The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
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Franco Freda - Wikipedia
how did you make this do you have a tutorial or any tips to suggest to some one trying to make somthing like this
Hey, just curious, what were the main changes of the great retcon? I started following this TL after the retcon so I don't know what was originally written before being changed.
For one, Truman was originally president after FDR, but in the revised chapters, Henry Wallace never gets replaced in 1944, leading to him becoming president instead.
The left was just a wikibox, there's some good tutorials on the website that is better than what I could do explain. The right I think was I think the 270towin historical election thing with some minor editing after the fact.
Chapter 224 - The Reaction
The Reaction
The 1966 elections delivered a message. Democrats had a very simple agenda - campaigning on crime/violence, race/immigration, and calling to an end of "Silerian austerity." The latter was perhaps the most devastating. Sky-high inflation helped elect Siler, but this meant that he actually had to do something about it. Unable to actually cajole Congress into doing anything, his bet was successfully pressuring like-minded Federal Reserve Chairman William Martin to hike interest rates as high as they could be reasonably hiked. The endresult was a tampering of inflation...and also a rather minor but noticeable recession in 1966 - timed exceptionally poorly for the midterms. Campaigning on tampering inflation meant very little to people who had lost their jobs, and they took out their anger at the ballot boxes. The results were deep and hard. Republicans had taken back the House of Representatives in 1962, held steady in 1964, and then easily lost their majority in a rout. The Senate was overwhelmingly Democratic and only became even more overwhelmingly so, with Democrats seizing a narrow 2/3rds majority in the upper chamber. All in all, the results were a disaster for Republicans, but it's not clear what else they could have done. The Democratic Senate had blocked every conceivable bill passed by the House - and with no legislation that could be passed, the alternative to a mild recession was allowing inflation to continue festering. Moreover, much of the intellectuals of America had become increasingly radicalized against the Siler administration. One Manhattan writer said that she didn't understand how Siler could have won - she had never met anyone who had voted for him! The response of liberal intellectuals was not introspection or engagement, but rather consolidation and reaction, with large newspapers and the "big three" channels having essentially nothing but negative coverage for the administration. If anything, it was considered a miracle to commentators that the Republican vote held up as well as it did. Interestingly, the electoral wipeout shifted the median Republican significantly to the left, since the losses were almost entirely concentrated among conservatives, especially those in more middle-class districts, even though the median Republican was still a center-right conservative.
The remarkably ambitious presiding officer of the Senate, Vice President Lyndon Johnson saw his opportunity. Archives and papers reveals contrary to the prevailing narrative though, VP Johnson wanted the Democratic Congress to aggressively pass popular bills unpalatable to President Siler, who would then likely veto them all (Democrats had a 2/3rds majority in the Senate, but not the House). Then Johnson would campaign for President in 1968 on those bills (mostly popular expansions of the welfare state), be elected, and then pass them. It was a simple and fool-proof plan. Unfortunately for LBJ, others in the Democratic coalition had other plans. Shortly after the election, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made his move. Immediately revealing illicit recordings of the Administration, the "Hoover Tapes" actually didn't really hint at any outright criminal activity. They however, did contain a plethora of leaked information on minor corruption or "lifestyle choices" of mid-level Siler administration officials. In particular, the Hoover Tapes revived the Lavender Scare by revealing dozens of homosexuals in the Siler Administration. Hoover defended his neutrality by saying that he held onto the tapes until after the election to prevent influencing the election. Hoover allies quickly seized upon the presence of gay men in the Siler Administration as an example of "latent Communism", which landed in public because of the general dovishness of the Siler Administration. This was seen as a method of splitting Siler's base, which was also comprised of many evangelicals in the South and Midwest. Siler, himself a former priest, simply refused to comment, simply stating that his opponents were "just as sinful, engaging in adultery and alcoholism."
Pressure among Democrats rose to a firestorm, especially as they were forced to rally behind Hoover. Although Americans were mixed, Democrats were especially outraged, and calls quickly arose to use the Democratic majority to impeach the President. VP Johnson notably refused to comment realizing the tightrope he was walking, but Democrat Senators quickly signed onto the cause. Hoover was unsurprisingly immediately fired, which actually caused even more damaging tapes to be leaked, including one where Siler was caught saying that he did not care about "international Communism." The only problem was that they didn't actually have a real reason to impeach Siler. After a significant amount of legal searching, they found an argument. Some of the tapes clearly indicated that Siler had sent Secretary of State McCarthy to begin negotiating an end to the Congo War before becoming President. As such, the decision was made to hold articles of impeachment on whether Siler violated the Hatch Act, which prohibited civilians from "making foreign policy." The arguments were specious and largely didn't land in the public, but trusted FBI and CIA officials tested again and again how "dangerous" Siler was by engaging in "pro-Communist foreign policy." The end result was that the public came down splitting 50/50 in favor of impeachment, as almost every newspaper and major network news channel supported impeachment.
The vote was never really in doubt. On essentially a party-line vote, House Democrats signed off on sending articles of impeachment to the Senate, which then voted on a party-line vote to convict. Although condemning the process as a "Kangaroo Court" and although many Republicans (especially younger leftists) called on the President to resist, Siler was ultimately a conservative constitutionalist who never seriously tried to resist. After the voting, Siler simply left the White House, turning everything that could be turned over to his Vice President, who could actually speak the truth by saying that this whole thing actually wasn't his idea. Ironically, this meant that the only two people who believed LBJ didn't mastermind the impeachment was the former President and the new President. That being said, LBJ had not masterminded the crisis, but he was determined to make lemonade out of lemons. The LBJ era had begun and against all expectations, it would not be the return to normalcy that impeachment advocates expected...if anything, the SIler Administration had been the eye of the American political storm.
Welp the first Republican administration since Herbert Hoover has just come to an end.
Chapter 225 - United Nations Resolution 404
United Nations Resolution 404
Although President Johnson had envisioned an ambitious domestic agenda, the first crisis to hit his table was once again of foreign policy. After British troops withdrew Oman, Dhofari rebels had seriously damaged Oman's heavily outdated army. Numbering only a few thousand men, the Sultan's army was equipped primarily with vintage World War II weapons scavenged from the British, which was significantly inferior to the modern weaponry shipped to the Dhofari rebels from Pakistan and North China. A government offensive into the Dhofari completely collapsed, as the Royalist Army found themselves significantly outnumbered and outgunned. The most popular member of the royal family, the Prince Qaboos sin Said, was essentially stranded in Great Britain, as the British government simply refused to give him a visa to return to the country for fear of arousing blowback in the Middle East (a significant number of British POWs remained in Saudi and Syrian captivity and they viewed Qaboos as a potential rogue agent in their negotiations in repatriating them all). The Saudis in particular held British POWs captive, realizing Qaboos would be more effective in opposing the Dhofari rebels.
In the wave of an increasing weak Omani government, the Dhofari rebels expanded their demands to the creation of a socialist, federal republic in Oman. When subsequent rebellions exploded to the shock of the government in Northern Oman, many had seen the writing on the wall. A desperate memo was written from the CIA to the White House, informing the administration that unless American soldiers were sent immediately, Oman would likely collapse to a socialist rebellion. LBJ's cabinet was staffed by members of the anti-Siler "resistance" and actually significantly more hawkish than the President himself. That being said, LBJ generally went along with their recommendations, which meant an immediate detachment of American soldiers to be sent to Muscat in order to at least stabilize the capital. LBJ's memoirs stated that he largely didn't think much of the decision, since it came with the recommendation of his entire foreign policy team - and who was he to say no?
This move did not unnoticed in the Eastern bloc. In particular, Pakistani authorities concluded that this was an aggressive American move meant to desocialize the Middle East, especially since they noted that LBJ had risen to power largely thanks to an "anticommunist conspiracy." The decision was made to significantly accelerate one of their plans. The Pakistanis believed that upon the fall of the Omani government, it would withdraw troops from Gwadar, the Omani exclave in Baluchistan. In particular, Gwadar had become a refuge for Baluchi anticommunist rebels, who regularly launched attacks on Pakistani army units, even as the majority of the population seemed to favor union with Pakistan. However, the arrival of American troops in Muscat meant the plan to withdraw Omani troops was cancelled. Pakistan opted for a more direct plan.
The cancellation of the planned withdrawal sparked mass protests and strikes among Gwadar's students and workers, which the government responded to with violence, gunning down strikers in the street. The Pakistanis, who had made contact with local resistance activists, made their move. The Pakistani Army simply moved into Gwadar, completely overrunning the Omani garrison in a matter of hours. The loss of such a large proportion of the Omani army was devastating to the situation in Oman, which then prompted a response from Washington. Secretary of State Connally immediately organized for the drafting of what would become United Nations Resolution 404, which called for the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from its "illegal occupation" of Gwadar. Much to even the surprise of hawkish Americans, the resolution became even more hawkish when it went through consultation with South China and France (the permanent members), as well as the temporary members of Sweden, India, Portugal, West Germany, and South Africa. The Indian delegation gave a very convincing (and largely correct) presentation that the Pakistani nuclear program was essentially nearing completion and that any such completed weapons would be shared with its closest scientific partners, East Germany and North China.
Most damningly, the Soviet delegation was simply absent, as yet more complicated politics at the time meant more shifting of positions. All of the powers involved knew that the Soviet Union was likely not going to veto whatever came out of the UN. The only fear was that the United Kingdom would veto a resolution if they went too far, but the British delegation, largely comprised of amateur Liberals with no political position, simply did not catch on this and agreed to abstain on any resolution without even seeing what kind of resolution it would be. As a result, United Nations Resolution 404 made the fateful decision to demand the denuclearization of the Indian subcontinent and subtly justified "military measures to restore international security." Passed in 1967, with three abstentions (UK/USSR/Iran), eight ayes (US, France, South China, India, Sweden, Portugal, West Germany, and South Africa), and four nays (Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and Yugoslavia), UN Resolution 404 would widely be known as the most consequential and contentious resolution ever passed in UN history.
Well, THAT escalated quickly. And I don't think it's done escalating either.
(I apologize, but it was too damn obvious not to post that)
Error - Delegation Not Found
(I apologize, but it was too damn obvious not to post that)
Talk about escalation. Also found it funny the Soviets not sending a delegation hahaha
Seeing how disjointed the UK answer was, I'm calling it that either it becomes a V of Vendetta-like Fascist dystopia or an anarchic society in the coming years.