The following comprises entirely of my own views and opinions, and given the region no longer exists other than as a trophy under The North Pacific's control, I have little reason to defend its actions in retrospect.
It has been a while, but I intend to recount this story to the best of my recollection, to provide a comprehensive historical document detailing the salient points of the history of a troubled region. I will add my own running commentary, hoping to detail exactly what went wrong - this is not an attempt to glorify it in hindsight, but intended as an insider's insight into the region, that I hope also serves as a warning for those hoping to emulate it.
Below is the story of the Confederation of Corrupt Dictators.
In the beginning (2016-18)
The CCD was founded in November 2015, by a group of mostly real-life friends who found NationStates and wanted a place to roleplay political scenarios. It was initially a region of roleplay, with no real intention to become a larger region with any international influence. Quite quickly though, people online discovered the region, joined, embraced the culture and were given positions on the regional government, while many of those who had initially helped start it lost interest and left the game.
By mid 2016, the region had a small, but active playerbase comprising of a couple dozen different people, and I joined the region around this time. Throughout 2017 and the first half of 2017, the region continued to grow slowly, but was largely irrelevant within NationStates gameplay; the population hovered between 30 and 50.
Explosive growth (2018-19)
In June 2018, the CCD tried its first attempt at mass recruitment. This was, I have to admit even in retrospect, a pretty good combination put together - Jocospor sent out a tag:all recruitment telegram, and shortly after this I submitted a proposal to "Commend Confederation of Corrupt Dictators" which was voted on in the Security Council. There was an additional element of luck; the CCD was also, entirely coincidentally, the Featured Region of the day on 29 July 2018.
And all that recruitment worked - on 29 July, the CCD's population was 80 nations. By the end of September it was 514. This was certainly not the region's only attempt at mass recruitment, several more followed and the population peaked at 869 on May 2019. I've long wanted NationStates' regional history graph to track the number of WA nations rather than the total number of nations - given this is a much better indicator of the size of the playerbase - but at the region's peak in 2019 it had over 250 WA nations and 220 endorsements on the WA Delegate at the time (Jocospor).
Troubled times, unsteady leadership (2019-20)
Throughout the above period of time, various regions approached the CCD to establish embassies and inter-regional relations. Unfortunately, those regions were almost universally right-leaning regions, including some far-right and fascist regions. I won't go into deep commentary here, but ultimately we were all new at this - none of us had run a region, or indeed any large online community, before and Jocospor was very naive in assuming that "just because they're roleplaying fascists doesn't make them fascists". In an ideal world, maybe that would be true. Unfortunately, we live in this world, and it is not particularly ideal.
In my opinion, if your region is based around an in-game political ideology - and especially if, as in CCD's case, your intention is to roleplay as a dictatorial right-leaning region - the line between IC and OOC politics is one that needs to be very firmly drawn. In the CCD's case, it was not, and this became increasingly problematic for the CCD as the region expanded through recruitment and attracted more and more involvement from the far-right. By the end of 2019, the involvement of fascism and the far-right in the CCD, though not outwardly obvious, was an insidious growth within the region and this built up to a dramatic collapse.
Attempted coup of The North Pacific (2020)
In 2019, the region brainstormed a number of different ways to infiltrate the more mainstream NSGP regions. The majority of these never progressed past a ill-conceived suggestion in the CCD regional government's private discord channel, but one did: "Operation 84", the CCD's attempt to infiltrate The North Pacific's regional government, and eventually stage a coup of the region.
This attempt was executed in a way that was entirely devoid of intelligent thought. At the time, I knew only some vague details of a plan to stage a coup of The North Pacific, and that we had an agent in the region working on this, but I learned the finer details of the CCD's attempt to stage a coup at the same time that you all did. My initial reaction, upon learning the details of the now exposed operation was one of... what the hell was that?
Our operative had absolutely no experience in this area. They repeatedly got distracted and side-tracked from their objective by becoming overly involved in TNP's regional roleplay. Instructions from CCD's side were unclear and there was no real plan to actually hold onto TNP's WA Delegate position even if the operative was, in an incredibly unlikely scenario, able to take it.
"Operation 84" was not only a terrible idea, it was also impressively poorly planned and executed. As one can probably imagine, the backlash once this was leaked - as was inevitable given the terrible handling of "classified" information - was severe, and this coincided with those factors I detailed above regarding fascism within the CCD reaching breaking point.
The Aftermath (2020)
In early 2020, in the aftermath of the above, we had a number of active and influential members leave the CCD. Two names that come to mind were members of the CCD's regional government: Transnista and Riakou.
Transnista I think provided a very reasoned, moderate voice within the regional government, and unfortunately became inactive in the aftermath of the above. She was only a part of the region for a relatively short time, several months, but was an intelligent gameplayer and quickly gained influence within the region. She was also a trans woman who was openly out, which I only mention because it inspired me to write a couple of WA General Assembly proposals in favour of expanding transgender rights - an issue I think is important - but at the time (and quite understandably) my motive was questioned, and my attempts were subsequently raided out of quorum.
Raikou was the person who executed "The Snap". In a very public condemnation of the CCD's actions, on 1 February 2020, he used his substantial influence to rapidly eject hundreds of nations from the CCD, and the population fell overnight from 576 to 309. The loss of Riakou was felt elsewhere too: he had donated a large quantity of telegram stamps to fund the region's recruitment efforts, and his departure from the region took quite a while to recover from.
In the immediate aftermath, the region executed "Operation Seismic Toss" - I replaced Jocospor as the region's WA Delegate, issued an apology on behalf of the region, and closed all embassies - including those with fascist regions - as CCD briefly adopted an isolationist foreign policy.
As much as I would have liked to end this story here, and say we maintained this policy, cut ties with the far-right, and continued a genuine effort to reform the region for the better... unfortunately, there's more to this story. While the fallout from the attempted coup, and "The Snap", certainly served as an immediate wakeup call for the region, unfortunately I think this was a negative in the longer term due to the lasting effects of the departure of several of the more moderate voices of the region. The region eventually dropped this isolationist policy, re-established embassies with problematic regions, and adopted the "Shadow Cult" aesthetic, changes which I very much disliked and argued against at the time but was unable to overrule.
Other in-game controversies (2020-22)
There were a couple of other events and controversies that the CCD was involved in, most are public, some are not. I'll detail a few below:
Repeated self-commendation attempts: The first one was submitted in 2018 to coincide with recruitment as detailed above, this particular attempt was misguided, poorly worded, and repeatedly crossed the IC/OOC line. I later submitted a several more attempts to self-commend, one made it to vote while the later attempts were quorum raided.
WA presidential election: The 2020 April Fool's event was a US Presidential style election - remember that? The event was structured so that the top 5 nations from day 2 made it into the final election on day 3. Jocospor ran on behalf of the CCD, sent out a campaign telegram, and finished 5th on the first day. On the second day I was appointed as running mate, and we were again running in 4-5th place on track to make it into the final round. Towards the end of that day, the top candidates united to knock Jocospor into 6th, preventing us from progressing into the final round. We made a big fuss about this "collusion" afterwards. In retrospect, we deserved it.
Europe WA Delegate toppling: We toppled Imperium Anglorum as the WA Delegate for Europe a few times. Europe specifically was targeted as the gap in endorsement numbers between the Delegate and the second highest endorsed nation was quite small, and because Jocospor had some disagreement with IA that I never really learned about in detail - just another meaningless conflict I think we've come to regret.
Quorum raiding: In 2022, after an attempt to get "Commend: Confederation of Corrupt Dictators" to vote was raided out of quorum, I decided to explore gameplay mechanics in more detail and coordinated a number of quorum raids for the CCD. We knocked a couple of proposals below quorum with this tactic, although quite quickly defenders began to proactively pile on native delegates to prevent this. I gave up after this, given we had only a very small team of players with technical skill and, despite coordinating jump timings myself, I could not personally add to the numbers as my WA membership was stuck as the region's Delegate.
Inactivity (2022)
In the second half of 2022 I lost interest in this game. We refused to make any real progress on improving the region, or close fascist embassies. I realised that the region was still resistant to change, and that, quite rightfully, the rest of the NSGP world were still resistant to the region. I became less and less active, and my nation briefly ceased to exist in December 2022.
Final years (2023-24)
I, honestly, can't tell you much about what happened during this period; I can only assume it wasn't much, and that the status quo within the region was maintained. While I did revive my nation and move it back to the CCD, my nation's brief CTE had meant I'd lost my position as the region's WA Delegate and was no longer part of the regional government. I made no effort to reclaim that position.
Jocospor ceased to exist on 12 June 2024, and was removed as Governor on 14 July when the region was transitioned to a Frontier. On 28 July, Charnwood of the North Pacific Army was appointed as Governor, and this marked the end of the Confederation of Corrupt Dictators.
To summarise, I think ultimately the failure of the Confederation of Corrupt Dictators was multifactorial.
The CCD was never intended to be a well liked region. We never wanted to become beloved within the NSGP community, and we enjoyed employing what most others considered annoying WA antics. We wanted to play the bad guys - my personal opinion is that this game is much more fun when you're "bad". The problem is that, for a region that relied so heavily on the separation of IC/OOC, regional leadership was terrible at distinguishing between being "bad" in-game and bad influences - fascism and the far-right - outside of this space.
As I mentioned above, none of the region's leadership had prior experience in running a region, and truthfully we'd been mostly making it up as we went along. The forces behind fascism in online spaces are insidious; there is a reason the alt-right has been so successful in spreading conspiracy theories and far-right propaganda over the dark corners of the internet. We were not prepared to deal with this. And while I don't intend to make excuses for myself or for others involved, for many of us our involvement in CCD was almost all gameplay related on this website. I rarely used the region's Discord server, and this delayed my awareness of the problem at the time. I would assume the same is true for Riakou, who after two years in the region realised the above, and decided to make a dramatic exit.
I will state that, to my knowledge, no one on the regional council was personally a fascist, including Jocospor. I would never willingly associate with a fascist, I think it is a disgusting ideology that has no place in our society.
However, there is the old saying - "if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, then you've got a table with 11 Nazis" - and by this metric I can understand that the CCD's harsh criticism was warranted. Jocospor's actions in leading the region were a product of naivety and stubbornness, as demonstrated at one point by his claim around "invisible scripts" in the region's Discord server. They were not intentionally malicious, but unfortunately the outcome was the same: the CCD helped to enable fascism, and that is something I deeply regret.
