>atomic theory is discussed
>Russians are known from future hints that they are classically censorious
>"Threshold Bomb" is discussed based on atomic theory
>"Sunrise War" is going to happen in the future
......
Oh shit.
Look to the West Volume IX: The Electric Circus
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
>Russians are known from future hints that they are classically censorious
>"Threshold Bomb" is discussed based on atomic theory
>"Sunrise War" is going to happen in the future
......
Oh shit.
Very good show!
Really like how the world being less European-dominates both makes Societism possible and Diversitarianism
Also how nations like China get to truly develop their own political systems rather than trying to copy and paste European ideas like Marxism onto themselves.
Really like how the world being less European-dominates both makes Societism possible and Diversitarianism
Also how nations like China get to truly develop their own political systems rather than trying to copy and paste European ideas like Marxism onto themselves.
You meant the Sun, didn't you?
The scientific updates are lots of fun since the genre tends to focus so much on diplomacy and wars. Speaking of different approaches to science, is it un-Diversitarian to make fun of flat earthers just because they have a different opinion than you? I can imagine peer review being a nightmare in the Diversitarian world. "Your conclusions are bullshit and at odds with established findings!" "And YOU are trying to establish societist uniformity of thought which suppresses scientific freedom!" etc. Diversitarians may need their own word for doublethink if they want to describe reality without hurting other Diversitarians' feelings. Science in the Diversitarian world could face a whole different set of problems than the ones faced by Societist science and OTL science, e.g. the scientific establishment rejecting new ideas because the people with new ideas are just doctors barely out of their diapers and not professors, or politicians causing trouble if scientific findings don't show what they want them to show because there is room for only one reality. My intuition is that Diversitarianism can be more encouraging of new ideas, and may de facto encourage a more practical mindset because of a lesser inclination to assume that there is one single way of doing things, at the cost of it being harder to let go of wrong ideas.
Last edited:
It was explicitly mentioned at one point that 3 threshold bombs were used during the Sunrise War, for one purpose or another. Given Japan's future Societism and the references to some sort of Junta in Russia after the Sunrise War, I'm guessing it was used on Russia.
It's baaaaaaack! I was actualy thinking earlier today now that it is September about when the next update was gonna be out. Glad it was today.
I doubt it, since the whole point of diversitarianism is inviting discourse. Diversitarianism does not profess that all points are truly legitimately equal, only that all points will have their defenders, who must be allowed to voice their opinion.
Thande
Donor
Whoops, well spotted! Will correct in the main text.
Well, flat-eartherism probably doesn't really exist in TTL because it being a serious thing is largely a consequence of the internet allowing large numbers of stupid attention-seeking prats to find and reinforce each other, and the equivalent of the internet is too young, limited and regulated in TTL. More broadly, however, it would be a contentious philosophical debate over just how archaic or out-there a theory has to be before it's shunned, vs the scientific principle of keeping an open mind - but, naturally, that's really no different to OTL. The Societists somewhat resemble the Soviet (or, in earlier times, Catholic) problem that a large centralised authority claiming a unique access to truth in other spheres has to nail its colours to the mast of a particular scientific theory, which may then be disproven in practice (and the initial choice of theory may be affected by unrelated ideological positioning).
Oops. Nope.
Time dilation at ISS orbit is apparently .01 s over a year. That's one part in 3E9. Firstly, I doubt highly that you can get a 'clockwork' clock that is that accurate. Even if you could, the vibration of launch, the vacuum of space and the temperature cycling of the artimoon would introduce more variation - or at least would be believed to do so.
Thande
Donor
The figure is 35-45 microseconds per day for today's GPS satellites, which means that the relativistic error in photographic a target on the Earth (compared to Newtonian assumptions) grows at ten kilometres per day, so not sure where you got that interpretation from. I deliberately scaled it back because of the more modest orbits used here. Of course, it is fairer to say that the clockwork timer aspect is a bit of a stretch as the errors involved might well overwhelm this factor - but I didn't want to unrealistically imply progress in electronics just for this when it doesn't fit the overall theming.
That's the idea but there is always a temptation to game the system. It's easier to accuse others of deviating from the prevailing ideology than to respond with accusations of being too orthodox.
There's a story that in OTL Russian scientists convinced Stalin that nuclear weapons were a possibility that needed funding because the scientists who later were part of the Manhattan Project (and their German equivalents) had stopped publishing nuclear research.
So the Societists were always portrayed as this truly grave existential threat to The Nations and so far we have seen them threaten Africa via their vast domain over the core of the continent, Europe via Iberia and the Eternal State, Southeast Asia via Indonesia, and North America via Carolina and owning ALL of South America.
It's outright known Japan falls to Societism and Societist Conspiracies in India and former Belgium are referenced but implied to have shriveled up.
It seems like of all the Great Powers the only ones not threatened by Societists so far are China and Bengal.
It's outright known Japan falls to Societism and Societist Conspiracies in India and former Belgium are referenced but implied to have shriveled up.
It seems like of all the Great Powers the only ones not threatened by Societists so far are China and Bengal.
Ironically in a prior thread someone dug up an old book of an ersatz Societism centered on a universalised Chinese empire.
322
Thande
Donor
Part #322: Oh, Mr Ambassador…
“JEFFERSON!
The record-busting Duzzin’ musical returns from Nassau Street to the capital!
Starring…
AKRON POWELL as Ambassador Thomas Jefferson
ASHANTI ANSON as Martha Jefferson
ERIC STAPLES as Frederick Grenville
PAUL WILLIAMS as King Louis XVI
AND INTRODUCING
C. B. K. COOMBS as L’Inhumaine!
“An unforgettable retelling of the great tragedy of the early Empire” – New York Register
“Darke and Cullen’s radical fusion of Duzzin’ music with American foundational myth secures a Diversitarian place for the African people at the heart of our identity”- Philadelphia Courant
“Sparkin’ tunes!” – Debutante
Music by Afrika Cullen, lyrics by Jayjay Darke
ONE WEEK ONLY – JANUARY 11th-17th 2021 – BOOK NOW!
– Advertising poster outside the Gooch Theatre, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr Bruno Lombardi, December 2020
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Age of the Celebrity Diplomat” by Lady Britannia Parkin, recorded October 15th, 2020—
Nowadays, there’s almost an unspoken assumption that a foreign minister or an ambassador has to be – well – a bit of a showman. Or show-woman, as the case might be. I don’t lay any claims to that title. (Audience chuckles) But I think it’s true that moving in diplomatic circles demands a certain kind of charisma.
Before the last century, that charisma had been of an elite kind. It was about earning respect from foreign monarchs and other leaders, learning to fit into the power structure of the unfamiliar land to which one found oneself posted, temporarily or long-term. Ordinary people did not care about diplomats, unless an unpopular treaty could be blamed on them and a king or a minister could scapegoat them. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles) We could seldom lay claim to the kind of popular fame that talented – or lucky – generals or admirals could.
But all that began to change with the era of what we nowadays think of as ecumenical media. It began with Optel and Lectel, but accelerated with the growth of newspapers and then Photel transmissions. The odeon, and eventually the home motoscope, were the final piece of the puzzle. The public could now put names to faces. Not merely still images, either, but moving pictures. It helped build the fame of sportsmen and women, which is more obvious, maybe. It’s one thing to read in the paper that a Global Games runner has broken the record and see a time quoted, but quite another to see it happen before your eyes, even in black and white and with no sound. There have always been sporting celebrities, but the moving visual medium made a big difference. Boyd Wilson is long dead, but we all know his name and the fact that he ran the first four-minute mile in 1948. Films are still made about him. But who remembers Timothy Dalby, who broke the four and a half minute mile in 1901? He was well known in his time, a nine days’ wonder, but he had the misfortune to be born before films had become widespread. Whereas Boyd Wilson will live forever. Or look at actors. Great men and women treaded the boards in Dalby’s time, but they’re only known to historians, while those who performed in front of a camera will be immortalised for all time.
It’s less immediately apparent, but the same effect was true of diplomats. We weren’t just names or imposing, brittle, obviously-staged asimconic portraits anymore. The news-films would show clips of important summits in which they might recognise the Foreign Minister and ambassadors of the Empire, moving among their counterparts from overseas and making small talk. Even in the days before soundies, when everything was silent save for musical accompaniment, much of the skill of diplomacy is in body language. The public understood, partially. Just as their generals and their sportsmen competed against other nations in their own spheres, they began to recognise that their diplomats danced a subtler dance with their rivals, fighting for American interests the world over. They began to place value on these people.
In the past, Presidents might give the more minor ambassadorial role to unqualified but wealthy allies out of patronage, men who more desired a few years in the sun than possessing any talent or motivation to fight for America. (Audience murmurs) News-film diplomacy changed all of that. A President could no more assign an unqualified ambassador and get away with it than Terry Huskisson could put a second-division player in the national H-ball squad and expect to avoid a public scandal. (Audience laughter) The public now followed diplomacy like a competitive sport. They wanted skill, they wanted results – and, less positively, they wanted good looks. (Thoughtful audience chuckles)
The age of the celebrity diplomat has never truly gone away. But its heyday was undoubtedly the decade or so between about 1945 and 1956. It was the last phase of what some people now call the Electric Circus, a positive economic time in which there was rapid development in most of the world. Harnessing electricity, cities broke their last ties with the mediaeval past and became something more recognisable to us, with the Lectromulti-lined streets and large, modern houses with every convenience. For better and for worse! (Audience chuckles). We think of the twentieth century as transformative, and it was, but it was specifically this era, between the end of the Black Twenties around 1929 and the Crash of 1956, that most of the transformation happened. Only about one generation’s worth of time passed, but the way people lived – in most of the world, as I said – changed far more than that would suggest.
But it’s that last phase we’re talking about. We had come through the Dirty Thirties, the Archies and Reckies, the reaction and exhalation of relief after the end of the war and the plague years. In other parts of the worlds, colonies like Bisnaga, Pendzhab and Panchala fought for independence. The Gold Standard stabilised the world economy and China re-emerged from its internal struggles. Then came the Naughty Forties, the Long Hot Summer, when people railed against injustice and fought for civil liberties and the right to vote for all. All while singing zig-and-zag records and developing a fascination for foreign cultures. The Diversitarian movement began in earnest with the establishment of the ASN and its Concord predecessor.[1] It was a heady age.[2]
That’s the other thing that really kickstarted the idea of the celebrity diplomat. Diversitarianism. Not just that it led to a more globally interested and curious public – though you can debate the chicken and the egg on that one, maybe Diversitarianism wouldn’t have begun if the people weren’t already thinking that way, reacting against the dark tales of what was going on in the Societist Combine. (Audience murmurs) Regardless, there was another factor going on here, and that was Madame Héloïse Mercier. Madame Mercier had become France’s first Foreign Ministress near the start of the Black Twenties and had inspired and impressed millions. She was a powerful symbol, especially for women of course, but for many men as well – she projected a very ordinary image, someone balancing the responsibilities of a wife, later widow, and mother with her political career. She was an example of politics suddenly seeming within reach of the common folk. It was a great irony that she was often hated by many French cobrists who called her elitist, when she held far more appeal to the public than they did!
Much of what I just said was slowly burning from the Black Twenties onwards, inspiring young children who would grow up to enter politics or the diplomatic service – whether in France or around the world. But what really made the difference was the Toulon Conference in 1941. Nowadays it’s fashionable to rewrite history and say that Madame Mercier’s policy was simply driven by a desire to put a brave face on France’s colonial reversals. Ah, we are not weak, she allegedly says, we wanted those nations to become independent as we embrace their unique identities, the alloy of diversity that holds the line against the Societist hordes! (Mixed reactions from the audience) Yes, it is pathetic. Trace it back to those same mean-spirited cobrists, and Areians, and others, unable to tolerate the success of a woman in high office who is true to her own ideals.
Toulon was one of the first really big diplomatic events to be extensively filmed and broadcast around the world in news-films in odeons. There were also recordings of statements made by the diplomats that were broadcast over Photel networks, and even released on groovediscs like zig-and-zag records! People in Europe, and here in the Empire, got to see people they recognised, like Madame Mercier, interacting with exotic representatives from all over the world. Today we’d say it was like the Global Games of diplomacy, but it was actually examples like this which led to the Games becoming truly Global, rather than just a European and Novamundine club with some token Asian countries as they had been before.[3] The same is true of the WorldFests. The Toulon Conference was also broadcast, if more spottily, in many of those countries we’d call exotic. People in Matetwa, Abyssinia, Guinea got to see their representatives hob-nobbing with white diplomats on equal terms. (Audience murmurs) It was a powerful image.
And the Toulon Conference was only the first of many, of course. Soon the Empire would be part of these exchanges, too, and China, and even the young Indian states as they emerged, blinking, into the new light of day. All around the world, these images inspired thousands, millions to pursue diplomatic and political careers. Such roles had become romantic, fashionable, and within reach of the great masses of the people, not merely the elite. The Diplomatic Rage had begun…
*
(Lt Black’s note)
I’ve cut a few paragraphs here as they largely just rehash some of the material we’ve already seen from other speakers (such as the ‘Canajun Question’), setting the context for some of the geopolitical struggles of the time.
*
…but it wasn’t just a shift in how people viewed others, a change towards ecumenical media, that was part of the Diplomatic Rage. One cannot get excited about athletes without a contest or actors without a play or a film. The other factor that made this era extraordinary was that the public acknowledged the existence of crises across the terraqueous globe. For the first time, they began to fully understand all the work that went on – and goes on – behind the scenes, out of sight, to prevent them from igniting into wars. It was similar to the explosion of espionage fiction in the 1970s and 80s, which some of you may remember – naming no names. (Audience chuckles)
A fireman is called a hero when he puts out a fire with water. But what if that same fireman advised his neighbour to install a smoke signaller so that the fire never got a chance to start? He will not be called a hero for that, if only because we never heard about it in the papers. It is the same with spies. It is the same with diplomats – and sometimes there is a fine line between the two. (Audience murmurs) Usually our names only became known to the public when we failed. Just as firemen seldom get credit for preventing fires, so diplomats seldom received credit for preventing wars. But that began to change in the late 1940s.
We think of the early part of that decade as a time of peace, of course. Perhaps not without conflict, when we think of the internal social struggles and riots of the Long Hot Summer. But largely free of skirmishes between nations. There remained fighting in Africa and the Nusantara between nations there and the Societists, but even there the Silent Revolution within the Combine, together with the building of what became the ASN, helped quell the level of violence compared to the 1930s.
Nonetheless, there were already worrying birth-pangs suggestive of future conflicts. Romulan Italy remained an aggressive, unpredictable firebrand that causes endless problems for diplomats. The regime only narrowly avoided invading Sicily in 1940, which could have triggered a wider war, and then overthrew Italy’s monarchy in 1943 in the Lucretian Revolution. Germany, though not run by madmen, remained fixated on the notion that she had been ‘betrayed’ by the settlement at the end of the Black Twenties. Indeed, perhaps the only reason why Romulan fellow travellers – like the Mannusverein – remained obscure in Germany is because an even higher priority for German voters was the increasing unpopularity of their own monarchy.[4]
In some ways, it was almost as if the House of Wettin was cursed. Even when High Saxony had won the German Unification War back in 1853, then formed a united Germany in 1859, it had done so under a banner that had originally been stitched to lay claim to Bavaria – the German colours combine Saxon green with Bavarian blue.[5] (Surprised audience reaction) Yes, we don’t often think about that these days, but it’s true. After about a decade of successful rule under Bundeskaiser Augustus and his son Christian, who died tragically young, Germany then came under Johann Georg, who proceeded to throw away any goodwill his grandfather and father had left him.
Even if you have not heard much of this era of European history, you probably know about the Kulturkrieg, the Culture War. (Assenting audience murmurs) Johann Georg had struggled to unite the German people around a common identity – for example, Swabians were reluctant to play host to High Saxon troops being rotated in and vice-versa. He also feared political cobrism and the growth of parliamentary power. He tried to circumvent and supplant parliamentarians by rallying the people directly to his rule. Part of this strategy was to give the German people a new kind of enemy to unite against, an enemy within. Minorities like Danes, Jutes, Jews, Czechs and Sorbs. And more. We do not remember the countless anonymous figures who were overtaxed, roughed up by customs officers who demanded papers, whose businesses were vandalised whilst police looked the other way. We do remember the few big names whose cultural and scientific achievements have long outlasted their mortal lives. Anders Jacobsen, Claus Jensen, Mordechai Liebermann and many more.[6] In the end, after years of this, peaking in the 1880s, the German people were fed up and realised it was all just an excuse to distract from economic problems and the royal family’s own scandals. When Johann Georg tried the same thing to distract from Germany’s defeat in the Pandoric War, the people were thoroughly unconvinced, and began turning to the High Radical or Hochrad cobrist movement instead.[7]
But it wasn’t just that. As I said, one might almost think the Wettins cursed, considering just how consistently they seemed to get it wrong – like Unlucky Ralph playing the casinos of Nueva Dublin in “Doyn and Oyt.” (Audience chuckles) Johann Georg had enthusiastically backed the Pandoric War, which turned into a miserable grind and a severe defeat for Germany. Then he tried to dispose of unwanted by veterans to send them on a hopeless attempt to fight the Societists, he suffered an assassination attempt, he went mad, and Germans spent five agonising years from 1903 to 1908 trying to work around this. The Abdication Crisis, it was called. He was eventually replaced by his son Anton, but the damage was done. Anton always refused to admit how far his father had sunk or that he had made any mistakes, resisting attempts to draw a line under the period. He would name things after his father, be they experimental warships, bridges or military offensives, and the people would sigh, roll their eyes and pay lip service to them. Meanwhile, Fritz Ziege and the Hochrads continued to gain power at the expense of the monarchy.[8]
Johann Georg had bet on the Pandoric War being short and victorious and had lost, so Anton tried to prevent Germany joining the Khivan War, which became the Black Twenties. Again, he seemed to get everything wrong remarkably consistently, opposing the war when the public backed it and then switching to support when the public began to waver. He then disowned the attempts to break the Oder bridgehead just before the offensive named after Ziege broke through.[9] During the conflict, Anton’s son Maurice had died of the plague, a man who might have been able to mend the problems with the German monarchy. Instead the throne would pass directly from Anton to Maurice’s son Christian Augustus, hopefully named for Germany’s first and second modern emperors. Christian, a spoilt playboy, would decidedly fail to live up to those names. He came to the throne at the age of 29 when Anton died in 1942, and immediately became embroiled in controversy for his partying lifestyle. He was a transoceanic embarrassment for Germany, of doradist as well as cobrist sympathies.
From 1926 onwards, Germany alternated between Niederrad and Vereinspartei chancellors, with the traditional monarchist Treuliga relegated to the backbenches and the aristocratic Hochrads usually reduced to a junior ally of the more proletarian Niederrads. Uwe Fischer, a Niederrad, was replaced with Vereinspartei Gerhard von Nostitz after the 1931 election. Then the Niederrads returned in 1940 under Erich Stark, ensuring they were in power when Christian Augustus came to the throne. They soon began working around the monarchy wherever they could, while the Vereinspartei remained noncommittal. Only the Treuliga still tried to rally the people against the Niederrads’ controversial cobrist policies, such as a massive expansion of federal insurance funded by increased taxation, by appealing to the monarchy as a symbol. And, though some voters did oppose the Niederrad policy, few saw the vapid playboy in the Dresdner Schloss as any kind of standard-bearer for their values. By the time the Vereinspartei returned to power in 1946 under Johannes Althaus, it was clear that the patience of all parts of society was running out. The tide of politics towards the abolition of the German monarchy began in earnest in the late 1940s, but the interruption of the Crash of 1956 and the Sunrise War meant that the process would not be completed until the 1960s.
Anyway, that was a long digression, but the point is that Germany was too concerned with her own inward struggles to prove a flashpoint on the world stage in this period. Her governance of Bohemia was also controversial, with counter-persecution of Czechs and Silesian Slavs, just as the Russians had backed those groups persecuting ethnic Germans in the period in which the country was known as Czechosilesia. In practice, of course, those who benefited were often the unscrupulous and well-off who could turn their coats and embrace a new identity at the drop of a hat, while others became cynical towards the invocation of patriotism. (Audience murmurs) Few would have been surprised to learn that Bohemia would eventually be one of the flashpoints that would end the Electric Circus period of peace, but many would have been shocked to learn precisely how.
1945 was an important year, in some ways signalling the end of a period of relative peace. Outright global war would not return for another twelve years, but the people, as I said, became increasingly aware that war was now being averted only by the strident work of diplomatic heroes across the world. The usual event that people point to is the attempted Societist takeover of Formosa in August of that year, but that is only the most prominent of a number of events and tensions which began to build. In 1944, only four years after Panchala had successfully fought for independence against China, its leaders made another attempt to take Delhi, hoping that this time the Chinese would not directly support their Muslim-dominated client state, now geographically separated from China. Paresh Anand and the other Panchali leaders were correct in this respect, but China had nonetheless armed Delhi. Delhi would also be be supported by Pendzhab and, indirectly, Bisnaga and Bengal, both of which were pluralistic entities that feared the rhetoric of the new militant Hindu empire of Panchala just as they had once feared the Islamic Great Jihad. After the defeat of the Panchalis at Delhi and their withdrawal in 1945, Panchala suffered a revolution. Narayan Kumar, a general in the army who had been gathering political power, seized power. He immediately began pushing for military reforms and sought new allies. He and his son would go on to be among the most infamous, yet arguably successful, dictators of the twentieth century. (Audience murmurs)
Formosa and Delhi were not isolated incidents. Enough years had passed since the horrors of the Black Twenties that a new generation of young people had grown up, and the memories of some of their elders had started to fade. The success of the Gold Standard had, paradoxically, made people complacent, less fearful of the destruction that war could bring. The siren song of the quick, glorious victory was beginning to make itself known again.
Until Formosa, the Societists had also slipped off the perception of many people, a far cry from the terrors of the Second Black Scare following the War of 1926. (A few audience murmurs) Their activities in Africa had been brought to prominence by the Toulon Conference, but then that too had begun to fade. Ironically, the Societists’ own internal struggles had reduced their actions against Africans, and the alliance being built by Madame Mercier and others paved the way for the collective security of the ASN. Paradoxically, removing the Societists from the equation as a threat also led more people to talk about re-opening disputes with other nations that had previously been suppressed.
Of course, all of this was meat and drink to Societist theorists – especially those in places like Danubia, as many of the ones in the Combine had been summarily purged in the last few years for loyalty to Alfarus. The Societists argued that the nations were doomed to fight eternal, futile battles until we all exhausted each other and then they could move in and take over – the so-called Doctrine of the Last Throw. (Murmurs) But the diplomatic stars of the period from 1945 to 1956 were determined to prove them wrong!
So who were these celebrity diplomats? I can’t give an exhaustive list, because they were subject to the same whims of fashion as the music charts or the film ratings. Some had mayfly careers in which they burned brightly over one diplomatic crisis before fizzling out. Others became reliable standards, regularly wheeled out for consultation even after retirement. Such men, and the occasional woman, would be a regular source of income for publishers, churning out libraries of books. Some of them were even written by them.
I might mention a few more later, but for now, I’ll stick to the biggest names in each nation. Firstly, there are the three who are sometimes called the Trinity, the representatives of three out of the four most powerful nations on Earth – excluding China as China was still emerging from its isolation and had to play catch-up. Here in the Empire we had Sir Andrew Lawrence Leighton, known as Laurie Leighton, also known as the Brain of Laurel House.[10] (Audience reaction) Yes, even today adept diplomats are routinely compared to the Brain. In many ways, he was everyone’s stereotypical idea of an American diplomat, a New England aristocrat who went to Yale, spoke with a cut-glass accent and wore an aeroscrew tie.[11] But half the reason we have that stereotypical image is because Sir Laurie created it by his existence.
His French counterpart was Pierre Lesterlin. Lesterlin was a protégé of Madame Mercier, who served as her Foreign Minister at the Tuileries in her last years in power. It was when she finally retired from politics for good in 1945, at the age of seventy-seven, that Lesterlin really came into his own. He was Foreign Minister in the brief government of Bernard Mignon until 1947 when the Rubis Party won power under François Bouquin. But given the increasing foreign policy crises of the period, Lesterlin became a natural choice of opposition leader to criticise the inexperienced, more domestic-focused Bouquin, and became Prime Minister when Bouquin’s government collapsed in 1950 after the Sol Invictus 1 crisis. Like his mentrix Madame Mercier, he effectively controlled the Tuileries from the Montmartre through a series of proxies. He helped to build on the foundation of the Concord and ASN that Mercier had begun, ensuring a place in the sun for France in the form of diplomatic leadership, even after the loss of her colonial empire.
The third member of the Trinity was Aleksandar Janković, known as Strannyy Sasha or ‘Strange Alec’ to the Russians due to his eccentric habits. He was not a native-born Russian himself, but a child of Serv refugees who had fled Servia after the Ottoman takeover following the Pandoric War. The Russian Slavicist ideology provided a path for his success, but many Russians often provided only lip service to the idea that their ‘Slavic brothers’ should be considered equals. Furthermore, Janković did not come from aristocracy or money, but worked his way up from the bottom of the pile, a rarity in Russia. He was a businessman rather than a politician, who owed his success to being the first to realise and seize an opportunity. Tsar Paul III had built, or rather modernised, the Russian cult of autocratic state government, creating a system that worked providing one ruthless, effective man was at its head. But after his death, there was no one to fill it but the underage and vacillating Fyodor V, who came under the control of a series of different regents who jockeyed for power and whose goals were incompatible. During this time, centralised state power began to wither in Russia and many of the old laws simply ceased enforcement, with bribes being common. Aristocrats huddled in their palaces, while businessmen came to independent arrangements with increasingly militant workers rather than being able to rely on the state power to crush trade unionists.
Janković ‘s genius was in realising that this also applied to the state monopoly on broadcasting. The Dalekodeon system, which had incidentally allowed the Okhrana to listen in on private conversations due to being a two-way broadcast, was now creaking and ancient. The old ban (or heavy restrictions) on Photel systems was no longer being enforced. Small illegal Photel stations abounded, but Janković was the first to audaciously plant transmitters in full view and register his company…let me see if I can pronounce this… Sverkhvysokaya Chastota… (Audience applause)…means something like ‘High pulse rate Photel’…openly with the authorities. As he had guessed, nobody attempted to stop him, and for a time around 1939, Janković had secured an effective monopoly. Even after competitors sprang up and the state belatedly became involved, Janković’s position was so strong that the Imperial Soviet – which belatedly now began to fill the power vacuum left by the weak emperor and frenetically-changing regents – felt it had to negotiate with him to issue propaganda broadcasts, rather than simply ordering him. On the plus side for them, Janković’s network also let them broadcast that propaganda into neighbouring countries too, getting Russia’s versions of events out there. Janković had worked with Photel broadcasters in other nations when gaining experience, which led to accusations from bitter competitors that he merely copied the broadcasting ideas of others and put his own spin on them. But others retorted that Janković ‘s versions were more popular than the originals. Regardless, these links meant that he moved in wider circles than many even in Russia’s Foreign Ministry. It was Janković, not any of the princes of the latter, that would forge the strongest links with Sir Laurie and Lesterlin.
This Trinity were responsible for many of the big achievements of the Diplomatic Rage. Through Janković, Fredericksburg and Paris felt they finally had someone they could negotiate with rather than the usual unpredictable enigma of Russia. I could list lots of examples here where conflicts were averted, or the steady progress towards Russia beginning to engage with the ASN and oppose the Societists, though later events would complicate that. However, the single biggest achievement of the Trinity was undoubtedly the Oleic Bank. (Audience murmurs) Yes, I know it’s a bit controversial nowadays, when we only hear about the disadvantages – both in terms of corruption and climate amelioration, of course. But at the time, the Oleic Bank was a big step forward.
At the midpoint of the twentieth century, oil was increasingly king. Oil didn’t overtake coal as our primary energy source in general until the 1970s, due to coal-fired electricity power stations, but by 1950 it had already overtaken coal as the primary fuel for mobiles, ships and – almost – trains.[12] In the Societist Combine, Josephus Kalvus had embarked on his disastrous ‘Oil Standard’ programme that discredited Alfarus and partly led to the Silent Revolution. But Kalvus was at least correct in his starting observation, that oil was now the most valuable substance in the world. Gold sits in vaults, but oil is consumed. And without oil to power all the sinews of our economy, all the transport that holds our world together, that economy – that world –grinds to a halt. (Audience murmurs)
As the importance of oil became recognised during the First Interbellum and the Black Twenties, theorists began to speculate about how it would affect future wars. The Russians had already been accused of seeking to conquer Persia in part thanks to its oifields, although Russian attempts to conquer Persia long predated oil- or, indeed, coal-fired engines. One memorable analysis came in the form of a work of fiction, the scientific romance Abyss by Robert Blunt, published in 1944. Blunt drew heavily upon The Abyssal Empire by Joseph Taillant, which had been published seventy-four years previously but remained a classic in how it subverted the usual expectations of ‘invasion bloodies’ and the ‘Submarine Rage’ novels.[13] Taillant had envisaged the surface world being invaded by the more technologically advanced Ondine civilisation from beneath the waves. His intention was to mock some of the tropes of the chest-beating invasion fiction that had set France and Germany against one another, instead hinting at a pan-human alliance to oppose the Ondine. The Ondine did not long stay under Taillant’s attempt to hold sole copyright and were widely used by other authors. Land For Sale, written by the Californian authoress Audrey Fernandez in 1874, is so iconic that many people (and film adaptations) confuse its ideas with those of Taillant’s original. Taillant’s goal was to mock invasion bloodies and tell a compelling story, whereas Fernandez used the Ondine as a criticism of colonialism. She shifed the usual arguments about superior civilisation by showing Europeans and Novamundines being colonised in turn by the Ondine, and asking whether their superior technology meant that Europeans and Novamundines should be expected to just shrug and accept Ondine rule.
Blunt used the ideas from Land for Sale in his much later book Abyss, but turned them around. His version of the undersea Ondine are less advanced than humans, rather than more. Blunt was inspired by recent undersea oil discoveries, and portrayed the Ondine as living on the ocean floor atop such an oilfield.[14] Various competing human powers and companies seek to take their undersea homes from them and secure the ocean floor – and oil – for their own claims. Blunt was making an allegorical warning that the same could soon happen to the less fortunate groups of humans who lived atop oilfields. Indeed, to some extent it had already happened to groups like Tortolians here in the Empire or traditional Bedouin tribes in Araby. Oil was king, and greed was its chief minister.
The Trinity, however, were more concerned with the idea that competition over oil resources could become a trigger for war. Lesterlin pointed to the analogy of the Ruhr industrial area that was split between, and had often been fought over by, Belgium and Germany. “If either side secured the whole area, how long would it take the increased production to pay for the costs of conquest followed by the cost of rebuilding?” was his famous question, and Sir Laurie was able to demonstrate the point mathematically. Janković agreed. “Why should men fight over how large their slice of pie is,” he asked rhetorically, “and in the process drop the whole thing on the floor – when they could use those same energies to bake a larger pie in the first place?” Some rather fanatical enemies accused him of stealing a talking point from Pablo Sanchez, but in general, the point was accepted.
The creation of the Oleic Bank, in 1951, was a turning point. Most major nations agreed to a common framework for oil exploitation, building on the kinds of multilateral agreements previously made at the Passau Conference of 1935 to implement the Gold Standard. The treaties are long and complicated, but two important principles were established. Firstly, a minimum of 25% of all oil profits would go to the indigenous owners of the land on which the oil was extracted. In recent years this has come under criticism, as often it’s been swallowed up by greedy dictatorial governments and not trickled down – no pun intended – to the people, but it was nonetheless an important recognition of a new post-colonial reality. Secondly, all companies would be able to compete freely to exploit oil fields regardless of their country of origin, with this managed by independent, multi-national committees evaluating their bids. Thirdly, all companies must agree to place at least 50% of oil extracted into a common transoceanic fund on which all nations could bid, with the remainder being permitted to be sold in secret or restricted transactions. The notion was to prevent oil-exploiting nations from holding others to ransom in the event of war. In practice, there proved to be ways to circumvent the rules, of course, but they were nonetheless an important move towards defusing many areas of tension around the world. And, of course, all of this needed some kind of secretariat to run it – and the brand-new ASN stepped in as the most obvious contender. As we’ve heard its critics opine ever since, the ASN almost sleepwalked into being the organisation that speaks for all nations in so many fields.
I could talk for hours about the exploits of the Trinity, whether it be the Madagascar independence settlement of 1953, the Kalat Accord of 1950 or the Gibraltar Declaration of 1955. But there is a bittersweet edge to these triumphs. Janković, reasonable and rational, unintentionally convinced France and the Empire that a kernel of such rationality and reasonableness could be found in the Russian government itself. But Janković was an outsider, a figure from outside the traditional power structures of Russia, alienated even from other upstart businessmen. For a time, he exerted power and influence over the government due to it being weak, divided and indecisive. But that would not last forever, and when it changed, France, the Empire and the rest of the world would be caught offguard by the sudden shift in rhetoric from Petrograd.
But that is a story for another day. The Trinity might have been the most prominent among the diplomatic celebrities of the age, but there were others as well. For example, the Lesser Trinity, as we sometimes call them, or the Real Trinity, as they do. (Audience murmurs) Yes, well, that’s the old country for you, always playing catch-up. (Audience laughter and one or two oohs) The Lesser Trinity consisted of Kenneth Sefton of England, Rodrigo Abikoff of California and Piet Halsbeek of Belgium. Although Sefton is usually considered the leader of the alignment and Abikoff the most interesting – he had a musical career on the side – it was really the addition of Halsbeek that changed things. For the first time since the country had been broken up and reduced after the Black Twenties, Belgium ventured back onto the world stage, with a tone very much changed from the hectoring, repressive days of the Maximilians.
Belgium had lost Luxemburg and Liége-Luik, and was now a very different country. It had lost a large number of its Catholics (though they remained the majority) and many of its power structures under the Maximilians, already hollowed out by the period of Russian vassalage, slowly crumbled throughout the 1930s. This was followed by social upheavals in the early 1940s, as in many nations during the ‘Long Hot Summer’. These upheavals shattered the former system of pillarisation and rehabilitated many of the Protestant Dutch republican figures and imagery that had formerly been discouraged under the ‘Belgian Party’ ideology of the Maximilians. The Calvinists, though a minority, had always survived through the years of southern rule, in part due to their role in the port cities – which continued to be important. Now they began to reassert their influence once more. It was an opportunity for the new Belgium to draw a line under its murky past and seize the day as a diplomatic wild card. Halsbeek played a key role in what became known as ‘Neo Belgicus’,[15] carefully divorcing the new state from the misadventures of its former incarnation in its (now lost) colonies and portraying the Belgian people as ‘the first victims’ of the Maximilians, rather than those who had followed their orders. (Audience murmurs) Yes, well, it is a controversial point, still.
Halsbeek, and his allies in the States-General, successfully and audaciously reinvented Belgium as a champion of oppressed peoples everywhere, which mostly seemed to amount to selling guns to Panchala and the Zanguebari rebels. In fairness, Belgium’s allegedly decommissioned munitions factories in the Ruhr also armed Africans and Siamese-backed Sumatrans who were fighting against Societist expansion, hence why the ASN allowed them to get away with it. England and California were valued allies for Belgium, all three arguing for the ‘rights of small nations’ in the new world order that was slowly emerging from the decolonisation of the 1930s and 40s.
Sefton was most concerned with finding a way for England to withdraw from the increasingly unprofitable colony of Natal without it seeming like a retreat, or conceding it to Matetwa conquest; a part of the old colony was already under Matetwa ‘administration’, a transparent diplomatic fiction from the Black Twenties conflict.[16] Sefton was a proletarian, a leader among the Trade Unionist Alliance – which would later merge with the more bourgeois Democratic Party to form today’s Democratic Unionists in England – who was hard to connect with images of past colonial exploitation. Rather, he claimed that exploitation was just the same if it came from a neighbouring African power like the Matetwa. In 1955, a treaty was signed that created Natal as an independent state as Sefton had hoped. Something that was not predicted was that rather than the native black majority coming to the ascendancy as it did in some other post-colonial African states, the Bengali-dominated civil service promptly seized power as soon as the English pulled out. The ‘Bengali Raj’ would not be toppled until the landmark elections of 1972.[17]
California was worried about being swallowed up by the Empire, given that the UPSA was gone and Russia had been pushed out of North America. Murmurs) Abikoff still had ambitions that California could try to engage with the Combine (More murmurs) and, in the aftermath of the Silent Revolution, some seemingly-reasonable Societist diplomats did reach out. Of course, as with Janković in Russia, their influence over the state was exaggerated. This isn’t to say that there weren’t genuinely prominent Societist diplomats who were part of the Rage, it’s just that they weren’t Combine Societists. Paulus Arbormontis, also known as Paul Baumberg, skilfully represented the interests of Grey Societist Danubia throughout the period. He played a particularly prominent role in the creation of the Oleic Bank, which made him a target for the Combine’s Deleters due to perceived embarrassment in comparison to the Kalvus’ failed Oil Standard. Baumberg was also key in reaching out to the Eternal State as that entity used the Silent Revolution to fully assert its autonomy from the Combine. I believe he even tried the same with Iberia, but there were too many doctrinaire Societist troops there even at the height of the Silent Revolution to have any hope of splitting it off. Nonetheless, there is some justice to the controversial quote of Scandinavia’s Henrik Elleman, that Baumberg did more to damage the cause of Combine Societism in the 1940s than all the ASN resolutions put together. (Even more murmurs)
We’ve only scratched the surface. One of the most prominent figures of the Diplomatic Rage was China’s Xu Yiying, Lady Zhao. She was the widow of Qiu Qiming, a diplomat who had been the protégé – and, some whispered, the illegitimate son – of China’s great foreign minister Ding Guoyang, Duke of Cao. Whether that’s true or not, the aged Ding was certainly greatly saddened by Qiu’s untimely death at the hands of Panchali rebels in 1932. As though to transfer his affections, and knowing that Xu had helped and supported her husband in his work, Ding audaciously brought her into the diplomatic service in her own right. It was a controversial move in China, whose administration – though certainly radical compared to that of their Qing predecessors – was still often very traditional and rooted in Confucian patriarchy. But Lady Zhao, as she became, soon became a feared name for her relentless refusal to be intimidated by the old boys’ network. Her enemies called her ‘the Widow of Zhao’, in reference to the Chinese play “The Orphan of Zhao”.[18] Like the titular Orphan, they alleged, she was determined to take revenge for her dead relative(s). But soon Zhao’s supporters adopted the name as a badge of honour. In China, Lady Zhao is mostly remembered for her strident warnings that Panchala, arming and modernising under Narayan Kumar, should not be discounted as a threat. However, on the world stage she became a glamorous symbol of the new China in her attendance at ASN summits, starting around 1947.
Lady Zhao was also one of many Chinese diplomats to engage with Siam’s own coterie of stars at this time. Siam was already involved in an unexpected alliance with Bengal, shifting pieces as the Indian states emerged from the chaos of decolonisation, but also storing up problems in Burma.
Unfortunately, this apparent further Sino-Siamese reconciliation following the Treaty of Guiling hid an unforeseen consequence, something which was repeated elsewhere. As mapping improved, with camera-dromes and even artimoons in time, disputes that had been thought settled were now reopened. Lines that had sufficed at the time were now called into question, as rivers shifted courses, the positions of mountains were altered, and more.
The Diplomatic Rage was a glorious era in which, for a time, it felt as though the world’s many problems could be solved solely by enough stern-faced men and charismatic women in a gallery making small talk over canapés. But it was a false dawn. Resentment and disagreement continued to bubble beneath the surface of the world, and it would not be long before the failure of the seemingly-invincible economic system would spell doom for ‘the peace upheld by a thousand hands’…
[1] Technically the ASN began as one part of the Concord and then subsumed its name.
[2] Lady Parkin is basically giving the stereotypical, cliff notes version of how Americans in 2020 tend to think of the Electric Circus period. Obviously, this is not necessarily accurate even just for America, never mind the world, but it is what people immediately think of. (Compare how the 1960s is presented in OTL pop culture).
[3] This is a slight exaggeration to make a point – China had participated extensively in the Games years before. However, this is confused slightly by the fact that China had initially remained largely inward-looking in the 1930s and not sent many athletes to the Games again until the 1940s.
[4] The Mannus Verein or ‘Mannus Society’ is a German- and Germanic-supremacist movement fixated on ethnological pseudoscientific theories connected with Mannus, the legendary founder of the Germanic peoples. It is probably the closest analogue to OTL’s Nazis and similar groups. Besides the reasons given in the main text, one reason why it fails to capture the public imagination is that (thanks to the lower colonial penetration in India and the devastation of the Great Jihad) ancient Hindu texts like the Rigveda are much more obscure in Europe. The related studies of the ‘Old Eurasian’ language (i.e. Proto-Indo-European) are also considered politically suspect by many due to Sanchez writing about the idea of reviving it. Thus there are many barriers to the ‘Aryan’ idea becoming well known in TTL. There is still plenty of casual antisemitism and prejudice against other groups like the Roma, of course, but it is not framed in those ways (and Germans have become somewhat cynical about such things due to the Bundeskaiser ineptly trying to use them, as described in the main text).
[5] See Part #199 in Volume IV.
[6] See Parts #219 and #221 in Volume V.
[7] See Part #247 in Volume VI.
[8] See Part #257 in Volume VII.
[9] See Part #289 in Volume VIII.
[10] Metonym for the American Foreign Office, headquartered in this building which was built in the 1930s.
[11] I.e. a tie that looks like an aeroscrew (propeller). Think a bow tie but with three ‘blades’, ultimately originating in futurist, technophilic fashion crazes that were related to the Wreckie youth movement.
[12] In OTL oil overtook coal (as an energy source in general) in 1964. Significant differences in TTL (though these partly cancel out) include the later rollout of the public electricity supply and the wider pre-existence of a coal-steam engine based ‘ecosystem’ of steam cars and other road vehicles. In OTL this only applied to ships and trains (both of which took longer for oil to take over).
[13] See Part #218 in Volume V.
[14] The first undersea oil drilling took place in 1896 in OTL. In TTL it is a few years later, in 1902, but not by much. However, undersea oil does not become a practical major fuel source (and known about by the general public) until the 1930s.
[15] A pun on ‘Leo Belgicus’, the lion-shaped propaganda map of the Low Countries that dates from the Eighty Years’ War for Dutch independence. Here it is a useful reference that both retains the name Belgium while newly invoking the formerly suppressed Protestant Dutch Republican heritage.
[16] See Part #293 in Volume VIII.
[17] For the Bengalis in Natal, see Interlude #8 in Volume II and Part #282 in Volume VIII.
[18] Properly titled “The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao”, this play is attributed to Ji Junxiang and probably dates to the 13th century. In the eighteenth century, after translation by the Jesuit Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare, it became the first Chinese play to ever be performed in Europe – albeit many of the European versions drifted considerably off-piste and added their own political opinions.
“JEFFERSON!
The record-busting Duzzin’ musical returns from Nassau Street to the capital!
Starring…
AKRON POWELL as Ambassador Thomas Jefferson
ASHANTI ANSON as Martha Jefferson
ERIC STAPLES as Frederick Grenville
PAUL WILLIAMS as King Louis XVI
AND INTRODUCING
C. B. K. COOMBS as L’Inhumaine!
“An unforgettable retelling of the great tragedy of the early Empire” – New York Register
“Darke and Cullen’s radical fusion of Duzzin’ music with American foundational myth secures a Diversitarian place for the African people at the heart of our identity”- Philadelphia Courant
“Sparkin’ tunes!” – Debutante
Music by Afrika Cullen, lyrics by Jayjay Darke
ONE WEEK ONLY – JANUARY 11th-17th 2021 – BOOK NOW!
– Advertising poster outside the Gooch Theatre, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr Bruno Lombardi, December 2020
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Age of the Celebrity Diplomat” by Lady Britannia Parkin, recorded October 15th, 2020—
Nowadays, there’s almost an unspoken assumption that a foreign minister or an ambassador has to be – well – a bit of a showman. Or show-woman, as the case might be. I don’t lay any claims to that title. (Audience chuckles) But I think it’s true that moving in diplomatic circles demands a certain kind of charisma.
Before the last century, that charisma had been of an elite kind. It was about earning respect from foreign monarchs and other leaders, learning to fit into the power structure of the unfamiliar land to which one found oneself posted, temporarily or long-term. Ordinary people did not care about diplomats, unless an unpopular treaty could be blamed on them and a king or a minister could scapegoat them. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles) We could seldom lay claim to the kind of popular fame that talented – or lucky – generals or admirals could.
But all that began to change with the era of what we nowadays think of as ecumenical media. It began with Optel and Lectel, but accelerated with the growth of newspapers and then Photel transmissions. The odeon, and eventually the home motoscope, were the final piece of the puzzle. The public could now put names to faces. Not merely still images, either, but moving pictures. It helped build the fame of sportsmen and women, which is more obvious, maybe. It’s one thing to read in the paper that a Global Games runner has broken the record and see a time quoted, but quite another to see it happen before your eyes, even in black and white and with no sound. There have always been sporting celebrities, but the moving visual medium made a big difference. Boyd Wilson is long dead, but we all know his name and the fact that he ran the first four-minute mile in 1948. Films are still made about him. But who remembers Timothy Dalby, who broke the four and a half minute mile in 1901? He was well known in his time, a nine days’ wonder, but he had the misfortune to be born before films had become widespread. Whereas Boyd Wilson will live forever. Or look at actors. Great men and women treaded the boards in Dalby’s time, but they’re only known to historians, while those who performed in front of a camera will be immortalised for all time.
It’s less immediately apparent, but the same effect was true of diplomats. We weren’t just names or imposing, brittle, obviously-staged asimconic portraits anymore. The news-films would show clips of important summits in which they might recognise the Foreign Minister and ambassadors of the Empire, moving among their counterparts from overseas and making small talk. Even in the days before soundies, when everything was silent save for musical accompaniment, much of the skill of diplomacy is in body language. The public understood, partially. Just as their generals and their sportsmen competed against other nations in their own spheres, they began to recognise that their diplomats danced a subtler dance with their rivals, fighting for American interests the world over. They began to place value on these people.
In the past, Presidents might give the more minor ambassadorial role to unqualified but wealthy allies out of patronage, men who more desired a few years in the sun than possessing any talent or motivation to fight for America. (Audience murmurs) News-film diplomacy changed all of that. A President could no more assign an unqualified ambassador and get away with it than Terry Huskisson could put a second-division player in the national H-ball squad and expect to avoid a public scandal. (Audience laughter) The public now followed diplomacy like a competitive sport. They wanted skill, they wanted results – and, less positively, they wanted good looks. (Thoughtful audience chuckles)
The age of the celebrity diplomat has never truly gone away. But its heyday was undoubtedly the decade or so between about 1945 and 1956. It was the last phase of what some people now call the Electric Circus, a positive economic time in which there was rapid development in most of the world. Harnessing electricity, cities broke their last ties with the mediaeval past and became something more recognisable to us, with the Lectromulti-lined streets and large, modern houses with every convenience. For better and for worse! (Audience chuckles). We think of the twentieth century as transformative, and it was, but it was specifically this era, between the end of the Black Twenties around 1929 and the Crash of 1956, that most of the transformation happened. Only about one generation’s worth of time passed, but the way people lived – in most of the world, as I said – changed far more than that would suggest.
But it’s that last phase we’re talking about. We had come through the Dirty Thirties, the Archies and Reckies, the reaction and exhalation of relief after the end of the war and the plague years. In other parts of the worlds, colonies like Bisnaga, Pendzhab and Panchala fought for independence. The Gold Standard stabilised the world economy and China re-emerged from its internal struggles. Then came the Naughty Forties, the Long Hot Summer, when people railed against injustice and fought for civil liberties and the right to vote for all. All while singing zig-and-zag records and developing a fascination for foreign cultures. The Diversitarian movement began in earnest with the establishment of the ASN and its Concord predecessor.[1] It was a heady age.[2]
That’s the other thing that really kickstarted the idea of the celebrity diplomat. Diversitarianism. Not just that it led to a more globally interested and curious public – though you can debate the chicken and the egg on that one, maybe Diversitarianism wouldn’t have begun if the people weren’t already thinking that way, reacting against the dark tales of what was going on in the Societist Combine. (Audience murmurs) Regardless, there was another factor going on here, and that was Madame Héloïse Mercier. Madame Mercier had become France’s first Foreign Ministress near the start of the Black Twenties and had inspired and impressed millions. She was a powerful symbol, especially for women of course, but for many men as well – she projected a very ordinary image, someone balancing the responsibilities of a wife, later widow, and mother with her political career. She was an example of politics suddenly seeming within reach of the common folk. It was a great irony that she was often hated by many French cobrists who called her elitist, when she held far more appeal to the public than they did!
Much of what I just said was slowly burning from the Black Twenties onwards, inspiring young children who would grow up to enter politics or the diplomatic service – whether in France or around the world. But what really made the difference was the Toulon Conference in 1941. Nowadays it’s fashionable to rewrite history and say that Madame Mercier’s policy was simply driven by a desire to put a brave face on France’s colonial reversals. Ah, we are not weak, she allegedly says, we wanted those nations to become independent as we embrace their unique identities, the alloy of diversity that holds the line against the Societist hordes! (Mixed reactions from the audience) Yes, it is pathetic. Trace it back to those same mean-spirited cobrists, and Areians, and others, unable to tolerate the success of a woman in high office who is true to her own ideals.
Toulon was one of the first really big diplomatic events to be extensively filmed and broadcast around the world in news-films in odeons. There were also recordings of statements made by the diplomats that were broadcast over Photel networks, and even released on groovediscs like zig-and-zag records! People in Europe, and here in the Empire, got to see people they recognised, like Madame Mercier, interacting with exotic representatives from all over the world. Today we’d say it was like the Global Games of diplomacy, but it was actually examples like this which led to the Games becoming truly Global, rather than just a European and Novamundine club with some token Asian countries as they had been before.[3] The same is true of the WorldFests. The Toulon Conference was also broadcast, if more spottily, in many of those countries we’d call exotic. People in Matetwa, Abyssinia, Guinea got to see their representatives hob-nobbing with white diplomats on equal terms. (Audience murmurs) It was a powerful image.
And the Toulon Conference was only the first of many, of course. Soon the Empire would be part of these exchanges, too, and China, and even the young Indian states as they emerged, blinking, into the new light of day. All around the world, these images inspired thousands, millions to pursue diplomatic and political careers. Such roles had become romantic, fashionable, and within reach of the great masses of the people, not merely the elite. The Diplomatic Rage had begun…
*
(Lt Black’s note)
I’ve cut a few paragraphs here as they largely just rehash some of the material we’ve already seen from other speakers (such as the ‘Canajun Question’), setting the context for some of the geopolitical struggles of the time.
*
…but it wasn’t just a shift in how people viewed others, a change towards ecumenical media, that was part of the Diplomatic Rage. One cannot get excited about athletes without a contest or actors without a play or a film. The other factor that made this era extraordinary was that the public acknowledged the existence of crises across the terraqueous globe. For the first time, they began to fully understand all the work that went on – and goes on – behind the scenes, out of sight, to prevent them from igniting into wars. It was similar to the explosion of espionage fiction in the 1970s and 80s, which some of you may remember – naming no names. (Audience chuckles)
A fireman is called a hero when he puts out a fire with water. But what if that same fireman advised his neighbour to install a smoke signaller so that the fire never got a chance to start? He will not be called a hero for that, if only because we never heard about it in the papers. It is the same with spies. It is the same with diplomats – and sometimes there is a fine line between the two. (Audience murmurs) Usually our names only became known to the public when we failed. Just as firemen seldom get credit for preventing fires, so diplomats seldom received credit for preventing wars. But that began to change in the late 1940s.
We think of the early part of that decade as a time of peace, of course. Perhaps not without conflict, when we think of the internal social struggles and riots of the Long Hot Summer. But largely free of skirmishes between nations. There remained fighting in Africa and the Nusantara between nations there and the Societists, but even there the Silent Revolution within the Combine, together with the building of what became the ASN, helped quell the level of violence compared to the 1930s.
Nonetheless, there were already worrying birth-pangs suggestive of future conflicts. Romulan Italy remained an aggressive, unpredictable firebrand that causes endless problems for diplomats. The regime only narrowly avoided invading Sicily in 1940, which could have triggered a wider war, and then overthrew Italy’s monarchy in 1943 in the Lucretian Revolution. Germany, though not run by madmen, remained fixated on the notion that she had been ‘betrayed’ by the settlement at the end of the Black Twenties. Indeed, perhaps the only reason why Romulan fellow travellers – like the Mannusverein – remained obscure in Germany is because an even higher priority for German voters was the increasing unpopularity of their own monarchy.[4]
In some ways, it was almost as if the House of Wettin was cursed. Even when High Saxony had won the German Unification War back in 1853, then formed a united Germany in 1859, it had done so under a banner that had originally been stitched to lay claim to Bavaria – the German colours combine Saxon green with Bavarian blue.[5] (Surprised audience reaction) Yes, we don’t often think about that these days, but it’s true. After about a decade of successful rule under Bundeskaiser Augustus and his son Christian, who died tragically young, Germany then came under Johann Georg, who proceeded to throw away any goodwill his grandfather and father had left him.
Even if you have not heard much of this era of European history, you probably know about the Kulturkrieg, the Culture War. (Assenting audience murmurs) Johann Georg had struggled to unite the German people around a common identity – for example, Swabians were reluctant to play host to High Saxon troops being rotated in and vice-versa. He also feared political cobrism and the growth of parliamentary power. He tried to circumvent and supplant parliamentarians by rallying the people directly to his rule. Part of this strategy was to give the German people a new kind of enemy to unite against, an enemy within. Minorities like Danes, Jutes, Jews, Czechs and Sorbs. And more. We do not remember the countless anonymous figures who were overtaxed, roughed up by customs officers who demanded papers, whose businesses were vandalised whilst police looked the other way. We do remember the few big names whose cultural and scientific achievements have long outlasted their mortal lives. Anders Jacobsen, Claus Jensen, Mordechai Liebermann and many more.[6] In the end, after years of this, peaking in the 1880s, the German people were fed up and realised it was all just an excuse to distract from economic problems and the royal family’s own scandals. When Johann Georg tried the same thing to distract from Germany’s defeat in the Pandoric War, the people were thoroughly unconvinced, and began turning to the High Radical or Hochrad cobrist movement instead.[7]
But it wasn’t just that. As I said, one might almost think the Wettins cursed, considering just how consistently they seemed to get it wrong – like Unlucky Ralph playing the casinos of Nueva Dublin in “Doyn and Oyt.” (Audience chuckles) Johann Georg had enthusiastically backed the Pandoric War, which turned into a miserable grind and a severe defeat for Germany. Then he tried to dispose of unwanted by veterans to send them on a hopeless attempt to fight the Societists, he suffered an assassination attempt, he went mad, and Germans spent five agonising years from 1903 to 1908 trying to work around this. The Abdication Crisis, it was called. He was eventually replaced by his son Anton, but the damage was done. Anton always refused to admit how far his father had sunk or that he had made any mistakes, resisting attempts to draw a line under the period. He would name things after his father, be they experimental warships, bridges or military offensives, and the people would sigh, roll their eyes and pay lip service to them. Meanwhile, Fritz Ziege and the Hochrads continued to gain power at the expense of the monarchy.[8]
Johann Georg had bet on the Pandoric War being short and victorious and had lost, so Anton tried to prevent Germany joining the Khivan War, which became the Black Twenties. Again, he seemed to get everything wrong remarkably consistently, opposing the war when the public backed it and then switching to support when the public began to waver. He then disowned the attempts to break the Oder bridgehead just before the offensive named after Ziege broke through.[9] During the conflict, Anton’s son Maurice had died of the plague, a man who might have been able to mend the problems with the German monarchy. Instead the throne would pass directly from Anton to Maurice’s son Christian Augustus, hopefully named for Germany’s first and second modern emperors. Christian, a spoilt playboy, would decidedly fail to live up to those names. He came to the throne at the age of 29 when Anton died in 1942, and immediately became embroiled in controversy for his partying lifestyle. He was a transoceanic embarrassment for Germany, of doradist as well as cobrist sympathies.
From 1926 onwards, Germany alternated between Niederrad and Vereinspartei chancellors, with the traditional monarchist Treuliga relegated to the backbenches and the aristocratic Hochrads usually reduced to a junior ally of the more proletarian Niederrads. Uwe Fischer, a Niederrad, was replaced with Vereinspartei Gerhard von Nostitz after the 1931 election. Then the Niederrads returned in 1940 under Erich Stark, ensuring they were in power when Christian Augustus came to the throne. They soon began working around the monarchy wherever they could, while the Vereinspartei remained noncommittal. Only the Treuliga still tried to rally the people against the Niederrads’ controversial cobrist policies, such as a massive expansion of federal insurance funded by increased taxation, by appealing to the monarchy as a symbol. And, though some voters did oppose the Niederrad policy, few saw the vapid playboy in the Dresdner Schloss as any kind of standard-bearer for their values. By the time the Vereinspartei returned to power in 1946 under Johannes Althaus, it was clear that the patience of all parts of society was running out. The tide of politics towards the abolition of the German monarchy began in earnest in the late 1940s, but the interruption of the Crash of 1956 and the Sunrise War meant that the process would not be completed until the 1960s.
Anyway, that was a long digression, but the point is that Germany was too concerned with her own inward struggles to prove a flashpoint on the world stage in this period. Her governance of Bohemia was also controversial, with counter-persecution of Czechs and Silesian Slavs, just as the Russians had backed those groups persecuting ethnic Germans in the period in which the country was known as Czechosilesia. In practice, of course, those who benefited were often the unscrupulous and well-off who could turn their coats and embrace a new identity at the drop of a hat, while others became cynical towards the invocation of patriotism. (Audience murmurs) Few would have been surprised to learn that Bohemia would eventually be one of the flashpoints that would end the Electric Circus period of peace, but many would have been shocked to learn precisely how.
1945 was an important year, in some ways signalling the end of a period of relative peace. Outright global war would not return for another twelve years, but the people, as I said, became increasingly aware that war was now being averted only by the strident work of diplomatic heroes across the world. The usual event that people point to is the attempted Societist takeover of Formosa in August of that year, but that is only the most prominent of a number of events and tensions which began to build. In 1944, only four years after Panchala had successfully fought for independence against China, its leaders made another attempt to take Delhi, hoping that this time the Chinese would not directly support their Muslim-dominated client state, now geographically separated from China. Paresh Anand and the other Panchali leaders were correct in this respect, but China had nonetheless armed Delhi. Delhi would also be be supported by Pendzhab and, indirectly, Bisnaga and Bengal, both of which were pluralistic entities that feared the rhetoric of the new militant Hindu empire of Panchala just as they had once feared the Islamic Great Jihad. After the defeat of the Panchalis at Delhi and their withdrawal in 1945, Panchala suffered a revolution. Narayan Kumar, a general in the army who had been gathering political power, seized power. He immediately began pushing for military reforms and sought new allies. He and his son would go on to be among the most infamous, yet arguably successful, dictators of the twentieth century. (Audience murmurs)
Formosa and Delhi were not isolated incidents. Enough years had passed since the horrors of the Black Twenties that a new generation of young people had grown up, and the memories of some of their elders had started to fade. The success of the Gold Standard had, paradoxically, made people complacent, less fearful of the destruction that war could bring. The siren song of the quick, glorious victory was beginning to make itself known again.
Until Formosa, the Societists had also slipped off the perception of many people, a far cry from the terrors of the Second Black Scare following the War of 1926. (A few audience murmurs) Their activities in Africa had been brought to prominence by the Toulon Conference, but then that too had begun to fade. Ironically, the Societists’ own internal struggles had reduced their actions against Africans, and the alliance being built by Madame Mercier and others paved the way for the collective security of the ASN. Paradoxically, removing the Societists from the equation as a threat also led more people to talk about re-opening disputes with other nations that had previously been suppressed.
Of course, all of this was meat and drink to Societist theorists – especially those in places like Danubia, as many of the ones in the Combine had been summarily purged in the last few years for loyalty to Alfarus. The Societists argued that the nations were doomed to fight eternal, futile battles until we all exhausted each other and then they could move in and take over – the so-called Doctrine of the Last Throw. (Murmurs) But the diplomatic stars of the period from 1945 to 1956 were determined to prove them wrong!
So who were these celebrity diplomats? I can’t give an exhaustive list, because they were subject to the same whims of fashion as the music charts or the film ratings. Some had mayfly careers in which they burned brightly over one diplomatic crisis before fizzling out. Others became reliable standards, regularly wheeled out for consultation even after retirement. Such men, and the occasional woman, would be a regular source of income for publishers, churning out libraries of books. Some of them were even written by them.
I might mention a few more later, but for now, I’ll stick to the biggest names in each nation. Firstly, there are the three who are sometimes called the Trinity, the representatives of three out of the four most powerful nations on Earth – excluding China as China was still emerging from its isolation and had to play catch-up. Here in the Empire we had Sir Andrew Lawrence Leighton, known as Laurie Leighton, also known as the Brain of Laurel House.[10] (Audience reaction) Yes, even today adept diplomats are routinely compared to the Brain. In many ways, he was everyone’s stereotypical idea of an American diplomat, a New England aristocrat who went to Yale, spoke with a cut-glass accent and wore an aeroscrew tie.[11] But half the reason we have that stereotypical image is because Sir Laurie created it by his existence.
His French counterpart was Pierre Lesterlin. Lesterlin was a protégé of Madame Mercier, who served as her Foreign Minister at the Tuileries in her last years in power. It was when she finally retired from politics for good in 1945, at the age of seventy-seven, that Lesterlin really came into his own. He was Foreign Minister in the brief government of Bernard Mignon until 1947 when the Rubis Party won power under François Bouquin. But given the increasing foreign policy crises of the period, Lesterlin became a natural choice of opposition leader to criticise the inexperienced, more domestic-focused Bouquin, and became Prime Minister when Bouquin’s government collapsed in 1950 after the Sol Invictus 1 crisis. Like his mentrix Madame Mercier, he effectively controlled the Tuileries from the Montmartre through a series of proxies. He helped to build on the foundation of the Concord and ASN that Mercier had begun, ensuring a place in the sun for France in the form of diplomatic leadership, even after the loss of her colonial empire.
The third member of the Trinity was Aleksandar Janković, known as Strannyy Sasha or ‘Strange Alec’ to the Russians due to his eccentric habits. He was not a native-born Russian himself, but a child of Serv refugees who had fled Servia after the Ottoman takeover following the Pandoric War. The Russian Slavicist ideology provided a path for his success, but many Russians often provided only lip service to the idea that their ‘Slavic brothers’ should be considered equals. Furthermore, Janković did not come from aristocracy or money, but worked his way up from the bottom of the pile, a rarity in Russia. He was a businessman rather than a politician, who owed his success to being the first to realise and seize an opportunity. Tsar Paul III had built, or rather modernised, the Russian cult of autocratic state government, creating a system that worked providing one ruthless, effective man was at its head. But after his death, there was no one to fill it but the underage and vacillating Fyodor V, who came under the control of a series of different regents who jockeyed for power and whose goals were incompatible. During this time, centralised state power began to wither in Russia and many of the old laws simply ceased enforcement, with bribes being common. Aristocrats huddled in their palaces, while businessmen came to independent arrangements with increasingly militant workers rather than being able to rely on the state power to crush trade unionists.
Janković ‘s genius was in realising that this also applied to the state monopoly on broadcasting. The Dalekodeon system, which had incidentally allowed the Okhrana to listen in on private conversations due to being a two-way broadcast, was now creaking and ancient. The old ban (or heavy restrictions) on Photel systems was no longer being enforced. Small illegal Photel stations abounded, but Janković was the first to audaciously plant transmitters in full view and register his company…let me see if I can pronounce this… Sverkhvysokaya Chastota… (Audience applause)…means something like ‘High pulse rate Photel’…openly with the authorities. As he had guessed, nobody attempted to stop him, and for a time around 1939, Janković had secured an effective monopoly. Even after competitors sprang up and the state belatedly became involved, Janković’s position was so strong that the Imperial Soviet – which belatedly now began to fill the power vacuum left by the weak emperor and frenetically-changing regents – felt it had to negotiate with him to issue propaganda broadcasts, rather than simply ordering him. On the plus side for them, Janković’s network also let them broadcast that propaganda into neighbouring countries too, getting Russia’s versions of events out there. Janković had worked with Photel broadcasters in other nations when gaining experience, which led to accusations from bitter competitors that he merely copied the broadcasting ideas of others and put his own spin on them. But others retorted that Janković ‘s versions were more popular than the originals. Regardless, these links meant that he moved in wider circles than many even in Russia’s Foreign Ministry. It was Janković, not any of the princes of the latter, that would forge the strongest links with Sir Laurie and Lesterlin.
This Trinity were responsible for many of the big achievements of the Diplomatic Rage. Through Janković, Fredericksburg and Paris felt they finally had someone they could negotiate with rather than the usual unpredictable enigma of Russia. I could list lots of examples here where conflicts were averted, or the steady progress towards Russia beginning to engage with the ASN and oppose the Societists, though later events would complicate that. However, the single biggest achievement of the Trinity was undoubtedly the Oleic Bank. (Audience murmurs) Yes, I know it’s a bit controversial nowadays, when we only hear about the disadvantages – both in terms of corruption and climate amelioration, of course. But at the time, the Oleic Bank was a big step forward.
At the midpoint of the twentieth century, oil was increasingly king. Oil didn’t overtake coal as our primary energy source in general until the 1970s, due to coal-fired electricity power stations, but by 1950 it had already overtaken coal as the primary fuel for mobiles, ships and – almost – trains.[12] In the Societist Combine, Josephus Kalvus had embarked on his disastrous ‘Oil Standard’ programme that discredited Alfarus and partly led to the Silent Revolution. But Kalvus was at least correct in his starting observation, that oil was now the most valuable substance in the world. Gold sits in vaults, but oil is consumed. And without oil to power all the sinews of our economy, all the transport that holds our world together, that economy – that world –grinds to a halt. (Audience murmurs)
As the importance of oil became recognised during the First Interbellum and the Black Twenties, theorists began to speculate about how it would affect future wars. The Russians had already been accused of seeking to conquer Persia in part thanks to its oifields, although Russian attempts to conquer Persia long predated oil- or, indeed, coal-fired engines. One memorable analysis came in the form of a work of fiction, the scientific romance Abyss by Robert Blunt, published in 1944. Blunt drew heavily upon The Abyssal Empire by Joseph Taillant, which had been published seventy-four years previously but remained a classic in how it subverted the usual expectations of ‘invasion bloodies’ and the ‘Submarine Rage’ novels.[13] Taillant had envisaged the surface world being invaded by the more technologically advanced Ondine civilisation from beneath the waves. His intention was to mock some of the tropes of the chest-beating invasion fiction that had set France and Germany against one another, instead hinting at a pan-human alliance to oppose the Ondine. The Ondine did not long stay under Taillant’s attempt to hold sole copyright and were widely used by other authors. Land For Sale, written by the Californian authoress Audrey Fernandez in 1874, is so iconic that many people (and film adaptations) confuse its ideas with those of Taillant’s original. Taillant’s goal was to mock invasion bloodies and tell a compelling story, whereas Fernandez used the Ondine as a criticism of colonialism. She shifed the usual arguments about superior civilisation by showing Europeans and Novamundines being colonised in turn by the Ondine, and asking whether their superior technology meant that Europeans and Novamundines should be expected to just shrug and accept Ondine rule.
Blunt used the ideas from Land for Sale in his much later book Abyss, but turned them around. His version of the undersea Ondine are less advanced than humans, rather than more. Blunt was inspired by recent undersea oil discoveries, and portrayed the Ondine as living on the ocean floor atop such an oilfield.[14] Various competing human powers and companies seek to take their undersea homes from them and secure the ocean floor – and oil – for their own claims. Blunt was making an allegorical warning that the same could soon happen to the less fortunate groups of humans who lived atop oilfields. Indeed, to some extent it had already happened to groups like Tortolians here in the Empire or traditional Bedouin tribes in Araby. Oil was king, and greed was its chief minister.
The Trinity, however, were more concerned with the idea that competition over oil resources could become a trigger for war. Lesterlin pointed to the analogy of the Ruhr industrial area that was split between, and had often been fought over by, Belgium and Germany. “If either side secured the whole area, how long would it take the increased production to pay for the costs of conquest followed by the cost of rebuilding?” was his famous question, and Sir Laurie was able to demonstrate the point mathematically. Janković agreed. “Why should men fight over how large their slice of pie is,” he asked rhetorically, “and in the process drop the whole thing on the floor – when they could use those same energies to bake a larger pie in the first place?” Some rather fanatical enemies accused him of stealing a talking point from Pablo Sanchez, but in general, the point was accepted.
The creation of the Oleic Bank, in 1951, was a turning point. Most major nations agreed to a common framework for oil exploitation, building on the kinds of multilateral agreements previously made at the Passau Conference of 1935 to implement the Gold Standard. The treaties are long and complicated, but two important principles were established. Firstly, a minimum of 25% of all oil profits would go to the indigenous owners of the land on which the oil was extracted. In recent years this has come under criticism, as often it’s been swallowed up by greedy dictatorial governments and not trickled down – no pun intended – to the people, but it was nonetheless an important recognition of a new post-colonial reality. Secondly, all companies would be able to compete freely to exploit oil fields regardless of their country of origin, with this managed by independent, multi-national committees evaluating their bids. Thirdly, all companies must agree to place at least 50% of oil extracted into a common transoceanic fund on which all nations could bid, with the remainder being permitted to be sold in secret or restricted transactions. The notion was to prevent oil-exploiting nations from holding others to ransom in the event of war. In practice, there proved to be ways to circumvent the rules, of course, but they were nonetheless an important move towards defusing many areas of tension around the world. And, of course, all of this needed some kind of secretariat to run it – and the brand-new ASN stepped in as the most obvious contender. As we’ve heard its critics opine ever since, the ASN almost sleepwalked into being the organisation that speaks for all nations in so many fields.
I could talk for hours about the exploits of the Trinity, whether it be the Madagascar independence settlement of 1953, the Kalat Accord of 1950 or the Gibraltar Declaration of 1955. But there is a bittersweet edge to these triumphs. Janković, reasonable and rational, unintentionally convinced France and the Empire that a kernel of such rationality and reasonableness could be found in the Russian government itself. But Janković was an outsider, a figure from outside the traditional power structures of Russia, alienated even from other upstart businessmen. For a time, he exerted power and influence over the government due to it being weak, divided and indecisive. But that would not last forever, and when it changed, France, the Empire and the rest of the world would be caught offguard by the sudden shift in rhetoric from Petrograd.
But that is a story for another day. The Trinity might have been the most prominent among the diplomatic celebrities of the age, but there were others as well. For example, the Lesser Trinity, as we sometimes call them, or the Real Trinity, as they do. (Audience murmurs) Yes, well, that’s the old country for you, always playing catch-up. (Audience laughter and one or two oohs) The Lesser Trinity consisted of Kenneth Sefton of England, Rodrigo Abikoff of California and Piet Halsbeek of Belgium. Although Sefton is usually considered the leader of the alignment and Abikoff the most interesting – he had a musical career on the side – it was really the addition of Halsbeek that changed things. For the first time since the country had been broken up and reduced after the Black Twenties, Belgium ventured back onto the world stage, with a tone very much changed from the hectoring, repressive days of the Maximilians.
Belgium had lost Luxemburg and Liége-Luik, and was now a very different country. It had lost a large number of its Catholics (though they remained the majority) and many of its power structures under the Maximilians, already hollowed out by the period of Russian vassalage, slowly crumbled throughout the 1930s. This was followed by social upheavals in the early 1940s, as in many nations during the ‘Long Hot Summer’. These upheavals shattered the former system of pillarisation and rehabilitated many of the Protestant Dutch republican figures and imagery that had formerly been discouraged under the ‘Belgian Party’ ideology of the Maximilians. The Calvinists, though a minority, had always survived through the years of southern rule, in part due to their role in the port cities – which continued to be important. Now they began to reassert their influence once more. It was an opportunity for the new Belgium to draw a line under its murky past and seize the day as a diplomatic wild card. Halsbeek played a key role in what became known as ‘Neo Belgicus’,[15] carefully divorcing the new state from the misadventures of its former incarnation in its (now lost) colonies and portraying the Belgian people as ‘the first victims’ of the Maximilians, rather than those who had followed their orders. (Audience murmurs) Yes, well, it is a controversial point, still.
Halsbeek, and his allies in the States-General, successfully and audaciously reinvented Belgium as a champion of oppressed peoples everywhere, which mostly seemed to amount to selling guns to Panchala and the Zanguebari rebels. In fairness, Belgium’s allegedly decommissioned munitions factories in the Ruhr also armed Africans and Siamese-backed Sumatrans who were fighting against Societist expansion, hence why the ASN allowed them to get away with it. England and California were valued allies for Belgium, all three arguing for the ‘rights of small nations’ in the new world order that was slowly emerging from the decolonisation of the 1930s and 40s.
Sefton was most concerned with finding a way for England to withdraw from the increasingly unprofitable colony of Natal without it seeming like a retreat, or conceding it to Matetwa conquest; a part of the old colony was already under Matetwa ‘administration’, a transparent diplomatic fiction from the Black Twenties conflict.[16] Sefton was a proletarian, a leader among the Trade Unionist Alliance – which would later merge with the more bourgeois Democratic Party to form today’s Democratic Unionists in England – who was hard to connect with images of past colonial exploitation. Rather, he claimed that exploitation was just the same if it came from a neighbouring African power like the Matetwa. In 1955, a treaty was signed that created Natal as an independent state as Sefton had hoped. Something that was not predicted was that rather than the native black majority coming to the ascendancy as it did in some other post-colonial African states, the Bengali-dominated civil service promptly seized power as soon as the English pulled out. The ‘Bengali Raj’ would not be toppled until the landmark elections of 1972.[17]
California was worried about being swallowed up by the Empire, given that the UPSA was gone and Russia had been pushed out of North America. Murmurs) Abikoff still had ambitions that California could try to engage with the Combine (More murmurs) and, in the aftermath of the Silent Revolution, some seemingly-reasonable Societist diplomats did reach out. Of course, as with Janković in Russia, their influence over the state was exaggerated. This isn’t to say that there weren’t genuinely prominent Societist diplomats who were part of the Rage, it’s just that they weren’t Combine Societists. Paulus Arbormontis, also known as Paul Baumberg, skilfully represented the interests of Grey Societist Danubia throughout the period. He played a particularly prominent role in the creation of the Oleic Bank, which made him a target for the Combine’s Deleters due to perceived embarrassment in comparison to the Kalvus’ failed Oil Standard. Baumberg was also key in reaching out to the Eternal State as that entity used the Silent Revolution to fully assert its autonomy from the Combine. I believe he even tried the same with Iberia, but there were too many doctrinaire Societist troops there even at the height of the Silent Revolution to have any hope of splitting it off. Nonetheless, there is some justice to the controversial quote of Scandinavia’s Henrik Elleman, that Baumberg did more to damage the cause of Combine Societism in the 1940s than all the ASN resolutions put together. (Even more murmurs)
We’ve only scratched the surface. One of the most prominent figures of the Diplomatic Rage was China’s Xu Yiying, Lady Zhao. She was the widow of Qiu Qiming, a diplomat who had been the protégé – and, some whispered, the illegitimate son – of China’s great foreign minister Ding Guoyang, Duke of Cao. Whether that’s true or not, the aged Ding was certainly greatly saddened by Qiu’s untimely death at the hands of Panchali rebels in 1932. As though to transfer his affections, and knowing that Xu had helped and supported her husband in his work, Ding audaciously brought her into the diplomatic service in her own right. It was a controversial move in China, whose administration – though certainly radical compared to that of their Qing predecessors – was still often very traditional and rooted in Confucian patriarchy. But Lady Zhao, as she became, soon became a feared name for her relentless refusal to be intimidated by the old boys’ network. Her enemies called her ‘the Widow of Zhao’, in reference to the Chinese play “The Orphan of Zhao”.[18] Like the titular Orphan, they alleged, she was determined to take revenge for her dead relative(s). But soon Zhao’s supporters adopted the name as a badge of honour. In China, Lady Zhao is mostly remembered for her strident warnings that Panchala, arming and modernising under Narayan Kumar, should not be discounted as a threat. However, on the world stage she became a glamorous symbol of the new China in her attendance at ASN summits, starting around 1947.
Lady Zhao was also one of many Chinese diplomats to engage with Siam’s own coterie of stars at this time. Siam was already involved in an unexpected alliance with Bengal, shifting pieces as the Indian states emerged from the chaos of decolonisation, but also storing up problems in Burma.
Unfortunately, this apparent further Sino-Siamese reconciliation following the Treaty of Guiling hid an unforeseen consequence, something which was repeated elsewhere. As mapping improved, with camera-dromes and even artimoons in time, disputes that had been thought settled were now reopened. Lines that had sufficed at the time were now called into question, as rivers shifted courses, the positions of mountains were altered, and more.
The Diplomatic Rage was a glorious era in which, for a time, it felt as though the world’s many problems could be solved solely by enough stern-faced men and charismatic women in a gallery making small talk over canapés. But it was a false dawn. Resentment and disagreement continued to bubble beneath the surface of the world, and it would not be long before the failure of the seemingly-invincible economic system would spell doom for ‘the peace upheld by a thousand hands’…
[1] Technically the ASN began as one part of the Concord and then subsumed its name.
[2] Lady Parkin is basically giving the stereotypical, cliff notes version of how Americans in 2020 tend to think of the Electric Circus period. Obviously, this is not necessarily accurate even just for America, never mind the world, but it is what people immediately think of. (Compare how the 1960s is presented in OTL pop culture).
[3] This is a slight exaggeration to make a point – China had participated extensively in the Games years before. However, this is confused slightly by the fact that China had initially remained largely inward-looking in the 1930s and not sent many athletes to the Games again until the 1940s.
[4] The Mannus Verein or ‘Mannus Society’ is a German- and Germanic-supremacist movement fixated on ethnological pseudoscientific theories connected with Mannus, the legendary founder of the Germanic peoples. It is probably the closest analogue to OTL’s Nazis and similar groups. Besides the reasons given in the main text, one reason why it fails to capture the public imagination is that (thanks to the lower colonial penetration in India and the devastation of the Great Jihad) ancient Hindu texts like the Rigveda are much more obscure in Europe. The related studies of the ‘Old Eurasian’ language (i.e. Proto-Indo-European) are also considered politically suspect by many due to Sanchez writing about the idea of reviving it. Thus there are many barriers to the ‘Aryan’ idea becoming well known in TTL. There is still plenty of casual antisemitism and prejudice against other groups like the Roma, of course, but it is not framed in those ways (and Germans have become somewhat cynical about such things due to the Bundeskaiser ineptly trying to use them, as described in the main text).
[5] See Part #199 in Volume IV.
[6] See Parts #219 and #221 in Volume V.
[7] See Part #247 in Volume VI.
[8] See Part #257 in Volume VII.
[9] See Part #289 in Volume VIII.
[10] Metonym for the American Foreign Office, headquartered in this building which was built in the 1930s.
[11] I.e. a tie that looks like an aeroscrew (propeller). Think a bow tie but with three ‘blades’, ultimately originating in futurist, technophilic fashion crazes that were related to the Wreckie youth movement.
[12] In OTL oil overtook coal (as an energy source in general) in 1964. Significant differences in TTL (though these partly cancel out) include the later rollout of the public electricity supply and the wider pre-existence of a coal-steam engine based ‘ecosystem’ of steam cars and other road vehicles. In OTL this only applied to ships and trains (both of which took longer for oil to take over).
[13] See Part #218 in Volume V.
[14] The first undersea oil drilling took place in 1896 in OTL. In TTL it is a few years later, in 1902, but not by much. However, undersea oil does not become a practical major fuel source (and known about by the general public) until the 1930s.
[15] A pun on ‘Leo Belgicus’, the lion-shaped propaganda map of the Low Countries that dates from the Eighty Years’ War for Dutch independence. Here it is a useful reference that both retains the name Belgium while newly invoking the formerly suppressed Protestant Dutch Republican heritage.
[16] See Part #293 in Volume VIII.
[17] For the Bengalis in Natal, see Interlude #8 in Volume II and Part #282 in Volume VIII.
[18] Properly titled “The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao”, this play is attributed to Ji Junxiang and probably dates to the 13th century. In the eighteenth century, after translation by the Jesuit Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare, it became the first Chinese play to ever be performed in Europe – albeit many of the European versions drifted considerably off-piste and added their own political opinions.
...while the more historically informed critics pointed to Thierry de Missirien.
Very good update.
I'm surprised China and Siam seem poised to have another exchange of blows. Also the Combine really was punched in the teeth by the Silent Revolution huh?
I'm surprised China and Siam seem poised to have another exchange of blows. Also the Combine really was punched in the teeth by the Silent Revolution huh?
I like the Ondine! New stock races that arise in AH are one of my favorite aspects to the genre. Inspired by War With the Newts, I presume?
I got War of the Worlds vibes. Newts was more about man's readiness to unleash uncontrollable forces (e.g. appeasing imperialism or permitting uncontrolled and unregulated technological development) to make short-term gains. EDIT: but yes, tolerating colonialism was one of the themes, if not the only one.
Last edited: