Premier’s Special Address #1, Order #1

From the office of the Premier and Commissar of Defense on 53-AG-30:

Comrades of the Socialist Dominances of Solstice!

As these words are spoken, as they are written, as copies are printed, and distributed, a monumental effort is taking place across our beloved homeland. To the south, our brave warriors resist strongly the brutal, pitiless advance of our monstrous enemy. Here in Solstice, our government has reorganized itself for the effort of war and for the care and relocation of millions of refugees from the southern battles. Farther north, our industry, tucked away from the line of battle, prepares itself for the gargantuan effort that lies ahead.

My name is Daksha Kansal. Henceforth I am your Premier — it is an office held by few before me, and held before only during war time. Again it shall be held during war time, for this war that has come to us is like no war before. I was appointed by the National Council before its self-directed disbandment, and have pledged to vigorously direct the struggle ahead, hand in hand with the remaining senior elected officials, a cabinet of qualified ministers, and the elected leaders of our industrial unions, regional organizations and collective farms.

Today, whether you are listening or whether you are reading, I address you in order to explain to you in the fullest terms our situation, in order to enlist your aid in the endeavor of our lifetime, and to instill in you hope and confidence in these difficult times.

Starting on the 18th of the Gloom, the advance of the Lehnerite Nochtish forces, spurred by the perfidious ideology of the global bourgeoisie, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, soldier and civilian both. As they advance they have imprisoned millions of our civilian comrades in the cities and villages that they once called home. It is difficult to determine exactly the number of our people lost or enslaved, but any number is too high.

The Nocht Federation is our enemy, and we have from the first day strongly resisted their attacks. Nevertheless they have taken Adjar and Shaila, and though some of their finest divisions and air forces lie dead and smashed across the face of our dear Ayvarta, they continue to hurl men and equipment against us with such bestial fury that we find ourselves unbalanced by their maneuvers. In Ayvarta and across the globe, there is talk of the invincible power of the Nochtish army. Does our situation serve as a demonstration of this?

Of course not! I urge you to read on and correct any such defeatist nonsense!

People are quick to sing to the praises of ravenous power as if lulled to some kind of religion. History has proven that no army exists that cannot be defeated. Did not the Kingdom of Lubon appear invincible as it spread across the world, claiming colonies on every sea and crushing indigenous resistance? And yet, one by one their colonies secured themselves. Everyone believed Svechtha had no hope of rescuing itself from Lubonin imperialism, and yet here we are! That is History, and it has been made before.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Lubon was the Nocht Federation of its time.

Did not the Franks in the northern Unification War appear invincible as they rolled over the Nochtish army and pushed them further and further back across the northern continent? And yet, in the end, Nocht not only defeated the Franks, but conquered and assimilated their lands fully within two years. Back then, the Franks were akin to Nocht now. People were in awe of the magnificence of the Franks, the large number of their guns, the fine make of their bayonets, the wild blue flash in the eyes of their men!

But they failed; this is history now! Nocht made history then!

Fact is that these battles of the past month do not represent the making of war but the springing of an ambush against a peaceful and unsuspecting people. Our troops were near totally demobilized and unprepared for any battle, much less a full scale war. Nocht attacked unsuspectingly with scores of fully mobilized divisions and secured itself every short-term advantage that it could, while we suffered every short term disadvantage possible.

We were hamstrung by the politics of my governmental predecessors, slowed down by the need to evacuate as many people and industries as we could on the shortest possible notice against the most horrible and unceasing violence, all the while fighting the enemy while outnumbered and not fully reequipped. In such circumstances, we have lost many battles.

I must stress that these are not permanent, insurmountable deficiencies.

Even with these disadvantages, we managed to secure a great victory in the battle of Bada Aso in Adjar, killing scores of the enemy, destroying much of their precious equipment and erasing many skilled officers and men. We have deprived Nocht of tanks, aircraft and ships that they could not afford to lose at this stage of their operation. They expected to defeat us with impunity because of their surprise advantage. Our tenacity has so surprised them that their entire front has slowed to a crawl in fear of our growing resistance.

Nocht’s short-term advantage is spent! Our country is awakening. At the political level we are appointing experts in various fields to form a new council of executives and secretaries to insure we are able to sustain the battlefront and home front and to conduct both military and civil policy as smoothly as possible. Ministers like War Secretary Chakma, Economy Observer Mamani, and Civil Executive Yuba, and myself, are committed to building up our armies without sacrificing the services that are the human right of our citizens. Rest assured that we continue to be committed to feeding and housing all citizens. This includes our traumatized comrades fleeing north from the Nochtish violence.

We are working with Union leaders, who have key roles to play in this struggle, to rebuild our industry and to create the necessary weapons and ammunition to defeat the enemy. Our work, that was beforehand casual and peaceful, will have to take on a more serious mentality to cope with these dire times. I must beseech every comrade who can go to work to do so; those comrades, who before chose to live on stipends, as is their right of course, I ask that you seek out the nearest work office or union contact, or the recruitment office, and serve your country, which is in great need of you. Every man, woman and young student or child, who is thinking “what more can I do for my country?” I encourage you to go to the nearest political or union or work office, and seriously consider this question.

I also encourage those spoiling for a fight to put their energies to good use and join the armed forces. We are undergoing a project to revive our military programs after the neglect and mismanagement that was rife in the past administration. Our Sunhera Thalsena is in great need of men and women. Those of you who wish to defend the homeland, regardless of your current ability, consider joining our Gold Army. It is the duty of trainers and instructors to hone your skills and make best use of you. So long as you try your best, previous experience or exceptional strength is unnecessary to join.

However, I must also beseech comrades who are working in important industries, and feel their work is insufficient and that they must run to the nearest recruitment center and sign up for war — your work is important to the nation! Those of you in machining, in mining, in agriculture, in academics, in care work, in medicine, in numerous other professions, can do much good in your position. It is true that we need soldiers, and I will not discourage any man or woman who wishes to fight for our country. However, whole factories, whole farms, cannot pick up and go fight without serious shocks to their regions and to the country as a whole. Please consult with a political or union official and consider your options.

The Gold Army is our great hope, but an army cannot fight without factory workers to produce weapons, without teachers to protect and care for the children they leave behind in their villages and towns and cities, without doctors to care for them if they are hurt or sick, without writers and journalists and artists who keep them informed and entertained and who enrich their minds and give them dreams to dream in the middle of the trenches. Our entire body of work, the nation’s body of work, is important, and meaningful. All of our nation must mobilize for war, for the war will inevitably involve every industry.

That is the message that I wish to send to every citizen comrade of our nation. You are at war, a war that none of us wanted. To end this war will require each and every one of us to commit all of our efforts. Join the army, join a union, seek to do everything possible to you, and let nothing hold you back. Only through this great shouldering can we pick up and heave our hated enemy away! Volunteer today, and make every effort for comrade and country!

For motherland and for socialism, comrades! Rise up and fight back!

— Premier Daksha Kansal

From the Office of the Commissar of Defense, 53-AG-2030

Disseminate to all combat Headquarters and officers down to Battalion level.

You will have heard that the political situation in Solstice has changed and a government more amenable to the great and heavy restructuring necessary to rebuild the armed forces has come into power. As such, you are now part, not of the Territorial Army or the Kivuli Jeshi A Watu but part instead of the new Sunhera Thalsena of the SDS.

Due to the establishment of the Gold Army, the K.V.W. and the Territorial Army will now effectively cease to exist, and will become part of this unified structure.

Your orders no longer come from the Military Council or the Civil Council (any Civil Council) but from the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, known as the “SIVIRA.”

Battlegroups Tortoise, Dingo, Serpent will be renamed the 5th, 6th, 7th Armies of the North Solstice Front, operating in Chayat and thereabouts. Battlegroup Rhino, Battlegroup Falcon and Battlegroup Ram will become the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Armies; the first belonging to the 2nd Solstice Front, operating in Dbagbo and Southeast Solstice, and the latter two belonging to the 1st Solstice Front, operating in Tambwe and Northwest Solstice.

Where necessary these armies will be reinforced beyond their current standard.

Finally, the Revolutionary Guards will be mobilized and activated as the 1st Army of the 1st Solstice Front of the national capital; while the KVW Divisions, which enjoy a greater standard of armored and motorized vehicles than any other currently active force, will be parceled out among the remaining armies where necessary to act as fast strike forces.

In addition, we are in the process of raising three additional armies that will be activated as the 8th, 9th and 10th Armies by the start of the new year, divided among the 1st and 2nd Solstice Fronts. This will help us achieve our short term goal of 500,000 operational troops active in and around Solstice. Furthermore we are mobilizing civilian labor and reserve or training troops to create defenses, camps and supply areas around Solstice to fend off the incoming Nochtish assault. From this follows this next, most painful order.

Due to the botched offenses in Tambwe and Dbagbo that were ordered by the inexperienced leadership of the defunct National Council, it has become untenable to defend these areas, and as such, the SIVIRA is ordering a withdrawal in partial stages from Dbagbo and Tambwe to Southeast and Southwest Solstice. These orders are effective immediately for the 2nd and 4th Armies. The 8th Mechanized Division and the 10th Mechanized Division, as well as the newly-organized 2nd Air Army and 3rd Air Army are being deployed to these territories to assist in whatever way possible. The 2nd Army will withdraw toward the city of Sahib Qadis and the Gennom pass, while the 4th Army will withdraw toward Sirat and the southwest desert. This is effective immediately.

We are appointing new officers to the new Front commands as well as promoting Generals in charge of the various Armies. All Divisional level officers interested in these commands are encouraged to apply; due to the current situation however, officers of the 2nd and 4th armies will not be considered as they are needed in their posts to maintain combat discipline and order. We will not yet reestablish Corps commands, until more officers are available.

Finally, the SIVIRA wishes to formally applaud and remember forevermore the bravery and spirit of the fighters of Battlegroup Ox who survived the entire length of the battle of Bada Aso as well as their commander, the exemplary Colonel Madiha Nakar. While Battlegroup Ox was technically disbanded due to losses, Colonel Nakar and her handpicked troops will be reorganized as the 1st “Askari” Motor Rifle Regiment, recognizing their bravery and their hard-earned experience in combat with the foe. In addition the Regiment will be awarded the Order of Lena, and a new “Battle of Bada Aso” merit to commemorate their struggle, as well as the Gold Banner. Thus: attached to the 4th Army, they are to be known now as the 1st Order of Lena, Defenders of Bada Aso, Gold Banner Askari Motor Rifle Regiment.

All of our armed forces should look to them as an example in the coming months.

— Marshal Daksha Kansal

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From The Solstice Archive I

Side-Story Occurring Prior To Generalplan Suden

(From the state archives of the Socialist Dominances of Solstice)

Original Title: Concerning The Idyllic Fields Of Dori Dobo

Original Publication Date: 44th of the Yarrow’s Sun 2003

Author: Daksha Kansal, publishing for The Union Banner

A much beloved strategy from the exploiter toward the exploited is to speak in aberrant terms that redefine the world around them. They drown out the world in the noise of these aberrant discussions until silence and peace cannot be found. They circulate so much analysis and discussion of their terms toward conclusions convenient to them, that it becomes the common tongue, and any other manner of speaking is seen as the aberrant current in the air.

I’m not merely talking about the way Umma and Arjun pronounce words differently, or the unification of the scripts, or grammar subjects. I’m talking about our discussions as people.

I’ve outlined before that we have two classes of people in Ayvarta, whom we can easily refer to without using any terms foreign to us as the “exploiters” and “the exploited.” It is crude but it works for this paper. Exploiters seek to extract value from us for their gain.

They have their own language that they have forced upon our society to expedite the collection of our value, and in many cases, to guide us into offering it willingly without our knowledge. Underpinning this language is a simple idea I will outline below.

To the exploiter, things do not exist to serve their functions. They exist to create value and provide convenience for the exploiter. That is the underpinning of their dialect.

We have seen recent discussion about the production of food in the Dori Dobo region, and it has been dominated by this aberrant dialect, where a farm is an instrument that produces value for its owner through a secondary action of turning out food. We hear about rising prices of food, about the crop selection, about the conditions of the farms as “capital” in someone’s hands. We hear about strikes, and those strikes being crushed, and farm hands being in short supply and wages being low. Nobody seems to put into plain speech the fact that a farm makes food for our nourishment. They are not doing so right now because farms are owned by exploiters who demand the farm produce money for them. Anything else is secondary.

To the exploiter, the most important concept of a farm is that it be quiet, productive, make a lot of money, and require little of the exploiter’s own money to work. Thus the farm is run by laborers, for the exploiter’s convenience, and these laborers are paid poorly and treated poorly, for the exploiter’s profit. Should they tire of this state of affairs, they will certainly come to harm for doing so. As I write there is serious talk of forcing people to work in farms like prisoners, because the farm produces wealth and its production of wealth cannot be interrupted by such a mere thing as workers demanding wages and the chance to live.

To me, and to most normal people, we see a farm and think “this makes food for us.”

But it does not stop there at all! Everything can be viewed this way. For the farm owner to view the farm as an engine that produces money, he must also view food as an engine that produces money, and he does. He prices food such that it makes him the most money for his troubles. Thus, food itself gains the purpose “make money,” of greater importance than “provide nourishment.” For some time and through sheer luck, this methodology has resulted in food prices that large amounts of people can afford, and has therefore widely distributed food, and widely enriched the exploiters. However, the exploiter is ravenous, and if one sees everything as extraction of value, one must keep asking how more value can be extracted. Food can become even cheaper and more available, thus producing more money! It is limited by a few things — land, for example, which is plentiful. And labor — every shell you pay a farm hand is a shell you must make back in some way, if your goal is to “produce money.”

This creates the situation where the farm hands must be paid little, and must be worked more harshly, and must be held to greater scrutiny and generally treated like slaves, to produce the most value and convenience for the exploiter. Cheap labor on a forced march results in more vegetables being delivered, and sold at a cheaper price, thus they are bought in greater bulk, and the exploiter reaps a greater reward. At least, for a certain amount of time.

In the end the result is our situation now. Farm workers are barely able to eat and live under these circumstances, as such they are discontented, and cease to produce. They are removed or destroyed and replaced with new farm workers who do the job more poorly under the same poor conditions due to being unprepared and unmoviated and must then also be destroyed or replaced eventually. Because food “produces money” and does not “provide nourishment.”

And if we are talking about a farm, it is not solely in its relationship to producing food that value is the greatest virtue, but whether food is produced at all! Let us fly back up, and look again at a farm instead of at food specifically. Can you take action such that your farm produces even more value overall? For example, right now, plants for smoking are more valuable than plants for eating, so many farms that could be making food instead produce leisure items, because leisure items are more profitable. This is a minor feature of our local situation in Bada Aso, but it illustrates that there are various ways the exploiter’s mindset causes harm.

Everything works the same way. Medicine does not heal us, it profits the chemical company. Shelter does not house us, it profits the land owners who rent it or sell it. Our society is driven by this exploitation, and our discussion is dragged screaming to the topic of how to keep producing wealth for our exploiters. We cannot discuss the purpose of things — analysis will veer violently back to avenues of discussion that revolve around wealth production.

I posit a radical alternative, for which common language does not exist, such that I had to borrow words and concepts from a foreign land: let us produce food primarily to feed us. This is one of the main facets of what is called Socialism: a nation guided around bread, health and shelter, rather than profit. We produce what we can to care for each other.

From the land owners in Bada Aso, Solstice, and elsewhere the retorts are endless and inevitable. Two basic ones: “Who is going to pay for this?” “How do you expect things to be made if I cannot produce money from them?” This is all part of aberrant discourse. I will ask in its place a sensible question, one that is so simple and obvious and unproblematic that it no longer exists in our political discourse. This question is seen as the province of children: What is the purpose of food? I say the purpose of food is to nourish us. But it is an important question!

We need to eat food to live! In our society, however, seeing food as nourishment is a secret sin. Instead, we are trained to view it as a commodity, a means of exchange. Food loses its basic purpose and gains the purpose to produce money, to make wealth for someone.

Right now there are people starving on the streets of Bada Aso and Dori Dobo.

A significant amount of them used to grow and pick the food they now cannot have!

And why do we not have more food and more affordable food? Why are people starving on the street? We’ve seen this scene before only during natural disasters, during horrendous wars. Certainly no army is looting our crops. There is no storm sweeping all the grain in the Dori region or the Kalu region or the Kucha region, and even if there was, there would be stocks in Bada Aso, and stocks up north in the Tambwe dominance, and massive fields in Jomta.

Simply, the reason is that food is not given to us without providing an adequate value for the exploiter. There are people who take very seriously the job of making sure the exploiters get the exact best value from the food at all times, or else no food is given. Many people: economists, police, food policy administrators, and so on. An entire corps is in place to insure we cannot buy food. It is not that we can’t afford to pay it, and that anybody needs to pay it, but that the exploiter must extract value from it.

We have plenty of food to distribute, but only one permissible method to distribute it — we receive our food so that the farm owner receives a profit, of which, the actual growers of the food see none of.

To these people it makes perfect sense that you and I cannot eat fairly.

Until we reward the exploiters properly, we’re not supposed to eat!

Everything in the world, discussed through their goblin tongues, adds up perfectly today.

Should you or I start suddenly eating well without the exploiters being paid, now that would be a nightmare for the police, and the food policy men, and the economists and the farm owners and so on. That is a nightmare that I want to inflict upon them. Don’t you?

That nightmare is Socialism, under which the engines of society are seen thus: we are not individuals, but a people, and we will make sure the people can eat. We will not stand for individuals prevented from eating such that someone else among the People can profit from their starvation. We will produce food so that everyone can eat enough to live, because the purpose of food is to nourish us. We will make medicine to heal people, not to profit chemical companies. We will raise shelter such that the people are all protected from the elements, not to extract rent or sell villas to the people who have profited from starvation.

A nightmare for the farm owners, but for us, the only sensible way to live.

Let us create the means to content the real farmers who feed us, rather than bayonet them.

–Shacha (Archivist’s note: Daksha Kansal, under a nom de plume.)