I find that roleplaying games (especially the text-based, online variety) can pique my interest in writing something when I’m otherwise at a bit of a low ebb. At the moment, I’m working on running a game set in the universe of a newly revived obsession of mine: Battlestar Galactica.

That said, heavens forfend that I ever try to do something easy or normal, so this game has got a bit of my own twist on it. It’s set on a Sagittaron mining vessel (the Sagittarons being pretty much the most discriminated-against people in the Twelve Worlds) and is going to spend a lot of its time exploring issues like race, prejudice, oppression and politics.

The last one is especially interesting to me because the Sagittaron representative on the Quorum is Tom Zarek, a political revolutionary and freedom fighter that a lot of people consider a terrorist. Mainly because he once blew up a government building. From what we see, Zarek’s politics have quite a lot in common with some strains of anarchist thought, and appears to be predominantly collectivist. This makes him fascinating to me. I share a lot of the beliefs that he appears to hold, but disagree with others. Either way, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to try and get inside his head and walk around, and for a while now I’ve been doing exactly that.

It would also appear from this impassioned defence that my view of Tom Zarek is pretty consistent with the view held by Richard Hatch (who played him).

Tom Zarek supposedly has a book that has been banned across the Twelve Colonies, and for the introduction to Sagittaron that I’ve been working on for my players, I decided to try and tackle Zarek’s voice and attempted to write an extract from that book.

I’ve included it here in case there is possibly one other person somewhere in the world who shares my love of politics and Battlestar Galactica.

Facing Sagittaron

Preface to ‘The Revolution Within’

by Tom Zarek

You reap what you sow.

The traditional perception of Sagittaron is that it is the biggest backwater in the twelve worlds. The people who live there are stubborn. They are backwards, or else they are fanatics.

Caprica and her allies are happy to believe that every Sagittaron they could ever meet would be a dirty, stupid, inbred pacifist that rejects modern medicines and denies themselves all intimate relations before marriage. The more open-minded among them may think that we labour under the yolk of colonial rule because we are not interested in doing anything to defend ourselves and our families.

Of course, it is very easy for them to go on believing that for as long as they choose to, because they are unlikely to ever have to speak to someone who actually comes from Sagittaron. The vast majority of us are planet-bound. We spend most of our lives as slaves in the Caprican-owned factories, making goods that are shipped off-world to the other eleven colonies—feeding their prosperity and riches while we remain unable to afford the very commodities that we produce for them.

We pay what few cubits we have into Libran banks.

Our lives as good as owned by the Caprican-run Colonial Labour Ministry.

Those of us who do manage to get off-world are frequently found in the most unpleasant jobs aboard the colonial vessels and battlestars. We are the cleaners, the kitchen hands and the contracted workers of the twelve worlds, and we have learned not to challenge the assumptions that the other colonies make about us and our people. We have also learned to reject our heritage entirely: Turning our backs on it so that we may succeed without it, because the gods only know that we cannot succeed for as long as we embrace it.

The truth is more unpleasant than anything that might be taught to Caprican children on the token ‘Sagittaron History Day’ that is wedged into the curriculum and paraded around with great ceremony the moment anyone dares to raise the idea that our people are treated unfairly.

Sagittaron is an occupied world.

Even our own history is denied to us, and made the property of Caprican scholars and libraries who choose to represent us exactly as they wish. Of course they will allow the idea of the Sagittaron ingrate to perpetuate itself, when the alternative is that their ancestors have oppressed our people for generations and that they themselves continue to grow rich on the legacy of that oppression. The fact that every luxury and commodity enjoyed on Caprica, on Libran, Virgon, and on Picon was made in a Sagittaron factory by men, women and children who are denied even the most basic entitlement to shelter, education, healthcare and fair representation is so much easier when you can believe that those people are not worthy of these things.

Even the most pitiful library on Caprica has more books of Sagittaron history than our finest on-world university. The majority of these books perpetuate the myth that Sagittarons are universally ignorant and fanatical. Some of them do not. Either way, the power of that knowledge is kept out of our hands, where it belongs.

Anyone seeking the reason why Sagittaron exists in a state of perfect oppression (or any evidence of the fact that this may not always have been the case) is immediately left with little choice but to extrapolate what they can from the spaces left in colonial academia. They may consult the diaries and memories passed down through Sagittaron families from generation to generation, or they may even find most rare of all treasures: a Sagittaron book written in the old language.

Over the first twenty years of my life I researched all of these things, and this book represents (among other things) the sum of what I have learned.

To this effect, the first thing that you must accept is that Sagittaron’s position amongst the Twelve Colonies is not the result of any inferiority on the part of its people. Rather, it is an accident of its birth.

Sagittaron has little by way of natural resources, and it is isolated from many of its fellow colonies by virtue of its position at the outer cusp of our system. I do not believe that it is any coincidence that the only planet which is in a more remote orbit than our own—Tauron—enjoys a reputation that is almost as poor as ours. Because of this remoteness, when people first settled here they learned two seemingly contradictory lessons. Firstly, that if they were going to survive then they would have to learn to support themselves, to become independent on what limited natural resources that they had. Secondly, that if they ever wanted to thrive, then they were going to have to rely on the other colonies in order to do so.

In this way, Sagittaron began its work as the factory of the twelve worlds: Making all of the luxuries and commodities that its brothers and sisters required in order to grow stronger. However, to do this we needed money and, of course, the banks of our sister Libran were happy to oblige. As a direct result of this, for the past millennia Sagittaron has been kept impoverished and indebted at the feet of the other worlds. Over the years, the myriad of tiny Sagittaron manufacturing firms were bought by companies from Caprica and Virgon and amalgamated. Eventually, the Colonial Labour Ministry was founded, and the erosion of the rights of the Sagittaron people began.

In the wake of the inevitable labour strikes and riots, any recourse left open to the Sagittaron workers was removed. The unions were gradually eviscerated, then they were eradicated entirely. This state of affairs persisted for many hundreds of years until the Sagittaron Workers Union was founded by my mother forty years ago. Of course, by then such a thing had become so unthinkable that the wrath of the Twelve Colonies was brought down upon our heads. The gods forbid that any Sagittaron should ever dare to stand up for their own rights, or that we should speak out against the fact that our people are denied even the most basic access to healthcare.

The gods forbid that any Sagittaron should seek to represent herself, or that she should not be content to settle for the colonial puppets which we are supposed to accept as our rightful government.

My mother paid the ultimate price for such insubordination, and despite the claims of a full and thorough investigation by Sagittaron’s so-called ruling party, to date no one has been tried or prosecuted for her murder.

But the more the colonial forces attempted to choke us, the stronger we became. After my mother’s death, I took over the day-to-day running of the union and tried to carry on where she had left off. When that became impossible, the Sagittaron Workers Union became the Sagittaron Freedom Movement and we began to speak of other, less palatable ways to get our voices heard.

It was at this point that the foundations for the attack on the Labour Ministry were laid, and the colonial occupation began to bring about its own demise. If the other eleven worlds were determined to silence us, and the peoples of those colonies were deaf to the cries of our children, then we would find new ways to make them hear.

I did not expect to live long after the explosives were set. I believed that the courts would see that I was tried and convicted of treason. I was prepared. Sagittaron needed a figurehead for her revolution, and perhaps I even believed that the revolution required a martyr. Either way, I was prepared to be that man. I was prepared to pay for the blood of the men and women that died at the Labour Ministry with my own. I did not expect to be here long enough to regret what I had done. Five years into my sentence in a colonial prison camp, and I am still not certain that I will.

I do not mourn the lives of the men and women from Caprica, Picon, Virgon, Libran or even the people from Sagittaron that died that day, but I do bear the burden of their lives, and of their deaths, with me. Such a responsibility of necessity will be mine and mine alone for the rest of whatever existence I am allowed.

I will dedicate what life I have to making sure that others understand exactly why I felt as though I had no other choice but to take those lives to gain the freedom of my people. I will do what I can with the time that I have left to ensure that no citizen of Caprica continues to ignore what has been done (and what continues to be done) in their name in order to assure them wealth and luxury.

Most of our oppressors will question why I have insisted time and again that we Sagittarons have been denied their rightful access to drugs and hospitals to treat diseases that have been all but eradicated on the other eleven worlds. After all, everyone knows that Sagittarons reject modern medicines in favour of herbalism, amulets, and dedications to the gods. I am not about to deny that this stereotype has some foundation in the lives of real Sagittaron men and women, however, as always the situation is not quite as simple as the colonists would have you believe.

It is not difficult to grasp why a people who are denied even the most basic access to medicine may grow to resent and mistrust it, or why they may instead turn to the support and love of the Lords of Kobol. But the truth runs deeper still, because as the poorest people of the twelve worlds, any new drug that was developed on Caprica was tested first and foremost in Sagittaron hospitals. When our people have been treated like animals, worthy of little more than experimentation with untested and potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals, is it any wonder that the Sagittaron people began to distrust the very drugs that they were permitted?

It is not difficult, then, to see how the stranglehold of colonial pharmaceutical companies has also informed Sagittaron attitudes to conjugation. After all, it only takes one particularly virulent sexually transmitted disease to be brought across from Scorpia before rejecting any kind of sexual relationship that is not utter exclusive begins to look less like a choice, and more like a matter of survival.

Neither is it difficult to see how a population of working men and women who have lived under the oppression of colonial rule could gain a reputation for being pacifists. After all, when everything that you see and hear from childhood informs you that you exist to work, and that those who do not work (and those who cause unrest) are punished beyond all degree of fairness, you learn from infancy that if you want to survive then you must submit.

How can the people of the other eleven worlds expect a Sagittaron to have any desire to fight when she has had that desire beaten out of her since childhood? How can they stare down their noses at her for submitting to be kicked and taunted, for working in the most menial and undesirable of jobs, or for standing by while those she cares about are threatened? How can they think the less of her for it, when the society that they have imposed on us has taught her that if she does anything to stop it then she risks losing everything she has?

It is easy to believe that Sagittaron’s problems are Sagittaron’s responsibility and ultimately that they are Sagittaron’s fault. In fact, it is too easy. Each and every man and woman of the Twelve Colonies owes it to themselves and to their children not to take the path of least resistance. Each of us, no matter which of the Twelve Worlds we feel that we belong to, is responsible for the oppression of the Sagittaron people. This oppression has occurred across the centuries, it continues to exist today, and we must accept responsibility for that because, until we do, none of this will change.

The Lords of Kobol tell us that we are not free until each and every one of us is free. On Sagittaron, that freedom is still a dream as dim and distant as the sun that rises low and pale each morning on the barren horizon of our world.

These things can change, and we owe it to ourselves and to the Lords of Kobol to change them. No matter what the cost. Because you do reap what you sow.

So say we all.