New Deal Coalition Retained: A Sixth Party System Wikibox Timeline
The British Commonwealth and French Community (most of them anyway) are in much better shape than OTL, while Uganda is also better off as we will see in a new update.
Please don't have him do we he did to the Israeli citizens, especially that old woman.
I've detailed Angola in a previous post, while the War in Mozambique is even bloodier than OTL (Salazar will not give Mozambique to the communists and RENAMO isn't as willing to stab their allies in the back as UNITA was). Spain doesn't have that many colonies, but it is hanging on to it's portion of Morocco with a tight fist. Franco is nearing his deathbed, but his subordinates are laying the foundation to maintain the Falange control after his death.
also British Commonwealth ghanan/gold coast flag assuming closer relations continue?? (credits to Wikipedia)
Dat elephant tho
A segment on prominent dog-lovers of the world and their taste in furniture decoration?
International Terrorism
Technology was a wonderful thing in the 1960s and 1970s, expanding the frontier of human potential in was that one could never have imagined even two decades earlier. Men had been put on the moon, events could be watched in millions of homes as if they were happening right next door, and the spectre of starvation was considered by many experts to be on the way to being eliminated.
However, the advent of mass media, cheap explosives, rapid international travel, and automatic weapons had ushered in a new horror upon the world. That of terrorism.
Terrorism and its ancestors had been around since the beginning of mankind. The first real wave of terrorism had been around the late 1800s and early 1900s, where actions such as the anarchist wave, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the killing of Franz Ferdinand, and the Irish War for Independence passing into lore. This second wave would begin as “National Liberation Movements” were spreading across the world, most of them communist or socialist in nature.
Each of these would end up being supported by the same state actors: Semichastny’s USSR, Ulbricht’s East Germany, Mao’s China, Nasser’s UAR, and Guevara’s Cuba. They would be spread far across the globe, some in full scale insurgencies against governments, some toppling governments, some waiting for the right moment, and every shade of grey in between.
Due to the backdrop of the Iron Curtain, the groups in Europe received the most attention by the international press. With the landward pipeline from the east, weapons and materiel flowed rather well to them from the Warsaw Pact (as well as monetary aid to political groups such as the Spanish and Portuguese socialist opposition and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s Italian Communist Party), leading many to grow bolder and ever willing to hit against the capitalist governments they so despised.
With the Soviet Union occupied for most of the late sixties in solidifying their control after Prague Spring, the terrorists such as the French Action Directe, Italian Red Brigades, and the West German Rotfrontkampferbund were keeping a low profile as opposed to their allies in Africa, Asia, and South America. This would all change in the fall of 1971.
The German Autumn had sounded the horn for terrorists across Europe, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain being the hardest hit. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.
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As the fiftieth anniversary of the failed Easter Rising was being celebrated across the Emerald Isle on 24th April, 1966, tensions over the status of Unionist Ulster began to boil up after simmering for decades. Unionist anger in the cities of the north grew against the overwhelmingly Catholic Republicans after a group in Dublin bombed Nelson’s Pillar – a famous remnant of British rule in Ireland – along with a series of random violent attacks by groups calling themselves the Irish Republican Army in a homage to the Irish Civil War. Though these attacks were minor in scope, many in Ulster were panicked that the violence would spread. Cheered on by politicians such as Northern Irish Cabinet Minister Bill Craig, groups of Protestants formed paramilitary defense groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force as a defence against the IRA. Throughout 1967 they attacked civilian areas in Republican neighborhoods, including the petrol bombing of several houses in which families were burned alive.
This burning led to riots and protests across Ireland, the Taoiseach himself condemning the Northern Irish Government of Terrence O’Neill (despite the patrician O’Neill being a moderate in the Ulster Unionist Party). As a result, the once moribund Sein Fein and its military wing – the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army or PIRA – began to surge in membership and support. Before, the group’s leaders had kept up a steady policy of building networks and importing weapons from Soviet-influenced retailers in East Germany and the UAR. Now, newly installed Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness felt it prudent to take the fight to the British. Starting on New Year’s Day 1969, a wave of protests and attacks touched off in Ulster, PIRA forces targeting government buildings and Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks. Dozens would be killed.
O’Neill’s government quickly collapsed, the Stormont parliament electing Bill Craig as the NI Premier over the more moderate James Chichester-Clark (many moderates would then leave the UUP for the emerging Alliance party led by the charismatic Oliver Napier). Craig and Prime Minister Julian Amery were both hardliners against Republican sentiment. Wishing to integrate Northern Ireland in the same manner as Scotland and Wales, 10 Downing Street agreed with Craig that the PIRA couldn’t be coddled. As a result, Parliament passed the Terrorism Act, effectively declaring terrorism a capital crime and allowing the Prime Minister to use the military to enforce it if need be. In early 1970 the first military units arrived in Belfast and Derry, leading to a series of violent confrontations with the PIRA and Republican protestors.
Initially, the PIRA leadership was united in strategy, basically a redux of Michael Collins’ during the Irish War of Independence – only focused on Ulster. McGuinness would lead the armed campaign restricted to Northern Ireland while Sein Fein spokesman Gerry Adams built international support for the Republican cause. However, as 1971 dawned tension between the leadership and a group of young commanders reached the boiling point. Believing that attacks needed to be made into Britain itself to convince the Amery Government to relent, a large faction of the PIRA broke off in what they called the Renegade Branch.
The Renegades quickly asserted themselves, setting off a string of major bombings across England and Scotland. However, retaliation by Amery and MI6 was fierce, convincing the renegades that something bigger was needed. The target was deemed Mr. Monday Club himself, widely seen as the most hardline of all the Unionists. Calls to negotiate from even members of his own party were beaten back, the Prime Minister constantly seen on media vowing to “Break the back of these malcontents,” and that “Britannia will never be intimidated.” For the Renegades, this was merely a challenge. Killing Amery, in their minds, would serve as a message that no Briton was safe. Since it had worked with the killing of Tito in Yugoslavia, why couldn’t it be applied here?
Upon intelligence reports that Amery always made a weekly journey to Buckingham Palace to meet with Her Majesty, the Renegades planned to assassinate him on his return to Downing Street. The plan was scheduled for 8 August, 1972.
The assault team had appropriated several civilian vehicles, including a taxi, while some melded into the ever-present crowd of tourists gawking at the palace. Waiting for Amery’s limousine to leave the palace so they could ambush it, the plan was thrown awry when two escorted limos pulled out of the palace gates. Two limos. Their intelligence hadn’t planned on this, and which one was Amery in? Nevertheless, the leader on point – youthful Renegade Faction member Ronnie Bunting – made a judgement call. They would just attack both.
The square in front of the palace erupted in gunfire and explosions, one of the escorting Metropolitan Police Service vehicles blasted with an RPG as gunmen raced on foot toward the limos. The driver of the first, a former military driver from WWII, ripped out at high speed, escaping despite Kalashnikov fire slamming into them from behind. Fuming, the Irish “Patriots” concentrated on the second, raking it with fire and grenades.
Unknown to Bunting, they had just made a fatal miscalculation for both the Renegade and Provo cause. The first limousine had been Amery’s, his driver’s quick action saving the Prime Minister with only a small flesh wound to his personal secretary. As for the second… it had been the chartered vehicle for Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Normally traveling in the ceremonial carriage, she and her husband Prince Phillip had insisted on an impromptu visit to 10 Downing Street for further conference with Amery about the Troubles. As the horrified guards called for ambulances, the Queen was grievously wounded, Phillip and the others in the vehicle dead from the Renegade fusillade.
Upon the knowledge of the attack hitting the world press circuit – virtually unavoidable considering the victims – PIRA spokesman Gerry Adams immediately denounced the attack to the Boston Globe (as well as other US and Irish media) and brought up how the Renegade Faction had been excommunicated from the PIRA the year before. Unionist paramilitaries such as the UVF went on rampages in Catholic and Republican neighborhoods in a frenzy of retribution and bloodlust. Belfast collapsed into anarchy for nearly two days as Bill Craig was forced to call in specialized police units and the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment in to restore order against people who had once been his allies.
For the IRA leadership, the wounding of the Queen was a disaster of epic proportions. Martin McGuinness was reported to have gone into a fury, ranting for nearly an hour in the headquarters in the northern Republic of Ireland. If they didn’t act fast then even their supporters in the Republic wouldn’t be enough to prevent the coming Tommy hammer upon them. Soon, an execution order went out from the top. The Provos were declaring war against the Renegades, a bounty set for Bunting’s head especially. Three months later, the Renegade commander was tracked down to a farmhouse in County Cork. After nearly a week of torture, McGuinness would put a bullet into his brain.
Only time would tell if this would save the Provisional Irish Republican cause.
Such left Charles, Prince of Wales – having only just married Julie Nixon (Julie, Princess of Wales) in the beginning of the year – and Prime Minister Amery to lead the nation through the coming crisis.
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Following the Treaty of Amman, only the vital support of the KGB and the UAR government kept the Palestinian cause from collapsing. A vast portion of the Palestinian indemnity against Israel had been eliminated with a stroke of a pen, vast majorities of the West Bank and Jordanian refugee population joined by a third of Israeli Arabs in assuming Jordanian citizenship. No longer were they displaced persons. And all knew that displaced persons made up all of Yasser Arafat’s support for the PLO.
As a result of the setback the Palestine Liberation Organization found itself feuding (just as with the PIRA). As opposed to the generally Islamic-secular Arafat core, a hardline communist faction supported by Walter Ulbricht’s East Germany and Mao’s China split and formed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Allying with the maze of communist terrorist groups in Europe and with aid from the various Libyan military juntas that would pop up every now and again, they branched in a different direction from the traditional guerilla (similar to the North Vietnamese but with an exclusively political target list and focused on Israel in the vein of the PIRA) approach favored by Arafat and the PLO.
The PLO would not take its battleplans lightly, making life within Israel hell – dubbed the Years of Fire by the newspaper Haaretz – and inflicting large casualties among the IDF. However, these would be dramatically overshadowed by the PFLP. Modeling themselves after the PIRA Renegades, they specialized in spectacular attacks that would draw worldwide attention to their cause. Several jetliners such as Luftansa flight 181, Pan American flight 1789, and a series of five aircraft that were later stormed by Israeli special forces on the tarmac in Athens Airport began a massive scrambling to amp up airline safety – while also putting the PFLP on the map.
What had to be the most signature action by them was the capture of the Israeli Embassy in London. Conducted by a mere eight gunmen who had entered the UK on stolen passports, several hostages were killed before the standoff developed which would last four days, the terrorists holed up inside while the Metropolitan Police surrounded the Embassy from the outside.
Problematic for Israel, the series of attacks, bombings, and hijackings weren’t isolated in the sense of being planned and carried out by the PLO and PFLP alone. While Arafat and his cronies served as the proximate planners and operational commanders of the various operations, ultimate direction was uniformly out of Cairo and Damascus. Gamal Nasser and General Jadid were in a precarious position trying to keep the United Arab Republic together in the face of internal tensions, regionalism, and political rivalry. Sensing the united front against Israel was their best bet, the coordination with Arafat’s Palestinian terrorist groups served as a feint to draw Israeli attention away from the UAR itself. Concerned about the security of its international holdings, the Mossad and the Begin Government (busy applying its massive domestic reform policies as well) took the bait.
Nearly a year after the siege, further bombings and the attempted hijacking of an El Al aircraft – foiled by attentive passengers and safely landed in Idi Amin’s Uganda, an Israeli ally – Nasser and Jadid formally put their seal of approval on Operation Saladin, marked for October 1972.
Right in the middle of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday.
bookmark95
Banned
This is horrific, in another world, terrorists can still think of unimaginable cruelty
An American woman becoming queen. Nothing would symbolize the the Special relationship than an American daughter becoming its reigning monarch.
An American woman becoming queen. Nothing would symbolize the the Special relationship than an American daughter becoming its reigning monarch.