The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
- Thread starter TastySpam
- Start date
Part of the Republic of China (South China), but essentially autonomously governed by the Lamas.
Chapter 216 - Frankenstein Government
Frankenstein Government
On paper, North America was under solidly progressive governments, overturning the political status quo. However, in both Canada and the United States, the ruling governments were true Frankenstein coalitions. The Coldwell government only held power thanks to the right-wing Conservatives and...whatever Social Credit was (a strange big tent that included everyone from the far-right to the left). Similarly, the Siler administration was a hodgepodge of Christian conservatives, business types, old libertarians, and radical youth socialists. The reality of this was policy paralysis in both countries.
Vice President Johnson made his intentions clear: Siler should be a one-term President. Pulling strings in the Senate, the conclusion was clear: no legislation would take place until the Democrats took back the White House (with one major exception.) With a solidly Democratic Senate, legislation was dead in the water. For what it meant, this suited Siler quite well. Much of Siler's coalition demanded large expansions in the welfare state...which Siler, a fiscal conservative, largely did not want. Legislative gridlock was a remarkably good excuse for why he couldn't deliver. To the extent Siler had a domestic agenda, it was largely on the domestic front. Examples ranged from symbolic, an executive order adding "In God We Trust" to the Pledge of Allegiance, to substantive, such as ordering the government to recognize American victims of nuclear fallout (from the Three Years War). However, none truly transformed the field of American politics.
Siler had never really thought that much about race. Southern as he might have been, he came from an overwhelmingly white (Appalachian) district that had overwhelmingly sided with the Union during the Civil War. While generically in favor of Civil Rights and finding white supremacy offensive to his Christian principles, it was always a topic he essentially found fit to delegate to others with a larger stake in the whole issue. The policy wars of the Siler administration would ironically end up heavily focused on race. President McCarthy had started desegregation, President Kennedy had made the bulk of actual progress, and it was time for Siler to finish the rest. The last segregated public school in America folded in late 1965, a fact celebrated by the government. However, desegregation led to new, unique problems. Siler had inherited a serious problem of crime, urban decay, and "white flight", all driven by the collapse of industrial jobs (disproportionately those held by blacks) in the wake of the 1963 oil shock. One of the factors that led to a historic shift away from the Democratic Party was an unprecedented spike in crime, especially in economically hammered black neighborhoods. Moreover, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was so fervently anti-Siler (viewing him as a Communist), he received no help there.
As a Southern social conservative and with no federal police agency to help him, the Siler administration settled on an answer to crime: vigilantism. As part of the demobilization from the Kennedy period and the end of US participation in the Congo War, the United States had a lot of surplus weapons. Moreover, Siler was a balanced budget hawk. The result was a fire sale on American military weaponry. As part of an ongoing war with Hoover, the Department of Justice simply said that it would not be bringing cases under the National Firearms Act except to enhance sentencing for another crime (such as murder). Crime did actually go down during the Siler administration (albeit to nowhere close to 1950's levels), though it has been debated whether this was actually a result of Siler's gun policies (an alternative explanation points to a variety of federal racial equity undertaken by the federal government to lessen housing discrimination - as Johnson's gridlock strategy did have one major exception - civil rights law, which wasn't really possible to politically obstruct.) As a result, an endless bevy of lawsuits was brought against local governments, (mostly correctly) accusing them of unlawfully making policy moves on the basis of impermissible racial animus (such as housing, education, and policing policy). McCarthy's repeal of racial immigration laws had also come to fruition, as significant immigrant communities from Latin America began forming in American cities - and the Siler Administration alienated many middle-class Americans, especially Southern Californians, by restraining border security forces, officially apologizing for the Corpus Christi massacre, and generally taking a dovish approach to border control. As a result, Southern evangelicals loved Siler, but Californian evangelicals loathed him.
Effects on crime aside, the Administration's open embrace of vigilantism only supercharged ideological violence in the United States. Radical black liberationist and KKK gangs regularly shot each other up, often with fully automatic assault rifles. Amusingly, black radical groups used the AK-47 to symbol their fight, while white supremacist groups used the IKEA rifle to symbolize their cause, even though both sides tended to use surplus American weaponry. Moreover, middle-class Americans purchased weapons en masse. This had a tendency of radicalizing the police forces, which ended up disproportionately staffed by returning veterans from the Congo War, many who had essentially spent the last half-decade of their lives shooting at African guerillas. This skillset tended to map extremely poorly onto inner-city policing, as police shootings of African-Americans skyrocketed. Interestingly enough, the end result of this was to solidify African-American support of Siler, as gun control was largely favored by conservative whites (who largely one-sidedly focused on the violence by black radicals) and the Democratic Party, and Siler resisted all calls for gun control, even threatening to pre-empt state gun control laws.
All of this naturally spilled over to Canada, even as the government was more functional. In fact, the CCF-Tory-Social Credit coalition actually managed to pass a massive expansion of the welfare state, including the creation of Canada's modern Old Age Security system and universal healthcare system, catching up to the United States (and arguably surpassing it with a more state-driven system). The Mounties were simply unable to stop the tidal wave of American weapons flowing into Canada, which significantly worsened a major crisis. Inspired by the Irish People's Republican Army assassinating the literal monarch of Canada, the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), was immediately formed afterwards, calling for a "Quebecoise People's War" to expel the "Anglo-Saxon imperialists." Establishing close links with the IPRA and black radical groups in America, the FLQ quickly surged in popularity, staging bank robberies, bombings, and other acts of "propaganda of the deed." Frankly put, not that many people died in FLQ attacks, which totaled at best a bad weekend in Chicago, causing the ruling government to simply...ignore the issue. This was seized upon by the Liberals, who quickly claimed they were the only party that could protect Canadian unity. Despite a very actually productive legislative agenda, the Liberals would once again take a commanding lead in the polls, which certainly made the ruling government worry about the 1968 elections (though it would also scare off any one party from collapsing the government and causing early elections).
Hey, remember when we thought North China would have become this TL's version of North Korea? Well, i didn't expect the country to be the most political stable country of this TL
I mean Jesus Christ, the US in "A world of Laughter, a world of tears" come across as slighty better than this TL's US at this point point
I mean Jesus Christ, the US in "A world of Laughter, a world of tears" come across as slighty better than this TL's US at this point point
I’d say both Chinas are the most politically stable nations ITTL. But yeah, surprised to see how crazy the USA, Germany, and above the the USSR have become.
Couldn't agree more. And the idea of a "Canadian Civil War" is just so . . . strange. Then again, so is everything else in this timeline. It would be pretty funny is the U.S somehow remain intact while Canada collapsed into Civil War.
mortonofski
Donor
On the one hand, the FLQ crisis so far doesn't sound all that much different from OTL. On the other hand, given that it's @TastySpam we're talking about, I'm envisioning James Cross or Pierre Trudeau being pronounced guilty of crimes against the people by way of brain scan or being assassinated by IKEA-toting FLQ gunmen or some such.
Chapter 217 - Mao's Dead Hand (Part 1)
Mao's Dead Hand (Part 1)
Although a variety of revolts abroad, such as the Irish People's Republican Army and the FLQ in Quebec cited the works of Mao vaguely in their inspiration, nowhere was the inspiration stronger than in two far closer locales, which would spark remarkable unease throughout the entire continent and far more bloodshed than any examples in Europe or North America.
Although in the 1950's, Chiang Kai-shek had once signed off on limited land reform measures that were broadly implemented in most of the country, local cadres had a right to veto such reforms. Generally eager to display their fealty towards Chiang, they generally went along. However, one region of South China saw such reforms completely vetoed by the local branch of the Kuomintang - Tibet. Although true KMT believers such as Pandatsang Rapga eagerly tried to push land reform - and partly succeeded in Kham, Central Tibet proper saw total political dominance by the Buddhist clergy and the landowning gentry. Whereas the rest of South China (including Kham and Amdo) advanced economically from the nadir of the 1940's, the 1950's and 1960's essentially saw no major economic growth in Central Tibet. In the end, Tibetan reformists could easily be smeared by the Tibetan political establishment as "pro-socialist", which meant that the central KMT administration almost always took the side of the establishment. Moreover, although many reformers (including within the clergy) existed in Lhasa, the established modus operandi was simply to exile them to the Chamdo region, a more religious mixed region where they found more success and ironically then were unable to return to Lhasa.
Underpinning the failure of Tibetan land reform was Tibet's traditional 'serfdom' system, which saw almost the entire population of Tibet technically bound to a few hundred noble families (and overseen by clergy). However, such a system had momentum because far more than a few hundred families were invested in it. Most, but not all families under this system were landless peasants with no rights - but some of the strongest supporters of the status quo were actually a significant class of peasants who owned their own small plots of land, and thus were able to enjoy personalistic, partly paternalistic relationships with the nobility without the crushing economic deprivation experienced by landless peasants, or even the feudal obligations to their lord (since unlike landless peasants, they could simply pay the customary fee exempting them from feudal obligations and thus enjoyed significant personal freedom). Ironically, most of Tibet's most vocal reformists actually came from a feudal or elite theocratic background, and it was widely understood that the Dalai Lama himself was sympathetic to their cause (which only made reactionary nobles or clergy try even harder to cloister the young man away from the rest of Tibet).
Although Tibet was mired in economic stagnation, a new generation of Tibetan elite youth had become educated, disproportionately in the large cities of coastal China. Many were the most voracious readers of Chinese Marxist works, which had to generally be smuggled in from the North. The irony was that many of them were able to use their noble connections to avoid police oversight. During the Sun administration, many restrictions on civil liberties and censorship were lifted, as many of these students returned to Tibet and much to the surprise of their families, began advocating against the established system. North China dutifully smuggled copies of Marxist literature (translated into vernacular Central Tibetan) from North Chinese Xinjiang into Tibet, through incredibly inhospitable deserts and mountain passes. Incidents of violence and reprisals skyrocketed in Tibet. The traditional landholding system quickly began to unravel as peasants often engaged in wholescale propaganda of the deed. In fact, the generally deplorable political situation in Tibet gave further impetus for King Mahendra's land reform program in Nepal. Unlike in Tibet, where a powerful clergy and nobility could veto reforms, Nepal had an authoritarian king who with Nehru's support in 1951, had ousted the nobility (including the once-dominant Rana family) with the aid of progressive pro-democracy protestors, who the monarchy eventually also illegalized (with Indian and South Chinese support) in 1960 to gain more power.
Tibet was a tinderbox, and the fire would eventually be lit, seriously harming President Sun's unsuccessful re-election bid. In early 1966, a Buddhist nun by the name of Trinley Chodron declared herself the earthly incarnation of Ani Gongmey Gyemo, the aunt of Gesar, the heroic mythological hero of classical Tibet. Weaving together Buddhist millenarian thought with Tibetan folklore and North Chinese Communism, Chodron also declared Mao Zedong both a bodhisattva and a living reincarnation of the Hero Gesar, who was forced to ascend to heaven by the "Demon Kings" of South China, United States, India, and Lhasa (each corresponding to a different demon king in the Epic of King Gesar). Welding the economic grievances of the landless peasantry with both folklore and Buddhist elements quickly drew crowds beyond anyone's expectations. Her "Army of Gesar" quickly stormed and butchered local security forces with swords and spears. The disorder would only get worse as the People's Republic of Pakistan, quickly seeing a possible flanking move on India, began smuggling free weapons en masse to areas known to have high-concentrations of "Gesarite" militants.
With no central government restraining them (given the Sun-Soong transition period), the Tibetan government was left to devise its own solution. The rebellion began directly west of Lhasa, which terrified the ruling government, which decided to simply purge the rebellion by scouring where it began. Tibetan regional security forces simply marched to the villages near the beginning of the rebellion, burned them down, and either massacred or expelled their residents. Like kicking a bee-hive, this only forced militants and civilians to scatter in every direction, bringing news of the rebellion and atrocities committed by the Lhasa government (while conveniently leaving out atrocities by the militants.) Outraged landless peasants across all of Central Tibet rallied to their cause, dooming the region to one of the most vicious civil wars of the Cold War era. With both sides seeing each other as religious enemies and perhaps barely human, atrocities piled up, as both sides eagerly embraced the idea that a war of extermination was the ideal. Although painted by the militants as a war against the nobility and clergy, the reality was that there weren't really that many nobles or clergymen in the country, so in practice, this became a brutal war between landless poorer peasants and small-landowning peasants, both very large groups (albeit with the former being significantly larger by several degrees.) Very soon, it became harder and harder for the government in Tibet to actually conceal the war from the Dalai Lama, an outcome they feared for a variety of reasons.
Western scholars quickly found a strong historical parallel - they immediately compared the war in Tibet to the Albigensian Crusade, though South Chinese scholars naturally had many millenarian rebellions to turn to as precedent, namely the Taiping Rebellion. Waged across a massive territory, the Gesarite War would quickly become an intractable headache for Nanjing.
So Mao now is this AND a direct descendant of Gengis Khan. I can hardly wait for the arrival of a new christian sect calling him the descendant of Jesus
Please god no! I can’t handle anymore Mao-related insanity!
You can't handle Any-Mao?Please god no! I can’t handle anymore Mao-related insanity!