Chapter 32
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Chapter 32
The Great Wars (the Great Patriotic War and the Great Pacific War, usually encompassing the Draco-Spanish War and the Second Draco-American War as well) left many of their participating governments facing public hostility and calls for change once the fighting was done. These calls for change took different forms- in democracies they manifested as popular support for opposition parties and political outsiders, in dictatorships they often wore… other faces- but they occurred nearly universally. The Great Wars had been brutal in ways that no conflict had been prior, and their cost had fallen far heavier on the shoulders of the civilian population than had ever before been the case. Many countries now had lands rendered toxic by the use of chemical and biological weapons and now were forced to face the fact that these lands would remain contaminated for years if not decades to come. In a sense humanity never recovered entirely from the demographic and environmental legacy of the Great Wars, and it should be unsurprising that they drove such a large percentage of humanity to demand change.
In Europe this took the form of the “Silent Revolutions” that toppled most of the Rex regimes in the Pan-European Pact. While not entirely bloodless, the Silent Revolutions derive their name from the relative ease and speed at which they took place. The Pan-European peoples had no desire to end the alliance between their homelands or end their hostility towards Drakia and the Societists, but they blamed the Rex Movement for starting the Great Patriotic War in the first place, and they blamed it for the European defeat. The various Rex governments were all different flavors of authoritarian and disinclined to give up power voluntarily, but anti-Rex sentiment had grown so great that the Silent Revolutions were supported and even led by monarchs and regular armed forces.
The first Silent Revolution occurred in Germany in 1946, when the Diet of the German Confederation ordered the arrest and removal of Prime Minister Bernhard Krauszer. It was not the tame, Rex-dominated lower house that voted to remove Krauszer and seek peace, but the largely ceremonial upper house composed of the German kings and princes (whose seats that Rex had no control over) that took the lead. The caretaker government that the monarchs appointed was predominantly composed of conservatives and popular military leaders, but when elections were held in 1948 they returned a commanding majority for Wilhelm Tannhäuser and the New Reds. The New Reds were a party of Christian Populists (Christian Democrats) that regarded themselves as the heirs to the old Red Movement, and they restored democratic norms to Germany. The second Silent Revolution was in the Netherlands in 1947 when a mob of demobilized veterans marched on the States-General and the Dutch Army silently stepped aside to let them in. The Nationalists who had led the country through the wars were removed, but not arrested, and the new Dutch constitution followed classical liberal lines. There was some actual bloodshed when the Silence came to Italy, and Rex Party paramilitaries clashed with protestors, but it was that very bloodshed that motivated General Ultima Agnello (one of the heroes of the Liberation when Drakian forces were pushed back to Calabria) to declare his support for the protestors and their demands for free, competitive elections. In Hungary a hundred thousand mourners dressed in black and carrying candles gathered silently outside of the temporary capital and the Rex government- which had been following events in its neighbors- agreed to call new elections without requiring further pressure (the Hungarian Rex party came third in the vote, and would in time peacefully return to power). Poland (which was Nationalist, but never Rex) simply ended the state of emergency it had declared when the war began, and the Veterans’ List swept the vote in 1950.
Black-clad Silent Revolutionaries- in permanent mourning for the dead of the Great Patriotic War- mobilize in Italy.
The only member of the Pan-European Pact to completely avoid the Silent Revolutions was Lithuania- all but annihilated by the Russians they mutated into a literal army-with-a-country where every citizen held a rank and belonged to some kind of unit. The Lithuanians hadn’t been part of the Rex Movement any more than the Poles or the Dutch had been however, and so it was that the sole Rex government to carry on after the war was the Fourth French Republic where the Rex remained largely popular. The Eastern-European governments-in-exile continued to meet in Paris, vowing to one day liberate their homelands.
If the World War had ended the age when Europe was the center of the world, the Great Wars ended the age when there was such a thing as a European great power. Europe by the 1950s was a collection of (mostly) allied countries struggling with the economic and demographic consequences of the Great Patriotic War and terrified of Drakia.
Meanwhile, Asia struggled to deal with its own legacy of the Great Pacific War.
The Asia-Pacific League of Friendship had decisively defeated the Grand Alliance, but it had come at a tremendous cost and that cost had been most heavily borne by Japan. The Japanese Archipelago was the primary target for American bombers, and everything that Japan did to the American West Coast the United States did to Japan proper. Most major Japanese cities lay in poisonous ruins, and most of Japan’s industry had been either destroyed or relocated to its mainland holdings in Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, and China. The demands of total war had resulted in increasing reliance on non-Japanese labor to keep the economy going, and mass-conscription of non-Japanese into the military to fill out the ranks. Under the rules of Imperial Democracy military veterans received the vote regardless of their ethnicity, meaning that as of 1950 the majority of the Japanese electorate was no longer Japanese, but that wasn’t a bad thing, right? All Asians were equal under Pan-Asianism, right? The Koreans, the Manchus, and the Mongols who had proven their devotion to the Emperor and the cause were going to receive the full equality and cultural autonomy they wanted, right?
You know where this is going.
Korean soldiers in the IJA rounding up Chinese dissidents. Maybe using a privileged but not totally equal minority to control a very much not privileged majority is a bad idea?
Reconstruction of Japan required cheap mainland labor- mostly Chinese- and a steady influx of taxes, raw materials, and manufactured goods from the non-Japanese (and less war-damaged) parts of the empire. This was deeply unpopular with the non-Japanese citizenry, particularly the newly enfranchised veterans, and the Japanese military itself, which (by virtue of who now made up its ranks) emerged as an advocate for “true Pan-Asianism” in which all Asians had an equal voice in government. The generals might all be Japanese, but the junior officers and the rank-and-file were far more diverse and tired of waiting for full equality. Meanwhile the civilian government continued to insist that the reconstruction of Japan and the political unification of Asia took precedence over social issues, and while non-Japanese could vote in regional elections, you had to live in Japan proper in order to elect the Imperial Assembly that truly ran the country.
When the house of cards came down, it was because India gave it a shove.
India had come through the Great Pacific War relatively unscathed, with new territory, new client states, and a mature military-industrial complex. Where once it had been the junior partner in the League, now New Delhi had ambitions to become the hegemon of Asia. The other members of the Asia-Pacific League of Friendship had never been keen on Japanese plans for a politically unified Asia dominated by Japan, and the idea of an India-led military alliance promised to be far more palatable. Achieving such a thing meant moderating India had to moderate its Hindu-nationalism and moderate its approach towards Islam, but that was the trend already. There was no need to treat Persia as a puppet when sheer terror of its western and northern neighbors would keep it in line, and better treatment (still far from ideal) of Indian Muslims followed.
With America dealt with and most of the Near East in Societist hands, the free countries of Asia needed to reorient to face down the Drakian threat. They began to do so at the Jakarta Conference.
India at this point was both one of the largest countries on Earth and one of the least affected by damage from the Great Wars. They were at least the third strongest global power, and there is a case to be made that they were briefly the second.
In the spring of 1954, most of the world’s remaining free Muslim countries met in Jakarta to discuss a pan-Muslim alliance explicitly aimed against the Drakian Empire that now held all three of their holy cities. Even the Paris-based governments-in-exile for Turkey and the Arab Union sent representatives, as did the government-in-exile that the Turkmen rebels had briefly formed during their uprising against Russia. Only neutral Afghanistan abstained, although there were private Afghan citizens present as observers. The conference’s participants did not feel that Japan and the old League of Friendship served Muslim interests, and they were leery of India given its history towards its Muslim minority, so they drew up plans to form an alliance of their own. New Delhi had nothing to do with organizing the Jakarta Conference, but it raised no objections to Persian participation and happily saw an opportunity to build geopolitical influence.
Japan, meanwhile, was outraged at the Jakarta Conference as its goals ran contrary to the political unification of Asia. In particular it was outraged by the participation of Borneo, which remained under Japanese occupation since it had been liberated from the Americans, and whose government was under pressure (as was the government of the Philippines) to join the Empire of Japan. Kyoto demanded that Borneo withdraw and ordered the other members of the League who were participating to follow suit. Japan might be weakened, but it was still a global economic and military power with a great deal of both soft and hard power.
Enter President Krishna Mirchandani, one of the original founders of the Asia-Pacific League of Friendship and the man who had guided India to victory during the Great Pacific War. India, he announced, rejected Japan’s attempt to coerce the free nations of Asia into following its leadership and would be supporting their freedom to engage in whatever diplomacy they wanted. In fact, did they mind if India joined the Jakarta Conference too?
Japan couldn’t risk a war with India in its current state, no matter what the consequences, and Malaya, Indonesia, Borneo, and Persia were hardly going to refuse to let it join the Conference. Thailand followed India in sending a representative to Jakarta, and what had begun as negotiations to form a pan-Muslim alliance became negotiations to form a replacement for the League of Friendship. When the Philippines expressed interest in participating as well, Kyoto responded by overthrowing the governments of the Philippines and Borneo and replacing them with puppets who would vote to allow their countries to be annexed by Japan. Predictably, this triggered war in both nations and inspired Dai Nam to join the Jakarta Conference as well. With Japan’s allies either deserting or actively rebellion against Japanese occupation, a cabal of mostly Korean soldiers launched a junior officers’ coup. The June 1st Clique (as they became known) seized Kyoto and announced that the civilian government had failed the nation, abandoned the principles of Pan-Asianism and Imperial Democracy, and that out of loyalty to the Emperor and the people they would be taking over. The June 1st Clique proclaimed the establishment of the Empire of East Asia, a truly federal Pan-Asian country under the Emperor of Japan but favoring no specific ethnic group or nationality. The Emperor rejected them of course, as did the ethnically Japanese elements within the armed forces, but the regional governments of Korea, Manchuria, and Mongolia all endorsed the Empire of East Asia, and there was mass mutiny by non-Japanese military personnel.
The Japanese Civil War had begun.
The June 1st Clique actually didn't last very long- they were either dead or arrested within a week of their coup- and it briefly seemed like the government would regain control. But the regional governments remained behind the cause of East Asia, mutinies continued spread when Japan began disarming non-Japanese soldiers, and protests that could be broken up by police spiraled into full-scale uprisings.
We won’t go into all of the details of the battles and campaigns of the JCW, but suffice to say it was a mess. The Japanese government had legitimacy, heavy weapons, and most of the air force and the navy, the East Asians had numbers, most of the army rank-and-file, a lot of industry, and decisively they had weapons and funding from India and the newly formed Jakarta Pact. Massive nationalist rebellions erupted in the Philippines, Borneo, and China against both sides. When the fighting finally died down a sullen Empire of Japan under an IJN military government was reduced to its homeland proper and a scattering of island possessions in the Pacific and Insulindia. Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea were left part of a new non-monarchical “Confederation of East Asia”, and the Great Han Republic had achieved its independence. India and the Jakarta Pact, formed by the participants of the Jakarta Conference and a few late joiners (Cambodia, once the Japanese were kicked out, the Philippines, and eventually China) was now dominant in non-Societist Asia.
Things remained… fluid, however. East Asia was run by the old collaborative classes and ethnicities- the Manchus, the Mongols, the Korean Yangban- which was not entirely popular with all of its citizens. It might have been friendly with India but it was not a Jakarta Pact member, and Mukden continued to claim Japan as part of its territory. Japan itself was left diplomatically isolated and revanchist, outraged that the countries it had “liberated” had stabbed it in the back. China was a fascist democracy, but its government was weak and it struggled to integrate the many different militias and paramilitary groups who had fought together with the Chinese Republican Army for independence, but now disagreed as to what the new China should look like, and remained as well armed as the state military. There were many in China who opposed membership in the Jakarta Pact- after all it was the Pact that had armed and funded the East Asians, and China had to fight the East Asians just as much as the Japanese for independence- and a new political ideology from America that had played a minor role in China’s war of independence found itself growing in strength.
All over the world- from New York to Nanjing to Berlin to London- Situationism was on the march.
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