Raspara

The Raspara were a political party formed in the Four Quarters Empire while it was being occupied by AlphaLEAP. They were one of several political parties calling themselves the Cold Men, and thus used the untranslated name "Raspara" to clarify the distinction.

Etymology of name

Raspara is a Pabappa name, related to but not a direct cognate of the Andanese name Lahilili. The word lahalala, which is also found in Andanese, is a loanword from Palli of a name which had in turn come from an earlier stage of Andanese. If the name that produced lahilili in Andanese had survived in Pabappa, it would have produced *Rasara; however, this is largely a coincidence, because in the original language, only the first syllable was the same.

The alternate Andanese name Lahalala can be appreviated to pipa using the numeric readings of the syllables: lahalala is 1-3-1-1, and pipa is 13-11.

Language

See here for other languages spoken by the Raspara.

The Raspara may have spoken Meromo, or Merar, which despite their names are not closely related.

Philosophy and politics

The Raspara believed their destiny in life was to abuse other people. They selected the Swamp Kids, a gullible population who had just emerged from the world's most repressive authoritarian regime, as their new hosts and penetrated their nation at its weakest points.

Raspara belief system

Some of the basic tenets of Raspara philosophy were:

• The Raspara must always be actively enslaving a subset of the host population.
• The Raspara must always spare another subset of the host population from slavery, in order to divide the middle and lower classes against each other.
• The host population, not the Raspara, is responsible for military defense of the nation.
• The Raspara people should be settled throughout the nation, but must have at least one Raspara-exclusive colony, ideally in the center of the nation, into which they can retreat in the event that the host nation is invaded. If the Raspara cannot be present in every city, there must be in their place a different minority that is willing to collaborate with the Raspara. The host population cannot have any territory completely to itself, even in the poorest parts of the nation.
• The Raspara must always remain a minority in their occupied nation, in order to ensure a plentiful supply of people to dominate. If the Raspara birthrate becomes too high, a new war must be launched in order to increase the supply of people to rule over.
• Living standards in the Raspara colonies must be superior to those in the nation as a whole.
• Public criticism of the Raspara should be at best illegal and at least frowned upon by the masses of the host population. Raspara people should be seen as superiors who are immune from criticism and reserve the right to attack without fear of retribution.
• Raspara people should be nominally represented in areas in the government in which they are not already fully in control.
• If a host population considers itself to be a male-dominated society, in which men are responsible for protecting women, prostitution of a very abusive sort must be openly practiced and promoted in cities dominated by the host population, but strictly suppressed in cities dominated by the Raspara. To avoid the appearance of impropriety, these prostitution operations should be run not by Raspara in disguise but by members of a different minority, distinct from both the Raspara and the host population. Additionally, the customers of these prostitutes must be members of the host population rather than the Raspara.
• Crime must be punished more harshly when committed by a member of the host population, particularly a male, than by a Raspara.
• Raspara people are not allowed to work for companies in the host country unless all of the people above them in the corporate hierarchy are also Raspara. If no such employer can be found, a new company must be created to find jobs for the Raspara.
• Politically successful members of the host population must be targeted with invitations to join the Raspara, in order to deprive the host population of its most powerful defenders. On the contrary, unsuccessful members of the Raspara population, including criminals, will forever retain their right to remain a member of the Raspara.

The Raspara rejected democracy, since they figured that in a democracy the oppressed people could simply vote the oppressors out of power. Previously, the Raspara had been hindered by their struggle for a weak, gullible population to rule over, and had been forced to prey on each other, but when the Raspara heard that they had been conquered by an army calling itself the Tinks, they selected the Tinks as their new hosts and began plans for their climb to power.

The Tinks permitted the Raspara to exist and to run their areas of the nation as they wished, but insisted that the people living in those states must be given the ability to vote for the Tinks. The Raspara agreed to a compromise: they would hold elections and allow their people to vote for the Tinks, but they would ignore the results and always keep the Raspara leaders in power anyway. The Tinks realized their relationship with the Raspara people to their north was going to be a very interesting one.

The Tinks did not allow women to vote, but as above, they were the only party that allowed common people to vote at all, and women generally did not complain about this, as there were other more pressing issues at hand. Even the Zakap party, which the Tinks had overthrown, was legal, although it also did not participate in elections and had no supporters. In fact the Zakap were more of an army than a political party and it seemed to some that the Tinks could not tell the difference.

History

Origins

During the 3700's, a tribe calling itself the Dinis rebelled and escaped from their home in Amade, which was itself in rebellion against the wider world. At this time, more than half of the land in the world belonged to either the Crystal Empire or the Thunder Empire, and the two empires considered themselves allies. Therefore, by rebelling against the Crystals, the Dinis people were declaring war on most of the world. Although the Dinis were dark-skinned people closely related to the Crystals, the Crystal Empire was hostile to them, and they instead chose to settle in a strategic location in southeastern Dreamland near the border with their enemy, the Crystal territory of Baeba. Dreamland's people were tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, the very opposite of the Dinis, and had fought a racial war against all of the dark-skinned tribes about 350 years earlier which had never completely died down. Nevertheless, the Dinis people believed that Dreamland would welcome them because they promised to ally with Dreamland against the Crystals.

However, Dreamland soon realized that the Dinis minority was trying to provoke a war against Baeba in which Dreamer soldiers would die for the benefit of the Dinis, and therefore the Dreamer government voted to expel the Dinis. The Dinis responded by invading Baeba Swamp themselves. They did not expect to defeat Baeba, as they were badly outnumbered, but they realized there was no safe territory for them to flee to that would not require passing through either Baeba or the now-hostile Dreamland.

Baeba's Crystal army quickly defeated the rebellious Dinis army, but did not kill those who surrendered. Soon, word of the Dinis attack on Baeba spread, and other opponents of the Crystals looked to the defeated Dinis people for inspiration. The remnants of the Dinis tribe signed a pact with Xómeye (Hōmoya), a Thunder nation located at the northern limit of human habitation. As the climate was known to be warming, the Dinis hoped that by moving to Xómeye they could build a prosperous future for their people. The Thunder state of Vēga also enticed the Dinis people to move in, but they refused, since they had signed a pledge of loyalty to Xómeye, and knew through third party information that Vēga was secretly hostile to Xómeye. Thus the Dinis people became firmly entrenched in Xómeye.

Intermarriage with locals

The cold climate made the extremely dark skin of the Dinis people a severe liability; they had come from the hottest part of the continent, and had in just a few short years found themselves living in one of the coldest parts. They intermarried with the locals and raised children with a more moderate skin tone, and these quickly married with locals as well. Within a few generations the dark brown skin of the Dinis had merged into a light tan.

Spread throughout the Empire

Vēga's hostility to Xómeye was merely territorial, not ideological, so when their people overthrew their leader and installed a new populist government, they became more sympathetic to the Dinis way of life. Soon, their movement spread throughout the Thunder Empire. As the Dinis people were now a political ideology rather than a tribe of people, the Raspara party had been born.

The Raspara wanted to move their base of power to the Thunder capital city of Blop, and to completely subdue the people of Blop. But they realized this would take many generations of high population growth to accomplish, as despite the rapid spread of their ideology most Thunderers did not feel safe joining a political minority party.

Submission

The Raspara party was outlawed when Dreamland conquered the Thunder Empire in the year 3844. The Dreamers considered all of their new subjects the same, and therefore treated the Raspara no worse than the mainstream Thunderers. Many Thunderers converted to Rasparism, since there was no longer any disadvantage to doing so. Thus, the Raspara party grew rapidly during the Dreamer occupation.

Independence

In 3884, the Thunder army overthrew the Dreamer occupation and set up a one-party government with power reserved for the mainline Thunderers only, not the Raspara. In part this was due to suspicion that the Raspara were planning to turn against their own lower ranks in the future, and that recent converts from the Thunder party would be considered to be of a very low rank. Many Thunderers disliked the Raspara view that tall people deserved the right to rule over small people, as the Thunderers were typically short, but the Dreamers were among the tallest people in the world and had for forty years exploited the small, physically frail Thunder people and destroyed much of their wealth.

Their war against Dreamland had taught the Thunder soldiers to overcome their fear of tall, strong men; but they felt that the Dreamers had generally been poor soldiers who had failed to take advantage of their superior muscular strength, whereas the Raspara were known to be fond of humiliating tactics aimed at small targets even in peacetime. Furthermore, their loyalty was dubious: during the war, Raspara soldiers had mostly retreated to the hills and let the Thunder army face the Dreamers head-on, suffering heavy casualties while the Raspara suffered nearly none.

Fifth Empire

For historical reasons, the Thunder army counted its history as beginning from a period long before the name Thunder had been coined, and considered the new empire they were forming to be the fifth Thunder Empire. (The second Empire had been the period in which they were united with the Crystal Empire, while the third and fourth "Empires" were their periods of submission to the Crystal and Dreamer occupiers.)

Slavery

The Thunderers announced that they would begin enslaving all ethnic minorities shortly after the founding of the new regime, and their army captured most of the Dreamer and Crystal minorities within a year. They initially wavered on whether to also enslave the Raspara, who had helped the Thunderers in the war but had largely avoided close combat. The general of the Thunder army was also the first emperor, since he was the one who had brought the empire into existence, and he decided that the Raspara would indeed be enslaved, but he knew that the Raspara were much stronger than the Crystals and Dreamers and therefore to capture and enslave the Raspara would lead to yet another war. The Thunderers also announced that the borders of their Empire would be closed to all foreign races, and that dark-skinned people attempting to enter the Thunder Empire would be captured and enslaved.

In 3915, thousands of dark-skinned Crystal people moved to the Thunder city of Lypelpyp and set up a corporation called STW. They declared that they were allies of the Zenith party, an ancient organization consisting of tribes mostly living along the tropical rim who had historically harassed the Thunderers' Pabap ancestors and forced them into prostitution. Within a few years, the STW'ers dominated the economy of Lypelpyp, and therefore dominated the Thunder Empire's trade route to the sea of Baeba. Although these immigrants were all illegal, the Thunder Empire had found a loophole: they ceded the city of Lypelpyp to STW, which declared itself a separate nation named Lindasia. Since Lypelpyp was no longer a part of the Thunder Empire, the dark-skinned immigrants were not violating the Thunder immigration laws. In return, STW agreed to pay the Thunder Empire taxes on all trade passing through Lypelpyp in both directions.

In 3919, the Thunder Empire was overthrown by a pro-immigrant wing of the Thunder party which immediately legalized the immigrants in Lypelpyp, readmitted Lypelpyp to the Empire as a proper city, and freed all of the dark-skinned Crystal slaves. The new Thunder party officially rejected racist beliefs and welcomed minorities into the Empire. However, slavery of the Dreamers continued, and conversion was denied. Thus, in the new Empire, the only remaining slaves were people who shared the same blonde, blue-eyed physical type as the party of power. Some of the old Thunderers objected to this and formed a new party, Găpa, based on racial sympathies, although even the Găpa still disliked the Dreamers since they were not truly of the same race.

The abolition of slavery provided cover for the embarrassing failure of the Thunder generals to capture and enslave the Raspara minority settled in the hills; just as predicted, the Raspara had proven to be far more violent than the other minorities, and also far stronger in battle. Although the freed Crystal slaves had embraced their emancipation by affirming they had no grudge against the Thunderers and would not seek repayments, the Thunderers worried that the Raspara were far more aggressive and would seek revenge against the Thunder majority even though they had suffered very little.

War with Laba

The Raspara had hoped to infiltrate and abuse the Thunder population in order to make the Raspara the most prosperous people in the world. But in 3948, king Adabawa of Laba declared war on the Thunder Empire and began an invasion. Because there was no common land boundary, the fighting began in Baeba Swamp and Paba, both well outside the Thunder Empire's borders. And in both of these places, the soldiers fighting for Adabawa were of the familiar blonde Lenian tribes. When the Găpa people learned of this situation, they defected to Laba and began to fight the mainline Thunderers from within.

Furthermore, pacifist movements had been gaining ground in the Thunder Empire, and many young men simply refused to join the army, and threatened to defect if the Emperor (still in power from the previous war) tried to force them to suit up. Therefore, the Thunder Empire was very weak, and for the third time in 200 years they were completely conquered by an outside power, in this case Laba. However, Dreamland had early on joined the war on Laba's side and many Dreamers occupied Thunder territory and set up new Dreamer-led governments in which the descendants of Dreamer slaves shared power with the new Dreamer invaders.

The Thunder and Raspara parties were again outlawed, but Laba's occupation was much weaker in scope than the previous two had been, and they were unable to take control of events at the local level. In 3977, a civil war erupted in Laba itself, and Laba's army was forced to give up all of its enormous gains and retreat back to Laba. But by this time, life in what had been the Thunder Empire was so disordered that no new empire arose to replace the old one; all power was restricted to local levels, and petty monarchies similar to Lypelpyp became the new norm.

Loporomo

During the postwar period, known as the Loporomo government, party identification became stronger, but at the same time, conversion decreased and the parties once again came to resemble tribes. Most Thunderers by this time had defected to a stronger power; in some cases, to Dreamland, and in other cases, to the Raspara. The Raspara came to consider themselves the heir to the Thunder party's name, while also considering themselves to be superior to the Thunderers.

Settlement of Blop

The Raspara decided the time had come to infiltrate the city of Blop, the capital of the former Thunder Empire. The Thunderers in blop were taller than most, and the Raspara saw them as potential converts. But they needed a slave population to rule over, so they knew they would not completely merge with the Blopians. They again appealed to the Zakap people to their east, promising they would have extra power if they converted to Raspara.

Contact with the Zakap

The early Raspara converts were largely descendants of long-ago migrations from Subumpam, and had retained the tall stature of the original settlers. Even though the Subumpamese were closely related to the Pabaps, there was a great difference in height between the two groups.

Some were of the Zakap people, who were descendants of immigrants from Tarwas and were even taller. Only a few Raspara came from shorter tribes such as the upland Pabaps. Even those who belonged to the shorter tribes were still taller than the Andanese and also more robust and in some ways hardier than the taller tribes. Raspara people identified themselves as Cold Men and said that, since most of the world was cold, their ability to endure cold weather would lead them to victory over the peoples of the tropics. They also claimed immunity to sunburn and said that they were thus stronger than some tropical peoples even when forced to live in the tropics.

History in Anzan

The Raspara did not have formal legal authority in the Swamp Kids' nation, called Anzan, but they stood on the toes of the Swampy leaders and often assassinated Swampies who did not obey their orders. The Raspara claimed that they were destined to rule over the Swampies because they were physically superior; Raspara men were much taller and had more masculine body types than Swampy men, who seemed little different than their women. Although Raspara were indeed taller and of a more masculine body type than the Swampies they ruled over, they kept secret the fact that it was their abusive political philosophy which was mostly responsible for keeping them in power. They knew that if the Swamp Kids learned the truth, they could be overthrown, but so long as the Swamp Kids believed that the Raspara's success was related to their physical body type, the Swamp Kids would believe the Raspara were destined to rule.

Boundaries of Raspara settlement

The Raspara called themselves Cold Men, and believed that cold weather gave them power. They settled territory between 29°N and 37°N; the 37th parallel, then as now, was the approximate northern limit of human self-sufficiency. There were human tribes such as the Moonshines living further north, but they were dependent on the sea for their food and needed to be constantly on the move, meaning they could not build many permanent settlements.

Relations with other armies

The Raspara often fought against the Zenith, another abusive minority population in Anzan who had been living there for thousands of years. The Raspara refused to ally themselves with the Zenith, considering them an eternal enemy, and some Raspara even portrayed themselves as heroes for enslaving the Swamp Kids because their slavery was not as harmful to the Swamp Kids as the prostitution and erratic violent crime that the Zeniths inflicted on them. The Zeniths were also much taller than the Swamp Kids, but lacked the organized conspiratorial power structure of the Raspara and despite living among the Swamp Kids and their ancestors for thousands of years had never achieved political power.

The Raspara's main weakness was that their power was tied to the continued existence of the Swamp Kids. Even though they abused the Swamp Kids, they had to allow the Swamp Kids to maintain an independent military so that their many other enemies would not eat them up and throw the abusive Raspara out of power. After forty years of abuse, the Swamp Kids began a quest to escape their nation and settle in Baeba Swamp, which was much smaller than Anzan but offered the Swamp Kids a safer place to hide from their abusers. When the Raspara heard this, they blocked the paths out of major population centers and massacred the Swampy army battalions that had intended to provide the citizens a safe path out of Anzan. Nevertheless, those Swamp Kids who did manage to escape through other routes indeed founded a new settlement in Baeba Swamp, and the remnant population of Swampies in Anzan no longer had a powerful military. This left the Raspara with no protectors, and they were forced to disperse into the wilderness and abandon their abusive lifestyle.

When the Raspara reemerged a few years later, they were also in Baeba Swamp, attempting to impose another abusive slave system on the Swampies that had run away from them back in Anzan. However, the Raspara were much weaker now, and were forced to dilute their power by allying with other groups that were unrelated to any political organizations that had existed in Anzan. Within a few decades, the Raspara and the Swamp Kids they had abused died by the same sword when the new leadership of Baeba Swamp was handed over to yet another outside army, Asala, which had recently immigrated from Nama.

Post-Baeban history

The Raspara who had not made it to Baeba simply lived in the wilderness, passing down their philosophy to their children, but never again regaining power. In the end the descendants of the Raspara were swallowed up by the surrounding peoples, and were not part of an organized state for more than a thousand years afterward, when they were conquered by the Crystals.

Near the west coast of Rilola, the descendants of the Raspara came to settle further north: primarily in areas between 35°N and 47°N. Along the west coast, the climate was warmer in both winter and summer than it was near the center of the continent. This is because the center of the continent was divided by a shallow sea that greatly lowered the temperatures in summer while in winter it was frozen and had little effect on temperature. However, despite the warmer than expected climate, the Raspara along the west coast had a much more difficult time gathering food than they had when they had lived in the central part of the continent.

Economy

Parasitic stage

During their time in Anzan, the Raspara followed a parasite-predator model of economics, meaning that they refused to work, but instead enslaved the people around them and compelled them to donate money and goods, and occasionally stole more when the income from their slavery and protection operations was not enough. Nevertheless, the Raspara preferred military security to financial prosperity, and because they never created a self-sustaining economy, they never obtained a financial status significantly above that of the people they abused. They thus were much poorer than the Matrixes, with a per capita income oscillating between a tenth and a fifth of that of the Matrixes; they were likewise less than half as wealthy as the lower class of Dreamland, and less than a twentieth as rich as the free people of Baeba Swamp.

Ghost Era

Note: the Ghost party was actually formed during the Period when the slopes were converting to gold. They had an independent state during this period, and even underwent an internal revolution. So, both Ghost philosophies were fully formed BEFORE the Cosmopolitan Age. Nevertheless, their range was tiny and their grip on power was weak, and so the Ghosts were primarily known for their role as a minor player in the Cosmopolitan Age.

Cosmopolitan Age

The Raspara renamed themselves the Ghosts of Comfort and promised to restore their right to rule in what had been Anzan. They declared the foundation of the Eighth Empire, the 6th and 7th having transpired during the existence of Anzan. This time, they appealed to ethnic minorities, since they were based in an area that was heavily cosmopolitan. They still promised, however, to spare the lives of the old Raspara who did not accept the new ideology.

The Ghosts signed alliances with many old enemies, and stated that they would never attack those armies again, but also that they would remain neutral in any wars that did not involve the Ghosts or the remaining non-Ghost Raspara. They then declared war on Asala, an alliance of pro-Nama armies that had already declared a preemptive war against them.

Language

The Raspara took the Khulls language and radically reduced the phonology. Vowels were down to 3, and all six tones merged into one (although vowel lengh was preserved_. Yet, not much collision of word forms because there were many marginal phonmeewsssss in Standadrd Khulls.

Settlement of Yīspwilinâ

The Ghosts then settled in the Anzanan state of Yīspʷilinâ , an ethnically diverse area with a traditionally feminine leadership. Yīspwilinâ contained the headwaters of two major rivers. Its people had resisted the male Swamp Kids' leaders and had helped them in some of their wars, but the Swamp Kids he never asked for total control. Now the Ghosts wanted to make Yīspwilinâ the homebase of their new empire.

Yīspwilinâ also provided the Ghosts a path between Tata and Lypelpyp, which they needed in order to invade Lypelpyp and overthrow the emerging democracy based on cooperation with Nama's new Asala government. The Ghosts supported democracy, but insisted that to remain healthy, a democracy needed to be controlled from above to prevent dissent from arising among the voters. The Ghosts thus abolished freedom of speech and taught their children that those who questioned authority should be punished.

Demographics of Yispʷilina

There were 5 armies in Yispʷilina already before the Raspara took control:

• Crystals, who formed the majority.
• Swamp Kids, who mostly had lost contact with both Baeba and Anzan and focused on day-to-day survival instead of dreams of military conquest. Yet, they were not vulnerable to attack as they often had been in the past because the Swamp Kids' historical weakness had been largely due to their tendency to challenge enemies far larger than themselves, while ignoring uprisings in their own homeland. The Swamp Kids in Yispʷilina had fixed both of these problems, and thus ensured their survival, though they lost the ability to influence politics outside their immediate territory.
• Matrixes who had fled in from Tata after being thrown out of power.
• Asala, which had come in from Lypelpyp in the hopes of expanding even further west and destroying their enemies.
• Dreamland, a weak force.

Foundation of the Ghost Empire

The Ghosts reaffirmed that they were the Cold Men, and that they found strength in building settlements in cold climates. However their population grew quickly in the state of Tʷădu, on the border of the tropics and near Baeba.

One reason for retaining the name Cold Men despite centering their power in a warm climate was that the Ghosts believed that all of the peoples to their north were peaceful and submissive, whereas their true enemies lived in the tropics.

economy

The Ghosts promised economic supremacy would take over for military superior personnel supremacy super supremacy. They promised a nat'l income 10x that of Moonshine, 3x that of Dreamland, and higher than that of any geographically contiguous state. They asked 'all neighboring empires for statistics on income, to verify this, but did not collect from distant empires or subentities way sway sway st I'll such as as states or cities.

immigration

Promised unrestricted immigration of all, but had to be Ghosts, thus becoming like Moonshine. Promised go avoid the error of Dreamland, who had 900 yrs earlier promised the same and then launched a racial war against Baeba. The dark-skinned people of the extreme south of the southernmost state (Tʷădu) became wealthy because they were the ones nearest Baeba, and the light-skinned Ghosts did not try to supplant them. However, any of these aboriginals who showed loyalty to parties other than the Ghost Party was stripped of their power and in some cases killed.

Ghost-Poswob relations

The Ghosts considered themselves allies of the Poswob tribes. They claimed that the Poswobs were the most submissive and easily abused people in the world, and that they needed another tribe to protect them. The Ghosts merged the concepts of tribe and territory here; to them, the Poswobs were any people who lived in the young but growing empire of Pusapom, whether they were new migrants, aboriginals, or a mix of both. Therefore, as the Ghosts anticipated they would one day conquer Pusapom, they considered all non-Ghost people living within Pusapom to be Poswobs.

The Ghosts recognized that the Poswobs had many tribes among them, but observed that the most feminine tribes were the ones with the greatest power, and therefore that the Poswobs as a whole were a feministic people. They figured that a male-led tribe could easily invade the Poswobs and force themselves on top of the Poswobs, but that the Ghosts could here serve as the protector of the Poswobs by maintaining geographical separation while building economic cooperation: profiting from the Poswobs without harming them.