Join the new world

Saepe creat molles aspera spina rosas.
Often, the sharp thorns produces tender roses

I've played eRepublik since February 2008 and in the beginning I was on fire, everyone was on fire back then. There was a sort of intensity in everything we did; hopes and aspirations. I joined the game with a couple of friends and together we founded eSweden's (if not the world's) first syndicate (co-operative) and we also gathered Gold to buy a newspaper. In the beginning we were furious players, but our syndicate didn't effect the market the way we wanted and the things we wrote in the newspaper wasn't appreciated. After a few months my friends decided to stop playing and I gained full responsibility over the company. By this time I was a full-time e-journalist more or less. Earlier I published several times a week if I wanted but I slowly shifted balance towards quality instead of quantity (in terms of publications, the articles got longer...), so I spent a lot of time researching everything thoroughly before I published. The result of this was that even though I only published heavy critique, mainly towards the eSwedish government, it was now accepted as good writing at least...

I didn't join a party until much later in the game, but I was still invited to the government by several presidents even though I was criticizing them and the government daily. I was appointed minister of foreign affairs during the second German/Swedish war and I was also member of the Round Table (inner circle of the government) so I have played my part with the big boys and contributed in my own way. I was a very stubborn pacifist back then and eSweden was probably the most warmongering nation in the game, but despite all this I was let inside. I was accepted because I was still a part of the eSwedish community and arguments was kept on an objective level, even though I became famous for serving these with passion.
There was a sense of belonging even though the debates could be harsh from time to time, but that's probably because we were fewer than we are today, but that doesn't account for all of it I think. We were all new back then, but we all dared to dream and experiment with new and seemingly stupid ideas, some of which were buried and some came to good use (and was even implemented), because there was no one there to say to us that we couldn't do this and that because they thought it was stupid. There are a lot of stupid ideas that are realized and people can't understand why they laughed at them to begin with, just as there are ideas that people talk warmheartedly about and when they emerge they are totally useless or just plain counterproductive or harmful.

This spirit of pioneering and the sense of actually being able to contribute with something of your own that you wanted or thought was lacking is what has always kept me going in this game and that's over three years now and I have no intention in leaving. This spirit fueled us all in the early days and it built eSweden and our community.

Some time after I began my political career I felt that there was something eating away at this spirit that I'm talking about, a square-minded mentality that was growing from the inside of eSweden, a cancer.
I felt that I had to do something. I became loyal only to our community, so I started the Swedish Nobel Prize. It is to this day my "magnum opus" - my greatest contribution to our community. It was an adaption of the real-life Nobel Prize, restricted to eSweden only (which included Denmark, Germany and Poland at times). It had six categories; Society, Economy, Political, Media, Peace and the Honorary Award. The prize was varying amounts of both SEK and Gold, but I gave away all my money every time, plus any state subsidies a managed to talk my way to. There was a grand ceremony on IRC in the Swedish Nobel Prize's own channel with international press and guests participating, long passionate speeches from the laureates and free food and everything. It was a blast! And for the second (and last) edition of the Swedish Nobel Prize my plead to the state to partially fund the prize again was denied because they didn't want any "state money to go to private people" but I used my contacts and managed to get funding from the eRepublik Admins instead. And after that I almost completely gave up on eSweden - the cancer was growing and reigned supreme...

I left eSweden to travel the world to see if I could find the spirit still alive somewhere else . I had no plans on ever coming back. After half a year or so in exile I received a pm from an old friend from the liberal party DNS saying he and a couple of guys from FBS and MSAP(now couped and basically dead) wanted to create a new socialist party, they wanted my help and I agreed to help with the creative and structural process and together we regained control over MSAP and founded Folket (The People) in it's place.
It was a project that experimented with eSocialism. We all came from totally different parties and some was living abroad, like myself, but we had something in common; that spirit of being able to do whatever we wanted. I was so happy to see that it still lingered in my old birthplace of which I had given up hope, but here it was, among us and within us.
We decided to take to the skies, and we did. I have never seen so much creativity and frantic, passionate work being done by so few with so much dedication. Oh I was back home again!

In the beginning we did great, we practically ignored the political opposition, we were fully occupied with building internal structures, wiki-pages, organizations and so on. People joined and we grew in numbers. Somehow they thought that it wasn't perhaps a stupid idea, it was just an idea, and the people who joined us whether they were dedicated socialists or anarchists or new members of the community looking for a place where their inspiration wasn't smothered.
However, at a certain point we became more than just a mild nausience; a direct threat to the ruling order. We were infiltrated, couped and sanctioned. Tensions built up within and after months of internal struggling the party was divided into two factions: radicals and reformists (bluntly put). The establishment wanted to se a pacification within the political left and acted the only way it could. A river can only flow downstream. So they encouraged the reformists and attacked the radicals.
This situation could only hold for so long and after some time the great split came where the reformists founded the party Folkhemsdemokraterna (FHD) which instilled some of the typical social democratic values and they co-operated with the right-wing. The radicals on the other hand stayed in the party but reverted it back to MSAP.
I decided to stay with the radicals because by this time I had gone so far in my analysis of eSwedish society that i considered myself a radical; if i was to kill this cancer nothing could stand i my way, no lords, no laws and no greed. The spirit had to be kept burning, the flame was dwindling but it survived in small pockets, MSAP and FHD was the two I really knew of, but FHD had a more positive view, they thought they had the strength to keep it alive and spread it too. But I had seen too much, I had been disappointed too many times and I would never allow myself to lose hope again, so I became a radical; a militant socialist, loyal only to the community!

This is basically where I am today, MSAP has been in decline (member-wise) but the core is still intact and strong, and as long as it is I will have a place to gather inspiration, energy and hope so I can step outside and contribute to the community in any way I can: comic strips, helping people with avatars, banners and whatnot, I don't care what party they belong to or any other allegiance they have, we're in the same community and as long as they have an Idea I will be there making sure they at least try to realize it before it gets stomped on and cast into the past, because if I don't I believe we're all small spats of butter in a frying pan of desperation, and it's no good.

This is why I am a member of MSAP, it's why I offered myself as candidate in the party president election, and it's why I think you should join.



With friendliest regards!
-JosefStark, party president of MSAP