I am ashamed to say that unlike so many others here, I am a child a privilege. I was born into a wealthy family of four in a gated community on Planet Manhattan. My home was beautiful. It was an expansive estate with freshly manicured lawns, gorgeous fountains and dozens of indentured servants that answered my every beck and call.
My father comes from a long line of merchants, each more successful than the last, all the way back the ancient country of South Africa on Earth. There were Niekerks in the skies above Manhattan since the earliest days of Liberty. There were Niekerks blazing the path for capitalist expansionism and blazing a new trail of markets, enslaving ever more with the materialist, narcissistic lifestyle that poisons the souls of men sector-wide.
This is the shame I bear. My kin is responsible for the spread of that great plague and deceiver democracy. We were the ones who made it possible for the few to enslave the many, for the capitalist pigs to chain the worker in every way possible. We Niekerks spread that opiate religion wherever we went with a singular mind. Why not? A drugged populace is much easier to exploit.
You may be wondering, oh glorious premier, vanguard of the people's freedom, what would cause a boy with everything to turn on his family, their tradition, their so called honor. I was 17 when I took a trip after secondary school to Rheinland. It was in that corrupt, decaying society that I met my god: socialism.
I met a man in a bar on New Berlin. He asked me "Son, are you happy?" "Of course I am" I replied. "What makes you happy? Your clothes? Your friends? Your family? Your ship?" he asked. I answered, "All those things, and the things that I love." "You deserve none of them. They are the work of others, unjustly appropriated. Your friends? They are only thus because of your money. Your family? They only love you because your greedy father wants his property to stay in your family." The stranger then took me to the country. He showed me how the worker had nothing and the master everything. He showed me how democracy is impressed upon the people and deludes them into thinking that they matter, that they have a voice. He showed me how the women was enslaved in her home, her work ignored and unappreciated. He showed me how the man on the pulpit tells the worker to shut up and wait, your rewards are waiting just around the corner and to be obedient. I remember seeing all this and weeping at the tragedy and folly of mankind. How could it be that so few could dominate so many with so little effort? How could it be that the great mass of mankind was stripped naked of it's humanity? How could this continue?
Two people returned to the city. One was not the same man who left. Before parting ways the man turned to me and said, "Property is the root of all evil" and handed me a data chip. On it was a work entitled "The Communist Manifesto." I had never heard of it, but the more I read the more it made sense. All my questions, all my problems melted away. Utopia was before me.
Upon my return home I disowned my father, my mother, and my brother. How can they not only be part of such a cosmic scandal but not be the least bit shamed by having actively participated in the suffering of millions? It was disgusting to me now. All of it. The house. The servants. The marble floors.
I left with no where to go. No safe harbor to call my own. I heard a rumor while returning to Rheinland, the only place in the sector of which I knew something, of a shadow of a possibility. I heard what I and many had thought was impossible, that the coalition survives. I hope this finds you wherever you are. I hope that your grace sees me as worthy of joining the only hope for mankind's continued survival. I want to become a glorious member of the SCRA more than life itself. Nothing else has any meaning or holds any value to me. I will be a faithful servant of the vanguard. I will be a servant of the proletariat. Please consider my application.
-Koos Niekerk
So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.