Editing Communism (section)

==Communism in Traditional Games==
In general there are three ways communism is used in fiction and board games:

1: '''Filthy Godless Red BASTARDS!''': Dangerous, faceless enemies, ripped straight from the wettest dreams of the Cold War-era American John Birch society. These communists are the enemy; a vast, brutal, godless horde determined to take over the world that our heroes must resist. Nowadays, this attitude is usually played for comedy, as in ''[[Paranoia]]'' where Friend Computer's glitched-out personality has made it a paranoid wreck obsessed with a largely-imaginary adversary (while creating some actual communists in the process). Others have played it seriously, especially in works produced during the Cold War (such as the 1984 film ''Red Dawn'').  By the way, if you want an example of literal CommuNazis, the East German Stasi are a good place to start, although the Nazi part is mostly aesthetic and the Communist ideology is what was dominant (for CommuNazis as an ideology, Nazbols are basically that, combining far left economic policy and far right cultural party). Red Alert 1 is a /v/idya example, totally starting with a massive Tabun gas attack on the Polish city of Torun with ''children'' being discussed as dying the easiest.

2: '''Champions of the Proletariat''': The other side of the coin to what is listed above. These are either rebels against corrupt corporate overlords (frequently cyberpunk heroes) or a body of workers and soldiers fighting against fascist invaders (any game from the Russian perspective in WWII will count). Occasionally this show up in Medieval settings as anachronistic peasant revolts or other politically-radical types out to pull down the social parts of [[Medieval Stasis]]. Red Alert 3 has this a smidge between the lines, moreso in Uprising where they avenge innocent Russian citizens being frozen and crushed alive for fun by bloodthirsty Allied mercenaries.

3: '''GLORIOUS COMMUNISTS''': Somewhere between the other two and generally played for laughs. Communist regimes are oppressive and ponderous, but also able to do great things through sheer force of Industrial Might, Soviet Super Science, Stalinist Architecture and Will-Of-The-People and can be heroic just as easily as villainous. See Red Alert-II(more of it) and III(less of it), and to a lesser extent a few parts of the [[Imperium of Man]]. As close to real communism as you can get, comrade.

Communism has also provided us with the Russian army, which is an awesome gaming resource and reference, either in a drunken, drown-your-enemies-with-bodies-and-artillery sort of way (World War II), or a send-in-the-hardened-and-manly-Spetsnaz-and-tanks way (Cold War). It is a sacred law of [[/tg/]] alternate history [[/tg/'s homebrews|homebrew]] settings that there must be at least one communist faction and it must control at least 50% of the world's total landmass. Even [[Warmachine| Khador]] draws on the imagery of the Soviet armed forces, despite being more analogous to Tsarist/Imperialist Russia politically, aside from their Manifest Destiny "Why can't everyone else just roll over and let us conquer them?!" ideology that has... [[Nazi| other roots]].

Like all radical ideologies, communists are all over [[Shadowrun|the Sixth World]], mostly among the poor and disenfranchised who can't help looking up at the big fancy megacorp enclaves and wondering how ''that'' makes any kind of just sense. The Berlin Flux State was probably the biggest and most successful anarcho-communist enclave in-setting for a while, before it became such an embarrassment to the megacorps insisting they should be the only game in town that many of them (including the one run by the great dragon Lofwyr) had it dismantled somewhere around second or third edition.

People like to call the [[Tau]] communist. There's ''some'' truth to that, given they're a highly-collective society that generally values group achievement over personal accomplishment, but they're also a largely class-stratified society, with only the assurance that their leaders are theoretically cooperating for the [[Greater Good]] to keep them from being out-and-out feudalists with castes. This system is actually very similar to Italian and Spanish ''[[Nazi|fascism]]'', where the economy was split between several large trade-based corporations, where the workers and the bourgeoisie were supposed to talk out their issues together (under the benevolent guidance of the party elites of course) but this is not a perfect fit either.

There was also the [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee]], a parody of the kinds of communist guerrillas of previous decades, who are armed grots out to demand equal treatment from their Ork masters with comical results. The Imperium, being a decentralized feudalistic empire, undoubtedly has many worlds that have communist governing bodies and economies, and maybe even a few where things worked out okay.

The [[Genestealer_Cult|genestealers]] of the rusted claw have a communistic vibe as they utterly reject wealth in all its forms to the point that they dont bathe or maintain their weaponry allowing it to rust. They willingly joined the [[Tyranid|tyranids]] in order to escape the dismal working conditions of the [[Adeptus_Mechanicus|mechanicus]] and are one of the few truly nihilistic cults as some of them know that their masters will kill them in the end.

In '''Pariah: Ravenor vs. Eisenhorn''', Alizebeth Bequin (The clone) was seen hunting for relics from a collector. There, she came across [[wat|an ancient children's toy in the shape of a rocket with the marking of C.C.C.P (aka '''оюз Советских Социалистических Республик''' (Soviet Union))]]. Although it was obvious that 40k sets in the far future of our real world, it none the less confirmed the existences of Soviet Russia and communism in the setting. Btw, neither Bequin nor the collector knew what CCCP meant, considered much of the ancient Terra history were lost in the far future, but at least they remembered ancient humans on Terra made their ''first step'' to space using chemical rockets.

[[Pathfinder Roleplaying Game|Golarion]] has got a semi-hemi-demi communist nation in-setting: Galt, land of insane, constant revolution where the only winners are the ''final blades''. It represents the "messy revolutionary" kind of communism rather than any of the three flavors above, though there's some obvious mixing with the principals of the French Revolution that was its more-direct inspiration.

The [[Harpers]] of Faerun are, among other things, semi-communists in outlook. They strongly favor removing power from single governments and shifting leadership to individual communities. This can make them heroic when unseating despots but significantly less so when assassinating anyone who tries to unite the city-states. 

[[Khador]] in Warmachine takes the Glorious Soviet Russia identity and wears it like a badge, even though its actual government resembles Tzarist Russia.

''[[Star Trek]]'' is complicated. On the one hand, the Federation has essentially a communist economy and they have the humanist element down, but their advanced technology has created a post-scarcity economy, so it can be interpreted that the producers thought this would be a natural product of a society where everybody was self-sufficient. Conversely, their chief rivals, the Klingons and the Romulans, are transparent analogues of the USSR and Maoist China seen through the pre-détente eyes of an American lounge lizard. Similar post-scarcity communists are common in ''[[Eclipse Phase]]'', though with a much stronger anarchist bent. They are largely and uncomplicatedly perfect due to the game designers' raging stiffy for that kind of thing.

Any WWII or quasi-WWII game worth its salt will have a communist faction, including the classic ''[[Axis & Allies]]'' and the modern wargame ''[[Flames of War]]''. Additionally, many classic board games have attempted to tap into the forty-five year struggle for dominance between America and the communists. The most famous and best is probably ''[[Twilight Struggle]]''. [[TSR]] also released an RPG set during the Cold War called ''[[Top Secret]]'', though, like most non-''D&D'' TSR products, no one under thirty-five has ever heard of it.

{{BLAM|This article has been marked as containing treasonous capitalist road sentiments. Please report to your local commissariat for re-education through labor.}}