Rumsfeldia: Fear and Loathing in the Decade of Tears
- Thread starter Drew
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Bookmark1995
Banned
Most likely they'll be spending their lives with a cloud of shame hanging over them. But eventually, they will come out in public and try to give people a personal view of Rumsfeld.
I think they'll try and slip into obscurity, either overseas, most likely Australia or New Zealand as they're white English speaking countries so I doesn't take much to git in, or somewhere in the American countryside as with all the movement of displaced people it's unlikely anyone would notice. They'll definitely change their last name, though I don't think they'll go to the length Hitler's relatives did.
On a side note about the discuss of the US military, I think they're going to end up like Japan. Still respected socially, but it's going to downsize to possibly Interwar size for fulfilling its new role for defense purposes. The greatest hit will be the Navy and Airforce to limit the ability to deploy overseas and prevent 'adventurous behaviour'. The nuclear stockpile will be somewhat dismantled with a greater focus on security and maintenance of whatever is left so they won't have the same trouble with it as we do today.
Something tells me people will actually defend Rumsfeld, even some of his own family. Yes, there'll be a strong sense of shame at the association, but the man had a (once) popular belief in something and fought for it. He went utterly too far in the process, yes, but even 10 years after the exposure of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, you had Neo-Nazis and Nazi apologists and Stalinists. They became more common as time went by, but Rumsfeldism would actually be a political movement.
Cyberpunk literature would pretty much follow the concept of Rumsfeld's "utopia" taken to its utter extremes - assuming, of course, the genre wasn't driven to extinction because of how close to home the idea of a corporation-dominated nation would hit after Rumsfeld's ruinous reign.
Same with the CV's, of course. ::sigh::
Cyberpunk literature would pretty much follow the concept of Rumsfeld's "utopia" taken to its utter extremes - assuming, of course, the genre wasn't driven to extinction because of how close to home the idea of a corporation-dominated nation would hit after Rumsfeld's ruinous reign.
Same with the CV's, of course. ::sigh::
So far a good chunk of America's nuclear arsenal is untapped, since it was seized by the CV's enemies or in case of the Navy, interned in foreign ports.
I'm not sure if they can deploy it, since the CVs were the last "legitimate" goverment with the launch codes and stuff.
Of course, unless Rummy had outsourced the maintaining of the nuclear forces to some company who wasn't as strict in it's security measures.
And I wonder if California/Midwestern enclaves/North-Eastern remnants or Cuba would retaliate with WMDs like chemical weapons after the CV's nuclear attacks.
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Nazi Space Spy
Banned
Have I ever mentioned that I know a woman who thinks Rumsfeld was/is the sexiest man on the planet?
Bookmark1995
Banned
Truth is, the idea of Americans fleeing to the Soviet Union is a very enticing thing to write about. I think I'll write a contribution about it:
20 Years a Red: An American Soviet Looks Back
The Guardian
October 7, 2008
Novosibirsk, USSR
Svetlana Perensky appears to an outsider stereotype of a Soviet woman, with a stern face and a staunch obsession with Communist ideology. It is hard to imagine this woman was once the Gainesville High School Senior Prom Queen of 1983, in the picture she showed me. The image of happy American teenage girl in a beautiful dress next to the prom king in a nice tuxedo contrasts sharply with the dourly critical woman.
"I was a little brat," Perensky bitterly says while smoking a cigarette ,"a girl who fed from the capitalist table. But I would soon learn the truth of capitalist oppression."
Svetlana Perensky was born Sarah Carter in 1965 Gainesville, Florida, to Jack and Lorraine Carter. Her father, a lawyer, provided Sarah and her two younger siblings with an upper middle class lifestyle even during the rough economic climate of the 1970s. Like many Southern whites, the Carter family voted conservatively, voting for George Wallace in 1976, and Donald Rumsfeld in 1980 and 1984, and like most Floridans, viewed Castro's Cuba as Satan. Her background seemed unlikely for somewhat who would become an Soviet communist, something Perensky observes.
"Many of my comrades were stunned to believe I was a bourgeois," Perensky said with a wry smile, "but a history professor pointed out to me that Comrade Lenin has once been bourgeois. But he, like I did, discovered that his chains were as heavy as those worn by the peasants, only invisible."
In the fall of 1983, Perensky, at her father's expense enrolled at George Washington University, intending to follow in her father's footsteps and study law. During her first year, she claims she was never very politically active, and mostly partied and studied. She was, however, disdainful of the student chapter of WTP, believing them to be Communists as her father complained about.
"The insidious nature of capitalism led me to blame the proletariat for the corruption and decadence of the bourgeois," Perensky says.
However, by 1985, the young Sarah Carter and other young people were finding themselves at a crossroads. As Donald Rumsfeld's policies shredded the welfare state and clamped down on freedoms, she and other college students found themselves under siege and their futures under threat.
When Rumsfeld privatized federal student loan institutions, it sent shockwaves across college campuses, as many were aware that Rumsfeld's deregulation allowed businesses to charge usurious rates of interests. Even though her parents had covered her education, even she was not immune to the effect.
"Several of roommates were crying that day," Svetlana said sadly, "they knew they would be forced to drop out because the capitalist pigs were bankrupting them. I realized I could not sit back and do nothing."
Sarah and her friends joined a mass protest against Rumsfeld's privatization in April 1985, a decision she sees as foolish in retrospect.
"It was naive of me to think the capitalists would listen to a march and a few demands," Svetlana said bitterly, "but who would have expected them to be so craven in their attacks."
Instead of facing the DC and campus police, Sarah and her fellow protesters were confronted by Liberty Legions, who quickly demonstrated they had little restraint when dealing with protesters, attacking them and beating them savagely with little warning, including Sarah who was very badly bruised on her left arm. However, when DC police arrived, they arrested the injured protesters.
"I remember one student had a concussion and could barely stand," muttered Svetlana,"and the lapdog police yanked him by his shirt like he was a wretched criminal.
Sarah had been ordered to sign a release form, clearing the police of charges of false arrest and promising not to protest, but refused believing she could sue in favor of her civil rights. She was paraded to a room with a federal agent, who implied that if she did try to sue, her father would be disbarred and arrested for misconduct.
"That was the day I discovered the chains around my neck," Svetlana muttered, "the day that pig made threats against my father, against a fellow bourgeois.
Her growth from dissident to Communist radical, however, was more gradual. Over two years, saw many off her friends ruined by Rumsfeldia. Some had been forced to dropout, as their families lose their livelihoods due to Rumsfeld's war on the middle class, (leading to Eric Foner to dub the young people of the era the "Dropout Generation". Some had been unjustly expelled from college due to continued political activism. Some had been unjustly imprisoned on fallacious charges.
But there were two events that forever shattered the young Sarah's faith in the system. Due to the Rumsfeld's administrations lax enforcement of female rights, Sarah became a victim of sexual harassment at the hands of a senior partner of a law firm where she was an intern.
"I had tried to report him," Svetlana said angrily, "but no one did anything. The week after, I was met by campus police."
She claims her employer had falsely accused her of taking drugs after she refused to sleep with him. The false claim led to the GW administration to suspend her in March 1987 for six months, preventing her from taking her finals .
"I tried to appeal the process," said Svetlana sadly,"but the administrator laughed and called me a 'mouthy slut', who should try and be a mother".
When she left the university and went back to Florida, she learned that her father, despite the promise to the federal agent, had been disbarred for trying to defend a local Democratic politician pro bono from fake obscenity charges.
"My father, when I saw him, looked like man who had lost everything sitting in his chair," Svetlana said with a small tear in her eye,"he had fought in Korea, and the capitalists rewarded him by taking his livelihood away."
By the end of 1987, while her parents and younger siblings had moved to Canada, Sarah had returned to DC as an American Communist Party volunteer, calling for a violent revolution. She was surprised by Rumsfeld's quiet fall, expecting he would be forced out by the anger of the American proletariat. But what drove her to leave America was the fact that even after many skeletons fell out Rumsfeld's closet, there hadn't been a major mass rebellion by the American people.
"The proletariat in America were the most brainwashed of all," Svetlana said with disgust,"even after years of being robbed by the capitalists, even more so than usual, they still were conned by the capitalist-liar Denton and the religious fundamentalists. Some men rioted, but these men were just deprived souls looking for a meal, not people looking to overthrow the capitalist system."
When asked if she felt dissuaded by the authoritarian nature of the Soviet government, she scoffed at calling the actions of the Soviet oppressive.
"The Soviet government had to fight capitalist reactionaries at every turn," Svetlana said dismissively. "When the capitalists retook Eastern Germany, Nazis and other fascist elements gained a foothold. Give the reactionaries an inch, and they will return to feast on your children. Even the so-called 'Free America' bourgeois forces during the Second American Civil War were brutal toward the CV, but no one called their actions 'oppression'."
In May 1988, Sarah traveled to the embassy of the USSR in Washington, now a committed Communist, and hoping to defect. But she was surprised to find others lined up.
"Many of them were a diverse bunch," said Svetlana wistfully,"Some of them were black and white. Some of them were clearly bourgeois and others workers based off of the clothing they wore, but like me, they had all woken up to their oppression. I saw the angry realization on their faces, and like me, the angriest were the bourgeois. Unlike the poor, they hadn't known about the chains around their neck."
Many dispute the idea that all of the Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union were committed Communists. Most were said to be economic migrants who were ruined by Rumsfeld's sledgehammer to the middle class, and sought the newfound prosperity in the Soviet Union under MBA Communism. But the image of huge lines of Americans standing in line for visas to the Soviet Union, a sight unthinkable 7 years before, proved a major propaganda victory for Nikolai Ryzhkov. Sarah received her visa in July, and by August, she and other American defectors were in Moscow being greeted by local politicians and citizens in a PR campaign.
"There were these crowds of people cheering us as we walked through the terminal," Svetlana said happily, "waving flags and throwing confetti. One group was holding up a red banner that said 'Welcome American Comrades'. We were overwhelmed. For years, we had been raised by our bourgeois parents to believe these men sought to destroy us. But they were welcoming us like long lost relatives."
By the end of the year, Sarah, feeling grateful, embraced her new Soviet identity. She changed her name to Svetlana, and joined the Red Army, where she admits that she was treated harshly by her superiors, more so than her other comrades.
"It was too make sure I didn't get complacent," Svetlana said," considering all the warm welcomes I had gotten, and the fact that the politicians saw me as a propaganda tool, I couldn't blame them for their discipline. Some of my fellow sisters in the army mocked me as a "capitalist weakling'. But eventually, they accepted me as one of their own. "
Between 1988 and 1992, nearly 150,000 Americans, like Svetlana, would defect to the Soviet Union. Most of them had been refugees from the Second American Civil War who had been unable to get residency in Canada. Ryzkhov, seeing these refugees as an PR opportunity and a means to gain valuable skills, allowed for an open door immigration policy to American refugees, granting them easy entry in exchange for "promising never to engage in counterrevolution,", a coded term for promising not to engage in political dissidence.
Svetlana, thanks to her English, was sent to the USSR embassy in Canada in 1990 to guard a small camp set up for American refugees preparing to go Russia. Like Svetlana, many of them came from backgrounds that were least likely to create eagerness toward Communism, with many of them Midwesterners who had seen their livelihoods destroyed by the CV. Many were unprepared by the hospitality showed to them by the Soviets.
"I remember seeing one man, his wife, and his three children who lost their home in Minnesota to the reactionaries," Svetlana said while shaking her head,"this Russian woman brought him a bowl of soup. When that soup came before him, he wept as did the family. Seeing their worldview of the Soviets as monsters shattered so quickly, it was unbearable for them.
After leaving the army in 1999, Svetland settled down and married a Russian apparatchik, and had three children. Today she lives a quiet life as an English teacher, and also manages a local chapter of American Proletariat, a national support group for the American community in the USSR.
As of 2007, the estimated number of Americans in the Soviet Union has reached 500,000. One American recently made headlines by becoming the first American to ever become an apparatchik by joining the Leningrad City Committee. Their story, like Svetlana's, is like the Communist equivalent of an immigrant's tale to America, and searching for the American Dream. Entering a strange new land and struggling to build a life. Some don't adapt, but many like Svetlana, have managed to prosper in all walks of life in the USSR. Svetlana believes their story should be about the ability of human beings to adapt to a new reality and of opening your mind instead of listening to old dogmas.
20 Years a Red: An American Soviet Looks Back
The Guardian
October 7, 2008
Novosibirsk, USSR
Svetlana Perensky appears to an outsider stereotype of a Soviet woman, with a stern face and a staunch obsession with Communist ideology. It is hard to imagine this woman was once the Gainesville High School Senior Prom Queen of 1983, in the picture she showed me. The image of happy American teenage girl in a beautiful dress next to the prom king in a nice tuxedo contrasts sharply with the dourly critical woman.
"I was a little brat," Perensky bitterly says while smoking a cigarette ,"a girl who fed from the capitalist table. But I would soon learn the truth of capitalist oppression."
Svetlana Perensky was born Sarah Carter in 1965 Gainesville, Florida, to Jack and Lorraine Carter. Her father, a lawyer, provided Sarah and her two younger siblings with an upper middle class lifestyle even during the rough economic climate of the 1970s. Like many Southern whites, the Carter family voted conservatively, voting for George Wallace in 1976, and Donald Rumsfeld in 1980 and 1984, and like most Floridans, viewed Castro's Cuba as Satan. Her background seemed unlikely for somewhat who would become an Soviet communist, something Perensky observes.
"Many of my comrades were stunned to believe I was a bourgeois," Perensky said with a wry smile, "but a history professor pointed out to me that Comrade Lenin has once been bourgeois. But he, like I did, discovered that his chains were as heavy as those worn by the peasants, only invisible."
In the fall of 1983, Perensky, at her father's expense enrolled at George Washington University, intending to follow in her father's footsteps and study law. During her first year, she claims she was never very politically active, and mostly partied and studied. She was, however, disdainful of the student chapter of WTP, believing them to be Communists as her father complained about.
"The insidious nature of capitalism led me to blame the proletariat for the corruption and decadence of the bourgeois," Perensky says.
However, by 1985, the young Sarah Carter and other young people were finding themselves at a crossroads. As Donald Rumsfeld's policies shredded the welfare state and clamped down on freedoms, she and other college students found themselves under siege and their futures under threat.
When Rumsfeld privatized federal student loan institutions, it sent shockwaves across college campuses, as many were aware that Rumsfeld's deregulation allowed businesses to charge usurious rates of interests. Even though her parents had covered her education, even she was not immune to the effect.
"Several of roommates were crying that day," Svetlana said sadly, "they knew they would be forced to drop out because the capitalist pigs were bankrupting them. I realized I could not sit back and do nothing."
Sarah and her friends joined a mass protest against Rumsfeld's privatization in April 1985, a decision she sees as foolish in retrospect.
"It was naive of me to think the capitalists would listen to a march and a few demands," Svetlana said bitterly, "but who would have expected them to be so craven in their attacks."
Instead of facing the DC and campus police, Sarah and her fellow protesters were confronted by Liberty Legions, who quickly demonstrated they had little restraint when dealing with protesters, attacking them and beating them savagely with little warning, including Sarah who was very badly bruised on her left arm. However, when DC police arrived, they arrested the injured protesters.
"I remember one student had a concussion and could barely stand," muttered Svetlana,"and the lapdog police yanked him by his shirt like he was a wretched criminal.
Sarah had been ordered to sign a release form, clearing the police of charges of false arrest and promising not to protest, but refused believing she could sue in favor of her civil rights. She was paraded to a room with a federal agent, who implied that if she did try to sue, her father would be disbarred and arrested for misconduct.
"That was the day I discovered the chains around my neck," Svetlana muttered, "the day that pig made threats against my father, against a fellow bourgeois.
Her growth from dissident to Communist radical, however, was more gradual. Over two years, saw many off her friends ruined by Rumsfeldia. Some had been forced to dropout, as their families lose their livelihoods due to Rumsfeld's war on the middle class, (leading to Eric Foner to dub the young people of the era the "Dropout Generation". Some had been unjustly expelled from college due to continued political activism. Some had been unjustly imprisoned on fallacious charges.
But there were two events that forever shattered the young Sarah's faith in the system. Due to the Rumsfeld's administrations lax enforcement of female rights, Sarah became a victim of sexual harassment at the hands of a senior partner of a law firm where she was an intern.
"I had tried to report him," Svetlana said angrily, "but no one did anything. The week after, I was met by campus police."
She claims her employer had falsely accused her of taking drugs after she refused to sleep with him. The false claim led to the GW administration to suspend her in March 1987 for six months, preventing her from taking her finals .
"I tried to appeal the process," said Svetlana sadly,"but the administrator laughed and called me a 'mouthy slut', who should try and be a mother".
When she left the university and went back to Florida, she learned that her father, despite the promise to the federal agent, had been disbarred for trying to defend a local Democratic politician pro bono from fake obscenity charges.
"My father, when I saw him, looked like man who had lost everything sitting in his chair," Svetlana said with a small tear in her eye,"he had fought in Korea, and the capitalists rewarded him by taking his livelihood away."
By the end of 1987, while her parents and younger siblings had moved to Canada, Sarah had returned to DC as an American Communist Party volunteer, calling for a violent revolution. She was surprised by Rumsfeld's quiet fall, expecting he would be forced out by the anger of the American proletariat. But what drove her to leave America was the fact that even after many skeletons fell out Rumsfeld's closet, there hadn't been a major mass rebellion by the American people.
"The proletariat in America were the most brainwashed of all," Svetlana said with disgust,"even after years of being robbed by the capitalists, even more so than usual, they still were conned by the capitalist-liar Denton and the religious fundamentalists. Some men rioted, but these men were just deprived souls looking for a meal, not people looking to overthrow the capitalist system."
When asked if she felt dissuaded by the authoritarian nature of the Soviet government, she scoffed at calling the actions of the Soviet oppressive.
"The Soviet government had to fight capitalist reactionaries at every turn," Svetlana said dismissively. "When the capitalists retook Eastern Germany, Nazis and other fascist elements gained a foothold. Give the reactionaries an inch, and they will return to feast on your children. Even the so-called 'Free America' bourgeois forces during the Second American Civil War were brutal toward the CV, but no one called their actions 'oppression'."
In May 1988, Sarah traveled to the embassy of the USSR in Washington, now a committed Communist, and hoping to defect. But she was surprised to find others lined up.
"Many of them were a diverse bunch," said Svetlana wistfully,"Some of them were black and white. Some of them were clearly bourgeois and others workers based off of the clothing they wore, but like me, they had all woken up to their oppression. I saw the angry realization on their faces, and like me, the angriest were the bourgeois. Unlike the poor, they hadn't known about the chains around their neck."
Many dispute the idea that all of the Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union were committed Communists. Most were said to be economic migrants who were ruined by Rumsfeld's sledgehammer to the middle class, and sought the newfound prosperity in the Soviet Union under MBA Communism. But the image of huge lines of Americans standing in line for visas to the Soviet Union, a sight unthinkable 7 years before, proved a major propaganda victory for Nikolai Ryzhkov. Sarah received her visa in July, and by August, she and other American defectors were in Moscow being greeted by local politicians and citizens in a PR campaign.
"There were these crowds of people cheering us as we walked through the terminal," Svetlana said happily, "waving flags and throwing confetti. One group was holding up a red banner that said 'Welcome American Comrades'. We were overwhelmed. For years, we had been raised by our bourgeois parents to believe these men sought to destroy us. But they were welcoming us like long lost relatives."
By the end of the year, Sarah, feeling grateful, embraced her new Soviet identity. She changed her name to Svetlana, and joined the Red Army, where she admits that she was treated harshly by her superiors, more so than her other comrades.
"It was too make sure I didn't get complacent," Svetlana said," considering all the warm welcomes I had gotten, and the fact that the politicians saw me as a propaganda tool, I couldn't blame them for their discipline. Some of my fellow sisters in the army mocked me as a "capitalist weakling'. But eventually, they accepted me as one of their own. "
Between 1988 and 1992, nearly 150,000 Americans, like Svetlana, would defect to the Soviet Union. Most of them had been refugees from the Second American Civil War who had been unable to get residency in Canada. Ryzkhov, seeing these refugees as an PR opportunity and a means to gain valuable skills, allowed for an open door immigration policy to American refugees, granting them easy entry in exchange for "promising never to engage in counterrevolution,", a coded term for promising not to engage in political dissidence.
Svetlana, thanks to her English, was sent to the USSR embassy in Canada in 1990 to guard a small camp set up for American refugees preparing to go Russia. Like Svetlana, many of them came from backgrounds that were least likely to create eagerness toward Communism, with many of them Midwesterners who had seen their livelihoods destroyed by the CV. Many were unprepared by the hospitality showed to them by the Soviets.
"I remember seeing one man, his wife, and his three children who lost their home in Minnesota to the reactionaries," Svetlana said while shaking her head,"this Russian woman brought him a bowl of soup. When that soup came before him, he wept as did the family. Seeing their worldview of the Soviets as monsters shattered so quickly, it was unbearable for them.
After leaving the army in 1999, Svetland settled down and married a Russian apparatchik, and had three children. Today she lives a quiet life as an English teacher, and also manages a local chapter of American Proletariat, a national support group for the American community in the USSR.
As of 2007, the estimated number of Americans in the Soviet Union has reached 500,000. One American recently made headlines by becoming the first American to ever become an apparatchik by joining the Leningrad City Committee. Their story, like Svetlana's, is like the Communist equivalent of an immigrant's tale to America, and searching for the American Dream. Entering a strange new land and struggling to build a life. Some don't adapt, but many like Svetlana, have managed to prosper in all walks of life in the USSR. Svetlana believes their story should be about the ability of human beings to adapt to a new reality and of opening your mind instead of listening to old dogmas.
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This goes without saying but the Fourth of July probably hasn't been celebrated in a while ITTL and while it is completely understandable why that is it saddens me nonetheless. 
Also happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans!
Also happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans!
Lost Freeway
Banned
Those damn American proletariat, robbing each other instead of teaming up to fight the bourgeoisie!
They are natural enemies. Like proletariat and the upper classes! Or proletariat and the intellectuals! Or proletariat and the other proletariat! Damn proletariat - the ruined the workers state!
Bookmark1995
Banned
This goes without saying but the Fourth of July probably hasn't been celebrated in a while ITTL and while it is completely understandable why that is it saddens me nonetheless.
Also happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans!
I think it has, but in a more bread and circuses way, like with garish TV shows and parades that talk about Rumsfeldian freedom and such.
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