In Communist Chicago God has provided us with a test in the form of our equal and opposite. We had grown fat and complacent in victory and He set forward the ultimate test: the Atheist Machine State.
we are so going to steal this. its just to badass a name
not to take.
We misread their insistence on "defence in depth" and Third Generation techniques as a fear of fighting. But it was something else entirely, something Victoria has never fought before: a strategy of pure metal. A mind of metal rigidly calculating and grinding away behind the facade of Burns the Coward and his battalion of myrmidons.
We erred, we saw Burns, we thought we knew what we were getting. But we were wrong.
Look at how they fought: not with elan. Not with wills of flesh, not with maneuver or the contest of will, but like machines. Shells, bullets, ships, missiles, trenches, wire, tanks... Things of metal and not of flesh. Operated as a single will by a people that have turned themselves into a single machine."
he's not really
wrong this is how industrialized nations fight. Never spend blood when you can spend steel. Unlike the victoran mobs, we very much had one grand plan and stuck to it, and build everything around using that strategy.
You keep looking for the mastermind behind all this. The Coward Burns, some foriegn plant, some pagan Witch President and her Crow familiar.
Simply put, this is in no way what lies in Chicago's squalid neighbourhoods. Individual leaders mean nothing in that place. You'll even note that sympathetic actors killed many of their leaders and it did nothing to hinder their military campaign.
again, he's onto something. we have a stable power structure, with institutionalized handoffs of power. we're not built on the backs of a few "heros" the institution can replace leaders more or less without issue, or at least not without the kind of issues victoria would have.
Look at the facts, things from their very own declarations: all men and women are equal, that hierarchy is determined by public will, that all social status and economic class are the same. That all should be equal in all ways.
These are no longer humans but… but rather some sort of collective. Or as I consider it: The Machine State.
Does a machine care if its individual components are Male or female? If they are normal or degenerate? If they are White, Black, Red or Yellow? Does it care about the Soul? About Salvation?
No, it does not.
They are all the same fuel. The same, interchangeable, parts. The Machine State feeds, houses, educates, employs, nurtures all human bodies the same, so it can calculate them the same.
The men and women of Chicago have machine minds and machine souls. They are automatons whelped and groomed communally for a single purpose: to perpetuate an out of control machine.
so, essentially we are a democracy, where the will of the people leads the government. He's describing that like its some eldritch horror.
God does not test without reason. God is punishing us for the arrogance and complacency seeded within us by our many victories. We must humble ourselves before Him and cast aside our pride as our fathers and grandfathers once did."
Aside from being spot on meta wise, he's right that lazy pride was what fucked them in-universe. They got too used to punching down, so the instant they where not doing that quite as much it all went to shit.
The Army ultimately failed. Our weapons and tactics were not up to the task, the Machine State calmly calculated what it would need to spend in blood and ammunition to stop us and it did so.
this is more or less exactly correct. With less precision than he's implying, but yeah. Again, he's seeing a thing we did and treating it like its Lovecraftian magic. That we sat down and
thought about how we could win is to him terrifying.
"What will Victory take?
Utter annihilation. Next question.
Alright, fine, James.
In my time in command of continuous counterinsurgency patrols in the southwest and along the Mississippi I learned that in order to pacify an area you had to identify the leaders, the bad apples, remove them and then make a few additional examples to make the lesson stick. Very rarely did I ever need to destroy entire communities of malcontents.
But the Machine State that has metastasized in Chicago is different. Leadership means nothing to them. Leaders are generated from within, by the communal mind to coordinate actions. There is nothing there to remove or make an example of, the entire community is the cancer.
We need to see that the Machine State comes from its people. It is a true expression of their collective will. It will only be defeated by annihilating the minds that make it up. And they are all equally culpable in its function.
There will be no "rescued" feminist wives taken by men thinking with their dicks instead of their faith this time. None of that here.
Every male and female component of the Machine State will need to be destroyed before sanity returns to God's land.
He's not really even wrong. We
won and our people have tasted both freedom and food. If we where conquered, we would remain a hotbed of rebellion for generations. Its one of the benefits of a healthy democracy, a lot of citizen buy-in. The smart sociopath move
is to simply exterminate everyone and be done with it.
this guy is a great villain because he's essentially coaching a description of the virtues of a healthy industrialized democracys Warmachine like its some Lovecraftian horror come down from space. He is also in a way a good man. He buys into the values he was taught, and looked at from within those values, he is thoughtful, intelligent and kind. Its just the value system he is a paragon in is one that would not be out of place as a Warhammer chaos cult.
Amazing work AKuz, this guy if a
fantastic antagonist.
