Different timelines on the precipice of very different world wars, different timelines marked by different forms of revolution and reaction, where history took wildly different paths to arrive at peculiar destinations. Some well known, some not, some made by me and now all brought together in a cross-over timeline written by myself and my wife, though feel free to contribute if you please.
We think that a powerful and vigorous movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery" - Iosif Stalin
Nobody could really explain the hows or whys of these things called "worldmerges", to bring different realities together in such a way that one can transit between places that meet certain conditions. Whether they are permanent faultlines, the uninhabited open ocean, or between two iterations of a country or area on a similar "wavelength", Liberal to Liberal, Reactionary to Reactionary, Socialist to Socialist and so on so forth; it would allow for different iterations of a certain blue-green ball of rock and metal from the sun to interact. How and why, nobody knows. Perhaps none ever will know. But on the first of January, 1936, it was reality.
Nobody could definitively say who was the first, beyond that it was probably people trying to chase after strange electromagnetic signals only to find that by seeking the source of these signals, they would find themselves in strange worlds. Worlds where history zigged rather than zagged, and worlds where different roads were taken to produce familiar, yet strange results. But there would be a commonality noticed, each had a very different outcome for the first world war. They would soon be named for the most distinctive features each bore.
"Ravenworld" to refer to the timeline where Germany was defeated in the first world war, where Lenin and the Bolsheviks rose against the Russian Empire on that fateful November day in 1917, and would be joined by the Americans in 1933; where Germany descended to Nazism out of spite and fear, Italy to Fascism out of resentment, Japan to futurism out of fanaticism and bloody-minded optimism, and Brazil towards Integralism out of terror and uncertainty. Britain and France scheme together for ways to save a dying world order, but perhaps have made deals with devils they cannot hope to contain.
"Eagleworld" for the dominant position Imperial Germany landed upon by sheer accident through its victory in the first world war mostly through the fortuitous French revolution and the withdrawal of Republican Russia, followed by the British syndicalist revolution of 1925 that allowed Germany to, perhaps clumsily, staple its own hegemony atop the prior Anglo-French system. However there are foes both new and old who look hungrily upon the Kaiserreich's order with envious eyes, or revolutionary aspirations to bring an end to the reign of the reichsadler, as brief as it has been so far.
"Bearworld" for the world that would be born of a great war that had no winners, of a militarily defeated France, only for the Russians to break the Austro-Hungarian Empire and prompt a revolution in Imperial Germany before the tired Russian people began an attempted, scattered, and disorganised uprising that while ideologically incoherent, forced the Empire to come to a dead halt, and retreat to its core territories. Futurism in France would arise in response to the discrediting of both ordinary socialism and the old reactionaries while China bogged down into an industrialised nightmare between the leftist South and reactionary North and the United States retreated deeper into isolation.
And finally "Serpentworld", where the Crown from the Gutter was lifted up to form a United States of Germany, the revival of Bonaparte's Empire remained in place in an alliance of opportunity with the new German State, the more successful liberalisations of the Russian and Chinese Empires would see a great syndicalist revolution of the 20s to shake the world to the core, including a bitter British civil war over its restricted franchise and extreme control measures that would give rise to the British State to preside over the ashes and seek its revenge against those who had taken advantage of its moment of weakness in collaboration with the Japanese Shogunate, the Italian and Spanish Kingdoms, and an America dominated by Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh following the December Plot.
A world of Reds and Revolutions, a world of the Kaiserreich, a world of a Flood of crimson Blood, and a world still yet to feel its first great war.
...
Hot on the heels of the strange signal, the Kharkov, a sleek, modern Soviet heavy cruiser and his brother the Sevastopol, the Light Cruiser Ullan-Uda,,and their two destroyer escorts Gnevny, Grom, and Gremyaschy; all four designed with the aid of the Union's American allies began to surface, following the electromagnetic activity that their radioman had been detecting. Counter-Admiral Oleg Mikhailovich Gradenko would rub at his beard as the heavy cruiser pushed through the choppy winter waters of the North Seas, on a patrol heading southwards from the arctic ocean that had seen then trailed by British warships, the Kriegsmarine, and Norwegian coastal defence vessels.
An American patrol consisting of the Battlecruiser Toledo, the Aircraft Carrier Gettysburg, the Heavy Cruisers Hammer and Anvil, the light cruiser Mayflower, and the destroyers Gear, Wrench, Bolt, Compass, and Sprocket had also joined up with them. It was a formidable concentration of naval power, and one that made some people nervous, but they were what was available on hand to investigate, descending from the arctic ocean into slightly warmer waters as the show of naval strength kept in touch with nearby submarines that were out on reconnaissance. A patrol of this size was officially for large scale training operations, unofficially it was to explore whatever was on the other side of the "faults" in force.
From his bridge, Oleg could see the nearby Gettysburg. Part of his brain rebelled at the idea of the Gettysburg being the centrepiece of this fleet, and not the Toledo with its big guns. But the warship had Admiral Raymond Spruance aboard, so it was the de facto flagship of the fleet, as well as the detached patrol elements that were sweeping the edges of the formation. And in a sense, he was also his commander. The Counter-admiral sipped from his warm tea, wondering if there was any truth to what he was told.
It was not like the Stavka to send him out on a joke, so he figured that he wasn't just being fed wild rumours of submarines finding themselves in other worlds or aircraft finding themselves going through distortions that brought them through entirely different patterns of weather in an eyeblink.
"Comrade Admiral, do you think we'll be at war?" The Captain of the ship asked, a younger, fresher-faced man by the name of Sergey Moskvin who couldn't have been more than a boy when the revolution came. It would explain why he asked as if he was hoping for action.
"Sergey." He said in an avuncular manner, briefly putting down his hot cup of dark as coal tea.
"I would sincerely hope not. Life is brief enough to not be cut even shorter by a bloody death." He explained, but his thoughts were interrupted by a series of exclamations and profuse, profane mat.
Taking a look through his binoculars and guessing where his men were shouting at excitedly, he saw aircraft starting to fade into existence, sort of like smudged glass growing less and less smudged until it was fully clear to reveal planes that were not there before.
"Fuck...it is real." He said, unable to stop himself from swearing in surprise.
"Comrade?" Sergey asked.
"The planes are here. We should be getting word from the Unionists soon." He said. Many in the Soviet Union preferred to refer to the North American Union of Socialist Council Republics as "Unionists" much as how the Soviet Union frowned on referring to the country as "Russia" when it was meant to be a union of many nations, not just one of Great Russians; him being among them. It felt to him to be the more communist thing to do.
And it was not like he was going to have a scarcity of time to waste...it would take some time waiting for the pilots' information to be processed before they could act on it.
But they would not have to wait for long,
Much larger shapes began to emerge from the worldmerge, some from the south, more from the west. The first sets of ships struck him as rather...French and British, one looking to him to be far more German, and the last was Russian yes...but strange Russian just a bit more Tsarist and yet...not quite, waving a black banner that brought the Makhnovites of old to mind. From what he could tell, none of them seemed to be operating as if they were any more familiar with each other than he was with them.
Flags of the Free Socialist Council Republic of Germany, the Socialist Worker's Commonwealth of Britain, the Communal Worker's Republic of France, and the Combined Zavkoms and Mirs of Eurasia
He swore, not to a god for he believed in no such things, but simply to relieve his sense of surprise. He could only hope, as he saw the ships start to approach close enough that he could clearly see their flags through his binoculars, that they weren't going to start a shooting war.
The briny waters of the North sea in the month of January were cold in a far more insidious and dangerous way than anything that the arctic winds and snows could bring. To sink in waters like this was to die a miserable death as every last gram of heat was leeched out of you into the unforgviging embrace of Veles. It was a fate that made his spine feel like it was trying to dance out of his skin, uncontrollable shakes and shudders rolling through him even though he was rather warm with his coat and the heated interior of the ship.
"Are you afraid comrade?" Sergey asked.
"Of a dip in these waters? Yes." He replied.
"Have our comrades reported anything so far?" He asked, looking to one of the radio officers who kept rapt attention to his headset before looking towards the admiral and shaking his head.
"No comrade, though at the very least it seems that they are not aliens. We can communicate." He said, getting a nod in response from Oleg while he grabbed his cup of tea and took another deep sip, letting the overpowering scent of tannin fill his nostrils and the dark fluid fill him with a vigour far more powerful than any American coffee he'd tried. Let the English dilute their tea with milk, he would take of the black brew strong and pure.
Taking a look through his binoculars after putting his tea away, he used his sailors' eyes to gauge the fleets he was looking at, as far as he could tell, the German-seeming ships that bore a red banner with twin hammers and a sword had no more familiarity with the...French and British vessels he supposed; approaching from the South. The French and British vessels though, seemed moved with an intimate sort of familiarity that only came of a long and fruitful alliance, while the strange Russian ships moved with cautious confidence.
If only he could tell what was being said...he was here in case things got hot, the diplomats were all aboard the American Carrier, so all he could do was wait...
He took a look at a watch given to him by his uncle, who had lead men during the revolution. He had kept in maintained despite its age. A reminder of an earlier time informing him of how much of the present was passing by every moment.
Moments turned to minutes, as the lead warships, a battleship bearing German writing and an aircraft carrier of what he assumed was British make approached the Gettysburg and boats were exchanged to meet aboard the American ship.
At last, Oleg's musings would be interrupted by his attached Commissar, a cleanshaven man who wore his peaked cap well, tall and muscular...Vasily Vladmirovich Vodnik, a man who could quote the General Secretary as easily as he could breathe, and one who could easily be described as handsome, a man who looked younger than his years, but one who more than a few trusted only somewhat more than the NKVD attache.
"Comrade, come with us, the Soviet Union requires your presence in these negotiations." He said, prompting the Counter Admiral to raise a brow.
"I've not been informed of much." He replied, holding his hands behind him.
"We will inform you on the way, but you need not say a whole lot, Comrade Maisky will handle it."
"Isn't he supposed to be in London cavourting with the English?"
Vodnik smiled. "Well, we have Englishmen here, do we not?"
Picture of the first meeting between UoB and USSR personnel aboard the Gettysburg.
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Red Tuesday and Black Monday and the January Revolution
As discussions started in earnest in the weeks of January, it was clear to the revolutionary forces at play that the Vladivostok Compact and the Rotfront and their associates were an eight hundred kilo bear in the proverbial room, the combined powers of the Soviet Union, America, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Cuba, the People's Republic of Denmark, the People's Republic of Norway, Mongolia, Tannu Tuva, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Dominica, Hindustan and two Chinese United Fronts represented an enormous concentration of manpower, industry, and resources.
While the Syndicalists of the Kaiserworld had access to the high seas and support from many neutrals they could not measure up to the VOSCOM, and the Ulaanbaatar Pact of Serpentworld while strong, were strong but novice naval powers. The INFOR of a Britain and France without their Empires, Norway, and half an Italy, even with support from a distant Chile, Patagonia, Mexico, and Nicaragua to the west and Free India and Egypt to the east; along with a generally favourable opinion from America, Russia, Iran and a few others paled before the might of the Communists.
From Serpentworld there was the Combined Zavkoms and Mirs of Eurasia and the Combined Suweiai and Gongshe of China as well as a sundered India and smaller powers such as Gran Colombia, Burma, Mongolia, and Siam to balance the scales somewhat, but they were principally land based powers still getting used to stretching their sealegs. While impressive monuments to the possibilities of Syndicalism, they were faced with challenges that would require certainty that their theories on naval warfare could bear out, theories untested by a great war; for none happened in their timeline.
Hardly ideal for syndicalism to assert itself as the new hegemon of the worker's movement then. Especially when it was clear that the Marxists of the Bearworld and Ravenworld were quite likely to agree on a great deal.
If the INFOR, ULAPAC, and Rotfront wanted the assistance of the VOSCOM, and they did, they would do well to at least listen to the Bolsheviks and Harpers. Even if some chafed at the summation of their revolutionary efforts as valiant; but lacking in strength. Oswald Mosley, whom the Rotfront's representatives were as surprised to see as anyone who had seen a dead man would be; and whom the VOSCOM's representatives raised an eyebrow at the presence of; in particular was not enthused for the idea of "subordinating our Syndicalist achievements to the demands of Marxist outsiders who understand not our system nor our situation" as he declared when the deputy chairman arrived in the Ravenworld's Hamburg, the easiest and quickest place for everyone involved to reach on short notice.
He did not rebuke the Marxists or gush into overly rosy praise for the Syndicalists of the Haunting Spectre, he was much too clever for that. Rather, he stressed that there needed to be an atmosphere of cooperation and coming together, rather than a programme handed down on high by those who had only understood the situation for a week or two. A few noted the Syndicalist International of Worker's Movements was often happy to give recommendations and "recommendations" with the lure of their substantial technological expertise and industrial power or the resources and manpower of the ULAPAC when it suited it, including Mosley himself. But so far such sniping was deemed unsuited for the air of the Hamburg Socialist Conference.
The Syndicalists would not budge on submission to the Comintern line, nor would the Communists accept submission to the Syndicalist doctrine. However, there was a great desire to work together, recognising at the very least that if they didn't they would all hang together and that given that the Cominterns were party organisations and the Syndinterns were worker's federation organisations; technically there was no conflict if they coexisted.
It was much too soon to form anything particularly concrete, but Hamburg would see the Hamburg declaration, delivered on the Ides of January, stating that the Socialist movement was now stronger than ever, and for whatever differences there may be, there would be an effort to collaborate. And a cheeky decision to amend the slogan of "Workers of the world, unite!" to "Workers of all worlds, unite!". Something that at the very least, everyone could agree on was necessary to remove any confusion.
That being said, Stalin and other leader figures of less fully industrialised countries; particularly many observers or delegates from those who had yet to hold the reins of state power also pushed for as to be expected; assistance with industrial development and growth.
Delegates at the Hamburg Conference listening to a Dutch speech
It was a valid question, the growth of the industrial resources of socialist movements surely meant that there should be more devoted to allowing those in need of catching up to do so. Especially when they had much to offer in return for comradely aid and the INFOR, ULAPAC, and Rotfront both could do with a great deal more resources than they already had. The Soviet Union with its seemingly unlimited natural wealth was a natural target for this, and Stalin knew it.
Calculations would of course, need more time to be fully worked out, but the numbers were quite favourable on the current five year plan finishing massively ahead of schedule, farther than it already was with generous American investment and reciprocal exchange as well as access to the goods and services of much of Latin America and improved relations with the Nanjing government of China. With more resources, particularly delivered from European powers using short routes via gliding, much more could be done. And of course, the Union would not ask for these things for free, the motherland had much to give back after all.
And it was willing to lend its services in providing expertise for the development of under-industrialised powers who may need some idea of what starting from much less than what the industrialised revolutionary powers had to work with will entail. Especially great attention was paid to the openly Socialist government of the Hindustan Socialist Government in the Red Flood, under Shirpad Amrit Dange as well as the Kuomintang and Communist movement in the China of that same Earth. This, as well as other potential revolutionary movements, could lead to something could great indeed, should they be able to flourish with the right sorts of support.
Sympathisers such as the Kuomintang or the Free India government would of course, also be accommodated, with the hopes that by drawing them firmly into the Socialist orbit, they would end up fermenting the conditions for a more complete transformation of society along socialist revolutionary lines later. It would also of course, signal to the anti-colonial movements that even if they were not fully on board with the program, they could still expect substantial support both in the lead up to revolution and also in the rebuilding that would come after to turn extractive colonies into flourishing and free countries.
...
"Verdammte Scheiße!" - Chancellor Kuno Friedrich Viktor Graf von Westarp upon being told that the Gold Market has just collapsed
The thing that a Gold Standard economy hates more than anything is the disruption to the world's gold supply. Usually this means a possible massive reduction in supply due to accident, a country closing itself off, major mining strikes, or the like. Generally, most countries in the era of the gold standard regulated their extraction of gold to ensure stability in currency value, and barring dredging up the Spanish treasure ships from the ocean floor it wasn't like that there was going to be a great many ways to rapidly increase the supply of gold.
This system has its flaws, but it does lead to generally stable currency values for the most part. That is, unless suddenly say; there are now three other earths worth of gold and the enterprising businessmen looking for new markets have come back with news that there is in fact, a much greater quantity of gold to have to factor into the calculations that determine the value of your currency. Combined with particularly reckless speculatory investment by common German citizens into assorted imperial projects in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the informal empires in China and South America; and then suddenly you have a sudden panic at the gold market.
As details of how the worldmerge were still being worked out by the middle of January 1936, the panic at the Berlin Stock Exchange would take hold with almost immediate effect, and ripple out elsewhere. Whereas the British Empire of the Reds and Red Flood timelines had already created its own system to innoculate itself from massive fluctuations in gold availability in response to the Red American revolution of 1933 and the financial systems of the Red Flood Earth were already comprehensively shattered by the sheer chaos of the post-war period and the Haunting Spectre economies had sought to move away from the gold standard out of earlier strategic concerns and lacked a clear hegemon in any case, the German Empire of the Kaiserworld had its own ideas.
It had sought to claim its place in the sun and make itself the head of a global economic system. The Wilhelmshaven system that it boasted would bring about peace by bringing the dastardly Americans, Brutish Russians, sinister Syndicalists, and conniving Japanese to the table while leaving the unrecognised Entente remnants out. It dreamed of a global financial system predicated on the supremacy of Berlin and the orbit of the "international community" around the "Superpower" as it proclaimed itself.
The Chancellor would learn that God, as many ascribed the worldmerge to, must have had a rather great fondness for repeating the story of Icarus. The German government had looked too closely at the possible military implications and the possible money to be made by extending its world system further; that it had realised that the speculative bubble it was already atop was not going to respond well to inflation.
Prices went for a rollercoaster as confused information was leaked into the Berlin stock exchange by those who wanted the information before anyone else. Leaks became rumours, rumours became panic, panic became chaos. Chaos that would not kindly stop in Europe. While the Vozhd of Russia closed his gates and the economic Daimyos of Japan scrambled to ensure the Zaibatsu would ride rather than be smote by the storm, the impact on the new world and the United States of America would be anything but gentle.
The American economy had been long struggling in the Eagleworld. Despite German boasts that it had been subjugated to the Kaiser's system, this wasn't quite the case, though it was happy to simply devour whatever money Germany threw at it while pumping funds into Russia and the Syndicalists to counterweight the Reich. It was however, suffering from the twin effects of the 1925 British revolution and the break up of the British world system it was tied into as well as the 1929 Wall street crash. The "Black Monday" crash of 1936 was a minor detail however, nothing compared to the much more serious "gold sprint".
The representatives of the American government in the Uncrowned Earth's World had barely even reached Herbert Hoover's office before they got sight of their first riot. The price of bread had risen again, and Hoover was too slow to do something about the companies playing with the costs to chase margins on a sheet. It was not an unfamiliar sight to the delegates of the America of the Red Flood, but the word that Hoover had tried to force the Canadians into also paying for Britain's wartime debt to try and inject cash into the economy only to be rebuffed struck them as a bit odd. They'd never tolerate such uppitiness from the Canadians, especially Canadians trying to pretend to be British.
"We'd have sent the envoy back home tarred and feathered for that degree of disrespect" as Cordell Hull would say, citing the British government (potentially no longer) in exile's conditions of "not until a return to the Home Island is affected" which struck the American delegates as a fancy way of saying "never."
But just as shocking was the America of this world of the Kaiserreich responding to such a blatant insult with...nothing. Even when they could have destroyed what existed of Canada's economy with the stroke of a pen they chose to do nothing but a verbal condemnation and preformative tariffs on goods the Canucks hardly exported to begin with.
The Jeffersonian America of the Serpentworld however, looked upon this sick, diseased America and sneered, contemptuous of what it saw as a dying Republic, much like the Republic it had killed before to birth the National American Citizen's Federation. The UASR of course, saw all the signs, because it had been there before, knowing fully well where these signs could lead.
Weather however, is a funny thing. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause tumult and turmoil to devastate cities when that stirred air births a hurricane elsewhere someday. The continents may be in the same place, the people mostly variants of each other, and the geology largely the same; but they had done different things which had lead to differing side effects. Air had been fed with different inputs, and the mysterious quantum mania of the so called "Glide" between worlds had its own poorly understood effects.
All of which conspired to produce a rather typical winter in the UASR that year, a somewhat chillier than normal winter over the NACF in the Haunting Spectre's America, an unusually mild winter in the Red Flood's USA; and the coming of Khione's arctic wrath in the Kaiserworld's America. Perturbances in the polar vortex where the coldest, bitterest air on Earth lingers spilt downwards across the great channels of the great plains. Temperatures dropped to degrees that only polar bears would find palatable and the ice raced south.
With the dustbowl in recent memory, and coal mining disrupted from the shuttering of many power plants from companies going belly up, there was bound to be trouble. Where there was once the dustbowl was now the "Reign of Winter", and even the great lakes saw ice cover their surfaces almost completely as the killing cold came to town. The Happy New Year was nowhere to be found, and with heat being cut and people out of work; there were going to be corpses.
At the point of equality, that is to say where the Metric and Imperial temperature scales come to the same number; negative forty degrees; it takes five to ten minutes for hypothermia to develop, and an hour to die if exposed. And there were many who would be exposed to frosts not seen since the little ice age, long before the United States of Amerca had ever been founded. The industrial states' unions sought to seize power plants for themselves, to keep the electricity and the heat running at any cost, the Midwest sought to find whatever could burn, the west coast huddled, and the deep south found homes entirely unprepared for a chill of this magnitude.
Chill and the deluge. Snow where it was cold enough, bitterly unpleasant rain where it was not. Unseasonal and intolerable, the weather would lay bare issues in the United States not ready for disruptions to the routine. Coupled with the economic downturn from the sudden and violent collapse in gold value though? Now that was a particularly spicy barbecue, especially when companies panicking over the seizure of power stations or trains to ship coal to heat homes at risk of being turned into icy tombs by the dropping temperatures.
Not helping things was that the international community, greatly expanded as it was, was slow to respond. The British, because they were more concerned with Canada than anything to do with the uppity yanks anyway; with the exiles in particular doing their best to kiss the ass of five new londons to pray for a return to; and to be quite frank the rest of Europe and the whole of Asia cared even less. Other Americas would be too busy keeping their own houses in order; with Andrew Mellon trying, largely in vain, to stop the ship of his presidency from sinking as further austerity proved to not be the vote winner he'd have liked it to be, meanwhile Moseley's American Union Republic was busy trying to purge the ranks of potential enemies within.
But there were powers that cared; ones that saw opportunity and had, in its efforts to scope out its alters; saw there was the potential for something great indeed in that alter.
The North American Union of Socialist Council Republics, with Premier Foster facing challenge within the WCPA for leadership in the near future; had decided to flex its foreign policy muscles to offer a helping hand to other Americans in need. The depression was a fading memory in the UASR and the country had been revived under a Red and Black Banner, and the WCPA, while grumbling under its breath about "Trade Union brainedness" when holding talks with the Socialist Party of America, of course; understood the potential of another America waving the red banner, and the concerning possibility of what could happen if the ANS made its moves.
There was of course, immediate grumbling about sedition, about foreign invasion and of course, complaints that were quite adjacent to the usual spiels about Jewry, Masonry, Queers, and whatever other personal bugbears people were willing to spin into blame for their perdicament as long as it didn't involve blaming the current system. But while the UASR's Foreign Commissariat was looking keenly into other potential revolutionary situations elsewhere in the worlds; such as Spain, Central America, and Peru in its own world, Japan, Iran, and Cisleithania in Bearworld, India and Latin America in the Haunting Spectre, and now America and Argentina in this world; there was of course, going to be a bit of a bias towards the potential for another revolution in another America.
The Central Executive Committee of Foster had taken some time to verify the reports that had flooded in, that was only sensible, but they didn't leave even the smallest scrap of information regarding the Socialist Labor Party of America's situation. Especially when the possibility of intervention from other powers was as high as it was. William Haywood's SLPA was met with regularly, exchanging information as well as what to expect across the campaign trail and what would happen if they won. These conferences were more than just busywork however, it was an important means of gauging capabilities and limitations. In short they were starting to get an idea of what they could do, especially as the ability for the planning of the economy to deal with the shocks of the capitalist world allowed them to act without paralysis.
Especially as, just as the situation reports on the Japan of the Bearworld hit the desks of the leadership of socialist movements around the three worlds, it had to be amended; because as the result of a conflict with the Beiyang government of that world and an attempted putsch by a pretender to the throne who regarded Emperor Yasuhito's desire to negotiate with the general strike in Japan to get them back to work quickly as weakness and cowardice had started to reach their ears new and more pertinent information had arrived.
The Japanese workers in that cold winter day of the 22nd of January, 1936 had decided to take up arms in revolution, racing ahead of the Americans of the Kaiserworld who were on the brink as Hoover tried to send in the troops to provide "overwatch" over the negotiations between the unions of the Combined Syndicates of America and the bosses while America first militias and the Klan were starting to get rowdier and rowdier.
"Didn't even have a chance to get cozy", as Foreign Commissar John Silas Reed would remark, reading through the flurry of information filtering into his office from a confused Main Reconnaissance Directorate. The outcome in Japan was...surprisingly quite optimistic for a short war, especially as the still liberal Japanese Empires of Eagleworld, the Shogunate of Serpentworld, and the Futurist regime of the Japan of his own world were also largely in the dark about the inner-workings of the Empire.
It was clear to him then, that aid should be sent, and quickly before the forces of reaction in Asia mobilised once they had their economic house in order and a firmer view of the situation. It would perhaps be a bit premature, but the Central Executive Committee and the Presidium had agreed on a course of action. Molotov had signalled that the USSR would follow suit in Japan and...apparently Korea too, if the GRU's intel was accurate. It so very rarely wasn't, and while connections with other socialists were on the threadbare side, it was enough to know that while there were plenty of often noisy disagreements, there was a general consensus to help revolutionaries where they cropped up.
Interesting times indeed.
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Turning gears: The British Empire and Nazi Germany's initial response
"Even if what you are saying is true, I cannot have you launching a war of reclamation with a fleet this ramshackle. Nor will we support it." Stanley Baldwin put down the cup of tea he used to wet his throat once again, looking disinterestedly at Lawrence Moore Cosgrove, a man from this "Kaiserworld" Canada.
"I suspected as much." He replied, half blind from an injury in the great war and doing his best to conceal this fact.
"Rather than waste battleships on starting a world war, the exiles can return home to us, to our Britain." He said, also hosting Sir David Kelley in the very same room with him, the man from the World of a Red Flood calmly partaking in some of the Indian tea that he gathered was less commonly available than in his own world.
"What about ours? It's hardly fair for you to go and hog all the Brits." He said with a slightly jovial, jolly tone, getting a laugh out of Baldwin and then Cosgrove.
"We are representatives of the same Empire, under the one God. We cannot, even accepting alternate worlds; divide our interests. We are a commonwealth of nations, and an empire of every sea. While it may, I suspect, take much time to fully develop into something more, I think some manner of working relation is needed. A customs Union at the very least, as well as joint military programs." Baldwin's words were authoritative, even for a man who was not looking to be prime minister for a great deal longer given his deeply advanced age.
"It will take time to work out all the fine details, but I think we are on what is ultimately the same page in our path towards an Imperial Commonwealth of British Nations." He concluded.
"Is this all to deal with the reds?" Cosgrove asked.
"Possibly, though I can't imagine that they are the only threat facing our shores. Tell me more about these huns of your world, beyond what the documents say." Baldwin asked, looking to Cosgrove and reaching his hand out before also giving his attention over to Kelley. "And these...Futurists of France as well." He finished.
"Half of what seems to go on in "La Soleil" as they call it these days, appears to be more performance art than anything else. They vote on things at least, but morally they seem to have sunken into transgressive perversion even worse than Jerry. And as for Ivan, little comes out of Russia besides what Ivan's selling, little good anyway."
"The Russians were never much for liberty anyway. Fascist, Communist, Tsarist. Hardly seems to matter." Baldwin mused, nodding contently to himself. "Surely a product of their oriental upbringing, born of the Khans rather than enlightenment." He added while he took a look at the maps, including versions that showed informal areas of influence.
"And this "British State" business over in the "Haunting Spectre", what's that mess about? Looking at the state of this "republic's" empire makes a man want to weep." Baldwin asked.
"Suffrage war they call it, all while the Romanovs and Qing waved the Syndie banner, another Indian revolt ate a generation, then Bonaparte and the Gutter Crown kaiser helped themselves to the spoils. As far as we can tell, Francis Yeats Brown's in charge of that mess." Cosgrove said, sipping at his drink.
"Well, parliament wants to extend an arm out to the "Empire of the United States of Germany" and to the French Empire, so better learn to put pride for another world and time's empire aside for the good of the one we've got." Baldwin said as he gave it some thought.
"Churchill would like to call our project the "Commonwealth of Allied Free States", Mosley's more particular for the title of "Alliance of Democratic Nations and Peoples"." Baldwin said, looking over the papers of what could potentially be brought together if a new entente was signed. America, another France, another Britain, Spain, Italy, another Portugal, Scandinavia, Russia, Japan, Germany and others besides...there was potential. It wouldn't be that easy however, everyone had different goals, different visions, different aspirations, and many were of the opinion that great alliances did more to provoke than prevent war.
That got a sigh out of him. Perhaps they were right, with how useless the League of nations had been lately...but perhaps...no no he was getting distracted, he needed ot focus on the here and now. Let's see...
Mittelafrika...
Oh dear.
"...You're telling me the Germans run all of this as a single colony? This is a joke, right?" Stanley was...genuinely baffled by the giant blob of Mittelafrika, an undifferentiated mess that just reeked of idiocy or insanity.
"Hardly sir, and they've had the gall to steal our colonies when our motherland was indisposed." Cosgrove tried his best to present an air of giving a shit about the empire beyond its benefit to Canada, but Baldwin would forgive him of his this for now. Cosgrove was here to try and alleviate the dire economic isolation of the entente, starved of access to industry and rather literally starved to try and pay for a military that made Baldwin wince looking at the budgets for. It was hardly his fault for being self-centered, even if his Canada would; if it desired to sup at the waters of the Empire; have to learn some discipline again.
But to the more important matters at hand was this...thing...straddling a third of the dark continent giving him an aneurysm the longer he looked at this bespoke dark green blob simply labelled "Mittelafrika". He tried and failed to imagine how a single governor could even run a thing of Eight colonies, three "autonomous" kingdoms, and seven stolen colonies still being administered by captive britons. No this would not do, he mused, sipping at his tea with an irritated expression. The Lord Halifax or especially the ever bothersome Churchill would probably be incandescent at this particular outrage.
"Who runs this?"
"Why, von Goering sir."
That was a name familiar to him. Hitler's pet air ace, more loyal than Max Immelman and now more prestigious than the limping, cane needing Red Baron with no Barony. Von however, was new to him.
"A kingdom, or a prison?" Kelley said, looking over the map.
"I suppose that depends on one's perspective." He replied, folding his arms.
"A kingdom if you believe he'd be content with this. A prison, if you suppose he'd want to be more than just a Stadthalder of a supercolony." He said.
"Quite right on that." Kelley replied, to Cosgrove's shrugging.
The hours were often filled with minutae ladened discussions like this. Baldwin wasn't going to see the end of these talks of creating one big Empire, which would surely take more time than he was willing to spend as Prime Minister, so he knew that he should spend his time carefully, getting the big agendas out of the way and then fretting about the hours until the end of his premiership on conversations like these; to get top level information into Downing Street's office, seemed like a good way to use that time without setting overly restrictive precedent for Mr.Wood, his hand chosen successor.
He did hope that he would at least live to see an election where the electorates of two Britains would vote as one at least, that would be nice.
...
The so-called Third Reich, a regime dominated solely by the National Socialist German Worker's Party, was having something of a field day. Adolf Hitler had, by fiat, ordered that the Reichsmark would remain exactly at the same value regardless of how much gold was available, and so far it seemed nobody was willing to contest that command in the January cold of central Europe. Furthermore, it would not be long before that the British and French to the west would be conceding the matter of the Rhineland. They had other, bigger digestions to undertake following this crisis of other worlds and could-have-beens.
To the Fuhrer and the inner circle of the NSDAP however, was the greater issue of the Kaiserreich, the Empire of the United States of Germany, and most especially the Free German Socialist Raterepublic. Challengers to the legitimacy of the Nazi state, and to Hitler's understanding of how this phenomenon worked which was of course soon the orthodoxy of the Nazi state, something that bore possible strategic risks to the territory of the Reich should any monarchists, federalists, or Socialists seize substantive amounts of terrain.
Monarchists meant that there needed to be a purge of certain disloyal elements of the right, those who would rather kiss the Kaiser's ass than see the real, genuine triumph of the third reich. The most valuable would be monitored and their loyalty forcibly re-affired, the less useful and incompetents would be given the boot and sent over to the Kaiserreich to start negotiations with the "reactionaries". For one thing, access to the Kaiserreich's naval technologies may be of use, for another, planting the seeds of Nazism could further the destiny of the herrenvolk.
As for the "Free German Socialist Raterepublik", the Nazi inner circle would carefully examine those revealed to be communists in the other world, but backed down quickly in the case of Goebbels at Hitler's own intercession. The Fuhrer knew Josef, and his Goebbels was no Bolshevik nor Maximalist. Still, lists had to be compiled, and plans had to be made.
The "Empire of the United States of the German Nation" though...successors of an 1848 revolution that triumphed, yet at the same time nauseatingly close to the Bonaparte's French Empire over the Brothers of the British State, and so blind to the Syndicalist threat to their east in a grand asiatic alliance. They would have to awaken them.
The Nazi state understood this to be a risk, and so had his men work on how to understand, and then master this power that seemed to bend to will; convinced that he could use it for the Reich's goals.
Also of concern to the Fuhrer's government were the frequent appearances of the "Vagabonds". People who appeared from what could not have been any of the four timelines, or who claimed to always have been from the place they appeared in, but lacked documentation and often had a somewhat exotic appearance. Hair like spun gold, eyes of odd hues, often even skin tones that seemed a bit off or ethnic features that didn't quite fit the ideas of racial science's categories. Of course, many were arrested on the spot, potential problems to the regime were so happily reported to the Police after all.
So far though, it seemed most had no intention of causing trouble, and the few who did were at worst pranksters or far more often; simply confused. Nevertheless, it required dealing with, and Hitler was nothing if not someone who liked to rule by impulse and the National Socialist German Worker's Party designed to obey its fuhrer instantly.
Put them to work to earn their place in the fatherland, he declared. As they seemed to speak the language of the lands they arrived in, they would understand the need to get to work in important positions being vacated by the mandate for the expansion of the armed forces. It is an inconvenient fact of history that one cannot run military war machines without industrial product, but one also cannot fight without soldiers, and that the sort of people who can do either sort of work are largely one and the same.
Perhaps curious was that reservoirs of resources seemed to refill in a similar manner. Oil wells once near emptied from curious pokings in the 19th century were refilling to full, and the production facilities of the black gold Germany extracted quite dry often decades ago were reporting very stable output with none of the usual fluctuations of drilling. Coal miners meanwhile, would dig one day, then find the coal back the next.
Unlimited did not mean infinite, the resources still had to be harvested, worked, and moved around. but to the Fuhrer whose mind was obsessed with the nitty gritty of such raw material trivia, it was of the keenest interest. The Wehrmacht had less interest in such things, and the NSDAP inner circle bemoaned the OKW's myopic focus on tactics over all other things. How could they be masters of Europe, of the world, with an army that cared almost nothing for strategy?
The offices of the Reich would order production to be stepped up within the limitations of the geography and existing infrastructure with a modification of the Four year plan, and would hear out the Panzertruppe on programs that would necessarily entail a massive amount of things that would need oil and oil products; such as synthetic rubber that would be a necessity to complete the vision of autarky.
Gears were turning in the Fuhrer's mind, and he had his eyes on a particularly grand prize. The world may yet be in reach.
Though the four worlds had different histories, they shared enough history that the century of misfortune that had afflicted the world's most populous nation was a commonality. And in each, the country was divided as part of the legacy of foreign meddling and internal squabbling over what had once been the Empire of the Great Qing. Now there was chaos and strife under heaven, a struggle to be the one to unify the most populated country in human history and claim it for whatever cause they saw fit, and deliver unto the people of China whatever bounty they believed they were deserved.
In the World of the Raven and the Bear, the Northern expedition was a success, with the Kuomintang and their Communist allies pushing far to the north and routing the then internationally recognised Beiyang republic of the Zhili clique. They would then hold against the alliance of the Fengtien, Shandong, and Shanxi cliques, at least, up until the Japanese intervened out of alarm that the Sunist-Communist coalition lead by Wang Jingwei and his followers was approaching its interests in northern China. The Imperial Japanese Army, using modern tanks and motorised formations routed Jiang Jieshi's forces and drove them out of the forbidden palace, pushing them all the way to the Huang He, or Yellow River and allowing their aligned warlords to select a new "President" and "Prime Minister" of the "Republic of China".
Old man Wang Kemin would be given the position, though in truth he was little more than a puppet for the real power in the Beiyang Republic, Zhang Zhongchang; who had "graciously" accepted a chance to move his base of operations to Beijing and leave Shandong in the hands of a trusted subordinate. Zhongchang, who had cut himself off the opium habit after the central plains war could lord authority over even Japan's toady in chief; Liang Hongzi who would, despite his personal scepticism of the eclectic futurist ideology of Japan still bleats pro-concordist ideology whenever prompted. With a Japanese-trained and equipped army the new Beiyang government would, from 1930 onwards, wage low level conflict and skirmish with the Wuhan and Nanjing based Republic of China supported by the Soviet Union, and after the 1933 Red May Revolution; the United Republics.
In Manchuria, the Qing dynasty would be invited at the behest of Japan to serve as a frontman for the Concordist vision of Pan-Asianism, while the Fengtien clique would in truth, remain the power behind the scenes that kept the "Manchurian Empire" running with greatly increased Japanese support. While it would come at the cost of a claim to all of China, meetings with Shimoi Harukichi and Shumei Okawa, the great ideologues of the New Japan and the new Asia would personally charm the Zhang family enough to go along with it, enrapturing them with a vision of being a piece in a great Asian puzzle that would truly bring to light the power of the orient and surpass the occident once and for all.
While Britain and France would do business with both Beijing and Nanjing, simply choosing the odd stance of labelling one "Chinese Peking" and the other "Chinese Nanking", Germany and Italy, hoping to court the Japanese Empire's favour; would back the Beiyang Republic. However, while the Beiyang Republic would face its own internal squabbles between warlord factions who either wanted their own fiefdoms expanded or more power from behind the seat of the presidency, things in Nanjing and Wuhan would only get spicier as the factions of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party found themselves squabbling continually.
In the communist party, Chen Duxiu, Wang Ming, and Zhou Enlai would frequently argue over the direction of the communist movement. With supporters such as Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhang Wentian up for grabs, the successes of the Communist party in getting Jiang Jieshi marginalised within the Republic's government through the support of Sun Yat Sen and Soong Qingling as well as the conditionality of support from the USSR and UASR had seen it spread wide across the country with ever growing dual power. Farming communities of peasants, urban communes of workers, and many Soldier's soviets had all been part and parcel of the growing revolutionary wing of Chinese politics, but whether to take an American, Soviet, or self-inspried direction was a matter of hot contention.
And while Wang Jingwei was currently predominant in the Kuomintang, Soong Qingling as ever, remained a thorn at his side; needling him for his contentment with "social nationalism" rather than a more revolutionary direction and urging him to take a stronger stance on the rights of women and a more international direction for politics. Meanwhile Li Zongren, who had de facto taken control over much of the apparatus of the right of the Kuomintang from the disgraced Jiang Jieshi took issue with Wang Jingwei's continual deferment to the Comintern without even pushing for membership in the organisation by the Kuomintang so that the ruling party of China could at least guide the Comintern to Chinese directed and Chinese dictated directions to suit Chinese interests.
All however, agreed on a need to reunite China at long last, hoping to bring an end to generations of conflict and realise the dream of so many; China one and indivisible, and never again the slaves of the west. Perhaps a friend, but an equal, not a subject. But as Concordism and Communism grow in popularity in China's politics, many disagree who would be the best friend for that bold step into the future. The traditional right and the parochial sections of the left seemed to be dead ends. Something bolder, more drastic would be needed to truly bring an end to the century of humiliation and allow the Dragon to roar once again.
In the Kaiserworld, with Imperial Germany's support, the Northern Expedition was smashed in the favour of the Zhili clique, and the Qing Emperor Pu Yi restored to serve as in essence, a frontman for the Kaiserreich's desired order in China in 1925 and 26. German support and weapons would help the Zhili extend nominal control of most of China save for Mongolia and the still defiant (and Japanese supported) Fengtien, but also see a new age of economic exploitation. Though the investment of the world abroad into the stabilised Chinese Empire did bring about a new era of prosperity, it also saw China having to give up even more concessions to the Legation Cities and the German AOG; the Aufsichtsrat der Ostasiatischen Generalverwaltung which would serve as a reminder of whom the Chinese economy was really meant to serve.
The sale of Chinese cities to German corporate interests in particular was driven by Sun Chuanfang, perhaps the most widely hated man in China for his shameless toadying to the white man. To work with the Reichspakt and to make money with them was tolerable, to sell off Chinese land for the Germans to rule directly as their own sovereign territory was unforgivable. And not a day went by that dozens of conspiracies to make him atone for his sins in blood were not formed. Furthermore, outside of the core Zhili territories, Wu Peifu and Pu Yi's control over China largely existed on paper. There was peace between the regional warlords, in the sense that there was mostly just peripheral banditry, but the regional warlords all maintained armies ready and rearing to have at it.
The League of the Eight Provinces was on paper, the most loyal part of China to the Qing Emperor in the forbidden palace outside of the Zhili core territories proper. In practice, Sun Chuanfang had ambitions to replace the Confucian Marshal at the helm of the German sponsored system that had seen China become a "Neokolonie", a state that had nominal independence from the Kaiserreich but whose economy had a magical habit of draining into Berlin's coffers. Surely for nothing but very legitimate, mutually beneficial reasons that are absolutely in the best interests of the Chinese people, and not at all the collections of Konzerns that dominate China's economy whenever it isn't the Japanese or Russians doing so instead.
Within the League of Eight provinces was a collection of restive movements, such as the Left wing remnants of the Kuomintang who saw a path towards a Chinese form of Socialism or the Federalist movement which admired the system of the United States; though of course having its own ideas for how to work what was still seen as a progressive dream by many outside of America who were less aware of the sheer magnitude of its rot as most who did not follow the politics of the world's largest federal liberal democratic republic all that closely. And for those who were aware of the great sickness befalling the United States, it was believed that the mistakes of the American experiment could guide towards a better, stronger Federation.
But there were also movements firmly loyal to Germany, the beneficiaries of the great Imperial restructuring of the economy who holed up in Nanjing. They had grown rich and prosperous from the "Qing decade" that had seen a general end to the worst violence in China and a prolonged period of Legation League investment and economic involvement in China, and greatly admired the German system as a matter of fact. They had hoped to take the government down a pro-German path in the hopes that if they could just toady up to the Kaiserreich in the right way, they could get the same wealth they personally received for everyone else. The people whose wealth only grew more tenuous were simply those who could not make it in the society of the future, and would be crushed beneath the wheel of history.
And in Anqing were those who hoped to take China under the direction of a Japanese style Liberal system, and were eager to cooperate with the Japanese of their world to make that real. TO be part of a brotherhood of asians, to practice democracy in their own way, and to build a system under their own auspices without the unwanted and unwelcome influences of the Europeans or the Unconfucian ways of the Federalists or the Socialists. A China for the Chinese, and a rebirth of the values of the Xinhai republic and revolution that were perverted by those who had led Doctor Sun Yat Sen astray and convinced him to take the roads of foreign temptation.
And beneath it all was the Millenarian religious sect of the Shangqing Tianguo under the Yiguandao cult that syncretised Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism into a new blend of ideology that envisioned a way to restore China to greatness and to at last ensure that all under heaven was back in the places they belonged to. A China free of Opium, of unrighteous rule and banditry, of oppression and immorality, and of unwanted foreign domination.
The China of the Uncrowned Earth was the most divergent, affected by the stalemate in the Russo-Japanese war that saw Russia claim the Heilongjiang and the Jilin provinces as part of "Zheltorossiya", Yellow Russia; when joined with Transamur and Russian Outer Manchuria. While Japan would claim the southern provinces of inner manchuria; Fengtien and Rehe; as part of the domain of the Mantetsu railway company, the outright loss of Manchuria to foreigners would see the Qing dynasty fall even sooner than in the other two worlds, with the Republic's struggle to be born leading to tragic collapse later on in the face of provincial armies and foreign interference.
The general collapse of the world order as it was once known in the aftermath of the Great War hit China hard, as foreign capital withered dramatically in the aftermath of such a calamitous human disaster. As France withdrew from Asian affairs and allowed Japan to fill the void; drawing in Indochina into its sphere as the "Empire of Annam" and Britain reeled from the collapse of the Raj and the Russian Empire dealt with the abortive attempt at a Republican Revolution, China shattered. Then it shattered again with the Kuomintang being unable to agree of who or what could fill in the massive shoes of Sun Yat Sen. In each of the five provinces lay a different vision of the Kuomintang and what it would offer to society.
Within the Fuijan government would embrace a revisionist, patriotic vision of Socialism pushed forth by the Minsheng wing of the Kuomintang, Hunan a pluralistic progressive democracy with a strong alliance between the Progressive and Socialist wings of the KMT on one side and the CPC on the other, Lingguang a fiefdom of the National Revolutionary Army, Yunnan the personal domain of Tang Jiyao, and Nanjing an increasing hotbed of the reactionary wing of the Kuomintang in conflict with the Worker's movements in the major cities and the peasant movements in the countryside. Particularly with many looking for something more radical than what the Kuomintang had to offer.
The nominal government of China, the Beiyang government currently dominated by the master of Shanxi; Yan Xishan who had seen off the attempts of the Mantestsu company and the Japanese Empire to carve out a larger slice of his domain, was not in a well way. With long years of civil war between the southern Kuomintang and the northern Beiyang, the country was often beset by famine, and many grew tired of the long hours of labour and the endless changing of hands between one despot or the other. The Beiyang Republic and Kuomintang were both urbanising and industrializing quite quickly with the money being poured into them, turning the country into an eastern recreation of the horrors of the great war as armies with an overabundance of manpower but an underabundance of hardened armour try to break the cratered wastelands dividing them.
Though the Beiyang government and its cliques seem secure, whispers of discontent have been riding high. The Chinese Creation Society, a Futurist organisation born of the pain of the rapid transformation of Chinese society and the trauma of seemingly endless warfare and the rapid but poorly controlled process of mechanisation; has grown more and more prominent in China, seeking to form an alliance with the Communist Party in the hopes of creating a newer, more modern China, one with a totally transformed culture in dedication to the Socialist and Bolshevist ideal in the mould of the Kavakz' Society's Transcaucasian Federal Societ Socialist Republic, or Bogdanov's Zheltorossiyan Soviet Collective.
The peasant-based Red Spears also hoped to cast down the present order, seeking to impale the landlords upon ten million angry men and women's sharpened bits of metal and establish a socialism of the peasantry and the rural peoples of China; perhaps even the world. To seize the means of cultivating the land for their own enrichment and to till the soil and reap its bounty as they wanted and planned, rather than at the relentless pace demanded by warlords seeking to win a civil war that seemed to be without end.
But within the peasant societies also lay the far stranger Yellow Sands society, who with the family of the last holder of the Ming Dynasty's mark of legitimacy had come to declare the Republic itself to be sick and flawed, that the problem with the monarchy was not that it was a monarchy; but because it was fundamentally unchinese, and only a return to the glory of the Great Ming could soothe the pain in China's soul.
The events in China would start to spiral with the sudden and as most would say, richly deserved assassination of Sun Chuanfang by Chinese patriots in the Kaiserworld as the Chinese economy was rocked by the collapse of the Reichsmark and the Black Monday crash, with Sun becoming an easily visible and blamed embodiment of everything that Anti-Germanists in China hated about the current way things were run. No sooner than Sun had died than the League of the Eight provinces shattered all at once, with the Kuomintang raising the banner over Fuijian and starting its march northwards, seeking to beget the Socialist Republic of the three principles that had been denied to China for too long.
At the same time, the Federalists quickly made their claims apparent in Guangdong, with Chen Gongming having the Qing lapdogs in the province quickly dealt with and cast out so that the Federalist society could take power in the provincial capital of Guangzhou. Anqing and Nanjing would themselves quickly have a violent falling out while for the time being, it seemed Hunnan at least would ride out much of the storm.
With the worldmerges so new, the initial thought for extrauniversal political consequences was not really on the mind of the revolutionaries. But news travels quickly in the modern age, and the British Empire and the Uncrowned Earth's United States were not entirely idle. While the Uncrowned Earth's United States had a minuscule and continually defunded military and so far, weak to nonexistent economic ties with the other worlds, Acting President Norris; as he sought to build a coalition in the current Four-Party system; sought to build economic ties while he also hoped to push through the Fiat currency amendment to stabilise the economy. Fully aware that he had a golden opportunity to push through the sort of progressive legislation he wanted without worrying about his electoral prospects; he wanted to get in an open door policy and get jobs in the US building things. Not weapons and warfare as he despised such things, but money, credits, and industrial goods he could do.
America needed something to export to in order to clear out the funk afflicting the economy. Market expansion could recover the rate of capital and allow for the spending that would be needed to bring back the economy. And as Norris had no intention of running for another term, he had no real concern for whether this would hurt his electoral fortunes in the presidency. Once he was done with this position, he would return to his position in the senate and hope that his people would accept what he'd done for the country.
He would sell this to the American populace as a way to get work and to get American goods on the markets of a democratic revolution revealed to the nation by what was surely an act of God. Get people back in the factories and working for decent wages and fair hours while helping those suffering from tyranny rebel against the crushing fist of the German Empire; which was a more understandable factor than Nazi Germany. Film crews and newsreels were sent out to gather information about these otherworlds and stir the sympathetic strings of the hearts of the average American.
The British worked on a somewhat more cynical calculus. The Kaiserliche Marine of the kaiserworld's Kriegsmarine was a potential threat to the Home Islands, a vast, bloated monstrosity with an absolutely alarming number of battleships; including a number of ridiculously huge monsters financed surely by stealing the wealth of Britain's own colonies languishing under the Hun's yoke. If the Qing were being supported by the Kaiserreich which had spat out a fleet that could potentially threaten Great Britain itself, then Britain would be against them. So the Anqing and the Federalists were both only natural to support.
While a third red scare brought about by the simple existence of Syndicalists and Communists in these other Europes was being threatened by the traditionally scaremongering British press, the cold logic of the Empire's strategic departments was that so long as the America of the Uncrowned Earth remained stable, they would be able to at least partially check the UASR; while the Union of Britain was a Britain without her Empire and thus surely a shadow of the potential of Insulisrael; or whatever the British wanted to call their island now. The kaiserreich however, was a bitterly known factor that would have to be opposed by any means necessary.
Only the Serpent World's China was largely united, save for a smattering of territories aligned with the Japanese Shogunate under the auspices of the Yellow Sands society.
The Communal Worker's Federation of China was the most populous socialist entity in any of the four worlds, born of a Qing Empire that better crested the waves of modernisation, only to crash downwards when a proletarianising society forced to serve to put down a major uprising by the fellowship of true life ended up turning that experience towards ending the days of Emperors and birth a Socialist Republic built on the models of Syndicates of Labour that had grown into widespread counter societies in the time of rapid industrialisation to serve as a workshop for capitalists looking for massive amounts of cheap labour. Though the outside world had tried to put down the Labourer's Revolution of 1923-1925, they had not succeeded, and swiftly joined by Russia and much of Asia, China had become a stronger, richer, and freer nation than the Emperors could ever dream of.
And with the rise of Lindbergh's America, the might of the Shogunate, and the British State, the French, Dutch, Scandinavians, and Germans were surprisingly willing to open their coffers to bolster potential cobelligerents in what some fear would be a truly great war unlike anything the world has ever seen, further accelerating the rise of a Republic of Labor and Virtue, and the Speaker of the Assembly of Labor; Cai Hesen has already made overtures for his plans to help promote Socialism in Asia and provide a path towards uniting Syndicalist and Communist efforts to counter imperialism and capitalism.
This of course meant that they were immediately interested in the fate of the divided Chinas, and hoped to steer them towards the path of worker's revolution in a rapidly changing world as soon as they were made aware of the situation on the ground. Heavy equipment which they manufactured at their facilities in particular, they felt would be of great help to progressive forces in the warring Chinas against their reactionary counterparts. Especially pertinent when the Russian Empire, the Kaiserreich, the American State, the Shogunate, and the Concordists were all dead set on arming these reactionaries for war.
The four worlds' socialists of course, had their sympathies towards the significantly left-shifted Kuomintang. Small in territory yes, but arising in some of the most populated territory in all of China. While the other Chinese of course did have their own commitments to worry about as well as the countering efforts of other powers to deal with, shipments of aid could be arranged in short order through glide-shifted versions of the channels with which their own respective Chinas received; or the simple long route in the case of the European Syndicalists or the Free Indians. Another socialist China was a great prize indeed, even if the odds against them seemed rather long indeed.
Battles were already being recorded emerging out of the confused chaos of the death of the league of eight provinces, and things would only start to get more complicated as Concordist Japan began to take note. The Asiofuturists of Japan were intrigued by the possibility of expanding their influence into another China, full of potential converts ripe for embracing the future envisioned by Prince-Regent Yasuhito and his acolytes. While it was deemed to be unlikely to turn the tide in the Japanese revolution int he world of the Uncrowned Earth, this fred the Japanese to instead show their strength and power to another Earth; arriving at Peking with a display of force and a delegation from Manchuria to get their foot in the door, offering the Qing a potential alternative to German puppetry.
But this was hardly the only China being affected. As the Japanese revolution began in the Uncrowned Earth, the seemingly victorious Beiyang Republic found its far abroad armies receiving reports of the Guominjun, Creation Society, Red Spears, and the Yellow Sands Society all deciding to rise up now that the threat of invasion and incorporation into Mentetsu had passed.
Frantically, the Beiyang sought to pull forces back to defend their positions, leaving the Japanese of the world of the Raven and the bear to take advantage of the situation to slide into Mantetsu and Annam to reinforce and seize what they saw as valuable positions to prepare for the Empire. While from the sheer strength of the revolution in the home islands visible in the Japanese revolution in that timeline it was clear they were going to lose sooner or later, the concordists had their eye set on the Empire. Quick, short operations would ready the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy for its future operations, and the fleeing loyalists to the Imperial Throne were; loyal to Araki as they were; easy additions to the Imperial Japanese Navy and the fleets of the Shogunate, easier than they would be with a Japan to report to anyway.
That is not to say that the Imperial Japanese Army was uninvolved in the Japanese revolution, but that committing the entire army on a war footing was not yet in the cards; and that ultimately; this other Japan was another country having a civil war, rather than a part of the fatherland to defend to the death. Of course, they couldn't just pass up on the opportunity to propagandise about it. That would be disgraceful. But they could make plenty of other gains, such as trying to lean on anti-communist fears in the Chinas, and push their own model of pan-asianism as a salve for it in turn. One that might see the east match and surpass the west.
After all, look at the besieged Beiyang who were dealing with an assault so sudden and unexpected and so multidirectional that the Kuomintang could barely get a clear idea of what was going on itself. Beset by Christian Socialists in the Guomindang, Futurist Bolshevists in the Creation Society, and Peasant Rabble in the Red Spears. If Yan Xishan wanted help to survive the storm, he would surely have to offer something to the Japanese Empire, the one, true Japanese Empire. The only salvation for their problems that wouldn't involve kowtowing to Russia or other westerners.
Savinkov of course sought to stake his own claim, offering potential support to Xishan out of a fear of the Japanese Concordists, and also a great distaste for any possibility of Drozdovsky getting a foot in any further than they did. Naturally, this terribly confused Yan Xishan who only grew more baffled when delegates from some German regime bearing a swastika also started making offers, but with the situation collapsing, he would try to simply go along with what he at least, understood was the situation and try to milk everyone making him offers for everything they were worth.
The Russian Empire though would not remain laggard forever. Prime Minister Drozdovsky's whole policy was built around settling the far east and making Russia as much of an Asian power as it was a European one, hoping to gradually bring the east up to the population density of the west. The present situation, where China was in complete chaos with the potential for godless socialists and degenerate liberals to threaten the eastern flank; was entirely unacceptable. However, Mongolia was shattered into many warlord zones, and already there were rumours of intervention that might further spread the scourge of Communism and Syndicalism, things that would not do, and could not be allowed without a Russian response, including a mobilisation of the Imperial Russian Army to start probes into western China and begin sending Russian mercenaries to assist the Beiyang cause.
In the world of the Raven and the Bear, the discoveries of the otherworlds brought about substantial disturbance to say the least. Stalin found the extremely heterodoxical Bolsheviks of Transcaucasia and Zheltorossiya almost as bewildering as an existing Russian Empire and Savinkov's "National Populism" or the simple existence of a Syndicalist Russia. He also found the potential disruption to the longstanding policy on China alarming, and asked for a special emergency meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist international to discuss matters.
Speaking at length to his American counterpart, the General Secretary of the Worker's Communist Party of America; Earl Browder (even if Browder was very much the junior of Chairman Kantarovich and especially Premier Foster), Stalin voiced concerns that the situation in the four worlds was to put it lightly; chaotic. If these conflicts in Japan, Korea, two Chinas, Arica, Peru, Ethiopia, Arabia, Madagascar, and beyond were linked conflicts, they would be called a world war. And they would deserve the title more than the Great War for their incredible geographic spread.
He worried that, with the USSR still busily building up, that this storm of conflict may lead to a premature quarte-global war, and that something should be done to ensure that they remained local conflicts. The provisions for an International Volunteer Army that would be able to maintain some distance from the national armies of the Proletarian world may be of use in allowing for intervention without providing causus bellis. Something that Browder agreed on.
China however, should be supported, to present a possible threat to the reactionary Russias of these otherworlds, that had the Man of Steel so particularly worried. The way the Glide worked remained not entirely understood, and he was fearful of spies from the Empire or the Federal Russian People's State might do in the Soviet Union, and has his misgivings about Syndicalist Russia, and while he was interested in working with the Kavakz Society and the Vperedists, everything he read of them convinced him that they were to put it lightly; heterodoxical beyond belief. The Vperedists offered an avenue to reach into the mess of China yes, but the thought of listening to Bogdanov's ravings made Koba break out into hives.
The Creation Society was some of the most active Socialists in that China, but they were Vperedists themselves, believers in the transformation of society for transformation's sake, and the Communist Party of China was increasingly embracing their mode and style of thought. This was...concerning to say the least as he was unsure of whether such an approach would even appeal to a heavily peasant based society, though he would be the first to admit to himself that he; nor his fellows of the centrist faction of the Bolshevik party; were not familiar with all the facts in this particular case. More information was needed.
And it would be needed soon, because it was becoming increasingly clear in his conversations with Mikoyan, Yezhov, and Kaganovich that the China situation was a microcosm of the fact that as the Americans would say "the shit has hit the fan". While he was having Molotov and Litvinov try to work on trade deals with the Syndicalists and Bearworld Communists that were already providing even further technological and mechanical assistance while Soviet resources flooded the INFOR, ULAPAC, and Rotfront, he had Yezhov try to check what may be going on inside.
Yezhov was also worried about potential threats from within, like Koba was, educated by the fearful conditions of the twenties of the possibility of assault from without by means of agents from within. Smirnov and Bukharin no longer worried him quite as much as they once did, the calculus had changed. But as Yezhov said, there were now sources of potential infiltrators who could speak fluent Russian and blend in almost perfectly. And while he did play the part of the good comrade with the Futurist Bolsheviks, he remained unconvinced by the enthusiastic embrace of the pie in the sky visions of cosmism and technology fetishism.
And as for the others..particularly regarding the complex and dangerous situations in China, he spent many late nights thinking about how to deal with the crisis in the far east. Stalin would confide in Wang Ming; his most ardent supporter in the Chinese Communist Party and another attendant in the meeting at Moscow that he was concerned that in the excitement over the new worlds; people were forgetting that the revolutionary fortress also needed to be secured. The Creation Society in the Uncrowned Earth's China was nice to have, but he was hoping for something less...ungrounded in general.
Still, it would ultimately come to a decision by the Politburo and the Presidium, as well as the Committee of the Supreme Soviet; to dispatch aid to China. Kaiserworld's Wang Jingwei would have his tanks; as would the creation society of Tian Han and his "Marxist Constructivists". And they would have a lot more, but it would not be unlimited support just yet, especially when word came to his desk that Kaiserworld's America had; much to the GRU and NKVD's expectations; collapsed into civil war when attempting to have the Army "mediate" negotiations just led to gunshots and arms being taken up once the familiar face of MacArthur repeated history in another world.
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The Divided States of America: The Kaiserworld American Civil War 1936-1937
"MacArthur just cannot help himself no matter the reality, can he?" - Premier Foster upon being told that Douglas MacArthur caused a civil war in another version of America
The assassination of Huey Long's Son Palmer Long by the Ku Klux Klan in an attempted hit on the Kingfish himself; proclaimed a "Syndicalist in waiting" by the Klansman who killed him was often regarded as the unofficial beginning of the Kaiserworld's Second American Civil war. This act, which shattered Long's faith in the system once and for all saw the breaking the standoff as militias and supplies were raised to protect one set of territory or the other after Douglas MacArthur started to try to crack down on all "seditious conduct" by means of terror and violence.
It was for the men and women in the halls of the Capitol in the Uncrowned Earth something to fear and dread, while in the Palace of the Congress built in the United Republics it was seen as a golden opportunity. Big Bill Haywood*, the would-be presidential candidate of the Socialist Worker's Party of America, while a bit long in the tooth; thanks to breaking from habits that would have fed into diabetes and alcoholism, was in good enough spirits to take charge in the call to arms as militias and sympathetic national guard units formed to guard the seizure of coal and power infrastructure readied for the fight.
Movements organised by the Klan, by Longist Minutemen, by the National Guard or the Sons of Liberty and more rose up all across the country. African-American and Indigenous groups seized whatever guns they could, counting on support from the opportunistic UASR that saw a chance to repeat history as the WFRN laid the lines of siege around the country.
The UASR of course, had a natural advantage to intervention in the conflict, given that this alter-USA was a simple glide away while the Bearworld USA had a deeply dilapidated military and the Serpentworld Federal American National State was principally deployed for more distant wars with its garrisons in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. Meanwhile the UASR was preparing for the mother of all battles in North America with British Canada and so had plenty of mobile assets arrayed in combat formation in places coterminous to where the Combined Syndicates were. The advantage of surprise wouldn't last forever, but it wouldn't have to, once enough territory and resources were secured for the Alter-Reds, the other intervention forces would be doing so at a disadvantage. Foster declared that the area would be kept under the "protection of the revolutionary navy to prevent imperialist incursions into the American landmass".
And with Norris abhorring the idea of throwing the minuscule Uncrowned Earth American Army into the meatgrinder, there was not likely going to be much opposition to this until the FANS moved forces to deploy to theother America. What would this would essentially mean in practice is that the opposition to the Combined Syndicates of America and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the United States of America would be left largely cut off from the outside world for the most part, though with a game of chicken being planed with the American National Navy to see who would have the stones to make the first move when they pulled heavier assets away from more distant postings to menace the civil war.
Whatever plans for intervention that Edward may have entertained were immediately, mercilessly squashed as soon as he was informed that doing so would both be unsupported by the United Kingdom, which was still in the process of building a land army capable of waging a long continental war; and would be met with retaliation by the Worker's and Farmers Revolutionary Army of America. One that Canada would have no chance of victory against.
Once again, Edward would have his political ambitions squashed by the poisoned chalice of reintegration with a functioning British Empire, leaving the dejected King to sulk in Buckingham palace after being in essence; dismissed as an unruly child by Lord Halifax. Triply so when McKenzie King told British command that in no uncertain terms, he was not going to have Canadians die in a colossal war in a far more populous country with no realistic exit plan. Canada had already sold off much of its navy to provide warships for the dominions of the empire, and even if it were intact, they would have almost certainly lost a naval war with the WFRN in style; while also likely sparking a world war Canada would likely be overrun in.
And the Imperial German Navy would find that the waters of America were now being patrolled by ships bearing the Red and Black banner. The Kaiserliche Marine would then quickly back down and settle for setting up bases in the Dominican Republic after being invited by the Anti-Syndicalist government of the eastern part of Hispanola, with even the bloodthirsty warhawks of the Kaiserreich unwilling to take on the Vladivostok Compact until they got a better idea of what they were working with. While they were willing to push with the American National Navy in deadly games of chicken, the worry of sparking a wider conflict kept most of the navies crowding around America shores well behaved.
And of course, non-americans intervening was always a dangerous gambit given the negative effects on legitimacy that being perceived as a foreign puppet had. Nevertheless, everyone did send volunteers and equipment as they felt they were able to through the blockades of the assorted navies gathered. However, MacArthur's putsch before an election was even properly organised had done much to devastate the legitimacy of his national salvation league. New England and the west coast had rejected his leadership straight away, and the Constituional America Republic had decried him as far too limpwristed to get the job of purifying America done and the Long aligned populists and progressives decried his "shameless kowtowing to the elite".
The UASR however, would find the insistence on Syndicalism within the CSA to be annoying, frustrating, and to some, borderline heretical. Thomas Mann and Pouget instead of Lenin or Marx, and Premier Foster quickly came to dismiss his otherworldly counterpart as "bizarrely obsessive" after a brief conversation purely to satiate his curiosity about what another iteration of himself might be like. However, as the Combined Syndicates of America were not tied to the Third International, there were no direct means to rebuke or influence it beyond leaning on it with aid and advice.
The isolation of the non-CSA elements of the civil war had an immediate effect, as did the sight of the WFRN's warships off the coast. In the midst of the coldest winter yet recorded in American history, the provision of coal and heating to the Provisional Revolutionary Government as well as shipping excess loads of foodstuffs to keep the revolutionaries and the populace in general fed.
While Norris' USA lacked the massive military industries needed to send weapons, he would send food supplies out to "fellow, if otherworldly Americans" as part of a Farmer's relief package to get their produce bought and sold to needy mouths and get work going once again. Desperate to get work going once more, Norris would be rewarded by signs of life in the long stagnant American economy once more, even as papers reported quite frankly confused information about what was going on in the otherworlds; attention fixated on the developing civil war. All while also trying to get an idea of what both the UASR and the FANS were capable of, observers and attaches trying to get a read on the burgeoning conflict and its fluidic lines.
However it was clear that MacArthur was not at all ready for the degree of air supremacy the CSA would be enjoying. With the Canadian border being locked down by PRG friendly militias outside of the New English Emergency Government's territory and the Mexican border being under the control of Socialist Zapatistas and Agrarianists, the skies would belong to the reds and blacks. Aluminium monoplanes far superior to anything in the inventory of anyone else involved in the war save for small handfuls of modern aircraft would patrol the skies regularly, exercising tactics of tightly coordinated bombardment with the benefit of radio communications to devastate many a position with rocket, machine gun, and bomb.
The Federal American Nationalists had plenty of Aircraft to give to the Constitutionalists, but without the experience of a proper great war, their aircraft were often more experimental than practical. Metal triplanes built on the assumption that more wings meant more turning ability which of course meant more dogfighting capability frequently found themselves gutted by Soviet and Council aircraft that would rush, fire away, then keep on going ahead without stopping in lethal boom and zoom runs.
Airships still being used in a military capacity loaned to Bill Murray's constitutionalists were big, intimidating, but not particularly unstoppable as autocannon equipped aircraft and flak cannons aimed for the more vulnerable components while easily outpacing or warding away parasite escort craft, and the "quad-stitcher" halftracks armed with four 23mm autocannons would make dive bombings by their parasite craft a one-way trip. And while the aircraft sold by other powers were more sensibly designed, there were just not enough of them to prevent the skies from becoming a sea of red.
There were some fumbles here and there. The realisation that San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles were not the hubs of the Sino-American community they were in their own timeline and that the Kaiserworld United States was short about fifteen million people relative to their own America resulted in a disappointing early showing in trying to spark revolt in the southern Pacific States under the Sacremento Government. Similarly, Huey Long's populistic American Unity government was a fierce competitor with trying to pull at the sympathy strings of the working poor American man, and even with the relatively limited skirmishing between PRG and Longist troops, there was a sense of uncertainty as to which direction the Kingfish would go while he was locked in a mortal struggle with the Constitutionalists and the Government of National Salvation.
Though it resulted in a stalled midwestern offensive, it wouldn't slow the pace of things in the east coast or Oregon; the latter of which would be seized by WFRA troops flying the Provisional Revolutionary Government flag. They were Americans after all; hardly anyone would notice, and the volunteers from the America of the Red Flood would be massively materially outmatched while the Allied troops dispatched were simply outnumbered. Volunteers with rifles from home cannot match the might of tanks and aircraft, and the UASR was far more willing to enforce its blockade than most were willing to contest it. This was after all, American soil; and only Norris and Lindberg's Americas were in a position to have ships contest it with anything resembling regularity. Albeit with a smaller, less well funded Navy that more often than not contented itself with delivering fuel and humanitarian supplies; particularly with Norris' hatred of the idea of contributing more American lives into a civil war. Meanwhile, it was starting to become apparent to the Nationalists that they needed to winnow away the more...extravagant ideas untested by the crucible of actual conflict, especially as their forces near Ohio were overrun.
As word came of the final fall of the Imperial Japanese government of the Uncrowned Earth in March of 1936; with the rival Japanese governments instead deciding to exploit the fall of that government rather than back it up, the war in America was starting to intensify with the melting of the snows and ice from the polar storm. New England. New England's emergency government had been overrun after attempting to pincer the Revolutionaries with the Government of national salvation and receive a strong negotiating position; only for a "loaned" WFRA tank corps to simply bulldoze through its formations and allow the "People's Liberation Army" to fill the gaps. The western government of national salvation had similarly been overrun by the combination of Revolutionary, Klan, and Black militia movements tearing through its core territories of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina,
Some of the fastest military advances in human history had taken place over months of the war as yet another MacArthur's government collapsed in dramatic fashion, in the east coast their forces were harried by black militias and Appalachian hillbillies aligned with the reds, all while trying their level best to attempt to stop the forward momentum of mechanised formations with more than a thousand tanks in a single offensive push towards D.C. By April Southern New Jersey had collapsed alongside inner Pennsylvania.
By May New England had surrendered half its territory, with the outmatched militias and national guard units having succumbed to the deadly effects of tank shock in the face of armoured cohorts that shot at or simply ran over troops with no experience in anti-tank warfare, submachine gun armed shock troops dismounting from their transports shortly after to hose down anything left standing after the ground was churned by artillery and aircraft. By June Albany had flown the white flag, with the rout of more than thirty thousand troops having taken out the national guard core of the New England government's armies. By July, Maine had given up as paratroopers seized its capital, and New England was functionally out of the war, freeing up troops for elsewhere.
Things were similarly dire for the National Salvation Government, with a ring of steel rapidly closing around the Potomac to prevent a coherent retreat southwards and to block the constitutionalists off from the capital. The siege of D.C was waged less out of a lack of ability and more a desire to capture the capital with a minimum of lives lost while the western offensives were in full swing following the failure of the July counteroffensive by the Western Macarthurists and the Pacific Government. With no industry, no hope of relief, and with Bearworld's Americuba's promised aid being stymied by the presence of the WFRN's blockade and Britain's lack of stomach for an active intervention while they were managing the absorption of even greater colonies and dominions, the government of national salvation's Washington based forces would have to make another humiliating retreat, pouring into Ravenworld's Cuba with a fresh wave of yumas that nobody but the exiles was happy to see and a headache for Lindbergh and Norris for what to do with the exiled America.
Though western command still fought on, they increasingly folded into the Sacremento government when it was starting to be clear that MacArthur had left the building and that there was really nothing stopping the tidal wave of tanks and halftracks or the endless scourge of aircraft. While Norris' America had provided more proper guns and vehicles now that some of its industries had reawakened, his America was gearing up for election season and Norris was deeply unwilling to commit America to anything when he was an unelected seatwarmer.
While he would allow those who wished to flee to do so, this was more of a hindrance than a help, as many soldiers simply transported themselves to the Bearworld's America to desert, figuring that when the jig was up to this degree they may as well spare themselves the trouble, who was going to punish them for it anyway? Much of the Navy similarly refused to fight, either fleeing to alters or turning themselves over to the Socialists. Standard model battleships were not at all suited for realities of fast, radar directed warfare, and after the sinking of the USS Arizona and its division by dive bombers launched from the Kitty Hawk and the Shiloh in the San Francisco bay and the mauling of the last survivors of its division by the Battlecruisers Toledo, Antietam, and the battleships Comintern, Emancipation, and Soviet Power as well as the CSA commandeered WLNS "Joe Hill", "Blair Moutain", and "Mother Jones" against the USS Mississippi, Idaho, New York, South Carolina, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, and Delaware in a massive surface action near Alcatraz.
The climax of months of pacific naval warfare, Labor Day 1936 would be met with the surrender of the Pacific Fleet on the bridge of the Rhode Island, the colossal American super battleship's hull scuffed with shell impacts and bomb damage and now a war prize for the Worker's Liberation Navy whenever they could repair it. San Francisco and Sacremento themselves would fall not long after, with the last remnants of the Sacremento government coalescing around Los Angeles as the noose was wrung tight around the city of Hollywood. With a city of a million people to think of, the mayor would give up the ghost, and sign the surrender orders handed to them by Oliver Law.
This would leave the "Constitutionalists", dominated by Klansmen and Old Democrats who refused Huey Long's populist overtures, appeals to Republican tradition, or the "anti-constituion perversion" of the federalists; nevermind the socialists. The day of the rope would be coming, but increasingly it would be coming for them, as Black militia dominated areas of substantial size found themselves receiving; once the Red Americans figured it out; aid from the other side. Weapons, training, and often heavy equipment in the black belt areas that the Constitutionalists hoped to purge of the uppity black man who did not know his proper place.
The Klan had terror on its side yes, but white sheets or black hoods made for easy targets, and given the ad hoc; confused nature of the uprising, they would be facing enemies with immensely more material firepower than they did. "Tank divisions" of up armoured tractors with machine gun nests built into them to supplement the multi-turretted or sponson riven monstrosities given to them by the Federation were so much fodder for purpose-engineered vehicles created by the UASR and either given or "loaned" in the form of intervention forces. Forces that had so far proven to be generally unstoppable as the weeks rolled by and the sense of confusion regarding the Glide began to fade. A general idea of its rules was formulated, and that allowed for a period of rapid, sneaky intervention that would see city after city be cut off or overrun across the country.
Enormous vehicles better described as land battleships than sensibly designed tanks got stuck in the mud or waiting for spare parts or vehicles able to pull them out of their ditches. Sponson mounts were picked off by anti-tank gunners who recognised them as weaknesses while the sweep of aircraft from above only grew more and more frequent. Many constitutionalist ships were sunk at the battle of Ossabow Island, though they had managed to take some of the CSA ships with them, there wasn't exactly a buyer's market for replacement ships and the Federation fleet found that its turtleback armour scheme was a liability at long range for all of its dominance in naked eyeball range duels.
While Alfalfa Bill's home state of Oklahoma had managed to break through to the rest of the Constitutional American Republic's territory with the aid of Nationalist troops, they were running threadbare on their own troops and the FANS was starting to regard this as a waste of its resources when it had to prepare its military with the experience of this test run of a world war. With the massive tank battle of Shellby Alabama ending in a disorganised rout with a haphazard mishmash of German, Italian, FANS, and Imperial Russian equipment being swept aside by WFRA vehicles outside of those who had found strongpoints to try and leverage the firepower of the Federation's heavy tanks to best advantage, Alfalfa Murray was running short on hope and long on ways his life could end.
Knowing that many would be looking for him, especially as word of the war crimes that the Klan had gotten up to with his blessing, he decided to skip and bounce out of town to go hide in Lindbergh's State while encouraging others to also flee to Federal American National State or to Germany and White Russia.
The diehards of the constitutionalists would not be welcomed in Cuba, with MacArthur already trying to deal with a flood of other "National Salvationists" and it was clear that Norris, who had no love for the Klan, would not welcome a flood of armed gangsters in his America. By the time of the first snowfalls of the year, the battle had already been won.
By June, all that was left was Huey Long's government, and Long wasn't fool enough to hope for a sudden miracle after a lengthy and brutal war with the Constitutionalists and Feds saw him expend a great deal of blood and treasure. The Kingfish would instead, surrender in the hopes of amicable treatment and would, against the recommendations of the UASR; get it. Though this significantly annoyed DeLeon Debs-Commune, it would please those in Chicago who were just thankful that this conflict was as brief as it was with the last shots being fired in January 1937. It was bloody, with many massacres, people freezing or starving to death, and outbreaks of cholera and polio and other diseases that were able to spread in absence of vaccination and medical regimens, but it was only a year long, somewhat longer than the Ravenworld American civil war due to the greater injection of foreign equipment and fighters, but shorter by far than the war of the states nearly a hundred years ago. With a million dead, the time for war had to give way to the start of a new constitutional convention in Chicago, and to see the birth of a new, Syndicalist Giant.
*I'm mixing elements from Vanilla KR, Home of the Brave, Up with the Stars, and some of my own take. Hence the split between the Klan dominated south and the Longist sympathetic south and midwest, the rise of the Black Belt revolutionaries, and the Feds getting split. As a general rule, I'm just going with the broad strokes and if you want to contribute, feel free to in order to fill some blanks or propose your own entries and fanfics to fill out stuff. I also admittedly am not hugely interested in deeply detailed revolutionary war stuff and tend to prefer to give them broader strokes than my general wheelhouse of interstate conflict and post-revolutionary politics. Such as the upcoming shitfest arguments between the two revolutionary Americas.
Excerpt from "Kaiserworld in Chaos:The rise of the Teutonic Society" by Ivan Cazarin (Raven and Bear), Bryant Institute, Metropolis ASR - 2022
The German Empire of Kaiserworld's economy was in tatters from the gold shock and the black Monday crash as the colonial investment bubble came home to roost in dramatic fashion. The Kaiserworld's would-be hegemon, already flying so close to the sun, would in essence, pour incendiaries onto the wax of its wings by tying the money of so many of the petit-bourgeoisie into the hands of speculative investment in colonial gambles. The simple fact of commodity-based currency is that when the supply of currency rises, so too must its price fall. And when the value of the gold that each reichsmark represents falls, the Reichsmark itself declines in value.
In the sort of economic apparatus established by Hitler, who could institute a countermeasure by fiat, this can be mitigated. In the Kaiserreich whose banking institutions were given more independence from Berlin as a liberalisation measure under "free market" policies established after the end of the Ludendorf autocracy; there would be no such easy relief under the current system. And with the triumphant but constrained geopolitical situation of Kaiserworld's Germany; with vast colonies that were perilously easy to interdict in any direction; there were already ample spaces for radical rightists of both populist and aristocratic strains to rise like foam to the top.
"We are surrounded on more fronts than the physical. The godless menace of atheistic revolutionaries menaces us from other worlds while our economy is leeched by obese speculators, and Judeo-Masonic financiers." - Rudiger Von Der Goltz
Rudiger von der Goltz, self-proclaimed hero of the eastern front and warrior adventurer, had formed the "Friedreich the Great" society which had advocated for a return to absolute monarchy and the dissolution of the Reichstag as well as a far harsher stance on the "Red and Black menace which ever menaces fair Deutschland" and a return to a "simpler, more godly economic system, practiced in the Germany of Old, when our Empire was more holy." While many in the aristocracy and haut-bourgeoisie weren't necessarily unsympathetic to an absolute monarchy under the Hohenzollern dynasty, many were much more sceptical of his rambling about Guilds and Manorialism, deeming it a symptom of a madness born from spending entirely too much time trying to pacify the United Baltic Duchy's endless and almost certainly Russian supported insurgencies and spending a bit more time than was healthy visiting the relics of the Teutonic and Livonian Orders.
Following the Worldmerge however, he became a man possessed, convinced that God had chosen him to enact a purification of Germany that would return it and its Austro-Hungarian sibling towards the purity of the earlier era, to undo the "travesties of 1848 and 1789 once and for all" in his words. A profoundly old man who had grown steeped in strange forms of eclectic Germanicism in his time suppressing the anti-kaiserreich uprisings in the east, Rudiger made himself the face of "Reaction, in its purest form for our volk and fatherland". But perhaps what made him especially heterodoxical amongst the German far right, even to the Nazis who in their brief time being aware of this otherworldly version of the seventy one year old man; was his advocacy of a compromise with Savinkov's Russia regarding eastern Ukraine and Belarus to form an alliance with him against "Liberalism and the Communard conspiracy" which he viewed as the chief threats.
This, coupled with favouring the Belgrade pact over Germany's traditional ally of Bulgaria and the Cairo Pact over the Ottomans after being charmed by Arab orientalist societies in his earlier interwar years; made him something of a maverick, who had acquired a large cult of personality around himself amidst those who loved his tales of adventure and dashing romance dealing with Kaiserreich's many enemies that he codified in autobiographical novels and even commissioning fictional stories based on his adventures or endeavours he wished he undertook. Coming to be known as the "Hero Count", the graf of der Goltz' society grew explosively after the worldmerge.
Already a major thorn in the side of the traditional establishment and something of a personal annoyance to the Hohenzollerns who; save for the Crown Prince Wilhelm the Third; rather detested the idea of actually directly managing Germany. More power was always nice, but the expectations and burdens of absolute rule in the dictatorial style was something that would drain away time for the pleasures of being the Imperial family of the great empire. This would not dissuade him or the Friedrich the Great Society whatsoever as they; though notably without the direct presences of himself or one of the up and coming stars of his movement; Waldemar von Pabst in response to the declaration that the Kaiserreich had no plans to intervene in the civil wars of "other continents" on the seventh of April, 1936, would start a march on Berlin, also citing the arrest of Horst Wessel; a prominent supporter of Rudiger.
Baronet Waldemar von Pabst,
The chornomorphic event of 1936 had already sparked a certain mania in the count, and he assembled his followers to attempt to make his takeover. The police in Berlin, already dealing with bread riots and demonstrations protesting the high price of milk and eggs, were not at all ready to deal with Rudiger's freikorps* storming of the Reichstag, presently in session to debate a bill of public works to try and resolve the unemployment crisis in the reich as well as intervene to support the Korean Monarchy in the Uncrowned Earth currently split into a three sided civil war only for a flood of unruly mobsters lead by Rudiger's supporters such as Ernst Rohm and Hermann Ehrhardt to break the door. The Count made his announcement of the beginning of a new German era, proclaiming that "Germany will be reborn, as a nation devoted to God, Empire, and Kaiser", to the bewildered observers from the world over in a surrealistic experience.
Rudiger would turn out to be more right than he expected.
"His majesty has made it clear that the present insurrection is no better than Syndicalism or Communism, you are to stand down, or be made to stand down" - Supreme Admiral Erich Raeder
Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, supreme commander of the Kaiserliche Marine would receive orders carried by Otto Kretschmer directly from the Emperor himself that the current insurrection was to be crushed with all due force, with Wilhelm himself offering to lead the charge against the troublemakers in a fury at this blatant display of unruly thuggery done in, ostensibly, his name. Something that the Kaiser would not tolerate anymore than he would stand for the public pointing out his withered arm. Raeder's marines, together with soldiers from the Berlin garrison of the Heer and the personal Imperial Guard of the Kaiser himself, would ride into the masses of Freikorps with orders to put down the incident.
Wilhelm the second was angered not out of political reasons, being a reactionary man with a noted antisemitic streak perpetually paranoid of freemasons and esperantists; but out of personally being insulted that someone would dare presume to disrupt a system that he was already quite comfortable with and powerful in by trying to overturn the whole thing all while proclaiming that it was done in his name. Something that he would not abide by or stand for as the Guarde du Corps started to open fire on the freikorps whenever they refused to move out of the way, the Emperor riding from atop a tank to make his presence as obvious as possible.
The Freikorps would be crushed, and Rohm and Ehrhardt would both be swiftly put to death for treason against the Empire and dereliction of duty, though the bulk of the Freikorps and the Fredriech the Great Society would get away with relative slaps on the wrist in the interest of reconciling the factions within the German army and bringing about a restored sense of peace as the 7th of April incident calmed down and the requisite arrests were made. While Rudiger and Pabst would be questioned, they would escape notice for the time being, merely having inspired rather than directly leading this most egregious attack on the German system.
Instead, one of Rudiger's rivals in the German far right would rise to the fore instead. Instead of the Friedrich the Great society, instead, the Teutonic Society would rise. A society in the German business, political, economist, academic, and military worlds which had advocated for a more moderate, technocratic and bureaucratic vision of radical national conservatism as opposed to the outright reactionary dark revolution envisioned by the Friedrich the Great Society and the maintenance of Imperial German hegemony as well as Germany's special destiny to guide the world as its long-deserved rising power. Centred around the German Fatherland Party known for its endorsement of antisemitism, antimasonism, and antiziganism; the Teutonic Society nevertheless had many fellows across the right wing of the German political spectrum, and was supported by those who believed that the armed forces needed a stronger say in the government.
"A Germany victorious is a Germany that will never become a nation of, by, and for the rabble. We are a sensible nation; not one of the degenerate creed of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; but of the new creed of Authority, Order, and Justice. Though some of our fellows on our aisle of politics had to be purged for opening the door to chaos, we shall endure, stronger, purer, and prouder than before." - Alfred Hugenberg after being appointed Chancellor by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Newspaper magnate and leader of the German Fatherland party, Alfred Hugenberg was the man that would take over the Kaiserreich with the permission of Kaiser Wilhelm, fulfilling his long-held dream of leading a "fundamentally counterrevolutionary and national conservative Germany" as the parties of Germany were consolidated into a singular "Imperial Emergency Coalition" that de facto ended the shortlived Tirpitz-Westarp Democracy and brought forth a new, "radically unradical" form of military regime in charge of the Kaiserreich. One that would seek alignment with Nazi Germany, not out of especially great love for "Peasantblooded" Volkische Populism, but out of a belief that it was the only way to shore up Germany's national defence against the red menace or the renewed threat of the hated institutions of Britain and America.
Together with his so called "partner in crime" and successor in the Teutonic Society; Manfred von Richthofen, Alfred sought to transform the Mitteleuropan system and the Reichspakt as a whole, and prepare the German Empire for its future in what he was certain would be another victorious war of teutonic superiority over the degeneracy of the west and the barbarism of the east. His "Teutonic Society" as his clique of radical nationalists was called, would concern itself with ensuring that the sun would never set on the German Empire, and that it would only grow larger in the future and beget the downfall of all those who envied or despised the Reich's ascendancy.
Manfred von Richtofhen
Alfred would seek to ensure a firm hand in the puppet states of German-dominated eastern Europe. On paper a union of "entrusted allies", in practice a crushed collection of informal colonies whose economies were utterly subservient to the kaiserreich's and whose populations were being subjected to a slow process of having the landless poor of the Reich settled in their hands at low prices as a measure to deal with poverty in Germany itself. They would be kept precisely strong enough to ward off Savinkov, and absolutely no further; certainly in no position to resist the plan of "gradual germanisation" (as opposed to the "crash germanisation" planned by Hitler's Germany) nor significantly challenge Berlin's vision for the future.
Democratic practices would be quietly and brutally quashed as part of the Hugenberg policy. The Hetman system of dictatorship would be expanded across the German sphere, with Putschs being organised at the behest of the consulates against the governments of Lithuania and Poland to remould them along the lines of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian dictatorships. The Pro-Russian and Fascist ViN would be savagely suppressed in one of the rare positive moves of the Hetman or the Berlin regime, but the OUN and the underground Liberal and Socialist movements would similarly be repressed by an intensification of police campaigns; all while promoting a program of "Wehrbauer" settlement of the east to help fortify the reich's eastern frontier.
But perhaps more than the fear induced by the Soviet Union, or the Free German Socialist Raterepublik was the concern formed by the Intermarium and the potential example it could set for anti-kaiserreich elements in Kaiserreich's domains. Many for example, worried about the possibility of Ukrainians seeing the Ukrainian People's Soviet Republic; a Popular Democracy at the fringes of the Rotfront's sphere of Influence in Europe that helped shield it from Imperial Russia headed by the young Left-Futurist Mykhail' Semenko who replaced the Agrarian Socialist Mykhailo Hrushevsky as part of a modernist clique set on a dialectical materialist and revolutionary futurist vision for Ukraine. This could inspire those not taken with this "Marxism-Leninism"** or with Syndicalism into potentially rising against their betters.
For one thing, even with the coal bearing east lost to Imperial Russia, the UPSR enjoyed a higher standard of living, and was not currently suffering drought induced famine exacerbated by an Imperial German backed program of grain speculation that would conveniently put the price of food out of the reach of "useless eaters" whose vacant properties could be acquired by agricultural concerns and the landless poor of the fatherland itself. The Soviet Union perhaps could be shielded against with the usual anti-russian propaganda, this USPR though posed a more interesting issue for the german dominated press to ensure the Hetman continued to be seen as the benevolent father of the true Ukrainian nation.
Yan Gamarnik's Byelorrusian Social Ergatocrats, and Kaspuskas of Lithuania would probably be closer to the Uncrowned Earth German Socialists' model than the more "Vperedist" influenced Polish and Ukrainian movements, but also posed similar issues. They were of richer, more modernised countries that were considered fraternal allies of the Free German Socialists; whereas their counterparts in their own timeline were kept on a deliberate leash. Not to mention Ergatocratic Finland which pressured a vital part of the German sphere that supplied all-important nickel to the Kaiserreich's coffers.
Hugenburg's recourse would be to begin to court Imperial Russia, however much the idea rankled at many; and particularly Imperial Russia's proxy state; the rump Imperial German regime holed up in East Prussia that survived entirely through the threat of Swedish, Austrian, and Russian intervention and the country being a virtual barracks state with about ten percent of the male populace in the armed forces at all times, constantly setting up pill boxes, fortresses, and bunkers to protect a "cold and lonely outpost with more artillery batteries than factories".
While the Futurists in the France of that world disturbed Imperial Germany even more than the Nazis and Fascists of the world of the Bolsheviks, it was figured that for the time being there wouldn't need to be a formal alignment with them, especially when they were reshuffling the artistic regime after the sudden but perhaps fortuitous for Hugenberg disappearance of Artaud and Breton; giving room for the more rightist Carnalistes to fill the void as Augiers made his move.
To the new Imperial regime, the four worlds were a game of chess, to be played against many players, and by the time word had come of the fall of their own America to syndicalism; the centralist, militarist regime of Imperial Germany was now firmly locked into place, hoping to play its pieces in the game of China once again to assert Berlin's prerogative over the orient. The AOG intervention force to reinforce Nanking to demonstrate that German power, while perhaps staggered by Black Monday and the GOld Shock, was only growing stronger, while at home the militarization of the economy was hoped to provide the Panacea needed for the start of a recover just as foreign success abroad, such as the much-lauded destruction of the "Communard aligned Mau Mau" in Kirenya was propagandised as a triumph of German arms.
...
*The Irony in Rudiger leading a Freikorps crushed by the govt is deliberate
**Remember that my take on Kaiserreich has the October revolution simply not happen at all. The Left-SRs try to make an uprising when Kerensky accepts Brest-Livotsk, but are squashed, but the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party scarcely makes a peep; though Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike leave the country during the purging of the Left-Srs.
Excerpt from "From the lost decade to the great triumph: the Saisei era in retrospective" - Yasuhiro Matsuda, 2014, Tokyo University, Kaiserworld
"I believe that a Japanese century is within our reach." - Emperor Saisei* of Kaiserworld Japan
With a fresh mandate from a snap election in hand following the chaotic March incident that lead to the death of a Prime Minister, a chaotic melee between the Japanese Federation of Labor and ultrarightists in the Japanese military and the fall of the shortest-ever Japanese government, Saito Takao of Kaiserworld's Japan; our Japan, would ascend to the ranks of the Prime Minister of the young Japanese democracy. With a week of violence primarily instigated by the far right's reactionary, ultramodernist, and militarist wings battling for power and a fear of the Syndicalist, Communist, and Anarchist movements present; it was deemed time to transform the constitution of Japan.
The Meiji constitution allowed for a truly dangerous amount of military influence and the sight of an Ergatocratic revolution in the Japan of the Uncrowned Earth and the Futuristic bedlam of the Raven and Bear's Japan had deeply disturbed the establishment and convinced even many stubborn conservatives that the time had come for change.
Concessions would need to be made, and weaknesses in the anti-liberal Meiji constitution would have to be dealt with. Thanks to Emperor Saisei's endorsement of progressive transformations, the shape of the new government could be quite radical. The conservative preference for an involved government, shared by the socialists, would be compromised with on the liberals who; like the socialists, also favoured the implementation of unrestricted universal suffrage, though the granting of female suffrage was a bitterly contested vote. It would take many weeks of debate, but it was deemed necessary to keep women involved in politics through legitimate channels to prevent them from seeking unsavoury means of desiring power as they did in the revolutionary Japan of one of the otherworlds.
Such logic would drive much of the progressive character of the constitution, more fear of what would occur if they did not take extreme measures than an overflowing of progressive sympathies among the conservatives in particular or a love for interventionist economics among the liberals. While the radical, revolutionary left of our own Japan would denounce the defection of many Kautskyist Marxists, reformist syndicalists, and social democrats to this constitution as an abandonment of the revolutionary potential in the country; the more moderate or conciliatory left wing saw it as a chance to solidify a number of gains without risking a destructive civil war and legitimise their political organisations.
With much of the radical rightist factions in the countryside, aristocracy, and nobility dealt with already; there was no fear of an attempted putsch, and while Takao was not himself enamoured of all the rather radical propositions for the new Saisei constitution, the sight of the chaos and strangeness gripping the alternate Japans was enough to convince him to go along with it; with Saisei's blessing. By the 12th of June Japan would settle on its new paradigm and constitution, enshrining rights to strike, form a union, universal suffrage for all adults of conscription age regardless of gender or social standing, a guarantee of land reform and fairly distributed land towards the agricultural class, and a program to adopt a devolution system for the colonies.
The much celebrated Land reform campaign would take the better part of a year, enshrining community planning to ensure a steady supply of staple crops, the establishment of farmer's co-operatives to allow for profit sharing and guided mechanisation, strict policies of rent and housing price control as well as property construction to reduce and eliminate homelessness, and a guarantee of land to certified farmers. In all, 2.3 million hectacres of land in the home islands alone, would be redistributed in some of the largest land reform campaigns in any of the three worlds to take place outside of a revolutionary government. While this would draw criticism from the landlord classes, the crises of 1936 were good at making many of them quiet down and go along with it, especially to calm both the radicalised military men and underground revolutionaries.
The colonial program would also see an alteration of Japanisation policies in Korea. Aware of the Korean republicans, communists, and monarchists in the Uncrowned Earth timeline as well as the Asiofuturist rhetoric of the Raven and Bear timeline, the Busan negotiations were undertaken with a strongly conciliatory tone towards the Korean populace. Federalism; intended as a half-way measure between the Devolution in a fashion similar to Scotland or Wales in the United Kingdoms that still stood preferred by Tokyo, and the Confederation preferred by the Busan delegation would be offered, with Korean culture being offered protections under a broad program of autonomy and self-rule, as well as an extension of suffrage to Korean denizens. While right of secession would be firmly denied, and bilingualism would be mandated in Korea.
Were there not such pressures to offer these concessions, it is doubtful that they would have ever been made, but there was an understandable risk that, to use the words of Ambassador Yoshikawa "Anything less would likely open the door for something that would endanger us all. So we will give much, and hope that the men at Busan will be pleased with it".
However it was not a wholly ideal system, as later, post-war observers would note and struggle against; the assignment of prefectures to Korea in essence served as a form of gerrymandering on a national scale to ensure that the Japanese would retain an advantage even as the Korean population expanded. The lauded Saisei land reform program would not affect the agrarian south as strongly as the more industrial north, where rational planning of land allotment was felt to be more necessary to maximise production, while producing a loyal class of collaborators in the south was thought to be more prudent. And as many of the Busan delegation were themselves of well-off inteligentsia, this logic was agreeable. With the rationalisation of farmland in the south into more mechanised plots of land under middle-holders, the redundant farmhands would naturally head to the less populous but more factory strewn north to fuel the industrialisation of those prefectures.
Saisei era flag for Royal Korea.
Such social engineering was not entirely intended, but proved highly beneficial to the powers that be during the Saisei era. Though it would feed into the Hardhat Riots of Saisei year forty**, for the time being it was lauded as an unblemished and unadulterated success of progressive legislation and a masterful work of multipartisanship. Korea would, to the present day, remain a federal constituent of the Imperial East Sea Federation***, thus vindicating the Busan conference to many, but just as many regarded it as what it ultimately was; a compromise meant to ensure that the Empire remained territorially intact even following the disruption of the Worldmerges and to ensure that the Empire would be well positioned to take advantage of import hungry markets in other worlds.
Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Kurils, and the smaller pacific islands; including recently seized Guam; would be integrated along similar lines, though with less momentous occasion due to the significantly lesser size of these add ons, but perhaps the most complicated affair would be that of Hawai'i's.
Hawaii, acquired largely through the WFRN and USN's focus on the American mainland and Alaska and the state government being overthrown by an ultimately liberal Asian and Native uprising against the white minority that saw the islands; vacated by the Pearl Harbour squadron that sought to challenge the WFRN's pacific fleet in the Alcatraz incident; become a Japanese protectorate following its declaration of independence from the USA.
The Hawaii affair would spark significant international debate and argument, but the backing of the British Empire in the hopes of securing a renewed Anglo-Japanese treaty with this world's Japan would tip the scales in the favour of a Japanese protectorate over an appendage of the Uncrowned Earth's United States and especially over a German client state in the pacific, with the USA and British Empire both regarding the Kaiserreich with immense suspicion. Such would fuel the fires of Hugenburg's nationalistic rhetoric, especially with the allegations; later confirmed to be true; that the Imperial Japanese Navy used no small degree of subterfuge to tip the vote towards Japanese Protectorate status, promising land reform while still protecting the small businesses of the community and restoring the peerage of the former Kingdom's royals.
Hawai'i would in essence, be an autonomy of Japan, won more through the inability of other claimants to agree on who should have it, than a genuine conquest. The meeting however, would prove fortuitous in another way.
Drawing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance
The British Empire of the Raven and Bear Earth; high off of its diplomatic success with the Imperial remnant of Kaiserworld and its reduced counterpart in the Uncrowned Earth; sought to renew and solidify a second Anglo-Japanese Alliance, one that was destined to be remembered more fondly than that which would be made with the Asiofuturist regime of its native Earth. Almost as soon as diplomatic relations were established, the government of Baldwin, then Lord Halifax sought to woo Japan into an alliance that would remain to the present day in the continuing cold war. Offering an ample export market, triangulation against the threats of "German Hunnery" and "the Red menace, whether it be Communist, Syndicalist, or Accelerationist" and a means to settle disputes with the Uncrowned Earth's United States, the offer was taken enthusiastically by Prime Minister Saito.
The recognition of Japanese territorial claims in the Syndicalist revolution of Kaiserworld America as well as the inclusion of Thailand and the Philippines into the burgeoning "Indo-Pacific Cooperation Initiative" would prove to be significant boons to the Japanese economy and diplomatic prestige, and the calmer meeting ground with which Emperor Saisei and Showa****'s empire could meet and find just how great a divergence a mere forty years of unshared history could make served to further solidify the divide in Japans.
Other important diplomatic matters, such as ties of defence and the matter of apparated islands, which like the apparated themselves; started to appear without warning; sorting out the issue of the olympics and the world cup, or general policies of trade were all discussed in the Honolulu summit with not just the British, but the French of the Raven and Bear Earth and the Americans of the Uncrowned Earth to name the more important full participants.
In the matter of economic affairs, the end of the Lost Decade and the ignition of the Saisei miracle could be traced to, in large part, the gains made in these summits. The long economically starved territories of the Entente were ideal recipients of intensified export of goods as well as providers of raw resources such as high grade Australian coal or Canadian oil, while technological exchanges would allow for the completion of a number of major projects, such as the thousand cinema project and Kenjiro Takayanagi's television project and the experiments with "glide metamaterials" that the two would undertake.
Later unclassified documents would also reveal that the discussions, in top secret meetings between Foreign Minister Yoshizawa and his British counterpart Samuel Hoare to discuss the possibility of cooperation on research for "new and secret weapons". Which would serve as a predecessor for the joint allied "Cyclone Project" that served as a counterpart to "Project Sophia" among the revolutionary bloc during the interworld war.
*The Era name for Nobuhito's reign is "Saisei era", meaning Rebirth. A native Japanese could probably make a better name but I'm not native Japanese. It's also worth noting that in Japan, a no longer reigning Emperor is always referred to by era name.
**1972 by the Gregorian calendar.
***Renaming of the Japanese Empire in response to the hardhat Riots of '40 to reflect a more multiethnic Federal system.
****Reds! Japan, Yasuhito is a regent, but Hirohito remains the formal Emperor.
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The People's Flag is Deepest Red: The Union of Britain in 1936 in brief
"The otherworlders are not a threat to our syndicalist system, but a boon. A boon that will allow the flame of revolution to grow, to enkindle, and devour the powers of reaction. Maximism is the ideal companion of Bolshevism, Spartakism, Jijinpaists, and Maximalism in this holy crusade. And only Maximism has the power to ensure that Britain, our Britain, stands on the right side of history against these Fascists, these Nazis, these Futurists, these Reactionaries, these Dominists, and these Concordists who would seek to lead the common man astray from the path of revolution." - Oswald Mosley in the 1936 emergency session of the Federal Congress
The Socialist Worker's Commonwealth of Britain was once the primary industrial powerhouse of the Socialist world which served as benefactor and benefacted of a vast sphere of influence including Free India, Mexico, Chile, Nicaragua, France, Norway, and North Italy with healthy relations with Egypt, America, Russia, Iran and more. It was no longer the largely undisputed global hegemon no, but it was a major nexus for trade in and out of Europe, and the crass bullying and brutish appeals to force the German Empire made in its attempt to build itself up as a world power did little to endear itself to potential allies.
However, the strategic situation still seemed dicey. The German Empire had already proven itself to have the best army in the world and had a mighty, world-spanning fleet, and the Entente had already lost that war before; nevermind the problem of the imperial remnants staring across the patches of ocean.
1936 changed all that. The worldmerges introduced new threats and new boons. The Syndicalists would have to share space with the Communists, the Communards with the Bolsheviks and the Spartakists and even the Jijinpaists. Nothing would ever be the same again, and Britain found itself going from the hub of the revolution (even if the French would assert otherwise despite their reliance on British industry and naval power) to simply a node. A crucial, important node, but a node all the same.
The creed of internationalism had a rather different meaning when faced with the vastness of the Vladivostok Compact, the Ulanbaatar pact, and the Roftront, and the ideological hegemony syndicalism once knew among great power socialists was now diluted into merely one of the revolutionary theses, though the Ulanbaatar pact showed that Syndicalism had potential even in countries once considered on the periphery. And while there were warm greetings and exchanges between the Socialist powers, there was a sense that whatever course the Red banner would blow, it would not be Britain's destiny to command it anymore.
If anything, the nonchalant attitude the USSR, CWFE, CWFC, and UASR had to meeting what were intended to be unreasonable demands to be worked down from by Tom Mann's government instead were met with "is that all?" with regards to the INFOR's requests for oil, rubber, nickel, and other important materials. Indeed, Foreign Commissar Litvinov would crack a joke about how British society had clearly cut its expectations and demands since the revolution while working out a deal in the hopes for the machine tools and industrial technologies of the INFOR and Rotfront to supplement the exchanges with America.
As for the Americans, whereas the newborn Socialist Worker's Commonwealth of America would need time to rebuild and recover from the years of economic downturn and the revolutionary war, the UASR was mostly interested in two things; whatever technologies the INFOR may have had that they didn't, and basing arrangements. In exchange, the excess production of America would be at the INFOR's disposal, just as it would be for the Rotfront. It almost seemed to be too good to be true, and many feared that the Bolsheviks, particularly with how much the Spartakists agreed with them; were going to squash the Syndicalist system and "Bolshevise, Maximalise, and Spartakise our gallant syndicalist path to socialism until the noble trade union is cast aside in favour of party and council."
However, even the most radical of these voices recognised that with the threat of two United Kingdoms in full, as well as this "fascism" and "nazism" and "concordism", these disputes were best worked at from within the bounds of socialist diplomacy rather than with an open split with international tensions as high as they already were.
The Christian socialist Autonomists were perhaps the most concerned by the other forms of socialism present, fearing the generally bellicose attitude the Maximalists in America had towards foreign politics in particular, considering it in essence; reckless warmongering. Something that the feminist pacifists of the Congregationalists were largely in agreement on. However the Councilists of Sylvia Pankhurt surprised many by breaking from her allies of convenience in the Congregationalists to endorse a program first proposed by the "Vanguardists" to move towards signing terms of alliance with the Vladivostok Compact and the Rotfront.
"An alliance of Federationists, Councilists, Vanguardists, and Maximists may have in earlier times been an odd marriage, but in our current situation; is deeply sensible. The time has come to prepare for a true war to end all wars, a world war not of world empires, but of the world systems of revolution and reaction. However, we will not prepare for such things by abandoning our best selves, not when we may finally have our cake and eat it too." - Sylvia Pankhurst on the announcement of the coalition with the Federationists, Vanguardists, and Maximists.
The Federationists; the "centre" of the Labour Party's politics in the Trade Union Congress and the Provincial congress, had decided to make the move of endorsing Pankhurst, with surprisingly the Maximists also going along with it. The Maximist and Hyndmanist endorsement of the Councilist position despite their differences with the Councilists and Vanguardists was a major initial shock, but as Mosley and Beckett made their reasonings for it clear; was surely a product of their endorsement of the line they believed would suit their foreign policy goals.
And to be frank, it was also to get one over the Congregationalists, Parliamentarians, and Autonomists who advocated for a more conciliatory position. While the Maximists and Hyndmanists were advocates for the defence of British "national sovereignty" in the face of "otherworlder dictums", the Maximists in particular offered praise to the "achievements of the revolutions of other worlds who had kept their fires lit in the face of gale and rain", though it was clear that their understanding of the otherworld situations was not entirely coherent.
Though they did offer praise to the "proud spirit of 1848" embodied in Uncrowned Earth Goebbels' Social Republicanists, they also at the same time espoused admiration of the "20th century Americanism" of the WCPA in the Raven and Bear timeline; unaware that the Browder of that world had never really worked with such rhetoric and so desperately confused the sitting General Secretary of the WCPA. To the point of Browder sending Mosley a letter personally asking what on Earth he was referring to.
Nevertheless, the snap elections called for 1936 in response to the worldmerges and a cycle of revolution and reaction that ensued saw a complex series of agreements fire off at once. Mosley would take the position of Chairman of the Union, but the Councilist proposal of strengthening the Central Council would be approved of, with Sylvia Pankhurst as its Premier. The Maximists would however, require an agreement with defecting Federationists, Sylvia's Councilists, and the now more openly Communist Vanguardists would face opposition from the similarly oddball mishmash of Beckett's Hyndmanists who denounced the "reckless social radicalism" of the Maximists, as well the Autonomists and Congregationists who both opposed "a move towards military centralism", and the Parliamentarians who opposed "needless antagonism of wayward forces of liberty", but would retain a "wait and see" approach.
Though it was a triumph to be sure, Mosley found his power restrained by the coalition based nature of his current holding of the coveted position of Chairman of the Trade Union Congress and the fact that the cabinet had to be staffed by Federationists, Councilists, and Vanguardists to the point of pushing his own Maximists to a simple plurality position in the coalition government ensured that he would have to compromise significantly to get his program done, especially with a head of state to contend with; as well as General Secretary of the Labour Party Arthur Horner.
A troika arrangement would have to be established, and the irony of such a "Russian" arrangement would not be lost on either the members of the troika or its opposition.
The British Troika
The Troika's first order of business in terms of domestic policy was, beyond implementing the regional councils and their premier as a proper organ of the revolutionary state, was drafting the next edition of the planned economy. While Horner was sceptical, both Pankhurst and Mosley found themselves surprised by agreeing on a shared interest in the five-year plan system and its seemingly self-evident successes. With some modifications to account for the Syndicalist system, they theorised that it would allow for greater rationalisation of the response the Union would have to the economic fallout of the worldmerges to ensure that the gains would be distributed fairly and any hardships would be spread fairly.
Civilian goods would of course, be more plentiful, but there were pains to be taken to ensure that the British people were able to keep working without destructive competition, and there would be frequent diplomatic missions to both new allies and international organisations as well as even with liberal powers to secure whatever benefits that could be offered. But it was also clear that the British Empire regarded the Union quite frostily. To the point of their labour parties denouncing Labour as "Spartakists" or "Bolsheviks" depending on the world. In an effort to avoid confusion, the Labour Party renamed itself the Republican Labour Party of Great Britain*. Getting recognition from the otherworldly commonwealths was certainly not in the cards, and the influence of the British Empire on capital markets was vast, but some toeholds with those who honestly couldn't care less were definitely in the cards.
Of perhaps greater importance though, was the relation with other Socialist polities. Perhaps most pressing would be the "Mission to Moscow" in the hopes of solidifying a lasting agreement of the "Republican Lion and the Soviet bear", with the objectives being to secure permanent arrangements of trade, the provision of British technology and industrial assistance on top of what would be offered by other industrial great powers in exchange for access to the "limitless natural wealth of the Soviet, Socialist Motherland" in the words of Mosley whose wife Cynthia helped to broker the deal.
Republican British and Soviet Socialist exchanges would commence almost immediately. While it was recognised that the new American giants were important, and good relations with the Red Chinese were sought, and of course the Free Socialist Raterepublik Deutschland could only be a boon; Mosley in particular believed that Britain had a special kinship with Russia as a country on the Periphery of Europe. While the Stalin-Molotov-Kalinin troika government was willing to hear the British out, Mosley's talk of a particular special relationship between Britain and Russia was somewhat offputting to Koba, who regarded it as in essence; an appeal to a special historical spirit that he felt was not really born out either in history; with the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires not too far in the past; or in the present, where this was an entirely new Britain.
Still, in the interest of diplomacy, the address was accepted and the trade deals signed to share the INFOR's technological expertise and industries to help the five-year plans not just meet but exceed their schedules. It was in their interest to try and get their word in with the governments of the Soviet Union and other countries that were deemed as "still industrializing", such as Federal People's Republic of Brazil in the timeline of the Red Flood, where tropical goods such as Chocolate, Coffee, and Rubber were especially desirable for the British public and Brazil wanted all the help industrializing that could be offered. Brazil was not a country rich in the black and grey coal useful for coking Iron into steel that served as the bedrock of industrialisation, but Britain could offer that coal from its now seemingly inexhaustible reserves in addition to what was being shipped from two Americas, one Germany, and the USSR.
In exchange, a program of "making amends for the injustice of the informal empire" in Pankhurst's words that would operate in similar terms to the Anglo-Bharati agreements established with Free India or the Anglo-Arab treaties made with Egypt that saw those countries receive massive financial and industrial assistance as well as advice in building up militaries to deal with their regional issues.
While they wouldn't be the only, or even the largest such providers of aid now, the investments into RADAR technology developed by the Union and the Federation were of keen interest to even such giants as the Soviets or the Americans, particularly advanced Cavity Magnetron radars that were doubtlessly the best in the three worlds. It was likely that the British Empire had or would have such technology soon, so the chance to stay ahead of the curve was tantalising. Of particular import and interest, was the Union of Britain's pioneering work in computers in the hopes of devising a method of more efficient planning and information collection, including extensive work done to break the Imperial German encryption code without letting the Kaiser know they've been had. A program they've called...Gargant.
The British delegation to observe the foundation of the Combined Socialist Commonwealth of America and the process of its constitutional drafting would, perhaps unusually, include Mosley for the actual announcement of the formation of the Commonwealth by William Haywood; who would notably try his best to ingratiate himself to Premier Foster as much, if not more than he spent schmoozing with the hopeful candidates for the first post-revolution election of the new Combine that was clearly on the horizon.
Socialist Worker's Commonwealth of America flag adopted at the 1937 Constitutional Convention, Anthem: Hold the Fort.
*A reference to the concept of Labour Republicanism, and also in the specific context of Britain, Republicanism is incredibly transgressive.
These are for flags that I can get that aren't potato quality. Countries that are also in the general socialist bloc (including non-revolutionary socialist countries that are at least generally more friendly to the Socialists than the Liberals, Fascists, or Reactionaries) but do not have their flags here either because I couldn't find a decent render or because I ran out of image slots include but are not necessarily limited to Argentina, Nicaragua, Mongolia, Revolutionary Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Haiti, Dominica, and Tannu Tuva in Reds; Norway, Greece, the Kuomintang in Fujian, Liberia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Haiti, and Nicaragua in Kaiserreich; and Iran, Norway, South China, The Socialist Republic of Hindustan, Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria, Peru, Congo, Bolivia, Cuba, Poland, Finland, West Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania in Red Flood.
[h1][/h1]
Combined Zavkoms and Mirs of Eurasia. Anthem: Wide is My Motherland
Combined Councils and Communes of Burma. Anthem: ???
Combined Councils and Communes of Siam. Anthem: ???
Federal People's Republic of India. Anthem: ???
United Communes of Gran Colombia. Anthem: ???
*Composed earlier to have a separate anthem from other Socialist polities when the USSR was no longer the only such government in the world most people could point to on a map
**Composed Earlier than OTL due to a situation for Germany to metaphorically rise from the ruins arising earlier
***Composed earlier because the Brazilian socialists actually managed to come into power and because I can't find anything else that might fit.
****You just have to pretend its about the post-world war revolution rather than the April 4th Liberation in OTL WW2.
*****Bear with me, because this song is a bop, a childhood favourite of mine, and fits the general mood of Zheltorossiya very well.
Father James Renshaw Cox was a man of many firsts, for one, he was the first Catholic to become American President, the first man of the cloth to become a holder of elected federal office in America period, he was the first man not of either the Republican or Democratic parties to win the presidency in a hundred years, he had the first woman as a vice president, and he was the first president in quite a while to be a bachelor, and a lifelong one at that as a man of the cloth. While his election was controversial given his faith and his radically progressive politics and decision to take in a Vice President from the Communist Party of America and a woman at that, he had uniquely poised to sweep into office. The Republican party had firebombed its image with Andrew Mellon's disastrous presidency and nonhandling of the dustbowl, the Democratic party was dead, the Technocrats were esoteric and strange and ultimately could be mollified with some promises, and the DSPA had a faith and credit arrangement with the People's Progressive Party of America and the American Party ultimately had broken when the Longists and other populists crossed aisles to the PPPA over internal difficulties.
The choice of Selma Borchardt, who in this timeline had gained significant credentials within the DSPA, was in essence a form of assassination insurance. Should any of the deeply anti-catholic forces in America kill him, they'd get a feminist radical and an open socialist fond of Berlin as their president instead, and behind her in line was the PPPA's chosen speaker of the house, Floyd Olson, while their President Pro-Tempore was Upton Sinclair; ensuring that no matter how many they killed they would only make things worse for their reactionary causes. And if they killed all four? If everything went to plan then the last person in line would be Elizabeth Flynn.
Cox however, had made his spiel clear to the elites "It's either the People's Progress, or the Communist Guillotine", making it clear that trying to import fascism, futurism, or whatever to this America would not work out; they could try to roll the dice, but with the war in Kaiserworld; they were kidding themselves if they thought they were doing more than just offering themselves up to the pyre. Furthermore, Cox had a plan to both create jobs for the hungry masses and keep America safe. The lend lease program of Norris had provided dividends, and Cox would expand on them, to provide with America's surplus bounty to not just fellow Americans but to the world as a whole in exchange for their trade and investment, all while ensuring that American businesses would be in a position to recover from the depression and the effects of Artaud's debt repudiation.
Key to his plans was an electrification of the rural places and the tractor provision program as well as redoubling the dustbowl relief programs that his party had fought for and instated in a more limited capacity where they held power in the country. Good soil practices, tree planting to create windbreaks, recovery of grasslands, and bringing the power of modernity to the communities of America that had long been isolated from such things were all cornerstones of his plan to build America to the potential he knew it had. As a country that could stand as a place of freedom and prosperity for all worlds and be a crowning achievement of the whole human race.
Parts of America long locked out of the bounties of the Industrial Revolution would find work and modernity brought to them, healthcare would be made widely available for a populace often dealing with sickness and living with the memories of the Spanish Flu, and hunger in a country that produced so much food would be banished. It was an ambitious plan, but smaller scale demonstrations of the concepts he was promoting were already successful in states where the People's Progressive Party and its allies had held sway. Examples such as Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and more demonstrated that what they were proposing could work not just for the big cities or the big farms, but for the little America too.
While the Republicans tried to mobilise behind Branson Cutting and Alf Landon, the New Democrats trotted out Samuel Johnson Junior from Texas and John Holmes from New York, and the American Party fronted Dan Moody and John Garner; the vote of support from the Technocrats, the Communists, and the Populists would be more than enough to get him over the finish line with a widespread majority that would see his general agenda fear only the supreme court. But for that he too had a plan, an expansion of the supreme court from nine to fifteen justices, and the institution of terms for the judiciary via constitutional amendment to end the "period of judicial monarchy where a man can stay in an office of near absolute power for life without any further verification." He'd say in his addresses to the nation.
As for the economy, he swore to protect unions, the right to organise and strike, the implementation of a minimum wage affixed to the cost of living on the account that "a business that cannot afford to pay its workers a living wage on one paycheck is not a business that belongs in a country without slaves." As well as promising the implementation of "workplace democracy and employee ownership for science has proven that when the working man has a stake in his or her company, he or she is far more willing to give their all to its success and prosperity and the business itself becomes more productive and efficient. And if the traditions of a democratic republic, which is to say a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, are good enough for this nation of ours, they are good enough for our places of work."
He also planned an institution of a "board of development that through its subsidiary organisations shall marry the powers of the working man's unions, the business man's corporations, and the common man's government towards the maximisation of our increases in prosperity, our hopes to modernise and dare I say futurise, and to ensure that America is fair for all so that none are idle nor hungry." He declared in one of his campaign trail speeches before the masses at Time Square in New York City.
Further excerpts of that speech would further elaborate on his vision for the country in counter to accusations of seeking to implement corporatism or communism, revealing an image of a man who despite being an outsider as a clergyman and a unionist, was deeply invested into the vision of America and its potential.
"For those of us who would call this a path to revolution or the instatement of dictatorship, I have this to say. One, my policy is that of the Democratic Republic, of which our founders always intended for this nation. Democracy means rule by the demos, the masses, and our creed from our founding was "no taxation without representation", and if our representation cannot have a hand in our work and business, then it is not representation at all. Republic some would tell you simply means a place without a monarchy, without a King, but it means more than that. It is a beautiful word in Latin made of two, Res meaning in this case, the Concern Of, and Publicus, meaning the People."
"In our own more germanic language we also had the term "Commonwealth" which means much the same thing, though in our admiration of Rome we went for Republic. Nevertheless, when we know this, we know that our nation was intended to be a nation ruled by its people in the interest of its people. That we are not a mere realm devoted to a sovereign, but a mass of citizens who have a common interest and belonging and operate in each other's interest. Thus, what I am doing is not the institution of dictatorship or mob rule, it is achieving what the framers of this country had always intended, a realisation of the ideals of Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln and more besides. This is not destroying the country, it is saving it and allowing our flag to fly true and proud knowing that we have lived up to the ideals of the declaration of independence." He would add.
"For if we do nothing, then we will descend into unspeakable, obscene, and devastating violence, either of the angry masses or of the frightened moneymen. To let the present course be seen through, or to just bandage the gaping holes in the ship of our democratic republic, means that our republic and our democracy will be lost to civil war, putsch, anger, and fear. I am not offering the destruction of this nation, but its salvation. We, the People's Progressives, unlike the New Democrats, unlike the Republicans, and unlike the Americanists, are concerned with you, John Q Public, so that our nation achieves what it was always meant to and we complete the work of emancipation that began more than one and a half centuries ago. Just as we were freed of imperial tyranny and then slaver tyranny, so too will we be free of poverty's tyranny."
"And doing so will not mean spreading the butter thin on the toast, for in this nation of some one hundred and thirty million persons, presuming that we get at least half employed, of course excepting the elderly, infirm, or our children, every hundred dollars added to the average paycheck of each worker means more than six billion dollars more for the nation as a whole. And we can achieve that, we can achieve far more than that. For when the majority is richer, the strength of our nation rises and our options only grow."
His election would come in with an absolute majority for his own party, and a supermajority for the network of aligned parties like the Democratic Farmer-Labour Party, the Communist Party, the Populist Party, and Technocracy Incorporated as well as progressive factions of the other parties that would let him reshape the constitution. WIth his enemies hopelessly divided and eating into each other's votes, he secured the overwhelming majority of the states in the union, and would accept the concession of his electoral rivals in stride. They had told him that becoming president as a "papist" was impossible, that America would never accept a "pinko priest", but he had shown them what for, and with the amendment pushed by Norris to contract the waiting period between election and inauguration to a single week so that his strange stint as President could be over as soon as possible.
Father Cox meeting his supporters on the road
Father Cox was not a man with a great enthusiasm for war and armed conflict, it went against his beliefs in human dignity and the awfulness of armed conflict, but as futurist organisations started to creep up across Hispanic North America from the cancer of the Caribbean Futurist Society and word of the other worlds' security threats crept into his ears, he wasn't blind either. As civil wars and smaller scale interstate conflicts were felt across the four worlds, he had a dreadful feeling that his stint as president wouldn't be as peaceful as he'd like. He wasn't prepared to commit to any foreign alliances yet, but he made it abundantly clear that he was no fan of Hitler, the Kaiserreich, Lindbergh, or Artaud.
"I have heard more than enough of the ravings of reactionary and fascist demagogues to last a lifetime, and I shall say that uniformly they are sad little men who, lacking love in their own lives, seek to fill that void by making their colour on the map as big as possible so that in the absence of the love of others, they can feel powerful by the count of those they step on." He explained in his first address on foreign policy.
"But America will not be sending its boys to the grinder unless they drag the grinder to us first. We will not let that ideal of the Democratic Republic or the Folk-Led Commonwealth perish from this earth, if there is a demand for our wares by those nations who would stand for the ideals of a Democratic Republic or a Folk-Led Commonwealth, then we shall gladly sell to them. But we shall not sell to those who would ask us for guns and butter in the name of tramping a boot on the throat of mankind. So kindly, if you would, refrain from asking us for battleships and tanks in the name of conquest." He would add in that very same speech.
He had also made the move to recognise and normalise relations with the socialists, on the account that doing so would make interacting with the Syndicalist and Communist Internationals far simpler, and that it was an embarrassing and demeaning act to pretend that diminutive governments in exile were the genuine governments of countries that were largely ruled by other administrations brought about by revolution rather than foreign invasion. Furthermore, it was possible and even beneficial to do business with them, America needed buyers for its goods and countries not mired in depression were an excellent place for America's exports to get rolling.
Perhaps the oddest relation though, would be with Ravenworld's Cuba, occupied by MacArthur's exile regime and now swollen by a second cohort of exiles too reactionary for liberal democracies but not quite reactionary enough to flee to the likes of the Nazis, the Fascists, the Federals, or the Russian Empire. There were voices calling for annexing this cuba into America, but the new President was less than sure about pulling in such a hot mess of anticommunist zealots or a country that was rather less than entirely pleased with suddenly finding itself as a part of America. Furthermore was the fact that some would accuse him of trying to bring more papists into the country, and that the people exiled there would find whatever homes they were planning to return to at best occupied by alters of themselves, quite likely by other people entirely, or at worst find they were never built at all.
Then of course, was the fact that as a Catholic Priest, he could not condone imposing an English Protestant regime atop a Hispanic Catholic country and the efforts to make Cuba safe for the business plotters who supported the two MacArthurs would mean dealing with businesses who'd see his reforms as scarcely better than revolution. Plus, in his estimation of MacArthur, there could only be one, sooner or later one would have to make the other bend the knee, and he was hardly interested in getting involved in that mess, nevermind the "Cincinnatus fantasy that the general is indulging in rankles at every institution of the democratic republic. The constitution does not give provisions for the Roman institution of dictatorship for good reason." As he would say.
However, he was somewhat concerned with the regime's firesale of excess American warships that they couldn't afford, which was quite frankly most of them. One of his first foreign policy acts in office was to commission a committee on finding a way to minimise the number of former American warships that would find their way to "despotic regimes", particularly the Integralists in Ravenworld brazil or the Chileans and Argentines in Serpentworld and especially to the Futurist regime of Manuel Acre in Mexico as the new Mexican government rose during the temporary paralysis of the government following Mellon's impeachment.
However, Cox was less willing to expand the size of the standing army for now, not when there was so much work to be done with building up the country, though he did ask Scott how much work could be done in setting up arsenals and factories that could be converted in a hurry, just in case.
Father Cox First Term Cabinet
Secretary of State: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Secretary of the Treasury: Henry Morgenthau Junior
Secretary of War: George S Long
Attorney General: Robert Jackson
Postmaster General: Harry S Truman
Surgeon General: Thomas Carran
Secretary of the Army: Smedley Butler
Secretary of the Navy: Teddy Roosevelt Junior
Secretary of the Air Force: Eddie Rickenbacker
Secretary of the Interior: George Washington Carver
Secretary of Agriculture: Henry A. Wallace
Secretary of Commerce: A'Leila Walker
Secretary of Labor: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Secretary of Planning: Howard Scott
Secretary of Education: John Dewey
Secretary of Social Services: Francis Townsend
Secretary of Development: Albert Kahn
Secretary of Transport: Robert Moses 1
Secretary of Defence2: Jessie B Duckstein
Secretary of Information3: William J Donovan
1: Unlike OTL, this Robert Moses invested his money into trains instead and as such is a massive train nut, on the other hand he has crank ideas like Zeppelin fetishism and monorails, the Department of transport is also founded earlier
2: Closer to Homeland security, created after Artaud crashed the economy by repudiating all debts to the United States and was found to have sponsored agents working within the art community, as well as in response to Black Hundreds connected terrorists bombing the Vanderbilt and Carnegie buildings in New York on the eleventh of September and the Klu Klux Klan's "bloody Thanksgiving" attacks in an attempt to kill Huey Long and release the Hippos he had imported into Louisiana into Black neighbourhoods as well as the "Cool Incident" where Avant Garde artists turned a gallery show into a mausoleum of Phosgenne Gas all in the same month.
3: A polite term for espionage
