You have a point - these rolls mean that Victoria will take a lot longer to be a threat than they would otherwise... but once the war is over, Alexander is likely to provide aid in their rebuilding. And while they are unlikely to be a threat for a bit after the end of the civil war, there aren't really any powers with the ability to threaten them, either. At least, not for a while. Nibble around the edges, perhaps, but not much more.
I suppose I was conflating what you were saying with others who were treating Victoria as if it will be easy to conquer, which I consider highly unlikely. Sorry about that.
On another note, something that comes to mind about trying to deprogram Victorians - this is something where having established relations with Andrew's Garden/the Blue Mountain Farmers will help. Because they can provide both experience and serve as exemplars that we're not monsters.
No problem! I definitely don't think that we'll be conquering and reconstructing Victoria anytime soon.
As those entertaining and horrifying stories showed, there are lots of people who will be super eager to obey the Cultural Marxist Machine as long as we give them food. Victoria seems to have produced few True Believers in the occupied regions, but they have encouraged a culture of dedicated collaboration. Convincing people that we won't shoot them for voicing a dissident opinion is going to be hard.
There will be some black humor potential in having the Mayor of Louisville call us up to say that he's a good Communist now, he's converted all the churches to centers of Marxist worship, please don't shoot everyone. Also could you send us the Catholic Communist Anti-Bible, we need to know the appropriate terminology when your commissars stop by.
Oh geeze. Right. They have too many men mobilized. That's going to be utterly lethal...
Good point about the CMC's number problem. I do wonder if they are really just 2 divisions against a whole country though... These are the elite of Victoria, their Christian warrior-heroes - and critically, they don't stay at home the way the inquisitor division does, so while they lack the on-hand control systems that the inquisitors have through their network, they also won't be hated in the same way as the inquisitors likely are. And I'll bet Blackwell isn't too popular with taking all the men away and leaving their families facing starvation and it is easy to make propaganda that he personally is the villain responsible for all of Victoria's troubles. He's the only senior officer who survived the surprise defeat by a bunch of effete cultural marxists, the one who agreed to a humiliating treaty with those same cultural marxists, who perhaps is known for wanting to change the so-far super effective doctrine of Victoria towards some kind of weird soulless (dare we say culturally marxist) form where machinery matters more than heroism (if Blackwell's ideas have spread to the hearing of the ordinary population). I would think that the CMC would have good odds to convert "loyalist" militia units and gain the loyalty of towns and cities due to being able to make a plausible case that Blackwell is a cultural marxist and a traitor.
If the CMC can win enough victories to look like they have a realistic chance of winning to blunt the fear of the inquisitors, I'd wager on them being able to command more loyalty than Blackwell. Though this does also depend on how much self-destructive stuff they are doing on the political/propaganda front...
fasquardon
The Crusaders are the warrior-heroes, praised in propaganda and held up as exemplars.
It's just that the Inquisitor branch of the CMC controls the propaganda machine, and they're also in charge of keeping people in line. Which makes them hated, yes, but it also means that ordinary Victorians are accustomed to doing exactly what the Inquisitors say. They're the ones who know where your families live.
The Crusader faction has a strong narrative; Christian Warrior-Heroes fight Decadent Rear Echelon Cowards is a story deeply embedded in Victorian mythology. They just don't have the people with the skills to spread that narrative properly. Victorians will be listening to official radio broadcasts and reading official newspapers controlled by the Inquisitors, and the Crusaders can't build a proper apparatus of control in the middle of a war. Also, as several people have pointed out, it is unclear how much the commons actually believe in the Official Narrative, and defectors can expect Very Bad Things to happen to their families. The "safe" decision is to keep obeying the Inquisitors, at least until it becomes obvious that they're going to lose.
The CMC was absolutely in charge of Victoria because they had hard power through Crusader mechanized divisions and soft power through the Inquisition's secret police and propagandists. Now the CMC has split, and the Crusaders simply don't have the soft power to win this war. Even crushing victories diminish their limited stocks of modern weaponry, while Blackwell will keep throwing farmers with shotguns at them until he drowns the Crusaders under a mountain of corpses.
The way people survive in such systems is by being indistinguishable from true believers, regardless of the extent of disagreement.
It makes it very hard to tell what anyone is thinking, which is going to be a huge problem in dealing with Victorian refugees. Their survival mechanism is "tell the men with guns what they want to hear", so the whole concept of truth is a rare luxury reserved for your nearest and dearest.
Corruption is going to be an issue, because any police officer or government clerk can simply demand bribes from them. Extorting these people is going to be obscenely easy.
