Road To Sucession

Near the end of the Battle of Austin, the three founders of the AWA (Richard Trumka, Liam Sutton, and Salvador Gutierrez) ordered it to mobilize nationwide. On the 6th of February, AWA units in most major US cities began attacking National Guard armories, police stations, and state/local government buildings. They were quickly joined by tens of thousands of lightly armed rioters, who lashed out against the police and guardsmen called in to quell the revolt. On the fifth day of unrest, President Holder ordered several divisions of the US military to deploy into the affected cities, including elements of the 1st Infantry Division (which had recently retreated from Austin), the 7th Infantry Division, the 10th Mountain Division, and the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions. The relatively small uprisings in the newly-formed FRA were put down in short order once the secessionist forces recovered from the Battle of Austin.

While the swift military response was enough to restore order in most cities, the large popular support for the rebels in certain areas, particularly the Rust Belt, allowed them to capture large portions of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. This shifted the revolt into its second phase, with the military launching concentrated assaults on AWA positions instead of acting in an enhanced law enforcement role. By February 16th, the military had retaken Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and pushed the AWA’s New York cell back to the Bronx. In a bid to crush the morale of the remaining insurgents, Holder ordered the 28th Bomb Wing to begin bombarding their positions in Milwaukee and Chicago, much to the dismay of his cabinet (who had previously urged him not to use air power against the Texas separatists for the sake of PR).

The bombing of US citizens, which caused an unknown number of civilian casualties, immediately turned public opinion against Holder. Mass defections from the Wisconsin and Illinois National Guards ensued, bolstering local AWA cells’ numbers and firepower considerably. On February 20th, exactly a month after Inauguration Day, Congress passed an emergency resolution to declare the bombing campaign illegal and force the president to withdraw the federal troops from the conflict. Holder considered vetoing it, but relented when the Speaker of the House threatened him with an impeachment inquiry. The next day, the US military officially began to fall back to a defensive perimeter defined by the Mississippi River in the west and the Ohio River in the south and east. Without federal support, the National Guard’s campaign against the AWA quickly collapsed, and the guardsmen who had not defected retreated to rural areas to regroup.

level 2

jellyfishdenovo

Too many worlds 145 points·1 year ago·edited 8 months ago

Class Struggle in Aprils in Abaddon

Fair warning, this is going to be really long. Skip it if you like, but I think it adds necessary context to the revolt.

The Recession and President Cheney

The seeds of the leftist rebellion that would become the American Worker’s Army were planted during the Dick Cheney administration, which started in 2008. Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress responded to a rapid economic downward spiral by increasingly deregulating the economy, which many left-leaning groups saw as an attack on worker’s rights.

The Blue Movement

The Blue Movement grew out of a campaign to “turn the nation blue” after several typically Democrat-aligned states went to Cheney and the GOP in the 2008 election. It consisted of numerous strikes, protests, and rallies during 2011 and 2012, most notably the August 2011 transport strike, which shut down trains, buses, taxi services, and food delivery across the country for a week. Liam Sutton, an army veteran and factory worker who would later go on to co-found the AWA, rose to prominence largely due to his role in organizing parts of the Blue Movement.

The 2012 Election

Cheney managed to win his re-election campaign by an incredibly slim margin, securing the electoral college with a mere 271 electors against the opposition’s 268, with a popular vote deficit of nearly four million to boot. His election and inauguration were met with nationwide protests, which led to minor clashes with police in some cities.

The Fifth International

Formed in response to Dick Cheney’s re-election, the Fifth International was a coalition of labor unions, socialists, communists, and anarchists around the world, although the bulk of its membership was made up of unions and democratic socialist parties in America and Europe. The object of the Fifth International’s creation was to coordinate leftist movements around the globe, in the spirit of the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals that came before it. Because of the Workingman International’s shared history with the Soviet Union, right-wing groups in America denounced the formation of the coalition as an attempt to foment a communist rebellion in the US. They ended up being somewhat right, albeit indirectly.

Arming the Masses

Other than co-founding the AWA, Liam Sutton is perhaps best known for pioneering the concept of “preventative weaponization”, whereby labor unions coordinate mass buyouts of firearm stores prior to scheduled protests, both to safeguard against armed right-wing retaliation and to create a collective stockpile as a deterrent against police violence.

Fifth International-affiliated groups in the US began implementing preventative weaponization following the St. Louis Massacre of 2013, in which a brawl between left-wing protestors and right-wing counter-protestors was broken up with lethal force by the Missouri state police department, resulting in more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of injuries. The policy was highly controversial among neoliberals and conservatives, who saw it as detrimental to their gun control campaign and conducive to terrorism, respectively. The following year saw considerable disarray as the two parties began to swap places on the subject of gun ownership, with members of both vocally opposing viewpoints they had previously endorsed and vice versa. The 2014 midterms were muddled and contentious, but the Democrats managed to secure a large majority in the House of Representatives nonetheless.

Scandals Abound

Cheney’s second term in office was even more scandal-ridden than his first. From the beginning, there were allegations that he had used his influence as president to interfere in the electoral process, and the storm of negative PR only worsened when leaked documents revealed that his administration had ordered the nation’s intelligence services to conduct unconstitutional surveillance on American citizens.

The partisan deadlock in Congress resulted in an inability to pass an appropriations bill in late 2014, which led to the longest government shutdown in history, excluding the suspension of Congress during the war (78 days, December 22nd, 2014 - March 9th, 2015). Near the end of the shutdown, many of the 2,000+ public housing landlords whose federal contracts had expired began charging full rent to their tenants, causing widespread evictions and mass protests. Congress was eventually forced to settle on a bill due to the 2015 Rent Riots, a series of riots in which tenants and evictees of HUD projects began storming public housing units to seize control of them from their landlords.

Following the Rent Riots, right-wing media began pushing the idea that the Fifth International had organized them in an attempt to start a revolution. This talking point materialized as a GOP bill to make Fifth International membership illegal for American labor unions, as well as to ban the collective gun purchases central to preventative weaponization. In what was perhaps the low point of President Cheney’s political career, publicity-wise, Senator Bernie Sanders was arrested for sedition on the steps of the capitol building after an impassioned argument against the bill, citing rampant police violence as an argument that “the poor must remain armed at all costs in today’s society”. He was later released, but the event was seen by many as an illegal attempt to imprison the president’s political opposition, and Cheney’s already low approval rating was irreparably damaged.

(Note: Bernie Sanders was and still is much more moderate than the AWA, and was never actually affiliated with it, but he was a symbol of leftism to Republicans and thus was singled out for his opposition to the bill.)

The Democrats attempted to impeach Cheney in 2015, and although the House passed the impeachment resolution, the Senate voted against removing him from office by ten votes, to the anger of many Americans.

The 2016 Election

The 2016 election was easily the most divisive ever, and was essentially the final straw for the AWA and numerous other separatist movements.

The mudslinging began even before the primaries, with a multitude of different candidates representing opposing interests within either party. On the Republican side, the biggest contenders were Robert Gates, who was Cheney’s VP; Mitt Romney, who represented the portion of the party seeking to distance itself from the president; and David Duke, who drew support from the most radical parts of the voter base. The Democrats, meanwhile, were led by former AG Eric Holder from the moderate wing of the party and Senator Bernie Sanders from further to the left.

The growing disillusionment with the world of politics among American voters allowed third-party candidates to grow more popular than they previously had. In addition to the usual campaigns from the Libertarian Party and Green Party gaining more support than usual, ultra-billionaire Jeff Bezos launched a highly publicized bid as an independent candidate.

The nominating conventions of both parties were met with protests that quickly devolved into rioting, a la the 1968 DNC. Holder secured the Democratic nomination thanks to the support of unpledged superdelegates, despite Sanders receiving a majority of the votes during the primaries.

The Republican convention was initially postponed for two weeks due to three-way clashes between opposing groups of rioters and police. Their eventual nomination of Romney alienated pro-Gates neoconservative voters, causing many to shift their support to Duke, who split from the party to launch an independent bid of his own.

The political tensions that had built up during the election reached the breaking point when Jeff Bezos was fatally shot during a rally in October. The assassination of the second-richest man on Earth sparked a panic among the wealthy class that would later be dubbed the “Great Cash Migration”, which entailed more than twenty of the nation’s richest individuals fleeing the country and becoming citizens elsewhere. It also became something of a rallying cry for the most disenfranchised members of the Fifth International, with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka asking Liam Sutton to secretly begin organizing the AWA to take advantage of the raging anti-billionaire sentiments tearing through the lower class.

Eric Holder managed to win the election, thanks in large part to the orgy of third-party candidates sapping support from Romney, which led directly into the Secession Crisis of 2017 as deep-red states broke off from the union to protest his inauguration.