New Scandian Culture
Official cultural policy of the Scandian League. The core of the New Scandian Cultural Policy is that the Scandian League is building a newer, superior society to the old one, and should produce art and culture that reflects the glories of Communism embodied in the "Three Pillars" of the All-Union Communist Party (of the Dragon Dimension): Solidarity, Socialism, Collectivism. It is also partly an attempt to build a unifying culture out of the disparate peoples of the Dragon Dimension. Products of New Scandian Culture show the races of the League working together as equals, united under the benevolent rule of the party, and totally free of their old, superstitious cultures.
The dominant art style is socialist realism; books, plays, and music tend to focus on the glories of the laboring masses, or the timeless wisdom of "our dear leader and teacher, the greatest of all men, the greatest genius of our times," Travin Rumanski. Traditional holidays are replaced with holidays honoring various facets of Scandian society, like SLCM Day, Teacher's Day, Farmer's Day, and Factory Worker's Day.
New Scandian Culture takes a dim view of the traditional cultures of the dimension; in the Party's view, these "old societies" were thoroughly discredited by their inability to survive the Great War or offer much in the the way of an organizing principle shortly after. In some cases, this is simply a lack of support -- if you are a writer or an artist in the Scandian League, you had better make sure your work conforms to NSC principles. Similarly, the Scandish Empire's once-world famous ballet has been converted into a drab government building. In other cases, the traditional cultures of the dimension are outright oppressed, especially when it might suggest that the Gramorians, Gants, Forest Clanners, dwarves, and humans that make up the League might actually have some cultural distinctiveness from each other. Nowhere is this more extreme than in the expression of religion; the Scandian League not only actively persecutes any practicing any of the old religions, it has collected and destroyed almost all of the art, music, and literature with allusions to Tyr, Bleu, or the Dragon God.
The Scandian League is not exactly the cultural powerhouse of the Web or even of the Communist Protectorate, given the thriving music scene in the FTSR city of Bonro. New Scandian Culture has produced only a handful of items that have become popular in the wider web, perhaps the most famous being an epic film based on Vashilov the Terrible's life -- lacking the computer-generated animation available to capitalist countries, the Scandian League actually build a giant, realistic-looking Razboynik and trained several SLCM regiments in period-appropriate tactics. Other notable items include include Jendon Fel's book Battle Manual for the People's Warrior or the viral pop song "A Man Like Travin" (which people insist they only liked ironically.)
