Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
As my students are about to be going to learn (I feel sort of sorry for them) Arabic linguistic history and sociolinguistics are a rather complicated thing. MSA is indeed a modern standardization, but it is quite deeply rooted in older standardization trends that may date back to pre-Islamic times and the literary common language used at the time of the Prophet if not some decades earlier.
MSA "received pronouciation" is a 20th century thing in itself, but for the main part it is based on what the grammarians of the ninth/tenth centuries AD deemed to be correctly pronounced Arabic,, adding a significant modern Egyptian influence and other stuff.
By the way, Arabic "diglossia" is not really such. Contemporary scholarly consensus seems to point to a nuanced, and pretty complicated, continuum of linguistic varieties based on education of the speaker, context, cultural appropriateness, and so on. As far as I know, it definitely more complicated than the situation in Norway.
I think that "le weekend" has a lot of analogs in modern standard Arabic, like it has in a large chunk of European languages.
Colloquial/informal loanwords are likely to have an easier life ITTL, but I would not say that they will be necessarily from the border areas.
They also benefited from interest in signals intelligence--apparently, one motivation for putting together a number of instruments in the United States in the '50s was to spy on Soviet emissions that bounced off the ionosphere or Moon.
Anyways, I would expect that at this point not only would radio astronomy be an accepted thing, but that the other near-optical bands (ultraviolet and infrared) would be under active exploration, and people would be launching early x-ray detectors on sounding rockets or balloons. And particle experiments, though more of those would just be on mountaintops I think.
Although I assume there would still be a lot of DC-3 analogues used for regional travel, especially in less developed countries.
I'd guess, also, that the introduction of jet airliners would spell the end of airships' run in TTL - once commercial transcontinental flight becomes practical, the wealthy passengers who could afford airship tickets would want the extra speed of jet travel. Maybe some airship lines could survive as luxury cruises or on routes where jet transportation is spotty, but they probably can't survive as a routine form of mass transit.
Mauritius already has joined, and Zanzibar easily could; much of its economy is already oriented in that direction. The Khaleeji states might do so in the future, although probably not Fiji (unless the states of Australasian gain capacity for international affairs) or Trinidad and the Guianas (which are too far away to take part in the development and trade projects for which the Union was designed).
He had a daughter at the time he met the rest of the family in Zanzibar. She would have been very young at the time - five or six years old at most - and since then he's had a couple more.
Can you recommend a good basic source - English preferred, although I can manage French or Spanish?
This motivation would exist in TTL as well - if anything, in a more multipolar world, there would be more people spying on each other.
If they're using radio and X-rays at this point, I wonder if they've found the 3 degree background and confirmed the Big Bang yet. That wouldn't be a world-shaking discovery in itself, but advances in cosmology (like those in evolutionary biology) will affect the relationship between religion and science, and this would be a pretty big one. I could imagine the Egyptian neo-Mu'tazilites in particular having fun with it, and some of the West Africans as well. Come to think of it, maybe some of them were on the team that made the discovery.
You have to have a pretty big, sensitive antenna to pick it up--the horn antenna Penzias and Wilson use was huge, and they were cutting-edge electronics, cryogenically cooling them to get rid of thermal noise, and so on. It would be a bit of a project, and probably not overly useful for other research.
That being said, part of the reason Penzias and Wilson were able to scoop everyone else for it was that the astronomical community wasn't very interested in looking for it--it had been predicted in 1948, after all, and I have no doubt that if there had been sufficient interest a specialized CMB instrument could have been built in the '50s*. However, cosmology wasn't very popular as an astronomical subject until recently, due to its (apparent) disconnectedness with what astronomers could study, so that prediction went basically unnoticed until later (and Penzias and Wilson weren't even looking for it to begin with). Given the greater diversity of cultures and religions heavily involved in cutting-edge research here (versus OTL when it was mostly white Christians and Jews, though with a certain number of Chinese and Japanese researchers by this point as well), you could justify the scientists of one or more countries having a greater interest in cosmology for its own sake and pursuing that line of research when it appears.
* Also there were apparently Soviet discoveries of the radiation that were not noticed elsewhere, or indeed possibly within the Soviet Union itself. Not all cutting-edge research is noticed when it appears.
Guest Post: Central America, 1911-1956
Christiana Hageleit, A Modern History of Central America (Montréal: McGill University Press, 1996)
“...Following the rout of an attempted peasant revolt in 1911, the Salvadoran regime was secure in the short term under military rule. Army and paramilitary units continued to regularly cross into Honduras and harass communities of refugees there, while the Church faced extraordinary repression and order was reestablished on the coffee fincas through terror. However, debate within the elite raged. Moderates, led by former President Antonio Gutiérrez, sought to pair mass repression with targeted reform in order to reduce the social pressures that drove the revolt in the first place. This included some level of land redistribution, new taxes to fund a basic social safety net, and a return to a ‘managed’ democratic system, with real popular assent in local elections. On the other side, reactionaries led by Finance Minister Alejandro Duenas sought to limit even the most basic reforms, denouncing the moderates as ‘socialist radicals’ and ‘traitors’.
The contest would be definitively resolved with the intervention of the ruling military junta. Under orders from acting President Arturo Menéndez, most of the moderate faction’s leadership and political network, as well as many of their family members, were arrested on September 12, 1913. Several dozen, including Gutiérrez, were shot, while others received long prison sentences or expulsion from the country. Menéndez and his clique consolidated control over the country, permanently suspending the constitution and pledging a ‘new course of order and progress’. This institutionalized military rule, with all political parties banned and the House of Representatives subservient to the military-appointed Supreme National Council. While many liberals hoped that the death of President Menéndez in 1931 would spark a return to normality, the Presidency was handed over to the chairman of the Supreme National Council.
Military rule in El Salvador was exceptionally repressive. All political dissent was quashed, and membership in official organizations in labour, business, and other sectors was mandatory. If convicted of a political crime, only connections to high-ranking members of the elite could save someone from death at the hands of a firing squad or exile. Military control of the state placed army officers in a position of tremendous power. Tracts of land confiscated from peasants and unreliable members of the elite were given to military-owned companies such as the Society of Veterans of El Salvador, or even handed over to high-ranking officers upon their retirement. More and more, the state, military and agricultural elite became fused into a common bloc, a ruling class subsisting on the fruit of the land and the blood of their people…
…Nicaragua, following the end of the America military adventure in Honduras, entered a period of surprising prosperity and stability. American military forces had, in their mission protecting the canal, wiped out bandits, built roads, schools and clinics, and purchased locally made products. American troops trained the Nicaraguan army, and American advisors helped the regime reform its bureaucracy. When American troops withdrew –besides a limited number who remained to protect the canal– the state was able to stand on its feet.
During this period, economic growth, aided by the presence of the lucrative canal and American naval base, soared. Production of cash crops such as coffee, bananas and cotton fuelled growth, although manufacturing and mining assisted in economic diversification. Modest land reform, industrial development, a social-safety net and programs to encourage immigration and settlement of the frontier made sure that the wealth was distributed beyond the landowning elite, many of who sought to steer a course between the twin horrors of the Mexican Revolution and the totalitarian hellhole of El Salvador.
The wartime ruling coalition of moderate Conservatives and Liberals, tired of the repeated civil conflicts between their tribalistic factions, formed a new political movement, the United Nicaragua Party, promising cooperation with the United States, good governance and economic growth. Winning in Nicaragua’s national elections in 1916, the Unidados, as they were known, would rule Nicaragua uninterrupted for forty years, based on a broad multiclass coalition helped along by patronage and growth.
By the late 1940s though, the regime had begun to decay. Local party machines had devolved from political networks into engines for embezzlement, money laundering and even organized crime. Industrialization, rising prices and environmental deterioration caused social dislocations that the country’s safety net was unable to absorb. Meanwhile, the regime’s successes in spreading literacy and popular mobilization increased popular demands beyond what Unidado patronage networks could mollify. Radicals inspired by Honduran Fraternalism and the revived narodnik movement in Russia began to organize industrial workers and farm labourers, demanding a fair deal…
…Guatemala’s elite looked on the Salvadoran crisis and the Mexican Revolution with dread and revulsion. The 1903 settlement of the Chan Santa Cruz revolt placed them in a bad position. Yet, things would only get worse for the elite. On October 1 1913, clique of low-ranking military officers, inspired by Manuel Tavares and calling themselves the Free Officers’ Movement, launched a coup. They seized control of the capital, establishing a ‘temporary’ military junta and launching a wave of reform. They promised Maya community leaders a degree of autonomy in exchange for pledges of loyalty to the Republic and the votes of their communities; promised to end the impressment of workers through debt peonage and vagrancy laws; introduced a progressive labour code; and nationalized foreign-owned railroads, ports and telecom networks. The junta, modeling itself consciously after Guatemala’s founding caudillo Rafael Carrera, used a system of direct consultation to gauge popular opinion and bypass the landowning elite.
This new regime proved surprisingly durable. While elections were reinstated under a military-written constitution in 1927, the Free Officers retained a tight grip on the levers of power. The new ruling Carrerista Renewal Party, governed through a mix of patronage and repression, helped along by economic growth fuelled by coffee and banana exports. Yet, under the surface, tensions continued to mount. Without meaningful land reform, old elites retained an immense amount of economic power, which they used to bribe and influence the new political elite. By the third decade of Carrerista rule, the political establishment and old landholders had become highly intertwined, and the regime’s policies reflected it. Meanwhile, rapid social change, environmental degradation and the insidious influence of American companies began to cause upheaval. In response, the Carreristas escalated their repressive actions, and turned to revanchist appeals against their neighbors in Mexico and British Honduras.
Thus, although on a superficial level the regional state system appeared stable, by 1956 Central America was on the cusp of drastic upheaval…
Caroline LeGrand−Obando, The Coffee Republic: El Salvador Since Colonialism (New Orleans: Louisiana State UP, 1979)
“…Some have called El Salvador “the last slaveocracy”. While this description is not wholly accurate, the parallels between the Salvadoran convict-lease system and chattel slavery, including the participation of extremists from the American South, are compelling. Under a series of laws passed between 1914 and 1920 by the military-appointed National Assembly, the only legislative body in the country, the penal code was rewritten. Punishment for crimes was most often extremely harsh, with long prison sentences for murky offensive such as ‘insulting the nation’, ‘causing public discord’ or, most commonly, ‘vagrancy’.
Prisons though were rarely full. Instead, they acted as auction houses and labour depots: coffee growers, Army-owned haciendas, urban industrialists and foreign firms would bid on the labour rights to convicts, who were then expected to work in exceptionally harsh conditions in order to finance their own incarceration. Even once an individual finished their prison sentence, their criminal record -often tattooed as a set of numbers on their forearm- marked them for second-class treatment in employment. Often, convicts were then rearrested for vagrancy, with the cycle starting all over again. By the early 1940s, more than one-half of the country’s population was either incarcerated or held a criminal record.
Unrest and attempted escape was controlled with mass surveillance and cruelty; soldiers and police, drawn from a mix of those who lacked a criminal record and those who had proved themselves most vicious in the prison system, were tasked with snuffing out any resistance to the prevailing regime by any means necessary. The use of beatings, torture, disappearances and mass executions was ubiquitous on the great prison-farms of the coffee plantations, while National Guard raids to ‘halt the spread of criminality’ set rural slums aflame on a regular basis. Here, more than anywhere, whites from the American South -along with Natalians and white Jamaicans nostalgic for the ‘good old days’- were involved. Many white supremacists, enamoured with the system of social control established by the ruling Supreme National Council, immigrated to El Salvador. Famously, the country was celebrated by Chief Templar of the Knights of the Yellow Hammer Mark Wilson as ‘the lone outpost of white freedom and the free-enterprise system in the Western world’, prompting a wave of Yellow Hammers to migrate there following the organization’s defeat with arrival of federal troops in 1927, often joining the police or National Guard. Later, the fall of Natal in 1945 brought a wave of ex-soldiers, the Natalian Specials, sadistic enough to terrify even taskmasters of the prison gangs...
The Salvadoran government also encouraged other means of social control. Cut off from the Catholic Church following the 1911 revolt, the Salvadoran elite sought spirituality in other places. Baptist churches, particularly those branches affiliated with the white elite of the American South, became popular among the wealthy, with their gospel of prosperity, individual virtue, and celebration of commerce and respect for wealth and power. At the same time, the Salvadoran government surreptitiously encouraged conversion by charismatic Protestant preachers and fringe Christian groups, such as the Mormon Church, among the poor. Meant to undermine the Catholic Church, these preachers focused on the rewards of the next life and obedience to authority. The Congreso de Congregaciones de Jesús el Salvador, a union of Baptist and charismatic churches, acted as a de-facto arm of the government, rooting out Fraternalist influence everywhere. By 1956, only one-third of El Salvador’s population was Catholic, most of whom followed the government-appointed national Church hierarchy. However, popular religion remained active underground, and hundreds of years of Catholic teaching could not be wiped out in two generations…
By the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, El Salvador faced increasing international isolation over disgust with its political model. Starting in the mid-1940s, a movement to put pressure on the small country through a boycott on its all-important coffee exports gained popularity, particularly in the United States and Germany. While producers continued to sell to less discerning customers and disguised its product in the vastness of global commodity markets, the Salvadoran economy faced stagnation and decline. The privileged class, largely disconnected from the toiling and starving masses, failed to see the signs of budding desperation…
Lorenzo Vargas, All Authority Comes from God: Church and State in Latin America (New York: NYU Press, 2009)
…In 1913, Honduras was a proud, bloodied nation standing at the edge of a precipice. While resistance to the American invasion had rallied the people around the flag, close to one-third of the population had been killed, injured or displaced by the conflict, while the country’s infrastructure and valuable banana plantations were left in ruins. While reconstruction began in earnest, pre-existing political conflicts reemerged. In exchange for the support of peasant rebels and militias from Salvadoran refugee cofradías, the national government had pledged land reform and recognition of the refugee communities’ autonomy and legal residency. However, Tegucigalpa was reluctant to follow through on their promises. Tensions began to mount, culminating in the Christmas Day 1915 occupation of the national legislature by armed veterans demanding promised bonuses. Only timely mediation by the Pope and the threat of a war with El Salvador kept the country from a renewed civil war.
The 1917 elections brought the Liberal Party to power, which promised political reforms and offered a conciliatory stance towards the United States, now under progressive leadership. American investment streamed back into the country, along with development aid to rebuild infrastructure. Yet, most private investment again flowed to the banana plantations on the country’s north coast, rebuilding company towns and the groundwork for a ‘banana republic’…
The period between La Matanza and the Central American revolutions was one of ideological ferment in Honduras, particularly in the cofradías. Geographically isolated from the rest of the country, the cofradías sought to build a new society, far away from the temptations of the temporal world. They held property collectively and relied on the guidance of religious leaders in forming a communal consensus in decision-making. They also refused to participate in politics, defending their independence and freedoms with faith and the threat of arms rather than the ballot. The Honduran government responded in kind, leaving the cofradías alone in exchange for internal peace, even as they expanded from the trickle of Salvadorans escaping the prison that their country had become.
Yet, the cofradías could not completely wall themselves off from the world; secluded in the southwestern hills, farming poor land and with little capital, they needed goods that could only be purchased with hard currency. Following the declaration of the roving Bishop Hernando Vasquez, appointed by the Vatican to tend to the cofradías, young men began to travel to the expanding banana plantations as a rite of passage, spending several years there working and earning money for their communities. Among their coworkers, an amalgam of locals, Maya from Guatemala and migrants from the Afro-Atlantic sphere (particularly Jamaica), the cofradístas were seen as dour, pious recluses, refusing to indulge in coffee, let alone the alcohol and drugs that ran rampant in company towns on the northern coast. However, cultural exchange occurred, with friendships and even romance occurring across communal lines.
These interactions obviously included political discussions, an area where the young cofradístas shone. Much to their mutual surprise, the arch-Catholics of the cofradías held much in common with Abacarist and Belloist liberation theology, as well as the radicalism of South Carolina’s civil rights warriors. Language and ideas flowed both ways, and made their way back to the isolated farming villages. By the early 1940s, the plantation union movement, which won major concessions from the banana companies even as they were beaten back by hired thugs, was disproportionately led by workers from the cofradías. The cofradístas had changed, adopting the slogans and ideas of their fellows.
Meanwhile, the cofradías themselves had changed, increasingly under the leadership of a new generation: Villages had grown, accepting native Hondurans and building connections with neighbouring towns. Many communities had adopted some of the traditions and practices of the cofradías. Trade with indigenous settlements, previously banned for fear of corruption by ‘heathen practices’ began to sprout. These communities, whose folkways had begun to yield to orthodoxy even as it became acceptable to the Vatican, would play a major in the future of the region. While still highly patriarchal and suspicious of modernity, the cofradías could no longer isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Murmurs demanding change began to grow louder, on the banana plantations, in urban slums and the meeting halls of village churches…
Father Augusto Estrada, a priest and banana workers union leader, first espoused Fraternalism’s political platform in 1943, shortly before his assassination. Seeking to rescue the good of the Catholic-populist regimes from their own excesses and construct a society free of sin and suffering, Fraternalism translated the collectivism, popular participation and social conservatism of the cofradístas into a program fit for democratic politics and a national government. The Fraternalist Party, formed in 1945, advocated -among other radical ideas- agricultural collectivization, recognition of indigenous land claims, and strong environmental protections for all of God's creation. While secular socialists and elites scoffed at the party’s rural, religious base, it exploded in popularity. In 1952, despite voter suppression and attempts at rigging, the Fraternalists captured the second-largest number of mandates in the national legislature, edging out the conservative National Party. Meanwhile, affiliated parties began to sprout in neighbouring countries, including secret organizations in El Salvador and Guatemala…
The 1956 election in Honduras, was contentious, and allegations of vote-rigging on all sides abounded. However, when the dust cleared, the Fraternalist Party held a plurality of seats and, more importantly, the President’s office. However, the party would not last long. Prompted by the urging of the Liberal and National parties and executives from the banana companies, the Honduran military suspended the constitution and arrested the new president. When news reached the cofradías, led by religious poet, former union organizer and priest Father Roberto Dalton, it became clear that only one solution remained.
Revolution.
Christiana Hageleit, A Modern History of Central America (Montréal: McGill University Press, 1996)
“...Following the rout of an attempted peasant revolt in 1911, the Salvadoran regime was secure in the short term under military rule. Army and paramilitary units continued to regularly cross into Honduras and harass communities of refugees there, while the Church faced extraordinary repression and order was reestablished on the coffee fincas through terror. However, debate within the elite raged. Moderates, led by former President Antonio Gutiérrez, sought to pair mass repression with targeted reform in order to reduce the social pressures that drove the revolt in the first place. This included some level of land redistribution, new taxes to fund a basic social safety net, and a return to a ‘managed’ democratic system, with real popular assent in local elections. On the other side, reactionaries led by Finance Minister Alejandro Duenas sought to limit even the most basic reforms, denouncing the moderates as ‘socialist radicals’ and ‘traitors’.
The contest would be definitively resolved with the intervention of the ruling military junta. Under orders from acting President Arturo Menéndez, most of the moderate faction’s leadership and political network, as well as many of their family members, were arrested on September 12, 1913. Several dozen, including Gutiérrez, were shot, while others received long prison sentences or expulsion from the country. Menéndez and his clique consolidated control over the country, permanently suspending the constitution and pledging a ‘new course of order and progress’. This institutionalized military rule, with all political parties banned and the House of Representatives subservient to the military-appointed Supreme National Council. While many liberals hoped that the death of President Menéndez in 1931 would spark a return to normality, the Presidency was handed over to the chairman of the Supreme National Council.
Military rule in El Salvador was exceptionally repressive. All political dissent was quashed, and membership in official organizations in labour, business, and other sectors was mandatory. If convicted of a political crime, only connections to high-ranking members of the elite could save someone from death at the hands of a firing squad or exile. Military control of the state placed army officers in a position of tremendous power. Tracts of land confiscated from peasants and unreliable members of the elite were given to military-owned companies such as the Society of Veterans of El Salvador, or even handed over to high-ranking officers upon their retirement. More and more, the state, military and agricultural elite became fused into a common bloc, a ruling class subsisting on the fruit of the land and the blood of their people…
…Nicaragua, following the end of the America military adventure in Honduras, entered a period of surprising prosperity and stability. American military forces had, in their mission protecting the canal, wiped out bandits, built roads, schools and clinics, and purchased locally made products. American troops trained the Nicaraguan army, and American advisors helped the regime reform its bureaucracy. When American troops withdrew –besides a limited number who remained to protect the canal– the state was able to stand on its feet.
During this period, economic growth, aided by the presence of the lucrative canal and American naval base, soared. Production of cash crops such as coffee, bananas and cotton fuelled growth, although manufacturing and mining assisted in economic diversification. Modest land reform, industrial development, a social-safety net and programs to encourage immigration and settlement of the frontier made sure that the wealth was distributed beyond the landowning elite, many of who sought to steer a course between the twin horrors of the Mexican Revolution and the totalitarian hellhole of El Salvador.
The wartime ruling coalition of moderate Conservatives and Liberals, tired of the repeated civil conflicts between their tribalistic factions, formed a new political movement, the United Nicaragua Party, promising cooperation with the United States, good governance and economic growth. Winning in Nicaragua’s national elections in 1916, the Unidados, as they were known, would rule Nicaragua uninterrupted for forty years, based on a broad multiclass coalition helped along by patronage and growth.
By the late 1940s though, the regime had begun to decay. Local party machines had devolved from political networks into engines for embezzlement, money laundering and even organized crime. Industrialization, rising prices and environmental deterioration caused social dislocations that the country’s safety net was unable to absorb. Meanwhile, the regime’s successes in spreading literacy and popular mobilization increased popular demands beyond what Unidado patronage networks could mollify. Radicals inspired by Honduran Fraternalism and the revived narodnik movement in Russia began to organize industrial workers and farm labourers, demanding a fair deal…
…Guatemala’s elite looked on the Salvadoran crisis and the Mexican Revolution with dread and revulsion. The 1903 settlement of the Chan Santa Cruz revolt placed them in a bad position. Yet, things would only get worse for the elite. On October 1 1913, clique of low-ranking military officers, inspired by Manuel Tavares and calling themselves the Free Officers’ Movement, launched a coup. They seized control of the capital, establishing a ‘temporary’ military junta and launching a wave of reform. They promised Maya community leaders a degree of autonomy in exchange for pledges of loyalty to the Republic and the votes of their communities; promised to end the impressment of workers through debt peonage and vagrancy laws; introduced a progressive labour code; and nationalized foreign-owned railroads, ports and telecom networks. The junta, modeling itself consciously after Guatemala’s founding caudillo Rafael Carrera, used a system of direct consultation to gauge popular opinion and bypass the landowning elite.
This new regime proved surprisingly durable. While elections were reinstated under a military-written constitution in 1927, the Free Officers retained a tight grip on the levers of power. The new ruling Carrerista Renewal Party, governed through a mix of patronage and repression, helped along by economic growth fuelled by coffee and banana exports. Yet, under the surface, tensions continued to mount. Without meaningful land reform, old elites retained an immense amount of economic power, which they used to bribe and influence the new political elite. By the third decade of Carrerista rule, the political establishment and old landholders had become highly intertwined, and the regime’s policies reflected it. Meanwhile, rapid social change, environmental degradation and the insidious influence of American companies began to cause upheaval. In response, the Carreristas escalated their repressive actions, and turned to revanchist appeals against their neighbors in Mexico and British Honduras.
Thus, although on a superficial level the regional state system appeared stable, by 1956 Central America was on the cusp of drastic upheaval…
***
Caroline LeGrand−Obando, The Coffee Republic: El Salvador Since Colonialism (New Orleans: Louisiana State UP, 1979)
“…Some have called El Salvador “the last slaveocracy”. While this description is not wholly accurate, the parallels between the Salvadoran convict-lease system and chattel slavery, including the participation of extremists from the American South, are compelling. Under a series of laws passed between 1914 and 1920 by the military-appointed National Assembly, the only legislative body in the country, the penal code was rewritten. Punishment for crimes was most often extremely harsh, with long prison sentences for murky offensive such as ‘insulting the nation’, ‘causing public discord’ or, most commonly, ‘vagrancy’.
Prisons though were rarely full. Instead, they acted as auction houses and labour depots: coffee growers, Army-owned haciendas, urban industrialists and foreign firms would bid on the labour rights to convicts, who were then expected to work in exceptionally harsh conditions in order to finance their own incarceration. Even once an individual finished their prison sentence, their criminal record -often tattooed as a set of numbers on their forearm- marked them for second-class treatment in employment. Often, convicts were then rearrested for vagrancy, with the cycle starting all over again. By the early 1940s, more than one-half of the country’s population was either incarcerated or held a criminal record.
Unrest and attempted escape was controlled with mass surveillance and cruelty; soldiers and police, drawn from a mix of those who lacked a criminal record and those who had proved themselves most vicious in the prison system, were tasked with snuffing out any resistance to the prevailing regime by any means necessary. The use of beatings, torture, disappearances and mass executions was ubiquitous on the great prison-farms of the coffee plantations, while National Guard raids to ‘halt the spread of criminality’ set rural slums aflame on a regular basis. Here, more than anywhere, whites from the American South -along with Natalians and white Jamaicans nostalgic for the ‘good old days’- were involved. Many white supremacists, enamoured with the system of social control established by the ruling Supreme National Council, immigrated to El Salvador. Famously, the country was celebrated by Chief Templar of the Knights of the Yellow Hammer Mark Wilson as ‘the lone outpost of white freedom and the free-enterprise system in the Western world’, prompting a wave of Yellow Hammers to migrate there following the organization’s defeat with arrival of federal troops in 1927, often joining the police or National Guard. Later, the fall of Natal in 1945 brought a wave of ex-soldiers, the Natalian Specials, sadistic enough to terrify even taskmasters of the prison gangs...
The Salvadoran government also encouraged other means of social control. Cut off from the Catholic Church following the 1911 revolt, the Salvadoran elite sought spirituality in other places. Baptist churches, particularly those branches affiliated with the white elite of the American South, became popular among the wealthy, with their gospel of prosperity, individual virtue, and celebration of commerce and respect for wealth and power. At the same time, the Salvadoran government surreptitiously encouraged conversion by charismatic Protestant preachers and fringe Christian groups, such as the Mormon Church, among the poor. Meant to undermine the Catholic Church, these preachers focused on the rewards of the next life and obedience to authority. The Congreso de Congregaciones de Jesús el Salvador, a union of Baptist and charismatic churches, acted as a de-facto arm of the government, rooting out Fraternalist influence everywhere. By 1956, only one-third of El Salvador’s population was Catholic, most of whom followed the government-appointed national Church hierarchy. However, popular religion remained active underground, and hundreds of years of Catholic teaching could not be wiped out in two generations…
By the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, El Salvador faced increasing international isolation over disgust with its political model. Starting in the mid-1940s, a movement to put pressure on the small country through a boycott on its all-important coffee exports gained popularity, particularly in the United States and Germany. While producers continued to sell to less discerning customers and disguised its product in the vastness of global commodity markets, the Salvadoran economy faced stagnation and decline. The privileged class, largely disconnected from the toiling and starving masses, failed to see the signs of budding desperation…
***
Lorenzo Vargas, All Authority Comes from God: Church and State in Latin America (New York: NYU Press, 2009)
…In 1913, Honduras was a proud, bloodied nation standing at the edge of a precipice. While resistance to the American invasion had rallied the people around the flag, close to one-third of the population had been killed, injured or displaced by the conflict, while the country’s infrastructure and valuable banana plantations were left in ruins. While reconstruction began in earnest, pre-existing political conflicts reemerged. In exchange for the support of peasant rebels and militias from Salvadoran refugee cofradías, the national government had pledged land reform and recognition of the refugee communities’ autonomy and legal residency. However, Tegucigalpa was reluctant to follow through on their promises. Tensions began to mount, culminating in the Christmas Day 1915 occupation of the national legislature by armed veterans demanding promised bonuses. Only timely mediation by the Pope and the threat of a war with El Salvador kept the country from a renewed civil war.
The 1917 elections brought the Liberal Party to power, which promised political reforms and offered a conciliatory stance towards the United States, now under progressive leadership. American investment streamed back into the country, along with development aid to rebuild infrastructure. Yet, most private investment again flowed to the banana plantations on the country’s north coast, rebuilding company towns and the groundwork for a ‘banana republic’…
The period between La Matanza and the Central American revolutions was one of ideological ferment in Honduras, particularly in the cofradías. Geographically isolated from the rest of the country, the cofradías sought to build a new society, far away from the temptations of the temporal world. They held property collectively and relied on the guidance of religious leaders in forming a communal consensus in decision-making. They also refused to participate in politics, defending their independence and freedoms with faith and the threat of arms rather than the ballot. The Honduran government responded in kind, leaving the cofradías alone in exchange for internal peace, even as they expanded from the trickle of Salvadorans escaping the prison that their country had become.
Yet, the cofradías could not completely wall themselves off from the world; secluded in the southwestern hills, farming poor land and with little capital, they needed goods that could only be purchased with hard currency. Following the declaration of the roving Bishop Hernando Vasquez, appointed by the Vatican to tend to the cofradías, young men began to travel to the expanding banana plantations as a rite of passage, spending several years there working and earning money for their communities. Among their coworkers, an amalgam of locals, Maya from Guatemala and migrants from the Afro-Atlantic sphere (particularly Jamaica), the cofradístas were seen as dour, pious recluses, refusing to indulge in coffee, let alone the alcohol and drugs that ran rampant in company towns on the northern coast. However, cultural exchange occurred, with friendships and even romance occurring across communal lines.
These interactions obviously included political discussions, an area where the young cofradístas shone. Much to their mutual surprise, the arch-Catholics of the cofradías held much in common with Abacarist and Belloist liberation theology, as well as the radicalism of South Carolina’s civil rights warriors. Language and ideas flowed both ways, and made their way back to the isolated farming villages. By the early 1940s, the plantation union movement, which won major concessions from the banana companies even as they were beaten back by hired thugs, was disproportionately led by workers from the cofradías. The cofradístas had changed, adopting the slogans and ideas of their fellows.
Meanwhile, the cofradías themselves had changed, increasingly under the leadership of a new generation: Villages had grown, accepting native Hondurans and building connections with neighbouring towns. Many communities had adopted some of the traditions and practices of the cofradías. Trade with indigenous settlements, previously banned for fear of corruption by ‘heathen practices’ began to sprout. These communities, whose folkways had begun to yield to orthodoxy even as it became acceptable to the Vatican, would play a major in the future of the region. While still highly patriarchal and suspicious of modernity, the cofradías could no longer isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Murmurs demanding change began to grow louder, on the banana plantations, in urban slums and the meeting halls of village churches…
Father Augusto Estrada, a priest and banana workers union leader, first espoused Fraternalism’s political platform in 1943, shortly before his assassination. Seeking to rescue the good of the Catholic-populist regimes from their own excesses and construct a society free of sin and suffering, Fraternalism translated the collectivism, popular participation and social conservatism of the cofradístas into a program fit for democratic politics and a national government. The Fraternalist Party, formed in 1945, advocated -among other radical ideas- agricultural collectivization, recognition of indigenous land claims, and strong environmental protections for all of God's creation. While secular socialists and elites scoffed at the party’s rural, religious base, it exploded in popularity. In 1952, despite voter suppression and attempts at rigging, the Fraternalists captured the second-largest number of mandates in the national legislature, edging out the conservative National Party. Meanwhile, affiliated parties began to sprout in neighbouring countries, including secret organizations in El Salvador and Guatemala…
The 1956 election in Honduras, was contentious, and allegations of vote-rigging on all sides abounded. However, when the dust cleared, the Fraternalist Party held a plurality of seats and, more importantly, the President’s office. However, the party would not last long. Prompted by the urging of the Liberal and National parties and executives from the banana companies, the Honduran military suspended the constitution and arrested the new president. When news reached the cofradías, led by religious poet, former union organizer and priest Father Roberto Dalton, it became clear that only one solution remained.
Revolution.
It's very unlikely for Australian states to have any capacity for external affairs. In OTL, they wanted to maintain separate relations with London but both the Colonial Office and the Federal Government were very clear that this couldn't happen. From London's point of view it would keep too much unnecessary bureaucracy around when the advantage of Federation was that there were six fewer governments the Colonial Office had to regularly deal with- eight ITTL. From the Federal government's perspective, it would undermine the new state's ability to make policy.
But what would clinch it ITTL is the Imperial Party period- even if the Colonial Office completely reversed course as a way to give a friendly Queensland more leeway, by that time there's been about thirty years of the Federal Government and it wouldn't be so easily thwarted. If states tried to set their own course during the period of Imperial turmoil, there'd be a major reaction. No federal government could afford for Fijian or Queensland plantation classes to set their own policy on India, for example.
Now all that being said- with Fiji and New Zealand as constituent states, I can see a more Pacific focused Australasia that tries to set up its own free-trading bloc over the southern sea lanes.
I crossposted with the guest update-
Central America is going to have a whole different set of stereotypes in Hollywood, I see.
I wonder if ITTL, there's going to be a stereotype in science fiction of Evil Time Travelling Salvadoreans?
Central America is going to have a whole different set of stereotypes in Hollywood, I see.
I wonder if ITTL, there's going to be a stereotype in science fiction of Evil Time Travelling Salvadoreans?
Possibly, the Salvadoran elite is pretty monstrous.
Nicaragua is comparatively free, but it's still run as a one-party patronage state. Imagine a more conservative version of PRI Mexico, and you're somewhere close. It will have the easiest time dealing with transition away from oligarchy; the Unidados will probably survive as a political party, even if they aren't hegemonic anymore. El Salvador, on the other hand, can't go any other way than a bloodbath. The elite is totally committed to their system, and the people are desperate enough to face certain death for the possibility of freedom.
As for Honduras, I doubt they'll move on Belize. Guatemala, on the other hand, might gamble that All-Dominion Empire Britain is weak and won't want to go to war over a marginal colony that Guatemala has a reasonable claim to anyway.
Cultural imperatives would probably rank pretty low on the list of factors in setting research priorities - the potential to develop knowledge useful for further study, as well as commercial and national security applications, would still decide what projects get funded. Also, astronomers would use each other's work as baselines, which would pull them toward the more popular areas of study. There might be more interest in cosmology ITTL, but probably not a great deal more, which means that the Big Bang might still be proven by accident.
Thanks. That's more or less what I'd figured - that Australasia would be one of the less post-Westphalian countries ITTL for reasons similar to the United States, but might form or use international organizations to bring more of the Pacific into its informal orbit.
Guns of the South, with the villains being 1950s Salvadorans who can claim descent from Southern plantation families (as well as from Natalians and local haciendados)?
Venezuela already made that gamble with respect to British Guiana, though, and lost big time. Guatemala might rattle its saber, but is unlikely to take a similar chance.
I'd imagine, BTW, that British Honduras is one of the few British possessions that will still be colonies in the late 1950s, given its small population, inability to provide for its own defense, and proximity to a hostile neighbor. It will probably have responsible government of some kind, though.
East Africa, the Congo, Hungary and the less fortunate Pacific islands haven't proven that already?
For my course, I chose "The Arabic Language" by Kees Versteegh, Edimburgh University Press. First edition 1997, it has been reprinted with updates this year. I have still to see the new edition, actually.
Excellent guest update. Central America is always a sad place to read about, but politics of why in TTL have been explored very well, rather than in other TLs where it's just assumed to be that way because it is that way.
So were the Pipils slaughtered to point of nearly ceasing to exist, like they were in OTL?
So were the Pipils slaughtered to point of nearly ceasing to exist, like they were in OTL?
Deleted member 14881
Azander12, you made El Salvador even worse than what happened in the Salvadorian Civil War.
Something like that, I'd imagine.
I think you're right on British Honduras: if Guatemala goes for it, the British army will crush them like stale bread. Under a democratic regime, they might have been able to negotiate a purchase of the territory (gets a marginal and probably unprofitable colony out of British hands while appeasing the anti-colonial lobby at home), but there is no way they'll sell it to a Central American version of Nasserist Egypt.
Thanks!
Yeah, they most likely were. The Salvadoran regime took advantage of the Communist revolt in OTL to wipe out the Pipils, I don't see why they wouldn't do so here.
Yeah, pretty much, although Nicaragua might not have a civil war at all, and Guatemala and Honduras might be able to avoid major bloodshed. The Carreristas could fall apart if an alliance between liberals, Fraternalists and people who really believe in the ideals of the Guatemalan Revolution forms. Meanwhile, outside of parts of the Army and the old elite (never as powerful in Honduras as the rest of the region), the revolutionaries in Honduras will probably win absent American intervention, which I doubt will happen.
The Last Slavocracy... I can already see international opinion on the matter.
Speaking of which, I wonder if there's going to be something as polarizing as IOTL's middle-eastern conflicts by ITTL's 21st century.
I can already see international opinion on the matter. Speaking of which, I wonder if there's going to be something as polarizing as IOTL's middle-eastern conflicts by ITTL's 21st century.