So I got kinda bored at work the other day and thought I'd try my hand at an Omake worldbuilding...thing. I tried to make it sort of in the style of an old BBC documentary.
Victorian Dissident: The Cultural Marxist League of Victoria (CML-VIC)
Nighttime in Augusta. A man runs through rain-slick streets, glancing about nervously and tucking himself deeper into his trenchcoat. He ducks into an alleyway, looks around, and then knocks. The first three fast, then two more after a pause. The door opens, and the man skulks in. This man has just entered the shadowy world of the Victorian Dissidents.
To an outside observer, the Retroculture regime in Augusta may seem ironclad. Government footage always shows happy farmers going about their day, and the leadership's referenda are inevitably approved by a vast majority of the population.
Dig in the right places, however, and one might find a whole smattering of dissenting groups, gathering in sheds and backrooms. Always just one raid away from a painful death, theirs is a world of paranoia and secrecy. Where even a single tip-off to the Christian Marine Corps can put whole families in danger of disappearing without a trace. Yet despite the risk they still gather in a myriad of small movements. They range from simple bands of friends to organised resistance cells with perhaps thousands of members. And one of the stranger of these is a loose group known as the Cultural Marxist League of Victoria.
Cultural Marxism is a strange and concept. It is the great nemesis in Victoria's Retroculture ideology. And yet it is also loose, formless, and seemingly whatever the Victorian state wishes it to be. It is everywhere and yet nowhere. The monster under Victoria's bed.
In short, a very attractive idea for rebellious youths who wanted to distance themselves from everything Victorian.
With access to actual dissident literature limited by constant government surveillance, some young students instead opted to cobble together their own ideology from a mixture of repurposed government propaganda, youth counterculture and whatever scraps of actual Marxist literature they managed to get off the black market.
Just like the Victorian government, the CML sees Cultural Marxism as an attempt by shadowy academics to destroy the existing social order. But the CML takes this idea and turns it on its head. They believe that the Cultural-Marxist world before Victoria was the real culture of America. A culture that spread the idea of equality across the globe until it was destroyed by insidious Victorian reactionaries who destroyed the world in the process. They hope that by spreading counterculture and "proper Culturally-Marxist ideas" they can subvert Victoria from within and forge a better society.
The CML is a fringe group even among the small collection of dissidents that we know of. They are largely non-violent, being mostly interested in trying to discover "Proper Culturally-Marxist" fields of academia such as Women's Studies. This has led to other Diddident groups viewing themt perhsps rather unfairly, as squabbling teenagers playing at dissent. Even so, it would be a mistake to mistake this for weakness. To oppose the regime in Victoria, always just one raid away from a painful end, takes plenty of bravery and a willingness to get one's hands dirty.
The future of these groups is never secure. Yet one thing's for sure: For as long as the regime in Augusta remains, there will always be those men and women who wish to join the ranks of...the Victorian Dissidents.
