Cold Men

The Cold Men (Play Pupa) were a party formed as a faction of the Swamp Kids in spring 4172, becoming a separate party in the early 4190s.

Scope

The Play-speaking Cold Men were not the first party to use this name; the Raspara's private name also meant Cold Men. The name of the party was not mere trivia, as the Play speakers choosing the name suffered from the problems of ambiguous party membership, as they were forced to allow Raspara to join their party, meaning that some people could be members of two political parties at the same time, even though the parties' interests were against each other. Thus Raspara were voting in the Cold Men's internal party elections and disrupting their leadership. The Cold Men could not do the same to the Raspara because while the Raspara were also forced to accept Cold Men in their party, their internal party leadership was not democratic.

The Raspara were few in number, however.

Formal party split

When the Swamp Kids' Pioneer faction ordered their military to invade Baeba Swamp, the Cold Men faction was forced to follow along even though they opposed the war. Some Cold Men escaped the mobilization by joining yet another decoy party, the Counters (Fivīs Mas), a party whose leaders pledged to vote in lockstep with the Cold Men on all issues so that they could pull in Cold Men who chose to stay in their homeland rather than move to Baeba. The Counters promised that they would never have a party platform.

Counter War

Many Cold Men nonetheless chose to join the war in Baeba after all, figuring that to remain in Anzan would be foolish, as there were other wars already raging in Anzan, and opposition to war in Baeba would not give them ground to plead with the other armies for mercy in Anzan.

By contrast the Counters believed that the other wars in Anzan were opportunistic, as the rival Pioneer faction of the Swamp Kids was vastly overspread relative to its size, and thus their army was weak everywhere. The Cold Men explained that the Pioneers' recent move to Baeba proved that they had finally realized what the Cold Men had been arguing for twenty years: that it was much easier to defend a small territory than a large one.

Persistence of democracy

Nonetheless, the bulk of the Cold Men's adult male population remained in the coalition army and thus moved to Baeba to fight for the Pioneers. Within months, the only adult men living in the Cold Men's former territory were Counters and a few elderly and physically disabled Cold Men who had been exempt from the draft. These few men soon realized that by remaining in the Cold party, they could wield disproportionate power, as they expected that the Pioneers (who had quickly renamed themselves to the Slime party) would soon re-establish contacts with their original homeland in Anzan, and would prefer to interface with the Cold Men who had helped them rather than with the Counters who had ignored them. The Pioneers had suspended democracy in the territories they were fighting for in Baeba, but maintained democracy in Anzan.

The Counters soon realized that they could not keep their initial promise to vote in lockstep with the Cold Men, because the Cold Men were able to support the war in Baeba without fighting the war in Baeba, and could pass new laws that made it very difficult for an able-bodied male to function in society, effectively reinstating the draft.

However, as an independent party, the Counters were no longer bound by any rival party's charter, and the party's leaders voted to revoke their promise and develop their own party platform. They declared that the elderly and frail men in the rump Cold party were acting in bad faith and did not deserve the sympathy that would normally accord to people in such a state. The Counters seceded from Anzan and then declared that since the Counters were geographically dispersed, their new territory was coterminous with Anzan.

The resulting Counter War led the Counters to attack the defenseless Cold Men, even though they knew the wives and children of the Cold Men would be against the new war.

Surrender

Soon the Cold Men surrendered to the Counters. The defeated Cold Men signed over the rights to their party name and the Counters then expelled the defeated people from the party.

Leadership crisis

Having regained control of the name Cold Men, the Counters declared that the Cold Men would be a one-faction party, meaning that the Counters and the Cold Men were the same entity, and that the Counters' internal party leadership elections would be the means by which their population would vote in their democracy. That is, the party became the government. This had happened before.

But the Cold Men had chosen to maintain the law that only adult males could vote, and their adult population was primarily female. Thus the female population was disenfranchized, and some Cold Men worried that they might defect to the Play party, which was run entirely by women. Furthermore, since young children had not been sent to the war, and had had no reason to switch parties, the new generation of boys was approaching the age of thirteen, meaning that they would be legally adults and could vote in the Cold party's internal elections. This had also happened before but not in a nation in which the party internal elections were synonymous with the nation's democratic elections. The adults worried that the new generation of boys might also defect to the Players, or start their own party altogether.