The Legacy. Of Totalitarianism. In a Tundra.

Mahmood is the guy

Title: The Legacy. Of Totalitarianism. In a Tundra.

Genre: short story/experimental

Word count: 1273

It's an actually coherent story with a central idea and I hope someone finds this at least peculiar. So I stumbled upon this book multiple thousands of people wrote together on 4chan, then decided to look deeper into it and found a bunch of websites for collaborative wriring. Wanted to see what would come out of them, but they all ended up being dead. For one of them I wrote this short story, more of a tech demo, with the same name as the 4chan book but taken more or less seriously. I am the furthest thing from a writer, and am definitely stepping on other's turfs, but it's not horrible compared to other amateur stuff I've read. As I am not a writer, I don't really know how to judge my own creations and deal with getting locked into your own perspective after going through making the piece. Just want to hear if it feels like something is really behind the story, if it lets people imagine their own "aesthetic", if it works as a core idea in any way. It's going on wattpad and all, but here's the link to the original website because it has a pretty good reader and anyone can continue writing the story at any point for themselves, which could be interesting: https://www.storyfork.app/story/5a68_the-legacy-of-totalitarianism-in-a-tundra

Mahmood, aged 24, was in the prime of his life. He looked over the vast plains of the Tundra with the firm and stone cold gaze, just as the former regime's soldiers did.

From a very early age he had a part in the labors of his large nomadic tribe where you were already passing things to the elders once you learned to walk. He was a child of a ruthless dictatorship. It wasn't one of brutality or of cold and efficient calculations. It wasn't driven by an ideological fervor. It was completely aloof to what being a human meant.

He grew up at the edge of the world where civilization couldn't venture. Only his kind, used to tough life, in harmony with the wilderness and one with struggle, could sustain. It was a beautiful place of beautiful people, with seemingly limitless and profound wisdom of life. Yet, those were exactly the people to be ruled over, as they didn't care to whomever was their ruler. At first, they promised to bring order and civilization, to allow place for development. Then, every other person was armed, serving for the benefit of a perverted version of tribal fraternity. To control these lands, the army was everyone and everyone was the army. Every last construction worker was part of the army.

As always, it started with a few people who thought they could do better. They brought with them knowledge, an entire new system of thought, a set of new customs. They tried to make the existing ways simply a bit better. Then they raised children with their new ways. Some of them became those who enforced the regime to the last drop of blood, most of them just thought it's the price of sustaining their tribe.

Living a nomadic life in a tundra, theirs were all things as far as they could see. Those people learned to rely on eachother to earn their living, to look up to eachother for advice. Now the only thing they could hear was the word of the regime, and that's why most of them didn't listen. The only thing left for them was to wish forgiveness in the afterlife upon those who killed their brothers. They still had their lives, they still wanted to build families and retell the tale to the new generation.

After the dust settled, those who still remembered the days before totalitarianism could look back and weep silently. Mahmood, being 19 when it ended, was born in the dictatorship. His peers respected him for catching glimpses of the at that time still mostly free world. But the dictatorship was the best he knew.

Overtime, his people were given new things to care about. The army had order, honor and the valor of the rank to hold up. A soldier was just a young man, just earning a living, doing a good service to his tribe. And indeed, it was easy to get lost in all the menial tasks which served to remind everyone of the regimes presence. In this world, in a way, those who orchestrated the rivers of blood weren't madmen, they were model citizens, fulfilling their duty to the last letter.

But at this rate the leadership became aloof, prompty woken up from that slumber by acts of the opposition that were so minor as to not even be worth naming. An overreaction followed, and an equal and opposite reaction materialized out of the collective hopes. Within 2 years, the opposition was taking control and administeting land. Within another year, the regime was just shadowy clique of various organizations with no unity or goals, just as were now the various tribes.

As the opposition took land, the army orchestrated ethnic cleansing of the minorities, most dissatisfied by the rule of force. Mahmood's tribe was caught where the repression was richest, and he was now alone, only having a few distant relatives.

He had no time to look back. His life was now a struggle against his former closest friend, the tundra. Going between various towns, getting to know the different trader tribes and how they survived in these times, herding the sheep of others, supporting his remaining family and, perhaps, finding a new one.

He was 24, but he had seen everything the world had to offer. Deprivations and feeling death miss him just by that little bit was becoming stale. He was on his way to becoming a true man of the yet still cold and unfriendly wilderness. He was 24, but in that land and time people matured very quickly. And it was the kind of society where even the biggest idiot wasn't an aloof fool but knew exactly what it meant for his life and would be a rare find if he didn't have his own philosophical perspective on that fact.

And still, those claiming the right to rule. Men of the wilderness fighting for the tribes replaced those who only fought for the simple idea of being the opposite of the regime, and then were replaced by so-called peacekeepers, claiming right of rule through yet more new foreign ideas. But there was one army and one man who fought for those like Mahmood.

Few understood or cared to understand what the peacekeepers preached. But everywhere Mahmood went, he heard tales of the heroics from the army of all tribes. Old men spoke entranced about their great tricks and grand victories, far more glorious then anything the warlords had done. He knew that those people, with their one-eyed leader, offered no development and no reconciliation. They fought for no greater purposes, but did any simple man of the land like Mahmood at that time? Their law was more ruthless than the regime's, but right. Simply right. And that was enough. Increasingly more often, every child knew the figures by name wherever Mahmood went.

Whatever the people built for themselves, the fighting destroyed, just that one of the sides got some more of the destruction. But for Mahmood, there was hope. He established himself as being everything but in the bottom half of society. He knew the land and the people, he knew how to work with his hands and was learning the ropes of the art of craft. Was there indeed a bright future ahead of Mahmood? And of his future family?