It is a truth universally acknowledged that the easiest way of dealing with a problem was to deny that it existed. This was what every Fiefdom schoolchild had been taught for decades either in school or, if they were particularly unlucky, at a youth camp on a terrible excursion to some scrubland next to an industrial estate which counted as “wilderness”.
And let it not be said that the leadership of the Fiefdom did not practise what it preached. Racism, for example, was a product of class warfare. Everyone knew this. And everyone also knew that, being a classless society, it was impossible for anything as bourgeois as institutional racism to exist. It was, in every meaning of the term, inconceivable.
But if you asked a foreigner, someone who had never worn a red handkerchief around their neck or sung songs about the industrious squirrel, they might not entirely agree for most people only tended to know two things about the glorious People’s Democratic Fiefdom of Anahuac. First, that it was the sort of dreary, centrally-planned place that never really had any right to exist after the fall of the Soviet Union, especially considering it had the audacity to believe the Marxist-Leninism to which so many other brother socialist republics now paid only lip service to. So it continued to make wheezy little two-stroke cars, and televisions that would the season’s top buy in 1992, and tractors nobody wanted and jeans no one would wear. The second, was for all that the Fiefdom had tried its own version of the New Soviet Man, the faces of its Politburo were still remarkably white compared to the rest of the workers and peasants to which the party professed to be its vanguard.
This contradiction between words and actions (by no means unique to those practising a half-hearted authoritarianism) was a product of the Fiefdom’s complicated and contested history, not least the fact that a combined “fiefdom” history was a relatively recent phenomenon. Go 150 years and where today you see a bright red splodge on the map, with its happy murals brutalist palaces of culture, you would have instead seen two countries. The first, larger and older of the two was the great Nahua empire which had ruled since Tizoc had united the lands under the Quadruple Alliance. This empire, once the need for human sacrifice had finally ended, ruled with stability and tradition. It had also stagnated, falling further and further behind those nations over which, by nature of its existence, it claimed dominion over, before it finally collapsed under the weight of its own discrepancy. The second territory clung like a barnacle on this greater entity, it’s precarious existence between the innumerable host within and the unforgiving sea at their back. These later arrivals had originally come from the north coast of Epheron and would, once, have been referred to as Vandals but were instead called Vandels today in an effort to differentiate the once Germanic tribe from those that smash bus shelters. These Vandels brought with their Arian faith which they had preserved for countless generations and, more importantly, guns with which their heavily fortified coastal cities stood as a testament to the futility of those in the larger empire which had attempted to drive this burgher republic back into the sea from whence it came.
A kindly reader would, therefore, not be surprised by the original composition of the Fiefdom’s leadership. The proto-communist party, and related trade unions, had emerged from the industries which were the exclusive preserve of the Vandels. It is therefore understandable, if not excusable, that those first union leaders would fight so determinedly to protect the rights of white labour at the expense of those inland who, thanks in large part to the conservatism of the old empire, remained primarily agricultural. Nor should it be remembered that, as much as the Party doesn’t want to talk about it, but there was no great and glorious communist revolution. The revolution, such as it was, was imposed by the Soviet Union and the new leadership mostly dredged from the expats growing fat in the cafes of Moscow.
It was this which meant that, without much hyperbole, that Huitzilin Naui Quiahuitl was considered by many to be the most dangerous man currently at liberty in the Fiefdom, not that his age (62) or his profession (professor of philosophy at the Calmecac of Yancuitlan) would suggest that. For Naui Quiahuitl knew enough to know that a straightforward demand for democracy and civil rights would mark him as a troublemaker and certainly hinder if not his own career but also the fledging careers of his children. And so, with polite determination, he had begun to ask why the Fiefdom had not lived up to the ideals to which it already professed. Why, if racism was dead, were so many of the Party’s top jobs still taken up the Vandels or other European migrants? Why were some in the workers and peasant state seemingly treated more fairly than in others? Was this what Marx and Engels had proposed, was this what Dialectical materialism said would happen?
Of course, in the old days, it would be an easy problem to deal with. An early morning knock at the door, perhaps a drive around the sleeping city streets maybe a brief sojourn in the Secret Police headquarters before an extended, and compulsory, stay in the distant Pinacatl mountains. But times, as was their wont, had changed.
