Post by spanishspy on Mar 3, 2016 7:16:02 GMT
Preface: This timeline was originally written as a project for an English class, then posted to alternatehistory.com on May 9th, 2013. This timeline won the 2014 Turtledove Award for Best New Speculative.
THE RISE OF THE TRI-STATE WORLD ORDER: A TIMELINE OF ORWELL'S 1984
BY SPANISHSPY
BY SPANISHSPY
In 1939, the year before the dawn of the Second World War, the Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, both eagerly signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in Moscow, its name coming from the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov. The plan detailed the invasion of the Second Polish Republic under President Ignacy Moscicki, a country under the desires of both countries. The two had Poland surrounded.
As it became clear to the international community, the two powers were preparing for an inevitable invasion, an invasion the United Kingdom and France were not willing to permit happen under their watch. The First World War had forever destroyed the old world order, and the empires of Western Europe worked to ensure their place in the sun would continue for as long as possible. The three nations met before the invasion, and signed a pact promising Poland assistance if it were invaded.
However, one of the British delegates insisted on a secret clause that would not be revealed to the public, but known to the government: one that mandated help against Germany but not the Soviet Union. President Moscicki’s government strongly opposed such a clause, and, citing a 1921 agreement with the French, reminded them of their commitment to Polish independence. Britain eventually backed down on this clause.
The Invasion of Poland
A week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East and West, respectively. Hitler and Stalin were confident in their perceptions that Britain and France would not intervene, and for a few crucial weeks they were right. The Germans overwhelmed the western part of the country, forcing a Polish shift eastward. The Soviet forces succeeded in destroying the Polish eastern defenses, and by the end of September, Poland ceased to exist as an independent nation.
During this war, France and Britain declared war on both Germany and the Soviet Union, but were unable to provide any significant aid. However, the Polish government in exile succeeded in evacuating to Angers, France, and committed to liberating their homeland. Britain and France were determined to keep their promises and defeat the menaces coming from the east.
The Axis forces in Poland were quick to celebrate their victory, culminating in a joint military parade in Warsaw. The Polish themselves were given no say in their treatment, and the country was abused like no other in history. Citizens of Poland were murdered in the streets, their possessions looted, their homes ransacked. It is estimated 95,000 Poles died in the invasion, a body count, while horrifying in itself, would be eclipsed by the wider war that would ensue.
1939-1940: The Continental War
In November 1939, an anxious France and Britain were busy fortifying the area of Alsace-Lorraine in northeastern France. It was clear that an invasion of the area would take place soon, as it was one of Hitler’s goals to retake the area ceded to France after the Treaty of Versailles. However, a prelude to the invasion of France was taking place to the north, in freezing Finland.
That month, Soviet forces invaded Finland in an attempt to regain the territory lost by the Russian Empire after the Great War, namely the entire country, and to ensure one of their largest cities, Leningrad, was safe from enemy attack. The Soviets, taking cues from the Germans, launched a blitzkrieg-style invasion through the country, making a mad dash for Helsinki to decapitate the Finnish State.
However, a treaty negotiated between Finland and Sweden to defend the Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea had taken effect in October, to ward off potential German and Soviet aggression. Swedish forces made themselves available to the supreme commander of the Finnish armies, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, and positioned themselves around Helsinki. On November 13th, 1939, Soviet forces under the command of Kirill Meretskov came into line of sight of the Finnish capital and began to lay siege.
Finnish independence seemed dire at this point, but the British and French, eager to help what they saw as a fight against an entity whose values were antithetical to their own. As Sweden had already entered the war on Finland’s behalf, such a country was considered an ally. As such, the British and French believed landing troops at Narvik, a city in neutral Norway, would be taken in good faith by the Norwegian government.
This was not the case. The Norwegian government, under Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold, objected to the Franco-British force landing in Narvik. These objections took the form of a battalion of Norwegian troops at the port which immediately began firing on the Allied force as it arrived. The British and French destroyed the Norwegian force and moved into the Swedish city of Kiruna, with plans to move into the Finnish city of Rovaniemi to aid against the Soviet Union.
Prime Minister Nygaardsvold appealed to the German and Soviet governments to aid Norway against the British and French, widely seen as aggressors in the country. To solidify Nygaardsvold’s proposal, Hitler called a conference of Axis and Axis-aligned leaders in Stuttgart, Germany, to sign a defensive pact to counter what they perceived as British and French aggression. Ultimately, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini of Italy, Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, Caudillo Francisco Franco of Spain, Prime Minister Antonio Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, and Nygaardsvold. Salazar, previously a neutral dictator, had leaned decidedly in the favor of the Axis, and as such agreed to attend. Under Hitler’s proposal, the agreement at Stuttgart would be an extension of the Pact of Steel signed between Germany and Italy in May of 1939. Seeing as the pact’s countries spread from Iberia from the west to the Pacific in the East, Stalin proposed that the pact be known as the Eurasian Treaty of Defense and Cooperation. The leaders of the various nations agreed.
On New Year’s Day, 1940, Germany sent a force into Denmark, forcing the government in Copenhagen to submit to Nazi dominance. Danish Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning was forcibly made to cooperate, doing so out of hope of safeguarding Danish democracy. The Stauning government obeyed German orders to ban the Danish Communist Party and pro-Communist speech, and allowed the Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine access to the port at Copenhagen.
The invasion of Denmark was only a stepping stone for German assistance to Norway against the British and French, now occupying Narvik to ensure a safe route into Sweden and Finland. A German division of the Wehrmacht under the command of General Leonhard Kaupisch was shipped from Copenhagen to Oslo and sent north, in cooperation with Norwegian forces, to retake Narvik and deny the British and French the necessary route to fight the Soviet Union.
In January 1940, the first British and French forces under Field Marshal Harold Alexander arrived in Helsinki, holding strong despite the constant battery by the Red Army. General Meretskov, the commander of the Soviet forces in the area, had special orders from Stalin to take the city by 1940, and that engaging British and French forces was absolutely necessary if they intervened. Meretskov took heed and ordered saboteurs to frustrate the Allied advance. This succeeded only moderately, damaging some vehicles but causing no deaths except one crash in Helsinki proper, with a death toll of three.
The arrival of the Allies in Helsinki reduced the disparity in numbers between the Finnish forces under Mannerheim and the Red Army, but the Finnish were still vastly outnumbered. To counter the better-trained Allied forces now stationed in Helsinki, Stalin ordered Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov to bring his more elite forces to aid in the final capture of the Finnish capital. When Zhukov arrived, he ordered the creation of the improvised incendiary device, previously manufactured by only Finnish partisans, known as a “Molotov Cocktail,” after the Soviet foreign minister, notorious for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Soviet soldiers in Finland were also trained to manufacture these devices on demand to counter surprise attacks from Finnish partisans and the Allied armies.
Using guerilla tactics in imitation of Finnish partisan groups, Soviet troops used the Molotov cocktail, called the ‘Helsinki Cocktail’ by the Soviets themselves, to ambush Allied convoys. A small brigade was dispatched by Zhukov to the areas northwest of Helsinki to further heckle the Allied advancements. In March of 1940, the Germans and Norwegians succeeded in holding Narvik against several Allied attacks, cutting off the British and French forces in Kiruna from much needed reinforcements, meaning the Soviets only had to play a waiting game to eliminate the Allied forces in Sweden.
Sure enough, the Soviet capture of Helsinki in May 1940 occurred after half the city was burned by Soviet and Finnish Molotov cocktails applied liberally. The Finnish government capitulated and surrendered on the 27th of that month, and the Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic, under the premiership of Finnish Communist leader and Soviet sympathizer Arvo Tuominen, was admitted to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Finland as an independent nation was no more. A Sami Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was also established in the northern part of the Republic.
German and Norwegian forces, in conjunction with the Soviet capture of Helsinki, succeeded in securing Narvik by the end of May, accomplishing a pressing Axis goal: the cutting off of the Allied forces in Kiruna from aid from their home countries. Sweden, now isolated, began to seriously question its interest in being in a war in which it was surrounded by hostile territory and in the beginning of June of 1940, sent ambassadors to Oslo, Berlin, and Moscow asking for recognition of Swedish neutrality in exchange for Swedish recognition of the Soviet claim in Finland. A minor conference of Axis leaders in Copenhagen accepted, and Sweden withdrew from the war.
As victory parades rang through the streets of Oslo and Helsinki, Stalin and Hitler were beginning the transfer of Soviet and German troops from Finland, Norway, and Denmark into the Saarland region of Germany. Norwegian, Danish, and Polish troops loyal to the new government also gathered in the region. Simultaneously, Benito Mussolini ordered the positioning of the Italian military, battle-hardened from Ethiopia, into the Italian region of Piedmont, basing them in the city of Turin. Caudillo Francisco Franco of Spain also ordered Spanish forces, with a sizable Portuguese contingent attached to them, in Catalonia and Aragon near the Pyrenees. On June 3rd, 1940, the Axis began the invasion of France.
The Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish attacked first in an attempt to draw the French forces from the north of the country. The troops from Iberia ransacked Perpignan and captured Toulouse, while the Italians seized Nice and then Avignon. The French government under Prime Minister Paul Reynaud and President Albert Francois Lebrun ordered a majority of their forces to the south, assuming that the Germans and Soviets were still occupied in Scandinavia and Poland. This was an assumption that would prove to be incorrect.
On June 10th, 1940, German, Soviet, and their allies’ forces mobilized from the Saarland into Alsace-Lorraine, moving into poorly-defended Metz. From there, the German and Soviet forces moved westward towards Reims, a city with a token defense. After overwhelming the city, leaving it in ruins, the Axis force moved westwards towards their central objective: Paris.
Even with British forces arriving from the French port of Calais and Dunkirk across the English Channel, Paris fell to the Axis forces before the British arrived. With the French army and government in shambles, their leaders held hostage by the occupying forces in Paris, Toulouse, and Avignon, the British, too late to be of any assistance, had to return to Dunkirk for evacuation. German and Soviet air forces, based in Paris in the meantime, began to bombard their retreat. The British, along with the remnants of the French military, lost several hundred soldiers and vehicles, but was successful in evacuating.
After the installation of Philippe Petain as the leader of a puppet French government, German and Soviet forces under the command of Gerd von Rundstedt and Georgy Zhukov began a strategic redeployment of their assets in Paris to the northern coast of France, establishing several airfields in the area. On June 30th, 1940, the first Axis bombing of Britain took place, bombing several airfields and port facilities in the south of England. An invasion, codenamed Operation Sealion, was proposed by the German general staff, but was vetoed by Soviet authorities, claiming the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force still had air and naval superiority in the English Channel, and that a concentrated air campaign over England would be enough to drive the mighty empire into submission. This was eventually accepted by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, and ground forces in northern France were converted to a purely defensive force.
Another Soviet veto of Luftwaffe strategic propositions was a proposed concentration on civilian targets, specifically London. The Soviet air forces demanded that Germany assist them in destroying all British airbases, and then London could be considered. By August, the former goal was achieved: RAF capability to defend the channel was nonexistent; Britain’s only hope being ground-based anti-air forces based throughout England.
On August 14th, 1940, the first bombing of London occurred, despite heavy anti-air deployment by the British Army. Within a week, bombing runs had severely damaged the Palace of Westminster and Buckingham Palace, symbols of British national identity. By September, the majority of the city was in ruins, but the British still were able to muster enough anti-air guns and fighters to defend themselves. A stalemate would occur for the next several months.
While the war in Britain and France was raging, the German high echelons decided that they trusted the Soviet Union enough to reveal one of the Reich’s most secret projects: the Uranprojekt, a top-secret plan dedicated to the construction of a bomb based on the theoretical blast yield of the nuclear fission of uranium. Stalin himself personally hosted a meeting in Moscow with the top German nuclear scientists Kurt Diebner, Abraham Esau, Walther Gerlach, and Erich Schumann. By June, a joint bomb project was agreed upon, and uranium mines were discovered in the Karelian region in northwestern Russia, which provided a large amount of radioactive material in addition to those controlled by the Germans. Their work would continue in Moscow for several years.
The United States and Latin America, 1939-1941
The United States, during the war raging in Europe, was a confused, divided nation on whether to intervene in Europe or not. Many groups, often of leftist leanings, opposed any intervention in the European war, chief among them the Communist Party of the United States of America, led by General Secretary Earl Browder, despite being arrested and imprisoned in 1939 on allegations of being a Soviet spy. Other left-wing organizations, toeing the Moscow line, did the same.
However, the opposition was on the polar opposite of the Communists: the Silver Shirts, a Fascist party led by William Dudley Pelley. Formerly a supporter of isolationism and an admirer of Adolf Hitler, Pelley came to demand intervention in Britain’s favor after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the invasions of Poland, Finland, and France. Pelley also demanded friendly relations with the Empire of Japan, saying they were “a superior race worthy of sharing the globe with the United States and the British Empire.” This position was unpopular with the American public, but after the fall of France Silver Shirt popularity shot up, with hundreds upon thousands of new members joining in a fear of the decline of Western civilization.
By mid-1940, the invasion of France, Pelley had become a nationally recognized figure, judged to be in importance of a similar stature to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Pelley, an ardent opponent of the New Deal, announced his candidacy in the elections of 1940. Initially, either Roosevelt or his opponent, Wendell Willkie, were forecasted to win the election, as all Presidents since the American Civil War were either Republican, as was Willkie, or Democrat, as was Roosevelt.
However, the system dramatically changed when the Communist Party of the United States openly endorsed the Soviet and German invasion of France, giving a significant boost of support to Pelley’s campaign, now with a Vice Presidential candidate of Charles Lindbergh. By August, another Communist endorsement of the destruction of the British Empire caused even more people to flock to the Silver Shirts. Posters released by the Communists showing photographs of the burning Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster only galvanized the American public into thinking the Eurasian Pact of Defense and Cooperation was merely a Communist front to destroy Western civilization as they knew it.
By November 1940, Pelley’s campaign was among the largest in the nation, surpassing the Republican campaign by several thousand voters, with only the Democratic campaign posing any threat to the White House. As the nation headed to the polls, Pelley continued his massive advertising in a final push for the Presidency. By the end of the day, the results were announced via radio throughout the country: Pelley had won by a small margin.
In one of the most divisive elections in American history, Pelley ascended to the White House in pompous celebration, members of the Silver Shirts lined up in a massive rally in what Pelley deemed a “rebirth of freedom for this nation.” Pelley’s inaugural speech celebrated the contributions of the United States towards the glory that was Western civilization, saying his nation was “the new Rome,” which was by its duty the savior of its kind via the destruction of the influences of Jews, Communists, minorities, and other influences deemed unpatriotic.
One of Pelley’s earliest acts as president was to call the Japanese ambassador, Kichisaburo Nomura, in Washington to the White House to propose a treaty of amity and commerce between the two nations, both of which Pelley deemed among the inheritors of the globe. Reversing the policy of the Roosevelt administration, Pelley reached out to the Japanese and ensured that they would always have access to American oil supplies. Nomura happily agreed and relayed the treaty to the Japanese foreign ministry. The ministry relayed it again to Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, who signed the treaty under the orders of Emperor Hirohito. Japan was given a free hand in China and the Pacific, so long as it did not interfere with American holdings in Hawaii and the Philippines.
Despite his anti-Semitic rhetoric, Pelley knew better than to alienate the Jewish population in the United States, and did not force the country into yet another form of segregation, content to leave Jews to their own devices. The reason for this lack of action was due to one Jew in particular, one who had fled Germany in 1933 to escape persecution: the renowned physicist Albert Einstein.
Einstein’s theories of relativity provided massive insights into the inner workings of the atom, workings which, Pelley had heard, were already being exploited by the Germans. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian refugee, had informed the United States government in 1939, but was ignored. Pelley heeded his warnings, and began the commencement of the American atomic bomb program in June 1940.
Under Pelley, the military-industrial complex of the nation was heightened significantly, with factories going up all across the nation. Oil exploitation was increased within the country substantially and mining as well. The discovery of uranium in Pennsylvania and parts of New England gave them hope; the discovery of an even larger deposit to the north, in Ontario, gave Pelley even more.
As Britain was battered by the Eurasian (a term slowly seeping into the public lexicon, replacing the older ‘Axis’) air forces, Pelley offered the British government, led by Neville Chamberlain, a deal: Britain would allow American government agencies to begin extracting uranium from Ontario and also permit the United States cheaper prices on oil and other minerals, and in exchange the US would pass a ‘Lend-Lease Act’ to provide the United Kingdom with arms with which they would defend themselves. Chamberlain, not realizing what else he could do, signed the agreement. American prospectors came flooding over the Canadian border into Ontario.
The Pelley administration’s foreign policy in regards to its neighbors in Latin America was one heavily inspired by the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, a man Pelley felt was one of the more qualified presidents the nation had had so far. “Speak softly and carry a big stick” was yet again a motto of American foreign policy, one which Pelley used to justify alliances with questionable regimes, such as Edelmiro Julian Farrell of Argentina (with his vice president Juan Peron), Getulio Vargas of Brazil, and Manuel Avila Camacho of Mexico, the last of which Pelley negotiated a monopoly of the purchase of Mexican oil by the United States. In return, Avila would have United States troops at his disposal should an uprising occur against PRI (Partido de Revolucion Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, his own party) rule.
Pelley found an excuse (one found somewhat justifiable even by his detractors) to intervene in Mexico after the discovery of a German spy ring among Mexican newspapers promoting a pro-Axis viewpoint in the Mexican media. Pelley, understandably, was outraged, and sent a squadron of the American army into Mexico to root out the spies. Since these soldiers were based in Mexico City, the nation’s capital, the Mexican public became gradually outraged as the American army intruded into Mexican newspaper offices and executed suspected spies without trial.
The Mexican opposition to American intervention eventually led to a small rebellion within the confines of Mexico City, in which the American base was attacked with Molotov cocktails, the implicit comparison being that Mexico was being subjugated by the United States as Finland was being subjugated by the Soviet Union. The American Army quelled the uprising and forced Avila to sign a defensive treaty with the United States ensuring that Mexico would fight alongside the United States in any war either entered. This downright exploitation of the Mexican state led to one of the major Mexico City newspapers to dub Pelley Avila’s “Hermano Mayor,” or “Big Brother,” in English.
Upon hearing the epithet, Pelley found the name a perfect personification of his administration. Posters cropped up in American factories and ports proclaiming the brilliance of Big Brother Pelley’s administration. This moniker was initially mocked by the American newspapers and radio hosts, but such talk soon quieted after their offices were greeted by members of the Silver Legion.
Eastern Asia and the Pacific, 1940-1941
After the reception of the treaty with the United States in 1940, Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe heeded the recommendations of Army Minister Hideki Tojo to expand the war in China by several thousand men and armored vehicles, using oil provided by the United States to mobilize their massive army. The Second Sino-Japanese War had dragged on for years now, and Tojo, Konoe, and Emperor Hirohito were looking for a swift end. Tojo, who had previously backed an alliance with Germany and Italy, now supported the conquest of China by Japan itself, and to avoid antagonizing the Soviet Union.
The Japanese, aided by their puppet in Manchukuo (occupied Manchuria), were militarily superior to the ragtag assortment of the alliance of the nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang-Kai Shek, and the Chinese Communist Party, led Mao Zedong, who had agreed to put aside their differences to resist the Japanese. With the aid given by the United States, several of the pro-Chinese American volunteer brigades officially renounced their citizenship and adopted Chinese nationality. Pelley declared these forces personas non gratae in their homeland.
Battle after battle occurred in the entire country, and the Japanese pushed on while constantly triumphing over the Chinese. A meeting held between Mao and Chiang about their near-constant defeats led to violence between their two factions in the western city of Xining, leading to the collapse of the united front. Severe Chinese infighting occurred in the western regions of the country, allowing the Japanese to have firm control of the eastern part of the country by the beginning of 1941.
The Japanese then set their sights on the Dutch East Indies, an act that the United States tacitly endorsed so long as British and American holdings were not touched. The Japanese began a concentrated assault on the Dutch portions of Borneo and Sarawak, keeping careful not to attack British North Borneo or British Malaya. The Netherlands, neutral in the European war, was successfully able to divert most of its resources to the defense of the Dutch East Indies. The Kriegsmarine ordered all German U-boats to avoid Dutch shipping boats.
In February 1941, the Japanese government declared that the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere would no longer permit any more undue European influence in the area, but would recognize the holdings of French Indochina, British Malaya, the American Philippines, and the colonial holdings in the Pacific. The Australian and New Zealand governments, both loyal to Britain and committing troops to the war in Europe, expressed relief in the Japanese pronouncement.
The Grand Convergence, 1942-1945
By the dawn of 1942, the war in Britain was in a stalemate. Enough American arms were reaching Britain to defend against German and Soviet bombardment, but the Eurasian Alliance had enough men and resources to continue pounding the island and prohibiting an invasion of France; Britain was in too dire straits to consider anything other than defense. Even so, President Pelley never ceased arms shipments, citing a fear of Communist encroachment in the Western Hemisphere.
The German Kriegsmarine had several hundred submarines patrolling the English Channel, the North Sea, and the eastern Atlantic Ocean to prevent British evacuation and arms shipments from the Commonwealth. Several ships from the United States were permitted, as Eurasian governments had merely thought the Lend-Lease Act to Britain was a ruse, a simple sign of halfhearted sympathy with their former colonial masters. The Eurasian powers saw the United States as too isolationist in spirit to care whether Britain or the Eurasian alliance would win. They would be sorely mistaken.
On February 2, 1942, the U.S.S. Arizona was sent en route to the United Kingdom, bearing weapons shipments and several American military attachés to evaluate the British army. On February 4th, when it was approaching the United Kingdom, it was sunk by a German submarine under the command of Kapitanleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, not realizing it bore the flag and insignia of the United States Navy until it was sunken. Lemp then hurriedly reported to Berlin, pleading for an official apology to Washington in hopes of provoking the United States. Hitler made no such apology; he viewed a war with the United States as inevitable, and did nothing to stop it.
Pelley was outraged when he found out the Eurasian pact handwaved away American military might, and asked Congress (now controlled mostly by supporters of the Silver Legion) for a declaration of war. The resolution was passed nearly unanimously, with Jeanette Rankin of Montana, a Republican, the sole dissenter (Rankin later died under suspicious circumstances and was replaced by the pro-Silver Legion Jacob Thorkelson). The United States and several Latin American countries, united in a defensive pact with the Pelley administration, declared war on Germany, the Soviet Union, and the other minor members of the Eurasian pact. Several ships began sending American and Latin American soldiers into Britain, whose government had relocated to Edinburgh.
By the time Allied forces had reached Edinburgh, most of England was in ruins, with pockmarks of resistance to Eurasian bombing in several areas, most importantly in the city of Colchester, home of a makeshift Royal Air Force base. An American expeditionary force sent from Edinburgh in April 1942 attempted to reach Colchester and reestablish British government control there survived with only a fraction of the original force making it to the city.
British forces were also aided by the Anglo-French force formerly based in Kiruna which, having fought its way through Eurasian-allied Norway, had stolen several ships from Narvik and made its way through the North Sea to Scotland. Of the five ships commandeered, three survived constant submarine attacks. Even damaged, the army designed to aid the Finnish and had failed still provided a boon to the defenses of Edinburgh, which was beginning to see the first Eurasian bombers.
Throughout 1942 and into 1943, this murky status quo persisted, with England being ever more pelted by Eurasian bombers. The first sign of change, to the detriment of the Allies, was the complete defeat of the Armja Krajowa, a resistance movement in Poland against German and Soviet forces with loyalties to the Polish government-in-exile now based in Edinburgh, fleeing to London after the fall of France, and relocated with the British government. A small cadre of Armja Krajowa soldiers was able to flee in a boat, disguised as a civilian transport ship, from Gdansk and arrived on the east coast of Scotland. Their leader was a Jewish partisan by the name of Emmanuel Goldstein.
Upon arrival in Edinburgh, Goldstein immediately demanded to see the British Prime Minister, now Winston Churchill, and the American commander, General George Marshall, with two of his senior staff Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Patton. At a highly secured meeting, Goldstein carried news and photographic evidence of the sheer barbarism of the regimes that made up the Eurasian Alliance: the Final Solution of Nazi Germany. In it, the Jews of Poland were being rounded up and killed in death camps all throughout Poland as part of the racial theories of Adolf Hitler, and undertaken with apathy from the Soviet Union, with German racial scientists basing their methods off of the Soviet gulag for political prisoners. Churchill and Marshall were appalled, at first denying that humans were incapable of such cruelty. However, Goldstein’s abundant photographical evidence, with no apparent tampering, forced them to conclude that such barbarism was indeed occurring.
When the evidence of the concentration camps in Poland was released to the public, a massive surge in pro-war sentiment occurred in Britain and the United States. Anti-Semitism became rapidly discredited, and even Pelley, formerly an outspoken anti-Semite, struck all references to Jews being evil from official government and Silver Legion documents, albeit such views were often still held in private. This marked a fundamental change in the character of the Allied war effort; it had now become a war for the very fabric of Western civilization.
Goldstein was quickly accepted as a military figure by the Polish government-in-exile, his experience with fighting the Eurasian pact unmatched among the former bureaucrats. By late 1943, he had risen to the position of Polish President-in-exile, and called for the liberation of Europe from Fascist and Communist governments. Goldstein tried to lobby the Allied high command to try to invade France, but it was concluded that the Eurasian forces would be able to resist any current capable offensive, and that England was at the time a more pressing concern.
In 1943, British atomic scientists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls approached the American atomic program, currently testing in desolate areas of the American southwest, with new information on the nature of atomic chain reactions. The Americans, already well on their way towards mastering the atom, were ecstatic upon learning of these breakthroughs. By March 1944, the Americans had detonated their first implosion-based device in New Mexico. Pelley and Churchill demanded mass production of these weapons in case of escalation by the Eurasian pact. American scientists responded that they would need at least another year to have a bomb large enough to destroy a city; the two leaders gave them that time.
Unbeknownst to the Allies, the Eurasian pact was well on its way to manufacturing its own bombs, having tested some small nuclear devices in Siberia. Kurt Diebner, the head of the project and based in Moscow, reported to the heads of state of the Eurasian pact that a bomb would be ready by early 1945. Hitler and Stalin were both pleased and gave them access to additional war material for their construction.
The German Defection, 1945-1947
It was known to many high-ranking leaders in all the nations of the Eurasian pact that, despite being allies against a common foe, Germany and the Soviet Union trusted each other very little. Stalin derided Hitler as a bourgeoisie reactionary; Hitler eventually desired the lands of the Soviet Union for colonization by ethnic Germans. It was only a matter of time before the two powers would come to blows; it was only a question of who would start the war between them.
It was obvious to the German high command that Britain, despite her American backers, was not a significant threat to German national security. Knowing this, Hitler proposed the initiation of Operation Barbarossa, a surprise German attack on all Soviet forces stationed in Germany, France, and Poland, with the objective of entirely defeating the Soviet Union. Despite the objections of his generals, the German leadership ultimately approved the resolution.
On March 8th, 1945, the Wehrmacht forces stationed in those countries spontaneously attacked the Red Army garrisons. Luftwaffe forces were also ordered to engage Soviet forces in France. Fighting broke out in Alsace-Lorraine, Paris, and various parts of Poland. The Fascist states in Europe were pleased with the possibility of eliminating the Soviet Union, and declared war as well.
Despite the shock advantage, the Red Army was both larger and well-equipped, not least due to weapons deals made with Germany before Barbarossa. Soviet Forces proved to best their German opposite numbers, destroyed factories and civilian centers, and began terrorizing the territory of the Reich. Under General Georgy Zhukov, the Red Army garrisons in Poland marched directly to Berlin, causing a mass evacuation of the German leadership to Hamburg.
As the Red Army encircled Hamburg, a proposal by Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop became popular among several Reich officials in Hitler’s cabinet: an armistice with the Allies and evacuation to the British Isles. Hitler himself was outraged by the possibility, and Heinrich Himmler was not amused either. However, support came from Chief Architect Albert Speer and Finance Minister Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. Eventually, as the Red Army came ever closer to dominating Germany, Himmler had a change of heart and backed the pro-evacuation faction, and arranged for Hitler’s death in an “artillery strike” (in reality a planted charge detonated by War Minister Wilhelm Keitel). With Hitler out of the way, Himmler, as acting Fuhrer und Reichskanzler, authorized Ribbentrop to negotiate with the Allies.
When Ribbentrop arrived in Edinburgh, the rest of England still mostly wasteland, Churchill was not sure what to make of the proposal, while George Patton, one of the American commanders, eagerly supported it. George Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower were similar to Churchill in the regard that the plan was to be considered, as was British commander Bernard Montgomery. Emmanuel Goldstein, President of the Polish government-in-exile, vehemently opposed the possibility, having suffered firsthand in Auschwitz concentration camp.
In September of 1945, the Edinburgh-Hamburg deal was signed between Churchill and Ribbentrop, with Goldstein, Patton, Marshall, Eisenhower, and Montgomery in attendance. The treaty offered for the evacuation of German assets to Scotland with the intent of liberating England. Germany would cease submarine operations against American and British shipping, and would also cease the overt government-sponsored treatment of Jews and Poles (as insisted, quite adamantly, by Goldstein). The Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe would be allowed to operate in British territory and bases with the understanding they would defend Britain. Himmler agreed once given the treaty.
By January of 1946, the entirety of the German government and the remnants of the German armed forces, in addition to thousands of civilians, had successfully relocated to Scotland, living in camps around Edinburgh and Glasgow. Massive protests on the part of British soldiers and workers, in addition to those from American soldiers, broke out, calling Churchill a traitor to Western civilization. Churchill is on record as saying that “If Hitler had invaded Hell, I would at least have made a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
As the Reich government evacuated from Germany proper, one small portion of the German war effort was effectively captured by the Soviet Union: the joint nuclear program based in Moscow. Kurt Diebner, the project’s head, was forced to submit to the Soviet Union and declared his allegiance to the Worker’s State. As the program had previously yielded workable bombs, it was only a matter of time before this war redefined the very definition of the word.
As the Soviet Union came to dominate Germany, they gained access to the island of Peenemunde in the Baltic Sea, one of the most important German weapons development centers in the war. Upon its capture by the Red Army, Chief Reich rocket scientist Wernher von Braun surrendered the island and agreed to cooperate with Eurasian forces. Von Braun allowed the Soviet Union access to Reich rocket programs, designs which were found with great interest by Georgy Zhukov, the Red Army general supervising the extraction of war material from the island.
Zhukov proffered the designs to the Soviet high command in Moscow, noting that the rocket designs found on Peenemunde, the V-1 and V-2, would be able to replace the bombers continually bombarding the United Kingdom. Stalin, upon hearing of the rockets’ discovery and extraction, immediately ordered the reassignment of the Red Air Force planes in France to be relocated to Germany as soon as a substantial amount of rockets could be positioned on the English Channel.
At the dawn of 1947, a congress of representatives of the Allied nations met in Saint John’s, the Dominion of Newfoundland, to discuss the formalization of the makeshift alliance of nations opposed to the Eurasian pact, or what remained of it after the German initiation of Operation Barbarossa. President Pelley called for a formal declaration of alliance similar to the Eurasian pact signed by Germany and the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war, a sentiment backed by Churchill. Delegates from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Newfoundland, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, the Dominion of South Africa, the Polish Government-in-Exile, the German Government-in-exile, and the French-government-in-exile discussed the possibility, and by the end of the conference, the Trans-Oceanic Defensive Pact was signed by those nations. The designation ‘Trans-Oceanic’ was created by Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, stating that “this pact has dominion over three oceans: the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Pacific. It is the defining characteristic of the combined aspects of these nations. It should be reflected in the name of the pact which cements our lofty goal.”
Continental Europe, 1947-1949
After the complete destruction of the German government and military at Hamburg, the Soviet Union became the dominant power in mainland Europe, with the largest army and most developed industry after pillaging Germany. As the Union basked in its triumph, Stalin declared that it was then the time to “liberate Europe from the clutches of the bourgeois Fascists and their lackeys in other countries,” in a nationalistic tone that went against his previous policies of Socialism in One Country. Asked about the discrepancy, Stalin is known to have replied that “the Polish debacle in the 1920s was a defeat for us. Now is a resounding victory and the most opportune time to do so. Let us.”
In late January of 1947, the Soviet Union announced the creation of the German, Polish, and French Soviet Socialist Republics as equal parts of the Union. The German communists, persecuted under the Third Reich, were now forced into power in the Republic’s provisional capital in Munich, as Berlin was already rubble, a shell of what once was a metropolis. In France, the communists, backed by the Red Army, overthrew the Petain government and executed Petain himself in public, making their capital in a war-weary but sufficiently intact Paris. In Poland, the absence of government allowed for a relatively quick establishment of a Socialist Republic under Premier Wladyslaw Gomulka.
In Czechoslovakia, previously occupied by the Germans, another Soviet Socialist Republic was established with a capital in Prague, under Premier Klement Gottwald. Additionally, an Austrian republic was established in what was the post-Great War Republic of Austria, administered from Vienna.
After the consolidation of Soviet gains, the Red Army proceeded to launch invasions of Norway, Denmark, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula, all Fascist states or those otherwise allied with the Third Reich during its brief existence. Denmark was an easy conquest, the Stauning government yielding to the Soviets much as they did to the Germans. Norway required harassment via captured German submarines now operated by the Red Navy, but was eventually made to submit.
Spain and Portugal were subject to a similar navy-based campaign due to the peculiarities of the geography of the Iberian Peninsula. The Pyrenees Mountains were considered nigh-impossible to cross, a commonly expressed sentiment being that Iberia was, in strategic effect, an island. To remedy this, the Red Army used captured German transport planes, previously lying unused in Luftwaffe airstrips abandoned after Barbarossa, to transport Red Army soldiers from Provence in France to Catalonia in Spain, where they met up with Spanish Republicans who had left to support the Soviets once they learned they were en route to the Peninsula.
However, the Soviet high command had no intention of mounting yet another bloody siege, be it of Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, or Oporto. Instead, Stalin ordered the deployment of the fruits of the Soviet nuclear program to be tested on Madrid and Lisbon. Bombs were transported from Karelia to Provence via the continent’s extensive rail networks and loaded onto bombers specifically designed for the task of ferrying nuclear bombs, massive as they were. On May 18th, 1947, the skies above the Spanish and Portuguese capitals lit brighter than the sun.
After the installation of socialist republics in both Spain and Portugal and the division of the former into various Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics based on the various ethnic groups in the country, with Galicia, Catalonia, Valencia, Navarre, the Basque Country, Andalusia, Aragon, the Balearic Islands, and the Canary Islands each receiving autonomous status within the Spanish republic. The Azores islands were also given autonomous status within the Portuguese republic.
Italy was treated in a similar matter. Rather than a direct invasion through the Alps, the Soviet Union dropped another nuclear bomb on the Eternal City, Rome, decimating the city and decapitating the Italian government, as both King Victor Emmanuel III and Prime Minister Benito Mussolini were in the city at its destruction. The Red Army then easily secured the Italian peninsula and annexed it into the Union.
It was at this time that Stalin declared that all of Europe would be incorporated into a massive pan-Eurasian socialist state, and issued ultimatums to all the European governments that they would join in this new government or die in the process. Communist guerillas in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Hungary decapitated their governments as ordered by Moscow and pledged their allegiance to a new Socialist state.
Switzerland refused the possibility of submission to this new government and began reinforcing the borders it had with Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. The Swiss Federal Council refused to permit any form of Soviet entrance into the country, extending said protection to the Principality of Liechtenstein. The Soviet Union did not feel threatened by the Swiss assertion of power; they simply dropped yet another nuclear bomb on Bern, and yet another on Geneva for good measure. Switzerland was then divided and its individual parts incorporated into Germany, France, or Italy, with the Romansh-speaking parts of the country going to Italy. Liechtenstein was given to Germany.
Sweden was an easy conquest, conducted with the simple act of relocating Soviet forces in Norway and Finland into Swedish borders. Despite the protestations of the Swedish government, the invasion continued, overwhelming the mostly British-supplied Swedish army. Stockholm was made the capital and its government publicly executed. A similar course of action was implemented in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
As the Soviet Union finished with its conquest of the European continent, an assembly of leaders from all the various Socialist Republics in Europe met in Moscow in October of 1947. By November, negotiations had ended and a final plan for European hegemony created. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more; its remnants, combined with the rest of Europe, from the Belarusian and Ukrainian border to the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean, English Channel, and North Sea were united into the Socialist State of Eurasia. Despite its lofty new name, Eurasia was in many ways a continuation of the Soviet hierarchy and power structure; there was absolutely no change in the leadership. Stalin still held the title of Premier and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Eurasia.
The Nuclear War, 1948-1951
In May 1948, after consolidating its gains, the Soviet Union began to reposition several of its V-1 and V-2 rockets on the coast of the English Channel in France, beginning a near-constant stream of rocket strikes onto England. The British government in Edinburgh pleaded to the United States to begin using its own nuclear weapons program in the war effort, seeing how Eurasia used them to great effect. The United States, still under Pelley, who had been reelected President in 1944 with no competition and looking to have the same happen in 1948, had indeed stockpiled several crude nuclear bombs in various locations in the American Southwest, and finally saw the necessity of using them. Several bombs were transported on Navy ships from Norfolk, Virginia, to Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, with the intention of dropping them on Eurasian cities.
On June 12th, 1948, an American bomber took off from an Edinburgh airport en route to France, currently under Eurasian control. As the plane flew over Paris, it unloaded its payload: the first nuclear bomb fielded by the Trans-Oceanic Defensive Pact was dropped on the capital of the French Socialist Republic. The bomber, flown by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, was successfully to evade Eurasian anti-air guns to retreat back to Scotland. Doolittle quickly became a hero in the eyes of the various peoples of the Oceanic Pact (a common shorthand form).
Stalin was outraged when informed of the Oceanic Pact’s nuclear bomb, and rapidly grew paranoid of the possibility of full-fledged nuclear end of civilization, especially Eurasian civilization (he cared little whether the ‘bourgeois oppressors’ survived or not; in fact, he would have most likely been overjoyed by the possibility). In retaliation, he authorized the nuclear bombing of Colchester, the final bastion of major resistance loyal to and with significant contact with Edinburgh in England. In October, the bomb was ready. Colchester went up in flames.
With the atomic bombing of Colchester a massive shock to the British public but not so to the Oceanic high command in Edinburgh, it became necessary to consider the possibility of the usage of nuclear weapons en masse. General Marshall refused to consider the immediate usage of nuclear bombs on Moscow to encourage the possibility of a peace settlement, but authorized the usage of nuclear weapons on other cities in the former Soviet Union to demonstrate the power of the American nuclear weapons program.
In accordance with Marshall’s authorization, Doolittle led several other bombers into continental Europe to begin a swift stroke to hopefully push Eurasia to surrender. Kiev, Warsaw, Minsk, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Helsinki were targeted, and all were transformed from thriving metropolis to radioactive wasteland. Stalin, not surprised by the measure, but with a country still obviously reeling from the bombings, ordered the transportation of several atomic bombs to the Pacific port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Once preliminary airfields were established, another wave of Soviet bombers took off, this time to the East.
On the morning of September 14th, 1948, the United States, still under the Pelley-Lindbergh administration, and Canada, under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, woke up to the atomic destruction of the cities of Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, Spokane, Olympia, Portland, Salem, Fresno, Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Anaheim. The United States and Canada were further galvanized into supporting the war effort, previously criticized by whatever anti-war activists that the Silver Legion had not yet suppressed.
In early 1949, a rogue detachment of American troops left Edinburgh against the orders of General Marshall in landing craft and headed towards the English Channel, landing in Normandy, a province in northern France. This small force of a few hundred American soldiers, the majority from the West Coast, specifically cities destroyed in the nuclear blasts and their surrounding areas, had the explicit intention of “marching through Eurasia and hang Uncle Joe himself.” They sustained casualties until reaching the port of Le Havre, where they were killed by Eurasian troops.
It was this failed “invasion” by a contingent of discontented Americans who most likely knew their attack would fail proved to the Allies in Edinburgh that the Eurasians were too well dug into France that any sort of invasion would succeed with the current Allied infrastructure. Knowing as such, the Allied high command relocated its efforts towards another, easier to reach goal: London.
The de jure capital of the United Kingdom was a city in ruins, albeit not to the extent of the radioactive Colchester. A small community of survivors clung to a bare existence in the wreckage, making their living off of subsistence farming and rummaging through the remains. In early 1950, a combined American, British, Commonwealth, and German force made its way to through the wasteland that was England to London, an area receiving a decreasing number of missile strikes for lack of anything worth destroying. The Allied force sent to reclaim the city found a population in starvation, having resorted to cannibalism of corpses some time in 1947 or 1948 – exact details are hard to extrapolate as the population found by the expeditionary force had regressed to a hunter-gatherer state.
As the Wehrmacht detachment was instrumental in surviving the expedition to London, the German government-in-exile received a surge in popularity among the war-weary British population, and among those in other Allied countries; even the American opinion was warming to them. Likewise, the opinion of the Churchill government was declining, as his handling of the reclamation of England relied too much on American and German troops; a famous picture showed the Stars and Stripes and the Reichskriegsflagge flying over the remnants of the Palace of Westminster; the Union Flag was obscured. Public opinion swung towards a more militaristic policy similar to those of the German government-in-exile lead by Fuhrer Heinrich Himmler, and a vote of no confidence in the remnant parliament forced new elections. One candidate promised the return to the glory days of the United Kingdom and the punishment of the Eurasians: Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists.
Since the Conservatives were discredited by their handling of the war and Labour complacent, the British Union of Fascists won the election in a massive landslide. At his inaugural ceremony, Mosley promised a “reclaimed England and a punished Eurasia.” Mosley later took a personal trip to the London Reconstruction Zone (as it was called), riding in an armored supply truck and escorted by a solely British contingent, giving him a significant boost in popularity domestically and provided a message to other Oceanic governments that he could be trusted as a reliable Prime Minister.
Present at Mosley’s inaugural ceremony were the leaders of a soldier’s fraternity rapidly gaining membership within the British Armed Forces: the British League of Fascist Warriors, a soldier’s arm of the British Union of Fascists. This group was a military arm of the BUF founded during the war to raise morale and support for the policies of the German government-in-exile. After the election of 1950, membership surged.
The BLFW was led by three charismatic soldiers: Michael Aaronson, an artillery commander from Yorkshire, England, Stanley Jones, an infantryman from Cardiff, and Maximilian Rutherford, a navy man from Leeds. These men, attracted by the ideals of National Socialism, formed their own portion of the BUF, being both pro-German and pro-American, referring to the American President as “Big Brother Pelley” in public speeches around Scotland and the reclaimed parts of England.
However, as the war dragged through 1950 and into 1951, it came to the realization of the Oceanic pact that Eurasia was simply too powerful to launch an invasion anywhere in Europe; France, the Low Countries, Norway, and Iberia were all heavily defended. It was also known it was Stalin’s government would never permit any sort of ceasefire; it was his expressed intent that this war’s intent was to liberate all Europe from bourgeois control; Britain was the final stronghold of the old ways in the continent.
Upon coming to this realization, Mosley, in a speech played via film in several Oceanic Pact countries, acknowledged that the Oceanic Pact, despite its vast resources, had not the ability to gain any sort of foothold in continental Europe. Instead, Mosley proposed that the majority of effort be put into rebuilding the British nation and making it able to withstand the constant bombardment from France. This prospect was endorsed by the United States and the German government-in-exile, both of which promised aid to the United Kingdom to rebuild its infrastructure. However, there was one vocal dissenting voice: the Polish government-in-exile under Emmanuel Goldstein saw it as a betrayal to his home country, saying that it was inherently a surrender of his homeland to the claws of the Soviet Union. He would become a pro-war agitator in the years to come.
The Second Quasi-War, 1951-1961 – the British Civil War and the Oceanic Restructuring
The reconstruction of London began in the middle of 1951, with material provided mostly from the United States. Basic means of survival were provided to the impoverished population of London and the surrounding area, with other workers attempting to study the effects of radiation emanating from the wreckage of Colchester. Still others began on infrastructure repair.
In August of 1951, the head of the remnants of the International Red Cross, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, created several small organizations, each designated as a ‘ministry,’ to provide the impoverished residents of London basic utilities and conflict resolution. On the latter, Burckhardt remarked that “these are a people who have known only starvation for many years and have taken to murdering one another for control of food. We must allow them to break free from this state.” The first of these ministries, the Ministry of Plenty, was founded in September of 1951 to support supply efforts from the other nations of the Oceanic Pact.
The second of these ministries, the Ministry of Love, was founded in November of that year to promote friendship between the peoples of London and the expeditionary force, especially the Germans. This was followed by the Ministry of Peace in January of 1952 to counter the gangs that had gained influence in the power vacuum after the evacuation during the Battle of Britain. The final ministry, the Ministry of Truth, was a news organization dedicated to informing the people of London of the course of the war, founded in March 1952.
These programs were endorsed by the British and American governments, providing funds, funds coming from a cut military budget in both countries. Britain provided the bulk of the funds, as the United States had to deal with reclamation programs on its West Coast. To help support the four Charitable Ministries (as they were called), Mosley authorized the construction of the ‘Victory Mansions’ in London, four massive buildings that would serve as the headquarters of the ministries, one per ministry.
Programs similar to these were implemented in the western coastal cities of the United States as well as in British Columbia, Canada. The Canadians, with the help of the government of Newfoundland, established their own ministries, while the United States founded the Bureau of Western Reclamation, dedicated to the salvaging of useful material in California, Oregon, Washington state, and Alaska, and the resettlement of those whose assets were destroyed in the blasts. Various new bonds were bought from citizens of the two countries to assist in reconstruction.
These arduous programs of reconstruction carried from 1951 into 1952, continuing in 1953, 1954, and 1955. Despite the continual rocket barrages from the coast of France, otherwise there seemed to be little of the Second World War left. Stalin was focusing on securing Eurasian holdings in Europe, and the Oceanic Pact was more concerned with rebuilding its constituent nations rather than any war. There was a vocal opponent of this plan in Britain: Emmanuel Goldstein of the Polish Government-in-Exile.
Goldstein toured the United Kingdom in a speaking tour to attempt to force the governments of the Oceanic Pact to continue the war with Eurasia and liberate his homeland of Poland. For many years, this bore little fruit, but would change drastically in 1958. In that year, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom declared publicly her sympathies with Goldstein’s cause, beginning a great amount of debate on whether to reopen the French front or to start either a Norwegian or a Spanish front. The German government-in-exile was one of its most vocal opponents, leading some to conjecture that the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies were at odds with the fact that Goldstein was a Jew. Furthermore, Goldstein accused the Oceanic Pact of deliberately wasting its resources to contain the population, removing surplus to produce an Oceanic people with a love of suppression. These claims were used against him, proponents of which branded Goldstein a cynic and a traitor.
On April 6th, 1958, Queen Elizabeth II, three months after declaring her sympathies with Goldstein, was giving a public speech in the rebuilt London when she was assassinated by a gunman proclaiming loyalties to the British Union of Fascists. Mosley denied that he had sponsored the murder, but did not recant his Oceanian isolationist policies. After his continual refusals to apologize for the Queen’s murder, a massive crowd gathered in Edinburgh to demand Mosley’s removal from office.
This once-peaceful protest was shattered when forces of the German Wehrmacht, operating under orders from Mosley himself, began firing on the crowd, killing several hundred. Several of the protesters were armed, and a few even had Molotov cocktails. Several German, British, and American soldiers died in the ensuing confrontation, and fires from Molotov Cocktails caused several blazes to break out in Edinburgh.
On April 10, 1958, an assembly of several revanchist British and continental European persons gathered in Glasgow, branding themselves the European Liberation Front. Among the supporters of this front was former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as well as Emmanuel Goldstein. At this rally, a massive amount of pro-war citizens stormed a local military base and stole several hundred weapons, murdering the soldiers in the base and around the area of Glasgow. Most important was Goldstein’s commitment of the Polish government-in-exile to the cause of the European Liberation Front, which then hastily declared war on the powers of the Oceanic pact.
It was this declaration of war that gave Mosley, Pelley, and Himmler the justification to crack down on the ELF. German, British, and American forces quickly entered Glasgow to avenge the death of the Oceanic soldiers stationed in Glasgow. These forces, under the command of Wehrmacht general Erich von Manstein, fought street by street, block by block, through Glasgow, now solidly under the hands of the European Liberation Front.
By the end of April, the rebellion was quelled with over a thousand dead in Glasgow. Churchill and Goldstein were both taken to a high court in Edinburgh and tried for high treason. Churchill was permitted amnesty after pleading guilty and the judge, loyal to the British Union of Fascists, acknowledged his contribution to the war effort against the Eurasians. Goldstein, however, was found guilty, something which he said impossible since he was not a citizen of the United Kingdom and as such was not subject to British criminal law. This argument was denied.
As Goldstein was about to be executed publicly in a crowded area in Edinburgh, several militants overwhelmed the area of execution, killed numerous guards, and freed Goldstein. A mass militarization of the area was unable to find the perpetrators, and was called off after a month. Nevertheless, the British government-controlled propaganda machine continued to demonize Goldstein as a traitor.
In the absence of a monarch, Mosley took it upon himself to reorganize the United Kingdom into a new government, one based on the corporatist principles of the British Union of Fascists. On January 4th, 1959, Mosley declared that Parliament was to be reorganized. The House of Lords would be abolished and replaced by a House of the Learned, composed of elected representatives from various industries, the dominions and colonies, and from the Church of England. The House of Commons would be simplified in hopes of a less divided situation (which in reality meant even more control by the British Union of Fascists).
These new reforms culminated in the reorganization of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland into the Corporatist State of Great Britain, eschewing all vestiges of the monarchy, an institution Mosley called “a noble yet outdated institution now without any ability to govern effectively. The people of the British Isles have claimed their place as the nation’s supreme governor.” Members of the Royal Family reluctantly agreed under punishment of harassment by the BUF.
As Mosley entered his position as the new supreme leader of the British Isles, he looked to London as an attempt to inspire the nation to rebuild despite the constant Eurasian bombardment of England. His first order in office as Chief of State of the Corporatist State of Great Britain was to have Oceanic Pact authorities in London construct a new airstrip in London to aid in reclamation efforts, to be designated “Airstrip One.” Airstrip One would become a military codename for England in general and for London in particular.
One of Mosley’s controversial decisions was the nationalization of the four ministries in London set up by the remnants of the International Red Cross (Love, Plenty, Truth, and Peace), and transform them into nationwide departments dedicated –ostensibly- to the fields they were intended for originally.
However, under Mosley, these ministries were used for a far more sinister purpose than Burckhardt had intended. The Ministry of Truth was transformed into the Corporatist State’s propaganda machine, aided by the German Joseph Goebbels in tactics and technique, which began spouting anti-Eurasian and anti-Goldstein rhetoric throughout Britain. The Ministry of Peace was established as the head of all British military assets. The Ministry of Love became similar to the Ministry of Truth, but inclined more towards rallies and public speeches, as well as controlling the nation’s military. The Ministry of Plenty was put in charge of reclamation efforts and war rationing.
Another extremely controversial act by the Mosley cabinet was the consensual dissolution of the German government-in-exile and the appointment of several former Reich officials into the Corporatist State’s government. Joseph Goebbels became the head of the Ministry of Truth, Albert Speer the head of the Ministry of Plenty, and Heinrich Himmler head of the Ministry of Love. As a sign of goodwill towards Britain, General Bernard Montgomery would receive the position of the head of the Ministry of Peace.
Elected (cynics would say appointed) to the House of the Learned were the heads of the British League of Fascist Warriors, Michael Aaronson, Stanley Jones, and Maximilian Rutherford, as representatives from the military. They, in their position in the replacement for the House of Lords, lobbied for an increase in Fascist-style economic policies and the nationalization of key industries.
To accommodate the German civilians into the Corporatist State of Great Britain, Mosley officially merged the British Union of Fascists with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi Party, colloquially) to form the British National Socialist Party, with local offshoots being the English National Socialist Party (operating in London), the Scottish National Socialist Party, the Welsh National Socialist Party, and the Northern Irish National Socialist Party. In London, the English National Socialist Party was essential in providing aid to the recovering population of the city, at the time numbering about three thousand.
In 1960, President Pelley of the United States proposed to the Corporatist State and the other members of the Oceanic Pact that the various nations of the Pact incorporate into one massive superstate to counteract the gigantic influence and construction ability that Eurasia had. Mosley agreed, promising the rest of the Commonwealth would follow. Pelley’s influence in Latin America ensured that their governments would also be consolidated into the new superstate.
On April 23, 1960, delegates from the governments of the Oceanic Pact met in New York City to discuss the consolidation of the governments of nations ascribing to the Pact into one overarching government. There were five delegates from the Corporatist State of Great Britain: Mosley, Himmler, Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford. These delegates, along with the delegates from the various other nations, had a photograph taken of them in front of the Hotel Edison, the venue of the meeting.
Among the issues considered was a new psychological theory, known by the (admittedly sinister-sounding) name ‘Double-Think’ by several scientists and psychologists working under contract by the American government. The team tasked with creating the theory consisted of Noam Chomsky, Joseph Mengele, Joseph DeJarnette, Jean Piaget, Edouard Claparede, Edward C. Tolman, Edwin Guthrie, Clark Hull, B. F. Skinner, and Wolfgang Kohler, assembled from the best psychologists in the Western World not under Eurasian domination. ‘Double-Think’ allowed a combination of drugs and conditioning to allow the human brain to simultaneously accept contradictory ideas, gaining the ability to alternate between two perceptions of the world at will or as response to stimuli. This was demonstrated in the conference by Chomsky, who used the four-year-old child of a friend of his on the floor of the conference room used for the meeting. In his demonstration, Chomsky held up four fingers to the child and asked for the number of fingers. The child answered that there were five fingers. He waited a few moments later and asked the same question in a slightly different tone of voice, again holding up four fingers. The child then answered four. Chomsky repeated this several times, changes in tone of voice leading to different answers, sometimes ascending up to ten. Chomsky cautioned that this method of conditioning was long and resource-intensive and could not practically be implemented in all parts of society.
Another proposed invention was the ‘Telescreen,’ a form of television (a medium having come into vogue during the early 1950s) that also served as a recording device, to be used as a way to monitor potentially subversive elements of society. This design was based on designs smuggled out of Eurasia by Oceanic spies, the principal example stolen directly from Moscow, right under the Eurasian government’s nose. Certain delegates, such as the American delegate and party leader from California Richard Nixon, supported placing these devices in every home in the Oceanic Pact. Other delegates, such as Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, vehemently opposed this measure as they did the concept of doublethink.
The final item on the agenda was the merger of the various political parties that espoused a quasi-Fascist ideology throughout the Oceanic Pact. It was proposed by United States Vice President Charles Lindbergh that the British National Socialist Party, the faction supporting Pelley and himself, and the other anti-communist parties in the Americas and the Commonwealth into a Trans-Oceanic National Socialist Party for ease of governance. This motion was passed unanimously by the assembly.
As the conference ended on May 2nd of that year, the various nations of the Oceanic Pact ceased to exist as independent states; they were now the National Socialist State of Oceania. William Dudley Pelley was chosen as the first Chief of State of the new nation. In his inaugural speech in Washington, D.C., he proclaimed “A new birth of freedom and democracy under the guiding hand of Fascism and National Socialism. Some have objected to the characterization of Oceania as a ‘nation,’ rather than a collection of nations united with a common goal of defeating the blight upon Earth known as Eurasia. Truly, at New York we have forged a new nation: the Oceanian nation. It matters not whether we are American or British, Canadian or Australian, South African or Brazilian, Mexican or Argentinian. Today, we are now all Oceanians. Under one flag we will march forward to the future, a future free of the cancer that is Communism and the upholding of the beliefs traditional to Western Civilization, beliefs that have guided us all and will continue to guide us so long as we do not fall to Eurasian aggression.”
As the National Socialist Party of Oceania assumed its position as the collective captaincy of the ship of the Oceanic state, the question of the usage of doublethink in the common population of Oceania was a topic of serious debate. As of that time, the NSPO was being divided into two parts: the Inner Party and the Outer Party. The Inner Party was composed of the highest ranking members of the Oceanian Government, such as Pelley, Lindbergh, Mosley, and Himmler. The Outer Party was composed of various local and province-level officials tasked with the day-to-day management of the Oceanian state on the local level. A vocal number of Inner Party officials, such as the aforementioned Richard Nixon, head of the National Socialist Party of Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy, and Director of Revenues for Britain Harold Wilson supported the mass conditioning of children in Oceanian schools to be able to use doublethink, while other Inner Party members, such as National Socialist Party of Massachusetts John Fitzgerald Kennedy and National Socialist Party of Saskatchewan head James Diefenbaker opposed the measure, citing Chomsky’s fears that it would be impractical to impose.
Eventually, a compromise was reached between the two factions of the Party. Benjamin Chifley, head of the National Socialist Party of New South Wales, presided over the doublethink committee, hammering out a deal: the Oceanian education system would be used to select children who would be most likely able to govern the nation effectively. These children would be taught doublethink and eventually reach positions of the Outer Party, or if lucky and competent, the Inner Party.
Members of the Outer Party would have to live incredibly stoic lives, devoid of the majority of pleasure enjoyed by the Oceanian population at large, disparagingly known as ‘Proles’ (short for Proletarian). They would live under strict rations and be monitored every moment by police, their homes being equipped with telescreens (a device which was also decided to be used solely in the homes of Party members).
Upon being inquired on the reasoning that only Party members would need to be under constant surveillance, Chifley responded that the proletarian masses would be too docile to think independently enough to be any significant threat to the status quo so long as they were satisfied (a doctrine borrowed from the ancient Roman Panem et Circensis, or ‘Bread and Circuses’). Hence, the persons actually in control of the country were those who were in need of being monitored. This reasoning was given to Supreme Director Pelley, who agreed.
Following the directive set forth by the inner party, psychological conditioning was begun in several youths, often up to the age of thirteen, to begin to allow them to use doublethink as their primary modus operandi, fundamentally changing their methods of thought. To demonstrate its efficiency, Richard Nixon himself volunteered to undergo training in the means of doublethink, being capable of it by the end of the year. Curricula were introduced in schools nationwide to begin training the first generation of specifically-trained Outer Party members.
The Socialist State of Eurasia, 1952-1960
After the conquest of continental Europe, the Socialist State of Eurasia had to pacify an insolent continent used to dominating the world in its own right, not being subject to the whims of elite in a distant capital. The Red Army swelled in number as it expanded to accept young men from all across the continent, ostensibly uniting them to build a worldwide socialist government as predicted by Marx’ Communist Manifesto.
In 1952, Stalin took a tour throughout his conquests, stopping in Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Athens, before returning to Moscow. In this tour, Stalin promised a new series of five-year plans to convert Europe to a pure state of socialism to ensure that the wars that plagued the continent would never rise again. Conveniently, he never mentioned the ongoing war with the Oceanic pact still raging over Britain. He felt that Britain was the last bastion of aristocratic rule in Europe and hoped that it would fall and be incorporated into the Eurasian state.
Europe under Stalin, however, had other thoughts about his rule. Stalin used the Soviet military Police, the NKVD, to terrorize the population, leading to such incidents as the Berlin massacre of 1951 and the Barcelona pogroms of 1952, both of which killed thousands of people in their complete durations. The Red Army, too, was on the hunt for dissent, rampaging towns on the whims of local commanders when they suspected a possible form of dissent.
Most infamously, Stalin ordered the acquisition of former Third Reich extermination camps in Poland, Germany, and France initially intended for implementing Hitler’s final solution. Under the Socialist State of Eurasia, these camps were used to kill any persons suspected of treason, often extended to merely thinking (or suspected of thinking) against the Communist Party of Eurasia. The operators of these camps used the original German-designed cyanide gas dispensers disguised as showers to ‘welcome’ new prisoners to the camps. Millions died in these camps to justify Stalin’s rule, a tragedy that became known in several parts of Eastern Europe as the ‘Second Holodomor.’
In 1953, Stalin died of a stroke in his residence in Moscow. The Eurasian leadership met shortly after discovering their premier was dead and selected Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s most trusted aids, as the new Premier and General Secretary. Kaganovich then toured the dominions of Eurasia, heading into Scandinavia, then Poland, then into the Caucasus and the Central Asian republics.
During his tour in Poland, Kaganovich was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, at the time used as a form of punishment and execution for political prisoners. Kaganovich was horrified by the methods of torture and execution used at the camp. He is on the record as saying that “no good Bolshevist would use the methods of a mass murderer and aristocrat to justify the coming of the Socialist World Revolution.” Kaganovich immediately ordered the closure of Auschwitz and other similar camps throughout Europe.
In 1954, Kaganovich, in a speech in Copenhagen, declared the transition of the modus operandi to what he called “Neo-Bolshevism,” a form of socialism based on the expansion of infrastructure rather than the blind purges of the Soviet Union under Stalin and those occurring relatively recently in Eurasia. Extensive aggression would not be tolerated among the NKVD and Red Army, and political commissars were under orders to shoot soldiers who displayed excessive hostility to civilians.
Several excess battalions were converted into work brigades with the intention of rebuilding European cities devastated in the war. First came Berlin, then Munich, then Hamburg, before spreading to Paris, Toulouse, and other cities. This led to a surge in pro-Eurasian sentiment in the new Republics of the Socialist State. Kaganovich became a hero to many, with some justification to even his detractors (who were often purged).
However, certain cities would not be able to be reclaimed for several years, as Eurasian nuclear scientists were unsure of the effects of nuclear radiation on Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, and the cities destroyed by the Oceanic pact nuclear weapons during the nuclear phase of the war. The political prisoners that did remain were used as test subjects in radioactive areas, with a death rate approaching a hundred percent for convicts in radioactive areas.
Throughout the 1950s, continental Europe experienced a massive rebound economically, with military manufacturing, reclamation, and agriculture being the three largest sectors of growth. Using the weapons designs found in Peenemunde, Eurasia manufactured several thousand V-1 and V-2 rockets to be aimed at Britain, still the continent’s common enemy (at least as proclaimed by the Eurasian party line). Most of the new conscripts were used in securing the continent under administration from Moscow, but some were diverted south for Eurasia’s next conquest.
Africa, the Middle East, and India, 1950-1961
As the nuclear war ended in Europe, the peoples of the various colonies in Africa began to revolt against those who had exploited their lands for several decades. The first to rebel were the Portuguese colonies, both north of and adjacent to the British Dominion of South Africa, namely Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique. Eurasian-backed guerilla forces succeeded in overthrowing their colonial governments in Luanda and Lorenco Marques, respectively, and attempted to establish new socialist-backed governments in these countries; unfortunately for their populaces, the result was anarchy.
Such was the fate of several European colonies in Central and Eastern
Africa, including Kenya, Tanganyika, the Congo, Madagascar, and various other locations. As one progressed northward and westward, however, one would find more centralized governments in former colonies. There were two major powers in Africa at the time, one in West Africa and one in the Horn of Africa: Free France and the Empire of Ethiopia.
Free France, headquartered in the city of Dakar, French West Africa, was a country often derided for its misnomer of a name: the state was actually quite autocratic, and neither was it in France proper. Rather, for a time after the fall of France, the French rebel leader Charles de Gaulle had taken up residence in the United Kingdom to assist the war effort there. However, after the failure of Barbarossa and the relocation of the German government to Edinburgh, the United Kingdom and United States, as a gesture of reconciliation with the Germans, allowed the puppet government of Vichy France to be recognized as the legitimate French government, currently in residence in the British Isles. De Gaulle was, understandably, outraged, and took his government to Dakar, the capital of French West Africa.
Once in Dakar, De Gaulle rallied the forces of the French in Africa to consolidate their holdings and produce a country opposed to and free from both the Oceanic Pact and Eurasia, and set about a war of conquest of West Africa to ensure no power could compete with them in their chosen domain. De Gaulle personally commanded the invasions of the Gambia, Nigeria, Morocco, and other European colonies he viewed as a threat. By the end of 1954, De Gaulle was the supreme leader of West Africa, and neither the Oceanic Pact nor Eurasia cared enough to take action against them. De Gaulle also negotiated with the Japanese to ensure that Free France would take control of French Indochina in Southeast Asia.
Despite its supposed freedoms, Free France used its police force to ruthlessly exterminate what De Gaulle deemed foreign influences. Persons deemed as traitors (who were, more often than not, native Africans, rather than the European elite) were either shot publicly or, in later years of the country, guillotined. Various dissenting groups accused De Gaulle as being little more than another Pelley or Kaganovich in his intentions.
To the east, the Empire of Ethiopia was the chief power of the region. After the initiation of Operation Barbarossa, Italian forces occupying the country were relocated to Italy to fight the Soviet Union. In this power vacuum, Haile Selassie, Emperor of the legitimate Ethiopian state, was able to regain power over his country, and took over Italian Somalia and British Somaliland to consolidate his gains.
Selassie’s army also moved westward, advancing into the nominally British Sudan. Here, Selassie hoped to establish a foothold against any possible incursion from either the Oceanic Pact or Eurasia. Considering events more to the west involving the rise of Free France, Selassie viewed the capture and holding of Sudan as of even more pressing importance. By 1956, Selassie controlled most of the region as a territory of the Empire of Ethiopia.
The only part of Africa still under control by the Oceanic Pact was the Union of South Africa, a high-ranking former colony of Britain still under Apartheid. Under Prime Minister Daniel Malan, the Union signed all the treaties pertaining to the Oceanic Pact on behalf of South Africa as a quasi-independent entity on the same level as Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. In 1960, the Union was made a part of the National Socialist State of Oceania with Malan as the head of the Party in South Africa.
Events in the Middle East ran parallel to events in Africa, albeit on a larger, more unitary scale. By 1950, the Arab nationalist leader Haj Amin al-Husseini had, in his position as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, conquered the British Mandates of Mesopotamia and Transjordan and the French mandate of Syria. Al-Husseini had openly collaborated with the Eurasians before Barbarossa, and by the time of the German defeat had struck out on his own, raising an army of frustrated Arabs to dominate the Middle East.
After the conquest of Transjordan, Syria, and Mesopotamia, al-Husseini set his sights on the oil-rich Saudi Arabia to the south. Al-Husseini deeply respected the country as both the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad and containing his faith’s most sacred holy site, the city of Mecca. As such (as he saw a holy land the only place worthy of being conquered in such a manner), his attack on Saudi Arabia emulated the Prophet Muhammad’s conquest of Mecca from Medina, ensuring the holy site was under his possession. More practically, al-Husseini’s forces invaded Riyadh and captured the nation’s king, Abdul Aziz al Saud, in 1952, and negotiated a peaceful end and the usage of Saudi forces to wrest control of the southern portions of the Arabian Peninsula from colonial remnants. After securing the Peninsula, al-Husseini declared the creation of a new Caliphate with Riyadh as its capital.
After the Riyadh declaration and acquisition of a strong mobile army, the Caliphate invaded Persia to the east, ostensibly to protect it from the Eurasian menace. However, the purpose was clear to most of the world: al-Husseini wanted even more oil. The token Persian force was easily overpowered by the Caliphate forces, and in 1954 the country was annexed into the Caliphate.
In India, the voice of the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi was drowned out by those advocating violent resistance to British rule as several thousand Indian men were being conscripted and sent to Europe to fight the Eurasians. Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian with sympathies with Eurasia, used German armaments to overthrow the British Raj and establish his own state where Hindus and Muslims had ostensibly equal legal statuses.
Bose’s army was successful in pacifying the majority Muslim parts of the country, as well as taking control of British Burma, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The British Indian Ocean Territory was also used as a naval base after it was taken from the Oceanic Pact. By 1955, Bose had completed his control over the Indian subcontinent and had opened up relations with Japan. Additionally, he secured, with Japan’s graces, control of British Malaya in Southeast Asia, as well as retaining nominal status in Hong Kong (despite the Japanese insistence on a ‘favored trading partner’ in the city).
The Consolidation of Oceania, 1960-1965
The transformation of the nations of the Western world into the National Socialist State of Oceania was not without significant opposition. There were massive protests in the capitals of the former countries, all of which were put down incredibly violently. These protests were especially violent in the countries of Latin America, angry at what they perceived as even more American aggression not unlike the days of Theodore Roosevelt. The rule of the National Socialist Party of Oceania was being tried in the areas south of the Rio Grande. Pelley and the members of the Inner Party had to come up with a solution.
Placing the capital of the new superstate somewhere in Latin America, most likely Mexico City, Sao Paulo, or Buenos Aires, was considered as a possibility, and backed by Latin American Inner Party members such as Juan Peron and Getulio Vargas. Other Party members wanted the capital to be either Washington or New York, the former in the case of Hubert Humphrey, the latter in favor of Nelson Rockefeller, both American party members. Eventually, on behalf of Pelley and Mosley, the Inner Party would meet in a different city each meeting as to be fairer to the Latin Americans. The next meeting after the New York assembly was in Bogota, as part of the above plan.
It was also recognized that a heavy campaign of indoctrination would be necessary for the Oceanian state to thrive. Doublethink provided a core; however, structures to maintain the core would have to be erected in hopes that the core would not collapse. This would have to start in early childhood. As such, the creation of the Junior Spies of Oceania, an amalgamation of the Boy Scouts of America, the Hitlerjugend, and other similar youth organizations throughout Oceania. This organization was divided into “battalions,” each with a jurisdiction over a municipality or two, which then reported to regional organizations, which then reported to the Inner Party. The Junior Spies taught Oceanian children to monitor their parents, sing patriotic hymns, and tout the party line to their contemporaries and superiors.
A realization made by the Inner Party after being confronted by several incidences in dissenting parts of Oceania was the irrevocable fact that, in many, many cases, familial ties outweighed any possible loyalties to the Party, be it of the Inner or Outer sects. This was the rationale for the incorporation of spying on parents incorporated into the curriculum for the Junior Spies, a purpose inspired by Russian Revolutionary-era programs still in use in Eurasia. Another result of this anti-family crusade was manifested in the creation of the Junior Anti-Sex League.
The Junior Anti-Sex League was created with the backing of various religious conservatives in Party office, led by a small time party boss, Jerry Falwell, from Lynchburg, Virginia. Falwell, a devout Christian, demanded state support of pre-marital celibacy, a position taken up by high-ranking party members such as Nixon to secure the place of the State as the superior influence in the lives of Oceanians. The Junior Anti-Sex League, designed as a continuation of the Junior Spies, made sure all children designated for taking the mantle of the Oceanian leadership would love the Party and Big Brother Pelley before any personal commitment. Members of the League were taught strict celibacy as the only proper method of serving the Party. All forms of sexual intercourse would be only for the creation of children, a possibility made likely with the work of Oceanian human biologists working in a laboratory in Canada on the removal of all pleasure from the reproductive act.
However, the religious conservative members of the Party were appalled by the beginning on research of artificial insemination. A vocal sect had arisen within the Junior Anti-Sex League, with supporters of the Inner Party, to convert all forms of human reproduction within the members of the Party to artificial insemination, with genetic material gained from party members as part of their taxes. Falwell and other fundamentalist Christians of the sort fundamentally disagreed with the idea, but their voices were silenced.
After the purging of Falwell in 1962, a massive uproar in the Oceanian news media, especially in the former Southern United States, protested his removal. These critics were even more incensed when official Party records stated that the credit of the idea of Junior Anti-Sex League belonged to Pelley himself and not Falwell. To rectify this, Nixon had the radical idea of altering historical records to fit the party line to ensure Party dominance in the future. “He who controls the present, controls the future,” he is known to have said in an Inner Party conference in Norfolk, Virginia, a slogan quickly adopted by the Party aristocracy.
To facilitate this transition, ‘historical editing societies’ were established in key Oceanian cities, notably in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and other cities. These ‘societies’ were responsible for the near-complete rewriting of the historical narrative, even going so far as to say a form of Eurasian Neo-Bolshevism had started the war that Oceania and Eurasia were currently fighting one another in Britain. The Oceanian military was able to suppress any major dissent among the proles of the nation, but it became clear that, to control the masses of the country, forms of pacification, both peaceful and violent, would be necessary.
The peaceful means to do so were found in the project of a government research team headed by Jerome Salinger and Maurice Wilkes, an author of propaganda and a Radar scientist, respectively. Their new device was successfully able to manufacture cheap literature for the common worker based on a series of axioms and subroutines that were able to interchange individual words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, and chapters into novels. These novels were of low quality, often concerning themselves with fantasy, violence, and other forms of escape from the drudgery of daily life under the Oceanic state.
This device, named a ‘euscriptograph’ (eu (good) + script (writing) + graph (to write)), was presented to a meeting of Inner Party members in a private exhibition in Lansing, Michigan, in 1962. It was agreed that this would be the way to control the population, but one major question loomed over the assembly: who would run the machines. It was proposed that the Outer Party would manage euscriptography, while other voices called for Inner Party management. However, one voice stood aside from them: Clement Atlee, an Inner Party member from Great Britain.
Atlee proposed the nationalization of the four Charitable Ministries currently being run by the Party authorities in Great Britain and their application to the entirety of Oceania. This plan was found satisfactory by a majority of the Inner Party leadership, and was approved by Pelley himself. After the consent of Mosley in Britain, the four Charitable Ministries were made into official apparatuses of the Oceanian state, with euscriptography being assigned to the Ministry of Truth. By early 1963, the first mass-produced cheap novels were being sent to the general public.
To aid in this effort, Wilkes and Salinger developed yet another machine: a speakerphone which was able to translate the human voice into commands for euscriptographic machinery. Inner Party leaders recognized this as a potentially useful asset and began sponsoring construction of these machines from government treasuries.
The peaceful method of controlling the population formed a counterpoint to the far harsher government programs dedicated to the same end. Members of the Inner Party found it necessary to create a form of law enforcement more potent than any form of police force then known to mankind. This new force would need to harness the power of doublethink to create the ultimate law enforcement officer, one that could, in effect, read minds.
The Oceanian leadership looked to the former German police, such as the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) and Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) as a model, synthesizing them with the new technologies developed by Oceania in hopes of creating a force that could crush all dissent, be it written, spoken, acted, or even thought. This was the birth of the Thought Police.
The Thought Police were created as a specific subsection of the Outer Party, with components of the Junior Spies created to specifically ensure that the members of the Party chosen to become members of the Thought Police would be the most capable law enforcement officers in the world starting at their first assignments. Via a mixture of drugs, doublethink, and mental conditioning, the Thought Police became very sophisticated readers of body language, interpreters of speech, and analysts of human behavior to root out the causes of dissent within Oceania.
Reaction in the proles to the Thought Police was largely apathetic; most members of the Party were satisfied, with Pelley most pleased with the development. However, in Britain, the trio of Michael Aaronson, Stanley Jones, and Maximilian Rutherford, all members of the Inner Party up until then, broke from the Party due to the imposition of Thought Police in Great Britain. “The people of the British Isles are a free people not subject to the whims of men across an ocean. We will not ever surrender our very thoughts to the Party.”
Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford went on a speaking tour throughout Great Britain, and eventually made their way down to Airstrip One, the military name for the ruins of London. After the end of a large rally in the city, the three were sitting at the Chestnut Tree Café for coffee when the members of the British Thought Police arrested them, beat them, and left them for dead at the Café. A small child, named ‘Winston,’ was at the scene when the beating occurred. He was told to leave the area immediately or face the wrath of the Thought Police.
After the debacle of Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford’s speaking tour across the British Isles, it dawned upon the Party that they had failed to regulate
one of humanity’s most viable form of dissent: language. The three had not bombed anything, nor shot anyone, nor stolen any valuable commodity owned by the Oceanian government in Great Britain. They had simply spoken (on a podium to a crowd, granted, but the point remains). This led to a flurry of debate within the Party leadership on whether the party should restrict certain types of speech, and if so, which kinds of speech.
As the Party vigorously debated the prospect of even more speech limitations, Michael Halliday, a Party-sponsored linguistic researcher, approached the members of the Inner Party with his new form of communication: Newspeak. Halliday had been given his commission by the Party to find a linguistic method of population control, and he had produced one. Newspeak was designed to restrict the capacity of human thought such that political dissent would be impossible as there would be no method of expressing ideas contradictory to National Socialism; there would be no words for these concepts.
After being vigorously debated by the members of the Inner Party, Newspeak would become the official working language of the National Socialist Party of Oceania. All party members, already accustomed to doublethink, would have to learn this new language. In addition, schoolchildren selected to become part of the Party would be educated in solely Newspeak to prepare them for their occupations as either run-of-the-mill Party members or as Thought Police. It was projected that, by the year 2050, Newspeak would be able to completely phase out Standard English at an operating level in Oceania.
These reforms were all implemented in a timespan from 1960 to 1965, all with the graces of William Dudley Pelley, ‘Big Brother’ and Chief of State. However, a massive shock to the Oceanian system occurred when, in 1965, Pelley died of old age. An immediate conclave of Inner Party members was called in Sacramento, California, to select his successor. To the surprise of few, Richard Nixon was selected as the next Chief of State of the National Socialist State of Oceania, and the head of the National Socialist Party of Oceania. Despite his praise of Pelley, Nixon would prove to be, in many ways, a reformer.
The first of Nixon’s breaks from the Pelley formula was to not make himself the focus of the Party’s constant idolization. Instead, he had the history-editing presses rescind the notices of Pelley’s death and continue operating as if Pelley were still alive. The notion of ‘Big Brother’ watching over the people of Oceania was already too ingrained into the public consciousness to do away with so easily, and so the old campaign was kept. Big Brother, if Nixon had his way, would watch over the people of Oceania for eternity.
The next Nixonian reform was the purging of various elements of the Party he deemed too susceptible to other views of the world; namely, the Evangelical Christians in the manner of Jerry Falwell. He removed all forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of discrimination from the National Socialist Platform, and guaranteed free religion for the proles. Members of the Party, however, would have to subvert themselves entirely to the State and to Big Brother (now more of an ideal than a person).
Nixon also reconsidered the Party’s heavy emphasis on punishment via the Thought Police. “Killing the enemy, making him disappear, would only serve to make him a martyr. Look at the Inquisition. Look at the Holocaust. Look at the Eurasian purges. They all create publicity for the enemy.” Instead, Nixon authorized the development of psychologically-altering drugs to turn dissidents into adherents of the Party, to convert those who strayed from the Party line to become its most eager supporters. “The zeal of the convert is one of the greatest zeals we can hope for,” Nixon said at a congress in Chapultepec.
Nixon also created a unified economic policy within Oceania, ordering the implementation of a single currency, the Oceanian Dollar, to be used in all Oceanian territories, from Australia to Britain. Each of these dollars would be adorned with a picture of the now deceased (but never officially acknowledged as such) Pelley, with the caption ‘Big Brother is Watching You.’ The Oceanian central bank would be located in Ottawa in the local Ministry of Plenty building.
It was that one pivotal phrase, “Big Brother is watching you,” that enabled Nixon to continue solidifying Party control nationwide. That slogan would be put everywhere, on buildings, government insignia, coinage, and other forms of paraphernalia throughout the superstate, and quickly became, along with the constant demonization of Emmanuel Goldstein, a symbol of the utmost Party control throughout the Western Hemisphere and the areas culturally influenced by it (namely Australasia, the British Isles, and South Africa).
The Transition to Perpetual War, 1965-Present
The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, under the guiding albeit somewhat malevolent hand of the Empire of Japan, was, by 1965, the sole dominant power in East Asia. China was firmly under its grasp, its military strongest among the nations of the area, and had retreated into a blissful isolation. The vast resources of China and the former Dutch East Indies were at its disposal and fuelling a golden age of Japanese hegemony and industrialization not seen since the Meiji restoration.
Conquest, however, still beat in the hearts of the East Asian leadership (it would be inaccurate to call the country ‘Japanese;’ indeed, a good deal of Chinese, Korean, and Javanese had risen to high ranks, all swearing allegiance to Emperor Hirohito). Its decades-old treaty with the United States, continued by Oceanian diplomats who pledged their continued support, had grown irrelevant, as East Asia had access to the abundant resources of the former Dutch East Indies. The Oceanian protectorates of the Philippines, North Borneo, the various trust territories in the Pacific, and above all Australia and New Zealand were the subject of imperialistic designs by the East Asian high command.
An aging Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, now in his eighties, was looking for a way to give his country one more glorious triumph, a way to give himself a way to be remembered as the savior of the peoples of East Asia from colonial oppression. In addition to Oceanian territories, he also desired the far eastern parts of Eurasia for their mineral wealth to establish East Asia as the dominant power not merely in the region, but in the world. This moment, he thought, was the precise moment to cast off the final remnants of European and American colonial aggression. However, he knew he needed allies.
A natural ally was the newly independent India, who, with East Asia’s graces, had taken control of former British colonies in the area, but still left North Borneo and the Philippines as protectorates of Oceania. In a meeting with Subhas Chandra Bose, Tojo called for a combined assault of Indian and East Asian forces on North Borneo and Australia, and submarine warfare around South Africa, the west coast of the Americas, and Britain.
To facilitate the latter task, the East Asian navy had developed the Isonade-class submarine fortress as a method of consistently attacking a city with missiles for extended periods of time. With five constructed in total, they would rain death on the cities of London, Sydney, Los Angeles, Santiago, and Lima. With these ships, Tojo thought he could drive Oceania into submission.
Tojo was also planning a more conventional war in Siberia, with an invasion of the Eurasian ports of Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. After these two cities had fallen, they would march all the way to Moscow and establish puppet dominions in Europe and Central Asia. With Eurasia as well as Oceania down, East Asia would reign supreme.
This desire for rule was justified via a philosophical import from China: a quasi-Buddhist form of belief called “Obliteration of the Self.” This philosophy called for the submission of the individual to an all-consuming state, a state which would lead the human race to a state of nirvana. Tojo emphatically adopted this mantra as official state ideology, proclaiming that East Asia would be the ‘state’ to bring humanity to a higher form of existence.
However, Tojo was smart enough to realize the two other powers would need distractions on other fronts first. To do this, he enlisted the aid of two minor powers: Free France and the Caliphate. In terms of the Caliphate, Japan offered rule of the Islamic parts of Eurasia, where religion was being stifled by Kaganovich’s government. Haj Amin al-Husseini was ecstatic at the proposal, and immediately began mobilization near the borders with the Eurasian republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
In the case of Free France, Tojo offered control of the French homeland, broadly defined, to De Gaulle, with the possibility of the entire possessions of Napoleon at his empire’s greatest extent. Tojo also wanted De Gaulle to order an attack on the former French Guiana to bring another front to Oceania. De Gaulle agreed, also quite delighted.
On August 10th, 1967, East Asian forces began their invasion of Siberia via China, and a naval invasion, together with India, of North Borneo, French Indochina, and Australia, landing at the northern port of Darwin. Caliphate forces began their invasion of Central Asia and the Caucasus, seizing the vital oil fields of Baku, Azerbaijan. Free French forces began their invasion of Eurasian-controlled Iberia and Oceanian-controlled South Africa. With this broad stroke, East Asia had left isolation and began their conquest of what they hoped to be the world.
Most fearsome, however, was the Isonade-class submarine fortresses. These took their places around Sydney, London, Los Angeles, Santiago, and Lima. In London, the longest distance having been necessary to travel, the rocket bombardment was little different from the Eurasian attacks on all England. In fact, it is unlikely the citizens of London noticed any difference.
The Oceanians’ surprise at being invaded by what they perceived by their ally, as well as this new enemy’s invasion of an old enemy, was compounded by their ability to reach across multiple oceans in their display of power. Eventually, the submarine fortresses were destroyed in naval actions by the Oceanian navy. To remedy any possibly form of attack on the British Isles again, Chief of State Richard Nixon (under the guise of Big Brother Pelley) authorized the construction of a massive naval base in the North Sea, known as the Floating Fortress, to guard against any naval threat from East Asia. However, this project is still in construction at the time of this writing, being plagued by bureaucratic inefficiency.
On the domestic front, Richard Nixon found the Oceanian populace discontent with the government’s sudden change of enemy from Eurasia to East Asia, especially in Britain. To remedy this, Nixon ordered, via the usage of doublethink and the telescreen, to designate a certain amount of time in each day, known as the “Two Minutes Hate,” to allow the people to calm their latent base urges suppressed by the Party in such a way that benefitted the Party’s attempts at total control of Oceania.
The leadership of Oceania and Eurasia found themselves in an odd position. Now, they could not waste their resources fighting one another when East Asia posed the greater threat. In what appeared to be a tacit agreement, Eurasia moved its rocket batteries along the English Channel to the Pyrenees to aid in advancement against Free French forces in Iberia. Quickly, the Free French were routed at the battle of Madrid, and were forced back into Africa under pursuit by the Eurasian military. Similarly, Eurasian forces destroyed the Caliphate capital of Riyadh easily and acquired surrender from al-Husseini.
Similarly, Oceanian forces were able to easily repel Free French forces attacking South America and in the invasion of South Africa. Oceania was able to send its forces into the southern parts of Free France, ransacking the country in the process. Similarly, a naval force was launched from Cape Town to Delhi, destroying vital Indian infrastructure.
Even as the Siberian and Australian fronts subsided, tension still ran between Oceania and Eurasia. This tension turned violent when, at their first meeting, Eurasian and Oceanian forces met in Lagos, Free France and immediately regarded each other as hostile, although it is not clear who fired first.
At this time, Nixon and Kaganovich both reopened their declarations of war on one another. In a speech to the Inner Party, Nixon said that “the four cities of Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong represent a quadrilateral of anarchy. It is our nation’s mandate to free them from this anarchy and take them as rightfully ours.” However, members of the Inner Party realized the undercurrents of Nixon’s speech meant he coveted the resources of the countries in the area, especially in Husseini Arabia. Nixon ordered the immediate re-editing of historical documents to make it as if there was no war with East Asia, and all the damage from that war was the fault of Eurasia.
Eurasia responded in kind, relocating its missile batteries back to the English Channel to bombard Britain. Eurasian and Oceanian forces began fighting one another in the remnants of Free France, the Caliphate, and India. It was at this point senior Party analysts determined that winning a war between either of the other two world powers would be nigh impossible. Nevertheless, Nixon pushed on.
It was this final push that sealed the world as being locked in a three-way melee, never to end. No power could have superiority over the other two even in alliance with one other. Oceania had the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to defend it. Eurasia had the boundless tundra of Siberia. East Asia had a tenacious population ready to sacrifice itself for its emperor. This was the end of history.