Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
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Part #279: Rumours of War
“In summary, Panchala is a land of contrasts, and is clear the Sharma case will run and run. But in happier sports news, a reminder that this Saturday, C-WSC will be going live with the final of the California Rules Football Women’s League Championship. Can Carolina’s own Maubela Manhunters, after a run of victories that has shocked a continent, become only the second team from outside California to win the Volkova Cup?
“Maria Xiong, Captain of the Las Estrellas Stargazers, today wished luck to her historic opponents in a corinthian manner—but what she diplomatically doesn’t say is that the Stargazers are still the firm favourite with the bookies.[1] The Manhunters will face her team on their home turf, in the Stardome, but thousands of Carolinian fans will be lining the stands as well.
“Stay tuned for an exclusive interview with Manhunter captain Paulette Forsythe, who stoked controversy earlier this season by saying she hoped both the black and white communities of Maubela would support the team—but can her detractors argue with her results? Or is the question now whether any man, woman or child in Carolina will do anything but cheer on our girls to pull off a giant-slaying win and make history?”
*
(Lt. Tindale’s note)
Oh hello! Is this thingummy-whatsit turned on? Yes, little green light, that’s right, isn’t it? Well—while those two sergeants are at the local pub—again—I might as well feed in this finding I came across a few months ago when we were in Charleston. A suburb, I should say—lovely little local library, with a local history display by…locals. This nice big pinboard covered with felt! All old black and white photos, er, thingy, asimcons, cuttings from newspapers, and quotes from people at the time nicely written out again in proper calligraphy by schoolchildren with pens and inkwells. Made me quite nostalgic for my own schooldays!
Of course, the effect was spoiled a bit when I did notice the display was cut in half with two different colours of felt background, and one half was titled ‘White Version of History’ and the other ‘Black’—still, I suppose at least they gave ’em equal billing, eh? And some of the content was a wee bit dark, but that’s history, I s’pose. I should say when you see what some of ’em on both sides (hashtag?) say about the Imperials, y’should bear in mind that they did it in full view of Imperials here, who seem to actually approve of promoting a version of history that makes ’em out to be the bad guys. Diversitarianism’s a hell of a drug!
Stupid muggins here put that bally fool Charlie in charge of taking the photos—no, asim—no, they are photos if we’re taking them with our cameras, aren’t they? Very confusing—any road, he went side to side instead of up and down, so I think all the tasty quotes alternate between the black and white side, but never mind. And I got Bob of the Mumbies to find some accompanying text from a book we got elsewhere to lead into it, so hopefully it will all tie together nicely as a succinct narrative whatsit. Now, where’s my 5,000-piece jigsaw…?
*
From: “History of the Twentieth Century” edited by K. D. Saunders (2001)—
Few periods in our country’s history have been so re-examined in hindsight as the First Interbellum, something which would probably seem remarkable to those living through those events at the time, who regarded is a dull, grinding age of malaise and decline, in which persistent low-level enervating misery was never enlivened into the drama of full outbreaks of violence. In a sense, all the peoples of Carolina of all colours had held their breath when the country was conquered during the Pandoric War, and had kept holding it ever since, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would be one thing if a definitive answer for what postwar Carolina would look like had come out of the Imperials in Fredericksburg, but it never did. Rather than rage at any particular settlement, therefore, the primary emotional response was one of frustration at the uncertainty. This was compounded by malaise as new challenges arose and there was no effective response to deal with them; indeed, no-one was quite sure whose job it was supposed to be to do so. Some controversy-seeking modern historians even date the start of the National Coma to this First Interbellum malaise rather than its end, but there is little need for us to even consider such an outrageous stance.[2]
The tragedy of errors enacted by successive Imperial governments over a quarter-century can almost be characterised as sheer surprise that the conquest had been accomplished so definitively, and then a reluctance to confront the question of ‘what next?’ In truth, of course, this seeming indecision on Fredericksburg’s part is more a consequence of the Imperials electing divided governments where no clear majority could decide on a path forward. From the self-interested indifference of Faulkner to the excessive ambition of Tayloe, no Imperial president could come up with a way to answer what they patronisingly referred to as the ‘Cotton Question’.
There were multiple schools of opinion in the ENA of what to do with Carolina. Only a minority, mostly in the Liberal Party, had the correct view that Carolina should be restored as an independent country in personal union with the ENA, the status it now finally has after so many more years of brutality and suffering. Some Supremacists wanted the same independence but under the alleged John William, Prince of Jamaica, who was kept under house arrest in Corte for literally decades as the Imperials argued whether to restore his throne. In many ways the circumstances were the worst of both worlds for both the Imperials and we Carolinians; if the old royal family had all been wiped out then there could be no loyalty to them; if John William had escaped into exile then at least he could have become a definitive rallying cry; but having a possible heir of questionable veracity in a place no-one saw him? This was emblematic of the sense of uncertainty and malaise of the First Interbellum here, with few able to feel enthusiastic about the cause of restoring John William to the throne, yet no-one able to entirely discount the possibility from their calculations. It just added yet another faction of opinion to the mix and made it more difficult to come up with a majority for a lasting settlement.
The leadership of the ENA was often even far more removed from reality in possibilities they considered. The double-crossing Faulkner, before becoming President, had attempted to play both sides. From the Old Carolinian western province of Gualpa, many of his fellow Imperials viewed him with suspicion, but he saw himself as a westerner and cared nothing for true Carolina. Many modern Imperial politicians are often accused of ‘foreign policy by xyloid’[3] and getting their knowledge of the world from sensationalist films; the same was true of Faulkner and many contemporaries judging Carolina by bloody literature and sequents. Since the Ultima Coup of 1864 and the intensification of the Meridian Occupation, many Imperials had had a vested interest in presenting Long Peace Carolina in a gloatingly ironic manner, as though to punish those whom they still regarded as ‘traitors’. It is certainly true that the Meridian occupiers frequently turned to the Negroes as a source of recruitment for inspectors and overseers, men whose loyalty would be motivated by a chance to revenge themselves on white men for years of slavery. But this described only a small minority of Negroes, and those inspectors could still find themselves quietly disappeared if they ventured outside the cities or too far away from a Meridian patrol; one wit described the main contribution of white Carolinian society to world literature in this period as ‘coming up with increasingly inventive denials’. Joking aside, this hostile environment did inspire the small ‘Scarlet Ring’ circle of black Carolinian writers (writing years later in the 1910s) to create the ‘Cotton Gothic’ subgenre of horror fiction. The fact that antebellum Carolina remained an oppressive place for most Negroes is illustrated in the fact that black emigration to the ‘Africa Nova’ province of the ENA—formerly Raleigh—did not slow after the Ultima Coup, but accelerated as the ‘Seventies Thaw’ made border crossings easier.
But this subtlety was lost on the fiction that incurious men like Faulkner lapped up, seeing Carolina as now a topsy-turvy place in which the white man was lorded over by the black, all under the bootheel of the UPSA. (In practice, by this point even the latter was debatable, with Meridian corporate interests ruling the roost rather than the increasingly ineffective government in Córdoba). Faulkner was willing to pursue any strategy that shortened the war, and so worked with the One Carolina Movement, a naïve and backward-looking Patriot group whom still seriously thought that Carolina could be recombined with her old lost provinces and the clock turned back to her merely being another Confederation of the ENA. (Faulkner himself, at least more honest in his ruthless cruelty, instead imagined Carolina being a newly minted Confederation with her post-independence borders!) Faulkner’s farcical promises to Carolina’s white population that they would be put ‘back on top’ were dismissed with outraged indifference, while the Negroes, some of whom might otherwise have welcomed ENA rule, were alienated and their relatives in Africa Nova began actively sabotaging Imperial plans.
Emperor George in Fredericksburg wisely dismissed Faulkner for the damage he had caused, but sadly the president, Jamison, made the error of seeing a position of ‘Minister for Carolina’ as merely a poisoned chalice to dispatch the manipulative conniver to. Even he clearly viewed the idea of actually coming up with a solution for Carolina after the conquest to be a lost hope and not worth seriously devoting resources to.[4] Ironically, precisely because of the same misapprehensions of realities in Carolina that Faulkner had been sorely guilty of, the conquest proceeded more rapidly than the Imperials had expected; few Carolinians were willing to fight to defend the miserable status quo they lived under, with our kingdom reduced to a mere foreign corporate interest. Sadly, things were about to get worse, and worse. Faulkner’s apparent ‘success’ in his role catapulted him into Fourteen Culpeper Road; his alliances with the One Carolina Movement in the Patriots, together with his shaky so-called Social American Coalition, ensured that there would never be a majority for any solution, valid or not, for the ‘Cotton Question’. Our American neighbours, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit to maintain Faulkner’s government for eight years until his death, time in which the idea of Carolina’s unsettled status being left to fester became normalised.
Of the political leaders of the ENA in this era, perhaps the only one who made a serious attempt to resolve Carolina’s situation was Thomas Gedney, but his time in government was brief before he retired due to ill health.[5] Jack Tayloe, the crass Cygnian bushranger who replaced him, found the worst possible compromise between the already idiotic views of Faulkner and the One Carolina Movement: to create a new Confederation of Carolina consisting of our post-independence borders and Africa Nova and Hispaniola, but nothing else! Clearly, as he fairly openly admitted, his primary goal was to remove some black voters from the Old Virginia where his ancestors had been born. This kind of view was not uncommon among the white people of that Confederation, nervous about how their House of Delegates was now more than one-quarter black, and illustrates—as if another lesson was needed after the 1830s—that there is no more common ground between the Carolinian and the Virginian than with any other kind of American. Though one can argue that any kind of settlement would have been better than the nothing Carolina got, it is difficult to see how Tayloe’s outrageous idea would have led to anything other than strife. In any event, Tayloe’s attempts to use the interior territories of the ENA as a prototype for his plans ran into trouble, and his government was ejected over their failures with the Great Canal Race and the Panic of 1917.
David Fouracre III’s Liberal government was elected off the back of that Panic, which had devastated Carolina more than any of the Confederations of the ENA—because it was compounded by a new threat as well. The boll weevil, a pest formerly not found north of Mexico, had infiltrated cotton plantations across Carolina and began to destroy the crop that remained the economic basis for many rural regions.[6] This was widely attributed to new economic links with Mexico created by the ENA’s ‘Philadelphia System’, though more recently scientists have argued that the first boll weevils had already appeared on Carolinian soil before the outbreak of the Pandoric War. Regardless, at the time the perception was more important, with the ENA blamed for the economic catastrophe and Fouracre’s ruthlessly numbers-focused approach to government essentially writing off Carolina as somebody else’s problem.
Throughout these years, various Imperial governments had appointed various Governors and bodies to run Carolina, often multiple ones at once with overlapping and poorly-defined responsibilities. Cyrus Wragg had been appointed as puppet Governor as early as 1897 and was never strictly removed, but the fact that successive military administrators and Development Councils and Carolina Boards were appointed as well just ensured that no-one quite knew who was meant to be in charge. No elections, even to symbolic puppet bodies as the General Assembly had often been under the Meridians, took place, because no-one had agreed on what the status of Carolina’s government should be. While Meridian occupation had been oppressive, at least it had been well-organised by comparison. At the end of the day, as Phil Fontaine wrote, the Meridians had cared about Carolina if only because she was a way for them to militarily threaten their rivals, the ENA. But the Americans had only cared about Carolina in a negative way, seeking to remove that Meridian threat. With the Meridians ejected, Carolina might as well not exist in their minds. Certainly she was at the bottom of their priority list with other questions, like the loss of the old mother country and economic empire, what to do with their underrepresented interior, Faulkner’s social programmes, the canal rivalry with the Combine and so on. It is striking to contrast this with Nouvelle-Orléans, which was fairly swiftly annexed into the Empire and legally treated as a disconnected part of the Confederation of Westernesse, because that was a place that the Imperials had decided was strategically and economically important to them. Though this was hardly a perfect solution for the city state’s people, it was at least a solution.
While all this was going on, Carolina had fallen into almost a state of anarchy, in which local informal governments—some of them little more than bandit groups demanding money for menaces and calling them taxes—ruled the roost. The Imperial occupiers were often rather reluctant to confront them, providing they did not interfere with their own business (and the Empire, like the Meridians before them, increasingly relied on imperfect ‘auxiliary’ troops recruited from elsewhere whom often turned into bandits themselves). The government controlling the city of Talugisi [Birmingham, AL] is remarkable because it was led and controlled by black Carolinians; the Cherokee Empire did not try to contest this, but maintained a quiet remnant independence around the city of Nevadoheyadev.[7] Many of the other local governments were less remarkable, usually led by local white magnates, but not dissimilar in character. There was much racial migration across the occupied Kingdom at this time, with many Negroes going to Africa Nova or Talugisi, Indians going to the remaining Cherokee land, and whites going from cities to the countryside to escape Imperial control. This migration was partially captured by Faulkner’s census, although Carolina was—typically—treated as a tacked-on addendum and the work was not fully completed.
However, in some places there was increased cooperation and mutual respect between black and white Carolinians, seeing Imperial misrule and bandit neighbours as a common threat. These Neighbourly Communities, as they were named in hindsight, form the basis of our modern society which emerged from the terrors of the Fever Dream, and much else of them is said elsewhere.The most famous and noteworthy of them is the Lebanon Community [Athens, GA] which effectively controlled all the counties in the region except the centre of the titular city where the Imperial occupiers dwelt. It is a sad irony that if the Neighbourlies’ ideas had been widely embraced at the time, so much evil could have been avoided.
In the First Interbellum, Alfarus and the Combine were operating agents in many nations to either promote the ideals of Societism or, often, in a more pragmatiste manner, to sow disruption that would let the Combine take advantage. They found success in a number of countries, but in order to confront our country’s history we must be prepared to admit that Societist agents could not have succeeded in Carolina without the buy-in of our own people, be they white, black or red. It is one thing for Alfarus to sow sparks, but they would have fizzled out without dry tinder. The Imperials’ mistakes had done much to prime our kingdom for its embrace of an outside ‘help’ that turned into a nightmare, repeating a mistake already committed on a small scale during the War for Independence.[8] But ultimately, the decision to commit national suicide was that our own, and we can only be thankful that the bullet could be removed in time, though it took heroic surgery…
*
From: Quotes and newspaper clippings from local history display in public library in Cooperville [OTL Mount Pleasant, South Carolina]—
Charleston Herald: THE BALLOON GOES UP! French openly attack Russian troops violating Persian sphere of influence—Ultimatum Expected
Wando Freeman: Chinese-owned businesses burned in Paris—Siamese students drowned in Toulon by mob who thought they looked Chinese—Experts Predict Further Violence
Charles Town Mail-Gazette: Continental Parliament passes Fouracre’s mobilisation bill—Bankers Warn of Spending Impact—All Eyes on Germany[9]
The Maple Leaf: True Information: FIGHT FOR FREEDOM! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! Watch for news of recruiters coming through your town! Join up today to fight for the Emperor and protect your families![10]
“It was strange. Not like the last one. It felt unreal. We knew it wouldn’t come to our houses this time, so everything the Yankees said sounded absurd. But we were wrong, weren’t we?” – B. Wragg Hill, Local Cooperville Resident
“After they failed to protect our mothers and fathers from the bandits and the mob, now they wanted us to sign up? And the rumours said that after the war, they’d just send us on to Guinea or someplace and leave us there. No thank you, we said!” – Sebelle Brown, Local Cooperville Resident
(A hand-printed broadsheet) YANKEE SOLDIERS GO HOME, AND LEAVE OUR BOYS HERE!
(A hand-printed pamphlet) Racial Purging by the Back Door? Resist the Siren Call of the Greencoat!
(A barely legible, blurred page headed by Cooperville Weekly, with a transcription of part of it next to it) “OUTRAGE ON MAIN STREET: Military police open fire with wooden bullets on crowd of protestors laying siege to recruitment station. Six whites and three blacks hurt, two of each seriously. Local governor refuses to comm-” (Note) “This is a proof of an unpublished page of the Weekly that survived the paper’s press being seized by the occupying forces”.
(An advertisement) TREMURIATIX! The new wonder bug-killer from the Classes’ Chemical Factories in South America! Watch your cotton crops recover like that continent after her Revolution! Come for our free talk at Farmers’ Hall, night of Tuesday 13th May, and get your first bottle for half price! Learn both about the amazing power of this chemical to save your livelihood, and the new thinking that led to its discovery![11]
[1] ‘Corinthian’ here signifies gentlemanly or sportsmanlike, but in a more usefully gender neutral manner.
[2] This section should be contrasted with Parts #258 and #266 in Volume VII, which covers some of the same events from a more American/Imperial perspective (filtered in turn through English school history) as opposed to the (mostly white) Carolinian perspective here.
[3] A figure of speech to describe popular films, though they are not literally made of xyloid (celluloid) by this point in history.
[4] Note the careful ‘evil advisors’ narrative here to absolve the Emperor of any blame.
[5] The fact that, in spite of this, Gedney survived to write about politics for decades more may perhaps indicate that he got a chance to establish his version of events that of course he would have sorted out Carolina if he’d been in power longer…
[6] This is slightly ahead of schedule compared to OTL due to different economic links. Note that although it’s hard to tell from the phrasing here, and cotton is still often regarded as emblematic of Carolina (the Deep South), it is far less dependent on cotton monoculture than the OTL region, in part due to the delay in the invention of the cotton gin.
[7] Note the careful phrasing contrast of ‘Negroes’ when othering but ‘black Carolinians’ when talking about a part of history that is regarded as part of modern Carolina’s foundation.
[8] I.e. the Great American War.
[9] The Gazette, one of the two papers that merged into this one, became famous for refusing to concede ‘Charles Town’ becoming ‘Charleston’ and this has become a tradition retained even after the merger.
[10] Though it’s been arbitrarily put on the ‘black’ side, this is more of a propaganda paper produced by the Imperial occupying authorities…or one of them.
[11] Tremuriatix is, indeed, a new wonder insecticide created by the chemical factories of the Combine; it is so called because it contains a group of three muriatine (chlorine) atoms. We know it better as DichloroDiphenylTrichloroethane, or DDT for short…
“In summary, Panchala is a land of contrasts, and is clear the Sharma case will run and run. But in happier sports news, a reminder that this Saturday, C-WSC will be going live with the final of the California Rules Football Women’s League Championship. Can Carolina’s own Maubela Manhunters, after a run of victories that has shocked a continent, become only the second team from outside California to win the Volkova Cup?
“Maria Xiong, Captain of the Las Estrellas Stargazers, today wished luck to her historic opponents in a corinthian manner—but what she diplomatically doesn’t say is that the Stargazers are still the firm favourite with the bookies.[1] The Manhunters will face her team on their home turf, in the Stardome, but thousands of Carolinian fans will be lining the stands as well.
“Stay tuned for an exclusive interview with Manhunter captain Paulette Forsythe, who stoked controversy earlier this season by saying she hoped both the black and white communities of Maubela would support the team—but can her detractors argue with her results? Or is the question now whether any man, woman or child in Carolina will do anything but cheer on our girls to pull off a giant-slaying win and make history?”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 19/03/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 19/03/2020
*
(Lt. Tindale’s note)
Oh hello! Is this thingummy-whatsit turned on? Yes, little green light, that’s right, isn’t it? Well—while those two sergeants are at the local pub—again—I might as well feed in this finding I came across a few months ago when we were in Charleston. A suburb, I should say—lovely little local library, with a local history display by…locals. This nice big pinboard covered with felt! All old black and white photos, er, thingy, asimcons, cuttings from newspapers, and quotes from people at the time nicely written out again in proper calligraphy by schoolchildren with pens and inkwells. Made me quite nostalgic for my own schooldays!
Of course, the effect was spoiled a bit when I did notice the display was cut in half with two different colours of felt background, and one half was titled ‘White Version of History’ and the other ‘Black’—still, I suppose at least they gave ’em equal billing, eh? And some of the content was a wee bit dark, but that’s history, I s’pose. I should say when you see what some of ’em on both sides (hashtag?) say about the Imperials, y’should bear in mind that they did it in full view of Imperials here, who seem to actually approve of promoting a version of history that makes ’em out to be the bad guys. Diversitarianism’s a hell of a drug!
Stupid muggins here put that bally fool Charlie in charge of taking the photos—no, asim—no, they are photos if we’re taking them with our cameras, aren’t they? Very confusing—any road, he went side to side instead of up and down, so I think all the tasty quotes alternate between the black and white side, but never mind. And I got Bob of the Mumbies to find some accompanying text from a book we got elsewhere to lead into it, so hopefully it will all tie together nicely as a succinct narrative whatsit. Now, where’s my 5,000-piece jigsaw…?
*
From: “History of the Twentieth Century” edited by K. D. Saunders (2001)—
Few periods in our country’s history have been so re-examined in hindsight as the First Interbellum, something which would probably seem remarkable to those living through those events at the time, who regarded is a dull, grinding age of malaise and decline, in which persistent low-level enervating misery was never enlivened into the drama of full outbreaks of violence. In a sense, all the peoples of Carolina of all colours had held their breath when the country was conquered during the Pandoric War, and had kept holding it ever since, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would be one thing if a definitive answer for what postwar Carolina would look like had come out of the Imperials in Fredericksburg, but it never did. Rather than rage at any particular settlement, therefore, the primary emotional response was one of frustration at the uncertainty. This was compounded by malaise as new challenges arose and there was no effective response to deal with them; indeed, no-one was quite sure whose job it was supposed to be to do so. Some controversy-seeking modern historians even date the start of the National Coma to this First Interbellum malaise rather than its end, but there is little need for us to even consider such an outrageous stance.[2]
The tragedy of errors enacted by successive Imperial governments over a quarter-century can almost be characterised as sheer surprise that the conquest had been accomplished so definitively, and then a reluctance to confront the question of ‘what next?’ In truth, of course, this seeming indecision on Fredericksburg’s part is more a consequence of the Imperials electing divided governments where no clear majority could decide on a path forward. From the self-interested indifference of Faulkner to the excessive ambition of Tayloe, no Imperial president could come up with a way to answer what they patronisingly referred to as the ‘Cotton Question’.
There were multiple schools of opinion in the ENA of what to do with Carolina. Only a minority, mostly in the Liberal Party, had the correct view that Carolina should be restored as an independent country in personal union with the ENA, the status it now finally has after so many more years of brutality and suffering. Some Supremacists wanted the same independence but under the alleged John William, Prince of Jamaica, who was kept under house arrest in Corte for literally decades as the Imperials argued whether to restore his throne. In many ways the circumstances were the worst of both worlds for both the Imperials and we Carolinians; if the old royal family had all been wiped out then there could be no loyalty to them; if John William had escaped into exile then at least he could have become a definitive rallying cry; but having a possible heir of questionable veracity in a place no-one saw him? This was emblematic of the sense of uncertainty and malaise of the First Interbellum here, with few able to feel enthusiastic about the cause of restoring John William to the throne, yet no-one able to entirely discount the possibility from their calculations. It just added yet another faction of opinion to the mix and made it more difficult to come up with a majority for a lasting settlement.
The leadership of the ENA was often even far more removed from reality in possibilities they considered. The double-crossing Faulkner, before becoming President, had attempted to play both sides. From the Old Carolinian western province of Gualpa, many of his fellow Imperials viewed him with suspicion, but he saw himself as a westerner and cared nothing for true Carolina. Many modern Imperial politicians are often accused of ‘foreign policy by xyloid’[3] and getting their knowledge of the world from sensationalist films; the same was true of Faulkner and many contemporaries judging Carolina by bloody literature and sequents. Since the Ultima Coup of 1864 and the intensification of the Meridian Occupation, many Imperials had had a vested interest in presenting Long Peace Carolina in a gloatingly ironic manner, as though to punish those whom they still regarded as ‘traitors’. It is certainly true that the Meridian occupiers frequently turned to the Negroes as a source of recruitment for inspectors and overseers, men whose loyalty would be motivated by a chance to revenge themselves on white men for years of slavery. But this described only a small minority of Negroes, and those inspectors could still find themselves quietly disappeared if they ventured outside the cities or too far away from a Meridian patrol; one wit described the main contribution of white Carolinian society to world literature in this period as ‘coming up with increasingly inventive denials’. Joking aside, this hostile environment did inspire the small ‘Scarlet Ring’ circle of black Carolinian writers (writing years later in the 1910s) to create the ‘Cotton Gothic’ subgenre of horror fiction. The fact that antebellum Carolina remained an oppressive place for most Negroes is illustrated in the fact that black emigration to the ‘Africa Nova’ province of the ENA—formerly Raleigh—did not slow after the Ultima Coup, but accelerated as the ‘Seventies Thaw’ made border crossings easier.
But this subtlety was lost on the fiction that incurious men like Faulkner lapped up, seeing Carolina as now a topsy-turvy place in which the white man was lorded over by the black, all under the bootheel of the UPSA. (In practice, by this point even the latter was debatable, with Meridian corporate interests ruling the roost rather than the increasingly ineffective government in Córdoba). Faulkner was willing to pursue any strategy that shortened the war, and so worked with the One Carolina Movement, a naïve and backward-looking Patriot group whom still seriously thought that Carolina could be recombined with her old lost provinces and the clock turned back to her merely being another Confederation of the ENA. (Faulkner himself, at least more honest in his ruthless cruelty, instead imagined Carolina being a newly minted Confederation with her post-independence borders!) Faulkner’s farcical promises to Carolina’s white population that they would be put ‘back on top’ were dismissed with outraged indifference, while the Negroes, some of whom might otherwise have welcomed ENA rule, were alienated and their relatives in Africa Nova began actively sabotaging Imperial plans.
Emperor George in Fredericksburg wisely dismissed Faulkner for the damage he had caused, but sadly the president, Jamison, made the error of seeing a position of ‘Minister for Carolina’ as merely a poisoned chalice to dispatch the manipulative conniver to. Even he clearly viewed the idea of actually coming up with a solution for Carolina after the conquest to be a lost hope and not worth seriously devoting resources to.[4] Ironically, precisely because of the same misapprehensions of realities in Carolina that Faulkner had been sorely guilty of, the conquest proceeded more rapidly than the Imperials had expected; few Carolinians were willing to fight to defend the miserable status quo they lived under, with our kingdom reduced to a mere foreign corporate interest. Sadly, things were about to get worse, and worse. Faulkner’s apparent ‘success’ in his role catapulted him into Fourteen Culpeper Road; his alliances with the One Carolina Movement in the Patriots, together with his shaky so-called Social American Coalition, ensured that there would never be a majority for any solution, valid or not, for the ‘Cotton Question’. Our American neighbours, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit to maintain Faulkner’s government for eight years until his death, time in which the idea of Carolina’s unsettled status being left to fester became normalised.
Of the political leaders of the ENA in this era, perhaps the only one who made a serious attempt to resolve Carolina’s situation was Thomas Gedney, but his time in government was brief before he retired due to ill health.[5] Jack Tayloe, the crass Cygnian bushranger who replaced him, found the worst possible compromise between the already idiotic views of Faulkner and the One Carolina Movement: to create a new Confederation of Carolina consisting of our post-independence borders and Africa Nova and Hispaniola, but nothing else! Clearly, as he fairly openly admitted, his primary goal was to remove some black voters from the Old Virginia where his ancestors had been born. This kind of view was not uncommon among the white people of that Confederation, nervous about how their House of Delegates was now more than one-quarter black, and illustrates—as if another lesson was needed after the 1830s—that there is no more common ground between the Carolinian and the Virginian than with any other kind of American. Though one can argue that any kind of settlement would have been better than the nothing Carolina got, it is difficult to see how Tayloe’s outrageous idea would have led to anything other than strife. In any event, Tayloe’s attempts to use the interior territories of the ENA as a prototype for his plans ran into trouble, and his government was ejected over their failures with the Great Canal Race and the Panic of 1917.
David Fouracre III’s Liberal government was elected off the back of that Panic, which had devastated Carolina more than any of the Confederations of the ENA—because it was compounded by a new threat as well. The boll weevil, a pest formerly not found north of Mexico, had infiltrated cotton plantations across Carolina and began to destroy the crop that remained the economic basis for many rural regions.[6] This was widely attributed to new economic links with Mexico created by the ENA’s ‘Philadelphia System’, though more recently scientists have argued that the first boll weevils had already appeared on Carolinian soil before the outbreak of the Pandoric War. Regardless, at the time the perception was more important, with the ENA blamed for the economic catastrophe and Fouracre’s ruthlessly numbers-focused approach to government essentially writing off Carolina as somebody else’s problem.
Throughout these years, various Imperial governments had appointed various Governors and bodies to run Carolina, often multiple ones at once with overlapping and poorly-defined responsibilities. Cyrus Wragg had been appointed as puppet Governor as early as 1897 and was never strictly removed, but the fact that successive military administrators and Development Councils and Carolina Boards were appointed as well just ensured that no-one quite knew who was meant to be in charge. No elections, even to symbolic puppet bodies as the General Assembly had often been under the Meridians, took place, because no-one had agreed on what the status of Carolina’s government should be. While Meridian occupation had been oppressive, at least it had been well-organised by comparison. At the end of the day, as Phil Fontaine wrote, the Meridians had cared about Carolina if only because she was a way for them to militarily threaten their rivals, the ENA. But the Americans had only cared about Carolina in a negative way, seeking to remove that Meridian threat. With the Meridians ejected, Carolina might as well not exist in their minds. Certainly she was at the bottom of their priority list with other questions, like the loss of the old mother country and economic empire, what to do with their underrepresented interior, Faulkner’s social programmes, the canal rivalry with the Combine and so on. It is striking to contrast this with Nouvelle-Orléans, which was fairly swiftly annexed into the Empire and legally treated as a disconnected part of the Confederation of Westernesse, because that was a place that the Imperials had decided was strategically and economically important to them. Though this was hardly a perfect solution for the city state’s people, it was at least a solution.
While all this was going on, Carolina had fallen into almost a state of anarchy, in which local informal governments—some of them little more than bandit groups demanding money for menaces and calling them taxes—ruled the roost. The Imperial occupiers were often rather reluctant to confront them, providing they did not interfere with their own business (and the Empire, like the Meridians before them, increasingly relied on imperfect ‘auxiliary’ troops recruited from elsewhere whom often turned into bandits themselves). The government controlling the city of Talugisi [Birmingham, AL] is remarkable because it was led and controlled by black Carolinians; the Cherokee Empire did not try to contest this, but maintained a quiet remnant independence around the city of Nevadoheyadev.[7] Many of the other local governments were less remarkable, usually led by local white magnates, but not dissimilar in character. There was much racial migration across the occupied Kingdom at this time, with many Negroes going to Africa Nova or Talugisi, Indians going to the remaining Cherokee land, and whites going from cities to the countryside to escape Imperial control. This migration was partially captured by Faulkner’s census, although Carolina was—typically—treated as a tacked-on addendum and the work was not fully completed.
However, in some places there was increased cooperation and mutual respect between black and white Carolinians, seeing Imperial misrule and bandit neighbours as a common threat. These Neighbourly Communities, as they were named in hindsight, form the basis of our modern society which emerged from the terrors of the Fever Dream, and much else of them is said elsewhere.The most famous and noteworthy of them is the Lebanon Community [Athens, GA] which effectively controlled all the counties in the region except the centre of the titular city where the Imperial occupiers dwelt. It is a sad irony that if the Neighbourlies’ ideas had been widely embraced at the time, so much evil could have been avoided.
In the First Interbellum, Alfarus and the Combine were operating agents in many nations to either promote the ideals of Societism or, often, in a more pragmatiste manner, to sow disruption that would let the Combine take advantage. They found success in a number of countries, but in order to confront our country’s history we must be prepared to admit that Societist agents could not have succeeded in Carolina without the buy-in of our own people, be they white, black or red. It is one thing for Alfarus to sow sparks, but they would have fizzled out without dry tinder. The Imperials’ mistakes had done much to prime our kingdom for its embrace of an outside ‘help’ that turned into a nightmare, repeating a mistake already committed on a small scale during the War for Independence.[8] But ultimately, the decision to commit national suicide was that our own, and we can only be thankful that the bullet could be removed in time, though it took heroic surgery…
*
From: Quotes and newspaper clippings from local history display in public library in Cooperville [OTL Mount Pleasant, South Carolina]—
Charleston Herald: THE BALLOON GOES UP! French openly attack Russian troops violating Persian sphere of influence—Ultimatum Expected
Wando Freeman: Chinese-owned businesses burned in Paris—Siamese students drowned in Toulon by mob who thought they looked Chinese—Experts Predict Further Violence
Charles Town Mail-Gazette: Continental Parliament passes Fouracre’s mobilisation bill—Bankers Warn of Spending Impact—All Eyes on Germany[9]
The Maple Leaf: True Information: FIGHT FOR FREEDOM! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! Watch for news of recruiters coming through your town! Join up today to fight for the Emperor and protect your families![10]
“It was strange. Not like the last one. It felt unreal. We knew it wouldn’t come to our houses this time, so everything the Yankees said sounded absurd. But we were wrong, weren’t we?” – B. Wragg Hill, Local Cooperville Resident
“After they failed to protect our mothers and fathers from the bandits and the mob, now they wanted us to sign up? And the rumours said that after the war, they’d just send us on to Guinea or someplace and leave us there. No thank you, we said!” – Sebelle Brown, Local Cooperville Resident
(A hand-printed broadsheet) YANKEE SOLDIERS GO HOME, AND LEAVE OUR BOYS HERE!
(A hand-printed pamphlet) Racial Purging by the Back Door? Resist the Siren Call of the Greencoat!
(A barely legible, blurred page headed by Cooperville Weekly, with a transcription of part of it next to it) “OUTRAGE ON MAIN STREET: Military police open fire with wooden bullets on crowd of protestors laying siege to recruitment station. Six whites and three blacks hurt, two of each seriously. Local governor refuses to comm-” (Note) “This is a proof of an unpublished page of the Weekly that survived the paper’s press being seized by the occupying forces”.
(An advertisement) TREMURIATIX! The new wonder bug-killer from the Classes’ Chemical Factories in South America! Watch your cotton crops recover like that continent after her Revolution! Come for our free talk at Farmers’ Hall, night of Tuesday 13th May, and get your first bottle for half price! Learn both about the amazing power of this chemical to save your livelihood, and the new thinking that led to its discovery![11]
[1] ‘Corinthian’ here signifies gentlemanly or sportsmanlike, but in a more usefully gender neutral manner.
[2] This section should be contrasted with Parts #258 and #266 in Volume VII, which covers some of the same events from a more American/Imperial perspective (filtered in turn through English school history) as opposed to the (mostly white) Carolinian perspective here.
[3] A figure of speech to describe popular films, though they are not literally made of xyloid (celluloid) by this point in history.
[4] Note the careful ‘evil advisors’ narrative here to absolve the Emperor of any blame.
[5] The fact that, in spite of this, Gedney survived to write about politics for decades more may perhaps indicate that he got a chance to establish his version of events that of course he would have sorted out Carolina if he’d been in power longer…
[6] This is slightly ahead of schedule compared to OTL due to different economic links. Note that although it’s hard to tell from the phrasing here, and cotton is still often regarded as emblematic of Carolina (the Deep South), it is far less dependent on cotton monoculture than the OTL region, in part due to the delay in the invention of the cotton gin.
[7] Note the careful phrasing contrast of ‘Negroes’ when othering but ‘black Carolinians’ when talking about a part of history that is regarded as part of modern Carolina’s foundation.
[8] I.e. the Great American War.
[9] The Gazette, one of the two papers that merged into this one, became famous for refusing to concede ‘Charles Town’ becoming ‘Charleston’ and this has become a tradition retained even after the merger.
[10] Though it’s been arbitrarily put on the ‘black’ side, this is more of a propaganda paper produced by the Imperial occupying authorities…or one of them.
[11] Tremuriatix is, indeed, a new wonder insecticide created by the chemical factories of the Combine; it is so called because it contains a group of three muriatine (chlorine) atoms. We know it better as DichloroDiphenylTrichloroethane, or DDT for short…
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Once again, more proof that Diversitarianism is totally bonkers. Says the man from the TL that doesn't have diversitarianism.
1) Footnote 4 and the early mention of personal union finally shows what happens to Carolina and North America in regards to one another: they share a monarch with the separate titles of King and Emperor of those respective countries! Huh! It also made me realize it’s the *American monarch who is the legal head of state of various disparate lands in TTL versus the British monarch of OTL... timeline irony, indeed...
2) Just in case, I assume the Tayloe plan to make Carolina a confederation with Hispaniola and western North Carolina/Africa Nova never worked out and became official, merely proposed. If it DID get put into plan, does the modern kingdom hold those provinces mentioned above?
3) Hahahaha DDT Jesus fuck hahahaha
2) Just in case, I assume the Tayloe plan to make Carolina a confederation with Hispaniola and western North Carolina/Africa Nova never worked out and became official, merely proposed. If it DID get put into plan, does the modern kingdom hold those provinces mentioned above?
3) Hahahaha DDT Jesus fuck hahahaha
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Kaiphranos
Donor
I think the health effects of DDT are more long-term, though - it's not Zyklon-B. It is still used in parts of the world today for malaria control.
I don't think so. Romerus made reference to pesticide compounds in chapter 275 separately from the Alkahest.
The Combine inherited the UPSA’s world famous chemical companies and their infrastructure. So really they’re just continuing their research and seem poised to become the main source of chemical manufacturing already they created and used the poison/nerve gas at the end of the Pandoric War, and whatever there magic discovery is so DDT doesn’t seem that unusual.
I got a BAD feeling most of the major wars are going to see chemical weapons used far more than OTL
You know, that might explain a few things about the weirdness of threshold bombs. I'm thinking, maybe what's going on is that Timeline L thinks of Threshers as being basically upgunned "Scientific Weapons" with radiation in the place of chemical weapons as the payload?
In OTL it was used to make the eggs of the bald eagles thin and more brittle