The elections would have been decided months before, so these events have no effect.
The Maw: When The Lights of the World Went Out
- Thread starter Star Eater
- Start date
Archibald
Banned
And in this case, I'll add - "bon debarras" (good riddance). The House of Saud is a bunch of corrupted morons - publicially praising charia, living like pigs.
Wonder what effect this will have on the upcoming Euro 2016 tournament. Sadly, I can't think of it being good...
Insider
Banned
terrifying and excellent.
If I would had to be nitpicking, I find riots at Kukiz'15 rally somewhat strange. This party was started by a rock star because he had enough of Civic Platform corruption. It is a rather party aimed at youth, students especially. The alliance with Nationalists was unstable from the start and led to recent break-up (still pre 20/04). Of course, a lot of deep unrealised fear and volatile atmosphere could lead even a peaceful meeting to go ugly.
On the other hand our government is trigger-happy enough to deploy military units to quell such riots.
If I would had to be nitpicking, I find riots at Kukiz'15 rally somewhat strange. This party was started by a rock star because he had enough of Civic Platform corruption. It is a rather party aimed at youth, students especially. The alliance with Nationalists was unstable from the start and led to recent break-up (still pre 20/04). Of course, a lot of deep unrealised fear and volatile atmosphere could lead even a peaceful meeting to go ugly.
On the other hand our government is trigger-happy enough to deploy military units to quell such riots.
Poland and Warsaw are poor choce for an anti muslim riot for a couple of reasons, besides the one you have mentioned: there is no geographically concentrated Muslim or Arab community in Poland, and the numbers of Arab and Muslim are small, plus after Brussels, the government would introduce the state of emergency and forbid any marches or demonstration, and if they did allow it for some stupid reason, there would be thousands of police guarding it. I could see an attack of nationalists or hooligans (not the Kukiz party though) on a mosque or prayer house, but such buildings should be preventively protected by the Police as there isn't that many of them.
On the other hand, there are reports of organizational mess in security services post power change so a screwup is definitely possible, but not on a such scale. Outskirts of Muslim districts in western european cities are much better choices for largenscale riots and pogroms to be honest.
On different note, I am pretty sure that as of now, every EU country has the full power to control immigration from outside of the EU into its territory, and full authority over granting or not granting asylum, refugee status, conducting border control and such.
Insider
Banned
on the other hand... after Brussels, some elements in police could just happily stand and watch the lynchings - in this timeline I bet it already happened a few times around Europe. So police protection would do these few locations no good.
Riots in Warsaw could spark during march of KOD, an organisation aimed at subverting current regime, (albeit with peaceful methods) with sufficently large backing in citizens to organize massive rallies. That would explain brutal supression.
Riots in Warsaw could spark during march of KOD, an organisation aimed at subverting current regime, (albeit with peaceful methods) with sufficently large backing in citizens to organize massive rallies. That would explain brutal supression.
Canonical answer:
The mass protest in Warsaw took place despite a state of emergency indeed being imposed; however the Polish government gambled on allowing the march to take place anyway, out of anxiety that refusing it would only exacerbate anger which would be expressed at a later date. There was still a massive security presence, understandably. The march also wasn't completely anti-Islamic, it was rather a mashup of various far-right grievances which the Brussels attack caused to boil over.
The mass protest in Warsaw took place despite a state of emergency indeed being imposed; however the Polish government gambled on allowing the march to take place anyway, out of anxiety that refusing it would only exacerbate anger which would be expressed at a later date. There was still a massive security presence, understandably. The march also wasn't completely anti-Islamic, it was rather a mashup of various far-right grievances which the Brussels attack caused to boil over.
"It's all the government's fault!"nope, just a bunch of Poles, discussing local politics when the world burns.Typical
"It's all the opposition's fault!"
"Liars!"
"No, you are liars!"
"But you are double liars!"
"And you are triple liars!"
"You are quadruple liars! And thieves! And break the law every morning!"
"But you lied and broke the law first! And you are all Russo-German agents of influence and traitors! And liberals!"
"A typical bunch of lies from your party!"
An so on, 24 hours a day, in three major and who knows how many minor tv networks....
6.
The response to the Brussels attack in the following days and weeks was, of course, not limited to just Europe.
The most obvious immediate response was the destruction of Raqqah. When this came, it seemed the whole world fell silent for the briefest of moments. It was easy for governments to respond to the destruction of Brussels; messages of revulsion and horror had poured from every capital, from Washington to Pyongyang. But the retaliation was difficult to reply to. Could the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands upon thousands of people be justified? This was a particularly difficult question for the Arab world to answer. Many of their citizens expected nothing less than condemnation, as evidenced by the storming of the U.S. Embassies in Jordan and Bahrain as well as the French Embassies in Bahrain, Qatar, Sudan, and Pakistan. Yet the only government to take a negative line was Turkey, furious at the possibility of fallout drifting over their territory, which it did. As many as ten thousand cancer deaths in Turkey have been attributed to the destruction of Raqqah. The fact that the French used a nuclear weapon at all can hardly be ignored for its cultural and societal effects; the international response at times seemed almost like culture shock. The single greatest taboo in the conduct of states had been broken. If it could happen once, could it happen again? Would the U.S. turn a Minuteman missile against Mosul, presently occupied by the Islamic State? Or would Russia fire an ICBM against Grozny?
On April 21st, the United Nations had met in an emergency session in New York where it was unclear exactly what to do besides take turns offering condolences. A resolution submitted by the United States and backed by the British and French called for an international coalition under the flag of the United Nations to begin deploying ground forces to Iraq. This marked what many were beginning to call the Third Gulf War, as America and NATO finally conceded that it had only one true option left. Troops would have to return to Iraq, for the previous war of attrition gradually grinding down the Islamic State was no longer acceptable. President Obama was openly being told by the Joint Chiefs that it would be necessary to deploy 100,000 troops to Iraq, on the basis of outnumbering a defender by three-to-one, with an additional 50,000 for a mission to press into Syria. These numbers spiralled further upwards as the possibility of resistance by the Syrian government, considered an extreme likelihood, was taken into account. In New York, the Security Council voted on the resolution which made no reference whatsoever to Syria. With this in mind, it passed unanimously with the West encouraged by the support shown by China and Russia. Behind the scenes, the Chinese had already made clear to Washington that they would not stand in the way of an intervention into Syria. They were already anxious about emotionally driven economic retaliation by the West for doing so, and considered Syria completely not worth such trouble. It was a different story for Russia. Though President Putin had called the destruction of Raqqah “tragic but right,” it had been clear that a ground intervention in Syria could not happen as it would inevitably mean the overthrown of President Assad. Even after the destruction of Brussels, Russia remained intractable.
Two days later, on April 23rd, the U.S. announced that the three infantry battalions of the 2nd Marine Regiment would be packing up from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and heading for Iraq, numbering 4,800 troops in all. That same day, Congress finally passed authorisation to use military force against the Islamic State. It was a rather redundant action, as the conflict was two years old already, but it at least showed some sense of unity amid a very real feeling of peril. Despite the huge estimates, for the time being the U.S. prepared to deploy a hardly immodest force of 25,000 troops to southern Iraq in preparation for supporting the Iraqi Army’s drive north to cleanse the remnants of IS territory in the country. An additional carrier group would also be sent to the Persian Gulf. It was a decision supported by all except one of the year's presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, whose opposition surely contributed to his eventual defeat for the Democratic nomination by Hillary Clinton. Fierce talk came out of the Republican field; frontrunner Donald Trump raged that "we should turn their deserts into something prettier, like glass." A series of anti-Muslim attacks across the U.S., often perpetrated by people pledging allegiance to the Trump campaign, inevitably led to violence. Two weeks later, on the eve of the Indiana primary, violence would erupt throughout Indianapolis as Trump opponents and supporters took to the streets. The same would happen in San Bernadino in California, when Trump supporters used the recent terrorist attack of the previous year to protest Muslim immigration. But for all the debates about Iraq, all knew that it was just a backwater when it came to the Islamic State. Syria was the nest.
The U.S. wasn’t the only country to begin deployment. The British were also undergoing a partial mobilisation, and the House of Commons reluctantly voted in favour of sending troops under the flag of the United Nations to Iraq. It was not a decision taken lightly; even David Cameron admitted, “there is nothing that I wanted to ask of the House less than this.” Yet public, and political, opinion had shifted dramatically in the space of a few days. Even the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for all intents and purposes a pacifist, allowed his party a free vote on the matter while he personally abstained. More than half of his own party voted with the government, and 10,000 personnel belonging to the 11th Infantry Brigade and 12th Armoured Infantry Brigade prepared to make for Iraq. France mobilised just under 5,000 troops as the 1st Mechanised Brigade readied to fly to Saudi Arabia, while an artillery regiment was also prepared. Sizeable contributions were also put together by other European powers; Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands all promised troops. Further afield, so too did China, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Egypt, Morocco, Bangladesh, Niger, Senegal, and South Korea. The amount of force they deployed would vary wildly, but it would remain the largest multinational deployment since the First Gulf War. The show of international unity was very welcome in a world where some were claiming a third world war was approaching.
Despite the large multinational force being assembled, it would take time to arrive and be prepared; the pledged 65,000 troops would take more than a month to be fully ready for offensive action. With that in mind, the air campaign against the Islamic State was stepped up by several magnitudes. The United States increased the number of committed aircraft by fifty percent, while introducing B-52 heavy bombers for the first time. The Internet was soon piling up with footage of the fresh bombardments underway. The Islamic State was already beginning to prove shambolic in its coordination; the destruction of Raqqah had severed a head but a new one had yet to grow in its place, while the group was also desperately short of funds. The most powerful motivator now was ideology, and the destruction of Brussels and Raqqah had brought fire into the bellies of many fighters. The war of the end times which they had been told they would bring about was coming.
The British began allocating money to construct a second runway at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, an expression of a significant injection of defence funding which would include £3 billion to raise an additional 20,000 men and women for the Regular Army. Getting the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth ready for service would be sped up, or at least the government hoped it would be, which came alongside tremendous pressure on the Americans to get the new F-35 fighter aircraft operational despite their controversy increasing by the day. Whitehall even looked into a limited reintroduction of National Service, defunct since 1960, but quietly put it to one side. Across the Channel, President Hollande was enjoying, if that could be considered the right word, his place as a wartime leader. A great chunk of the French Army was still tied up maintaining order in a troubled Belgium, but the European troika’s promise to implement limited debt forgiveness amid the continent-wide emergency offered breathing room for fresh spending on security. The European Union would three weeks later sign the Treaty of Zilina, which would significantly integrate their intelligence agencies to better combat threats both internal and external. One secret clause of this agreement would see a detainment camp for the most “troublesome” of Islamists built on the British island territory of South Georgia, deep in the South Atlantic.
Comments?
The response to the Brussels attack in the following days and weeks was, of course, not limited to just Europe.
The most obvious immediate response was the destruction of Raqqah. When this came, it seemed the whole world fell silent for the briefest of moments. It was easy for governments to respond to the destruction of Brussels; messages of revulsion and horror had poured from every capital, from Washington to Pyongyang. But the retaliation was difficult to reply to. Could the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands upon thousands of people be justified? This was a particularly difficult question for the Arab world to answer. Many of their citizens expected nothing less than condemnation, as evidenced by the storming of the U.S. Embassies in Jordan and Bahrain as well as the French Embassies in Bahrain, Qatar, Sudan, and Pakistan. Yet the only government to take a negative line was Turkey, furious at the possibility of fallout drifting over their territory, which it did. As many as ten thousand cancer deaths in Turkey have been attributed to the destruction of Raqqah. The fact that the French used a nuclear weapon at all can hardly be ignored for its cultural and societal effects; the international response at times seemed almost like culture shock. The single greatest taboo in the conduct of states had been broken. If it could happen once, could it happen again? Would the U.S. turn a Minuteman missile against Mosul, presently occupied by the Islamic State? Or would Russia fire an ICBM against Grozny?
On April 21st, the United Nations had met in an emergency session in New York where it was unclear exactly what to do besides take turns offering condolences. A resolution submitted by the United States and backed by the British and French called for an international coalition under the flag of the United Nations to begin deploying ground forces to Iraq. This marked what many were beginning to call the Third Gulf War, as America and NATO finally conceded that it had only one true option left. Troops would have to return to Iraq, for the previous war of attrition gradually grinding down the Islamic State was no longer acceptable. President Obama was openly being told by the Joint Chiefs that it would be necessary to deploy 100,000 troops to Iraq, on the basis of outnumbering a defender by three-to-one, with an additional 50,000 for a mission to press into Syria. These numbers spiralled further upwards as the possibility of resistance by the Syrian government, considered an extreme likelihood, was taken into account. In New York, the Security Council voted on the resolution which made no reference whatsoever to Syria. With this in mind, it passed unanimously with the West encouraged by the support shown by China and Russia. Behind the scenes, the Chinese had already made clear to Washington that they would not stand in the way of an intervention into Syria. They were already anxious about emotionally driven economic retaliation by the West for doing so, and considered Syria completely not worth such trouble. It was a different story for Russia. Though President Putin had called the destruction of Raqqah “tragic but right,” it had been clear that a ground intervention in Syria could not happen as it would inevitably mean the overthrown of President Assad. Even after the destruction of Brussels, Russia remained intractable.
Two days later, on April 23rd, the U.S. announced that the three infantry battalions of the 2nd Marine Regiment would be packing up from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and heading for Iraq, numbering 4,800 troops in all. That same day, Congress finally passed authorisation to use military force against the Islamic State. It was a rather redundant action, as the conflict was two years old already, but it at least showed some sense of unity amid a very real feeling of peril. Despite the huge estimates, for the time being the U.S. prepared to deploy a hardly immodest force of 25,000 troops to southern Iraq in preparation for supporting the Iraqi Army’s drive north to cleanse the remnants of IS territory in the country. An additional carrier group would also be sent to the Persian Gulf. It was a decision supported by all except one of the year's presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, whose opposition surely contributed to his eventual defeat for the Democratic nomination by Hillary Clinton. Fierce talk came out of the Republican field; frontrunner Donald Trump raged that "we should turn their deserts into something prettier, like glass." A series of anti-Muslim attacks across the U.S., often perpetrated by people pledging allegiance to the Trump campaign, inevitably led to violence. Two weeks later, on the eve of the Indiana primary, violence would erupt throughout Indianapolis as Trump opponents and supporters took to the streets. The same would happen in San Bernadino in California, when Trump supporters used the recent terrorist attack of the previous year to protest Muslim immigration. But for all the debates about Iraq, all knew that it was just a backwater when it came to the Islamic State. Syria was the nest.
The U.S. wasn’t the only country to begin deployment. The British were also undergoing a partial mobilisation, and the House of Commons reluctantly voted in favour of sending troops under the flag of the United Nations to Iraq. It was not a decision taken lightly; even David Cameron admitted, “there is nothing that I wanted to ask of the House less than this.” Yet public, and political, opinion had shifted dramatically in the space of a few days. Even the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for all intents and purposes a pacifist, allowed his party a free vote on the matter while he personally abstained. More than half of his own party voted with the government, and 10,000 personnel belonging to the 11th Infantry Brigade and 12th Armoured Infantry Brigade prepared to make for Iraq. France mobilised just under 5,000 troops as the 1st Mechanised Brigade readied to fly to Saudi Arabia, while an artillery regiment was also prepared. Sizeable contributions were also put together by other European powers; Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands all promised troops. Further afield, so too did China, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Egypt, Morocco, Bangladesh, Niger, Senegal, and South Korea. The amount of force they deployed would vary wildly, but it would remain the largest multinational deployment since the First Gulf War. The show of international unity was very welcome in a world where some were claiming a third world war was approaching.
Despite the large multinational force being assembled, it would take time to arrive and be prepared; the pledged 65,000 troops would take more than a month to be fully ready for offensive action. With that in mind, the air campaign against the Islamic State was stepped up by several magnitudes. The United States increased the number of committed aircraft by fifty percent, while introducing B-52 heavy bombers for the first time. The Internet was soon piling up with footage of the fresh bombardments underway. The Islamic State was already beginning to prove shambolic in its coordination; the destruction of Raqqah had severed a head but a new one had yet to grow in its place, while the group was also desperately short of funds. The most powerful motivator now was ideology, and the destruction of Brussels and Raqqah had brought fire into the bellies of many fighters. The war of the end times which they had been told they would bring about was coming.
The British began allocating money to construct a second runway at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, an expression of a significant injection of defence funding which would include £3 billion to raise an additional 20,000 men and women for the Regular Army. Getting the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth ready for service would be sped up, or at least the government hoped it would be, which came alongside tremendous pressure on the Americans to get the new F-35 fighter aircraft operational despite their controversy increasing by the day. Whitehall even looked into a limited reintroduction of National Service, defunct since 1960, but quietly put it to one side. Across the Channel, President Hollande was enjoying, if that could be considered the right word, his place as a wartime leader. A great chunk of the French Army was still tied up maintaining order in a troubled Belgium, but the European troika’s promise to implement limited debt forgiveness amid the continent-wide emergency offered breathing room for fresh spending on security. The European Union would three weeks later sign the Treaty of Zilina, which would significantly integrate their intelligence agencies to better combat threats both internal and external. One secret clause of this agreement would see a detainment camp for the most “troublesome” of Islamists built on the British island territory of South Georgia, deep in the South Atlantic.
Comments?
Subscribed to this thread. Small thing; Amsterdam is in The Netherlands , not Belgium. Perhaps Antwerp would have been a better choice?
J.D.Ward
Donor
A return to nineteenth century diplomacy, ignoring Article 102 of the UN Charter. Before the end, many more conventions of post-1945 international relations will be abandoned ITTL.
I love the idea of a containment camp on South Georgia. Hopefully, every imam in the west will have all their sermons monitored; any hate speech will get them a one-way ticket to Grytviken.
Concerning Syria, if Putin flat out won't accept any NATO troops there, why can't he send in the Russian army in to clean ISIS out? Of course, if that were to happen, it gets really messy, because of the Syrian Kurds. Hopefully, out of this apocalypse, a more autonomous [maybe even independent] Iraqi Kurdistan can appear.
Concerning Syria, if Putin flat out won't accept any NATO troops there, why can't he send in the Russian army in to clean ISIS out? Of course, if that were to happen, it gets really messy, because of the Syrian Kurds. Hopefully, out of this apocalypse, a more autonomous [maybe even independent] Iraqi Kurdistan can appear.
Question: what happened to the Belgian royal family? Were they killed in the attack? If so, who is the new monarch?
Yep, it is like Virgin birth. No centrifuges or messing with Pu! Clean and handy!
The Belgian Monarchy is largely unscathed with the exception of Prince Joachim, who was one of the many victims of flash-blinding.