As for Indian history and this time period, I assume that a socialist/Communist-tinged Indian government would be concerned with the rights of the Dalits, which might attract the interest of a man named B.R. Ambedkar.
Although I wonder if B.R. Ambedkar is still going to be the same person here. Of course, it's possible given that MLK Jr. and Malcolm X were born almost a decade after real changes in this TL starts, that they're not even born, or if they are they are not the same people, although given that Arthur Schlesinger still exists and is still a historian, I'd like to imagine that they would still show up. After all, if snippets of a Bob Dylan song in universe can show up, and be very similar to one of his songs OTL ("All-American Blues" and "Talkin' John Birch Society Blues"), after all MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X being the same people would make sense. However, with the more socialist/Communist-tinged Indian independence movement and later government, I doubt they would be allowed to communicate with B.R. Ambedkar as they did OTL.
The Italian Revolution: Politics and Society in the New Italy
India: The Tragic Revolution
Proletarian Enlightenment: German Art and Architecture in the 1920s
1922: The Year of Blood and Lead
What can be expected of the Anglo-American menace, but that it will attempt to crush and to strangle all the fresh, healthy, collective life of the European peoples? Theirs is not a desire to contain social radicalism, or any such nonsense, but to establish a new imperium over the earth. One need not be red or white to say: no, we Europeans shall not consign ourselves to be the obedient underlings of a English Imperialism, we shall order our own affairs.
-Werner Sombart
The pustules of the red disease have embedded themselves in many peoples once thought to be mostly immune to this sickness, such that even now, men we previously considered reasonable, upright, and morally healthy are being gripped by a strange and overweening barbarism. It falls to the English-speaking peoples, whom have shown themselves to possess sufficient will to resist this pathology, to quarantine this sickness in its place, to declare: no further! And then we must hope that one day the rudiments of civilization will return to Europe.
-Oswald Spengler
And so Americans and Germans kill one another in the skies of France, and yet we continue to eat American wheat and American meat, and diplomats continue to exchange niceties in Berlin. Are we at war, or at peace? It does bear all the marks of war, though perhaps we would prefer not to say so. What a contrast from just a few years ago, when the enemies all had to be labelled and caricatured! Now German men bloody the fields of France and we studiously pretend to know nothing of it! Strange new world...
-Siegfried Kracauer
One could be forgiven for imagining that human civilization, having tired of its ordeal of bloodletting, had at last begun disembarking from its long nightmare to commence the hard task of reconstruction. The optimists found an abundance of pleasing portents in 1921: what was the sustained quiet across the Pacific, India, and France except so many signs that those embroiled in war had at last started to shirk from their ruinous vocation? The division of the world into competing blocs may be hardly sanguinary, but perhaps it would offer the basis for a diplomatic settlement between responsible powers.
Such were the hopes which floated like twilight smoke, intangible and powerless, above the iron laws and faultless logic stoking the world inferno. 1921 was not the denouement of the First Revolutionary Era but an intermission, a moment of temporary relief for the main players, who having gathered their strength and fixed their composure, readied themselves to make a final settlement. In Mindanao and Lucknow, in Vilnius and in Dijon, the guns of war thundered once again. Whole nations were put to the sword, and the forces of proletarian internationalism, having achieved stunning victories over the past two years, were forced to witness the frightful expansion in the destructive powers of the Anglo-American behemoth. The British Empire inexorably swelled, adding new territories and protectorates even while it battled for its existence in the Deccan plains. American industrial might, hampered by the depression, sprung back phoenix-like, buoyed by a rapidly metastasizing military complex. Spurred on by American diplomacy and American arms, a reactionary Balkan bloc began to coalesce. Predictions now abounded of a "second" Great War, a fresh cataclysm that would outdo the horrors of the last one…
Eastern Europe
The flow of American weapons and military advisors into Croatia and Romania fundamentally changed the nature of the Hungarian War. For some time, the leaders of the Council of Revolutionary States had been averse to supporting Karolyi, considering his regime nothing more than a relic of bourgeois social-chauvinism. Despite the support of the left-wing social democrats for the Hungarian government, the Revolutionary Council of State stuck firmly to its position of non-intervention throughout the winter of 1922. The German Revolutionary Social-Democrats were more sympathetic, and there is evidence that the Hungarian government was able to procure older weaponry at discounted costs from RSD-dominated Austria as early as January.
Growing indications of American involvement prompted another meeting of the Council of Revolutionary States in April. By this point, Czech forces had broken into Hungarian Slovakia, and Croatia was on the verge of swallowing what remained of Serbia. This imperiled the position of the Bulgarian revolutionaries, who had recently launched successful offensives into white territory in the east. The Bolshevik faction came around to arming the Hungarians, and over the summer increasing aid from IntRevMar flowed through Austria to Budapest. Unfortunately, it was far too little to salvage the Hungarian position. Following the capture of Belgrade in June and the beginning of the Serbian ethnocide, the Romanian army, the second-largest in the war, broke through several Carpathian mountain passes and streamed into Transylvania. A large Croatian offensive began shortly afterwards, recapturing Vojvodina and linking up with Romanian advance units around between Pecs and Szeged.
Ironically, the main victim of Hungary's imminent death (besides Hungary itself) was Poland. Pilsudski had long been suspected of harboring sympathies for the reactionary Croatian-Czech-Romanian bloc, and in June of 1922, German intelligence unveiled that a swathe of Czech Silesia had been ceded to Poland in 1921 in exchange for grain and weapons shipments. Thus far, the Polish Federation had permitted trade and soldiers to move between Germany and the Soviet Union free of charge, but if it ever became a hostile state, the land-link between the two main socialist powers would be cut off, creating a strategic vulnerability. In August, increasing economic and political pressure was placed on Pilsudski to bring Radek's socialists back into government, a prospect which Pilsudski feared would reduce Poland to a mere vassal of the larger socialist powers.
On the 16th of August, Pilsudski mobilized the Polish Army and marched it into the German province of Posen. He had little prospect of winning a long war against the socialist bloc, especially while his potential allies to the south were preparing to besiege Budapest. Yet a window of opportunity had emerged to cement Poland's independence: Germany was in the midst of a military reform process, transforming its professional army to a revolutionary militia, and the Soviets were currently engaged in a standoff with Japan over Sakhalin. A quick march to Berlin, he speculated, might shock the Germans into agreeing to a peace on reasonable terms.
At first, his gambit appeared to pay off. Assisted by Polish partisans in Posen, a stubborn white insurgency in East Prussia, and the disorganization of the German armed forces, Pilsudski seized a vast swathe of territory in the first week and a half of the war, including the cities of Danzig and Posen. Silesia proved a tougher net to crack; here, the red militias rallied quickly to the defense of the socialist republic, and the hoped-for Polish uprising did not materialize. The majority of the proletarian miners of Upper Silesia opted to fight against their ethnic brethren. Nonetheless, not just Kattowitz but Breslau as well fell by the end of the month, opening up the road to Berlin.
This was to be the kulminationspunkt of the Polish assault. Pilsudski had woefully underestimated the speed at which the Soviet Red Army could mobilize. Trotsky and Brusilov had implemented a series of ambitious military reforms following the lackluster performance of the Red Army in the Finnish Winter War, intended to give it a preponderance of power in any conflict in Eastern Europe. Almost immediately following the invasion of Posen, the Ukrainian and Northwestern theaters began mobilizing; after Poland ignored a Soviet ultimatum, the invasion of Lithuania and Polish Ukraine began. Numerically inferior and frequently poorly-trained Polish Confederation forces had little option but to retreat before the Soviet advance. Lithuanian nationals put up a valiant defense of Vilnius, which fell on the 30th; the "Ruthenian army" of the Polish Federation was a good deal less enthusiastic in the defense of Rivne and Lviv, with many mutinying to join the Ukrainian Red Army in its march into Galicia.
Facing an invasion of inner Poland, Pilsudski was forced to divert a sizable portion of his elite guard to the east. His offensive toward Berlin was halted well short of the city in mid-September, and with a massed German counterattack threatening to break what remained of his western army, he hastily sued for an armistice. There was some dispute in the socialist camp about whether this ought to be accepted. Most of the left-wing ministers in both Berlin and Moscow favored marching straight into Warsaw and installing a socialist government, but Lenin and some of the Revolutionary Social Democrats were skeptical about whether Poland was ready for a fully socialist administration. Pilsudski still undoubtedly commanded the allegiance of most Poles, and at this point, he appeared fully amenable to being made a puppet of the new International. He was therefore sent back with Radek to a much-reduced Poland stripped of Lithuania, much of East Galicia, and its Ukrainian and Belarusian territories. There are more than a few theories that this decision was informed by the distrust which both Lenin and Luxemburg had for the leader of the Polish left-socialists, Karl Radek, though there is no evidence that their attitudes toward the man figured into their calculations.
While the Polish imbroglio was sorted out through diplomacy, the nation of Hungary faced a far less ambiguous fate. Despite the pleas of Karolyi, there was no peace deal or armistice, but only a demand for unconditional surrender. Budapest was captured on September 12th, and Karolyi himself forced to sign a humiliating treaty that reduced Hungary to a diminished rump state. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians living in Vojvodina, Slovakia, and Romania were expelled by the new occupying powers. Karolyi was deposed, and a government of national salvation led by Miklos Horthy took his place. Horthy, an ultraconservative Navy Admiral, was widely seen as a puppet of Hungary's hated adversaries, and his government was sustained primarily by military force and repression.
Colonial Conflict and British Colonial Expansion
The basic tendencies of the First Revolutionary Era bore a complicated relationship to those of the Great War. From 1914-1919, European weakness became increasingly evident; each year, the Japanese and American economies grew as a proportion of the global total, and the Imperial Metropoles of London and Paris became dependent upon their backwards peripheries. British claims on American assets evaporated, and the center of world finance migrated over the Atlantic to New York following the abandonment of the gold standard. The Japanese intervention in China was only imaginable in a situation of extraordinary British weakness and imperial overstretch.
Yet while the First Revolutionary Era shattered the old empires of Europe, it did not bring about the end of European centrality in the world-system. In relative terms, Russian, British, and German power grew from 1920 to 1924. British economic might not only successfully reconstituted itself on a new industrial basis, but also adopted a fresh territorialist logic that won it control of the largest empire in human history, which at its height in 1928 encompassed more than a third of the world's total population. America, which may have otherwise used its immense financial-industrial power to discipline Britain, was initially dependent on British military might to ensure a proper cordon sanitaire was built around the Red Menace. Britain knew that this American dependency was not to last forever, and operating on a standard window-logic, engaged in a campaign of territorial aggrandizement while it still held a blank check. This only heightened American suspicions that Britain would soon form a Sterling bloc to protect its own manufacturing interests, thereby precipitating a renewed competition for the world's remaining markets.
British power, which had been damaged in absolute terms by the Great War, could only expand with such effortless ease because the French, Italian, Dutch and German Empires had been shattered by the revolutionary wave. Most of the German imperial territories had already been seized by the Entente during the war's first few years, and it was simple enough for British colonial administrators to step in and assume a benevolent guardianship over these lands. Italy, meanwhile, already struggled to administer Libya and defeat a partisan movement of rebels before the Great War; confined to the impoverished island of Sardinia, the weak Italian legitimist government had no hope of providing the reactionary Italian colonials sufficient arms and support to hold onto their bastions in the northern cities. Behind the back of their own government, the colonial governors of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania petitioned for British assistance - from there, it was a short road into being made a protectorate.
The Dutch East Indies shared a similar fate. The East Indies were dependent on British naval power even before the war, and the royal government-in-exile soon required more overt forms of British assistance to police labor unrest and a growing native insurgency. The installment of a British commissioner in 1922 was met with great alarm in America, but the foreign minister insisted that they did not intend to win any "special economic rights" in the East Indies. Nonetheless, the area had become a protectorate in all-but-name by the end of the First Revolutionary Era, and was increasingly integrated into British markets.
Perhaps the most explosive transformation of the existing colonial order occurred in the vast and unevenly developed French territories of North Africa, the Congo, Madagascar, and Indochina. The vast majority of colonial officials were loyal to Clemenceau's legitimists, but frequently found their administration understaffed. The Toulouse government simply did not have the fiscal capacity to maintain the colonies, and many of the underpaid colonial administrators left to either fight the reds or settle down in greener pastures, typically in either America or booming French Algeria. Some of the Central African territories, particularly those in the Sahel region, were so bereft of trained personnel that British expeditions were positively welcomed. As it became clear that ultrareactionary elements held the real power in Toulouse, some of the more liberal colonial officials, such as Abraham Schrameck in Madagascar, drifted into the British sphere voluntarily, while others looked to the Americans for support.
The situation of French Indochina was undoubtedly the most vexed and troubled. Seeing an opportunity to wrest back territories coerced from it at gunpoint by European diplomats, the Kingdom of Siam invaded the provinces of Laos and Cambodia in July. The governor at the time, Albert Sarraut, was no friend of Clemenceau's, and the Prime Minister's refusal to send soldiers from the home country to defend against the invasion enraged him; Sarraut speculated that this had to do with Clemeanceau's own previous criticism of French Imperialism, though it is more likely that the leader of Legitimist France simply felt as if he could not spare the resources to defend the distant colony. He suggested instead entering into negotiations with Siam over the territories. This Sarraut would not do; the threat of invasion had already rallied portions of the Vietnamese nation to the French flag, and Sarraut formed a conscript army to fight off the Thais. His major bottleneck was a lack of arms and artillery. Without a merchant marine necessary to procure them, he was forced to call for British assistance, which soon came with not only arms, but military advisors as well. This prompted accusations of treason by the reactionary catholics, but Sarraut, disdaining these types even more than Clemenceau, denounced their government as "illegitimate", even while continuing to pay them a portion of the colony's revenues, as was customary.
Sarraut was successful in stymying the Siamese invasion. Intended to be a fast, bloodless affair that would force a fait accompli on the colonial administration, it devolved into a protracted jungle war. While most Laotians and Cambodians felt no especial loyalty to French Indochina, the behavior of the Siamese troops spurred local peasant opposition and helped provide the first building-blocks of an Indochinese identity. The Siamese Army was frustrated by guerilla resistance and the fanatical defense of a largely Vietnamese conscript army in Cambodia, though they had greater success to the north, in Laos. By the end of 1922, the Thai government decided to enter into negotiations, though Sarraut's demands, which included the cession of additional Thai territories, prevented any peace from being made in the immediate future.
Ethiopia engaged in a more successful campaign of military adventurism. Under pressure from a modernizing, progressive faction behind the Regent Lij Tafari (eventually Haile Selassie I), the conservative Empress Zewditu ordered the Ethiopian Army into Italian Eritrea. This was a border region of countless previous Ethiopian Empires, and was felt by most of the ruling elite to be rightfully Ethiopian. With little Italian presence left by 1922, it turned out to be a relatively simple matter to occupy the territory, but sectarian religious tensions were never far away. Later in the year the British Somaliland protectorate was unceremoniously extended over its Italian and French counterparts; the anxious officials were sufficiently worried about the prospect of an Ethiopian invasion to sign away their sovereignty.
America looked on this silent expansion of British imperial power with great wariness, and sought assurances that in the post-revolutionary era, there would be a return to a free trade regime and that colonies would be yielded back to their original masters or to new, native-led governments. Not without a certain logic, the British replied that this latter matter was not entirely up to them, as these colonies possessed leadership that was typically not "british" in character. As for the matter of trade, Churchill insisted that any such negotiations be put off until the French conflict was settled (and thus until it could be guaranteed that the British loans to France could be repaid). America had little option but to reluctantly assent.
The Pacific War and the Lucknow Offensive
The final ten months of 1921 were some of the quietest in a war between two major powers. No major naval battles, no storming of the Japanese positions, no rumored Japanese assault on Hawaii took place during this long interlude. This is not to say that nothing happened. The Japanese did seize Wake Island in April, an event that was not much reported on in the press. They did not, however, advance any further into the Pacific; Midway was too distant a prize, and Hawaii far too ambitious a goal while the Americans still possessed such a crushing disparity of naval force.
Perhaps most importantly, each side spent time building up fortifications and naval bases. The rudimentary naval station in Pearl Harbor was expanded at breakneck speed, and America nationalized the Merchant Marine with an eye to conscripting a portion of the fleet to serve on logistics duty. New cruisers were laid down at existing dockyards, and when these reached their limits, fresh dockyards were built. Heavy industry began recovering.
The Japanese were not sitting idly by. Mindful of America's desire to intervene in Europe, a strategy of defense and attrition was settled upon by the military command. Coastal fortifications were built up in Manila, Iwo Jima, and the Marianas Islands. Efforts were made to consolidate control over the more rural regions of the Philippines, a task never fully completed owing to the fierce resistance of guerillas.
By 1922, the American public had begun to voice doubts about the direction of the war, especially after Japan publicized several peace offers which included the return of the Philippine Islands. Britain still refused to offer assistance until the planned Lucknow Offensive in August, which rendered any attempt to retake the Philippines before then impractical. Hoping for some positive propaganda, it was decided to begin an "island hopping campaign" across Micronesia a few months ahead of schedule. In February and March, marines recaptured Wake Island and several of the Japanese Marshall Islands after brief but bloody battles against small local garrisons.
Japan had no means to reliably resupply soldiers this far out from the mainland without putting their own naval forces at undue risk, and they constructed their primary line of defense from Luzon through Formosa to Okinawa, with an outer ring in Iwo Jima and Saipan. The decision to not fully garrison the newly-acquired Marshall and Caroline Islands has been criticized by certain Japanese military historians, who believe that much greater losses could have been inflicted on American soldiers if more stout resistance was offered here, but the Navy refused to risk the battlefleet on resupply missions.
Hence over the summer, America successfully seized not just the Marshall, but also most of the Caroline Islands, as well as the strategically situated Palau, which was the site of the most brutal battle of the war so far. American losses steadily mounted in this campaign, but still numbered no more than 10,000 casualties, prompting some to speculate about whether Japan may have left most of its army in China. In reality, the islands won were of no great strategic value, as they lacked naval or logistics facilities which could aid in the planned invasion of the Phillippines. Building them up would require at least another half-year. The naval command therefore hoped fervently for British victory in the coming Lucknow Offensive, which the government did their best to secure through the generous provision of excess airplanes and landships to Britain.
William Birdwood was placed in charge of this operation, which was the largest and most ambitious of the entire Anglo-Indian war. 250,000 British infantrymen supplemented by an additional 200,000 Indian auxiliaries gathered in the loyal princely states of Central India. They were to fan out in two formations to seize the cities of Kanpur and Allahabad, and then converge on Lucknow, the heart of the United Provinces. In contrast to Bengal, Punjab, and Bombay, the various zamindars and local elites of the United Provinces had shown little enthusiasm for the INC government; the military forces billeted there, largely of Bengali origin, aroused frequent ire from the local population. Despite this, control of the U.P. was crucial for the Republic, as it linked together the two real heartlands of rebellion, Bengal and Punjab.
The British aimed to sever this lifeline and cut the territory of Republican India in two; this would also starve the Bengalis of Soviet supplies, which had swelled worryingly over the past year. Opposing the British force was an army of around 280,000 Republican soldiers under the command of several great war veterans. Growing factionalism within the INC government and peasant discontent made conscription more difficult, a problem that could not be redressed through the importation of additional Russian rifles. To the west, the sizable Army of Punjab was occupied with the invading Afghan army of Amunullah Khan, who had finally agreed to attack the INC government following border clashes with the Soviets, while a massive but poorly-trained conscript army was stationed to the east, in Bihar.
The British attacking forces were bolstered by the presence of American-supplied landships and aircraft. Having achieved both numerical and technological superiority along the front, Indian lines were broken through with relative ease. Markedly less partisan and guerilla resistance was encountered than in previous offensives. Allahabad and Kanpur were captured within operational deadlines, and the reeling Indian Army struggled to halt the British strategic initiative. British landships converging on Lucknow shattered the exhausted defenders of the city, encircling 45,000 soldiers in the process. They soon drove up to Nepal, cutting the remaining Republican territory in two and isolating Bengal, Bihar, and Assam. An attempt to drive east met with less success when units from the Army of Bihar met advancing Indian auxiliaries outside the Republican stronghold of Benares; they inflicted enough casualties on the soldiers to force them into a headlong retreat.
As a whole, the offensive was a resounding success for British Indian forces, and likely sealed the death warrant of the fledgling Republic, which did not have the means to eject their adversary from the United Provinces. Confident that the crown jewel of the Empire would be reconquered in full, the British now gave the go-ahead for American troops to begin disembarking in Singapore, North Borneo, and French Indochina. British diplomats prevaricated for as long as possible, but it was impossible to hide the arrival of entire American divisions on British territories. Britain's decision shocked and enraged the Japanese government; they had known for some time that Britain would not take their side in a conflict with the Americans, but they did not imagine that they would ever have to count them as an enemy. Perfidious Albion had struck again. The leading Japanese newspapers excoriated the British for placing white racial solidarity before the accumulated diplomatic handiwork of decades.
Yet amidst the diatribes of nationalistic outrage, there was an undercurrent of trembling unease. How could Japan find itself in this situation? In 1919, near the end of the Great War, the nation had stood astride the world, its manufacturing industries booming, its exports the envy of all peoples, its navy an indispensable aid to the British in the mediterranean, and its sphere of influence set to steadily expand in China. Japan had entered the conflict as a custodian of peace and civilization, seeking to secure for itself a place among the world's great powers; now these same powers were arrayed against it. Japanese industries, which had eked out a precarious existence over the past two years, now stood at risk of collapse as its trading partners evaporated.
Some looked back to the ministership of Hara Takashi. He had been made Prime Minister after nationwide riots, and proferred inflated promises for democracy and reform. Food prices were brought down, but universal manhood suffrage was never implemented. Takashi had been unable to contain the Japanese military in its bellicose drive into China, and incapable of devising a means to avert a war with a far larger and more powerful nation. Takashi's cabinet fell shortly after the invasion of the Philippines; he was followed by a succession of ministers from his own Seiyukai party, who were each unceremoniously sacked after showing insufficient obeisance to the military-navy-industrial complex. Eventually, a purely aristocratic-military cabinet was formed, with Tanaka Giichi, a Japanese general, at its head. This was enormously unpopular at a time when Japanese mass party politics had finally begun clawing some power from the insular, oligarchic elite.
The national emergency of war provided the cabinet with some cover from newspaper accusations that it represented a "sliding back of Japan's journey to democracy". So long as this war was being conducted successfully, the military government could present itself as the saviors of Japan. On September 14th, they proclaimed the Anglo-Japanese alliance dissolved and declared war on the United Kingdom. Determined to exact revenge, an expedition was sent to seize the port of Hong Kong on the 22nd. Anticipating such a move, the British had already reinforced the island. Around 4,500 Japanese troops were able to land on the island, but the rest were turned back after an American cruiser squadron operating out of Singapore ambushed several poorly defended troop transports. The 4,000 Japanese troops were outnumbered by the British defenders, and also found themselves fighting against a Chinese Army stationed in the area; many of the same soldiers who initially participated in the invasion of Hong Kong now found themselves fighting to defend it from the Japanese. No attempt was made to salvage the situation of the stranded Japanese marines, and most were either captured or killed by the end of the month. More murmurs of discontent spread among the Japanese press. The mayor of Tokyo and "Father of Japanese Constitutional politics" Yukio Ozaki spoke before the Japanese Diet and reproached the incompetent Giichi ministry for its monumental military and diplomatic blunders. He received applause from both the minority Kensekai faction and many Seikuyai parliamentarians who had soured on the government. Shortly thereafter, nearly half of the conservative Seikuyai delegation split from the party to form a new political club, the Seiyuhonto.
The war, of course, went on. In October, the invasion of the Philippines began as American troops operating out of bases in Micronesia, Singapore, and French Indochina landed on Mindanao and the Visayan Islands. Here, the Japanese had much more success; British entry into the war did not change the calculus of forces in this theater, and over a year had been spent preparing for an American invasion. The Japanese fleet was still intact, and in fact growing; the outgunned navy refused to engage in the desired "decisive battle", instead dispersing itself to engage in ambushes. This strategy now bore fruit. Despite the best efforts of American planners to secure sufficient escorts for the American troop and resupply convoys, several were attacked by superior Japanese forces, throwing the invasion logistics into disarray. Japanese defenders in well-entrenched positions used their fortifications and interior lines of communication to devastating effect. More American soldiers were killed within the first week of the Second Battle of the Philippines than in the entirety of the Pacific War thus far. This created a public relations disaster for the Root administration.
American casualties only mounted over the next few months. The planned invasion of Luzon had to be delayed until 1923. American officers were aghast to discover that the famed Phillippine Guerilla movement was just as hostile to American as it was to Japanese soldiers; the countryside quickly turned into a no-man's land, forcing the American government to commit more soldiers to counterinsurgency, garrison, and police work. Nonetheless, some progress was made by the end of the year. Three of the Visayan Islands fell under American control. Despite the fierce resistance of the Muslim Moro peoples, all of the major towns in Mindanao were secured. The Japanese, in fact, were rebuffed somewhat more easily; after being ousted from their defensive positions and forced into the rural backwoods, few of the soldiers were heard or seen from again. They too, succumbed to the Philippine Guerillas.
The French Civil War
In 1922, renewed fighting erupted in the French Civil War after a year of relative quiet. Each of the combatants had grown increasingly dependent on their benefactors, and political leaders on both sides felt pressure from their allies to resume the offensive. In Revolutionary France, it was only Soviet-German food shipments that prevented a famine in 1921, while the Legitimists, who controlled only a small fraction of France's manufacturing base, required a continuous flow of American arms and ammunition to stay in the fight.
The benefactors anxiously waited for a return on their investment. The International Union of Revolutionary Marxists worried over the expanding presence of American pilots and landships in Legitimist France; one had to strike before the American behemoth recovered fully, and it was too late. The Americans adopted a similar logic, urging the legitimists to take the offensive before the revolutionaries could convert their demographic advantage into a military one.
The whites struck first. Rather than march into the heavily fortified Loire Valley, the white army proceeded east toward Dijon. Taking the city would cut the main artery between Paris and Lyon. Despite extensive planning for the operation, it failed to achieve the element of surprise; Soviet intelligence was already embedded deep within Legitimist France. American firepower provided the means to achieve an initial breakthrough, but it could not be sustained indefinitely. Legitimist air superiority was challenged by volunteer pilots from Germany and Italy. For the first time in the war, most aerial engagements were not between Frenchmen but between Germans and Americans. The conflict was being internationalized.
The resounding failure of the Dijon offensive marked the end of Petain's generalship. Clemenceau's right-wing opponents went on the attack, and the embattled Prime Minister was forced to concede to the opposition. General Del Castelnau, a right-wing Catholic who was also the unofficial leader of a paramilitary movement, was placed in charge of the Army. His nomination was bolstered by the favor he won from the American diplomatic corps, who admired him for his simplicity and directness. Castelnau was clearly a man of the right, and his fervent catholicism had likely prevented him from being promoted in the Great War, despite his distinguished service. Now, his religiosity became an asset, especially when paired with his refusal to become involved in the factional disputes between individual right-wing factions. He was a man almost everyone - or at least, almost everyone besides Clemenceau and his loyalists - could approve of.
At the urging of their anarchist and syndicalist allies, the Reds began their offensive out of the Rhone Valley. The main goal was to retake Marseille. If successful, this would be a great symbolic victory for revolutionary france, avenging the white massacre of 1920. It would also cut off a major point of entry for American aid. Normally, the mountainous terrain in the region would have made a frontal assault difficult, but over the summer, the Italian government massed the majority of its militia army in the western alps, prompting fears of an intervention. Legitimist France was forced to transfer troops to the border, while a new model of German landship provided the French advance out of Lyon with a heavily-armored spearhead. The attack toward Grenoble achieved a level of operational surprise, while another toward Valence plodded on slowly. Grenoble fell on August 15th, encircling 8,000 legitimists. The fall of Valence three days later stirred hopes that Marseille was still within reach, but the quick arrival of several American "volunteer" divisions sufficed to halt the armored spearhead toward Avignon. Italy retaliated for this overt intervention by ordering its army to occupy the cities of Nice and Cannes.
The failure of both major offensives led some to think about an armistice. Clemenceau, an exhausted and beaten man, mooted the prospect of peace to his cabinet. Soldier's councils in Paris endorsed a resolution calling for negotiations. However, few could imagine what peace might look like. While some thought that the division of France into two separate states had become an inevitability, most believed this was an unacceptable solution. Yet the internationalization of the conflict would make any post-war "national unity" government exceedingly unstable. America had already soured on Clemenceau after learning of his peace proposal, and plans were afoot to replace the increasingly powerless prime minister. In the north, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard had to deal with the spiralling demands of the soldier's councils, which requested an ever-growing share of the national income. Utterly reliant on the army for the tasks of both war and domestic peacekeeping, he had little option but to meet their requests, though this made it more difficult to feed and clothe the home front. Tensions between the worker's and soldier's of the French worker and soldier's republic were soon to balloon out of control.
1922. Hmmm. If I remember right at about this time, a Romanian Jewish couple living in New York City welcome a baby boy who will one day grow up to write stories about heroes whose powers are beyond those known by man.
Excellent update, as per usual. Interesting to see that Japan likely won't be nearly as humbled as they were post-WWII ITTL, and so likely will be the major capitalist opponent to Anglo-American interests.
So the Filipinos decided to go for independence once again instead of going for Ricarte's pan-Asianism. I wonder if this insurgency is closer to a neo-Katipunan rather than a HUKBALAHAP-style movement.
Was Ho Chi Min and an Indochina independence movement not sufficiently developed by the 20's to contest British takeovers? I suppose with French civil war going hard he won't be making the kind of revolutionary contacts you get by gate crashing Versailles.
Things are looking bleak in India but hopefully Nehru or someone is radicalized into fighting a 20 year communist gorilla war.
I suspect they're going to be just straight-up crushed, but that the British will learn the lesson of endless brutality and iron-fisted rule, meaning that the next time their grip slips it'll be that much worse.
To be clear here, and apologies for double-posting, iron-fisted brutality does actually work! It will successfully keep there from being revolts or so on. The problem is that the moment the grip loosens, the moment they try to return to "normality" or whatnot, that's when dictators often have real problems.
Also it's usually pretty expensive, so that's a separate problem.
Red Republic: The Political and Institutional Foundations of the New ItalyNew
Red Republic: The Political and Institutional Foundations of the New Italy
Lenin asked Borghi if he were opposed to the Centralism of the Bolsheviks, to which he replied: "You have that right. How could any anarchist be in favour of Centralism"? To which Lenin retorted: "Freedom cannot be the death of the revolution." Borghi countered with: "In the absence of freedom, the revolution itself would be a horror."
-Conversation purportedly overheard at the 1st meeting of the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists
Anarchy is synonymous with Socialism. Because both signify the abolition of exploitation and of the domination of man over man, whether maintained by the force of arms or by the monopolization of the means of life.
-Enrico Malatesta
The point of Modernity is to live without illusions without becoming disillusioned.
-Antonio Gramsci
Excerpts from Aurelio Chessa, Italy: Liberal Kingdom to Socialist Republic (Rome, 1964)
Much like its more populous counterpart to the north, the institutional structure of the Italian polity was determined both by the failures of the bourgeois state which preceded it and by its particular configuration of revolutionary forces. These were far more plural than in most other socialist states. The Italian Socialist Party never held anything close to a monopoly of working-class support, and in the prewar era, only a small fraction of the working-class was affiliated with socialist-aligned trade unions. War contributed to an extraordinary growth in their membership, but in relative terms, they were outpaced by the syndicalist USI (Unione Sindacale Italiana). In the year and a half-long period preceding the November revolution, non-marxist radicals successfully outflanked the socialists, and a wave of workers defected from the traditional socialist unions. Ousted from its position of hegemony in the Italian left, the socialists were forced to conciliate with other tendencies; as the most outspoken proponent of such a strategy, leadership of the party fell to Antonio Gramsci in the summer of 1919.
The platform endorsed by the Gramscians emphasized the worker-councils as the basis of the revolution, and called for permanent industrial militancy to win worker's control of production. Here, the policy of the "broad worker's front" was first explicitly formulated; the vanguardist party would collaborate with all truly proletarian social forces if their interests aligned. The ultra-left Bordigists reluctantly agreed to these measures: they were conscious that it had thus far been the anarchists and syndicalists who had acted as the advance spearhead of the worker's struggle, and were chastened by this realization into temporarily adopting a strategy of collaboration.
Liberal Italy was in a terminal state of crisis, with its cabinets recycled on a monthly basis and its leaders casting bitter incriminations at each other. The grand nation-building project of the Italian Liberals, the project of risorgimento, had ended in a humiliating treaty which permitted the indefinite occupation of Venetia by Austrian soldiers and forced the Italian state into harsh financial austerity to pay for reparations. Fiscal retrenchment meant that any efforts to forge a social peace were likely doomed in advance.
In this situation, it is perhaps unsurprising that Gramsci's "broad front" soon encompassed significant sections of the middle-class and rural population. Tepid efforts at land reform were not sufficient to placate the peasants of southern and central italy, and reformist attempts to negotiate wage-disputes merely exacerbated rising inflation. Over the summer, rural unrest in Central and Southern Italy exploded as peasants took it upon themselves to expropriate the estates. Middle-class elements and demobilized soldiers disillusioned with the liberal order flocked to revolutionary syndicalism.
The November Revolution turned the social war into a civil one. The "industrial triangle" of Milan, Genoa, and Turin fell to the revolutionaries in the first week of fighting. Anarchists in Apulia and Central Italy wreaked havoc on white supply lines. Gramsci's broad front policy was reaffirmed when the leaders of the nascent revolutionary state met in Milan and agreed to merge their assorted militias into an army, though Malatesta's "black brigades" largely fell outside the unified chain of command.
There was also the matter of the catholics. The Catholic Popular People's Party, formed in 1918 to contest the parliamentary elections, had won broad support amongst the smallholder peasantry in Central and Southern Italy. Many genuinely revolutionary elements of the body politic could be found in its rank-and-file. Even before the revolution, mid-ranking party activists were already advocating for a tactical alliance between left-catholics and socialists. Yet the party leadership had ties to the Vatican, and was predictably of a more conservative bent. The right-wing, led by Alcide de Gasperi, denounced the revolutionary upheaval and supported the legitimist government. The party left, however, refused to take sides in the civil war, declaring a "pox on both their houses". When the anarchist army marched on Rome, in a bid to prevent the outright destruction of the catholic church bureaucracy, the left-wing priest Luigi Sturzo declared his support for the revolutionary government. He was soon joined by Ernesto Buonaiuti, Romolo Murri, and Giorgio La Piana.
While the anticlerical anarchists and ultra-left bordigists were naturally united in opposition to catholic participation in the revolutionary government, the other factions took a more pragmatic approach. Gramsci favored an alliance with the catholics, not least to sideline the increasingly influential anarchist faction of Armando Borghi, which controlled the powerful USI. Mainline syndicalists led by Alceste De Ambris were willing to tentatively welcome the catholics into the fold on the condition that a new papacy be installed. However, the provisional executive committee remained deadlocked on the issue until the mass peasant revolts in 1921 convinced them of Sturzo's loyalty to the revolutionary project.
The Ideological Camps of the Early Republic
By the end of the Civil War, at least five distinct ideological tendencies had emerged with unique power bases and leaders. Firstly, there was the revolutionary socialism of Gramsci, situated in the new center of the Italian Socialist Party. This workerist form of council-communism most closely resembled the right-wing, pragmatist wing of the German Luxemburgists, though they retained a somewhat more libertarian outlook. The Gramscians desired a unitary state run by delegates from worker's councils. Contemptuous of revisionists and radicals alike, they believed in a steady path toward socialism which would involve a mixture of economic planning and market incentives. Generally speaking, Gramscians favored building as broad a tent as possible, but were skeptical of the ultra-radicalism of anarchists and bordigists. They were distinguished from other parties of the "new European centre" by an especially assertive and thoroughgoing embrace of proletarian internationalism. The counteroffensive of socialist trade unions in early 1921 won the Gramscian faction a plurality at the initial all-Italian congress of worker and peasant's delegates, but they found themselves outmanuevered by an unexpected coalition of opponents. Nonetheless, the Gramscians would be key players in all of the early governments of the republic.
The next largest faction were the anarchists of Armando Borghi and Errico Malatesta. Despite Malatesta's influence as a theorist, it was Borghi, as general secretary of the USI, who occupied a dominant position. Borghi also demonstrated a greater degree of pragmatism, especially in his willingness to work alongside the socialists and even, at times, the catholics. The close relationship between the two men likely delayed an inevitable split, but there were more than a few anarchists who accused Borghi of being a closet syndicalist from the very beginning of the Italian Worker and Peasant's Republic.
The anarchists, of course, favored a highly decentralized political system, and sought from the very beginning to strip the federal government of its powers. They also pushed particularly firmly for a national militia to replace Italy's army, a highly popular policy which nonetheless ended up having disastrous consequences for Italy's military readiness. In short, the anarchists left an enduring imprint on the politics of Italy, and a number of the main differences with the German and Soviet systems are directly attributable to their influence.
The "third force" of the early republic were the catholics. The remaining political factions, such as the right-wing syndicalists, ultra-left bordigists, and the rump of the reformist and left-centrist socialists were inconsequential compared to the "big three" (catholics, socialists, and anarchists). The reconstituted Catholic Popular People's Party named itself the Union of Catholic Socialists, and allied itself to the new red papacy in Rome. The beleaguered catholics became some of the staunchest defenders of traditional liberal rights, which they considered the main bulwark against left-radical anticlericalism. They also frequently aligned with the anarchists on issues of regionalism and federalism. Opposed to both cultural revolution and workerist conceptions of socialism, they were natural reformists and incrementalists; many of the welfare programs of the republic's early years were formulated either by catholics or in cooperation with them. They were especially popular in rural areas and among women and the elderly. Despite their quite genuine support in the country-side, the catholics were the political bloc most frequently in the minority, and it took some time before they could credibly rebut allegations that they were a counterrevolutionary fifth column.
Situated at the opposite end of the spectrum were the followers of Amadeo Bordiga's ultra-left communists. They held off on splitting with the socialists - who soon renamed themselves the Italian Party of Revolutionary Marxists - because they lacked support in the broader trade union and council movement. This would eventually change, but initially they operated as a pressure group on Gramsci's left, checking his penchant for opportunism. Calls for a revolutionary reorganization of the Italian economy and the introduction of Luxemburgist-style central planning were unable to make much progress, though they had more success as early proponents of European Federalism. Their clout grew considerably as Bordiga's ideas spread across Europe and a new generation of intellectuals grew critical of the perceived sclerosis in the Gramsci ministries. The Bordigists also resolved to carry out a "decisive break" with the anarchists, which principally meant shattering the power of the USI and using the power of the state to crack down on anarchist organizing. Gramsci shared their distaste for the anarchists despite his "broad front" policy of 1919, but was unwilling to employ such radical measures against the opposition. Of course, Bordiga's proposals were unacceptable to many in the republic who accepted anarchist participation in the political system as a given, but he did find some unexpected allies among the right-wing socialists. It is to them we now turn.
The socialist reformists and previous syndicalist leadership of the USI found themselves in a similar situation in 1919: tarred for their support of the war, banished from their positions of power, and overrun by previously marginal leftist radicals. Right-wing syndicalists such as De Ambris found some success in mustering up patriotic outrage against Austrian reparations, but his calls to restart the war were met primarily by laughter and derision. Reformist and left-centrist socialists, meanwhile, found themselves utterly out of touch with the mood of the rank-and-file; their complete loss of support amongst party activists doomed their position in 1919. Each group sent disappointingly small delegations to the All-Union Congress, and in an effort to shore up their numbers, they entered into cooperation. Gramsci finally expelled the right-flank in late 1921, shortly after the conclusion of the Third Internationale; unable to wrest back control of the USI, the syndicalists joined them in a small grouping of "Socialist Republicans". Though initially tiny and powerless, they won increased support in the next few years as middle-class participation in the new regime rebounded. Ideologically, they adhered to a corporatist version of Mazzinian Republicanism, and were consistently the most bellicose and jingoistic section of the All-Italian Congress. Their wish for a war with Croatia was eventually fulfilled, though the government was less willing to commit to its extensive plan of annexations.
The 1st All-Italian Congress and the Drafting of the Basic Law
In the summer of 1921, the first All-Italian Congress met in the provisional capital of Turin to draft the basic law of the new republic. The decision to host the congress here, in the northern stronghold of socialist unionism, had been an early victory for Gramsci, but he was to quickly find himself outmaneuvered by the opposition. In a historical irony that recalled Hegel's "cunning of reason", Gramsci's own attempt to bring the catholics into the political system to limit anarchist power had precisely the opposite effect. Of course, the alliance which brought together Catholics and Anarchists was not to last; it was broken later that year, in fact, when Gramsci invited the Catholic Socialists into government. But it would have an enduring impact on the political institutions of the new republic.
Composition of the First All-Italian Congress
Party/Faction
Delegates
%
Italian Socialist Party (Gramscian)
272
32
Italian Socialist Party (Bordigist)
34
4
Italian Socialist Party (Right-wing)
25
3
Anarchists
238
28
Union of Catholic Socialists
204
24
Revolutionary Syndicalists
76
9
There were some crucial points of consensus. The vast majority of delegates agreed that they could not repeat the "German mistake", which was heartily mocked by participants of every ideological stripe as typical teutonic excess: what manner of madman would enshrine dual-power as a positive principle of government? Of course, the Italians had their own problems. Even though they agreed on the need for a "pure" council republic, the councils were not nearly as widespread in Italy as elsewhere; trade-unions, in fact, had expanded at a faster clip than the councils themselves, owing largely to the weakness of the Italian state in regulating and suppressing them. Yet the Gramscians, anarchists, and bordigists alike denounced the notion of making the trade unions the basis of the new polity. Even the syndicalists weren't overly enthused by the idea; after all, they had lost control of their own unions to the anarchists!
Eventually, the delegates settled on a compromise solution: the new basis of the state would be the Camera del Lavor. These "Chambers of Labor" were originally affiliated with the main socialist trade union, the CGT, but they quickly grew into autonomous organizations. They became centers of social life for working-class communities, and also disbursed funds and assistance to strikers. Typically, leadership of the regional chambers was determined both by the composition of nearby unions and the dominant tendencies of local left-wing organizers. The chambers coordinated the massive protest wave at the beginning of the Great War, and were increasingly run by anarchists and syndicalists.
The Congress planned to fold regional administrations into the Camera del Lavor, and establish new ones where necessary. The Camera would also be responsible for appointing delegates to the All-Italian Congress, which would act as the supreme legislative body for Italy. This legislative body would directly appoint an executive, much like in the German system. Each Camera would have its leadership determined by votes in local trade unions, peasant leagues, worker-councils, and municipal committees. The first three would vary in proportion to the workers present in each, while the latter would remain fixed at 30%.
This solved the most basic issue of institutional design, but disagreements persisted about the true role of the Camera. The anarchists wanted to miniaturize and empower them, and proposed establishing hundreds of new chambers of labour across Italy to ensure an unbreakable connection between workers and the new bodies; naturally, the Gramscians considered this a recipe for chaos, and instead envisioned them as little more than regional councils which would appoint delegates to the all-important All-Italian Congress. When the catholics joined the anarchists in vetoing the Gramscian proposal, it became clear that it did not have the necessary support. It now fell to the opposition to sketch a robust alternative.
What emerged was, of course, a compromise. The Chambers of Labour were to take on a crucial administrative-political role in governance, but certain essential functions would remain the purview of the All-Italian Congress. While additional Chambers would be created, they would act as engines of regionalism rather than localism. Each Camera would be allowed, within limits, to determine its own composition: with the approval of a democratic, region-wide vote, a chamber could choose to reduce or to increase the share of members appointed by municipalities. They would also be empowered to recall appointed delegates and call elections at any time of their choosing.
The Central Government's freedom of maneuver was hamstrung by the federalist basic law. In order to engage in large-scale economic planning, cultural revolution, or any other "grand project", it would need to secure the assent of key Chambers of Labour. This arrangement certainly helped create a federal government uniquely attentive to the needs of particular regions, but it also likely contributed to a certain tendency for deadlock and institutional inertia in the early republic, which would only be fully resolved with later reforms which revised the balance of power between the camera and the central government.
Nonetheless, the libertarian and anti-statist proclivities of Italian worker's culture left a lasting mark on the basic structure of the Italian polity. The "cooperative federalism" of the Italian system persists into the present, and has recently become a model for new socialist states with highly uneven regional development and significant populations of national minorities. Today, Italy's council and trade union elections have the highest participation rates in the entire socialist sphere, and more Italians serve in government at some point in their life than in any other nation on earth. Political scientists attribute this to Italy's wide-ranging institutions of participatory democracy, as well as to the continuing importance of municipialism and regionalism in Italian political culture.
Camera Del Lavoro Elections and the First Gramsci Ministry
The 1st Congress of the Republic dispersed after adopting the basic law. Over three months, an additional twenty-five Camera del Lavor were established - at first, many of them were little more than rechristened administrative buildings. Elections were delayed until the end of the Third International, and took place amidst another feverish socialist campaign to win back the industrial laborers who had defected to anarchist and syndicalist unions. Gramsci had made it his mission to force the anarchists into a purely ancillary role. The policy of the "broad front", which sanctioned a temporary alliance with the anarchists to achieve revolution, ceased to apply now that proletarian power had been secured.
Despite the best efforts of the socialists, however, Borghi and Malatesta's anarchists won a little over a quarter of the delegates to the 2nd Congress, and also achieved outright victories in the camera of Genoa, Apulia, and Romagna. To form a national government which excluded the anarchists, Gramsci was forced to enter into coalition with the catholic-socialists, something which had already been accomplished in the regions of Lazio and Umbria. This was perhaps the natural culmination of Gramsci's voluntarist version of Marxism: long an opponent of "free thought", "naive positivism", and the entire tradition of Italian liberal anticlericalism, Gramsci now forged the first "alliance of hammer and crucifix".
Control of Italian Chambers of Labour Light Red: Socialist
Dark Red: Socialist/Anarchist Coalition
Black: Anarchist
Orange: Socialist-Catholic Coalition
Blue: Catholic
The new government's first task was the rationalization of economic life. For Gramsci and the socialists, this principally meant formalizing the worker's "prefigurative" institutions as the new basis of the economy. The most important of these were the producer's cooperatives and the factory committees. Revolutionary expropriations were given a legal basis, and the producer's cooperative made the primary unit of the new economy. In a rare show of unity with the Camera, Gramsci agreed to concentrate tremendous financial power in a network of community and municipal banks controlled by the chambers of labour; these would still, however, need to compete for grants from a central bank.
Gramsci was a critic of the statist socialism embraced by Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks. While Lenin believed that the cartelization of the wartime German economy paved the way for socialism, Gramsci argued that the massive industrial agglomerations of the 1910s represented a step back for worker's power. Markets were necessary tools to calibrate prices, though systematic guardrails must be instituted to limit their more corrosive effects and restrain the hegemony of "market-logic". Hence producer's cooperatives were allowed to buy and trade with one another, but were also subject to the control and sanction of their Camera del Lavor; in practice, this meant that economic planning, when it occurred, happened at the regional and local level. Enterprises which desired capital were required to prove the "use-value" of their products to local communities; unsurprisingly, this soon created complicated relations of patronage, though it did have the effect of limiting overly speculative businesses and ensuring close links between cooperatives and the municipalities they served.
Italy's new government also pushed for closer economic and political relations with its more thoroughly industrialized northern neighbor. Britain, Italy's main commercial partner since the Risorgimento, did not institute any explicit embargo, but the supply of most key British imports nonetheless mysteriously "dried up" in 1920. German coal allowed Italian industries to continue functioning, but these purchases came at a heavy cost. Gramsci, long influenced by the "free trade socialists" of the 19th century, hoped to regularize interstate commerce by entering into a customs union with Germany, and even mooted the building of a new railway through the alps. These endeavors were supported by an unusually large proportion of the Italian body politic: Bordigists, Anarchists, and even Catholics were interested in pursuing European confederation. It thus represented a natural avenue for the new government to explore: here, political capital could be won rather than expended.
At first, there was resistance to the idea in Germany. Having already established close economic ties with the Soviet Union, some in the Revolutionary Worker's Front worried that the confederative project would flood Germany with cheap consumer goods, harming local industries. Italy was also far less willing to accede to military cooperation, which was the main demand of the Germans; the deeply antimilitarist tenor of Italian politics at the time was only partially matched in Germany, and the catholics and anarchists in particular worried about being drawn into a new global war. Halting, incremental progress was nonetheless made: in 1922, a trade deal was signed removing tariffs on most heavy-industrial goods, and in 1923 the first set of new transalpine railway lines were laid in Venetia and Tyrol. The foreign ministers of Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands signed a memorandum in early 1924 expressing their commitment to creating a common market - this was perhaps the first real step toward European Federalism, though it was only the beginning act of a long saga. Notes
I want to thank @PrognosticHannya for helping me brainstorm ideas for this post, especially regarding the red papacy and left-catholics.
To form a national government which excluded the anarchists, Gramsci was forced to enter into coalition with the catholic-socialists, something which had already been accomplished in the regions of Lazio and Umbria. This was perhaps the natural culmination of Gramsci's voluntarist version of Marxism: long an opponent of "free thought", "naive positivism", and the entire tradition of Italian liberal anticlericalism, Gramsci now forged the first "alliance of hammer and crucifix".
Hmm, it honestly does probably mean that on at least some issues we'd define now as having to do with "social progressivism" they might have greater impediments therein for at least some of the issues.
There will be an entire post dedicated to the Red Papacy, to be written by a collaborator! I've intentionally kept things vague here since they're still filling things in.
I wonder if it would be plausible for the Papacy to just...be abolished. Like the Caliphate was just around this time IOTL.
Hell, I've wondered if that could've been possible as far back as 1870, when the pope, like the Ottoman Emperor-Caliph in the 1920s, lost all his temporal authority.
