The Legion was once a young collective, a hivemind not yet awakened to true consciousness. The Legion acted as a kind of international provocateur that fed on reactions. It grew and the world around it grew also. Mobile phones that could access the internet and take video made dictatorships an intolerable thing of the past. First to those in the Muslim world, then later to those in greater Africa, and eventually to those in South America.
When all was said and done, the upheaval in the Middle East had one net effect on the global balance of power: The United States and Europe lost all their influence except in Israel and Iraq. Despite a technological edge that prevented a mire such as Vietnam, holding power in Afghanistan was simply too difficult. The people were loyal to local warlords who took power whenever the opportunity presented itself. Applying the kind of overhwelming force that was necessary to destroy all opposition was too expensive in a place that had so little to offer for reward.
The genocide that followed these events was simply the crystallization of all the influence that European powers had failed to maintain. Israel used a nuclear weapon on Iran. Iran responded by invading Iraq. The world could not ignore the videos of Iranian troops marching into Iraq, greeted as liberators. The propagandists in the West spun these events in favor of Israel, creating a fantasy that Israel only hoped to pre-empt Iran’s actions decisively. For a small period of time this actually seemed to work.
Yet the world had changed beyond the scope of Israel’s aging leadership. They had failed utterly to pre-empt the true threat to their power. The genesis to a fully aware and active populace in America and Europe had reached what some have now dubbed a “singularity”. There was no hiding the true intentions of Israel.
In the past, attempts to provide inside information revealing the true intentions of governments and multi-national corporations were easily undermined and discredited. Trusted media shared interests with both the government and corporations in quieting these operations. Attacks on their credibility were all too easily manufactured and widely believed.
At the same time, The Legion was slowly building an infrastructure of highly unlocalized and redundant communications systems. These had grown naturally out of anonymous image boards, where users met to share interesting images of all kinds. At first, these systems were used to orchestrate online pranks that required the participation of hundreds or thousands. Out of these small beginnings a righteous subculture was born that realized how politically effective the collective could one day be. Prank slowly evolved into protest and this was the birth of The Legion.
The Legion gained massive attention from their provocations and new users flooded in. Thousands became tens of thousands. There was a flow of new ideas and despite some resistance from the more acculturated participants, good ideas stuck. This was just the nature of The Legion. The influx of newbies wanted more action and sooner. Democratic systems began to organize and focus the collective into more meaningful and popular action.
Old media outlets began to publish exaggerated and alarmist pieces in an attempt to stir up fear and opposition against the Legion, mistaking it for a conspiracy and not recognizing it as a collective. The focused, righteous, and effective actions spoke for The Legion and The Legion found sympathizers everywhere. Members of the media came forward with inside information that revealed how the attacks on The Legion were purposefully contrived to skew the truth. Members of the government brought proof that they were in collusion with the media and other corporations. People stopped trusting traditional news sources and The Legion became the most powerful and popular outlet for news.
The Legion’s most important and defining achievement was to completely undermine Israel one month after Tehran was turned into a glass crater. The documents on Israel that The Legion publicized were known as the Genocide Torrent. The source remains Anonymous to this day. Consisting of the correspondences of the highest ranking officials in the Israeli government and military, the Genocide Torrent was ridiculed by corporate media as imaginative fiction, but the tactic no longer applied to such an aware populace. Within days, America withdrew all support for Israel and condemned their actions. The ghetto-states of former Palestine revolted and marched on Jerusalem. The entire world celebrated the fall of a second Berlin Wall. In the streets, there was a final and moving show of grief for the massacre in Tehran, now a holy city of Martyrs.
Meanwhile, The Legion celebrated behind their computers in the only way they knew how: +1, Lulz.
I’ve got those PS3 loadin’ screen blues you see!