Chapter 149
Chapter 149
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Translator: crow
Chapter Title: Third in the Ranking of Great Powers (1)
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The colonial empires succeeded, if only temporarily, in dodging responsibility thanks to McCarthyism.
During this time, they threw everything they had into convincing Washington.
"Those bastards are straight-up reds, I tell you. Washington got hit by them too, didn't it? We're all victims here."
With the Berlin Blockade added to the list McCarthy had been waving around, public support for decolonization was supplanted by anti-communist ideology.
If it meant stopping those cockroach-like communists, people were willing to endure anything.
Even the Truman administration couldn't completely ignore this public sentiment.
No, they were on the verge of being crushed by the pressure.
"How long is the Truman administration going to keep betraying the free world? Let our allies catch those reds right now!"
The louder McCarthy shouted, the more the Truman administration had to backpedal from its initial stance.
In the end, America decided to turn a blind eye to the colonial empires' actions.
"There must be no massacres of colonial subjects. Understood?"
The colonial empires promised the U.S. government they would comply.
Of course, that wasn't their real intention at all.
'Hey, just kill 'em and say we caught reds afterward. No big deal. They're not gonna check the corpses to see if they were reds.'
Led by Churchill and Mosley, the colonial empires resumed their offensives in unison.
The war restarted after a brief pause.
But the fighting wasn't as easy as the colonial empires had thought.
While they had halted their attacks, the colonies had reorganized their forces and were fully prepared to confront their former masters.
"Uh-oh?"
Soviet-supplied weapons, military advisors, and enthusiastic young soldiers.
The war didn't unfold as easily as the colonial empires had imagined.
India was especially tough.
India was a continent too vast to conquer on foot.
The British racked up victories time and again, but the endless guerrilla warfare was wearing them down.
The independence war wasn't some European-style conflict that ended by seizing a few major cities.
Even Britain's war command was losing its will.
"Your Excellency, dragging this war out like this will leave us high and dry. We need to compromise somehow."
Churchill had a fit at the word "compromise," but reality was harsh.
Britain had mobilized 450,000 British troops along with a million pro-British Indian forces, but the enemy was resisting with 2.5 million.
And that wasn't even India's full mobilization capacity.
India was the world's second-most populous country after China.
With hundreds of casualties every day, the British began questioning the war.
"You said we'd win in one go if we fought again! Special military operation, my ass! Explain yourself!"
The British were starting to feel war fatigue.
They could tolerate it while thinking of it as some distant conflict, but as massive war costs squeezed their livelihoods, people woke up to the truth.
This wasn't about reclaiming territory—it was a war of conquest against another nation.
"Pack it in! That goddamn war! Stop killing our boys!"
Anti-war street protests erupted in central London.
Leading the march was the Labour Party, which had opposed the war from the start.
"Those damn mongrels."
Churchill sensed the tide had turned.
He'd had the upper hand when toppling the government, but not anymore.
Public opinion was behind Labour.
"We should crack down with force. Can't let a tiny minority's opinion drag us down. We have to defend the British Empire!"
Mosley advocated a hardline response.
Churchill was prepared to burn the bridges too.
"Deploy the mounted police."
Churchill made his decision.
"Sweep away those rioters!"
That day, the bloody crackdown killed over forty Britons.
Churchill earned the nickname "Murder Prime Minister" from the violent suppression.
Even after the forceful crackdown, the protests doubled in size.
While Britain's fascists and imperialists faced overwhelming popular resistance they couldn't handle, France's Leotard ran into opposition from his own military.
"We can't keep doing this. Algeria's Algeria, Tunisia's Tunisia. Let us concentrate our forces on territories worth defending to the end."
"Are you defying the government's orders right now?"
"Orders have to make sense for us to follow them!"
Leotard made an example of ten generals who rebelled against him, but the French army didn't submit meekly to this young president.
"Go ahead, chop off more heads? We'll just take off our uniforms and be done with it."
Faced with the army's mutiny, Leotard had no choice but to compromise.
"Fine, negotiate in Indochina if you must. But pull out of equatorial Africa."
Leotard began abandoning one quagmire battlefield after another.
As France gave up territory, the Golden Dawn Party's political standing inevitably eroded.
When France and Britain showed signs of faltering, the Netherlands—which had bravely fought trusting in those two great powers—began to waver too.
"Should we... actually negotiate?"
The Netherlands proposed a withdrawal in exchange for recognition of its interests and assets in the colony.
Considering the Netherlands' overwhelming superiority, it was a shocking offer.
Of course, the Dutch proposal fell on deaf ears.
"Cut the bullshit and we're going all the way."
The Netherlands couldn't help screaming.
At this rate, they'd sink alongside their colony.
Finally, Britain—the leader of the colonial empires—requested U.S. mediation.
"We'll end the war, so help us save face."
When that stubborn British Empire waved the white flag, the Truman administration regained its confidence.
"See? We advised our allies to stand down for the sake of the alliance."
Even McCarthy couldn't attack the Truman administration's foreign policy with things turning out like this.
"Hmm. Who could've predicted it'd go this way."
On August 15, 1949, a peace treaty was signed in Delhi between the British Empire and the Republic of India.
Whatever shape India took after that was India's problem.
Britain, having lost over 30,000 soldiers, packed up empty-handed and slunk away.
The blame fell squarely on the fascists and Churchill.
"Resign right now! What face do you murderers have strutting around as prime minister or minister?"
"You bastard Mr. Gallipoli! You shouldn't have held public office since you got dumped in Gallipoli!"
The British government collapsed just a week after the peace treaty.
"I take full responsibility and resign."
Right after Churchill stepped down, every cabinet member submitted their resignations.
The once-mighty Conservative Party and the Alternative for Britain sank with the mass cabinet resignation.
"To think I destroyed the British Empire."
Wracked with deep self-loathing over the empire's collapse, Churchill fled to America.
Mosley headed to France, but things weren't looking good for French fascists either.
"Leotard doesn't seem like he'll last long. Madrid it is."
So he went to Spain.
Britain's fascists and imperialists had crumbled, and France's Leotard wasn't unscathed.
The military, seething with internal discontent, threatened a coup.
"We need to drag this warmonger down like Yi Seong-jun and save the homeland!"
Externally, the regime change in their close ally Britain shattered France's independent path.
For Leotard, who had dreamed of joint nuclear development with Britain someday, it was a double blow.
Meanwhile, the war on the concentrated Algeria and Tunisia fronts wasn't going well.
Despite deploying 650,000 troops to northwest Africa, France couldn't crush the Algerian Liberation Front and other resistance groups.
The war dragged on interminably.
Territory shrank, and the war kept dragging.
Was supporting Leotard the right call?
French support for the Golden Dawn Party wasn't what it used to be.
The imperial regimes in the Netherlands and Belgium collapsed too.
The Netherlands lost Indonesia entirely, while Belgium had fought decently but buckled under U.S. pressure.
"You animal bastards who chop off hands! Stop killing people!"
Unable to withstand American pressure, Belgium decided to withdraw from the Congo.
In the original timeline, it might have held as a colony until 1960, but this world wasn't so lucky.
Getting swept into the massive colonial war Britain ignited was their mistake.
Collective responsibility.
In the wake of Europe's screaming imperialists and fascists collapsing, countless new nations rose.
Of course, the process wasn't smooth.
Even in India,
"We will unite as one India now."
"Cut the crap. We're living separately."
Pakistan broke away,
"You know we can't live with you people."
The Sikhs, who had resisted alongside the British, established Khalistan and declared independence.
And beyond that,
"Sikkim will stand as an independent sovereign state."
Countless small nations declared independence.
Of course, India wasn't about to recognize these new states' independence.
"The map of the Indian Empire, excluding Myanmar, is the unified India."
India had transformed from a force seeking its own independence into an imperialist power trampling others' bids for freedom.
"You only learned the bad stuff from the British. Who do you think you are?"
"When your position changes, so does the view."
India's leader, Jawaharlal Nehru—who followed Korean-style democracy laced with militarism—embodied this shift.
"A united India cannot be divided. If you don't accept that, you'll die by our hands."
"Bring it on."
India had plunged into wars of mutual slaughter, no longer a colonial power but brothers killing brothers.
The other new nations were no different.
The colonies entered an era of social Darwinism, invading neighbors right after independence to expand territory.
It showed colonies weren't inherently good.
They'd simply lacked the power to be imperialist.
The outcome was clear anyway.
The war that had briefly swept the globe ended in defeat for the colonial empires.
In the shadow of that defeat, the imperialists reminiscing about past glories suddenly turned their gaze eastward.
There, while everyone else screamed in the throes of war, one nation charged ahead.
"When did those guys get this far?"
Korea.
The era was dawning when the far-eastern empire of Daehan—long relegated to the world's periphery—would rise to third place globally.