Maybe that is TTL's conspiracy theory. The Mars landing was faked in a studio in Siberia.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I believe that due to orbital mechanics, the direction of concern for launches is East. On the one hand, they might grab Mozambique, OTOH, there are parts of the Namibia/Angola Coast that are as empty as any part of Africa south of Timbuktu. (and probably particularly empty of Europeans.)
Hmm. By that standard having Magdalena Bay turn into a joint US/Mexican launch facility as relations improve wouldn't be bad.
Right, that’s kinda what I was getting at - Namibia is remarkably desolate
OTL early SRs split from the earliest Narodnik thinkers when the peasant unrest that broke out in Poltava gubernia and Kharkiv gubernia in 1902. These events drew their attention to the potential of mass movements.
The OTL "Southern party" was founded in 1897, and mainly had branches primarily in the cities of Ukraine (including Kharkiv and Odesa) and southern Russia. Similar events in northern Russia around the same time led the local dissidents to similar conclusions, and these groups managed to get in contact with one another and create enough links to establish an underground party structure of local cells and regional groups.
Now, the Southern SRs are not to be mistaken with Ukrainian SRs, UPSR,which was a completely separate organisation established nearly two decades later.
The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
"...Kernan's famous quote "there are lines on a map and then there are facts on the ground" is generally thought to have referred not just to the strategic situation that the Confederacy found itself in by late February and early March of 1916, right before the devastating string of Yankee offensives that would carry through for the next eight months until the end of the war but also the incoming Vardaman-Patton administration, an unholy marriage of rabid agrarian populism finally unconstrained from democratic norms to elite plantocratic influence. Four months is an eternity at war and in politics, and the inauguration of James K. Vardaman took place on February 22, 1916 under very different circumstances than his triumph the previous November.
The intervening winter having been possibly one of the bleakest episodes in North American history, surpassed only by the next few years of the postwar Confederacy, had dramatically changed the mood in Richmond, and Vardaman arrived "not to a triumphant anthem of coronation but to a funeral dirge," as Woodrow Wilson phrased it in his seminal The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916. Starvation and violence plaguing most of the country had left the mood sour even amongst the oft-detached political class in Richmond, and suddenly the Red Scarves that had erupted as a potent political paramilitary a year before were no longer seen as patriots but rather as rabble-rousers whom it was increasingly possible to ask why, exactly, they themselves were not at the front. Senator Martin had, for his part, begun to see after a whole year of trying to cohabitate with Vardaman why Tillman had always made efforts to stymie the Chief's ambitions, and was so worried of the Red Scarves attempting to carry out a putsch that he arranged with Kernan a curfew in Richmond during the inauguration; Vardaman, persuaded by fellow travelers that gunmen awaited his arrival in Richmond to slay him before he could put his hand on the Davis Bible, requested no inaugural ball be held "due to this hour of hardship" but also that the ceremony be held indoors, in the House Chamber, where some modicum of security and decorum may exist.
While the sporadic fighting along the Rappahannock was too far from Richmond to be audible, it may as well have been close by considering that, compared to Joseph Johnston's inaugural just six eternal years earlier, the city resembled a military camp. The tenor of proceedings was just as somber as one might have expected for a capital that worried of falling under siege within months and where the supposedly allied Senate President pro tempore and incoming President were both certain that the other meant to see him killed. Vardaman, in the well of the House, gave a remarkably pugilistic speech even by his standards, promising "an unceasing resistance to the tyranny of the Yankee," and declaring, "the Confederate way of life will be defended to every last drop of blood in every able body." In case his point had not been made clear, his concluding line of his inaugural address declared "the White civilization's last stand against n***er mongrelism is here in this hour, and I would hang every n***er from the Rio Bravo to the Atlantic before I broke even a single one of their shackles, and I would rather draw my last breath on this Earth than speak the degenerate, un-Christian lie that the n***er is or ever will be equal to the White man!" Not once in his brief, angry address did he once acknowledge the increasingly dire situation the Confederacy found itself in both with its now-complete lack of allies, its frayed economy, or thinning manpower.
But, once again, there are lines on a map and facts on the ground. The Confederacy as March of 1916 arrived could not win the war simply because it really wanted to, and as the year marched on, the difference between areas under formal control by Richmond's forces and those that were not became increasingly ambiguous, and not only thanks to the open declaration of revolution in Texas. Slave revolts began to become considerably more common, especially in the rural Mississippi Delta where proximity to Yankee forces in Memphis and northern Arkansas had seen a cascade of rifles, bullets and crude explosives stream into the backwoods and bow lakes, finding their way into the hands of escaped slaves. More plantations were burned across the Confederacy, either by slaves or by American soldiers, in March of 1916 than the whole of 1915, and the figure would nearly double as April arrived. Home Guard and Red Scarves were increasingly at war with their own citizenry as many men, some who'd been maimed in battle, simply refused to return to the front when accosted, and deserters were for good reason not keen to see a noose in extrajudicial killings that often occurred with little to no evidence other than hearsay. Vardaman may have been the defiant new President who spoke boldly about carrying out a total resistance punctuated by a race war - but what was he President of, exactly?..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
The intervening winter having been possibly one of the bleakest episodes in North American history, surpassed only by the next few years of the postwar Confederacy, had dramatically changed the mood in Richmond, and Vardaman arrived "not to a triumphant anthem of coronation but to a funeral dirge," as Woodrow Wilson phrased it in his seminal The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916. Starvation and violence plaguing most of the country had left the mood sour even amongst the oft-detached political class in Richmond, and suddenly the Red Scarves that had erupted as a potent political paramilitary a year before were no longer seen as patriots but rather as rabble-rousers whom it was increasingly possible to ask why, exactly, they themselves were not at the front. Senator Martin had, for his part, begun to see after a whole year of trying to cohabitate with Vardaman why Tillman had always made efforts to stymie the Chief's ambitions, and was so worried of the Red Scarves attempting to carry out a putsch that he arranged with Kernan a curfew in Richmond during the inauguration; Vardaman, persuaded by fellow travelers that gunmen awaited his arrival in Richmond to slay him before he could put his hand on the Davis Bible, requested no inaugural ball be held "due to this hour of hardship" but also that the ceremony be held indoors, in the House Chamber, where some modicum of security and decorum may exist.
While the sporadic fighting along the Rappahannock was too far from Richmond to be audible, it may as well have been close by considering that, compared to Joseph Johnston's inaugural just six eternal years earlier, the city resembled a military camp. The tenor of proceedings was just as somber as one might have expected for a capital that worried of falling under siege within months and where the supposedly allied Senate President pro tempore and incoming President were both certain that the other meant to see him killed. Vardaman, in the well of the House, gave a remarkably pugilistic speech even by his standards, promising "an unceasing resistance to the tyranny of the Yankee," and declaring, "the Confederate way of life will be defended to every last drop of blood in every able body." In case his point had not been made clear, his concluding line of his inaugural address declared "the White civilization's last stand against n***er mongrelism is here in this hour, and I would hang every n***er from the Rio Bravo to the Atlantic before I broke even a single one of their shackles, and I would rather draw my last breath on this Earth than speak the degenerate, un-Christian lie that the n***er is or ever will be equal to the White man!" Not once in his brief, angry address did he once acknowledge the increasingly dire situation the Confederacy found itself in both with its now-complete lack of allies, its frayed economy, or thinning manpower.
But, once again, there are lines on a map and facts on the ground. The Confederacy as March of 1916 arrived could not win the war simply because it really wanted to, and as the year marched on, the difference between areas under formal control by Richmond's forces and those that were not became increasingly ambiguous, and not only thanks to the open declaration of revolution in Texas. Slave revolts began to become considerably more common, especially in the rural Mississippi Delta where proximity to Yankee forces in Memphis and northern Arkansas had seen a cascade of rifles, bullets and crude explosives stream into the backwoods and bow lakes, finding their way into the hands of escaped slaves. More plantations were burned across the Confederacy, either by slaves or by American soldiers, in March of 1916 than the whole of 1915, and the figure would nearly double as April arrived. Home Guard and Red Scarves were increasingly at war with their own citizenry as many men, some who'd been maimed in battle, simply refused to return to the front when accosted, and deserters were for good reason not keen to see a noose in extrajudicial killings that often occurred with little to no evidence other than hearsay. Vardaman may have been the defiant new President who spoke boldly about carrying out a total resistance punctuated by a race war - but what was he President of, exactly?..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
I wondered whether any other state in the confederacy would take the road that Texas is taking (or at least be interested in the idea of peaceing out by itself), but my thought is that Texas is *probably* the only state in the Union where you could have reasonably well off politicians with a minimal number of slaves (say only house slaves) especially if they were in the fields of Cattle or Oil (You put a slave on a horse to run Cattle in West Texas and they've got a non-zero chance of making Kansas or New Mexico, and if you don't arm him, he is useless against Rustlers and if you *do* arm him...
)
And *that* is probably the reason that the Confederacy actually stays together though the end of the war, nobody else is willing to take that deal.
I'm still trying to figure out Which defeated nation iOTL this is most similar to. Did Paraguay have congressional elections during the War of the Triple Alliance? Though I do wonder what it would have been like if the CSA had selected a 4 year term rather than a 6 year term and everything else had been equal.
)
And *that* is probably the reason that the Confederacy actually stays together though the end of the war, nobody else is willing to take that deal.
I'm still trying to figure out Which defeated nation iOTL this is most similar to. Did Paraguay have congressional elections during the War of the Triple Alliance? Though I do wonder what it would have been like if the CSA had selected a 4 year term rather than a 6 year term and everything else had been equal.
And when you consider that a good chunk of the Confederate Plantations in Kentucky and Tennessee had burned in 1915, having that number in March of 1916 and then doubled again in April sounds *really* ugly. I can't decide if this means the entire Shenandoah Valley goes up in flames, all of Alabama or both.
And it also makes it sound like the US doesn't really have any setbacks between March of 1916 and the end of the war in November 1916. Which doesn't mean good things for Atlanta... Also, I wonder whether in coordination with any of the columns reaching the sea whether they can be greeted by Marines having landed at whatever port they are going to. Makes you wonder if the US would deliberately leave such a port intact as long as they could given their ability to blockade farther out.
Also, I wonder what is happening in New Orleans. Definitely not an early city to fall like in the OTL Civil War, but *now*...
Love the idea of Tillman being like "see what I was dealing with all these years?"
Tillman is going to get out of this war with his reputation only partially destroyed, as opposed to Martin and Vardaman who are going to be pariahs on both sides of the Ohio and for good reason.
Vardaman's a charming bloke, ain't he? There's a certain amount of poetic irony that, should he survive until the end of the war (and this isn't for certain), that it's be a fireeater's fireeater who is forced to sign the treaty that brings about emancipation. 'Course, if he does, he ain't gonna live much longer than that anyway. Patton looks like a much more reasonable chap anyway - not sure he has what it takes to really steer the battered and broken ship that is the post-war Confederate state, but he'll have a much better chance than ol' Vardy..
There isn't a person living or dead who can steer the CSA out of the ditch it will be in after the war. When things are a shitshow for the USA, the side that won, you know the CSA is in for a world of hurt regardless of who is in charge.
How long do we want to bet it takes him to realize he fucked himself with a rusty piece of rebar by running for president? I'd bet about two seconds before his brains are blown out (assuming he sees it coming, of course).
I mean, while no one has the chops to meet that impossible challenge, Vardaman is uniquely unsuited for it in that he will be worse than pretty much anyone else at it.
"I'd like to think the last thing that went through James Vardaman's head - other than that bullet - was to wonder how the hell Thomas Martin ever got the best of him."
This is an excellent point!
Oh, totally agreed - although it's understandable WHY the Confederates fell back on a firebrand like Vardaman, he is the last man imaginable who should be allowed into theConfederate White House at this point.
Really, the biggest question is WHO kills the SOB before its all over. My current bet is either on a disgruntled soldier, or actully one of his own paramilitaries who feel betrayed by his eventual 'treason' and capitulation. Of course, he could also pull a Hitler in his own bunker as Union soldiers close in on Richmond; though I hope not for a multitude of reasons. Or it may be a military coup who realise the war is lost and just want to see some form of peace with the Yankees.
Either way, Vardaman pretty much makes sure that the ending of this war is going to be needlessly difficult for everyone, and there's going to be untold more devestation and misery amongst the Confederate people before its all done.
The Central European War
"...categorizing the Second Empire into three "periods" - Early Empire, High Empire, and Late Empire. The exact definition of Late Empire varies, usually but not always characterized by historians as beginning with either the death of Napoleon IV or the death of Georges Boulanger, but outside of a few figures who peg its arrival much earlier - sometimes as early as the Paris Bourse crisis of 1890 - it is generally agreed to have begun sometime in the first six years of the reign of Napoleon V and continued on through the ensuing decade, the Central European War, and the Second Empire's eventual overthrow.
Late Imperial France has been a subject of scholarly exploration for decades now as interest has risen in French politics of the period being downstream of French culture in that same period, as a potential avenue for exploring the causes of the Central European War. In part, this was thanks to the increasingly fragile political position of Raymond Poincare, and a great deal of early 20th century analysis has generally viewed Poincare's belligerency towards Germany and Italy, particularly as the internal situation in Austria-Hungary deteriorated 1918-19, as being a response to this. But why was Poincare's position so increasingly fragile?
The answer is in part that the France of the late 1910s was a deeply anxious country that increasingly lacked confidence in itself, either domestically or internationally, and that anxiety found belligerent nationalism as an outlet that could unite anticlerical liberals and radical socialists with monarchist conservatives towards an external enemy, a process that Poincare pursued with vigor. The reality is that France, despite being a world leader in aerial and automotive technology, was beginning to feel like it was drastically falling behind its peer nations, particularly after the Anglo-German Convention of 1916 that split Portuguese Africa in half, and this general sense of national malaise trickled down to - or perhaps was fueled by - the deep social divisions and anxieties of the country. Since the National Contract had been promulgated by Napoleon IV in 1878, the government of France had gone out of its way to attempt to marry the working classes, viewed as a better monarchist bulwark than the liberal bourgeoisie and urbane intelligentsia, to the Crown. Unlike most European states, the shadow of Revolution - be it 1789, 1830, or 1848 - hung over the Second Empire, and it was taken as fact by monarchist officialdom that the abortive Paris Commune of May 1868 had simply been a fourth edition of such upheavals strangled in its cradle. As such, republicanism was viewed as the enemy much more ardently at the Tuileries and as a much more live and real threat than elsewhere, and this anxiety colored both policy, such as France's generous welfare state that was grounded partly in Catholic social teaching, and politics, such as the near-panic from Prime Minister Poincare about his ill-advised decision to go to the polls in October of 1915 rather than six months later in which his Bloc Nationale lost her majority and was faced with insurgents of both Right and Left.
The specter of previous French upheavals was, of course, a hallmark of French politics (and perhaps even continues to be today), and by 1916-17 it could be credibly said that there was not one France, but rather two. There was the France of small medieval villages and rolling hills, of ancient vineyards and orchards, punctuated by church spires and associated with a rural, bucolic life. This was the France of Napoleon IV and Georges Boulanger, and the France with which the privately irreligious Raymond Poincare struggled to connect. Then there was the France of the cities, primarily embodied by Paris. Despite the conservatism of the French government, its capital had nonetheless retained its reputation as the City of Light, a place where artists, intellectuals, exiles and free-spirits gathered at cafes to debate philosophy, paintings, music or the emerging art form of cinema. Paris was a hotbed of radical, often republican, activity, and while Church attendance and religiosity across France itself was high (and growing, contravening trends elsewhere in Europe where it was flat to in slight decline), Paris was regarded as the epicenter of secularism, a political philosophy espoused in France as laicite.
Observers of French culture and politics, particularly from the polycentric United States, were often amazed at the vitality which Paris had in the French economic and political geography while also being stunned at how it seemed to exist in a different world than the conservative provincial France. Schools across most of the country, particularly in the south and east, were generally operated by the Church in partnership with the state and monastic orders; Paris, and to a lesser extent Lille and Marseilles, saw the bulk of their teaching done in private, secular academies as politicians who represented their interests, such as Aristide Briand of the Union of Socialist Reform, advocated for nationalizing these lycees and extending their purview to every student in France, a position which was met with considerable hostility from the devout majority.
It left France as a polarized country, split between its growing and cosmopolitan capital and satellite cities and traditionalist countryside, both claiming with some credibility to represent French interests abroad and at home as political and cultural practices were fairly homogenous depending on what side of the split one was on. However, one thing around which French society was not polarized was an intense French nationalism - for liberals, its legacy of revolution and reform, and for conservatives, its status as the chief defender of modernizing political Catholicism in Europe [1] - that was often directed externally. It was thus the case that most of the French public was equally contemptuous of Germany, Britain, Italy, even Spain, and with this being one of the few things that united a country that felt anxious about its place as the Great Power of the continent in Berlin's growing shadow, it was of course an itch that the French political class was ever-eager to scratch..."
- The Central European War
[1] Something I think is important to note about French Catholicism ITTL is that it takes pride in the National Contract and, due to having had to defend itself from secular and republican impulses over the 19th century in a way that, say, Habsburg Austria has not, but also not being actively sidelined by anticlerical forces as in Italy, has allowed it to both be more proactive in how it deals with the public and more sophisticated in its organization.
Late Imperial France has been a subject of scholarly exploration for decades now as interest has risen in French politics of the period being downstream of French culture in that same period, as a potential avenue for exploring the causes of the Central European War. In part, this was thanks to the increasingly fragile political position of Raymond Poincare, and a great deal of early 20th century analysis has generally viewed Poincare's belligerency towards Germany and Italy, particularly as the internal situation in Austria-Hungary deteriorated 1918-19, as being a response to this. But why was Poincare's position so increasingly fragile?
The answer is in part that the France of the late 1910s was a deeply anxious country that increasingly lacked confidence in itself, either domestically or internationally, and that anxiety found belligerent nationalism as an outlet that could unite anticlerical liberals and radical socialists with monarchist conservatives towards an external enemy, a process that Poincare pursued with vigor. The reality is that France, despite being a world leader in aerial and automotive technology, was beginning to feel like it was drastically falling behind its peer nations, particularly after the Anglo-German Convention of 1916 that split Portuguese Africa in half, and this general sense of national malaise trickled down to - or perhaps was fueled by - the deep social divisions and anxieties of the country. Since the National Contract had been promulgated by Napoleon IV in 1878, the government of France had gone out of its way to attempt to marry the working classes, viewed as a better monarchist bulwark than the liberal bourgeoisie and urbane intelligentsia, to the Crown. Unlike most European states, the shadow of Revolution - be it 1789, 1830, or 1848 - hung over the Second Empire, and it was taken as fact by monarchist officialdom that the abortive Paris Commune of May 1868 had simply been a fourth edition of such upheavals strangled in its cradle. As such, republicanism was viewed as the enemy much more ardently at the Tuileries and as a much more live and real threat than elsewhere, and this anxiety colored both policy, such as France's generous welfare state that was grounded partly in Catholic social teaching, and politics, such as the near-panic from Prime Minister Poincare about his ill-advised decision to go to the polls in October of 1915 rather than six months later in which his Bloc Nationale lost her majority and was faced with insurgents of both Right and Left.
The specter of previous French upheavals was, of course, a hallmark of French politics (and perhaps even continues to be today), and by 1916-17 it could be credibly said that there was not one France, but rather two. There was the France of small medieval villages and rolling hills, of ancient vineyards and orchards, punctuated by church spires and associated with a rural, bucolic life. This was the France of Napoleon IV and Georges Boulanger, and the France with which the privately irreligious Raymond Poincare struggled to connect. Then there was the France of the cities, primarily embodied by Paris. Despite the conservatism of the French government, its capital had nonetheless retained its reputation as the City of Light, a place where artists, intellectuals, exiles and free-spirits gathered at cafes to debate philosophy, paintings, music or the emerging art form of cinema. Paris was a hotbed of radical, often republican, activity, and while Church attendance and religiosity across France itself was high (and growing, contravening trends elsewhere in Europe where it was flat to in slight decline), Paris was regarded as the epicenter of secularism, a political philosophy espoused in France as laicite.
Observers of French culture and politics, particularly from the polycentric United States, were often amazed at the vitality which Paris had in the French economic and political geography while also being stunned at how it seemed to exist in a different world than the conservative provincial France. Schools across most of the country, particularly in the south and east, were generally operated by the Church in partnership with the state and monastic orders; Paris, and to a lesser extent Lille and Marseilles, saw the bulk of their teaching done in private, secular academies as politicians who represented their interests, such as Aristide Briand of the Union of Socialist Reform, advocated for nationalizing these lycees and extending their purview to every student in France, a position which was met with considerable hostility from the devout majority.
It left France as a polarized country, split between its growing and cosmopolitan capital and satellite cities and traditionalist countryside, both claiming with some credibility to represent French interests abroad and at home as political and cultural practices were fairly homogenous depending on what side of the split one was on. However, one thing around which French society was not polarized was an intense French nationalism - for liberals, its legacy of revolution and reform, and for conservatives, its status as the chief defender of modernizing political Catholicism in Europe [1] - that was often directed externally. It was thus the case that most of the French public was equally contemptuous of Germany, Britain, Italy, even Spain, and with this being one of the few things that united a country that felt anxious about its place as the Great Power of the continent in Berlin's growing shadow, it was of course an itch that the French political class was ever-eager to scratch..."
- The Central European War
[1] Something I think is important to note about French Catholicism ITTL is that it takes pride in the National Contract and, due to having had to defend itself from secular and republican impulses over the 19th century in a way that, say, Habsburg Austria has not, but also not being actively sidelined by anticlerical forces as in Italy, has allowed it to both be more proactive in how it deals with the public and more sophisticated in its organization.
I'll respond to all those above comments by just remarking that I'm amused that despite no particular textual hints (that I can think of) to suggest it, it's simply taken for granted that Vardaman will get whacked sooner or later lol
Great chapter as always, although i'm sad that the bonapartes will go eventutally your napoleonic victory TL is a great comfort.