The year was 799 when Tuudurxinn’s colonial forces arrived on Dorocbel’s shores, claiming dominion over our land.
“We come as benefactors to uplift your people, guiding you towards prosperity, and spreading the wealth of Tuudurxinn to all Shalic peoples. No matter your greed and barbarism, in the face of His Majesty’s great rule, you will shed your primitive ways and march with us into the future.”
Among those who heard these words was fourteen-year-old Endeck Haloal, a “Shalic” himself and native denizen of Dorocbel. Despite the outright condescension of the foreigners, he was moved by their words. Naive as he was, he genuinely believed they meant to help.
The old government of Dorocbel offered little resistance, as their forces were few, and their leaders complacent. They quickly bowed to Tuudurxinn. Within weeks, Endeck had joined the new administration, eager to be part of Dorocbel’s transformation.
By the age of twenty-two, while Endeck was serving the Tuudurxinn occupation faithfully, the reach of its King had finished extending across all of Dorocbel and beyond. Then they began to call Dorocbel for what it was: A colony. Our wealth flowed northward in an endless stream. Our minerals, our crops, our craftsmanship, even our people, used and abused for Tuudurxinn’s own ends. The transformation Endeck believed in revealing itself as systematic exploitation.
Endeck would later recall the atrocities he’d seen committed in the name of Tuudurxinn’s King, but he wrote them off as necessary sacrifices required for their noble goal. “I told myself it was temporary,” he said, years later when I inquired, “That the suffering I enabled was the price of progress. That those who resisted simply didn’t understand the end goal, the magnitude of good I believed we could achieve.” He remained loyal until the age of thirty-seven, when he went to sign a declaration for the export of the latest slaves, and saw on the manifest the names of his son and daughter in law.
At first, he believed it was an error, that the slavers did not understand their relation. But he soon learned that his son had set fire to a naval vessel, and his daughter-in-law had tried to prevent the sailors from disembarking. When Endeck confronted them, hoping to find some misunderstanding he could correct, their argument shattered any remaining illusions he had. Endeck signed the declaration that day, and resigned from his post the following day.
“I have no greater regret in my life,” Endeck later said, “than what I said and did to my son that day. It shouldn’t have even come to that. The fact that my son turned to violence as his means of expressing himself shows how deeply I failed him as a father. I cared more for a King I’d never met and a cause that had never helped my people than I did for my own child.”
For two years Endeck continued working for the Tuuderxinn occupation in a reduced rank. It was then that he was caught participating in an anti-colonialist demonstration. Recognizing his years of service, they demoted him again, but spared him further punishment. But his personal transformation was already complete. Two months later, he abandoned the occupation completely.
This is when I met Endeck. Together, we founded a publication dedicated to opposing colonial rule and promoting pacifism. I came to know him as both a brilliant speaker and a man haunted by the suffering he had brought to others.
Over the following eight years, we organized more than one hundred anti-colonialist rallies across Dorocbel, with Endeck Haloal serving as the main voice. He personally led countless protests against colonial rule and was arrested a multitude of times for his activism.
He spoke at length about his past failures and how he had bought into Tuudurxinn propaganda, he spoke of all the terrible things he had seen and authorized and explained how Tuudurxinn ensured Dorocbel gained no benefit. Endeck was also a staunch advocate for pacifism, saying that violence only begets more violence, and that what we needed was mutual respect for each other, and the right to rule ourselves. He called for peaceful resistance in the form of work stoppages, demonstrations, protests and the slow construction of native institutions outside of Tuudurxinn’s control.
Eventually, for all the problems he caused them, the Tuudurxinn occupation imprisoned, and later executed Endeck Haloal. In spite of their fear he would become a martyr, he had simply caused them too many problems.
And Endeck did become a martyr. His name had gone around the world, and his ideals with it, inspiring similar movements throughout the colonized world. But from his death, many also learned a grim lesson about the limits of peaceful resistance. However noble his goal of nonviolent liberation, the truth was that he had died without seeing his people freed, and his executioners continued their rule unchanged.
Endeck Haloal, the pacifist, who paved the way for the revolutions to come.
submitted by /u/Avantir
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