Vladimir

You misunderstand the point of Viceroyalties -- at least from the Pacifican perspective. The point was to avoid the necessity of eternal or repeating war. You take an alliance and, rather than destroying it to such an extent that its nations can never recover, you help to rebuild the alliance in such a way that its members are no longer a threat regardless of their nation strength. Unfortunately it didn't always work out that way, as emotion and attatchment to inefficient systems got in the way. Of course, other alliances may have used them in other ways. But if they were used to conquer alliances and prevent them from "escaping with their lives", no sane alliance would accept one.

Since I just consider myself and my writings to be Francoist I'm not sure the first half of the name is necessary.

Emperors who served for less than a year are in good historical company: Comrades Franco, Ivan, Dilber and myself, amongst others, all did likewise.

This article is best read while listening to this .La Vangardia Pacifica would like to thank regular readers for their patience during its prolonged hiatus, and can now confirm that production will resume in the near future. By way of apology for the unexpected interruption we we would like to offer readers a free copy of the December 2008 publication Letters of Pacifica. Within its cover readers will find the foundation of many of the intellectual and historical ideas that informed the Order during the early years of its existence. Some of these may be outdated while others may not be, but it will undoubtedly provide a wealth of information and a unique perspective to younger and older scholars alike. In line with this we are pleased to observe that the models developed through the Francoist method in previous issues of this paper have more than survived the test of time. What were once much maligned predictions -- the inevitability of the treaty web, of the bipolarity of international politics, of the existential crisis, etc -- have become, to contemporary society, a matter of historical fact. And finally, we would like to pay tribute to Emperors Cortath, Mary, Brehon, Farrin and Letum for the extraordinary job they have done over the past few years. Not only have they maintained the Order in the face of extraordinary odds, but they've reorganised, rebuilt and reinvented it into the powerful, efficient machine that it is today. They have proven that Pacifica Prevails was not only a popular saying of old, but a statement of fact.

Change doesn't have to come from players leaving the game. The game developed and the politics became more complex -- power became more diffuse and diplomacy became ever more important. We went from individual alliances who could act on their own, to simple treaties, to two blocs, to multiple blocs all tangled together in a treaty web. People used moral arguments that would previously have been pointless to create alliances and to coalesce around enemies. This needn't necessarily have led to any one specific policy, nor does it rule out a reversion in future, but political changes here have had a lot more structural and strategic reasons than individual.

How useful you find it will depend on what you're trying to get out of it. It isn't, for example, an assessment of anyone's mind. It is an attack on the popular notion that theory is without purpose, and an explanation that everyone's mind, regardless of their goal or hobby, regardless of whether they realise it or not, is built upon it.

This article is best read while listening to .The world of practical men often has occasion to laugh and mock the theorists and theories that seek to explain their domain. "What is the point of it all" they scoff. Why question such basic causes, connections, goods, evils and truths when they’re so obvious to me? They sit smugly, surrounded comfortingly by their common sense, attempting with the last of their strength to live in an independent, practical 'world of the real'. And in each moment they fail to recognise that every action they witness and every truth they know is nothing but the lingering imprint of some dead and defunct theoretician. One practical man looks at a war and sees a battle between alliances, another sees a battle between moralities, yet another a battle between cultures, and another still a battle between classes. Each is quite certain in his own unique truth, reacting to it in his own unique way as a result. And so the theory that he mocked as purposeless just moments before quietly welcomes him into its fold. Slowly the practical man must come to the realisation that far from being the master of his domain, he is but a slave of the theorist's. It can be seen therefore that every man, no matter how practical or introspective he may be, is operating based on the hidden assumptions, truths and demands of an underlying theory: the only difference is how much he realises it and thus how much control he has over his own actions. If the man fails to realise the reality of the structures, powers and influences around him, then no matter how revolutionary he considers himself, no matter how inspiring his voice sounds to his own ears, he is doomed to exist as just one data-point in millions as he perpetuates the hidden hand that controls him. We can see these practical men in every gutter and every office around us, working away diligently and thinking themselves accomplished. We saw it in the downfall of the Continuum, as so many practical men came out of the woodwork to proclaim a new world on the basis of... of what? A desire to see it? Like so many before them they were blind to the realities of power and structure. They had failed to investigate, to analyse, to theorise, and so they found themselves duped by the one-eyed king who knew how to use the structures and sought only to crown himself atop of them. The great self-proclaimed ‘revolutionaries’ of an age were buried to the eulogy of useful idiots, renewing that which they were revolting against, left as neither destroyers nor creators, forgotten to the pages of dust and mould. It is the folly of the celebrated great men in every epoch -- preachers of death, revolutionaries and kings alike. If you cannot see the realities of power and structure, if you are blinded by the golden robes of its momentary occupants, then you cannot rise to truly control, destroy or create anything. You are forever a slave and never a master. And as the defunct theory that serves as the foundation of your 'practical' action is undermined and destroyed by contraduction, the destructive life-denying force of nihilism begins to take hold and destroy you along with it.

Smart RL hegemonies do. There's more to staying on top than having a big stick. That doesn't mean they'll let it stop them from doing what they want to do, of course.

[quote name='youwish959' timestamp='1306919313' post='2721928'] As a member of the working class, I must say I am pretty happy myself. [/quote] False consciousness.

[quote name='BamaBuc' timestamp='1306507610' post='2719000'] Haha, I was about to say... I don't think I've met many Catholic Marxists. -Bama [/quote] You need to [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology"]broaden your horizons[/url], comrade. Though it should be further noted that the happiness bonus brought about by democracy here is transitory and ultimately illusionary. Looking at the nation as a unitary object and ignoring the fundamental class divisions within it is a transparent attempt to separate the economic base from the political superstructure, and thus to obscure the whole reality of our being. As a result Admin misses the long-term trend towards working class immiseration and instead picks up on the decadent wealth and power of a ruling class brought about by a defunct economic system and its associated so-called 'democratic' superstructure. He then proceeds to present this decadence as a universal 'happiness', when in fact far from providing this what we actually see is the happiness of the exploiting and the woe of the exploited. This can only be interpreted as a hostile attempt by Admin to hide the immeserated from popular consciousness by a process of social cleansing that can only be reminiscent of Germany in the mid-1930s. I contend therefore that equating the happiness of an exploiting class to the happiness of an entire nation is a ludicrous proposal -- that happiness for the slave owners is no happiness at all. And I conclude that the appropriate response is to remove the happiness bonus from democracy. And we all know that Kalasin would get a room with me anyway. After all, as well as being a Marxist I am devilishly handsome and charismatic. Kzoppistan can come too.

The essay really skims over alliances. If I were writing it I would cut down on the number of case studies and give more analysis of each -- the foreign policies pursued by alliances, such as neutrality, are irrelevant to the point being investigated, so GPA, for example, could be removed. The case studies also seem very descriptive, which doesn't answer the question of why these different forms of government developed. There is no consideration of what role RL ideology played (and whether this advanced or held back development), or how significant historical factors/path dependencies were (hugely in the NPO's case). In the section on Vox, for example, you note why they formed, but not how this affected their supposed structure or how their position changed over time. One has to consider their sources carefully. The Zhadum logs, for example, came from someone who had left due to personal issues with individuals, so objective analysis wasn't exactly on his mind.

It is an important lesson for every budding historian to learn to ignore Duffman. The important note in this case is that there were in fact two different Polar Wars. The first, which could properly be referred to as the NAAC-NPO War, had nothing to do with spying. I wrote a brief history of it [url=http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?app=blog&module=display&section=blog&blogid=104&showentry=1258]here[/url]. The Second Polar War was actually the NPO, GATO and Legion vs. NAAC, since NAAC was caught spying on all three (well, I say 'caught', their (not very good) leader tried to prove an unrelated point by blurting it out on the open forum). History in general is best understood as a series of eras and revolutionary wars as we move from one to the other. [list][*]The first was the Pacifican era, spanning from the NPO-ODN War to GW1 (Feb-August 2006). [*]The second was the anti-Pacifican era (so-called because the coaLUEtion never formed a bloc and were bound by nothing more than the fact that they held a greater irrational hatred for the NPO than they did an irrational hatred for one another), spanning from GW1 to GW2 (Sept 2006-Jan 2007). [*]The third was the Initiative era, spanning from GW3 to the Unjust War (March 2007-July 2007). [*]The fourth was the Continuum era, spanning from its formation to the Karma War (Nov 2007-April 2009). [*]The fifth and current can probably be defined as the MK era since they are the core alliance within it (much like the NPO was in the first third and fourth eras), spanning from the attack on TPF in January 2010 to present. The current war is just a cleaning up of potential competition so that we can live in an exciting world of stagnation for the next few years.[/list] Within this framework it is much easier to understand the flow of politics -- why certain events mattered, why alliances took the stances that they did, and why these stances were often in direct contradiction to the stance they took in the following era (something of particular note in the current one). Outwith this context the whole of history is just a morass of self-contradiction and confusion.

That is complete nonsense, DictatatorDan. When the NPO came out of terms we kept our heads down and attempted to engage in diplomacy with anyone who would listen. It was the hegemonic alliances that used us as a boogeyman to scare the children back in line, and even banned former alliances that wanted to sign treaties with us from doing so. This was pretty self-evident to anyone with eyes, leading me to write on it as early as May last year: http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?app=blog&module=display&section=blog&blogid=104&showentry=1712

So much for doctor-patient confidentiality. Janova is just one of many who have shown themselves as insatiable hypocrites over the past month, but he is nevertheless the outstanding example, and perhaps one of the few whom I would have expected to avoid being so obvious about it all.

This is hardly the place for such a discussion. If you took the time to read the literature on the subject instead of just making blind assumptions to fit your primitive narrative then you might be able to make more educated posts.