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Religion

2020-07-22T02:03:21Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90:

{{Heresy}}
{{topquote|Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.|Martin Luther King, Jr}}

:'''Dracula''': ''I was called here by, huuuuumans, who wish to pay me tribute!''
:'''Richter Belmont''': ''Tribute?! You steal men's souls! And make them your slaves!''
:'''Dracula''': ''Perhaps the same could be said of all religions.''
::--An excerpt from the infamous exchange that also gave us "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets" in [[Castlevania#Castlevania:_Symphony_Of_The_Night_.28Castlevania_9.29|Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.]]

Because it's important to several settings and RPG systems, particularly ones that are high-profile or relevant to /tg/, we have a religion article. Let's try and keep it focused on the directly-related-to-/tg/ stuff and not descend into the pure [[skub]] that can arise in discussions of real-life religions, okay?

==Definition of Religion==
Almost since the inception of the term, scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. While there are some belief systems that always count as religions, some have applied the term to various things such as political ideologies, or groups when they reach a certain point. There are however two general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the phenomenological/philosophical.

The two most widely accepted are:
* "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them."
* "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted".

As stated before, one common element that every religion which fits the criteria has is humanity's relation to supernatural forces, as all of them have at least one [[God|god]] and/or an afterlife even where there are exceptions; Buddhism doesn't have any gods or its own idea of the cosmos' origins but has afterlives and the existence of the eternal soul (unless a persons achieves nirvana), and Taoism doesn't have an afterlife in the conventional sense but is pantheistic.

Like other terms for heavily [[SJW|debated]] [[communism|subjects]], religion and religious have also been used as insults or Snarl Words in social and political discussions (especially from the 20th century and onwards) to ridicule groups openly promoting something the user disagrees with. This snarl creates a caricature of the group to smear them by association with the worst excesses/negative stereotypes of real-world religious people (like being too preachy, judgmental, irrational, hypocritical, or pressuring everyone to convert).

==List of Religions==

Too many to list, and there's debate about the categorization. In lieu of a list on this site, here are two complied lists that should cover everything that fits the bill. Otherwise, check out the [[Mythology]] page.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions Wikipedia's list of religions and spiritual traditions]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups For a simplified version from Wikipedia that focuses more on major religions]

==Religion vs. Mythology==
While [[Mythology|mythologies]] aren't religions in and of themselves, every religion has a mythology. While mythologies are merely the accounts of supernatural events, religions add rituals and practices that link those mythologies directly to the lives of their believers in one form or another, typically by describing how to properly serve to a god (or multiple gods, it depends) a significant role in the mythology a given religion is derived from. [[Skub|Whatever the source]], the mythology almost always predates the religion. As a result, especially since the Fantasy genre deals in supernatural beings and forces, most if not all fantasy settings have religions. Science fiction does to a lesser degree, mostly because during the Golden Age of sci-fi empiricists and secular humanists were attracted to the genre and their views often seeped into their stories. Despite this, given that most real-life societies have had religions playing a role in or since their founding, religions are still found in sci-fi.

Religions involves belief systems and practices, where an adherent can call upon the power/being the religion is focused on to give them aid in [[cleric|various]] [[Paladin|ways]], depending at the very least on the religion and the task in question. Given that religions are about people's place in the world, how it was made, ideas on how life should be lived and how humans should relate to the supernatural, they have major implications for societies. Given that people can become [[Exarch|dangerously single-minded]] about a cause, people can be become extremists about their religion, regardless of the fact that [[Heironeous|some]] are more benevolent than [[Asmodeus|others]] and in numerous cases even [[Heresy|if it involves going against the religion's teachings]]; in conjunction with the above this means religious conflicts can become widespread, long-lasting, cause carnage and also involve other elements such as politics- both in fantasy and in the real world.

==Role in Society==
A person's belief (for or against) any or all religions is a major factor in their worldview, and as such often serves as the undercurrent for all others. This is because this belief shapes people's views on the big things such as the purpose of life, how life should be lived in relation to oneself and others and what happens to people after they die. On the upside, this often leads to teachings with the goal of unity, peace, charity and co-operation as per the teachings of most religions, some of which are adapted by or also found among non-religious systems. On the downside, this can lead to clashes over how the people involved do the will of whichever beings or forces they follow, which religion should be followed or whether or not people should follow a god or religion at all. This can involve arguments and factionalizing, or in some cases worse things like pogroms and wars. Since they are an overarching and fairly common element in cultures, they often appear or are referenced in fiction.

The most common religious belief systems are the Abrahamic family of religions (primarily Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which are Monotheistic (belief in a singular God) and share many common elements and root, with - at the time this was written - Christianity being the most followed religion globally. Historically, these and other religions were frequently enshrined in law as the "state religion", giving them special privileges such as extensive influence over the government or tax exemptions. In some cases, they even took over the functions of the government entirely in a system known as theocracy; while uncommon in the present day, theocracies are still in use in places such as the Vatican and Iran.

Within the last few centuries, due to events such as the French Revolution, there has also been a significant amount of anti-religious sentiment, which regards religion as at best redundant and at worst destructive (beyond historical grievances with specific groups within religions, reasons for this view and whether or not those arguments have any merit, shall not be discussed here). For the most part, a combination of people identifying more with their culture or nation than their religion and the concept that religion and functions of state should not interfere with each other has turned into more of a "live and let live" mentality that doesn't really support or oppose any one religion and only reacts when said religions begin actively defying the state or the state starts bringing the boot down on religion.

Throughout history, numerous tyrannical regimes have tried to restrict or stamp out religions. This is usually because religious teachings put the figure/object of worship before the state in a conflict of interest and most religions' teachings condemn tyranny or [[Slaanesh|the vices tyrannical leaders indulge]]. Other reasons include tyrants dislike being answerable to anyone besides themselves and a tyrant may have some form of anti-religious prejudice. While nations have usually tried to block specific religions deemed "false" (read: religions opposing the state-sponsored religion in any way), several nations (usually [[Communism|Communist]] states which took Marx's "religion is the opiate of the masses" quote out of context as a call to arms rather than a passive theory) have tried to get rid of religion altogether, albeit with horrifying [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Militant_Atheists results] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_rule_of_Cambodia#Religious_communities each] time. Best case scenario, they sidegrade from one set of problems to another as cults of personality (commonly ones based on the ruler in charge) spring up to exploit the newly created power vacuum while believers who survive the regime try to continue their activities in secret. Worst case scenario, the society and its population degenerates into [[Commorragh|a violent, fractious, and nihilistic shell of their former selves]].

Aside from the aforementioned theocracies, the most religious nations are countries such as Brazil in South America or Zambia in Africa (Zambia even has a state religion alongside a law that allows for freedom of religion). China is - at the time this was written - the world's least religious and most atheistic country (the situation around North Korea is [[Skub|debatable]], since even though they violently suppress religions [https://www.foxnews.com/world/north-korea-publicly-executes-80-some-for-videos-or-bibles-report-says to the point that merely having copies of religious texts can be grounds for execution], they also have the Kim Cult blended with the Marxist offshoot ideology Juche).

==How this impacts /tg/==
A few major ways. Since most if not every society in real-life has had religion either be the basis for its founding or play a role in it, religion is just as involved in the backstory or current lore of settings. There are three major "modes" of /tg/ settings and related fictions:
* Purely functional use of religion as a story device. (What we might call "Functionalists")
* Endorsement of religion and/or religious people. (What we might call "Religion is Good" types)
* Criticism of religion and/or religious people. (What we might call "Religion is Bad" types)
For ease of categorization, writers who use these modes will also be called proponents, detractors or functionalists (who can be pro, anti or neutral).

===Religion as a story device/Functionalists===
Compared to the two types of writers found below, these writers are usually just attempting to model their work after real-world [[Mythology]] and are frequently attempting to keep their views of Religion separate from their work. Frequently comes in one of two subspecies:
* The [[Standard Fantasy Setting]] default: The world is ruled by an ordinary polytheistic pantheon, usually close to some admixture of Norse and Greek mythologies. Some of them also have a Top God more powerful than all the others, and maybe the in-universe creator of everything who is mostly hands-off in cosmic affairs. The gods of these religions tend to focus on specific areas (gods of [[Paladin|Justice]] and [[Druid|Nature]] are common, for subtly obvious reasons) and frequently want their followers to propagate or promote these things.
* The kind of setting they wanted to make dictated the nature of the divine. For example, in [[Exalted]] just about all the figures anybody would call a "God" (besides the Exalted) are Useless, because the Exalted (which includes the Player Characters) are the guys who were made specifically to do whatever the gods needed them to do for reasons inherent to the setting, to go with the main theme of the setting for the PCs: "You can do '''almost anything''', except ''avoid the consequences of being the one who did that anything''".

===Religion as a Bad Thing/Detractors===
There are several writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy that are of the opinion "Religion Is Bad", often alongside having an axe to grind (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) with either one or more specific real-life religions. This is more common in Sci-Fi than fantasy because the focus on science appeals to the naturalist, empiricist and/or humanist worldview of such writers, with the supernatural being seen as an obstacle to that. Despite that, the view is found among some fantasy authors as well, such as the author of the book series "His Dark Materials", Philip Pullman (he wrote it as pushback against C.S Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" series). Whatever the genre, this comes in flavors of either "The Gods Don't Exist", "The Gods are Incompetent" (more on that below) or "The Gods are Evil". Cosmic Horror also tends to use the "Gods Don't Exist" or "Gods are Evil" route, or combine them into "The Gods are actually Incomprehensible and Destructive Aliens" (for example; the author who codified the genre, [[H.P. Lovecraft]], was an avowed anti-religious atheist - which is why cults are recurring villains in his stories). This also has the side effect of inclining science fiction towards an atheistic perspective.

Another major component is personal issues of the author such as grievance or prejudice, but that's case-by-case and a major can of worms. A writer could have resentment against a specific religion or even the higher power a religion reveres (though opposition to a god or gods is called anti-theistic, not anti-religious), and single them out in their works due to personal bias or agenda. Worst case scenario, the story is some sort of anti-religious wish fulfillment power fantasy - such as Frank Miller's "Holy Terror" comics against Islam and Garth Ennis' "Preacher" comics (and their live-action adaptation) against Christianity.

Whatever the motivation, writers saying this message either model their fictional religions on the - occasionally exaggerated - worst excesses of real world religious people or use a fictional religion as a (usually strawman) stand-in of a real one. The most frequently targeted religions are Christianity, Islam, any faith that practiced human sacrifice (such as the Aztec religious practices) and Scientology. Cults, especially those with beliefs that mainstream religions consider unorthodox or outright heretical, are especially fertile ground for this message, albeit running the risk of being misapplied to tar other groups with the same brush.

===Religion as a Good Thing/Proponents===
There are several Science Fiction and Fantasy writers who either are religious themselves and want to promote their worldview, look upon religion positively and put that into the story or both. This is more common in Fantasy than Sci-fi, partly because with the supernatural being THE fundamental element of the genre, this gives opportunities to explore many aspects of religiosity. This is less common in science-fiction, but not unheard of, such as Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" where God's signature is found in the digits of pi. These authors usually put more thought into their fictional religion plus its central figure (although they have a tendency to go all "Crystal Dragon Jesus"), and try and have it be at least a somewhat good influence, although religious institutions and leaders are usually hit-and-miss affairs.

Some people make a fictional setting with figures from real-world religions, either in the real-world or [[CS Lewis|an alternate world (such as Narnia)]]. Others use fictional religions that either visually resemble real-life religions or figures from them; religions that often get this treatment are the Abrahamic faiths (most often Christianity), Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology and Norse mythology (albeit often a sanitized version of the latter three). In other cases they all but abandon any form of subtlety, with the fictional religion being distinguished from the real-world religion the author follows by only a handful of minor changes. Naturally, those kinds of works tend to come off as preachy, to say the least.

Another route this uses is the route that faith itself provides the power as per "[[Belief Function|Belief Function]]" (think Morpheus' "your mind makes it real" quote, but applying at the cosmological level). In fact, Warhammer often goes the route that the gods are powered by faith as well as from their sphere of influence which has either [[Sigmar|caused some people have risen to godhood]] or [[Ynnead|caused new gods to be born in the setting]]. In fact, this has proven the greatest weapon against Chaos in every Warhammer setting (and why the Emperor's plan to starve the Chaos Gods with atheism was doomed to fail from the start).

===Somewhat special cases===

One somewhat special case is the "Religion of Evil"; in many settings, there is a religion that is explicitly capital E Evil and seeks one of the usual "Card Carrying Villain" goals of Control, Conquest, Corruption, or Destruction. Frequently has some admixture of the worst aspects of Roman Paganism, Norse practices, the Aztec, Scientology and/or the various Abrahamic religions. They also often draw from those found in the writings of H.P Lovecraft. If this cult directly worships an individual Evil God, expect whatever makes sense for that deity to be some form of destructive activity--e.g., the cult of the God of Murder demands human sacrifice on a regular basis, with a certain portion of that explicitly being not-careful-enough cultists. Regardless, Religions of Evil can show up in all three above modes, and usually has a special purpose in all three:

* All three types need bad guys. In particular, a group who by definition is Evil is always good for some no-need-to-worry-about-the-ethics-or-morality-of-killing fodder (based on the idea that everyone in is group is evil because you have to do evil to be part of the group).
* Religion is Bad types tend to use them to say either "while they're all Bad, some are worse then others", that "Religion can be used to justify anything", use it as a strawman to tar all with the same brush or they have a specific axe to grind (either against an entire religion, a group within that religion or individual adherents the author personally dislikes).
* Religion is Good types or the sincerely religious tend to use them as analogies with fanaticism, criticize Real World cults, compare different beliefs or deal with negative aspects of religion (occasionally making jabs at competitive religions, or fellow believers the author disagrees with). Another approach is to have a Religion of Good fighting against a Religion of Evil - either as the heroes of the story or a valued ally - to say "there is good religion, so don't tar all with the same negative brush".
** As a side note, a lot of fantasy has moved slightly away from pure Religions of Evil, for much the same reason as [[Always Chaotic Evil]] races (questions of whether this fosters prejudice against real-life groups and audiences and authors demanding more motive for their villains). While there are still plenty of them, they usually add some nuance that makes them at least morally neutral under their own lights. Popular options are for them to be an off-shoot/subset of another religion and/or be taking vengeance for an injustice (real or perceived, both of which have '''plenty''' of real-life precedent).

[[Urban Fantasy]] writers are another special case, since almost all Urban Fantasy is set in something that might be called "the real world with a twist", with all the usual political trouble that implies. As a result, they can take one of a few routes:
* The most common route is "there are many possible explanations" and vague things up as much as possible ([[True Faith|Faith]] being the power that repels [[Vampire]]s rather than than a cross having any actual connection to a deity is a popular one).
* The second most common route (albeit rarer outside of Cosmic Horror) is the "Religion as a Bad Thing" route; the story is straight up atheistic/"Religion is Bad" [[Imperial Truth|propaganda]] where the writer often has an axe to grind against a specific religion. It's a popular choice for writers trying to be [[Edgy]] who want to include religious subject matter in their stories, and they almost exclusively go after the most established religion in the area or any new cults that have emerged at the time. Furthermore, any fictional religions or cults are most likely thinly-veiled stand-ins for real life ones.
* Some Urban Fantasy works with a clear correct religion exist thanks to the above mentioned sincerely religious authors, which are typically [[Chick Tracts|barely veiled proselytizing]] or [[Twilight|just straight up terrible]], though [[Monster Hunter International|there are some good ones]].
* The fourth route, taken most notably by [[Supers|DC and Marvel comics]] among others, is to take an "All Myths are True" approach: All religions are sort of true, but none have any exclusivity to the Truth, so Thor and Athena might have the Archangel Michael on speeddial when the Orochi teams up with Apep to get up to no good and start making trouble in their neighborhoods (because "Mikey really likes kicking serpent tail, and gets annoyed when we don't at least try to invite him to an evil serpent ass-kicking."). Differs from the "vague things up" route by being clearer on some details, and also much more gonzo. The Abrahamic God is the exception here: He's usually kept especially vague, albeit more powerful (and yet infinitely less accessible) than anyone else in the setting, and only referred to by some codephrase (Marvel likes "The One Above All", DC generally goes for "The Presence" or "whatever is behind the Source Wall").

===Miscellaneous Observations===

Doing the "The Gods are Incompetent" thing (the similar but different "The Gods are Insane", "The Gods Are Assholes" and "The Gods Don't Actually Do Anything" routes also falls under this umbrella) can go into any of the three modes; in a sincere monotheist's (such as Christian) work, it can be a "Take That" to polytheistic religions; in a "Religion is Bad" atheist's, it can be one to religion in general; in a Buddhist-influenced work, it can be a part of the whole "even the Gods are tied up in the Wheel of Karma" concept; and, even if the author is not pushing any religious message in any way, there's a neutral, plot-structural reason to go "Incompetent Gods": it can make the adventurers the Most Competent People Available since if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be anything for the adventurers to do.

If a work has multiple writers, (as frequently happens with RPG and Wargame settings, and quite a few popular SciFi/Fantasy ones as well) there's a tendency for the writers to try and pull the setting into one of the other two "modes" depending on their personal views. This leads to the theme changing from one side to the other as the story progresses. A recent example is [[World of Warcraft|the spate of retcons to the cosmology of the Warcraft universe]] and the morality of its fundamental forces/dominant higher powers, the Light and the Void. If the story doesn't get focused on a pro-religion or anti-religion message, it may end up swinging back and forth between both sides or settle in a mid-point which doesn't take a strong stance either way.

Note that members of the "Religion is Bad" and "Religion is Good" brigades will get involved in arguments over the relative morality or "goodness" of various factions in the story and the accuracy of any messages a writer presents. Often history buffs will throw their hat into the ring as well.

==Examples of /tg/ connected fictional religions==
===Warhammer 40k===
* The [[Imperial Truth]] was originally the Emperor's plan on beliefs, which he and his servants propagated throughout the galaxy during the Great Crusade. Attempting to wean mankind away from Chaos and being a firm member of the "Religion is Bad" brigade, the Emperor proclaimed there are no gods, and religion had to be abolished willingly or by force while science or reason are to be used for explaining the universe and morality. Everything transpired according to his design, except theistic religiosity in the 40k universe is the best weapon against Chaos so Emps' interstellar state atheism policy gave them a major opening. Things went from bad to worse when people started looking up to the Emperor as a god himself, [[Exterminatus|he responded accordingly]], and the Chaos Gods got a new tool in the form of [[Lorgar]]. After the Horus Heresy and the Emperor's removal from galactic politics: the Imperial Truth was slowly shelved in favor of the Imperial Cult, to the point that espousing the teachings of the Truth is ironically considered heresy. Only a few practitioners of the Imperial Truth remain, most notably the Custodes and the Space Marines (both of whom know The Emperor better than anybody to worship him as a god. Plus, their religious autonomy.).
** The [[Imperial Cult]] is the present-day religion of the Imperium of Man, and is a mix of several Abrahamic Religions along with copious amounts of warmongering, fanaticism and xenophobia. Derived from the Lectitio Divinatus penned by [[Lorgar]] pre-HH, the Cult decrees that because the Emperor is capable of all these miracles and power: he ''must'' be a god, and why you should worship and pledge loyalty to him. Its a complete 180 from the Emperor's original teachings, and has simultaneously been responsible for damning and saving the Imperium past the clusterfuck of the Horus Heresy. It's unknown whether the Emperor still abhors godhood and religion and would abolish it the moment he could, or if he's resigned himself to becoming the very thing he fought against for mankind to persevere in these trying times. Whatever the case, he didn't want to be a god, but now he has no choice but to become one.
** The [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Cult Mechanicus]] (Machine Cult) is the religion of the Adeptus Mechanicus, placing a heavy emphasis on machines, viewing them as gifts from the Machine God called "The Omnissiah" Officially, the Omnissiah is The Emperor, which allows the Mechanicus to sidestep the more puritan pundits of the Imperial Cult (we worship The Emprah, just not how you do it). Unofficially, the Omnissiah may or may not be the C'tan god: The Void Dragon. It also has a high emphasis on the collection of knowledge, and one of the Admech's roles in the galaxy is to explore remote and uncharted regions of space to find and search for knowledge that has been lost throughout the millennia. The last of these, is guidelines on machines and knowledge. Officially, heretic(tek) and xeno works are to be abhorred and disposed of, viewing them as perversions of the holy Machine God's works. Unofficially however, more liberally-minded and higher-ranked Magos would happily hoard heretek/xeno works, seeing their potential over the more restricted and constrained works of the Mechanicus.

* Chaos is a violent and complicated henotheistic (believing in multiple gods but only worshipping one) or polytheistic religion with dozens, if not hundreds of interpretations. Even then, there's more sub-cults that worship their particular god in a specific way, either minutely or vastly different from everyone else among followers of the Big 4. And this doesn't even get into the realm of Chaos Undivided (which worships the concept of Chaos itself, instead of the individual gods) and [[Malal]]. Chaos has very little established guidelines regarding worship, apart from their patron god's/gods' general likes/dislikes, so any religious practices or rituals are either based on commands from the god/s or up to the imagination of the cult.
** Interestingly, there is a Space Marine of the Chaos faction who follows the Imperial Truth, and that is [[Fabius Bile]].

* All Greenskins worship Gork and Mork (jury's out on whether the [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee]] do), but are too disorganized to have anything like a formal religion, though they do make effigies of Gork and Mork and call on them. The closest thing they have to tenants is that Gork favors violence, Mork favors cunning. Greenskins have gotten into fights over this, but violence is part of their nature and that of their gods. While they fight over religion, they also fight over almost any dispute anyway, and may even start a religious argument just to enjoy a good fight among themselves (though the only theological argument they can formulate is "is Gork the god of cunning or is Mork?" or vica versa). On the surface, religion does not play a big-enough role in Ork society compared to other races, being just another outlet for Orks to fight about. But if [[Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka|Ghazghkull]] is any indication: religion can have a great impact on Orks, with him being becoming one of the greatest Warlords in the galaxy, primarily because he thinks he's personally blessed by Gork and Mork themselves. So if you throw in the Orks' gestalt field into the mix, its likely that its not that religion doesn't matter to them, it's under-utilized.

* The Tau's creed "The [[Greater Good]]" is a specie-wide philosophy that was adopted ever since the initial unification of the Tau in the olden days. In a nutshell, the Greater Good emphasizes the co-existence of all Tau and sapient life in general into working together for a common goal to further the Tau's progress, seeing everyone's potential and hoping to utilize that for an, ahem, greater good. Personal religion isn't forbidden, but it must not contradict or override The Greater Good, and must be disregarded if it ever does so. Technically, this means Tau can be religious or non-religious, as the Greater Good is not a religion (due to lacking an afterlife and supernatural aspects, with the closest things to figures of worship being the Ethereals). This sounds all fine and dandy, but the Ethereal class, who are responsible for maintaining The Greater Good, have been shown to be less benevolent than believed and have been using their unnaturally powerful charisma to subtly oppress the Tau and use them to further their own agendas.
**The Farsight Enclaves, who have thrown off Ethereal rule, are the exception in that they have rejected The Greater Good, seeing it as the method of oppression used to keep the T'au under complete control of the ethereals. Due to this, if one considers the Greater Good a religion, The Enclaves are irreligious.
**As of the 4th Sphere Expansion disaster, Chaos Tau are starting to become a thing.
**At one point, the Earth Caste gathered Genestealer-infected Tau and studied them to see what would happen. Of course, a Genestealer cult developed and naturally they violently escaped control and surveillance. According to rumors, they've even produced a Genestealer-infected Ethereal.

* The Eldar have varying views on religiosity depending on their type. Their religion is polytheistic, with henotheistic offshoots, and Ausryan was the highest ranking god. However all of the Eldar gods were murder-raped to death by Slaanesh except for Isha (taken by Nurgle), Khaine (shattered and flung into realspace), Cegorach (hiding in the Webway) and Ynnead (born long after Slaanesh's birth). Their Pantheon's religious practices aren't fleshed out save for those of Cegorach, Isha, and Khaine, via the Harlequins and Aspect Warriors. With most of their gods out of commission, Eldar religious worship is of a deistic bent.
** Craftworlders and Exodites almost exclusively worship the original Eldar pantheon, though some engage in henotheistic worship of only one of the gods. Asuryan is more popular among Craftworlders while Isha is among Exodites, though nearly all give Khaine some tribute during war.
** Corsairs are all over the place, though Khaine is a popular choice given their more militant nature.
** Being agents of the Laughing God himself, the Harlequins' worship is centered around [[Cegorach]], whilst still paying minor tribute to the other gods.
** The new faith around Ynnead, the Ynnari, is rapidly growing but have yet to establish teachings or rituals.
** Unique among the Eldar, the Dark Eldar are irreligious for the most part and while they believe some gods exist they're too self-centered to worship them (this is canon). They're often also anti-religious to boot; a major landmark of Commorragh is a landfill of religious icons called Iconoclast's Mound, and one Wych cult - the Pain Eternal - revolves around killing religious people and destroying shrines and holy sites. The sole exception, except for Dark Eldar who stop being Dark Eldar, are the [[Incubi]] who hold [[Khaine]] in high regard.
** There are numerous rumors of a very small number of Chaos Eldar, but these are barely fleshed out and heavily classified in-universe. There have been verified Nurgle-worshipping Eldar and persistent rumors that some have embraced Slaanesh without becoming soul-food. Apart from this, some Dark Eldar have been willing to summon Chaos Daemons or work with Chaos worshippers ([[Fabius Bile|or allies of Chaos]]) to further their own ends.

* While the Necrontyr had religions before certain [[C'tan|star entities]] [[Necrons|roboticizied them]], those aren't fleshed out or detailed. Its also heavily implied the C'tan co-opted the Necrontyr religion beforehand. With the change to Necrons taking the higher though processes of most of them, any Necrons who can comprehend faith and religiosity either worship the C'tan or have become irreligious.

* The Tyranids themselves are irreligious, being spehss bugs and all, but understand at least a few of the advantages of religion. [[Genestealer]]s infect people and together they establish cults on targeted worlds, such as one worshipping "Children of the Stars", a perversion of the Imperial Cult (such as one that worships a [[Swarmlord|four-armed]] version of the Emperor) or something else like "Celebrants of Nihilism" (yes, that's a canon Genestealer cult name). Psychic influence is often involved and, notably, the Genestealers do not consider themselves gods. Once the Tyranids arrive en-masse, the cult-gets assimilated along with all non-Tyranids willingly or not. An interesting tidbit is that the Hive Mind stops the Tyranids from attacking the cultists in early stages of the invasion and leads them on, only to later override the Genestealers' wills and and make them slaughter the cultists.

===Dungeons and Dragons===
* Among Dungeons and Dragons settings, [[Planescape]], [[Eberron]], and [[Pathfinder]] are notable for having some coherent things that could be called "Religions", rather then the usual generic Pantheism.
** Most of Planescape's Factions effectively count as religions, to the point they can produce [[Cleric]]s ([[Planescape: Torment#Fall-From-Grace|Atheist ones at that]]). Yes, even the Athar. (Perhaps ''especially'' the Athar.)
** Half of Eberron's religions aren't worship of deities. The [[Blood of Vol]] seeks to unlock the divinity within one's self and rejects the gods (if they even exist) and the [[Path of Inspiration]] seeks to improve their next reincarnation. The Undying Court worships not gods but their undead ancestors that make up their government. The [[Path of Light]], [[Warforged_Mysteries#The_Becoming_God|Becoming God]] and [[Warforged_Mysteries#The_Reforged|Reforged]] all seek to ''create'' a deity. Even some interpretations of the [[Sovereign Host]], like the one most common among dragons, don't worship them as deities. Due to the way divine casting works in Eberron, all of these can produce divine casters.
** There's a handful of religions on [[Golarion]] that aren't merely worship of pantheons. The most prominent (read: Actually has mechanical support) is the [[Prophecies of Kalistrade]], which is basically fantasy [[Star Trek|Ferengi]].

* [[D20 Modern]]'s [[Urban Arcana]], unusually for urban fantasy, has D&D deities bleed into reality alongside the monsters. You are still able to play a <s>cleric</s> "acolyte" of any real world deity despite this.

===Star Wars===
* [[Star Wars]] is inconsistent on if the [[The Force]] is a religion. The Jedi and the Sith ''could'' both be considered religions as they are considered monastic, but mix in several other traits such as being meritocratic (Jedi) and kraterocratic (Sith) and Lucas himself has axed at least one prototyped book for portraying them too much as a religion. It's also notable that the Sith were former Jedi who left the Jedi path for several reasons including [[Heresy|disagreements over the teachings of that creed]]. Aside from that, religion is nearly always a non-human tradition, something noted in a culture's historical background and never seen implying its extinction, or a scam. The religiously linked "damn" and "hell" are the two real world swear words that exist in-universe, purely because Han Solo used them in the films, and some concept of an "angel" exists because a young Anakin told Padme about them in the prequel trilogy films.
** There are rare exceptions where a religion is fleshed out and explored, and the writing goes various directions for better or worse. A notable example is the aggressive polytheistic religion of the antagonistic Yuuzhan Vong from the EU (which the story gradually revealed was long ago perverted from benevolent roots, and this perverted form takes a few cues from Islam and Aztec mythology).

===Star Trek===
* Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had a low opinion of religion and in his vision humanity had done away with it and was better off for it and he had no interest in adding it to the aliens. However, some of the cast and crew disagreed and occasionally references and religions found their way into the show, which increased after Roddenberry's death. The Federation's culture is distinctly humanistic (extending the concept to alien species) in it's outlook in which religion is regarded as a thing of the past.
** While there are plenty of "Godlike" entities in Star Trek, almost all are treated as Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in the Arthur C. Clarke sense--and in particular, in ST:TNG, the flip side, that Picard and his crew are frequently shown to look like Gods to sufficiently primitive aliens, is gone into in more than one episode.
** The Bajorans are a highly religious alien race, with the majority following peaceful teachings and a minority of violent extremists.
*** Of some note, the Bajoran religion is of interest because their "Gods" actually exist, and can be (somewhat incomprehensibly) talked to (a rarity outside of [[Science Fantasy]]). In other words, they were frequently a method of having some religion vs. science debates where the divine entity (A) explicitly exists, (B) is explainable as "sufficiently advanced and unusual aliens", and (C) aren't jerks, just bad at communication with those of us who experience time linearly--in other words, with a deck that wasn't quite as badly stacked. The religiosity was meant to be as a way of contrasting the Starfleet personnel with the native population and to draw a parallel between Bajorans under the Cardassian Occupation and various real world recently freed oppressed religious-slash-ethnic groups.
** <s>In the fifth Star Trek movie, ''"The Final Frontier"'', some of the crew steal the Enterprise to look for God and instead find a powerful alien being impersonating God in the center of the universe</s> '''Just like there is no live-action movie of Avatar: The Last Airbender, there is totally no Star Trek 5!'''

===World of Darkness===
* Very large books could be written about religion and [[World of Darkness]]/Chronicles of Darkness. We'll just cover a few highlights:
** From [[Vampire: The Requiem]], there's the the Lancea et Sanctum, which might be best described as "Christianity for Vampires", and the Circle of the Crone, which is "Pagan Vampires". Both have Vampire miracles on tap (pun intended).
** [[Hunter: The Vigil]] has various religious organizations among the Compacts and Conspiracies, some very similar to real world ones, others...not so much.
** [[Mage: The Ascension]] has various religious Traditions, portrayed in that highly-stereotypical and highly-depending-on-the-author way typical of old WoD.

==See also==
* [[Mythology]]

[[Category:Not related]]
[[Category:History]]

Religion

2020-07-22T01:58:13Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* Definition of Religion */

{{Heresy}}
{{topquote|Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.|Martin Luther King, Jr}}

:'''Dracula''': ''I was called here by, huuuuumans, who wish to pay me tribute!''
:'''Richter Belmont''': ''Tribute?! You steal men's souls! And make them your slaves!''
:'''Dracula''': ''Perhaps the same could be said of all religions.''
::--An excerpt from the infamous exchange that also gave us "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets" in [[Castlevania#Castlevania:_Symphony_Of_The_Night_.28Castlevania_9.29|Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.]]

Because it's important to several settings and RPG systems, particularly ones that are high-profile or relevant to /tg/, we have a religion article. Let's try and keep it focused on the directly-related-to-/tg/ stuff and not descend into the pure [[skub]] that can arise in discussions of real-life religions, okay?

==Definition of Religion==
Almost since the inception of the term, scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. While there are some belief systems that always count as religions, some have applied the term to various things such as political ideologies, or groups when they reach a certain point. There are however two general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the phenomenological/philosophical.

The two most widely accepted are:
* "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them."
* "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted".

As stated before, one common element that every religion which fits the criteria has is humanity's relation to supernatural forces, as all of them have at least one [[God|god]] and/or an afterlife even where there are exceptions; Buddhism doesn't have any gods or its own idea of the cosmos' origins but has afterlives and the existence of the eternal soul (unless a persons achieves nirvana), and Taoism doesn't have an afterlife in the conventional sense but is pantheistic.

Like other terms for heavily [[SJW|debated]] [[communism|subjects]], religion and religious have also been used as insults or Snarl Words in social and political discussions (especially from the 20th century and onwards) to ridicule groups openly promoting something the user disagrees with. This snarl creates a caricature of the group to smear them by association with the worst excesses/negative stereotypes of real-world religious people (like being too preachy, judgmental, irrational, hypocritical, or pressuring everyone to convert).

==Religion vs. Mythology==
While [[Mythology|mythologies]] aren't religions in and of themselves, every religion has a mythology. While mythologies are merely the accounts of supernatural events, religions add rituals and practices that link those mythologies directly to the lives of their believers in one form or another, typically by describing how to properly serve to a god (or multiple gods, it depends) a significant role in the mythology a given religion is derived from. [[Skub|Whatever the source]], the mythology almost always predates the religion. As a result, especially since the Fantasy genre deals in supernatural beings and forces, most if not all fantasy settings have religions. Science fiction does to a lesser degree, mostly because during the Golden Age of sci-fi empiricists and secular humanists were attracted to the genre and their views often seeped into their stories. Despite this, given that most real-life societies have had religions playing a role in or since their founding, religions are still found in sci-fi.

Religions involves belief systems and practices, where an adherent can call upon the power/being the religion is focused on to give them aid in [[cleric|various]] [[Paladin|ways]], depending at the very least on the religion and the task in question. Given that religions are about people's place in the world, how it was made, ideas on how life should be lived and how humans should relate to the supernatural, they have major implications for societies. Given that people can become [[Exarch|dangerously single-minded]] about a cause, people can be become extremists about their religion, regardless of the fact that [[Heironeous|some]] are more benevolent than [[Asmodeus|others]] and in numerous cases even [[Heresy|if it involves going against the religion's teachings]]; in conjunction with the above this means religious conflicts can become widespread, long-lasting, cause carnage and also involve other elements such as politics- both in fantasy and in the real world.

==Role in Society==
A person's belief (for or against) any or all religions is a major factor in their worldview, and as such often serves as the undercurrent for all others. This is because this belief shapes people's views on the big things such as the purpose of life, how life should be lived in relation to oneself and others and what happens to people after they die. On the upside, this often leads to teachings with the goal of unity, peace, charity and co-operation as per the teachings of most religions, some of which are adapted by or also found among non-religious systems. On the downside, this can lead to clashes over how the people involved do the will of whichever beings or forces they follow, which religion should be followed or whether or not people should follow a god or religion at all. This can involve arguments and factionalizing, or in some cases worse things like pogroms and wars. Since they are an overarching and fairly common element in cultures, they often appear or are referenced in fiction.

The most common religious belief systems are the Abrahamic family of religions (primarily Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which are Monotheistic (belief in a singular God) and share many common elements and root, with - at the time this was written - Christianity being the most followed religion globally. Historically, these and other religions were frequently enshrined in law as the "state religion", giving them special privileges such as extensive influence over the government or tax exemptions. In some cases, they even took over the functions of the government entirely in a system known as theocracy; while uncommon in the present day, theocracies are still in use in places such as the Vatican and Iran.

Within the last few centuries, due to events such as the French Revolution, there has also been a significant amount of anti-religious sentiment, which regards religion as at best redundant and at worst destructive (beyond historical grievances with specific groups within religions, reasons for this view and whether or not those arguments have any merit, shall not be discussed here). For the most part, a combination of people identifying more with their culture or nation than their religion and the concept that religion and functions of state should not interfere with each other has turned into more of a "live and let live" mentality that doesn't really support or oppose any one religion and only reacts when said religions begin actively defying the state or the state starts bringing the boot down on religion.

Throughout history, numerous tyrannical regimes have tried to restrict or stamp out religions. This is usually because religious teachings put the figure/object of worship before the state in a conflict of interest and most religions' teachings condemn tyranny or [[Slaanesh|the vices tyrannical leaders indulge]]. Other reasons include tyrants dislike being answerable to anyone besides themselves and a tyrant may have some form of anti-religious prejudice. While nations have usually tried to block specific religions deemed "false" (read: religions opposing the state-sponsored religion in any way), several nations (usually [[Communism|Communist]] states which took Marx's "religion is the opiate of the masses" quote out of context as a call to arms rather than a passive theory) have tried to get rid of religion altogether, albeit with horrifying [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Militant_Atheists results] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_rule_of_Cambodia#Religious_communities each] time. Best case scenario, they sidegrade from one set of problems to another as cults of personality (commonly ones based on the ruler in charge) spring up to exploit the newly created power vacuum while believers who survive the regime try to continue their activities in secret. Worst case scenario, the society and its population degenerates into [[Commorragh|a violent, fractious, and nihilistic shell of their former selves]].

Aside from the aforementioned theocracies, the most religious nations are countries such as Brazil in South America or Zambia in Africa (Zambia even has a state religion alongside a law that allows for freedom of religion). China is - at the time this was written - the world's least religious and most atheistic country (the situation around North Korea is [[Skub|debatable]], since even though they violently suppress religions [https://www.foxnews.com/world/north-korea-publicly-executes-80-some-for-videos-or-bibles-report-says to the point that merely having copies of religious texts can be grounds for execution], they also have the Kim Cult blended with the Marxist offshoot ideology Juche).

==How this impacts /tg/==
A few major ways. Since most if not every society in real-life has had religion either be the basis for its founding or play a role in it, religion is just as involved in the backstory or current lore of settings. There are three major "modes" of /tg/ settings and related fictions:
* Purely functional use of religion as a story device. (What we might call "Functionalists")
* Endorsement of religion and/or religious people. (What we might call "Religion is Good" types)
* Criticism of religion and/or religious people. (What we might call "Religion is Bad" types)
For ease of categorization, writers who use these modes will also be called proponents, detractors or functionalists (who can be pro, anti or neutral).

===Religion as a story device/Functionalists===
Compared to the two types of writers found below, these writers are usually just attempting to model their work after real-world [[Mythology]] and are frequently attempting to keep their views of Religion separate from their work. Frequently comes in one of two subspecies:
* The [[Standard Fantasy Setting]] default: The world is ruled by an ordinary polytheistic pantheon, usually close to some admixture of Norse and Greek mythologies. Some of them also have a Top God more powerful than all the others, and maybe the in-universe creator of everything who is mostly hands-off in cosmic affairs. The gods of these religions tend to focus on specific areas (gods of [[Paladin|Justice]] and [[Druid|Nature]] are common, for subtly obvious reasons) and frequently want their followers to propagate or promote these things.
* The kind of setting they wanted to make dictated the nature of the divine. For example, in [[Exalted]] just about all the figures anybody would call a "God" (besides the Exalted) are Useless, because the Exalted (which includes the Player Characters) are the guys who were made specifically to do whatever the gods needed them to do for reasons inherent to the setting, to go with the main theme of the setting for the PCs: "You can do '''almost anything''', except ''avoid the consequences of being the one who did that anything''".

===Religion as a Bad Thing/Detractors===
There are several writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy that are of the opinion "Religion Is Bad", often alongside having an axe to grind (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) with either one or more specific real-life religions. This is more common in Sci-Fi than fantasy because the focus on science appeals to the naturalist, empiricist and/or humanist worldview of such writers, with the supernatural being seen as an obstacle to that. Despite that, the view is found among some fantasy authors as well, such as the author of the book series "His Dark Materials", Philip Pullman (he wrote it as pushback against C.S Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" series). Whatever the genre, this comes in flavors of either "The Gods Don't Exist", "The Gods are Incompetent" (more on that below) or "The Gods are Evil". Cosmic Horror also tends to use the "Gods Don't Exist" or "Gods are Evil" route, or combine them into "The Gods are actually Incomprehensible and Destructive Aliens" (for example; the author who codified the genre, [[H.P. Lovecraft]], was an avowed anti-religious atheist - which is why cults are recurring villains in his stories). This also has the side effect of inclining science fiction towards an atheistic perspective.

Another major component is personal issues of the author such as grievance or prejudice, but that's case-by-case and a major can of worms. A writer could have resentment against a specific religion or even the higher power a religion reveres (though opposition to a god or gods is called anti-theistic, not anti-religious), and single them out in their works due to personal bias or agenda. Worst case scenario, the story is some sort of anti-religious wish fulfillment power fantasy - such as Frank Miller's "Holy Terror" comics against Islam and Garth Ennis' "Preacher" comics (and their live-action adaptation) against Christianity.

Whatever the motivation, writers saying this message either model their fictional religions on the - occasionally exaggerated - worst excesses of real world religious people or use a fictional religion as a (usually strawman) stand-in of a real one. The most frequently targeted religions are Christianity, Islam, any faith that practiced human sacrifice (such as the Aztec religious practices) and Scientology. Cults, especially those with beliefs that mainstream religions consider unorthodox or outright heretical, are especially fertile ground for this message, albeit running the risk of being misapplied to tar other groups with the same brush.

===Religion as a Good Thing/Proponents===
There are several Science Fiction and Fantasy writers who either are religious themselves and want to promote their worldview, look upon religion positively and put that into the story or both. This is more common in Fantasy than Sci-fi, partly because with the supernatural being THE fundamental element of the genre, this gives opportunities to explore many aspects of religiosity. This is less common in science-fiction, but not unheard of, such as Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" where God's signature is found in the digits of pi. These authors usually put more thought into their fictional religion plus its central figure (although they have a tendency to go all "Crystal Dragon Jesus"), and try and have it be at least a somewhat good influence, although religious institutions and leaders are usually hit-and-miss affairs.

Some people make a fictional setting with figures from real-world religions, either in the real-world or [[CS Lewis|an alternate world (such as Narnia)]]. Others use fictional religions that either visually resemble real-life religions or figures from them; religions that often get this treatment are the Abrahamic faiths (most often Christianity), Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology and Norse mythology (albeit often a sanitized version of the latter three). In other cases they all but abandon any form of subtlety, with the fictional religion being distinguished from the real-world religion the author follows by only a handful of minor changes. Naturally, those kinds of works tend to come off as preachy, to say the least.

Another route this uses is the route that faith itself provides the power as per "[[Belief Function|Belief Function]]" (think Morpheus' "your mind makes it real" quote, but applying at the cosmological level). In fact, Warhammer often goes the route that the gods are powered by faith as well as from their sphere of influence which has either [[Sigmar|caused some people have risen to godhood]] or [[Ynnead|caused new gods to be born in the setting]]. In fact, this has proven the greatest weapon against Chaos in every Warhammer setting (and why the Emperor's plan to starve the Chaos Gods with atheism was doomed to fail from the start).

===Somewhat special cases===

One somewhat special case is the "Religion of Evil"; in many settings, there is a religion that is explicitly capital E Evil and seeks one of the usual "Card Carrying Villain" goals of Control, Conquest, Corruption, or Destruction. Frequently has some admixture of the worst aspects of Roman Paganism, Norse practices, the Aztec, Scientology and/or the various Abrahamic religions. They also often draw from those found in the writings of H.P Lovecraft. If this cult directly worships an individual Evil God, expect whatever makes sense for that deity to be some form of destructive activity--e.g., the cult of the God of Murder demands human sacrifice on a regular basis, with a certain portion of that explicitly being not-careful-enough cultists. Regardless, Religions of Evil can show up in all three above modes, and usually has a special purpose in all three:

* All three types need bad guys. In particular, a group who by definition is Evil is always good for some no-need-to-worry-about-the-ethics-or-morality-of-killing fodder (based on the idea that everyone in is group is evil because you have to do evil to be part of the group).
* Religion is Bad types tend to use them to say either "while they're all Bad, some are worse then others", that "Religion can be used to justify anything", use it as a strawman to tar all with the same brush or they have a specific axe to grind (either against an entire religion, a group within that religion or individual adherents the author personally dislikes).
* Religion is Good types or the sincerely religious tend to use them as analogies with fanaticism, criticize Real World cults, compare different beliefs or deal with negative aspects of religion (occasionally making jabs at competitive religions, or fellow believers the author disagrees with). Another approach is to have a Religion of Good fighting against a Religion of Evil - either as the heroes of the story or a valued ally - to say "there is good religion, so don't tar all with the same negative brush".
** As a side note, a lot of fantasy has moved slightly away from pure Religions of Evil, for much the same reason as [[Always Chaotic Evil]] races (questions of whether this fosters prejudice against real-life groups and audiences and authors demanding more motive for their villains). While there are still plenty of them, they usually add some nuance that makes them at least morally neutral under their own lights. Popular options are for them to be an off-shoot/subset of another religion and/or be taking vengeance for an injustice (real or perceived, both of which have '''plenty''' of real-life precedent).

[[Urban Fantasy]] writers are another special case, since almost all Urban Fantasy is set in something that might be called "the real world with a twist", with all the usual political trouble that implies. As a result, they can take one of a few routes:
* The most common route is "there are many possible explanations" and vague things up as much as possible ([[True Faith|Faith]] being the power that repels [[Vampire]]s rather than than a cross having any actual connection to a deity is a popular one).
* The second most common route (albeit rarer outside of Cosmic Horror) is the "Religion as a Bad Thing" route; the story is straight up atheistic/"Religion is Bad" [[Imperial Truth|propaganda]] where the writer often has an axe to grind against a specific religion. It's a popular choice for writers trying to be [[Edgy]] who want to include religious subject matter in their stories, and they almost exclusively go after the most established religion in the area or any new cults that have emerged at the time. Furthermore, any fictional religions or cults are most likely thinly-veiled stand-ins for real life ones.
* Some Urban Fantasy works with a clear correct religion exist thanks to the above mentioned sincerely religious authors, which are typically [[Chick Tracts|barely veiled proselytizing]] or [[Twilight|just straight up terrible]], though [[Monster Hunter International|there are some good ones]].
* The fourth route, taken most notably by [[Supers|DC and Marvel comics]] among others, is to take an "All Myths are True" approach: All religions are sort of true, but none have any exclusivity to the Truth, so Thor and Athena might have the Archangel Michael on speeddial when the Orochi teams up with Apep to get up to no good and start making trouble in their neighborhoods (because "Mikey really likes kicking serpent tail, and gets annoyed when we don't at least try to invite him to an evil serpent ass-kicking."). Differs from the "vague things up" route by being clearer on some details, and also much more gonzo. The Abrahamic God is the exception here: He's usually kept especially vague, albeit more powerful (and yet infinitely less accessible) than anyone else in the setting, and only referred to by some codephrase (Marvel likes "The One Above All", DC generally goes for "The Presence" or "whatever is behind the Source Wall").

===Miscellaneous Observations===

Doing the "The Gods are Incompetent" thing (the similar but different "The Gods are Insane", "The Gods Are Assholes" and "The Gods Don't Actually Do Anything" routes also falls under this umbrella) can go into any of the three modes; in a sincere monotheist's (such as Christian) work, it can be a "Take That" to polytheistic religions; in a "Religion is Bad" atheist's, it can be one to religion in general; in a Buddhist-influenced work, it can be a part of the whole "even the Gods are tied up in the Wheel of Karma" concept; and, even if the author is not pushing any religious message in any way, there's a neutral, plot-structural reason to go "Incompetent Gods": it can make the adventurers the Most Competent People Available since if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be anything for the adventurers to do.

If a work has multiple writers, (as frequently happens with RPG and Wargame settings, and quite a few popular SciFi/Fantasy ones as well) there's a tendency for the writers to try and pull the setting into one of the other two "modes" depending on their personal views. This leads to the theme changing from one side to the other as the story progresses. A recent example is [[World of Warcraft|the spate of retcons to the cosmology of the Warcraft universe]] and the morality of its fundamental forces/dominant higher powers, the Light and the Void. If the story doesn't get focused on a pro-religion or anti-religion message, it may end up swinging back and forth between both sides or settle in a mid-point which doesn't take a strong stance either way.

Note that members of the "Religion is Bad" and "Religion is Good" brigades will get involved in arguments over the relative morality or "goodness" of various factions in the story and the accuracy of any messages a writer presents. Often history buffs will throw their hat into the ring as well.

==Examples of /tg/ connected fictional religions==
===Warhammer 40k===
* The [[Imperial Truth]] was originally the Emperor's plan on beliefs, which he and his servants propagated throughout the galaxy during the Great Crusade. Attempting to wean mankind away from Chaos and being a firm member of the "Religion is Bad" brigade, the Emperor proclaimed there are no gods, and religion had to be abolished willingly or by force while science or reason are to be used for explaining the universe and morality. Everything transpired according to his design, except theistic religiosity in the 40k universe is the best weapon against Chaos so Emps' interstellar state atheism policy gave them a major opening. Things went from bad to worse when people started looking up to the Emperor as a god himself, [[Exterminatus|he responded accordingly]], and the Chaos Gods got a new tool in the form of [[Lorgar]]. After the Horus Heresy and the Emperor's removal from galactic politics: the Imperial Truth was slowly shelved in favor of the Imperial Cult, to the point that espousing the teachings of the Truth is ironically considered heresy. Only a few practitioners of the Imperial Truth remain, most notably the Custodes and the Space Marines (both of whom know The Emperor better than anybody to worship him as a god. Plus, their religious autonomy.).
** The [[Imperial Cult]] is the present-day religion of the Imperium of Man, and is a mix of several Abrahamic Religions along with copious amounts of warmongering, fanaticism and xenophobia. Derived from the Lectitio Divinatus penned by [[Lorgar]] pre-HH, the Cult decrees that because the Emperor is capable of all these miracles and power: he ''must'' be a god, and why you should worship and pledge loyalty to him. Its a complete 180 from the Emperor's original teachings, and has simultaneously been responsible for damning and saving the Imperium past the clusterfuck of the Horus Heresy. It's unknown whether the Emperor still abhors godhood and religion and would abolish it the moment he could, or if he's resigned himself to becoming the very thing he fought against for mankind to persevere in these trying times. Whatever the case, he didn't want to be a god, but now he has no choice but to become one.
** The [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Cult Mechanicus]] (Machine Cult) is the religion of the Adeptus Mechanicus, placing a heavy emphasis on machines, viewing them as gifts from the Machine God called "The Omnissiah" Officially, the Omnissiah is The Emperor, which allows the Mechanicus to sidestep the more puritan pundits of the Imperial Cult (we worship The Emprah, just not how you do it). Unofficially, the Omnissiah may or may not be the C'tan god: The Void Dragon. It also has a high emphasis on the collection of knowledge, and one of the Admech's roles in the galaxy is to explore remote and uncharted regions of space to find and search for knowledge that has been lost throughout the millennia. The last of these, is guidelines on machines and knowledge. Officially, heretic(tek) and xeno works are to be abhorred and disposed of, viewing them as perversions of the holy Machine God's works. Unofficially however, more liberally-minded and higher-ranked Magos would happily hoard heretek/xeno works, seeing their potential over the more restricted and constrained works of the Mechanicus.

* Chaos is a violent and complicated henotheistic (believing in multiple gods but only worshipping one) or polytheistic religion with dozens, if not hundreds of interpretations. Even then, there's more sub-cults that worship their particular god in a specific way, either minutely or vastly different from everyone else among followers of the Big 4. And this doesn't even get into the realm of Chaos Undivided (which worships the concept of Chaos itself, instead of the individual gods) and [[Malal]]. Chaos has very little established guidelines regarding worship, apart from their patron god's/gods' general likes/dislikes, so any religious practices or rituals are either based on commands from the god/s or up to the imagination of the cult.
** Interestingly, there is a Space Marine of the Chaos faction who follows the Imperial Truth, and that is [[Fabius Bile]].

* All Greenskins worship Gork and Mork (jury's out on whether the [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee]] do), but are too disorganized to have anything like a formal religion, though they do make effigies of Gork and Mork and call on them. The closest thing they have to tenants is that Gork favors violence, Mork favors cunning. Greenskins have gotten into fights over this, but violence is part of their nature and that of their gods. While they fight over religion, they also fight over almost any dispute anyway, and may even start a religious argument just to enjoy a good fight among themselves (though the only theological argument they can formulate is "is Gork the god of cunning or is Mork?" or vica versa). On the surface, religion does not play a big-enough role in Ork society compared to other races, being just another outlet for Orks to fight about. But if [[Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka|Ghazghkull]] is any indication: religion can have a great impact on Orks, with him being becoming one of the greatest Warlords in the galaxy, primarily because he thinks he's personally blessed by Gork and Mork themselves. So if you throw in the Orks' gestalt field into the mix, its likely that its not that religion doesn't matter to them, it's under-utilized.

* The Tau's creed "The [[Greater Good]]" is a specie-wide philosophy that was adopted ever since the initial unification of the Tau in the olden days. In a nutshell, the Greater Good emphasizes the co-existence of all Tau and sapient life in general into working together for a common goal to further the Tau's progress, seeing everyone's potential and hoping to utilize that for an, ahem, greater good. Personal religion isn't forbidden, but it must not contradict or override The Greater Good, and must be disregarded if it ever does so. Technically, this means Tau can be religious or non-religious, as the Greater Good is not a religion (due to lacking an afterlife and supernatural aspects, with the closest things to figures of worship being the Ethereals). This sounds all fine and dandy, but the Ethereal class, who are responsible for maintaining The Greater Good, have been shown to be less benevolent than believed and have been using their unnaturally powerful charisma to subtly oppress the Tau and use them to further their own agendas.
**The Farsight Enclaves, who have thrown off Ethereal rule, are the exception in that they have rejected The Greater Good, seeing it as the method of oppression used to keep the T'au under complete control of the ethereals. Due to this, if one considers the Greater Good a religion, The Enclaves are irreligious.
**As of the 4th Sphere Expansion disaster, Chaos Tau are starting to become a thing.
**At one point, the Earth Caste gathered Genestealer-infected Tau and studied them to see what would happen. Of course, a Genestealer cult developed and naturally they violently escaped control and surveillance. According to rumors, they've even produced a Genestealer-infected Ethereal.

* The Eldar have varying views on religiosity depending on their type. Their religion is polytheistic, with henotheistic offshoots, and Ausryan was the highest ranking god. However all of the Eldar gods were murder-raped to death by Slaanesh except for Isha (taken by Nurgle), Khaine (shattered and flung into realspace), Cegorach (hiding in the Webway) and Ynnead (born long after Slaanesh's birth). Their Pantheon's religious practices aren't fleshed out save for those of Cegorach, Isha, and Khaine, via the Harlequins and Aspect Warriors. With most of their gods out of commission, Eldar religious worship is of a deistic bent.
** Craftworlders and Exodites almost exclusively worship the original Eldar pantheon, though some engage in henotheistic worship of only one of the gods. Asuryan is more popular among Craftworlders while Isha is among Exodites, though nearly all give Khaine some tribute during war.
** Corsairs are all over the place, though Khaine is a popular choice given their more militant nature.
** Being agents of the Laughing God himself, the Harlequins' worship is centered around [[Cegorach]], whilst still paying minor tribute to the other gods.
** The new faith around Ynnead, the Ynnari, is rapidly growing but have yet to establish teachings or rituals.
** Unique among the Eldar, the Dark Eldar are irreligious for the most part and while they believe some gods exist they're too self-centered to worship them (this is canon). They're often also anti-religious to boot; a major landmark of Commorragh is a landfill of religious icons called Iconoclast's Mound, and one Wych cult - the Pain Eternal - revolves around killing religious people and destroying shrines and holy sites. The sole exception, except for Dark Eldar who stop being Dark Eldar, are the [[Incubi]] who hold [[Khaine]] in high regard.
** There are numerous rumors of a very small number of Chaos Eldar, but these are barely fleshed out and heavily classified in-universe. There have been verified Nurgle-worshipping Eldar and persistent rumors that some have embraced Slaanesh without becoming soul-food. Apart from this, some Dark Eldar have been willing to summon Chaos Daemons or work with Chaos worshippers ([[Fabius Bile|or allies of Chaos]]) to further their own ends.

* While the Necrontyr had religions before certain [[C'tan|star entities]] [[Necrons|roboticizied them]], those aren't fleshed out or detailed. Its also heavily implied the C'tan co-opted the Necrontyr religion beforehand. With the change to Necrons taking the higher though processes of most of them, any Necrons who can comprehend faith and religiosity either worship the C'tan or have become irreligious.

* The Tyranids themselves are irreligious, being spehss bugs and all, but understand at least a few of the advantages of religion. [[Genestealer]]s infect people and together they establish cults on targeted worlds, such as one worshipping "Children of the Stars", a perversion of the Imperial Cult (such as one that worships a [[Swarmlord|four-armed]] version of the Emperor) or something else like "Celebrants of Nihilism" (yes, that's a canon Genestealer cult name). Psychic influence is often involved and, notably, the Genestealers do not consider themselves gods. Once the Tyranids arrive en-masse, the cult-gets assimilated along with all non-Tyranids willingly or not. An interesting tidbit is that the Hive Mind stops the Tyranids from attacking the cultists in early stages of the invasion and leads them on, only to later override the Genestealers' wills and and make them slaughter the cultists.

===Dungeons and Dragons===
* Among Dungeons and Dragons settings, [[Planescape]], [[Eberron]], and [[Pathfinder]] are notable for having some coherent things that could be called "Religions", rather then the usual generic Pantheism.
** Most of Planescape's Factions effectively count as religions, to the point they can produce [[Cleric]]s ([[Planescape: Torment#Fall-From-Grace|Atheist ones at that]]). Yes, even the Athar. (Perhaps ''especially'' the Athar.)
** Half of Eberron's religions aren't worship of deities. The [[Blood of Vol]] seeks to unlock the divinity within one's self and rejects the gods (if they even exist) and the [[Path of Inspiration]] seeks to improve their next reincarnation. The Undying Court worships not gods but their undead ancestors that make up their government. The [[Path of Light]], [[Warforged_Mysteries#The_Becoming_God|Becoming God]] and [[Warforged_Mysteries#The_Reforged|Reforged]] all seek to ''create'' a deity. Even some interpretations of the [[Sovereign Host]], like the one most common among dragons, don't worship them as deities. Due to the way divine casting works in Eberron, all of these can produce divine casters.
** There's a handful of religions on [[Golarion]] that aren't merely worship of pantheons. The most prominent (read: Actually has mechanical support) is the [[Prophecies of Kalistrade]], which is basically fantasy [[Star Trek|Ferengi]].

* [[D20 Modern]]'s [[Urban Arcana]], unusually for urban fantasy, has D&D deities bleed into reality alongside the monsters. You are still able to play a <s>cleric</s> "acolyte" of any real world deity despite this.

===Star Wars===
* [[Star Wars]] is inconsistent on if the [[The Force]] is a religion. The Jedi and the Sith ''could'' both be considered religions as they are considered monastic, but mix in several other traits such as being meritocratic (Jedi) and kraterocratic (Sith) and Lucas himself has axed at least one prototyped book for portraying them too much as a religion. It's also notable that the Sith were former Jedi who left the Jedi path for several reasons including [[Heresy|disagreements over the teachings of that creed]]. Aside from that, religion is nearly always a non-human tradition, something noted in a culture's historical background and never seen implying its extinction, or a scam. The religiously linked "damn" and "hell" are the two real world swear words that exist in-universe, purely because Han Solo used them in the films, and some concept of an "angel" exists because a young Anakin told Padme about them in the prequel trilogy films.
** There are rare exceptions where a religion is fleshed out and explored, and the writing goes various directions for better or worse. A notable example is the aggressive polytheistic religion of the antagonistic Yuuzhan Vong from the EU (which the story gradually revealed was long ago perverted from benevolent roots, and this perverted form takes a few cues from Islam and Aztec mythology).

===Star Trek===
* Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had a low opinion of religion and in his vision humanity had done away with it and was better off for it and he had no interest in adding it to the aliens. However, some of the cast and crew disagreed and occasionally references and religions found their way into the show, which increased after Roddenberry's death. The Federation's culture is distinctly humanistic (extending the concept to alien species) in it's outlook in which religion is regarded as a thing of the past.
** While there are plenty of "Godlike" entities in Star Trek, almost all are treated as Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in the Arthur C. Clarke sense--and in particular, in ST:TNG, the flip side, that Picard and his crew are frequently shown to look like Gods to sufficiently primitive aliens, is gone into in more than one episode.
** The Bajorans are a highly religious alien race, with the majority following peaceful teachings and a minority of violent extremists.
*** Of some note, the Bajoran religion is of interest because their "Gods" actually exist, and can be (somewhat incomprehensibly) talked to (a rarity outside of [[Science Fantasy]]). In other words, they were frequently a method of having some religion vs. science debates where the divine entity (A) explicitly exists, (B) is explainable as "sufficiently advanced and unusual aliens", and (C) aren't jerks, just bad at communication with those of us who experience time linearly--in other words, with a deck that wasn't quite as badly stacked. The religiosity was meant to be as a way of contrasting the Starfleet personnel with the native population and to draw a parallel between Bajorans under the Cardassian Occupation and various real world recently freed oppressed religious-slash-ethnic groups.
** <s>In the fifth Star Trek movie, ''"The Final Frontier"'', some of the crew steal the Enterprise to look for God and instead find a powerful alien being impersonating God in the center of the universe</s> '''Just like there is no live-action movie of Avatar: The Last Airbender, there is totally no Star Trek 5!'''

===World of Darkness===
* Very large books could be written about religion and [[World of Darkness]]/Chronicles of Darkness. We'll just cover a few highlights:
** From [[Vampire: The Requiem]], there's the the Lancea et Sanctum, which might be best described as "Christianity for Vampires", and the Circle of the Crone, which is "Pagan Vampires". Both have Vampire miracles on tap (pun intended).
** [[Hunter: The Vigil]] has various religious organizations among the Compacts and Conspiracies, some very similar to real world ones, others...not so much.
** [[Mage: The Ascension]] has various religious Traditions, portrayed in that highly-stereotypical and highly-depending-on-the-author way typical of old WoD.

==See also==
* [[Mythology]]

[[Category:Not related]]
[[Category:History]]

Religion

2020-07-22T01:55:02Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* Definition of Religion */

{{Heresy}}
{{topquote|Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.|Martin Luther King, Jr}}

:'''Dracula''': ''I was called here by, huuuuumans, who wish to pay me tribute!''
:'''Richter Belmont''': ''Tribute?! You steal men's souls! And make them your slaves!''
:'''Dracula''': ''Perhaps the same could be said of all religions.''
::--An excerpt from the infamous exchange that also gave us "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets" in [[Castlevania#Castlevania:_Symphony_Of_The_Night_.28Castlevania_9.29|Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.]]

Because it's important to several settings and RPG systems, particularly ones that are high-profile or relevant to /tg/, we have a religion article. Let's try and keep it focused on the directly-related-to-/tg/ stuff and not descend into the pure [[skub]] that can arise in discussions of real-life religions, okay?

==Definition of Religion==
Almost since the inception of the term, scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. While there are some belief systems that always count as religions, some have applied the term to various things such as political ideologies, or groups when they reach a certain point. There are however two general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the phenomenological/philosophical.

The two most widely accepted are:
* "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them."
* "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted".

As stated before, one common element that every religion which fits the criteria has is humanity's relation to supernatural forces, as all of them have at least one [[God|god]] and/or an afterlife even where there are exceptions; Buddhism doesn't have any gods but has afterlives and the existence of the eternal soul (unless a persons achieves nirvana), and Taoism doesn't have an afterlife in the conventional sense but is pantheistic.

Like other terms for heavily [[SJW|debated]] [[communism|subjects]], religion and religious have also been used as insults or Snarl Words in social and political discussions (especially from the 20th century and onwards) to ridicule groups openly promoting something the user disagrees with. This snarl creates a caricature of the group to smear them by association with the worst excesses/negative stereotypes of real-world religious people (like being too preachy, judgmental, irrational, hypocritical, or pressuring everyone to convert).

==Religion vs. Mythology==
While [[Mythology|mythologies]] aren't religions in and of themselves, every religion has a mythology. While mythologies are merely the accounts of supernatural events, religions add rituals and practices that link those mythologies directly to the lives of their believers in one form or another, typically by describing how to properly serve to a god (or multiple gods, it depends) a significant role in the mythology a given religion is derived from. [[Skub|Whatever the source]], the mythology almost always predates the religion. As a result, especially since the Fantasy genre deals in supernatural beings and forces, most if not all fantasy settings have religions. Science fiction does to a lesser degree, mostly because during the Golden Age of sci-fi empiricists and secular humanists were attracted to the genre and their views often seeped into their stories. Despite this, given that most real-life societies have had religions playing a role in or since their founding, religions are still found in sci-fi.

Religions involves belief systems and practices, where an adherent can call upon the power/being the religion is focused on to give them aid in [[cleric|various]] [[Paladin|ways]], depending at the very least on the religion and the task in question. Given that religions are about people's place in the world, how it was made, ideas on how life should be lived and how humans should relate to the supernatural, they have major implications for societies. Given that people can become [[Exarch|dangerously single-minded]] about a cause, people can be become extremists about their religion, regardless of the fact that [[Heironeous|some]] are more benevolent than [[Asmodeus|others]] and in numerous cases even [[Heresy|if it involves going against the religion's teachings]]; in conjunction with the above this means religious conflicts can become widespread, long-lasting, cause carnage and also involve other elements such as politics- both in fantasy and in the real world.

==Role in Society==
A person's belief (for or against) any or all religions is a major factor in their worldview, and as such often serves as the undercurrent for all others. This is because this belief shapes people's views on the big things such as the purpose of life, how life should be lived in relation to oneself and others and what happens to people after they die. On the upside, this often leads to teachings with the goal of unity, peace, charity and co-operation as per the teachings of most religions, some of which are adapted by or also found among non-religious systems. On the downside, this can lead to clashes over how the people involved do the will of whichever beings or forces they follow, which religion should be followed or whether or not people should follow a god or religion at all. This can involve arguments and factionalizing, or in some cases worse things like pogroms and wars. Since they are an overarching and fairly common element in cultures, they often appear or are referenced in fiction.

The most common religious belief systems are the Abrahamic family of religions (primarily Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which are Monotheistic (belief in a singular God) and share many common elements and root, with - at the time this was written - Christianity being the most followed religion globally. Historically, these and other religions were frequently enshrined in law as the "state religion", giving them special privileges such as extensive influence over the government or tax exemptions. In some cases, they even took over the functions of the government entirely in a system known as theocracy; while uncommon in the present day, theocracies are still in use in places such as the Vatican and Iran.

Within the last few centuries, due to events such as the French Revolution, there has also been a significant amount of anti-religious sentiment, which regards religion as at best redundant and at worst destructive (beyond historical grievances with specific groups within religions, reasons for this view and whether or not those arguments have any merit, shall not be discussed here). For the most part, a combination of people identifying more with their culture or nation than their religion and the concept that religion and functions of state should not interfere with each other has turned into more of a "live and let live" mentality that doesn't really support or oppose any one religion and only reacts when said religions begin actively defying the state or the state starts bringing the boot down on religion.

Throughout history, numerous tyrannical regimes have tried to restrict or stamp out religions. This is usually because religious teachings put the figure/object of worship before the state in a conflict of interest and most religions' teachings condemn tyranny or [[Slaanesh|the vices tyrannical leaders indulge]]. Other reasons include tyrants dislike being answerable to anyone besides themselves and a tyrant may have some form of anti-religious prejudice. While nations have usually tried to block specific religions deemed "false" (read: religions opposing the state-sponsored religion in any way), several nations (usually [[Communism|Communist]] states which took Marx's "religion is the opiate of the masses" quote out of context as a call to arms rather than a passive theory) have tried to get rid of religion altogether, albeit with horrifying [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Militant_Atheists results] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_rule_of_Cambodia#Religious_communities each] time. Best case scenario, they sidegrade from one set of problems to another as cults of personality (commonly ones based on the ruler in charge) spring up to exploit the newly created power vacuum while believers who survive the regime try to continue their activities in secret. Worst case scenario, the society and its population degenerates into [[Commorragh|a violent, fractious, and nihilistic shell of their former selves]].

Aside from the aforementioned theocracies, the most religious nations are countries such as Brazil in South America or Zambia in Africa (Zambia even has a state religion alongside a law that allows for freedom of religion). China is - at the time this was written - the world's least religious and most atheistic country (the situation around North Korea is [[Skub|debatable]], since even though they violently suppress religions [https://www.foxnews.com/world/north-korea-publicly-executes-80-some-for-videos-or-bibles-report-says to the point that merely having copies of religious texts can be grounds for execution], they also have the Kim Cult blended with the Marxist offshoot ideology Juche).

==How this impacts /tg/==
A few major ways. Since most if not every society in real-life has had religion either be the basis for its founding or play a role in it, religion is just as involved in the backstory or current lore of settings. There are three major "modes" of /tg/ settings and related fictions:
* Purely functional use of religion as a story device. (What we might call "Functionalists")
* Endorsement of religion and/or religious people. (What we might call "Religion is Good" types)
* Criticism of religion and/or religious people. (What we might call "Religion is Bad" types)
For ease of categorization, writers who use these modes will also be called proponents, detractors or functionalists (who can be pro, anti or neutral).

===Religion as a story device/Functionalists===
Compared to the two types of writers found below, these writers are usually just attempting to model their work after real-world [[Mythology]] and are frequently attempting to keep their views of Religion separate from their work. Frequently comes in one of two subspecies:
* The [[Standard Fantasy Setting]] default: The world is ruled by an ordinary polytheistic pantheon, usually close to some admixture of Norse and Greek mythologies. Some of them also have a Top God more powerful than all the others, and maybe the in-universe creator of everything who is mostly hands-off in cosmic affairs. The gods of these religions tend to focus on specific areas (gods of [[Paladin|Justice]] and [[Druid|Nature]] are common, for subtly obvious reasons) and frequently want their followers to propagate or promote these things.
* The kind of setting they wanted to make dictated the nature of the divine. For example, in [[Exalted]] just about all the figures anybody would call a "God" (besides the Exalted) are Useless, because the Exalted (which includes the Player Characters) are the guys who were made specifically to do whatever the gods needed them to do for reasons inherent to the setting, to go with the main theme of the setting for the PCs: "You can do '''almost anything''', except ''avoid the consequences of being the one who did that anything''".

===Religion as a Bad Thing/Detractors===
There are several writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy that are of the opinion "Religion Is Bad", often alongside having an axe to grind (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) with either one or more specific real-life religions. This is more common in Sci-Fi than fantasy because the focus on science appeals to the naturalist, empiricist and/or humanist worldview of such writers, with the supernatural being seen as an obstacle to that. Despite that, the view is found among some fantasy authors as well, such as the author of the book series "His Dark Materials", Philip Pullman (he wrote it as pushback against C.S Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" series). Whatever the genre, this comes in flavors of either "The Gods Don't Exist", "The Gods are Incompetent" (more on that below) or "The Gods are Evil". Cosmic Horror also tends to use the "Gods Don't Exist" or "Gods are Evil" route, or combine them into "The Gods are actually Incomprehensible and Destructive Aliens" (for example; the author who codified the genre, [[H.P. Lovecraft]], was an avowed anti-religious atheist - which is why cults are recurring villains in his stories). This also has the side effect of inclining science fiction towards an atheistic perspective.

Another major component is personal issues of the author such as grievance or prejudice, but that's case-by-case and a major can of worms. A writer could have resentment against a specific religion or even the higher power a religion reveres (though opposition to a god or gods is called anti-theistic, not anti-religious), and single them out in their works due to personal bias or agenda. Worst case scenario, the story is some sort of anti-religious wish fulfillment power fantasy - such as Frank Miller's "Holy Terror" comics against Islam and Garth Ennis' "Preacher" comics (and their live-action adaptation) against Christianity.

Whatever the motivation, writers saying this message either model their fictional religions on the - occasionally exaggerated - worst excesses of real world religious people or use a fictional religion as a (usually strawman) stand-in of a real one. The most frequently targeted religions are Christianity, Islam, any faith that practiced human sacrifice (such as the Aztec religious practices) and Scientology. Cults, especially those with beliefs that mainstream religions consider unorthodox or outright heretical, are especially fertile ground for this message, albeit running the risk of being misapplied to tar other groups with the same brush.

===Religion as a Good Thing/Proponents===
There are several Science Fiction and Fantasy writers who either are religious themselves and want to promote their worldview, look upon religion positively and put that into the story or both. This is more common in Fantasy than Sci-fi, partly because with the supernatural being THE fundamental element of the genre, this gives opportunities to explore many aspects of religiosity. This is less common in science-fiction, but not unheard of, such as Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" where God's signature is found in the digits of pi. These authors usually put more thought into their fictional religion plus its central figure (although they have a tendency to go all "Crystal Dragon Jesus"), and try and have it be at least a somewhat good influence, although religious institutions and leaders are usually hit-and-miss affairs.

Some people make a fictional setting with figures from real-world religions, either in the real-world or [[CS Lewis|an alternate world (such as Narnia)]]. Others use fictional religions that either visually resemble real-life religions or figures from them; religions that often get this treatment are the Abrahamic faiths (most often Christianity), Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology and Norse mythology (albeit often a sanitized version of the latter three). In other cases they all but abandon any form of subtlety, with the fictional religion being distinguished from the real-world religion the author follows by only a handful of minor changes. Naturally, those kinds of works tend to come off as preachy, to say the least.

Another route this uses is the route that faith itself provides the power as per "[[Belief Function|Belief Function]]" (think Morpheus' "your mind makes it real" quote, but applying at the cosmological level). In fact, Warhammer often goes the route that the gods are powered by faith as well as from their sphere of influence which has either [[Sigmar|caused some people have risen to godhood]] or [[Ynnead|caused new gods to be born in the setting]]. In fact, this has proven the greatest weapon against Chaos in every Warhammer setting (and why the Emperor's plan to starve the Chaos Gods with atheism was doomed to fail from the start).

===Somewhat special cases===

One somewhat special case is the "Religion of Evil"; in many settings, there is a religion that is explicitly capital E Evil and seeks one of the usual "Card Carrying Villain" goals of Control, Conquest, Corruption, or Destruction. Frequently has some admixture of the worst aspects of Roman Paganism, Norse practices, the Aztec, Scientology and/or the various Abrahamic religions. They also often draw from those found in the writings of H.P Lovecraft. If this cult directly worships an individual Evil God, expect whatever makes sense for that deity to be some form of destructive activity--e.g., the cult of the God of Murder demands human sacrifice on a regular basis, with a certain portion of that explicitly being not-careful-enough cultists. Regardless, Religions of Evil can show up in all three above modes, and usually has a special purpose in all three:

* All three types need bad guys. In particular, a group who by definition is Evil is always good for some no-need-to-worry-about-the-ethics-or-morality-of-killing fodder (based on the idea that everyone in is group is evil because you have to do evil to be part of the group).
* Religion is Bad types tend to use them to say either "while they're all Bad, some are worse then others", that "Religion can be used to justify anything", use it as a strawman to tar all with the same brush or they have a specific axe to grind (either against an entire religion, a group within that religion or individual adherents the author personally dislikes).
* Religion is Good types or the sincerely religious tend to use them as analogies with fanaticism, criticize Real World cults, compare different beliefs or deal with negative aspects of religion (occasionally making jabs at competitive religions, or fellow believers the author disagrees with). Another approach is to have a Religion of Good fighting against a Religion of Evil - either as the heroes of the story or a valued ally - to say "there is good religion, so don't tar all with the same negative brush".
** As a side note, a lot of fantasy has moved slightly away from pure Religions of Evil, for much the same reason as [[Always Chaotic Evil]] races (questions of whether this fosters prejudice against real-life groups and audiences and authors demanding more motive for their villains). While there are still plenty of them, they usually add some nuance that makes them at least morally neutral under their own lights. Popular options are for them to be an off-shoot/subset of another religion and/or be taking vengeance for an injustice (real or perceived, both of which have '''plenty''' of real-life precedent).

[[Urban Fantasy]] writers are another special case, since almost all Urban Fantasy is set in something that might be called "the real world with a twist", with all the usual political trouble that implies. As a result, they can take one of a few routes:
* The most common route is "there are many possible explanations" and vague things up as much as possible ([[True Faith|Faith]] being the power that repels [[Vampire]]s rather than than a cross having any actual connection to a deity is a popular one).
* The second most common route (albeit rarer outside of Cosmic Horror) is the "Religion as a Bad Thing" route; the story is straight up atheistic/"Religion is Bad" [[Imperial Truth|propaganda]] where the writer often has an axe to grind against a specific religion. It's a popular choice for writers trying to be [[Edgy]] who want to include religious subject matter in their stories, and they almost exclusively go after the most established religion in the area or any new cults that have emerged at the time. Furthermore, any fictional religions or cults are most likely thinly-veiled stand-ins for real life ones.
* Some Urban Fantasy works with a clear correct religion exist thanks to the above mentioned sincerely religious authors, which are typically [[Chick Tracts|barely veiled proselytizing]] or [[Twilight|just straight up terrible]], though [[Monster Hunter International|there are some good ones]].
* The fourth route, taken most notably by [[Supers|DC and Marvel comics]] among others, is to take an "All Myths are True" approach: All religions are sort of true, but none have any exclusivity to the Truth, so Thor and Athena might have the Archangel Michael on speeddial when the Orochi teams up with Apep to get up to no good and start making trouble in their neighborhoods (because "Mikey really likes kicking serpent tail, and gets annoyed when we don't at least try to invite him to an evil serpent ass-kicking."). Differs from the "vague things up" route by being clearer on some details, and also much more gonzo. The Abrahamic God is the exception here: He's usually kept especially vague, albeit more powerful (and yet infinitely less accessible) than anyone else in the setting, and only referred to by some codephrase (Marvel likes "The One Above All", DC generally goes for "The Presence" or "whatever is behind the Source Wall").

===Miscellaneous Observations===

Doing the "The Gods are Incompetent" thing (the similar but different "The Gods are Insane", "The Gods Are Assholes" and "The Gods Don't Actually Do Anything" routes also falls under this umbrella) can go into any of the three modes; in a sincere monotheist's (such as Christian) work, it can be a "Take That" to polytheistic religions; in a "Religion is Bad" atheist's, it can be one to religion in general; in a Buddhist-influenced work, it can be a part of the whole "even the Gods are tied up in the Wheel of Karma" concept; and, even if the author is not pushing any religious message in any way, there's a neutral, plot-structural reason to go "Incompetent Gods": it can make the adventurers the Most Competent People Available since if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be anything for the adventurers to do.

If a work has multiple writers, (as frequently happens with RPG and Wargame settings, and quite a few popular SciFi/Fantasy ones as well) there's a tendency for the writers to try and pull the setting into one of the other two "modes" depending on their personal views. This leads to the theme changing from one side to the other as the story progresses. A recent example is [[World of Warcraft|the spate of retcons to the cosmology of the Warcraft universe]] and the morality of its fundamental forces/dominant higher powers, the Light and the Void. If the story doesn't get focused on a pro-religion or anti-religion message, it may end up swinging back and forth between both sides or settle in a mid-point which doesn't take a strong stance either way.

Note that members of the "Religion is Bad" and "Religion is Good" brigades will get involved in arguments over the relative morality or "goodness" of various factions in the story and the accuracy of any messages a writer presents. Often history buffs will throw their hat into the ring as well.

==Examples of /tg/ connected fictional religions==
===Warhammer 40k===
* The [[Imperial Truth]] was originally the Emperor's plan on beliefs, which he and his servants propagated throughout the galaxy during the Great Crusade. Attempting to wean mankind away from Chaos and being a firm member of the "Religion is Bad" brigade, the Emperor proclaimed there are no gods, and religion had to be abolished willingly or by force while science or reason are to be used for explaining the universe and morality. Everything transpired according to his design, except theistic religiosity in the 40k universe is the best weapon against Chaos so Emps' interstellar state atheism policy gave them a major opening. Things went from bad to worse when people started looking up to the Emperor as a god himself, [[Exterminatus|he responded accordingly]], and the Chaos Gods got a new tool in the form of [[Lorgar]]. After the Horus Heresy and the Emperor's removal from galactic politics: the Imperial Truth was slowly shelved in favor of the Imperial Cult, to the point that espousing the teachings of the Truth is ironically considered heresy. Only a few practitioners of the Imperial Truth remain, most notably the Custodes and the Space Marines (both of whom know The Emperor better than anybody to worship him as a god. Plus, their religious autonomy.).
** The [[Imperial Cult]] is the present-day religion of the Imperium of Man, and is a mix of several Abrahamic Religions along with copious amounts of warmongering, fanaticism and xenophobia. Derived from the Lectitio Divinatus penned by [[Lorgar]] pre-HH, the Cult decrees that because the Emperor is capable of all these miracles and power: he ''must'' be a god, and why you should worship and pledge loyalty to him. Its a complete 180 from the Emperor's original teachings, and has simultaneously been responsible for damning and saving the Imperium past the clusterfuck of the Horus Heresy. It's unknown whether the Emperor still abhors godhood and religion and would abolish it the moment he could, or if he's resigned himself to becoming the very thing he fought against for mankind to persevere in these trying times. Whatever the case, he didn't want to be a god, but now he has no choice but to become one.
** The [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Cult Mechanicus]] (Machine Cult) is the religion of the Adeptus Mechanicus, placing a heavy emphasis on machines, viewing them as gifts from the Machine God called "The Omnissiah" Officially, the Omnissiah is The Emperor, which allows the Mechanicus to sidestep the more puritan pundits of the Imperial Cult (we worship The Emprah, just not how you do it). Unofficially, the Omnissiah may or may not be the C'tan god: The Void Dragon. It also has a high emphasis on the collection of knowledge, and one of the Admech's roles in the galaxy is to explore remote and uncharted regions of space to find and search for knowledge that has been lost throughout the millennia. The last of these, is guidelines on machines and knowledge. Officially, heretic(tek) and xeno works are to be abhorred and disposed of, viewing them as perversions of the holy Machine God's works. Unofficially however, more liberally-minded and higher-ranked Magos would happily hoard heretek/xeno works, seeing their potential over the more restricted and constrained works of the Mechanicus.

* Chaos is a violent and complicated henotheistic (believing in multiple gods but only worshipping one) or polytheistic religion with dozens, if not hundreds of interpretations. Even then, there's more sub-cults that worship their particular god in a specific way, either minutely or vastly different from everyone else among followers of the Big 4. And this doesn't even get into the realm of Chaos Undivided (which worships the concept of Chaos itself, instead of the individual gods) and [[Malal]]. Chaos has very little established guidelines regarding worship, apart from their patron god's/gods' general likes/dislikes, so any religious practices or rituals are either based on commands from the god/s or up to the imagination of the cult.
** Interestingly, there is a Space Marine of the Chaos faction who follows the Imperial Truth, and that is [[Fabius Bile]].

* All Greenskins worship Gork and Mork (jury's out on whether the [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee]] do), but are too disorganized to have anything like a formal religion, though they do make effigies of Gork and Mork and call on them. The closest thing they have to tenants is that Gork favors violence, Mork favors cunning. Greenskins have gotten into fights over this, but violence is part of their nature and that of their gods. While they fight over religion, they also fight over almost any dispute anyway, and may even start a religious argument just to enjoy a good fight among themselves (though the only theological argument they can formulate is "is Gork the god of cunning or is Mork?" or vica versa). On the surface, religion does not play a big-enough role in Ork society compared to other races, being just another outlet for Orks to fight about. But if [[Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka|Ghazghkull]] is any indication: religion can have a great impact on Orks, with him being becoming one of the greatest Warlords in the galaxy, primarily because he thinks he's personally blessed by Gork and Mork themselves. So if you throw in the Orks' gestalt field into the mix, its likely that its not that religion doesn't matter to them, it's under-utilized.

* The Tau's creed "The [[Greater Good]]" is a specie-wide philosophy that was adopted ever since the initial unification of the Tau in the olden days. In a nutshell, the Greater Good emphasizes the co-existence of all Tau and sapient life in general into working together for a common goal to further the Tau's progress, seeing everyone's potential and hoping to utilize that for an, ahem, greater good. Personal religion isn't forbidden, but it must not contradict or override The Greater Good, and must be disregarded if it ever does so. Technically, this means Tau can be religious or non-religious, as the Greater Good is not a religion (due to lacking an afterlife and supernatural aspects, with the closest things to figures of worship being the Ethereals). This sounds all fine and dandy, but the Ethereal class, who are responsible for maintaining The Greater Good, have been shown to be less benevolent than believed and have been using their unnaturally powerful charisma to subtly oppress the Tau and use them to further their own agendas.
**The Farsight Enclaves, who have thrown off Ethereal rule, are the exception in that they have rejected The Greater Good, seeing it as the method of oppression used to keep the T'au under complete control of the ethereals. Due to this, if one considers the Greater Good a religion, The Enclaves are irreligious.
**As of the 4th Sphere Expansion disaster, Chaos Tau are starting to become a thing.
**At one point, the Earth Caste gathered Genestealer-infected Tau and studied them to see what would happen. Of course, a Genestealer cult developed and naturally they violently escaped control and surveillance. According to rumors, they've even produced a Genestealer-infected Ethereal.

* The Eldar have varying views on religiosity depending on their type. Their religion is polytheistic, with henotheistic offshoots, and Ausryan was the highest ranking god. However all of the Eldar gods were murder-raped to death by Slaanesh except for Isha (taken by Nurgle), Khaine (shattered and flung into realspace), Cegorach (hiding in the Webway) and Ynnead (born long after Slaanesh's birth). Their Pantheon's religious practices aren't fleshed out save for those of Cegorach, Isha, and Khaine, via the Harlequins and Aspect Warriors. With most of their gods out of commission, Eldar religious worship is of a deistic bent.
** Craftworlders and Exodites almost exclusively worship the original Eldar pantheon, though some engage in henotheistic worship of only one of the gods. Asuryan is more popular among Craftworlders while Isha is among Exodites, though nearly all give Khaine some tribute during war.
** Corsairs are all over the place, though Khaine is a popular choice given their more militant nature.
** Being agents of the Laughing God himself, the Harlequins' worship is centered around [[Cegorach]], whilst still paying minor tribute to the other gods.
** The new faith around Ynnead, the Ynnari, is rapidly growing but have yet to establish teachings or rituals.
** Unique among the Eldar, the Dark Eldar are irreligious for the most part and while they believe some gods exist they're too self-centered to worship them (this is canon). They're often also anti-religious to boot; a major landmark of Commorragh is a landfill of religious icons called Iconoclast's Mound, and one Wych cult - the Pain Eternal - revolves around killing religious people and destroying shrines and holy sites. The sole exception, except for Dark Eldar who stop being Dark Eldar, are the [[Incubi]] who hold [[Khaine]] in high regard.
** There are numerous rumors of a very small number of Chaos Eldar, but these are barely fleshed out and heavily classified in-universe. There have been verified Nurgle-worshipping Eldar and persistent rumors that some have embraced Slaanesh without becoming soul-food. Apart from this, some Dark Eldar have been willing to summon Chaos Daemons or work with Chaos worshippers ([[Fabius Bile|or allies of Chaos]]) to further their own ends.

* While the Necrontyr had religions before certain [[C'tan|star entities]] [[Necrons|roboticizied them]], those aren't fleshed out or detailed. Its also heavily implied the C'tan co-opted the Necrontyr religion beforehand. With the change to Necrons taking the higher though processes of most of them, any Necrons who can comprehend faith and religiosity either worship the C'tan or have become irreligious.

* The Tyranids themselves are irreligious, being spehss bugs and all, but understand at least a few of the advantages of religion. [[Genestealer]]s infect people and together they establish cults on targeted worlds, such as one worshipping "Children of the Stars", a perversion of the Imperial Cult (such as one that worships a [[Swarmlord|four-armed]] version of the Emperor) or something else like "Celebrants of Nihilism" (yes, that's a canon Genestealer cult name). Psychic influence is often involved and, notably, the Genestealers do not consider themselves gods. Once the Tyranids arrive en-masse, the cult-gets assimilated along with all non-Tyranids willingly or not. An interesting tidbit is that the Hive Mind stops the Tyranids from attacking the cultists in early stages of the invasion and leads them on, only to later override the Genestealers' wills and and make them slaughter the cultists.

===Dungeons and Dragons===
* Among Dungeons and Dragons settings, [[Planescape]], [[Eberron]], and [[Pathfinder]] are notable for having some coherent things that could be called "Religions", rather then the usual generic Pantheism.
** Most of Planescape's Factions effectively count as religions, to the point they can produce [[Cleric]]s ([[Planescape: Torment#Fall-From-Grace|Atheist ones at that]]). Yes, even the Athar. (Perhaps ''especially'' the Athar.)
** Half of Eberron's religions aren't worship of deities. The [[Blood of Vol]] seeks to unlock the divinity within one's self and rejects the gods (if they even exist) and the [[Path of Inspiration]] seeks to improve their next reincarnation. The Undying Court worships not gods but their undead ancestors that make up their government. The [[Path of Light]], [[Warforged_Mysteries#The_Becoming_God|Becoming God]] and [[Warforged_Mysteries#The_Reforged|Reforged]] all seek to ''create'' a deity. Even some interpretations of the [[Sovereign Host]], like the one most common among dragons, don't worship them as deities. Due to the way divine casting works in Eberron, all of these can produce divine casters.
** There's a handful of religions on [[Golarion]] that aren't merely worship of pantheons. The most prominent (read: Actually has mechanical support) is the [[Prophecies of Kalistrade]], which is basically fantasy [[Star Trek|Ferengi]].

* [[D20 Modern]]'s [[Urban Arcana]], unusually for urban fantasy, has D&D deities bleed into reality alongside the monsters. You are still able to play a <s>cleric</s> "acolyte" of any real world deity despite this.

===Star Wars===
* [[Star Wars]] is inconsistent on if the [[The Force]] is a religion. The Jedi and the Sith ''could'' both be considered religions as they are considered monastic, but mix in several other traits such as being meritocratic (Jedi) and kraterocratic (Sith) and Lucas himself has axed at least one prototyped book for portraying them too much as a religion. It's also notable that the Sith were former Jedi who left the Jedi path for several reasons including [[Heresy|disagreements over the teachings of that creed]]. Aside from that, religion is nearly always a non-human tradition, something noted in a culture's historical background and never seen implying its extinction, or a scam. The religiously linked "damn" and "hell" are the two real world swear words that exist in-universe, purely because Han Solo used them in the films, and some concept of an "angel" exists because a young Anakin told Padme about them in the prequel trilogy films.
** There are rare exceptions where a religion is fleshed out and explored, and the writing goes various directions for better or worse. A notable example is the aggressive polytheistic religion of the antagonistic Yuuzhan Vong from the EU (which the story gradually revealed was long ago perverted from benevolent roots, and this perverted form takes a few cues from Islam and Aztec mythology).

===Star Trek===
* Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had a low opinion of religion and in his vision humanity had done away with it and was better off for it and he had no interest in adding it to the aliens. However, some of the cast and crew disagreed and occasionally references and religions found their way into the show, which increased after Roddenberry's death. The Federation's culture is distinctly humanistic (extending the concept to alien species) in it's outlook in which religion is regarded as a thing of the past.
** While there are plenty of "Godlike" entities in Star Trek, almost all are treated as Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in the Arthur C. Clarke sense--and in particular, in ST:TNG, the flip side, that Picard and his crew are frequently shown to look like Gods to sufficiently primitive aliens, is gone into in more than one episode.
** The Bajorans are a highly religious alien race, with the majority following peaceful teachings and a minority of violent extremists.
*** Of some note, the Bajoran religion is of interest because their "Gods" actually exist, and can be (somewhat incomprehensibly) talked to (a rarity outside of [[Science Fantasy]]). In other words, they were frequently a method of having some religion vs. science debates where the divine entity (A) explicitly exists, (B) is explainable as "sufficiently advanced and unusual aliens", and (C) aren't jerks, just bad at communication with those of us who experience time linearly--in other words, with a deck that wasn't quite as badly stacked. The religiosity was meant to be as a way of contrasting the Starfleet personnel with the native population and to draw a parallel between Bajorans under the Cardassian Occupation and various real world recently freed oppressed religious-slash-ethnic groups.
** <s>In the fifth Star Trek movie, ''"The Final Frontier"'', some of the crew steal the Enterprise to look for God and instead find a powerful alien being impersonating God in the center of the universe</s> '''Just like there is no live-action movie of Avatar: The Last Airbender, there is totally no Star Trek 5!'''

===World of Darkness===
* Very large books could be written about religion and [[World of Darkness]]/Chronicles of Darkness. We'll just cover a few highlights:
** From [[Vampire: The Requiem]], there's the the Lancea et Sanctum, which might be best described as "Christianity for Vampires", and the Circle of the Crone, which is "Pagan Vampires". Both have Vampire miracles on tap (pun intended).
** [[Hunter: The Vigil]] has various religious organizations among the Compacts and Conspiracies, some very similar to real world ones, others...not so much.
** [[Mage: The Ascension]] has various religious Traditions, portrayed in that highly-stereotypical and highly-depending-on-the-author way typical of old WoD.

==See also==
* [[Mythology]]

[[Category:Not related]]
[[Category:History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-22T01:42:15Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused */ The focus of this section is COVID-19, reducing the events to a summary. Perhaps the removed text could be re-added elsewhere, such as the section below.

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{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared a "holy war" against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]], a spike in anti-religious crimes and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam and, strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion, Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who called for tightening already strict regulations against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals, an increase in domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality (intensified to a degree that some observers thought bordered on authoritarianism). And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to dominate the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck and playing the blame game as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police went viral across the internet. This recent act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led to an Executive Order banning choke-holds, debates across social media and most notably large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle where part of the city was taken over and renamed CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone; later re-branded CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act]), followed by a controversial crackdown in various states - such as Portland - by federal agents that's stoked various fears and accusations of democracy coming under threat.

By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump; with China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's initial provincial-level censorship of COVID-19 and the US retroactively nuking what's left of their reputation with the triple-whammy of the godawful mismanagement of their pandemic control, the economic crisis and the George Floyd protests. There is also the increasing Human Rights Abuses (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking '''very''' similar to Soviet Russia's treatment of the Baltics]), however, seeing as how nobody did jack shit to Myanmar's Rohingya situation, outside of Western governments, geopolitics are gonna geopolitics. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, ISIS and it's branches (such as the West African branch, Boko Haram) or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-22T01:26:16Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* 9/11 and the War on Terror */ You say bitching and moaning Newerfag? I say "pot, meet kettle". I'll be on the talk page (maybe with others), and you better bring some citations too.

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{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared a "holy war" against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]], a spike in anti-religious crimes and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam and, strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion, Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who called for tightening already strict regulations against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals, an increase in domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality (intensified to a degree that some observers thought bordered on authoritarianism). And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to dominate the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck and playing the blame game as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years, including killings of unarmed civilians in front of multiple witnesses) went viral across the internet. This recent act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led to large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 with burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response - several states had already banned choke-holds but the bans were rarely if ever enforced; it's unclear if the executive order will change that - many deemed it too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was later walked back and re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme due to the rioters being less violent compared to the 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally in front of the mayor's house).

The recent reports from Portland of federal agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off the streets without explanation or even the consent of state government (and the hints from the Department of Homeland Security that they will do the same in other states too). has only worsened fears of what Trump plans to do in order to "restore order". The trends are worrying, especially if you studied how liberal democracies collapse in on itself by a combination of internal and external stress factors, culminating to a period of vulnerability where a usurper would slowly chip away the democratic institutions before going all-in once every sector of accountability has been compromised (and there are various people and groups who could fit this "potential usurper" profile, and they're not all on one side).

By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump; with China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's initial provincial-level censorship of COVID-19 and the US retroactively nuking what's left of their reputation with the triple-whammy of the godawful mismanagement of their pandemic control, the economic crisis and the George Floyd protests. There is also the increasing Human Rights Abuses (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking '''very''' similar to Soviet Russia's treatment of the Baltics]), however, seeing as how nobody did jack shit to Myanmar's Rohingya situation, outside of Western governments, geopolitics are gonna geopolitics. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, ISIS and it's branches (such as the West African branch, Boko Haram) or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-22T01:20:31Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* 9/11 and the War on Terror */

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{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared a "holy war" against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]], a spike in anti-religious vandalism and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam and, strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion, Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who called for tightening already strict regulations against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals, an increase in domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality (intensified to a degree that some observers thought bordered on authoritarianism). And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to dominate the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck and playing the blame game as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years, including killings of unarmed civilians in front of multiple witnesses) went viral across the internet. This recent act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led to large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 with burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response - several states had already banned choke-holds but the bans were rarely if ever enforced; it's unclear if the executive order will change that - many deemed it too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was later walked back and re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme due to the rioters being less violent compared to the 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally in front of the mayor's house).

The recent reports from Portland of federal agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off the streets without explanation or even the consent of state government (and the hints from the Department of Homeland Security that they will do the same in other states too). has only worsened fears of what Trump plans to do in order to "restore order". The trends are worrying, especially if you studied how liberal democracies collapse in on itself by a combination of internal and external stress factors, culminating to a period of vulnerability where a usurper would slowly chip away the democratic institutions before going all-in once every sector of accountability has been compromised (and there are various people and groups who could fit this "potential usurper" profile, and they're not all on one side).

By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump; with China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's initial provincial-level censorship of COVID-19 and the US retroactively nuking what's left of their reputation with the triple-whammy of the godawful mismanagement of their pandemic control, the economic crisis and the George Floyd protests. There is also the increasing Human Rights Abuses (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking '''very''' similar to Soviet Russia's treatment of the Baltics]), however, seeing as how nobody did jack shit to Myanmar's Rohingya situation, outside of Western governments, geopolitics are gonna geopolitics. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, ISIS and it's branches (such as the West African branch, Boko Haram) or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Drycha

2020-07-22T00:05:50Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90:

[[File:Drycha vs Seraphon.jpg|500px|thumb|right|"What killed the dinosaurs?" "ME!"]]
{{topquote|Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.|Abraham Joshua Heschel}}
{{topquote|The trees have grown wild and dangerous. Anger festers in their hearts. Black are their thoughts. '''Strong''' is their hate. They will harm you if they can.|Treebeard}}
{{topquote|To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.|Khmer Rouge slogan}}

Drycha (AKA the Briarmaven of Woe, The bitch who will cover your army in bees and The Angry Tree) is an ancient and powerful nature spirit and probably the most [[/pol/|racist]] individual in Warhammer fantasy or Age of Sigmar. Considering this is a setting that includes the [[Skaven]] and the [[Dark Elves (Warhammer)|Dark Elves]], that's saying something.

Fans tend to describe Drycha as crazy, evil, and hot at least part of the time. She is also, unlike other dryads, depicted as anatomically correct by human standards (having at least a navel), much to the [[/d/|/d/elight]] of certain fans. This continues with the new model, as Drycha's humanoid part looks clearly feminine, though between the legs of her tree body are some [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spiders+legs ...unfortunately placed vines].

==Warhammer Fantasy==
Her earliest lore established that Drycha was old even by [[dryad]] standards, predating the Elves leaving Ulthuan, and may have been one of the first dryads in existence in Warhammer. Originally Drycha held court amongst the roots of Addaivoch, the once-glorious creature known in later times as the Tree of Woe, which got that way after Morghur was killed there. While some believe that Drycha lost her mind when Morghur’s death tainted the ground of her glade, she was insular, capricious and malevolent for many long years before that.

She first came to prominence after the [[Wood Elves (Warhammer)|Wood Elves]] entered an alliance with [[Athel Loren]]. Drycha did not like it. [[Rage|AT ALL]]. In the early years of the alliance between the Elves and forest, Drycha was ever in evidence about the glades and groves, watching the Elves and examining their every action for any sign of betrayal. She rarely conversed with others, even the Dryads who served her as handmaidens, but instead chanted a mantra of the names of all those fellow spirits whom she believes have been failed by the Elves. It's unlikely her list would ever end because, despite her age, Drycha's memory was crystal-clear and new names were added with every battle between Athel Loren and the outside world ([[Dwarfs (Warhammer Fantasy)|Dwarven-level grudge]] there). She was in regular contact with Coeddil, a racist old [[Treeman|Treelord Ancient]] who was held in high regard by Drycha (like a how a member of [[/pol/]] would view a [[Nazi]]; Coeddil was like [[Grandpa Dreadnought]] but racist and more susceptible to [[Chaos|corruption]]). Coeddil had attempted a coup before by trying to stop Orion's rebirth, but he was thwarted and imprisoned by Ariel.

As time went on, Drycha’s activities became more violent and worrying to the Wood Elves. On the fringe of the great Drakwald Forest in the Empire, peasants told stories of the trees that come alive, hungry for blood. On the edge of the Forest of Arden in [[Bretonnia]], villagers gather only deadwood for their purposes, citing tales of other settlements found ruined and torn, the inhabitants left as scraps of tattered meat by the vengeance of the trees. To many, these events seem as senseless as they are apparently random, but if they are indeed the work of Drycha and her handmaidens, there must surely be a greater goal behind them than mere slaughter — though what that goal is remained to be seen. Popular consensus was that she was trying to break the alliance between the Bretonnians and the Wood Elves. Drycha did stage a coup during one of Orion's absences only to be thwarted by a Grail Knight. Drycha disappeared after that, her last act beforehand being to help break Coeddil out of the prison Ariel had bound him in.

In [[The End Times]], things really went sideways. Drycha went to ground with Coeddil, her head full of schemes of vengeance against the Wood Elves. To that end, she committed her first act of open treachery, captured the Fey Enchantress and gave her to [[Mannfred von Carstein]] to bring back [[Nagash]] (which is like using a nuke to stop a squatter from trashing your house). Then she just sat on her hands for awhile until the final battle for [[Ulthuan]], where the remaining High and Dark Elves were evacuated to Athel Loren. While there was no direct word about Drycha, the forest spirits were largely unhappy about this turn of events and you can bet that Drycha would've been at the head of any tree-klansman meeting. Drycha's hatred was so fierce that she was easy prey for the daemon prince [[Be'lakor]]. After swaying the cultists of Khaine, disillusioned about Malekith outlawing Khaine's religion in the wake of all that trouble the Widowmaker and [[Tyrion]] had caused, Be'lakor played on the forest spirits' hatred of outsiders. Coeddil was revealed to have been tainted by Chaos and embraced Be'lakor's plan, with Drycha following Coeddil's lead; had Drycha known the truth about Coeddil and Be'lakor she would've had nothing to do with them, but she couldn't see past her hatred.

So a host of Khainite elves and forest spirits attacked the unified elven army around the Oak of Ages; if you're wondering why Drycha fought alongside the Khanite elves despite her hatred of non forest-spirits and wasn't suspicious of them like she was before, your guess is as good as mine. Probably so she could kill as many as she could. At one point she got into a duel with Malekith, and did surprisingly well. While nearly everyone was distracted, Be'lakor went for the Oak of Ages. As the daemon prince sunk his claws into the wood the earth shook, sending everyone sprawling as the magical weave the tree maintained was corrupted. Drycha looked to the Oak of Ages and saw what the first daemon prince had done. In that instant, she realized the horrible truth of how she had been used. She had been manipulated by to give him a chance, and now it was going to try and destroy the world. Drycha immediately turned to stop the daemon prince, but was decapitated by Malekith, who knew that Drycha had been manipulated but deemed her too erratic and violent to trust.

==Age of Sigmar==
During either the End Times or the Age of Myth Alarielle had somehow recovered Drycha's soul in something called a soulpod, as she had with countless other souls. While Alarielle made the [[Sylvaneth]] she refused to plant Drycha's soulpod. This was because Alarielle feared the damage that Drycha’s firebrand madness could cause and the horrors she might wreak. That said, she was very aware that Drycha’s was a necessary darkness, and that by keeping her imprisoned, the mother had somehow weakened her children.

At her lowest point during the Age of Chaos, Alarielle planted her barbed seed in the hateful chasm known as the Hamadrithil, desperate for someone to take the fight to Chaos. An ancient and malicious sentience dwelled in Hamadrithil that Alarielle hoped would make Drycha strong. The Everqueen got her wish and more. When she burst free from the rift, Drycha was no longer a mere Branchwraith. She was Drycha Hamadreth, a being encased in a body of twisted vines and gnarled thorn-root, the embodiment of the Hamadrithil’s malice given form. Her memory and sanity were fractured and she was torn between rage and depression, but Drycha was otherwise the same as she was before. Drycha’s bitter soul drew deadly spites to infest her form, flitterfuries that came to bask in the heat of Drycha’s rage while the squirmlings suckled at her sorrow.

She drew the Outcasts to her in great number, along with other disaffected clans besides. Drycha’s first host was uncontrollable, a force of nature’s wrath that ripped through the allies of the sylvaneth as readily as their enemies. Unable to fully command her wayward daughter, but unwilling to destroy her, Alarielle was forced to name Drycha an Outcast herself. This seems only to have strengthened Drycha’s resolve, for she rules the other Outcasts as a twisted queen in the place of their estranged mother. Drycha sings her own song, a discordant dirge of hatred for all those not of the sylvaneth. Drycha has no mercy for her foes since, in addition to using fear as a weapon, she's not above toying with her foes before she kills them (read; [[Grimdark|torturing them and drawing out their deaths]]).

Now Drycha seeks only the total dominion of the sylvaneth over the Mortal Realms and the death of everyone else. She will fight however and wherever she feels she must until that end is achieved; with other wargroves, by herself or even at the side of those flesh-and-blood beings she hates, providing that to do so furthers her genocidal aims. That's right, a racist, insane, genocidal terrorist is a "hero" among the forces of Order. Drycha herself remains an agent of anarchy and destruction with a hatred of non-Sylvaneth, though she retains a grudging loyalty to her mother goddess and a love for her people that keeps her on the side of Order.

==On the Tabletop==
In Warhammer Fantasy, Drycha was weird. Her first incarnation was mediocre, and there was a big drawback for both; an army containing her could only have units with the Forest Spirit rule. She was rather expensive for a Hero, at 255 points, but she didn't come with nearly enough stuff to justify this. For starters, she was a Level 2 caster and only had access to one lore. While she's reasonably fighty (she gets +2 attacks per lost wound, no life shenanigans), she was easy to drop. While her kinda ganky Deep Strike ability seemed fun, you're only guaranteed d3+1 Woods max (IE the one you brought, sitting in your half of the table, and the acorn of eternity if you brought it) it was probably easier to just have them join her from the front and thus Drycha was usually deemed not worth it.

Age of Sigmar was very kind to Drycha crunch-wise. She is a durable and heavy hitting named unit. Capable of leaping across the board with an insanely speedy 9" move, one which isn't altered by any damaged state no less. She also has some magic that gels well with Spite-Revenants. At close range is the best place to use Drycha, where she has a wound and damage output from shooting and melee combined which can rival that of Alarielle and surpass a Saurus Oldblood on Carnosaur. She can also switch between profiles reflecting her new bi-polar nature, with her angry profile making her hit harder in melee while her sad profile can mitigate negative effects she suffers on the damage table. While not perfect, just pairing her up with a couple of basic supporting units will offset most of her shortcomings, and she seems to have almost been tailor made to work with the Spite-Revenants. In fact, she's so good at that she has a unique spell which ties into them, allowing her to use their Bravery lowering abilities to charge her own powers, then in turn offering them re-rolls to Wound. Overall Drycha is worth her points and can be a major threat to either armies of MSU or hordes (but not both at the same time).

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Drycha Warhammer Fantasy.jpg|She looks like she's about to hug you, but only to [[Rip and Tear|remove your spine]].
Image:Warhammer_Wood_Elves_Drycha.png
Image:Sylvaneth Branchwraith01.jpg|Drycha's model in Warhammer Fantasy. Also pulled double-duty as the Branchwraith model. Now just the Branchwraith model in Age of Sigmar.
Image:Sylvaneth vs orkz.jpg|Not a good day to be an Orruk in the woods.
Image:Drycha Hamadreth.jpg|Drycha's model in Age of Sigmar. Bigger and badder. Called a tree [[Dreadknight|Dreadknight]] by some fans, but without the infamy or fail.
</gallery>

[[Category:Warhammer Fantasy]]
[[Category:Age of Sigmar]]
[[Category:Wood Elves]]
[[Category:Sylvaneth]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-21T23:11:05Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused */ I'm not a member of /pol/, Newerfag; never have been, never want to be. In fact, with my skin color and mixed black/white ethnic background, I'm the kind of person that cyber-cesspool known as /pol/ loathes.

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared a "holy war" against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam and, strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion, Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who called for a hardline stance against illegal immigration, close regulation of legal immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals, an increase in domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality (intensified to a degree that some observers thought bordered on authoritarianism). And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means [[Derp|despite those conservative and right-wing rallies themselves being a non-violent attempt to resolve the problem]]. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to dominate the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media plus the mainstream media increasingly taking sides rather than just reporting on the conflict, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck and playing the blame game as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years, including killings of unarmed civilians in front of multiple witnesses) went viral across the internet. This recent act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led to large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 with burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters and uninvolved police officers). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response - several states had already banned choke-holds but the executive order makes them prohibited across the entire U.S (and the officers involved in George Floyd's death were fired and face charges) - many deemed it too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was later walked back and re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme due to the rioters being less violent compared to the 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (though only right after protestors staged a rally in front of the mayor's house).

The recent reports from Portland of federal agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off the streets without explanation or even the consent of state government (and the hints from the Department of Homeland Security that they will do the same in other states too, albeit some of the people arrested appear to be ANTIFA members and/or have committed actual crimes) has only worsened fears of what Trump plans to do in order to "restore order". Whilst some may have already called these unidentified men as the [[Nazi|''''McGestapo'''']], it is honestly too early to conclude; although the trends ''are'' worrying especially if you studied how liberal democracies collapse in on itself by a combination of internal and external stress factors, culminating to a period of vulnerability where a usurper would slowly chip away the democratic institutions before going all-in once every sector of accountability has been compromised (and there are various people and groups who could fit this "potential usurper" profile, and they're not all on one side).

By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump; with China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's initial provincial-level censorship of COVID-19 and the US retroactively nuking what's left of their reputation with the triple-whammy of the godawful mismanagement of their pandemic control, the economic crisis and the George Floyd protests. There is also the increasing Human Rights Abuses (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking '''very''' similar to Soviet Russia's treatment of the Baltics]), however, seeing as how nobody did jack shit to Myanmar's Rohingya situation, outside of Western governments, geopolitics are gonna geopolitics. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, ISIS and it's branches (such as the West African branch, Boko Haram) or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-21T22:54:16Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared a "holy war" against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam and, strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion, Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who called for a hardline stance against illegal immigration, close regulation of legal immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals, an increase in domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality (intensified to a degree that some observers thought bordered on authoritarianism). And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means [[Derp|despite those conservative and right-wing rallies themselves being a non-violent attempt to resolve the problem]]. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to dominate the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media plus the mainstream media increasingly taking sides rather than just reporting on the conflict, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years, including killings of unarmed civilians in front of multiple witnesses) went viral across the internet. This recent act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters and uninvolved police officers). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response - several states had already banned choke-holds but the executive order makes them prohibited across the entire U.S - many deemed it too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme due to the protesters and rioters being less violent compared to the 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (though only right after protestors staged a rally in front of the mayor's house).

The recent reports from Portland of federal agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off the streets without explanation or even the consent of state government (and the hints from the Department of Homeland Security that they will do the same in other states too, albeit some of the people arrested appear to be ANTIFA members and/or have committed actual crimes) has only worsened fears of what Trump plans to do in order to "restore order". Whilst some may have already called these unidentified men as the [[Nazi|''''McGestapo'''']], it is honestly too early to conclude; although the trends ''are'' worrying especially if you studied how liberal democracies collapse in on itself by a combination of internal and external stress factors, culminating to a period of vulnerability where a usurper would slowly chip away the democratic institutions before going all-in once every sector of accountability has been compromised (and there are various people and groups who could fit this "potential usurper" profile, and they're not all on one side).

By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump; with China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's initial provincial-level censorship of COVID-19 and the US retroactively nuking what's left of their reputation with the triple-whammy of the godawful mismanagement of their pandemic control, the economic crisis and the George Floyd protests. There is also the increasing Human Rights Abuses (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking '''very''' similar to Soviet Russia's treatment of the Baltics]), however, seeing as how nobody did jack shit to Myanmar's Rohingya situation, outside of Western governments, geopolitics are gonna geopolitics. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, ISIS and it's branches (such as the West African branch, Boko Haram) or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-21T22:53:51Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:E0A6:C0CB:16E:EB90: /* The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared a "holy war" against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam and, strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion, Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who called for a hardline stance against illegal immigration, close regulation of legal immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals, an increase in domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality (intensified to a degree that some observers thought bordered on authoritarianism). And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means [[Derp|despite those conservative and right-wing rallies themselves being a non-violent attempt to resolve the problem]]. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to dominate the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media plus the mainstream media increasingly taking sides rather than just reporting on the conflict, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years, including killings of unarmed civilians in front of multiple witnesses) went viral across the internet. This recent act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters and uninvolved police officers). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response - several states had already banned choke-holds but the executive order makes them prohibited across the entire U.S - many deemed it too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme due to the protesters and rioters being less violent compared to the 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (though only right after protestors staged a rally in front of the mayor's house).

The recent reports from Portland of federal agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off the streets without explanation or even the consent of state government (and the hints from the Department of Homeland Security that they will do the same in other states too, albeit some of the people arrested appear to be ANTIFA members and/or have committed actual crimes) has only worsened fears of what Trump plans to do in order to "restore order". Whilst some may have already called these unidentified men as the [[Nazi|''''McGestapo'''']], it is honestly too early to conclude; although the trends ''are'' worrying especially if you studied how liberal democracies collapse in on itself by a combination of internal and external stress factors, culminating to a period of vulnerability where a usurper would slowly chip away the democratic institutions before going all-in once every sector of accountability has been compromised (and there are various people and groups who could fit this "usurper" profile, and they're not all on one side).

By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump; with China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's initial provincial-level censorship of COVID-19 and the US retroactively nuking what's left of their reputation with the triple-whammy of the godawful mismanagement of their pandemic control, the economic crisis and the George Floyd protests. There is also the increasing Human Rights Abuses (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking '''very''' similar to Soviet Russia's treatment of the Baltics]), however, seeing as how nobody did jack shit to Myanmar's Rohingya situation, outside of Western governments, geopolitics are gonna geopolitics. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, ISIS and it's branches (such as the West African branch, Boko Haram) or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]