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 lamuan languages.

The ancestors of the Raspara were a tribe of Meromo people living near Tŏli, who were descended from the Thunderers who had lived a few centuries earlier in the same area. The Thunderers had ruled at a time when it was tradition for every political party to identify with a unique language. In earlier times, when Nama had been the uncontested military guarantor of the known world, a tribe with its own language would obtain certain privileges that made it advantageous to do so, even if it hindered communication with other tribes.

The Raspara came to power at a time when there was no longer any advantage to cultivating a separate language, so the language the Raspara identified with was no more than an amplification of the dialectal differences of the branch of Meromo from which the core of their members had come.

Nevertheless, the tradition of maintaining a separate linguistic identity remained strong, and members of rival parties who defected to the Raspara were required to learn the Raspara dialect in order to become Raspara. Even people who already spoke another dialect of Meromo were considered to be learning a new language as they learned to abandon their own dialect's accent and colloquial vocabulary in favor of that of the Raspara.

Khulls

The Raspara admired the Khulls language, the ancestral language of the Crystals who had slowly conquered most of western Nama over a period of about 1200 years. Nama cooperated with the Crystal invaders, seeing them as less threatening than their other invaders, and eventually made Khulls its official language. The Raspara were also descended from people who had invaded Nama, and who had become enemies of the Crystals even though they were both also enemies of Nama. The ancestral language of the Raspara people was called Meromo.

The common parent language of Khulls and Meromo had split up around the year 600 AD, and after 3500 years of separation the two languages resembled each other very little. The Raspara people planned to transition to speaking only Khulls, even though it would mean cutting ties with their ancestors, because they believed the Khulls language to be superior to their own. In this, they were helped by the fact that the Raspara people came from diverse origins, and were not simply a tribe of Meromo speakers with a common political orientation. However, few of the people who converted to the Raspara party were of historically Khulls-speaking tribes, since the Raspara drew relatively few converts, either from the Crystals or from the aboriginal Namans who had adopted Khulls in order to open relations with the Crystals.

Pabappa and Andanese

Many Raspara also learned Pabappa or Late Andanese, which were the primary languages of the small, physically frail Pabap people living south of the mountains in Paba and Subumpam. Genetically, the Raspara were actually far nearer to the Pabaps than to the Crystals, but they preferred not to identify themselves with people who were both physically delicate and militarily unimpressive.

Pabappa was a sister language of Khulls, but sounded entirely unlike Khulls and was no easier to learn for Khulls speakers than for the speakers of Meromo.

Linguistic complex

By the time of their rise to power around the year 4150 AD, the Raspara had fully transitioned to Khulls, but most also still retained the knowledge of the Meromo language of their ancestors. Thus, they spoke of "Raspara Meromo" and "Raspara Khulls" rather than a single Raspara language.

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.

Origins

During the 3700's, a tribe calling itself the Dinis rebelled and escaped from their home in Atlam, which was itself in rebellion against the wider world. Although the Dinis were dark-skinned people closely related to the Crystals, they chose to settle in southeastern Dreamland near the border with their enemy, the Crystal territory of Baeba.

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 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.

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

The Raspara renamed themselves the Ghosts of Comfort and promised to restore their right to rule in what has been 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 genocidal 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.