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@Murica1776 quick question-

does ITTL America have universal health care?

I haven't talked about that too much, but I imagine it being something akin to either the German system (multi-payer with a public option) or the Dutch model (all insurance is private, but heavily regulated and universal).

Who is the current leader of Eurasia? I assume Zhukov is dead by now.

This fella

Unfortunately, the true scale of South Africa's war crimes has been kept secret. Some of Germany's allies might break off, but most of them will probably just put up with it for fear of sacrificing a good status quo.

I can see Germany losing clout in Asia as some of this comes out (no coverup is perfect). I have a hard time imagining European states getting angry enough over the deaths of non-white people who posed an existential threat to their economies (fuel riots suck) to leave Berlin's sphere. Scandinavia and Italy might move away, and this could play a role, but it won't be the only reason.

A interesting if chilling update. I haven't commented on LtES much, but this is a good example of why I like this story Murrica. The way I'd describe it is that the narrative is dark in places, but not grimdark. Ie, people are still people, and they have a variety of reactions to things.

Grimdark is overdone and boring. I'm glad I'm striking that balance.
 
I wonder if the Arabs that move to the US will join up with the Democrats with their similar social conservative beliefs and devout religious views.
 
I’ve been debating on whether or not to post this for a couple of days… just remember how long the majority of Territory The US has colonized and how it was colonized in the with you exceptions I don’t think there’s people still alive from when the Territory was independent. Canada similar to the United States. Amount of problems United States is having with beginning is beginning to become lose plausibility. You may wish to keep an eye on that. You’ve around reach the 70s and if I recall correctly Cuba in the Philippines were annexed in the Spanish-American war.
 
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I’ve been debating on whether or not to post this for a couple of days… just remember how long the majority of Territory The US has colonized and how it was colonized in the with you exceptions I don’t think there’s people still alive from when the Territory was independent. Canada similar to the United States. Amount of problems United States is having with beginning is beginning to become lose plausibility. You may wish to keep an eye on that. You’ve around reach the 70s and if I recall correctly Cuba in the Philippines were annexed in the Spanish-American war.

To be clear, the Mestizos and La Raza are in the minority. Also, the Philippines have been quiet since after the War. There's also another factor driving a lot of La Raza activity that I'm going to cover in the next chapter before doing a panorama of some other places.
 
The Great Melting Pot: Race Relations, Intermarriage and the Rise of "American Race Theory"
Something I've been trying to figure out how to tackle in depth for awhile. Hopefully this fits into the story fairly well.

The Great Melting Pot: Race Relations, Intermarriage and the Rise of "American Race Theory"

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A White Southerner and his Mestizo Cuban girlfriend (1955)

Ever since the London Company's colonists established Jamestown, America has been a diverse place ill-suited to the kinds of ethnic nationalism rife in Europe and elsewhere. Even when the 13 Colonies seceded, there were large numbers of English, Scotch, Scotch-Irish (Ulster-Scotch), Irish, Welsh, Dutch, German, and French colonists, a large population of free and enslaved Black Americans, and smaller number of Italians, Spanish, Jews, and other kinds of European settlers. This also doesn't include the Native Americans, some of whom assimilated and intermarried into American society. Even in those days, ethnic barriers that were impenetrable elsewhere (the thought of an English Rose marrying an Irishman would have probably incited violence in the old country) were beginning to come down. This lack of a single "pure" bloodline, the lack of a single faith, and even the lack of a uniform culture made the United States embrace its universal creed for which it is now famous. This history of blending and acculturation made the infant United States perhaps the most efficient machine of cultural assimilation in human history, perhaps even beating Ancient Rome.

The main obstacle to this miraculous ability to collect foreign peoples and make them American was, of course, the idea of white supremacy. Throughout the United States, not just the antebellum South, racism against non-white peoples hindered the ability of the Great Melting Pot to accommodate more people. Although we use the blanket term of white supremacy, during the ideology's heyday in the US it was even applied to Irish and Southern Europeans, albeit less brutally than it was to Black Americans. Reconstruction and the Redeemer War helped change that. White supremacists were openly and repeatedly defeated on the field of battle by Black troops. Anti-Redeemer propaganda eroded public support for white supremacy. At the end of the era, white men were forced to accept Black participation in government and business in order to escape military occupation. This didn't mean that things were hunky dory. White and Black Southerners still viewed each other with suspicion, and willfully self-segregated above and beyond the demands of the Cackalack Compromise. In Black communities, White patrons could expect similar business accommodations as Black people could in White businesses (which were similar to OTL Jim Crow). Although rarer than OTL, families that settled in towns on the other side of the color line were occasionally driven out by their neighbors. However, this was mostly in the immediate aftermath of the Redeemer War. By the 1890's, with the exception of interracial dating and some business accommodations, race relations had improved considerably in the South. Interracial same-sex friendships were common in towns with both White and Black populations (interracial friendships between those of the opposite sex were forbidden) and governments with White and Black officials were no longer divided by the color line, but instead aligned along issues of common interest. Utopia it was not, but the idea of a Black man being hanged for simply talking to a White woman would have been considered repulsive in this new South.

Instead, as has been mentioned previously, Southerners found a new, cross-racial identity based around Faith, Flag, and Family. Church attendance was consistently over 90% in the Southern states, and churches wielded considerable influence. Even as the memory of the Confederacy was trashed and denigrated, the memory of the Redeemer War and later the Spanish-American War were used as exemplars of cross-racial cooperation in service to the Glorious Union. Without racial supremacy to divide them, White and Black Southerners found they had more in common with each other than they did with the rest of the country. IOTL, White and Black cultures cross-pollinated a great deal. ITTL, this cross-pollination was an order of magnitude greater. While racial supremacy and nationalism were not dead, they were much weaker, and the example of the New South sent a message to the country and the world: if White and Black, slaver and enslaved, could co-exist, the possibilities were even greater outside of the South.

Outside of the South, race relations between Whites and other non-white peoples also improved a great deal. The annexation of Cuba would not have been possible if this weren't the case. ITTL, the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't even considered (although restrictions were put up they were fairly generous) and unlimited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was allowed. Many of these immigrants wound up converting thanks to concerted targeting by Protestant missionaries (often with funding from Southern luminaries) although many more formed the Catholic wing of the GOP that would wind up electing Kennedy. Chinese and Japanese immigrants were actually encouraged to come to the Second Cession after the Second Mexican-American War, where they were used in an attempt to swamp the local Mexican population. While this was not wholly successful, the La Raza movement was noticeably weaker here than it was in the Caribbean in the 1960's. The Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox Europeans gravitated more to the Mid-Atlantic, as IOTL. The Philippines also got a fair amount of Chinese and European immigration, bolstering the settler minority. In all of these places, immigrants of any racial origin by and large assimilated to American culture while bringing pieces of their own (Confucianism is surprisingly popular in the Philippines these days). Aiding this process was intermarriage. This America's vision of Eugenics was very different from anything seen elsewhere as it allowed for mixing between White and some non-White peoples, specifically Asians and Hispanics. Intermarriage between some non-White races was also seen as acceptable. However, lingering feelings of "race consciousness" meant that until the Second World War, intermarriage was relatively uncommon unless one counts Black Americans marrying Afro-Cubans and Afro-Dominicans of mixed ancestry. In the Second Mexican Cession, intermarriage between Asians, Mestizos, and Whites was actually fairly common, but the low population of the region meant that it wasn't very prominent on the national scale. After the Second World War, intermarriage really began to take off, which sparked anxieties in many. This brings us to La Raza.

The "Mestizo Question" was perhaps the most controversial racial problem in post-Redemption America. The majority of American Mestizos were concentrated in Cuba, Carib, Arizona, Texas, Santo Domingo, and Panama. These regions were governed by a joint group of White and Black citizens who were overwhelmingly Southern in origin. Although White and Black Southerners had respect for each other and other people of similar racial origins, the uncomfortable fact is that Southerners were still by and large racist towards Asians and Mestizos, and generally xenophobic. Like IOTL, relatively few immigrants settled in the South because the native elites would not make space for them or their cultures, and those who did tended to be overwhelmingly Anglo in persuasion (after WWI, quite a few Brits and Dominion citizens left for better opportunities in the States). The reasons for this were the result of a peculiar kind of racism. Southerners respected each other and those of similar stock, as even after the defeat of the First World War, Britain still had an empire impressive enough for them to be considered "a strong race." Beyond that, Anglo culture was similar to their own vision of American culture, which they held to be the best culture in the world. Mestizos, on the other hand, were strongly disliked by both groups. The descendants of Spanish Whites and Native Americans, the Southern colonists held them in low regard for both their origins and their culture. Although racism against Hispanic Whites was fairly benign, it did exist as many White Southerners considered them a "weaker strain" and looked down on their Catholic faith and culture. Nonetheless, intermarriage between White populations was frequent, and this gradually died down as the White settler population infused Anglo blood into the local Whites and vice versa. Black colonists engaged in similar activities with mixed Black natives as well.

The Mestizos, with their native and Hispanic blood, got the short end of the stick. White and Black Southerners had little fondness for Native Americans, considering them noble savages at best and just plain savages at worst. While Whites did intermarry with Hispanic Whites for economic and political reasons (as well as love of course) Hispanic culture in general was looked down upon. The result was that Mestizos were widely considered by White and Black alike to be, as one anthropology professor at Tulane University put it, "a cultureless hybrid race." They didn't neatly fit into a racial category beloved of either group, and their Hispanic-Native culture was seen as hopelessly inferior. What this led to was a system of racial discrimination. To call it Jim Crow-esque would be an overstatement. There were no technical bans on Mestizos moving into White or Black neighborhoods, no system of formal segregation, and until the crisis of the 1970's there was no racial terror to speak of. However, White and Black colonists and locals did systemically disenfranchise Mestizos, engage in de facto ghettoization, as well as engage in a policy of overtaxing and underinvesting in Mestizo communities. Despite the stated goals of the colonial and state governments, this crippled assimilation efforts for Mestizos specifically. Systemic underinvestment in schools meant most Mestizos could not read, write, or speak English beyond very basic words and phrases. This suited the region's elites just fine, as it prevented them from becoming politically enfranchised. Most Mestizos engaged in menial labor for the White and Black population of the Caribbean territories, working as farm workers, day laborers, maids, gardeners, hotel staff, and generally doing the jobs Southerners didn't want. For those Mestizos who did manage to assimilate and rise above this pay grade, they often married Whites and became a de facto part of the ruling class. In fact, marriage between Mestizos and Whites was perhaps the most surefire way for one to escape this life, leading to quite a few unhappy marriages and negative stereotypes.

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A Chinatown in Adams, New Canaan (OTL Chihuahua, Chihuahua)

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A 1920s postcard from the Havana Yacht Club. Although Spanish is included here to make the postcard "exotic" the language was forbidden on club property until 1989.

The Second World War threw a wrench into this system. The demands of total war meant that thousands of Mestizos were drafted and made to learn English so that commands could be issued effectively. This empowered Mestizos to mobilize and demand more respect and cultural autonomy. In places like the Second Mexican Cession and New Mexico, Mestizos were accepted enough and/or rare enough that most of these demands could be accommodated without any great conflict. In the Caribbean, Texas, and Arizona however, the La Raza movement ran into its most determined opponents. This alone would have been enough to trigger at least some conflict and animosity. However, another factor that arguably played an even bigger role in the radicalization on both sides was the dramatic post-war acceleration of intermarriage. For the first time, Americans from literally every race and region came together on an epic scale. Shockingly, putting together millions of hormonal young people into a life threatening situation meant that there was no shortage of romance in the barracks, and these often crossed racial lines. Even the normally ironclad line between White and Black wavered some (mainly between non-Southerners) although this was inadvisable to practice around Southern troops. Mestizo and White marriages (as well as some Mestizo-Black unions) were much more common than White-Black. It's estimated that by the end of the war, some 570,000 mixed Mestizo couples had been married in the service. After the war, intermarriage rates would continue to be above pre-war norms as many Mestizos who had learned trades/nursing and English in the military were able to join the middle class and take mostly White spouses (predominantly outside of the Caribbean and South).

At first it might seem unusual that an uptick in intermarriage would spark a backlash in the Mestizo community. If anything, it might seem like the next step towards true integration. However, with a strong Mestizo identity built on them being culturally and racially distinct from the rest of the American population, the prospect of mass intermarriage and assimilation seemed less like a way of integrating peacefully into the United States and more like the Yankees finally handling the "Mestizo Question" for good. Compounding this line of thought was a peculiar fact noted by demographers: half-white, half minority persons had a tendency to further marry into the White population and essentially become white. This explained why after a century of racial mixing (albeit limited) the United States was still "White" majority. One 1980 case study showed the example of a Chinese man who immigrated to California in 1895 and married a Russian woman. Over the course of the succeeding generations, the family became mostly White, with the youngest generation only being 1/8th Chinese and both them and their parents being functionally White. This was happening on a massive scale across the nation. While immigrant populations were positively eager to assimilate, the prospect of Mestizos being whitewashed out of their own homes sparked massive anxiety and fueled La Raza violence. On the side of the colonizers, there was no small amount of racial anxiety among White and Black Southerners about "allowing too much hybrid blood in." Race mixing of all sorts in the South was famously contentious on both sides, as has been noted previously.

It might seem unusual that Black Southerners were so invested in racial identity in a country where such preoccupations had harmed them for generations before the Civil War. The answer to this question lay in the Cackalack Compromise. While remarkably progressive for its time, by the midcentury it was holding the South back. Outside of the South and their Caribbean extensions, the United States was increasingly flexible in its views of race, ethnicity, and even culture, with a few notable exceptions. The Cackalack Compromise kept both Black and White Southerners invested in old-fashioned views on race. White Southerners were able to keep their own identity (sans Lost Cause BS from OTL) and managed to keep their communities under their control. Black Southerners were able to do the same thing. All of this was built on strictly racial conceptions of community. White and Black elites each had a vested interest in preserving the racial binary because it preserved their dominance over their communities. On the White side, lingering fears of mixing with Blacks (specifically White women) and losing ones "heritage" while not openly expressed, still existed in subdued and faded forms. On the Black side, there were more than a few conspiracy theories that either Mestizos or a future caste of half-Black half-White people would be used to knock Black people off of their perch and back into some kind of oppression. Another unspoken fact backing Southern Black opposition to the loosening of racial boundaries in the US was the fact that thanks to the Cackalack Compromise, Black Americans had essentially become the de facto co-rulers of the American Empire. There were more Black men (almost always men) in any given Congress than there had been Mestizos, Asians, and Jews combined over the course of American history. Having won a place of privilege after centuries of suffering, Black Southerners were not keen on losing it.

Despite the thrashing of conservatives and La Raza, racial lines in the United States are starting to relax in a way unseen before. Even in the South, the "Great Taboo" of White and Black intermarriage is starting to give way. The Mestizo population, despite having won cultural concessions, is more integrated and intermarried than ever. In the Philippines, large numbers of mixed-race persons who have no White blood are being born, mostly the children of Chinese and Filipinos. The Second Mexican Cession is becoming even more mixed up than before. Canada has seen large infusions of both White and non-White blood from the rest of the Union, a final method of obliterating the Canadian national identity. This ever accelerating mixing has led to the beginning of a new "American Race Theory." Many academics and demographers are theorizing that a day will come where the American population is so widely and evenly mixed that it will essentially create a new race. What physical form this theorized race would take was a matter of debate. Some believe that it will be a visibly non-white race with some white racial features, a consequence of immigration. The more popular theory is that the future American Race will be somewhere between French and Sicilian in appearance, visibly White, but darker in features. News of this theory was eagerly consumed by much of the public, and plenty of junk science went around arguing that an American Race might be, if not "superior," than at least better suited to a variety of things. This was in large part because American Eugenics, having been much less racist than the European variety, was able to survive as a pseudo-science after the War. We will hear more about this peculiar theory in the future. What's important to know is that by the dawn of the Castro Administration, America was an increasingly racially mixed society figuring out exactly what cultural identity it will carry into the future.

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White colonists prepare to confront La Raza protestors in Santiago de Cuba (1975)

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An interracial couple from Alabama (1977)

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An article on the theorized "American Race" (1981)
 
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Also, honestly, Tukhachevsky made more sense as the post-Stalin ruler of Eurasia than Zhukov (I know Stalin had him purged IOTL but still) considering he had some fairly interesting views IOTL as a POW in WW1 (he wanted Lenin to "plunge Russia into barbarism" and allegedly declared he was a neo-pagan).
 
I promise I'm alive! Finals, holidays, and some other law school stuff have been kicking my ass. Be on the lookout this weekend/early next week 👀
 
"A New Eurasia"
"A New Eurasia"

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"Old Man Zhukov" in his last public appearance in 1975

The Tenth Crusade was a shot in the arm for the Eurasian Union. Having suffered under sanctions and economic stagnation after the Kennedy Administration cut most economic ties with the regime, many were concerned for the future of the country. However, the massive surge in oil and natural gas prices that occurred as the Middle East erupted in flames profited the regime greatly. China and Europe alike bought billions upon billions of dollars worth of black gold from the Eurasians, and the surge in Eurasian purchasing power combined with easing tensions and an America facing its own economic difficulties meant that over a course of several years, America and much of the rest of the civilized world quietly lifted sanctions. The Eurasian giant came roaring back to life, and in the knick of time too. After all, not even Zhukov could live forever.

Vozhd Zhukov passed away in his sleep peacefully on May 9th, 1975. The country went into a frenzy of mourning that rivaled the mass outpouring of grief that met Josef Stalin. Even as new jets flew over the Kremlin and millions poured into Moscow to pay their respects to their deceased strongman, power struggles broke out behind the scenes. The Minister of Agriculture Igor Kulikov was assassinated alongside other ministers in a bombing, the head of the KGB died in a plane crash, and chaos reigned until, once again, a military strongman took the reigns. Dimitry Yazov was a young-ish, high-ranking officer in the Army who had built an effective power base in the Armed Forces. Using this power base, he kidnapped Field Marshal Mikhail Fedorov and forced him to endorse his bid for power (Fedorov would later die in a "tragic plane crash"). The military rallied to Yazov's cause, and the rest of the government apparatus fell in line because they didn't feel like getting shot. Yazov pledged to further the goals of Zhukov while also "carrying out needed reforms."

The biggest issue was the execution of the Eurasian Race Policy. While Yazov still agreed with the fundamental theory, he ended forced miscegenation and population transfers. This was not because Yazov was some kind of great humanitarian. He correctly feared that when the West regained its bearings, they might once again seek to shut Eurasia out of the global economy if such atrocities continued. Instead, Yazov created a new policy to encourage racial mixing: offering minorities and Russians new planned communities outside of crowded cities where they could intermingle in state of the art recreation centers, schools, and other amenities, while commuting to and from the city. This would, in Yazov's view, allow for a slower but more thorough and deep assimilation by large numbers of people into the state's ideal Eurasian culture. This would actually lead to Yazov later ending most restrictions on freedom of movement in the EU in 1977, on the 60th anniversary of the Revolution. Hailed as a revolution in human rights in the West, this was again an ideological move. As people left their isolated villages and communities for economic opportunities in the glistening Eurasian Metropolises of the Future, it not only made economic sense, it further encouraged a mixing and melting down of ethnic groups into one Eurasian Race. Ethnic "segregationism" was outlawed in all Eurasian cities, and for awhile many would take on something of a cosmopolitan appearance while the magic of inter-ethnic contact and state funded language education did its work. All of this made the lives of minorities and even Russians better, but it did not change the fundamental nature of the state. Eurasia was still fairly totalitarian, boasting a large security apparatus, and heavily surveilling the new cities and suburbs for signs of ethnic separatism or other anti-Eurasian ideologies. Furthermore, the end goal was still a fairly total cultural genocide of non-Russian groups. Despite this, minorities loved Yazov, and his "velvet glove wrapped around the iron fist" approach, as one American diplomat described it, brought further stability and prosperity to Eurasia.

If Yazov had a light touch at home, he was more aggressive abroad. He reasserted Eurasian dominance over Persia, crushing a fundamentalist Shi'ite revolt in Tehran with brutal force in 1979, while simultaneously masterminding Eurasian support for Arab jihadists fighting Germany during the Tenth Crusade. He also took advantage of Chinese dependence on Soviet and Persian oil to get China to ease (but not abandon) its revanchist designs on a fair amount of Eurasian territory. Aside from these moves, Yazov made sure he did everything possible to reassert Eurasian greatness abroad, hosting a World's Fair in 1980, increasing the number of atomic bomb tests being undertaken, and building up the Eurasian military. Yazov also poured money into technological research to further boost Eurasian economic growth. While the Eurasians were not as cutting edge as the Americans or Germans thanks to the nature of their totalitarian state, they were the first to adapt burgeoning computer technology to economic management, fueling further gains in productivity. Thanks to smart decision making, Eurasia was poised to play a major role in the future of mankind.
 
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