A/N said:
Posted pre-cleared and with the full approval of @PoptartProdigy and polished up to a "oh well, I feel fine about posting it" level
>: P
Found at FreeOpenSourceInfo.org
A History and Overview of the Resistance Groups of the Pacific Northwest:
The formative event of the current underground resistance ecosystem of Cascadia was
The Rainbow Uprising of 2062. Officially lasting from June 7th to October 21st 2062, between June and July 2062 the Cascadian Rainbow Army Offensive seemed on the verge of throwing the forces of Imperial Japan back into the sea and reestablishing an independent nation in the North American Pacific Northwest.
The name "Rainbow Uprising" comes from the fact that each of the various insurrectionary factions welded together by the Cascadian Green Party were designated by a colour term: The far left Red Army, the American/Canadian Revivalist Blue Army, the Green Party's own Green Army, the First Nations' Black and Red Army, and the far right White Army.
The genesis of the 2062 uprising can be traced back twenty years to the destruction of the original Cascadian Republic at Japanese and Victorian hands in 2042.
During the conflict the ruling Green Party leaders were killed after surrender by local Victorian auxiliares…followed quickly into the grave by the pre-selected collaborationist resistance government who were also killed by local Victorian auxiliaries in a case of their self-important Victorian commander going well off the reservation.
This was followed by the local Victorian-recruited auxiliaries, a mix of white supremacist, far right, and Christian extremist groups local to the area establishing themselves as the Cascadian government during the initial stages of the Japanese occupation.
After several weeks it became clear that the east Asian Japanese forces were not going to hand the region over to the newly formed, self-consciously Victorian, "Northwestern Confederation", and in fact, were there to stay. This occupation by a non-white, non-Christian, non-American force enraged the far-right coalition that made up the provisional Northwestern Confederation government and they attempted to organize a revolt.
However, due to a combination of an overwhelming Japanese military presence and the unpopularity of the provisional government with the majority of the Cascadian populace the revolt was over before it began. Most of the leadership was arrested or killed within days of their plot being brought into the open by members of the former Cascadian administrative apparatus.
Afterwards, the Japanese reorganized the region, and in many places relied upon the pre-existing political apparatus that had appeared happy being a junior partner to the late People's Republic of China and seemed just as happy being a junior partner in the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere.
For the next nearly two decades the puppet Cascadian Green Party government appeared to be efficient, compliant, and enthusiastic local partners to the Japanese Imperial apparatus and they managed to keep resistance across the region under control, barring a few minor flare ups from the far left and far right that were quickly dealt with.
However, behind the scenes, key members of the collaborationist government were engaged in building an anti-Japanese coalition. Moving cautiously, the Regional Action Committee of the Cascadian Green Party methodically built links with all the communities opposed to their Japanese overlords, and were more than prepared to throw uncontrollable extremist groups to the Japanese to preserve their secrecy and allay any Japanese suspicions.
In 2061, the Regional Action Committee was able to massively advance their agenda by making contact with elements of the recently reunified Chinese Republic's intelligence service.
With covert Chinese aid promised, the Regional Action Committee set a planned date of early winter 2062 for their revolt and began contacting the other resistance groups that they had spent years, even up to a decade, cultivating to coordinate their uprising.
Unfortunately for the newly reorganized Regional Action Committee (Now formed into the Rainbow Army Coordination Council or "RACC") Japanese intelligence stumbled across smuggled weapons shipments during routine operations in the Port of Prince Rupert. Alerted by sympathetic elements within the local law enforcement community, the RACC decided to move up the date of their uprising to the very next day, June 7th 2062, before Japanese Naval Intelligence could begin tracing the origins and destinations of several tonnes of surplus Indian and PRC military gear.
Despite the hastily launched nature of the uprising, the initial attacks were highly successful. Complacent Japanese troops and numerous Rainbow Army sympathizers within the local auxiliary forces ensured that the initial Japanese resistance was scattered and badly led.
In almost two weeks of furious combat operations the Rainbow Army had driven the Japanese Army and Navy out of much of the Pacific Northwest, with no intact Japanese formations remaining between the Coastal and Rocky Mountains.
With the Japanese attempting to reorganize their forces on the Vancouver and Haida Gwaii islands and rushing reinforcements to their remaining footholds on the mainland, the Rainbow Army also paused to reorganize their own forces. In early July the Rainbow Army launched a coordinated assault on all remaining Japanese port facilities up and down the coast of Cascadia before the Japanese occupation forces could fully re entrench themselves.
The fiercest fighting of the July Offensive was seen in the disastrous attempts to seize the gulf coast islands from the Japanese Navy via a combination of surprise attacks and local partisan resistance, as well as the ultimately successful attempt to seize Kitimat and Prince Rupert from the Japanese on the north coast during the night of July 31st.
Sadly, while initially a critical tactical and strategic victory, the Battle of Kitimat is better known for the Kitimat Massacre that followed the surrender of its Japanese garrison. Taken prisoner by members of the Victorian-inspired White Army, the Japanese prisoners, their families, and any local persons of east asian descent were killed by the White Army in retaliation for the losses they'd taken during the battle and in an attempt to break the morale of the remaining Japanese forces stationed on the north coast.
During the massacre, elements of the primarily First Nations Black and Red Army and primarily white Blue Army attempted to halt the killings. Their attempts spiraled into the Second Battle of Kitimat.
News of the Massacre and subsequent 2nd Battle of Kitimat spread throughout both the world and the rest of the Rainbow army causing the White and Red Armies, already tenuous allies of convenience, to move to open war across Cascadia in what was the start of the "August Mutinies''. This fighting was followed by other resistance groups of all armies taking the opportunity to settle old scores and even engage in looting and uncoordinated attacks on Japanese lines. Ultimately the Green Army was able to act as peacekeepers and end the infighting, but by the time they were able to put down the last Blue Army Mutineers on August 27th it was too late.
By the time the RACC was able to punish the remaining White Army members that had carried out the Kitimat Massacre and get all of their subordinate armies back in order Japanese Forces had not only managed to resecure Seattle and Vancouver, while the Rainbow Army was paralysed with infighting, but they'd secured permission to stage their forces from the New California Republic, Alaska, and the Arctic Conservationate to put down the barbarous Cascadian Eco-fascists.
To this day the surviving high command of the Rainbow Army maintain that newly reunited China was mere days away from recognizing a free and independent Cascadian Republic when news of the Kitimat Massacre hit and the subsequent August Mutinies ripped through the Rainbow Army's ranks, although no outside sources have ever corroborated the story and the Chinese themselves maintain that they would never interfere in the Japanese Empire's internal affairs.
By October it was all over but the lifetime sentences to forced labour and indentured servitude. The rifts formed by the August Mutinies have never healed and the various resistance forces in Cascadia have been unable to put forward a unified front ever since.
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Since the end of the Rainbow Uprising of 2062 the Imperial Japanese colony of Cascadia has gone through three distinct periods where insurgent and terrorist activity waxed and waned.
The years immediately following the Uprising's failure, from 2063 to 2067, is the first period. These four years mark a period where the remaining resistance movements operated in what is best described as a "defensive crouch"
Most movements rooted in defined areas like the communities founded by far left and far right elements, or First Nations communities, were treated with a very heavy hand by the Japanese occupation forces, who were unafraid of bad public relations due to the often isolated and rural nature of these communities compared to the larger coastal cities. In these places resistance was all but dead with entire generations dead or in work camps.
In the cities the remnants of the Blue and Green armies melted back into the urban population, and while surveillance was heavy, the new Japanese Governor General deliberately lightened the occupational force's hand by the end of 2064 to reduce costs and encourage economic development in the highly educated urban professional workforce.
The most relevant development during that period was the split in the Cascadian Green Party. Both factions had learned that a military uprising was doomed to failure, but one group had decided that that meant that the party should devote itself to collaboration and moderation of the Japanese occupation. The other disagreed.
By the time Cascadia had entered the spring of 2067, the Empire of the Rising Sun had concluded that they had pacified the northwest pacific region.
This was in error, as the second period, from 2067 to 2072 would show. The second period, known as the "Years of Fire", was defined by the bloody rampage of the Cascadian Green Party (Direct Action Committee) in a campaign of terror that extend from the northern interior to the coastal cities, and even to the Home Islands themselves, as the DAC sought to undermine the capability of the Japanese authorities to function and convince them that the occupation was too costly to maintain.
The Direct Action Committee announced their presence with the Bicentennial Bombings of July 1st 2067 with attacks across the former Canadian province of British Columbia. While the Bombings mostly targetted barracks belonging to the Imperial Japanese army, the most shocking bombing was the attack on
IJN Zuihō while the carrier was docked at the Japanese fleet base in Prince Rupert. The attack resulted in the death of Admiral Yakahashi Tomo and fifty two IJN other officers and sailors and resulted in
Zuihō's recall to Japan where she was laid up in repairs for thirteen months.
The Bicentennial Bombings were followed up by other Direct Action Committee operations across the coastal Cascadian cities including the bombing of JAL flight JL17 over the Pacific, killing all 334 passengers and crew including two sitting members of the Imperial Diet.
The DAC actions inspired the reformation of Red and White army formations in the rural countryside, which primarily launched attacks on work camps and Japanese settlers respectively.
The Years of Fire reached their climax in 2072 with the "Valentine's Day Massacre" on February 14th 2070, when a Green Party Do-Or-Die suicide cell launched an attempted to kill Imperial Princess Miki and her childhood friend Grand Duchess Catherine of Russia during a Russian sponsored environmentalist summet held in Vancouver.
While the Japanese response to Years of Fire had been escalating attempts to use mass surveillance, investigation work, infiltration, and special forces raids to counter the rise in terrorism, the Valentine's Day Massacre, and especially the death of Governor-General Tobei Ozawa during that attack led to a complete shift in strategy.
Abandoning earlier attempts to present a modern, enlightened, administration, the occupation administration banned all local political organizing, rounded up everyone even remotely linked with the Cascadian Green Party, instated curfews, instituted tight censorship controls, and began implementing collective punishment.
By 2072 the measure seemed to have worked, and the insurgent campaigns in both rural and urban Cascadia had petered out, though not after the DAC assassinated Kazuko Matsushima, the provisional Governor-General who had ordered the new measures. Matsuchima was killed by the last operational Do-or-Die cell in an attack on the Esquimalt Naval Base.
The third period, from 2072 to present, has been marked by a shift from boots on the ground to drone networks and data driven targeted killings as the IJA shifts its manpower to the Empire's increasingly uncertain border with the Republic of China. Despite, or perhaps because of, the brutal automated measures implemented by the Japanese occupation, the Cascadian populace remains unsettled.
And more troubling yet for the Japanese administration, news of the outcome of the Great Lakes War has reached Cascadia and the population of the Pacific Northwest again feel that independence is possible.
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The following is a deeper dive into the various "Colour Armies" of the 2062 Uprising, and the most well known of the splinter factions that continued the resistance against the Japanese Occupation.
The Cascadian Red Army:
When the American Federal government collapsed, a murderer's row of horrific far right regimes emerged across the former United states, and minorities of all types fled west to progressive Cascadia and California.
While many of the refugees that fled to Cascadia during the Collapse of US Federal control integrated into existing social structures, a plurality of those newly arrived refugees were politically left wing individuals who had fled from the growing zones of far right control in the Northeast, midwest, and elsewhere. When these refugees arrived in Cascadia they brought with them views on society and economics that led to the founding of hundreds of idealistic new communities, both urban and rural. They were often supported, though not entirely enthusiastically, by successive center-left Cascadian Green Party governments who considered it better to have the left engaged in sustained community building efforts than attempting to tear down what stability they'd maintained.
These communities, often made up of LGBTQ+ and racial minorities, were targeted by the new Christo-Fascist provisional government in the few months between the end of Cascadia and Imperial Japan asserting their full authority.
Afterwards, the Imperial Japanese occupation government, often at the advice of the Green Party collaborationist government, was content to leave these communities unmolested provided that they kept to themselves, made no attempt to openly spread their beliefs, and paid their taxes on time.
Despite this relatively light hand, when the Rainbow Uprisings began, members of these communities joined the various Cascadian Red Armies in disproportionate numbers, and a Red Army company raised from the Kitsault Commune was the first to turn on their nearby White Army compatriots in rage once they received word of the Kitimat Massacres.
When the Imperial Navy smashed the largest surviving concentration of the Cascadian Red Army in the two month long Battle of Portland, tens of thousands of surviving Red Army fighters were taken prisoner and subjected to terrible treatment as virtually the entire force was sentenced to forced labour and indentured servitude in remote resource extraction facilities. Those who arrived alive at these facilities then had to endure the endless "Camp Wars" fought with White Army fighters given similar sentences.
The children and surviving partners and family of the missing Red Army prisoners were never informed of their parents' and partners' fates, perhaps in an attempt to instill uncertainty and fear into their communities.
These communities also saw a much heavier occupational hand after 2062, with Japanese authorities often attempting to brutally and murderously impose their own moral codes on the "degenerate" Red Communes.
This, naturally, led to the rise of more resistance forces. Decentralized and heavily cellular in structure, these groups are often identified by the name "Cascadian Red Army," but just as often individual cells refer to themselves by names like "Cascadia's Orphans," "Cascadia's Daughters," and the like, and usually refer to each other as "Cousins" in reference to their shared experiences growing up in the shadow of a missing generation of parents and caretakers.
In the cities Red Army cells often attack anyone judged to be collaborators, and have a special love of attacking Japanese Army checkpoints. Out in the countryside, the Red Army will occasionally launch attacks on the Japanese forced labour camps. While this is often pitched as attacks on the material basis of the Japanese occupation, as often as not, the Children of Cascadia are looking for any Red Army of '62 members who have somehow survived the brutal decades.
While the Japanese have withdrawn many of their occupation units to garrison closer to the threat of a resurgent China, the void left by Japanese boots on the ground has been filled by drones in the skies. Rare is the day that a rural Red Commune cannot see an armed drone overhead. Watching, waiting.
The Lavender Army:
- During the 2062 Rainbow Uprising Several Red Army units were informally designated as "Lavender Army" units to denote being formed by LGBTQ+ members of the Red Communes.
One of these units, about a company in size, managed to escape the climactic Battle of Portland and escaped into the Pacific Rainforest. While they went to ground during the period directly after the Uprising, once the Years of Fire began, these experienced survivalists began launching attacks against corporate and military work camps, often attempting to liberate the prisoners and involuntarily indentured workers.
Though they survived the Years of Fire and the subsequent crackdowns, the Lavender Army was unable to survive the subsequent turn to heavy drone usage as the Lavender Army was destroyed by drone swarms and special forces attacks over the course of March 2074.
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Cascadian Green Party (Direct Action Committee):
In the aftermath of the 2062 revolt the Cascadian Green Party split, those who were resigned to the inevitability of the new order threw themselves on Japanese mercy and informed on as much of the resistance as possible in an attempt to survive.
Those who decided to fight on went underground and have become the Japanese administration's most dangerous foes.
Having determined that it would be impossible to drive off the Japanese colonisers in a straight up slugging match, the Cascadian Green Party's Direct Action Committee took up the torch of the defunct Regional Action Committee and Rainbow Army Coordination Council and decided that they would make the Japanese administration's occupation as untenable as possible by killing as much of said administration as possible no matter the reprisals.
Brutal Darwinian selection, the locations of remaining weapons caches, and knowledge of which skeletons were in whose closets from the '62 Rainbow uprising helped to mold these diehards into a dedicated and effective insurgent force.
During their nearly fifteen years of open operations the Direct Action Committee has killed: twenty Japanese C-level executives, eight Japanese Generals, two Japanese Cascadian Governor-Generals, one Imperial Minister, one member of the Japanese Imperial Family, and innumerable lower level officials and officers in a concerted campaign of terror that have even occasionally reached the Home Islands themselves.
The Direct Action Committee's most famous attack is probably the "Valentine's Day Massacre", of February 14th 2070, when a Green Party Do-Or-Die suicide cell launched an attack on a Russian sponsored environmental summit held in the Vancouver Convention Center.
During said attack the cell came close to killing both the heir to Russia's Alexander IV, Catherine, and her close friend the Japanese Imperial Princess Miki, and were only stopped at the last moment by the heroic actions of Catherine's special forces bodyguards.
Afterwards the remaining collaborationist Green Party was outlawed in the aftermath of the Valentine's Day Massacre, and the Japanese intelligence apparatus tore through any organization even remotely connected with the Direct Action Committee and reprisals were made with any civilian populations even remotely connected with the Direct Action Committee. For several years the Japanese hoped that they'd finished off the Greens, but instead the remaining cells had gone to ground and have reappeared again in recent months, just as deadly as ever, and especially emboldened by Victoria's defeat in the Great Lakes War.
The Cascadian Green Party (Direct Action Committee) is considered by many as the world's most bloodthirsty and fanatical currently operational terrorist organization. Others consider them anti-Imperialist heroes. As for the Greens themselves, they consider themselves merely determined men and women trying to convince an oppressor that the cost of occupation is too high to bear.
Despite their political aims being fairly average Social Democratic positions and Cascadian independence, a concerted Japanese propaganda campaign has sought to paint the CGP(DAC) as environmentalist extremist anarcho-primitivists dedicated to the destruction of civilization itself and conflating them with the Earth Liberation Alliance. One particular animated pseudo-documentary labelled the Direct Action Committee as "Gaia's Executioners": a term which so amused some cells enough that they unofficially adopted it for use in internal and external communications.
Older Japanese occupation officials still tend to refer to the Direct Action Committee as "The Regionals" and the "Green Army" in memory of the uprising of 2062 and it's lead up.
The Earth Liberation Alliance:
While Alexander IV's heroic (In the ancient Greek sense) efforts to prevent climate change have held off the worst catastrophes, the job is not yet finished and Earth teeters on the precipice of the apocalypse.
The initial Cascadian green party legitimately put in effort to combat climate change, efforts that were sadly undermined by the Japanese occupation. While since then the Japanese have humoured Alexander by using Conservationate pioneered resource extraction techniques, they still treat Cascadia as a disposable resource to be used and not respected.
This has, predictably, caused some anger in Cascadia. In most cases that anger is directed at the Japanese treatment of the populace, but for a handful that anger is directed at the treatment of the planet.
Those people have a tendency to join the Earth Liberation Alliance.
The ELA's precursor was formed from a late 2068 meeting between a Red Commune environmental advocacy group and ex-Green party collaborators, they spent a year as strident, but mostly peaceful group of environmental advocates that eventually grew to about thirty members.
At some point in late 2069 the Japanese occupation forces brought the entire group in for intimidation after they protested in front of a Japanese corporate office in Seattle. One member died "while resisting arrest" and the rest were brutalized to lesser levels before being dumped back on the street.
This caused a small group to break off, as they were now convinced that the Japanese would only understand direct action.
While the initial attacks by the ELA were mistaken as copycat Direct Action Committee attacks, the ELA radically radicalized themselves and their methods, eventually moving on to attack key infrastructure components that the DAC usually avoided as the harm to the civilian populace outweighed the harm to the occupation forces.
These included attacks on bridges in residential areas, on public transit, on manufacturing centers, power plants, and even hospitals.
Initially confusing for the Japanese, the occupation forces eventually captured members of the newly founded second cell of the expanding ELA who explained their newly codified anarcho-primitivist ideology which called for the destruction of everything that enabled industrial society and for humanity to return to a pre-urban state.
When questioned about their relationship to the Green Party Direct Action Committee, one of the ELA fighters responded contemptuously and claimed that they were "Gaia's
True Executioners," which made several confusing attacks previously assigned to the DAC suddenly make more sense.
While the terrorist organization of the ELA is still small, their ideology has still inspired people worried about the progress of climate change. By the mid-70s a larger group of a few tens of thousands, calling themselves "Earth's Children", had grown up in Cascadia that at least rhetorically defended the ELA's actions and called for the implementation of an anarcho-primitivist project.
Pacific Northwest Liberation Front:
When Cascadia declared independence from the former United States and Canada with Chinese assistance, a large population of patriotic Americans and Canadians remained. Most managed to accept independence as a temporary measure, and nearly all believed that the west coast would return after some time to repacify and reunify the former United States and Canada.
The remnants of the American Democratic Party and Canadian Liberal parties entered into a permanent temporary arrangement and acted as an active and enthusiastic loyal opposition to the Cascadian Green Party. Their main differences with the Greens being in the matter of preparing for a glorious return to the east.
Sadly, their return was not to be. Spurred on by Russian and Victorian assistance, the Empire of the Rising Sun crossed the pacific and crushed Cascadia.
During the chaotic few months where the "Northwestern Confederacy Provisional Government" believed itself in charge and the Japanese military prepared to take control of Cascadia, the Revivalist parties were driven underground by the near psychotic hatred of the far-right provisional government who considered even the remnants of the Democratic party their traditional enemies.
When the Japanese solidified their control over Cascadia the revivalists settled into unhappy acceptance of the occupation, not openly resisting, but putting their hopes into liberation by the Pacific Republic until they too fell to domination from across the ocean.
The remaining party apparatuses and business community was frozen out by the new Japanese overlords but maintained contact with each other and when some members were contacted by the Green party conspirators, they pledged their full support to any uprising.
The "Blue Army", (So named as the traditional colour of American Federal control) was not as fanatical as the Red and White armies, didn't have the local knowledge of the Black and Red army, and didn't have the inside track of the Green Army, but the Blue army was able to bring the resources of the local patriotic business establishment and revivalist sentiment to the cause of Cascadian independence -including several former American military units that had gone to ground after the destruction of the Pacific Republic.
The Blue Army didn't particularly distinguish itself during the Rainbow Uprising, negatively or positively, and are best known for attempting to stop the Kitimat Massacre and winning the Second Battle of Kitimat…as well as for sections of the Blue Army to be the last to return to order during the August Mutinies.
After the August Mutinies ended and the Imperial Japanese reconquest began in earnest the Blue Army melted back into the populace, deciding to forgo the suicidal resistance undertaken by the rest of the Rainbow Armies.
While this retreat has often been considered cowardice by the other resistance groups, the Blue Leadership maintains that it was a strategic consideration made to preserve the fighting power and resources of the revivalist cause. Even today the Blue Army is probably the most intact out of the forces that participated in the '62 uprising, with entire cells and companies simply vanishing into the civilian populace as the Japanese concentrated on the other resistance forces.
Despite the increasing brutality of the Japanese occupation, the bulk of the revivalist cause focuses on harbouring their resources for when the time is right. And with the recent revivalist victory in the Great Lakes War perhaps that time is fast approaching...
The Matchstick Men
"Matchstick men" is an unofficial term for loosely connected groups of revivalist youths who take out their frustrations with the repression of the Japanese Occupation by lighting Japanese businesses, and businessmen, on fire.
So far they've managed to survive by avoiding military targets and usage of digital techniques to avoid surveillance, which has led the Japanese occupation forces to suspect that the Matchstick Men are drawn from the ranks of Cascadia's tech industry.
The Grits
Though the descendants of the Blue Army have focused on building up their resources, this by no means indicates that the descendants of the Blue Army are idle. Many revivalist groups are known for engaging in bank robbing, theft, and kidnapping for profit.
These groups are known as "Grits", which started as a backhanded reference to the Blue origin in the Canadian Liberal party due to a complicated and obscure train of references and obsfuscations. But the term has been adopted because these latter-day Robin Hoods see themselves as the hardworking frontline of the Blue cause.
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American Patriotic Christian Army:
(AKA: "Cascadian White Army", "The 14th Division", "Sons of Liberty (Pacific)")
Before the Collapse, the Pacific Northwest harboured a large white supremacist and far right presence that often fought with the more well known far left presence in Oregon and Washington state. Though far right sentiment existed across British Columbia's rural areas as well.
When the Collapse began, the far right presence in the northeast consolidated into the Northern Confederacy, and the midwest fell under the control of openly Nazi-inspired groups, the far right of the PNW consolidated along similar lines as the Northern Confederation of Kraft and Rumford.
They were prevented from repeating Victoria's dark miracle by the entire Pacific Northwest splitting off and declaring itself Cascadia under a center left social democratic government with the backing of the People's Republic of China.
Despite this setback the far right continued to organize furiously along Victorian lines, and often with Victorian guidance and encouragement. Both groups dreamed of a Northwest Confederacy to match the Northern Confederation, two great White and Christian Brothers splitting the former US between them.
Suffice it to say that when they finally got their shot at power after Japan collapsed Cascadia, the Pacific Victorians proceeded to alienate every other group in the region and then brought the Japanese down on themselves as well when they refused to be a group of cooperative collaborators to Japan as Victoria had been for Russia.
Having been booted from power the far right stewed for nearly two decades, many of their members committing hate crimes against their neighbours, especially the more remote Red Communes who the Japanese occupation officials studiously neglected outside of tax and corvee labour collection.
However, due to their hatred of the east asian Japanese and heavy armament, in the lead up to the Rainbow Uprising of 2062 the more prominent far right organizations were contacted by the RACC and invited to join the general uprising.
While the soon to be White Army hated the other Armies, they hated the Japanese more, and considered that they would be able to take power again once the Japanese were gone and finally take their place as the "Pacific Victoria"
When the uprising came the White Army fought with viciousness against the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Too much viciousness as it would turn out. It was a White Army unit out of Prince George that conducted the Kitimat Massacre and triggered the August Mutinies that doomed the Rainbow Uprising.
Despite this, the White Army refused to accept defeat, believing until the last that the Victorian army would arrive to save their White Christian brothers, even informally calling the remaining White Army the "14th Division" -a reference to the 12 Divisions of the Victorian Regular Army.
In the aftermath, many captured White Army fighters were subject to the same treatment as captured Red Army fighters, and the "Camp Wars" between Red and White Army soldiers sentenced to a life of hard labour and indentured servitude are almost legendary in prisoner and Japanese military circles (and the focus of at least one animated pseudo-documentary).
Throughout the 60s, Japanese Army units heavily patrolled the communities that contributed to the White Army, and their high handed and brutal behavior enraged the locals who continually turned to White Army splinter groups who then carried out reprisal and hit and run attacks on the patrols. Eventually the Japanese withdrew their troops at the end of the 60s when the border with a revanchist China became too uncertain, and the patrols were replaced with Drones programmed to hunt down and kill terrorists based on facial recognition software and collateral damage be damned.
In the current day, the remaining far right leaders still marshal their power away from the ever watchful drones, planning for their next attempt to seize control of Cascadia. These bitter old men still hold out hope for Victoria's arrival, considering the news of the Great Lakes War to merely be (((Media))) propaganda.
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Sacred Lands Defence Group:
(AKA: "Cascadian Black and Red Army")
The material status of First Nations peoples didn't change that much under independent Cascadia's rule. But things didn't get worse as they had in so many other places. So that was nice.
When Cascadia fell, the only thing protecting them from the provisional Northwestern Confederacy was that they were farther away than the "liberals, communists, pagans, and freaks" closer to home. So when the Japanese formally annexed Cascadia into the Co-Prosperity Sphere it was almost a relief compared to what the Victorian-inspired far right government had been planning.
But the First Nations peoples also knew what being colonial subjects meant, and the Japanese were clearly here to rule colonial subjects. Resistance to the Japanese occupation started small. Small acts of sabotage, creative interpretations of instructions.
They stayed there for a long time, as most First Nations groups simply didn't have the power or numbers to resist Japanese forces for long.
Instead some communities turned to smuggling people and possessions into and out of Cascadia, especially via the northern routes to first the rump Canadian state and then the growing Arctic Conservationate. This underground railroad brought these organizations to the attention of the RACC as they prepared for the Rainbow Uprisings.
While not all First Nations groups joined in the Uprisings, those that did were called the "Black and Red" armies after the traditional style patches worn by the coastal fighters. Though these Armies generally banded together under the flag of the Sacred Lands Defence Group and secured their own territories in anticipation of Red, Blue, Green, and White relief.
Especially notable are the Black and Red Army partisan units that attacked the regrouping Japanese units reforming on the Vancouver and Haida Gwaii Islands and helping to prevent their return to the mainland.
White the Black and Red Army did initially have some scattered issues with the White Army, local Black and Red Partisans from Kitimat itself were present at the Kitimat Massacre and helped the Blue Army in their attempts to prevent the atrocity. In the chaos of the August Mutinies that followed the local Black and Red Army groups merely returned to securing their own lands and ignored instructions from the Rainbow Army High Command.
When the Japanese returned, the Black and Red Armies fought on, and in many cases evacuated their communities to prevent Japanese reprisals, many times fleeing across the border to Russian aligned territory in Alaska, the Conservationate, and California in an attempt to halt Japanese pursuit. The resulting refugee crisis annoyed Alexander IV, and embarrassed Imperial Japan.
Eventually, as the revolt wound down, the Japanese promised that they would not engage in collective punishment if the Black and Red Army leaders would hand themselves over for punishment.
They did so, and the Japanese mostly kept their word. Though the burden of corvee labour tends to fall heavier on First Nations communities than other populations, perhaps in memory of the Japanese embarrassment.
The memory of the Black and Red Army has never been forgotten, and the First Nations Communities of Cascadia wait for the right opportunity to again attempt to assert their sovereignty against a brutal colonial apparatus. And the small acts of rebellion continue.
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