Literature / The Footprint of Mussolini

"Blood alone moves the wheels of history." - Benito Mussolini. (Credits to alternatehistory.com's own JM23, also known as Chroniton8990)

"[Issac] Carpi would be praised as a model Italian citizen and Fascist for the rest of the Fascist era, even getting a biography made of him in 1958. But that wasn’t the main influence Carpi left behind. Not since Gavrilo Princip, perhaps, has one simple man changed the fate of so many millions."

The Footprint of Mussolini is a Timeline on AlternateHistory.com written by Sorairo.

Benito Mussolini came to power in war-torn Italy seeking to create a new Roman Empire, with himself as the emperor. In OTL, he tied himself to the Nazis, leading Italy down the road of ruin, and himself to overthrow and a humiliating demise.

TTL, however, a chance encounter with an assassin and the Heroic Sacrifice of a Jewish blackshirt changes Mussolini's outlook toward the Nazis. He proceeds to chart a unique course for the Italian empire, changing the events of the 20th century as well.

It can also be found in book format at Amazon, having been self-published by the author.

Tropes Include

#-D

• 0% Approval Rating:
  • Wallace's pro-Soviet policies turn him into a complete pariah. After he shares nuclear information with Stalin, who proceeds to nuke Warsaw during the Second Polish-Soviet War, he eventually ends up impeached in an effort lead by the Republicans. His actions end up destroying the Democratic Party as a whole.
  • Mao Zedong's failure of the Great Leap Forward, attacks during a festival, destructive charges of the Red Guard and People's Liberation Army, massive ego, and sleeping with underage teenage girls ensured his hatred by everyone. The army commanders for his senseless waste of manpower during the Battle of Shanghai, the Chinese Communist party along with the Politburo want to kill him for dismissing their advice and refusal to ask for help, and the people despise him for the failed GLF, loss of life from the war, and his indiscretions. Even his own wife decided him staying in power would destroy his legacy.
  • On a state scale, Apartheid-era South Africa is even more hated than OTL with its reputation being widely despised (to the point where mentioning being from there can kick you out of a bar anywhere). As said by the narration, the government has created a white ethnostate at the cost of their economy, moral decency, and grandchildren’s reputation.
• Abomination Accusation Attack: The Muscat Blood Libel. Where Aflaq ordered for the faked death of prominent Ba’athist Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr's twelve year old son to make it look like Muscat's Jewish community were responsible for it. Not only does the UAR use it as an excuse to wipe out the city's remaining Jewish population, but also serve as a reason to declare war on Israel.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Played for drama. The sloppily planned Soviet plot to fake the moon landing was born from Premier Suslov watching the film Aelita while incredibly drunk and incredibly depressed over Britain and Italy beating the Soviets to the moon, as the space program was the only thing the Soviet state had left going for it.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • Josef Mengele also drowns in this timeline... but much earlier, and under very different circumstances.
  • Einstein becoming Israel's President. Einstein was offered the post in real-life, but turned it down.
  • Kokura ends up being the target of America's second atomic bomb; in real life, it was the original target for Fat Man until adverse weather caused it to be dropped on Nagasaki instead.
  • The civil rights movement causes a controversy involving the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system, after a wealthy black businessman purchases the system and desegregates it, causing many white residents to boycott the buses.
  • The Ciano Plan, named after Galeazzo Ciano, is similar to OTL's Morgenthau Plan, which would have heavily weakened Germany through the complete dissolution of its military, though in this timeline it gets repurposed against the Arab states.
  • In a minor example, Saddam Hussein ends up dying in the 1960s the same way Benito did in our history, complete with his body being desecrated in the same way.
  • An unpopular Argentine dictatorship goes to war over some disputed islands in an attempt to boost national pride... except it's a dictatorship led by Isabel Peron going to war against Chile over the islands in the Beagle Channel.
  • Georgy Zhukov, accused of treason, commits suicide in 1944 to prevent his family from being targeted, a mirror of Erwin Rommel's fate IOTL.
  • Aflaq launches a purge of Lebanon's politicians very reminiscent of a purge Saddam Hussein perpetrated against members of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party in 1979.
  • The Qingming Offensive, which was launched in the middle of a festival important to the Chinese, is a mirror of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War.
  • Jack Ruby kills someone as part of their revenge against the death of an American politician except of Lee Harvey Oswald, in this timeline, it's James 'Catfish' Cole for assassinating Lyndon B. Johnson.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: When Stalin's death is announced to the world, Israel declares a state holiday.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: After the Mossad tracks Otto Skorenzy down in Brazil, they give him a choice: either help them track down ODESSA or they can execute him on the spot. Unsurprisingly, he chose to help them.
• Argentina Is Nazi-Land: Subverted. With Argentina in the Fascist bloc, the nation that gets the dubious honor of being the final home for Nazi war criminals on the run goes to the United Arab Republic. The UAR ends up being a refuge for all of ODESSA thanks to Hermann Fegelein with the likes of Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Walter Rauff, Otto Ambros, and Otto Skorenzy (albeit as an Israeli spy) among others all making the trip there. All but Klaus Barbie would be dead by the end of the Second Arabian War either due to Israeli Commandos or, in the case of Fegelein, killing themselves to spite their would-be captors.
• Armor-Piercing Question: After one of the Jewish Brigades arrives at Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss tries to claim that the Jews were being treated humanely. He says the deaths were caused by starvation (saying infighting among the Germans was causing supply issues) and a cholera outbreak. Zvi Brenner destroys this defense with two questions:
  "May I ask, commandant, are these the shoes of Jewish children? May I ask, commandant, why we haven't seen any children at the camp since we arrived?"
• As the Good Book Says...: Malenkov begins to quote the Bible more after his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. Two most notable times he quoted the Bible were when he parphrased Matthew 25:35-45^note "I was hungry and you didn’t feed me, I was thirsty and you didn’t give me drink, I was a stranger and you didn’t invite me into your home, I was naked and you didn’t give me clothing, I was sick in prison and you didn’t visit me[...]" when he abandons the remaining Communist nations of Asia and paraphrases Matthew 26:52^note "He who lives by the sword shall die from the sword" when he puts his foot down and refuses to take part in convicting the Communists' leaders at the Trier Trial, should the death penalty be on the table for any of them.
• Back from the Brink: By the time Patton gets elected as President in 1948, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang only had solid control of a toehold in the far south of China with Mao and his communists seem destined to control all of China. The arrival of reinforcements from America (who want payback against the Soviets for their perceived role in the Wallace administration) and eventually the United Nations sees Chiang become far more popular than Mao or "Madame Mao" Jiang Qing, the only other ruler of the PRC before its collapse in 1973 and becoming the sole ruler of post-war South China who lives long enough to see North China and Mongolia reunified under the Republic of China before dying in 1975.
• Balkanize Me:
  • Yugoslavia is carved up by the Fascist Bloc, with Italy getting Dalmatia and Slovenia, Hungary getting Vojvodina, Bulgaria getting Macedonia, a Croatian state that gets Bosnia, with the Serbs getting a greatly reduced rump state.
  • The fate of the Middle East after the UAR fell. Syria was carved into an Assyrian state, a Druze state, and a chunk in the north which Turkey took for itself. Lebanon became an exclusively Christian state. Egypt was divided into two, a Coptic Lower Egypt and a Muslim Upper Egypt. The Algerian coast remained French, and Spain annexed all of the Moroccan coast. Kurdistan was established as a socialist state that was still friendly to the West. South Iran occupies all of the former Saudi Gulf coast. Hejaz was occupied by Turkey and later returned to the Hashemites. As for the rest of the former Saudi Arabia, it became the Islamic State of Arabia and regressed into a backward, medieval theocracy that managed to become even worse than OTL's ISIS.
  • The aftermath of the Chinese War sees China split between a communist rump PRC aka North China, a ROC based in the south otherwise known as South China, Beijing split between them akin to Berlin, East Turkestan, and Tibet. South China ends up reclaiming North China and Mongolia after the collapse of communism in the early 1970s, but East Turkestan and Tibet are there to stay.
  • By 1973, the Soviet Union peacefully dissolves and sees the three Baltic States, Finland, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, the Central Asian Republics, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Chechnya, Tuva, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan all break off while Russia itself is the Tolstoyist Russian Federation with Georgy Malenkov at the helm.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game:
  • Once the American South breaks out in Troubles-style violence, many black activists give as good as they got from The Klan.
  • Afro-Fascism becomes the go-to ideology for African independence groups across the continent after Communism is discredited worldwide, most importantly being a major force of the Ethiopian Uprising in the early 1970s.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Elie Wiesel is a decent guy, but he had little mercy for Rudolf Höss.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • Nazi diplomat and Holocaust perpetrator Martin Luther kills himself rather than let himself be captured and face the hangman's noose.
  • Hermann Fegelein kills himself with a cyanide pill before the Israelis can capture him.
• Bittersweet Ending: Fascism joins communism in not making it out of the 1970s with a fair amount of Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries being surprisingly well-off compared to OTL. However, this timeline gets its name for a reason. Italian Fascism being legitimized allowed colonialism in Africa to continue to the point where many colonies were incorporated into the European metropole and acts considered war crimes in our world such as forced expulsions and collective punishment being considered normal by a good portion of the world. Fascist Italy also holds the dubious honor of having dropped the most nuclear weapons in history which includes the destruction of the Middle East that came with the fall of the UAR, the Nuclear Weapons Taboo only still in place during wartime thanks to the worldwide horror at the Soviets nuking Warsaw and the Italians nuking Addis Ababa.
• Boomerang Bigot: Ryu Ota, in his position as leader of the People's Republic of Ezo, discriminates against ethnic Japanese people despite being ethnically Japanese himself.
• Break the Haughty: After Mao is captured by the Soviets during the coup against him near the end of the Chinese War, his time in captivity in South China during his trial and being frequently beaten by prison guards broke what spirit he had left by then and was borderline mute in the days leading up to his execution.
• Butt-Monkey: Yumjaagiin Tsendbal, Communist dictator of Mongolia, gets absolutely shat on during the Trier trial as he is portrayed by prosecutors as a complete idiot subservient to his wife (who was considered the real leader of the regime) and had to sit through hearing the contents of numerous letters written among Soviet leaders mocking him for being his wife’s plaything. He even failed to commit suicide to escape either his humiliation or his inevitable guilty verdict thanks to authorities tightening security after Kenji Miyamoto succeeds in taking his own life.
• The Caligula:
  • Heinrich Himmler takes over Germany after Hitler's death, and proceeds to enact Stalin-style purges of the military and civilian populations, while also authorizing nerve gas attacks on Allied forces every chance he gets, even when it kills his own soldiers too.
  • Jiang Qing takes over Red China after Mao is arrested by the Soviets and handed over to his enemies. As it becomes clear that her country is little more than an impoverished Soviet puppet state, she retreats into an obsession with film, making a series of terrible movies starring herself and forcing her people to watch them.
  • Grand Mufti Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State of Arabia, is a massive luddite who bans all "non-Islamic" technology, causing entire villages to be wiped out by disease outbreaks they couldn't treat.
• Category Traitor:
  • During the Second Arabian War, UAR forces primarily from Egypt invade Italian Libya, thinking their fellow Arabs will greet them as liberators. The Libyans only resist against the UAR forces just as much as the Italian settler population does, making the UAR invaders treat the Libyans as occupied enemies.
  • When Anne Frank enters politics, Meir Kahane accuses her of antisemitism for her criticism of the Roman Alliance.
• The Chains of Commanding: Despite the Israeli Presidency being a ceremonial post, Einstein feels crushed by his job.
• Civil War: After Hitler is killed in Operation Valkyrie, Germany breaks out into in-fighting between the coup plotters and Himmler, with the latter declaring himself Führer and being supported by the SS and Nazi loyalists in the army, while the rest of the army flocks to Beck's provisional government in Hamburg and Rommel's Allied-backed "Free German Army" on the Western Front.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The standard punishment for just about anyone Stalin thinks is a spy or traitor, the effects of which are horrifyingly shown with how Italian communist exile Palmiro Togliatti is broken following his three-day-long torture at his show trial. After being falsely convicted of being a Western spy and sentenced to death, he proceeds to go on an unscripted rant praising Stalin and saying he deserves to die. It would later be reported that he was crying Tears of Joy in the days leading up to his execution.
  Palmiro Togliatti: "Thank you Comrade Stalin! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me the punishment I deserve! I am so happy you decided to slay all my associates as well!”
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much:
  • After the Nazis execute Horthy, the German media claims he was killed by communists.
  • After Khrushchev is shot by the other Soviet leaders when they usurp control from him, they put out an official story that he had a heart attack.
• The Coup:
  • Unlike in real life, Hitler is successfully killed in Operation Valkyrie. Though circumstances keep the coup plotters from seizing control of the Reich government before Himmler can, they're able to set up a provisional rival government in Hamburg, which gets backing from the Allies by means of supporting a defecting Rommel's "Free German Army" against the SS and the factions of the Wehrmacht staying loyal to Himmler.
  • After Pavelić leads Croatia into a war of extermination against Serbia over protests from the rest of the Roman Alliance (threatening to split the power bloc and/or start World War III by pissing off the Soviets), the other Fascist powers enable King Timoslav and the exiled Dido Kvaternik to overthrow Pavelić, purging him and his loyalists in order to install a government that will tow the Alliance's company line.
  • As in real life, Bey Muhammad VIII al-Amin of Tunisia is overthrown. In this timeline, however, it's assassination at the hands of his own bodyguards, for the purpose of swearing allegiance to the UAR at the start of the Second Arabian War.
  • In an act of desperation at the end of the Second Arabian War, Sadat poisons the completely delusional Nasser so that he can take over leadership of what's left of Egypt and surrender to Israel and the Roman Alliance while there's still a chance.
  • Due to the perception of having bungled his duties as leader, especially after the Second Arabian War, Suslov is able to convince Molotov and Malenkov to turn on Khrushchev, executing him and arresting his loyalists, allowing Suslov to take his place.
  • With the Soviet populace hitting their breaking point with the government after learning about Suslov's Moon-Landing Hoax and Yuri Gagaran's defection to the West as a result, Malenkov uses the public outcry to oust Suslov from power and take over as premier. And when he enacts liberalizing reforms, Communist hardliners headed by Molotov and Andropov place him under house arrest to take power for themselves and undo his work. This results in a general uprising, aided by the army against the KGB, which forces the hardliners to stand down and restore Malenkov to power.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: For being Defiant to the End in his show trial, Erich von Manstein is executed slowly with a knife.
• Cruel Mercy: For all the trouble he caused and the public fully convinced he was a Soviet spy, Henry Wallace was to spend the rest of his life imprisoned on Alcatraz in the very same cell that once held Al Capone to make his name synonymous with crime. This never comes to pass, however, thanks to Wallace being assassinated by a disturbed George Lincoln Rockwell. President Patton, who actually wanted him executed, actually ends up liking the idea better than just killing him.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The invasion of the Islamic State of Arabia done primarily by the Hejaz and Saba amounts to this. The ISA had banned guns and modern technology on the grounds of being "un-Islamic" and their armed forces only wielded swords and arrows in battle... against fully armored main battle tanks.
• Cynicism Catalyst:
  • Tito was initially a supporter of making a Yugoslav communist state, after seeing the murder of hundreds by the Ustashe and the indifference the Croatian population greeted such atrocities, he decided it was a lost cause and adopted Serbian nationalism instead.
  • Anwar Sadat loses all faith in Pan-Arabism when Nasser smiles at the thought of being the sole major figure of the UAR after the nukes dropped on the country due to Operation Samson.
  Anwar Sadat: “When I felt a sting worse than all the hunger, hopelessness and hell that had befallen our beloved Egypt – it was realising that not even the leaders of the Pan-Arabist movement believed in Pan-Arabism. Here was our leader, smiling and gloating about the deaths of our fellow Arabs – why? Because he wanted the crown for himself. The Jews began their miserable two thousand year exile because of the Italians, yet they fought as brothers. Here were we, of the same flesh, the same blood, and we smiled as we saw our brothers die. There could be no unity in this sad land. I knew that Pan-Arabism was the dream of a fool, like myself.”
• Dark Lord on Life Support: Like in our history, Stalin suffers from a stroke in 1952, which the Troika of Vyacheslav Molotov, Nikita Khrushchev, and Gregory Malenkov is quick to take advantage of to claw the USSR out of the hole Stalin had dug for it and to escape the resource sink that was China during the Chinese War. Stalin does eventually wake up, though is confined to a hospital bed on life support, which doesn't last long as the Troika finishes him off the same day he awoke out of sheer self-preservation, worried that taking care of business while Stalin was in a coma would be mistaken by him as a coup.
• Dawson Casting: In-Universe example. Jiang Qing's first role on her return to her film career would be her starring role in the 1961 North Chinese film The People’s Mulan: a biography about herself where she even plays the role of her teenage self, despite being about forty years too old to believably play such an age.
• Deadly Gas: The UAR launches nerve gas at Tel Aviv during the Second Arabian War, all possible thanks to them taking in Nazi war criminal Otto Ambros, who dabbled in experiments with Sarin and Tabun near the end of World War 2 in Europe.
• Deconstruction:
  • The idea that one could engineer a false moon landing. Suslov, desperately trying to restore the prestige of Soviet Russia, attempts to fake a landing on the Far Side of the Moon. From the very start, it was clear this wasn't going to go how Suslov thought it would.
    • Rather than being a stroke of genius that Suslov thinks it is, the hoax is portrayed as nothing but a last desperate move of a man who is cracking under the pressure of seeing Soviet communism replaced in the third world by Afro-Fascism and seeing everything he believes in dying before his eyes, even if he refuse to admit it.
    • Said plan was also conceived after Suslov got drunk because he was depressed over the British and Italians beating the Soviets to the moon. Even when he sobers up, he sticks with the plan because the glories the Space Program bring is the only positive the Soviet state has left.
    • Most of his subordinates see the plan for the insanity it is, Yuri Andropov even thought it was a "test of loyalty" from Suslov when first informed of the plan. Everyone else within upper echelons of the CPSU that are in on it are noted to be too terrified to stand against him thanks to the USSR's persistent Stalinist terror, with Gorbachev having been shipped off the gulag months before the plan went into motion for trying to foment opposition against Suslov.
    • Numerous intelligence agencies from the rival blocs would expose the act together after the fact. They have the means to know what's going on in the Soviet Space Program and have no reason to keep this ruse a secret. Not to mention that many trained engineers and scientists could easily debunk the Soviet Union's supposed landing.
    • Many subordinates, like Yuri Gagarin, would be deeply disgusted by this act. Pavel Klushantev, a Soviet science fiction move director who was dragged out of a gulag for the occasion, deliberately engineers the footage to be as bad as possible.
  • The idea of building a white ethnostate is viciously debunked: South African Whites do this, and suffering living in an impoverished pariah state.
• Decapitated Army: The Ikhwan ceases to be a serious terrorist force once their paymaster Mohammed bin Laden dies in 1968.
• Decapitation Strike: Operation Samson nukes every administrative center and prime military target in the UAR, wiping out the majority of their leadership and scattering what's left of their armies afterwards.
• Defector from Decadence: Gagarin is so angered with the attempt to fake the moon landing, during his flight, he flees to Turkestan and later the United States.
• Defiant to the End:
  • According to some reports, Horthy told one of his captors that he would rather "the Jews ruled Hungary forever rather than let your buffoon of a leader rule it for one second" before he died.
  • During his trial before a Kangaroo Court, Erich von Manstein is openly contemptuous of Roland Freisler and the Nazi regime.
  • During his lynching, Jackie Robinson's last words to the Klansmen was "You can’t degrade me. You’re only degrading yourselves". His words would later prove to be prophetic when his death results in the USA's version of The Troubles and causes the Ku Klux Klan to be virtually dissolved.
• Despair Event Horizon: Knowing he's screwed no matter what, Ware Group member John Abt lies and says that Wallace really was a Communist spy despite previously denying it just to take him down with him, with the public and the Patton administration quick to believe his statement. Abt's lie sends Wallace downwards into depression while in his cell and ensuring he dies a broken man.
• Destination Defenestration: During the coup against Pavelić's regime in Croatia, his Prime Minister Nikola Mandić is thrown out a fourth story window.
• Different World, Different Movies: Due to a stronger Red Scare which leads to a different Hollywood Blacklist in this timeline, various anti-communist movies were made as a response to it:
  • invoked We The Living is an adaptation of Ayn Rand's first novel and is the last film directed by Victor Fleming before his death some days after filming concluded, whose ending was changed to conform to the The Hays Code, leading to Ayn Rand herself to renounce it. While popular in Italy, the fact that the story can also be interpreted as antifascist lead to the Italian government banning it.
  • Right Hand Man sees Humphrey Bogart portray an Russian thug recruited by the NKVD as they terrorize various townspeople, only to be arrested by the NKVD through an cooked-up charge by an ambitious underling. Broken by their torture, he helps a Jewish girl and her father escape from the NKVD at the cost of his life.
  • Know Your Enemy is a series of documentaries by Frank Capra about Communism in the vein of Why We Fight.
  • A film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities is still released, with the notable difference that the evils of the aristocrats are downplayed in favor of the evils of the revolutionaries.
  • The Other Great Dictator, a sequel to Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, is released as a response to the Holocaust and is Darker and Edgier compared to the original film. Featuring the Barber who is freed from jail, his joy at seeing Tomania being liberated is diminished as freedom over there is slowly and brutally eroded by the Russians. The film ends with most of the cast from the first film and Barber escaping to Israel.
  • Warsaw features an old man wandering through the ruins of Warsaw, having flashbacks to his younger self portrayed by John Wayne, and ends with him deciding that while the city of Warsaw may be ruined, the spirit of it lives on and joins the local resistance. The film is a massive critical and commercial success, and John Wayne would receive an Oscar for his acting alongside John Ford.
• Dirty Communists: Communism becomes even more reviled in this world due to a combination of Stalin starting a second Holocaust in the 1950s and nuking Warsaw during the 2nd Polish-Soviet war, the Americans convinced that President Wallace was a Soviet spy, and being humiliated by the reveal of the UAR (the USSR's only ally outside of the Stalingrad Pact) harboring Nazi war criminals right under their nose. The straw that breaks the camel's back is Suslov ordering for a fake moon landing in the 1970s, and by then, the money sink the space program has become results in the USSR dissolving in 1973 by popular uprising that was less bloody than expected.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Hitler ends up being killed in Operation Valkyrie, leaving Himmler to take over Nazi Germany.
• Disney Villain Death: As part of The Purge of Pavelić's supporters in Croatia after he's overthrown, Vjekoslav Luburić (who was in charging of destroying Orthodox Christianity in the invaded parts of Serbia) gets thrown off a cliff.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: A Communist regime in the northern half of an Asian country attempts to take over the whole country in the years after World War II, almost succeeds, and then is driven back by a heavily American United Nations force but it's China instead of Korea, causing a much larger and bloodier conflict.

E-K

• Earn Your Happy Ending: After being brought Back from the Brink, Chiang Kai-shek lives long enough to see the collapse of Communism and the reunification of North and South China along with the annexation of Mongolia. Unlike in our history, where he dies in exile on Taiwan while the communists destroy mainland China, here he dies after living to see China free and goes down as a hero to the people of China for his fight against communism. He's even said to have passed with a smile on his face.
  Chiang Kai-Shek: "How lucky I am that I saw China’s finest generation."
• End of an Age: The 1970s sees the fall of both Communism and Fascism as a global force.
• Enemy Civil War: The British Union of Fascists would undergo a schism when Oswald Mosley begin supporting Italian Fascism against German Nazism, resulting in William Joyce denouncing him and Joyce, alongside 20% of the union, leaving to form the National Socialist League. It wouldn't be until the Roman Alliance's entry into World War II that the British Union of Fascists begin to recover its lost membership.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The war against Hitler doesn't just unite communists and liberal-democratic capitalists, but fascists as well once Hitler has the SS invade Italy just to hunt down and kill the Hungarian Jews.
  • After Spain goes to war against Germany as part of the Roman Alliance's mutual defense clause, some members of the anti-Franco resistance ironically end up joining his army.
  • The Cold War in this world sees an alliance of sorts between the democratic International Treaty Organization and the Fascists of the Roman Alliance against the USSR and its Stalingrad Pact. While the alliance does see major cracks that result in a split between the Fascist and Democratic blocs by the 1960s, it lasts long enough to be part of the reason why Communism falls and the Soviet Union collapses in the early 1970s.
  • The Mafia, several black radical groups, and Italian American organizations collaborate in a war against The Klan.
• Enraged by Idiocy: Many Nazi commanders finally turn on Hitler when the madman proceeds to invade Italy, already overstretching German resources, and drawing in the entire fascist bloc against Germany.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Mussolini is a brutal, imperialistic dictator, but after a Jewish blackshirt takes some gunfire for him, he decides he'll never have anything to do with antisemitism.
  • Horthy may have instituted anti-Semitic laws, but that doesn't mean he wants all of Hungary's Jews to be killed in Nazi death camps.
  • Stalin supports the Arab Coalition during the First Arabic War, but pulls out when they appoint Amin Al-Husseini — a proponent of Hitler who had called on Muslims to support the Nazis during WWII — as their new figurehead ruler. As the narration notes, Stalin may have hated Jews, but he hated Hitler more.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • The American public of the 1950s aren't very racially tolerant, but many are outraged over the lynching of Jackie Robinson, who in this TL became a decorated veteran.
  • Rudolf Hess is hardly a picture of sanity, but even he thinks Mikhail Suslov is crazy.
  • Rhodesia is an Apartheid state with institutionalized racism in place against its black population, but even the ruling white minority are horrified and disgusted by the racial violence enacted by white immigrants from the American South, to the point that the government reacts to the formation of a local KKK branch by arresting and deporting its entire membership.
• Evil Luddite: Grand Mufti Muhammad ibn Ibrahim is the leader of the ISA, a nation established in former central Saudi Arabia after the Second Arabian War that quickly bans "non-Islamic" technology and pretty much anything modern, all as part of an insane notion of repenting for the sin of allying with the UAR lead by a Christian, who in turn was allied to the atheist Soviet Union. By the time of the nation's fall, the army was reduced to using swords and bows, and various diseases that were previously extinct have come back with a vengeance to ravage the largely rural population.
• Evil Versus Evil: Like in OTL, the Soviet Union fights against Nazi Germany. After Horthy deports Hungary's Jews to Italy rather than send them to the camps, the Fascist Bloc/Roman Alliance also gets drawn into the war against the Nazis.
• Eye Scream: Nasser is blinded after he looked at the Cairo nuke going off while he happened to look out at the city when the bomb exploded.
• Fatal Flaw: Hitler's raging antisemitism and paranoia leads him toward his most stupid choices. His hatred of Hungary's Jews is such that he invades Italy just to kill them. His hatred then leads him to murder a popular aristocrat for his ties to Italy's monarchy, aligning Germany's nobility against him.
• Fictionalized Death Account: There are plenty of these.
  • Miklós Horthy is murdered by the SS after being overthrown, unlike IOTL where he lived until 1957.
  • Adolf Hitler and several other high-ranking Nazis are killed in Operation Valkyrie, a plot they survived IOTL.
  • Albert Speer is killed when Heinrich Himmler purges him and the rest of his offices for delaying the gas shipments.
  • Rudolf Höss is killed during the Auschwitz reprisals, as is Josef Mengele.
  • Multiple high-ranking Nazis, most prominently Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, are executed at the Nuremberg trials despite not having been tried (at least not there) in our timeline.
  • Mao Zedong is publicly hanged in Shanghai. Many of his supporters, meanwhile, are killed over the course of a purge by the PLA; Zhou Enlai is shot in the streets of Beijing in broad daylight, Liu Shaoqui is mauled to death by a crowd, and Deng Xiaoping shoots himself to avoid being murdered or executed.
  • Josef Stalin dies when Khrushchev has him disconnected from his life support.
  • Jackie Robinson is lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
  • Lyndon B. Johnson is assassinated by a Ku Klux Klan sniper.
  • Saddam Hussein is shot dead in Mosul and his corpse hung from a lamppost.
  • Gamal Abdel-Nasser dies from drinking coffee poisoned with cyanide.
  • Jiang Qing dies of dehydration and exhaustion in a bunker.
  • Idi Amin is killed in a firefight in Nairobi.
  • Robert Mugabe is killed in a joint Rhodesian-Katangan military operation.
• Fictional Political Party:
  • In response to President Wallace's desegregation policies and soft stance on Communism, the Dixiecrats split from the Democrats and found the Freedom Party on a platform of segregation and social conservatism. The Democrats then implode completely after Wallace is impeached for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets, with the pro-Wallace left wing splitting off to form the Progressive Democratic Party, which collapses not long after Wallace is convicted of being a Soviet spy.
  • And when the Freedom Party in turn alienates its own far-right wing by not defending the KKK from the crackdowns following Jackie Robinson's lynching, they split off to form the State's Rights Party, which advocates expanding Jim Crow to the whole country and turning the Klan into a State Sec.
• General Failure: As the Chinese War continues to go south for him, Mao takes more command from his generals for himself, which culminates in the the Battle of Shanghai where Mao commits a great deal of his forces in order to make it "the Graveyard of the West". All this does is see his side take one and a half million casualties due to Commissars being given strict orders to make units fight to the last and shoot any that try to surrender or run and civilians caught in the crossfire, while the UN in contrast see 250,000 dead. This devastating loss, combined with severe shortages of food and resources caused by his disastrous policies, sees East Turkestan revolt against the PRC as Mao's popularity with both the citizenry and the army plummets, eventually resulting in Madame Mao herself leading a coup backed by the Soviets to oust him from power and end the war.
• Godzilla Threshold: After the UAR launches nerve gas at Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur in 1956 during the Second Arabian War, Operation Samson is put on the table. An arrangement made by Italy, Turkey, and Israel some years before the war, Operation Samson thoroughly nukes the UAR and the capital of their ally Saudi Arabia in retaliation for Tel Aviv. It proves to be the beginning of the end for the UAR that also leaves 1.7 million dead in the aftermath and the Arab world shattered forever.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Subverted as Otto Skorzeny being forcefully enlisted by the Mossad to hunt down ODESSA in the 1950s would not be revealed to the world... until the 21st century.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The main premise of the Timeline apart from the war against the Nazis and the UAR naturally. In the words of the author himself:
  Sorairo: "This timeline is not about creating a better or a worse world. It's about finding the moral grey that exists within human beings and exploring that to its upmost. I can only leave it to the readers to decide what they make of them."
• Hanlon's Razor: It would take until the dissolution of the USSR in 1973 and the subsequent release of previously classified documents to reveal that former US President Henry Wallace was not a Soviet spy like the Ware Group. Just a misguided fool with some good intentions that only held onto his views even after the Soviets nuked Warsaw due to Sunk Cost Fallacy.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Just because you have good intentions, doesn't mean you'll always be commended for it, or even emerge victorious, as shown with the fates of Henry Wallace and Patrice Lumumba:
  • In the case of Wallace, his hatred of Fascism is fully justified as by the time he ascends to the Presidency, the Italians have put a number of nations such as Greece and Serbia in chains along with Slovenia essentially being erased from history. But his alienation of democratic and Fascist Europe and trying to ally America to Stalin's USSR out of his hatred for Fascism only got people killed, most notably Warsaw being nuked by the Soviets, who were only able to do so because the Wallace administration handed over nuclear secrets to Moscow in order to even the odds in the early Cold War. Wallace's hatred of Fascism is never once portrayed as wrong, but his sympathy and willingness to ally with the Soviets is what ruined him in this world.
  Sorairo: "I felt sick writing about what happened to Wallace in my timeline, because the whole point of that was to show he would have been such a GOOD President if there was no Communism. Could you imagine the absolute force for good he would have been ITTL if there was no Communism and he went full-throttle after Fascism? [...] It was an absolute waste and that was the point I was trying to show: Wallace could have been a saint in most other timelines, but because he lived in the wrong one, he's a Satan.
  • Just like Wallace, Lumumba is more than justified for calling out both Belgium's colonial rule of the Congo and the foreign powers intervening in TTL's Congo Crisis that they couldn't care less about the inhabitants. In the words of the author "He had the moral right to do what he did, but moral rights don't matter in a world where Fascists prowl Africa", hence Lumumba's vilification in this world, complete with the author himself calling Patrice "...a tragically misunderstood figure ITTL".
• Heel–Faith Turn: As both the Soviet Union's international reputation and their internal situation swirls deeper down the toilet, Georgy Malenkov converts to Russian Orthodoxy in the late 1960s (about twenty years earlier than he did IOTL) to find comfort. Not only does he find God, Malenkov becomes the final leader of a Soviet Union that is falling apart by 1973 sees him reside over the peaceful dissolution of the USSR with Russia itself becoming a country committed to the Christian Socialist ideals called Tolstoyism. Malenkov goes on to rescue the reputation of Russia by not only voluntarily allowing the other Socialist Republics to break off, but disarms Russia of its nuclear stockpile, which nets him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
• Heroic RRoD: After the Battle of Shanghai, the stress of the grueling bloody fight gives General Eisenhower a heart attack, though he does recover.
• Historical Badass Upgrade: Fascist Italy was infamously incompetent in the field. ITTL, Fascist Italy is far more militarily competent, having managed to learn from previous military disasters.
• Historical Downgrade:
  • Josip Broz Tito, the heroic partisan leader of our world who lead Yugoslavia to be a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement and played off both sides of the Cold War, becomes another one of Stalin's puppets. Although Tito's only other choices was facing off against the Fascists alone and does at least get sympathy from the democratic world, partially because Pavelić is such a repugnant excuse of human being. Tito at least manages to avoid being put on trial at Trier after the Fall of Communism along with the other communist dictators, albeit going on trial separately from them and dying three years earlier than he did in our world.
  • Because of the religious mood in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, neither Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin ever amount to anything in their post-Soviet careers. The only mention of Gorby anywhere in the timeline is spending the rest of the Soviet Union's life in a gulag.
• Historical Hero Upgrade:
  • Played With. The premise of the timeline is Mussolini deciding never to have anything to do with antisemitism following an assassination attempt in 1932, after having been a dictator for a decade by that point. What sealed the deal were the last words of his Jewish savior Isaac Carpi ("Then we are safe."), which fed Mussolini's ego. This magnanimity toward Jews and (accidentally) becoming a member of the Allies during World War II allows Mussolini to get away with atrocities such as genocides in Libya and Albania (later downgrading to assimilating them into Italian culture) that don't get a critical look until the 21st century.
  • Fidel and Raul Castro turn their backs on communism once and for all after the nuking of Warsaw and the revelation of the Second Holocaust (although its left ambiguous as to whether it was genuine disgust over Soviet actions or because being tied to communism would impede their revolution more than help it). This combined with American support means that when they overthrow Batista, Fidel is a democratically elected president of Cuba rather than becoming a dictator himself, and the Castro brothers are remembered worldwide as great liberators despite Fidel being forced to make a deal with the US Mafia in order to win the revolution.
  • Unlike in our timeline, here Augusto Pinochet is democratically elected to succeed Chilean president Salvador Allende. When Allende steps down, Pinochet thanks him for setting aside partisanship during the war against Argentina.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • Michel Aflaq in our world is a rather obscure figure in the history of Ba'athism and has since been overshadowed by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Syria's al-Assad family. Here, Aflaq not only becomes the Arabic version of Hitler, who unites most of the Middle East under the United Arab Republic and rallies support Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Morocco in addition to rebel groups based in French Algeria and the French protectorate of Tunisia, he starts a war against Israel and their allies in the West (mainly Italy, Turkey, France, and Britain) and begins a third Holocaust against the Jews. Attacking Tel Aviv with nerve gas had the Italians retaliate by nuking the cities of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Deir Ez-Zur, Muscat, Riyadh, and Tripoli in Lebanon. This not only destroys the UAR's war effort and wins the war for Israel, but sees the entire Arab identity suppressed by the Western world post-war, and irreversibly changes the face of the Middle East forever.
  • The United Arab Republic itself. In our history, it was Nasser's vanity project that only consisted of Egypt and Syria for most of its history. Here, while it encompasses most of the Middle East, the Italians nuke it after the UAR fire nerve gas at Tel Aviv and the nation utterly collapses, and even after its demise, it is spoken with the same scorn that Nazi Germany is in the Western world.
  • Grand Mufti Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al ash-Sheikh is rather obscure outside of Saudi Arabia and made little if any mark on the history of our world. Here, however, he's the leader of the Islamic State of Arabia, which was one of three new nations carved out of Saudi Arabia after the Second Arabian War. A nightmarish abomination of a state that lasts up to 1969 whose rap sheet includes (but is not limited to) enslavement of children and adults alike along diseases like polio, the plague, and leprosy wiping out entire villages thanks to the regime banning modern medicine and technology. Roughly 750,000 people lived in the ISA when it was first established and only about 100,000 people were left alive by the end of it all, and the only reason the Mufti himself wasn't put on trial was because he was killed by one of his own sex slaves.
  King Hussein: "I used to believe God had made Hell for the Devil and his Angels, but now I know it was made for that snake who dared call himself Mufti!"
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the course of the Auschwitz Reprisals, Josef Mengele is drowned in an ice bath he'd used to test how long humans could survive in freezing water.
• Hope Spot:
  • The People's Republic of Korea is still an oppressive communist dictatorship; however, the lack of the radicalization brought about by the North-South divide in Korea has led to this united communist Korea being relatively more moderate than OTL's North Korea (which is admittedly a low bar, but still) with Kim il-Sung forced out of office in the mid-1950s, making it look like Korea will be the only Stalingrad Pact state to not be a hellhole. However, this moderate phase ends badly when Khrushchev falls as Kim il-Sung, with the support of Stalinist hardliner Mikhail Suslov, overthrows and purges the leaders who had forced him out of office.
  • The changes and reforms Nikita Khrushchev brings in makes it seem like the USSR might be able to come Back from the Brink and limp to the next century. After Khrushechev's racket involving the UAR Goes Horribly Wrong and destroys any credibility the Soviets had left, he is couped out of power and killed, being replaced by the above-mentioned Suslov.
• Horrible Judge of Character: President Henry Wallace avoids making deals with the authoritarian Mussolini and proceeds to enter a military alliance with the totalitarian, mass-murdering Josef Stalin, much to Winston Churchill's chagrin.
  Winston Churchill: The only thing on that man's head is his hat!
• Hypocrite: Despite his preaching about the evils of race-mixing, Joseph Goebbels had an affair with a Czech actress named Lída Baarová. This ends up being used against him during his trial.
• I Am Spartacus: After the Battle of Tobruk in the Second Arabian War, the remaining 976 Italian soldiers had to surrender after running out of ammunition. When a UAR commander demands them to hand over any Jews present for execution, all of the soldiers proceed to declare themselves as Jews, with even those who were obviously Libyan or Italian joining in and with records indicating that there were only fifteen Jews among them. This act of defiance gets them all killed, though the act would earn Tobruk its status as a Hero City alongside Trieste.
• Icon of Rebellion: As Italy's political situation in the 1970s continues to grow tense and the world begins to turn against Fascism, Enrico Berlinguer (who's been imprisoned since 1963) becomes the symbol for the people of Italy who demand change to the system after all the blood spilled in Ethiopia. When he is released from prison, he becomes the first non-Fascist leader of Italy.
• Insanity Defense: It's speculated by historians that Himmler's... unusual defense strategy was intended to shock the judges, cause them to think he was insane, and thereby secure him a lighter sentence. If that's what he was going for, it didn't work.
• Insistent Terminology: By the 1960s, Libya is fully incorporated into Italy proper with the now largely Italian speaking natives given full rights. By that point, both the Italian government and the Libyans themselves identify ethnic Libyans as Phoenician rather than Arab or Libyan.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • Subverted with the death of John Wayne. He still develops cancer here (Justified due to his lifetime history of heavy smoking and drinking), but this trope really comes into play when it's mentioned that he worked on a film set doused in radiation, contributing to his cancer.
  • Again subverted with Inejiro Asanuma, who still gets stabbed to death. Although, he is stabbed to death by the bayonets of Japanese soldiers during the reclamation of Hokkaido, instead of a young Japanese ultra-nationalist with a sword at a political rally.
• Irony: Quite a few examples.
  • Most obviously, the Italian Fascists were historically one of Nazi Germany's closest allies. Here, they end up as bitter enemies, with Himmler even denouncing Italian Fascism as an ideological enemy.
  • While Henry Kissinger was noted for his opposition to Salvador Allende IOTL, this version of Kissinger helps Allende in Chile's war against Argentina.
• I Shall Taunt You: Eichmann is successfully provoked into losing his temper and having a Villainous Breakdown at his trial, which seals his fate.
• Karma Houdini Warranty:
  • After communism falls in eastern Europe and Asia, all the leaders of the Stalingrad Pact still alive that escaped to Korea were put on trial in Trier (intentionally chosen as it was the birthplace of Karl Marx), all possible because Kim Il-Sung tried to save himself by giving up the Communist leaders Korea was sheltering. ^note Mikhail Suslov, Andrei Grechko, Yuri Andropov, Kim Il-Sung, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Yumjaagiin Tsendbal, Anastasia Filatova, Reza Radmanesh, Erich Honecker, Kenji Miyamoto, Fyodor Kulakov, Andrei Kirilenko, Viktor Grishin, Gennady Voronov, Andrei Gromyko, and Nikolai Podgorny would be among the accused in what became the Trier Trial and all would be found guilty.
  • With the fall of communism, the actions of the Fascist bloc, especially in Africa, increasingly come under greater scrutiny, with Italy undergoing sanctions and boycotts, even from Israel. Balbo himself is assassinated in a plane crash by a disgruntled former mafioso.
• Karmic Death: Grand Mufti Muhammad, leader of the Islamic State of Arabia, is killed during the invasion of his country by one of his own underage sex slaves that was actually the sister of the very boy who brought the horrors of the ISA to the world's attention.
• The Kingslayer: Claus von Stauffenberg's bomb successfully kills Hitler in this timeline.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • With North China's rapid fall to a joint South Chinese-American invasion and knowing he's next without any hope of victory, Tsendbal signs away Mongolia's sovereignty to Chiang and accepts arrest without a shot being fired.
  • Kim Il-Sung is the last Communist leader in the world by October 1973 and Korea is boycotted by the whole world to be starved into submission. He tried to hold his ground, though he relents by the end of the month due to food shortages sparking protests across the country.

L-P

• Lack of Empathy: Erich Honecker is noted to have absolutely zero remorse for his cruelty as East Germany's Stalinist leader during the Trier Trial, which got him a life sentence — though he may or may not have hanged himself in his cell about five years later.
• Lady Macbeth: Anastasia Filatova, the wife of Yumjaagiin Tsendbal (who was instead described as a Henpecked Husband), was portrayed as this during her trial at Trier and got 30 years in prison. It took until the 21st century for scholars to begin to question if her sentence was too harsh.
• Landslide Election: With the collapse of the Democrats just before the 1948 election, Patton faces no serious opposition, becoming the first President since George Washington to win every state and every Electoral College point, as well as over 90 percent of the popular vote.
• Last Stand:
  • The Battle of Trieste, where most of Hungary's Jewish population faces off against the Nazi war machine. They eventually win once the Italian-Croatian counteroffensive gets underway, and more than ninety percent of them actually survive.
  • Ezo is unique in this respect as the local forces on the island were the only ones to fight their invaders (in this case the Japanese) to the bitter end once they invade following the Fall of the USSR in what was described as a ironic mirror to Japan's own fight to the last mentality in World War II. No doubt the Ezoans knew of the fate that awaited them should Japan ever return.
• A Lighter Shade of Black:
  • Mussolini is a corrupt, imperialist, fascist demagogue, but he's the corrupt, fascist demagogue who isn't trying to invade all of Europe or commit mass murder against the Jews.
  • The American Mafia may be a bunch of gangsters, but it's not hard to argue that they hold the moral high ground against the Ku Klux Klan.
• Loophole Abuse: Erwin Rommel, despite his frustration with the Nazis, refuses to turn on Hitler due to his oath. When Hitler stupidly attacks Italy, he decides Hitler is practically brain-dead and joins the anti-German resistance.
• Mad Artist: Madame Mao, who acts in ridiculously poor movies and forces her subjects to watch and applaud them under the threat of punishment.
• Mary Sue: An In-Universe example with Madame Mao Jiang herself being the Trope Namer in this universe, as all of the films she stared in have effortlessly defeat her foes while being adored by all of China. The aforementioned plotlines, her wooden acting, forcing her subjects to watch the films or face reprisal, and even winning every award at the annual movie awards in North China (where she used the same speech thanking the people of China and every speech ended with no less than five minutes standing ovation from the audience) would contribute to her sole legacy of being riff bait for this world's version of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
• Mercy Kill: How Khrushchev paints the idea of euthanizing Stalin to Malenkov and Molotov, who had just emerged from his coma after a stroke and had the Troika fearing that they would be purged for handling everything while he was incapacitated.
  Khrushchev: “It will be an act of love. An act of loyalty. An act of ensuring that Comrade Stalin will be praised until the end of time, before he could do anything that would permanently harm his name. Do you want to be known as the men who allowed our suffering, honorable leader to perish so painfully at the cost of the lives of so many of the citizens he loved dearly?”
• Military Coup:
  • In 1942, the Turkish military overthrows their government in order to join the Roman Alliance in its conquest of Greece.
  • The People's Liberation Army, with the support of the Soviet Union, decides to overthrow Mao and sue for peace before they lose everything. Mao is arrested while visiting the USSR so he can be used as a bargaining chip, and the PLA launches a purge of his loyalists within the government. Jiang Qing becomes the new leader of Red China, and the China War comes to an end.
  • With Communism collapsing across the Stalingrad Pact, a group of Serbian military officers led by Slobodan Milošević seize power from Tito in order to avoid a war with Croatia.
• Moon-Landing Hoax: With domestic support declining rapidly, the Soviets of all nations fake a moon landing to give the Suslov regime some much-needed popularity. Not only does this plan blow up in their face with every other nation in the world not a part of the Stalingrad Pact calling it out as fake, but it serves as the final straw for the Russian people to lose all faith in Communism.
• Morality Pet: The Jewish people serve as a kind of collective one to Mussolini. Despite all the blood on his hands, nobody can deny that he cares for them.
• Moral Myopia: Italo Balbo is horrified by Nazi Germany's antisemitism, but it is clear he didn't lose any sleep over Mussolini ethnically cleansing Slovenia and effectively destroying Slovenian identity.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • After the Soviets nuke Warsaw, made possible in part by her spy ring's actions, Ethel Rosenberg (who was only interested in balancing the sides of the Cold War) turns herself in to the FBI and tells them everything she knows about Communist espionage in the United States.
  • The post-Second Arabian War generation of Israel begin to feel this way about Operation Samson, which thoroughly destroyed the Arab world after nuking the UAR, though this feeling hits David Ben-Gurion, Israel's Prime Minster at the time, the most. He lived with regret over having to authorize it since that fateful Yom Kippur in 1956, no matter how often he was told he had no choice. Anne Frank described him as living in a deep depression over that choice ever since, and the narrative would state that he was haunted by his choice to his dying day.
  Anne Frank: "The pain and anguish I felt for him all those days ago came back to me as fresh as ever. I saw how aged he had gotten, how tired his joints, how thick his wrinkles. He was doomed to go every waking moment of his life thinking about that night, whether anger had clouded his judgement, whether there could have been another way, whether he could have done something before the war, something. Every day and every night, he tortured himself with the thoughts of all the souls who had perished that day. If any Arab wished revenge on him for what happened, they had surely gotten their wish."
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Defied by Mussolini, who successfully does his very best to ensure that fascism is seen as an ideology distinct from Nazism.
• Never Found the Body:
  • Khawaja Nazimuddin, provisional leader of Pakistan during the Indian Civil War, is said to have died during the Fall of Karachi, but no one ever found his body. Even up to the modern day, long after he would have died naturally, people would claim to have seem him doing everything from being a beggar to a cab driver.
  • Italo Balbo's body was never recovered from the Adriatic after his death from Bernardo Provenzano's suicide attack which brought down his plane, even if it was a result of the impact of the plane crashing into the Adriatic destroyed his body than anything else.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Hitler's moronic decision to invade Italy in order to kill the Hungarian Jew refugees not only causes the entire Roman Alliance to join the war on the Allies' side, but also leads to Rommel joining the Operation Valkyrie conspiracy, which leads to Hitler's death and the civil war that brings about the downfall of Nazism.
  • Four Klansmen murdering Jackie Robinson, decorated war veteran and sports legend, kickstarts the Civil Rights Movement, brings about the downfall of the Klan and associated white supremacist movements in the USA, and inspires the Afro-Fascist movement as a reaction.
  • The Soviets' clumsy attempt at a Moon-Landing Hoax is what precipitates its downfall.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Horthy's refusal to participate in the Final Solution ends with him being overthrown and killed by the Nazis.
• No One Could Survive That!: When Baghdad is nuked during Operation Samson, Aflaq's all but confirmed death is what sends the remains of the UAR into chaos as troops begin to desert or surrender. He survives by escaping into his bunker, but by the time the world learns he escaped the nuke, it's much too late for him.
• Not Me This Time: Turns out that the Soviets were telling the truth when they said Wallace wasn't spying for them.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Goebbels tries to play this card at the Nuremberg Trials against the victorious Allies, saying they have no right to condemn him and his fellow Nazis when they're guilty of similar misdeeds.
• Now What?: Mentioned to be the prevalent view of Israel's population by 1975 with the Nazis being defeated, the UAR and Pan-Arabism going up in nuclear fire, and the fall of the Soviet Union just two years prior. There was nothing to justify their militarism and they got all the territory they could ever want, as Israel spans from the Sinai to the Euphrates after the Second Arabian War.
• Nuke 'em:
  • Stalin glasses Warsaw to defeat Poland during the Second Polish-Soviet war.
  • What Mussolini does after Israel was attacked by the UAR. Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia were targeted.
  • Balbo drops a hydrogen bomb on Addis Ababa to put down a prolonged Ethiopian insurgency. It doesn't work: instead, it sharply turns global opinion against him.
• Odd Friendship: Strom Thurmond and T.R.M. Howard become shockingly good friends after the former relaxes his stance on Civil Rights in an attempt to distance himself and the Freedom Party from the extremism of the KKK (though never apologizing for his past statements).
• Off with His Head!: The primary form of punishment dished out to the senior Japanese members of Ezo's ruling Communist Party and Ainu resistors once Japan returns to Hokkaido after the Fall of the USSR. This also happens to be the way Ryu Ota dies after Japanese troops find him hiding in a forest.
• One-Hit Kill: Played for Drama for a brief moment. During the Israeli raid on Baghdad, the commandos encounter a man so emaciated from starvation that he couldn’t raise his gun much higher than his waist. Ariel Sharon decides to punch the man with intent to simply knock him out and to not waste a bullet. To Sharon's shock, he had instead killed the man instantly.
• Open Secret: The USSR planning to fake a moon landing in 1970 quickly becomes this to both the Western and the Fascist blocs, who both confirm that it's happening only two months after Suslov announced the Soviet's mission to land on the far side of the moon.
• Operation: [Blank]:
  • The German invasion of Italy is codenamed Operation Visigoth.
  • Three plot-important ones during the Second Arabian War:
    • Operation Samson is the name given for the nuclear retaliation against the UAR and Saudi Arabia for the nerve gas attack on Tel Aviv.
    • Operation Wrath of God is for the Israeli commando raid meant to kill or capture the Nazi war criminals hiding in Tikrit in the collapsing UAR.
    • Operation Cyrus (named after the Persian Emperor who freed the Jews from bondage) is for the Israeli commando raid on Aflaq's bunker under Baghdad to land the killing blow on the UAR.
• Our Presidents Are Different:
  • (1945-1948) President Henry Wallace (who takes over after Roosevelt dies of a stroke) tries to be President Personable, but actually ends up being a combination of President Buffoon and President Puppet due to his naivete regarding Stalin.
  • (1948-1956) President George Patton is a President Badass and President Iron. His time in the military solidifying his badass. His hard stance on communism in Asia (particularly China and Vietnam), and implacable support for Civil Rights making him one of the greatest of the American presidents.
  • (1956-1964) President Kennedy is President Personable, President Iron, President Scheming and President Badass. His strong support for the space program built it greatly. The small forces he sent into South Egypt and Indonesia rebuilt confidence in the military among Americans. Built up of nuclear programs ensuring minimum influence of EPOP brain drains from the RA. He is typically fondly remembered by both the public and the scholars.
• The Paranoiac: Stalin's historical paranoia is ramped up after getting mostly locked out of Europe following World War II. His paranoia results in a downwards spiral for Stalin's sanity which results in massive purges of CPSU members (including loyalists such as Lavrentiy Beria and Lazar Kaganovich) that lasted throughout the rest of his reign as General-Secretary, ramping up antisemitism in the USSR to the point of sending the USSR's entire Jewish population to Siberia, and making the fateful decision to drop a nuclear weapon on Warsaw to prevent another defeat just like during the original Polish-Soviet war.
• Patron Saint: Both Leo Tolstoy and Gregory Malenkov are canonized Saints by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1983 and 1999 respectively (though Malenkov's actions as part of the communist regime are excused by being compared to Saul’s trip to Damascus).
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Holocaust perpetrators in Auschwitz and Dachau are subjected to reprisals as brutal as they are deserved.
• The Performer King: After taking over China, Jiang Qing starts spending more time making movies than actually running the country.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Mussolini goes from being ambivalent toward Jews toward gladly welcoming Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Western Europe and Hungary.
  • Subverted with Hitler's decision to deport over a quarter million Jews to Libya rather than exterminate them. It may seem like an act of mercy on his part... but he does so under the impression that they'll be "stranded in a lifeless desert under a Latin heel". The success of Jewish resettlement in Libya is a big part of why Hitler reacts so badly to the news that Horthy deported Hungary's Jews to Italy rather than sending them to the camps.
  • Patton leans sympathetically toward racial equality and clamps down hard on the Klan after they murder war hero Jackie Robinson.
• Point of Divergence: Mussolini being saved from an assassination by a Jewish Blackshirt changes Mussolini's outlook on Jews, as well as the course of history.
• Public Execution: This happens to Mao after his conviction, being hanged in Nanking in front of a crowd numbering half a million.
• The Purge:
  • Stalin, as per real life, carries these out in both political and military circles whenever he's feeling particularly angry or paranoid. This later expands to enacting a Second Holocaust against the Soviet Union's Jewish population.
  • After Himmler takes over Germany following Hitler's assassination in Operation Valkyrie, he emulates Stalin's policy of having anyone even remotely suspected of opposition to his regime executed.
  • After Pavelić is ousted from power in Croatia, his Ustashe loyalists are systemically eliminated to ensure there isn't a counter-coup.
  • Following Lebanon's willful annexation into the UAR, Aflaq enacts a purge of anyone suspected of supporting a restoration of Lebanese independence, starting at parliament and working his way down to the rest of the country.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • How the end of the Ethiopian Uprising goes for both Italy and Ethiopia. Ethiopia freed itself from the Italian Empire at the cost of at least 5 million dead, the country shattered by years of warfare that struggles to recover even in the modern day, and is a poor husk due to refusing to trade with Italy at all. For Italy, the supposed victory only serves as the catalyst for change to come to Italy in 1979.
  • South Africa managed to maintain the regime of Apartheid and create a white ethnostate after expelling the majority of the black population from the country. And it only cost them the small price of the total destruction of their economy and being turned into an international pariah that is despised by every other country in the world. At least there is almost no crime... because everyone is so poor that there is nothing worth stealing.

Q-Z

• The Quisling:
  • Ryu Ota, leader of the People's Republic of Ezo who spent his entire rule discriminating against the Japanese on Hokkaido despite being Japanese himself, labeling the Ainu "Lumpenproletariat" that needed to be reared to power. During the fall of Ezo to Japan when Communism collapses in Asia, he would be found hiding in a forest by Japanese soldiers and beheaded for his betrayal.
  • Dimitrios Ioannidis, the leader of Greece's Italian collaborationist government, is especially considered a detestable bootlicker even by Italy, with Balbo once describing him as “A man made of meat that a dog wouldn’t eat”. He's forced to resign by Italy on Duce Ciano's orders in 1976 as part of a desperate attempt to salvage the deteriorating situation in Greece.
• Refuge in Audacity: This is pretty much what Himmler's defense at the Nuremberg Trials amounts to. He says the Holocaust was perpetrated in self-defense, talks about how the material challenges of the genocide were overcome through "German ingenuity", insists that even children had to die to prevent vengeance and end the cycle of hatred, and even has a recording of a speech he made in Posen on the topic played in court. It backfires, and only succeeds in making him a more hated figure than even Hitler.
• The Remnant: After Communism falls in Europe by August 1972, the only communist nations left in the world are Mongolia, North China, Korea, and Ezo. The remaining Russian troops are recalled home and Malenkov leaves the four of them to the wolves. Korea is the one to outlast the other three, as Ezo is retaken by Japan by April 1973, while Mongolia and North China fall to South China by September 1st the same year but even then, Korea only lasts to the end of October due to being starved to submission by the rest of the world.
• Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman:
  • Both Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel survive The Holocaust, and both of them become Israeli Prime Minister in 1974 and 1988 respectively.
  • Similarly, Jackie Robinson (famed for breaking baseball's color barrier in our world) becomes a Medal of Honor winner after returning to the Army due to being rejected by the MLB. His lynching at the hands of the Klan leads to President George Patton starting a Roaring Rampage of Revenge on them.
  • In a blink and you'll miss it example: Mariya Takeuchi of Plastic Love fame ends up being an author in this timeline.
  • George Lincoln Rockwell is still a Fascist and even comes close to being an outright Nazi here; however, he doesn't establish the American Nazi Party. Instead, he serves in China during the Chinese War, though he was sent home shortly after due to being wounded in Canton along with becoming a Shell-Shocked Veteran. Blaming all of his misfortune on Wallace, Rockwell ends up assassinating him and being locked away in a mental asylum until he died in 1989.
  • Charles Manson never even starts the cult he did in our world, though he does assassinate George H. W. Bush in a futile attempt to start a race war. Ironically enough, Manson's actions leads to Bush Sr.'s running mate Edward Brooke becoming the first African-American president in US history.
• Rightful King Returns:
  • Otto von Habsburg and Louis Ferdinand von Hohenzollern become kings of Hungary and Germany respectively after the Second World War, fueled due to the United States under the Wallace administration being in chaos at the time, which helped discourage turning both nations into republics.
  • Constantine II of Greece returns to power in 1976 after the widely hated Italian puppet regime is disbanded by protests.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • Largely the reason the US committed the second highest number of troops to China during the Chinese War, the American public and the Patton Administration wanting payback for Wallace being a Soviet spy short of invading the USSR themselves.
  • President Patton launches a crackdown on The Klan and Jim Crow laws after the Klan lynches Medal of Honor recipient Jackie Robinson.
  • Japan's entire reconquest of the Soviet puppet of Ezo (or Hokkaido) during the Fall of Communism in Asia, fueled by the horror stories of ethnic Japanese refugees that escaped and the Ainu minority government's oppression of the remaining Japanese on the island. After Japan reasserts control over Ezo, where the Ainu population dropped by a quarter of their pre-war population in the three-month conflict, they outlaw any displays of Ainu culture, flood the island with Japanese settlers, and relocate the remaining Ainu to the desolate Kuril Islands.
• Sanity Slippage: As the tide of the Chinese War turns against him, Mao becomes increasingly unstable and delusional. By the end, he resorts to sleeping with young (often underage) virgins because he believes it will restore his youth and make him smarter.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • As Berlin falls to the Allies, Himmler and Goebbels flee the city, intending to board a submarine and travel to Japan, convincing themselves that the Japanese honor system will mean that they'll be safely harbored until they can "inevitably" retake Europe from their enemies. Unfortunately for them, they're caught before they ever reach the sub.
  • Harry Truman, being the Only Sane Man of Wallace's cabinet left, resigns seven hours into his presidency so as to avoid being tarnished with Wallace's downfall.
  • During the Fall of Communism, any remaining members of the Communist leadership of the Stalingrad Pact nations that were still alive fled to live in exile in Korea rather than face the popular wrath of their long-oppressed people. As mentioned above in Karma Houdini Warranty, this doesn't protect them for long.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: George Lincoln Rockwell fights in the China War and develops severe PTSD as a result. His mental illness is a contributing factor in his decision to assassinate Henry Wallace.
• Shout-Out: When meeting the Allied Forces to discuss his surrender, Erwin Rommel says in a interview that he met George S. Patton, who remarks that he read his book.
• Small Role, Big Impact:
  • Isaac Carpi, a Jewish Blackshirt that's the only fictional character of note in the TL, dies in the same chapter he's introduced in after saving Mussolini's life in 1932. That one act inspires Mussolini to save the Jews from the Holocaust a decade later and changes the rest of the world forever.
  • The two thirteen-year old boys in Poland that mock a Soviet soldier in Krakow kick off a chain of events that causes relations between Poland and the USSR to break down completely just as the two governments were attempting to negotiate a deal that would either have the Red Army go home or for Poland to become a neutral party in exchange for not joining the side of the Western democracies. This leads to the Second Polish-Soviet war that ends with a Soviet nuke dropped on Warsaw and a communist dictatorship that lasts to 1972.
  • The four Klansmen that lynch Jackie Robinson not only kickstart Patton's efforts for Civil Rights but also sees the American South become the site of violence between The Klan and the Afro-Fascists reminiscent of The Troubles throughout the 1960s.
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • "Madame Mao" Jiang of North China was the Stalingrad Pact's only female dictator.
  • The same could be said of Isabel Peron of Argentina, who was the only female dictator in the Roman Alliance until a catastrophic defeat against Chile leads to the downfall of her regime.
• So Bad, It's Good: In-Universe example. Madame Mao's propaganda films have this reaction to those not forced to watch them at gunpoint: their numerous absurdities, including an old lady playing a teenager, makes them a source of amusement.
• Space Amish: The Islamic State of Arabia attempted to ban all technology, including guns. At best, it can be described as OTL's ISIS territories, but with the primitive tech of the Khmer Rouge.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Anne Frank and her family, much of Elie Wiesel's family, and almost 1 million more Jews end up surviving the war.
  • Italo Balbo avoids the friendly fire incident that claimed his life OTL, living into at least the 1970s.
  • Likewise, Rommel manages to avoid the death throes of the Nazi regime, and becomes a renowned commander for the Allies and lives at least into the 70s as well.
• Spark of the Rebellion: The rebellion against the Soviet Union when it is revealed that Suslov faked the Soviet moon landing, revealing both the ineptitude and weakness of the whole communist system.
• Straw Hypocrite: Himmler and Goebbels show signs of this. Once the war starts going south, they start putting random civilians in uniform, executing for desertion anybody who refuses to fight. However, they have little problem trying to escape with their lives in a submarine to Japan.
• Stupid Evil: Hitler invades Italy just so he can kill Hungarian Jewish refugees, crippling his own efforts to beat back the Allies and the Soviet army, and uniting Europe's fascist nations against him.
  Adolf Hitler: “I would rather have a world with no Germans and no Jews than one with a hundred million Germans and a single Hebrew.”
• Suicide Attack: Bernardo Provenzano of our world's Sicilian mafia becomes a pilot in the Italian Air Force who hated the Fascist regime due to the brutal crackdowns on the mob ordered by Mussolini. His hatred for the regime comes back in full force following his time serving in Ethiopia fighting against a massive insurgency that has made most of the colony a wasteland, the brutality against the Ethiopians reminding him of the brutal ends his mobster friends had suffered under the Fascist regime. Bernardo happened to be Duce Balbo's pilot to bring him home from a meeting in Turkey on December 2nd 1975, and he deliberately crashed the plane into the Adriatic, killing everyone on board, including himself.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: The very reason President Wallace remains true to his ideals and views despite the damage he's done up until the moment he's thrown in jail. Best summarized in an alleged answer he gave in response to demands to condemn the Soviets nuking Warsaw.
  Wallace: "I can’t. If I say that it means I was wrong. If I was wrong about everything up to now… I could never live with myself."
• Take That!: By implication, the author delivers one against moon landing hoax conspiracy theorists. By showing the Soviet Union attempting to fake a moon landing in the middle of its own Cold War, and showing just what a complete disaster the hoax is, it is implied that the same thing would have happened had the US attempted to fake the moon landing IOTL — especially given the fact that the Cold War was then ongoing.
• Taking the Bullet: Part of the POD is a Jewish blackshirt named Isaac Carpi taking two bullets for Mussolini.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt are pleased to have another ally in the war against the Nazis, but are not exactly thrilled to work with self-aggrandizing Mussolini.
  • Albert Einstein becoming President of Israel means he has to work with Mussolini. Their meeting is about as fun as one expects.
• The Theocracy: Two exist by the 2020 epilogue. The first is North Egypt, while the second is the Holy Lusitanian Kingdom, which came into being after Portugal seceded from itself due to the far more religious African colonies running the show following the Empire forming into a federation (which pissed off the far more liberal mainland). The Kingdom would have Duarte III on the throne and took the Azores and Timor with them on the way out. The Coptic and Catholic churches respectively have much power in their respective nations.
• Thirsty Desert: The Islamic State of Arabia is located smack dab in the center of former Saudi Arabia. With the nation being a Luddite fundamentalist backwater state with all technology being banned, Crossing the Desert to escape is a near death sentence. Even long after its fall, the region remains uninhabited with no human life present.
• Tired of Running: Discussed by Elie Wiesel, who sees the Battle of Trieste as when Jews went from merely surviving to fighting back against oppression.
  Elie Wiesel: At that point, we knew we’d survive — as a people. But that wasn’t enough for us anymore. All we’ve ever done is survive! It was so routine, it was almost boring. Of course we would pull through, we always had and we always would. But there was one thing more we were going to do now: fight back. The Nazis said we’d cower and shake at their sight. But it wasn’t what the Nazis said about us that matter. The only thing that mattered was what we said about us. If we said we were going to fight them to the death, then by all the strength within us, we would. David was still a boy when he slayed Goliath, and so I would slay those who would have killed my family, my country, my whole world. As the day broke over the horizon, I could feel the presence of God within, telling me that I would enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but not to be afraid… for he was with me.
• Token Evil Teammate:
  • While Italy's fascists have varying degrees of sympathy and moral ambiguity, Graziani is the most vicious of Mussolini's army.
  • Among the Roman Alliance as a whole, Ante Pavelić is this. Despite not being a part of the Axis ITTL, he's still a repugnant antisemite that wants to exterminate Serbians and tries to do so during the Croat-Serbian war in 1946, when Tito's communist revolution in Serbia gives Pavelić an excuse. Pavelić's considered such a murderous, out of control maniac that the rest of the Alliance orchestrates a coup to see the war end, purge the Ustaše of his influence and repair the Roman Alliance's reputation in the democratic world.
• Token Good Teammate: Downplayed in regards to Communist Poland's leader Edward Ochab. During the Trier Trial, it's revealed that while he was a genuine believer in communism, he was disgusted with Stalin starting the Second Holocaust. As a result, Edward risked his own life to try and convince Stalin to spare Poland's Jewish community, and when that failed, he helped at least 3,000 Jews escape Poland through Sweden. Saving their lives helped in him only getting a 10-year sentence though he's still a hated figure in post-Communist Poland.^note This is Truth in Television as he historically resigned from his offices in the Communist Party and essentially retired from politics in response to Gomulka's use of anti-Semitic rhetoric..
• Undignified Death:
  • At the tail end of the Second Arabian War, President of the United Arab Republic Michel Aflaq dies in his bunker underneath a nuked Baghdad by radiation poisoning. He desperately tried to avert this by dying in his office, though this fails as he is found dead by Israeli commandos on the ground with patches of his hair falling out and in a pool of his own shit.
  • Mohammed bin Laden (father of Osama bin Laden in our history) is the only Saudi billionaire who didn't take his fortune and flee the country after the Second Arabian War, instead founding the terrorist group Ikhwan and being its main bankroller. He dies by tripping on the stairs that lead down to his escape tunnel while fleeing from the SAS in Khartoum.
  • A young Saddam Hussein becomes the leader of a Neo-Ba’athist insurgency Kurdistan in 1960. He dies after being hunted down by the Kurdish government, caught while attempting to flee to Syria, dragged into the streets of Mosul, and simply shot. The funny part comes when his corpse is hung upside down from a lamppost and pelted by rotting tomatoes by Kurdish residents, the exact same end Mussolini ended up meeting in our history, with the man himself even finding Saddam's death amusing.
• Universally Beloved Leader: An extremely twisted example in South Africa, with Andries Treurnicht being beloved by his people (rural and suburban) for saving them from blacks, but absolutely despised outside (even Rhodesia condemning him).
• Velvet Revolution: Ultimately, it is not in the fires of violent revolution that sees Fascism fall in Italy, but rather, it is done through protests, the Army being angered over the needless losses in Ethiopia, and the people across the country demanding change.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Eichmann is provoked into one at the Nuremburg Trials. When prosecutor Hartley Shawcross asks him a series of questions about Jewish combatants designed to get under his skin, he loses his temper and goes on a furious anti-Semitic rant.
  "I never begged to those disgusting vermin! I’ve done nothing wrong! The fact that we killed five million of them is the greatest thing we ever accomplished! I’ll go into my grave with a clean conscience that I did so much to remove those cockroaches from the face of the Earth!”
  • After Cairo is nuked during Operation Samson and he's blinded after looking at the explosion, Gamal Nasser's sanity goes up in smoke as well. Still determined to fight the Italians and the Anglo-Sudanese to the very end (despite the fact that Egypt's war effort had all but collapsed) and become the leader of the crumbling UAR, he becomes obsessed with getting revenge on Aflaq after he reveals to the world that Nasser was blinded by the Cairo nuke. Nasser degrades so much that his own close friend Anwar Sadat had to kill him just to save Egypt.
  Anwar Sadat: "It was October 1st. Nasser was escorted to the table and we delivered a report discussing the situation in Kurdistan – about the Kurds rebelling and seeking Iranian help. Once we finished, and we talked for about fifteen minutes, Nasser spoke for a whole hour about nothing except how much he hated Aflaq and that we must plan a way to get him to lead the UAR instead of him. Then he left – the words ‘Kurdistan’ or ‘Kurds’ weren’t spoken. Yasser [Arafat] came to me after the meeting and said, ‘We can’t live like this – we need to do something’. He was right, and I told him he was. That was when, with the heaviest heart, I decided to put my love of my country over the love of my friend.”
  • After she coups Mao out of power for his disastrous leadership during the Chinese War, it quickly became clear to Jiang that the rump PRC is nothing but a starving puppet state beholden to Moscow. Jiang decides to return to the big screen in North China to escape her situation by staring in movies that star herself in various Mary Sue-like roles, even mandating her people see her horrible films or face reprisal. What began as an escapist project, however, would soon become an obsession and then a mania, and the worse things got, the worse she sank into delusion, which contributes to how she dies. During the Fall of North China, Jiang would lock herself inside one of the underground theaters in her bunker where she gave one last decree to the projectionist to broadcast all her films nonstop, which she continued watching until she died from exhaustion and starvation. The author even describes her situation as "basically Sunset Boulevard but Gloria Swanson runs the whole country".
  • Mikhail Suslov first begins to visibly crack when Malenkov takes full control of the USSR but leaves him alive afterwards and finally shatters by the time of the Trier Trial. During his trial, he would call Malenkov “a cross-humping faggot”, call Molotov “the bastard son of a gypsy and a vodka bottle”, and declared that he had secret Communist agents within the court ready to kill everyone in the room and rescue him. Future historians note that had the circumstances been different, Suslov would've been declared unfit for trial.
• Villainous Legacy:
  • The Fascist regimes in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa all play a part in forming what becomes known as the "Salisbury Plan" to dominate Africa through "outposts" or direct colonies in order to use the continent's resources to advance the Fascist cause. Among the consequences of the Plan is the independence of Biafra and Katanga from Nigeria and the Congo respectively, with the Roman Allinace later opening up to states lead by native Africans. By the time Fascism fell in the 1970s, Italy, Spain and Portugal were still able to annex most of their colonies into the motherland. Rhodesia survived after Ian Smith of all people implemented reforms to grant native Africans representation while South Africa survives... as an all white ethnostate shunned by the rest of the world after South Africa spent the 80s in a brutal race war.
  • Italo Balbo's main legacy in Italy is fighting a brutal uprising in Ethiopia that turns into a slog, culminating in dropping a hydrogen bomb on Addis Ababa that horrifies the world and even most of his own allies, cementing anti-fascist opposition in the Democratic world. Italy's war in Ethiopia is spoken of in the same breath as the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, with the aftermath and the losses during the conflict setting the stage for democracy to return to Italy a few years later.
• War Is Hell: And how. Due to various circumstances, the wars of TTL are far bloodier and larger in scope than that of the equivalent time IOTL, despite the Second World War ending earlier and having far fewer casualties than in our world.
• Was It Really Worth It?: What Benito Mussolini asks Balbo only seconds before his death.
  "W-was I worth Isaac’s sacrifice?"
• We ARE Struggling Together: The anti-Nazi alliance is as shaky as one would expect, when the alliance has capitalists, fascists, and communists on the same side.
• We Have Reserves: Mao's attitude towards the Battle of Shanghai can be summarized as this. It's estimated that one and a half million Northern Chinese died in that battle alone.
  Mao Zedong: "We don’t need to win, all we need to do is bleed more."
• Wham Line: From the end of the chapter "An Evil Miracle":
  [...]The Soviet Union was despised like no other nation in peacetime had ever been. There was only one thing that seemed to be a source of pride: the West had not discovered Stalin’s comatose condition, at least as far as they knew. And yet soon, even that calm tranquility was about to change. It was a cold morning, cold even for winter.

  The Troika was discussing what the Soviet’s official response to the Mao Trial would be. At that moment, they were startled when an adjutant burst through the door. Molotov recalled, “His face was in bliss but his eyes were in terror”. Though the Troika was not as cruel as their predecessor, they were angry at the young man’s entrance and demanded to know why he had burst in like that.

  The young man stuttered. “C-comrades! I give you the greatest news possible! A miracle! Our brave leader, Comrade Stalin, he … he’s woken up!”.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The chapter "2020" looks at where several nations of the world have ended up two decades after the fall of Fascism. Some spots are better off ITTL than IOTL (save for South Africa, Africa is less impoverished thanks to Rhodesia-Zimbabwe remaining the continent's breadbasket), others worse (several spots in the Middle East are even more badly off).
• Who Shot JFK?: The Trope Namer is never shot and instead the trope would be "Who Shot Wallace?" ^note or "Who Wacked Wallace" if you want to be alliterative. After Rockwell kills him in 1949, conspiracy theories emerge in the years afterwards that Rockwell had an accomplice or that a vengeful Stalin or Patton ordered the hit, though naturally, there is no evidence for any of those theories.
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: Played for Drama. Horthy and Graziani both laughed at the idea that Hitler would blow his cap over Hungary's Jews being sent to Italian colonies. Hitler's racism is so deep, he proceeds to invade Hungary, and start a war with Italy.

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Circumstances have bent fates before, writing great men out of history by chance accident and keeping fools on their thrones until a ripe old age. As Nazism proved, decent men can become savage monsters when placed under extraordinary circumstances, but as Israel proved, people who were mercilessly degraded without end can still have the strength to make a strong, powerful and tolerant nation. Who is good? Good compared to who? Why are they good? These questions will all depend on individuals to make the final decision. So when someone asks, ‘What sort of a man was Mussolini’, perhaps the final answer is ... that there is no final answer. Only the endless debate of scholars and writers. In short, only history.