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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 19 2013, 03:04 PM (271 Views) | |
| The Man | Aug 19 2013, 03:04 PM Post #1 |
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1940-1970 1940: The French government refuses to declare Paris an open city on 10 June, instead preferring to stand and fight against the German onslaught. Alas, it was too late for the Allies to change much of anything by this point, and France still falls anyway. That said, from this point onward, World War II proceeds normally.
1945: Hitler commits suicide in the Fuhrerbunker as the Red Army storms Berlin and puts his mad dreams in the dust, while on the other side of the planet Japan surrenders in the face of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Second World War is over. 1950: North Korea launches a massive surprise attack against the South, threatening to overrun it entirely until a massive US-led UN force lands at Inchon and turns the tide. Despite apparently having every reason to do so, Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong inexplicably fails to intervene in favor of the collapsing North Korean regime. Predictably, North Korea is promptly completely crushed by the UN/SK forces. Around the same time, Mao invades and easily conquers Tibet himself, with little Western outcry. Soviet General Secretary Josef Stalin dies of a massive heart attack in bed, and is almost immediately succeeded by moderate Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev proceeded to ram through a campaign of 'de-Stalinization', cursing Stalin's name and tearing down or renaming most of the monuments he had set up to himself, and an 'internal thaw' where the Soviet government's repressive domestic policies were relaxed somewhat. 1951: In a complete 180 of his prior moves, not to mention in direct violation of his own election promises, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh suddenly agrees to a 50-50 split of the profit with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company instead of outright nationalizing the British-dominated corporation as he said he would. Mossadegh took a major hit to his popularity for going back on the single biggest plank of his electoral platform, but Western powers would never seriously contemplate overthrowing him after this & Iranian democracy would remain intact, with subsequent governments and Mohammad Reza Shah's more restrained leadership continuing to modernize Iran at a slow but steady pace. 1952: Republican Thomas E. Dewey wins the US presidential election of this year, now with Richard Nixon as VP - third time's the charm, it seems. The Dewey administration is typical of moderate Republicans of this time: economically moderate & in favor of the New Deal programs, socially progressive, and pro-intervention abroad to combat Communism. All this said, to the CIA's chagrin Dewey firmly opposed any suggestions to overthrow left-leaning but democratically elected governments in Latin America and elsewhere, insisting that 'America is supposed to stand for freedom and democracy'. Joe McCarthy still made his infamous 'I have a list of Commies in government' speech two years prior, and remains an outspoken anti-Communist, but is kept on a much tighter leash by the Dewey administration. 1953: In this year's South African election, J. G. N. Strauss and the more liberal United Party defeat D. F. Malan and the conservative, pro-Boer and pro-apartheid National Party, even despite suffering a sectional split over whether to remain a part of the British Commonwealth or to leave. Although Strauss's government is largely ineffective and spent most of its time indecisively waffling or bickering with each other over policy, they do get one thing right - the complete abandonment of the old Nationalist government's steps towards apartheid. Though the United Party would fracture completely in 1960, the Nationalists would never regain power (much less enact apartheid or break with the British Crown), and the South African government would develop into a truly non-racial democracy by 1968. Nelson Mandela, a prominent peaceful reformer and member of the Progressive Liberal Party, would become South Africa's first black Prime Minister in 1981. 1953-9: The Cuban Revolution erupts, driven by popular outrage at the gross corruption (up to and including active ties to the Mafia) and indifference to suffering exhibited by Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship. After six years of bitter fighting, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro prevails over the government's armies and sends Batista running. 1955: The French withdraw from Indochina, but not before transporting hundreds of thousands of Northern Vietnamese civilians and trapped military personnel southward with the help of the USN in 'Operation Passage to Freedom'. Vietnam is separated into a Communist North and a republican South by popular referendum this year, albeit one marred with allegations of fraud and voter intimidation. North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, an ardent opponent of the 'Two Vietnams' policy and (as one may expect of a hardened revolutionary leader) a hardline Communist, suffers a highly convenient heart attack while planning...something before the year's end. He is replaced not by another member of the Vietminh's Old Guard as expected, but by rising star and prominent moderate voice Nguyen Van Linh, who proceeded to privately burn all records of whatever Minh had been planning prior to his untimely demise. Under Van Linh, North Vietnam adopted policies of openness and reconciliation with the South, while at home they broke up the vast estates of the aristocratic landowners with only token compensation at best, but then distributed parcels of land to peasant families instead of instituting a policy of collectivization. Back in the US, the brutal murder of Emmett Till & the release of his killers after only 67 minutes of deliberation provokes national outrage. The Dewey administration, working in close tandem with the Republican supermajorities in the Senate and the House alike, rams through a comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1955 (outlawing racial segregation in all public facilities, racial discrimination by private entities, poll taxes, and unequal wages based on race or sex) over the Dixiecrat opposition, and unlike many past presidents the Dewey government proved more than willing to enforce the CRA - even if it required them to completely sideline state governments that were unable (or, more likely, unwilling) to do so. Incidents of racism, up to & including more murders, still happened, but the perpetrators were always brought to justice, even by all-white juries. 1956: The Suez War between Nasser's Egyptian republic and an Anglo-Franco-Israeli alliance is sparked when Nasser attempted to nationalize the Suez Canal ahead of time, in blatant violation of past treaties with Britain. The Egyptians are roundly defeated, with Israeli forces marching into Cairo by early November under British and French air cover. Nasser is ousted and dies under mysterious circumstances en route to prison, former president Muhammad Naguib is restored to office with support from the Muslim Brotherhood & 'indefinite' emergency powers, and a new agreement that gave the Suez Canal Company a new 199-year lease on the Canal 'negotiated' between the Allies and Naguib's government. Oddly, the Soviets seemed to be awfully quiet over this matter... ...because the Red Army was presently quite busy crushing the Hungarian Revolution. It soon became apparent to the keener political observers of the time that the West and the USSR had struck a deal: the Soviets would ignore Western intervention in Egypt, and in turn the West would turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the Hungarians' appeals for help. The lack of a Nasser-figure to popularize the secular & Arab-nationalist Baathist ideology, of course, that the ideology effectively 'dies on the vine'. Pro-Western capitalistic monarchies would survive in Iraq, Tunisia & Libya for years to come, as would a democratic (though markedly Islamist-influenced) government in Syria. 1956-89: The Chinese government embarks on its Hundred Flowers Campaign, encouraging the people to openly express their opinions on government policies and relaxing repressive intellectual & cultural policies. Oddly, the campaign is allowed to operate 'indefinitely', with only the most outrageous and offensive critics of the Chinese government being thrown in jail for 'seditious remarks'. As a result, the moderate faction in the Chinese government (championed by Zhou Enlai, and including rising stars such as Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang) was able to tap into a massive flow of popular support for their ideals and policies, to the detriment of the Communist hardliners. 1957: Mulatto landowner Louis Dejoie defeats black populist Francois Duvalier in this year's Haitian elections. Dejoie turns out to be a corrupt autocrat in the mold of his predecessors, but at the very least he was sane and generally not a man prone to violence - far more than can be said of his opponent. 1958: Without Nasser to inspire them & provide a solid ideological basis for their plans, the badly hamstrung Free Officers' Movement of Iraq fail to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy there. Faisal II remains alive & in power as King of Iraq. 1958-68: China embarks on its Great Leap Forward. Mao is constantly pressed by moderate advisers such as Zhou Enlai to scale down his programs, and grudgingly does so eventually: the plans for China's rapid industrialization were changed to accommodate a 30-year timeframe and accept only volunteers, the collectivization process concentrated lands into smaller collective farms held and operated by 20-40 households instead of massive state farms and were properly supported with well-planned irrigation projects using some of the funds previously allotted to industrial development, no particularly radical moves were made in the area of crop experimentation, and certainly there were no wars declared on sparrows. The 'Great Leap Forward' produced relatively small advances in industrial & agricultural output, leading to it being mocked as the 'Little Step Forward', but at least it didn't produce crippling famines that would cause the deaths of millions, either. 1960: VP Richard Nixon defeats reactionary Democratic candidate George Smathers in this year's election to succeed outgoing President Dewey. Nixon never feels a need to appeal to the conservative white Southerners, leaving the Republican Party a progressive & economically centrist force; never does more than send military advisers & supplies to South Vietnam, as the North is making increasingly reconciliatory gestures to the South under Van Linh's hand, resulting in a much smaller & less violent counterculture; and embarks on an increasingly ambitious list of 'Perfect Society' programs throughout the decade to further court the inner cities, the unions and minorities. In Africa, President Patrice Lumumba and Force Publique commander Emile Janssens resolved to make moderate rather than inflammatory speeches to the citizens of the newborn Congolese Republic & Force Public troops respectively, resulting in a much smoother transition of power from the Belgian colonial authorities to the newly-minted republic. The Republic has its fair share of struggles ahead of it, but in time it is able to overcome them without imploding into a humanitarian catastrophe, eventually becoming a beacon of post-colonial progress in Africa by the 1990's. 1961: The Bay of Pigs Invasion sends a sizable contingent of CIA-advised Cuban exiles back home with carefully coordinated US air support, resulting in the downfall of Castro's Communist government. An interim government, led by pre-Batista President Carlos Prio Socarras and miraculously free of Batista cronies, is set up with a five-year timeframe in which to write up a new constitution for the Second Cuban Republic & hold free elections. Naturally, the end of Communism in Cuba means the Soviets would never get to plant missiles there, potentially threatening nuclear armageddon. With Iraq still under the control of a pro-Western monarchy, Britain turns suzerainty over Kuwait over to Baghdad instead of granting the Kuwaitis independence. 1964: Though the loss of Egypt and Cuba to the capitalist orbit should have logically led to his downfall, Nikita Khrushchev manages to retain his hold on power in the USSR anyway, as his hardline enemies are sufficiently convinced/intimidated (one way or another) to refrain from any coup attempts. 1965: Mao Zedong attempts to unleash a 'Cultural Revolution' with the objective of purging China of 'Western and counterrevolutionary elements and persons', apparently driven by resentment towards moderate members of his inner circle who pressed him to scale down his Great Leap Forward earlier. He dies in yet another highly convenient accident not one day later, to be succeeded by the moderate Zhou Enlai in a relatively smooth transition of power. Zhou would put an end to any notion of a 'Cultural Revolution' within months of taking office, and remained Chairman to his death in 1976. Under his reign, China would see eleven years of soaring living conditions, all thanks to his steps to construct a 'socialist market economy at peace with the world' under the 'Long March Forward' that replaced his predecessor's already-hamstrung Great Leap Forward programs: Mao's collective farms were broken back up into hundreds or thousands of smaller estates that were then given out to individual families/local communities, private ownership of light industries (clothes, furniture, toys and other consumer goods) was permitted once more while heavy industries (shipbuilding, arms, etc.) remained under state control, the Hundred Flowers Campaign continued unabated, and moves toward detente with the West were made. 1966-7: The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, forbidding Presidents from serving more than two terms, is repealed between 1966 and '67 - how convenient for Richard Nixon, who would facing his second presidential election just a year later. 1967: The oil-rich, Christian & Igbo-dominated Biafran Republic won its independence from the rest of Muslim-dominated Nigeria after just four months of war, thanks to a chain of decisive victories scored with the help of an apparently prophetic intelligence agency, a favorable UN ruling & the deployment of armed peacekeepers to enforce the terms of their peace treaty with the central government. 1968: Richard Nixon wins a second term, defeating Democratic candidate George Wallace. 1969: In what is now recognized as the first high point of capitalist-Communist detente, President Nixon travels to China to meet with Chairman Zhou. They walk away on friendly terms, and by the end of the year the US had opened an embassy in Beijing while the PRC had taken the ROC's seat on the UN Security Council. 1970: The past era of nearly-completely-uninterrupted global peace, harmony & prosperity is broken with a sudden spike in militant activity in 'chilled zones of conflict' such as Vietnam, Eastern Europe and the Mideast, where nations that had been so close to full reconciliation suddenly began derailing peace talks and turning against each other, terrorist activity surged or in some cases began where before there had been nothing, and moderate reformers within dictatorial governments were found dead in larger numbers while their hardliner counterparts began to advance against them. Not even the American and Soviet hyperpowers would be immune to this disturbing new trend, as their own populations would find out in time... Edited by The Man, Aug 27 2013, 12:00 AM.
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| The Man | Aug 19 2013, 05:28 PM Post #2 |
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1971-1980 1971: Nikita Khrushchev dies of heart disease. Hardliner Leonid Brezhnev, capitalizing on the Politburo's dissent over Khrushchev's apparent failure to defend Soviet interests abroad, derails the chain of succession and takes control of the Soviet government. However, despite his renewal of internal repression after the liberalizing 'thaw' of the Khrushchev years, Brezhnev did not often openly oppose the forces of capitalism until later in his reign, instead preferring to operate through local Communist proxies.
The Sino-Soviet Split occurs. Moderate Chairman Zhou Enlai had no love for the hardliner Brezhnev and breaks off diplomatic relations in protest to his ascension; Brezhnev, for his part, considered the Chinese 'revisionists' who were getting too close to the West, and condemned them as traitors to Communism. 1972: Richard Nixon wins a fourth term in office, defeating George Wallace yet again. In Britain, talks between the British government & Irish nationalists are derailed by 'Bloody Saturday': an Irish teenager was shot and killed in the middle of a peaceful nationalist demonstration by a British Army trooper, leading to riots and a military crackdown that left 21 dead and over 100 injured. 1973: Afghan monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah is overthrown by his ambitious cousin Daoud Khan, who proclaims an Afghan republic with himself as President (conveniently without any term limits). A monarchist insurgency begins operating in western Afghanistan with the aid of Iran & the USA, while the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan works to undermine Daoud Khan's government from the opposite end of the spectrum with support from the Soviets. The Nixon administration introduces the 'Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan' or CHIP, providing free government health insurance to all American citizens, to the great joy of the left and over the howls of 'Socialism!' from both Republicans & Democrats on the right. This, combined with the 'Fair Housing Act' that reinforced the earlier 'Open Housing Act' of 1966 in subsidizing the construction or expansion of even more low-income tenement buildings across the USA, marks the high-water point of Nixon's Perfect Society programs. With pro-Western and at least Israel-neutral governments in charge of the Arab nations, and no prior defeat to seriously motivate further decisive action against Israel, no actual war is fought against the Jewish nation this year; Jordan still keeps the West Bank. Still, government inaction did not match popular sentiment, which was still widely against Israel: the Arab monarchies are attacked by their people as 'stooges of the Zionist West', and Islamist militants begin operating with the intent of overthrowing their moderate but seemingly weak and unrepresentative governments before 'taking the fight to Israel'. To appease their own people by 'punishing the Western nations for their continued support for Israel', the OPEC nations double the price of crude oil without warning, to the great detriment of pretty much everyone else, and mounting Arab resentment towards the West contributes to a breakdown of peace in the Mideast. 1974: Palestinian militants, apparently actively aided by soldiers of the Jordanian army, launch raids into Israel in June, killing over a hundred civilians and a dozen Israeli troops in dozens of coordinated attacks along the border. Even before issuing a public condemnation of the attack, Israel launched an invasion of the West Bank: for its part, the Jordanian government & military appeared paralyzed by inaction, with officers receiving conflicting orders to stand down or fight in the face of the Israeli offensive. Exactly 12 hours after the start of the Israeli-Jordanian War, a political crisis engulfed the Jordanian government when Field Marshal Habis Al-Majali & PLO commandant Abu Iyad joined forces to attempt a coup d'etat against King Hussein, who was in the process of restarting negotiations with the Israeli government. By the time Hussein had squashed the Marshal's coup, it was all over - the West Bank was now in Israeli hands. Jordan expelled the PLO in retaliation for its support for the Marshal's June Coup:as a result, many Palestinians sought refuge in Lebanon, where they inadvertently contributed to that country's own demographic & political crisis, causing the eruption of the Lebanese Civil War one year later. 1975: Daoud Khan, President of Afghanistan, is overthrown and killed in the Saur Revolution by the PDPA. A People's Republic of Afghanistan is proclaimed, and the Brezhnev government immediately begins sending them supplies & advisers. Nixon & the Iranians step up aid to the Afghan monarchists in turn, while Pakistan begins playing its own game by diverting US aid funds into Islamist movements opposing both the progressive Communists & moderate monarchists alike. The OPEC nations raise the price of oil by a further 10%. The Chilean government of Salvador Allende is overthrown in a right-wing military coup, operating independently of the CIA for a change, and although he survived the fall of the government palace to the coup d'etat forces, Allende himself 'disappears' en route to prison. A four-man Chilean junta with police chief Cesar Mendoza at its head and General Augusto Pinochet as his right hand is proclaimed, and vowed to lead the 'fight against Communism in Latin America' in the face of 'the cowardice and indecision of the United States'. They made good on their promise almost immediately, cracking down on labor unions & socialist/Communist associations without mercy. A CIA-sponsored democratic counter-coup is swiftly discovered and quashed, though no conclusive evidence linking the US to the anti-junta efforts would surface for another four years. In a mirror of the Chilean situation, the Brazilian military overthrew newly-elected Labor Party President Henrique Teixeira Lott, this time with the support of the CIA. General Emilio Medici proceeded to institute a dictatorship only barely hidden under the pretense of a civilian government: he & his co-conspirators sponsored elections that their party, the National Renewal Alliance or ARENA, would conveniently never lose no matter how dead-set the public seemed to be against them, and each military president would in turn appoint a successor to serve as ARENA's candidate at the end of their own terms. This new government, despite its continued non-recognition of the Chilean junta, also claimed to be fighting Communism. Labor-backed riots are suppressed with extreme prejudice by the Army, which forcefully disbands many unions and maneuvers their key allies to lead the few still allowed to continue existing. 1975-1979: The Lebanese Civil War, a three-way sectarian conflict between Lebanon's traditionally dominant Maronite Christians, the Druze and a rapidly growing community of Palestinian refugees (complemented by expulsions of Palestinians from Jordan following the Black September Crisis of 1970), doesn't stop at just tearing the small nation apart but further destabilizes the entire region. Maronite militias absorbed considerable aid from European Christians and Israel, the Druze relied on their own strength, and the Muslims were further divided into a Saudi/Jordanian-backed Sunni camp and a Syrian-backed Shi'ite faction. Matters were further complicated by a Syrian incursion in 1978 that directly led to a four-month war between them and Israel, and of course the escalating sectarian violence between the various Lebanese factions. The war would end with the UN-sponsored Gaza Accords of 1979, which left Lebanon under the hand of the Maronites while orchestrating massive Palestinian exoduses back to the West Bank, Gaza or even the Sinai. While the Nixon administration accepted responsibility for the majority of the operation's logistics, primarily transportation and the supply of rations to Palestinian migrants, the Helms administration went back on this promise in 1981 before even 100,000 Palestinians had been moved, nearly leading to a humanitarian catastrophe and a return to fighting before Israel, Jordan and Iraq doubled their own commitments to pick up the slack. 1976: Richard Nixon wins a fifth term by the skin of his teeth, beating former USAF General Curtis LeMay. The aged POTUS confides to his inner circle that he intends to retire after the 1980 election, and nominates ex-Democrat John Connally of Texas as his successor. Pastor Ken Holmes, a local Southern Baptist leader from Arkansas, founds the 'Tribulation Defense Force', a supposed 'survivalist association' to last through the coming 'end of days', at the advice of an 'angel' who visited him in his dreams. In reality, Holmes & his congregation were stockpiling arms & making plans to violently overthrow the US government, the first of many who would try. In China, reformist Chairman Zhou Enlai dies smiling, knowing that his 'Long March Forward' had succeeded in all of its aims. Deng Xiaoping succeeds him, despite the best efforts of the hardliners (led by Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing) to derail the succession. Argentine generalissimo Jorge Rafael Videla overthrows the nominally democratic but hopelessly incompetent government of Isabel Peron & inaugurates a brutally repressive military junta, in hopes of putting down highly active Communist militants neglected by the Peronistas. 1977: The Klu Klux Klan hits national news for the first time in almost a decade with the high-profile assassination of former North Carolina governor & Democrat-to-Republican 'convert' Terry Sanford, denounced as a 'negro-loving scalawag' and worse by Dixiecrats for his progressive social policies. As if that were not bad enough, the US economy was already grinding to a halt under the weight of stagflation & Nixon's welfare programs. Though it could always be worse, they could have leaped into a nightmarish quagmire such as a hypothetical Vietnam War prior to this, after all. In general, this was the year in which the American militia movement, characterized by a violent hatred for America's perceived degeneracy into a 'godless socialist hellhole' & fought over between more rational 'militantly conservative' groups & far-right ideologies ranging from anarcho-capitalism or Objectivist-influenced social-Darwinism to Christian Identity and outright Neo-Nazism, really started to gain traction, with the seemingly benign 'visionaries' or 'true angels' or 'prophets of the master race' gracing their leaders' dreams leading them every step of the way. Similar movements, more explicitly oriented along ultranationalist & racial supremacist/separatist lines and largely bereft of the moderating influences present in the American militia movement, also form across Europe and in the Union of South Africa, though they have markedly less success there. 1978: Iraq is rocked by a three-way civil war between the moderate Islamic monarchy, a clique of hardline progressive & ultra-nationalist officers led by traitorous General Saddam Hussein, and Sunni extremists convinced that the government (despite being led by a Sunni King) was making too many concessions to the West & the Shi'ite majority. Just next door, Iran faces its own problems as radical Shi'ite clerics begin taking to the hills in protest of the regime's modernizing reforms, though unlike the Iraqi Hashemites, the Pahlavi dynasty & its democratic parliament still have too much popular support for these movements to be little more than a nuisance. 1979: North Vietnamese Chairman Nguyen Van Linh is ousted and killed in a hardliner coup on Tet, the Vietnamese new year. The radical new government of Le Duan purges itself of as much moderate influence as it can, and launches a massive surprise attack on South Vietnam in March - only to fail completely in breaking through the Hue DMZ, thanks to extensive ARVN intelligence-gathering in the two preceding months and eventually, American air support for the South Vietnamese. Deng Xiaoping mounts an invasion of North Vietnam itself, allegedly in support of the few moderates who survived Duan's purge & were now sheltered on Chinese soil. The PRC won a military victory, capturing Hanoi itself in late May, and installing Truong Chinh as head of a puppet North Vietnamese government dominated by returning reformist exiles: however, Communist hardliners & nationalists continued to fight a guerrilla campaign across the countryside under the banner of the 'New Viet Minh'. US involvement in the failed Chilean counter-coup of 1975 became public knowledge following a leak of critical information by anonymous agents. The Democrats seized the chance to lambast the Nixon administration for its 'cowardly attempt to overthrow what should have been a friend against International Marxism' in favor of 'known Communist sympathizers who corrupted & manipulated the democratic process', while Chile suspended diplomatic relations with the United States in protest. As the leak was first issued from a room in the Watergate Hotel, the scandal was branded 'Chilegate' by the media. Conservative Margaret Thatcher buries James Callaghan & Labour, already marred by the paralyzing strikes of the 'Winter of Discontent' last year, in an electoral landslide this year, becoming the first woman to sit as Prime Minister of the UK. Thatcher made good on her promises to control inflation and break the back of Britain's formidable labor unions, widely held responsible for bringing the economy to a grinding halt, but it wasn't easy: her efforts would result in unemployment skyrocketing and the economy slipping into a full-blown recession by the early '80s. Liberian President William Tolbert declines his Agriculture Minister's suggestion that he raise rice prices, ostensibly to encourage rice farmers to stay in the field instead of moving to the cities, but more likely to just make a bigger buck off of their landowning families' vast rice farms. Ethnic tensions between the Americo-Liberian elite and native underclass remain high, but without rising prices to galvanize them the masses never quite manage to explode into open rebellion, and Tolbert's liberal & conciliatory policies go a long way to unwind said tensions. A distinct lack of catastrophic civil wars, combined with mounting foreign investment as the Liberian government opened up to countries other than the US, helps propel Liberian living standards upward. By 2020, the average Liberian (regardless of whether he lived in the country or the city) could match the average Austrian in personal wealth, and while the Americo-Liberian True Whig Party still exclusively controlled the presidency, other tribal groups were increasing their representation in the Liberian Congress with every election. 1980: The US presidential election this year saw Democratic candidate Jesse Helms, a high-profile defector from the Republicans & leading conservative voice, bury his opponent John Connally (ironically a defector from the Democrats himself) in an electoral landslide: a poor economic climate marked by rampant stagflation, the perceived weakness of the Republicans on the world stage, increasingly truthful accusations of 'socialism' on the home front, and Chilegate had combined to make a Republican victory virtually impossible, despite their best efforts. In the months leading up to and following Helms' & VP Ronald Reagan's inauguration, the federal government was wracked by a spate of assassinations, courtesy of the ascendant militia movements. Whenever caught, said militiamen would bizarrely get away scot-free or with light sentences most of the time, to the outrage and confusion of the victims' families. On the flipside, previously peaceful counter-cultural communities across the United States began spewing revolutionary propaganda and apocalyptic prophecies, all but ensuring the rise of left-wing terrorist organizations, ranging from the Black Panther 'self-defense association' to the Maoist Revolutionary Underground, to combat right-wing militias & the now hard-right federal gov't in the following years. In addition, across the ocean, the Soviet Union began to see a surge in right-wing terrorist activity aimed at destroying the CCCP & gaining independence for the various Soviet Republics, all of which were spurred on by Chinese material assistance & memories of the White movement or pre-Bolshevik national governments. 1980s: The White House & the Kremlin would take increasingly aggressive steps against each other, both in terms of proxy wars and in direct confrontations, and the specter of World War III loomed once more over a world that had known mostly (admittedly increasingly tenuous, but still) peace over the last 30 years. In 1983, NATO's highly provocative Able Archer exercise, combined with a Soviet false alarm thanks to their faulty early warning satellites (resulting in a near-missile launch averted only by the premature detonation of that particular Soviet nuclear weapon & the destruction of the entire missile silo, then a leak of the details surrounding the incident just before Soviet hardliners could rebrand it as 'Western sabotage' and justify a first strike on the US), brought the world closer to nuclear holocaust than ever before. Even after these particular flashpoints came to naught, tensions remained high throughout the decade. Edited by The Man, Sep 4 2013, 01:24 PM.
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| The Man | Aug 19 2013, 07:50 PM Post #3 |
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1981-1990 1981: Capitalizing on the popular outrage generated by the fatal shooting of 'seemingly threatening' (but actually unarmed) African-American teenager John Coleman by the LAPD, the Revolutionary Underground instigates the 'Week of Fury': seven days of intense rioting across the great cities of the West Coast, which they hoped would galvanize a popular Communist revolution across the US. The riots devastated Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and other major cities in Oregon, Washington and California, resulting in 114 deaths and over 40,000 injuries on top of billions of dollars in property damage, but 'only' lasted four days before they were stopped by the states' respective National Guards. Still, the Four Days of Fury put left-wing terrorist movements like the RU on the map...and directly in the crosshairs of both the right-wing militias they were most opposed to, in addition to the federal government.
Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's widow and head of the hardline faction in China, is sentenced to death after conclusive evidence linking her to yet another anti-Deng Xiaoping plot is unearthed. She is executed before the year's end, permanently solidifying reformist control on China. 1982: General Videla's crumbling junta launches a massive surprise attack on the Falklands, banking on a swift victory to stifle domestic dissent at their oppressive policies & the stagnating Argentine economy. The British task force sent to retake the islands unexpectedly ran into a massive (some say unnaturally so...) storm in the middle of the Atlantic & lost several ships, while a spate of left-wing terrorist activity in the USA forced President Helms to focus on cleaning up the home front before he could support Britain. As if things couldn't get worse for Britain, the Argentine air force - already modernized with the help of the late Nixon administration for combat in the Dirty War - had freshly received the last of its Exocet shipments by the time the RN taskforce got back on track, and devastated the weakened British fleet as they attempted to force a landing at San Carlos in the middle of yet another fierce storm. The Rio Peace Accords of November 1982 recognized the Argentine victory on the Falklands, buying the Videla junta enough popularity to teeter onward for at least a few more years. In Britain, Thatcher - already facing massive domestic unrest over her economic policies - saw her popularity tank completely following Britain's defeat, and her opponents within the Conservative Party are quick to depose her & force an election early next year. In the US, following a chain of bombings, murders and kidnappings by left-wing groups such as the Revolutionary Underground and the American Liberation Army, Congress & the Helms administration approves of the Hardee Act late this year. The Act expanded the prison system, mandated an increase in government surveillance, and further empowered law enforcement agencies in general, particularly by mandating the creation of SWAT teams within every single police force in the country. At the same time, right-wing militias such as the fundamentalist Sons of Eli and the Neo-Nazi Aryan Defense Force redoubled their efforts against the left-wingers (while facing comparatively light government crackdowns at best, actually engaging in covert cooperation with the FBI against the left-wing terrorists at worst), resulting in bloody street fights in the inner cities & guerrilla campaigns in all but name being fought in the backwoods. Leonid Brezhnev dies and is succeeded by fellow hardliner Yuri Andropov, despite the moderates' best efforts to retake power. 1983: The Tories are ousted in this year's UK general election, which is won overwhelmingly by David Steel's Liberal Party - Michael Foot's Labour had 'signed the longest suicide note in history' with the revelation of their far-left platform earlier in the season, and there was no way the Conservatives were going to get back in the game after the Falklands debacle. Disappearances and homicides within the British government bureaucracy spikes this year, but returns to normal levels starting on New Year's Day 1984. The LAPD's SWAT team proves its mettle in the Hollywood Shootout with fighters of the Revolutionary People's Front & Revolutionary Underground on September 25th. 20 heavily armed men & women (12 from the RPF, 8 from the RU) were surrounded by the LAPD following a major bank robbery, and the resulting firefight left all 20 'urban guerrillas' dead, 1 officer killed & 34 others wounded, and over 2000 rounds of ammunition spent. The Iraqi Civil War ends in a victory for Saddam Hussein & his secular ultranationalists, who proceed to brutally repress the Sunnis, Kurds, monarchists and anyone he didn't like in general. Hussein begins supplying extreme Shi'a clerics fighting the Iranian monarchy just across the border, heightening Iran-Iraq tensions. 1984: USSR General Secretary Yuri Andropov unexpectedly comes back from the brink of death, seemingly perfectly fine, despite having suffered (what was supposed to be) terminal renal failure just the year before. Jesse Helms wins a second term as President of the United States, and celebrates by ramping up the War on Drugs. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution, restoring the two-term limit on the Presidency struck down back in '67, is ratified. In this year's highest-profile terrorist attack, twenty-four men and women belonging to the left-wing militia 'People's Action' invaded a Presbyterian church in Cleveland, Ohio, where they murdered the presiding minister and took nearly a hundred innocents (including 23 children) hostage. After hours of fruitless negotiations, the police stormed the building: the resulting gunfight resulted in the deaths of every terrorist and a dozen hostages, including two young boys. Elsewhere, right-wing militiamen belonging to the Colorado chapter of the nationwide 'New Minutemen' attacked a bar in Denver apparently in hopes of assassinating Michael Lamarr, the leader of the American Liberation Army (a left-wing militia unrelated to the PA). Given that they opened fire with automatic weapons immediately upon forcing entry into the establishment while the man they were after was in the washroom, all the Minutemen managed to accomplish was killing a bouncer, a dozen innocents and the bartender, while Lamarr himself escaped through the washroom window and into a back alley. 'Salvae Terrae' or 'Save the Earth', an apocalyptic Christian sect that believes an army of Angels will descend from Heaven within the next century to purge the world of sinners & construct a thousand-year paradise for the worthy in preparation for Christ's Second Coming, surfaces in inner-city Detroit. The cult begins to gain popularity through its charitable works for the poor, willingness to freely take in anyone regardless of wealth/race/sex, a spate of publicized miracles where the loved ones of church members would make unexpected (and scientifically improbable) recoveries from terminal illnesses or accidents, mysterious rituals, and the aggressive preaching style adopted by its evangelists: by the end of the decade, there would be well over a million blue-and-white clad 'Lost Lambs', as ST's adherents called themselves, in the US alone. Salvae Terrae was attacked by major faiths & even other cults as anything and everything from a 'money-making machine' to a 'shady conspiracy aimed at taking over the world' and straight up Satanists, but that did nothing to stop or even slow its meteoric rise to prominence and, in some cases, even helped provide it with free publicity. 1985: The Revolutionary Underground attempts to assassinate Helms at his inauguration, but fail miserably. The months to come would see the organization effectively destroyed under redoubled federal crackdowns and right-wing offensives, culminating in the infamous 'Night of Nails' where the heads of 88 RU members, both unimportant goons and high-ranking lieutenants, were nailed to the doors of their families or friends by members of the far-right American Defense Organization. Despite having beaten kidney failure last year, a now-healthy Andropov is killed anyway during the bombing of the Kremlin by members of the far-right Georgian 'Volunteer Guard'. He is succeeded by yet another hardliner, Andrei Gromyko. Shah Reza Pahlavi & Iranian PM Ruhollah Khatami, a moderate Islamist, decide to go to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi People's Republic over the latter's continued support for Iranian radicals. The resulting Iran-Iraq War lasts three years but, thanks to the high quality of the Western-trained & armed Imperial Iranian Army, Iran would consistently have the upper hand. The US begins secretly funding Hussein's war effort, despite a long history of friendship with Iran, allegedly because Hussein was a 'progressive secularist' as opposed to the 'Islamist radicals who have corrupted Iran's political processes'. Of course, this is complete nonsense to anyone who would look at the two countries seriously, leading keen observers to seriously ask whether America had ulterior motives here. President Helms declares war on drugs and promptly institutes 'tough-on-crime' laws, including mandatory minimum sentencing laws, with the 'Anti-Abuse of Drugs Act' of 1985 - most notably, the act included 15 years for possession of over 100 g of hard drugs (following the earlier example set by NY) and 5 years without parole for possession of either 5 g of crack cocaine in rock form or 500 g of crack cocaine in powder form, despite the drug not being any more addictive in rock form (statistically preferred by blacks) than in powder form (statistically preferred by whites), which combined with the Helms administration's gutting of welfare spending, meant that... 1985-2000s: ...the War on Drugs propelled the crack epidemic from another flash-in-the-pan drug into an absolute nightmare for America's poor, especially the African-American and Latin-American communities: countless black & Hispanic families would grow up with parents & sons rotting in prison over what should have been minor drug-related crimes, leading to the further decay of inner cities across the nation & creating a perfect atmosphere for the rise of gangs and a murderous, misogynistic thug culture... ...had Salvae Terrae not existed to help put these shattered families back together, while supporting their crumbling communities with shelters, soup kitchens, a source of employment and a non-criminal moral center, turning what should have been a great crime wave into a generation-sized horde of zealous cultists instead: that the Helms administration insisted on continuing the War on Drugs simply further broadened their supply of recruits. Salvae Terrae's well-publicized egalitarianism and willingness to freely take in anyone who turns to them, free of charge, also helps them bleed off followers from other cults & faiths, to these others' great annoyances. As mentioned earlier, by the end of the '80s, Salvae Terrae would have over a million members in America alone. By the end of the '90s, Salvae Terrae's American chapter had grown to 12 million (20 million worldwide), with no signs of stopping anytime soon, and the inner cities & poorer rural areas in particular had become hotbeds of Lost Lamb activity. By the 2000s, Salvae's American membership had nearly doubled to 20 million, and worldwide membership had grown to 30 million, with even prominent businessmen, government bureaucrats & municipal to state-level politicians secretly practicing Salvae Terrae's rites or for the bolder ones without fear of electoral defeat, daring to wear their new beliefs on their chests. The problem of an ascendant thug culture had been dispelled, only to be replaced with the completely different issue presented by millions of fanatical cultists controlling America's inner cities & preaching to everyone who'll stop to listen. 1986: A cabal of ultra-nationalist officers in the JSDF attempt a military coup against the democratic government, but are shouted down by the Emperor himself and destroyed by loyalist troops. The first serious demonstrations against the increasingly authoritarian US gov't and the wanton brutality of the right-wing militias in bed with it (their left-wing counterparts having been reduced to a near non-factor by this point, further eliminating justification for the continued existence of the right-wing groups in the first place) take place in California. These protests are eventually dispersed by police, and in the case of a fairly small protest in San Diego, scattered by the Sons of Eli with firebombs and AR-15s. Iranian troops force a decisive breakthrough on the Tigris, braving massive Iraqi gas attacks & artillery barrages in the process, and also later seize the major port city of Umm Qasr, severing Iraq's last link to the sea (and American weapon shipments). Combined with a mounting Kurdish uprising in the northwest, Saddam's days are now clearly numbered. 1988: General-Secretary Andrei Gromyko dies. The resulting succession crisis spirals into the Soviet/Second Russian Civil War after a moderate coup places Mikhail Gorbachev in power, followed almost immediately by the proclamation of an 'Emergency State Committee' by the hardliners & the seizure of the Kremlin by their allies in the Tamanskaya Division. The various SSRs and Warsaw Pact nations take advantage of by declaring independence & ousting their Communist governments, one by one, in this year and the next. To the south, the Armenian & Azerbaijani SSRs already came to blows over Nagorno-Karabakh before the year's end. In this year's American presidential election, President Helms is succeeded, not by his VP Ronald Reagan (whose health complications prevented him from running), but by NY Congressman Jack Kemp. His running mate? Ascendant Virginian televangelist Pat Robertson. Together, the two narrowly defeated the Republican team-up of Delaware governor Pierre S. Dupont IV & former Tennessee senator Howard Baker, and promised to inaugurate an era of renewed American dominance, restored internal security & 'Godliness'. Iraqi forces are decisively defeated in the Karbala Offensive of early '88, completing the Iranian encirclement of Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein attempts to flee into the countryside but is shot down & killed by the Imperial Iranian Air Force. The exiled Hashemite royals restored to power in a bombed-out, Iranian-occupied Baghdad later this year, and what few Ba'athists remained at large were purged by the year's end. Iraqi Kurdistan is recognized as an independent nation, to Turkey's consternation. 1989: The Berlin Wall is torn down as the GDR implodes beneath popular pressure while, on the other end of the Warsaw Pact, the Baltic republics are the first SSRs to declare independence: the Cold War is over, in all but name. In Russia, Gorbachev finally drives the hardliners out of Moscow after months of exhaustive campaigning that laid waste to most of the city, but must now take back the remaining third of the country that still recognized Gennady Yanayev, head of the Emergency State Committee, as the legitimate General Secretary. China is rocked by the Tiananmen Protests. Deng Xiaoping is encouraged to heed the protesters by liberal reformers in the Chinese government such as Zhao Ziyang, but remained opposed to any further liberalization of Chinese politics: 'this far, and no further' had become his watchword. When he moved to purge the likes of Zhao, and to crack down on the increasingly rowdy and frustrated protesters, the liberals evidently staged some kind of internal coup, overthrowing Deng and placing Zhao in power instead. Zhao, already known for his conciliatory tendencies, took steps to democratize China & reach a total rapproachment with the similarly-democratizing ROC on Taiwan. 1990: Gorbachev's loyalists defeat the remaining hardliner forces, and it seems that the USSR was finally past its nightmarish civil war. True, the Kremlin's hold on the Warsaw Pact nations & the Baltic SSRs have been lost, but at least no nukes had been fired and the central government could finally re-impose order in the Caucasian & Central Asian SSRs... ...but, of course, the nightmare is really only just beginning. On August 19th, barely five months after their final triumph, Gorbachev & most of his inner circle were unexpectedly assassinated in their offices & bedrooms, while the elderly Marshal Vasily Petrov seized the reins of the state and proclaimed a military dictatorship. Unfortunately for those who had bet on the hardliners' Trojan horse, Gorbachev's Deputy Chairman Ivan Silayev escaped the slaughter, denounced Petrov as the opportunistic tyrant who slew Gorbachev, and proclaimed a nominally democratic counter-government in Volgograd. The various remaining SSRs began declaring independence, one by one, and reliving old grudges in light of Moscow's complete inability to rein them in. In the USA, with the left-wing militants effectively destroyed, their right-wing rivals began turning on civilians of the wrong race/gender/ideology. Congressman Henry Cohen (R-NJ) was the first high-profile casualty in a spate of political assassinations this year, though perhaps fortunately for everyone who isn't a deranged Nazi/fundamentalist/anarchist, he was the only federal-level gov't official killed; most of the militias' targets were municipal or state level officials, prominent left-wing or moderate speakers, and the like. While the Kemp administration did at least open an investigation, these brutal slayings served to decisively turn public opinion against the militias and a government that was seen as too accommodating of right-wing extremists. President Kemp repeatedly expressed a desire to crack down on the militias, but his & the Democrats' actions told a different story, as their investigation went nowhere and was eventually quietly dropped while the militias kept right on killing. Edited by The Man, Aug 27 2013, 05:41 PM.
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| The Man | Aug 19 2013, 09:07 PM Post #4 |
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Administrator
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1991-2000 1991: Turkmenistan becomes the last SSR to leave the Soviet Union. Sporadic but always exceptionally bloody infighting seems to have erupted within the Soviet hardliners' ranks, featuring entire divisions' worth of men tearing at each other at their commanders' orders instead of the enemy at Volgograd & leaving entire bunkers painted with blood and body parts.
Meanwhile in the Caucasus, the other SSRs step into open warfare, if they haven't already: Armenia & Azerbaijan push ever harder & more viciously against each other over Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgians & Abkhazians and Ossetians begin fighting their genocidal war to the knife, and Chechen militias began fighting the Volgograd government. Yugoslavia implodes shortly after the death of Josip Broz Tito. The wars are every bit as atrocity-ridden as one would expect of an ethnic conflict fought with modern weapons, though there is a spike in unexplained incidents where the populations of entire Croat towns were butchered with inhuman savagery, Serbian civilians were coldly gunned down and left to rot in ditches or thrown in rivers, or Bosniaks (even Bosniak Serbs) & Albanians were slaughtered without mercy by 'Serbian' militants, and so on. Reports of covert American supply drops to Saddam's Iraq even in the later stages of the Iran-Iraq War are leaked by CIA operative Paul Hubbard, with disastrous consequences for the Kemp administration & the Democrats in general. Kemp's approval ratings nosedive, and the outraged Iranians cut diplomatic relations with the US. As if it couldn't get any worse for the Democrats, Hubbard's brother in the FBI, Peter Hubbard, leaks reports regarding 'Operation Basilisk', where the federal government actively colluded with right-wing militias in their fight against left-wingers. Neither one of the Hubbard brothers would live to see the year's end, but this only serves to further fuel domestic furor at the Kemp administration. 1992: Given the double-whammy of Saddamgate and Op. Basilisk, it should come as no surprise that President Kemp is crushed beneath an electoral landslide by Republican Senators Richard Lugar of Indiana & Tom Harkin of Iowa: Lugar won every state outside of the Deep South, Texas and Tennessee, with even Kemp's home state of New York turning against him. As if that weren't bad enough for the Democrats already, this year's Congressional elections also saw resurgent Republican majorities in the Senate & House. Once more, in the lead-up to the presidential inauguration, the Federal government faced a spate of assassinations and disappearances that stopped almost as soon as it began. The Lugar administration brought the Hardee Act to bear against the militia movement, which had conveniently exposed many of their assets to the feds over the course of Operation Basilisk. This year's 'Operation Tempo', as the first phase of the government crackdown on the militias was codenamed, resulted in 318 militants dead and 10,000 arrested (of these, 1,217 would face the death penalty, while 3,429 got life in prison) for 'only' 37 FBI agents and 93 police officers. The situation in Russia melts down even further. Marshal Petrov is killed, allegedly in an Islamist terror attack but in reality thanks to an internal coup spearheaded by fringe politician & extreme-right Trojan horse Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who proclaimed the end of the Soviet Union & the rise of a 'Democratic Federative People's Union of Russia' with himself at its head. While Silayev's Volgograd government also proclaimed a 'United Democratic Republic of Russia', what little was left of the Soviet old guard & pro-Petrov remnants seized control of Moscow and insisted that they were still the legitimate RSFSR with Nikolai Ryzhkov as their General Secretary. The Third Russian Civil War has now degenerated into a three-way slugging match between the UDRR in Volgograd, Zhirinovsky's extreme-right Petrograd-based DFPUR, and the RSFSR with Ryzhkov at its head. Fighting between the DFPUR and RSFSR was notably brutal, even more so than their efforts against the UDRR, and their fighters' conduct among civilians also left much to be desired to put it mildly. Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia is removed in an internal coup led by ex-Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shervardnadze, causing yet another bout of civil war between 'Zviadists' loyal to the ousted president and Shevardnadze's 'State Council', even as the nation fought with Abkhazian and Ossetian separatists determined to ethnically cleanse their lands of Georgians. 1993: An emergency session of the UNSC produces Resolution 795, mandating the formation of a standing 'United Nations Peacemaking Force' or UNPF comprised of volunteer formations from the various member states with a mandate to stabilize regions that have deterioriated into mass violence, particularly regions where one or more sides may get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. While most of the UNPF is made up of international volunteers, its elite 'Rapid Response Forces' raises more than a few eyebrows: its members are exclusively drawn from ex-special forces, but simultaneously have incredibly strenuous entry requirements that even said ex-specops fighters find difficult if not impossible to meet, and it worked in extreme secrecy with apparently no accountability to even the UN itself. A Magnitude 5 earthquake hits the northern Caucasus, killing thousands and disrupting the military operations of every side in every war there. As if things couldn't get worse, the quake was almost immediately followed by a massive (but, bizarrely, apparently completely unrelated) tidal wave that struck the Georgian coast - despite Georgia having been left largely untouched by the earlier quake. It is here that the UNPF faces its baptism of fire, but to the amazement of the world, it succeeds in all of its aims: besides toppling the illegitimate Shevardnadze government & restoring Zviad Gamsakhurdia to the presidency of Georgia, the UNPF also protected a massive international relief effort in the region, while simultaneously destroying the genocidal Abkhaz and Ossetian separatist movements with efficiency and extreme but wholly justified prejudice... ...at least, if you believe the media outlets of the world. Abkhazians & Ossetians widely reported UN-RRF units mercilessly gunning down even surrendering militants, sweeping the countryside in the wake of Abkhaz or Ossetian atrocities but turning a blind eye to Georgian war crimes, arbitrarily detaining & torturing village chiefs on suspicion of collaboration with the separatists, and occasionally 'raving' about 'demons' & 'Satanists' in the separatist ranks. Alas, their cries fell on deaf ears - the world media played up their atrocities but virtually never reported on the crimes of their enemies in Tbilisi. The Aryan Defense Force attempts a daring 12-man raid on a Salvae Terrae shelter in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, instead of finding meek defenseless untermenschen to slaughter or at least a hostage crisis to make some money off of, they ran into twice their number in surprisingly well-armed & obviously well-motivated Lost Lambs. The following battle ended with all ADF men killed, the few Lost Lambs hauled in for their deaths released with no charges, and public opinion shifting even further against the militias: these were just minorities and poor folk who wanted to make a better life for themselves being forced into exercising their Second Amendment rights against literal Neo-Nazis, after all. The traditionally secularist Turkish Army attempts a coup d'etat against the Islamist government of Necmattin Erbakan, but their efforts come to naught - thanks to not only the Presidential Guard, but one of their own officers, who evidently leaked critical details concerning the op to Erbakan's government. A reinvigorated Erbakan proceeded to purge the army of Kemalist elements, while the few dozen plotters who had been taken alive were assassinated in or en route to prison. 1994: The same stories coming from Abkhazians and Ossetians are repeated by Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the UN ruled in favor of Armenia and sent in UNPF troops to enforce said ruling later this year, and in the Balkans where the UN ruled (in a complete opposite of their stance in Georgia) that the various Yugoslav republics were right to secede from Belgrade's rule, but their outrage went largely unreported as well. The Budapest Accords of April '94 recognized the surrender of the last Abkhaz and Ossetian militants & the preservation of Georgian territorial integrity, while the Treaty of Stepanakert a month later recognized an Armenian annexation of Nakchivan and the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. In Russia, things take an even bigger turn for the worse as UDRR forces mount a massive offensive directed against Moscow itself, defended by what little was left of the Soviet army that still remained loyal to Ryzhkov, starting on June 10. General-Secretary Ryzhkov had made a well-publicized threat of nuclear bombardment two days prior, but President Silayev decided to call his bluff and press the attack anyway, apparently on his own initiative. What happened afterwards remains unclear: UDRR forces made slow but steady progress between June 10 and 19 when a complete information blackout engulfed the entire city, and when it lifted on June 20, Moscow was a smoldering ruin and millions of people - Soviets, UDRR troops, and civilians alike - lay dead. Survivors claimed Ryzhkov had made good on his threats and nuked Moscow while on the verge of defeat, just to spite Silayev: as Ryzhkov & his inner circle had all been killed in the battle, the story stuck due to a lack of opposing testimony. In the Balkans, the leaders of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Republic unexpectedly agreed to an armistice and a temporary alliance with the Croatians, despite the two having engaged in brutal fighting over 'Herceg-Bosna' or Herzegovina for the last few years. The Serbian positions in the Krajina and Republika Srpska come under joint Croat-Bosniak begin to crumble beneath joint Bosniak-Croat onslaughts. 1995: The Trieste Peace Accords brings a definitive end to the Yugoslav Wars. Croatia & Slovenia are recognized as independent entities; Bosnia lost Herzegovina/Herceg-Bosna to the Croats; the Republica Srpska, a Bosniak Serb client state of Belgrade, was completely destroyed and forcibly integrated into Bosnia to make up for Herceg-Bosna's loss; and the Serbs held on to Kosovo and Montenegro as the 'Federal Republic of Yugoslavia', while the KLA was branded as a terrorist organization in bed with criminal interests & suppressed. Back in the 'States, the leadership of the 'Vanguard for a Pure Future', a major Neo-Nazi militia active in California and Oregon, are arrested or killed in a surprise decapitation strike by the FBI. Elsewhere, 200 members of the Christian Identity militia 'Brotherhood of Christ', notorious for assassinating Congressman Cohen three years ago, are killed in the FBI & ATF's 3-day siege of their 'Third Temple' bunker, Arkansas - including, unfortunately, 58 women and 17 children. The Lugar administration is praised by some Americans for their decisive action in crippling these groups, both noted for their virulent racism and particularly brutal methods, while being criticized by others for the heavy-handedness of law enforcement and their attempt to brush off the deaths of innocents as 'collateral damage'. Still, their work was far from done: at least another five dozen militia groups, totaling about 30,000 armed members, remained active elsewhere. The UDRR, fresh from its victory over the 'RSFSR' last year, makes a final push to take down Zhirinovsky's DFPUR. Zhirinovsky's forces collapsed after nine months of bitter fighting, and the madman himself was betrayed & killed by his own cronies after he started ranting about nuking his own capital at Petrograd as Silayev's men began surrounding the city. With this, Russia has been reunited under the banner of the United Democratic Republic, though far-left and far-right terrorist organizations continued to plague Silayev for the rest of his years in office. 1996: President Lugar, riding on his 'tough on crime' credentials and a general revitalization of the US economy, handily wins a second term, crushing Democrat Pat Robertson with a 65%-35% victory margin. The federal gov't continues its push against the militia movement, which does manage to kill a total of 548 civilians and 113 federal officials this year in a spate of bombings & drive-by shootings - better than last year's record of 1,109 civilians and 422 government workers, at least. This year's economic surplus would be used to revitalize the welfare system, and a reform of the US prison system to focus more on rehabilitating than punishing inmates would begin in this year...not that most militiamen would be taken alive to be rehabilitated in the first place. The high-profile siege of this year was the 73-day standoff at the 'Lamar Compound' between the Feds and the 'Lone Star Rifles', a Texan secessionist militia, resulting in 50 of 73 militiamen surrendering & leaving the bunker with 40 women and children on the 70th day: however, 23 die-hard fighters refused to stand down and were all killed in an assault on the building three days later. The victorious UDRR begins cracking down on the Islamic Chechen secessionists. Still, the virtually independent 'Islamic Republic of Ingushetia' holds firm in their mountain fortresses and the heavily mined city of Grozny. 1997: The 'American Defense Organization', the same militia responsible for the 'Night of the Nails' twelve years ago, bombs the Federal Reserve Bank Building & the Salvae Terrae chapter house in Boston. The attack is the single deadliest blow struck by the militia movements of the '90s, leaving 189 dead and over 600 wounded. In the wake of this catastrophe, President Lugar signs the 'Homeland Security Act', a piece of legislation that expanded on the earlier Hardee Act and created a 'Department of Homeland Security' to further crack down on domestic terrorism, and redoubles efforts against the militia movement. By the end of the decade, five of ADO's nine leading 'Master-Chiefs' had been captured by the FBI, and would be sentenced to death between 2002 and 2009. The other four Master-Chiefs (Simon P. Murray, Levi B. Jenkins, Roger Harris and Obadiah J. Morton) were reported 'still at large', but the group apparently fell into infighting while still facing an intensive federal crackdown: Murray's and Harris' remains were found a year later, apparently tortured to death by members of their respective factions, while Morton died in an accident and Jenkins was simply never found. With this, the ADO is finished, marking a great victory for the federal government and, at least in moral terms, for Salvae Terrae as well. Capitalizing on the mass outrage and shock caused by the bombings, the Republicans ram through a bill to establish a comprehensive national firearms registry. Popular outrage was sufficient to push the Democrats into the House & Senate in next year's Congressional elections, but nobody was going to forget that the militia movement had just killed or wounded nearly 800 Americans in the nation's greatest terrorist attack to this point: their growth, which had been rather slower than what they were used to but still steady before the bombings, would stall entirely for the next five years. A massive financial crisis devastates the economies of Southeast Asia & the Korean Republic. Presidents Suharto of Indonesia and Park of Korea, both actually military dictators putting on democratic airs who had nevertheless presided over earlier periods of massive economic growth, hastily resign and flee their respective countries: still, both countries would receive massive IMF bailouts to stabilize their collapsing economies, and overcame periods of intense tension (particularly ethnic anti-Chinese sentiments in Indonesia) to peacefully transition into functioning democracies in time. Unfortunately, matters would not be as bloodless in Thailand, the epicenter of the crisis, where the government was ousted in a coup by a rogue faction of the army. Prime Minister Yongchaiyudh fled the country and UNPF troops were called in to restore order by specially-appointed replacement PM Leekpai, resulting in the defeat of the coup d'etat forces by New Year's Day '98 - and Thai domestic discontent at what was increasingly perceived as a puppet gov't that served at the beck and call of foreigners. In Russia, Chechen militia drive Russian forces out of Grozny, and make quite the show of brutality towards any Russian soldiers & suspected collaborators in the aftermath. President Silayev directs yet another, even more intense bombing of the Chechen republic in retaliation. Hugo Chavez wins this year's Venezuelan election. Domestically, Chavez confiscated estates from the landlords, cracked down on the tendrils of Colombian drug cartels, supported union activity, and nationalized key heavy industries. In the area of foreign policy however, Chavez did support the Colombian government in its war with FARC and the drug cartels, greatly weakening the former and finally completely crushing the last of the latter, while limiting his criticism of the United States to mostly economic matters and in fact praising the Americans for their efforts against the Chilean military junta back in the '70s. 1999: The brutal torture-murders of James Copeland and Vikki Ladbroke, a mixed-race couple of Salvae Terrae preachers, by the 'Aryan People's Army' in California leads to a national outcry. Of the thirteen perpetrators, five were sentenced to death, and not one of those sentenced to prison survived to see the end of the decade, courtesy of ST's contacts within the black prison gangs. Salvae Terrae itself begins taking the fight to the militias, organizing & training a paramilitary 'self-defense corps' called the 'Legion of the Blessed Lamb' in secrecy that would go on to battle right-wing guerrillas in the inner cities and the poorer backwoods areas of the USA. Behind closed doors, the highest-ranking Legionaries would claim that they were actually receiving their orders from Angels, or at least allowed rumors of Angelic support for ST to spread. President Lugar is, once again, simultaneously praised and criticized by different elements of American society after the 'Kansas City Standoff', a crisis initiated by 48 members of the anarchist 'Popular Action Force' occupying the Kansas City mayor's office, is resolved by SWAT storming the building & kill every single militiaman - including, some allege, two college students-turned-militants who attempted to surrender after fatally shooting a SWAT officer & being cornered. The UNPF directly intervenes in Russia's favor via 'Operation Xavier' when it became apparent that they could not defeat the Chechens themselves. Grozny is leveled and many of its inhabitants slaughtered in the crossfire, but when the dust settles, the city belongs to the Russians once more. 2000: In this year's Republican convention, President Lugar's National Security Advisor & former four-star general Colin Powell of New York defeats VP Tom Harkin and initial front-runners John McCain & Bob Dole for the party's nomination, though he picked the conservative Governor George W. Bush of Texas to be his running mate & provide a balanced ticket. He defeats the Democratic candidate, firm rightist Pat Buchanan, by a landslide, no doubt helped by Buchanan's tactless statements of support for the right-wing militias still terrorizing the nation. As for outgoing President Lugar, in his memoirs he would write about his crackdowns on the militia movement being 'a mission from God' and a great many-winged, many-faced Angel visiting his dreams to give him orders...memoirs which, thankfully for his reputation, would not be released until 2017. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II & his family are canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, and President Silayev expresses his support for the Church (particularly stressing his private baptism in Soviet times) in a televised address. In general, the Silayev regime and the resurgent ROC would come to cooperate more closely in this decade, fueling both joking and serious allegations that the days of the Empire were returning to post-Soviet Russia. The Brazilian junta falls after twenty-five years, not with a bang but with a whimper, in the so-called 'Green Revolution'. Charismatic populist Fernando Collor of the 'Brazilian Democratic Movement' or MDB, the only legal opposition party under the military dictatorship, defeated ARENA candidate Lt. Gen. Urano Teixeira da Matta in this year's presidential election: to the amazement of the world, Teixeira accepted defeat, and the military allowed Collor to take office. Collor proceeded to dismantle the overbearing security apparatus set up by the junta and to organize a 'Commission for Truth and Reconciliation' to uncover the military's atrocities, punish guilty parties and provide what compensation they can for the wronged. Edited by The Man, Sep 4 2013, 01:29 PM.
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| The Man | Aug 19 2013, 11:11 PM Post #5 |
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2001-2010 2001: A final, Iranian-supported monarchist offensive seals the fate of the Islamists in Afghanistan, who are driven back into the southern mountains and the border with Pakistan. Mohammad Zahir Shah returns to Kabul in triumph, and while the Royal Afghan Army would have to deal with a low-level insurgency to the south for years to come, by and large he would see stability and prosperity return to the country before his death in 2007.
The Aryan People's Army and the Sons of Eli work together to bomb President Powell's inauguration ceremony, but are foiled at the last minute by the FBI. In this year's round of federal crackdowns, 148 militants are killed and 2,800 are arrested, in comparison to 9 federal agents and 56 civilians killed in various incidents. 2002: The Argentine military's 26-year reign of terror ends in the face of the 'Blue Revolution', the second of two Color Revolutions to hit Latin America. Starting on February 17th, hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators marched through the streets of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and other major Argentine cities, and the troops dispatched to deal with them are unwilling to open fire on their own families, friends and loved ones for a change. Generalissimo Videla resigned and caught a flight to Mexico on March 15th, and the rest of his government crumbled soon after. Fernando de la Rua won Argentina's first democratic elections in a quarter of a century, campaigning on a platform of 'justice and prosperity for all', and following in the footsteps of his Brazilian counterpart Fernando Collor he would also open a 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' to deal with the many abuses of the old regime. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez withstands a military coup. Colombia's greatest drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, is killed in a massive shootout with US Delta operators, Colombian special police forces and 'Los Pepes' vigilantes, and his empire crumbles to dust not long afterward. 2003: Chile's junta is the last of the three great Latin American military dictatorships to fall, this time in the bloodier 'Red Revolution'. President-for-life Augusto Pinochet, having succeeded Cesar Mendoza after the latter's death in 1996, went back on his promises for democratic elections, and wound up setting off riots in Santiago and other major Chilean cities. Army units brought in to repress the rioters proved unreliable, and combined with the danger of an internal coup by reform-minded officers and foreign pressure from the US & other Latin American states, Pinochet resigned and bolted for Cuba. Andres Zaldivar, representing the Christian Democratic wing of the leftist coalition 'Concert of Parties for Democracy' or Concertación, won Chile's first democratic election in 27 years on December 3rd. Thanks to last year's legislative election restoring a supermajority in both the Senate and House to the Republicans, President Powell finally musters the political capital to strike down the Anti-Abuse of Drugs Act of '85, instead replacing it with the much milder 'Drugs and Substances Act' later this year. The DSA decriminalized possession of marijuana, eliminated mandatory minimum sentencing for all but the hardest drugs, and set the maximum mandatory sentence for mere possession of drugs to five years with parole. 2004: President Powell handily wins a second term. The International Crimes Tribunal summons Georgian, Armenian, Croatian and Bosniak war criminals for trial alongside their few Abkhaz, Ossetian, Azeri and Serbian counterparts not already condemned & sentenced. Being on the winning side did not save these men, most of whom would receive lengthy sentences for their atrocities over the course of the decade. The Beslan school hostage crisis, where approximately three dozen masked Chechen militants stormed a school in North Ossetia and held over a thousand people (including 777 children) hostage in an attempt to gain Chechen independence, is resolved forcefully in a joint storming of the school building by the Russian Internal Troops, Spetsnaz and a UNPF-RRF. The details of the operation have yet to be disclosed to the public, but it did result in the deaths of all the hostage-takers, a dozen Russian military and security personnel, fourteen UN troops and five adult hostages. President Silayev vows vengeance, and besides expanding Russia's role in the UNPF, closely collaborates with the UN's Rapid Response Forces to crack down on Chechen militant activity. 2005: After 16 years of UN-supervised negotiations, reunion between the PRC and ROC becomes a reality. Highly publicized reunification referendums in both countries mobilized tens of millions of voters, and the results came in at 57% in favor of reunification on Taiwan and 64% on the mainland. The reunited nation is titled the 'Union of China', and organized as a federation of 37 administrative divisions with a democratic constitution that created a bicameral legislature & enshrined freedom of speech, movement, and religion. By the year's end, the governments of both Chinas had resigned to make way for a UN-appointed caretaker government and the UC's first elections on January 19th 2006, which saw the Kuomintang and the Chinese People's Party (as the Communists rebranded themselves) win nearly equal percentages of the popular vote: former noted Communist reformer Bao Tong of the CPC won the presidential election, but the KMT secured a narrow legislative majority, and KMT Chairman Chiang Pin-kung became the first Prime Minister. A major offensive called the 'Thousand Man March' is sprung by the militia movement in the US - a massive armed march on Washington DC itself, coming from multiple directions so as to force the US Army to divide its resources against them, combined with carefully planned revolts in several major cities from Boston to LA with the objective of hamstringing local authorities & causing as many deaths as possible, and involving all 40,000 militants still under arms across twenty-seven different groups. Fundamentalist or Christian Identity Lily-White Leaguers and Sons of Sabaoth, Neo-Nazi Aryan Defense Force & Aryan League men, and anarcho-capitalist Sidewinders and Reborn Minutemen all moved in tandem in this last desperate gambit to forcefully bring down the US government. Alas, it was not to be: in the countryside the militia convoys were annihilated in bombings and drone strikes or by armored counterattacks, in the cities they were laid low by SWAT or the National Guard and - in their first open militant action - Lost Lamb Legionnaires, and Federal decapitation strikes targeting militia leaders effectively left what few groups were still functional after all this effectively leaderless. 546 militants had been killed, but even worse than that 30,000 more had been arrested: several hundred would receive the death penalty in due time, but most got anywhere between 25 to life in prison. Notably, the 'moderate' wing of the militia movement suffered crippling casualties, with most of their organizations completely destroyed and only the 'Popular Action Force' (itself originally an extreme minarchist movement that had toned down somewhat) left as the one moderate militia worth the name: power in the remnants of the movement had now irreversibly shifted to the extremists, who had been slowly gaining ground against their moderate 'allies' prior to this mess anyway. By the year's end, President Powell proudly told the nation that he had 'broken the back of the extremist scourge on our country' - and he was absolutely correct. Out of 27 groups pre-march, five militias were still in any shape to do much more than petty vandalism or robbery, and even they lost large numbers of members who had lost their nerve in the face of air and drone strikes or intense urban fighting. The militia movement would experience a brief surge in membership in 2008-10, but never again would they become more than a petty nuisance the federal government. 2008: As economic times are still good throughout the world and the militia movement is increasingly marginalized, Illinois Senator and Republican candidate Barack Obama handily defeats his Democratic opponent, ex-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. A final round of UN-sponsored talks over the 'Palestinian question' result in the transformation of Israel into a binational state: the Law of Return was extended to cover Palestinian refugees outside the nation's borders, all but the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank dismantled and their inhabitants either dispersed throughout other Israeli provinces or concentrated into the settlements that were left standing (Ariel/Betar Illit/Maale Adumim/Modin Illit), and the West Bank designated as an autonomous region of the Israeli state. In exchange, besides the West Bank's complete integration into Israel, the Palestinian Authority disbanded to make way for the aforementioned binational and multi-confessional local government, the Palestinian armed forces were to be integrated into the IDF, and Palestinians were to be held accountable to Israeli law as Israeli citizens. A new flag for the Israeli State, featuring the blue Star of David set into the black-white-green of Palestine, is unveiled on December 20th. 2009: An attempt by the 'Reborn Sons of Eli' to bomb & shoot up the inauguration of President Obama is foiled by the FBI. Sixteen of the 50-man movement's leading members are arrested, effectively leaving this particular militia stillborn. President Obama passes the 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act' of '09, expanding the CHIP system laid out by Richard Nixon so long ago into a comprehensive single-payer national healthcare system that, following the UK model, featured a government-owned, directed and staffed National Health Board. 2010: Massive bushfires wreak havoc in Australia. The Labor government's shoddy handling of the situation, combined with the downfall of PM Kevin Rudd at the hands of his own Deputy PM Julia Gillard, cripples the party's popularity: in this year's election, Tony Abbott and the Liberal/National Coalition win a resounding victory over Australia's first and extremely short-lived female Prime Minister. The 'People's Fist', an umbrella militia combining the remnants of the Sons of Eli, Sons of Sabaoth, Gadsden's Guards and White League, attempts to violently seize control of the Louisiana state government, starting with an audacious attack on the courthouse & sheriff's office in Colfax, Grant Parish. Their attempts to recreate the Colfax Massacre of 1873 came to nothing, thanks to SWAT and the local Lost Lambs, and their efforts to incite riots in New Orleans turned out even worse for them: however, their brazen attack does provide the Obama administration with the needed political capital to ram through the Sporting Weapons Act of '10, outlawing private ownership of automatic handguns (preferred by the militia movements of the past...though not semi-automatic handguns, which are coincidentally preferred by Salvae Terrae) and introducing a stiff federal tax on ammunition. Above all else, this is thought to be what motivated the spike in militia recruitment this year, though the movement as a whole would never return to 2004 levels, and in any case their numbers would progressively decline post-2012. Edited by The Man, Aug 30 2013, 04:32 AM.
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| The Man | Aug 26 2013, 03:47 PM Post #6 |
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2011-2020 2011: Militia violence in the US continues to fall. The occasional bombing, shootout or armed robbery still makes the news, but the frequency of these incidents has hit an all-time low since the foundation of the movement back in the '70s, worse (or better if you aren't a militiaman, obviously) than even the five-year period of militia inactivity following the 1997 Boston Bank Bombing.
The 80-strong Idaho Light Rifles, a tax-protesting militia, surrender without a shot fired after their mountain fortress is surrounded by the feds: more and more militias would follow their example in the years to come, rather than going down guns blazing as their predecessors surely would have. All in all, this was a year of peace and quiet growth across the globe. 2012: ...something...happened this year on December 21st, but nobody remembers exactly what. Aside from this unknown and indescribable event, nothing of note happened this year. 2013-2019: Little of note happens throughout all these years. Economies across the world continue to grow with little signs of stopping, standards of living consistently surge upwards from Afghanistan to Canada, organized crime the world over is steadily going down with more & more high-profile busts of mafia dons or yakuza/cartel/triad bosses and the like, no wars break out anywhere on the planet, Salvae Terrae's steady growth (now increasingly at the expense of traditional religious institutions) continues worldwide with no sign of slowing down, and the United Nations continues to grow in power and prestige. 'Global economic integration' talks, hosted by the UN and with the ultimate objective of a one-world currency, begin in 2015: plans of a 'universal credit' to be adopted by first the G20 countries in 2035 and by the rest of the world by 2065 are soon drawn up. 2016: GOP Congressman Thomas Sandoval of Florida is elected President of the USA this year, defeating Democratic Senator James Hickman with a solid majority. 2019: The 'Legion of God', one of the last functioning militias in the United States, is decapitated in a massive FBI attack on its leader James Mulligan & his entire command staff while they were busy strategizing in their Oklahoma bunker. Mulligan & most of his underlings were killed in the ensuing shootout, with only one severely wounded lieutenant surviving at least long enough to be dragged into custody. This sole survivor's identity and current whereabouts remain unknown, though his underlings are no doubt working to break him out of jail... 2020: Game start. Edited by The Man, Sep 3 2013, 02:48 AM.
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7:12 PM Jul 11