There are like no suitable pictures of Bela G. Lugosi! Lucien ascended the throne in 1975 and I'm chalking up how light his hair looks to the lighting of the photo. Born in 1932 he's married to an Italian princess. Also I got as close as I possibly could to an Eibon reference 😂
The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts
- Thread starter Born in the USSA
- Start date
Interesting times ahead for India. By Cthulhu's tentacles, what a world to live in!
I'm glad you think so! For now they'll be staking out a position on their own but come the Age of Fear they'll be back in a big way.
Politically more than anything. By the end of the Bush Wars the FBU was well and truly drained and none of the other AfD members wanted to get involved in bringing the Union to heel, so most of the actual fighting was to purge collaborators and loyalist elements and to drive the Company out of the country. Given the heterodox combination of traits Nehru pioneered it was far less useful as a proxy war between the Comintern and the Pact in any case and Thompson's tack was exclusively to mediate. It helps that (as I mentioned) without the Raj to play divide and rule, outside the much reduced Irredentists ethnonationalism is a dead letter. I'll give a clearer picture of the new status quo in the next update.
Hey there is a very real and logical economic and social reason for that... Do you KNOW how much it costs to get all the paperwork and livery re-branded if you have to change things! And then there would be the debate over the font to use, the color pallet... Trust me it's VASTLY more simple this way
Randy
Yeah the Company Mark worked into the flag wasn't being subtle but going from "practically no rights" to "the most rights of any British colony at the time" tended to paper over that for a generation. Classic case of "meet the new boss".Hey there is a very real and logical economic and social reason for that... Do you KNOW how much it costs to get all the paperwork and livery re-branded if you have to change things! And then there would be the debate over the font to use, the color pallet... Trust me it's VASTLY more simple this way
Randy
I made another tiny retcon and had Ayn Rand go into exile in Ceylon instead of the UK, it'll be clear why in the next update. Also, to better set the stage for the Age of Fear I'll do one super long post (or a few splitting it up into blocs if it gets unwieldily) dealing with the political parties in the major countries and their positions going in.
- The Providence Pact "Big 5" (their smaller neighbors tend to take cues from them)
- The United States
- The Republic of China
- The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
- The Brazilian Estado Novo
- The Republic of the Congo
- The FBU and major Dominions (most of the smallfry in the AfD basically just go with the Franco-British line, since they're either teeny tiny or vestigial empires that have lost most of their traditional territory)
- Franco-British Union proper/affiliate parties in other AfD members/Dominions
- Canada
- South Africa/Rhodesia
- Oceania
- The Comintern (It'll make sense why I'm treating it as a big blob, I promise!)
- The tangentially aligned
- The Indian Union
- The Ottoman Empire
- Japanese Empire and Kingdom of Thailand
I know I just posted this but after spending way too long looking up long defunct political parties instead of doing my media update I realize it's a huge undertaking and I likely won't be able to do it like that while I'm working. As a compromise I'll do something like they do in Reds!, namely list the major parties of the superpowers and add an authoritative list with all their cadet branches and affiliated parties across the bloc. It helps that the Comintern is doing its own weird thing and that the political spectrum of the US and FBU tend to mold their alliance structures given how dominant they are. To that end the new proposed structure will be:
- The US parties and their affiliates
- The Franco-British parties, their Dominion cadet branches and independent affiliates
- The Comintern and Indian Union (not allied in any way, just both politically very blobby by 1980 in different ways)
- The Great Powers, their parties and any affiliates
- The East Asian Coprosperity Sphere (Japan, Thailand)
- Oriental Treaty Organization (Ottoman Empire, independent Arab states, Ethiopia, maybe Persia)
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The Quest of Iranon- A Brave New World
-Though he had patiently declined the position of World Teacher in the 1920s, Jiddu Krishnamurti remained a valued spiritual and political leader in India until his death in the 1980s. Though only loosely affiliated with Theosophy after his turn toward political activism he insisted on including the Theosophy symbol in the new nation's flag as a testament to the religious tolerance it had been created to symbolize and which he now sought to make a permanent feature of the Union's government.
The Second Great Revolt was the last in a series of strains in Alliance-Pact relations dating back a decade or more, with the end of the India Crisis formally heralding the Entente-American split, the end of the Strange Aeon, and the beginning of the Age of Fear. An odd feature of the Strange Aeon was that although the weaponry tended to be more advanced (or at least more gruesome) there were hardly any brushes with disaster that theoretically could have ended with the mushroom cloud— nothing like the Cuban Missile Crisis or even the Korean War. Although there were plenty of very long and heavily guarded borders between the blocs and espionage was a constant concern historians tend to peg this lack of potential flashpoint events to a fluke of political geography, with each major faction either, like the Comintern, concentrated among itself or, like the other two, overwhelmingly dominant in an area with only token allies or neutrals around. Hence the Age of Fear. If the only thing stopping war was the fact that Alliance members in Asia and the Americas and Pact ones in Africa were technically aligned with their neighboring alliance structure what would the future hold in a crosshatched world of all against all? That's not for me to get into today.
The India Crisis (as it was known in the FBU) and the Bush Wars that had preceded it would have tectonic effects on the nature of the Dominion system and the Franco-British Union as a whole. There had already been a trend favoring the gradual independence of the most loyal* colonies but the Crisis had demonstrated the futility of trying to hold a restive colony of nonwhites absent good faith political autonomy, with Labour leader J.G. Ballard frequently going on long tirades about the banal and everyday horrors maintaining the colonial system was forcing on the Union even while the Africans were left to face the most visceral consequences. This bitter pill was much easier to swallow by the 70s because the administration of the colonies had by that point transitioned entirely to a loyalist native elite who stood to lose everything if their nations ever left the AfD. Guyana and Oceania had set a precedent for combining British and French colonial possessions, leading to the creation of a variety of newly independent Dominions loyal to the crown if not (de jure) subject to the Union, with the Union proper, not the component states, retaining strategically valuable exclaves as integral territory.
But what of India itself? While the ascension of Lucien I as King-Emperor in 1975 had kicked off an escalating cycle of unrest, the Second Great Revolt proper is usually dated to 1978, the year of the general strike and the high point of the mass mobilization that characterized the India Crisis. The FBU had signalled its unwillingness to stay in India any longer in the wake of the brutal slog of the Congo Crisis and the Bush Wars that had seen the Entente Armed Services deployed in combat essentially continuously since the mid-fifties and the Indian National Congress was able to declare a provisional government within the year. Nehru had not lived to see it but Krishnamurti had stewarded the independence movement ably in his absence, even commissioning a provisional constitution derived from Nehru's notes and theories before the India Crisis even began. With the discrediting of the Moderate and Irredentist factions several years before the Maximalists were firmly in control of the Congress and, with the Confederation government having successfully driven every possible other bastion of popular legitimacy to extinction, the Congress was firmly in control of the new state.
Nehruism drew from a wide variety of sources in a bid to create a third-way position hybridizing what he had seen as the benefits of both Fascism and Marxist-Trigonism and adapting the resulting amalgam to the Indian historical experience and cultural landscape. Fascism provided an excellent model for the fostering of cultural expression, with each state under the new system allocated funds to spend on the development of local styles of architecture and the arts, and also provided an excellent fiscal policy that accommodated the mixed economy of nationalized resources and private businesses the Maximalists favored. Though Vorticism was left at the door, Nehru also admired the Marxist-Trigonist policies of the Free Economy and Councilism, viewing the former as an effective way to improve the state of the economy through fiscal policy and the latter as the best method to ensure democratic accountability from the social base. Though a far lesser factor, all things considered, the state of Rational Anarchism in the Americas and Japan seems to have informed the Union's policy toward individual citizens, with a wide variety of personal restrictions abolished outright. This was seen as an essential step, with the overwhelming majority of citizens regarding the caste system those restrictions had enforced as an anachronism only retained for the privilege of elites who had done so well under Company and Confederation rule.
Once the Congress was in power these dynamics began to alter the nature of the party itself, transforming what was on paper merely the overwhelmingly dominant party in a theoretical multiparty system into a multiparty system in miniature. While American parties were strong things with subordinate labor unions that competed with one another over policy and the Comintern favored a decentralized ecosystem of language-based parties intentionally kept weak, equal to the labor unions and united around a central guiding policy**, the Congress would embrace a policy of fractionalism, with the different languages within the party empowered as separate party branches but with members caucusing across those lines and setting the party's policies through internal democracy.
Following the formation of the Indian Union the new government would stamp down on the violent but sporadic reprisals that had broken out in the wake of the Revolt, with Krishnamurti pushing for a general amnesty (barring cases of inciting or abbetting gender and ethnoreligious violence or politicide) from his position as an elder statesman within the Congress. While a majority of the former Confederation officials would take the offer, the elite classes were far more opposed to a government the saw poised to strip them of hereditary privileges and tax the living hell out of them, with the resulting Indian diaspora settling throughout the FBU and the Dominions. This "exile" community has historically provided the governments of the Union and the Dominions with some of their most stable and active support, a trend which continues into the modern day.
While the Union was absorbing or dismantling those organs of the Confederation government that helped or hindered the new state the time finally came to deal with the East India. In a widely heralded speech delivered across the nation's airwaves usually called "The Emergency" Premier Indira Gandhi made the forceful case that the Company had hindered and exploited the subcontinent since its arrival and would not be allowed to continue any further, citing the expulsion of the China branch in the Wushen Rebellion by name. As such she had ensured that although Company officials had been subject to the amnesty the Company's liquid assets had been seized pending review and its physical ones had been cordoned off or impounded. She announced on air that these assets would be nationalized or auctioned off to domestic concerns as appropriate and that no East India branch, affiliate or official would be permitted access to the nation's economy in any form. Now stripped of both its traditional bases of activity by a brutal 20th century those shattered elements of the Company that remained would be forced to consolidate in their last remaining stronghold in the Dominion of Ceylon.
-The Dominion of Ceylon had a government even more nakedly in thrall to the East India than the Confederation's had been, making it for all intents and purposes a Company special economic zone for most of its modern history. The rise of the particularly Randian Ceylon Renewal Front would see the nation renamed the Dominion of Kumari Kandam during the 80s but the Company remained secure as the power behind the ultranationalist and hypercapitalist throne.
With the passing of the Emergency the Union would undergo a diverse flowering of art, culture and societal movements, none more impactful on the global stage than the World State Movement that had been a major force pushing for independence for a generation. As in OTL Aldous Huxley had been longtime friends with Krishnamurti and had written a version of Brave New World around the same time. In this version the text ended with John the Savage accepting exile rather than embracing the downward spiral that lead to his suicide in the historical version. Living in the Confederation after the Second Clash, Huxley would publish a direct sequel in 1946. This second novel, Island, revolved around John's acclimation to the society to the island of Pala, made up of an exile community adopted into a preexisting culture influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism.
While the Palanese saw value in the World State's principles the community sought to employ them in a more fulfilling way, favoring personal spiritual development and individual choice over mind numbing Soma and fully artificial reproduction and striving to use technology for the benefit of man rather than man adapting himself to it. Island revolved around John gradually growing out of his emotional immaturity and coming to better understand himself and his place in the context of a broader society and the universe more generally, ending with the implication that he would attempt to become a World Controller to better export the more fulfilling life he had discovered in his exile. The duology would prove immensely influential, with the World State movement advocating for world peace and disarmament with the ideal of the eventual creation of a global international body marrying the reach of Brave New World's World State with the attitudes and approach fostered by the Palanese.
-The timeline's equivalent to the peace flag, the flag of the World State movement was inspired by the covers of Huxley's duology, with the globe inspired by Brave New World symbolizing the ideal of a universal international peacekeeping body and the myna bird representing the ideals of Island. The three stars represent the hope for peace between the Alliance, Comintern and Pact, and together the flag represented a world at peace among the stars.
*Read: "settler"
**"Vox Populi Vox Dei", the Comintern has such high levels of workplace and council democracy the actual positions of the bloc ebb and flow organically in response to public pressure with any factionalism, such as it is, the result of demographic differences that mirror society at large.
I start in a couple days but I might have time to start doing the political posts next week or thereabouts. In the meantime I'm opening the floor for questions since Act V is done!
So Indira is now effectively dictator of India, that's going to be... Interesting
The Esoteric Fascists/Vitalists are obsessed with that stuff, to the point that there's going to be factionalism (to greater or lesser degrees depending on the country) between those types and the plain old Christian theocrats who are onboard for the racialism and conspiracies but not the aliens. Kumari Kandam is it's own weird thing what with all the Objectivism but they're considered part of the general movement all the same. I'll get a bit more into how Vitalism is distinct from Esoteric Fascism when I get to the FBU political post but, spoiler, it's splitting hairs at the absolute most.
Only during the immediate period of consolidation. There's such a heavy emphasis on councilism in the Indian Union that cults of personality aren't really feasible, especially since the driving social forces behind Indian independence are so drastically different.
So, what happened to, if there are any, the descendants of Napoleon I through the deposed Napoleon II? Are they politically active? Have they tried to reclaim the family leadership? What is their relationship with the familial branch belonging to the usurpers AKA Napoleon III's offspring? Have they made attempts to stay relevant? Will any of them try and reclaim the throne in the future, if you don't mind me asking?
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Napoleon II had daughters, something Napoleon III used to great effect to legitimize himself due to the agnatic principles the Empire operated under at the time, though their lineage has done a better job of intermingling with the royal families of Europe (mostly Scandinavia) in the long run. Following the birth of his own son his supporters would push through an amendment to the constitution further cementing his line, something helped along greatly by the prestige he had won for overseeing the massive expansion of the Empire and victory over Russia in the Second Conflagration. Relations between the branches are fairly amicable all things considered, with Napoleon II's grandchildren and on retaining the title of prince and princess just like spares in the main branch. Though some have entered electoral politics, most of the nebulous Napoleon family not ruling another country are quite content to receive their automatic membership in the College of Guardians and quite a few of the more useful ones have been made ceremonial leaders of the various French colonies. With the creation of the Franco-British Union a further change was made adopting absolute primogeniture for the French throne, further cementing the new House of Angevin as the only serious game in town. By 1980 a Napoleon from a lesser branch only has a serious chance with the dissolution of the FBU, something at best unlikely given the political situation of the Age of Fear. It doesn't help that despite being an only child King-Emperor Lucien had five sons, the eldest of which will end up having several sons and daughters.
-Say hello to the Prince Imperial during the Age of Fear! Born in 1952, Victor has been very busy cementing Portugal's alliance with the FBU by producing many (many many) children with a Portuguese princess.
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Extra- An introduction to the Age of Fear
The end of the Strange Aeon and the start of the Age of Fear opened the door to a new and more aggressive geopolitical landscape as the anti-Comintern axis between the Providence Pact and the Alliance for Democracy suffered that final, fatal, fracture. To give a better idea of the factions at play (both within and between ideological blocs) I will be dividing an analysis of major political parties and factions (c. 1980) into three partitions:
- The United States and the Providence Pact- As the founder of the Fascist movement and first among equals in the Pact the American political spectrum tracks well with the political consensus that has become normalized throughout the bloc more broadly, from the Five Eyes to La Hermandad to ASEAN.
- The Franco-British Union and the Alliance for Democracy- The FBU has taken a more direct role in steering the politics of its vassals and allies as a result of its origins and the close ties its former colonies retain to the motherland, with not only affiliated but theoretically independent parties as in the Pact but also devolved cadet parties forming the dominant political force in the Dominions.
- The Comintern and the Great Powers- The Great Powers, characterized by an existence outside the three dominant power blocs but also a high level of global or regional influence, are unaffiliated with the Comintern itself but all nations and alliances in this category share the key feature of being either one-party states or overwhelmingly dominant-party systems and so will be covered together.
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My new place doesn't have internet yet so I can't make guarantees about how quickly I'll be able to put these out but I'm hoping for sooner rather than later.
Extra- The United States and the Providence Pact
-Symbol of the Five Eyes. Source: David Larocca
Properly considered, by the start of the Age of Fear the Providence Pact is something closer to three separate alliances that share a common set of goals rather than a single monolithic bloc. At the top of the heap are the Five Eyes, commonly referred to in conversation as the Big Five or the Five Ayes, since a veto from enough of them basically sinks your initiative stone dead. Made up of the United States of America, the Republic of China, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Brazilian Estado Novo and the Republic of the Congo, the Five Eyes have earned their position through a combination of large size and population and high levels of industrial and military development. The other two alliances are not subordinate to one another, rather acting as coequal regional power centers. La Hermandad is an alliance of the Hispanophone powers of the Americas, while ASEAN, the Alliance of South East Asian Nations, is made up of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nusantara and the Philippines.
As the most powerful single member and undisputed heart of the Pact, the politics of the United States of America have played an outsized role in the development of political culture within the alliance more broadly. As a quirk of the historical context of Philippine independence that nation is the only one with cadet branches of the American parties, with the other members having affiliate parties to one or more of the American ones.
- As the oldest explicitly Fascist party in the world, the Independence Party still goes a long way toward establishing the broader Fascist overton window. Still a party devoted to materialism (in the philosophical sense), cultural development, Georgist resource principles and urban interests, some within the party have called for a reappraisal of the Pact's stance toward the Comintern, having come to view the two blocs as economically similar enough (and the new Comintern culture sufficiently refined sixty years on) to warrant closer ties in the face of escalating Alliance bellicosity. Affiliates:
- Bolivarian Republic of Colombia- Radical Party of Columbia
- Bolivarian Republic of Ecuador- Radical Party of Ecuador
- Brazilian Estado Novo- Integralist Party of Brazil (maintains cadet branches in Portugal, Angola and Mozambique)
- Caribbean Confederation- Progressive Action Party
- Central American Republic- Progressive Action Party
- Dominion of Canada- Social Credit Party of Canada (factions)
- Dominion of Oceania- Justice Party (factions)
- Franco-British Union- Popular Republican Rally (factions)
- Kingdom of Persia- Laborer's Party (factions)
- Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- National Democracy
- Republic of Argentina- Radical Civic Union
- Republic of Bolivia- Revolutionary Nationalist Party
- Republic of Cambodia- Democratic Party
- Republic of China- Nationalist Party (factions)
- Republic of Liberia- Republican Party
- Republic of Laos- People's Revolutionary Party
- Republic of Mexico- Progressive Constitutionalist Party
- Republic of Paraguay- Liberal Party
- Republic of Peru- Independent Civil Party
- Republic of Nusantara- New Order Party
- Republic of the Congo- African Solidarity Party (factions)
- Republic of Vietnam- Constitutional Party
- Republic of Uruguay- Colorado Party
- Second Atlantean Empire- Freethinker's Party
- Though the Populist Party remains centered on rural interests and religious faith, the party has perhaps evolved the most from its original form under President Bryan, with the isolationism advocated by Huey Long gradually chiseled away in favor of a sort of humanitarian pacifism, an accommodation with the Fascist welfare and land policies and the complete purging of the last of the racists and unreconstructed Democrats from the party. Affiliates:
- Brazilian Estado Novo- Republican Party
- Dominion of Canada- Social Credit Party of Canada (factions)
- Dominion of Oceania- Justice Party (factions)
- Franco-British Union- Popular Republican Rally (factions)
- Kingdom of Persia- Laborer's Party (factions)
- La Hermandad- Liberation Army of the South (Zapatista)
- Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth- Polish People's Party
- Republic of Cambodia- Social Republican Party
- Republic of China- Nationalist Party (factions)
- Republic of Liberia- True Whig Party (back to its rural roots)
- Republic of Laos- National Progressive Party
- Republic of Nusantara- Nationalist Party
- Republic of the Congo- African Solidarity Party (factions)
- Republic of Vietnam- Personalist Labor Party
- Second Atlantean Empire- Agrarian Party
- Though not a political party in the traditional sense, the Liberty Party label adopted by politically unaffiliated Rational Anarchists is going strong, with a record presence in Congress since the start of the Thompson presidency. Although it lacks actual affiliates in the rest of the Pact, several Rational Anarchists in other countries remain aligned with the broader movement, particularly the Nihilists thriving in the Comintern, and it has also come to shape the Fascist and Populist movements abroad, especially as expressed in La Hermandad. Affiliates:
- Empire of Japan- Commoner's Party (Heimin tō)
- Ever the black sheep of the American political scene, the American Workingmen's Party is beginning to show its age, with decreasing membership rolls, a growing rift between the Esoteric Fascists and the Christian Theocrats, and persistent rumors it is being illegally funded by the Entente Renewal Front in a bid to destabilize the American political system. Affiliates:
- Dominion of Canada- Canadian Renewal Front
- Franco-British Union- Entente Renewal Front (de facto)
- La Hermandad- National Synarchist Union
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