The Humanate

The Humanate is an area in which aliens rose to overthrow human political dominance, but the humans have re-arisen and established their ascendancy with vigor and venom. It is one of the most centralized of large multi-system states. Only Rete is more so.

History

The races principally involved in this piece of history are Terrans, mainly humans, and jowers, native to Chaegga.

The volume now occupied by the Humanate was originally a swath of independent systems and small associations, with solid human economic dominance and occasional human colonialism. For some time after the jowers were discovered, they were deliberately isolated by surrounding worlds, but a trickle of commerce and technology got through. Eventually, jower merchants came out into space, along with (or identical with) pirates. Their natural rapacity was edged by resentment at their long isolation.

The region coped and suffered with jower piracy for some centuries, but then Gold Gossik came to power, uniting the pirate fleets and carving out an instant empire, like those of Alexander, Napoleon, or Attila the Hun.

Gossik exacted tribute from all worlds in the region, but it destroyed the governments and cities of the human-dominated worlds. It specially targetted humans for several reasons: they were the richest targets, they were the most numerous and powerful race and so must be scotched before they could unite and retaliate, they made a good scapegoat for rallying other nonhumans, and they tasted great in cheese dip.

But soon Gold Gossik was assassinated, its empire shattered into warring fleets, and the humans could regroup. They did, but got very little help from the other races. Gossik had done an excellent job, driving a wedge between humans and others, and its work lived on. Most non-humans stood back from the human-jower conflict; a few came to the humans' aid, but some came to the jowers' aid too.

The humans had unity and technical superiority. They allied and were compelled (they believed) to take control of many alien and mixed worlds, in self-defense. This alliance was the foundation of the Humanate.

Organization

The Humanate capital is Brassport on Larmei. Other major Humanate worlds are Chey Ji, Torry, and Rosstyr, the last being the capital of its own pocket empire.

The Humante is ruled by the Electorate class, strictly human, about 85% of the human population. The Electorate elects members of a parliament, which elects a prime minister. Within the Electorate, there is considerable democracy and freedom.

Non-Electorate humans are either on the outs with the Establishment or out of favor with it, e.g. criminals of various types, seriously slothful slackers, serious ideologues.

There is an "eo-humans first" faction that is in conflict with the larger "united we stand" faction.

The government subsidizes training in patharchy and psi, and some genetic enhancement, for humans only.

The government facilitates alien emigration and essentially prohibits alien immigration.

There is no birth limit on humans, but all human births are gene-screened. All alien reproduction is supposed to be limited, though enforcement is very difficult. Non-human Terrans are unregulated, and there is an overall tendency for them to fall through the cracks.

The Humanate still has strong signs of its old planetary cultures at planetary scales. In most cases, the local human culture is much as before, only the planet or pocket-empire may have acquired a number of alien holdings that they are free to exploit now. Alien cultures, on the other hand, are now all tightly controlled or rebellious.

The majority human culture, the victors of the founding coup, is militarized and segregated from aliens. All members of the Electorate serve a term of military duty at least once, and politically active ones serve regularly every few decades. They often serve on alien-colonized worlds or alien homeworlds, but immediate communication with the non-humans is handled by specialists in all routine cases.

The state religion of the Humanate is Ideolatry, subsidized by the government. Under most administrations, at least nominal membership is required for government careers. The Humanate government subsidizes dissemination of Ideolatrous religious works and often restricts dissemination of other religious works. In extreme cases, Humanate administrations have made conversion to or membership in other religions a crime for humans. However, the degree of religious bias varies a lot over time and place.

The fringe cultures include disaffected humans and are dominated by jowers. Most humans, certainly the vast bulk of the Electorate, view jowers with loathing and regard all other non-Terrans coldly, feeling they were betrayed by them to the jowers.

The Humanate flag shows the Chinese ideogram for "human" (a caved-in lambda) flanked by two Egyptian hieroglyphs for "human" (little profiles of people seated on the ground with their knees up).


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Copyright © Earl Wajenberg, 2010