Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I wonder what will happen to Ireland.
Did we get any glimpse into the Extended Universe?
(After all, we know lots of things through Extended Universe, such as the Ottoman Empire staying alive with at least Kosovo on their hand, thanks to the World Cup post mentioning some Albanian footballer playing in the national team)
My guess is a compromise like Irish Free State, except with even more rights given to the Irish and with Northern Ireland (or Ulster) given to the Irish as well.
Did we get any glimpse into the Extended Universe?
(After all, we know lots of things through Extended Universe, such as the Ottoman Empire staying alive with at least Kosovo on their hand, thanks to the World Cup post mentioning some Albanian footballer playing in the national team)
My guess is a compromise like Irish Free State, except with even more rights given to the Irish and with Northern Ireland (or Ulster) given to the Irish as well.
Excellent use of the meme
A kinder phrase than I would use, if you know what I mean in British terms lol
With Herbert Samuel, I expect he will end up hated by both sides the way that he was for OTL Palestine...
Also, I wonder if given the UK's less than stellar luck iTTL, if he will manage to destroy what became the image of Neutrality of Jews iOTL Northern Ireland. (The Catholics and the Protestants could meet with each other at Synagogues since the Jews were Neutral...)
Also, I wonder if given the UK's less than stellar luck iTTL, if he will manage to destroy what became the image of Neutrality of Jews iOTL Northern Ireland. (The Catholics and the Protestants could meet with each other at Synagogues since the Jews were Neutral...)
Living in Scotland, I think I know the exact word you mean. Which has caused me some problems while visiting back home, as I've picked it up and my Mother is not impressed
Of course, I picked him specifically for a reason, though it’s hard to do as much damage as he did in Palestine for… well, reasons specific to him and the post-WW1 settlement there
My personal bet is on a united Ireland being given effectively Dominion status, but perhaps with some restrictions on their foreign policy - and for this to then become the model for India and other Commwealth nations as they arise. This, in turn, leads to a much stronger Commonwealth than in OTL.
This also gives us an Ireland which is going to have some deep political divides between Republicans and supporters of the Dominion, as well as regional strife between Unionists and Nationalists in Ulster.
If would be interesting if your erstwhile wounded royal is made King of Ireland (though I find that unlikely) or given a title such as Prince to act as a hereditary Governor-General or some such.
Also, if Irish Dominion status proves successful, I wonder if this will inspire Scottish nationalists to fight for a similar deal later in the century.
My two cents are that they go independent. There's no way to salvage Ireland after the extent they tried to be conciliation about it. Even the most Pro-British irish party grew fed up with the shit they were getting. Either independence or death at this point.
Well its been great to come back to plenty of updates to read! Exciting to see you are self publishing, means i can recommend this brilliant story to friends who aren't really forum users!
Look forward to reading about the red summer in the CSA and the train crash in slow motion that is the approach of the CEW.
I wonder what TTL Gerry Adams would end up being like with such a different future for Ireland?
Look forward to reading about the red summer in the CSA and the train crash in slow motion that is the approach of the CEW.
I wonder what TTL Gerry Adams would end up being like with such a different future for Ireland?
Doesn't mean that they are especially targetted, just that they don't have the *neutral* party status of OTL.
Been catching up, Ireland is unlucky as ever and remains Britain's bleeding ulcer for unionist sectarian/authoritarianism and Irish nationalists.
That said, going to take a bit of a guess of it's future and say Britain will reach a rough accommodation with Irish parliamentarians in a Dominion status that's pretty unfair to Unionists that Irish local elites will agree to in part to stop diaspora from ruling the Island.
By that Irish Catholic nationalists are extensively relying on the Irish diaspora and people who immigrated to the US for funding, weapons, training, fighters ect something that's probably going to increase overtime and one natural result independence brought by such figures they would have a lot of power in. Something which many Irish elite Catholics who dream of ruling a free Ireland probably don't want to play second fiddle to Irish Americans with some radical republic ideas that might threaten a rather traditional class structure they are at the top of. This will create the next big political divide in Ireland.
Though I could be wrong, seems Ireland's destined for a lot of strife before Britain lets it go and given we know India won't be peaceful as the British empire get's more turbulent overtime maybe Irish elites will start viewing a ''good'' accommodation with Britain as less necessary step to freedom.
That said, going to take a bit of a guess of it's future and say Britain will reach a rough accommodation with Irish parliamentarians in a Dominion status that's pretty unfair to Unionists that Irish local elites will agree to in part to stop diaspora from ruling the Island.
By that Irish Catholic nationalists are extensively relying on the Irish diaspora and people who immigrated to the US for funding, weapons, training, fighters ect something that's probably going to increase overtime and one natural result independence brought by such figures they would have a lot of power in. Something which many Irish elite Catholics who dream of ruling a free Ireland probably don't want to play second fiddle to Irish Americans with some radical republic ideas that might threaten a rather traditional class structure they are at the top of. This will create the next big political divide in Ireland.
Though I could be wrong, seems Ireland's destined for a lot of strife before Britain lets it go and given we know India won't be peaceful as the British empire get's more turbulent overtime maybe Irish elites will start viewing a ''good'' accommodation with Britain as less necessary step to freedom.
A sound guess.
Scottish nationalism didn't really take off to the extent that Ireland's did until oil was struck in the North Sea and the industrial economy of Glasgow collapsed; before that, the Scottish position within Britain was much more sound. So full Dominion status is unlikely to be pursued, IMO
There's independent of Westminster, and independent of the Crown. Two very different things.
Thank you!
Gerry Adams would probably be a leading left-wing figure in Irish politics, perhaps leading a party to the left of Labour?
Good point on the ascendancy of the diaspora within revolutionary circles, I hadn't considered that but that's certainly an important consideration for the IPP's Catholic hierarchy.
The Red Summer
CONTENT WARNING
[Seriously, this is the ugly one]
[Seriously, this is the ugly one]
"...the Red Summer of 1917 encompassed a great many things. It referred to the increasingly radical labor strikes in the United States, most famously in Minnesota's great cities of Minneapolis and Duluth, where the National Guard had to be federalized and brought in to break the strikes for the first time since the 1890s. It encompassed also unemployment riots and nativist actions against immigrants, especially Chinese and Negro, across the country from the Chinatowns of California to the shanties and lean-tos of "Blackburg" encampments outside of places like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, Missouri. It was the moment when the bottom essentially fell out from under the hapless, inept and often cruelly indifferent Root administration and put paid to the lie that once the war ended, there would be a 'return to normalcy' as men came home to the lives they had put aside to defend their country against the Dixie menace.
While "Red Summer" means all those things in the United States, it means something much more apocalyptic south of the Ohio, and the term encompassed that for those infantrymen still on rotation in occupied Dixie. The Red Summer was the red of an orgy of bloodshed, of communal violence sprawling from the hollers of Kentucky to the Florida Everglades, from the urban ruins of Richmond, Atlanta and the eastern industrial belt to the swampy hinterland shared with secessionist Texas. The Red Summer was, as March would put it in a memorandum shortly before his retirement in 1921, "the moment in which Dixie simply devoured herself," and Pershing would note that for all his considerable differences with March, it was hard to think of a more succinct summation of the time..."
- Pershing
"...not an uncommon view amongst both officers and the enlisted that the NRO and its semi-affiliated "hillboy" militias were not the Confederate Army and thus not a legitimate enemy combatant. While atrocities had occurred, especially towards the back end of the war as tempers and frustration ran high, the US Army had genuinely made an effort to limit reprisal murders or other extrajudicial killings outside of the color of law and war, and soldiers found engaging in such war crimes according to the Army Field Manual (which had been personally drafted, edited and revised multiple times by General Peyton March, now the Army Chief of Staff after the conclusion of the conflict) were court martialed fairly expeditiously considering the context of the Great American War and manpower needs, often not without controversy. [1]
With memories of the occupation of Maryland still fresh for many, there was no official policy to use scorched-earth tactics against the Confederate insurgency, but it was tacitly accepted. A common refrain that spread like wildfire through American ranks was that the Confederate Army had surrendered properly under "rules of war" and thus that the NRO and its affiliates were operating outside of those rules, and that insurgency was entirely ungentlemanly conduct. It was under this mindset that the escalation of atrocities against both captured insurgents and the civilian population of Dixie began - the war was over, and thus the fighting was not the action of noble resistance but of cruel criminals whose barbarism seemed unlimited. American soldiers were routinely ambushed and summarily executed; the Army had to (unofficially) import its own prostitutes and burlesque performers from north of the Ohio because so many GIs were being murdered in Confederate brothels. Many hillboy gangs crucified American soldiers and suspected collaborators, nailing them to fences along well-used rural roads and occasionally beheading or disemboweling them to send a further message (and, allegedly, save bullets). It cannot be said that the American occupiers were not responding to considerable provocation by a populace they regarded as having already submitted under the generally accepted terms of war at that time, and in sharp contrast to how Chileans and Mexicans had behaved during the brief occupations of territories in those countries during the course of the war.
Retribution was thus seen as necessary for survival, and many of the most infamous butchers of the war, still down south for the Red Summer, stood at its leading edge. Future US Senator Harland Sanders wrote wryly to a friend in a letter posthumously published to great controversy "one does not search the forest for brigands hiding within it - when they are captured, new brigands will use the forest again, and again. Rather, one should burn the forest down - then no brigand will ever use it, and they will be much easier to find, provided they survive the flames."..."
- A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War
"...efforts meant entirely to push the terms of the Mount Vernon through, including the formal abolition of chattel slavery, though Patton was entirely open to loopholes such as peonage, prison labor, and what came to be known as "sharecropping" to support the Confederate cotton economy and racial hierarchy even once slavery was, on paper, abolished. While this would in time, in practice, come to be embraced, the Confederate mindset in 1917 was not one of logic but entirely an emotive one, and had polling been an art at the time, measles or syphilis may well have scored higher than George S. Patton. Having not just begrudgingly accepted but negotiated the "Gunbarrel Amendments" with the despised Hughes and Lodge, Patton was the traitor of traitors, the Dixie Judas or Confederate Benedict Arnold, a collaborator of the first order. The complete and total collapse of federal authority across the Confederacy in 1917 was not entirely due solely to his illegitimacy to most of the country (and especially to local elites, who were typically even more emotionally married to the cause of slavery as "Dixie's pillar" than the cloistered men in Congress), but that certainly did not help.
It is hard to put in modern terms what had occurred to the Confederacy in the spring of 1917 and how the escalation that summer essentially broke its society. It was in part a civil war between not only whites and Negroes, but also an internal conflict between local hillboys, the decentralized but coordinated resistance network of Nathan Forrest, state constabularies, and what little remained of authority emanating from Charlotte, all intermixed with a brewing insurgency against the Yankee occupation. There was a reason why North Carolina emerged in the early 1920s as the Confederacy's most stable and affluent state, and that was not only because it was mostly untouched by the worst of the war but also its state government becoming essentially an extension of the Bourbon hierarchy in Charlotte that was able to keep the peace.
That the Confederacy did not collapse into a dozen republics during this time is, on its own, a minor miracle. There was no way to enforce federal authority upon Louisiana, or upon Arkansas, or even really in much of nearby Georgia. County sheriffs and constables quickly became regional warlords, arming themselves and their large extended families (or what remained of them after the war) to the teeth to defend their small insular fiefdoms, especially as it became clear that there was not going to be much of any harvest come autumn and that food imports from the United States, Russia and Canada would essentially have to sustain the country as it teetered on the edge of famine. Across much of central Alabama and the Mississippi Delta, freed slaves concentrated in "Negro colonies," armed with surplus Yankee weaponry, and cases of ethnic cleansing spiraled starting in late May as it became clear to the formerly bonded that they would have to defend their newfound liberty with blood, often murdering white families who did not flee out of fear that such brutality awaited them. Not just cows and pigs were food but horses, dogs, cats and even sparrows and rats; it was estimated that one in three Confederate women older than thirteen engaged in some form of prostitution, often just to feed themselves or their children.
It is also important to note that much of what was said to be occurring in the Confederacy during this time is often exaggerated to put the Yankee occupiers in a remarkably negative, almost cartoonishly evil light. Atrocities were widespread, yes, but entire villages were not massacred on the orders of the ur-villain John Pershing, who by this point was ensconced in Philadelphia at a desk job on the General Staff. Rape was so common as to be blase, but it was not an official policy and Yankee soldiers did not encourage roving gangs of freedmen to gangrape white women as a form of punitive damages against Dixie's honor. And while Mount Vernon did extract huge economic concessions upon the Confederacy, stories of American soldiers gleefully ripping up train tracks and tearing down factories to the point of melting down the nails keeping wood panels together so Dixie would have no use of them are so outlandish as to be absurd.
Nonetheless, this was the environment in which Patton operated, the types of rumors and innuendo swirling the smoking ruins of his country that had collapsed into un-policeable anarchy and where hundreds, sometimes thousands, were dying by the day from starvation or murder. How could he lead the Confederacy through his gauntlet, when there was barely anything left to lead...?"
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
"...news of the situation in Kentucky was alarming. In the space of six months, the occupied state's population had swelled to nearly three million, and efforts to curtail the passage of freedmen across the Ohio were badly failing. A race riot in Evansville, Indiana - the first of many over the next ten years - gave the administration pause, and Root ordered General Farnsworth to submit a report.
What he revealed was horrifying. Refugee camps were squalid and, without the war effort to occupy them, now centers of criminal activity. The "Free Commonwealth" had several competing nodes of power from its civilian infrastructure, often staffed by Yankee Negroes with university educations and sterling Liberal credentials, along with various "camper" figures who were quickly building substantial political machines in the camps with the omnipresent threat of mass protests or riots if they did not receive their due respect or supplies, and the military administration was woefully overwhelmed. Making matters worse were efforts to penetrate the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, the epicenter of hillboy activity in occupied Kentucky, which saw the enemy vanish into the trees and hollers of that rugged country and turned the territory into a bleeding ulcer for Farnsworth's men. Things were clearly out of control, and the best path forward was not apparent, especially as the unemployment crisis in the industrial Midwest in particular mounted.
The steady stream of refugees into Kentucky and, to a lesser extent, Tennessee, and their attempts to cross into the United States, was the genesis of discussions in Philadelphia of how to curtail their immigration to a controllable level, with a great deal of fear also of white Confederates fleeing north as potential sleepers. As the Red Summer progressed and the news of atrocities and outrages across Dixie hung over Philadelphia like a dark cloud, and it became clear that Root most certainly did not have the situation under control, the need for drastic action on the refugee crisis became apparent. The blank cheque the Liberal Party had handed abolitionism and Negro advocacy was about to meet its political limit..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...women's jails for those suspected of harboring hillboys or NRO operatives, both of which the Yankee military administration quickly labelled as seditionist. The conditions in the prison camps were medieval; mothers and sisters separated from their families squeezed together in tents or cramped bunks, refused shoes or anything other than a single shirt and trousers to wear, denied baths and given only two meals a day unless they confessed to their crimes and pointed Yankee soldiers in the right direction. Stories of torture and rape were common, especially in later years when the "tales of the camp" became a popular genre in Dixie, but in many ways, those arbitrarily jailed by the occupation had it better.
Suspected collaborators, or even just those who gave any comfort to the Yankees no matter how small, were made public examples of. Men had it worst, for not only were they helping the enemy materially they were compounding that sin by not volunteering to be a hillboy, but their wives and daughters were targets, too. For the first time in Confederate history, white women were lynched, though usually under over of night. Heads were left on fenceposts as a warning, bodies displayed in all manners of barbaric fashion, with signs of brutal torture including scourging and branding.
Women were, in most cases, left to essentially fend against his horror on their own. The Confederacy had sustained close to nine hundred thousand combat deaths, effectively a tenth of its white male population, heavily concentrated in a now-lost generation of young men to the point that Yankee soldiers had encountered schoolboys and, in some infamous cases, septuagenarian veterans of the War of Secession when they marched through South Carolina and Alabama in the closing weeks of the war. This meant there were no husbands, fathers and brothers coming home for a wide swath of the Confederate population, or if those men did come home, it was as broken, mangled shells of humans who were often more burden and help. With the evaporation of chattel slavery in many communities once dependent on it, and Negro freedmen fleeing their old farms if they had the means, the support of the Confederate society as it stared down the barrel of famine and demographic collapse fell upon its women and girls.
This was not just through backbreaking manual labor they had to sustain their crumbling world. The story of the University of Mississippi only surviving as an institution because the women of Kappa Delta and Chi Omega made so much money converting their houses into brothels is apocryphal and likely exaggerated to the point of urban legend, but every woman in the Confederacy who did not turn to the world's oldest profession to feed herself and her family knew one or several peers who did. Further compounding the acute, crippling economic and social depression across Dixie in 1917 were the instances of war brides, the tens of thousands of women who went north with Yankee soldiers, often in admittedly murky circumstances, a phenomenon that peaked in late 1919 and quickly diminished as the occupation headed towards is inevitable conclusion..." [2]
- A Republic of Widows and Orphans
"...food security as September came around became a major issue, and simply killing their way out of the crisis was clearly not an option. But the paths north were no longer safe, either, and even upon arrival in Kentucky, what was now the Free Commonwealth was not the promised land it had been at the start of American occupation. By the end of the Red Summer, even though the violence was still heightened, the Root administration's stance on trans-Ohio refugees had hardened, and routes into Missouri through the bitter Ozarks were instead the only way for freedmen to make it into the United States less they wanted to brave the harsh Appalachian border of West Virginia, which required trudging through the epicenter of hillboy and National Resistance territory.
The late summer of 1917 saw a hard shift amongst many freedmen, who essentially elected at that point not to brave the path out, with it abundantly clear that it was a fool's errand and entrenching themselves in their territories was the best option, as the Yazoo League determined by popular vote. The roads across Mississippi, Alabama and West Tennessee were littered with corpses both black and white, often left to rot in the hot Dixie sun and be picked over by crows and, curiously, vultures. ONE did not venture out of Kentucky, and the promise of a new life for freedmen underwritten by American power seemed ever distant, with Yankee soldiers often holding abhorrent views about the Black population that ventured perilously close to what their Confederate counterparts thought. There was nowhere safe on either side of the Ohio, it turned out, and despite auxiliary activities being encouraged by the upper brass, many freedmen found quickly that they couldn't trust Yankee infantrymen to protect them even if they were ordered to do so.
Whatever the next stage after the Red Summer looked like, Dixie's freedmen would have to write it on their own..."
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] In other words, not WW2 on the Pacific front where teeth, skulls, ears etc were cheerfully collected as mementos to be sent back home.
[2] Congrats to whoever guessed that a big part of the 1920 election is both parties running on pulling out of Dixie
So, Confederacy seem to get a century worth of trauma from this experience, uh?
I can already imagine what this new generation of Dixies would look like: untrusting, probably extreme amounts of anger issues, some kind of unhealthy coping mechanism (whether it is drugs, alcohol, some mad preacher who decided that it is a great time to form their own cult, etc), lost their emotions when they were twelve either because they had some close family member that died or they suffered heavy PTSD after joining to resistance or had to prostitute themselves for a loaf of bread or…
Also, I wonder what will happen to Freedmen?
It was mentioned in the EU that there is enough black people in Confederacy to form a political party and to be a very important issue, so I feel like it is not entirely massacre them all… perhaps, some kind of compromise that is a mix of Bantustans and Extreme Amounts of Segregation?
I can already imagine what this new generation of Dixies would look like: untrusting, probably extreme amounts of anger issues, some kind of unhealthy coping mechanism (whether it is drugs, alcohol, some mad preacher who decided that it is a great time to form their own cult, etc), lost their emotions when they were twelve either because they had some close family member that died or they suffered heavy PTSD after joining to resistance or had to prostitute themselves for a loaf of bread or…
Also, I wonder what will happen to Freedmen?
It was mentioned in the EU that there is enough black people in Confederacy to form a political party and to be a very important issue, so I feel like it is not entirely massacre them all… perhaps, some kind of compromise that is a mix of Bantustans and Extreme Amounts of Segregation?
Jesus, gonna need a shower after reading this one. I'm clicking "like" mostly because the writing is superb, not to endorse any of the content.
There's no political will, from either party or its voters, to sustain a long-term occupation and fundamentally transform Confederate society "root and branch" as Lodge wanted to do back in late 1916/early 1916. Any party that advocates keeping American troops down in Dixie to be living target practice would get romped electorally. Hell, the fact that the occupation lasted as long as it did is a bit of a miracle given all the forces arrayed against it.
Going to sound a tad bizarre but do we know much about the CSA diaspora? By that sounds like their homeland (or homelands) will need all the help it can get stabilising itself much less rebuilding it. Though they might end up being seen as carpetbaggers given they avoided the horrors of their homeland aflame and did not see their all of their wealth nearly rendered worthless.
Though with the time limit I'm not really sure how the CSA will look soon, they will avoid long term occupation but same though that means either somehow the administration manages to roughly find it's feet a couple years or will face a partial collapse/turmoil as it simply can't extend it's writ over large chunks of land because it can't afford to with the US no longer footing the bill and trying to forget all it can of how victory was so bitter.
Maybe sharecropping becomes increasingly embraced the US occupation? As in a close enough system of racial hierarchy a decent chunk of the militias and government will accept to provide a truce with the US army while they focus on dealing with parts of the insurgency that won't accept it or the ex slave groups. Thus leaving a very unstable, wobbling CSA that never the less can function enough not to starve and population is not actively revolting for now.
Though with the time limit I'm not really sure how the CSA will look soon, they will avoid long term occupation but same though that means either somehow the administration manages to roughly find it's feet a couple years or will face a partial collapse/turmoil as it simply can't extend it's writ over large chunks of land because it can't afford to with the US no longer footing the bill and trying to forget all it can of how victory was so bitter.
Maybe sharecropping becomes increasingly embraced the US occupation? As in a close enough system of racial hierarchy a decent chunk of the militias and government will accept to provide a truce with the US army while they focus on dealing with parts of the insurgency that won't accept it or the ex slave groups. Thus leaving a very unstable, wobbling CSA that never the less can function enough not to starve and population is not actively revolting for now.