GWOT IV - Breech Birth Of A Republic
Nov. 9th, 2019 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT IV - Breech Birth Of A Republic
Contrary to the propaganda that is leaking through from the Untied Snakes, the California Republic wasn't a plot long in the planning.
It just kind of happened.
I missed out on the formative period. Between my arrest (admitted by Homeland itself to be unfounded!) for treason, and my rescue by Resistance shock troops that had covered as a Site security operations cell, I had been too busy getting tortured to notice anything.
Basically, a lot of competent adults scattered all through the State of California decided, more or less simultaneously, that enough was fucking enough. That struggling to feed people when shiploads of food were being loaded through the Oakland ports inbound was absurd. That skipping elections due to an Emergency was just not on. That when the rumors of genocide were all too true, that Never Again was no longer an option but a do or die command.
I'd finally gotten a letter from the PEG, the Provisional Emergency Governor of California. I'm not at liberty to reveal private, personal correspondence ... although I have given a copy to the California Military Museum in Sacramento, to be revealed after both of us are dead ... but one part that has since been made very public stood out.
Pat McGregor had no intention to be a traitor until hir spouse was sidewalked. About six inches from her. When Pat protested moments later, and was arrested, the arresting officer was about to comply with Homeland policy when a Resistance cell sniped him out.
Pat had nowhere to go and nothing to do - a transgender person simply doesn't survive capture by Homeland. So Pat invented a militia, then took over an army, using a truly dreadful weapon. Pat had been an attorney who dabbled in graphics design.
Armed with GIMP, a public domain graphics design tool akin to Photoshop, Pat started issuing orders to California National Guard units. They liked their new orders, a lot.
So the position of Provisional Emergency Governor, a very real authority under which I have acted to execute (or if you go with the USA version, murder) over two thousand genocidaires, was created out of thin air by a felony forger.
There are many theories of how nations begin and end. I like the theory that one person can make a difference. But if the conditions aren't right, that person's actions may be useless, or even worse.
Six months prior, Pat would have been shot. Six months later, another hundred thousand Californians would have been Homeward Bound.
Then came the problems of logistics.
California is utterly dependent for her existence on three large, complex water systems. We can survive with two. After American naval ground troops seized the Colorado River Aqueduct, we had to. (Note: these naval ground troops are NOT Marines, and are the first to insist on it. Civil war gets confusing.)
California has a little domestic oil production. One of the bigger pre-War stocks of heavy metal - armor and artillery - is in a forgotten corner of California in mothballs just in case. We had the tools to make the tools.
But in the pre-Firecracker world, the United States Navy would have blockaded a rebellious California, and we would have starved. Or died of thirst after the spare parts ran out.
The United States Navy had been too busy trying to run roughshod over the entire world, but especially China, so the Resistance taking over San Diego had ruined the USN's entire day. Then when the California Naval Militia started fielding destroyers, minesweepers (which double as mine _layers_, just ask Seattle) and lithium ion diesel electric submarines, we forced a sea lane open to Mexico and Canada. The latter was harder. But when Washington declared herself 'affirmatively neutral' (to avoid starvation) and Oregon also seceded, we had our own independent link to world commerce via the Barents Sea and the Northwest Passage, protected by the Russian Fleet as far south as Vancouver.
This also ended the China War, with American forces still holding on to our possessions in numerous coastal cities, but unable to advance or to expand our holdings. There was still an air bridge via Alaskan airspace for personnel, but not the tonnage either way needed for major ground war.
(We nearly lost the planet when a Coast Guard antisubmarine warfare aircraft dropped a torpedo on a Russian flagged freighter carrying disaster supplies to Los Angeles. The US had to shut up and swallow losing that aircraft, especially when an alpha strike of Russian carrier aircraft formed up in the aforementioned Barents Sea with a primary target of Anchorage.)
The remnants of American forces actually present in the continental United States, or CONUS, were flung in a desperation assault to re-open a land route to one of three sets of docks: Seattle, Portland or Oakland. They should have tried for Los Angeles, they might have won. But we suckered them into thinking they could have Oakland back cheap, and turned the Sierras into our own Maginot Line of desperate anti-armor defense. Unlike for the French in World War II, ours worked.
So the California Republic was quite, quite real. We held territory that we had fought for. We were recognized diplomatically by over fifty nations. Our Bear Dollar was not quite an eye catching piece of toilet paper.
And we were a nuclear armed power.
While I was still in the Site infirmary recovering, the San Francisco Resistance Command had sent a charge d' affaires to the United Nations, in New York City. Apparently getting there not sidewalked had been a bit of a trick. But when the California Republic representative had started presenting, step by step, the measures we had taken (with details!) on how California was now a fusion weapon armed power, the horrified UN representatives cut first video, then audio, and the real negotiations began.
We were still a long, long ways away from being granted a seat on the United Nations Security Council. But that had been the moment that Homeland had been withdrawn from still-occupied California territory east of Sacramento; American forces had started obeying the laws of war; and a trickle of released prisoners started being repatriated through Tijuana.
As a member of the California Military Commission, which had been the Resistance Military Commission, I had been read in on the darkest and deepest secrets of the Republic.
I won't share them here. But I consulted on how to keep them very, very secure from those who did not need to know; and how to very, very carefully reveal them to those who do.
Example:
"The permissive action link system used by the California Republic is a tripartite system, as is standard in Russian and American and Chinese service. However, one leg of the California Republic PAL is nothing more than continuous monitoring of the electromagnetic spectrum. If CAGO 740 AM, or several other frequencies which we choose not to disclose at this time, cease broadcasting, one of three votes necessary to arm the weapon is cast in favor of arming. The time lapse necessary is highly classified, as are the conditions for reset, IF ANY."
It doesn't take very long to get incredibly impossible complex things done, if enough people truly believe they are necessary.
It took less than a decade for America to decide to go to the Moon, and then do it.
It took less than four weeks for California to decide that in order to survive, to stop our citizens from being murdered, that we had to become a thermonuclear ballistic missile armed power. And then do it.
Contrary to the propaganda that is leaking through from the Untied Snakes, the California Republic wasn't a plot long in the planning.
It just kind of happened.
I missed out on the formative period. Between my arrest (admitted by Homeland itself to be unfounded!) for treason, and my rescue by Resistance shock troops that had covered as a Site security operations cell, I had been too busy getting tortured to notice anything.
Basically, a lot of competent adults scattered all through the State of California decided, more or less simultaneously, that enough was fucking enough. That struggling to feed people when shiploads of food were being loaded through the Oakland ports inbound was absurd. That skipping elections due to an Emergency was just not on. That when the rumors of genocide were all too true, that Never Again was no longer an option but a do or die command.
I'd finally gotten a letter from the PEG, the Provisional Emergency Governor of California. I'm not at liberty to reveal private, personal correspondence ... although I have given a copy to the California Military Museum in Sacramento, to be revealed after both of us are dead ... but one part that has since been made very public stood out.
Pat McGregor had no intention to be a traitor until hir spouse was sidewalked. About six inches from her. When Pat protested moments later, and was arrested, the arresting officer was about to comply with Homeland policy when a Resistance cell sniped him out.
Pat had nowhere to go and nothing to do - a transgender person simply doesn't survive capture by Homeland. So Pat invented a militia, then took over an army, using a truly dreadful weapon. Pat had been an attorney who dabbled in graphics design.
Armed with GIMP, a public domain graphics design tool akin to Photoshop, Pat started issuing orders to California National Guard units. They liked their new orders, a lot.
So the position of Provisional Emergency Governor, a very real authority under which I have acted to execute (or if you go with the USA version, murder) over two thousand genocidaires, was created out of thin air by a felony forger.
There are many theories of how nations begin and end. I like the theory that one person can make a difference. But if the conditions aren't right, that person's actions may be useless, or even worse.
Six months prior, Pat would have been shot. Six months later, another hundred thousand Californians would have been Homeward Bound.
Then came the problems of logistics.
California is utterly dependent for her existence on three large, complex water systems. We can survive with two. After American naval ground troops seized the Colorado River Aqueduct, we had to. (Note: these naval ground troops are NOT Marines, and are the first to insist on it. Civil war gets confusing.)
California has a little domestic oil production. One of the bigger pre-War stocks of heavy metal - armor and artillery - is in a forgotten corner of California in mothballs just in case. We had the tools to make the tools.
But in the pre-Firecracker world, the United States Navy would have blockaded a rebellious California, and we would have starved. Or died of thirst after the spare parts ran out.
The United States Navy had been too busy trying to run roughshod over the entire world, but especially China, so the Resistance taking over San Diego had ruined the USN's entire day. Then when the California Naval Militia started fielding destroyers, minesweepers (which double as mine _layers_, just ask Seattle) and lithium ion diesel electric submarines, we forced a sea lane open to Mexico and Canada. The latter was harder. But when Washington declared herself 'affirmatively neutral' (to avoid starvation) and Oregon also seceded, we had our own independent link to world commerce via the Barents Sea and the Northwest Passage, protected by the Russian Fleet as far south as Vancouver.
This also ended the China War, with American forces still holding on to our possessions in numerous coastal cities, but unable to advance or to expand our holdings. There was still an air bridge via Alaskan airspace for personnel, but not the tonnage either way needed for major ground war.
(We nearly lost the planet when a Coast Guard antisubmarine warfare aircraft dropped a torpedo on a Russian flagged freighter carrying disaster supplies to Los Angeles. The US had to shut up and swallow losing that aircraft, especially when an alpha strike of Russian carrier aircraft formed up in the aforementioned Barents Sea with a primary target of Anchorage.)
The remnants of American forces actually present in the continental United States, or CONUS, were flung in a desperation assault to re-open a land route to one of three sets of docks: Seattle, Portland or Oakland. They should have tried for Los Angeles, they might have won. But we suckered them into thinking they could have Oakland back cheap, and turned the Sierras into our own Maginot Line of desperate anti-armor defense. Unlike for the French in World War II, ours worked.
So the California Republic was quite, quite real. We held territory that we had fought for. We were recognized diplomatically by over fifty nations. Our Bear Dollar was not quite an eye catching piece of toilet paper.
And we were a nuclear armed power.
While I was still in the Site infirmary recovering, the San Francisco Resistance Command had sent a charge d' affaires to the United Nations, in New York City. Apparently getting there not sidewalked had been a bit of a trick. But when the California Republic representative had started presenting, step by step, the measures we had taken (with details!) on how California was now a fusion weapon armed power, the horrified UN representatives cut first video, then audio, and the real negotiations began.
We were still a long, long ways away from being granted a seat on the United Nations Security Council. But that had been the moment that Homeland had been withdrawn from still-occupied California territory east of Sacramento; American forces had started obeying the laws of war; and a trickle of released prisoners started being repatriated through Tijuana.
As a member of the California Military Commission, which had been the Resistance Military Commission, I had been read in on the darkest and deepest secrets of the Republic.
I won't share them here. But I consulted on how to keep them very, very secure from those who did not need to know; and how to very, very carefully reveal them to those who do.
Example:
"The permissive action link system used by the California Republic is a tripartite system, as is standard in Russian and American and Chinese service. However, one leg of the California Republic PAL is nothing more than continuous monitoring of the electromagnetic spectrum. If CAGO 740 AM, or several other frequencies which we choose not to disclose at this time, cease broadcasting, one of three votes necessary to arm the weapon is cast in favor of arming. The time lapse necessary is highly classified, as are the conditions for reset, IF ANY."
It doesn't take very long to get incredibly impossible complex things done, if enough people truly believe they are necessary.
It took less than a decade for America to decide to go to the Moon, and then do it.
It took less than four weeks for California to decide that in order to survive, to stop our citizens from being murdered, that we had to become a thermonuclear ballistic missile armed power. And then do it.
