Per Ardua Ad Astra
"Our aim is to boldly go where no man has gone before"
- Winston Churchill, 1949
"Our aim is to boldly go where no man has gone before"
- Winston Churchill, 1949
Supreme Human War Council:
1942-1944: Franklin D. Roosevelt / Josef Stalin / Adolf Hitler / Winston Churchill
It is a testament to human disunity that, even as mysterious alien crafts entered human skies and devastated first Paris and then Beijing, it took six months for the human powers to unite around a single goal; the survival of their species. Nevertheless, in January 1942, six months after aliens first landed and seven after the beginning of the German-Soviet war, the Allied Powers and the Axis signed a temporary accord, agreeing to fight together against the "Xeno" forces of the "Third Galactic Confederation" (as well as her Japanese, Polish, and Jewish, and Indian allies of convenience). In fact, the Confederation, a vast Galactic democracy which had emerged from generations of era to porudtice an interspecies utopia, had not meant to attack the Earth; the initial 1941 assault began after Markor Aden, the hotshot captain of an exploration vessel and his crew were attacked by Soviet soldiers on their front with the Germans and the ship was shot down after an extended Russo-German assault, with his landing party captured. Within two weeks, his brother, an admiral in command of a battle fleet, had come to earth to investigate his brother's disappearance, and discovering his capture launched an illegal full-scale assault on the Earth's "primitive" civilisation as revenge. His justice was swift and prompt, with an attack on the East Coast of the United States and a brutal fight down it to D.C. against American guerilla forces, whilst Germany and Britain worked together to repel an assault on France. In early 1944 the Xenos finally reached the White House, and FDR was summarily executed even as Vice President Wallace and the cabinet escaped to Virginia where they would continue the war effort.
1944-1949: Henry A. Wallace / Josef Stalin / Adolf Hitler / Winston Churchill
The new Supreme War Council, unlike the first, finally met in 1945 - by that point the Xenos had overrun much of France, Spain and Italy, and though they were being held at the Maginot Line, the invading forces seemed unlikely to be defeated permanently. A new strategy was neeed for the "United Nations" alliance, and it would be found in the form of nuclear weapons. Developed by Britain and the US and Germany almost concurrently, the first atomic bomb was finally used in January 1945, dropped on the War Fleet command ship as it launched an assault on London to obliterate Britain as a base for bombardment of continental shock troops. The city was left in rubble, and 30% of the population did not make it out in time... but the flagship was destroyed and Admiral Aden and his command team killed. Indeed, with Hitler, Wallace, Stalin, and Churchill all putting everything into atomic bombs, the UN was finally able to stem the tide of Xeno invasion, first driving them out of the US and Canada, before finally obliterating their marshalled forces in Paris. The invasion had been defeated, if barely, and humanity saved at great cost. By 1947 Japan and the last alien shock troops and been defeated, and human forces had managed to master Xeno technology (with the help of American and German Xeno prisoners) well enough for the UN powers to enter space, and beat back the Confederation. The destruction of the majority of the Galactic Confederation's fleet using nuclear weapons, injeard of by Galactic forces, at Mars and then Alpha Centauri resulted in the ceasefire of 1949, and a new era in which mankind would become the divided masters of a spacefaring empire.
First Citizens of the United Nations:
1949-1953: Winston Churchill (Unity, UK)
1949 def. unopposed
Ousted from domestic power in the 1947 General Election, Winston Churchill quickly became the top choice amongst UN officials of who to lead the organisation into its new role as administrator of a galactic empire held in trust by the four "Superpowers". Having defeated the Third Confederation at the battles of Mars and then at its capital in Alpha Centauri, the UN now effectively controlled what had been the "outer planets" of the Third Confederation, as well as Centauri and a handful of minor inner planets which were quickly gutted for their technological marvels as a tidal wave of refugees fled to the regrouped "Fourth Confederation". X'andar Ideth, the nineteenth President of the Third Confederation who had tried to sign a peace with Earth in 1946 and who had attempted to prevent the Rogue Confederation Pioneer Group under the Centauran Markor Aden (and later his older brother Admiral Jedren Aden, commander of the Confederation's 6th War Group) from assaulting earth was ultimately found "not-guilty" of jeaporidsing the Galactic state, but his moderate pro-reconciliation faction would never recover. With all the pomp and circumstance of a British monarch, Churchill was proclaimed "First Citizen" of the UN, a profoundly republican title, which Churchill himself had suggested in order to make it clear that he did not wish to appropriate the grandeur or position of his own King. Churchill found himself suddenly at the command of the most powerful army in a populated galaxy which, just seven years prior, had been totally unknown on Earth, a word which had gone from fourth rate power to Galactic dominator, largely thanks to its luckily unique discovery of the power of the atom, and which remained in a precarious position with only the barest understanding of Confederation technology. In just four years, Churchill would change all of this; using UN money to incentivise even greater military and civilian research into spacefaring technology, Churchill built up a Galactic navy of incomparable size and strength, whilst transforming Earth, allowing Western Nations to become paradises of welfare provision and technological innovation (even as colonies continued under oppression, and increasingly authoritarian figures took control of state programmes from Stalingrad to San Francisco under Stalin and his ally President Wallace). When Churchill declined to run for a second term in 1953 (instead opting to retire to his literary and historical talents) the world mourned the loss of a great statesman, a man who had at least partially led the Earth for 12 years and cemented her position of parity with her rivals.
1953-1961: W. Averell Harriman (Unity, USA)
1953 def. various Fascist candidates
1957 def. Unopposed
After Churchill stepped down, his long-time UN deputy W. Averell Harriman stepped into the role of First Citizen without a challenge, the right-wing supporters of Hitler's Germany having failed to gain the support of any other major power, Japan having been tarred by her alliance with the Confederation against China and still under occupation, and the Kuomintang curiously wedded to the Soviet Union and USA. Harriman would remain in close, if tense, contact with the Confederation over his eight year tenure in office, collaborating with popular President Earl Warren to send a delegation of Americans to the Confederation as researchers, in part of a largely American sponsored initiative to ensure peace between the Earth and her Galactic neighbours, though the programme ended in catastrophe in 1958 when it became clear that the Fourth Confederation was seeking to steal nuclear technology from the Terran scientists visiting them. Nevertheless, Harriman was re-elected by the General Assembly in 1957, with little serious competition in the days of the Sino-Anglo-Soviet-American alliance within the "Unity" Party, and continued the work of Winston Churchill in fostering technological advancements on Earth through the scavenging and reverse engineering of technology from the UN-Confederation War (1947-1949), which culminated in the UN's 1960 discovery of how to synthesise the "Alcubierric Agent" used by the Confederation to power their faster-than-light technology, used for the first time to create a far larger quantity of the agent than the "Liberator Class" frigates scavenged together in 1947 had needed, this was used to create the "Dreadnought" the United Terran Ship Roosevelt, completed in the cast factories of the Ford Space Corporation at the end of 1961. The maintenance of peace, the First Citizen's other role, however proved more challenging - in 1954 Adolf Hitler had died peacefully in his sleep, and the confusion of the multiple wills he had left guaranteeing his succession, as well as the complex internal politics of the Third Reich meant that in the four months after his death, three factions emerged all vying for the leadership; the SS led by Himmler, the Wehrmacht and the state bureaucracy led by a triumvirate of generals and administrators , and Heydrich and Goebbels' expansive NSDAP apparatus. The Civil War in Germany was blessedly brief and frighteningly violent - outside assistance to any side was prevented by each side's control of nuclear weaponry, and even as Berlin went up in Atomic fire in 1956 as part of the SS' last ditch plan to stop the Wehrmacht (the NSDAP had been defeated in 1955), the UN was forced to sit by and watch in horror. However, when the war ended Harriman leapt to give aid to Germany, protecting the steady stream of refugees returning to the fatherland form the collapsed Reichs Komissariats in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic region as these were reoccupied by the USSR, and ensuring that the moderate authoritarian nationalist Albert Speer took power. The UN's sole failure in the aftermath of the crisis was the escape of a large contingent of SS officers into space with about a quarter of Germany's fleet; fleeing to the planet "Wotan" on the fringe of German space, they would establish a new series of "Aryan" colonies which would prove a persistent thorn in the UN's side.
1961-1969: Mikhail Suslov (Unity, USSR)
1961 def. Charles Lindbergh (Terran Front, USA)
1965 def. Ernst Jünger (Terran Front, Ger)
The supposed "grey eminence" of the Stalinist Era presided over a surprisingly inept and clumsy UN policy on Earth, which saw the disintegration of the Unity bloc and the end of the dominance of the UN by Soviet and American interests. Forced to turn to Earth by a period of relative harmony between the Fourth Confederation and Earth (interrupted briefly in 1964 by the brief threat of a conflict over Alpha Centauri which was resolved quickly by the arrival of the UN Fleet, and resulted in the collapse of the militant government of General Damar Exis), Suslov's machinations to use the UN to improve the Soviet position in Europe, already bolstered by the weakening of Germany, in fact ruined decades of work towards world unity. Trying to pressure Finland and Norway into joining the Soviet Bloc in the now infamous "Helsinki Affair", Suslov panicked the British government, and when Albert Speer began to make diplomatic overtures to London in the mid-1960s, London picked up the phone. What followed was the rapid Anglo-German reporachment, culminating in the 1967 Anglo-German Friendship Treaty which led to a considerable realignment of the power relations on earth, particularly when the Vichy state in France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain togethered formed the European Concordat in 1968 to act as a military "alternate path" to the Soviet-American duopoly. Suslov had singlehandled weakened the Human Bloc both on Earth and in space, as the British began to allow covert conflict between the German state on earth and her SS opponents in space, which had briefly aligned themselves to the Confederation (an alliance of convenience which would end dramatically in 1979). Though Suslov had been re-elected in 1965 handily, by 1969 the realignment on earth meant that, with many smaller nations discontented with Unity, and many Third World Nations falling to authoritarian puppet regimes of the European states which had once ruled them as colonies, his successor in the Unity Party was defeated in 1969 by the candidate of the right-wing, human expansionist, Terran Front, the inheritors of the fascist tradition for the space age...
1969-1977: Julian Amery (Terran Front, UK)
1969 def. Michael Stewart (Unity, UK)
1973 def. Nelson Rockefeller (Unity, USA)
"Only Speer could go to England..." one famous historiographical mantra proclaims; certainly had he failed to do so, Amery - and by extension the Terran Front - could never have held power in the United Nations for eight belligerent years. Amery was hardly a "pro-Nazi" as his brother John had been and, elevated to the cabinet as late as 1960, was seen as an odd choice for First Citizen despite his two year stint as Foreign Secretary. Nevertheless, through his father Amery had strong connections to both Unity and the United States Government, and formed something of a "moderating" force in the Terran Front, combining his own brand of Anti-Communism (a trait common amongst his Unionist colleagues and which had forced the party into a tentative alliance with Speer's Germany) and "third-way" economics, Amery also pioneered a virulently anti-Confederation policy with regards to the UN's Galactic rivals, advocating the extension of Terran Space into the "Inner Planets" of the Fourth Confederation, which gained the support of both Germany and the USSR, but angered President Lindsay whose primary "galactic" objective had been the maintenance of peace. In his final year in office, Amery very nearly succeeded in igniting a conflict between the UN and the Confederation, coming to the aid of the "Sons of the Latter Day Saint", a small Human Mormon colony around the outer-edges of Terran Space which, having come into conflict with a local Xeno religion, were occupied by a large Theocratic power which played a tributary role to the Confederation. Seeking to exercise the UN's role as "Protector of All Humans", Amery controversially made a personal visit to the Assembly of the Confederation and demanded it back down, threatening the deployment of human military vessels and nuclear weapons - a technology still underdeveloped by the Confederation in the 1970s - if the invading Xeno power was not compelled to stand down. Although at first a Second UN-Confederation war seemed imminent, the Confederation eventually backed down, largely under the aegis of Politicians who had been Junior Ministers in the First Ideth War Ministry and who did not wish to see a second Galactic-Terran War. Though his manouverings had been popular with the people (particularly in Germany and Britain) and ensured his election as British Prime Minister, Amery also made it inevitable that the UN General Assembly would reject a Terran Front successor...
1977-1981: Chiang Ching-kuo (Unity, ROC)
1977 def. Kurt Waldheim (Terran Front, Ger)
Chiang Ching-kuo, despite facing the near universally respected Kurt Waldheim, Speer's deputy prior to 1977, was elected handily to the First Citizenship in 1977; the first Asian UN leader, Chiang was a senior Chinese nationalis beauraucrat, and a figure who could act as a bridge between those in Unity ho favoured a stable galaxy and those who sought a more aggressive polic against the Confederation, loved by many for his reputation as the man who finally purged Japanese and Confederationist guerillas from Taiwan in the 1950s. The first crisis of his tenure erupted just six months after his election when, with popular discontent about the refusal of the German government to pull out of the UN, protests transformed into riots, riots into violent revolts, and finally revolts into a full-blown revolution, as hidden Hitlerist cells in the Fourth Reich's government sprung into action. Officially a "Cultural Revolution", it in fact represented a comprehensive seizure of power, with Speer assassinated and the NSDAP purged and transformed into the Nordic German People's Movement, a deeply racist, nationalistic, and human supremacist movement of Pagan former national socialists who idealised Himmler as "The Knight of Odin" and were determined to return Germany to a spiritual and natural ideal of rolling hills and a supreme race of perfect beings. Led by Bernhardt Pauli, a minor functionary prior to the revolution, the new state centralised power in the hands of a Fuhrer who acted as Hitler's regent, prior to a mythologised return and the reunification of all Germans on earth and in the Stars. In the year following the cultural revolution, as Germany alienated her allies, 1 million German refugees (including Waldheim) would flee to space and under Waldheim's leadership establish the "Republic of the German Nation", the first non-earth nation to be admitted as a full member of the UN - prior to 1983 it was the sole recognised German state in the General Assembly. Interestingly, it was this earthly crisis which triggered the other major crisis of Chiang's first citizenship; now recognising the presence of a Nazified power on Earth, the SS led "Holy Reich" severed her alliance of convenience with the Confederation, instead realigning herself with the Fifth Reich, and harrying the "impure races of the galaxy" in a series of raids throughout May 1980. The Confederation, of course, was rightfully angry, and demanded that Earth force the Holy Reich to back down, and when they did not immediately move to prevent such attacks, the Fourth Confederation's fleet began to prepare for an all-out assault on the Holy Reich, a threat matched by the Fifth Reich in Earth when it despatched its own fleet to prevent the assault. The galaxy was one blink away from a second Galactic war, and only Earth coming to Germany's aid forced the Confederation to back down, ruining even the tenuous cordiality which had succeeded the Crisis of '77. Accused of warmongering and aggression, but Unity and the Terran Front would find themselves pushed out of power in 1981, with the majority of nation's voting for the First Citizen democratically for the first time, and the world's populations decisively rejecting Western led aggression.
1981-1985: Indira Gandhi (Reconciliation, Ind)
1981 def. Chiang Ching-kuo (Unity, ROC), Alexander Haig (Terran Front, USA), Barry Goldwater (National Freedom, USA)
If just four years before one had suggested that Indira Ghandi, the former Ministers of Finance of India and then chair of the Pan-Asian Cooperative Sphere, would be elected UN First Citizen in 1981, one would have been laughed at at best. But, by 1981, Ghandi had led a "third-way" power into government in India, Japan, South Africa (beginning the end of Apartheid) and through, their links to the Labour Party, Great Britain, and now turned her sights to charting a new course for the Earth's interstellar empire. Other minor anti-Unity parties also emerged (especially Barry Goldwater's libertarian "National Freedom Party"), and anti-UN spirit was woefully high. Ghandi took the oath of office and quickly set about "making things right" with the Confederation, achieving serious diplomatic breakthroughs in a series of peace summits from 1982-1984 which agreed to a demilitarised zone between the two major powers, and for the UN to formally declare the Holy Reich an "outlaw state" without the backing of the human powers. All of this would come crashing down when the Earth woke up one morning to the revelation of the "Dijon-Centauri Affair". Ghandi's son Sanjay (UN Comissioner for Population Control by 1984) had conducted secret meetings with a Confederation Ambassador in a Dijon Hotel as early as 1980 during the early stages of his mother's campaign, in which Xeno resources, sequestered on earth for just such a contingency, would be put at his family's disposal in return for the cession of the Alpha Centauri system to the Confederation. No proof was found that Ghandi had accepted this deal, but the fact that talks had continued through to 1982 made the Ghandi First Citizenship seem to have been in collusion with Xeno powers, particularly due to Ghandi's decision to share nuclear secrets with the Confederation. When her First Citizenship came to an end, Ghandi did not even bother to run again - the UN's politics was fraught and divided; the centre-left and socialist Unity, led by the US and USSR fought against the German led Terran Front, whilst Britain was divided between the two, and most of the non-aligned nations who had once clustered around Reconciliation now fought amongst themselves for the mantle of the "peaceful" alternative. The post-War political consensus of a militarised peace established by Unity and the Terran Front was now well and truly over, and had been shattered into hundreds of fractal political movements.
1985-1989: Otto Ernst Remer (Terran Front, Ger)
1985 def. François Mitterrand (Unity, Fra), Lazar Koliševski (Reconciliation, Yug), Nina Temple (Fifth International, UK)
An old Hitlerite loyalist, Otto Remer had risen to power as Foreign Minister after the German Cultural Revolution of the late 1970s, loved by the new regime of the Fifth Reich for both his ties to the old Third Reich and experience in government, and tacitly accepted by foreign governments as the "moderate" face of Bernhard Pauli's "Pagan Nazism". In fact who Remer was mattered little; he had been elected not as a representative of a far-right resurgence (only Germany and Italy had been caught up successfully in the cultural revolution, and whilst both had decisively purged "modernists" by 1985 they had also been unable to spread their movements to Britain and France as desired), but instead of a backlash against Reconciliation as a party and a concept after the Dijon-Centauri affair in 1984. Where Remer's Fuhrer in Berlin was nigh on omnipotent within his domains, Remer was a lame duck First Citizen, never commanding a majority in the Assembly after 1986 when moderate Terran Front members broke away to form the "United Front" with American anti-Xeno politicians in Unity as well as the Chinese and Japanese delegations to the assembly, fearing Remer and his associates in the German government marked an extremist band of racial supremacy which did not match their own internationalist Anti-Xeno outlook. Remer did sign the "Mars Accords" of 1987 in which the Fourth Confederation and the United Nations finally recognised the official status of their respective territories, formally ending the state of diplomatic limbo which had existed between the two powers, but this had largely been Ghandi's work, and the signing was reluctant at best. Remer's attempts to aid the rump "Holy Reich" as a fellow "human power" embarrassed his own government when the space-based SS remnant imploded and was absorbed into the Republic of the German Nation (a state formed by refugees from the Cultural Revolution) and by 1989, with the Fifth Reich tenuous at best, Remer's chances of a second term were non-existent.
1989-0000: Jeane Kirkpatrick (United Front, USA)
1989 def. Ralph Nader (Reconcilliation, USA), Cyrus Vance (Continuity Unity, USA), Otto Ernst Remer (Terran Front, Ger), Acchile Occheto (Fifth International, Ita)
The undeniable Nazism of the Terran Front under Remer was the final impetus for the British section of the movement to break away, taking the French authoritarian "Dirigistes" with them, before moving to court American Galactic interventionists from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Enter Jeane Kirkpatrick. A former New York Senator and then head of the US Unity delegation to the UN, Kirkaptrick had long been a "Wallaceite" soft-socialist, but with a twist; Kirkpatrick strongly believed in the use of militaristic and often directly aggressive means to secure the security of the human powers and to beat back the Fourth Confederation (a task many military officials and diplomats privately believed should have been accomplished during the first war) and guarantee human Hegemony over the galaxy. Though having only served for just one year so far, Kirkpatrick's reelection is ensured in the face of a divided opposition, and her plans to increase the UN military presence on the border of the "Neutral Zone" (with every aim of violating it) has put terror into the hearts of the Fourth Confederation, now itself pursuing a peaceful policy of exploration and improvement, boldly going where no one has ever gone before. Whether their belligerent human neighbours will allow the Galactic project to redeem itself, however, remains to be seen.
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I kind of wanted to see how I might write a version of Worldwar mixed with elements of Star Trek and explore a kind of "best case scenario" for the earth which doesn't end with Stirling's "and then Earth became the Federation and everyone lived happily ever after".
