Something from my ASB scenario thread which isn't too ASB...
Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here
With the US still bogged down in a slow-moving civil war and France overrun, the UK decided to sue for peace: Canada was vulnerable if the Corporatists won, and since the Patriots (having finally decided on a relatively inoffensive name more American-sounding than “Corporatists”) seemed in no great rush to win, overseas aid and assistance in the near future seemed unlikely. Here things stuck for a while, however: German terms and conditions were unacceptably harsh, and the Germans turned to submarine warfare and air attacks to throttle and batter the British into submission. (Which was loudly protested by both sides in the US civil war, both being in the business of selling things to the UK). With convoys and victory gardens and a remarkable development of edible yeasts grown in vats of filth, the British held on doggedly, and the Germans, impatient to turn to Russia, finally agreed to a Status Quo armistice and evacuation of the Channel Islands.
This had the unfortunate (from the German POV) effect of getting Stalin to expect an attack.
In the meantime, the Japanese had overrun most of the West Pacific: although logistical difficulties averted the much-feared invasion of Australia, all OTLs conquests were duplicated and the Japanese army plunged into India (sort of the way a man might plunge into a large vat of wet cement: for all Gandhi’s insistence on non-violent resistance, the Indian Army, Hindu, Muslim and European, weren’t eager to test out its effectiveness on Japanese troops, and stuck with the old-fashioned sort of resistance, the kind with bullets.)
With Germany well and truly up to their necks in the USSR by early ’42, the British turned their full military efforts to defeating the Japanese: support for the Patriots remained mostly verbal, given that the Corporatists still held New York and much of New England, threatening eastern Canada with their large, if poorly led, armies. The learning curve for dealing with Japanese aircraft carriers proved steep, and it was mostly British submarine warfare that kept Yamamoto from turning the Indian Ocean into a Japanese lake.
Although German attack failed to come as a surprise, the Soviet learning curve was also by necessity steep: deplorable military leadership and ignorance of Blitzkrieg tactics meant that a Soviet army on the attack rather than the defensive still suffered bloody losses: the Germans were stopped by winter and stubborn dug-in resistance well short of OTLs benchmarks, but Soviet losses were still horrendous. The next year, however, the greater amount of manpower, industry, and resources behind Soviet lines began to tell: the Germans never got anywhere near Stalingrad.
1942 finally saw something of an effective unification of Patriot forces behind a “restore democracy first and argue about what it means later. Oh, and hang General Haik and anyone who supported Buzz Windrip from the nearest tree” program which played relatively well in Peoria. It also allowed the largest-scale coordinated attack so far, with a major push into the Northeast to clear the Corporatists, as much as possible, from the Canadian border.
The Corporatist preemptive invasion of Canada was No Fun at All for the Canadians.
1943 saw the German advance turn into a slow, grinding retreat, the Soviet advance hampered by a lack of trucks and a Germany undistracted elsewhere. In America, Corporatist forces were ejected from Canada, and the bloodily crushed New York Uprising (New Yorkers had generally never been very fond of Windrip’s corn-pone populism, and liked military rule even less) provided the Patriot forces with the battle cry of “Remember Manhattan!” In the meantime, vengeful Mexican forces wiped out the weak remainders of the Corporatist invasion forces and prepared for a march on the Rio Grande. For a while the Patriots and the Mexicans would remain “co-belligerents” rather than outright allies: the Corporatists got enough propaganda points out of their claims that the Patriot rebellion (Patriots being generally renamed to something along the lines of “traitorous Bolshevik scum” in the Corporatist news media) would allow brown-skinned savages to re-conquer the southwest and rape all the local white women.
1943 also saw the Brits finally get the hang of carrier sea battles, although the completion of several new aircraft carriers was delayed by the need to transfer resources to help out Canada until the Corporatists were expelled (aid to north America was reduced to a relative trickle after the last of them fled across the border, but would continue for the rest of the war). Political Hindu-Muslim quarrels re the form of Indian independence (promised As Soon As Possible by the British) almost led to the breakout of civil war in the midst of fighting the Japanese in Bengal, and only a last minute compromise and Gandhi’s moral authority kept things from boiling over. A “provisional government of India” was set up by the Japanese in the conquered territories of the NE, under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose.
In December, the Germans, through a mix of massive slave-labor built fortifications and the extensive use of chemical weapons, finally managed to halt the Soviet advance well within the former borders of Poland. An unofficial cease-fire took place as both sides built up resources for another assault: energetic secret negotiations took place, but neither side was willing to offer terms that the other would find acceptable. Late in March of 1944, the Soviets launched a massive assault south and west into Romania, hoping to cut off Germany from its major source of oil: with the chemical cat out of the bag, the Soviets used considerable quantities of less sophisticated but still quite nasty chemicals in their advance.
Also in early 1944, as Britain’s superior industrial capacity was felt in the Indian Ocean and the Japanese navy began losing the war of attrition, the Japanese high command decided some bold new plan was called for to knock the British out of the war. Heroic efforts (translation: massive die-offs of forced labor) were put into building better roads and railroads through the mountains of Burma to allow for a true buildup in NE India, and the Invasion of Australia was put on the rails. (Yamamoto is reported to have Double Facepalmed).
The last isolated pockets of enemy forces were wiped out in North America, leaving the two sides fighting along a tremendously long front running from Augusta to Albany, writhing among the hill country of west Pennsylvania and west Virginia, savagely contested along the Ohio, swinging south from Jefferson city though bloody Missouri to Tulsa, growing vague through thinly populated Colorado, anchored firmly along the Grand Canyon by the Mormons (who had decided they had far more to lose than gain from a dictatorial government) and ending in the blood-soaked front lines running from San Jose to the Nevadas. In this new North vs. South battle, the South had superior numbers, but a far more apathetic population….
Elections took place in a bit of a rush in Patriot territory, it having been uncertain until August whether they would be held at all. Although Walt Trowbridge was confirmed as President, the Socialist, Communist, and Neo-Jeffersonian (drown the Federal Government in a bathtub) candidates got an alarming number of votes.
The Soviets took Romania. Casualties were massive, but Stalin had lives to burn. Both sides were by now using extensive use of chemical weapons, and Soviet chemists were coming up with fun ideas of their own. Nightmare figures in masked synthetic rubber overalls battled across a devastated landscape. Italy broke out in revolution, and Mussolini was forced to call in his German allies to help keep order. German diplomats began sounding out the British about an anti-Communist alliance. Quite a few in the British government were not entirely hostile: a Europe divided between Germany and the USSR might be better than one entirely run from Moscow. However, the Germans would have to withdraw from France and the Low Countries at least before anything could be agreed on.
1945 came around in Asia. With four years of buildup and preparation, the New Indian Army (aided by a lot of British regulars shipped in once the sea lanes had been secured) crushed the Japanese and Bose-ist forces in North India and pursued the remnants into the mountains. Bose himself died when the plane on which he was hurriedly departing was shot down. The late ‘44 invasion of Australia had been, of course, a logistical clusterfuck. With massive human losses and the Anglo-Indian forces pushing into Burma, while another few major Japanese navy ships went to the bottom, a tiny wee light of reason came on, and the Japanese agreed to negotiations.
As the armistice settled in, an increased flow of military supplies from Britain began to cross the Atlantic. Canadian military production was fully allocated to the North American theatre. New York was liberated with much fanfare. A joint invasion of the Rio Grande valley by Patriot forces from the north and Mexican forces from the south effectively split off Corporatist California and Arizona from the rest of their territories: the Siege of Los Angeles was a long and bloody one, but Corporatist forces shifted from the East were unable to break the Patriot-Mexican lines on the Rio Grande to relieve the city: the city was pacified by Christmas, the mass graves of anti-Corporatist “fifth columnists” executed during the siege providing the Patriots with a lovely propaganda Christmas present.
The remaining Balkans fell under Soviet control, without the Germans agreeing to any territorial compromises. A Hitler assassination attempt went awry and there was a formidable purge, which didn’t do much for morale or military leadership. Soviet forces began to push into German territory proper, in spite of savage German last-ditch efforts. Massive uprisings broke across occupied France. Late in June, Hitler suffered an immobilizing stroke. Himmler took over, which didn’t help at all. Neither did the human sacrifices at the Brandenburg gate. [1] British planners finished the revisions on Project Seahorse.
In late ’45 Britain was an exhausted country.The economy was by this point almost entirely Socialized, everyone was in government service, and on short rations at that: although the German blockade had been lifted in ’41, foreign currency reserves had been earmarked for military purposes, and there was little left over to buy things from still-peaceful South America: without the Canadian food aid, many would have had to go back to eating yeasts. But there were still duties for the British to carry out.
A horrendously bloody and, worse, expensive invasion of the Japanese islands was not in the cards: even a blockade would require more island battles, more naval battles, more deaths and more Pounds down the drain. Japan would withdraw from its British conquests and (as a sop to US allies) the Philippines: the rest of the GEACPS they could keep – or at least try to. The treaty of Madras, November 12, 1945 put an end to the war in the east. Berlin fell in that same month. Soviet Special Forces scouting ahead in the ruins of the Chancellory found Adolph Hitler in a back room in bed, lying in his own filth and badly dehydrated. He would later be taken to Moscow as a living trophy before his execution. Himmler had withdrawn to Cologne, promising to fight to the last and to shoot anyone who disagreed with doing so.
Germany troops pulled out of most of France to help protect the Fatherland: Vichy forces moved in from the South. And British and Free French forces invaded across the channel. With little popular support and most of its effective forces in the east, fighting the Reds, Vichy forces did not fare well.
British forces also landed in Norway. Simultaneously with their invasion, the British declared war on Germany and Italy. Stalin was reportedly annoyed at the British “jackals.”
Soviet forces met British ones along the Rhine and south of Rome January 19, 1946.
In ’46 the Corporatist state began melting away like a snowflake in the sun: without the nationalist element to unify them against their foes, defections and surrenders took place en masse. By appealing to Southern sentiments and racial fears, the Corpo government was able to temporarily solidify its position in the Deep South, but too many Southerners had no desire to play the Bad Guy in another morality play. General Haik fled from besieged Washington to a temporary capital in Birmingham, only to be murdered by his own men and replaced by an “emergency government” that offered peace terms in exchange for immunity from persecution. The Patriot response can be abbreviated to “Nuts!” By the turn of the year, things were into the mopping-up stages.
The Soviets consolidated their grip over an empire extending from SE France and the Netherlands to the Pacific. Soviet losses, human and industrial, had not been as great as OTL – military deaths had been roughly equivalent, fewer massive German “bags” at the start of the war being compensated by a longer and more grueling march not only to Berlin but across Germany – but civilian losses were rather lower. Still, Stalin was in no immediate rush for Round Two with the Capitalist world…
May, 1947.
The long-promised new constitutional convention began in Chicago. It was a turbulent affair: the many differences and disagreements between the various Patriot groups, suppressed for the sake of victory, were out in the open. In the streets, those who felt what was needed was a Proletarian state along the lines of fellow Fascist-smashers in the USSR clashed with those who wanted a return to a (slightly modified) status quo ante, and in turn clashed with those who wanted to keep any future federal government far too weak to turn on the People, while the classical Anti-Red folks spoke of the new Soviet Menace and tried hard to pretend that they hadn’t been latecomers to the Patriot movement.
Anti-Soviet revolts broke out here and there across Europe, and were crushed savagely. Soviet news media began to grumble about British and North American subversion and anti-Soviet propaganda, not to mention the pernicious influence of the “surviving fascists” in southern Italy.
A small group of Soviet scientists and bigwigs sat in chairs in front of a panel of smoked glass. A light of unimaginable brilliance shone, briefly. The bunker shook as a terrible wind passed over it. The lights came on, and the Soviets stared incredulously at the monstrous fiery mushroom arose, ever higher, above the desolate Scottish Highlands as Winston Churchill simply grinned smugly.
2011
History happens.
In 2011, the world is in some ways more chaotic than OTL. There is no EC, no World Trade Organization. A universal meeting place of sorts for nations to get together and work out their problems, the World Forum, was established after a great deal of squabbling in the 60s, but is even less effectual than our UN: there is no such thing as World Forum Peacekeepers, for instance. The US, which defeated no Fascist dictatorships except its own during the Second Great War, never clearly established itself as the leader of a Free World, and messy struggles for influence continue in the Third World.
On the positive side, with the end of the alarming three-sided cold war and major international reductions in nuclear arsenals, military tensions are down at least.
The United States had a rather difficult transition period, and the Second and Third Constitutional Conventions failed to entirely deliver what people hoped for: a new democratic system that would be corruption-and-demagogue-proof. The country now has five major political parties, two of them to the left of our Democrats and Republicans and another largely orthogonal: it probably would have been even Redder, save for the utterly failed effort by the far Left to launch a coup when the 1952 elections didn’t go their way and, of course, Soviets Behaving Badly.
Heavily armed local militias of both the left and right are numerous, and politicians are followed by cameras everywhere: there are no such things as a “closed door” session, although there are some special circumstances relating to such things as nuclear secrets. Currently the President is sufficiently limited in his powers that the Speaker of the House has in some ways more clout than they do: Congressional Supremacy has been fairly well established. There have been those who have tried to buck the trend, admittedly: well-meaning but somewhat ideologically tone-deaf President Harrington managed to accidentally create the Panic of ’75 when his feud with Congress seemed to portend a new dictatorship. US politics in 2011 is less turbulent and fiery than it used to be: older folks grumble about apolitical young whipper-snappers and how will democracy be preserved with such a useless younger generation? (Indeed, some argue that the vast, grinding, knee-jerk-opposed-to-sudden change bureaucracy already counts as a dictatorship of sorts).
The US is closely allied to Canada, which fought and bled by their side in the Second (or Third, depending on who you are asking) American Revolution: less so with Mexico (the whole “you invaded us first” is a bit of a conversation killer.) It is also allied to the British and various other nations around the globe, although there isn’t an overall NATO type organization. The US has generally been less interventionist abroad, feeling in the 50s and 60s that it had too much to clean up in its own back yard to spend the time and energy fighting Communism in every dusty corner of the planet. (After it developed its own atom bomb in 1952, the US did make clear to the Soviets its solidarity with the UK’s position that invading the remaining bits of Western Europe was a big No-NO). It also has maintained a strong position in the Persian Gulf from early on, to keep Soviet armies well clear of the oil: with no Israel (not enough Jews got out of German Europe alive to push it over the top) and no US-supported Iranian coup, relations with the Muslim world are rather better.
The US is a bit larger than OTL: enlargement of the US democratic system by extending US citizenship to other nations has become a popular notion, which is reinforced by the notion that a more variegated US is also one less likely to march to one (dictatorial) drummer. Not just Puerto Rico but also Cuba and Panama are US states, and the notion of a merger with Canada is occasionally mooted.
The Great Japanese Empire is no more: driven out of China by Soviet-backed guerillas by 1960 (its economy almost wrecked in the process), driven out of Indonesia and SE Asia by the mid-70s after an almost genocidal struggle to crush resistance (which led to trade embargoes by most major nations) and the trashing of the economy and the national reputation completed by the hysterical, “traitor” mass-purging “Pure Nippon” dictatorship of 1976-1997, Japan is in poor shape nowadays. The territories of the new Republic are down to south Sakhalin, a bunch of wee islands, and Taiwan, where due to forcible population movements the locals are now roughly 50% Japanese. The current Neo-Socialist/Zen Peace Party government is struggling to make Japanese industries competitive with the rest of the world again, and to keep the population from shrinking further (in reaction to Pure Nippon’s rather squicky efforts to keep the female population barefoot and pregnant, after 1997 birth rates have plummeted, and a lot of ambitious young Japanese move abroad). At least (from the point of view of the rest of the world, anyway) there is no longer any risk of Japan carrying out Seppuku on a national scale and taking the Northern hemisphere with it: as part of the Treaty of Montreal, the Japanese have greatly reduced their nuclear arsenal.
Australia (along with New Zealand), thanks to fears of the Japanese and the perceived unreliability of the Americans, has stuck closer to the UK than OTL and still hosts some sizeable British military bases and nuclear launch sites. It is considered part of the so-called “inner commonwealth”: the British floated the notion of a Federal Empire again after the global wars, and although it largely went over as unto a lead balloon with the colonials of a darker hue, Australia, New Zealand, and a number of smaller countries do form an alliance of EC/NATO-esque closeness. (It is a more prestigious thing than OTL to be a Commonwealth member: after all, the British pretty much did save the day in Europe in this ATL)
India remained unified for a while, but Indian “Socialist” notions pushed things in the direction of a more centralized state, and the Muslim provinces broke away somewhat messily. Bengal went its own way, but at least the *Pakistanis got the Muslim bits of Kashmir out of the deal. (Burma/Myanmar, however, remained as an autonomous part of India).
Independent Vietnam includes chunks of Cambodia and Laos: the Thais, as Japanese allies, got the other bits, and cheerfully cooperate with the Dirty Reds to keep things as they are. Relations with the Chinese to the north are cordial, the Chinese being ruled by a rather different cast of characters ATL with wars in China having continued a decade plus longer than OTL.
Iran is a corrupt one-party “republic” (think Egypt with oil): the government is currently suffering from increased pressures from both the Socialist left and the theocratic Right, the unemployed young man – to – oil dollars ratio having dropped dangerously low with population growth. Iraq is a close US ally, needing military support to avoid being swallowed by the United Arab Republic, which extends from Tunisia to Syria.
Sub-Saharan Africa is a bit of a mess, what with China, the US, the Brits, and both Russias competing for influence. Without any clear indication as to whose responsibility failed states are, and a general sense that sending aid is a political act, some African states have disintegrated outright. The Federation of East Africa is doing alright, and is trying to create its own African alliance: the African Socialist Bloc doesn’t like this at all, although they can’t agree on much else. The US is pondering the Kalahari Confederation’s alliterative name and request to join the US, and after the Battle of Gondar the Ethiopian Reunification War has only seven more states to deal with. Meanwhile, the Federation of Azania, a product of the Rhodesian Intervention and the Second Boer War, is doing fairly well, while the side effect, the former Boer People’s Republic, has switched from a Soviet alliance to one with the Russian People’s Union and changed its name to the Vaal River Republic.
Europe suffered a longer German occupation than OTL, and the bulk of it ended up under Soviet rule to boot. With the US, after its civil war, in no real shape to deliver a massive economic boost to the remaining free European nations, things did not go too well. The annoying Soviet occupation of Provence prevented the Communist and pro-Soviet left from taking over in France, but with rather less successful efforts to get the economy up and going, democracy did not flourish. The “Neo-Fascist” period of the Mediterranean League (S. Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Turkey) is now thankfully over, but France and S. Italy nowadays look more upper-end Latin America (with nukes) than full first-world nations, and French politics remain bitterly divided between Left and Right. Provence remains independent.
The Confederation of New Burgundy (The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the German Rhinelands), territories liberated by the British before the Soviets could arrive, is the richest portion of Europe and forms an customs union with Sweden, Norway and the British Isles (although there remain customs barrier between the non-British bits of the North Sea Trade Union and the rest of the British Commonwealth): it is something of a mini-EC, with a joint military and its own nuclear deterrent. Currently a lot of money is being invested in the “Red Germanies” in hopes they recover economically to the point where they can once again serve as the economic motor of Western Europe (most of Germany being in the Soviet camp was another major factor in a slower and patchier western recovery).
The Soviet Union, overextended in Europe, suffered from unrest almost from day one, and its Empire in Europe underwent various splits, fusions, reorganizations, etc. It didn’t help, nor did a “micromanaging” approach from the late 50s onward that tried to put every aspect of society under control while pursuing a maniacal hyper-industrialization that covered the USSR with massive and rapidly decomposing highways, under-populated and economically improbable cities of huge concrete towers powered by nuclear energy, and the endless cabling snaking over the landscape and bringing to every shack in the USSR a bizarre “Soviet Internet” (crude and incompatible with any western tech) meant to hold all (ideologically acceptable) knowledge .
The Total Information System proved utterly unmanageable in a pre-high-speed computer era, and the system bogged down in witch-hunts in the 70s, around the same time that the basically extractive economy hit its limits. The Troubles followed.
By 2011 the successor states to the USSR are Premier Solovyov’s Russian People’s Union, extending from SE Russia to the Pacific, and puppetizing southern Central Asia, and the ruled-by-committee Democratic Neo-Socialist Union of Brest, including the western Ukraine and Poland and its Agglomerated Unions of Czechia and Slovakia.
The RPU is a Russian-nationalist state not entirely unlike a larger Saddam’s Iraq, the electronic networks most eliminated save for a spy camera in every corner and a bug in every radio. In contrast, the DNUB is more explicitly socialist, if of a highly technocratic nature: their explanation for the failures of the “cybernetic system” is that it was a “premature effort” and that with a lot more technology, a better society is within human grasp, as long as those crazy reactionaries to the east don’t start a nuclear war.The Union of Brest is more democratic than the People’s Union, but it still isn’t allowing the German states to reunify anytime soon: the general flavor is “authoritarian cyberpunk”.
China, which settled down under Communist rule after 1960 (and some vigorous purges of collaborators and people who looked like they might have been collaborators), has developed rather differently than either the USSR or its OTL equivalent. It was never run as an independent country by Mao, who was rude and arrogant while visiting Moscow once too often, while the guerilla war against the Japanese ground on. (Not that the man who succeeded him was particularly grateful).
Various local revolutionary groups seized power in the wake of a Japanese withdrawal: unlike OTL, there was no center of power with control of its own territory and a functioning army marching triumphantly south, and rather than descend into a lengthy round of civil war, five major revolutionary groups agreed to create a national federation (and suppress any of the other seven less-leftist groups who wouldn’t go along.) As a result, after only a mere five years of civil war, the Federation of Han Republics came into existence, and has slowly turned into something like a genuine federal state, with the exception of those uncooperative dicks in the Upper Yellow River Republic, who remain stubbornly attached to their rather primitive version of Socialism and are always threatening to ally with the Russian Union if the other four pick on them. The other four generally follow an odd form of “State-Capitalist” socialism, with vast industrial combines all shares of which belong to the Workers (the bureaucratic elite must content themselves with their Rather Large publically funded salaries) and competing on equal terms with foreign businesses. Other oddities include the Universal Militia and the Urban Planning For Agricultural Self-Sufficiency (Chinese cities tend to be rather…vertical and close-packed).
Mexico, unlike OTL, has a fairly professional (and large) army: they’re friendly with the US nowadays, but they don’t entirely trust them, either. Latin American union is a major political movement, although with the Mexican headed (democratic-old style leftists) Organizacion Para la Unidad Latina, the Brazilian (rightist) Liga de las/dos Americas, and the Argentine (neo-Socialist) Union Progresivo Para la Raza Unida all in competition, it looks like a long row to hoe.
Scientific progress marches on: with nuclear weapons never used in anger (although much feared for their possible use), atomic power has seen wider adaptation. There is quite a bit of talk lately re an international expedition to the Moon: there are half a dozen manned space stations in orbit, but no human has been beyond geosynchronous orbit as yet.
The US did not have the tremendous boom of the 1945-1973 period OTL, given the damage inflicted by the civil war and the following period of extended political turmoil, but its huge internal market and vigorous investment in infrastructure, schools, etc. finally did bring an era of vigorous growth starting in the late 50s. The confidence in future prosperity of OTL never developed, though: over two decades of Very Bad Crap and another of Moderately Bad Crap shook American confidence enough to make Americans a more cynical, gloomy, in some ways more “European” people, who spend a lot of time arguing about what makes for a strong democracy and what is the true essence of being “American” (and unlike OTL 2011, it’s rarely a matter of ethnicity or religion that is being discussed). Still, the notion of the City on the Hill has not disappeared: most still argue that the 1936-1946 was a mistake, a disastrous wrong turn, and the essence of America is still different – after all, unlike Japan or Hitler’s Germany or the Soviet Union, Americans had after only a few years risen in revolt and put an end to a dictatorship rather than waiting for it to collapse of dry rot or being liberated from outside.
[1] With apologies to John Reilly.
Bruce
