"What Madness Is This?" Volume I: The Union Forever
- Thread starter Napoleon53
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Words of advice for California, Texas and South Louisiana; get settlers into those territories ASAP!
Not at this point. LA only grew the way it did with the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
THE MEINRAD BEUTEL STORY
“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
- Meinrad Beutel in a letter to follower Leonhard Troki
“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”
-Meinrad Beutel's second book, The Triumph of the People
Meinrad Beutel was born on January 1, 1800, among the first babies of the new century. He would end up being one of its most well-known celebrities and political thinkers. At the time of his birth, his father Wilhelm Beutel was working on a farm with his wife, Meinrad's mother Sofia. The family lived in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel, part of the Holy Roman Empire. Meinrad's grandfather, Karl Beutel, was a farmer as well, but had also served in the Hessian Army during the American Revolution. Karl respected the revolutionaries he fought against and loved the original American dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When he came back home he tried to instill these ideals in Wilhelm, but Wilhelm was a devout monarchist and was loyal to the Holy Roman Empire. Karl Beutel had better luck with his grandson Meinrad, and in their leisure time on the farm the old veteran would share the works of Immanuel Kant and other famed authors of the Enlightenment. - Meinrad Beutel in a letter to follower Leonhard Troki
“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”
-Meinrad Beutel's second book, The Triumph of the People
In 1807, Caesar Napoleon I marched his Grand Army into Hesse-Kassel and proclaimed the land as the Kingdom of Westphalia, with his brother Jerome Bonaparte as King Jerome I. It then became a part of the wider Confederation of the Rhine, itself created by the Treaty of Pressburg in 1806. As the Great Wars of the Empire came to an end in 1815, this new Confederation made travel, education, and commerce much easier, especially for the poor wishing to venture out for a new life. In 1817, a strapping young Meinrad left his home for Bavaria and its famed Ludwig Maximilian University of Landshut. While at Landshut, Meinrad poured over the great works and the most famous political theories. For a while, the young man went back on his grandfather's teachings and the pressures of the college made him into a monarchist. His mother had raised him as a devout Catholic, and Landshut taught him to see the government and Caesar and King as God's Hand on earth, preventing the masses from turning to barbarism.
Things changed, however, in 1819, when the infamous Hep-Hep Pogrom began in Bavaria. At the same time Henry Marx was taking his family to the Republican Union after the massive anti-Jewish violence, Meinrad was becoming concerned at the plight of the Ashkenazi Jews. Napoleon had been the Great Emancipator of the Jews, promising them equal treatment and fair laws. Now, he did nothing as Bavarians massacred Jews following their status elevation to citizen. Even the Bavarian Royal Army was getting in on the action at this point, such as the Ingolstadt Massacre of 1819. Bavaria was also experiencing a famine and economic depression for several years, leading to starvation for some of the poor. Meinrad was a devout Catholic, but he believed in the inherent value of all human life and the respect of other religions and was disgusted by the treatment of the Jews. For a while, he explored the paths of radical republicanism and democracy, but those viewpoints were being taken less seriously in the aftermath of the Fall of the Old Republic in America and the abrupt turnaround in France from regicidal democracy to the Second Coming of Julius Caesar. By 1820, Beutel decided none of the forms of government were the right one.
As he struggled with the ideas of law and order and government itself, Meinrad began to turn back to his grandfather and his love of the idea of absolute freedom, Kant's "Law and Freedom without Force." Some in Europe had already described anarchy as a form of society free from hierarchy, but this was not enough to Meinrad. Pure anarchy seemed to leave too much unanswered to him, and society would never choose anarchy as the way forward voluntarily. The hierarchy was too entrenched to defeat through debate or elections alone. The big companies and nobility would always keep them down. In 1822, he experienced an epiphany. "The Fifth Way."
Immanuel Kant had described four means of government as:
- Law and freedom without force (anarchy)
- Law and force without freedom (despotism)
- Force without freedom and law (barbarism)
- Force with freedom and law (republic)
What Beutel envisioned was a "Fifth Way," consisting of "Law and freedom through revolution and then without force." Beutel referred to himself throughout his life as a "Practical Anarchist" and "Anarcho-Libertine." However, he was the first of what would become Anarcho-Beutelism, sometimes called "Fifth Way Anarchism." Anarcho-Beutelism sought for all the forces of society to join hands to overthrow the oppressive hierarchy and destroy classes forever. Beutel claimed that only through chaos could the Fifth Way advance into the future and bring about true freedom and fair law. Upon the day a country totally accepted the Fifth Way, it would then be their sole purpose to continue the revolution into other nations to liberate them from dictatorship and monarchy.
The wheels inside Beutel's mind were turning at a thousand times per minute during the 1820s, when he continued to formulate and refine his new ideas. In 1824, he was kicked out of Landshut for his "subversive ideology" and he returned home to Hesse-Kassel and Westphalia. There, he began working on a book entitled The Anarchist Way. It would change the course of history forever. In 1828, the relatively small 239-page volume was published and caused much outrage in society. In early 1829, Napoleon declared the book to be "degenerate and dangerous" and rounded up as many copies as possible and burned them. In March of 1829, Imperial police raided the main print shop responsible for the printing of The Anarchist Way and Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary, head of the Imperial secret police, had it razed to the ground.
"There will come a time on this earth when true free men will cast off their oppressors. The bloated hierarchical ticks in Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, and Philadelphia will eventually run out of ways to contain every citizens' deep and innate desire to have liberty, and then what will they do? They will either wipe their people out, wipe each other out, or the people will wipe them out. To achieve the last option, we must also assist in the second option. It is the Anarchist Way to pit our swindling, oppressive monarchs and leaders against one another. We must destabilize, so that we can stabilize. We must destroy, so we can create. We shall build a New World Order, an order dominated by personal liberty, freedom of choice, and minimal government. No government should have the ability to impress its citizens into military service, like every civilized country today does. No government should have the right to tax its citizens. No government should oppress the civil liberties of its citizens. The freedom-loving man had one chance thus far in history to create an Anarchist Utopia: the old United States. But the United States failed to solidify its freedoms under a constitution, and after good General Washington stopped holding their ship of state steady, the place fell to civil war, violence, slavery, racism, and murder. If all free men join this cause, once and for all, and fight for the Anarchist Way, for the Fifth Way, then we shall truly be free. The Ancient Regime of the status quo must crumble. The New World Order must rise."
-Final Page of The Anarchist Way
With the government now trying to silence him, Beutel knew he was a man on the run, a fugitive, and that he would likely be imprisoned or executed if the Imperial government ever got to him. Thus, he and a small group of followers fled to Morocco and then from there sailed to Gran Colombia, a South American nation so embroiled in civil unrest that he could live in peace and seclusion. From there, more copies of The Anarchist Way were printed and shipped out all over the world.
In the Republican Union, any negative reaction or book burning in France seemed positively tepid. The American Fundamentalist Church declared Beutel an enemy of the church and an Antichrist. As the book became secretly distributed to the poor Inferiors slaving away under the Yankee jackboot, teams of American detectives began hunting for him in Gran Colombia. Still, Beutel slaved away, continuing to print his masterpiece and churning out many letters and treatises.
In 1828, Beutel had married Marie Granger, an ethnic Frenchwoman living in Hesse-Kassel. They both had a great fascination with philosophy and political thought, and it was she who transcribed her husband's words following a failed assassination attempt by American agents in 1832 left him unable to write. At last, however, their luck ran out when a team of bounty hunters paid for by Charles Goodyear discovered their Colombian estate, high in the mountains. After a brief shootout August 1, 1833, between the Beutelists and the bounty hunters, Marie was shot dead on the portico of the house. Ten more anarchists were killed as well, but they had helped Meinrad to escape into the forest.
Now widowed and incapable of writing on his own, Meinrad fled to Peru, a neutral nation where he hoped the extreme isolation would protect him. There he began work with a new secretary on a second book titled The Triumph of the People, which showed Meinrad Beutel as an angry, vengeful man, filled with rage and depression at the loss of his wife and more focused on the violent revolutionary aspect of Anarcho-Beutelism and advocating for the assassination of government and corporate figures. He also became an atheist, finally and fully rejecting the Christianity he been raised in. Declaring that governments used religion to keep the people in their places of poverty and inequality, he said that even the leaders of the Church should not feel safe from the Revolution. He desired the people to seize their leaders and violently overthrow those that wouldn't embrace the Revolution.
His luck returned in late 1833 after he published The Triumph of the People, when the growing crisis in Gran Colombia exploded into full-on civil war. The elements of the government that had supported the late President Bolivar aligned with the military to crush a monarchist uprising of the upper classes, mostly former Spanish colonials. The poor people and working class were largely uninvolved in this struggle, simply focusing on survival in the total collapse of society. It was Beutel's time. He and his followers emerged from their exile in Peru and returned to Gran Colombia with rifles in hand. They marched on Guayaquil and Quito, abolished slavery, took over the factories and forts, and declared the Revolutionary Nation of Ecuador.
This terrified the Gran Colombian government and generally everyone else in the region. Though there was no "government" in Ecuador, Beutel was calling the shots, his crippled right arm kept in a sling over the shoulder of his military-style uniform. As most of South America, even Peru, united to crush this outbreak of anarchism, he knew he had to take emergency power and fight off this assault. He declared that this military rule was not permanent, but simply a "necessary step" to defend the nation before "true anarchy could be implemented." Fifth Way revolts were breaking out all over South and Central America, but this sudden militarism by Beutel was causing some to rethink their plans. But many, loyalists through-and-through, put their faith in Meinrad to get them through the storm and believed that the Hessian needed to raise such a vast army to combat the forces of the enemy that sought to end their freedom and their very lives.
Beutel's right hand was a young Jewish Pole named Leonhard Troki, and Troki quickly became the iron-fisted right-hand (pun unintended) to Beutel. He had fled persecution in Prussia only to find it in the supposedly emancipated Jewish ghettos of Bavaria. He had been with Beutel since his flight from Europe and had survived the bounty hunter attack that had killed Marie Beutel. Now, he was placed in charge of the People's Free Army of the Liberation. He rallied the former slaves and the working poor and led the massacres against the upper class and the old aristocracy. While Beutel wanted to win over the upper class if they were willing, Troki thought them inherently dangerous and far too risky to keep alive. Beutel had no idea that Troki was off murdering over ten thousand people in 1834 alone, and mostly concerned himself with the day-to-day operations of the "un-state," as his enemies called it. When Beutel found out about the massacres, he wanted to sack Troki, but he realized he was too valuable.
In late 1835, the Republican forces and the Army finally defeated the monarchists in the north and could turn their attention to the south. As government forces marched down, Troki mad a surprise move and invaded Mexican Panama, setting it up as the Anarchist People's Republic of Panama. What had happened was a total betrayal. Troki abandoned Beutel to the Colombians while he set up shop in war-torn Mexico. While Republican troops closed in on Quito, Beutel's remaining soldiers held them off as he was in flight once again. Beutel was heartbroken, and as he left Ecuador he realized he had become his own worst enemy. He had left it in a worse state than it ever had been in, and his right-hand man had massacred thousands of innocents. Peru told the failed leader that he was no longer welcome in their country and they would arrest him if he tried to cross the border. With no other choice, he boarded a ship and set sail for Mexico.
He would land in Baja California in January, 1836, just days after his 36th birthday. The former dictator tried to rally some locals to his cause to go against Iturbide, Mexico's Mad Monarch. In July, he went east to Durango and he and his supporters overthrew the local garrison, creating the Anarchist Commune of Durango. Iturbide, already busy fighting all of North America and dealing with Troki in Panama, was furious at this turn of events and wanted the Commune crushed utterly. A civil war broke out, often called the Durango Conflict, and while the Anarchists had no hope of victory they chewed through a lot of Iturbide's best men, substantially weakening him before the early-1837 French invasion. In late 1836, Durango fell and was then burned to the ground by Iturbide's forces. Beutel was captured in the chaos and brought to Mexico City. Trying to use momentum and the high morale of the moment, the Mexican Army marched south and razed Panama to the ground and arrested Troki, ending the Anarchist People's Republic of Panama.
With both revolutionary leaders now in his dungeon, Iturbide was free to finally end the anarchist threat once and for all. During the early hours of December 13, 1836, Troki was publicly executed by firing squad. A few minutes after him, Beutel and several of his officers were brought forth and strapped to the pole. Upon being asked if he had any last words, Beutel reportedly said, "The Triumph of the People shall come. Though I may die, the People will live on. No amount of tyranny can hold back the power of a billion starving, hopeless, huddled fools yearning to be free. I go now in peace, knowing my followers will avenge me sevenfold, and safe in the knowledge that nothing can stop the Revolution."
With that, the Meinrad Beutel story ends, as his limp corpse dangled from a pole, riddled with bullets. Some said he was a messiah of the poor, while others said he was the devil in the flesh. Some said he was a great author and intellectual, while others said he was simply a man who knew the philosophy he invented would gain him popularity and power with the poor and uneducated. Some said he genuinely wanted to improve the world, while others called him a terrorist who inspired the assassination of Caesar Napoleon I and countless other figures. He was many things, but at the end of the day he was a poor boy from Hesse-Kassel who became one of the most colorful and interesting figures of the entire 19th century.
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Leonhard Troki leads his Panamanian Army to its last battle against the Mexican Army
Execution of Meinrad Beutel by Mexican Imperial firing squad
Thank you, Hans! Do you mean the ending of Classic? Trust me, it will be completely different this time.
I suppose you recognized these quotes?
I have a biography of Emma Goldman in the back seat of my car right now. Ending of the original and please don't call me Hans it's a referenceThank you, Hans! Do you mean the ending of Classic? Trust me, it will be completely different this time.
I suppose you recognized these quotes?
SuperZtar64
Banned
Oh.
Uh.... no. I just thought they sounded cool.
Haha... I don't know who that is. Whoops.I have a biography of Emma Goldman in the back seat of my car right now.
Well, I do now cause I just googled her but still.
Haha! Don't feel bad, I had only heard her name in the past until a work buddy gave me the book. lol
Here's an OTL map to give a rough approximation of Beutel's War of South American Liberation.
I couldn't really decide where exactly Beutelism would fit in OTL. It's almost communistic in some aspects, but quite. Trokiism would be essentially the Stalinism to Beutelism's Communism.
Beutelism is pretty surprisingly unique. I'm honestly stumped as to if it's like anything OTL.
In a way, Beutel has the last laugh at least against Iturbide, and he deserves at least that for one of the Madness verse few true heroes.