Part 5
The First Cold War
Chapter 1
Buildup to the First Cold War
Author’s note: This is being retconned: Turkey is no longer Communist. It is a secular military dictatorship with a figurehead Sultan. Also, Kurdistan and Armenia are independent, Russia controls the Holy Land and Lebanon, and Germany rules Iraq, Syria, and Jordan as protectorates. On with the show!
It has commonly been said that, after Pyotr Wrangel signed the Chinese instrument of surrender, he immediately called Tsarina Olga on the phone to inform his liege himself. Olga would then inform the Kaiser, who would then burst into the Reichstag’s first session since the beginning of the war to tell them. Huey Long, much to his chagrin, would only find out after the American ambassador to India told him, after being told himself by Subhas Bose.
For the first time in years, life was normal. That was not to say that everything was good. For example, a British Fascist devoted to Mosley, Colonel Andrew Cornelius, would, with his unit, take a nuclear device to the Isle of Mann and essentially hold it hostage, declaring that the Isle of Mann was the last holdout of the true Britain, while the usurper King George VI whored Britain out to the Kaiser. Cornelius thus proclaimed himself God-Emperor Andrew I of the Imperium of Mann, with the intention to one day dominate the world. He was laughed off at first, but the knowledge that he had a nuclear weapon caused great concern among the international community. For the moment, a standoff ensued.
Long was far too busy to be concerned with the Imperium. Under him, the forces of Communism had conquered all of the Americas, the Iberian peninsula, and North Africa. Long thus consolidated America’s conquests into the Communist International Alliance (CIA) with the stated goal of protecting Communist countries from the counter revolution. Already, the ruling classes in Germany, Russia, and Japan were nervous.
In Germany, the elections brought a victory for the Center Party, led by Heinrich Bruning. Bruning firmly believed that it was crucial to have an international body in place to stave off future conflicts. He called this pet project the International League, and offered every nation the chance to join. The World Assembly would vote on resolutions that would solve conflicts. In practice, the IL would have little to no effect on anything.
The first problem that the IL had to deal with was the problem of Italy. As you remember from the Italy chapter, following the collapse of the Mussolini government a civil war had erupted, with the Royal Army and the Communists in an unholy alliance against Mussolini’s blackshirts. The Royalists at the end of the war controlled the north of the country while the Communists controlled the South; the border was at Rome. Now, the two governments were opposed about who was the rightful government of Italy.
At first, the delegate of the Kingdom of Italy was emphatic that the South should be brought back into the fold. The delegates of Germany and Russia quickly informed him that that was likely not going to be possible as long as the USSA backed the Socialist Republic of Italy. Likewise, the delegate of the USSA told the delegate of South Italy to (paraphrased) shut up and let me do the talking. Eventually, the IL passed Resolution 1, which stated that North and South Italy would have to coexist. Thus, 1942 ended.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Germany was finally starting to release its mandates. The Kingdoms of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq were important German allies against the rising threat of Saudi Arabia. United in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottomans by King Abdulaziz, the Saudis followed a violent, fundamentalist form of Islam. Abdulaziz harbored dreams of uniting all Arabs, and to Germany and Russia, this was unacceptable. That was THEIR oil!
To compound the threat of Abdulaziz, Russia chose NOT to release their protectorate in the Holy Land and the Levant. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, with Tsarina Olga as the ceremonial head of state, was nominally to be shared between the Jews, Christians, and Muslims who inhabited the area, in practice the Russians gave preferential treatment to the Christians, especially after they began settling more and more Christians from Europe there. This created an environment where the Holy Land was a land of divisions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, which Abdulaziz was only too happy to exploit.
In this endeavor he was joined by an unlikely ally for the fundamentalist king: Huey Long. Long was very much eager to gain a foothold in the Middle East, and saw the resentment of the Jews and Muslims as a golden opportunity to wipe Russian influence on the map. Thus, while Abdulaziz began arming Muslim terrorists, the USSA began arming Jewisbh terrorists, particularly the Judean People’s Front. They were opposed not just by the Russians, but also by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the organization backed by Saudi Arabia. Thus began what history records as the Levantine War, an ugly, brutal conflict that had no clear good side. For now, though, Abdulaziz and Long decided to work together against their mutual enemy, Russia.
The Imperium of Mann was not the only Fascist state to survive the Second World War. South Africa was already a society explicitly based on racism, with a White elite ruling over the Black majority. However, with the end of WWII a massive amount of Fascist refugees from Britain, France, and Italy came in. This gave the Afrikaners of South Africa a new sense of purpose. They were now, argued the leader of the National Party, Hendrik Voerward, faced with a threat to civilization both politically, from the twin degeneracies of Communism and Democracy, and racially, from the “uncivilized” Africans. The influx of Fascists into South Africa not only brought up the ratio of Whites to Blacks to around 35-65, it meant that Voerward’s Nationalists swept the 1944 South African elections. With the population gap being apparently closed, Voerward felt no need to show any mercy to the Blacks. He passed a series of laws called the Apartheid laws, which not only separated the Blacks from the Whites, they also essentially enslaved them, forcing them to work in the diamond mines in the north of the country. Voerward also passed a series of laws making him President for life, and meaning that the National Party was now the only legal party in South Africa. It was clear to anyone that the threat of Fascism had not ended.
To counter this, Germany released its Southwest African colony of Namibia as an independent Kingdom. Namibia had by far the best economy in Africa due to the relatively light German colonization of the area. Immediately, Namibia’s King Hans I (the Namibians were partially Germanised) began arming the opposition to the South Africans. He found this opposition when Voerward tried to fully incorporate the formerly autonomous tribes of South Africa into his country, thus reducing them to the de facto slavery already suffered by the rest of the Black South Africans. The leader of this opposition was a man that would go down in history as the liberator of South Africa: King Rolihlahla Mandela of the Thembu.
Meanwhile, Long found his horse to back in the South African race amongst the Communists, but, in a detail that would mean much for the future of the country, the Communists were mostly White. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, the Whites were generally more educated than the Blacks, and so had better access to the theories of Marx. Secondly, the anti religious rhetoric of Communism did not appeal to a good deal of Africans. These lopsided demographics amongst the Communists had the practical effect of alienating the natives from the Communist cause, as they viewed it as just another kind of Western Colonialism.
In Asia, meanwhile, the battle lines were drawn between the Japanese and their allies and the Indians and their allies. The two primary battlegrounds for this were in Southeast Asia and China. In Southeast Asia, Cambodia and Laos were both beset by Communist revolutionaries funded by the Indians. Vietnam, however, was relatively unaffected, as they had an economic infrastructure in place before ether alliance with Japan. In Laos and Cambodia, meanwhile, the Japanese built the economy in exchange for a cut of the profits, which did not endear them to the people, who were kept in extreme poverty as a result.
In China, meanwhile, the Russians had directly annexed Manchuria Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and the rest of China was split between Japanese and Indian occupation zones. It went without saying that the Indians armed the Chinese Communists, while the Japanese armed the soldiers of their new Ming Dynasty (they had found a pretender named Zhu Rongji to crown). In the end, however, it was not either of these factions that won out, but something much darker.
No one really knows when the I-Kuan Tao faith first rose. It was inspired by the Taiping Rebellion, a Christian revolt in China that is beyond the scope of this book, but the I-Kuan Tao went beyond that. What is certain is that their leader, Zhang Zhulang, began preaching in earnest in 1945. The I-Kuan Tao combined elements of Christianity and Islam, and combined it with the cruelty of the Old Testament and the fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia. They preached that the apocalypse would come, and that China would lead the way after they ruled it. When the Chinese Civil War between the Communists and Imperialists broke out, inevitably, in January of 1946, then the I-Kuan Tao rose in rebellion. The details of that rebellion will be covered in a future chapter, but it started in 1946.
Although the Allies and Communists had not necessarily initially intended for something like the Cold War to happen, it was inevitable, really. They were backing different factions in South Africa, in Italy, in China, and in the Holy Land. When in March of 1946 Long expanded the goals of the CIA to explicitly be to spread Communist revolution as well, the Capitalist world acted. Germany, Russia, and their allies signed the Eurasian Mutual Defense Organization (EMDO) an alliance created explicitly to rival the CIA. The Cold War had begun.
I could end it here. I really could. I won’t, however, because 1946 is also the year that someone very important will be born. He was the man who would take on the world, the man who would earn the name the “American Caesar”. The man who was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York, in the USSA was the man who would either destroy the USSA or save it, depending on who you ask. His name was Donald Trump.
The intelligence bureau is the PBI, and they are both the secret police and the intelligence agency like the RL KGB. I also didn't want to be too analogous here. Trump will be featuring prominently here, but he won't be fulfilling a similar role to any of these people, except maybe for Putin depending on your opinion of the man. He is called the "American Caesar" for a reason. Well, if Japan's better, then China will actually end up worse off, as will the Middle East and the Americas. Europe is probably better off, though. A history of the Pokemon world sounds awesome, too, especially given that it's essentially a de facto military dictatorship under the Champion.