alternatehistory.com

The reworked and, I assume, ASB free version of the last chapter.




After a tense peace in the Middle East after the Suez Crisis and the Six Day War in 1967, conflict erupted again in 1973. Iraq had become a republic and a dictatorship under the Arab Socialist Baath party, ending British influence in the region by the late 1960s. Egypt, Iraq and Syria banded together and in 1973 launched a surprise attack against Israel to destroy it once and for all, the so-called Yom Kippur War. Israel was under the threat of being defeated, so it invoked a military pact with Italy signed in 1957, which guaranteed that one would support the other if it was the victim of Egyptian aggression.

Ciano was a bit reluctant to uphold his end of the deal, since he couldn’t use an enflamed Arab public opinion against him now that he also was fighting in Africa and had that entire continent riled up. He nonetheless supported Israel since backstabbing the Israelis would undoubtedly backfire on Italy in terms of Western sympathy. The Egyptian offensive into the Sinai stopped within range of its own anti-aircraft defences; the IDF couldn’t push them back, but the Egyptians didn’t advance any further. The reason for that was that Egypt came under air attack from the Regia Aeronautica while an armoured division moved to Sidi Barrani, a fairly tame military intervention on Italy’s part considering what it was capable of. It was enough for Israel to grind the Syrians and the Iraqis to a standstill at Karmiel, preventing a breakout toward Haifa just 25 kilometres away. Arab forces were driven back into the Golan Heights, but there they managed to hold a defensive line under the cover of SAMs provided by the Soviet Union, which prevented Israel from gaining air superiority.

The war ended through American as well as Soviet mediation, allowing Syria and Iraq to get away with a status quo ante bellum peace, apart from small war reparations, while Egypt and Israel agreed to a referendum on the Sinai’s future to be held in 1974 under UN supervision. The Arabs walked away fairly unscathed and they had been fairly successful militarily, unlike in 1948, 1956 and 1967, but the outcome was still widely perceived as a failure because nothing was achieved for the Palestinian cause (many of them remained stuck in surrounding countries, particularly in Jordan). The OPEC initiated an oil embargo against Israel and its Western backers, but the effects were mitigated by the effect that the competing PESA continued to sell oil to the affected countries. With greatly diminished oil supply, oil prices did rise and Italy made a lot of money, while other Western states suffered from stagflation in the 1970s. The Arab League cut off diplomatic ties with Israel and Italy.

The fascist bloc, however, was showing cracks. Portuguese Prime Minister Caetano was fundamentally an authoritarian, but he did make some efforts to open up the regime. Soon after taking power, he renamed the regime as the “Social State,” and slightly increased freedom of speech and the press and conducted an emancipation program in the colonies (the latter had been effective, and by 1975 the colonial war had become rather low-key). These measures did not go nearly far enough for a significant element of the population who had no memory of the instability which preceded Salazar. The people were also disappointed that Caetano was unwilling to open up the electoral system; the 1969 and 1973 elections saw the National Union – renamed People's National Action – sweep every seat, as before. However, even these small reforms had to be wrung out of the hardliners in the regime – most notably Thomaz, who was not nearly as content to give Caetano the free rein he had given Salazar. By 1973, the hardliners were pressuring Caetano to end his reform experiment, causing discontent to simmer among the people.

In Spain, King Juan Carlos I functioned as active head of state during periods of Franco’s temporary incapacity in 1974-’75 and in October 1975 Franco gave him full control, dying three weeks later on November 20th. His accession met with relatively little parliamentary resistance from the ruling “Movimiento Nacional” party. He, however, quickly initiated reforms that displeased conservative and Falangist elements, especially in the military, who had expected him to maintain the authoritarian state. In July 1976 he dismissed Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro who had been trying to continue Francoist policies in the face of the King’s reformist stance. Although recycled as a moderate during the final years of Franco’s rule, Navarro was in fact a hardliner who had been involved with the “White Terror,” signing thousands of death warrants in the 1936-1939 timeframe.

Navarro was replaced with Adolfo Suarez, a former leader of the Movimiento Nacional. Navarro being replaced by the King rather than becoming a new caudillo displeased Ciano, who disliked the precedent that a head of government could be replaced by his monarch. The Estado Novo regime was also displeased since it feared the effects of its Spanish neighbour’s democratization on the growing demand for reform in its own country. Their arguments against “bourgeois capitalist democracy,” however, fell on def ears with King Juan Carlos. In September 1976 Spain was confronted by 350.000 unarmed Moroccans brandishing Moroccan flags, portraits of King Hassan II and Korans. They’d been given permission by King Hassan II to march into the Spanish Sahara and they went unopposed by the Spanish Armed Forces on the King’s orders. That was the final straw to the domestic opponents of Juan Carlos’s reforms as well his foreign opponents, particularly Italy and Portugal. Rome and Lisbon were alarmed by Spanish negotiations with Morocco concerning the surrender of the Spanish Sahara. They viewed possible Spanish concessions to an Arab state as a dangerous example to their own colonial peoples, who had just been pacified through combinations of force and moves toward emancipation.

On September 7th 1976 members of the “Guardia Civil” led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero seized control of parliament and placed Juan Carlos under house arrest as an “illegitimate usurper,” the rightful heir being his father. This was ironic since Franco had passed over Juan Carlos’s father as his successor because he was thought to be too liberal. Infante Juan was blackmailed into ascending the throne – with the threat that his son Juan Carlos would be tried for treason and face lifelong imprisonment, being spared execution only because he was a royal. He became a puppet ruler as King Juan III. The Spanish military reinstated Navarro as Prime Minister while Juan Carlos was sent into internal exile to a villa on the island of Formentera, just off the coast of Ibiza. The first thing Navarro and his military junta did was to break off negotiations with Morocco concerning the Spanish Sahara, and order riot police and soldiers to chase the Moroccan protestors back across the border with truncheons, rubber bullets and tear gas. The Spanish Army clashed with Moroccan troops sent by Hassan II in response, and Spanish forces proved superior by far. Morocco and Spain found themselves in a shooting war. In the meantime, there was a major protest in Spain, but security forces broke it up and further protests were limited due to the rally to the flag effect. Besides that the separatist Basque ETA stepped up its terrorist activities, thereby legitimizing continued dictatorship.

In Italy itself the fascist regime remained fairly popular due to the wealth and the opportunities it provided, though there were some objections to it. Firstly, fascism appealed the most to the generation that had come of age between 1914 and the early 1950s: it appealed much less to the post-war generation, which had not experienced the Great War, the “mutilated victory,” post-war instability, the great depression, WW II and the reconstruction era. The generation that came of age post-1955 didn’t see the need for authoritarianism and uniformity as much as earlier generations. In the meantime, like his father, Galeazzo Ciano was not above extracting private profit from his public office, using his influence to depress a company’s stocks, after which he’d buy a controlling interest, then increase his wealth after the value rebounded. He introduced an element of mild corruption into the system, and power abuse by state and party officials was a serious annoyance to many Italians by the early 1970s. This was starkly contrasted against Mussolini’s incorruptibility, more so since the latter’s lifestyle had been fairly Spartan compared to Ciano’s taste for the finer things in life such as a bourgeois game of golf. He also never did have the clout of his illustrious predecessor since King Umberto II asserted himself after Mussolini’s death. Besides that, he had rivals like Pavolini waiting in the shadows for a moment of weakness to usurp his position. Ciano, however, still had the prestige of being Mussolini’s son-in-law going for him as well his status as a first generation fascist.

Nonetheless, Ciano felt the need to increase funding to Italy’s secret police to bolster his position: the OVRA (Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Antifascism – Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo). The OVRA’s powers were increased and along with it the definitions of what constituted anti-fascism, turning Italy into a more repressive society than before. Among the OVRA’s victims were feminists: in the late 1960s groups of women who rejected the gender roles imposed by the fascist state banded together, mostly inspired by liberal democratic, socialist or outright Marxist-Leninist ideas. Feminists were arrested by the OVRA and forced to follow re-education, which consisted of the following: memorizing and parroting quotes of Mussolini concerning the “natural roles” of men and women; psychological torture like sleep deprivation, humiliation, solitary confinement and fear; and physical torture when all else failed. All-in-all, corruption issues and increased repression made the populace rather apathetic, mildly supportive at best, while state propaganda seemed a bit hollow. Added to this was the fact that, for lack of reform, state officials continued to rely on existing procedures, producing the annoyance of bureaucratic red tape (the truth was that this already existed under Mussolini to an extent, but that his personality cult and popularity deflected blame to his underlings). The fiftieth anniversary of the March on Rome in October 1972, though it was grand, just didn’t have the Mussolinian patina to it of the fortieth, thirtieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries (even though his picture was everywhere one looked).

In the end antifascists could level accusations of conservatism, corruption, repression and red tape against the Italian state all they wanted, but combined those factors didn’t accumulate nearly enough resentment for a full-blown revolution. As late as 1973, the OVRA declared in a report that antifascist activities and sentiments were negligible and not a threat to national security. Many critics agreed that there should be reforms and relaxations of some kind, which had to do with zeitgeist as well: fascism was an ideology born in the interbellum and it appealed the most to the generation that had witnessed WW I, the post-war chaos, the mutilated victory, the golden years in the 1930s when Italy was mostly spared the consequences of the Depression, WW II and post-war reconstruction (i.e. the generation that had consciously experienced any significant part of the 1914-1952 timeframe). The generation that had come of age after 1958 had never experienced such crises and didn’t see why their country couldn’t become freer. However, as late as the mid 1970s only a select few argued that fascism was finished. Many of those were aging exiled Italian communists and socialists who repeated ad nauseam that fascism was doomed due to “the inexorable march forward to socialism dictated by iron Marxist laws, which would relegate fascism to the ash heap of history.” By the 1970s these surviving exiles, mostly members of Mussolini’s generation, were going extinct (besides that, their impact had always been negligible since they had always been ignored). Only in combination with external factors would internal issues precipitate the fall of fascism, but the “Second Duce” Ciano didn’t get to see that because he died of a major stroke in November 1977, aged 74. It was the culmination of a cardiovascular condition he’d been diagnosed with in 1971.

In 1977, there were only two first generation fascists left who were big enough to possibly succeed Ciano: there was Pavolini, but he’d been exiled to the Dodecanese years ago, and there was the 82 year-old Dino Grandi who reluctantly accepted the position of Duce out of a sense of duty, though he styled himself Prime Minister since he believed “Mussolini was and is the Duce of Fascism.” He was old and lacked the energy as well as ambition for the office bestowed upon him, allowing corruption to become ubiquitous. He soon faced a foreign policy crisis that dragged the country into another war.

Portugal still owned the exclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu which together constituted Portuguese India. On February 27th 1950, the Indian government asked the Portuguese government to open negotiations about the future of Portuguese colonies in India. Portugal asserted that its territory on the Indian subcontinent was not a colony but part of metropolitan Portugal and hence its transfer was non-negotiable; and that India had no rights to this territory because the Republic of India did not exist at the time when Goa came under Portuguese rule. When the Portuguese Government refused to respond to subsequent aide-mémoires in this regard, the Indian government, on June 11th 1953, withdrew its diplomatic mission from Lisbon. By 1954, the Republic of India instituted visa restrictions on travel from Goa to India which paralysed transport between Goa and other exclaves like Daman, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Meanwhile, the Indian Union of Dockers had, in 1954, instituted a boycott on shipping to Portuguese India. Between July 22nd and August 2nd 1954, armed activists attacked and forced the surrender of Portuguese forces stationed in Dadra and Nagar Haveli (the latter two were ceded in 1954). On August 15th 1955, 3.000-5.000 unarmed Indian activists attempted to enter Goa at six locations and were violently repulsed by Portuguese police officers, resulting in the deaths of between 21 and 30 people. The news of the massacre built public opinion in India against the presence of the Portuguese in Goa and on September 1st 1955, India closed its consulate in Goa. Foreign mediation failed to produce any tangible results and Lisbon felt confident by the firm support of Rome.

In 1956, Mussolini attacked Egypt and the Indian ambassador was told by Ciano, then still Foreign Minister, that India could expect the same treatment as Egypt if it invaded Portuguese possessions, possibly with the support of Italy’s allies if need be. Nehru was intimidated, certainly because these words were backed up by precedent. He couldn’t think of any reason why Italy would back off rather than giving India the Egyptian treatment. Leaving an Indian annexation of Goa unopposed would be a major loss of face for the entire fascist bloc. The entire matter was shelved indefinitely when Italy tested its first atomic bomb in 1958 since Nehru was unsure as to whether Mussolini would go that far (his use of mustard gas on the Ethiopians in 1935, however, spoke volumes and there was no indication that Mussolini viewed atomic bombs as anything more than big explosives). India limited itself to peaceful means, such as a total economic embargo against Portuguese possessions, but for the sake of national pride Portugal wouldn’t give up even though holding on to these exclaves meant haemorrhaging money. Much of it was spent on heavily fortifying these exclaves with defence in depth consisting of pillboxes, casemates, trenches, barbed wire, anti-tank ditches, Czech hedgehogs, barbed wire, mine fields, artillery batteries and machine gun nests with overlapping fields of fire. By the 1970s Goa, Daman and Diu were among the most fortified places in the world.

India strengthened its relations with the USSR in response and got Soviet aid for its nuclear weapons program, conducting an 8 kiloton test codenamed “Smiling Buddha” in May 1972. By late 1977 India had seven weapons available to it and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, feeling strengthened, tried to reopen negotiations with Portugal concerning the status of Portuguese India. The technocratic Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano reiterated that Portugal’s territories on the Indian subcontinent were 1) an integral part of metropolitan Portugal and 2) that India had no rights to this territory since it had come under Portuguese rule long before India even existed as a country. Its status wasn’t negotiable. Indira Gandhi responded by ordering a naval blockade of Goa, Daman and Diu, escalating the crisis to the point where backing down would mean major loss of face. Frantic arbitration by the United States and the Soviet Union tried to steer the world away from a conflict between two nuclear powers; the US suggested a referendum and the Soviets were generous enough to suggest a five-year transition period. Even the Vatican’s mediation had no effect, even though Pope Paul VI had been directly involved. Heightened tensions, stubbornness, pride, conviction, miscommunication, lack of empathy, fear of losing face and underestimation of their adversary on both sides ensured that diplomatic efforts came to naught. In the end Prime Minister Gandhi ordered Operation Vijay to commence on December 10th 1977, upon which 40.000 Indian troops assaulted Portuguese defences. She hoped to vindicate her rule by decree with a military victory against a reviled colonial power. Despite their numerical superiority, the tenacious Portuguese defence initially held them back.

Caetano immediately invoked an emergency teleconference of the San Remo Pact powers and got Italian support, with Grandi issuing an ultimatum to India to cease and desist within 24 hours or face war. Frantic negotiations by the US and the USSR had no results since both parties rejected compromise, and the spectre of nuclear war loomed. Under the mistaken assumption that the Soviets would actively support them, the Indian government allowed the ultimatum to expire and incurred the wrath of Mussolini’s ghost. US Forces went to DEFCON 3 while Soviet forces were put on a similar state of alert. In the meantime, a naval taskforce centred on guided missile battleships Impero and Roma, aircraft carrier Falco and guided missile cruisers Gorizia and Fiume appeared off the Indian west coast to provide fire and air support to ground troops, also firing cruise missiles at targets deep inside India. Unbeknownst to the Indians they carried a small number of nuclear shells. Italian elite forces were deployed to assist their allies, the Portuguese defenders. By the end of January Portuguese defences buckled under sheer weight of numbers and their positions were overrun. Under heavy cover fire from Italian 15 inch naval guns, Portuguese and Italian defenders were evacuated. Dino Grandi threatened nuclear war, but lacked the stomach for it and as a face saving measures ultimately accepted an American proposal to have India “buy” these exclaves from Portugal. Lisbon agreed to “sell” for a sum of 1.5 billion dollars.

Anti-war sentiments aroused by this pointless and costly war combined with frustration about the administration’s rigidity, sluggishness, repression, political corruption and economic nepotism. Massive student protests erupted in Rome in March 1978 demanding reforms from the fascist regime: such as the abolition of obsolete bureaucratic procedures; more anti-corruption efforts; an end to the nepotistic favouritism in the career ladder for the sons of big party officials; change to the repressive gender roles still imposed by the state to a certain extent, even though universities had opened their doors for women; an end to extra-legal arrests and the use of torture by the OVRA to extract confessions. Above all, however, they demanded an end to the Italian involvement in postcolonial and neo-colonial conflicts in the Third World, especially in Ethiopia. The prospect of being drafted and sent to Ethiopia and other places was particularly resented by college students in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.

Grandi simply ordered the riot police to break up the students camping on the Piazza Venezia, using truncheons and teargas. A battle erupted between the students and the police and rioting erupted all across Rome, upon which Grandi ordered soldiers, including armoured vehicles, to occupy the city. Martial law was declared and a curfew was put in place, after which things seemed to quiet down, but only for a few days. Soon protests erupted across Italy, which quickly devolved into riots and looting since the response of the authorities was the same everywhere: truncheons and teargas. The protests gained a new dimension in May 1978 with the dramatic death of a 32 year-old communist named Mario Moretti, who was beaten to death by the riot police with their batons. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, but now they demanded not reform but free elections, with the moral support of the Holy See. Pope Paul VI, who was lingering on death’s door at this point, asked both sides to end the violence and to enter a dialogue.

Grandi didn’t want to open the can of worms of ordering soldiers to open fire on crowds of protestors. He saw which way the wind was blowing and instead put forward a motion in the Grand Council of Fascism to restore to the King his full constitutional prerogatives, which was accepted by a slight majority. King Umberto II issued elections which would take place in July 1979, and up until then Minister of the Interior Giorgio Almirante would serve as interim Prime Minister. He also announced the withdrawal of Italian ground troops from Ethiopia. After those announcements things quieted down and everybody went back to school and to work. Fascism ended with a whimper rather than a bang.