The 25th or so (Yes, I counted) "Famous People In Alternate Realities" Thread

1. It never the Central Powers won, just that they CP Empires still existed, which is possible if they only lost slightly. But I must have missed the American entry into the war.

2. I had Austria be on the winning side in WW2. And WW2 doesn't need to have the same alliances as WW1.

I was speaking generally a bit; Caliboy's post having the tank division Chernenko served in capturing East Prussia in 1945 seemed to imply Russia was on the winning side and Germany on the losing one.

Hopefully this isn't too outlandish. :eek:

I like, although I'm unsure of a Roman Alliance-aligned Britain in WWII. Your entry though, so... :)

ooc: Why would America fight on the side of the Central Powers and wouldn't an American Doctor Who violate the BBC copyright?

It would be helpful if someone more knowledgable on this period than me could flesh that out.

Presumably an American studio licenses it; given that the movies were released in Britain they probably were not bootleg ripoffs.

In addition to being a regular personality on The History Channel and PBS, he remains Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Mathematics at UC-Berkeley and gives regular guest lectures.

Minor quibble: ITTL there is no PBS; America has the FBC (Federal Broadcasting Corporation), public radio and TV broadcaster funded by a television license fee ala the BBC or CBC IOTL.

Where is Athabasca?

Glad you asked...

My conception of what the US looks like ITTL. Given we haven't established exactly how Canada is absorbed into the US, don't take those statehood dates (Save for Athabasca's) as set in stone.

(Map in next post to avoid text stretchyness)
 
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That is awesome!

Now we just need to fill up our Presidential list (which needs to be updated by the way), which I will abstain from adding any more to so others get a chance to add to the wackiness.

Anyways...

Rick Santorum (195:cool:

Professional Wrestler and champion of the American Wrestling League from 1983 to 1998, Santorum was famous for his signature move, the "Slamtorum" After 5 years in retirement in 2003 he became the host of reality-game show American Rockstars. In 2009, he got a show focusing on his life and his family, Santorum City.
 
That map contradicts my Balfour update that had the US mainly gaining mastery over Mexico (puppet regime) from WW1.

The US was already stated to have Baja.


Gustave Whitehead (1874-1935) - German-American aviation pioneer who made the first verified powered heavier-than-air flight in history in 1901, creating the first successful aerodrome. Born Gustaf Albin Weisskopf in Leuterhausen, Bavaria, he was interested in flight from an early age, experimenting with kites and studying how birds flew. He trained as a mechanic and went to Hamburg as a boy after his parents died, where he was forced to join a sailing crew, learning more about wind and birds. In 1893 he arrived in the United States and Anglicized his name. In 1897 he built two gliders for the Aeronautical Club of Boston, which were mildly successful, and he was hired by a toy company in New York to build kites and model gliders. In 1900 he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut to get a job at a factory.

It was while living in Bridgeport that on August 14 1901, Whitehead flew his Whitehead No.21 in nearby Fairfield. Four days later the Bridgeport Herald reported the story, which soon spread to papers around the northeast. At the end of the month, a photographer from the Boston Globe arrived, and on September 1 1901, Whitehead flew the No.21 again, which was verified by the photographer, and the Globe published the story two days later. Whitehead became known worldwide, and in 1905 he founded the Whitehead Company in Brigeport to capitalize on his aerodromes, which soon established a partnership with German investors to found Weisskopf GmbH in Bremen.

Both the American and German firms played a huge role in aviation development in their respective countries; Whitehead Co. was one of the largest aerodrome makers in the US and a major supplier of the Army Air Corps and later the independent United States Air Corp before merging with American Rocket and Curtiss-Fairchild in 1964 to form General Aerospace (Still headquartered in Southwest Connecticut; specifically, in Fairfield, where Whitehead made his first flight) while Weisskopf GmbH merged with Rumpler in 1925 and purchased the ailing Zeppelin GmbH in 1948, becoming RWZ GmbH, Germany's largest aerospace concern.

Whitehead died of a heart attack in 1935, at the age of 61.

George Lucas (1944-) - American automotive executive and engineer who is currently CEO and Chairman of General Motors, the world's largest automaker. Born and raised in Modesto, California, he was interested in cars from a young age, and aspired to be a race car driver, but a minor crash in 1962 just before his high school graduation dampened his enthusiasm for racing. Instead he attended Modesto Junior College, studying mechanics and engineering and graduated from San Jose State University in 1967, hoping to become an automotive engineer. He joined the United States Air Corps as an officer after graduation and was deployed to La Mancha during the Spanish War against Franco-Italian supported communist North Spain, where he operated anti-air missiles, but fell ill and was discharged the next year after it was found he had diabetes.

After being discharged, Lucas returned to the US and settled in Detroit, where he was hired by Hudson Group, the third largest American automaker behind GM and Ford, as an engineer in 1969, attending night classes at the Ross School of Business as well. He was laid off by Hudson in 1976, as that company faced financial troubles, and briefly worked for German automaker Daimler at their recently opened engineering center in Ypsilanti, Michigan before moving on to GM's Oldsmobile division in 1978. After a decade and a half there, he was promoted to head the division in 1994.

Lucas took the reins at Oldsmobile at a troubled time; since the oil crisis and recession of the 1970s the division, GM's mainstream, volume brand, had downsized it's cars and become known as a maker of staid, bare-bones, and poorly made products and had been battered by overseas competition. Indeed, 1994 was the first year Oldsmobile was overtaken by Mawei, a Chinese automaker who had helped make the southern city of Fuchow China's Detroit, as the best selling brand in America. Lucas, a lifelong car enthusiast, was determined to turn around the division's fortunes with well equipped and well designed cars; his philisophy was that the best way to get a customer to buy a car was to elicit emotion right from the showroom floor. Working towards this goal, he hired up and coming industrial designer Chris Bangle to be Oldsmobile's new chief of design not long after his promotion. Bangle's influence was first seen on the 1998 Oldsmobile Aletta, introduced in January 1997 at the American International Auto Show (AIAS) in Detroit, a mid-size car replacing the staid Cutlass. Featuring edgy styling befitting it's name (Aletta means "Fin", as in of an aircraft or fish, in Italian) that was an early application of Bangle's trademark "flame surfacing" It became the best selling car in America and returned Oldsmobile to the top of the sales chart in 1998.

Lucas' boldest move at Oldsmobile was the return of the legendary 442 muscle car of the 1960s and early 1970s. Originally just a coupe on a shortened rear-wheel drive chassis from the Oldsmobile 88 full-size sedan sketched up by an engineer to pass the time, Lucas ordered it be produced. Ultimately the 88 chassis was reengineered to have suitable ride and handling characteristics, a Cadillac specification V8 was earmarked as power, and aggressive sheetmetal was cooked up by Bangle, heavily incorporating his trademark "Flame surfacing". The car was first unveiled at the 2000 AIAS as the 442-000 (Pronounced "four four two thousand") concept and went on sale in 2002 as a 2003 model. Originally standing for a four-barelled carburetor, four-speed manual transmission, and two exhausts, the 442 name was interpreted as standing for four valves per cylinder, four throttle bodies, and two doors. The only engine available was a 360 horsepower, 5.0L (305 cid) DOHC V8. Despite the radical styling, late arrival, and higher than projected starting price of around $29,000, it was a modest success, and sales picked up after the addition of an entry level model with a 297 horsepower, 3.3L (201 cid) supercharged V6 in 2004.

Having proved able to dramatically turn around Oldsmobile, Lucas was promoted to CEO and Chairman of GM in 2006, but has struggled to increase the company's market share in emerging markets despite stemming the loss of sales in the domestic market, and it has been rumored he will step down in late 2012. If so he will likely be succeeded by the company's CFO, Mitt Romney. Lucas is a practicing Methodist and lives in Royal Oak, Michigan and Los Gatos, California.
 
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Nice map, Æsir! This thread is moving too fast for me to keep track of North America or Europe, but I will try to fill in a little bit about East Asia.

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Baron Kijūrō Shidehara (幣原 喜重郎 1872 – 1951)

Shidehara was was notable for both the sucess and failures of his political career. He would serve as both Foreign Minister and Prime Minister multiple times, each time being forced from his post only to return to it later. The foreign policy school that bears his name--Shidehara diplomacy--would lead Japan throughout most of the 1960's. He was also the first, and thus far only, Japanese Prime Minister to profess the Quaker faith.

Shidehara was born in Osaka to a merchant family. His family valued high academic achievement; his older brother Taro would go on to be a Dean at Taihoku Imperial University in Japanese Taiwan (called National Taiwan Univeristy post-independence). Shidehara himself would attend a private Christain school in his youth, giving him a good command of the English language that would serve his throughout his life. Due to both his strong educational background and his fluency in English, he joined the Foreign Service in 1908. By 1919, he was posted to Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, such was the public outcry in Japan over the passage of anti-Japanese legislation in the US in 1920 that the Japanese government felt it had no choice but to sack the entire high-level staff of the embassy in the US. Despite having no foreknowledge of the US legislation, Shidehara found himself back in Japan without a post.

Nevertheless, Shidehara was still considered one of the Foreign Service's "bright young men". The 1920's was a period of global economic contraction. However, Japan proved to be an exception, weathering the economic storms well, at least at first. Japan's continued economic growth at the same time that many of the other advanced economies shrank meant that the nation rapidly grew in economic influence. Shidehara aligned himself with the school of thought that said Japan should concern herself first and foremost with economic growth, and this would prove a more true and lasting source of national strength than purely military power. In 1926, he was named to the post of Foreign Minister. Once again, however, disaster struck the very next year. The Nanking Incident of 1927 outraged the Japanese public, serving as proof in the eyes of many that military force was needed in China to protect Japanese economic interests and the lives of Japanese nationals. Shidehara was dismissed from his post.

By 1932, he had wandered in the political wilderness for five long years. However, the atmosphere was beginning to change. The economic boom times were over for Japan. The continued economic weakness in the US and Europe, alongside the instability and anti-foreign boycotts in China, dramatically reduced demand for Japanese export products. The military forces Japan maintained in China (alongside the US and Great Britain) were increasingly straining the national budget in a time of reduced tax revenues. Also, the consistent loss of soldier's lives for little visible gain was turning the public against the venture. Despite this, the military--still and important power block--was in favor of continuing the mission. In a surprise move, Shidehara was offered the post of Prime Minister. His supporters hoped he might bring an end to the endless fighting in China, while his political opponents were hoping it would discredit him once and for all. Bravely, Shidehara accepted the offer.

Shidehara began by consulting the military in what they might find acceptable to support a withdrawal. He presented a withdrawal from China as an inevitability; however, he was still willing to offer them some concessions. The deal he struck was to allow the IJAAF to conduct a bombing raid with five of the brand-new Ki-20 heavy bombers deep into "rebel-held" China. The point of this was less to intimidate the enemy before peace negotiations, and more to provide useful data for the development of heavy bombers.
Mitsubishi_Ki-20.jpg


After securing the consent of all Japanese parties, he obtained the consent of the international groups concerned. Late in the year, representatives from Japan, the UK, and the US met with representatives from the Northern Warlords Coalition and the KMT at a peace conference in Ryojun, Kanto Leased Territory. The end result of the treaty would hold on the ground for over 40 years. All sides agreed to the principle of "One China". However, in practice China was split in two, at the Yangtze River. The Northern Coalition controlled the north, with its capital in Beijing. The south of the nation was controlled by the KMT, with a capital in Amoy. However, the price for the withdrawal of foreign troops from both halves was high: the foreign settlements in China were made permanent, with all leases transformed into permanent concessions.

Following the peace settlement, Shidehara stepped down. He retired to great public acclaim, and was elevated to the peerage with the rank of Baron. He gained a reputation as a man who could solve problems in international circles for Japan, someone to see the empire through crises. Therefore, he was "drafted" into the post of Foreign Minister after the outbreak of the Second Great (or World) War. He managed to keep Japan out of the fighting, overseeing a near doubling of Japanese exports to the warring powers. By the end of the war, he had once again become Prime Minister. Once peace came, he retired again, citing reasons of health. He died in his home in 1951.

Shidehara's influence would outlive him, A series of Prime Ministers throughout the 1960's would follow the doctrine that would bear his name. As it came to be defined, this consisted of four parts: a strong focus on economic growth, armed neutrality (in this case, from both the first and second worlds), decolonization, and friendly relations (though never alliance) with the Anglophone world.
 
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A fairly major problem; ITTL, the alt-Great Depression seems to have happened in the 1920s rather than 1930s.
 
Jean Chrétien (1934-) - American politician and labor union leader. Born in Shawinigan, Quebec to a poor family, the 18th of 19 children; 10 of his siblings did not survive infancy. He studied at Séminaire Saint-Joseph de Trois-Rivières, a private Roman Catholic school. As a teenager and young adult, he worked odd jobs in Quebec before moving to Lafayette, Louisiana in 1955, presaging the large scale migration of Québécois to the state in search of better weather and job prospects after the advent of air conditioning and the jetdrome-liner. He got a job working on the oilfields while auditing classes on engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 1958, he married Genevieve Guidroz.

Chrétien experienced discrimination against Louisiana Francophones and poor working conditions in the oil and gas industry and became active in union organization and Cajun advocacy. He played a major role in establishing the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIU) in the oilfields and paper mills in Louisiana. He was elected President of the Louisiana CIU in 1968 and became one of the most powerful figures in the state, successfully fighting proposed right-to-work laws in the state. He resigned as President in 1979 and was elected to a 1980-1984 term as a Democratic state senator.

In 1983, Chrétien announced he would not run for reelection to the senate, instead running successfully for Governor. Chrétien was reelected three times, serving four terms from 1984 to 2000, where he worked to root out the endemic corruption in the state and succeeded in building a coalition of African-Americans, Francophones, and organized labor supporting the Democratic Party and breaking the back of the States' Rights Party while preventing the rise of the Republican Party as happened in parts of the south since the Goldwater Presidency. He was the longest serving Governor in Louisiana's history, and after he left office, a coalition of States' Rightists, Republicans, and some conservative Democrats established a strict two-term limit for Governors. He was Bob Dole's running mate in the 1988 Presidential Election and ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1992 and 2000, losing in the primaries to Jack Layton in 1992 and withdrawing before the primaries began in 2000.

Herbert Hoover (1874-1970) - American businessman, engineer, humanitarian, and public servant who had a prominent role in the Republican administrations from 1921 to 1937. Born in Iowa and orphaned at age nine, he went west to live with an uncle in Oregon and was the first ever student at Stanford University in California, which he graduated from in 1895 with a degree in geology and become a mining engineer in the Western Australian goldfields before working in China, where he and his wife Lou Henry Hoover learned Mandarin. He continued to invest in the mining industry around the world and by 1914 had a fortune of some $4 million and investments on every continent. During the First World War and it's aftermath, he became noted as a humanitarian, whose efforts fed tens of millions of people at their height.

When General Leonard Wood, who had commanded the US army on the Canadian front, was elected President as a Republican, he appointed Hoover Secretary of Commerce. At Commerce, Hoover reshaped the formerly minor department into a powerful force, promoting American industry and culture, forging cooperation between business and government over the adversarial relationship pursued by figures such as former President Theodore Roosevelt, and often overshadowing Wood, a political novice and in poor health. He is best remembered for establishing the Federal Broadcasting Corporation (FBC), the world's first public broadcaster, in 1925, and for the program of public works that helped America through the 1919-1927 Depression.

When President Wood died in 1926 after a recurrence of his brain cancer, Hoover had a rather less productive relationship with Irvine Lenroot, who acceded to the Presidency. Lenroot, a staunch progressive, was in favor of stricter government regulation and intervention in business, and while he kept Hoover on while serving out the balance of Wood's second term, after being elected in his own right in 1928, he sacked Hoover. When Lenroot chose to retire in 1932, Hoover ran for the Republican nomination but was defeated by Lenroot's hand-picked successor, Kansas Alf Landon, who, running with James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr, won the general election. Landon considered appointing Hoover back to Commerce, but instead appointed him the first American Governor of the Territory of Baja California after Congress formally annexed that American-occupied region of Mexico in 1933. Hoover served until 1937, when he was replaced by a Democratic appointee.

After this, Hoover returned to private life, becoming a prolific writer of non-fiction and continuing to be one of America's most prominent humanitarians and philanthropist, strongly advocating for American aid to rebuild France, Italy, and Spain after their defeat in the Second World War, both on purely humanitarian grounds and to prevent them from falling to communism as Russia did in 1949. Hoover lived to be ninety-five years old, dying in New York City in 1970. His eldest son, Herbert Hoover, Jr, was Governor of California 1955-1963 and the unsuccessful Republican Presidential nominee in 1960.
 
My apologies for the double post, but it isn't really related to either of my entries and is a serious page stretcher so.

My take on what the outcome of the 2004 election might be ITTL. I imagine the Republicans retain more of the northeastern liberal wing ITTL, and with Barry Goldwater and Gary Johnson as Presidents and gaining Canada, their conservative wing is most likely more libertarian and less theocratic. Because of this there is an opening for a southern third party to attempt to play kingmaker in Presidential elections and probably elect some state officials and lawmakers and even congressmen. There may also be an opening in parts of the country, namely Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Pacific Northwest, and New England, for a party of the left of the Democrats, something like the Vermont Progressive Party writ large or a somewhat stronger Green Party.

presidential_election__2004__tl_25_by_snackserv-d4tg1sw.png


EDIT: Before anyone asks, as far as I could find, Craig McCracken was born in 1971, and so would not eligible in 2000 or 2004, so Johnson gets Fred Thompson as his VP instead.
 
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John W. Lennon (1940-2003) Famed British revolutionary poet and playwright thrown into prison several times in the 1960s and 1970s for "seditious writings" by the Nationalist Government. Eventually, he was exiled, and spent the rest of his days as a favored guest in certain radical chic circles in New York society.
 
Kakuei Tanaka(田中 角栄 1918-1993)

Tanaka was born into a poor rural family, the last of seven children. His father ran an unsecessful dairy farm, and money was chronically short. At age 16, he dropped out of school and moved to the capital to make his fortune. He soon found a job running errands for a construction company. He was am ambitious, driven individual, attending night school to become a draftsman.

In 1937, a chance meeting in an elevator with Baron Masatoshi would change his live. He was able to impress the aristocrat with his ideas, and the Baron agreed to provide the funds to allow Tanaka to set up his own drafting firm. His timing could hardly be better. During the 1940's, much of the world was at war. As the factories of Europe turned to war production, Japanese goods were able to make huge gains in important export markets. Industrial workers streamed into the cities, especially Tokyo, to work in the booming factories. All these new workers needed new homes, and construction companies could hardly keep up with the demand. Tanaka's drafting firm became known as the go-to company for modern apartment block designs. Tanaka himself rapidly assembled a small fortune.

Unusually for a Japanese man, Tanaka was not above self-promotion. He had greater ambitions still, and decided to enter the realm of politics. He soon co-authored a series of books on his ideas for the future of Japan, mainly focusing on making politics responsive to the needs of the burgeoning urban middle classes. Tanaka founded his own political party to make real his ideas, called the Progressive Party (進歩党). The party was unique for its near total focus on economic policies, ignoring social and cultural issues entirely.

Tanaka was elected Governor of Tokyo in 1960. He proved as aggressive as a politician as he had been as a businessman. His key iniative was his drive to "verticalize" the capital--he famously promised that by the time he left office, the average height of a building in Tokyo would be 20 stories. Within a month of his inauguration, the local legislature had repealed the "sunshine laws" that prevented many tall buildings, and begun rezoning large strips of land for dense development. Tanaka pushed for the establishment of governement-funded labs, to research ways to help skyscrapers pass the tough Japanese earthquake safety requirements for buildings. Finally, he made the destruction of old neighborhoods more tolerable to the public, by requring firms buidling new "supertall" apartment buildings to pay for the housing of displaced families during the construction phase, as well as giving them new modern apartments at no cost. This the firms were willing to do, as the huge numbers of tenants in each tall building meant that dozens of apartments could be given away without making the project unprofitable.

When Tanaka retired in 1976, Tokyo was a changed city. It now had a vast modern skyline to rival anything in New York, Chicago, or Hamburg. The average Japanese family in Tokyo had gone from having an average of only 475 sq. ft. at their disposal to over 700 sq. ft. Tanaka's "market oriented" approach compared favorably to the New York system of rent control in controlling average rental costs, as well. Perhaps the surest indication of the economy and space provided by these new apartments could be seen in the surge in average fertility. In 1945, a family in Tokyo had an average of only 1.7 children. By 1976, this had increased to 2.9, close to the national average.

Tanaka's retirement years were somewhat spoiled by frequent investigations, alleging that he had recieved kickbacks from various construction companies while in office. Although he was aquitted of all charges, the allegations stuck with him for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, he remained a popular figure, sometimes called "the people's governor". His son is currently on the board of directors of three seperate construction and engineering firms.
 
I noticed I put Puerto Rico in the electoral map when it shouldn't have been a state yet. Welp...

Felt like trying to revive this again.

Dolores Ibárruri (1895-1987) - Basque nationalist and later exile nicknamed "The Steel Lady". Born and raised in Gallarta near Bilbao in a conservative, Carlist family, her father was a miner, and her family struggled to pay for her education. Intelligent and strong-willed, she worked various odd jobs and managed to become a schoolteacher.

During the series of political and economic crises that plagued Spain through the 1920s, Basque nationalism grew in support. This often took a conservative character, as liberals in Spain had traditionally supported centralization in opposition to the regional autonomy granted under the old regime. Ibárruri became active in Carlist circles and supported the imposition of the right-wing regime in 1930, but her Carlist and Basque nationalist leanings lead to her being purged along with many Basque former supporters of the regime in 1934, going into exile in Portugal, whose liberal government was wary of her and encouraged her to relocate again to Britain. She was living in London when President Mosley was deposed by Parliament at the direction of his own Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, in early 1944, following the 1942 American and German declarations of war precipitated on the Anglofascist Mosley government's tacit support for the Roman Alliance. She was briefly held as the new government under Acting President Eden was determined to seek with the Allies and was suspicious of her ties to the government and the Roman Powers.

Following the end of the war, she returned from exile to Allied occupied Spain to great fanfare, and once again became prominent in Basque nationalist circles, advocating the creation of an independent Basque state. The Basque regions of Spain fell into the American occupation zone, and with the help of wealthy Basque-American rancher and Republican Party Nevada Congressman Dominique Laxalt managed to secure the establishment of the Basque-Navarrese Republic (ENE) at the end of the occupation in 1952. While she never held elected office, she remained the dominant force in the country's politics, especially following the French-supported 1960 socialist revolution in northern Spain. Basques were heavily split between conservative, Catholic views espoused by the ruling Christian Popular Party and left-wing ideologies, and the ENE fell into civil war between Franco-North Spanish supported socialists and the government (Backed by the US as part of the Spanish War).

Eventually, it would become clear that the west could not defeat the socialist regime outright, and Edmund Muskie was elected President in the US in a landslide victory partly on the basis of war weariness. In 1973 the Gonzalez-Yarborough Treaty, drafted by North Spanish Foreign Minister José Maldonado Gonzalez and Secretary of State Ralph Yarborough, was signed, recognizing a "Permanent truce line" following the Sistema Central and Sistema Ibérico mountains an the border of the Valencia Region, with the Kingdom of Spain (South Spain) southwest of the line and the Democratic Spanish Community (North Spain) northeast of it, implicitly ceding the Basque-Navarrese Republic to the communists although reaffirming Portuguese sovereignty over Galicia. By 1974, a left-wing government had been established in the ENE, which subsequently voted for admission into North Spain as an autonomous region.

While Basque independence was lost, the flight of tens of thousands of Basque refugees, including Ibárruri herself, to the US, settling mostly in Calfornia, Idaho, and Nevada, made the Basque plight a cause celebre among American anti-communists. Ibárruri settled in Carson City (Nevada's capital and second largest city after Reno) at the invitation of Paul Laxalt, the eldest child of her late ally Dominique Laxalt and long-time Nevada Congressman, where she died in 1987. According to her wishes, she was buried near Lake Tahoe, only to be reinterred in her native Basque country when communism fell there. This has not been carried out as the Spanish conflict remains frozen, still supported by the continuing French and Italian communist regimes.
 
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