Interesting! I haven't had a chance to read it entirely (yet), but it seems like things have somehow stayed in a rough sort of stasis since the 30's, and accordingly things are rather dystopic, especially for the Jews.

Personally, I think fascism would struggle to maintain any sort of mainstream appeal outside of times of hardship. In the "Alternate Essays world" (shit, need a better name for that) fascists have pretty much only risen to power in nations that felt humiliated or beaten down in some way. Italy, the birthplace of fascism as in OTL, picked the losing side in the Great War and even though it gained land in the swift kick to the jaw that was the Austrian campaign, it performed horribly in every other major engagement and in the end lost badly. Germany and Russia, two other major losers, also had their own various fascistic style movements tied to revenge. America was a bit different - there, the cause of fascism's rise was entirely due to economic problems... but the ruling groups were always more authoritarian than outright fascist, and even at their worst worked hard to legitimize everything with elections.

(One of the bits I'm uncertain about is that in TTL, the Ottoman Empire, despite being on the "winning side" got totally dismantled by the European powers - Constantinople became the Free City, big chunks of it's eastern territories were placed under League Mandates, etc. Ostensibly I think this was because of some revolution in the Ottoman Empire, or perhaps it's government tried to seek a separate peace with Russia and Germany.)

Plus, while fringe fascist groups remain, the world has by and large moved on, leaving them as more of a far-right relic than anything else. Sure, it's scary they get any percentage of the votes, but I wanted to clarify that they're really not all that powerful. The modern world of Alternate Essays isn't meant to be any better or worse, just fundamentally reshuffled.
 
[[OSIR is pronounced Oh-seer]]

Excerpt from Mark Jacobs Interview

Truth and Reconciliation Commission File
[Case Ochre]

[INTERVIEWER] The purpose of this interview will be to ascertain the full extent of Diverse Tendency, and the degree to which the Office of Strategic Intelligence and Research [OSIR] was complicit in the activities of the so called “sub-agencies,” including STATEL.

[JACOBS] Alright, I’m back. Is this thing on?

[INTERVIEWER] Yes.

[JACOBS] So now I have to tell you about Diverse Tendency?

[INTERVIEWER] Yes. Zhu told us everything, but we’re looking for corroboration.

[JACOBS] [exhales deeply] Well fuck. I’m not, look, I’m not… whatever. Okay, so Diverse Tendency. It all started with our psychoactive experiments and the compartmentalized operational hierarchies. OSIR was always interested in the paranormal, in the inexplicable, shit out of Jules Verne or Lawrence Troyer. You know, scifick. The general ethos of the time was something along the lines of… well, if the French are doing it, we have to be. Of course, nobody in our department had any idea what the French were doing.

[JACOBS cont] Do you know why we worked so hard to keep Diverse Tendency a secret? Not because it was so terrible, although it was. Because it made the brass look like fucking idiots. Because nobody wants to believe that the OSIR decided to start secretly giving entire departments [REDACTED] or LSD or whatever. Nobody wants to believe how many people in the 60’s were convinced that would give us an edge. But what nobody really wants… nobody really wants to admit how far we took it. Nobody really wants to admit how far Diverse Tendency took it. We were coming up with new [REDACTED] every day.

[INTERVIEWER] So you can confirm that Diverse Tendency was the implementation of these early experiments on a grand scale?

[JACOBS] Yes. It all started in Burma, actually. We experimented with aerosolized hallucinogens as a less-lethal alternative to crowd control. But experiments were mixed. It turned out that [REDACTED] didn’t work as well in the field as it did in laboratory experiments. I trust you’ve seen the pictures. That shit stays with you. I’ve seen some bad things in my day… but I’ll never forget that. [exhales deeply] And then of course, we made modifications and turned it into Diverse Tendency. It was nothing like Jamaica Plains, it was nothing like the bioweapons. That was all the Army, when they realized it was too late to step in and play the benevolent caretaker, that main-street America wouldn’t take their shit anymore and it was all over. Jamaica Plains was desperation. This was… it was planned.

[INTERVIEWER] How deeply involved were you with Diverse Tendency?

[JACOBS] It wasn’t my department. Most of what I know is hearsay. By the early 70’s, we had the highest proportion of incarcerated people in the world. Those people were just languishing in prison, and nobody was sad that we put them to work. We needed test subjects. We had to beat the French, the Europeans. And Diverse Tendency wasn’t just the drug stuff. It wasn’t just the crazy psycho-visuals like something out of Battlespace. We were doing important biological research, genetic research. Stuff that has medical and scientific implications to this day. And it was just criminals. Terrorists and dissidents, the kinds of people who wanted to throw this country into total anarchy. We didn’t do this stuff to citizens. We weren’t the Army. We weren’t STATEL. We had discipline.

[INTERVIEWER] [REDACTED]

[JACOBS] [REDACTED]

[INTERVIEWER] During the period from approximately March 1969 to April 1971, you were a liaison between STATEL and OSIR, correct?

[JACOBS] That’s right, yeah.

[INTERVIEWER] To what extent did STATEL receive orders directly from OSIR?

[JACOBS] Never. Compartmentalized hierarchies, remember? We were just oversight. Record and monitor. We didn’t interfere with their operations, they didn’t interfere with ours.

[INTERVIEWER] And yet STATEL engaged in their own project much like Diverse Tendency.

[JACOBS] Parallel development. Those guys were smart. For all we knew, they had us infiltrated and were coming up with the same ideas in parallel because they were stealing from us. Or maybe vice versa. Since ’64, we didn’t interfere anymore, so I don’t know. Their operations should be kept distinct from Diverse Tendency though. I know they took it way further. Torturing the black-bagged, beating them within inches of their lives for no reason but to see how long they could endure. We never did stuff quite that bad. We never raped anyone. I have a wife, I have daughters, you know. I wouldn’t stayed with an organization that did that sort of shit.

[INTERVIEWER] You can’t deny the connections. A lot of personnel moved between the two organizations, according to Zhu’s testimony and our own records.

[JACOBS] We shuffled off the bad eggs. The ones who didn’t have discipline. You have to remember, OSIR was about law and order. We stood for something. We stood for an orderly society, for a safe and prosperous society. We kept the wolves away from America’s door while ensuring that Eric six-pack had his freedom. STATEL, CONTEL, FRID, those were the ones who diverged from that goal. They were the ones who wanted to play god or dictator like America was in the colonial world. We wanted to rein them in, to make them see reason, but it was difficult.

[INTERVIEWER] Because you created them to be autonomous?

[JACOBS] Because the brass didn’t think about the ramifications before they did anything. I definitely have problems with the way certain things were managed or explained. Don’t get me wrong. We messed up. But that doesn’t indict the whole agency. We did good work. Without us we’d all be speaking French and kissing the Copenhagen Pact’s collective ass.
 
Transcript from the Eulogy of General Farouk Al-Jabiri
Aaisha Al-Jabiri, Director-General, the Green Cisjordan Project

I’ll try to keep this brief. I hope you all understand. The outpouring of support and kindness I have seen in the past few days has been beautiful. My father would be in awe. I don’t think he ever expected this.

When I was a child, my father would claim that within a generation our accomplishments would be dust. Many of you may not know this, but he was not an idealistic man. [polite laughter] Those who knew him recalled his stalwart pessimism even in the face of unrelenting good news. He was always a skeptic, always a cynic. He never believed that we would achieve even a fraction of the peace we have. But then, he was a soldier, and a man in a different generation. There was always an enemy to fight, just around the corner. He was never impolitic, and he was often prescient, but most often, I remember him as a fighter. He was the warrior who protected me from scary things in the dark when I was a girl, he was the old lion who kept the bad men away from the door. I think he would have liked to imagine he was that for our Union as well.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: “When you wake up in the morning, do not desire that you should live until the evening and when the evening comes do not think that you will be alive until the morning. Make use of your health before you fall ill, and make use of your youth before you turn old, and make use of your life before you die.”

I don’t think anyone can argue my father didn’t make the fullest use of his life. These past few months he was constantly busy, constantly moving. I don’t think he ever stopped. There was always more work to be done, with the Foundation most of all, but he couldn’t ever say that was enough. He took tea with ministers and diplomats, with lawyers at my firm, with the professors at University College Beirut, and with his imam. Rest, I think, was unbearable to him. It meant, after all, an end to the struggle that he had devoted his life to.

And he knew that such struggles don’t really ever have an end.

He would want those of you who knew him well to remember him as a restless man, an impatient man. The world moved too slowly for his taste. Retirement was uncomfortable to a man such as he was.

My father was profoundly concerned with justice. Justice, good conduct, fairness. These were words he lived by. He understood the necessity of them, and how rare they were under Mandate Rule. Growing up as a young man, he had unprecedented opportunities but most were not so lucky. I would certainly have not been so lucky, as a young woman in those days. We’ve moved forwards so far, so fast. I think he always feared that progress was a mirage, something that could crumble at any moment. I think many times he was right. If he were alive now, he would warn you all about the green-jackets in Malaysia or whatever crisis caught his attention. He would remind you of America or Burma. At the risk of sounding too much like him, he would remind you that democracy is only ever a heartbeat from extinction.

The best thing you can do to honor my father is to give frequently and joyfully to charity. The next best thing you can do to honor him is to ensure that his vision is never forgotten. A united Syria, a united Near East, those were his dreams. That he lived to see them was to him a miracle, a gift.

He lived every day as if it was a gift. He lived every day as a traveler or a stranger on the road, knowing that it was transitory. He treasured the twenty-six years he shared with my mother, and I know how proud he was seeing me graduate from university and watching my life unfold. I know how much he wished that my mother had been there with him to share in more of that gift. I know how much he wished he could have seen what was to come, however much he might have been afraid for the future. However much he might have denied it, he was always something of a dreamer.

He never allowed pessimism to get in the way of doing what was right. He had firm principles and he never wavered in them. Nothing of my father was more typical than giving and giving graciously without a second thought to himself. He gave all that he could for our country, for our dream of a united Arab state. He gave because he believed in our nation, and he believed we could overcome the sectarian plagues that divided us. Christian, Muslim, nonbeliever, we share a common history, bound as much in our achievements as in our common plight. Ours was a land long ruled, first by the Ottomans, then by the West. When we emerged blinking into the light of a new dawn, it seemed impossible that we could stand tall. For a while we stumbled. By father as a young soldier saw this, in Mesopotamia and later in the Hedjaz.

My father never stopped believing, even when he felt certain that all we had built together would fall. He never stopped believing that history was on our side.

And now, looking back after fifty years of public service, both in uniform and out of it, I think I can say that it was. It still is. As we all move forwards, as I move forwards, I will have his example to guide me. I hope that I can match even a fraction of his achievements.
 
In this timeline, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire resulted in Hashemite puppet states under League Mandates... sound familiar?

But the struggles of Europe left natives with a free hand to run their own affairs to a far greater degree, and accordingly the decolonizing process was far less brutal than it was in North Africa. Greater Syria is a large state with a cosmopolitan an population that's doing far better than its equivalent.

Visualize, I suppose, a world where America played a lesser role, a world where America turned inwards and the struggles of politics remained between various tottering great powers. America's forays into international politics came slowly and often lead to crisis and quagmire and thus the country remained rather isolationist.

Which leads into our discussion of the Far East.
 
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