Literature / Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

aka: Victoria

The future never looked more flannel! And yes, that is a grenade on the mother's necklace.

Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War is a novel written by William S. Lind (under the penname Thomas Hobbes) and published in 2014 where, 20 Minutes into the Future, the United States breaks up into a series of warring successor states, including the Northern Confederation, eventually renamed Victoria, in New England.

This is told from the perspective of John Rumford, a US Marine discharged when he ruins a ceremony honoring fallen Marines to stop a woman saying "Iwo Jima." Because no woman Marines fought on Iwo Jima, and so they do not deserve to participate in his eyes. After having trouble farming and working, due to government regulations, Rumford forms a group, the Christian Marines, to fight for traditional Christian values in an increasingly multicultural and tolerant society. He becomes a leader in the revolution to restore America to an idealized version of the 1930s. 'Retroculture' it's called.

Then things get really crazy....

The novel is an openly white-supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, and reactionary-right-wing Propaganda Piece that has been described as "the paleocon Turner Diaries". Compare with Christian Nation and After the Revolution, similarly speculative political novels featuring an oppressive, near-future American government with its own La Résistance valiantly fighting back ... but from a standpoint politically opposite to Victoria.

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Tropes:

• After the End: Much of the novel takes place against the backdrop of the Fallen States of America. Plagues killed much of the population, economic depression destroyed trade, and a collapse in the social order that Rumford blames on "Cultural Marxists" who spread degenerate ideas like tolerance and equality ultimately brings down the US government.
• Anarcho-Tyranny: The system that the "Cultural Marxists" are described as running. They make sure violent criminals go unpunished while people who stand up for them are spoken against, and also recruit said criminals into the army for battle against rebel cities.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Northern Confederacy's people reaction to dissolution of USA and The Purge of liberal professors in Dartmouth College.
  • Southern Confederates’ reaction to destruction of liberal Atlanta
• Artistic License:
  • Regarding agriculture. Early in the book, Rumford complains that he can't use some nearby wetland for farming. Considering the types of crops he was growing, a wetland would've been a terrible place to farm, as it would've been a perfect breeding ground for his crops to be infected. And this is without getting into what would happen to his farm if it flooded. Doubly so in that more and more farmers are intentionally adding wetlands to their farms as they prevent flooding and soil erosion.
  • Regarding organized crime. All of the drug cartels in Mexico join forces into a neo-Aztec Empire, which is highly improbable as they fight one another for market share as often as they fight their governments.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: One early scene has a judge tarred and feathered with road tar. Tarring and feathering in Real Life was done with pine tar that was not nearly as hot as the asphalt now used to pave roads, and slathering someone in hot road tar would assuredly burn them to death rather than "just" painfully rough them up. Lind seems to portray the incident as painful and humiliating, but not fatal, indicating that he didn't know the difference between the two types of tar.
• Artistic License – History:
  • Studying history seriously leads Rumford to conclude that there is absolutely nothing truly new. All issues have already been debated by Greek philosophers, and even technology is just following tracks laid down by the time Napoléon Bonaparte was trying to conquer Europe, which is utterly absurd and ignores the possibility of multiple independent discoveries.
  • Lind states that the U.S. was the "freest" nation in the world until the 1960s, which is... very debatable, at best, considering this is the decade in which the non-white segments of the population gained many basic rights they'd previously been denied under openly racist and white-supremacist systems of segregation and disenfranchisement.
  • The book gets a lot of facts about women's role in military history wrong.
    • Rumford asserts that no army that has included female front-line combatants has ever been successful and that "all armies, everywhere, that had actually fought anyone had been made up solely of men". The same war that produced the T-34 that Lind gushes about also saw the Soviets field female snipers, machine-gunners, a tank crew for a T-34 (famously led by Mariya Oktyabrskaya), and combat pilots (including the 588th/46th Bomber Regiment,^note a.k.a. The Night Witches from Sabaton's song of the same name. a raider group that used low-tech biplanes that ought to fit right into Retroculture if they hadn't been flown by women). In all, ninety women received the Gold Star Medal and the title Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II, most for service in front-line combat. And while militaries with female members have not been the rule in human history, they have existed since the Ancient World in some places, and one of the most successful militaries in human history, the Mongols, included women in both command and field positions.
    • At one point, Rumsford states that there are no women interested in military theory. Even a casual glance at military-theoretical literature shows that this is not the case, leading one to wonder if Lind has actually read any milsci journals since 1980.
    • The book treats women in the United States military as new and dangerous trend. In truth, experiments with service women began during World War I and all branches were forced to allow women with equal benefits to serve in non-combat roles in 1972. The Air Force, which had been doing the same since '48, decided to just let women serve in combat roles in '76. There's always been some grumblings about things like different fitness standards between the sexes, but it's hardly the sort of 21st century Political Overcorrectness trendiness Lind thinks of it as. Part of this might have to deal with the fact that while the first parts of the book (or perhaps a preceding short story) were written in 1995, the book itself wasn’t released until 2014.
    • He also shows complete ignorance of Iwo Jima when he claims that there were no women there. Jane Kendeigh and her fellow flight nurses who landed on Iwo Jima during the heaviest fighting would disagree. Then there is the fact that 20,000 women actively served in the United States Marines by the end of the war, with over 85 percent of the staff in the Marine HQ being women.
• Artistic License – Military: The Author Filibuster extends even here: in his non-fiction, Lind insists that the US military has too many staff officers, doesn't study enough military history, and has forgotten the art of maneuver warfare, against all evidence to the contrary.
  • He tries to paint the Russian T-34 as a good, reliable tank designed to defend against rear area strikes, which are apparently the sole purpose of tanks. Just what the Christian Marines needed, apparently. Historically, said tank was known for frequent breakdowns (modern computerized systems such as fuel injection greatly improve reliability), among other problems. And that's not even getting into the fact that the newest T-34 rolled off the assembly line in 1958. The tanks are almost 60 years old, at best, at the time of the novel's publication. And the ones that Russia has are mostly literal museum pieces in the real world, disabled to the point that they're fancy metal sculptures.
  • Also the hero, John Rumford's, Establishing Character Moment as a young US Marine is interrupting a ceremony honoring the Corps' war dead rather than let a female Marine participate. No woman fought at Iwo Jima, he insists, so no woman has a right to speak the words and honor the dead. In reality, women have been a part of the USMC since 1918, served in combat areas since The Vietnam War, and, as of the story's beginning, have been full and equal parts of all save small unit ground combat for over twenty years (the fact that a precursor short story/the first part of the book was literally written in 1995 might have something to do with this). There are no male, female, white, black etc. Marines, only Marines. Besides, disrupting a remembrance ceremony is far more disrespectful than any imagined slight. Exactly none of these points come up when his CO chews him out and he gets discharged, only that a congresswoman is hounding him to be inclusive. If anything, his fellow Marines seem to respect his stand on the issue (despite the fact that doing this is approving of disrespect against far more fellow Marines both living and dead).
  • And that's not including other things such as live-fire infantry training with offset aim alone preventing casualties, modern warships destroyed with spar torpedoes, antiquated 1950s radar easily spotting stealth bombers, etc. etc. Platoon strength militia units with no logistics or coordination with each other are upheld as vastly superior to existing military, to the point of being called upon to train the actual military. At one point, the protagonist shows his contempt for the established military by sleeping through a briefing containing such useless trivia as local politics, road and weather conditions.
• Artistic License – Physics: The EMP bomb is portrayed in a more than somewhat implausible manner. From the description, this seems to be a deliberate storytelling device.
• Artistic License – Politics:
  • Rumsford writes that none of the federal government's globalist allies could (initially) send troops to help suppress the rebellions because Russia "exercised her veto in the Security Council." The United Nations has no authority over a bilateral agreement to deploy troops in another country at the host country's request. Indeed, less than one year after Victoria was published, Russia herself deployed troops in Syria to suppress rebels at the request of the Syrian government, a deployment which Lind apparently thinks the United States would have been able to veto.
  • Rumford makes a note at the end of the book that, if soldiers/warriors had been the ones to choose symbols, the symbol for war would've been linked hands and the symbol for peace a sword, because war unites while peace divides. Beyond the obvious resentment the losing side will have toward the victor, war only unites for a time, while peace (or rather, trade) allows for, if not Unity, at least tolerance.
• Artistic License – Religion:
  • At the end of the book, Rumford claims that the different branches of Christianity have joined together in order to launch a massive crusade... against a similarly united Islamic world. This is laughably impossible, for many reasons. Even setting aside the huge divides within each faith, both Christianity and Islam have spent as much, if not more of their histories warring between different branches and denominations of their own religions as they have with one another.
  • Every drug cartel in Mexico join forces together to create a neo-Aztec empire, worshipping the Aztec gods and reviving all the human sacrifice and cannibalism that characterized the ancient society. While many of the drug empires of Mexico have their "unique" spins on religion, most of them tend to take after Catholicism.
• Author Appeal:
  • There are a lot of trains in this story, guess who used to write about revamping public transport?
  • William Lind has a fondness for German military trappings, so most prominent characters, particularly Rumford and Kraft will reference German or Prussian sayings, military leaders, battles, costumes, and other history.
• Author on Board: Lind despises anything to do with 'political correctness' - which covers a broad spectrum of ideas such as civil rights, environmentalism, feminism, Islam, and living in cities - and can't imagine anyone with a brain would embrace such ideas. When his Northern Confederacy fights its various opponents that represent such ideas they inevitably act with such stupidity that defeating them is a cakewalk for the Anglo-Saxon followers of his Retroculture ideology.
• Capital Offensive: Federals trying (unsuccessfully) to capture Augusta, capital of Northern Confederacy. In return, NC army units destroy bridges of Washington DC, capture federal pilots from nearby airport; successfully support states of Maryland and Virginia trying to separate from federal government, thus completely isolating Washington DC and making it unsustainable for Federals.
• Cavalry Betrayal: fate of liberal!Cascadia Resistance leaders at hands of Rumford and Japanese.
• Civil War: The main premise of the book. Before states even start seceding, there is a shooting war over smoking bans.
• Combat Pragmatism: The Christian Marines use hostages and human shields to great effect in the early stages of their war against the federal government, who are understandably reluctant to engage in actions that might kill their own men.
• Conspicuously Public Assassination:
  • Destruction of the presidential helicopter carying USA President Warner, Vice-President Mowukuu, senior cabinet members and the majority leaders from the House and Senate from Washington DC to Harrisburg, Pensylvania by kamikaze pilot Mr. Montgomery Blair (of Clinton, Marylandpilot,) in name of "Leaderless Resistance".
    • This eventually led USA into military dictatorship and ultimately to its dissolution , thanks to UN veto on General Wesley's dictatorship of USA and its membership, mostly by China and Japan, with Russian influence.
• Destination Defenestration: a corrupt federal official (Ms. La Drek of HUD) is thrown out of a window several stories up by a mob of angry citizens, after gangs’ brutal rape and murder of Sister Mary Frances and her young charges in Worcester and government’s lack of response and remorse, and does not survive the experience. This instance explicitly references the famous Defenestrations of Prague .
• Divided States of America: Rumford and his allies are almost gleeful in kicking off the secession crisis that leads to the dissolution of the United States. By the halfway point of the novel there's a handful of organized states while the rest of the former country is awash in chaos. Which parts are which depend largely on the melanin content of the population. The central premise is the dissolution of the United States owing to a combination of hyperinflation, pestilence, and disobedience in the face of growing lawlessness. The heroes occupy the Northern Confederacy/Victoria, a deeply conservative version of New England, and in the South a New Confederacy forms, torn between its cosmopolitan and rural elements. Past that, Wisconsin is taken over by Nazis, the 'Party of the Will'. Insane parodies of 'Deep Greener' environmentalists take over the Pacific Northwest, forming Cascadia. California is renamed Azania, moving the capital to the Berkley campus and outlawing men. The rest is overrun by 'orcs' as minority gangs and rioters are called in-story.
• Euphemistic Names: The feminist Anglican bishop the protagonists burn at the stake in the first chapter is called Ms Cloaca Devlin. In other words, Lind essentially gave this introductory Straw Character the name ‘Butthole Satan’.
• Fallen States of America: With the exception of areas dominated by reactionary white powers such as the Northern Confederacy, Nazi Wisconsin, and a recreated CSA, the rest of America is depicted as awash in gangs of Black and Hispanic marauders or states dominated by crazed ideologies. Why the reactionary white powers aren't included in the crazed ideology category has everything to do with the protagonist sharing said ideology.
• Ghetto Name: "The mayor of New Orleans, Mr. Tsombe "Big Daddy" Toussaint L’Overture Othello Jones ..." Which serves to reinforce how New Orleans became a war hidden hell hole after Black people took over because the author thinks they are all inherently violent thugs.

• How We Got Here: The opening takes place in 2055, but then the narration goes back to 2016. Except for a very small bit on Rumford's death, the entire story is written as his retrospective view.
• Human Shield: After the Feds start bombing only trains to limit casualties, the Christian Marines kidnap 300 pilots and announce one will ride each cargo train from now on.
• Idiot Ball: Victoria can only exist because every member of the Federal government, and every rival state, seizes the Ball with both hands and won't let go.
• Informed Ability: For all the military brilliance of decentralized light infantry abjuring post-World War II technology, the reader does not see any direct confrontation between Victoria's military and outside forces that are not explicitly described as hopelessly incompetent.
• I Reject Your Reality: Lind claims all "ideology" works like this, until reality smacks you in the face. Of particular note is the federal government, which is continually depicted as on the side of criminals against law-abiding citizens to the point of backing up gang members with federal troops, and with a massive financial meltdown in progress and megadeaths from a pandemic, still sets anti-smoking laws as a high priority.
• Kaiser Reich: Despite being the governor of Maine, Bill Kraft considers himself a subject of Imperial Prussia. He has the full uniform with a pickelhaube, and follows the orders of his Kaiser, the last of the House of Hoenzoller.
• Ludd Was Right: Modern technology is depicted as evil because it creates virtual realities divorced from the true realities, driving long distances destroys communities, and mass produced goods are always inferior to handcrafted.

• Moral Myopia: The Christian Marines often spout on about wanting to reestablish a virtuous Christian country based on Western principles, but then merrily engage in kidnapping, humans shields, torture, ethnic cleansing, biological warfare, kangaroo courts, sexual slavery, and in general proudly hold themselves up as sexists, racists, and homophobes.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When the Feds start bombing Victoria, one bomb accidentally lands in a schoolyard. The same pilot is shot down and captured, and driven out to see the clean-up. Then he is released to spread the story, and the government thereafter restricts bombing to disabling rail nodes.
• New Technology Is Evil: Post-1930s technology is depicted as being an inherently corrupting force which is destructive to the communities that Rumford wants to create.
• No Woman's Land: Victorians are harshly opposed to feminism and hostile to the idea of women working and particularly in the military, in favor of minding their 'sphere' of the home. When the Victorians defeat the armies of Azania , those who do not become good housewives are sold into slavery in the Middle East to "experience real patriarchal oppression." Not to mention the novel begins and ends with a woman being burned at the stake for claiming to be a Christian bishop. Note that the narrative portrays all of this positively.
• Oppressive States of America: Before the economic meltdown, the plagues and the secessions, there erupts a shooting war over harsh anti-smoking laws that let people exposed to secondhand smoke or scenting tobacco sue the smoker for massive damages. Tobacco is serious business.
• The Plague: A large part of the fall of the United States is genetically engineered diseases. The Northern Confederacy is also attacked this way by Muslims while returning enslaved Black people, but since the returnees were quarantined upon arrival, the only deaths were among a minority race that Rumford looks down on anyway. Despite officially doing away with any sciences from before the 1930's, the Northern Confederacy somehow engineers its own plague and unleashes it upon the Middle East, killing countless millions of people as it spreads.
• Plot Armor: Every threat Rumford faces that should at least be a challenge for him to overcome is effortlessly dealt with because the threat is quickly revealed to be hopelessly incompetent and incapable of mounting anything but a token resistance to Rumford's brilliant tactics. Even when those tactics depend on bonkers ideas like women not having spatial awareness.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: While the forces of Islam are treated as the true Arch Enemies of Christiandom, slave-trading, genocidally violent, and deeply opposed to the healthy free exchange of ideas, it's worth noting that the disciples of Retroculture are guilty of literally all of these things at various points in the text, including literally selling dissenters on conquered territory as slaves to the Middle East. As per the trope, the author just makes excuses for or expects the audience to accept the main characters doing it because they are the main characters.
• Public Execution:
  • The story begins with the protagonists burning a female bishop at the stake for her refusal to conform to the Northern Confederacy's religious laws.
  • Kraft's massacre of intellectuals at Dartmouth for teachings that go against his ideology is televised to all the Northern Confederacy.
  • To avoid an ethnic cleansing of the surviving Black people in the Northern Confederation hold public hangings for crimes with trials that are so quick and so lacking in legal defense that they'd they're effectively a Kangaroo Court.
• Second American Civil War: main theme of novel is Civil War and its results and Aftermath.
• Southern Gentleman: Rumford is very impressed with the hospitality of the white people of the New Confederacy, and considers them genteel but indecisive because of their bureaucracy, attention of logistics, and commitment to equal rights for all their citizens.
• Straw Character: Each and every one that is not on the side of Rumford, Kraft and their Retroculture ideology. Most notable is Kateesha Mowukuu, the Black secretary of defense whose raps and rants - yes, both - are racist and devoid of coherency, but she's supposed to be a stand in for people who support civil rights.
• Strawman News Media: Rumford frequently expresses nothing but disdain for the media because they are all evil liberals who shamelessly distorts reality. Bizarrely they almost always report stories exactly as he wants them to be portrayed though.
• Strawman U: UNESCO funds colleges in Victoria. To show the evils of liberal schools these are hyper-parodies with things like male students forced to prostrate before a Temple to Artemis, white students wearing signs confessing to "PC sins" and lectures on the evils of Eurocentrism.
• Take That!: To all the forces of 'Cultural Marxism' Activist judges, liberal media, CNN, liberal academia, environmentalists, feminists, modernists, LGBTQ, atheists, Muslims, Blacks, Afrocentrists, Jane Fonda and more!
• Tar and Feathers: The Christian Marines get their start leading a mob that gives this treatment to a judge who ruled against them. Worse, it was road tar, and the man most likely died.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: absolute behemoth of an Author Filibuster speech, given to a group of "liberal professors" before summary execution in front of Kangaroo Court. William S. Lind may not be as bad as Ayn Rand in regard to long speeches, but he still has the tendency.
• The Theocracy: The stated goal of the Christian Marines is "a land where the Ten Commandments are the law." By the beginning/end, non-Christians are banished from Victoria. Plus they're a training center for the new crusade against the Muslim world in the Middle East. Also Newark after Purge of gangs.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Neo-Nazis have created a new state in part of the Midwest. Disturbingly, they're the only faction that Lind portrays as anything close to being an acceptable society, and only reason given for why Rumford won't aid them in conquest is that the Nazis were industrialized and modern.
• Torture Cellar: In Augusta, the state capital. Some enterprising followers of Rumford were so eager to torture somebody that they went ahead and built and installed a rack before the protagonists even agreed on using torture as a form of interrogation.
• Turbulent Priest: The Reverend Ebenezer Smith is a Knight Templar who eventually starts a bloody revolution when the government refuses to effectively prosecute the criminals who prey on his congregation in Newark. Purge of gangs and Theocracy in Newark were starting point of the Second American Civil War, with Divided States of America and Fallen States of America as its result.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: Rumford is first radicalized on May 7th, 2016. Two years after the book's publishing.
• Who's Laughing Now? / The Dog Bites Back : Third World's countries (that suffered military interventions and coups by USA, because of federal insisting that every other country conform to Washingtons notions of democratic government ) and China, Imperial Russia, Japanese Empire have this reaction to USA falling into military dictatorship by General Wesley, and its inevitable dissolution.
• With Us or Against Us: The attitude Kraft and, by extension, everyone in the Northern Confederation. Are you a loyal Retroculturist loyal to Kraft and Rumford's cherry-picked version of history? Or one of them, the Cultural Marxists who believe in things like human rights and equality? If you're the latter, don't expect to live long.
• Urban Ruins: ultimate fates of Washington DC, New York City, New Orleans, Atlanta (center at least) as result of Civil War.

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