Excerpt: La République

It began with the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations. Everyone thought it was a little strange when Canada ceased to be and La République de la Nouvelle-Canada came into existence, but no one said a word until that fateful June fourteenth, 2013, when King Henry IX announced the alterations to the Statute of Westminster and the movement of Dominion to Nathanael Harold, High Chancellor of LRNC.

For a great many years—twelve to be exact—there wasn’t nothing except that slight shift. The economy of the Commonwealth was bolstered, and in turn the economy of those that traded with the Commonwealth grew. America in particular garnered a few years of peace and prosperity, which hardened their alliances with LRNC and Europe.

On July fourth, 2026, at exactly seven in the morning, La République de la Nouvelle-Canada annexed the United States of America in a peaceful treaty signing. President Patricia Harden could not be more pleased, she told every bit of press that asked, to be a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

“It has been two-hundred fifty years since we left the Commonwealth. To be welcomed back with open arms and without threat or violence is better than we could have ever asked for. Praise be to God, and good health to the High Chancellor.”

Later that summer, High Chancellor Harold was killed in his home. Within three weeks, the next Chancellor—former Secretary of the Interior, Daniel Markus, a Canadian expatriate to America—was elected into the position. Within the first five years of his control of LRNC, the Commonwealth grew to include Russia, Western and Southern Europe, and the whole of the Middle East.

There was never a war. Treaties were signed after careful negotiation, autocratic monarchies were quietly displaced for constitutional monarchies and republics, and, if anyone were to ask, no one would say that there was anything foul about the quiet take over LRNC was staging of the world.

Rural Africa was easily swallowed by its Commonwealth neighbors, but the more urban countries—particularly Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Congo—held a hard resistance. Southeast Asia fought long and hard, China not least of which, but eventually fell to the ranks.

Central, Northern and Eastern Europe held strong against the new order. Germany was the staging point of the third World War. High Chancellor Markus, thinking to improve the moral of soldiers in their first war since peace had fallen over the Middle East, joined the ranks and went to the Polish-Lithuanian front.

In his eleventh year as High Chancellor, Daniel Markus was killed on the front by a Lithuanian sharp shooter. Within three months of his death, the new High Chancellor—a petite woman by the name of Arlette Pritchard—sent the Russians in to quell the remaining European resistance. By the end of her first year, High Chancellor Pritchard controlled ninety-five percent of the populated world. For the government of LRNC, this was complete domination.

“On this day [August 14, 2038], let it be known that La République de la Nouvelle-Canada accomplished what over six thousand years of human history could not. Let it be known that we have brought the salvation of the world. Let it be known that this shall forever be the day of our unification. Let us raise our voices in praise to the glorious state that has united us, to the men and women that have died for our cause, to the High Chancellors and state officials who could not be here for what they risked for this greatest Commonwealth. The road has been long, and it has been hard. But we shall persevere, as we have proven time and time again. La vie et la gloire de la République.”

—from the official History Text in Australia, translated from Canadian

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What I’m about to tell you will seem like a lie, and I do not expect you to believe me, but I can expect you to believe me when I say, it was not always like this. I am certain, one day, they will rewrite the text books otherwise. For now, there was still a time when the Republic was simply Canada, and the world did not exist in this false sense of peace and tranquility.

I do not remember such a day. No one I know does. My grandmother was a child when the Republic declared its annexation of the Union States and Mexico. She never spoke of such things to me, or my siblings, and I learned everything I know of the time before then from old text books she hid during the Reformation, books she had found quaint and amusing with her emerging Canadian education.

I understand the want for peace and tranquility. I understand that the world was begging, yearning, for what the Republic brought about. From the books my grandparents hid in their attic, I know of the wars that scoured the Middle East and my home and Africa, the economic crisis facing the world from its interdependent distribution of trade and wealth and the commingled deficits arising from such a scenario.

The thing that I do not understand is why the Republic thought they would do any better for the world than the Union States, or the Empires of old, lost with the First Great War. The Republic had nothing more or less to offer, just the knowledge of what had happened with the downfall of all the other great Empires over time, and still they strove for that ridiculous goal.

Manifest Destiny, I think they called it. The right to expansion. The Union States used it to drive the Natives off their land and send them to the worst spites of dirt they could scrub together. The Republic used it to take the countries under their control, one after another after another.

Latvia was the last, I think. I have forgotten my text books. Latvia-that-was. If you looked at a map, you would not see Latvia. You would see the region known now as Baltic Finland. Thank High Chancellor Alexander for that. For Finland and Scandina and Polithuand. For the Greater and Lesser Union States. But Latvia was the last of the nations to hold a defense, I think. I remember, those pre-Canadian text books from my great-grandparents, speaking of the Second Great War, and the Latvians that lured the Nazis to fight the Soviets before they themselves fought the Nazis. When I was a child, when I would see Mounted Canadians, I would think of myself as a great Latvian in the Second Great War, and them as the Nazis.

It was suiting enough. My mother was never Jewish, but my grandmother was. She told me once she sobbed when they took our Torah and other Jewish things. My mother and I never understood; my mother went willingly to the New Religion, and I, over time, willingly went to nothing at all in my heart. The Great Books tell us that faith if the fulfillment of a fundamental aspect of human life.

I have faith. But not in them. And for a very long time, after I came to the Union States, I did not think I had faith in much of anything.

And then I met Minnow.