Life in Communism 2.1. A Chechen Trilogy

By Carla O’Gallchobhair

Life in Communism 2.1. Chechen Trilogy

Vol. 1 Another 2021

By Carla O’Gallchobhair

© Carla O’Gallchobhair, 2025. To Maman, Cathal, Tanya, Evgeni and Maksim, Michael, Yvonne, Odile and Jean-Michel, Vicky and Nora, and all other believers in the Eastern promise.

Preface in Illyria and Saint-Denis. Another 2021. Yalla, yalla, let’s go!

October-November of Year 19, 2021, year of the World Revolution, being Year Zero

Aslan, by Olivier and Danièle

The night before our departure, I made a terrible nightmare. There had been no world revolution in 2021, no world-wide uprising against the toxic Covet-19 vaccine and the other repressive Covet policies, which had even included a discriminatory vaccine pass. It was already 2025, but all the old flunkies were still in charge: Donald J. Bimp in the U.S., Empress Ulla in Europe, King Emmanuel and his Macronie in the French lands, John Bonson as prime minister in Britain, Mick Mc Leary as top oligarch in Ireland, Fritz Merz, le Merc as chancellor in the German lands, and Nikolai Morbidov, the corrupt successor to Vladimir Neputin in the Russian lands. Donald J. Bimp, Jobo, Empress Ulla, King Emmanuel, and Fritz le Merc had just had one of their war-mongering conferences in their old oligarch hide-out in Zeebrugge, Belgian lands, or was it the Petersberg in the Seven Mountains on the Rhine over Bonn?  Anyway, they had agreed to step up the war in Ukraine against Russia, even if  it led to a third world war, and the genocide against Gazans even if it entailed the total annihilation of the Palestinian people and a conflagration in the whole Middle East. Gerardo Trilei, the illegitimate ultra-liberal president of Argentina as well as other stooges had already signalled their readiness to support capitalism until it caused a total Armageddon.

For the time being, only the Chechen people had said No. Comrade Ramzan and the other revolutionaries had resurfaced from the underground and were leading a march to the presidential palace of the pro-American Chechen president Akhmed Zakayev, who had pledged support to King Emmanuel, President Bimp, Empress Ulla, Jobo, Mick McLeary, Fritz le Merc and Co. in their unjust, imperialist war against Russia.

Zelim, by Zelim-Philippe and Julie

Zelim, Muhammed, and I were in the French lands and trying to convince the old PCF executive committee or Cellule 14 comrades, who these days were either Illyrians, meaning part of our self-managed, rural cooperative near the little agglo(-meration) of Aimeran, Yvelines, or part of the neighbourhood assemblies Casa Latina, Russki Dom, Peace Dove at number 76 rue de Lorraine in Saint-Denis to organise similar marches to the Elysée, Matignon, the Assemblée nationale, the Hôtel de Ville, other organs of government and company executives all over the French lands. They had agreed of course and were now blocking all these places and others as we had done in reality during Covet.

We had just received encouraging videos from Berlin and Moscow, where similar rallies were underway as well. Comrade Misha who had taken the train from Illyria to help out in his old agglo, had made the videos from Berlin, comrade Sergei and the other Moscow and Novgornyi Recycling Hounds the ones from Moscow. Some of them were also protesting against the war in Leningrad-St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, and other Russian cities.

However, no matter how we tried to agitate, in this nightmare, the momentum was not there. We tried it not only live and online, but also intraline – meaning the informal way of communication of the revolution via low-frequency neural waves, and bio-wifi. Humans, animals, robots, plants and intranet-capable materials and things could serve as natural wifi-towers and cables! Yet we just weren’t able to mobilise the millions we had gotten out for the real revolution in 2021. The Chechens, the French, other Europeans, the Berliners, the Russians, and also the Palestinians, the New Yorkers and other American agglo residents and also the North American Indians and Indios in the prairies and pampas who were rooting for a sweeping ecological revolution, the Chinese, the subcontinental Indians, many Africans and Middle Eastern agglo inhabitants protesting imperialism, had mobilised, and yet… “They have bribed the police to fight us to the kill!” came the panicked bio-messages from everywhere. Instead of being convinced by our arguments and our funny, yet peaceful clowns like in 2021, the police and army had struck back everywhere with tear gas and clubs and intimidated us.  I woke up bathed in sweat and totally desperate, because for a moment I believed that this was the truth, not just a f**g nightmare.

Zamira, by Faroukh and Sarah

“Terrible!” said Zamira, my partner. “Poor Aslan!” And she kissed me on the cheek.

“But it was just a nightmare,” I rejoiced and kissed her back and all others around me as well, including comrade Marianne.

Marianne, by Olivier and Danièle

Well, I know, it was a liberty, but comrade Patrick keeps cheating on her with comrade Francine, the agronomist, and we, Marianne and I, already have a son, young comrade Olivier, just as comrade Patrick has a daughter, young comrade Natalie, from Francine. “Well, are we all packed then? We have the train to Istanbul to catch, after all!”

 Muhammed, by Bashir and Sevim

“Indeed!” said Muhammed. “Let not their brown pulse stop us! Yalla, yalla, let’s go!”

Only when we were in the train, and those Illyrians who had not found the time to accompany us to the railway station were wishing us a good journey intraline, did I have the chance to jot down a few notes on what my nightmare had really brought home to me, namely the

“10 sine qua nons or indispensables of the revolution:

1)The revolution has to be world-wide to be successful.

2)There is a need for a global trigger like Covet-19, the rejection of imperialist wars is not sufficient.

3)Nationalism alone is not sufficient as a catalyst because it does not aggregate over regions.”

At this point, comrade Annie who had just tuned in as well to wish us a happy journey, burst out happily. “My thoughts since ever. Right you are! Nationalism is not a sufficient catalyst, religion or ethnicity aren’t either. Don’t you remember our seminars on the Vikings and Pruzzens, the religious wars in Europe and the eviction of the French Huguenots, the Salzburg and other protestants, and on what may have been the first world war, the seven years’ war between France and Austria from 1756-63 and the British-French-Austrian-Prussian-Russian wars surrounding it which had reverberations all over the world from Europe to North America to India?”

“Of course, but there are even more sine qua nons:

4) We have to succeed in eliminating the central government as well as all governmental hierarchies down to the town and village level, all police, army, and  secret services, as well as all corporate hierarchies and their security forces immediately at the outset of the revolution, so as to prevent a constantly renewing flow of mercenary armies. Instead, only brigades, neighbourhood assemblies of at most seven members with the chairman rotating daily or at least every week, workplace and village plenary assemblies with the moderators rotating every hour, shall take all decisions consensually. All assemblies shall be on an equal level, none of them entitled to overrule the others, and all decisions, including local, regional, continental, and world-wide referendums shall be liable to instant revocation if even a single neighbourhood, workplace or village assembly raises additional consideration and relaunches the discussion.”

“You see,” I said. “This is why we had to capture van der Leihen and Macron, to get things moving. And we also had to sow unrest in the Caucasus lest it become a counter-revolutionary backwater.”

“But back then, we reactionaries pretended it was to thwart the revolution in these regions!” objected comrade Abram, a repentant small oligarch from Ukraine.

“Yes, but that was buffaloshit, and you know it,” I countered. “Think about, why would Papon and Pucheu,” two neo-Vichyites, “have sought refuge there if it had been in such a turmoil?”

5)We need not prevent the counter-revolutionary
 reaction by force of arms but mainly by persuasion, convincing the public and private security forces that their future and that of their children is with the revolution. Yet we have to eliminate all money and money substitutes such as crypto and tokens and get as quickly as possible to an organisation with free allocation and distribution of inputs, tools and equipment, food and all basic and other goods at markets, share points, get them directly from the producing workshops, simply share them, engage in revolutionary barter, or get help by the neighbourhood assembly when needed.

Hisham and his son Bashir, by Marius and Jean-Luc

“I wonder whether the Chechens are also participating in their latest scam, the underground logistics stations Amazon, Uber, Deliverando, DHL, and Volt, in other words, our future comrades Andy, Henri, Fernando, Louis, and Viesturs are running in the French lands…,” asked young comrade Bashir, comrade Hisham’s son, comrade Muhammed’s grandson, also intraline from Illyria, and as brazenly as ever. “Once they no longer succeed in hiring any soldiers, we just need to convince them of the revolutionary way, don’t we?”

“And what about animal and plant rights?” asked young comrade Julie. “Do you already have thoroughly mixed harp assemblies everywhere in Chechnia?”

“I don’t know yet,” I answered truthfully. “We first have to get to Istanbul, that will take about a week on the train, then via electro-bus to Ankara where we will stay at comrade Işil’s. She is a fellow feminist comrade.”

“Are you sure the busses are all electrical already, as with your counter-revolutionary nightmare the other night,” asked comrade Jean. “Maybe time has really stood still there?”

“Oh, yes, comrade Vicky,” revolutionary travel agent based in Novosibirsk and a buffalohuman, meaning being able to morph from human to buffalo shape just upon a spell, “assures us the ecological section of the revolutionary sine qua nons, namely

6) Abolition of all private cars, and only functional vehicles such as tractors, excavators, fire brigades, ambulances, taxis, and small delivery vans permitted on the roads returned to natural field roads, cobble stones or pavement only in the village centres, abolition of combustion engines in all vehicles and ships and jet engines, radical expansion of public transport, based on trains, sail-and-solar operated boats and small wind-and-solar propelled airplanes,

7) Breaking up of all large polluting factories and energy works into small workshops of 50 workers maximum, much higher soil, water, and air quality standards and filters, only small block energy works consisting of solar panels, small wind mills, small water turbines where appropriate, and  well-insulated and filtered incineration only of non-recyclable rubbish,

8) radical recycling of all textiles, wood, metal, plastic, paper, return to natural materials instead of polluting synthetics,

9) fully natural, biological, and organic agriculture, highest comfort standards for stables,  maximal room on the pastures and in the poultry coops, avoid slaughter wherever possible, use animals for milk, eggs and wool only to the extent compatible with their welfare and that of their offspring, eliminate artificial ingredients in processed foods, and use only natural fertilisers and pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides etc.,

9) deconstruction of all unneeded, ugly, and outright toxic buildings and structures, including highways and tarmacked roads, parking lots and garages, and all apartment houses higher than five floors, use animals, plants, and bacteria to enable recycling piece-by-piece and organic deconstruction methods wherever possible,

10) expansion of all brigades, neighbourhood, workplace, and village assemblies to full harp – meaning including humans, animals, robots, and plants on an equal basis,

Comrade Vicky assures us that this ecological section of the sine qua nons has been fully implemented in Turkey and the Caucasus regions. Anyway, we shall see, as we progress from Ankara via Samsun, Trabzon, and Rize to Tbilisi. There Pierre le Gars and Lilo will get out and visit her relatives in Georgia, to then catch up with us later. We on the other hand will continue onward on another electro-bus to Grozny, where comrade Ramzan will meet us, and from there by a last regular line bus relayed by a minibus to our little home village in the mountains.”

1) Mud slides

Mud Slides near Uyutnoe, by Jean-Saïd and Natalie

Natural Disaster or Planned Ecocide?

When we reached Uyutnoe, as it is known in Russian, a little hamlet in the foothills of the Caucasus protected from the elements by the ruins of an old fortress, the disaster was already underway… massive mud slides. Instead of the whole village assembly coming to pick us up at the minibus stop further down the road, it was just comrade Ramzan’s wives, comrades Bukhya and Nazha with their smaller children and my father, comrade Abukhan who came to greet us. When he heard the news, comrade Ramzan’s face got all red and wrinkled, he staggered up the hill ahead of us more than he ran, and we were afraid he would fall over.

As we hastened after him, Nazha pointed right, and we Illyrians quickly made bio-videos to be transmitted back home. At least for you young revolutionaries, it must have been the first time that you saw something like that. Brown avalanches you might call them.

The mud slides, at least three of them, had not touched the village directly, since the houses stood on a hill somewhat removed from the main slopes, but they had ravaged some fields and the more remote grazing grounds, forcing the animals, especially the horses and cows to stay all together crammed on the pastures closest to the houses. When we had been here the last times as revolutionary barter correspondents, it had been in the summer, and we had spent most evenings outside at the fire place. This evening, because of the cold, but also the risk of further mud slides, we had to stay inside. The villagers held their assemblies like the Illyrians, every night, and switched the location between the seven family houses. Tonight, to welcome us, the assembly was held at my old family home, where about twenty people – our fellow villagers Bulat, also called the Georgian, comrades Deki and Temirbek, nicknamed the Mongols, Muhammed’s cousin Islambek, and Zelim’s brother Tamerlan, their ten wives, and their teenage children older than 12 – were already sitting, eating and drinking as the shock would allow, and discussing what to do next as well as the news from other villages. It turned out that Uyutnoe was far from being the only village affected. There had been mud slides all over Chechnya, and since there had not been that much rain yet this fall, the often-voiced suspicion was that “This wasn’t forces of nature, that’s the Western Sheitans,” meaning the Western ex-capitalists and fascos, “behind it.”

To general hilarity, comrade Temirbek played a newscast from Imperial Renaissance, the Russia and Asia affiliate of the fascist media channel European Empire. “Our interior minister in exile Dzhokhar Zakayev, brother of president Akhmed Zakayev, has rejected the allegation that counter-revolutionaries might be behind it. He instead blamed unnamed Russian forces for interference in Chechen affairs and for trying to draw advantage from the natural catastrophe. He was presumably referring to the group of sinister Russian oligarchs and clandestine producers known as the Big Animals.”

“We should get at the radio channel for disparaging animals,” shouted Bashir from Illyria, again almost too cockily for our hosts. “Animal lives matter, don’t they, especially now after comrade Julie’s landmark presentation?” And without waiting for the applause to subside, he begged his father, Hisham. “Papa, may I come? Zelim-Philippe as well? At least for the Winter Holidays? You have so much research to do there and schools are still only functioning part-time because of the aftermath of the brown and the blue pulses?”

“And what do your pregnant girl-friends, yours truly comrade Sevim, and Zelim-Philippe’s Julie say to that?” countered Hisham. Bashir looked embarrassed.

“For the Winter holidays at the earliest, we shall think about letting you go!” said Bashir’s mother Rim, who was sitting next to Sevim at the Illyrian youth club participating in the bio-wifi conference.

“That’s no problem!” said Zelim-Philippe, who seemed embarrassed as well. After all, Bashir and he had only recently enjoyed the limelight with their presentation of the intranet-capable free gauge. For any good or service it traced the amount available for free at the local market, share point, or directly from the producer workshop, via simple sharing, revolutionary barter, or with help from the neighbourhood assembly or trade union. The free gauge also allowed to ascertain residual amounts of goods, mostly illegal ones like drugs, dangerous medicines, weapons, and similar banned products that were still sold against crypto, token, or other forms of money by the fasco underground.

After they had finished, their girl-friends Sevim and Julie had given their university entry project presentations. Sevim on hierarchy-free education and Julie on ‘Animal lives matter. Plant lives triumph’ and nature-speak and nature language. Again with a bit of the glory  reflecting on their boy-friends. Yet, at the moment, his friend Bashir apparently couldn’t get enough attention. There was a second reason why little Zelim-Philippe, while just as keen on seeing the Caucasus as Bashir, was a bit recalcitrant still. He was probably afraid of causing an embarrassment to comrade Zelim. His mamon, comrade Camille had always left it open whether Zelim-Philippe was Zelim’s or Philippe’s son. Yet the astute Chechen villagers would clearly see that blond-haired, blue-eyed Zelim-Philippe was much more likely to be comrade Philippe’s.

“You’ll come see us later!” I said, so as to save everybody  even more embarrassment remembering their own skeletons in the cupboard. “Let me ask everybody at home in Illyria and the brigade here at Uyutnoe, what do you think, was it the fascists or was it forces of nature?”

The overwhelming majority said it was the fascos. Only comrade Hisham asked: “Well, but they are such a dwindling minority, just a few criminals on the lam. Why does it always have to be them? Maybe just a wild goat that tread loose some stones?”

“Even there it would have been the fascos behind it,” noted Zamira. “Nothing in nature happens by accident.”

“We agree,” said Islambek, “it has got to be fascos. As we said, there has hardly been any rain, where would all the mud be coming from? We usually get mud slides only in the spring, and usually covered by snow, as part of avalanches.”

“You said a goat could have tread it off,” said comrade Marianne. “In Argentina, in the sierra and in the foothills of the Andes, stone slides can start this way. Yet how would a such a big mud slide go off that way, especially as you say, the weather has been dry?”

“D’accord,” Hisham shrugged. “Maybe I am wrong? But how would the fascos have started them? They look a little bit big for just human agency, don’t they?”

“I heard something in the Russian news a moment ago,” said comrade Jean. “Apparently, they have had mud slides in the Russian lands as well. There villagers claim they have seen people climb the mountains carrying big white apparatuses with blue lamps on them.”

“What we in the French lands called pinguins!” I said, just to get the comrades going.

“Well, that would explain it, wouldn’t it?” said Zelim. “They serve to start a blue pulse, meaning major disruptions in electro-magnetic radiation that can block even our natural low-frequency intranet.”

“We should walk up by these mud slides tomorrow morning to see whether we can find any such device or other traces the fascos have left,” suggested Muhammed, sensing the disbelief of the villagers.

Aini, by Bashir and Sevim

“In the French lands, they did the pulse not only to make people go back to their high-frequency internet for which they would then have sold us cables and towers against crypto, but also to harm our growing partnership with animals and plants,” said his wife Aini.

“How far are you with setting up your harp, meaning mixed human-animal-robot and plant assemblies?” asked Julie.

“Oh, we had one just the other day when the weather was still good,” said Ramzan’s second wife, comrade Bukhya. “We meant to do another one when you came, but now we have had the mud slides, and the animals are agitated and the plants have closed up or even lost their leaves.”

“That’s very sad!” said young comrade Natalie, expert on rescuing the Taiga from the pre-revolutionary ecocide. “Another ecocide in the making!”

Their Chechen comrades still looked dubious. “But who would have been the people carrying the pinguins?” asked comrade Tamerlan.

“Mercs probably!” I shrugged. “Same pattern everywhere.”

“But we don’t have all that many Chechen oligarchs. Maybe they were Dagestanis?” suggested comrade Temirbek.

“Magomedov and Kerimov maybe,”  continued comrade Deki, “but they are old hat already, and they work with the Russian oligarchs, of which there aren’t all that many left either.”

“Could it have been these Big Animals that were mentioned in the radio show?” asked Zelim quizzically, and I had to burst out laughing.

“You can’t be serious!” I said.

“Very unlikely!” said comrade Sergei from the Moscow Recycling Hounds who had popped up intraline. “The so-called ‘Big Animals’ – Aistov, Belkov, Gusev, Kozlov, Kotov, Lysov, Medvedev, Oleinyi, Rybakov, Slonek, Volkov, and Zhuravlev –, have embraced the Russian chapter of ‘Animal lives matter. Plant lives matter’ and are setting up harp assemblies in the plants they still control. You may know, our oligarchs pretend that theirs are self-managed enterprises, then we revolutionaries have to find fault with them again. It has been their game over the  past few years.

“Their product lines are bad enough. Dodgy processed foods. Synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. Counter-revolutionary, weaponisable smart phones, even some pretending to be intranet phones. Pharmaceutical medicine, including nanobotted vaccines, using spike proteins and synthetic mRNA and other toxic or addictive by-products. Ships, boats, ice breakers, and maybe even planes, even solar and wind propelled revolutionary ones, as well as means of production such as robotised conveyor belts.  Steel, and other metals imminently useful for the production of weapons. Finally, oil and gas, where the revolution has already transitised to completely renewable block energy works, consisting of solar panels, small windmills, small water turbines, and  rubbish incinerators for non-recyclable rubbish. Yet these comrades have also pretended to be just rank and file members of rotating management brigades in their half-open, half-clandestine workshops, where you as the worker never know whether by misfortune you are producing for money or rather for crypto or tokens and may have to buy all you needed  from underground outfits. This while in the revolution you would get everything for free as part of the economic circuit. You would receive all your basics such as food, clothes, household goods, furniture, toys, phones, computers, robots and other devices either for free, by simple sharing at a share point, by revolutionary barter, by discussion with your neighbourhood assembly or trade union cell directly from the producing self-managed workshop, or in difficult situations, by voucher. You would also get your home renovated, repaired or even built new by self-managed construction enterprises and brigades. And of course, like everybody else you would be entitled to use public transport for free, drive a functional vehicle if approved by the village assembly, send your children to school, training, or university for free, receive treatment at a self-managed policlinic for free, and so on. So, we wondered, since 99% of the economy was already functioning according to the free principle as measured by the free gauge, why did we need all these clandestine workshops, or at least clandestine sections working for money?

When we first talked to the Big Animals, we had gotten the contact to them through some ex-military concerned about the defence capability of the Russian lands in case of another counter-revolutionary or Nazi attack. The Big Animals said the contact to the Western Sheitans was needed to keep up with potentially nefarious technology the class enemy might develop.

“Why don’t you just produce revolutionary intranet phones?” comrade Timur, presently based in Murmansk,  robot expert with the Moscow Recycling Hounds, asked them. “Aren’t we helping them by cooperating and even subcontracting for them?” comrade Andrei, economist with the Moscow Recycling Hounds, supplemented. “I mean, those at the top of their global hierarchy at the moment, messieurs Uber, Deshalles, Deliverando, Jassy, and Volt, hardly produce anything any longer. At most, the logistics stations assemble things like vehicles or blue pulse emitters, produced in China, or by you, here in the Russian lands. Without our Russian zeal, their edifice would crumble.”

“Yes, of course,” said Leonid Volkov, himself a producer of an all-Russian intranet phone. “Yet as we told you, we, our entirely self-managed enterprise which works only for the economic circuit, still needs to know what their latest inventions are to keep our own phones and laptops up to the defence of the motherland.”

Then comrades Evgeni and Volodia spoke from Novgornyi. “If you could locate one of these pinguin devices for our examination?” said comrade Evgeni. “Maksim,” his son, “and I might even come down to see you. There are also rumoured to be a few hidden around here, in old light towers  on the Baltics and on viewing points in the Romintian heath. Yet so far, we haven’t been able to find a single one.”

“I should go for your walk up by the mud slides tomorrow morning!” comrade Volodia seconded him. “You are bound to find something.”

Chechnia 2000-01

Papa and his friends in the Chechen war, by Olivier and Danièle

“Funny,” I said as we were looking at the  maps, old-fashioned print maps, mind you, not bio-maps that people would be able to summon with their brain apps and carry in their intranet-capable devices. “I seem to remember that we had a look-out point quite close to that hill-top during the second Chechen war in 2000-01. Remember, you, comrades Zelim and Muhammed were in a team with me, we were fighting on the Russian side. Only, we were mercs back then, we were expecting money. Revolution was far from anybody’s mind.” And when I saw the younger Illyrians frown, I had to explain. “You see, we were young back then, 14 years old at most. We hadn’t studied any revolutionary theory. We just knew intuitively that the Americans and other Westerners were worse than the Russians.”

“You’ll just have to tell us more about that tomorrow  night,” said Deki. “I fought in the Donetsk militia against the Ukrainian central government starting in 2014. For the same reasons. Yet then luckily the revolution came in 2021 and changed everything.”

“There is not much to tell,” I said. “From 2001 to 2021, we continued as serfs of the oligarchs. Back then, they were organised by sector – oil and gas, steel, metals, manufacturing and services, for instance, phones and banking… Or by business forum that existed in Sankt Petersburg, Novgorod, Yaroslavl’ and other Russian cities, a bit like the Davos or World Economic Forum in the West.”

“You mean the World Extermination Forum?” asked Peter Gar intraline from Georgia. “By the way, we here in the Georgian Caucasus have had these mud slides as well. It’s the latest major attack by these fiends.”

“World Extermination Forum. Quite,” I said. “Big Western businesses and their executioners in government tended to look down on poor people and to accept and sometimes even plan their extinction, that’s true. I think comrades Boris and Rodion will have more to say on that taking the cases of some of the Russian forums and Whiterock in the ex-U.S.. Back then, we just felt like soldiers. We did not mind being ordered around, as long as we earned money. At that stage, we also did not care whether it was Russians, Americans, Sheiks or Imams that we were working for. Don’t think that we exploded the World Trade Centre or abducted heads of government, state or multinational organisations every day. It was mostly boring work. Opening car doors, guarding gates, following suspects, or increasingly, hacking their phones.  Yet as we got older and wiser, things began to clash in our heads. And here I talk for Muhammed, Zelim, myself, and also Saïd, Miguel, Noah, Seth, Omsinbaba and other mercs from oppressed regions. We were Chechens, Palestinians, South-Americans, Africans, after all, anti-imperialists,  so why were we all the time protecting global capitalists and their neo-colonialist governments? And our Russian comrades were working for Western imperialism in the Russian lands, or so it seemed to them. Things really came to a head in 2021, because when the revolution broke out, we got lent out to the French Neo-Vichyites, while their mercs got employed in the Russian lands. Russia was one of the first countries to go, mainly because of the incompetent way our leaders handled the demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, blockades, and the popular upswell on the whole. President Neputin had resigned, his successor, Nikolai Morbidov, collaborated with international capital to the point of organising a vaccine roulette to distribute market shares for Big Pharma. Ask our Illyrian comrade Robespierre if you don’t believe me! He was there as a hostage and guinea pig for testing the vaccine. Morbidov then went on to forge the election results by organising break-ins into the local electoral commission headquarters. You young comrades here at Uyutnoe are quite likely not to believe me. They were using foreigners who barely spoke Russian to do these break-ins. Talk to comrades Jacques, Gabriel, François and Béa, now rehabilitating at 76 rue de Lorraine in Saint-Denis, neighbourhood assemblies Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove. Jacques’ and his people’s minds cracked during these missions as well.  Ultimately, they must have felt that their sponsors and handlers were taking the piss of them. The fraud flopped, the Communist candidate Gennady Grudinov won. He promptly yielded to the neighbourhood, workplace, and village assemblies and brigades that were forming everywhere in the Russian lands. And all over the world as a matter of fact. On the way home, our boat with Morbidov and a few Neo-Vichyite sponsors on it almost sank in the Arctic. If it only had gone down, it would have saved the Russian lands a lot of grief.

Then we went to Paris. We worked together with comrade Jacques and the other Westerners. We  abducted King Emmanuel and Empress Ulla, supposedly to bring about a counter-revolutionary backlash, especially among the armies and security forces. Well, this strategy flopped as well. Some White Armies formed. They were called white in analogy to the Western armies sent against the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.  Yet one speech by our Russian Communist spokesman, Gennady Grudinov, already got them to get off their tanks, drop their arms, and go home.

Some of the Neo-Vichyite sponsors, such as ex-general Roland Papon and  top-bureaucrat Marcel Pucheu tried to flee via the Caucasus to China, where they sought protection by the warlords. We tried to help them, and Jacques and the others joined us after they had, unsuccessfully, tried to stir unrest in the ex-U.S.. They did not succeed, president Bimp was happy to go. After an odyssey via south America and Africa, they finally joined us in Georgia, then followed Pucheu to China. That didn’t work either, the Georgian or Chinese  comrades respectively arrested Papon and Pucheu. The French comrades debunked banker Etienne Flandin who is still in prison. Jacques murdered another one, pharma tycoon Roger Sabiani, on order by Hunziger and others who wanted to take over the crypto business with medicines. You could really say that was the beginning of the ex-capitalists turning into mafiosi. 

Well, they tried to play politicians again a few more times. First and foremost during the coup of Winter of  Year 1-2. Empress Ulla in Brussels, Nicolas Papon – that was the nephew of Roland Papon –, in Paris, Joe Bonson in London, Olaf Bolz or whatever is name was in the German lands, a new incarnation of a different Donald J. Bimp in the ex-U.S., and old Morbidov in the Russian lands tried a putsch and failed. Even though they got vicious! For instance, Paul and Emmanuel, the terrorists, who are now rehabilitating at Osip and Fyodor Rothschild’s castle – these particular Rothschilds are with the revolution and friends of our comrade Jean’s.  Comrades-to-be Paul and Emmanuel killed Guillaume Bousquet when he refused the post of maire of Paris that Nicolas Papon was offering him.

Here in the Russian lands, Nikolai Morbidov had to run. He tried to hijack the Bolshoi Theatre where militia cornered him in the end.  Hunziger also had to flee. He was by now the only remaining leader of the neo-Vichyites who had not either recanted or been arrested.

Zelim, Muhammed, and I had switched to the revolution. So had Noah, Seth, Miguel, Boris, Rodion, and Saïd. They all live at Illyria now, you can talk to them  intraline if you don’t believe me. Jacques, Béa, François, and Gabriel had repented and were rehabilitating as I said, soon to be followed by Olivier, Silien, Paul, Emmanuel, Benoît, Henri, Ugolin and many others of the second, third, fourth and fifth generation of counter-revolutionary terrorists and their sponsors, everybody from Marcel, son of the older Hunziger to Markus Nah, Ian Fern and even Elon Deer and Jeff Kiss.

“Tell us exactly what made you switch sides?” asked comrade Bulat.

“Well, we, Zelim, Muhammed, and I simply no longer wanted to be lackeys of imperialism.”

“We were also convinced that violence and weapons were not a way to win arguments,” added Zelim.

“And we had families or at least partners to take care off,” said Muhammed. “My son Hisham was a promising young revolutionary scholar, an economist and statistician. I was very proud of him and wanted to support his education.”

“Well, that is a perfectly understandable reason for switching, cousin Muhammed,” said Islambek. “But it is personal. Yet we can’t really wait for all these terrorists and their sponsors to develop personal reasons for quitting, can we?” “Well, how would you go about getting them to repent, pray tell?”  I asked.

“Work hard until we arrest them, ask them to repent, offer them fair trials by their village assembly and decent conditions in  prison and under house arrest, and if they don’t capitulate, just push them into the volcano! Yeah, just push them into the volcano!” Islambek nodded to himself.  Bulat, Ramzan, my papa Abukhan, Tamerlan, and even Deki and Temirbek looked unconvinced.

“Why not?” asked Islambek nervously. “Look, you’ve arrested  them,” said my papa. “They are just like you, Chechen villagers, only misled by these Western Sheitans. Plus, you want information of them. Where are the blue pulse devices, where are their fellow mercs, where are their sponsors hiding? And instead of pulling the worms out of their noses fast, you want to make them clam up by talking about judgment by the village assembly, prison, and even threatening them with being thrown into a volcano?” “Then what would you do?” asked Islambek hesitantly. 

“I would say, help us find your pals, buddy, before they kick off any more trouble. We shall see you tomorrow, cousin,” said Muhammed. “I hope we run into some of them fast so we can put both methods to a test.”

Squirrel talking to leopard, by Maksim and Zhenya

Up the Mountain

“If it is the fascos as I think, we’d better not go all of us,” said Ramzan. “You Muhammed, Aslan and Zelim should come with us, and maybe Bulat, Tamerlan, and Temirbek. We can pretend to be leading some sheep for grazing. Let no spy of theirs suspect that we are looking for something. Deki, Islambek, and Abukhan, you should stay in the village, take care of the horses and the cattle and keep company to the women and children.

“If we don’t come back before night-fall, set up some watches.”

“Comrades Zamira, Marianne, and Aini can participate in those,” I said. “They have been part of our rotating block-energy works guards for as long as I can remember. They know exactly what is involved.”

Deki acted impressed. “We taught our wives the know-how as well, but I would not have believed that your women in the French lands are also that competent.” His wife Dagmara and my girl Zamira almost throttled him.

Temirbek pretended not to notice. “We leave you eight dogs and take six. We may need them if something happens,” he said.

Next morning , we left before daybreak so as not to cause any distress to our comrades. Yet some of the Illyrians were already awake, although it was two hours earlier there. “Please never stop transmitting bio-video-footage, and we’ll let you know if ever it gets interrupted. We have set up a channel for you in Robby 1 which will be monitored 24/7. And, oh yeah, you comrades from Uyutnoe, does Iasnoe pole ring a bell to you in your parts?”

“Of course,” said Ramzan, caressing one of the sheep. “It’s a small hamlet keeping sheep and goats pastures about half-way up the mountain. It might have been ruined though by one of the slides. It’s not a bad idea to start by going there. We still have some goats up there with a comrade shepherd from one of the next villages. The goats may add to our alibi for exploring.”

“You seem to be mighty afraid of these fasco mercs,” said Robespierre smilingly. “That is why we are sending you some strong helpers. Volgo, the Volgotitan, and a few of his friends will debark there from the time tunnel in about two hours. Will you be there?”

“Oh, yes, we should be there in an hour if the sheep come along,” said Bulat. “But I don’t see the point, why dinosaurs?  Why not ask Leo, the leopard, Misha, the brown bear, Milyi, the grey wolf, Jack, the jackal, and if you want to, Foxie, Lynx and Boar to join us?”

“Well, would they care to join us?” asked Zelim.

“I can ask them,” offered a squirrel from a near-by tree, hastened away and soon send a first bio-video of itself being involved in conversation with a leopard. As always since humans had started to study nature language earlier this year, after some initial hesitation, but especially easily when dinosaurs were involved or when robots did the mediation, they could understand most animals, especially the smaller and more harmless ones quite easily. And the animals in turn were extremely helpful, especially when it was  about forming a common front against the fascos.

Tracks in the Mud, by Busana and Khazarbek, children of Uyutnoe

“Why don’t we invite some vipers as well?” proposed a rosefinch. “They will slow the fascos down if they come after you. We know what you are looking for. It is this thing that looks like a big snow fox, with blue eyes that are turning, a bit like the headlights of a monster. They installed it on the very top of the mountain, right before the mud slides went off. They brought it up the night before yesterday, and this morning, they are back again to fiddle with it. There you can see the tracks of the monster they came with.”

2)  Back to petrol?

Arrival of the Dinosaurs, by Emmanuel and Laurence

Arrival of the Dinosaurs

“The device the animals are describing seems to be what we called pinguin in the French lands, for its black and white colour and tubular shape. But when they said eyes of a monster, what kind of monster were they referring to?”

“Didn’t you know that the animals call the pre-revolutionary times either the car or the monster age? They say it is the worst thing that happened to them since the stone age.”

“That’s when the humans began to force them to carry loads and do other menial tasks, isn’t it?” I asked. “Yet when the cars came they no longer had to do that, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but they were deemed inferior to the cars. Anyone could run them over, and if they were not run over, the toxins in the air would kill them.”

“Now I see why most animals would take somewhat longer in rushing to our rescue,” I explained to our Chechen comrades. “Yet the dinosaurs do not have that kind of negative experience. They remember us humans as small, clumsy, and harmless. And not all that dumb, because back then we could speak to them. And as a matter of fact, even today the linguistic spark seems to jump right over between the dinos and us. So, our hope is that we can rebuild the trust between humans and animals via the dinosaurs.”

“Here we are at the clearing now,” said Tamerlan. “And I see, your friends have  already arrived. They seem to have just gotten out of the time tunnel.” There were seven of them. The huge one was Volgo, the Volgotitan. We knew him from the French lands. Then came two slightly smaller Amuro- or Aralosaurusses but with armour, originally from the river Amur in Eastern Siberia, but who had spread much further West and South to the Aral Sea in the Kazakh lands, two Stegosaurusses, about the same size, but with even bigger armour,  and two smaller dinos with wings, probably Kileskuses or some kind of raptors, meaning meat-eaters. And what is Sultan doing there?” He pointed at one of our dogs. “He pretends not to even have noticed them but is jumping up and down next to the mud slide.”

We motioned the dinos to follow us. They did out of friendliness although some of them were over 5 and even 10 times bigger and heavier than us,  and went over there. Now Sultan was sniffing something, which lo and behold, looked like car tracks, and a  blue rock thrush interpreted his barking in a sing song for the intranet to forward it all the way to Moscow, Illyria, Istanbul…Beijing, all over the world and naturally.

“Comrade Sultanbek who works with the revolutionary humans has discovered monster tracks, and he thinks they are from a combustion engine, what do you humans call it? A petrol-fuelled car. He thinks by driving it up the mountain, the nasty humans have caused the slide…”  

“Are they still up there?” I wondered and was quite surprised when the two raptors immediately swung themselves up into the air to reconnoitre. They were back within ten minutes and when they were close to the ground again,  dropped two humans, frightened but still alive, who immediately raised their hands and whined:

“Please don’t hurt us. We have done nothing to deserve this!” said the first.

“We were just following orders by the Big Animals,” said the other.

“That’s not true!” shouted Ramzan, and the dinosaurs who were quite intimidating because of their huge size, be they vegetarians, advanced several steps towards the two villains. Several of the wild animals the squirrel and other friendly animals had alerted were glowering at them from the underbrush as well.

Interrogation of the Villains

“Listen, he misspoke,” yelled the other fasco, “he meant the Ubermenschen. They were trying to forge an alliance with the Big Animals, but they had not succeeded by the time we went up there to install the blue pulse emitter. And we can tell you, it will start to operate soon. All your intranet communications will be disrupted.”

“Ladno,” Muhammed said. “Let’s start to walk up there then. You will help us neutralise this device, and I seem to remember from the French lands, once you can stop the process at one place, it will carry over to the devices at all other locations. Who are these Ubermenschen?”

“Ruslan and I, my name is Ali, call them Ubermenschen, because they are affiliated with a logistics tycoon, Henri Uber from the Canadian lands. Some people call them Uberytes as well. Yet in fact, they are Germans, Nazis you know, they want to conquer Chechnia, Russia, the whole lot. Their names are impossible to pronounce, Freeze Merts, Arnim Peppberger, Larz Creeksbyel, Conrad Wadaphool…the list goes on like that”

“Was the mud slide already there when you came up here?”

“No, I am afraid that went off when we drove up in our Mercedes,” said Ruslan. “It has big tyres. It had rained just a little bit, but because of the big weight of the vehicle it sent the mud off behind it. Plus, we had to dig them tyres out several times. We did not know it would be so heavy!”

“Why did you use a combustion-engine vehicle then?” asked  Jean, who was a chemical engineer and tyre specialist, intraline from Illyria.

The two thugs blushed. “Because it was the one they gave us. But of course you are right with what you are implying. It may be a bit lighter than the electrical car. The battery is a lot heavier in an electrical type car. So, our bosses might have known.”

“However, you do know, and your sponsors would know as well that the village assemblies world-wide have forbidden combustion engines and private vehicles for environmental reasons, haven’t they? You should not even have used this car at all in this area which is an agricultural and resort area. Our whole village does not have a single transporter,” said Tamerlan. “When we need one, we borrow it from a logistics hub several villages down the river. Its workers service the cars, we surrounding farms produce their food, clothes, and so on. Everybody is happy without money and without stock markets.”

“I know,” said Ruslan. “I did not want to do it. It was Ali’s idea.”

The Revolutionary Economic Circuit disrupted by Logistics Stations, by Faroukh and Sarah

“Where did the Mercedes come from?” asked Bulat. “Don’t tell me the Ubermenschen dropped it from a plane or a helicopter?”

“Maybe some of the parts, yes,” said Ali. “It came from a logistics hub, just like the one your pals work at.” He had lied again. All seven of us were looking at him with growing disgust, and Ruslan was fidgeting.

“Well, not quite,” he said. “It is one of these new logistics stations. You don’t borrow vehicles there. It is more like a post-office. You can bring your stuff to be sent all over the world, or their people even pick it up at your place. Or, the other way around, you pick up what gets sent to you, or they may even deliver it to your place. And sometimes they do assembly as well. However, it’s not for free. We, eh, they do not participate in the economic circuit. They have printed new crypto-rubles. You can earn them by working for them.”

“Haven’t there been all these referendums last year outlawing crypto, token, phoney vouchers, all these money substitutes?” Zelim asked, pretending naivety.

“Yes, but a little bit at the margin won’t hurt, would it?” asked Ali cockily, while Ruslan looked increasingly miserable.

“I think some parts came by airplane, our bosses after all still produce some in the ex-U.S., in Britain, France, Germany and even in Russia. Although, you are right, officially all planes have been outlawed by the revolutionary village assemblies,” he coughed nervously as he said that and all of them heard his subliminal bio-message like a scream in their brains, ‘Please, I am willing to jump ship, I was misled by Ali and others, please call back your dinos!’, “yeah, they have been outlawed by the village assemblies, and by local, regional, continental, and even world-wide referendum as well, except for small wind- and solar planes to be used only for rescue and emergency and research purposes. Other things come by transporter from Turkey or by train from Moscow.”

“Do they bribe the drivers and conductors, or how do they manage to get their freight on board?”

“Sometimes, they may bribe them,” Ali rolled his eyes, as if to underline that so much evil was beyond his belief, “but most of the time, they just pretend the boxes are part of the economic circuit, meaning free exchanges between producers, consumers, and users world-wide or maybe some revolutionary barter deal.”

“And what do you think the snow foxes are for,” I asked. “Are they wifi towers?”

“Something like that,” replied Ali, visibly glad to be let off the hook.

“You are lying again, you’ve already said they were blue pulse emitters,” Zelim scoffed and the dinos, who had already taken one step back, came one big step closer again.

“Yeah, in the beginning, just to stop the intranet, but then they will be wifi-towers again,” Ruslan this time defended his companion.

“Why do your bosses want to stop the intranet?” asked Ramzan. “After all it is just a healthier and more ecological alternative to the internet, the internet requiring around 5 GB meaning 5 billion Hz frequencies, as well as cables and wifi-towers, whereas the intranet just requires 0.4 to 100 Hz maximum and can be transmitted via humans, animals, plants and all intranet-capable robots, things, and materials, including water and pebbles even. Our friend Volgo, the Titan here is a better wifi-tower than hundreds of their old-fashioned metal and wire monsters taken together.”

“Oh, I think they just want to harm the revolution.” This time Ali had been faster with his answer. “And by the way, you may throw me into prison, I am willing to repent, rehabilitate, do any chores, but please, eh, call your monsters back.”

Ruslan’s and Ali’s testimony, by Jean-François and Alexandra

This time it was not the raptors that had seized Ruslan and him but two giant boars. When they let them go, the two gangsters tried to run. Yet they were able to do only a few steps before two poisonous vipers seized their ancles. “You are lying to our friends. You are not going anywhere until you have helped them disable the blue pulse emitters.” And looking around, they could see that boars, dinosaurs, leopard, wolves, jackals, and birds were still around and ready to help the revolutionaries hold them or at least communicate messages that would enable us to catch them if they tried to escape.

“I think we must interrupt this interrogation and try to neutralise the blue pulse emitter lest we get another electro-magnetic pulse. At least here in the Russian lands. And it is bound to be worse than the prior ones, because the counter-revolutionaries learn from their mistakes just as we do!” Robespierre spoke up intraline. “Urgent bio-call to the Moscow and Novgornyi Recycling Hounds, have you been able to locate any other devices?”

“Yes,” Maksim’s happy voice sounded through their heads, “two of them, actually. The ones my papa told you about, one on the coast hidden in a cave or let’s say a crevasse in some rocks, quite close to our place, in Svetlogorsk, and one in a somewhat remote location on a forest viewing point in the Romintian heath to the South-East of our village. And, as you Chechen brigade will find when you access your local blue pulse emitters, each of them has a map with all the remaining blue pulse emitters in the Russian lands and world-wide. There are two, no three remaining in the French lands as well, if you can believe it, all of them in the région parisienne. Wait, I can send you the coordinates.”

The Snow-Fox on Mountain Top

“You see,” Ruslan was trying to talk to the three Illyrians as they climbed the final distance to the blue pulse emitter, the two crims still with the vipers around their feet, ready to bite if one of them made a false move. “It is like your comrade from the French lands said, the fascos have learnt from their mistakes, and I heard them say, this time the on-switches will all be operated on a decentralised basis.”

“Well,” said Zelim, forcing the pace a little. “We shall see.” And then they had already reached the top of the mountain, where a small hut, an all-weather shelter stood next to a tubular device that was turning almost like a wind gauge. It took Zelim only one step to the device to switch it off, or rather to at least prevent it from turning. Muhammed and I meanwhile went into the hut, followed by Ramzan and Tamerlan. Temirbek and Bulat stayed outside guarding the two villains. It was already rather cold here on the top of the mountain and for a moment we were glad to find a fire burning in the fire-place. Yet Saïd, speaking intraline from Illyria, warned us. “Remember the logistics station comrade Fabien went in undercover. They almost killed him, several other workers, and a few spontaneous militiamen who had come to investigate, by pouring some chemicals into the fire that then exploded.”

He is right, I thought, and stepped up to the fire-place just in case, while Muhammed, Ramzan, and Tamerlan went to the computer desk first.

“We found the map comrade Maksim was talking about!” Muhammed cheered, while I peered into the flames. It seemed to be just wood burning, nothing untoward, but then I saw tiny blue flames as well.

“Let’s carry the computer out,” I shouted. “I think this fire may also go off!” Muhammed and Zelim who had come in as well immediately seized it and began to carry it out. I followed. But then, all of a sudden, ‘Bang!’, the whole place got grey with smoke, with red and fellow flames licking at us from all four walls as well as from the ground, roof, and the furniture. Zelim and Muhammed had reached the door and I could see them disappear through the grey mist with the desktop, a rather old-fashioned device, actually, pre-revolutionary probably with some hardware extensions and software updates. In addition, each of them was carrying a laptop. Zelim’s still had its bag, Muhammed had shoved the other in his backpack, making it overfull and about to burst. Yet then I tripped over a cable that was lying around and fell. “Ow!” My whole body hurt, especially my ankle which had maybe been twisted or broken. Zelim and Muhammed had to come back and drag me out as well as the printer. Just a rickety, old-fashioned model as well, but it seemed to be still intact. Fortunately, the goat shepherd had arrived with a few of his mates. They carried the printer and me, while Muhammed and Zelim carried the computer, and his brother Tamerlan the two laptops. Comrades Ramzan, Bulat, and Temirbek took care of the prisoners.

It was too long a way to get back to the village on foot. Therefore, my papa Abukhan and comrade Islambek came with a few horses and donkeys, leaving the village for Deki and the women to guard. We arrived back home when it was dark already. Luckily, nothing had happened there.

However, I had passed out on a horse and had to be treated for multiple bruises and, possibly, a twisted ankle, which turned out to be a passing problem, fortunately. I insisted for my bed to be made up in the room where comrades Zelim, Muhammed, and the others were examining the desktop, laptops, and printer we had found and carried out.

The printer had only one task still in its memory, and that was printing out the map of blue pulse emitter locations world-wide. When the printer had spit it out, we immediately photographed and scanned it with all available intranet phones and of course also sent bio-shots of it we made with our own eyes to all our contacts world-wide. There was some good news. Our blue pulse emitter up the mud slide on the mountain top had been located, as well as the two close to Novgornyi. However, there were still several other blue pulse locations in Chechnia, and we were trying to get in touch with the comrades in the close-by villages.

Same situation in the Île de France. There were three approximate locations, one near Beauvais to the North of Paris, the other one near Meaux to the East, and the third one near Étampes to the South-West, where comrade Fabien had delivered goods to fasco logistics station as a revolutionary under-cover agent. They were of course fine-combed by spontaneous militia until, eventually, the three blue pulse emitters were found. Yet, unfortunately, by that time, the latest pulse had already gone off.

With remote help from Robespierre, Sylvain, Jean-Wadi, Josip and the other computer and robot wizards at Illyria and Institut Galilée near Saint-Denis, we tried to restart the desktop and the two laptops with the revolutionary operating programme One World which would have automatically installed comrade Josip’s and Rosa’s moral imperative. It set up any device, computer, robot, phone, animalbot, and so on not to launch any programme likely to cause harm, not to permit itself to be weaponised, and not to allow any programmes, apps, or devices not approved and recommended as good practice for use world-wide by at least one revolutionary village assembly. Of course, no assembly anywhere in the world had condoned the nefarious blue pulse gimmick. We managed to install the basic programme and then tried to access the blue pulse device just as the Illyrian comrades had done the other day during the first wave of the pulse in the French lands. There were some initial successes, the programme did open, and mandated the revolutionary moral imperative at least for  those locations of blue pulse emitters we or other revolutionaries already had direct control over. However, we were not able to enforce the moral imperative across all relevant devices,  and we were also not able to de-activate their local on-switches. That meant that even in cases where we had managed to install  and to run the moral imperative, the fascos could still override it with their local on-switch. We had one last hope, to find a central override or on-off switch that would allow us to override their local on-switches. But try it as we might, by scrolling through hundreds of pages, we were not able to de-activate the latter. So, at about twelve o’clock, midnight Chechen time, meaning standard Moscow time as well, the third edition of their latest electro-magnetic pulse weapon went off, impossible to impede.

3) The Blue Pulse

Worse than the brown pulse, by Jean-Saïd and Natalie

Worse than the brown pulse

The brown pulse had been nothing compared to this! The intranet was down all over Chechnia. Even the simplest bio-messages had trouble getting through, let alone longer calls, texts, bio-audios, and bio-videos. The revolutionary apps – material check, for checking all materials, products, processes and services anywhere in the economy, hierarchy check, for immediately reporting any hierarchy that developed anywhere in society, village forum app for broadcasting the neighbourhood assemblies and voting the quorum for forming and empowering spontaneous militia brigades, the market forum or freefoil app to check availability of goods on the markets, in share points, at the workshops, via revolutionary barter or long-distance order with the help of the neighbourhood assembly – were down as well. And unless we located the remaining blue pulse emitters or snow foxes as we call them here in the Caucasus region, we would have no way of stopping the  fascos.

It had been easy when they had spread poison-laced nanobots via drones and from airplanes. Humans, strong animals, and even trees could stun pilots with revolutionary red stun beams, nothing dangerous, just to force them to land, and for only half an hour until a spontaneous militia brigade could come and arrest them. Or humans, strong animals, and especially dinos could send bronze beams which would not destroy airplanes and drones but simply stop them and force them to land without dropping their charge. Yet with these new generation weapons those two methods no longer worked.

We were desperate. And in fact, we were almost quarrelling. Our Chechen friends said we brought this trouble over them. Even Ramzan. “A couple of weeks ago, we were peacefully organising the harp brigades and preparing the harp assemblies. Now it’s all on hold! You are throwing us back  centuries!”

Of course, we were trying to remind them it was not us but the Ubermenschen – Henri Uber, Louis Deshalles, Fernando Deliverando, Viesturs Volt, Jeff Bezosnik, Andy Jassy,  and their mercs ranging from Donald Trumpel, latest edition, Jack Brower, Boris Pistazius, and Lars Kriegsbeil to Fritz le Merc. Yet the Chechen comrades were angry. What to tell them?

Resist!

“…To organise the resistance, of course!” Senior comrade Georges spoke first. “Mobilise the people, the animals, including the dinos, the plants. Find these pinguin- or snow-fox bots, whatever you call them. We are doing the same in the French lands.”

“Don’t feel bad,” said Jérôme, digital terrorism expert. “We haven’t found two of the left-over pinguins yet either. In fact, I had to postpone my journey to join you until we have found them. But I promise you, the minute we have gotten rid of this interference, I’ll hop on the train.”

Marianne blushed. Every idiot could see that she fancied Jérôme. Apparently, they had already had a fling during their trip to South America. I would have to talk to her about it. Did she mean to leave me for him, in spite of young comrade Olivier? Or were we supposed to have a threesome?

“Talk to comrade Jérôme as well,” I heard a delta wave bio-message or thought cord sound in my brain. They had the lowest and safest frequency of all, 0.4-3 Hz, almost impossible to intercept by even the worst fasco hacker squad. But who was it from? Could it be from comrade Denis, his father, who often disapproved of his son? Or from comrade Michel, his partner, biochemical terrorism expert? “Remember, he’s got Arlette as well and Michel!” So, it wouldn’t be comrade Michel himself, and it wasn’t a female voice, so it couldn’t be comrade Arlette. So, was it from comrade Denis, or maybe from comrade Alain? Comrade Alain was a bit of an amateur psychoanalyst who sometimes gave helpful advice like this. Or was it from comrade Jean maybe? Yet, you see, comrades, had the intranet functioned properly without phasing or hacking, I  would have known immediately who it was from.

“It’s not as easy as you think!” comrade Zelim was bio-messaging next to me as I was distracted. “The Caucasus has many mountain tops. Without any intranet, even birds will have trouble bringing us the message.”

Then comrade Temirbek shouted from the entrance. “We have found one of their snow-fox bots. Here, talk to these brave fellows!”

Everybody’s surprise was great when instead of humans, two large brown bears walked in on all fours, then rose on their hind legs to greet the humans human-style. Then the dogs made space for them before the fireplace. We could listen to the animals bio-chatter with each other although they ignored us. “So, tell us?” asked the dogs. “Where is it? Our human friends need to get their bearings as soon as they can.”

Visit by the two bears, by Jean-François and Alexandra

“Well,” said  bear Misha, with a whimsical grin on his face, and I immediately made a bio-video for the young Illyrians to watch later. Since bears were not back running wild yet in the French forests and mountains, they probably did not realise how charmingly bears grin. “Not to offend you, valiant humans, but it is right before your noses. My brother and I spotted it from the neighbouring hill, then we came right over.”

“You don’t mean to say…?” asked Deki and his face paled. Before anybody could stop him, he was out of the house. We had trouble getting our boots on fast enough to follow him.  He ran ahead of us through the forest for about half a mile, then stopped. In admiration I noticed, he had even taken a stun gun. In balance, however, he was only wearing sneakers. They were bound to get wet and break sooner rather than later from the mud. When he nodded at me, I straightened to take over as spontaneous brigadier once that happened.

“From now on,” he said. “We have to tread very carefully in case there are still some of them up there.”

“Up where?” groaned Muhammed who was also wearing only sneakers and probably already had his feet bathed in mud.

Ramzan also looked at Deki admiringly. “Now I understand, the old tower, just as Misha, the bear said, ‘Right before your noses’. It has a stone stairway leading up to the very top, but the entrance to it is on the other side of the fortress wall. You enter from beyond the ridge of this hill, on its other side. That way, they did not have to show themselves when they entered. The device is probably up there!”

“Wow!” We now heard a faint, but clear bio-message from Illyria. “Hello, comrades, this is Jean-Wadi. I can’t believe we have intranet. How did you manage?”

“We may not have it for long!” said Zelim. “Maybe I know why we have got it. We are right in the shadow of the wall now. The brunt of their blue waves does not get here. And the bio-wifi works on the soil and underground. If we had a flashlight, I would show you the little ants and roaches scurrying along to help us!”

“Don’t use flashlights!” Ramzan was now whispering. “If they are still up there, they might see us. We have to turn around the base of the tower. And then climb the stairs without a sound, if possible. Those with sneakers on, go first!”

I ignored him although I was wearing boots, because Deki had after all nominated me as the next brigadier to take over. So, Muhammed and I were in the first group to get up there. Luckily, the place was empty. There was just the large, snow-white device, hence the name snow-fox, turning around on its axis with a slight metallic-plasticky grating noise and turning out the mostly invisible blue waves. Only here and there could you see little blue sparks.

Deki and Ramzan had already found the battery switch and turned it off. Yet the strange beast kept on churning. “Probably, some residual power, or an auxiliary battery,” grumbled Ramzan. Zelim and I went down on our knees and searched the base of it for another switch. Meanwhile Tamerlan, Muhammed, and Bulat were looking for other devices. There were none, not even a laptop. And no ashes in the fire place either. “This time, the fascos have cleaned up behind themselves!” said Tamerlan.

“I think I have  found something!” I had to groan rather than say it, because my ankle which I had all but forgotten, was suddenly acting up with shrill pangs of pain. “It is not a switch, but a kind of slide. Ah, lookee here, there is a laptop in here after all, or at least some kind of monitor with a keyboard.”

We pulled it out. Naturally, it asked for a password. We provided an override, did a restart, installed One World, rebooted, and… bingo… Just as in the French lands, the device was happy to run moral protocol. Then we relaunched the blue pulse programme. “Warning!” the screen read in Russian and Arabic. “This programme may cause harm!” We pressed override. After all, we wanted to uninstall the programme for good, not just leave it alone once. The second warning  even sounded aloud as well as being written on screen: “Warning! This programme violates no-weaponisation protocol!” Zelim pressed override again. Now the third warning read and sounded: “This programme has been prohibited by 100% of the village assemblies seized with its material check so far, and now the screen ran a long list of village assemblies, organised by continent, starting with North America. “Look, even the American Sheitans themselves don’t want it!” marvelled Islambek who had arrived with a few dogs to search the place. And we found Farner Rory’s and John’s twin cooperative at the feet of the Little Big Horn mountains  and the Indian village next to it among the disapproving assemblies.

At the bottom of the list it now showed the alternative Josip and Rosa had fitted it with: “Run full list or uninstall now!”  Feeling the urgent need to get myself in the horizontal position with my ankle propped up, I pressed ‘uninstall now’. The blue eyes of the monster went dark. The monitor now just showed ‘Error 2021’. We hugged and kissed each other.  2021 was the prime revolutionary error code indicating counter-revolutionary sabotage. It meant the revolution had won!

The Blue Pulse in the Agglo of Groznyi

Well, at least here on one lone mountain tower, near one remote mountain village in Chechnia, Russian lands. The news from Groznyi was less good. The intranet was seriously disrupted, the assemblies had trouble meeting except physically, but people were afraid to go out, because, they said, Dudaevytes and Zakaevytes, in other word, fascos may be out to get us. Comrades were trying to organise a central rally around the Mosque, but so far, the turn-out had been low.

And the craziest thing, and that was disturbing our friends, the animals and plants especially, there had been a message by president Zakayev on Imperial Renaissance, offering to bring his influence to bear on the fascos to turn off the Blue Pulse. Yet you know what he claimed their demand was:  bring back private car traffic and even combustion engines. The reliance on public transport and sharing, he alleged, had harmed the Chechen economy, and you know what the worst was, the fascos claimed that some revolutionary neighbourhood assemblies had already agreed to the bargain.

There was a bio-video circulating, somebody had been able to send it off with delta waves…

“That requires a lot of intensity, much more direction and focus even than the other to gamma waves,” interjected Jean-Wadi. “But it is not impossible…”

“Yeah, so there is this bio-video of cars rolling into Grozny, big black Mercedes transporters like the one that set off the mud slide. It looks like a coup, or at least like oligarchs returning into town.”

“Well, we must mobilise the people. What do you suggest?” I asked.

“Not animals and dinosaurs!” said Ramzan. “I don’t want our precious cows, horses, sheep and dinosaurs to be run over by fuel-guzzling monsters.”

We all had to laugh despite the desperate situation. Then there was a request for a bio-conference from Illyria. “We already have the Moscow Recycling Hounds, their Novgornyi branch, and the Beijing Almond Tree Brigade cooperative lined up intraline. Do we have comrades in Groznyi who would care to join?”

“Care they would!” sighed my papa, comrade Abukhan. “But we can’t reach them!”

“Comrade Jean-Wadi suggests using extra-focus and intensity and specifying delta waves, the lover’s wavelength and frequency.”

My papa sat down cross-legged like a monk and wrinkled his brows, then went on his knees in the prayer position, and then all of a sudden, we heard a voice first in Ingush, then Vainakh, then Russian who seemed very happy to hear from my dad.

“Comrade Abukhan, long time, no hear! First the brown pulse, then the blue pulse, and now we have visitors from the Cretaceous. Look at that. And then there was a shaky bio-feed of a dinosaur, a stegosaurus by the looks of it, sticking his head through what had to be a ground-floor window. Groznyi had been deconstructing as well of course, just like Paris. There were trees in the background.

“Comrade Eldar is with the revolution!” Abukhan said pleadingly to the stegosaurus. “Don’t scare him. He is against the monsters, meaning the cars, as well.” And to Eldar. “He is a friend from the past. The comrades from the French lands have summoned the dinosaurs to help us with the intranet and nature language. What about your neighbours, comrades Murad, Shaman, and Zubair? And what was the comrade’s name to your right on the upper floor, something with U, Usam?”

“That’s right,” sighed Eldar. “But I can’t get in touch with them. You think I should ring at their doors?”

“Yes!” said my papa. “That’s what you should do. Take your time! We shall wait!”

While Eldar was running around in the house, we talked to the stegosaurus. As we could not find our seven saurusses – where were they? –, we used Sultan and Sultanbek, two of the village dogs as translators when our nature-speak and nature language no longer sufficed.

“How many saurusses are in Groznyi?” “Oh, not that many so far,” said Stego. “You see, when the news from Groznyi broke, your dino friends took the initiative, travelled here on a yellow beam, borrowed the time capsule from the Groznyi Historical Museum and brought back another 30 dinos. The idea was to bring one per 1000 residents, so as to have at least one for every one or two quarter assemblies, but there weren’t enough dinos prepared to leave the past. We’ll have to wait til they our ladies lay eggs or get pregnant. But we came up with a different solution.

Save the Revolution. Do you really want back cars? By Jean-François and Alexandra

“We brought ten more Volgotitans. They are big enough to create an impression even by the Mosque, so we’ll use them to wander around there, attract people to the rally and serve as bio-wifi towers to the extent they can. Of course, if we can get people to come outside and pronounce themselves for the intranet and against cars, they will be bio-wifi towers as well, it is just people withdrawing that creates problems.

Rounds in the Quarters, by Emmanuel and Laurence

“Then we have five Aralosaurusses who look a bit like Amurosaurusses and five Stegosaurusses, one of them being me. We do the rounds in the quarters and try to get the bio-wifi going again and  to mobilise people. Of course, there should be a lot more of us.

“And then we have ten Kileskuses, and they, as you have found the other day when you were investigating the mud slides, are very useful even to serve as spontaneous militia to arrest and guard villains.

“Please look, here in Groznyi, they have neutralised a number of fascos as well already.”

Kileskuses making arrests, by Faroukh and Sarah

“What about the other animals?” I asked. “ Well, we are hesitating about bringing in herds of Turs, red deer, Bezoar goats, mouflons, and boars, or for that matter leopards, bears, wolves, red foxes, jackals or lynx. Yet what exactly would their revolutionary purpose be?” asked Murad.

“Well, the wild deer could roam the streets and make it difficult for the cars to get through. So could tame cows, sheep and goats, for that matter.  If there are many animals of all kinds, the cars will no longer have the advantage. The predators could hunt fascos, and the birds would be immensely useful in breaking through the blue pulse. I wonder whether a united front of humans, animals, including dinosaurs, plants and robots could not overcome their blue pulse even without physically switching off the snow-fox or pinguin contraptions, whatever we call them. We are many, they are just medium-sized devices these gangsters have installed as a loose irregular network, or am I being too optimistic?”

“You are right!” said comrade Usam. “We need to form a spontaneous militia brigade. We can ask birds and maybe dogs to gather the quorum. I think, comrade Shaman should be responsible for the wild vegan animals, comrade Zubair for the predators, and you, comrade Ramzan and friends, for the tame cattle. Meanwhile, comrades Murad, Eldar, and I should cooperate with you French comrades in setting up this human-animal-plant-robot and dino or Haproid resistance front. I find that a very promising idea which should be applicable far beyond the agglo of Groznyi.”

4) The Human-Animal-Plant-Dinosaur Resistance Front

Uncovering the blue pulse emitters, by Jean-Saïd and Natalie

Uncovering the blue pulse emitters

“The most important task at this stage is to restore bio-wifi!” I said. So, we travelled by yellow beam, meaning disassembled into molecules, jumped on the yellow beam, then reassembled in Groznyi. The important thing was not to miss the cue at that stage, otherwise you risked remaining in limbo a long time… We met up with Murad, Usam, and Eldar in the latter’s living room. “Now we have to find the fasco string-pullers here in Groznyi and elsewhere. The role of each species is clear: first, humans, animals, plants and dinosaurs must all work together on restoring basic bio-wifi. No subspecies is too big or too small to play its role. As you may remember from comrade Jean-Wadi’s, Josip’s and Maksim’s presentations, the intranet can travel at different altitudes: underground, on the ground, at grass, flower and small animal level, at bush and larger animal level, at tree top and at bird flight level, and jump up and down between these. Yet the blue pulse creates disruptions at all these levels and between them. As long as we don’t locate the blue pulse emitters, the only hope is as tight a network of bio-wifi transmitters as we can establish. The problem is people staying inside and animals hiding because they are afraid of the radiation, while the way to overcome their fascist sabotage is precisely to stay together, outside, and fight their blue pulse with as many natural bio-wifi towers as possible. Think about it, how come we have intranet here, with the signal even carrying to Illyria, in the French lands? It is because we are several humans together, and we also have dinosaurs and other animals  around.”

“What about the dangers of radiation?” inquired Sevim intraline.

“Couldn’t we use blue beams against their blue waves?” asked Bashir, a little less cheeky than normal, probably because he realised  that the latest events endangered his trip to Chechnia. “Not really,” answered comrade Michel. “Our revolutionary blue beams help against bio-chemical attacks, not against blue waves.”

“In fact, they may make them worse,” added Jean-Saïd. “They contain somewhat more EMR than the normal intranet waves with a low frequency of 0.4-100 Hz – yellow beams as well by the way. Not that much compared to the 2 GHz  minimum and over 5 GHz maximum before the revolution, but still….”

“But then we shouldn’t use red beams and bronze beams either,” I objected. “In that case, we might as well give up all hope of winning against their pulse and other weapons.”

“I have an idea,” said Zelim. “Do you have any intranet gauges floating around here in Groznyi?  If not, you might want to get some by train or transporter from Moscow or Tbilisi maybe, or even by rescue and emergency wind- and solar-powered planes. This is an emergency after all. If we can get people to go outside with them, we might test the signal. Where it gets weaker, we might look for a blue pulse emitter close by.”

“Oh, that’s too dangerous,” said Eldar. “They may be guarding their blue pulse emitters, see us coming, and fire one of their lethal beams at us.”

“And greater Groznyi is over 300 square kilometres large,” sighed Usam. “That’s smaller than Paris or at least than the Paris region I am sure, but we’d have to do quite a lot of walking to locate all of them.”

“True. Mind you, this gives me an idea where we might look for the emitters, with or without intranet gauge,” said Murad. “The  deconstructing skyscrapers of the old pre-revolutionary business centre near the Mosque. Don’t these blue pulse emitters have to be at a certain altitude to work? Well, there you go!”

I was already standing. “Murad, you are an ace. Let’s not lose any more time. Let’s go!”

“Wait!” Eldar ran after us as the three of us and Murad already were out of the door, with Murad sending out bio-messages for a militia transporter while the three of us just asked for one big or two small taxis, free in the revolution, of course, as the taxi drivers  participated in the economic circuit. The taxi arrived first. It was a transporter or mini-bus and as the driver explained, these days usually served to bring sick or elderly people to the policlinic. That’s why he had come so fast.

“We could have taken a militia car,” grumbled Eldar as we climbed into it. “The quorum from the local village assembly of this quarter just arrived.”

“Well, don’t worry,” I tried to comfort him as we drove past a herd of sheep guarded by a comrade farmer, doing its best to keep the bio-wifi alive. “It’s for free anyway and it’s better camouflage. That way they won’t know we are spontaneous militia. Good that you are not a fuel-guzzler.”

“Oh, no,” said the driver. “I already stopped driving one of those in summer of 2021. Our neighbourhood assembly had voted for electrical vehicles only.”

Nevertheless, about half way to the business centre,  a militia car stopped us and several other taxis with militia brigades in it, yet only handed each brigade at least one intranet gauge.

“You are looking for these blue pulse emitters?” the driver asked. “You should have told me. My name is Movladi, by the way. I know the Grozny business centre very well. There are just five highrises to speak of, and three of them are significantly larger than the others, even in their deconstruction stage. So, you should start with those, at least one brigade per building, I should think. My son can guide you through the fattest one, the blue and grey one on the right there. He works there as an ecological deconstruction engineer. I heard you say you are from Illyria? His brigade is using your methods, nanobots to guide the bacteria. And soon, he says, they might use dancing dinosaurs as well, for the piece-by-piece deconstruction, although only on the ground. They don’t want our comrades from the past to get vertigo.” He chuckled, then gulped as he saw several Kileskuses already circle around his son’s workplace.

“They, not being sissies, have beat us to it!” said Muhammed and laughed. “Mind you, they are Kileskuses, they are a kind of Tyrannosaurus rex, they don’t take prisoners wherever they are.”

“Let’s hope the perps don’t run away,” I said, but the taxi had already arrived at the blue and grey building which was of course closed off and guarded by a deconstruction security brigade. We explained the urgency of our mission in Russian, and our new friend Movladi translated into Vainakh. “Ladno, you may go in, but there are no elevators anymore. They have already been dismantled, good stuff in them, metal, glass, and so on. And all floors above the 35^th are closed to the public.”

Haproid Resistance Front in Action, by Cédric and Charolaine

Red and Bronze Beams, Dinosaurs dancing, and other methods of the Haproid resistance

When we had climbed up, some of us huffing and puffing – my ankle started to hurt again as well –, to the tenth floor, a young comrade caught down to us who looked strikingly like Movladi.

“Zdravstvyite, I am Nezh, and you are the Chechen comrades from Illyria, aren’t you? Then you must be Aslan, Muhammed, and Zelim? You may have seen me on a bio-feed. When we started this project we communicated quite a lot with comrades Robespierre – his Russian is excellent, after all, he studied in Russia for a while –, his brother Danton, and the other physicists and deconstruction wizards. You don’t have to walk up. We can travel in one of the building cages that go up and down on all four sides of the structure. Only drawback, you can always look only into one side of the building, obviously. Yet you may switch cage of course. Any idea where this brown, beg your pardon, blue pulse emitter could be?”

“Hmm, that is what we would like to ask you,” said Murad. “You work here every day, don’t you? Haven’t you noticed anything suspicious these last couple of days?” he asked.

Comrade Nezh had to think about it. We were now on the 15^th floor and about to switch into one of the cages on the South side going up. It was already getting dark.  We would have to either receive a tip very fast or wait around all night for something or somebody suspicious to materialise.

Now we were on floor 35 already. “The comrade at security said, the public was only allowed up to floor 35?” I asked. “Down to what floor has deconstruction progressed?”

“To about Level 36. Yet on the top floors, there is total disarray these days. Lots of construction debris, and the fascos would be afraid to put their sensitive apparatus into the midst of all this lest it break down.” He looked worried all of a sudden. “Don’t tell me you came to this building on my dad’s advice, because I work here? Do you know whether these saboteurs are locals? Because if they are, they would be much more likely to put one into the Groznyi-City. It used to be a hotel rather than an office building. So, it’s being deconstructed much more carefully and slowly for that reason alone. It has more useful fixtures, bathroom equipment, and so on. Plus, it has the façade clocks. They are a bit of a landmark. People don’t quite know yet what to do with them. Some want to deconstruct them, lots of good aluminium in them, others want to place them in a park as a monument. There have been many neighbourhood and village assembly votes already. Any local neighbourhood and village assembly may of course debate this question and voice an opinion on it, and there have even been one or two agglo-wide referendums, but there isn’t any consensus yet.”

“Well,” said Usam. “But another militia brigade would have gotten there before us.”

“Never mind,” I said, suddenly alert. “Nezh is right. It seems to be the more likely setting for their device. We should just swing over there on a yellow beam and look.”

“Another yellow beam,” clamoured Eldar. “So much more kinetic energy in the middle of a blue pulse.” Yet it was too late. The three of us, Muhammed, Zelim, and I were already disassembling, and Murad and Usam followed suit. As I reassembled, a small tit landed before me and crooned. “The thing you are looking for is below you on the 28^th floor. But go there with a good defence, they are vicious and armed.”

It turned out that Nezh had not come with us. As a good specialist he knew about spatial travel by beam already and was probably instead exploring the floors above the 35^th in the skyscraper he felt responsible for.

Now a clear bio-message from him sounded in our brains. “I or rather we – I took two young comrades along to be on the safe side –, were surprised that they had put an emitter among all the debris and dust anyhow. Yet  it was just emitting away on its own, no humans guarding it whatsoever. I hope you are as lucky in the Grozny-City. We already switched off the main power supply, and are now working on reprogramming the device with One World.”

We were  still on floor 35, and Eldar was coming back from a brief exploratory tour. “Same state as in our building,” he reported. “Disorder and lots of dust. They are unlikely to have put it there.”

“A tit just said it was on floor 28,”  I told the comrades, and  Usam was already running towards the cage. “But wait!” I shouted as I ran after him. “It told us to activate red and bronze shields and beams. It said the fascos were heavily armed.”

“I think,” Murad whispered as we crossed from the cage to the other side of the building on floor 28, “they may have installed it behind the clock. That way no one would be able to spot it from downstairs even if bad luck wanted it that the windows on this floor got taken out in the near future.”

And then as we approached the hands of the clock showing about seven p.m., we could see it churning and hear the metallic-plasticky grating noise we already knew from Uyutnoe. If the pinguin slash snow fox were unguarded as in Nezh’s grey-silver tower, we would be able to relaunch it with One World and uninstall the blue pulse programme as easily as we had done in the old fortress tower over Uyutnoe. If it was guarded, on the other hand, we would have to stun the fascos very quickly before they could use lethal beams on us.

Now we could see them.  There were at least three of them, two of them had fire arms and the third one had a counter-revolutionary phone probably enabled to send out lethal or at least heavy duty brown beams. Yet our friends, the Kileskuses did not care. They seized the two who had fire arms from behind so that both of them had to drop their  weapons. Usam, who probably thought that the device the third one was brandishing was just a boring old internet phone jumped forward to the blue pulse device and had already found the main power switch. Before I could stop them, Murad and Eldar ran to the other side of the device where they knew from our and Nezh’s reports the roll-out control screen and keyboard were located.

“Are you crazy?” I yelled. “Mind the third one!” Yet Muhammed shouted: “Don’t worry, comrade Zelim has stunned him with red beam!” Indeed, he seemed to be turning and falling, but as he collapsed, he directed his phone at all six of us in turn, and when he had me in his visor, my head immediately started to spin, I felt faint and nauseous, my legs gave way under me, and bang. There was an atrocious pain in my head, then all went black.

While I was out, I had the most wonderful dream. Two beautiful rose-blue-green- and gold-coloured birds, big like saurusses were carrying me to a cloud where a beautiful band of girls in white dresses where dancing, first to a classical concerto for harp, flute, and orchestra, then the famous jazz harp duo from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. In the pause between them comrades Georges, Jean, and other senior Illyrians appeared and assured me: ‘Don’t worry, Aslan! No pasarán! The Kileskuses have got you. There is no way the fascos are going to kill you with this silly beam…”

Then I woke up with a start. It was rather dark already. I was lying under a warm blanket on a lawn where some cows, sheep, goats and further away wild Caucasian deer and even a few dinos were grazing.  It was a kind of municipal park  which was being transformed into pastures again. I remembered we had passed it in Movladi’s cab on the way to the towers. Yet where were they?

Further away, behind the Mosque and the dino pasture, there were just five huge mountains of rubble, with a thin dust cloud hovering over them. No fire or smoke, so, there would not have been an explosion. And a minimal amount of air pollution, so it would not have been a classic implosion either. What had happened?

“Did the towers collapse of their own accord, or what?” asked Zelim who was lying next to me and seemed to be troubled by the same question.

Then Nezh appeared, still covered with dust as were the rest of us as well. He smiled, squatted down between us and told us the story of what had happened while we were stunned. The brigades in the three other towers had deactivated their blue pulse emitters as well, and from the map of Groznyi that was found in the controller, the militia was able to locate the other devices all over Groznyi – about sixty of them, no less –, and to deactivate them within minutes. The intranet being back, harp functioned again, and the Illyrians were able to get through to our friends the Volgotitans, Stego-,  Amuro- und Aralosaurusses and communicate  them the frequencies by which the five towers were oscillating. The info came from Illyria. A certain young comrade Cédric supported by the other members of the robot and intranet brigades had done the necessary calculations.

“Molodets,” said Maksim, who had tuned in from Novgornyi. “You French are otlichniki,” meaning star students.

As the fascos were trying to get off the towers with the cages, or once they had gotten further down, via the staircases, the dinos and also other large wild and tame animals, such as deer, cows and sheep began to dance and beat the earth in a rhythm that disequilibrated the towers completely. You know, the way you destroy bridges in a war so as to prevent the enemy from following you, but you do not want to ruin visibility entirely. The instant before the towers collapsed, Kileskuses swooped in and grabbed the fleeing fascos as well as a few workers still on the premises and deposited them on this lawn to recover just as they had done with us.

“Of course,  we are keeping the fascos separately,” Nezh grinned. “Look over there!” And indeed. Handcuffed and encircled by spontaneous militiamen, militia electro-cars and dogs, about two dozen mercs were standing hand-cuffed,  some of them looking angry or sheepish, others just tired. And among them were those that had stunned and almost killed us with their beams on Grozny-City.

“That was super-work,” I said. “And I am proud we Illyrians and young comrade Cédric, who has only recently hit upon this method by the way, were able to help you Groznyites in this effective and elegant way.” ‘Dancing dinosaurs, deer, and cattle get contaminated skyscrapers to fall with minimal pollution,’ the headline in l’Humanité flashed up in my brain.

“Young comrade Cédric is a legend!” agreed Zelim.

“And we are very grateful,” said Eldar who had only just woken up. “For a minute it looked like the whole agglo of Grozny and parts of rural Chechnia would go fascist.” “We were very lucky you were there and dropped in to help us!” agreed Murad. “You and the comrade dinosaurs you brought in!”

“It was an honour to work with you,” said Usam. “Lucky  that comrade Ramzan knew our neighbourhood assembly, otherwise you might not have called on us, and we would still be hiding inside with the blue pulse and the fascos roaming free.” Well, we decided to spend the night at their house. We were dead tired of course. Yet we did not sleep, but discussed the conferences of the Haproid resistance we were going to organise all over Chechnia and world-wide.

First Conferences of the Human-Animal-Plant-Robot- and Dino or Haproid Resistance

First Haproid conference in Grozny, by Busana and Khazarbek, children of Uyutnoe

Well, the first Haproid resistance conference in Chechnia took place in the Groznyi quarter park close to Eldar’s, Murad’s and Usam’s house, and the second one only a few days later in Uyutnoe. We had decided to travel back by mini-bus, so as not to further burden the EMR balance of the air with yellow beams. Of course, our revolutionary beams based on will-power and intensity of feeling only have a maximal frequency of around 100 Hz. However, one of the important results of beating back this blue pulse is to make us realise that yellow beams, blue beams, and even bronze beams, red shields and red stun beams are fraught with certain risks in cases where fasco saboteurs have already injected lots of high-frequency EMR into the air. The attendance at the conferences was clear from the name haproid. There had to be more or less equivalent numbers of humans, animals, plants, robots and dinosaurs of various  subspecies.  We  talked in Russian, Vainakh, nature-speak and nature-language with simultaneous translation done by robots and bio-messaged directly into our brains. That part worked seamlessly.

We recognised red beams and shields to beat back fascos, bronze beams and shields to disable their weapons, and solar- and wind-powered planes and yellow beams to get to places fast best practice for such extraordinary emergencies. We launched an appeal to all scientists world-wide to work further on nature-speak, nature language, and the dance of the dinosaurs to make it a safe and effective method to use even for day-to-day deconstruction-reconstruction.

“Our dream is to help you not only to destroy buildings, but to build them,” said one of the Volgotitans. “Not skyscrapers and similar towers obviously, they have been deemed unhealthy by most revolutionary assemblies anyway, but smaller houses, one- or two-floor apartment houses maximum, maybe town-houses, but mostly one-family-houses, tree houses, refurbished caves…We  can balance logs and stones that ten of you couldn’t lift…”

“I read somewhere the pyramids were probably built by giants and dinosaurs,” mused Peter Gar, still speaking from Georgia. “And you are right. We humans should live in caves, stone houses, tree houses, or at least in izbas, wooden cottages, like in the traditional Russian villages. All this concrete needs to be replaced and faster.” 

“Oh, yes,” rejoiced young comrade Danièle, our most radical ecologist, intraline from Illyria. “Back to the forest, or back to the grottos. That is wonderful idea, comrades Volgo and Gars.”

5) Solid Rain

Solid Rain in Uyutnoe, by Jean-Saïd and Natalie

Poisonous Rain under Capitalism

“What is that?” I said, standing at the window. “We’ve got snow, no, hail!”

Immediately, Maher bio-tuned himself in from Illyria. “No, it‘s something else, we’ve got the same here in Illyria, Saint-Denis, and the whole world over. Let’s us ask the comrades!”

“It’s fist-size here,” Maksim from Novgornyi was the first to respond. “And there is a major storm over the Baltics. Several big ships, and lots of fishermen have sent distress signals.”

“We have got baseball-sized hail here. Fist-size, nay baseball-sized hail, that would seem unlikely without capitalist agency, wouldn’t it?” sighed Farmer Rory from the Great Plains in North America.

“It must be their fasco blue pulse!” agreed Farmer John. “Lucky that we brought the horses and the cows in, and that the buffalos and other wild animals will hopefully be able to stand it.”

“Here in the Argentinian Sierra the rain is not quite fist-size, but from the Pampa Mazanape and the others report huge balls as well, soccer-ball size they say, and ours here are grape-size at least,” senior comrade Ramón took over from Cumbrecita. “It must come from their blue pulse. I wonder how it got here. We did not find any pinguin emitters in this area. Maybe they managed to place snow-fox ones on the top of the Andes?”

“We have the solid rain here in the Sahel as well, believe it or not, although the drops are smaller, corn-size,” said Sosthene from the Nelson Mandela cooperative on Lake Chad.  “Same here,” concurred Dileita from the Desmond Tutu cooperative in Djibouti, Somali Lands. “And do you get the terrible smell?”

“Something like a mix of electricity burn and salt, isn’t it?” Raj spoke up from the Gandhi 2.1 cooperative in Kolkata. “What about you comrades in Mumbai?” “Yes, we’ve got the solid rain drops, and we have an unpleasant wind here as well!” said Sanjee from the cooperative’s Mumbai branch. “We think it’s probably fasco weather manipulation to sweep the blue pulse down from the Himalayas. They have stolen a lot of R&E planes here in India.”

“Yes, we have got the solid rain here as well,” scowled Longwei from the Almond Tree Brigade cooperative in Beijing. “Yet the strangest thing is, red intranet and bio-wifi still work like a dream. That’s probably because we Chinese are so many people, and have animals and plants as well, of course, lots of live wifi towers. How is it in your parts? We are able to hear all of you loud and clear although we can’t see all of you, even the Novosibirsk buffalohuman comrades look kind of blurry.”

“We can hear and see you Chinese comrades clearly,” said Vicky, the buffalohuman travel agent from the Zoological Institute in Novosibirsk. “And the Moscow, Novgornyi and Uyutnoe comrades as well. The other ones are blurry, but we can hear you good as well.”

***

“Now, how to explain this solid rain phenomenon? Over to you, comrades Jean, Maher and the other chemists and biophysicists!” “It is a struggle, like in dialectical materialism,” senior comrade Jean, chemical engineer, spoke first from Illyria. “It’s their concentrated, sharp high-frequency waves versus our well diffused and harmless bio-waves.” “Given our harp and even haproid alliance, we shall triumph of course,” continued his son, Maher, also a chemical as well as robot engineer. “But it will be an epic battle nonetheless. Let me give you a little background on this. The senior comrades still born and raised before the revolution remember acid rain, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said comrade Francine, agronomist. “It was caused by excess nitrogen and sulphur as well as other toxins in the air. That is why some capitalist agitators blamed farming and pushed for the abolition of small farms and the mass slaughter of cows and other cattle.”

“Which was ridiculous of course,” comrade Jean took over again.  “There were so many other sources of rain water pollution, first of all, the CO₂ emissions from cars and other vehicles with combustion engines, including ships and airplanes. And industrial smog, of course, heavy metals in the air that also pass to the rain water, such as aluminium, lead, zinc, copper,  manganese, arsenic, and others and their often toxic compounds. The cattle and other animals and innocent humans were suffering from these toxins instead of causing them. It was capitalist private transport, exploitative mining, and mass production that caused this air pollution. Young comrade Tahir will have more on this in due course when he grows up to be an air quality specialist.” Baby comrade Tahir, comrade Rashida’s son, on hearing his papa voice his name, started to yell happily in his crib.

“Systemic or class-structure-induced pollution you might call it,” nodded comrade Georges. “Worsened by wars. Bombs and drones cause fire, smoke, and dust.”

Polluted rain before the revolution by Maher and Karla

“After the revolution, we strove to eliminate all four of these sources of air pollution!” said Maher. “We returned to small-scale family and cooperative farming, orientated ourselves towards animal and plant welfare, and rigorously enforced organic, natural and biological processes also in the processing of farm products.”

”Where small-scale really means 10 hectares maximum, animal and plant welfare means roomy pastures and stables, solely organic fertilisers, pesticides – herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, etc. –, natural methods of planting, fertilising and weeding, milking, and shearing, slaughter only as an exception and as painlessly as possible, and biological processing, meaning 0% of non-natural ingredients, down from the 5% and upwards still permitted under late capitalism.

“Naturally, we also abolished all combustion engines and all private cars, leaving only public transport, fire engines, ambulances, small excavators, tractors, taxis, small delivery vans no larger than a Peugeot transporter and other functional vehicles – all with purely electrical batteries…”

“And produced with recycled metals in small workshops so as to prevent the toxins from mining and mass production.,” interjected  young comrade Zamir, precocious genius at age 12. “To prevent metal-mongering.”

“We have transitised to block-energy works consisting only of solar-panels, small windmills, small water turbines where possible, and well-insulated and filtered rest rubbish incinerators instead of huge energy works, solar panel or windmill parks,” supplemented comrade Alain. “And we are returning to wells instead of water mains.”

“And the roads are all field roads, except for some cobble-stone and pavement in the village centres!” noted comrade Annie, logistics expert.

“Exactly, and to build in extra safety, with the numbers of vehicles at the discretion of village assemblies. If there is a worsening in air quality and or people notice too many delivery vans on the road, or too many taxis, some of them will have to be scrapped,” added young comrade Renée, organisational science expert and mother of toddler Comet.

“And transport by private delivery van and taxis is free precisely so as to prevent any incentive for their number to grow beyond the bare essentials,” said Bashir.  “After all, there is no need for profit-seeking behaviour since taxi and freight drivers get all their needs satisfied via the economic circuit: food, clothing, all household goods, including furniture, housing itself, everything. There is no need to travel on the greed curve.”

“Still they are trying to wreck our ecology again with their logistic stations!” scoffed Georges.

Biophysics of the brown pulse

Brown Pulse in Uyutnoe, by Busana and Khazarbek, children of Uyutnoe

“Clearly, pollution is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. So, even after their defeat in 2021, they tried to use it so as to force their way back into power,” Maher continued his presentation. “This started already in Year 1, when we third generation young revolutionaries were hardly born yet. They continued to sell and spray the remainders of their synthetic Monsatanic fertilisers and pesticides and founded the first underground or rather clandestine workshops.

“Remember, capitalist pollution consisted firstly of sulfuric and nitric acids, secondly, CO₂,  and lastly of metals, and other toxins. Now we have counter-revolutionary or clandestine capitalist pollution, consisting, to begin with, of pharmaceutical residuals, all the nanobotted, mRNA or spiked anti-Covet and anti-Coflu vaccine serums, including their psychotropic ingredients such as steroids, amphetamines, tranquilisers and neurolepts. They thought this nerve-wrecking, blood-pressure-raising, heart-breaking, inflammatory, cancerous, stroke-inducing and what-not cocktail would either wind up or dumb people down sufficiently to work for or accept at least one of their counter-revolutionary plots and a return to capitalism, phoney bourgeois democracy, if not outright fascist dictatorship.

“In the case of the brown pulse they just combined this toxic waste drop with an old-fashioned electro-magnetic pulse  weapon like they had fired already in Year 8. Yet at that time, it had been several relatively large weapons. This time it was miniature EMR blasts created by minuscule nuclear charges.

“When analysing the residues of the brown pulse earlier this year, we found that nuclear fall-out can be created not by electro-magnetic bombs of the size people imagine all nuclear bombs to be, but also quite small ones that can be fired from a gun, or as it were, from one of Pappberger’s Rheinmetall drones.

“To visit the drone scourge on us, the fascos used three kinds of planes:  pre-revolutionary planes they had still hidden somewhere. With these the drawback was that their combustion engines were much too loud and we typically noticed them. Second, they used post-revolutionary planes they had managed to produce in one of their clandestine workshops. They had electrical engines but were bigger and heavier than our planes, hence easier to spot on the sky and to stop and force to land even with a bronze beam.

“Therefore, their preferred solution was to steal  our small revolutionary planes propelled by wind- and solar power that we use only for rescue and emergency and educational purposes. They would not have raised people’s suspicions unless there had appeared too many of them over the same area and at the same time. The fasco used them to drop nanobots as well as mini-EMR charges.”

“And at the same time, there have been individual attempts on people with EMR-guns. For instance, Louise’s colleague Nadine and other serfs of theirs whom they wanted to punish for alleged treachery.”

“Here near Uyutnoe, we had an EMR -gun attack like this as well, but the intended victim survived,” comrade Ramzan noted. “So did comrade Nadine, but she felt faint for months afterwards. She had just told the spontaneous militia some ways the fascos used to undermine share points. What had your comrade done?”

“He was not our comrade then, he was with the fascos, but he had bragged that he knew about the impending brown pulse, and that they would use planes and drones. That enabled us to get ready and withstand them with bronze beams. He is now with the revolution. He, Salman, lives in one of the neighbouring villages due East from Iasnoe pole if you want to talk to him. In Zumsoi, I think, he lives. There is the school complex there our older children go to.”

Biochemistry of the Blue Pulse

The Day after, by Olivier and Danièle

The fascos probably realised that the combination of vaccine and EMR waste wasn’t as effective in preventing the intranet and bio-wifi from spreading as they had thought. The friendship between humans, animals, robots, and plants, in other words the harp developed in spite of them. So, they came up with the blue pulse.

“The blue pulse is closer to the original EMR pulse weapon and the EMR gun, with the only difference that it is emitted from these pinguin-like devices and does not depend on a nuclear charge although it may be partly radio-active.”

“So, it is really less harmful than the EMR weapons and the brown pulse?” “Less harmful than the EMR pulse bomb of Year 8, but more harmful than the brown pulse this year. The brown pulse was just an attempt by Pappberger and Co. to put the vaccine waste to use to scare people and wear them out, and to stop our bio-wifi network from expanding. Both of these ploys failed. The people weren’t all that scared and tired, we had rallies for a non-hierarchical education one night before one of the brown pulses. And on the other occasions, we managed, like you, to turn them away or even to stun the pilots with red beams or stop the planes in their tracks with bronze stun beams and get them to land before they had dropped their charge.

“With the blue pulse that was harder. We had to find the blue pulse emitters before they had contaminated whole regions. We did, and yet we have to fight the residue now. So, what does this hail or solid rain consist of? Tell us, comrade Maher?”

“Your answer is as good as ours. We have sent you the test kit Karla and I have developed. What did you find?” “Metal compounds mainly. Yet what exactly are they? We are not chemists.”

“Mainly metal-carbon, or organometallic.  Alkaline, transition, basic and semi-metals all form these compounds, including our beloved revolutionary element Revolutionium (abbreviated Rv), located on the periodic table in between Flerovium, a semi-metal, and Moscovium, a non-metal.“

The Illyrian Table of Elements

The Illyrian Table of Elements, Year 19, at the time of Chechen Trilogy, by Maher and Karla

“You are not telling us that the element you discovered, comrade Maher, Revolutionium, can be abused to stop the intranet, harp and, for that matter, haproid?” I asked, feigning despair, just to put everybody in a better mood, in spite of the terrible after-effects of the latest ex-capitalist wrecking attempt.

“Well, it is in between a semi-metal and a non-metal,” answered Maher. “As a metal, it can form organometallic compounds with carbon, and then yes, it can stop or at least slow down the intranet, plus it can ignite and it is toxic.

“Like most of these metal-carbon compounds. They may be solid, but still they ignite very easily. Some can be used as catalysts, even for semiconductors in computers and robots, but this precisely because of their high reactivity. Others are extremely toxic, even radioactive. We do not have to worry whether or not the latter carry the capitalist internet. They don’t.  All you have to know is they make humans sick, and animals and plants as well, and that would definitely put a spanner in the works of intranet, bio-wifi, and harp. Remember when you comrades arrived in Groznyi and nobody was in the streets, and they were all hiding at home? That was because people were afraid of the smell as well as the weakening and debilitating effect some of these compounds have. Luckily, with the help of people like Nezh and Movladi we were able to locate and stop most of their pinguins as well as their fasco crews before their pinguins could properly start emitting them.”  

“D’accord, son,” asked Jean, who was moderating  in Illyria. “We thank you for updating us all on the biochemistry behind it. Do you think this is a promising area of weapon development? Will they continue pestering us in this direction?”

Maher had to think about it for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so, they don’t have so many R&D facilities now that Markus Nah, Jeff Kiss, and even Elon Deer have passed over to the revolution. And they seem to want to change their strategy. Apparently, they want to become like a mafia, lie low for a while, and base their underground business on private policlinics and other medical facilities, night clubs, and sports clubs. Even if the former may produce fake medicines and drugs and the latter weapons, they are bound to be more basic, at least in most workshops, except for very few maybe.”

“And they have been fighting amongst each other. Especially those who remain of the German Neonazis after Nah’s arrest have sparred with the Russian Big Animals, who are much more benign,” supplemented Muhammed who was moderating in Uyutnoe.

“Comrade Zelim,” comrade Jean carried over the discussion to the next topic, “you have been specialising on this issue in preparation for your presentation on re-educating the oligarchs, and comrade Aslan, you have been observing a major scene in their internecine struggle from the bio-thicket. Tell us more!”

6) Bio-Thicket

Hiding in the Bio-Thicket, by Olivier and Danièle

Struggle of the oligarchs

“Indeed, our comrades Aslan, Zamira, and Marianne were able to observe the latest stage in the epic battle between Western and Eastern oligarchs from the bio-thicket,” said comrade Bulat, who was now moderating in Uyutnoe. “Over to you, comrades Aslan, Zamira, and Marianne.”

“Well,” I began. “There are not that many Western oligarchs left at the moment, and they are of two types. One is old-fashioned pharmaceutical moguls  like Markus Nah’s successors at TechnotBio, Mr. Falk and Ms. Tür, pronounced Tyur I think. According to the latest bio-chatter, they are an item and they have joined Arnim Pappberger, weapon producer, Lars Kriegsbeil and Boris Pistazius, crypto-bankers, and Fritz le Merc, would-be chancellor in a reborn bourgeois or fasco state in their latest sabotage attempt. The Boches have no French supporters at the moment, only British, Ricky Handsome, also into planes and weaponry, Irish, Mick McLeary, who used to do planes, but who these days is more interested in vaccines and nanorobotics, and Americans. Yet the latter are of a secondary character, Jack Brower, Chris Wray, Donald Trumpel and Joe Triden. The successors to the big oligarchs like Sundar Pinchai to Larry Note, Andy Jassy to Jeff Bezosnik and Jeff Kiss, and Satya Mersoon to Bill Doors consider it beneath them to work with the likes of Arnim Pappberger and Fritz le Merc, so they have sent swamp creatures.

The above-mentioned were walking a stretch through the woods quite close to Uyutnoe to meet with the twelve big Russian animals Anatoly Aistov, Avgustin Belkov, Vladimir Gusev, Sergei Kozlov, Valentin Kotov, Evgeni Lysov, Grigory Medvedev, Lavrenty Oleinyi, Matvei Rybakov, Yegor Slonek, Leonid Volkov, and Piotr Zhuravlev at one of their secret hide-outs.

Just in parentheses, some more on the  ‘Big Animals’. Anatoly Aistov (Mr. Stork)  and  Vladimir Gusev (Mr. Goose) both produce processed food. Nothing against that, but they have been material-checked already several times for using synthetic Monsatan fertilisers and insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides, as well as chemical additives or at least unhealthy levels of sugar, salt, and fat. Then there are  Sergei Kozlov (Mr. Goat) and Valentin Kotov (Mr. Katz)….”

“Kotov, that wouldn’t be our neighbour Kotov from Novgornyi who lives in the European Community style blue-glass house?” asked Maksim’s mother Tanya.

“We don’t know, the Big  Animals have been very elusive so far, but he well might be. Does your Kotov produce phones?

Anyway, Kozlov and Kotov are rumoured to be producing reactionary smart phones under license from World Vu, Blue Origin, and X, still using remnants of the internet, spewing fasco propaganda, and the phones – at least some of them – are weaponised, but they deny that.

They have a competitor, Gospodin Leonid Volkov (Mr. Wolf) who invented a Russian brand of smart phone and laptop, but no less dangerous than their Western ones.

Then there are Avgustin Belkov (Mr. Squirrel) and Evgeni  Lysov (Mr. Fox) – reactionary producers of pharmaceutical medicine, including nanobotted vaccines, using spike proteins and synthetic mRNA and other toxic or addictive by-products –, Grigory Medvedev, also nick-named Belyi Medved’ (Mr. Bear or Polar Bear), Lavrenty Oleinyi (Mr. Reindeer), sometimes confused with Elon Deer, and  Matvei Rybakov (Mr. Fisher) – all three of them producers of ships, boats, ice breakers, and maybe even planes, even solar- and wind-driven revolutionary ones, as well as means of production such as robotised conveyor belts,  Yegor Slonek (Mr. Elephant or Mammoth) – steel, and Piotr Zhuravlev (Mr. Crane, sometimes also nicknamed Mr. Eagle) – oil and gas.

We heard their visitors approach, speaking  loudly in German and English. That seemed odd here in the foothills of the Caucasus. So, we hid in the bio-thicket and could not believe whom we saw coming. It seemed that our twelve remaining Western conspirators were slated to meet with the Big Animals. Yet in the last minute, the latter must have decided the meeting was beneath their dignity and sent them a gang of kidnappers instead.

Yes, and when the kidnappers confronted them, they started firing beams at each other as if they had not been the closest of associates until very recently. It was actually ‘Animal lives matter. Plant lives triumph’ versus ‘Human lives matter’ and other such ideological issues rather than disputes over money, or rather crypto, token, etc. that had driven them apart. That is why we were quite surprised that the Big Animals had apparently sent a band of thugs to take their rivals out or at least capture them and hold them somewhere safe where they could do no more harm. Well, in the beginning, when they were not fighting mano-mano but using beams, the Western Big Animals, let’s call them that for lack of a better term, had a chance. Especially, Chris Wray, Jack Brower’s partner, was good at throwing beams, so was he himself.

“Yet then, when the two of them, and also Donald Trumpel and Joe Triden, as well as Kriegsbeil and Falk had stunned a few of them, and urged the others to run away, they did not want to, especially Arnim Pappberger, Boris Pistazius, and Fritz le Merc. These three as a matter of fact launched themselves in  pursuit of the apparently retreating animals, while McLeary, Handsome, Falk and Tür used the lucky moment to enter the bio-thicket and get lost. More on the role of the plants in all of this later on.

“Pistazius, Pappberger, and Fritz le Merc were clearly overestimating their forces. The soldiers of the Big Animals were able to wrestle them down and tie them up without even having to use stun beams. They assumed that Brower and the others would run away and sent only three men after them to stun them and bring them down. Yet to their big surprise, the five of them turned around and fought. Meanwhile, the four who had fled, Handsome, Mc Leary, Falk and Tür and who had probably been alerted of the better fortunes of their fellows by some bio-chatting animals and plants, came back with some spontaneous militia from a neighbouring village. Among them by the way was comrade Salman, victim of a EMR-biochemical gun attack whom we told you about. They were already about to arrest the three losers when the other nine soldiers of the Big Animals broke through the thicket and stunned the nine enemies as well as, let it be said to their shame, the spontaneous militia brigade of seven. Later when they are rehabilitating, we shall have to ask them why the Big Animals arrogantly ignored decisions by the village assembly who approved the militia mission by a quorum of at least twenty percent.

“I remember thinking that they had probably left the three who were already prisoners, Pappberger, Fritz le Merc, and Pistazius somewhere with comrades of theirs that had been close by enough to help out.”

Involving the Thicket

“It turned out that they did not even have any comrades guarding the three villains. They had simply left them tied up on a small clearing surrounded by deep bio-thicket. The three of them, fat and out of shape, would not have been able to get up, let alone claw their way through the thorny thicket. They had made a fatal error agreeing to meet the Russians in a remote place like this with plants and animals against them. In fact, Pistazius and Fritz le Merc had been able to crawl a few metres, but immediately a circle of angry birds had formed around them, vipers were poising themselves as if to say, ‘Not a step further’ and the smaller mammals were poking fun at them. “Look at the three fatties up to committing an ecocide. We should send them packing!”

So, the nine soldiers of the Big Animals were now surrounding the twelve Western Big Animals as well as the spontaneous militiamen, all of them stunned. We, meaning Zamira, Marianne and I were still hidden in the bio-thicket observing it all. Us, by the way, the birds and the vipers left quite alone. Nobody suspected we were there. From the different attitude, the thicket and its inhabitants had exhibited towards Falk, Tür, Mc Leary and Handsome and us on the one hand, and Pappberger, Merz and Pistorius on the other, you can see that the thicket is quite discriminating and at times clearly taking sides, you could call it a revolutionary bio-thicket, and also a humane and just one.

“Now a rustling swelled up, not on our side, but on the other side of the clearing, and about five of the Big Animal soldiers went to see what it was. The other four were somehow looking the other way. Now again Falk and Tür, and this time Brower and Wray opened their eyes, blinked, and after only a moment of looking at each other, got up and ran as best as their ties would permit into the thicket. The spontaneous militiamen, and lastly Trumpel and Triden followed.

The Big Animals were going to burden themselves only with the ex-oligarchs and their political stooges whom they really needed to see, namely Armin Pappberger, Ricky Handsome, McLeary, Fritz le Merc, Lars Kriegsbeil, and Boris Pistazius. The rustling turned out to have been the thicket’s announcement of the camo electro-transporter that took the eighteen of them away. They had a hard time even getting everybody in. The six prisoners had to sit in the middle, with two rows of Big Animal soldiers on either side, and three further soldiers in the driver cabin.

And wait, the bio-thicket did even more. From the moment the transporter left until about twelve hours later when the Big  Animals had released their prey, we got a continuous bio-audio, interspersed with some videos, of what happened. Here is its first part…”

And again the other comrades in Uyutnoe, Illyria, Saint-Denis, Moscow, Novgornyi and others interested could sense a virtual Aurora browser opening in their brains and could follow the events as they unfolded.

The Big Animals, by Maksim and Zhenya

“Send them packing!”

“During the ride through the forest already, the soldiers questioned the six prisoners, in a seemingly innocuous and casual way, but all the important facts about their greed for profit, their disdain of the people, and their aggressive intentions and hatred of Russia came out clearly.

“So, why did you try to organise ecocide in Russia. One after the other. You should all have a chance to explain yourselves…”

“We did not organise ecocide, we were here to talk trade…,” replied Handsome.

“We are Human lives matter, we are trying to defend the human race against animals and wilderness taking over again,” was McLeary’s evasive answer.

“Our ecological reconstruction may take a long time,” Pistazius feigned revolutionary beliefs. “We need the help of the Russian people.”

“The revolution risks lapsing into anarchy, at least in the German lands,” Fritz le Merc tried for a more elaborate answer. “Your bosses, the Big Animals, eh, Gospodins Aistov, Belkov, Gusev, Kozlov, Kotov, Lysov, Medvedev, Oleinyi, Rybakov, Slonek, Volkov, and Zhuravlev must have noticed that. I mean, in the German lands, they are holding assemblies with animals, plants, and robots already, and now they are thinking about inviting in dinosaurs from the past as well. We reasonable people the whole world over need to collaborate.”

“What’s wrong with haproid assemblies?” asked one of the Big Animal soldiers, and the six greed-mongers no longer knew what to say.

Lars Kriegsbeil added quickly, “We might be able to lend you money, eh, crypto, eh, token.”

“Your bosses have left us in the lurch,” moaned Pappberger. “And the dumb sheeple are ensnared by the revolutionary pipedreams.”

“What revolutionary pipedreams?” asked another soldier.

“All of them,” answered Kriegsbeil. “No more vehicles, not even electrical, travel by beam, no more buildings over five floors high as well as dust-free deconstruction of the highrises by bacteria, moss and algae, and now dancing cattle and dinosaurs. No more pharmaceutical medicine, I was talking to an expert the other day,” he meant Falk, “He said that was insane. Without proper vaccinations we would have one epidemic after the other, the people would be collapsing from strokes and heart attacks in the open street, and we would have the cancer sufferers yelling from pain all night. They promise  to seat people, animals, plants, robots, and dinos all at the same table, where not even we humans get along with each other half of the time. They have abolished the military, police, and weapons, and look at the chaos we have all over the world with thieves going free because the spontaneous militia don’t get the quorum from the village assembly and don’t have the arms to apprehend the villains…”

“That’s buffaloshit, we don’t have all that many thieves any more, after all people get all they want for free: food, clothes, even their home, furniture, household items, books, toys, useful as well as entertaining robots…,” said yet another Big Animal soldier.

“The people need leaders to guide them, that is obvious,” said Pistazius. “And our friend Fritz Merz is the right one, at least for the German lands. He used to be good friends with Vladimir Neputin and Nikolai Morbidov. What was your Chechen leader called?”

“Ramzan Kadyrov.”

“Yah, probably with Ramzan Kadyrov as well. That way we won’t need war…”

“Why would we need war?” asked a fourth Big Animal soldier, acting puzzled.

“Well, because Germany and Russia are archenemies,” replied Merz, to general consternation among the Big Animal soldiers.

“But there is no more Russia and Germany,” one of them finally ventured an argument. “There are just the Russian lands and the German lands, consisting of hundreds of thousands of independent villages or agglo quarters with 600 inhabitants at most, who take independent decisions in their assemblies, and don’t have to listen to any central government in Moscow or Berlin any longer. Of course, they may take notice of the votes of other village assemblies or local, regional, continental and even global referendums. We Russians and also the Chechens often take part in both European and Asian referendums, just for fun. I mean they are only binding for a while. When new problems come along or new research on how to solve them, the whole discussion process starts again at the neighbourhood and village assemblies and their forum apps. And now, Gospodin Pappberger, why don’t we ask you a question: why do you produce weapons and why do you want our bosses to produce weapons or at least raw materials, energy, and equipment, conveyor belts and so on for their production?”

“Let me ask you in return,” said Pappberger, licking his lips because he felt the discussion was going his way. “Do you believe human nature is good or bad?”

“Good,” said about four, meaning a third of the Big Animal soldiers.

“Mostly good,” said another four.

“Mixed, about half good, half bad,” said the last four. “And what does it have to do with Russia and Germany being archenemies?”

“Well, if human nature is not all good, then we need weapons to defend ourselves against the evil ones,” said Pappberger, getting red.

“But violent crime, like theft has decreased phenomenally over  the last nineteen years. After all, people get almost everything for free, the rest can be shared or bartered, so why steal and kill?”

“Not everything is available for free everywhere,” moaned Kriegsbeil.

“Then you can order it intraline,” said one of the soldiers. “I remember, the other day, my boss had ordered cognac from the French lands. It came, it was for free, because we have promised to deliver some boats there, and we all got a bottle, not only the security detail, but also the wharf workers.

“Then if everything is for free, peaceful, democratic and generally nice, why do you work for the ex-oligarchs and why do they even bother resisting the revolution?” asked Kriegsbeil sarcastically.

“We don’t know,” said one of the soldiers. “Honestly, I am planning to get out. But I am staying on to make sure you Germans and other foreigners don’t come back to rule over us like you tried so many times in history.”

“I think that is a big concern of our bosses, all twelve of them,” agreed another. “Abolishing the military and just forming spontaneous militia brigades only when there is an emergency and a quorum of villagers approves them, has had the advantage of making everybody fitter. These days even villagers who might not have had any exposure to police work can use stun beams and red shields, arrest and secure a suspect, do investigations and so on. But that is still a far cry from being able to defend the motherland especially if you guys really produced lots of nasty weapons, and if the counter-revolution won in your regions and you decided to invade us.”

“You have seen it with the pulse weapon in Year 8, and the brown and the blue pulses this year. Ladno, they tried this the whole world over, also the Zamboni cataclysm, meaning the melting of the polar caps a few years ago, and the various fake epidemics, Covet, Coflu, Lep-AL. What if there was a restauration in Western Europe and Russian haters like you, Gospodin Merz, got into power again? We might get an apocalyptic world war before we Russians even realised that the revolution was in trouble!”

Lars Kriegsbeil shook his head. “Then why not work within the framework of the revolution, assemblies, referendums and so on. I believe your bosses are also half good-half bad like some of you said. They may be good Russian patriots, but they also like their money, crypto, tokens, luxury possessions…”

“Well, you would have to discuss that with them, wouldn’t you? Anyway, we are almost there. They are expecting you. Gospodins Henri Uber, Viesturs Volt, Fernando Deliverando,  Louis Deshalles, and Andy Jassy will participate intraline. You can discuss this question as well as your futures with them we well. I think they are bigger fish than you are.”

***

There is also a brief tape of how the six escapees, Jack, Chris, Donald, Joe, Adele and Frank found refuge with a farmer in the area who sent us this bio-video-record of his conversation with them.

“How come you cleared the bio-thicket so well?”

“Oh, we are old forest hands,” said Donald.

“We can talk to the animals and plants,” said Jack.

“Are you ex-military?” “Something like that,” said Joe curtly, trying to prevent his associates from blabbing out more.

“We are bio-chemists, pharmacologists and we do lots of experiments with animals and plants,” said Adele Tür.

“Oh, I thought such experiments were forbidden in the revolution by the village assemblies?” asked the farmer, getting suspicious.

“Yes, but we do them gently and they are for the development of natural medicines,” explained Falk.

“Your Russian is not native, and you seem to have all different accents,” the farmer probed further. “Donald, Joe, Jack, and I are from North America,” said Chris. “And Adele and Frank are from the Germanic lands. We are revolutionary barter correspondents.” Revolutionary barter correspondents were sent by enterprise, organisational, and sometimes whole village assemblies to explore sharing and barter opportunities in far-away places. Especially for young trainees, senior experts, and recent migrants, this was a way to be useful if you could not do heavy physical work.

“And you, your Russian is excellent. Are you Chechen?” Chris seemed to like this fellow, Jack though a bit disgruntled. She was almost flirting with him. “No, Ingush, but I am born in this village. My name is Ibrahim, I am helper of the prophet. Many of us still go to Moscow and other big agglos all over the Russian lands to study. That is why we all speak good Russian. After all, in the revolution, good education is no longer reserved to the elite. By the way, have you head of these ex-oligarchs they found down the road a few hours ago? One English, one Irish, and four Germanics  it appears. Their Russian is a lot worse than yours. We think they may be behind the recent blue pulse.  So, when they come back from their public conference with the Big Animals, our village assembly will hopefully take them into custody.”

7) The Corruption Gauge

The Uberytes, by Emmanuel and Laurence

“Just to explain to you what happens in the course of this intraline transmission,“ Zelim introduced the following bio-audio and video. “A friendly takeover by the revolutionary workers who turned what was supposed to be a strategy meeting between the North American Ubermenschen or Uberytes, German Neonazis, their British and Irish colleagues, and Russian Big Animal oligarchs into a preliminary questioning of all four groups preparing their later repentance and rehabilitation.”

Intraline with the Uberytes

“You know me, call me Henri, and these, from left to right, are my friends and colleagues Viesturs Volt, Fernando  Deliverando, Louis Deshalles, and Andy Jassy – he has Jeff Kiss slash Bezosnik pulling his strings, but Jeff is alright as well . He is a better advisor than Hans Liedel, Ernst Alldie, Dieter Weiß, and the other logistics and retail gurus you Germans might have. And more peace-minded.

“Now our idea is, and I just reiterate here what I have said many times at previous meetings and phone conferences – it just seems to fall on deaf ears, that we adherents of the Cause of Free Markets, Private Property, Presidential and or Parliamentary Democracy writ large, have suffered so much adversity lately that we have to do some rethinking.”

“Adversity of our own making,” interjected Fritz Merz, and Henri Uber looked him up and down as if he was a giant slug. “I mean, we have fought constantly instead of cooperating!” Fritz le Merc continued, more wary already.

“I am not so sure about that,” Uber continued. “We can do the soul-searching and continue the blame-game on another occasion. As I said, we have urged everybody at previous events to get out of weapons, get out of all but the most essential pharmaceuticals, steer clear of drugs, and get into more popular ventures such as private policlinics, sports clubs, and night clubs.  In the light of this new tactic, which may even turn into a long-term strategy, what is this trip of yours to Russia meant to accomplish? And what about the blue pulse? Do you really believe you can stop the spread of the intranet and bio-wifi as well as the ‘Animal lives matter. Plant lives triumph’ movement?”

“We meant to intensify our cooperation with the Big Animals,” muttered Pistazius.

“To accomplish what precisely? Get steel for Pappberger’s planes and drones that he wants to attack the Russian lands with?” Andy Jassy asked sharply.

“The intranet, bio-wifi and the movement towards harp assembly threatens to create too much random chatter and white noise,” mumbled Lars Kriegsbeil. “Craig Larman and other communication and work specialists have argued this way as well. It will wreck people’s nerves or put them to sleep instead of galvanising them!”

“Well, it may calm them down!” said Viesturs. “And then our night clubs, sport clubs, and policlinics and their products will wake them up the gentle way.”

“’Animal lives matter. Plant lives triumph’ is pure baloney,” slurred Pappberger. “What is it supposed to entail? Affirmative action for cows? Dictatorship of the weeds?”

***

“No, of course not!” yelled Danièle, drowning out the bio-feed for a moment. “It just means we need to give plants a chance so that we and our animals may feed on them and yet ensure their survival. I mean we want to stop desertification and grow back the forests, don’t we?”

“Of course, wild rose, that’s not a flaming ecologist, that’s a  Neonazi warmonger talking,” said her boy-friend, Olivier, and put his arm around her and his hand over her mouth. “Let him get off. He does not know what he is talking about.”

***

“We want ‘Human lives matter’!” Pappberger had meanwhile continued on the bio-audio.

“And by disrupting their intranet and bio-wifi you want to convince them of Human lives matter, or what for you basically is the superiority of humans?” asked Fernando Deliverando. “It will have the opposite effect. It will make them admire the dinos, other animals, and plants that helped them overcome the pulses, the earlier brown pulse and now the blue pulse as well. It will increase the chances of harp or haproid getting implemented by many more village, workplace, and neighbourhood assemblies and not the opposite.”

“We wonder, Henri, why you are so eager to eliminate plane production?” asked Ricky Handsome. “People like planes. It might even help us restore some credit with them. Or is it that your model of logistics stations is based on the premise of a dense network rather than long hauls? What if we don’t manage to build up and maintain such a dense network? Maybe the plane idea will prove superior?”

“And I also wonder why you want to get out of pharmaceuticals as you put it and steer clear of drugs? People still demand pharmaceutical drugs, some even take our nanobotted mRNA or spiked vaccines every season. And how does this voluntary restraint go with the idea of pushing private policlinics?” Mick McLeary inquired with contrived humility. You could feel that he and Handsome were fuming. Why were they allowing the Uberytes to dress them down together with the Neonazis?

“I have a short answer to that. The revolutionaries will sooner or later come up with a fully natural medicine,” explained Louis Deshalles. “They will convince people with that and run a full-scale attack against the remnants of pharmaceutical medicine. So Henri and I agree that it is best to get out of them early.”

“As for the planes, they are popular, of course, but precisely the small wind-and-solar-propelled ones that only do rescue and emergency and educational flights,” said Viesturs. “People admire the ecological and social justice principles behind these. Their love does no longer extend or maybe never extended to the stinking big steel and aluminium albatrosses of the past.”

“Now I wonder why we are being lectured here by you and haven’t heard a single word from the Big Animals yet.” Handsome was still not quite satisfied, for understandable reasons. “We came here to discuss things with our Russian colleagues, some of whom also produce planes, weapons, pharmaceutical and other drugs. Yet for some reason, the original meeting point could not be upheld, and we have been captured and dragged here. And now here we don’t find anything but a big screen with you Uberytes on it. Anatoly, Avgustin,  Vladimir, Sergei, Valentin, Evgeni, Grigory, Lavrenty, Matvei, Yegor, Leonid, and Piotr, where are you, and why can’t we  discuss things?”

“I think before we go on, you’d best introduce yourselves,” snarled Vlad Gusev, about to hand over the moderation to Valentin Kotov.

“Who? The Uberytes, us, or everybody?” asked McLeary. “All of us, I suppose,” yawned Kotov, who had now taken over as moderator. “And tell us why you do things! Not only to make money, because we all want that, yet it is going to get much harder, so it had best not be your only motivation.”

“Starting with myself,” said the next Big Animal, “I am Evgeni Lysov, I make medicine, mostly synthetic for the time being, although natural it would be fine by me. In fact, natural medicine has been a life-long interest of mine. Gospodin Uber, on to you.”

“I am Henri Uber, and I have come up with a new model of logistics, a dense network of stations and a whole army of dedicated self-employed who will take things here and there. Same as before the revolution, only under the tundra capitalist conditions that we are now facing.”

“I am Mick McLeary, I used to own an airline, Dirtair, the name in order to move people to think more ecologically and pay more, get it? Now I do mainly nanobots, especially nanobots for medicine, hence I would not be adverse to continuing with the production of synthetic medicines, as long as people demand them, of course.”

“I am Grigory Medvedev, I am a shipwright, and people sometimes also call me the Polar Bear, because one of my specialities is building solar-battery-powered icebreakers. Lately, I have also built revolutionary airplanes, entirely to revolutionary specifications, meaning propelled by wind turbines with batteries powered by light-weight solar panels as a support during take-off and landing. And yes, they are small and are only being used for R&E and educational missions. In other words, I am only here as a Russian patriot, not as a greedy oligarch out for money.”

***

“Wait a moment, comrade, when you say, you are a shipwright,  you mean that you are building ships and planes with your own hands?” I asked, launching the friendly takeover, pretending to be a Big Animal soldier intraline. “Yes,” the Polar Bear answered. “I am in a brigade, although I work only seniors’ part-time. After all, I am 67 already.”

“And the foreman in your brigade rotates every day? Your workplace enterprise meets at least once every quarter and takes all strategic decisions? And for the rest of it, there are no permanent managers and management institutions? If there are, membership in any accounting and management brigades, if the enterprise has got them, rotates at least on a monthly basis as well? And your workshop, if it is only one – usually, you oligarchs call several enterprises their own –, participates in the economic circuit, does it? This would mean you give all your ships and planes for free to village assemblies, harbour or shipping organisations that need them. Workers in your workshop including yourself get everything they need – food, clothes, toys, books, robots and other digital devices, household items, furniture, your home, and so on –, for free? And your workshop also gets all its equipment and inputs for free, does it? If this is so, then you are a revolutionary enterprise, no problem.”

“Yes, you can come visit,” the Polar Bear nodded eagerly. “Everything is true and aboveboard.”

“Then how come you are reputed to have accumulated a fortune of two trillion crypto-Rubles since the revolution?”

Grigory, the Polar Bear, got red in the face but was quick to swear to his innocence. “All lies, probably from Western Russian-haters and scoundrels here in  the Russian lands whom they managed to convince to work with them.”

“Well, ladno, if your fellow workers confirm that you work and live just like any of them, no problem. What about you, Mr. Deliverando?”

“I belong to a family that ran the Deliverando logistics enterprise in Italy and all over Europe before the revolution. After the revolution, we ex-capitalists and oligarchs did not have that easy a time. We just weren’t like everybody else. So, when Henri and Jeff came up with the idea of the logistics stations, I was glad to join. Although our stations are not self-managed, we are not exploiters either. The 15 hours socially necessary labour time stipulated by the village assemblies is sufficient to get a salary in token and help with building a personal house or renovating an apartment in a house that has been deconstructed-reconstructed.”

“It is rumoured that you have at least one sumptuous villa on the Italian riviera, several limousines, a yacht, and a private airplane…”

“All operated on battery and solar and wind power where applicable…”

“Well, yeah,” I set up a contrived smile. “But that is not the only criterion for this kind of property to be o.k. in the revolution. Why do you need, let me check, 30 rooms in your villa? Let’s hope it is your only one! How many partners and children do you have? Why do you need several limousines? After all, you can only drive in one at a time.”

“They are delivery vans.”

“A village assembly usually does not approve more than  one delivery vehicle per workshop and, let me show you a picture, do these slick sledges really look like delivery vans? And what about your yacht?”

“I am a fisherman.” “But your boat is not even registered with the village assembly. And are you also an R&E pilot?”

“Ehm!” Deliverando was now clearly unmasked. I left him to his remorse and asked the next felon.

“I am Yegor Slonek, or rather that is my nickname, my real family name is,” and he muttered something unintelligible. “My family has always made steel, and it was natural for me to continue as a steelworker after the revolution. However, the workshops in our chain are all self-managed, I am a normal worker in our management brigade, I rotate like everybody else. Like Grigory, I am a bit too old to work full shifts in a blast furnace,  I don’t own any fancy houses, vehicles, let alone yachts or airplanes…”

Talking to the Big Animals

Talking to the Big Animals, by Maksim and Zhenya

“Yet your fortune is estimated at 5.6 trillion crypto-Rubles. Why does Severstal sell steel against crypto and tokens although virtually all village assemblies in the Russian lands have outlawed them and several all-European and all-Asian referendums have done so as well? Residents of the Russian lands may vote in both continental referendums as you know.”

Slonek opened his mouth, but only managed to garble a response. He was clearly contrite already.

“While you ponder whether you should not rather give up and accept a course of rehabilitation, let me ask one of your customers about you. Monsieur Pappberger, do you admit having received Russian steel from Gospodin Slonek’s clandestine blast furnaces and against crypto?”

“My, … ehm,” Slonek now brought out, “…our workshops are fully self-managed, as I have already told you, “ he stammered. “I stand by my fellow Russian workers.”

“I remember negotiating with Gospodin Slonek both for long-term contracts as well as one-time delivery contracts of various cuts of steels in the millions of tons, either against crypto-Euro, or sometimes, if the Euro was too weak, crypto-Dollars,” said Pappberger.

“And your enterprise Rheinmetall worked these into guns, drones, planes and other weapons you intended for use in the Middle East, Ukraine, and potentially even against Russia, isn’t that right?”

“Well, I fear that reborn German and Russian nations might at one point again find themselves at loggerheads.”

“So, if you sold steel to an admitted German chauvinist and probably Nazi like that, Gospodin Slonek, how can you say that you stand by the side of the Russian workers?”

“I only realised what a swine he was when the fascos tried to exterminate all Siberian animals earlier this year,” Slonek murmured. “Thank God, the ghosts of Batagay helped us.”

“You, comrade Zhuravlev, are not much better. Not only did you barter and trade with the enemy on a crypto or token basis, but you sold oil and gas. Don’t you know that they are no longer to be used as energy sources and only with utmost caution and with ample material checks as an input for chemical industry, for instance, approved plastic formulae, not pharmaceutical medicine, of course?”

Zhuravlev shrugged. “By inertia, I suppose. I respect the ecological aims of the revolution, block energy works, small-scale artisanship, and return to nature. For me as a Russian patriot, it also means a return to the Russian soul.”

“And you, comrade Oleinyi, is it not true that you have exchanged plane and drone blueprints with Rheinmetall and produced some for them as a subcontractor?” Oleinyi got fidgety. “Yes, but we, meaning my workshops, I mean, the various workshops I worked in, did this in order to gain knowledge of their technology to prevent their use against the Russian motherland.” “As long as you did not give any secrets away in exchange and did not violate workers’ rights!”

“You, Louis Deshalles, have repeatedly voiced your unwillingness to work with German ex-oligarchs because they were Nazis. When did you realise that?” asked Zelim.

 “They are not good business men,” replied Deshalles. “I had to buy what remained of the private divisions of the German post-office, because of my name, you see: DHL … Deshalles. And, yes, the attempt at doing away with the animals was also an eye-opener. Luckily, Patrice Caine and Hervé Dammann cancelled French and with that West European participation in the last minute.”

“Mick and I had also cancelled,” Handsome threw in and nodded to himself. “That was good!”

“And you, Viesturs Volt? When did you decide to quit the Neonazis and join the Americans, so to say?” “Already earlier, when they threw beams at cowbot shepherds just to enable them, meaning some fascos, including Mr. Pappberger, I think, to escape from pursuing militia by helicopter. They had prevented Kaya Callous from defecting from the Cause and arrested and tortured her lover, comrade Arvo, who was with the revolution to begin with.”

“Our young comrade Alexandra has written her university entry project on this crime and the whole conundrum  of counter-revolutionary sabotage in the Baltics,” I said. “It is in the minutes entitled ‘Remarks of a Sceptic’, ‘Léon’s Permanent Revolution’, and ‘ Bishop Adalbert at the Pruzzens.’”

“And ‘Son of a counter-revolutionary’,” added Alexandra, who did not want her boy-friend’s participation in her research and his exploits to be forgotten.

“That’s right,” said Viesturs Volt. “I wonder if we made these logistics stations self-managed and fully integrated them into the economic circuit, would they be o.k. then?”

“Yes,” Zelim answered. “Yet you need not do that. The revolutionary workers will revolt and take things back into their hands on their own. All you need to do is resign from any remaining executive positions you hold. All positions are ephemeral in the revolution anyway, brigadier of the day, this week’s chairman of the neighbourhood assembly, this hour’s moderator at the workplace, organisational, or village assembly.”

“We’ll repent, ladno,” said Belkov, “if that is all we will have to do to return to the revolution!”

“Not quite!” I said. “Andy Jassy, you, for instance, are rumoured to have a villa of 10000 square feet.”

“But I got rid of my second house!” Jassy interjected nervously. 

“Still, what do you need such a big house for?”

“I followed Jeff Kiss and Jeff Bezosnik as head of Amazon, but I already worked with Amazon before and I had to buy that house. You may remember, those of you who were adults or young adults already before the revolution that Amazon’s annual net income  (60 billion Dollar) was larger than the annual expenditures of the Russian state budget (41 billion Dollar). You can imagine that we had a lot of representation to do. We were almost like a small kingdom.”

“But you still have the house?” “Yes, I kept it as the one home you are allowed to live in. Yet I share it now with about 30, well maybe 20 other families.” Jassy became embarrassed and scratched his head. “Don’t worry. It is no longer a palace, and we share it. I join myself to Viesturs’ question, what if we somehow made our logistics stations legitimate again?”

“What then about your clandestine private policlinics prescribing pharmaceutical medicines, night clubs peddling drugs, and sports clubs advertising weapons?” “You know about that, too? Well, that is an ongoing strategic debate in our midst. I may get back to you.  I have another appointment now, with my dentist.” Whereupon he nervously and quickly signed off his bio-feed.

“One more who is ready to crack,” Jean bio-whispered with relief. “He is like Jacques Henriot, Marcel Hunziger, Markus Nah, Jeff Kiss, Elon Deer, all of them, before they came over. All of them exhibit the same mixture of spite and self-disdain. You will have a lot to do liberating all these oligarchs, Zelim.”

Zelim grinned and answered the same way, by a delta wave. “Looking forward to it, comrade Jean. And I am sure you will assist me with all your experience.”

“Avgustin is right,” said Aistov.  “If that is all we have to do, resign from any fake position and give up excess space and other excess riches, I am up to it.”

“Well,” I said. “Unfortunately, that’s not all. As comrade Zelim will soon explain, you’ll have to undergo a full course of rehabilitation. And your former enterprises will get monitored, so that you’ll have no chance of reappropriating them.”

The Corruption Gauge

“Listen, what I have come up with,” Bashir was stirring on his seat with excitement. “The corruption gauge. It will be able to measure the degree of revolution, or conversely corruption in the enterprises of the Big Animals, half red, half brown, and that they now  seem to want to generalise over the whole world. It takes the well-known indicators, are decisions taken in the brigades and in the workplace assembly, does the enterprise take part in the economic circuit, with three subpoints, does it get its inputs and equipment for free, does it hand over its production free, and do its workers get their basic goods – food, clothes, their home, their furniture, household goods, toys, books, robots etc. – free, and third does the enterprise take part in revolutionary barter or does it trade its production against crypto, token, vouchers, old money, or some such. If the answer is yes to all these three main questions and to the three sub-questions under point 2, we are having to do with a full-blown revolutionary enterprise. If instead we get, the enterprise has bosses, the brigadier never changes, the workplace assembly never meets, the workers get paid in crypto, token, or some such, they are obliged to buy other underground products with this money, the enterprise has to buy or lease its inputs and equipment and sell its products on the dark web or at any remaining shadow corners at markets and share points, and it does not engage in revolutionary barter deals, but trades in crypto, then we are having to do with a fully corrupt firm. There may be intermediate situations of course, where the enterprise is not self-managed, for instance, but still manages to somehow participate in the economic circuit. With this gauge, we may be able to prevent their next big wave of sabotage, the mafiaisation or mafiafication – I don’t know how to call it –, of our revolutionary economy and the undermining of self-management and the trefoil.”

“That’s great, Bashir!” I said. “I think with this invention you have earned yourself a visit here during your Christmas holidays. What do you think, comrades?”

8)   Haproid assemblies

Haproid assembly in Uyutnoe, by Busana and Khazarbek, children of Uyutnoe

In  Uyutnoe

My papa Abukhan, as well Ramzan, Bulat,  Deki, Temirbek, Islambek, Tamerlan, their fourteen wives, including Bukhya. Nazha, and Dagmara, as well as my mamon, Roza, already had conducted one harp and one haproid assembly. The main issue always was to ensure equal participation and respect for all humans, animals, robots, and plants. Integrating dinosaurs wouldn’t be that much more difficult if it weren’t for the giant size of some of them. The Volgotitans were, in fact, similar to huge trees except that they could move, Stego-, Amuro- und Aralosaurusses were like humungous cows under armour. Kileskuses were like oversized eagles maybe or condors.

Once the assembly was more or less constituted with everybody in hearing distance or intraline, my papa, Abukhan, chosen by lot to be the first moderator, introduced some special guests. “We did not think that they would join us already today – comrade Pierre le Gars will arrive from Georgia tomorrow only, or maybe the day after tomorrow –, but here they are already, comrades Jérôme, expert on digital terrorism, and that includes, in the wider sense, the blue pulse, comrade Camille, witness and, you could say, expert on rehabilitating oligarchs, and comrade Hisham, path-breaking revolutionary economist, especially with his thesis on revolutionary barter…”

The humans clapped, the birds chirped, the dinos bellowed, the cattle and the horses – we had a few young ones, just born –,  mooed, whinnied, and bleated, and the chicken cackled.

Then an exuberant young voice sounded from the background: “Don’t forget about us!” “…I meant to get to that but you, comrades, started to cheer a bit too early. Having gotten on the road several weeks earlier than the beginning of the Christmas holidays as we had planned, young comrades Bashir and Zelim-Philippe have also arrived already to help us with de-briefing the oligarchs and beginning their rehabilitation. We quickly have to get you intraline, so that your pregnant fiancées, comrades Sevim and Julie, as well as your mothers, comrades Rim and Inès can see you live. They probably miss you at home.

Hopefully, the light from the fireplace would not be too bright, so as to mask the fact that he did not look at all like the son of a Chechen peasant, Zelim-Philippe prayed. Yet then Zelim had already wrapped him with his arms. “Proud to have you with us, son. This is your home, too.”

“Now that everyone is settled, let us first ask our comrades, the plants and animals, whether they are in any way afraid of the dinosaurs.”

“Not yet,” mooed a cow. “For the time being there is enough grass, hay, and sileage for the planteaters, and the Kileskuses won’t touch us.”

“We are a little bit afraid of the Kileskuses,” admitted the smaller tame and wild animals, donkeys, small sheep, deer, chicken, birds, squirrels, and so on. “They are the only predators luckily, but they are reputed to be quite voracious.”

“Of course, we are worried as well,” said the wild flowers and grasses. “What if the hay supplies run out before the winter ends? Volgo, Aralo, and Stego and their partners are lovely, but they are living creatures and they may soon have young ones to feed especially if more of them come through the time tunnel or from another village.  It will be our turn. And there isn’t always enough snow to hide under down here in the valleys.”

“We shall restrain ourselves!” promised all four of them, the Kileskuses-predator and the three vegetarian giants.

“A better question!” roared Aralo, “is why you humans are not afraid of the Kileskuses like the mice that you are. You have seen them deal with your fasco enemies. They almost pulled their heads off.”

***

“Wait a minute, before you continue,” said Bukhya who had taken over the moderation, women moderators were perfectly alright in this Communist Chechen village. “We have a distress signal from the little hamlet Iasnoe pole, up the mountain. It is close to the clearing where you cornered the fascos the other day.”

“Listen, can you hear us? This is Ibrahim. We are producing a bio-feed. Let us know whether you can receive it.”

Now they could hear an American-accented voice in Russian, very clearly. “No, we don’t want to go back to the ex.-U.S.”

“That’s Jack Brower!” shouted Bashir. “He was with the Boches when we were in Siberia researching the intranet in huge spaces. Then the Neonazis sprung the brown pulse on us. He and Donald Trumpel and a few others maybe were kind of their protective squad.”

“…And not to Western Europe either. In fact, we would like to stay with you for a while if you cared to have us. We could pay you in crypto.”

“No crypto!” they heard another resident of Iasnoe pole say, or maybe it was comrade Salman visiting from Zumsoi. “We have long outlawed it.”

“If you wanted to drop the fascist cause, you could give yourselves up, say that you repent and be judged by your home assemblies back home in the U.S. Then you could rehabilitate, first in prison, then at home. Where are you from?“

“Well, Jack, Chris, and Joe are from several different boroughs in Washington, D.C., I am from N.Y., a quarter of Manhattan, to be more precise,” said Donald Trumpel.

“He owns several skyscrapers there,” said Joe jokingly. “Being eaten by the bacteria and the algae, mind you!”

“How did Joe find them?” whispered Jérôme. “From what I remember the Big Animal mercs released him only later.”

“I am a fast runner,” they heard Joe say to their amazement. He shrugged. “I am good at reading bio-messages. Always have been even when it had not been invented yet.”

“Can’t we be judged here?” begged Chris Wray, or what had to be her latest younger incarnation.

The residents of Iasnoe pole weren’t sure. “Tell them it is o.k. if they take responsibility for the blue pulse,” I suggested.

“No,” said Jean intraline. “That would be unfair. We know that it is Pappberger, Fritz le Merc and Co. and some of the ex-oligarchs still at large in the ex-U.S. who have done that.”

“Well,” I said. “Tell them they are lucky that in  the person of Zelim a serious expert in re-educating oligarchs has arrived from the French lands. Would they be willing to let him debrief and analyse them?”

“No problem. We are ready to start tomorrow!” said  Jack.

“Are the two German pharmacologists, Adele Tür and Frank Falk with you as well?” asked Jean.

“No, they went back to the German lands with Pappberger and Co.,” said Jack.

“That is unfortunate,” said Jérôme. “I would have loved to debrief them on the bio-chemical component in the brown pulse.”

“Well, you might still catch them. The Big Animals released them, and then they had to take the train home. No more private or government jets after all!” noted Joe.

“Do you have holding cells in Uyutnoe? Then we would bring them down to you?” asked Ibrahim.

“Or does any of the houses have a basement?” asked Denis intraline. “We don’t want them to decide rehabilitation isn’t for them after all and run  with your details.”

“Not basements,” said  Ramzan. “But our houses are built of solid bricks and stones after all. There are secure pantries we can clear and lock them up in when we don’t work with them, don’t worry!”

***

“That worked brilliantly!” Lars Kriegsbeil rubbed his hands in a close-by mountain hut from where he, Pappberger, Falk, and the others were following the bio-feed just like the Illyrians. “They really haven’t noticed we are here!”

At home in Illyria

Haproid assembly in Illyria, by Sevim and Julie

“You might want to know how the haproid assembly  is proceeding here in Illyria,” reported young comrade Jean-François. “Young comrade Danièle raised a stink, how to make room for the big dinosaurs, and how to make them less voracious. They, just like those on your end, said of course they would restrain. Yet now this has ushered in a general discussion on justice. Should the dinos get more just because they are big, some have asked? Maybe not, but then, should the humans get more just because they are humans? We are not sure about that either.”

“Well, I think it won’t be a problem as long as there is enough to eat!” said comrade Lénina. “For the next season, we might have special dinosaur patches. We are presently calculating the required sizes in the revolutionary planning app. I think the rivalry between dinos and cattle might be even bigger than that between dinos and humans.”

“And remember, if you humans really want to regrow the forest in the French lands and elsewhere in the world, the dinosaurs will be a problem. The huge ones feed on trees after all,” said a fox who was kind enough to participate in the Illyrian assembly. “And the predator ones are worse than foxes, wolves, and leopards taken together.”

“On the other hand, think of the advantages these dinos bring with them if we can harness their appetite and occasional clumsiness. Remember the  experiments you implemented in Grozny on comrade Cédric’s advice,” said comrade Danton, ecological engineer. “By dancing, or just by moving their feet according to a certain rhythm, the dinos can get skyscrapers to implode naturally.  Imagine using that technique in what remains of La Défence. Not all of it at the same time of course, but still.”

“And the much maligned Kileskuses saved our lives, by carrying us away from the fascos and depositing us safely in the park,” I said. “We should really not get cynical about dinosaurs. They are a very generous race.”

“They helped us recover naturespeak and nature language as well,” noted Sevim.

“Exactly, sweetheart,” cheered Bashir from Uyutnoe. “The right person is on the ball as always.”

“Wait a minute,” I could hear a very faint but clear voice all of a sudden which seemed to come from the very depths of my brain, or maybe my guts. This had to be one of our famous delta waves, for adults, or thought cords, which the students used to remain undetected by their teachers. Remember, I had received a personalised one earlier to give me advice on how to deal with Marianne’s love affair with comrade Jérôme.

“There are signals coming from a hut about half a kilometre, 500 metres to the East of Iasnoe pole. Is that part of the hamlet?” I used delta waves as well to ask Ibrahim and the other Iasnoe pole residents the same question and got a negative.

“No,” I could hear Ibrahim answer on the same frequency. “It belongs to comrade Salman’s village. We thought it was empty.”

“Oh, mon Dieu,” I now heard Jérôme. “It could be them, Fritz le Merc, Pappberger and his crowd, and Jack Brower and his friends could be either spying for them or running away as they pretend. It is no longer sure!”

“We should advance quietly through the forest and the thicket towards the hut, both here from Uyutnoe as well as from Iasnoe pole,” I said. “If they don’t get suspicious, they are unlikely to leave the place in the middle of the night. It’s dark already after all. We should pompously wrap up the  assembly, some of us should bring the cattle into the stables, create the pretence that we are all busy with that. Meanwhile at least seven of us, a full brigade, should proceed towards that house, plus whomever you can spare at Iasnoe pole. Yet you as well should advance very cautiously.

“If they want to, some dino and animal comrades may join us.”

***

And that was what happened. About an hour later, Frank Falk who was a light sleeper heard some noise at the window and thought it was jammed open somehow, especially as a cold draft was coming from its direction.

He went to fix the problem. The window was half open alright, yet as he wanted to pull it close, he found himself looking into the deep blue eyes of a giant dino, a Volgotitan.

Next to it, Zelim appeared. “Care  to join us? Jack, Chris, Don, and Joe are already down at Uyutnoe being rehabilitated.” That was a white lie. They were still at the hamlet, so as not to create a security risk. Yet the strategy worked. Falk started to shake with his whole body. It seemed that Jack and his associates had come on their own accord. Had they been spies, Falk would have known they were there and would have been less surprised. Now Adele approached her lover from in back. “What is it, honey? Are you talking to someone. Then when she saw Volgo’s big head she let off a scream. Immediately, Merz and Kriegsbeil were next to her with guns.

“What happened to your colleague, Konrad Wadephul, by the way?” asked Zelim, swinging himself through the window into the room. “Did he repent and join the revolution or did he at least give up his war-mongering?”

Both Pappberger and Fritz le Merc tried to shoot at us, but I and Muhammed next to me disabled both of their guns with bronze beams and stunned them with red beams. Now it was just Kriegsbeil and Falk against us. Falk stood back and raised his hands. “Adele is pregnant,” he whimpered. “Please don’t hurt us. In fact, we were trying to get the others to go back to the German lands.”

Kriegsbeil raised his phone and maybe meant to send a lethal beam, but Zelim’s brother Tamerlan checked him with bronze beam, so the phone dropped out of his hands. Then Zelim who was closest, stunned him with red beam.

“You are aces!” said Jérôme who had entered through the front door as we put the handcuffs on them. “We heard it on the train that the Big Animals had let these villains go instead of handing them over to their village assemblies, maybe upon the entreaties of the Uberytes.”

“But it’s just the Nazis, the Germans,” Zelim was disappointed. “Mick McLeary and Rick Handsome must have taken the train after all.”

“Oh, well,” said Bashir who had sprinted up as well through the forest from Uyutnoe with Zelim-Philippe, wanting to catch a slice of the action. “We shall catch them another time.”

9) Cuddly softbots and other things

Difference between functional and plush- or fluffbots, by Petit Pierre and Mao

Humanoid robots as friends

“Can you make love with a robot? Well, not perfectly yet,”  comrade Robespierre launched next evening’s, already more relaxed discussion. “But we have a gender switch, so you can adjust the looks of your robot with your sexual preferences. You can kiss it, of course, it has smooth, humanlike skin. And we are working on some details like kissing in the mouth, entering each other from the front, and from behind… Don’t worry, give it ten more years, and we’ll be there. And the best thing has been and is that our humanoid robots are for everybody. Not just Mark Saltvalley, designer of facebook, now revbook, but each and every one may own one and use them.

“And that reminds me, before we get to the detail about the plush- and fluffbots, they were designed by the capitalists before the revolution already just like the humanoid robots. Yet just like the humanoid robots, their introduction got delayed so as to reserve them for the big capitalists and not have them as helpers for everyone, pupil, student, worker, scientist, housewife, pensioner, anybody…

“After the revolution, the reactionaries pushed robot development in their clandestine workshops, even invented insectbots, all kind of nanobots,  but not as democratic tools, and not even to make money, but in order to weaponise them and use them in the fight against us revolutionaries. Partly, because they were not recruiting enough mercs, partly, because they were working on cruel weapons like nanobot injections. And they hoped they had killed our competition by telling us the internet was bad for us. Well, it was, so we walked away and invented the intranet and bio-wifi and the humanoid robot and the other articulated robots, dogbots, dinobots, dragonbots, and so on, as well…

“The development of the plush- and fluffbots under capitalism was totally halted, and in fact, one of their first and foremost inventors, a woman from Poland, Danuta, was killed in a bus collision soon after the revolution, in Year 3. The funny thing, of the two times fifty passengers in two coaches, only she was dead. Probably, her death was orchestrated, so that there not be any internal competition, meaning within the ex-capitalist underground, to their weaponisable robot project. Over to you, comrade Petit Pierre.”

Plushbots and Fluffbots to write theses with

Writing our thesis on revolutionary plush- and fluffbots, by Jean-Luc and Marius

“Before you take over, comrade Petit Pierre, let me ask you Pléiades,” or second generation revolutionaries, in other words from comrades Philippe, the oldest, to comrades Anton and Yvonne, the youngest, “before the revolution, would you rather have written university entry projects or university theses with a laptop, a tablet or a smart phone, or with a humanoid robot?” I helped introduce the second module.

“Well, we wouldn’t have written one on either,” comrade Léon answered grinningly. “Because back then, we did not have to write university entry projects. Our first longer university papers or theses, like mine on the ‘Beautiful Country’  we wanted to create, these days are considered our university entry projects. But as the robot brigades will tell you, you can write them with Plushbots, or Fluffbots. Is there a difference between the two, by the way?”

“It’s just the consistency of the surrounding material,” explained Petit Pierre, new young robot expert from the garden colony. “Plushbots are somewhat more solid than Fluffbots. It also depends on the animal, plant, or thing they incarnate. Teddybearbots tend to be plushbots and sheepbots fluffbots, because the latter tend to be more woolly in nature as well, although there is no iron fast rule. There can be hard sheep and fluffy teddies as well, of course. Trees can have harder parts, stem and branches, and softer ones, twigs and leaves.

What is important is that they incorporate all the ingredients of a laptop, tablet, or large smart phone, screen, keyboard, processor, memory, camera, microphone, revolutionary apps…, yet no longer in a heavy aluminium and plastic case, with lots of iron and other metals, silicates, ceramics, and glass to boot, but just the essential tools and insulation, surrounded by the plush or fluff shape of the name giver, which could be a crocodile or an alligator or a dinosaur for that matter.”

“But wait a minute, comrade Petit Pierre, did we not have that already with the humanoid robots, dogbots, cowbots, buffalobots, eaglebots, and all the other robots you young revs created?” I asked the young comrade, partly to jog his brain.

“No, no,” Petit Pierre shook his head. “The difference is: humanoid robots, dogbots, monkeybots, eaglebots, treebots, whatever, are meant to look and function like the human, animal, plant, dinosaur, and so on, they incarnate… Humans walk and reason, dogs have four feet and can wag their tail, monkeybots can climb, eagle- and other bird robots can fly, and treebots oscillate in the wind. Human- and animalbots make natural sounds or at least good imitations thereof. They are often covered with real skin and hair or at least synthetics imitating them closely. On the other hand, a plushbear or a fluffbear does not have to growl like a bear, they just have to look like one, and they can even be caricatures. Tigerbots can be orange and look friendly if you know what I mean. Yet any revolutionary plushbot or fluffbot can do everything a laptop or notebook can.  And of course, it comes equipped with the basic programme One World, the Browser Aurora, the Chinese Wall Security Suite fortified with Bio-Thicket to guarantee security even when communicating intraline with animals, plants and dinos, as well as all basic revolutionary apps. And more apps can be added, both as backup for a brain or as an independent app. However, a dolly plushbot may be too small, non-articulated and totally unable to do the vacuuming, while a real-sized humanoid robot will have not only the necessary programming, but the requisite strength, dexterous arms, legs, etc. to do everything, homework, office work, vacuuming, and more.

“However, precisely because of that, it is not so easy to use if you need to sit behind a desk, or even on a sofa or in bed and work on a project, and most of them are too big to travel with.  When at home, they are just standing there, and you have to go to them and pull out a keyboard and sign in on a screen before you can type something, and you may have to do your work standing. There are dwarf- or leprechaunbots, of course, but these as well are of two kinds, the functional kind, as comrade Robespierre said, who can use their arms, legs, and more, play music and dance, for instance, and the plush or fluff ones, which just have the shape of a doll, a dwarf, or a leprechaun, but have a comparatively large screen and keyboard and are comfy to settle down with to work on your project and to even take along on a research trip. They are basically light laptops with a cushion cover.

When Égale met Liberté…

When Égale met Liberté, by Odile and Zamir

While they continued discussing plush- und fluffbot models, I quietly went out went to pick up our comrades at the bus station. “Glad you made it, comrade Pierre le Gars!” I said slightly intrigued, and then made a show of straining my eyes to look around the bus so as to mask my realising the obvious. “But where is comrade Lilo?” “That’s the f**g point!” And the big man broke out in tears. “She decided to stay in Georgia! And you know, the worst is… She has got a new fellow.”

“Well,” comrade Quan immediately piped up from Illyria intraline, be it somewhat sternly. “You already had a good wife in me.”

“I am your friend as well,” said comrade Ronggang.

“Yeah,” said Peter Gar, still sobbing. “You have been pretty loyal.”

“And there is me,” comrade Carla, Pierre le Gars wife prior to comrade Quan, supplemented from the garden house. –Only his very first wife, Gemma, had remarried, a certain Tom Hellish.

“You could always stay with us, papa!” Carla’s son, comrade Misha added.

“Oh, yes, you could stay in my room,” said comrade Carla. “I could do the editing of the minutes in the kitchen. We could share my bed-room. It will be roomy enough without the desk. We could put a second bed in if you like.”

“You could stay for a while in Novgornyi with us!” suggested her daughter Tanya from Pionerskii. “Just to digest things and take in the sea breeze.”

Peter Gar was still crying. “Look,“ I said. “We still have to do the debrief of all the big animals and Nazis and the Uberytes we may catch as well as help with comrade Muhammed’s and Hisham’s study of the Chechen people’s assessment of the revolution. Stay here with us and take in the mountain air. Then you might go to Novgornyi for a while.”

“By the time you get back to Illyria, there will be another option,” said Jérôme grinningly. “Arlette invited some eye-witnesses for her project on women in the revolution. There is a comrade from Sudan, Égale. Look, here is her picture!”

“Oh, she is gorgeous,” said Peter Gar squinting through his eyes still full of tears. “A real desert jewel!”

“She has a comrade in Saint-Denis, Liberté, a woman, whom she knew in Sudan already, but she says Liberté is a bit overbearing. She jokes that with her, she, comrade Égale, will be less equal. She and her children, she has got a boy and a girl, will need more people, apparently,” said Jérôme. “And you will need a new friend, obviously. A slut is not worth a tear of yours.”

Postscript in Uyutnoe, Illyria and Saint-Denis. Soon to come

Preview of Liberating the Oligarchs, Mixed Brigades, and from Colour to Red Revolutions, by Danièle and Olivier

“Aslan, thank you for a magnificent introduction to Chechnia as well as an excellent continuation of the animal and plant lives matter and harp topics, or what do you think, comrade Julie? Did comrade Aslan do justice to your work?”

“I think he could not have done better!” Julie said. “I was afraid the nature language topic would drop out, but so far it hasn’t!”

“Comrade Zelim, what’s next?” “Well, as a result of the work we did in Chechnia, we have a lot more oligarchs to rehabilitate. Not only the French, American, and German ones we already held, but also the Russian ones who have now switched to the revolutionary side. If we manage to convince all of them, they may convince their friends and we may prevent the spread of a new post-oligarch mafia.”

“What about the Chechen revolution, comrade Muhammed? Is it on a good track?” “Well, as you have seen, it is doing alright, especially as far as the struggle against the ex-capitalists and fascos is concerned, and also the full realisation of harp and even haproid assemblies. Although some of the dinosaurs might go back to the past or to less populated places maybe. Yet problems remain, the difference between the villages and the agglo of Groznyi is huge, we have yet to eliminate the differences between town and countryside…”

“At least your towns are still old and venerable,” Natalie said. “In Siberia you can see many, you might call them pseudo-towns. Like in the American Wild West, agglos that just emerge to serve the Transsiberian railroad and or oil, gas, metal, or mineral exploration. The case of the Arctic is particularly striking. There, whole villages and small agglos even migrate once one exploration has stopped and another one is slated to begin at another spot.”

“Is there hope for your topic, comrade Jean-Saïd?” “Yes, but it looks like we may considerably reduce the injustices towards animals and even plants, that their lives may indeed triumph before we can eliminate the last differences between people, and I am thinking of Zionists and Palestinians in particular. Maybe mixed brigades like the one I am in, researching revolutionary travel beams, can help.”

“Is it only the Zionists, comrade Youssef?”  “Yes, I think so. Of course, there are many differences in the Middle Eastern revolutionary movement. I wouldn’t deny that. Still, there is the acknowledgement of a common ancestry, even between Muslims and Christians within the same people and region, for instance between Lebanese Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, or between Muslim and Christian Kurds in Kurdistan. We have the same roots. But not between Palestinians and Zionists. There the difference is as bad if not more pronounced than between indigenous Algerians and French colonialists, wouldn’t you say, comrades Salma and Mina?”

“I would not know, I have never been to Palestine,”  Salma spoke carefully. “Yet from what I have read and heard from those of you comrades who have done research there, the situation has been bad in Palestine even after the revolution. It is one of the revolution’s worst unsolved problems.”

“I have done research on revolutions and restarts or new beginnings of history following a war or a revolution as the case may be,” said Mina. “Nowhere have the divisions between people and the difficulties in getting along been as grave as in Palestine. Comrade Youssef has called his work ‘From Colour to Red Revolution.’ As comrade Jean-Saïd has said, let’s hope mixed brigades can finally make a peaceful red revolution triumph in Palestine as well.”

The adventures and discussions of our comrades in Illyria, the garden colony, the Manouche camp, the neighbourhood assemblies Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove in Saint-Denis, the village Uyutnoe in Chechnia and their friends world-wide will continue in Life in Communism Chechen Trilogy vol. 2 Liberating the Oligarchs, vol. 3 Red Chechnia, and Life in Communism 2.1. Regreening the Taiga,  Mixed Brigades, and From Colour Revolutions to Red Revolution. Stay tuned!

Map and Plan of our rural cooperative Illyria, Yvelines, and our neighbourhood assemblies Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove on 76 rue de Lorraine, Saint-Denis, State November-January of Year 19-20 of the Revolution during comrades Aslan’s, Zelim’s and Muhammed’s  “Chechen Trilogy”, there are 17 three-room apartments with the bedrooms occupied as follows, Young Revolutionaries marked in italics:

Map of Aimeran at the time of comrade Aslan’s presentation “Another 2021”, by Marius and Jean-Luc

	Apartments in the old Farmhouse Noah and Michelle Malik and Mao and baby Aisha   Claudia and Miguel	Jana, Youssef, and Salma Anton and Monique Marius and Jean-Luc	Michel and Fabienne Pierre le Gars (Peter Gar) and Égale Yoga Room Ronggang and Quan
	Muhammed and Aini Hisham and Rim Bashir and Sevim and baby Asma, to be born in January of Year 20	Marie and Daniel Omsinbaba and Fofana Lulu and Maurice, and toddler Bouna	Arlette and Jérôme Karla and Maher, baby Soho Pléiades Room Jean-Vladimir and Adilah, and toddler Akila
	Patrick and Marianne Abram and Francine Olivier and Danièle	Youth Club Che, Georgette, and toddler Salvador	Jean, Mina, and Hélène Laurent and Véro Zamir and Odile
Apartments above Robot Workshop Emilia, Robespierre, Sophie, and Pascal Lénina and Jean-Fidel, and baby Evo Alexandra and Jean-François and baby Max				Apartments above  the stables Denis and Laure Young Revolutionaries Room Jean-Saïd and Natalie
Danton Inès, and toddler Ramón Julie and Zelim-Philippe, and baby Giles to be born in April New Pléiades Room Assad, Kaltouma, and baby Nahel				Boris and Karima Jean-Wadi, Zafira, baby Sandrine Rashida and Seth,  baby Tahir
Philippe and Anisah Renée and Guillaume and baby Comet Aslan and Zamira
	Apartments above Clothes Workshop Alain and Bulan Félix and Leyla Saïd and Rodion	Georges and Jeanette Pierre and Marine Aleksei and Evgenia	Apartments above Furniture Workshop Annie and Frédéric Léon and Martine Rosa, Josip, and baby Fabien	Camille and Zelim Sylvain and Nicole Guest Room

Red: House 1, Old Farmhouse; Dark Blue: House 2, Clothes workshop; Light Blue: House 3, Furniture workshop; Dark violet: House 4, Stables; Light violet: House 5, Robot workshop

Garden Colony and Manouche Camp

Garden Colony Louise, Tim, and Mélanie		Arthur and Huguette, daughter Françoise, and granddaughter Murielle
Raphaël, Jacqueline, Fabien, Catherine, their kids Cédric, and Charolaine Sabine, Charles, their kids Colin and Cécile		Misha, his partner Yvonne, his friend Cato, their young son Jean-Michel, and Misha’s mother Carla
The Cambodian martial arts Dan, In, Ayak, and Vit		Mireille, Marwan, and Zima, baby Tonyi
Bérénice and son Pierre		Raoul and Josetta, baby Evita
Manouche Camp
Django, Manou, their son Orel and his friends		Roman and family
Matthias, Céline, and baby Isabel

Neighbourhood Assemblies Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove at 76 rue de Lorraine, Saint-Denis

Luc, accountant at l’Humanité, wife, children, daughter Lucille, and grand-son Jean-Luc	Bertrand, works at l’Huma, Illyria and peace movement, and family	Clément, works at l’Huma, Illyria and anti-fake vax movement, and family
Sebastien, gardener, wife hairdresser, and family	Mathieu, concierge, wife post-office worker, and family	René, doctor for refugee children and family, daughter Sarah
Béa and François, Gabriel and Benoît, Repentant terrorists, now gardeners	Dominique, peace activist, and family, daughter Laurence	Aurélie, New Workshops, trade union activist, and family, son Emmanuel
Illyrians, their visitors, live and online	Rebecca, Marwan and son Faroukh	Pauline and Jacques, Pauline’s son Antoine and partner Murielle, and toddler Zac
Youth Club Casa Latina and Russki Dom Toddler Crèche	Homework club, All Pléiades, New Pléiades and Young revolutionaries	Marxism reading courses and adolescent and student hangout

Yellow: first floor, youth club; Green: second floor; Red: third floor; Blue: fourth floor, and violet: fifth floor. 2^nd and 3^rd floors: Casa Latina Russki Dom, 4^th and 5^th floor: Peace Dove.

You will also enjoy…

 Life in Communism 2.1. Animal lives matter. Plant lives triumph, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. The reactionaries have managed to design a low frequency pulse weapon that will stop or corrupt the revolutionary red intranet and bio-wifi. Overcoming this latest challenge requires the young revolutionaries to learn better naturespeak and communicate better with animals and plants – and fast.

Life in Communism 2.1. Son of a Counter-revolutionary, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. Jean-François, son of the repentant fasco terrorists Béatrice Meunier and François Aliot, or maybe, horribile dictu, even illegitimate son of the most famous neo-Vichyite of all, his nominal uncle Jacques Henriot, has received a good revolutionary education, first, with his young comrades in the neighbourhood assemblies Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove at 76 rue de Lorraine, Saint-Denis, then at the rural self-managed model cooperative Illyria, near Aimeran, Yvelines. Nevertheless, he suffers from pangs of inferiority and would so much like to be a young revolutionary with an irreproachable pedigree and a brilliant scientist at the same time just like his friends. Yet he will come up with ways to prove his worth as an active revolutionary agent by scuppering no less than three major plots of the counter-revolutionaries, in medicine, computer science, and economics. Find out how in this cliff-hanger!

Life in Communism 2.1. Bishop Adalbert at the Pruzzens, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. It is late autumn of Year 18 of the revolution (2021 being Year Zero), and young comrade Alexandra is doing research for her university entry project in history and anthropology on Bishop Adalbert’s missionary work with the Pruzzens and the light it may shed on the primitive Communism of this ancient people as compared to the feudalism and early capitalism surrounding them. At the same time, the ex-capitalists and their fasco mercenaries continue with their nefarious vaccine campaigns and other drug trade, cattle molesting and diffusion of the Satanitis computer virus, clandestine production of weapons and other dangerous goods, such as synthetics or non-organic pesticides, the campaign for militia coordinators or ombuds(wo)men as a step towards the return of the state, and the undermining of Communist property arrangements by crypto-financed construction and unjust real estate swaps, especially in the Russian lands and the Baltics. Alexandra and her comrades are forced to become spontaneous militia(wo)men as well as academics.

Preview of Life in Communism 2.1. Léon’s Permanent Revolution, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. It is autumn of Year 18 of the revolution, 2021 being Year Zero. Young comrade Rosa is not only a persuasive advocate of scientific progress and research into nanobots, especially in construction, she is also an enthusiastic advocate of permanent revolution. While she gives her fascinating presentations, the fascos continue with several of their sabotage campaigns, spreading of the Coflu 18- Lep, meaning lymphatic, encephalitic, pulmonary syndrome which is not only caused by their toxic vaccine Coflux 18-Lep that is supposed to cure it, but if wrongly treated can lead to hallucinations, leprechaun sightings, hence its second name, Leprechaunitis, and even full-blown paranoid schizophrenia; diffusion of the malignant Satanitis computer virus which makes devices come up with evil plans and risks counteracting the revolutionary moral programme code; and the campaign for militia coordinators, although luckily, young comrade Arvo has managed to win over one of its main actors in Estonia, Kaya Callous, and unsettles her oligarch husband and his friends before they take revenge. And finally, especially in the Baltics and Russian lands, there is also a new campaign to undermine revolutionary property rights that threatens to affect friends of the Illyrians, the Novgornyi branch of the Moscow recycling hounds.

Preview of Life in Communism 2.1. vol. 52 Remarks of a Sceptic, by Carla O’Gallchobhair.  Pierre is just explaining his work as a double agent to the young revolutionaries and making a proposal for more effective roof-based solar panels to win back their affection, when a new wave of sabotage breaks out, centred on a fake pandemic worse than Covet-19, Coflu-LEP or Asymptomatic Leprechaunitis, as well as another campaign to undermine the spontaneous militia brigades by a new job of coordinator. Moreover, a revolution within the revolution has erupted in the Baltics which the ex-capitalists, crypto-oligarchs, and fasco-terrorists try to use to their advantage.

Life in Communism 2.1. vol. 42-46. What is to be done? , by Carla O’Gallchobhair. What would Lenin have done differently if he were active today? He would have made sure that the revolution triumphs world-wide. He would have insisted on equality, self-management, and direct democracy at every step, working through the organisation of venues: brigade, neighbourhood, workplace, and village assemblies, constant material and hierarchy checks and surveys and, if needed, local, regional, continental, and world-wide referendums. He would have stood for radical de-urbanisation, regrowing, regreening, and respect of human, animal, plant, all living beings world-wide. He would have stood for the prevention of any further wars and armed conflicts by complete de-weaponisation world-wide, as well as blocks on re-weaponisation, and last but not least, he would not have cooperated with capitalists, let alone fascists under any circumstances. Back to Year 18 of the World Revolution of 2021! While the class enemy continues its Satanic work of undermining the revolution, e.g., by creating new gangs of terrorists such as the Critics, the Sons, the Anti-Nanobot League, and the Cryptoleak Avengers, kindling revolution in the ex-U.S., forcing the Rothschilds to bankroll them and returning Ursula van der Leihen or her look-alike from the executioner’s block to launch a new career as an ombudswoman, our comrades in Illyria and Saint-Denis have launched into a super-project: How to do the Communist revolution in the 21st century? In Book 1, young comrade Lénina details what is to be done and presents a revolutionary app that will help us plan things, in Book 2, senior comrade Marie analyses the strategy and processes of the Revolution in the Streets, in Book 3, young comrade Guillaume outlines how to do away with weapons as a prerequisite for conflict avoidance and peace on earth, in Book 4, young comrade Renée discusses how the four venues of the revolution (all institutions of the capitalist state and economy having been abolished), namely neighbourhood assemblies, brigades, workplace assemblies, and village assemblies can be saved from usurpation and sabotage by the ex-capitalist reactionaries, and in Book 5, senior comrade Denis analyses problems that have arisen after a referendum did away with the standing people’s militia, it being a den of incipient hierarchies and weaponisation.

Life in Communism 2.1. The Moscow Recycling Hounds, by Carla O’Gallchobhair, It is October of Year 8 of the Revolution. The Moscow Recycling Hounds and their sociologist friend from Novosibirk are just enjoying a holiday in Illyria to discuss the state of the revolution with the French comrades and to inform comrade Anton – who is doing a university entry project on them – on their projects, when a top Russian reactionary, Nikolai Morbidov, starts another coup attempt at home. With the help of newly recruited patriotic cells and despite the misgivings of the ex-oligarchs who focus on their crypto-currency revenues, he plans biochemical terrorism on an up to now unknown scale. Our comrades make a desperate attempt to use revolutionary communications, the venues of the revolution, and their scientific knowledge to help thwart this nefarious design from far away…

Life in Communism 2.1. Revolutionary Barter, By Carla O’Gallchobhair, In this 15th volume of the Life in Communism 2.1 series, taking place in Year Eight of the world revolution, Hisham, Omsinbaba, Noah, Claudia and others visit Russia and the Middle East, West Africa, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Latin America and Asia, to barter the famous robots their cooperative Illyria in Yvelines produces against agricultural and technological products that they don’t produce themselves but that they need either for their consumption or as inputs for their clothes, furniture and robot production workshops. While they encounter quite a lot of adversity, ex-capitalists and fascist terrorists who won’t give up and who even manage to cause major disruptions of communications and weather over Western Europe and world-wide by detonating an Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapon, our comrades are happy to meet with old and new comrades abroad – among them Sergei and the other Moscow Recycling Hounds, Ramzan of Grozny, Hassan and their other Middle Eastern, Ernesto and their other Latin American, and Changlong and their other Asian comrades –, and to learn about foundations of revolutionary barter, such as the labour theory of value, the transport problem, housing swaps and exploitation checks.

 Life in Communism 2.1. Part 10. Robespierre’s Robot by Carla O’Gallchobhair  Three years into the world revolution, the Communists need help in fully implementing all its aspects and are looking into the further development of the productive forces. Robespierre has just explained how his clever robots can serve as shadows to human beings, assisting them not only in basic chores but also in analytical and creative work when one of his prototypes is stolen – presumably by the usual suspects, disgruntled ex-capitalists and fascist terrorists –, and to find him our comrades from Saint-Denis and Illyria have to start a wild chase through partly uncharted technological territory: 5 and 6 G, Don’t weaponise and other Red Lines, nanobots, Redtooth, and expected actions and also the fraudulent free energy proposals of the former capitalists.

Self-description Life in Communism 2.1. Part 2. Jacques Life of Crime, by Carla O’Gallchobhair It is autumn of Year 2 of the world revolution. The basic interactive venues – neighbourhood assemblies, brigades, village and workers’ assemblies and the rotating people’s militia – are working well and the ecological thrust of the revolution is advancing. All residents of the two neighbourhood assemblies of 76 rue de Lorraine, Casa Latina and Russki Dom are back home, working, studying and making and raising children. As a voluntary activity, Jean debriefs Jacques Henriot of the Fasco Four on his life of crime. Jacques reveals himself as an unpredictable, unstable actor and thinker, yet he passes Jean quite a few insights not only on past actions but also on future plans of the counter-revolutionaries. However, his information comes almost too late to prevent a new wave of terror from unfolding.

World Revolution 2.1. Part 1. One Step Closer. Jean in Moscow By Carla O’Gallchobhair President Neputin, the almost undisputed leader of Russia for over 20 years, has resigned, opening the door for true change and real improvement. Yet a right-wing terrorist organisation, ‘Patriotic Army. One Step Closer’, tries everything to prevent it, collaborating in its evil conspiracies not only with interested Russian capitalists, but with an international consortium in France, Ukraine, the U.S. and world-wide. Just for starters, the presidential candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is abducted, the Russian regions Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol are subjected to severe infrastructural sabotage and economic sanctions, attempts are made to introduce GMOs into Russia, ruthless oligarchs organise unethical tests for vaccines and gambling for vaccine market shares, and strategic electoral fraud including the hacking of satellites takes place to get the mainstream candidate desired by the capitalists strong enough to be elected but weak enough to do their bidding. The chase of the terrorists takes KPRF activists and their comrades from France all over the Russian federation and up to the Arctic Circle.

Anti-Communism 2.1. Part 3: Of Missiles and Men, by Carla O’Gallchobhair . The West is trying to make itself impervious to nuclear strikes by a space-based missile defence system, even precluding retaliation by a foreign power in case the West were to strike first. And French firms are deeply involved even though France is not even part of NATO’s nuclear planning group. The brave young communists and the indefatigable members of the PCF’s executive committee try to inform the French public as well as the potential targets of the belligerent weapon systems, almost losing honour and life as a result. Clearly, the fascist terrorists are more closely intertwined with the ruling elites than these want to admit. This is the concluding part of Anti-Communism 2.1. However, the story of the refoundation of International Communism in spite of its fascist detractors continues in World Revolution 2.1. Part 1. One Step Closer. Jean in Moscow. Peter Gar comments: “A superb read. Life under a future democratic Communism would be far superior to the rotten sanitary capitalism we have now.”

Life in Communism 2.1. South American Trilogy vol. 3 Gangster, Guerrillero, Revolutionary

By Carla O’Gallchobhair

© Carla O’Gallchobhair, 1976, 2025. This is a work of revolutionary fiction, engaged literature where similarities to real events and persons serve to explain historical processes. To Mamon, Papa, Tanya, Evgeni, and Maksim, Misha, Yvonne, Odile, and Jean-Michel, Vicky and Nora, and all other friends of Latin America and its revolution

To Cathal

“I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.”

Che Guevara, Letter to his mother on July 15, 1956

“Revolution comes from the barrel of a gun.”

Mao Zedong

“If you have the capacity to tremble with indignation every time that an injustice is committed in the world, then we are comrades.”

Che Guevara

Preface in Illyria and Saint-Denis

The Junta of Villa General Belgrano, by Jean-Fidel and Lénina

“And right when we thought the South American revolution was back on track: the fake pope debunked, would-be president Trilei ridiculed – another bombshell. New whistleblowers have stepped forward. The Bonaparte scheme is continuing. Ramón and Diego, even the local oligarch club Los once look like choir boys in comparison to the dark forces weaving in the background. Part of them are known as the junta of Villa General Belgrano. It consists of a motley bunch of Argentinian Contras, among them descendants of former fasco politicians, former big capitalists, oligarchs, and bankers and the leaders of the guerrilleros, some of them foreign mercs, doing their bidding. To some of you the names Pablo Aramburu, Carlos Ongania, Alberto Vasena, Jorge Videla, Maximo Brio, Marcos Galperin, Fortunato Bulgheroni, Fernando Perez, Eduardo Rocca, Juan Lopez Rega, Joe Baxter, Edelmiro Farrell and others may evoke some infamous figures from history books. Well, the members of the Junta de Villa General Belgrano are related to them. They also take reference specifically from German Nazis, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Mengele, Adolf Eichmann and others, who are rumoured to have sought refuge in Argentina.

And their latest scam on orders of the underground ex-U.S. imperialists is weaponising the revolutionary intranet-bio-wifi-harp communication method by the so-called intranet facilitator or booster app.

The IF – intranet facilitator –, is a small gadget, the size of a party alarm, but where you push a button, not if you get attacked during a celebration, but in order to relax, get sensitised, or desensitised as the case may be, and if necessary, fast-reconnected to intranet, bio-wifi, and harp.

“Comrade Lénina by the way found an excellent way to explain the difference between these three – intranet, bio-wifi, and harp –, to an amateur like me.

“Intranet refers to the low-frequency electromagnetic waves we communicate with nowadays – lower than a 100 Hz as compared to a minimum of 3 GHz under capitalism.  They interact like a kind of bio-wifi, meaning that messages and data are not transmitted via cables or towers, but via natural wifi towers, such as trees, large animals, humans, big robots, but also smaller towers, such as grass, birds and other small animals, and small devices such as phones or IFs. Harp stands for human-animal-robot-plant communication. We hope it can be in naturespeak, meaning the language all living beings speak and that humans can programme into their devices. In a way, this is how Lénina explained it to me, harp is the social media of the intranet.

“So, we talked about intranet facilitators or IFs. The BA – booster app –, is a traditional phone app where you adjust individual settings to achieve your personalised optimised connection to intranet, bio-wifi, and harp. This seems like sorcery to me, but according to Josip, Rosa, and the other physicists and computer scientists, the reactionaries are developing ways to access our revolutionary intranet based on will-power and good intentions and corrupt it via high-energy, and thus potentially harmful waves, nanobots carrying drugs, and minuscule antennas sucking the messages to their users, thus diverting and twisting the structure of our networks.

This intranet facilitator, actually an intranet saboteur, is only one of four thrusts of their latest effort at Reconquista, the other three being genetic sabotage, institutional sabotage, and violence. Later, we’ll come back to those, but first I must explain where I am coming from.

1)Prologue from the Past, or: Years in the North: Education in Violence

Pueblo del Desierto, before and after the Revolution, by Georgette and Che

Off to America

My old man, comrade José, most of you know him already, at least intraline, used to always say that whoever and wherever you are, you should first introduce yourself. When I was 14 – that was in the year 2000-01, still in the heydays of capitalism, they had just introduced the Euro, you remember, the pre-revolutionary all-European currency –, I was dressed in my Sunday best and pushed before the gas station attendant in our village. My father stood behind me and said: “My name is Pedro Marajón and this is my son Miguel!” The gas station attendant was my godfather, and my father has been sitting with him in the village pub every night for 20 years now.

That’s almost all we had in our village back then, by the way, a gas station and a pub. Nowadays the gas station has turned into a share point where you can bring anything you don’t need at the moment and get something else you like and get the food and other basics for your household at the same time. And it has a battery charger for electrical vehicles, no more fuel-guzzlers allowed in Pueblo del Desierto as by decision of the village assembly. It charges mainly small transporters, every village has a few for deliveries, and tractors, but it can even charge up the large public busses, seating 50, because how else could people get to and away from Pueblo del Desierto? The next train line is still hundreds  of kilometres away. Although new ones are being built, of course. In the interest of preventing alcohol abuse, the village assembly has decided to turn the pub into a bakery. You can drink coffee there and eat pastries, and buy your bread. If you must drink alcohol you can go to the Orange Tree restaurant, also run as a share point, which is right next to the bakery. It used to be a trucker café, full of smoke, and with people stinking of tobacco and beer. It is nicer now, serves home-made food and good Mexican wine. When I come home these days with you Illyrians, my papa and I always take you there, don’t we?

“Back then, in terms of energy supply, there was only the filling station. These days there is also the block energy works, consisting of solar panels, a part wooden, part metal windmill – none of these huge metallic monsters –, of guaranteed self-managed South American production, — none of this clandestine capitalist production sold against crypto, or vouchers, or token, whatever they call it. There is a well, with a good pump, and a water pipeline running to all houses of the village and the fields and pastures. Since the beginning of this year, there is our dinosaur cage, now that we have brought a few Alamosauruses back from the past via time travel to help us store water and defend the village, for instance, by transporting harp and bio-wifi signals… Back to that later!

The Dinosaur enclosure in Pueblo del Desierto, by Julie and Zelim-Philippe

“Where were we? Oh, yeah, introductions. I hadn’t even learnt to read and write properly, just my name, greetings and kisses and a few words of poor English. Typical, my old man, you should introduce yourself first as if you were Emperor Maximilian!

Therefore, during my gangster years as well, I had to introduce myself. That is good tone, although my life was certainly not an opera. “So, guys, sit down,” I used to tell people. “Hold on to the edge of the chair or pillow if you’re already in bed. Go as far away from the window as possible and do not hold a hammer or similar dangerous object in your hand. I am, well, so how can I say it, I, I, I am rather reluctant to snub your moral fibre, but, the truth is: I am a gangster. Stop, don’t run to the phone! The police can’t help you there either. I’m here now. Hands up, and then ready, steady, go read this book, otherwise you’ll be off the brink. And don’t sing, otherwise I’ll get into the can. I learnt this meaning for the word sing from Richard, who was responsible for the training of our young. He always looked at you as if he was going to eat you right away, then said in a grave voice: “Never sing, it doesn’t pay.” And then, after a significant pause:

“Promise, big word of honour?” Of course, everyone said “yes!” As a gangster you are not squeamish.

YES, as a gangster you are not squeamish. So, you don’t push yourself, you only go for things that are necessary, of course, you don’t put a finger on anything unnecessary. What is necessary for sure is money, and no gangster makes a mess of that. He jumps on money! Therefore, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realise that since our revolution did away with money, it more or less did away with gangsters as well, except for those who decided to help out the counter-revolutionaries.

Oh, I can see, I’m jumping too far ahead already. So, I meant to tell you, I am Mexican and I grew up close to the northern border with the USA in a one-street village on a lonely country road. Even the junctions were already field roads before the revolution. And as we’ve established already, the village consisted only of a gas station and a pub, a grocery store, and a few crooked ranchos with corrugated metal roofs. School, policlinic, post office, other amenities, all several villages down the road only. No wonder, the revolution broke out and completed here so easily in 2021!

And yet again, I am ahead of myself. One spring morning in 2002 it must have been, I packed up!!! I stuffed my good pants, my extra T-shirt, my money and my very few souvenirs into my Eastpack or whatever brand it was – it was an Eastpak, I held on to it until I came to Russia, then looked at it, said “American war-mongering junk!”, and threw it out, then went to celebrate with Muhammed, Aslan, Zelim, Saïd, Rodion, Boris and the other choir boys.

But back then, I had not even heard of the Chechen wars yet. It was the year 2002. I went to mom and dad. I was 16 at the time.

“Guys, I’m going!” “But boy, what are you going to do there?” cried Mama, “it’s hell up there!” And Papa paced up and down angrily.

“And that’s what I raised you for, that is why I let you learn something, so that you now go away and forget your parents? But you will be amazed. You won’t get everything done for you in the US. You will have to do something.” Well, I wouldn’t let him tell me that twice.

“Yes!” agreed Mama. “Boys! Typical! Always ready to abandon ship!” “Ciao, mama!” I gave her a kiss. “Ciao, Inès,” this is not yet my daughter, our Illyrian comrade Inès, but Aunt Inès, my little sister. Some of you have met her. “I’m going to send you a doll, right?” Then I stood in front of Papa. “Ciao, Papa.” “Yes,” he said. “Ciao, son. Do you even know any English, any English at all?”

“I’ve read all the English books in the school library 7 times,” I lied. I simply had the guts for it, back then! Well I had read ‘Winnie the Pooh’, that was for the boys, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, that was for the girls, ‘1984’, that was on the politics of capitalism and imperialism, and some kind of picture book on the Mafia, with chapters on the American, Russian, Italian, and other mafia branches. That was for the adults and was hopefully going to show me the way to the right people.

“Send some money! Ciao, Miguel!” “Ciao!” I called and ran, turning over and over again. “Ciao! Ciao! Ciao! ” Then I turned into the big street and realized that I needed a handkerchief. I was moping already. By the time, I was in the next village and walked past the school library, where I had sat so often and flipped through the illustrated books on the USA as well as U.S. web pages for directions, the nostalgia was gone already. But one thing after the other, First I entered the gas station.

“Could you change that for me into dollars, boss?” I said, tipping my peso coins and one or two bills onto the counter.

“So, Miguel, now you are going, too!” said my master, fiddling with the cash register. “Going too, eh? Good luck! You’ve always worked hard. Do you want a certificate?”  “I’d love to if you’d bother.”

He reached for the block with his trembling hands. “Yes, Miguel,” he said. “When I was young, I was like you. And now my hands are shaking when I think what will happen to you over there in the big world. Never believe in anyone else, only in yourself. You have to go your own way, not one for the others, and you’ll write me a postcard?”

“Of course,” I promised. “You won’t remember it, but good will counts!” “Sure, sure!” I said. “Well!” He threatened me with his finger. “Here you have $ 20 and your certificate.” “So much money!!!!” “I added your wages for the next few months, in dollars, of course. Now a rich American has to come and fall in love with my gas station, otherwise I won’t get any new dollars.” He laughed as if he was being tortured.

“Ciao, Miguel!” “Ciao! And I wish you many customers.” He laughed again, this time sounding happier already. “Come back, Miguel. And think of what I told you. ” And then I set off.

***

For the first three kilometres I thought: “Hiking is nice!” For the next three, I thought. “Forward, Miguel!” For the three after that I thought: “Hopefully somebody will pick me up soon.” And at 12 noon, when the sun was really burning, I sat down on a milestone and was done. I also noticed that I had left my provisions at home. “It’s starting well!” I grumbled. Then: “Come on, Miguel, there’s sure to be something to eat at the custom’s station.” I limped on … The area became hillier. Sure, now we have desert and Sierra combined. If this continues, I’ll die of hunger and thirst before I even reach the border.

March in the Desert, by Jean-Vladimir and Adilah

Then I turned a curve and saw the border ahead of me. First I thought I had to cross either by swimming over the Rio Grande, and or by hopping the fence. Hitch-hiking would have been too risky, they might have asked me whether I had papers. It was evening already. Since my night-time vision is not great, I was almost in despair and thought I was never going to make it, but then, as I came out of the filling station where I had finally managed to buy myself a sandwich and a coke, I realised that some of the trunks of the parked cars were open. I just carefully squeezed myself into one and shut it over my head as best I could. The driver came, hopped into the driver’s seat and drove off, seemingly unsuspectingly. A couple of hours later I was in America.

“The bars in San Francisco …”

Miguel in San Francisco, by Maurice and Lulu

I already know what you think. You think now there will be a kitschy story about a gangster boss who finds me in his trunk and saves me from starvation, like in ‘Red Circle’, and I of course then enter his club out of honest gratitude. But to tell the truth, it wasn’t like that at all.

I still see the face of my examining magistrate who asked me, “How did you get to the Harrimans?” “Jack hired me as a chauffeur,” I said. “Who else was in the gang?” After a quick look over to Jack, I said, “I refuse to testify!” “You know that would greatly reduce your sentence?” “Yes!” “I’ll ask both of you again!” “I refuse to testify!” Jack yelled. “Me too!” I croaked hoarsely. I was thinking about the jail though, and a cold shiver ran down my spine.

My enemy, the little angel, began to whisper to me: ‘What do you prefer, your freedom or the gang?’ And it sent another ice-cold shiver down my spine. “Is the cell heated?” I asked. The examining judge looked at me for a long time and then said, “It depends on you!” ‘You hear!’ whispered the stupid angel. ‘Surely you don’t want to sleep in an unheated cell, do you?’

Do you know the Eastside Bar in Chicago? No? Then you missed something. It’s a private bar! It belongs to Jack Harriman and I am his chauffeur. I’ve already told you how I got there. No, not yet? So, a first I hitchhiked to San Francisco and ran my socks off after a job. To honour the truth again, it was only my shoes! In the evening I went from bar to bar and played. I won $ 3 but also a pretty blue haze! I went out into the night air to get some fresh air, but since it was pretty mild, nothing came of it. In fact, I had to puke. That’s when I met Jack!

“Come along!” “Don’t even think about it. You want to kidnap me, but I shall scream. I’ve had a pretty strong lung as a little boy already.”

He gave me his business card. It said: Jack Harriman Bar manager. And he scribbled on the back. Tomorrow 10 a.m. in the Palace Hotel. If you’ve been to San Francisco now and say, “I don’t know any Palace Hotel,” I can’t help it. Back then, there was a Palace Hotel, or Palace Guest-house as we revolutionaries would call it.

I don’t want to say anything more about the details of my engagement because gangster secrets are everything to me. And they never declassify them.

The Eastside Bar, by Jean-Wadi and Zafira

Can we turn to the Eastside Bar period now? Do you know that one? Not yet? Then jet, or rather time-travel back to pre-revolutionary Chicago. When you’ve seen the Eastside Bar, you can calmly enter gangster heaven. No bar, no casino in Frisco or anywhere else can compete with the Eastside.

I crouched on my bar stool, had a coke with a shot in front of me and listened to a couple in love at the neighbouring table who had a deep discussion about the prices of rentals. Of course, it is outrageous to listen to private conversations and watch people fight, and my little angel tells me three times a day that nosiness is one of my most horrible qualities. And it knows a lot of my bad habits!

My 1st rehearsal!

“Miguel, you’re just hopeless!” “If you say so,” I said contritely. “Besides, you have no idea!” “Exactly!” I murmured. I was just getting another of those lectures. Jack paced up and down in front of me. Jack is responsible for morality. “You are stupid!” “I know!” I whispered.

I was getting quieter and he was getting louder. There you have a nice example of reverse proportionality. Our teacher, we always called Señor Tabacco because he always smoked the same brand of cigarettes: it’s the tobacco that counts, isn’t it?

Well, this teacher once explained indirect proportionality to us like this: “We assume there are 10 pirates on an island and they have 10 cans of compote. You have to stay on the island for 10 days. How many cans of compote can everyone eat in these 10 days? ” I was the first to get it out: “One can each, Señor!” “Right, but now 10 more pirates come to the island. How many cans does everyone get now? “” 1/2 can, Señor! ” “Correct, but now 20 pirates are coming to the island. How many cans does everyone get now? “” 1/4 can, Señor! “

Pirate compote

10  pirates →1 can for each

20  → ½ can for each

40 → ¼ can for each

etc. etc.

The Recipe for Pirate Compote, by Maher and Karla    

And that, dear fellow gangsters, is indirect proportionality! And it was the same with my voice compared to Jack’s: the more volume added to his voice, the more I missed! “First you bring both of us to the examining judge because you stick your head out of the basement window too early.”

***

“That reminds me of comrade Raphael’s story!” Zamir giggled, as he listened to the bio-audio.

***

“That was not my fault,” my voice grew louder again: “It was agreed that Richard would take the loot on right at the basement window. I relied on you, stuck my head out of the basement, said: ‘You are a real friend!’ Then came: ‘In the name of the law, you are under arrest!’ Richard and you, you were in charge of security. Then I was supposed to get the stuff to the ghetto and give it to Keith to distribute! ” “I know, I know!” Jack muffled his voice. “But you almost sang.”

“When?” “At the examining judge’s.”

“I, me?” “Yes, you.”

“Jack Harriman, I put up with a lot. After all, we’re a nice gang, and so on, but you can’t get me like that. I won’t sing, but when I get out of here,” I waved my arms around the cell as if to knock over its walls. “I’m going to go straight to the competition!”

“You won’t do that!” “You can be damn sure I will.” “Ridiculous! Trifle! “

The night was long, sleepless, uncomfortable. My little angel whispered that it was time to send father money to find a job, and it even rose to the claim that if I hadn’t joined the gang, I would not be in prison.

“Miguel Marajón.” “Yes.” “You know something about cars!” “Naturally, being a car mechanic by training!” “Then come down.” The judge’s car won’t start.” As I leaned over the engine, a man came up to me, “My name is Robert Jackson.” The guy has manners, he knows he has go to introduce himself. “Miguel Marajón.”

“When you’re done here, I’d like to speak to you for a few minutes.” I nodded. It was starting to get exciting. I didn’t know the man. “How old are you?” “16 ¾.” “So, you may get a youth sentence!” “Could be. I could even be acquitted if I make a comprehensive statement, but I won’t. It’s cold coffee, Mr. Jackson. “

He looked at me long and with piercing eyes. Then he lit a cigarette. The chair was comfortable. I looked at the whitewashed walls of the room. A bird sang outside.

“I’ll get you a lawyer, Mr. Miguel!”

If someone had told me I was a good person, I would not have been more amazed. The stupid bird sang again, and I knew that my angel had taken shape.

My little angel!

Miguel’s guardian angel takes shape, by Malik and Mao

The courthouse was full of people. Had they all come to look at me? You have got to be a significant person, Miguel, I thought, and straightened my shoulders. First the lecture of the indictment began. The jury was bored. I exchanged a glance with a young girl. Then I sat there thinking about yesterday afternoon. The man is crazy, I thought, just insane. To shoot such a kitschy scene in front of me. Perhaps I should still believe in Christian love, for my youth’s sake! This person was wound wrong.

Now the prosecutor got up. He was very fat and had a full beard. ‘Defendant Miguel Marajón, do you admit that you broke into the city bank on March 3, 2003?’ “Yes.” “Who was or were your accomplices?” “Jack Harriman! “Nobody else?” “I refuse to testify!” “Jack Harriman, who were your accomplices?” “I refuse to testify.”

“Miguel Marajón, the guard says that you had a gun. But it was not found. ” “I didn’t have a revolver.” “Jack Harriman, did you?” “No.”

“Then how do you explain that the bank clerk was threatened by 3, keep in mind 3 men, one of whom carried a revolver?” “I refuse to testify.” “Miguel Marajón?” “What did you ask?” “Miguel, you’re sleeping!”

“Sorry, I didn’t close my eyes last night.” “Why? “”My little angel was bothering me.” The audience groaned with subdued laughter, the judge asked for silence ..

Then my defence lawyer spoke up: “I think, colleague, you are going into too much detail! My client is a bit confused. ” The prosecutor turned back to me. “You are released from examination!”

I knew the break was only short. It would go on after lunch. And suddenly, I made a decision. It was dangerous, could put me behind bars for life, but I dared. It was the strange idea of an angel mixed with the reasonable logic of a devil, and I dared.

“Miguel Marajón, I ask you one last time: you are not ready to make a comprehensive statement?” “But I am.” A murmur went through the room, people looked at each other, Jack bit his lip, my defender scratched his head. “

“I raided the Citibank with Jack Harriman, … Dave Holk and Kenny Smith. “Dave Holk and Kenny Smith belonged to the Davis gang, our main opponents!

A huge company!

“2 ½ years, on probation!” The jukebox played some song that I didn’t know, “Road to Gangster Paradise”, or something like that. For songs I know, I usually keep my mouth shut so as not to spoil my enjoyment.

***

“You were good!” Said father George Harriman, pulling on his pipe. “Poor Jack!”

“Yes, they had already been investigating against him. Although he agreed with my testimony, he was burdened from the start. “

“It is doubly unfortunate that you have to go to Germany instead. Mackie has got to be replaced. “

“Me, I… to Germany? I don’t speak German, and what am I supposed to do there, anyway?”

George looked at me. “You do not want to?”

“I…!!!” “Well, then we’ll make you go. You’ll be on tomorrow’s plane!!! ” “But I would…” “You’ll fly, if not, you died for us.” “… do better elsewhere.” “Nonsense! How would you know what you are good at?” I walked! Futile. There was no talking to the old man. I left the Eastside and strolled a bit in the streets. The street lamps were already shining. Busy people were heading for the bus stations. They all do the same thing day in and day out. They get up in the morning just to get back to bed in the evening. They work like crazy to make money and they pay taxes to be allowed to spend it again. They think they are human and they are machines. They think they are honest citizens and yet they are all cold-blooded terrorists. If they aren’t ready to do anything – and I mean anything, down to murders –, or the others suspect so, they’ll have to go to the villas miserias or the ghetto, and there they’ll just look stupid.

Yet when the boss says something to them, they usually think: ‘Shall he slide my hump down!’ And in each of these moments, they become spiritual terrorists!

The city fell silent! People were at home watching boring thrillers or baseball matches. It was cold and damp!

I lit a cigarette! Miguel, you have to go to Germany tomorrow. Where is that? As far as I know in Europe …

You have to cross the ocean. So far, I have only been to the ocean once, in Villa Gesell with Uncle Ramón. There is endless water that goes into the sky, waves with white spray above that came from who knows where, now and then a bottle floating on it … It was hard to imagine what could be behind it.

This Señor Tabacco is a smurf. Instead of babbling about indirect proportionality, he should have explained where Germany is.

Suddenly I see a young girl on the other side of the street. In fact, she might have been at the courthouse the other day. Certainly, a college bee. Maybe I should ask her what’s going with Germany. She had such learned glasses on, she had got to know that.

“Do you know anything about Germany?” I accosted her directly, and got an unexpectedly positive answer. “I come from Germany!” “Well, that’s lucky, because I have to go to Germany tomorrow, and I have to find out.”

“Can you speak German?”  she asked. “Not at all.” I shrugged desperately. “Can you teach me?” She laughed hoarsely. “Not in one day, for sure. It’s hard. Why do you have to go to Germany?” “On business.” “Don’t you have an interpreter, a google translator at least?” “No, where from?” “Then I don’t know either.” “But if you are German, you’d have to know where Germany is!”

“I know that, of course.” “Yes, where?” She looked at me in amazement.

“I don’t have a fever, believe me. For you, who were born in Germany, it is easy, you have absorbed everything with your mother’s breast milk, so to speak, but I am from a small village in the Mexican desert, I haven’t the vaguest! It’s somewhere across the ocean, isn’t it?”

We had slowly walked on without realizing it and were standing in front of the Eastside. “May I invite you to a Coke?” “With pleasure!” For a studious bee she was easy to get. My good luck!

We went down the steps to the taproom. It was pretty busy. People were dancing. Only with difficulty did we even find seats for two people. Keith came to take the order. “Two Cokes!” “With a dash or lemon?” “Lemon.” As a gangster, you can’t afford getting drunk, and she was watching her health, probably.

Keith diligently disappeared into the crowd. “So where is Germany now?” “In Europe!” She drew on a napkin: “This is England (the British isles). This is France, it looks like a hexagon. Spain is like a fist. Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg lie to the west of Germany, Poland to the east, Denmark and Scandinavia to the north. South of Switzerland and Austria and down here Italy, like a boot, and Greece, a bit like a hand …”

“You are a talent,” I marvelled. “Oh, we learnt that at school. Do you want to talk to the Ossies or the Wessies?” “Are these different types of Germans?”

“Yes,” she said. “Because there were once two German states. There are East Germans and West Germans. “What are you then?” “I am a West German. They are richer. ” “Well, your good luck!” “Say, are you really as stupid as you do or are you just pretending?” “This is an insult. I demand satisfaction. ” She nodded darkly: “We can duel any time.”

Now Keith brought the two cokes. “It’s just a shame that I have to go to Germany tomorrow. How about you? ” “I’m only going in two weeks. I’m an exchange student!” “Well, I’ll come to see you in three weeks. Your Address?”

“Connie Finkenberg, Hasenbalgstrasse 3, Hamburg.”

“Finchhill on Hare Baby Street, oh how cute! I leave the choice of weapons to you!” “How generous. I’ll find something dangerous. Coming to think about it, what’s your name? ” “Miguel Marajón.” I choked on my Coke. Miguel, you deserve to be slapped in the face. How quickly will they snatch you up in Europe if you tell your real name to every daisy you meet?

She stood up: “I expect you to be with us in three weeks, Miguel. Bring a second with you, will you? “” Yes! “” Bye! ” Bye!” What an amusing joker she had been, pretending to be a gangster bride. But back then I thought I would never see her again.

***

“Stop singing nonsense operas, Jack! I’m going with him. After all, Miguel has no idea about the company, does he?” Keith had told Jack during a prison visit. “All right!” sighed Jack, jealous and tired. So now he was sitting next to me on the plane, telling me how to buckle up and chattering incessantly.

“If another group offered you more, would you get out?” “No. I do not think so.” “Sheep’s head!” He roared with laughter. And then he whispered in my ear: “A gangster always goes to the highest bidder!” “Ah!”

“Now I’m going to tell you what to expect in Germany. We have a contract with a large company. Their boss supports us financially and we do him small favours for it. Got it?”

“No.” “Then too bad.” With hindsight, I can see that this boss was something like a sponsor in today’s counter-revolutionary movement. He has the money, and lets the mercs do the dirty work.

Back then I just thought what nerve Keith had. Stubbornly letting me deteriorate! What if I had to know that somehow?

“What did you do with the girl yesterday?” “I spoke to her.” “Man, Miguel!” “I wanted to ask her about Germany, but she insulted me and now we want to duel. She even gave me her address. She is West German and lives on Rabbit’s Nest Street or something in Hamburg.”

“We are going to Hamburg right now. Are you going to visit her? ” “Perhaps.” The conversation seemed to have ended, but this book has only just begun, and that’s a shame in that I now have something embarrassing to report. I would have left it out, but my little angel is really a nuisance, and that’s why I’d better tell it like it is. So the fact is: me, Miguel Marajón, the greatest gangster and what else has gotten bad. I, the greatest, got air sickness. I had to reach for the paper bags and throw up.

Yes, I know, you nine-times cunning, now you are giggling: “That wants to be a gangster!” No wonder, he passed over to the revolution so gingerly. “In for an easy life, heh?”

Be reassured that I have suffered enough for this bummer. When we landed at Paris Orly Airport, the angel whispered with bull bass: ‘Buy postcards for mom and Inès!’

And so, I had to sneak, poor drips, still green, yellow and miserable through the airfield hall until I found the cards at one boutique, the stamps at the other and the mailbox at the other end of the hall. Mama would have put me to bed!

Then I slept like a log until we arrived in Hamburg and I was rudely awoken. Maybe it was a real cop who wanted to arrest me?

Miguel’s Dream, by Guillaume and Renée

In any case, I dreamed very nicely of my real guardian angel who I know exists, small but with big wings and who was feasting with the red devils (my gangster colleagues)  up in the sky and having a good time while I was running in a moonscape towards a huge boulder like they have in Pueblo del Desierto as well as in Cumbrecita on which Connie Finchhill was sitting and bombarding me with glowing red needles, a bit like red beams, but back then, we didn’t know about red beams yet.

“Why don’t you throw them back, you stupid, I’m giving you enough ammunition?”

Suddenly I got a wet Lufthansa towel in the face and Keith roared: “Wake up, otherwise we’ll fly to Copenhagen!”

It’s getting exciting!

Getting Presents under Bloodsucking Capitalism, by Bashir and Sevim

“How about this? The Sophia sing and speak doll costs only 33 Euro.” “Err.”

“Or here, the laugh doll Pita for € 12.95. Doesn’t she have a cute smile? And you get sleep doll Nunus as a bonus for only 9.95 €.”

“Yes, I think I’ll take it! Where’s the housewares department? “

“Down in the basement. Should I wrap the doll up as a gift? “

I’m worried about Inès. If Señor Tabacco has not been replaced, she will learn as little arithmetic as I did and will end badly.

In the household department, I bought an electric vegetable cutter on a battery – we didn’t have electricity at home, no overland lines to Pueblo del Desierto, and no revolutionary block energy works yet, obviously –, and for Dad I bought a new pipe and the new Irish Spring soap, which was recommended to me as particularly good. When I returned to our guesthouse with my parcels and parcels, Keith showed me a bird, as expected.

“This is almost normal, boy! You are turning petty bourgeois!”

He was lying on the bed smoking his 32nd cigarette that day and explained that Mackie was not at home and that we would have to go to the company first. I didn’t bother with him and instead wrote a letter to Mexico. I told them I had found a good job, that I would be in Germany as a representative of my company, Harriman Inc., and earning plenty of foreign exchange. After chewing my pen for a while, I wrote that hopefully the gifts would be good, money would follow soon. The soap would have the wonderful scent of the ‘Irish spring’ – then I tried to draw a map of Europe for Inès, with Ireland on it, almost as good as Connie’s –, and that the electrical devices had a two-year warranty, even if I did not know exactly what it meant, that you’d get something back if you did nothing wrong maybe.

Then we were finally invited in to our partner company. We took an elevator to the 7th floor of a large building, sat in an aseptic waiting room with lounge chairs, and waited 1½ hours. I was just telling Keith that I was going to blow myself up in exactly 2 seconds and 33 milliseconds when the door opened and a blonde secretary looked in and said, “Keith Harriman! Miguel Marajón! “

Thankfully, there was nobody else in the waiting room so we could keep our incognito. We came into a meeting room with three armchairs room and a long desk, where two girls sat, typing forms in the sweat of their faces.

We waited another 5 minutes, then we were taken to a large room. It contained 2 small sofas, a low table, a desk and behind it a swivel chair on which a fat man was sitting. Oh, yes, and the colours were mainly blue and yellow. Back then, I did not know this was the flag of the Ukrainian lands, which after the revolution became a hub of their Satanic fasco Return to the State plot. He spoke on two phones at the same time and only nodded to us briefly.

“He is very rich!” Keith explained to me. “The amount of stocks he has got!”

“What are stocks?”

“Don’t ask me. Shares in an enterprise that you can buy and sell for profit, but the other players and sometimes the government have to approve your every move.”

This is something that would happen to me often in my gangster career of almost 40 years. People just start chatting although they have no clue.

For example, my publisher back then, when in prison, I was trying to write memoirs, like Jacques Henriot, one of the anti-Communist and counter-revolutionary fasco terrorists of the first hour. These days both of us are choir boys. “Can’t you write a little more realistically?” this publisher asked me. “No gangster would say it that way. ” “Man, I need to know. I’m from the industry. ” Then he just looked at me stupidly and tapped his head.

Meanwhile the fat man had been droning on. “So you understand me? ½ million for everyone, no less. And here is the list of names, all famous politicians: Maas (he has foreign aid under him, a miserly idiot, not essential), Merkel (well, if you can tow her), Van der Leihen (top-EU Commission snake, if she doesn’t bite you) etc. They will bring you money, the Germans will follow through. I know that, after all, I’ve been doing business in Germany for 20 years. With that money you then bribe the research institutes and pharma firms to give you the virus. You release it. The DAX plummets, me and my pals will have sold out before, and we’ll all be rich…”

“Ahh!” said Keith.

“Ahh!” I echoed.

“And how do we get hold of them?” I asked excitedly.

“Merkel’s grandson plays soccer and she, or rather her limousine, brings him there…” “Well, does that mean we have to make him slip in training?” “Oh nonsense, you’ll have to lull security, you have got to know how, you’re a specialist. If need be, you may send girls and boys to their necks! ” “Bah, immoral,” I bleated. Thereupon Keith gave me a chin hook. Soon we rolled on the carpet in front of the famous American-German industrialist. Sometimes the one had the upper hand, sometimes the other, but mostly I, which made me extremely happy.

The Big Sponsor, by Jean-François and Alexandra

The great German industrialist with the many stocks, of which I didn’t know back then exactly what they were, luckily we no longer need them in the revolution –, was watching us amused.

Finally, he raised his hands and said: “People,” in German you call persons people to say guys. “Make love not war!” In view of his thundering voice, we immediately started up. “You know, Keith’s a bit stupid,” I said. “He doesn’t allow me the girls.”

“I see,” the fat man nodded. “Now back to business. You get the bribes individually. You start with Merkel, then Maas, then you turn to Van der Leyen etc. I’ll give you an appointment for tomorrow morning. You will then get in touch with my managing director, Mr. Finchhill! “

I almost fell off my chair. “Miguel, you are so pale!” “May he lie down on the sofa for a moment?” Keith asked solicitously. I bet he had not forgiven me the joke about the girls.

“I just don’t understand what upsets him about my managing director.” The fat man frowned. Keith stood up in front of me. “Miguel, we can’t give up. We have to arrest these politicians! “

“Finchhill! Finchhill!” I groaned. “See, Keith?!” our patron wondered. “He has something against my managing director!” “But on the contrary,” I breathed. “He might even be likeable to me. I just don’t know how many of his kind there are here in Hamburg.”

But you have to admit, dear comrades, that I was not spared anything. If Connie learnt what a bad gangster I was, she would lose all respect, and hate me the way you and I hate the Contras. And we don’t have a very high opinion of them, we know that.

At home in the hotel the obligatory lecture by Keith: “Girls are there to snack on and not to love! Where would we go if you wanted to make an impression on the father of every bird in town” etc. etc. etc.

“Never heard of women’s emancipation,” I tried to counter. “Maybe Connie will also become a gangster.” But basically, he was right. We just had to hope that the scandal would not become too obvious.

Mr. Finkenberg received us warmly. He was a huge figure and blond and wore a black suit.

“You sit down! Over there in the briefcase on the sofa are the toads for Merkel. Be careful who you give it to, the really influential employees, otherwise it’s wasted money!” His room was as luxuriously furnished as that of his boss.

“Do you drink whiskey? What was the name again? “

“Keith Harriman.”

“And you?” “My name is Miguel Marajón.” “A fancy name, almost like mine. We can drink brotherhood.” Of course, we refused the booze.

The telephone rang. He took off the receiver. “Of course,” he blasted theatrically. “Send her on.” He hung up. I suspected evil, but didn’t dare ask.

The door opened. In kicked a tall girl with learned glasses … Connie. The blow almost hit me. Keith whispered to me, “If you want, I’ll shoot her.”

“May I introduce my daughter Cornelia. Two of our business friends: Keith Harriman and Miguel Marajón.”

She blushed. I’d rather not know what I looked like

“Good afternoon, Mr. Harriman! Good day, Mr. Marajón!” She indicated a curtsey in the direction of her father. Then she said to me: “Well, do you know now where Germany is?”

I was desperately looking for a mouse hole. However, the house was too well maintained. Mr. Finchhill was almost as shocked as I was.

“Do you know each other?” He was bright red.

“Vaguely. We met in Chicago,” I sought refuge in the truth.

“Cornelia,” His tone was very sharp, but he was smiled. “Do you have to hang out with anyone you’ve just met?”

“But you do know him,” she replied sharply as he. That completely knocked me off the track. “Hold me!” I whispered to Keith.

“Mr. Marajón, I want answers. How did that happen? “

“It was like this! I spoke to her because I didn’t know anything about Germany. Fortunately, she came from Germany. She enlightened me, but then insulted me and we want to duel. Have you actually decided on a weapon?” I called over the giant’s shoulder.

“Yes, my father!”

“Miguel Marajón, you’re a bit childish for a gangster,” Old Finchhill said thoughtfully. “If I had the say, I would perhaps advocate the termination of the contract between you and our company, insofar as you yourself are concerned. Cornelia, we’ll talk later!”

He was throwing us out. As a farewell, Keith, who of course had underestimated the whole situation in all its complexity, spat at Mr. Finchhill’s feet.

Terrorist beginnings…

Terrorist beginnings, by Jean-Saïd and Natalie

“But, no,” said our fat friend. “After all, Mr. Finchhill has only private reasons for rejecting our cooperation. And he is only the managing director. I can override him. Kidnap and bribe as much as you can! “

“You see how bad hierarchy is for morality!” Lénina interjected.

“And so, we had to start our kidnapping rampage, as bad and ill-conceived as it was. Oh, first of all, we didn’t start at all, but went to bed and drank whiskey from toothbrush glasses. Then we turned our backs on each other Prussian eagle-style and considered our further roles separately.

However, I could not concentrate, I always thought of a pretty girl with dark blonde hair and a sharp voice.

Therefore, the development of our plan was essentially left for Keith. He told me that the best way to get to Bonn-Berlin was to contact Merkel as representatives of a particularly efficient American armaments company, Pershing-Lockheed Inc., and enlist her as consultant.

In the Ministry of Defence, they got rid of us relatively quickly. “The gentlemen are busy!” Same in the Federal Chancellery. Our offers of money were met with icy silence!

 “No, thank you!” said one of our conversation partner. “I can’t afford that in my career. Otherwise the media power would cost me my head. “

I think he had an exaggerated notion of media power and independence. All this meant was that the fat man – you know him, still one of the top German fascos, Arnim Pappberger –, and Connie’s father were small fry, mavericks at best, if their plot had been widely approved, the media would have been fed a phoney story.

I thought about what to do, Keith too. Neither had a brainwave!

“I have an idea!” I suddenly shouted shortly after midnight, we had already switched to vodka. “We’ll just grab her somewhere on the way. “That will look almost as bad as if we bribed the security forces. We’ll show them that they are zeros! “

Keith was thrilled. By now we had reached Mackie, too. He was ready to come in again. We immediately started the preparations.

“This morning, the former chancellor, Angela Merkel, was attacked and kidnapped by two unknown men on her way from her grandson’s soccer training to the Arte television studio, where she was to introduce the show Mecklenburg greets united Europe. According to residents, the two masked men blocked the street with a Volkswagen bus and transferred Merkel and her chauffeur into their sports car, which they used to flee at 200 km / h. Despite many clues from the population, no trace has yet been found that points to the kidnappers. Mr. X is the responsible detective. We asked him … “

“Now!” Keith said.

I dialled the Hamburg police number. The towel that Keith had artfully tied around my mouth prevented me from breathing. The cop must have believed we were on the phone from the underworld.

I said, “We are asking for a ½ million dollar ransom and the release of Jack Harriman, who is detained in the United States. Thank you!”

“You idiot!” said Keith. “You forgot to say that you are Merkel’s kidnapper.”

Then he turned on the radio. There Mr. X just said: ‘We have just received a call from our headquarters. A man called and said in Spanish: ‘We are demanding a ½ dollar ransom and the release of Jack Harriman, who is jailed in the United States. Thank you! ’It’s not certain, but it can be assumed that these are the kidnappers of the former chancellor.”

Then cheeky little Tanya was audited, who said: “As Tanya Simenon, I will write one of two-hundred bestsellers: ‘Maigret and the polite kidnapper’.”

That way, I, not the fat man was rubbished by the media. Keith switched off. “Please let me go,” Merkel whimpered. “I can tell you the low-down about Minsk.”

“Don’t sing opera, please!” Keith silenced her, then turned to me. “And now?”

“Stupid question. Get out of Hamburg as quickly as possible. They will find out that we have made calls from here and will block the exit roads. We don’t have a minute to lose. “

I dragged the bundle wrapped in a blanket with Angela Merkel out of the garden house we had broken into and back into the car. We roared off.

“What did you do with the chauffeur?” I asked Keith. “A few blows with the revolver grip, but I don’t think he’s dead. Pity?” “Nonsense,” I said. “Self-preservation instinct.”

The empty country road lay in front of me. “What about the bribes?” “Let van der Leihen write the checks, that will be easiest, the EU is richer than the German government. But first we have to get out Jack and the others.”

So, we turned into a forest path, somewhere on the country road, between Hamburg and Berlin and dictated, after we had fed her rusks and tea, to the stripped Merkel. She looked a little miserable. Our second message ran as follows:

“Dear Finder!

I’m Angela Merkel, a prisoner of the MK movement. I am fine according to the circumstances and am not being tortured. I put the demands of my guards in writing here:

1) a ½ dollar ransom,

2) the release of Jack Harriman, Dave Holk and Kenny Smith

3) unimpeded departure for my guards to a country of their choice

signed Angela Merkel”

“Good!” Said Keith, after reading it again. Then, because Keith had forgotten, Merkel had to write under it:

“P.S. We expect a response in 6 hours after the discovery of this letter, at the latest in 24 hours.”

Now we could debrief Merkel and made her swear that she would tell the truth about the Minsk agreements, namely that the West was never going to respect Russian security concerns, and that all the Minsk negotiations had served for was to provide a breathing space for Ukraine to rearm, with massive help by the Western arms industry and NATO. Then we tied her to the back seat and gagged her. She groaned, but we couldn’t risk her calling for help. I took the revolver and kept her in check while Keith drove. Soon, it became too boring for me and I stunned her with the handle. Strangely, she started snoring shortly afterwards. So, I was being rather humane, I noted this as plus point with my little angel.

“Keith,” I asked curiously. “Why do we bother about Dave Holk and Kenny Smith?”

“Old story, they helped out Mackie and Richard once. Got it? “”Got it.”

Here the gangster’s manuscript breaks off. He may be languishing in a prison somewhere in our neoliberal dictatorship. Thank you for your solidarity donations!

Picking up the virus in Wuhan

Picking up the Virus in Wuhan, by Olivier and Danièle

“As a matter of fact, that last line was buffaloshit of course,” Miguel chuckled. “We got our 500,000 €, not by the government and certainly not by donations, but by stopping at a bank, getting out of the car, pushing Angela Merkel through the door at gun point, and when everybody recognised the former chancellor, asking for the dough.

“Jack, Dave, and Kenny were released on the same day as a result of a simple verbal note from the German to the U.S. government. The Americans were in the middle of breaking all their arms agreements with Russia, making threats to integrate Ukraine into the West, fighting a trade war with China, preparing for continued war in the Middle East, and specifically, against Iran, sanctioning Cuba and Venezuela, increasing the tariffs on the Germans etc., they could not have cared less for a couple of what they thought were apolitical gangsters.

While Mackie was holding the fort in Germany, Jack, Kenny and Dave recovered from prison in the U.S. and Merkel was enjoying her post-trauma retirement, Keith and I were lying low in Connie’s student apartment in Paris, where she was learning French.

Van der Leyen had written a curt reply to our threat, saying that if we released the Corona virus –so named, of course, after the beer my father and my boss used to drink at our village pub –, she would stop the whole world and make it difficult even for gangsters to get a buck. Yet that was double-speak. At the same time, we received encouraging calls from several big research institutes and pharmaceutical companies, so the bribe had worked. All that remained was to kidnap miserly, old Maas.

“This time, since we had no more prisoners to free, we would ask for a lot more money, as well as safe passage, of course. Yet then came the message from George that Jack and Kenny had the bird flu and could not travel. Dave was already expecting us in Wuhan. We left Maas, whom the fat man had already declared small fry, aside and forged ahead. Mind you, with hindsight, he was responsible for entertaining over half of the world, South America, Africa, and the poorer parts of Asia, but we declared him small fry. This is how callous you are as a gangster. If Germany had been a difficult call, China would put me totally out of my league.

“Even though she protested that she did not know Chinese and would not know how to help me, I wanted to take Connie along as a good luck charm.

“No way, I am against spreading disease, even such a comparatively harmless flu virus,” she said. “In fact, I would like the world to become a much better place. And remember our duel. I only let you off, because you had urgent things to do for my father and his boss. Soon, it will be your turn!”

2)Sneaking back in

Sneaking back in, by Antoine and Murielle

“So, Now I understand,” said Jean-Fidel, my wife’s bastard son with comrade Jean, whom I love dearly, we all love him, don’t misunderstand me, but it sometimes pains me that I have so little connection to this brilliant young comrade who is supposed to be my son, but in fact isn’t. These were actually some of our star hours, under the night sky of Cumbrecita this year, where we finally had some time for each other. “You went to Wuhan, got the virus, helped spread it for the capitalists, then went to Russia, and then met Muhammed and the others. But how did you get to Venezuela? That’s where you met Mama, didn’t you? And what happened to Connie?”

“I left out that part, I’ll get to it. In between my initial training with the Harrimans in 2003, my arrest during the bank robbery and my false testimony at the trial in 2007, and my missions with the Germans starting in 2016 and culminating in Wuhan 2019, which I pride myself were instrumental in bringing about the revolution, a few years actually passed each time. I snuck back into South America several times, and worked, not as a gangster, although we robbed some banks and petrol firms as well, but as a right-wing guerrillero, or we nowadays would call it a merc.

“Don’t call us the only violent types. You know, there were left-wing guerrilleros, from Che Guevara to the Montoneros, the FAL, the ERP, who loved their rifle as much as we did… I read this book back then in Venezuela, Love my rifle more than you, and I quoted it to Claudia, I mean Mama, during one of our quarrels. To give her ammunition actually because I was fed up with being a merc. She was pregnant with Inès. I wanted to run away with her to Germany, but that seemed a bit uncouth. So, we went to France instead. She stayed there, I went back to Caracas, and then to Berlin, to Wuhan, and to Russia, as you guessed. So, I will figure in our Russian and Chechen comrades’ upcoming presentations as well, don’t worry!”

But Connie, you wouldn’t guess what became of her! She joined the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation as a revolutionary scholar actually, not a Communist comrade, mind you, but left-wing enough to work at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation. In 2021, Year Zero when I repented, I met comrade Michael from Berlin. I told him, I had been there already, and about Connie, just as a joke, but then he very earnestly told me that he knew her.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Yes, of course. She is my age, and I am fifty-five. You think your Papa is an old man, do you?”

Jean-Fidel grinned sheepishly, as we both know full well, that Jean is even older, 64 by now, and still about to become father of yet another son, and from another mother, comrade Rashida from the Somali Lands, or the Horn of Africa, or Djibouti, former French colony to be precise. “You know about Tahir to come soon?” asked Jean-Fidel, drawing pictures in the sand before the guest-house-steps with a stick. “Papa, eh comrade Jean says, Rashida was too strict, he had to mellow her down.”

“Well, she has got to be strict, as a revolutionary accountant,” I nodded. “If anybody embezzles something, there might soon not be enough for everyone to go around.”

“But as far as I remember, she was strict only because she was afraid her daughter Adilah and her boy-friend Jean-Vladimir were taking drugs and about to become drug addicts.”

“Yes, that may be,” I said. “But it still means that I am not an old man.” We both had to laugh.

“Did she marry?” “Claudia, I mean mama…” I tried to laugh some more. “…Yes, she married me.” “No, I know she loves you, don’t be silly, Papa, eh, no, I mean, that German bourgeois girl, Connie, who then joined the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation?”

“Yes, she did, a comrade called Volkmar, and she has two daughters, and she says that episode with me is just her dark side, and that she is a good East German proletarian social scientist now.”

“So, you made it all up?” “Hell, no, we revolutionaries all have trajectories, and many of us have Mr. Jekyll and Dr. Hide natures. You know, murder by night, be a doctor by day. So does Connie!”

“Are you still in touch with her?” “Yes, and lately, with the intranet, I hear more of her. It has the power to bring you back together with the people in your past.”

“Does she still want to duel you?”

“No, she biomessages that she is proud I am no longer a violent type. But let’s get back in. Aren’t you dying to know the latest on their IF plot?”

“Yes,” said Claudia when they had sat down inside. “But not before you tell us about your life as a merc.”

“Before I do that, I have to tell you more about the ways I found to sneak back in. After all, I was working with a well-known American gangster family and because of the extradition treaties forced on the South American countries by the Yankees, warrants for my arrest were out in almost all of them.

“The first time I got in the same way as I first came, in the trunk of a vehicle, only in the opposite direction and with the drivers aware of my existence. I was even able to squeeze in a visit to my parents. I had bought a toy llama for my sister Inès.”

“But when I asked you for one you did not bring it!” comrade Inès said reproachfully.

“But I brought you one, remember, you were not at home! I left it with your mama!” Jean said. Inès blushed. That was when he had slept with mamon and made Little, well, by now grown-up Jean-Fidel. And the next time around, in Year 15, he had made love to her and out had come Little Ramón, her pride and joy next to Julie. She was going to be a revolutionary ecologist and Ramón a revolutionary doctor, but still! Why did these senior comrades have to be so open about these matters?

Hélène who had picked up her thought cord apparently, said: “So, that it does not become an issue for the young revolutionaries. The revolution is for free love, and we stand by it.”

And Papa Miguel acted even more naïve: “Yes, Papa Jean brought it to you. I was very busy at the time, I’ll tell you about it if you give me chance…And after all, comrade Jean is like second papa to you, isn’t he?”

“Then from there, I went on by train, bus, and hitch-hiking to Caracas. I could not risk taking a train, I did not have proper ID. And that is when I met your mother. My uncle Ramón, best friend of my old man, picked me up at the bus station and pushed a Venezuelan passport into my hand. “Don’t worry, next time you will no longer have to travel for so long. And we shall go to Argentina, maybe you remember, you have been there as a boy, visiting with me and Carmen in Cumbrecita, and we took you to Córdoba and Villa Gesell.

“The reason for your trip this time is not family of course, although it may come as a side benefit, but an assignment by your bosses that requires you to be in Argentina. Put in a nutshell, we want to blackmail the phoney left. You are familiar with the treachery of the Kirchner government?”

“Yeah, only I would not even call them left. They are not even socialists and social-democrats, just neo-liberal turncoats,” I said looking absent-mindedly at a beautiful girl about sixteen in a red dress who had sat down opposite us in the tram. “Hola, Claudia!” papa Ramón interrupted himself. “I did not even see you come. I was so busy explaining your cousin Miguel his mission here. Claudia, meet Miguel! Miguel, meet Claudia!” I have to say after all these years, I was smitten with your mother, Little Inès. I remember myself humming. “I didn’t know what beautiful a sound a name can be.” And it turned out to be programmatic as well. We stole, just like ordinary gangsters, and even from people who called themselves left, but we were doing good at the same time, because we were debunking their hypocrisy, running after IMF stabilisation packages instead of helping the people.

“Of course, it will take time to prove their corruption, they have only just started,” papa Ramón explained. “But you can lay the groundwork, put in listening devices, find trustworthy allies within their administration, talk to people.”

“Not during this visit, although I told Claudia about my little angel, and that I was not as bad as she might think, and that she should wait for me to come around. And the second time around, we already made you, Inès, and got married. But again I am galloping ahead of myself. So, that was the first way to get into South America, by train, bus, autostop, what have you.”

Time snake of Argentinian pre-revolutionary history, by Jean-Fidel and Lénina

“The second time, I came in style, on a regular flight, with the Venezuelan passport, comrade Ramón had organised for me. Notice, no boats back then, let alone regular ecological, meaning wind-and solar-powered transatlantic ferries like the ones we take these days. And I asked both the Harriman’s as well as comrade Ramón and his people, wasn’t there a way to get at Maduro’s enemies, Guaidó

 and his U.S. and European sponsors, the same way we had gotten at the Kirchners?”

“Yes,” said comrade Ramón. “At least we could let them know we know they are American puppets.”

“We’ll get to that in a moment, I promise. In a way, you could say we were defending the revolution before it even happened. In fact, from 2019-21, we had a brief imperialist interlude in Venezuela, like they had in China from 1978-2021, and in Russia from 1992-21.”

Time snake of Venezuelan pre-revolutionary history, by Emmanuel and Laurence

Therefore, when we came to Mexico in 2018-19 together – Claudia, Inès and I, you, Inès, were nine years old at the time, how time flies –, I decided to get a different passport, this time a U.S. one from the Harrimans, and enter Mexico by airplane as a normal commercial traveller who, just on a whim, would have sought to combine business with pleasure and taken his family.

“We were almost caught, because while I had a brand-new American passport identifying me as Miguel Sanchez, rather than Marajón, I almost fell backwards into comrade Claudia’s arms when the Mexican custom’s official asked me what kind of business I was travelling for.

I said: “Oil, of course!” and showed him my business card identifying me as an Exxon manager.

Time snake of Mexican pre-revolutionary history, by Faroukh and Sarah

Fortunately, the brand name had allayed his suspicions, and we were let in, and on all three missions, in all three countries, the Harrimans, I, and our local allies pursued our twin goals, extorting from the Phoney Left, robbing the  New Right, and – generally – sowing as much chaos as we could, because that is good for gangster business, especially drug and weapons trade. By the way, I met the custom’s brigadier again after the revolution, he was now working at the port of Altamira and he apologised: “Think about it, even if I had been a spontaneous custom’s brigade member in the revolution I would have had to ask you for the purpose of your travel: holiday, educational, revolutionary barter correspondence, wouldn’t I?” He seemed quite glad when I did not take offence. You see, people fear a gangster.

3)  Ferment in Mexico: “The Top 0.00001 Percent are finished!”

The End of Pemex, by Jean-Luc and Marius

 2012:  The End of PEMEX

To make a long story short, we, meaning me, Jack, and Keith participated in the strike at PEMEX. I was 26 years old, Jack and Keith were slightly older. None of us had ever held down a job for more than a few days at a time, and that only to give us entry into a business we wanted to rob. And now we were standing in front of the PEMEX headquarters with thousands of other workers and were yelling our lungs out. “Mexico’s oil belongs to the people!” Then, by some strange coincidence, I spotted somebody from our village only a few rows down. “Just wait a minute!” I told Jack and Keith, and sidled up to papa’s Indio friend, or rather his son. I knew that both father and son worked at PEMEX. It was the son. “Hola, Popol. How is your papa?” “Oh, you are José’s son, aren’t you? My papa’s name is Popol, that’s Mayan for mat, I am Balam, that means Jaguar. I did not know you also work at PEMEX. Which site?” “Oh,” I said. “I don’t work at PEMEX, I…” I had to quickly find an excuse that not only motivated mine, Keith, and Jack’s presence here, but also would induce young Balam to help us.” “…I am a Communist, from the Mexican Communist Party. And Keith and Jack over there are from the CPUSA.” I waved them to come over. “Oh, really?” said Balam. “You must help me, comrade Miguel! I also want to join and a.s.a.p., because I believe the 0.00001%, they no longer know what to do, and the masses no longer want them. Yet so far and for the longest time I have only been a candidate member.” “Look!” said Keith, “we’ll even help you join the CPUSA , and we’ll get you a good trade union job in America.  Your papa, what is he by profession?” “Village grocer, and farmer, of course. In our village, everybody is a farmer.” “We shall help you,…but we need to see the big boss.” “That shouldn’t be too difficult. Look, the colleagues have already forced their way into the building.”

On the heels of Balam, the Jaguar and with his help we pushed ourselves across the overcrowded into the office of the CEO, Lazaró Cárdenas, who had taken on the name of the PEMEX founder as a moniker. Of course, the Mexican people and especially the Pemex workers saw the dismantling of the state petrol company Pemex as the scam that it was. Capitalism was not being dismantled, just one particular outgrowth of it: the state monopoly or oligopoly behaving like a private enterprise, and yet providing sinecures to all its managers. Their anger turned against president André Obrador and his phoney leftism. It was in Mexico that we would put our idea of blackmailing the phoney left into operation the first time. And the PEMEX boss was going to help us. “We need an audience with the president. We have a business proposition to make to him.” Cárdenas barely blinked. “I believe you, but the president is very busy. Why don’t you tell me what it is all about, and I will speak for you.” “Well, Lazaró,” said Jack. “We misspoke. We actually have two ideas, one for you, one for him. Let us first tell you about the one for you. You sell us a certain amount of Pemex oil, cheap…”

“I’d love to,” said Lazaró. “But I’d have to consult with the government. I am only a state employee. You can hear the workers chanting: ‘Mexico’s oil belongs to the people!’”

“Of course,” I hastened to assure him. “We only want to sell it on behalf of the Mexican people, so they can profit from it, and not only the elite, and we shall sell it to ordinary Americans, not the elite either.”

Cárdenas nodded gravely. “Then you may show me your papers. I’ll sign anything. But you have to help me get out of the building. Because I have to talk to the president about it. And what’s the second scheme?”

Once we had loosened his ties, he called Obrador for us. “Listen André, two things! Oil for the people, and hugs, not gunshots.”

Obrador received us behind a huge desk that made him look like a North American capitalist rather than a social-democratic, let alone Communist revolutionary. “I think he’ll be easy to get!” whispered Jack. “Leave him to me!”

“We know that your two great plans, oil for the people, and hugs, not gunshots are shams.”

“What makes you think that?” Obrador asked, seemingly unperturbed, although he appeared to become a little bit pale below his sun tan.

“Well, for one thing, Mexican oil is not free, and not even cheap enough to make a real difference in the lives of ordinary and poorer Mexicans,” I said. “And a lot of it is smuggled to the United States.”

“So, you want to blackmail me?” Obrador stammered. “But you won’t succeed!” He regained his composure and even had a tiny inkling of a cynical  smile on his face. “You only know about the oil smuggling because you yourselves are involved in it, people won’t believe your accusations against me. Unless diverted, a certain contingent of oil is sold cheap to the needy.”

“How generous!” Keith tried an infectious laughter which Jack and I joined obligingly. Obrador remained cool.

2018: Hugs, not gunshots

Hugs, not Gunshots, by Zamir and Odile

The idea of hugs not gunshots as put forward upon our suggestion by Obrador  was to buy the drugs cheap from the drug dealers against a promise of immunity, then destroy the drugs before they caused any more harm. Buy cheap we would, but then we wouldn’t destroy them but sell them on!

Appeasing the drug lords did not work anyway, because when they realised we were collaborating with the Americans they flew into a blind rage, against us, but also and mainly against the Mexican government. I remember the scene as of it happened yesterday. We were on a remote tourist road in the Mexican forest. We were in a green rental transporter, the druglords in a fancy white van, and then there was a regular Mexican police transporter, ironically, a Ford. There was in fact little if no attempt at fighting U.S. imperialism until up to just before the revolution. 

Hugs, not gunshots 2, by Zamir and Odile

“Muy bien, you get the drugs but not as cheap as we said, because you made us agree to that price on false premises. You and the government do not want to fight the drug trade, you want to participate in it.”

***

“What about hugs, not gunshots?” we  had asked president Obrador.

“That is a completely different policy,” Obrador frowned. “Associated with my name rather than that of my predecessor. The idea is to offer arrested drug lords the option to stay free if they hand over their drugs to the police which then destroys them…”

“We heard the police even pay the remorseful druglords money for the drugs, is that true?” I asked.

“I don’t know of such instances. In  principle, hugs just mean letting them off unless they become recidivist,” replied Obrador. “And the drugs get destroyed!”

“Some of them maybe,” said Jack. “Those confiscated by particularly clean policemen. Others end up in the United States after all, with just a slightly lower margin for the druglords.”

“So does a lot of the petrol and oil supposedly earmarked for the people,” I added.

“How do you know all of that?” asked Obrador sarcastically. “Are you FBI?”

“Something like it!” said Keith mysteriously.

“I’ll tell you what you are!” said Obrador. “You are just small-time American gangsters…”

“Miguel and I are Mexican Communists!” piped up Balam. “We think you are just as bad as Nieto oscillating between the nationalist PAN and the socialist PRI, although you pretend to be with the people.”

“…Smuggling oil and drugs to North American and megalomaniac enough to want to meddle in politics,” Obrador continued ignoring the interruption.

“The people don’t care who we are,” I said. “They want to know how genuine you are. And they are not impressed.”

“You take American money, supposedly to help development, but in  fact to feather your nest and that of your cronies!” Balam also spoke on undeterred.

“Is it true that you managed to set up your daughter as an actress in Hollywood?” Keith asked.

“Aren’t you gay?” was Jack’s question.

The exchange still went back and forth for a while until Obrador waved in Cárdenas who had waited outside the office, then provided a round of drinks for everybody, followed by a dinner. We had certainly fully debunked Cárdenas and Obrador. They were just corrupt, self-serving egocentrics. I remember waking up hours later in the arms of a plump, but nice-looking Mexican girl. Keith, Jack, and Balam also had various attachments at their sides. “André and Lazaró have gone home already!” my girl giggled. “And we can escort you home to your home, wherever that is, and party some more.” “Oh, no,” said Jack. “Unlike the president and the boss of PEMEX, we have to get back to work in the morning.” We surely did not want police to follow us to Pueblo del Desierto.

2019-20: Pueblo del Desierto

First time in Pueblo del Desierto, by Inès and Danton, with help from Little Ramón

“I am glad you came,” said  my father, rolling his eyes. “Hola, Claudia! Happy to see your daughter Inès and her cute little boy-friend online as well.” And he gave comrade Danton, who was thirteen at the time, a friendly look. “But something strange is happening. Look, I have all this PEMEX petrol stored to go up North, and then all these drugs in the hangar over there! Hashish, cocaine, heroin,  all kinds of pills as well! You can try them if you want to! And look over there, in the garage. Two guys came the other day with several vanloads full of that stuff! Covet vaccines with artificial mRNA – that can’t be good for you, can it? They said they were friends of yours! But would you keep friends like that, American gangsters?”

“Shut up, papa, will you?” I gave my papa a punch that made the old man, in his sixties already, fall backward and sit on his bum, totally bamboozled.

“Wait!” said Danton from the screen. “Weren’t we supposed to help your papa against these gangsters, and now you are roughing him up in their name?” He was right. Back then I was still a gangster, only gradually evolving into a guerrillero, and certainly not a Communist yet. Still, I could see where Mexico was headed, to become capitalist state within the U.S. like New Mexico, unless a real revolution messed up things for the good.

2019-20: Scaremongers

Scaremongers, by Maurice and Lulu

“The chance came with the so-called Covet-19 pandemic. It began with a new wave of scaremongering. To us  as guerrilleros, it was important that people realise it was just a scam.  In that sense we gangsters may have contributed to  enlighten people about the perfidious nature of capitalism when we bought vaccines cheaply from state policlinics, then sold them dear to people in need.

“You could say that you were already no longer suffering from false consciousness,” suggested Marianne and I hugged and kissed her. “Thank you for already building up my revolutionary credentials,” I said, and ‘They are having an affair’,  I heard comrade Inès whisper to her mother, comrade Claudia. “That’s good,” Claudia murmured back. “Finally, he is in the role of perpetrator for once, not only papa Jean!” who over the years had made at least seven babies, all boys, to at least five different mothers. “Me, the gangster-guerrillero not a perp!” I had to wait five minutes for the laughter to subside.

“Policlinics back then were not what they are now, small hospitals with twenty beds maximum, to allow full attention to be given to the patients, and seven mixed brigades consisting of support personnel, nurses, and doctors, each of which has a speciality. In  Pueblo del Desierto, the brigades are maternity, dental, eyes, NET – nose, ears, and throat, heart and circulation, neurology, and prevention of all the above and more. We are especially proud of our prevention brigade because it also engages in research and teaching in our laboratory. The Pueblo del Desierto policlinic participated in developing a medication  based on the Mexican oak which works against LEP Lymphatic, Encephalitic, Pulmonary Syndrome or Asymptomatic Leprechaunitis just as well as the Irish oak leaf potion. And every year we offer internships to young doctors and nurses the occasion to learn new skills in a desert setting.

Back then, the next policlinic was more than 500 kilometres away. It was organised like a traditional hospital with several hundred beds, emergency and operating wards, intense care unit and rehabilitation wards as well as a whole range of specialised wards, cardiac, cancer, neurological, etc. – laboratories, equipment and facilities management, dining services and so on.

Covet came, the first cases caught pneumonia on the ventilator, people got scared, and our good old friend, presidentObrador himself advertised for the vaccine by showing himself first masked, then getting tested, and finally getting vaccinated. Remember, there were two types of vaccines, the classic infusion  with a spike protein provoking the production of antibodies offered by Jackstone and Jackstone, Moony Cicero, and others, and the new mRNA vaccine where the production of antibodies or immune reaction takes place in response to an artificial messenger RNA offered by Fishy-TechNotBio, Old-fashioned, and a number of other companies.

“We Mexicans were told that the first method was outdated, and that our only hope lay in the mRNA vaccine. But these, especially the Fishy-TechNotBio one, Markus Nah’s and Ian Fern’s old company, were almost unaffordable for the poorer Mexican families, with the average monthly wage at 29000 Pesos, meaning 1500 Dollars or Euros only.

“Still they lined up at the vaccination centres, whole families, consisting of father and mother, two to seven children, and sometimes grandpa and grandma as well, paid at least 300 Dollar or Euros to get everybody vaccinated, and then prayed that nobody would have to be cured from unpleasant side effects.

“For the Harrimans that was a golden business opportunity. They managed to buy even the expensive vaccines cheap in the U.S., Europe, and China because of the panic the scaremongers had sowed. They then sold them to Mexican doctors, hospitals, and policlinics at exorbitant prices which these then of course passed on to their customers.

“The scamdemic also saw the emergence of the first clandestine workshops that I know of, which were somewhat anti-capitalist back then because they served  to undercut imperialist patent law restrictions that, for instance, prohibited Fishy-TechNotBio to be produced in countries other than the U.S. and Germany, allowed Moony-Cicero to be put together in the U.K. but not in India, and Old-fashioned only in the U.S. Of course, they were also good for producing medicines cheaper. Thus, we had underground workshops in Mexico as well, producing for both the Mexican as well as the U.S. markets, and we had storage facilities, for instance, in Pueblo del Desierto, for recreational drugs, weapons, and anti-Covet vaccines. When the revolution came in summer of 2021, these were the first facilities to be dismantled, then the people proceeded to the Exxon filling station, papa was the master of, but he had already set fire to it, or at least the pumps, then Papa, Mama, my sister Inès and her family transformed his joint into a share point, not only for recharging electro-cars, but also groceries, clothes, toys, and other basics, run by a family brigade. But wait a minute, I am skipping ahead of myself again.  Let me first tell you about mine and the Harriman’s role in the run-up to the revolution in  Venezuela and Argentina.

4)  Imperialist Interlude in Venezuela: “Love my rifle more than you!”

Discover the U.S. Infiltrators, by Che and Georgette

The Venezuelan people had of course soon discovered the American infiltrators. Not they themselves were after all behind the turn away from revolutionary fervour after the retreat of Chávez in 2013. Representative organs instead of assemblies. Export orientation rather than ecological reconstruction, and the most fateful measure of all, dollarisation instead of working on economic sovereignty. We can say that Venezuela at that point entered a kind of dark ages, or what the Chinese and Russian comrades call an ‘imperialist interlude.’ And the Harrimans and I tried to help arrest the spies and expose the fake leaders left and right.

“Matthew John Hewett was mighty surprised when he heard the police knock on his door, opened it and saw us instead.”

We said: “Hands up!” and while Keith held him at gunpoint, Jack and I tied him up expertly. “What do you have to tell us?” “They will run this Guaidó fellow against Maduro, using Maduro’s two weaknesses, vanity and reliance on vaguely representative institutions, such as the constituent assembly, the national assembly, and UNASUR instead of self-managed workplaces, and village and quarter assemblies.”

“O.k., and what are Guaidó’s comparative strengths, money, lots of it, he is from a rich family, and he gets lots more from his family.”

“And what’s your role?” “I work with Luke Denman and Airan Berry. We are information workers. We make sure that everybody gets fed the information they want and need to hear.”

When we related this explanation to the other two, they just laughed. “Information workers!” chuckled Airan. “He tried to fob you off with a line from the training manual. Especially here in Venezuela, but actually all over Latin America, we are diversionists rather than spies. And in the end, we will get him,” meaning Maduro, “trust me! Do you want in?”

“We said yes, Jack, Keith, and I, of course, not to support Guaidó,  after all, we wanted to blackmail him, but to sow confusion.

“In fact, when we told some of the colleagues at Langley, I was working at the Latin America desk, or rather section, each regional subdivision has a huge apparatus” Airan’s pal, Luke, added, “one of my colleagues from the Russian desk laughed and bragged: ‘We Russianologists are the only true spies in the CIA, you in the South American team are just diversionists.”

“But then I said, well, you shouldn’t be talking,” Airan continued. “What about the turn you played to Gorbachev. Was that spying?”

“Yeah, chuckled our colleague, John Blogley or something was his name, wasn’t it? We set him up good. It was the summer of 1991. He was still nominally the elected president of the USSR, and he had some standing left, not with the people, although maybe even with them, some sections of the elite workers, the engineers and technical experts, IT we call them, but definitely with the Russia’s friends in the other Soviet republics, and in the wider abroad. There was the fear in Washington that he might turn the wheel around and be able to stabilise the old regime.”

“We know all of that,” I interrupted angrily. “So, what did you do?” 

“We recruited none other than Boris Yeltsin, newly elected president of Russia, using his morbid jealousy of Russia. We made him go to the generals and police chiefs and ask them to unsettle things, capture Gorbachev at his holiday resort in Foros, declare an emergency government, and they obligingly formed the State Committee for an Extraordinary Situation, or GKChP.

“So, in other words, we did a lot more than collect information, and we not only channelled it into the correct directions like Matt claims, but we ourselves created it. We pulled political strings behind the scenes.”

“Well, after the revolution, you will have to pay,” said Balam. “Just like the CIA stooges in Mexico, for now, just lie low…” All three of them just laughed at that, they did not see the signs of the revolution in the making, that’s how bad they actually were as true intelligence operators.

2013:  Whither Maduroism

Wither Maduroism, by Maher and Karla

“Maduroism, meaning the personality cult, he had built around him, alleged to drive the Bolivarian revolution forward, was withering. And this at all levels. And even more so after we took over Matt’s, Airan’s and Luke’s job. To Maduro, we told he is the greatest, if only he did not have so many enemies. That made him angry and would hopefully make him go even after imaginary opponents we just invented for him.

“To Guiadó, we told he had our, meaning full U.S. support. We played the CIA actually, as long as he defeated Maduro.

“To the military and remaining entrepreneurs, we told Maduro was a dictator, and to the workers and peasants he had betrayed him. We used social media blogs, trusted journalists, even grassroot agents who did mouth-to-mouth agitation for us. The three CIA quislings helped us with their contacts rather than report mafia activity to home. It was a huge operation.

“I remember  at one point, we were sponsoring a workshop that was producing badges with ‘Ni…ni…’ on them, meaning the people wanted neither Maduro nor Guaidó, but a real revolution, obviously.”

“I remember those,” nodded Comrade Ramón. “Later on, after the revolution when the counter-revolutionary workshops came up, people joked that they were in fact not a great invention at all. We revolutionaries had run such before them, and now you are telling me, they were built with U.S. money?”

I grinned. “Well, the idea was local, but yeah, some gangster money from the Harrimans and other families was involved and some CIA funds.

“We were very powerful in Venezuela around 2019, believe me, and all doors were open to us. Of course he hobnobbed with Guaidó who was running with his Obama image…”

“It is true he looks a bit like him,” said Jérôme.

“Not only a look-alike, but we briefed him to carp on about human rights and democracy to endear himself with the U.S. Left, although he was actually a rich elite kid and an authoritarian. We were waiting for our moment to tell him what a fraud he was and milk him. The right time came with dollarisation scam in 2019.”

2019: Guaidó and the Dollarisation scam

Robbing from the Perpetrators, by Jean-Wadi and Zafira

“The idea of dollarisation as proposed by our man, Guaidó, then picked up by Maduro himself, was to spread the dollar as a safer alternative to the peso, yet at the same time to take a tax out to feed the greed of the rich right-wingers in the corridors of power, for instance, Guaidó’s himself. Yet we played the good, moral policemen who arrested the villains and got the money back.

“It was an excellent scheme, much better than the silly bribe scheme in Europe, because there we were just gangsters, lone kidnappers, whereas here we were guerrilleros, meaning we fought for the people, or at least they thought we did, and therefore, we had lots of support, as well as the rich North American gangsters behind us.”

“First, we went in for Maduro. That was more of a long shot. After all, he was a real revolutionary, even more so than Obrador in Mexico, heir to Chávez, who dressed in simple workers’ clothes, was aware of the plight of the poor, and had seized to the scheme, because he was desperate. The North American capitalists had him in their fangs. They were printing dollars just as, if not more rabidly than the U.S.-Americans themselves, yet the peso kept depreciating, the Venezuelan export revenues, even from oil, were falling, while import prices were rising.

“We just burst into his office, comrade Balam with his Jaguar strength helped us intimidate security and out him before the alternative: ‘Either you pay the tax, or at least a good chunk of it to us, or we expose your corrupt dealings and those of all your friends.”

“Which corrupt deals?” Maduro asked. “I am a servant of the Bolivarian people, not only the Venezuelans, but also the Mexicans and the Argentinians.” And he eyed Balam and me with curiosity, be it with a lifted eyebrow, as if to indicate puzzlement at our betrayal of the all-American revolution.

“You are building your support on representative institutions instead of the people,” Balam replied. “Don’t you hear the people shout in the streets?”

“You corrupt politicians should all go away. The power should belong to the village and quarter assemblies and the self-managing workers,” I said, remembering the slogans of the Cordobazo and the Argentinazo. I remember thinking I would probably be a more credible left-winger than these people. Well, now I am a true Communist.

“The tax is being redistributed to the people,” Maduro stammered. “We,” meaning he himself and his deputy and military friends, “don’t take anything out of it and we also cannot funnel anything to you. The money flows are all decided by parliament.”

“In what way is that still revolutionary?”  Balam taunted him, you are running a bourgeois representative government, and the people have not seen any of the money yet, they claim you are feasting on it.”

“’In what way am I feasting?’ Maduro wailed and pulled at his shirt and trousers to prove how loose they fit. Then we just surrounded him, threatened him physically, and made him sign.

“As far as Guaidó and the other right-wingers were concerned, our game had to be a little bit more subtle. After all, we were nominally his allies. So, we simply impersonated Bolivarian police, went into his luxury apartment uphill to where Matt, Airan, and Luke were hanging out, pretended to be searching his apartment and took our cut.”

“You said you were proud to be a guerrillero,” Jean asked. “But it must have been clear to you that the money you appropriated from Maduro and stole from Guaidó would no longer go to the people. Why did you not simply throw it out of the window?” Everybody clapped, even my nominal son, Jean-Fidel, even Claudia.

“Well,” I grinned. “Hence the title to this module, ‘Love my rifle more than you…’ You may mean a beautiful woman,” and I tried to make eye contact with Claudia, but she was hanging at Jean’s lips, obviously. “But it may also mean the people. We were rough and tumble guts, to be sure, but so were quite a few of the left-wing guerrilleros.”

5) Action in Argentina: Extorting from the Phoney Left and Robbing from the New Right-wing Oligarchs

The two Juans, by Jean-Fidel and Lénina

“And the processes in Argentina were the same,” I began again at next evening’s section. “With the only difference that the inequalities were even more horrendous than in Venezuela’s imperialist interlude which at least had followed on a bit of a revolution. Popular resentment was all the stronger.

“Here, on Jean-Fidel and Lénina’s picture, you have the two Juans, left the rich prince Juan from Cerro de las Rosas, right the poor monkey from the Villas Miserias. We want them to give you, young revolutionary readers, an idea of how desperate the situation was back then all over our huge, beautiful, and potentially very rich continent.

“The story starts, as was typical, in the school yard with a fight over a soccer ball. Poor Juan conquered it, but rich Juan was strong, and he only won after tearing rich Juan’s clothes, even those below the school apron, kicking and even biting him. Rich Juan’s parents were furious, they phoned the school, and next day, the two boys were summoned  to the headmaster’s office.

“The headmaster was a nice fellow, actually a bit of a revolutionary already. ‘So, why can’t the two of you get along?’ he asked the two boys. ‘Because he has more than the others,’ growled poor Juan. ‘He is spoilt. He thinks everything belongs to him and he won’t even share…’”

“That is not true,” wailed rich Juan. “I am not spoilt, and I am not mean.”

“Well, then shake hands over it, “ suggested the headmaster, Señor Tobacco must have been his name. “And let’s tell your parents that you reconciled like men.”

Indeed, they did shake hands, and the other students saw them walk out of the headmaster’s office, talking very earnestly to each other. “I apologise for what my parents did, probably causing trouble to you.”

“My parents were furious!” nodded Juan. “Your papa tried to call mine, and wanted him to pay for the repair of the school apron and my shirt. Of course, that would have been impossible. My parents don’t even have the money to come up for my brothers’ and sisters’ aprons and mine, we have to lend them from school stocks, and we can’t wash them either, only in puddles, so, we wait until they are filthy and come apart and then sign out a new one. Not only that, but we don’t even have a phone at home, no land line, and my parents half of the time don’t even have the money to top up their mobiles.”

“Do you have electricity?” Juan asked.

The other Juan grinned. “Yes, we get it from a clasp onto the power line. But it is a constant fire risk.”

“You see,” said so-called rich Juan. “The reason I apologised is not only because you don’t have all of these things, like running water, electricity, decent clothes… Do you have enough food even?” he interrupted himself. And they sat down in the back corner of the yard and shared rich Juan’s bocadillos. “It is that my parents are actually mean to boot. They never talk to me, and I am not allowed to invite anyone home…”

“We wouldn’t come!” laughed poor Juan. “Sorry, compañero, but we would not know what to wear, let alone how to behave in your palaces. We would be afraid of knocking over a vase.”

Rich Juan laughed. “Well, that is why I am always alone, and that is why I seem spoilt to you. I only have myself to think about. My little sister is a nuisance. How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“Seven!” said poor Juan. “Three brothers and four sisters.”

“Wow!” said rich Juan.

“Yeah,” said poor Juan. “I always have someone to play with, but we often don’t have enough food to go around.”

“If only there was a way to change this!” mused rich Juan, then he broke out in laughter. “I have an idea how to get at my parents. All you will have to do, is to be me for one evening… Listen!”

After he had finished listening to Juan’s plot, Juan laughed. “That’s great! And you can be me… Listen, I tell you how.”

***

“A few hours later, after school had finished, rich Juan’s mother heard the bell ring, too risky to give Juan a key, it might get stolen, and the maid-cook shuffle from the kitchen to the door and open it. There was some whispering and his mother already thought that Juan had gotten into another fight, but then it stooped, and the maid did not come to report anything unusual. Often, Juan would stick his head through the living room door where she was working at her fashion design sketches, and greet her, but sometimes he wouldn’t, if he had a lot of homework, for instance, or if he was hungry and needed to go to kitchen first to get the cook to warm him an empanada. Today, it seemed the latter was the case. That was what the whispering would have been all about. Satisfied, Juan’s mama went back to her work. Later, she could hear him play soccer in the garden with the neighbours’ kids, one of whose daughters was his classmate. She even head his sister laughed as if he had amused her. That was unusual, the two of them were usually cats and dogs.

At about 9 o’clock in the evening, it was almost Juan’s bed time, papa came home. “How did Juan’s meeting at the headmaster go?” “Oh,” said mama. “I did not have a chance to talk to them yet,” meaning the kids, “we have all been so busy.” “Well, let’s call them in then, shall we?” said papa and fixed himself and his wife a drink at the house bar. The maid brought in some empanadas and lettuce for them as well. No need to eat more than that in this heat.

Juan’s sister, Fernanda, came in first, still smiling about something that she would not reveal, then Juan came in. His mother almost dropped her glass. His father spiled half of the tobacco, he had just been stuffing into his pipe. Juan, or rather, not Juan, but a boy wearing Juan’s clothes even though he was a lot smaller and thinner opened his mouth to make an explanation. He was also admiring the modern designer furniture and the well-kept fire place. No wonder, he thought, rich Juan was always so happy. “It is just a …!” Game or joke, he meant to say. But too late, Juan’s papa had already dropped his pipe and reached for his mobile. “Police,” he said. “We have a burglar in the house!” And to mama. “You call them as well on the landline.”

***

“At poor Juan’s parents’ hut in the Villas Miserias, rich Juan with his good clothes had of course also caused  stir, but just as in poor Juan’s case, people sympathised when he told the background of the prank he was playing, and several children knew him from school.  He was escorted into poor Juan’s parents’ hut by about five of them.

‘Here is rich Juan. The real Juan is over on the Cerro de las Rosas to teach this one’s wretched parents a lesson!” Juan’s mama was not altogether happy since dinner time was approaching and it was one of those days at the end of the month where she did not have enough for everybody. And now these six guests had come!”

“Yet the two friends had foreseen this problem, and rich Juan had brought fifteen empanadas that the maid had given to him once he had introduced poor Juan to him and told her about their game. There was enough for poor Juan’s papa, who had just come home from the building site, mama, and six of Juan’s siblings, there was one toddler, for whom the maid had enclosed of her own daughter’s some baby food, as well as six additional empanadas for rich Juan and his five escorts, as well as one left-over for a need that might arise later on. They were all munching and exchanging stories from work, poor Juan’s mother had worked at a clothes’ workshop, rich Juan mentioned his mother was a designer and had contacts to many workshops and factories. She might get her a job. Anyway, they were all munching,  thinking how life was nice actually with good empanadas like these, when about twelve policemen burst into the hut almost shaking down the corrugated iron walls…

“You are all under arrest!” they shouted, and you can imagine what followed. A whole evening spent at the police station, rich Juan’s father making his angry testimony, his wife whispering that she could understand her husband’s anger, but she was also glad that Juan, who had been a bit of a loner, had finally found a good friend like this. The children testified that the two Juans had been an item ever since  the headmaster had resolved their dispute over the soccer ball in the morning. “They were even kissing below the ivy in the back of the schoolyard,” one girl chattered, but she was probably exaggerating. 

“The two Juans said they had gotten to like each other, ‘We are not gays or something, of course,’ they hastened to assure everybody, and as proof poor Juan kissed rich Juan’s neighbour’s girl that had recognised him earlier, and rich Juan one of poor Juan’s sisters. ‘We are working for equality and world peace,’ they both testified, yet were forbidden to play with each other at school, let alone visit each other until rich Juan’s dad had gotten over his anger.”

“So, what do you think of that?” Miguel concluded. Little Odile, about ten years old, frowned. “Were they allowed to remain buddies?” she asked. “Because otherwise, it is not a good story.”

The New Desaparecidos, by Maher and Karla

“Well, let me hasten to assure you, the new wave of repression in the 2010s was not quite as bad as that during the military dictatorship of 1976-83. The methods are more subtle, not disappearance, torture and death. The websites of the victims are harassed, censored, and in case of allegations of severe anti-state activities, shut down. Or they were trolled at least. The problem was that all three administrations involved, the Kirchner, Macri, and Fernandez were reputed left-wing or at least liberal politicians.

2015: Extorting from the Phoney Left: the Kirchners

End of the Kirchner Monarchy, by Guillaume and Renée

“So, what do we do about this two-Juan game?” Maximo asked his father, Nestor, over breakfast in their sumptuous Buenos Aires villa. The Kirchners, just as moth modern Argentinian presidents, had opted not to live in the austere presidential palace, but to stay at home. “It’s spreading like wild fire all over the country. Friends from different circumstances just change places to make a point about equality of chances and the need for redistribution.” “Well, let them,” Nestor was just saying. “Didn’t you play pranks as a child?” and Christina was chuckling appreciatively, when the  window pane shattered and me, Jack, Keith, and Balam jumped in like crypto-avengers. You must admit that at this stage, we were beginning to look more and more like anticipative revolutionaries.

“You think you are a saint, Mr. Kirchner!” Jack snarled. “What about the billion  dollar, which comes to a trillion pesos that you funnelled into various firms in the Kirchner empire, even your hotels which are pure for-profit enterprises, all with flimsy pretexts of furthering the welfare of the Argentinian people? What about the super-career you provided to Maximo, and to your wife who is about to become president as a consequence of your retirement because of frail health? What about the terrible propaganda lies you have inflicted on the Argentinian people, playing Peron, where you are anything but, much more of a liberal maybe, but much less of a man of the people as well? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Nestor took some time to gather his thoughts but his wife and son forged ahead.

“And you, what are you, political prowlers?” asked Maximo.

“Maybe you want money?” murmured Christina, “But we don’t have a lot in the house? Or would you like humble favours? Maximo and I are at your service.” I  could not believe it. Apparently, the bitch was offering herself to us, horny she was, or what? And had the gall to even speak for her son? Now Nestor had found his voice. “You are wrong. I am honest and want to hear what the people have to say. I do not want to enrich myself in this job. I am aware that the people are clamouring for village and quarter assemblies and self-management. Let us learn together how to solve the problems of this great country instead of intruding on other people’s week-end.”

“Don’t  sing operas, but take out your check book!” Keith hissed about to seize his throat.

“Please!” Christina almost choked as Jack had already seized her. “My husband is of ill health.”

“Wait, I’ll write you a cheque!” said Nestor, reaching to his drawer “Take that for starters!” “Hold it!” Balam jumped in and opened it for  him. “In case you have a gun in there.”

“Although I personally think an agreement should not be the result of an imposition,” Nestor meanwhile rabbited on while he was writing the cheque for a decent sum, 250000 U.S. dollars. “Don’t you think, gentlemen? I agree with you that the IMF has not created the right type of globalisation for everyone.” On and on with pseudo-left-wing rubbish like that. Hardly anyone would notice the difference between him and Christina. They were both old women. We took the cheque and left in a hurry!

2019: Robbing from the New Right Perpetrators

Macri’s Panama Papers, by Josip and Rosa

“And finally, we visited Mauricio Macri bent over his Panama papers as well as Alberto Salvador planning his next package of concessions to the International Monetary Fund at the expense of the people.  In fact, I remember saying to myself,  ‘Now at the ripe age of 34, you are finally beginning to understand what stocks are.’ The two evildoers were not contrite in the least, Marci claimed that he had been investing the money for the benefit of the people. However, he was more generous than Kirchner, gave up a million dollars immediately and promised more.

Salvador just grumbled how proud, young Argentinians like me could do stuff like that to a true heir of Perón! Yet he also agreed to pay, so his conscience cannot have been all that clear either. Fortunately, our revolution has brushed all these little masters away!

6) Revolution in Mexico

Revolution in Pueblo del Desierto, by Jean-Fidel and Lénina

Revolution in Pueblo del Desierto

The 2021 revolution in Mexico, which was a long process stretching out over the whole summer and autumn of that year, is remembered these days mainly on two traditional days, Mexican independence day on 16 September, and revolution day of 20 November.

This Year 19 of the Revolution was the first where animals could participate in the celebrations on an equal footing to humans and not just as cattle to be slaughtered and grilled. And our dinosaurs, time-travelled or already bred in the present, were invited as well. But I am jumping ahead of myself again. First of all, let me tell you about the special features of the World Revolution in Mexico as seen through the prison of a tiny village of a hundred souls, Pueblo de Desierto. First about the triggers of the revolution: I am hesitating what to put in first place, high energy, meaning in Mexico’s case mainly oil prices or Covet-19. Let’s consider them both on a par on first place, followed by the drug trade, forced migration,  overpriced industrial goods, toxic goods, such as synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, pollution, climate change, privatisation of health, public transport, education and other public services leading to high prices as well as poor quality of these services, as well as low incomes for most of the population in general. Mexico, especially the deserts and forest areas is sparsely populated, and we faced the special problem of having to make a revolution in huge spaces, yet ensure communication between the masses, and that meant not only neighbouring villages but also between villages and larger agglo(-meration)s.

How did we do it? I remember my papa showing me the first leaflets truckers brought in the spring of 2021. The first and most benign of them just listed the ten points I already mentioned, and what the revolutionary people were going to do about. Make Covet vaccinations non-mandatory, subsidise energy prices and especially fuel, arrest and punish the drug lords, send migrant workers deported by the Bimp administration right back, ignore American sanctions on Chinese and other Asian products and improve Mexican-Asia and especially Mexican-Chinese relations, subsidise organic agriculture, subsidise electrical cars and solar energy, consider a flight and landing ban over Mexican territory especially for American airplanes, bring up the anti-pollution standards of Mexican industry up to at least the U.S. level, nationalise and subsidise health, guarantee free health for the masses, develop Mexican medical research and eliminate dependence on U.S. pharmaceutical medicines and medical equipment and utensils, develop public transport, especially trains and electrical busses, give out taxi vouchers to students and the elderly, prohibit privatisation of schools and universities and renationalise private schools and colleges, increase the educational standards over and above the North American level, stressing math, science, Spanish, Mexican history and anti-imperialist theory, and other knowledge useful to the budding young Mexican revolutionaries.

Another, more radical leaflet entitled ‘Quién debería gobernarnos si no nosotros mismos’ ‘Who should rule us if not we ourselves’ debunked the practice of representative government as corrupt and authoritarian, potentially even dictatorial, and a tool in the hands of the American imperialists, as they only needed to deal with our masters – president, governors, deputies, economic bosses, and military –, not with the people as a whole, not with the angry 99 percent, starved and abused by capitalism. The leaflet had a picture of a poor campesino in the desert, licking a few drops of water off a stone. Then it proposed a new organisational model, more or less like we have it now, and that you Europeans were already developing, starting with village assemblies in the country side, neighbourhood and barrio assemblies in the towns and cities, and brigades and workplace assemblies to manage work not only in factories, but also all other economic organisations, such as small workshops and shops, there it might be family brigades, and social organisations, such as hospitals and schools. Even army and police could work on the basis of brigades of seven with rotating brigadiers and daily assemblies, and full assemblies of battalions and larger units only once in a while.  My father as well as the other shopkeepers in the village immediately took to that idea and instated the family brigade model. I remember how excited my little sister Inès was once she had been made, for the first time, day brigadier of the village Exxon station which we had inherited from my old boss, I might have forgotten to tell you. Soon afterwards, we took the Exxon sign down altogether and became an independent filling station and later battery charging station and share point. You can see how we are dancing around the main issue of the Mexican revolution, our relations to our domineering Northern neighbour.

The American Neighbour

The American Neighbour, by Maurice and Lulu

Another leaflet discussed Mexican-American relations.

A huge danger for the Mexican people even during the revolution was being engulfed into the maelstrom of events in their big Northern neighbour. For instance, “Why not form a federation?”, many fake (!) North American revolutionaries argued, to be called Federation of North American and Mexican villages to stretch all the way from Canada deep into Central America. The main danger of this, seemingly very internationalist and progressive idea were, first of all, that the powerful American neighbours would create and insist on new representative institutions and bureaucracies to administer that federation. That, according to the leaflet, was not best practice and harboured the danger that the democratic thrust of the world revolution would be stifled. It demanded, as we have just seen in the other leaflet that just four assemblies brigades, workplace, neighbourhood, and village without any hierarchy between them be enough to accomplish all decision-making and coordination in all regions, world-wide. A second danger was that the North Americans would twist revolutionary barter deals in their favour. Third that they would monopolise the equipment and know-how needed for scientific progress, and so on.”

“Who made these leaflets?” asked Jean.

“Ha, I am glad you ask that question, because it brings me to my next point. I already mentioned revolution in huge spaces and how the truckers brought in these leaflets. Their authors were sitting in other villages or agglos, some but not all of them affiliated with the trade unions and the Mexican Communist Party.  They had them printed in underground revolutionary workshops that may well have served as models to their reactionary ones, with the only difference that the latter will demand payment in money, crypto, token, whatever serves as a money substitute, whereas the revolutionary workshops did their work for free already back then, relying like the workers in all economic organisations on farmers and other revolutionary workshops to cover their needs.

“The pre-revolutionary Mexican trade unions being as  corrupted by the regime as their European analogues if not more so, it did not make sense to enter a revolutionary leaflet at a congress even a regional one or a even a workplace meeting. Typically, our comrades and that holds for all three countries I know, Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina, and even for South America and the Caribbean as a whole first ran their leaflet by their immediate colleagues at work, their embryonic brigade, so to say, then by their neighbours, the embryonic neighbourhood assembly, and when colleagues and neighbours patted their back and said, ‘Well done!’ cautiously circulated it in wider circles. I say cautiously, because anti-state and anti-capitalist publications were of course censored and their authors punished, even worse so if their actions had real effects such as a strike or a rally to the mayor’s or governor’s house. Pueblo del Desierto was too small to have a mayor and council. Our families had already taken decisions in a village assembly for quite a long time, maybe the Mexican revolution of 1920.

“Yet as the revolutionary momentum spread, and after the people of Pueblo del Desierto had successfully destroyed their local Covet-19 vaccine, drug, and weapons depots, remember, I told you about them – they were actually of the Harriman’s and my making, but nowadays I am considered a hero of the revolution, of course –, they wanted to take part, naturally, in the overthrow of the governor, as well as the occupation of the imperialist ‘commanding heights’ in the region as we called them, mainly Exxon and other big U.S. monopolists’ bases.

“Getting the word around was not as easy as in a Paris or Berlin apartment house, where you just have to go down one flight of stairs to inform the next neighbourhood assembly of what you have been discussing, and get their drift on things. We used truckers and bus drivers to spread the word, local and regional markets to spread leaflets, and sometimes neighbouring villages also sent delegations over to each other to make sure, all good ideas were diffused and everybody was on the same wavelength, so to say.

“We used the internet as well, of course. The intranet had not been discovered yet back then, but it played a role already. My Papa, comrade José, my mama and sister, comrade Ramón as well as myself and comrade Claudia have often noticed how people not only in Mexico, but all over the huge continent all of a sudden flocked to the neighbourhood assembly, village, and workplace meetings, organised themselves in brigades, cooperated in convincing the recalcitrant even without having to plan and discuss  things aloud all that much in advance. That stealth was probably enabled by the intranet, naturespeak, harp, and bio-wifi. It was also what made possible the Russian and other revolutions in the 20^th century. It is especially useful if the revolutionary movement is infiltrated by state police, as it usually is, unfortunately. And we cooperated with fellow revolutionaries beyond our region, beyond Mexican borders all over South America and the Caribbean and world-wide.

The Pan-American Momentum

The Pan-American Momentum, by Jean-Vladimir and Adilah

Indeed, one way to prevent Big Brother from North America to reach out and stifle the Mexican revolution was for the Mexican workplace and village assemblies to seek support further South, creating a Pan-American revolutionary momentum that would overcome the imperialist curse.

Of course, we discussed the immediate measures to be taken, some of which I mentioned already like the crack-down on the toxic Covet vaccine and on the drug trade, but there were others, of course. For instance, early on, we heard that the comrades in other countries, especially those in the agglos, were abolishing private car traffic, permitting only functional vehicles such as fire brigades, ambulances, small delivery vans and of course, public transport.  Taxis could still run, but they had to be electrical and accept vouchers, in the beginning only from students and pensioners, but soon from everybody else as well. In the beginning, the countryside was a bit dubious, but the people in the agglos were all the more enthusiastic, the air had become much more breathable, the roads about 90% less congested, and last but not least, people conversed more with each other, on the public transport or during joint taxi rides.

The second step was the pulling up of tarmacked roads and their replacement with sand and dirt roads. This measure was especially welcome in the huge South American agglos where the hot son reflected from the tarmac and made the heat even more unbearable. Neighbourhood assemblies and barrios voted for these two measures in overwhelming majorities and later on, regional and pan-South American referendums generalised them all over the huge continent. The rural assemblies just allowed a few more delivery vans and tractors as well as a slightly slower pace in their conversion to electrical.

The next measure everybody agreed upon all across neighbourhood, village, barrio, workplace assemblies and local, regional, continental, and world-wide referendums was the expansion of public transport, especially trains, trams, and boats, except for fuel-guzzling airplanes. The North-South trans-American railway from Canada all the way down to Fireland is still being worked upon, but we will most likely see its completion in our lifetimes, and as you travellers to the Amazone and  to Cumbrecita know, we are connecting regional agglos by train at a rapid pace. By now, Year 19, our revolutionary engineers have also developed ships and airplanes running solely on wind and solar energy with minimal battery support. Yet South Americans just like the people in other continents have decided not to return to mass airplane travel as it would necessitate the return to environment-hostile airport technology. Small wind and solar driven ships along the coast, while the railroad is not ready yet, can be just as good.

The next issue everybody was in agreement over was the total abolition of all institutions of the state, all levels of government, army, police, and multinational organisations. As of Year 19, even the standing, roll-call militia has been abolished, leaving only spontaneous militia brigades forming ad hoc to address emergencies.

Related to that is the abolition of all forms of money, including  vouchers, crypto, token, I and especially the young comrades, Bashir, Zelim-Philippe, Sarah, and Jean-Luc will say more on that in their upcoming presentations.

Suffice it to say at this stage that contrary to what you might think of the South American people – many Europeans consider us both rebellious and greedy at times –, we South Americans and Caribbeans accepted the abolition of money readily, much more readily than the North Americans. Talk to Ernesto from Cuba, Daniel from Nicaragua, Pablo from Costa Rica, Pedro from Panama, Gustavo from Columbia, Hugo from Venezuela, Emmanuela from Brazil, Dina from Peru, Evo from Bolivia, and of course, our buddies Geronimo from Chile, and Uncle Ramón from Cumbrecita, Argentinian lands.

South Americans are more sociable than North Americans, hence they are better at simple sharing, revolutionary barter and the other forms of exchange our revolution has invented to facilitate moneyless exchange and free distribution. There is of course an underground economy as well. But as we have seen, it is sponsored by North American and European oligarchs, or capexogarchs our dinosaurs call them in naturespeak, short for capitalists and ex-oligarchs. Sometimes the descendants of old Nazis or old military dictators try to enrich themselves with it, but we shall get to the bottom of these corrupt practices as sure as I am Miguel Marajón, ex-gangster, but now 100% revolutionary.

Which brings me to my next point, the fact that one of the areas in which Pan-American cooperation was the most intense was the pursuit and chasing of old corrupt potentates, such as Nieto and Obrador, Guaidó and his ex-U.S. handlers from Venezuela, and the Kirchners, Macri, and so many others, including the Junta of Villa General Belgrano from Argentina. Of course, the Reaction is a multi-headed hydra. You think you have cut off all its heads, but it manages to regrow them. That is why reaffirming the revolutionary thrust at rallies and assemblies is so important.

7) Revolution in Venezuela

Revolution in Caracas, by Jean-Luc and Marius

There is a huge demonstration every year in the agglo of Caracas on the 5^th of July.  This year the top demands were to hold on the assembly and self-management organisation as the only decision-making organs, the spontaneous militia as the only executive force, and the intranet and harp, mathematical planning and the trefoil instead of crypto and tokens.                                            

“Traditionally  the 5^th of July was the day of independence from the colonialists, and since 2021, also from the new oppressors, big energy, pharma companies and other capitalist, especially huge U.S. companies as well as the bourgeois state that buttered them up. Of course, revolution in a huge agglo such as Mexico City, Caracas, or Buenos Aires bears quite different challenges from those in a desert village, one of which may be not to trample each other to death.

“No, let’s be serious, a major, if not overwhelming problem is dealing with the forces of order trained to defend the bourgeois capitalist, imperialist power against the storm of the people. The first thing the Venezuelan people did, according to comrade Hugo – Claudia and I, and even Papa Ramón were out of the country back then –, was to let the spokesmen of the rally chosen to liaise with police or army rotate as well.

“At first, that made the opponent angry, and they demanded to see the same persons every time. We demonstrators said ‘No!’ and urged them to rotate their spokesmen as well.

“You can have one or two self-managed police or army battalion guarding the Casa Rosada, the Miraflores or the Nacional Palace,” they explained. “Seven times a brigade of seven plus one floating. The seven brigade foremen change every day. Thus, even if you allow only the foremen to come talk to us, you will be able to change the person in charge of the negotiations seven times a day.  That way you will be able to tell your leaders that the negotiations are stalled, and that it is best to wait until the demonstrators withdraw peacefully. Meanwhile, you extend feelers to the demonstrators.”

“And?” asked Marie intraline from Illyria. She was a top expert on revolutionary action in the streets. “Did that work? Did any of the guards change sides?”

“Well, there were several kinds of behaviour that sort of point to their switching over to the revolution. One is walking out of the blockaded building and over to our side. The second is to remain with the reaction, but sow confusion and defeatism among the fascos and praise the determination and  hope among the revolution. They will be asked as experts, and they may pave the way for a peaceful withdrawal of the forces of order as happened in Paris. Other possibilities are a long stand-off leading to attrition on both sides, or the guards may lose their nerves, unfortunately, and use weapons against the people. Or guerrilleros can go in and get the prize for either side out as Jacques Henriot’s counter-revolutionary group ‘One step closer’ did with Emmanuel Macron and Ursula van der Leihen in 2021.

“In my mind, it is no accident that Henriot and his team are with the revolution these days. Because kidnapping the main protagonists is a double-edged sword. The continued guarding of the building will become unnecessary, because who is left in there to protect? The hijacked may sign appeals to the revolutionaries to withdraw, but if they do, the guards may be tempted to go home as well. And the bigshots will typically also sign their own resignation. They will seem to have given up. Then why not have the brigades and  assemblies  the revolutionaries are advocating?

2The dynamics of the kidnapping will work for the revolution unless the American sponsors of the counter-revolutionary reaction immediately field another clown to take over. Yet in the Venezuelan case we guerrilleros had done our jobs. All politicians that might come remotely to their mind had been drugged, and most of them had drugged themselves so heavily that they slept or at least dreamt al through the revolution.”

Overcoming the U.S. Infiltrators, by Jean-Saïd and Olivier

That as we found out, was also the state of four main protagonists of the revolution, their client Guaidó and the U.S. infiltrators running him – we were the Mexican ones –, Matt, Airan, and Luke.  Nevertheless, one important stage in the Venezuelan revolution of 2021, sometimes also called the Second stage of the Bolivarian revolution, was the arrest and final overcoming of the resident U.S. infiltrators.

“We found all four of them drugged like kites in their apartments, barely able to listen or form a reasonable sentence. Matt asked for an airplane and Airan for a boat to escape, Luke just asked for more stuff.                                                                                                                                                                                                   

“ Airan told me later that the idea was to go down as mad drug users rather than criminal secret service agents. That attempt was futile, of course. We, or rather the revolutionary militia brigades in charge of the arrest, knew very well what they had done, paid off Guaidó and bribed other Venezuelan officials, maybe even Maduro himself, for many years.

“Because think about it,” Miguel rolled his eyes. “Why did Maduro not work with the village and barrio assemblies as Chávez had done? Instead he starts this wholly unnecessary imperialist interlude with a new constitution worked out not even by the basic brigades and workplace, neighbourhood and village assemblies, but by a Constituent representative assembly similar to the Parliament and with a Newly formed Constitutional Court at their side to protect their power.

“And that concerned only the interlude in the area of democracy, there was a similar, maybe even graver  step backward in the economic area, from considering barter and techniques of free, the revolution moved backward to not only pegging the bolívar to the dollar, but even declaring the dollar the national currency. Only Trilei in the Argentinian lands did worse later, subscribing to all the bad ideas like crypto, vouchers, and tokens etc. That is a development that has distressed even seasoned guerrilleros like me. Why take such a huge step backwards towards capitalism?

Village Assemblies versus Mock Representation, by Laurence and Emmanuel

Therefore, one major task of the Venezuelans in all villages and workplaces was to prevent the relapse into Maduroism, meaning the overgrowing of the genuine revolution in village and organisational assemblies by representative institutions such as parliament, constitutional court, and multinational organisations.

“Look at the picture Laurence and Emmanuel have drafted. In the left one, describing the imperialist interlude or any type of counter-revolutionary reaction, the people are again at the bottom. They must look up and admire the parliament where people pontificate from the rostrum interrupted by applause by their peers whom they themselves have not even elected, or at least only those among them who are really quite close to the bourgeoisie, either mercs, or bribed by them in other ways.

“How can the people prevent their revolution from going awry this way? By holding on to the assemblies and the abolition of money  no matter what.”

El Pueblo Unido, by Faroukh and Sarah

“And to be able to do that, what is crucial is the cooperation and friendship among people across class, professional, gender, ethnic and other boundaries and their agreement to carry the five thrusts of the revolution forward in their rallies and assemblies.

8) Revolution in Argentina: the Intranet Facilitator, or: The Junta of Villa General Belgrano

Revolution in Cumbrecita, by Jean-Fidel and Lénina

“Meanwhile, the main feature of the anniversary celebrations of the 2021 revolution in Cumbrecita on 9^th of July, Year 19, as every year,  was a long march along the Calamuchita river, carrying banners for the five thrusts of the revolution: economy, education, science and giving activists the occasion to hand out leaflets propagating their views foradoption in assemblies and referendums.

Their demands were the final elimination of private cars, especially fuel-guzzlers, concrete, that was to forestall the concrete mafia to make any more inroads into revolutionary construction, permanent material checks, and animal lives matter, plant lives triumph. According to the author, that demand was of course for the sake of the animals and plants, but moreover might prevent the Contras from undermining  the revolutionary intranet, naturespeak, harp, that is human-animal-robot-plant communication, and bio-wifi.                           

Nazis, Patricians, and Mercs, by Jean-François and Alexandra

“We talked about the Junta of Villa Belgrano in the beginning of this workshop. It is composed of descendants of old Nazis, ex-military right-wingers, or fervent Argentinian fascos full of nationalist, right-wing ideology, sons and heirs of patricians coming up with ever new stratagems to hold on to their remaining wealth, and mercenaries intent on lining their pockets, were clearly behind the spread of the intranet facilitator. And not only that, but they voluntarily accept  its inadequacies and potential for causing environmental damage. Their callousness, shying back neither from murder, nor any type of cruelty, is already too well know for me to harp on it.

“In conclusion I would say that among the major challenges of the revolution such as spreading it in huge spaces, overcoming the different sensibilities of agglo and countryside, keeping the momentum going through constant contact and debate in the  brigades, and in workplace, neighbourhood, and village assemblies all on a par, as well as frequent referendums so as to temporarily finalise a decision that is then of course open to debate at the assemblies and or another referendum again in the future, overcoming Contra sabotage is the main issue we are facing. It is them who are keeping alive the use of money substitutes, the production of illegal goods starting with unsafe vaccines and ending with weapons, and the exploitation of  the remaining disadvantaged on the fields or in their workshops. Claudia has talked about it at length, and neither the repentance of comrade Diego, Milei’s retirement, or the conversion of the recalcitrants among los Once, the group of rich farmers, guest house, and share point dominating life in Cumbrecita has really stopped it. Now we have the Junta of Villa General Belgrano, which counts among them a Pablo Aramburu, Carlos Ongania, Alberto Vasena, Jorge Videla all descendants of Argentinian dictators, Maximo Brio, Marcos Galperin, Fortunato Bulgheroni, Fernando Perez, and Eduardo Rocca, all related to rich oligarchs during the pre-revolutionary period, and Juan Lopez Rega, Joe Baxter, Edelmiro Farrell and other merc commanders , hailing from pre-revolutionary police chiefs, censors, and torturers. Compared to them, los Once, even bad ones like Jorge Behrend and Claudio look like revolutionary choir boys. We have tried to arrest them, they had flown their nests. We have intercepted gruesome bits and pieces of their planning sessions: ‘These free love addicts should have to live in fear, like in the old days!’ said Ongania. ‘Doesn’t matter if a few of their houses burn down as long as it gets the facilitator brandmarked!’ ventured Fortunato Bulgheroni. ‘As soon as these tokens will be worth something, people will flock back to you, I promise!’ vouched Farrell. And I bet you, we’ll get just as bad ones in Europe and Russia. Fascism is on the rise again!”

Spread of the Intranet Facilitator, by Josip and Rosa

“Excuse me, Miguel, I cannot but agree with your evaluation,” butted in Michel Wang, French-Chinese counter-terrorism expert. “And here is European acid on your mills. Pierre le Gars has disappeared!” “You are joking!” “Not at all, and we have reason to believe that he has been abducted by the counter-revolutionaries. Listen, his son Misha got this as a biomessage. Lilo and I… on the way to Georgia… caught by thugs. They are keeping us prisoners in what seems to be an underground workshop for the manufacture of intranet facilitators and counter-revolutionary smart phones. That means we can start our assignment!”

“Whose assignment?” shouted comrade Jean. “Peter Gar is how old? Seventy-two, seventy-three, and wasn’t he recently hospitalised for something?”

“Yes,” sighed Jean-Wadi. “Papa, if you would only allow us to explain! He was hospitalised one or two weeks after we had our inaugurating meeting of the intranet facilitator leaks  app, designed to counteract slanting of the intranet. We, that means the dedicated brigade, consisting of Robespierre, Sylvain, Jean-Wadi, Maher, Karla, Josip,  Rosa, and auditors. When leaving that meeting, he had a ministroke apparently, followed by one or several bigger ones. During the meeting already, when we were running tests with the intranet facilitator apps, he was kind of wobbly, and when he walked out, he was leaning so far to the right that he almost fell. Most of us believed he was just clowning around.

But then he stopped eating, just sat there, no longer responded to questions, and wouldn’t get into bed in the evening. Quan and Ronggang tried to lift him up, he started beating his arms and kicking his legs and hit them and himself several times quite seriously. He also no longer went to the toilet and wetted and shat himself. He seemed to feel bad about that, you know what a well-organised man he is, and stopped drinking as well. That’s when Quan really got worried. And when the next morning, he still had not gotten back into bed, still would not accept their help, and still would not respond to questions, she called the ambulance. The Aimeran policlinic decided he would be better off in a Saint-Denis policlinic, not the one close to 76 rue de Lorraine, where comrade René works, but one close to the Cathedral, which has a brigade working on brain strokes. We must admit, not many of us actually visited him there, we were all busy either following Miguel’s seminars from Cumbrecita and or the work of the facilitator leaks brigade. Ronggang, Quan, Mao, and Carla did go to see him, however, but they noticed something wrong with him beyond the stroke.”

Here Ronggang took over. “Carla and Quan came back crying. Comrade Carla heard a biomessage where he called her the ugliest hag he had ever seen, and that he would divorce her if there wasn’t free love in Communism anyway. Comrade Quan had heard a similar biomessage where he complained about her cooking, and said she was no longer going there, and had left Ronggang there. But when I was not back in the morning, comrades Mao and Malik took the train back into town and the RER to Saint-Denis to get me.”

“The young comrades found me in bed as I am now with a bandaged head, because when I wanted to help the nurses to lift him in bed so they could clean him up, he kicked me. I fell on my head and became unconscious. And now he is gone.”

“Apparently, he left the policlinic with the help of a young nurse from Georgia, Lilo. We gave all spontaneous militia brigades in the Paris region their full description, and thought it would take only a few hours for them to be found, especially with Peter Gar so weak and bruised. But now, we’ve got his biomessage, and it seems the fascos have got him and Lilo, and they are being held in an underground workshop run by the Georgian mafia, which is counter-revolutionary, apparently. Lilo is able to follow their conversation. Pierre le Gars said they directed one of their gadgets at him and were able to extract the whole bio-video and -audio about your intranet facilitator leaks meeting from his brain. And they laughed and said,  according to Lilo, ‘Once we do the reversal, they won’t be able to transmit anything anymore, let alone find their facilitators.’ Any idea what they could have meant by reversal?”

“Probably, the reversal of their facilitator so that it becomes an intercept or at least an impediment to our intranet!”

“Wow!” said Ronggang.

“Don’t worry, now we know about their plans, we’ll be able to stop them probably,” mused Sylvain. “I have an idea! Fake tokens with revolutionary nanochips!”

Revolutionary Nanochips, by Bashir and Sevim

“What do you mean, fake tokens?” asked Jean-Fidel intraline. “The tokens are fake.”

“Yes,” said Josip, “but we can put nanochips into the coins, the cards, and the card readers, so that they reveal their exact location at any moment. Then they can reverse their facilitator, doesn’t matter, we shall be able to follow them with conventional internet as well. The only thing, we needed the approximate location of all token manufacturers. You mentioned that you have found one close to Cumbrecita, and we must find the Georgian one where they holding comrades Pierre le Gars  and Lilo.”

“How come he can send such elaborate bio-messages although he can’t even speak?” asked Marianne.

“That is the miracle of naturespeak and the transmission via natural wifi towers, such as trees, smaller plants, elks, and smaller animals, such as rabbits as well. It works much better with the brain that the conventional intranet.”

 “The workshop closest to Cumbrecita is in Villa General Belgrano by the way,” said Jérôme. “Let’s form a spontaneous militia brigade and then biomessage any that the people of that small agglo or small town may already have formed.”

An Ecological Nightmare, by Julie and Danièle

“But look, comrades, what’s that? The sierra seems to be on fire!” Raoúl interrupted. It took naturespeak-intranet expert Lénina only one second to guess at the truth.

“And look at these red streaks. That must be their enhancing waves already made visible by our tech. Don’t tell me they are risking real large-scale fires just to stop our intranet!”                                                                                                                       

“Let’s hope not, but for starters, put on all available air quality monitors. You should be able to that remotely, since the intranet is still working. Do they detect smoke?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, no. Comrade Raoúl, you were right! Yes, smoke and fire read at all locations. We must send the fire brigades and any other vehicles with water! So, that is their high tech to kill the intranet, just ordinary wildfire. Shame on them, and on us for not guessing at their intentions.”

“You’ll be happy to know,” interrupted comrade Michel Wang from Illyria, “that we have located the place Pierre le Gars and his new friend are being held. Should we wait till we get there, or tell the local spontaneous militia brigades to strike immediately?”

“The latter!” said Jean. “We need to get Pierre le Gars back into bed as soon as we can.”

“D’accord, we are going in.”

“Got him!” a local spontaneous militia brigade member who happened to be a medic answered within five minutes. “He indicates that his heart is hurting a bit and that he no longer wants to room with comrades Quan and Ronggang, no way! He’d prefer the garden colony, he is just biomessaging, although not with comrade Carla either. Rather a small house together with his new flame, comrade Lilo.”

9) What remains to be done!

The Revolutionary Trefoil, by Bashir and Zelim-Philippe

“We have to fully and completely abolish money. Immediately after the revolution, we were naïve. We thought it would be enough to abolish hierarchy, introduce ecological material checks and self-management with the brigadiers rotating daily and the workplace plenary as the only decision-making organisation in the enterprise. And pay everyone equally! We even allowed people to keep moderate monetary savings and use them in lieu of vouchers, or as complement in revolutionary barter deals for goods that were not free yet. It turned out that was not enough at all. Those with more money formed clandestine enterprises where hierarchy persisted and which produced shoddy and even toxic goods that most village assemblies had already forbidden as inadequate. If we had eliminated money faster, we would not have all the trouble with clandestine weapons, drugs, and other production that we have now.”

“You are right! We were really wearing rosy-coloured glasses back then, not only our young revolutionaries!” sighed Jean contritely.

“I am not blaming you!” Miguel shook his head. “After all, you wrote one of the first, if not the first article showing how money in all of its functions, means of exchange, store of value, and gauge of relative worth serves to reproduce capitalism. Even though an easy means of exchange money is exclusive to those who have it, only the rich capitalists and bankers have the luxury to store it. Moreover, the colluding capitalists will also agree on relative prices. If for instance, relative wages seem too high to them they can force people to migrate and worsen everybody’s standard of living at home and abroad. Money must be abolished! Yet we have got to make sure, now that we have finally eliminated crypto-currencies that money does not come back in another form, for instance, tokens.

“If it does, it will open the floodgates to all kinds of illegal production again. It am not a mathematical economist. I am aware that we do a lot by surveying consumers, users, and producers online and nowdays intraline and that we  are able to ascertain consumption patterns and production that way. However, as a security expert, I think nothing beats regular check-ups by each and every one of us on market stalls, share points and assimilated outlets such as restaurants, workshops, in fact all enterprises and social organisations. Do they satisfy their patrons for free, and do they in turn get the supplies and inputs they require? And are these inputs of the quality they would wish for? Everybody can blow the whistle, but unfortunately, under capitalism, not everybody did. All kinds of corruption and abuse got swept under the carpet.

“In the truly Communist economy, there will be just three forms of exchange, for free, where the producing enterprise gets its inputs for free, produces and distributes its output for free as well, and consumers and users simply have to show up at their local market or share points and get what they need. In the worst case scenario, they may have to order a good or service intraline and wait a while. Or they may simply share with others in a piece of equipment, or good, such as food, that is already there. Finally, if they have special needs, they can barter for one or several goods or services with other goods and services they’ve got. This third method is particularly prevalent in world trade. If anyone sees money or tokens enter the picture at any point, they must immediately blow the whistle. That way, we shall keep our economy running smoothly and our conscience clean.”

“Very true!” said Ramón. “Had comrade Diego and I only followed your advice to begin with!”

True Ecology, by Julie and Danièle

Miguel grinned. “Well, that’s why we came over, didn’t we? At least some of us. Others, like my bastard son, Jean-Fidel, came to save the rain forest and the pampa. I am not a scientist, and to me, like to most comrades, ecology is even less intuitive than economics.  Especially on a global scale. Therefore, when the neighbourhood, village, and workplace assemblies met right after the revolution, they decided to focus on their immediate business and surrounding area. If other neighbourhood, village, and workplace assemblies wanted to take over their ideas, fine. I was talking about it to comrade Salma the other day who is planning her presentation on property rights. There is in Communism no such thing as property rights, let alone intellectual property rights. The world belongs to all! Assemblies will feel honoured if others take over their ideas, and there are of course multiple cases of simultaneous discovery. No one should be a snob concerning their inventions. What is taken over by many if not all village assemblies in a region and possibly world-wide, maybe aided by a referendum will become best practice, often aided by revolutionary technologies. Typical examples in the ecological area are the abolition of private and fuel-guzzling vehicles except for functional vehicles such as fire brigades, tractors, and taxis, the radical expansion of public transport, the conversion of ships to sail- and solar ones and the abolition of large container ships, the moratorium on air travel and freight until a sustainable wind- and solar alternative to the jet engine was developed, the pulling up of tarmacked roads and the return to field and sand roads and maybe pavement in the centre of the villages, the deconstruction, upon recommendation of  Fridays for the Future and other young ecologists, of all ugly, unneeded, and outright toxic buildings, including skyscrapers, the transformation of huge cities into agglos of villages of no more than 2000 inhabitants in the beginning, nowadays 600 only, the replacement of the electricity and gas works and mains by neighbourhood block energy works consisting of solar panels, a small windmill, a rubbish incinerator for non-recyclable rubbish, and a water turbine where possible, the gradual replacement of the water mains by wells and other natural water sources. The replacement of broadband cables and wifi towers by the red or natural intranet where humans, trees, large animals, and even smaller animals and plants, as well as devices and other conductor materials can serve as natural wifi towers for this so-called bio-wifi. With guaranteed no EMR above 100 Hz, instead of 3-4 gigabyte before the revolution. Excellent air, water, and soil quality by way of proper revolutionary filters and organic farming. Reduction of meat consumption, a high quality of life also for animals and plants, domesticated and free ones.

True Democracy, by Guillaume and Renée

“Our young scientists tell us that we have rediscovered the ancient language, naturespeak, in which all animals, humans, and plants used to communicate before the nefarious emergence of feudalism, capitalism, and the concomitant exploitation of the development.

“We have already managed to programme naturespeak into our phones and other devices so as to enable bio-wifi. Many people, especially those in rural areas or traditionally close to nature, like our Argentinian Indios, have begun relearning naturespeak. It turns out that our neighbourhood, village and workplace assemblies and brigades that we are so proud of won’t be perfect until we manage to admit surrounding plants and animals, tame and wild ones, to the discussion and also have mixed human-animal-plant brigades as we have to reconcile other conflicting groups.

“At the same time, we have to continue to be vigilant and enforce the no-hierarchy principle as well as permanent rotation of all moderator and other roles of authority. We must also ensure permanent discussion of all issues, which may mean returning to the same debates over and over again until we can make a decision acceptable to all. And of course, we must make decisions by consensus, not only simple majority.”

Finish off the Contras, by Jean-Saïd and Olivier

“How come that despite all our best efforts at rehabilitating them, there are still so many fascos or as we South Americans call them, Contras, meaning old and new capitalists, oligarchs, and bankers and their mercenaries on the prowl?

“One reason is the delay in fully and completely abolishing money I already mentioned. That omission certainly offered them an angle. Money, crypto-currencies, vouchers, and tokens mean that there can be shadow corners at markets and in share points, as well as websites on the dark web where goods can be bought with crypto- or token cash, coins, and cards.

“That in turn means that you can possibly entice workers to work in clandestine workshops violating the no-hierarchy and other self-management principles, and producing dodgy and outright dangerous goods such as weapons, weaponisable smartphones and other gadgets such as the intranet facilitator we’ve been dealing with lately , drugs, pharmaceutical medicines, harmful medical equipment, synthetic fertilisers, and pesticides, processed foods etc.

“Luckily as the true trefoil or freefoil of only free, simple sharing, and revolutionary barter spreads, the benefits to be derived from being exploited in such a crypto-outfit have been dwindling. Most goods are available for free, of course. Yet tokens may still be of interest in order to acquire weapons, drugs, illegal vehicles such as private limousines, boats, or airplanes, luxury villas, etc.

“Once the seed of greed is planted into people, it may be hard to eradicate. From the beginning of the revolution, for better or for worse, we have been extremely lenient with punishments. Written law, including criminal law, has been abolished world-wide. Crimes like private, civil disputes get adjudicated by the village assemblies, sometimes with jurors, rotating, of course, who get chosen by acclamation or by draw.

“The village assemblies rarely pronounce life-long prison sentences, let alone the death penalty. When a number of particularly monstrous French  and German oligarchs were sentenced to death in a volcano, they were saved by unknown in the last minute.” Here Miguel  flashed his teeth at Jean whom Miguel along with a few other peace doves suspected to have been instrumental in this act of grace. “The worst punishment is typically a long prison sentence which may be commuted to a long and even life-long house arrest. Convicted criminals also need to submit to an arduous rehabilitation procedure aimed at producing true remorse.

“Yet, again and again, not only do seemingly repentant criminals suddenly escape and become recidivist, several new generations of sponsors, underground capitalists, and terrorists have already formed since the revolution, and their bands have taken quite some effort to crack. By the way, we do this solely by spontaneous militia brigades, since Year 18 the only form of militia acceptable to the revolution. Moreover, spontaneous militia brigades need a quorum of at least 20% of village citizens to make an arrest, conduct a search, set up village ID check-points etc. Talking about village IDs, the only piece of identity in the revolution, they are unfortunately quite easy to forge, just a laminated piece of paper with your photo, name, date of birth, and home address on it.”

Don’t let them go!, by Zamir and Odile

“Imagine!” The South American brigades were already on the way home, and Vicky and Vitya were chatting with their fellow buffalohumans in Novosibirk. “Miguel jumped into the ocean to prevent Markus Nah and the others from escaping!” “How did that happen?” “We were sitting together in the kitchen of Red Novgornyi late, discussing the thrusts of the revolution you have just heard Miguel outline intraline and wondering whether Pierre le Gars’ stroke may have been brought on by the malicious EMR in their intranet facilitator and that he was lucky to have survived his abduction. By the way, we had decided to travel on the freighter Red Novgornyi once more, instead of using a normal passenger ship, so as to make it easier to guard our prisoners.

“All of a sudden, the captain of the day, comrade Kostya, lifted his hand, then immediately spoke without waiting for the moderator, comrade Marianne it was at the moment, to give him the word.

“Did you hear that?” There had been a short thud followed by some splashing. “I think someone just launched one of our dinghies.”

“Oh, no!” shouted Miguel and was up the stairs and on deck before anyone else understood what he was suspecting. “The prisoners!” Jérôme got up as well, and got chalk-white in his face as he bumped his head several times trying to follow Miguel up the low staircase. Kostya, Jean, Danton, Jean-Fidel, Raoúl, Vitya, and Vicky climbed up after them. It was a clear night, and they could all see Markus Nah and Sundar Pinchai row out on one of the ships dinghies. Later it turned out that there was a third person hiding on board who had to be part of the crew of Red Novgornyi, because where else would he have come from?

“Where do they think they are going?”

“There is a freighter passing just over there on the horizon. Can you see it?”

“That’s the Libertad or Liberté,” said one of Red Novgornyi crew. “It’s a legit self-managed boat with a half Argentinian- half Senegalese crew. It usually carries Argentinian grapefruit and apples in exchange for Senegalese tuna and peanut. Mind you,” he laid his face in wrinkles. “I don’t want to come across a cynic, but they could sometimes be carrying phosphate, you know, for underground NPK fertiliser production. Most village assemblies in both regions have forbidden them, but Senegal still has some clandestine phosphor production. And the chap you can’t see, steering, is Nicolas. I noticed he was acting dodgy these last few days, always asking to guard the prisoners.  We can’t find him on board anymore. Unbelievable that he would be such a traitor!”

The remaining dinghies were already almost lowered to the water when Miguel was ready to jump into the water. “Comrades Vicky and Vitya. Wreak your buffalo magic, will you? I’ll be close.”

Jean, Jérôme, and Vicky were in the first boat, Danton, Jean-Fidel, Raoúl and Vitya in the second. The two buffalohumans were murmuring spells until all of a sudden, both of them simultaneously began to transform. They grew hard, hairy skin, horns, protruding ears and mouth, and a tail. Their hands and feet transformed into hooves, and finally they lowered their upper body so as to stand on four legs. “See you later!” they grunted to their mates in the buffalo dialect of naturespeak, then they jumped overboard.

“They are absolutely fearless!” Danton commented admiringly as they approached Nah’s and Pinchai’s dinghy and began to ram it with their horns. “Almost like whales!” agreed Jean-Fidel, thinking that he had to draw one for Little Evo, future marine biologist, maybe also order a toy one from the toy workshop in Versailles. The three counter-revolutionaries tried to hit the two buffalohumans over the nose with their oars but the two of them just dived under the dinghy and pushed it up until they got it to capsize. The water was rather calm, although not as calm as in the Pacific, Raoúl thought, then decided to jump like Miguel had done. He could see from the corner of his eye that  Miguel had seized Markus Nah who was beating around himself like crazy and for a moment wanted to swim over to help him, but then Jérôme was there earlier, and together Miguel and he neutralised the infamous Mr. Na and dragged him onto their boat.  The two now swam after Pinchai who had made some headway in the direction of the Libertad while his colleague was being apprehended. Yet with Vicky-buffalohuman blocking his way forward, our young comrades managed to surround him and made him give up. Raoúl, Jean-Fidel, and Danton pulled him back with them on board the second boat. Meanwhile, however, the traitor called Nicolas had managed to turn around the capsized dinghy, jump back in and was paddling fiercely towards the Libertad. This time it was Vitya-buffalohuman who blocked his way forward, while his grandma Vicky tried to throw over his dinghy. Before she succeeded, however, he jumped and could no longer be seen. “Has he drowned?” wondered Jean-Fidel, but then he suddenly saw Miguel swimming on his back  pulling a hairy and soaked bundle towards the boat where Jérôme and Jean had handcuffed and were guarding Nah.

Was that safe? he wondered. Two wound up villains with just three revolutionaries minding them. “Wait!” he decided instantaneously and jumped, leaving Pinchai to Danton. He arrived at the other boat just on time to help push and pull Nicolas aboard, then turned around to see whether Danton was alright. He certainly was, Vitya having transformed back into human and joined him on the boat,  while his grandmother, Vicky, who had chosen to remain a buffalo for the time being was pushing and pulling the third dinghy.

“Lucky, we were so close to the coast and it was so calm tonight!” said Kostya as he welcomed them back on board the Red Novgornyi. “Yet I’d ask you not to do it again when the waves are even the slightest bit choppier.” Our comrades dried with warm towels, there were even some for the prisoners, and then they all reconvened in the kitchen.

“Let us call the Libertad!” said Kostya and went next door to the bridge. At first there wasn’t any reply, then a sleepy voice answered in English. “Yes, this is Niall and Seamus! I’ll be captain, he’ll be first mate today!”

Jean laughed out loud. “From Leitir Ceanainn?” “Yes, how did you know?” the wrecker called Seamus was getting alarmed.  “Quick!” whispered Jérôme. “Let’s get Pierre le Gars intraline!”

“Never mind!” groaned Peter Gar sleepily. “It’s already 3 o’clock here in Illyria. The witches’ hour may begin!”

“Hello!” he addressed his two  fellow Irishmen with his best imitation  Oxbridge accent. “What brings you here to the ocean?” He pretended to  be on the Red Novgornyi as well.

“Peter Gar!” Niall laughed out loud again. “Are you really here or just on a wave?” “Both!” the gar snapped, wondering whether to tell them about his stroke and blame their intranet facilitator for it, then seemingly tightened and repeated sweetly. “And what brings you here if I may ask? Wait a minute, we are setting up the intranet bio-call  to Kharkov!”

“But we are not in Kharkiv!” protested one of Siobhan’s boy-friends, Liubko. “Liubko, Siobhan, and I are in Novgornyi to help Maksim with his research on the red intranet in huge spaces. Don’t you remember? Should I wake them up, Volya and Siobhan? It’s still early in the morning here.”

“Yes,” sighed Peter Gar. “I remember. But it is very urgent! And can you get your mother-in-law intraline for us?”

Sinead was on almost instantaneously. “Seamus, Niall, what are you doing? Where are you?  Are you with Siobhan?”

Siobhan giggled. “No, we are in Novgornyi after all, don’t you remember? Where are you, comrades?”

“Somewhere off the coast of Africa,” answered Seamus. “They were looking for volunteers to spread the intranet facilitator in the Argentinian lands and South America as a whole… That is a constructive initiative after all.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” said Peter Gar. “That’s their latest scam. Why did you leave Sinead alone?”

“You were not volunteering!” Kostya noted. “Your buddy Nicolas testified that he received tokens, a crypto token card, and a promise of flying brigades to help him construct his family house back in Mar del Plata.”

“That’s believable. We have such clandestine, token-mongering brigades even around Cumbrecita,” added Miguel. “They’d have them around Mar del Plata as well.”

“We were not leaving Sinead alone,” Niall swelled his breast, ignoring Miguel. “We were organising money, pardon crypto, pardon tokens, for the baby. It’s coming any day now. Either one of us must have made it before we left for India last September. It will be a boy, and we want to call it Patrick.”

 Postscript in Illyria and Saint-Denis

Grandma Jana’s Family Workshop, by Marius and Jean-Luc

“Comrades, you no longer have to fear any self-congratulatory drivel you were hopefully not expecting of me anyway,” Jana was panting from stress, some of the younger comrades already feared she was having a heart attack. “Especially in light of what they have done to poor Peter Gar. They have come up with a new scheme, not only there, where you are, but world-wide. A corruption of self-management on a major scale: fake family workshops.”

“I have heard of those,” Miguel grinned, proud to be finished although he had received relatively few accolades, maybe his comrades were still disgusted by the gangster in him. “Most of the time, they don’t work.”

Jana glowered at him. “Quit the bad jokes. Mine works perfectly! This isn’t a joke. We have more and more cases of extremely exploitative workshops that for a long time manage to hide under the shroud of family relations. Oddities that people observe are attributed for the longest time to family tiffs, between father and mother, parents and children, siblings etc. Yet when people finally take a closer look and start an investigation, there are ever more frequent cases where the supposed family members are not even related, the uncle who comes to visit is in fact a fasco merc checking on things for the underground oligarchs, there are no intimate relations between the parents, the women and the children are just slaves. And of course, the bosses completely ignore the rotation principle, not the workplace assembly takes the decisions, but the oligarch masters far away, the inputs are procured on the dark web, in shadow corners, and most of the outputs are illegal: toxic synthetic pesticides and herbicides, poisoned processed food, toxic fibres in clothing, harmful medicines and medical equipment, dangerous drugs, weaponised phones and other devices, or just junk that the crypto-merchants force the people under their spell to buy and live with against their will. And if you don’t believe me, comrades Philippe, Pascal, Hisham and comrades will tell you more straight away.”

“We had already heard of that scheme, when Jana came to us,” nodded Philippe. “We economists and statisticians at Nanterre University have immediately started a survey, and 60% of respondents claim to have encountered suspicious behaviour at family workshops, share points, and farms, as against only 35% who said that was news to them. And 5% on average, 1.5% in the rural areas, and up to 11% in the agglos of villages say they are either themselves caught in such an enterprise, or know someone or several people who are. It is a serious problem. We should form a spontaneous militia brigade to investigate, and we can only praise comrade Jana to have returned to her self-management expertise as the issues are still burning hot today. We are also looking forward to her case study of self-management in the research, development, and production of revolutionary phones. Back to you, comrade Jana!”

The adventures and discussions of our comrades in Cumbrecita, Illyria, Saint-Denis and world-wide shall continue in Life in Communism 2.1. Self-management triumphs, Gauging Free, Red Intranet in Huge Spaces, One step backward, two steps forward. Against incipient hierarchies in Education, Animal lives matter, plant lives triumph, and Part 1 of the Chechen Trilogy, the presentation by comrade Aslan, Another 2021.

The members of the two Latin America brigades of Year 19

Miguel – Claudia’s husband, former gangster and terrorist, now security expert at Illyria, this is his project “Gangster, Guerrillero, Revolutionary”

Jean – chemical engineer, homeless advocate and prison worker

Claudia – daughter of papa Ramón, ex-counterrevolutionary merc now with the revolution, now lives at Illyria, member of the clothes workshop brigade and revolutionary barter correspondent with focus Latin America

Inès – daughter of Claudia, French and Spanish teacher at the School complexes Paul Élouard in Saint-Denis and Jean Moulin in Aimeran

Danton – her partner, construction engineer and ecological reconstruction expert, on-going research project “Paris in the Year 30” of the revolution

Ramón –Inès son, already in pre-school, born in Year 15

Jean-Fidel – son of Claudia, young ecology expert, University Entry Project “Regrowing not only the Rain Forest”

Lénina – his girl-friend, computer scientist and mathematical planning expert, University Entry Project “What is to be done?” on a decision-making app she developed

Evo – Lénina’s toddler son, born in Year 18

Raoúl – a young Chilean comrade, studying medicine in the French lands

Josetta – his girl-friend, an Indio from a tree-house village in the Amazone rain-forest

Evita – Josetta’s toddler daughter, born in Year 18

Marianne – partner of Patrick, one of the editors of the l’Humanité news channel, she is a Latin American expert, “The Little Monk and the Pope” is her project

Jérôme – digital security expert

Vicky – grandmother of Vitya, mother of Nora, a buffalohuman, visiting Illyria from Novosibirsk and participating in the South America brigade as a travel expert

Vitya – son of Nora, a buffalohuman, visiting Illyria from Novosibirsk and participating in the South America brigade as a young robotics expert

For the other characters in this novel see the text as well as the maps of Illyria and Saint-Denis in the appendix

Timeline of Argentinian pre-revolutionary history

1943-46   Band of officers (Ramirez, Farrell, Perón and others) stops Argentina joining the war on the side of the allies

1946-1995 Juan Perón’s first presidency, emphasis on industry and social policies

1955-58 Revolución libertadora is a repressive backlash and leads to a cycle of violence

1958-66 Fragile radical administrations

1966-73 Dictatorial Revolución argentina, Ongania, minister of the economy Vasena and others stifle protest

1969 Cordobazo protests against repression and austerity

1973-74 Return of Perón, also repressive, Triple A against Montoneros and FLA

1974-76 tenure of Isabel Perón mired by repression, grey eminence Lopez Rega

1976 -83 Back to military dictatorships, Videla and others

1983-89 Raoúl Alfonsín effort at Re-democratisation

1989-99 Carlos Menem follows IMF dictates

1999-03 New Millenium crisis

2003-15 Nestor and Cristina Kirchner stabilisation policies

2015-19 corrupt Macri administration, Panama papers

2019-21 Alberto Fernández, Attempt at returning to Perónism

2021- World Revolution

Timeline of Venezuelan pre-revolutionary history

By 1927 Venezuela is biggest oil exporter in the world

1928 Carlos Ramírez, economic minister under López Contreras represses strike in the oil industry led by comrades Rodolfo Quintero and Jesus Faría  of the PCV

1948 military coup against bourgeois Democratic Action followed by ten years of military dictatorship

1958 coup brings to power civilian but nonetheless autocratic rulers such as Andres Pérez and Rafael Caldera

1989 Repression of Caracazo revolt against high prices and austerity

1992 Attempt at military coup against Pérez by Chávez and others

1999 Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela becomes hub for revolt and direct action elsewhere in South America

2002 coup, first serious threat against Bolivarian revolution

2013 Hugo Chávez followed by Nicolas Maduro who must contend with North American infiltrators

January 2019 alternative right-wing president Guaidó challenges Maduro

November 2019 Maduro declares dollarisation, Venezuelan imperialist interlude

2021 World Revolution relaunches Venezuela on its course of democracy, economic justice, and ecology

Timeline of Mexican pre-revolutionary history

1940-70 Milagro mexicano, Mexican economic miracle, based alternatingly on expropriation of foreign companies, import substitution, and social policies (Cárdenas, 1934-40, and Aléman, 1946-52) versus concessions to U.S. companies, repression, and ‘green revolution agriculture’ (Camacho, 1940-46)

1970s and 80s emergence of the competitors to the PRI because of its bad and repressive economic policies

1994 NAFTA free trade agreement with the United States

2000 Vicente Fox Quesada became first president from the National Action Party, but presided over Mexico’s decent into crime, especially the drug war

2012 President Enrique Peña Nieto upon pressure by PAN and parts of PRI ends the monopoly of PEMEX, the Mexican state oil company

2018 Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador changes tack in the drug war and opts for policy of “hugs, not gunshots” (Abrazos, no balazos)

2019-21 The Mexican people, hard hit by Covet crisis, enthusiastically embrace the World Revolution

Upcoming and future books by Carla O’Gallchobhair that might interest you:

Life in Communism 2.1. Self-management triumphs, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. This is how Jana Fivebins – so nicknamed because of her huge volume –, herself describes her project. “What looked like it was just going to be a self-congratulatory review of revolutionary self-management in workshops and share points, larger manufactures – taking the case studies of revolutionary phones, Intranet and bio-wifi –, agricultural cooperatives, various sectors of the economy, as well as social organisations like schools and policlinics, has become a criminal case because the underground capitalists, their fasco mercs, and token merchants and bankers are trying to undermine self-management principles by fostering patriarchy and other incipient hierarchies in family and other enterprises.”

Life in Communism 2.1. Gauging free, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. Bashir and Zelim-Philippe are rightfully proud of the gauging free app they have developed, that allows to measure for any local, regional, and even the world market, the proportion of goods of any category that is already allocated or distributed for free. But then an illegal token inflation shakes them out of their complacency. Does it mean that the trefoil or freefoil is faltering? Not at all. The inflation has been provoked to sell more illegal goods such as drugs, weapons, and harmful devices. Our Illyrian comrades get involved in chasing the main perps.

Life in Communism 2.1. Red Intranet in Huge Spaces, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. The revolutionary, so-called red intranet makes it possible to communicate via very low frequency electro-magnetic waves, neural or brain waves, lower than 100 Hz as compared to 3-6 Giga (meaning billion) Hz for conventional wife and internet, and this without broadband cables or wifi towers. However, the new method requires natural wifi towers, humans, animals, plants, and to a certain extent, devices and other conductor materials to be available at close intervals. In wide landscapes such as the Siberian steppe, the prairies, the pampa, and deserts world-wide, successful transmission requires a certain amount of re-population. Not necessarily human, the advocates of Animal lives matter, plant lives triumph stress. And this calls the bourgeois reaction on to the stage.

Life in Communism 2.1. One step backward, two steps forward. On incipient hierarchies in education, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. It is summer of Year 19. A new school year will soon begin, and Sevim has developed an incipient hierarchy gauge modelled on Bashir and Zelim-Philippe’s free gauge to detect developing hierarchies and ex-bourgeois wrecking, such as the so-called adulation scam that makes students and other vulnerable individuals fall for an unworthy person’s ego. How to make sure that sabotage like this does not undermine the efforts of revolutionary education at creating happy, independent, and communicative people?

Life in Communism 2.1. Animal lives matter, plant lives triumph, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. The reactionaries have managed to design a low frequency pulse weapon that stops or corrupts the revolutionary red intranet and bio-wifi. Overcoming this latest challenge requires the young revolutionaries to learn better naturespeak and communicate better with animals and plants.

Preview of Life in Communism 2.1. Revolution for the Oceans and other Waters, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. Young 4th generation comrade Evo, son of Jean-Fidel and Lénina, born in Year 18, is doing field research for his university entry project for the Institut d’Océanographie in Paris, and the Marine Stations in Arcachon, near Bordeaux, and Villa Gesell, Argentinian lands on how to do away with water pollution, overfishing, and generally overexploitation of our oceans and other waters, as well as on how to make sure the animals and plants of the seas and other waters can decide themselves who travels on their home waters and exploits them. Contrary to what one might think, nature is with the revolution against the desperate bid of the dark forces of capitalism to come back to power.

Preview of Life in Communism 2.1. Revolution in the Beehive, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. Young 5th generation comrade Maya, born in Year 35 of the World Revolution, is researching revolutions in the beehive. Wherever she is, be it in comrade Ramón’s garden in Cumbrecita, at Illyria, Yvelines, at the Moscow Recycling Hounds rural cooperative in Novgornyi, in the agglo gardening cooperatives Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove in Saint-Denis or the Almond Tree Brigade in Beijing agglo, the pattern is always the same. The working bees revolt against the queen and her drones. That much is clear, but how come they never win? How come the hierarchical class structure of the bee-hive is always restored? Maya wants to find a way to make the revolution of the working bees last.

Map and Plan of our rural cooperative Illyria, Yvelines, and our neighbourhood assemblies Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove on 76 rue de Lorraine, Saint-Denis, State May-June of Year 19 of the Revolution during comrade Miguel’s “Gangster, Guerrillero, Revolutionary”, there are 17 three-room apartments with the bedrooms occupied as follows, Young Revolutionaries marked in italics:

	Apartments in the old Farmhouse Noah and Michelle   Malik and Mao and baby Aisha (born in January) Claudia and Miguel	Jana, Youssef, and Salma Anton and Monique Marius and Jean-Luc	Michel and Fabienne   Peter Gar (Pierre le Gars) and Quan Yoga Room Ronggang
	Muhammed and Aini Hisham and Rim Bashir and Sevim and baby Asma to come	Marie and Daniel Omsinbaba and Fofana Lulu and Maurice, and toddler Bouna	Arlette and Jérôme Karla and Maher, baby Soho Pléiades Room Jean-Vladimir and Adilah, and toddler Akila
	Patrick and Marianne Abram and Francine Olivier and Danièle	Youth Club Che, Georgette, and toddler Salvador	Jean, Mina, and Hélène Laurent and Véro   Zamir and Odile
Apartments above Robot Workshop Emilia, Robespierre, Sophie, and Pascal   Lénina and Jean-Fidel, and baby Evo   Alexandra and Jean-François and baby Max				Apartments above stables Denis and Laure Young Revolutionaries Room Jean-Saïd and Natalie
Danton Inès, and toddler Ramón Julie and Zelim-Philippe New Pléiades Room Assad, Kaltouma, and baby Nahel				Boris and Karima Jean-Wadi and Zafira, baby Sandrine Rashida and Seth, baby to come Tahir
Philippe and Anisah Renée and Guillaume and baby Comet Aslan and Zamira
	Apartments above Clothes Workshop Alain and Bulan Félix and Leyla Saïd and Rodion	Georges and Jeanette Pierre and Marine Aleksei and Evgenia	Apartments above Furniture Workshop Annie and Frédéric Léon and Martine Rosa, Josip, and baby Fabien	Camille and Zelim Sylvain and Nicole Guest Room Vicky Vitya

Red: House 1, Old Farmhouse, Dark Blue: House 2, Clothes workshop, Light Blue: House 3, Furniture workshop, Dark violet: House 4, Stables, Light violet: House 5, Robot workshop

Garden Colony and Manouche Camp

Garden Colony Louise, Tim, and Melanie		Arthur and Huguette, daughter Françoise, and granddaughter Murielle
Raphael, Jacqueline, Fabien, Catherine, their kids Cédric, and Charolaine Sabine, Charles, Colin, and Cécile		Misha, his partner Yvonne, his friend Cato, their young son Jean-Michel, and Misha’s mother Carla
The Cambodian martial arts Dan, In, Ayak, and Vit		Mireille, Marwan, and Zima, baby to come Tonyi
Bérénice and son Pierre		Raoul and Josetta, baby Evita
Manouche Camp
Django and Manou		Roman and family
Matthias, Céline, and baby Isabel

Neighbourhood Assemblies Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove at 76 rue de Lorraine, Saint-Denis

Luc, accountant at l’Huma, wife, children, daughter Lucille, and grand-son Jean-Luc	Bertrand, works at l’Humanité, Illyria and peace movement, and family	Clément, works at l’Huma, Illyria and anti-fake vax movement, and family
Sebastien, gardener, wife hairdresser, and family	Mathieu, concierge, wife post-office worker, and family	René, doctor for refugee children and family, daughter Sarah
Béa and François, Gabriel and Benoît, Repentant terrorists, now gardeners	Dominique, peace activist, and family, daughter Laurence	Aurélie, New Workshops, trade union activist, and family, son Emmanuel
Illyrians, their visitors, live and online	Rebecca, Marwan and son Faroukh	Pauline and Jacques, Pauline’s son Antoine and partner Murielle, and toddler Zac
Youth Club Casa Latina and Russki Dom Crèche for Toddlers	Homework club, All Pléiades, New Pléiades and Young revolutionaries	Marxism reading courses and adolescent and student hangout

Yellow: first floor, youth club; Green: second floor, Red: third floor, Blue: fourth floor, and violet: fifth floor. 2^nd and 3^rd floors: Casa Latina Russki Dom, 4^th and 5^th floor: Peace Dove.

Other books by Carla O’Gallchobhair you might also like:

Preview of Life in Communism 2.1. South American Trilogy vol. 2. The Little Monk and the Pope, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. It is April-May of Year 19 of the World Revolution (2021 being Year Zero). The Illyrians are looking forward to comrade Marianne’s long-awaited presentation on the interrelationships between Catholicism, Communism, and Imperialism, taking examples mainly from the Latin American experience, when chilling news from Rome reminds them that the obscurantist forces of the past are still to be reckoned with.

Preview of Life in Communism 2.1. South American Trilogy 1. Y los pueblos del mundo responden…, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. It is March-April of Year 19 of the World Revolution (where 2021 is Year 0). After their latest adventures in the Amazone, the Pampa, and in Outer Space, comrades Jean-Fidel, Lénina, Jean, Miguel, Claudia, and others are in Cumbrecita for more research on regrowing and regreening desert, mountains, and rainforest. Yet, unfortunately, obscure forces are still at work forcing the poor campesinos and rainforest hunter-gatherers, most of them Indios, to enter in ruinous exchange arrangements with old and new capitalists and oligarchs hostile to the revolution, and to make things worse, comrade Miguel’s uncle Ramón and his best friend Diego are deeply implicated. What to do?

 Life in Communism 2.1. Revolutionary Travel, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. It is February-March of Year 19 of the World Revolution (where 2021 is Year 0). Comrade Vicky, Peter Gar’s long-missed daughter is in our cooperative Illyria in Yvelines with her grandson Vitya to give what might at first sight seem to be a boring presentation of bourgeois, business, and elite travel under capitalism as compared to the much more fulfilling experience of revolutionary travel in Communism. Yet Vicky is not only a travel agent, who has done a thorough study of all new travel forms possible thanks to revolutionary science. She is also a buffalohuman, who can switch magically from a human to a buffalo and if need be to a grasshopper incarnation. At the same time, ex-U.S. underground capitalists and fasco revanchists have still not given up their pipe dream of returning capitalism and imperialism. Their latest hope is Gerardo Trilei, an Argentinian underground oligarch who has declared himself president and has a programme for returning money or at least money substitutes, harmful EMR-run internet, exploitation of humans, plants, and animals, and renewed surveillance from satellite not only in Argentina but all over Latin America. Two Illyrian research brigades accompanied by Vicky and Vitya happen to be on their way to South America, and may have a chance to do something to thwart Trilei’s plot.

Life in Communism 2.1. Regrowing – not only the rainforest, by Carla O’Gallchobhair. Young comrade Jean-Fidel has succeeded in securing consensus for his field research in South America in his home neighbourhood assemblies of Illyria, Yvelines and Casa Latina Russki Dom Peace Dove at 76 rue de Lorraine, Saint-Denis and a whole brigade of Illyrians have come with him. He wants to help and learn from the South American comrades who have begun to regrow their rainforests but also other natural habitats from the Andes to the pampas which are still suffering from the aftereffects of colonialism and imperialism. Yet the South-American revolutionaries have a formidable adversary in the ex-oligarch Jair Saconaro who wants to rewind the clock, continue with the drug trade and other exploitative capitalist practices.

 World Revolution 2.1. Part 3. Happening, by Carla O’Gallchobhair

The revolution is spreading in North and Central America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. Neighbourhood assemblies are being formed, work-place brigades and enterprise or divisional workers’ plenaries instituted. Court is held at village meetings. There will soon be no more hierarchy anywhere in society. Planes, cars, and other fossil fuel-powered engines are being scrapped. All potentially toxic foods, medicines, vaccines, fabrics, and other materials, products, and questionable practices are being submitted to popular referendums. People will only have to work 15 hours a week with a maximum of three hours a day. The rest of their time they can spend in voluntary and creative pursuits. Educational systems will be reconfigured and thoroughly improved, culture should blossom. Yet the fascists and their capitalist and other backers are not yet ready to surrender. Using their wealth, connections, and the many possible hide-outs in a world that is after all becoming decentralised and freer, not more controlled, they elude their Cellule 14 pursuers and their friends in many a breath-taking chase all through America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. Be prepared for abductions, ambushes, explosions, chemical and nuclear attacks, near-arrests, police corruption, oligarch conspiracies, coup attempts, war, civil war, strange encounters, passionate debates and romance…