Anarchy in Cherry, Nevada

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

The young Republican has waited in a queue to have her photo taken in front of the remains of Cherry, Nevada. Her hair is still short after the fascists shaved her head, and branded her with St David’s star because she had a Jewish name. She would later tell the Republican Militia that she wasn’t, in fact, a Jew. The Militia didn’t care.

So she drapes herself in the anarchist flag and holds an ancient Mosin rifle she’d never fired, and for a moment she is part of something bigger than herself — of hope, and anger, and brotherhood. These are the things that fuel the Republican movement, despite its infighting and poor equipment. There are many factions within the Militia — the Moscow-backed Marxist-Leninists, anarchists, Trotskyists, and smaller liberal sects. For now, they fight together against the fascists.

The Vanguard movement grew in the South after decades of poverty and neglect from the federal government. Vanguardism was ostensibly about family and Southern nobility, but was always unmistakably fascist at its core, and part of a wider populist movement across the world in 2063. Many Southerners found themselves choosing between enlisting with the socialists, or death. Because for many, that’s what it was. Fascism was death — if they didn’t shoot the Jew or the socialist or the negro, they would displace them into oblivion. It was worth picking up a rifle for.

The young girl here, Tzipora, aged eleven, would later be disillusioned by the Republican movement and escape it. She had seen too many terrible things performed on behalf of the Militia, and the anarchists were being sabotaged by Moscow. This was the ultimate product of the civil war — bitter, jaded soldiers who had been stripped of their idealism and vitality. Fascist or socialist, everything they had fought for had died in the South.