Redshift (OTL/The Long March worldmerge)

StarMaker764 · Mar 15, 2025

"Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full."—Leon Trotsky

If a time traveler had told a denizen of 1916 what the world would look like in a hundred years they would probably be thought either a charlatan or a lunatic.

If that same traveler were to recite the same story to an inhabitant of the nightmarish world order of 1962, they would at best be considered hopelessly delusional, and more than likely reported to the local political police.

But should the same temporal nomad recount their tale to a citizen of the world in the year 1975, they would simply be considered over-enthusiastic and idealistic, and repeating their words one final time in the year 1989 would result in mild skepticism and debate over the exact date where such achievements would be within mankind's reach.

But our time traveler would not only be an emissary of another era but of an entirely different world; one undeniably human in all the ways that matter yet utterly alien in others, one that prior generations could only glimpse in idle utopian musings and stories or the wildest dreams of visionaries and prophets.

By 2016 in the world that would become known as the "The Long March" timeline, the 4th Communist International would be entering its 41st year; barely two human generations past its founding yet encompassing all seven continents and achieving the once inconceivable dream of uniting (nearly) the entirety of Homo Sapiens under a single banner rising like a phoenix to vanquish the darkness that had taken hold of the human oversoul. A remarkable achievement for an organization that had begun merely as an economic and military alliance meant to secure a handful of backwater nations against the depravity of the German Reich and Japanese Empire, and yet now rose like a phoenix to vanquish the darkness that had taken hold of the human oversoul.

Having endured decades of hardships, trials, and tribulations, the International has nevertheless persevered against all odds and now presides over the greatest era of peace and prosperity in human history; achieving ever greater abundance, innovation, and culture with every passing day.

Beneath its aegis nearly seven billion humans enjoy a life free of the countless scourges that have plagued their ancestors in the past. Famine is now unknown, existing only in the pages of dusty history books and the stories told by Elders.

War, with all its terror destruction, and hate, has been reduced to old photos, videotapes, new films, and cybergames for youngsters to experience a gelded harmless shades of its full horror and glory (save for one dark corner of the world).

Diseases that had once been the doom of nations and familiess are now little more than nuisances or borderline extinct pathogens that exist only at the pleasure of the beings they once preyed upon. True a few ailments continue to stubbornly resist eradication efforts, (such as the long dreaded cancer) but their demise is now merely a matter of time as every year brings spews forth new discoveries, new herbs, new drugs, new technology, and new treatment methods as the average human quality health span inches ever closer towards a 100 years.

Even Death, the ever-present specter of life, is now thought of not as an inescapable law of reality but simply another malady to be tackled, dissected and inevitably defeated, a uniquely puzzling and frustrating problem to be sure but a mere problem nonetheless.

And it is quite understandable that the citizens of the Comintern and its member nations should want to evade the grim reaper, for the world they inhabit is one of endless paths, unbound wonders and so many beautiful opportunities to explore in a world that makes the visions of old utopians seem limited and pragmatic.

A human living in this world could be living in one of the countless megacities that dot the world like shining gemstones; metropolises that exude the cosmopolitanism, thrill, and ease of city life while avoiding the wretched overcrowding and pollution that defined urban life in the past even as they diverge into a hundred different paths as some become ecological landscapes that blend in seamlessly with the nature that surrounds them, others explore Metabolic architectures and other esoteric concepts that would seem alien to an urban designer twenty years ago as freedom from the constraints of scarcity allows the imagination to run rampant. Some cities may opt for the way of Babylon, seeking to create societies of utter comfort, others instead may opt for something more grounded yet still beautiful. Cities may dedicate themselves to becoming nutrition nodes, while others forgo the constraints of land for the sea or simply dig into the womb of Mother Earth, even mimicking the structures of the fellow creatures that inhabit it.

But if one is not content with city life then there is little issue; one could easily hop on one of the many train lines, solar-powered powered aero-buses, airships, buses, or sea-faring vessels and retreat to one of the many rural communes and townships scattered across the globe; places where one may find the amenities of modern life positioned over the draw and lure of simple country life; though not without some hardships and one must remember that not all such locales are the same and all have their respective contexts and eccentricities whether they be the quaint hydraulic communes of the isles, the multi-religious Soviet townships of Eurasia, the Sahara's solar villages or one of Bharat's Agri forest townlets.

Of course, one may not feel like settling down in one place, either temporarily or permanently, and one would be pleasantly surprised to find those wanderlust nomads too are not neglected in this world as borders are now near-forgotten relics of a more paranoid uncivilized age and passports are increasingly irrelevant as travelers now seamlessly move across cities, regions, and continents with only a single electronic record being all that is needed for one's identity, needs and qualifications to be recognized across the International. Trains and ships are now more than transportation, having come communities onto themselves as whole families and subcultures build their lifestyles around them. If one seeks the thrill of travel without the loneliness of estrangement there are always the nomadic cities that gently travel across landscapes or one is free to sign up with one of the many roving seaborn communes that endless cross oceans whether by motor or (increasingly common) sail.

Indeed even the sea, where once humans could only be infrequent visitors, has become more and more a home for hundreds of thousands or even millions of people as oil platforms turned oceanic hamlets are joined by purpose-built platforms commissioned by all manner of folk who for whatever reason want to live their lives away from dry land, furthering the growth of an intricate ecosystem of floating cities, scientific enclaves, resource transport fleets, ecological restoration/expansion communities and ever more complex maritime societies that boggle the mind; some have even come to include non-human species in the more extreme cases.

For indeed, the light of communist victory is no longer limited to human life alone nor could it afford to, as the ecological consequencesof the previous generation's neglect and the ecocides of some of the last dying spiteful liberal regimes have all but ensured that the human race could not afford to merely preserve what few ecosystems remain but must take an active part in the restoration of the biosphere and in some cases go beyond even that as humanity's understanding of the complex webs and intertwined systems of the biosphere grows and intermingles with mankind's boundless curiosity and creativity.

The Seas are now home to uncountable artificial reefs, ranging from titanic pre-fabricated structures to community and even personal projects that blur the lines between art, science, and aquaculture, all of which serve to supplement and complement the protection of pre-existing natural reef systems.

Floating cities and oil platforms now become the nerve centers of so-called "neo-pelagic" or neustonic ecosystems At first an unintentional creation of human activity but later deliberately encouraged and cultivated with floating forest skeletons and raft reefs, the food webs that have sprung up around the various floating communities or bemusingly around the depleting garbage patches that still blight the ocean. This has caused much headache and debate within ecological circles worldwide.

The debates themselves are a mark of just how far the democratization of science has gone, as they take place not just among seasoned ecologists and academics but among tens of millions of people across uncountable cafes, coffeehouses, comnet chatrooms and citizen science forums, along with almost every manner of scientific activity and research dilemmas one can think of as knowledge and academic authority no longer restricted to the privileged few who can afford to dedicate their lives and income to academia. Humankind has entered an age where its collective information, for better or worse, is something that everyone can contribute to with results as amazing as the Global ecological catalog, as vindicating as the global explosion of art, or as off-putting as the increase in misinformation and even deliberate disinformation.

Indeed, ComNet is slowly becoming a world within itself as the global proliferation of mobile cybernetic and computing devices in the late 2000s and early 2010s has transformed it from an economic planning tool into what many are dubbing the fabled Noosphere as human creativity and culture escape the confines of the material universe and bloom into something indescribable that hosts a near infinite amount of human expression. By the year 2016, almost every citizen of the world has both a material and an "online" identity with the two sometimes being wholly separate or intermingled in such a way it's hard to determine where one begins and the other ends.

But even if one prefers the physical world, then there are still plenty of things to be done in the world of atoms; whether it be exploring the world by foot, wheel, or wing or letting it explore you by visiting one of the world's 37 great International centers and simply taking a walk there and talking with any number of people with their myriad stories and experiences, whether by one's polyglotism (as the majority of the world's population speaks at least 4 languages and nearly all speak two) or using one of the many RTT (Real-time translator devices) that have become the newest must have item for a world where the boundaries of ethnicity and nations are increasingly irrelevant as a new age of the Creole, Pidgin and Hybrid shows no signs of stopping its momentum.

But perhaps one is not into any of that, and one simply wishes to lounge about some cozy and quiet place with a good movie or book at hand and just enjoy a night with one's thoughts then one has a wide variety of housing collectives and international lodges to choose from, or if one's desires are more culinary then they are free to sample from a wide variety of palettes and cuisines even with certain limitations placed on food transport due to ecological concerns as local cooking styles thrive even in light of innovations in vertical farming and stemriculture heralding a new age of food production that is set to be one of the many technological revolutions of the visionary 2010s. Labor and Leisure now blend as automation and compartmentalization of complex tasks all but render even the most mundane and unpleasant tasks into something tolerable and occupying a manageable chunk of one's time while other jobs become indistinguishable from play.

One might be tempted to think of the Long March world as a utopia, a paradise free from all suffering and the culmination of history. Though it is a world that is undoubtedly better than most and has achieved much and will surely achieve more in the future, it is still a world of mortal beings, and such worlds can never truly be perfect barring some universal alteration of the human collective psyche that would no doubt come at too great a cost.

Murder, both cold and hot-blooded, still occurs. Families are torn asunder by abuse or differences in opinion. Not to mention that for every 99 perfectly fine isolated communes there is always the one that happens to be a murderous brainwashing cult or a half-dead enclave clinging to old prejudices. ; and of course, this is without mentioning the abomination that is Freedonia or the uncountable little struggles and problems that arise from merely possessing emotions.

But none of this should distract one from the sheer achievements that the people of this universe wear with pride, to have seen their world sink to the lowest depths of human depravity and yet still fight on despite it defying all reason and logic, and in the process daring to create something novel, bizarre and wonderfulâ€¦.

| Let us take a look at this brave new world, shall we? |

Brazil: The Kingdom of Carnivals

"Trying to put Brazil into a single neat classification is akin to trying to stuff the sun into a box"

Brazil is unlike anything else in the world.

This is not merely some fanciful boast but a simple statement of fact as the self-proclaimed cosmosocialist entity has evolved over its years of class struggle, economic restructuring and cultural waves into something that really cannot be lumped with anything else in the world, rivaling even the Eurasian patchwork in its peculiarity.

Which is an impressive feat when one remembers that Brazil is considerably more centralized than Eurasia (although not nearly as unitary as the likes of the PUC or the Commonwealth) and had started out as a relatively mundane socialist republic.

But in the aftermath of the Metade years and the rise of the situationists to power, everything would change as the most populous nation in the new world embraced the so-called Socialismo Carnavalesco or "Carnival Socialism" (or Carnivalism as it is usually called in short) , which espoused ideals of social liberty even more progressive than the ultra-radical doctrines of the time, combined with an ethos of artistic expression, a lifetime of pedagogical education and an embracement of technology in all aspects of life conjoined to a mass-line powered Central government.

The following years would see Brazilian society so utterly transformed and remodeled that everything from street names, city layouts and even the language would be nigh unrecognizable to someone from even just fifty years ago, the last part cemented by Brazilian Portuguese or Brasili as it is more colloquially known becoming recognized as an official language separate from peninsular Portuguese, made distinct by its continuous adoption of loan words, sounds and in some cases grammatical rules from its diverse communities and migration waves to create a Frankenstein of a language to rival English and Romanian.

Indeed Brazil probably would have stayed more conventional if not for its dual policies of embracing its latent multifarious cultural heritage of European, African, Amerindian and Asiatic peoples and its open encouragement of migration and formation of new established societies from abroad to create an affluent melting pot that puts even of that the US to shame and has shaped every aspect of Brazilian society; a society which can trace its years by the number of cultural fads that have come and gone, whether they be Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Cantonese, Yoruba, Romanian, Hungarian, Javan, MÄori, Tibetan, Buryat, as well as local Amerindianmanias.

The cultural soup is reflected well by Brazilian cities, the once iconic favelas now gone save for a few culturally significant ones preserved for posterity and replaced by far better planned and organized urban areas, known as so called Ambiscapes that skillfully weave human architecture into the environment while wrapping around it and into itself to create cities that truly earn the nickname of concrete jungles, even if these days they are equally formed of dirt, soil, metal, grass, glass, and paint as would be expected from the cities that pioneered the very first ecological modernist schools and the country that was the birthplace of the ecological village movement, both of which intertwined and crystallized in the massive autonomous zone of Amazonia where millions of native peoples and others redefine what it means to live with rather within nature.

Indeed in the megalopolises of Brazil such as Rio or Brasilia, or the newly built Guyanan capitals, it's often difficult to determine where the city begins and the surrounding wild country end,s if not for landmarks such as the Thousand Plant Tower in Rio or the Mountain of a Thousand Chains in Brasilia.

Though it can be said that almost every building in the land of carnivals is a work of art or monument in of itself, as can be expected from a people who value self expression and education as the Brazilians do, for whom life long education is not merely a goal to aspire to but a way of life, whereupon every dwelling doubles as a pedagogical school, with universities and schools now transcend the material and permeate virtually every space in society through cybernetic clouds that allow anyone anywhere to learn about anything they wish with a tap of a button or on a screen, letting them set up a classroom with as much ease as posting a picture on GloShot, leading to a society where one can stop any kid on the street on discuss the basics of quantum mechanics or have a thrilling conversation on the African-American arts with a fellow commuter on one of the many trains that connect the sprawling nation's population hubs.

One could also reasonably expect that any Brazilian would also be well versed in politics and sociology, for the very simple reason that almost any Brazilian could at any time find themselves in a position where such information is crucial thanks to the country's embrace of sortition in every level of government as a means of never allowing any suffocating status quo to set in and to allow for regular infusions of new blood and fresh ideas into the political scene that are in tone with the popular mood.

This means that a man you saw driving a bus or setting up solar panels or plumbing one day could tomorrow have an executive seat in the municipal, regional or even central government, with even the position of president being temporarily up for grabs at random times every year.

This rather bizarre arrangement has proved workable thus far, and has produced more than its fair share of talented men, women and non-binary comrades who have went beyond the call of civic duty as well as many mediocre ones, and not too few who unfortunately held onto reactionary views, as is want to happen with any system based on random chance with the struggles arising from these events ranging from nasty but quick to long and bitter.

For yes, though Brazilian society has achieved much and will achieve more, even the cutting edge of International ultra-radicalism is not without flaws and shortcomings; not least of which is its foreign cultural manias that are often seen as appropriation as much as they are celebration or the still controversial annexation of the Guyanas and the polarizing debates about ecological management, rights and other contemporary matters.

And it goes without mentioning that the corridor of sorrow still casts a shadow over the colorful nation, as the integralist genocide and gendericide has left the region an underpopulated and still ecologically vulnerable mess that stands out like a sore thumb.

These obstacles aside, Brazil still remains standing as a relatively small but agile titan in the world, always ready with something new to dazzle and surprise the world with, and ever welcoming to those who wish to add their voice into its lively multi-sonous chorus.

| No more masters, No more kings, no more tyrants |

Eurasia: The Harlequin's Dominion

"Nothing is ever simple in Eurasia, that is what makes it so special"

Eurasia is either a vision that all of mankind should aspire to, an entangled nightmare of various overlapping institutions and systems that needs to be done away with or simply just a place that has developed its own unique way and shouldn't be thought of as something to be exported or maligned.

But all agree that the world's largest nation (if one does not count the International territories as one entity) is also by far its weirdest, in a manner that could only produced by an long complicated history of being empire, socialist revolution, empire again and then another socialist revolution in less than a century and Eurasia's unique position on the cultural peripheries of the continents where its name comes from (even as many wonder if the name is not outdated with the inclusion of American territories)

If one wishes to know Eurasia, then one would need to travel it from one end to the other, a journey that would take one from the fairytale forests of Northern Europe all the way across sixteen different time zones and more peoples and biomes than one can imagine to the very tip of the Pacific Imperial border.

Most of those who chose to go through the "Eurasian Trek" or "Pokho" as some call it begin at the very north western tip of Suomi; where they are likely to spend time in the Sami territories; which extend all across Northern Europe in one of the many experiments with intra-border sovereignty experiments and consist of a mixture of Arcticvogue communes and townships interlacing with roving communes of reindeer herders whose nomadic lifestyles are updated to a modern style with GPS trackers, mobile phones and clinics among other seemingly anachronistic devices.

Moving further to the east and south the travelers would find themselves at the "Finnish Heartland" or the region where Suomish culture predominates; though said culture would be unrecognizable to a Finn from a century or even fifty years ago as communities of Sami, Estonians, Baltians, Swedes. Russians, Tartars, Jews, Germans, Nepalese, Arabs and more intermingle and intercalate in the fabric of Finnish society after decades of Austro-Marxist legalization has all but ensured that true cultural purity is impossible.

Said society that at present is governed under the auspices of a very centralized regional government that paradoxically operates by a system of E-democracy and governed interlocking city states that form the unofficial southern Finnish megalopolis centered around Helsinki, the Tundra metropolis that many have termed the invisible city due to just how much its architecture and layout overlaps with its surrounding biome that it's almost impossible to tell where the city ends and the wild begins as wooden skyscrapers and buildings act as homes and places of gathering for man, pollinator and beast alike.

As our travellers move further to the east they would cross the porous threshold to the Karelian region and its unique mixture of pseudo-Soviet and indigenous designs scattered across dozens of factory towns, mining communities and small cities, the region having the distinction of being the birthplace of the Rusfinn culture group as a result of the long complicated history of conflict, coexistence and intermixing between the old Finnish and Russian regimes, now these creoles co-exist with Karelians, Russians, Finns and more recent migrants from East Asia and Pacific North America, loosely organized around anarcho-syndicalist lines.

Further East and the trekkers would soon find themselves in the hustle and bustle of the west Russian cultural capital of the sprawling Union: Saint Petersburg, a city that by its proximity to the Baltic and International Eastern Europe has become a mega-city that truly lives up to its nickname of "the little Eurasia", as it is home to over a hindered different peoples and a thousand tongues throughout its varied neighborhoods and living blocs, and the city's long damaged landmarks now stand rejuvenated alongside dozens of new monuments; some grand, some humble and others downright bizarre but all a testimony to the thriving cultural scene of the pseudo-city state whose inhabitants govern it through a typical Eurasian style of overlapping democratic institutions and associations with an attempt at mapping the city's governing structure estimating at least 49 different major organizations involved in the daily runnings of the region, to say nothing but of the more obscure and minor ones.

From there on, our trekkers may opt to take a detour to the south through one of the famous Rotodyne routes through the Cacauses mountains and gaze upon the eclectic religious scene of the world's most ethnically and linguistically diverse regions that are only semi-coherently brought together in the form of many municipalities , ASSRs and autonomous zones under the auspices of the Cacasusion Soviets Sub-Union. Here they can witness sights such as Buddhist monks meditating over Quranic verses, Muslims paying homage to Christian saints while Baha'is offer salvation to all unconditionally, though our travellers would need to be either exceptionally well versed in either Russian, Turkish, Farsi or some of the local languages if they are ever to understand the true nuances of these syncretic theologies and universal translator devices have yet to develop enough to allow that level of conversation for many of the local tongues.

However if our travelers instead opt to go East then they have many options for their travellers, though all but the most committed eschew the option of going through the entire journey on of the many nomadic cities that roam freely across the Eurasian plains, mega-convoys of thousands of prefabricated mobile homes and public buildings that serve as traveling trade hubs and points of connection between the disparate locales of the vast Siberian hinterland and the rest of Eurasia.

But if our travelers took a train instead they may quickly find themselves immersed in a wonderfully complicated world of politics, as Eurasian trains are more often than not communities in of themselves with their own histories, traditions, attached communities and even recognized soviet government structures, with them being one of the reasons that Eurasia is considered by many Qitarat people to be the closest analogue they have to a homeland.

From then on the journey of our nameless allegorical protagonists would take them across a vast landscape of idiosyncrasies, marvels and oddities, whether it be the city of Moscow and its seeming paradoxical mix of uniform buildings, vast gardens and colorful murals, the Ural Belt and its hyper-industrial cities that could only be efficiently run by recent advances in cloud computing, the many quaint communally luxurious indigenous republics of the Siberian interior or its myriad of multi-faith multi-religious Rurban communes that dot the landscape, the relatively mundane steppe Soviet republics, the every polarized politics of the Nestor Corridor and the still steadily recovering communities of the far east with their mix of local peoples and exiles from the death throes of the American and Japanese empires as Yakuts, Siberians, Pacific-Russians, Mongolians, Asian peoples, Sango creoles, Ainu and hybrid peoples attempt to find a place for themselves between the Eurasian, American and Pacific worlds.

And as they dismount at the very edge of Kamtcka our travelers would have also witnessed many great natural sights as well, from the Aral Sea (which thanks to restoration efforts now resembles something of its former glory), the wonders of Lake Baikal or the herds of camels, horses, bison, Moose, reindeer and musk oxen that are transforming the very landscape; and if our travelers are especially lucky (or have planned their journey exceptionally well) they may catch a live glimpse of something not seen since the days of their spear throwing ancestors as Eurasia is also now home to the revived Woolly Mammoth in the form of a small 14 strong herd under constant monitoring by ecological restoration authorities.

From Kamtchka the journey would cross the Bering strait by boat, encountering the quaint Aluet communities of the islands along with the massive sea platforms and derelict floating bridges that the US attempted to construct to link itself to its colonial Asian additions. The platforms are still inhabited, having become homes and hubs for many people who wish for relative isolation from the world even as they act as points of contact between Eurasia and the Commune-Fleets that roam the seven seas and oceans.

As the travellers set foot on the shores of the North American continent they enter the latest regional addition to the Eurasian patchwork but one that is by no means any less impressively bizarre than that its old world counterparts as the Alaskan or Alyaskan territories are a patchwork in of themselves, governed by a mixture of councils, associations communal collectives and pseudo-city states under the auspices of the Regional Cooperative Council, an organization that consists of elected representatives from all the major regional players.

Alaska itself has become something of a point of pride for Eurasia due to the successes of its indigenous sovereignty restoration movement, with the region becoming a symbol of the aboriginal modernity movement with their unconventional but effective approaches to environmental protection and land management while keeping the peace amid the various peoples that call Alaska home (from the indigenous peoples such Aleut and Tlingit among others to the Russians, Russian and Asiatic Creoles, the Japanese and the Anglo-Americans that remain) with the land being a puzzle of seeming paradoxes as indigenous peoples practice the rites and customs that their ancestors did for generations while Arctic Arcologies and Indigmodern ecovillages dot the land in an anachronism stew that baffles outsiders but the citizens of the land treat with complete nonchalance.

Moving across the borders of the greater Alaska region, our travellers would finally find themselves at the edge of the Eurasian world, with either the slowly rejuvenating lands of the American Commonwealth to their East or the borderlands with the Pacific Imperials to their south and the latter remains under joint Eurasian and Comintern administration as one of the last militarized borders on the planet, even if it is a less hard divide than what would be natural even a decade ago.

Of course even this account of a trip across Eurasia glosses over many things, our imaginary adventurers having never gotten to know the triumphs and struggles of the Eurasian Jews, the grazing conflicts between Mongolian, Turkic and Siberian indigenous herders, the language debate or any of the other societal issues that Eurasian society is going through, and their trip in other circumstances may have been made slower by being unlucky enough to deal with the Eurasian bureaucracy on one of its bad disorganized or spiteful days or even have the misfortune of being caught in a miniature inter-village warfare that is all too inevitable to happen in a system as decentralized as this one.

Indeed many would point out that for all the wonder, beauty and flowerings it inspired the so-called Eurasian System is also riddled with many flaws and shortcomings that may yet spill its end one way or another, as various ideologues within and without have proclaimed without fail since 1984. But though the patchwork has gone through its fair share of trials, reforms and changes it remains in place and for now the Eurasians are largely content with it, some even proud of what they built warts and all, for while Eurasia might not be as stable or friction free as other socialist societies, it is something that through the very constant maintenance needed to keep it alive has brought many disparate peoples together and united them in keeping their corner of the world spinning, and perhaps, they say, this is why Eurasia continues to defy all odds.

| The Patchwork twists and turns, ever complex and unpredictable and birthing new varieties each day |

The American Commonwealth: The Recovering Promise

"The time has come where we must wake up from the American dream, so that we may finally build something better in reality"

The North American Commonwealth is a young nation.

Not just young in the fact that it has existed for less than a generation but also young in the age of its inhabitants; with more than half of its population being somewhere between infants and teens, just barely on the precipice of adulthood.

The reasons for this are as varied as they are awful; from the breeding manias that preceded the fall of America and the post-Canadian states, CDN child relocation programs, the cocktail of epidemics ranging from ancient and haunting (smallpox, measles, malaria and tuberculosis) to recent and terrifying (ICS, the Cambodian flu, the hyper-nipah and monkey pox) that cut down entire populations in weeks (their job made easier by the utter dismantlement of the US healthcare system) and the simple flight of so many into Freedonia or the Pacific State in the wake of the communist revolution.

It is this very reality that has come to define the nature of the socialist state that now builds itself on the largest monument to capital's folly and has created challenges and (morbidly) opportunities in equal measure, as the New York centered commonwealth deals with the baggage of a long sordid history even as it finds itself in a situation that isn't too different from the founding fathers it so detests: having to make a new nation out of the disparate, distrusting and traumatized remains of an empire.

If nothing else, at least the NAC is quite unlike the FF when it comes to treatment of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, going out of their way to include members of the First Nations into the new order's governing structure, something that was equal parts genuine decolonial sentiment and pragmatism; since Amerindians once again are the majority in large parts of the continent, in part due to the new adoption system employed by some nations but largely due to the simple fact most other people in the region simply perished in the Great Dying or migrated elsewhere.

The same would be applied to the long suffering African-American population, and naturally their Asian and Latino counterparts as well, though the prominence of minorities in government was a given seeing as how disproportionately present they were in the left-wing movements and parties that preceded the fall of the States; it has nonetheless ensured that the second reconstruction period would be far more successful and lasting than its half hearted predecessors as land back, slavery reparations, affirmative action programs, cultural restoration campaigns (which also applied to long suppressed "white cultures" such as Poles, Finns, Russians, Italians and even Germans), feminist socialization drives, anti-child marriage sweeps and many other decolonial policies would take up almost half of the NAC's governing capacity in its formative years.

The second half of course would be dedicated to the physical aspects of reconstruction, a prospect that while relatively more straightforward than their social counterparts were no less easy as the NAC had to deal with the opposing challenges of having to retool the still significant but outdated and decayed American industry (and its almost non-existent post-Canadian counterparts) and build infrastructure from scratch in some cases while also maintaining its ecological restoration obligations.

The commonwealth would handle these challenges ironically enough with gusto, zeal and determination that so typically archetypal of old America, though their successors at the very least lacked the xenophobia and arrogance that often accompanied such attitudes, and certainly were far more capable of backing up their rhetoric with action; as evidenced by the great ecological mobilization campaigns of the 2000s (with such ambitious goals such as the eradication of the earth worm and the restoration of the Mississippi river), the Great Red Society, the setting of America's first truly intercontinental railway system, the Cyberification Act, the Turtle Islander Campaign and a hundred more projects with grandiose names and even more grandiose goals.

Of course all these grand schemes and ambitions may not have been possible had it not been for what is arguably the most decisive break between the commonwealth and the old United States, the former's adoption of a centralized unitary system, one that puts it on the center line of the centralism vs decentralization debate that rages across the world, standing with the the likes of China and Latin America.

This choice was consciously made while laying the foundations of the new socialist state by those who had seen first hand just how much the only two tier system had served to only entrench reactionary interests and prop up bastions from which they can overrule popular sentiment and crush progressive opposition by wielding state rights as a hammer.

So where does all this leave the somewhat idiosyncratically named commonwealth in the here and now?

Well it is safe to say that the entity that stretches from the Arctic circle to the Great Plains would be utterly unrecognizable to any of its predecessors from just 30 years ago, while still retaining aspects that would be all too familiar.

Perhaps most notable would be that the NAC is a melting pot of nations like the old States, only unlike them it has truly embraced that idea, unshackled by petty xenophobias, vicious imperialism and the logic of labor supply, allowing the commonwealth to surpass its predecessors a thousand fold as a nation of nations that is quickly catching up with old socialist bastions of internationalism.

The half dead communities of the northern west hemisphere are now revitalized by the arrival of millions of migrants, who come for reasons that range from the ideological to the self-interested but all inevitably become participants in what is the second largest reconstruction endeavor in living memory.

From then on an ever intricate lattice of communities both established and new began to take shape, as Luddye began to settle in on the eastern coast, Romanians moved into the interior, Levantines found the former Canadian heartlands to their liking and many other stories that cannot be recounted in a single chronicle.

And these are just the tales of the immigrants, for one would be remiss to not mention the reinvention and rethinking of the long standing Anglo-French-Latin communities, from which now emerge the ecologically minded and hybrid francophone Arcadians, the dynamic Solivrians and the restless Elytherrans, all of whom are borne from a mix of conscious nation making and simple cultural rifts brought upon by the upheavals of the previous half century as even the Christian core of the nation finds itself infused with Native American traditions, Islamic Revolutionary theology and neo-Hindu thought as old and new world thoughts clash and mix.

Nowadays children living in the lands that were Columbia and Canada grow up learning and speaking not just English, Spanish, French, Italian and German but less spoken European tongues like Finnish, Yiddish and Ukrainian, the original tongues of turtle island such as Ojibwe and Mohawk, tongues from across Asia such as Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Farsi, Nipponese and Bengali or even pidgins and constructed languages like Zapadon Luddye or Esperanto.

They will grow up in a land where new shining cities built for humans and nature rise ever steadily from the ground, skyscrapers now replaced with vertical farms and parking lots made into pollinator parks while trains criss cross the lands and coastal cities begin to inch forward into the sea and the embrace of the growing Pan-Atlantic thessalic communities, where the howls of wolves once again fill the night and the plains are shaken by herds of buffalo.

That is not to say that their lives will be free from struggles, for the commonwealth still has ways to go in its reconstruction and old hatreds have yet to vanish completely (queerphobia and anti-Asian racism in particular proving difficult to dislodge even if efforts are starting to bear fruit), even with the neo-klan insurgencies decisively broken in 2009, and politics remain as polarized as ever as ultravisionaries and ecological modernists vie for votes in the next election while the effects of ecocide continue to be felt in ever present natural disasters.

The North American Commonwealth is a young nation indeed, still clumsily trying to find its way and prove itself to the adults in the room, but with youth comes the capacity for change and opportunity for development to the better, and the people of North America are yet writing their own stories into the book of humanity.

| Give me your tired, your poor |

Europa: The Garden of many Lights

"An ideal European city should have French painters, Dutch cyclists, Irish farmers, Romanian teachers, Russian musicians, German mechanics, Ukrainian engineers, Zapadoslav militiamen, Romani artisans, Italian ecologists and a Jewish government"

The dream of a United Europe has beckoned its inhabitants ever before a concept of Europe ever existed.

First the dream was one of unity under the cross with the converted ruins of the western Roman Empire and the remaining pagan strongholds/peripheries being carved into one whole under the spiritual dominion of the papacy whether by the book or by the sword. Though eventually almost the entirety of Europe would follow the word of Christ one way or the other, the dream of a United Christendom was laid to ruin by the natural forces of geographic and cultural separation colliding with political realities to result in one schism after the other leading to cracks in the supposedly mortally divine edifice.

As such the dreams of a Europe united by the cross soon came to be eclipsed by one where the continent was bound by blood, the blood of the crowned heads by whom's whims untold lives were decided, but those dreams proved no more feasible or lasting than the theocratic visions before them as the inbred self-aggrandizing royals predictably all fought one another in the race for who can be the one to rule them all.

As the twin dawns of capitalism and liberalism came, the monarchists' vision was soon usurped by merchants, ideologues, visionaries, pragmatists and humanitarians who believed in a Europe united through ideology, trade, science, law or carefully crafted alliances and real-politicking; only for these dreams to turn into nightmares of apocalyptic scales as their reckonings with reality ushered in the horrors of high imperialism and the First World War that would leave chunks of the world a vision of hell and millions of psyches bent, broken or undone.

And from these nightmares would emerge the most nightmarish vision of a United Europe, one where instead of a regular cross it would be a crooked one casting its baleful shadow across the second smallest continent and the rest of the globe. In a fit of bitter irony, the mid twentieth century would see Europe approach the point where it was closest to unification under the auspices of a regime that abhorred the very notion of transnational politics as it sought to burn down and remake the patchwork of peoples and communities built over the centuries into a single homogenous slob of fascist perversion and volkish madness; only to be laid to ruin by its own contradictions and cruelty never to rise again to a form so terrible and world shaking.

But amid all the wreckage there would be another vision of an undivided Elysian continent, the one that simmered within hundreds of multi-ethnic communities and the hopes, writings and actions of millions of common decent people who dared to dream that there was something better to be had than the petty murderous fairytales of nationalism or the authoritarian self righteousness of feudal lords or even the cold heartless logic of the industrial capitalist machine. Their dream would be one of a Europe that has transcended the ghosts of its violent past through fraternity and reconciliation between nations, through shared labor in the building of a new kinder world and the betterment of all.

Where the Caesars, Popes, Kings, Robbers and Fuhrers have all failed it would be the Proletariat of Europe that would finally achieve the dream that drove many to the height of excellence and madness in equal measure as the Union of European Council Republics, or "Pan-Europa" as it was commonly known, an idea that gestated in the wave of the dancing 90s and would grow and mature as the logics of socialist ideology and the laws of economics brought the red nations of Europe ever closer; with the Last Jihad seeing the final obstacles to a true union finally removed as the last of the fascist beastly states and American neo-colonial outposts were swept aside by a red flood.

Today Pan-Europa is a titan that despite its relatively small size can stand head and shoulders with the likes of the American Suprastates and not feel too humbled by the likes of Bharat or China, its borders stretching from the coasts of the Black Sea to the very semi-Arctic northern reaches of Alba and from the volcanic Icelandic landmass to the Carpathian Mountains constrained only by the International European territories in Andalus and the so called teal belt in the East.

Within its rather porous and nigh meaningless borders lies a flowering awe-inspiring garden of culture and technology that make all the previous failed dreams of tyrants and hypocrites look farcical and sickly as the nations of Europe, both grand and small, intermingle and cohabit in uncountable communities ranging from the grand megalopolises of Paris, London, Sarajevo (the national capital) or Dublin, the recovering metropolises of Warsaw, Stockholm, Oslo and Zurich or in one of the thousands of communes scattered all over from the hydraulic townships of Albion to the eternally carnivalistic hamlets of southern Italia, each either steadily recovering or finding their way towards comfortable abundance and almost all a delightful mangerie of peoples from all corners of Europe and beyond.

Indeed the imperial cosmopolitanism of the Habsburgs and Ottomans is a mere echo when compared to the heights achieved in pan-Europa as Javans, Brazilians and Watuni cycle through the streets of Amsterdam as Ukrainians, Serbs, Amoronians, Kurds, Jews and Lithuanians frolic in the rural German hinterlands while across the Rhine in France one sees Occitans, Bretons and Parisians work side by side with Bosnians, West Africans, Vietnamese, Arabs, Haitians and Mexicans; and to the south in the quasi-Eurasian patchwork that was Italy one finds ethnic and ideological diversity in equal measure as regional parties with ideas found nowhere else (such as the neo-socialists, universalians or dafelnists) compete with bog standard Marxists, Bordigists, anarchists and syndicalists. All the while all the continental corners and tapestries are tied to each other through the expansive networks of Luddye, Jewish, Roma and other international communities that serve as bridges and connections as well as nations in of themselves some rooted in one place while others stride across the breadth of the continent wherever they please whether on land, sea or air when they do not exploit one of the myriad telepresence technologies blossoming in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

On the topic of politics, Europa is something of a contradiction in Comintern politics being the place that hosts some of the last holdouts of some of the more conservative strains of societal organization while also giving birth to some of its most radical. It is a state that looks to the future to recover its past and looks to the past to glimpse its future.

All of which is to say that while Europa is perhaps considered among the more boring states of the world along with the UNCCS that is only by comparison to the likes of Eurasia, Brazil and Bharat and perhaps the result of Europe being one of the regions of the world that has yet to fully recover from decades of fascist, liberal and imperialist inflicted-devastation, ensuring that it hasn't yet escaped the grip of old world problems.

Nevertheless the land of Elysium are currently in a state of flux as the recent elections have seen an unexpected victory for a last minute ecological bloc and situationist alliance that seems set to change the current status quo of revolutionary militant dominance that has reigned since the union's very foundation (though to be fair that itself was barely more than a decade ago).

And the ecological-situationist bloc have their work cut out of them as they take charge of a Europa whose differences are becoming more obvious by the day and where much baggage of the past remains, the repopulation of Central Europe in the aftermath of the Sterben, whether it be the sharp contrast between the European East and South (cosmopolitan, prosperous, confident and ultra-radical) and the more recently incorporated Northern Europe (provisional, recovering, insecure and relatively cautious), the dual scandal of the Stockholm Cults and the Ulster Brown Group and of course the question of the (intra) national capital.

The current capital of Europa is the now quite expansive, , internationally spirited and styled city of Sarajevo though even now there are attempts and plots at having the capital changed to be in a more "Central" location, something which many detractors see as little more than barely disguised chauvinism against the long imagined to be backward Balkans and an attempt to recreate the old power dynamics between the west and east. Supporters of the move themselves are divided on where the new capital should be with as many candidates as there are cities in Europe though its generally agreed that ones with the greatest support being Paris with its Prolekulturian Sichtgeist and municipal opulence, Neo-Rome with its retro-futuristic splendor and history, Budapest and its gargantuan cultural industry, Bucharest with its superpower of being able to absorb and represent so many visions of Europe in one place, the mundane but well-designed Bratislava or the Cosmopean Esperantist city of Eyrostoht/Orourbo built in the ruins of former Germania.

At least the pan-European supreme council isn't the only debating these issues as the hundreds of millions of European denizens debate these issues in uncountable party clubs, housing associations, coffeehouses, sporting unions, gardening communities, unions and even Comnet forums and other electronic social networking avenues, with everything from the wether to turn Europe into a fully electronic republic, decentralizing the union and manufacturing standards being brought to bear every hour and day.

But it is not only economic, social and political concerns that they debate as Europe's ecological landscape remains something of a mix between successes and setbacks as the socialists attempt to repair damage sustained since even before the full rise of capitalism and fascism. Europe's forests, meadows, seas and streams see many species make their comebacks as beavers, Eurasian bears, wolves, salmons, water buffalos, aurochs, lynxes, sturgeons and even the long gone lions are less of a rare sight each year; but with them however come other invasive species (almost half of which were deliberately introduced by the Aryans or Tkumans) that persist even as their ranges are cut down ever so slightly by popular elimination campaigns each year; from the small but damaging such as the Asian hornet to the massive and biosphere building like the cleverly elusive crocodiles, leopards and elephants. And that is before one gets into the topic of de-extinction; with the recreation of the great auk using a mixture of genetic engineering and penguin breeding being either hailed as pure genius or denounced as folly of Icaursian proportions.

Indeed Europa's politics may be more mundane than most but they are hardly boring or stagnant as the continent that once brought forth darkness now desperately seeks to become another beacon of light to humanity; even as it still has ways to go before making it up completely to its former colonial victims and putting the ghosts of its past to rest, but if nothing else the citizens of Europe could at least never be accused of not trying their best to make the beautiful Europe glimpsed in many paintings a reality.

| Though there is much to be done, Europe now stands as one more homeland of humanity |

Bharat: The Colorful modernity

"The future must not merely be built, but also nurtured and grown".

Bharat has come a long way.

The most populous nation of the world has long had a reputation for economism and general mundanity when compared to some of the more eccentric and iconic countries of the socialist world, and that is when it wasn't seen as a nation that was still struggling with issues from the medieval era while the rest of the world was moving on.

But as the second decade of the 2000s rolls in it is now the subcontinental nation that is leaving others in the dust as the seeds planted by decades of esthetic, educational, ecological and economic campaigns finally blossom and transform Bharat into the powerhouse it always could have been, something that becomes most apparent when one turns on their Televisions and Glommunal media networks to see the absolute spread of Bharati cultural products, from Bollywood dramas, Bengali animations, fashion fads and Desi-Pop becoming markers of international culture to the point of many burgeoning international tongues now integrating hundreds of Bharati languages' words into their lexicons, helped by a still growing diaspora.

Likewise mainstream Bharati culture itself is a panorama of various subcultures and regional cultures that now flourish and intermingle as old hatreds die and the gravitational forces of economy and technology bind tribes, indigenous peoples, agrarian communities and urbanites all together helped by the world's single largest network of railways; all free to worship a thousand and one deities of any of the hundred creeds that live in the land of the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains and more, with all participating in the fermentation of something new entirely.

And said something would have quite the soil to nourish it within Bharat's urban areas, sometimes literally as entire cities have sprung up that are more hummus and moss than they are cement and steel, as the challenges of constructing livable city spaces for tens or even hundreds of millions of people in the region's punishing climate has allowed urban planners to experiment with all manner of radical ideas and concepts, with Bharat's growing number of conurbations featuring dwellings built from mud, wood, fungus or bamboo, roads made from organic concretes, glowing living bio-fibers or even forgoing roads entirely in favor of hydro-cities (indeed it is often joked that Bharati engineers will build with anything except "normal" building materials), all combining traditional aesthetics with modern designs.

All this of course would not be possible had it not been for the Great Education drives of the previous decades and their accompanying aggressive hybrid (combining government action and grassroots mass action) campaigns against leftover discriminations and chauvinism, leading to the last remnants of casteism and sexism to be relegated to footnotes in history with Bharati human capital being unleashed in every manner of science and philosophy possible, the most notable of their fruits being Bharat's second and third green revolutions, the former seeing unprecedented application of agronomist, permacultural, regenerate farming and farm gardening to somehow achieve the impossible goals of expanding food production while expanding wildlife zones, while the third revolution would usher in a rethinking and restructuring of what food production and human relations to their food sources should look like.

As such it is no surprise that the sapience rights movement would get its start in Bharat and that the subcontinent would remain one of its biggest strongholds to this day, with protests and marches being common even as Delhi implements more humane measures for meat production and has even joined the ranks of former Oceania in becoming a nation with non-human citizens after its enshrining of the elephant sapience and rights act granting legal personhood and rights to the tens of thousands of pachyderms that inhabit the land's many ecosystems, something many hinterland communes and scientists have latched onto to begin attempts at forging more cooperative ties with the giants, with some more successful than others.

Of course it's not only the iconic elephants that are prospering in the new India, as aggressive rewilding and conservation efforts have done wonders to boost the population of iconic megafauna like the Bengal tiger, Indian rhino and water buffalo and less well known but vital species like the Ganges Shark and Dolphin, the Indian gaur, and even reintroducing species that have been long gone from the Bharati biosphere such as aurochs, lions, Javan rhinos and cheetahs, with their being talks of introducing even the long locally extinct hippos to the region.

All the while new bold methods of agriculture are feeding humans and wildlife alike in addition to preserving endangered flora species as evidenced by the examples of the famous food forests of Assam, with it and others like it not so coincidentally powering Bharat's medicinal industry.

But the most populous holdout against internationalization is not a society free of problems either.

For Delhi is now faced with the age old problem of urban rivalry, as other Indian megalopolises continue to grow in influence and begin to demand increased autonomy from the notoriously centralized state, to say nothing of the uneasy relationship with the growing number of coastal/oceanic communities and the connections they bring to the global thessalic ecosystem that Bharat is yet not fully on board with.

And of course even if mainstream societies have largely been purged of old world prejudices, they cannot be fully eliminated in a population of over one and a half billion people, especially in the hinterlands where news of reactionary cults disguised as communes continue to pop up regularly every few months. And then there are the ongoing struggles of the Tamil and other groups who don't believe they have received adequate restitution for past injustices, the list now adding the Japanese-Bengali Sango Creoles who were long purposely ignored in order to cover up the Hindustani history of Japanese collaboration and compradorism.

Nevertheless, the future of the Bharati people remains bright and vibrant, even as the sun of their global cultural influence is being eclipsed by recovering China with its own diaspora and the growing global Polynesian-mania, as a neglected cradle of mankind can finally live in a long well-deserved age of peace and prosperity.

| Nothing is impossible, all is to be explored |

China: The Smiling Titan

"China is a giant that has been awoken and agitated for too long, let her sleep so that she may imagine beautiful dreams once more"

The People's Union of China has always suffered from an annoying hand dealt by fate, seemingly doomed to always stand close to achieving their aims but never to perfection.

The socialist giant had been denied full unification for so long, and all its dreams and aspirations had to be tempered by the reality of a hateful, cruel enemy living not on its doorstep but in the house itself, imprinting a militaristic streak into Chinese communism that even now it struggles to shed.

But shedding it is exactly what the Union had been working towards for the past decade in the aftermath of Asia's full liberation and the final reunification of China, leading to the subsequent relaxation or abolishment of the Union's protracted war measures.

The process was and remains not without friction and challenges as many had become comfortable within the old system or simply still believed in the necessity of some its doctrines in a world that was still taking shape and where the PUC still had many challenges to overcome, from the need to get a handle on environmental spillover from the Sphere's maniacal ecocides (and the PUC's own occasionally reckless policies), the coming challenges of reintegrating the lost territories that are now utterly different beasts from the rest of the country, and even simply the need for the PUC to remain relevant in a world where it was increasingly overshadowed in many aspects.

The year of ten thousand struggles would prove to be the long delayed but inevitable dancing 90s-like crisis that the Union had seemingly deftly avoided, uniting almost every segment of Chinese revolutionary society; from sexual minorities demanding more than simple equality, national minorities who wanted more than mere affirmative action and representation, students who chafed under the rigidity, pressure, and purely material science focus of Chinese education, artist groups who lamented the state's apathy towards them and many many more in a grass-roots mass mobilization campaign that would have made the 90s movements proud.

The CPC, itself divided and unwilling to wage war against its own people, would give in, kickstarting a period of national dialogue and popular restructuring that is ongoing to this day as the PUC's military industrial complex downsizes and the country's entire paradigm is shifting to something new.

Where does this leave the second most populous nation in the international (not counting the international territories)?

There is no straight answer to this question as the new Chinese society has yet to coalesce into something easily definable and coherent, and some believe it might never actually reach that stage as it seems the East Asian dragon is always going through some new fad or development, always innovating and always striving for something new, the centeralism of the party now replaced by a centeralism of the people as communes and Soviets both agrarian and urban penetrate into every aspect of daily life and into digital space bringing political life in China to a level unforeseen in its long history.

What one can tell you is that ambitions and aspirations of the Union have remained intact throughout its transformations, only now instead of campaigns to liberate Asia they are now channeled into avenues such as the International "War Against Extinction" and the Global Artistic Society campaign instead.

Indeed the PUC's burgeoning ethos of ecological modernism have attracted their fair share of fanatical supporters and detractors as Beijing has become the place where the limits of environmental restoration and ecological development are pushed to their limit, whether it be through its famous Blue Revolution techniques in aquaculture and thessalic habitation that have made humanity's stewardship of the sea possible, its rapid adoption of sponge city and adaptable dams among other hydraulic wonders, its ambitious carbon sink projects, being the first non-international territory to adopt the biomass index as a measurement of its economic success, or its ongoing ecological communal overhaul campaign.

All this was initially adopted out of equal parts idealism and necessity as the PUC's ecosystems were entangled with those of the neighboring EAF and thus had to actively work to mitigate the fallout of the latter's destructive policies, but even with the looming threat of a Sphere-wide ecocide removed the drive towards ecological civilization remains as one point of continuity between the old and new red Chinas.

In terms of cultural makeup however, the new China is already moving away more and more from its predecessor's rather neglectful relationship with its regional and minority cultures, which in some periods would even extend towards an apathy or even distaste towards traditional Han culture as well (in-part due to the early union's struggle with many reactionary groups appropriating ancient traditions).

Now a hundred flowers bloom as mainstream society delights in exploring long standing regional cultures as equally as they do foreign exotic ones, as Tibetans, Hui, Uyghur, Mongolians, Koreans, Zhuang, Yue, and others add their colors to an even more elaborate artistic-cultural canvas, joined in by migrant communities from across southeast Asia, Pacific Asia, Eurasia, Bharat and even from as far as Europe, Africa and America, with many long-standing expat Chinese communities now free to reconnect with the mother country through the miracles of mass communication technology.

Even cultures that were originally viewed with distrust such as the Zhujin and other hybridized Japanese cultures are beginning to find acceptance and tolerance within neo-China, even if mainstream Nipponese influences remain distrusted, as evidenced by the animation Cold War that even now is waged between the PUC and DUCN, (with Bharat and the USASR occasionally chiming in).

And Chinese animation studios in this era are lucky, for they now have an audience eager for new ideas and unconventional stories that combine the old and new, as part of the broader attitude shift among the younger generation who now seek something beyond the militarism of their elders (but not less politically engaged) and wish for lifestyles more conducive to comfort, self actualization and peace of mind, even as this trend is sometimes derided as a retreat from material reality and politics doomed to allow the re-entrenchment of elitism.

Indeed despite all the accomplishments of the counterculture revolutions many issues remain in the Middle Kingdom; between the long and odorous process of rebuilding the much despoiled eastern coast and the refuse of decades of Tokoyo manufactured ethnic hatreds that plague it, the continuing struggle against remnants of the old orders in areas that were neglected in prior decades, and the CPC's own continuing fracturing as factions morph into parties just in time for what is set to be one of the nation's most polarizing elections in 2018.

At the end of the day however, the days where the land of Zhongguo and its people were under the thumb of despots and gilded bandits, or threatened by occupiers are now but a distant memory, and a new red golden age that makes those of the past look paltry beckons to the red dragon land, built upon the bodies, minds, and souls of a people free at last.

| One ship guided by a billion helmsmen |

Central America: The Realm of Gifts

"Communism doesn't merely exist in increased productivity, shared abundance or the party; it also exists in the way we live, how we treat ourselves and others and how we treat the world we live in"

What is it that unites a government entity that stretches from the banks of the Rio Grande to the very edge of the Panamanian jungles and from the shores of Haiti to the reefs of Belize? Whose inhabitants hail from every continent and speak innumerable tongues and range from Afro-indigenous farmers, Maroon traders, Latasian workers and Nortian ranchers?

The answers that most people in the Long March would give you is deceptively simple; some would say that it is belief in a better tomorrow that unites them, others would say it is the struggle for liberation from the domination of the Americans and later the Japanese and more than a few would cynically suggest its fear of being subsumed by their bigger neighbors that keeps everyone getting along.

But ask the inhabitants whether they be native, creole, maroon, or a migrant of the land that hosts the Abayalan Union of Council Republics, they would give a thought-provoking answer: presents.

For you see the AUCR is equal parts a conventional Marxist state and a layered network of gift exchange systems, library economies, decentralized cybernetic nodes, mutual aid societies, and indigenous modes of commerce; a system that some would call Eurasian but diverges from its old world counterpart by the fact that there is one coherent and simple bureaucratic system to handle most of the day to day running of macro-affairs.

As a result the people who live under the AUCR's aegis exist under two systems: one relatively centralized and one horizontal, one that the people use for politics and the other that is used for economic activity, and while both seem to exist in parallel sometimes they end up unexpectedly intersecting in others; an arrangement that emerged from the particulars of Central America's gradual strenuous piecemeal road to liberation that has come to be known by nicknames such as Mesoamerican hybridism, horizontal socialism, or as its most common name Kaapelism.

Whatever it is called though, and regardless of how many deride it as unsustainable and inevitably headed towards abandonment or reform, this model has served the much abused Central American population well enough so far and has only continued to improve as recovery efforts began bearing fruit and the abundance of the rest of the socialist world began flowing in, ushering in an era of peace and prosperity the region has never seen before.

A prosperity that materializes in an ethic that is known internationally as communal luxury but has been applied most widely in this region under the name of Cachitoism, stemming from the Mayan word for small things that are part of a greater whole, it permeates to varying degrees in every aspect of Central American life, being is most apparent in the designs of Abayalan urban areas which straddle the boundaries of city, country, and wild somehow in a manner that gives them a certain degree of quiet opulence in spite of their usually humble indigenous inspired designs.

Indeed a walk through an Abayalan city is often described as combining a market trip, a stroll through a park, and a community visit all at once as one makes their way in the gentle shadows of modest abodes and housing units, each made a work of art through the creativity of its inhabitants, all while basking in the refreshing phytogenic aroma coming from the gardens and orchards that line every street, roof, and window designed to feed both the human and non-human inhabitants of these lands (indeed one can and is expected to pick some of the dangling fruits whenever they are peckish), all while their ears pick up words from the many tongues spoken here from Spanish, French, and English to Mayan, Nahuatl, and Kriol with even the likes of Arabic, Korean, and Igbo being a mundane part of the local vocal scene. If they truly wish to get a taste of the Abayalan life then they can always participate in the webs of exchange, gifts and barter in the famous Tianguis, where one can find almost any trinket or unique item along with all manner of home produce and artisanal items, and also find someone willing to exchange with anything they have at hand (it may seem odd that a socialist society would tolerate and even celebrate what are essentially markets but one must remember that these spaces have long been decoupled from anything resembling accrualable currency and the existence of guaranteed necessities and luxuries all but ensures that old exploitations remain shackled).

If one wishes to explore the entire breadth of CentroamÃ©rica then they can take a ride on one of the many buses trains, ships and rotordynes that connect the region, or (if they feel more bold) head to one of the hundreds of LOTs (Libraries of Things) and get a reliable bike or simple boat rented to them so that they may explore the sights outside the usual locales, though in truth they are never far away from an international hostel or Qitarat station.

Of course, for some witnessing the sights of the amphibious Neo-Aztec city of Neo-Atlixco, the burgeoning Chinconian-Nortian towns and their ecological restoration efforts, the hand crafted artisan cities of the western coast is adventure enough.

Nonetheless while the nation may seem like a paradise that would dwarf the dreams of the empires that made their homes there, like all societies it is not without issues, as largely agrarian societies now face the challenges of a growing push for urbanization clashing with more unconventional visions for the nation which some decry as putting undue strain on the still recovering biosphere.

And of course there are the questions of ethnicity, indgenity and identity as old rivalries (while muted) remain prevalent even in the birthplace of the re-indigenization movement and the struggle of maintaining cultural authenticity and purity in an age of growing creolization and internationalism remains a subject with no easy answers, and these all co-exist with the normal leftist questions of Unitarian statism or horizontalism.

And of course there was the matter of the nation's borders with the Pacific State and the shadow the post-American state casts over its smaller neighbor, though it's a shadow that grows less menacing each day as the Pacifician grows ever closer to socialism while refusing to admit it.

End of the day however, the narrow strip of land that at once separates and unites the Atlantic and Pacific spheres is a region that can now take it easy for the first time in centuries with no despots or emperors or conquerors or capitalists to disturb them, as the many peoples who live there are at least at liberty to determine their destiny and future with the shackles of colonialism and finance broken foreverâ€¦

| Granting the greatest gift of all: Freedom

The Latin Union: The land of the Old-New

"Let all the sins of our ancestors be remembered, so that our children know how far we have gone and how further they must go"

The Pan-American Union is a nation that on the surface seems relatively mundane when compared to the carnivalesque dynamo that is Brazil or the humble luxury of the Abayalans but the nation that is the inheritor of the legacy of Roman-inspired colonial empires, indigenous kingdoms and native non-state communities alike is far more complex and has a much more intriguing history than what appears on the surface.

For starters, the drive behind the unification movement that formed it came initially from its ruling parties with popular support only coming later, being based more on pragmatism and necessity rather than political idealism as the Latin nations sought both international relevance and security from being subsumed by the Brazilian Titan.

Additionally it, alongside the USASR, is distinct from other post-nationalist states in its unification happening piecemeal over decades rather in a sudden rupture as with the Pan-African, Pan-Arab, Pan-Bharati and Pan-European projects, which is evidenced by the fact that of all the extant governing entities in this world, it has gone through the most renamings and flag changes as it expanded it to include new members and often new concessions and compromises that yielded a patchwork not unlike that of Eurasia or Elouera.

However it soon became clear that said patchwork, rather than being a veichle for radical experiments in governance and social expression, had become akin to a fishing net trapping people in old world feuds, hatreds and power structures as the nature of the South American Red Wave allowed for many former aristocrats and elites to retain a measure of their former influence, to say nothing of ossifying parties that in old core members of the then federation

All of this would promote the long overdue Latin American social crisis in the form of the Red Fiesta or Latin Summer, as an eclectic alliance of unions, feminist movements, indigenous activists, radical splinter parties, artist movements, Dynosian carnivals and (most surprisingly) the Selimist Bureaucracy would confront and succeed in getting the rotting new old order to step down and ushering in the grand restructuring of the Pan-American federation into the Pan-American Union in a series of unprecedented reforms inspired by the post-dancing 90s policies of other socialist nations.

The end result is a unitary socialist state with a vibrant if polarized political scene as the waves of indigenization, re-feminization, globalization and more begin to finally crash on the long shores of the Union, and the many cafes, bars, e-lounges and street restaurants become makeshift councils where much heated debates and discussions take place (which makes the relatively more civil atmosphere of the actual governing bodies seem paradoxical).

Where does this leave the quasi-continental entity today? In truth that is a question for which there are so far about 20 potential answers and counting as cultures bloom, the weight of histories shuffled off, and a new generation is free to breathe fresh and make a new history.

And there are many ways to write this history indeed, as years of cultural mixing and regional diversity finally begin to reshape the Spanish lingua Franca and cause dialects to diverge ever further despite the centralization of education.

Chilean Spanish (already notorious for being incomprehensible) now boasts of having a fifth of its vocabulary and slang originating in Arabic, Asian, Mapuche and Polynesian tongues as the Chilean coast hosts an ever growing number of aquatic communities in what many are calling the Blue Line and with those settlements come immigrants that bind what was once the first red Latin nation further into the pacific world.

In the interior, Spanish is merely one language out of many as the great Andes native belt (stretching from Peru to Paraguay) sees indigenous languages recovering faster and further than any imagined, as surviving languages strengthen and extinct ones are gradually relearned and revived while even those of settler stock embrace aboriginal culture and life (with proper respect to and guidance from their native comrades of course), joined in by Chinese, Nipponese and Korean as neo-Incan styles mesh with East Asian calligraphy.

To the north the creole and neo-Latin ideals clash in the so called Bolivarian Belt, with its communal cybernetics and unconventional barefoot eco cities that now see arrivals from as far as Greenland, Bharat and East Africa; while on the other end to the south poor depopulated Argentina sees a new boom as its potential draws in welsh, sorbian, basque, Catalan, Bretonian, Arcadian, and Magrebis to set roots in what many are calling a quaint little inverse mirror of Europe.

Uruguay perhaps remains the most distinct part of the Union, an oddity of pure anarchist politics within a pseudo-Stalinist body that looks ever closer to Brazil (as evidenced by the rise of Sportguese among the growing number of mixed families) and whose fabric now includes ideological diasporas from the Arab, African, American and Asian worlds who mingle freely with the growing number of re-indgenized peoples.

And through all the ferment and flux there are the many rejuvenation projects undertaken by the new Pan-Latin state from the great struggle to devise mass transport networks that can account for the varied rugged terrains of the sprawling land, the race to save so many damaged ecosystems and the never ending battles against forms of reaction both old and new as revolutionary theologians excise queerphobic roaders from their ranks and the women of the continent contend with the long ignored divisions amongst themselves as they play catch up with the global feminist movement.

Of course there are the nomadic groups old and new that work to carve out a place for themselves in the still forming system, the fight by certain native groups to be recognized as such and other past injustices that haunt a union that even now is beginning to match old heavy hitters when it comes to scientific and social innovation.

The PAU has come a long way from its start and has many miles yet to go, if there is even a destination, but at least now change is no longer a monster to be feared but a companion to be celebratedâ€¦

| in the long march to freedom for all |

Former ASU: The Motherland of a thousand tapestries

"Africa is more than a place, it is a people, an ideal and a promise. A promise that from greatest darkness comes the brightest light"

Anyone attempting to give a summary description of the International territories that were once the African Socialist Union has their work cut out for them; for how does one concisely describe the world's first (and for a long time only) wholly socialist continent and the wonders it hosts without doing them a great injustice?

Does an aspiring Fabulist begin with its many multifarious peoples, whose ancestry ranges from the proud ancient Bantus, the cosmopolitan Swahilians, the free-spirited Congolese, the culinary Madagascarians, the generous Tuareg, the artisanal Yoruba, the curious Zulu, the ever bold Wutuni Creoles, the smiling Canarians or the adventurous Afro-Arabs, before one even gets to the non-Africans who have made their home here hailing from every corner of the globe, from Norway to Burma and from Iceland to Cuba, all living, working, and loving side by side creating many a hybrid peoples that earn the continent the moniker of the land of ten-thousand nations.

Or maybe our story teller ought to speak of the marvels that line every inch of the continent where two no cities are the same, but then does one dwell also on the Great Green Wall and the veritable army of laborers, drones and trained animals that keep it functioning every day, or do they instead direct their audience's attention at the magnificent garden forests of the Congo or the great solar arrays in the north that power Africa, the Middle East and large portions of Europe. Perhaps a more poetic entertainer would speak of the magnificent Tower of Humanity and dazzling array of art from every culture in the world, or one more melancholic would speak of the African Holocaust memorial and its ever burning fires commemorating and mourning those who could not see this kinder reality; all while a more optimistic orator would reveal the existence of the Iron Reef or lefika la tshipi; the world's largest artificial reef project constructed entirely from derelict naval vessels, battle tanks, fighter jets and other instruments of war and death that now bring life and joy to those in the southwest coast.

Or perhaps it is the cities and communities of Africa that a wordsmith should tell on, letting his audience's imaginations run wild and passions heighten as they recount the vibrant solarian beauty of Lagos, Africa's first megalopolis and a cultural hotspot whose gaze reaches as far as Haiti and New York, or Luanda's marine glory and its famous turtle islands, or Kinshasa's nuclear ecological genius and its tale as the birthplace of the Wutuni movement or Adis Ababa's rainbow retro-modernism or even Kigali and its alien drone spires that resemble titanium bee hives, but ultimately they would have tell the story of the impossible city of Gqebehra and its beautiful, harsh, grueling and triumphant history as the capital that represented the dreams of an entire continent managed to become a place that would make the pan-Africans of the past weep tears of joy upon seeing its artisanal near crystalline buildings, glittering streets and bioluminescent lightings.

A less human-centric narrator may instead opt to shed light on the other inhabitants of Africa, the iconic fauna and flora that even now are part and parcel of the continent's image, except they are now cherished and maintained for their own sake rather for the sake of European flights of fancy, the former ASU having seen first hand what true ecological collapse means and determined to never such a nightmare come to life again.

Through decades of hardship, sacrifice, use of every tactic practical and impractical and more than a few failures, the African ecology is perhaps in the best shape it has ever been since the dawn of the industrial age, uncountable numbers of antelope, buffalo, wildebeests, giraffes, elephants, rhinos, lions, cheetahs and more roaming the plains free from fear of trophy hunting or being cut down for their parts, while bonobos, gorillas, Okapis and other forest critters now quietly return to places where they haven't been seen in centuries, including the site of the now long gone Congo Lake and the waters teem with crocodiles, cichlids, penguins, sharks and more.

But for some this is not enough, and a dozen movements flourish across the continent that seek for their home to join Bharat, Brazil and Oceania on the non-human citizen club, demanding that this or that animal or even entire patches of land be declared citizens of the international, with the IOJ soon to decide whether the Nile River will become the International's first riverine citizen.

A minstrel who is a bit more down to earth may instead decide to regale with the ever developing stories of Africa's civil society as its activists and protestors weave ever more intricate tapestries of revolution, protest and evolution, the long victory of communism in the continent doing little to dull its political engagement (quite the contrary in fact), as the citizens of the International African Territories discuss the future of the land that for so long was denied one.

The debates themselves are as esoteric as they are spirited, with one day having the African international citizenry discussing whether the path to further political emancipation lies within embracing electronic-democratic Centralism, municipal Umajan socialism, an adoption of the Eurasian model, or other systems of government.

The next day the topic of discussion may move onto matters of transportation as many question whether the current area of non-human habitations is enough for ecological restoration and if further hyper-urbanization shouldn't be pursued while others believe in following the ecologically blended community model while others advocate for a move to the sea and many other suggestions.

And that is without going into the struggle to catalogue and recognize the ever growing number of cultures residing in the African continent, with the saying of their being a new creole nation born every five days being only a slight exaggeration, or the disruption of the political systems caused by the passing of Afro-Diaspora citizenry act and the subsequent influx of long severed African communities in the new world into long standing political structures.

In the end, there is no one single storyteller or bard who can ever hope to capture the full story of a billion strong continent all by themselves, with even our various rhetorical tale weavers missing crucial details about the African cultural renaissance, the internationalization of Africa, the rise of the Nigerian Science Fiction literary genre or the long struggle for linguistic equality in the many tongued land.

But fortunately ,the story of the mother of mankind is not told by a single Griot or chronicler or folklorist, but by hundreds of millions of such individuals who side by side are a testament for humanity's will to freedom and an ever wonderful insult to the legacy of those who sought to corral and chain it.

No matter what trials and tribulations lie ahead, the people of Ifriqya can now face them standing proudly and smiling on their own two feet, slaves to no one and heirs to a great dream.

| the Bright continent shines ever brighter |

Former Middle East: The Reforged Cradle

"This region is still known as the cradle of civilization but we have become something more than that, a nursery for a new humanity that will finally right the wrongs of the long night"

Let us say for the sake of theory that you are someone who wishes to set their roots in the international region that stretches from the gentle coasts of Thessaloniki to the deserts of the Sudan and from the edges of the Indus Valley to the Pyrenees mountains, encompasses hundreds of nations old and new, and where one is seemingly never a mile away from some odd wonder or relic of ancient history (it is not without a sense of irony that the Middle Eastern communists would achieve the caliphate borders long desired by Islamists only to build something they despise with every fiber of their being).

Where would you want to settle down and build a life?

That is a question that depends entirely on what one values and what they seek from the stretch of time they have in this world.

If one simply seeks a humble yet comfortable life but still wants to be close to dynamic urban centers and a buzzing cultural life then the Iberian interior may suit their taste, the peninsula's past wounds finally becoming bad memories as well furnished and colorful communes dot the land its inhabitants a medley of long extant Castilians, Portuguese, Galicians, Basques, Andalusians, Asturians and Catalonians, joined by long absent returnee Arabic, Sephardic and Amazigh communities who are themselves followed by wholly new comers from both the new world like the Mayans, Nahautl, and Aymarans and the old world like Eurasians, Cornish, Yoruba and Cambodians.

Here one can get immersed in all the little joys and challenges of commune life, perhaps even participating in the rites of the machine spiritualists or the Black Lynx Order while still being an hour away by bike from the nearest train station, from which one can pay visit to the golden cities of the coast with their more grandiose architectures and dynamic cultures.

Perhaps one instead enjoys the hustle and bustle of city life and places that never sleep, in which case the region that is increasingly known as Shouria offers something for everyone.

The more artistically inclined have hubs such as Nouakchott with its Afroarab-Atlantic beats or the omnilingual writer's paradise that is Beirut or perhaps even Doha's famous parkour centered designs.

Those who value the material may instead be drawn to the Levantine coast and its burgeoning megalopolis where the limits of cybernetics and organics are pushed further everyday, or perhaps Muscat with its ingenious desert agronomies is more to one's taste, or Athens with its ever polarizing philosophies or maybe even Ankara's mad but mesmerizing nuclear mania.

The cultural side is not neglected either, whether one seeks Al-Qahira and its global cuisines that merge the modern and the ancient under the shadow of great pyramids and vertical farms, or find the quaint Eurarabian beauty of Algiers and Maraksh or maybe the queer internationalism of Tehran more alluring. Most, however will gravitate to the Prismatic Pearl that is Dubai and its many floating islands and coral towers or maybe the famous Somali boat cities or the sky towns of Iran, will be enough to sate their desire for the unconventional.

For spirituality then one will find their choices are no easier as the great luciferian temples of Sicily and Neo-Pharaonic pyramids of Nubia beckon just as much as the grand Armenian and Coptic churches of Minya or the dazzling mosque of Persia and the mountain carved Buddhist monasteries of Afghanistan, or alternatively the great synagogues of the Sham or the comsoreligous under city of Jerusalem/Al-Quds.

Or if one has a sense of grandiosity then the Hejaz with the dual cities of Mecca and Medina are where one must visit to witness the beating heart of the Islamic world that welcomes wonders and peoples from every corner of the globe as Bestakis mingle with Qamtarians and Shias pray alongside Sunnis without a fuss, and with clever use of loopholes now non-Muslims add their own colors to the canvas, including the historic return of Judaism to the area, marking the completion of a long forgotten utopian promise.

Of course you may be unsatisfied with all of this, the human inability to decide driving you to desire all of the above somehow, and luckily there are in fact two ways for that to be achieved.

If one has a nomadic spirit, then one is welcome to hitch a ride on the many town-trains that roam back and forth across the land like great chromatic snakes, locomotives that have become communities all on their own and where one can live their entire lives without ever touching the ground.

Your second option of course is Iskandaria, the city named after a conqueror who wished to bind the quarters of the world together surpassing even his wildest dreams, the capital of communism having become the place where every human creed and culture could be found, where every style and taste is accommodated, where every human tongue and the some are spoken, where ecosystems found nowhere else flourish and where the modern is obsolete within months if not weeks of being created here in the place that has been dubbed the Axis of Humanity.

Here one finds marvels in every corner, from the great NeoAkhdarian towers that reach to the clouds and extend underground while gleaming with life, or the vast marina that is a twin city all on its own for human and non-human life alike, and the intricate automated circular systems that keep the trains running, garbage recycled and deliveries met with only partial human input, and of course there is the Headquarters of the Comintern, the building complex that can host the now 100K strong International commons and all their attending staffs while still having room for a small city still.

Of course one who wishes to live here must also know that for the socialist opulence of these lands, they are still spaces made by humans and thus can never truly be utopias even as they chase the mirage of the no-place.

Those that live in Persia will have to contend with lingering reactionary attitudes that are still being whittled down even now, the inhabitants of Iskandaria may tire of the near constant motion and change of the city and its difficult to follow politics, with the multiple struggles for recognition being merely one of many complex issues that have their start in the beating heart of socialism before circulating to the rest of the world, while those who make the solar Saharan communes their home have to contend with the isolation and the looming threat of cultism that follows, the great debate over what secular identity if any can unite the disparate peoples of a landmass that dwarves even Eurasia and a million other caveats and buts for every place the cradle has to offer.

Even so many still come to the cradle, for this chronicle has only merely touched the surface of what it has to offer and only hinted at its glorious history of struggles and triumphs from the Bah'ai reconciliation, the great rewilding of the 2000s and the Sikhmania and many more stories that await being catalogued and told as hundreds of millions now add their voices and writings to the great song and story of humanity, as befitting the place where the first known stories were born.

| What may your tale look like, one wonders |

Former Eastern Europe: The Resurrected

"Our past and trauma are part of who we are, but it is not all that we are and never will be"

Looking at the state of Europe throughout most of the twentieth century, none could have ever guessed that the lands that seemed destined to be living space for some of the most vile examples of government in human history would rocket past to become a world hub of technological innovation and a region at the forefront of international politics in both figurative and literal ways.

The area known as the Teal Curtain, stretching from the Baltic Sea to Crimea and separating Eurasia and Pan-Europa, is a region that is at once still rebuilding from its past wounds inflicted by the Nazis, Tkumaites and Aryans while also setting an example of one of the many glorious futures that awaits the human race with a knack of finding ways to turn what should insurmountable setbacks to creative strengths.

As an example, the region even now retains the dubious honor of having the lowest population density (and one of the lowest populations in total) in the world, a product of the Nazis' and later the Aryans and Tkumites' final attempts at genocide compounded by the pandemics that tore through the capitalist world like a bear dismantling a honeybee colony; and the less said about the dismal state of the infrastructure the better; none of the psychotic regimes that ruled over most of the region since WW2 being all that interested in human-centeric municipal planning or rational allocation of economic resources.

Where most might despair, the international easterners would instead invest much of their resources during the reconstruction into automation, the importation of the latest in industrial technologies and cybernetic (helped by their direct connection to Alexandria) and heavy focus on easy accessible lifelong education to all (though not on a scale comparable to Brazil) coupled with ecological restoration initiatives and urban renewal programs inviting experts and diaspora communities from around the world.

All factors that would combine into what would be called the Deniperian Rebirth, as eastern Europe's relatively blank slate allowed it to kick start its development with all the best techniques and technologies available in record time in a manner that many would compare with the Meiji restoration in the sheer leap forward it represented (though many would hate to associate this miraculous recovery with an event that certain Japanese scholars see as their start of darkness).

Now Eastern Europe boasts some of the most efficient, productive and environmentally friendly mega-industrial complexes in the world with the ones in the Polish-Ukraine titanium corridor being instrumental in helping set up the basis for the burgeoning space industry , and alongside them are Ukraine's famous "bio factories" that rival Bharat when it comes to pioneering or adopting the fruits of the Nutritional Revolution, and of course the famous Silicon Coast of the Baltics.

Indeed, while the cybernetic revolution would have many origins, it is only in this region can it be said to have found a home as a mixture of local governing structures and the international's emphasis on cybernetic economic planning to speed up development and the formerly isolated peoples of the region being enthusiastic in adopting any method that allowed them to connect with the neighbors (both local and international) that they have become enthusiastic adopters and tinkerers of all the latest innovations in communications and computational technologies (helped along by the fact that they often lacked any long standing alternatives to slow proliferation).

As such it was not a surprise to any who paid attention to the developments in one of the Comintern's lesser infamous mandates that the region would become one of the first to fully embrace Comnet's increasing relevance in politics by adopting an E-governance policy, initially extending only to local and regional votes, before expanding its preview to the point where today the Eastern European international territories (sometimes nicknamed Intopa) are the one place where a Comintern citizen can establish a union, preform government functions, work, get a college certification, get married, divorced, adopt a child, elect a delegate or even run for the commons without ever leaving the comfort of their home.

But one would have little reason to not want to leave their home in Intopia, as they are likely to want to enjoy a walk through many of its recently resurrected cities, as the likes of Warsaw, Kyiv and Minsk are no longer mere names in history books or war slogans but living breathing areas of human life, leisure, labor and flux

Within these places one finds urban styles that range from "Pan-Baltic Googeism with its mix of unusual shapes and runic patterns, Slavic Lunarisn with its elegant sleekness, Kievan revivalism and its abundance of retro-futuristic elements, the infamously baroque Rurtherian Gothic style and the ever hard to define "Mystical-Modernist" aesthetic that both inspired and infuriates artists from around the world, with its mix of seemingly fairytale inspired designs and celebration of mankind's scientific success (with such little but significant elements such as the use of bioluminescent tree lights and mushroom pathways among other things).

And though the towns and villages that dot the countryside are somewhat less opulent than their denser counterparts, they are no less interesting, many of them having the double function of being veritable fortresses designed to be functional in battle as well as nice to look at it, the product of a period where Aryan slavers attempting to snatch any unfortunate victims they could was a fact of life (even if the fiends could rarely ever make it deep into Comintern territory), and though the fascists are now gone, they were far from the only thing to stalk the night, as the wolves and bears that long stalked the nightmares of European peasants are now joined by tigers, leopards, Pumas, lions, elephants, cassowary birds and all manner of dangerous species introduced into Europe by the Confederation, their ecological impact being one of the few physical things that would indicate the nightmare nation had ever existed.

For though the region once derisively called Ruritania has come a long way and now looks to soar ever higher it remains grounded by its lingering traumas, from the minefields that even now are still being cleared, the wastelands and multitudes of former slaves that need to be rehabilitated (incidentally the reason why the region has the highest psychologist ratio per capita) and the reparations And reconciliation committees that have a list of messes to untangle that are nearly as long as the region's achievements, for though the victory of socialism is allowing the wounds of the past to close at last, the pain and trauma will take generations to truly pass along, and even now echoes of rivalries and prejudices both old and new remain, instances of inter-ethnic violence being increasingly uncommon but still prevalent enough that they remain in the forefront of global news, with the recent eruption of tensions in the city of Twangste being only one example.

But that is not say that all inter-communal relations are marked by suspicion and hostility, far from it as the Teal Belt's long standing connection to Iskandaria has meant that the region was one of the first to embrace the post-Westphalian ideal and is now home to the long extant Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Belarusians and Russians along with returnees such as Jews, Romani, Tartars, Hungarians and Romanians and joined by more recently arriving Arabs, Africans, Bharati, Latins, Amerindians, Asians and Eurasian immigrants all tied together by the Luddye and other creole cultures, with the Luddye and their cultures being particularly prominent in the region due to it boasting the largest total population.

Where once would be petty nationalists were ashamed of the their home nations' diversity and would have sought to hammer it into a bland homogenous national identity now such variety is openly acknowledged and embraced as part of the region's history to be celebrated and a template to the future, a fact that the peoples of the region both ancient and recent have embraced to the fullest, with one being able to encounter Vietnamese priests of Perun (neopaganism finding fertile soil in the recovering land) preforming their rituals in the shadows of great cathedrals, glimmering synagogues as the adhan booms from tartarian style mosques; all while Estonian youths practice writing their language in the Arabic script in one of the latest global trends and multicultural multicolored seas of bikers roam across the land.

Yes, the twentieth century has not been really kind to the lands of the Slavs and many other cultures, but the twenty first century is set to become infinitely better as the people of this brave new world can now live without fear of war or strife as they debate everything from the minutiae of aquaculture policy to the feasibility of full automation within the next decade, wether in personal councils or one of the many cybernetic ones that bind them all together in a burgeoning mode of existence that is mysterious as it is exciting, but is a product of their imagination and work nonetheless; despite everything and despite how hard old monsters have tried to deny them.

| Nightmares are not forever |

USASR: The Borderland Mistress

"Following the paths of others blinds one to alternatives most wonderful"

Nations are often defined as much by what they aren't as by what they are, and that axiom holds especially true in the Union of Southeast Asian Soviet Republics and its miscellany of component nation-states, stateless nations, nationless states and other unconventional forms of government.

The USASR at its core is a grouping of government entities that desired to escape from the political gravity of the two giants that were China and Bharat and to remain relevant on the world stage through presenting a united front.

On paper, the USASR accomplished this quite well, managing to keep out Delhi and Guangzhou (later Beijing) and transforming the region long under the grip of colonial powers both oriental and occidental into a prosperous peaceful bastion of socialism for all its myriad peoples.

Materially, however, the state that stretches from the forests of Burma to the beaches of Malaysia still has a lot of issues to work through and a lot of questions to answer as it ponders what exactly it is and what its future should look like, and more importantly what can unite people and polities as disparate as the quasi anarchist peoples of the highland, the relatively mundane Soviets of urban Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the revolutionary militarism of the Filipinos, the Red Pan-Asians of Thailand and Myanmar , the Malay situationists, the burgeoning sea communities and many others.

Initially, the USASR's goal of maintaining its independence was sufficient even if any hopes of becoming one of the big six were undone by Indonesia's turn towards internationalism and Iskandaria as opposed to red pan-Asianism and Hanoi (and the union was not yet wholly comfortable with the idea of a union with the DUCN, even if they were more receptive than China), but with China's militarism winding down and Bharat's plans of economic victory thwarted this left a vacuum that even now has yet to filled.

Not helping matters is the fact that the nations USASR lacks a sort of grand unifying history or unification tradition beyond the still controversial ethos of pan-Asianism (which are viewed as possessing revolutionary potential by one half and viewed by distaste by the other half who would much prefer a more generalized internationalism take its place) with even the equally recent and motley Pan-American Union at least have a skeleton of pan-bolivarism and a shared enemy in the form of America to unite against, something that the SEA polities lack given the complicated histories of collaboration and compradorism in some of them.

To many the answer lies in the entirety of the Union adopting the so called Laotian model, a relatively mundane and bureaucratic but still efficient system of council democracy and cybernetic economy, with an explicit emphasis on general internationalism and move towards becoming an international territory in the world government.

Proponents of this model point to its undeniable success in building up the war torn Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian nations into models of socialist democracy and prosperity that have successfully managed to dodge the worst of the problems that led to the crises of the 90s, though some would point out that conversely has meant that many still prevalent problems are being addressed slower than they might have otherwise.

Nevertheless it would be hard to deny the glittering indochinese megacities combining vibrant cultural scenes and diverse communities within cybernetically managed municipalities whose style combines scientific modernity and traditional arts.

Others more bold point to the so called "Zomian ideal", its name derived from the nickname given to the southeastern massif region whose peoples have been noted to have lasted the longest in resisting state structures (a hypothesis that while championed by some continues to be controversial in political and anthropological circles), promoting the ideal of a Southeast Asia that has fully embraced non-state socialism by combining modern social anarchist and anarcho-communist theories with traditional non-state structures and forming the largest anarchist bastion on the planet, heralding a new model of existence that may even challenge the international's current statist orthodoxy.

While the idea is not without merits, as evidenced by the astounding number of modernized terrestrial and aquatic self-governing communes under which live close to 90 million souls, some argue against it on ground of whether the ethos could be exported beyond its native homeland, if such a homeland is even real and not just mere misunderstanding by well-meaning but still ideological historians, and others point out that for all the horizontalism of the massif communities they still often struggle with prevalent exploitation and informal hierarchies of sexism, ethnic chauvinism, anti-foreigner sentiment and the like.

The third camp, concentrated mainly in urban Burma, Thailand and Malaysia is a firm believer in that the union ought to fully embrace pan-Asianism to unite southeast and far east Asia into a single state that would form a juggernaut that could then join the list of international territories as a credible counterweight to the Afro-Arab duopoly, an idea which has garnered equal parts support and condemnation as many point out the sheer difficulties and bad blood that would need to be overcome for it to be feasible, with a union between Japan and China alone requiring a small miracle, with some more moderate voices preferring a more conservative Mekong union that would attempt to build a shared SEA sovietesque identity instead.

While all these debates are ongoing, however, the people who inhabit the USASR continue to be the main force shaping their patchwork of a union into something that holds parts of all these ideals but is none of them, as the thousand ethnicities both old and new of the region, from mingle and share in a cultural heritage that is only now getting the attention and recognition it deserves (with the now famous sea nomads being merely one example as they now face the prospect of both appreciation and appropriation), even as they remain divided between communes, Soviet republics, popular SRs and a growing number of nomadic communities both terrestrial and aquatic.

Some have described the USASR as a master of none state, being decent in all aspects of what is considered an ideal socialist society while never truly excelling in any of them, but perhaps there is a certain beauty to that for this leaves many paths untaken for the a bold people to take and the nations that threw off the yoke of so many oppressors certainly don't lack for daring.

| a canvas awaits to be painted |

Former Indonesia: The Pacific's Pearl

"We are a country of impossibilities, of contradictions and paradoxes that shouldn't exist. And yet we are here, despite all they did to us we are still here, laughing and living"

Indonesia is a complex place.

Sure the same can be said about anywhere really but none can match a region that began as a collection of kingdoms, maritime empires, quasi republics, native communities and pirate havens that hosted every major religion before becoming a Dutch corporate colony that transitioned into state owned one before the Japanese took over and established a developmentalist collaborator government that was later overthrown and replaced by a pure kleptocracy that itself was soft couped by a pan-asianist technocratic clique who were finally themselves thrown out by a leftist United front in the night of a hundred revolutions, ushering Indonesia into finally joining the free world.

Most had expected that the Indonesians would quickly join the USASR as their Red Pan-Asian sister republics had done in the wake of their own socialist takeovers, turning the southeast Asian Union into a veritable superpower overnight, only for the ten thousand island nation to shock the world by instead applying immediately to become an international territory, a decision that seemed utterly at odds with the rather national communist bent of the ruling party.

But to the reborn communist party of Indonesia there was no contradiction between their regional ambitions, pan-asianism and aspirations for direct rule from Alexanderia, for they believed that a conventional pan-Asian unification was simply not feasible and that the way forward was an Asia united under the aegis of an international world republic, and that by being the first to commit to that path Jakarta will manage a position of leadership in the future (and successfully contain the influence of Hanoi, Beijing and Tokyo alike).

These events had all taken place close to a decade ago, and the Indonesian territory has yet to take a final form unique to itself, if it ever will (though some would say that is a form in of itself).

Perhaps this is merely because Indonesia has yet to recover completely from the scars of Dutch/Japanese colonialism and its own self inflicted wounds in the name of development even as the progress it has made in such a short time is commendable, a situation that finds a microcosm in the form of the megacity of Jakarta.

The former capital and now center for the regional commons has been going through a total overhaul for the past decade as slums were turned into functional housing spaces, its land, air and waters scrubbed clean of pollutants while the local ecology was rebuilt from the ground up and the city redesigned to combine the very best and latest of architectural and urban landscape technologies (the city's reconstruction often having to be halted and redesigned when new developments in these fields occurred ).

Now the overhaul is nigh complete, and the city is now unrecognizable from the half glittering half decaying landscape of inequality and Victorianesque squalor that it was once, in its place rising an opalescent metropolis of verdant multicultural neighborhoods , crystalline buildings such as the now famous gemstone mosque, bioluminescent waterways, coral artwork, hybrid solar train networks and airship nodes and so much more even as areas of the city are still being rebuilt and renovated to this day, a yeast meant to the sheer size of the rot left behind.

Indeed the story of Jakarta is mirrored a thousand times in the many cities, villages, factory towns, hamlets, former company colonies, sea platforms and agricultural units that are being remodeled into something better and grander even a decade and half later, more a product of the sheer size of Indonesia than any complacency on the regional government or Iskandaria's part, along with the unreliable bureaucracy of the old regime and the corruption of the Zaibastus colliding to cause many townships and islands to simply become lost and forgotten about, only to be rediscovered later having completely missed the collapse of capitalism and the sphere and gone about their business as usual.

Even now, every so often a new story emerges of another of the so called ghost-soldiers: Crimson-helmet troops that have been cut off from high command and were utterly ignorant or disbelieving of the fall of Tokoyo, continuing to fight a war long over through raids, kidnappings and bombings only to be systematically hunted down.

And they are not the only specters from Indonesia's past that haunt it, nor are they the most obvious for that dubious honor goes to the uncountable mutilated forests, drained islands and half dead ecologies left in the wake of Asian capitalism's deliberate ecocide and modernmania.

It is little wonder that much of the region's resources would marshaled in a massive hybrid campaign to save and restore as much biological diversity as possible, an effort that would have been much harder had it not been for the brave efforts of many who risked everything to smuggle endangered species and endling specimens into Comintern custody but even so the Indo-Pacific continues to be classified as a code orange ecological disaster zone with almost half of the International's ecological restoration corps being stationed there at any given time.

And with ecological damages come social damage, as the thousand and a half peoples of the world's most populous archipelago remain wary and fearful of each other after decades of divide and conquer policies that are proving stubborn even as the tsunami of the Indonesian socio-cultural revolution is tearing down the remnants of the old world and its -isms one by one.

Though the ISCR itself is not exactly an uncontroversial project even within the halls of the reborn PKI, who are divided between those who wish for the regional government and Comintern to take active steps in the creation of a genuine pan-Indonesian identity and those who wish to simply let such a culture emerge organically at the grassroots level even as a third camp argues that active efforts will need to be taken anyways because so much of Indonesia's cultural heritage is at risk of extinction within the next generation.

But for all its problems and challenges, Indonesia is a place of hope and prosperity at the end of the day, arguably one that is not all that different from the one of the ages past, as communes, autonomous republics and city states intermingle with one another criss crossed with nomadic solar sail fleets, a million platform islands and even more than a dozen so called pirate communes and their ritualized playful "raids" on passing ships, as every day the wounds close ever more, cultural walls are torn down and bridges built as cultures both old and new are celebrated in the shadow of great technological marvels and restored monuments as Javans, Papuans, Sumatrans, Creoles, Natives and more work together to heal and create a new glowing pearl in the sea of life.

| The best revenge is to live well and let the past rot |

Oceanian-Polynesian Federation: The Accidental Puzzle

"We stand as proof that it is never too late, that something beautiful can emerge even from the most selfish of ambitions and longest of nights"

When the motley coalition of pragmatists, idealists and ideologues crafted the idea of transforming Australia from being a another mere anglophone dominion in a commonwealth disembodied from its motherland and appendage of the United States into a true nation state with its own distinct culture and ambitions of regional dominance as a new big player in the Cold War, it is unlikely that they could ever envision just how far their vision would go transforming not just Australia but the entire Pacific region (then again barring clairvoyance it was nigh impossible for anyone to predict the way things turned out), indeed the very idea of Oceania was initially laughed at as a harebrained scheme that would never work by many both within and without Australia. nevertheless what started out as an elaborate ploy that was equal parts cynical and condescendingly compassionate has grown far beyond its original purpose and into something more, something beautiful, bizarre, brave and wonderful all at once, something that the founding fathers of Oceania would have wept at the sight of, half of them in horror and the other half in joy for their actions have given birth and rebirth to a whole new social world.

The continent of Elouera (formerly known as Australia) is a land that has come to rival even long-established cosmopolitan centers in the old world in its sheer cultural richness and is now slouch when it comes to the scientific department either even if its methods are more unconventional than most as western sciences now seamlessly blend with ancient but still effective aboriginal/indigenous knowledge with its most stellar example being the Elourean Ecosphere Organization and Coordination Network (EECON), a complex web of cybernetic centers, coastal plus inland communities, off, ranger lodges, drone hives and nomadic ranchers that is responsible for the Herculean task of monitoring the Elourean Biosphere, keeping track of various rewilding projects, undaming initiatives and the intricate processes of Elourean polyculture, agropyroculture, aquaculture and the other branches of what has been termed the world's largest single food production unit and/or ecological land management project.

And while such measures may be seen as overkill they are in fact necessary as the continent's ecology is a confused mess of native, nativized and invasive species that requires a lot of work for things to remain stable, even as mass line campaigns have helped reduce the threat of many pests, such as the infamous cane toad (whose range and numbers have been reduced considerably even as it stubbornly clings on in old strongholds) but the spread of elephants, lions, Komodo Dragons, camels, ostriches, and what were once the last wild Javan rhinos presents more of a dilemma as debate ranges on whether these species must be eliminated completely or if they might help repair the land's ecosystems by taking up long empty niches.

These questions have as many answers as there are peoples here; the once predominantly white Anglo/Irish/Scottish population of Australia having now become one part of a broader Elourean culture that includes people from every corner of the world, from the now well established Zhujin communities in the coast to the widely mixed old world diaspora that arose from the wake of 1984 and the latter new world/pacific arrivals as MICRO was tied closer and closer to Central America and the Pacific Ocean islands through the CPS; and of course there are the Elourean aboriginal peoples, other indigenous cultures from across the pacific (and beyond) and of course their growing number of creole descendant cultures.

Indeed, when one speaks of Elouera there must come awareness that there are in fact three distinct Eloueras: The Inner one, the Coastal one and the Oceanic one.

Inner Elouera is often described as a vision of what the American Wild West might have been in a better world; here one finds techno nomadic rancher groups that spend their lives tending to, culling and living alongside the camels, wildebeests and other fauna that have been introduced to the land alongside unconventional equally nomadic hori-agriculturists; many of them a curious mix of Anglos, Arabs, Aboriginals, Mongolians, Nahuatl, Bharati, Turkish and other peoples who have made the outback their home.

Alongside them are the aboriginal people who live either in well-furnished communal republics or one of the many many towns that dot the vast hinterland, interlaced with them all are various non-native communes, Ahmadi, Mormon, Mennist, and other communities that are drawn by the relative freedom and isolation of the outback wether be they secular or theological or utopian or anarchist while mining settlements and eco-villages are far from an uncommon sight.

These seemingly disparate groups are united by the vast railway network that allows for trade and exchange between them (facilitated by the growing Qitarat communities) along with regular airship routes, a mind for sustainable living/development and the general agreement of the need for cooperation to ensure the somewhat scarce resources of the region satisfy all, all factors that have resulted in the outback becoming one of the largest commons economic zones (CEZs) in the world.

The management of such a vast area involves a Eurasianesque system of overlapping micro and macro organizations, agreements, power sharing arrangements and deliberative planning; with some of these procedures having even taken some form of ceremony as is the case of the now famous "flower wars" where two groups who disagree over the primacy of a certain resource will compete or play fight against one another, with the winner usually inviting the loser to share later on.

Beyond the rugged interior is the more conventional coastal Elouera; though conventional is hardly what one would describe the likes of Sydney or Melbourne as conventional in any other scenario; the latter being a shining jewel of a city that combines opalesque buildings with walkable green streets cross crossed by trams and bike lines and hosting habitats for life in seemingly every crevice and cafe, or the former with its colorful coral-inspired sectionalism designs and cornucopia of cultural groups that definitely makes it a contender for the title of most beautiful city in the world, though its iconic neighborhoods are only part of the story as half of the city isn't even on land, as swarms of floating "reef" towns neighborhoods, aquaculture facilities and platforms form the porous connection between Coastal and Oceanic Elouera.

Oceanic Elouera is the most outlandish of the three Eloueras and the one closest culturally to the rest of Oceania, the first link of a patchwork that many call "the Eurasia that floats".

For you see Oceania has the honor of being one of only two goverment entities to have a double digit percentage of its citizenry live on or under bodies of water (discounting the fact that all freshwater bodies within Oceania have been declared citizens), with its continental shelf and the waters that separate it from the international Indonesian territories and Aotearoa being among the most densely populated Marinoplises across the world; the waters being home to floating cities that lazily move along the currents, repurposed oil platforms and specially made habitation platforms that band together to form archipelagos of light, wood, steel, coral and solar panels, underwater research facilities and small settlements all connected by the constant movement of dozens of flotillas both relatively traditional and ultra-modern (or sometimes both, as evidenced by the many modern yet sail powered cargo vessels sailing across the pacific and beyond), manned by a motley sum of humanity ranging from traditional MÄori sailors, Polynesian gift bringers, cosmopolitan retired pirate crews and Comintern supply fleets that are themselves miniature worlds in a maze of gift economies and planned exchanges that extends from the land down under and its formerly Dutch named neighbor into the disparate islands of the Pacific; its cultures only getting ever more varied, bizzare and even downright unhuman as one leaves behind the shores of Aotearoa and ventures into the great open expanses of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the term unhuman here being literal rather than demeaning as it is an increasingly common phenomena for floating island communes or their nomadic counterparts to form cooperative ties with local dolphin (inculiding killer whales) and porpoise populations, the ceteaceans often becoming vital to helping local fishermen in return for a share of the catch, but in many instances the marine mammals have proven helpful in other areas as well, wether helping determine the health of local ecologies, acting as messengers, being able to aid with infrastructure maintenance in hard to reach places or even in some cases displaying behaviors not too dissimilar from sheep dogs around aquaculture communities.

So integral have these non-human beings become to their communities that there is a growing movement within and without Oceania that vehemently argues that all cetaceans must be declared citizens of Oceania/the International and be granted rights befitting that status, using Bharat's non-human citizenship model as a blueprint. Thus far the movement is broadly popular but practical implementation has run into several legal complications, one of which being the fact that many dolphin species have demonstrated a tendency for behaviors that humans would call rape, sexual harassment and sexual assault; leading to the question of wether they should or even could be prosecuted for such acts if declared citizens.

The story of Ceteacean citizenship is simply one of many developments going on in the sociopolitical-economical sphere that has grown far beyond Oceania's nominal borders now extends from the Easter Islands and Latin American western shores, across the many Polynesian and Pacific islands and even reaching as far Madagascar and Taiwan as the oceans are no longer inaccessible to mankind as the so called Thassaolphlic revolution continues on, with ever more floating solar farms, wind turbines, aquaculture farms, artificial reef cities, man-made neostenic communities, kaawale zones and more become ever more prevalent and drawing ever more people to the domain of Tangaroa as Polynesians, Austroneasians, Asian sea nomads, Malagasy, Sango and more participate in building a new mode of existence, international but indigenous and industrial but ecological.

Indeed Oceania may have started out of mundane human ambition but it has grown into something more fantastic and interesting by the effort and dedication of the people who inhabit it.

| A sea of wonder beckons |

Japan-Korea: The cracked pearl

"The inheritance of empire leaves all its heirs ever poorer. If we are ever to atone for the horrors done in our name then we must strive to leave a legacy of life and liberty whose light will drown out the flames of the rising Sun"

The island of Nippon was the last place anyone would have predicted to become a modern nation state when its economy was forcibly opened to the world by the might of American guns, and no one could have ever predicted that the land of the samurai would become the heir to the legacies of the Occident as the last truly capitalist superpower standing in the Cold War, an empire that had survived against all odds through luck, guile, violence, displacement, pragmatism and no small amount of its non-socialist rivals proving utterly incompetent or unstable.

At its height Tokoyo commanded an empire whose writ stretched from the plains of Beijing to the forests of Peru and from the shores of Taiwan to the very heart of the American sunbelt, connecting the fates of a hundred peoples together as chains of gold, steel and silicon bound the East Asian, Latin, American and Indochinese worlds together through a complex system that rivaled the Eurasian patchwork in complexity if not in its liberty.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere's economic machine was as marvelous as anything conjured up by Selimist planners, bringing together Bornean rubber, Peruvian pharmaceuticals, Venezuelan oil, American lithium and Korean rice together with Detroitian factories, Navajo programmers, Japanese managers, Chinese laborers, Polynesian engineers and Sangokujin whalers all in the service of the cause of liberal-reactionary Pan-Asianism.

But the empire's magnificence was a mirage that hid an rotting edifice as its ecocidal policies slowly took their toll and spread of toxic corporate work cultures drove many to the thorny comfort of the noose or the cold caress of the katana, all while the compromises of empire made too many people angry, scared and hateful as they saw the Nippon they knew picked apart and destroyed in the name of power, for no culture or community is safe from empire even its parent.

In the end the heights reached by the Japanese empire proved to be matched only by its fall, whereupon those obsessed with a fictional purity attempted to tear down everything to rebuild their new nirvanic society from the ashes, and just like Schlafyism ended up the market's downfall in the States so did their actions lead to the Co-Prosperity sphere embracing a new shade of red, and not just from all the blood spilled.

Today, the Dual Union of Nipponese-Chosunese councils is all that remains of the old empire, and Chosun's continuing union with its long-time oppressor is more of an ideological move by the local pan-Asianists rather than out of any nostalgic sentiment; and that may soon change.

For now however the DUCN finds itself in a place not too dissimilar to that of the old FSRD, accepted but isolated and having to fix the wounds physical and mental inflicted by decades of oppression and exploitation, a task that the Asian People's Communist Party knows will take a generation at the very best but must be done.

As such the dual nation is perhaps the most "mundane" of all the world's entities, as their government handles issues of housing, urban development, ecological restoration, material reparations, cultural heritage reclamation, still persistent xenophobia among the people (whether it be Nipponphobia, Koryophobia, anti-Sango chauvinism or others more still) and the creation of democratic institutions while other Comintern nations are discussing topics such as super-culturalism and the implementation of full communism by claiming the energy of the sun.

But this is not to say that the politics of the post-imperial state is in any way boring, quite to the contrary as the opposite facing nations are one of the protest hotspots in the world today as peoples denied a voice for too long now find a chance to shape the country into something they can proud to live in, the fact that the DUCN has a way long way to go before it can catch up only encouraging its denizens to be bolder.

Across Isle and peninsula corporate megacities are reshaped into something more and better as advertising boards are torn down, railways expanded, roofs greened and renewable grids installed, all while the habitat-platforms that dot the Sea of Japan are retrofitted and plugged into the largest network of artificial reefs and thessalic restoration structures in the world.

The hyper-industries of the old world Zaibstus and Chaebols are now either scaled down for ecological reasons or integrated into cybernetic networks that allow them to finally break free from the constraints of petty market manipulation and serve those who operate them, workers from a dozen nations working side by side as equals (unthinkable even at the height of Sejimist idealism) while their communities experience the international luxuries and entertainments of the socialist economy for the first time ever.

Fishing and whaling communities now abandon their hooks in favor of restorative aquaculture, their inland counterparts also embracing new holistic agricultural techniques hailing from Bharat, the Andes, Egypt and more while ecological laborers race against the clock to save some of the most damaged ecosystems in the world.

Meanwhile against the backdrop of nativist backlash and attempts at terror and sabotage, millions of children from both countries learnt not only Nipponese now but also are grokking Korean, Ainu, Javan, Cantonese, Bengali, Vietnamese, Amerasian, Hawaiian, Samoan, Sangoleseian and the many tongues of the immigrant and hybrid communities that now participate in forming a new truly pan-Asian-Pacific culture in film, anime, theater, literature and art, all further enriched by the growing links with the lost children of both lands as the Japanese and Korean diaspora from places as disparate as Eurasia and Brazil to Egypt and Peru now add their own stories to the grand narrative of the East Asian Lands.

And as always there remains the debate that is as old as socialism itself, statism vs anarchism, with a new paradigm emerging of cities, coastal settlements and larger inland communities opting for centralized state socialism while more rural communities opt for anarcho-communism or municipal mutual aid federations.

The DUCN has a long way to go but by the year 2016 no one can ever accuse it of being lax in socialist reconstruction, with the ongoing trials of previously rehabilitated war criminals and comfort women peddlers proving to most the sincerity of former core's change of heart (even if the riots and civil unrest that followed demonstrated that much remained to be done), enough that in a move unexpected by anyone the PUC and Oceania would finally accept the DUCN's request to participate in the governing of Taiwan, turning the co-dominion into a tri-dominion and signaling a new era in international cooperative governance, even if the PUC is unlikely to accept DUCN requests for a union (though the USASR is slightly warmer to the idea).

The shadow of empire may still loom over the lands of the rising sun and the morning calm but the light of shared humanity pushes it back ever so slightly further every dayâ€¦.

| Until a new dawn finally breaks |

Pacific Democratic Imperial State: The Baffling Bastion

"It's not socialism! It's technocratic democratically decided universal shareholder capitalism"

Aside from its name, a surface glance at the Pacific Democratic Imperial state would reveal an entity that wouldn't look out of place in the earlier stages of the international, though the technological elements of later socialist societies would seem anachronistic.

The economy is one that is managed and directed by the workers themselves through a complex system of cybernetics, council meetings and the occasional e-vote, and universal healthcare, education, water, food transport, electricity, internet and other basic rights are fully guaranteed and enforced for all.

The cities of the PDIS, while utterly mundane compared to the sheer bizarre wonders of the world outside, are functional, sustainable and designed with the well being of their inhabitants both human and non-human in mind, with well maintained walkable streets and bike lanes bisected by tram/train lines and regular bus routes that connect the various hubs of the nation that extends from the tip of Eurasia to the industrial heartland of northern Mexico.

The Cosmopolitanism of socialism can also be found here with tens of millions of Anglos, Latinos, Mesitzos, Amerindians, Zambos, Amerasians, Latasians, Polynesians, Afrikans and creole peoples of all the above living together in the spartan but now iconic honeycomb housing complexes that dot both the land and sea of the country, fitting for a nation that has taken the humble honey bee as its symbol.

Though there much remains to be done in material reality, on paper the citizens of the PDIS are all equal under the law regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation, and they are all represented by elected recallable officials in a nested system that leads all the way up to the head of state, who in this year is a Sangokujin woman with some native and Jewish ancestry, a fact that would have made all the elites of golden bastion's parent states scream bloody murder had they not almost all been busy rotting in international prisons or graves when they weren't laboring to fix the many messes they made.

Indeed the Pacific State as described thus far seems like a place any leftist would at least consider acceptable, had it not been for the fact that the nation borne from the remnants of the Occidental Coalition of Democratic Nations and the Pan-Asian Co-prosperity sphere is a staunch blatant proponent of capitalism and liberalism that even now holds onto anti-communism in an age where the reds have triumphantly planted their flag everywhere from Berlin and Tokoyo to Washington and Stockholm.

This was all well and understandable during the state's troubled founding, as the American West Coast had long become a bastion of mega corporate power as American conglomerates and Zaibastus intertwined in an age of Asian neocolonialism entrenching itself ever deeper in North America during the Washingtonian decade of humiliation, with the brief regional economic boom that followed from the initial investments, capital flight to the area and some pragmatic reforms to local governance to ensure compliance all collided to make the region a bastion of pro-status quo stability amidst a rising tide of radicalism across the last sad remnants of the world of Adam Smith, Hitler, Keynes, Mises and Schlafly.

All this made it the natural place for the remnants of the old world to regroup as the other heartlands of capital finally crumbled under the weight of their impossible demands, socialists and fascists rising up to take control while the old regimes decided that all was lost and escaped with all they could bringing uncountable numbers of soldiers, government personnel, civilians, naval assets and more retreated to and consolidated around the Golden Bastion of California, even managing to counterattack enough to conquer and consolidate much of the American and Mexican pacific before succeeding in regaining nuclear deterrence and forcing a frozen conflict with the advancing armies of revolutionaries.

Of course the brief respite for the bourgeoisie proved short lived as the task of forming a cohesive whole out of the hodgepodge of American state governments, Nipponese businessmen, Korean settlers, Amerindian tribal elites, African Dons, Mexican/American/Nortian workers Polynesian immigrants, Oceanian idealists, Chinese occultists, and Pan-Asian bureaucrats and more who had reasons to hate each other almost as much as they did the reds, not even being able to agree on an elegant name for their new home, only settling on the current one as a compromise between monarchist conservatives, liberal republicans and technocratic corporatists.

Indeed, for a short period, the leaders of the socialist world (now just the free world) had believed they only needed to ready their troops to march into yet another festering capitalist colossus collapsing on itself.

Instead, the slowly coalescing government in San Fransoko did the unthinkable: they made concessions.

First it had all started rather reasonable enough (for liberal sensibilities anyway), universal suffrage and equality was absolutely necessary to ensure the perfidious reds would find no marginalized underclass or parallel society to use as a base from which to destroy the burgeoning Pacific society from within (and more importantly the PDIS had not the resources or cohesiveness to "harmonize" its diverse population at the time).

From that very same logic came the drive for universal welfare, which started out as a universal basic income scheme that was expanded to its current scope under the dual influences of growing labor agitation and the growing power of the so-called "Utopian-Corporatists".

When even that did not prove enough to match the growing prosperity of societies of Red Plenty a stone's throw away (or quell the growth of black markets), and predictably led to more labor agitation and popular unrest, material shortcomings would have to be made up for with increased political participation, with the universal shareholder and streamlined management ordinances being merely the first step towards latter full blown ownership of the means of production.

And so on and so forth as company towns became communes, boardrooms became Soviets and chief executives were general secretaries in all but name, even as the PDIS remained overtly opposed to the socialist world that was springing up around and inside it, the state where Mammonite cultists, Mormons, Buddhists, Afro-Islamic and many more mingled together becoming more and more prosperous as things stabilized into a comfortable status quo and limited trade with the International was opened.

Such a state of affairs that has led many to dub the Pacific Communist Party as equally the luckiest and unluckiest left-wing party in history as each year sees policies they favor adopted even while they themselves remain ever so tantalizingly away from the halls of power themselves.

Even the miniature Cold War with the communist international is becoming something treated as a game and joke by the wider socialist world, with border militarization being relaxed and the frontiers between the progressive bastion and its neighbors becoming ever more loose and diffuse.

This strange status quo may not hold for long, as a new generation of Pacificans now rises to take the reins, a generation that is increasingly seeing the charade for what it is and wants to finally shout out that the emperor's clothes are red and finally be able to fully join with the international community.

Arrayed against them however is the still entrenched anti-Comintern attitudes that plague the bureaucracy and even the people themselves, along with prevalent reactionary attitudes that many early socialist states had to contend with, to say nothing of the fact that the international will be reluctant to permit their entry while the PDIS allows so many war criminals to walk free and run for office and certain sinister cults are allowed to do as they please and act as sickening islands of exploitation and quasi-slavery.

The story of the progressive golden bastion is still being written, but should it want its coming chapters to be happy ones then its people have a mighty struggle ahead of themâ€¦

| a long odorous march even |

The Labor Republic of Freedonia: The Last Nightmare

"In Freedonia we found both a monument to Socialism's success and a scathing reminder of its failure"

Total purity of anything is theoretically possible but in practice can only be glimpsed through immense effort and care in controlled environments, and even then the purity in question is never total, there are always flaws too small for sensors to detect or for humans to remove.

Such is the way of life that everything and everyone are entangled with one another in the infinite lattice of existence, with the only constants being change and intermingling (and attempts at stifling either of those ending in madness and death). Where there is light, there must always exist shadow and in the wonderfully bright world of the long march, the one shadow that remains is very dark indeed.

Freedonia can be aptly described as the apotheosis of all humanity's worst political impulses and hateful attitudes distilled into a single state that covers most of the former Deep South, a heart of darkness in a world of light born in the wake of the America's final sudden death as the federal government was torn down in an inferno of self-sabotage and mob violence and with it died all semblance of unity as idealists, heroes, monsters and devils emerged to feast upon the corpse of Colomubia.

Here all the ideological refuse of the past centuries would be forced into one tiny corner of a world hostile to them leading to Neo-Confederates, White Nationalists fleeing from across the Americas, Yankee Technocrats, German refugees, Australian fascists, Canadian national socialists, Aryans, Hyperboreans, the so-called Ordoliberals from the Isles, National Bolsheviks from Eurasia, French Neosocialists, American Christians, Brazilian integralists, Latino Hybridists, Caribbean gentry, Belizian Soliderists, Salvadoran slavers and even the likes of Arab aristocrats, upper caste Hindus, Amerindian tribal elites and Albino Dons all forced into cooperating with one another to varying degrees to retain some semblance of their power, privilege and prestige, their mutual hostility and contradictions set aside by the fact that infighting and division would lead to them all being put down by the rest of humanity, eager to finally write the last chapters of the darkest stories in history.

Sadly for the millions it holds in bondage, Freedonia continues to survive against all odds and reason, living through being under a global blockade, revolts and multiple coups/counter coups/purges as even the desperate situation they find themselves in hasn't robbed all of the Freedonians from their ambition for power and absolute control.

Nonetheless the struggles and isolation have forged Freedonia into something that is very much different than what any of its myriad founders had intended, something that many inside and outside struggle to define and classify as the idiosyncrasies of many strains of right wing thought both congenital and bizarre coalesced into something new, something that is clearly parts fascist but also divergent from it and disturbingly contains echos of the very socialism that Freedonia was formed to oppose.

And indeed by the year 2016 the Labor Republic of Freedonia is a state that considers itself a dictatorship of the (white) proletariat and possess some of the tappings of an orthodox Marxist state; with a vanguard party in power along with empowered worker councils and unions that work in concert in a planned economy that is partially cybernetic (Freedonian scientific and industrial capabilities are severely limited by the embargo, their American predecessor's degenerated academic base and the standard pseudoscience malarkey that is the bread and butter of reactionary movements).

Freedonian cities bore little resemblance to the car centered monstrosities of old America, being instead both walkable, having ready access to mass transit and well-designed with environmental concerns taken into account when possible, ecological sustainability being an area where Freedonia largely agrees with the Comintern in stark contrast to the ecocidal regime that birthed it (a necessity when active stewardship and repair is necessary for the region to be livable).

Freedonian society is also a relatively pluralistic community with a vibrant cultural scene that embraces not only Anglo-Saxon, Aryan and German heritage but every single cultural group that the state has deemed fit to label white, weather out of conviction, convenience or simply sheer desperation as the post-American elites engage in a nation building process that now not only includes and respects the standard western European cultural groups but also Slavs of all stripes, Criollos and Mestizos from Latin America, and even select white passing middle eastern and Asian groups like Iranians, Arabs, Turks, lighter skinned Bharati and Armenians as contributors to a wider White Civilizational Project that paradoxically encompasses everyone from Washington, Augustus Caesar and Coloumbs to Suleiman the Magnificent, Muawiya and Aurangzeb.

Women in Freedonia who are of certain residency status enjoy rights and have obligations that would have been unthinkable for most women in the liberal-capitalist world, and even grave sins like homosexuality are, if not legally protected, then at least socially tolerated with the understanding that participants must also fulfill their reproductive duties to the cause of Freedonia.

But alongside these elements that wouldn't seem out of place in an early international member one finds that every single one comes with a reminder of Freedonia's true nature, whether it be the strasserist syndicates and small business associations mingling alongside worker syndicates, the abundance of theocratic indoctrination into the Freedonian cults (an amalgamation of prosperity gospels, Aryan paganism, Hinduism, Satanism, Jihadist Sufism, and other even more esoteric beliefs) that accompanies Freedonia's attempts at hammering its diverse peoples into one, the perpetually pregnant hormone-infused teen girls, liberty battalions constantly terrorizing the non-citizens with their alien gruttal constructed language, the militarization of every aspect of society from grave to cradle, the asylums that ensure that those citizens who don't live up to Freedonia's standards are made useful in other ways and the sheer pervasiveness of hierarchies informal and formal in every aspect of Freedonian life crystallized in the residency tier system that ensures all Freedonian citizens are in a constant struggle to the top.

But of course no mention of Freedonia is complete without the infamous Reservations and the E-day.

For the Nightmare state is composed of two societies, one for the citizens and one for the Reservees (the official name for these unfortunate souls though they are commonly called a wide variety of less flattering and dehumanizing labels) with the latter being composed of the millions of African Americans, Amerindians, Asians and other people the state has deemed subhumans and were unlucky enough to find themselves on the wrong side of the border when Freedonia was born.

Though Freedonia would initially consider a massive ethnic cleansing/genocide operation to ensure that their bastion was secure from any fifth columns or reliance on slave labor, the elites opted for a more sustainable and productive approach to the "surplus problem".

Instead, the people who would soon become labeled as the Chinos by their oppressors would find themselves under the iron boot of one of the most sophisticated machines of oppression in human history as an apartheid was built all around them (though not without attempts to fight back and revolt).

The Chinos would become restricted to living in certain areas designated as reservations, some of them urban, others peripheral slums while others were agricultural settlements and villages, all separated and crisscrossed by heavily guarded roads, check points and citizen settlements gradually encroaching on what little land the underclass was allowed to "rent" as they tried to go about their lives in their open air prisons, watched by drones, their food intakes determined by uncaring bureaucrats and managed by cultivated quisling middleman elites that the Freedonians outsource most of the direct day-to-day oppression to.

In fact it is very possible for a Reservation inhabitant to never lay an eye upon a Freedonian for years if not their entire lives; unless they were unlucky enough to be caught during periods of high conflict, happen to live in a Reserve deemed "obsolete" and liquidated through expulsion/murder or decide to join their many brothers and sisters who labor inside the Freedonian zones as construction crews, janitors, exterminators, nannies and other jobs that the Freedonians deem beneath them, indeed those who enjoy irony would be amused to know that most of Freedonia's wonders and achievements were built by the underclass it so deeply despised but relies on to maintain whatever prosperity they have left, which makes the fact that an official countdown for when the last non-white in Freedonia will be exterminated all the more morbid (the so called E-Day).

Yet for all that it differs from its predecessors, Freedonia cannot escape the contradictions of capital and the self-defeating nature of the fascism latent in its national DNA, as reservations become ever harder to police with growing insurgencies popping up in every corner as smuggling lines from the Comintern become ever more effective and resistance ever more organized all while the firsts generation of Freedonian youth grows up hating and despising the cage they find themselves in and unwilling to be shackled for the Freedonian dream of securing a white socialist paradise, and alongside them a new generation of Chinos too grows ever bolder after living in hell and staring at heaven for all their lives, all while the material realities of shortages, economic stagnation and growing rifts between the state, the bourgeois remnants it begrudgingly tolerates and the more extreme Freedonian organizations.

Indeed Comintern intelligence and political analysts estimate that even if Freedonia was able to maintain its limited nuclear arsenal intact, it was still likely to fall through internal cracks within its edifice within 5-10 years; something that is recognized by Freedonian government in Jefferson as they oscillate between increasing brutality against the Chinos and pathetic attempts at securing a deal with the International, who always make it clear that the only thing it will accept is Freedonia's unconditional surrender and dissolution.

A dissolution that would have happened if things stayed the course, but alas deliverance would come to the last nightmare from a source most unexpected..

| And two worlds would suffer for it |

Vagarcia: The Nomad's Land

"We are more than nations"

It is fitting that the last entity on this list is also the most bizarre, beating out even the semi-incomprehensible Eurasian patchwork, for even Eurasia is an entity with a basis in history and material reality, whereas Vagracia is unmoored from such petty concepts.

Vagracia is a quasi state that has no borders, standing armies, an economy or a capital (save for Nairobi's spiritual value as its official birth place) and whose sovereignty is scattered across an estimated 35 million individuals scattered across seven continents and every people on the planet, and its existence is only evident in the millions of passports, travel centers/embassies and online bureaucracy that manages its immaterial Soviets and discussion groups.

Vagracia had initially been born as a mere statement of protest by several stateless groups that felt their unique needs and aspirations weren't taken seriously by Iskandaria as opposed to the concerns of government entities that were still primarily entangled with ideals of nation-statism,even if the nation part had long since been replaced by international or regional, this left many cross border groups both ancient such as the Mongol people, the Sami, the Central Asian/Afghani steppe peoples, the sea nomads of Southeast Asia, Kurds, Armenians, certain Jewish groups, the Romani and certain Amerindian communities that have reclaimed their nomadic lifestyles, alongside newer ever moving cultures such as the Qitarat, the Luddye, the Sangokujin, the Wutuni, Neo-Soviets, holders of Comintern citizenship, Esperantists and many others.

Realizing that they shared similar goals and broad similarities between their ethos, certain radical groups from these peoples would band together to declare the formation of Vagracia as a nation for the nationless and a home whose doors are open to all humanity, anywhere and at anytime; a statement that would shock and stupify an international community which was just settling down after the post-Last Jihad status quo had finally began to set in and the so called "start of history" was taking place (though some would argue that Vagracia's birth was precisely that).

The world was even more shocked when the newborn quasi-state immediately applied for Comintern membership and demanded to be recognized as a sovereign entity with its own laws, customs, citizenship and possessing the right to treat with other nations of the international and its territories as equals, a proposal that divided the commons for a whole month as they debated whether the ramifications of accepting or refusing the proposal, settling on accepting Vagracia's plea by a narrow majority; a decision that while remaining controversial has been respected nonetheless.

In the years since Vagracia has evolved into something that is both hard to describe and yet held by some as an example of one of the futures humanity should aspire towards, though others decry it as a childish ploy for attention that will sputter and peter out eventually once the novelty wears off.

But Vagracia remains and shows no signs of going anywhere, 9 years after its birth, if anything, only growing more entrenched in popular culture and global politics with each day.

The Vagracian government is scattered across multiple online platforms, temporary Soviets and mobile networks of train/ship communes across the world and consists of a parliament selected by a mix of voting and sortition, with the largely diplomatic posting of Vagracia first speaker being also chosen at random from any who enroll to be its citizens and meet certain requirements, a process that has led to both great, mediocre and downright bizarre persons to fill the one-year term office.

The Vagracian citizenry is a motley bunch that are largely united only by a shared ethos of horizontalism, cosmopolitanism and freedom to self actualize, though the formation of a unified Vagracian culture beyond that is ironically limited by the very diversity it champions as it will take quite some time for the hundreds of cultures that have signed up with the nationless project to coalesce, if they ever do.

However certain patterns and traditions are emerging within the Vagracian communities, such as the growing trend of Vagracian wearing elaborate wrist chains that can be "read" to learn the person's history and personality (a tradition that is derived from Qitarat practices) or the now famous Almtrekker package that each citizen receives; which includes two passports (one Comintern and the other for Vagracia), a universal translator, a copy of the constitution, a Vagracian-grade sibwatch and an ID card to identify the person as a citizen wherever they go.

Additionally Vagracia is the world's most queer nation, with the latest census estimating a full third of its citizens being non-cisgendered heterosexuals of various genders and identities, a fact that arises from both a general interest within the LGBTQ+ community and the fact that Vagracian citizenship is seen by many as an extra shield against discrimination in areas where the Comintern's ultra-radicalism still struggles to take root.

Many challenges lie ahead for the youngest "country" in this world, between the growing trend of bad online actors, the nation's lack of an actual economy beyond rudimentary networks of exchange and the fact that it still struggles with legitimacy in many regions and infighting amongst its ranks.

Nevertheless, there is something that keeps Vagracia going and growing, something that still attracts many a free spirit to it and the promises it holdsâ€¦.

| for a stranger grander world |

Of course dear reader what you have just read is but a mere outline that couldn't possibly hope to capture the full complexity and nuance of a post-capitalist and post-imperialist world and all the stories and struggles it has to offer us, from the Venetian-Omani-Swahili Cold War over cultural dominance over the old world sea communities, the radical reimagining of the world's major religions, the space debate, the international sex worker movement and more, but every writer worth their salt must know how to not perfect be the enemy of good and that more words are not always good, and thus we will for now conclude our overview of a world scarred but smilingâ€¦.

| And take a look at the other side of this story |

The year 2016 in the world that will come to be called the Dewey Denied timeline is pregnant with great change even as the decaying neoliberal world order holds on.

The United States has seen the Obama years come and go with great disappointment and even greater discontent as the hope and change promised by the very first black president was smothered and crushed under the weight of hundreds of compromises, betrayals and commitments to a cruel terrible status quo that has seen millions impoverished in the core and millions dead in the peripheries, as the war of terror continues and the security state tightens its grip on the American soul ever more tightly, even as the actual souls of American citizens are ever burdened with sorrow, debt and shame.

All the while two candidates wait to replace the prematurely aging incumbent, each representing a different vision of the land of the free.

One is Hillary Clinton, the heir to a dynasty and standing for the liberal America of avocado toast and coastal cosmopolitanism with all its technocratic elitism, condescending pseudo-progressivism and its priest-like commitment to the norms and traditions of a young empire already growing old.

The other is one Donald Trump, borne from the elite but wearing the clothes of an outsider he has managed to bully his way into the Republican Party and into the presidential nomination, speaking to the other America, the savage America with its racism, xenophobia and gritty brutality that forms the foundation of the empire that feeds the beast to this day always needed but now shunted aside and neglected by the new order thing even as their hatred, fear and anger grows and grows, needing only the right spark to set the world aflame.

Across the Atlantic fortress Europe is seemingly in better shape than the American titan but the behind the image of a relatively progressive and socially democratic Europe is a patchwork of troubled states each with their own baggages and problems as the neoliberal hollowing out at long last begins to noticeably ship away at the foundations of the post-WW2 welfare state in the former heartlands of empire, and in south and east the paralyzing chaos of the post-socialist collapse finally begins to settle down and the survivors begin to stew in hatred and despair at the wreckage they were left with, denied the dreams of a prosperous liberal utopia but having completely burnt their bridges with the possibility of a post-capitalist future.

Both halves, however, are united by a trend of a rising far right and crumbling center (and a left not worth mentioning) as the Fuhrer Geist now begins to stalk its old hunting grounds once more even as anti fascists and decent people alike hold the ever shrinking line, protecting a system that wants no protection and desires nothing more than to leap into the arms of reaction and fascism.

Outside the core, the situation is little better as climate change marches on unchallenged and ignored, the wretched masses of humanity abandoned to rot and fight over the scraps left by their neo-colonial masters, as the planet turns into a blast furnace of biosphere collapse and resource wars.

The Middle East has seen its hopes die as the hopeful flames of Arab spring are smothered by the cold realities of war and reactionary appropriation or the avalanche of the status quo reasserting itself with blood and iron, the grip and legacy of the Cold War proving inescapable even now as Islamists, fascists and militarists run rampant and burn the very foundations of societies for another short benefit in wars that have lost any meaning, all while the long decadent and stagnant Arab gulf now joins the great game against the rising non-Arab powers of Israel, Turkey, and Iran as each races to carve out their spheres of influence and neocolonies in a region drowning in oil, lead and death, and the Palestinian genocide continues with no signs of stopping, the 70 year old carnival of murder, mass rape, displacement and torture standing as the one constant in a region constantly in flux.

Hope remains strong in the long suffering Latin American region, as the pink wave and subsequent return of social democracy is watched closely by a world divided between those who wish to see vindication on the viability of electoral left politics and those who wish to ensure that such a thing never comes to past, all while the new progressive governments themselves struggle with the crushing weight of past sins and the ever growing spectre of future struggles amongst men and with nature.

All the while in the still marrow-rich corpse of the former USSR, scavengers continue to burn through the legacy of the Soviets to keep going just a bit longer even as stagnation develops into deterioration.

Even Russia, the greatest vulture empire of them all, finds itself groaning and struggling to reanimate itself into a new imperialist half-life, attempting to mimic the American empire without ever understanding what made it work and finding itself mired ever more in the politics of its vassals and yet ever more insecure as Ukraine slips from its grasp and Beijing becomes ever more necessary for Moscow to function.

As for China, the last remaining red titan finds itself finally in a position of being able to challenge the western powers but ironically after having shed the notions of such conflict entirely (along with almost all its socialist principles as well) and seeking quite cooperation as it goes through the process of national consolidation with all its benefits and horrors while building its own sphere of influence in symbiosis with its former rivals.

But a new Cold War is brewing all the same, only now driven by American insecurities and need for war as the Asian Pivot sees rivalries reignited and the geopolitics of Kissinger make a triumphant comeback to a world that has supposedly grown beyond the need for them, the Pacific now set to become the site of ever increasing tensions and conflict.

India meanwhile has become akin to a slow rolling nightmare, as the Hindutva steadily and surely accumulate more and more power and influence within society and politics, driving the so-called largest democracy into a path that may yet see untold millions burned on the pyres of ultranationalism to distract from an ever growing cornucopia of problems that no one wants to solve.

And as always Africa still chafes under its chains, now forged from debts and SAPs rather than simple bullets and whips as old standing colonial powers and new international conglomerates alike suck the life blood of the most abused continent like the many malaria mosquitoes and Tsetse flies that inhabit the birthplace of mankind, its peoples denied agency and control over their future in the name of the almighty dollars and its endless need for cheap goods.

Such is the state of this beautiful doomed world, held in the grip of an anticommunist war machine whose war is long over but continues to murder millions every day without a care from the apathetic populations it serves even as they themselves are increasingly unable to escape falling in the suffocating grip of its iron gauntlet. At the same time, hateful madmen, smiling hypocrites and cynical monsters are free to do as they please as they devour the world's heritage for a few more dollars to add onto their massive hordes. At the same time, whole nations are ground to dust under the turning wheels of the liberal world order and fascism proves itself to be the late triumphant of the Second World War as its ideals infest the human collective soul.

Left to its own devices one would have to wonder whether such a scenario could be turned around and the old order replaced with something better or if humanity had doomed itself to either a slow death or an even slower pathetic slide into a dystopian nightmare that combined the worst of Orwell's and Huxley's visions, but inexplicable events conspire to change the course of history and link two worlds together: one of communist realism and the other of capitalist realism, all set to clash in a sequel to the Cold War that would put any prior contest of mankind to shame.

| Let us see what new marvels and horrors await |

A/N: this work is inspired by Spartakrod's The dual order and Rebellions! Timelines' use of the concept of the worldmerge and big thanks to @thatone_dude and @Endorfinator for betareading, @SadMuseGirl and @Raiho-kun for helping out with ideas and the flags respectively and to all the followers of TLM on the discord server who have been nothing but supportive and encouraging. For old veterans of my TLs I hope you enjoy this and for new comers I apologise for the terrifying wall of text. This entire work started out as some idle musings that become an idea for a TL that was originally planned for next July, but recent…ahem current events have made me decide to post it earlier since a lot of my readership and the SV community in general could use something positive to read about.

Now there are a few things I should make clear:

This TL is merely a side gig and the main TLM quest TL will have absolute priority in terms of updates
This TL is further along than the main quest line but any information revealed in it about events pre-2016 should not be taken as canon for the main quest, any details about post-2016 events should not be taken as set in stone.
Omakes are encouraged.
The worldmerge mechanics are basically similar to the original TDO but with a few caveats that will be revealed later on.

With that out of the way, hope you all enjoy.

yeastmobile · Mar 15, 2025

Been waiting to show this baby off just to assault your eyes specifically yes you.

StarMaker764 · Mar 18, 2025

1. One of CAR's most enduring legacies is its introduction of crocodiles of multiple species into European ecosystems, which have hybridised with one another to form multiple hybrid or "creole" species that are plaguing Europe's waterways after somehow managing to adapt to the colder climate.

2. The 1985 trioka have long retired from politics and taken up several hobbies, including Bukharina getting really into psychological horror novels and games, Ghaddafi having a lets play WorldView channel while Selim enjoys city builder games

3. The Comintern's manned moon mission had retrieving the Nazi flag up there as one of its primary objects, upon return to earth it was thrown into a Volcano.

4. There is an unofficial contest between TLM polities on who can build the prettiest most ornate replacement to the destroyed statue of liberty, with the former UAR, ASU, Europa, Brazil, PUC and Bharat all having their own versions by 2016.

5. Brazil's statue is is also completely submerged under water since it also doubles as an artificial coral reef

6. A third of southern Italy's population are revolutionary Satanists

7. Iskandaria is home to a wide variety of creatures that exist nowhere else in the world, including a dozen fungi species, over 20 species of fish, biolumenicent neotonic amphibians and at least one rat species.

8. Though Russian culture as we know is still around, there are also about 11+ Russian sub and hybrid cultures that emerged across Eurasia and the wider world.

9. The World Population has reached seven billion by 2016

10. The world of TLM is made up entirely of republics but there is a single ceremonial title of "Comintern Princess" that was bestowed to terminally ill 6 year old Ayanna Ramlal as part of her wish.

Oseanman · Mar 22, 2025

Thar Water and Wildlife Programs

ਪਾਣੀ ਦੀ ਮੁੜ ਸੁਰਜੀਤੀ (PdPJ (Punjabi)), जल का पुनर्जीवन (JkP (Hindi)), Rejuvenation of Water Project (RoWP) : mainly a water conservation group originally founded in 2007 by rural Balotrans attempting to improve water availability and quality. After the first phase of collecting data on the Lavanavari's hydrology the group decided to tackle the issue of water availability holistically. There were many ideas ranging from community in ground rainwater cisterns, to massive earthen works built to slow the flow of rain water in order to allow the water to soak into the soil. RoWP then consulted various communities along the Lavanavari and its tributaries in order to find stakeholders who were willing to volunteer their land and time in order to fufill the various projects the RoWP had in mind.

Major Projects:

Partial damming of the Lavanavari in order to increase the amount of meandering turns it makes
Planting of several key native, and (noninvasive) nonnative tree species that elephants rely on in the dry season within new and current floodplains
Built several rainwater cisterns for various villages
Dug water retention ponds in more mountainous areas to raise the water table
Form anti poaching brigade (Green Community Flock (GCF(English)), हरा समुदाय झुंड(HSJ(Hindi)), ਹਰੇ ਭਾਈਚਾਰੇ ਦੇ ਝੁੰਡ(HBdJ(Punjabi))) for the various woodlands/wetlands they end up creating
Create an online tracker for elephant herd sightings around Bharat

Minor Projects:

Help local farming communities build up seed banks
Work with locals to safely deter pest birds without killing them or poisoning them
Petition in and outside of Balotra for various clean water programs to decrease the salinity of the runoff

StarMaker764 · Mar 24, 2025

"World-Systems by their very nature cannot tolerate each other, inevitably one will seek conflict and emerge triumphant wether by the pen, the gold or the sword."—Anwar Aboulezz, former head of the Comintern Office of Intelligence.

January 1st of 2016 would be the single most pivotal day in human history, or histories it would be more accurate to say as the unthinkable happened and through means unknown two worlds became inexorably linked with one another through the mysterious so-called "glide" phenomenon.

One was a world that had seen the minions of Hitler stampede uninhibited throughout the world and unleash all manner of human monsters and horrors in their wake, only for the swastika to be broken and its legacy drowned in a red flood that soon saw the rising sun and the American eagle both also being swept aside as the red banner flew over almost the entire globe and ushered in a new wonderful weird age for mankind, marking the true beginning of history with the name worthy international at the helm.

In another world, the rolls of the dice would instead see the Axis broken, and the world divided between a self-crippled socialist world and a rejuvenated liberal one with the latter eventually triumphant and striding free across a globe wholly chained to the so-called free market and its tyranny all while the contagion of fascism gestated within its already rotting body, all with the stagnant but still very much powerful United States acting as the lynchpin.

Two worlds, two ideologies, and two new orders bound to clash with one another in every aspect of existence as the status quo of both sides was inevitably smashed and remolded by the reality of a new Cold War on a scale unprecedented.

A few fringe voices on both worlds may have held hope that peace or at least an understanding would emerge, but once the initial misunderstandings, existentialist crises, arrests, and standoffs were cleared it quickly became apparent that the worlds of Dewey Denied and Long March were simply too incompatible with one another.

For one thing, the former quite simply had no answer to the Communist International, a truly transnational entity that was de facto and in many parts de Jure acting as a global government with actual authority and power in its own right, a far cry from the largely toothless and ceremonial United Nations that existed and functioned solely on the whim of its world's great powers.

The very existence of the International itself was akin to taking a sledgehammer to the Westphalian nationalist basis of the DD world, to say nothing of the sociopolitical headaches that were the entities not yet fully absorbed into the Iskandarian framework, from the Abaylan and Eurasian patchworks to the post-capitalist juggernauts akin to Bharat, the PUC or PAU, and all this before one delved into the economic and human aspects of it all (assuming one wasn't one of the rabid anti-communists busy screaming their heart out at the very idea of a socialist dominated world).

From the side of the long marchers, the shock was somewhat more muted, as they were familiar with some elements of the Dewey Denied world that convergently evolved in their own, but the sheer scale of liberal-capitalist (and some would even say fascist) ideological penetration into every level of society and every corner of the globe was something that aroused excitement only in Comintern sociologists and utter dread in everyone else.

However ideological enmities would have to take a backseat for the moment, as both worlds needed to take stock and plan their next move, each already devising and planning ways to subvert and destroy the other, and this paradoxically meant that both global systems would need to agree to a framework that allowed for them to exist side by side without immediately descending into all-out war and chaos.

The Hanoi conference would be the result of this line of reasoning, as the leaders of both worlds under the aegis of the UN and COMINTERN came together for the first (and for a long time, last) time to hammer out an arrangement regarding the still poorly misunderstood nature of the glide, although by now it was becoming clear that the phenomena not only allowed for this interdenominational travel in unclaimed lands and water but also between nations and areas on both sides of the divide that were ideologically aligned.

Despite this seeming common ground, the stark differences between both worlds was immediately apparent from just the physical appearances of the rulers and delegates present, with the sensible and spartan business suits of the capitalist world worn by mainly old men contrasting with the outre, dandyish and peculiar attires of their far more youthful Comintern counterparts, a disparity perfectly encapsulated by the most powerful figures on both sides.

At the head of one bloc was one President Barack Obama, the man who made history by becoming America's first black president had aged and lost much of the vigor and youthful progressive spirit that defined his earlier years, but had made a point to appear at his best for the occasion if for no other reason than to project an image of power even as America's actual power was in slow but noticeable decline, fitting for someone who represented an America of optimism and dynamism that was slowly fading and giving way to something new that yearned to be old again.

Standing on the other side and towering both metaphorically and physically at a height of 6'7 was the newly elected chairwoman of the Comintern Jiya Fainu, whose mixed Jewish, Bharati, Korean, and Polynesian ancestry combined with her openly bisexual and polyamorous sexuality seemed tailor-made to make a lot of Dewey Deniers descend into hateful conspiratorial madness but perfectly encapsulated the demographic zeitgeist of her world's youthful and cosmopolitan global society, and that's without getting into her rather curious politics.

Symbolism aside however, the Hanoi conference would amount to little other than formalizing the few established international "glide-points" as regulated points of travel between both worlds and hammering out agreements on how they are to be used, in every other aspect it had proven to be something of a disappointment, even if it was an entirely predictable disappointment for anyone familiar with the politics of either world; the free trade politics and sanctions regimes of the "Teal" timeline were never going to be accepted by those in the "Crimson" timeline, and conversely even normally "apolitical" matters such as environmental standards proved to be utterly controversial and bewildering when it became clear that the long marchers had a very different conception of what ecological preservation and maritime laws entailed.

These were merely civil disagreements, as it didn't take too long for the socialist ambassadors and delegates to start raising concerns about imperialism, neocolonialism, and the various ongoing conflicts and man-made crises that no one seemed to care about, or as their Teal counterparts would put it were either "resolved" or "being resolved". The ensuing deadlock and disagreements all but ensured that the conference ended soon after the initial glide agreements.

Even nominally socialist nations would find themselves quickly out of their depth dealing with their far more radical and faithful counterparts, with the sole exception of Cuba which would take the opportunity to announce that it would be requesting membership in the International, a request that was bound to be fast-tracked by an Iskandaria eager any footholds in the world, and it didn't take long after the conference for American CIA agents to get in contact with their Pacific and Freedonian counterparts.

| The race begins…|

Endorfinator · Mar 25, 2025

View: https://imgur.com/a/k9wZ6Ev

StarMaker764 · Mar 29, 2025

Brazil: you could have been so much more but alas, you are just another shitty colonial relic.

Pan-American Union: I understand, truly I do, that you all were denied the chance to be better but there is a point where it is not just Washington's fault.

International Africa: *Screams in Pan-African*

International Middle East: Amazing! Over 30 different nations and you all managed to be equally shitty and worthless in unique ways.

Eurasia: Keep the Union's name out of your damn mouth.

Oceanian-Polynesian Federation: We had our faults but at least we grew beyond being a petty racist grease mat to the Yankees.

DUCN and NAC: *both cringing hard at having constant unashamed reminders of their past sins running around*

Abayala: For you we have a really special gift, its called revolution.

PDIS: How do you do fellow capitalists, what a won…why are you all staring at me like that?

Bharat:…..how did it all go so wrong?

International Eastern Europe: By Perun, you believed them?! You actually believed the nazis in liberal skin!

Pan-Europa: Nazis! Nazis Everywhere!

PUC: *screams of "Revisionist" in 70 different languages*

International Arctic: Such Potential if we play our cards right.

USASR: Such a mess, but at least now we have something to unite us for the next decade or so

International Indonesia: We must plan a grand ecological and cultural heist immediately

Freedonia: Hell yeah a fascist cultural victory world

Bonus:

Vagracia: *sees all the hard borders* It is ugly. Ugly Ugly *grabs submachine gun* UGLLYYYYYYYYYY

StarMaker764 · Mar 31, 2025

"Ironic that the US died ranting about Jews being reptilian monsters while not caring that their Aryan pets were creating actual scaly monsters"--Luddye crocodile hunter.

Perhaps no creatures better represent the complexities of ecological preservation in the post-capitalist world than the Creole Crocodiles of Europe.

As with much of the non-native megafauna that now prowl through Europe's ecosystems, the reptiles find their origins in the Confederation of Aryan Republics and its "Aryan ecosystems" initiative which believed that the European ecosystems should be made as dangerous as possible for humans in order to strengthen the master race and weed out the weak.

To that end, the beastly settler would unleash all manner of deadly animals into the Eastern European wild, from lions and elephants to killer bees and rattlesnakes, and of course the crocodiles.

The Aryans weren't picky at all when it came to species, letting loose everything from the giant Nile and Saltwater crocodiles to the less well-known American crocodiles, Cuban Crocodiles, Siamese crocodiles, and Garials, or even smaller species such as the West African dwarf crocodile; the Aryans later justified using a diverse collection by desiring to see which species was ultimately the strongest and most "Aryan in spirit."

Most everyone else thought it madness, and crocodilian specialists lamented that the Aryans were essentially engaging in drawn-out murder of these fine majestic beasts, as no one believed that the cold-blooded reptiles would be able to survive in the harsh snowy winters of Eastern Europe.

And indeed, most of the poor creatures did not, simply freezing to death once temperatures reached below zero and their ectothermic metabolisms couldn't function at all.

For years this is how everyone believed the story of yet another Aryan folly ended, a tragic predictable loss that ultimately benefited no one and yielded only rivers clogged with scaly festering corpses.

But life finds a way goes the saying.

In the years before the Last Jihad and afterward, reports and news would come in of crocodile sightings and attacks throughout the Aryans' territory, and later even in the waters of international Eastern Europe where no crocodiles were ever introduced at all, and it didn't take long afterward for the first specimens to be captured and studied revealing the shocking truth that these creatures weren't some remnants or stragglers but relatively recent hatchlings born years after the initial introduction, and more to the point initial examinations and autopsies of the animals revealed them to not exactly match any known species of crocodiles, with later genetic analysis confirming that almost each one of these animals were hybrids of various species; their very existence shattering decades of dogma and orthodoxy on speciation and wild hybridization.

How exactly did enough reptiles survive for the first few years to form a viable breeding population is unknown, with theories ranging from the creatures developing some kind of hibernation mechanism, small populations managing to survive in warmer spots such as borrows or waters near nuclear reactors, certain genetic/epigenetic adaptations or simply being more resilient to the cold than scientists originally believed.

It is also believed that the initial population crash is what incentivized hybridization in the first place, as crocs desperate to pass their genes and forced into proximity with close enough genetic relatives began to interbreed by accident or by choice, a hypothesis supported by similar behaviors with bears in the Arctic and wolves in North America, though this would be the first time such cases happened with a reptilian species.

In any case, the European crocs are almost all hybrids to some degree, with genome analysis revealing that most mainly carry genes from American, Nile, Saltwater, Cuban and slender-snouted crocodiles with other species contributing as well, and though the saying that no true crocs have the same genome is inaccurate the creatures are quite diverse genetically even as evidence emerges of rudimentary speciation taking place.

Regardless of how they came about, it quickly became clear that the creatures were going to be a headache for ecological restoration teams as the beasts hunted carefully introduced de-extinct megafauna and no doubt would make reintroduction of locally extinct fish and amphibian species more difficult, to say nothing of their still poorly understood effect on the pre-existing ecosystems they now live in.

Many want to simply remove the creatures from the ecological equation, whether by removal to specifically designed enclosures or the old-fashioned way

But that approach has seen much pushback from just as many people, who point out that simple extermination would deprive future crocodile conservation efforts of a valuable reservoir of genetic diversity for more endangered species, such as the American crocodile, meanwhile, relocation risks the crocs escaping and making their way into a new biome where they may push native species to extinction through competition or mating.

Complicating matters further is the fact that many Luddye and Euronisy* communities have grown to incorporate the creatures into some of their folk traditions and thus would not be happy to see them gone, and then there are the supporters of the new Bio-Noospheric movement who not only see the reptilians as vindication of their ideology and a model for future efforts at active human supported biodiversity.

And then some see their skin and other body parts as valuable resources that can be sustainably harvested as is being done with the lesser-known but no less dangerous alligator population in former Tkuman lands.

The International has so far only implanted population control programs to ensure the apex predators don't overburden the ecosystems they have been forcibly implanted in, but other than that remains hamstrung by debates and disagreements over what to do even as the Creole crocs are making their way westward despite efforts at containment; their issue becoming a microcosm of the many post-capitalist ecological oddities and problems that evade easy resolution such as South America's Hippoes, Mexico's giraffes or Greenland's penguins.

The recent so called worldmerge only serves to add more variables to an already entangled equation, as fears of the crocs spreading to the Dewey Denied World( by accident or on purpose) now add greater urgency to the matter.

| Megafauna, Megaproblems |

* A new identity in Eastern Europe that emerged from indigenous Luddye/Slavic slaves from CAR mixing with Caribbean, Latin/Central American, and Asian slaves imported to the confederation over the years.

StarMaker764 · Monday at 10:10 PM

With Friends like these….

"Humanity can learn from those who have broken their chains. Those who have chained humanity for centuries cannot teach humanity anything."—Castro

"I look at these labor brigades and I feel grateful and impressed, how can you not be when they fix up the water pumps, refurbish the town school, and set up drone deliveries in a single week? But I also can't help but feel dread because my mind can't help but ask what disasters made them necessary to begin with"—Dewey Denied, a Cuban Citizen in an interview with Redworld.

Of the nations in the Dewey Denied world, by far the most to profit from the event known as the worldmerge was the republic of Cuba.

Before the sole socialist bastion in the western hemisphere was increasingly isolated and being strangled by a spite-fueled embargo and sanctions regime spearheaded by the world's hyperpower throwing the geopolitical equivalent of a hissy fit over the Cuban people not laying down and dying like good little colonial subjects and daring to want something better.

The Cuban people would manage to do well with the hand dealt to them, despite the hardships and suffering brought on by the special period and the severing of most of its economic ties to the world, managing to establish a respectable scientific sector and a healthcare system whose success would always embarrass that of its supposedly richer and more advanced nations.

But the seemingly inevitable march of marketization was already establishing beachheads within the island, with America's seeming loosening of restrictions only hastening the erosion of Cuban state control over the economy, even as it became that liberalization was only worsening pre-existing problems.

In another time, this slow pitiful decline of a nation that dared dream and had given its all for the cause of universal liberation might have continued unabated, the vultures circling closer every day as they dreamed of inflicting upon Cuba the same social mass murder they inflicted in Chile, Russia, Iraq and practically the entire globe to build new obscene fortunes from mountains of corpses.

It is enough to drive all but the most staunchly materialistic socialist to hope for a miracle.

And to the shock of everyone, a miracle did happen as the worldmerge utterly changed the status quo and flipped the script over a story that might have been tragic.

The opening of relations between Iskandaria and Havana was almost immediate once the confusion of the worldmerge cleared , the former eager for any foothold in this strange world that was both wonderful and nightmarish at the same time while the latter was simply grateful and desperate for any sort of lifeline that didn't also involve cutting its own veins; which they would receive and then some.

To the long marchers, Cuba was both a pleasant surprise (after witnessing what total global Schlafyism looks like, and the disgusting mockery of leftist ideals that was "socialism with Chinese characteristics") and a depressing insight into just how low Actually Existing Socialism has fallen.

everyone agreed that it was unacceptable that a fellow socialist traveler, much less a nation that was in another world would have been a founding member of the Comintern be left in such a state, and as soon as proper agreements and arrangements in place (helped by the personal interference of both versions of Fidel Castro) aid began to flow in unimaginable quantities to the world's seventeenth-largest island.

The Cuban government now found itself in a position where everything it could ever need was being delivered on a silver platter and then some as the resources of an entire world were marshaled to its economic rescue, with everything from Bharati food shipments, Chinese labor volunteers, state of the art medical supplies/equipment, modular housing, agricultural facilities and more being delivered to Havana, the process made much easier by the still poorly understood effects of the glide.

Indeed sailors, pilots, and native Cubans on both sides of the divide found inducing "folds" within the bizarre phenomenon to be much easier once DD Cuba formally obtained Comintern membership, leading to the largely undisproven claim that the glide seems to be influenced somehow by human geopolitical alliances and political ideologies, which only further confounded scientists regardless of affiliation and would inspire a veritable flood of amateur theories on both the Inter- and Com- nets.

Regardless of the exact mechanisms, the ease of transport would only hasten Cuba's planned reconstruction as International reconstruction experts now worked in tandem with Havana officials to map out how to revitalize the island's infrastructure and economy, the former having mixed feelings about their field gaining relevance once more just as it was increasingly becoming obsolete in their native reality.

Along with reconstruction, there was also the opening up of the two cubas to one another and the sheer difference between the two was more than a little disconcerting for both, one was predominantly Hispanic, relatively conservative socially, and having to be self-sufficient while the other was International, cosmopolitan (and in the middle of a Taino cultural revival), interconnected, queer embracing and had the privilege of a global economic network to support it, and the Comintern's more esoteric elements that showed up to help such as the multitude of fleet communes and gift flotillas only served to stun and stupefy the Dewey Deniers even more (especially when one fleet was accompanied by its dolphin non-human citizens).

There were clashes and misunderstandings but thankfully the process was peaceful and productive for the most part, even with minor protests over Cuba's rabid relaxation of anti-LGBTQ+ laws so that it may qualify for International assistance and membership; though this seemingly minor hiccup would be merely the beginning of a long chain of events and debates that would question the uneven power dynamics between the new socialist bloc and its prospective allies in the new world along with the question of how to better effectively ensure social progression in a world still largely trapped in 20th-century social mores.

And of course, this new partnership didn't go unnoticed by the rest of the Dewey Denied world, who of course went through with the usual denunciations and tightened sanctions (along with condemnation of Comintern "red colonialism and denial of self-determination"), the Obama's administration scrambling to pre-empt accusations of being soft on Cuba and communism in general by ending any possibility of a dentente and thaw with Cuba and nullifying any prior agreements to that effect; even as it proved utterly ineffective in silencing the GOP's and broader conservative movements, instead galvanizing to demand even more as the elections loomed ever closer.

The global socialist bloc of course had its own answers to its neoliberal counterpart's accusations, quickly remarking on the Dewey Denied world's abundance of conflict zones, disease hotspots, poverty, continuing famine, colonial exploitation, environmental degradation and other issues that were left unaddressed despite the Cold War being over, and that was before talk began about the misfortunes that the Washington consensus did not see as a problem at all but features.

And beneath all the subtle and not-so-subtle barbs and proclamations the likes of NATO, the PRC, and others were keenly observing the Comintern's actions and policy in Cuba to gauge its motives and capabilities, and found themselves more than a little scared of the sheer magnitude of the resources the International could muster at such short notice and the near inhuman efficiency with which the International Labor Battalions operated, doing work that should take months in mere weeks as roads were repaired, public transport updated and cybernetic infrastructure was set up as a remnant of the Cold War was brought into a post-capitalist age with a speed that was proving disorienting to the island's now stillborn capitalist and elite classes.

A new chapter was beginning in the history of Cuba in both worlds, marked not just by the worldmerge but by the passing of legends; the two Fidel Castros both passed away months after managing Cuba's transition to Comintern membership.

Dewey Denied Castro would pass away on December 11th of the worldmerge year while his Long March counterpart survived into the seventh month of 2017 before joining his double (though not before surviving one last assassination attempt).

| Even legends must die to make way for the future |

….Who needs enemies

"People will die young but it will be fun. We will burn the corpses of the heroes."--Edward Limonov

"We see no issue in dealing with you because you are a slave, as are all the other non-whites in the United States, the only difference between you and the original wretches dragged from Africa is that you are so well trained that chains and whips are no longer needed"—Sovrant Varga Kallio to President Barrack Obama

Like Dewey Denied Cuba, Freedonia was a nation that existed in a state of global siege and isolation when the worldmerge began; though the world of the long march had very good reasons to shun the post-American state.

The so-called labor republic was a nation that celebrated every historical atrocity and sin of humankind and updated them to a form that could persist in the modern age, even if barely in a world dominated by communism and its emancipatory politics, and made no secret of its wish to not only continue doing so (despite also professing to be socialist) but to actively exterminate or enslave those it deemed lesser as evidenced by the now infamous E-day countdown.

As such the Comintern expended every possible effort to contain and strangle this blight upon the world (open war not being an option thanks to the LRF's nuclear arsenal) from arming rebel groups and dissidents, running smuggling operations, destroying infrastructure, denying resources and refusing any diplomacy and contact, even to the point of refusing to bolster Freedonian environmental protection and reconstruction programs at the apartheid's state's own request.

To the Comintern all of the above was the only remotely sane response to a state whose elites paraded around with child bride harems and kept millions in a state of de facto slavery for no other reason other than petty spite, unfortunately however many in the new world had a different view of these events.

To many observers outside the long march timeline, Freedonia was either a besieged bastion of liberty forced into making difficult decisions by the reality of communist dictatorships triumphing all over the world or a state that was maligned by a relentless propaganda machine that distorted and exaggerated every aspect of what was likely a normal liberal democracy (a view that was helped by the fact that Freedonian society had many absurd beliefs and practices in ways both hilarious and horrifying), and most disturbing were those who believed everything the Comintern said about Freedonia but only saw every single crime against humanity as another reason to support the heir of humanity's dark ages.

None of these opinions, however, mattered when it came to Washington's decision to open relations with Jefferson in the aftermath of the Hanoi conference's failure to produce a favorable arrangement for American interests.

Oh there were sympathizers to Freedonia within the edifice of the Federal government and military for one reason or the other, but the bedrock of the then nascent Freedonian-American partnership was grounded in mercenary pragmatism: the US (and its NATO/OCED allies to a lesser degree) needed a foothold in the Long March world and it needed it yesterday with the threat of a globally entrenched socialist world order being something that was unprecedented and existential for a neoliberal hegemony predicated in part upon the notion of their being no alternatives.

One may think that the Pacific State would be a more palatable option on the surface but the third post-American state was far too independent-minded and economically powerful to neatly fit within a world order with room for only one superpower (and the US already having a hard time containing the PRC and its entanglement in the global economy), while Freedonia was seemingly more subservient and economically threatening even if the nightmare republic retained enough industry to be a formidable addition to the US' economic sphere and offered the potential of a new market for the ever hungry capitalist class.

On Freedonia's end, the benefits were both more and less obvious: on the former front they gained a powerful patron to shield them, access to a new global support network, and the potential for help in keeping their restive "surplus" population in line.

Sure Washington's market fetishism and the demands that came with it were a hurdle but not an insurmountable one as evidenced by the Chinese of the DD world, and the Freedonians fully believed in their ability to eventually sway the political consensus in their favor.

Even the alter USA's seeming commitment to racial and gender equality was not alienating to the Freedonian elites (or at least not enough of them), the dark Marxists and national Bolsheviks accurately assessing that behind the curtain of progress the America of Jim Crow and Manifest Destiny not only survived but thrived under new guises, with Europe being little better in their eyes.

Indeed, as evidenced by internal memos and proclamations, the Freedonians saw in the world where the Nazis lost a second chance to forge a world of many sister white labor republics; one who they believed the foundations for had already been laid and merely needed to properly built upon.

This was why the Freedonian Sorvant Kallio, a man whose rise to power began with pioneering the Reservation system, saw no problems in publicly shaking hands with America's first black president even as he seemed to delight in mocking his far more powerful counterpart in ways both subtle and unsubtle (knowing that the calculus of politics ensured that there was backing out for the Americans).

For their part the Americans knew of Freedonia's dreams and aspirations but thought little of it; they were hardly the first or last abominable regime that the land of the free had happily got in bed with, and like all the others Freedonia would be used as needed but kept on a leash and probably made to reform to something more publicly acceptable once it ensured its obsolescence, with a few even entertaining the notion of a post-Comintern collapse Freedonia being incorporated into the United States.

Of course, all of this rested on many assumptions, from the US intelligence agencies' belief in their country's continued competence and President Obama's confidence in Hilary Clinton's victory and ability to keep America's newest monster in line.

| So many un hatched chickens counted |

StarMaker764 · Monday at 1:33 PM

intothekillzone said:
Please

Okay but only because you said please.

1. Freedonia has a tradition of "birth" and "earned" names for each citizen. What this means is that each Freedonian citizen can get a new official name based on their deeds and civic performance with each act deemed worthy meaning you get to add another name up till you get people with 15 word names.

2. Related to the above Freedonia also has a tradition of "pan-whitening" their naming conventions beyond just American names as a way to further bind the disparate freedonian founding groups together, with Sorvant Varga Kallio actual birth name being Stephen Kiss (which is what the Comintern calls him in all official documentation)

3. Part of the reason no Comintern nation joined the UN during Hanoi is that they demanded that the US, France, Israel, Russia, the Arab Gulf States, China and India were to be expelled first as a start.

4. The UK is very very angry at not being included in the above list.

5. Iskandaria Syndrome will be an actual psychological phenomena ITTL.

6. TLM Iceland is one of the world's centers for Jewish Culture.

7. There is a monument to Phyllis Schlafy in Alexandria, first erected as as part of TLM's version of April fool's but kept around by popular demand.

8. Vanuatu is the first non-socialist nation to establish formal diplomatic and trade relationships with TLM polities (by complete accident).

9. The Comintern is currently having a minor crisis about how to handle celebrated figures in TLM who have more sordid or even downright unacceptable histories in OTL such Xi Jinping, Thatcher or Abba Kvoner.

10. There is a growing consensus among older Zapadoslavs that they were too harsh on their German comrades but they are still too stubborn to admit it.

Redshift (OTL/The Long March worldmerge)

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