Literature / Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

The future never looked more flannel! And yes, that is a grenade on the mother's necklace.

Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War is a novel written by William S. Lind (under the penname Thomas Hobbes) and published in 2014 where, 20 Minutes into the Future, the United States breaks up into a series of warring successor states, including the Northern Confederation, eventually renamed Victoria, in New England.

This is told from the perspective of John Rumford, a US Marine discharged when he ruins a ceremony honoring fallen Marines to stop a female officer from saying "Iwo Jima" to honor the dead there, because no woman Marines fought on Iwo Jima, and so they do not deserve to participate in his eyes. After having trouble farming and working, due to government regulations, Rumford forms a group, the Christian Marines, to fight for traditional Christian values in an increasingly multicultural and tolerant society. He becomes a leader in the revolution to restore America to an idealized version of the 1930s. 'Retroculture' it's called.

Then things get really crazy....

The novel is an openly white-supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, and reactionary-right-wing Propaganda Piece that has been described as "the paleocon Turner Diaries". Compare with Christian Nation and After the Revolution, similarly speculative political novels featuring an oppressive, near-future American government with its own La Résistance valiantly fighting back ... but from a standpoint politically opposite to Victoria.

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Tropes:

• After the End: Much of the novel takes place against the backdrop of the Fallen States of America. Plagues killed much of the population, economic depression destroyed trade, and a collapse in the social order that Rumford blames on "Cultural Marxists" who spread degenerate ideas like tolerance and equality ultimately brings down the US government.
• A Million Is a Statistic: When dealing with the Nazis, Rumford doesn't consider the Jewish holocaust as important as some people would, since all great nations in history have caused large genocides, and the Nazi one was pretty small compared to those their archenemies the Dirty Commies did, anyway. He's more upset by the totalitarian nature of Nazism as such, their fanaticism about their ideology and the power of the state to control the people through police and propaganda. Well, that and that they like color TV.
• Anarcho-Tyranny: The system that the "Cultural Marxists" are described as running. They make sure violent criminals go unpunished while people who stand up to them are spoken against, and also recruit said criminals into the army for battle against rebel cities.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: The Northern Confederacy's people reaction to the dissolution of USA and The Purge of liberal professors in Dartmouth College.
• Artistic License:
  • Regarding agriculture. Early in the book, Rumford complains that he can't use some nearby wetland for farming. Considering the types of crops he was growing, a wetland would've been a terrible place to farm, as it would've been a perfect breeding ground for his crops to be infected. And this is without getting into what would happen to his farm if it flooded: many farmers nowadays are intentionally adding or restoring wetlands to their farms as they prevent flooding and soil erosion.
  • Regarding organized crime. All of the drug cartels in Mexico join forces into a neo-Aztec Empire, which is highly improbable as they fight one another for market share as often as they fight their governments.
• Artistic License – Art: Lind gets the Scouring of the Shire from The Lord of the Rings completely wrong. He describes the Retroculture getting rid of all of the ugly modern buildings as akin to the Scouring of the Shire but in reverse. Except the Scouring of the Shire was getting rid of Saruman's forces occupying it and cleaning up the pollution and wreckage they left behind. It also shows that he doesn't even know what the word scouring is as it means scrubbing something with a rough surface to clean it—meaning he's unintentionally saying that Retroculture literally dirties anything it touches. Besides which, J. R. R. Tolkien himself was famously anti-racist, even coming to regret having written the orcs as Always Chaotic Evil, and likely would have been appalled at even being mentioned in the same breath as this novel.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: One early scene has a judge tarred and feathered with road tar. Tarring and feathering in Real Life was done with pine tar that was not nearly as hot as the asphalt now used to pave roads, and slathering someone in hot road tar would assuredly burn them to death rather than "just" painfully rough them up. Lind seems to portray the incident as painful and humiliating, but not fatal, indicating that he didn't know the difference between the two types of tar.
• Artistic License – History:
  • Studying history seriously leads Rumford to conclude that there is absolutely nothing truly new. All issues have already been debated by Greek philosophers, and even technology is just following tracks laid down by the time Napoléon Bonaparte was trying to conquer Europe, which is utterly absurd and ignores the possibility of multiple independent discoveries.
  • Lind states that the U.S. was the "freest" nation in the world until the 1960s, which is... very debatable, at best, considering this is the decade in which the non-white segments of the population gained many basic rights they'd previously been denied under openly racist and white-supremacist systems of segregation and disenfranchisement.
  • The book gets a lot of facts about women's role in military history wrong.
    • Rumford asserts that no army that has included female front-line combatants has ever been successful and that "all armies, everywhere, that had actually fought anyone had been made up solely of men". The same war that produced the T-34 that Lind gushes about also saw the Soviets field female snipers, machine-gunners, a tank crew for a T-34 (famously led by Mariya Oktyabrskaya), and combat pilots (including the 588th/46th Bomber Regiment,^note a.k.a. The Night Witches from Sabaton's song of the same name. a raider group that used low-tech biplanes that ought to fit right into Retroculture if they hadn't been flown by women). In all, ninety women received the Gold Star Medal and the title Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II, most for service in front-line combat. And while militaries with female members have not been the rule in human history, they have existed since the Ancient World in some places, and one of the most successful militaries in human history, the Mongols, included women in both command and field positions.
    • At one point, Rumford states that there are no women interested in military theory. Even a casual glance at military-theoretical literature shows that this is not the case, leading one to wonder if Lind has actually read any milsci journals since 1980.
    • The book treats women in the United States military as new and dangerous trend. In truth, experiments with service women began during World War I and all branches were forced to allow women with equal benefits to serve in non-combat roles in 1972. The Air Force, which had been doing the same since '48, decided to just let women serve in combat roles in '76. There's always been some grumblings about things like different fitness standards between the sexes, but it's hardly the sort of 21st century Political Overcorrectness trendiness Lind thinks of it as. Part of this might have to deal with the fact that while the first parts of the book (or perhaps a preceding short story) were written in 1995, the book itself wasn’t released until 2014.
    • He also shows complete ignorance of Iwo Jima when he claims that there were no women there. Jane Kendeigh and her fellow flight nurses who landed on Iwo Jima during the heaviest fighting would disagree. Then there is the fact that 20,000 women actively served in the United States Marines by the end of the war, with over 85 percent of the staff in the Marine HQ being women.
• Artistic License – Military: The Author Filibuster extends even here: in his non-fiction, Lind insists that the US military has too many staff officers, doesn't study enough military history, and has forgotten the art of maneuver warfare, against all evidence to the contrary.
  • He tries to paint the Russian T-34 as a good, reliable tank designed to defend against rear area strikes, which are apparently the sole purpose of tanks. Just what the Christian Marines needed, apparently. Historically, said tank was known for frequent breakdowns,^note In fact, this was true of most tanks of the era, with the notable exception of the M4 Sherman: the Department of War demanded it be reliable, given it couldn't be readily shipped back to the factory for repairs from overseas. to the point where they were known to drive into battle with entire spare transmissions lashed to the hull. And that's not even getting into the fact that the newest T-34 rolled off the assembly line in 1958. The tanks are almost 60 years old, at best, at the time of the novel's publication. And the ones that Russia has are mostly literal museum pieces in the real world, disabled to the point that they're fancy metal sculptures.
  • John Rumford's Establishing Character Moment as a young US Marine is interrupting a ceremony honoring the Corps' war dead rather than let a female Marine participate. No woman fought at Iwo Jima, he insists, so no woman has a right to speak the words and honor the dead. In reality, women have been a part of the USMC since 1918, served in combat areas since The Vietnam War, and, as of the story's beginning date in the near-future, have been full and equal parts of all save small unit ground combat for over twenty years (the fact that a precursor short story/the first part of the book was literally written in 1995 might have something to do with this). There are no male, female, white, black etc. Marines, only Marines. Besides, disrupting a remembrance ceremony is far more disrespectful than any imagined slight. Exactly none of these points come up when his CO chews him out and he gets discharged, only that a congresswoman is hounding him to be inclusive. If anything, his fellow Marines seem to respect his stand on the issue (despite the fact that doing this is approving of disrespect against far more fellow Marines both living and dead).
  • And that's not including other things such as live-fire infantry training with offset aim alone preventing casualties, modern warships destroyed with spar torpedoes, antiquated 1950s radar easily spotting stealth bombers, etc. etc. Platoon strength militia units with no logistics or coordination with each other are upheld as vastly superior to existing military, to the point of being called upon to train the actual military. At one point, the protagonist shows his contempt for the established military by sleeping through a briefing containing such useless trivia as local politics, road and weather conditions.
• Artistic License – Physics: The EMP bomb is portrayed in a more than somewhat implausible manner. From the description, this seems to be a deliberate storytelling device.
• Artistic License – Politics:
  • Rumford writes that none of the federal government's globalist allies could (initially) send troops to help suppress the rebellions because Russia "exercised her veto in the Security Council." The United Nations has no authority over a bilateral agreement to deploy troops in another country at the host country's request. Indeed, less than one year after Victoria was published, Russia herself deployed troops in Syria to suppress rebels at the request of the Syrian government, a deployment which Lind apparently thinks the United States would have been able to veto.
  • Rumford makes a note at the end of the book that, if soldiers/warriors had been the ones to choose symbols, the symbol for war would've been linked hands and the symbol for peace a sword, because war unites while peace divides. Beyond the obvious resentment the losing side will have toward the victor, war only unites for a time, while peace (or rather, trade) allows for, if not Unity, at least tolerance.
• Artistic License – Religion:
  • At the end of the book, Rumford claims that the different branches of Christianity have joined together in order to launch a massive crusade... against a similarly united Islamic world. This is laughably impossible, for many reasons. Even setting aside the huge divides within each faith, both Christianity and Islam have spent as much, if not more of their histories warring between different branches and denominations of their own religions as they have with one another.
  • Every drug cartel in Mexico join forces together to create a neo-Aztec empire, worshipping the Aztec gods and reviving all the human sacrifice and cannibalism that characterized the ancient society. While many of the drug empires of Mexico have their "unique" spins on religion, most of them tend to take after Catholicism.
• As Long as There Is One Man: Bill Kraft's epic speech to the effect that Prussia will never die, so long as men fight for her.
  "We were wiped off the map in 1947, but Prussia is more than a place. As Hegel understood, it is also an ideal. Prussians still exist, and so does the Prussian Army, a bit of it anyway. Now, it’s fighting again, here, for what it always fought for: for our old culture, against barbarism. Someday, we will win."
• Author Appeal:
  • There are a lot of trains in this story, guess who used to write about revamping public transport?
  • William Lind has a fondness for German military trappings, so most prominent characters, particularly Rumford and Kraft will reference German or Prussian sayings, military leaders, battles, costumes, and other history.
• Author Tract: Lind despises anything to do with 'political correctness' - which covers a broad spectrum of ideas such as civil rights, environmentalism, feminism, Islam, and living in cities - and can't imagine anyone with a brain would embrace such ideas. When his Northern Confederacy fights its various opponents that represent such ideas they inevitably act with such stupidity that defeating them is a cakewalk for the Anglo-Saxon followers of his Retroculture ideology.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Rumford gives one to the woman representing the Resistance Council in the Cascadia Arc for wasting his time.
• Blatant Lies: Played straight by the villains, who lie endlessly in their propaganda. Averted by the heroes; they have their own spin doctors, but make sure to tell the people the truth. Rumford points out that this is really the smart as well as the honorable thing to do: Lies backfire when they are found out, whereas a true propaganda is invulnerable.
  The first rule of good propaganda is to make sure the facts are accurate.
• Bread and Circuses: America in the years before the collapse. As long as the food stamps continue to flow and TV keeps running, the Apathetic Citizens remain somnolent. When the government runs out of borrowed money to pay for the show, however, chaos ensues. Rumford and Kraft ensure that this can never happen again by eliminating all welfare handouts in the Confederation.
• Capital Offensive: Federals trying (unsuccessfully) to capture Augusta, capital of Northern Confederacy.
  • In return, NC army units destroyed bridges between Washington DC and Virginia, captured federal pilots from nearby airport; destroyed planes on nearby airfield by mortars, successfully supported states of Maryland and Virginia in their attempts to separate from federal government, thus completely isolating Washington DC and making it unsustainable for Federals. This ultimately leads to federal evacuation of Government from Washington DC to Harrisburg, Pensylvania, making them easy target of Kamikaze-style assassination.
• Cavalry Betrayal: ultimate fate of liberal!Cascadia Resistance leaders at hands of Rumford and Japanese, much to joy of ordinary Cascadia Resistance members.
• Civil War: The main premise of the book. Before states even start seceding, there is a shooting war over smoking bans.
• Clark Kenting: When he travels in the South, Rumford counts on local-style clothes, glasses and suppressing his Maine accent to avoid being recognized.
• Combat Pragmatism: The Christian Marines use hostages and human shields to great effect in the early stages of their war against the federal government, who are understandably reluctant to engage in actions that might kill their own men.
• Confusion Fu: Fourth Generation Warfare heavily incorporates this. The basic idea is to do what the enemy doesn't expect, and/or can't defend himself against.
• Defensive Feint Trap: the primary defensive tactic of the Christian Marines is not to hold their borders, but draw the enemy in and ambush them. This works to great effect at the Battle of Seabasticook, and later (on a strategic scale) against the Numero Uno Division.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: While many of the villains are simply greedy and corrupt hypocrites, the Landwehr and the Azanians both have reasonably coherent ideologies, though they still look alien and "evil" to Rumford and his allies. The former follow a version of Nietzschean philosophy that idealizes strength, will, heroism and racial purity (in opposition to borgeouis, Christian values), whereas the latter are transhumanist separatist feminists trying to build a Themyscira-like society.
• Delivery Guy Infiltration: When the secessionist commandos attack the Federal air force base early in the story, one of the devices they use is a beer truck with faked credentials to get some operatives past the outer security grid.
• Destination Defenestration: a corrupt federal official (Ms. LaDrek of HUD) is thrown out of a window several stories up by a mob of angry citizens, after gangs’ brutal rape and murder of Sister Mary Frances and her young charges in Worcester and government’s lack of response and remorse, and does not survive the experience. This instance explicitly references the famous Defenestrations of Prague, which disregards the fact that said defenestration was a result of a Catholic-Protestant religious dispute and those defenestrated survived the incident.
• Divide and Conquer: the The primary strategy of the Northern Confederation is to stand back and let the enemy collapse under their own multicultural differences and incompetence. Aided by the odd quiet military intervention.
• Divided States of America: Rumford and his allies are almost gleeful in kicking off the secession crisis that leads to the dissolution of the United States. By the halfway point of the novel there's a handful of organized states while the rest of the former country is awash in chaos. Which parts are which depend largely on the melanin content of the population. The central premise is the dissolution of the United States owing to a combination of hyperinflation, pestilence, and disobedience in the face of growing lawlessness. The heroes occupy the Northern Confederacy/Victoria, a deeply conservative version of New England, and in the South a New Confederacy forms, torn between its cosmopolitan and rural elements. Past that, Wisconsin is taken over by Nazis, the 'Party of the Will'. Insane parodies of 'Deep Greener' environmentalists take over the Pacific Northwest, forming Cascadia. California is renamed Azania, moving the capital to the Berkley campus and outlawing men. The rest is overrun by 'orcs' as minority gangs and rioters are called in-story.
• Easy Evangelism: To an almost mad absurd degree. Police are easily converted by the Christian Marines and feed them intelligence. All good and right-thinking people embrace Retroculture without hesitation. The mass votes for Kraft or military intervention never ever go the wrong way. May be partially justified by the groundswell of discontent with the Federal Government and its ridiculous politically correct laws.
• Enemy Mine: The patriarchal Mexicans ally with the Lady Land Azania, because both states hate and fear their common enemy, the Confederation, more than each other.
• Enigmatic Minion: General Wesley. Was he responsible for the death of almost the whole Administration in a very weird-looking terrorist attack, or was he really its last major loyal supporter? Is he a mere power-hungry tyrant, or just a stolid patriot who blindly keeps fighting for national unity long after everyone else realizes it is dead and buried for good?
• Euphemistic Names: The feminist Anglican bishop the protagonists burn at the stake in the first chapter is called Ms Cloaca Devlin. In other words, Lind essentially gave this introductory Straw Character the name ‘Butthole Satan’.
• Fallen States of America: With the exception of areas dominated by reactionary white powers such as the Northern Confederacy, Nazi Wisconsin, and a recreated CSA, the rest of America is depicted as awash in gangs of Black and Hispanic marauders or states dominated by crazed ideologies. Why the reactionary white powers aren't included in the crazed ideology category has everything to do with the protagonist sharing said ideology.
• Full-Circle Revolution: Averted in Victoria itself, but present in the New Confederacy, where the transition to independence is less of a clean sweep. The same old politicians, officials and generals by and large manage to retain power under the new flag, with the result that the Confederacy remains almost as corrupt as the United States used to be. So it needs another revolution, assisted by Rumford, before it can finally shake off the remnants of the old regime.
• Genius Book Club: Rumford contantly engages with the cultural and philosophical treasures of the West, from Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon to John Boyd.
• Ghetto Name: "The mayor of New Orleans, Mr. Tsombe "Big Daddy" Toussaint L’Overture Othello Jones ..." Which serves to reinforce how New Orleans became a war hidden hell hole after Black people took over because the author thinks they are all inherently violent thugs.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: President Yancey and the other Neo-Confederate leaders, who refuse to accept the seriousness of the situation and deal forcefully with the Commune when they launch their bid for power. Luckily, Rumford and his allies in the Confederate military have the moral courage "moral courage" to do "do what needs to be done.done"]].
  • Also the Federal Government, which deals with armed revolt by passing harsh anti-smoking laws and condemning the rebels for their racial insensitivity.
• Herr Doktor: Professor Sanft, from whom Rumford first learns about the Cultural Marxist conspiracy.
• How We Got Here: The opening takes place in 2055, but then the narration goes back to 2016. Except for a very small bit on Rumford's death, the entire story is written as his retrospective view.
• Human Shield: After the Feds start bombing only trains to limit casualties, the Christian Marines kidnap 300 pilots and announce one will ride each cargo train from now on.
• Humble Hero: Rumford lets President Yancey and General Laclede take the public credit for the crushing of the Commune, even though he planned and prompted it.
• Idiot Ball: Victoria can only exist because every member of the Federal government, and every rival state, seizes the Ball with both hands and won't let go.
• Informed Ability: For all the military brilliance of decentralized light infantry abjuring post-World War II technology, the reader does not see any direct confrontation between Victoria's military and outside forces that are not explicitly described as hopelessly incompetent.
• I Reject Your Reality: Lind claims all "ideology" works like this, until reality smacks you in the face. Of particular note is the federal government, which is continually depicted as on the side of criminals against law-abiding citizens to the point of backing up gang members with federal troops, and with a massive financial meltdown in progress and megadeaths from a pandemic, still sets anti-smoking laws as a high priority.
• Kaiser Reich: Despite being the governor of Maine, Bill Kraft considers himself a subject of Imperial Prussia. He has the full uniform with a pickelhaube, and follows the orders of his Kaiser, the last of the House of Hoenzollern.
• Ludd Was Right: Modern technology is depicted as evil because it creates virtual realities divorced from the true realities, driving long distances destroys communities, and mass produced goods are always inferior to handcrafted.
• Make an Example of Them: After capturing the Numero Uno Division with the promise of sparing their lives, Rumford sidesteps this promise by turning the soldiers over to the communities they brutalized marching North, and they are all hanged to a man. Later, after lynchings become codified, Rumford muses that the examples of a few hangings and a few gallows in each town guarantee their use will be relatively rare.
• Married to the Job: Invoked by Rumford at one point, who is then giving all his time and effort to his service as the Confederation military command's chief of staff.
• Mexico Called; They Want Texas Back:
  • As America declines and the regime comes to depend more on minorities to support its corrupt rule, President Warner eventually agrees with Mexican nationalist leaders to establish a condominium over Texas, Arizona and Newmex. This backfires, however, as the locals strike back, and end up destroying most of the Mexican army in the ensuing war. The resultant power vacuum then allows the Aztecs to seize power in Mexico itself.
  • The civil war in California sees that state split. The Hispanic-dominated southern part is apparently annexed by the Mexicans, whereas the north becomes Azania.
• Mildly Military: Intentionally invoked by Rumford when he organizes the General Staff, as he wants a flexible and dynamic military command rather than a rigidly hierarchical assembly of martinets.
• Moral Myopia: The Christian Marines often spout on about wanting to reestablish a virtuous Christian country based on Western principles, but then merrily engage in kidnapping, humans shields, torture, ethnic cleansing, biological warfare, kangaroo courts, sexual slavery, and in general proudly hold themselves up as sexists, racists, and homophobes.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When the Feds start bombing Victoria, one bomb accidentally lands in a schoolyard. The same pilot is shot down and captured, and driven out to see the clean-up. Then he is released to spread the story, and the government thereafter restricts bombing to disabling rail nodes.
• Nepotism: A rare benevolent example. When Colonel Mc Moster McMoster disobeys orders and attempts to intervene against the gangster armies ravaging New Orleans, the politically correct masterminds want him cashiered. But he is allowed to remain in command of his unit because his wife is related to the First Lady.
• New Technology Is Evil: Post-1930s technology is depicted as being an inherently corrupting force which is destructive to the communities that Rumford wants to create.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: General Wesley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who, unlike most of the Federal Government leaders, does not seem to care very much about political correctness, and more about crushing the rebels. When the regime begins falling to pieces after its botched final offensive, the President and Cabinet are killed in a supposed lone-wolf terrorist strike, whereupon Wesley proclaims a no-holds-barred military dictatorship and attempts to salvage the situation. By then it is too little, too late, however.
• No Woman's Land: Victorians are harshly opposed to feminism and hostile to the idea of women working and particularly in the military, in favor of minding their 'sphere' of the home. When the Victorians defeat the armies of Azania , those who do not become good housewives are sold into slavery in the Middle East to "experience real patriarchal oppression." Not to mention the novel begins and ends with a woman being burned at the stake for claiming to be a Christian bishop. Note that the narrative portrays all of this positively.
• Nuke 'em: Ultimate fate of Atlanta, seat of liberal-governed-New South, who previously got taken over by African-American Commune. ALSO fate of CNN HQ, with Jane Fonda included.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: When purging slaughtering the liberal intellectuals at Dartmouth, a choir is brought in to chant Dies Irae.
• Oppressive States of America: Before the economic meltdown, the plagues and the secessions, there erupts a shooting war over harsh anti-smoking laws that let people exposed to secondhand smoke or scenting tobacco sue the smoker for massive damages. Tobacco is serious business.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: the strength of Fourth Generation War. Rumford is able to sink modern warships with spar torpedoes, and arrests a bombing campaign by kidnapping pilots and holding them hostage. The outdated military of the US is utterly helpless against these tactics. During Muslim invasion of Boston, Christian Marines destroyed nearby airport, making hostile airplanes easy targets for militia during and after landing attempts.
• The Pardon: When the Deep Green militants rebel and their uprising is put down, Kraft reprieves the captives from execution and instead just exiles them from the Confederation. In order to justify this, he argues that while they are traitors, they are less malicious than merely misguided.
  "Because they erred, they had to pay a price, and they did. The price was banishment. Had we set their lives as the price, we would have gone too far. It is useful to remind ourselves that we are all fools on occasion."
• The Plague: A large part of the fall of the United States is genetically engineered diseases. The Northern Confederacy is also attacked this way by Muslims while returning enslaved Black people, but since the returnees were quarantined upon arrival, the only deaths were among a minority race that Rumford looks down on anyway. Despite officially doing away with any sciences from before the 1930's, the Northern Confederacy somehow engineers its own plague and unleashes it upon the Middle East, killing countless millions of people as it spreads.
• Plot Armor: Every threat Rumford faces that should at least be a challenge for him to overcome is effortlessly dealt with because the threat is quickly revealed to be hopelessly incompetent and incapable of mounting anything but a token resistance to Rumford's brilliant tactics. Even when those tactics depend on bonkers ideas like women not having spatial awareness.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: While the forces of Islam are treated as the true Arch Enemies of Christiandom, slave-trading, genocidally violent, and deeply opposed to the healthy free exchange of ideas, it's worth noting that the disciples of Retroculture are guilty of literally all of these things at various points in the text, including literally selling dissenters on conquered territory as slaves to the Middle East. As per the trope, the author just makes excuses for or expects the audience to accept the main characters doing it because they are the main characters.
• Public Execution:
  • The story begins with the protagonists burning a female bishop at the stake for her refusal to conform to the Northern Confederacy's religious laws.
  • Kraft's massacre of intellectuals at Dartmouth for teachings that go against his ideology is televised to all the Northern Confederacy.
  • To avoid an ethnic cleansing of the surviving Black people in the Northern Confederation hold public hangings for crimes with trials that are so quick and so lacking in legal defense that they'd they're effectively a Kangaroo Court.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The regular Army's rank-and-file during the downfall, who are fighting only for their paycheck. Most of them actually sympathize with the Christian Marines' ideals, they just have their families to think of in a collapsing society.
• Rage Against the Legal System: Rumford, who comes to recognize the corrupt legal apparat in the dystopian future United States as the literal enemy of the people. Realizing this is a major turning point in his life.
  This wasn’t law, I realized, this was war. The Legal Services lawyers, the liberal judges who gave them the rulings they wanted, their buddies in the ACLU, they were just enemy units of different types.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: Kraft to liberal intellectuals at Dartmouth, just before massacre.
• Rising Empire: Several of the American successor states, after the downfall of the old regime, as everyone scrambles to first secure their own borders and then take up the mantle of the United States as dominant power on the continent. Though most are weeded out before long in the ensuing struggles. Toward the end of the story, the only two real challengers remaining are the Confederation and Azania, with other, more minor powers appearing to align with either.
• Rock Beats Laser: Older tech is always better, because Retroculture. Spar torpedoes can easily sink modern warships, old WWII short-wave radar is fantastic at spotting high-tech stealth bombers. T-34s are more reliable and easily repaired than modern tanks, though at least there it's acknowledged they'll want to avoid any pitched battles with newer armor. The only computers in Victoria are those their EW specialists use to hack and confound the enemy, so their electronic security is absolute.
• Ruthless Modern Pirates: The Aztecs, Neo-Barbary States and the Orcs of Philadelphia all provide examples of this. The Northern Confederation's naval forces are equally ruthless in suppressing them.
• Second American Civil War: main theme of novel is Civil War and its results and Aftermath.
• Semper Fi: Most of the main characters are ex-Marines, and the militia they form (the Christian Marines) is themed on the Corps' good sides. William Kraft is not a Marine originally, but accepted as an honorary Marine for his activities in the civil war.
• Sleeping Their Way to the Top: Rumford's contempt for the Pentagon early in the story includes the observation that, to use a euphemism, promotion there depends less on professional qualifications than on other qualities, and the willingness to employ them. In the context he says it, this may be hyperbole for sycophancy and yes-manship or a literally intended complaint against women and homosexuals in the military, of whom he certainly does not think very highly at other points.
• Slut-Shaming: Heroic example, since the Confederation believes in strict morals. They actively champion pre-1950s social values (some hardliners prefer pre-1850s), and have very strict policies in place against prostitutes, wanton women and other sexual deviants.
• Smash the Symbol: The Azanian capital at Berkeley is burned, bulldozed and salted by the Victorians, symbolizing the complete destruction of this state and all it represented.
• Straw Character: Each and every one that is not on the side of Rumford, Kraft and their Retroculture ideology. Most notable is Kateesha Mowukuu, the Black secretary of defense whose raps and rants - yes, both - are racist and devoid of coherency, but she's supposed to be a stand in for people who support civil rights.
• Strawman News Media: Rumford frequently expresses nothing but disdain for the media because they are all evil liberals who shamelessly distorts reality. Bizarrely they almost always report stories exactly as he wants them to be portrayed though.
• Strawman U: UNESCO funds colleges in Victoria. To show the evils of liberal schools these are hyper-parodies with things like male students forced to prostrate before a Temple to Artemis, white students wearing signs confessing to "PC sins" and lectures on the evils of Eurocentrism.
• Take That!: To all the forces of 'Cultural Marxism' Activist judges, liberal media, CNN, liberal academia, environmentalists, feminists, modernists, LGBTQ, atheists, Muslims, Blacks, Afrocentrists, Jane Fonda and more!
• Tar and Feathers: The Christian Marines get their start leading a mob that gives this treatment to a judge who ruled against them. Worse, it was road tar, and the man most likely died.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Absolute behemoth of an Author Filibuster speech, given to a group of "liberal professors" before summary execution in front of Kangaroo Court. William S. Lind may not be as bad as Ayn Rand in regard to long speeches, but he still has the tendency.
• The Theocracy: The stated goal of the Christian Marines is "a land where the Ten Commandments are the law." By the beginning/end, non-Christians are banished from Victoria. Plus they're a training center for the new crusade against the Muslim world in the Middle East. Also Newark after Purge of gangs.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Neo-Nazis have created a new state in part of the Midwest. Disturbingly, they're the only faction that Lind portrays as anything close to being an acceptable society, and only reason given for why Rumford won't aid them in conquest is that the Nazis were industrialized and modern.
• Torture Cellar: In Augusta, the state capital. Some enterprising followers of Rumford were so eager to torture somebody that they went ahead and built and installed a rack before the protagonists even agreed on using torture as a form of interrogation.
• Turbulent Priest: The Reverend Ebenezer Smith is a Knight Templar who eventually starts a bloody revolution when the government refuses to effectively prosecute the criminals who prey on his congregation in Newark. Purge of gangs and Theocracy in Newark were starting point of the Second American Civil War, with Divided States of America and Fallen States of America as its result.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Subverted. After the death of the President, Vice President and most of the cabinet and leading legislators in a suspicious-looking terrorist attack, General Wesley attempts to suspend the civil government and impose a military dictatorship, in order to finally deal with the secessionists. However, his troops desert him, and instead the Christian Marines take over. Ultimately, old United States of America and federal Government ceased to exist.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: Rumford is first radicalized on May 7th, 2016. Two years after the book's publishing.
• Velvet Revolution: While the Civil War itself is often extremely brutal, it ends with a whimper rather than a bang, as the Federal Government largely ceases to work after being forced to abandon Washington. General Wesley and his hard-core cadre excepted, most of their remaining loyalists either desert or flee to the New Confederacy, rather than making a last stand.
• Vigilante Man: Rumford and the original Christian Marines early in the story, striking back against the criminals and corrupt officials who are preying on their neighborhoods.
• Voice of the Resistance: During the Civil War, the regime and its corrupt backers control the mainstream media, but the Christian Marines are able to get their side of the story out through the Internet and (sometimes) undercover sympathizers inside the Propaganda Machine who slip news past the censors.
• White Guilt: President Warner, who feels that he can't stand up to Ms. Mowukuu's plan of action against the Confederation because doing so would be racist.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Snidely Hokem, the liberal Governor of Maine. Also the Honorable Kateesha Mowukuu, Secretary of Defense
• With Us or Against Us: The attitude Kraft and, by extension, everyone in the Northern Confederation. Are you a loyal Retroculturist loyal to Kraft and Rumford's cherry-picked version of history? Or one of them, the Cultural Marxists who believe in things like human rights and equality? If you're the latter, don't expect to live long.
• Urban Ruins: The ultimate fates of Washington DC, New York City, New Orleans, Atlanta (the center at least) are to be reduced to rubble as a result of Civil War and following conflicts.

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