Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline

[Comrade Future]

The claim that all Sephardim & Mizrahim [ this category is synthetic to post-1948 Zionist ideologist construction ] were like desperate to escape Arabic, Persian, etc & Islamist antisemitism and waiting as waifs for Zionists to establish their ethnostate as a promised land they passively didn't know they needed ( and thus Zionism had an extremely tepid response from Sephardim-outside-Europe, much less Mizrahim, and vastly predominately a minority ethnonationalist vanguard minority near solely within Ashkenazim )

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This testifies to the conservatism and religiosity of these communities - Zionism is a "modernist" ideology born in a radical environment (including a socialist one) - in particular, Theodor Herzl believed that freedom of religion, a seven-hour working day should be established in the new state, and yes - in his project, Arabs were supposed to have equal rights with Jews (he believed that slave settlers would welcome the arrival of Jewish colonists). For religious Jews, this was akin to blasphemy - they had their own ideas about how Jews could return to Israel and the Zionist plans were for them a violation of the "Three Oaths." In fact, even now many ultra-orthodox Jews consider Zionism a mistake (rightly, although not entirely for fair reasons).
Moreover, although the Arab-Israeli war did take violence against Jews to a new level, a new wave of major pogroms began back in 1941. And when the opportunity arose, the Mizrahim fled the Islamic world at the first opportunity. Moreover, they always voted for conservative parties. Two factors played a role here - firstly, the fact that they lived in agrarian and pre-industrial communities. Secondly, the arrogance of the Ashkenazis, because of which people from Western Asia and North Africa were deprived of significant social influence, ignorant of the position of unskilled workers and deprived of social benefits. In addition to the fact that such conditions often contribute to the persistence of prejudices, it also led to the fact that they did not trust the socialist and liberal parties (the basis of which were Ashkenazis), and the religious parties used their vulnerable position to instill in them the idea that the "damned leftists and Arabs" were to blame for everything ". As a result, this situation (coupled with the arrival of conservative Jews from the former USSR) contributed to the rise of right-wing parties.

PS - I already told you this, but I'll say it again. I ask you not to multiply posts. You don't have big enough notes for this.

 

[Chamarmur]

Herzl's attitude towards the non-jewish inhabitants of Palestine was at best, idealistically utopian. As far as I can recall, he believed that simply providing them with job opportunities was enough to counterbalance their planned exodus from Palestine.

As if they would be fine with leaving their homeland! Such a belief is only possible when you already hold the colonialist view that natives are happily rootless (which is ironic as a Jew)

All the major Zionist theorists and politicians have held colonialist attitudes, including Ben-Gurion, and even Ber Borochov.

The claim that all Sephardim & Mizrahim [ this category is synthetic to post-1948 Zionist ideologist construction ] were like desperate to escape Arabic, Persian, etc & Islamist antisemitism and waiting as waifs for Zionists to establish their ethnostate as a promised land they passively didn't know they needed ( and thus Zionism had an extremely tepid response from Sephardim-outside-Europe, much less Mizrahim, and vastly predominately a minority ethnonationalist vanguard minority near solely within Ashkenazim )

These are just plain facts, and disputing them is so preposterous as to be frankly beneath replying to.

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Adding on to Raiho-kun's reply here:

Nazi Germany didn't leave North Africa unscathed, and many governments passed anti-Jewish laws (although they were much more small scale and less comprehensive than in Europe), which did affect the lives of Jews there to an extent.

It's not just about existing discrimination in the Muslim sphere, you have to remember there's a global effect which was brought on by the Nazis and the Holocaust.

Tripoli, Libya was home to a pogrom which left over a hundred Jews dead in November 1945 - ignoring the amount of synagogues, homes and other property destroyed or damaged. Moreover, in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were riots which left dozens of Jews dead as a response to Israel's activities. Just as in 1945 there were pogroms in Tripoli too, but there were also riots in Morocco which were indeed deadly.

Pro-Nazi sentiments and the rise of fascism in Iraq also led to deadly pogroms known as the Farhud in 1941, which killed close to 2 hundred Jews.

However, none of these events would have precipitated a mass exodus without several factors:

1. Zionist authorities would often (allegedly) collude with these states to make life worse for Jews living there. Through positive and negative economic incentives, they would be able to persuade more 'Mizrahim' to emigrate. This was a policy which was especially effective in Yemen, although Yemenis have been one of the more aliyah-inclined, thanks to a long history of emigration due to favorable Ottoman policies.

2. Likewise there was also a collusion in the social-political dimension - some Libyan Jews in fact suspected that the 1948 riots were set off by their meddling.

3. Obviously, propaganda and outreach efforts did a lot.

You had things like governments passing denaturalization laws and systematic programs to expropriate Jewish assets. Meanwhile in Egypt, it was the Suez Crisis that trumped everything else, and as a result of the very bad political climate that Jews found themselves in then, it led to one of the biggest exoduses. Only Iran's Islamic Revolution tops it as a cause.

The Iraqi Jews were very (relatively, I suppose) patriotic for their country, and they were also a community where the radical solution, was in fact to join the Iraqi Communist Party, not make aliyah for Palestine. But after all that collusion, propaganda efforts by the Zionist organizations -- which rewrote the historical narrative and were based on real events like the Farhud [a little bit of truth makes for the best lie], as well as just general political and economic chaos, it's not too hard to see why there are ~0 Jews in Iraq today.

This 'tepid response' you're talking about, I find hard to believe, since even if a significant fraction of the circumstances that led to them to emigrate to Israel were fabricated, the feelings of the migrants were very real. Unless you're talking about the non-Zionists, in which case, is it really surprising their response was tepid at best?

I'd be happy if you were to provide any sources that would corroborate your comment.

And yes, obviously, in Reds! these Zionist efforts would be annihilated after the establishment of democratic Palestine, and there will still be hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the Muslim sphere.

 

[Comrade Future]

As if they would be fine with leaving their homeland! Such a belief is only possible when you already hold the colonialist view that natives are happily rootless (which is ironic as a Jew)

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In fact, it is ironic that a significant part of the Palestinian Arabs were not so much settlers, but first- or second-generation descendants of settlers.
(Plus, as far as I remember, not all Zionists proposed the resettlement of Arabs)

1. Zionist authorities would often (allegedly) collude with these states to make life worse for Jews living there. Through positive and negative economic incentives, they would be able to persuade more 'Mizrahim' to emigrate. This was a policy which was especially effective in Yemen, although Yemenis have been one of the more aliyah-inclined, thanks to a long history of emigration due to favorable Ottoman policies.
2. Likewise there was also a collusion in the social-political dimension - some Libyan Jews in fact suspected that the 1948 riots were set off by their meddling.

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Do you have any sources? I have a couple of half-Jewish colleagues, and I would like to discuss it with them.

 

[Chamarmur]

In fact, it is ironic that a significant part of the Palestinian Arabs were not so much settlers, but first- or second-generation descendants of settlers.
(Plus, as far as I remember, not all Zionists proposed the resettlement of Arabs)

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I don't understand

Do you have any sources? I have a couple of half-Jewish colleagues, and I would like to discuss it with them.

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Thank you for asking. When I reviewed again it appears I'd severely misremembered the degree of collusion that actually happened. It certainly wasn't an universal thing, and I'm certainly mis-using the word.

In Libya, the shadiness comes down to the fact that the 1948 pogrom was not caused by Arabs on their own. There are observers who report the Jewish community making signs like "It is good to die for one's own country" beforehand, and already signs of increasingly agitated youth long before. This all happened after the establishment of a Zionist post in Libya, and considering the results benefitted their aims, it's not hard to see why one would conclude that they were behind it.

But I can find no sources about this except on Wikipedia, who cite it from the British Public Information Office. There aren't any links. My best guess is that you could look for these citations through the national archive's own website, but you would have to request them to make a copy. That is a hassle which I'm not willing to go through right now.

Libyan Jews do seem to have been eager to migrate to Israel anyhow, considering it was there that the Holocaust affected North Africa the greatest -- concentration camps were even built there, and Jews were taken from there to Bergen-Belsen as well.

In Yemen, the accusation of collusion, in the proper sense, is taken to come from "Operation Magic Carpet: Constructing the Myth of the Magical Immigration of Yemenite Jews to Israel", by Esther Meir Glitzenstein. However, I cannot find anything about this collusion.

Having read the article, the Jews in Yemen did not migrate even for economic reasons, and their migration was instead nearly mostly a religious-ideological affair. At least, that is how the article frames it. I will say, I am somewhat skeptical that these Yemenis would have walked many kilometers through the desert with little food and water just out of a messianic basis. Like, we're talking conditions so bad, you have people making comparisons to Bergen-Belsen (in the poorly organized migration camps at Aden, to where migrants were supposed to rest, and from where migrants were supposed to be flown to Israel).

That kind of deadly effort I just don't see coming from religions; I only see that kind of stuff from cults like Jim Jones'. That is my sole experience of it. But maybe many more people have done worse things in the past.

In Iraq: Now, while there may not have been any governmental collusion like I alluded to, there is one thing we can talk about: the Baghdad bombings that destroyed synagogues in 1950. This is a pivotal event in the history of the Jews in Iraq, since it represents the greatest manifestation of the Jews' fears of political and economic insecurity in the country. That fear being the thing that led to so many Iraqi Jews deciding to migrate out of the country, whereas years before, they were either opposed to, or indifferent to Zionism.

The usual narrative is that these bombs were ultimately from anti-semites in origin, but according to this Mondoweiss article 'Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing': how Zionism engineered the expulsion of Iraq's Arab Jews, they were planted by Zionists working with the Israeli government.

I apologize for being otherwise misleading in my earlier post - take that as a lesson to always carefully review your information, I guess.

 

[Chamarmur]

Also wow, 300 pages in this thread!

 

[Comrade Future]

The usual narrative is that these bombs were ultimately from anti-semites in origin, but according to this Mondoweiss article 'Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing': how Zionism engineered the expulsion of Iraq's Arab Jews, they were planted by Zionists working with the Israeli government.

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Thank you - although I don't think that this will be a compelling argument for my colleagues.

 

[TheParkerMachine]

How is Abraham Lincoln remembered in Reds-TL?

Is the public's view of him negative or positive -- a bit of both?

 

[Bluespark9]

How is Abraham Lincoln remembered in Reds-TL?

Is the public's view of him negative or positive -- a bit of both?

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While I suspect that it's more nuanced in the academic circles, I would think the slave-free president praised by Marx himself would remain mostly popular this timeline for a variety of reasons.

 

[Born in the USSA]

How is Abraham Lincoln remembered in Reds-TL?

Is the public's view of him negative or positive -- a bit of both?

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I'm sure given Johnson "WI Lincoln survived and brought about a Second American Revolution 70 years early" would be a pretty popular POD for AH TTL.

 

[IlluminatusP]

This testifies to the conservatism and religiosity of these communities - Zionism is a "modernist" ideology born in a radical environment (including a socialist one) - in particular, Theodor Herzl believed that freedom of religion, a seven-hour working day should be established in the new state, and yes - in his project, Arabs were supposed to have equal rights with Jews (he believed that slave settlers would welcome the arrival of Jewish colonists). For religious Jews, this was akin to blasphemy - they had their own ideas about how Jews could return to Israel and the Zionist plans were for them a violation of the "Three Oaths." In fact, even now many ultra-orthodox Jews consider Zionism a mistake (rightly, although not entirely for fair reasons).
Moreover, although the Arab-Israeli war did take violence against Jews to a new level, a new wave of major pogroms began back in 1941. And when the opportunity arose, the Mizrahim fled the Islamic world at the first opportunity. Moreover, they always voted for conservative parties. Two factors played a role here - firstly, the fact that they lived in agrarian and pre-industrial communities. Secondly, the arrogance of the Ashkenazis, because of which people from Western Asia and North Africa were deprived of significant social influence, ignorant of the position of unskilled workers and deprived of social benefits. In addition to the fact that such conditions often contribute to the persistence of prejudices, it also led to the fact that they did not trust the socialist and liberal parties (the basis of which were Ashkenazis), and the religious parties used their vulnerable position to instill in them the idea that the "damned leftists and Arabs" were to blame for everything ". As a result, this situation (coupled with the arrival of conservative Jews from the former USSR) contributed to the rise of right-wing parties.

PS - I already told you this, but I'll say it again. I ask you not to multiply posts. You don't have big enough notes for this.

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This is not true and is soft on Zionism. Avi Shlaim and others have demonstrated that Israeli security operations together with very small Zionist minorities in local Jewish communities in Egypt & Iraq carried out very involved provocateur actions to agitate pogroms or create the perception of pogrom risks to drive Arab & Persian Jews to uproot and trade their established presence in local societies for internment / DP camps in Israel.

In fact, it is ironic that a significant part of the Palestinian Arabs were not so much settlers, but first- or second-generation descendants of settlers.

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This is nonsense, basically the thesis of my From Time Immemorial that the Palestinian Arabs of today are the direct descendants largely of immigrants to the region during the First Yishuv because of them 'making the desert bloom' or the like [ just a new iteration of 'the white's man burden' or 'the civilizing mission' ]

The most conserved haplogroups from 1st century CE Judea populations is Palestinian Christians followed by Palestinian Muslims (which is likely due to Christian endogamy vs intermarriage by local Arabized mawālī with other Arabized mawālī from throughout the Caliphate or the original Penninsular Arab aristocracy on commercial, political, military intercourse).

Just as the handwringing about Arab Jews immigrating to Israel after 1948 ( notably, something that didn't happen anything like the Nakba but fits and starts for differing push-pull factors through the 1950s ) — whose object is to prettify the Nakba & Zionism through both-sidesism about Arab Jewish immigration & trying to relativize Zionist ethnic cleansing strategies by appealing to 'intrinsic Gentile [here Arab Christian or Muslim] antisemitism.'

The Czech and Polish flags were maintainend to mark their governments as Progressive coalition dominated People's Democracies rather than Proletarian governments. It's why they were the "People's Republic" and not the "Socialist Republic". It was also notably after the Comintern itself was dissolved to appease the western allies and to also mark the distancing away from Communism as world government and more towards Communism as left wing national liberation. The UASR shoots down any moves towards the latter and the Comintern post-war is explicitly meant to be supreme over any national government or communist party and the general trend of the cold war is of national governments acceding to the supremacy of the Comintern.

By the 21st century if the Congress of the Soviets of the Communist International vote on something that applies to the UASR, not even the UASR is allowed to contravene it without going through the process of appeal as the Communist International is sovereign over the Liberation Communist Party, the Communist Labor Party, the Social Ecology Union, and the Democratic Farmer Labor Party and thus is supreme over the government of the American Union.

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I largely imagine that in terms of hub-spoke integration, that the World Workers' International, with respect to the 'Fraternity of DOTPs' — by the 1960s-1970s is akin in those respects to say, the EU — for confederate fiscal, economic, legislative & legal-jurist policymaking — a combination between:

1. Macro-federalism

2. "Intergovernmentalism"

…however I would see that the tendency would be toward, rather than BY 'governments' strictu sensu as 'nations' would tend to be supplanted by the expectation it become more like BY registered-member CPs per DOTP —

— so 'Americans' as such would be represented & seated for "intergovernmental" functions as…

• 'Liberation'
• 'Labor'
• 'Social Ecology'
• 'Farmer-Labor Democratic'

…vice a unitary "UASR" delegation

In addition to that flavor, I would add that there is also like 'Red NATO' analogous attributes with respect to security policy, under the Vladivostok Pact which cross-cuts

(a) "Fraternity of DOTPs" [ registered-CPs of DOTPs ]

(b) "World Party" [ registered-CPs of DOTPs + registered-CPs of bourgeois states ]

And then of course there's ideological & political policy which is straight "World Party" basis, basically the IOTL ideal of the Comintern

Of course, I do think that its a simplification, because even in the "EU-like" policymaking framework — trade policy by the Fraternity of DOTPs may weigh-in how impacts the 'alternative culture' / 'mutual aid' wings of the workers' movement even in bourgeois states

Presumably though there are also global union, mutual aid, etc federations under the aegis of the International

Ryukyu is meant to be one of those funny things born of a decision made in the 40s with long lasting consequences. Ryukyu's secessionist or Nihonjin annexationist movements never quite gain the votes to succeed in such referendums but the Workers' Socialist Republic of Zhonghua favours Ryukyu becoming independent and the Socialist Council Republic of Nihon generally favours the return of Ryukyu to Nihon. But the status quo largely continues and most efforts to get the Comintern to decide on it end up stuck in Congressional Hell.

Hoxha is the one getting essentially house arrested by Pro-Romanian and Anti-Balkan Federation people during the National Communist crisis of the 60s.

The Romanian Crisis is currently not super detailed but it is essentially a crisis over nationalism and whether the Comintern should be a forum for national liberation and a brotherhood of nations or a world government as well as how much power the attached COMECON should have over the planning of individual countries along with how to deal with Romania's perennial issues with its Transylvanian Hungarians.

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PERTAINING TO REDS! (#1): What about Eastern-Southeastern European regional integration as a bridge, 'unity in diversity' and all that?


THEORETICAL SIDEQUEST (wrt lore building):

I was always of the view that the "national-party/movement section" vs the "world-party/movement (international)" conceptual divide has the defect of being too wide of abstraction:

Why? Because the military-economic framework which achieves credibility for pressing forward the minimum program and sustaining the regime of transition, is fundamentally credibly is the 'continental' or 'sub-continental' mediating level, and this emanated concretely IRL in the II International's "United States of Europe" demand, which in a partial way, perceived the issue and its programmatic solution:

In my view this was the obvious original idealization of the USSR:

• [ 'National' ] the RSFSR was to be the federalization (liberate the 'prison-house of nations') of the Great Russian national state + minorities

• [ 'Continental' ] the USSR was to have been ideally the 'United States of Europe' demand of the II International (and maintained by Trotskyists and other III International dissidents), IMHO it is rather clear had the Bolsheviks' 'Hail Mary' on '1848-type march-of-revolution' played out across Europe, than all the European states would have been SSR union republics co-equal to the RSFSR in 'pan-European' USSR

AS A NOTE FOR TODAY this would probably look like:

• Anglo-American CL [ Canada + US ]
• Latin American CL [ all of Ibero-America ]
• Pan-Arab CL [ Arab League ]
• Pan-African CL [ African Union/Sub-Sahara ]
• European CL [ EU ]
• South-SE Asian CL [ India + ASEAN ]

The former USSR-space [ Russia + its 'near abroad' ] & the PRC are demi-continental practically in themselves, which is part of the reason "'Stalinist' / 'Five Year Plan-oid'" fundamental structures persisted discretely (without being immediately dependent on external aid & security guarantees) at all there for any length of time.

Or put another way, USSR & PRC are proofs of the patent reality that it requires at least a 'demi-continental' beachhead as the absolute minimum required spatial / economic & demographic material weight in order to endogeously secure expanded production of any social fabrics which are autonomized to any degree from global capital

[ this is true, even at the level of the 'ectopic society' or 'blind-alley' that was the party-state monolith + "Five Year Plan" target-value & graft-value model that could, for a time, expandedly reproduce the arms industry + social contract for the staffing of it + its all-the-way-downstream suppliers, while above all with huge expense premiums in graft & waste…

…these — "the tankies' system" if you will — are social forms which are really autonomized from capital, but are blind-alleyed / ectopic and annihilate the potentiality of 'for-itself' worker-collectivity, they live on borrowed time but even within that straitjacket, that autonomization still requires near-continent scale enclosure of neo-colonial spaces, as a whole, to create a secured zone where even that relative autonomization or detachment from the law of value becomes possible

Ex., 'British Road to Socialism' is fiction because it could be starved into submission in less weeks than fingers on your hands ]

Probably ideally PRC + Tigers + Japan would be a bloc, as would ex-USSR + EU.



PERTAINING TO REDS! (#2):

I would say the 1930s US (+ Latin American sister DOTPs peeled-off) being added to the scales and the revitalization of the Comintern makes 'de-linking' on a national basis plausible in consequence, in a way totally implausible as strategy for national-states without a functioning fraternity of DOTPs to lean on [such as, socialist strategy IOTL today]

But the objective forces provided by historic ties, cultural/linguistic-continua, and the sheer economics of geographic proximity (both due to 'path-dependency' of conjoint development to the transfer of power, like continuing advantages in the immediate marginal cost of transportation) would still tend to draw national movements-out-of-power & 'national' DOTPs alike into regional networks or blocs

💡 Maybe a way that in Reds!verse these gaps are bridged, with the concern being to avoid positing 'federations-of-federations' bc both —

• lots of added complexity in plausibility testing & conceptual modeling in abstract

• and of course avoid excessive cost in lore-engineering / world-building to come up with all these 'superstates' stories' as intermediation between the 'national' that readers know, and 'full { and thereby implicitly global } communism'

… can be bridged by 'piggy-backing' off the Comintern: where regional pacts exist as a combination between

(1) 'Regional Bureaux' of Comintern delegations on a regional basis across the 'macrofederal' / 'intergovernmental', 'defense', 'political' verticals

(2) Direct treaty [x-DOTP] / concordat [x-party] agreements bestriding coherent regions which — in excess of 'all-Comintern' obligations — additional, or surplus, solidarity & cultural-economic-political cooperation commitments

So there is both maybe? …

[ 1 - 'pan-americanism' ]

• Organization of Workers of the Americas
+
• Pan-American Bureau of the Comintern

OR

[ 2 - latin/ibero-americanism forked from anglo-america; where UASR considered 'continental' in-it-self ]

• "Alianza Socialista para los Trabajadores de Nuestra America (ALSA)"
&
• Comintern Bureau Ibero-Americana

+

• Union of North American (and other Free Associated) Socialist Council Republics [UNASCR — or, short-form: UASR] in itself
&
• UASR ('American') Comintern Delegations

With Model #1 there is basically UASR + Latam in an integrated structure all the way through

But Model #2 UASR is a 'bloc' as it were in-itself, which sits next to & bilaterally is fraternal vs the pan-Latinoamerican / or Iberoamerican bloc & association

————

Brings up other interesting questions, such as integration policy through the 1930s… to what extent does the UASR (with Red Mexico as a junior partner) try to aggressively mobilize Spanish-English bilingual American (or Mexican, but tbf thats prolly Yanks:Mex 9:1 being charitable) as cadre politically, militarily, economically in advisory capacity through the 'Red Ribbon' running from Rio Grande down thru Nicaragua, Columbia, and the Andes?

I would imagine that there is the Bracero Program on roids, with the 'Pink & Red' Latinoamerican states' peasantry & urban informal employment implicit labor reserves being mobilized with only partial respect to 'per nation' prioritization or monopolization, in order to massively staff accelerated strategic industries [ Chilean copper immediately leaps out ]

And because the extant 'Red / Pink Ribbon' industrial working class sheds manpower as cadre to political & military mobilization

I would imagine there'd be at least one Pan-Hispanic Red field army in each:

• the trans-Brazilian theater
• the Soviet-German theater

… and probably proteges of Villa, Zapata & Sandino are dispatched with volunteers to both stay-behind partisan zones behind German lines & also in China

Food for thought?—

Villistas fighting in China? Zapatistas fighting with Tito? Sandanistas in the woods from the Baltics thru Poland & Belarus to Ukraine?

FINAL QUESTION:

For people part of lore-building from what I pick up, Red Mexico comes out of the 'center cannot hold' tension with the American Reds over the border being the 2nd rank weight after the Soviets (even prior to the KPD being eradicated by Nazism)

So it is as IOTL that Cardenas who is on the left but inside of the, for lack of better term:

"mishmash of a warlord-clique ( with each warlord being based in local state cross-sectional patronage power-bases ) together with urban critical support from 'official labor' + intelligentsia under a mixed bag of formal to real tones of restorative to radical national-progressive positions banner"

… so under the added pressure globally of butterflies + American Reds … the revolutionary mood & organization of the workers & ejido farmers + hacienda tenants is greatly added … so, Calles vs Cristeros takes on a stronger uh 'Strasserist' tinge? ?

So the PCM is much stronger, as is the persistent Magonistas, together with Casa del Obrero Mundial … and Calles veers right on anti-clericalism, but without any base it defaults to statism and reliance on military men emigres from the Porfiriato maybe, so its articulated in a rightist register as pure statism-militarism, and the 'returnees' see it as a repression against the campesinos in 'secular' garb thats leaning back toward the Centralist Republic ('unitary state')

And so all hell breaks loose? Calles stays the course assured by Mexican compradors that US support in arms & even men can be relied on, and that US UK France will steer funds and arms the right way?

COM [ Casa de Obrero Mundial — the syndicalist urban union movement ], PCM, the Magonistas, Villistas, & Zapatistas restart their regional / sectional armies & movements

Cardenas issues a "Plan de [X]" and defects from sympathizers also from the "all-Mexico consolidated warlord-state clique" together with the left-sympathetic wing of the bureacraticizing-statizing assimilation machine in formation that was the nascent 'PRM'"*

{ * this + critical PCM / COM / Labor support was basically all there was to the Mexican state core in this period IOTL }

SO OK — Calles gets deposed, American Red support pushes the PCM + COM + Magonistas + Zapatistas into the place of driver's seat on critical momentum… so Mexico basically get a halfway house between "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" & the DOTP-proper?

With a somewhat hamfisted mirroring of the UASR soviet-chartist regime overlaid, but also a semi-'circa-1946-8' amalgation-party of the …

• defecting ex-Caranzaista revolutionary generals (led by Lazaro Cardenas)
• Left-PMR officialdom & staffing from the statization-bureacratization project recently launched ( IOTL how the 'PRI' got built )

+

• PCM
• COM [ syndicalists ]
• Magonistas [ el norte; intellectual heavy, bridging urban-rural syndicalism vs land reform ]
• Zapatistas [ practically control the countryside via land-reform campesino commit, 'ur-Maoism' ]

… as the 'all MexRev Ch2 club'-party? In the 'POLN'?

If so, ok—assume that the Laborers' Party of National Liberation ( Partido Obrero de Liberacion Nacional ), or POLN, is in practice a 'federative party', so (and/or applying) …

• PCM
• COM
• Magonistas [Obreros Libertarios Mexicanos / OLM]
• Zapatistas [inside/outside faction vs PCM ?]

… remain either party-discrete affiliate-member-orgs under the umbrella, or else if they dissolve as such into the general party, they remain org-factionally very strong (practically if not formally; much less 'muh military discipline than even the poly-factional WCPA)

… either way; as concerns the former state-center, the long shadow cast by Porfirian comprador submission to foreign capital (above all US) left a legacy of FDI & arms+loans driven patron-client dynamics from -Mexico-DF- vs -DC- & -other foreign state sponsors-;

and selfsimilar dynamics replicated from the center ('Mexico-DF') vs the internal 'periphery' — so the ( largely ) Sonoran revolutionary warlord clique ( the Carrancistas or ""Constitutionalistas"" ) was highly reliant 'upward' on "sponsorship or favor" from keystone domestic & foreign capitals + reliant 'downward' on ability to successfully provide "client-mobilization" vs their local-resident powerbases

… so … UASR / Comintern intervention on the side of the structural losers of the Mexican Revolution Chapter 1 …

… Shifts dramatically the balance of power toward Villistas, Zapatistas, PCM, COM-syndicalists …

… The resultant 'peel-off' of 'left-leaning' MexRev warlord clique leaders with their locally-raised columns based on clientelist backing, & concurrent follow-up of PRM nationalizing-bureacratization-engineers [think: an array of micro-Stalins] …

… Really leaves the leftoid revolutionary generals (warlords) in a pickle: they have the officers & cadre & materiel inventory, but no supply depth or political program besides

"…however I can get support + Porfirian rent-seeker officials & latifundistas get rekt bc the masses like it & I wasnt on speed-dial with Portfiro Diaz (or also Carranza; or Calles recently as well)"

…So I see them becoming rapidly captive figureheads bought-off with medals & state employment + 'go-soft' vs their personal or their associates' landowning & local enterprise property rights in a very rapidly accelerating fashion, on the basis of a…

" this [ submit to socialism ]
-for-
that [ will go-slow for 'patriots'] "

…dynamic

Sort of like the co-option of the US Naval brass ITTL which is highly racist & gentry-aristocratic { look up John McCain's male-line heritage } in this period; except writ-large

I imagine Red Mexico real politics are fought out primarily in "mass organization / 'revolutionary democracy united front'" local-regional-national congresses & in the institutions like the civil service & military & economic organs

I know that this Mexican halfway house [translated to Mexico 1930s-40s register] is like (and/or applies):

• "1970s-80s FSLN"
• "Third-Period Stalinism v Trotskyism"
• "Left Communism / Council Communism"

…but yet does resolve into a legitimate set of bona fide workers' parties and a "'not-kinda-forced'-DOTP model," but how that plays out im curious

I am curious abt these questions bc imo 'Hispanidad Rojo,' and how it plays out — would be keystone for downstream, since it is 'orthogonal' to a wooden 'Americans v Soviets' framework — as movements navigate national liberation + social emancipation across Global South & postwar reconstruction of former Axis industrial powers & their junior partners alike

The Mexicans in spite of themselves may end up teaching lessons 'upstairs' to the UASR & 'sideways' abroad because of the 'reelection' taboo … they may realize forms of the original Chartist demand for annual elections + Paris Commune recall as realized political practice vs 'brand-name' positions, & start the process of generalizing the same throughout the seniority hierarchy well before the Americans

A major challenge on this project is what *plausible* political cultures & practices would credibly reach toward the ideal-type, ij the face of still-relative national- & -socio-economic global encirclement of a kind, not to mention the privations of struggle to win the DOTP locally, to keep it & rebuild, all while burdened with the marks of the parent society all the while

and still yet burdened by the mission statement to relieve those pressures and spread the march of the revolution:

this is a tall-order and makes demands that inevitably come at loggerheads vs 'internal construction' in an intensive way

Personally: ideally I think the populace engages in 'participatory democracy' as a matter of course: vs the personally immediate & 'next level-up local' levels

And those activity centers populate further uptown candidate nomination, selection, & ratification; and reciprocally inform uptown and down below as an info conduit

The vision was something like a fusion of the Russian Soviet Republic pyramidal system synthesized with intuition & modern political science — something like yr avg person does participatory democracy in organic localities, interacting with the 'active minority' in same;

active groups in participatory democracy place lists, platforms, and agitate vs range of alternatives as factional positions

Then the laboring citizen is presented with party / affiliate / platform / ranking options vs flat list

And higher bodies are thus elected, and presumptive elects for placements to yet higher bodies are presented back to same [ as if in a runoff round 2 ]

And same electorate is invited to sign off on it, or reject either presumptive electeds or withhold of ratification triggers by-election reset

A major problem of socialist democracy is it objectively demands much greater mobilization intensity of the commonest laboring citizen

 

[Comrade Future]

This is not true and is soft on Zionism. Avi Shlaim and others have demonstrated that Israeli security operations together with very small Zionist minorities in local Jewish communities in Egypt & Iraq carried out very involved provocateur actions to agitate pogroms or create the perception of pogrom risks to drive Arab & Persian Jews to uproot and trade their established presence in local societies for internment / DP camps in Israel.

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Again - are there any detailed studies? Because this is a very provocative statement, and in order for me to push it through to my colleagues, I need evidence. So far they have given me one article, and not very detailed.

This is nonsense, basically the thesis of my From Time Immemorial that the Palestinian Arabs of today are the direct descendants largely of immigrants to the region during the First Yishuv because of them 'making the desert bloom' or the like [ just a new iteration of 'the white's man burden' or 'the civilizing mission' ]

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"I look at the information on the book" - Yeah. That's it. I'll keep it on mind.

Peters's argument that, because Palestinians ranged so much in skin tone, from fair skinned to dark brown skinned, that they could not be descended from the same land

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This is the funniest thing I've read today.

Just as the handwringing about Arab Jews immigrating to Israel after 1948 ( notably, something that didn't happen anything like the Nakba but fits and starts for differing push-pull factors through the 1950s ) — whose object is to prettify the Nakba & Zionism through both-sidesism about Arab Jewish immigration & trying to relativize Zionist ethnic cleansing strategies by appealing to 'intrinsic Gentile [here Arab Christian or Muslim] antisemitism.'

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Would you deny that anti-Semitism was indeed widespread in the Middle East?

…these — "the tankies' system" if you will — are social forms which are really autonomized from capital, but are blind-alleyed / ectopic and annihilate the potentiality of 'for-itself' worker-collectivity, they live on borrowed time but even within that straitjacket, that autonomization still requires near-continent scale enclosure of neo-colonial spaces, as a whole, to create a secured zone where even that relative autonomization or detachment from the law of value becomes possible

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This is a very controversial description of Soviet society - or indeed any Eastern European society during the Cold War. Still, even some dissidents (such as Boris Kagarlitsky) say that Soviet citizens, despite authoritarianism, were higher even in the Brezhnev era - at least at the level of labor collectives. Modern Russian citizens are a much more amorphous and disunited mass.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

I'm sure given Johnson "WI Lincoln survived and brought about a Second American Revolution 70 years early" would be a pretty popular POD for AH TTL.

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Would be amazing if "The Lost Cause" in the Reds!verse didn't refer to Neo-Confederate apologia but to the feeling that the premature end of Reconstruction/Lincoln's death was missed opportunity to bring about a racially equal socialist democracy, maybe with some utopian thinking that having just fought an incredibly bloody Civil War the pro-Labor/proto-Socialists politicians like Lincoln would have been able to effect change without plunging the country into another conflict.

IOTL the Lost Cause got a major boost from the Wilson administration as a recruiting tool for WW1 and a means to get Southerners on board (suddenly Lee and Jackson were part of the proud American military tradition instead of, you know, fucking traitors). Here, you might see the UASR go all in on Lincoln and Union hagiography as a means of selling the public on the war (especially given that American involvement in WW1 was a fucking disaster ITTL). Instead of the government sending our boys and girls off to die in the Russian steppe, they're finishing the fight their grandfathers and great-grandfathers started and letting freedom ring world wide (or whatever).

I've said this before but I think the historiography of the First Civil War/Slavers War would be very different ITTL, with it almost certainly being framed as a labor/capital fight that was a warm up/precursor to the Second American Revolution. You'd also be likely to see artists using ACW1 as a means of exploring and interrogating ACW2 - even with MacArthur's discount fascism smashed and in retreat in Cuba and the forces of socialism triumphant, you're still going to have a post-war period where most people would likely be too traumatized to really go for stories just straight up set in the War - IOTL I imagine it was easier to watch fictional accounts of battles on the other side of the planet, but I can't imagine a lot of people chomping at the bit for a movie about the grueling Battle of Pittsburgh that they actually lived through.

Stories that were reframing some of the undercurrents of ACW2 as stories about heroic working and immigrant Union boys shooting Col. James Crowe Lee in the face would probably go down a lot smoother and present a sort of universal historical boogeyman everyone could rally around hating post-Revolution.

 

[Mal-3]

IOTL I imagine it was easier to watch fictional accounts of battles on the other side of the planet, but I can't imagine a lot of people chomping at the bit for a movie about the grueling Battle of Pittsburgh that they actually lived through).

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You'll have some to be sure - I remember watching a (OTL) post-WW2 Italian movie that was all about how much it sucked to be in Italy in general when everybody was using it as a battleground - but definitely not the sort of big crowd movies United Artists or Hyperion crank out, no.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

You'll have some to be sure - I remember watching a (OTL) post-WW2 Italian movie that was all about how much it sucked to be in Italy in general when everybody was using it as a battleground - but definitely not the sort of big crowd movies United Artists or Hyperion crank out, no.

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Yeah, I imagine there'd be more films like The Best Years Of Our Lives (an astonishingly frank and honest film about WW2 vets tackling PTSD and post-war alienation) - somewhat realistic accounts of the after effects of the conflict or of people/society readjusting post war(s), but you probably wouldn't see just stories just straight up set during ACW2 until maybe a decade or two-post war (when the actual war generation comes of age and TTL's Boomers start to assert themselves).

Now what I'm really wondering is if, in the aftermath of the French Civil War and the FBU/WAllies finally teaming up with the Americans and Soviets, do we see a Reds! version of Mission to Moscow, where the UASR's ambassador gets wined and dined by Atlee and Churchill and reassured that the newly minted Union is just on the slow path to universal peace and brotherhood? Fun fact: the film is so cartoonishly and uncritically pro-Stalin that supposedly when it was screened in Moscow Soviet commentators were like "come on man even the KGB doesn't lay it on that thick".

 

[Born in the USSA]

Would be amazing if "The Lost Cause" in the Reds!verse didn't refer to Neo-Confederate apologia but to the feeling that the premature end of Reconstruction/Lincoln's death was missed opportunity to bring about a racially equal socialist democracy, maybe with some utopian thinking that having just fought an incredibly bloody Civil War the pro-Labor/proto-Socialists politicians like Lincoln would have been able to effect change without plunging the country into another conflict.

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I agree that historiography of Civil War 1 would be incredibly different. I could even see a thematic link in the literature tying the Lost Cause of Reconstruction to the Good Old Cause of the English Civil War, since both represent a moment of true opportunity for revolutionary social change transmuted into failure to crush reactionary forces that could be argued to be the roots of the pre-Revolution US government (and current government in exile) and the inherently classist regime of the FBU, respectively.

 

[Raiho-kun]

How is Abraham Lincoln remembered in Reds-TL?

Is the public's view of him negative or positive -- a bit of both?

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Generally positive for a progressive liberal figure within the bounds of the Old Republic, with nuanced criticism in regards to his native policies (to put lightly the largest execution in US history).

As a rule, the average American's view on pre-Revolutionary history is going to be viewed through a more dispassionate lens. People are not going to be fed at a young age a triumphalist narrative of history that puts 18th through 20th century figures on a pedestal, which is a large source of the immense disillusionment American leftists often go through IOTL. Also helps that it all "worked out" for the better with the founding of the United Republics, and the OTL social issues considered stemming from American history into the present are either mitigated or uprooted entirely here.

 

[Comrade Future]

Yeah, I imagine there'd be more films like The Best Years Of Our Lives (an astonishingly frank and honest film about WW2 vets tackling PTSD and post-war alienation) - somewhat realistic accounts of the after effects of the conflict or of people/society readjusting post war(s), but you probably wouldn't see just stories just straight up set during ACW2 until maybe a decade or two-post war (when the actual war generation comes of age and TTL's Boomers start to assert themselves).

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In fact, there is almost OTL here - if you study Soviet cinema about the Second World War, you will find that in the first ten post-war years in the USSR there were few war films, and those that were were mostly epic canvases with cartoonish and comedic Nazis. After 1957, the situation changed, and by the end of the sixties, a complex system of cinema about the Great Patriotic War emerged. First of all, three types of pictures arise - Epic (that is, with an emphasis on command, large-scale historical events, and grandiose tasks), Heroic (that is, an emphasis on the feat of ordinary soldiers), and Tragic (showing the hardships of military life and the hardships faced by the civilian population ). Moreover, the latter form does not necessarily always exist as a tragedy - the film Only Old Men Are Going to Battle, being a comedy, ends with the vast majority of the characters dying and being mourned by those left behind.

 

[IlluminatusP]

Again - are there any detailed studies? Because this is a very provocative statement, and in order for me to push it through to my colleagues, I need evidence. So far they have given me one article, and not very detailed.

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Uh, well, first I don't know who 'your colleagues' are so what the user base's product need specs are, and relevancy to the purpose, perhaps you can enlighten me on the context…

…and [looking back here] I especially have no clue why something sounding akin to 'card-carrying Member of The Tribe' bona fides is even qualificationally relevant in principle ( except insofar as validation may be agitationally useful in the face of Zionist revanchism politically ) — in my view, it presupposes Zionist ideological premises at the get-go from an analytical perspective.

One might go so far as to say that even raising this as a prerequisite qualification is poisoning of the well.

I think even at first approximation, clearly:

(1) there was no organic & close-to-uniform global pan-Jewry Zionist solidarity through 1950s

(in fact, even on the level of Anglo-American Jewry today, the fecklessly pretended organic Zionist political solidarity is in critical crisis)

(2) there was no organized, culturally endogenous antisemitic political project with ethnic cleansing, genocidal, or apartheid-like aim that spanned the range over either 'the Pan-Arabia nations' or 'the global / MENA Islamic community continuum' alike

( here much discourse on other side is a fan of using 'Arab' & 'Muslim' interchangeably as an assigned-racial {racist in fact} category

and further, there was none of the above even spanning Europe as a generality prior to, during, or after WW2… this is of course the thesis of Goldhagen's asswipe Hitler's Willing Executioners which furthers a thesis of fundamental goyim eliminationist antisemitism, which no one takes seriously and his citation arc & persistence vs his media-feting reveals to be just a backhanded way to establish that Israel as a 'Jewish'-exclusivist & supremacist state is a moral necessity bc goy are all willing would-be SS-Totenkampferband recruits

so euros are hitler > goy are hitler … > Arabs/Muslims are hitler )

(3) there WAS however an in-built & inevitable presupposition in Zionism for settler-colonialist ethnic cleansing for territory clearance and state-formation on the basis of supremacy exercised, by an attributed on quasi-racial grounds using a pseudo-religious basis, for purported & contrived national self-determination

(4) following from 1-2–&-3… it is in my view adequately clear that there is no comparison between the Nakba of 1947-8 of the Palestinian Arab nationality [be it Christian or Muslim alike], and the immigrations that took place by Arab-Jews from their resident communities across the pan-Arabian nations [nor Iran & South Asia also] which occurred in fits-and-starts running from 1948 through 50s — with a long tail even into the 60s in some cases — and which ranged from [state, or yes, even spontaneous] pogrom-like violence driven refugee cases over on through the not really disputed cases of Israeli state security provocations in especially Cairo & Baghdad to push refugee exodus

(4)

Would you deny that anti-Semitism was indeed widespread in the Middle East?

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In Norman Finkelstein's words (paraphrased):

"All non-Jews harbor some amount of antisemitic feeling"

The question is quite explicitly:

' Is—

[a] the Nakba of 1947-8 of the Palestinian Arab Muslims & Christians alike

the (staccato in volume over time) Arab-Jewish immigrations from various nations where the 'Mizrahi Jews' were both resident & had developed minority communities

— comparable in a credible way? '

And the answer is no.

This is a very controversial description of Soviet society - or indeed any Eastern European society during the Cold War. Still, even some dissidents (such as Boris Kagarlitsky) say that Soviet citizens, despite authoritarianism, were higher even in the Brezhnev era - at least at the level of labor collectives. Modern Russian citizens are a much more amorphous and disunited mass.

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I have no idea what 'higher' means here.

It is obviously apparent that even Nazism, Italian Fascism, plus its weak-sauce imitators in Greek authoritarianism, Franco's appropriated-&-neutered-Falangism, Salazar, etc etc etc … ALL each & without exception created practical potentiality for collective action & organizing that was already heavily deficit even underground through the USSR in the 1920s and after Team Stalin's 'Great Break' and especially the purge, virtually evaporated and never reemerged not only in the USSR despite thaw-reform-rising education & living standards … but also in the satellite & hangers-on small state regimes which 'structurally-assimilated' to the postwar USSR social formation format.

And it is not actually controversial, but is documented & described at length in polemical & scholarly publications by Hillel Ticktin, Donald Filtzer, & Simon Clarke.

I frankly, as an aside, don't understand the "higher" unspecified or context claim to labor collectivities in Soviet production concerns ( be they industrial, commercial, retail, or even the somewhat apart sovkhoz & kolkhoz agriculturalist sector ) … yes, your Kagarlitsky has admitted in frank commentary that:

[a] the open Marxist political discussion & agitation politically he enjoined for 2 decades and continues today,

and together also with labor unionism by and for the workers in a going-practice fashion even on the barest economistic defensive basis

[c] … and so—Kagarlitsky himself admits this was not possible under the Soviet regime through perestroika

In my opinion, his remarks in this vein are about articulating how even forced-channeled collectivities under state combined cooption & surveilling basis, provided some negotiating of conditions basis of a kind — that one struggles to find in Putin-led Russia today … but that doesn't negate that fundamental seeds of collective action are still yet possible today in a qualitative way it was not possible under the 'Great Turn-thru-Perestroika USSR'

Note here: exception-proving-the-rule in "USSR + the PRC daughter + all the hangers-on & assimilates" — each and every all observing the rule laid out is excepted in Poland … which had the lightest & most compromising hand laid in the course of 'Sovietisation' vs both

i. the church ( notably: a national subsidiary of the Roman See )

ii. the farming class was given the lightest treatment of any primary Stalinist model duplicates through 50s

iii. frankly Solidarity was a 'big-tent anti-Moscow creature' largely of foreign 'proto-color revolution' inspiration drawing on the loose-leashes on prior mentioned special-grants on both the farmer regime & church v state relations

+ also massive allowance for PRL client regime to runup debt exposure vs US-hegemon-dominated credit facilities & somewhat also vs emigres (both are in themselves emanations of the exceptional peace-offering compromising offered vs the PRL vs Polish nationalism)

[* which should not be seen by me to mean any prettifying of Gorbachev's confused & continuously revised running program to coopt so as to revitalize the regime core:

How? — through 'sovereign / channeled pluralism' & 'market socialism' — basically free up the formal monolithic formal monopolism by the combined party x state x industrial-ministerial object …

… so valuable domestic-global political legitimation & global-terms-of-trade economic yet uncovered value in emergent grass shoots could really emerge but then be incorporated as buttressing to the essential core, shorn of its 'total-incorporative' pretensions ]

The remark abt the USSR ( & its imitators / assimilates in turn ) social relations of production is simply underscore that the reality that 'workers' in these societies failed to display an emergent tendency toward going-organization of collectivity in defense of their immediate interests, nor that ideological opposition — and even underground in the fashion possible under say, Mussolini or Franco — could coalesce, and so the sine qua non of Marxism as mass politics — the 'SPD's merger formula' of 'socialism x labor movement' was dead in the cradle

And thereby, Trotskyist, leftcom, or left-Maoist accounts alike, arguing for a program of endogenous revolution against the Stalinoid state-core, be it called 'political revolution' or 'social revolution' lacked the material basis plausible for Marx's argument for strategy vs bourgeois state regimes

Frankly, Stalinoid-model regimes' "workers" were more like militarily-mobilized serf-staffing of state workshops under Tsarism centuries hence materially through and through — there was the possibility for social explosions (like peasants or artisans under feudalism) — but they were sliced-and-diced 50 different ways and their main mode of struggle was denying use-value in appropriation of their labor-power, and lending weight to immediate and intermediate 'lordly' bureaucratic superiors to add weight in the patron-client pyramid's push-pull dynamics

I do not think Soviet industrial or kolkhoznik/sovkhoznik labor-power naturally formed a coherent class like capitalist proper market-mediated wage-employee base producers tended toward.

 

[Miss Teri]

May 16th, 1942, 4:06 AM

The ring of the phone woke Earl Browder up.

"Did they install a phone in…."

It was then he felt the softness of the bed he was on. As he came to, he began to notice the size of the bed. The blankets on it.

He soon saw the little cabinet to the side. The large wooden door. The table with the tea kettle. The green plastered walls on the other side. The photos of Lenin, Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon, and Bill Foster hanging.

This was most certainly not his cell at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he went to sleep last night. Did they take him here in the middle of the night? Right when Roosevelt had commuted his sentence? Wasn't out of the bourgeois playbook. Strange they'd put him in this room.

The phone rang again, and Browder spotted it next to bed. After some hesitation, he reached out and picked it up.

".... Hello?"

"Apologies for waking you at this time, Comrade Secretary-General"

He recognized the voice as that of Morris Childs, his young protege. His brother Jack was his assistant.

"You're needed at Stavka for a Council meeting."

Stavka? "Like in Moscow?"

"No, like alongside the Potomac.

"Yeah, yeah, okay." So, he was in DC. Though, there was no "Stavka" there, as he remembered it at least. And the Council…

"Is the Politburo meeting?"

"The election is over, so probably not. Regardless, it's the Revolutionary Military Council"

The election? It's mid-May! Also, the Revolutionary Military what?

"Is Bob there? Bob Minor? I might need to speak with him"

"I thought you knew this, he left for Canada a few days ago. He and Franklin Roosevelt are trying to work out a trade deal with them now that they're in the war."

"Wait, Bob's with the President? Was that part of the deal?"

"The President? What are you talking about? Roosevelt is just a cabinet secretary and an opposition leader. And yeah, it was part of the deal to get them on board with our coalition government."

What the hell was going on?

"Are you okay, Comrade Secretary-General? Do you need to sleep more?"

"No, no, I'll try to get to this meeting. Where is it again?"

"If you've forgotten, the chauffeur probably remembers. Just get dressed."

He put down the phone, and shuttered. When he went to sleep, he was in a prison cell, about to be released from his sentence. He had beaten the unwarranted passport charge made against him, and now he was in this green, luxurious room, having to go to some meeting, and the President was hanging around with the acting head of his party.

He looked out the window, to see more clues. He saw a large lawn. To the side was a large white building. It looked familiar…

"Wait, am I in…"

Above it was a flag. But not the Stars and Stripes. It was Red and Black, with a yellow symbol he couldn't discern.

Looked a little like the Party flag.

[....]

Browder shifted in his suit. A smaller version of the flag pinned to his collar. A red pocket square. The last time he was in the backseat of the car was in the paddy wagon he was put in to transport him to Atlanta.

After finding his clothes and getting dressed, he worked around the White House. He noted that there were no photos of the Founding Fathers, no patriotic iconography. Rather, there were murals much like the ones he saw in the Soviet Union. Busts of the old socialists Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon, Karl Marx, even the late Emma Goldman.

There were a lot of assistants, both male and female, who were helping him out. They dismissed his confusion as merely sleepiness. Moreover, it seemed like he was…. Respected among them. He didn't expect White House aides to treat him with such deference.

He ultimately asked for a map of Washington, and received one very quickly. Upon opening, the words, "Debs Commune, DeLeon City" popped out at him.

It looked like Washington. Had the Washington and Lincoln Memorials listed, but he certainly didn't remember a city with the names of two socialists on it. Certainly not some of the landmarks, like the "Debs Monument" or the "Temple of the Revolution".

Browder, somehow, came to realize he was in some sort of Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon kind of scenario. He was on some strange version of Earth where the socialist revolution had happened 9 years ago, and there were certain things that were different.

"How is Raisa?", the driver of the car, Helmut, suddenly asked

"Hm?"

"Your wife"

So, that was the same. "Fine."

"Heard she was in Russia. Some diplomatic mission."

"Right, right." Honestly, he couldn't even remember the last time he had spoken to his wife. She visited him often in prison, but his upcoming release precluded that.

"Congratulations on your election to SecGen, Comrade."

"Thank you." He was apparently in the same position he had been before, but this time, as the head of state. Bill Foster was the old premier, but he was gone by now. Didn't catch who was premier now before he left.

Much of DC looked like the one he left behind. That is, until they finally arrived at Stavka.

Browder was awed by the fortress before him. It looked very reminiscent of the buildings he had seen in Moscow. Very collectivist, very imposing. It looked like the buildings in Moscow.

A soldier opened the door quickly, scaring Browder. He feared this was an elaborate, cruel ruse meant to send him back to prison. The soldier pulled Browder out and saluted him.

"Comrade Chairman, I hope we didn't disrupt your sleep."

"No, no of course not."

A small cadre of soldiers surrounded Browder as he walked up the steps. He followed them primarily, as they walked into the building. The wood paneling and bustling energy of soldiers and workers reminded him of the war planning buildings he'd see in the newsreels. Except with a seal with a Raven on it (Browder didn't understand that, but let it slide).

They moved through the building, full of machinery and people running, before getting to the center. A large circular room with a circular table at the center. Large maps of Europe, Asia, South America, Africa and the entire world hung on the walls.

He was relieved to see some familiar faces sitting already there at the table, even if they looked slightly different.

He was surprised to see Eugene Dennis in a suit similar to his, with the red handkerchief. He hadn't seen Dennis with such a nice suit. Interestingly, his name tag was his birth name. Perhaps he never changed it?

That old Wobbly Liz Flynn looked the same, with her hat and suit dress. Always a pleasure to see the old "Rebel Girl".

Browder was extremely surprised to see Marty Abern there. Abern, Cannon, and that whole Trotskyist lot were expelled from the Party before the Stock Market Crash, from what Browder remembered. From his tag, he was actually this world's version of the Secretary of War! Was there more to this world than he knew? Maybe Abern stuck with Foster.

The rest, he couldn't place. Some stern looking military men (including a black man, which Browder appreciated), and some other bureaucrats around.

He didn't recognize an older gentleman in a grey suit, but did recognize the name under him: Theodore Roosevelt III.

Browder recognized the bespectacled fellow in the white suit, Harry Truman. He was the Senator from Missouri, he believed.

Browder definitely didn't recognize a sterner, German man sitting to the side. His name was Paul Mattick, and Browder didn't know him.

Browder sat down, and Abern stood up. "Alright, now we just wait…"

"I'm here, I'm here."

Everyone turned to see the man coming in. Browder didn't recognize him for a second, but once he got closer, Browder stood in silence.

He was 20 years older, with a little bit of grey now in his hair, and he looked a bit heavier, but more energetic than the last time Browder had seen him, but the man before him was John Silas Reed.

Browder watched in discomfort as Reed headed to his seat. Browder remembered when Reed died 20 years ago. He had seen his grave at the Kremlin Necropolis. And here he was, living, breathing.

"Alright, comrades, let's begin."

Browder was so stunned he barely registered the sentence.

"Oh, yes, start, start…."

What was this world?

(This was a short story I posted in the Fanfiction Thread some years ago. Since I didn't have time for a good April Fool's update, figured it might tide people over)

 

[Mr. Anggur]

Damn you, get me all exited for a sequel!

 

[LNSS]

Who won the 1934 and 1938 World Cups?

 

[Spartakrod]

Who won the 1934 and 1938 World Cups?

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Italy and Brazil

 

[Spartakrod]

"The Starving Jaguar, Brazil in 1943-1944" by Johanna Gelt, Ludwig Renn Military Academy, Free Socialist Raterepublik of Deutschland.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: "The situation as of 1943"

As 1943 began, the Amazonian giant of Brazil had found its path toward a quick and easy victory shut. With Buenos Aires no closer to being captured, the Guianas offensive was ground down by Venezuelan, South African, Cuban, Colombian, Nigerian, French African, and West Indies soldiers. With the hopes of cracking the Andes turned into an exhausting meat grinder, the country was at war in nearly every direction without a clear way out.

Deeply stressed, Salgado grew more erratic and unstable, frequently breaking into explosive rants aimed at his generals and administrators when things didn't go his way. Hopes that others could take the reins were dashed by the fact that the enigmatic fanatic Cristiano Boaventura and the intellectual antisemite Gustavo Barroso squabble openly for power.

Cristiano Boaventura, O Diabo Verde as he was often called, believed that the aims of the war had shifted towards buying Brazil enough "breathing space" to ensure the survival of the integralist regime. Something that Barroso had rejected as defeatist, as Barroso believed, as did Salgado, that a final victory with Brazil having dominance over all of South America as a "Christian fortress" was not merely possible but inevitable. Boaventura, conferring with his brothers Rafael, Uriel, Miguel, and Gabriel[1] sought to contest this, but were overruled by the AIB inner circle as trust between the AIB and Guarda Verde started to fray in places.

Dutra, often regarded as the face of the regular Brazilian army believed that the time had come to seek terms with the Allies for a possible concentration of all Brazilian forces against Argentina, for which AIB hardliners, whom Dutra had clashed with regarding his spite towards Integralist attempts to Brasilianise Black and Native Brazilians, almost had him killed were it not for Salgado refusing to sign off on the orders. Nevertheless, Dutra and others in the rightist wing of the Brazilian military regarded a Brazilian victory against Argentina and Chile as not only possible but necessary, dismissing Boaventura's limited aims as cowardice.

Mascarenhas de Morais, largely regarded as Brazil's greatest commander of the war, had outright lent his prestige to shield a growing conspiracy against Salgado formed by Henrique Lott that believed that the Integralists had brought the country to ruin and had to be eliminated and an alignment with the allies sought. An eclectic alliance including everything from Communists to Monarchists, the Anaconda Group, named for the first word of its preferred codephrase, was hoping for a time to strike as they believed that the war could not be won.

However, even as the first "Hungry Summer" hit the country, brought about by a paucity in fertilizer and farmhands by the needs of the war, the situation remained somewhat stable.

The propaganda reels continued to play on the idea that this was a war of religion and the preservation of Christian virtue and Brazilian pride against atheism, degeneracy, and internationalism. The average Brazilian was led to believe that a triumph was around the corner, that once their invincible allies overseas had slain their foes, God would deliver such a victory to Brazil as well.

Salgado himself declared that the harsh times were but a test of Brazil's faith in God, and that these meager hardships, when he acknowledged them as even existing, were simply the birthing pains of a marvelous victory to come. He insisted that the United Nations could not last, that the aberrant forces of wickedness that had brought London and Paris on one side and Moscow and D.C on another together would be dissolved away by the light of righteousness.

He would even make up anecdotes that "proved" the difficulties in the United Nations to assure his people that the situation would reverse, and increasingly spoke of miracles and signs of God's will in this crusade, reading "secret messages intercepted by our agents through providence" that he claimed "proved" a fraying between Western Europe on one side and Russia and America on the other. Messages that were invented wholesale by the Integralist party for this stunt.

And in 1943, the situation in the world was still very much in doubt for the bulk of the world. Spain had been reunified under the Nationalists, the Caucasus was still embattled by the might of the German Army while Africa and the Middle East strained under the Italian and Turkish boot. Japan's ambitions had yet to be seriously checked, with the futurist army of the Concordists still going from strength to strength. So to many, it was believed that the present difficulties were simply a bump in the proverbial road, and that smooth travels would be awaiting them.

While Peru's two front war against José María Velasco Ibarra's Ecuador and Bernardino Bilbao Rioja's Bolivia supported extensively by Brazil through the large border with Bolivia and the far more tenuous border with an Ecuador bloated by its ill gotten gains seized from Peru's northern provinces during its revolution remained firm and presently partaking in trying to destroy Peru by pincer, the Liberal Party of Colombia under its young president Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was starting to show signs of ending the country's neutral stance.

Gaitán reviled the network of dictatorships that formed the so-called "Union of Sovereign Latin Nations" - comprised of Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay - and adopted a stance of "both London and D.C", believing that "these democratic nations and peoples have more in common when faced with the dictators of Tokyo and Berlin than separates them." Held back by a military reluctant to enter a war in favour of communism without certainty of victory, as the timetables for an expedient road to triumph ran out for the Axis, Gaitánist intervention seemed more and more likely, with a timetable set for a strike against Velasco's Ecuador and an incursion into Brazil within the year, raising "two hundred and fifty thousand bayonets against Integralism".

While Gaitánismo would one day be remembered for being one of many casualties in Premier Nixon's "Which side are you on?" campaign against third way movements as "a half-measurist movement", at this time, he enjoyed great prestige from both London and D.C as a man of compromise who had risen meteorically to straddle between the Red and Blue worlds, and this support had borne fruit in the shape of a surprisingly strong and decently equipped military that had been trained and furnished for modern warfare against both Brazil and its ally of Ecuador.

Diógenes Escalante, the recently established democratic president of Venezuela after Contreras stepped down and ended the military dictatorship over the country early in the decade, also decided that his country had stood aside for long enough. With a belief that Brazil would lose the war, his administration managed to garner support for an intervention in Venezuela's legislature with the aid of Gaitan as well the Anglophilic establishment of the country. With Brazil's desires for absolute supremacy over the whole of South America being made clear and with the British offering a condominium over British Guiana as well as further aid in refinery construction in Venezuela; the deal seemed irresistible. Venezuela would raise an army of a hundred and fifty thousand men for its intervention, with Escalante declaring that a crusade for Democracy would be waged against the "autocracies of the world who scorn governance by and for the people."

Venezuela, already one of the world's largest producers of oil, would continually increase its production of oil, single handedly providing 80% of the fuel used by the Franco-British Union in the war, with the remainder being produced by Arabia and Canada. The proceeds generated by this oil bounty were used to equip and train one of the single most modern armies in the new world, fully equipped with mechanized assets and trained to British standards. The potential entrance of Venezuela into the war as one of the allies threatened the entire northern sector of Brazil and imperil all U-Boat operations in the Caribbean, and could not be tolerated.

…

Brazil by 1943 reached its peak military scope of more than two point two million soldiers fighting on three fronts, in the North, in the West, and in the South. A monstrous drain on its manpower that had required a program of "youth work" to sustain by bringing young children as well as women and the elderly to work in the fields, while the roundups of "deviants" would keep the factories churning. With material shortages becoming more evident, the country that had made several impressive innovations in both mass deforestation as well as crucible steel was now starting to devour its own populace in earnest to escape the situation it had found itself in.

This led to an expansion of the Guarda Verde's anti-deviancy campaigns to find more slave workers both within Brazil as well as occupied territories. Cristiano Boaventura's General Order 2381 declared that "simply the air of homosexuality, transvestitism, political degeneracy, irreligiosity, heresy or any other sort of aberration is sufficient for correction". Villages in occupied territories would find their populations gradually and then rapidly emptied to cut down trees, make charcoal, extract petroleum from the Chaco or the Brazilian interior, dig coal, press steel, manufacture guns, and more just to keep the country going. Quality suffered, with shoddy workmanship and often outright sabotage plaguing virtually every creation of Brazilian factories.

Wood and fabric aircraft, largely held to be obsolete in Europe and East Asia, had made a comeback in an attempt to get anything that could fly into the air by bulking up the numbers of the air force. While Brazil was not short in aluminium from its plentiful bauxite supplies, factories that could work the material into aircraft were relatively centralised and the need for aircraft was vast indeed. And while aircraft such as Hurricanes and Mosquitoes had shown that the swang song of the wooden aircraft had not come yet, these aircraft were met with the distribution of incendiary autocannon rounds to make them into what American pilots would morbidly call "Flying Viking Funerals".

But it would be remiss to speak of this without mentioning the human cost. Of the USAT community, more than 2.2 million would be directly exterminated as part of the Lavender Holocaust in Latin America for so much as being reported to be even a "little off" as any excuse was made to find people to consign to the Guarda Verde's work camps in Brazil; its allies of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay, and in their occupied territories. Many others, whether political dissidents but especially communists, those deemed to have ties to or any participation in resistance movements, expendable mouths to feed, atheists, the disabled, and more would also be consigned to perish in these facilities in a bestial process that would consume the lives of three million additional people in total.

It is without exaggeration that Salgado's regime was the cruelest and bloodiest to ever disgrace the Americas, and it was only getting worse as the war turned more and more against it. The effort to squeeze blood from the proverbial stone required escalating cruelty and repressions that were increasingly wearing away at the very heart of Integralism, and while the Communist movement was broken by targeted repressions and massacres, dissidence against the emerald tyranny was rapidly mounting in many other forms, including conspiracies aimed at the very heart of the Integrated State.
…

For much of the war, Brazil made up for its lack of ability to match the Enigma or Purple Cipher machines of its ally with the highly secretive constructed language of the Guarde Verde; Uzumrik, which was created by the Boaventura family as a language to ensure that outsiders could not comprehend the mysteries of the Humble Knights of God. The army naturally noted the potential usage of the language, which also had its own bespoke character script, to conceal information, and Boaventura would dispatch those of the Guard trained in the language to manage and deliver important communications for the Brazilian army.

As the language was unknown outside of Brazil, intercepted communiques were so much gibberish even to those who had broken their ciphers. And the Guarda Verde's insistence on only teaching the language to valued journeymen of their military cult ensured that interpreters would not be forthcoming. This greatly resembled Compact usage of Navajo as a secret code language impenetrable to Axis ears, and Allied usage of Kpelle for much the same purpose and had a similar effect. As this allowed for the concealment of important details regarding the Brazilian war effort, an unprecedented multi-national team of both Allied and Compact linguists would join the United Nations Cipher cracking program to reveal the lannguage's secrets.

Working on carefully compiled phrasebooks and spywork as well as what could be gleaned from what prisoners of war they could gain with any inkling of the language; as most entrusted to learn the tongue were also loyal enough to take poison if at risk of capture and few were ever in a position to be captured in the first place; the Ganzir Project would work to surmount long odds. The task was daunting: linguistics work on such short notice could be nothing less, and the usage of Uzumrik in the battle of the Atlantic was providing the U-Boat armada with an extra line of secrecy that had frustrated admirals to no end.

But with the work of dedicated linguists such as John Ronald Reul Tolkien, George Dumezil, Larin Boris Alexandrovich, and William Chomsky would ultimately prove to be up to the task. Through many a sleep deprived night, they had managed to piece together enough to start working on "the Green Book" which would allow for United Nations operatives listening in on Brazilian transmissions to understand the information received.

This would allow them the benefit of, when combined with the supremacy in cryptography enjoyed by the United Nations, allowing their intelligence arm to have a complete picture of the medium term movements of the axis armies in Latin America that had so far avoided the scrutiny of the Allies and Compact. The missing link between the short term information provided by reconnaissance and the long-term information by embedded agents had been discovered, and it is not an exaggeration to say that this discovery shaved months off the war by ending the veil of secrecy that had existed around Brazilian movements and allowing for informed decisions to be made by commanders to a degree not possible before.

Excerpt from Chapter 2: "The Northern Front in early 1943"

However, cities such as São Luís, which had seen major growth during the 30s as part of Brazilian-Western European ties, would be targeted by the "Caribbean Aerial Offensive" dreamed up by Entente Air Force Bomber Command to strike at centers of production thought safe from the battlefront. While these bombing raids were sporadic by the standards of Europe, the sight of hundreds of long-range bombers descending upon Brazilian air space with munitions meant to level the ports of Brazil's "northern jewel" were something that integralist propaganda could not cover-up.

Key to the choosing of the targets was the extreme importance of Brazilian naval bases to the European Stahlpakt's naval strategy. With surface naval inferiority to the Red American and Blue British fleets operating in the Atlantic, reactionary naval strategies focused on surface raiders and submarines, both of which were greatly aided by the offering of safe harbor within the vast reaches of Brazil and the many naval pens carved into the coastline from natural harbors with the aid of conscripted or even enslaved labor. The Brazilian Navy; knowing full well how outmatched it was, sought to focus on a strategy of cooperative submarine warfare with the Third Reich and the Third Rome.

Nothing could be done about the resources heading across the Pacific save for entreating the Japanese, but the trip across the South Atlantic was a shorter and more direct way to get resources to the front, and the Caribbean was full of Allied and Compact shipping. So the theory went that they could utilize cheap submarines and harry these vital shipping lanes in tandem with the Kriegsmarine and the Regia Marina as part of a grand strategy and these bases were crucial towards its realization of Dönitz and Bernotti's "America to Australia" grand strategy for the Axis powers to collaborate towards choking the sealanes of nearly the entire world with submarine warfare.

As hundreds of thousands of Brazilians were swept up in Boaventura's targeted pogroms against the queer population, they would often die digging these naval bases in sweltering heat and unsurvivable humidity, creating what Admirals Dönitz and Bernotti often called "their saving grace." From the very beginning of the war, these press-ganged hands would work the earth and concrete to provide fascist and reactionary ships with shelter and supplies in the country, while the jobless but acceptable poor would be given work to provide repairs and restocks of supplies.

With sea mines, aircraft, torpedo boats, and naval batteries warding the shore, it was highly risky to pursue these ships to their shelter. With these shelters, the crews could relax and their craft could receive crucial maintenance that would extend their range and allow them to better threaten shipping of supplies across the Atlantic. So popular were the stays in the comparatively pleasant weather of Brazil as well as a chance to enjoy the beer, women, and song that the sailors of the Kriegsmarine and the Regia Marina came to call the visits to the country on their patrol routes "the Brazilian Vacation".

Northern Brazilian naval pens had been crucial linchpins to the Stahlpakt's naval grand stratagem following the declaration of war by London upon the Third Reich and Brazilian Estado Novo and the loss of Allied neutrality. This allowed for a threefold increase in tonnage lost in the Atlantic Seaboard of the Americas and Africa versus what was observed later in the war once these facilities were lost. Of course, accounting for the general degradation of the strength of the European Axis at Sea and the increasing strength of Allied and Compact convoys.

It also permitted the increased usage of seamines by the Axis fleets. While troublesome to carry to the Americas from Europe, with supplies in Brazil, Submarines could disgorge enough mines to cause trouble for passing convoys. While rarely enough to stop a convoy outright, the disruption and delay caused was believed to be worth the relatively minor expense of producing the sea-mines for use by the submarine fleet operating in these waters.

Furthermore, the Brazilian Navy was also building and operating its own submarines, and while they often lacked the sophistication of their European counterparts, the presence was considered enough of a nuisance to prompt a strategic study on how to minimize and if possible, eliminate the "Barracudas" as the American navy referred to them (in contrast to the "Sharks" of the German, Italian, and Japanese submarine fleets).

Particularly infamous were the bases in the northern coast of Brazil, from which U-boats and surface raiders regularly would emerge and cause havoc in the Caribbean and the Eastern Seaboard of North America. Often referred to as the "Great Green Thorn in the Ass" by Rear Admiral Marcus Brown*[2], the architect of the American strategy for the Atlantic War, the Northern bases menaced everything from the supply of Texan and Venezuelan oil to the flow of West Indies sugar to battlefields in Europe, Africa, and Western Asia.

The Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Navy and Royal Navy required a strategy to withstand this surge in Axis submarine activity. With Comintern and Allied timetables requiring unrestricted flow of war materiel into Europe and Africa, it was an absolute necessity to weaken Dönitz and Bernotti's grand stratagem as much as possible. In a moment of rare agreement, the American and Franco-British Naval Staffs agreed to begin conducting joint convoy escorts.

Armed convoys, composed of American and Commonwealth destroyers escorting cargo ships and transports of varying ownership, soon began crisscrossing the Atlantic. While there was some early friction between the two services, this strategy soon paved the way for dividends in the broader Atlantic War. While submarine attacks would still occur, the overall tonnage losses were kept significantly below quota by the combination of Entente and American capabilities. Merchant vessel sinkings would see a sharp decline by New Year's 1943, a trend that continued for the rest of the war once joint convoys became the norm for guarding trade in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

The United Nations had a much tougher go at it when trying to deal with the root of the problem: the naval bases and sub-pens strung along the Brazilian coast. They were not without recourse, however. The previous year's Natal Raid had shown just how vulnerable the Marinha do Brasil was. The continuing build-up of Axis submarines in the South Atlantic did nothing to dissuade the growing pressure of air raids and bombardments that would only ramp up through 1943.

While the Atlantic Fleet of the WFRN lacked the sheer weight of aircraft carriers of their Pacific counterparts, they still had enough to make the Marinha smart. These carriers would be responsible for much of the havoc that would occur in 1943 and even 1944. With not much of a navy to guard their coastline since the Battle of the Rio, the Marinha's surface fleet would be reduced into a non-factor. Fuel for the submarines, communication centers, anything in a port that could be useful to the enemy: all targets for destruction. And to add further insult to injury for the Brazilians, they could be hit from all sides.

The Royal-cum-Imperial Air Force had begun practicing with grappled line mid-air refueling as early as the mid-1930s, when concerns over the loss of Canada and Continental Europe to the Red Tide and the need to possibly bombard both Soviet Russia and America directly from Britain became a pressing issue. The tests ended in 1939, partly due to the Imperial General Staff's growing confidence in the armies of the Dominions and those of Britain's allies on the continent, erstwhile and otherwise. Additionally, the experiments failed to produce a system capable of transatlantic flight. It did, however, produce a system capable of making the punishing round trip from the Entente's Caribbean airfields to Brazil's northern population centers and the industry built there to ironically, be safe from bombers in Argentina.

Making use of this mid-air refueling technique to extend their range with maximum bomb loads, one hundred and sixty-eight of the EAF's Avro London bombers operating out of the Franco-British Antilles reached the port of Madeira. They met coast hugging boats meant to carry supplies to soldiers embroiled in the Guianas by 0715 hours on the 14th of February, 1943. This was the so-called "St. Valentine's Day Raid". Half of them would bombard munitions and fuel depots, the other half would continue on to bombard the iron and steel works within São Luís.

By the end of the raid, the Fonesca smelting facility and ancillary iron industry plants would be 57% destroyed, while the Cabral Ball Bearing Factory would be more than 46% destroyed. The primary fuel storage and munitions dump facilities that supplied the Northern Squadron were more than 73% and 64% destroyed, severely hampering the fleet's mobility at port and denying crucial fuel and ammo to the Northern Fleet.

Many other buildings would be heavily damaged, and the lackluster anti-air presence led to none of the bomber formation suffering losses as they returned to join the twelve bombers that had been intended to join the strike but were forced to withdraw due to mechanical issues.

While smaller bombing raids had previously been attempted, the primarily Canadian-South African bombing force decided to escalate to large-scale strategic bombing in light of the vulnerability of North Brazilian industrial sites and the success of major raids. The Commonwealth Caribbean Air Force Command decided to unleash the "Brazilian Blitz" against the country from island bases as well as facilities built in allied Venezuela.

The EAF's successful bombing campaign was followed three weeks later by the Entente Navy's Operation Mainsail. With the Brazilian Air Force attrited by repeated bombings, the Admiralty was sufficiently emboldened to attack the Brazilian Navy at anchor. A squadron formed around the fleet carriers Audacious and Irresistible, escorted by the battlecruiser Beatty and a cadre of the new Minotaur-class light cruisers, attacked the Brazilian Navy's northern squadron and German U-boats and Italian submarines at port in São Luís.

Utilizing torpedoes and dive bombing, the raid would sink more than twelve cargo ships, cripple or sink five destroyers and three frigates, and sink the squadron's flagship, the Great War era armored cruiser Tordesillas (ex-Edgar Quinet) while destroying four Kriegsmarine U-Boats and two Regia Marina submarines in port.

The pace of bombing would only increase over the following weeks, as the CCAF refined their techniques into a bloody-handed art. The increasing strain and attrition wrought upon Brazilian industry - especially shipbuilding and repair capacities - severely thinned the density of Axis submarines and surface raiders across the Southern Atlantic. War planners in London and DeLeon were counting on this. Operational plans for the year were extraordinarily far reaching, including troop movements from Canada and the continental UASR across the Atlantic to Northern Africa and Portugal. Operation Torch, the Second Peninsular War, and the eventual liberation of France and all of North Africa, are in part owed to the decimation of Brazil's naval logistics.

The air campaigns impacts were not exclusively so distant, however. In part was the CCAFs tactical operations in the fighting for the Guyanas.

Brazil's invasion of the Guyanas, along with the near-simultaneous invasion of Uruguay, goes down in the history of military blunders along with the Roman defeat at Cannae and the ultimate defeat of the Commonwealth in Indochina. After the Entente's declaration of war Salgado could have simply dug in on the border - there were no real road connections between Brazil and the Guyanas at the time. Instead, he ordered two full divisions across the Oyapok in what amounted to a fleet of rafts. While the Army and Green Guards had been able to establish a bridgehead within the first week of fighting, the ferocity of the operation presaged the brutality of the fighting to come. The Brazilians took nearly 20% casualties as a whole, with some units taking up to 50% casualties. Nevertheless, Salgado had a foothold in the Guyanas, and that foothold would expand as men and materiel were shoveled into it. The colonial troops seemed to melt away before the Brazilian Army, and Cayenne fell within the month.. At the helm of this force was Brazilian General Valdomiro Castilho de Lima, who was to be reinforced with several more Brazilian divisions. Salgado had opened a third front in a war that was already starving his country, but this one at least was making progress. At least until they reached the Maroni River.

Despite the promises coming from Rio de Janeiro, no reinforcements could disguise the simple fact that the Brazilian army was at the end of an impossibly long logistical rope. Furthermore, the terrain of the Guianas was far less simple to conquer than they had thought. Opposing him would be the Commonwealth Commander of the Americas, Sir Archibald Percival Wavell, commanding a force primarily of Africans and Caribbeans.This was the force that de Lima's army ran headlong into at Paramaribo.

The southern border was virtually impenetrable to any serious advance, and Allied dominance in the air and sea had made attempted bypasses suicidal while the formidable Oyapok River bottlenecked logistics. However the initial impetus to block the Brazilian army entirely was vetoed by Union armed forces commanded by Field Marshal Archibald Wavell who, advised by his Caribbean counterparts and his Venezuelan allies, decided to instead allow the Brazilians to believe they had a chance if they could commit.

Making a feigned fighting retreat through Guianna, Wavell's plan was to force the Brazilians to overextend so that his foe would commit as many of his troops as possible and then with General Alphone Juin's African and Caribbean troops, pincer them against the Maroni and Suriname Rivers while amphibious landings and paratroopers would create a "vertical envelopment" to ensure no escapees. With the blessing of Imperial High Command, he would seem to play the part of a defeated foe being routed by an overconfident de Lima who was giddy with having any success at all.

However, Wavell had a trump card - forces from Escalante's Venezuela and MacArthur's American Havana ready to spring while Dutch forces evacuated to Veacruz and Aruba would make their dramatic reappearance. Being a military man himself, MacArthur would take direct command of the American exiles' troops and launch Operation Vigilante to land troops on Plage des Hattes.

Making an opposed landing, Nimitz and MacArthur would overrun the Brazilian 38th "Brasilia" Regiment of the Greenshirts, the 39th Brigade of the Brazilian Army, and the 71st "Redemptor" Battalion of the Guarda Verde with the 1st Marine Division of the United States in exile and the 5th Imperial Marine Division, and the guns of the United States Navy and Imperial Caribbean Fleet on the 13th of April. The fighting would be fierce but brief, with the Brazilians retreating within twelve hours, regarding the attention of airpower and naval artillery to be simply too intense to withstand.

SAS Troops would be paradropped further behind to threaten the rear operating area of the Brazilian Army of the North which had grown into more than a hundred and fifty thousand men with another hundred and fifty thousand waiting in northern Brazil, a force with an utterly voracious appetite for supplies. With the experiences of facing the Brazilian army in the defense of Uruguay, Imperial High command regarded them as perilously vulnerable to deep penetrating raids by SAS commandos, who, frequently making use of glider droppable Hussar tanks and artillery pieces when fighting alongside regular paratroopers; could have an outsized impact on the campaign.

General de Lima, aware of problems to his rear, tried to reorient his troops to stop the incursions, but found his flanks pressed by formations shielded by the terrain of Guiana and his front met with redoubled offensives by Juin and Wavell. With the recapture of Marienburg in Suriname and his forces split in half by intensive air interdiction of river crossing supplies, he found himself in a suddenly desperate situation.

Trying to enact a breakout to save his troops, de Lima would face his Cannae on the Maroni with forces on all three sides and the Imperial Navy staring him down across the shore and the Commonwealth Caribbean Air Force Command initiating nonstop aerial operations against them. Hawker Tornados and Mosquitoes roamed at will over the skies, with constant attention by Spitfires and the longer range Goblins keeping the Brazilian air force's interventions to a minimum.

Fighting was often intensely violent due to the Brazilian doctrine of maximalised ferocity and "dirty warfare", with Brazilian special forces often hiding amidst civilian populations to try and infiltrate behind the lines of their foes and strike before exfiltration. Brazilian special forces, built along the "commando doctrine" of men trained to devote themselves entirely to warfare in both mind and body, were more known for their capacity for committing war crimes than the sort of continent conquering military success initially hoped for, but were able to strike at key supply bases established by the advancing allies, especially targeting the Venezuelans advancing from the west whom the Brazilians hoped to dissuade from a further escalation.

Of the four hundred total armored fighting vehicles available to de Lima, half were now destroyed or damaged, and replacements were not forthcoming even in the face of a wholly mechanized enemy which even included "crocodile" Daphne Heavy Tanks fitted with flamethrowers to rapidly clear out brush and flush Brazilian jungle warfare troops from cover.

Hoping to retreat to French Guyana while he still could, he committed the great majority of his strength eastwards, hoping to overwhelm Generalissimo MacArthur's troops and the Franco-British Royal Marines dispatched to assist them. With sixty thousand soldiers facing just a quarter of their number at the battle of the Maroni, he had reason to be confident in victory.

Some in MacArthur's general staff even told him to withdraw, such as his deputy Prescott Bush, currently in Havana while MacArthur lead the troops directly, but the decision to sail some of the shore defense gunboats and small, cheap corvettes meant to provide mobile medium and light artillery in defense of the reactionary exile state in case of invasion by the mainland down the Maroni river proved to be decisive.

The Brazilians, unable to contest the Allied naval superiority, found the guns of the corvettes USS Lee and Grant and six gunboats to be a thorn in their side they struggled to deal with. A thorn that let the exile's military presence build up and close the jaws of the trap. Even as a fresh corps of the Brazilian Army plus a division of the Greenshirts and three regiments of the Guarda Verde were brought up to the North in the hopes of relieving the Brazilian forces caught in the cauldron with more on the way, Wavell had achieved his Guiana pocket and would not let it be broken.

However, Brazil, still mobilizing fresh reserves, sought to pre-empt the Venezuelan and Colombian intervention with incursions on their countries with soldiers mobilized to strike at the Colombian departments of Vaupes and Amazonas and the invasion of the Venezuelan state of Guyana from the south through the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén in the hopes of relieving pressure from the Guianas and allowing the hundred and fifty thousand trapped Brazilian soldiers to escape, all while a weapon long held in reserve had been prepared for Brazil's final surprise.

The stage for Operation Zero had been set and a million men would battle for the soul of the northern fringe of South America.

Footnotes

[1] The Boaventuras are a very religious family
[2] Fictional African American Admiral

 

[Night_stalker]

Ah, good to see this is back and updating once more.

 

[Mythopoeist]

I think "USBT" should be "USAT" unless you've decided to switch from Ambisexual back to Bisexual.