you're not talking about Mario Vargas Llosa are you?[1] Yes, as in that Vargas' dad.
you're not talking about Mario Vargas Llosa are you?[1] Yes, as in that Vargas' dad.
"...labor strikes that essentially shut down most of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro for days at a time, responded to against by the veterans' brigades which made a game of knocking out teeth and eyeballs when they "shattered" the heads of their hated leftists on the streets. If the radical left and radical right had one thing in common, however, it was a mutual contempt for the political establishment of the Congress of Brazil and the military, and this hatred came due in the polls of November 1917.
Weimar Germany vibes right here:It was often said that Vargas, who was woken up after his birthday celebrations groggy and confused, was as surprised by his nomination as the rest of Brazil, which responded with a collective "Who?" upon the proclamation that he had agreed to form a government of technocrats, scientists, academics, and retired - at his insistence - military officers, ideally ones who had not served in the recent war. It was a curious Cabinet, with conservative jurists such as Clovis Bevilaqua invited to serve as Minister of Justice and draft Brazil a new civil code while also containing longstanding establishmentarian figures such as Ruy Barbosa contrasted with genuine radicals such as Manuel Bomfim. How exactly this mix of men of profoundly different views, ideas and backgrounds would coexist would come to define Vargas and, indeed, the time period associated with his government…”
Really well put - not much to add to these thoughts, other than that France's isolation is only worsening, and hopefully my efforts in charting out why France feels so paranoid make sense without resorting to making them cartoonishThe problem I think stems from the fact that the alliances that were initially formed to keep peace in Europe have become too inflexible. At some level policymakers have become too complacent/comfortable with simply relying on an the alliances they do have. These commitments have been reinforced by longstanding relationships and as well as plans and deployments. But what nobody has realized at least until now is that these understandings are meant to be flexible. Austria should not be bound to France in the same way that Germany should not be bound to Italy. Austria needs to be free to reach understandings with Germany and Russia on its own terms.
The problem I think is that it has been caught squarely in the middle of the Franco-German rivalry and it is too strategically vulnerable to forfeit the safety of the French alliance. I don't recall whether it was AJP Taylor or Bridges but one of them said about Austria but they pointed to Austria being a great power because the other great powers permitted it to be. In this case Austria is a great power because France enables it to remain and stay a great power; Austria cannot throw its weight around and frankly has not been able to do so since at least the 17th and 18th Centuries. Indeed you could claim Austrian overtures to Germany are a means of reclaiming that great power status that has been so diminished.
At the same time Austria maintains some degree of leverage over France and the allusion to "blatant favoritism" may allude to something later on akin to the "blank check". I don't think French policymakers entirely appreciate how weak the Dual Monarchy actually is. If anything they overestimate Austrian strength - especially in light of the crisis in Hungary but Poincare is driven more by fear of French isolation which is in turn driven by French belligerence and may thus act more provocatively toward Germany in future. They see their peers going out of their way either to avoid or snub France (i.e. the Anglo-German agreements in Africa) and they worry that somehow they will lose their only other guarantee of stability. I don't think that the Franco-Austrian alliance extends to Central Europe but one could see the French changing the conditions for activating the alliance and thus widening the scope of any local conflict into an general war. A good parallel would be the "Balkan Inception Scenario" that Clark mentioned in Sleepwalkers.
But you see, it is harder for me to read, soPlease return to italics as was done in Vol.I. It’s easier to read for me
Ayup. Entryism is a time-tested thing for a reasonAgreed. Fascist movements don’t typically win power in their own right. The idea that they seize power is a myth. Conservative politicians typically think they can co-opt fascist movements. In practice however these movements tend to hijack the government if they are given power. That was what happened with Mussolini and Hitler respectively. That doesn’t mean that the AIB won’t receive a considerable amount of support. But fascist movements need legitimacy and there will typically be right wing voters that opt for parties of the Conservative and Liberal center.
...no. Getulio Vargas.you're not talking about Mario Vargas Llosa are you?
We’ll have something coming up but I’d have to consult my notes on exactly whenSpeaking of Brazil, An update on Uruguay would be nice. Are they still under Brazilian Occupation or the Blancos establish a government there?
Yeah, postwar Brazil here is a mix of Italy/Weimar Germany. Of course, Plinio Salgado is no Mussolini, and he’s definitely no Hitler - but he’ll have some fairly wacky ideas to introduce nonetheless. (Integralism lacks the weird futurist/positivist aspect of fascism after all)Weimar Germany vibes right here:
Left and Right wing paramilitary violence (Check)
Unstable Governments (Also check)
I wonder if the military just says enough is enough and launch a coup and overthrow their weak monarch that is afraid of them anyway.
True, Integralism after all is just taking the phrase "Christ is King" to the literal fullest potential it can be. It's lacks ambition other than that.Yeah, postwar Brazil here is a mix of Italy/Weimar Germany. Of course, Plinio Salgado is no Mussolini, and he’s definitely no Hitler - but he’ll have some fairly wacky ideas to introduce nonetheless. (Integralism lacks the weird futurist/positivist aspect of fascism after all)
I like your thinking though those who’ve predicted a more… shall we say tropical Suez are barking up the right treeCould it be that the reason why American soft imperialism in Central America ended in ‘69 because someone successfully revived the idea of a unified Central America? A unified Central America would be an amusing contrast to the somewhat Balkanized Canada.
That’s true and, in terms of my thinking in planning this out, partly by designTrue, Integralism after all is just taking the phrase "Christ is King" to the literal fullest potential it can be. It's lacks ambition other than that.
When you think about it, Syndicalism and Integralism both suffer from a lack of ambition. Unlike the former, Syndicalism is "Workers own the means of production" and nothing more
Great update, nice job Mr. President."...few men had mainstreamed the idea of Georgist taxation more than Tom L. Johnson, William Randolph Hearst's ill-fated but well-liked Vice President. Johnson had tried and failed to pass such a tax in Cleveland during his mayoralty, but he had never ceased believing in the single land tax, and a number of his acolytes had since managed to pass such laws in Toledo, Dayton, and Athens after his death. One of his chief proteges, Newton D. Baker, was now a powerful Senate Democrat tapped to one day be a Senate leader or even a President; though Ohio's Governor James M. Cox was not a Johnsonite, he got on well with that faction of the party and when a bill arose to limit the ability of municipalities to levy a land tax, Cox was instrumental in helping defeat it even if he was skeptical of extending the land tax to the entirety of the state.
The late 1910s and early 1920s thus saw a blooming of the use of Georgist taxation as an "alternative revenue" vehicle. It was appealing specifically because it was so simple - it taxed, and in a way penalized, unproductive and inefficient urban land, and even many Liberals had a hard time sympathizing with large landowners who "provided little public good." Seattle had passed a two-percent land levy in 1913 under Hulet Wells, a Socialist, but raised that levy higher to three-and-a-half in late 1917 under a much more conservative administration, proving its relative lack of controversy there at that point. While the heartland of the Georgist tax was New York or Ohio (by virtue of George and Johnson having been mayors of New York and Cleveland), it was quickly spreading across America as a new plank in the efficiency revolution of the postwar years. The sharp decline in industrial production had badly hollowed out municipal budgets that had become reliant upon sales and excise taxes and, in some cases, employee head taxes; the land tax was an easy way to plug that gap and very straightforward to assess, what with city and county assessor's offices knowing where municipal boundaries ended and keeping excellent records of various plats and properties.
Indeed, what revealed Georgism's mainstreaming more than anything was that it was often Liberal candidates who endorsed it as a revenue-raiser - in order to avoid income taxes at the state and municipal level, as there were still a great many in that party who were skeptical if not hostile to an income tax, period (although such hostility was often much more muted in state rather than federal government). A land tax was an easy workaround that allowed delays in generally more unpopular taxes on income, a workaround that Democrats found themselves happy to use as well and avoid potentially unpopular votes as people looked to stretch their meagre wages further than they had prewar.
As such, 1917 and 1918 were banner years for the land tax. Spokane passed a land-value tax of eight percent, the highest in the country; cities as varied geographically and politically as San Diego, Scranton, Hartford, and even Philadelphia followed suit. But the true triumph came in the spring of 1918, when the state of Oregon passed a land-value tax that would encompass the entire state, exempting "agricultural uses beyond municipal boundaries" from properties affected but otherwise extending one single rate from the Pacific to the Snake River in what was generally considered the most conservative polity on the West Coast. Georgism was no longer a fringe project of the left but rather a mainstream revenue-raiser embraced by the center and the right; Georgist taxation, in other words, was here to stay..."
- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31
It’s me putting my thumb on the scale a bit but, hey, even this TL needs some utopian concepts@KingSweden24
[SQUEEING] LAND VALUE TAX!!!!
Well that explains some of the lack of sprawl in the US as housing improvement is mechanistically incentivized in large urban centers.
lets go i love georgism 👏- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31
About 5, give or take depending on how I want to structure certain onesHmm... How many more updates of 1917 do we have remaining here?
I wonder when we will get the next Ottoman update.About 5, give or take depending on how I want to structure certain ones
We’ll have one before that focusing on the beginning of the end of Sabahaddin’s Ahrar Party dominance, and then the Mehmed update will be laterI wonder when we will get the next Ottoman update.
I feel like it will come during the July of 1918 of this timeline, as it was the month Mehmed V (the Ottoman Sultan in both timelines who preferred poetry and religious studies over political stuff) died.