Flag of the Green Cross Movement
The flag of the HAMR Movement
The Southern Families refers to the eleven historic families that originally settled the southern parts of Kings, and especially the Portland area. They moved to the south in order to escape an ill faith of unemployment and poverty. An subgroup with an own identity grew out of the Southern Families and their lineage, frequently called the 'southerners'. Due to economic and historic developments in Kings, the Southern Families got into conflict with the governments in Newhaven and Noble City. This conflict roots the conservative and economically liberal values commonly associated with the southerners.
Two local organizations occupied with the needs of the southerners are the pragmatic Green Cross Movement and the more radical, even separatist, HAMR Movement. The current leading figure and spokesman of the Southern Families and Gep Mecano II.
Historic identity[]
In the fifties, Kings was still a poor state and there was not much work in the city of Newhaven. A lot of people left to either Noble City or Hurbanova to find their luck, but some stayed on the isle in search of an escape from poverty. A series of migrations to the southern parts of the isle resulted in the creation of a community that would become present day Portland. The people who migrated there became known as the Southern Families, or southerners. They farmed the fertile lands in central and southern Kings and the community flourished. At the time that the investments made by the Southern Families started to pay off, politicians with a new mindset get to occupy crucial posts in Newhaven: a series of socialist governors want to use the southern wealth to stimulate economic growth by redistribution programs and subsidizing economic activity in the north.
The Southern Families reacted by uniting themselves in the Portland Green Cross Movement in 1962, a loose political network which opposed the wealth redistribution programs that the governors wanted to impose. The Movement saw the entire set of measures not as a means to get King's economy booming but as a dictate coming from the central government of Noble City. The idea lived that the states of Sylvania and Oceana, who's economy had been slacking throughout the sixties and early seventies, wanted to keep Kings down by tricking it into expanding government and reducing market incentives. Of course the lack of socialists in Congress was simply left out of the picture, which made some notable Newhaven politicians believe the Southern Families were being selfish.
The Portland Green Cross Movement sought recognition as a separate 'Southern Kings' state and opposed any regulation coming from outside the commune. The governor of Kings, in cooperation with the Federal Police, broke the resistance with violence and socialist policies were enforced. The Green Cross Movement remained nonetheless active as a committee demanding more autonomy and fighting socialist views. The tensed relation between Portland and Newhaven remained until the eighties, when King's economy was on the rise and the influence of the movement was dropping.
Contemporary status[]
In 2002 the Green Cross Movement was founded anew, though this time as a movement active in all of Kings. The present Green Cross Movement advocates a more confederal state model with great autonomy for the states. This fits in the idea that Kings can only remain wealthy if it doesn't have to look after the other states that did not manage their economies well. Quite obviously, the Green Cross Movement oppose heavily to the CPL.nm which represents both a unitarian and socialist approach and remains the most popular party in Kings.
During the Lovian Civil War, in October 2011, the GMC remained true to its tenets of civil and peaceful actions. At the beginning of the Civil War the GCM was reluctant to the usage of violence and condemned the riots, not unlike the Oceana nationalist movement. GMC members where however divided over how to fill in the local authorities now the grip of Newhaven and Noble City was weakening. A group of radicalized members left the GMC to form a new 'revolutionary' organization: HAMR. During the excesses performed by HAMR-associates in the Civil War, the Green Cross Movement kept distancing itself from the extremist discourse used by Kim Dae-su and others.
While the GMC remained true to its tenets of civil and peaceful actions, the Southern Families themselves proved more susceptible for collaboration. It was Gep Mecano II who united the eleven main southerner families behind HAMR and its goals. The Southern Families have a lot of power in Portland and employed in to force the hand of local authorities and even the GMC, which stood idle as HAMR attempted to install its own regime. This cooperation with HAMR troubled the relationship between the Southern Families and the GMC.