The Footprint of Mussolini - TL
Man, Wojtyla’s part had me tearing up inside. You did a phenomenal job!
Also Stepan isn’t a full blown Ustashe collaborator ITTL? Interesting.
Also Stepan isn’t a full blown Ustashe collaborator ITTL? Interesting.
OTL he wasn't either from my researches, so it was easy to let him play a more active role of opposition to Pavelic ITTL.
And thanks!
Well done Khruschev! I would have preferred he beat the piece of shit to death with his shoe, but I suppose slow suffocation will have to suffice.
The coptics will see the italians as the lesser evil to the turks because they are christian like them.
When did the persecution of Coptics pick up steam by the local Muslims?
I think the persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Middle East is going to spike after the second Arab defeat because they gonna be looking for someone to blame for their foreshadow devastating defeat.
Persecution and discrimination of coptics never happened in the 20th century and earlier? The turks and ottomans have a sterling reputation for their treatment of christians? Persecution of christians in the middle east and north africa never happened? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Copts#Islamic_era The turks are not more local and them being more local does not make it better.
I am aware of there being a history, but its not a field I have much knowledge of and therefore on how it might affect this story, hence my inquiry for details.
Thank you for the link.
I don't think the Turks would care much for the Egyptian situation, considering they grew fed of them for all the 19th century and in the end Ankara would consider the fate of Egypt of Anglo-Italian competence (because the invasion of Oman we saw didn't left the British indifferent, as for they losing their ground in Arabia as well, and for last the Suez canal). We can be sure Israel will demand the Sinai and be favorable to pegging Egypt really down this time, including breaking it apart.
Now, Lebanon is looking to see an interesting case... it is clear the country will become indipendent again (but we can't exclude Italy may keep the country instead) and recover as well, probably playing a cushion role between Turkish Syria and Israel. Probably will become a RA ally as well, but also Turkey and Italy may play thumb game of influence here.
If Lebanon does become a member of the Roman Alliance then might I suggest these guys be in power?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party
Seems being suitable to other Fascist nations. And its leader Pierre Gemayel seems being acceptable president of liberated Lebanon if he just survived from Aflaq's purges.
Gemayel escaped to Turkey with Aflaq's goons on his tail. He's currently residing in Rome at the leisure of the Italians. The Cedarists come from many different walks of life, but the Phalange are definitely the largest. The Kataeb Party has obviously been illegalized as a 'Zionist-front Organisation' but it commands the hearts among many of the Lebanese diaspora.
Which is ironic because the Lebanese Falangists were quite markedly Anti-Semitic*. It did not stop them to ally with Israel during the Lebanese Civil War, though the Gemayels are on record as having strongly disliked having to take that option. Their interests are likely to align with Israel's ITTL, too, and probably their Anti-Semitism is a bit toned down anyway as the Lebanese Phalangists took inspiration from Fascism, and ITTL Fascism actively opposes Anti-Semitism (another major irony from OTL's POV).
*I use the word in the current sense, not the obviously contradictory etymological one.
The War At Home
The War At Home
‘Amazing Grace: The Story of Civil Rights in America’ by Judith Moore
‘Amazing Grace: The Story of Civil Rights in America’ by Judith Moore
“We are as determined to defeat the enemy at home as we are the enemy abroad.” So said President Patton at his second inaugural address. No one was in any doubt what he meant: the total destruction of the Ku Klux Klan. Thankfully for Patton, the Klan had made it surprisingly easy for him. In 1944, the Klan seemed to be on its deathbed due to a series of back taxes the IRS pushed on it. However, at the last moment, an anonymous donor or donators gave enough money for the organisation to (barely) survive. It is believed that the ascension of Civil Rights-supporting Wallace to the Presidency scared someone enough to convince them that there needed to be a counterbalance. Regardless, saved from the death, the Klan hobbled on in the South. Then the word of Dickstein’s deeds became public knowledge, sparking a renaissance of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Communism in the American sphere. Then, when the Wallace Affair grew into a national sensation, the Klan’s membership and influence returned to their 1920s heyday, at least in the South.
But there were a series of problems that emerged from their growth. Firstly, the America of the post-WW2 era had grown far less Anti-Catholic (and indeed far more Catholic) than the 1920s. Many potential Klan members would have served with Irish, Poles and Italians in the war and had no interest in turning on their friends. Secondly, while a brief burst of Anti-Semitism did appear after the Dickstein case, the Klan was left totally exposed when word of the Soviet Holocaust emerged. Not only did their Anti-Semitism appear even crazier, but even fouler. Lastly, and most importantly for the organisation, many of its membership had taken the Impeachment of Wallace as ‘their win’. They believed that Wallace had been kicked out due to fears of a Klan uprising if he stayed on. With this delusion, the Klan thought themselves invincible, the result of which was the case of Jackie Robinson. With the loathed Northern Democrats no longer a serious force in government (unable to be cajoled by the likewise near-extinct Southern Democrats), the Republicans stepped up to the plate to do the job that some of their fellow party members set out to do nearly 100 years ago.
Thankfully for the Republicans, the Klan had made their job exceptionally easy by continuing to be one united organisation, rather than a hodgepodge of lone-wolves who would be harder to track. In one group, the Klan would have membership lists that could help in hunting the organisation down. Two days after Patton’s inauguration, Republican Senator Joseph Kennedy Jr. introduced a bill to declare the Ku Klux Klan a terrorist organisation. The Freedom Party was caught in a desperate spot, since while very few of their actual politicians were Klan members (with any of influence quickly exiting the organisation when news of Robinson’s murder came out), a large amount of their supporters and backstaffers were indeed Klansmen. Thurmond made the reluctant decision to vote for the act on the basis that ‘the Klan is threatening to end the institutions (Segregation) of the South’. Roughly a third of the party voted for the bill (overwhelmingly the ones with higher office in mind), a third abstained and a third voted against it supposedly due to the gross overreach of Federal power. Many observers asked if the infighting that enveloped the Freedom Party as a result of this measure would ultimately overwhelm the party – however, no such result was achieved.
One Addison Roswell Thompson would be on of the more prominent politicians protesting the bill. He was elected in Louisiana and went to Washington representing a self-created, one-man Ku Klux Klan that he proclaimed himself Wizard of. He most infamously stated, “I’d rather see a hundred dead Jackie Robinsons than serve one ape in my taxi.” He was so bigoted that the Freedom Party themselves frequently had to condemn him. Senator Al Gore would privately muse, “If Addisson doesn’t say ‘Nigger’ at least a hundred times a day, I think he’ll explode.” Thompson, disgusted at the Freedom Party’s lack of defence of the Klan, quit the organisation and created the ‘State’s Rights Party’, an avowedly racist organisation that called itself, ‘The Political wing of the Ku Klux Klan’. It advocated a system more akin to Apartheid than to the normal Jim Crow segregation of the time, with the Klan not only enduring but also becoming a ‘national militia to guard against domestic threats’. If that wasn’t enough, they advocated extending the segregation northward and imposing it, in total opposition to their own name. They were shunned by most of society, but in the South there was a radical enough element of the population for them to become relevant. Thurmond, who had always been considered one of the more moderate Southern segregationists, held a party for his staffers upon news of Addisons’s departure. He had, correctly, guessed that he could be able to transplant much of the heat that had fallen on the Freedom Party due to Robinson’s death to the State’s Rights Party.
After speeding through both Senate and House, President Patton signed the bill with T.R.M. Howard standing alongside him. Howard had become the unofficial face of the Civil Rights movement because he was a Republican and business leader, while many of the NAACP and other long-standing Civil Rights organisations were traditionally from the Left. Howard, highly influenced by Booker T. Washington, believed the future of Black America lay in cultivating entrepreneurialism and independent initiative rather than through social programs. This allowed him to more strongly influence members of the Republican Party, who remained suspicious of DuBois and other Leftist Civil Rights Leaders for their support of Wallace, some even after the Impeachment. However, Howard’s finest hour was in spearheading a personal investigation into the Jackie Robinson case, helping the FBI locate, interview and protect multiple witnesses while local law enforcement shrugged and did nothing. For that, he would later become the first recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.
The bill was signed on May 3rd 1953. That night in Birmingham, a congregation at the 16th Street Baptist Church was celebrating the illegalization of a group that caused so much misery and death. Unfortunately, that night, in response to their newfound illegalization, the Klan intended to send a message. J. B. Stoner, a prominent local Klansman, threw a grenade through the church window, killing four and injuring far more. Other incidents would spring up all over the South that night, but none so prominent. It was beginning of ‘The Troubles’ (known as ‘the American Troubles’ outside of the US to differentiate from the ‘Irish Troubles’). The next day, the Klan released a statement to the press, taking full responsibility for the attack saying, “It is unfortunate that such measures are being used, but as long as the Negro communities of America support the disempowerment of White Southerners, these measures must continue. For the sacred rights our forefathers passed down generation after generation for us, we are not simply prepared to die, but to kill as well.” As Americans geared up for more carnage, T.R.M. Howard would cement his legacy by giving declaring to the press, “Our victory will be the laughter of our children”. The saying would go on to be one of the main phrases of the Civil Rights movement.
Extract from the Ku Klux Klan’s press release following the Baptist Church Bombing
“This is not the end. This is not even the beginning. King George may coo in triumph that he has avenged his pet, but he faces an enemy far fiercer than any he’s ever met. He faces the will of God and Jesus Christ himself, he who ordained the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and cast the descendants of Ham to the roasting sun of Africa. Though Papists and Christ-killers line King George’s army, the fiery cross from old Scotland’s hills shall devour any number of those who try to defile us. Defile our society with extinction, defile our sons with enslavement and defile our daughters with Negro lust. To those who would pollute our land, our faith and our daughters, the men of the South have this answer: K. K. K.”
‘“At Least Wallace Is Gone …” : America in the 50s’ by Samantha Kelly
Despite their illegalization, the Klan’s membership held remarkably steady, though not necessarily from the same people. More middle class types who saw the Klan as a networking method leaped out of the organisation as quick as a flash and pretended they were never in it in the first place. By contrast, many of the White South’s lower elements, from the chronically angry to deadbeats looking for purpose came in, seeking protection and friendship. Furthermore, despite their lofty statements harkening back to the Confederacy (which for all its evils primarily concentrated its firepower on the men of the Union army) some 65% of the Klan’s killing would be done to black civilians, with a further 20% to white citizens who were either ‘collaborators’, ‘race traitors’ or some ethnic or religious group the Klan didn’t like (which they were hardly short on). Infamously, even politicians were considered fair game.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was one such man. He thought he was a shoe-in to win in his Texas constituency in 1946 under the Democrat ticket, but then Wallace’s many scandals unfurled. However, the Freedom Party was impressed by his obvious skill in rhetoric and making deals in Congress and wanted to recruit him. Yet when offered the role of the Freedom Party’s candidate for his constituency, he refused due to the Party’s avowed support of segregation. In his youth, Johnson remembered and was disgusted by the bigotry that infected his community and swore he would never embolden it. This would doom Johnson, who narrowly lost his constituency to the Freedom Party. As the party of Thurmond increased its hold over the South, they approached Johnson on multiple occasions to join forces and set him up in another seat. Finally, at one such meeting with a young recruiter who quickly got on the Texan’s nerves, Johnson pulled down his pants and exposed his genitals to the recruiter and said “Do you think a man of my size is just going to break down because some peckerwood pipsqueak keeps asking me?!” This stopped the Freedom Party’s recruiting attempts. However, Johnson grew disillusioned by the Democrat Party’s troubles and his own disgust of Wallace. Finally, to his total reluctance, he joined the Republican Party. When asked by one paper why he’d switched to the Republicans, he replied, ‘Someone’s got to put in a good word for the South to George [Patton].” Johnson won the Republican nomination for Texas’s Senate seat in 1948. In a dirty contest with a lot of back and forth and multiple charges of voting fraud, Patton’s popularity was enough to narrowly push Johnson into office, making him a minor celebrity among Republicans for cracking ‘the Solid South’.
As the Civil Rights era dawned, Johnson supported the push for equality. This cratered his popularity in Texas, but as he told Patton, “This something worth getting voted out of office for”. Johnson’s condemnations of the Klan before and after their illegalization were unrelenting and merciless. Unfortunately, the Klan decided to take action. While the Klan hated Kennedy and McCarthy for being ‘Papists’, they reserved special hatred for both Johnson and Patton for being ‘Race-traitors’, i.e. White Southern men who opposed their bigotry. Johnson received death threats on a near hourly basis, warning him to ‘stay in Washington if you value your worthless life’. Johnson refused to adhere to their demands, saying, “I didn’t fight the Japs to run away from my own home.” On July 8th 1953, Johnson attended a campaign event in Dallas Texas to speak on the subject of bringing jobs to Texas. However, he would be shot three times in the back by a sniper, a Klansman sniper by the name of James ‘Catfish’ Cole. Multiple conspiracy theories were created due to the shockingly lax security of the event that allowed the assassination to happen, many alleging that members of Johnson’s security forces were in on the plan due to their disgust of Johnson’s race policies. Yet if the Klan thought that their murder of an American Senator would lead to the government backing off, they did not know George Patton.
Patton nationalized the Texan National Guard and ordered Dallas to go on lockdown. Southern Law enforcement were not trusted to handle the operation, which was quickly taken over by the FBI with the National Guard as muscle. With a ruthless efficiency that outraged many members of the public for its stern handling of the matter (notably beatings during the interrogations of prominent Texas Klansmen), Cole was finally found … dead. His body was found lying in a ditch just outside of Dallas. Most incredibly, this lead was discovered by accident by a local boy passing through at the time. As no one missed Cole, it was chalked up to a tiff between Klansmen and ignored. Years later, it would emerge that Dallas strip club operator Jack Rubenstein (also known as ‘Jack Ruby’), had ordered the hit on Cole. Cole had entered one of the establishments, attempting to hide. Cole got drunk and struck up a conversation with Ruby, the former not realising the latter was a Jew and going on an Anti-Semitic rant about how the Jews controlled Patton. Feigning support, Ruby continued the conversation, before realising that Cole matched the description of Johnson’s murderer. Ruby contacted his bouncers and detained Cole, before contacting certain Mafia ‘fixers’. The Mafia men were naturally no friends of a Klansman, and made sure Cole suffered a hundred times over for what he did. Not wanting to be connected to the event, Cole’s body was dumped outside of town.
The Klan would often try to assassinate political leaders, including members of the Freedom Party. Estes Kefauver, the Freedom Party Senator from Tennessee, was wounded after being shot at the front door of in his house in December 1953 due to his strong condemnation of the Klan. TRM Howard was another such target, but that turned out less well than expected. On September 9th 1953, three Klansmen broke into Howard’s house with the intention of grabbing and lynching the Civil Rights leader. They were sorely mistaken when they opened the door to his bedroom, found the bed empty, and then turned around. A Thompson submachine gun wielded by Howard soon sprayed and killed them [1]. Despite the obvious nature of the Klan’s plan – down to one holding a noose in their hand at the time – Howard was ordered arrested by Mississippi Governor Hugh White for defying both gun laws and for murder. In an extraordinary intervention, Patton threatened to arrest White if the arrest occured, and Howard moved to safety in Canada at the expense of fellow Black Republican (a multi-millionaire) Sam Fuller - the charges being dropped several months later. Fuller had likewise become a Civil Rights legend by buying out National City Lines, which ran the bus services in Montgomery, Alabama, and his attempts to desegregate the bus service ran afoul of Jim Crow in a battle destined for the Supreme Court. Together, the two would become a team working together to end segregation. The reaction to Howard’s attempted murder and retaliation divided America. While the North almost unanimously defended Howard, many in the South were terrified at the thought of armed black groups. Unfortunately for them, that’s just what the Klan’s terrorism was soon to create.
[1] – Yes, Howard literally slept with a sub-machine gun.
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