PART SIXTY-FIVE: Liberation Theology (January 6th, 1883 – October 27th, 1884)
(Disclaimer: As an ordinary human being, I have no idea how the Victoria 2 economy really works. Explanations for why everything went horribly wrong are therefore basically made-up, and probably don’t match whatever mysterious logic decreed that… things happened.)

Excerpts from the minutes of the Salon of Noor Sallajer

DEBATE PARTICIPANTS

For the irenicist tendency of the Athens Commune
Rabbi Liraz Tavori

For HERMES
Citizen Philomon Anatolikos

Fatima Sallajer, hostess

TAVORI: Why, look who it is! Philomon Anatolikos, the prodigal Pangalist, has come crawling back to Athens.
ANATOLIKOS: Please, Liraz, give me a break. Even I think Goethe went too far.

TAVORI: Yes, changing the rules of baseball in the Northern League is clearly the greatest crime committed by the Kazike. You’ve hit the nail on the head, Philomon.
ANATOLIKOS: Times are tough all over.

ANATOLIKOS: Are you two really the only ones here?
SALLAJER: Many other members of the Debate Society are busy with Commune business. TAVORI: We’ve been rather busy lately. You might have noticed.
ANATOLIKOS: Anyway, the whole… Goethe thing. Proof positive that the Pangalists are wrong and I, personally, Philomon Anatolikos am right. Since, shock of all shocks, a bloody revolution in the industrial heart of Central Europe might have some economic consequences that will hang over everything else like the god-damned sword of Damocles.

TAVORI: The stock market collapse of ’83. The unemployment, the breadlines, the protests…
TAVORI: It feels disingenuous to blame that solely on Goethe, like it’s some kind of freak occurrence and not just the worst iteration yet of a continuous cycle of capitalist booms and busts.

ANATOLIKOS: Labor is a commodity. You’re going to get price changes, you’re going to get surpluses. But… yes, a warehouse of surplus cotton nobody can sell isn’t going to get out torches and pitchforks and riot in the streets. So maybe it’s a little different.

ANATOLIKOS: Don’t pretend like you have all the answers, though. Duvnjak was a socialist.

TAVORI: Not a very good socialist.

ANATOLIKOS: Hey, remember when the Capitolino thought the stock market crash was their time to shine? Pretty fucking hilarious that they thought this was at all about them, that they meant anything at all in politics.
TAVORI: A heartwarming reminder of a simpler time, I agree. Revolutionaries on one side, conservatives and reactionaries on the other.
ANATOLIKOS: Now the revolutions three deformed children are trying to eat one another.

ANATOLIKOS: But, you know, I kind of thought the liberals had a shot. Not HERMES, obviously, but your regular plain jane liberals woulda been all right. Shit, the Junonians and the Julians finally buried the hatchet and became ARTEMIS! Meanwhile, the Labour Party was tearing itself apart over whether to stand with Duvnjak and the Irenicists were twisting the knife.

TAVORI: We were winning the election, you mean.

Fr. Konstantinos Hadjiapostolou, Fifteenth President of the Byzantine Republic
Inaugurated March 4th, 1883

The Irenicists

ANATOLIKOS: Fat lot of good it did Hadjiapostolou.
TAVORI: I feel for Comrade Hadjiapostolou, I really do. He was trying to solve a problem that just couldn’t be solved within the framework of a liberal capitalist state, however good his intentions. Even palliative reforms were blocked by the intransigent upper house of the National Assembly.

TAVORI: All he could do was try to institute regulations, and no regulation in the world is strong enough to shackle a beast like capitalism.
ANATOLIKOS: Why shackle it? Let it be strong! Let it fuck everyone up! Ride the bull, don’t chain it a fencepost!

TAVORI: There was nothing left to do except declare a General Strike. The Athens Commune, the Inernational Workers’ Movement, the labour unions, the irenicist congregations of the Orthodox and Gallican Churches, Catholic dioceses, monasteries and convents, synagogues, mosques, Bogomilist study groups, universities, guilds, cooperatives, fraternal societies, the Baseball Player’s Union–
ANATOLIKOS: We almost missed the whole fucking season!
TAVORI: –even a few other polis governments sympathetic to the plight of the workers– we all realized that enough was enough. Something had to be done.

ANATOLIKOS: “Something” like a fucking armed insurrection.
TAVORI: We defended ourselves when fired upon.

TAVORI: And we lost people as well. The City Guard killed ten thousand of us before they relinquished control of the capital.

ANATOLIKOS: What I don’t get is… why didn’t Hadjiapostolou put up more of a fight? He’s the fucking President of the Republic! Commander in Chief! It… it wasn’t unwinnable, starting off. It wasn’t like the 1802 revolution. Yet he sent the main army up to Belgrade, out of harm’s way, while communist rebels had the run of the rest of the country. Sure, he was a socialist, but… I doubt he wanted a massive uprising to sweep Byzantium.

TAVORI: Don’t you read the papers?
ANATOLIKOS: Not these days.
TAVORI: “I could, perhaps, defeat the rebels by strength of arms and restore a kind of ‘order’— but, in doing so, I would be rightly called one of the worst butchers of his own people in Byzantine history.” Hadjiapostolou.
ANATOLIKOS: So he’s a fucking coward, then.
TAVORI: It takes true courage to recognize when the Mandate of the People has been lost.
ANATOLIKOS: Old priest was probably just spooked by a bunch of redder-than-average sunsets and spooky clouds. You religious types are all the same.

ANATOLIKOS: What about all the soldiers who didn’t make it back to Belgrade? Who were caught exposed in the open and massacred? Did it take true courage to let their murders go un-avenged?
TAVORI: Regrettable miscommunications.

ANATOLIKOS: Look, sometimes revolution is justified. Like Noor Sallajer. Like the Jacobin Revolution. France is obviously better off with Élisabeth safely deposited in Tuileries Palace and power in the hands of the Estates General. But this is just uncivilized.

Fr. Henri du Bois of the First Estate, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the French

ANATOLIKOS: Guess it was all a moot point anyway when the second wave hit. Don’t you actually have to be in a union to strike? Now it was just all the dregs of society rising up out of the gutters and thinking, us too!
TAVORI: It’s important for all the people to have communes to call their own. That so many were left to fend for themselves was one of the great failings of prior governments.

TAVORI: The Red Guards were the people. No bourgeois-led army in the world could stand against them.

ANATOLIKOS: So I’ve noticed.

ANATOLIKOS: It’s odd that Johannes… that the Kazike ignored all of this and went after France. Guess even after everything else that’s gone on in Germany, hating the shit out of France still trumps everything else.

TAVORI: Perhaps he simply recognized historical inevitability, that the instant the General Strike was declared the road to September 24th, 1884 lay open.

ANATOLIKOS: Ah yes, September 24th, 1884. A day that will live on infamy. After a strong opening in Spring, both Athens and Thessaloniki failed to make the playoffs!

ANATOLIKOS: And that other thing.

THE GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY

Red Guard Commander Valentinos Spyromilios, Dictator of the Byzantine Commune
Installed in Constantinople September 24th, 1884.

The Red Guards

TAVORI: Before you even start, no, we didn’t approve of Spyromilios’ actions, either. I suppose he felt that somebody needed to take charge in Constantinople. Should it have been him? Probably not.

ANATOLIKOS: Yes, well, that’s what happens when you try to rearrange your society in the midst of a bloody revolt that killed everyone. Moron.

TAVORI: In any case, for the most part he limited himself to taking immediate steps to get the unemployed masses back to work, or provide for them in lieu of that…

TAVORI: …and secure diplomatic recognition for the Commune by renewing the old Republic’s alliance with Great Britain.
ANATOLIKOS: I’ll note that Great Britain is literally the only nation that recognizes the Commune. Iran and Azerbaijan bolted. Our entire sphere of influence collapsed overnight. Queen Victoria just fucking hates the NGF that much, I guess. Holy shit.

TAVORI: In any case, true power lay with the Communes, who were already opening factories shuttered by the vagaries of the ‘free market’, and building new ones in the poleis hardest hit by the Crash of ’83.
ANATOLIKOS: Yes, because in the long run we want an industrial base that’s all about inefficient busywork and subsidizing factories that should have gone out of business ages ago. Look, there’s a reason some people own factories and some people work in ’em, all right? Not everyone has the skills you need to run a company.

TAVORI: This is a pointless argument, anyway. Spyromilios was forced out a month later, obviously. The assembled Communes of Byzantium were its sovereigns, now and forever.

Evgenia Exteberria, First Chairman of the Byzantine Commune
Inaugurated October 28th, 1884

The Athens Commune

TAVORI: This wasn’t like the Revolution of 1802, which rightly sought to make a clean break with everything that came before. Noor Sallajer’s revolution was a vital step on the road from tyranny to true liberty. It was fatally flawed from the start, since it had capitalism baked into it from the group up, but it was necessary. We are proud to call ourselves her heirs.

TAVORI: Now, though, we’ve taken the next step into the future.

TAVORI: Tomorrow has come.

TAVORI: The Owl of Athena has taken flight; the stars themselves await.

ANATOLIKOS: All this and London wins the fucking European Classic again. I’m going to shoot myself in the fucking head.

WORLD MAP, 1884:


EUROPEAN BASEBALL LEAGUE RESULTS THROUGH 1884:

(OOC: This update used a slightly modified version of the Syndicalist Repubic Mod made by ZearothK, which makes it so that not every Communist government is a Stalinist dictatorship. Also, there probably shouldn’t have been a baseball season in 1884, but my attempts to clear the schedule just destroyed Baseball World since I did it wrong, and figuring it out would have taken way more time than I should devote to baseball joke content.)