Land of Cotton

An old ASB scenario of mine.

It is the Year of Our Lord 2011. Nobody could remember why the War started. It was some dispute about cotton rights or something. At any rate, it is unimportant. What is important is that the war continues until final victory is achieved. Why? Ask the man in Richmond, and he will tell you how the damned Yankees tried to steal their birthright as masters of the world. Ask the man in Technocracy Command, and they tell a tale of how the eleven perfidious provinces attempted to break away, reeling back the inevitable chain of history and holding back mankind's march to progress. Ask any soldier on the front, and he will say that he is there to win the war. Does he need any other reason? His father fought in these trenches, and so did his father's father, and so on. To shirk his duty is to betray their sacrifice. A century and a half of ceaseless struggle against their diabolical foes, the citizen exists for no other reason than to ensure that the other side never gains the upper hand.

But outside the North American continent, beyond the oceans of blood and fields of bone, beyond the rot and rust and radiation of the North American front of the Eternal War, some books know the truth. The dusty tomes of Petrograd and Paris, hidden away in cellars and attics, remember when the election of a president caused brother to fight brother, when a seemingly minor dispute over ironclads led the greatest empire in the world to war against a country that broke away from it almost a century before, when this regional war became a world war when the greatest empires of the world entered the fray and almost brought western civilization to an end. These ancient books, if anybody was curious enough to read them, recount the tales when the two American states would always go to war whenever the world did, and the world would go to war whenever the Americans did. In these books are strange tales, like the collapse of the Austrian Empire, the creation of the German Technate and the rise of the Jade Emperor. The forgotten story of how the captains of industry transformed Britain into the world’s greatest factory, promising a future of plenty but delivering only a cornucopia of bullets and bombs. How the world was carved up between the opposing forces of Technocracy and National Sorelianism. And most importantly, they remember that when the cannons began to roar in Kentucky, in the Year of Our Lord 1941, they never stopped.

But it is not only the Americans that die in the trenches of the Eternal War. In central Europe, north is pitted against south, brother against brother as the German Technate of the north fights against the Greater German Reich of the south through the fortress cities of the Mainline. Stahlkasts rust away in the fields between the Russian Empire and the Anatolian Logocracy. Under the Channel, akulas and battleships serve as eternal tombs for the sailors of the French nation and Factory One. In the jungles of southeast Asia, the servants of the eternal Jade Emperor hack through any resistance in the name of All Under Heaven. Throughout the world, children slave away in factories to promise their fathers victory that will never come. Throughout the world, mothers cry with joy to give their country soldiers that will die for nothing. Entire generations have come and gone without knowing peace, for there can be no peace so long as the enemy exists. The enemy deserves no mercy, only hate. And the war will continue for as long as it has to to ensure that the righteous achieve victory.