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

[TastySpam]

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).

 

[TastySpam]

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.

 

[TastySpam]

Mao's Dead Hand (Part 2)
​

Rajaji, despite being a pro-Western leader, was never an ardent anti-communist. His approach to India's Communist movement was simply to ignore them. He figured that his economic reform program, with India's rapidly rising GDP, would simply cause Communists to lay down their arms. They didn't actually do that, but political violence from the left was surprisingly rare during the Rajaji era. Part of this had to do with his personal political career in the Madras State.

Between 1946 and 1951, Communist peasants threatened to overturn the Princely State of Hyderabad, calling for land reform, women's rights, and anti-casteism, often establishing their parallel village communes in opposition to the Royalist state (dependent on a landed aristocracy known as the jagirdars, who themselves employed hereditery tax collectors). That being said, not all peasants joined the revolt, because under the traditional feudal rules of Hyderabad, peasants actually had significant rights (for one, it was unlawful to evict a peasant if they properly paid their taxes). Moreover, Hyderabad quickly became supported by Muslim activists who given the intense communal violence engulfing India, hoped that Hyderabad would become a place of refuge for Muslims (who did in fact often flee to Hyderabad). Self-governing villages, while officially nonsectarian, were overwhelmingly Hindu.

Ultimately, the Indian Army would invade Hyderabad with the assistance of Communist guerillas, toppling the royalist government and annexing India. Deciding to simply shut down every side of this conflict, the Indian Army actually sided with Muslim refugees who (fairly or unfairly) feared the Communists. The Indian Army would then in turn ban the Communist Party in Hyderabad, dissolve the state entirely, redraw its borders as an integral part of India, and forcibly shut down the self-governing villages, often by force. The Communists would largely cease resistance, given that the Nehru government, although unwilling to make more reforms, was at least willing to not roll back any reforms.

Ultimately, the Telugu-speaking parts of former Hyderabad were split off to unify with the Telugu-speaking regions of Madras State, significantly expanding the state. A proposed bill to reorganize states to put Telugu speakers and Tamil speakers in different states (by splitting Madras State) failed because of the prominence of Rajaji, whose political machine was largely active in Madras State. When Rajaji took national power, leaders who took a harder market edge actually inherited his position. Seeing land reform as a socialistic mistake, the Madras government seriously favored former landowners in "asserting legal title" to their former lands, often by evicting squatters. Communist guerillas slowly reorganized.

Even in the late 1940's, Andhra Communists were avid students of Mao Zedong and followers of the notion of a People's War. Although maintaining peace with the Rajaji government, Communist militants quickly established shadow governments in Madras, largely assisting tenant farmers in chasing off both illegitimate tax collectors and eviction notices from the Indian state. With the Communist Party of India banned, Andhra militants quickly formed the nucleus of a new, united (albeit illegal) Communist Party. They were actually significantly bolstered by the Sifar Revolution in Pakistan, which caused many former RSS militants (also banned) to join the CPI as they ironically saw Pakistani Communism as the best shield against "Congress Islamism." Of course, they were also generously supported by the Pakistani ISI.

The triumph of Indira Gandhi saw a completely new government take shape. Although far less right-wing on economic policy, the Gandhi government was significantly more authoritarian in their mindset. Gandhi saw the Communists as an existential threat to the Indian state and decided to move first. Her vitriol was especially strongest against indigenous Adivasi villages in Madras, which she saw as a convenient way to weaken the power of Rajaji and his clique. After a shootout between tribal villagers and Indian police sent to enforce evictions, the Gandhi government simply sent the army in with no meaningful rules of engagement. The bloodshed significantly expanded on both sides (as stories of mass killings of civilians and other atrocities simply rallied peasants). Citing "Communist insurrection", the union government simply imposed direct rule on Madras State, unceremoniously booting Rajaji and his entire clique from local government. This was an opportunity Indian Communists had been waiting for. Years of preparation had been made for this moment.

Within a month, a small uprising had turned into a complete crisis. Entire rural areas of the Indian state simply stopped taking orders from New Delhi, particularly in the Andra region, Bihar, Orissa, and West Bengal. West Bengal was particularly problematic, because this meant that Communist Pakistan and Burma could simply send in arms and support over land borders. The general disorder also gave a huge shot in the arm for separatist guerilla groups in Northeastern India, especially in Mizoram and Manipur. All of this also gave the Union Government in India ample reason to declare a state of emergency, which simply meant that Gandhi's political opponents were headed straight to jail. Menon was captured, but Bose had actually escaped in the night, aided by his paramilitaries.

That being said, the Indian Army was amply prepared. Although the militants could easily overwhelm Indian police, they really had nothing to compare to an army significantly more modern and well-equipped than the ROC Army in 1945. Moreover, the war in Ceylon had actually been a significant training moment for the Indian Army, which was given orders to use artillery and airpower against peasants if needed. The violence was brutal, wrecked affected areas, and did not seem to lead any clear victory in sight for the Indian government, but the dream of the Communists, a People's War to topple the government and establish a People's Republic, seemed also rather distant. However, simply the outcome of crippling India with internal violence was enough to get the Pakistanis to go all-in on supporting the rebels - and many of those outside of India began fretting about a possible "loss of India."

 

[TastySpam]

The Autocrat​

Increasingly buoyed by seeming success in international affairs as well as an economic surge based on some sort of trade rapprochement with the United States and the European Union, Prime Minister Mattei was not happy to rule like his center-left precedessors, who largely governed by consensus within Christian Democracy, largely only breaking such concord only to chart a more independent foreign policy. Mattei was determined to impose his will on Italian politics, focusing on Christian Democracy. Quickly drumming out free-market opponents and socialist-left opponents, Mattei thought to build the party in his own image - technocratic, interventionist, and centralist. Unlike many cold warriors, Mattei truly cared very little for international ideological politics. Although his predecessors adopted nonalignment based on moral and pacifistic and Christian principles, Mattei believed primarily in economic realpolitik. When European nations were setting themselves on fire playing influence wars in the Middle East, Italy sat at the side, happy to make deals with anyone that would turn them a profit. When the British fled for their lives from Jordan, the Italian government was the first to reach out to Social Nationalist Syria, offering engineers, investments, and oil technicians. Italy had never played along with the sanctions on Iran. Italy was also the first Western government to reach out to the new regime in Egypt. Even in Kenya, the Italians were happy to do business with Idi Amin, and were also happy to throw him away once he had outlived his purpose.

Their close ties to the Muslim world, based on simply not caring about what kind of government they had, almost perfectly shielded Italy from the 1963 oil crisis. If anything, Italy's monopolization of oil resources from the rest of Europe saw Italian industry surge at an era where Franco-German industry stagnated. This was seen and appreciated by Italy's labor unions, whom he quickly bent to his will. The grand bargain would survive. The Socialists and Reform Communists would continue supporting his administration in exchange for regular wage increases and tolerating mass unionization. In exchange, Italian unions refrained from directly striking, but rather went over the heads of management, discussing directly with an increasingly authoritarian Italian state, who would simply command industries. The significant state-owned enterprise sector of the Italian economy gave Mattei the ability to set de facto wages and benefits, which he used to secure union support.

Ironically, Italian hostility to Yugoslavia (due to the Trieste dispute) meant that Italy also had a unique role in reaching out to the Communist bloc. Soviet-Italian relations were cordial and Italy stood as an unusual example. In many ways, Italy remained an economic lifeline for much of the Eastern Bloc, especially Eastern Bloc members that exported raw materials. All of this regularly meant that Western liberals condemned Italy as an "authoritarian cancer" in the "democratic" world. Despite the fact that Mattei was actually more reliant on the left, he was regularly condemned by Western analysts as a "far-right" leader, even though many of those analysts lauded Portugal and Spain as good EU members. That being said, some of the Italian far-right did defect to support Mattei, seeing at least that he had established a surprisingly corporatist system at home that reminded them of the non-militarist, non-racist elements of the old regime. However, it was difficult to make that label stick, especially because he did not seem to be a militarist in the slightest, even if he obsessively concentrated political power in his own office. In a lot of ways, he had tamed both the far-left and the far-right under one umbrella, with his strongest opponents generally being centrist liberals.

Although maintaining cordial relations with the United States, there was always the sense that a large and powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington disliked Mattei's Italy. Similarly, Italy soon became the odd man out in Europe, being the only major Western European country to not dutifully join the European Union. Charitable foundations and intelligence agencies in the United States and the rest of Western Europe quickly found a group in society that chafed against the seeming conformism and "managed democracy" of Italy - namely increasingly radical youth at Italian universities who either challenged the regime from the left, right, or even center. Italian students quickly received sponsored lectures from radical academics who raged against the system. However, they were never able to expand their ranks to include workers in their demonstrations - and it was increasingly obvious that the workers of Northern Italy were too closely welded to the regime.

Finally, the declining economic fortunes of France/Germany and the rising fortunes of Italy quickly shut off the spigot of Southern Italian emigration to France and Germany - instead, they generally piled into Northern Italy, where they tended to actually moderate the labour unions by adding more labour to the local market. In fact, the government saw this as a positive, but the widespread migration from the South to the North also created social and economic problems in the South - problems that the government sought to rectify by loosening immigration and migrant worker laws. In a return to history, Italy quickly became one of the most generous takers of Greek refugees, either fleeing the aftermath of the Greek Civil War(s) or the ethnic cleansing of Thrace and Cyprus. Besides Greeks, a not-insignificant number of Latin Americans arrived, largely because the Italian government widely overestimated Italian cultural influence in Latin America (and often mixed up nations). Although this led to more economic growth, it further alienated elements of the far-right. Even liberals found something to complain about it - often arguing that Italy was "de-europeanizing" under Mattei, who clearly prioritized Italian national interests (especially economic) over "European solidarity."

 

[TastySpam]

The "Militant" Democracy
​

West Germany came out of the Three Years War a deeply scarred society in the aftermath of the 1957 Hanover massacre. No nation was as rhetorically dedicated to the cause of "democracy", as West German propaganda regularly contrasted "democratic Germany" with the "totalitarian Communist occupied east." Moreover, unlike Portugal or Spain, where integralist regimes did not permit free elections, West German authorities generally celebrated its free elections. However, West German elections had severe deficiencies., heavily linked to an official state ideology where a "nonideological watchman" was required to snuff out "threats" to democracy.

The West German state explicitly cited Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance" and Hannah Arendt's "Origin of Totalitarianism" to essentially suppress dissidents. For example, the government banned expression of "totalitarian ideologies", which in theory meant both Communism and Nazism, but was essentially selectively only applied to Marxists and other socialists. Short of outright defending and celebrating the Holocaust, few far-right ideas were condemned under Germany's "democracy protection" regime (for example, in one court case, a scholar downplaying the death toll of the Holocaust was acquitted, while another expressing support for the Tanganyikan Mapinduzi rebels was convicted). Ironically, neither Popper nor Arendt were fans of West Germany's "constitutional protection regime."

The Gehlen Organization, under former head of Nazi military intelligence in the Eastern Front, Richard Gehlen, was transformed into Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), which was given a broad mandate to "root out anti-democratic elements." Opposition elements quickly referred to them as the neo-Gestapo due to the prominence of many ex-Gestapo members (that being said, a majority of members were Abwehr veterans). The election system was also predictably rigged. Under West German election laws, each state sent MPs to the Bundestag based on proportional representation with the caveat that if any one electoral party alliance cleared 50% of valid votes in a state, they would receive 100% of the seats from that state. The ruling coalition would always get over 50% in enough states to guarantee 100% of the seats in those states - and no opposition alliance would ever manage that feat themselves because threatening candidates were often banned from the ballot (for "sympathy to totalitarianism"). Moreover, the opposition, deeply infiltrated by the BfV, was generally unable to ever unite.

In many ways, West Germany had constructed what many American liberals had desribed as the "perfect democracy." Angered by New Left student radicals during the 1964 elections, luminary American historian Richard Hofstadter penned an article describing West Germany as the "perfect democracy." To many American liberals, finally, "men of high virtue" with a belief in "human progress, technocratic rule, democratic rule, and high culture" (West German elites regularly cited Kant to justify their supposed "constitutional rule by law" state) would rule instead of "Marxist student activists, primitive Christian fanatics, and other deranged populists". The obvious fact that many of the judges in the so-called "rule-by-law" state were hanging judges for Nazi Germany was glossed over because pointing this out was quickly condemned as "Communist propaganda" sponsored by the "butchers of Stockholm." The most famous proponent of "militant German democracy" in America was German-born political scientist Karl Loewenstein, who argued that the West German legal system was actually reliable (most prosecutions of electoral candidates actually failed, though too late for their votes to actually be counted) and the system was unlike the Imperial and Nazi past because the government was 1) parliamentary, 2) restrained by courts, and 3) not run by any one autocrat in particular. All of those points were technically true, but this did not convince anyone skeptical of the system.

The West German secret services were heavily supported by France (as West Germany was a dutiful member of the EU) as well as the United States (as a dutiful member of NATO). Moreover, West German universities and political scientists were typically on the forefront of any analysis justifying Western intervention wherever they went (especially in anticolonial struggles, where most nations were actually quite embarrassed to do so). Moreover, West Germany once again became an intellectual center in Europe, at least for a certain type of European. The West German government gleefully sponsored free education for any anti-Communist Eastern European, where they would impress upon their own narrative of history - chief among the official state narrative in West Germany was that "international Marxists" tricked the West and Nazi Germany into a war together, that Operation Barbarossa was a "defensive war" launched to liberate the ethnicities of Eastern Europe, that the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities were real but their death toll was "overexaggerated" by "Marxist propaganda", and that anticolonial revolts abroad were part of an ancient "Bolshevik war against Western civilization." Their first eager students were Swedes, but they were quickly joined by Hungarians and Yugoslav anti-Communists, as well as Polish refugees. German intellectuals who detested the new regime typically either moved to East Germany - or more popularly, the Saarland, which quickly became a hotbed of anti-regime extremism and academic freedom.

At least between 1957 and 1963, the regime saw skyrocketing incomes, which quieted domestic discontent. However, the oil crash of 1963 and political chaos in neighboring France would also spark remarkable disorder in West Germany, which would only be compounded by the chaos in the Soviet Union. The "Spirit of 64" would soon be on its way to West Germany...

 

[TastySpam]

The Hangover
​

A wave of patriotic fervor had seized Yugoslavia in the 1950's. By the 1960's, it was looking much less clear. For one, it wasn't actually clear if the Three Years War was actually a good idea. During the actual Warsaw Pact invasion, the narrative was of an unprovoked Soviet invasion. However ironically, the more liberal, less authoritarian post-war Yugoslav government amnestied a significant number of imprisoned Communists who had a different story to tell.

During the Tito-Stalin split, Stalin had purged suspected "Titoists" across the Warsaw Pact, but Tito himself had also purged a significant share of his own party - almost a fourth of whom had sided with Stalin and the rest of the Warsaw Pact. The Titoist purges ripped through the Yugoslav Communist Party, including many well-known partisans such as Arso Jovanovic, Vlado Dapcevic, and others. This actually significantly harmed the military preparedness of the Yugoslav Army, helping to explain the incredibly disproportionate share of deaths suffered by Yugoslavia in the Three Years War. Where the Soviets used steel, the Yugoslavs used blood. One in eight Yugoslavs died in the war, compared to one in every one thousand Soviets.

Although the Titoist government had attempted to execute most arrested Yugoslav Communist members, most had escaped in the chaos of the war, and the postwar Dilas "thaw" saw a general amnesty for all kinds of ideological crimes. As a result, many orthodox Communists openly questioned the decisions that went into the war. The biggest criticism was that the Soviet Union ultimately actually adopted ideological provisions not so different from Yugoslavia, so the entire ideological struggle was pointless. Moreover, a genuine error in judgment had been made - Tito had believed strikes against Soviet intelligence operations across the Bulgarian border wouldn't lead to a bigger war, but it simply gave the Soviets the casus belli they had been hunting for.

Amusingly, the other group to be amnestied out had been in hiding in the mountains and abroad - and gleefully returned to fight for the Yugoslav Army - the Chetniks. Although they were furiously kept out of government, they were at least given the right to return to Yugoslavia and live in peace. After all, Yugoslavia needed assistance from anyone it could in order to rebuild. Ironically, the resurgence of both royalists and Stalinists gave the reformist government the ability to paint both sides as dangerous extremists.

In contrast to Sweden, the political leadership in Belgrade was...not as committed to a hardline description of its history. Tito's inner circle had more or less actually been annihilated, leaving fringe elements of the Yugoslav Communist Party in charge. And more than anything, they were pragmatists. Ironically, despite the fact that it had snatched an entire Republic from Yugoslavia, the Bulgarians were generally viewed as the least hardline Warsaw Pact members, and moves were quickly made to quietly reopen the borders with Bulgaria-Macedonia (eased by the fact that there was historically no border between Serbia and Macedonia). Beria cleverly understood Yugoslavia was better as a friendly neighbor than an implacable hostile one - even though he was the one who had masterminded the total annihilation of Sarajevo. As a result, Beria ordered the Bulgarians to adjust the borders between Macedonia/Yugoslavia in Yugoslavia's favor, meeting Yugoslav demands. That being said, the nation with the best relations with Yugoslavia ended up being Hungary, which like Yugoslavia, was a perceived buffer between East and West. Ironically however, Hungary had worse relations with the Warsaw Pact than the nation that had actually fought a total war against it - so Yugoslav diplomats were ironically often used as a go-between between the Warsaw Pact and National Hungary.

In the constraints of Yugoslav politics, the Royalists were generally seen as an American proxy and the Stalinists seen as a Soviet proxy, which allowed Yugoslavia to quietly open up links to both blocs. While Yugoslav society unanimously celebrated and commemorated the tremendous sacrifice and acts of heroism in the Three Years War, there was never a consensus on whether it was good idea. Moreover, many embittered veterans resented being essentially thrown against Soviet steel as cannon fodder by the Titoist regime, so while supportive of the war effort, the nation avoided total consensus groupthink. As the war was now over, it became acceptable to question the conduct of the war.

In general, the Bosnians were generally the most anti-Soviet, while the Albanians the most pro-Soviet. Many Albanians still resented forcible inclusion into the new Yugoslavia, but the Dilas Thaw actually expanded the territory under Albanian control (Albania was largely governed by Yugoslav Kosovars), so Albania's local ruling class was pro-Yugoslav. The Croats and Slovenes were willing to put anti-Serbian sentiment in favor of a different external enemy. Even though Italy posed as the non-aligned, neutral power siding against colonialism abroad, the Italians were quite willing to completely flaunt international law in one area - revising the status quo in Trieste (officially annexing former Trieste). Moreover, Italian troops had entered Dalmatia and Fiume...and simply never left. Yugoslavs welcomed Italian soldiers, sent to fight with them, to these regions. But when Italy left the war...their troops didn't actually leave. The Western Allies had no real interest in evicting them - and the Yugoslavs no capability, and so there they stayed. The Yugoslavs were pretty sure they wouldn't ever get Trieste back - but there was a strong hope of evicting Italian troops from Dalmatia and Fiume. Realizing there was no meaningful way to remove the Italians through military force, Yugoslav insurgents became active in these region, happily supported by the Yugoslav government.

As chaos swept through Europe (especially the Soviet Union), the Yugoslavs decided on ramping up their support for insurgents in these regions,. Moreover, the death of Beria was generally celebrated, especially in Sarajevo.

 

[TastySpam]

The Estado Novo: The Last Days of Pluricontinentalism​

The Battle of the Montewara Perimeter was seen as a catastrophe in Europe. The collapse of their temporary ally in Kenya, Idi Amin, led to the creation of a huge socialist revolution on the doorstep of Mozambique, led by leaders who promised to liberate Mozambique. Indeed, the victory of the Mapinduzi supercharged militants of the newly founded FRELIMO (Liberation Front of Mozambique). Moreover, despite generous American support, the bombing campaign in Angola had killed tens of thousands, perhaps even over a hundred thousands, with essentially nothing to show with it. Most worryingly, the war in Mozambique quickly began to resemble a conventional war. In Angola, sporadic guerilla groups tried to seize rural regions, fighting with small contingents of Portuguese troops. In many ways, Angola was a less costly war for the Portuguese, largely consisting of special forces operations and bombing. In contrast, the Mapinduzi, essentially having exhausted their supply lines up north (they had more troops they could throw at Amin's remaining forces, because they actually weren't able to supply their army if they sent them north due to Amin's brutal scorched earth policy), had surplus troops to throw against the Portuguese. And throw them against the Portuguese they did. Portuguese forces had to both simultaneously fight a counter-insurgency at home while repelling repeated Mapinduzi offensives and border incursions.

The involvement of Madagascaran and North Chinese forces also made these offensives far more threatening. Both nations provided heavy equipment, the most damaging which was anti-air weaponry, which limited the mobility of Portuguese troops, who trained in the French method of counterinsurgency, used helicopters for rapid and extreme mobility. Moreover, the North Chinese carefully trained Mapinduzi in North Chinese-style infiltration assault tactics. North Chinese infantry warfare involved the large use of infantry troops, deliberately exaggerating their numbers with the use of drums, light artillery (especially knee mortars), liberal usage of handheld explosives, and attempts to rapidly ram men through any breaks in defensive lines. These tactics generally caused Portuguese forces to widely overestimate the numbers of attacking Mapinduzi, Madagascaran, and North Chinese troops, leading to significant low-level tactical failures (such as a reluctance to issue what would have been actually effective counterattacks). Moreover, knowing the limited manpower reserves of European Portugal, Portuguese commanders were politically loathe to aggressively counter-attack.

Ironically, the gambit of Rhodesian hardliners to allow transit of Communist forces into Tanganyika had largely succeeded. The creation of a large socialist movement nearby caused the Central African Federation, Portugal, and South Africa to allow develop a close working relation. The moderate Welensky government actually got along better with the South Africans than hardline Rhodesians ironically, simply because they had fewer Anglo/Afrikaner grievances against the other. Fearing that newly enfranchised Africans would simply vote in anti-imperialist, socialist-leaning parties, the Welensky government slowed down (but did not suspend or end) their goals of bringing in more Africans into the government (at least a partial victory for the hardliners). Close cooperation was important to Portugal, because the wars had turned all their African "provinces" into huge financial losses, but significant funds did come in to Portugal as a result of shipping out Mozambique migrant laborers to work in South African mines.

All of this also took place in an era where European Portugal was in significant demographic decline. A significant number of young Portuguese simply packed up and moved to work in factories in France and Italy, despite fertility rates tumbling as Portugal went through the same demographic transition that most industrializing countries go through. This simply meant a dearth of actual recruits for the Portuguese Army, even when widely unpopular conscription orders were implemented. This amusingly also led Portugal to ban emigration to Italy, driven both by demographic concerns and fury at the Italians for abandoning the fight against the Mapinduzi, which many international observers humorously noted was something now like an Italian Modus Operandi (having earlier abandoned the Axis Powers and the anti-Soviet coalition in the Three Years War.)

All of these developments came as a genuine shock to the Portuguese government, which did not expect these challenges when they tacitly supported France in its infamous "compromise" with Beria. Indeed, the Soviet Union was not significantly involved in sending military aid to anti-Portuguese rebels (though the Soviets did send humanitarian aid). This significantly discredited reformist government officials who argued for a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, but it also discredited hardliners who argued the USSR was against all socialist rebellions. The rebellion was clearly homegrown and drew support from a broad support of socialist-aligned nations (including Korea, North Japan, and Pakistan). The ultimate result was neither a victory for the reformists nor the hardliners, but just angrier division between the two groups. However, the two groups clearly agreed on what the enemy was - what a growing set of thinkers quickly referred to as the "Communist Third World". This was quickly a theory that picked up credence around the world, especially in pessimistic Portugal.

The Portuguese had closely paid attention to the British defeat in Egypt, noting that the British had lost control once they ceded the countryside. The Portuguese attempt to prevent this saw the "Secret War" in Angola (mass American bombing of the countryside), which failed to actually restore order. To an extent, Angola was not in total collapse, but Mozambique quickly seemed as it was going down the same path as Egypt. Portuguese forces, even with Central African and South African support, simply weren't numerous enough to simultaneously hold back Mapinduzi offensives and smack down FRELIMO forces in the countryside. The security situation continued to deteriorate, causing desperate Portuguese rulers to throw their hat into the ring as yet another Western power that believed something drastic had to be done to "chasten third world Communism."

 

[TastySpam]

Inter-Services Intelligence
​

Ironically, with the NKVD focused on running their own country, one secret service agency became the most feared in the Western world - Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. As many of the most politically contested regions in the world were found in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, Pakistan's ISI became one of the most crucial supporter for left-wing movements across these nations. Although the People's Republic of China marshalled many of the most dramatic interventions, it was often Pakistan's ISI that had the deepest long-term impact.

For example, North China's intervention in Israel, Syria, and Iraq was profoundly important to the creation of socialist regimes in these regions, but the North Chinese quickly saw these interventions as costly and largely ineffective (having carved out only small slices of these nations). It was ultimately the ISI that quickly came in with funding and resources, strengthened by the general cultural literacy of Pakistani operatives in the Muslim world. Pakistan simply had a far larger pool of Islamic-educated operatives than North China, which had a relatively small population base in the Xinjiang region.

Moreover, widespread English literacy among Pakistan's British-educated socialist elite also meant that Pakistan could make dramatic interventions in the West. The most dramatic was Pakistan ISI's support for the British National Front, the radical political party widely seen as white supremacist (who had ironically organized primarily in fierce opposition to Pakistani refugees). Finally, Pakistan's ISI was the most effective agency in the Eastern bloc at acquiring clandestine nuclear materials. Pakistani cooperation with the Warsaw Pact and North China supercharged progress. Western intelligence was increasingly beginning to understand that their window of opportunity to stop the emergence of a third, more radical nuclear bloc was rapidly closing.

That being said, there was pushback. Pakistani ISI continued penetrating Afghanistan, launching assassinations of Pakistani intellectuals (especially Pashtuns) who had fled Communism to Afghanistan. ISI saw Afghanistan's Communist movement as divided between the more moderate, pro-Soviet Parcham faction as well as a more radical, pro-Pakistani faction widely called the Khalq faction, filled with younger cadres who wanted to emulate the Pakistani Sifar Revolution. ISI support for Khalqists quickly alienated social democrats in Iran, with the ISI turning against Iran after its normalization of relationships with the Western powers. At the end of the day, Mossadegh was neither a Communist nor a Socialist, and having achieved his moderate nationalist aims, he had turned against his once-Communist allies.

ISI was also essentially the strongest major supporter of Socialist East Indonesia, after the devastating Soviet withdrawal. NILF, increasingly radical and powerful, became seizing more and more territory. Socialist Indonesia quickly became only able to rely on minority groups, who feared the national-Islamist takeover. In many countries, Islamism and ethnic pluralism actually correlated, because of both influence from Western thinkers (who often saw Islamism as a method of establishing stable allies) as well as the natural fact that establishing an identity based on shared religion deemphasizes ethnic divisions. However, it was not so in Indonesia, where Eastern Indonesia was generally more "traditionalist" in its practice of Islam, which actually meant more syncretic, less fundamentalist, and more "indigenous." Moreover, Eastern Indonesia was disproportionately populated by ethnic minorities, especially Madurese. As a result, NILF became quickly filled with radical ethnonationalist extremists who saw Eastern Indonesia swarmed by "perfidious minorities" and "fake Muslims." This development was generally ignored by authorities n West Indonesia and Western states, which were simply more concerned about defeating socialism. ISI often became intricately involved in coordinating a surprisingly wide coalition of society against NILF, confounding predictions by many that East Indonesia would immediately collapse upon Soviet withdrawal (even if the government did increasingly lose ground).

However, the biggest move for the ISI was its key role in instigating the Oman Civil War. The collapse of the British Empire in the Middle East horrified the Trucial States and Kuwait, who fearing a power vacuum, had actually offered to the British that they would pay all expenses of the British Army if they simply stayed. The radical Liberal government rejected the offer, forcing the Trucial States and Kuwait to turn to basically any international power willing to protect them. Indeed, a power vacuum had to be filled.

The Italians, known for doing good work aiding the Iranians during the Western embargo period, were overwhelmingly seen as the most popular option. The Trucial States immediately began negotiating the creation of a Federation of Arab Emirates, who would enjoy generous Italian protection and supply Italian industry as the first priority customer. Fearing being locked out of this oil market during an era of high energy prices, the Western powers, working with Qatifi operatives, helped promote widespread protests by the Shia majority against the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain. In exchange for a variety of Iranian promises, one of which would dramatically alter world history for millions, Western navies cleared the way for Iranian troops to land in Bahrain to "restore order." In outrage over this move, Qatar, once wavering from the concept of a federation, quickly signed on instead. Due to the participation of Qatifi clerics, this was generally seen as an American plot and pan-Arab anti-Americanism spiked after the invasion.

British forces, fighting a furious insurgency of Marxist-Leninist rebels, had finally been chased out of South Yemen. ISI was crucial in preventing the West from peeling off North Yemen, even as their shared enemy in the United Kingdom was gone. Western intelligence agencies had reached out to North Yemen hoping to play up the Saudi-Egyptian threat. However, ISI agents, generally trusted by all sides in Yemen, helped brokered an agreement between Marxist-Leninist South Yemen and monarchist North Yemen, playing on anti-American sentiments after the invasion of Bahrain. The Imam of North Yemen would continue ruling in North Yemen, the successful Communists would govern newly liberated South Yemen, and Dhofari Socialists would also receive an autonomous zone in South Yemen. In the end, Saudi and Egyptian diplomats would work to increase integration between North and South Yemen. The motivation of ISI was to preserve a common enemy in American-backed Oman, where well-funded Dhofari rebels had first demanded autonomy and then independence from Oman. The creation of the Dhofari autonomous region in South Yemen led these rebels to call for unification instead with the new Federation of Yemen. Immediately after this, Saudi, Egyptian, Pakistani, unified Yemeni, and North Chinese weapons began flooding in immediately. In contrast, the Italians and Arab Emirates simply ignored Oman when desperate calls for aid were made. This all was widely seen as essentially a declaration of cold war from the ISI to the CIA, which was initially not taken seriously by the Americans (they generally saw Pakistan as simply kicking the British when they were down).

In reality, this wasn't actually about an anti-American goal for ISI. America had accidentally fired the first shot. President Kennedy had preserved peace in Oman by rushing troops and military aid to protect Oman, but that also ensured American protection of their enclave on the Pakistani coast, Gwadar. The Pakistanis saw this as an attempt to encircle Pakistan despite the fact that archives seem to indicate that Americans actually did not know they were doing this. This seemingly innocuous decision years ago had tipped a fateful domino.

 

[TastySpam]

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.

 

[TastySpam]

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.

 

[TastySpam]

Prussianism and Socialism
​

Many saw the "Rau Thaw" as an opportunity for East German society to draw closer to the West and moderate its position in Europe. Indeed, Beria's machinations in East Germany (driven by Beria's desire to institute a reformist, pro-Beria government) ended up depleting East Germany of a wide swath of many of its most vocal and dedicated actual Communists. In theory, most of those who took power were moderates and pragmatists. However, current events would harden their approach. The hardline approach of West Germany, a seeming den of monarchists, right-wing radicals, ex-Nazis, and anti-communist fanatics quickly created an East German government unable to reach out to the West, yet with increasingly troubled relations with the East.

The public disorder in the Soviet Union, especially compared to the "order" of West Germany convinced most East German politicians that something had to be quickly done. The civilian government began leaning even harder on the military, especially as East German general Wilhelm Adam essentially was given more responsibility over the East German state. The event that would transform East Germany forever would however also come within that army. One of Adam's close associates, General Vincenz Muller, saw the chaos in the Soviet Union as the opportunity to strike. Also increasingly erratic himself, Muller rounded up a small group of soldiers to storm the 6th Congress of the Socialist Unity Party. The plan was rather ramshackle and ultimately ended in failure - but not before random machine gun fire and explosions had simply massacred a rather significant portion of the SED leadership. Muller's plan elsewhere would actually fail - as attempts to seize control of radio stations and railways failed as students and workers, fearing a "Nazi coup", stormed the barricades against coupist soldiers, even though Muller's manifesto actually called for an "independent foreign policy" and "reapproachment with the West." Seeing his plan fail, Muller quickly committed suicide, but the damage to the country was done.

Ironically, the primary target of the coup, General Adam, had more or less survived, albeit with a nasty facial scar (and widely suspected brain damage). Despite that, he was given essentially total leverage in having loyalist elements of the East German state declaring martial law, and surrounded by a small, rather mysterious brain trust, which the state security forces did their best to keep completely secret. As a result, East Germany quickly became the government on Earth with the most mysterious and poorly understood leadership - unlike other Communist parties with relatively opaque but still analyzable democratic centralist organization, East Germany was a true mystery.

Ultimately, a deep investigation was done within the East German state, spearheaded by a respected intelligence agent, Markus Wolf. The coup participants were actually a strange coalition of pro-Western liberals and German nationalists, both of who wanted reunification with the West and thus both of which were then seen by the regime as relatively disloyal elements. However, given the rather ramshackle state of the actual SED (with huge swaths killed in the coup or previously lustrated by Beria), a purge of these elements was deemed infeasible. Thus, a decision was made to simply appeal to all of them at once.

In a widely televised speech, Adam declared the creation of "socialism with a human face" - which quickly became derisively nicknamed by opponents as "socialism with a Prussian face." Although funneling additional funds into the state security forces to tightly control society, on paper, cultural repression was significantly pared back and both agricultural cooperatives and worker-led enterprises were quickly ordered to respond to certain "market" incentives, namely being allowed to rent our lands, negotiate for prices (albeit with the state), and sell "surplus" goods on rudimentary markets. Ironically, as East Germany was the closest supporter of the "Emergency Committee" in Poland, the East German state also able to promote its own economic growth by purchasing goods produced in Poland's vast forced labor camps, which they then sold on the private marketplace to nonaligned nations (chiefly Italy) - a relatively profitable (to all three governments) relationship quickly developed between Poland, East Germany, and Italy. For example, many of the proceeds of this trade were then collected into what was essentially a sovereign wealth fund for the East German government (designed to support economic development in the Warsaw Pact), which then hired Italian engineers and managers to use Polish forced labor to build infrastructure in Poland and the rest of the Warsaw Pact, recouping investment returns all in the process (this was justified by Marxist principles, which stated that East Germany was still in a stage of "primodial socialism", as opposed to the advanced socialism that it would seemingly eventually achieve).

Furthermore, a great "reopening" to re-examine history was declared. However, this was not an unguided opening, but rather one carefully shaped by East German security services to promote their narrative. Playing on preexisting German nationalist sentiment, certain "wrongs" and "mistakes" made by the German Communists were acknowledged - but fury at the (now non-existent) Junker class was replaced by specific fury at "Western capitalists", who were described as the real causes of the two world wars. Modern West Germany was lambasted as a Western puppet - one that willingly allowed even German territory to be given up (East Prussia was not mentioned.) In fact, the government deliberately played up regionalist East German identity, as unofficial use of the former Imperial tricolor (despite its right-wing undertones) was quickly revived. Prussian symbolism was quickly revived, with Bismarck and such characters being described as "national bourgeoise" figures in history (aka, still modestly preferable to Western liberals). Even the Strasser brothers, although still condemned, were described more as "misguided" then anything else. Of course, the West Germans were still to be condemned as Nazis, with every ex-Nazi in West Germany highlighted.

As a cultural, political, and social narrative, the new East German state ideology was actually quite infectious. A not insignificant amount of authors and writers defected from West Germany to East Germany, where state security forces generally left them alone (given fears that repressing them would be a huge propaganda defeat). Furthermore, many hardline German nationalists also embraced the East German state. East Germany became a shining model to both the West German left and far-right, simultaneously portraying itself as reformist/market socialist, German nationalist/Prussianist, and culturally progressive (which it admittedly was in many ways, given mass female participation in the workplace, liberal divorce and family planning laws, and universal childcare, all of which West Germany lacked and intentionally discouraged). Market reforms led to significant economic growth, which in turn then helped support the rest of the Warsaw Pact during a period where Soviet aid notably significantly dried up, and which could also be funneled into an increasingly powerful state security service, as well as an increasingly advanced nuclear program (in partnership with Pakistan, a choice which would lead to significant global ramifications). Moreover, East German funds quietly equipped conservative-socialist elements in the Red Army, as the East Germans viewed the disorder in the Soviet Union as a significant threat to East German independence from the West.

 

[TastySpam]

Operation Durga's Trishul
​

By the 1970's, the Indian Air Force had actually more or less become the most experienced, most modern air force in the entire Asian continent. With the Indian occupation of Sri Lanka increasingly loathed by locals, the Indian Army became increasingly reliant on air power to stabilize the front. This led to the increasing sophistication of Indian bomber capabilities, which only further developed as India purchased a very large chunk of America's decommissioned and surplus airpower. Although Operation Durga's Trishul was widely believed to have been planned in coordination with British and French forces, the Indians had actually rebuffed French assistance as unnecessary (the British had actually not offered assistance, contrary to public perceptions both in Britain and in South Asia).

Indian intelligence had understood that the Pakistani nuclear weapons program was far more advanced than originally believed. Although Western intelligence agencies dismissed the program as merely an East German vanity project, the actual driving force for the scientific development was Pakistani, chiefly the brilliant Abdus Salam. Believing that a war from NATO was imminent, the East Germans harried the Pakistanis to simply speed the project up. Instead of constructing a separate nuclear facility for uranium enrichment, the enrichment facilities simply became a side-annex to the Karachi Nuclear Power Complex. The Soviet military noted with rather deep unhappiness that despite not supporting this program in any way, the KNPC was literally just based on stolen designs of the new Soviet RMBK-1000 model, introduced only five months before construction on KNPC had begun, which led many scientifically-minded Soviets (otherwise well-predisposed to the present state of affairs in the USSR) to also start believing that the "Second Revolution" had seriously harmed the national security capabilities of the USSR.

Cognizant of the natural dangers of constructing nuclear tests in Pakistan's second largest city and capital (only Dhaka was larger), the Pakistani government was able to secure top-of-the-line anti-air defense capabilities from the Warsaw Pact and North China to defend the installation, which quickly became one of the most heavily defended sites on Earth (at least from aerial assault). The IAF had access to some of the most advanced bombers in the world (namely American-built F-111As), but was given the task of bombing the unbombable. An idea was floated by a surprising source, former Luftwaffe ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, then-serving as a freelance advisor to both French forces in Cambodia and Indian forces in Sri Lanka. His proposal was simple: if you couldn't bomb the uranium enrichment facilities, then blow up the entire nuclear reactor next to the facility.

The problem with the design of Soviet nuclear reactors being pitifully easy to steal by the Pakistani ISIS meant that they were at least possible for the Western powers to steal. Having such plans, the Indians determined severe weaknesses in the design. On a stormy morning in June of 1971 (in the middle of monsoon season), a squadron of IAF planes took off to commence Operation Durga's Trishul. The ability to fly at near max speeds barely hundreds of feet above ground level (or building level) meant that the F-111As were able to evade most Pakistani anti-air defenses, while the monsoon weather scrambled the ability of the Pakistanis to respond. As a result, much to the shock of the Pakistanis, IAF bombers were able to deliver all of their payloads before being shot down (of which many were shortly after on the way back). Successive strikes on coolant and water pumping stations more or less guaranteed a meltdown. Multiple massive explosions ripped through the plant, further worsened by the monsoon conditions (which made it essentially impossible to drain water as needed).

Prime Minister Hasim ultimately made the fatal decision to not evacuate the Pakistani government from Karachi, even though an attempt to evacuate the civilian population was made. However, given Karachi's massive population (almost four million), it was deemed essentially impossible to evacuate most of the civilian population. However, that would not stop most civilians from fleeing the "Black Monsoon. of 1971." So much (radioactive) dust had been swept into the monsoon itself, the rains across almost the entirety of West Pakistan dripped black. Given widespread panic and flight of hundreds of thousands of civilians, it became quickly impossible to stop the reactor fire.

Civil order in West Pakistan, already under significant threat from the Safir Revolution, began unravelling. Paramilitary forces under the Indian-backed Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan quickly dusted off old weapons, attacked government buildings, and specifically targeted Ahmadiyya Muslims (Abdus Salam, the head of the Pakistani nuclear program, was notably an Ahmadiyya Muslim, who were often seen as the strongest supporters of Pakistani socialism). Chaos on the streets of West Pakistan only further but erroneously convinced the the Pakistani leadership that an existential invasion from India was imminent.

In Bangladesh, unprecedented fury convulsed the population as hundreds of thousands of retired veterans and reservists quickly began answering volunteer organizations. Condemnation quickly rolled in against India from more or less the entire Eastern bloc and global South, with the Western bloc remaining palpably silent, with some even denying Indian involvement. Prime Minister Gandhi was taken back by the criticism, having been essentially ensured by most advisors and foreign diplomats that the international community would accept the rationale of destroying an illegal nuclear weapons program. However, it ended up that most of the world did not buy the Western narrative that the destruction of the Karachi Nuclear Power Complex was only an incidental "accident."

In the crucial next days, Prime Minister Gandhi largely spent her time coordinating humanitarian refugee programs at the Indo-Pakistani border, evacuating Indian residents from the effects of the Black Monsoon, and trying to make the case to non-aligned nations that the Karachi disaster was largely an incidental disaster caused by the Pakistanis intentionally placing their nuclear weapons program next to their largest nuclear power plant. These seemingly sincere efforts actually quieted a significant amount of international fury and outside of the Social Camp, calls for an anti-Indian embargo quickly died off. However, it did nothing to quiet the omnipresent calls for revenge in both West and East Pakistan and would be considered by some as a form of "dithering" before a Pakistani response that quickly exceeded even the wildest expectations of the Eastern bloc.

Ironically enough, despite the massive destruction and misery wrought by the Karachi disaster, the uranium enrichment facilities of the Pakistani nuclear power program were built under such formidable bunkers, they had actually mostly survived intact, even if significantly delayed.

 

[TastySpam]

The Siligurite Rebellion
​

By the late-1960's, the Indian Communist Movement had reached an ideological crossroads. Given the stunning success of the Communists in Burma, previously also a territory of the Raj, India's Communists ideologically styled themselves most closely after middle-of-the-road Communists abroad. However, the failure of the Communist movement to simply avoid being brutalized and tossed into jail by the dominant Indian government caused many to believe in an alternative model. Although the oldest, most well-established Communist movements were in the south, conditions in the east rapidly became highly conducive to radicalism. The east was poorer, more economically dependent on agriculture, more heavily dominated by landlords, and had less progressive governments. One thinker in particular, an intellectual from the eastern city of Siliguri, believed in a new way. More inspired by the Pakistani model than the Eastern European, an activist and intellectual by the name of Charu Majumdar agitated to eschew local politics (increasingly an obvious choice as Indian authorities continued to ban Communists from peaceful participation) and simply seize power by force.

Although the preparation had taken place for several months, the Indian bombing of Pakistan caused these cadres to significantly accelerate their plans, based on the assumption that a "final people's war in the Indian subcontinent" was inevitable. The Indians were generally prepared for this, especially around East Pakistan (which was conveniently surrounded by India on three sides), causing troop deployments to rush somewhat away from interior areas, with the exception of various states in Northeast India. These states, from Tripura to Mizoram to Nagaland, were awash in increasingly violent insurgencies. It was widely understood that the Indian government helped support anti-Communist rebels in Burma, which also caused Burma in turn to send significant amounts of military aid to separatist rebels in Northeast India.

As such, Indian authorities generally neglected evidence of growing movement in the Siliguri region. Majumdar himself had even published eight monographs, calling for a People's War in conjunction with foreign 'proletarian powers' to overthrow the Indian state, though this was simply dismissed as Pakistani propaganda. When the rebellion actually happened, officials were caught off-guards. Market reforms under the previous Rajaji administration (ironically, now he was banned from politics and himself facing jail time) had brought prosperity to most, but had not significantly improved labor conditions for landless farmers, who seethed at the unequal development in India and often blamed market reforms for pre-existing economic conditions. The Communists themselves were apparently shocked at how many peasants signed up to join their committees and militias - allowing them to seize wide swaths of ammunition and weapons from extremely understaffed local police (who saw much of their best forces deployed to Northeast India or the border with Pakistan). In a matter of days, a large militia army had managed to establish self-rule in most of the countryside in upper West Bengal. Although they were unable to siege Siliguri itself, omnipresent Communist presence in the countryside around the famous redoubt made extensive rail sabotage omnipresent, grinding commercial traffic through the railroad hub to a halt.

This did not go unnoticed. Indian military planners panicked, believing that the security of all of Northeast India was critically threatened. Indeed, as rebels in the various separatist movements in the northeast learned of the Siliguri siege, they stepped up their attacks, believing that this was their best chance ever. What forces could be redeployed from the border (of which there were not that many given difficult logistics) was quickly sent to crush the rebellion. However, forces were not as mobile as expected. In an widely controversial order, PM Gandhi signed off on the use of airpower (as was being used to decent effect in the Sri Lanka war) to bomb rebel villages around Siliguri and other regions in "Communist rebellion." However, the nature of the rebellion was to establish de facto village governments, turning wide swaths of rural east and northeast India into de facto targets. The Indian Air Force worked overtime, essentially bombing Indian territory, in a move that outraged many Indians and only caused more to flock to the red banner.

The Siliguri Rebellion would ultimately go down in history as one of the "Three Great Disasters" to strike India that year. Although itself not the only Communist rebellion in India at the time, the fact that it took place in an extremely strategic location, was backed by intellectuals who wrote quite a great deal about it, and played a major role in future events to come would make it emblematic to many of Indian Communist radicalism.

 

[TastySpam]

Operation Chengiz Khan
​

The strategic axis of an all-out war in South Asia never favored the Pakistanis. East Pakistan, or Bengal, was surrounded on all three sides by India. Indian troops were arrayed on each side of the border, ready to engulf the Communist stronghold in the outbreak of any war scenario. The Pakistani military always concentrated the bulk of their forces in West Pakistan, where the bulk of Pakistan's territorial disputes with India were (such as, but not limited to the Kashmir crisis that sparked the original war between the two). However, West Pakistan was in many ways a mess. The Communists had always been fairly unpopular in West Pakistan, with millions of refugees fleeing bouts of revolutionary violence that exploded. Operation Durga's Trident had ground daily life in the West to a halt - with most of the calls for revenge coming from the East.

Prominent Pakistani exiles in India, such as the former general Ayub Khan, informed his Indian supporters that the only way to defend East Pakistan would be in West Pakistan, an understanding which slowly permeated the entire armed forces of India. After all, the numerical superiority of India's armed forces seem so overwhelmingly, only in the West could it face a defeat based on tactical failure. Thus, the impetus was created to avoid such tactical failure. As it was understood, as long as they could hold the line in the West, East Pakistan would eventually fall, causing the regime to sue for peace. Significant Indian artillery and infantry formations were moved to the border with East Pakistan, with the doctirne emphasizing slow deliberate advances with artillery support in order to try to pulverize Pakistani army formations outside of cities - before slowly advancing into those cities. The extremely dense population of East Pakistan clearly necessitated these tactics.

The problem of course, is that the Pakistan which most Indians remembered had long since ceased to exist. Almost a decade had passed since the start of the Sifar Revolution. Estimates of the death toll varied, but it was generally understood to be in the hundreds of thousands. The olds had been smashed from statues, to old palaces, to even historical architecture. Even Urdu itself had been smashed. Being associated with "Indo-Aryan imperialism", Urdu was romanized and saw several Persian influences removed, which ironically brought it much closer to Hindi, something Pakistani authorities furiously denied even though it was true. The repeated governmental intrusions into Urdu made it relatively unpopular to many (since saying it in the wrong way opened people up to reprisal) - which ironically made English the de facto lingua franca of most West Pakistani elites. Bengali saw a rather lambasted romanization movement pushed by young radicals, but it was generally harder to say it in the "wrong way". Furthermore, demographic shifts (more refugees left West Pakistan than East Pakistan) quickly made Bengali the dominant language of Pakistan, alongside English.

This general program was more popular in East Pakistan than the West for many many reasons, something which Indian planners did not quite catch. Furthermore, with the bulk of the population in the East, the Pakistani popular militias were much much much larger in the East. Although the Pakistani Army was somewhat more numerous in the West, the popular militias were so numerous in the East, that the Pakistanis had in fact significantly more troops in the East in a significantly smaller territory.

Furthermore, the Pakistanis were receiving far more foreign tutelage than expected. One of the benefits of the joint nuclear program was that it also became a pretense for the nations of the Warsaw Pact, generally too scared to engage in air drills in actual Europe, to basically spend their time in Pakistan training. The last major war which saw significant air assets on both sides was the Three Years War - and that was a semi-limited war that saw relatively few attacks on air bases themselves. The North China-Israel war saw little such combat - nor did the UK-South Greece war. The Indonesian War and Burma War saw pretty one-sided aerial theaters. And so on and so on. As such, it was not as well understood how vulnerable unprotected air bases could be.

On a sleepy morning in 1968, waves of Pakistani MiG-21 and Sukhoi-Su-7BMs crossed into India - not from West Pakistan as widely expected, but urban airfields in hyper-densely populated East Pakistan and much to India shock - from Burma - in either case often cleverly disguised by civilian buildings. Significant Indian bomber assets had been moved from West Pakistan and even Ceylon to East Pakistan to bomb Communist revolutionaries to smithereens (which they did fairly effectively), but Indian fighter coverage was still heavily slanted in the West. The result was catastrophic. What few Indian fighters managed to make it into the air were knocked out almost immediately, as East German-produced airfield destroying bombs rendered most airfields in Eastern India inoperable. Bombers on the ground were blown up on the ground - and whatever few managed to make it into the air rarely lasted long.

In the span of roughly two days, wave after wave of SU-7s peppered air fields in Eastern India, destroying hundreds of planes (one estimate up to 600 airplanes), representing a large majority of the entire Indian Air Force, and essentially rendering inoperable every major air base in Eastern India. By the end of the second day, it was assessed that the Pakistani Air Force had achieved total superiority over Bengal and Northeast India, causing the Pakistanis to start targeting every Indian railway connecting Northeast India to the rest of the country. Although the rail hubs in Siliguri survived, the rails around the fortress did not. Communist revolutionary groups, hunted down by India's expert anti-guerilla operations, cheered as bombers came to their rescue.

The Indian Army had mustered around 360,000 men to surround the borders of East Pakistan. In contrast, the East Pakistanis only had around 130,000 regular soldiers (out of a total Pakistani army of around 290,000), but they were supported by around 130,000 popular militias, some of which had received significant training in Burma. The coup de grace came when due to complicated factional politics in the increasingly labyrinthine world of Burmese political struggles, the more moderate white flags encouraged the more adventurist red flags to join in the war simply to get rid of them.

Obviously the borders were significantly guarded, but the main concentration of troops was clearly organized in preparation for an offensive into East Bengal. Furthermore, significant assets were tired down in combatting both Communist rebels as well as various ethnic rebels in regions like Nagaland, Tripura, and Mizoram. Although most of the rebels were non-Communist, they had a line of communication with the Communists in Burma as they were their primary arms suppliers through the Burmese jungle.

Although Indian army troops rapidly switched to the defensive and prepared the best they could, the situation became quite daunting. The Pakistanis had total air superiority, Burmese militants flooded in from the border into a much more weakly defended back in cooperation with various ethnic militias, their armies had no viable supply lines, and they had mere hours to quickly switch to a defensive posture, build secondary lines, and entrench themselves before the Pakistanis assaulted. Indian army concentrations on the Western border of East Pakistan were able to supplied to some extent, but the other groupings alongside the northern and eastern borders were put in one of the worst positions a major army grouping had been put in since the Second World War - and superior Indian training held back relatively poorly trained Pakistani militias until ammo ran dry (supply by the sky and by the seas was also impossible - and the situation in Northeast India was essentially non-salvageable). The total collapse of the army corps in those sectors was inevitable as soon as regular Pakistani forces joined the fray (which they did late, to minimize losses.) Within a week, one after another, Indian army corps trapped in Northeast India surrendered, totaling somewhere between 250,000-300,000 soldiers - or almost a third of the entire Indian Armed Forces.

All in all, India retained significant numerical superiority over Pakistan - but those numbers were disproportionately tied up in West Pakistan - or Ceylon. In West Bengal, the numerical superiority had fallen to overwhelmingly favor Pakistan. This was unsurprisingly unanimously seen as a catastrophe in India, the second of three great disasters to befall India that year. Shock fell upon the Indian war cabinet as several generals urged the Prime Minister to desperately shift troops from Ceylon and West Pakistan to the east. She approved the request for Ceylon (leaving only barely enough to hold the line) - but to their shock, denied their request with regards to West Pakistan. They would be given another order entirely - to advance. They had prepped an offensive for too long to simply throw it away to defend the east. The Prime Minister simply told the generals to make do in the east. She had seen thousands of West Pakistani refugees flood into India by the day - and had long since decided to end the bloody Marxist experiment to the west, an extremely fateful decision for both nations.

In the capitals of the West, diplomats and strategists were in dismay over this outcome, but not inclined to panic. It was a disastrous start to a war, but in their view, the Indians would be paying the price, so they simply didn't care. Furthermore, they were confident superior Indian numbers and materials would grind down the Pakistanis in a matter of time. In some sense they were right...but in others, they were not.