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

TastySpam · May 12, 2020

A Game of Thrones

Perhaps no region saw its politics dominated by the diverging political interests of monarchical figures than a somewhat war-torn region of the world, French Indochina. Despite being Europe's leading republican state, the French colonial empire more or less ruled through all of its Southeast Asian dominions indirectly through monarchs in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. As the French Empire receded from Asia rather rapidly during the Three Years War and the Algerian War, all three monarchies had somehow survived. During the Three Years War, the French grudgingly had earlier agreed to the return of the relatively popular Duy Tan to Vietnam, giving the unpopular Central Government of Vietnam a huge boost in popular legitimacy. The French Empire seemed like it would ensure in Southeast Asia - until a few royals made their moves.

By 1954, the left-wing United Issarak Front led by Son Ngoc Minh controlled essentially two-fifths of the country. With French troops busy in Vietnam at first and then scaling down their troop presence in the region, French colonial authorities in Cambodia grew increasingly worried. Although Cambodia had officially declared independence in 1953, French officials were still very influential on the ground, causing great worry about the UIF threat. King Sihanouk (who was ironically placed onto the throne by the French, who thought him a pliable puppet), increasingly fearing that the Communist insurgency would triumph, decided to completely go over the heads of his French masters, negotiating directly with UIF leaders, in particular Tou Samouth. Although the Viet Minh preferred to treat Sihanouk kindly in hopes that he would be a neutralist leader, the Cambodian Communists were willing to bargain more harshly, given the failure of the Viet Minh to really seize much territory outside of the mountains of Vietnam. Sihanouk eventually pulled out of negotiations with the UIF, after the UIF demanded that the Communist Party of Kampuchea be allowed to compete in fully fair elections. Although Sihanouk agreed in principle - he was unable to provide any assurances that this would happen. As Communist forces continued to advance in the countryside, Prince Norodom Phurissara, a cousin of Sihanouk, maneuvered his way into the position of Prime Minister, as many in the ruling Democratic Party thought that the left-leaning Phurissara would be better negotiate with the Communists. Going over the head of the King, Phurissara covertly bargained with the UIF, essentially agreeing to their demands for a fair and free election.

Sihanouk surprisingly did not respond with rage, given that he actually liked his cousin and knew him from a young age, despite their political differences. Agreeing to disagree, Sihanouk accepted the peace deal, which also required that the Cambodians withdraw from the French Union. Indeed, almost immediately after the Soviet invasion of Finland, forcing a further diversion of French troops, King Sihanouk declared that Cambodia would be leaving the French Union, outraging both the French and the Americans, who were seemingly powerless to stop him. A pragmatist, Sihanouk moved forward with an alliance with his cousin Phurissara, whereupon Phurissara would support his internal agenda of "Buddhist socialism" - which included constitutional monarchy, women's suffrage, public education, land reform (but no collective farming), and large public works. Phurissara's Democratic Party defeated both the right-wing Khmer Renovation Party and the left-wing Communist Party in the 1956 elections, keeping the Communists out of government despite having friendly relationships.

With little money to build his infrastructure programs, Sihanouk went on an international tour looking for aid. He was happily received by President Chiang Kai-Shek of the Republic of China, but a week after returning in triumph, the KMT reneged on all of its promises, much to his fury and consternation. He applied to the French, British, Americans, and whoever he could find, but was repeatedly turned down. He quickly began to realize that under French insistence (with support from President Russell), the Western powers were essentially treating his regime as persona non grata. The KMT was not opposed to Sihanouk in any sense, though they actually relented because of anger not from France, but from Thailand, a key partner that saw Sihanouk as inculcating Communism. One country seemed particularly kind to Sihanouk however - Communist Burma and to a lesser extent, their friends in North China. He quickly struck up a close relationship with Zhou Enlai (who had come with Mao to Burma but stayed behind), the head of the Chinese military mission in Burma (officially known as the Yunnanese People's Liberation Front), which was largely stuck in Burma because they had no actual way to get back to North China. The YPLF quickly became an indispensable ally of the Burmese government, because Zhou Enlai was a clever diplomat who tried to stay neutral in any Burmese power affairs. YPLF troops quickly grew to monopolize the opium trade in the Golden Triangle, sharing such revenues with the Communist Burmese, making them ironically a de facto power of their own, linking North China and Burma together. The YPLF was also instrumental to the Communist Burmese defeating the Nationalist Burmese remnants in North Burma, especially as many ethnic minority groups preferred YPLF influence to Burmese control (due to perceived ethnocentrism of a Bamar-dominated central Burmese government). The slow fall of the Nationalist Burmese remnants in North Burma left the Nationalist Burmese with only a tiny sliver of land in the Tanintharyi Region (defended by the Royal Thai government). Tanintharyi used to be controlled by Thailand centuries ago, leaving many to believe that the Thais were slowly integrating Nationalist Burma into their nation.

With Burmese and North Chinese support (Burmese funding, North Chinese engineers), Sihanouk returned triumphant from Rangoon, sparking alarms in the heads of Western governments. By 1957, the new McCarthy administration in the United States had seen enough. To the Central Intelligence Agency, Cambodia seemed to be openly aligning with the Communist Bloc. Dap Chhuon, a right-wing warlord in Cambodia, joined with Cambodian intellectual Son Ngoc Thanh and his Khmer Serei militia, closely supported by French-aligned militias and mercenaries from the Republic of Cochinchina (as well as ethnic Cambodians from Cochinchina, of which there are many). The King of Thailand (and his right-wing Prime Minister, Sarit Thanarat) signed off, as did French President de Gaulle and even Chinese President Chiang. Notably, the King of Laos refused.

Shortly after Dap Chhuon started a rebellion in Northwest Cambodia to distract Royal Cambodian forces, the Khmer Serei invaded from Cochinchina with French support. The effect was immediate. Royal Cambodian forces were caught totally off-guard, causing prominent politician Lon Nol to defect at a critical moment. Fleeing for their lives, Phurissara and Sihanouk fled the capital as coup forces approached. Phurissara was able to get out in time, but Sihanouk's plane was intercepted at the airport. The King was placed under house arrest, but the Communist Party of Cambodia, as well as left-leaning politicians aligned with the ruling Democrat Party, formed the Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea (GRUNK), based on Rangoon, which sponsored a Communist insurgency in Cambodia itself. Son Ngoc Thanh, a former member of the UIF (with some nationalist credentials) who opposed the Communist majority was declared the new President of the Khmer Republic, which immediately faced what was rapidly spilling into a civil war. Arguably, it was widely believed that the Khmer Republic would have collapsed in 1957 if not for the end of the Three Years War, which allowed French forces to quickly return to Cambodia, which rejoined the French Union. Even as the peasantry widely sided with the Khmer Rouge (as right-wing peasants revered the monarchy and left-wing peasants just became Communists), the regime managed to hold on in the critical year of 1957.

The result of the Cambodian coup was to spark panic across the border in the Kingdom of Laos, where Prince Souvanna Phouma and Prince Souphanouvong had agreed on a stable coalition government to keep Laos neutral in the increasingly bloody proxy wars between the capitalist and communist worlds. Souphanouvong's sympathy was with the Communist world, but with the Viet Minh largely not seizing control of Vietnam as planned, he saw neutralism as a benefit to the Viet Minh. Under the neutralist policy of the Laotian government, the Royal Lao Army would neither help nor hinder Viet Minh forces operating on the Vietnam-Laos border, which in practice was a huge boon for the Viet Minh (temporary sanctuary was very important for them), because the Laotians would object to Royal Vietnamese military offensives into Laotian territory. The King of Laos, Savang Vatthana, simply wanted peace and attempted to get all political factions in Laos to cooperate. However, with Burmese supply trains going through Laotian territory to support both the Khmer Rouge and the Viet Minh, international attention slowly began to fall on Laos, and in particular, the right-wing prince Boun Oum, who was known to dislike the ruling neutralist government...

TastySpam · May 14, 2020

The Inconvenient War

No more war befuddled dreamers of a united Western anti-communist alliance than the Tunisian Civil War, which emerged after the French had handed command of the Tunisian Army to King Muhammad VIII al-Amin. Interesting, the Tunisian Civil War was perhaps the least bloody civil war of the decolonization of European Empires, with most "battles" being shooting matches between small squads of gunmen in the streets, retaliatory bombings, and other small-scale violence. An estimated 3,000 Tunisians would die in the long conflict, with another 40,000 wounded. Although serious, the death toll came nowhere close to the First Algerian War, which may have killed over 200,000 people, or the catastrophic Indonesian War, which probably killed over a million people. Regardless, the war was extremely inconvenient for all parties for one simple reason: because of who lined up behind each side.

The French had naturally supported the Royalists and the Soviets were supporting the Republicans. However, one surprising power was also supporting the Republicans - the nearby Kingdom of Libya, still furious at the French Republic for refusing to vacate Fezzan. This was a problem, because the King of Libya was a valuable partner to the British in the war in Egypt - whereas the King of Tunisia was a valued partner in the war in Algeria. Thus, the Libyans were funneling British aid towards the Republicans while the French backed the King, causing the two nations to be deeply embarrassed about this, especially the anticommunist government in the United Kingdom. This was grudgingly tolerated for several years, as neither side ever got an upper-hand. Prime Minister Bourguiba refused the King's attempts to dismiss him, declaring himself President, which created the truly bizarre situation where a President and King reigned only a mile from each other, both claiming to be the legitimate leader of the nation. They issued contradictory orders that otherwise ground Tunisian government to a stop, as their supporters lobbed bombs and bullets at each other.

Amazingly, in the midst of this, relatively functional elections to the Tunisian Assembly would take place, with both sides bombing each other to try to scare away voters from the other side, but always pulling back not to inflict TOO much violence (or else they'd jeopardize their own support). Really, the vast majority of British and French wanted the war to just go away, but the French were afraid that vacating Fezzan would show "weakness.". The French had earlier vacated Morocco entirely in hopes that it would quell "Arab nationalism", but it only further inflamed passions in Algeria. Furthermore, Fezzan was becoming an increasingly common route for taking Algerian oil shipments out of Southern Algeria, given the excessive violence in Northern Algeria. This set of affairs would continue up until 1963, when the French would shatter the status quo by entering in the "Three Power Conference" with the Soviet Union. At the same time, the new King of Tunisia, Husain III, ascended the throne after his predecessor and...cousin of his father, died of old age. Husain III was much less enamored with the French than his father and like Idris I, feared the Algerian Communists far more than the Nationalists. King Husain III made a famous trip to Tripoli, where he reached an accord with King Idris.

Both parties agreed to both recognize Libyan claims on Fezzan. The two nations established very close defense relationships with each other, throwing their support to the FLN in Algeria, which rejected the peace agreement with France and continued to wage war on both France and the Communist government of Algeria. The Libyans in particular believed that the independence of Algeria as negotiated in the agreement with the French ultimately doomed attempts to take militarily acquire Fezzan, as it was now a key link between the French Sahara (which the French kept) and French Equatorial Africa. The Moroccans quickly offered support the new "Benghazi Pact", a distinctly anti-Communist alliance against the PCA in Algeria, although they did not openly join out of consideration to their friends in Spain (which had good relations with France). Finally, the Libyans stopped supporting the Republicans and began supporting the Royalists, which alongside an end to Soviet aid to the Republicans, was viewed to be a coup de grace to the movement. Bowing to pressure, Bourguiba agreed to lay down his arms and take an amnesty, which really just for him meant a return to normal civilian politics where he would continue to oppose the monarchy. The French had succeeded in extricating themselves from a war in Algeria while keeping several coastal enclaves of French settlers, as well as the oil resources in the Sahara in what was seen as a shocking diplomatic coup, but they had done so at the cost of alienating most of their North African allies. The power that naturally immediately swooped in to sign commercial and military agreements with Libya and Tunisia would be of course, the other power in the Mediterranean - Italy, which despite its universally mocked performance in the Three Years War, continued to expand its influence.

The rise of the Benghazi Pact meant huge changes in another nation. In theory, the Kingdom of Egypt would be a prime example of a nation to join the new Benghazi Pact, fighting an insurgency movement by both the Muslim Brotherhood and HADITU. In 1963, a week after the crushing defeat of the Royal Navy at the Battle of Souda, the governments of Libya and Tunisia officially withdrew recognition of the Royalist Kingdom of Egypt, something Idris had always been wanting to do because he knew the Egyptian monarchy was utterly loathed and Egyptian refugees piling up in Eastern Libya were turning into a genuine security threat, angry at Libyan support of Royalist Egypt. King Fuad II was an irrelevant leader, being only 10 years old in 1963, as the Egyptian government remained under the control of various generals that circled in and out in a rather dysfunctional process (as none of them were capable of doing the impossible - establishing peace in Egypt). In many ways, the association of the Royalist Jordanians and Egyptians with Britain and by extension Israel doomed any hopes of acquiring popular support. Idris and Husain viewed the rebels in Egypt as not particularly dangerous because they did not view the Communist element as "dominant". Although the Communist HADITU was a member of the "National Front". it was widely believed that the Muslim Brotherhood was the strongest element. The interesting coalition was made possible by Sayyid Qutb, a prominent intellectual associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, who criticized Communist collective farms as a violation of human nature, but still urged Muslim Brotherhood leaders to work with them. Notably, Beria's Soviet Union generously rushed him funding upon taking power, including paying for foreign language translations of his book, Social Justice in Islam.[1] Qutb was not pro-Soviet, but he certainly viewed the West as the greatest enemy. Part of this was strategic - HADITU had originally been divided on whether "Zionism" or "reactionary Arab monarchies" were the leading enemy, but seeming cooperation between Israel and the Arab monarchies of Jordan and Egypt more or less smoothed all over internal divisions among the Egyptian Communist movement, making them too strong to ignore. The two highest-ranked survivors of the Egyptian Revolution, Khaled Mohieddin and Kamal el-Din Hussein, both supported the alliance, functioning as a third pole of support in the National Front. As they were popular with the masses due to their participation in the Egyptian Revolution, Mohieddin and Hussein served as President and Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Egypt, thus meeting directly with Idris and Husain.

At least by of 1963, the forces arrayed against the British and Royalists in Egypt stopped scheming about how to win the war - and more about what they would do after they won - and how to work out the incredibly deep political divides within the movement. The experience of Algeria and Indonesia ,which broke out into civil war as soon as the French and Dutch left, was a searing reminder to Egyptian leaders, actually creating a strong impetus to peacefully settle disputes, since it was widely believed that the civil wars in Algeria and Indonesia were a result of "Western Zionist meddling." And nobody wanted to look like any of those things in Egyptian politics.
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[1] OTL, the Eisenhower Administration paid for this. ITL, the USA isn't willing to back anti-colonial non-Communist regimes until the rise of Kennedy in 1957, so Laventry Beria starts sponsoring Qutb in 1955.

TastySpam · Jun 9, 2020

The Boat People

The triumph of Communist forces in Korea was a bitter triumph indeed. North Chinese forces had to desperately withdraw almost as quickly as they had aided the Korean People's Army in conquering the South, leaving a shell KPA (heavily damaged in the initial South Korean invasion) to govern a newly conquered South. The end-result of this and the creation of the unified People's Republic of Korea was largely a result of the anarchy that exploded across the South. There simply weren't enough KPA troops to guard the Korean coastline and govern South Korea. The military leadership of the DPRK decided to prioritize stopping a foreign invasion over actually establishing any semblance of order. Guerilla troops belonging to the former Korean National Army went underground with guerilla warfare, adding to the fire as criminal groups often set up small fiefdoms in their localities. Most police were trained by the Japanese and tied to the GKR regime, causing many of them to outright join either right-wing guerilla groups or join less ideologically motivated crime groups.

In general, living standards collapsed in South Korea as the KPA requisitioned food to support both their forces and to supply withdrawing Chinese troops. Small-scale famine broke out across the South, sparking a mad rush of Korean refugees into the small island of Jeju. Jeju, itself having revolted against the Greater Korean Republic was filled with angry left-wing natives who detested the right-wing government. Moreover, Jeju was a fairly small islands and the flood of Korean refugees fleeing "Chinese Communism" vastly stripped the ability of the GKR regime to hold them. After a certain point, the government simply shut off more refugees. However, anarchy still reigned over much of the interior of South Korea. The North Korean regime, outnumbered, decided it wasn't worth it to use limited military resources to stop Koreans from fleeing. After all, they believed only a few anticommunist fringes would flee.

That was not the result. The conquest itself wasn't particularly bloody because the Korean National Army had collapsed so fast, but the anarchy was destructive. South Korea was significantly already poorer than the North - and it was clear that the North Korean regime was prioritizing the reconstruction of North Korea instead (as their capital, Seoul, had utterly been destroyed by South Korean forces). What they had expected to be a trickle turned into a complete flood, as millions of Koreans, also rejected from Jeju, fled abroad in rickety boats. The President in 1956, Richard Russell, immediately stated that it was the policy to prevent any Korean refugees from reaching the United States (as he did not desire non-white refugees to settle in the United States), causing both of his opponents in the upcoming Presidential election, Douglas MacArthur and Joseph McCarthy, to lambaste him as both a white supremacist and "red supremacist." However, the United States Navy was still ordered to pick up any boats and help them transfer to a third country. After all, it was truly politically impossible to force refugees to return to a Communist bloc that the United States had just entered a war with. Eventually, one of the first acts of the McCarthy Administration was to sign the Immigration Act of 1957 (later administered by the Kennedy Administration), which allowed some refugees to resettle in the United States. However, as things stood in 1956, there weren't many nations willing to take them in. Although the Casey government was in the middle of dismantling it, the White Australia Policy was still mostly in effect. New Zealand was too small. Two nations largely stood up.

Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke was a radical far-right wing leader who in his previous stint in government had overseen war crimes in Manchukuo (including the use of Korean slave labor), signed the declaration of war on the United States. Just months ago, he led the bloody crushing of protests in killed thousands of Japanese in the "Tokyo Massacre" and hastily constructed the infamous Tokyo Wall between West and East Tokyo. It was this Kishi Nobusuke who stunned the Japanese political sphere and most of the world by accepting an open border for Koreans fleeing "Communist oppression" in light of "historic ties between the Japanese and Korean people." Some argue that his anti-Communist convictions were significantly stronger than any other beliefs he had - others argue that Kishi was never a committed ideologue under the Imperial Japanese system and now simply wanted to turn over a "new leaf" given the new politics of the era. In 1945 at the height of the Pacific War, 2.5 million Koreans lived in Japan, mostly brought over to work in Japanese factories (as more and more Japanese were drafted to die in an increasingly futile war). 2 million slowly trickled back in South Korea between 1945-1956, but the collapse of South Korea led the vast majority of them to return to Japan. Moreover, most of those additional refugees then chose Japan as their destination since they were offering. Coincidentally, Chiang Kai-Shek of the Republic of China was also offering, but most Koreans chose the nation that was much less poor and not at war. The flood of refugees into Japan meant there were around 5 million Koreans in South Japan, out of a population of 65 million South Japanese (compared to 15 million North Japanese). The Japanese political sphere was shocked, but the United States was not shocked, President Russell having promised the Japanese extensive economic aid in exchange for taking these refugees (so they would not have to).

An interesting legal problem arose as a result. After 1945, the Japanese state rejected all claims of any sovereignty whatsoever on Korea, which meant transferring the Imperial citizenship of all Koreans into Korean citizenship. This was welcomed by many Koreans, largely because Japanese intervention in Manchuria was often justified on the basis of "protecting Imperial citizens", which ironically generally referred to Koreans who had fled poverty in Korea and actually loathed the Japanese Empire. A condition for any refugee settling in Japan was simply - they had to choose Republic of Korea citizenship over DPRK citizenship, which highlighted much to the embarrassment of the Communist bloc, many of those that had fled weren't even South Koreans, but North Koreans from destroyed Seoul. However, this meant that none of them were true immigrants. Indeed, Prime Minister Nobusuke shepherded a bill through the Parliament guaranteeing "temporary residency for all Republic of Korea citizens until the liberation of the mainland." This meant that Japan actually had more far more ROK citizens than the actual ROK (which had around 2 million Koreans).

Some of the Koreans actually found a fairly easy niche for themselves, returning to their old homes before the end of World War II, but many of them had few useful skills, were poor, and were unfamiliar with their new nation. Crime rates unsurprisingly exploded and although few Japanese actually called for their expulsion, most were deeply concerned about the issue, regularly listing the "refugee issue" as one of their top concerns. Discrimination and conflict were commonplaces. Interestingly, violent far-right groups grew, but for a very unexpected reason. While prejudice was commonplace, South Japan had actually instituted some of the strictest hate speech laws in the liberal world - it was extremely taboo under Japanese political culture to make openly disparaging remarks about any group except through dozens of coded euphemisms such as "crime problems regarding temporary refugee status individuals." Moreover, after the rise of the centrist Prime Minister Miki, the right-opposition led by Nobusuke wasn't really in a position to criticize him on the refugee issue. The real reason far-right gangs (the ones used to help crush the Tokyo Spring) grew was that many were closely tied with Yakuza groups, which actually registered a tremendous spike in recruitment because of the huge numbers of poor, unemployed young Korean men, who joined for more pragmatic than ideological or nationalistic reasons. Conservative Japanese businessmen were loathe to actually criticize this - after all, many of them relied on Yakuza members to collect debts and evict delinquent tenants. Ironically, right-wing politicians trying to openly spread ethnic hatred would often fall victim to tattooed far-right gangs who would club them for "disrespecting the Emperor", which while ingratiating the refugees to the Japanese political class, only further fueled widespread popular stereotypes of Korean criminality.

The situation in Korea would only calm down once Chinese appointed military governors, desperate over a rapidly collapsing situation in North China itself, withering under American assault, decided to go over the heads of North Korean Communist officials and establish political order as soon as possible through any means as possible, directly negotiating with left-wing South Korean politicians for a compromise that would create the People's Republic of Korea, a Communist-dominated, but not explicitly Communist state that on its paper was a multi-party democracy (though not in practice). With most of those most fervently opposed to the new regime having left, the remaining police and army units more or less accepted the new system, helping the unified state restore order. Although the North Koreans had their complaints, they were largely satisfied with the process.

TastySpam · Jun 11, 2020

Well, I guess we're back to normal operating order. Probably going to do an update on Pakistan - and then go back to talking about stuff going down in the USSR and the Mediterranean War.

Deal with the Devil

Menachem Begin was faced with an interesting dilemma. The Syrian invasion dealt a death blow to British hopes in Egypt, as Israeli troops were hastily withdrawn to desperately defend the small Jewish state. And survival was no great reward: now the state of Israel was flooded with Jewish refugees from Northern Israel, which had lost almost half of its Jewish population to massacres and expulsions by the victorious Syrians. Israel seemed irrevocably wounded - and with the Kingdom of Egypt, not friendly towards Israel but not also dedicated to destroying it, widely expected to fall to a far more radical anti-Western movement, the future of the small Jewish state seemed very precarious. But the same issue that Menachem Begin took advantage of to save Israel - the Sino-Syrian split, seemed to be tearing apart the entire Eastern bloc. The Syro-Israeli War lasted roughly between May of 1960 to the end of the Battle of Haifa in February of 1961, more than two years before the August Days, two years of great peril for Israel.

The year and a half after the end of the Syro-Israeli War was a time of political triumph for Begin, who was hailed as Israel's savior and enjoyed sky-high approval ratings, especially because the general public was not aware of what he had done to get the Syrians off their backs, allowing him to institute radical free market reforms in Israel. In addition, Begin in fact had correctly guessed that the Syrians desired Israeli military technology and prepare for a strike against Jordan, something he was more or less fine with it, since he figured it was better them than Israel. Furthermore, he believed that the Syrians didn't actually have the capability to seriously defeat the British Army, one of the most technologically advanced and well-trained armies in the world, having proved its prowess in both the Second World War and the Three Years War. Begin was much less impressed by the Syrian Army, as he generally believed that the Syrian Army was both smaller and less competent. In fact, he feared the People's Volunteer Army from North China far more the Syrians, because they had almost managed to overrun Haifa even without Syrian support. Although the loss of Northern Israel was a catastrophe for Israel, the fact that a tiny Israeli army outnumbered in armor 15-1 by the Syrians (and closer to 3-1 in infantry numbers) managed to hold out for so long generally led Begin to believe that the Syrians were simply not a threat to Israel given Israel's rapid militarization after the Syro-Israeli War - let alone the mighty British Empire. If the Syrians smashed into Britain, he assumed this would prove to be a costly and bloody mistake for the Syrians, removing yet another threat to Israel and allowing Israel to concentrate on the growing threat to the southwest (the expected regime change in Egypt). Furthermore, the Syrians were fighting in a second front. As a result, the decision was made personally by Begin for the Mossad to openly aid Syrian intelligence services in supplying fake information to the British, obscuring the fact that the Syrians were preparing for a massive assault on the British-backed Arab Federation.

After the end of the Syro-Israeli War, the Syrians had thrown their army immediately supporting the Iraqi Nationalists under Fuad al-Rikabi. Most of the weapons transferred to the Syrians were mechanized, armored, and aircraft technology, including long-range missiles, which didn't seem particularly helpful in the actual war in Iraq, which was largely waged between infantry militias in close urban areas. Moreover, the Nationalists had attracted the ire of more or less every other faction in Iraq, including the British-backed Royalists and the American-backed Islamists, who more or less had an informal understanding that they would focus on the Syrian-backed Nationalists first. The North Chinese, stung by the defeat in Haifa, more or less just adopted an entirely defensive posture in Judeopalestine and Iraqi Kurdistan, refusing to help any of the other factions, including Syrian-backed Nationalists, in an ironic echo of how the Syrians refused to back the PLA in the Battle of Haifa. Syrian intervention in Iraq played a major role in shifting the war - the Islamists, Nationalists, and Royalists had all expended significant manpower and materials expelling the Communists and the North Chinese from Baghdad - who had conveniently left behind most of their heavy equipment in their frenzied retreat to Kurdistan. The Nationalists ended up seizing most of those weapons because almost half of the ethnic Arab officers from the Communists defected to the Nationalists in the aftermath of the "Second Mongol Sack of Baghdad", bringing with them access to where such materials were stored. The Nationalists had already gained a huge advantage in weaponry before the Syrians explicitly entered the war - the Syrian entrance turned the advantage overwhelming.

President Kennedy began to see the intervention, which he had inherited from his predecessor, as rather problematic - and began to quietly plot for an exit strategy. The American CIA cleverly guessed that upon a Nationalist victory, pro-Islamist refugees would flood into nearby Kuwait, giving the Islamists sufficient public support to seize control of Kuwait. Welding together Kuwait, Al-Hasa, and Qatif would give America nearly direct control of most of the Middle East's oil resources outside of Iran. The large Shia population of Bahrain was also seen as an asset. President Kennedy was increasingly infuriated at the refusal of Western European nations to decolonize, something he believed would lead to the rise of Communist anti-colonial leaders. He believed that covertly seizing control of most of Great Britain's oil resources would allow the United States to impose its political will on Western Europe, forcing them to relinquish control of their colonies to indigenous anti-Communist leaders. The French cooperating with the Soviet Union to preserve their colonies in Algeria was the final straw in the political coffin of the American Europhiles, causing them to step up aid to the Islamists - but on the goal of seizing control of Kuwait and Bahrain upon defeat in Iraq. In contrast, the British also stepped up their aid to Jordan, the main sponsor of the Royalists, hoping to still win the war. The Royal Jordanian Army became one of the best equipped armies in the Middle East, essentially on par with the Syrians.

In conjunction with the failure to conquer Haifa and the flight from Baghdad, the leadership of the PRC began to universally regard their Middle Eastern foray as a costly disaster (considering the loss of thousands of lives, tanks, and airplanes), but blamed the failure primarily on "ideologically suspect allies", which was not wrong considering the breakdown in relations with Syria. North Chinese military aid to the rebels in Egypt - but were targeted with the explicit purpose of strengthening Egyptian leftists vis-a-vis the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of a revolution they also anticipated would be successful. It seemed in the early 1960's, every nation thought the Kingdom of Egypt was doomed (including its own leaders, who slowly transferred their assets and extended family abroad) except the United Kingdom itself. PVA commanders were ordered to not "escalate" the wars in Iraq and Israel, essentially entrenching themselves in Judeopalestine and Northern Iraq. Amusingly, as a result of the North Chinese and Iraqi Communist retreat into Kurdistan, Kurds politically dominated three political entities - the Iraqi Republic, the Federal People's Republic of Turkey, and the Republic of Mahabad (a Soviet puppet state from 1946-1956, when it was once again placed under Iranian control as an autonomous region during the Soviet-Iranian detente) - none of them with the Kurds directly referenced. The Iranian Kurds generally didn't hold much in common with the other two - though there were efforts to ensure Kurdish unity by creating a "People's Federation of Turkey-Iraq", but this was seen as implausible in light of tensions between the USSR and North China.

In addition, Begin understood that the existence of Judeopalestine in the North was essentially a buffer between Israel and Syria - the Syrians had gotten surprisingly little from the whole affair besides domestic mass support. In a sense, from a pure realpolitik perspective, this actually made the two of them natural allies. Tlass was nowhere as Marxist-leaning as his predecessor - and although willing to pay lip service to "scientific socialism", didn't really see any need to align himself with any form of Communism. Relations with the USSR were driven merely by a realpolitik trade - the Syrians received military equipment from Beria in exchange for giving the Soviets naval access to the Mediterranean.

Begin's solution to the mass influx of refugees from the North...was to settle them in the Sinai Peninsula, as the Israelis continued to fortify the Suez Canal, having abandoned the rest of Egypt for the British and Royalist Egyptians to take care of. In many ways, the Israeli presence in Egypt was just not helpful in any way whatsoever - the mere fact that the Royalist Egyptians were seen as being aided by the hated Israelis torpedoed their public support. The Israelis, aided generously by the Kennedy Administration, quickly resupplied their army with the help of Americans and French. In particular, very warm trade relations were forged between the Israelis and both the Indians and South Chinese, partly in reaction to the increasing omnipresence of the Pakistani Interservices Agency (ISI) in the Middle East. In fact, the massive intelligence triumph of Syria (who did not have a sophisticated intelligence agency) against the British (who had an incredibly sophisticated intelligence agency) was heavily due to the fact that both the Mossad and ISI, typically at odds, actually covertly cooperated to mislead the British. The Asian trade turned Eilat, a port city alongside the Red Sea, into one of the most important ports for the Israeli economy, causing Israel to invest significant resources in developing a naval presence in the Red Sea. As a reuslt, many such refugees sent to the Sinai Peninsula would settle on the Southern Coast, setting up small businesses to export goods to India and South China. The desire to hold the Sinai led the Israelis to building one of the most heavily fortified borders in the war, hoping to also seize the Suez upon any collapse of the Kingdom of Egypt.

TastySpam · Jan 17, 2020

Mass Immigration in the Early 1960's

In many ways, the 1960's was the first decade in which mass immigration became a major phenomenon affecting major industrialized nations.

In the United States, one of the first acts of President McCarthy in the United States was to sign the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1957, which removed racial, national, and ethnic quotas on immigrants. The original impetus for the bill was to remove any restrictions that would prevent refugees from Yugoslavia from moving to the United States, but it was also quickly decided that racial quotas should be removed entirely, especially in light of close Sino-American relations. Refugee groups that fled to the United States as a result of the Three Years War included Yugoslavs, Finns, Swedes, and anti-Communist Koreans fleeing the conquest of the South by the Seoul government. The most controversial were the Koreans, but widespread anti-Communism overpowered any racial animus, especially in the heydays of Kennedy's Red Scare, when racism and white supremacy were often castigated as being a "treasonous useful idiot for global Marxism." Interestingly, the majority of those Korean refugees were settled in the South, often because segregationist politicians who desperately wanted to appear less-racist often were the first Governors and Mayors to jump at accepting these refugees (and their constituents actually didn't mind that much, as anti-blackness was more strongly motivating).

However, the 1957 INA would not only facilitate mass immigration of anti-Communist refugees. In particular, two booming economies of massive nations with high fertility rates would produce huge numbers of immigrants - namely South China and India. The United Kingdom under the Fyfe Administration notably refused to alter racial quotas on Commonwealth immigrants to the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the right-wing government in Australia backed off on paring away the White Australia Policy when a modest loosening created a huge momentary explosion in immigrants from China and India. As a result, most of these immigrants would head towards New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. The United Kingdom would join these countries however in 1963, when one of the first acts of the George Brown Labour government in the United Kingdom was removing racial quotas on immigration. However, most immigrants to the United Kingdom would be Indian and Caribbean, largely because Chinese emigrants typically chose Hong Kong over London (the economy of Hong Kong boomed alongside the rest of the Guangdong region). Interestingly, very few Americans actually noticed the statistical impact of Indian immigration to the United States, largely because Indians were classified as white by the US Census.

China in particular suffered mass emigration between 1958-1961 during the Great Chinese Famine, especially from the famine-afflicted Southwest (such as Sichuan province, the largest province in China). The KMT government, although deeply embarrassed by Chinese emigration, was unwilling to restrict it out of humanitarian concerns. In addition, the KMT wasn't particularly popular in Southwestern China, the political base of the KMT being the Southern coasts and former CPC regions still under martial law. The only place where South China tried to restrict emigration towards was North China, for fear of the propaganda value. Particularly famine-affected were the Zhuang regions of Southwest China, the Tibetan regions of Sichuan, and Hmong regions of guizhou. Those emigrants often suffered the most, since they were typically even poorer than Chinese emigrants and few countries wished to take them. Most of the poorest emigrants went to Hong Kong (since it was the closest and the British Tory government, while not allowing Chinese emigrants into Britain proper, were not blind to humanitarian concerns and allowed them to emigrate freely to Hong Kong, which then received generous British humanitarian aid). However, the local Chinese residents of Hong Kong, although unhappily but begrudgingly accepting Chinese refugees, went ballistic over the possibility of Hong Kong accepting Tibetan and Zhuang refugees, sparking riots in the city. As a result, British authorities denied them entrance.

Most of those refugees instead were forced to flee across the poorly-guarded and crime-infested jungle border with Communist Burma, often smuggled by pro-Communist drug smugglers (as the Burmese Communist regime openly funded itself with drug trafficking). Although many of those smugglers would be prove cruel and exploitative, at the end of the days, huge numbers of Tibetans, Zhuang, and Hmong were smuggled into Burma. The government of Burma had little interest of taking care of them, but they realized that the North Chinese government would want a propaganda victory, securing more weapon shipments from North China in exchange for helping those refugees safely reach North China, where they were celebrated as "defectors from capitalist-feudalism." Most of the refugees landed directly in crushing poverty (due to the general poverty of North China, but also large rates of drug addiction and sexual assault suffered by smuggled refugees), but at least they escaped famine. Interestingly, the family they left behind would quickly rapidly outstrip these refugees in income and living standards, though it's also arguable many of the families they left behind not have survived had they had these extra mouths to feed. Chinese emigration significantly declined after the famine began ending in 1960, reaching parity with Indian emigration. However, this was still a large number, especially to low-population destination nations.

However, mass immigration was not merely a story of non-Western immigrants to the West. One of the largest recipients of immigrants was France, as hundreds of thousands of Italians packed up from South Italy to move to France. The social democratic government of Italy, while distinctly trying to stay neutral between the two blocs, seriously lost out on economic trade with the rest of Western Europe. In addition, Italy was largely cut off from American aid after pulling out of the Three Years War, and didn't even have functioning trade relations with Yugoslavia, as Yugoslavia criticized Italy breaking its agreement with Yugoslavia but retaining ownership of the entire Trieste region (which due to Yugoslav refugees from the war, was overwhelmingly majority Slovene). Such economic pain largely fell not on prosperous North Italy or leftist-favored central Italy, but rather South Italy, which once again saw mass emigration. In contrast to the past, when most of them chose to go to the New World, most of these emigrants decided to go to France, especially in the large industrial cities. De Gaulle was hostile to non-European immigrants, but he welcomed Italian immigrants.

Moreover, mass immigration was not even just a story of immigrants to the West. The government of North China, plagued with low birthrates that were wildly outshined by the high birthrates of the South, was obsessed with the notion that the South would swarm them with their already superior numbers. North China had barely over 10% of the population of South China and given current birthrates, this was projected to rapidly fall in the low single-digits. Those numbers seemed deeply in congruent with the Maoist People's War, since you need actual people to wage a war. North China's "Three Child Policy", which banned abortion and contraception while including punishments for having less than three children was generally an abject failure and totally abandoned in the Three Years War - contraception access remained very spotty, but it was no longer strictly punished as counter-revolutionary. In those circumstances, it was unsurprising that the North Chinese jumped at the opportunity to receive refugees from the South.

One of Kennedy's goals was to mastermind the total defeat of Communism in Indonesia. The United States, although having agreed to a peaceful division of Indonesia, was generally not very good at sticking to the peace. East Indonesia, while appealing to many peasants and generally implementing a surprisingly successful land reform program, remained loathed by many others, especially because their atheist program was found offensive by many more devout Muslims. US and West-Indonesian-backed Islamist-Nationalist militias organized within East Indonesia in hopes of overthrowing the Communist government reunifying the nation. A Soviet detachment was sent to Indonesia to support the government, but they found victory fleeting. Many Indonesians decided to flee the violence, and as East Indonesia was seen as a "friendly socialist government", large numbers of Indonesian "guest-workers" were brought to North China. A fear was raised that such a move might alter North China's demography in problematic ways, especially because by 1960, North Chinese bureaucrats were much better informed about the world. They were less village cadres who rose during a desperate guerrilla war against the Nationalists and now a group that in many cases had grown up and been educated in the "New China." However, such fears were quickly just buried because they would raise uncomfortable facts about the nature of the North Chinese government as by the 1960's, the youngest members of the bureaucracy were disproportionately either the children of Japanese settlers or Jewish refugees.

First, at the end of World War II, the Communists had secured former Manchukuo almost immediately and Japanese settlers were given a choice of returning to North Japan or staying in North China. However, it quickly became known that the North Japanese government would subject returning settlers to "socialist re-education", so the vast majority of settlers quickly opted to stay in China. North Korea notably deported its entire Japanese population after the war, and rather than return to North Japan (where they feared ideological reprisals), they all moved to North China as well. Second, many of the children who had been deported from the USSR to Northeast China during Joseph Stalin's Jewish persecutions were now actually adults, who generally had wildly above-average levels of education. North Chinese Jews were actually highly valued by the Communist Party, which saw their usefulness as spies for Communist China to operate in Western countries, though in many times, their loyalty was often rather suspect, especially due to North China's war on Israel. As a result, not only were Jews overwhelmingly over-represented in the North Chinese secret police, they were also the most heavily monitored group in Communist China by that secret police.

Perhaps one of the most politically contentious modern issues can trace itself back to the start of Korea's economic boom. At the time, Korea was significantly poorer than its neighbor to the North, having suffered a significantly damaging war. Moreover, the Korean government was heavily influenced by the North Chinese government, with most of the leading members of the Korean People's Army being former officers of the People's Liberation Army. In many ways, the KPA formed a separate state-within-a-state in Korea, one that was tied to the hip with North China. Korea, a much younger and fertile nation, would send hundreds of thousands of guest-workers to the giant industrial steelworks of North China, where their remittances would help the Korean economy lift-off. Education levels were higher in Korea despite its relative poverty, so these workers were highly desirable to the North Chinese government. At least at the time, this setup was highly beneficial to both nations, as the supply chains and railroad systems of the two nations became closely connected. When the South Chinese dropped their embargo of Korea, this would further lift both nations. However, awkward tensions would emerge, especially because North China was significantly more authoritarian than Korea, and many North Chinese would often seek to defect to South China through Korea. Furthermore, although most expatriate Korean guest-workers returned to Korea (especially as Korean living standards rose, eventually surpassing North Chinese living standards), a significant number actually decided to stay, a desire that was facilitated by a North Chinese government granting them nationality, as the government 1) saw them as more culturally compatible than well, almost all the other guest-workers in North China and 2) feared angering the Korean government. Ironically, the majority of those who decided to stay were the descendants or families of Koreans who had some connection to the old GKR regime, who often suffered discrimination in Socialist Korea after his defeat.

In many ways, every-time a group was granted full nationality by the North Chinese government, political motivations were relevant. The Japanese settlers were granted nationality simply to spite "imperial-fascist" South Japan and "deny the Japanese Imperialists manpower." The Jews were given nationality simply because the North Chinese were terrified of angering Stalin and Beria. And now the Koreans gained nationality because of the desire of maintaining Chinese influence in Socialist Korea. Although those relations were maintained, this would significantly impact demographics of the Chinese regions bordering Korea.

TastySpam · Dec 18, 2019

The Christmas War

Britain was not to be caught unprepared. Many British regularly painted President Mustafa Tlass as the "Arab Hitler", including Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, lamenting that their French allies had clearly taken the path of appeasement.[1] If even Labour was calling him Hitler 2.0, the Conservative government of David Fyfe was even more uncompromising, quickly deploying its troops to the Syrian border. With an election year rapidly approaching (the last British elections were in 1957), the Fyfe Administration was already unpopular due to the cost and expense of several colonial campaigns. The polls predicted a hung parliament even though the British economy, increasingly integrated with the rest of Europe, was booming. The British military presence in Jordan was rather large due to Britain being the primary supporter of the Iraqi Royalists (as part of the Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan, or AFIJ) in the Iraqi Civil War. In contrast, the Syrians were the primary supporters of the Iraqi Nationalists, especially after a suspicious assassination attempt on Nationalist leader Abd al-Wahab al-Shawaf killed the Nationalist leader.

The planners of the assassination was one of the most closely guarded Arab mysteries. Popular opinion generally blamed the MI6 of Great Britain since one could intuitively conclude that killing the relatively moderate al-Shawaf would eventually chase more moderates into the Royalist camp. In reality, the operation was undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, personally greenlit by President Kennedy, who judged that killing the moderate al-Shawaf would allow the Syrians to take control of the Nationalists, putting them on a collision course with North China. Indeed, this succeeded wildly, as the Syrians placed their own man in Iraq, Fuad al-Rikabi, in charge of the Syrian-supported Nationalists, as well as a local Iraqi millitant who worked with the CIA to enact the assassination, the 25-year old Saddam Hussein. The Nationalists and Communists immediately went to war in Iraq, further straining relations between Syria and North China. The radicalism of the Nationalists also chased away the Iranians, who had previously supported the Nationalists, but now simultaneously supported both the North Chinese-backed Communists and the American-backed Islamists. Indeed, this caused all three factions to unite against the Syrian-backed Nationalists.

In addition, Kennedy's ploy put the Soviets in an increasingly awkward position. The Soviet Union had received a naval base in the coastal Syrian city of Tartus to match the Soviet naval base in Port Arthur. As a result, it was forced to juggle its two ostensible allies, who loathed each other. Interestingly, Beria's lesson from the Three Years War was that the massive Soviet army was not as useful as the Soviets originally believed. However, he was consistently angry at the weak state of the Soviet Navy, which generally was unable to stand up to the Western powers in the Three Years War. Although able to prevent any NATO navies from entering the Black Sea or too far into the Baltics, the USA quickly established total naval superiority in the Pacific theater and the Anglo-French similar superiority in the Mediterranean theater, with the unlucky Soviet submarine that poked into the Black Sea quickly tracked down and sunk. With much better information than most other politicians, Beria had judged that the Soviet economy was actually crumbling under Western blockade by 1957. The Soviet Union engaged in a massive naval buildup immediately after the end of the war, which took more urgency after the Soviets were defeated by both the Americans and the French in reaching space. Both naval bases were essentially strategically invaluable to the Soviets - and nothing pained Beria more than the possibility he might have to pick one of those bases.

In Damascus, the Syrian detente with their former colonial ruler, France, cynically took advantage of De Gaulle's natural fondness for former French colonies so that Syria could turn their attention towards the struggle in Iraq. In particular, the Syrians saw Britain as the main enemy. If Britain were to collapse, that would open not only Iraq, but also Jordan and possibly even Egypt (though even Tlass's second-in-command, Hafez al-Assad had to admit this was a pipe-dream). Moreover, it was hard to find a power more unpopular than Great Britain in the Mediterranean. Royalist Greece and Turkey both loathed the UK for its planned annexation of Cyprus. Italy was mildly annoyed by the annexation of Malta. The Kingdom of Yemen had its eyes on British-controlled South Yemen. An increasing crisis was brewing in Asia over Singapore. The Argentines still hadn't given up on their claims on the Falkland Islands. Ironically, Tlass was not interested in destroying Israel. In many ways, he used rampant antisemitism and hatred of Israel, including his history of war crimes against Israeli citizens to legitimate his rule. If he were to actually destroy Israel, this would actually be far less effective.

On the morning of Christmas, when many British troops and officers were attending Christmas services, almost the entirety of the Syrian People's Army bulldozed across the Syrian-Jordanian border. The Palestinian fedayeen rose up in Jordan against Anglo-Jordanian forces and the Gaza Strip (against Anglo-Egyptian forces). They were so numerous, that Jordanian and Egyptian forces were taken by total surprise, especially because many of those fedayeen fighters had fought with Egypt and Jordan in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Interesting, because the West Bank was so open in terms of terrain, most of the Palestinian fedayeen from the West Bank were operating in Jordan itself, not the West Bank. The Jordanians had expected an attack on the West Bank as a plot to "flank" Israel, but not an attack on Jordan itself. Crossing near Nasib, Syria, the Syrian People's Army quickly bulldozed the Jordanians, who had many troops uselessly stationed in the West Bank. The Jordanian supply system collapsed as the fedayeen, active throughout almost all of Jordan (half of Jordanians were Palestinians, who almost entirely sided with Syria) made it very difficult to supply Jordanian troops by land, forcing the British to airlift supplies.

The British had strong contingency plans and immediately moved British troops to fortify Zarqa, north of Amman on the Damascus-Amman road and home to the largest Jordanian army and air base in the country (making it simple to supply from the air). The British understanding was that Anglo-Jordanian forces could easily blunt the Syrian advance at Zarqa, at which point the Mediterranean Fleet and the Asian Fleet would bring reinforcements directly into the Red Sea to push the Syrians completely out of Jordan and possibly even to Damascus. However, the Syrians had another trick to play. A day after the Syrian invasion, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, announced solidarity with Syria. Unbeknownst to the British, the three powers had signed a pact to partition conquered territories. Syria would get almost all of Jordan, Saudi Arabia would get the coastal regions of South Jordan that used to be part of the Hedjaz Kingdom (which Saudi Arabia used to claim), and North Yemen would obviously get South Yemen. Saudi participation shocked the British since none of Britain's Saudi contacts was told of this - largely because the Saudi Royal Family was largely opposed, with only the relatively left-wing, nationalistic King Saud himself being a supporter. In contrast, the British had expected North Yemen to attack if Syria attacked, so their troops fared far better.

Saudi Arabian troops immediately assaulted the city of Aqaba on the south coast of Jordan. Although Jordanian troops resisted fiercely, Aqaba was across the desert and more or less impossible to supply from the rest of Jordan because of the Palestinian uprising. Control of the city remained contested, but the Saudi Arabians prioritized completely the ports with artillery fire, effectively rendering Jordan landlocked. The British were forced to aerially resupply Jordanian troops in Aqaba from Egypt, which hurt as the British plan was to aerially resupply North Jordan from Egypt. The Saudi Arabians had purchased several Soviet-made SAMs, such as the S-75 Dvina, that rendered the planned aerial resupply of North Jordan impossible once the Saudi Arabian Army established some sort of position in Aqaba. British troops were far better trained and equipped than the coalition facing them, but the extremely disadvantageous situation of the war meant that something had to change for Great Britain - and change fast.

Several possibilities opened up for Great Britain. First, they could sail the Mediterranean fleet to the coast of Syria itself and launch a diversionary attack. Alternatively, they could reinforce in Kuwait and try to blow their way across Iraq. Third, they could try to launch an amphibious assault across the Red Sea to reinforce Jordanian troops in Aqaba. Their choices narrowed significantly after the Israelis, currently in control of the Suez Canal (or at least one side, enough to deny passage to anyone), declared "armed neutrality" whereupon no navy ships would be allowed to pass through the Suez Canal. This was seen as incredibly suspicious, because of Britain's overwhelming naval superiority, this was seen almost entirely anti-British. And indeed, Israel had also been promised something.

At the United Nations, a condemnation of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and North Yemen failed in both the Security Council and the General Assembly. Not only did the entire Communist bloc vote no, but so did Brazil, Italy, Argentina, Turkey, Malaya, and (North) Greece (their UN seat was occupied by the Royalist government). Most disturbingly, several expected allies voted present, including Canada, Spain, Israel, France (De Gaulle feared an oil embargo), Ethiopia, India, the Philippines (South) China, and most devastatingly of all, the United States, which was a shock present vote. The message was clear: Britain would have to win this by herself.
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[1] OTL Gaitskell compared Nasser to Hitler - and Syria is far more extreme than OTL Syria.

TastySpam · Dec 19, 2019

The French Union

By the 1960's, the importance of France's colonies had significantly declined. In 1954, 70% of France's agricultural imports came from its "overseas countries", while the majority of its industrial exports went to its colonies as well.[1] By the 1960's, increasing integration into a (Western) European common market quickly reduced France's economic dependence on trade with Africa. One major journalist, Raymond Cartier, was a vociferous critic of the French colonial empire, arguing that the African colonies were economic sinkholes for spending. In a famous article published after the war in 1957, Cartier quipped "Corrèze before the Zambezi." The debate sparked a total break among the Poujadists, as Poujade himself agreed with the arguments, although the radical youth wing, led by Le Pen, rejected the notion that France should focus at home. Charles de Gaulle, who was not a Poujadist but desired Poujadist support for his government, more or less played the two groups off against each other. De Gaulle wanted out, but the Opportunist Gaullists didn't.

As a result of France's leading role in the European Economic Community, De Gaulle was able to eventually secure preferential access of all French colonies to the European market. Many observers theorized that De Gaulle's support for British entry into the EEC was to gain an ally in this endeavor, as the Italians notably objected. With British support, British colonies were included as well, while Somalia and Libya were allowed to sign association agreements that gave them a backdoor into the European market.

De Gaulle was a believer in the idea of a French empire, but he was notoriously reticent to spend much blood on it. Moreover, his opinions on race and ethnicity were complex. De Gaulle's famously stated in writing that:

"'It's a very good thing that there are yellow French people, black French people and brown French people. It's a sign that France is open to all races and that it has a universal vocation. But on condition they stay a minority. If not, France wouldn't be France anymore. After all, we are an European people from white race, Greek and Latin culture, and Christian religion. Try to mix oil and vinegar together. Shake the bottle. After a while, they get separated again. The Arabs are the Arabs, the French are the French. Do you believe that the French nation is able to integrate ten million Muslims who shall be twenty million tomorrow and forty million the day after? If we integrated them, if all the Arabs and Berbers were considered French, how could we prevent them from moving to our home country where the standard of living is so much higher? My village wouldn't be named Colombey-les-Deux-Églises (Colombey of the Two Churches) anymore, but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées (Colombey of the Two Mosques)!"[2]

De Gaulle was sympathetic to the stated goals of the French Union and the many African intellectuals who supported such an ideal of racial equality, while being deeply unsympathetic to what he saw as an oppressive, racist settler society in Algeria. In addition, he had established a true bond of friendship with the late Félix Éboué, the black Governor of French Equatorial Africa who was the first major politician to declare for Free France. However, he was also deeply fearful of a truly multiracial, multiethnic France. His vision for the French Empire was truly neocolonial - the idea that most Africans would be largely self-governing and ostensibly free, but France would retain its influence, including strategic territory and access to rare natural resources. A consensus emerged in the government to decolonize most of the nations with the highest populations (under close French tutelage), but to retain low-population colonies where the local leaders (or even better, local residents, though this was unlikely) could be convinced to stay.

After an inter-government quibble, the decision was made to tinker with the French Union (most of the Opportunist Gaullists who fled the mainstream center-right to support De Gaulle were okay with his overall plans, but opposed an outright constitutional revision for fear that De Gaulle would become a strongman). Overseas countries, overseas territories, as well as the UN trust territories, were required to choose between becoming 1) French overseas departments, 2) protectorates of France (a status held by Tunisia, Vietnam, Cochinchina, and until 1955, Cambodia), or just 3) independence. In short, 6-tier system of the French Union (metropolitan departments -> overseas departments -> overseas territories -> overseas countries -> protectorates -> UN trust territories) was compressed to three tiers. Notably, citizens of protectorates did not enjoy French citizenship.

French special services and colonial administrators tried their best to make sure the results would end out just the way De Gaulle wanted. It quickly became obvious that French officials couldn't stop Ahmed Sékou Touré from voting the French out, and it was decided to have Guinea vote first, whereupon it voted for independence. Immediate sanctions from France followed in hopes of scaring the rest into line. All of the Overseas Territories voted to become overseas departments under French muscling. The UN Trust territories all had to go simply because De Gaulle didn't want to openly flaunt international law and because Cameroon had a growing insurgency against the French that De Gaulle did not want to develop into outright war. The various colonies of French West Africa all chose to become protectorates, starting a process of independence under French tutelage. Madagascar, still stinging over the brutal crushing of the 1948 Malagasy uprising, opted to be a protectorate, but would unilaterally declare independence a few years later.

In the end, only one colony chose to become overseas departments: French Equatorial Africa. At the time, French Equatorial Africa was actually a unified colony. The French found significant local interests, especially in Gabon and Brazzaville, who sought to remain with France. To De Gaulle, their population seemed minor enough. At the time, Gabon had under 500,000 people, the Congo around 1,000,000, Chad somewhere under 3,000,000, and Ubangi-Shari around 1,300,000. Five and a half million Africans, compared to nearly fifty million white Frenchmen, seemed a perfectly acceptable ratio to De Gaulle (he quipped it was about equal to the % of blacks in the United States). In addition, he personally went to bat for French Equatorial Africa, claiming that their support for the Free French made them "fully French by blood." Ironically, in the largest region, Chad, it was primarily the Muslim and Ouaddaïan nobility that voted to become French, largely because they feared atheist socialism arising from France leaving (the list of eligible voters in all of these departments was very low, as it required literacy and an address, which disenfranchised almost all of the nomads).

Interestingly, the new Department of Dijibouti was one of the few regions that genuinely voted for French integration - ethnic Afar (roughly 40%) voted en masse to become part of France, in fears of ethnic Somalis (55%) dominating an independent Djibouti. Similarly, in Comoros, the smaller islands all voted en masse for integration out of fears that the residents of Grande Comore (the largest island) would dominate the other islands. In many cases, the vote was driven not by love of France, but fear of what might replace her. When the radical right was told that many colonies had been retained, they generally endorsed the decolonization of West Africa, placating them, for now.

De Gaulle seemed perfectly content that he had settled most colonial issues for France. Except for the Algerian War, where the death toll continued piling up.[3] De Gaulle personally was fine with leaving, but he knew that he would be eaten politically alive - pretty much everyone else on the French right was loathe to part with Algeria. However, De Gaulle saw no path out. With French deaths piling up, De Gaulle sought to open peace negotiations with the insurgents. However, there were now two major insurgent groups, roughly equal in strength, the FLN (National Liberation Front) and the PCA (Algerian Communist Party) - and his own supporters in France would never allow him to talk to either. In 1962, with the British facing an absolute disaster in the Middle East, De Gaulle saw a path out of the morass - and that path led him directly to Moscow.
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[1] Cited here.
[2] An OTL quote.
[3] Death toll is pretty OTL.

TastySpam · Dec 23, 2019

Molon Labe

In 1957, Cyprus was an unusual possession of the British Empire. Cyprus was a crown colony with a predominantly European politician. In the wake of the devastating British defeat in Burma, the Fyfe Administration saw Cyprus as a rare colony that the British could retain without causing the mass immigration of non-whites into Great Britain (something he understood would be wildly unpopular in Britain, especially after the 1955 UK election where fear of such torpedoed hopes of a Labour majority). The Fyfe Administration foresaw a much smaller, leaner British Empire. As of 1960, the British Empire still officially included Malta, Cyprus, Singapore, Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, the Central African Federation, Belize, Tanganyika, Aden, the Trucial States, Kuwait, and parts of the Caribbean. Nigeria and Sierra Leone were moving towards peaceful independence, much like Ghana had, although road blocks had presented themselves in Tanganyika and the CAF, which was still unwilling to grant majority rule. The Fyfe Ministry more or less planned on eventually letting go of most of those colonies, except for Malta and Cyprus. Earlier, Oman had more or less been humiliatingly lost to American interference. The Tory right in particular was livid at what they saw as a humiliated and collapsing British Empire and demanded that the British salvage something from this.

Upon realization that the British had designs on Cyprus, Royalist South Greece broke out in a rage. Giorgios Grivas, one of the leading generals of South Greece, was a Greek Cypriot and a staunch supporter of enosis, the unification of Cyprus and Greece proper. However, the Cyprus situation was complicated by the fact that somewhere between 20% to 25% of Cyprus was Turkish and did not want to see an annexation by Greece. Notably, both leaders of Greece and Turkey had ties to Cyprus. South Greece had been under martial law since 1949 (when the situation significantly worsened for the Greek Royalists) and the Cypriot Giorgios Grivas was one of the leading generals in the governing junta. President Alparslan Turkes, the strongman of Nationalist Turkey, was in turn a Turkish Cypriot.

British attempts to strengthen their control in Cyprus significantly worsened after John Harding, the Governor of Cyprus, was assassinated by EOKA (pro-enosis) millitants after calling off a peace meeting with Archbishop Makarios III (the meeting was canceled by the British civilian government). Harding was a relatively tough Governor and the event encouraged the British government to take an even harder line. The colonial secretary at the time, Alan Lennox-Boyd, was an ardent colonialist who tapped Evelyn Baring, the former Governor of Kenya who had crushed the Mau Mau rebellion. Baring's plan was to do whatever was possible to divide the Greek and Turkish populations of Cyprus. MI6 infamously incited several race riots against Turks (by Greeks) in order to convince the Turkish population that continued British rule would be the only thing protecting them from a violent Greek majority. Taking lessons from the French in Algeria, British paratroopers used the same urban warfare and torture methods.

Archbishop Makarios himself was assassinated in broad daylight in Nicosia. An unknown figure stabbed Makarios with a ricin-tipped umbrella, causing his death within hours from poisoning. MI6 was widely suspected as the culprit because Makarios had only recently barely escaped an obviously British-orchestrated kidnapping attempt (the British intended to exile him).[1] In reality, Makarios's assassin were actually members of the NKVD, who wanted the Archbishop out of the way to further inflame the war. By 1960, Cyprus was in a full-blown war, with British troops and Turkish paramilitaries fighting off Greek guerrillas. Civilian casualties and atrocities expanded. The war was not exactly hideously unpopular in Britain itself, as EOKA was depicted in the British press as a neofascist terrorist group with close links to the USSR (despite EOKA being ferociously anticommunist). EOKA received no Soviet support, but South Greece still received covert Soviet support as a legacy Stalin-era policy (despite its fervent anticommunism) and South Greece supported EOKA. The strangest fact was that Nationalist Turkey continued its policy of disguising Soviet arms at the Turkish straits (as Turkish) and shipping them to South Greece despite the fact that so many of them were being used to murder Turks.

Upon the outbreak of the Syro-Israeli War and the Christmas War, the British garrison in Cyprus was forced to trade away most of its heaviest weapons. First to British troops in Egypt devastated by the withdrawal of all Israeli troops - then second to the British troops desperately reinforcing the Jordanians. Immediately, EOKA declared a general offensive, trying to establish actual control over territory as opposed to its previous goals of simply launching guerrilla attacks against British guerrilla forces. Cyprus was not prioritized because by virtue of being an island, it was widely believed that no matter how bad the situation turned, the British could simply arrive later with the support of the undefeated Royal Navy and turn it around. Instead, Egypt and Jordan were prioritized, for fear that Syria could be a "new Germany", also presenting a "snowballing" threat. This theory was immediately called "Snowball Theory", but its primary supporter, Lennox-Boyd.[2] It immediately became obvious to other powers that Great Britain was simply juggling too many problems and every problem led to another new problem.

In 1962, the British gained an unwelcome surprise. When British aircraft carriers attempted to cross the Suez Canal on their way from the Mediterranean to Jordan, the Israelis denied them (and all other warships) access, stating that Israel was neutral in the war. The British decided to move north and attack the Syrian coast itself simply because there'd be nothing else for them to do. The South Greeks, given intel that was notably falsified by of all things, French secret services (who had their own agenda), saw this movement as a sign that the British were moving north to crush the Cypriot revolt.

South Greece saw an opportunity and took it. Against the wills of the King of Greece (who was conveniently waylaid by Greek soldiers and put under house arrest), the South Greek government acted. The British government was sent into disarray and disbelief - the Kingdom of Greece, citing British atrocities in Cyprus, sent an ultimatum to the United Kingdom to immediately vacate Cyprus or face war. Laughing off the ultimatum, the British cabinet, staffed with Tories who had a pretty good grasp of classical Greek, responded only with "molon labe" or in Greek, "come and take it", the famous response of the Spartans to Xerxes I after he demanded they surrender their arms. The South Greeks got the message.

A bewildered world community saw tiny, plucky South Greece (with its ardent foe to the North), nevertheless declare war on the United Kingdom. However, the South Greeks were not totally insane - they actually did have a card to play - they announced immediately that the Syrian Navy had arrived in Crete - a predominantly submarine navy constructed out of surplus Soviet ships. Although incapable of threatening any major British fleet, such a major base in the middle of the Mediterranean gave the Syrians the ability to interdict commercial and military supply shipping across the entire region, a grievous blow to the United Kingdom's attempts to supply Egyptian, Jordanian, and British troops in the Middle East. The South Greeks communicated to the British that this arrangement would end if the British were to vacate Cyprus.

In addition, in the aftermath of the Greek Civil War, the South Greeks quickly built up a not-irrelevant navy presence. Although not a particularly strong navy at all due to South Greece's relatively small population and poverty, it was still strong enough to dominate the seas in a potential resumption of war against North Greece. This was seen as necessary because ultimately, the North Greek offensive into South Greece stalled because of South Greek domination of the seas. The Royal Hellenic Navy could similarly prove a nuisance - the South Greeks focused heavily on small torpedo boats, which meant that they could evade British patrols and harass British shipping.[3] This was viewed as foreclosing a massive British amphibious invasion of Syria and making it harder for the British to reinforce Cyprus, fulfilling the goals of both Syria and South Greece. The dual setbacks of the Syrian base in Crete and the blocked Suez Canal presented a further challenge for London, both military and economic, which began to ponder its options...
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[1] The kidnapping/exile was OTL, except it fails here as Makarios is more wary of the British.
[2] Lennox-Boyd was later a major member of the pro-colonialist Conservative Monday Club.
[3] Actually pretty OTL, though Greece develops such a fleet earlier than OTL.

TastySpam · Dec 30, 2019

The Durian War

The independence of Malaya did not spell an end to tensions on the peninsula. Besides Hong Kong, the Crown Colony of Singapore remained one of the last British bastions in the Pacific, especially after the independence of Malaya itself, as well as Sarawak, Brunei, and the retrocession of North Borneo to Filipino trusteeship. None of these moves were made with particular British happiness, but redirecting troops from Asia to Europe (namely Yugoslavia and Finland) was deemed a necessity during the Three Years War. Immediately, these moves seem prescient for Britain - the cost of holding these regions was exceptionally high, especially in Malaya, where the British were distrusted by both the (mostly Chinese) Communists and (mostly) Malay Nationalists. North Borneo immediately broke out in violence, creating a remarkable headache for the Filipino government. Finally, a coup in Brunei by military officers linked to the Brunei People's Party and Communist rebels in Indonesia, abolished the monarchy and established a socialist people's republic, which lasted for a week before British-sponsored forces from Sarawak invaded and federated the nation (restoring what was left of the royal family).

Shortly before the Three Years War, the United Kingdom agreed on a limited degree of self-governance for the Crown Colony of Singapore, including local legislative elections (the "Rendel Constitution). The 1955 Singapore elections were largely won by left-wing parties, who won a majority due to their better distribution of the voteshare. Broadly popular among the working-class, left-wing parties won most of their seats narrowly, while the conservative parties piled up massive majorities in upscale neighborhoods, often splitting the vote. The left-wing Labour Front and People's Action Party won 13 seats (from a combined 36% of the vote) while the right-wing Progressive and Democratic Parties won only 6 (from a combined 45% of the vote). Pro-Malaya parties won 3 seats. This result shocked both the left and right-wing parties.[1]

The Labour Front's leader was independence activist and World War II veteran David Marshall, an Iraqi Jew raised in Singapore. Marshall's goal was to compromise enough with Great Britain in order to maximize Singaporean autonomy and move towards independence. However, in the height of the Three Years War, British colonial authorities were increasingly skeptical of the PAP, which they viewed as too closely linked to pro-Communist trade unionists. The British demanded that if Marshall didn't outlaw the PAP, they would not allow him to become Chief Minister of Singapore. Marshall turned towards Malaya and China in hopes that they would side against the British, but both nations signed off on this plan. Instead, he resigned rather than take this action - his replacement Lim Yew Hock immediately obliged, by outlawing the PAP. Hock outlawed the PAP with support from the center-right parties and the pro-Malaya parties, even as a significant share of Labour legislators defected. At that point, the center-right parties immediately denied support to the government, triggering new elections. The newly recombined Democratic Progressive Party, headed by the British-backed Tan Chye Cheng, and the pro-Malaya parties, won almost every seat, flushing out both Hock and Marshall.

The results of the new elections in late 1955 resulted in a night of riots in Singapore, as working-class voters raged against British authorities and local elites. Trade unionists were notably almost all arrested during these riots. Many major PAP figures, such as Devan Nair, Lim Chin Siong, and Lee Siew Choh were arrested.[2] With Malaya lost as KMT support flooded to the Malay government, fleeing Communists snuck instead into Singapore. Crime and disorder skyrocketed, especially as organized crime in Hong Kong, South China, and even Cochinchina used Singapore as a stopping point. The government plunged in popularity, even as the postwar recovery brought unprecedented prosperity to Singapore. In late 1959, the incumbent Democratic Progressives (which had folded in the moderate remnants of the Labour Front) had redrawn the districts ahead of the election in hopes of shutting out the opposition. This proved to be a grave mistake. The dominance of the Lee Siew Choh's People's Action Party was so thorough, the DPP was washed out of everywhere...except those same three 3 pro-Malaya seats. The result in Great Britain was panic. Revoking Singaporean autonomy was seen as undesirable and likely to provoke more violence. At the same time, the PAP was openly leftist, pro-independence, and deeply uncooperative with the British.

Prime Minister's Fyfe's solution was actually diplomatic - by seeking an accord with the other two regional powers, Malaya and South China. Tunku Abdul Rahman always had some goals of acquiring Singapore and North Borneo, but the latter had been totally lost, while the former seemed like a political trap - filled with Chinese leftists. The governments of the United Kingdom, Malaya, and South China signed onto a joint manifesto against unilateral independence for Singapore. The Choh government chafed, but realized that with no control of foreign policy or the military, the Singapore crown colony government had no way to unilaterally declare independence. Angered, the cadets of the PAP continued to radicalize, stocking up arms and forging covert relations with exiled members of the Malaya Communist Party under Chin Peng. Relations finally broke when the Choh government unilaterally released all arrested trade unionists, PAP party members, and even outright Communists.

The immediate result of the letter in South China was not just rage against the British, but also against the KMT government, which was seen as cravenly cooperating with Western business interests (although most Chinese wanted independence, many elite Singaporean Chinese did not - and it was with them that much of the KMT elite had familiy ties too). The declaration also sparked riots in Hong Kong, where leftists smashed many of the business districts before police dispersed them. Anger over the Three Nation Declaration played a pivotal role in the election of President Sun Fo, as he was the most prominent figure in China to criticize the joint declaration. One of President Sun's first acts was to repudiate the declaration, which caused Malaya to call for "revisions" (though they did not pull out). Immediately, the British were in the midst of a crisis. On May 1st, 1960, symbolically on May Day, the Crown Colony of Singapore issued the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, declaring that Singapore had become an independent nation. The British unsurprisingly condemned the UDI. The United Kingdom condemned the act and were about to take harsh steps, until the British cabinet was informed just hours before ordering the Far East Fleet to crack down (then-headquartered in Singapore) that Israeli troops had all pulled out of Egypt, creating a crisis there as well.

Under advice from PAP member Lee Kuan Yew, the Choh government did not declare a Republic for a simple reason - if the Singapore government continued to recognize the British Queen, this allowed almost every foreign to send a diplomatic mission to Singapore on the justification that they were accredited by the Queen, not the government. Few Western governments recognized the new government in Singapore, but both the entire Communist bloc as well as most Asian nations, including South China and Sarawak, which notably had always supported Singaporean independence. In fact, the way that heavily British-supported Sarawak quickly became a diplomatic opponent of the British Empire, advocating for independence of most colonies, deeply embittered the British political class, who saw this as a sign that the "White Rajahs" had "gone native" (entirely accurate) and that local officials, even those that were British, advocating for self-government were not to be trusted. Malaya, France, and India, trying to walk a narrow, neutral line between the UK and China, declined to recognize Singapore but retained their diplomatic mission there.

A tense stand-off immediately emerged. The government of Singapore ordered the British Far East Fleet out of Singapore, but the Far East Fleet refused to leave (even if ships left, the British left enough military personnel to hold the base). Meanwhile, the United Kingdom had levied economic sanctions on Singapore, which was beginning to dent the local economy. Finally, the Singaporeans did not have the capability of evicting the Royal Navy. As a result, the two political camps really just stared angrily at each other across from the fence, with pro-government Singaporean protesters constantly lobbing rotten durians at British sailors within fruit-hurling range. Immediately, being deployed to Singapore quickly became known as the most undesirable deployment in the entire Royal Navy, because British sailors were often deeply physically nauseated by the constant rotten durians thrown into the Singapore Navy Base. British sailors were ordered to not shoot any protesters and the Singaporean government, aware that an actual violent attack on British sailors would lead to terrible repercussions, had a policy of strictly screening any protesters allowed to go near the British naval base. The so-called "Durian War" would last several years.
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[1] All OTL.
[2] One of these figures was OTL not arrested.

TastySpam · Jan 2, 2020

The UK Elections of 1963

The British elections of 1963 would kick off the "Spirit of 63", a tremendous year in global history known for dramatic political change across the world matched only by 1945. Surprisingly, despite taking place less than a month after the beginning of a dramatic war in the Middle East (the Syrian invasion of Jordan), the Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell talked very little about the war. After all, the Labour Party had largely also voted for the deployment of British troops to Jordan - and Gaitskell himself had compared the Syrian government to Nazi Germany. Instead, Gaitskell drilled down on critiquing the economic policy of the Conservative Party, including their ascension to the European Economic Community, which was always unpopular among British workers. Although economic growth was high, unemployment was also exceptionally high, as British workers found themselves outproduced by French workers (largely as a result of dirigisme-driven French industrial subsidies that the free-market Tories refused to match). The strongest suffering were industrial towns in Scotland and Wales, which rallied to the Labour cause.

However, a third party was running a primarily war-driven campaign. The Liberals, taking on the banner of Britain's anti-war party, castigated intervention in Jordan. At glance, this was a mistake as polling had the war fairly popular, at 61-29. However, as Independent Labour had fallen apart after Aneurin Bevan's death in 1960, this left the United Kingdom with only one antiwar party. Many radical left, antiwar voters flocked to the Liberal banner, ignoring the fact that the rest of their platform was predictably market liberal. They had also been the staunchest critiques of British Empire, castigating the planned annexation of Cyprus and Malta, something Labour did not do for fear of looking unpatriotic. In many ways, their support skewed extremely upscale. Party leader Richard Acland was even from Putney (in London), one of the wealthiest constituencies in the United Kingdom.[1]

Ultimately, the Conservatives lost too many voters from both sides of the socioeconomic spectrum. The industrial poor abandoned the Tories en masse for Labour, especially in Scotland/Wales. The wealthy abandoned the Tories en masse for Labour. The Conservatives had always expected losses after their landslide in late 1957, but they had not expected to actually lose a majority. However, a late-shift happened ironically because of the death of Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, who died on the campaign trail. A nearly unanimous vote selected the also popular George Brown, who was both himself a gifted speaker who could take advantage of an outpouring of sympathy for Gaitskell. As a result, not only did the Conservatives lose their majority, but in a remarkable political upset, Brown's Labour had also won the most seats.

This left the country at crossroads. Neither the Conservatives nor Labour wanted the support of the antiwar Liberals, especially as it was argued again that the country had to be united during a war against "Hitlerian Syria." However, both of them realized that the country couldn't afford another coalition government between the two largest parties. Eventually, an agreement was struck that (enough though not all) Conservatives would abstain on supply motions until the end of the war. The agreement bolstered George Brown, but severely hurt the standing of Prime Minister Fyfe, who was seen as "surrendering" to Labour again, which especially hurt since he had won his leadership in-part by railing against the Second National Government. Interestingly, a localized Conservative triumph was in Northern Ireland, which overwhelmingly voted for the Conservative Party, as much of the local population had grown deeply radicalized against both the Irish Republicans, both the Marxists and the Non-Marxists.

Choosing to avoid being challenged, Fyfe immediately resigned, forcing the Conservatives to scramble. In the wartime atmosphere, they settled on the Minister of War, John Profumo, an respected politician who had been one of the staunchest war hawks during the showdown with Hitler (Profumo was the last MPs who had served in Parliament during the Second World War). As for the Liberals, party leader Acland wasn't sure if he had to go or not. The Liberals had scored yet again another increase in the vote share...but they had added only one seat. Once again, the Liberals chased out another leader for a disappointingly low seat gain. After a disappointing performance in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (traditionally strong for the Liberals), the party caucus turned to a new generation of younger leaders. possibly from those regions.

Labour celebrated their triumphant upset victory. Until they realized that they had to actually lead Britain through perhaps the most challenging year in British geopolitics since 1940. Prime Minister Brown arrived at 10 Downing Street only to be asked to sign off on a dizzying array of military maneuvers and realizing that a backlog of communiques, nearly hundreds of pages, from the Soviet Union, United States, Republic of China, France, and other countries were waiting for him. His first instinct was to grab a suitably cool but not chilled mug of British ale.
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[1] Political trivia: Putney was the only constituency that flipped from Conservative -> Labour in the recent 2019 elections.

TastySpam · Jan 6, 2020

Camelot At War

Although President Kennedy had ended three wars during his tenure as President (albeit he had precipitated American intervention in two of those wars, Indonesia and Oman). The division of Indonesia seemed to be an acceptable endgame for the Americans, especially because Islamist-Nationalist Indonesia was clearly the stronger of the two Indonesias. In addition, although the Dutch had claimed far more colonies than Kennedy had preferred, most of their holdings were at least on paper stable, as the vast proportion of Indonesians had left Dutch rule. Similarly, after forcing them together at gunpoint, the Islamists and Royalists of Oman were more or less capable of co-existing, especially because the Communist Dhofar rebellion (backed by Saudi Arabia and North Yemen) were seen as an existential threat to the regime (it was not in any reasonable sense). The increasingly negative relationship between Britain and Saudi Arabia further pushed Oman into the American camp, as both the Islamists and Monarchists were glad to be staying out of this Arab Cold War. Furthermore, the Americans generally were able to work out a 1:1:1 deal, whereas oil revenues would be split three ways, between the Imamate, the Sultanate, and Western companies (British oil companies quickly moved many of their operations to America to qualify as American in a successful bid for American diplomats to cut them in). However, two other wars were much more awkward for the United States, namely Venezuela and the Congo.

The former quickly became regarded as a grievous blunder even though it was the least violent of the four wars. Namely, the anti-Perez Jimenez forces quickly dispersed when American troops landed to restore order. However, militants associated with the Communist Party retreated inland in order to oppose the entire Venezuelan state. However, the intervention devastated the image of the United States, both in Venezuela and across all of Latin America. Although the CIA officials who shepherded Kennedy's intervention told him it was an urgent matter to crush the Communists, most of the continent saw the Americans intervene to crush democracy. As a result, JFK resented the CIA and blamed them for "misleading him" into intervening. The initial protests had exploded in 1958 as a result of Perez Jimenez blatantly rigging his re-election (ironically, his reign was quite good for Venezuela's economy, so he might have won even had he not rigged the election). In 1961, he had planned to run for an unconstitutional third term, but his American backers would have none of this. When Perez Jimenez proposed amending the constitution to eliminate term limits, protests broke out in Venezuela. The Americans responded by sponsoring another military coup, except this one against Perez Jimenez instead. The Americans found a young colonel from a well-respected family, the 36-year old Juan Manuel Sucre Figarella (also a relative of Antonio José de Sucre, the Venezuelan independence war hero whose name notably lent itself to Bolivia's capital). Having wildly overstayed his time and having lost the support of his American supporters (who bankrolled the Venezuelan Army), Perez Jimenez reasonably fled the nation (to the United States). Sucre Figarella, a right-wing Catholic, was quickly chosen to run in 1961 against the opposition leader Romulo Betancourt, who the Americans didn't think was a Communist, but who the Americans suspected would hold a grudge against America. With intense US funding, Sucre Figarella won an upset victory against Betancourt, establishing a dynasty of pro-US, right-wing presidents (so indebted to the Americans that one of his first decisions as President was to restore Venezuela's pre-Perez Jimenez name, the United States of Venezuela). Although on paper successful, heavily due to President Kennedy pushing against the worst instincts of the CIA (they wanted a third term for Perez Jimenez), the whole incident nevertheless hurt America's image, especially in Mexico, where anti-Americanism only continued to rise after the infamous Corpus Christi massacre.

In the Congo, the Americans found themselves in a real quagmire. The Belgian Congo was not incredibly heavily populated, having only 15 million people (far more than the roughly 100 million Indonesians). However, Congo was very young, having just hit its industrial demographic transition (the tendency of industrializing populations to rapidly boom before stabling off as birth rates decline to match declined death rates) - this meant that a much wider swath of the population would be engaged in fighting. In addition, the Congo was just a far larger nation in terms of area. In Indonesia, Dutch-American troops could quickly be ferried around by ship. In Algeria, French troops could quickly move through both sea, roads, and helicopter. In contrast, the Congo had few airbases and wildly underdeveloped infrastructure. American and Dutch ships were able to easily interdict arms shipments into Indonesia - in contrast, the borders of the Congo were long, wide, and porous. Worst of all, whereas in Indonesia, the Americans were able to browbeat the Dutch into submission, following American war plans, the Belgians were nowhere near as cooperative. The answer was simple: Belgium had close supporters. The OAS, funded by the Belgians, the French (from French Congo), the Portuguese (from Angola), and the Central African Federation funneled arms and resources to the OAS, which quickly built itself up as a state-within-a-state in Loyalist Congo, de facto controlling most of Katanga province. Although the OAS disavowed explicit white racial supremacy, their staunch defense of "European civilization" attracted the support of South Africa as well. Kasa-Vubu's Dominion of the Congo broadly controlled most of the Southwest, while Lumumba's Free Republic of the Congo was based in the Northeast. However, the war was not just a ideological war - both sides employed tribal and ethnic militias, giving promises to enlist various ethnic groups to their cause. In many cases, these ethnic militias would switch sides between each other.

At home, the Congo War opened up uncomfortable racial tensions. By the 1960's, the civil rights agenda of President Kennedy was broadly successful. Segregationists were gruesomely thrashed in the 1958 midterm elections and when Strom Thurmond himself was put on the Republican ticket in 1960, he notably refrained from openly supporting segregation (he merely expressed support for "states rights.") Young radical blacks often expressed support for Lumumba's cause, which drew the extreme ire of the American security services. The FBI regularly raided the homes of black radicals, arresting them on suspicion of aiding Lumumba's cause. One of the most high profile arrests was Pastor Martin Luther King Jr., a relative moderate (among the black radicals) arrested for speaking out against the Congo War, as he would pen his famous Letter from a Cuban Jail (most black radicals were interned in Guantanamo Bay, though after a few months, MLK himself was released after they couldn't get any charges to stick due to his assiduous rejection of violence). The administration retained the support of most African-Americans, but they no longer could retain the 90% margins that they had become accustomed to, as many younger and more radical members loathed the administration for the Congo War. Although the Americans were waging a covert war against the OAS, at the end of the day, they were on the same side, causing negative aspects of the OAS to be attributed to the Kennedy administration. By 1962, Kennedy received fairly approval ratings on foreign policy (roughly in the mid-60's, compared to his actual approval in the high 50's), but the Congo War had dipped to being roughly a 50/50 proposition in polling. A proposal was made to "Africanize" the war, but the USA trusted neither the OAS (too colonialists) nor any native African forces (after so many had famously betrayed UN peacekeeping forces). This necessitated that American troops take the lead in any major operations, which meant American casualties began to pile up. With an incredible surplus of young people (due to the young population), it seemed that Revolutionary Congolese forces could easily replenish their numbers. In addition, although Congolese revolutionaries began the war as totally unorganized rabble (relatively early in the war, a US Navy Seals raid was able to kill, wound, and capture over 8,000 Revolutionary Congolese fighters at the cost of one American death), they began to develop in military expertise as the war continued.[1] The Congo became a cause celebre for most of the Communist powers, as Soviet, North Chinese, North Japanese, East German, and Czech advisers became commonplace in Congo (in particular North China, which dedicated a mind-boggling 18% of its national budget to foreign aid despite being in the middle of the Great Leap Forward, helping explain why North China seemed to have intervened in almost every single anti-colonial war).[2]

Ironically, much like how Imperial Japan exported many of its bureaucrats seen as the most ideologically unreliable to Manchukuo, North China would export many of its leaders seen as ideologically unreliable abroad. After the death of Mao, Zhou Enlai was notably not recalled from Burma (he would stay there until his death). After making a statement viewed as skeptical and defeatist about Communist central planning, Deng Xiaoping and Li Xiannian were essentially exiled to Egypt, while Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang were sent to "support" the revolution in Algeria. The "success" of the Great Leap Forward allowed for the quick marginalization of wide swaths of the Communist Party of China, who were typically removed from power by sending them abroad.
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[1] Based on an OTL battle....
[2] The OTL PRC dedicated 9.5% of its national budget to foreign aid/subversion. ITL, North China is even more gungho than the OTL PRC because of well, compensating for not having most of China, and it typically isn't actively intervening against the USSR like often happened OTL

TastySpam · Jan 8, 2020

The Battle of Souda

The Battle of Souda is often used as a turning point in global history, often finding itself on a list of top ten influential global battles, although the impact may have been heavily overstated simply because much like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the battle may have just been the spark to accelerate several historical trends long in the making. The battle was the culmination of British political aims - the British, finally sick of the military junta in Royalist Greece, had decided on a plan of regime change, as they were well-aware that the regime was unpopular.

Alexandros Papagos took command of the Greek Army in the summer of 1948, just as the Royalist Army began collapsing. As Communist forces closed in on Southern Greece, the Royalists were rocked by a devastating defection, that of his top subordinate, Lt. General
Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos. The result was devastating for Papagos, whose every maneuver become double-checked and triple-checked by skeptical anti-Communists. In reality, Papago's retreat from Northern and Central Greece saved the Royalist Greeks, allowing them to hold a smaller, less bloody-front until the cease-fire in 1954. However, as a result, his moderating influence on politics was utterly shredded, especially after the death of the moderate politician, Themistoklis Sofoulis, in 1949 and the assassination of Konstantinos Tsaldaris in the same year. In the 1950 Greek elections, the winner was Nikolaos Plastiras of the National Progressive Center Union, which favored peace with the Greek Communists. However, the Greek Communists turned down the peace offering, viewing it as a sign of weakness and then intensifying their offensive. The King of Greece, Paul I, deeply distrusted Plastiras, who was an ardent Republican who had previously launched two coups with the aim of ending the Greek monarchy. The final straw was when Plastiras was found meeting with agents of the NKVD (ironically, he had successfully negotiated more covert Soviet arms shipments to Royalist Greece to fight Tito-aligned Communist Greece). Paul I sacked Plastiras, and when Plastiras refused to leave, the King turned to a fringe far-right politician, Giorgios Grivas, who immediately took a young group of radical officers who overthrew Plastiras. Grivas then had himself appointed as Prime Minister, dissolving Parliament and holding new (more or less rigged) elections.

Having pushed back the Communist offensive until they finally came to the peace table in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia in 1954, Grivas's position in Greece seemed strong and he turned instead towards his lifelong goal of uniting Greece and Cyprus (he was a Greek Cypriot). In late 1962, King Paul died of cancer, removing another moderating influence on Grivas. The new King, the 21-year old Constantine II, had nowhere the same political base of his father. Relations between Grivas and Constantine II quickly deteriorated to the point where the young King was essentially put under house arrest by Prime Minister Grivas. This outraged many South Greek right-wing royalists, a crucial part of Grivas's support, but also allowed Grivas to strike his now infamous deal with the Syrians. MI6 was aware that the young King disliked Grivas, so the British cabinet figured the best way to put the Mediterranean back in order was to remove the relatively unpopular and radical South Greek dictatorship and put a moderate democratic government supported by both the King, centrists, and others. The South Greek King was under house arrest in Crete, so the British plans were to simply occupy Crete, declare a rival government with the King at its head, and then watch the South Greek government collapse in Athens from internal revolt. Regardless, this would crush the Syrian threat to British shipping, as they were primarily using the surprisingly large Souda Naval Base in Crete as their goal, the largest naval base in the Mediterranean, which stands out for being simultaneously constructed by covert American and Soviet aid.

First of course however, was to liberate Crete. The British Mediterranean Fleet was located in Cyprus itself, which was to cause several delays. Unlike in Singapore, Cyprus was an outright warzone, with EOKA militants launching bombings and sabotages. In particular, EOKA militants sabotaged everything British they could get their hands on, which meant that on the departure date, some ships of the British Navy were not exactly battle-ready. First Sea Lord Mountbatten had essentially been fired by the new Labour government for 1) disagreeing with Labour's plan to enact regime change in Greece and 2) being a Tory, who was famously close friends with many hated political enemies of Labour, leaving policy somewhat confused. Regardless, the Mediterranean Fleet was quickly able to assemble two aircraft carriers, the HMS Ark Royal, HMS Hermes, and HMS Eagle, which had been recently rebuilt at Devonport Dockyard as a key (and expensive!) Conservative policy goal.[1] This comprised roughly three of the United Kingdom's six carriers, an acceptable committment because the Mediterranean Fleet was viewed as the most important British fleet at this time.

The new British Buccaneer aircraft was a few days away from being ready for deployment, but it was viewed as too risky to change aircraft days before a major operation. As a result, the British aircraft at hand were primarily de Havilland Sea Vixens and Supermarine Scimitars. The plan was for the Royal Navy to park well outside of Souda, pound the Naval Base alongside any South Greek naval assets caught inside, before moving up many of the screener ships to support an amphibious assault. Once the Souda Naval Base was offline, the Royal Navy would enjoy total naval superiority over the Mediterranean and would then would be able to launch multiple amphibious assaults all across Crete, totally disorientating the South Greek Army which would be presumably collapse under assault from all sides. British officers carefully studied the German invasion of Crete, eager to avoid its bloody outcome, as Prime Minister George Brown explicitly told British commanders that he wanted minimal casualties on both sides, which meant pushing the South Greek Army into a surrender was preferable to any bloody offensives. For similar reasons, air strikes in heavily civilian areas was ruled off, something that irked many British officers because of the South Greek government's tendency of placing air bases close to major population centers.

The British strike on Souda was a clear success - pretty much every large ship of the Greek Navy, including both of their flag ships, the Cruiser Illi, the Cruiser Giorgios Averof, as well as over 60% of Greece's destroyers, was destroyed in the initial British attack despite much-formidable-than-expected anti-aircraft defenses at the Souda Naval Base. British pilots were surprised at the number of surface-to-air missiles, especially because they seemed very similar to Soviet SAMs - namely the stationary S-25 Berkut and the mobile S-75 Dvina. Although British aircraft took heavy casualties, they dutifully completed their mission, essentially knocking down most of the defensive fortifications of the Souda Naval Base. Royal Marines, supported by the Royal Navy, landed in Souda Bay. Although most of the South Greek artillery emplacements had been disabled, South Greek soldiers were able to resist on the cliffs and base itself. However, Royal Marines slowly but surely advanced to slowly surround the Greek garrison in the base itself.

In the peak of fighting, British AWACS quickly picked up that the remnants of the Greek Air Force was entering the fray. However, this was caught very late for the simple reason that the British were primarily prepared for South Greek aircraft to attack them from Crete - British planes systematically shredded South Greek fighter planes who attempted to enter the fray. In the dogfights over Souda, the British had managed to down 102 South Greek airplanes at a loss of only 21 British aircraft. Although the South Greeks had the advance of fighting on their home turf, their planes were typically outdated, some of them even being outdated British aircraft! However, much to their surprise, Greek aircraft were approaching from the other side - from Mainland Greece itself (Souda was in the north of Crete). This was seen as immediately strange because the South Greeks were not known to have any long-range fighters with sufficient range to reach Crete from the Peloponnese. Much to the shock of the whole world, including almost all Greeks, the Grivas government had somehow acquired four Tu-22 Blinder bombers from somewhere (it was not widely known that the Royalist Greeks had been receiving Soviet aid since 1948). Worst of all for the British, the South Greeks came prepared - as the Blinders were modified to replace their bomb space with more missile racks, allowing each bomber to hold three Kh-22 missiles. As the missiles were coming from the opposite side of the British carrier group that AWACS was focused on, they remained undetected until it was far too late to evade.

At this time in history, anti-ship missiles had never been used in combat before - and the Royal Navy in particular had relatively weak anti-missile defenses. The Western allies were aware of the new SS-5 Styx anti-ship missile put on missile boats, but they weren't even aware of the new Kh-22 missile. At 3:15 PM, twelve Kh-22 missiles smashed into the British fleet. Only two missiles missed. The combined countermeasures of the fleet, primitive as they were (mostly just WW2-era chaff) with barely any advanced notice, were only able to deflect one missile (aimed the Hermes). The other missed the Ark Royal, simply because a remarkably brave Royal Navy officer, seeing no other choice, set off his own ship's ammunition in front of the Ark Royal, causing the missile to mistake the heat of the destroyer for the carrier. Although almost the entire crew of the destroyer died (over two hundred sailors), the move likely saved hundreds of more British lives. Five missiles hit the HMS Eagle, causing the entire carrier to crumble and sink almost immediately with almost all hands lost, almost three thousand sailors, often drowned to death or asphyxiated by fire within a giant steel coffin. The Hermes was hit with three, which also caused the ship to start sinking, but so the largely majority of sailors were able to escape, with even the majority of stored aircraft being able to be transferred. The Ark Royal in contrast, was the luckiest, as only two missiles hit it, enough to cripple it and kill almost a hundred sailors, but not enough to immediately sink it. Most importantly, this gave the surviving aircraft of the HMS Eagle somewhere to land, which meant that there could still be aerial cover over the Mediterranean Fleet. Had the missiles also disabled the Ark Royal, then the Mediterranean Fleet would have been left totally defenseless against South Greece's Blinder bombers, at least until reinforcements could arrive (they were immediately ordered from Singapore).

Off the coast of Souda, the remnants of the South Greek Navy took this as their signal to attack. Most of the smaller missile boats of the Hellenic Navy had been concealed in various small caves on the shores of Crete - with British air support basically destroyed, the missile boats launched what were essentially suicide charges into the still larger British Navy. As most of the boats were able to fire off their entire complement of Styx anti-ship missiles before being unceremoniously sunk by the Royal Navy, the rest of the South Greek Navy was able to sink or disable almost two-thirds of the Royal Navy parked off the coasts of Souda (which in practice meant around 1/3rds of the Mediterranean Fleet, carriers excluded, though most of the disabled destroyers were repairable, so the long-term impact on the Royal Navy of this assault was low). The commander of the Ark Royal grimly realized that the damage to the carrier was simply too severe to actually limp back to Cyprus without sinking along the way - so there was only direction he could sail towards. The HMS Ark Royal immediately sailed towards Souda - for the Royal Navy, the Crete campaign would literally now be a matter of victory and death.

Regardless of the outcome of the Crete campaign, the news headline that the entire world first saw was blazoned across a picture of the sinking HMS Eagle. As it was immediately obvious that the HMS Ark Royal was probably damaged past repair, world leaders immediately interpreted this to mean that South Greece, which was quite likely the poorest nation in all of Europe (after so many years of civil war) never hit by a hydrogen bomb, a nation which literally had a hostile enemy directly to the North, had managed to sink three British carriers. One major newspaper simply broadcasted that "half the Royal Navy" was sunk, even though the lost ships were far far less than half (they were about half of then-active carriers, however). By any standard, the British still enjoyed one of the strongest navies on Earth, enough to typically best basically any major power not named the United States of America. However, that was no longer the impression, not in the world and especially not in Great Britain itself, where pretty much every British newspaper responded with some of the most literary, well-written displays of horror ever penned. The Conservatives more or less immediately terminated their supply-and-confidence agreement with the Labour government, very rationally concluding they would take back power easily. This only further added to the national humiliation when Prime Minister George Brown was forced to give a speech to the press calling for new elections while quite clearly visibly drunk. Although Prime Minister Brown did have a drinking problem, there was no evidence that was ever simultaneously drinking while making policy (the PR was scheduled at the last minute, once the election date was already decided at a suitably clever date). However, that didn't particularly matter to the British press, who found their villain.
--
[1] OTL, both were meant to go to Suez, though only one got there. The HMS Eagle refit is also more extensive ITL.

TastySpam · Jan 9, 2020

Knives Out For Albion

Prime Minister Brown cleverly set the election as far back as possible for a simple reason: he was briefed that despite the humiliation at Souda, the fall of Crete was inevitable. Royal Marines in Souda itself, rather than being discouraged, were further motivated to seize the naval base. South Greek forces fell apart as the fighting spirit of British troops shot up almost immediately, once they were told that the fate of the Mediterranean Fleet was put on their shoulders. Ferocious British shock troops armed with grenades and submachine guns swarmed Souda, quickly corralling Greek troops into the naval base administration HQ. Once it was obvious that the South Greeks were surrounded and trapped, the South Greek commander surrendered rather than die in a pointless last stand. British troops immediately began constructing fortifications around Souda. The disaster at Souda set aside, the British strategy was largely prudent and successful. British marines landed all over Crete in various locations, quickly disorientating South Greek command who found their forces divided and destroyed in detail. When South Greek forces had surrendered, the British had suffered around 1,400 deaths and the South Greeks had suffered 2,400, with roughly 65,000 troops captured. As the British secured Crete, the next destination for the Royal Navy was set - the city of Latakia in Northern Syria, their largest naval base. A long-range strike would disable much of Syria's ability to refuel its submarine fleet, establishing British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. All in all, Prime Minister George Brown hoped that the British triumph in Crete would wash out the humiliation at Souda, limiting the electoral fallout. In addition, reinforcements had been sent to Jordan and South Yemen, enough to force the Syrian-Saudi war machine to a grinding halt. In a remarkably large tank battle north of Amman, hundreds of British and Syrian tanks clashed. At the end, the British had lost 14 and the Syrians 118, breaking the back of the Syrian offensive on Amman. 1963 was a very difficult year for the United Kingdom, but it remains a point of pride among many that outside of Souda, British forces typically triumphed in every battle they fought.

However, the problem of Souda for Britain was not in its military repercussions, but in its geopolitical fallout. A large number of actors across the world judged that the United Kingdom was weak. The first bad news came out of Kenya. Upon taking power in 1957, the Fyfe Administration had been very skeptical of a united Uganda, feeling a divided Uganda would be more easily ployed to British aims. Buganda in particular had a large number of figures who desired separation. The first nation to gain independence was the Kingdom of Buganda, which represented nearly two million of Uganda's six million residents. In fear of being dominated, the southwestern kingdoms of Ankole and Butoro agreed to federate into Ankole-Butoro (largely just a defense-pact). Finally, independence was granted to the Dominion of Uganda in the north, to whom Bunyoro turned towards for protection. Almost immediately, the Kingdoms of Bunyoro and Busoga,to the northwest and northeast, fearing Buganda domination (especially Bunyoro, which had a simmering territorial dispute with Buganda) voted to accede to the Dominion of Uganda. The nature of Bunyoro's territorial dispute with Buganda led to extremely poor relations between Uganda and Buganda, as evidenced by the extremely poor relationship between Kabaka Mutesa II of Buganda and Prime Minister of Uganda, Milton Obote.

Upon hearing of the ambush of the Royal Navy in Souda, Obote saw this as his opportunity to strike. Ugandan troops marched into the disputed counties between Bunyoro and Buganda, sparking a low-level conflict. Unfortunately for Mutesa II, his administration was dominated by landed nobles who were skeptical of the value of importing large amounts of industrial weaponry to Buganda, leaving Buganda with a considerably weaker military. Bugandan troops, armed primarily with Martini-Henry rifles, were routed by Ugandan troops, who had access to several machine guns and mortars. Almost a thousand Bugandan troops were killed, compared to only forty Ugandans (the bulk of Bugandan casualties were taken in the retreat under mortar fire). The Kabaka (monarch) of Buganda, fearing that Ugandan troops would drive into the rest of Buganda itself and integrate the entire state into Uganda. However, the Kabaka found someone who could save his regime. A few weeks after Souda, Mutesa II signed a secret treaty with the Commander of the Kenyan Rifles (once the King's African Rifles), Idi Amin, who himself was from Northern Uganda. A week later, the Kenyan Rifles burst across the Uganda-Kenyan border. Trained in the British method of warfare, with helicopters, assault rifles, artillery, and even armored vehicles, the Kenyan Rifles absolutely bulldozed the Ugandan Army, which crumpled almost overnight. Milton Obote fled into Ankole-Butoro. A worrying omen for the future was that although the Kenyan Rifles behaved properly, many of the militias that Idi Amin recruited were rumored to have engaged in horrifying war crimes, including looting, murdering, and raping. The secret treaty ultimately gave Buganda back its disputed territories, while giving the rest of Uganda over to Amin. Despite his brutality, Idi Amin was welcomed a local hometown hero in some parts of Northern Uganda, as they saw him as a powerful hometown hero here to rescue them from colonialism.

The government of the Federation of Kenya, dominated by white settlers, vociferously condemned Amin's conquest of Uganda. As a result, pro-Amin militias swarmed Nairobi, demanding a new "anti-colonial" Constitution. The government of Kenya, lacking support among Kenyan peasants, had become increasingly dependent on the Kenyan Rifles under Idi Amin to safeguard them. They had not considered the possibility that Amin himself was far more ambitious than he pretended to be. Instead of saving them, the Kenyan Rifles immediately removed the government. After one cabinet minister was literally flayed by pro-Amin militias, almost all of Kenya's entire white population, numbering in the tens of thousands, desperately fled with all of their wealth to the Crown Colony of Tanganyika, one of the last British colonies in Africa. Idi Amin, in his role as the acting Prime Minister of Kenya, demanded that the British turn over all of the settlers or at the very least, their wealth. Prime Minister Brown, horrified at what was going on in East Africa, vehemently denied. Kenyan forces invaded the next day.

At the same time, the British had been alerted that another British territory had been invaded. In the middle of the Crete landings, another Mediterranean power launched a major invasion. Nationalist Turkish troops, without declaring war, invaded Cyprus in 1963. Landing in Northern Cyprus, the Turks faced little resistance because Cyprus had been almost completely emptied of British military assets for the preparation of the invasion of Crete. In addition, the Greek Cypriot militias had been heavily damaged in their guerrilla war against Britain. Turkish troops rolled across Cyprus, sparking one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the age. For Greeks, 1963 was seen as a year of both triumph and tragedy, as the triumph of Souda was followed almost immediately by tragedy, both the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the North Greek invasion of South Greece.

Two more conflicts were also to confront the United Kingdom. The Singapore situation had officially developed into a full-blown crisis. Finally, the British had also been informed that President Peron of Argentina was demanding that the British reconsider their stance on the Falkland Islands. However, no incident was to traumatize the United Kingdom as badly as the Glasgow incident. By 1963, the Irish Republican Army offensive was clearly failing. Middle-class residents, even Catholics, began to loathe the "people's war." Indeed, many more centrist members of the IRA had splintered off into the Irish People's Republican Army and Provisional Irish Republican Party, the IPRA continuing the Irish People's War with most of the military equipment and the Provos retaining close relations with Sinn Fein in Ireland itself. IPRA and the Provos also disagreed on religion - IPRA was thoroughly nonsectarian and actively recruited both Protestants and British (in hopes of inspiring a pan-British revolution), while the Provos were sectarian. As part of IPRA's goal of sparking a revolution in Britain itself, they believed one person was standing in the way of the revolution. In late 1963, IPRA militants had built up dozens of mortars in what they hoped would be a successful Hail Mary (they were keenly aware that British security forces were slowly crushing them, rather brutally, which had a tendency of causing the surviving leadership to grow even more radical and brutal).

In late 1963 at an event celebrating the opening of a new Catholic children's hospital in Glasgow, almost three-dozen mortars opened up with fire on the crowd. 187 people were killed and over 1700 were injured. Among those injured was Prime Minister George Brown himself, given a nasty scar on his face. However, that fact was overshadowed by the fact that among those killed were notably Minister of Health Kenneth Robinson and most devastatingly for the nation, the pregnant Queen Elizabeth II and the Prince of Wales, the young Charles (many children were brought to the event due to the children's hospital, but later studies showed that this caused British security services to be slightly lax due to the clearly incorrect assumption that nobody would attack a children's hospital). The nation would have spent months morning if not for the fact that not only was there an election in a month, but that the nation was not at war or facing war in four different continents. The assassination however, did push one war towards ending - mass public revulsion in Northern Ireland towards the IPRA's act of desperation shredded much of the rest of their public support, pushing the organization into terminal decline.

TastySpam · Jan 14, 2020

The Three Power Conference

Although he had ridden quite high after the end of the Three Years War, General Secretary Laventry Beria found his power continually diminishing. The humiliation of both the United States and France beating the USSR to space created a widespread impression among the Soviet nomenklatura that Beria's USSR was falling behind the West. In response, Beria blowed large amounts of state funding for scientific development, including promising a "Five Year Plan" that would end with the Soviet Union reaching space. Ironically, growing prosperity in the Soviet Union made Beria's brutal NKVD even more hated, as improving technology actually made it easier to spread tales of NKVD brutality. In addition, Beria''s "Georgia Mafia" monopolized state positions and often abused them for their own profit. Aware that his political power was diminishing and aware that his typical modus operandi of terror and torture wasn't actually working as well as it used to.

However, this also meant motivated and capable young Georgians could easily rise through the Soviet oligarchy. One profoundly ambitious Georgian Communist, the 34-year old Eduard Shevardnadze, had already risen to a high position in the Soviet diplomatic corps. Indeed, it would be Shevardnadze's memo to Beria that changed the trajectory of several nations. Shevardnadze pointed out his belief that the "Western alliance" was actually fraying and that even the Western Europeans could be divided. The memo cited two foreign leaders as particularly pliable with realpolitik. Just to see if this idea would go further, the Soviet diplomatic corps send missives to both leaders. Much to the surprise of Beria, both leaders responded positively, albeit it for different reasons.

The first leader, President Sun Fo of the Republic of China (South China), could be easily swayed. Namely, the Soviets had the ultimate trump card: North China. The second leader was a more enigmatic figure: Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle of France, who had once taken France into a war to fight the Soviet Union. However, de Gaulle was known to be exceptionally swayed by concerns of geopolitics - he entered the Three Years War not due to anticommunism, but due to fears of Soviet domination of Europe. In contrast, the Soviets had three cards to play, namely East Germany, Algeria, and Syria, that if properly played, could assuage De Gaulle's concerns. Beria's geopolitical goal was through by any means, create a totalitarian state that could rise to the level of development and national unity of a nation like, well, France. The brutal repression of minority groups was part of this agenda, especially in the Baltic States, where the NKVD responded to the Forest Brothers with mass killings on a truly staggering level, a reality that was not to be revealed until several years later. In addition, if a few "pawns" had to be discarded towards those purposes, so be it.

In perhaps the ultimate humiliation to the British Empire and to an outraged United States, the largest international event of 1963 was scheduled actually before the Battle of Souda, but took place just a week after. Meeting in "neutral" territory, a majority of the members of the UN Security Council met in Tehran, namely the Soviet Union, France, and China. The French and South Chinese delegation were shocked at how much the Soviets were willing to concede. For both delegations, it seemed that the Soviets were willing to fix every major geopolitical problem they had, at the relatively low cost of infuriating the Americans. For example, the conference actually had a fourth guest - representatives from the Algerian Communist Party.

For the South Chinese, the Soviets promised to pull out Soviet troops from North China, Port Arthur excluded. Although they obviously wouldn't be able to effectuate a change in the North Chinese government, they vaguely hinted at pressuring a more reformist government to come in charge. In exchange, only one minor concession had to be given: the South Chinese trade embargo on the People's Republic of Korea had to be dropped, which meant recognizing it as the official government of Korea. As the Soviets could not promise to withdraw from North Japan due to the lack of a North Japanese military, the two powers could not make a similar deal on North Japan. In addition, North Japan was significantly smaller than South Japan. In contrast, the ROK-Jeju was seen as an almost irrelevant backwater island nation. and ROC diplomats generally mocked the Jeju government - the idea of an anticommunist remnant hiding on a small island to "retake" the mainland seemed utterly laughable to the Republic of China. However, dropping the embargo on Mainland Korea essentially ruined the embargo against North Japan, because Mainland Korea was North Japan's closest trading partner. Through this phenomenon, the Chinese and Soviet blocs essentially established commercial relations, using Mainland Korea as their conduit. The South Chinese took the deal.

For the French, their concerns were more complex. First, Charles de Gaulle desperately wanted an "out" from Algeria, but one that wasn't pure defeat. Ironically, even though the French had more or less negotiated a detente with Syria, the Syrian conquest of North Israel had inspired other Arab ultranationalists, chiefly those within the FLN in Algeria, away from a negotiated peace with France. That meant the other main group willing to make peace with the French was the PCA, the Algerian Communist Party. Luckily for De Gaulle, he understood that the PCA more or less took marching orders from the Soviets - and could be forced into a peace by Moscow. PCA delegates had arrived to the Second Tehran Conference, brought by Beria to negotiate the terms of peace with France. Second, the French were afraid that Communist rebels in Lebanon would threaten their influence in Lebanon. The French had already come to an agreement with Syria, but this was seen as fragile, especially because the Syrians were more acceptable than the French expected. A planned Soviet withdrawal from North China was viewed by the French as a likely death knell to North Chinese intervention in the Middle East. Third, France was now tied at the hip with West Germany, with the Bundeswehr and French Army closely connected. By offering a Soviet withdrawal from East Germany, Beria could essentially crown De Gaulle as the elder statesman of Western Europe, especially as he could contrast the tranquility of France with....whatever the heck was going on in Great Britain. All the French had to do acquire this was to open up economic relations with the Soviet Union, including transferring large swaths of military and civilian technology. The French took this deal.

The results of the Tehran Conference, closely guarded by Soviet, French, and South Chinese officials, shocked and horrified most of world leaders. First, the Americans were obviously horrified. President Kennedy viewed this as two stabs in the back by two nations that the United States had aided and helped recover. That being said, the French betrayal was much worse to the Americans, since they were openly allowing a Communist government to come in charge. Kennedy was deeply unhappy with the ROC for recognizing the PRK and opening commercial relations, but it wasn't as outrageous as actually trading off an entire nation.

Second, most Eastern bloc nations were horrified. East Germany had no intention to go quietly, nor did North China. A secret agreement between various Communist states bypassing the "revisionist madman Beria" was immediately signed. North China, East Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and much to the surprise of even the other plotters, Bulgaria-Macedonia all signed on to a secret agreement (interestingly, the Macedonian leaders all signed on, though not any Bulgarians). Foreign Minister Molotov was so outraged, he resigned on the spot, something he realized was a terrible idea when the NKVD was dispatched to his location. He barely escaped with his life and only by fleeing to North China, which angrily refused to return him. Molotov may have been an old guard, but his opinions were widely shared in the Soviet officer corps. Third, similar fierce outrage exploded in France itself, where many locals saw De Gaulle seemingly throwing Algeria over to Beria's Communist friends, which was exceedingly loathed by certain quarters, especially those that were not going to forget Stockholm. In contrast, there wasn't much rage in South China over the deal with Beria - the Three Years War was after all, not directly waged between the USSR and South China. The South Chinese were very much more focused on North China.

Interestingly, most Algerians also loathed the deal, which harmed the popularity of the PCA. After all, De Gaulle chose to make peace with the PCA, nor the FLN, which allowed the FLN to denounce the peace as one-sided neocolonial. In addition, under the Tehran Accords, most of the weapons of the pro-French security forces in Algeria would be turned over to the PCA, which outraged the (generally anticommunist) pied-noirs as well as the Americans. Finally, the Tehran Accords allowed the French to keep an enclave on Oran, as well North Algiers (Algiers had to be partitioned, as neither side was willing to let go of the symbolic nature of Algiers being the capital of Algeria), and the Sahara itself (the PCA was actually convinced that it was worthless). The PCA desperately did not want to concede coastal enclaves, but Beria essentially strongarmed them. Beria's ability to strongarm the PCA into what was seen as a deeply disadvantageous was in fact why De Gaulle responded so positively to overtures from the USSR. The FLN responded by declaring war on the PCA as well, as well promising to throw the French out of coastal Algeria. In practice, as the French walled off their enclave in Oran, it would be largely an Algerian Civil War, one that put American and French secret services on opposite sides.

In contrast, the conference was actually pretty popular among citizens and intellectuals across the world, who saw the Soviets pull out from East Germany and North China and the French make peace in Algeria. In addition, intellectuals were lured by the fact that the three parties had agreed to a nuclear arms reduction treaty. Ironically, having more or less murdered millions of people through the use of nuclear weapons, Beria was quick to agree to nuclear disarmament, since he viewed the number of nuclear weapons as not so-important compared to the deterring fact that everyone knew the USSR to be a nation that would use a nuclear weapon. This was seen as a horrible outcome by not only the Americans, but pretty much every nation aligned against the USSR, from Yugoslavia to Israel to Sweden.

TastySpam · Jan 16, 2020

Old Soldiers Do Die

The Tehran Accords were actually surprisingly favorable towards France. Although the French originally wanted to create one contiguous district from Oran to Algiers, that was never plausible, largely because not even the Beria-ordered PCA would have agreed to that. After days of fierce bargaining, the French demands were limited to merely Oran and its immediate suburbs, as well as the Northeastern edge of a partitioned Algiers. However, in exchange for yielding on their territorial demands, the French were allowed to hold onto the largely unpopulated Tuareg South, which they planned on eventually creating an independent Tuareg state. For now, French access to the oil fields would be preserved by instead of sending the oil pipelines to the Algerian coast, to instead send them south through Mali and Niger and towards the West African coast. This kept French control of Algerian oil supplies, although it necessitated much deeper French involvement in West Africa.

The most important part of the peace treaty however, was that in order to get the PCA to agree to the wildly unpopular partition of Algeria (most Algerians were outraged), the French were required to transfer to them most of their military supplies in Algeria. Interestingly, the Pied-Noirs weren't the most outraged by this - in fact, the PCA was significantly less violent towards European Algerians and pro-French Muslims (largely because their ideology wasn't based off Arab Nationalism) and as a result, most pied-noirs actually supported the peace agreement. However, as a prerequisite to the peace agreement, France was required to transfer a great deal of military technology, including non-French military equipment, to the Soviet Union. Outrage exploded in both London and Washington D.C., a rare area of agreement. Upon learning that some of the military technology being transferred by France to the Soviet Union including the technology behind the Asterix satellite, which in theory could be used for intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Americans decided to make their move. CIA and MI6 were basically willing to offer unlimited amounts of cash and supplies to anyone willing to play ball.

Whereas the majority of pied-noirs supported De Gaulle, the Secret Army Organization was split. Although many members were pied-noirs who generally supported De Gaulle, others were just typical right-wingers, who as ardent anti-communists, loathed De Gaulle's ploy. In general, Algerian members of the OAS tended to actually draw from across the political spectrum, including many center-left Jews who felt the OAS were the best defense against the anti-Semitic, ultranationalist FLN. However, mainland French OAS members tended to be on the far-right, often recruiting from neofascist groups. In general, the OAS was a very strange group where a vicious anti-semite Vichy sympathizer might end up working closely on an assignment with a socialist Jew who fought for the French Resistance. However, this would come to an end, as mainland French OAS was outraged at De Gaulle for tilting so closely to the Communist bloc. Fortunately for them, they found a remarkably moneyed and well-supplied patron.

Moreover, although De Gaulle was popular with many professional soldiers, many of those same professional soldiers had become radicalized against Communism during the Three Years War, including the thermonuclear bombing of Stockholm. As befitting for a group that really really loved classical references, French members of the OAS planned their move on March 15th, 1963. With the help of British aircraft that scrambled French radar with strange British air drills, French paratroopers from of all places, French air bases in West Germany, dropped over Paris, seizing control of the radio stations and air fields. Interestingly, this was opposed by the OAS in Algeria, who declared their support for De Gaulle. However, Algeria was too far from Paris to help - the farthest they got was landing paratroopers in Corsica. Although they were preparing to land in Marseilles, Paris would be uncontested.

Prime Minister De Gaulle called on the radio across all of France for citizens and soldiers of France to resist the coup, including France's labour unions. Although the left-wing unions now supported De Gaulle (at least against the coup), they had been so brutalized by De Gaulle during the Three Years War, they were too disorganized and unable to coordinate the large general strikes they used to be able to organize. Moreover, Paris had been a bad place for protesters to shut down ever since the streets were widened to prevent that from happening. In popular opinion, it was tanks rolling down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, but it was actually Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) carrying paratroopers. Regardless, the outcome is generally not disputed, when left-wing Labour unions came to try to stop the troops, the professional officers immediately concluded they were working under the orders of the USSR (much as they had done so during the Three Years War), and simply ordered their men to disperse the crowds with live ammunition. The death toll may have possibly hit four-digits, especially because several members of the French Army were actually Swedish refugees who reportedly yelled "Remember Stockholm" while gunning down fleeing protesters in the back.

When soldiers came to burst in to arrest Charles De Gaulle, he had already fled the capital, apparently on route to Algeria. Taking a flight across the Mediterranean, his plane made it half-way through before exploding in-flight, killing everyone on board. The identity of who masterminded the sabotage of De Gaulle's plane was unknown, but was widely blamed on either the British or the Americans, the two powers who seemed to have the greatest vested interest in killing De Gaulle. In reality, it was neither of them. The bomb was apparently planted by the Czechoslovak StB, who hoped that by killing De Gaulle, they would weaken the Franco-Soviet detente that emerged from the Tehran Conference. The NKVD was actually trying to protect De Gaulle and were on guard against American and British attempts to assassinate De Gaulle, but neither of those agencies had any intention of killing the man (they merely wanted him out of power to stop any further technology transfers to the USSR). The assassination of De Gaulle made the holdouts in Algeria feel the situation was hopeless, especially when the FLN opened up an offensive against the French enclaves in Oran and Algiers. Unwilling to be caught in a war on both sides, the loyalists in Algeria surrendered to the coup.

The generals in charge of Paris organized a "Committee of Public Safety" that declared the National Assembly of France dissolved. However, instead of directly taking power themselves, they appointed as the new Prime Minister Jacques Soustelle, a once-close supporter of De Gaulle and key figure in Free France, who felt betrayed that his boss had "sold out France to Beria." In many ways, De Gaulle had signed his own death warrant by suppressing leftists and promoting European integration, because it was Europhiles who were most offended by Beria's thermonuclear bombing of Stockholm and felt that any dealings with him were unacceptable. The first act of Prime Minister Soustelle was to not revoke the peace in Algeria (which most pied-noirs actually supported), but merely to cut economic ties with the Soviet Union (most of the relevant technology had been already transferred, but at least they could stop the trade). In contrast, Soustelle moved quickly to deepen economic ties both with the rest of Europe as well as the United States.

The reaction in the Soviet Union was furious. Beria had given genuine concessions to get a trade deal with France. And now France appeared to have killed their old leader for making that deal and reneged on the deal. This heavily discredited Beria's foreign policy among voices in the Soviet bureaucracy already skeptical of his stranglehold on politics. In France itself, the coup was widely unpopular, but street action had failed gruesomely to actually stop the coup. Although the military regime promised elections by 1964, most French agreed that they were almost doomed to lose that election, which only added to the tension in French politics. As a result, Beria refused to change his course, believing that the upcoming French elections would put in power someone amenable to his old deal.

TastySpam · Oct 26, 2020

The New Sweden

The Swedlund Government was actually able to accomplish most of its goals before its term expired in late 1961. Sweden had joined both the EEC and NATO, the economy was distinctly on the upswing, Sweden had made serious progress on a nuclear weapons program, and reconstruction efforts, generously funded by other Western European powers, had been fully implemented in Stockholm. However, many in Sweden were harshly critical of the new government, especially as it seemed as if reconstruction efforts were disproportionately benefitting a network of large corporations and businessmen close to the government and Swedish military. Before the war, Prime Minister Swedlund had organized a massive stay-behind network to resist Communist control if Sweden were ever conquered by the USSR. Although that never happened, such a network did quickly spring up, ensuring relative political stability in Sweden after the vast majority of the Swedish political class was wiped out in the thermonuclear destruction of Stockholm.

The Rightist-Peoples "Coalition" government was expected to romp to a victory, especially as the Swedish Communists and even Social Democrats were now proscribed by law, due to an ultimatum given by Francisco Franco's government in Spain as the Spanish threatened to otherwise veto Swedish EEC entrance. However, discontent with the government simply migrated into the Farmer's League, which quickly became swamped by left-wing ex-Social Democrats.

They weren't the only enemies to the Coalition - Pentecostal minister Lewi Pethrus saw his church flooded by new members after the social and psychological devastation of the Three Years War - and whereas the Church of Sweden was disastrously disorganized after the destruction of Stockholm (due to their Stockholm-centric hierarchy), it was Pentecostal ministers like Pethrus who took the initiative in caring for the poor, injured, and orphaned in the years after the war. In particular, they would be funded by a flood of donations originating from Americans, who gladly opened up their wallets for Swedish orphanages and other charities. The Swedlund years saw an explosion in Pentecostal activity in Sweden - and Pethrus himself saw a way to bring those values into politics. Declaring the creation of a new political party, Christian Democratic Unity, Pethrus soon saw his party also flooded by right-wing members of the Farmer's League, who disliked the increasing leftist trend of the party.

Finally, the most dangerous enemy to the Coalition came from within. To effectuate EEC entrance, the Coalition was required to give two ministries to the Swedish Social Movement led by Per Engdahl, whose radical right-wing views attracted many of those most infuriated by the Soviet Union. In many ways, the Swedish Social Movement became increasingly popular amongst the right-wing businessmen of postwar Sweden, and they even moved to limit the stain of their former sympathy with Nazi Germany by courting Israeli right-wingers (similarly triumphant in Israeli politics). The problem is that the SSM actually used those two ministries very effectively, inserting itself very cleanly into a burgeoning Swedish military-industrial complex. Prominent Swedish military officer Alf Meyerhoffer also led an exodus of surviving Swedish officers, at least those who believed Swedlund too moderate, into the SSM.

The 1961 Swedish elections shocked the coalition. On almost every social and economic indice, the government had succeeded. The populace saw massive corruption, inequality, and political repression and discussed otherwise. Most devastatingly, the Rightists (15%) and People's Party (14%) managed to finish only third and fourth, defeated by both the Farmer's League (37%) and the Swedish Social Movement (22%), though the Christian Democrats came in fifth with 12%. Swedlund immediately retired from politics, declaring that it was time for a new leader. However, no such new leader emerged. The Farmer's League came in first by a wide margin - although they did not have enough for a majority unless another party joined their government. After almost half a year of no functioning government - especially devastating given Sweden's relatively precarious economic situation, the SSM struck. Meyerhoffer, leading a band of Three Years War veterans, marched on the capital of Stockholm, seizing control of Parliament and demanding that a non-leftist government be formed. With Swedish paramilitaries taking over the Riksdag - and an absentee Queen "reigning" from Denmark, the mainstream right-wing parties came to a decision. They would support the creation of a Swedish Social Movement (soon renamed the Swedish Socialist Party) minority government, with the implicit understanding that any of the other right-wing parties could veto their laws.

Ironically, Meyerhoffer passed away of natural causes two days after being named Prime Minister, who meant that power quickly fell to the radical founder of the Swedish Socialist Party, Per Engdahl. Fearful that the other parties would veto Engdahl, it was quickly decided by Socialist Party members to place into power the American-backed Lauri Torni, instead shuffling Engdahl off to Education and Justice. Party Treasurer Ingvar Kamprad became Minister of Finance and Minister of International Trade and Industry - while former SS Volunteer Gustaf Ekstrom was put in as Minister of Defense. Although the European left raged against the rise of "fascism in Sweden", the ruling governments of Western Europe welcomed the government in the name of shared anti-communism, and Sweden soon after became a founding member of the European Union.

Although the new government was unable to actually achieve a "revolution in Swedish society" given the constraints of the political system, it was able to distinctly put its mark on society. Swedish education took a distinctly nationalist tilt - and due to demands by the Christian Democrats, eventually incorporated religious teachings. Government contracts as part of the massive reconstruction effort were doled out to corporations with close ties to the ruling ideology of the state. Although the Socialists hadn't been able to indoctrinate most Swedes into their ideology, they were able to foster the creation of an elite business class did followed such beliefs. In many ways, this could not have happened not the Swedlund government "temporarily" suspended most of Sweden's labor unionization protection laws in the name of national recovery - the Socialists made such suspensions permanent, delighting many Swedish corporations. With massive party coffers tied, the Socialists were able to simply buy off relatively poor villages from voting Socialist instead of Farmer's League, which was hobbled due to the collapse of Sweden's left-wing labor unions. As part of a natalist program to "restore the Swedish population", the government very much adopted generous family programs encouraging families to "multiply for the sake of the nation." Mandatory national conscription was introduced and integrated into the education system, per Engdahl's mandates. Although not denying Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust, Swedish textbooks notably shrank their description to an infamous singular paragraph. Abroad, Sweden became an active anti-communist power, sending expeditionary forces and funding to various wars abroad, causing Swedish "volunteers" to show up abroad in a dizzying array of random wars. Islamist rebels in East Indonesia or Pakistani Baluchistan largely didn't know what a "Swede" was, but they were certainly not going to turn down the aid!

After a year and half, the Socialists had very much outlived their welcome on the mainstream right. They did not see the government as a success, especially as Swedish newspapers and intellectuals regularly mocked the increasingly radical and erratic government. Stories of corruption were almost everyday - and attempts by the government to shut down the newspapers had actually failed when all the other parties rallied against them. Joining the Farmer's League in a no confidence motion, the Rightists and People's Party helped trigger new elections. The results were very much to be a referendum on the Socialist government of the last year and a half. Although EU governments largely welcomed the Socialist government in Sweden, they were perfectly fine with seeing the Coalition back in power. However - that was not to be the case. Against all expectations, the Socialists had won the 1963 elections, cleaving into the voter base of the Farmer's League with generous rural support and family benefits, funded by their close relations to Sweden's burgeoning industrial conglomerates. Although once again a minority government, the Socialists had almost doubled their support - meaning they would need the support of any two of the three center-right parties to pass a policy - sending a shudder down the spine of Sweden's weakened left-wing.

TastySpam · Oct 28, 2020

Chaos on the Cape

By 1963, the Yu Chin Chang had transformed into a more normal-sounding name, the National Liberation Front of South Africa. Although clearly inspired by North Chinese Maoism, the group realized it was better to take those principles and apply them to a more neutral sounding goal: the violent end of Apartheid. Increasing chaos in the British Empire gave them more hope of overthrowing the National Party regime in South Africa, even as many of South Africa's leading left-wing intellectuals grew increasingly disdainful of their movement. Many of these intellectuals realized that the NBF ("Nasionale Bevrydingsfront") was actually only causing the South African government to grow more radical, alienating many Anglo moderates from the anti-apartheid movement. Ironically, this was also promoted by the fact that the NBF, despite being ferociously anti-Apartheid, was largely dominated by Afrikaans speakers due to its strongest support being in Namibia, where more non-whites spoke Afrikaans.

Ironically, the most complicated diplomacy took place with regards to the Republic of China, which generously supported the South African regime simply because it seemed like they were fighting "Maoist" rebels. The awkwardness of this was that the majority of Chinese South Africans were exceedingly sympathetic to the NBF - as apartheid largely did not exclude Chinese South Africans except those with close government ties. Ironically, whereas as Dai Li's National Bureau of Investigations and Statistics (NBIS) was increasingly brushing up against President Sun Fo (Chief Li and President Sun did not like each other at all), causing their traditional policing abilities in China itself to be limited, no limits were placed on the NBIS abroad. Increasingly, the NBIS became tasked by the governments of Malaya, Sarawak, and starting in the 1960's, South Africa to monitor ethnic Chinese populations in their nations. As a result, the South Chinese Secret Police, with explicit approval of the South African government, operated without impunity in South Africa, albeit only with jurisdiction over ethnic Chinese. Similar privileges were soon granted to the NBIS in both Imperial Vietnam and West Indonesia.

In many ways, South Africa was viewed as a bulwark against Communism in Africa by the Western powers and with a distinctly violent Communist insurgency, the South African government persuasively argued to Western powers that any criticism of apartheid in turn jeopardized South Africa's status as a Western ally. Even as many Western politicians were secretly horrified by Apartheid, most turned a blind eye. The only major Western powers to openly condemn apartheid were Canada and Italy, though unlike the Italians, the Canadians still maintained amicable commercial relations with South Africa. Amusingly, this also led to strange alliances. For example, the South African government actually supported Roy Welensky, the moderately liberal (and Jewish) leader of the Central African Federation over his rival, Ian Smith, who while sharing a similar racial ideology, was viewed as too erratic by the South African government. Roy Welensky personally loathed apartheid, but squeezed by threats in all directions, cordial relations with South Africa was seen as the devil he knew.

Indeed, the Donges government was somewhat more moderate. Although the National Party was largely seen as an Afrikaner chauvinist party, the most hardline members had actually splintered off, and the Donges government, seeking more support, increasingly reached out to Anglophone whites and even incentivized immigration from Europe. The only problem with their outreach is that not many people actually wanted move to South Africa. Crime rates were among the highest in the world as South African police simply stopped policing black neighborhoods. Wages were weak, conscription was being implemented to deal with a lack of military manpower (to deal with the NBF), and National Party censorship/repression (including whites who criticized Apartheid) alienated many youth. In fact, it would be one (and a half) nations that provided the bulk of migrants to South Africa - Sweden-Finland. Shattered Sweden, teeming with refugees from Finland, was one of the rare European countries that saw South Africa as a step up. Tens of thousands of Swedish and Finnish refugees flooded into South Africa, carving out Swedish/Finnish ethnic enclaves with official government support. Although there were hopes Yugoslavs might do the same, Socialist Yugoslavia firmly refused to establish diplomatic relations with South Africa.

In addition, the rise of the "New Sweden" created perhaps the most enthusiastic booster of apartheid in Europe. For example, although Portugal also ran a settler-colonial empire that widely discriminated against non-whites, the Portuguese Estado Novo at least claimed to be non-racialist and tolerant under their theory of Lusotropicalism (so discrimination, while typical, was not universal) - and thus while friendly with South Africa, could not openly endorse apartheid. Francoist Spain, although an radical-right authoritarian government where the Falange seemed to be gaining more, less dominance, actually enjoyed very good relations with most of the Arab World to the point where in historical irony, it was Tunisian diplomats who brokered a maritime dispute between Spain and Italy. Even Corporatist West Austria shunned apartheid, fearful of angering the Catholic Church (which fiercely opposed apartheid). In contrast, the Swedish government had no compunctions, declaring South Africa the "shield of the eternal European race against Afro-Asiatic-Communism" in official state declarations. One of the top Swedish exports of the time was hundreds of thousands of cheap IKEA rifles to South Africa, where they were touted as an "anti-Communist home defense weapon." The Swedish nuclear program soon found eager collaborators in the governments of South Africa and Israel, enough to continue the nuclear program after the South Chinese and French politely pulled out of their nuclear cooperation agreements with Israel after the West Bank invasion.

Laventry Beria largely lost interest in supporting the struggle against apartheid, viewing it as hopeless. Instead, a variety of Eastern bloc nations were once again forced to pick up the slack. Chief among them was North China, who saw their pride at stake (a failure to support any movement venerating Mao would have been viewed as an ideological defeat), but North China would naturally drag its closest partners in Pakistan, North Japan, and Burma along with it, who all brought different assets to the table. This allowed the NBF to outmaneuver many of its intra-ideological rivals, especially those who argued for primarily a war of independence in Namibia. The South African government hoped a quick application of military force would destroy the NBF, escalating the war by intensifying repression in Namibia and the rest of South Africa. After all, this had sort-of-worked for the Portuguese in Angola, who seemed like they were winning. However, that actually hurt the South Africans. Many defeated Angolan guerillas responded by simply moving south into Namibia - which was an easy transition since many of these Angolans were ethnic Ovambo (the dominant ethnicity of Namibia). They brought with them expertise, fierceness, and generous funding from the Eastern Bloc. As a result, in Namibia particularly, the South African crackdown had the opposite effect, sending young men who had been radicalized by growing up under apartheid, clamoring to the NBF. A decade-long low-level insurgency had now kindled into a full-blown guerilla struggle.

TastySpam · Jan 22, 2020

The 1963 Oil Shock

Outraged by Western support for Israel in the Second Arab-Israeli War, a consortium of Arab nations, often forced by domestic outrage, declared a boycott of the nations seen as supporting Israel, namely the United States, France, United Kingdom, South China, and India. This would have differing effects on each country, partly due to their own oil situation. Libya, although a fairly moderate nation, was forced to join the oil boycott. The oil fields in Iraq had largely fallen to Syrian-aligned Nationalists. Iran had a preexisting boycott on most of the West (besides Italy). Mexico continued to reserve its oil for domestic use as part of their protectionist import-substitution industrialization policy. Venezuelan oil rigs were mostly only barely getting back online after the economically disruptive (low-level) war in Venezuela. The only major oil-producing region aligned with the West was Kuwait and the Trucial States, both under British protection, and the Islamic Republic of Al-Hasa and Qatif, under American protection These exports cushioned any major oil shock until 1962.

However, these hopes were dashed in late 1962, when the Iranian government, siding with the Syrians in their war on Britain, declared that they would "no longer be able to guarantee the security of Western oil shipments." The Soviet Union generously supplied missile boats to enterprising young sailors, trained by the NKVD but disproportionately from Soviet-aligned Pakistan, who then used them to pray on Western shipping in the name of Islam. It was widely known that Iran was complicit in this, outraging the West but delighting many of those in Iran skeptical of the left-wing government, including conservative Muslim ulema clerics. Although the Royal Navy was able to sink most of these wannabe privateers and protect most shipping, the pirates never targeted South Chinese and Indian shipping, not viewing them as complicit in Western colonialism. This caused Indians and Chinese (with growing oil demands) to buy oil at a favorable price, which meant their growing industries could actually outbid Britain on oil from its own protectorates. When the British found out, they threatened to equalize the oil prices, but South China and India issued a joint declaration stating that such a policy would violate trade agreements with both China and South India and result in trade retaliations. The Conservative government was inclined to stand up to the South Chinese and Indians, but the new Labour government realized that this could be even worse for British global influence, so they backed down. Britain quickly plunged into a deep recession, though this was just as much due to the war as it was due to the oil shock.

France was partly shielded from the effects of the oil embargo because they regularly pumped oil from both the Algerian Sahara and Fezzan, enough to make up for the fact that Libya had continued to boycott France in retaliation for France's refusal to relinquish Fezzan to Libyan sovereignty. In France, the outbreak of the Algerian Civil War and French evacuation of Northern Algeria meant that the pipelines from the oil fields in South Algeria to the Mediterranean were unusable. Boycotted by almost every oil producer on Earth and with no more oil colonies besides small deposits in Equatorial Africa, the French economy, built on state-led dirigisme heavy industrial projects, quickly came to a screeching halt. Widespread unemployment and economic recession were very much the context of the French coup, as Prime Minister De Gaulle faced criticism for a part of policy he typically neglected, the economy. Under his rule, economic policy was deeply neglected, leaving France unusually poorly prepared for a future in which cheap oil was not available. This would create an opportunity for the French putchists who removed De Gaulle, but it also presented a major problem for them once they had taken power.

The United Kingdom and France were not the only nations to suffer economic consequences. Although not in a recession, the United States certainly did suffer serious economic repercussions, as wage growth collapsed. Notably, the skyrocketing price of oil came as a shock to the nation where car ownership had recently begun surging. President Kennedy wasn't particularly concerned with how happy voters were with the economy - the Kennedy-aligned Congress simply passed a tax cut and a grant program to cities to implement more fuel-efficient public transit systems. Innovative states and cities actually used their grant money fairly well, but it didn't calm Americans outraged by rapidly rising oil prices. Kennedy was in particular so laser-focused on pushing back Communism, he vetoed foreign policy proposals meant to expand American access to cheap oil if he felt they jeopardized the struggle against Communism. In this fact, he was backed by most of the American foreign policy establishment, which was generally unconcerned about economic issues facing everyday Americans. Indeed, 1963 would be one of the most contentious years in American history, characterized by both a new antiwar protest movement led by activists like Martin Luther King Jr. on one side and the violent radicalization of the KKK on the other.

TastySpam · Jan 23, 2020

A House Divided

The 1962 election was a watershed election for segregationists, insofar that 1962 saw the last open segregationists in the Senate (the class most recently re-elected in 1956) lose their seats. Of course, it was not the end of the Dixiecrats - in fact, many former segregationist politicians still held major positions in the South. However, for the most part, most of these politicians would say with gritted teeth that they would accept the verdict in the Supreme Court's Wood v. Richmond, arguing instead that states rights meant that states should have the rights to implement desegregation on a "timely, pragmatic pace that works for the local system." Although almost all of these former segregationists unsurprisingly opted for a pace that was significantly slower than civil rights activists desired, none of them openly opposed the end-goal of desegregation. As a result, 1963 would be the first year in which roughly half of black students in the South would attend desegregated schools.[1] However, this also caused many white families to pull their children out of the public schools, putting them in private schools that explicitly rejected black students (the "segregation academies"). Setbacks aside, the goal of desegregation was largely continuing unabated.

Although the Southern Democrats would survive, albeit in a more moderate and racially conciliatory form, one group suffered badly. Isolated and localized groups arose in the 1950's, outraged against desegregation, taking upon the mantle of the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike the 1920's KKK (a national organization, sometimes international in the case of the Canadian KKK, that also campaigned on animus towards Catholic and Jewish immigrants), the groups now referred to as the Third KKK were a primarily Southern group monomanically obsessed with opposing civil rights. That being said, the third KKK did eventually branch out into anti-semitism after JFK's support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli War caused them to make common ground with Neo-Nazi movements. The KKK bombed the houses of federal agents and civil rights activists before the US government declared them a domestic terrorist group, and let loose the FBI, which in the late 1950's, was totally unrestrained by notions of due process. One result of this was that although Hoover's FBI was brutally effective at crushing KKK groups, they also took the opportunity to smear political enemies as associated with the KKK, even if they were not, in hopes of destroying their political careers. Moreover, this harsh suppression created a survival-of-the-fittest dynamic where the KKK groups that evaded capture were often the most capable and extreme. Moreover, this meant when white supremacists like the neo-Nazi extremist George Lincoln Rockwell denounced the authoritarianism of the American secret services and police...well, he actually had a point. Running as an independent candidate in the 1961 Virginia gubernatorial elections, taking advantage of the fact that both the Democrat in the race (in the aftermath of the collapse of the Byrd Organization) as well as the Republican did not openly oppose desegregation, Rockwell ran a single-issue campaign calling for "massive resistance" to school desegregation. He lost of course, but shocked most of the nation when he took 14% of the vote (mostly Jim Crow dead-enders protest voting, not actual Nazis), giving him an unusual bully pulpit. However, Rockwell condemned violence against the American state and supported all the wars abroad, claiming that anti-Americanism divided the anticommunist powers of the world. In contrast, his competitor, Francis Parker Yockey, also grew stronger by harnessing antiwar sentiment and linking it to white supremacy (Yockey was also unabashedly pro-Soviet, because of Stalin's persecution of Jews).

KKK groups also had an easy group to recruit from: disaffected veterans from the Three Years War, especially those who had suffered the effects of nuclear radiation and were unceremoniously abandoned by the US government and blacklisted by corporate America. Although many of those veterans, such as student leader Robert Bork, joined the radical left, many would also join new KKK groups. As less competent groups were slowly weeded out by the FBI, the surviving groups were extremely well-disciplined, well-armed, and well-trained organizations that slowly began to coalesce. The FBI's relentless pursuit of mafia and other organized crime groups had the effect of chasing gunmen with mafia ties into the hands of anti-government groups such as the burgeoning KKK movement, which funded itself often through illicit drug trafficking. Ironically, despite their staunch anti-Communism, many of these KKK groups received secret funding from the Eastern bloc, in particularly East Germany, which had already been funding neo-Nazi groups in West Germany, and had a large supply of Stasi agents who could pretend to be exiled Nazi noblemen to unsuspecting KKK members accepting their sophisticated military aid. As a result, local police forces and FBI agents often found themselves outgunned by KKK terrorists, who could often wreak terror on small towns (they primarily operated in small towns) before any US National Guard troops could arrive.

On the complete other side of the civil rights spectrum, radical activists were coalescing into a large march on Washington D.C., calling for both an end to the wars and stronger social services. In the planning for over a year, the eloquent Martin Luther King, Jr. continued to gain followers across the country, even as he and his close circle of supporters regularly dodged FBI harassment. Closely planning with college students, the goal was not to only to have a show of force, but also to seize control of American electoral politics. In 1964, both political parties would essentially have an open primary, and in both parties, young radicals had a preferred option. In the Democratic Party, the hawkish Vice President Henry Jackson was widely expected to be the nominee (Kennedy was term limited), but a small insurgent campaign was being planned by the relatively antiwar Abraham Ribicoff, President Kennedy's Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Although Ribicoff was a close friend of Kennedy, he had increasing disagreements over foreign policy. In contrast, the 1964 Republican Party was increasingly expected to be a showdown between Barry Goldwater (primarily strong in the South) and Eugene McCarthy (strong in the North). At the time, Goldwater appeared to be holding an actual lead, which greatly worried the burgeoning antiwar movement, who saw Goldwater as even worse than Jackson. Perhaps cleverly, Martin Luther King, Jr., while not explicitly call for the criminalization of abortion, did cite skyrocketing abortion rates in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 1960 decision on abortion alongside other issues such as poverty, racism, and imperialism as an example of society's moral rot, in hopes of aligning conservative Christians with his socialistic and antiwar agenda, a decision that would have a remarkable impact on American politics.

However, the biggest news to drop that month went relatively unnoticed. Although most Americans had forgotten Kennedy's arrest of several United Fruit Company executives (and political rivals close to them), many of America's business and legal elites had not forgotten. Yes, Kennedy's administration did stop a potentially disastrous American intervention in Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company, but they had done it by blatantly fabricating evidence on political rivals for imaginary crimes that they were then prosecuted for. An explosive leak of information and evidenced slowly collected over the last 5 years soon began circulating across American legal circles, that the president's Department of Justice had acted illegally to throw political enemies in well, a literal camp. Of course, this was widely known, but the media and other power elites generally didn't complain when the state targeted unpopular groups (such as socialists or white supremacists). But in this case, there seemed to be some proof that the President's office had directly targeted, well, one of their own. The "DOJ Papers" were quickly reported on by the major news channels, which saw this as their greatest scoop ever. Polling generally indicated most Americans dismissed the case, so the White House dismissed the leak, instead dedicating their efforts towards hunting down the leaker.
---
[1] Faster than OTL. I think I remembered reading that in 1968, most black students in the South attended segregated schools.

TastySpam · Jan 24, 2020

Project Oliphant

The largest multinational nuclear program in the world history did not actually begin as a reference to J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. Instead, it began when Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, in a conversation with Muhhamad Ali Jinnah, recommended that Pakistan develop nuclear weapons. Jinnah rejected this idea as did most Pakistani politicians and officials. However, the socialist regime in Pakistan that took power after the crushing defeat in the Indo-Pakistani War had no such qualms. In fact, the Pakistani Army's defeat, even with British aid, so humiliated these military leaders, they actually convinced themselves that Pakistan could not win any confrontation with India through conventional military methods. President Akbar Khan happily plunged Pakistan in an intense nuclear weapons program in 1951, at a time in world history when the only nations with functional nuclear weapons were the United States and the Soviet Union. Nicknamed Project Oliphant, the Pakistani nuclear weapons program was based in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, which was ostensibly for peaceful atomic energy, but was anything but. It took three years for any source of uranium to be located, which meant operations could only begin in 1954. This was convenient, because the outbreak of the Three Years War meant that the possibility of India and Pakistan going to war again as a proxy for the West and East skyrocketed. Soviet economic officials were deployed by Beria to help the Pakistanis construct the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant. The funding for the project was less Soviet, but rather a consortium including Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Progress was generally good, but even by 1963, the Pakistanis had no such nuclear weapons. Although they had done much of the grunt work...the project needed a lot more funding.

In 1963 however, the Pakistanis found an unexpected source of aid. In 1963, so outraged by Soviet withdrawal of troops from East Germany and North China, much of the Warsaw Pact states had lost faith in Beria's ability. In theory, the Warsaw Pact members were all under the Soviet nuclear umbrella, but many Warsaw Pact nations had interpreted Soviet withdrawals from these countries as a shrinking of the nuclear umbrella, even as they insisted it was not. In particular, two nations would lend almost all of their scientific expertise to Operation Oliphant, which by then had understood that the word Oliphant was also a giant elephant-like creature in the Lord of the Rings, causing many scientists to decorate their offices with elephant toys and to adopt a local elephant as the mascot of the Pakistani nuclear program. This in particular annoyed the North Chinese and forced them into a desperate military operation to locate their own elephant, because many North Chinese officials were jealous of the popular National Revolutionary Army Officer Lin Wang, who was an Indian elephant who had served with the NRA during the Second Sino-Japanese War and was now a popular mascot of the South Chinese Army. The constant attempts of the North Chinese to draft the local elephant mascot as a commissioned officer of the People's Liberation Army in a ploy to outshine the South led to great tensions between Pakistan and North China and nearly led to North China pulling out of the project, though calmer heads eventually prevailed after the Pakistanis gave them a giant stuffed elephant instead.

Ultimately, the project saw funding from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, North China, East Germany, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, causing progress to rapidly accelerate. The parties in question generally tried to keep it clandestine, away from Soviet knowledge, a ploy that only succeeded because the elements of the Soviet Army who best understood what was going on...really hated Beria, and typically kept mum. Three countries in particular provided the vast majority of funding, East Germany, North China, and Pakistan, leading to the conclusion that the three countries in question would establish a tripartite nuclear umbrella - the Pakistanis would cover socialist nations in the Middle East, the East Germans would cover Eastern Europe, and the North Chinese would cover the rest of East Asia. Surprisingly, the nations in question generally agreed to the selection of nations, as East Germany and North China were seen as the most ideologically reliable, insofar that their raison d'etre as a state would disappear if they "deviated" from Communism, although the secret service agencies of each respective host country agreed that in the case of seemingly unstoppable regime change, they could secretly transmit their arsenal to another nation in the region.

With the massive infusion of funding, Project Oliphant rapidly advanced in its pace, although it would still take several years to produce results.

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

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