The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL

mial42

Gone Fishin'
It's back! The USSR is giving off very strong Cultural Revolution vibes right now, so it's not too surprising that the conservative Communist Warsaw Pact governments are breaking with them (at least rhetorically), but I'm not sure how long they can go without the de facto Soviet subsidies they received OTL, so they don't have too much leverage.
 
@TastySpam , i wanted to ask you if i can add this part to the timeline' Tv Tropes page:

- Spiritual Antythesis: Although the two timelines started around the same time, some readers have pointed out that The North Star can be considered the spiritual antithesis of Footprint Of Mussolini in its depiction of Henry Wallace and decolonisation:

1)Both timelines depict a Henry Wallace's precidency but their portrayals are completely different. In FOM Wallace is presented as Too Dumb To Live, being uterly unable to understand or accept the true nature of Stalin's rule while in The Red Star he is presented as a misguided but reasonable authority figure who like his OTL self ultimately realises his mistakes and does anything in his power to remedy them.
While in bothy cases Wallace's actions profundly impacts the future events of the timeline, FOM has him impeached and killed while The Red Star has him losing the 1948 election but still being respected as a former president, albeit a very controversial one.

-2)In both timelines the process of decolonisation significantly diverges from OTL thanks to the Soviets being more focused on their internal issues and the US being partially supportive of the Eurupean Powers. FOM however has a more positive portrayal of surviving European colonial empires, with the author stating that FOM's Asia and Africa are mostly in a much better shape than OTL thanks to this, while The Red Star has a much more cynical outlook with both the rebels and the colonial governments adopting increasingly brutal tactics to get rid of each other, with widespread destruction and chaos spreading in Asia and Africa. The North Star is also far more cynical in its depiction of the Francophonie and the idea of former colonies remaning under European influence, often presenting these countries as puppet states that desperately want to get rid of Europe's influence.Likewise in North Star the US' support of the colonial governments has numerous negative consequence with many African-Americans symphatising with the anticolonial struggle and identyfing the centuries of persecution they suffered with Washington's wars against the rebels of Congo, compared to FOM's more neutral stance.

3)In FOM Italy is a fascist dictatorship ruled by a Puppet King and it is a superpower thanks to a international alliance of fascist governments. In The North Star the country is a costitunional monarchy whose third position consists in creating a stable series of alliances of countries who have good reasons to dislike both the United States and the Soviet Union.




I can probably add more regardng the USSR, and the two Chinas and the two Japans but i wanted to know your opinion first.
 
@TastySpam , i wanted to ask you if i can add this part to the timeline' Tv Tropes page:

lol, why do you need my permission to add anything? Add away!

I personally haven't actually gotten around to reading most of FoM, but people are perfectly encouraged to analyze/compare/opionate in any way they want!

Also, as an unrelated issue, I just got off a long plane flight where I read a history on the Korean War, and I'm probably going to retcon some of the Korea stuff (like I did to Iran).
 
Chapter 5.5 - The Division of Korea
The Division of Korea
With Soviet forces rapidly converging on Seoul, American diplomats suggested the 38th parallel as a temporary line of division between Soviet and American armies, cleverly trying to place Seoul in the American area of influence. The Soviets, with no clear policy on the Korean peninsula, readily accepted. Coming across the Korean peninsula, both the Americans and Soviets found the Japanese colonial administration in total collapse. Most Japanese had simply left the peninsula, often abandoning lands and businesses in their wake. At the time, Korea was comprised of 1) a large mass of tenant farmers (under both Korean and now-fled Japanese landlords), 2) industrial workers, many returning from Japan or former Manchukuo, and 3) lower-level government officials, such as bureaucrats and police officers, often discredited by being employed by the Imperial Japanese government.

With almost everyone with actual government experience having abandoned their posts in fear of widespread lynchings and mob 'justice' from vengeful Korean nationalists, public order had collapsed outside of areas directly occupied by US or Soviet soldiers. Tenant farmers regularly claimed their lands for themselves, while angry mobs roamed the street hunting down suspected Japanese collaborators (sometimes just an excuse to target subjects of grudges). In the chaos, a network of "People's Committees", largely staffed by peasants or industrial workers, began establishing local governments with the implicit support of most of Korea's elites (who preferred usually light communal justice to violent mob justice). The Japanese Governor-General's Office met with several Korean independence activists and agreed to relinquish sovereignty to a new "People's Republic of Korea", who would presumably rule through the People's Committees.

American army forces were immediately inclined to crush the new PRK with force. Everything about the enterprise to them stunk of Communism, with most of Korea's landlords (who were seen as the most stable conservative force in society) generally horrified. General John R. Hodges, commander of US forces in Korea, pushed to immediately outlaw the People's Committees. Direct orders came down from President Henry Wallace that he was forbidden from doing so - Wallace, who had been a hawk against Imperial Japan from the start, saw the People's Committees as a natural progressive resistance movement against Imperial Japan and saw the Korean landlord and business class as compromised by collaboration with Imperial Japan.

Similarly, the Soviets were at the start favorable to the new People's Republic of Korea. By late 1945, many optimistic diplomats believed that Korea could be released as a united, neutral nation, perhaps as a model for Germany. However, trust between the Soviets and Americans quickly broke down. At the Moscow Conference in December of 1945, the Americans as ordered by President Wallace pressed for immediate independence of Korea, while the Soviets believed Korea ought to be placed under a five-year trusteeship before independence. The Soviets were in fact prepared to grant unified Korean independence, but they believed five years would give them sufficient time to "purge the remnants of Japanese fascism" from Korea before releasing the North back into a unified Korea.

What broke Soviet support for the PRK was the fact that PRK leadership, such as Lyuh Woon-hyung and Cho Man-sik (the highest ranking PRK official in the Soviet zone) ferociously opposed the trusteeship idea. Contrary to American hawks, neither the men were actual Communists, and they feared a five year trusteeship would allow the Soviets to further spread Communism in Korea. Soviet officials, seeing that the PRK was oddly spared by the USA and opposed to Soviet goals, immediately concluded that the PRK was run by "social fascists."

The Americans begrudgingly agreed to the five-year trusteeship plan, agreeing to retract recognition of the People's Republic of Korea (which was in practice not a cohesive national government, but rather just a cabinet of activists speaking on behalf of local People's Committees in the aggregate). However, this was not to be the end of the dramas in Korea. In 1946, NKVD agents broke into the home of PRK leader Cho Man-sik, the de facto leader of the Korean government in the Soviet zone, placing him under house arrest. Alleging that the People's Committees were social fascists infiltrated by Americans and "Titoists", the Soviets banned the People's Committees. Cho Man-sik was replaced by a man they believed would be a more reliable Communist, Kim il-Sung, who shared the general left-wing impulses of the People's Committees, but was much more aggressive. Whereas the People's Committees spent most of their times legitimizing squatters and compelling compensated land reform, Kim's new government simply declared landlords class enemies and expropriated their lands entirely. Independent media was largely stamped out as a bourgeois construct and Northern Korea's large mines and factories, then owned by Koreans with ties to Imperial Japan, were entirely nationalized. Mob violence against collaborators was generally sanctioned by the new government.

Korean landlords in the North, who had long loathed the People's Committees, now saw them as a lesser evil and simply turned over their stores of funds and weapons to the People's Committees. In the 1946 August Uprising, Northern Korean People's Committee rose up in revolt against the Soviet Army and the new Kim il-Sung government. The NKVD reaction was swift, with the Red ARmy utterly destroying the rebels. The reaction put Kim firmly in charge of the Soviet occupation zone, but sparked outrage in the South. Lyuh, seeing the fate of both his second-in-command and the People's Committees in North Korea, contacted the Americans with a radical plan. Whereas Wallace's dovish tendencies allowed the People's Committees to flourish - he was now like those same committees much more hawkish on the Soviet Union, especially in the wake of the rigged 1947 Polish election.

In March of 1947, the USA officially recognized the People's Republic of Korea as a legitimate government of the entire Korean peninsula, essentially breaking its trusteeship agreement with the Soviet Union. Holding elections, Lyuh Woon-hyung's nationalistic triumph allowed him to narrowly triumph over two right-wing candidates, Syngman Rhee and Kim Gu (who had conveniently split the right-wing vote), in the first presidential election of the People's Republic of Korea. Furious at American "duplicity", the Soviets declared the creation of the rival Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the North under Kim il-Sung. Wallace saw Lyuh as a reliably pro-American progressive, and personally saw it that the new PRK was generously furnished with humanitarian and economic aid, whereas the Soviets largely saw the DPRK as a relatively minor interest in comparison to the unfolding situation in China.
 
@TastySpam , i wanted to ask you if i can add this part to the timeline' Tv Tropes page:

- Spiritual Antythesis: Although the two timelines started around the same time, some readers have pointed out that The North Star can be considered the spiritual antithesis of Footprint Of Mussolini in its depiction of Henry Wallace and decolonisation:

1)Both timelines depict a Henry Wallace's precidency but their portrayals are completely different. In FOM Wallace is presented as Too Dumb To Live, being uterly unable to understand or accept the true nature of Stalin's rule while in The Red Star he is presented as a misguided but reasonable authority figure who like his OTL self ultimately realises his mistakes and does anything in his power to remedy them.
While in bothy cases Wallace's actions profundly impacts the future events of the timeline, FOM has him impeached and killed while The Red Star has him losing the 1948 election but still being respected as a former president, albeit a very controversial one.

-2)In both timelines the process of decolonisation significantly diverges from OTL thanks to the Soviets being more focused on their internal issues and the US being partially supportive of the Eurupean Powers. FOM however has a more positive portrayal of surviving European colonial empires, with the author stating that FOM's Asia and Africa are mostly in a much better shape than OTL thanks to this, while The Red Star has a much more cynical outlook with both the rebels and the colonial governments adopting increasingly brutal tactics to get rid of each other, with widespread destruction and chaos spreading in Asia and Africa. The North Star is also far more cynical in its depiction of the Francophonie and the idea of former colonies remaning under European influence, often presenting these countries as puppet states that desperately want to get rid of Europe's influence.Likewise in North Star the US' support of the colonial governments has numerous negative consequence with many African-Americans symphatising with the anticolonial struggle and identyfing the centuries of persecution they suffered with Washington's wars against the rebels of Congo, compared to FOM's more neutral stance.

3)In FOM Italy is a fascist dictatorship ruled by a Puppet King and it is a superpower thanks to a international alliance of fascist governments. In The North Star the country is a costitunional monarchy whose third position consists in creating a stable series of alliances of countries who have good reasons to dislike both the United States and the Soviet Union.




I can probably add more regardng the USSR, and the two Chinas and the two Japans but i wanted to know your opinion first.
Treating the survival of European Empires, with all the brutality and exploitation that comes with them, as good things sounds pretty horrible.
 
Well, the Korea rework for this TL is going to be interesting.

The Korean rework is oddly mostly done. Chapter 10 is also new - and other chapters tweaked (may have to do some more, but I think I've done most of them). Not a huge retcon since Korea oddly ends up in mostly the same place by 1957
 
Treating the survival of European Empires, with all the brutality and exploitation that comes with them, as good things sounds pretty horrible.
Yeah, that timeline is full of unfortunate implications.
Like i don't think the author realised it, but it is kinda bad when your timeline depicts Ian Smith in a more positive light than Patrice Lumumba.
lol, why do you need my permission to add anything? Add away!
Well, this is your timeline and i want to avoid mistakes

I personally haven't actually gotten around to reading most of FoM, but people are perfectly encouraged to analyze/compare/opionate in any way they want!
Honestly i was really surprised when i realised the number of similar plot elements FoM and The North Star were using.
I know the timelines more or less started at the same time but it is interesting that your timeline seems to often deconstruct or at least have a more negative outcomes for many of the developments of the events in FoM

I mean at the top of my mind, i can think of Indonesia, Algeria and Vietnam as the three biggest examples of this. Both FoM and your TL use similar ideas regarding these three countries but the outcomes of such events are completely opposite or at least far more negative.

Considering in most cases these coincidences happened almost at the same time, it is quite interesting that they happened naturally without copying or any kind of interference
 
Chapter 193 - The US 1964 Presidential Election Campaign
The US 1964 Presidential Election Campaign
The election was believed lost. According to Time Magazine, the "old Republican coalition, one that was already not a victorious coalition, was disintegrating, with untold numbers of white-collar workers reacting against Siler's antediluvian piety, big business threatening to sit out the election, conservatives furious at perceived defeatism, the West lost. The war chest was almost empty, and the party's machinery, neglected after decades out of power, creaked in disrepair."[1] Admittedly, the polling at the start of the general election was not the darkest of dark days where the Republican ticket trailed by 30 points (which would have represented a worse defeat than any inflicted by FDR), but the post-convention polling still saw the Republicans trailing by 16 points. This would have still represented the worst Republican defeat since 1936, which was still eight years after the most recent Republican presidential victory.

A strange coalition of Republican operatives made peace. The radical leftists who had led to the "Convention Coup" and career Republican operatives both realized they had to cooperate to prevent a blowout. The leftists feared their politics would be discredited, while Republican operatives feared downballot disaster. Party infighting largely dissipated after the Republican National Convention, which allowed most career Republican politicians to endorse the ticket. Only a few hawkish hardliners, led by notably Barry Goldwater, refused to support the ticket. Just this helped a great deal in improving the Republican ticket numbers. The largest problem, was the candidate himself.

Siler was quickly seen as a walking political disaster. An ardent Christian pastor, Siler laced almost every speech with biblical references, even condemning the decreased President Kennedy for his "hard-drinking, ungodly ways" in remarks that outraged much of Washington DC which believed that the personal lives of politicians should be off-limits. He openly condemned the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion-on-demand, arguing that "God's law" ought to "always surpass Man's law." On foreign policy, he was a fierce non-interventionist, condemning the American war in the Congo in harsh terms thought by some to be unpatriotic. Finally, he was an ardent believer in a balanced budget - and although he narrowly avoided saying that he would roll back social programs (like the disastrous Taft nomination), he admitted that he would seek to increase taxes to balance the budget. The Democratic attacks were complete - he was to be attacked as a theocratic Soviet-sympathizing tax-hiker.

However, not all of those attacks were to be quite complete weaknesses. As the Soviet convulsed under the weight of what became called by some the "Second Revolution", many Americans also became repulsed by Jackson's hawkish stance. Jackson proposed increasing American troops in the Congo and an even more aggressive posture against the Soviet Union, arguing that he could "finish off a weakened Soviet Empire." This actually did not sell itself to most Americans, who believed that the Soviets were a threat to America but had little interest in actually overthrowing the Soviet government, especially as they became to appear more reformist. Finally, attacking Siler as a theocrat actually alienated some Democrats. A significant number of religious Democrats outraged by abortion-on-demand and Jackson's overall social liberalism toyed with voting for a Republican for the first time. In particular, several Southern Protestant leaders, long loyal to the Democrats, began subtly promoting Republican candidates.

However, the highest profile defection was not to come from the political right - but from the political left. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, long a mainstay of the political left after the success of Operation Dixie (a mass, multiracial unionization effort in the South that succeeded after President Henry Wallace ordered the National Guard to defend union organizers) had long loathed their rivals on the center-left, the more centrist American Federation of Labor. Vice President McCarthy was long known as a friend of the CIO - which had backed Ribicoff in the primary (the AFL, hawkish against Communism, had backed Jackson). The CIO endorsement of the Siler-McCarthy ticket shocked much of the political world - a far-left political union endorsing a conservative Christian. However, the Siler ticket had actually more or less backed down on anti-government rhetoric. Although their embrace of tax hikes as an alternative to deficit spending or cutting social spending alienated many upper-class voters, it made the ticket palatable to leftist labor organizers. Moreover, Jackson was one of the AFL's favorite candidates - and CIO leaders delighted at the possibility of spiting them. Similarly, some big business representatives supported the Republican ticket. The chairman of the American Motors Company, George Romney, was one of the largest boosters of the Republican ticket, believing that a more cooperative posture towards the Soviet Union was ideal. A few business types even viewed Siler and McCarthy as actually less economically threatening than Jackson, worried about what hawkish foreign relations would do to international trade.

The flood of religious conservatives, leftist labor organizers, and anti-war types of all kinds, combined with Republican unity against what was to expected to be a Democratic onslaught significantly narrowed the once gaping chasm in polling. The debates were a remarkably hostile event, where Acting President Henry Jackson called Siler a Communist sympathizer - and Siler called Jackson "godless." Journalists in particular were horrified by Siler as an "unreconstructed theocrat" - and most leftist journalists were at least embarrassed by his open religiosity even as they supported him for foreign policy reasons. The largest "October surprise" was nothing in the United States, but rather the declaration of the Soviet foreign ministry that they would cease the bombing of East Indonesia, seek a negotiated peace, and withdraw Soviet troops from the nation. In the end, the election had narrowed, though a large Democratic victory was still expected, with the Jackson-Johnson ticket leading the Siler-McCarthy ticket, 53-44. From a 30 point deficit after the disastrous 1964 RNC, the Republicans had narrowed the election to an expected 9 point loss, which all things considered, could have been much worse.
---
[1] Based on a real quote.
 
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I'm gonna be honest, i recently found this thread and i'm only 1/3rd of the way through, but quite literally all i want is for Finland to get Revenge.
 
Chapter 194 - Jackson Defeats Siler
Jackson Defeats Siler
Based on the first exit polls, most newspapers got their headlines out, with cutting commentary from the leading intellectuals at the time. Simply put, the center had held. The postwar consensus of social liberalism and cold war hawkishness had triumphed in yet another election. In many ways, the election results were a vindication for the Kennedy line. Early returns seemed to quickly a more interesting race. Namely put, something very strange was going on in the "Solid South." The Democrats had won the entire South in almost every election from 1932-1960, even when they had campaigned on civil rights (the 1960 elections). The new suburbs of the South seemed solidly Democratic, but both the cities and rural areas were coming far below expectations. An overwhelming Democratic advantage among black voters quickly dissipated into a dead heat among black votes. Black precincts oddly enough consistently produced the closest races in the South. Elsewhere, evangelical voters appeared to abandon the Democratic ticket in droves, casting their votes overwhelmingly for the firebrand preacher from Kentucky.

However, it would not only be the South where the Democratic coalition collapsed. The Upper Midwest swung heavily towards the Republicans as conservative Catholics bolted the Democratic Party (partly due to the abortion issue) as anti-war liberals simultaneously voted Republican as a lesser evil. It became quickly obvious to many newspaper publishers that the race was far closer than expected. Siler had been seriously underestimated in the polls simply because the votes that he had swung were the least likely to answer their telephones, namely rural Southern white evangelicals, black voters, and anti-war youth. Whereas as Jackson was largely appealing to upscale suburban voters who tended to answer polls greater than their actual numbers. By Wednesday morning, it became clear that the United States did not have an elected president. Ultimately, only a few states remained uncalled by the next morning, primarily Western states that began counting much later.

1619591106749.png


Soon, states soon became called. Despite Vice President candidate Lyndon B. Johnson being from the neighboring state of Texas, Oklahoma narrowly went to Siler. Ironically, on election night, Siler narrowly led in New Mexico by a few thousand votes and Jackson led in Hawaii by a few thousand, but ultimately Siler won Hawaii by a 4,515 votes and Jackson won New Mexico by 2,254 votes. Most other states were less close, with Siler winning in Oregon and Nevada, but losing in Idaho by roughly 1% for each. This put the election at 269 electoral votes for Jackson and 265 for Siler. The only state remaining was New Hampshire, where the final state tally had Siler ahead by 335 votes.

American newspapers quickly declared an electoral college tie for the first time in American history, albeit one where the Republicans would be heavily favored to win due to Republicans enjoying a clear majority of House state delegations, apparently seizing control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1928. Republicans erupted in fury as the Governor of New Hampshire, a Democrat, attempted to create a partial recount (of only Democratic-leaning areas) in hopes of erasing Siler's narrow lead. Republicans cried foul and raged even more furiously when the Supreme Court immediately upheld New Hampshire's inequitable recount process. However, much to the surprise of most political observers, the New Hampshire governor's office, relatively politically outdated, determined blue and red areas based on the 1960 elections, which actually poorly mapped onto the political coalitions of the 1964 election. Instead of a widely expected Democratic victory in the recount, Democrats were shocked when their own recount had Siler still winning New Hampshire by a grand total of 2 votes, a particularly painful margin when the recount committee had three Democrats who reportedly forgot to vote.

A "Stop Siler" movement by various generals, intelligence agency veterans, and other commentators was quickly formed to convince Congressional Republicans to vote down Siler, calling him a dangerous pawn of Communism. The more urbane intellectuals, such as Jackson supporter William F. Buckley, referred to Siler as an "American La Pira". However, at the end of the day, most conservative Republicans didn't believe a biblical literalist preacher was really going to be a Communist, and when the House convened to vote for a candidate, they easily selected Eugene Siler as the 37th President of the United States. The Senate, controlled by Democrats, fairly easily confirmed the Senate Majority Whip, Lyndon B. Johnson, as the next Vice-President. For the first time in 36 years, the Republican Party had (sort of) won a Presidential election - and most shockingly, with a candidate few Republicans knew or actually expected to win.

One commentator said it quite simply - the "Spirit of 64" that had begun in the Soviet Union had spread to the United States. After all, the only people more unhappy about the events of 1964 than the Warsaw Pact at the Soviet Union were NATO ministers at the United States, which had just elected someone who they viewed as an antediluvian simpleton. But then again, an overwhelming desire for "new politics" and "political change" had not begun in America - it had also torn through the United Kingdom (with interesting repercussions) and was hardly finished.

1619592544391.png
 
Siler actually winning the upset would be precisely the kind of wild curveball I’ve come to expect from this TL
You know, I was actually expecting our good comrade TastySpam to subvert our expectation by actually letting boring Jackson won. At first it seems I'd be vindicated by the new chapter title until I thought "What if it's like Dewey won newspaper headline?". I read a bit and I found it curves in a slightly weird way
 
So, exactly how much of the Constitution will President Siler do away with?

Without Republican control of the Senate and of a supermajority of state legislatures? Probably a percentage between 0 and nil. He'll definitely try remodelling US society according to his Christian ideals via executive decrees, but with a hostile Supreme Court those won't stick either. On the other hand, with the Administration and Congress deadlocked for at least the next 2 years, Siler's vision for a more isolationist America will be easily achieved.
 
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