Internal Conflicts in SAMAD

[Webstral]

Some of the reading I’ve been doing lately has spawned a rather ugly idea regarding Thunder Empire. (Is there much about Twilight: 2000 that isn’t ugly?) In American Nations, Colin Woodard describes the culture of the Deep South and its Tidewater satellite in eastern Virginia and North Carolina as being oriented towards rather rigidly hierarchical societies in which nearly universal franchise is a foreign idea imposed by other American “nations” through the federal government. I won’t debate the depth or universality of this observation. The idea is an interesting theme that I’ve heard spoken aloud often enough that there is grounds for a literary theme. In The New Russians, Hedrick Smith describes the supine system of soviets in the USSR up through 1990. The somewhat democratic local institution of soviets were almost completely powerless before the Communist Party. As perestroika neared its denouement, however, the workers’ institutions on which communism in the former Russian Empire was supposed to be based began to assert themselves.

The idea that territory controlled by Fort Huachuca becomes rather imperial—or, more correctly, feudal like most other places—is not new to me. However, the prospect that many of the leading lights at Huachuca might be Deep Southerners as Woodard describes them who rather unconsciously assume the role of the new aristocrats, intrigues me. I find the idea offensive. That intrigues me. I’m guilty of making my favorite characters too noble, too ideal.

On the other hand, there are a lot of communists at Fort Huachuca, and many of them are Soviets. For the purpose of training interrogators in the principle languages of the enemy, speakers of every language given for Warsaw Pact troops in the character creation system have been assembled at Huachuca. Once the nuclear exchange goes strategic and Thomason co-opts the EPW, the new recruits are sorted by skill. Some of them will have skills that Huachuca needs even more than military skills, like dry land farming, machinery skills, medical skills, etc. Even though dispersal of all of the Kazakhs, for instance, among various non-military skills and among all the battalions in the 111th Brigade, they would remain a group with an identity. There would be a strong social pull among them. The same could be said of former Soviets troops from any of the Soviet republics or even from smaller groups within the Soviet Union. They would tend to congregate amongst themselves at least some of the time. Eventually, the idea of a soviet representing the workers (farmers, industrial workers, salvagers—anyone supporting the military) would surface. Depending on circumstances, this idea might then be propagated among one or more sectors of the SAMAD economy (can I even use that word here?).

The irony here would be the Americans creating what really amounts to a totalitarian system in which everything belongs to the fighting aristocracy, while the former Soviets bring in a foreign democratic tool that never properly flourished in the land of its creation to challenge a post-apocalyptic dictatorship from below. I’m not settled on turning Thunder Empire this way. However, I think there’s some rich material down this path. It could be that the emergence of a soviet movement among the laborers causes the more thoughtful among the Huachuca leadership to pause and reflect on what they’re doing. It may be natural for them to assume that under the circumstances highly centralized control of the local economy and political life is necessary. But what if that is not the most efficient means of utilizing the available human resources? It may be that Huachuca’s relative success by late 2000 demands a change of paradigm. The folks at the top of the power structure in SAMAD can debate this one as they have had to negotiate so many other issues. Perhaps the real opportunity for developing these characters and certain themes is the arguments they make and choices they make once the existence of fledgling soviets among the laborers comes to their attention.