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The question is will this lead to a war between Japan and Europe? Their arrogance must not go unpunished! if Korea or Formosa were to revolt it would be a great opportunity for the Entente to regain a foothold in the Chinese area. Australia is to far away from this hotspot and the India/Thai border could well get bogged down to a massive jungle war with little chance of a great push.

Anyway RP aside great update keep it up :)
 
Rule, Co-Prosperity Sphere! Co-Prosperity Sphere rule the Indochina :laugh:
 
Chapter 2: The Birth of Brasília


In the late summer and autumn of 1943, while the beginnings of Indochina’s war unfolded, Syndicalist comrades were also on the march on a completely different continent. After a series of major strikes and industrial disputes in the mid-1930s, and in the aftermath of the Great Crash, Syndicalists had won election in Brazil by democratic means. Concerning themselves mostly with establishing peasants’ cooperatives in the countryside and nationalizing the nation’s economy, Brazil had stayed out of world affairs with a winning combination of isolationism and irrelevance. Development aid from the Syndicalist nations had helped grow the Brazilian economy, but they had largely avoided international entanglements, staying out of the Syndicalist War.


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Brazilian propaganda, c.1938. Conscious of their relative backwardness, internal development was a consistent aim of the Brazilian politburo. Bringing women into the workforce was one important way of accomplishing this.

The Brazilians might have been content to grow Syndicalism in their own country if not for the provocations of La Plata. La Plata’s ruling junta could never accept the presence of a Syndicalist government over their border. In 1938, they had been the instigators behind an attempted military coup that had launched Brazil into civil war. When the Syndicalists had proven victorious, La Plata and Brazil had fallen into a protracted arms race, with La Plata forming a system of alliances against the Syndicalist nation. Feeling increasingly under threat, the Brazilian leadership could not ignore a La Platan incursion into the Brazilian province of Uruguaiana in February 1941. The Great South American war had begun.


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La Platan dictator Edelmiro Farrell. Farrell and his colleagues in the junta had an almost pathological hatred for Syndicalism, and were determined to drive it out of South America.

Three years into the war, things were going badly for the anti-Syndicalist alliance. The Phalanstere International might have been defunct, but its aid had given the Brazilians an industrial edge. Civil war had toughened their generals, and their popular militias had a fanatical zeal that La Plata’s reluctant conscripted regulars couldn’t match. By October of 1943, Brazilian forces had completely overrun the La Plata's ally Peru.


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By this point, the thinking of Brazil’s leaders had hardened. It was increasingly clear to them that the Reactionaries would never leave Brazil alone - that the very nature of the Capitalist system required them to try and stamp out Syndicalism before their own people saw the light. Without power to resist, the same ghastly fate would befall the people’s government in Brazil as had played out in Europe. Their refugee comrades from the fallen Commune of France and Union of Britain were proof enough of that. Nothing less than a united, syndicalist South America would be sufficiently strong to deter their aggression.

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The provinces and people of Peru found themselves integrated into the new syndicalist union of Brasília at gunpoint. New centralized plans were issued to move the economy to a total war footing. Only ultimate victory would now secure the people’s future from the machinations of the bloodthirsty generals in La Plata, and their Chilean lackeys.

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The commissars of the ACPE were responsible for imposing 'war syndicalism' across vast swathes of South America: its key features included forced food requisition from the agricultural peasantry, nationalization of all private enterprise, rationing, and the imposition of 'mandatory labour' for the non-proletarian classes.


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Borders and combat fronts, South America, November 1943.

Momentous as they may have been, South American affairs rarely made the news in the nations of North America. The new American republics were instead concerned with internal matters. In the American Union State, the gloss was finally starting to come off Huey Long’s economic vision. His ‘Share The Wealth’ programme had proved tortuously unworkable at the local level, and ruinously expensive. Worse, it exposed an internal contradiction within the America First party: Long called for the limitation of private wealth, yet relied on the conservative wealthy elite for backing. Evasion was common. Long’s de-urbanization policy of shipping industrial capacity away from the Rust Belt cities and their Syndicalist tendencies had proved a disaster, with many ‘de-urbanized’ factories never reopening due to shortages of skilled labour or vital resources. As the 1944 election approached, Long doubled down on his ideological pet projects and the repression of opposition.

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Meanwhile, the Entente-aligned American republics were experiencing political changes of their own. In 1944, the inaugural president of New England, Percival Baxter, stepped down citing the prevailing tendency of the old United States presidents to limit themselves to two terms in office. His calm leadership of New England during the disordered days of the American Civil War, and judicious decision to align with the Entente, had brought peace and prosperity, and had made Baxter a popular figure.


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President Percival Baxter, 1st President of the New England Republic. Republican. Formerly Governor of Maine under the old United States, Baxter was appointed President by the occupying Canadians in 1937, at the height of the Second American Civil War. Baxter gracefully guided the young nation through that period of emergency, winning re-election in 1940. Baxter loyally aligned New England with the Entente, going as far as to send troops from New England to take part in the Liberation of Britain, while pursuing fiscally conservative policies at home.

President Baxter’s popularity was enough to see his Republican Party retain the presidency in the 1944 election, with GOP candidate John D. Rockefeller Jr., gaining victory. One of the world’s wealthiest men, and a famed philanthropist, President Rockefeller promised a more socially conscientious brand of New England politics, while maintaining the pro-Entente world-view of his predecessor.
Meanwhile, ‘stability’ was still the watchword of President Henry Arnold of the Pacific States and his military cabinet. Recognizing that the disproportionate size and population of California was a destabilizing influence on the administration and internal relations of their new Pacific union, the generals permitted a plebiscite in 1944 to consider the question of diving the state into more equitable (and manageable) units. The people of California voted for a straight division between the new states of North California, with Eureka as its capital, and South California, with San Diego as its capital. The old Californian capital of Sacramento was discarded as a relic of the failed United States, becoming just another city of North California. San Francisco, capital of the Pacific States, acquired status as a ‘federal’ city. At this time, the small territory constituting ‘West Wyoming’ (as opposed to ‘East Wyoming’ in the American Union State) was also formally annexed into the Pacific State of Utah. Pacific States liberals hoped that this successful democratic exercise might pave the way for future elections, but the possibility still seemed far off.

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Democratic change - or at least the appearance of it - was also underfoot in Canada. In July 1943, Canada’s foreign minister, Robert Manion, had been found dead at his desk in Ottawa, having died of natural causes. A respected war hero of the Weltkrieg and one of the chief architects of the Entente alliance, Manion was duly mourned, but the death of one of its leading figures from old age was something of an embarrassment to an administration that had itself been in office for almost 14 years. In the propaganda driven world of Canadian ‘democracy’, appearance was everything, and the government was appearing aged.

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Robert Manion served as Canadian Foreign Secretary during some of the pivotal moments of the 1930s and 40s, and his considerate, tactful character helped to bind together the sometimes-discordant personalities of the Entente leadership into a lasting alliance that would hold together through the challenging times of the Syndicalist War and Liberation of Britain. Manion died in July of 1943, just as the Union of Britain was defeated. A decorated war hero of the Weltkrieg, his state funeral was attended by King Edward and Queen Barbara among many other distinguished dignitaries from Canada and beyond.

Later that year, Prime Minister Bennett reshuffled the cabinet to give it a more youthful edge. The appointment of Quebecois Onésime Gagnon to replace Manion was a deliberate move to show the Liberal heartland of Quebec that it too was part of the ‘new’ Canada - whether it liked it or not.

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The new cabinet saw a return of former Prime Minister Arthur Meighen to front-line politics, as well as many fresh faces in ministerial ranks. Less publicly, Sir Stewart Menzies, an intimate of the Royal Family, became the new Director of Imperial Intelligence.

The Canadian left, led by their old lion Mackenzie King but largely excluded from the national narrative, complained that the reshuffle was merely window-dressing, and that Canadian democracy itself had been reduced to a form of window-dressing. Imperial Canada’s model of Authoritarian Democracy, imitated across the Entente, was legitimated by free and fair elections, but elections were increasingly emptied of any real ability to meaningfully change the nation’s policies, motives or goals. Instead, these were determined by a small Anglo-Canadian elite: business figures, media tycoons, military leaders, civil servants, amenable intellectuals and, of course, the King and aristocracy. By the mid-1940s, omnipresent propaganda ‘guided’ Canadian democracy in the ‘right’ directions, always justified by the twin themes of Imperial Greatness and Syndicalist Threat. While many Canadian Liberals despaired at the new status quo, younger, more ambitious figures considered how they could adapt to work within it and return the Liberals to power after so many years in the political wilderness.

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Highway propaganda billboard, c.1944, celebrating the prosperity government industrialization initiatives had brought to the 'New' Canada. Glorifying the achievements of the state and lionizing King Edward as its figurehead was a hallmark of Canada's new model of Authoritarian Democracy.

Meanwhile, discussions of political philosophy seemed comfortably academic in a Europe still-scarred by war and tyranny. In Germany, economic wobbles after the war had progressed to a full-blown recession by the spring of 1944, as the stimulus of conflict fell away to reveal harsh realities. The loss of industrial activity in ruined western Germany and the cost of repairing the damage was ruinous. The Indochinese War had been a financial black hole. Moreover, Germany’s imperial military was bloated, inefficient, vastly expensive and - worst of all - not particularly effective, as Indochina had proved. The military leadership were entrenched, disinclined to change and enjoyed great political and cultural prestige. For Chancellor Von Neurath, reform was a vital but exceedingly difficult task.

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Another major political issue facing the newly-appointed chancellor concerned French reconstruction. When Germany had set up its puppet government in Northern France, it had assumed a certain financial responsibility for rebuilding the shattered country.

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The ruins of Paris in 1943, following the German siege of the city. The Battle for Paris was one of the most costly of the Syndicalist War, with approximately 80,000 Germans killed and over 100,000 French losses. Civilian casualties were also high, as was the extent of damage to the city. One year later, over a million Parisians were still homeless.

Naturally, this was monstrously unpopular among the German public, especially in those regions decimated by French invasion. However, Germany’s leaders saw it as a strategic necessity. If their experiment bringing France into Mitteleuropa failed, Syndicalism could rise there again, or Entente-aligned Imperial France and its Napoleonic emperor would fill the vacuum. A hostile France really would make their victory in the Syndicalist War hollow. Once more, Franco-German had relations became one of the European continent’s great uncertainties.

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The British Reconstruction Authority was spared from the economic austerity of the Continent by the financial largesse of the British Empire speak of. Even if most basic services would be restored by the summer of 1944, and urban repairs begun, normalising life in Britain was painfully slow. The remaining months of 1943 after the Liberation and into 1944 saw a series of decrees intended to lay the foundations for a new British state, as well as deal with the worst actions of the former one. The Edinburgh Trials had started in December 1943. They were a series of military tribunals held to prosecute the military, political and economic leaders of the Union of Britain and Commune of France that had fallen into Entente custody. All-in-all, 43 Syndicalist leaders were tried, with most receiving the death penalty for their various crimes. Noticeably absent was Oswald Mosley, the Totalist dictator. Officially, Mosley had died-in-action, but Imperial Intelligence had privately advised the Entente leadership there was a chance he might have escaped.

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Edinburgh Castle, Scotland, where leading Syndicalists were imprisoned and tried before a judging panel of leading legal figures from across the Entente.


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Against this backdrop of international political and economic uncertainty, the war in Indochina was suddenly to enter a dangerous and unpredictable phase. Ho Chi Minh had made his most incendiary move yet...


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Loved the little touches regarding Brazil - erm, it's the "Republic of Brasília" now. ;) The name of the ACPE sound painfully bureaucratic - a perfect organ for a Totalist government, which is what Brasília has become, so it seems. And, really, some of the events you've made would be nice aditions to KR. ;)
Following this!
 
I never knew that Brazil could become Brasilia before. I should try conquering South America as them next time instead of La Plata!

Also, the Germans cutting reconstruction funds to the French seems like a Bad Idea
 
Brasília is one of my custom events. I couldn't think of a good name for a South American USSR - something like 'Syndicalist Union' seemed too generic, so Brasília it is.

Yes, the Reich might regret that one. I leave events like that to an equal AI Chance and see in what directions the AI cares to take the story :happy:
 
Nice update :v but the propaganda is in portglish

Edit: Oh boy, where I can download this AUS events?
 
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The death of our Comrades in the Union of Britain and the Commune of France is greatly demoralizing. However, their memories will forever be held in the hearts of the People! We can only hope that our comrades in Brasilia and Hanoi can redeem these great loses and aid the international revolution against the British Reactionaries!
 
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It seems that the torch of Socialist liberty has passed on to Asia and Latin America. Let's hope they hold it high!
Also, I'm really liking the new events. Good job!

Thanks Straczynski! Glad you like them. The Brasilians aren't quite Totalists yet, but Chairman Mosley is out there somewhere on his submarine...

"We all live in comrade Mosley's submarine
Mosley's submarine, Mosley's submarine
We all live in comrade Mosley's submarine
Mosley's submarine, Mosley's submarine
"

:D
 
Portuguese is not one of my languages unfortunately. Google Translate is a capitalist-reactionary conspiracy to besmirch the People's Tongue :rofl:

Google Translate did quite a good job there, remarkably. :p "Da administração" should be "A administração" but that's it.
In case anyone else is curious, the text in the poster translates as "Socialist women! Help build the syndicalist economy. Begin working at factories, fields and administration!".
 
your events seem really cool, do you think you could upload them somewhere? I'd love to take a look at em and play with them!