The Pale Horse: The Northwest Montana Insurgency and its Aftermath (1987-2002)
- Thread starter XTrapnel
- Start date
What game is this from OTL? (TTL, I could actually see NWF members writing something like this...maybe when the Northwest Republic is declared, it becomes their national anthem, or at least is widely used as a battle song.)
Its from Far Cry 5. Where a cult called Eden Gate basically took control of a county in Montana due to a prophecy of a nuclear war by their prophet.
The very boss he pretends to hate, he works to form another state, education is his sin, to power bring his followers in.
Butte shares with Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kyiv the horror of being a genuine site of working class consciousness within a society organised "for" the working classes. This will have influenced it, especially under the diffuse enforcement of the CSA compared to the CCCP.
For those who don't know every soviet capital was subject to purges of its working classes on a political basis because of the attempt to politically control the working class. Particularly post war. This was when our lovely friend and biblically inspired liar Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for being associated with the capitols tendency. Now admittedly Solzhenitsyn does not pretend to be anything other than literaryily engaged with his subject: it is the reaction of his followers to his works of literary art as if they were history that make them corrupted. Oh yes the great american novel. Published in London. With Her Majesties' Supplement.
To move on with the "dissidents" in Butte, this is similar to dissent in Czechia or Hungary: that much of the dissent are self-interested middle classes, or on the ground hard as fuck prole organisers with a history of organisation. [Yes mid winter drinking in deer hunting lodges is drinking, oh no honey there's only one flayed skin this year, and Bobby^Stevie^Kevvie^Brian's missus has it].
So for all the organisation, Butte is only a space for this because, paradoxically, the wankers in Butte know they can only attain their ideal [power] via working class strength…
…now admittedly this is as unliked as 53 or 56 or 68, but it is still an appeal to syndicalism. And especially sad fucks who'll learn this history 70 years later over seas after everyone in the small cell of people talking about Lenin's real aims in [city] are dead.
yours,
Sam R.
Hoping X has enjoyed the holidays perfectly, unlike the horror of summer solistice with his burning majesty supplemented with steaming la nina.
Every time you post, it's like a depth charge of rhetorical nitromethane dropped in a bucket of analytical gasoline. Never change.
Which btw may have just been 'wrecked' by the volcanic explosion recently....
Five Days in May (1994) Part III: Suffering Shipwreck with Dignity
Five Days in May (1994) Part III: Suffering Shipwreck with Dignity
For both camps, the morning of 11 May was a time for the accounting of forces. The Haig Clique’s task was somewhat easier: Haig could rely absolutely on the two regiments of IntSec Guards based in Chicago and, thanks to the wholehearted cooperation of the Daley political machine (Daley himself having been unofficially promised the Governorship of the Haymarket CSR), had the People’s Militia of the Chicago AUZ, outnumbering the Guards by about two to one, at their disposal.
As it happened, the Chicago AUZ’s civil unrest response plans had been recently updated , the legacy of a series of student disturbances in 1988, which had started as spontaneous on-campus protests against the lack of police response to alleged sexual assaults by a handful of international students from the Centroamerican Workers’ Federation and had taken on an increasingly radical edge as it snowballed, to the point where order in the AUZ was under genuine threat. Accordingly, any dissent against the Haig Clique had been stamped out by noon on 11 May: the Chicago AUZ was under the Clique’s complete control.
Elsewhere, the situation was far more unclear. Of the AUZs other than Chicago, New York (where Chief Executive Norman Podhoretz’s decidedly technocratic sympathies had placed him in consistent opposition to Traficant) would almost certainly recognise the Haig Clique as the legitimate government. The other two were either firmly in the Traficant camp (Philadelphia) or deeply unreliable (St Louis). The New Afrika and Rio Grande CSRs, both of whose Governors were at least tangentially linked to the Haig Clique, could be counted on. It would be reasonable to assume the Delaware-Susquehanna CSR, where Governor Casey had welcomed Traficant, would be hostile to the Haig Clique. Haig was quietly confident that, if he could shift momentum decisively in his favour, the others would fall in line.
The Haig Clique’s greatest asset at present was Haig’s following within the Army of the CSA. Although the vast majority of units not deployed to the faltering Centroamerican Workers’ Federation were stationed in the Rio Grande CSR, one and a half thousand miles from Chicago, a presence had been maintained on the New England border (if shrunk somewhat following the détente of the 1970s). The Air Force of the CSA’s loyalty was somewhat more questionable. Its structure, established in its present form during the period of greatest tension between the CSA and Canada, was informed by the need to establish local air supremacy in the event of a multi-front Canadian invasion and then destroy the logistic networks of any Canadian-New Englander invasion force; local autonomy was an essential component of the CSA’s air strategy, with recruitment being undertaken almost exclusively from the CSR that each wing was stationed in. Accordingly, the Haig Clique would have to work on the assumption that airspace control would rest in the hands of the CSRs. The Navy (with two blue-water forces based in Charleston and Norfolk, and a smaller Milwaukee-based combat group covering the Great Lakes) was a virtually unknown element, although a rapid settlement of the crisis would almost certainly preclude naval power as a decisive factor.
By the early afternoon of 11 May, it was clear to both camps that no swift resolution would be possible. The Gubernatorial response to Haig’s and Dwyer’s speeches was almost unvarying: in CSR after CSR, the Governor in charge announced that, for the duration of the crisis, reserve elements of the People’s Militia would be called up, while all non-essential travel between CSRs would be halted. Across the CSA, the governing class was hedging its bets.
Of the statements of support issued on 11 May, the vast majority were entirely expected – the New Afrika, Rio Grande, Sequoyah and Heartland CSRs and the New York AUZ for Haig, the Delaware-Susquehanna CSR and Philadelphia AUZ for Traficant. Some, if not entirely unanticipated, were nevertheless disappointing for one of the factions – the Gullah CSR’s announcement for Traficant, although it could be explained away by Governor Clarence Thomas’ known reformist sympathies, came as something of a shock, while the refusal of Governor Baucus of the Grangeland CSR to declare one way or the other unnerved the Traficant camp somewhat. Only one declaration of support was truly unexpected.
The results of the 1993 Chairman elections had granted David Duke a permanent place in the political world of the CSA. His strong first-round results, coupled with his combative and entertaining TV presence, had ensured that he remained in the public imagination: by May 1994, the Popular Democratic Party had established branches in multiple CSRs and was gearing up for the first proper multi-party elections in the last fifty years, to take place in November. Accordingly, it was Duke who was turned to for comment by the Chicago AUZ’s broadcasting service once the scale of the situation had become clear. Reiterating his criticisms of Traficant from 1993 and suggesting that his proposed reforms were measures designed to weaken the CSA, allowing Canada and the PSA to divide it between them, he placed his entire party apparatus behind the Haig Clique. This endorsement, not courted in the slightest by Haig and coming as a complete surprise to the Popular Democratic Party’s upper echelons, nevertheless served to give Haig at least some democratic legitimacy going into the morning of 12 May.
For those Congressmen still in Chicago – by now, to all intents and purposes, held under arrest by the Haig Clique – 12 May was a torturous period of waiting. It was little more pleasant for the Traficant and Haig camps: despite wild rumours and counter-rumours of widespread bloodshed, of CSRs seceding from the CSA altogether, of entire brigades mutinying and shooting their officers, the stasis of 11 May continued into the second day of the crisis. The “Battle of Point Pleasant” is an excellent illustration of the day’s confusion. An armed standoff between two units of People’s Militia on Silver Bridge, running between the Debs and Blair Mountain CSRs, developed into a brief exchange of gunfire, which was terminated once the Lieutenant of the Blair Mountain People’s Militia detachment – a Point Pleasant native who happened to have dated the Debs People’s Militia Lieutenant’s sister in High School – was able to make contact with his counterpart. All in all, two Militiamen were lightly injured, with free flow of traffic over the bridge resumed in the afternoon. The battle was one of dozens of similar incidents on the 12th, as both sides jostled for position in a civil war which now seemed impossible to avert.
It was on 13 May that the Haig Clique made their fatal mistake. With a rapid resolution now essentially impossible, their largest immediate issue was securing a sustainable supply line into Chicago. Although Haymarket CSR People’s Militia detachments guarding the highways into Chicago had been happy to wave through vehicles carrying essential supplies so far, this situation could change at any moment: Governor Stockdale’s refusal to declare for either side began to be seen by the Clique less as a reasonable precaution than as an active threat. In reality, his vacillation was driven by internal factors more than anything else: with its combination of large industrial towns whose politicians were linked to the Daley machine and rural farming cooperatives and its heavy air and naval presence designed to counter any Canadian incursion into Lake Michigan, the Haymarket CSR was unusually evenly divided between Haig and Traficant supporters.
This state of paralysis was broken in the early hours of 13 May. The area which had been Michigan’s Upper Peninsula prior to the Second Civil War, with its long history of industrial radicalism and its influx of Finnish Syndicalist refugees throughout the 1940s, was almost certainly the part of the CSA where the Committee to Restore Syndicalism’s principles had the widest popular support: seeing that their Governor refused to throw himself behind the Chicago government, People’s Militia units in the area launched a spontaneous uprising, securing the peninsula and advancing as far South as Marinette by 8:00 in the morning.
This gave the Clique an opening which was fully exploited. At 8:30, Haig announced that Stockdale had forfeited his office, and called upon military and People’s Militia units to remove him by force. A sizeable detachment of IntSec Guards were dispatched North with a view to seizing as much of the coast as possible, while another was sent West to ensure that the road to Iowa City remained open: subduing the Haymarket CSA’s border guards with minimal force, their advance was fully underway by quarter to nine.
As was usual across the CSA, the Haymarket CSR’s People’s Militia was comprised by 1994 of middle-aged men retired from the Army’s general manpower reserve, teenagers who saw service as a more pleasant alternative to being drafted into the CSA’s doomed peacekeeping mission in CentroAmerica and community-minded locals close to retirement age; other than in the largest cities, it was armed with thirty-year-old army surplus light weaponry. The People’s Militia units between Chicago and Milwaukee stood no chance against the Guards - a brief but bloody skirmish in Kenosha managed to delay the guards for twenty minutes at the cost of over two dozen lives: nearby Racine was seized without a shot being fired, the Militia having taken control of the city unilaterally in the name of the Chicago government.
Utterly outmatched by Chicago government’s troops, reeling from multiple uprisings in towns across the CSR (Madison and Rockford had both declared for Chicago by 9:30), and prevented from calling in any of the (relatively loyal) air wings stationed in the CSR as air support by Haig loyalists’ seizure of about a third of the CSR’s independent air defence systems in the course of the Guards’ advance, Stockdale played the one card he had left. By 11:45, forward echelons of the general Guards two mileas away from the outskirts of Milwaukee reported that a vessel was pulling out of the city’s small naval dockyard: CSS John Paul Jones, the flagship missile cruiser of the Lake Michigan Combat Group, was making for open waters. The vessel was long out of range of any ordnance the Guards had to hand by the time anyone had grasped the implications of this: James Stockdale, former Admiral, had taken up his last command.
Although there is evidence that Haig considered ordering an air or missile strike on the John Paul Jones, there would have been little point: the fact that the loyalties of the crews manning the remaining two thirds of the Haymarket CSR’s air defence systems were unknown made any incursion into Lake Michigan a virtual suicide mission, while the ship’s state-of-the-art missile defences would be effective against anything but an overwhelming barrage of the Chicago Government’s extremely limited supply of heavy ordnance.
In any case, Stockdale’s escape, if irritating for Chicago, didn’t mar the fact that the Guards had overwhelmingly achieved their immediate objectives – by mid-afternoon, Lake Michigan’s coastline had been seized as far north as Sheboygan, while the detachment of Guards advancing to the West had reached Sterling, thirty miles from the Heartland CSR’s border. The morning’s events, however, had utterly failed to realize the Haig Clique’s longer-term aims: rather than seizing the entire CSR in one fell swoop, the offensive had simply caused a general collapse of order in the area, adding to the supply chain issues beginning to affect day-to-day life in Chicago.
Worse, the summary removal of Stockdale from his position had horrified those Governors who were still undecided. The first public denunciation of the Chicago government’s actions came from Dennis Kucinich, hitherto a relatively loyal Syndicalist: his public support of Traficant prompted an avalanche of similar declarations by undecided governors through the evening of 13 May and the morning of 14 May, with the Chicago government’s support reduced to the four CSRs who had supported the Committee to Restore Syndicalism from the outset by noon.
14 May saw the final and complete collapse of the Haig Clique’s momentum. As Stockdale loyalists within the Haymarket CSR began to coordinate with each other, the Northern advance of the Guards was halted in a series of unpleasant but far more evenly-matched engagements ten miles south of Green Bay – the increasingly exhausted Guards, faced with unorganised but effective civilian attacks on their logistical networks, were ordered to pull back to defensible positions by Mark Felt, who overruled Haig’s orders for the first time since the establishment of the Committee to Restore Syndicalism. By the afternoon of 14 May, Milwaukee had been abandoned, with the Guards in full retreat towards Chicago. Coupled with the Westward-advancing Guards detachment’s inexplicable loss of contact with Chicago in the early hours of the day, the Haig Clique had lost one fifth of its military strength for no gain at all.
The Chicago Government ended the day as the recipient of three further pieces of bad news. Of least immediate relevance was the behaviour of David Duke - noting which way the wind was blowing, and in the face of a rebellion from the Popular Democratic Party’s local branches, he fled Chicago in the afternoon of 14 May, denouncing Haig from the relative safety of Indianapolis that evening. More dangerously, the two brigades detached from the Southern Border to support the Chicago government had advanced by the afternoon of 14 May to the Rocheport Bridge crossing the Missouri: in the evening, their overall commander sent a terse message to the Chicago government stating that they would be halting there for the time being to ensure the security of critical infrastructure. More than half of all food transported in the CSA crossed the Rocheport Bridge: the commander’s actions sent a clear signal to the Chicago government that the Army’s sole aim at present was to ensure that whoever won the power struggle would have to make concessions to the armed forces.
Worst of all was to come. Since the beginning of the May Crisis, Jimmy Hoffa had ensured that the Teamsters Union stayed above the fray: his announcement on the evening of 14 May that all deliveries to Chicago and to New York were to halt, as the safety of drivers could no longer be guaranteed, meant that the Chicago Government was logistically cut off from the world. The effects were immediately felt in the New York AUZ, surrounded by hostile CSRs and reliant on road transport for much of the 4.4 million pounds of food per day needed in Manhattan alone: thanks to Podhoretz’s wholehearted embrace of MacNamara’s “lean ordering” philosophy, New York had less than eighteen hours of food stockpiled by the time of Hoffa’s announcement. Podhoretz had resigned by the morning of 15 May, destroying the Haig Clique’s last connection to the outside world.
Matters weren’t quite so desperate in Chicago: more sensible stockpiling policies meant that the city could support itself, with the institution of strict rationing, for up to a week. In that time, it was entirely possible that a mistake by Traficant could allow the Haig Clique to regain its footing. As it happened, the Haig Clique would be destroyed, at the hands of an unexpected source, by the afternoon of 15 May.
For both camps, the morning of 11 May was a time for the accounting of forces. The Haig Clique’s task was somewhat easier: Haig could rely absolutely on the two regiments of IntSec Guards based in Chicago and, thanks to the wholehearted cooperation of the Daley political machine (Daley himself having been unofficially promised the Governorship of the Haymarket CSR), had the People’s Militia of the Chicago AUZ, outnumbering the Guards by about two to one, at their disposal.
As it happened, the Chicago AUZ’s civil unrest response plans had been recently updated , the legacy of a series of student disturbances in 1988, which had started as spontaneous on-campus protests against the lack of police response to alleged sexual assaults by a handful of international students from the Centroamerican Workers’ Federation and had taken on an increasingly radical edge as it snowballed, to the point where order in the AUZ was under genuine threat. Accordingly, any dissent against the Haig Clique had been stamped out by noon on 11 May: the Chicago AUZ was under the Clique’s complete control.
Elsewhere, the situation was far more unclear. Of the AUZs other than Chicago, New York (where Chief Executive Norman Podhoretz’s decidedly technocratic sympathies had placed him in consistent opposition to Traficant) would almost certainly recognise the Haig Clique as the legitimate government. The other two were either firmly in the Traficant camp (Philadelphia) or deeply unreliable (St Louis). The New Afrika and Rio Grande CSRs, both of whose Governors were at least tangentially linked to the Haig Clique, could be counted on. It would be reasonable to assume the Delaware-Susquehanna CSR, where Governor Casey had welcomed Traficant, would be hostile to the Haig Clique. Haig was quietly confident that, if he could shift momentum decisively in his favour, the others would fall in line.
The Haig Clique’s greatest asset at present was Haig’s following within the Army of the CSA. Although the vast majority of units not deployed to the faltering Centroamerican Workers’ Federation were stationed in the Rio Grande CSR, one and a half thousand miles from Chicago, a presence had been maintained on the New England border (if shrunk somewhat following the détente of the 1970s). The Air Force of the CSA’s loyalty was somewhat more questionable. Its structure, established in its present form during the period of greatest tension between the CSA and Canada, was informed by the need to establish local air supremacy in the event of a multi-front Canadian invasion and then destroy the logistic networks of any Canadian-New Englander invasion force; local autonomy was an essential component of the CSA’s air strategy, with recruitment being undertaken almost exclusively from the CSR that each wing was stationed in. Accordingly, the Haig Clique would have to work on the assumption that airspace control would rest in the hands of the CSRs. The Navy (with two blue-water forces based in Charleston and Norfolk, and a smaller Milwaukee-based combat group covering the Great Lakes) was a virtually unknown element, although a rapid settlement of the crisis would almost certainly preclude naval power as a decisive factor.
By the early afternoon of 11 May, it was clear to both camps that no swift resolution would be possible. The Gubernatorial response to Haig’s and Dwyer’s speeches was almost unvarying: in CSR after CSR, the Governor in charge announced that, for the duration of the crisis, reserve elements of the People’s Militia would be called up, while all non-essential travel between CSRs would be halted. Across the CSA, the governing class was hedging its bets.
Of the statements of support issued on 11 May, the vast majority were entirely expected – the New Afrika, Rio Grande, Sequoyah and Heartland CSRs and the New York AUZ for Haig, the Delaware-Susquehanna CSR and Philadelphia AUZ for Traficant. Some, if not entirely unanticipated, were nevertheless disappointing for one of the factions – the Gullah CSR’s announcement for Traficant, although it could be explained away by Governor Clarence Thomas’ known reformist sympathies, came as something of a shock, while the refusal of Governor Baucus of the Grangeland CSR to declare one way or the other unnerved the Traficant camp somewhat. Only one declaration of support was truly unexpected.
The results of the 1993 Chairman elections had granted David Duke a permanent place in the political world of the CSA. His strong first-round results, coupled with his combative and entertaining TV presence, had ensured that he remained in the public imagination: by May 1994, the Popular Democratic Party had established branches in multiple CSRs and was gearing up for the first proper multi-party elections in the last fifty years, to take place in November. Accordingly, it was Duke who was turned to for comment by the Chicago AUZ’s broadcasting service once the scale of the situation had become clear. Reiterating his criticisms of Traficant from 1993 and suggesting that his proposed reforms were measures designed to weaken the CSA, allowing Canada and the PSA to divide it between them, he placed his entire party apparatus behind the Haig Clique. This endorsement, not courted in the slightest by Haig and coming as a complete surprise to the Popular Democratic Party’s upper echelons, nevertheless served to give Haig at least some democratic legitimacy going into the morning of 12 May.
For those Congressmen still in Chicago – by now, to all intents and purposes, held under arrest by the Haig Clique – 12 May was a torturous period of waiting. It was little more pleasant for the Traficant and Haig camps: despite wild rumours and counter-rumours of widespread bloodshed, of CSRs seceding from the CSA altogether, of entire brigades mutinying and shooting their officers, the stasis of 11 May continued into the second day of the crisis. The “Battle of Point Pleasant” is an excellent illustration of the day’s confusion. An armed standoff between two units of People’s Militia on Silver Bridge, running between the Debs and Blair Mountain CSRs, developed into a brief exchange of gunfire, which was terminated once the Lieutenant of the Blair Mountain People’s Militia detachment – a Point Pleasant native who happened to have dated the Debs People’s Militia Lieutenant’s sister in High School – was able to make contact with his counterpart. All in all, two Militiamen were lightly injured, with free flow of traffic over the bridge resumed in the afternoon. The battle was one of dozens of similar incidents on the 12th, as both sides jostled for position in a civil war which now seemed impossible to avert.
It was on 13 May that the Haig Clique made their fatal mistake. With a rapid resolution now essentially impossible, their largest immediate issue was securing a sustainable supply line into Chicago. Although Haymarket CSR People’s Militia detachments guarding the highways into Chicago had been happy to wave through vehicles carrying essential supplies so far, this situation could change at any moment: Governor Stockdale’s refusal to declare for either side began to be seen by the Clique less as a reasonable precaution than as an active threat. In reality, his vacillation was driven by internal factors more than anything else: with its combination of large industrial towns whose politicians were linked to the Daley machine and rural farming cooperatives and its heavy air and naval presence designed to counter any Canadian incursion into Lake Michigan, the Haymarket CSR was unusually evenly divided between Haig and Traficant supporters.
This state of paralysis was broken in the early hours of 13 May. The area which had been Michigan’s Upper Peninsula prior to the Second Civil War, with its long history of industrial radicalism and its influx of Finnish Syndicalist refugees throughout the 1940s, was almost certainly the part of the CSA where the Committee to Restore Syndicalism’s principles had the widest popular support: seeing that their Governor refused to throw himself behind the Chicago government, People’s Militia units in the area launched a spontaneous uprising, securing the peninsula and advancing as far South as Marinette by 8:00 in the morning.
This gave the Clique an opening which was fully exploited. At 8:30, Haig announced that Stockdale had forfeited his office, and called upon military and People’s Militia units to remove him by force. A sizeable detachment of IntSec Guards were dispatched North with a view to seizing as much of the coast as possible, while another was sent West to ensure that the road to Iowa City remained open: subduing the Haymarket CSA’s border guards with minimal force, their advance was fully underway by quarter to nine.
As was usual across the CSA, the Haymarket CSR’s People’s Militia was comprised by 1994 of middle-aged men retired from the Army’s general manpower reserve, teenagers who saw service as a more pleasant alternative to being drafted into the CSA’s doomed peacekeeping mission in CentroAmerica and community-minded locals close to retirement age; other than in the largest cities, it was armed with thirty-year-old army surplus light weaponry. The People’s Militia units between Chicago and Milwaukee stood no chance against the Guards - a brief but bloody skirmish in Kenosha managed to delay the guards for twenty minutes at the cost of over two dozen lives: nearby Racine was seized without a shot being fired, the Militia having taken control of the city unilaterally in the name of the Chicago government.
Utterly outmatched by Chicago government’s troops, reeling from multiple uprisings in towns across the CSR (Madison and Rockford had both declared for Chicago by 9:30), and prevented from calling in any of the (relatively loyal) air wings stationed in the CSR as air support by Haig loyalists’ seizure of about a third of the CSR’s independent air defence systems in the course of the Guards’ advance, Stockdale played the one card he had left. By 11:45, forward echelons of the general Guards two mileas away from the outskirts of Milwaukee reported that a vessel was pulling out of the city’s small naval dockyard: CSS John Paul Jones, the flagship missile cruiser of the Lake Michigan Combat Group, was making for open waters. The vessel was long out of range of any ordnance the Guards had to hand by the time anyone had grasped the implications of this: James Stockdale, former Admiral, had taken up his last command.
Although there is evidence that Haig considered ordering an air or missile strike on the John Paul Jones, there would have been little point: the fact that the loyalties of the crews manning the remaining two thirds of the Haymarket CSR’s air defence systems were unknown made any incursion into Lake Michigan a virtual suicide mission, while the ship’s state-of-the-art missile defences would be effective against anything but an overwhelming barrage of the Chicago Government’s extremely limited supply of heavy ordnance.
In any case, Stockdale’s escape, if irritating for Chicago, didn’t mar the fact that the Guards had overwhelmingly achieved their immediate objectives – by mid-afternoon, Lake Michigan’s coastline had been seized as far north as Sheboygan, while the detachment of Guards advancing to the West had reached Sterling, thirty miles from the Heartland CSR’s border. The morning’s events, however, had utterly failed to realize the Haig Clique’s longer-term aims: rather than seizing the entire CSR in one fell swoop, the offensive had simply caused a general collapse of order in the area, adding to the supply chain issues beginning to affect day-to-day life in Chicago.
Worse, the summary removal of Stockdale from his position had horrified those Governors who were still undecided. The first public denunciation of the Chicago government’s actions came from Dennis Kucinich, hitherto a relatively loyal Syndicalist: his public support of Traficant prompted an avalanche of similar declarations by undecided governors through the evening of 13 May and the morning of 14 May, with the Chicago government’s support reduced to the four CSRs who had supported the Committee to Restore Syndicalism from the outset by noon.
14 May saw the final and complete collapse of the Haig Clique’s momentum. As Stockdale loyalists within the Haymarket CSR began to coordinate with each other, the Northern advance of the Guards was halted in a series of unpleasant but far more evenly-matched engagements ten miles south of Green Bay – the increasingly exhausted Guards, faced with unorganised but effective civilian attacks on their logistical networks, were ordered to pull back to defensible positions by Mark Felt, who overruled Haig’s orders for the first time since the establishment of the Committee to Restore Syndicalism. By the afternoon of 14 May, Milwaukee had been abandoned, with the Guards in full retreat towards Chicago. Coupled with the Westward-advancing Guards detachment’s inexplicable loss of contact with Chicago in the early hours of the day, the Haig Clique had lost one fifth of its military strength for no gain at all.
The Chicago Government ended the day as the recipient of three further pieces of bad news. Of least immediate relevance was the behaviour of David Duke - noting which way the wind was blowing, and in the face of a rebellion from the Popular Democratic Party’s local branches, he fled Chicago in the afternoon of 14 May, denouncing Haig from the relative safety of Indianapolis that evening. More dangerously, the two brigades detached from the Southern Border to support the Chicago government had advanced by the afternoon of 14 May to the Rocheport Bridge crossing the Missouri: in the evening, their overall commander sent a terse message to the Chicago government stating that they would be halting there for the time being to ensure the security of critical infrastructure. More than half of all food transported in the CSA crossed the Rocheport Bridge: the commander’s actions sent a clear signal to the Chicago government that the Army’s sole aim at present was to ensure that whoever won the power struggle would have to make concessions to the armed forces.
Worst of all was to come. Since the beginning of the May Crisis, Jimmy Hoffa had ensured that the Teamsters Union stayed above the fray: his announcement on the evening of 14 May that all deliveries to Chicago and to New York were to halt, as the safety of drivers could no longer be guaranteed, meant that the Chicago Government was logistically cut off from the world. The effects were immediately felt in the New York AUZ, surrounded by hostile CSRs and reliant on road transport for much of the 4.4 million pounds of food per day needed in Manhattan alone: thanks to Podhoretz’s wholehearted embrace of MacNamara’s “lean ordering” philosophy, New York had less than eighteen hours of food stockpiled by the time of Hoffa’s announcement. Podhoretz had resigned by the morning of 15 May, destroying the Haig Clique’s last connection to the outside world.
Matters weren’t quite so desperate in Chicago: more sensible stockpiling policies meant that the city could support itself, with the institution of strict rationing, for up to a week. In that time, it was entirely possible that a mistake by Traficant could allow the Haig Clique to regain its footing. As it happened, the Haig Clique would be destroyed, at the hands of an unexpected source, by the afternoon of 15 May.
Awesome update that gives even more insight into the political realities in the various republics of the CSA. Now I'm thinking about a Zhirinovsky-style spinoff timeline where David Duke manages to take over as the nation shakes itself apart. I'd like to think the CSA's political system, even at its least effective, would be resistant to such a horrible outcome (even though he's already been mentioned here I flinched when I saw his name come up in this context), but grimdark comes when you least expect it.
Michael Aquino and his Mormon puppet underlings airlifted into Chicago?
Duke will take over the CSA and launch a "war of liberation" against the PSA, New England, and Canada in order to "reunify" "the great North American Nation" from "the evils of imperialism and disunity." After this war is won he will implement "Juche with American Characteristics" as the state ideology.
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*shudders at the realization that Frank Rizzo probably held some sort of high office ITTL*
That'll certainly be an interesting point of contention in the future. NYC and Chicago have pretty well survived deindustrialization IOTL, but will St. Louis be able to keep its autonomous status into the 21st century if its decline continues as IOTL?
Not in Grangeland? That's a tad surprising.
Very interesting; I'm a bit surprised that one of the fleets isn't in Mobile, though.
Now that is a masterful piece of allohistorical allusion.
For some reason, I'm reminded of the naval component of the Iran-Iraq War, with all its petty sorties and tit-for-tat raiding, and the fact that Iraq's naval infrastructure was more vulnerable than a baby deer on a Tesla testing track.
Not too surprising, the CSA probably isn't pursuing Reagan's 600 Ship Navy (which Naval Station Mobile was part of iOTL).
Now I would imagine that there would be a fleet tasked with the Caribbean and South Atlantic (akin to OTL's 4th Fleet) but it'd probably be based in Jacksonville or somewhere else along the Atlantic seaboard (again, akin to OTL's 4th Fleet).
Given how militarized the Great Lakes are ittl is it safe to assume that the ship builders of Ontario have remained afloat thanks to generous military contracts? Without the constraints of the Lachine canal they would be able to turn out even cruiser sized ships (though I imagine Canadian budgets will mean that they stick to frigates and corvettes).
Isn't Jimmy Hoffa in his 80s? Fuckin Emperor of Truckerkind out here. Dude probably looking like Palpatine, just sitting in the national office and cutting off all food to the CSA's two biggest cities
I’m thinking of just how the teamsters got so powerful ITTL. It’ll be auto manufacture technocrats and unionists joining up with the teamsters to cripple the railways technocrats and unionists. Which leads to Bill and Debs excellent syndicalist publishing house’s “Hoffa: true syndicalisms enemy and union buster.”
The wheels are well and truly off the wagon right now. Hopefully this means the worst is over and there'll be no more bloodshed with Haig's position becoming untenable. Be interesting to see what fallout it'll have for the US in general and what's going to happen to that slice known as Montana.
IIRC, the protests which culminated in Tiananmen Square started off in similar circumstances, with unverified allegations that students in Beijing from China-aligned African countries were sexually harassing Chinese women sparking off a limited demonstration which largely succeeded in its aims and convincing the students that they could push for changes on a slightly larger scale.
Now that you mention it, Rizzo is exactly the sort of politician who'd have dominated urban politics during the George Meany era.
Glad someone caught it. The Mothman, being an interdimensional being and thus above partisan politics, has remained steadfastly neutral during the May Crisis.
Both Canada and the CSA have smallish combat groups (a cruiser plus a half-dozen frigate/corvette picket ships to deal with incoming missiles) based in the Great Lakes, largely to serve as floating anti-aircraft platforms in the event of a war. Both sides consider air dominance over the Great Lakes region to be fundamental to the outcome of any war, and given that both sides pretty much know where their opponent's static air defences are by this point, anything which can add an element of unpredictability is welcome. This won't become relevant to the TL for a fair few updates, but it's worth noting that the Canadian airforce possesses arguably the world's best SEAD capability at this point.
Thinking about it further, the life expectancy of both combat groups would have been measured in hours rather than days in the event of a war. Given the lack of an equivalent in TTL of the Falklands War (the only naval war of note since the Second Weltkrieg has taken place between the Philippines and Indonesia and involved forty-year-old destroyers flailing ineffectually at each other), neither side has much idea about just how effective Exocet equivalents are against even fairly modern ships.
Hoffa announces the trucking halt (1994, colourised)
How tightly integrated are the militaries of the Commonwealth at this point. I'm guessing after the Entente reclaimed the Birthright the British Army, RN and RAF were re-established from a mix of exile, Dominion and carefully screened former UoB personnel but that was over 40 years ago at this point. Are there non-Canadian Commonwealth units permanently based in Canada?