The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
- Thread starter Augenis
- Start date
Before Nagai's Japan is brought down by the Chinese, it would be.
Each country has it's own spice in megastructure design.
The Turks, being the most, erm, idealistic of the squad, focus on complete reconstruction - rebuilding cities and infrastructure that they inherited from the Ottomans and reshaping it to fit the tenets of Unitarianism. Constantinople, for example, has basically become an entirely different city from what it used to be. Most, if not all pre-1916 buildings have been either demolished or refurbished for different usage (the Hagia Sophia has been mostly demolished, some parts have been left as a museum and one of the minarets now stands as a clock tower), while the city itself is divided into specific sectors - the government sector, the transport sector, the living sector, you know, utopian/dystopian things like that. The Union wholeheartedly believes that Constantinople will be the capital of a United Earth, and thus the city has been designed for that - the "Congress" holds 2500 seats even though there are only 300 deputies, as the other seats are reserved for future additions; and all road signs and street names are in the Unitarian language.
Currently, Constantinople is on the process of having any mentions of the original name be destroyed and getting ready for a name change to Kubilay.
India, meanwhile, is a lot more practical in it's megaconstruction. The nation has built hundreds of closed towns for research, technology and military construction, all with already mentioned optimistic names. Massive mines dot Orissa and the Deccan, the rainforests which used to be common in the south have been cut down completely for export, and to control the water supply in the Indus and Ganges, gigantic dams were built upstream, which have eliminated floods in the river valleys and formed giant lakes along the Himalayas. All in all, megaconstruction in India ties directly to Accelerationism and it's goal of rapid modernization and industrialization.
Lithuania doesn't have many megaprojects finished, and they are mostly practical, like the Amelioration Campaign, but they have plenty of plans on what they will do once Russia is defeated.
What about Japan? I'd take it they focus on glorifying their Supreme Leader (Nagai)?
The Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa (January 1940 - April 1940)
“When this order is received, all men and boys able to carry a spear will go to Gondar. Every married man will bring his wife to cook and wash for him. Every unmarried man will bring any unmarried woman he can find to cook and wash for him. Women with babies, the blind, and those too aged and infirm to carry a spear are excused. Anyone found at home after receiving this order will be hanged.”
-- Order of Yaqob II, Emperor of Ethiopia, calling for a chitet (a general mobilization and muster) of the Ethiopian Army [1]
The January Chitet of 1940 brought representatives of all Ethiopia together in Gondar, and the influence of the last century’s events was clear to see.
In 1840, Ethiopia was still in the throes of the Zemene Mesafint, an “Age of Princes” in which feudal Oromo lords, their upstart tributaries, and marginalized scions of the Solomonic dynasty vied to impose their own order upon a barely-controlled chaos. This state of affairs came to an end in the 1850s, when the country was reunified under Tewodros II with the aid of French merchant companies operating in the western Indian Ocean. His long-term plans for the country involved restoring the supremacy of the Amhara and Tigray populations—whose loyalty to the Ethiopian Church was greater than that of the Oromo—expanding the borders of church and state, and securing the borders against Muslim incursion. His demands of the French government to provide skilled workers for starting a local firearms industry, and the control over Ethiopian foreign policy that the French reciprocally requested, caused his relationship with the French to break down. In the run-up to the Conference of Rome, the French sent an expeditionary force to make Tewodros come to terms. He was defeated at Adwa, and committed suicide shortly afterwards. Upon hearing of Tewodros’s defeat, Dejazmach Kassai, the military governor of Tigray— one of the three most powerful rulers left in Ethiopia— came forward to meet the French force and claimed that he would give France influence over Ethiopia if they helped him unify it. By 1871, Kassai had been crowned Emperor Yohannes IV at Gondar, and signed a treaty with the French shortly afterward. The Treaty of Gondar gave France full control over Ethiopian foreign policy and most-favored-nation status in matters of trade. French merchants would be allowed access to Ethiopian markets and the ability to buy land. The treaty also required Ethiopia to pay a “protection” payment annually, but allowed it to retain its army and internal autonomy. French troops would not be stationed in Ethiopia, both versions of the treaty claimed, unless the Emperor requested it or the Ethiopian government proved unable to protect French citizens in its territory.
The next seventy years transformed Ethiopia. Having secured his borders and received firearms from the French expeditionary force as a parting gift, Yohannes defeated Wagshum Gobeze and Menelik of Shewa, his rivals for mastery of the country. Ten years later, the French founded the city of Nouvelle-Lyon [2] as a trade hub and naval base. It performed admirably in both functions, eclipsing the older market of Zeila in size and stature and serving as an outpost of French naval power in the Western Indian Ocean. With French investment, a number of increasingly modern roads and bridges helped spur trade between growing cities. Small scale businesses, started not just by Frenchmen but by Greek and Armenian immigrants, helped build systems of light manufacturing, transport, brewing, and finance. These achievements were crowned by the completion of the Great African Railway in 1907, which linked Nouvelle-Lyon with Gondar and Ankober, a city in Ethiopia’s south that was once the capital of Menelik’s kingdom. From 1900 onward, cultural and political changes accompanied economic shifts. The French had strong-armed the Ethiopian government into outlawing slavery in the 1890s. Though the Shanqella peoples of western Ethiopia were still the target of discrimination and mostly worked at the same kind of unskilled labor they’d done before emancipation, they were now— in theory— equal before the law. Those laws were the subject of great debate by the “young Ethiopians.” Educated in the lycées of Nouvelle-Lyon and Moquedichou [3] they campaigned for further modernization in Ethiopia. Yaqob II, who became emperor in 1915, proved receptive. He established a cabinet with ministries for finance, agriculture, and labor, all staffed by educated, progressive Ethiopians. A “foreign affairs and trade” ministry was created for the near-exclusive purpose of dealing with the French. Some “young Ethiopians,” though, could not find places in government so readily. There was much about the state of Ethiopia in the early 20th century to be angry about— the French abused their economic privileges to put down local competition, the Greeks and Armenians were almost worse— but openly sporting anti-French attitudes didn’t suit one for service to a state that was a French protectorate. The army, however, had more lax requirements. Containing significant contingents of peasants dispossessed by rural banditry or French-built coffee plantations, nobles who had faced scandals and needed to retreat from public life, urban workers who’d found that the factory life was worse for one’s health than a career as a soldier, and middle-class radicals looking to make a difference, the army became a locus of radical discontent against the status quo. After the Great European War, when the French denied Ethiopia rewards for its people’s wartime service and instead unilaterally hiked the Gondar Treaty’s “protection” payments in 1932 in order to pay for French flu recovery, there was much to be angry about.
By 1939, the United Officers’ Movement was, under the leadership of Dawit Gebeyehu, ready for revolt. By 1940, they had their excuse. Shortly after the Battle of De-Foix, a call for a chitet, a gathering and inspection of the land’s war-ready soldiers and civilians alike, was distributed on the Sengupta and by horsemen riding through the country. Almost 500,000 Ethiopians answered the call. It was generally expected that the Emperor would meet and exhort the assembled population, in his creaking voice, about the need to help France in its time of need.
He did no such thing. The Emperor, on the day of the Chitet, remained silent until Dawit Gebeyehu took the stage and did something extraordinary.
He bowed before the Emperor.
Theodore Weber, the father of Unitarianism, had been a biologist. In his studies of insects, he determined that the anthill— a structure in which each individual is an equally important part of the collective— was the model for an ideal human society. But even ants have monarchs. The queen ant, like a queen bee or queen termite, is bestowed with the largesse of the collective. They are fed by workers and protected by soldiers, because in return they allow the collective to continue existing. The Solomonic dynasty was, to its detractors, a symbol of Christian Amhara imperialism over the other ethnicities of Ethiopia— but even the most virulent anti-monarchist could not deny that the very concept of Ethiopia had sprung from the legitimate rule which the Solomonic kings, as a group, had embodied since the days of Aksum. The monarch was the overriding unity that linked Amhara and Oromo [4], noble and peasant, Christian and Muslim. Starting from this existing unity, closer links between the people could be built.
All of this was related by Gebeyehu in a speech to the city of Gondar that lasted for two hours. After it, the aging Emperor Yaqob declared his eternal opposition to the French, his determination to set right what the earlier Solomonic kings had done wrong, and his age. In a section of the speech delivered with great consternation and seeming hesitation on the Emperor’s part— the section that leads most modern observers to believe that the Emperor was forced into toeing the Unitarian line— he cited his age and developing infirmities as reasons why, though he could start a difficult war of liberation against France, he could not wisely continue it. He declared that Dawit Gebeyehu would be the regent— the Enderase— of the monarchy until the war’s successful conclusion. Gebeyehu would assume full control over Ethiopia’s military forces and be allowed to make emergency proclamations on governance. Emperor Yaqob appeared to hearten slightly when allowed to proclaim that “under my august guidance, and with Enderase Gebeyehu’s service… Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” [5] This last line appeared to remind the religious among the assembled that they had a stake in the upcoming fight. Their roars for vengeance against the oppressors became as loud as the more atheist Unitarians’. French flags paved the streets.
Broadcasting the events of the January Chitet from Gondar’s Sengupta stations helped, but was not absolutely necessary. The United Officers had already made sure that the men appointed to govern important provinces were of military backgrounds and United Officers membership. These men didn’t have to learn anew about a war they’d been preparing to wage for years.
The Union of Ethiopia, in all its contradictions, was quite literally born fighting.
The flag of the Union of Ethiopia.
The Birlik wasn’t perfectly happy about this. They had long been the defenders of Unitarian orthodoxy in a world that seemed ready to accept India’s Purple nonsense. Ethiopia’s monarchical Unitarianism was, in an ideological sense, a bigger slap in the face than Japan’s Nagai cult and Aceh’s Islamic Unitarianism combined. But Constantinople, soon to be christened Kubilay, was in need of allies. Ethiopia was, if nothing else, the first step to a Turkish backyard in Northeast Africa. While the Ethiopians organized their forces, Turkish submarines began the assault on Nouvelle-Lyon by raiding its shipping. By the start of February, the Ethiopian army arrived. Most of the army was infantry, but Oromo cavalrymen and the shifta— rural militiamen that were either bandits or wealth-redistributing heroes of the people, depending on how Unitarian you were— served as important auxiliary forces. The introduction of the Turkish air force into the battle decisively shifted the balance in favor of the Ethiopians. The Turkish air force easily defeated the small colonial air force, and victory in the skies allowed the Unitarians to end the Battle of Nouvelle-Lyon on their terms after a month of protracted siege warfare. The pacified city was renamed as Addis Ababa [6], and its environs annexed as a new province of Ethiopia.
Though the Turks originally hoped to be granted preferential treatment in the newly Unitarian port city, Ethiopia declared that Addis Ababa would be an open port to all members of the Commonwealth. India in particular used this as an excuse to drop off the aid it promised years earlier. In the months to come, the Ethiopian army would become flush with weaponry, suppliers, and advisors from the most powerful member of the Commonwealth. The most valuable gift from India, the Siddi Regiment, would arrive through Addis Ababa as well. This all-volunteer unit, drawn from the descendants of slaves imported by the old Indian sultanates, returned to Africa ready to fight for the freedom of Ethiopia. The Siddi Regiment and the example it set would become instrumental in later changes in Ethiopian military and civilian culture, but they also served as an indelible reminder of India’s influence in what was originally to be a Turkish satellite.
To keep the Turks happy with all of this, Gebeyehu made a gift to the Turks of 10 tons of coffee from the Ethiopian interior provinces, and left open the possibility of a coffee-for-guns barter trade that might continue until the end of the war. He also promised Ethiopian aid in any Turkish attacks on Moquedichou, which Constantinople saw as a much-needed bridgehead for true Blue Unitarian influence in Africa.
Mural commemorating the “Unification” of Addis Ababa. The people of Ethiopia are pictured here, acting as one.
The capture of Addis Ababa, however, was soon overshadowed by an even greater event. The French exercised a loose control over the interior Ethiopian Highlands, preferring to concentrate their forces along the Somali coast and the outlying lowlands. The French garrison defending Harar, as a result, lacked the resources to withstand the Ethiopian assault. The old city was captured near the middle of March, and upon visiting it, Gebeyehu realized something.
Gondar, the capital of Ethiopia, was a lovely city. It was also a parochial one. Despite substantial immigration from other parts of Ethiopia and the construction of ethnically diverse suburbs and slums, Gondar’s center was conservative, Christian and Amharic. Even the Muslims, who had lived in the city as traders since the 1600s, lived in a separate quarter called Addis Alem. The city was stratified and hierarchical, and reconstructing it from scratch Kubilay-style was not worth the expense.
Harar, however, was different. It lay outside of Ethiopia’s borders, and did not bear the oppressive weight of tradition that was Gondar’s burden. It would be a perfect stage for an idea Gebeyehu had been working on for a long time.
Acknowledging that Ethiopia had already overspread its borders and would only grow more likely to do so over the course of the war against France, Gebeyehu elevated the Unitarian struggle to an East African one. At a conference in Harar, to which representatives of Addis Ababa’s homegrown working-class Unitarian movement were invited, the Popular Union of East Africa was brought into existence. This new state, born in the first week of April, was meant to serve as a federal framework for the region's Unitarian movements.
Section I of the PUEA Basic Law created the Congress of East African Deputies, a unicameral body of lawmakers headed by a Chairman, who ruled with the advice of an appointed Executive Committee. The Chairman was granted the power to veto or ban any policy of the sub-federal units of the PUEA, but the sub-federal units had, on paper, the right to appeal veto decisions by consulting the Congress. Dawit Gebeyehu, unsurprisingly, became Chairman. This granted him paramount authority over the Congress—which devolved into a rubber-stamp committee—and over the Union of Ethiopia, a sub-federal unit. Gebeyehu now, on paper, outranked the Emperor Yaqob II, and aimed to keep developing a new power-base. Eventually, the basis of his authority would rest on something more stable than his revocable status as Ethiopia’s Enderase.
Section II of the Basic Law declared the federal language to be French. The decision to retain the colonialists’ tongue as the official language of the liberators was controversial, but justified by the fact that the French language was really the only pan-East-African language. The peoples of the Horn had been brought together by French oppression, and their shared struggle elevated it into a tool of unity and Unitarianism. In private, when asked why he didn’t immediately declare the Unitarian language to be the federal language, Gebeyehu replied that the “bastard tongue of Buda” would have no place on the African continent. As a sop to the Turks, however, Section II made provisions for the importation of Unitarian-language teachers, the co-official use of French and Unitarian after ten years, and the final and permanent replacement of French by Unitarian in twenty-five years. Gebeyehu felt that, in time, he would be secure and independent enough to repeal these clauses without making too many waves.
Section III of the Basic Law placed the federal capital in Harar. Big plans existed for Harar’s future. The city would not be an ideological dollhouse on the level of Constantinople. No, future construction in Harar, the new epicenter of Unitarianism in Africa, would have an eye toward… accelerating its development. Funding was set aside for Indian-style mega-construction and associated rapid modernization and industrialization. As March drew closer, however, the PUEA continued to only have one official member: the Union of Ethiopia. Steps were taken to remedy this...
The flag of the Popular Union of East Africa (PUEA).
Though French forces in East Africa were left directionless in the wake of the Commonwealth’s rapid declaration and expansion of war, the armies and navies of the Horn soon regained organization. With naval support making its way around South Africa and northward along the Swahili coast, the French appeared ready at the start of March to roll back all the previous month’s Unitarian offensives. Both Ethiopian and Turk, despite differences, recognized that control of the coast had to be wrested from the French in order to isolate the colonial troops of the interior. The foreign minister of the PUEA, Wolde Mikael, met with Turkish envoys in Addis Ababa. The parties agreed to split Somalia in half. In return for Ethiopian assistance in capturing Moquedichou and extending Unitarianism to the frontiers of Spanish Central Africa, the representatives of the Union would recognize the PUEA’s right of conquest over northern Somalia, a zone which included the ports of Berbera and Bosaso, set its southern border at the latitude of Galkayo, and extended eastward to the Indian Ocean.
The sun beat down upon the land and peoples of the African Horn. The wispy chains of cloud cover could not restrain the empowered blueness of the endless sky.
The flag of the Administration of Somalia, the second sub-federal member of the PUEA. It is headquartered in Addis Ababa, and doesn’t control any Somali territory yet. The two green stars represent equality and freedom, which point to the great white star of human unity.
[1] This is copied almost word-for-word from Haile Selassie's general mobilization order during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.
[2] OTL Djibouti.
[3] OTL Mogadishu.
[4] The three kings— Tewodros II, Yohannes IV, and Menelik II— who ruled OTL Ethiopia after the Zemene Mesafint (a time of Oromo ascendancy in Ethiopian politics) all had seriously bad relations with the Oromo people. A British missionary observing a victorious battle of Tewodros’s claimed that “upwards of a thousand Gallas [Oromo] fell in battle, or perished under the executioner’s knife, whilst the country around was plundered, and the poor women and children carried captive into the various provinces of Abyssinia.” Meanwhile, Menelik’s expansions of Ethiopia’s borders involved capturing the whole of the Oromo territories, and placing them under the hegemony of Christian Tigray and Amhara administrators. TTL, the French intervention have prevented the erosion of Oromo power, autonomy, and rights that accompanied the late 1800s. The Oromo retain some of the stature in the army and government that they held in the 1700s and early 1800s, and are thus more committed to the idea of Ethiopia— even a Unitarian one.
[5] Psalm 68:31.
[6] “New Flower” in Amharic. OTL’s Addis Ababa was never built, since Menelik II never became emperor.
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I can't believe there is a completely valid justification in-universe for monarcho-unitarianism.
Yeah, the canon description of Unitarianism as a philosophy based on the "equal bug society" confused me-- in real bug collectives, members tend to have different jobs and different levels of relative importance. I figured it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for someone to point out that bees have queens and turn that into a justification for monarchist Unitarianism :^)
I don't think you're wrong. The thing that, to me, makes Unitarianism different from OTL communism is that it's so open to interpretation, and there's no single USSR-style superpower to set limits on what's acceptable and what isn't. Some Unitarian states feel comfortable in challenging all traditions (the Union denationalizes all, Turk or Arab) do so. Some societies would prefer to destroy some traditions and keep others (India's favoring of Northern culture above Deccan culture). Some societies have weak state structures and are very dependent on tradition to enforce their rule, forcing them to come to accommodations with tradition (Ethiopia).
Pan-human unity is implied to be the end goal, and it's possible that that end goal keeps the Unitarians together despite their differences. However, there's different ways to achieve that, and so local Unitarians go with what works for their societies. I do wonder what the Unitarians in French Cambodia are cooking up...
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I'd does seem to make far more sense than either Monarcho-Communism or Anarcho-Monarchism, due to the fact that as you mentioned it's based on bug societies.
Well, a China where the Empire Renewal Movement succeeded in their coup would be another example of a Unitarian monarchy as the ERM was a Purple Unitarian organization.