Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 Asia is the largest continent on Earth, and home to more great civilizations than any other in the history our world.\u00a0 It is fitting that this continent still dominates our politics to this day.\u00a0 Home to two great alliances and two non-aligned powers, more Asians have colonized the stars than the people of any other continent.\u00a0 The future is out there, and Asia may be the key to it.<\/p>\n
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Book of Civilizations<\/strong><\/p>\n Asia<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The continent of Asia is the home to many of our greatest and oldest civilizations.\u00a0 There are the river valleys of Mesopotamia in western Persia, where many believe ancient Eden was located, and the Indus River where Indian culture originated.\u00a0 Some of our earliest great cities, complete with schools, aqueducts, and roads, were built in those regions.\u00a0 The Mongols, the Chinese, the Tibetans, the Turkics, and the Persians, all of which lived as far back as the Ice Age themselves, show that Asia has had many ancient civilizations that have traded and warred for thousands of years.<\/p>\n The Mongols of northern Asia and Turkic peoples of central Asia between them have created some of the largest empires on Earth.\u00a0 Attila the Hun and Genghis Kahn are but two names in history that tell of these massive empires that took over broad swaths of both Asia and Europe.\u00a0 The Greeks and the Arabs did the same in their times, uniting the world from western India to Europe through force of arms.<\/p>\n But while most of those empires failed, and the people with them, the Turkics continued to influence the world for centuries after the death of Attila.\u00a0 They conquered India where the Arabs failed, and conquered Constantinople where the Persians failed.\u00a0 The Turkish Ottoman Empire would conquer almost all of the old Roman Empire, even advancing deep into Europe.\u00a0 It took the British to break their command of India, and the Ottoman Empire held strong until World War I shattered them.\u00a0 But even then, the Turkics would remain in charge of their individual nations off and on for another century, a great legacy indeed.<\/p>\n The ancient cultures of Asia that affect the present day are the Persians, Indians, the Chinese of course, and to a lesser degree the Tibetans.\u00a0 The Tibetans lived on the Tibetan Plateau, also called the Roof of the World due to its extreme elevation.\u00a0 They followed Bon for most of their recorded history, until Buddhism entered their lands and suppressed the older religion.\u00a0 Tibetan pyramids and other structures could still be seen into the Twenty-First Century, but were lost when China demolished them in their continuing effort to erase Tibetan culture.<\/p>\n The Chinese originated in the Yellow River valley, east of the Tibetan mountains, and expanded to the Pacific Ocean in the east.\u00a0 They fought the Mongols in the north for millennia, sometimes ruling them, and sometimes being ruled by them.\u00a0 Like most of the ancient civilizations, they built pyramids and other grand structures that can be seen to this day.\u00a0 The Great Wall of China, built to stop the Mongol raiders, is to this day the largest construct of mankind in all the worlds, though few outsiders have seen it since the Second Great Depression and the Islamic Jihad.<\/p>\n The Indians started in the Indus River Valley before moving south and east.\u00a0 They took over the entire Indian Subcontinent, from the mountains in the north to the seashores in the south, and two of the great religions of our worlds started there.\u00a0 Hinduism and Buddhism.\u00a0 Their ancient pyramids are still open to visitors from all nations.\u00a0 Most of the time they warred with themselves and had little more than trade relations with outsiders.\u00a0 The Arab Muslim invasion in the eighth century forced the Hindus to unite, but once again they returned to their infighting. Then the Turkic Muslims invaded in the eleventh century and slowly conquered almost the entire subcontinent, forcibly converting most of the Hindus there.<\/p>\n The Persians are still one of the proudest peoples in the world, perhaps befitting their command of what is generally considered one of the cradles of civilization.\u00a0 They built massive pyramidal ziggurats that towered above the landscape, many of which have been rebuilt in recent centuries.\u00a0 They learned to follow the ideas of Zoroastrianism, a monotheist religion that has much in common with Judaism and Christianity.\u00a0 Unfortunately for Persia, it began to suffer conquests and invasions from Alexander the Great, the Arabs, and the Mongols.\u00a0 While the Greeks and Mongols did not care about the culture, as long as they didn\u2019t rebel, the Arabs did everything they could to erase the Persian culture.<\/p>\n And then of course there are the Jews and the Arabs, who between them created three of the seven most powerful religions in the history of mankind.\u00a0 While they were once the same people, they have fought each other for thousands of years.\u00a0 One of the hearts of their rivalry is the Jewish claim over the lands of ancient Israel, given to them by God, through their ancestor Abraham who bequeathed it to them.\u00a0 The Arabs on the other hand lay claim over those same lands, as their birthright through their ancestor Abraham who gave it to them.<\/p>\n Religion is another heart to their differences.\u00a0 While they both worship the same Creator God, they have very different Prophets who preach very different things.\u00a0 The Muslims, as the last of the Abrahamic religions, believe their religion to be the best, and therefore it is their duty to convert all the worlds to it, by any means necessary.<\/p>\n The Jews seemed happy to remain in their ancestral lands, until forcibly taken away as happened under the ancient Babylonian and Roman Empires.\u00a0 The Arabs also seemed willing to remain where they were, in the deserts where others preferred not to live.\u00a0 The rise of Muhammad would change the Arabs forever, and bring great change to the world at large.\u00a0 He united the warring Arab factions against everybody else, and sent them out to conquer the world.\u00a0 They spread out from Arabia and conquered ancient Israel, North Africa, Persia, and even tried to conquer India.\u00a0 They spread Islam to the Turkics who conquered Byzantium and India, and the Muslim empires became the greatest powers of their time in the world.<\/p>\n They were defeated by the Mongol hordes of course.\u00a0 The Mongols conquered everybody they took the time to attack, uniting the world from Eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean under a single government.\u00a0 While their growth slowed down after the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire continued to grow and became the greatest nation in recorded history.\u00a0 They defeated anyone who fought them, but practiced religious and cultural toleration after securing their new territory.\u00a0 That allowed previous cultures to continue to survive throughout the Mongol Empire\u2019s history.<\/p>\n No nation or group of nations could stop them.\u00a0 It is interesting that the Mongols, after facing and defeating the greatest nations of the world, were defeated by a threat so small they could not even see it.\u00a0 A plague known as the Black Death ravaged the empire from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and killing countless millions of people in the empire and outside the borders as well.\u00a0 It would take centuries for all of the Mongols to fall of course, but the Black Death broke their utter domination, and gave the other nations of the world a fighting chance to drive them away.<\/p>\n The civilizations of Asia picked themselves up and began to rebuild after The Plague receded, but Asia is typically a continent where change takes place over centuries.\u00a0 China rebuilt, Muslim Turkics slowly conquered the Eastern Roman Empire, India, and expanded into the islands beyond it, and the Persians took their future back into their hands.\u00a0 The Mongols had never conquered the Arabs, but the Black Death still devastated their cities, leaving them to prefer the nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors.<\/p>\n Then the nations of Europe recovered from the Black Death and spread out to conquer the world.\u00a0 Arabs, Persians, Turkics, Chinese, and more fell to the powers of Europe.\u00a0 The Russians crossed Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, and farther.\u00a0 The British Empire became the largest empire in the history of the world.\u00a0 The Turkish Ottoman Empire held until World War I destroyed them, and isolationist Japan rose up to challenge every power in Asia and the Pacific before falling in World War II.<\/p>\n After that war ended, Western Europe abandoned its Asian possessions, some by choice and some by force.\u00a0 The Jews returned to Israel and Indian Hindus reclaimed their power, igniting wars with the Muslim nations that would last for over a century.\u00a0 Soviet Russia\u2019s Communist Revolution spread throughout most of the rest of Asia, making it in the new front line of the Cold War between West and East.<\/p>\n For half a century, almost every nation in the world picked a side, until Russia\u2019s economy collapsed.\u00a0 The Turkic nations enjoyed their independence for a time, China grew to fill the power vacuum, and the Muslims sent their Jihadists against every nation that did not convert to Islam.\u00a0 Russia, China, India, Africa, Europe, Australia, and America all felt the sting of the Islamic Jihad.\u00a0 Some nations fought back against the Jihadists while some tried to mollify them.<\/p>\n The economic strains of the Islamic Jihad, and the mounting costs of governmental overspending, caused runaway inflation and resulted in the general collapse of the Western economies.\u00a0 And when they collapsed, the rest of the world went with them, resulting in the Second Great Depression.\u00a0 Western soldiers returned home, leaving a power vacuum that the Muslims quickly sought to fill.<\/p>\n They escalated from sending small numbers of Jihadists spreading terror throughout the world to full armies bent on conquest, and the nations of Asia and beyond reeled.\u00a0 Of the Asian governments, Russia, China, India, and Israel fought the hardest and bloodiest, in a total war that left tens of millions dead on all sides.\u00a0 And when armies weren\u2019t enough to win the wars, nuclear weapons deployed.\u00a0 Most of the warheads failed to detonate, but hundreds of thousands died under the mushroom clouds that appeared.<\/p>\n Russia, China, and India fought Jihadist cells inside their borders, and sent their armies to smash the neighbors that supported them.\u00a0 The mountains of central Asia were difficult combat environments for the Russians and Indians, and proved again why the denizens of those areas have broken so many empires in the past.\u00a0 China took the opportunity to not only rid themselves of any Muslim groups they could find, but also to conquer the various smaller nations around them in the name of Pan-Asian security.<\/p>\n Israel was the target of a far more desperate war.\u00a0 Surrounded by Muslim nations that dreamed of driving the Jews into the sea, they became the target of four neighboring armies, plus numerous elements loaned by other governments.\u00a0 The Israelis had no option to retreat, no room to fall back to that did not leave their civilians in danger, so they attacked.\u00a0 They targeted the Arabian air forces first, with tarmac-shredding bombs and bunker busters.\u00a0 They even used large fuel air explosives and small tactical nuclear weapons in their strikes, though most of the nuclear warheads failed to detonate.\u00a0 The aerial superiority those strikes secured helped keep Israel alive in the years to come.<\/p>\n In the middle of the Jihad, a revolution swept through Persia that would change everything.\u00a0 The Persian people had long protested and fought the regime installed by the Islamic Revolution of the previous century, and when the government cracked down on them after losing most of its air force to Israel, a new Persian Revolution swept through the streets.\u00a0 The Supreme Leader ordered the military to kill the revolutionaries, and the armed forces splintered as entire regiments rebelled against the idea of shooting their own people.\u00a0 The governmental loyalists lost and the Islamic government collapsed.\u00a0 The successful revolution in Persia sparked further revolutions in Cairo and Constantinople that further rocked the Muslim World, denying them the resources of some of the most powerful Middle Eastern nations.<\/p>\n It would be decades before the Islamic Jihad truly ended, but the fall of their most powerful nations and the destruction of their training camps left the Jihadists reeling.\u00a0 Russia conquered the Turkic nations of Central Asia, India secured its old borders, and China expanded into a true maritime empire when it followed the Jihadists to their bases in the southern Pacific.\u00a0 They occupied the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and many other nations in the area.<\/p>\n And in the largest amphibious assault since World War II, Chinese troops invaded Japan.\u00a0 Neither the Emperor of Japan nor his government surrendered.\u00a0 They evacuated when it was clear they could not win, and the Chinese installed a government to sign the surrender.\u00a0 To this day, the Free Japanese and their Emperor seek to find a way to liberate their homeland from their Chinese occupiers.<\/p>\n After the successful conquest of Japan, China turned their sights to New Guinea and Australia.\u00a0 When they moved to take the region, they met a combined force of American, British, Canadian, and Australian ships in the islands of Indonesia.\u00a0 The alliance stopped them from moving further into the Pacific, more by their presence than with weapons.\u00a0 There was some fighting, but it was generally more sparring for position rather than all out war.\u00a0 In the end, China stepped back into their firmly held positions and allowed the Western Alliance to think it had won a great victory.<\/p>\n With most of the Islamic governments destroyed, occupied, or overthrown, the Islamic Jihad was effectively over.\u00a0 The Islamic Brotherhoods continued to fight, but they had few resources and fought from secret bases that were constantly under threat of destruction.\u00a0 There were no safe havens for them anywhere on Earth.\u00a0 Asia and the rest of the world began to work itself out of the Second Great Depression and return to space.<\/p>\n By the end of the century, the Persian Revolution had resulted in a greatly expanded Persian Republic and a return of traditional Persian culture to the regions long suppressed by their previous rulers.\u00a0 Zoroastrianism returned to the forefront of Persian religion and the first Persian crew sent to space burned a fire to their ancient creator.\u00a0 A much larger Israel went to space on its own as well, as did India, China, and of course Russia.\u00a0 Space was the future, and every civilization sought to claim as much of it as they could.<\/p>\n When the Chinese made the first hyperspace jump in 2105, it brought the space race into a new dimension.\u00a0 Humanity finally had the stars to go to, not simply other worlds and moons.\u00a0 The Western Alliance and Russians followed them in 2110, and Persia and India joined the hyperspace club in 2115 and 2120.\u00a0 The nations of Asia stretched out and began to explore the universe, and they found many worlds waiting for us to colonize them.<\/p>\n All humanity needed was to send large amounts of cargo into space far cheaper than rockets could. \u00a0Orbital Elevators were the answer, and the Western Alliance built one at Port Harcourt in Africa.\u00a0 China quickly answered by building one in Singapore, and Russia soon helped the Indians build one at Colombo, Sri Lanka.\u00a0 Two more elevators would follow quickly, an American one at Panama and one built by Australia at Jayapura in New Guinea.<\/p>\n Using the elevators mankind went to space, and the Solar System filled with new colonists from every nation in the world.\u00a0 The major nations sent colonies to the stars, and in the next century they colonized seventy-six worlds up to 100 lightyears away from Earth.\u00a0 China alone colonized twenty-seven worlds, with Russia colonizing another ten.\u00a0 India and Persia each colonized four, and even Israel colonized their New Zion.<\/p>\n It was not a period of peace for Asian\u2019s nations, but rather a period of not shooting each other on a regular basis.\u00a0 Persia and India cooperated with each other, but remained neutral to the large alliances.\u00a0 India negotiated understandings with Nepal and the other nations of the Himalayas, and gave the Tibetans asylum from Chinese rule.\u00a0 They also became a center for other peoples who did not want to live under China, offering asylum to hundreds of thousands.\u00a0 Likewise, Persia welcomed Turkic refugees from the neighboring regions that Russia controlled.<\/p>\n When the Peloran made contact in 2205, it changed our worlds again.\u00a0 We finally knew we weren\u2019t alone in the universe, and they brought new technologies that soon filtered into the non-aligned nations of Asia.\u00a0 Medical treatments that extended our lives and ended diseases, and cheap gravitic tech that allowed us to go to the stars without a governmental-sized space program.\u00a0 Soon after the Peloran arrived, the Shang showed up to give technology to the Chinese and the Roderan began helping the Russians.\u00a0 Persia and India received no direct aid from alien sources, but they purchased many technologies from the other nations, giving them a way into the new Great Space Race.<\/p>\n For the next century, the nations of Asia explored and expanded.\u00a0 While the Russians, the Chinese, and the Western Alliance engaged in a long cool war over colonies, India and Persia maintained they neutrality.\u00a0 They kept their distance from the major colonies, hoping that distance would keep the opportunists from targeting them.\u00a0 In fact, the majority of their new colonies after Contact were near the Pleiades Cluster and the large Peloran base that protected the Terran side of the Taurus Gate.\u00a0 The Chinese and the Russians sparred with each other and the Western Alliance for colonies inside the Terran Bubble, attempting to concentrate their power.<\/p>\n When the Shang attacked Yosemite, Persia and India kept their distance.\u00a0 They did not want war.\u00a0 Neither did Russia who sat back and watched.\u00a0 Of the Asian nations, only China went to war with the Western Alliance, supporting the Shang.\u00a0 The rest of the Asian nations are simply seeking to avoid The War and continue on with their lives as normal while the known galaxy devolves into chaos.\u00a0 Only time will tell if they can continue the balancing act of deciding for neither side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello, my name is Charles.\u00a0 Asia is the largest continent on Earth, and home to more great civilizations than any other in the history our world.\u00a0 It is fitting that this continent still dominates our politics to this day.\u00a0 Home[…]↓ Read the rest of this 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