The Far Eastern Nightmare

Thanks for RVBOmally for making the basemap for this.

In China, Christopher Columbus' name is constantly ridiculed, five hundred years after his death. He was the one that began a chain of events that would topple the world. After landing in China on his ship, he was quick to claim that he landed in India instead, covering up the fact that he didn't. The Spanish government was quite pleased by this, and he ended up going on many more missions for both the Spanish and the Portuguese governments. The Spanish began to influence China, while the Portuguese began to forcefully open up Japan to the rest of the world. The Pope was the one who initiated colonization, believing that these people of the Far East would be easily influenced by conversion. Spain began small, buying out ports on the coast of China in the mid-1500's. Portugal quickly used the opposite tactic, taking over the islands of Japan in a series of wars and dividing it up. The English and French were looking forward to gaining resources as well. The French went for the Indonesian islands, eventually working their way up into Siam and Sri Lanka. England worked both ways, beginning with colonization of Siberia in the 1600's and ending with colonization of Oman and Africa in the early 1800's.

English Thule began the long used practice of turning the natives of a region into slaves. The native Siberians weren't strong enough to fight back, and the Japanese eventually fell to the same circumstances. The English were pretty strong due to this, and began a series of conquests to help the Spanish take down the Qing Monarchy, pushing them into the central highlands of China. They eventually did the same to the Mughals, turning them into a colony and expelling the monarchy into the Rus. Eventually, the Spanish seemed to be getting too strong for the English-Portuguese alliance. In the late-1700's, the two nations teamed up on Spain, grabbing their colonies for themselves and dividing up mainland Spain. Aragon was freed, along with Grenada and Basqueland. Castile became a backwater, even though it was once the strongest nation on Earth. The English absorbed the Basques, while Portugal basically turned Grenada into a Christian colony.

Expansion and repression was the same method used by every European power for years. Dividing up the African continent was easy. England took over Zanzibar and Oman, while the newly unified Italy took over Libya and Tchad. Europe eventually worked their way all the way down to the south, which was a problem for them. It was much too cold in the south for them to survive, but the "Antarctic Africans" managed just fine. They would become a colony, but would later be one of the freest former colonies in the world (although free is used loosely here, as they basically had no central government). In the mid-1800's, after most of the world was divided up (the Qing dynasty in Central Asia was the only country that wasn't in the European sphere), people began to rebel. The Sokoto peacefully rebelled, making threats to advance them to autonomy. The Japanese (known to the rest of the world as the "Lapaman" began fighting slowly, eventually breaking into a full-fledged revolution by the 1950's.

The biggest tragedy was probably the Chinese Civil War, occurring from 1886 to 1912. The now extremely harsh English were putting the vast Chinese population down the most, stealing any new inventions or weapons that came out of the region, such as the lightbulb or the automatic gun. A strong revolution broke out, becoming one of the most well-known periods of death in the history of the world. Millions died on both sides, with hundreds of thousands of innocents being sacrificed for neither side. The English had never lost a fight before, but after thirty years they were beginning to wear themselves down. Their surrender came fast and uneventful, since they never wanted to fully admit defeat. The Chinese didn't gain their goals either, and lost Peking and their claims on Manchuria. On top of that, the government began silencing any dissidents, which caused revolts that eventually stretched over into Qinghai.

Other colonies took after China, including English Thule. They rebelled twice, once in the 1920's and another time in the 1940's. Of course, neither time turned out well for them, and only ended up with them being rounded up into camps in the far north. The English eventually used this tactic on non-rebelling parties, causing a period of systematic racism and genocide to emerge. After noticing that this would only cause worse revolts, they began to delete any information regarding the Chinese Civil War, removing the motivation from the people. Censorship also became popular, especially in the remaining colonies. The Europeans were reassuring the non-enslaved Africans that they were equal, even "freeing" them. They were turned into "Protectorates", which was supposedly a separate entity from their former owners. In truth, they didn't have any freedom, only being influenced by their "former" colonialists.

By 2015, the world is in all meanings a dystopia. Truly free regions exist nowhere, nor will they ever exist again. Eastern Europe is in the process of being absorbed into the Rus, while a dictatorial England and France are in the process of absorbing parts of Africa. The parts that are independent have been forced into anarchy or fascism, while the places that are in the process of rebellion will continue to do so for centuries. Colonialism ended up destroying the world, instead of building it up.