Stars and Sickles - An Alternative Cold War
- Thread starter Hrvatskiwi
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I just found this TL and started reading, pretty cool stuff. The cold war is a goldmine of potential, there's plenty to read here, a bit of a Yugowank, so far not portraying either the west or the east as heroes or villains but both as flawed and on top of that written by a seemingly Yugonostalgic New Zealander Croat, all very nice things.
One tiny, genuinely miniscule nitpick, in the early chapter that covers the "Liberation" of Trieste and Carinthia the Yugoslav soldier says "Engleski pička", whereas it would either be Engleska pička if he's just calling the one soldier an English Cunt, or, though I doubt it's the latter, Engleske pičke if he's referring to the New Zealanders in general, though he could be a Serb from Niš, a city whose local dialect doesn't contain noun cases but even that would require a convoluted explanation like him trying to add noun cases into his speech to seem less weird ass the Niš dialect would just put it in the nominative case so it'd still be Engleska pička. Like I said, a small detail, I'm not sure how many generations your family's been in New Zealand for, but my cousin who was born in Bosnia but grew up in the US is completely incompetent at speaking so I can hardly blame you for messing up on noun cases, the most complicated part of the language.
Also the tinypic link for the map expired
Still, epic TL so far, curious to see where it's gone
One tiny, genuinely miniscule nitpick, in the early chapter that covers the "Liberation" of Trieste and Carinthia the Yugoslav soldier says "Engleski pička", whereas it would either be Engleska pička if he's just calling the one soldier an English Cunt, or, though I doubt it's the latter, Engleske pičke if he's referring to the New Zealanders in general, though he could be a Serb from Niš, a city whose local dialect doesn't contain noun cases but even that would require a convoluted explanation like him trying to add noun cases into his speech to seem less weird ass the Niš dialect would just put it in the nominative case so it'd still be Engleska pička. Like I said, a small detail, I'm not sure how many generations your family's been in New Zealand for, but my cousin who was born in Bosnia but grew up in the US is completely incompetent at speaking so I can hardly blame you for messing up on noun cases, the most complicated part of the language.
Also the tinypic link for the map expired
Still, epic TL so far, curious to see where it's gone
Guilty on all charges
. In the Trieste chapter he was actually calling the soldier an English c*nt, so I'll edit is to Engleska pička. I'm second generation, so in that kinda position where if Serbo-Croat is spoken to us we get the general idea, but would be hard pressed to repeat it. Can speak a little bit, but are practically illiterate in the language. Furthermore my family is from Makarska and most of the NZ Croats we know are from around the same area, so the way they speak are kinda specific. Takes me a second to really understand anything Serb friends of mine say, even though they seem to get what I mean straight away, but I keep it basic.Yeah noun cases in Slavic languages are just wild. Thanks for your input Višeslav! Nice to have another reader around too.
Chapter 77: Kyōko no Ie - Japan (until 1980) (Part 2)
The tension that existed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s in Japanese politics and society failed to give way in the late '60s and throughout the '70s, despite the consistently strong performance of the Japanese economy and the resultant rise in living standards for the average citizen of the Land of the Rising Sun. A major driver for this was the leftist student associations. The Zengakuren engaged in constant mitosis, schisms splitting them into smaller and smaller, and increasingly more radical, and often violent, groups. The various Zengakuren factions did not have a monopoly on student political action, however. By the end of the decade they had largely been eclipsed on the campuses themselves by the emergent All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees, or "Zenkyōtō". With leftist militancy in the ascendancy on Japanese campuses, a wide array of forces of reaction began to rally against them. Aside from the police, the students were opposed also by various groups affiliated with the Yakuza crime syndicates, as well as the followers of influential writer Yukio Mishima.
The first Zenkyōtō of note was the one founded at Waseda University in 1962. Whilst initially founded in opposition to construction plans for a new student hall, but soon shifted to demonstrating against a proposed raise in tuition fees. These demonstrations were interspersed with violence between the students and police. The incidents at Waseda University would not subside until June 1966. The organisation of Zenkyōtō would soon be imitated by students throughout Japan. Disputes concerning tuition fees, university management corruption and the use of violent guards on campus (often recruited from far-right groups or criminal organisations) would prompt students to gather in "Kyōtō Kaigi" ("action committees") which would organise against the university authorities.
Zenkyōtō students demonstrating at Hibiya Park
In May 1968, a demonstration was held in Nihon University, traditionally the most conservative university in the country, as a reaction to the university authorities' lack of transparency surrounding the expenditure of 3400 million yen. On May 27th, the Nihon University Zenkyōtō was formed by Akehiro Akita, who also was its first chair. Despite most universities' Zenkyōtō being dominated by radical leftists, the elite Nihon University's Zenkyōtō consisted of anti-Communist and non-sectarian radicals. In order to negotiate between students and authorities, university authorities held a conference at the Ryogokan Auditorium on September 30. 35,000 students attended the rally. After 12 hours, the authorities accepted the students' demands, leading to the resignation of the university directors involved. However, following this capitulation, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato declared that "establishing relations with popular gangs deviate from common sense". In response, the Nihon University authorities reneged on their commitments to students. Provoked by this volte-face, students sports associations began to riot in Ryogoku Auditorium. Riot police were mobilised and stormed the auditorium. With the violence halted, students would eventually resume classes, but in an enclosed compound ringed with a barbed-wire fence, which was soon given the popular epithet of "Nihon Auschwitz".
Meanwhile, at Tokyo University, a dispute arose over the status of graduate medical students. The new Medical Doctor's Law had restricted employment opportunities and a judgement on militant students by the university's board of directors which furthered threatened these students' future prospects led to mass protests. This provoked the establishment of a Zenkyōtō, which would soon become the epicentre of left autonomist political action in Japan. Students occupied the Yasuda Auditorium, barricading it and battling the police with staves. In January 1969, 8500 police were called to take on the protestors. Throughout the country, Zenkyōtō were established in solidarity with the one at Tokyo University. Operating independently from the Zengakuren. Committees were organised by levels (students, staff, researchers etc.) and by departments (humanities, medicine, literature etc.). Each committee would operate with a degree of autonomy within a confederal structure in cooperation with the other committees. Committee members participated in debates, and openly voted by a show of hands, in a form of direct democracy. A National Federation of Zenkyōtō was set up at Hibiya Park in September 1969. However, Yoshitaka Yamamoto, leader of the University of Tokyo Zenkyōtō and chair of the National Federation, was arrested. The genesis of the National Federation of Zenkyōtō was a result of the wide proliferation of autonomous Zenkyōtō in universities all over Japan, from Tokyo to the most far-flung provinces. Initially focused on issues specific to their university that stood beyond the jurisdiction of the Zengakuren councils, experiences with the violent suppression of their demonstrations by riot police radicalised them. The Zenkyōtō students were galvanised against the concept of universities themselves, conceiving them as "factories of education" embedded in "imperialist forms of management" and characterised faculty councils as "terminal institutions of power". To the student radicals, university autonomy was an illusion, and universities should be dismantled through violent political action, as summarised by their motto "daigaku funsai" ("smash the university"). The Zengakuren factions had been an intermediary stage between the 'Old' and 'New Left', being anti-capitalist, often anti-Soviet and engaging in self-criticism and anti-state action, they still followed the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism", taking orders from an established hierarchy within the faction. By contrast, the Zenkyōtō were truly a "New Left" movement, eschewing democratic centralism in favour of broad-based decision-making and ideological purity over pragmatism. Observers noted that the Zenkyōtō movement began to adopt an almost religious degree of zealotry and ideological puritanicalism. It is no surprise that the most influential academic figure vis-a-vis the Zenkyōtō movement was Takaaki Yoshimoto, who was commonly referred to as a "prophet".
Ideologically-driven infighting would intensify as the Zenkyōtō movement began to lose momentum. Many of the issues with universities were stuck in stalemates, as university authorities were unwilling to negotiate, aware that the Zenkyōtō would continue to push for the abolition of the universities anyway. In August 1969, the Act on Temporary Measures was passed by the Japanese Diet, allowing universities to unilaterally mobilise riot police units against the students. The Act would come into effect in late 1970. The lack of nuance or willingness to compromise weakened the Zenkyōtō movement. Whilst initially a thriving autonomist movement, it soon alienated those outside the National Federation of Zenkyōtō. They deemed everyone complicit in the university system, including lower administrators, as "kagaisha" ("victimisers"). During the 1968-69 protests, the Zenkyōtō students had driven Yoshimoto's rival Masao Maruyama ou of the university system. Maruyama would retire in 1971. The Japanese university conflicts of the late '60s held a wider significance than mere disruption of the academic life of the country. Unlike the Zengakuren, which were largely comprised of undergraduates, the Zenkyōtō broadened the scope of student protest - postgraduate students, concerned at the increasingly limited and restricted employment opportunities in a Japan dominated by major corporate and industrial conglomerates, were a major force in these autonomous student federations. Even some members of staff at the universities also engaged in political organisation and rebellion against the university system. Although the Zenkyōtō largely operated parallel with the Zengakuren, there was some overlap of course: most notably the November 1968 hostage situation, where members of the Kakumaru-ha Zengakuren faction took nine professors hostage. Several of the professors were beaten and interrogated, with the hostage-takers demanding that they "admit" their role as instruments of imperialism. Other groups would also become involved in the following stand-off with police, including the Shaseidō Kaihō-ha and the Minsei Dōmei, a JCP-affiliated Zengakuren clique.
The left-wing student movements in Japan (both Zenkyōtō and Zengakuren) must be understood as part of the global '68 movement of the newly-matured "baby boomer" generation, but there was a distinct militancy that arose out of the post-war Japanese context. The generation that was coming of age had no memory of the deprivation of the Second World War and the immediate post-war years. They did see Japan incorporated into an American-led world order defined by capitalism and, in their eyes, the commodification of everything, including human experience. Furthermore, the setbacks experienced by the American-led "Free World" in other parts of Asia led many young Japanese to the conclusion that their homeland had been "shackled to a corpse". Furthermore, the discrediting of pre-war Japanese imperialism was met with impassioned reactions on both sides of the political spectrum. Whilst the older Japanese who had lived through WWII largely saw the imperialist project as ultimately foolish and self-destructive, preferring the ruling LDP's project of pacifism and economic development, to younger Japanese who hoped for something more meaningful than simply accumulating more goods, Japanese imperialism was not a fully resolved issue. On the left of the political spectrum, the student rebels of the 1960s and early 1970s saw around them a society which engaged in post-imperial arrogance, largely failing to acknowledge the bloodshed that Japan had unleashed on the other nations of East Asia. They saw Japanese imperialism as switched for a lieutenant role in the global American imperialist project. In that worldview, the Japanese elite were compradors, enriching themselves on the work of the ordinary Japanese and kowtowing to American interests. The emergent right-wing reaction to the new order in Japan was to look back favourably on this era of imperialism; to them it was not only wrong for Japan to bow to a foreign power in the United States, but they saw the democratic government as weak-willed and decadent, too 'soft' to suppress the communist threat emerging from the universities. Many of these right-wingers hadn't lived through the bloodshed of the Second World War. They of course knew of Japan's defeat, but they saw not the folly of Japanese militarism. They saw an honourable death in the service of the Emperor preferable to the meaningless, materialist life of the modern, capitalist Japan. Whilst the todestrieb of the far-right was not an unusual element of the psychology of the extremist, in Japan it took a particularly aesthetic flavour, especially amongst the acolytes of writer Yukio Mishima. Whereas the fascist instinct in the West was often driven by a desire to dominate, to manifest the brutality of the darkest corners of the human psyche, in Japan there was a certain perceived harmoniousness to it. The tradition of bushido, the code of conduct of the samurai of ages past, glamorised the concept of the triumph of personal will, duty and self-sacrifice. To those enamoured with these ideas, their actions did not seem thuggish. In reality, however, their violence against Japanese leftists and cooperation with organised crime syndicates seemed to indicate the opposite. Like the samurai, they had a certain self-righteousness to their aggression and contempt for those they deemed below them.
Yukio Mishima was a character whose internal turmoil coexisted with a rapidly changing, and often disorienting, world around him. Raised by a stern military father who was critical of his 'effeminacy' and a doting mother, Kimitake Hiraoka, who would later go by his pen name Yukio Mishima, fell in love with the traditional Kabuki and Noh theatre styles at a young age. His attraction to traditionalist Japanese literary styles would not end there. Whilst in secondary education, he developed a passionate appreciation for classical Japanese waka poetry. As a teenager, he was taken under the wing of Zenmei Hasuda, a member of the board of prestigious literary magazine Bungei Bunka, who highly praised him in the magazine: "this youthful author is a heaven-sent child of eternal Japanese history. He is much younger than we are, but he has arrived on the scene already quite mature". Hasuda was an ardent nationalist and fought for the Japanese Empire in China in 1938, and despite his relatively advanced age was recalled to active service in 1943 to fight in Southeast Asia. At a farewell party, he uttered words that would carry a great weight with Mishima: "I have entrusted the future of Japan to you".
Yukio Mishima, one of the most influential (and bizarre) figures of the postwar Shōwa era
Mishima was drafted into military service in 1944. He barely passed his physical examination, and was classified as a "second class" conscript. During a medical check in 1945 on his day of convocation, Mishima was suffering from a cold, which was misdiagnosed by the doctor as tuberculosis. As a result, he was declared unfit for duty and sent home. Mishima's failure to be deployed was one of many instances in Mishima's life which contributed to an inferiority complex. He had been mocked by his school's rugby team for his membership in a literary society. He was naturally a man of slight frame, and was not particularly vigorous. His father had criticised him as a "sissy" as a child. His diaries also detailed several instances of homosexual love during his life, none of which were acted on, and which proved to be a sensitive topic with his wife when later brought up by biographers and journalists. After the war, as a result of this crisis of masculinity, Mishima would become obsessed with physical fitness, particularly bodybuilding. For Mishima and his mentor Hasuda, the surrender of Japan and Emperor Hirohito's declaration of mortality were traumatic events. Mishima, who was devoutly Shinto, vowed to 'protect' Japanese culture. He wrote in his diary: "Only by preserving Japanese irrationality will we be able to contribute to world culture 100 years from now". Zenmei Hasuda, deployed in Malaya, shot dead a superior officer for criticising the Emperor before killing himself. A few months later, Mishima's sister died of typhoid fever. Around this time he found that Kuniko Mitani, the sister of a classmate who Mishima hoped to marry, was engaged to another man. This string of traumatic and disillusioning experiences changed Mishima forever. Although he had shown some interest in the pursuit of an honourable, meaningful death before (telling his mother that he had hoped to join a "special attack" unit in the IJA), the loss of his mentor, his beloved sister, and his hope for a marriage with Kuniko Mitani reinforced his drive to make some meaning out of his life. Domestic bliss was no longer an option. He developed a great sense of anger against the progressive literary and academic establishment in the post-war period. American-imposed bans on any "reminiscent" portrayal of Japanese militaristic nationalism left Japanese literature almost entirely monopolised by progressives. Many of the literary figures who Mishima respected were denounced as "war criminal literati". Despite the opposition of some in leftist literary circles, Mishima's postwar works, both plays and novels, were well-received by the public and made him a major public figure, an "enfant terrible" who revived the Japanese Romantic literary style that had dominated the literary landscape of the 1930s. Many of his famous works prior to 1960 were very popular, and were denounced by left-wing academics who noticed the seed of conservative ethics, but it was until the Anpo protests that Mishima's works became undeniably political in tone. Mishima criticised Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi for subordinating Japan to the United States, but reserved harsher criticism for the Japanese Communist Party and the Zengakuren organisations, seeing the treaty issue as a Trojan Horse for promoting their own ends. Shortly after the Anpo protests, Mishima made several works that lionised the ultranationalist army revolt of the February 26 Incident.
Mishima had particular hatred for Ryokichi Minobe, who was a communist and the governor of Tokyo beginning in 1967. Mishima had influential connections within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and was asked by several senior members to run for the position of governor, but at this time, Mishima didn't seek a career in politics. This would later change [177]. That year, Mishima and his wife would travel to India, where Mishima became enamoured with the spirituality of Indian culture and the determination to maintain Indian cultural identity in the face of Westernisation and modernisation. Whilst in New Delhi, he befriended a colonel in the Indian Army who had seen action against the PLA in Tibet. He warned of the dangerousness of the Chinese troops, contributing to Mishima's anxieties about Chinese communist expansion. Mishima stated in his The Defense of Culture, that the postwar era was one of fake prosperity: "In the postwar prosperity called Shōwa Genroku, where there are no Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ihara Saikaku, Matsuo Bashō, only infestation of flashy manners and customs in there. Passion is dried up, strong realism dispels the ground, and the deepening of poetry is neglected. That is, there are no Chikamatsu, Saikaku, or Bashō now." From 12 April to 27 May 1967, Mishima underwent basic training with the Ground Self-Defense Force. He had initially wanted to train for six months, but was met with resistance from the Defense Agency. Mishima utilised connections of his and eventually it was settled that Mishima would secretly train for 46 days. From June 1967, Mishima, along with other right-wing figures, promoted the creation of a 10,000 man "Japan National Guard" (Sokoku Bōeitai) as a civilian militia to complement the JSDF. Mishima began leading groups of right-wing students, having them go through training with the aim of having them form an officer corps as the National Guard expands. Alarmed by the 1968 riots of the Zenkyōtō, Mishima and other right-wing figures signed a blood oath to die if necessary to prevent a left-wing revolution in Japan. With a lack of interest in the National Guard amongst the Japanese public, Mishima formed the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"). The Tatenokai was essentially Mishima's private militia, composed mostly of right-wing college students and which spent much of their time with physical training and practicing martial arts. Initial membership was 50, but it would soon expand to several hundred [178]. The Tatenokai would, in the early 1970s, regularly engage in battle with left-wing militant groups in street fighting. This was largely enabled by Mishima's successful campaign for the governorship of Tokyo. Mishima was a reluctant politician, but had finally capitulated to requests by right-wing members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to run against the communist governor Ryokichi Minobe, largely due to increased concerns about the vulnerability of Japan to leftist revolutionaries as American military presence wound down. The doveish US President Chuck Percy had renegotiated the US-Japan Security Treaty, removing US forces from mainland Japan (limiting them only to Okinawa) and abandoning limitations on the Japanese armed forces. Within the Liberal Democratic Party, there had been debate about whether to alter the pacifist elements of the Japanese constitution. In any other time the issue probably would've split the party in two, with the right faction strongly in favour of expanding the military whilst the centrists (there was no real 'left' per se in the LDP) sought to focus solely on economic development and normalisation with Korea and China. The social turmoil of the time would keep the party together, even if this internal turmoil remained. The right of the party sought through Mishima to continue to strengthen their views in order to seize control of the LDP and promote rearmament and anticommunism. Mishima narrowly defeated Ryokichi Minobe in the 1971 Tokyo gubernatorial election. To this day it is debated how much the close result in favour of Mishima was influenced by the meddling of Yakuza gangs, most notably the Yamaguchi-gumi and Sumiyoshi-rengō syndicates. Both of these Yakuza groups had tendrils in certain labour unions and thus were able to effectively mobilise their resources to intimidate political opponents. Their underground connections would also make them key in the efforts to suppress the left militants of the 1970s, able to engage in activities beyond the scope of the police and leveraging both their resources and their capacity for violence to secure concessions from the civilian government in exchange for assassinations against leading left terrorist figures.
By 1968, Japan had become the second-largest economy in the 'Free World', surpassing that of West Germany. The United States returned the Ogasawara Islands to Japanese sovereignty. Moscow and Tokyo had been in negotiations about the return of Shikotan and the Habomai Islands in the Kurils, but these had stalled with the Soviet condition that the American base in Okinawa must be shut down. In December 1970, a major riot against the American military presence on Okinawa flared up in the city of Koza. By this time, the American and Japanese governments had agreed that Okinawa would be transferred to Japanese sovereignty in 1971, but the locals were enraged by the revelation that a significant US military presence was to remain. The Okinawans had been soured on the American presence as a result of a number of incidents, including extortion, assault, rape, theft and criminal nuisance by US servicemen, none of whom were punished for their misconduct. 5,000 Okinawans clashed with roughly 700 American MPs. Fortunately there were no deaths, but 60 Americans and 27 Okinawans were injured. Some rioters even broke into Kadena Air Base and burning down several buildings inside. The riot fizzled out overnight. A year later, a Zengakuren demonstration turned into a riot in Tokyo, against the terms of the Okinawan return agreement, seeking a full departure of US military personnel. A month later, Okinawa was returned to Japan, albeit with US military bases still on Okinawan soil.
Despite the efforts of the right-wing forces in Japan, the Japanese Communist Party had its strongest showing ever in the 1972 election, winning 38 seats in the Diet.
Emboldened and increasingly radical, the Zengakuren organisations continued to fracture. In 1963, the Marugakudo group had split into the "Central Core Faction" (Chūkaku-ha) group led by Kuroda Kanichi's former right-hand man Nobuyoshi Honda; and the "Revolutionary Marxist Faction" (Kakumaru-ha) cell which more staunchly followed Kuroda's line. By the mid-1970s, these two groups were in outright warfare against each other. In 1975 there were 16 deaths in this conflict alone, including the assassination of Honda. Between clashes between each other and with Yakuza groups and the Tatenokai, the Chūkaku-ha and Kakumaru-ha were illustrative of the difficulties experienced by the urban leftists of 1970s Japan: slowly being whittled away despite the odd crackle and pop amidst the dying embers. The Kakumaru-ha also came under fire from the Shaseidō "Liberation Faction" (Kaihō-ha) which had split off from the JSP-affiliated Zengakuren groups and would be expelled from the party in 1971. The Shaseidō Kaihō-ha would claim the lives of 20 Kakumaru-ha members by 1980, and would also be one of the three founding groups (along with the Chūkaku-ha and the Second Bund) of the "Senpa Zengakuren" (Three-Faction Zengakuren) in 1966. The Second Bund birthed the splinter group referred to as the "Red Army Faction" (Sekigun-ha) which would be the precursor of both the United Red Army and the Japan Red Army urban guerrillas. The Raison d'être of the Sekigun-ha was typical of the Kanto urban guerrilla groups: their parent organisation was apparently insufficiently militant for their tastes. Most of their members were regional Japanese who had moved to Tokyo's elite universities. Isolated from their families, and embittered by the newfound knowledge that they were, regardless of their academic capacity, 'yokels' in the eyes of some of their old-money peers, they had turned to radical, iconoclastic politics. The Sekigun-ha would merge with the JCP Kanagawa Prefecture Committee (which had begun to operate in opposition to many of the JCP's core tenets) to form the United Red Army. The URA and its precursor groups had engaged in a number of robberies of banks and gun stores. Banding together to pool their complementary resources (i.e. guns and money), the formation of the URA was announced on July 15 1971 in a magazine the group had published named Jūka ("Gunfire"). The URA committed to "fight a war of annihilation with guns, against the Japanese authorities". It was not long, however, until the URA devolved into self-dissolution as a result of a cultish obsession with "self-crit" and "struggle sessions". Physical punishment from the autocratic and increasingly-unhinged co-leaders, Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko, resulted in several deaths. By early 1972, the remaining members of the URA had largely been arrested by the police. A few members of the group had attempted to fight their way out of Tokyo, but died in battle with Yakuza thugs and the Tatenokai [179]. Whilst the URA was operating in Japan, a small core group of militants led by Sekigun-ha leader Fusako Shigenobu left Japan for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Trained in urban guerrilla tactics by the Korean military, this small group which became known as the "Japan Red Army" would be sent to Europe, where they engaged in a number of operations in support of urban guerrilla groups in Italy, France and Germany.
In 1972, the long-running Prime Minister Eisaku Satō was succeeded by Kakuei Tanaka, who would soon become known by the nickname of the "Shadow Shogun" (Yami-Shōgun). Tanaka was far from a paragon of civic virtue: his tenure would later be infamous for a number of embezzlement scandals, where he was found guilty but never punished; the Japanese Supreme Court would keep these as "open cases", accepting the appeals but never actually processing the case, thus allowing Tanaka to remain free and politically-active. Tanaka had placed himself at the centre of a number of political axes: he has myriad contacts in the American diplomatic corps, had built a political machine in his home region of Niigata through the Etsuzankai association. Tanaka's close ties to the construction industry also meant close cooperation with Yakuza syndicates. His ascension to the post of Prime Minister was the emblematic beginning of the leadership of the right wing of the LDP.
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[177] Historically, he never sought a career in politics, but would commit ritual suicide after a failed attempt to induce army troops into a coup d'etat.
[178] IOTL, the grand total was 100, but ITTL the Tatenokai movement grew at a greater rate.
[179] Historically, the remnants of the URA were arrested after a hostage situation at Asama Sanso Lodge. The trial process after was highly irregular.
The first Zenkyōtō of note was the one founded at Waseda University in 1962. Whilst initially founded in opposition to construction plans for a new student hall, but soon shifted to demonstrating against a proposed raise in tuition fees. These demonstrations were interspersed with violence between the students and police. The incidents at Waseda University would not subside until June 1966. The organisation of Zenkyōtō would soon be imitated by students throughout Japan. Disputes concerning tuition fees, university management corruption and the use of violent guards on campus (often recruited from far-right groups or criminal organisations) would prompt students to gather in "Kyōtō Kaigi" ("action committees") which would organise against the university authorities.
Zenkyōtō students demonstrating at Hibiya Park
In May 1968, a demonstration was held in Nihon University, traditionally the most conservative university in the country, as a reaction to the university authorities' lack of transparency surrounding the expenditure of 3400 million yen. On May 27th, the Nihon University Zenkyōtō was formed by Akehiro Akita, who also was its first chair. Despite most universities' Zenkyōtō being dominated by radical leftists, the elite Nihon University's Zenkyōtō consisted of anti-Communist and non-sectarian radicals. In order to negotiate between students and authorities, university authorities held a conference at the Ryogokan Auditorium on September 30. 35,000 students attended the rally. After 12 hours, the authorities accepted the students' demands, leading to the resignation of the university directors involved. However, following this capitulation, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato declared that "establishing relations with popular gangs deviate from common sense". In response, the Nihon University authorities reneged on their commitments to students. Provoked by this volte-face, students sports associations began to riot in Ryogoku Auditorium. Riot police were mobilised and stormed the auditorium. With the violence halted, students would eventually resume classes, but in an enclosed compound ringed with a barbed-wire fence, which was soon given the popular epithet of "Nihon Auschwitz".
Meanwhile, at Tokyo University, a dispute arose over the status of graduate medical students. The new Medical Doctor's Law had restricted employment opportunities and a judgement on militant students by the university's board of directors which furthered threatened these students' future prospects led to mass protests. This provoked the establishment of a Zenkyōtō, which would soon become the epicentre of left autonomist political action in Japan. Students occupied the Yasuda Auditorium, barricading it and battling the police with staves. In January 1969, 8500 police were called to take on the protestors. Throughout the country, Zenkyōtō were established in solidarity with the one at Tokyo University. Operating independently from the Zengakuren. Committees were organised by levels (students, staff, researchers etc.) and by departments (humanities, medicine, literature etc.). Each committee would operate with a degree of autonomy within a confederal structure in cooperation with the other committees. Committee members participated in debates, and openly voted by a show of hands, in a form of direct democracy. A National Federation of Zenkyōtō was set up at Hibiya Park in September 1969. However, Yoshitaka Yamamoto, leader of the University of Tokyo Zenkyōtō and chair of the National Federation, was arrested. The genesis of the National Federation of Zenkyōtō was a result of the wide proliferation of autonomous Zenkyōtō in universities all over Japan, from Tokyo to the most far-flung provinces. Initially focused on issues specific to their university that stood beyond the jurisdiction of the Zengakuren councils, experiences with the violent suppression of their demonstrations by riot police radicalised them. The Zenkyōtō students were galvanised against the concept of universities themselves, conceiving them as "factories of education" embedded in "imperialist forms of management" and characterised faculty councils as "terminal institutions of power". To the student radicals, university autonomy was an illusion, and universities should be dismantled through violent political action, as summarised by their motto "daigaku funsai" ("smash the university"). The Zengakuren factions had been an intermediary stage between the 'Old' and 'New Left', being anti-capitalist, often anti-Soviet and engaging in self-criticism and anti-state action, they still followed the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism", taking orders from an established hierarchy within the faction. By contrast, the Zenkyōtō were truly a "New Left" movement, eschewing democratic centralism in favour of broad-based decision-making and ideological purity over pragmatism. Observers noted that the Zenkyōtō movement began to adopt an almost religious degree of zealotry and ideological puritanicalism. It is no surprise that the most influential academic figure vis-a-vis the Zenkyōtō movement was Takaaki Yoshimoto, who was commonly referred to as a "prophet".
Ideologically-driven infighting would intensify as the Zenkyōtō movement began to lose momentum. Many of the issues with universities were stuck in stalemates, as university authorities were unwilling to negotiate, aware that the Zenkyōtō would continue to push for the abolition of the universities anyway. In August 1969, the Act on Temporary Measures was passed by the Japanese Diet, allowing universities to unilaterally mobilise riot police units against the students. The Act would come into effect in late 1970. The lack of nuance or willingness to compromise weakened the Zenkyōtō movement. Whilst initially a thriving autonomist movement, it soon alienated those outside the National Federation of Zenkyōtō. They deemed everyone complicit in the university system, including lower administrators, as "kagaisha" ("victimisers"). During the 1968-69 protests, the Zenkyōtō students had driven Yoshimoto's rival Masao Maruyama ou of the university system. Maruyama would retire in 1971. The Japanese university conflicts of the late '60s held a wider significance than mere disruption of the academic life of the country. Unlike the Zengakuren, which were largely comprised of undergraduates, the Zenkyōtō broadened the scope of student protest - postgraduate students, concerned at the increasingly limited and restricted employment opportunities in a Japan dominated by major corporate and industrial conglomerates, were a major force in these autonomous student federations. Even some members of staff at the universities also engaged in political organisation and rebellion against the university system. Although the Zenkyōtō largely operated parallel with the Zengakuren, there was some overlap of course: most notably the November 1968 hostage situation, where members of the Kakumaru-ha Zengakuren faction took nine professors hostage. Several of the professors were beaten and interrogated, with the hostage-takers demanding that they "admit" their role as instruments of imperialism. Other groups would also become involved in the following stand-off with police, including the Shaseidō Kaihō-ha and the Minsei Dōmei, a JCP-affiliated Zengakuren clique.
The left-wing student movements in Japan (both Zenkyōtō and Zengakuren) must be understood as part of the global '68 movement of the newly-matured "baby boomer" generation, but there was a distinct militancy that arose out of the post-war Japanese context. The generation that was coming of age had no memory of the deprivation of the Second World War and the immediate post-war years. They did see Japan incorporated into an American-led world order defined by capitalism and, in their eyes, the commodification of everything, including human experience. Furthermore, the setbacks experienced by the American-led "Free World" in other parts of Asia led many young Japanese to the conclusion that their homeland had been "shackled to a corpse". Furthermore, the discrediting of pre-war Japanese imperialism was met with impassioned reactions on both sides of the political spectrum. Whilst the older Japanese who had lived through WWII largely saw the imperialist project as ultimately foolish and self-destructive, preferring the ruling LDP's project of pacifism and economic development, to younger Japanese who hoped for something more meaningful than simply accumulating more goods, Japanese imperialism was not a fully resolved issue. On the left of the political spectrum, the student rebels of the 1960s and early 1970s saw around them a society which engaged in post-imperial arrogance, largely failing to acknowledge the bloodshed that Japan had unleashed on the other nations of East Asia. They saw Japanese imperialism as switched for a lieutenant role in the global American imperialist project. In that worldview, the Japanese elite were compradors, enriching themselves on the work of the ordinary Japanese and kowtowing to American interests. The emergent right-wing reaction to the new order in Japan was to look back favourably on this era of imperialism; to them it was not only wrong for Japan to bow to a foreign power in the United States, but they saw the democratic government as weak-willed and decadent, too 'soft' to suppress the communist threat emerging from the universities. Many of these right-wingers hadn't lived through the bloodshed of the Second World War. They of course knew of Japan's defeat, but they saw not the folly of Japanese militarism. They saw an honourable death in the service of the Emperor preferable to the meaningless, materialist life of the modern, capitalist Japan. Whilst the todestrieb of the far-right was not an unusual element of the psychology of the extremist, in Japan it took a particularly aesthetic flavour, especially amongst the acolytes of writer Yukio Mishima. Whereas the fascist instinct in the West was often driven by a desire to dominate, to manifest the brutality of the darkest corners of the human psyche, in Japan there was a certain perceived harmoniousness to it. The tradition of bushido, the code of conduct of the samurai of ages past, glamorised the concept of the triumph of personal will, duty and self-sacrifice. To those enamoured with these ideas, their actions did not seem thuggish. In reality, however, their violence against Japanese leftists and cooperation with organised crime syndicates seemed to indicate the opposite. Like the samurai, they had a certain self-righteousness to their aggression and contempt for those they deemed below them.
Yukio Mishima was a character whose internal turmoil coexisted with a rapidly changing, and often disorienting, world around him. Raised by a stern military father who was critical of his 'effeminacy' and a doting mother, Kimitake Hiraoka, who would later go by his pen name Yukio Mishima, fell in love with the traditional Kabuki and Noh theatre styles at a young age. His attraction to traditionalist Japanese literary styles would not end there. Whilst in secondary education, he developed a passionate appreciation for classical Japanese waka poetry. As a teenager, he was taken under the wing of Zenmei Hasuda, a member of the board of prestigious literary magazine Bungei Bunka, who highly praised him in the magazine: "this youthful author is a heaven-sent child of eternal Japanese history. He is much younger than we are, but he has arrived on the scene already quite mature". Hasuda was an ardent nationalist and fought for the Japanese Empire in China in 1938, and despite his relatively advanced age was recalled to active service in 1943 to fight in Southeast Asia. At a farewell party, he uttered words that would carry a great weight with Mishima: "I have entrusted the future of Japan to you".
Yukio Mishima, one of the most influential (and bizarre) figures of the postwar Shōwa era
Mishima was drafted into military service in 1944. He barely passed his physical examination, and was classified as a "second class" conscript. During a medical check in 1945 on his day of convocation, Mishima was suffering from a cold, which was misdiagnosed by the doctor as tuberculosis. As a result, he was declared unfit for duty and sent home. Mishima's failure to be deployed was one of many instances in Mishima's life which contributed to an inferiority complex. He had been mocked by his school's rugby team for his membership in a literary society. He was naturally a man of slight frame, and was not particularly vigorous. His father had criticised him as a "sissy" as a child. His diaries also detailed several instances of homosexual love during his life, none of which were acted on, and which proved to be a sensitive topic with his wife when later brought up by biographers and journalists. After the war, as a result of this crisis of masculinity, Mishima would become obsessed with physical fitness, particularly bodybuilding. For Mishima and his mentor Hasuda, the surrender of Japan and Emperor Hirohito's declaration of mortality were traumatic events. Mishima, who was devoutly Shinto, vowed to 'protect' Japanese culture. He wrote in his diary: "Only by preserving Japanese irrationality will we be able to contribute to world culture 100 years from now". Zenmei Hasuda, deployed in Malaya, shot dead a superior officer for criticising the Emperor before killing himself. A few months later, Mishima's sister died of typhoid fever. Around this time he found that Kuniko Mitani, the sister of a classmate who Mishima hoped to marry, was engaged to another man. This string of traumatic and disillusioning experiences changed Mishima forever. Although he had shown some interest in the pursuit of an honourable, meaningful death before (telling his mother that he had hoped to join a "special attack" unit in the IJA), the loss of his mentor, his beloved sister, and his hope for a marriage with Kuniko Mitani reinforced his drive to make some meaning out of his life. Domestic bliss was no longer an option. He developed a great sense of anger against the progressive literary and academic establishment in the post-war period. American-imposed bans on any "reminiscent" portrayal of Japanese militaristic nationalism left Japanese literature almost entirely monopolised by progressives. Many of the literary figures who Mishima respected were denounced as "war criminal literati". Despite the opposition of some in leftist literary circles, Mishima's postwar works, both plays and novels, were well-received by the public and made him a major public figure, an "enfant terrible" who revived the Japanese Romantic literary style that had dominated the literary landscape of the 1930s. Many of his famous works prior to 1960 were very popular, and were denounced by left-wing academics who noticed the seed of conservative ethics, but it was until the Anpo protests that Mishima's works became undeniably political in tone. Mishima criticised Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi for subordinating Japan to the United States, but reserved harsher criticism for the Japanese Communist Party and the Zengakuren organisations, seeing the treaty issue as a Trojan Horse for promoting their own ends. Shortly after the Anpo protests, Mishima made several works that lionised the ultranationalist army revolt of the February 26 Incident.
Mishima had particular hatred for Ryokichi Minobe, who was a communist and the governor of Tokyo beginning in 1967. Mishima had influential connections within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and was asked by several senior members to run for the position of governor, but at this time, Mishima didn't seek a career in politics. This would later change [177]. That year, Mishima and his wife would travel to India, where Mishima became enamoured with the spirituality of Indian culture and the determination to maintain Indian cultural identity in the face of Westernisation and modernisation. Whilst in New Delhi, he befriended a colonel in the Indian Army who had seen action against the PLA in Tibet. He warned of the dangerousness of the Chinese troops, contributing to Mishima's anxieties about Chinese communist expansion. Mishima stated in his The Defense of Culture, that the postwar era was one of fake prosperity: "In the postwar prosperity called Shōwa Genroku, where there are no Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ihara Saikaku, Matsuo Bashō, only infestation of flashy manners and customs in there. Passion is dried up, strong realism dispels the ground, and the deepening of poetry is neglected. That is, there are no Chikamatsu, Saikaku, or Bashō now." From 12 April to 27 May 1967, Mishima underwent basic training with the Ground Self-Defense Force. He had initially wanted to train for six months, but was met with resistance from the Defense Agency. Mishima utilised connections of his and eventually it was settled that Mishima would secretly train for 46 days. From June 1967, Mishima, along with other right-wing figures, promoted the creation of a 10,000 man "Japan National Guard" (Sokoku Bōeitai) as a civilian militia to complement the JSDF. Mishima began leading groups of right-wing students, having them go through training with the aim of having them form an officer corps as the National Guard expands. Alarmed by the 1968 riots of the Zenkyōtō, Mishima and other right-wing figures signed a blood oath to die if necessary to prevent a left-wing revolution in Japan. With a lack of interest in the National Guard amongst the Japanese public, Mishima formed the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"). The Tatenokai was essentially Mishima's private militia, composed mostly of right-wing college students and which spent much of their time with physical training and practicing martial arts. Initial membership was 50, but it would soon expand to several hundred [178]. The Tatenokai would, in the early 1970s, regularly engage in battle with left-wing militant groups in street fighting. This was largely enabled by Mishima's successful campaign for the governorship of Tokyo. Mishima was a reluctant politician, but had finally capitulated to requests by right-wing members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to run against the communist governor Ryokichi Minobe, largely due to increased concerns about the vulnerability of Japan to leftist revolutionaries as American military presence wound down. The doveish US President Chuck Percy had renegotiated the US-Japan Security Treaty, removing US forces from mainland Japan (limiting them only to Okinawa) and abandoning limitations on the Japanese armed forces. Within the Liberal Democratic Party, there had been debate about whether to alter the pacifist elements of the Japanese constitution. In any other time the issue probably would've split the party in two, with the right faction strongly in favour of expanding the military whilst the centrists (there was no real 'left' per se in the LDP) sought to focus solely on economic development and normalisation with Korea and China. The social turmoil of the time would keep the party together, even if this internal turmoil remained. The right of the party sought through Mishima to continue to strengthen their views in order to seize control of the LDP and promote rearmament and anticommunism. Mishima narrowly defeated Ryokichi Minobe in the 1971 Tokyo gubernatorial election. To this day it is debated how much the close result in favour of Mishima was influenced by the meddling of Yakuza gangs, most notably the Yamaguchi-gumi and Sumiyoshi-rengō syndicates. Both of these Yakuza groups had tendrils in certain labour unions and thus were able to effectively mobilise their resources to intimidate political opponents. Their underground connections would also make them key in the efforts to suppress the left militants of the 1970s, able to engage in activities beyond the scope of the police and leveraging both their resources and their capacity for violence to secure concessions from the civilian government in exchange for assassinations against leading left terrorist figures.
By 1968, Japan had become the second-largest economy in the 'Free World', surpassing that of West Germany. The United States returned the Ogasawara Islands to Japanese sovereignty. Moscow and Tokyo had been in negotiations about the return of Shikotan and the Habomai Islands in the Kurils, but these had stalled with the Soviet condition that the American base in Okinawa must be shut down. In December 1970, a major riot against the American military presence on Okinawa flared up in the city of Koza. By this time, the American and Japanese governments had agreed that Okinawa would be transferred to Japanese sovereignty in 1971, but the locals were enraged by the revelation that a significant US military presence was to remain. The Okinawans had been soured on the American presence as a result of a number of incidents, including extortion, assault, rape, theft and criminal nuisance by US servicemen, none of whom were punished for their misconduct. 5,000 Okinawans clashed with roughly 700 American MPs. Fortunately there were no deaths, but 60 Americans and 27 Okinawans were injured. Some rioters even broke into Kadena Air Base and burning down several buildings inside. The riot fizzled out overnight. A year later, a Zengakuren demonstration turned into a riot in Tokyo, against the terms of the Okinawan return agreement, seeking a full departure of US military personnel. A month later, Okinawa was returned to Japan, albeit with US military bases still on Okinawan soil.
Despite the efforts of the right-wing forces in Japan, the Japanese Communist Party had its strongest showing ever in the 1972 election, winning 38 seats in the Diet.
Fusako Shigenobu, leader of the Sekigun-ha (Japanese Red Army)
Emboldened and increasingly radical, the Zengakuren organisations continued to fracture. In 1963, the Marugakudo group had split into the "Central Core Faction" (Chūkaku-ha) group led by Kuroda Kanichi's former right-hand man Nobuyoshi Honda; and the "Revolutionary Marxist Faction" (Kakumaru-ha) cell which more staunchly followed Kuroda's line. By the mid-1970s, these two groups were in outright warfare against each other. In 1975 there were 16 deaths in this conflict alone, including the assassination of Honda. Between clashes between each other and with Yakuza groups and the Tatenokai, the Chūkaku-ha and Kakumaru-ha were illustrative of the difficulties experienced by the urban leftists of 1970s Japan: slowly being whittled away despite the odd crackle and pop amidst the dying embers. The Kakumaru-ha also came under fire from the Shaseidō "Liberation Faction" (Kaihō-ha) which had split off from the JSP-affiliated Zengakuren groups and would be expelled from the party in 1971. The Shaseidō Kaihō-ha would claim the lives of 20 Kakumaru-ha members by 1980, and would also be one of the three founding groups (along with the Chūkaku-ha and the Second Bund) of the "Senpa Zengakuren" (Three-Faction Zengakuren) in 1966. The Second Bund birthed the splinter group referred to as the "Red Army Faction" (Sekigun-ha) which would be the precursor of both the United Red Army and the Japan Red Army urban guerrillas. The Raison d'être of the Sekigun-ha was typical of the Kanto urban guerrilla groups: their parent organisation was apparently insufficiently militant for their tastes. Most of their members were regional Japanese who had moved to Tokyo's elite universities. Isolated from their families, and embittered by the newfound knowledge that they were, regardless of their academic capacity, 'yokels' in the eyes of some of their old-money peers, they had turned to radical, iconoclastic politics. The Sekigun-ha would merge with the JCP Kanagawa Prefecture Committee (which had begun to operate in opposition to many of the JCP's core tenets) to form the United Red Army. The URA and its precursor groups had engaged in a number of robberies of banks and gun stores. Banding together to pool their complementary resources (i.e. guns and money), the formation of the URA was announced on July 15 1971 in a magazine the group had published named Jūka ("Gunfire"). The URA committed to "fight a war of annihilation with guns, against the Japanese authorities". It was not long, however, until the URA devolved into self-dissolution as a result of a cultish obsession with "self-crit" and "struggle sessions". Physical punishment from the autocratic and increasingly-unhinged co-leaders, Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko, resulted in several deaths. By early 1972, the remaining members of the URA had largely been arrested by the police. A few members of the group had attempted to fight their way out of Tokyo, but died in battle with Yakuza thugs and the Tatenokai [179]. Whilst the URA was operating in Japan, a small core group of militants led by Sekigun-ha leader Fusako Shigenobu left Japan for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Trained in urban guerrilla tactics by the Korean military, this small group which became known as the "Japan Red Army" would be sent to Europe, where they engaged in a number of operations in support of urban guerrilla groups in Italy, France and Germany.
In 1972, the long-running Prime Minister Eisaku Satō was succeeded by Kakuei Tanaka, who would soon become known by the nickname of the "Shadow Shogun" (Yami-Shōgun). Tanaka was far from a paragon of civic virtue: his tenure would later be infamous for a number of embezzlement scandals, where he was found guilty but never punished; the Japanese Supreme Court would keep these as "open cases", accepting the appeals but never actually processing the case, thus allowing Tanaka to remain free and politically-active. Tanaka had placed himself at the centre of a number of political axes: he has myriad contacts in the American diplomatic corps, had built a political machine in his home region of Niigata through the Etsuzankai association. Tanaka's close ties to the construction industry also meant close cooperation with Yakuza syndicates. His ascension to the post of Prime Minister was the emblematic beginning of the leadership of the right wing of the LDP.
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[177] Historically, he never sought a career in politics, but would commit ritual suicide after a failed attempt to induce army troops into a coup d'etat.
[178] IOTL, the grand total was 100, but ITTL the Tatenokai movement grew at a greater rate.
[179] Historically, the remnants of the URA were arrested after a hostage situation at Asama Sanso Lodge. The trial process after was highly irregular.
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Pity Japan won't be going socialist or Communist. I think it would look spectacular- with later Red anime, and everything.
And not so nice regarding human rights. And imaginat eif ITTL would had been created some bizarre Ainu state to Hokkaido.
Just wondering how Henry A. Wallace is seen ITTL. At least in much better light than in FoM. I guess that even in best pretty mediocre.
Thus far in the story, the following IOTL countries are part of the UAR: Egypt, northern Sudan (i.e. the territory left in OTL 2021 now that South Sudan is an independent nation), Jordan, Syria, non-Kurdish parts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and North Yemen.
Socialist or Communist Japan would be interesting, but with a POD in 1944 its virtually impossible to achieve in any realistic way. I actually think a Communist Japan wouldn't have anime in the sense we know it today. Pictoral representations as popular media have a long history in Japan, but I expect the socialist realism style to kill the more cartoonish or expressive elements of Japanese animation in its crib. I think we'd see something more akin to Soviet animation, just a little less weird... well, a different kind of weird.
I think the closest IOTL analogue to how Wallace is seen ITTL is Neville Chamberlain. A good guy, but naive and maybe a bit weak, not really fit to lead a major power in a time of crisis. Some degree of contempt for him due to this. But because of the ideological nature of the Cold War, the more 'passionate' right-wingers will denounce him as a 'crypto-communist' or a 'puppet of Moscow'. What's FoM? Another TL?
A Communist Japan's human rights record largely depends on when it would go Communist, and how. One that came to power in the immediate post-war would be Stalinist. One that came to power via the Communist Party in the late 60s onwards retains parliamentary democracy, and looks more akin to a blend of Kerala and Denmark than a traditional Communist state. If by some weird twist the radicals of the Zenkyoto or Zengakuren got into power (pretty ASB, to be honest), then it would look like China during the Cultural Revolution. Just an absolute mess. As it was, the Zengakuren groups weren't too far off the Red Guards (and probably would have been like them if they hadn't been under attack from the Japanese state).
I think the most likely scenario were you get an assertively Ainu Hokkaido would be if the Soviets had taken only Hokkaido in an Operation Downfall scenario. If they give up on getting a Communist Japan it could be incorporated into the USSR as the "Ainu Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic".
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The Footprint of Mussolini. There Wallace is president too and he is incredibly bad and globally really bad reputation. He was even impeached and removed due espionage and it was just several years after Wallace's death when it was clear that he wasn't Soviet spy. He basically gave for Stalin everything what he wanted and even more. And he too damaged relationships with Britian.
And on that TL is too bizarre Ainu state where is really terrible human rights. But Communism generally is much worse and they are seen as evil as nazis.
Not really - the "oriental" animation could be quite "cartoony". Here the point is different. First, the Soviet Union and its allies did not have the concept of long-term television series. The Eternal Call consisted of episodes 12 and 7, and is one of the longest running projects (and hasn't been broadcast as densely as a regular TV series). "Well, Just You Wait!" consists of 16 episodes, but this is a set of sketches for 10 minutes (even if the Russian variation on the theme of Tom and Jerry). Secondly, there are different conditions. Much tougher censorship, at the forefront is entertainment for children (at the same time, experimental projects aimed at a different audience are still released), and centralized management of the industry. In post-war Japan, not only censorship is peculiar, there is also the fact that anime is a product "for its own". Existence in the conditions of extreme deregulation of the eighties, the splicing of anime and merchandising, and finally the surge of OVA led to the fact that animation projects were shot with sights on a certain audience - often narrow. Therefore, for example, hentai is flourishing - he lives at the expense of "regular users", while others do not pay attention to it. Anime itself arose on the verge of children's shows and exploitative cinema, but in the USSR there are no conditions for this.
Oh .... by the beginning of the last century, the Japanese were already in the majority. So either it will be a predominantly speaking Autonomous Republic, or an autonomous region with various minorities.
I'll have to check it out, sounds interesting. I'm always a little put off by TLs that equate Nazism with Communism though. Obviously historic Communist regimes are responsible for a lot of deaths, torture etc., but not on the inescapable basis of being born into a particular ethnic group. Just seems like lazy 'radical centrism' to me.
That being said, that might not be what you mean at all and it would still be an interesting TL to look into anyway. Am I right in assuming that the concept is "Mussolini's Italy stays neutral in WWII and participates in the Cold War?
Very interesting analysis of the development of anime. I myself only watch a little bit of it, but try to acquaint myself with some of the 'classics'. For instance I adore Neon Genesis Evangelion. I also liked Elfenlied, but was put off by some of the obvious fanservice. I don't mind there being the odd bit of juvenile/American Pie-esque humour ("haha, the 15 year old boy gets nervous walking in on a naked girl") but the lingering camera angles are quite off-putting to me.
I do think that Eastern Europe was always going to take longer to accept "adult animation" as a thing regardless. There is a very ingrained belief that cartoons are for children and that adults should partake in more serious entertainment. It's pretty much only changed with the millenial generation in EE, as far as my knowledge/experience.
On the topic of the Ainu autonomous region, it wouldn't be the first time the Soviets have an ethnic autonomous region where the ethnic group in question is the minority (practically all of the historical ASSRs had a Russian plurality, if not majority) and they literally had a Jewish autonomous oblast in Birobidzhan that was mostly Buryat Mongol-inhabited.
It is indeed intresting to read altough there might be some flaws on plausibility. And yes, Italy indeed is neutral most of WW2 but joins close of end but not reasons what are expected. And POD is good time before WW2. And Italy has important role on Cold War. But check rest yourself.
This is what I am talking about - the elements of operational cinema. Anime takes fanservice and builds around it by forcing the audience to spend money and time.
Chapter 78: Il Lupo Perde il Pelo ma Non il Vizio - Italy (Until 1970)
The immediate post-war period saw the dissolution of the Italian monarchy and the establishment of a new constitutional order with the establishment of the Italian Republic. This major shift was followed by the most significant election in Italian history. The 1948 election was the first immediate postwar election, and was both a major test of the viability of liberal democracy in Italy, as well as the election that would determine whether Italy, a state strategically located in the centre of the Mediterranean, would be aligned with the Eastern or Western bloc. The two primary groups contesting the election were the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats; DC) on the right and the Fronte Democratico Popolare per la libertà, la pace, il lavaro (Popular Democratic Front for Freedom, Peace, Labour; FDP) which was comprised of a coalition between the Partito Comunista Italiano (Communist Party of Italy) and the Partito Socialista Italiano (Socialist Party of Italy; PSI). Largely due to the Yalta agreement, the PCI had abandoned armed revolutionary struggle in the post-war, despite the majority of Italian anti-fascist resistance forces being Brigate Garibaldi, PCI-affiliated partisans. The PCI disarmed voluntarily and PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti would even serve as Deputy Prime Minister for a time under the national unity government. By 1947, however, the PCI had been expelled from the government. This left the "salami tactics" used in some Eastern European nations as untenable in Italy, forcing the PCI to seek power through legitimate electoral means. The exclusion from government also created a more adversarial atmosphere in the 1948 election. PCI leadership of the FDP was solidified by the internal split within the PSI as a social democratic faction led by Giuseppe Saragat left the party and joined the Christian Democrat-led coalition. Whilst maintaining strong control of the other parties in its electoral coalition, the PCI did have some difficulty with restraining militant followers concentrated in the triangolo rossa ("Red Triangle") of Emilia-Romagna, as well as the shipyards of Liguria.
With such high stakes, the 1948 election was also one marked by intensive foreign meddling. The Soviet Union did finance the PCI efforts to a degree, but this was dwarfed by the full-scale campaign mounted by the United States to influence the 1948 election in the favour of the Christian Democrats. The American government funneled millions of dollars to Christian Democrat politicians, of course, but also engaged in a multifaceted psy-ops campaign to sway public opinion. Complementing the Christian Democrat warnings about the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, the United States spread propaganda via radio programs, books, academic papers with false data and conclusions. The Holy See was also strongly involved in the elections. Concerned at the prospect of encirclement by an officially atheist Communist state, the Vatican backed the Christian Democrat slogan "In the secrecy of the polling booth, God sees you - Stalin doesn't" by denouncing Communism and declaring that any Catholic who voted for the PCI should consider themselves excommunicated. The Irish government also funneled money to DC politicians through the Vatican. Perhaps surprisingly, this threat didn't sway some of the most devout rural regions in Italy. Communist support was particularly high in the rural regions of Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna. Political scientists have come to the conclusion that this was due to dissatisfaction about the common sharecropping arrangements found in these regions, the mezzadria. The tension between leftist politics and devout Catholicism in the region was notably explored in author Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo series, based in the Emilian village of Brescello.
Anti-Communist election poster. The text translates to "vote or it will be your master"
American efforts would pay off. The 1948 election resulted in a victory for the Christian Democrats, who won enough seats to govern alone, but instead formed a coalition government with liberals and republicans. Italy become a founding member of NATO in 1949, and Marshall Plan aid would help revive the economy which had been devastated by the Second World War. The Italian colonial empire ceased to exist, Libya having been given independence under King Idris, and Italian Somaliland was made into a UN Trust Territory under Italian administration until 1960. The per capita economic growth of the 1950s, driven by Marshall Plan aid as well as both fiscal and agrarian reform became known as the "Italian Miracle", as per capita income grew more rapidly than any other European country, despite still being lower than France or Britain by 1960. Despite this rapid growth, the benefits of this newfound economic expansion were distributed highly unevenly. A 1953 parliamentary commission into poverty in Italy found that one quarter of Italian families were "destitute", and that 52% of homes in the mezzogiorno (Southern Italy) had no running water. 43% didn't even have lavatories. There were some efforts to promote development in the South, but this often fell short. What funds were committed to development in the mezzogiorno would predominantly end up in the pockets of corrupt politicians and mafia figures. The concentration of increased prosperity in the industrial North, especially in Lombardy, prompted massive waves of migration from the South to the North. This would create tension between the established "worker aristocracy" and the new "operaio-massa" from the mezzogiorno. The new arrivals were largely excluded from existing labour unions and occasionally tensions would boil over into brawls in industrial workplaces. By the end of the 1960s, there would still be over 4 million Italians who were unemployed, underemployed or casual labourers.
The mezzogiorno regions issues were exacerbated by the corrosive effect of organised crime on civic and economic life. Nowhere was this more true than in Sicily. On June 12, 1943, after the fall of Pantelleria to Allied troops, a separatist proclamation was made by the so-called Provisional Action Committee that would in the following weeks rebrand itself as the Committee for Sicilian Independence. The main promoter of the initiative was Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile, considered the father of contemporary Sicilian separatism. Whilst there had long been distaste for Italian governance over the island ever since the time of Garibaldi, and there was a strong regional identity, the reality of the Sicilian separatist movement was that despite a handful of genuine believers (such as Aprile), for the most part it was an instrument of the mafiosi that bankrolled the organisation. Ever since Italy's unification, the police power of the Italian state was the biggest obstacle to complete dominance of the entrenched elites (including the Mafia). The fascist regime of Benito Mussolini had been particularly vicious in its suppression of the Cosa Nostra. By supporting the cause of Italian independence, Mafia leaders sought to rid themselves of meddling from the mainland. The Committee for Sicilian Independence also had an armed wing, the Esercito Volontario per l'Indipendenza della Sicilia (Voluntary Army for the Independence of Sicily, EVIS) led by Antonio Canepa (nom de guerre Mario Turri). Canepa viewed Italian governance over the island as a state of "colonial repression". Canepa would give his life for his cause, dying in a shootout with the carabinieri in 1945. Command of EVIS was inherited by Canetto Gallo. Italian troops arrested Gallo and began to chip away at the strength of EVIS, which was largely composed of rural bandits. Negotiations between the government and Sicilian separatists led to a compromise establishing a 'Special Autonomy' to the region, which would have its own legislature and presidency. The Mafia leaders largely withdrew their support for any remaining separatist guerrillas, as the guaranteed autonomy would essentially allow them to co-opt the official power structures anyway. What was left of the separatist movement would peter out after the 1948 election. By the 1960s, the mainland meddling had resumed. The Italian parliament voted in December 1962 for an anti-mafia commission. A year later the Ciaculii Massacre confirmed the need for such action. seven police and soldiers were killed attempting to defuse a car-bomb in a suburb of Palermo. The bomb itself was planted in an assassination attempt on Salvatore Greco, the head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission, within the context of the First Mafia War. This gang war was largely driven by a shift in the economic circumstances caused by rapid urbanisation and the growth of the heroin trade with North America. This conflict claimed 68 lives within the two years from 1961 to 1963. At this time, the mafia was strongly integrated with local politics. The period 1958-1964 would be remembered as "the Sack of Palermo" as mafia-operated construction companies would be granted false contracts in order to embezzle government funds. The notoriously corrupt Mayor of Palermo Salvo Lima and Assessor for Public Works Vito Ciancimino (both of the Christian Democrat party) enabled this corruption.
The 'Trinacria', the flag of Sicily depicting a triskeles around a central Gorgoneion
The 1953 general election was marked by controversy over new electoral rules that had been introduced by the ruling Christian Democrat party. These rules, referred to as the 'Scam Law' by its detractors, established a total monopoly over law-making in the republic for any party which could single-handedly attain 50% of the vote. The Scam Law was opposed not only by the PCI/PSI Popular Front, but also by the smaller parties which were in coalition with the Christian Democrats. In the election, the Christian Democrat-led ruling coalition would attain 49.9% of the vote, only a few thousand votes short of the required supermajority. Despite the comfortable victory, the failure to secure the hoped-for supermajority led to the resignation of Christian Democrat leader De Gaspari. The office of the Prime Minister would be further weakened by a 'musical chairs' of DC Prime Ministers during the rest of the parliamentary term. Amintore Fanfani, the party secretary of the Christian Democrats from 1954 to 1959 would be the most powerful political figure in Italy at this time. Fanfani reorganised and rejuvenated the national party organisation of the Christian Democrats and lessened their dependence on support from the Catholic Church. His vigorous and at times authoritarian style did alienate many conservatives in the party. A significant outcome of this election was that it was the first time that the so-called "Constitutional Arch", the norm of ruling parties only allying with parties which had supported the post-war republican constitution, was broken. Attempting to get over the 50% threshold, the Christian Democrats allied with the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement; MSI). The Christian Democrats had first collaborated with the MSI in the late 1940s to prevent PCI membership on the Roman civic council. Nevertheless, such cooperation was discreet, with the neo-fascists still a fringe political force.
The 1963 general election further confirmed the shift of Italian democracy to partitocrazia, rule by the parties, as opposed to the executive or the legislature as a whole. This was symbolically represented by the secretary of the Christian Democrats refusing to take the mantle of Prime Minister, preferring to retain the more influential position in the party. The 1963 election was also much more narrow than any of the other post-war elections, with the Popular Front winning 45.2% of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and the right coalition winning 47% of the vote. Whilst falling short of including the MSI in the coalition government, a confidence and supply agreement was reached with the neo-fascists. The MSI was willing to ingratiate itself with the Christian Democrats, having adopted a policy of insertimento ("insertion") seeking to regain lost legitimacy through alliance with the ruling electoral centre-right. The architect of this strategy was Arturo Michalini, who would lead the party from 1954 until the late 1960s. The most hardline fascists in the party, who rejected cooperation with democratic parties regardless of position on the political spectrum, would split off to form their own factions. 1956 saw the formation of the Ordine Nuovo ("New Order"); and the Avanguardia Nazionale ("National Vanguard"). These groups would contribute to the politicised urban violence of the 1970s. The Christian Democrats had come under fire for their dealings with the MSI even before the 1963 election. In March 1960, the MSI had become the sole backer of the minority Tambroni Cabinet, and held a congress in Genoa to celebrate the alliance with the ruling party. Militant anti-fascist protests erupted in the industrial districts of Genoa, and demonstrators clashed with police. Similar events occurred throughout northern towns in the following fortnight. The government would temporarily turn their back on the MSI, banning the congress from taking place. It also caused the resignation of the Tambroni Cabinet, although the DC was able to maintain their hold on power. Nevertheless, the enduring Popular Front between the PSI and PCI left the Christian Democrats with few alternatives when faced with losing ground with the Italian electorate, and as such the MSI were members of the ruling coalition from 1963[180]. The greatest benefactors of this alliance within the Christian Democrat party were the 'rightists' Antonio Segri and Fernando Tambroni, who largely marginalised Amintore Fanfani and his supporters, who had sought in vain to peel the PSI away from the PCI. Notably, both Segri and Tambroni had taken left-wing positions in the past. Like many notables of the Christian Democrat party, they were experienced opportunists.
As outrage amongst the left-wing elements of the electorate over the DC's marriage to the MSI generated a greater deal of assertiveness against the ruling government, and as general elections appeared to be trending in the direction of an imminent victory by the Communist-led FDP, the Christian Democrat leadership spent much of the period between the 1963 and 1968 elections desperately attempting to divorce the PSI from the PCI, which would split the left vote, ensure the dominance of the DC coalition, and allow the coalition to do away with the troublesome association with the fascist right. Nevertheless, the PSI/PCI alliance stayed strong, the results in the 1963 election having been encouraging, and the noticeable increase in engagement and organisation amongst left-wing supporters throughout the country giving hope to the dream of a left-wing coalition victory in '68. The Christian Democrats were not above dirty tricks in attempting to divide this union: In 1965, the SIFAR intelligence agency was forced to reform into the SID as a result of controversy surrounding an abortive coup, codenamed Piano Solo, which was supposed to concentrate power in the hands of Carabinieri commander General De Lorenzo. The coup never came to fruition, as it very quickly became an open secret among elite circles. Piano Solo became public knowledge in 1967, due to the uncovering of documents related to the plot by investigative journalists Lino Jannuzzi and Eugene Scalfari of the news magazine L'Espresso. Both Jannuzzi and Scalfari were sued for libel by General De Lorenzo[181]. They were both found guilty and sentenced to the maximum punishment of three years of imprisonment. This caused outrage amongst the general public, who saw the authorities at covering up an attempt at subverting democracy. In actual fact, historians now believe that Piano Solo was never a genuine plot to overthrow the government, but rather part of a failed misinformation campaign intended to convince the PSI to join the Christian Democrat-led alliance in order to prevent an anti-democratic coup. Nevertheless, the punishment was blatantly unjust, and the calls to free the L'Espresso journalists would become a common sound at left-wing demonstrations through the late '60s.
Like many other nations in the so-called "Free World", the tensions of a modernising world, concepts of feminism, racial equality and economic redistribution and the coming-of-age of a generation born after the great conflagrations of the early 20th century would erupt in waves of political action in 1968. This period, the so-called "Sessantotto" was not limited to student occupations of university campuses, but also included demonstrations by jobless farm workers and unrest in the factories of the industrialised north. Conservative and reactionary forces throughout the country sought to intimidate progressives, and the military engaged in sabre-rattling, making apparent an ever-present threat of an imminent coup, only this time for real. Violence broke out in several incidents in 1968, most notably at the Battle of Valle Giulia. In this early clash, far-right and far-left students both occupied the Sapienza University of Rome, with right-wing and left-wing groups occupying different buildings. Members of the Avanguardia Nazionale initiated violence against the police, which soon sucked in left-wing activists into anti-police violence as the state security forces counter-attacked indiscriminately. Hundreds of police and students were wounded, and around 280 students were arrested. Social tensions boiled over into the events of the Autunno Caldo ("Hot Autumn") of 1969. At the very end of 1968, on the 2 December, in the town of Avola near Syracuse, police fired on workers who were demonstrating after the end of negotiations for the renewal of employment contracts, killing two demonstrators. On 9 April 1969, near Battipaglia, Campania, the police shot workers demonstrating against the incoming closure of a tobacco factory, killing a nineteen-year-old worker and a young teacher. Unrest in the mezzogiorno was eclipsed by the scale of industrial rebellion in the north. The student demonstrations in the universities had influenced and somewhat inspired a newfound assertiveness amongst the northern proletariat. Many of these workers had migrated from the mezzogiorno, but with a decrease in the rate of south-north migration, employment in the north was at near 100% levels. This gave the factory employees more boldness in asserting themselves as organised labour. There was a great deal of resentment against the managerial class, who were considered to have exploited the workers for years. The southerners were also disillusioned by the experience of leaving their families to work in the north, only to be able to afford to send back a pittance to their hungry families back home. Furthermore, there was a general angst against the clientelism of the Christian Democrat government and the fail to secure a left-wing government in the 1963 election led the activists to seek extra-electoral means of furthering their political goals. Turin saw a series of wildcat strikes centred on the FIAT factory. The automotive factory workers sought a flat pay increase and the same conditions as white-collar employees. Violence was ever-present at these strikes, and clashes with municipal police were common. A strike against high rents outside the factory gates in Corso Traiano was attacked by riot police, who would be targeted in reprisal attacks by workers and their sympathisers in running battles throughout the city. These strikes took place within the context of heterogenous leftist activism. At times the PCI-affiliated labour league, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) would support the strikers and the latter would follow their lead. At other times, the workers would organise in autonomist councils in imitation of the student rebels.
Left and right-wing Roman students clash
Italy's 'swinging Sixties' would end with a tragic foreshadowing of the violence that would engulf the 1970s. On 12 December 1969, a number of bombs would explode in Italian cities, the most damaging of which detonated at the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (the National Agricultural Bank) at the Piazza Fontana in Milan. 17 Milanese were killed and 88 wounded. The same afternoon, other bombs would go off in Milan and Rome, and another would be found unexploded. The bombing was initially attributed to anarchists. 80 persons were arrested and suspect Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist railway worker, 'fell' from to fourth-floor window of a police station to his death. Another anarchist, Valpreda, and five others were convicted and jailed for the bombings. Years later, it would come to light that the bombings were in truth the actions of fringe neo-fascist militants.
---
[180] IOTL, the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary facilitated the break-up of the Popular Front, as the PCI was unwilling to denounce the Soviet actions. ITTL, the intervention never occurs, therefore the impetus to break up the coalition doesn't exist.
[181] IOTL, the journalists were acquitted due to the PSI utilising political leverage to free them. This was because the PSI had joined the Christian Democrats after splitting away from their partnership with the PCI.
With such high stakes, the 1948 election was also one marked by intensive foreign meddling. The Soviet Union did finance the PCI efforts to a degree, but this was dwarfed by the full-scale campaign mounted by the United States to influence the 1948 election in the favour of the Christian Democrats. The American government funneled millions of dollars to Christian Democrat politicians, of course, but also engaged in a multifaceted psy-ops campaign to sway public opinion. Complementing the Christian Democrat warnings about the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, the United States spread propaganda via radio programs, books, academic papers with false data and conclusions. The Holy See was also strongly involved in the elections. Concerned at the prospect of encirclement by an officially atheist Communist state, the Vatican backed the Christian Democrat slogan "In the secrecy of the polling booth, God sees you - Stalin doesn't" by denouncing Communism and declaring that any Catholic who voted for the PCI should consider themselves excommunicated. The Irish government also funneled money to DC politicians through the Vatican. Perhaps surprisingly, this threat didn't sway some of the most devout rural regions in Italy. Communist support was particularly high in the rural regions of Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna. Political scientists have come to the conclusion that this was due to dissatisfaction about the common sharecropping arrangements found in these regions, the mezzadria. The tension between leftist politics and devout Catholicism in the region was notably explored in author Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo series, based in the Emilian village of Brescello.
Anti-Communist election poster. The text translates to "vote or it will be your master"
American efforts would pay off. The 1948 election resulted in a victory for the Christian Democrats, who won enough seats to govern alone, but instead formed a coalition government with liberals and republicans. Italy become a founding member of NATO in 1949, and Marshall Plan aid would help revive the economy which had been devastated by the Second World War. The Italian colonial empire ceased to exist, Libya having been given independence under King Idris, and Italian Somaliland was made into a UN Trust Territory under Italian administration until 1960. The per capita economic growth of the 1950s, driven by Marshall Plan aid as well as both fiscal and agrarian reform became known as the "Italian Miracle", as per capita income grew more rapidly than any other European country, despite still being lower than France or Britain by 1960. Despite this rapid growth, the benefits of this newfound economic expansion were distributed highly unevenly. A 1953 parliamentary commission into poverty in Italy found that one quarter of Italian families were "destitute", and that 52% of homes in the mezzogiorno (Southern Italy) had no running water. 43% didn't even have lavatories. There were some efforts to promote development in the South, but this often fell short. What funds were committed to development in the mezzogiorno would predominantly end up in the pockets of corrupt politicians and mafia figures. The concentration of increased prosperity in the industrial North, especially in Lombardy, prompted massive waves of migration from the South to the North. This would create tension between the established "worker aristocracy" and the new "operaio-massa" from the mezzogiorno. The new arrivals were largely excluded from existing labour unions and occasionally tensions would boil over into brawls in industrial workplaces. By the end of the 1960s, there would still be over 4 million Italians who were unemployed, underemployed or casual labourers.
The mezzogiorno regions issues were exacerbated by the corrosive effect of organised crime on civic and economic life. Nowhere was this more true than in Sicily. On June 12, 1943, after the fall of Pantelleria to Allied troops, a separatist proclamation was made by the so-called Provisional Action Committee that would in the following weeks rebrand itself as the Committee for Sicilian Independence. The main promoter of the initiative was Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile, considered the father of contemporary Sicilian separatism. Whilst there had long been distaste for Italian governance over the island ever since the time of Garibaldi, and there was a strong regional identity, the reality of the Sicilian separatist movement was that despite a handful of genuine believers (such as Aprile), for the most part it was an instrument of the mafiosi that bankrolled the organisation. Ever since Italy's unification, the police power of the Italian state was the biggest obstacle to complete dominance of the entrenched elites (including the Mafia). The fascist regime of Benito Mussolini had been particularly vicious in its suppression of the Cosa Nostra. By supporting the cause of Italian independence, Mafia leaders sought to rid themselves of meddling from the mainland. The Committee for Sicilian Independence also had an armed wing, the Esercito Volontario per l'Indipendenza della Sicilia (Voluntary Army for the Independence of Sicily, EVIS) led by Antonio Canepa (nom de guerre Mario Turri). Canepa viewed Italian governance over the island as a state of "colonial repression". Canepa would give his life for his cause, dying in a shootout with the carabinieri in 1945. Command of EVIS was inherited by Canetto Gallo. Italian troops arrested Gallo and began to chip away at the strength of EVIS, which was largely composed of rural bandits. Negotiations between the government and Sicilian separatists led to a compromise establishing a 'Special Autonomy' to the region, which would have its own legislature and presidency. The Mafia leaders largely withdrew their support for any remaining separatist guerrillas, as the guaranteed autonomy would essentially allow them to co-opt the official power structures anyway. What was left of the separatist movement would peter out after the 1948 election. By the 1960s, the mainland meddling had resumed. The Italian parliament voted in December 1962 for an anti-mafia commission. A year later the Ciaculii Massacre confirmed the need for such action. seven police and soldiers were killed attempting to defuse a car-bomb in a suburb of Palermo. The bomb itself was planted in an assassination attempt on Salvatore Greco, the head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission, within the context of the First Mafia War. This gang war was largely driven by a shift in the economic circumstances caused by rapid urbanisation and the growth of the heroin trade with North America. This conflict claimed 68 lives within the two years from 1961 to 1963. At this time, the mafia was strongly integrated with local politics. The period 1958-1964 would be remembered as "the Sack of Palermo" as mafia-operated construction companies would be granted false contracts in order to embezzle government funds. The notoriously corrupt Mayor of Palermo Salvo Lima and Assessor for Public Works Vito Ciancimino (both of the Christian Democrat party) enabled this corruption.
The 'Trinacria', the flag of Sicily depicting a triskeles around a central Gorgoneion
The 1953 general election was marked by controversy over new electoral rules that had been introduced by the ruling Christian Democrat party. These rules, referred to as the 'Scam Law' by its detractors, established a total monopoly over law-making in the republic for any party which could single-handedly attain 50% of the vote. The Scam Law was opposed not only by the PCI/PSI Popular Front, but also by the smaller parties which were in coalition with the Christian Democrats. In the election, the Christian Democrat-led ruling coalition would attain 49.9% of the vote, only a few thousand votes short of the required supermajority. Despite the comfortable victory, the failure to secure the hoped-for supermajority led to the resignation of Christian Democrat leader De Gaspari. The office of the Prime Minister would be further weakened by a 'musical chairs' of DC Prime Ministers during the rest of the parliamentary term. Amintore Fanfani, the party secretary of the Christian Democrats from 1954 to 1959 would be the most powerful political figure in Italy at this time. Fanfani reorganised and rejuvenated the national party organisation of the Christian Democrats and lessened their dependence on support from the Catholic Church. His vigorous and at times authoritarian style did alienate many conservatives in the party. A significant outcome of this election was that it was the first time that the so-called "Constitutional Arch", the norm of ruling parties only allying with parties which had supported the post-war republican constitution, was broken. Attempting to get over the 50% threshold, the Christian Democrats allied with the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement; MSI). The Christian Democrats had first collaborated with the MSI in the late 1940s to prevent PCI membership on the Roman civic council. Nevertheless, such cooperation was discreet, with the neo-fascists still a fringe political force.
The 1963 general election further confirmed the shift of Italian democracy to partitocrazia, rule by the parties, as opposed to the executive or the legislature as a whole. This was symbolically represented by the secretary of the Christian Democrats refusing to take the mantle of Prime Minister, preferring to retain the more influential position in the party. The 1963 election was also much more narrow than any of the other post-war elections, with the Popular Front winning 45.2% of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and the right coalition winning 47% of the vote. Whilst falling short of including the MSI in the coalition government, a confidence and supply agreement was reached with the neo-fascists. The MSI was willing to ingratiate itself with the Christian Democrats, having adopted a policy of insertimento ("insertion") seeking to regain lost legitimacy through alliance with the ruling electoral centre-right. The architect of this strategy was Arturo Michalini, who would lead the party from 1954 until the late 1960s. The most hardline fascists in the party, who rejected cooperation with democratic parties regardless of position on the political spectrum, would split off to form their own factions. 1956 saw the formation of the Ordine Nuovo ("New Order"); and the Avanguardia Nazionale ("National Vanguard"). These groups would contribute to the politicised urban violence of the 1970s. The Christian Democrats had come under fire for their dealings with the MSI even before the 1963 election. In March 1960, the MSI had become the sole backer of the minority Tambroni Cabinet, and held a congress in Genoa to celebrate the alliance with the ruling party. Militant anti-fascist protests erupted in the industrial districts of Genoa, and demonstrators clashed with police. Similar events occurred throughout northern towns in the following fortnight. The government would temporarily turn their back on the MSI, banning the congress from taking place. It also caused the resignation of the Tambroni Cabinet, although the DC was able to maintain their hold on power. Nevertheless, the enduring Popular Front between the PSI and PCI left the Christian Democrats with few alternatives when faced with losing ground with the Italian electorate, and as such the MSI were members of the ruling coalition from 1963[180]. The greatest benefactors of this alliance within the Christian Democrat party were the 'rightists' Antonio Segri and Fernando Tambroni, who largely marginalised Amintore Fanfani and his supporters, who had sought in vain to peel the PSI away from the PCI. Notably, both Segri and Tambroni had taken left-wing positions in the past. Like many notables of the Christian Democrat party, they were experienced opportunists.
As outrage amongst the left-wing elements of the electorate over the DC's marriage to the MSI generated a greater deal of assertiveness against the ruling government, and as general elections appeared to be trending in the direction of an imminent victory by the Communist-led FDP, the Christian Democrat leadership spent much of the period between the 1963 and 1968 elections desperately attempting to divorce the PSI from the PCI, which would split the left vote, ensure the dominance of the DC coalition, and allow the coalition to do away with the troublesome association with the fascist right. Nevertheless, the PSI/PCI alliance stayed strong, the results in the 1963 election having been encouraging, and the noticeable increase in engagement and organisation amongst left-wing supporters throughout the country giving hope to the dream of a left-wing coalition victory in '68. The Christian Democrats were not above dirty tricks in attempting to divide this union: In 1965, the SIFAR intelligence agency was forced to reform into the SID as a result of controversy surrounding an abortive coup, codenamed Piano Solo, which was supposed to concentrate power in the hands of Carabinieri commander General De Lorenzo. The coup never came to fruition, as it very quickly became an open secret among elite circles. Piano Solo became public knowledge in 1967, due to the uncovering of documents related to the plot by investigative journalists Lino Jannuzzi and Eugene Scalfari of the news magazine L'Espresso. Both Jannuzzi and Scalfari were sued for libel by General De Lorenzo[181]. They were both found guilty and sentenced to the maximum punishment of three years of imprisonment. This caused outrage amongst the general public, who saw the authorities at covering up an attempt at subverting democracy. In actual fact, historians now believe that Piano Solo was never a genuine plot to overthrow the government, but rather part of a failed misinformation campaign intended to convince the PSI to join the Christian Democrat-led alliance in order to prevent an anti-democratic coup. Nevertheless, the punishment was blatantly unjust, and the calls to free the L'Espresso journalists would become a common sound at left-wing demonstrations through the late '60s.
Like many other nations in the so-called "Free World", the tensions of a modernising world, concepts of feminism, racial equality and economic redistribution and the coming-of-age of a generation born after the great conflagrations of the early 20th century would erupt in waves of political action in 1968. This period, the so-called "Sessantotto" was not limited to student occupations of university campuses, but also included demonstrations by jobless farm workers and unrest in the factories of the industrialised north. Conservative and reactionary forces throughout the country sought to intimidate progressives, and the military engaged in sabre-rattling, making apparent an ever-present threat of an imminent coup, only this time for real. Violence broke out in several incidents in 1968, most notably at the Battle of Valle Giulia. In this early clash, far-right and far-left students both occupied the Sapienza University of Rome, with right-wing and left-wing groups occupying different buildings. Members of the Avanguardia Nazionale initiated violence against the police, which soon sucked in left-wing activists into anti-police violence as the state security forces counter-attacked indiscriminately. Hundreds of police and students were wounded, and around 280 students were arrested. Social tensions boiled over into the events of the Autunno Caldo ("Hot Autumn") of 1969. At the very end of 1968, on the 2 December, in the town of Avola near Syracuse, police fired on workers who were demonstrating after the end of negotiations for the renewal of employment contracts, killing two demonstrators. On 9 April 1969, near Battipaglia, Campania, the police shot workers demonstrating against the incoming closure of a tobacco factory, killing a nineteen-year-old worker and a young teacher. Unrest in the mezzogiorno was eclipsed by the scale of industrial rebellion in the north. The student demonstrations in the universities had influenced and somewhat inspired a newfound assertiveness amongst the northern proletariat. Many of these workers had migrated from the mezzogiorno, but with a decrease in the rate of south-north migration, employment in the north was at near 100% levels. This gave the factory employees more boldness in asserting themselves as organised labour. There was a great deal of resentment against the managerial class, who were considered to have exploited the workers for years. The southerners were also disillusioned by the experience of leaving their families to work in the north, only to be able to afford to send back a pittance to their hungry families back home. Furthermore, there was a general angst against the clientelism of the Christian Democrat government and the fail to secure a left-wing government in the 1963 election led the activists to seek extra-electoral means of furthering their political goals. Turin saw a series of wildcat strikes centred on the FIAT factory. The automotive factory workers sought a flat pay increase and the same conditions as white-collar employees. Violence was ever-present at these strikes, and clashes with municipal police were common. A strike against high rents outside the factory gates in Corso Traiano was attacked by riot police, who would be targeted in reprisal attacks by workers and their sympathisers in running battles throughout the city. These strikes took place within the context of heterogenous leftist activism. At times the PCI-affiliated labour league, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) would support the strikers and the latter would follow their lead. At other times, the workers would organise in autonomist councils in imitation of the student rebels.
Left and right-wing Roman students clash
Italy's 'swinging Sixties' would end with a tragic foreshadowing of the violence that would engulf the 1970s. On 12 December 1969, a number of bombs would explode in Italian cities, the most damaging of which detonated at the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (the National Agricultural Bank) at the Piazza Fontana in Milan. 17 Milanese were killed and 88 wounded. The same afternoon, other bombs would go off in Milan and Rome, and another would be found unexploded. The bombing was initially attributed to anarchists. 80 persons were arrested and suspect Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist railway worker, 'fell' from to fourth-floor window of a police station to his death. Another anarchist, Valpreda, and five others were convicted and jailed for the bombings. Years later, it would come to light that the bombings were in truth the actions of fringe neo-fascist militants.
---
[180] IOTL, the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary facilitated the break-up of the Popular Front, as the PCI was unwilling to denounce the Soviet actions. ITTL, the intervention never occurs, therefore the impetus to break up the coalition doesn't exist.
[181] IOTL, the journalists were acquitted due to the PSI utilising political leverage to free them. This was because the PSI had joined the Christian Democrats after splitting away from their partnership with the PCI.
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As if killing people based off of how much money they make is somehow better or more palatable.
I'm sorry, but this is an exaggeration. The main goal of revolutions is the redistribution of property, not the extermination of the rich (many would even prefer that they work for the new government as organizers and rationalizers of production). This does not mean that the excesses you mentioned did not happen - but as a rule it was rather an outburst of anger of ordinary participants than a systematic order from above. And one must admit that after the landlord rapes the daughters of a local peasant, and your brother is beaten by a strikebreaker, it is difficult to restrain yourself.
I'm not really going to argue about this, mainly because it's Saturday and I am too exhausted for an online back-and-forth. Especially when it comes to apologetics, but I will say that I don't really care how you want to spin it, those deaths happened and by your own admission was born out of anger and hate, same as Nazism. I fail to see how it can simultaneously be claimed that the murders and genocides of Nazism are inexcusable while the same actions are hunky dorry if done in the pursuit of the "Glorious Revolution." Give me a break, you're so ideologically possessed that you can't see your own hypocrisy staring right back at you.
PS. I want to make it clear that I do not believe that the murders and genocide under Nazism are excusable, I believe that killing in the pursuit of ANY ideology is inexcusable. I don't care what you claim this group or that person did, what the hell gives you the right to play God and decide their fate? Nothing, that's what. I added this because it could be construed at one point that I am lamenting attacks on Nazism, I'm not, simple as that.
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The problem is that there is a difference between an occasional outburst of anger and systematic terror. Marxist ideology does not call for the extermination of the bourgeois - it is about the fact that factories and land should be in the public domain, but as a rule, private owners do not understand on good terms - they have to go on strike (to begin with). Nazism, on the other hand, sets precisely as its task the extermination and steam-incineration of non-Aryan peoples. In fact, the Nazis in this sense are similar to the Australian and American Anglophones, who exterminated native peoples for much more pragmatic reasons. The worst terror in Soviet history was not the genocide of the bourgeoisie - it was caused by paranoia. This was not a hunt for imaginary traitors. In addition, the specificity was that a political crime could be blamed on both a Trotskyist, an engineer, and an ordinary criminal - the main thing is that there is good reporting.
The problem is that this is not a realistic judgment. If only because for a long time conservative-liberal governments persecuted workers' activists and members of social democratic parties. The German Social Democrats cleaned out the communists. And the young bourgeois governments themselves persecuted nobles and clerics. Of course, the end does not justify the use of any means, but during civil wars it is difficult not to get dirty.
Chapter 79: Men Among the Ruins - Italy (Until 1980)
Vito Miceli gazed wistfully at the smooth, light and somehow hopeful crema sitting atop his espresso. It irked him somewhat that he was wearing his fedora at the table, even when dining al fresco. It was an unfortunate necessity. He was, after all, the Italy's spymaster. Appearing incognito was somewhat key. Why couldn't the generals tell him to meet somewhere more discreet than damn Saint-Tropez! The French generals were a lot of things, but in his opinion, the worst was their venality, and that is coming from a former Bersaglieri... Miceli always had felt ridiculous wearing those feathers. The junta spent much of their time gallavanting around the French riviera with their mistresses, predominantly would-be starlets that are soon thrown away for younger, bustier models. Miceli reflected that this fact more than any other proves that France and Italy are fraternal nations. The old spy sipped again on his coffee. At least the baristas in this country hadn't all fled abroad alongside the artists and filmmakers.
"My friend!" Maurice Challe's voice cut through the peaceful quiet like a lightning bolt. "He can't help but make a scene", thought Miceli. In contrast to Miceli's civilian facade, Challe was dressed head to toe in full dress uniform. Subtly was clearly not the order of the day. Miceli's teeth clenched in anger, but his face retained the image of amicable shyness. He stood to shake Challe's hand. "You have somewhere to be?" Miceli joked, seething inside. Challe replied, "you are a representative of another nation, a guest of state!". Miceli wondered how this man could possibly have toppled a government. Surely the alarm bells would have gone off before? Or perhaps he got this kind of confidence only after taking power? Miceli glanced around the room, and one of the waitresses caught his eye. Not because of her admittedly considerable attractiveness, but because of the intentness in her face. A Soviet spy? An American plant? An anarchist? Miceli turned back to Challe. "You... want to speak in detail elsewhere, correct?". A huge grin spread across the tanned face of the aging, but still spry general. "Of course not! You think with such important things to discuss, I would do it here for the whole world to hear?". Exactly what Miceli DID think he would do. "No, come, we speak on the yacht. And do not worry about payment, you could say I'm a regular here". Miceli glanced over at that waitress again, catching her eye. She furtively glanced down and walked over to the other side of the restaurant, picking up a cloth and polishing cutlery. Miceli stood up, following the Frenchman, who strode confidently out of the restaurant. "I really hoped they checked for bugs on this boat" thought Miceli.
---
"Buona notte, Italia" the uniformed man stared into the camera, his thick Triestini accent quivering ever so slightly. "I am Lt. Col Amos Spiazzi, leader of the armed forces of national salvation. As we have all seen, the red threat looming over our Republic has been emboldened. Anarchists and communists murder good law-abiding Italian citizens seemingly without consequence. The decadent politicians who ruled this country did nothing. But Italy is not weak! The beating heart of our country is strong, our bravery and commitment to our way of life is still steadfast as ever. Tonight, real Italians, people of heart and principle, are now leading the Republic. We implore you to stand with us against the criminals, the degenerates and the communist sympathisers working to erode away Italian pride and freedom..."
The night of 9th December 1970 was a pivotal time in modern Italian politics. After two and a half decades of Italian democracy, the Republic was toppled by a right-wing coup d'etat. Army dissidents under the command of Lt. Col Spiazzi, supported by hundreds of neo-fascist militants from Stefano Delle Chiaie's National Vanguard and members of the Forestry Corps, seized key positions throughout Rome and Milan. Giuseppe Saragat, the President, was kidnapped. National police chief Angelo Vicari, was murdered. The Italian public television broadcaster, RAI, was occupied by the putschists, with Spiazzi broadcasting their message nationwide. The next morning, Saragat was trotted in front of the cameras, forced to resign as president whilst a National Vanguard gunmen stood just out of frame. The Ministry of Defense headquarters, the Quirinale and the Ministry of the Interior headquarters (including its armoury) were also seized. On Spiazzi's orders, his Milan-based battalion marched into Sesto San Giovanni, a stronghold of the PCI inhabited mostly by blue-collar workers. Protests by the locals were met with gunfire.
Outside of Rome, army units were mobilised and surrounded the various government buildings now occupied by the putschists and settled in for a siege as the coup plotters threaten to kill Saragat and other government employees that had been captured as hostages. In the early hours of the morning of the 12th, French military cargo planes landed at Rome Ciampino airport. French paratroopers disembarked. Confused by the arrival of the French paratroopers, and unwilling to risk conflict with the French, the local military commanders allowed the newcomers to land unimpeded. The French commanders that arrived claimed that they were there in a peacekeeping capacity and travelled to the centre of the city. Italian army commanders were outraged with the unannounced French intervention, and refused to allow the French troops to position themselves between the putschist-occupied buildings and the Italian military. In the meanwhile, a steady stream of French foreign legion troops, armoured cars and tanks were trickling into Rome via Ciampino airport. By this point, the French were sufficiently entrenched at the airport to prevent expulsion without a full-scale attack by Italian forces. Protests to the US embassy by the Italian government representatives fell on suspiciously deaf ears. As talks broke down by the 15th, French troops attacked Italian troops at several points in Rome, opening channels to resupply the putschists who were running low on water and food. The French regime broke their silence on their activities in Rome, claiming that they were there to mediate the shift to a new negotiated government and that the Italian military units besieging the putschists were initially unwilling to do so. The French show of force gave the Italian government no other option than to come to the negotiating table, "mediated" by the French.
A new constitution was promulgated, banning the PCI. The PSI was allowed to remain to maintain appearances, but would be institutionally marginalised over the next few years. The new President of Italy would be "the Black Prince" Junio Valerio Borghese, a scion of a Sienese noble family who had been a commander in the Italian navy during the Second World War. The man responsible for the development of frogmen commando units, Borghese had established anti-Communist bona fides in his stalwart defense of Veneto against Tito and Italian Communist partisans in 1945. Spirited away by the OSS, he would spend only four years in prison before being released and becoming a major figure in the Italian far-right. Perhaps unsurprising for a member of the aristocracy, Borghese believed in a neo-fascism that was significantly more hierarchical than that of Mussolini's. Borghese ensured that the leaders of multiple neo-fascist groups' leaders were given official positions, whilst the groups themselves would remain to harass political opponents. The coup caused massive protests, particularly in Genoa and Emilia-Romagna. Neo-fascist thugs were shipped in by the trainload to these areas to support police suppression of these protest movements. Hundreds were arrested in the next few days. PCI protests were fired upon, and in response left-wing militants engaged in assassination of police officers and bombings throughout the north of the country. By 1974, attacks by the Brigate Rosse and other left-wing militant groups were increasing in frequency. The PCI had no official connection to these groups, which were often derided by them as being cowards, given that the leadership of the PCI had fled to Prague. Although the Eastern Bloc denied any support for the Brigate Rosse, the left-wing militants were almost always armed with Czechoslovak weapons, the Škorpion SMG becoming emblematic of the left-wing terrorist movement in Europe through its ubiquity.
Junio Valerio Borghese shortly after the successful coup
The regime of Borghese maintained close ties with the French military regime and a friendly, but more distant relationship with the United States. Their staunch anti-Communist stance relieved the US foreign policy establishment, who had long been worried that Italy, which had Western Europe's largest Communist party, could be peeled away from NATO. Italian economic growth slowed significantly during this period. Violence in the streets and the leftist militants' strategy of bombings of banks and other financial infrastructure spooked international capital, reducing the rate of foreign direct investment. There was, however, a greater degree of integration with other European economies, particularly the French and German economies. This allowed some concentrated growth and development in Italy's north, particularly in Lombardy and Liguria, whilst the Italian south remained poor and agrarian. Wealth in the south remained in the hands of organised crime groups such as the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, Neapolitan Camorra and Sicilian Cosa Nostra, which cooperated with the ruling kleptocracy to maintain the wealth inequality and extractive nature of the mezzogiorno's economy. During the late 1970s, a few Brigate Rosse groups from the north migrated to the South. Influenced by Maoist ideology of peasant's war, these cells believed that it was in the south where a peasant insurgency could be ignited in order to bring about revolution more effectively than urban militancy. These groups found some degree of following in the mountainous regions of Basilicata, a region where mass emigration had slowed demographic growth, government neglect had degraded infrastructure, and which had a tradition of political brigandage.
"My friend!" Maurice Challe's voice cut through the peaceful quiet like a lightning bolt. "He can't help but make a scene", thought Miceli. In contrast to Miceli's civilian facade, Challe was dressed head to toe in full dress uniform. Subtly was clearly not the order of the day. Miceli's teeth clenched in anger, but his face retained the image of amicable shyness. He stood to shake Challe's hand. "You have somewhere to be?" Miceli joked, seething inside. Challe replied, "you are a representative of another nation, a guest of state!". Miceli wondered how this man could possibly have toppled a government. Surely the alarm bells would have gone off before? Or perhaps he got this kind of confidence only after taking power? Miceli glanced around the room, and one of the waitresses caught his eye. Not because of her admittedly considerable attractiveness, but because of the intentness in her face. A Soviet spy? An American plant? An anarchist? Miceli turned back to Challe. "You... want to speak in detail elsewhere, correct?". A huge grin spread across the tanned face of the aging, but still spry general. "Of course not! You think with such important things to discuss, I would do it here for the whole world to hear?". Exactly what Miceli DID think he would do. "No, come, we speak on the yacht. And do not worry about payment, you could say I'm a regular here". Miceli glanced over at that waitress again, catching her eye. She furtively glanced down and walked over to the other side of the restaurant, picking up a cloth and polishing cutlery. Miceli stood up, following the Frenchman, who strode confidently out of the restaurant. "I really hoped they checked for bugs on this boat" thought Miceli.
---
"Buona notte, Italia" the uniformed man stared into the camera, his thick Triestini accent quivering ever so slightly. "I am Lt. Col Amos Spiazzi, leader of the armed forces of national salvation. As we have all seen, the red threat looming over our Republic has been emboldened. Anarchists and communists murder good law-abiding Italian citizens seemingly without consequence. The decadent politicians who ruled this country did nothing. But Italy is not weak! The beating heart of our country is strong, our bravery and commitment to our way of life is still steadfast as ever. Tonight, real Italians, people of heart and principle, are now leading the Republic. We implore you to stand with us against the criminals, the degenerates and the communist sympathisers working to erode away Italian pride and freedom..."
The night of 9th December 1970 was a pivotal time in modern Italian politics. After two and a half decades of Italian democracy, the Republic was toppled by a right-wing coup d'etat. Army dissidents under the command of Lt. Col Spiazzi, supported by hundreds of neo-fascist militants from Stefano Delle Chiaie's National Vanguard and members of the Forestry Corps, seized key positions throughout Rome and Milan. Giuseppe Saragat, the President, was kidnapped. National police chief Angelo Vicari, was murdered. The Italian public television broadcaster, RAI, was occupied by the putschists, with Spiazzi broadcasting their message nationwide. The next morning, Saragat was trotted in front of the cameras, forced to resign as president whilst a National Vanguard gunmen stood just out of frame. The Ministry of Defense headquarters, the Quirinale and the Ministry of the Interior headquarters (including its armoury) were also seized. On Spiazzi's orders, his Milan-based battalion marched into Sesto San Giovanni, a stronghold of the PCI inhabited mostly by blue-collar workers. Protests by the locals were met with gunfire.
Outside of Rome, army units were mobilised and surrounded the various government buildings now occupied by the putschists and settled in for a siege as the coup plotters threaten to kill Saragat and other government employees that had been captured as hostages. In the early hours of the morning of the 12th, French military cargo planes landed at Rome Ciampino airport. French paratroopers disembarked. Confused by the arrival of the French paratroopers, and unwilling to risk conflict with the French, the local military commanders allowed the newcomers to land unimpeded. The French commanders that arrived claimed that they were there in a peacekeeping capacity and travelled to the centre of the city. Italian army commanders were outraged with the unannounced French intervention, and refused to allow the French troops to position themselves between the putschist-occupied buildings and the Italian military. In the meanwhile, a steady stream of French foreign legion troops, armoured cars and tanks were trickling into Rome via Ciampino airport. By this point, the French were sufficiently entrenched at the airport to prevent expulsion without a full-scale attack by Italian forces. Protests to the US embassy by the Italian government representatives fell on suspiciously deaf ears. As talks broke down by the 15th, French troops attacked Italian troops at several points in Rome, opening channels to resupply the putschists who were running low on water and food. The French regime broke their silence on their activities in Rome, claiming that they were there to mediate the shift to a new negotiated government and that the Italian military units besieging the putschists were initially unwilling to do so. The French show of force gave the Italian government no other option than to come to the negotiating table, "mediated" by the French.
A new constitution was promulgated, banning the PCI. The PSI was allowed to remain to maintain appearances, but would be institutionally marginalised over the next few years. The new President of Italy would be "the Black Prince" Junio Valerio Borghese, a scion of a Sienese noble family who had been a commander in the Italian navy during the Second World War. The man responsible for the development of frogmen commando units, Borghese had established anti-Communist bona fides in his stalwart defense of Veneto against Tito and Italian Communist partisans in 1945. Spirited away by the OSS, he would spend only four years in prison before being released and becoming a major figure in the Italian far-right. Perhaps unsurprising for a member of the aristocracy, Borghese believed in a neo-fascism that was significantly more hierarchical than that of Mussolini's. Borghese ensured that the leaders of multiple neo-fascist groups' leaders were given official positions, whilst the groups themselves would remain to harass political opponents. The coup caused massive protests, particularly in Genoa and Emilia-Romagna. Neo-fascist thugs were shipped in by the trainload to these areas to support police suppression of these protest movements. Hundreds were arrested in the next few days. PCI protests were fired upon, and in response left-wing militants engaged in assassination of police officers and bombings throughout the north of the country. By 1974, attacks by the Brigate Rosse and other left-wing militant groups were increasing in frequency. The PCI had no official connection to these groups, which were often derided by them as being cowards, given that the leadership of the PCI had fled to Prague. Although the Eastern Bloc denied any support for the Brigate Rosse, the left-wing militants were almost always armed with Czechoslovak weapons, the Škorpion SMG becoming emblematic of the left-wing terrorist movement in Europe through its ubiquity.
The regime of Borghese maintained close ties with the French military regime and a friendly, but more distant relationship with the United States. Their staunch anti-Communist stance relieved the US foreign policy establishment, who had long been worried that Italy, which had Western Europe's largest Communist party, could be peeled away from NATO. Italian economic growth slowed significantly during this period. Violence in the streets and the leftist militants' strategy of bombings of banks and other financial infrastructure spooked international capital, reducing the rate of foreign direct investment. There was, however, a greater degree of integration with other European economies, particularly the French and German economies. This allowed some concentrated growth and development in Italy's north, particularly in Lombardy and Liguria, whilst the Italian south remained poor and agrarian. Wealth in the south remained in the hands of organised crime groups such as the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, Neapolitan Camorra and Sicilian Cosa Nostra, which cooperated with the ruling kleptocracy to maintain the wealth inequality and extractive nature of the mezzogiorno's economy. During the late 1970s, a few Brigate Rosse groups from the north migrated to the South. Influenced by Maoist ideology of peasant's war, these cells believed that it was in the south where a peasant insurgency could be ignited in order to bring about revolution more effectively than urban militancy. These groups found some degree of following in the mountainous regions of Basilicata, a region where mass emigration had slowed demographic growth, government neglect had degraded infrastructure, and which had a tradition of political brigandage.