the weather and the context, and he might receive a radically different reception from the same man depending on these minor factors. It was one thing to argue that racial divisions were arbitrary and meaningless when living in a society where racial status was rarely ambiguous, as in Carolina; but Caraíbas was living proof of this assertion. Sanchez’s message of meritocratic governance also appealed to a man whose boldness and ingenuity had never been rewarded as well as they deserved.
Unity Through Society did not merely speak to Caraíbas on a personal level. He managed a team of workers from diverse backgrounds, including some poor Meridian or Brazilian Criollistas and European or Carolinian immigrant whites, a small number of blacks and Novamundine Aboriginals and a what seemed like every possible combination of these three. Caraíbas did not write a journal at the time but later recounted some of his experiences in his speeches (likely carefully edited to support his point). He spoke of two Italian immigrants who had had a fistfight over the virtue of Princess Carlotta Dorotea—something which neither of them had any control over or stake in. There was the tale of the Carolinian immigrant who was good friends with an Aymara man and refused to speak to the black man he often found in the same room; he was unaware that the two were in fact brothers, and it was simply that the genetic lottery had favoured the Novamundine Aboriginal traits in the former and the African ones in the latter. There were Meridians who would not work with other Meridians from neighbouring cities who had beat their team in a disputed H-ball match three years before. (Likely an example of Caraíbas’ creative editing, as H-ball did not catch on in the UPSA until a generation later). Most of all, there were the Germans. Some of them were dutiful enough workers and didn’t cause trouble, Caraíbas said, but there was always the minority who decided to get political.
This was unquestionably an era of worker exploitation by their corporate masters, who rejoiced in a climate in which President Varela and the Cortes Nacionales was leery of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and thus tended to look the other way. One perceived advantage of the logging and charcoal-burning process was that it created new farmland. The workers signed contracts which awarded them their own slice of this farmland after five years: a rich prize for poor men whom under other circumstances could never have afforded land. However, the contract included a clause that if a worker died before the five years were up (or had to forfeit his job due to injury) then it reverted back to the company pool. Therefore, the companies had no incentive to keep their workers safe—quite the opposite, considering the apparently never-ending supply of replacements from the cities and immigration. The result was an almost deliberately hellish and hazardous existence.
Under other circumstances, in other countries, it seems obvious that Cobrist forces should have been strengthened by this. And perhaps if Caraíbas had lived in one of those countries, he would have become a radical Mentian, and history would have been very different. But he lived in the UPSA, and in the UPSA the Cobrist interest had been hopelessly divided for years. This de facto split was finally formalised in 1854, the year Caraíbas arrived on the Arcadia site. The core of the old Colorado Party had become obsessed with Neo-Jacobinism, idolising Juan José Castelli while taking their views far beyond what the old President would have countenanced. They regarded the bloody tyrannical regime of the Portuguese Latin Republic as something to be emulated, and spent most of their time constantly arguing about esoteric racial classifications using jargon-heavy terminology that anyone outside the party treated as a joke. Whereas the Noir Party in France was at least considered somewhat sinister and people spoke nervously of what might happen if they ever took power, the Meridian Colorado remnant was regarded with nothing more than contemptuous laughter by the people they claimed to represent.
The other half of the split, the old ‘Germanophile’ faction of the Colorados, had become the Mentian Party. Allegedly seeking to unite all people, in practice it only obtained the votes of German immigrants and was regarded as a narrow ethnic-interests party (and a potential threat by many Meridians, not least the Neo-Jacobin Colorados). But though the Mentians claimed to reject many of the negatives of the latter, they shared one important point—constant discussions over irrelevancies, often centri ng around whose father had supported which Schmidtist faction in the Popular Wars. Caraíbas disliked both of these groups but had a particular enmity for the Mentians, who he regarded as trying to organise workers not for the workers’ benefit but merely due to being power-hungry and wanting to lord it over their fellows as union leaders. They were often the bane of his existence when trying to do his job, creating controversies where none existed and giving Caraíbas’ bosses an excuse for crackdowns when Caraíbas was trying to negotiate a better deal for his own workers.
According to Caraíbas, his final breaking point was when a rickety charcoal plant collapsed during an inspection by one of Caraíbas’ superiors. He along with two other men failed to escape: a German immigrant and a Meridian supporter of the Neo-Jacobin Colorados. Caraíbas heroically dived into the flaming wreckage and managed to rescue all three men, each in turn. Every time he emerged again from the flames bearing new burns and blisters, he found a group yelling at him that he could stop, because he had found the only one of the three they cared about. As he brought the third and final form from the flames, he came across an argument between Meridians and Germans, who it transpired had mistaken each other’s man for the other and only realised their mistake when they began to scrub away at the soot on their faces. “You would have abandoned your own brother to the flames because you can’t tell him from Adam!” Caraíbas yelled at one of the Germans. “What if we’re all sons of Adam? What if we’re all human beings and all of our lives matter?”
Caraíbas’ charisma was such that this incident was not forgotten, as it easily could have been. He began to organise Arcadia’s workers on Societist lines, or at least his version of Societist lines. Crucially, he also brought his fellow managers into the organisation. “The boss is nothing without his workers: the worker is nothing without a boss. Only together, as equal parts of a sum, can they achieve great things,” he said, paraphrasing Sanchez (and, characteristically, more snappily). Caraíbas introduced all sorts of schemes such as rotating workers between different sites to build more camaraderie and discourage cliques, establishing new transport links to allow workers to enjoy weekends off in the nearest towns, and standardising safety procedures to prevent more disasters. His own immediate managers supported him in the wake of one of them almost losing his own life. A year after Caraíbas had begun, in 1861, productivity on his part of the Arcadia lands was way up and deaths and injuries were down.
At which point, of course, there was an intervention by the Cabrera brothers themselves that fired Caraíbas and many of his supporters. They had no interest in such minor issues as concern for human life interfering with their profit margins, and their business model effectively relied upon a certain mortality rate. Caraíbas, enraged at this, took his wages and returned to Buenos Aires (along with some of his supporters) where he took over a factory and ran it on his experienced-refined principles. In his spare time he became an orator who spoke in favour of Sanchez and fierily attacked Arcadia and similar companies. He first met Sanchez in 1863, only five years before the latter’s death. Sanchez was impressed with the passionate young man but a little nervous by where he had taken his own theories.
Though he had known tragedy in his past, Sanchez’s work had always had overtones of being an academic theory rather than something planned for direct implementation in the real world. He was both awed and shocked by what Caraíbas had done. There are often claims that Sanchez was a hypocrite who, after all his writings, was repelled by Caraíbas’ proletarian and racially diverse background. These, however, appear to originate solely from twentieth century Russian propaganda. Where Sanchez did take issue with Caraíbas was with how the latter had worked to effectively fill the gaps in many of the more vaguely-described aspects of Societism. It was Caraíbas, not Sanchez, who created the idea of Zones with rotating Zonal Rejes—something carefully purged by the Biblioteka Mundial, befitting Caraíbas’ own habit of attributing his own ideas to Sanchez after the latter’s death. Better known is the fact that Sanchez had indistinctly envisaged a single worldwide decisive revolution—or ‘moment of decision’ might be more accurate—in which the peoples of the world would finally realise the absurdity of war and division and embrace unity. The harder-headed Caraíbas recognised that even if this was possible, those with a vested interest in division and conflict would act to prevent it. He, more realistically (as it turned out) foresaw a world where Societism could come to power in just one country and then seek to expand, while constantly faced by opposition from its neighbours. Whereas some other Societist thinkers in Caraíbas’ stable argued more aggressively, Caraíbas—who had the same horror of war as Sanchez after his experiences, but was more realistic about it being a necessary tool to eventually bring peace—instead outlined his ‘Doctrine of the Last Throw’. In this doctrine, the hypothetical Societist regime would not make aggressive moves that would only unite its neighbours against it, but would remain peaceful and allow them to fall out with each other, then wait for the ‘last throw’ of the war in question before intervening to expand at the expense of the weakened neighbours. This was the doctrine eventually adopted by the Combine when it made the leap from hypotheticals to reality, and it is telling that despite Caraíbas openly publishing it (under Sanchez’s name), nations still keep falling for it.
Caraíbas also foresaw the idea of a universal religion to go with Sanchez’s universal language. Sanchez had never been entirely clear on the role he saw for religion in the future and his few statements on the subject in general are frustratingly inconsistent: summed up by one biographer as “I don’t believe in God, thank the Blessed Virgin”. Caraíbas drew upon old Catholic ideas of a return to a universal church, but, influened by the Jansenist creed of the UPSA, without a single Pope. This would be developed further following the Last Revolution.
The ambiguous nature of Sanchez’s ‘moment of decision’ had always rendered it unclear whether Sanchez saw the unity of Societism as embodied in a single global state or an anarchy in which the state had become obsolete. There is evidence for either point of view, but in reality the less than practical Sanchez probably never even considered the question. A persistent rumour is that Sanchez fell into the anarchist camp, but this again appears to be propaganda aimed at the Combine and is ultimately derived from the weak connection that Sanchez’s friend Luis Carolos Cruz’s nephew Esteban was one of the intellectual founders of Anarchist Societism. The latter group still exists to this day, using a grey and white chequered flag, and their role in some of the Old World Societist powers remains a thorn in the side of the orthodox State Societists who dominate the core of the Combine.
Speaking of flags, though Caraíbas did not invent the Black Flag and Threefold Eye symbol, it was under his leadership that they were popularised throughout the movement. The black flag was originally intended to be a simple empty field to signify a rejection of nation and all other division. However, not least because plain black flags were already used to signify other things, it was eventually emblazoned with the Threefold Eye symbol which had been created elsewhere by a certain nascent Societist secret society within the military. Sanchez, of course, would have been appalled by the idea of a symbol for Societism—anything that had a symbol had a defined identity and therefore an opposite which other people could follow, whereas he looked to a future in which such a concept would be meaningless. The Threefold Eye was itself a combination of two things: the Eye of Providence, used as a near-universal symbol of good fortune, and a popular puzzle in which three short sticks, none of which were long enough to bridge the rim of a cup, could be interlocked in a triangular shape to stretch across the cup and support a marble atop them.[3] The symbolism was obvious: what individuals could not do separately, they could achieve together. The ‘marble’ doubled in the Threefold Eye as the pupil of the Eye, and is often also depicted as the globe of the world supported on the interlocked strength of its people.
Another significant difference between Sanchez and Caraíbas was that the latter was not so dismissive of electoral politics. Indeed, it was the sudden attention from the Meridian media when the ‘Societist Party’ first contested elections in 1869 (two years after Sanchez’s death) that likely elevated Caraíbas’ faction above the others and helped make him the uncontested leader of the movement, particularly following Luis Carlos Cruz’s own death the year after. This young, charismatic, enigmatic orator with his rough-and-ready phrasing and his hero worship of ‘Señor Sanchez’ captured the attention of many, for good and for ill. Caraíbas campaigned largely on his experiences of the corporations’ abuses on the frontier and the government turning a blind eye to it, prompting attention from investigative reporters, an embarrassed and castigated government, and eventually action against the corporations. Caraíbas had the last laugh when, in 1872, the newly-elected Adamantine government of Augusto Araníbar bowed to public and media pressure by putting the Cabrera brothers on trial and seizing portions of their assets to pay off the families of the workers who had fallen to their deliberately unsafe policies.
For the present, Caraíbas’ ‘Societist Party’ would be nothing more than a footnote to Meridian elections. In the long run...what chance did the petty infighting Colorados and Mentians have of competing with it?
The story of Raúl Caraíbas was far from over.
[1] A term used by some academics in the era this book was written to describe all the native peoples of the Americas: it did not become widely accepted.
[2] OTL Perry, Georgia.
[3] This puzzle does not appear to have a single well-known name but it has a longstanding existence in OTL. The Eye of Providence can be found, among other places, on a United States one-dollar bill.
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Alex Richards
Donor
I think that deserves a Dun dun Duuun.
Fantastic update there, and fascinating to see how Societism actually starts to twist and change from what Sanchez advocated.
Also, loved the dig at the OTL far left there.
Fantastic update there, and fascinating to see how Societism actually starts to twist and change from what Sanchez advocated.
Also, loved the dig at the OTL far left there.
Oooh, great. Life of the first great practical Societist.
Okay. What does 'meritocratic governance' mean here?
Just say it directly. The Illuminati!
I want MOAR!
Okay. What does 'meritocratic governance' mean here?
Just say it directly. The Illuminati!
I want MOAR!
I am almost certain that Thande will make Caraibas a more interesting man that a mere analogy, but I think you are correct.
I wasn't suggesting that Caribas will simply be an analogue, I just thought Carabias will function to Sanchez what Lenin was to Marx.
Yeah, that's what I thought as well. I just found it too inaccurate to actually post it.
Anyway, now that you've mentioned it, I am looking forward to Stalin, Mao, the Kims and Pol Pot. Hopefully there's a Deng Xiaoping somewhere in the mix as well.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone
So we finally get an explanation here for the Societist symbol, which of course appeared in the frontispiece to this volume:
But it's been in the making for far longer than that, I can't find where I first posted it but according to the image file I created it in July 2008. A lot of water under the bridge since then!
By the way, I'm not that familiar with the Assassin's Creed series but I understand that uses the Illuminati with the Eye of Providence in it, but this wasn't a specific shout-out to that - the Eye is a much older and more universal symbol than that which has been used by many secret societies: it arguably goes back to the Eye of Horus from Egyptian mythology. It's even probably the main inspiration for the sign of the Hallows from Harry Potter, to take a recent example.
So we finally get an explanation here for the Societist symbol, which of course appeared in the frontispiece to this volume:
But it's been in the making for far longer than that, I can't find where I first posted it but according to the image file I created it in July 2008. A lot of water under the bridge since then!
Basically just that under Sanchez's models, what job you do in life is not determined by who your parents were or the colour of your skin.
By the way, I'm not that familiar with the Assassin's Creed series but I understand that uses the Illuminati with the Eye of Providence in it, but this wasn't a specific shout-out to that - the Eye is a much older and more universal symbol than that which has been used by many secret societies: it arguably goes back to the Eye of Horus from Egyptian mythology. It's even probably the main inspiration for the sign of the Hallows from Harry Potter, to take a recent example.
New World Order conspiracy folks have been talking about the Illuminati using that eye for decades, it's not just an Assassin's Creed thing.
I suppose in this world it would be the Novo Mundine Order.
Oh. Well, that's pretty interesting. I'll still be calling the Combine the New World Order though.
So, Illuminati confirmed, eh. Still have some time until the forshadowed Pandoric War, so we might get to see some more of how alt-Lenin distorts Sanchez' ideas into what eventually becomes Societism.
Now, when is someone going to burn down his house?
Now, when is someone going to burn down his house?
So, Illuminati confirmed, eh. Still have some time until the forshadowed Pandoric War, so we might get to see some more of how alt-Lenin distorts Sanchez' ideas into what eventually becomes Societism.
Now, when is someone going to burn down his house?
Sounds like his whole job used to be EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE ALL THE TIME