Rossartrism

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Rossartrism (罗克萨特主义) is a school of thought developed by Raeder Rossartre (雷德尔·罗克萨特) in the aftermath of World War Three, which was widely adopted during the reconstruction of mankind. It is the official thought system of the nations in the Union of Rossartrism Nations Coalition, created in 2064.

Ideas

The core idea of Rossartrism is that mankind's survival can only be ensured by the establishment of a world government to promote global cooperation. Failing this, nations would ignore the suffering of others and start wars to defend their own interests, eventually leading to global conflicts that would threaten mankind's survival.

Rossartrism promotes the equal allocation of resources across the entirety of mankind, the definition of clear leadership for each social class, and the piloting of society by automated systems. Rossartrism was appealing to lower and middle classes for its idea of a fair society, but also to the ruling class for its centralization of social rights, its automated bureaucracy and focus on technological development.

Rossartrism is considered to be incompatible with classical socialism, which became one of the causes of the fallout between the Union of Rossartrism Nations Coalition and the Antarctic Union.

History

Beilan Island Incident Investigation Report

Raeder Albert Rossartre was born on 24 April 1986 as an Englishman of German extraction. He worked as a Relic Technology activist and scholar, archaeologist, author and humanitarian and joined the United Nations Relic Agency, of which he became Chief Director before 2030.

On 17 January 2030, at the time of the Beilan Island Incident, Rossartre was hosting an academic conference on Relic site exploration in Hong Kong and was evacuated with the rest of UNRA members to Sydney, but soon returned in contaminated South Korea to direct the establishment of safe zones during the month of February. Rossartre hoped that the sheer size of the incident would force both Koreas to cooperate, but on 3 March 2030 North Korea invaded and the UNRA evacuated their members to Japan while US troops also fled. Hearings at the UN Congress in 2032 would reveal that the US had attempted to pressure North Korea by preventing its people from crossing the 38th parallel, provoking the retaliation.

Rossartre was then put in charge of the Tokyo Protected Zone project, and as more survivors poured in he pushed to transfer parts of the population to Hokkaido, the new siege of the Japanese government and one of the last safe regions in East Asia, calling to the unity of the Japanese people. However, the local population resisted the new influx of survivors and the project also made it more difficult for the US military to secure its last foothold in the region. On 23 May 2030, the Cabinet of Japan and USPACOM made a joint declaration announcing the end of survivor transfers. USPACOM and the Cabinet ordered UNRA members out of Tokyo the same night and cut all transportation and communication with Tokyo, effectively leaving the Protected Zone to fend for itself. Rossartre and more UNRA staff who had used the confusion to stay in Tokyo were powerless to stop the formation of factions among survivors and had to take refuge at JGSDF Camp Mishuku.

There, they learned of Kawasaki Kazusa, a girl in Nagoya located by the JSDF that showed immunity to ELID. Rossartre mounted a team of volunteers to protect this chance to find a cure, but when they arrived a group of religious zealots had begun a riot in the local safe zone to try to kill Kawasaki and driven the local JSDF forces away. Using his knowledge of the Russian submarine satellite network, Rossartre managed to contact Mikhail Tsvigun, the former Director of the KGB's 16th Directorate and Russia's prime Relics specialist he had sympathized with in 2023, to organize the evacuation of the subject. On 19 June 2030, Rossartre and Kawasaki were preparing to head for Niigata and from there to Vladivostok using a Weight Bearing exoskeleton when the Tokyo factions attacked Camp Mishuku to seize Kawasaki for themselves. She was killed by a stray bullet during their escape and Rossartre reached Russia with her body in tow on 3 July 2030.

Rossartre was not aware that the Second Revolution that would bring back the Soviet Union was brewing in Russia, and that he was handing precious research material to the new Bolshevik movement by asking for their help. In Moscow, Tsvigun seized Kawasaki's corpse, copied all of Rossartre's notes and had him tell his insider knowledge of the Chinese, Korean and Japanese situations before sending him back to the UNRA offices in London. Rossartre's hopes were dashed again when the Soviets found no use for Kawasaki's immunity because her adaptation to contaminated environment made her unable to live without radiations. Rossartre warned the United Nations of the potential of new contamination areas, but was viewed with suspicion because of his stint in Russia.

In September 2030, as Rossartre had warned, contamination reached North America: Collapse fluid capsules drifting in the Pacific Ocean contaminated the West Coast and private companies created new contaminated areas far into the continent by seizing and studying the capsules without necessary precautions. UNRA was feeling increasingly powerless to stop the spread of the contamination, but Rossartre was nevertheless put to work on the American West Coast Re-Evacuation Plan, working from the UNRA HQ in New York. However, his opposition to the construction of the North American Exclusion Wall, cutting the continent in two to stop the flow of survivors, led to the UNRA withdrawing from the Re-Evacuation Plan and Rossartre returned to London. There, he found that the massive influx of Asian and Middle Eastern refugees in Europe led to 2 million dead in the unusually cold winter of 2030, as governments neglected the refugees due to popular distrust.

As mankind slowly fell, two UNRA projects came to the forefront. Project Prometheus, first drafted in 2030 after the disaster in Tokyo, was a long-term plan to assist mankind in its fall and renaissance. Project Beacon, submitted in February 2031, planned to leave mankind crash and burn while securing a selected portion of "worthy" individuals (including UNRA members) inside the Hollow City relic in Antarctica, where they would survive and evolve independently before reconquering the world after its fall. Rossartre considered Project Beacon a proof that the UNRA had abandoned all the hope it embodied and that the agency had become cowardly. His response was writing the Beilan Island Incident Investigation Report. Inside, Rossartre described the theory of the dark age he had formulated during his experience in dealing with the aftermath of the Beilan Island Incident: he claimed that human civilization had missed its chance to maintain world order and that the globalized effects of the Incident would lead to all nations choosing conflict with each other for the sake of their own interests, in other words World War Three. If mankind survived, Rossartre felt that the declining human race could only be saved by forming a global government to foster greater cooperation. In his conclusions, Rossartre expressed his hope that the Report could "light the ember that will become the fire in which human civilization will be reborn", an image of resurrection by fire that would become a staple of Rossartrist iconography.

The morning of 15 January 2033, Rossartre made his sources and the report public in the Internet. Later this day, FBI agents found him dead at his desk in the Rossartre Manor near Philadelphia, where he had killed himself with a bullet to the head. Officially, Rossartre had died in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania due to internal organ failure caused by long exposure to contamination. The report was then presented by the UNRA to the 2033 UN General Assembly. While he was awarded the Nobel Prize of Peace for his actions, Rossartre's decision to make the report public led to the General Assembly passing Resolution GA/21135, which sparked violent Relic activism and eventually to the expulsion of UNRA from New York.

Projects Beacon and Prometheus

On 1 April 2033, the US Congress ordered all members of the UNRA to leave American soil and move their HQ to their offices in Geneva. In the waiting lounge of the John Kennedy International Airport, the new Chief Director of UNRA Thomas Sorell Huxley held a vote among the remaining staff to determine whether the UNRA in exile would support Project Prometheus or Project Beacon, and the latter was supported by the majority. From then on, two factions acted under the name of UNRA: the Rossartrists supporting Project Prometheus by recruiting allies in key government positions over the world, and the Beaconists supporting Project Beacon from Antarctica.

Rossartrists called Beaconists traitors to the cause of "Mr. Rossartre" and the UNRA, who had fled to become power-hungry elitists embracing mankind's evils and abandoned their responsibilities toward mankind for their own safety. Meanwhile, Rossartrists "comrades" would preserve their hope that dawn would come after dark and continue on their mission to "protect the embers of human civilization so that the torch can be lit once more" and unite survivors with it. For their part, Beaconists perceived that by abandoning the UNRA, mankind had surrendered its right to survive, and that the greater good would be preserved even if Project Beacon saved people that did not have mankind's best interests in mind. Despite Sir Huxley still being the Chief Director of the UNRA and de facto leader of the Beaconists, he was still loyal to Rossarte and secretly helped Rossartrists by giving them access to the English intelligence apparatus through his own position in the English aristocracy as president of the Royal Society.

The Rossartrists supported the New Soviet Union, as they perceived the resurrection of Bolshevism to be proof of the continued pride and resilience of the Russian people. The Council thus elected to back the Siberian Lifeline Program, aiming at restoring the Siberian railway and nearby industrial facilities using robots. Using automatons would not only enable 24-hour work cycles, but most importantly enable facilities in Yellow Zones to function, since humans could not live in these contaminated areas. To steer the program in their desired direction, they enlisted Mikhail Tsvigun, who was favorable to Rossartrism and was a valuable ally because of his cautious views toward Relic Technology. The Council shared the idea that Relic Technology was akin to Pandora's Box and that no state army should be permitted to control them. For these reasons, the Rossartrists considered the New Soviet Union their prime candidate as sole survivor of World War Three.

Other key individual to the Rossartrist ambitions were Havier Witkin, leader of the Universal Labor Robot project at LBT General Manufacturing and a key element for the Siberian Lifeline Program and beyond, Carter Neustadt, head of the International Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, and Persicaria, a leading researcher in the field of automation, though the Council did not recruit them directly. As soon as April 2034, the Rossartrists started their evacuation plan of Northern and Central Europe in order to preserve key figures from the impending Northern Light Incident that would contaminate these regions the following year. Moving from Finland to Russia as part of this project was the young Lycoris, whose ambitions for Relic-based technology later became a key figure of concern for Rossartrists. Meanwhile, the Beaconists started to send their invitations to key scientific and societal figures to move to Antarctica as soon as December 2036, and in December 2041, after a last batch of seeds were transferred from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to Antarctica, the UNRA officially moved its HQ from Geneva to Hollow City.

In early 2040, Project Prometheus was advancing faster than predicted due to increasing political conservatism reinforcing their control over the world. While encouraging the development of heavy weaponized robots in Eastern Europe, they supported Havier Witkin's foray into the civilian Dolls sector, believing it to be an important step toward mankind's next technological and societal evolution. Following the World-Island theory, the Rossartrists aimed at making the New Soviet Union the winners of World War Three over the United States. This is also during this period that the slogan "the shining beacon in a brave new world", an evolution of Rossartrism's resurrection in fire iconography, started to be used. In Hollow City, Sir Huxley was eventually assassinated near the start of World War Three by the Beaconists, his influence in the old world's high society no longer being needed.

In a brave new world

"This is classified information!"

This article contains unmarked spoilers. You have been warned.

In the closing years of World War Three, the Rossartrists, firmly holding the New Soviet Union through their ally Viktor Zelinski, started searching for a key agent able to navigate the complex order that would soon emerge in post-war Europe. On recommendation from Major general Isaac, their sights landed on Griffin, a British-born intelligence agent with an extended network of information collectors, analysts, relays and executors in Eastern Europe and a brilliant track record. Incidentally, Lycoris was already part of Griffin's network since late 2040. Isaac himself recruited Griffin to the Rossartrist cause. The post-war prospects of the Rossartrists were less optimistic: the production estimates for the first reconstruction phase of Project Prometheus would not be met due to the heavy losses to mankind's industrial capabilities and thoroughly crushed global population morale, unless the world government could be created to firmly steer the reconstruction process.

In 2052, Griffin approached one of his contact, MVD veteran Berezovich Kryuger, and asked him to retire and found a private military company that would use Tactical Dolls, in order to provide a new reputation to IOP's product in the military market. As for Kryuger, he would receive an opportunity to serve his country in his own way and work with his friend Persicaria. Griffin asked the company to be named Griffin and Kryuger but relinquished all management decisions to Kryuger, having faith that their ideals would align.

Rossartre's story had been made more compelling by Rossartrists for their propaganda in North America, where they believed their ideology would meet great resistance. In 2053, the East Coast American Rossartrism Alliance held a demonstration in front of the Center City Hall of Philadelphia, claiming Rossartre had been killed there by those seeking to protect their private corporate and political interests rather than ensure mankind's survival.

In the wake of the events sparked by the Butterfly Incident, two rival factions are using the Rossartrist slogan "the shining beacon in a brave new world": Griffin and Kryuger and Paradeus.