Revolutions - 11.10-Red Justice Red Freedom

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

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Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 11.10, Red Justice, Red Freedom. We left Mars as an increasingly pressurized powder keg ready to explode into one of the most famous revolutionary events in human history, the three days of red. But as we stand on the precipice of that world's historical moment, I need to bring us up to speed on two vital components of that revolutionary event. The first component is ideological. because we've spent a lot of time laying out why the Martians of 2247 felt aggrieved, mistreated, abused, frustrated, and angry, all of which would drive and sustain their insurrection. But we have not talked much about why the climax of the three days of red would be a declaration of independence. So first today, we're going to talk about the development of independence as an idea and how it became the ultimate goal of the revolution.

The other component will complete the revolutionary coalition. Because while the Martians doing things on Mars is obviously at the center of the story, the spaceshipers doing things in space really takes the dream of independence and makes it a reality. So we need to head back out to space to properly fold the spaceshipers into the revolutionary mix. As we discussed in episode 11.3, the idea of Martian independence was first broached around the time of the Martian centenary and then carried into the Martian Way cultural movement of the 22-teens and 2220s. The Martian Way embraced the idea that Martians were a people as such, distinct from Earthlings. And it's not inaccurate to say they were essentially reinventing the pre-corporate ideology of nationalism and applying it to themselves.

We are different from you. We deserve self-determination. The idea of Mars for the Martians became an abstract aspiration gestured at in several songs and vids and posts from the era. Then Jose de Petrov took these gestures and spelled them out explicitly in his forces of history. which, as I said, became an urtext of Martian independence. Petrov's argument was largely rooted in a somewhat simplistic extrapolation of history combined with a lofty sense of destiny. But the idea caught on with mostly younger B-class radicals in the teens and 20s, who believed that the Martians not only deserved independence,

but they would inevitably achieve independence. This was the driving force and motivation behind the attempted coup of 2229 that ended on the commissary floor. So the idea of independence kind of went dormant in the 2230s, as much more aggressive censorship and monitoring made discussing such ideas much more dangerous. Even committed Martian activists looked askance at the idea of a literal political break with Earth. They might advocate reforming Mars Division and altering the nature of the relationship between Mars Division and Omnicore headquarters back on Earth, but that did not require anything so radical as independence. They wanted Mars division to have greater corporate autonomy and draw its leadership from Martian-born executives. They wanted Martians to have a voice in their own affairs, a sentiment that gained explicit

expression with Mabel Doris run for the board of directors in 2244. Most especially, they wanted corporate policy to shift from treating Mars as merely a site of resource extraction for Earth's benefit to treating Mars as a human community where people deserve to live dignified and fulfilling lives. None of that involved literally breaking away from Omnicore or Earth. But the idea of Martian independence never went away. If you were really motivated and took appropriate precautions, you could access and disseminate banned materials in the black channels.

This, for example, is how young Zhao Lin managed to cobble together a pretty robust library of Martian Way cultural products, including a full version of Forces of History by Jose de Petrov, which he was always happy to share clandestinely with his friend. and he wasn't the only one. None of this happened out in the open, and the actual number of people involved in preserving and sharing the work was tiny. But they did keep the flame alive. So while the word independence was being whispered in the black channels, the practical fact of Martian autonomy was simultaneously being entrenched through sheer force of neglectful inertia.

Remember, during the later bird years, the decline in central control, and de facto autonomy from headquarters gave the Martians a taste for self-determination. Sure, the senior executives of Mars Division were S-class Earthlings, but they were making a lot of decisions for themselves. They were making most decisions for themselves. For decades, this autonomy seemed to increase a little bit more every year, such that by the 2240s, Mars Division was effectively self-governing, and it worked mostly fine. The Martians knew how to get on with things. They knew how to extract FOS 5, they knew what to do in case of emergencies. They knew how to repair and maintain hardware

using local fabricators to keep operations online. The directors of Mars Division and the executives surrounding them, many of whom were Martian-born, got very used to making decisions for themselves, of not having anybody looking over their shoulder. So the dream of Mars for the Martians didn't have to be the result of some dramatic break, and in fact it kind of looked like it might just be the slow, inevitable result

of decades of changing habits, patterns of behavior, and corporate expectations. This obviously changes abruptly with the arrival of the new protocols in 2245. The new protocols didn't just reverse those decades of slowly accruing autonomy, they rocketed past the previous status quo and introduced far tighter centralization than the Martians had ever experienced. So the new Society of Martians that formed in response to the new protocols was a whole couple of clicks more radical than its predecessor.

The first Society of Martians had been built a around pretty moderate philanthropic efforts to improve the lives of people born on Mars. It was only around the deeper fringes that Petrov's red-cap radicals coalesced around the idea of literal political independence from Mars. The New Society of Martians, meanwhile, was from the beginning, secretive and underground. They had no moderate outer face, and the kind of people who joined were automatically inclined towards more radical beliefs, otherwise they wouldn't be joining a secret resistance group. Now, they were coming together first in the United States. Now, they were coming together foremost to protect Martian lives and undo all the havoc Werner had wrought,

but they also started talking amongst themselves. If this is the way they're going to treat us, do we need to be a part of Omnacor at all anymore? Can we break off and become our own thing? The chatter in the black channels about independence grew louder and gained new acolytes with each passing day. But independence from Mars, true independence, was still mostly a fantasy held by a tiny subset of young radicals.

where it wasn't even clear how serious they were about it, or how much they just liked fantasizing about it. The whole thing seemed almost unthinkably daunting, and talk rarely descended into the 10,000 minute details of how such independence would even work in practice, if indeed it was possible at all. They may have wanted Mars to become more than a resource extraction site serving Earth, but that's still what they were.

So even through all the struggles over the new protocols, The prevailing goal, even among committed Martian activists, was resisting Warner's reforms, not chasing pipe dreams induced by too many stems. Earth dwarfed Mars in size, strength, wealth, resources, manufacturing capacity, everything. There was absolutely nothing about the present relationship between Mars and Earth that recommended independence from Earth. They were totally dependent on Earth. How in the worlds were they supposed to be independent? Look around.

Everything you see comes from Earth, or requires things that can only be made on Earth. Materials, supplies, equipment, the basic building blocks of life on Mars. Think it through for five seconds, and you'll realize that three colony cities huddled on an otherwise lifeless rock are never going to be able to survive without supplies from Earth. So just quit that chatter. And this isn't just coming from like Omnicore Loyalists, this is coming from people inside the Society of Martians. They scoffed at the radicals and demanded it. they focus on securing reforms inside Omnicor's existing hierarchy? More autonomy and better conditions

for the Martians? Yes. Independence? No. Inside the Society of Martians, this resistance to independence was best represented by a woman named Angeline Coles, a B-class functionary in the accounting department. Coles wrote a post called Restructuring Mars, a blueprint for a better run, more humane, and more independent Mars division. But critically, this was still going to exist inside Omnicor's corporate structure. She argued that this would not only improve the lives of Martians, but improve Phosphi production. She also argued that independence was not just a fantasy, it was a fantasy that would surely lead to nothing less than mass death. Now, she had been working on restructuring Mars for several years in response to declining

standards during the later bird years. But then when the new protocol so severely disrupted things, she joined the Society of Martians and released her blueprint onto the black channels, where it made the rounds. And even though it argued independence was impossible, when independence came, Coles would be invited into Mabel Dorr's cabinet to help put many of her ideas into effect, which was controversial because she was invited into the cabinet even after voting against independence in the first Martian Assembly. So around about 2246, Coles still probably represented mainstream Martian opinion. But calls for independents continued to grow louder. And these calls broke down into two strains.

One I would call poetic or romantic, the other I would call practical and realistic. The romantic strain is the stuff that starts back in the Martian way and runs through Jose de Petrov in the first red caps. Shortly after the election of 2244 showed how insignificant the Martians were back on Earth, another B-class functionary named Hans Samara wrote a hugely influential post called I Am a Martian. It laid out in florid prose that the Martians were people, noble, and proud, that they had their own ways of thinking and doing things, that Mars was their home and it belonged to them, no matter what Omnicor said. They were being exploited and mistreated and not taking it anymore, rising up and seizing what was theirs, was the highest calling in life.

So put on the red cap and work for that higher purpose on behalf of your fellow Martians. even if you die will be for the greater good, and you will be a glorious martyr. It ended by calling for Mars to be free and independent, that it was their destiny. So rise up and heed the call. I Am a Martian was a core text spreading the idea of independence to other members of the Society of Martians, who then disseminated it more widely among their friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers. But where Samara painted lovely word pictures that fired the imagination, and got the heart beating a little faster.

An A-class executive in the engineering department named Helter Lanny wrote a series of posts amidst the annulment crisis that made the case that independence was possible. It was not just a pipe dream. Mars was capable of self-sufficiency. They had all the basics. Their power grid was self-generating and self-sustaining. After all, they were the source of Phosphive in the solar system.

Their flex cells were never going to fail. The biomass units, while admittedly not capable of producing gourmet luxuries that came from Earth, they had more than enough capacity to feed every Martian on Mars the calories and nutrients they needed to get them through the day. Water was easily acquired from the polar caps, all it had to do was be melted down and clean. Besides, the Martian colonies were practically a closed-loop system that only required new inputs in accordance with a growing population. There were still trillions of untapped gallons of water on Mars. They also have their own fabrication facilities because in many cases it was much cheaper to fabricate things on Mars than ship them from Earth. It was true that at present they did not meet the demands of more sophisticated equipment, most especially grab units, which could be repaired on Mars, but if they ever failed replacements did have to come from Earth.

But that was no problem, because Lanny made the obvious point that independence did not mean cutting themselves off from Earth completely, because Earth couldn't afford to be cut off from Mars. and that gave the Martians leverage. Lanny said that an independent Mars would not need to be wholly self-sufficient. They would simply have to go from supplying Earth with FOS-5 to trading with Earth for FOS-5, because frankly, Earth was more dependent on the FOS-5 coming from Mars than Mars was for anything coming from Earth, at least for a while.

Life on Mars would be less comfortable, and there would be hardships and deprivation at first, but they didn't have to hold out forever. They just had to hold out longer than the Earthlings, because while Mars could technically survive without inputs from Earth, without Phosphive, Earth was well and truly screwed. How long could they last if Mars shut off the supply? How big were their Phosphive reserves really?

Especially following decades of declining production, followed by an acute crisis thanks to the new protocols. There were rumors Omnacor was already tapping its phosphive reserves by 20, 27, even if no one talked about it publicly. An independent Mars does not cut itself off from the Earth. It trades with the Earth, and frankly, we'll be able to trade with the Earth on very favorable terms. You withhold what you have, and we're all uncomfortable. We withhold what we have, and your civilization collapses. So let's make a deal. But of course, the most famous and influential case for independence was

made by Zhao Lin, who was now making his first real mark on the Revolution. not just as one participant in a larger game, but as a forceful visionary who will help define the Martian Revolution. He combined the two strains of independence talk, the romantic and the practical, and produced a screen vid called Red Justice, Red Freedom, which he released into the black channels just after Bloody Sunrise. The vid incorporated lots of footage he himself had taken,

or which came from his private collection. Shots of Martians being harassed and deported or, alongside stats about pay docs and infractions, and how they were all being punished for the Earth's mistakes. It included anonymous interviews with Martians who had been annulled, or who had loved ones who had been annulled. It had footage from Bloody Sunrise showing security services firing on unarmed protesters and the ensuing stampede. But the coup de Gros was pirated footage of the massacre and the commissary in 2229, which most people on Mars had never even heard about, let alone seen footage of. it all combined to paint a damning picture.

Zhao said if this is the way Omnicor was going to treat the Martians, then Earth deserved to lose Mars. All we're going to do is leave a toxic relationship. And then he transitioned into all the points made by Lanny about Martian self-sufficiency. That independence was possible. This was much to Lanny's later great annoyance because a lot of his ideas would be subsequently attributed to Zhao.

And that was because Red Just, red freedom was the thing that broke containment. It spread far beyond just the black channels and the Society of Martian activists and spread out into the wider population. Now most people, most times, most places are thoroughly apolitical, whether they are living in hell, paradise, or purgatory. Political movements, political awakenings, political consciousness is generally a minority phenomenon. Even quote-unquote mass movements and quote-unquote mass movements and quote-unquote mass uprisings throughout history never involve a majority of the population. And so it was on Mars. Only a small number of Martians joined the Society of Martians, either the old one or the new.

So the idea of independence and Martian political and economic self-determination was largely lost on them. But after Bloody Sunrise, when fear, anger, and outrage were at an all-time high, Red Justice, Red Freedom started getting passed around more mainstream servers. This, thanks mostly to a clever piece of code, that kept altering the Vids hash number to evade the sensor bots. So despite efforts to block the Vid from being available, it just kept sitting there freely available, available to anyone who got curious and click. And click they did, and when they did, the idea of independence was planted in their minds. So after Bloody Sunrise, the idea of Martian independence entered mainstream consciousness.

The authorities knew the idea was on the rise out there, and they hoped Warner's late-breaking concessions would head it all off. We now have a Martian Advisory Council. The annulments have been stopped and may even be reversed. Timothy Warner himself is off the planet for good and promising to allow Mars Division more autonomy. There was hope in the upper rungs of Mars division that this would be enough. But I wouldn't have called the last episode too little too late, if it was. And so we left that episode off with incidents popping up all over the place on Mars. Mars really was a powder keg. And words like independence, freedom, justice, were on the tips of an increasing number of tongues. Now we are going to shift gears to set up the other key component of

the coming Declaration of Martian Independence, the spaceshipers, because none of this is possible without the mutiny of the spaceshipers. Now the space shippers, remember, broke into two basic classes, the Phosphive container fleet, and everyone else, all those other cargo ships carrying people and goods back and forth

between Earth and Mars. Now, like the people of Mars, both classes of shippers had been severely annoyed by dozens of daily frustrations thanks to the new protocols. There were new interfaces and shipping schedule redesigned.

There were problems with docking and backlogs with onboard, importing and offloading cargo. It was a mess. But both classes had their own unique grievances that led many in their ranks to start grousing sediciously. And then when the Martians went into revolt, say, you know what? We're with them, actually. So to take the non-phosphive shippers first, the officers and crews of the myriad vessels plying the lanes between Earth and Mars had been getting excruciatingly squeezed for years now. The entire economic ecosystem of the shippers had been propped up by smuggling, and that had been severely curtailed.

I probably did not explain this well enough before, but the relationship between the shippers and Omnicor was complex, and had evolved in an idiosyncratic way. They were not technically employees of Omnicor. All of them were independent owner-operators. It's just that they had one client, one supplier and one banker, Omnacore. But they had to acquire their vessel from Omnacore on credit, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to pay off that. debt, which they basically never could. They also had to bear all risk and all maintenance costs

themselves. Now, this is the result of some unique circumstances and decisions made by Omnacor back when Martian colonization first got started, but then it just persisted thereafter. All of this is covered very well by Yin Soddering in their book Full Freight and Credit, the early history of the spaceshipers 2113 to 2157. But the point here is that after 2245, the spaceshipers' way of life was being driven to the breaking point, because official shipping rates had never been enough to cover their actual costs and payments that they were expected to come up with, and they were now all falling dangerously behind. Now, thanks to all those decades of smuggling, there had long been a relationship between these

shippers and Martian activists. After all, where was the First Society of Martians, and then later Mabel Dorr, getting the provisions, equipment, and materials that official channels failed to provide, from smuggling. So there were long-standing friendly and mutually beneficial relations between patriotic Martians and the spaceshipers, and they were both very upset by the impact of the new protocols on that smuggling. So when the new society of Martians got going, more radical officers and crew members of these various cargo ships formed their own network of seditious resistance. They both pitied themselves and sympathized with the Martians with whom they shared now an object of scorn and frustration, Timothy Warner. And so when Mars declared independence and Mabel Doer issued

her call, they were ready to say yes. But them saying yes would not have mattered much if the FOS-5 fleet had stayed loyal to Omnacore because the security ships that protected the containers were the only military force in space, save for the ships patrolling the lunar orbit line to ensure Omnacor's monopolistic supremacy of the solar system. The Foss-5 container ships crisscrossed the void between Earth and Mars near continuously. Advances and energy and propulsion meant that while the shortest distance between the two planets came once every two years, and that's when the Great Convoys moved, Omnicor kept their container fleet in continuous transit back and forth.

Each of the roughly 350 container ships Omnacor operated had on board three security vessels in case of an attack. There was a gunship crewed by about a dozen and a couple of smaller two-person fighters, all of them equipped with drone bombs that ran seek kill programs. Now, because they were the only vessels in space equipped with any kind of weaponry, a shot had not been fired in anger in space since the Battle of the Line way back in 2154. Now, because of how important FOS 5 was, these ships were run directly by Omnacore, and their crews were employees of Omnacore. For decades, it had been standard policy to prioritize the needs of the Foss 5 crews.

They enjoyed all kinds of special perks and privileges and benefits. But the advent of the new protocols stripped a lot of that away. They no longer got the special treatment they had grown accustomed to, most egregiously of all on matters of compensation. For decades, their salaries had been augmented by an array of kickbacks and bonuses and service fees, none of which were a part of the official salary structure. So when the new protocols went into effect, the salary structure was cleaned up and rationalized,

and all those kickbacks and bonuses and service fees disappeared. So the Foss 5 crews were pretty angry about that. Now, why would Werner be so stupid as to piss off the people guarding the most valuable resource in the solar system? Well, he didn't really think it would be that big of a deal. He believed that there was a lot of waste and bloat out there that needed to be cleaned up. And when he cleaned up the books, he wasn't necessarily targeting the Foss 5 crew specifically. They were just getting caught up in a larger churn without stopping to wonder what a fact. it might have on the people in charge of delivering literally the most important substance

in the solar system. But aside from their own self-interest, the officers and crews of the FOS-5 container fleet could see plainly that the new protocols were not just bad for them, but bad for everyone. You didn't get to serve on one of the FOS-5 ships unless you were pretty elite, so all of them were extremely well-educated and able to make their own intelligent assessments of what was going on out there. They also happened to know the exactest of the exactest of the exact amount of FOS 5 they were bringing back to Earth, and how it had been in slow decline for a while now, and then Werner drove it right off a cliff. So inside the officer core of the Foss 5 fleet, there started to be conversations, internal discussions about how badly Warner was screwing things up

and what they could maybe do about it. So when they stopped grousing about their pay, they brought up the bigger picture, that Warner wasn't just a threat to their way of life, but a threat to human civilization. Once they started thinking in those terms, the crew started developing their own political consciousness. They had never needed to develop political consciousness before because they had always been treated extremely well. But now that they were being disrespected, they fully grappled with the fact that they were the guardians of, again, literally the most important substance in the solar system. And that not only meant they had the right to demand special perks and privileges, they meant they had real power. If they decide they weren't going to sit here

and take it anymore, that they weren't going to deliver Phosphive anymore. Who could stop them? They controlled every available weapon in space. Now, of course, just as on Mars, this kind of seditious talk was not exactly mainstream, and you had to be very careful about who you said what to, and even those who were inclined to hear such seditious talk and not rat anyone out, might point out that if they mutineate against Omnacor, sure, they had a monopoly on force and space, but Omnacore controlled literally everything else. How are we going to run and maintain our ships without parts and servicing from Earth?

Grave units, propulsion drives, oxygen generators, liquid recyclers, any one of those fails, and we're dead in space. The answer to that, though, was a modified version of the case that was made by Helter Lanny. The crews were reading what was coming out of the black channels on Mars, and the counter-argument that Earth will still provide everything we need, the grav units and propulsion drives and oxygen generators and liquid recyclers, however begrudgingly, once they realize they need us out here delivering their FOS-5, and if we die, then they die. So that's the state of things, heading into July 2247. And next week, a set of deportation orders will trigger scuffling inside the stockades of Olympus,

which will then spiral out of anyone's individual control into a colony-wide conflagration. And though no one planned it or anticipated it, when this wave came, the Martians wrote it all the way to independence.