Summarize

"Part #305: Inside an Enigma

“‘Where do we go from here?’
DIVERSITARIANISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

An entire generation has grown up in a world without the Combine.
Is the Prism still relevant today? Is Iverson?
Or are we complacent towards tomorrow’s threats?

COLLOQUIUM AND DEBATE – ALL PERSPECTIVES WELCOME

Invited speakers:
The Rt. Hon. Mildred Prewitt MCP (Former Minister for Information)
Prof. Alistair Hoist (Chair of Modern History, New Corte University, Carolina)
M. Jacques Birraux (Director, French Institute of Cultural Exchange – Directeur, Institut Français des Echanges Culturels)

Go to Motext page 84V-126 to book tickets!”

– Poster seen on Bezant Street, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr David Wostyn, October 2020

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(Dr Wostyn’s note)

While we have read a number of times that the ‘Iversonian’ principles of ASN member nations allegedly require those nations to permit the free discussion of Societism as an ideology, we have noticed since our arrival here that those lectures devoted to Societism – even in a critical voice – are often subject to protests. In the case of the lecture recorded here, however, this consisted of six teenagers from different ideological factions who seemed to hate each other more than the lecturer, and after the start there were fortunately no further interruptions.

*

Recorded lecture on “The Other Societists” by Dr Algernon V. Stoddart, recorded October 29th, 2020—

…thank you to security for that. (Laughs) If I had a dixie for every time that happened at the start of my lecture, I’d have (theatrical pause for thought), oh, at least four imps, three dix and fivecents. (Pause for confused chuckles from audience) Look, one time they only managed to open their mouths before they were thrown out, I’m counting that as half. (More chuckles)

So, as I was saying…

Lots of people have observed that it was the existence of so-called deviant forms of Societism that did more damage to the Combine than we in the free world ever could. Any nation expressing a Diversitarian response to the Combine, from the most nuanced Iversonians here in the ENA or in Europe, all the way down to simple Soviet censorship and thuggery,[1] could be dismissed as ‘the nationalistically blinded’, some homogenous ‘other’ not part of the so-called Liberated Zones. But the heterodox Societists offered an awkward wrinkle in such a simple worldview, shades of grey in the Combine’s picture of black against white.

So it’s all the more appropriate that Grey Societism is also the term most commonly accepted for these forms of Sanchezista belief. And yes, I said forms plural – what’s not appropriate about the term is that it gives the false impression that there is only a single third force in the equation.[2] In fact, with an irony both powerful and delicious, there are almost as many shades of alternative Societist grey as there are colours of cultural diversity in the Diversitarian rainbow. And such views were seen as far more insidious by the Combine, far harder to root out by their crude tools of internal purges and censorship. Suddenly it was not enough for a man to declare himself a Societist and proclaim his commitment to the so-called liberation of the world and the unification of the human race. Now, they had to decide if he was the right sort of Societist, if he was commited to the right sort of liberation, the right sort of unification.

This wasn’t the first time the Combine had faced this dilemma. Early on, they had had to assimilate the different ideas of the Batavian School in order to secure control over the Nusantara. But that had been in the early days, when the very idea of orthodox Combine Societism was still in flux, and it had come at a time when Alfaran pragmatism was the order of the day. It was the Second Interbellum, the Electric Thirties, which would pose a more daunting problem as ideas diverged in other lands now expressing some loyalty towards Sanchezista ideas. Alfaran pragmatism worked only so long as all Societist lands, all the so-called Liberated Zones, were under the firm grip of Alfarus himself – in reality, whatever the form of government they supposedly possessed on paper. The Viennese School was already proving itself a problem even while Alfarus was alive. But it would be the dramatic changes in the Combine after the Silent Revolution – which would, though the Black Guards would refuse to admit it, shift the Combine itself in a new direction out of step with the status quo of Societism elsewhere in the world – that would really start to cause problems.

As I said, it was clear early on that the Combine recognised heterodoxy as a greater threat than outright Diversitarianism, or I should say Contrasanchezista Thought at that point.[3] In many ways, the principle in general philosophical debate long predates Societism, and it is telling that it is from the world of religion that the best analogy comes. The eruptions in confessional disagreements within Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so contentious because they were seen as all-or-nothing. If only one Christian creed led to heaven, the argument went, then all others were not simply false, as (say) Islam was, but insidiously disguised as the true faith in a manner that would hoodwink sincere Christian believers in a way that an openly alien belief like Islam never could. ‘Better an infidel than a heretic’ was the same principle applied by earnest Combine Societists in the 1930s and beyond; the cult of Sanchez had indeed been elevated to a faith, in which only one interpretation of his words could lead to the true victory of the Final Society.

This attitude was aptly demonstrated in the Iberic War, which lasted roughly between 1925 and 1931, though it is difficult to draw the line precisely. Some scholars argue that Spain and Portugal, in different ways, were never truly quiescent throughout the years of apparent peace, with the control exerted by Madrid and Lisbon sometimes not extending into the farthest reaches of the countries, and organised crime and the like ruling the roost in some parts. I’m not going to get into that debate here. Regardless of any pre-existing undercurrents beneath the surface, open war broke out in November of 1925, when Prince José, the heir to the exilic Portuguese throne, appeared in Oporto at the head of a royalist insurgency. It’s still debated whether he was truly in charge or if he’d been all but kidnapped and used for conspirators’ own ends as a figurehead – and if those conspirators were truly royalist, if they were seeking chaos to line their own pockets or to serve Russian paymasters trying to undermine the Bouclier alliance, or if even then they were working for Alfarus. Whether the last one was true in 1925 or not, certainly some elements of José’s movement appear to have been suborned by the Societists at some point.[4]

The Portuguese Republic was shown to be a corruption-wracked hollow husk of itself when the rather ramshackle royalist insurgency defeated the army in battle, with some of the soldiers joining their side. Desperate moves by feuding consuls and generals, including ineffectual use of death-luft for terror reprisals, failed to quell the royalist advance into the Douro valley. Finally, the playboy King João VII was assassinated in France. Again, there’s huge debate over whether it had been truly ordered by the republican government, whether it was an extremist conspiracy acting alone, whether this was an act of Societist Agendes…the main argument for the latter is that the consequences of the attack certainly favoured Societist aims in the long term, but it would have been difficult to predict this at the time. The killing at the heart of France poisoned the Franco-Portuguese relations that Prime Minister Leclerc had tried so hard to build a generation before, and so the Republic was on its own as the royalist insurgency advanced – but an increasing number of the local uprisings did not seem to be royalist in character anymore.

The war became truly Iberic after the death of the popular French Regent of Spain, the Duke of Orleans, in March 1926.[5] Spain had been held together, after King Charles V had died four years earlier, only by the Duke’s vigour and perceived success in fighting for Spanish interests. Without his strong hand, the country now began to disintegrate. The French hope had been that the death of Charles would occur in peacetime, allowing King Charles XI of France to take the throne of Spain as Charles VI in personal union. However, the poor timing with the Black Twenties meant that neither in 1922 nor 1926 was France well placed to see through this succession. Plans for Charles XI to be crowned in Madrid had been pushed back repeatedly, and would never be realised. Ordinary Spaniards began to petition for the return of their troops, which had mostly been assigned to hold down occupied Belgium, as bandits and revolutionaries began to seize control of cities.

By the time those troops – depleted by plague – did make it home, it was often too late. Many deserted due to the lack of central authority (and reliable wages), instead turning to whichever faction controlled their home city or region. In the early period of the civil war, the most coherent alternative government faction was the Second Spanish Republic, which was proclaimed in Granada on April 29th, 1926 by revolutionaries led by Enrique Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez was a former Mayor of Córdoba, the city to which the republicans swiftly moved their capital, as well a well-known orator in the Cortes, for all that had decayed into a largely rubber-stamp body in the later years of Charles V.[6] However, as the crisis wore on, most power became consolidated in the hands of General Ruy Lafuente, an experienced military commander who defected to the republicans more out of local loyalty than ideological conviction, and who led a de facto military junta.[7] Lafuente became notorious for ruthlessly purging the more extreme Neo-Jacobin (and Paleo-Jacobin) republicans in the heterogonous coalition in favour of moderate (or, his critics said, pliable) Adamantines. Many of them fled to Portugal and its own, just-as-complex, civil war.

Though the most significant of the opposing factions, the republicans – generally strongest in the south – were far from the only force fighting the French and, indeed, each other. A strangely popular group, considering the esoteric nature of their beliefs, were the Felipistas, who claimed that Charles V had sired a secret son who was hiding out in the mountains with a band of followers, seeking to reclaim his rightful throne.[7] Despite the fact that the possibly-bastard son of a French-imposed king was an unlikely rallying figure for Spanish nationalists, the Felipistas enjoyed some level of support, mostly in Asturias. As there was no consensus early on about the name of Charles’ legendary son, some have argued that the name Felipe was chosen precisely because it allowed a link to be drawn with the Felipista faction in the civil war of more than a century before.[8] Again, it seemed almost irrelevant that the cause of those Felipistas had been arbitary, in service of another French-imposed king,[9] and was now irrelevant and almost forgotten – but people remembered the romantic bloodies celebrating the derring-do of fictionalised irregulars loyal to Infante Felipe. And that was all that mattered.

Yes, the people of Spain really were in a desperate situation, willing to turn to almost any cause. Probably the majority wanted some form of home-grown constitutional monarchy with a strong Cortes, but there was no consensus on who should take the throne. Many of the bandit or warlord groups occupying particular cities and regions (for example, Valladolid and Salamanca) ostensibly claimed to be part of a broader anti-French constitutional monarchist movement, but deliberately used this ambiguity to arbitrarily refuse orders when others ordered them into battle rather than looting the countryside.

French forces themselves, in the period between 1927 and 1931, mostly controlled Madrid and its environs plus important seaports such as Valencía and Cartagena. However, the French – led by Vincent Pichereau’s fractious Rubis coalition – failed to expel the Spanish republicans from Cádiz or Algeciras. These defeats fatally damaged France’s reputation as the de facto dominant party in Spain. This would have ramifications in regions of Spain where, previously, light-touch control by a few soldiers flying the flag had previously been enough to keep them quiescent; many of them now joined opposition factions, though not always the republicans. These incidents also damaged Anglo-French relations, as Prime Minister Frederick Osborne refused to allow the use of Gibraltar as a staging ground for the French – having bought neutrality from the republicans to allow English ships to pass without harrassment, in return for the republicans quietly recognising Gibraltar as English. Osborne had no interest in damaging that hard-won treaty.

Getting back to the role of the Combine Societists in all this, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that they were secretly behind the whole of the chaos in Spain. It’s certainly true that several of the anti-French factions would prove to be infiltrated by Societist Agendes and used for their own agenda – if you’ll pardon the pun. (Chuckles) But frankly, the Combine was far from the only power with an interest in destabilising Spain and disrupting French rule there. Romulan Italy had a particular interest, as did Russia – again, it’s debated just how closely they were working together. Fabio Veraldi, who had risen to power as Prime Minister by this point after outmanoeuvring the Alliance Party, was determined to openly send Italian troops to fight for the republicans. It was only the intervention of King Carlo himself which prevented this. At the time, it was generally assumed that the francophobic Romulans had merely chosen to back whichever faction they thought would provide the most coherent opposition to French rule. However, opinions would shift a few years later, when Veraldi felt strong enough to renew his confrontation with the King. In the meantime, it meant that Italian aid to the republicans would be relatively subtle.

Apologists for the Romulans claim that this vacuum provided an opportunity for the Combine to intervene. However, what’s important for our discussion here is for us to note the attitudes Alfarus and the Combine took to the different factions in shattered Spain. Spain genuinely did have home-grown Societists, not just cadres operated from the Combine; as I said, the Spanish people were desperate enough to turn to almost any group that claimed to offer a light at the end of the tunnel. But these Spanish Societists, though often influenced by books and pamphlets smuggled in from South America, had often developed their own heterodox ideas – sometimes helped by visiting envoys from Vienna. It is highly instructive – and very typical – that the Combine’s aid, whether it be Agendes smuggling weapons or Celatores in plain clothes pretending to be Spanish volunteers, was happily applied to republicans, Felipistas, royalists and bandits alike, but never to any heterodox Societists they could not control. Indeed, even those local Societists who did pledge allegiance to Alfarus and the Combine were regarded with suspicion, often viewed as ticking time-bombs that would inevitably betray them. Combine policy was aimed at ensuring Spanish Societists were sacrificed on the altar of battle, while viewing republicans or Felipistas as ‘useful idiots’ who could be safely neutralised, or even converted, later. Un-Societist ideas could be temporarily tolerated; allo-Societist ideas must be exterminated immediately.

In this, the Combine forces were more successful in Portugal than in Spain, where the elimination of local heterodox Societists was so complete that the entire war is usually presented simply as ‘royalists vs incumbent republicans, fight to a standstill, exhaust one another, then the Societists land at Setúbal, sweep in and take over’. It was never that simple, of course. Spain was large, and her terrain difficult enough, that such simplistic ideas never truly took hold even in propaganda. But in both cases, the basic Societist plan remained the same: Raúl Caraíbas’ so-called Doctrine of the Last Throw, using opposing factions to weaken one another before striking hard and fast to establish their own control.

Of course, we all know how it ended. Héloïse Mercier was elected France’s first Prime Ministress in part due to the failures of Pichereau’s government to win the war in Spain, with mounting French casualties unacceptable to an electorate still recovering from the Black Twenties. After a few months, Mercier had concluded that the war was unwinnable in its current form. She ordered France’s forces to withdraw to what later became known as the Marche d’Espagne, named after Charlemagne’s similar fortified frontier zone established more than a thousand years before against an alien-occupied Spain (in that case by the Ummayads). Initially Mme Mercier probably saw this as a temporary measure while France regrouped, as evidence by the fact that she also continued to supply the garrisons holding out in isolated ports like Cartagena. However, in time these too would be abandoned. From Santander to Vinarós, a broad swathe of Spanish territory became treated as a military frontier extension of France, perhaps motivated by a desire to keep Combine rocket missiles as far away as possible. South of that line, Iberia was abandoned to the Combine.

The purpose of this lecture is not to cover the Societist conquest of Iberia in detail, an event that was highly complex and full of enough unlikely, unverified – and unverifiable – stories to stock a few centuries’ worth of a corpus of myths and legends. I need only mention the persistent story that, after being chased out of Lisbon by the Societists invading from Setúbal in August 1929, Prince José – now the claimant King Joseph II following the assassination of his father – ended up hiding out with the Felipistas in Asturias and claiming to be the imaginary Infante Felipe. There is absolutely no contemporary evidence for this story, which was first recorded as late as 1940, but the glorious irony of one exilic monarch pretending to be another has ensured that it has persisted in works of fiction ever since. And, as the ASN will tell us, to persist in works of fiction is a level of reality far deeper than the truth that our eyes tell us. (Uncertain chuckles) In reality, the Prince, or King, merely disappeared without trace, as did so much of our knowledge of what went on in Iberia, for all that it took place in a land so close to free Europe and civilisation. Thus ended the ancient and noble House of Braganza, at least other than obscure distant cousins uncertain whether to act on a mere presumed death.

That’s one story among many. What’s important for our topic today is the Combine Societists’ particularly vicious and determined actions against heterodox local Societists. The best example of this is was Salamanca. Of course, this was the university city where Pablo Sanchez himself had been both student and professor, where he had given his famous speech attacking war, only to face an angry mob.[10] It is no exaggeration to say that it was this experience that led Sanchez to leave Spain for the UPSA and, therefore, start the world down the road to Societism in South America. As such, the city had long been something of a pilgrimage site for Societists in the late 19th century days of that ideology being one associated with lodges of peculiar upper-bourgeois men desperately interested in secret societies.[11] Just as Nazareth and Bethlehem frequently play host to some of the oddest and most obscure Christian sects, Salamanca acted as a candle flame to the moths of every heterodox interpretation of Societism. (Murmurs)

It’s important that you understand that those Societists were always a minority, more figures of fun than anything, even during the First Black Scare. As I said, Salamanca was properly under the control of one of the bandit groups ostensibly claiming to be constitutional monarchists, in this specific case led by the man who called himself, simply, El Hidalgo. His real name was Miguel Figuerola and he was a retired colonel who had served in the Belgian occupation. The Societists had no more quarrel with him than they did with any of the other minor warlords, men who could be swept aside at their leisure and, usually, quietly recycled into Celatores posted on obscure Nusantara islands in exchange for their lives. But Figuerola had the misfortune to be occupying a city with plenty of heterodox Societists in it, so his fate was sealed.

The Societists were careful not to use the Scientific Weapon in Europe, due to strategies worked up by Alfarus’ advisors intended to split French and European public opinion from the ENA’s. It was felt that using the Scientific Weapon in what the nations regarded as ‘peacetime’ would be too much of an escalation. In addition, the lack of such escalation poured fuel on the fires of American public opinion regarding France as a fading power in the Electric Circus era. (Mixed murmurs) Though partly driven by the (mostly) later French decolonisation crisis, the other factor in this was the idea that the French had effectively been defeated by the Societists in their own backyard without a direct fight, in contrast to how American soldiers had stood and fought against the Celatores a few years earlier. (Approving murmurs)

But the one exception to this rule was, of course, Salamanca. Without warning, in November 1930 Combine forces surrounded the city and pounded it with death-luft and Alkahest, mostly from artillery pieces. However, Sagrera’s epic painting Salamanca focused on the smaller number of luft-bombs falling from Societist Capybara bombers, so popular images of the massacre tend to assume it was mostly a bombing attack. Of course this also feels more of a violation, due to the global near-consensus on avoiding civilian aero bombing after Shiraz during the Black Twenties. But to the people in Salamanca, of course, it scarcely mattered if they choked to death on death-luft from an artillery shell or from a drome-dropped bomb. (More murmurs).

If the Combine Societists had hoped that they could slay everyone in the city and then hush it up through lack of witnesses, they were naïve. Attempts at outright denial failed when evidence of the use of the Alkahest leaked out; at that point the Combine had a monopoly on that wonder weapon. Eventually, the official line was that a group of ‘rogue Celatores’ had collaborated with a rival bandit, and in 1931 the Combine had a number of Celatores publicly executed to assuage European public opinion. Some of them might even have been somewhere near Salamanca when the attack happened. (Nervous chuckles) This was from the only factor that led to Alfarus becoming increasingly embattled and subject to opposition within his command structure, but it was significant.

Later, Salamanca was also an exemplar of how much the Combine has made it difficult, both intentionally and accidentally, to tease out what truly went on behind the Line. The city was resettled with ‘good Societist’ colonists from all over the Combine and a monument was erected to Sanchez, we believe in 1932. Then a few years later, during the Konkursum ad Kultura, the Black Guards decided that recognising specific historical events being tied to geographic locations, even Societist-relevant events, was itself un-Sanchezista. The first monument was thoroughly demolished and the Biblioteka Mundial ensured that all records of it were deleted along with it; it’s only due to a few fuzzy asimcons taken by French spies that we have proof it existed at all. And then, of course, a few years after that they changed their minds again and a new monument was erected – and then the BM rewrote history to suggest that it had been there since the start. This is an extreme case, but it’s an illustration in just how difficult it can be for us now to untangle the history of the Combine.

From Alfarus’ point of view, the Iberian acquisition meant that the Societists now held knives to the throats of two out of four of the world’s greatest powers, as then recognised: Carolina for America and Iberia for France. In hindsight, it is obvious that even then, Societist strategic planning looked to replicate that feat elsewhere, and so exert influence on the global balance of power and encourage infighting…

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(Dr Wostyn’s note)

A few minutes of the recording are missing here as the battery in the recorder had run down and had to be quickly replaced under cover, so as not to draw attention of other attendees to our unusual-looking technology.

*

…Russia was faced with a system of government designed for one powerful ruler to sit at the top, and no-one consistently occupying that seat following the death of Tsar Paul III. The underage Emperor Theodore V was initially under the regency of Alexander III, Grand Duke of Courland. However, other powerful forces were moving at court, including the Empress Dowager Elizabeth and her mother-in-law, Anna, along with Anna’s alleged lover, the Meridian Refugiado General Pichegru.[12] At this stage, Russia lacked much of the anti-Societist attitude we associate with her today, and some Russians still saw the Societists as a de facto cobelligerent against the ENA. (Murmurs) I’m not here to talk about the Societist cadres moving in Russia herself, but I will mention how Russia’s actions in the early 1930s helped pave the way for heterodox Societism to bloom elsewhere.

Of course, the biggest and most successful group of heterodox Societists were the Viennese School, who by some definitions are the only ones ‘properly’ called Grey Societists; the fact that the term has been broadened is evidence of their impact. Danubian Societists first rose to prominence in the elections of 1918, held in the aftermath of the Panic of 1917, in which a Societist group entered government through democratic – well, semi-democratic – elections for the first time, anywhere in the world.[13] (Murmurs) Then in 1923, the Societists aided the indecisive Archking Leopold III to resist a coup by the nationalist Brotherhood of the Iron Chain, who advocated for an attack on the Ottomans in defence of Greece, but also opposed a Russian proposal to move troops through neutral Danubia to do the same.[14] In the aftermath of the defeated coup, Danubia’s shaky semi-democracy became increasingly dominated by the Societists and backed up by their street militias. There was little public opposition, largely because the Societists were credited for Danubia’s neutrality and fairly effective counter-plague response during the Black Twenties. (More murmurs)

But as far as Alfarus and the Combine were concerned, this development was not viewed as an unambiguous positive. The Danubian Societists were not under his control. Rather than attempting to remove the Archking, they had simply proclaimed him a Zonal Rej, just as Alfarus had to King Gabriel of Peru – but they had done so unilaterally. They also did not even pay lip service to the idea that, eventually, he would be rotated to a different Zone. The Grey Societists similarly only made vague and symbolic commitments about introducing Novalatina, instead focusing on universalising the primary use of Martial Latin, Danubia’s pre-existing reconstructed form of Latin used by the armed forces, at the expense of native tongues like German and Hungarian.[15] Towns and cities mostly retained their existing names, sometimes switching to existing Latinised versions of them, with ‘Zon6Urb1’ only in tiny letters below ‘Vindobona; Wean; Bécs; Viena; Beč’ on the sign.[16]

The increasing mutual distrust between Combine and Grey Societists came to a head during the plague pandemic, when Alfarus refused to share the Combine’s wonder insecticide Tremuriatix with the Danubians, seeing them as unreliable.[17] However, this was seen as less dramatic a break at the time as it was presented in historiographic hindsight, with the Combine still sharing precursor research with the Danubians. The Danubian Societists also became noteworthy for mass use of the poison Vienna Green to kill off rats and fleas (which, despite its name, was not an exclusive product of Vienna) and for acting as a hub for (selected) refugees fleeing the war and plague elsewhere in Europe.

In the aftermath of the Black Twenties, Alfarus’ paranoia and the divisions with the Grey Societists continued to deepen. Attempts to give the Danubians direct orders were dismissed with the innocent-faced objection that Alfarus had always claimed to be merely the Kapud of the Celatores, a minor figure, certainly subordinate to a Zonal Rej like ‘Leopoldus Habsburgus’. According to Markus Garzius – who is scarcely a reliable source where ‘the Kapud’ is concerned, of course – Alfarus did believe the Greys had good intentions, but needed a firm hand to set them straight. In his writings, Garzius even makes comparison to some of the letters of St Paul to wayward churches in the New Testament (which, in Alfarus’ time, still survived – in a highly edited form – as part of the corpus of the Universal Church). This positive impression does rather clash with the fact that Alfarus was perfectly willing to luft-choke thousands of civilians in Salamanca in an attempt to erase all traces of other groups of heterodox Societists, but perhaps he simply saw Danubia as too big to take over in one fell swoop.

The final straw came in 1934. The Danubian Societists, unlike the Combine, had allowed elections to continue under their rule and other political parties to still exist – not on a level playing field, to be sure, but most of those parties were nobility-backed reactionaries who had been just as happy to exert unequal pressure when they had been in power. By 1934, the warm public regard the Societists had won for their anti-plague measures was cooling, and the Hungarians were particularly unhappy with some of the Societists’ pushes for cultural homogenisation, even if far more lukewarm and voluntary than those in the Combine. The Hungarians elected a Volksrat in which the Grey Societists lost their majority – and the Societists meekly accepted the defeat and allowed a coalition of nationalists to take their place, merely trusting that their faith in Sanchez’s ideas meant that history was on their side and the public would eventually come to agree. (Murmurs)

Whether one accepts that thesis or not, the previous election was not the last time that the Hungarian people would elect a Societist-majority Volksrat. But Alfarus was enraged. The Combine was already threatened by a Societist party that had been semi-democratically voted in to power without the cleansing flame of a violent revolution. Now, that same party openly accepted that the will of the people, as expressed through ‘bourgeois-proletarian democracy’ as Markus Lupus called it, overruled the principle that legitimacy flowed from purity of acceptance and interpretation of Sanchezista historical theory. This was, indeed, a far more existential threat to the Combine than any of the nations’ armies. (Murmurs)

Now, events in Russia – almost certainly not actuated by Societist Agendes, no matter what the Soviets used to claim – would offer Alfarus an apparent opportunity to both threaten another great power and put his boot on Danubia’s jugular to ‘encourage’ them back to the ‘right’ path.

In the Black Twenties, Russia had achieved one great foreign policy goal going back centuries – the conquest and subjugation of Persia – at the expense of going backwards in many other theatres. In Europe, half of Poland and Scandinavia were lost, along with an important Baltic seaport, the puppet state of Belgium and her colonies. Across the Pacific, the entirety of Russian America was under ENA occupation. Africa had seen the loss of allies such as Abyssinia and the Matetwa Empire. Even the continent of Asia, which had seen the aforementioned Persian success and the achievement of the Tarsus salient splitting the Ottoman Empire in two, hardly played host to an unmitigated series of Russian victories. The uprisings in Tartary, which had ignited the war in the first place, were never entirely quelled no matter how many ruthless generals Grand Duke Alexander sent there to commit crimes de guerre. Important lands in Manchuria had been ceded to China to buy her neutrality at the start of the war, already alienating the influential RLPC even before the loss of the American colonies. And, most visibly, Russia had lost the colony she had built in northern India in secret throughout the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, taking advantage of the near-silence of the Jihad-devastated ‘Aryan Void’ that had persisted for years and turned news into legend and rumour. Pendzhab.[18]

In many ways, Russian control of Persia’s ports only made sense as part of a broader global strategy that included Erythrea and influence over at least parts of the Indian subcontinent, both of which were now gone. But Grand Duke Alexander, it seems, was pragmatic. With the Russian economy and military apparently having recovered after a few years of peace, he now sought to reverse as many of the losses of the war as he could. He obviously could not attack Poland or Alyeska without reigniting a general war, but the hope was that India would be treated differently by the great powers; after all, France was already facing difficulties in holding on to Bisnaga and was in no position to directly object. And so, in May 1935, a new Russian army crossed into northern India with the goal of retaking Fort Saltykov in Srinagar, and then using it as a staging post to defeat the new Sikh-led state now controlling most of the former Russian Pendzhab.

Eighteen months later, a defeated and humiliated Russian army withdrew through the Khyber Pass. I don’t have time here to discuss the Pendzhab War, but suffice to say that it had a dramatic effect on not only India, but the world as well. The successful Sikh repulsion of the Russians, helped by the Bengalis and others, catalysed a new wave of anti-colonial resistance – most famously in French Bisnaga, but also around the world. The Sikhs had demonstrated that a native force, properly trained and equipped with modern weapons, could stand up to the mainstream core of a European army and defeat it; not merely the colonial outriders that the Matetwa or the Mauré had beaten in the past.[19] There were even uprisings in Persia, though they failed to truly ignite at this time, as the Shah-Advocate knew the time was not right. Nonetheless, Kalat and Rajputana, former Persian vassals, were quietly able to take advantage of the brief unrest to secure and fortify their own borders against further Russian ambitions.

The wave of anti-colonial fervour was only one part of a complex set of falling dominoes set into motion by Russia’s failure. Firstly, and most obviously, Grand Duke Alexander fell from grace, was overthrown at court and packed off back to Courland. Initially Anna and Pichegru tried to take over, but Theodore V, now of age, had formed an alliance with Marshal Mikhail Kobuzev. The hero of the Persian conquest had had few political ambitions and had accepted Alexander’s government, but remained popular and worried that Russia would follow the wrong track under Anna and Pichegru. Ironically from our modern perspective, one of his concerns was that Pichegru was, I quote, ‘obsessed’ with the Societists as the biggest threat to the world. (Murmurs) Yes, well, quite, one can only speculate how history might have gone if his ideas had dominated in the court at Petrograd. Regardless, Theodore and Kobuzev were able to shut out Anna and Pichegru from control, and they lived out their years in a dacha in Circassia, passing away at an advanced age in the 1940s.

The brief period of internal chaos in Russia would seem to offer an opportunity for Russia’s enemies, in particular the Ottoman Empire, to recover what they had lost in the Black Twenties – the biter bit. Though Europe remained exhausted and there was little incentive for the ENA to open hostilities, the Ottomans did plan an offensive to crush the Tarsus salient. The Grand Vizier in Alexandria, Mustafa Damat Pasha, had reached an agreement with Ahmet Ismail Pasha, who still held de facto power in Constantinople, to coordinate the attack. However, Mehveş Sultan still refused to contemplate collaborating with the man she held responsible for her son’s death. Furthermore, the Alexandrine Ottoman Empire was still suffering problems elsewhere; the aftermath of al-Jizani’s Arab uprising and the Javanese refugee crisis from the ‘One-Way Hajj’; the increasing spread of Societism in Africa continuing to threaten Sennar and Darfur; and attempting to reassert control over Tripolitania (Tunis and Algiers now increasingly looking like lost causes).

So Mehveş Sultan threw out the plan in favour of a more modest naval attack staging from Crete – not against the Russians, but taking the island of Rhodes from Ahmet Ismail’s control. The fall of the island to Suleyman the Magnificent in 1522 had been an important foundational moment for the House of Osman, which Mehveş Sultan hoped to repeat to enshrine her grandson Murad XI’s legitimacy. As Ahmet Ismail had always insisted he was still loyal to the Sultan but was exercising control on the ground ‘for the duration of the crisis’, Mehveş Sultan also hoped that forcing his hand like this would make Ahmet Ismail either surrender or fight and prove himself a liar.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Greece, reduced to the Ionian islands by the Ottoman invasion during the Black Twenties, had ambitions to retake the mainland. Through the judicious use of spies, the Greeks were able to take advantage of Mehveş Sultan’s betrayal of Ahmet Ismail to land troops and mercenaries on the Morea at just the same moment that the Alexandrines attacked Rhodes, in November 1936. In the end, though the Alexandrine attack was successful, the Greeks were quickly forced to retreat. They had planned on having the support of Italian regulars posing as ‘mercenaries’, but the Romulan government got cold feet and scaled back their support at the last minute. Reprisals by Ahmet Ismail’s garrison troops in the Morea killed many Greek civilians who had supported the invasion, and the only lasting territorial acquisition by the Kingdom was the island of Kythira. The Alexandrines’ naval dominance had quickly cleared Ahmet Ismail’s ships from the Aegean, offering this minor opportunity for the Greeks.

Mehveş Sultan’s betrayal meant that the Russian-controlled Tarsus Salient survived, of course. Ahmet Ismail, it appears, had decided to surrender rather than split the empire further, fuming though he was. Ahmet Ismail, a brilliant general but an amateur at politics, had already been manipulated once by the Neo-Azadis who had killed Murad X.[20] In turning on those Neo-Azadis, he had clumsily made alliances with any other group that would back him in The City’s politics. Among these were Societists.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pandoric Revolution, Constantinople had been similar to Vienna in that it had played host to heterodox Societist thinkers. As with Danubia, the multi-ethnic and non-nationalist construction of the empire seemed to offer many opportunities for variations on Sanchezista thought.[21] However, the Constantinopolitan School had been cut short in the 1910s when they were accused of being fellow travellers with the Societists that the Ottomans were already fighting around the Moon Lakes. Several had been executed and others had fled elsewhere. Alfarus, of course, saw this as a prime opportunity; by wiping the slate clean, the Ottomans had inadvertently ensured that any future Societist movement would be entirely imported from the Combine and, therefore, under his control. New cadres had been set up almost as soon as the Grand Vizier’s purge was over, and by 1936 they had been growing for two decades. The time was ripe.

Ahmet Ismail was probably poisoned, but the exact details are unclear. Like the Neo-Azadis before them, the new Rumelian Societists seized power in Constantinople and bought the support of the people simply by offering cheap food in times of difficulty. In some ways it was, as Alfarus had thought, a great opportunity. Usually a Societist uprising in Rumelia and western Anatolia would have been living on borrowed time, with the Russians taking any opportunity of Turkish division to attack. But now the Russians were weakened and consumed with their own internal divisions and rebellions. The Alexandrine Ottoman Empire was also in no position to launch a full conquest for reunification, as Mehveş Sultan had realised. Soon Combine ships, already operating openly in the waters of the former Spain and Portugal, were travelling through the Mediterranean to challenge the Alexandrine Donanmasi’s dominance.

It was another brilliant coup for the Societist, another string to Alfarus’ bow, another shocking threat to the nations. Or so it seemed. Combine Societist administrators moved in to Rumelia and Anatolia, working with the local Societists. They knew that, not only did they threaten Russia and the Mediterranean, but – almost more importantly – the heterodox Societists in Danubia now faced a serious threat if they decided to make any more creative interpretations of the Kapud’s orders. It was only a matter of time before the Greys were crushed, wiped out of history by the Biblioteka Mundial.

Or so they thought. Few at the time would have dreamed that not established ‘liberated authority over Zones 6 and 25’. Instead, Alfarus had poured Celatores, Agendes and money into what would become an entity just as productive of heterodox Societists as neighbouring Danubia was: what would come to be called the Eternal State…











[1] Note that this is a ‘translation’ by the team transcribing the lecture, as the word ‘thug(ee)’ has not entered English in TTL.

[2] For more on Grey Societism in the First Interbellum, see Part #268 in Volume VII.

[3] See Part #273 in Volume VII.

[4] See Part #292 in Volume VIII.

[5] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.

[6] During the period of rule from New Spain (ca. 1830-1848) Ferdinand VII attempted to impose the use of the term ‘Audiencias’ for the central legislature rather than ‘Cortes’, as in the Americas the latter term had become too associated with the UPSA. However, this proved unpopular and the attempt was abandoned even before the overthrow of New Spanish rule in the Second Spanish Revolution.

[7] See Part #289 in Volume VIII.

[8] See Part #49 in Volume I.

[9] A slight simplification to make a point.

[10] See Part #121 in Volume III. Note that this skips over the fact that Sanchez was a self-funded mature student who transitioned almost seamlessly to being a lecturer due to his experience.

[11] As discussed in Part #259 in Volume VII.

[12] See Part #300 in Volume VIII.

[13] See Part #270 in Volume VII.

[14] See Part #283 in Volume VIII.

[15] To be clear, the native tongues are still in use, just typically in smaller text below the Martial Latin on posters and so on (see Mme Mercier’s diary description in Part #300 for an example).

[16] Vienna’s name is here given in Martial Latin followed by the four official languages of Danubia – Austrogerman, Hungarian, Austroslav (basically Croatian for the most part) and Austrovlach (Romanian).

[17] See Part #286 in Volume VIII.

[18] For more on the Russian loss of Pendzhab, see Parts #282 and #292 in Volume VIII.

[19] ‘Native’ here, a rather un-PC term used by older Americans in TTL, is an essentially arbitary definition used to mean anyone from a culture historically not seen as ‘civilised’, itself a definition influenced by how successful they were in resisting colonialism beforehand. So it would include the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa, but also Indians and Japanese – but not Chinese, Coreans or Persians, for instance, which are presented as ‘non-European civilisations’. Attempts to objectively define the difference have caused endless headaches because it is so obviously a product of a particular time in the nineteenth century – i.e. judging India by the passing chaos of the Great Jihad and not by having literate and advanced civilisations with an equally venerable heritage to China’s.

[20] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.

[21] See Part #268 in Volume VII."