Fugue For A Darkening Island scenarios

DISSIDENT

Banned
There is a novel from the 1970s in Britain during the Enoch Powell immigration scare period by Christopher Priest of "The Prestige" fame about a nuclear war between South Africa and its neighbors leading to a mass flight of refugees from Africa to other nations around the world. In the book, a right wing xenophobic government under a Prime Minister named John Tregarth who bares a suspicious resemblance to Enoch Powell leading a Nationalist Party which bares a suspicious resemblance to the National Front came into majority in Parliament shortly before the war and the refugees arriving. The African refugees are treated much worse than other nations they arrive in and militant groups are formed with aid by survivors of African militaries. The militant African refugees receive arms from the USSR and begin forcibly occupying houses in London and other areas and liberal or civil rights sympathetic elements of the constabulary and Royal Armed Forces secede and join them and a civil war begins in the United Kingdom.

The protagonist is a philandering college professor whose house is taken over by armed African refugees and is forced to become a refugee himself, being harassed by the Nationalist government, the African refugee army, aided by the British secessionists and obstructed by the UN and others. He joins an organized group of refugees after leaving a UN camp, then his wife and daughter are abducted by the African guerillas and he sets off to find them, leading to a pretty scary ending.

The book is interesting in AH terms for showing in graphic detail a bloody Third World style civil war in a modern first world country, complete with USSR sponsored left wing guerillas and a right wing authoritarian US backed regime, UN refugees camps and Blue Helmets and starving desperate refugees and how they survive.

Can anyone think of similar scenarios that would lead to modern civil war, anarchy, failed state status, UN intervention in the US, France, UK, Canada, Australia, etc.?
 
Can anyone think of similar scenarios that would lead to modern civil war, anarchy, failed state status, UN intervention in the US, France, UK, Canada, Australia, etc.?


Off hand, the "race war" books, where black form a secret army and secede.

The Siege of Harlem, Warren Miller (1965)

Siege, Edwin Corley (1969)

Trespass, Fletcher Knebel (1973)

Night of Power Spider Robinson (1985, 2005)

Miller, I've read, was making a fairy tale. Now Corley is more reasonable in that he actually doesn't have a United Oppressed Mass Rising In Their Might. I mean, Robinson calls his conspiracy after a Muslim doctrine and has Israel recognizing the new state! And Knebel shows the result, namely an increase in racial distrust.

These all have racial war in the U.S. In fact, in the first review I ever read of Night of Power, the reviewer claimed he had described the book to a friend who wondered if it were written by a White Nationalist.

Let's not mention (beyond this) The Turner Diaries . . .
 

DISSIDENT

Banned
That was the gist of the novel I talked about too. Basically, the illegal African immigrants in Britain get treated like shit by the National Front-Enoch Powell analogs and go Mugabe-UNITA-ANC on them with Soviet supplied weap'ons. The book makes it pretty clear that not all the African refugees are actually involved in the militant guerilla stuff and that alot of left wing UK military and police side with the Africans and join them. The book also depicts minorities already resident in Britain getting treated worse by association.

The scenarios don't nessecarily have to be racial. Anything that gets a modern "Third World" style civil war along the lines of Cambodia, Lebananon, Nicaragua, Angola etc. in a modern first world country.

Ideas I had included Quebec independence, the French coup attempt over Algeria turning into a civil war, the protests and Watergate and counterculture tensions in the 1960s turning into a Second American Civil War and the MI6 coup involving Lord Mountbatten in Britain in the late 70s or early 80s going through.
 
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