299.1
Thande
Donor
Part #299: Krezhendus
“Thank you, Miss Jaxon. I’m sure we all hope the gentleman from West Florida has a speedy recovery and that the hospital staff are able to remove it as soon as they find a long enough pair of tongs. (Pause) Finally, another reminder of the upcoming frequency shift – yes, I know we’ve been playing this clip a lot, but we want to make sure no-one is caught offguard by it!” (sotto voce) Roll the cart…”
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
Thank you once again for the further updates on the situation at home. Here, I fear we are running out of material that justifies our continued presence. The Captains held a conference to discuss it yesterday, and I believe they will soon be in touch with you about another (shudders involuntarily) Zoom call.
Our hope when we arrived here in Waccamaw Strand was that we would be able to obtain Societist sources on the Black Twenties as well as Diversitarian ones, in order to obtain a better-rounded view. We did fear that there might have been censorship of these sources after the Americans took the place back over. While this has applied in a few cases, there are still plenty of dusty old Societist textbooks and the like knocking about, as you have seen in some of our past extracts.
Unfortunately, it appears we would have done better to worry about the Societists themselves. Reading between the lines, it is clear that Societist accounts of the conflict here and around the world – with a few notable exceptions, such as Markus Garzius’ memoirs – are all but useless for understanding this chaotic period in this world’s history. I have seen some vague reference (in Diversitarian books, I mean) to the Societists publishing triumphal histories of their victory here in the late 1920s and the 1930s. However, though I presume bilingual copies of these were circulated in Carolina as propaganda aimed at its people, if so all of them appear to have since been destroyed. Not by the Americans, as I might have assumed, but by the next form of Societists, after the death of Alfarus and the Silent Revolution (I gather – we still do not have much information about this period).
In the last set of analysis notes you sent us, Dr Pataki has drawn some rather facile and inevitable comparisons between the Silent Revolution and the rise of Khrushchev and de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union in our own world. While it is easy to see how a superficial reading could draw this comparison, it does not capture the degree of purpose, fanatical I dare say, in the later Societists’ determination to all but write Alfarus out of history. Practically all sources on Alfarus, other than Garzius’, are written by Diversitarians. Whereas in our world the Soviets might have been content to rename Stalingrad to Volgograd, it seems the Societists’ commitment to ideological purity might extend, in a comparable situation, to demolishing the city altogether, denying it ever existed and removing all references to a battle being fought there from the historical record!
This begs the question of how on earth we hope to gain any understanding of this period in Societist history. I have come to a very strange conclusion, not to pre-empt the Captains’ meeting with you, of course. Some time ago, when trying to escape the sweltering heat of summer in this benighted land, I ducked into a library and came across a reference on a notice-board to a research project going on at the University of King’s College in New York, better known to us in our timeline as Columbia University. Apparently the researchers from UKC are working with their counterparts at the University of Corte in Carolina – I’m not sure if that survived Societist rule or if it’s been reconstructed. Regardless, the point of the project is to reconstruct social and oral history of Societist rule in Carolina, as it seems historians in this timeline have run into the same problem of lack of sources as we have.
It sounds like it’s a bit of a controversial project when I looked into it, but strangely, I’m thinking that if we really want some evidence of what it was like living under Societism, we may need to head north into the Empire proper. In the meantime, my colleagues and I will, of course, conclude our current findings to tie up our history of the Black Twenties, such as it is...
*
From: “Europe - From Pandora to the Sunrise” by A. K. Dalziel and Alice Fielding (1980)—
European reaction to the successful Societist attacks on the Imperial Navy, and then the invasion of Carolina, were decidedly mixed. We cannot ignore the fact that in France (along with Germany, Italy and so on) there was a sense of schadenfreude from both the ruling classes and ordinary people. Throughout the war, the Americans had been regarded as thoroughly unhelpful cobelligerents who needed bribing in order to stay in the war, a war which had taken place well away from their major population centres. The fact that the ENA had weathered the plague pandemic better than most of densely-populated Europe, and had refused to share its patent on Birline rat-poison and sold it at extravagant prices, did not help. From the European (especially German) point of view, America had spent the whole war complacently being little touched by either the conflict or the plague, making money off both, and Europeans were more than willing to see them taken down a peg or two. Of course, few Americans would agree with the idea that the plague had somehow spared their homeland, but perception was everything. This perception undoubtedly played into the decision by the French government to not become directly involved; even aside from their exhaustion and losses from the war, few French voters would have been enthusiastic about fighting to defend the supposedly fat and lazy Americans from a problem of their own devising (as they saw it, in reference to Gilmore’s sabre-rattling about Venezuela).
More fundamentally, of course, the attack on the ENA, Carolina and Guatemala threatened the European position. While few were too optimistic about the possibility of the Vienna peace talks bringing the war to a satisfactory close, this in itself threatened to upset the apple-cart. From the Russian perspective, the Societist attack was a key opportunity. Some Russians (though not Tsar Paul himself, despite some later claims) had the same common misconception as some Americans, viewing the Combine as simply the UPSA with a new coat of paint, and even viewed it as a natural ally or cobelligerent, as the UPSA had been in the Pandoric War. Regardless of that misconception, many more Russians (including the Tsar) saw this as a way to effectively eliminate the Kamchatka front from the war and focus on Europe.
On precisely how to achieve this, however, they were divided. The Pandoric War veteran, retired general and Imperial Soviet member, Arkady Streshnev, strongly advocated that the European ceasefire be maintained, allowing Russian forces to focus on driving the Americans into the cold seas of the Bering Strait. Streshnev, who had fought in Russian America a quarter-century earlier, undermined his own case by further arguing that Russian forces should then seek to cross the strait and reclaim those lost lands, which the Tsar was uninterested in. Paul was more receptive to the argument of fellow advisor Prince Kirill Dashkov, who suggested that while some visible effort should be put into ejecting the Americans according to the first part of Streshnev’s plan, this should purely be a propaganda exercise to put pressure on the French and their allies at the Vienna talks. The unspoken (or spoken) threat was that the Russians would be able to resume the war in Poland while directing more of their forces and attention to it. Of course, this was undermined by the fact that fighting was still ongoing in the Anatolian and Wallachian fronts, as the Ottomans were not part of the ceasefire negotiations. Meanwhile, the Meridian Refugiado General Pichegru, a former favourite of Paul’s, continued to advocate that Russia should set aside her differences with her enemies and focus on preventing the cancer of Societism from spreading earlier – a position which did not endear him to many, other than the increasingly anti-war Dowager Empress Anna.
Another commonly-cited point is the idea that Paul was hoping that his enemies’ governments would become undermined from within by their rival oppositions demanding fresh elections. This was certainly true to some extent, but controversy arises between historians and analysts with the question of Russia’s involvement in secretly funding and manipulating those oppositions. With most of the Russian records highly secret and later lost, it provides a riddle for future generations. There is some evidence of Russian funding for the Legion of Romulus in Italy, then mostly seen as an organisation for irate wounded veterans who felt betrayed by Orsini’s government, but even this is hotly disputed. If it did exist, others will argue, did it represent any kind of implicit approval by Paul of the Romulans’ values and later objectives, or was it merely the act of a troublemaker seeking to undermine Orsini by any means necessary?
To an extent, these debates about Russian involvement take place in the midst of a fog of paranoia and accusations at the time in Europe, in which every negative act – from losing one’s wallet up to the appearance of the plague itself – being attributed to a sinister Russian plot. In the early part of the war, the Belgians were also often the target of such claims due to their legendary association with elite infiltrators. What is less often discussed was the anti-Semitic roots of such conspiracies, with ‘Russians’ and ‘Belgians’ often being portrayed as mere useful idiots for the global Jewish conspiracy whose existence had been frequently claimed since the financial collapse in 1917. Such claims were often ludicrously inconsistent even by the standards of conspiracy theories, as Russia was the most anti-Semitic of all the great powers at the time, and was not above loudly invoking Jews as scapegoats herself (though, these days, usually without actually prodding the beehive of the Jewish colony in Crimea). Indeed, the Crimean Jews were sometimes absurdly portrayed by European anti-Semites as the real puppetmasters of the Tsar.
Amid these clouds of malice and uncertainty, perhaps the first round of talks would have failed regardless. But the Societist entry into the war was certainly a destabilising factor that doubtless contributed to their collapse. From April 14th to May 17th, war resumed along the Polish front (and technically the Finnish-Scandinavian one, though that had already more or less come to a halt). Madame Mercier would later record her frustration that “the men – and it is always men” of both sides were envious of the Societists’ remarkably rapid advance, and were acting in bad faith at the peace talks because they secretly hoped that a resumption of war would lead to similarly decisive battles on the static front with which they had long been frustrated. This was driven by nothing more than wishful thinking, a vague sense that somebody had changed the rules of war again, and resulted in a predictable round of pointless slaughter and failed offensives on both sides for a month. Any hopes of achieving a breakthrough, or even improving one’s position at the negotiating table, failed.
By the time the brief resumption of the war was over and the ceasefire resumed with the second round of talks in Vienna, the Societist invasion of North America had moved into a new phase; yet the rulers of the European powers, burned, now avoided trying to make any comparisons. The second round of talks continued in greater earnest, as both sides began presenting outrageous opening offers (not only did the Russians want Czechosilesia back, but they also demanded those parts of pre-Pandoric War Bohemia that had been transferred to High Saxony!) and chipping away at them.
Still, it continued to seem unlikely that a peace was possible. As Mercier had warned, the French diplomatic strategy had always fundamentally rested on the notion that it was possible to take sufficient crucial Russian or Russian-allied territory that the Tsar could be forced to except status quo ante bellum in Persia as the only way to see this returned. But the increasingly-shaky French Dictatorship and its triumvirs did not have direct control over most of the areas which Russia’s enemies had managed to obtain. Allied withdrawal from western Poland and the Baltic conquests in return for Russian withdrawal from Persia seemed the only semi-viable swap, and it would require France to build consensus among the Germans, Italians, English and Scandinavians to pull it off. In practice, with all the democratic powers having similarly shaky governments with opposition at home, and unable to commit to a position that effectively said that all that sacrifice of young men had been for nothing, this proved impossible.
With seemingly no other option, the war resumed once more in July 1926. Throughout this time, morale had collapsed on both sides. It was one thing to present the hell of the Polish front as a purgatory through which only the strongest would survive, and which one’s own side had to face down the enemy until he blinked and broke. It was another to undermine this message by the war stop-starting repeatedly at the whims of diplomats sipping champagne in distant, peaceful Vienna. As Societist militias controlled increasingly large sections of Spain and Portugal, printing presses were at work. Propaganda condemning the pointless, bloody war, a slaughter without reason that continued only because of the incompetence of governments, began circulating throughout the European continent, and the first reports of mutinies began to escape the censors.
Who can guess what would have happened if this misery had continued – might European civilisation have truly collapsed under the strain? Fortunately for the world we live in, the stalemate would finally be broken by the news from Petrograd on September 3rd, 1926...
*
From: “Collected American Biographical Sketches”, edited by Stephen Tyrell (1971)—
George Spencer-Churchill the Younger is a man who needs no introduction. Yet, as is often the case, we can gain deeper insight into this oft-misunderstood figure by seeking to provide one regardless.
Churchill was a fourth-generation American, his namesake George Spencer-Churchill the Elder having fled to the Empire in 1813 to escape the tyrannical regime of his own father, the Duke of Marlborough. In exile, he penned polemics against that regime, darkening its reputation in American eyes and helping pave the way for the Proclamation of Independence some years down the line.[1] In contrast to his reactionary father, the elder George (a misleading term, as he was then a young man) was a Radical and an ally of Henry Tappan. He married Lady Shenandoah Fairfax, one of the younger daughters of Henry Fairfax, Earl of Belvoir.[2] By all accounts it was a love match, though also a politically useful one. George was elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1816 and then to the Continental Parliament in 1822, both times as a member of the American Radical Party. He chose not to return to Great Britain after the Inglorious Revolution and would frequently boast of his belief in the superiority of America, to the point that some accused him of ferdinandismo. George supported President Vanburen’s merger with the Neutrals in 1839 and became a member of the new Liberal Party. Aside from his earlier political criticisms of his father’s regime, he is best remembered for his stirring speech to Parliament in 1851, rallying fellow MCPs at a time when combined Carolinian and Meridian troops seemed on the verge of overrunning Fredericksburg.[3] Naturally, this role in history would lead to inevitable comparisons with his namesake.
George Spencer-Churchill the Elder, by intention or not, established a dynasty. His son John, defiantly named (according to George) after John Vanburen rather than George’s own despised father, followed him into the Liberal Party, albeit in a less high-profile role. He is less well remembered than his younger brother Thomas, who was one of the many adventurers of the Long Peace era. However, John revived the Churchill tradition of writing history, which had been established by his ancestor Winston, father of the Duke of Marlborough, who had fought in the English Civil War. John’s work on the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires is not as well known as it once was and has received criticism as new sources have emerged, but it paved the way for his descendants alongside current politics.
Indeed, John’s son was named Winston in honour of that ancestor. Winston Spencer-Churchill had more doradist views than his father and grandfather, and took the controversial step of joining the Supremacist Party, though he retained many social ties to the Liberals. This stood him in good stead with the outbreak of the Pandoric War and the formation of an American Coalition between Stuart Jamison’s Patriots and Michael Briars’ Liberals. Ironically, Winston’s work was so successful in coordinating the parties that it left the Supremacists seeing Jamison as too close to the Liberals, and the Liberals seeing Briars as too close to the Supremacists – leading to their political downfalls at the hands of Lewis Burwell and Lewis Faulkner, respectively.[4] While Briars would eventually work his way back to a certain level of prominence, he would always nurse a grudge against the Churchill family.
Finally we come to George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, son of Winston, born in 1890. George was the first member of his branch of the family to cross the Atlantic and return to England, studying for a degree in History at the University of Oxford in 1909-12. He became something of a minor celebrity in both countries and undoubtedly played a part in the normalisation of relations between the two. His younger brother John would join him there and choose to stay and build a political career in England, commenting wryly ‘A disturbing number of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived were foreigners’.[5] On once more returning to the ENA, he took up work at the University of Philadelphia, eventually rising to the Morrisian Chair of History.[6] He was first elected to Parliament in the Liberal wave of 1918 following the Panic of 1917, representing one of Philadelphia Province’s seats. Politically, George resembled both his namesake and his father; he was a Liberal, but on the doradist wing of the party. He was a pragmatist who saw party labels as more an exercise in tradition than ideological coherence, always willing to defy the party line and make his own conclusions.
This made him a memorable and perhaps admirable parliamentarian, but certainly not one whose behaviour endeared him to his party or led him to build a useful faction. While George developed significant support among the approving general public, including many far from his constituency, he was isolated within the Liberal caucus. It is natural that imaginative speculative romances have liked to suggest the idea that he could have become President, but though that would be bandied about in the Empire’s darkest hour, it was never seriously considered. Perhaps things might have been different if George had lived under a political system in which central positions of power were directly elected, as in California’s consular system, but the Empire’s parliamentary system meant that a man who could not build support within his party’s caucus was doomed to the sidelines.
Despite this, George had an immense impact upon history, both in hindsight and those events which became history in his lifetime. As an epitaph, I could do worse than to merely reel off a long list of memorable phrases he coined: “History is written by the victors” (disputed), “Those who yearn for freedom and liberty will soon find themselves enslaved by Freedom and Liberty”, “Any atrocity is excusable by intellectual society if hidden beneath a veneer of progressive thought”, “He who controls the present, controls the past”, and many more.[7] In his historical work, he is perhaps best remembered for his further development of Maccauley’s theory of ‘Wars of Supremacy’ and his argument that the War of the Grand Alliance (1688-97) should constitute a ‘Zeroth’ war before those listed by Maccauley. Fond of that term, he also dubbed the Third War of Supremacy the ‘Zeroth Worldwide War’, reflecting terminology at the time (which did not catch on long-term in the Anglophone world) which described the Pandoric War as the First Worldwide War and the Black Twenties conflict as the Second Worldwide War.
It was his early work on historiography, he wrote later, which alerted him to the dangers of the growing threat of Societism long before most contemporary politicians in the ENA. “When one realises how much one’s perception of history is influenced by those who write it, one naturally becomes suspicious of the intentions of he who, all but openly, proclaims that he seeks to control not merely the narrative of history in the past, but its exercise in the future.” Most of Churchill’s best-known historical works were penned after the Black Twenties, such as his “A Century of War” (1941) and its mammoth successor “A History of Modern Warfare”, whose final volume was not published until after his death in the 1960s. These more conventional works ultimately stemmed from his 1931 study “Supremacy: A Treatise on Global Warfare”, which represented the lessons and interpretation that he took from the Black Twenties, relating them to Maccauley’s Wars of Supremacy.[8] But his interests ranged far from the history of warfare that he became associated with, as evidenced (for example) for his historiographic commentaries on past great works of history, such as his 1929 critique of Herodotus and similar works in 1935 on Gibbon and 1939 on Tacitus, among others.[9]
George Spencer-Churchill had a long life which allowed him to witness the Pandoric War, the Black Twenties and the Sunrise War, and write about all of them, as well as the events in between. Yet despite his important works in later life, his cognomen ‘the Younger’ matches his popular image; most will picture him not as an old and seasoned historian, but as a relatively young and brash MCP of thirty-six, standing proudly in the Continental Parliament and declaiming as American politics, government, even the Empire itself seems to be unravelling around him…
[1] See Part #89 in Volume II and Part #124 in Volume III.
[2] An ATL grandson of William Fairfax, whose family intermarried with the Washingtons in both OTL and TTL, and who was the cousin of Thomas Fairfax, Lord Fairfax of Cameron, who in TTL was first Lord Deputy of North America (Prince Frederick had been ‘Lord Deputy for the Colonies’).
[3] See Part #191 in Volume IV.
[4] See Parts #241 and #250 in Volume VI. Note that this is probably overstating the role of Winston Spencer-Churchill in the two leaders’ political fates.
[5] See Part #15 in Volume I.
[6] This is the entity known in OTL as the University of Pennsylvania, descended from the College of Philadelphia founded by Ben Franklin in the 1740s-50s (the exact founding date is a point of contention).
[7] See quotes in Interlude #1, Part #12, Part #44, and Interlude #1 again, all in Volume I.
[8] For quotes from these books, see Part #65 in Volume II, and Parts #9 and #29 in Volume I respectively.
[9] Only the Gibbon critique has been mentioned before, in Part #59 in Volume II.
“Thank you, Miss Jaxon. I’m sure we all hope the gentleman from West Florida has a speedy recovery and that the hospital staff are able to remove it as soon as they find a long enough pair of tongs. (Pause) Finally, another reminder of the upcoming frequency shift – yes, I know we’ve been playing this clip a lot, but we want to make sure no-one is caught offguard by it!” (sotto voce) Roll the cart…”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 04/08/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 04/08/2020
*
(Dr Wostyn’s note)
Thank you once again for the further updates on the situation at home. Here, I fear we are running out of material that justifies our continued presence. The Captains held a conference to discuss it yesterday, and I believe they will soon be in touch with you about another (shudders involuntarily) Zoom call.
Our hope when we arrived here in Waccamaw Strand was that we would be able to obtain Societist sources on the Black Twenties as well as Diversitarian ones, in order to obtain a better-rounded view. We did fear that there might have been censorship of these sources after the Americans took the place back over. While this has applied in a few cases, there are still plenty of dusty old Societist textbooks and the like knocking about, as you have seen in some of our past extracts.
Unfortunately, it appears we would have done better to worry about the Societists themselves. Reading between the lines, it is clear that Societist accounts of the conflict here and around the world – with a few notable exceptions, such as Markus Garzius’ memoirs – are all but useless for understanding this chaotic period in this world’s history. I have seen some vague reference (in Diversitarian books, I mean) to the Societists publishing triumphal histories of their victory here in the late 1920s and the 1930s. However, though I presume bilingual copies of these were circulated in Carolina as propaganda aimed at its people, if so all of them appear to have since been destroyed. Not by the Americans, as I might have assumed, but by the next form of Societists, after the death of Alfarus and the Silent Revolution (I gather – we still do not have much information about this period).
In the last set of analysis notes you sent us, Dr Pataki has drawn some rather facile and inevitable comparisons between the Silent Revolution and the rise of Khrushchev and de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union in our own world. While it is easy to see how a superficial reading could draw this comparison, it does not capture the degree of purpose, fanatical I dare say, in the later Societists’ determination to all but write Alfarus out of history. Practically all sources on Alfarus, other than Garzius’, are written by Diversitarians. Whereas in our world the Soviets might have been content to rename Stalingrad to Volgograd, it seems the Societists’ commitment to ideological purity might extend, in a comparable situation, to demolishing the city altogether, denying it ever existed and removing all references to a battle being fought there from the historical record!
This begs the question of how on earth we hope to gain any understanding of this period in Societist history. I have come to a very strange conclusion, not to pre-empt the Captains’ meeting with you, of course. Some time ago, when trying to escape the sweltering heat of summer in this benighted land, I ducked into a library and came across a reference on a notice-board to a research project going on at the University of King’s College in New York, better known to us in our timeline as Columbia University. Apparently the researchers from UKC are working with their counterparts at the University of Corte in Carolina – I’m not sure if that survived Societist rule or if it’s been reconstructed. Regardless, the point of the project is to reconstruct social and oral history of Societist rule in Carolina, as it seems historians in this timeline have run into the same problem of lack of sources as we have.
It sounds like it’s a bit of a controversial project when I looked into it, but strangely, I’m thinking that if we really want some evidence of what it was like living under Societism, we may need to head north into the Empire proper. In the meantime, my colleagues and I will, of course, conclude our current findings to tie up our history of the Black Twenties, such as it is...
*
From: “Europe - From Pandora to the Sunrise” by A. K. Dalziel and Alice Fielding (1980)—
European reaction to the successful Societist attacks on the Imperial Navy, and then the invasion of Carolina, were decidedly mixed. We cannot ignore the fact that in France (along with Germany, Italy and so on) there was a sense of schadenfreude from both the ruling classes and ordinary people. Throughout the war, the Americans had been regarded as thoroughly unhelpful cobelligerents who needed bribing in order to stay in the war, a war which had taken place well away from their major population centres. The fact that the ENA had weathered the plague pandemic better than most of densely-populated Europe, and had refused to share its patent on Birline rat-poison and sold it at extravagant prices, did not help. From the European (especially German) point of view, America had spent the whole war complacently being little touched by either the conflict or the plague, making money off both, and Europeans were more than willing to see them taken down a peg or two. Of course, few Americans would agree with the idea that the plague had somehow spared their homeland, but perception was everything. This perception undoubtedly played into the decision by the French government to not become directly involved; even aside from their exhaustion and losses from the war, few French voters would have been enthusiastic about fighting to defend the supposedly fat and lazy Americans from a problem of their own devising (as they saw it, in reference to Gilmore’s sabre-rattling about Venezuela).
More fundamentally, of course, the attack on the ENA, Carolina and Guatemala threatened the European position. While few were too optimistic about the possibility of the Vienna peace talks bringing the war to a satisfactory close, this in itself threatened to upset the apple-cart. From the Russian perspective, the Societist attack was a key opportunity. Some Russians (though not Tsar Paul himself, despite some later claims) had the same common misconception as some Americans, viewing the Combine as simply the UPSA with a new coat of paint, and even viewed it as a natural ally or cobelligerent, as the UPSA had been in the Pandoric War. Regardless of that misconception, many more Russians (including the Tsar) saw this as a way to effectively eliminate the Kamchatka front from the war and focus on Europe.
On precisely how to achieve this, however, they were divided. The Pandoric War veteran, retired general and Imperial Soviet member, Arkady Streshnev, strongly advocated that the European ceasefire be maintained, allowing Russian forces to focus on driving the Americans into the cold seas of the Bering Strait. Streshnev, who had fought in Russian America a quarter-century earlier, undermined his own case by further arguing that Russian forces should then seek to cross the strait and reclaim those lost lands, which the Tsar was uninterested in. Paul was more receptive to the argument of fellow advisor Prince Kirill Dashkov, who suggested that while some visible effort should be put into ejecting the Americans according to the first part of Streshnev’s plan, this should purely be a propaganda exercise to put pressure on the French and their allies at the Vienna talks. The unspoken (or spoken) threat was that the Russians would be able to resume the war in Poland while directing more of their forces and attention to it. Of course, this was undermined by the fact that fighting was still ongoing in the Anatolian and Wallachian fronts, as the Ottomans were not part of the ceasefire negotiations. Meanwhile, the Meridian Refugiado General Pichegru, a former favourite of Paul’s, continued to advocate that Russia should set aside her differences with her enemies and focus on preventing the cancer of Societism from spreading earlier – a position which did not endear him to many, other than the increasingly anti-war Dowager Empress Anna.
Another commonly-cited point is the idea that Paul was hoping that his enemies’ governments would become undermined from within by their rival oppositions demanding fresh elections. This was certainly true to some extent, but controversy arises between historians and analysts with the question of Russia’s involvement in secretly funding and manipulating those oppositions. With most of the Russian records highly secret and later lost, it provides a riddle for future generations. There is some evidence of Russian funding for the Legion of Romulus in Italy, then mostly seen as an organisation for irate wounded veterans who felt betrayed by Orsini’s government, but even this is hotly disputed. If it did exist, others will argue, did it represent any kind of implicit approval by Paul of the Romulans’ values and later objectives, or was it merely the act of a troublemaker seeking to undermine Orsini by any means necessary?
To an extent, these debates about Russian involvement take place in the midst of a fog of paranoia and accusations at the time in Europe, in which every negative act – from losing one’s wallet up to the appearance of the plague itself – being attributed to a sinister Russian plot. In the early part of the war, the Belgians were also often the target of such claims due to their legendary association with elite infiltrators. What is less often discussed was the anti-Semitic roots of such conspiracies, with ‘Russians’ and ‘Belgians’ often being portrayed as mere useful idiots for the global Jewish conspiracy whose existence had been frequently claimed since the financial collapse in 1917. Such claims were often ludicrously inconsistent even by the standards of conspiracy theories, as Russia was the most anti-Semitic of all the great powers at the time, and was not above loudly invoking Jews as scapegoats herself (though, these days, usually without actually prodding the beehive of the Jewish colony in Crimea). Indeed, the Crimean Jews were sometimes absurdly portrayed by European anti-Semites as the real puppetmasters of the Tsar.
Amid these clouds of malice and uncertainty, perhaps the first round of talks would have failed regardless. But the Societist entry into the war was certainly a destabilising factor that doubtless contributed to their collapse. From April 14th to May 17th, war resumed along the Polish front (and technically the Finnish-Scandinavian one, though that had already more or less come to a halt). Madame Mercier would later record her frustration that “the men – and it is always men” of both sides were envious of the Societists’ remarkably rapid advance, and were acting in bad faith at the peace talks because they secretly hoped that a resumption of war would lead to similarly decisive battles on the static front with which they had long been frustrated. This was driven by nothing more than wishful thinking, a vague sense that somebody had changed the rules of war again, and resulted in a predictable round of pointless slaughter and failed offensives on both sides for a month. Any hopes of achieving a breakthrough, or even improving one’s position at the negotiating table, failed.
By the time the brief resumption of the war was over and the ceasefire resumed with the second round of talks in Vienna, the Societist invasion of North America had moved into a new phase; yet the rulers of the European powers, burned, now avoided trying to make any comparisons. The second round of talks continued in greater earnest, as both sides began presenting outrageous opening offers (not only did the Russians want Czechosilesia back, but they also demanded those parts of pre-Pandoric War Bohemia that had been transferred to High Saxony!) and chipping away at them.
Still, it continued to seem unlikely that a peace was possible. As Mercier had warned, the French diplomatic strategy had always fundamentally rested on the notion that it was possible to take sufficient crucial Russian or Russian-allied territory that the Tsar could be forced to except status quo ante bellum in Persia as the only way to see this returned. But the increasingly-shaky French Dictatorship and its triumvirs did not have direct control over most of the areas which Russia’s enemies had managed to obtain. Allied withdrawal from western Poland and the Baltic conquests in return for Russian withdrawal from Persia seemed the only semi-viable swap, and it would require France to build consensus among the Germans, Italians, English and Scandinavians to pull it off. In practice, with all the democratic powers having similarly shaky governments with opposition at home, and unable to commit to a position that effectively said that all that sacrifice of young men had been for nothing, this proved impossible.
With seemingly no other option, the war resumed once more in July 1926. Throughout this time, morale had collapsed on both sides. It was one thing to present the hell of the Polish front as a purgatory through which only the strongest would survive, and which one’s own side had to face down the enemy until he blinked and broke. It was another to undermine this message by the war stop-starting repeatedly at the whims of diplomats sipping champagne in distant, peaceful Vienna. As Societist militias controlled increasingly large sections of Spain and Portugal, printing presses were at work. Propaganda condemning the pointless, bloody war, a slaughter without reason that continued only because of the incompetence of governments, began circulating throughout the European continent, and the first reports of mutinies began to escape the censors.
Who can guess what would have happened if this misery had continued – might European civilisation have truly collapsed under the strain? Fortunately for the world we live in, the stalemate would finally be broken by the news from Petrograd on September 3rd, 1926...
*
From: “Collected American Biographical Sketches”, edited by Stephen Tyrell (1971)—
George Spencer-Churchill the Younger is a man who needs no introduction. Yet, as is often the case, we can gain deeper insight into this oft-misunderstood figure by seeking to provide one regardless.
Churchill was a fourth-generation American, his namesake George Spencer-Churchill the Elder having fled to the Empire in 1813 to escape the tyrannical regime of his own father, the Duke of Marlborough. In exile, he penned polemics against that regime, darkening its reputation in American eyes and helping pave the way for the Proclamation of Independence some years down the line.[1] In contrast to his reactionary father, the elder George (a misleading term, as he was then a young man) was a Radical and an ally of Henry Tappan. He married Lady Shenandoah Fairfax, one of the younger daughters of Henry Fairfax, Earl of Belvoir.[2] By all accounts it was a love match, though also a politically useful one. George was elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1816 and then to the Continental Parliament in 1822, both times as a member of the American Radical Party. He chose not to return to Great Britain after the Inglorious Revolution and would frequently boast of his belief in the superiority of America, to the point that some accused him of ferdinandismo. George supported President Vanburen’s merger with the Neutrals in 1839 and became a member of the new Liberal Party. Aside from his earlier political criticisms of his father’s regime, he is best remembered for his stirring speech to Parliament in 1851, rallying fellow MCPs at a time when combined Carolinian and Meridian troops seemed on the verge of overrunning Fredericksburg.[3] Naturally, this role in history would lead to inevitable comparisons with his namesake.
George Spencer-Churchill the Elder, by intention or not, established a dynasty. His son John, defiantly named (according to George) after John Vanburen rather than George’s own despised father, followed him into the Liberal Party, albeit in a less high-profile role. He is less well remembered than his younger brother Thomas, who was one of the many adventurers of the Long Peace era. However, John revived the Churchill tradition of writing history, which had been established by his ancestor Winston, father of the Duke of Marlborough, who had fought in the English Civil War. John’s work on the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires is not as well known as it once was and has received criticism as new sources have emerged, but it paved the way for his descendants alongside current politics.
Indeed, John’s son was named Winston in honour of that ancestor. Winston Spencer-Churchill had more doradist views than his father and grandfather, and took the controversial step of joining the Supremacist Party, though he retained many social ties to the Liberals. This stood him in good stead with the outbreak of the Pandoric War and the formation of an American Coalition between Stuart Jamison’s Patriots and Michael Briars’ Liberals. Ironically, Winston’s work was so successful in coordinating the parties that it left the Supremacists seeing Jamison as too close to the Liberals, and the Liberals seeing Briars as too close to the Supremacists – leading to their political downfalls at the hands of Lewis Burwell and Lewis Faulkner, respectively.[4] While Briars would eventually work his way back to a certain level of prominence, he would always nurse a grudge against the Churchill family.
Finally we come to George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, son of Winston, born in 1890. George was the first member of his branch of the family to cross the Atlantic and return to England, studying for a degree in History at the University of Oxford in 1909-12. He became something of a minor celebrity in both countries and undoubtedly played a part in the normalisation of relations between the two. His younger brother John would join him there and choose to stay and build a political career in England, commenting wryly ‘A disturbing number of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived were foreigners’.[5] On once more returning to the ENA, he took up work at the University of Philadelphia, eventually rising to the Morrisian Chair of History.[6] He was first elected to Parliament in the Liberal wave of 1918 following the Panic of 1917, representing one of Philadelphia Province’s seats. Politically, George resembled both his namesake and his father; he was a Liberal, but on the doradist wing of the party. He was a pragmatist who saw party labels as more an exercise in tradition than ideological coherence, always willing to defy the party line and make his own conclusions.
This made him a memorable and perhaps admirable parliamentarian, but certainly not one whose behaviour endeared him to his party or led him to build a useful faction. While George developed significant support among the approving general public, including many far from his constituency, he was isolated within the Liberal caucus. It is natural that imaginative speculative romances have liked to suggest the idea that he could have become President, but though that would be bandied about in the Empire’s darkest hour, it was never seriously considered. Perhaps things might have been different if George had lived under a political system in which central positions of power were directly elected, as in California’s consular system, but the Empire’s parliamentary system meant that a man who could not build support within his party’s caucus was doomed to the sidelines.
Despite this, George had an immense impact upon history, both in hindsight and those events which became history in his lifetime. As an epitaph, I could do worse than to merely reel off a long list of memorable phrases he coined: “History is written by the victors” (disputed), “Those who yearn for freedom and liberty will soon find themselves enslaved by Freedom and Liberty”, “Any atrocity is excusable by intellectual society if hidden beneath a veneer of progressive thought”, “He who controls the present, controls the past”, and many more.[7] In his historical work, he is perhaps best remembered for his further development of Maccauley’s theory of ‘Wars of Supremacy’ and his argument that the War of the Grand Alliance (1688-97) should constitute a ‘Zeroth’ war before those listed by Maccauley. Fond of that term, he also dubbed the Third War of Supremacy the ‘Zeroth Worldwide War’, reflecting terminology at the time (which did not catch on long-term in the Anglophone world) which described the Pandoric War as the First Worldwide War and the Black Twenties conflict as the Second Worldwide War.
It was his early work on historiography, he wrote later, which alerted him to the dangers of the growing threat of Societism long before most contemporary politicians in the ENA. “When one realises how much one’s perception of history is influenced by those who write it, one naturally becomes suspicious of the intentions of he who, all but openly, proclaims that he seeks to control not merely the narrative of history in the past, but its exercise in the future.” Most of Churchill’s best-known historical works were penned after the Black Twenties, such as his “A Century of War” (1941) and its mammoth successor “A History of Modern Warfare”, whose final volume was not published until after his death in the 1960s. These more conventional works ultimately stemmed from his 1931 study “Supremacy: A Treatise on Global Warfare”, which represented the lessons and interpretation that he took from the Black Twenties, relating them to Maccauley’s Wars of Supremacy.[8] But his interests ranged far from the history of warfare that he became associated with, as evidenced (for example) for his historiographic commentaries on past great works of history, such as his 1929 critique of Herodotus and similar works in 1935 on Gibbon and 1939 on Tacitus, among others.[9]
George Spencer-Churchill had a long life which allowed him to witness the Pandoric War, the Black Twenties and the Sunrise War, and write about all of them, as well as the events in between. Yet despite his important works in later life, his cognomen ‘the Younger’ matches his popular image; most will picture him not as an old and seasoned historian, but as a relatively young and brash MCP of thirty-six, standing proudly in the Continental Parliament and declaiming as American politics, government, even the Empire itself seems to be unravelling around him…
[1] See Part #89 in Volume II and Part #124 in Volume III.
[2] An ATL grandson of William Fairfax, whose family intermarried with the Washingtons in both OTL and TTL, and who was the cousin of Thomas Fairfax, Lord Fairfax of Cameron, who in TTL was first Lord Deputy of North America (Prince Frederick had been ‘Lord Deputy for the Colonies’).
[3] See Part #191 in Volume IV.
[4] See Parts #241 and #250 in Volume VI. Note that this is probably overstating the role of Winston Spencer-Churchill in the two leaders’ political fates.
[5] See Part #15 in Volume I.
[6] This is the entity known in OTL as the University of Pennsylvania, descended from the College of Philadelphia founded by Ben Franklin in the 1740s-50s (the exact founding date is a point of contention).
[7] See quotes in Interlude #1, Part #12, Part #44, and Interlude #1 again, all in Volume I.
[8] For quotes from these books, see Part #65 in Volume II, and Parts #9 and #29 in Volume I respectively.
[9] Only the Gibbon critique has been mentioned before, in Part #59 in Volume II.
