Background Notes: Entropy

"In a more homogeneous society, the growing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a privileged minority might be expected to produce a strong reaction on the part of the majority. In present-day America, however, no such reaction is likely to take place. Although heavily outnumbered, the unified few rest secure in the knowledge that any insurgency will almost certainly dissipate in quarrels among the fragmented many rather than in open rebellion; during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, black, Hispanic, and white rioters turned on Korean middlemen rather than march on Beverly Hills. The belligerent guests on the never-ending talk show, urged on by the screaming audience, will continue to enact allegorical conflicts, while, off-camera and upstairs, the discreet members of the class that does not exist ponder the choice of marble or mahogany for the walls of the executive suite from which they command."
-Michael Lind

[GM: What if the masses had marched on Beverly Hills at the end of the Cold War? What if that decade had been a lot worse overall? As a Millennial, I look back on the 1990's as something of a golden age: good wages, cheap gas, bland culture, moral degeneracy, and all the other hallmarks of a society gone as high as it'll ever go. That's why I decided to change the setting for this RPG from near-future to alternate-history: what if my formative years had been every bit as bad as the 1980's action movies predicted?]

Robert Donner:
They called them the 1992 California Riots and they were wrong on all three counts. The riots weren't exclusive to 1992, they didn't only happen in California and "riot" wasn't always the best term to describe them. More like "insurrections" (or, less charitably, "pogroms"). Clinton did his best to ease tensions and keep a lid on those boiling pots, but that was all he could really do. The violence had been a long time coming, burning over areas that still showed scorch marks from the '60s, and everyone knew it would boil over again.

We on the Right weren't happy back then either. Ruby Ridge was that year, Waco was next year, those of us with longer memories still recalled Kent State and the MOVE House. Oh, some folks were still content with voting, but even the dimmest bulbs were starting to see what a useless gesture that was. Pat Buchanan's and Jerry Brown's insurgent campaigns both performed well, despite the parties using every trick in the book to railroad them out of their primaries. The Reform Party took over 25% of the vote in 1992, 12% in 1996, and probably won't field a candidate at all in what will be more or less a ceremonial election this year.

Throw in NAFTA, gun control, information blackouts, the War on Drugs, the prison system, a protracted ground war in the Balkans, and it wasn't long before someone expressed that displeasure through what Clausewitz called "politics by other means". Tim McVeigh expressed it with bombs under the cars of federal agents. I expressed it with molotov cocktails through the windows of abortion mills. Next thing you know our country is falling apart and we're all fighting over the rotting carcass.

By 1998 America was full of burning federal buildings and those remaining had converted into mini-fortresses. The newly-formed United States Garrison force was holding the major population centers, minus the worst of the ghettos plus the large thoroughfares. We were left with most of the countryside and inner city and could could generally check any incursions by all but their strongest convoys, though we could never truly consolidate our gains for fear of getting carpet-bombed.

None of these events occurred in isolation. Canada was likewise mired in a multifaceted ethnic and geographic civil war: the West and Maritime provinces are fighting the central government, the French and First Nations are fighting the English and each other. Mexico broke like a pane of glass under the burden of racial, economic, and political disparity. Nations around the world were butting heads and making alliances, filling the vacuum created by our departure from the world stage.

We made our move on Washington DC itself in the spring of 2000, in one of our biggest conventional actions to date. But it was not the new Yorktown to which we were marching, but the new Culloden: The president had called upon the aid of the International Community, who responded in force against the "extremists" threatening the legitimate United States government. They hit without warning and overwhelmed us, sending the surviving remnants trailing back to their backwoods sanctuaries. Many were cooked alive in their compounds, but those of us who read Mao did a bit better.

Some folks think the whole thing was planned as part of a conspiracy to destroy America and bring about a one world government in the new millennium. I don't. I think the Blue Helmets just saw this country unraveling, feared it would give their own folks the wrong ideas and decided to take action before things got too out of hand. Not much different from the Allied interventions against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, just more successful.

That was six months ago. At that time I commanded a 1,500-man light infantry battalion and there were about 27,000 militia members in the lower Shenandoah Valley alone. I now find myself with a 6-man staff and about a dozen contacts with the small, dispersed direct action cells that make up the remnants of my formation. I don't know how many resisters are left in this region and I don't know how many won't die or quit over the course of the winter. Our goals at this time deal primarily with evasion and survival; we'll regain our strength, striking out at our enemies when we can and reorganizing our forces for the kind of war that John Singleton Mosby might have liked.