NationStates Jolt Archive

Portmeirion, The People's Commonwealth of Beth Gellert, New Tiamat, the southern Indian Ocean

“...and, of course, the tower you see rising behind me is the Green Tower, upon which comrade Sopworth Igo proclaimed the People’s Commonwealth after the expulsion of the Royalists.”

The tour of Beth Gellert’s sites of historical interest was nearing its conclusion as the party entered The Village upon The Island, which was the man-made heart of the capital, Portmeirion. The unlikely blend of just about every architectural style on record had only existed in its current form since the short-lived Igovian Revolution period of a few years earlier. As was explained to the uninitiated amongst the tourists, the brief authoritarian socialist period that followed the post-feudal capitalist period is still considered –despite its faults- to have been the last golden age in just about anything but drug-culture and peace.

These were both widely regarded, in The Commonwealth, to be good things in which to excel. The problem was they didn’t entirely compensate for the artistic, architectural, political, scientific and revolutionary lull that came with Premier Sopworth Igo’s stepping down before the current leaderless utopia. On the other hand, the end of the Igovian period had uncovered several controversial re-education camps in the New Welsh Mountains. These still existed, but were much more civil affairs than in the past.

Tour guides had been taking an increasingly nostalgic line, of late. It seemed strange that residents in a nation with a near hundred and forty trillion-dollar economy with an education system in the top one percent on earth and public healthcare to match would be so restless. The United Nations rated both civil and political freedoms superb, but visitors to the (some say excessively) open People’s Commonwealth could hardly fail to spot the Igovian flags inked on student’s bags as well as flying from windows fronting houses lived by members of the authoritarian Old Guard.

“And finally we see The People’s Commonwealth Final Senate, once –while still part of the party-based politics of the bourgeois- interrupted by Igovian revolutionaries, marking the beginning of the end for the principality.”

“Hey, Sam, check out the Igo impersonator on the steps.”
“Looks just like in the guidebook.”
“Bit short though, isn’t he?”
“I don’t remember reading anything about him being armed during the interruption...”
“That’s a Drapoel rifle, anyway! I saw it on the hotel film about the last Korean War.”
“Don’t look so smug, I saw it, too.”
“These people don’t know shit about Beth Gellen history...”

Iskra! News Agency: Igovian Old Guard seizes Village
’Father’ of international terror repute is Sopworth, ex-Premier calls for support from comrades

-Foreign bourgeois tourists taken hostage at gunpoint
-Mouthy American told to shut up
-Generals Louis Pangloss, Ilmari Tedeski, Consul Nicolas Kezo, Professional Civil Servant Graeme Igo rumoured, “on-side” with Old Guard
-Army, “hesitant”
-'Father' says momentum of global revolution at stake, comrade Hotan a good man

President Halen Gorman (Position currently sponsored by Nike) was awoken in the middle of the night, and informed about the situation. His advisors had let the situation develop before alerting him, because it wouldn't have been good for ratings - and because they wanted to see how the wind was shifting. They would have left him asleep, but some Abydoan tourists were among those held by the military junta.

"Bloody 'ell," he muttered as he crawled out of bed not bothering to hide the intern he'd been sleeping with, "what is it now?"

"Mr. President, we have a situation in the west," his Chief Advisor Adele Brockenstein (Position sponsored by Brockenstein Corp) whispered, "the Commonwealth of Beth Gellert has fallen under a military coup, and some Abydoan tourists were taken hostage. Their family's are well-placed, and already owe us some favours, otherwise we would have let this wait until morning."

"Very well, what do you need me to do?" He was grumpy, they hadn't even brought him coffee, or a doughnut. His ample stomach rumbled angrily.

"Well, we've already released a statement denouncing the military coup, and advising that the Beth Gellen government return the reigns of power to its rightful owners, specifically the people. You know, the typical boiler-plate, but for this we need you to sign these forms authorising an attempt at a diplomatic arrangement to retrieving those tourists, or if that fails - gods bar it - to hire a civil agency to extract them forcibly."

"One of these days, I'm going to get a rubber-stamp with my signature on it," President Gorman muttered.

"You keep saying that, Sir, but you know it wouldn't be legal. And it would add fuel to the fire of the reformers who the political reigns returned from the corporations to the people."

He signed the forms, and then padded back to his bed. Adele Brockenstein narrowly held back the bile rising in her throat as she realised that he hadn't been wearing fur pagamas - he'd been nude.

----

To the new Beth Gellen Government:

We welcome you to power, and offer our condolences at having to harbour mouthy American tourists. However, our own citizens - on a historical study expedition - were rounded up in your crackdown. We would like to enter into a diplomatic relationship with your nation, to negotiate for the safe return of our citizens, and more importantly to foster a friendly atmosphere between our two nations.

Counter-Igovian protestors heckled by thousands; countless comrades resigned to defeat, become refugees

With the centre of Portmeirion in the revolutionary hands of an armed Igovian group, hundreds of Commonwealth residents took to the streets in support of their leaderless pure communism. They were met by even larger and more vocal throngs of nostalgic and enthusiastic Igovian sympathisers who made it apparent that the coup has popular support.

It now appears that power may be handed bloodlessly from the people-powered Commonwealth Final Senate to the Premier-powered Igovian Old Guard, and that it may be official within hours. Opponents are split between those increasingly resigned to a return to authoritarian socialism and those wishing to get out now. The problem is that few if any other nation states are known to combin Beth Gellen freedoms with The Commonwealth's prosperity and high standard of living. Local co-operatives have begun sending out appeals for suitable new homes for hundreds of anti-authoritarian communists, citing the probability of their impression into a rigid, militarist sham-communism within perhaps days if they do not leave before the Igovians consolidate power.

[Just a bump for views before the final completion of the authoritarian Igovian coup]

ISKRA!: SOVIET PEOPLE'S COMMONWEALTH DECLARED!

A great day for the revolution! Commonwealth Chief Consul comrade Chivo has today announced The Final Senate's decision to support the Igovian Revolution. This, comrades, is a grand evidence of the worthiness of our system! Here, in Beth Gellert, even the old order can accept revolutionary upheaval without bloodshed, while in the capitalist world -even now, in Iansisle- workers die on the ball-point* of bourgeois ignorance and stubborn refusal to accept change. We have made our new revolution in peace and comradeship! All glory to the people!

It was true, in fact. The Commonwealth Final Senate actually had passed a motion to support the coup. The Final Senate was hard to corrupt, too. Its membership rotated from one issue to the next, and every step was visible to every single comrade in The Commonwealth, save some few in Re-education Colleges. Even interested foreigners could sit in on the Local Senate meetings that decided which comrades would represent the locale at the Regional Senates, wherein quorum was reached and the region's concerns taken by these one-issue-term politicians to the elaborate and historical Final Senate in Portmeirion. The common Beth Gellen supported the Igovians, there was no way around it. Over two and three-quarter billion comrades were, by and large, united in their life-long desire to support and now to spread the revolution.

It remained to be seen whether the Igovians could take real charge, or whether the Final Senate would continue to dictate The Commonwealth's actions. Even if the latter case were proved real, it was evident that said Senate would be heavily influenced by Igovian doctrine, and even likely to perpetuate its pervasion into popular culture and the nation's 100% state-run education system. Perhaps the Final Senate would gradually and unwittingly subvert itself to the Igovian's whims, anyway.

...You try making two point eight billion individuals understand that possiblity. In communist Beth Gellert, convincing one, five, ten thousand, or fifty million means nothing without the whole.

*I know, I know, but the editor didn't like nib or quill! (Did I read of the Iansislian introduction of the ball-point, actually? I do hope so, or else my halucinations are really going down hill!)

*I know, I know, but the editor didn't like nib or quill! (Did I read of the Iansislian introduction of the ball-point, actually? I do hope so, or else my halucinations are really going down hill!)

((You did, as a matter of fact! No halucinations here, I'm afraid. A ball-point was used by a portly reporter to record an interview with the (kinda sorta) fascist Chancellor of a new republic in the South Pacific. We've at last found someone to whom we can show off our advanced technology, and we'll be damned if we don't!

Come, Abargraptines and Eastgaters! Gaze in wonderment at our ball-point pens, wireless sets, moving pictures, motor cars, and powered aero-flight! Hahaha!

Erm, in more relevant points, shocking development on the Sopworth front. Simply shocking! No doubt it will provoke some serious pub debates across the Shield (that is, those parts of it which aren't busy killing other parts) and possibly some drunken curses. I wouldn't be holding my breath for a formal diplomatic response, though ;).

Oh, and rumors of an Igovian regime taking power in weak, disoriented, leaderless Wyclyfe are completely and utterly unfounded! *cough* ;)))

(Heh, brilliant :D )

Iskra!: Igovians announce Party plan!

...it is thought that The Communist Party of Beth Gellert would exist more as a conduit through which to deal with similar institutions abroad, rather than to fight elections at home. This seems to follow in popular opinion, which is, so far as anybody knows, still almost absolute in its scorn for the bourgeois tool that party politics is considered to be.

Party membership would, probably, encompass much of the standing Commonwealth Professional Civil Service, and the move would merely make the institution more easy to identify with, both at home and abroad.

Further to this, The Commonwealth Final Senate has begun to address the issue of popular support for the creation of a premiership, and for the election of a Chairman to the CPCS, or, as the case may yet be, Chairman of the Communist Party. Public opinion appears certain to grant these two offices -should they be created- to the father and son team of Graeme and Sopworth Igo, with the experienced Civil Servant Graeme presumably taking the Chair in the service he has done so much to develop.

Already young Sopworth has spoken of his desire to strengthen The Commonwealth and spread the revolution, and as part of this to reactivate a number of the initiatives and projects abandoned with the end of his first Premiership. Sopworth's first (and voluntary) decline saw defence spending fall from a high of 11% in yearly GDP terms to the 3% to which we today are more accustomed. This would surely mean the reactivation of the fleet-building programme, the replacement of CS-400 air defence batteries with the world-beating CS-500 deployed in such small numbers today, the possible re-opening of genetics research works in the New Welsh Mountains, and the reviving of Ekranoplan design.

OOC: As WAAMA officials drool at the thought of a new BG market, someone thinks to *tag* the reports for later notice.

It happened, sure enough. The Commonwealth Final Senate ate up whatever proposals the Igovians tabled, and Sopworth was created Premier. He stitched on quite the title, as was conveyed by any number of propaganda posters urging comrades to join the Party! (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Chivtv/NS1/1939-2-plakat400.jpg) That being a branch of the Commonwealth Professional Civil Service and now, according to plan, headed by the vocal Graeme Igo.
One of the successful motions permitted the recruitment of a further nine hundred thousand amry personnel, boosting the total from 2.1 to 3 million. There would be few cut backs in this major change, as funding had for years been far in excess of requirement. 2.1 million people defending the nation from roughly no serious threats simply didn't spend four trillion dollars a year, and excess funds were put at the end of each year into grand parties in the defunct People's Commonwealth, where millions of comrades savagely attacked their IQs and their livers at the expense of the state. Perhaps they'd have to make do with home brew and the weed growing in their basements, next year, but the armed forces were begining their rise.

Comrade General Niles Brenni expressed some of the aims and needs of those armed forces, in an address at the New Gibborim Regional Senate -one of the oldest in Beth Gellert, and occuring at a level low enough to allow-in foreign guests.
The Igovian Soviet Army, as it would not be called, needed an awful lot of new kit thanks to its planned expansion. The infantry were almost unique in using largely imported systems, where armour, aircraft, and maritime assets tended to be domestic in origin. The standard assault rifle was the AN-94, the side arm FN's BDA9, acquired in the reunification with Victoria and Salvador, and there existed in service almost as many different sub-machineguns as ethnicities in the inclusive force. There was a precident, though. Russian chamberings. Beyond that, weapons were British, Belgian, American, German, and, quite heavily, Israeli. The Negev rechambered for 5.45mm was about as close to dominant as a single weapon came in any class. Where some soldiers carried AKM-BG rifles and others AN-94, or officers houlstered BDA-9 next to a comrade with an old Tokarev, squad machinegunners all had the Negev. It was apparent that the ISA needed just about everything else, and was prepared to pay.

Supreme Admiral comrade Katerina Ivolgin, chief of the Admiralty, meanwhile, was not afraid to express the desperate need for carriers. At present, twelve domestic Nibiru light carrier/assault ships and four Johnathan Netnyahu trimarans were the sum of it. It was reported that the hated Nicobarese were turning out Liberation Class fleet carriers at a rate of several per year from yards across their island chain. This had to be addressed, as did the sorry state of medium-range air defence in the gap between the excellent Citadel-S long range SAM and the effective 30mm BG-CIWS. Buying systems from the pauper Chinese didn't seem right any longer.

(All right, I got drunk and wandered off my point, sue me, BG's withdrawn currency)