I'm just saying while not on topic nobodies getting super mad, and some of us our learning something.
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This is the thread congress will base it's federal prison system on
And we go a very off topic discussion it seems
Again I get while you're putting down.
Kekekekek. Can we never, ever have a citation fight on this forum? It's a waste of time and will continue to convince no one anything at all.
I'm just saying while not on topic nobodies getting super mad, and some of us our learning something.
Ah then I see
Never said anything about citations
But let us say you say that evolution doesn't exist. Then I argue against it, and you reply by saying "but it doesn't exist" then I wouldn't continue to argument against it That is because it would only end up in a cyclus where no one would agree and present no new arguments and viewpoints. Not because I would think you lacked citations.
Never said anything about citations
Exactly, than you drop the issue. For if I believed in creationism I would be a fundamentalist and therefore be a fanatic. Since I am a fanatic therefore arguments are useless and you just drop it.
If the neofuedalist win will we bring back medieval jaunting tunes?
[video=youtube;63yTUdPU_bQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63yTUdPU_bQ[/video]
Europa Universalis II classic.
Full playlist of epic music can be found by here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bLm7-cEyAA
Sweet childhood memories!
The first Paradox game I played.
Why has this thread been so quiet for once? What is happening?! Enewald, go into a tl;dr wall of text on why Enewaldism is the best bat-shit insane ideology, anything to keep things moving dang it!
((Actually, I have a (smaller) wall of text and a few pictures, but I'm waiting for the next election to post it.
Today is Walpurgis Night, so maybe everyone is out drinking.))
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((Ha, ha, and here I was few minutes ago wondering, who will be the first one to break this awkward silence. Ultranitarianism is coming Contravarius?))
((You better believe it. I even spent like three hours on a goddamn symbol.))
((Now, after reading this, I suddenly reminded myself of Morricone's "Man with a Harmonica". I would drop link to Youtube here, but I have already posted too much of Red Army Choir recordings))
And what's wrong with peace and no page inflation? Let's just wait patiently for the update.
((I always liked the "Once Upon a Time in America" soundtrack the best, I think. But all the western-stuff was great, too, yes.))
Not outside and drinking, just feverish and playing HoI3 inside.
Head is so fatigued by this illness that I'm close to behaving irrationally!
(yay spring, air is full of plant molecules that are currently killing my mental capacity)
New World Coming
1964-1969
1964-1969
The middle to late 1960s were a time of remarkable, perhaps unprecedentedly rapid, change across the globe. In the Third World revolutionary movements aimed against imperialism and social injustice rose in arms against the world’s old masters, in the developed countries the latter part of the decade witnessed the beginnings of an incredibly sharp upturn in working class militancy with industrial action increasing by several orders of magnitude across Western Europe, whilst at the same time a new generation began to fundamentally challenge the values of their forbearers. Economically, politically, socially and culturally the world was starting to change, forever.
Ironically, the one party that for decades had associated itself with a rejection of the old order more than any other led the most substantial rebellion against the changing world in Britain. John Gollan and his moderate allies in the CPGB leadership had delivered impressive election results in 1964; however the success failed to satisfy either the trade union leaders who dominated the upper echelons of the party, nor the radical rank and file membership with both demanding distance from the Lib-Lab government and a more militant party line. In April 1964 these groups launched an effective coup against Gollan – Reg Birch being chosen to replace him at the head of the party.
After seizing control of the leadership, Birch and his hardline allies began to initiate a wide sweeping purge against moderates not in line with the CPGB’s new, radical direction. Over the course of the next half decade the party would lose a large number of prominent and capable members and supporters. In the trade union movement, an old rival of Reg Birch, Hugh Scanlon was purged and would lead a large number of Communist trade unionists out of the party and into affiliation with Labour with as many as 11 MPs joining them. At the same time many of the intellectuals that had associated themselves with the party, notably the historian Eric Hobsbawm, would distance themselves. Rejecting any cooperation with the any other parties in parliament, and denouncing Labour and Liberal trade unionists, British Communism adopted a reflexive siege mentality as it became every more focussed on trade union activity and trade union activity alone, even as the long abandoned revolutionary rhetoric of yesteryear returned in force. Cocooned in an ossified, and all encompassing, political shell the movement appeared entirely inward looking even as it maintained influence over a substantial part of the workers’ movement.
The rise of Jo Grimond’s second government was not greeted with anything like the enthusiasm his first electoral triumph in 1958 had been. Despite reduced expectations in the conflict riddled government, the Lib-Lab coalition passed a series of major reforms as abortion was legalised and capital punishment outlawed, whilst substantial legislation aimed against discrimination, with an emphasis on both racial and gender issues, was passed including a demand that equal work be rewarded with equal pay universally.
However, these major reforms were quite exceptional for a government that was far more frequently crippled by infighting. The government’s divisions ran far deeper than the simple boundary between its two constituent parties as both groups were riddled with factionalism. In Labour, the moderate Gaitskellites hoped to maintain the alliance with the Liberals at all costs and sought to find compromise within the coalition, whilst left wing critics of the leadership varied from those who wanted a slightly better compromise for Labour and circles desiring the separation of the two parties entirely. The discord within the Liberal Party was, if anything, even worse with the simple, early 1960s, categorisations of Oranges and Yellows no longer satisfactory in describing the dozens of competing cliques that existed predominantly in the party’s large Yellow right wing. The situation was made more strenuous by the thinly concealed contempt the Yellows maintained for both Orange Liberals and Labour alike – the Oranges believed by some to be little more than Labourite agents with the Liberal party aimed at either seizing control over it or provoking a split in the interests of Labour and its trade union pay masters. Beyond this, Grimond himself was becoming increasingly abrasive as his reliance on a small clique of advisors, most of whom had been involved in the Liberal government of 1958-1963, convinced him to stand firm rather than compromise with the various groups involved in the governing coalition.
Hampered as it was, the government’s struggles to find a consensus that could be passed through parliament left made greatly weakened its reforming agenda. The sodden agreement reached over reform of the House of Lords typified the struggles of Grimond’s government as virtually nothing could be achieved beyond a commitment to increase the number of Life Peers. The Liberals were also unable to achieve their aim of passing further devolved powers to the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. Far more significant, in practical terms, was the annual governmental civil war over James Callaghan’s budget. There were especially vicious clashes over the rate of taxation (with Grimond’s demands for tax cuts meeting opposition from both his Chancellor and his Labour allies) and the direction of government investment (Liberals continuing to support investments in rural regions whilst Labour demanded substantial support for improved housing as well as investment in deprived urban areas).
Overseas, there was a much strong degree of unity behind the cause of decolonisation. Following a rising aimed against the ruling Arab minority on Zanzibar in September 1964 Tanganyika was given permission to united with the East African island to form the new state of Tanzania. The following year Gambia was given independence whilst the West Indian Federation finally achieved full dominion status. More significantly, the British government made clear its attitude towards white settler colonies by granting Kenya its independence under a constitution that granted no special privileges of guarantees to the settler community beyond the same rights enjoyed by all the newly independent nation’s citizens. As Botswana was granted independence in early 1966 the states of Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland were scheduled to be turned over to majority rule within the year. Rather than allow this to happen a group of officers based in South Rhodesia rebelled against the British government – proclaiming the Republic of Rhodesia that would maintain minority rule in the province for years to come.
Throughout the period of 1964-1969 Britain’s military expenditure continued to fall with the Royal Navy facing further major reductions as outdated vessels were scrapped without major investment in replacements. Elsewhere there was a heavy emphasis on updating equipment without expanding the armed forces, yet even this was a struggle financially. Finally, the two mandatory conscription implemented by the Conservative government of the 1950s was reduced to one year.
The Liberal-Labour Coalition was held together primarily in opposition to the radicalism of the Conservative Party. After the Tories’ drastic defeat in 1964 the party’s leadership started to make major strides in curbing that radicalism as Enoch Powell entered into a strange alliance with Edward Heath’s One Nationists and Margaret Thatcher’s National Liberals. The Tory troika’s dual aims were to modernise the party and make it electable once again. As steps were taken to curb the power of Traditionalist and authoritarian elements in the party, the Conservatives finally implemented a democratic procedure for the election of its leaders as Powell stood uncontested in the party’s first leadership election in 1965.
The culmination of the troika’s reforms came at the 1966 Party Conference in Stirling. Just months after the Rhodesians’ Unilateral Declaration of Independence the party denounced the rebellion whilst previous support for South Africa was greatly cooled – the removal of the highly reactionary Marquess of Salisbury, an outspoken ally of white minority rule in Africa, from the Shadow Cabinet symbolically showing the party’s willingness to accept the changing world. At the same time the historic Conservative policy of dissolving the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments was abandoned in favour of an acceptance of the constitutional status quo. With the militancy of the 1964 manifesto being questioned from every angle, the Tories’ determination to adapt to the changing world had ended their brief status as political pariahs during the mid-1960s.
The Liberal-Labour Alliance had never been a happy marriage with both parties retaining competing visions of Britain’s future, and competing claims to the status of the country’s leading force on the Centre-Left. The events that would lead to the divorce of the two parties began in March 1967 when Jo Grimond announced that the Liberal Party would stand candidates in every constituency in the England, Scotland and Wales at the next election - making it explicitly clear that the party had no intention of entering the next election in a pact with Labour. The repercussions of this announcement were most significant in Yorkshire where Lib-Lab electoral cooperation had first been pioneered by Hugh Gaitskell in Leeds as early as 1958 before expanding across the County long before the parties agreed to national cooperation in 1964. Grimond’s determination to maintain the Liberal Party’s independent identity would rip the Yorkshire organisation apart. The better part of the local party resisting the national party’s demands to organise separately from Labour as it instead broke away from the Liberal Party entirely and moved into close alliance with Labour – resulting in the effective defection of 13 MPs from the Liberals to Labour.
Left to Right: Roy Jenkins and Jeremy Thorpe
Had Hugh Gaitskell and many of his closest allies not be so closely associated with events in Yorkshire, it might have been possible for the coalition to survive these shocks. Instead the Liberal-Labour Coalition collapsed on an early April evening that the media dubbed ‘’the Night of the Long Knives’’. With the Conservatives showing a willingness to work renew their history of cooperation with the Liberals, Grimond moved to shunt Labour out of government and side line the Orange Liberals within his own party. As the coalition was dissolved and Labour ministers expelled from the government several leading Oranges were sacked with the Chancellor, James Callaghan, the most prominent victim. With the government gutted of ministers several younger members of the Liberal Party had the opportunity to rise up the ranks with the bombastic Jeremy Thorpe becoming Chancellor and the moderate Orange, Roy Jenkins becoming Foreign Secretary as the leadership offered the left wing of the party a concession.
One of the greatest achievements of the Liberal government after it moved into a minority administration in 1967 was the peace agreement it reached in Cyprus – bringing an end to a war that had raged between British authorities and both Greek and Turkish guerrillas, who in turn also fought one another, since the early 1950s. The peace accords created an independent state, existing within the Commonwealth and with large permanent British military bases on its territory, which attempted to unite the two communities in peace.
In the Far East, the war in Indonesia intensified through the mid to late 1960s. Through the 1960s the Americans became involved on an ever grander scale in the War in Indonesia and brought several other states into the conflict – Korea, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Japan all agreeing to send troops to Indonesia whist having been sucked into the conflict by incursions into their own territory both Australia and Malaysia became involved in military actions in Indonesian territory. Despite the overwhelming fire power of the anti-Communist coalition, the Communist insurgents appeared impossible to defeat – their audacious offensive across several cities in Java (the part of the country deemed safest from the rebels by the Americans and their allies) in the Summer of 1968 only accentuated just how far the Americans were from victory. With popular opinion both within the States and internationally turning firmly against the American war effort the future appeared bright for revolutionaries in South East Asia, despite decades of struggle.
Closer to home, the era’s promise of change, and the example of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement in the Unites States, inspired Northern Ireland’s Catholic community in a Civil Rights Movement of their own as the mistreatment of Catholics by the Protestant controlled Stormont regime was opposed. As the movement grew more influential in the last years of the 1960s reprisals from the almost entirely Protestant, Royal Ulster Constabulary as well as independently organised paramilitaries became more frequent and more violent. With the IRA largely dormant since its defeats in the late 1950s and early 1960s the Catholic community appeared defenceless from the very real prospect of violent pogroms. Meanwhile, even as elements of the Protestant community, pressurised by the Liberal government in London, attempted to seek some sort of reform that would preserve social peace in the Six Counties others promised adamantly to ‘’Never Surrender’’. By the start of 1969 Northern Ireland appeared to be rapidly approaching violent intercommunal conflict.
Across the world 1968 is remembered as a year like no other. In Czechoslovakia the native Communist Party’s efforts to create ‘Socialism With a Human Face’ ended in tragedy as the Soviets invaded to topple the reforming regime and reaffirm their iron grip over Eastern Europe. In France the largest wild cat strike in world history saw 10,000,000 workers down tools across the country whilst riots in Paris brought the Gaullist regime to the brink of collapse. In China the Cultural Revolution was in full swing – acting as a point of inspiration for many disillusioned with the mechanistic authoritarianism of Soviet Communism. In Egypt and Syria Ba’athist Arab Nationalists seized power in the spring as left wing officers seized upon popular protest against their regimes to take power. Just months later British forces were involved in a counter-coup in Cairo that, for the second time in a little over a decade, put the conservative British-backed elite back in power in Egypt. In the Western world the student demonstrations that rocked the world in 1968 marked the birthplace of many ‘new social movements’, including environmentalism, gay liberation and a new, militant, wave of feminism, as national forces capable of profoundly changing society.
From the end of the Second World War until the latter 1960s the people of Britain had enjoyed an extraordinary period of rapidly rising standards of living coupled with job security as the country remained close to near employment throughout the era. During this long period, with the notable exception of the Steel Workers’ Strike of 1951, the trade unions had been comparatively docile with mutually acceptable compromise far more common than industrial action. Yet, as incomes and job security started to come under threat from the late 1960s this long age of industrial peace came to an end. The most lasting image of 1968 in Britain was to be a series of large scale industrial actions during the summer that saw strikers and police clash violently on a number of occasions. Notably, although pushing hard and unswervingly to achieve the aims of union members, the Communist Party, theoretically committed to violent class struggle and revolution, joined with Labour and Liberal trade unionists in denouncing violence as counterproductive to workers’ interests.
A small group of no more than a dozen youthful ultra-leftist Communist dissidents left the CPGB in September 1968 having been disillusioned by the refusal of the party to ‘take the class struggle to the next step’ – armed struggle – and formed the Popular Army. Like a number of similar urban guerrilla groups forming around the developed world the Popular Army turned towards terrorism and ultra-violence as, just like Anarchist terrorists at the turn of the century, they attempted to rouse the masses to revolutionary through acts of extreme violence. Britain would become closely acquainted with the Popular Army as a series of bombings, robberies and shoot outs between November 1968 and February 1969 announced their arrival. Although denounced by the Communist Party, elements of the party clearly held some degree of sympathy with the PA – pushing the CPGB ever further beyond the pale of respectability for all those outside its immediate milieu.
Congratulations Antonine Grimond, you've just handed the next election to Powell on a silver platter.
Also, about time Thorpe and Jenkins showed up.
Also, about time Thorpe and Jenkins showed up.
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