For context, this is from the trailer from the Divided States of America spin-off miniseries (from the Kaiserreich universe from Hearts of Iron mods). It casts the Combined Syndicates of America (the socialist faction in the civil war) in a mostly negative light because something something warcrimes something something revolution is bad.
The best part of playing the CSA is that you can take a decision called "Our turn has come, and we shall not make excuses for the terror"
I think Chelsea Manning always plays as the CSA whenever she streams HoI IV. Based.
I love the mod but holy shit can the Kaiserreich subreddit/community be full of lib/chud cringe sometimes, so much "reclaim muh birthright", "sYnDiE eXtReMiSm" bullshit
No, you see, there's a lot of moral ambiguity between the side that wants to give power to the workers and the side that wants to send millions of conscripted boys to the meat grinder just so some Nazi-sympathizing royal fuck can sit his ass on a fancy chair.
Also Syndicalism isn't acktually what the British people want despite them having a populist uprising to install it
The british women, which is like 50% of the population, sure is going to love having all of their rights stripped and reduced back into subhumans.
All the CSA paths are good and based, even the Totalist ones, especially compared to the cursed shit you can do with the American Union State.
Better than alternatives, sure, but I’m not sure about “good and based”.
The Totalist paths are “literally 1984 red fash American Stalin” shite which completely ignores the fact that America and Russia have completely different material conditions. (though Foster isn’t that bad so long as you don’t take the weird decisions)
The RadSoc AFL path is straight up :LIB:. So much blood sacrificed so that workers can finally be free... through welfare and increased bargaining power with the bourgeoisie.
That leaves the IWW.
I think all of the paths would be a response to how the 2ACW plays out. I'd imagine a Totalist America would be a response to a long, bitter war, while the RadSoc path could almost be voted in.
I sometimes wonder if the IWW path is a bit too perfect, maybe that's just the doomer in me.
holy shit they are doing an animated series? sucks they are doing my faction dirty though but i guess not everyone plays them all lawful good socialist like i do.
The only good thing I have seen from Kaiserreich is making Orwell a fascist.
I mean I would expect that any successful american socialist movement uses american imagery, particularly of people viewed as liberators and the founding fathers. “We’re continuing along the path the founding fathers and lincoln laid down for us by liberating America from capitalism”
If historical dialectics teaches us anything it’s that we never get that clean break we all want. Gotta go through a lot of shit to get to the inevitable light at the end
Unless america just gets fucking smashed and suppressed by some third world vanguard lol
:inshallah:
Based on the imagery I'm imagining an alternate history where Lincoln goes communist and less bigoted.
Just imagine him surviving Booth and saying “you know what? Enough’s enough” and going full Stalin on the south
Lincoln and the founding fathers
I mean at least Lincoln did some actual meaningful good, unlike the founders who were all just flaming hypocrites and bastards save maybe Thomas Paine.
Well Lincoln is rightfully being seen as less and less of a "liberator" as historical study progresses. Black slaves were defecting and joining the Union army in large rates, taking emancipation and remuneration into their own hands to great extent. The Emancipation Proclamation really was a formalization of an already undergoing social revolutionary process of self emancipation, and one that Lincoln only undertook reluctantly because his mission in fighting the Civil War was never in ending slavery but in preserving the Union. That's why he said if he could have preserved the Union without freeing a single slave, he would have.
This is a large reason why I find the "procession of heads" in ML imagery rather strange, but especially ones that are retconned to include these dork ass fantasies about Lincoln representing some radical Republican agenda that was really self consciously emancipatory. Lincoln was kind of a dumb shit milquetoast liberal tbh. And his political miscalculations and unwillingness to pursue a radical break with entrenched American institutions including slavery led to a lot of misery and injustice that persists to the present day.
Like if you want a procession of heads from the American Republicans, do like Thaddeus Stevens or something. Lincoln was just straight up not that great.
Can someone do procession of heads with john brown replacing lincoln? Cause I think that would be dope.
Socialist movements in the USA already did use Lincoln in their imagery, often simultaneously with people like Lenin.
Kinda like how FDR is used as an example by socialists even though he absolutely was not a socialist.
To add to what others have said, the Lincoln head is pretty much in line with the lore. The CSA see themselves as the latest (and most radical) iteration in the pursuit of actual "liberty" in American history, as well as the eradication of liberal democracy's many contradictions, which naturally leads to Socialism. Yes, it's lib and all to try to reconcile a settler-colonial project like America, but given that they're burning said settler-colonial project to the ground and building on top of its ashes, it could be worse. There's also the pragmatic value since outright disowning America would only embolden reactionaries.
It's not that weird when you look at our history, anyway. Just look at the CPUSA in its relative prime. Even the Bolsheviks didn't make a clean break from Russian patriotism and history. Why else would they wear those silly-looking hats in the Russian Civil War?
It's okay to make all the Nazi empires you want in fiction but the moment you make anything left of socdems then you're going too far. Kaiserreich used to be pretty generous with the Syndies but it have since been taken over by reactionaries who's pushing the mod into a monarchist propaganda.
God they were SO good at making things impartial and keeping the politics out. Then the same gamers who scream about that demanded they started making them look shot and the nazi Russians look good
