I’m sure they would try to name that wall from a white person.
Screw Postcolonial Africa EVEN Harder Than OTL
- Thread starter TickTock The Witch's Dead
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I’m sure they would try to name that wall from a white person.
It is possible, with something like Gandhi's Wall being a more informal or community specific name for the northern border wall though OTOH the latter becoming the official name in the context of Indian/Asian minorities being given equal rights, would be something for this ATL South Africa to readily capitalize on and make the most mileage of in propaganda terms.
I highly doubt most would fall for it, so what would be the point?
It is not so much about fooling the rest of the world (though some would view it as an easy excuse to ignore the domestic issues in the country) rather it is about making the Indian/Asian/etc minorities dependent on the continued survival of the existing (albeit expanded) minority ruled South African government, the closest rough minority rule analogue would be OTL Syria.
Indian/Asian/etc minorities gaining equal rights in ATL South Africa would also potentially enhance ties with both India and China should the West attempt to isolate it like in OTL (with the West being largely impotent to do anything against both India and China), with the latter two having the incentive of protecting the existing government as well as their own interests and expat communities in the country in the event of a civil war (like Russia and others with Syria, China with Myanmar in some respects, etc).
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The PRC was very anti-apartheid though. I’m not sure if they’d care for the Chinese minorities there.
It is dependent on what the Chinese gain from backing the continued existence of the South Africa government (as well as which faction wins the Chinese Civil War), the latter has plenty of natural resources (including those of Namibia, Rhodesia, etc) and would be looking for powerful backers in the face of Western attempts to isolate the country which the government could potentially leverage to its advantage.
Another idea would be the PRC opting for the immigration of Chinese to places like this ATL South Africa in place of the One-Child Policy upon the latter gaining equal rights to Indians/Asians/etc, along with immigration from other countries. The intention being to create a situation where in the event of a South African Civil War other countries like China and India (along with possibly Brazil, etc) would get militarily involved or provide mercenaries to ensure the continued existence of the current South African government in order to protect their interests within the country.
The country would likely remain a pariah state as in OTL (albeit more subdued in ATL) with its ATL deals with larger countries (especially those notorious for poaching and the Ivory trade, etc) potentially gaining it further infamy for the possible extinction of endangered animals, though like other OTL dictatorships that would not stop other countries from doing trade deals and being friendly for business as well as have powerful backers seeking to maintain the status quo for as long as possible.
How likely is a white supremacist regime going to want non-white immigrants though?
Am coming from the premise of a wanked South Africa (possibly including Namibia, Rhodesia, etc) being much more pragmatic compared to OTL in the name of survival. While white immigrants would be ideal, Gandhi's OTL comments and relationship with Jan Smuts could potentially be used as a way for Indians/Chinese/other Asians/etc basically being given equal rights (and making them dependent on the government's survival) with the door open for further immigration from the latter's countries as part of ATL South Africa's growing ties with India and China out of necessity.
ATL South Africa building a northern border wall and naming it after Gandhi due to the latter's relationship with Jan Smuts (or any ATL Chinese equivalent), would also make Indian, Chinese and other South African non-white/black communities associated with Apartheid in the eyes of many Black South Africans and thus seen as legitimate targets by African Paramilitaries in the event of a civil war or decades long campaign of terrorism.
Not sure how effective the following would be though it would be interesting seeing ATL South Africa play off the Bantu peoples against both the Khoisan and Coloureds in order for the latter two to seek the protection of the government as more vulnerable minorities.
A pragmatic minority rule South Africa (in so far as that's even possible) never adopts apartheid to begin with, and instead persists with Rhodesian style "it's not a racial requirement it's a property/income requirement. There are black people who vote, I'll even give you both of their numbers so you can call and confirm" policies.
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So South Africa adopting a more OTL Rhodesian model in place of Apartheid would have allowed issues to potentially fester for a lot longer?
Not sure how much longer. The west was going to stop putting up with them as soon as the Soviets ceased to be an actor on the world stage.
Which is all the more reason why ATL South Africa should have taken a similar approach to other dictatorships that managed to remain in power to this day (with some even managing to rehabilitate themselves to some extent via propaganda, etc) and sought out other non-Western backers to ensure its own survival, whether it is doable is another matter though goes some way towards screwing that part of Africa even harder compared to OTL.
In 1962, US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, authorised Project 112 . The project expanded bioweapons testing and pumped new funds into research. Project 112 was a highly classified military testing program which was aimed at both offensive and defensive human, animal, and plant reaction to biological and chemical warfare in various combinations of climate and terrain.
In March 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sent Averell Harriman to the capital, Leopoldville-Kinshasa, to assess the situation in Congo. In which, a leftist umbrella group called the National Liberation Council had taken control of much of the country with backing from China and the Soviet Union. A hand-written memo is added to Project 112 stating that :
It was the origin of Project Liberty, named after Liberia. Liberia, a former colony of the USA, never became a party to the Biological Weapons Convention and was considered far enough to minimize the risks of contamination or public scrutiny. Liberia was thus chosen as the main extraterritorial site for Project 112.
The Vietnam War soon brought public awareness to the U.S. biological weapons program. The use of chemicals, riot-control agents, and herbicides like Agent Orange drew international criticism, and negatively affected the U.S. public opinion on the development of biological weapons. The Nixon administration felt an urgent need to respond to the growing negative perception of biological weapons. Subsequently, President Nixon announced that the U.S. was unilaterally renouncing its biological warfare program, officially signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972.
Both the U.S. bio-weapons ban and the Biological Weapons Convention restricted any work in the area of biological warfare to defensive in nature. In reality, this gives BWC member-states wide latitude to conduct biological weapons research because the BWC contains no provisions for monitoring or enforcement. The treaty, essentially, is a gentlemen's agreement amongst members backed by the long-prevailing thought that biological warfare should not be used in battle.
Small stocks of U.S. biological weapons, or contingency stocks, were quietly moved to Liberia over the next few years. They included :
Those stocks kept in Liberia weren’t the only ones owned by USA, as official stocks were still used in civilian and military laboratories for scientific research and to work on vaccines. On the request of former CIA director Richard Helms, who feared a sole military control on such numerous apocalyptic weapons, Liberian stocks were put under joint-control of the military and the CIA in 1973. The containment and research unit in Liberia was ironically nicknamed Pandora box.
The existence of those stocks wasn’t a problem until 1980. After his coup, Samuel Doe suspended the constitution and headed the country's military junta for the next five years. In 1985 he ordered an election and officially became the 21st President of Liberia. The election was marked by controversy as there was evidence of election fraud. Despite this fraud, Doe had immediate support from the United States, when he threatened to reveal the existence of Pandora box.
During a decade from 1973 to 1985, millions of Liberians and other Africans had been used for biological experiments by US and Allied scientists. The arrival of Samuel Doe in power forced them to open new sites in Africa for large-scale experiments resulting in the spread of rare diseases in other regions of the continent.
Unfortunately for the world and Africa, Pandora box was left opened at the end of Samuel Doe’s reign. On 24 December 1989, rebels entered Liberia through Ivory Coast with the intent of capturing Doe on the behalf of USA. The US Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed that Taylor first started working with US intelligence in the 1980s but refused to give details of his role or US actions, citing national security.
On 1st January 1990, Pandora Box was looted. When US special units reached the complex, they could only find corpses and hundreds of broken vials and used syringes on the floor. A later investigation showed that many sets of vials were missing. This incident was buried by intelligence communities and widely considered as a conspiracy theory.
The perpetrators of this destruction are still unknown in 2019, but Africa is doomed.
Dozens of years later, newspapers would reveal that many of those broken vials and syringes were actually used by fighters who thought they could render them invulnerable. Infecting themselves, they contaminated their neighbors, friends and refugees who unknowingly propagated weaponized and often incurable diseases outside of the country.
Sets of missing vials were later sold on blackmarkets and were used by hostile groups and organizations including the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, fringe fractions of Umkhonto we Sizwe in South Africa (Johannesburg incident) or the recent PanAfrican Caliphate born in Nigeria.
... to be continued ...
In March 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sent Averell Harriman to the capital, Leopoldville-Kinshasa, to assess the situation in Congo. In which, a leftist umbrella group called the National Liberation Council had taken control of much of the country with backing from China and the Soviet Union. A hand-written memo is added to Project 112 stating that :
.
It was the origin of Project Liberty, named after Liberia. Liberia, a former colony of the USA, never became a party to the Biological Weapons Convention and was considered far enough to minimize the risks of contamination or public scrutiny. Liberia was thus chosen as the main extraterritorial site for Project 112.
The Vietnam War soon brought public awareness to the U.S. biological weapons program. The use of chemicals, riot-control agents, and herbicides like Agent Orange drew international criticism, and negatively affected the U.S. public opinion on the development of biological weapons. The Nixon administration felt an urgent need to respond to the growing negative perception of biological weapons. Subsequently, President Nixon announced that the U.S. was unilaterally renouncing its biological warfare program, officially signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972.
Both the U.S. bio-weapons ban and the Biological Weapons Convention restricted any work in the area of biological warfare to defensive in nature. In reality, this gives BWC member-states wide latitude to conduct biological weapons research because the BWC contains no provisions for monitoring or enforcement. The treaty, essentially, is a gentlemen's agreement amongst members backed by the long-prevailing thought that biological warfare should not be used in battle.
Small stocks of U.S. biological weapons, or contingency stocks, were quietly moved to Liberia over the next few years. They included :
Those stocks kept in Liberia weren’t the only ones owned by USA, as official stocks were still used in civilian and military laboratories for scientific research and to work on vaccines. On the request of former CIA director Richard Helms, who feared a sole military control on such numerous apocalyptic weapons, Liberian stocks were put under joint-control of the military and the CIA in 1973. The containment and research unit in Liberia was ironically nicknamed Pandora box.
The existence of those stocks wasn’t a problem until 1980. After his coup, Samuel Doe suspended the constitution and headed the country's military junta for the next five years. In 1985 he ordered an election and officially became the 21st President of Liberia. The election was marked by controversy as there was evidence of election fraud. Despite this fraud, Doe had immediate support from the United States, when he threatened to reveal the existence of Pandora box.
During a decade from 1973 to 1985, millions of Liberians and other Africans had been used for biological experiments by US and Allied scientists. The arrival of Samuel Doe in power forced them to open new sites in Africa for large-scale experiments resulting in the spread of rare diseases in other regions of the continent.
Unfortunately for the world and Africa, Pandora box was left opened at the end of Samuel Doe’s reign. On 24 December 1989, rebels entered Liberia through Ivory Coast with the intent of capturing Doe on the behalf of USA. The US Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed that Taylor first started working with US intelligence in the 1980s but refused to give details of his role or US actions, citing national security.
On 1st January 1990, Pandora Box was looted. When US special units reached the complex, they could only find corpses and hundreds of broken vials and used syringes on the floor. A later investigation showed that many sets of vials were missing. This incident was buried by intelligence communities and widely considered as a conspiracy theory.
The perpetrators of this destruction are still unknown in 2019, but Africa is doomed.
Dozens of years later, newspapers would reveal that many of those broken vials and syringes were actually used by fighters who thought they could render them invulnerable. Infecting themselves, they contaminated their neighbors, friends and refugees who unknowingly propagated weaponized and often incurable diseases outside of the country.
Sets of missing vials were later sold on blackmarkets and were used by hostile groups and organizations including the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, fringe fractions of Umkhonto we Sizwe in South Africa (Johannesburg incident) or the recent PanAfrican Caliphate born in Nigeria.
... to be continued ...
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"Friendship ended with Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now my best friend."
Pretty much. Iran also has ties with China, Russian and others as well as friendly relations with India.
The Literally No One Likes Us, We Just Put Up With Each Other Treaty Organization (LNOLUWJPUWEOTO): the Alliance of China, Iran, South Africa, Sudan and Zaire.
There, that's how you really screw Africa, you insert Hezbollah, Communists, Arab supremacists, and white supremacists into the First Congo War.
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It definitely takes the OTL Amoral Afrikaner trope into another direction in ATL, the only thing missing would be ATL South Africa (which already includes Namibia, Rhodesia, etc) managing to incorporatie ATL Portuguese South Mozambique at some point.
Besides for all the West's protests in OTL against various dictatorships, it has has not stopped a number of those same Western nations from both doing business / trade with said dictatorships as well as helping the latter in dodging sanctions at times.
Keep the White Independent Colonies fighting hard. The face of Rhodesia and South Africa were a pampered White minority in gated communities, supported by the brutality of White Paramilitary fighters and Police States. Like 1960s Mississippi on a national level. With groups such as the AWB, it's not difficult to see those nations becoming modern day neo-fascist. Also, keep the Portuguese fighting. Add into that the African natives turning to the USSR (because humanity works in terms of extreme) as a result of various anti-native actions by the West (whatever they may be), the Free World backing the White minorities as a result to keep Africa from falling into the Soviet sphere, and a cluster of proxy wars between West and East in Africa. And heck, let South Africa get the nuclear bomb; so now you have South Africa propping itself by threatening to annihilate its enemies (and maybe it even would try) like a North Korea at the bottom of the world, South Africa guaranteeing the independence of other White minority states through nuclear posturing, emboldening Rhodesia and potential other states (again, Portuguese) and forming something of a coaltion which can extend its influence into the rest of Africa like an oil spill that caught fire.
Just keep twisting knots of extremism and hate and ignorance and anger, with eyes for an eye that make everyone blinder and blinder in constant retataliation, which the parties involved all justify to themselves. All justified evil is is "evil" with an adjective in front of it so people can pretend its something different.
Just keep twisting knots of extremism and hate and ignorance and anger, with eyes for an eye that make everyone blinder and blinder in constant retataliation, which the parties involved all justify to themselves. All justified evil is is "evil" with an adjective in front of it so people can pretend its something different.
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