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Yo, it’s December. And I’m still not done with Age of Aquarius yet. But don’t worry, I have something for ya right now. And look, it’s red, and it’s all about sharing and togetherness, and not getting the thing you wanted this year because the bearded man who watches your every move disapproved of your behavior. Perfect for the holiday season, amirite?

So let’s dive into today’s episode of Fullmetal Overchemist: Brotherheaven, comrades!

Not satisfied with propping up East Bloc and Moscow-aligned countries in establishing colonies on Venus, beginning as early as 1979, the USSR started essentially trolling the West (and others) by sponsoring the movement of left-wing dissidents and defectors from enemy countries to demonstrate that space was available to all. This was Interkosmos’ Morning Stars (Utrenniye Zvezdy) program. Most Morning Stars simply settled in the existing colonies, in particular the KVR (Konfederatsiya Venerianskikh Respublik), the confederation of Soviet aerostat colonies, or settled in the other original “Cosmic Twelve” republics. However, in other cases, so-called “Morning Star republics” were given their own prefabricated aerostats, to build their own colonies with their own little governments.

Let’s get started and take a look into a few of these Morning Star republics, see how they’re doing in Overheaven’s version of 2021!

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF NEW AMERICA

In 1979, the Peoples Temple community of Jonestown, Guyana successfully negotiated their exodus to the Soviet Union, which settled them in the Black Sea city of Sochi between ‘79 and 82. At the time, the Soviets were just looking for a quick propaganda victory (“Hah! So what if a few loser Germans jump over the Berlin Wall! We just scored nine-hundred Americans!”). However, Jones’ heterodox Christian preaching, cult of personality and insatiable sexual appetite was something Moscow would have preferred not to bother with. Jones sensed how unwelcome he was, and reasoned briskly that he had been used as a prop by the Soviets. Unsure if he or his cult would last long with nowhere else to go, he preached that so long as the Earth remained in the grip of Antichrist capitalism, the future of the “spiritual revolution” would need to continue far, far away. And that’s how Jim Jones arrived on Venus.

Of course, it wasn’t just the Peoples Temple aboard this ark of American revolutionaries. Others were convinced that America was just too enthralled by the forces of capitalism to be saved, and that a new, more just America had to be built in the sulphury skies of the Amber Planet instead. A small number of CPUSA members, a few former members of the Weather Underground, a smattering of Black Panthers, a handful of radical feminists, some former members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and more militant groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the May 19th Communist Organization. All these disparate groups formed a single political coalition - the United Front of the People’s Republic of New America. By 1989, a total of 4,244 Americans took up the Soviet offer, and in 1985, they chose “Father” Jim Jones, as the first Premier of the PRNA, who served as the supreme leader of the colony until 1995, when he abruptly slipped off this mortal coil.

The official story was a brain aneurysm, but rumors swirl of a more outlandish fate. After a brief power struggle (and waiting three days for Father Jones to rise from the grave), someone stepped into Jones’ shoes, elected into the position by the Temple members (and non-Temple United Front officials who feared a revolt by the Temple). Stephan Gandhi Jones, the reverend’s only biological son. Lacking his father’s gift of charisma, “Son” Jones found he had to act more carefully and pragmatically than his father, who enjoyed uncritical support from his cultists. To this end, he built up ties with the factions on New America who previously didn’t appreciate his father’s use of the brainwashed flock to effectively dominate the PRNA and brute-force his agenda without consideration of those outside the Temple. Stephen Jones would need their support to consolidate his winning coalition, while also maintaining his father’s traditional base. To that end, the ultimate tragedy of Stephen Gandhi Jones was self-imposed exile into his father’s shadow. In the late 1990s, he erected a cult of personality outliving his father, whose body was interred in a glass coffin on public display, emulating Lenin, where he became an object of cultic worship by Temple devotees.

There were attempts to reconnect the New Americans with the United States starting as early as 1986. At least in part, this was to dampen the Soviet propaganda victory. However, family members of those who had left for Venus (particularly family members of Temple cultists) wanted to hear from their relatives, make sure they were okay, and so they became the staunchest advocates of trying to reunite with the residents of New America. There was some pressure inside New America as well. Not everyone was pleased with the results of the socialist experiment. As early as 1992, talk of a “Commonwealth of Cytheria” was discussed on national television in the US - the idea of integrating New America with the “Greater United States” of colonies across the Solar System. However, this idea of re-entering the fold was declined for a number of reasons. Many aboard New America were in favor of re-establishing communication with relatives back on Earth, but reintegration into the Union was easily spun into an imperial scheme to undo the PRNA (“It’s not about us,” said Jones in 1991, “it’s about all the oppressed people on Earth, who can’t be allowed an example of what their world can be!”). Additionally, Jim Jones, fearing that the FBI would try to assassinate him, rebuffed any and all attempts at diplomacy made by the US State Department in the late 1980s. Pragmatically, while New America was effectively a client state of the KVR, Stephen Jones was eager to secure supplies wherever he could, and was worried about some of the more “troubled” persons aboard New America, who seemed to have not properly adjusted to life in the colony. However, skepticism of his commitment to the revolutionary cause meant it wasn’t until late 2001 that he began correspondence with the US State Department, going out of his way to address them as a foreign agent, and mark a clear distinction between the “so-called United States” and the PRNA in his public addresses on the matter.

Starting in 2003, a US aerostat was established in the skies of Venus, known as Wright Base, and linked with New America by cables and struts. While Wright Base has only a modest civilian population - composed mostly of scientists on long-term missions to the Yellow Planet - owing to the politics of New America, Wright Base exists in a weird sort of non-Westphalian flux. Wright Base is a self-governing colony of the United States in theory, and counts as American soil, but in practice, Wright Base is associated quite heavily with the PRNA, which acts on Wright Base’s behalf on Venusian political forums such as the Venusian Council. Additionally, Wright Base acts as a sort of “free economic zone” for New America.

In 2021, New America had a population of 24,118. Politically, the Jones Dynasty fundamentally controls the organs of the PRNA state apparatus; on paper the PRNA is a multi-party democracy, with the United Front composed of the Communist Party of New America, the Black Panthers of New America and the Social Democratic Party of New America, however in practice the CPNA dominates the Front, and elections consist almost exclusively of candidates chosen by the CPNA. Speculation persists that the Jones Dynasty hasn’t exercised effective control of the PRNA since the death of Jim Jones, and that Stephen Jones is a puppet controlled by someone behind the scenes on the station (widely speculated to be either Bill Ayers or Angela Davis), however this has yet to be confirmed by substantive evidence. New America is around 72% black, the People’s Hall doubles as a basketball court, and like most other things on Venus, is culturally stuck in the 70s and 80s. All of the computers are blocky and have Russian labels on them, the walls are covered in murals conflating Marx, Christ and Lincoln with Jim Jones, and news from Earth is filtered through an especially far-left perspective which paints the United States as a plutocratic herrenvolk democracy ruled by anti-Christian Nazi corporations. Like many other societies on Venus, living accommodations consist of a hammock and a tool box - the latter is where your private possessions are kept - with curtains creating small temporary rooms.

Back on Earth, meanwhile, defectors from the PRNA who wished to return to Earth began arriving back to the Blue Planet in 2004. Despite the stories they brought with them about the brainwashing, the strange cult of personality around the Jones Dynasty [1], the harsh conditions and the literal lack of private property beyond what can fit into a single small box, New America remains an object of fascination among American leftists in 2021. Among more orthodox Marxist thinkers, New America is condemned as a defeatist gesture, however, “exit socialism” (the belief that socialism could or should be achieved offworld), which experienced its first spike in popularity in the 80s, has seen renewed interest in a younger generation of increasingly-defeatist American radicals, convinced that late capitalism will simply take the Earth with it, and in this regard New America’s hagiography of Jim Jones, even in its creepiest displays, became a popular meme in left-wing Internet communities beginning in 2016. And even in non-radical intellectual spaces, Jim Jones is still highly-regarded as an anti-racist humanitarian in certain corners of American progressive thought, where it’s claimed that the accusations of brainwashing and cult behavior constitute far-right smears against a progressive spiritual movement against systemic racism in America. And as a sign of the times, a number of high-profile political live-streamers have in recent years raised millions of dollars in online donations to send enthusiastic Western millennial colonists to the Venusian colonies, with most settling aboard the larger aerostats of the KVR, Neu-Dresden Democratic Republic or Shukra Federation, but New America still receives the occasional new immigrants.

However, the most visible presence of New America in modern US culture is the usage of the PRNA flag at far-left protests, beginning in the 1990s with the 1996 protests against the Second Korean War, the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle, and Rage Against The Machine’s performance at Woodstock ‘99, and continuing well into current protest movements in 2021. The flag is a simple red field, with six stripes, symbolizing the six founding states of the US which outlawed slavery at the start of the nation’s history, and didn’t fight to preserve the institution during the Civil War (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire). The stripes represent the only American heritage that New America wants to embrace. And instead of fifty stars, there is only one, the single star representing the unified colony of New America.

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF AUMBRIA

Moving on to the next flag, tis the banner of the People’s Republic of Aumbria (derived from the Middle English “aumbre”, or “amber”, referring to the yellow haze of the Venusian clouds). Founded by more traditionally-minded pro-Soviet British communists, who regarded themselves as the only “real” communists left in the Communist Party of Great Britain, Aumbria’s origins date back to the “Pioneer Front” founded in 1978, shortly after Valentina Tereshkova “landed” in the sky of Venus. The Pioneer Front was a faction of the CPGB which was an early adopter of exit socialism, and organized groups of wouldbe space explorers into training programs which quickly alienated them from wider far-left movements at the time. Practicing with homemade spacesuits, homebrewed “space food” diets, and solitary-confinement sessions in sealed wooden boxes meant to simulate long-duration spaceflight, the Pioneer Front was skewered in Trotskyist and Tory papers alike as sideshow “space tanks”. However, as silly as these displays might have been, the Pioneer Front was first in line to join the Morning Star program in 1981. Thatcher’s ascension to Prime Minister made exit socialism significantly more popular in UK far-left circles, which pushed into the program a few of the “comrades” who previously mocked the Front for their quirky enthusiasm.

Joining the program, however, meant undergoing real training. To make sure these latter-day pilgrims were cut out for life on a giant balloon floating hundreds of miles above Hell atop acidic clouds, prospective Venusian colonists began training in August of 1982. Similarly to the Mars analog colonies built in the Australian Outback, the Canadian Arctic, American Southwest and the dormant volcanic calderas of Japan, the USSR operated Venus analog colonies for training purposes, although these were of a markedly different nature. Living in self-contained facilities built from repurposed water towers in closed cities across the Central Asian republics, like the Martian colonists-in-training, the Pioneer Front and their colleagues had to learn the basics of routine life in cramped indoor conditions, simple diets of chicken and insects, tending to aeroponic vegetable gardens and psychologically adapting to all the mental pressures of this lifestyle. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect was having to simulate repairs (often improvised), from 65 meters above the ground. The rules of the simulation required that the trainees conduct these exercises while wearing acid-proof suits with bulky oxygen tanks and no safety harnesses; the logic being that while harnesses would be used on Venus, the training needed to be harsher than the real thing, with real danger to convey the true hazards of living in the Venusian sky. Anyone who fell off was disqualified and removed from the training program, although given how high up these platforms were, most who fell were unable to walk or breathe afterwards. And to avoid diplomatic incidents from British subjects falling to their deaths deep in Soviet territory, prospective Morning Star colonists were required to waive their prior citizenship.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was qualified to go offworld after three months of the aforementioned training completely cut off from the outside world, but those who passed muster got to go to Venus, and in 2021, Aumbria has turned out to be one of the more successful of the Morning Star republics. Notably, Aumbrian chemists came up with an improved process for producing fabric from the Venusian air. Beginning with independent experiments by Soviet and Japanese scientists in the early 1970s, carbon nanotubes became a top priority for Soviet research and development, owing to the lack of readily-available raw materials in the Venusian atmosphere besides carbon dioxide, a few trace gasses and metallic vapors. Nowhere were the incentives to innovate and find as many uses for CO2 quite as strong as on Venus itself, where the consequences for stagnation were quite literally Hell itself, and so chemists and materials scientists on Venus tirelessly experimented with new formulas in countless directions of research. Among these colonial scientists was one Marcus Owen of the People’s Republic of Aumbria, who found a way to synthesize synthetic yarn from carbon nanotubes using less energy and fewer resources, although with the minor downside of all the fabric being black. Naturally, these discoveries were shared with all the aerostats across Venus, but Aumbria also happened to have a few comrades from the London College of Fashion among their ranks, and today in 2021, Aumbria is something of a Venusian fashion hub, although Venusian standards err on the simple side of things.

Today, the Aumbria aerostat has a population of 18,262 as of 2021. Separated by millions and millions of miles, and living under a single-party socialist republic in the skies of an alien planet, the Aumbrians are still remarkably British in character. And also not. For starters, not everyone’s British - Aumbria’s scored a number of Australians, Kiwis, Canadians, West Indians and Americans (the latter being orthodox Marxists dissatisfied with New America, looking for somewhere that spoke English). Aumbria still speaks English, but if you ask an Aumbrian what they think of the UK or the Crown, they’ll answer you in Russian. They enjoy their aeroponic tea, their carbon-fiber soccer balls and John Lennon’s music [2] fills hallways covered in colorful socialist-realist murals, and the only thing to sip at the pub is vodka. There are aging Russian TV sets all over the colony blaring “educational” material on the neoliberal dystopia of modern Britain, everyone’s dressed in black for the most part, and the Premier (currently Carl Benjamin) of the People’s Republic is jokingly referred to as “Big Brother”.

The flag of the People’s Republic of Aumbria is a red field, with two white and blue stripes close to the top of the flag, symbolizing the relatively-habitable upper atmosphere of Venus. A red star near the upper-left corner of the flag contains a dove, a hammer, a wrench, a wreath and a flask. The dove symbolizes peace and evokes the anti-war contingent of the Pioneer Front who came to Venus to escape Earth’s capitalist war machines; the hammer and wrench represents the workers and engineers of Aumbria, who make the colony’s very existence possible; the wreath represents the colony’s agriculture technicians, who raise the settlement’s aeroponic and hydroponic produce; and the flask symbolizes Aumbria’s chemists and material-scientists.

REVOLUTIONARY UNION OF GUERNICA

Next up, we have the flag of the Revolutionary Union of Guernica, a strange kitbash of disparate figures. In the early 1980s, an odd coalition of leftist and communist dissidents from France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, featuring a mix of enthusiastic, young students and burned out, old 68ers who for different reasons sought to build socialism far away from the establishment; radical left-wing Esperantists; quirky new strains of left-wing ufologists from Latin America and Southern Europe (in particular, an especially weird strain of Basque left-nationalists positing an extraterrestrial origin for their people); and hardline socialist members of the Second Spanish Republic government-in-exile who dissented sharply from the rest of their cohort when in 1977 the largesse of the Republicans recognized Juan Carlos’ monarchy as the successor to Franco’s defunct fascist regime. This last group, while older than the rest of the gaggle, found itself able to trade in the prestige of their association with the Spanish Republicans, for a leading voice and elder leadership role within the Committee for Revolutionary Settlement, and it is through their influence that the Committee adopted the name “Guernica” for their colony, in honor of the victims of fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Which is why their flag bears the violet and gold of the Spanish Republic, while the three-pointed star of the International Brigades represents the diverse origins of the CRS.

Today, the Revolutionary Union of Guernica consists of three connected aerostats; Guernica-1936, Guernica-1917 and Guernica-1871, with a combined population of around 14,500 in 2021. Guernica’s zany, multicultural mishmash of tendencies lent itself easily to the adoption of Esperanto as the standard language of the colony. Children born on Guernica (beginning with one Illich Guevara Marchello, born May 22nd 1989) have been raised with Esperanto as their first language, although with the adults on the aerostat still speaking their own mother-tongues, so a mix of Romance and Basque loanwords creep into every Guernican child’s vocabulary. Said children are raised communally, although the aim of eventually dissolving the nuclear family unit and creating a single undifferentiated social unit which regards all members as family in equal measure...this hasn’t worked out as expect, because treating everyone as your family makes reproduction somewhat strange, meaning Guernica’s birth rate is much lower than expected. Oh, also, nudity is the norm aboard Guernica - clothing is for when you go outside because the air is acidic, but inside is a shame-free zone.

While Venus is no stranger to ufologists (indeed, no offworld colony is, really), Guernica has an especially active ufology scene. Murals are often jokingly referred to as the “dominant artform on Venus”, but they do tend to broadcast a given aerostat’s values and many are quite impressive works of art - they should be, since there’s not much else to do with your spare time on Venus. And aboard Guernica-1917 is La Progreso de Homo (“The Progress of Man”), painted on the walls of the habitat’s main room, depicting a series of events that begins with socialist extraterrestrials visiting paleolithic man in his nude, hunter-gatherer innocence, before oppressive kings and money changers enslaved them to agriculture and feudalism, moving towards Marx, the Paris Commune, the invention of Esperanto and the October Revolution, Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, progressing towards the advent of the final worker’s paradise and reunification with the extraterrestrial proletariat, who are present in the background of the entire mural, watching over mankind, waiting for them to attain enlightenment.

SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF JINYUN

Jinyun is a bit of an interesting departure from the other colonies here. While China has the largest population of any country on Earth, the Socialist Republic of Jinyun has one of the smallest populations of any independent colony on Venus at only ninety-two people as of 2021.

Aspiring Chinese communists in the 50s went to the USSR for education, however during the Cultural Revolution, many were unable to return to China due to the Cultural Revolution and more specifically the Anti-Rightist Campaigns, which targeted these students on account of their foreign connections. All but a few hundred returned to China anyway, but those who remained in Russia were so nonplussed by the shenanigans happening in China, that twenty-two of them decided to hop on a rocket to Venus. The Soviets, for their part, figured it wouldn’t be too much hassle to just cram twenty-two dudes (these dissidents were almost exclusively men) onto a smaller aerostat, just to snub their nose at the PRC. This was someone’s idea. Many of these ideas were unfortunately someone’s idea.

Because there were so few women in the initial population of the colony, they had to recruit from outside, meaning nearly all of the children born on Jinyun are only half-Chinese. Still, tiny Jinyun claims to be the ideal socialist Chinese society. In their own words, they have gone small to engineer the ideal society at the micro level. Mao swayed from the truth of Khruschevism, but Jinyun would make the dream come true. Chairman Jiao, age 85 runs the show from his closet-sized office. Because their society is so small, there’s no need for an intelligence service, everyone just spies on each other on their own initiative, to ensure everyone is “mentally-well”. The punishment for deviant thought is a day in solitary confinement, but the station is so small, there’s only enough space for one sound-proof box to keep someone in, and society is so controlled that even dissent is on a schedule to avoid forming a line for the penalty-box. On the other hand, life on the station is also stable and routine, there’s a predictable cycle of chores and duties, there’s no luxuries but everyone knows each other very well, children are raised communally, nearly everything is voted on in a very robust system of grassroots democracy, everyone gets the same amount of food, there’s no secrets, there’s no point in rebelling except to make small unpopular statements to get it out of your system and be punished for the good of the community. Everyone plays Go, makes sure to fill in the crosswords on a separate sheet of paper so it’s a surprise for the next person, and takes turns telling tall-tales in the common area to make up for the lack of scenery or scenic views aboard the station (there’s no windows).

The flag of Jinyun harkens back to older proposals for the flag of the PRC, and features a yellow stripe (the cloud deck of Venus), a wreath, the Chinese symbol for “labor”, and a red star in a gold circle (socialism on Venus, the Amber Planet). There are only two of these flags on Jinyun, one in Chairman Jiao’s office, the other in the common area.

SYRIZA DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

You would think, going off of the rogues gallery so far, that this would be a settlement made up of disaffected leftists from Greece. And you’d be dead wrong. That is not what Syriza is at all. Syriza is something significantly weirder. Syriza is a manufactured colony made up of ethnic Greeks recruited from Soviet Ukraine, Russia and Georgia. The constitution of the Syriza Democratic Republic was written by a Russian, and later translated to Greek. The plan was to astroturf a leftist Greek colony on Venus, in the hopes of landing a propaganda coup against the pro-Western government in Athens, as well as luring actual Greek citizens to the colony. To the latter end, the Soviet embassy in Athens maintained an office for the SDR, hoping to sway Greek dissidents to enlist, with visions of science-fiction Hellenes building socialism on the Venusian frontier - posters and literature was distributed at the universities, speakers gave lectures singing the praises of the colony. By 1987, these promotional campaigns included photos and film reels of Syriza’s egalitarian society, the hydroponic crop yields, the magnificent view of the vast amber clouds of the Venusian sky, the smiling faces of Greek pioneers raising their fists in socialist solidarity in high-energy photo-ops.

Not a single Greek citizen signed on with the Syriza project. Prospective space colonists in Greece were much more interested in the moon or Mars. Indeed, in the 1980s and 90s, more Greeks moved to the Japanese colonies on the Red Planet, than signed up to the “Greek Experiment” on Venus. Still, it wasn’t all bad. The people in the promotional images were only slightly exaggerating for the camera. Syriza’s not half-bad for a single-party state, and its 2,589 residents in 2021 only found out about the actual intention of the colony in 2004. Shrug. Oh well.

Oh right, the flag. The flag of Syriza is distinguished from the abundance of proverbial (perhaps also literal) red flags in this graphic by its blue field, which contrasts very well with the yellow hues of the sulphury Venusian clouds. There’s a laurel wreath, because Greeks, y’know. A yellow disk for Venus, just so people don’t forget which planet they’re on. We’ve got a red star for socialism, and a blue astrological sign for Venus (“Look, Giorgos, it’s really embarrassing to forget what planet you’re on, we need to make it explicit, you’ll thank me later, Giorgos”). And inside the circles, a Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, which stands for “Democracy”, a symbolism borrowed from the flag of the Democratic Army of Greece from the Greek Civil War.

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF AKATSUKI

The USSR was very much interested in establishing a Japanese Morning Star republic, to try and score a propaganda coup against the rising economic superpower. However, many of the founders were downright crazy members of the Japanese New Left. In the 1980s, Akatsuki became a refuge for members of the Japanese Red Army (who hijacked a plane with katanas in the 70s) and the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front - rebranded to the Akatsuki Anti-Japan Front. Early on, Akatsuki (Japanese: “Dawn”) was a basket of absolute psychos, although mixed in were more moderate colonists, many of whom weren’t even terribly left-wing, they were just interested in living on Venus and weren’t completely opposed to the politics involved - such was the enthusiasm for space colonization in Japan at the time.

The JRA had their weird and authoritarian streaks, and more or less bullied their way into controlling Akatsuki’s democracy, but while they shared power with the AAJF, the relationship between the two wasn’t always on best. The Anti-Japaneseists in the AAJF were still pretty fond of their old program [3], which didn’t have to be as scary it was, were it not for the fact that the AAJF guys would waltz up and down the halls of the colony waxing philosophical about their totally-normal ideas, while holding their sharpened samurai swords, making everyone on the colony very nervous.

Then word broke out in 1991 that a long-standing power struggle within the AAJF was about to be settled Et Tu, Brute-style, preceding a wider purge of the colony for “the revolutionary cause” by the explicitly genocidal “Kirāzu” (Japanese: “Killers”) faction, bent on ridding the aerostat of all “Japan Empire nationals” in their future utopia. As a result of this leake, the more “moderate” Anti-Japaneseists (who, unsurprisingly, further moderated their views after these events) joined the JRA in suppressing their own zealous brethren. This counter-coup by the relatively-sane was remembered as the Night of the Pillows (because the Kirāzu were suffocated in their sleep with pillows), and it prevented things from devolving into Battle Royale. So they thought as they tossed 19 bodies into the clouds below.

In the late-90’s, with Venus opening up somewhat to market reforms, Akatsuki, against everyone’s expectations, began to welcome investment from their Terran and Martian ethnic kinsmen, much to the chagrin of the remaining Anti-Japaneseists, who grumbled the whole time but remained non-violent. But even so, Akatsuki became the unlikely means by which Japanese and Kaseijin business ventures entered the Venusian market from Earth and Mars, respectively. They came to tap into that rich carbon market, while hawking the latest consumer goods and other outside technologies in discrete “Special Economic Rooms”. Yes, actual rooms on the Akatsuki aerostat that have different trade policies than the hallway they’re connected to.

The Akatsukian (“Akat-ski-an”) people still speak Japanese. Kinda? They write it in Cyrillic, and their weird pronunciations and spelling, and wholesale replacement of certain words with Nipponized Russian or Engrish, effectively constitute the slow emergence of a new language, or at least a very, very distinct dialect of Japanese. All to the joy of the Anti-Japaneseists, who pushed so hard in the 90s to remove the “imperialist” aspects of the Japanese language. And indeed, even after the Night of the Pillows, the Anti-Japaneseists remain a powerful force in Akatsukian society. Although ever since the Night, they’ve narrowed their proscriptions away from the literal eradication of the Japanese race, to simply policing overt displays of “imperialism”, ranging from expressions and turns of phrase that that’ve been deemed “too feudal”, to banning anime and manga on Akatsuki, to encouraging interracial marriages to dilute the ethnic purity on the aerostat (one reason for the Special Economic Rooms is to keep the Japanese/Kaseijin traders from potentially mingling with the Akatsukians), to outlawing the display of the Japanese national flag, which is officially regarded as a fascist icon on Akatsuki. Ironically, however, the Регурeтa (“Regyureta”, or “Regulators”), dressed in their black boiler suits and red headbands and armbands with a white Cyrillic “Р”, all carry crudely-forged katanas as their service weapons, which are pretty effectual on Akatsuki, since there’s no firearms on-station.

Given the extreme and bizarre policies aboard Akatsuki, it should come as no surprise just how meme-ified they have become. In 2015, an old video clip resurfaced from 2007 of Regyureta militants destroying a Sailor Moon doll by smashing it repeatedly against a bulkhead and shouting, in English, “NO CARTOON”, became the basis of countless anti-otaku memes - edited, clipped and remixed in seemingly endless variation. In Japan, mainstream left-wing parties avoid any association with Akatsuki like the plague, while far-right movements in the country accuse their opponents of “wanting Akatsuki'' for Japan. The colony, ironically, has been referenced and even used as the setting of several manga and anime, or informed what Japanese artists think of when they imagine stories set on Venus, due to the attention Akatsuki has tended to garner in the Japanese media.

Speaking of flags, Akatsuki’s flag is admittedly just generic left-wing imagery. A gear for industry and a fist for proletarian solidarity. Not much more to say about it, except that it suits Akatsuki as a society of Japanese people who don’t want to acknowledge their heritage.

NOTES

[1] Currently preparing “Grandson” James Warren Jones, Jr, Stephen’s adopted African-American son, currently the Secretary of Agriculture and the subject of the viral “our radishes” meme back on Earth

[2] One night in the late 1970s, Yoko has an epiphany and grabs Sean in the middle of the night. Leaves, never comes back to John. Yoko decided she cared more about her son than she did John, who was abusing her and she feared would abuse him. She went to Paul, and stayed with him. Crestfallen, John decided he had enough of the Earth. He skipped planets, moved to Venus, dragging a few dozen followers with him there. Was received well by the Premier of the KVR, who gave him primo accommodations. He has all the groupies he's ever wanted, and no more of the Beatles to haunt him. But he's a prop. He lingers on, a parakeet in a dictator's birdcage. A sad old man, at the age of 81. It's the Hell he believes he’s earned. Nobody to share his life with. No life worth sharing.

[3] Anti-Japaneseism isn’t to be confused with Anti-Japanism. The latter posits that since the Meiji Era, all of Japan’s actions have been inherently imperialist, and the only redemptive action one can take is to destroy the royal institutions and install a communist republic. Anti-Japaneseists, beacons of sanity within the Japanese New Left that they were, posited a much more erudite proposition: the entire Japanese culture, nation and race needed to be eliminated, starting with an invasion of South Korea to install an anti-Japan regime, thereby luring the evil Japanese to invade, sparking a general strike and uprising which would destroy the regime in Tokyo, after which, every “Japan Empire national” would be sentenced to death regardless of age or sex, sparing only the comrades of the World Revolutionary Ronin who have abandoned ethnic and national consciousness and fought the anti-Japanese struggle, now freed from their “original sin“. These guys came to Akatsuki to build their “ideal society”, yes. If they sound like really shoddy Reddit worldbuilding or like badly-written anime villains, that’s probably because they were a real movement: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jap…

Description

Yo, it’s December. And I’m still not done with Age of Aquarius yet. But don’t worry, I have something for ya right now. And look, it’s red, and it’s all about sharing and togetherness, and not getting the thing you wanted this year because the bearded man who watches your every move disapproved of your behavior. Perfect for the holiday season, amirite?

So let’s dive into today’s episode of Fullmetal Overchemist: Brotherheaven, comrades!

Not satisfied with propping up East Bloc and Moscow-aligned countries in establishing colonies on Venus, beginning as early as 1979, the USSR started essentially trolling the West (and others) by sponsoring the movement of left-wing dissidents and defectors from enemy countries to demonstrate that space was available to all. This was Interkosmos’ Morning Stars (Utrenniye Zvezdy) program. Most Morning Stars simply settled in the existing colonies, in particular the KVR (Konfederatsiya Venerianskikh Respublik), the confederation of Soviet aerostat colonies, or settled in the other original “Cosmic Twelve” republics. However, in other cases, so-called “Morning Star republics” were given their own prefabricated aerostats, to build their own colonies with their own little governments.

Let’s get started and take a look into a few of these Morning Star republics, see how they’re doing in Overheaven’s version of 2021!

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF NEW AMERICA

In 1979, the Peoples Temple community of Jonestown, Guyana successfully negotiated their exodus to the Soviet Union, which settled them in the Black Sea city of Sochi between ‘79 and 82. At the time, the Soviets were just looking for a quick propaganda victory (“Hah! So what if a few loser Germans jump over the Berlin Wall! We just scored nine-hundred Americans!”). However, Jones’ heterodox Christian preaching, cult of personality and insatiable sexual appetite was something Moscow would have preferred not to bother with. Jones sensed how unwelcome he was, and reasoned briskly that he had been used as a prop by the Soviets. Unsure if he or his cult would last long with nowhere else to go, he preached that so long as the Earth remained in the grip of Antichrist capitalism, the future of the “spiritual revolution” would need to continue far, far away. And that’s how Jim Jones arrived on Venus.

Of course, it wasn’t just the Peoples Temple aboard this ark of American revolutionaries. Others were convinced that America was just too enthralled by the forces of capitalism to be saved, and that a new, more just America had to be built in the sulphury skies of the Amber Planet instead. A small number of CPUSA members, a few former members of the Weather Underground, a smattering of Black Panthers, a handful of radical feminists, some former members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and more militant groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the May 19th Communist Organization. All these disparate groups formed a single political coalition - the United Front of the People’s Republic of New America. By 1989, a total of 4,244 Americans took up the Soviet offer, and in 1985, they chose “Father” Jim Jones, as the first Premier of the PRNA, who served as the supreme leader of the colony until 1995, when he abruptly slipped off this mortal coil.

The official story was a brain aneurysm, but rumors swirl of a more outlandish fate. After a brief power struggle (and waiting three days for Father Jones to rise from the grave), someone stepped into Jones’ shoes, elected into the position by the Temple members (and non-Temple United Front officials who feared a revolt by the Temple). Stephan Gandhi Jones, the reverend’s only biological son. Lacking his father’s gift of charisma, “Son” Jones found he had to act more carefully and pragmatically than his father, who enjoyed uncritical support from his cultists. To this end, he built up ties with the factions on New America who previously didn’t appreciate his father’s use of the brainwashed flock to effectively dominate the PRNA and brute-force his agenda without consideration of those outside the Temple. Stephen Jones would need their support to consolidate his winning coalition, while also maintaining his father’s traditional base. To that end, the ultimate tragedy of Stephen Gandhi Jones was self-imposed exile into his father’s shadow. In the late 1990s, he erected a cult of personality outliving his father, whose body was interred in a glass coffin on public display, emulating Lenin, where he became an object of cultic worship by Temple devotees.

There were attempts to reconnect the New Americans with the United States starting as early as 1986. At least in part, this was to dampen the Soviet propaganda victory. However, family members of those who had left for Venus (particularly family members of Temple cultists) wanted to hear from their relatives, make sure they were okay, and so they became the staunchest advocates of trying to reunite with the residents of New America. There was some pressure inside New America as well. Not everyone was pleased with the results of the socialist experiment. As early as 1992, talk of a “Commonwealth of Cytheria” was discussed on national television in the US - the idea of integrating New America with the “Greater United States” of colonies across the Solar System. However, this idea of re-entering the fold was declined for a number of reasons. Many aboard New America were in favor of re-establishing communication with relatives back on Earth, but reintegration into the Union was easily spun into an imperial scheme to undo the PRNA (“It’s not about us,” said Jones in 1991, “it’s about all the oppressed people on Earth, who can’t be allowed an example of what their world can be!”). Additionally, Jim Jones, fearing that the FBI would try to assassinate him, rebuffed any and all attempts at diplomacy made by the US State Department in the late 1980s. Pragmatically, while New America was effectively a client state of the KVR, Stephen Jones was eager to secure supplies wherever he could, and was worried about some of the more “troubled” persons aboard New America, who seemed to have not properly adjusted to life in the colony. However, skepticism of his commitment to the revolutionary cause meant it wasn’t until late 2001 that he began correspondence with the US State Department, going out of his way to address them as a foreign agent, and mark a clear distinction between the “so-called United States” and the PRNA in his public addresses on the matter.

Starting in 2003, a US aerostat was established in the skies of Venus, known as Wright Base, and linked with New America by cables and struts. While Wright Base has only a modest civilian population - composed mostly of scientists on long-term missions to the Yellow Planet - owing to the politics of New America, Wright Base exists in a weird sort of non-Westphalian flux. Wright Base is a self-governing colony of the United States in theory, and counts as American soil, but in practice, Wright Base is associated quite heavily with the PRNA, which acts on Wright Base’s behalf on Venusian political forums such as the Venusian Council. Additionally, Wright Base acts as a sort of “free economic zone” for New America.

In 2021, New America had a population of 24,118. Politically, the Jones Dynasty fundamentally controls the organs of the PRNA state apparatus; on paper the PRNA is a multi-party democracy, with the United Front composed of the Communist Party of New America, the Black Panthers of New America and the Social Democratic Party of New America, however in practice the CPNA dominates the Front, and elections consist almost exclusively of candidates chosen by the CPNA. Speculation persists that the Jones Dynasty hasn’t exercised effective control of the PRNA since the death of Jim Jones, and that Stephen Jones is a puppet controlled by someone behind the scenes on the station (widely speculated to be either Bill Ayers or Angela Davis), however this has yet to be confirmed by substantive evidence. New America is around 72% black, the People’s Hall doubles as a basketball court, and like most other things on Venus, is culturally stuck in the 70s and 80s. All of the computers are blocky and have Russian labels on them, the walls are covered in murals conflating Marx, Christ and Lincoln with Jim Jones, and news from Earth is filtered through an especially far-left perspective which paints the United States as a plutocratic herrenvolk democracy ruled by anti-Christian Nazi corporations. Like many other societies on Venus, living accommodations consist of a hammock and a tool box - the latter is where your private possessions are kept - with curtains creating small temporary rooms.

Back on Earth, meanwhile, defectors from the PRNA who wished to return to Earth began arriving back to the Blue Planet in 2004. Despite the stories they brought with them about the brainwashing, the strange cult of personality around the Jones Dynasty [1], the harsh conditions and the literal lack of private property beyond what can fit into a single small box, New America remains an object of fascination among American leftists in 2021. Among more orthodox Marxist thinkers, New America is condemned as a defeatist gesture, however, “exit socialism” (the belief that socialism could or should be achieved offworld), which experienced its first spike in popularity in the 80s, has seen renewed interest in a younger generation of increasingly-defeatist American radicals, convinced that late capitalism will simply take the Earth with it, and in this regard New America’s hagiography of Jim Jones, even in its creepiest displays, became a popular meme in left-wing Internet communities beginning in 2016. And even in non-radical intellectual spaces, Jim Jones is still highly-regarded as an anti-racist humanitarian in certain corners of American progressive thought, where it’s claimed that the accusations of brainwashing and cult behavior constitute far-right smears against a progressive spiritual movement against systemic racism in America. And as a sign of the times, a number of high-profile political live-streamers have in recent years raised millions of dollars in online donations to send enthusiastic Western millennial colonists to the Venusian colonies, with most settling aboard the larger aerostats of the KVR, Neu-Dresden Democratic Republic or Shukra Federation, but New America still receives the occasional new immigrants.

However, the most visible presence of New America in modern US culture is the usage of the PRNA flag at far-left protests, beginning in the 1990s with the 1996 protests against the Second Korean War, the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle, and Rage Against The Machine’s performance at Woodstock ‘99, and continuing well into current protest movements in 2021. The flag is a simple red field, with six stripes, symbolizing the six founding states of the US which outlawed slavery at the start of the nation’s history, and didn’t fight to preserve the institution during the Civil War (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire). The stripes represent the only American heritage that New America wants to embrace. And instead of fifty stars, there is only one, the single star representing the unified colony of New America.

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF AUMBRIA

Moving on to the next flag, tis the banner of the People’s Republic of Aumbria (derived from the Middle English “aumbre”, or “amber”, referring to the yellow haze of the Venusian clouds). Founded by more traditionally-minded pro-Soviet British communists, who regarded themselves as the only “real” communists left in the Communist Party of Great Britain, Aumbria’s origins date back to the “Pioneer Front” founded in 1978, shortly after Valentina Tereshkova “landed” in the sky of Venus. The Pioneer Front was a faction of the CPGB which was an early adopter of exit socialism, and organized groups of wouldbe space explorers into training programs which quickly alienated them from wider far-left movements at the time. Practicing with homemade spacesuits, homebrewed “space food” diets, and solitary-confinement sessions in sealed wooden boxes meant to simulate long-duration spaceflight, the Pioneer Front was skewered in Trotskyist and Tory papers alike as sideshow “space tanks”. However, as silly as these displays might have been, the Pioneer Front was first in line to join the Morning Star program in 1981. Thatcher’s ascension to Prime Minister made exit socialism significantly more popular in UK far-left circles, which pushed into the program a few of the “comrades” who previously mocked the Front for their quirky enthusiasm.

Joining the program, however, meant undergoing real training. To make sure these latter-day pilgrims were cut out for life on a giant balloon floating hundreds of miles above Hell atop acidic clouds, prospective Venusian colonists began training in August of 1982. Similarly to the Mars analog colonies built in the Australian Outback, the Canadian Arctic, American Southwest and the dormant volcanic calderas of Japan, the USSR operated Venus analog colonies for training purposes, although these were of a markedly different nature. Living in self-contained facilities built from repurposed water towers in closed cities across the Central Asian republics, like the Martian colonists-in-training, the Pioneer Front and their colleagues had to learn the basics of routine life in cramped indoor conditions, simple diets of chicken and insects, tending to aeroponic vegetable gardens and psychologically adapting to all the mental pressures of this lifestyle. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect was having to simulate repairs (often improvised), from 65 meters above the ground. The rules of the simulation required that the trainees conduct these exercises while wearing acid-proof suits with bulky oxygen tanks and no safety harnesses; the logic being that while harnesses would be used on Venus, the training needed to be harsher than the real thing, with real danger to convey the true hazards of living in the Venusian sky. Anyone who fell off was disqualified and removed from the training program, although given how high up these platforms were, most who fell were unable to walk or breathe afterwards. And to avoid diplomatic incidents from British subjects falling to their deaths deep in Soviet territory, prospective Morning Star colonists were required to waive their prior citizenship.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was qualified to go offworld after three months of the aforementioned training completely cut off from the outside world, but those who passed muster got to go to Venus, and in 2021, Aumbria has turned out to be one of the more successful of the Morning Star republics. Notably, Aumbrian chemists came up with an improved process for producing fabric from the Venusian air. Beginning with independent experiments by Soviet and Japanese scientists in the early 1970s, carbon nanotubes became a top priority for Soviet research and development, owing to the lack of readily-available raw materials in the Venusian atmosphere besides carbon dioxide, a few trace gasses and metallic vapors. Nowhere were the incentives to innovate and find as many uses for CO2 quite as strong as on Venus itself, where the consequences for stagnation were quite literally Hell itself, and so chemists and materials scientists on Venus tirelessly experimented with new formulas in countless directions of research. Among these colonial scientists was one Marcus Owen of the People’s Republic of Aumbria, who found a way to synthesize synthetic yarn from carbon nanotubes using less energy and fewer resources, although with the minor downside of all the fabric being black. Naturally, these discoveries were shared with all the aerostats across Venus, but Aumbria also happened to have a few comrades from the London College of Fashion among their ranks, and today in 2021, Aumbria is something of a Venusian fashion hub, although Venusian standards err on the simple side of things.

Today, the Aumbria aerostat has a population of 18,262 as of 2021. Separated by millions and millions of miles, and living under a single-party socialist republic in the skies of an alien planet, the Aumbrians are still remarkably British in character. And also not. For starters, not everyone’s British - Aumbria’s scored a number of Australians, Kiwis, Canadians, West Indians and Americans (the latter being orthodox Marxists dissatisfied with New America, looking for somewhere that spoke English). Aumbria still speaks English, but if you ask an Aumbrian what they think of the UK or the Crown, they’ll answer you in Russian. They enjoy their aeroponic tea, their carbon-fiber soccer balls and John Lennon’s music [2] fills hallways covered in colorful socialist-realist murals, and the only thing to sip at the pub is vodka. There are aging Russian TV sets all over the colony blaring “educational” material on the neoliberal dystopia of modern Britain, everyone’s dressed in black for the most part, and the Premier (currently Carl Benjamin) of the People’s Republic is jokingly referred to as “Big Brother”.

The flag of the People’s Republic of Aumbria is a red field, with two white and blue stripes close to the top of the flag, symbolizing the relatively-habitable upper atmosphere of Venus. A red star near the upper-left corner of the flag contains a dove, a hammer, a wrench, a wreath and a flask. The dove symbolizes peace and evokes the anti-war contingent of the Pioneer Front who came to Venus to escape Earth’s capitalist war machines; the hammer and wrench represents the workers and engineers of Aumbria, who make the colony’s very existence possible; the wreath represents the colony’s agriculture technicians, who raise the settlement’s aeroponic and hydroponic produce; and the flask symbolizes Aumbria’s chemists and material-scientists.

REVOLUTIONARY UNION OF GUERNICA

Next up, we have the flag of the Revolutionary Union of Guernica, a strange kitbash of disparate figures. In the early 1980s, an odd coalition of leftist and communist dissidents from France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, featuring a mix of enthusiastic, young students and burned out, old 68ers who for different reasons sought to build socialism far away from the establishment; radical left-wing Esperantists; quirky new strains of left-wing ufologists from Latin America and Southern Europe (in particular, an especially weird strain of Basque left-nationalists positing an extraterrestrial origin for their people); and hardline socialist members of the Second Spanish Republic government-in-exile who dissented sharply from the rest of their cohort when in 1977 the largesse of the Republicans recognized Juan Carlos’ monarchy as the successor to Franco’s defunct fascist regime. This last group, while older than the rest of the gaggle, found itself able to trade in the prestige of their association with the Spanish Republicans, for a leading voice and elder leadership role within the Committee for Revolutionary Settlement, and it is through their influence that the Committee adopted the name “Guernica” for their colony, in honor of the victims of fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Which is why their flag bears the violet and gold of the Spanish Republic, while the three-pointed star of the International Brigades represents the diverse origins of the CRS.

Today, the Revolutionary Union of Guernica consists of three connected aerostats; Guernica-1936, Guernica-1917 and Guernica-1871, with a combined population of around 14,500 in 2021. Guernica’s zany, multicultural mishmash of tendencies lent itself easily to the adoption of Esperanto as the standard language of the colony. Children born on Guernica (beginning with one Illich Guevara Marchello, born May 22nd 1989) have been raised with Esperanto as their first language, although with the adults on the aerostat still speaking their own mother-tongues, so a mix of Romance and Basque loanwords creep into every Guernican child’s vocabulary. Said children are raised communally, although the aim of eventually dissolving the nuclear family unit and creating a single undifferentiated social unit which regards all members as family in equal measure...this hasn’t worked out as expect, because treating everyone as your family makes reproduction somewhat strange, meaning Guernica’s birth rate is much lower than expected. Oh, also, nudity is the norm aboard Guernica - clothing is for when you go outside because the air is acidic, but inside is a shame-free zone.

While Venus is no stranger to ufologists (indeed, no offworld colony is, really), Guernica has an especially active ufology scene. Murals are often jokingly referred to as the “dominant artform on Venus”, but they do tend to broadcast a given aerostat’s values and many are quite impressive works of art - they should be, since there’s not much else to do with your spare time on Venus. And aboard Guernica-1917 is La Progreso de Homo (“The Progress of Man”), painted on the walls of the habitat’s main room, depicting a series of events that begins with socialist extraterrestrials visiting paleolithic man in his nude, hunter-gatherer innocence, before oppressive kings and money changers enslaved them to agriculture and feudalism, moving towards Marx, the Paris Commune, the invention of Esperanto and the October Revolution, Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, progressing towards the advent of the final worker’s paradise and reunification with the extraterrestrial proletariat, who are present in the background of the entire mural, watching over mankind, waiting for them to attain enlightenment.

SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF JINYUN

Jinyun is a bit of an interesting departure from the other colonies here. While China has the largest population of any country on Earth, the Socialist Republic of Jinyun has one of the smallest populations of any independent colony on Venus at only ninety-two people as of 2021.

Aspiring Chinese communists in the 50s went to the USSR for education, however during the Cultural Revolution, many were unable to return to China due to the Cultural Revolution and more specifically the Anti-Rightist Campaigns, which targeted these students on account of their foreign connections. All but a few hundred returned to China anyway, but those who remained in Russia were so nonplussed by the shenanigans happening in China, that twenty-two of them decided to hop on a rocket to Venus. The Soviets, for their part, figured it wouldn’t be too much hassle to just cram twenty-two dudes (these dissidents were almost exclusively men) onto a smaller aerostat, just to snub their nose at the PRC. This was someone’s idea. Many of these ideas were unfortunately someone’s idea.

Because there were so few women in the initial population of the colony, they had to recruit from outside, meaning nearly all of the children born on Jinyun are only half-Chinese. Still, tiny Jinyun claims to be the ideal socialist Chinese society. In their own words, they have gone small to engineer the ideal society at the micro level. Mao swayed from the truth of Khruschevism, but Jinyun would make the dream come true. Chairman Jiao, age 85 runs the show from his closet-sized office. Because their society is so small, there’s no need for an intelligence service, everyone just spies on each other on their own initiative, to ensure everyone is “mentally-well”. The punishment for deviant thought is a day in solitary confinement, but the station is so small, there’s only enough space for one sound-proof box to keep someone in, and society is so controlled that even dissent is on a schedule to avoid forming a line for the penalty-box. On the other hand, life on the station is also stable and routine, there’s a predictable cycle of chores and duties, there’s no luxuries but everyone knows each other very well, children are raised communally, nearly everything is voted on in a very robust system of grassroots democracy, everyone gets the same amount of food, there’s no secrets, there’s no point in rebelling except to make small unpopular statements to get it out of your system and be punished for the good of the community. Everyone plays Go, makes sure to fill in the crosswords on a separate sheet of paper so it’s a surprise for the next person, and takes turns telling tall-tales in the common area to make up for the lack of scenery or scenic views aboard the station (there’s no windows).

The flag of Jinyun harkens back to older proposals for the flag of the PRC, and features a yellow stripe (the cloud deck of Venus), a wreath, the Chinese symbol for “labor”, and a red star in a gold circle (socialism on Venus, the Amber Planet). There are only two of these flags on Jinyun, one in Chairman Jiao’s office, the other in the common area.

SYRIZA DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

You would think, going off of the rogues gallery so far, that this would be a settlement made up of disaffected leftists from Greece. And you’d be dead wrong. That is not what Syriza is at all. Syriza is something significantly weirder. Syriza is a manufactured colony made up of ethnic Greeks recruited from Soviet Ukraine, Russia and Georgia. The constitution of the Syriza Democratic Republic was written by a Russian, and later translated to Greek. The plan was to astroturf a leftist Greek colony on Venus, in the hopes of landing a propaganda coup against the pro-Western government in Athens, as well as luring actual Greek citizens to the colony. To the latter end, the Soviet embassy in Athens maintained an office for the SDR, hoping to sway Greek dissidents to enlist, with visions of science-fiction Hellenes building socialism on the Venusian frontier - posters and literature was distributed at the universities, speakers gave lectures singing the praises of the colony. By 1987, these promotional campaigns included photos and film reels of Syriza’s egalitarian society, the hydroponic crop yields, the magnificent view of the vast amber clouds of the Venusian sky, the smiling faces of Greek pioneers raising their fists in socialist solidarity in high-energy photo-ops.

Not a single Greek citizen signed on with the Syriza project. Prospective space colonists in Greece were much more interested in the moon or Mars. Indeed, in the 1980s and 90s, more Greeks moved to the Japanese colonies on the Red Planet, than signed up to the “Greek Experiment” on Venus. Still, it wasn’t all bad. The people in the promotional images were only slightly exaggerating for the camera. Syriza’s not half-bad for a single-party state, and its 2,589 residents in 2021 only found out about the actual intention of the colony in 2004. Shrug. Oh well.

Oh right, the flag. The flag of Syriza is distinguished from the abundance of proverbial (perhaps also literal) red flags in this graphic by its blue field, which contrasts very well with the yellow hues of the sulphury Venusian clouds. There’s a laurel wreath, because Greeks, y’know. A yellow disk for Venus, just so people don’t forget which planet they’re on. We’ve got a red star for socialism, and a blue astrological sign for Venus (“Look, Giorgos, it’s really embarrassing to forget what planet you’re on, we need to make it explicit, you’ll thank me later, Giorgos”). And inside the circles, a Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, which stands for “Democracy”, a symbolism borrowed from the flag of the Democratic Army of Greece from the Greek Civil War.

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF AKATSUKI

The USSR was very much interested in establishing a Japanese Morning Star republic, to try and score a propaganda coup against the rising economic superpower. However, many of the founders were downright crazy members of the Japanese New Left. In the 1980s, Akatsuki became a refuge for members of the Japanese Red Army (who hijacked a plane with katanas in the 70s) and the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front - rebranded to the Akatsuki Anti-Japan Front. Early on, Akatsuki (Japanese: “Dawn”) was a basket of absolute psychos, although mixed in were more moderate colonists, many of whom weren’t even terribly left-wing, they were just interested in living on Venus and weren’t completely opposed to the politics involved - such was the enthusiasm for space colonization in Japan at the time.

The JRA had their weird and authoritarian streaks, and more or less bullied their way into controlling Akatsuki’s democracy, but while they shared power with the AAJF, the relationship between the two wasn’t always on best. The Anti-Japaneseists in the AAJF were still pretty fond of their old program [3], which didn’t have to be as scary it was, were it not for the fact that the AAJF guys would waltz up and down the halls of the colony waxing philosophical about their totally-normal ideas, while holding their sharpened samurai swords, making everyone on the colony very nervous.

Then word broke out in 1991 that a long-standing power struggle within the AAJF was about to be settled Et Tu, Brute-style, preceding a wider purge of the colony for “the revolutionary cause” by the explicitly genocidal “Kirāzu” (Japanese: “Killers”) faction, bent on ridding the aerostat of all “Japan Empire nationals” in their future utopia. As a result of this leake, the more “moderate” Anti-Japaneseists (who, unsurprisingly, further moderated their views after these events) joined the JRA in suppressing their own zealous brethren. This counter-coup by the relatively-sane was remembered as the Night of the Pillows (because the Kirāzu were suffocated in their sleep with pillows), and it prevented things from devolving into Battle Royale. So they thought as they tossed 19 bodies into the clouds below.

In the late-90’s, with Venus opening up somewhat to market reforms, Akatsuki, against everyone’s expectations, began to welcome investment from their Terran and Martian ethnic kinsmen, much to the chagrin of the remaining Anti-Japaneseists, who grumbled the whole time but remained non-violent. But even so, Akatsuki became the unlikely means by which Japanese and Kaseijin business ventures entered the Venusian market from Earth and Mars, respectively. They came to tap into that rich carbon market, while hawking the latest consumer goods and other outside technologies in discrete “Special Economic Rooms”. Yes, actual rooms on the Akatsuki aerostat that have different trade policies than the hallway they’re connected to.

The Akatsukian (“Akat-ski-an”) people still speak Japanese. Kinda? They write it in Cyrillic, and their weird pronunciations and spelling, and wholesale replacement of certain words with Nipponized Russian or Engrish, effectively constitute the slow emergence of a new language, or at least a very, very distinct dialect of Japanese. All to the joy of the Anti-Japaneseists, who pushed so hard in the 90s to remove the “imperialist” aspects of the Japanese language. And indeed, even after the Night of the Pillows, the Anti-Japaneseists remain a powerful force in Akatsukian society. Although ever since the Night, they’ve narrowed their proscriptions away from the literal eradication of the Japanese race, to simply policing overt displays of “imperialism”, ranging from expressions and turns of phrase that that’ve been deemed “too feudal”, to banning anime and manga on Akatsuki, to encouraging interracial marriages to dilute the ethnic purity on the aerostat (one reason for the Special Economic Rooms is to keep the Japanese/Kaseijin traders from potentially mingling with the Akatsukians), to outlawing the display of the Japanese national flag, which is officially regarded as a fascist icon on Akatsuki. Ironically, however, the Регурeтa (“Regyureta”, or “Regulators”), dressed in their black boiler suits and red headbands and armbands with a white Cyrillic “Р”, all carry crudely-forged katanas as their service weapons, which are pretty effectual on Akatsuki, since there’s no firearms on-station.

Given the extreme and bizarre policies aboard Akatsuki, it should come as no surprise just how meme-ified they have become. In 2015, an old video clip resurfaced from 2007 of Regyureta militants destroying a Sailor Moon doll by smashing it repeatedly against a bulkhead and shouting, in English, “NO CARTOON”, became the basis of countless anti-otaku memes - edited, clipped and remixed in seemingly endless variation. In Japan, mainstream left-wing parties avoid any association with Akatsuki like the plague, while far-right movements in the country accuse their opponents of “wanting Akatsuki'' for Japan. The colony, ironically, has been referenced and even used as the setting of several manga and anime, or informed what Japanese artists think of when they imagine stories set on Venus, due to the attention Akatsuki has tended to garner in the Japanese media.

Speaking of flags, Akatsuki’s flag is admittedly just generic left-wing imagery. A gear for industry and a fist for proletarian solidarity. Not much more to say about it, except that it suits Akatsuki as a society of Japanese people who don’t want to acknowledge their heritage.

NOTES

[1] Currently preparing “Grandson” James Warren Jones, Jr, Stephen’s adopted African-American son, currently the Secretary of Agriculture and the subject of the viral “our radishes” meme back on Earth

[2] One night in the late 1970s, Yoko has an epiphany and grabs Sean in the middle of the night. Leaves, never comes back to John. Yoko decided she cared more about her son than she did John, who was abusing her and she feared would abuse him. She went to Paul, and stayed with him. Crestfallen, John decided he had enough of the Earth. He skipped planets, moved to Venus, dragging a few dozen followers with him there. Was received well by the Premier of the KVR, who gave him primo accommodations. He has all the groupies he's ever wanted, and no more of the Beatles to haunt him. But he's a prop. He lingers on, a parakeet in a dictator's birdcage. A sad old man, at the age of 81. It's the Hell he believes he’s earned. Nobody to share his life with. No life worth sharing.

[3] Anti-Japaneseism isn’t to be confused with Anti-Japanism. The latter posits that since the Meiji Era, all of Japan’s actions have been inherently imperialist, and the only redemptive action one can take is to destroy the royal institutions and install a communist republic. Anti-Japaneseists, beacons of sanity within the Japanese New Left that they were, posited a much more erudite proposition: the entire Japanese culture, nation and race needed to be eliminated, starting with an invasion of South Korea to install an anti-Japan regime, thereby luring the evil Japanese to invade, sparking a general strike and uprising which would destroy the regime in Tokyo, after which, every “Japan Empire national” would be sentenced to death regardless of age or sex, sparing only the comrades of the World Revolutionary Ronin who have abandoned ethnic and national consciousness and fought the anti-Japanese struggle, now freed from their “original sin“. These guys came to Akatsuki to build their “ideal society”, yes. If they sound like really shoddy Reddit worldbuilding or like badly-written anime villains, that’s probably because they were a real movement: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jap…