My Confession On The Dominion

[Manson]

Written by Biyah in March of 2006, this piece provides a lot of insight on the West Pacific Dominion (WPD) and on Biyah himself. Originally posted to TWP's old |invisionfree| site, which is now non-existent, the region of Great Britain and Ireland saved this essay and posted it in their university for safekeeping. Here's a link to their re-post.

A Comprehensive Viewpoint of “The Dominion of The West Pacific”
Or:
How to Seriously Screw with People’s Heads.

It came to me that Berhampore never did get his full deposition about The Dominion, which is what he originally wanted from each of the Dominion Members. I was bored earlier today and I started playing around with witting up my full unedited NS history. After I got about a third of the way (and 20 pages) into it, I decided that the Dominion Slice would make a fairly nice explanation into the events proceeding the launching of the Dominion, and the steps taken in the aftermath.

And so, for probably the first time, you’re going to get my full unbiased thoughts on one of the major events which have marked my career. For good or ill, some of my opinions of people and events are going to be highly critical. I have no particular dislike of anyone, so try not to take it personally.

I don’t suppose this really matters anymore; the Dominion is now but a gleam to the events taking place. That’s probably the only reason I felt comfortable posting this.

Don’t expect great writing, this is more of a sketch of the final product I wanted, but I’m to tired to go through it all right now and make it perfectly publishable.

The rest of my history, and my views on TWP from FoCA on, will be coming...

Anyway, on with the show…

***
The Dominion started quite simply really, as a conversation (one of many) between TAO and myself on the phone. Not that we discussed the actual change-of-government, mind, but we often-times discussed the looming specter of a problem facing us in terms of Perfect Stability, lack of new players, and all the little issues which would come of this… not being able to fill government positions with people of worth, dealing with fallout as other regions began to fall apart, etc.

We spent happy hours discussing ways plausible and foolish to shake the TWP up a bit. Going to war, changing governments, breaking all treaties, condemning some little piddly invader group and launching a War against Terror on them… up to and including putting individual people on trial for no particular reason then being idiots. F&P, Biteland, Nadnerb, and few others came up for consideration (and no, I’m not going to say who came up with who). We discussed everything, sometimes with great seriousness and sometimes with more then a dash of humor.

We didn’t actually decide to do anything, but we did agree that there were problems looming and the WestPac was not in a position to deal with them. The government was large, bulky, and we were already loosing people to inactivity or boredom. You see, we both considered the government –too- stable. Dilber and Monte Ozarka had done their jobs well, to well, we had so many ties and affiliations that we couldn’t breathe anymore. We couldn’t go to war with anyone without stepping on a treaty or bringing one of our allies in against us.

This did, however, get me to thinking. I went to a few other people on IRC as the days went on, asking for their opinions on Nationstates and the current slump in new recruits. I would say that most agreed that things were strange, the bounce we were expecting from the summer-slump never materialized. It was generally worrisome, though most I talked to also belonged to groups and regions that were typically more active then your average feeder… if for no other reason then they were constantly recruiting and pulling the active ‘cream of the crop’ away from the very feeder I was worried about.

I threw my net larger then, this time with something slightly different in mind. I wanted a special action group, a focus group made up of a great many minds so we could analyze the problem. I started with Shasoria, who was involved in a couple other black projects with me for West Pacific Intelligence. If I could trust –anybody- in The West Pacific, he was the man. I rapidly included ZetaOne, Minineenee, Halmont… and after about 24 hours I had what would become the Core of the Dominion.

I basically wooed them all in different ways. I talked to Halmont about legality, Zeta about regime change and the good old days, Shasoria about doing what we could for the region to keep her great. Everyone had an angle that caught them, and the only person I talked to that failed my initial questions was Limitless Events. Keep in mind that I wanted this to be a very quiet focus group, because I had this idea that we’d decide to do –something- and I didn’t want it leaking right away. This would come to naught, but that will be explained later.

And so, the ‘Masterminds’ were born. ZetaOne set up a board (what became the Dominion Forums) and set up a super-secret forum named (aptly enough) “Take Over Inc.” as a joke. The usergroup required to see Take Over Inc was named ‘Masterminds’. It was a good bit of humor. ALL of this started as humor, and we had a good chuckle over it. We had a dozen AIM conversations with portions of the Core present at all times. This is, in fact, where I got the term ‘Core’. I was describing a possible idea for a regime change and mentioned the original ‘conspirators’ as the active core of the West Pacific, which is why I thought such a thing might work with the right planning… because we ‘were’ the active core. That eventually got whittled down to The Core and became the working name for my theoretical governments Legislature.

Always we wrestled with two basic questions… what were we going to do and how were we going to implement it without a civil war? Those questions were the purpose for T.O.I. We threw out a lot of ideas, from a ConCom and Regime Change to a simple change of laws. And we also discussed ramifications of all.

And, we discussed why we wanted to do this at all when things were still running semi-smoothly. The basic answer was simple; I think we were all bored. I know I was… and I could speak for a few others, though I won’t. Some things I will leave for others to tell.

We had that forum up for a mere few days before it became apparent that most people were leaning to a full Regime Change. I will admit that I did a fair bit of pushing in that direction; I wanted to see a real shakeup that would wake the region up AND give us a legitimate reason to break most of our alliances. One of my strongest selling points was that if we maintained the same government, even if we went into a full reform, all the stipulations of the treaties we had would still be in force. That was something I didn’t particularly want to deal with, it was a political headache of Excedrin size. A complete regime change on the other hand, ahhh, that erased the slate and gave us a new tune to dance too. It went especially well if we abolished the government and set up a new concom, this idea was especially popular (not the concom, but abolishing the chains which were holding us)

And so we began working on our theoretical government and set a tentative time-table for 2 weeks to a month. That seemed like a reasonable amount of time to write up some documents, prepare the forum, and pull a few more people into the fold. People like Eli, who was the Regent and #2 in endorsements. We moved slowly in adding people after the original sprit of the Core though, we had already reached a point that the secret was going to be hard to keep and nearly impossible to track down leaks without clear evidence. The only three people we were absolutely not going to add were Limitless Events (who had already not responded favorably to my exploration questions). F&P, (whom we all considered an idiot) and Biteland (whom I didn’t trust.)

It should also be noted that this was the time Dilber started getting flaky on us. He didn’t much want a regime change; he was about the only one. What’s more, it was readily apparently (and much commented on by us) that the primary reason for his hesitancy was his Mighty Reputation; he couldn’t bear to see it come under any sort of fire. However, he was slowly coming around to our point of view. I worked on him constantly, so did Shasoria and TAO I believe. Again, we figured we had plenty of time for everything to go through. And what was better, if we decided that things just weren’t going our way, we’d be able to walk away from the project with nobody else the wiser. The forum was secret and the members were approximately 10, all of us used to keeping secrets of one sort or another.

It was at this time that I added three others to the list of conspirators. Moo-Cows with Guns, the Prime Minister of Equilism. Zorn-Uzkul, a respected member of the Equilism Military (and Neenee’s significant other, even better!) and finally Gaspo of Nasi/Equilism fame. I did this for two reasons. 1) I trusted all three of them. 2) I wanted some opinions from solid men and women who didn’t come from The West Pacific, a neutral third party as it were. We were one sharp group, the Core, but we were also biased in that we came from the WestPac and might not be able to predict every response from people we were so close to. Further, each had an ear on their respective governments and could basically predict what each would do. The only person who had a condition was Moo-Cows, he wanted to serve out his term as Prime Minister first so he could take part without issue. This wasn’t an issue at the time because his term lasted for two more weeks, the earliest nominal time that we planned on launching.

And the work continued. The original governing documents were drafted by Shasoria (oh, and were they hard, HA!). The original legal code was written by Halmont. The rest of us threw ideas as we went, my primary contribution to the actual government was describing exactly how I wanted the upper echelon to function (since I’d be the first Head of State), I also supplied the new forum skin, the darker look, and… I provided our working name. The West Pacific Dominion. The WPD. This was, as stated, a working name… something we could use to refer to the government until we came up with a name that wasn’t nearly as harsh sounding.

Basically, we just thought it sounded cool!

There were the usual jokes. We came up with a list of who we would like to see booted first when we launched the new regime, and I wrote the first of the informational announcements about the government change-over. This would bite me in the ass later, from a source that wasn’t quite a surprise, but still galled me.

Things were progressing quickly, and then we were all in for a shock. I did a double-take when I noticed the name “EuroSoviets” on the list of people visiting the board. First a moment of shock, followed by a moment of anger, followed by a good hour of introspection and hurried conversations with various members of The Core while I waited for Euro to come onto IRC. I was not in a good mood by the time he’d popped onto IRC, and I was quick in asking him where he’d gotten a hold of the forum from. His response: Dilber.

BAH! DAMN! *CCUUUUUUUUUURSES*

And it got even better; Dilber had let slip a lot more then the forum name. He’d also forwarded a copy of my announcement letter, a very rough copy of what I eventually ended up posting on the WestPac and Dominion forums ushering in the era of the Dominion. Not only that, but Dilber had told EuroSoviets that we were going to slice most, if not all, of our treaties. But that’s not all boys and girls, oh no… Euro had passed that announcement to Xha’Dam as a Commander in the RLA military. Who had in turned passed it to… hmmm, that was the question, now wasn’t it?

Euro’s only question to me was whether or not we would hold the ASE treaty inviolate, because we’d had such a ‘long history of cooperation’. I didn’t give much thought to it, really. I rather sluffed off his question with a generic ‘all treaties are under consideration’ line, mostly because the ASE was one I wanted to drop in a hurry, but I didn’t want to piss off Euro and force him to tip his hand to the world before we were ready. (It’s no real secret that I disliked the RLA and the ASE.)

In the mean time, well, I had a quick conversation with Dilber asking just what the hell was going on… and all the while I was part of about 3 panicked conversations about security, and what we were going to do.

You see, the secret was out now. There was no walking away, the information was public and was likely to spread game-wide inside a week. There are few governments or organizations as infiltrated as the RLA. Thoughts of –not- launching were quickly dropped; we all had our necks in the noose in terms of court cases, treason against the WestPac and all that. We the Region was already starved for something real to do, I could just imagine the fun that would have been had by biting into our butts for possible treason, even if all we had at the time was a focus group.

And so, with most opinion on our side (we couldn’t get a hold of the whole Core in time), we decided that we had to launch and launch soon, so we could control the fallout and direct it as we so desired. And there is one further point to consider at this moment, those of us active decided without a single nay to cut Dilber out of the loop. He’d broken the primary rule of Intelligence Gathering; he’d leaked information to someone famous for leaking. We could no longer trust him in the inner-circle; he was therefore bashed and heard nothing of our plans to launch. We even went so far as to avoid posting anything more on the Dominion Board until such time as the deed was done.

This was not something designed to make him happy. But then, he’d leaked and pissed us off… I wasn’t exactly in a mood to be charitable.

With Shas, Neenee and ZetaOne acting as my primary officers… we came up with a plan of attack. ZetaOne would go into the WestPac forums, hide everything but announcements, clear out Announcements, and remove the other Admins so they couldn’t undo our work.

We had played with the idea of staying on the old board, it was our hope to do so… we were going to have TAO call Lanier up and get his approval. However, it was quickly decided that since we had to move early, we couldn’t take the risk that he’d just boot us all off the board. We turned the Masterminds board into the new Dominion headquarters and created all the forums that we’ve become used to seeing. That particular job was between me and Zetaone, the only two people in the Core online who had really done anything with Invision forums.

And so it happened. Zeta was nearly successful, everything was hidden and the admins removed. The only mistake was that all the Announcements were deleted, not moved, and I think that might have been because of something I said. Once we started the ball rolling, of course, things got hectic real quick. I told him to clear Announcements quick so I could post… he took me literally. I accept equal responsibility for that, but I would like to note that everything else was left untouched. We had no desire to destroy history, I’m a history major and I had a lot of posts I wanted to keep, we just wanted to hide them so that all attention would focus on our announcement and the new boards.

I posted the slightly edited announcement immediately. There was only one problem with this, and again it was one of my oversights, I left Moo-Cows name on the list when he was not going to commit fully until his term was over.

We made this move early in the morning, mostly so we could work without a huge crowd to distract us while we were working. And it worked; I got no questions about the move until after I had posted the announcement to IRC so it would come under immediate attention. After that, well, things were smoooooooth sailing. There was only one basic issue, and that was Biteland coming into the radio and trying to bite off my tail. That didn’t last long though; we (surprisingly) came to talk civilly once the harsh words had been passed off.

Dilber came online pretty quick and blasted me too, but that was to be expected. He’d been cut out of the loop; his first words to me were very close to “YOU BASTARD, YOU HAD ALMOST CONVINCED ME.” I’m not going to dig out the log, but that was pretty close to the exact quote. We talked for a while, I was coldly brutal in describing why he had been cut out of the loop… and he left in a very depressed mood, after having moved all his nations to Lemuria and saying he was pulling out of The West Pacific forever.

… and still, smooth sailing.

I had warned Pope Hope about all this approximately 10 minutes before we launched, and asked her to continue with ADN protection since we were still The West Pacific and the people involved made up almost all of the active members of the region. She said she would take it under serious advisement and would put the question to Nasicournia and the ADN once we’d launched. In the mean time she said she’d put an Embassy for both on the Dominion Boards so we could keep open communications. I think I shocked her with this whole action, one of the few times I can say I did. Heh. Several of us, but primary Zeta, Shas and myself, went through Monte Ozarka’s old forum list of our allies and posted the announcement to the NS world.

I went to bed about 6am that day to no problems, none at all. I was all smiles; it looked like our rushed and hectic plan might just have a chance of succeeding. Of course, we all knew that there would be a lot of waves once the bulk of NS learned about our actions. But I wasn’t particularly worried about it at the time, I was to tired and to pumped to really give much of a care. We’d pulled it off, if only for a few hours, we’d overcome the security leak and the blasted RLA to form the Dominion.

When I woke up many hours later, I’d discovered just how badly things had gone down. I won’t bore you all with the details, most of you read them on the Dominion forum. We came under heavy attack from damn near every group that wasn’t known for patience, and a couple that were. We’d been threatened by the CDA, the RLA (Dalimbar messaged me personally saying, in gist, that he didn’t think we’d be able to maintain the alliance). Hell, we even came under fire from members of the PRP… the hypocrite brigade themselves.

Even better. Dilber had decided to come back after all and launch a resistance (though he has said many times he couldn’t have taken the region from me if I had chosen to fight). Berhampore, Lanier, TSS, and a couple others were prominent. Even that loud-mouthed nutjob Gossetopia decided to jump back into the region. And Tweedy of course, though he’ll jump into any situation that allows him to insult people with apparent justification. (You’re still an idiot and a hypocrite Tweedy. With love and kisses, of course.)

I found out that The Faeyas, Shasoria, Halmont, Clockwork Isle, Enegro Montoya, Gaspo and a couple others had been running damage control from about an hour after I went to bed until the time I’d woke up to the fire. Of course, I jumped in as well. What was worse about all of it was that almost nobody was taking the time to listen to what we wanted, we never wanted a dictatorship… but we DID do a regime change. We didn’t get the government documents or the Concom up until it was to late (as it turned out), but they had been planned from the start. Some of the worst aggressors against us were Glenon with the CDA and Talkos of the Pacific Army. Neither one was listening to a word any of us said, and both more-or-less promised war. The conspiracy theories that were being thrown around were sad, some where downright hilarious, others were truly disturbing. I think my favorites were those that said the whole thing was a product of ADN planning. Half the WestPac’ers involved weren’t particularly fond of the ADN *chuckles*

Yay.

We posted the articles and the citizen sign up early in the evening. By the time late night had come around it was blaringly obvious that we were going to have a Civil War on our hands. Further, it became obvious that a lot of regions were going to go to war with us. War I can handle, other regions sticking their noses into our business I can deal with… I was quite happy to lop their noses off and spit in their eyes. What I did NOT want to deal with was a Civil War, and for many reasons. You see, our whole philosophy was that we wanted to streamline the government, to shake it up and make it an active and interesting place to be. We’d considered and tossed out the idea of starting a Shadow Civil War early in our discussions in Take Over Inc. It was considered to messy, to likely to destroy the harmony of the region.

It was about this time that TAO left the Core, which was a real blow to our morale. If TAO the Rock was being driven off by the hate mail, how did that bode for the rest of us? In truth, it was at that moment that we really started to wonder if we could pull this off without totally destroying the region.

And so, in a conversation between Shasoria and me, we discussed what we could ultimately do. The only option that came to both our minds was that we fold… but it couldn’t be me who folded since I was the one that launched it. Suddenly, reconciliation was forced into our minds and we had to deal with the rough questions of how we could possibly make the bulk of the Core righteous again. It was a tough question, and it was finally decided that I would turn the helm over to Shasoria, who would then fold the Dominion and return control of the government to the Constitution.

It was further agreed that I would be the sacrificial lamb for the Dominion, and that Neenee would leave the delegacy post-haste so that someone the revolutionary government wanted could take the position. (In hindsight, this was stupid, look where we are now.)

This was the end of the Dominion, the WestPac government that only lasted 24 hours. The Core folded and only two of us were forced out from the start, Neenee and myself. We both left willingly, and I was willing to come back for Trial. Neenee was left trying to decide, though the issue didn’t come up for a while, we both went to the new region The Refuge where she became delegate.


What followed is another story, and quite a mess. All the arguments and discussions on IRC and various regional boards, my talks with Lanier and the resulting Reconciliation committee, The Committee’s eventual failure and the Trials which ended up rocking the WestPac into near-death. And Etc. I might comment on those later, for now… this 8 page monster is quite enough.

Cheers
~B