SLotH4's Note: Hello, everyone, I will be your guest author for the evening.
When I was reading the history of the Systems Alliance in "The Cerberus Files Addenda : The Systems Alliance," I was very puzzled by the whole thing. America seemed woefully out-of-character and I didn't understand why. After joining the PV Discord server, it was made clear that the PV timeline had diverged from our own and LP's published works had simply never addressed that. The timeline divergence for the purposes of this piece, as previously discussed through PMs with LP, is only that [REDACTED]. ;)
See if you can spot the moment when reality ends and the Premiseverse begins.
BTW, huge shout-out to my Editing Gang and LP's Editing Gang for their help with this, especially Jacob, who pointed out what a bag of wank one section was and how best to fix it. Special thanks to HailToTheKing/Throne_Of_Terror (he goes by both) for helping me revamp certain sections dealing with the Middle East and China.
UPDATE: The section dealing with the Kurds in the 1980s has been completely revamped. Also, some expansion was done to flesh-out China during WWII and the Cold War.
Matriarch Trellani walked the empty halls of Minuteman Station, her heels echoing off the polished ash wood floors like the clicks of a yeri bird in the meadows of Thessia. It was the twilight of late night and early morning, and though there was a full staff, they tended not to roam the halls at this hour. It offered her a chance to wander without concern. To take in the sterile sights and the echoed sounds. From the windows, she could see the empty void of space speckled with twinkling stars whose light had traveled centuries to grace her violet eyes.
Her nanosilk dress was dyed in Cerberus colors: grays and blacks, with a smattering of white highlights and a deep burgundy orange on the frills around her wrists and ankles. Her stiletto shoes were black to match but with burnt-orange heels – adding a splash of vivid color for any onlookers. An intricately patterned shawl of gray and white was draped over her shoulders. The dress parted along the thighs with each step, revealing cobalt legs marred by intricate jet-black script tattooed across her flesh like a broken writhing serpent – disappearing beneath the silk only to reemerge betwixt her breasts and continuing across her face.
She paused before a window pane, taking a moment to marvel at the universe laid bare before her. The weight of eons in the vast nothingness separated by mere centimeters of reinforced transparent armaglass. A high-definition screen display would have sufficed, but there was something about seeing things unfiltered that no projection could match. There was also a silent thrill in the idea that so little material protected her from certain death. The Thirty could not kill her whilst Jack protected her, nor could the forces of the universe when she was clothed in metal and glass.
Loud shouting echoed ahead of her – startling her out of her reverie. She relaxed her biotics – which had flared to life on instinct – and gingerly made her way toward the commotion. As she came closer, she determined that it was a single voice – distinctly male. But as she listened to the words he shouted, she grew confused. She had translator implants embedded in the sound-receptor pads on either side of her head, yet the words remained only gibberish. Rounding the corner, she found a man with his back turned, hurling – what she could only assume was – abuse upon the kitchenette's lonely Tupari machine.
"Credit entry declined," said the machine in a nasally monotone.
"Máquina do caralho! Se você não me der a porra do meu café, eu vou mandar a Niri te desmanchar, um parafuso de cada vez!" he roared, punching the machine's interface and losing his balance as his fist passed through the holographic display.
Trellani stifled a chuckle, startling the man who whipped around with wild eyes, only to noticeably stiffen when he saw her. Was it fear? Respect? Disdain? She'd seen such body language before and it had accompanied all three emotions. She took a step forward into the kitchenette and watched the man's reaction, he seemed to lose the tension and regress into discomfort.
It was disdain then. How tiresome.
"Is my presence truly so discomforting, child? What do you see when you look at me with such scornful eyes?"
The man glanced away, unable to meet her eyes. "It isn't scorn, Matriarca, more like… caution. Você é uma dama assustadora."
There it was again. That strange language that didn't translate.
Her thin lips curved almost cruelly at his hesitance. "Caution is advisable, I suppose. It is refreshing in a sense. Some of your colleagues looked upon me with derision. Though that has been much muted following BENEDICT."
"Not surprising. Anyone who was purged saw you as an asari, an alien. Those who stay see you as patrão sees you, pure Cerberus."
"Something I am grateful for. Though I am curious – if you will indulge me – what is that language you speak? My translator does not recognize it."
Trellani watched with fascination the strange amalgamated expressions her question engendered: mixed pride and hate. Not unlike her feelings surrounding the Temple of Athame.
"It is português, the language of my people," he spoke in bitter tones, "When Brasil was put to the sword, the Alliance made an effort to actively suppress the language and culture, even the parts the Imperador hadn't corrupted."
"And yet you speak this… pork-and-cheese?" Trellani said, inwardly grimacing at what her accent did to the foreign word.
The man turned his head and coughed into his mechanical fist to cover an errant chuckle – a tactful move she appreciated. "We keep the language alive amongst ourselves, that we may ever believe in our mantra: Brasil Eterno. The ghetto colony of Oro is the only place where português is lingua franca as far as I know. Commissars and others who go there receive a temporary patch to their translators for português, which is immediately deleted once they leave."
"Is this language such a threat? Are your people?" her tone soft and earnest, though secretly disingenuous. She was familiar with asari practices of cultural suppression and appropriation, but she was curious how an alien affected by it felt.
"Not anymore, no. The Imperador made us a threat… and made us victims." He looked away and grimaced. "It's how it always happens. Some slick talker comes in and appeals to the people. To their pride, their patriotism, their honor. Then, when they have everyone tangled in strings, they pull them taut and corrupt all that made the people a people. We saw the same thing in Germany and Japan in the Interwar Period."
"The what?" She marveled at just how easy it was for even a maiden to manipulate most human males, let alone a matriarch. All it took was physical confidence, offset by a certain coyness, and then the finely calibrated ability to flatter their own image of themselves. Most of all, it was the ability to seem forever out of their reach that always made them so desperate to impress her.
No wonder the Discerning has swept through their society like tidal waves through tissue paper, she thought, with more than a trace of sourness.
The human kept talking, of course, "About two decades' time between the first two World Wars. It was a time of great confusion and upheaval for humanity. It allowed vipers to slither into power and twist the people into a grotesque caricature of themselves. The Nazis twisted German nationalism into some mad attempt to enslave the 'lesser races' of the East. While the Japanese turned their Emperor into a mortal god and twisted the samurai code into something that turned every citizen into a fanatic."
"Strange, I don't recall any of this from Dr. Minsta's report on human history."
The man's face twisted as if smelling salts were rubbed upon his upper lip. "That's because that blue-blooded snob wrote about the 21st and 22nd Centuries. Very relevant to understanding modern humanity. That said, though the information is relevant, the context for why things went down the way they did is all tied up in the 20th Century."
"And the 20th was spawned from the 19th?"
"Naturally, but there needs to be a cutoff point, and the 20th Century held such massive changes in society. Prior to that, things moved at an elcor's pace," the man said as he folded his mechanical arms, "Patrão could probably hook you up with some historical documents that haven't been whitewashed by the Alliance."
"Pa… trowm?"
"Ah, right, it means 'boss.' "
"I see, so that's what you call Jack."
"Picked it up from Pel and put my own spin on it."
Trellani nodded in understanding – though it was insincere. Mr. Pellham had spoken at length about this man previously, and thus far he had matched perfectly the description of a man of troubling shallowness covered by a paper-thin veneer of masculine overcompensation. Though that didn't mean he was void of use – his point about historical context was true enough. History to an asari held more weight than other species. She knew the historical files Jack had commissioned were for her benefit, but she wondered if this man was correct, that she lacked the proper context – despite her own research into the officially sanctioned histories. Speaking of context. "It occurs to me that though you likely know my name, I never asked yours."
She already knew his name and even more than that – if Mr. Pellham's stories were to be believed. Not that he needed to know just yet.
"Volinski, Matriarca. Estêvão Volinski, head of anti-pirate/anti-slaver operations. Forgive me, I should have introduced myself at the outset."
"It is of no moment, Mr. Volinski," she said with a siari gesture of dismissal, "Though now I'm even more curious. These mannerisms – are you of noble bearing, or simply polite?"
Volinski shifted his feet and appeared to grow uncomfortable. "My father was a noble, and raised me to be his heir," he said, before adopting a wan smile, "I'm a horrible disappointment."
"Aren't we all?" Trellani chuckled into the back of her hand. "Now, if you'll indulge me, Mr. Volinski, tell me more about this 'Interwar Period.' "
Jack Harper tapped the cherry of his cigarette against the ashtray. Staring back at him – utterly nonplussed – was the shimmering form of Estêvão Volinski in the QEC communicator. He reached for his glass of Wild Turkey as the Brazilian absorbed his words.
"You cannot be serious, patrão. I'm a thug, not a historian. Go get your pet noble to write this shit."
"I am."
"Then why the hell am I here and not hi—? Gah— Dammit… you're talking about me."
Something darkened across Harper's features, a shadow that merely hinted at what he was capable of in the name of humanity, and Volinski seemed to realize – too late – that once again he had erred.
"Mr. Volinski, it is not your place to question what Cerberus does nor how it operates nor how you are to serve it. Nor is it your place to disrespect me, the man who, need I remind you, facilitated your partner's recovery from mental collapse and certain death, and you from what would of course have been a lonely, heroin-induced suicide in an Oro favela following the total collapse of your relationship with your estranged daughter. Not only does Cerberus serve humanity, it has also given you everything you have. Your immaturity and ingratitude are most… unbecoming," Harper said as he placed his cigarette in his mouth and drew the bitterly flavorful smoke into his lungs – all the while staring at his operative without blinking.
The message was brutally clear and entirely effective – what Cerberus could so generously give, it could just as easily take away.
Volinski's body was stiff in the projection, more so than before. Harper saw the man swallow a lump in his throat, trying and failing to hide it from his luminous eyes.
Good.
"Please forgive me, patrão. This won't happen again," he said with a curt nod.
Harper believed him. Volinski could lose his composure when irritated, but he was capable of correcting his behavior when it was pointed out to him by someone he respected. It was a useful aspect of an otherwise immature and often frustrating personality.
"Good. I dislike repeating myself. Returning to the issue at hand, Dr. Minsta's contributions to Cerberus trend toward historical and biological documentation. However, for this particular assignment, I believe you would be the best suited."
Volinski narrowed his eyes, his posture slightly less submissive, though still obviously disturbed. "Patrão, with respect, I do not believe that. You've never come to me for my opinions in the past. Never once, and I'm fine with that. I kill vesgos for you, and that's enough for me. But now you come to me and ask for an official accounting of human history?"
"A specific era of human history, yes."
"Yeah, I got that, but I find it interesting that not a week after speaking to the Matriarca, you come to me for a paper on the very subject we discussed at the time."
"Matriarch Trellani suggested you author a file, it is true, but I agree with her that such an assignment – in the voice of one such as yourself – would be valuable to our organization."
Volinski grimaced and glanced away, shaking his head. His air of irritation worn as a mask to hide his discomfort and diffident nature – something only the keenest eyes could detect.
"When can I expect your report?"
"I want it known that I object to this and think it's a terrible idea."
"Noted," Harper said, tapping his cigarette against the ashtray, "Now, when will it be ready?"
"I dunno… a couple weeks at least," Volinski said, sounding defeated as he glanced up at the ceiling, "The Kraków Arcology should have everything I'll need in the royal archives, but I'll need a room for me and Niri. Something with a cleanroom built into it."
"You'll have it."
"Fine. It'll take four days to get back to Earth. Put the reservation under 'Rodriguez.' Volinski out."
The Brazilian faded from sight as the QEC spun down. Jack stared a moment longer before taking a drag from his cigarette and bringing his haptic screens back up. EVA would have already made the reservation. On the whole, the trip to Kraków might have been superfluous, but it was good to reward a loyal dog when they behaved correctly – otherwise they might bite your hand when too often you used the whip.
"Droga!" Volinski roared, throwing a nearby datapad against the wall and shattering it.
"What's wrong, Estê-kun?" Nirin asked from her seat on the edge of the bed – dismissing the spirally manga she was reading on her omni-tool.
"You heard what he said. He wants me to write a history report. It's bullshit. I can't write this thing. I'm not Minsta."
"Would you like some help?" his girlfriend offered, "I did write the report on the geth after all."
"For fuck sake," he exclaimed as her whirled around on her, "You were never asked to write that, Niri. Stop trying to make it a thing."
"Hmph," the quarian huffed before going back to reading her manga, "Mr. Illusive-dono will come around. You'll see."
He grumbled under his breath as he sat down at his desk and lit a fresh cigarillo — the scent of tobacco and cannabis flavoring the air before the automatic fans kicked in. He tapped the built-in comm system and pinged the ship's bridge. "Guilherme, set course for Earth. The Kraków Arcology."
"Aye, Capitão."
The Cerberus Files : Addenda, Human History (1910-1990)
Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING
NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR
SYSFILL 5421135-SUB-TWO:Cross check complete
THANATOS-ONE-ONE-SEVEN :: VOLINSKI-117
CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED
BEGIN TRANSMISSION: VOLINSKI
Oi patrão,
Here I am, as demanded. The royal archives were just as I expected: public areas are pure propaganda, while the restricted sections are filled with truth, more or less. Glad you spoofed the scanners, or maybe Niri did, not sure.
Side note, Kraków is beautiful. The Commonwealth really went all-out when they de-communized the place. The architecture is exquisite. Tell the Matriarca to visit it sometime if she hasn't already. Pure Eastern Europe. Glad Victor didn't level the place when he put the Commonwealth under siege.
By the by, this report doesn't really have sections, so I'll break it up by decade.
-Volinski
Cerberus Thought for the Day: – file error – not found – error 404c –
Niri's Notions: QUARIANS RULE, SALARIANS DROOL! Lol, I'm so random. Mr. Illusive-dono, did you know your footer messages weren't properly encrypted? Incidentally, a picture of a grumpy cat will now appear on all outgoing messages. I'm sure your IT department could use the practice. Say 'hi' for me! :3
＜ATTACHMENT: KittEzno. jpg＞
1910s – 1940s
World War One is a good place to start, some stupid dustup in Europe because everybody's allied with somebody else. A lot of people describe it like a drunken bar fight. Anyway, the alliances of Europe were like a spider web, entangling every major country – Otto von Bismarck was quite the diplomatic architect. The war itself probably would've ended in a German victory, borders slightly changed and everything goes back to normal after the peace treaties are signed. But that's not what happened.
The British and French got the Americans to join the fight and together they forced Germany to the peace table. They might have received a reasonable peace settlement, but Britain and France wanted to punish them, and President Wilson had such a hard-on for the League of Nations that he let them do whatever they wanted. Funny thing is, the US never joined the League because the Senate fucking hated the idea.
Now, WWI was hugely complicated, but ultimately, only the end matters for this document.
There were four major changes following the end of the war: Russia went communist, New York became the center of world finance, the Ottoman Empire was dismembered, and the Germans were forced to accept blame for the war. The war defined the 20th Century and laid the foundation for everything that came after. It is so hugely important that I'm legitimately embarrassed to have only dedicated a few paragraphs to it. Honestly though, go listen to a voxcast or something if you want a more in-depth history. You could write volumes on single days or single encounters in that madness.
Actually, now that I think about it, there was a fifth change too. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at war's end, but… well, they may not have been a country even without the war. The ethnic tensions were pervasive, to the point that a Serbian nationalist assassinated the ethnically German Austro-Hungarian heir and started the whole fucking war to begin with. Is there anyone more influential in human history than Gavrilo Princip? I'm not sure. Hell, even Victor Manswell may not have done what he did without everything that happened because of Princip. Sorry. Off-topic. The Austro-Hungarian collapse was less relevant for what happened than how it is remembered thanks to Alliance propaganda. The collapse of the Hapsburg Dynasty created a power vacuum that led to the Balkans burning in ethnic violence. That part is true enough. The issue is that the High Lords then equate such instability with the lack of well-bred noble leadership. Never mind the fact that honest histories paint the inbred monarchs of the day as incompetent boobs who stumbled into war because they couldn't figure out how to stop it. WWI would've been smothered in the cradle had there been competent leaders like Bismarck.
Back on topic.
The Treaty of Versailles utterly raped the German people. They were forbidden to wage war, their military was neutered, they were forced to pay ridiculous restitution to France and Britain, and then they had their country carved up and some of the most productive land was given away to its neighbors. That sort of vindictiveness creates a lot of hate and resentment; I don't think the French or British really understood what they'd created.
After the war, it was a boom time. Economies grew and the people reaped the benefits… unless you were a kraut. Germany's neighbors enacted high tariffs on German goods, further depressing the economy and making it impossible to pay off their treaty obligations. The Reichstag turned to printing money by the boatload to pay off its debt, which, of course, led to hyperinflation. They have stories about people going to the store with a wheelbarrow full of money, and then other Germans will come by, dump out the cash, and steal the barrow because it's the only valuable thing. People were wallpapering with Reichsmarks or burning them for warmth.
That's not to say everyone treated them like shit, the Americans tried to provide aid, but that tapered off when the Stock Market crashed and kicked off the First Great Depression. Now everyone felt the pinch and the Germans became even worse off than before. People were scared and angry and depressed. They needed an enemy, someone to blame for their problems… someone to save them.
That's where Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists came in. The Nazis declared they could save Germany, rebuild its pride, and cast down the Jew-devils who'd ruined the greatest nation on Earth. Normally, people ignore such rabble-rousing asshats, but a crushed economy makes people very desperate for relief.
I'll take a moment to backtrack, because something very important was taking place right after the war, and that was the beginning of long-term, practical zionism. The idea of zionism – of creating a home or nation for the Jewish people – had existed for a while, but it really only took off in the 1920s. You had zionist supporters and groups cropping up and people actually started moving to Palestine (prior to WWI), which was under the auspices of the Ottoman Turks. It was fairly benign at first, with European Heebs immigrating there and purchasing some land. After the war, the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire like a turkey. (Addendum: I make no apologies. -Volinski)
I will point out that while European imperialists drawing arbitrary lines on the map laid the foundation for the Middle East and created numerous problems, there was a tonne of historical bullshit the locals had lovingly nurtured in the background. Ethnic hatred is deep-rooted and intense, amongst all peoples it should be noted. The destruction of this practice is one of the few things I appreciate about modern human society – anti-Brazilian racism notwithstanding.
The Arabs had been offered a nation of their own if they rebelled against the Turks, which they did during the war. Unfortunately for them, the British overpromised, and those promises overlapped between the Arabs, the Zionists, and the French. This isn't relevant right now – much like the zionist movement itself – but it sets the groundwork for later catastrophes. The long and short is that European Jews – fleeing very real persecution, like the ubiquitous pogroms of Eastern Europe (between 1881 and 1883 there were at least two hundred pogroms in Russian territory alone) – leveraged their wealth, connections, and even the antisemitism of their allies (some British leaders thought the Yids ran the world, so they supported zionism to stay on the good side of the all-powerful Jew (racism is fucking goofy, innit?)) to colonize their homeland of Israel… which they hadn't controlled in two thousand fucking years. (Addendum: Not that I blame them. Revanchism is very familiar to me. Both Polish and Brazilian flavors. -Volinski)
The ragheads were… less developed? They weren't subhuman or some shit, they just had a society that was antiquated. It left them vulnerable to the political games of Europe – i.e., outright lying to their fucking allies. The zionist movement was very disruptive, and the Zionists and British did themselves no favors in the way they dealt with the 'natives.' Any time the Arabs tried to organize politically, they were disrupted and played off one another. When all was said and done, the only thing that united these people was religion – and, of course, through European fuckery, the most radical voices were encouraged so as to disrupt any possible unity.
I'm not trying to make the Arabs out to be harmless or blameless. There were riots. And as rioters are wont to do, there were murders and rapes. But it's important to recognize that the Arab position was a legitimate one (they'd lived in the region for generations and were being pushed out by European foreigners) and they had no one in England advocating for them (because who gives a shit? There were no Arab constituents to worry about, after all). So the only time anything changed or was addressed was after they became violent.
Like I said, not relevant yet, but very relevant in the 21st Century when this dynamic is embraced by the whole of the Muslim world.
Now, back to the future… of the 1930s.
The Depression severely limited the ability of Germany's neighbors to do anything meaningful to resist its resurgent militarism. Remember that detail when you hear about 'appeasement,' to say nothing of the fact that French and British leaders had been soldiers in the First World War. They would do anything to avoid that armageddon.
On the other side of the world, Japan was facing similar radicalization. They'd aided the Allies in WWI, but something changed after the peace talks and a fascistic imperialism took root – historians suspect they felt snubbed, or felt the high-mindedness of the League of Nations was so much pretense for the West to fuck with their rivals and keep them from joining the big boy club. It didn't help that when Japan proposed a racial equality resolution, it was turned down flat – making it clear that the League served white European interests first and foremost. Before you get all starry-eyed, the proposal's aims were modest and lukewarm at best. It was not a universal equality proposal. It would only demand racial equality amongst members of the League – anyone on the outside was fair game.
In 1931, Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria, turning the province (now called 'Manchukuo') into a puppet-state as the world looked on. The League protested, of course, after all, they'd been created to prevent this very thing. The japs told 'em to fuck off and immediately walked out.
They focused on East Asia, namely China, though this focus shifted somewhat following the American oil embargo. At that point, they started picking off European colonies one by one to make up the difference in lost resources. The brutality they displayed in Singapore and Nanjing, well… you saw what the batarians did to Mindoir.
I'll note that China in the early 20th Century was a fucking mess. The Qing Dynasty was toppled and replaced by a republic that quickly fell apart during the Warlord Era, only to reunify for two seconds before descending into civil war again once the communists joined the fray. It was a historical low point in China's power projection – they were beset by foreign nations and forced into unequal treaties. Hell, even the Treaty of Versailles was a slap in the face – despite China's minimal but important aid to the Entente, German-controlled Kiautschou Bay was given to Japan. This was something the warlords agreed to in order to secure Japanese loans to fund their personal ambitions. Like I said, the Middle Kingdom was a house of cards, and when it became public that the leadership had sold out the country, the people lost their shit. Some historians suggest this national weakness is what allowed Japan to flourish in the first place.
Over in Europe, Italy had gone through its own changes in the Interwar Period, leading to the growth of Italian fascism and the political victories of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who became prime minister and set about reshaping Italy into a hyper-patriotic state. This Mussolini cocksucker was a puffy fucking goofball, ranting and raving and dripping with grease – it's fucking hysterical to watch those old videos of him posturing for the crowds. He's remembered as a clown – and he was – but this is a dangerous mindset because it ignores the fucking horror of this man's megalomania. Need an example? Well, aside from being a violent rapist and mass murderer, his supporters used to force-feed people castor oil until they literally shit themselves to death. If ever there was a minimum threshold for evil shit, it's that.
He spent a decade building up Italian strength until late 1935 when he invaded Ethiopia (known as 'Abyssinia' at the time) in an attempt to expand Italy's colonial holdings. It wasn't even a contest. How do you fight a modern European power when all you have are conscripts and an air force full of rusty old airplanes? Turns out there's no good way to fight such a war and they were forced to capitulate. (Addendum: Who knew dropping mustard gas on people armed with sticks was so effective? -Volinski)
The Emperor, Haile Selassie I, traveled to Geneva to directly petition the League of Nations to intervene. To its credit, the League did impose sanctions on Italy and strongly condemned its actions. But much like the Japanese, Italy simply withdrew from the League and continued kicking Ethiopia around.
In addition to the flaccid response of the League of Nations, Europe also dealt with France and Britain bending over backwards whenever Hitler asked. 'Appeasement' was a dirty word – still is – but it's important to remember the oft-forgotten context that made it a reality. World War One was a fucking horror show. A meat grinder that emulsified an entire generation of young men. A conflict that destroyed nations and permanently crippled those that survived. Appeasement was possible and desirable because every single political leader in Europe had lived through that devastation and had it indelibly etched into their very souls.
They would do anything to prevent another general war in Europe – which includes allowing Germany to remilitarize the Rhineland and 'legally' annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. But there's a reason 'appeasement' is a dirty word, and it's because they were appeasing Adolf Hitler. Peace was never a possibility with that man – a point that crystallized when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 alongside the USSR.
The two philosophical enemies had signed a non-aggression pact – Molotov-Ribbentrop – shortly before this which contained a secret clause that demarcated a future border between them that cut straight through independent Poland. The fact that they signed such a pact in the first place was shocking. You have to understand that Nazism, and fascism in general, was utterly anathema to communism (despite the nuts and bolts of each system being authoritarian supremacy, they disagreed vehemently on economics and the structure of society). Signing anything other than an annexation treaty was like making peace with the devil to these people, and yet they did it anyway.
Europe, North Africa, and East Asia were all warzones in the early '40s. France had surrendered and China was too absorbed in a civil war to mount a proper defense. It seemed like Japan and Germany were invincible, but Hitler was no general and it was just a matter of time until he screwed up in such a way his generals could no longer salvage things. In 1941, after growing tired of bashing his forces against England with no success, he invaded the Soviet Union, breaking the non-aggression pact he'd signed two years earlier. The Blitzkrieg pushed the Russians back to Moscow and out of the Caucasus; a good general would have seized the initiative and taken the city instead of fumfering around till winter.
The regions between Germany and Russia – where the civilians were persecuted by both Nazis and Soviets – are known to the Polish-Lithuanians as the 'Bloodlands.' Fourteen million people, give or take, were intentionally murdered by either regime – by Soviets in peace, and Nazis in war. Most fell to famines like the 'Holodomor' of Ukraine or the German 'Hunger Plan' in the occupied territories – to say nothing of the Jewish victims of the 'Holocaust,' who account for nearly half the total dead.
When you include soldiers killed in action and civilians who died accidently or from exhaustion, the death toll triples. In fact, if you separated the 'Ostfront' from World War Two, it would be the single most devastating and costly war in terms of lives lost of any war at any point in human history… up until the 21st Century, obviously. (Addendum: I like how much of its bite WWII loses if the Soviets and Nazis don't start shooting each other. It's one front in a world war and it counts for over a third of all deaths. The same is true for the Pacific Theater, with conservative civilian death tolls at twenty-five million minimum – the vast majority being Chinese. -Volinski)
Elsewhere, in the land of degenerate political gamblers apparently, the Japanese had painted themselves into a corner. Historians argue over the details, but it doesn't seem like anyone can determine what Japan's endgame was – even the Japanese themselves recognize that their chances for victory were beyond slim. What wasn't in doubt (unless you spoke to the army) was that war with America and Britain was a terribad idea that should be avoided at all cost – a point that was vociferously highlighted by naval leaders who would bear the brunt of such a conflict. And yet, they still ended up in a war with both.
How that happened can be explained a thousand different ways, but the long and short is that Japan was desperate to create an empire that was not beholden to the outside for things like resources – such as oil, which the Americans stopped providing and thus proved Japan's point. So how does one win an unwinnable war? That was the task handed down to one Yamamoto Isoroku, an admiral who conceived of the single most batshit gamble you could possibly imagine: a surprise naval/air attack against a neutral power (who could destroy you if angered) six thousand kilometers away. A plan so risky, that the man who conceived it said that if it didn't work, Japan would need to sue for peace immediately.
His colleagues said he was bonkers. He said if they didn't go with his plan, he would resign. They went with his plan. And I think that sums up the man, he was crazy in a way that made him invaluable. And so, on a date which lives in infamy, the Empire of Japan attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor. For whatever fucking reason, the American government thought stationing its entire Pacific fleet in a single port was a good idea. I suppose it was, in a sense, after all, who the hell would have seen that shit coming? That's why Yamamoto threatened to resign, because no one thought it could be done.
The sneak attack brought America into the war (Hitler stupidly declared war on the US a few days later, the only country to receive an official declaration from him). Fresh to the field, the US pushed back the Nazis and Italians in Africa before joining the assault on occupied France. Italy gave up as soon as things became difficult; I guess the wops had no stomach for war (they didn't fare much better in WWI either – goddamn eleven Battles of the Isonzo that went fucking nowhere).
As for Germany, the Allies bombed the shit out of her until the cities were charred rubble while the Red Army moved through East Prussia like a swarm of drunken batarians – mass murder, mass torture, mass rape… and these were the fucking 'good guys.' That was around the time the Russians 'liberated' Poland… and when they found the camps. The Jews get shit on a lot in history, makes me glad they made a home on Bekenstein since every motherfucker's trying to wipe them out. Half their number was killed off in the Holocaust; it's the closest anyone's ever come to finishing the job.
Anyway, the German lines collapsed and Hitler nommed a bullet.
And just like that, the war was over… for the Europeans, at least. America was still bogged down with the Japanese in a dogged, logistically nightmarish, island-hopping campaign. Fun fact: Japan had joined the First World War on the side of the Entente and taken all of Germany's Pacific Island possessions – creating a virtual shield around the home islands during the Interwar Period.
The Americans were forced to seize one island at a time – paying a terrible price with young men's lives. Each island was a fortress, or at least took the same effort to neutralize as a fortress. Underground bunkers and pillboxes honeycombed the islands. Filled with fanatical japs ready and willing to fight to the death. Just how willing and fanatical? Onoda Hirō, the final Japanese soldier to surrender after the war, did so in 1974… that's almost thirty fucking years after the war ended. And this wasn't uncommon, there were a bunch more who had spent years fighting a war that had already ended.
The Americans pushed them back to the main islands and told them to surrender or else they'd drop a couple nukes. Apparently, Japan didn't know what a nuke was and two cities had to be wiped out to enlighten them. Incidentally, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pretty much the only cities left by that point. Fire-bombing raids had already left the rest of the nation a burning devastation.
The bombings, in addition to the Soviet invasion of the Manchukuo puppet-state and predicted invasion of the home islands, convinced Emperor Hirohito to issue the 'Gyokuon-hōsō' – announcing his acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded Japan's unconditional surrender.
1950s
After the japs surrendered, the world took a breath and calmed the fuck down – except for China, they were still in the middle of a brutal civil war. The West took stock of the ruined world they inhabited and set about cleaning it up. This is when America's influence really shined. Rebuilding is expensive, and Europe was broke as a joke. The American Congress authorized the 'Marshall Plan' – or 'European Recovery Program' if you want to be technical – to provide foreign aid to Western Europe with the stated goals of rebuilding and modernizing the European economy. It gave America enormous influence and laid the foundation for the future world order. The first part was to scrap the League of Nations and start over with an organization called the 'United Nations.' It was similar to the League – in that it was completely fucking useless – but far less idealistic. Probably for the best, since it was conceived right at the outset of the Cold War. East against West, capitalism versus communism. People were terrified. Entire continents were traumatized. And the Soviets never demilitarized, content to flex on the West as they camped out in Central Europe – necessitating the creation of the NATO military alliance in the West. The Cold War brought out the absolute worst in the governments of the time, especially after the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapons.
After Moscow detonated a nuke and President Truman announced to the world that they had – he wanted to put his own spin on it, spoiler: Communist nukes are bad news – there was chatter in American circles about creating a super bomb. In fact, they codenamed it the 'Super.' A bomb so big, it would use an atomic bomb (AKA: a fucking city-killer) as a primer for the main explosion. Truman went to the eggheads from the Manhattan Project and asked if they should pursue the Super, if it would be feasible to do so, etcetera. The scientists debated and unanimously told him not to build the bomb.
So Truman authorized the Super – what we know as a thermonuclear weapon or 'hydrogen bomb.'
He had to – despite the fact the military still didn't know what to do with the nukes they already had. It was politically infeasible not to authorize the Super. Because if the Russians got one first, it would destroy the West's morale and decimate Truman and his allies in Congress.
On the heels of this paradigm shift on the world stage, the Chinese Civil War came to an end in a communist victory – with the Nationalists or 'Kuomintang' retreating to the island of Taiwan. In the middle of the Cold War it became a debate amongst American politicians about who lost China – Democrats or Republicans – as if China was America's to lose, narcissistic dicks that we are. The truth is that it all falls on the shoulders of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek – whose repressive actions turned the peasantry against the Nationalist cause – and the Japanese Empire, whose invasion so weakened the Kuomintang that the communists returned from near-extinction to win the Civil War.
And once the dust settled, that was it really. China was commie, and they had no real interest in the outside world. They kept to themselves, and as a result, their impact in the Cold War at the time was minimal.
I'd say things really started picking up when Joseph Stalin dropped dead in 1953. The history's a bit fuzzy, looks like some kind of internal power struggle afterwards; when the dust settled, the USSR was in the hands of Georgy Malenkov, but that's not the important part. The important part is who was pulling his strings after he was in power, that was a guy named Lavrentiy Beria. Used to be the head of 'Internal Affairs,' some kind of proto-Commissariat/AIS hybrid if I had to describe it. Whether or not Beria wanted to be the General Secretary is debatable. What isn't debatable is the fact that everyone who knew him fucking hated his guts, and actually holding that office would have created unnecessary strife in Soviet society.
It's hard to put into words just how evil this motherfucker was. He was manipulative and cunning, turning multiple nations into his own private prison-states. There's nothing he wouldn't do to secure his position or that of his benefactors before his rise to power. He was also a prolific rapist… so fuck that guy.
As always happens in authoritarian states when literally anything changes, there was a massive purge of domestic political enemies. Beria oversaw the whole thing, he'd gotten plenty of practice back in the '30s when his little clique was in charge of Transcaucasia, so this one was particularly thorough. Bulganin, Molotov, Khrushchev – he made sure that even history would not know these men, only that they were traitors to the communist ideal.
He also purged, with prejudice, General Georgy Zhukov. After his execution, Zhukov's name was dragged through the mud and the Soviet people were forced to forget him. He was still remembered well in the West – militarily-speaking at least – but that's small comfort to the dead.
I bring up those four names because what little we know suggests they attempted an anti-Beria coup… I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it failed.
With Beria's position secured, he set about, through Malenkov, restructuring the USSR and liberalizing its economy. Which is hysterical since the Soviets were still beating the drum of communist dogma. No need to let a little thing like hypocrisy stand in the way of competing with your rivals.
One of the things he pushed was reconciliation with the West, something that would've been impossible if not for the purges. The Soviets started ceding conquered territory to make nice. They relinquished East Germany to West Germany, ceded parts of Karelia to Finland, and left the Kuril Islands to Japan – after finally signing a formal peace treaty with them. It told the world that the USSR was reasonable and willing to compromise. That sort of 'soft power' maneuvering helped them move spies into – and exert influence over – friendly and/or weaker nations. The USSR became a major diplomatic player in the Beria years, far more subtle and statesman-like than it had been under Stalin. (Addendum: Important caveat to their withdrawal from East Germany, it was done under the express understanding that Germany was to remain neutral and demilitarized. This meant German accession to NATO was verboten, and that any violation of the agreement OR violation of German sovereignty would be a tripwire for the Cold War to go hot. This both cooled tensions and removed Germany as an area of concern so long as the agreement was honored, which it was. -Volinski)
Now, I don't want you to get the wrong impression about this guy. As skilled and Machiavellian as he was, he made mistakes. Not only mistakes, but there were cultural and societal movements that could not be contained or countered – some of which were directed at him, as he was something of a reviled figure behind closed doors. The most that can be said is that he appeared to be a figure that outside nations could work with in a way they couldn't with Stalin.
He maintained an iron grip over the Soviet Union for nearly a decade, but even with all his power and a deep state of domestic spies and saboteurs at his disposal, he was never able to exert absolute control. This was seen in the underground society that had always existed in the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before it.
Corruption was rampant amongst local political agencies and police departments. The Братва́ (Russian Mafia) operated with impunity so long as it respected high-level Communist policies and kept its nose out of Soviet politics – beyond the local level. Many professed an adherence to 'Понимание,' a criminal code of conduct for 'thieves in law' to respect a societal hierarchy in the criminal world – though it should be noted that many of the 'laws' were more like suggestions, and most criminals would ignore them if it suited their purposes. The MGB – later renamed the KGB following Beria's death – recruited criminal organizations and facilitated their expansion in foreign nations, most especially the capitalist democracies of the West.
More insidious – from an authoritarian point of view – were the underground cultural movements. Russian and Slavic artists, musicians, and authors operated in the shadows, influencing Soviet culture (such as it was) with messages of critique of the Soviet model. Some pushed the idea of reorganizing the USSR to more closely align with Karl Marx's original vision, while others pushed the idea of dissolution. The most brazen of them called for ethnic nationalism and greater autonomy within the Union if not outright independence. This was the so-called 'Yellow Revolution,' symbolized by a USSR flag with inverted colors. (Addendum: My hat's off to them. It takes balls of neutronium to stand up to the state like that when the consequences of a fucking song can be death by gulag labor. I wish my people had a few more rebellious artists. Too many of us are strung out on drugs or laundering clothes for noble sponsors. -Volinski)
But the world is more than the USSR and USA – though they take up much of the historical spotlight. The Persian Gulf was under the purview of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company following an agreement with the Iranian government in the Interwar Period that gave AIOC control of the oil reserves in exchange for a yearly stipend to Tehran. It was a bad deal for Iran, but it had the appearance of a fair one. Still, it left a bad taste in the mouths of the Iranian people who complained vociferously to their government. By 1951, Iran moved to nationalize their oil reserves. Two years later, the democratic government of Iran was overthrown in a US/UK-backed coup d'état, leaving Iran in the grips of a military dictator and subject to the whims of foreign nations.
It was a poison pill, but that's something for later.
Elsewhere, the Russkies established their own space program and near the tail end of the decade, the Soviets launched the first satellite, some shitty little soda can called 'Sputnik.' Useless trash compared to literally anything Joe Schmoe can create on an omni, but what can you expect from the very first prototype ever? The Americans certainly didn't know what to think, that's why they freaked the fuck out and rushed to propose their own agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
There was always a fear of space becoming militarized, and understandably so, we've seen in our time the results of orbital bombardment and asteroid-based terrorism. When it became clear that Soviet leadership wanted to put armed satellites in orbit, President Eisenhower tried to establish disarmament treaties with Moscow, with each side agreeing to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. When that fell through, he tried to at least get them to agree to leave space demilitarized.
Malenkov acquiesced to the Outer Space Treaty, but only to prevent the US from doing the same. Beria was practical enough to know that Russian tech wasn't at the level needed to put anything substantial in orbit. He was also aware that the US, with its stronger economy, would most likely beat him to the finish line if they weren't hobbled by a treaty. His ability to operate outside Party dogma made him dangerous and less predictable.
It wasn't until the early 1980s that the Voevoda Orbital Missile System came online, with a dozen R-36 nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. Impressive, but the US had already done the same thing four years earlier. Operation: STAR WARS placed two such satellites in geosynchronous orbit near the Arctic Circle. US missiles were more compact, so they could maintain the fiction that they were simply spy satellites. (Addendum: I'm a fan of the movies, but goddamn that's a corny name for a government op; shame Lucas died in '85, can you imagine the amazing movies he never got to make? -Volinski)
When the Soviets took to the airways to declare their supremacy, the US quietly informed them about STAR WARS and the communist world became very quiet. Makes you wonder why the Days of Iron took so long; we were ready to kill ourselves for decades.
Getting back to the '50s, though, the backdrop to all of this was a pervasive fear amongst the American people. Good, honest, proper citizens who believed all the horseshit the propagandists fed them. The 'Red Scare' was a collective national paranoia, it unhinged people.
No one embodied the frenzied paranoia of the time quite like J. Edgar Hoover. He was the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and a virulent commuphobe and cross-dresser. He spent who knows how much time and money spying on the citizenry at every level – from dirt-farmers to congressmen. Everyone was suspect, and his fevered anxiety was spread to others who took up the banner to fight the red menace.
There was this Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who started ranting and raving about communist infiltrators. He rode the wave of hysteria and became something of a kingmaker in the Senate. I just want to point out that Eisenhower fucking hated this guy, and understandably so, McCarthy was not the type of guy people spoke fondly of. He was too powerful to be dismissed out of hand, so the President had to work with him and give credence to the Red Scare, but any time McCarthy fucked up (read: a lot), Eisenhower and his cronies were ready to pounce.
Framing this air of suspicion was a brewing calamity coming out of the foothills of rural America. The Mine Workers of America union went on strike. First it was like a brush fire, little embers flying up in the wind to land helter-skelter. Local chapters would strike only to be joined by other chapters until the momentum reached a tipping point and the entire organization stopped working. All large-scale industrial mining ceased and the government had a fucking conniption. A union strike in the middle of the Red Scare? Communism!
The government tried to crack down, sent in the National Guard to force them to stop and get back to work, but they just dug in their heels. A kind of doomed resistance with all its romantic connotations. The clashes became violent. Many were injured. Some died. It turned public opinion against the government, and convinced other unions – completely disconnected from resource extraction – to join the strike in solidarity.
Their largest ally in this was the Longshoremen Union. When they went on strike, all foreign trade by sea ended in an instant. Ships piled up in the harbors only to watch as their goods collected dust or spoiled outright if they were perishable. It was an absolute nightmare, and the closest America came to collapse in the Cold War. Society was split between those who supported the workers and those who knew – in their bones knew – that Moscow was responsible for this.
Paranoia was a pandemic that infected the West as everyone watched America roil and consume itself. And laughing all the way, was Lavrentiy Beria. Soviet infiltration and manipulation of the Longshoremen Union and the Mine Workers of America was a masterstroke – on par with convincing scientists from the Manhattan Project to turn traitor.
The Soviets had been manipulating those two unions for years. Offering gifts and influence in return for being more ideologically open. They created a fifth column that would cripple their most hated enemy without firing a single shot. The only saving grace is that they failed to secure the other union they were courting: the Newspaper Guild.
If Beria's efforts led to Soviet control of all three of America's largest unions, the country would have collapsed and the Cold War would have ended in a communist victory.
Broadly speaking, the Newspaper Guild portrayed the strikes in favorable terms to its readership, though with an edge of simmering anxiety. While they supported the workers' demands for better wages and working conditions – things anyone would support unless they were an ideologue – they were deeply concerned about both the optics and the terra firma risks it presented. It made America look weak in a time when public strength was everything. Worse, it made America actually weak. How do you fight a war when your own people refuse to perform the work necessary to simply survive an armed conflict?
Senator McCarthy was apoplectic during the strike. Ranting and raving about communist influence in the unions. Many believed him of course, but there was no real proof, so the whole thing smelled of baseless paranoia – even if it was true. He ramped up efforts to target 'disloyal Americans.' 'McCarthyism,' as they called the witch-hunts, started to falter in the mid-50s when the Senate turned against him and voted to censure him. Baseless accusations and forced self-incrimination were, unlike today, frowned upon. He didn't have a leg to stand on because ninety percent of what he said was bullshit. He lost favor and the Red Scare lost some of its bite, at least until the 'Revelation of 1956.'
McCarthy was full of shit, but he wasn't wrong about communist infiltration. Beria had agents hidden in every level of government. Most were simple spies, but a few were active agents, manipulating certain members of Congress to rebuke and defame McCarthy and call his words into question. To say nothing of liberal politicians voicing support for the strikers. When it came out that the staff for Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was two-thirds commie… well, McCarthy was sitting pretty after that, and Rayburn was out on his ass.
The newspapers swung fully to McCarthy's camp. Gone were calls for restraint. Gone were pleas for common humanity. Gone were calls for striking in solidarity. The newspapers became anti-communist platforms of the most virulent nature. They called for the heads of every union leader involved in the strikes – those both knowingly and unknowingly supporting Moscow. Though they never abandoned the workers themselves, now portraying them as victims of others' political machinations. (Addendum: I should probably mention that a newspaper is a piece of physical paper – made from trees – that has recent news printed on it – in ink. -Volinski)
The Red Scare was back with a vengeance and the Tydings Committee turned Washington on its head. A third of Congress was forced to resign when it was revealed their staff were communist infiltrators or sympathizers. Congress, the military, civilian industry – everything was suspect and subject to McCarthy's ire. Riots and lynch mobs broke out in the streets as hysterical declarations led to public beatings and executions for anyone even slightly suspicious. So many people were accused – rightly or wrongly – that the army established concentration camps to house potential traitors, something authorized by the McCarran Act of 1950. The unions on strike were utterly discredited and their leadership was arrested, the workers forced to disband as the state nationalized the mines and ports – which is a very communist way of dealing with industry, just sayin'. It was as ugly a situation as you can imagine.
As for the government purges, they did little to stem the tide. As you well know, patrão, a power vacuum is the perfect backdrop for inserting agents into even better positions. At least six senators and forty-three congressmen were legitimate Soviet agents following special elections to replace those who resigned. Now, instead of a communist staff, you had communist officials who, ironically, were the greatest supporters and allies of McCarthy. They prodded him to attack non-communists while securing their own positions and that of other agents.
1960s
In the late 50s, Chairman Mao Zedong launched a domestic campaign to revitalize China and give it a chance to compete with the rest of the world. One goal was to increase Chinese economic wealth which he tied directly to grain output and steel production. This was problematic for two reasons: one, that's not how economic wealth was measured, and two, it incentivized lying on the part of low-level bureaucrats. They would inflate grain yields and even move grown plants closer to the train tracks so Mao could see the bounty when he came to visit.
It was even worse for the steel. The incentives created amateur foundries in every home, turning out useless, low-quality steel from any iron they could find. To meet the ridiculous quotas, there were farmers – now responsible for both grain and steel – who smelted their farming tools into useless steel. Meaning they were incapable of fully farming their crops – leading to even worse yields than expected, given the inflated numbers and inflated expected growth.
This was exacerbated by the Four Pests Campaign. It was an initiative to get the nation to destroy animals that were a threat to the people: mosquitoes, rodents, flies, and sparrows. The first three are obvious, they carry disease. The sparrows though were about protecting food, because the birds would eat grain. Mao declared that they should all be killed. And they were. And with the sparrows essentially extinct in parts of China, there was nothing to keep the locust populations in check. Combine that with a couple years of poor weather and an inability to harvest the crops, you had the single worst artificial famine in human history. The number of total dead varies depending on the source, but the most-reliable historians generally agree that around thirty million people starved to death to feed the ego of a fool. (Addendum: To combat the locusts, they employed pesticides with such enthusiasm that they killed entire ecosystems. Swathes of China were depopulated of insect pollinators. It became a cottage industry for poor Chinese to trade pollen packets at market and hand-pollinate fruit orchards. You can watch old vids of this – the inefficiency of it is appalling. -Volinski)
Mao espoused the 'success' of the Great Leap Forward even after it became impossible to see it as anything but an abject failure. What standing he had in the party was permanently tarnished, and he was forced to end the policy – though he never publicly called it a mistake. Was he a delusional madman, or a cynical bastard who refused to lose face?
I doubt the dead care which.
In America, the embers of the Red Scare left the people jittery and afraid. They craved hope, but needed security. The US Presidential Election in 1961 was practically a dead heat, with Richard Nixon just barely squeaking out a victory over John Kennedy.
The level of conniving that fucking guy brought to the table would make a Manswell proud, but it was really his ally Henry Kissinger who shook things up the most. Kissinger, who became Secretary of State, prodded Nixon to open up relations with Communist China to try and counter Russia and its allies – a strategy that was only palatable domestically because Nixon was vociferous in his anti-communist rhetoric, so people knew they could trust him on this. Kissinger advocated a relatively restrained policy in the Cold War, at least as far as the military was concerned (he had no issue with deniable ops). The US only allied with or propped up those countries that were useful to it. The big three were Japan, the British Empire, and Communist China. There were others, of course, but any country too poor to matter before the war was left to the red wolves knocking down their borders.
China was still dealing with the fallout from the Great Leap Forward famine. It speaks to Kissinger's abilities as a diplomat that he was able to convince Premier Zhou Enlai to accept American aid and supplies – over the objections of others in the Party. Perhaps it was the offer of engineers and investment money that made it palatable. Or perhaps it was when America publicly recognized the People's Republic as the legitimate China – effectively throwing Taiwan to the wolves. Who knows? Regardless of the potential perks, the objections went all the way up to Mao himself. But things had changed and Mao was no longer the infallible leader he once was – not after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. He was at a low point at the worst or best time possible, depending on your point of view.
With US backing, Chairman Liu Shaoqi – one of the few to publicly question the 'success' of the Great Leap Forward and remain influential – worked to undermine Mao's authority and dismantle his support base. This quiet coup left Mao a puppet to his former underlings, Liu and Zhou. He was the public face of the Party and the nation, but now he espoused new doctrines and philosophies that made coexistence and cooperation with the capitalist West not only possible, but desirable.
This also brings us to one of the more interesting reversals of the commies: the proliferation of Christian missions in China. This was something the Americans pushed for, hoping it would create greater similarities between the cultures. So why did the Communist Party of China (CPC) – a militant, atheist, secular authority – agree to allow the conversion of the people? Control.
Faith is a beautiful thing. It can unite a people behind a singular vision. The CPC encouraged the conversions because it created another mechanism of control – Christianity with Chinese characteristics. This was helped along by tying the teachings of Jesus Christ to the socialist doctrine – a fairly easy task, given all the talk about community and the disdain for worldly possessions. With the backing of Beijing, the Christian Church of China became a mainstay throughout the Middle Kingdom. This had the benefit of softening China's image to the American electorate – who saw communism as ungodly.
With the loudest Party detractors effectively muzzled, China accepted American aid and distributed it to the people to great fanfare – it should be noted that it was done in such a way that it looked like the CPC was providing the aid alone, lest they lose face. This was why they had previously rejected USSR aid under Mao.
It didn't take long for American engineers to arrive and help tame the mighty Yangtze River with the Three Gorges Dam, as well as other projects to modernize Chinese infrastructure. China was sitting pretty and they had America to thank for it.
Kissinger's policies toward Beijing left room for Tokyo to reach out to Seoul in an attempt to counter China's growing position in Asia. South Korea was unstable at this point, with protests forcing a dictator out and a military coup following the establishment of a new government. Once the politics of Seoul stabilized, Japanese and South Korean relations improved considerably as the US buddied up with China, culminating in a mutual defense pact and free trade agreement – something that astounded everyone at the time. Japan had to eat a lot of humble pie to get the kimchis to entertain the idea of an alliance. They had to give formal, official apologies for their conduct in the war and everything that came before that when Korea was a Japanese colony. The apologies were… tepid, I guess? But if you know anything about the japs, you know that any slight or dishonor is stupendously embarrassing – probably why the Koreans were willing to accept them. The Japanese Prime Minister of the time was assassinated and riots broke out in Tokyo. The Emperor himself had to step in to calm the situation.
Basically, Gookland was a fucking tinderbox, but alliances and trade kept it from boiling over.
The other major beneficiary of Kissinger's strategy was the British Empire. They'd been floundering since WWII, and only barely maintained their holdings in the Middle East. But they received US funding and supplies to act as an American proxy, expending British military capital so the US didn't have to. I'm sure it was hugely embarrassing to Britain's top government officials, but the propaganda machine made sure the people were content with the arrangement,
America itself was still dealing with the fallout of the Red Scare, and, with assistance from Mossad and MI6, the CIA and FBI were able to identify the Soviet agents who had infiltrated the government. Hoover and the head of the CIA – James Angleton – walked into Nixon's office to hand him the list of names themselves, the President ordered that everyone on the lists and anyone associated with them were to be arrested and tried for treason. A full half of Congress was in chains along with their friends and families.
At the same time, Nixon signed an executive order banning anyone not born in the United States from serving in any official capacity in the federal government; though he made sure to include language that protected Kissinger from the ban. This effectively ended Moscow's attempts to influence the US government, forcing them to focus on spreading communism to Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
Then there was Cuba. Normally, a lot like Dekuuna, nobody gave a fuck about the place, but two years before Nixon came to power, the Cuban government was overthrown by communist guerillas. This was before Kissinger's policies went into effect so everyone was losing their minds. The CIA pushed for regime change and received approval; Cuba was a little too close for comfort.
The Bay of Pigs operation involved the overthrow of the communist government by CIA-trained Cuban expats and it was a complete disaster. The expats were defeated and Fidel Castro consolidated his control of the island before reaching out to the Soviets for help.
Malenkov started saber-rattling over Cuba, as if it were the tripwire that might set the planet ablaze. A compelling ruse. Truth is, Beria had no interest in Cuba. It was too weak and exposed, and the eyes of America were focused on it as if Castro held the One Ring. So, while everyone was distracted with Cuba, Moscow started funneling money into South America.
The British, fuckawesome cryptographers that they were, intercepted these southern plans and gave them to Washington. That's when Kissinger really started to shine. Negotiations with the British ended in something called the 'Kissinger Corollary,' though most know the more ominous sobriquet of 'Victa Libertas' (Freedom Through Conquest) – a corrupted interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, which allowed allied Europeans to run roughshod in the Western Hemisphere. (Addendum: Kissinger needs a pimp theme. This motherfucker could pull strings all day long – of nations and bikinis. The latter is all the more impressive given his underwhelming looks. Never let it be said a man can't get a woman without effort. I find him one of the most fascinating men to have ever been – like Machiavelli reincarnated. But that was also the distasteful thing about him, he was pragmatic to a fault and played politics like no one else – remaining influential long after Nixon left office. Thus, he can be seen as an opportunist who will turn on people at the drop of a hat if needed – just ask the Kurds. -Volinski)
Kissinger had never been a fan of overt intervention, and the Bay of Pigs reinforced this idea, but the US could never again tolerate a communist regime in their backyard. So, while he disdained American intervention, he had no issue with an American ally intervening on their behalf. This is where the British come in, under the leadership of Prime Minister Gerald Templer. Acting as the catspaw to the US, England inserted itself into Latin America over the coming decades, starting with Cuba. Later, they crushed communist revolutions in Peru, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. They even overthrew the democratically elected socialist regime of Chile after the CIA failed to replace the pro-government head of the army. The people were spared socialism and communism, only to be conquered as British colonial subjects. It didn't exactly engender goodwill amongst the people, which is why they became hotbeds for anti-British terrorist groups after several failed rebellions.
British public opinion was very supportive of all this, a resurgent British Empire was seen as a positive. Amongst the political elite it's harder to gauge, though I suspect they were conflicted. On the one hand, the UK was more or less subservient to the United States. On the other, that subservience allowed them to partially revive the old empire.
The backdrop to all of this was domestic civil unrest in America itself. With reelection season around the corner, Nixon found he had nurtured two groups of enemies: the political left and the black community. Protests and being black were (surprisingly) legal at the time, so he needed to sling some mud on his foes, which he managed through the so-called 'War on Drugs.' They outlawed and cracked down on everything, even harmless shit like erva. It was the perfect backdrop to dismiss and disrupt his domestic detractors. It was all the more important as the Democrats started to signal support for the growing Civil Rights Movement; previous attempts at civil rights legislation were never able to overcome Nixon's veto power.
There was a special kind of dangerous the government feared most, a peaceful and sympathetic protester. The movement found this in a southern preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. The FBI tried to dig into his past to find some dirty secret to destroy his image and credibility – going so far as to give him a video tape of him cheating on his wife and suggesting he should kill himself. When that failed, they turned to threats of violence and retribution if he didn't convince everyone to stop protesting. But the sonuvabitch told them to fuck off – I'm paraphrasing of course; a preacher probably wouldn't curse at them.
I admire his gusto, standing up to the man and spitting in his face, it was certainly brave. But it was also a death sentence. J. Edgar Hoover opined that King was the most dangerous man in America – and in some ways he was correct. King was a man who could upturn the status quo at a time when society hinged on its precarious stability. They tried blackmail and threats but he stood his ground and kept preaching equality under the veil of peace. He's a better man than I.
I could not stand such barbs and walk on without retaliation.
I could not bear the clubs and dogs and water hoses of the police in silence.
I could not endure the repression of the State's thugs with calm words of injustice.
I would fight. I would kill. And I would die.
When King and his followers marched on Selma, Alabama in 1965, they were met with force. Armed officers blocked the way, demanding over bullhorns that King and the others turn back and disperse.
They did not.
The marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and all hell broke loose. The bourgeois beatings returned, yet the marchers never wavered. They approached the barricades and made to remove them, even as they were beset with billy clubs and tear gas. They continued on, until the gunshots rang out.
There's disagreement about it even to this day. Did a marcher fire a shot? Did an officer? Was it intentional or accidental? No one knows, but given the stress of the situation, I – and others – suspect an itchy trigger finger on the State's side.
Once the first shot rang out, they all opened fire, mowing down the marchers row by row. King fell in the volley alongside dozens who sought only peace and equality. And these images were shown to the country and the world.
I said I would have fought had I been there. Apparently, I'm not alone. News of King's murder touched off mass riots all over the country. It was easier to ignore when the worst that happened was 'agitators' being mauled by dogs. This though, this was mass murder carried out by the State.
The leadership of the peaceful wing of the Civil Rights Movement had been decapitated. King wasn't the only one to fall that day – Lewis, Williams, Mants, and Turner were all struck down as well. 'Bloody Sunday,' as it came to be known, rocked the nation and opened the floodgates for those of a more militant mindset.
Factions merged and splintered and reformed anew – each more distant than the last from King's peaceful aims. Protests turned to anarchy and the movement lost much of its support in the areas where civil rights support was a fashionable bauble to discuss at dinner parties where the only negro in attendance is the one clearing the tables.
Nixon and Kissinger had been fairly quiet during the Civil Rights Movement – a smart move considering what happened after Bloody Sunday. The peaceful voices had been silenced and all that remained was violence. It was the perfect backdrop for an unlikable robot like Nixon to operate in. He had an enemy he could crush with impunity, thus the growing black nationalist groups were labeled terrorists and treated as such.
Most leaders of these groups wound up dead or arrested. Increasingly, military force was brought in to smash these people, in a grotesque caricature of Grant's crushing of the Klan. The movement collapsed in on itself and people returned home, only to face even greater bigotry. Now they weren't just stupid or lazy, they were positively dangerous. They no longer had any place in American society. The people feared, and they lashed out. But violence amongst the white reactionaries was met with equal violence from surviving black nationalist groups like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Nation of Islam. Following the collapse of the movement, these groups went to ground. They recruited from poor neighborhoods and all-black colleges. They stocked up on weapons and explosives purchased with lucrative drug money. The crackdowns had honed them to a knife's edge – precise and without mercy. They assassinated cops and low-level politicos. They even took a shot at Nixon or so he claimed after he was shot at in '67. (Addendum: It was a beautiful mechanism for proper change. Let King's memory die. Only violence begets change. An oppressor does not negotiate with victims. -Volinski)
The US government tried to put down the violence and reestablish order, but ultimately, this just led to greater oppression as blacks were relocated at gunpoint to less contentious regions. The black community was in shambles and the country itself exhausted from the whole episode. Even the Nixon Administration was fractured in the coming peace; he'd lost the faith and support of the people.
Ever since his reelection, Nixon had tried to convince Congress to repeal the 22nd Amendment – the one that said a President could only serve two terms. But race relations were shit from day one, and the country was in no mood for four more years of this shit, not when it was still recovering from a peaceful protest-turned-pseudo-civil war. Most blamed him for the problems; it's why Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency instead of Spiro Agnew. Once in power, the Democrats pushed through civil rights legislation and protections – enacted new laws to clamp down on the Jim Crow bullshit that was still prevalent in the South. It, much like Reconstruction a hundred years prior, created a lot of resentment in that region and abroad. After all, this looked like a vacillation of responsibility to voters who demanded law and order. To them, offering concessions to 'terrorists' was unthinkable.
They called them 'Race Wars.' Bah! You want race wars, you go full-on Nat Turner, not this hippie-dippy peace and love bullshit. What was needed was organization and leadership. They needed a warlord to rally behind. Someone who could bring the hurt. They needed black Spartacus. It's a shame, the movement had a lot of potential.
1970s
In the years after the American race wars, the southern states tried testing the chains of the Civil Rights Acts. Each one tried to push the limits, using things like gerrymandering and voter ID laws to maintain white supremacy through a receptive Republican Party. Every time they pushed back, the North pushed harder. The courts took a hard line and sided with the Federal government almost every time – at least during challenges to the CRAs. The South did what the black nationalists did and went underground.
The Ku Klux Klan saw a resurgence like a plague of fucking locusts. Intimidating blacks and foreigners and any whites who supported integration – smashed windows, burning crosses, written and verbal threats. That was the tame shit compared to the lynch mobs they organized (if a mob can be considered organized). Occasionally, they even tried to do their own peaceful marches, something the government allowed – free speech is a powerful thing sometimes.
But they were always beset by terrorist actions from the black nationalists. Mailbox bombs, drive-by shootings, assassinations. My favorite was a story out of Museville, Virginia – a Klan meeting in the woods was infiltrated by some enterprising black men in white robes. They pulled out guns and killed everyone.
Why are my Klan brothers shooting me? Such scrumptious confusion, so thick and rich you could spread it on pancakes. Glorious.
It was low-level guerilla warfare between two irregular forces. Terror tactics and scorched-earth responses. And caught in the middle were the civilians. White civilians were targeted by the black nationals, and black civilians were targeted by the Klan. It pushed everyone to pick a side. Stone-cold liberal progressives who would sing the hymns of unity would spew epithets and join the side that offered them protection.
This! This is what race war looks like! Each man to his nation. Each nation to its race.
And on the edge of all this was Lyndon Johnson and the US government. They had to deal with violent, ethnocentric organizations armed to the teeth. Worse still, the longer they waited to respond, the greater strength each group gained from the worn-out civilians.
Johnson declared a national emergency and called on the National Guard to quell the violence. When the Guard showed a lack of enthusiasm against the Klan, but a vigorous zeal against the black nationals… the army was brought in. They restored order by smashing both groups where they could. Of course, irregular forces are notoriously difficult to deal with, and so both groups went into hiding.
The sidebar to this little episode is Soviet involvement, making it a hotbed for conspiracy theories. The Russkies never copped to their involvement in all this, even after the USSR collapsed, but it's telling just how many Kalashnikovs were floating around at the time. Then again, they were so goddamn cheap to produce that every two-bit army on the planet fielded 'em.
Anyway, other shit was going on besides America tearing itself apart, and that 'other shit' required oil. Oil was the lifeblood of the planet; every nation that mattered needed the stuff just to function. So when OPEC decided to shut off the spigot, the major economies were hit pretty hard; it made them very desperate for relief. The US, which had to deal with destroyed oil wells in Texas (did I mention they were torched by Weather Underground? No? Well, they were), found an outlet in Ecuador. Political pressure and 'debt diplomacy' forced the Ecuadorians to acquiesce to American demands for access to their petroleum reserves and the establishment of military bases.
Texaco Inc. (later acquired by Chevron Corporation) won the bid to extract Ecuador's resources and they drained the petroleum reserves as quickly as they could, clearcutting the rainforest all the way to the Peruvian border (the Anglo-Latin Oil Company was doing the same in Peru). The runoff from the drilling sites eventually poisoned the entire Amazon River and what was once the most diverse patch of land on the planet slowly died and became a continental scar. The Ecuadorians and Peruvians protested vigorously and were met with company-owned guns on both sides. Bulldoze a dozen villages and shoot anyone who gets in the way and people tend to keep their distance and stay quiet – it would've been quite the scandal in Washington and London if not for the fact that no one in America or Britain gave a shit about what happened to dirty foreigners.
Brazil was apoplectic over all this – most of the Amazon cuts through their territory after all. The geography was too much of a bitch to do anything militarily, so they engaged in economic reprisals against England and America, railing against them in the United Nations – they put forward a motion to place sanctions on them both and got enough support to pass it, but it was vetoed by the Security Council. This was the status quo of the UN from its conception to its dissolution – essentially an ol' boys club for Britain, America, France, China, and Russia. Any one of them could veto a motion and that was that – kinda like the High Lords and their Red Notes. The UN could offer nothing to Brazil in the face of American and British interests, thus they were forced to act on their own and hope others would join the trade embargo – spoiler alert: no one did.
In short, it was a disaster. Brazil's economy tanked overnight, and no amount of patriotism could reverse that trend. The nation's geography forced the population centers to stay on the coasts near the ports, limiting the nation's growth and ability to extract natural resources in-house. Brazil survived on imports and the government had just shut down trade with its biggest trading partners just to spite them. It completely upended the nation's politics and society devolved into chaos. Competing factions fought amongst themselves – socialists and ultranationalists, environmentalists and mercantilists – leaving the country's already precarious domestic economy in the toilet. This destabilized the country for decades afterward, and helped facilitate the eventual rise of the Imperador – they were run ragged by the 2030s.
And people wonder why the nation embraced that psychotic Spaniard.
The violation of Mother Earth was fairly commonplace; our ancestors honestly had zero fucks to give about the environment. It bred an extremist mindset to counter the rape of the natural world. PETA, ALF, ELF, Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd, and a dozen others all trace their origins to this period of time. Vicious little bastards sabotaged drilling and fishing operations, assassinated company CEOs, mailed homemade nail-bombs to any company that even slightly benefited from the degradation of Mother Nature.
But it was the reprisals against the medical scientists which were especially brutal. ALF and PETA hit a lab run by Merck Pharmaceutical and kidnapped most of the staff. They used them as 'test subjects' for the same products and chemicals that had been tested on animals. They videotaped the whole thing and broadcasted it over a pirate television network. It took months for the FBI to track down the torture den and by then there was nothing to do but put the poor bastards out of their misery.
Don't be too sympathetic though. Most American and European pharma companies had offices in Africa to provide 'vaccination services,' free of charge. In truth, the Congo was little more than a petri dish to test viral infections and military bioweapons. Some useful, but a whole hell of a lot of it was utter bullshit. I think that's the most disappointing thing about it. The waste. If you're gonna do evil immoral shit, at least create something positive out of it.
Anyway, the Bush Administration made a concerted effort to stamp out eco-terrorism in the 1980s and was largely successful. It's pretty easy to stop that sort of shit as long as you're willing to ignore things like due process. Apparently, President Bush was, and after six years of crackdowns and violent retributions, eco-supremacy fell apart as an organized movement. You'd still see the random nut, but nothing significant.
Across the Atlantic, the Soviets were dealing with their own ecological and social issues. In terms of the environment, decades of raping the natural world had left Soviet territory a dismal and poisonous place. Factories as far as the eye could see, pumping black and gray smoke into the sky and toxic sludge into the rivers.
It didn't have to be this way. When the Soviet Union was first established, it had some of the best environmental protections in the world. It makes sense when your philosophy demands that all things be held in common. It is everyone's air. It is everyone's water.
And then Lenin died, and the one man he most feared succeeding him, did. Joseph Stalin was an outlier amongst the Bolsheviks, more of a Middle Eastern despot cloaked in the mythology of Marxism than a true believer. And he had no time for environmentalist bullshit. All that mattered was competing with the West, the commons be damned.
In terms of society, deficits had been building for years, fueling economic bubbles the Party swept under the rug. Prices on consumer goods continued to rise as median wages remained stagnant. Protests broke out in the Masovian Voivodeship of Poland when additional price increases were announced. The protests were suppressed by the authorities, but other regions were beset by their own protests. Labor unions – long a government apparatus in the USSR – became underground networks for dissatisfied citizens. Poland was not the only Soviet puppet-state to suffer from economic stagflation. Sympathetic protests broke out across the Eastern Bloc, with sympathetic crackdowns in response.
A movement began in Poland, with a small, unofficial labor union called 'Solidarność' (which translates to 'Solidarity'). It advocated for workers the way a genuine union is supposed to. As the protests grew and the crackdowns increased, Solidarność found more and more workers willing to join. Other 'countries' in the Eastern Bloc found native Solidarity groups taking root. The Solidarity Movement grew into a major political force within the Soviet Union, such that the Kremlin could no longer ignore them.
It was the double-punch of early Soviet mythology that people latched on to. They demanded that the USSR live up to its founding principles. They demanded protection and responsible stewardship of the motherland and of the workers that lived there. They evoked the sanctity of the shared commons and the unity of the proletariat. The Kremlin acquiesced after a time; they were the ones dealing with the policy fallout after all. Water was undrinkable and the workers could not afford food. The very air burned the skin in places, while corrupt governments ignored the problem and exploited the people. Birth defects were rampant and cancers were ubiquitous as workers labored upon poisonous lands for a pittance, despite propaganda reels which touted the Soviet healthcare system as the best in the world and the Soviet worker as the epitome of industriousness and skill.
The Kremlin had been mellowing over the years, with more moderate siloviki types rising to prominence. They had been discussing these issues for a while prior to the protests, which is why they didn't respond with military force when the people occupied Red Square. I'm sure Beria would have been disgusted with the weepiness of his countrymen had he not dropped dead a decade earlier.
The first thing they did was increase wages while fixing prices for consumer goods across the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. They then reinstated the environmental protections that Stalin had repealed. Then they began an audit of all manufacturing processes, shuttering redundant areas or merging them with others for greater efficiency – all while improving working conditions for safety and comfort. Scientists were tasked with creating new manufacturing techniques as well as clean-up policies to restore areas that were left barren. Finally, they instituted a nationwide clean-up campaign, encouraging people to recycle and reduce waste – something that was mirrored in directives toward manufacturing plants.
The hidden aspect of that last point was the institution of the 'mobile gulag.' Kinda like prison chain gangs cleaning up the side of the highway in Texas… if said chain gang was composed of literal slaves. Political prisoners and agitators were put to work cleaning up chemical dumps. Hundreds of thousands died in the process, but eventually, they were able to remove enough waste that rivers and lakes had clear water for the first time in decades. I mean, they were still toxic, but at least they looked like they contained water – which is more than could be said for the Aral Desert.
It doesn't take an economic genius to see the dangers in imposing price fixing on a national level. Communism creates artificial scarcity to begin with because human nature rebels against the idea of working for less – 'if people are willing to pay X for this bushel of wheat, why am I forced to sell for less? I'm not gonna work for nothing!' Thus, less is produced, exacerbating issues of supply for any potential economic contractions.
To the west, Europe was dealing with a resurgent threat out of Anatolia when the Turks – responding to a Greek-backed coup d'état – annexed Cyprus and claimed everything but the British military bases. The British had attempted to aid Cyprus against the Turks, but were too spread-out fighting communist guerrillas in South America. Greek Cypriots resisted and turned their anger against their Turkish countrymen, the invading Turks used this as justification for mass-killings and the total expulsion of the Greek population. The British negotiated a temporary ceasefire between the two groups and provided ships to transport the Cypriot refugees off the island.
The diplomatic fervor this induced from nearby Greece led to open war, with the military junta in Athens quickly calling it quits when it realized it was overmatched. The government of Greece was reorganized under Turkish suzerainty, leaving Greece de jure independent but de facto under the jurisdiction of Ankara. They revived the old Ottoman millet system, allowing Greece to remain autonomous beneath the Turkish yoke – much to the chagrin of Greek nationalists who organized demonstrations in public and sabotage in private. The 'Greek Ulcer' as it came to be known, was a major drain for decades to come. Low-level insurrection that was impossible to stamp out given the diffused nature of the Greek people and their geography.
With Athens under their thumb, Turkey was like a reborn Ottoman Empire – if the Ottomans were a modern, secular, democratic state. Turkish leaders had gradually shifted their stance from disdaining imperialism, to embracing a paternalistic façade that encouraged spreading the enlightened views of Atatürk. They turned their influence to their neighbors over the coming years and replaced the governments of Albania and Syria with Turkish puppets organized through millets. The whole episode changed the layout of Middle Eastern and Balkan politics for decades. Knowing what I do about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, I'm confident in saying he would be appalled by the imperialist actions of his nation, even if he supported the underlying structure in Anatolia itself.
Attempts by the United Nations to rein in Turkey were stymied by the United States, who were concerned about losing a friendly nation in the region. The only other major ally in the area was Israel, and they were encircled by Soviet allies. It was a delicate balance that could mean open war if it wasn't maintained.
I'm not sure it would have mattered one way or the other. Assuming the UN could get its shit together for two seconds to actually do something substantial, the most they could have done was muster their 'Peacekeepers' to Cyprus itself. These jokers were incompetent and corrupt and dangerous. Not dangerous in terms of military might – though they did have gear and training – but dangerous in the fact that every single one of them had full diplomatic immunity. They could do ANYTHING they wanted and the country they were 'keeping the peace' in could do NOTHING about it. UN Peacekeepers were Commissars with human flaws and the results are fucking repugnant.
In addition to Turkey's newfound ascendancy, the region was defined by the deterioration of diplomatic relations between Egypt and Ethiopia, and everything that followed. Egypt only exists because of the Nile River. Without it, you have only desert. So when Ethiopia drew up plans for a dam across the Blue Nile tributary, Cairo lost its shit.
Protests and threats were levied on both sides, and when Egypt objected on the floor of the United Nations, they were rebuffed. The reasons why are numerous and nuanced, but it ultimately boils down to Egyptian opposition toward certain UN-backed initiatives and actions. Cairo considered it a betrayal. The river was the lifeblood of the nation, and with climate change becoming a noticeable problem, there were serious concerns that any upriver dam could result in desertification of every major population center.
They almost left the United Nations right then and there, but they were convinced to stay by their ally to the east, Saudi Arabia. The Saudis poured money and influence into Cairo in an attempt to create and prop up a friendly state nearby. The Egyptian government accepted these subsidies out of pure, political pragmatism. There was a quiet acknowledgement by the ruling elite that without accepting Saudi money and 'advice,' they were no more than six months from open revolt – something the Saudis would have exacerbated had Cairo failed to kowtow. The situation was all the more dicey because the civilian population of Egypt fucking hated the Saudis – for both religious and secular reasons. The acceptance of Saudi money necessitated greater autocracy to keep people in line, something the towelheads were all too happy to assist with.
Saudi money was used to improve and modernize Egyptian infrastructure – something no one could object to. It was also used to modernize and expand the Egyptian army – something quite a few people could and did object to. Israel watched all this with growing anxiety. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel seized the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and knew that any military action out of Cairo would seek to reclaim it. When war finally came, both sides met at the Suez Canal. The bridges destroyed in the last war had never been repaired, thus the actors were forced to cross by boat. The Egyptians landed troops on the far shore in the dead of night to establish a beachhead on the Sinai Peninsula before pushing into the desert. Their momentum lasted two days before Israeli forces enveloped them near Hasna.
The West, meanwhile, saw this as an opportunity to punish Egypt and ensure that the vital passage at the Suez Canal was maintained as a neutral shipping lane. Cairo had – time and again – proven themselves to be fickle and untrustworthy when it came to the canal. First, they attempted to fully nationalize the passage for their own benefit in 1956. Then, during their war with Israel, they rendered the canal inoperable by sinking ships at both ends to prevent passage – leading to the stranding of the so-called 'Yellow Fleet.' Turkey, Great Britain, and the United States joined Israel in forcing out the Egyptian military from the canal zone. The area was ceded to United Nations' authority as a free territory to ensure freedom of passage for all maritime traffic.
A humiliating peace was forced upon Egypt, and before the ink had dried, the Egyptian military had limped back to Cairo and overthrown the government. The new leaders announced that they would not abide by the dictates of conquering infidels and heretical Jews, that the West had bullied the Muslim world with its hypocrisy for far too long. They withdrew from the United Nations, the first to fully do so. They became even more tied to Saudi Arabia following this, as UN-backed sanctions and blockades at the mouth of the Nile crippled their already fragile economy. (Addendum: The war sparked sympathetic pogroms all across the Middle East, further encouraging surviving Jews to emigrate to Israel. -Volinski)
Running parallel to this little fracas was the emergence of a Sufi counterculture movement in northern Iran. It was led by a figure we know very little about beyond his moniker, the 'Wali of the Caspian.' He styled himself as a teacher – though 'mystic' applies equally well – who espoused opposition to hardline legalism and centralized authority. He and his followers argued that 'only through ihsan and introspection can we best serve Allah.'
It was a simple message and it resonated with simple people. A solution or antidote to the world's endless cycles of chaos and violence, it spread beyond Iran and permeated – or infected, depending on your viewpoint – the Middle East. The Turks and Persians largely tolerated this movement, because its tenants of personal internal betterment were seen as a positive thing, in addition to the fact that while the Wali was a Sunni Muslim, his movement was philosophical and non-denominational. However, what made it palatable in Turkey and Iran, made it utterly repugnant to the leadership of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Non-denominational philosophical self-enlightenment and opposition to authoritarian states… it was dangerous because it resonated with people, same way socialism resonated with the poors in the West.
Egypt – in the middle of losing the Suez Canal Zone – diverted its resources to deal with 'internal security concerns.' This took the form of a crackdown on everything that was seen as counter to the regime. The Sufists were lumped in with the Muslim Brotherhood – who had been a thorn in Cairo's side for years – and used to justify extrajudicial imprisonment and killing. The Brotherhood as an organization was shattered in a matter of months and its shadow was forced underground, becoming the terror cell Cairo had always accused them of being. The Brotherhood became a major irritant to the Egyptian government, responsible for no less than five presidential assassinations.
Simultaneously, Cairo led a crackdown on the nation's Christian minority. The government, with urging from Saudi Arabia, embraced a hardline Islamist viewpoint and saw any deviation from that ideal – be it Sufism or Christianity – as a threat to be quelled. Coptic Churches were shut down and religious leaders arrested. New laws went into effect, restricting sanctioned activities non-Muslims could perform. It led to a mass-exodus of the Christian population, many finding their way to the United States at that time.
While Egypt convulsed, Saudi Arabia further centralized its society – which is hysterical since it was already a theocratic absolute monarchy. It makes sense though, the Sufist movement came to Arabia and people were listening in the back alleys and backrooms of cafés, there was no Muslim nation more anathema to the message the Wali spread than Saudi Arabia. Possessing or proselytizing Sufi teachings was punishable by death – very public executions were held in the beginning, but they petered out once the condemned became venerated as martyrs.
Perhaps the biggest change was in education. The Saudi's mandated an ultraconservative viewpoint of Islam and one's place in the nation. This was taught to every child in every grade level. It was in these schools that al-Ahmar was molded into the batshit firebrand who would lead the Hand of Allah to execute the very Saudi Royals who mandated his education. It's a beautiful irony, if tragic for what it created in the War of Allah.
1980s
1982 was perhaps the most significant year of the decade, as it marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was spread thin, propping up its allies all across the world. From Southeast Asia to Central Africa. Eventually, it became too much, and the Union's economy collapsed and the rest of the government followed.
The USSR had been liberalizing in the years since Beria's death. Slowly decentralizing control and ceding power to the component republics. This rankled the hardliners and in 1982 they launched a coup d'état in Moscow and managed to overthrow the government and reinstate the Supreme Soviet. Unfortunately for them, the component republics had grown accustomed to their new-found sovereignty. They resisted, and the Red Army marched to war.
For months, Russia fought to suppress central Asia. The army crushing their own as army units stationed there chose either the USSR or their own nation. The Soviets – like Imperial Russia before them – used local ethnic units as auxiliaries with Russian commanders, while the core of the army was composed of Russian units with Russian commanders. That said, plenty of locals could work their way into leadership roles if they displayed appropriate loyalty to the motherland and ideology of the day. It was civil war lite, and as the Red Army penetrated deeper into the Steppe, stories of atrocity and war crimes leaked out – as is common in times of war, though the rampant nature of it in this case has been blamed on mediocre leadership of the time. Mass murder, mass rape, mass torture, theft, and arson. The only thing they didn't do was sow salt into the fields. Entire villages were depopulated – through murder and mass exodus – and razed, triggering a refugee crisis to the south and east.
Hope you're a fan of refugee crises, because there's plenty more to come. This one in particular exacerbated issues in neighboring nations. The majority of refugees were Sunni Muslim – Shia Muslims mostly settled in Iran – and this became a major issue for India and China. Take the issue of masses of new people who cannot be supported by established infrastructure, then give them a religion that's different from the ruling state. It's a recipe for disaster, as was seen right away in India with the proliferation of Hindutva gangs who harassed and attacked the refugees – often with the support of local officials. Then there's China, which kept the refugees in the western province of Xinjiang. That's less of a concern at the time for two reasons: one, China could give less than a fuck about human rights, and two, the region was already majority-Muslim thanks to the Uyghur ethnic group. (Addendum: China's Muslims became more of an issue during the War of Allah. At this point in our story, they're content to be persecuted by the state. -Volinski)
The West watched with hungry eyes and anxious souls. There was opportunity in the chaos, but also great risk. What if there was a nuclear exchange? Would the automated, retaliatory strike protocols interpret the bombs as American? Would America and west Europe burn due to Russian squabbles?
They found out six months in, when an army garrison in northwest Tajikistan was incinerated. NORAD went to DEFCON-2 and prepped the American arsenal, but nothing happened. Dozens of other military targets were wiped out as the world watched from afar. The explosive yields were minimal, these were tactical nuclear weapons or 'battlefield nukes,' not city-killers. (Addendum: If you want to be pedantic about it, then yes, they could be used to destroy a city or at least part of it, but they were nowhere near as powerful as the megaton bombs the Russians held in reserve. -Volinski)
The crackdowns exacerbated problems back in core Russian territory. There was rationing of everything: food, medicine, basic essentials. People waited in line for hours on end every single day. They finally snapped in 1984. Mass protests and strikes crippled the USSR. The economy tanked. The government tried to stem the tide, but no amount of beating and killing was able to get the people to settle down. They had had enough, and the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself.
The West – which had been funneling weapons and supplies into the satellite republics – did its best to prop up and encourage the republics that began to secede. The entire Eastern Bloc broke away and fractured, along with Central Asia. It seemed like things were finally calming down a bit, until Armenia and Azerbaijan declared their independence, which had the unfortunate knock-on effect of encouraging the Kurds of nearby Turkey to do the same.
Now, it's important to understand what the Turkish government was at the time. In 1980, the military overthrew the civilian government in a coup. Three years later, the military 'returned' power to an elected civilian president, but it was a farce, Turkey was still a military junta, it just pretended it wasn't.
Having a group of one's own citizens clamoring for independence was intolerable. The Turkish mindset echoed the late Atatürk, that these people were members of the nation and shared the same history and laws of Turkey. They could not be an independent people because they were no different than other Turks. The concept is sound, I suppose, but the Kurds disagreed and the army moved in to squash the uprising. The pacification lasted for months and led to the deaths of over twenty thousand Kurds and the utter destruction of at least three towns. It also left thousands of Turkish troops dying in the mountains – this was no massacre of lambs; the Kurds were fierce. The Kurdistan Workers' Party, or 'PKK,' retaliated in an attack against the Turkish President's family which left his wife disfigured and his son dead. You can imagine what happened next.
The Turkish military began a systematic campaign that targeted any Kurd (or 'Mountain Turk,' as Ankara insisted on calling them) over the age of ten (anyone younger would be raised as good little Turks in government orphanages and turned into neo-Janissaries). Refugees fled in all directions, some of the poor bastards went to Syria, even though it was a Turkish puppet-state at the time, it didn't end well. Most tried fleeing into the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and found a place to call home, at least for a time.
But what to do with a large swath of abandoned property and land? A decade prior, Turkey had a massive shift in its urban demographics as big-agro forced farmers to move to the big cities by outcompeting them. But they were farmers, and they had difficulty finding work and housing in cities that were already full of people. This led to the establishment of slums on the city outskirts. It was a constant source of strife and crime that the government had to constantly wrestle with.
Now that the Kurds had been persuaded to leave, there was a place for these useless people. Offering these people homes and opportunity gave Ankara an air of legitimacy. Remember, this is a fake democratic state puppeted by its military leadership. Using problem citizens to fill a vacuum left by more problematic citizens was a stroke of genius.
During this time, Iraq was bogged down in a war with neighboring Iran and was attempting to annex the Khuzestan Province. It was a terrible time for refugees to pour into the north – the whole fucking country could fall to pieces at the drop of a hat. The leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was never keen on the region – it was majority-Kurd and had dreams of national sovereignty long before now. Most dictators pull their fucking hair out at the idea of people not listening to them, and this moustachioed shipdit was no different.
But he had to be careful, he couldn't afford to offend them – not with his army hundreds of kilometers away. So… he sent his eldest son, Uday Hussein, to Erbil.
Good Lord, I can't even with this guy. Uday was a fucking monster. And his father knew that – because he created that monster. And I don't blame Uday for being what he was. He was, ultimately, a victim. Consider, when he was in kindergarten, he and a female friend were brought into a torture cell with the girl's father – he had offended Saddam in some way, doesn't matter how – and he had his men…
He had…
[pause in audio; 9 seconds]
{visual analysis: Estêvão Volinski's breathing is elevated; Volinski screams incoherently as he grabs a nearby table and smashes it against the wall before collapsing back into his chair and grabbing a bottle of Teotihuacan brand tequila, 100% hybrid blue agave; bottle emptied}
[audio resumes at 82-second mark]
Ugh… this is rough. This so fucking rough. And all I can think of is Pam when she was a child and I just want to murder every-fucking-thing in the universe. Apologies, patrão, dealing with Ba'athist Iraq is just… are we any better than the vesgos? This makes me physically ill. Just… ugh.
Okay, so, tiny-dick Uday – in his attempt to diffuse a volatile situation – nabbed the daughter of a prominent Kurdish tribal leader and raped her. Then he killed her and had her mutilated body thrown off the top of a building in the town square in full view of some of the tribesmen.
I can only assume he had an overwhelming compulsion and could not think clearly, because how the fuck else do you bungle a task that badly? Maybe he was just used to getting away with anything he wanted? Well, doesn't really matter. Things went fucking nuclear immediately.
The building he was holed up in was surrounded by an angry mob while the Peshmerga broke in and started taking people out. They tried their best to take people alive, but it was a free-fire zone and a lot of Uday's security was killed in the crossfire – they were the lucky ones. Uday and two dozen others were captured and torture-executed in front of a cheering crowd. They were torn apart. Flayed skin, smashed toes, pulled fingernails. Every one of them was castrated and burned with fire and hot irons. Uday had his hands split open from the webbing between the fingers all the way to the wrists. And then all of them were crucified in the town square and left to wither in the sun for days.
There were foreign reporters in the city and they recorded all this and interviewed many, including the father of the murdered rape victim. The world saw all this, and so did Baghdad. Saddam Hussein fumed. Not because he cared about his son, he didn't, but it was a slap in the face with a fucking sledgehammer, in public, and everyone knew it.
So, how does one respond to an old school Middle Eastern blood feud? You can either bury the hatchet – maybe exchange a goat or two or some shit – or you can retaliate and perpetuate the feud. Guess which one he chose?
The army was stuck in Iran, so he thought it'd be a swell time to test out the poison gas he had lying around collecting dust. Erbil had poison canisters dropped on it for hours. Thousands died and many more were injured. The international response went like you'd expect – especially if you correctly guessed that the West did jackshit-all about it beyond wagging a finger.
What was more interesting was the local response, because this is when the Wali of the Caspian returns to the history books.
The Wali had been quietly building a support network for his Sufist movement. It was all very grassroots and low-level up to that point, though increasingly widespread. With the defeat and expulsion of the Kurds, however, he saw an opportunity. Contacting the Kurdish leadership, he offered aid in their attempts to resist Baghdad and create an independent state. He also mediated between the Kurds and the Iranians, resulting in a cooperative military agreement against Iraq.
The Kurds would sweep down from the north while the Iranians came in from the east. The encirclement cut off Baghdad from its ports and left the Iraqi army to die by a thousand cuts. There was no retreat and there was no surrender – at least not to the Kurds, who would kill any Iraqi soldier that fell into their hands. And there was never any relief from outside. Saddam had zero allies to speak of, especially now that the Cold War had come to an end. And when Baghdad fell, Saddam nommed a bullet rather than suffer at their hands – probably a shrewd move on his part.
Iraq was partitioned into three separate states along religious and ethnic lines: Kurdistan in the north, a Sunni state in the west, and a Shiite state in the south. The Shiite state immediately entered into a military alliance with Iran, lest Saudi Arabia become covetous. As for Kurdistan and the Sunni state, they became the foundational states of the future Caliphate. For now though, they were simply Islamic states that were heavily influenced by the Wali's philosophies.
Over a million Kurds were killed during the 'Qûrban' (Kurdish for 'Sacrifice'). It was a hefty price to pay for an independent state. The Kurds called it a genocide, but I'm not sure that applies in this situation given the military implications, though their point is well-taken: it was brutal and a lot of noncombatants died, whether intended or not. Turkey, of course, maintained it wasn't a genocide, same as with the Armenian Genocide during WWI. Even to this day there are Kebabs who'll pitch a fit if you bring either up, as if they're so fucking special they're the only ones in history who haven't committed genocide.
The following year saw the collapse of the global economy: bank runs, stock market crashes, rioting in the streets, hyperinflation in post-communist nations. The Second Great Depression hit every single nation like a runaway dreadnought. The US and its allies were able to weather the market correction – barely – but most countries weathered it alone and had no means of keeping their shit together, especially since their own markets were already distorted from communist dickwaving – either by being propped up by Moscow or being a direct member of the USSR.
It was during this little fracas that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant went into meltdown and doused the area in high-band ionizing radiation. Due to the economic collapse and friction between Russia and newly-independent Ukraine and Belarus, the response to the meltdown was delayed by a full fucking week. The airborne fallout from the fires followed the prevailing winds and left an enormous scar in eastern Europe where human habitation is impossible – north Ukraine, south Belarus, and east Poland were the hardest hit.
Russia itself remained embroiled in civil war. Entire republics broke away as Moscow struggled to maintain its control of European Russia. They abandoned communism and reverted to something more… well, I'm not sure what to call it. To say they established a presidential republic is technically correct (the best kind of correct), but there's an image you have in your mind of such a system: democracy, liberalism, capitalism. It wasn't that. Yes they had elections, but their votes didn't really matter because power could be bought and bullied. Yes they had a constitution that guaranteed freedom of speech and protest, but good luck exercising those rights with the FSB watching you. Yes they had a market economy, but it was controlled by the oligarchs who rose to prominence during the liberalization period prior to the coup. With the collapse of the USSR government and Russian economy – combined with the secession crisis – Moscow embraced its roots. They had no experience with real democracy, and only knew stability under authority.
There actually was one area that they did kinda-sorta liberalize: 'freedom' of religion. The collapse of communism saw a resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Tens of thousands of churches were reopened or rebuilt and the people flocked to them in these desperate times – not for security or sustenance, as the church could provide neither, but for hope and familiarity. The People praised the Patriarch for that, and they listened as he beseeched them to live up to the principles laid out in the Bible, to care for one another and to be fruitful. I should note that this religious revival wasn't universal, and many in Russia disdained it. But for those who didn't – a minority of the nation, though a vocal one at times – it became a center of daily life. And as faith is wont to do, it became a special interest group in Russian politics simply because a portion of the electorate considered it important.
Russia's birth rates began contracting just before the collapse of the USSR – combined with abnormally high death rates, Russia was on track to have a population crash within fifty years. The church helped reverse this trend once the economy stabilized – or so it was claimed, hard to say how much stock to put into this idea. Regardless, the church's new status necessitated political lip-service from the siloviki that came to power in the Kremlin – this saw the promotion of the church and the suppression of faiths deemed un-Russian. The resurgence helped maintain the social conservatism of Russian culture that still occasionally colors their views to this day. (Addendum: God help you if you were a queer livin' in Saint Petersburg at the time and didn't keep that shit secret. -Volinski)
The resurgence of the Orthodox Church – even if it lacked political power and universal appeal – was a frightful concern for the Vatican, which had seen its own influence wane. The Pope reached out to the broken pieces of the Eastern Bloc and found a willing ear in Poland, which had long considered itself a bastion of Catholicism – even during its communist years. Recently traumatized by communist rule and the double whammy of economic collapse and radioactive air, the Poles were ready for change.
Conclusion
So that's where things stand. The Cold War brought humanity to the brink before dying in ignominy. Had the global economy not taken a shit, the world might've started to heal and society might've chilled the fuck out. Maybe it was all inevitable, but the 20th Century feels like decades of continuous escalation, no?
Anyway, I think that'll do for now. Niri wants to visit the salt cathedral in Wieliczka, so I'll have to put off part two for a couple days. I'm also using that little excursion to meet up with a few contacts of mine. I'll send you a copy once it's done, patrão.
-Volinski
Matriarch Trellani stood before the atrium of Jack's inner sanctuary – staring out at the smoldering spheroid of plasma that Minuteman Station orbited. She idly marveled at the sheer age of such an object. Marveled at the age of the light that entered her eyes after spending millennia worming its way out of the stellar body's core. Finally, she marveled at the resolution of the hyper-definition pixels of the display screen – Jack not being foolish enough to sit in front of structurally weak armaglass when he could be safely nestled in the core of the station behind meters of reinforced armor and honeycombed structure points.
Behind her sat the man in question, along with another who stood nearby. Galen Minsta struck an impressive figure – not in terms of physique, but in raw upper-class poise. The man dripped with sneering noblesse the way an impoverished corvée laborer would drip with sweat deep within the sulfur mines of Io. She smiled at his natural demeanor, marveling at how much the man took for granted. Had his ancestors not been wealthy, where would he be now? Did he have the drive to pull himself out of the stratified society of the Alliance the way her Jack had? Hard to say.
She kept her violet eyes focused on the citrine-colored star as Dr. Minsta cleared his throat.
"It's a decent enough summation," he said in a grudgingly haughty tone, "There are numerous things he left out – which is understandable, not all history is relevant. Though I take issue with his liberal interpretation of chronology – détente with China was at least two years after the Bay of Pigs, not before – to say nothing of his affectionate tone when expectorating his encyclopedic index of ethnic slurs."
Jack took a sip of his whiskey. "Such diatribes are to be expected, doctor. Volinski's predilections are well-known."
"Yes, sir, they are well-known, hence why I don't understand the insistence that this savage be trusted with this assignment."
"Jealousy is an ugly perfume, doctor," Trellani purred as she turned around and sashayed her way over to the men, "It is important to see things from more than one set of eyes."
"Perhaps, but surely you agree that such form can be done professionally. Tactfully."
"Of course, and yet some of these documents were written by Mr. Pellham and Ms. Brooks. No one could mistake their tones as 'professionally tactful.' "
"My point is that there are better options than a Brazilian cretin who spends his day proudly proclaiming to have murdered X-number of batarians – or whatever that gibberish word is he uses – while blithely ignoring the fact that at least half the people he butchers are not batarian. He exaggerates and embellishes. You can see that in the section on socio-cultural tensions in the United States. Those numbers are inflated, and they didn't have nearly as much support as his narration implies. He makes it sound like the entire country was at war, instead of a handful of turf battles and a single city that had to be put under martial law.
"Which brings me to the most pertinent issue when it comes to that man: his bizarre and antiquated views on race and ethnocentrism. His obvious glee when discussing anything even remotely related to his racial issues and other psychological hang-ups is, frankly, creepy. I strongly suspect that being rejected by the Alliance, his countrymen, his House, and then finally his daughter has shattered whatever mental stability he once possessed, to say nothing of losing his wife or his heroin addiction." Galen gave a tired sigh. "It is perhaps understandable, but I do not believe it is useful for an assignment like this, sir, and we must concern ourselves with use-value. There is simply too much at stake here for humanity."
The Illusive Man smiled. "History is so often a blind search for the truth inside the lie, doctor. Volinski's flaws are obvious – as are the distortions one inevitably finds in modern historical records – but that is the point. I do not want objectivity. I want a truer understanding of the lies the High Lords tell themselves, and of the way they use propaganda and other such info-memetic tools to shape human thought and human behavior. If we are to free our kind from their poisoned grip, Galen, we must first know it as well as we can. If he bends the truth, it is up to you to straighten it for me."
"Very well. I suppose it's a decent enough summation for those purposes. The inaccuracies are… inconsequential for the most part."
"Then we'll consider this a success of sorts," Jack said as he crushed his smoldering cigarette in the built-in ashtray, "Thank you for your input, doctor. You'll be expected to review the second part of his report once it comes in."
Dr. Minsta nodded. "Very well, sir," he said as he departed.
Trellani waited until he was gone to turn to Jack, a questioning note in her voice, "While I am always suggesting that the strength of waves combined will reach further ashore than a single wave, I am confused exactly in the value you see in him. I know you well enough that you would certainly be capable of obtaining objectivity from less contentious figures."
Harper nodded slowly, his blue-ringed eyes glowing faintly as he refocused his gaze on her. "To a point. Ezno, Leng, Pellham – they are military men. Despite how they act, ultimately, they default back to military mindsets. Vaught, Rasa, and Brooks, on the other hand, are psychopaths and sociopaths, thrill-killing murderers who value nothing above their own amusement."
He reached for his glass of whiskey, drinking before continuing, "The utility of such people is therefore, sharply limited – not only by their actions and backgrounds, but their connections to others. It says a lot about them that Ezno of all people is the most balanced and human of the lot. In most cases, of course, that has served us well – our uses of such people are, after all, rarely benign. But they are sharply limited in one shared regard – none of them work well with aliens."
She nodded in return. "Ah… the quarian." She tilted her head. "You think that's significant?"
The Illusive Man sipped his whiskey again. "I think in terms of the long game. As distressingly crude and somewhat disjointed as the man is, one doesn't take up a mentally unbalanced alien as a lover without some kind of insight. Insight and a certain lack of dissimilation which may be needed at some point."
She made a sign of siari disagreement at that, her expression clearly dubious. "I have my doubts regarding that, I am afraid. What possible reason could we need such an insight for, given your own relationship with me?"
He tapped a control on his chair, one of the many haptic screens nearby flickering to a new image, one of sets of orders for N7 active personnel to assemble on Arcturus Station. "It would appear that certain parties are moving forward with the plans we stumbled on some time ago regarding Sara Shepard. Finding a line of contact to her with any of our other operatives would be problematic."
Her expression grew more dubious. "…You cannot possibly be thinking of attending this… this…" she trailed off, and Jack Harper smiled.
SLotH4's Note: If you couldn't figure it out, the divergence was that Malenkov supported Beria following Stalin's death in 1953 instead of betraying him as he did in real-life. Everything that followed was based on that single change and how it affected global politics and foreign policy during the Cold War.
It also means that anything prior to that remains exactly the same as in real-life. Yes, the Bloodlands are a real thing and it's shameful that more people don't know about it.
I have immense respect for alternate history writers. This shit is horrifically difficult to write. One change will change everything else. How do you cover it all?
I also feel the need to… not apologize, but make a note about Volinski's manner of speech vis-à-vis ethnic slurs. The best comparison I can think of is Clint Eastwood's character in "Gran Torino." If you haven't watched it: get off your ass. He plays a war vet who uses ethnic slurs extremely casually, but without malice. Volinski is like that, using slurs both as terms of endearment and as a passive-aggressive 'fuck you' to anti-Brazilian racism (unless you're a Spaniard like Miguel de la Ardiente, then the hate is real). It's a way for him to take away the power of the words and cope with his own self-loathing as a half-Brazilian who has experienced the discrimination of his people.
Also, if you want to read more about Volinski and Niri, head over to my author's page and check out my "OSaBC Tales" series.
Unlike most things I write, I actually did research. Thus, I shall list my sources (other than Wikipedia, that is).
Bibliography:
"Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant" by Amy Knight
"Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" by Timothy Snyder
"Special Tasks" by Pavel Sudoplatov
Podcasts:
"10 American Presidents: Nixon" by Dan Carlin
"Hardcore History - Blitz Edition: The Destroyer of Worlds" by Dan Carlin
"Hardcore History: Blueprint for Armageddon" by Dan Carlin
"Hardcore History: Supernova in the East" by Dan Carlin
"Martyrmade: Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem" by Darryl Cooper
"Martyrmade: God's Socialist" by Darryl Cooper
"Martyrmade: The Anti-Humans" by Darryl Cooper
"The China History Podcast" by Laszlo Montgomery