So begins another day at the Committee’s Office. With all of the activity in the lobby this morning, it is easy to forget that this is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the seat of the All-Union Central Committee for the Union of American Socialist Republics, and not a busy subway terminal. Amidst the hustle and bustle of the early morning activity, a stately man, advanced in age, walks briskly past the security guards at the entrance. He moves quickly through the lobby, weaving past a busy clerical worker as he walks towards the receptionist’s office.

As he passes the receptionist terminal, the attendant says “Nice morning, Comrade McGarry.”

“We’ll take care of that in a hurry, won’t we, Mike?” the man replies with dry sarcasm.

“Yes sir,” the attendant chuckles.

The man continues his brisk pace into the inner workings of the west wing of the old Pennsylvania House. He is Leo McGarry, the Chief of Staff to the Central Committee, and a personal friend of the First Secretary.

He quickly pushes through a set of white double doors, into the inner office. A woman runs past him quickly, pausing only momentarily to exclaim, “Don’t kill the messenger, Leo.”

“Oh, why the Hell not, Bonnie?” he replies as he grabs the morning’s memos. He passes quickly through the press office, making his routine morning acquaintances before calling out for his deputy. “Josh!” he yells.

Josh’s blond assistant responds instead. “Morning, Leo,” she says.

“Hey Donna,” Leo responds. “Is he in yet?”

She pauses from stirring her coffee, looking up at him coyly. “Yeah...”

“Can you get him for me?” he replies, clearly irritated.

She turns around in her seat and yells “Josh!”

“Thanks...” he sighs.

“I heard it’s broken,” she says, abruptly changing the subject.

“You heard wrong,” he replies, barely pausing from reading the memo.

“I heard it’s–”

“It’s a mild sprain,” he interrupts; “he’ll be back later today.” Anticipating her next question, he continues explaining as he walks towards Josh’s office: “He was swerving to avoid a tree and he was unsuccessful.”

Leo walks though Josh’s open door just as Josh finishes his phone conversation. “How many Cubans exactly have crammed themselves into these fishing boats?”

Josh responds as he busily jots down a note, “Well, it’s important to understand, Leo, that by and large, these aren’t exactly fishing boats. You hear ‘fishing boats’, you conjure an image of, well, a boat, first of all. What the Cubans are on would charitably be described as rafts. Okay? They’re making the hop from Havana to Miami in fruit baskets, basically. Let’s just be clear on that. Donna’s desk, if it could float, would look good to them right now.”

“I get it. How many are there?”

“We don’t know.”

“What time exactly did they leave?”

“We don’t know.”

“Do we know when they get here?”

“No.”

“True or false: If I were to stand on high ground in Key West with a good pair of binoculars, I’d be as informed as I am right now.”

“That’s true...”

“That’s the Foreign Office’s money well spent.”

“Well, having any sort of diplomatic relations with the exile regime occupying Cuba, we might have a better idea.”

“You look like Hell, by the way,” Leo sighs as he begins the walk toward his office.

“Yes, I do. Listen, Leo, did he say anything about it?” Josh asks timidly as he follows Leo.

“Did he say anything?!” Leo cries. “The First Secretary is pissed as hell at you Josh, and so am I.”

“I know,” he protests.

“We’ve gotta work with these people, and how the Hell do you get off strutting your—”

“I know.”

“Al Caldwell is a good man,” Leo scolds.

“Al Caldwell wasn’t there!”

“I’m saying you take everyone on the Christian Left, dump them into one big basket and label them stupid! We need these people.”

“We do not need these people...”

“Josh, if this minority government can’t get at least some votes from the Left Democrats, then we can’t govern. You know we have a whole lot better chance dealing with them than the Socialists or the SEU.”

Originally Posted by Red American

So I was just reading through The Daily Worker today when I found a very interesting article. Apparently, when a family in Detroit, Michigan SR were digging through their attic looking at old family heirlooms, they stumbled upon the diary of their great-great-grandfather, a son of Polish immigrants named Leon Czolgosz.

Apparently, Leon’s diary had confessed that he had attempted to assassinate the President of the old United States in early September 1901. He made his first attempt on September 5th, but was unable to get close to the old imperialist. He was going to try to catch him on the next day of the exposition, but he was arrested that night by a racist Buffalo cop who had a grudge against Poles and other immigrants.

So what would our world look like today if Leon had managed to assassinate that bourgeois dog?

Originally Posted by SeriousSam

Well, that’s interesting. If I remember correctly, McKinley’s VP at the time was a noted progressive... I forget his name though. Anyway, he’s not a very important person in history, so I don’t think you’ll find too much on Wiki about him.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

I think his name was Theodore Roosevelt... *wikis*

Yup, Theodore Roosevelt. Apparently, he was a politician of some progressive sympathies at the time, and McKinley picked him for his deputy because it would help him fight off the influence of the populists and the unions. The corporatist establishment kind of marginalized him afterwards, and he faded into relative obscurity.

If McKinley were assassinated, then Roosevelt would become president, which would definitely give a boost to the progressive movement. While it might lead to short-term gains for the working classes, ultimately it might butterfly away the Red May revolution in ’33. It was the complete defeat of the progressive wings within the Republican and Democratic Parties that ultimately gave the Socialists the long-term support base they needed.

“...it follows that the portion of living labour, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall.”

Refrain:
’Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The Internationale
Shall be the human race.
’Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The Internationale
Shall be the human race.

Refrain

Refrain

Refrain

...unlike their European comrades in the Second International, the American socialists alone remained resolute in opposition to the imperial war brewing in Europe. However, their paltry influence in the halls of the bourgeois state were not enough, even with the help of defectors from the Democrats joining them in opposition. However, in spite of the enormous momentum towards plunging headlong into an age drowned in blood, the Socialist Party was able to maintain unity on this critical issue. Progressives like LaFollete Sr. stuck with the party and voted en bloc.

...A general agreement had been reached to leave the issue of mobilization until after the November Congressional elections. In spite of the bourgeois literature on the subject during the ’20s and ’30s, the American populace faced the thought of fighting and dying for their country with great fear. The general sense of foreboding was very clear at the polls in November. Voter turnout averaged 8.1% higher than would be expected in an off-year election of that era. Clearly the American state was facing a similar “excess of democracy” that President Wood decried in the mid-1920s. That excess would soon be remedied by the Espionage Acts.

...Eugene Debs remarked that “regardless of which faction of the capitalist party triumphs in the election, major American involvement in the European war is inevitable. J.P. Morgan and the other Robber Barons have already loaned huge sums to the British and French governments, and they will want it repaid in full.” Had Grandfather Debs known the full scale of the loan scheme, I’m sure he would have had a stroke. In 1919 dollars, J.P. Morgan & Co. alone lent over one billion dollars to the Allies during the war. Other financial trusts lent comparable amounts. The First World War was big business before the first American soldier set foot in France.

...The midterm election left the Democrats with a weakened grip over the House of Representatives. By this campaign, northern Democrats had abandoned attempts to exploit class conflict to gain votes. While they retained the incumbents’ advantage in many districts, the eclipse of the Democratic Party had begun. Forced to play second fiddle on the national stage, the party increasingly devoted itself to Southern sectionalism and the cultural conservatism that benefited the Southern landed gentry. Its brief flirtations with populism and liberalism were largely over with by the 1914 election. Democratic campaign literature largely focused upon national strength and cultural conservation, portraying the Republicans as dangerously individualistic, tearing apart American culture. In practice, they began behaving in much the same way as the Old Right in Europe, the monarchism replaced with a curious brand of Roman-style republicanism.

...1914, on the eve of the greatest bloodletting yet seen in history, was also the climax of the old American Left.² Made up disproportionately of immigrant workers and, with the exception of Oklahoma, tied strongly to industrial cities in the east, the old Left would soon be in its twilight. While the First World War put the old Left to the sword across the world, at least in America the trials of war provided the necessary conditions for the birth of a new Left in the ’20s and ’30s, a Left unaffected by the split riven within European social democracy.

...The vote on [President] Taft’s mobilization bill was scheduled for the second day of new Congressional term. Fresh from his party’s election victory, he expected [House Speaker] Champ Clark to comply with his bill with no debate and at all due haste. Of course, we had other plans. Solidarity’s Central Committee voted unanimously to call for a nationwide general strike of all of the affiliates the week before the opening of the new Congress. I can still remember being on the picket lines in front of the steel mills that day.

...The working class unity was amazing. For the first time that I could recall, black and white, native and foreigner agreed to put aside all differences, if only for this one moment in time. Even though the horrors of the First World War had yet to be revealed to anyone so far from the fronts, the great fear of another major war, begun for seemingly no reason other than to ensure that bankers would get a return on their loans, quickly turned into anger and, for the moment, a galvanized resolve to oppose the war.

...We got exactly what we wanted; we gave them pause for debate. However, the general strike turned out to be a sword that cut both ways. Until now, the political classes had been apathetic about the rise of industrial unionism and the Socialist Party. It was all too easy to give ground and let the radicals recruit another worker than to deal with them in any concerted fashion either through terror or appeasement. Our united front had unwittingly unleashed the largest domestic terror and propaganda war by any State extant in the world at the time.

August 3, 1914

Was ecstatic today to learn that we [America] would go to war against Kaiser Billy soon. It would be a great tragedy to miss out on the great War of this generation. And to be doing it for such a noble cause¹ should be the dream of every Christian soldier to fight and die for. It will be some time before we actually can ship out, and I do feel anxious about leaving my young wife so soon, but I have talked to her about it and she feels filled with pride that her husband has such devotion to duty. An acquaintance at the officer’s club informed me that such a sentiment is unlikely to last, and since he is many years my senior I am inclined to trust him on the matter. But her heart is in the right place.

I read this morning that the damned Socialist leader Debs had pledged to do everything in his power to stop the war. Such a prominent firebrand of a leader speaking such things on the eve of war ought to be put up against a wall. But I am told that only the savage nations permit such practices, and I will leave the matter at that...

December 2, 1914

...Also informed of possible promotion today. The President had earned his mandate in the election, and I am told that a major expansion of the Army is now under way. Still, would have rather learned that promotion had come because of merit rather than a sudden urgent need for more First Lieutenants.

April 5, 1915

Currently aboard ship headed for France. The A.E.F.², I am told, will be deploying on the line somewhere, though for obvious reasons I still do not know where. One of the more cynical lieutenants remarked that the whole A.E.F. was nothing more than a propaganda ploy. Suspect him of being a Socialist subversive, though I am wondering if he is how he made it through West Point. He carries the air of the professional, educated soldier, though I wonder if it is indeed just cynicism on his part.

June 4, 1915

Haven’t written for several days. Still trying to make sense of it all. Our first action began on the 28th of May. We just arrived on the line to reinforce French push at Artois. We began the campaign with much enthusiasm; the news had told us the French were nearing a breakthrough and we were eager to push through the breach...On the front, the sound of the shelling was everywhere. I had never imagined warfare quite like this. My battalion would lead the charge. We went over the wall that morning, running through the fog over the broken earth. We covered no-man’s-land quickly, and encountered minimal resistance from the Huns. We neutralized their remaining machine gunners with minimal causalities and took their first trench with little difficulty. No sooner had we prepared to advance further than we came under bombardment. First thought the Frogs had fouled up the operation. But we were soon under massive attack from the Germans. No sooner had the bombardment lifted we saw waves of gray-uniformed German soldiers charging at us. We fought them off as long as possible, but they had the advantage of numbers and terrain. We were forced to retreat, abandoning all the ground we had gained, leaving behind many of our brothers....The Germans pressed us until the 1st on the line before the skirmishes stopped. Only just now beginning to make sense of it. We went over the wall with 1,120 men, exactly, as the Mstr. Sgt. informed me. By the time fighting died down, we had just over five hundred battle ready men. At least two hundred were killed in the initial engagement, and the remaining wounded, missing and dead accumulating over the next four days.

June 30, 1915

In the battalion infirmary today. The doctors tell me that I suffered “mild exposure” to “chlorine gas” during the fighting. I suppose that means they think I should feel more gracious about my fortune. Ashamed to say that I too retreated from the yellow gas clouds. A week ago, I had no knowledge of any such horrifying weapon. It came on the winds, and wafted into our trenches, and rather than stay and suffocate we all ran. Retreat could have turned into a route, but the winds reversed just in time, and we rallied to a secondary trench. Still, had to be carried off the lines on a stretcher, in spite of my insistence that I could still walk. Breathing has been more difficult than I’ve ever known, like being perpetually at a run. My lungs still burn some. I suppose it’s Christ’s Providence that it wasn’t worse. The man in the bed next to me suffocated in the night. Still feel shame over retreating without orders. But men can be fought with bullets and steel, this gas cannot.

August 9th, 1915

The horrors of this war do not cease. We marched through a ruined French village today, finally leaving the line. What I saw I’ll never forget. The little French girl, in torn rags, crushed under the collapsed house, sinking in the mud; must have been killed by artillery bombardment. I can’t stop thinking about my little daughters, young Beatrice, and Ruth, whom I have not even been able to see, or to hold yet. What if my daughters, or my wife, or any of my family were killed, an innocent “casualty of war"? I left for France with so much resolve, but my experiences here have given me doubts about our purpose...

...Met a young lieutenant today, a one David Dwight Eisenhower. In our spare time we took to talking of things we missed back home. He tells me to call him by his boyhood nickname, Ike. I suppose it’s easier than picking him out of the many Davids in the world. He’s five years my junior, and unmarried, but he’s bright and a welcome confidant. Apparently he shares my growing doubts about the war, doubts which we wisely keep to ourselves lest it affect the men’s morale. Still, I am sure that our cause is just, even if the outcomes have been unsavory so far. Our road is not an easy one, and we must push onward.

The war, I think, changed everything. I am candidly certain that had not over one million young American boys bled the soil of France red, then life as we know it today would be radically different. I’m sure it is the peculiar navel-gazing of old men and historians to ask what would have happened if some important event were to have been undone, but I cannot help to succumb to the temptation. One thing I do know for sure is that my own part in the war changed my life forever. The deaths of my comrades in the trenches of France and the militarization of society at home are an irrevocable part of me, and without them, I do believe I would have remained a simple farmer, happy with the smell of good tilled earth.¹ I’m sure I would have been happier for it.

...During the 1916 Red Scare, President Taft and all of the kings of mine, rail and factory declared that the Army deployed in France was becoming a “boot camp for communist, socialist and anarchist subversion”. I do not know much of other regiments, but that was certainly true of mine. My fellow enlisted men were my teachers in the great school of Socialism, and much of what I am today I learned there. When the “dangerous subversives” and “bomb-throwers” are the only men decrying the insanity of attacking machine guns with the chests of men, of sending men to dark and bloodied battlefields for the purpose of conquest and plunder, of killing our brothers so that the Imperialist scramble can continue unhindered; then we all come to find that perhaps we who went along with the bloodshed were the insane ones, not those who denounced it.

...The events of today give me trouble. When I see Foreign Secretary James Burnham’s dangerous game of cat and mouse with Nikita Khrushchev over which direction the Comintern will sway; or when watching the nervous tension in the news broadcasters and official government spokesman as they tried to calmly explain to us that the missile deployments in Ireland² have brought us two minutes away from midnight, I sense that we are in an age that is every bit as pivotal as the First World War.

June 25, 1941: Today’s front page of The Daily Worker confirmed my suspicions. America is engaged in a worldwide conflict for the second time in my life, this time ostensibly on the side of righteousness. In thinking of this issue, I can’t help but think about how horrible the coming days may be. The war in my youth ended before I was of fighting age, but even at home we felt the effects. Even in the relatively affluent district of New York that I was raised in, we still felt the effects of wartime scarcity and rationing.

The wage and price controls enforced by InCor² and the rationing were making life miserable. It wasn’t uncommon to see the local bootblacks hauled off by the police, with the pretext of violating wartime rationing. Everything was scarce. I remember one of my more important chores was to go and stand in the breadlines every afternoon just to make sure that we got our bread. If I dallied even a little, there was a chance that there wouldn’t be any left. I fear that the rationing of my youth will come back in full force to support the global fight against fascism.

Predictably, the rise of the Progressive Socialist Party as a third force in American party politics created dramatic consequences for party-government in the Congress. The work of previous theorists of the party in government demonstrated the effects of certain facets of the revolution in party politics more than adequately. Notably, the work of Fenwick et al. have theorized the enormous upheavals that the existence of three parties in Congress (particularly the House) have caused in the American constitutional system. Demonstrably, the existence of a sharply defined separation of powers within the government was a system that reflected the strongly non-partisan preferences of Founders such as Washington and Madison, and has adapted poorly to a regime of two powerful political organizations competing for control of the apparatus of government.

...Presidential government, while hindered by the existence of political organizations independent of the formal positions and councils of government, nonetheless could still function even with the consequences of divided party authority and potential divided government. As Representative Clark noted, while the government could still function being pulled in two separate directions, the addition of a third independent force made such functions impossible.

...However, the resulting crisis in party government between 1912 and 1918 could not be explained solely in terms of constitutional factors of separation of powers. As we must understand, in seeming paradox, party government does not just form within the councils and halls of government. The party is larger than its members within the government, and as will be demonstrated with reference to the specific cases of the 1917 New York City Mayoral election, the characteristics of the party and the form its membership takes can have drastic consequences upon the performance of the party in government.

...1917 saw the first eclipse of the Tammany Hall machine in New York politics. As was demonstrated, the Progressive Socialists’ ties to both organized labor and a large pool of enrolled members to the party eroded traditional dominance of the political machine’s system of organized legal corruption. The Socialists and the unions provided the same services to their members that the machines did; they offered opportunities for gainful employment, helped cover rent shortfalls for party workers, offered legal services to members and medical care to injured workers. But more importantly, the party’s membership rolls enabled it to mobilize its electorate in much the same way as the Tammany Hall machine. However, it did so without resort to the totality of legal corruption of the machine, and the egalitarian drives of its leaders created effective political organizations more of the vein of a fraternal order than of a cloistered, highly stratified secret society. Morris Hilquit’s move into the mayor’s mansion on January 1st, 1918, was the first blow in the final death knell of machine politics in the former United States.

§ One: The executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States; and in the Cabinet of the United States, consisting of the various Secretaries in charge of the executive departments and the First Secretary.
The First Secretary and Secretaries of the Cabinet shall be elected by the House of Representatives without debate on the proposal of the President. The person who receives the majority vote of the House of Representatives shall be appointed by the President.
Members of the Cabinet may serve concurrently as members of the House of Representatives.

§ Two: The House of Representatives may express its lack of confidence in the Cabinet only by electing successors by majority vote of the members and requesting the President to dismiss the Cabinet. The President must comply with this request and appoint the successors.
If a motion of the First Secretary for a vote of confidence is not supported by a majority of members of the House of Representatives, the President may dissolve the House of Representatives, and order new elections to occur within twenty one days of dissolution.

§ Three: Save the following provisions, the House of Representatives shall be elected for four years. Its term shall end when a new House convenes. New elections shall be held no sooner than forty-six months and no later than forty-eight months after the electoral term begins. If the House be dissolved, new elections shall be held within sixty days.
The House of Representatives shall convene no later than thirty days following election.

Vice President: Calvin Coolidge (R-MA)
First Secretary: James Mann (R-IL)
Secretary of State: Charles Evan Hughes (R-NY)
Secretary of the Treasury: Joseph Fordney (R-MI)
Secretary of War: John W. Meeks (R-MA)
Attorney General: Harry M. Daughtery (R-OH)
Postmaster General: Hubert Work (R-PA)
Secretary of the Navy: Edwin Denby (R-MI)
Secretary of the Interior: Knute Nelson (R-MN)
Secretary of Agriculture: Gilbert N. Haugen (R-IA)
Secretary of Commerce: Herbert Hoover (R-NY)
Secretary of Industrial Coordination: William S. Vare (R-PA)

The Second World Congress of the Comintern laid out the basic doctrine of the international communist movement from early July to late August of 1920. To the modern eye, the decisions made at the Second Congress seem frightfully premature. While Lenin sent his 21 Conditions for approval by the Congress, he and his comrades were still bitterly engaged in the Rossiyan Civil War. Yet the delegates prefaced their speeches with talk of the imminent world revolution, while all of the major capitalist powers had encircled Rossiya with bayonets, and threatened to strangle that very revolution in the cradle. Still, the deputies at the Congress maintained sufficient foresight to at least tackle the issues of the future of the movement.

...The severity of the 21 Conditions would prove too much for most delegations. The inability to compromise on certain areas of doctrine, such as the strict adoption of democratic centralism, or the requirement for the complete expulsion of members deemed to be reformist, would deepen the already disastrous rift in the international Left. This hardline of the First Period policies would be made all the more disastrous with the Third Period policy of denouncing moderates as “Social Fascists”, but for now, it served to create two competing Workers’ Parties in nearly every advanced capitalist nation. And in the new Communist parties it molded, it created insidious weapons for internal witch-hunts and factional squabbles.

...The American delegation to the Comintern faced the same unenviable choice as the French Section. While the use of state terror had destroyed much of the Progressive Socialist Party’s moderate faction, either by pushing them to the Left or out of the movement altogether, even many on the Left were hesitant to completely endorse the 21 Conditions. While many conditions were rather agreeable, the second, seventh and seventeenth conditions proved particularly worrisome. The party was simply in no shape for the internal purge necessary to put “tested communists” in every important decision. Similarly, a drastic restyling of the party was most unsavory at a time when the existing party name was finally gaining strength among the proletariat.

...In the end, the American delegation gave their unanimous recommendation to adopt the 21 Conditions and join the Comintern as a full member. However, that decision would ultimately be put to the test at the Progressive Socialist Party National Convention, to be held in the Chicago Commune in January of 1921. The debate would be heated, and threatened to split the party in two. The rump of the reformist faction, severely depleted of delegates and speakers, clustered around president of the former Typographical Union Max S. Hayes, and vehemently opposed joining the Comintern. The moderate Left, committed to revolutionary socialism in spirit, but facing many reservations with the 21 Conditions, also criticized the proposal. They centered around the leadership of famed academician Walter Lippmann, and the hero of the Manhattan Commune, Morris Hilquit. The hard Left, represented by the party leadership, fought back with just as much tenacity.

...In the course of the debate, Debs, in ill health, cast aside his traditional role as unifying leader figure, and gave his endorsement, with reservations, to the 21 Conditions. Comrade Reed, the boyish face of the future, personally presented Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin’s personal remarks to the American proletariat, offering their reasons in favor of the Comintern and the conditions it imposed. He ended his speech with his own reflections of his time in Rossiya during the revolution, and the decisive moment the question of whether to strike in Petrograd was considered. “This decision,” he argued, “will be no less momentous than that fateful decision by the workers of the Pulitov Plant, in Petrograd, to consider their shivering and starving children’s plight, throw caution to the winds and a spanner in the Pulitov works. That one decision [...] set off the chain of events that toppled an Emperor, ended a war, and established the first worker’s republic the world has ever seen. Fortune favors the bold, my comrades.”

...It was Lippmann who spoke after Big Bill Haywood. While he congratulated the stout Wobbly on his work organizing the industrial unions and fighting against the imperialist game of the First World War, he offered his own annotations to the late German communist Karl Liebknecht’s criticism of the excesses of the Bolsheviks, relating them directly to the matter of the Comintern’s conditions. The specter of a “red bureaucracy” just as sinister as the old, he argued, lay within this focus on doctrinal pieties and democratic centralism: “If Rosa Luxemburg, the fiery and defiant leader of the German Communist Party and seasoned revolutionary, finds herself deposed and purged from the very party she helped forge because the central committee felt her politics deviated from the program established by the Comintern, then how safe are any of we from internal bloodletting?” Indeed, his words would prove all to true over the next two decades. The purge would become the favored weapon of communist organizations the world over until the beginning of the Popular Front.

...Ultimately, what stole the show and sealed the decision was a speech by the most unlikely of party members. Former Senator LaFollette arrived at the convention fashionably late, excusably so. Recently pardoned by President Wood for conviction under the Sedition Act, the former Republican and moderate fellow traveller of socialism came to the convention a broken man. Freshly divorced, penniless, and emaciated from his stay in federal prison, LaFollette proved to be another strange convert to the Left. He spoke of how his trust in the American dream had been shattered by the events of the last six years, half-cursing the naivete of his past. As a pariah now, he accepted his fate handed down from on high, but did not shrink from fighting against. Shocking everyone, he spoke in favor of the Comintern and endorsed the 21 Conditions. In the end, the Left prevailed. The moderate Left agreed to ratify the conditions, though they urged solidarity and fairness in their application. And the majority of the Right, though they voted against acceptance of the 21 Conditions, agreed to abide by them and to not quit the party. On February 15th, 1921, newly rechristened Workers’ Party of America formally joined the Communist International.

Of one thing there is no doubt, and that is the simple fact that George Patton lived an extraordinary life. Born into an aristocratic conservative family in California on November 11, 1885, Patton would go on to serve with distinction in the First World War, advancing to the rank of Colonel in the American Expeditionary Force. While serving, he helped pioneer the use of armoured warfare, innovating tactics and strategies would later become staples in the American military. Facing the hardships and horrors of life in the trenches, Patton, like so many others of his generation, came home a changed man. He soon renounced his birthright, became estranged with his wife and family, and joined the Workers’ Party of America, all within a few short months of returning from France in 1919. Patton, along with his close comrade David Eisenhower, had set the pattern for so many World War veterans. They went off to war committed to their nation’s cause, and came home subversives.

...The sheer number of career military officers in the United States Army who professed belief in Socialism after the Great War is simply astounding. While no reliable figures can be found to establish the exact percentage, estimates range from fifteen percent to as high as twenty-eight percent! Whatever the rate, it is clear just how much the American polity and her military were rotting by 1920. Patton was hardly alone in his beliefs in the army, and as his letter’s show, he formed a discussion club among trusted comrades from the army to correspond on politics.

...In one such letter, Patton writes to Eisenhower, confessing about his experiences in the Great War. “Dear Ike,” he writes:

It was at Chemin-de-Dames that it hit me with the force of revelation. Our Mk. IVs had bogged down in the German auxillary trench, and the Jerries soon came down on us with artillery, followed by an infantry attack. We soon ran out of ammunition for our tank’s machine guns, and we had to fend off the last of their assault hand to hand, with knives and bayonets. The kids we bayonetted, they couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen. I felt old, and worn out. And as relief came, and we finally had a moment of peace, I suddenly realized I had no idea why I was here, or why I was butchering young German boys, or why they were doing the same to us. I didn’t know whether I could believe in my country anymore, or even believe in God.

While the exact details of Patton’s conversion from Christian soldier to atheist communist remain to the imagination, the documentary evidence suggests that it occurred shortly after the end of the Chemin-de-Dames campaign, while Patton was on a three-day pass in Paris.² Patton’s letters, and own recollections preserved on archival film suggest that during that time, Patton met up with a French socialist group. One of the few details that are known is that the group was composed of some number of dissident intellectuals, as well as a number of veterans of the French army, discharged as amputees. Patton, now semi-fluent in French, conversed with this group about the political issues of the war and economics for from anywhere from a few hours to whole evening, depending on the account.

...The first self-reference of socialist belief would not come until a diary entry some three months later. He writes tepidly in favour of socialism and its “brotherhood of man,” and suggests at an imperial nature in the First World War, impugning the motives the national leaders of the Allies as well as the Central Powers. In perhaps the strongest language seen from this previously gentlemanly character, he calls the current president, Woodrow Wilson, a “pompous old jackass” and “a capitalist running-dog.” Where he picked up such an obviously German construction is impossible to tell.

...Like many radicals of his generation, it was the Bolshevik Revolution that ultimately steeled his convictions in socialism. His correspondence after the war contains many recollections and conversations about the aforementioned event. One such letter was written to John Reed, praising his work on Ten Days That Shook the World, and propositioning a collaborative history of the Rossiyan Civil War, a project that later became the infamous three volume history compendium, written with Reed and Leon Trotsky, the charismatic exile from the very regime he helped build. A History of the Soviet Union, from Birth to Betrayal is perhaps the most oft-cited history of the early Soviet period, and became one of Patton’s fixations from 1928 to its final publishing in late 1932, just before the American Revolution.

Lenin’s corpse was hardly even cold before the power struggle began in the USSR. The struggle for dominance between Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin¹, at first limited to the Soviet Politburo, would eventually come to be played out on a dramatic world stage, becoming one of the pre-eminent international ideological conflicts of the 20th Century.

...At the Sixth World Congress, held from July to August of 1925, the delegates agreed that a major restructuring of the International’s strategy was in order. The complete failure of revolutionary movements to spread socialism through central Europe had seriously affected the legitimacy of worker’s movements all accross the world. The unfortunate outcome, as might be guessed, was that this failure damaged the credibility of internationalists within the Soviet state, and ultimately gave Josef Stalin, the unscrupulous Rossiyan chauvinist and political manipulator that he was, just the leverage he needed to secure total mastery of the Soviet state.

It was at the Sixth Congress that Bukharin outlined Stalin’s thesis of “socialism in one country”. The programme laid out before the Congress by Zinoviev generally finalized the disastrous splits within the international left; Comintern parties would abandon their insurrectionary tactics and underground organizations to stand for parliamentary elections, but they would still offer only limited cooperation with socialist parties. In the United States, this resulted in the dissolution of the underground Communist Party apparatus into the mainstream Workers’ Party, and a general turnover of leadership within the party.

...John Reed reluctantly complied with Zinoviev’s order to resign his position as Executive Secretary and stand for a by-election to the U.S. House in Greenwich Village, a constituency he won and held until his eventual retirement from politics in 1945. A more pro-Moscow Troika would be placed in the party’s leadership, consisting of Reed’s successor, C.E. Ruthenberg, the inimitable Wobbly leader “Big Bill” Haywood, and Earl Browder. This move led directly to an internal conflict between the party’s organization apparatus and the parliamentary party, under the tenure of Opposition Leader Upton Sinclair and his whip, William Z. Foster.

That year’s national convention would dramatically illustrate this tension. The parliamentary faction, which generally favored increased party pluralism and syndicalism, quickly began to resent Moscow’s increasingly heavy hand in internal party politics. The pro-Moscow party organization fought to tighten standards of membership, and bring the parliamentary faction under Moscow’s directives. The central flashpoints that year were the choice of many syndicalist groups, many anarchist or left communist, to begin entry into the party, including the famous German émigré and self-professed anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker. The Muscovites generally opposed allowing such groups to join the party, decrying them as “infantile leftists”. The parliamentary faction, with the support of much of the union’s rank and file, was much in favor of a united left front.

The other was the question of parliamentary tactics, especially on the electoral front. Prior to this date, with the exception of a few of the most concentrated industrial regions, the Workers’ Party had generally avoided campaigning in the South for tactical reasons. The party’s limited resources would make a campaign in the South futile due to the combined weight of the completely dominant reactionary Democratic Party. Not even the national Republican Party, which commanded resources far more vast than than the Workers’ Party could hope to field, could successfully crack into the South. Campaigning among Negroes was similarly futile; though population of former slaves in both the North and South were incredibly receptive to socialism, throughout much of the South voting was an absolute impossibility, even in federal elections. Regrettably, even as these words are written the battle for full suffrage and equality for the American Negroe in the South is not yet fully won.

...The outcome of the convention was mixed, and neither faction came away with a clear victory. The Muscovites “Southern Strategy” had ultimately prevailed. The party would have a candidate standing in each and every one of the 435 House constituencies, and the unionization drives would now focus on organizing rural and urban Southern workers, both black and white. On the other hand, the Muscovites were forced to accept, against the Comintern’s directives, that syndicalists, left communists and even anarchists be counted among the “tested communists” the Comintern demanded be placed in the party’s offices.

Nathan Fines’ recent study of American political trends gives us a bold prediction: as a direct consequence of political dynamics, demographic trends and most of all economic cycles, the American Republican Party will be uniquely situated to dominate American political life for the foreseeable future. Fines’ thesis is bold indeed, and while the Republican Party’s landslide general election victory and the political success of the Hoover-Longworth Administration’s¹ political programme may seem to the pedestrian observer to be proof positive, we must be more cautious in evaluating the strength of such a profound claim. Nevertheless, Fines has come prepared, marshalling an impressive range of evidence with remarkable clarity.

...One of the strongest planks of Fines’ thesis is his analysis of the Republican Party’s successful strategy of co-opting both the political programmes and organization methods of their adversaries at the polls. Since the final midterm Congressional election in 1918, the Republican Party’s chief adversary has been the communist Workers’ Party. As Fines so eloquently put it, “the socialist opposition has been the most able and thorough schoolmaster in the art of mass politics in the entirety of the Grand Old Party’s existence.” Indeed, the Republicans have made able use of their education. The modern Republican Party, organizationally, is the mirror image of the mass-based membership Workers’ Party². The Republicans’ impressive resources have allowed for the mobilization of an impressive membership group, and a powerful electoral apparatus to mobilize support for the party on Election Day.

The Republicans have done more than learn new organizational methods from the opposition, though. While many high-profile attempts at political realignment failed under the Wood presidency, the Republican Party has spent most of the ’20s experimenting with adopting facets of the Workers’ Party’s “Minimal Programme”. Hoover’s first term led to limited success on that front, adopting landmark workplace safety legislation; it was ultimately First Secretary Longworth’s decisive reorganization of the parliamentary Republican membership leading up to and after the 1928 election victory that have allowed the social democratic reforms of the past year. Hoover’s controversial election platform, which called for the nationalisation of the railroads and comprehensive federal disaster relief programmes, are, as Fines’ polling data demonstrates, a key factor to winning over many Midwestern and Southern farmers to the Republican Party. In spite of high profile opposition within the party, both measures passed under Longworth’s strong parliamentary leadership.

...However, there remain some problems with Fines’ thesis. A permanent Republican majority rests on extrapolating current economic and demographic trends. A dramatic increase in the rate of urbanisation, or a weakening of economic standard of living growth, could very easily upset the Republican Party’s prospects for the future. Similarly, Fines’ prediction of the total demise of the Democratic Party within the next decade is beset with reasonable doubts. Identification with the Democratic Party is still very strong in the American South, in spite of the success of both the Republican and Workers’ Parties’ penetration of the electorate in the last election. The Republicans’ Southern auxiliary, the Conservative Party, simply may not have the staying power to uproot such an enduring tradition.

“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
-Irving Fisher

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Basic Law of the Union of American Socialist Republics against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

1. Representation of the Union in international relations, conclusion and ratification of treaties with other states;
2. Questions of war and peace;
3. Control over the observance of the Basic Law of the UASR and ensuring conformity of the Basic Law of the Union Republics with the Basic Law of the UASR;
4. Organization of the defense of the UASR and direction of Revolutionary Defense Forces;
5. Foreign trade on the basis of state monopoly;
6. Safeguarding the security of the state;
7. Establishment of the national economic plans of the UASR;
8. Approval of the single state budget of the UASR as well as of the taxes and revenues which go to the all-Union, Republican and local budgets;
9. Administration of the banks, industrial and agricultural establishments and enterprises and trading enterprises of all-Union importance;
10. Administration of transport and communications;
11. Direction of the monetary and credit system;
12. Organization of state insurance;
13. Raising and granting of loans;
14. Establishment of the basic principles for the use of land as well as for the use of natural deposits, forests and waters;
15. Establishment of the basic principles in the spheres of education and public health;
16. Organization of a uniform system of national economic statistics;
17. Establishment of the principles of labor legislation;
18. Legislation on the judicial system and judicial procedure; criminal and civil codes;
19. Laws on citizenship of the Union; laws on the rights of foreigners;
20. Issuing of All-Union acts of amnesty;
21. The impeachment of the President of the Union and all other public officers for official misconduct, high crimes or treason.

1. No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be made or enforced.
2. No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any party to the Union.
3. No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one Union Republic over those of another.
4. No money shall be appropriated from the public trust except by provisions of law. Regular statements and accounts of all receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published regularly.
5. No title of nobility shall be granted by the Union, and no person shall accept any office or title of any kind from any foreign state except upon the consent of the Congress of People’s Deputies.

1. To offer amendments to legislation on the floor of the Congress of People’s Deputies, subject to approval by a simple majority of the Congress of People’s Deputies;
2. To delay the passage of any act or executive action by Congress of People’s Deputies for up to three months by a simple majority vote, up to six months by a two thirds vote, and to veto legislation by unanimous consent;
3. To conduct official, independent inquiries and provide oversight over the All-Union and provincial governments.
4. To oversee All-Union elections and to provide indictments for violation of election law;
5. To act as the standing legislature in times when the Congress of People’s Deputies is not in session. All acts of the Council of the Union in such periods are subject to ratification by the Congress of People’s Deputies upon reconvening;
6. Confirmation of alterations of boundaries between Union Republics;
7. Confirmation of the formation of new territories and regions and also of new Autonomous Republics within Union Republics;
8. Admission of new republics into the UASR.

1. No province shall enter into any treaty, alliance or confederation.
2. No province shall print or coin money.
3. No bills of attainder nor any ex post facto laws shall be made.
4. No province shall, without the consent of the Congress of People’s Deputies, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports. The net produce of all such imposts and duties shall be for use in the public trust of the Union, and all such laws shall be subject to revision and control by the Congress of People’s Deputies.
5. No province shall, without the consent of Congress, keep troops in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with other provinces or with foreign powers, or engage in war, unless actually invaded or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.

We often never realize just how vastly different our own epoch is from past epochs. Events that we celebrate, cherish and immortalize become removed from the time and circumstances of their own epoch. Disconnected from their own circumstances, events of history become the free-floating ideological debris of our own age, constantly filtered and re-filtered through the discriminating lens of the historian. But as a result, our sense of history is impoverished. It becomes the burden of those of us who had borne witness, as well as those who consider themselves to be proper students of history, to cut back the veil of time and breathe life into the dead past so that we may fend off the cycle of historical tragedy and farce.

The great centers of learning in our Union must prepare the students of today to continue the battles of yesterday. And I’m sure they do not need an old man such as me to tell them this. But if I may offer my own experiences to help light the way, I am more than happy to my duty for the great human brotherhood. While it may depress the modern reader to learn that America has not always not been on the right side of the World Revolution, and has failed in her duty to her international comrades many times since her own revolution, it is patent absurdity even to entertain the conservative charge that to teach these truths is anti-American and counter-revolutionary. If that is indeed the case, then we have already lost.

In my own lifetime, I have seen world capitalism brought to its knees by a crisis of its own making. I have lived through the counter-revolutionary junta of the American master class, and manned the barricades during the revolution. I’ve watched fascism cover the whole of Europe in a terror never before seen in the world. I, like everyone else of my generation, took up arms to defend the country of my birth as well as the country of my mother’s birth. I saw firsthand the results of Stalin’s wanton betrayal of the revolutionary movement. I too gasped in awe and horror upon seeing the news reels of the harnessing of the power of the atom, and the liberation of Nazi death camps in Central Europe. Had these tragedies alone been our legacy as a species, we would have already had our share of blood spilt.

But new horrors would follow the Second World War. The world evermore divided itself into three bitterly opposed hostile camps. America and the Soviet Union both in turn betrayed the World Revolution in their rush to divide the world into zones of control. The last of the Imperialist powers, the Franco-British Union, recovered its strength and clutched onto its colonies ever tighter, while Dewey and Bulganin brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war in their struggle to control the Comintern and the path that international communism would follow. The only way to go was down. Each passing year brought more warheads, more powerful nuclear weapons and deadlier means of delivery. Our collective race to suicide was sad and terrifying. The world over, we saw the end of the classical worker’s movement, its revolutionary potential negated by the march of history.

...At some point, we must ask, where did this all begin? We hear often of the good that came from the Revolution. Where did it come from? And how?

This is where Avrich’s book comes in. As his own words show (see Preface), Paul began writing this book seeking to answer exactly these questions for the high school history students of America. As with many of the great history texts, a commission from the People’s Secretariat for Education set the ball rolling, but hundreds, perhaps thousands of individuals devoted their time and effort to making this book possible. I am proud to have contributed in my own way to this project. As Karl Marx noted, “History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.”

In my travels through America, I’ve come to see that conventional narratives of American communism; from the Communist Party and the Labour militants on the left, or the reactionaries on the right, are both fundamentally and inescapably wrong. Since the reasons for rejecting the Tory official history on the subject are all too clear, I shall dismiss this right out of hand, and focus on the Left’s ideological shibboleths. It has not been because of the leaders of the Workers’ Communist Party¹, nor because of their doctrinaire application of Marxism-Leninism, that socialism has been put into effect. Rather, it has been in spite of the best efforts of men like William Z. Foster or Earl Browder (ashamedly, the working class heroes of European Left) that this idea of libertarian communism was put into effect.

The transformation of the country has been amazing. Very quickly, much of the land in American South was collectively cultivated by the former tenant farmers themselves, without landlords, without bosses, and without instituting capitalist competition to spur production. The government’s collectivization programmes, for all their promises, have been most shameful. In the South, the old foremen and plantation owners have been reappointed as “managers” of the kibbutzim. Power inequalities, between black and white, between worker and manager, have been preserved, not eradicated.

The “genius” of the American planned economy relies less on the planners in their ivory towers, and far more on the initiative of the rank and file union members. In almost all the industries—factories, mills, workshops, transportation services, public services, and utilities—the rank and file workers, their revolutionary committees, and their syndicates reorganized and administered production, distribution, and public services without capitalists, or high salaried managers.

Even more: the various agrarian and industrial collectives immediately instituted economic equality in accordance with the essential principle of communism, ‘From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.’ They coordinated their efforts through free association in whole regions, created new wealth, increased production (especially in agriculture), built more schools, and bettered public services. They instituted not bourgeois formal democracy but genuine grass roots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated directly in the revolutionary reorganization of social life. They replaced the war between men, ‘survival of the fittest,’ by the universal practice of mutual aid, and replaced rivalry by the principle of solidarity...

This experience, in which a nation of some one hundred twenty million directly or indirectly participated, opened a new way of life to those who sought an alternative to anti-social capitalism on the one hand, and totalitarian state bogus socialism on the other.

...When I had first arrived in America in October of 1936, I was confronted with the freshness of the revolutionary fervor. It was as if the revolution had happened yesterday. Only later did I realize that the revolutionary fervor was still high because it had not ended yet. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with the red and black flag of the revolution; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been closed. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.

Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had disappeared. Nobody said ‘Mister’ or ‘Sir’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ or ‘Brother’. Tipping was now forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were few private motor-cars, most had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. As throngs of people passed through the city’s busy arteries, the radios on the street corners and in the shops bellowed revolutionary songs and broadcasts of the public assembly’s meetings. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a city of millions in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough denim working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. The greatly diminished number of women who still wore dresses or skirts were far less modest than before the revolution; ‘To save fabric’ one girl explained. ‘Freedom to be a woman and not be smothered by a blanket,’ explained another. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.²

When I first started teaching modern American history at Columbia University in 1978, life was certainly exciting. Watching a momentous historical event in the making is a uniquely terrifying event for any historian, let alone one fresh out of grad school. Watching the political order that had endured literally my entire life suddenly and dramatically realign was an event of such importance that I don’t think we’ll experience another in my lifetime.

The June 1978 General Election was still fresh in everyone’s minds when classes began that fall. It was wonderful to see our youthful hopes vindicated, that national politics wasn’t the sport of old white men. The Social Ecology Union was the new dominant political party, and it promised to fulfill the ambitions of student movements and the Counterculture that had nurtured and supported its growth. America had her first African¹ premier, and almost half of the Central Committee members were women.

Still, one of my students was a little jaded, even with all of this. She was a freshman political science major from Tennessee named Scarlett. I’ll never forget her question to me. She approached me after class one Friday early in the term and wondered if she could ask a question. Not paying too much attention, I hurriedly gathered up my papers and motioned for her to walk with me. “Sorry I’m in a hurry,” I said, “but I need to get home in time for the repairman. Go on.”

She was a bit old fashioned, and still had trouble calling me by my first name. Nevertheless, she managed. “Well, Norm...I guess I was just wondering why politics isn’t as, well, ‘awesome’ as it was during the Revolution. I mean... I look at the leaders we have now, and they just look bland compared to the men who led the Revolution. The speeches aren’t as exciting, the leaders are dull and uninteresting. Why are things so dull?”

I stopped to think for a minute. Truthfully, I didn’t have an answer then, and I apologized for it profusely. However, in retrospect, it’s all so obvious. Things aren’t as exciting in politics because the things that were revolutionary in 1933 are normal now.

In spite of all the kinks that needed to be worked out of the system, the people of my generation, and of succeeding generations, have all known nothing else but socialism. The stories of revolutions and revolutionaries that we tell our children, that fill our novels, are things of fantasy now. Our forefathers sought to build a utopia, and now we’re living in it. This is not to say that life is somehow perfect now, or that all heartaches have been conquered. The project of scientific socialism has never been about such religious absurdities as “perfecting existence”. It’s been about ensuring that man’s animal needs are all met, so that each individual can then find the best way to meet his human needs. “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” as Marx would put it.

We’ve never known wage-slavery in our lives. We’ve never known the adversity that capitalism causes, and so we cannot know the struggle against it. Divorced from the real conditions of that struggle, our past struggles have become romantic folk stories, little different from the tales of knights of old slaying dragons and rescuing maidens. So if I were to answer her question now (though I doubt I’d have to, considering Scarlett is now a distinguished member of the political science faculty at MIT), I’d have to tell her that politics being more “boring” now is a good thing. There’s an old Chinese curse that goes something like “May you live in interesting times.”

The revolutionary fervor is gone because there is no need for it anymore. The goals of the revolution have been accomplished. Socialism, participatory democracy, egalitarianism; these are all accepted facets of life in America. The ’30s were a dangerous time, in America and in the rest of the world, and we should not kid ourselves about what came along with the revolutionary fervor. Atrocities were committed by revolutionaries and the state they created. Had things gone a little differently, it is very easy to see how America could have slid into dictatorship and totalitarianism.

Originally Posted by Ubermunch

Hey guys, I just got back from the cinema, and as you can guess, I just watched the new historical drama Public Enemies. Now, I’m a Brit, so I’m not very well versed in American revolutionary history. There was like literally two paragraphs in my school textbook on the subject, so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance.

While I used to be one of those patriotic Brits who always thought “Better Dead than Red”, since I’ve been at university I’m a little bit less of a wanker about it. I’d like to keep this from turning into a transatlantic flame war (the Cold War is hot enough as it is ), so can we please just stick to the discussion of the historical facts. I really don’t care if you think the Revolution was the best thing since sliced bread, or if you think, like the average Brit, that it’s the most terrible thing to happen. Let’s just agree to disagree about politics.

First off, it’s a very well done film. I hate to admit it, but you Yanks know a thing or two about movie making. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it stars Adam Sandler as former NBI agent and reluctant revolutionary Melvin Purvis, and Johnny Depp as the suave, loyal party man and secret police Lieutenant John Dillinger as they’re assigned to lead a task force to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy the KKK in the South from 1933 to 1938. The casting was pretty good, and Sandler did a very good Dixie accent, at least to this Brit’s ear. Hard to believe his first acting roles were in comedies, actually. Johnny Depp plays the suave police officer to the hilt.

Anyway, the film is long, almost three hours, and it covers the drama of SecPubSafe’s campaigns against paramilitaries and terrorists. I admit, I was surprised at the balance of the portrayal. I was expecting them to treat the KKK as cartoonish villains and totally whitewash the secret police atrocities of the era, but it turned out pretty good. Like I said, I don’t know much about the history of the era, so how well did it do?

Originally Posted by DeOpressoLiber

Hate to break it to you, bub, but the KKK were cartoonish villains. I know that your history textbooks like to portray the KKK as freedom fighters of sorts, but they were nothing more than racist, fascist thugs and murderers. Yeah, they were human beings too, and a lot of them might have even been sympathetic characters. Doesn’t make them any less of monsters.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

The historical inaccuracies were forgivable in most cases. The chronology of a couple of events were dramatically shifted in a couple cases, and as far as we can tell, the scene where Purvis and Dillinger were arrested by Alabama State Troopers while undercover, and thrown in the same holding cell as Right Democrat strongman Strom Thurmond seems to be apocryphal.

Still, I agree, good show. Though, I’m from South Carolina, and I could tell that Sandler’s accent kept slipping in a number of scenes, especially when he had to raise his voice. I’m glad it didn’t pull its punches, because there were atrocities committed in the name of the revolution in this period, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves about that.

Originally Posted by SeriousSam

I liked the “Western” feel they gave to it, in spite of being a serious law and order drama. The score was very good, reminded me a lot of Ennio Morricone. Still, looking back from 2009, I have a hard time believing that the main characters really had that much kinky sex. Sure, the thirties were a time of sexual liberation, but I really don’t think THAT MUCH occurred. The casual threesomes with the female lead seem just gratuitous. I can buy that sort of thing happening in the fifties, but not the thirties.

The shorter skirts of American women in the Cultural Revolution were clearly about more than just saving fabric. The Cultural Revolution had sparked its own sexual revolution, with millions, youth and adult alike, challenging existing social taboos about marriage, divorce, premarital sex, and sexuality. This revolution was not without controversy, and even many of the most committed revolutionaries of the era were taken back by this tide of sexual openness.

Like many of the great political upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, it was carried out primarily in the workers’ councils and public assemblies that had been the vanguard of the Revolution. In the spirited discussions of the era, there were no sacred cows left. Every tradition and taboo was up for review.

...The ball was rolling long before the Civil War was over. In the activist public assemblies of New York, the Working Women’s Federation began its campaign to legalize and promote the distribution of birth control in January of 1933. Within weeks, the small sparks had grown into a raging inferno. With many churches and religious doctrines under intense criticism for their support of the reactionaries, the general feeling became it was a revolutionary act to question any existing dogma.

And question they did. Condoms, once controversial, became tame now. The real question, as one party activist argued, was, “Is sex sinful?” In July of 1933, the consensus position was that sex within marriage was not sinful, even if done purely for pleasure. By January of 1934, that consensus position had shifted to “Sex between men and women is not sinful”.

...The Party, for its part, generally promoted this overturning of old traditions. The Law, throughout much of the UASR, would be mostly silent on the issues of sexuality. Cohabitation, homosexuality, premarital sex, and divorce were all legalized. The Young Pioneers distributed condoms to their members and gave them some rudiments of sexual education at their urban and rural camps. Sexual and health education in secondary schools became a required part of the curriculum. Nudity taboos were discouraged, and most communal living arrangements, public restrooms and baths, and locker rooms built in this period were not gender segregated. Dating and even sexual experimentation by teenagers was quietly promoted, though not without controversy.

Citizens who were taken aback by this new sexual openness largely flocked to the Left Democratic Party in this era, and the LDP changed its party platform accordingly. The party moved dramatically to the left economically, abandoning its earlier moderate socialist/social democratic platform in favor of a full endorsement of many of the economic policies of the Foster government. By shifting the focus to cultural issues, the LDP sought to capture the discontent of moderates left lost and confused by the Cultural Revolution.

Originally Posted by Tanks_A_Lot

I think, without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest blunder the Catholic Church has ever made was the Church’s interference in the American Revolution. I know a lot of churches were hit hard during that time period, but arguably the Catholics were hit the hardest. So, let’s say Pope Pius XI doesn’t issue his bull excommunicating Catholic members of the Communist Party or the priests who continued to give them communion in defiance of earlier directives.

Originally Posted by Kielbasa

Well, that’s a complicated question, for many reasons. The Holy See’s relationship with its American flock had been strained for some time. By and large, American Catholics, especially the most recent immigrants, were working class, and heavily tied to the syndicalist movement and the Communists.

My grandfather was a Polish Catholic immigrant, and I can remember him talking about how in his youth, he didn’t leave the Catholic Church; the Catholic Church left him. I don’t know if that’s generalizable, but I suspect a lot of Americans Catholics felt that way in the Revolution. When the Church supported the military junta, and tried to muscle its flock away from the revolution, it backfired tremendously. I don’t know if we can conceivably change Pius XI’s stance without changing the decades of policy before it. The blanket excommunication of many Americans, clergy and laymember alike, and the resulting formation of the American Trinitarian Church¹ was the end result of a Nixon Gambit decades in the making.²

Originally Posted by PatrickBateman

I disagree, Kielbasa. You just need to have Pius be the one who flinches. I’m sure he knew that the course he was taking was incredibly risky; he just expected it to pay off. It didn’t, obviously. Just increase his doubts, and he could easily decide to back down to try to salvage what was left of the situation. The results of the decision had long-term repercussions that extended well beyond the UASR as well. All it would take is a little more forethought.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

I don’t know if negating the decision would be enough though. Anti-clericalism was at an all-time high in the Cultural Revolution, and that feeling extended to much of organized religion. When the first Gallup Poll was done on the subject in 1938, I think something like 30+ percent of the population identified as atheists.

Maybe he can salvage what’s left, but the Catholic Church is still going to be a shell of its former self in terms of membership.

Originally Posted by Tanks_A_Lot

Hmm. You all make good points. Though I’d just like to point out the major irony of four atheists discussing the subject. I was hoping maybe some religious people might comment, but it seems they decided to stay home today.

Originally Posted by LunaticScrewball

Dude, it’s easier to find religious people in a university faculty than it is on the internet

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

I’ve been thinking of doing a timeline for an alternate Second World War recently, and I’ve been wondering about exploring Hitler’s revanchist ambitions against France and Britain. I probably have a somewhat pedestrian view of world history, but I’ve never really understood why Hitler abandoned this in favour of a direct crusade against Communism. Both National Socialism and Communism were forms of Socialist ideology, so why was there such great animosity kindred ideologies?

I understand there probably is a good reason; it’s just that I’ve made it to freshman year of university without finding it, so I hope someone might be able to enlighten me here. This is an international board; I do know there are plenty of American and Russian posters here as well, so maybe they might have an insight on this.

As we all know, the Second World War began on May 6, 1940, when the German Wehrmacht launched a pre-emptive, surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, violating the non-aggression pact signed just prior to the partition of Poland. The very next day, elements of the Japanese Army in Manchuria crossed the Amur River. Since Japan had already been heavily involved in China and fighting proxy wars over the Philippines and the Indies, this was totally unexpected as well. The Soviets were caught completely off guard, and were forced to fall back.

So how do we get Hitler to go west instead in 1940, and spark off a world war in a showdown with Germany’s old nemeses, France and Britain? And how does the war go? Does the Comintern stay out, and let the Nazis demolish the imperialist powers? Or do they join in the fray to put down the aggressor?

Originally Posted by flibbertygibbet

Uh... where to start? Well, being a Brit myself and having been subjected to the absolutely dreadful propaganda they call “history education” here, I can understand your confusion. However, I’m going to say that you just started an international flame war. First off, “National Socialism” is an oxymoron, and the Nazis were about as far away from being good Marxists as anyone can come. I’m sure you didn’t mean it, but basically you might as well have just impugned every Russian or American poster’s relationship with his mother; it would have been less offensive then comparing them to fascists.

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

Wow... that mod action was quick. Three deleted posts and two bans before I could even respond. Well, I feel like such an idiot. At any rate, I’m not British, I’m French, though currently studying physics at Cambridge, but I guess history education is uniformly bad throughout the Union.

Anyway, noobish mistake on my part, and I shan’t be repeating it. I haven’t heard that many colourful metaphors since I was at the pub with some mates and football was on.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

Whoo...looks like I missed quite the flame war. I won’t talk about the difference between fascism and socialism, since you’ve doubtlessly already learned your lesson on that part. Sticking to the facts: how do we get Hitler to go west, and what happens when he does?

That’s going to be very, very difficult to do without totally erasing the American Revolution. In spite of the timidity of the Foster-Reed doctrine, America and the USSR were always the greatest threats to the Nazis, and that’s the reason why Hitler ultimately devoted all his efforts to wiping us off the face of the earth.

Ultimately, the only reason why Britain and France ever entered the war in the first place is because Hitler’s megalomania got the better of him. Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil fields had fallen in 1941, Moscow and Leningrad were both surrounded and under siege that Winter. Beria had already suicided Stalin, and the entire Soviet leadership seem to be on the brink of total collapse. Japan was holding its own against the American navy, and the American army was spread too far to thin, bogged down in China. The American Expeditionary Force in Rossiya, almost three million men in total, was on the brink of collapse. So was the Red Army. The terrifying truth of the Second World War is that the Axis very nearly won.

But we held on, and Hitler’s own genius got the better of him. Opening up a second front against what is now the Franco-British Union was a terrible mistake, even though it too nearly succeeded. By late spring of ’42, Metropolitan France and Algeria had fallen. All of North Africa fell to the Axis by midsummer. That Winter, German and Italian troops had occupied Palestine, Syria, and Transjordan.

Hitler nearly won because he had the audacity to do the unthinkable. This same quality also ultimately doomed him, but I think you can agree that it was a terrifying time.

If Hitler went west first, Rossiya may have stayed out of it, but America would have intervened very quickly. Foster’s government had banked on the hope that the Nazi threat could be contained and then undone at America’s discretion. Just like IOTL, if Hitler sparks a war between the major powers, Foster will resign in disgrace, and just like IOTL, Reed will likely be the one to take over.

Originally Posted by Ленин

I’d like to agree with my beard (strangely, he’s American )

Stalin was an uncouth and unprincipled leader, and he’d more than willingly see Europe perish in Nazi flames before intervening to aggrandize himself. Depending on how well the war went, he’d probably try to invade the Soviet Union anyway. But if he doesn’t begin the War, Stalin will eventually, though at a time of his greatest convenience. The postwar world is definitely going to be interesting. Stalin would likely be more belligerent to the Americans, and that axis of the Cold War would probably be pretty warm compared to OTL.

Antisocial: Adjective. Opposed or detrimental to social order or the principles on which society is constituted: Theft is antisocial.

Apparatchik: (Ross., colloquial, professional functionary). Noun. Civil servant, general positive connotations. Contrast “bureaucrat”.

Babooshka: (Ross., lit. grandmother). Noun. Collquial, an old-timer, or someone with an old-fashioned or conservative view of the world, though not to the point of being a reactionary. See also “dyadooshka”.

Bolshy: Adjective. From Rossiyan¹ bolsheviki (majority). Colloquial, something politically left or foreward thinking.

Charles H. Marx: (Obsc.) Slang expression for surprise, confusion or disappointment. Compare “Jesus H. Christ”.

Christian Socialism. Noun. A political ideology associated variously with the center-left and center-right in America. Defining characteristic of American Left Democratic Party.

Comrade: 1. Unisex formal title, replacing “Mister”, “Miss” and “Misses”. In practice, reserved for use in the military and the government. 2. Common form of anonymous address.

1. Would you please return this form to Comrade Herger in the Records Department?
2. Comrades! Could I have your attention please!

Counterrevolutionary: Adjective. 1. Pertaining to or having the quality of being opposed to revolution. 2. Quality of persons or organizations in opposition to the political advancement of popular democracy. Compare “fascist” or “reactionary”.

Dacha. (Ross.) Noun. Communally owned seasonal exurban homes. Compare “vacation property”.

Enemy of the people. Noun. Official designation for those alleged to have committed treason, sedition, desertion, or other infamous counterrevolutionary and anti-social acts. Adj. “public enemy”. Compare “enemy of the state”.

Fink. Noun. 1. Strikebreaker or informant. 2. (Pejorative) a traitor.

Kibbutz: (Hebrew, gathering or clustering). Noun. Collective communities, based on communal agriculture, also incorporating light industry and higher-technology enterprises. Plural kibbutzim, demonym kibbutznik.

Labor skate. Noun. 1. A union official who sees union office as an avenue of privilege and power. 2. A civil servant or party member whose ideological commitment is questionable.

Liberalism: Noun. A political ideology associated with the right-wing in America, advocating some privatization of public resources, free markets, and social safety nets. Associated with the American Democratic-Republican Party or the Canadian Liberal Party.

Running dog: Noun. (Derogatory) A lackey or sycophant. Denotes a servile attitude towards a master, analogous to a trained greyhound mindlessly running long distances at great speeds at the master’s command.

Scab. Noun. 1. Term applied to a worker who refuses to join a strike action. See also “to cross the picket line”. 2. (Slang) An uncommitted, untrustworthy or otherwise cowardly person.

Soyuz: (Ross., lit. union). Noun. A tight-knit circle of friends or colleagues. Compare “band of brothers” or “nakama”.

Wobbly: 1. (Slang) A union member in good standing with the local, who is active in economic management and democratic participation. Contrast “slacker”. 2. (Historical) Name for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World syndicalist labor union.

1934

Robert A. Taft kept his face carefully neutral as he looked at the seemingly young man in his office. Seemingly, because Taft remembered that this man had looked exactly the same when his father had been President.

“You refused to take the oath of office, even though you’ve been elected.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes.”

“Not just you, the rest of the GOP and some of the Right Democrats also refused.”

“Yes.”

The young man sighed and rubbed his eyes under his glasses, “Why?”

Taft didn’t answer immediately, “We are asserting our right to criticize the government.”

Samuel Jones sat down and looked Taft straight in the eyes, “Premier Foster isn’t going to take this lying down. He’s going to try to put Communists and Left Democrats in the seats you wouldn’t fill.”

Taft grinned (it held no joy): “Then we shall find out just how much this new Basic Law is worth, won’t we?”

--

UASR, Washington-Debs DC, USSR Embassy, 1934

Анна Ивановна Олегова stared disbelievingly at Samuel Franklin Jones, “America, you are actually letting the counter-revolutionaries organize? Why?”

America blinked at Russia, confused, “Because the people have a right to participate in politics, even if they’re Capitalist?”

This didn’t seem to be enough explanation for Anna, “They fought against your Revolution. They should be put up against a wall and shot.”

“If they actively helped the Junta, then they will be. If they’re just calling Marx a fool, Foster a bastard, and Du Bois a Nigger, then that’s their right. I might not like it, but I can’t do anything about it.” The blond nation shrugged.

“Can’t do anything about it? You are America, da?”

“Yeah, so?” Sam responded uncomprehendingly to the tall Russian woman.

“You can arrest them anyway.”

“But that would be illegal.”

“You are the Union of American Socialist Republics, it’s legal if you say it is.”

Sam seemed stunned, “But the Basic Law says...”

“Comrade Stalin says the security of the Revolution is more important.”

America went silent as he considered that, then his expression hardened and he spoke softly, “If Comrade Stalin thinks that Constitutions are for wiping one’s ass, he should feel free to discuss how my People would take such actions with General MacArthur.”

He stood up abruptly, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a court case to attend.”

-----

Detroit, 1934, May 8th

“Hey Jones, did you read the news?” came the enthusiastic greeting from Jack Davidson, factory worker and Union member in good standing, as Samuel F. Jones entered the factory that morning.

Jones grinned and shook his head, “Nah, what’s the rag have to say?”

“Comrade Foster lost his case. Unanimous too. Good to see the Courts still have their stuff.”

Sam raised an eyebrow, “Weren’t you going on last week about how the Republicans should be shot? I thought Taft was the bad guy?”

Davidson fidgeted, “Well, I voted for the Workers’ Party, but that doesn’t mean people who disagree with me shouldn’t have a voice. Stalin was wrong; if we don’t follow the Basic Law and let the counter-revolutionaries have their say, then we’re no better than them.”

Sam nodded as the bell rung and they went to work, he didn’t stop whistling “Lincoln and Liberty” until the lunch bell rang.

-----

1935, DC

“So you’re taking the oath now?”

Taft nodded, silent.

America smiled knowingly, “May I ask why?”

“Because our point has been made. The Party of Lincoln is still a force, and we have been derelict in representing those who voted for us.”

“Well then, Comrade Taft, I’ll walk with you to the Chamber.” And Sam did, humming optimistically the whole way.

-----

Taft vs UASR was a landmark court case in the UASR. After the first election under the Basic Law, none of the GOP politicians would take the seats they had won (all 25 from the National Party List seats). Some of the Right Democrats also refused to take the oath of office. Premier William Z. Foster ordered the vacant seats filled with Communists and Left Democrats. Taft sued the Administration claiming that, while the Basic Law didn’t provide for vacancy because of refusal to take the oath of office, it was clearly intended that seats awarded to the GOP from the National Party List seats couldn’t be filled by anyone else.

The first break between the UASR and the USSR happened when Stalin wrote a scathing criticism of Constitutionalism in response to the announcement that Taft’s case would be heard by the Supreme Court. Since UASR propaganda emphasized the MacArthur Junta’s Constitutional violations to give itself legitimacy, when Stalin’s tract was translated and published in The Daily Worker it largely discredited the Pro-Stalin wing of the Workers’ (Communist) Party in the eyes of the American people.

Many Right Democrats were, indeed, put up against a wall and shot during the Red Terror. Some of them were People’s Deputies. Incidentally, very few Republicans were sentenced to death during the Terror, probably because those who didn’t go to Cuba had been outspoken against the Junta during the Second Revolution.

The six Republicans of the first 25 on the National Party List who avoided jail took their oaths and were seated in the Congress in 1935. They and the Right Democrats formed a Coalition that eventually culminated in the founding of the Democratic-Republican Party, after the historical Party of Jefferson.

“Lincoln and Liberty” was a Union marching song from the First Civil War.

Political historians generally refer to the period from 1933 to 1946 as the “First Period” of American party politics. As noted by the eminent political historian V.O. Key, the First Period’s political alignment grew from three defining factors (1955). The first, often ignored in discourse on the subject, was the long and painful development of the Workers’ Communist Party in the terminal period of the United States. While the earliest progenitors of the Party date to 1876 with the founding of the Socialist Labor Party, the date of importance in the development of the party was the foundation of the Progressive Socialist Party in 1901.

Under late capitalist society, the Progressive Socialists represented a diverse and often seemingly contradictory constituency. Motley syndicalist miners mingled with prairie socialists among yeoman farmers. Immigrant radicals in the cities often came into fierce conflict with native workers in the Party. The party’s intellectual constituency was conflicted as well. The hardline Marxists intellectuals among the immigrants and radical youth clashed with the moderate visions of the radicalized Progressive reformers (Kahn 1964). Nevertheless, the trials caused by the Party’s opposition to the imperial adventures in the First World War unified the party under a genuinely radical, revolutionary platform while maintaining the critical ideological diversity necessary to avoid slipping into totalitarianism after the revolution.

The second key event in the development of the First Period was the dramatic upheaval caused by the Great Depression and subsequent Revolution and Second Civil War. The Depression would provide the key stimulus to dispelling false consciousness among sections of the American populace that had previous remained indifferent or even hostile to the aims of socialism, and realigning vast sectors of the American electorate for the 1932 general election (Chambers & Burnham 1972).

The third key event was the split of the Democratic Party during the Great Depression. The ascendency of Huey Long in the heavily divided Democratic Convention in 1932 overthrew the Bourbon Democrats’ long dominance of the party. Southern Populists, trade unionists, Christian Socialists and, admittedly, more than a few labor skates among the Southern plantation elite had created a new center of power in the Democratic Party that was willing to adapt to changing political winds (Bensel 1984). During the Revolution, this led to a complete split between the so-called Long faction and the Bourbon Democrats. The split was made permanent by Harry Truman and other members of the Left-Wing Section of the Democratic Party joining the Provisional Government in Chicago in mid-May. In effect, two separate party’s existed, both claiming control of the whole Democratic Party.

Truman’s faction ultimately decided that wresting control of the existing party apparatus was futile and unnecessary, and reorganized their section into the Left Democratic Party. The Bourbon faction, under the leadership of John W. Davis, never officially adopted the name Right Democrats, but the name stuck anyway. The existence of a loyal opposition would be crucial during the First Cultural Revolution and the Second World War. Ideological diversity, both within and outside of the party, was the key factor in distinguishing the relative success of the American socialist experiment from the blunders and atrocities of the Soviet experiment (Hartz 1955).

The defining characteristic of the First Period of party politics is the overwhelming hegemony of the Workers’ Communist Party on the political, social and ideological fronts. The Party routinely polled above 60 percent in national elections during this period. Even with the setbacks in the 1938 general election over the Party’s social policies, more than 2/3rds of the Congress of People’s Deputies remained in the firm control of the Communists.

However, the Communists themselves were not without their discontents. 1937 would see the birth of two dissident groups from the Party that would become prominent in future politics. While both the prairie socialist Independent Labor Party and the African National Congress would remain caucused with the Communists in this period, under the Revolutionary Left Bloc, the birth of these two organizations signalled the stress the Party underwent in power. Keeping the many groups within the party, from anarcho-syndicalists aligned with Emma Goldman to the moderates in the vein of Thomas Dewey, was a chore in itself, and certain compromises would inevitably favor some groups over others.

The eminent historian Norman Thomas Washington attributes the birth and growth of the African National Congress to the growing consciousness within the African community, and among intellectuals especially, to the limitations within the Marxist-Leninist framework. Marxism-Leninism’s economic reductionism, as many African leftists came to realize immediately after the Revolution, left it ill-equipped to conceptualize and address the uniqueness of social and cultural realities that are, at best, only tangentially related to questions of economics and class (Washington 1989). Richard Wright’s break with the Party and the founding of the ANC by Wright and others was an important step in the development of political theory in its own right. The ANC would eventually become home to some of the most poignant critics of the reigning Marxian orthodoxy in the 60s and 70s, including Malcolm Little, John Henrik Clarke and Angela Davis.

The Independent Labor Party was born in the mines and collective farms of Montana. Inspired by the seeming independence and homegrown spirit of the Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the Independent Labor Party was the brainchild of Montana teacher and politician Mike Mansfield. The ILP stressed independence from Washington-Debs, effective provincial government, and intercommunal cooperation in the extractive regions of the Northwest and the prairies. The party would win a seat each in Montana and North Dakota in the 1938 general election.

The birth of the ILP belied the notion that Marxian socialism could do away with economic conflicts in society. While class conflicts had been sequestered (at least mostly, as even critics of the alleged class conflict such as Michael Albert admit), the potential for sectional conflicts still remained. The extractive nature of the economies of the Rocky Mountain and Prairie provinces placed them in economic subordination to the industrialized regions in the East, Pacific West and the new South. Raw materials, whether in agriculture or natural resources, remained volatile commodities, subject to price fluctuation and low surplus value under the Union’s planned economy. For the same reason that farmers and workers in these periphery regions turned to the Communists before the Revolution, so they began to split from them afterwards (Bensel 1984).

The opposition during the First Period remained in a constant state of flux for the most part, adapting and re-adapting to remain relevant in the world turned upside down. Overall, the Left Democratic Party fared the best. While the party’s message was confused in the immediate wake of the Revolution, the party clarified its message and organizational questions at the pivotal 1936 National Convention in New Orleans. The new party constitution declared the LDP was “a Christian socialist party...” in support of “...the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” The Party’s New Orleans Program widely lauded many of the fundamental economic policies instituted in the past three years by the Communists. However, the party’s quite conservative stance on “moral” and cultural issues tapped into discontent over the radical upheavals of the Communist’s radical egalitarian and libertine cultural policies.

The New Orleans program secured the LDP the position as the official opposition throughout this period. After good showings in the 1936 presidential and 1938 general elections, the LDP had captured a third of the electorate. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the LDP would join John Reed’s Popular Unity Government as the junior partner.

The Right Democrats, by contrast, suffered disaster after disaster in this period. The arrest, imprisonment and even assassination of many of the Right Democrats’ prominent leaders during the Red Terror crippled the party. Party offices were routinely raided by Public Safety agents, and numerous “black bag” burglaries were conducted by Public Safety’s infamous Section 9. Undercover agents infiltrated the party, creating networks of paid informants to disrupt and neutralize the effectiveness of the party (Churchill & Wall 1990).

The climate of paranoia created by the official disruption campaign would develop disastrous rifts within the Right Democrats. The above-ground parliamentary party was no longer willing to shield the underground resisters in the party. Tensions mounted as party workers accused each other of being informants or undercover agents. The situation at times bordered on farce; one infamous incident involving a Louisiana party local has become an omnipresent joke about government incompetence. A party local in Monroe was staffed and attended by a roll of party “members” consisting entirely of undercover agents and paid informants from Public Safety, the Louisiana State Police, and the local Parish police.

These tensions came to a head in 1936, when the Right Democrats nearly disintegrated as a party. Major sections of the party abandoned legal pretenses and chose to focus solely on underground resistance to the new government. Facing financial ruin, the moderate elements of the party opted to sit out of the 1936 presidential election to endorse the more organized campaign of Republican William F. Knox.

The Republicans did not escape unmolested. Though the few Republicans who remained had been vehement critics of the MacArthur Junta, they faced suppression under the Red Terror as well. However, the Republican remnant in mainland America chose non-violent civil disobedience to the often terrorist resistance waged by Right Democrats. While the landmark case in judicial independence, Taft v. UASR, had won the Republicans (and Right Democrats) the right to their seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the party ultimately was forced to concede to the new political reality. In a symbolic gesture of obedience to the new Basic Law, the Republican people’s deputies chose to take their oath of office.

William F. Knox was able to save the party’s sinking fortunes during this period by recasting the Party in the image of its first president, Abraham Lincoln. A darling of the left and noted critic of capitalism as well as saintly figure in American history, Lincoln was the perfect persona to rebuild the Republicans. The new Republican Party would embrace social democracy and internationalism, giving the Grand Old Party a new lease on life in the face of political extinction.

Though long enemies, the Revolution played a great role in erasing the political differences between the Right Democrats and the Republicans. The successful electoral alliance in 1938 general election would lead to the formation of the Democratic-Republican Party in 1939, and an eventual token spot in the wartime Popular Unity Government in 1940.

While there is still some debate on the subject, the general scholarly consensus on the subject is that the First Period came to an end in 1946. The reasons for why this occurred can be easily understood. The broad electoral coalition that united under the banner of the Workers’ Communist Party had largely achieved all of its consensus goals by 1940. The Left in the party wanted to continue pushing “forward” while the Moderates had largely been satisfied by the party’s accomplishments in economics as well as social issues. The changing geo-political realities created by the Second World War further intensified this divide. The Left saw the post-war world as an opportunity to build a worldwide anti-colonial movement under joint American-Soviet leadership, while the Moderates, unimpressed by political progress in the Soviet Union, favored alignment with the democratic capitalist powers to contain what they saw as Soviet aggression and authoritarianism (Key 1955).

With the war drawing to a close in both the European and Pacific theaters, the brave new world of the future loomed on the horizon. The end of the war would mean the first general election in eight years. The time came for the two factions of the Workers’ Communist Party to go their separate ways. With the final end of the war only a month away, the Popular Unity Government disbanded. At the National Convention, the Workers’ Communist Party voted to dissolve into two successor parties. The Left would form a caretaker government under the leadership of Henry Wallace, and would stand for election in July of 1946 as the Socialist Party. The Moderates withdrew from the government caucus and formed the Progressive Labor Party.

Some confusion exists as to the end of the First Period due to the results of the 1946 General Election. The Socialist Party under Wallace formed a minority government. Wallace himself was a stalwart from the First Cultural Revolution, and many of the Central Committee’s members were the same old faces from the previous Foster and Reed governments. For some, the First Period only definitively comes to an end following the 1948 general election, following Wallace’s dramatic shake up of the Central Committee.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

Exactly what it says on the tin.

I may be an effete intellectual snob, but beneath this bearded, beret and turtleneck sweater-wearing exterior there lies a preteen boy who likes big explosions and gunfire, so I have a thing for the good old jingoistic action movies. Seeing Sly Stallone and his misfit crew of American special forces and Vietnamese guerillas running around the jungles of Indochina, blowing up Anglo-French helicopters and troop carriers with explosive tipped arrows in First Blood just warms the cockles of my heart.

As for books, I have a profound attraction to the English dystopian writers. Huxley’s Brave New World is a classic, and I think it points out some disturbing tendencies in modern authoritarian societies. I’m sure most modern Brits would compare the hedonistic society of Huxley’s nightmare to modern America, but I think that really misses the point. First of all, we don’t exhibit the kind of disturbing consumerism or political quietism. And second of all, Huxley wrote it as a pretty clear critique of industrial capitalist society.

Originally Posted by Ubermunch

Dude, this is non-political chat :p

But anyway, I actually enjoy some of you Yanks’ action movies. When they’re not being too anvilicious, that is. First Blood is not the most egregious example, but too often, the colonial troops are treated like mindless mooks, and in this case, it ignores the multiple dimensions of the conflict.

Quite a few Vietnamese collobarated with the colonial regime, and fought against the NLF, for various reasons. Some for pragmatism, some as soldiers of fortune, and others because they didn’t like the idea of trading foreign dominion from people they know to a group they didn’t know. But I digress. The Indochina Wars were a rough time for us as a country, and I’m glad we did the right thing in the end and granted the region its independence, even though they ended up as an American satellite.

I personally think The Rock was a better one. It was more anviliciously communist than most, but damn, it really did a good job critiquing militarism. The rogue general begins a Nixon’s gambit backed by chemical weapons to expose the government’s history of illegal covert ops around the world. The secret police scramble to take him down and keep the situation under control. Very gray and gray morality, and boy, it shows what your Hollywood collectives can do with the generous state grants they get to make movies. And it was so critical of the national security state. I’m really glad it was made.

I do wish we’d get more of the classic American TV shows over here. And I know my brother, who is doing a cultural exchange program in America, says that finding some of the British classics in America is damned difficult too. I remember seeing Star Trek on the BBC when I was like seven or eight, and I thought it was the coolest thing since Dr. Who. Sure, it was set in the backdrop of a socialist utopian future, but all the strange new worlds were great. Captain Jill T. Kirk is a certified badass, and definitely gave me a lot of respect for women’s liberation. I’m surprised that it only lasted like six seasons on its original run. I’ve been wanting to catch Phase II and the other sequels, but finding those without importing an American disc player is really hard.

Originally Posted by SeriousSam

I’m somewhat of a connoisseur of movies actually. Kind of comes from being a film student at Berkeley. On the campus fileshare network, the film department has a massive library of movies from around the world, in all different eras. Even some of the harder-to-get foreign films.

But, in spite of all the seriousness that comes with being a film student, I think I enjoy romantic comedies the best, and I have to admit, it was British filmmakers who wrote the book on the romantic comedy. I think we take our films a little bit too seriously here in America, trying to make them serious literature, but sometimes we miss out on spice-of-life type comedies as a result. My favorite is the Ur-example of the modern sex comedy, American Girls Are Easy.

When it comes to being hilariously subversive, it’s hard to beat Terry Jones. I know a lot of the press here in America was up in arms when American Girls Are Easy came out in 79, but if they had taken the time to actually watch the movie, they’d see that it was a whole lot more on their side than they imagined. It spoofed the hilariously uptight views a lot of establishment Brits and French had about sex, and subverted most of the stereotypes about Americans that are prevalent in British media. Besides, the nerdy main character who falls hopelessly in love with the strong and sexy American exchange student, who can’t love that?

Here’s hoping the Cold War ends soon, because this has ridiculously stifled cultural exchange between our peoples.

Originally Posted by flibbertygibbet

Ah, American Girls Are Easy...that was like the biggest movie in the world when I was like 15. I remember standing around the block waiting to get in that summer. Rosanna Aquette was so sexy in that movie.

The gags are just classic. And the greatest part about them, as I found out when I went to New York for grad school, is that those sorts of things would happen. Sure, it’s part adolescent boy’s fantasy. Who wouldn’t want to meet a girl who has no concept of a nudity taboo? And Neil Gaiman plays the nerdy, slightly repressed British school boy to the hilt. You can easily imagine that it’s you when Rosanna Arquette sleeps naked on the bunk bed above you, or follows you into the boy’s locker room and starts undressing.

And yeah, Arquette’s character really subverted a lot of the stereotypes about Americans. Sure, she’s kinda ditzy and flighty on the surface, but that’s just because she’s off in la la land thinking about so many different things. She seems rude at first, but that’s just because she’s friendly and informal, and doesn’t really have much of an ingrained idea of “personal property”. She seems angry only because she bothers to stick up for herself and her friends, espescially against sexism. She might be promiscuous, but only with people she trusts and who will respect her. Unfortunately for our hero, he didn’t realize that she’d been coming onto him basically since they met until just before she has to go home.

Originally Posted by DeOpressoLiber

When it comes to movies, i’m really into the Red Westerns and the Soviet Osterns. While the genre started originally in Europe, with the Soviet postwar films set in the American West or the postwar “Spaghetti Westerns” from Italy, it definitely had its impact here. The style was really popularized with 1961’s The Magnificent Seven, which combined many elements of the classic Japanese film with a pretty rough look at class warfare in the American west. What I found really notable was the casting of Marion Morrison as one of the (anti)heroes. When you think of such a legend in acting, you really don’t think of Westerns.

I really liked the Ostern classic White Sun of the Desert too. It really signalled that Soviet cinema was coming into its own, as well as the potentials of the late Khrushchev’s liberalizations, which were continuing under Ryzhkov.

As for books, I think the British and Japanese cyberpunk workers are pretty cool. We don’t get much of that natively in America (probably because our society is a little bit less dysfunctional ), but they’re really cool looks at the potential pitfalls of technology being divorced from social responsibility. In particular, I think Ghost in the Shell, in all its varying forms, is magnificent. I remember studying the politics of the Socialist Republic of Japan in college, and boy, it’s easy to see where such a pessimistic vision of the future came from.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

Speaking of stuff from the other side of the Atlantic, The Prisoner is an excellent TV show, even though it’s like four decades old now. I’m sorry to say, but I think it’s been a long downward spiral from there when it comes to British TV. Sure, Dr. Who is as entertaining as ever, but there just aren’t as many standouts as there used to be.

What really disturbs me is this phenomenon of “Reality TV” that you see creeping in from the Anglo and French zones. I was in Quebec over the summer, and I had the opportunity to watch some French language TV, and some of what I saw was rather disturbing. Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, The Bachelor(ette), and even Rock of Love... where a bunch of young girls compete for the affections of an aging rock star... That sort of stuff just offends me on a deeply preconscious level...

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

*obligatory “that’s cuz ur a bisexual freelovin commie” comment*

Believe me, we probably hate “Reality TV” just as much as you do. However, a lot of people tune into watch these sorts of shows every week, and try to live vicariously through the people on the tube. It’s kind of depressing, really. These shows are very low budget, easily merchandisable, and they avoid all of the actors’ and writers’ guilds, so they’re very profitable. Even if you get half the viewers of a regular TV show, you’ll still make gobs more money.

Still, we all have our share of quirks. You Yanks have full frontal nudity on daytime TV and your obsessively political programming. We have our annoying commercials and Reality TV. I think it balances out in the end.

Originally Posted by Ubermunch

That reminds me... American sex ed videos. Big budgets, good actors, much better than any of the pr0n we have here. Kept me company on many a lonely night.

Originally Posted by SeriousSam

Uh dude... Too much information.

I really don’t see why there’s such a big deal about sex and nudity. It’s just normal human behavior, no more different than going for a walk. It’s also not like we’re completely uniform about sex here in America anyway. It’s not even a rural vs. urban divide either, it’s much more regional. The really big cosmopolitan centers like New York, Chicago, Detroit or Pittsburgh are extremely libertine about it. The rural kibbutzim, and cities in the Midwest, Deep South and Atlantic Coast are pretty liberated as well. Then again, in other parts of the South and Mountain West they have a much more conservative, almost British view of sexuality.

My roommate my freshman year of college was from Wyoming, and going to Berkeley was quite a shock for him. Orientation was pretty fun for him, lol. It’s hot and humid, since it’s August. So naturally, lots of people are running around topless. It was like he was a kid in a candy store. He’s like “Bubiez!”, and I’m like, “Yeah, so?” Culture shock.

Originally Posted by flibbertygibbet

But surely all that sexual openness leads to sex losing some of, well, its magic? I mean sure, America seems on the surface like a pre-teen boy’s wanking fantasy, but sex must just seem so frighteningly ordinary that it stops being so special. I mean, at least here in Britain, it’s kind of a big step into a new world. Without getting into too much detail, my first time with my boyfriend was a romantic, almost magical occaission, and it signified that our relationship had become serious and exclusive.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a proud leftist all of my life. This girl is a red diaper baby born in the steel mills of Birmingham. Every general election, for the Union parliament I dutily vote for the Left Alliance list. For the British Parliament and the local councils I vote Socialist Worker or Labour. But damn, some times I think you Yanks don’t realize how much you’ve lost.

But back on topic. I think the biggest lead the Americans and the Japanese have on us is in animation and comics. They never suffered through the idiocies of censorship codes, and so those two art forms aren’t struggling against the Age Ghetto the same way they are here in Britain or France. My personal favorite are the Disney feature films. Conan is an absolute classic, as are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Sure, they’re adaptations, but they’re pure magic.

Originally Posted by KittehKommitteh

Since this is an alternate history board, I’m surprised no one has listed AH literature yet for their favorites. Phillip K. Dick’s classic AH novel The Man in the High Castle is one of my favorites. Its brilliant depiction of the very real dangers of Britain siding with the Axis against America and Russia and the terrifying fascist-dominated world that it would result in is definitely a chiller.

Still relevant today. The Anglo-French Union is fascist in all but name, and is the greatest threat to world peace today. Strange how life imitates art.

Originally Posted by Ubermunch

Oh great, KittehKommitteh is back...

Seriously, I know you Yanks are a political lot, and you don’t really think that anything can be truly non-political, but the Non-Political chat stays away from RL politics and current events for a reason. It keeps us from wanting to tear each other’s hearts out.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

Eh, he’s not really that bad in the grand scheme of things. He’s just fiercely patriotic, like most people in the Socialist Party’s base. He’s actually pretty nice when you get to know him, and he’s quite sharp about domestic politics. He just comes off pretty harsh to you guys across the pond. At least he’s not as bad as RuleBritannia, who espouses the far too popular opinion among Tories in Britain that the British Empire should have sided with the Nazis as the lesser evil in WWII.

Anyway, I’ve just found this delightful ’80s political satire and sitcom called Yes, Comrade Secretary, and it’s quickly become one of my favorites. It doesn’t advocate like The Committee’s Office often did, but still gives a good, if satirical, portrayal of politics. It really does a good job poking fun at the pitfalls of practical politics. It follows the career of PLP Central Committee member Alphonse “Al” Bundy,¹ a bumbling and unlucky politician who has clearly risen to a position way above his merit. Bundy is the perfect portrayal of why the traits of a publicity-minded politician don’t mesh well with civil service (and how often those political marriages are really fakey. His wife, a real battle axe, is just as often stabbing Bundy’s ambitions in the back as promoting them. Their dysfunctional marriage is a nice sideline to the politics).

It’s also a quote gold mine. This one, from the sequel series Yes, Comrade Premier (Bundy, through the expert manipulation of his Deputy Secretary Steve Rhoades, ends up as head of the parliamentary and the Premier of the Central Committee), is my absolute favorite:

Bundy: Don’t tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country; The Daily Worker is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Labor Review is read by people who actually do run the country; The Washington Post is read by the wives of the people who run the country; Rational Economy is read by people who plan the country; The Freeman is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The New Internationalist is read by people who think it is.
Rhoades: Premier, what about the people who read The New York Sun?
Bundy: Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.

Absolutely priceless.

Originally Posted by flibbertygibbet

Haha... that’s fucking fantastic. I think you could probably apply that to any country and it’d still be as true ever. I take it The New Internationalist is the American equivalent to the Daily Torygraph?

Originally Posted by Ubermunch

Lenin, I like you a lot as a poster. I really do. I know you’re a huge Social Ecology supporter, and thus you’re as far left as they come, but in spite of that, you’re not a complete cock to people from across the pond. But I don’t know why you feel that you need to defend KittehKommitteh. He’s a troll. An educated and articulate troll, but a troll nonetheless.

Originally Posted by RuleBritannia

*reads Ubermunch’s post*

I fucking lolled. Considering you’re the one who cited that communist American propagandist Chomsky in political chat, you don’t have much room to talk. More proof that socialism is a mental disorder. If you like those Americans so much why don’t you just move to America, you traitor.

Lol Socialist logic. There’s a reason Labour hasn’t won an election here since 1942.

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

I’m guessing the banhammer is finally going to hit RuleBritannia. It’s a pity, you had so much potential. Sure, Ubermunch is a Labourite and is thus bound to hate you. But I’ve been a member of the Conservative Party since I moved to Cambridge for college, and I’ve got to say, you’re a really poor reflection on other Tories in the forum. It’s not that you’re not intelligent; it’s just that you’ve shown a flagrant disregard for decency and tact ever since you’ve joined the board. Yeah, I enjoy taking the piss out of the Labour Party or their “friendly enemies” in the Socialist Workers’ Party, but you’re clearly going too far in most cases, subscribing to such unfounded conspiracy theories. Come on, even I admire Attlee’s leadership of the country in the Second World War. I’ll even admit that Labour’s economic policies were instrumental in the health of the Anglo-French Union in the post-war world. Yet you’ve, on more than one occasion, trotted out that terrible conspiracy theory that Attlee’s government was filled with Communist agents, and that Attlee was trying to sell out the Country and the Crown to America and the Soviet Union. Come on...

I don’t watch much TV, and I don’t take much time to go to the cinema, mostly because I like the style of my native French cinema over that of my adoptive country, but I read a lot. I read a lot of the classics, stuff like.... [material omitted from prior to known POD – Infinity Patrol Penetration Service]² … I’ll avoid putting Tolkien on the list, since he’s a given. However, I do rather enjoy other fantasy works. Conan might be from America, but I can’t avoid loving it, just because the meta-series is so diverse. Like most things American, it’s anviliciously political, but as adventure novels they’re first rate. And you can’t help but admire the “No Gods, No Masters” ethos that our barbarian-thief (apparently he multi-classes ) personifies.

I also enjoy the Bond series of novels and movies. I particularly enjoyed James Bond’s epic clash with the Section 9 agent Felix Lieter in Man with the Golden Gun. More than any other one of the books, Fleming captured the clash of cultures in the Cold War in this book. Yeah, I know that Bond started out as a pulp literature potboiler for the author, but it really challenged the author, and it grew into fairly respectable literature.

1. Yes, I did just, in fact, cross over Yes, Minister with Married...with Children. Here’s to you, President Al Bundy.

2. Give yourself a cookie if you get the reference.

“I’ve heard about the troubles at the convention. I learned most of the scant amount I do know from a letter from Solomon Blatt, but as you might guess, they [the Secretariat for Public Safety] read my mail, and they heavily censored the letter. I’m troubled very much by the rift within our party, but even more troubled by the fact that I don’t know who to side with. I feel like the Majority faction wants us to capitulate, to give in to the Red tyranny. But the Sons of Liberty group wish to fight fire with fire, to wage bloody warfare against our own people to force them to accept the righteousness of our cause.

“This cannot be the way. As I await sentencing for sedition, this terrible fact keeps creeping to me: we’ve lost. Whatever chance we had of winning this fight, if it even ever was there, is long past. My trial was proof of that. The People’s Tribune was a Negroe man, and as he spoke with the fire and passion of a Sunday preecher, the white crowd in the gallery hooped and hollered, not to lynch him, but to convict me. Deep in their hearts, they hated the People’s Tribune, and knew he was inferior, just another nigger, but that disgust was quelled by their hatred for me and what I stood for. After seeing that, I needed no more convincing. The Communists have won, even here in the South....

“I’ve prayed long and hard on this, and still don’t know if I’ve got the answers. But I do have faith in the Lord that nothing happens without a reason. The Communists’ victory in the class war, and the coming of the dictatorship of the proletariat must too also be a part of God’s plan. Perhaps this is to test our faith as Christians, to test our faith before the fires of new zealously atheist regime. But we must also consider the possibility that God is not on our side in this tribulation, that our Lord Jesus Christ might be siding with the Samaritan with good intentions rather than empty faith of the Believer.”

“We cannot, nor should we aim, to ride out the storm of war, and to attempt outlive the menace of tyranny, with hopes that the odious tyranny of Nazi armies find elsewhere to pillage. Large swaths of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen into the grip of the Gestapo. As I speak before you know, Nazi armies lay siege to the great cities of Leningrad and Moscow. The jackboot has tread through ancient Anatolia, and now leaves its black stain upon the Holy Land.

“This war has made former enemies into blood brothers. And through our combined strength, and in the righteousness of our cause, we shall, in the end, bring about the final defeat of the Nazis. The Empire shall, and must, stand with the free peoples of the world. Under the banner of the Internationale, Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union shall meet the enemies of humanity, armed and united. We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in Palestine, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

“Soldiers: I am proud to say I have fought with all of you these many long months. We’ve endured the bitter sting of defeat at the hands of our implacable Nazi foes, and still we have fought on. And through it all, it has been the democratic soldier, fighting for liberty against his or her oppressors—no matter what form they may take—that has persevered. Workers from all nations have united in this Great Crusade under the banner of the International Forces. Workers from the steel mills of Britain, the fertile Nile Valley of Egypt, the ancient metropolis of Istanbul, the arid plains of Palestine, have gathered in defiance of tyranny, to throw off the chains of the imperial past. Here today, a Gurkha warrior from India stands side-by-side with a Negro from the American South, united at last by a common enemy.

“The final conflict between oppressor and oppressed is before us. The Nazi war machine marches upon us once more, and we must seek refuge upon an Ark of our solidarity lest we be swept away by the Flood. Soldiers, I speak to you now not as your commanding officer, but as your comrade in the brotherhood of man. We fight today not just for each other, or for this bit of parched, chalky soil, but for all of Creation. Some of you in the ranks have already witnessed the horrors of Nazi brutality, so you know well of the terror that will engulf the world should we fail today. You have seen your homes and communities destroyed by Nazi savagery. You’ve witnessed firsthand your friends and loved ones consumed by the nightmarish Waffen SS. Unprecedented and unimaginable though they may be, these are the signs of our time.

“I stand here with you, my brothers and sisters, because I know that the People of the world can unite against their oppressors. A day may come when our courage fails, when we forsake our comrades and cast away all bonds of fellowship, but it will not be this day! An hour of woes and shattered dreams before the Age of Reason comes crashing down! But it will not be this day! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, soldiers of freedom!”

“Liberty,” so Lenin declared, “is so precious a commodity that it must be carefully rationed.” On face, it is rather unfortunate that such sentiments were once seriously entertained in the UASR. While it would be a gross oversimplification to foist the blame for the trend toward political authoritarianism and centralization under the First Cultural Revolution solely upon the shoulders of Marxism-Leninism, the importance of ideology in informing the bounds of political freedom and the actions of the state cannot be ignored. To be sure, the Union faced great perils at home and abroad in its formative years. The threat of terrorism from within the state, and of reactionary armies from without, were very real dangers that American workers faced on a daily basis. Twice during this period, first in 1934 and again in 1936, the UASR was on the brink of war with the major imperial capitalist powers of Europe.

But in understanding the complexities, we cannot go so far as the apologists for the American history of state terror suggest. To understand is not to condone. We must not have any illusions about what was at stake: the American state amassed many of the trappings of a totalitarian regime in short order. Only the existence of a functional democratic polity in the factory committees, ward councils and the regional soviets, which retained a faith in both democracy and the rule of law, staved off the complete suppression of democratic dissent and the UASR joining the sad list of degenerated worker’s states.

The growth of an authoritarian state apparatus during the Cultural Revolution came swiftly. It was assisted by many of the enforcers of the old regime who proved more than willing to change masters once the outcome was certain. Chief among these labor skates was the inimitable J. Edgar Hoover, a hardline reactionary enforcer turned hardline revolutionary enforcer. Indeed, changing sides was the best career move any ambitious lawman could hope to make. Hoover would go from the head of an undermanned and underfunded federal investigation agency that routinely competed with the Marshals Service and the Secret Service (and state and local law enforcement as well) for jurisdiction, to the master of the one of the largest, most powerful unified national police forces in the entire world and a political leader in the new state.

In terms of resources at its disposal, and the power it commanded, the People’s Secretariat for Public Safety during the 30s and 40s was perhaps second only to the dreaded Soviet NKVD. And after the resolution of the Civil War, the victors of what should have been a movement towards liberty and democracy effectively gave Public Safety carte blanche to eliminate all opponents to the new order. And to this day, the UASR remains the only democratic state with an unapologetic secret police force. While the USSR and other degenerated workers’ states have since abandoned such tactics in the transition to full political and civil democracy, it remains troubling that in the UASR, the option remains on the table.

...J. Edgar Hoover’s conversion to the enforcer of American national ideology came swiftly. As his private secretary noted, his habits of speech, his reading materials, even the company he kept, all changed within the span of a mere year. Hoover embraced Marxism-Leninism so thoroughly, even the most trusting among his personal confidants have admitted to incredible cynicism about his apparent embrace of the hard ideological left. Regardless, what is important to remember is Hoover’s conversion was a reflection of his function in the American revolutionary state.

Like all state security agencies, Public Safety’s primary role was not to enforce the laws of the state, but rather the ideology of the state. While Marxism-Sinclairism¹ had its share of discontents during the 1930s, its status as the American national ideology became very clear in the 1938 general election campaign. Both opposition parties, the Left Democrats and the nascent Democratic-Republicans, had officially embraced Marxian socialism to varying degrees, and raced to the left to fight the utter hegemonic electoral strength of the Communists. Consider Robert Taft’s famous “The Genius of Marx and the Foolishness of the Foster Government” address to the Congress, widely rebroadcast on the radio and film reels during the election campaign. In the speech, Taft spends an equal measure of time praising Marx and pointing out Foster’s government’s failure to keep:

Consider now the great foresight Marx had. In 1853, Marx wrote, in one of his many columns for The New York Herald-Tribune, that the hangman’s noose was an instrument of barbarous oppression fitting the barbarities of the capitalist economic system. In his own words, ‘Capital punishment cannot be justified in any society that calls itself civilized.’ So what has this supposedly Marxist government done, in the five years since the revolution? It has put to death more men for counterrevolutionary activities in these five years then fell to the hangman’s noose in the barbarous age before! Comrade Foster, how in God’s name can you call yourself a Marxist!?...The Central Committee’s official security reports have endorsed the use of extralegal terror, summary execution and other heinous, fascist methods in the pursuit of justice. How many of these recommendations have been enacted? Comrade Foster, your only answer so far has been that this is classified information. You have asked us to endorse your Public Safety campaign, and this body has given you carte blanche, and surrendered the purse to the Executive without an accounting of how the Public Safety budget will be spent. Indeed, we can learn all we want about the number of paper clips Section 1’s Marshal’s Service uses, or the amount of paper procured by Section 3 for transportation security. Yet we have no way of knowing how much money the Counterintelligence service in Section 9 spends, let alone what it is spent on. Comrade, this is a travesty of socialist democracy, and unbecoming of any revolutionary state.

1. The use of this term separately from Marxism-Leninism is deliberate. While Sinclairism is derivative of Leninism, the term didn’t come into use until after the Second World War, even though it refers in large part the American variant of Marxist philosophy codified during the First Cultural Revolution.

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A Simple Life

The last seconds of the school day always tick by the slowest, especially on a Friday. For the sixth graders of Alexandra Kollontai Middle School, that was doubly true this Friday. Tomorrow would be May Day, probably the biggest holiday of the whole year.¹ The streets and fora of New York would be filled with parades, picnics, art shows, theater troupes, and all other manner of ways for a kid to become lost in youthful exuberance.

And, unfortunately for the American History class, the teacher Lily Edelin insisted upon using every second of seventh period to cover as much ground as possible. The lecture would continue until the final bell rang, and would not relent so much as a moment sooner. This suited Lenina Revmira² just fine as she watched the birds frolic about outside the classroom window. With a heavy sigh, she slumped down to her desk, wishing she could be as free as the birds. The pigeons suddenly scattered from their roosts, heralding the coming of a great black raven. It perched on the tree branch right outside the window, unconcerned with the panic of the other birds. And as Lenina stared, the raven stared right back.

“Students,” the teacher called, “who can tell me about the dictatorship of the proletariat that we read about in Critique of the Gotha Programme?” The class was silent, fidgeting uncomfortably. Less than a minute to go until the bell, and Comrade Edelin won’t let anyone go until the question is answered to her satisfaction. Since no one volunteered, the teacher began searching through the class to volunteer someone.

Before she could make her choice, one kid finally spoke up. “I’ll bet Lenina knows,” he snickered.

Lenina shot him an icy glare. “You scab!” she wanted to say, but she bit her tongue. Lenina played video games with Fred after school, helped him with his homework, and this was how he showed his thanks? She just couldn’t understand it, let alone why he was laughing about it.

“Pranks like that aren’t very nice, Fred. However, Lenina; you shouldn’t be daydreaming like that in class. It’s disrespectful to your classmates. So, unless the raven outside can answer the question better than you, I’d like to hear your answer.”

Edelin’s smile just sickened Lenina. She was so matronizing about everything. With a sigh, Lenina flipped through her notes, trying to find something important to say so that the day could end and she could go home. “Well,” she paused, fiddling with one of her dreadlocks as she collected herself, “the dictatorship of the proletariat is like when the workers overthrow the capitalists and the state, and set up a new worker’s state to defend the revolution from enemies.”

“And who leads the workers?”

Lenina flipped through her notes again. “Uh, is it the vanguard party?”

“Yes. But who then teaches the vanguard how to fight the revolution?”

“Damn know-it-alls like you” was what she wanted to say. But she wasn’t that rude. “That would be the working class, right?”

“Yes. But it looks like that’s all we have time for now. So, remember to read up on the Foster government’s Red Terror, and be prepared to criticize it in class tomorrow in relation to Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat. Okay, have a nice weekend.”

The class bolted out the door as soon as they heard “all we have time for.” The race outside was brutal, but Lenina was a bit taller and stronger than most in her class, so she had a natural advantage pushing her way through to her locker and then outside. She squeezed her way through the throngs of people, and out through the school’s main entrance. From there, it was a short walk to the metro station. She skipped down the several flights of stairs down to the metro platform. Sticking her hands in her jean pockets, she paced back and forth while the platform began to fill up, waiting for the 3:40 train to arrive. Many of her classmates would ride the same metroline home, and they milled about, gossiping about the day’s drama.

When the sleek train arrived, everyone quickly filed into the train and found a seat. Once the doors closed, the train accelerated quickly, though in the tunnel it was hard to get an accurate sense of speed. The trains in New York’s Metro Line usually cruised at around 130 kph, but the new express lines that ran from the Jersey Shore to the far end of Long Island would routinely break 200 kph.³

Lenina always enjoyed the metro ride to and from school. The trains were very nice, and the whole metro was well maintained, befitting its status as the pride of the New York ASR. While the stops weren’t quite as frequent as the light rail or the bus lines, it was the best way to get long distances. The train soon reached her stop, and she quickly disembarked, along with a couple of her classmates and some other commuters. She didn’t go to her grandfather’s flat often enough to recognize the rest of the commuters on this stop, but her classmates clearly did. Older brothers, friends of the family, fellow communards, it didn’t really matter; the sense of community in the neighborhoods of the city was always strong.

Lenina took her time to get to her grandfather’s flat. As she lollygagged, she looked at the agitprop pasted on the sides of the old buildings, wondering if this sort of thing was common when Grandpa Arnold was a boy. The military’s famous Uncle Sinclair “I want you to join the RDF, comrade!” posters always struck Lenina as a bit odd. Uncle Sinclair just looked too old and jolly to seriously encourage someone to join the military to fulfill their national service requirement. He was like a skinny, beardless Santa Claus; not very intimidating.

She bought two cappuccinos from the café across from Grandpa Arnold’s apartment building. Her grandpa lived up on the eighth floor, so she decided to skip the pastries they barrista tried to offer her before skipping across the street. She took the elevator up, after briefly contemplating taking the stairs. Grandpa’s flat was just down the hall and around the corner, and much to her amazement, her grandpa was already waiting there to welcome her.

“Grandpa!” she cried, “how did you know I was here?”

Grandpa gave her a big hug before taking one of the cappuccinos from her. “Well, baby-doll, I always know when my granddaughter is coming, because you bring joy wherever you go.” He took her backpack, and ushered her into his flat.

“Aww, grandpa,” she blushed and quickly changed the subject, “Are your flatmates in?”

“No, looks like we’ve got the commons to ourselves for the next few hours. Jim’s got his chemistry lab at the university today. Robin and Marian are going out to dinner, and Marcel... well, Marcel is just being Marcel. I think he’s out clubbing or something. He never tells us much.”

Lenina had hear a lot about Marcel these past few weeks. Marcel was one of those people who might be called “antisocial” rather unfairly due to his idiosyncratic behavior and lack of participation in community events. As Grandpa Arnold had described him, he was a nice enough fellow, just not really with the program when it came to communal living and civic virtue. He suspected he was probably from Canada, so sharing a flat with a widowed pensioner, a young married lawyer couple, and a young college student was probably a new experience for him.

“Well that’s a bummer. I was hoping to get to say hi to Robin and Marian; he’s such a funny guy, and Marian really is sweet as can be.”

“Well, I’ll make sure to tell them that you missed them. Now, you tell me about your day while I make us a snack to go with the coffee.” He pulled out a stool at the island in the flat’s well-equipped kitchen before setting about the business of after-school snacks.

Lenina sat on the stool, dangling her feet playfully while she told Grandpa Arnold about her day. “Well, we’re learning about polynomials in Algebra class right now. It’s really hard, but the teacher says it’s important. Oh well. My group aced the quiz though!”

“Oh, that’s great. So, coffee cake or fruit slices?”

“Mm... how about both?”

“Sounds good to me,” Grandpa Arnold smiled as he started chopping the two Fuji apples into slices.

“We watched Premier’s Questions in Politics today. Daniel Berrigan⁴ is a smart old guy; he really did well fending off Progressive Labor’s questions, I think. My teacher, Comrade Giuliani, says that there’s probably going to be new elections soon.”

“Probably true. So, what else did you do today, sweetie?”

“Well, in Literature we started reading To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s supposedly based on some real events in the author’s life. So kind of the Old South right after the Revolution. I think it’s really interesting. I like Scout, she’s a neat character.”

“Oh, I remember that book. I read it when it was first published. Really good book, good to see your teacher knows a good one when she sees one. Yeah, I wasn’t much older than Scout during the Cultural Revolution, probably about your age when it was going down. Here’s your snacks, sweetie.” He took a first sip of his cappuccino. “I say, I do like Ma Belle’s espresso. She makes it the proper way, like they do in Italy. I remember having cappuccino in Rome with some of the Frente Populare partisans, after we liberated the city from the Fascists. One part espresso, one part milk, one part foam...”

“Grandpa?” Lenina asked, sipping on her cappuccino.

“Yes dear?”

“What was it like, growing up in the Cultural Revolution?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, Edelin wants us to discuss the Red Terror and other things of that period, and I just can’t help but think that so much of that stuff was just wrong. I mean, what does that say about our country, when we did terrible things then?”

“Well, sweetie,” he said, scratching his graying goatee, “that’s only one part of a very complicated time. I was about your age during that time period, just growing up, but I still remember a whole lot about that time. A lot of things were going on, some good, some bad. But mostly, it was just an exciting time.”

“Like what?” she asked, nibbling on an apple slice.

“Ever heard of the Collectivization Drives?”

“Vaguely...”

“Well, starting in late 35 and early 36, the union government started this massive public campaign to collectivize agriculture and what was left of private capitalist business from the revolution. Mostly the smaller businesses and factories that escaped occupation during the great strikes of 33 and 34.”

“That does sound kind of exciting.”

“Yeah, it really was. I was twelve when it started. I remember when the drive started. My father was a small farmer, and we were in the town of Three Forks, Montana that day to pick up some barb wire fence to string out on the border between our farm and neighbor’s ranch. Just as we were leaving the general store, a group of men from the Ag secretariat, along with a small group of party workers, were collecting a town meeting in a nearby park. So we went down to see what the commotion was about.

“Now, my dad had been a loyal member of the Workers’ Communist Party for over a decade, and he knew all of the officials from the state’s union and party locals. He didn’t recognize most of these men, which must of meant they were from the national party headquarters in Chicago, which meant this must be important.

“The head honcho of the union government officials identified himself as Cecil Salmon, one of the principal administrators the Agriculture Secretariat, and he said something along the lines of ‘In order to continue the revolution, we must not rest until all the vestiges of capitalism are eliminated from our society.’ I’m sure he said a lot more, but I can’t really remember much more than it was a rousing speech and everybody cheered.”

Lenina sipped her cappuccino thoughtfully. “Were all speeches that jingoistic in the 30s, Grandpa?”

“Absolutely, pumpkin. Absolutely.”

She laughed heartily. “So, what did you do?”

“Well, the mayor of the town convened a town assembly that night, and the party workers gave us the brief on the government’s collectivization policy. They encouraged us to form a kibbutz from the town and the surrounding farm land, and collectivize all of the agriculture in the county and bring it under rational management. And with the kind of aid the government was offering, we really would have been stupid to say no. So, going with the revolutionary spirit of the time, we agreed to trade in our private land allotments for tractors and advanced irrigation systems.

“A couple people in the county needed to be dragged along, but mostly, if they put up a lot of resistance we just let them stew in their reactionary juices. So we tore down most of the old fences, and set up new ones, mingled our herds, and marveled at the new wonderful tractors that came in on the railroad that spring. It was a lot of hard work, and the managers and technicians the Ag secretariat assigned to our kibbutz were a bit spread too far, too thin. But they taught us what we needed to learn to keep them running until they could do the more detailed work. Hell, working on those beasts is why I learned how to be a mechanic. Wasn’t quite strong enough to buck hay or rope calves yet, but I was good with my hands and I learned fast.”

“I really never thought of you as a farm boy, Grandpa. Montana’s like three thousand kilometers away from the New York ASR. Why’d you leave for here?” Lenina asked.

“Well, I left because I met your grandma. But that’s another story. Now where was I? Oh yeah, working on the kibbutz. One thing I’ll always remember was during the summer of 36, we got a lot of German immigrants coming into the county. From what I heard, there were a lot of them scattered all around the country. A lot of them couldn’t speak much English when they arrived, and I was always so intrigued by their strange clothes, or that they didn’t go to church with the rest of the community.”

“Why didn’t they go to church, if it was so important in the town?”

“Most of them were Jews, sweetie, fleeing the Nazis.”

“Oh...” she said, realizing how serious it was.

“Quite a few of them came over thanks to cloak and dagger diplomacy between our government and the Nazi regime. The Nazis hated Jews, but didn’t know what to do with them now that they were in power. The politically easy solution was to make as many of them as possible someone else’s problem. They’d take their homes and possessions, and give them a one way ticket to America.”

“That’s terrible!” she gasped, “how could they do such horrible things to other people?”

“Believe me, exiled Ashkenazim got off light compared to the rest of the Jews in Europe. You’ve probably never heard of the Final Solution, have you?”

“No, I haven’t. Though I think Comrade Edelin said that we’d be watching a documentary on that next week.”

Grandpa Arnold sighed. Her innocence was about to be shattered in a pretty brutal way. Better now then later, so he thought. “Well, let’s just say that it’s something you’ll never forget...” he said, as memories of the living skeletons he had seen when his unit liberated Dachau came flooding back in a torrent. The anger was still there as well, the seething hatred he had felt as they marched the townsfolk and captured Hitler Youth paramilitaries through the hell they had turned a blind eye to. If his chest had been a cannon, he’d have shot his heart at the ones who were responsible.

“Grandpa, are you okay? You look upset...”

“Oh, I’m okay,” he lied and then changed the subject, “Did I ever tell you about one of my old friends, Otto Liebgott?”

“No, I don’t think so. Who was he?”

“Well, he was a German immigrant that I met when I was a boy. He settled in Three Forks that summer I was working on the kibbutz’s tractors. In Germany, before the Nazis had come to power, he had been a fairly prosperous banker in Munich. He arrived at Ellis Island with only the clothes on his back, a letter from his brother encouraging him to come out west.

“Needless to say, he did not feel very welcome in the UASR.” Hearing her laugh, he chuckled too. “Sad thing is, a lot of my fellow kibbutzniks didn’t treat him with much respect either. Sure, he wasn’t the friendliest, and had been a class enemy once upon a time. But he was a still a human being, and that might as well have been another life. He was as proletarian as the rest of us now.

“He got employment teaching German at the school house, since the new curricula from the republican government in Helena required all of us to learn a second language. When he wasn’t teaching us, or working on the community projects with the rest of the kibbutz, he would teach other German immigrants how to speak English.”

“Sounds like a neat guy then,” Lenina said.

“I’ll never forget when I first met him. He knew a fair bit about engines, since he used to own a car back in Germany, so he and I were sent to go recover a tractor that had broken down in one of the hayfields during the harvest season. No one else was available, so it was up to a thirteen year old kid with a spot of on-the-job training, and a former banker used to tinkering with passenger cars to go rescue the big beast.

“He wasn’t very talkative in the morning. We stripped apart the engine, looking for the problem all morning, until finally, frustrated and hungry, we decided to break for lunch. I finished before him, and like most kids I hated awkward silences. So I decided to make small talk with him. ‘So, got any family Otto?’ I asked him.

“He was quiet for a long time, and just when I was about to move onto something else, he finally answered. ‘Just one brother,’ he drawled, in between bites of his sandwhich, ‘Karl. I haven’t spoken with him in years though.”

“‘Oh, why is that?’ I asked, forgetting that this was such a touchy subject.

“‘Well, if you must know boy, it’s because of politics. We had a falling out because father disowned him for joining the Communist Party, and I refuse to take his side in the issue. Oh, he was always so impetuous. But, now, he’s probably the only reason I made it out of Germany, even though we haven’t spoken in since he left home almost a decade ago.’

“Now, naïve as I was, I just didn’t understand this. I mean, I had gotten into fights with my brother, but we always worked it out and we stayed friends. ‘Well, why don’t you just talk to him then?’ I said.

“What did he say about that?” she asked.

“He laughed actually. He said something like, ‘If only more people were as straightforward and honest as they were as boys.’ I think we clicked right about then.”

“How did he deal with living here?”

“Pretty well actually. He took to teaching pretty well, and pretty soon he was teaching the philosophy he learned from his days at university to some of the seniors in the high school. I think some good collective labor was great therapy for him, and he finally reunited with his brother too.”

Lenina smiled, “That’s a happy ending.”

1. It’s 1999 at the start of this story

2. Yeah, a nod to Brave New World. But more, it’s just that I think “Lenina” is a pretty name really, regardless of its significance.

3. This timeline will come as close as possible to being a trainwank

4. To fend off the inevitable questions, Daniel Berrigan is an ordained Trinitarian priest, and a member of the Left Democratic Party. He leads an electoral coalition with the Socialist Party and the Social Ecology Union.

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American Freecar Challenge Cup (AFCC) (by President Al Bundy)

The American Freecar Challenge Cup, was an SCUA (Sportscar Union of America) sports car racing series from 1966 to 1982.

History

The AFCC started out as a cooperation between the SCUA and American automotive manufacturers in 1966. They wanted a racing series with cars that have no restrictions in engine capacity, aerodynamics or technical equipment. The hopes of the manufacturers were, that the techniques used in this series might be used for their production cars, as many American manufacturers faced competition by the cheaper and technologically advanced cars from Europe (In particular Germany). Thus, the American Freecar Challenge Cup was born (The “Freecar” should indeed indicate, that the cars were free from any restrictions).

The regulations were minimal, for example the engine size was unlimited (and turbo- and superchargers were allowed). The main idea was that as long as the car had two seats, bodywork enclosing the wheels and met the safety standards, it was legal. The AFCC regulations became so popular, that international manufacturers such as Toyota, Nissan or Auto Union from Germany build sportscars after those regulations.

With these factors, the AFCC became quickly popular. The prize money was decent, so a lot of teams built cars for the series to partake. The cars were spectacular, and crowd attendances were high. The “Freecar” (Common abbreviation of the official name) was also the first motorsports series to get coverage on a major television network in the UASR.

But the first clouds on the horizons arrived in the mid-1970s. An economy crises forced foreign manufacturers out of the series, and even some national teams pulled the plug. Only the spendings of American car manufacturers saved the series. The SCUA also cooperated with the FIA, and introduced Group 6 sportscars in 1976. But they had much more restrictions than the old Freecars. While the interest of motorsport enthusiasts was still high, sponsors, TV, and in the end even the manufacturers lost interest in the series. By this time, the rival AMSA (American Motorsports Association) GT Championship attracted fans and manufacturers with cheaper cars, and close racing. The manufacturers went to the AMSA series, while the AFCC became a privatiers-only championship, with an average of 12 cars at every race. After the 1982 season, the SCUA pulled the plug on the series, and thus ended the 16 year old life of the AFCC series.

Notable drivers

Because Freecar was one of the most prestigeous championships in its era, many American drivers competed in this series. But international drivers competed in this series too. Notable drivers were Chris Amon, Mario Andretti, Jack Brabham, John Cannon, Mark Donohue, Vic Elford, Masten Gregory, Dan Gurney, Jim Hall, Phil Hill, Denny Hulme, Jacky Ickx, Parnelli Jones, Roger McCluskey, Bruce McLaren, Paul Newman, Sam Posey, Peter Revson, Pedro Rodríguez, Jo Siffert, John Cordts, David Hobbs, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees, Hans-Joachim Stuck, Jochen Mass and Hans Heyer.

Technology

Still, the AFCC left a huge legacy for the automotive industry. The excessive use of turbochargers allowed American manufacturers to use this technology for their road cars. The trend went to smaller, but more powerful engines in road cars, which led to the use of these cars in rally competitions, as they were pretty fast, but still easy to drive.

The cars were pretty fast, even by today’s standards. In fact, they could race faster lap times than today’s Formula One or IndyCar cars.

The big disadvantage was the high costs which were ironically triggered by the involvement of the manufacturers. The teams could spend lots and lots of money, because the manufacturers would have paid anyway (Or bailed them out in case of emergency). After the manufacturers pulled out, many teams had to pull out of the AFCC too.

Manufacturers

Many private teams (Or “racing collective”, as they were called in America) build cars on their own. Chapparal, McLaren, Lola and Shadow were among them. They were supported by manufacturers like Ford, Chevrolet or Chrysler. Even the manufacturers’ design bureaus helped the teams with designing their AFCC race cars.

But foreign involvement was also high. The Auto Union fielded several variations of their AU 917 sports prototype that were very successful. Auto Union was also the only foreign company that provided their Group 6 936s to local teams. Toyota and Nissan also competed with their AFCC prototypes. British manufacturers like Jaguar and BRM also planned to partake in the series, but the frosty relations between Britain and the UASR forced them to abandon their plans. British drivers would nonetheless compete in the series.

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Excerpts from the AH.com discussion titled “WI: A Different Nuclear Age?”

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

So I’ve been thinking of working on a new timeline, and it struck me that one of the things most of us seem to hold constant in all of timelines, regardless of the POD, is how the nuclear age begins at the end of the Second World War.

How can we do this differently? And what kind of ramifications are we talking about if, say, the nascent Franco-British Union’s nuclear program gets off the ground first. Attlee’s government devalued funding for the project in favour of conventional arms. Could we get the bomb in time to turn Berlin into a smoking crater? If what would the UASR do then? Does Operation Damocles go through as planned on Japan?

Originally Posted by DeOppressoLiber

Now this is a discussion I can really get into.

I think the reason it’s avoided is because figuring out the ramifications will be a lot of work. In many ways, the modern age began when Red Air Force bombers dropped Cortana on the city of Kokura, as a prelude to the invasion of Kyushu.

Now, I think there are several possible PODs that need to be considered for a different nuclear age. The one you mentioned is a possibility, but in my opinion its remote. Given the military situation, I don’t think that you could get the Brits to be beat the Americans in the race by by at least four months in order to make nuking Berlin a viable option. Any later and Soviet and American troops are already in the suburbs of the city, and within a few weeks, British and French troops will be in the city from the west anyway. After that, Britain doesn’t have any viable targets for the bomb. Japan is the only Axis power left, and the Franco-British Union had already had an armistice with them since late 43.

The reason why we wanted to go through with Operation Damocles on the old Empire of Japan was because both the American and Soviet leadership agreed that the complete obliteration of the Japanese state and the feudal superstructure of the society was necessary to pave the way for socialist revolution. That meant invasion and unconditional surrender. So American troops steam roll Kyushu while Soviet armored troops link up with American and Chinese troops to smash the bulk of the Japanese Army in Manchuria. And for the coup de grace, Joyeuse and Durandal get to flatten Yokohama and Kyoto.

However, if the Brit do succeed, it means the Cold War is far more serious far sooner. Americans always enjoyed a sense of military superiority to the Anglo-French througho?t the 1950s. If you beat us to the punch, I expect we’d feel a lot of the same insecurity that British and French people felt throughout that era. Part of the reason for the American-Soviet pole of the Cold War was due to how quickly the Soviets began building large arsenals of nuclear weapons right after the war. It seemed like a betrayal that after jointly developing the bomb with us, the Soviets seemed to be putting a gun to our head.

Under your scenario, ’50s paranoia gets worse. The nuclear age is the age of extremes: the brilliant optimism of futurism armed with the seeming potential of nuclear power, and the terrible fear of global nuclear annihilation. So, paradoxically, I don’t see it changing much in all. We’re still going to have the civil defense drills, the bomb shelters.

Originally Posted by RuleBritannia

I think a more interesting POD is no nuclear weapons being used in WWII to begin with. Though I think it’s fitting that the only nation to use nuclear weapons for such atrocities is a socialist state.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

As much as I am loathe to admit it, Joe Fascist did point to a more interesting scenario before he began his usual tirade against socialism.

A less rampant arms race, with perhaps both powers holding their small arsenals of nuclear weapons in secret until the early 50s at least might butterfly away the whole Cold War. Who knows, Labour-Parti Socialiste might win the 51 election, which if I remember correctly, is the closest they’ve come to taking control of the Union parliament. IOTL, the hung parliament gave the Conservatives and their allies a razor-thin advantage over the left. Without an unending parade of militantly anti-internationalist governments in the Anglo-French sphere, maybe the Internationale wouldn’t be constantly hampered and rendered ineffective by one of the four veto powers.

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

I’ve tried reasoning with him, but anymore I just think it’s better to ignore him. He represents all that’s worst about Cold War conservatism, something I’m hoping we can transcend in the new century.

It’s this kind of knee-jerk attitude, devoid of either compassion or realpolitik, that lead to the Congo and Indochina Wars (though, obviously, you Yanks have your own share of the blame for the carnage that resulted) in the 50s through the 70s. A refusal to give any ground to communism, even when the native populations were clearly against any place in the empire, even with a modicum of self-rule, led to the rationalization of terrible atrocities to keep wayward colonies in the fold.

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Computer Technology in the USAR

The basic structure of the GNU/Linux community is probably the most compatible for development of computer OSes in a socialist environment.

So for those of you that aren’t familiar, that means that at least in the American/Soviet tech zones, the baseline operating system, which I’ve decided to call “Unix” (it will likely be designed in much the same way as OTL, at least at first), will be simply a collection of shared technologies developed around a single basic kernel and a collection of basic extension technologies like command line shells and basic windows systems. Different collectives will distribute their own compilations of this basic package, along with other open source technology developed by their communities, to suit various purposes.

There’s still going to be battles over licensing and closed code, but in general, it’s safe to say that the battle for open source will be won fairly decisively, and the base standard for the American/Soviet zone will be open source software built on *Unix systems.

The basic idea that I’m toying with is that the government of the UASR will directly fund the ongoing development of the *Unix kernel and other fundamental software technologies while smaller development syndicates will use a combination of public grants funding, revenue from software sales and donations to fund their operations on the vast majority of end user software, from word processors to computer games.

On the other hand, in the Anglo-French zone, both computer hardware and software is not going to be very cross-compatible with American zone tech. It will also follow much more proprietary hardware and software protocols, making reverse engineering even more difficult. So a lot of computer work being done on different sides of the Iron Curtain will be mutually unintelligible except at basic theoretical levels.

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The Trinitarian Church (by traveller76)

Trinintarianism is Christianity with its sleeves rolled up. It is not afraid to get dirty. It is not afraid to work with the sick, the poor, the illiterate. It is not afraid to go to the ends of the earth, to the jungles and deserts, to the city slums and forgotten villages. It does not discriminate against the dark skinned farm worker daughter or the lighter skinned merchant’s son. It teaches all, helps all, loves all and gives all. Why do we do it? Because we can, because we should, we live in each other’s happiness and not in each other’s misery. To hear children laugh, to see the spark of learning in someone’s eyes is worth more to me than all the gold in heaven and pearls in the sea.

Comrade Tomas Pentti, Trinitarist Service Committee (Retired), The Struggle for Liberation (1970)

The two men came into our town one day wearing dark suits and ties with white shirts, sunglasses and hats hauling suitcases. One was tall and skinny, over six foot tall and one twenty, one thirty I say. The other was about five five and about one sixty. So both of them walk into the cafe and I walk over to them to take their order. I see the tattoos on their hands, the skinny one had ELWOOD on his right hand and the fat one had JAKE on his left. I thought, oh Marx, some reactionaries escaped from prison and me being a good looking girl of eighteen would be kidnapped. Yes I read the romantic magazines to pass the time, what girl didn’t. Anyway. The fat one asks me if we serve fried chicken. I tell him we serve the best damned chicken in the province. He orders four chickens, not four pieces, four entire chickens. The skinny one just wants dry white toast. Both order sweet tea. I take their order and start moving to the phone thinking I can get the switchboard to call the State Police when I look in the mirror. I was concentrating on the hands I didn’t notice the Roman Collars. They were preists!

So I pour two glasses of tea with ice and head back to the counter and place them in front of them. “So, Comrades, what brings you here in all this heat?” The skinny one takes off his hat and sunglasses and I am looking into the greenest eyes I have even seen. “We’re on a mission from God and the People” he says in a flat Midwest voice.

That is how I met my Comrade Elwood Greyson, Trinitarian Brother, my future husband and his brother Jake, also a Brother.

Adwoa “Mama” Grayson, Diary of a Southern Town, 1988.

Timeline of the Trinitarian Church

July 2, 1928: A papal edict is issued, aimed at the growing involvement of U.S. Catholics with the socialist movement. It harshly condemns socialism and laborism, and instead encourages humility and charity as an alternative. Known members of the Workers’ Party are to be explicitly denied communion. This begins what is called the Catholic Splintering as liberal and conservative wings of American Catholicism are soon formed. The Liberal or Reform faction would continue to work with socialism and laborism, arguing that to ignore the plight of the poor and working classes and why they were in that situation lead to stagnation.

When we give bread to the poor, we are called saints. When we ask why the poor have no bread, we are called communists.
-- Brother Bartolomé Fabio, Reform Minster

The Conservatives counter with Matthew 22:15-22:

15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. 16 They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are. 17 Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

18 But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? 19 Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?”

21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

22 When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

Basically stating that the Church and Catholics were become too involved with politics and were neglecting their missions to assist their communities. While attempts were made to mend the divide, many believed it was too little and too late.

By the time of the Second Civil War the split had become wider and wider with each year. A third faction also formed born of militant Agnostics tired of the divisions in the Church. Both Orthodox and Reformers would serve and die on both sides of the Revolution as both soldiers and civilians. With the end of the war and the success of the Revolution, many of the conservatives form the Underground Churches which received some support from the Vatican. Most of the support is smuggled in from Canada, especially Quebec. Many conservatives are smuggled out along an underground railroad and form the Catholic Church of the United States in Exile.

The Reformers would soon become the Trinitarian Church.

February 8, 1935: The American Trinitarian Church is founded by a congress of delegates from pro-separation Catholic parishes across America. Espousing a radical re-interpretation of Catholic social doctrine that would later be named liberation theology, the Trinitarians uproot much of the Catholic remaining hierarchy of the Church in America.

1935-1940 would see the creation of the Trinitarians fusing together liberal factions of Methodist, Catholic, Unitarian and Universalist groups. In 1936 the first Church Convention would be held in Philadelphia, which would see the voting and adoption of the Trinitarian Covenant, the establishment of February 8th as a Church Holiday and recognition of the blood shed by Catholics and Christians during the Second Civil War and Revolution. A yearly convention would be held and would be open to any member of the church to attend in order to adopt and revise church policies to prevent stagnation.

The Covenant was debated and passed after four days and would set the tone for the policies of the church. Catholic titles were abolished with members referring to each other as Brother or Sister or Comrade. Each church would be organized as a syndicate under a elected council. Instead of Combines based on a particular industry they would be organized along Provincial lines under a elected committee. One Manifold composed of elected representatives from the Combines would be created to organize aid and support to various Combines and Syndicates based on need and reports. Priests or as they were renamed Coordinators would be allowed to marry and have children and women would be allowed to serve. Stances against discrimination by race and sex and economic status would be included and the church would work with all it’s powers to end such relics of the past.

The beginning of the Second World War would see the expansion of the Church into all sections of the AUSR as Trinitarians moved across the country for war work or would serve in the RDF. While the RDF prohibited Chaplains as ‘reactionary throwbacks’ many units would have a Brother with a good knowledge of the Bible lead ‘discussion groups’ and provide counseling for their fellow soldiers. What started as a primarily Northeastern urban based church in 1940 would have syndicates in all Provinces and cities by 1945. Then the Spartans came in.

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A basic election primer, circa 2009

Democratic-Republican Party
Party Leader: Kevin Carson
Secretary-General: Ronald Ernest Paul
Founded: 1938
Ideology: Social liberalism, geo-libertarianism
Political Position: Right (UASR) Center-left (International)
International Affiliation: International Democrat Union
Official Color: Blue
Youth Wing: Liberal Youth Federation
Party Newspaper: The Free Republic

Political stances
Capital Punishment: The national DRP maintains no favored preference on capital punishment policy, by default favoring the status quo position, which reserves the death penalty for treason and espionage. Provincial sections have generally favored the abolition of the death penalty for most civil cases.
Civil Defense: The party platform calls for an end to the Civil Defense Initiative, which as part of the National Service, mandates minimal military training of all students as part of the required four year Civil Service after high school graduation.
Cultural Stance: Traditionalist, often aligned with conservative Christian groups. The party’s conservative wing often favors a return of pre-revolutionary cultural mores.
Defense: Since the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the DRP has supported a unilateral conventional and nuclear disarmament program, aiming to cut the size of the conventional and nuclear military arsenals by over one-half.
Drug Policy: The party general favors stronger restrictions on controlled substances, most notably criminalization of legally restricted substances such as heroin and PCP, and the institution of a 21 year age restriction on “softer” drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and LSD.
Economy: Considerable scaling back of the central planning in the American economy, including the privatization of the automotive, aircraft, construction and steel industries.
Education: The DRP favors increased local control of education policy, and the reduction of Union involvement in educational standards, including lifting the ban on parochial and private schools.
Environment: The DRP is a defector from the current “Environmental Consensus”, considering efforts to limit climate change and ecological devastation to be ill-advised, unnecessary and harmful to the economy.
Foreign Aid: The DRP often supports the cutting of foreign aid in an effort to trim the Union budget.
Foreign Alliances: Isolationist
Health Policy: Privatization of state and provincial owned hospitals and treatment clinics.
Immigration: Generally restrictive on immigration policy, though the party has in the past voted to allow complete open borders with Mexico and the Commonwealth of Canada.
Social Welfare: The party considers the Union’s policy of supporting rural and urban communal living projects to be detrimental to the private and cooperative sectors of the housing and construction industry.
Taxation: Champions the institution of a national sales tax, to encourage savings and investment.
Trade: The DRP is regarded as the party of free trade, even with capitalist nations.

Left Democratic Party
Party Leader: Raúl Juliá
Secretary-General: Brian Moore
Founded: 1933
Ideology: Christian socialism
Political Position: Center-left (UASR) Far Left (International)
International Affiliation: Socialist International
Official Color: White
Youth Wing: Student Left Democrats
Party Newspaper: Commonweal

Political stances
Capital Punishment: Almost universally opposed.
Civil Defense: Left Democrats consider the Civil Defense Initiative to be a relic of yesteryear, unnecessarily militaristic for modern society.
Cultural Stance: Since the 80s, the Left Democrats have wholeheartedly embraced Trinitarian Christianity, moving considerably to the left on cultural issues. The party has repudiated its past support for racial segregation, as well as its past opposition to feminism and gay rights.
Defense: The Left Democrats, since the 80s realignment, have taken a nearly pacifist stance on national defense, advocating a phased, multi-lateral nuclear disarmament agreement with both the Soviets and the Anglo-French.
Drug Policy: Maintain status quo policy.
Economy: Support a mix of participatory and central planning, though some support is given for market reforms in luxury goods.
Education: The LDP supports government initiatives to encourage more young people to take advantage of education opportunities provided by the state.
Environment: While it is a lower-tier issue in the LDP, ecological justice is considered to be an important part of the core value of social justice.
Foreign Aid: The LDP is opposed to the cynical use of foreign aid to benefit the state’s foreign policy objectives. They consider compassion to be the sole legitimate deteriminant in allocating foreign aid.
Foreign Alliances: While supportive of containment of the Franco-British Union, the LDP is categorically opposed to aggressive foreign policy and other destabilizing actions.
Health Policy: A mixture of tighter regulations and programs to encourage healthy lifestyles at work and at home.
Immigration: Generally favoring more open immigration.
Social Welfare: The LDP often styles itself as the party of social justice, and it has committed much of its efforts to turning the vast resources of the American polity to put an end to poverty at home and abroad.
Taxation: The LDP favors taxing socially destructive activities as part of its overall theme of social justice.
Trade: LDP trade policy generally favors autarky in essential industries such as agriculture, mining, steel and energy, but free trade in less essential, more luxury oriented markets.

Progressive Labor Party
Party Leader: Joshua Muravchik
Secretary-General: Bob Avakian
Founded: 1946
Ideology: Marxism-Sinclairism, Neo-conservativsm
Political Position: Center-right (UASR) Far Left (International)
International Affiliation: Communist International
Official Color: Orange
Youth Wing: Youth Progressive Labor League
Party Newspaper: Unite!

Political stances
Capital Punishment: The national PLP has continued to support the use of the death penalty in cases of infamous counterrevolutionary crimes. Historically, the party also opposed efforts in the Union and provincial governments to abolish the death penalty for civil crimes.
Civil Defense: The PLP continues to defend the tradition of American civil defense(1), and seeks to promote readiness among the citizenry.
Cultural Stance: The party champions the values of solidarity, militancy, equality and sacrifice that were at the forefront of the First Cultural Revolution. While the PLP has always crusaded against racial, political and sexual inequality, they often find the causes championed by the Left to be “decadent” or “hedonistic”.
Defense: The PLP often styles itself as the party of national defense, and platform explicitly supports sustaining the strength of the military even after the end of perceived threat from the Soviet Union. The party also advocates military intervention to support the interests of the American state and of socialist internationalism more broadly.
Drug Policy: Progressive Labor is generally the party of the status quo on drug policy. Key issues include maintaining the 18 year age limit on the buying and use of drugs such as cannabis and LSD, and the prohibition on the sale of narcotics without valid medical license.
Economy: The PLP champions a more state directed, centrally planned economy. The party is equally suspicious of the participatory planning favored by the Left and the advocacy of markets and privatization on the Right.
Education: The PLP has no national policy on education, preferring to leave the issue to provincial party sections.
Environment: While the PLP has made its own efforts to fight climate change and environmental degradation, it is very much a back-burner issue in the party.
Foreign Aid: The party advocates the use of foreign aid to build strong alliances to serve the interests of the American state.
Foreign Alliances: With the end of tensions with the Soviet Union, the PLP has advocated building alliances with nations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia to contain the Franco-British Union.
Health Policy: Proposed reforms include increased support for state directed medical research and tighter regulation of individual practice physicians.
Immigration: Generally restrictive, favoring tighter border security.
Social Welfare: The party proposes expanding state-sponsored child care programs and increasing food subsidies to urban workers and rural kibbutzniks.
Taxation: The PLP is most often the party of balanced budgets.
Trade: The PLP strongly supports autarkic economic policy.

Social Ecology Union
Party Leader: Alix Olson
Secretary-General: Murray Bookchin
Founded: 1978
Ideology: Social ecology, communalism
Political Position: Far Left (UASR) Ultra Left (International)
International Affiliation: Green International
Official Color: Green
Youth Wing: Students for a Green Society
Party Newspaper: Telos

Political stances
Capital Punishment: The SEU is categorically opposed to the use of capital punishment.
Civil Defense: The SEU has supported current Civil Defense policies, though it is very much a back burner issue.
Cultural Stance: The SEU has worked to integrate ecological awareness to all facets of proletarian culture. While other members of the Green International might shrink away from the accusation of being watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside), Social Ecologists find this to be the highest compliment.
Defense: The SEU has sought détente with the Franco-British Union, preferring to let the internal contradictions of its capitalist economy bring an end to the foreign threat.
Drug Policy: Total decriminalization, combined with awareness programs and programs to combat addiction.
Economy: Strongly in favor of participatory planning, though central planning to maintain ecological standards is often supported.
Education: The party advocates increased local control of educational policy, in keeping with the party’s strong support for participatory democracy.
Environment: The SEU advocates a total integration of the economy with the biosphere. As part of the philosophy of dialectical naturalism, it is humanity’s responsibility as nature made self-aware to promote biological stability and diversity in the biosphere.
Foreign Aid: The SEU advocates using foreign aid to promote ecologically sound economic policy in developing socialist nations.
Foreign Alliances: The SEU is philosophically internationalist to the core, and has often echoed the Socialists’ support for genuine proletarian internationalism.
Health Policy: The SEU supports public policy initiatives to promote healthier eating, as well as promoting exercise for both students and workers.
Immigration: Permissive
Social Welfare: The SEU has advocating using social welfare policy to promote ecological sustainability, such as massive renovation programs in public housing projects to reduce their ecological footprint.
Taxation: The SEU has supported the institution of a carbon tax to promote sustainable economic policy.
Trade: The SEU considers some forms of foreign trade to be ecologically unsustainable, and have supported the use of mileage taxes on many goods to support ecological localism.

Socialist Party
Party Leader: Lisa Edelstein
Secretary-General: David McReynolds
Founded: 1946
Ideology: International socialism, council communism
Political Position: Left (UASR) Ultra Left (International)
International Affiliation: Communist International
Official Color: Red
Youth Wing: Youth Vanguard
Party Newspaper: Appeal to Reason

Political stances
Capital Punishment: The Socialists seek to maintain the use of the death penalty only in cases of treason, and in grievous international crimes such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Civil Defense: The Socialists continue to champion the Civil Defense Initiative and its role in American society.
Cultural Stance: Like the PLP, the Socialist Party continues to promote the First Cultural Revolution and the traditions that it began. However, the Socialist platform insists that the job is not yet finished, and that the full development of each citizen requires further revolution in culture.
Defense: The Socialist defense policy is based around meeting extant threat of the Anglo-French Union, seeking to force their capitulation.
Drug Policy: The Socialists have lead many efforts to regulate and decriminalize drugs, while at the same time publicly supporting measures to combat addiction among the population.
Economy: The Socialists ideologically favor participatory planning systems, but most often have supported a mixture of central and participatory planning.
Education: The party advocates increased local control of educational policy, in keeping with the party’s strong support for participatory democracy.
Environment: The Socialists support attempts to contain climate change, and have in recent years worked to develop public policy to repair the ecological devastation caused by past industrial policy.
Foreign Aid: The Socialist Party is often seen as the party of foreign aid. The party uses foreign aid policy as a weapon against the Franco-British Union.
Foreign Alliances: The Socialists are both pragmatically and ideologically internationalist, and from the support for the Internationale and its humanitarian causes to the building of strong alliances among socialist nations, the Socialists have been the among the biggest proponents of genuine socialist internationalism.
Health Policy: The Socialists have continued to support public policy initiatives to promote healthier eating, as well as promoting exercise for both students and workers.
Immigration: The Socialists have favored highly permissive immigration policy, including offering asylum to anyone from war torn or oppressive regimes.
Social Welfare: The Socialist Party is the architect of the modern American social welfare system, from the near universal public ownership of housing, to the state system of maternity and paternity leave and other child support subsidies.
Taxation: The Socialists have remained categorically opposed to the institution of individual income taxes or general sales taxes, favoring union and provincial revenue to be derived from rents to publicly owned enterprises.
Trade: The Socialists have championed the development of free-trade blocs among socialist nations.

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Excerpts from the AH.com thread “What Irks me about WWII Fiction”

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

Okay, this has been bothering me for a while, and really, it’s a whole lot broader than just alternate history, it’s something that comes up in all fiction and documentaries on the subject to some extent or the other.

First of all, the Second World War was not a one man show. We didn’t show up after 41 and suddenly bring the Jerries to their knees. The Second World War was a collective effort involving every nation that had the decency to not be jackbooted Nazi thugs. Yeah, I know, hard to believe, but the Empire didn’t just sweep in and save the world single-handedly.

If anyone gets the credit for fighting the Nazi hordes, it’s the Americans and the Soviets. They’re the ones who bled the ground red trying to contain the Nazis. 80% of the war’s casualties occurred on the Eastern Front. But what history of the war do we learn in schools, and see in movies?

Apparently, the war begins with the fall of Metropolitan France. The Battles of Vilnius, Minsk and Kiev are seldom if ever mentioned. Neither are the Sieges of Leningrad or Sevestapol. Or the Fall of Stalingrad, or the epic Soviet-American last stands at Moscow and Baku.

We don’t hear of American involvement in the liberation of Palestine and North Africa. Apparently we Brits and Frenchmen did that on our own, in spite of International command being placed to an American general for the entire campaign.

Which brings me to my next point, which is more specific to Uchronia: The number of “take thats” against the Soviets or the Americans is ridiculous. And it’s pretty simple: if you want to stop the spread of international revolution, the Nazis are probably your weapon of choice.

But I’m sorry, I don’t care how bad you think the Soviets or Americans are, or how bad of an idea you think international socialist revolution is: they are the lesser evils. It’s like in Mobile Suit Gundam: if you’re not an insane Zeon fanboy, you root for the Federation. It’s not because the Federation are particularly nice. They’re hardcore internationalist socialists, just like the Americans and Soviets in the Second World War. But Zeon is far worse, and that’s all that really matters.

Originally Posted by flibbertygibbet

I’m glad someone else is as pissed off about Zeon fanboys as I am...

But in all seriousness, I agree wholeheartedly. It’s shameful what a half-century of Cold War and reactionary opportunism has done to our own sense of history. Entire chapters of history practically erased from public consciousness... it’s disgraceful really.

Don’t find myself agreeing with you very often. Keep up the critical thinking, we’ll make a good socialist out of you yet.

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

Oh not even close, flibbertygibbet Granted, I’d give you my means of reproduction any day, but I’m sorry, but the means of production are staying right where they are.

Also, I didn’t know you were a Gundam fan. Admittedly, it’s my favorite World War II allegory in Sci-Fi. Though, you did say you were a fan of the fourth season of the original Star Trek, and that’s when Heinlein debuted the mobile infantry. It’s fascinating really, how differently Americans do TV and movies. Everything is designed by committee. I’m sure Roddenberry, Mack Reynolds and Heinlein must have butted heads a lot making that show.

Originally Posted by LeninsBeard

And it looks like AdmiralSanders got distracted and sent off on a tangent. Again. Seriously, is there a subject you aren’t knowledgeable enough to comment on?

Anyway, I suppose it happens for us as well, though from what I can tell it doesn’t seem to be as bad. Our history here really plays of the whole “International struggle against fascism” angle, even if it means sharing the limelight with countries who are now the official enemy.

Originally Posted by AdmiralSanders

Hey, it’s not my fault that Norma Jean Baker plays a ridiculously awesome and sexy starship captain! :mad:

Originally Posted by DeOpressoLiber

And AdmiralSanders finally admits he is a human being...

Actually, enough with the teasing. You seem to have loosened up quite a bit recently. Anything new going on for the sudden change?

Originally Posted by TacticalNuclearPenguin

He said in another thread that he just started taking anti-depressants. Apparently it’s making a quite the difference for him.

On the subject of Captain Kirk’s breasts, it looks like we’re in agreement. And on the subject of history, well, it’s not like any reasonable person can disagree. And yet the cynical abuse of history continues.

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Excerpts from Weapons of the Second World War, (Chicago: Pathfinder Educational, 1987).

T-3 “John Henry” tank

Type: Medium tank
Place of Origin: Union of American Socialist Republics
Used by: UASR, Soviet Union, Republic of China, Palestinian Republic, Mexico
In service: 1938 to 1949
Wars: Spanish Civil War, Second World War, Palestinian War of Independence, First Palestinian War

Designer: Ford Design Bureau
Designed: 1934-37
Produced: 1937-44
Number built: 9,776
Variants: A-3 self-propelled artillery, I-3 infantry carrier

Specifications (Mk I production tank, 1938)
Mass: 26.2 tonnes
Length: 6.65 meters
Width: 2.90 meters
Height: 2.55 meters
Crew: 4
Armor: Hull upper front 45 mm/60°, hull side 40 mm/40°, rear 30 mm, top 20 mm, bottom 10 mm; turret front 60 mm, sides up to 55 mm/30°, rear 40 mm, top 16 mm
Primary Armament: 50 mm/40 caliber AT-36 high velocity gun
Secondary Armament: 2 x M1919 7.62 x 64 mm machine gun
Engine: 12 cylinder Chrysler DB diesel engine, 370 kW
Power to mass: 14.1 kW/tonne
Suspension: Christie
Operational Range: 450 km
Speed: 52 km/hr

All American tanks are, in essence, descended from the Soviet BT-2 fast tank. Produced as the T-2 “Pecos Bill” in the mid 30s in America, the design heritage of BT series would heavily influence the design and doctrine preferences of the American military, for good and ill. American military leadership rejected the traditional emphasis on the role of tanks for infantry support. Anticipating the high probability of conflict on the steppes of the Soviet Union, armor leaders such as Chaffee and Patton would emphasize mobility and firepower at the expense of armor protection.

The first product of the new armor doctrine would be known as the T-3 “John Henry.” The T-3 would be the workhorse of the American tank corps in the first half of the Second World War. The first design requirements, finalized in late 1934, were submitted to the Ford and Chevrolet Design Bureaus. While the initial plans only called for a single, all-purpose mid-weight tank, the design requirements were later amended to include separate designs for light, medium, and heavy tanks.

Chevrolet dropped out of the medium tank competition, to focus its resources on the heavy tank designs. Engineers at the Ford Design Bureau nevertheless cooperated with their counterparts at Chevrolet, sharing resources even though both collectives continued to compete over the light tank design. This cooperation, encouraged by Stavka, resulted in the various final designs sharing a considerable number of components between them in the powerplant, drivetrain and suspension. These standardized components would greatly reduce production costs and ensure field maintenance was easy.

The first prototypes of the T-3 began trials in August of 1936. The designs, while revolutionary at the time, would prove to age badly during the war, resulting in its gradual phase out. Nevertheless, the sleek lines and sloped armor of the John Henry heralded a revolution in tank design that would be repeated elsewhere to great effect. The early prototypes, armed with the same 37 mm gun as the T-2, were upgraded with the new AT-36 50 mm high velocity gun following the finalization of the design in May of 1937.

The new AT-36 would greatly increase the firepower of the John Henry tanks, but unfortunately would only further complicate the issue of the T-3’s undersized turret. The cramped, small turret had a small silhouette, but unfortunately would limit the turret crew to 2 individuals: the loader and the commander-gunner. This would seriously hinder the tank’s effectiveness against its German opponents, in spite of the its slight technical edge over the Panzer III. With the introduction of Panzer IV tanks armed with high velocity 75 mm guns and heavier armor in late 1941, it became clear that the T-3’s days were numbered. However, American tank crews continued to use the T-3’s superb reliability and mobility to thwart their German adversaries best efforts, and continued to trade tanks at a rate of 2 German tanks to every 3 American tanks lost. When units of similar experience met, the ratio most often reached 1:1 parity.

Both American and Soviet tank designers learned from the weaknesses of the T-3, and when the Soviet T-34 came into service in 1941, its three man turret and high velocity 76 mm gun greatly improved the effectiveness of the Internationale’s tank forces.

The proven, reliable T-3 chassis would serve in a variety other capacities throughout the war and beyond, including self-propelled artillery and armored personnel carriers.

T-4 “Paul Bunyan” tank

Type: Heavy tank
Place of Origin: Union of American Socialist Republics
Used by: UASR, Soviet Union, Franco-British Union, Palestinian Republic, Indian Federation
In service: 1939 to 1951
Wars: Spanish Civil War, Second World War, Palestinian War of Independence, First Palestinian War, The Indian Wars

Designer: Chevrolet Design Bureau
Designed: 1936-38
Produced: 1939-47
Number built: 11,413
Variants: D-4 tank destroyer, A-4 self-propelled artillery

Specifications (Mk I production tank, 1939)
Mass: 46.1 tonnes
Length: 6.95 meters
Width: 3.20 meters
Height: 2.84 meters
Crew: 5
Armor: Hull upper front 75 mm/60°, hull side 55 mm/40°, rear 60 mm, top 40 mm, bottom 40 mm; Turret front 75 mm, sides up to 70 mm/30°, rear 70 mm, top 40 mm
Primary Armament: 76.2 mm/45 caliber AT-38 high velocity gun
Secondary Armament: 1 x M2 12.7 x 99 mm machine gun (coaxial), 2 x M1919 7.62 x 64 mm machine gun
Engine: 12 cylinder Chrysler DB diesel engine, 450 kW
Power to mass: 9.8 kW/tonne
Suspension: Christie
Operational Range: 340 km
Speed: 33 km/hr

The T-4 “Paul Bunyan” heavy tank was developed to fulfill a broad array of roles that T-3 medium tanks could not fulfill. While the John Henry was mobile, and in its time very well armed and protected, it was only well suited to killing other tanks. The T-3’s 50 mm high velocity gun could not effectively deliver high explosive shells, and her complement of machine guns was lacking as well. In practice, this would make the John Henry’s substandard for both infantry support and attacking enemy fortifications.

Initial specifications for the T-4 simply involved swapping the high velocity gun out for a short, low velocity 75 mm howitzer. This plan was abandoned quickly, since the new model would share the same design limitations of the T-3. Furthermore, such a tank would be helpless against other tanks. Proponents of heavy tanks within Stavka made their push to very quickly to radically alter the design requirements for the T-4. The new plan was soon approved, and the Chevrolet Design Bureau started from the ground up building an all new tank model that would nonetheless share an important number of components with the T-3.

The Chevrolet Design Bureau team addressed many of the key flaws of the T-3 design while building a new platform capable of serving a heavy tank role. In particular, the designers avoided aping the trends in heavy tank design that were the norm in British and French tank design. The T-4 would essentially be a medium (or in British terminology, cruiser) tank in design philosophy, owing to its lineage from the Soviet BT-2. In spite of the major increases in armor and armament, the Paul Bunyan would still have exceptional mobility, especially for a tank its size.

The new turret gave sufficient room to mount a long 76.2mm high velocity gun, and the three man turret crew necessary for effective massed tank coordination. The larger gun had excellent multipurpose applications, and most importantly, was capable of penetrating the frontal armor of any tank in existence in 1939 at ranges greater than 1000 meters.

The T-4 would at first be deployed to special heavy tank battalions in American armored divisions. However, as the war raged on, and it became clear that the T-3 was becoming increasingly outclassed, the Paul Bunyan series were pushed into a stopgap role, along with the Big Bill Haywood tank destroyers. Eventually, many of the T-4s would be upgraded with the AT-40 84 mm, 60 caliber gun. Along with upgrades in armor and optics, the new gun would extend the service life of the Paul Bunyan to beyond the end of the Second World War.

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Notable Events of 1936

January 1: Today’s scheduled execution of counterrevolutionary John Birch is halted an injunction from the All-Union Constitutional Court. A court date is scheduled in front of the Constitutional Court’s 3rd Cadre for early in March. The issue before the court is the legality under the current Basic Law of executing a minor.

January 5: Attorney-General Crystal Eastman, in a public statement in Washington-Debs, announces the completion of the “Loyalty Purges” within the party. The purges will continue in the military and civil service.

January 8: At the emergency National Convention of the Right Democratic Party, the party virtually disintegrates. Many local sections balk at the Secretary-General John Nance Garner’s attempt to accommodate the changing political winds, vowing to go underground in resisting the socialist government.

January 11: A report by the Labor Secretariat is released, detailing industrial safety in the UASR. The report concludes that in spite of some efforts by the unions in fighting against industrial accidents, work is almost as hazardous as it was before the Revolution.

January 20: King George V of the United Kingdom passes away. His eldest son succeeds the throne as Edward VIII.

January 28: The Constitutional Court delivers its verdict on Birch v. Eastman. While John Birch’s conviction is lawfully upheld, the Constitutional Court issues its opinion that the execution of a minor is unconstitutional under the provisions of the Declaration of Human Rights. While some in the Foster Government wish to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court, Foster himself gives his assent, and before the ruling takes effect, voluntarily orders the commutation of John Birch’s sentence to life imprisonment.

February 6: The IV Olympic Winter Games open in Germany.

February 10: The Loyalty Purges continue within the military, with the arrest of a major spy ring within the Army. Public Safety agent Elliot Nash, the mastermind behind the dragnet, becomes a national celebrity.

February 16: Following legislative elections in the Spanish Second Republic, the Popular Front achieves a stunning victory over the rightist National Front.¹

February 17: The masked hero “The Phantom” makes his debut in American newspapers.

February 20: British economist John Maynard Keynes’ magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is first published in the UK.

February 28: In violation of the Treaty of Versailles, the German Reich reoccupies the Rhineland. In Japan, improving relations between the UASR and the Empire of Japan result in pro-democratic militarist Keisuke Okada taking the office of prime minister.

March 6: Elections in the Republic of Turkey. Rightists opposed to Mustapha Kemal’s government’s close relations with the UASR (and by extension the Soviet Union) make an impact in the transition to multi-party democracy in the Republic.²

March 10: Monetary reforms in the UASR: the transition to fiat money is completed, with the Finance Secretariat retiring the last of the gold-backed treasury notes. Steps to nationalize remaining private holdings of gold bullion begin.

March 17: St. Patrick’s Day flooding in the Pittsburgh Commune causes significant damage and homelessness in the city. Relief efforts begin immediately to resume full industrial production.

March 24: University of Chicago economist Oskar Lange publishes the first volume of his treatise On the Economic Theory of Socialism. Lange’s synthesis of neo-classical economic price theory with Marxist political economy creates considerable stir in intellectual circles.

April 1: The Missouri River Industrial Collective project begins with the construction of a 75-meter-tall dam in Canyon Ferry, Montana.

April 5: A tornado hits Tupelo, Mississippi. One of the worst tornado disasters in history, the tornado kills almost two hundred and injures close to one thousand.

April 7: Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky begins a tour of American industrial and military institutions, as part of Soviet-American cooperation. His tour begins today with a meeting with Vice Admiral Chester Nimitz, and an inspection of the fleet carrier RDF Vladimir Lenin (CV-2) undergoing final commissioning at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

April 12: The “Special Evacuation Plan” goes into effect in the German Reich. A group of 800 German Jews are deported to the UASR. By the termination of the program in 1939, close to two hundred thousand Germans would make the journey to America.

April 15: Arab revolts against Jewish immigration begin in Palestine. The sporadic revolts greatly increase already high tensions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

April 16: The French legislative elections begin: Leon Blum’s Popular Front hopes to hold onto control of the government and defeat the increasingly fascist-sympathizing rightist coalition.

April 21: The Civil Rights Act of 1936 passes without opposition in the CPD. The amended act removes many of the provisions that would have forced integration in Southern provinces. However, the act is notable, in that it does assert the primacy of the all-Union government in electoral law. Discrimination by race in federal elections is strictly forbidden. The act also legalizes abortion throughout the country, and mandates equal pay for equal work standards. The act would be spotty in its enforcement, but would eventually become the prime weapon in the Civil Rights Era from 1947 to 1959, as part of the Second Cultural Revolution.

April 24: Marshal Tukhachevsky meets with General Chaffee at the RDF Armor Corps headquarters, in Fort Knox, Kentucky. The two flag officers discuss armor doctrine, and examine the T-3 “John Henry” prototypes being tested there.

April 27: A major Sons of Liberty cell is broken up by Public Safety in Nashville, Tennessee.

May 1: May Day celebrations across the UASR herald a day of fanfare, feasting and fireworks. However, in some quarters of society, typically among formerly middle class neighborhoods and rural conservatives, moral panic develops over alleged “free love orgies” among the urban youth and workers. Though likely entirely fictional, or at the very most a few very rare incidents, the growth of this urban legend would eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy in the 1950s.

May 2: Sergei Pokofiev’s Russian fairy tale, Peter and the Wolf, debuts at the Nezlobin Theater in Moscow.

May 3: French legislative elections conclude. The Popular Front coalition strengthens its lead in the French National Assembly, and Leon Blum is re-elected President of the Council. Most notably, both the SFIC and SFIO gain seats at the expense of the Radical Socialists.³

May 7: Fascist Italy annexes Ethiopia as part of Italian East Africa.

May 9: The American Left Democratic Party begins its national convention in New Orleans. The eventual adoption of the “New Orleans Programme” marks the final transition of the Left Democrats from a loose left-populist coalition to a coherent party of Christian Socialism.

May 12: A gold panic starts at the London Stock Exchange, following the publishing of a news story in the Daily Mail which claimed that the American government’s nationalization of gold reserves would be a prelude to an “economic attack” upon the Empire, with the American government flooding world gold markets to initiate a collapse of the pound sterling and other gold-backed currencies. In spite of the lack of evidence of any conspiracy by the American government to liquidate its gold reserves, the panic causes considerable short term havoc in world financial markets, briefly threatening a “double-dip” depression in the UK.

May 16: Trade negotiations between the UASR and the Soviet Union nearly break down over an off-the-cuff remark by an American delegate about Stalin’s heavy-handed leadership. A considerable argument breaks out, with the Soviet delegates accusing the Americans of being upstart infantile leftists, and the Americans accusing the Soviets of being the running dogs of a tyrant. Reed’s arrival to contain the situation only makes things worse, as the Trotsky issue is brought into the public view for the first time. The trade talks finally resume a few days later, after one of the American commissars resigns his post over the incident.

May 21: A rail electrification project begins in the heavily trafficked Northeast Corridor. The project hopes to increase passenger travel times and improve the efficiency of trains. As part of the project, continuous welded rail technology is tested on a number of new tracks being built in the corridor.

May 27: On the final day of the LDP’s New Orleans convention, New York people’s deputy Franklin D. Roosevelt is nominated as the LDP’s presidential candidate.

June 1: A major heat wave strikes North America starting this week. Temperature records are set that will stand for decades, and in total, over a thousand die from heat-related injuries by the time the heat wave ends.

June 7: General strike ends in France, as the French Popular Front government negotiates the Matignon Agreements between the CGT and the industrial cartels. Often called “the Magna Carta of French Labor”, the Mantignon Agreements ensure the legal right to strike and the removal of all obstacles to union organization. Further government acts in the coming months lead to the establishment of collective bargaining and a standard 40-hour work week.

June 12: The American Union Bank cancels its planned program to begin a slow sell-off of American gold bullion to finance government spending, as the collapsed price of gold has made the program nearly useless.

June 15: A controversial amendment to the Sedition Act (ratified under the provisional government) is passed by the Congress of People’s Deputies on a strict party-line vote. The amended act now prohibits the open display of “reactionary symbols” for the purpose of “inciting rebellion, communal mistrust or other anti-social behavior”. Among the symbols that have been largely banned by the act are most historical Confederate flags (including the “Stars and Bars” and the ‘x’ shaped Confederate Army battle flag), swastikas, fasces, paraphernalia related to reactionary paramilitaries like the KKK or the Sons of Liberty, and the United States flag flown upside down (to symbolize the Union in distress).

June 19: The Workers’ Communist Party national convention begins in Toledo, Ohio. On the opening day, the delegates near-unanimously support a second presidential term for current party Secretary-General Upton Sinclair.

June 23: With a crippled party organization, the remaining “Loyal Oppositionist” Right Democrats vote to support a combined electoral ticket with the Republican Party for the presidential election.

June 26: The groundbreaking color film, A Farewell to Arms, is released in the UASR. Based off the Hemingway novel, the film (starring the previously little-known Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball in its leading roles) is notable for refusing to pull any punches on its major themes, whether it was the anti-imperialist plot or the strongly sexual romance between the two leads.

July 1: The U.S. government in exile undergoes a major shake up following declining sugar harvests and a rash of riots in Havana. Several political heavyweights from the junta are purged from the government by MacArthur. Among their replacements is the new Secretary of the Interior Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.

July 6: The Army of Africa launches a coup d’état against the Second Spanish Republic, marking the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Though forewarned by the CNT, due to its excellent intelligence network, the Republican government is effectively caught unprepared, having ignored the CNT’s warnings. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT begins a proletarian revolution in its strongholds of Valencia, Catalonia and Aragon, defeating Falangist uprisings.

July 10: The aircraft carrier RDF Vladimir Lenin (CV-2) is commissioned today. Her sister ships Karl Marx and Eugene Debs are due to be commissioned in one-month intervals.

July 15: Premier Foster calls an emergency session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, cutting the summer holiday short. At that night’s closed Central Committee meeting, the government discusses policy in regard to the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, the Soviet ambassador urges caution, not wishing to allow the situation to degenerate into a world-wide anti-communist crusade.

July 17: Premier Foster issues one of the more famous speeches of his tenure as Premier before the Congress today. In a shocking leadership choice, Foster throws the government’s support to the left-communist and Trotskyist factions of the Worker’s Communist Party, a stark change from his previous adherence to the Moscow line. If only for a moment, it looks like Trotsky’s world revolution has finally arrived.

July 18: A CNT militia, under the leadership of Buenaventura Durruti, successfully relieve the siege of Zaragoza, while the Madrid government remains paralyzed by the coup. Over a third of Spain is under Nationalist control.

July 21: Often mournfully hailed by post-war Anglo-French intellectuals as “The Day Democracy Died”, today the British government successfully pressures the French government to adopt a position of non-intervention. The League of Nations begins negotiating the creation of a “Non-Intervention Committee” to prevent personnel and material from entering the conflict. In practice, this is a clear abandonment of Spain to fascism.

July 25: Fascist Italy begins military aid to the Nationalists, including the provision of aircraft and Italian pilots to support General Sanjuro’s coup, in flagrant violation of the non-intervention agreement.

July 29: Premier Foster’s planned state visit to the Soviet Union should have been a cause for celebration. Instead, on this hot summer day, as Foster enters Leningrad for the first time, it’s an ominous occasion. A preliminary meeting between Foster, Reed and Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov ends in shouting, as the two socialist leaders come to cross-purposes over Spain, and not even Reed’s celebrity as a participant in the October Revolution will help here.

August 1: The 1936 Summer Olympics open in Berlin, Germany, with the world’s first live television broadcast of a sporting event. In spite of mutual non-recognition, American and Soviet athletes participate, perhaps the only ray of light in the otherwise gloomy state of international cooperation.

August 3: Foster and Stalin meet at the Kremlin, in Moscow. While the Soviet leader appears sympathetic to American concerns, it becomes abundantly clear he will not risk the fragile safety of the Soviet Union to save his Spanish comrades. On the first day, the American and Soviet delegations are at a total impasse over all major points of contention, including whether to abide by the Non-Intervention Agreement and the eventual blockade, whether to support CNT as well as the Republican government, and whether to furnish just aid or to supply troops and training support as well.

August 4: France closes its border with Spain. Meanwhile, Republican counterattacks against Nationalist gains falter, and Mérida falls.

August 6: American-Soviet talks end in Moscow, without any united front to be agreed upon. It is clear that both parties will approach the issue in their own way. American-Soviet relations are at a new low.

August 10: The city of Granada falls to the nationalists. Thousands of Republican soldiers, trade unionists and leftist politicians are massacred by Nationalist forces in the coming days.

August 11: In spite of sending troops and aid to the Nationalists, Italy and Germany both officially join the Non-Intervention agreement, allowing them to participate in the international blockade of Spain. Because aid can still reach the Nationalists from Integralist Portugal, the League of Nation’s non-intervention policy is a de facto support to the Nationalists against the democratically elected Spanish Republic.

August 12: While Foster and Reed’s hope for full military support for the Republic died at Stalin’s hands, neither are content to abandon yet another nation to fascism. At Goldman and Eastman’s insistence, Foster announces that the government will under no circumstances abide by the Non-Intervention Agreement, and will furnish aid to both the Republic and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT.

August 16: The Basque city of Irún falls to the Nationalists. A small CNT militia, poorly armed, starving and ill-supplied, defend the city’s heart to the last man, delaying the final fall of the city for almost three days. In spite of their sacrifice, Basque country is now entirely cut off from the rest of the Republic.

August 17: With the closing of the Olympiad, the UASR gives the Nazis a surprise upset, beating Germany in the number of Gold medals as well as total medal count. American athletes such as African sprinter Jesse Owens and Jewish relay runners Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman make it very clear that their victories are political victories, defiantly sporting the raised fist salute at the medal ceremonies.

August 20: With the eyes of the world upon them, the American Congress of People’s Deputies passes the “Aid to the Spanish Republic Act” without opposition, appropriating humanitarian and military aid, as well as authorizing the lend-lease of arms to the Spanish Republic. One of the act’s chief authors, Franklin Roosevelt, compared the lend of arms to the lending of a garden hose to a neighbor whose house is on fire.

August 21: The first of the Moscow Trials begins in the Soviet Union, marking the beginning of the Great Purge, and Stalin’s paranoid consolidation of power in the USSR.

August 26: The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 is signed, granting Egypt some nominal self-rule.

August 30: The Comintern authorizes the creation of the International Brigades. To avoid diplomatic repercussions, both Foster and Reed agree that the use of a volunteer international force would be more effective than direct military deployment to Spain. Without the Soviets on board, a direct confrontation is out of the question. Stalin will not risk the proxy war developing into a full-scale war.

September 4: The Basque provisional government surrenders San Sebastián to the Nationalists, rather than risk its destruction. Meanwhile, the American Central Committee authorizes the lend-lease of arms and munitions to the anarcho-syndicalist militias of the CNT. Spanish Communists condemn this act as damaging to the anti-fascist struggle.

September 6: Pope Pius XI condemns the Republican Government of Spain for their “satanic hate against God,” following a string of reprisal raids against pro-fascist priests in Barcelona.

September 8: British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden delivers a harsh condemnation of American interventionist policy to the American embassy in London. Neville Chamberlain’s National Government begins discussing possible diplomatic rebukes to the UASR.

September 10: The Public Broadcasting Service is founded in the UASR. Five nationally syndicated radio channels are set to begin broadcast by the end of the year.

September 15: The city of Toledo falls to the Nationalists. With the fall of the city comes a new wave of atrocities, as doctors and nurses in the hospital are summarily executed, along with the wounded militamen in their care.

September 17: The Durruti Column, supported by Republican military units, attack the Nationalist held city of Pamplona. In reprisal for the widely spread atrocities by Nationalist army units, the militias massacre cadres of captured Nationalist officers and supportive priests.

September 20: The Nationalists begin the advance on the capital of the Spanish Republic, Madrid. Meanwhile, the coup leader, General Sanjuro, is declared Generalissimo by the Falangist juntas.

September 24: With the first shipments of American arms and munitions, including much needed artillery (and American volunteers to man them and train the militias), the CNT militias begin counter-attacks. Meanwhile, the General Government in Catalonia capitulates to CNT worker council federation, releasing arms to the people. By month’s end, most of the functions of the Catalonian government are subsumed to the CNT and their POUM allies.

September 27: The Non-Intervention Committee refuses to hear charges against Portugal for its open support of the insurgents and defiance of the blockade. However, charges are heard against the UASR for its open defiance of the League directives.

October 1: The Rome-Berlin Axis is formed today.

October 3: The XI International Brigade, raised by American and Canadian volunteers, sets sail for Spain. Informally named the Eugene Debs Brigade, the unit is a cover for American RDF units to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

October 6: The German-Italian XII International Brigade is formed at Albacete.

October 7: The Soviet government declares that it will be no more bound by the Non-Intervention committee than Portugal, Italy or Germany. The Spanish Republic will now be able to buy arms and munition from the Soviet Union.

October 10: The Siege of Madrid begins. Nationalist tanks crush the Republican Army’s outer defense lines. The Nationalist advance is fought off tooth and nail with “Sanjuro cocktails” and other improvised explosives.

October 14: In the UASR, the release of the yearly progress report for the First Five Year Plan once again exceeds expectations. Unemployment is only at 10 percent, and the economy has returned to pre-Depression GDP. Industrial production is five percent higher than its pre-Depression high.

October 18: The widespread use of terror bombing begins in Madrid, as German and Italian pilots deliberately target civilians to encourage the surrender of the city’s defenders.

October 20: The XI and XII International Brigades, along with the CNT’s Iron and Black Columns, begin marching to relieve the siege of Madrid. While the Stalinist-dominated XII Brigade is suspiscious of their anarchist allies, their trust in the left-communist XI Brigade, led by the legendary American revolutionary David Eisenhower, is enough to make the coalition stand.

October 24: American and Russian volunteer fighter squadrons begin their desperate defense of the beleaguered city of Madrid. While not enough to stop the tide of Nationalist bombers, at the very least the city’s air space will not fall without a fight.

October 26: Following a heavy attack by Moorish cavalry, tanks and aircraft, the Madrid suburb of Getafe falls, and its defenders are completely crushed. Fascist General Valera tells foreign journalists famously, “Madrid will fall within one week.”

October 28: The Nationalists are on the doorstep of Madrid proper, with the fall of the strategically important hill Cerro de los Angeles. The Republican government evacuates to Valencia, to the chagrin of the Anarchists who are in de facto control of the city.

October 29: The Nationalists gain important bridges within the City of Madrid. Fascist General Francisco Franco declares that by the next day, he will take communion in the cathedral of Madrid.

October 30: As an all-out assault begins upon the city of Madrid, the International Brigades and the Anarchist Militias arrive to relieve the city. At dawn, the popularly elected general of the “Popular Liberation Army”, American Brigadier David Eisenhower, orders an all-out artillery bombardment of Nationalist positions. The Internationals begin their counterattack that afternoon, supported by American artillery and Soviet provided T-26 tanks. The Republic will not fall today.

October 31: The massacre of over one thousand political prisoners occurs in the Paracuellos del Jarama. Their guards refuse orders to evacuate the prisoners from Madrid to prevent their liberation by the Nationalists, massacre them all, and head to the front.

November 1: As the Internationals bite into the eastern flank of the Nationalists, the 3,000-man Durruti Column arrives from the Pampalona front to attack the Nationalist’s western flank. Facing potential encirclement, the Nationalist armies begin a withdrawal from the city of Madrid.

November 3: Presidential election in the UASR: Upton Sinclair is re-elected President of the Union by a landslide.⁴

November 5: Italy and Germany recognize Sanjuro’s government, with the hope that the blow to Republican morale will be enough to turn the tide in the increasingly stalemated Battle of Madrid.

November 7: Close to three thousand Nationalist veterans of the Spanish Foreign Legion are caught in a pocket in the Cuidad Universitaria. Under siege from the west by the Durruti Column, now reinforced by American artillery, and from the north and east by Republican loyalists from the Madrid defense junta, it becomes clear that continued assault in the city has become impossible. By week’s end, the trapped Nationalists will be dead to the last man.

November 10: Generalissimo Sanjuro declares a halt to all offensive operations in Madrid, and a general withdrawal to more defensible positions 50 kilometers to the south of the city. The Siege of Madrid ends, as both sides prepare for a long, bloody and difficult war.

November 13: The Durruti Bridge opens in San Francisco, in honor of the Spanish anarchist and revolutionary hero. The bridge connects San Francisco and Oakland.

November 15: Volunteer drives begin in the UASR, with the hopes of raising two more International Brigades by Spring of 1937. The Defense Secretariat prepares to clandestinely deploy the 101st Independent Armor Regiment, with early production models of the T-3 medium tank as part of the volunteer International Brigades.

November 20: The Anti-Comintern Pact is signed by Germany and Japan.

November 24: The anarchist-dominated provinces of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia form the Iberian Libertarian Federation, as the social transformation of the Spanish Revolution kicks into overdrive. While there are some in the American Workers’ Communist Party who believe that abandoning the Republic in favor of sole support for the Libertarian Federation would be more appropriate, the government continues its policy of aiding both groups as part of the anti-fascist struggle.

December 1: Mandatory enlistment in the Hitler Youth for all boys between the age of 10 and 18 begins in Germany.

December 5: The Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic is dissolved, and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia become full Soviet republics.

December 11: Premier Foster meets British King Edward VIII and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on state visit in London. In spite of the pomp of the occasion, American-British relations are very sour, and much of the visit is spent by Foster chastising the British government for its failure to stand by a democratic government under siege by fascism.

1. Considering this will be the last election of the Spanish Republic, the differences are not big enough to really matter.

2. Turkish general elections results

Party	Seats
Republican People’s Party	311
National Solidarity Party	134
Independents	5

3. French legislative elections results

Party	Seats
Popular Front
Section Française de l’Internationale Communiste (SFIC)	81
Parti de l’Unité Prolétarienne (PUP)	4
Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO)	156
Union Socialiste Républicaine (USR)	25
Parti Républicain, Radical et Radical-Socialiste (PRRRS)	110
Independent Left	15
Centre-Right Opposition
Gauche Démocratique et Radicale Indépendante (GDRI)	34
Alliance des Républicains de Gauche et des Radicaux Indépendants (ARGRI)	43
Indépendants D’Action Populaire (IAP)	16
Parti Démocrate Populaire (PDP)	13
Right Opposition
Indépendants Républicain (IR)	40
Federation Républicain (FR)	63

4. See exact results above.

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Excerpts from Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Socialism Past and Present, Vol. 2: The American Experience (Boston: Politiea Press, 1977), 1,117 pages.

This chapter is titled “Revolutionary Totalitarianism” not as hyperbole, for the period following Red May, through the First Cultural Revolution and the wartime Popular Unity Government, ending with the dissolution of the Workers’ Communist Party is one that is unequivocally marked with all the facets of totalitarianism: the existence of a democratic centralist party-state, a command economy, and the subordination of all forms of association to the political prerogatives of the party-state. Other trappings of totalitarianism (party-state media, official repression and state terror), while ancillary, were also present during this period. This is all undeniable. There has been no official campaign of censorship in the history books. Even the strongest defenders of the past regime, with the exception of a few truly insane and isolated ones, do not even attempt to deny that these actions were committed by the government. Yet the logic of the party-state is still accepted in many quarters of society. The state was not totalitarian because it exercised its authority as the dictatorship of the proletariat, advancing the social abolitionist role of the party, and thus could not be totalitarian.¹

This sort of cognitive dissonance is cute here in the UASR, but in other states with similar legacies of party-state centralism, it is a deadly mixture. And unlike what our critics have accused us of, we do not wholly reject that even certain totalitarian periods may be justifiable or objectively necessary. We do, however, wish to call a spade a spade. As Chomsky has noted in his oft-cited truism, “Armies are totalitarian institutions, whether they are ‘Red’ armies with their soldier soviets and elected officers, or they’re bourgeois armies with top-down command structures. That didn’t diminish their usefulness, their necessity, in combating fascism in the Second World War.”

...It was the Workers’ Communist Party’s utter political hegemony that enabled the spread of a totalitarian political ethos in both the institutions of state and the body politic. At varying times during the totalitarian period, the WCP controlled between two-thirds and three-fourths of the seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Given the electoral constitution of the era, which apportioned half of the seats to proportional representation, this is an astonishing feat. But even these figures are misleading when analyzed via bourgeois prejudices of the state’s authority. The Basic Law may make the People’s Assembly the de jure sovereign representative of the American polity, but by fact it is one of many important and powerful political institutions. In wry irony, the ones who are most often the critics of American totalitarianism, the bourgeois liberal intellectuals of the Franco-British coordinator class, have understated their critiques due to their obsolete mode of interpretation.

In the 1930s and ’40s, just as today, there were many cooperating and competing institutions, all ostensibly democratic, that represented the party-state. The one most often neglected in analysis is the Solidarity trade union. This is quite perverse, since in terms of membership and economic power, Solidarity has long been perhaps the single most powerful institution in the party-state. At the height of its influence in 1946, over 86 percent of the American workforce were dues-paying members of Solidarity. Solidarity’s Congress of Industrial Organizations, unifying all of the manifolds that dominated the advanced, industrial sectors of the economy, was in theory the equal partner in the Social Economic Plan with the State Planning Commission. It should come to no-one’s surprise that the leadership of Solidarity and of the Workers’ Communist Party were heavily intertwined, and that the policies of the government in this period heavily reflected the syndicalist-coordinatorist alliance of convenience.

Only one of the opposition parties in this period had any sort of presence within Solidarity. Even then, the Left Democrats’ influence within Solidarity was proportionally much smaller than their share of the national vote. Co-opting communist economic policy could only go so far in penetrating the layers of nested councils in the Social Economy, especially when met by effective, coordinated opposition by Workers’ Communist Party apparatchiks. The Democratic-Republicans or their prior forms had next to no presence in the unions.

The hegemony of communist values enabled the logic of nested councils to flow in reverse. Rather than the base sections maintaining democratic control of the commanding heights, the politics of the lower sections became increasingly directed from above by increasingly powerful leaders within the union and the Party. Insulated from popular pressure by informational constraints, the manipulation of public opinion by the leadership became a direct function of the political organization.

This was reflected in the heavily partisan press. Following the upheaval of the Revolution, it was largely the labor press that survived in the new order. The working class press, a vital force for counter-hegemonic struggle in the pre-revolutionary era, soon became part of the apparatus promoting the hegemony of the party-state. With the exception of The New York Times, all of the powerful, high circulation newspapers of this era were controlled by party-union-elected committees. During higher periods of cohesion within the party, such as from 1933 to 1937, almost no coherent dissension appeared within the press. The growth of dissent in the press coincided with the growth of political factions within the Party.

This political hegemony reflected in all other participatory democratic sections of society, including the oft-lauded ward councils, city and rural soviets, and in the great commune governments of the metropoleis. The immense, vulgar politicization of participatory democracy in what should have been solidaritous institutions had a profoundly corrosive effect on all spheres of association, including kinship associations. The reactionary claim that American revolutionaries were destroying the traditional family was very much true. While the traditional family may not have been something worth preserving, the hindrance of any organic replacement for it reflected the totalitarian nature of American society.

New forms of kinship did evolve, and the hyperpoliticized kinship and solidaritous institutions would return to an organic libertarianism in time. But the experience of totalitarianism had a profoundly negative effect on all of the left’s most lauded goals. In many ways, we still feel this effect today, and it is up to each of us to decide whether our new socialist culture was worth it. The utter hegemony of state atheism and the corresponding ostracization and at times repression of the overtly religious, the obliteration of “bourgeois” taboos against nudity, sex, polyamory, the social pressure towards participation in communal life and even conformity: these are all the legacy of our Revolution. Even if we on the modern Left accept these goals as legitimate, we still must question the means by which society was engineered to ensure their dominance.

It is often said by the Franco-British intellectuals that social engineering is the American pastime. Thankfully, their American counterparts have been more honest about this. Fundamentally, nearly all sectors of American society accept the logic and legitimacy of social engineering. The post-Marxist communalists that the authors find members of are no different. The missing question, however, is an inquiry into how these ends are achieved.

...It is the totality of the American Revolution that often shocks its commentators. The lingering unanswered question in many observers, whether American, Soviet or Franco-British, was how the Americans could achieve such total social transformation within a single generation. After all, they did not have access to, nor use, the totalitarian methods of the Soviets to achieve their goals. On the contrary, the American communists were so much better, so much more insidious in their totalitarianism. This profound misunderstanding of the events of the era reflects the all-too-common problem on the discourse of totalitarianism. In our cultural schema for totalitarianism, people tend to have in mind Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe, with its brutally murderous superstates that use unlimited terror and butchery to coerce obedience to the state, not Huxley’s Brave New World, where totalitarianism is achieved by the abdication of choice through ideology and endless distraction. Brave New World may seem to be a nicer place to live on face, but it is altogether more horrifying. The Big Lie is far worse than the Big Stick, because it turns the well-meaning, active among us into the proselytizers of the Lie.

The use of terror by the Soviets under Stalin, and the repression by the following regimes is evidence of the Soviet state’s weakness, not its strength. The American state, by contrast, controlled the polity through its own love and good intentions, using terror only against the tiny minority of overt official enemies that the polity despised. Because of the extreme consensus and hegemony of communist values, the WCP, function as the workers’ vanguard, was practically omnipotent so long as it could be demonstrated that its policies were even tangentially connected to the revolutionary impulse.

1. Albert and Hahnel’s writing style involves lots and lots of endnotes. So just pretend that there are a bunch there, and that the endnotes are interesting :P

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Excerpts from William F. Buckley Jr.’s review of The American Experience, in Labor Literary Review¹, Vol XXII, No 14., July 17, 1977.

Well, what can be said of Comrades Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel? It is oft-repeated that these two young men are among the most important intellectuals alive in the world today. Leaders of the youth movement in the ’60s, they both participated in the Student Revolution on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, supposedly completing the Deweyite revolution in education. Unfortunately, such youthful adventurism leaves a sour taste in my mouth, but thankfully the pair’s academic credentials have matched up. The two both completed field changing dissertations in political science and economics respectively in 1972, and were both admitted to the National Academy that Fall.

The past five years have been good to them, and I’ve already heard mutterings that Albert and Hahnel are the modern-day Marx and Engels. The jury is still out on that one. I must admit, in my own review of Albert’s republished dissertation What is To Be Undone? (MIT Press, 1974), I, in spite of myself, was rather impressed with the young man’s scholarship. While Albert is certainly well read, and has a profound grasp of Marxist theory, I did not feel his theses were compelling.

I find myself giving the same appraisal to the second volume of their (eventually) massive history/political economy, Socialism: Past and Present. Their critical review of the history and the political economic trends of the American experience in socialism is a mixed bag. Their scholarship is impeccable, but one cannot help but feel that their revisionism is motivated by the youthful infantile leftism they participated in as students.

...Albert and Hahnel seem to be in the same camp of as that of Noam Chomsky, particularly his borderline libelous book American Power and the New Mandarins (which is cited numerous times in Albert and Hahnel’s endnotes and draws upon many of the same primary sources as their work). Their critical appraisal of the excesses of the revolution seems to be un-Marxist and ahistorical, failing to take into account the importance of dialectical thinking or historical materialism. For one, their appraisal of “totalitarianism” in the Cultural Revolution is unconvincing. I will be the first to admit that our Revolutionary Forefathers made mistakes during the Red Terror, but their assertion that the American state was more powerful than the Stalinist state of the period seems just absurd on face. There were simply no American analogues to the Moscow Show Trials.

...For all its punch, this is a flawed work that seems to take the worst of the excesses of ’60s youthful leftism and push them forward into the future. Albert and Hahnel are far from alone. There are many young ultra-leftist adventurists marching their way through America’s institutions now. Thankfully, Albert and Hahnel do not indulge in the same kind of vitriol towards the current Progressive Labor administration as many of their comrades do.

1. Not to be confused with the previously mentioned Labor Review.

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Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine^{1
החזית העממית לשחרור פלסטין
الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين}


Active: 1941-48
Country: British Mandate of Palestine, Palestinian Republic
Type: Paramilitary (pre-independence)
Unified armed forces (post-independence)
Role: Liberation of Nazi occupied Palestine, establishment of a multinational worker's state in Palestine
Ideology: Socialism, Marxism-Leninism, Jewish-Arab multinationalism
Size: ~210,000 at height
Engagements: Second World War
Palestinian Revolution
Palestinian War of Independence
Disbanded: July 28, 1948

1. Don't know if the Hebrew Translation is accurate. Also, I am aware that the probabiltity of OTL's PFLP and TTL's PFLP adopting the same flag is very low. The symbolism is the same, regardless.

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