I could see a sort of EU forming after Italy's (and the USSR's) fall tbh. Depends on if Otto lives to 2011 as he did iotl (remember Otto was a big Pan-European fan).
And if Otto lives that long I imagine Hungary would be a founding member of it.
The Footprint of Mussolini - TL
I could see a sort of EU forming after Italy's (and the USSR's) fall tbh. Depends on if Otto lives to 2011 as he did iotl (remember Otto was a big Pan-European fan).
And if Otto lives that long I imagine Hungary would be a founding member of it.
Belgium and the Netherlands didn't exactly go through a velvet divorce in OTL and yet ended up closely aligned.
The potential EU thing is of course an alternative. But without one I could very much see an A-H federation for one simple reason:
They are both small countries bordering on bigger ones. Better be an equal parter with "those other guys, who'm we have historical ties with", than being merely a province completely dominated by whichever country annexes or vassalizes you.
The potential EU thing is of course an alternative. But without one I could very much see an A-H federation for one simple reason:
They are both small countries bordering on bigger ones. Better be an equal parter with "those other guys, who'm we have historical ties with", than being merely a province completely dominated by whichever country annexes or vassalizes you.
Might be genetically similar but still they speak different languages which are not relatives and these are politically and culturally very different. Probably best what can get is some free trade region but nothing else.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Hungarians are essentially Central Asians planted in the middle of Europe. They are neither Latin, Germanic, or Slavic.
Zagan
Donor
That is not correct. A few tens of thousands of those "Asians" interbred with millions of Europeans over one millenium. Therefore, today the DNA of the average Hungarian is almost indistinguishable from that of their neighbours.
So what flags do the two Egypts fly? I imagine the British forced Sadat, as part of the purge of Pan-Arabic ideas, to fly the flag of the Kingdom of Egypt:
Dolan
Banned
Since there is Roman Alliance who resurrected many old nations...
Would bet the infamous RTW Logo would be used in some capacity...
But yeah, South Egypt probably reverted to the flag of the monarchy?Since there is Roman Alliance who resurrected many old nations...
Would bet the infamous RTW Logo would be used in some capacity...
Hell is empty, and all the Devils are Here
Hell is Empty, and all the Devils are Here
Extract from ‘Flirting with Chaos: America in the 60s’ by John Foster
Extract from ‘Flirting with Chaos: America in the 60s’ by John Foster
The Nixon Presidency was always a tumultuous one. The Republicans by now had ensured twenty years in the White House, a feat that has been without replication since. Nixon’s primary focus on foreign policy was to continue to develop America’s relations in Africa for the Post-Colonial states. His visit to Nairobi in 1965 would be the first time an American President had been in Sub-Saharan Africa on official business. His intervention was key in persuading states like the EAF and Sudan to resist the siren-call of Afro-Fascism. He was also instrumental in ensuring significant aid was sent to Ethiopian Freedom Fighters during the mid-1960s, which helped make that country’s resistance as fearsome and legendary as it became. The American economy continued to purr with life on the back of Indian and Chinese capital and everything seemed to be going smooth. The Arlington-Agreement had held, a more sexually permissive society was establishing itself without sparking intense moral backlash much like the 1920s and America was quietly catching up with the Soviets in the Space Race. All in all, the honeymoon of the Kennedy years seemed likely to last, and with Rajaji’s Swatantra Party taking control of India, the worst of the Hindutva excesses that characterized Savarkar’s reign were finally ceased – no more Goa headaches to worry about.
The only real trouble spot that had begun to establish itself was the annual fiasco that Columbus Day had become. Originally protested primarily by Native Americans who saw the festival as at best indifferent or at worst celebratory of their national demise (while the Italians revered it as a day honoring the Italian who discovered the country), the day was increasingly protested by Afro-Fascists and often Blacks in general to make political statements about the main proponent of colonization: Italy. In Newark, New York, Philadelphia and almost any major city on the North-East Coast, early October would mean cities emptying out, unbearable tension and the inevitability that someone was going to die in the protests and counter-protests. Black Americans, who had become far more politically assertive after Arlington and indeed the Troubles in general, were faced down by Italian groups who praised how their country had ‘civilized’ Ethiopia. Even the Mafia, no friend of Balbo, would often defend the Columbus Day Parades as a matter of Italian honour. Columbus Day would become a microcosm of the serious divide in American life, particularly between Italians and Blacks. Other white working-class communities, such as the Irish and Jews, generally sympathized with the Italians and would often involve themselves in the Columbus Day celebrations as an alliance against the Afro-Fascism that they feared. In 1966, what many felt was inevitable came to pass. After more riots that put East Harlem in flames, Italian-Americans did what many had once thought unthinkable: they changed their allegiance to the Freedom Party and delivered the House to Thurmond and Corley’s grasp. Corley had been one of the first to recognize the potential of the Italian vote to flip given that Blacks had been inextricably linked to the Republican Party for reasons reaching back to 1860. Coining ‘The Northern Strategy’, Corley would plan the Freedom Party’s ascent by seizing Socially Conservative Whites in the Rust Belt and New York. He would tirelessly stress what Patton had, namely the idea of ‘Judeo-Christian values’ and stressed the importance of Catholicism in America when many Catholics feared the Freedom Party was bigoted against them. Corley’s appearance in East Harlem on October 16th in front of still-smoldering buildings where he condemned ‘This campaign of violent terrorism against Italian-Americans’ when most Republican politicians refused to touch the matter was instrumental in re-writing the electoral map. As Columbus Day always happened in October, Nixon cringed in horror as he knew what could happen in 1968. Ultimately, that was not what finished off Richard Nixon. Nor was it the global economic downturn that began in 1967, the creeping globalization that had begun the steady process of Western de-industrialization nor any other broader trend.
As these events hung in the background, Nixon effortlessly won the GOP re-nomination. At the same time, George Corley fought off challenges once again to enter into a rematch with Nixon, saying that the tumult of the last four years had demonstrated Nixon hadn’t worked. Corley shocked America when he announced his running mate: the traditionally Republican and internationally renowned film star John Wayne. This had two effects – firstly, it further ‘detoxified’ the Freedom Party (as Corley had repeatedly said was necessary) and it led to a broad exodus of social conservatives from the GOP. Wayne, who had won an Oscar for Best Actor for ‘The Searchers’ back in 1957 [1], had felt he had done all he could in Hollywood. To that end, he finally felt it time to do something different. Though he used to be a Republican, Wayne had grown increasingly suspicious of the Social Liberalism that was becoming more common in the Republican Party despite rising crime, which he felt was a sop to the new Black voter base the Republicans had created. Wayne’s Convention speech condemned the ‘Money-money-money’ obsession of ‘East Coast City-slickers’ who ‘couldn’t fix a boo but think everyone who didn’t go to a fancy college is only good enough to shine one’. His call for ‘Law and Order’ seemed well fitted as a man who many thought of as a sheriff, and he was considerably more popular than Corley – still tainted by the Freedom Party’s troubled history. He was certainly more liked than Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, who had divorced his wife to marry another divorcee in the early 1960s and seemed to embody the stereotype of the rich, out of touch Republican that the Freedom Party wanted to convey. Of course, the fact Wayne had divorced and remarried more than once was quietly forgotten. By popular demand, Wayne was put into a debate with Rockefeller that was broadcasted live on TV, the first such Vice-Presidential debate. When Rockefeller accused Wayne of ‘Not knowing a thing about how Washington works’ in agreeing to be Corley’s Vice-Presidential candidate, the star famously replied, “Now look here pilgrim, it's precisely because of people who know everything about Washington that we are in such a mess”. Such combativeness was shocking to many Middle-Class Americans, but it fit in well with the Working Class image the Freedom Party wanted to convey. Millions of New Deal Democrats who left the party in outrage but did not like the economic liberalism of the Republicans felt like they had ‘found a home again’. But people were surprised when it turned out that the greatest threat to Richard Nixon was none other … than Richard Nixon.
On October 7th, 1967, several men were caught and arrested trying to break into the Freedom Party’s National Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Suspicions were raised when their bails were posted immediately and they were about to be let go. However, when it was discovered that they were setting up recording devices inside the rooms of prominent Freedom Party figures, among them George Corley, they were put back behind bars. The intervention of senior and shadowy figures immediately tipped off people that something wasn’t right. It wasn’t until connections between the offered cash and a Republican political slush fund were found that the national press (though more so the Southern because the East Coast papers had become dominated by Republicans) began to take a real interest. Their homes were raided, with one bizarre piece of evidence being a transcript of Corely’s performance in the 1964 TV debates. Then it turned out that one of the men, E. Howard Hunt, had been in Atlanta three years before. Once again, it appeared as though this was at a time when Corely was in town. That was when the investigators put one and one together: Nixon’s stellar debate performance in 1964 was because he knew precisely what Corely was going to say and wrote specified rebuttals to everything. The news came out three days before the Republican National Convention and it threw the event into an uproar. Nixon denounced the news as an invention by Freedom Party hacks while the Freedom Party-run House and Senate swore to investigate the President, with some going so far as to compare Nixon to President Wallace, whose downfall Nixon played a crucial part in. When the two met for a second TV debate in 1968, it was a wipeout: Nixon was sweating, stumbling and obviously uncomfortable while Corley was focussed, humorous and ruthlessly tearing Nixon apart over the revelations from the last debate, most infamously interrupting a moment where Nixon could only ‘Ah’ and ‘Ehm’ by saying, “You ain’t so good at debating when you don’t have the script, right?” Many believed that this was the moment that sealed Nixon’s fate, though a late rally from Civil Rights groups helped ensure it remained close right until the end.
As the results came in on the night of November 5th, the shocking reality had asserted itself. By means of the White Working Class (especially but not exclusively from the Italian-American community), George Corley had won nearly 300 electoral votes and the Presidency of the United States when New York’s vote count came in and the Italian populace swung the state his way – the Northern Strategy worked. He was the first President for the Freedom Party in its history and the magnitude of the political earthquake could be felt across the world. At the same time Corley was smart and did not want to inflame tensions any worse than before. He gave a Presidential Pardon to Nixon (which Nixon said ‘hurt worse than a sentence’), met with TRM Howard to ensure that Black Southerners had a chance for the future and promised tariffs on China and India in the name of stopping American factories being sent overseas. Vice-President Wayne would be invaluable on the PR front due to his immense popularity abroad as a representation of Americana, which helped cool concerns of a Freedomite President. The Roman Alliance was immensely pleased with the victory. Corley had promised to be lighter on Fascism and focus overwhelmingly on combatting Communism. More importantly, he made moral equivalence between the Afro-Fascists and Italian Fascists to argue that Ethiopia was ‘none of our business’. One of his most controversial foreign moves early on was recognizing the Rhodesian government in return for a pledge from Ian Smith to work closer with moderate Black leaders, though the latter had little teeth. Restrictions on South Africa were also lifted on the premise that neither it nor Rhodesia were a threat to American interests and that America needed more trade due to the need to recover from the recession. He would enthusiastically endorse the Space Race, saying “God strike me dead if a Commie reaches the Moon first”. He never had to test the almighty, as American astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the Moon that October to national euphoria. Though Corley and others were beaming at America’s triumph, they could never have known just how important that mission would be not just in the Space Race, but the Cold War in general.
Extract from 'Shooting for the Moon: The Fall of the USSR' by Harold Dietrich
The Americans, British and Italians fought the four-way Space Race of the 1960s and 1970s with gusto. But for the Russians, the Space Race was not simply an amusing measuring stick – it was all they had. After such regular humiliation on the international stage, capped off by the total implosion of the USSR’s international position after the Second Arabian War, the Soviets had retreated into their immense, starving corner of the world. Their only comfort blanket to assure themselves that they remained a great, influential power, while they successfully initiated a conflict between the Capitalists and Fascists due to their inaction, was to outperform all nations in terms of Space Exploration. Initially, it had indeed proved a source of immense pleasure to the Soviet people, even amidst their sufferings at home in the Suslov-era. The Soviets launched their first satellite in 1957, with the Americans replying in 1958 and Italians and British both launching their first in 1959 (with Italy launching first, as it had a lot of help from other Fascist powers and Israel who wanted to help Italy embarrass the Soviets in the domain they loved so dearly). In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in Space for the Soviet Union, with John Glenn becoming the first American months later. In 1962, Britain beat Italy to get their man into Space – Peter Taylor. The first man the Italians sent in Space was Paulo Balbo, son of Italo, who had been inspired into the Air Force due to his father’s fame. As the Soviets stacked up achievement after achievement, Suslov finally had something to brag to his people about. At the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the October Revolution in Red Square, he declared that ‘The Soviet Union have introduced the era of Space Communism’. The sheer arrogance and insanity of the line invoked anger in the West at the time, unlike the laughter it induces now.
But something was happening behind the scenes. Sputnik and Gagarin were interesting novelties, but by the time they were speaking of the first Spacewalk or first female Cosmonaut, the average Soviet peasant who could barely afford to eat – and some couldn’t even do that – stared in disbelief that their government spent so much on what was nothing more than a vanity project. But the isolated Soviet leadership did not seem to notice as they were even more isolated from reality than almost any historical regime from the Kremlin. Communism was reviled around the working classes of the world as much as the elite, the right of the Soviet Union being allowed an embassy was a serious in question in almost any Western capital, and the regime looked on the masses with the callous indifference in keeping with their worship of Stalin. At the same time, following the Stalinist economic model had doomed their greater aspirations. Suslov had boasted soon after Kennedy spoke of America being on the Moon by decade’s end that ‘they will have to park beside the flag of the Soviet people when they arrive’. But after consultations with the leading Soviet Rocket Designer in Kerim Kerimov, the scale of the Lunar Landing operation only then came into view. Suslov realized to growing alarm that the resources allotted to the Soviet space program did not match the size of his mouth. They had traded the crippling costs of nuclear rockets for the crippling cost of space rockets. They were going all out and it still was going to be an intensely tough ask to get to the Moon at all, let alone before the Americans. Suslov tried what he could, but it was hopeless. A series of technical disasters due to gross inefficiency and corruption destroyed three attempted lunar missions before they left the atmosphere, killing all the crew in each instance. When the rocket team demanded a delay to stop the deaths, Suslov arrested most of the troublemakers and left political hacks in their place, all but dooming the Soviet Space Project.
On October 20th 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon to international acclaim, Suslov drank himself into a stupor and fell into depression. But it was not simply because the Americans had beaten the Soviets there. The trigger, according to Molotov, was reading what Italo Balbo had said as Italy’s official response. He congratulated the astronauts (and President Corley) while saying, “Keep a warm place – we’ll be coming up soon!” Losing to the Americans had been baked in for Suslov – he had known for months that it was going to happen. But only after Balbo’s words reached him did a quite new terror overtake him. The thought of Fascism, Fascism, beating the Soviets to the Moon was incomprehensible. After so much investment had been put into the Space Race, for the Italians to overtake them on the final strait would be a humiliation worse than all the other ills the USSR had put together. Britain’s leading Rocket Scientist, Werner Von Braun, had likewise assured the BBC that “The Union Jack will be the second flag on the Moon”. Falling behind Italy was still bad, but being fourth when they were once the best further cemented Suslov’s helplessness. According to records uncovered in Moscow, he ordered private screening for himself of great Soviet films to cheer himself up. Among them was the 1924 Sci-Fi film ‘Aelita: Queen of Mars’ – many historians feel that this was the film, taking advantage of sleeplessness and depression, that made Suslov follow such an ill-omened gambit. It would not be On the morning of Ocotber 26th, Suslov emerged from his room not only cured of his cares but exuding radiance, according to Molotov. At his trial, Molotov would say, “I was first told of that damned plan six days after the Americans landed on the Moon. Suslov had probably lost his mind with grief and anger and that was the only way he could have agreed to such stupidity. I asked him why he seemed so much better and he told me that he had it all figured out, about how to guarantee that we could beat the Fascists to the Moon. I told him that we’d gone over all this a hundred times – with the state of our program we’d be lucky enough to see a lunar landing in our lifetime let alone in the next few years. Then he said that I was right and I getting really confused. Then he told me that sentence which I remember and hate with all my heart: ‘We don’t have to get to the Moon before the Fascists, we just have to pretend we did’. And that’s how the so called ‘Lunar Ruse’ was created.” Suslov’s scheme was so hare-brained that KGB head Yuri Andropov asked Molotov if this was a ruse to see who in the Politburo was a true loyalist. The plan was to take the old hero of Yuri Gagarin, put him on a spaceship and send him around the moon without actually landing, which was still a serious ask. A pre-recorded fake film reel would then emanate from Moscow to the TV stations of the world of Gagarin on a film set of the moon. Gagarin would return to Earth and see great fame once again. The multiple, multiple flaws of the plan were obvious to all, but the Stalinist terror that once again pervaded the Kremlin kept mouths shut. No one wanted to be accused of being a ‘Krushchevite’ – only a few months before a Soviet politician by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev was arrested for fomenting ‘Krushchevite Insurrection’ within the Party and sentenced to Siberia. The Soviet ship drove blindly forth towards the catastrophe that awaited it.
Extract from ‘The Screams of a Continent: Africa after WW2’ by Ayaan Ferguson
Haile Selassie lived in exile for decades following his expulsion from Ethiopia due to the Italian invasion. He had watched in horror as Italy’s aligning with the Allies during World War 2 saw interest in his cause of liberating his homeland fall by the wayside. It wasn’t until the late 1960s, with the dawn of the Cool War that his cause once more began to gain broad popularity. He would, however, face a challenge in the form of Afro-Fascism. Afro-Fascism was not kind to the notion of nobility, as it was considered a bourgeois concept unfitting for the strong new Africa that people like Mulele and Tubman wished to embody. For this reason, even up to the start of the Balbo era, the Ethiopian resistance would be divided between the Restorationist Selassie loyalists of the EIA (Ethiopian Independence Army) that was primarily funded by Europe, and the Afro-Fascist ALM (African Liberation Movement) that was primarily funded by Brazil and India. These squabbles badly divided the Anti-Italian insurgency, often resulting in the two organisations killing more of each other over the course of a month than killing any Italians. Finally, after the Addis Ababa riots in late 1965 due to the death of the Ethiopian miners, both sides realised that the opportunity of liberating Ethiopia from Italy was too important to waste. Ethiopia had garnered a reputation among Africans, perhaps even more so than South Africa itself, for wicked cruelty. A secret meeting was performed in Zanzibar between Malcolm Little, representing the champion of Pan-Africanism in Zaire, and Selassie under the auspices of the EAF government, who wanted a deal between the two hostile camps. Ultimately, it was agreed that Selassie would promote ‘modernising’ Ethiopia by promising to align his country with Pan-African thinking, break up the landed elite and eventually turn Ethiopia into a country with himself as President rather than Emperor. Selassie, hoping that the West could support him enough to preserve him against Zaire’s machinations ultimately agreed. His Overtureville Speech would be the rallying call of the Ethiopian War, his constant invocation of ‘Africa’ marking a shift in the conflict from an Ethiopian one to a near continental one. “They may beat a country,” Selassie would say, “but they can’t beat a whole continent!” The EAI and ALM were consolidated into the ALA, ‘African Liberation Army’. To ensure Western support and beat back Italian criticism, Selassie swore to uphold any abolition of slavery (with some estimates having shown more than a third of Ethiopians in 1935 were slaves). Nevertheless, Selassie’s initial acceptance of slavery would become an unending source of Italian propaganda that was used by their apologists for decades. At the same time, many Ethiopians felt little better than slaves within Italian East Africa.
The EAF and Sudan would prove determined allies of Selassie, who took up base in the Simien Mountains to affirm his presence and excite his followers of ‘the King’s imminent return to power’. Both Sudan and the EAF had resolutely determined that Italy was the rotten core of the entire Settler project, and Ethiopia represented the ‘Soft Underbelly of the Crocodile’ according to EAF Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta. Ethiopia shared a gigantic border between both Sudan and the EAF that was impossible to entirely police. Furthermore, both states were under British protection and were unable to be breeched by the Italians. This meant countless amounts of men and guns could be sent into Ethiopia and nothing could be done about it. Zaire, despite not sharing a border, sent whole divisions of conscripts across the EAF border and into Ethiopia. By 1966, there were almost as many armed rebels and conscripts in Ethiopia as there were Italian soldiers – though the latter was increasing rapidly. Spread across the vast expanse of Western Ethiopia, in the mountains and forests, the rebels had created a near impregnable position while having more than enough friends and allies within the cities themselves to ensure the Italians would have no easy task ahead of them. Initially, the Italians focussed entirely on the kill-count, with the kill ratio sometimes hitting as high as 1:40 on a good day (though how much that was inflated by civilian deaths is debatable). The problem was that the Ethiopians quickly replenished their numbers through an unendingly sympathetic local population and foreign volunteers. Indeed, not just Zaire’s volunteers, but African-Americans, many of whom had been members of the Black Fascists and took tickets to the EAF to take the fight to Colonialism head on. The Fascists wasted no time in going for atrocities, dropping napalm and poison gas on the forests, aerial bombardment of tiny villages suspected of harboring rebels and summary executions of rebels who were foolish enough to surrender. The Italians expected the population to bend with terror and submit to their rule once again. However, these new Africans, inspired by the very insidious ideology that animated Italy, returned blow for blow, fighting with unprecedented tenacity. They also tricked the Italians into sending more and more of their men out into the vast, wild terrain of the Ethiopian interior, leaving the cities exposed to their next major assault
On March 2nd 1970, on the anniversary of Ethiopia’s victory over Italy in the First Ethiopian-Italian War, the ALA rose up in arms all across the urban areas of Ethiopia, especially in Addis Ababa. The Italians, both on the front line and the home front, were convinced that the Ethiopians were at their end resources – to be hit by such a large attack was not only shocking but deeply demoralizing. The Fascist Grand Council could scarcely believe it themselves. To that end, Balbo would make what was perhaps his most infamous decision: Operation Aesop. After several weeks of brutal street-to-street fighting, with air strikes, nerve gas and napalm having already rendered the city a pile of ruins, on March 29th the Italian forces were ordered to make a tactical retreat, along with what little remained of the Italian settlers who had long since made for safer territories in the Ogden region. There was brief celebration on the Ethiopian side that they had finally liberated their capital. Haile Selassie was under no illusions that something was amiss despite his subordinates’ excitement. As it turned out, he had every reason to be concerned. On April 2nd, the world witnessed the first – and so far mercifully last - combat use of a Hydrogen Bomb. Addis Ababa was not simply destroyed; it was vaporized by four megatons of nuclear obliteration. While Hiroshima, Warsaw and Damascus still had their ruins and foundation, everything within 20 kilometres of the centre of Addis Ababa literally ceased to exist. The ancient tomb of Menelik I, the supposed forefather of Ethiopia and son of King Solomon, now existed only in memory. Centuries of culture vanished in the blink of an eye, and all the people inside the city with them. It is estimated that 450,000 people perished in nuclear fire. The pilot, who was a fan of Shakespeare looked at the detonation from afar and quoted ‘The Tempest’: “Hell is empty, and all the Devils are Here”. The news stunned the entire world – even Rhodesia and Portugal wrote a joint, private letter to Rome demanding they never to do something like that again at the risk of inflaming their own colonial wars. In the UN, the Italian and Swedish representatives came to physical blows, which led to the temporary severing of diplomatic relations between the two countries. It decisively swung the 1970 UK elections to Roy Jenkins’s Labour Party, who promised unending resistance to Fascism, which had grown especially strong in the minds of the British due to the growth of the Fascist inspired Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland and Turkish nationalists in Cyprus. Even Corely condemned the attack, though privately reassuring Balbo that he considered the situation an internal matter. Protestors filled Times and Trafalgar Square demanding tougher sanctions on Italy, with almost every future visit of an Italian leader in the next decade being met outside the Roman Alliance with mass protests. But most notably in Italy itself, Balbo faced unprecedented pushback. The most obvious came from companies who had property in the city that had now gone up in smoke, as well as settlers who were angry at being forced to the Ogden ‘for the duration of the crisis’. More worryingly, King Umberto told Balbo in no uncertain terms that he would ‘Order the country to rise up against you before I ever accept another Addis Ababa again’. Balbo knew it was a gamble, but he hoped that the sheer scale of the destruction would terrify the Afro-Fascists and Ethiopians into meek submission. After all, nukes had won WW2, won in Poland, won in Arabia, why not in Ethiopia?
Haile Selassie keeled over with a heart attack when news of the nuclear obliteration of his capital first reached him. By quick work from his associates, he was able to get enough medical attention to keep him alive for a time. While lying in bed, dying, he penned what was to be his final speech to his people. Still lying in bed while being recorded, Selassie gave the words that would rouse not just a nation but a continent: “My time is growing short, my people. But Ethiopia is not Haile Selassie, nor is it a palace, nor is it any one man or any one thing. It is the peak of the mountains, the babbling of the brook and the light of the African sunset. And when I am gone, we shall still have our mountains, our rivers, and yes, we shall have Ethiopia. As long as there is still any man who can fight, any woman who can fight, any one boy who can fight, any old man who can fight – as long as any one Ethiopian still has pride in his country, his heritage, his family … Italy can never win. I may not live to see it from this world, but I shall see it from the next”. Two days later, on April 8th, Haile Selassie passed away, the crown of Ethiopia passing along to his son Amha Selassie, who swore to finish his father’s mission. To Italian astonishment, and indeed horror, the Ethiopians did not break. Not even the Hydrogen Bomb could intimidate them into surrender. “How do you make peace with people too stupid to know they’ve been beaten?!” Ciano cursed. The Italians could not bring the nukes back out for fear of angering the King, but their campaign of chemical weapons and terror continued unabated to international revulsion. All the while, more and more Italian boys were being sent to this godforsaken corner of Africa to crush this insurrection that wiser Fascists were beginning to see was becoming more than a nuisance and increasingly a serious danger that endangered the entire country. By 1970, almost 25,000 Italians, 10,000 Italian allies (many Greeks, Somalians, Eritreans) and two million Black Africans including civilians had perished in the wilds of Ethiopia and there was no clear plan within the Fascist Council about how to end the war with honour. Expenditure was ramping up to unsustainable proportions to destroy an area of land they were supposed to be getting economic benefit from. An ocean of blood had been created and to finish it would require another ocean on top of that. The Third Italo-Ethiopian War … was roughly at its halfway point.
Extract from Mapai MK Anne Frank's speech to the Knesset, April 7th 1970
"Half a million people! Vanished! No ... not vanished ... Dead. The lives they had and had yet to live, the children they had and had left to give … all gone. And yet our Prime Minister does nothing? Oh, if only he did nothing. No, he tells the world that Balbo had his ‘reasons’. Reasons? To hold a people in bondage? To take what was a proud, independent state and reduce it to serfdom for the benefit of barons and bigots? To commit atrocities that will poison any relations between the peoples of Italy and Ethiopia for more than a century? I am told that I should be grateful to the Italians for their having liberated me from the clutches of Nazi rule in Europe. And I am. But no level of gratitude I have for Italy for helping one persecuted people will ever make me silent in the face of their treatment of other persecuted people. After all, hath not an Ethiopian eyes?”
[1] – With Hollywood more desperate to prove its loyalty in the Post-Wallace world, Wayne had less competition because leftist actors went and the producers wanted him to feature prominently to convince viewers that they were Pro-American. Ronald Reagan would also benefit from the gap opened up in the market due to the Liberal Exodus to England and would become a mega-star in his own right, though he would stick with the GOP over Freedom Party as he cared far more about economics than social matters.
Coincidentally, I found this today:
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Still Begin. That guy lost eight elections OTL and stayed leader of the Israeli Right. With how many wins he's got under his belt ITTL? He's an absolute hero to most of the population - he's not going away until he decides it's time to go.
Also, the fact the road to the USSR's final downfall has begun has made me wonder how such a collapse would play out and what post-Soviet Russia would look like.
Things seems going ugly in USA. Anyway, what Martin Luther King Jr. is doing? And I am guessing that father of one certain US politician didn't move to USA.
Suslov idea is indeed really idiotic and it just discredit Communism more if it is possible anymore. Just wondering how actual hoax will affect to Moonlanding is hoax conspiracy theories.
And Ethiopia is really going very ugly. And I am worry that there might be civil war once Italians are expelled. Seemingly the country hasn't any better fate as in OTL.
Suslov idea is indeed really idiotic and it just discredit Communism more if it is possible anymore. Just wondering how actual hoax will affect to Moonlanding is hoax conspiracy theories.
And Ethiopia is really going very ugly. And I am worry that there might be civil war once Italians are expelled. Seemingly the country hasn't any better fate as in OTL.
The fact Andropov asked Molotov whether it was a glorified "loyalty test" should give you a hint on how crazy the plan is.
Ethiopia is probaly Foing turn into a shithole after the Italiens leave after that they see it got worse after we left. The civil war Will probaly between afrofacist and loyalist to monarchy and those who want democracy. The latter two can probaly allie toghtrer against the afro facist.
Well i am sure this totally won't apply to Italy in the future.
Also "Space Comunism"? Is Suslov secrtely planning to escape to space or something?
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