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    H 
  • Hate Sink:
    • The in universe posters RitterStahl, Cheka, RuleBritannia and CyberDoctor are generally thoroughly dislikable people, being a dyed in the wool West German Wehrmacht apologist, a Stalin-apologizing Tankie, a hardliner Franco-British conservative, and an Ayn Rand worshipping objectivist respectively. While not outright evil, they tend to be rude, abrasive, and hostile to those they disagree with.
    • In the timeline itself, the elements of the National Salvation Front that went on to collaborate with Nazi Germany rather than settle in Americuba such as Henry Ford and the entirety of the leadership (William Dudley Pelley, Virgil Effinger) of what would become the Free American State. They form SS volunteer divisions and openly participate in the Holocaust, with Henry Ford using captured slave labor to build armaments for the Nazi war effort and the Free American State subjecting both Slavs and captured prisoners of war to horrific slave labor. After the war, their depravity is seen to draw the disgust of both anti-Communist elements in the FBU and the MacArthur regime in Cuba, with the former refusing Henry Ford's request to defect and the latter refusing similar requests by Pelley, leading to their eventual arrests and subsequent executions.
  • Heel–Face Turn:
    • Paul Matthews is first introduced as a young adult part of the Sons of Liberty alongside his family. After his capture he accepts to join the army instead of going to prison, at first believing he could use the skills he learns to fight against the Reds and bring back the Old Republic but he completely abandons the reactionary cause when he learns from his brother, who fled the group because his homosexuality would get him executed, that their father refused to mount a rescue operation, declaring Paul lost to communist brainwashing. Paul would serve in WWII fighting the Axis on the Eastern Front.
    • Reginald Cox, after he was forced to resign from the chairmanship of the Detroit Central Committee, decides to give the leaders of the Revolt of the Cadres incriminating documents to ensure the downfall of Gil Green and his faction, even if they also implicate him, because he had come to betray the revolution through his actions.
    • Oswald Mosley abandons fascism and aligns himself with Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee against the Wood government and the Axis Powers. His lover Diana Mitford, who's also an MP for his New Party, does the same.
    • After the Military Coup in Brazil, the Axis countries in South America switch sides to join the Allies and Comintern against Germany, Italy, and Japan.
  • Hellhole Prison: Barry Goldwater describes Alcatraz, which he was held in for 25 years, along with other political prisoners and organised crime members, as such, saying he was forced to perform hard, backbreaking labor for most of the day, regularly risking his life to smuggle in paper so he secretly could write anti-communist essays in the middle of the night which he would smuggle out again, and was constantly bullied by several of the gangsters he was imprisoned alongside, with the prison guards being mosty apathetic to his plights. Pretty much every other former prisoner and employee at the prison disputes this account, noting that there was a hard limit on how much work a prisoner could do in a week, leaving them with plenty of free time and allowing them to form prisoner clubs for various activities, with Goldwater being noted to be the head of a rugby team and a debate club. Goldwater's so-called smuggled paper for his essays and the pencils he wrote them with was bought openly over the counter at the official prison store for the money he was given as compensation for his work. About the only part of Goldwater's story anyone is willing to corroborate is that he would smuggle out his essays as letters.
  • Hereditary Republic: Douglas MacArthur attempts to invoke this after being made President for Life over Americuba, by grooming his son, Arthur MacArthur IV, to be his successor. His plans don’t come to pass, and eventually Robert F. Kennedy rises as his eventual official successor and proceeds to reform the dictatorial Americuban government into a proper democratic one while Arthur defects to the UASR.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Huey Long, among others. Long had good reason to suspect that standing up for the Constitution would have dangerous consequences; he chose to do so anyway.
  • Hired to Hunt Yourself: George Patton, himself an undercover spy for the Socialist movement within the US Army, is put in charge of the part of the Army intelligence apparatus that is meant to sniff out any subversives and communist sympathizers in the military. Though many of the conservative hardliners in the military do suspect a mole somewhere high up in the organisation, they all fail to realize that it is the seemingly loyal and very trustworthy Patton.
  • Historical Badass Upgrade:
    • Many OTL figures with no military experience become war veterans in this timeline, especially of the Second American Civil War.
    • Paul Mattick is first mentioned in the timeline as a street fighting veteran who successfully chased down and apprehended the man who bombed the newspaper office where he worked, killing three and injuring seven of his coworkers.
    • Harry Truman was a veteran of World War I in OTL, but in Reds! he also becomes a renown war hero by leading his Minutemen militia against the National Salvation Front regime during the Second American Civil War.
    • Harry Haywood is chiefly remembered as the liberator from white supremacist terror by Southern African-Americans, being one of the architects of the Southern Strategy before the Second American Civil War and the leader of the Midwest Army Group, better known as the Nat Turner Column, during it. He goes on to become one of the most important generals on the Eastern Front during WWII.
    • Amedeo Bordiga becomes an undercover agent in Operation Othello, a Comintern plan to foment a communist revolution in Somalia.
    • Isaak Ozimov (who never changes his name) serves on the Eastern Front during WWII.
    • Lau Sing Kee, an OTL WWI veteran, becomes one of the first Asian-American to reach the rank of Field Marshal during WWII.
    • Jessica Mitford becomes a British IVA volunteer with the WFRA.
    • The OTL Axis Powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, are much more powerful and fearsome than IOTL thanks to France and the United Kingdom turning a blind eye to and even helping their military buildup through trade as a result of America turning communist.
      • Notably Italy develops a powerful fleet which jointly with the French State dominates the Mediterranean Sea early in the war. It also doesn't develop the same reputation as The Load it is sometimes attributed OTL in popular consciousness.
      • The French State becomes a full member of the Stahlpakt/Axis instead of a disarmed German puppet state.
    • Léon Blum and Clement Attlee become the wartime leaders of the Franco-British Union.
    • Hunter S. Thompson becomes a WFRA officer.
    • J. R. R. Tolkien, George Dumézil, Larin Boris Alexandrovich, and William Chomsky contribute to the United Nations war effort against the Axis by working on decoding Uzumrik, the secretive conlang used by the Brazilian Green Guard. Their work and of the other participants to United Nations Cipher cracking program shortens the war by several months.
  • Historical Domain Character: Most characters in Reds! are historical but there are also fictional characters (indicated in the timeline by an asterisk after their name the first time they are mentioned).
    • Nikola Tesla appears in a sidestory named Lightning in a Bottle where two Red Army soldiers find him in the New York hotel where he resides during the Second Civil War (and learn to not mention Thomas Edison in his presence). Tesla proposes to help the Reds win the war using his newest invention, the Teleforce, but it turns out to be based of faulty research and thus of no use.
  • Historical Hero Upgrade:
    • IOTL, George Patton was the one to lead the suppression of the Bonus Army, in Reds! he isn't, and once the Civil War starts he goes to them and successfully convinces them to take up arms and join him against the Putschist forces.
    • George Lincoln Rockwell (OTL founder of the American Nazi Party) and Jesse Helms (OTL opponent of Civil Rights), are initially arrested for reactionary activities (trying to bomb the local WCPA headquarters and attempting to burn a black-owned store to intimidate African-Americans respectively) and accept to join the military instead of going to prison, they are subsequently reformed and go on to serve on the Eastern Front during WWII.
      • However, as a deputy of the Congress of Soviets after the war, Jesse Helms opposed the payment of reparations to uranium miners given inadequate protection and information about their work, leading to many to develop cancers, and offering any apology from the government.
      • Jeff Cooper never develops his OTL far-right opinions, becoming instead a WFRA commissar and taking charge of their squadron.
    • Downplayed. In Reds!TL, Wang Jingwei stays loyal to the Republic of China but remains the same Opportunistic Bastard he was in OTL.
    • Subhas Chandra Bose never collaborates with the Japanese in this timeline, instead supporting the Comintern.
  • Historical In-Joke:
    • The two sides of the Second American Civil War are referred to as "Reds" and "Whites", like the two sides of the Russian Civil War.
    • During the same civil war, the Reds enact a policy of War Syndicalism, in reference to the policy of War Communism practiced by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.
    • The ship MacArthur leaves on after his defeat in the civil war is called Brumaire, alluding to Napoleon's Coup of 18 Brumaire.
    • T.E. Lawrence asserts about the Soviet-American forces fighting the Axis that "having spilled blood together to forge their International, they will not let it be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it." This quote is almost verbatim one said by General Sherman about the Union upon the secession of South Carolina.
  • Historical Villain Downgrade: Stalin is portrayed as very authoritarian, but not to the degree he was in our timeline. A lot of this comes from the conditions that prompted it never arising due to the Soviet Union no longer being isolated and having a more powerful Socialist country than itself to account for in its actions. Subverted when after the war it's revealed that Stalin killed 600,000 people in The Purge, which is the most conservative estimate in Real Life for the Great Purge.
  • Historical Villain Upgrade:
    • George Marshall and the other generals who support MacArthur's putsch are subject to this.
    • John E. Rankin, already an outspoken racist and antisemitic politician IOTL, becomes Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan ITTL.
    • Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane become supporters of the MacArthur regime.
    • Barry Goldwater takes up the White cause by delivering Mexican weapons and supplies to White militias and letting them use his store to plan attacks, including several massacres of civilians, although the post-war prosecution failed to directly link Goldwater to the planning of the massacres, sparing him execution (evidence of his involvement would surface after he leaves prison). Goldwater also exaggerates in his publications about his conditions as a prisoner, depicting them as a totalitarian nightmare. He would also express admiration in his writings for the dictatorships of MacArthur, Mussolini and Salgado, calling them "benign authoritarianism", although he would repudiate this position in latter years.
    • Joseph Kennedy Jr. becomes a Nazi and joins the Waffen-SS after the Second American Civil War.
    • Henry Ford, already an antisemite in OTL, is radicalized towards Nazism by the Communists' victory in America and becomes an important contributor to Nazi Germany's war effort and an accomplice to the Holocaust, for which he is given the death penalty after the war.
    • Jiang Jieshi takes Wang Jingwei's place as China's Quisling, becoming the "Chief Protector" of the Provisional Republic of the Chinese Nation, a Japanese puppet state.
    • James Buckley becomes a member of the Young Sons of New England, part of the Sons of Liberty terrorist group, in his youth but is reformed through military service after his capture by UASR authorities.
    • IOTL white supremacist Bull Connor becomes Grand Wizard of the Sons of the Confederacy.
      • Shelby Foote becomes Connor's messenger to transmit his terrorist plots and his confidant in the process..
  • History Repeats: In Reds!TL, the Commissar Order issued by Nazi Germany during its invasion of the Soviet Union is an echo to MacArthur's Enemy Agents Order tasking the 'liquidation of communist political agents'. Ironic considering that in real life it is the other way around, the Commissar Order is the inspiration for the Enemy Agents Order.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • Faced with stiff opposition to American involvement in the Great War from the pacifist Socialist Labor Party, the government decides the best way to get rid of them is to draft the agitators into the armed forces to "beat the communist out of [them]" but they end up converting many of the soldiers to communism as they become exposed to the horrors of war.
      James P. Cannon: "America would enter the war with a professional bourgeois army and navy. When the armistice was signed, America had a communist army and a syndicalist navy. It rather came back to haunt them in thirteen years' time."
    • The decision to disregard the results of the 1917 New York mayoral election giving the SLP candidate victorious and install the government-backed candidate is the catalyst for the beginning of the Biennio Rosso and provokes an uprising leading to the creation of the New York Commune and soon spreading across the country. After a full-blown revolution is averted, the government ends up deposed by a motion of no-confidence.
    • MacArthur's coup, intended to crush a potential socialist insurgency before it started, ended up creating such a storm of popular and political outrage amongst the military, politicians and the general public that it led to the revolution he was afraid of in the first place, which in turn ended up with him and the other remnants of the former United States finding themselves in exile to Cuba.
    • Henry Ford, after fleeing to the US, joins up with Hitler and becomes an armament minister. His arrogance and belief in Nazi superiority led him to put his marque on everything he's built, including weapons he built with slave labor. When Germany is defeated he is unable to deny his highly visible role in Nazi atrocities, and gets about much mercy as you would expect at the hands of the UASR.
    • In a Shout-Out to Red Alert 1's Soviet ending, Salgado meets his end not at the hands of partisans but his own trusted (and much abused) female aide. The aide takes part in a plot to launch a coup to restore the Brazilian Monarchy and end the Integralist's war effort by poisoning his tea as he prepares to make a speech at a news reel. As he lays choking and dying from the poison, she angrily lets out her frustrations on him and shoots him three times before being shot herself by another coup agent to close off all loose ends.
  • Hold the Line: At the Battle (or Miracle) of El Alamein, the British Eighth Army repulsed the Italians until the Egyptian government could evacuate, after which they retreated too.
  • Home by Christmas: As expected of a timeline including World War I. The British officers prior to the Gallipoli Campaign believe the Ottoman Empire to be a rotting structure waiting to collapse and their solders to be "oriental barbarians and ignoramuses", and their soldiers would endure eight long months of disappointment because of it and the Ottomans' tenacity.
  • Hope Springs Eternal: Samantha Waver never gives up on her draft for Commander Columbia, even after several refusals because considered too ambitious and scepticism about a woman leading the project, and proposes it again after every refusals. She is eventually rewarded for her tenacity when her script is approved thanks to the endorsement of the influential Charlie Chaplin and the now Secretary-General Upton Sinclair.
  • A House Divided: In the build-up to World War II, the community of White exiles from Russia in Europe are split on their stance towards the brewing war. A slight majority argues for fighting alongside the Nazis as volunteers, believing that it presents their best chance to overthrow the Soviet Union and reinstate the Russian Empire of old, but many of them, including their nominal leader Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, know that Nazi Germany desires nothing less that the eradication of their culture, their country, and most of their people. Some in the latter camp even go as far as to pull an Enemy Mine with Pavlovich's blessing, offering their support to the Soviet Union to help stop the German onslaught. When the war breaks out, and news of Nazi atrocities against the Slavic population become prevalent, the first camp ends up losing face, and most of the men who had been willing to collaborate with the Germans previously now either quietly refuse, some end up switching sides to the latter camp, and those who joined the war effort on German side are shunned as traitors. But that is not to say that internal tensions in the White exiles community completely dies down with the outbreak of the war; many in the White movement remain furious with Pavlovich for what they see as selling out Russia to the Bolsheviks and the atheist Soviet state, and for a time rumors circulated about an assassination plot against him.
    I 
  • I Have Your Wife: Post-revolution, Herbert Hoover, now living in exile in the UK, claims that he enabled Longworth and MacArthur's coup under duress, saying that the conspirators threatened his family.
  • Improperly Paranoid: The beginning of World War II and the then-separate Japanese invasion of China causes a strong paranoia directed at Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and resulting in multiple violent incidents.
    • A notable incident involves a 17-year old Chinese-American murdering a Japanese immigrant because he believed she was running a "spy ring" from her restaurant, the MDSS investigations don't find any evidence to support this claim.
  • Inspirational Martyr:
    • According to William Z. Foster, Norman Thomas understood that accepting the role as the WCPA nominee, more-so winning the 1932 election, would paint a target on his back. Regardless, he accepted the role of martyr willingly.
      "I think some part of him always knew that his life was forfeit the moment his name appeared upon the ballot. But someone would have to bear that cross, and consecrate the Revolution with innocent blood. It was a duty he could not shirk, no matter how hopeless or foolish it may seem. It was how he chose to live his life, to be the best he could be. So he bore the weight of the world on his frail shoulders."
      William Z. Foster's Funeral Oration for Norman Thomas
    • Played with in Stalin's case. His refusal to evacuate Moscow during Operation Valkyrie, which ultimately results in his death, paints him as this in-universe, which further complicates his legacy within the Comintern.
  • In Spite of a Nail: Despite the changes to the timeline, especially through the presence of a prominent Socialist party in the US congress throughout the 1910s and 1920s, surprisingly much of history in those years happens much like it would in OTL, with only some subtle changes. Pop culture, for the most part, develops quite a bit like it would in our world, though this also drastically changes when the Revolution sweeps in.
    • Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich still becomes the in-exile heir apparent to the Russian throne following Nicholas II's abdication as Tsar and the death of the Tsarevich in an accident.
    • Even if D. W. Griffith's infamous blockbuster never comes to be, the Second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan still arises and gains nationwide prominence but now in response to the desegregation of the US Armed Forces during the Great War, the passing of civil rights legislation in 1925 and the more successful American Communist movement. However, it is smaller than its OTL counterpart and largely localized to the American South, whereas other organizations like the Silver Legion fill in the vacuum for the American far-right in the North and West.
    • Herbert Hoover still becomes the US president in the late 1920s. The main difference being that he actually becomes president earlier than in OTL. He first ascends to the presidency in 1927 from being vice-president, when President Leonard Wood dies from his injuries following an Assassination Attempt.
    • Fascist Italy still rises under Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany still rises under Adolf Hitler, and World War II still takes place as a showdown between Fascist nations on one side and Communist and Capitalist allies on the other, with the battle for Moscow marking the beginning of the former's defeat. The war is, however, somewhat longer and much bloodier.
    • The 1930s are still ushed with the international stock marked undergoing a serious meltdown. The difference being that instead of September 1929, the crash happens in February 1930.
    • The film Gabriel Over the White House is notable for still being more-or-less similar to its OTL counterpart, still starring the same actors and still being backed by William Randolph Hearst, with a only few details being changed, such as the film getting released in December 1932, rather than March 1933, and the names of some characters being slightly different. Unlike OTL however, the film is considered a invokedlost film with no known surviving copies.
    • Brothers Walt and Roy Disney still rise as stars in the animated film business of the 1930s. Though instead of OTL's Disney Company, their studio is instead a collective cooperative named "Hyperion" after its street address. Mickey Mouse is also partially hit by the Butterfly Effect, retaining the name Walt Disney had originally considered for him; Mortimer "Morty" Mouse.
    • George "Old Blood and Guts" Patton still becomes an important American military leader despite becoming a convert to Communism, serving in the American Red Army.
    • Henry Wallace thinks he would've remained a "simple farmer" without the influence of communism; he became Secretary of Agriculture in spite of the radically changed political landscape.
    • Joseph Breen, the infamous enforcer of The Hays Code, is one of the many conservatives who relocates to Cuba, where he takes up his old job as a leading film censor in the Americuban film industry. He is eventually removed from his position by order of MacArthur himself following World War II, when film producers Harry Cohn and Jack Warner, both members of MacArthur's inner circle, complain to the president that Breen's constant objections to violent content hinders the production of patriotic films.
    • The Turkish state still carries out a version of the Armenian genocide, the difference being that the genocide first begins in 1940, during World War II, rather than in 1915.
    • A war still takes place in Palestine by 1948. However, there is now a third side that is the socialist-led, multiethnic People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which ultimately triumphs over Zionist and Arab nationalist forces who are themselves preoccupied with each other. The resulting socialist Palestinian federation, however, still has a tense relationship with its (AFS-aligned) Arab neighbors who intervened on behalf of the Palestinian Arab Whites, even if war hasn't broken out between them since.
    • Edward Bernays still codifies the idea of Public Relations and thereby becomes a prominent funding figure in the fields of advertisement and propaganda, and he also still assists the United Fruit Company with a campaign that more or less lets them get away with heaping abuse after abuse upon their local labor force in South America. One of the main differences is that he becomes slightly more involved with politics than in OTL; one of the greatest feathers in his cap becomes helping the conservative parties of France and England repair their tattered reputation following World War II and even win in a landslide in the FBU 1950 elections.
    • Robert F. Kennedy still becomes US Attorney General, but for the exiled government in Cuba.
    • Ayn Rand still becomes an influential writer in the Capitalist bloc but became much more extremist in her beliefs after she fled her adopted country while her work has become decidedly more dystopian. This world is 100 percent guaranteed to make her squirm.
    • Ishir⁠ō Honda still becomes a influential figure in the Kaiju film genre in the 1950s and beyond, directing several entries in the Godzilla franchise like he did in OTL.
    • Ed Gein still becomes an infamous Serial Killer, whose lurid crimes shocks the UASR when he is captured in the late 1950s, and goes on to inspire many pieces of fiction, amongst them Robert Bloch's Psycho.
    • Another serial killer, Albert Fish AKA the "Brooklyn Vampire", is still charged with the murders of multiple children, some of which happened just after the revolution. As in real life, he is interned and executed at Sing Sing.
    • The Beatles still rise as a band that changes both music and the world music industry forever. The difference being that they continue using and become famous under their original band name of "The Quarrymen" (resulting in "Quarrymania", rather than Beatlemania), and invokedPete Best remains in the band line-up as drummer, rather than being replaced by Ringo Starr. A more subtle difference is that the band's sound is ultimately more Skiffle influenced than in OTL.
      • By extension, a version of The British Invasion, still occurs in the mid to late 1960s, the main difference being that this period is known as "The Franco-British Invasion" in hindsight, and that this timeline's versions of The Rolling Stones goes by the name "Hoochie Coochie" and The Who goes by "The Group".
    • L. Ron Hubbard still funds a financially successful religious movement, that manages to go big by drawing in famous actors into movement to help promote it (amongst others Errol Flynn), and also draws a lot of controversy and concern, both legal and otherwise. The difference being that Hubbard doesn't move on from the name of Dianetics in this timeline, so his movement ends up being called the Church of Dianetics.
    • Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. still suffers a stroke in the early 1960s that renders him unable to speak, and thereby influence the political career of one his sons at a critical time. He also ultimately dies from a second stroke in 1969.
    • Richard Nixon becomes Premier of the UASR in the 1960s.
    • William Luther Pierce is still an infamous white supremacist in this timeline. The difference is that he ties his racism and anti-Semitism to leftist language, and rather than founding the far-right National Alliance of OTL, his organisation is instead called the Socialist Action Front, which is effectively a Strasserist movement with a heavy white supremacist bend (yes, Pierce and his ilk effectively become actual Commie Nazis).
    • Ron Paul still becomes a politician, but is the Secretary-General of the Democratic-Republican Party (a social-democratic party on the center of the UASR political spectrum) in 2009.
    • Sean Hannity is still a pundit and writer in the same style as in real life, except he is also a hardcore Marxist.
    • George C. Scott still ends up playing the role of George Patton on film, but it's in a Docudrama miniseries about the Revolution called Vanguard.
    • Some historically significant video game studios such as Westwood and Valve still come into being, albeit as video game development collectives rather than companies.
    • Leonardo DiCaprio still ends up playing Howard Hughes. The difference being that he plays him in the film Death of MacArthur, the timeline's version of The Death of Stalin.
    • Iain M. Banks still succumbs to cancer.
    • No matter the differences in the timeline, people still try to imagine years and decades later how Germany could've won World War II. As an SV poster wrote:
      "No matter the timeline, people will spend hours of their lives working out ways the nazis could've won a war they could not have won."
  • Interrupted Suicide: Robert LaFollette Jr., who spent years struggling with chronic depression, was caught one day by an aide with a pistol in his hand, requiring his brother Phillip to be flown in from Wisconsin to talk him down, after what he stepped down from DFLP leadership to seek treatment.
  • In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous:
  • Inadequate Inheritor: Douglas MacArthur attempts to turn Americuba into a Hereditary Republic by setting his son, Arthur MacArthur IV, up to being his successor after his death. It is, however, clear to everybody that the rather hapless Arthur has inherited none of his father's brains and guts, and once old MacArthur bites it, Arthur is in short order politically outmanoeuvred by Robert F. Kennedy, who quickly secures his position as the new President, which he uses to reform the government and reinstate a proper democracy.
  • Insignia Rip-Off Ritual: Major General George C. Marshall is subject to a cashiering ceremony before his execution by firing squad.
  • International Showdown by Proxy: As IOTL, Olympic Games are used as an avenue by great powers and political blocs to demonstrate their superiority to their ideological opponents.
  • Inter-Service Rivalry: The army of Reorganized China is internally divided between officers coming from the old Beiyang government and those from the Right-Kuomintang (including Jiang Jieshi himself), they have fought against each other in the past and the former sees the latter as usurpers and bandits.
  • I Reject Your Reality: Many times capitalists dismiss any support, even mass support, for socialism and a revolution as the work of "foreign agitators", a thesis that continues to guide Franco-British Union policy in the present day.
    • Many delegates of the 1932 Republican National Convention still expressed doubt and dumbfoundedness that the ongoing Great Depression was as bad as the reports claimed. They blamed immigrants, foreign agitators, communist fifth columnists, anything but the system itself.
  • Irony: Also used liberally. Bank robber John Dillinger becoming a national security agent is one of the most obvious examples, as is William F. Buckley, Jr. (one of America's foremost conservative thinkers) becoming a Marxist and J. Edgar Hoover (the commie-busting head of the FBI) switching allegiances to the new communist government in order to preserve and expand his power. And apparently in this world, it's nearly impossible to think of actor Marion Morrison being in a western.
    • Not to mention Cuba becoming the seat of the capitalist US government in exile.
    • Or Wang Jingwei leading the United Front against Japan while Chiang Kai-Shek turns into a Japanese puppet.
    • Mao Zedong is expelled from the Communist Party for "rightist deviation", a charge that was used by Mao to purge all his critics in the party.
    • IOTL the children's play Revolt of the Beavers was accused of promoting Marxism to children, ITTL it is praised for introducing Marxism and class consciousness to children.
    • During World War I, the leftists actively campaign against American involvement and the American government pushing for it. When World War II begins the leftists are the government pushing for American involvement, which is not lost on anyone.
    • For much of World War II on the Eastern Front, American soldiers have on occasion to restrain their Soviet comrades from committing atrocities on the Axis forces because of what they did to their people and land. When the Americans discover the extent of the atrocities committed by the Free American State in Maly Trostenets, the Soviets are the ones who have to prevent them from committing war crimes out of fury.
    • To remain competitive with the Vladivostok Compact, the ruling parties of the Alliance of Free States have embraced a large degree of state intervention in the economy, to the point where they'd be considered center-left at the very least by Real Life standards.
  • It Has Only Just Begun:
    • Murray Bookchin notes that the end of the Second American Civil War did not signify the end of the Revolution, but rather its beginning as it still had to deal with the legacy of capitalism, chauvinism, racism, sexism and queerphobia, which would not magically disappear with the installation of a communist regime, noting the "revolution itself can become a smokescreen for counterrevolution" as it did in the Soviet Union.
    • Invoked by Upton Sinclair in his "What is to be Done?" speech in the early days of the UASR.
    J-K 
  • Jurisdiction Friction: The early years of the UASR see tensions and overlap between its law enforcement and intelligence agencies as their respective jurisdictions are defined and because of problems of communication, leading to instances of Flock of Wolves.
  • Just Like Robin Hood: During the Great Depression, unsold food would very often disappear on its way to disposal, only to miraculously wind up in volxküchen (people's kitchens in North American German dialect) to feed the poor while stockpiles of unused coal were routinely pilfered during the winter and find their way to tenant unions to be distributed. The workers and sometimes the police itself turned a blind eye to these thefts.
  • Kaiju: King Kong becomes closer to the Japanese image of the kaiju with the addition of a power of electric blasts and attacks introduced in the B-Team Sequel King Kong Returns.
  • Kangaroo Court:
    • The MacNamara brothers, union members accused of being responsible for the bombing of the Los Angeles Times office, become subject of a show trial attempting to suppress the city's burgeoning labor movement. Even before the trial they are arrested and taken from Indianapolis to California without getting to see a lawyer. The trial ends with a plea bargain, the brothers pleading guilty in exchange for being spared the death penalty.
    • Despite assurances of a fair trial, Sacco and Vanzetti still get convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death just like in OTL.
    • Some of the counter-revolutionaries captured by the United Republics during the Second American Civil War are given quick show trials and executed. Granted, large percentages of them are probably guilty, but that doesn't make it any less unfair. That said, most, who aren't executed but still imprisoned without trial, get fair trials after the war.
    • A twenty year old Brazilian bisexual named Jose Ribeiro and his lover Joao Peres are subject to a transparently rigged trial before being executed by firing squad under the Integralists' "deviancy laws".
    • Stalin's purges include the same rigged show trials as OTL but with slightly different dates and some of its victims, such as Tukhachevsky, are spared death in this timeline.
    • The last Senussi independence activists are subject to one after their capture by Italy then executed.
  • Karma Houdini:
    • The Green Guard's most infamous general, "O Diabo Verde" (The Green Devil), a man behind numerous war crimes and atrocities, is by all appearances not amongst the numerous men killed in their infamous last stand, and is generally believed to have slipped away into the thick South American jungle during the chaos of the battle. Though ultimately it is hard to tell for certain, as he was known to wear a face-concealing gas mask at all times and pretty much all of his public records were destroyed, most likely deliberately, so it is not entirely out of the question that he could have been killed in the battle either. What further muddies the waters is the fact that Diabo Verde had been proven to use Body Doubles. Whatever the case is, O Diabo Verde has become infamous as a symbol in post-war South America of how some of the worst people of the war managed to completely escape justice, and urban legends about where he ended up are still circulating in the region.
    • Averted for Wernher von Braun compared to OTL. He is arrested and given the death penalty at his trial for his use of slave labor from concentration camps.
  • Karmic Death: Lavrentiy Beria, one the greatest enablers of Stalin's purges and a depraved monster in his own right (even amongst the other already pretty cruel leaders of the NKVD), who's orders has had several thousands Soviet citizens summarily executed, is himself taken down by a American and Russian soldier-commissar team, who has him secretly arrested and killed without a trial, before leaving his corpse to rot in a shallow grave.
  • Kick the Dog: The execution of a bisexual man and his lover by firing squad after a blatantly rigged trial under Integralist Brazil's "deviancy laws".
  • King On His Death Bed: Riza Nur, the authoritarian Prime Minister of Turkey at the onset of World War II, starts getting increasingly ill from what turns out to be stomach cancer in the summer of 1941, and as 1942 rolls around, his health continues to deteriorate and it becomes obvious to everyone in his inner circle that he will likely succumb to his illness within the next six months. This starts a simmering power struggle between Nur's two most trusted political lieutenants, the ultranationalist Nihâl Atsız, who wants Turkey to strenghten their relationship with Nazi Germany, and the slightly more progressive Zeki Velidi Togan, who argues for stronger ties to Imperial Japan.
  • The Klan: The Ku Klux Klan is present and very active in attempts to maintain white supremacy in America, clashing very often with the Spartacus League during The Roaring '20s. One member is the assassin of President Wood, resulting in the group being declared public enemy number one and the beginning of a crackdown on their activities. During the Second Civil War and after it the KKK is very involved in reactionary violence, answered by the brutal crackdown of the UASR.
    L 
  • Landslide Election:
    • Leonard Wood wins his reelection as president in 1924 by almost 20% above his second place opponent, while Herbert Hoover actually wins by more than 20% above his second place opponent in 1928.
    • Norman Thomas and the Workers' Communist Party of America win the 1932 general elections in a landslide both presidential and legislative thanks to the devastating effects of the Great Depression making many receptive to socialism, Hoover's terrible handling of the Depression, the Democratic Party's fall to a regional status and a fusion ticket with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
    • The 1934 elections right after the Second Civil War and the Red May Revolution give the WCPA an absolute majority of the seats. The party even increases its majority in the 1936 elections.
    • In the FBU, the People's Alliance wins a landslide victory in 1950.
  • Last Stand:
    • With the Red Army closing in on Washington DC, MacArthur orders the 29th National Guard to delay the invasion force for as long as possible, while he rearranges for a large scale evacuation to Cuba.
    • British forces protecting Malta hold on for two weeks against the Italian marines and paratroopers taking the island.
  • Law Enforcement, Inc.: United States companies regularly make use of them as scabs to break-up strikes and union activity, particularly the infamous Pinkertons. This sometimes results in battles with the Solidarity Federation's Spartacus League paramilitary.
  • Leave No Survivors: As the battle on the Eastern Front in World War II gets increasingly ugly and brutal, the American Red Army starts summarily executing Waffen SS members, civilian collaborators, suspected spies, or deserters whenever they come across them, rather than taking them prisoner. Opinions — be it from historians, military leaders, politicians, or the rank-and-file soldiers who had to handle the Dirty Business — differ greatly on whether this was just a Necessarily Evil part of an extremely bloody and terrible war or a major What the Hell, Hero? moment.
  • A Lesson in Defeat: Historians like Alistair Buchanan believe the Czechoslovak War was this for the Wehrmacht. While they won the war it was not the easy victory they expected or proclaimed and it exposed a lot of issues within the German military and war economy the Nazis would fix, making them a much more fearsome opponent during the World Revolutionary War.
  • Let No Crisis Go to Waste:
    • Santo Trafficante, Sr. used the Red May Revolution to wipe out his Tampa rivals and seize control of the rackets left vacant by other families in Florida, becoming the de facto boss of Florida and one of the most powerful bosses in the decimated mainland mob.
    • Ecuador takes advantage of the Peruvian Civil War to invade Peruvian territories it has claims over.
    • The Ação Integralista Brasileira gains important influence for its participation in the suppression of the communist uprising, its leader Plinio Salgado is even named Vice-President, setting the stage for their own eventual coup against Vargas.
    • The DRP and DFLP find a more receptive audience to their message during the Revolt of the Cadres and make important gains in rural Machigan in the snap election concluding it.
    • Like in OTL, Poland takes advantage of Czechoslovakia's dismemberment to snatch some territories it claimed but did not own.
    • Wang Jingwei uses his position to rid himself of troops and officers loyal to the KMT leftists and the Communist Party by placing them in dangerous positions to be destroyed by the invading Japanese forces.
  • Let's You and Him Fight:
    • Hitler is fond of seeing his subordinates squabble with each other. When the Diehl Brothers approach the Führer with offers of building a German animation industry he agrees but also offers similar deals to two other teams of German animators, informing them that whoever best pleases the herrenvolk will receive the greatest favour.
    • Both the UK and the USSR try to encourage Nazi Germany to attack the other one, standing only to gain from having two rivals fight each others. In the end Germany attacks the USSR first and but the UK eventually declares war on them, being threatened by the prospect of the German Reich becoming a continental power.
  • A Lighter Shade of Black: Americuba under MacArthur is an oppressive dictatorship but appears tame compared to the totalitarianism of the Axis powers.
  • Literary Allusion Title: The Part 3 of Reds! is entitled "The Great Crusade" after a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower's speech to the Allied soldiers on D-Day in OTL. A different version of this speech is pronounced by Eisenhower in Reds!.
  • Long Game: The Communist Labor Party's strategy to win the Cold War is to contain the AFS and wait for capitalism to collapse on itself.
  • Lower-Deck Episode: The short stories about ordinary people's lives, contrasting with the big picture narrative focused on nations and governments.
  • Lowered Recruiting Standards: As the Brazilian Green Guard is progressively worn down by the engagements with the UASR army and local South American forces, the previously elite organisation eventually starts press-ganging random teenagers with no combat training into their ranks under the threat of violence.
  • Lying by Omission: When the reason for Jesse Helms' arrest is discussed by his comrades, trying to burn down a grocery store in Monroe, he first denies it, then says he didn't meant to, then that he was going to start a small fire that got out of hand as a warning to the local officials. What he leaves out is that the grocery store was operated by African-Americans, and that he wanted to intimidate the African-American authorities.
    M 
  • Meaningful Rename:
    • Marius Victor Gracchus chose his surname after the Gracchi brothers, Roman advocates for social reform who were both killed by a reactionary political system.
    • The Socialist Labor Party renames itself to Workers' Party of America after it joins the (Third) Communist International, and again to Workers' Communist Party of America after the beginning of the Third Period of the Comintern marks the end of conciliatory politics with capitalism.
    • Spartak Leonovych Kolisnyk chose his own first name as part of his parents' protest at the "Americanization" process that stripped them of their original names.
    • Following the Second American Civil War of 1933, the First Civil War of 1861–1865 becomes popularly known as "The Slavers' War" to better distinguish the two wars.
    • Similar to the above, UASR historiography gives new names to different periods of American historynote .
    • Following the Revolution, John F. Kennedy decides to distance himself from the exiled Kennedy Family by shedding his birthname and going by the Gaelic version, Sean Cinnéide, instead.
      • Similarly Henry Ford II, grandson of Henry Ford, legally changes his last name to O'Hearn to avoid association with his now Nazi grandfather.
    • Many organizations and institutions are given a new name after the Revolution turns America communist to match the change.
      • All of the government bureaus and branches are given new names after the creation of the UASR. A US Department is generally renamed to a corresponding "People's Secretariat".
      • The National Guard becomes the Red Guards.
      • Similarly, several private automobile companies seized by their workers have their names changed.
      • The Ford Motor Company is renamed the Detroit Arsenal to humiliate Ford, in exile in Nazi Germany, and because the company is reorganized into the primary supplier of tanks and other ground combat vehicles of the UASR.
      • General Motors becomes the Dynamo Collective by vote of its workers and its General Aviation division is split to form North American Aviation.
      • The Chrysler Corporation becomes the Chrysler Technology Group to reflect its reorganization as an automobile research and development corporation.
      • Other companies completely change of industry sector, like Hudson Motors transitioning to a marine-diesel company as Kenosha Marine and Brewster & Co. becoming Long Island Aeronautics.
      • The same happens to the Hollywood lots of movie studios, for the most part renamed after the name of the street the studio is onList while some executives restart them in exile under the same names.
      • Many sports teams get new names tooIce Hockey Baseball.
      • The National Geographic Society is renamed to People's Geographic Society a year after the end of the Civil War but is otherwise unaffected.
    • The Humble Knights of God rename themselves to the Green Guard to commemorate their first year of being merged with the Brazilian Integralist Action party as its State Sec.
    • The South African Revolutionaries choose "Azania" as the name of their nation as a clear break from colonial South Africa.
  • MegaCorp: The monopolistic companies of the United States and the Zaibatsus of the Empire of Japan dominate the economy of their respective countries until their switch to communism.
    • In the United States industries from steel and coal to radios and cinema are controlled either by a single monopoly or by several big companies working together to maintain their hegemony on their industry of choice.
  • Mercy Kill: General Dmitry Pavlov receives this from his chief of staff after being mortally wounded by a strafing German fighter.
  • Mistaken for Spies: Morris Rubenstein writes a science-fiction story in 1943 about a world socialist government creating nuclear weapons to scare into submission an hostile alien empire but resulting in the destruction of the universe from how many they used. The story caused an investigation by the Public Safety, who put Rubenstein in detention, because of the accuracy with which he noted the production of the weapon and the parallels between it and the ongoing top secret effort to create a nuclear bomb. After ascertaining that he had gotten the information from publicly available sources written before the war, the State Sec released Morris, and got assurances from the editor that no stories involving nuclear technology would be published for the remainder of the World Revolutionary War.
  • Motive Misidentification: The Revolt of the Cadres is initially mistaken by White emigrees and the British as the beginning of a liberal restoration, particularly due to the former interpreting the events through their own wishful thinking, with newspaper like The Daily Mail championing the revolt until they realized that they'd hitched their wagon to a devoutly anti-liberal left communist movement.
  • Multinational Team: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Boy Commandos is an international group of "street kids" composed of American "Brooklyn", Soviet Fyodor "Freddy" Cherenko, Chinese Song Ling, and Mexican Pedro Salvador.
  • Murphy's Bullet: Zig-Zagged. Some of the assassination attempts result in stray bullets hitting other people, but not always and not necessarily fatally.
  • The Mutiny:
    • Mutinies and defections are common within the White forces during the Second American Civil War. In particular, the sailors of the US Pacific Fleet in San Francisco and later the Atlantic Fleet and US Marines in Norfolk under their old commander, General Smedley Butler, mutiny against the National Salvation Front and switch side to the Workers' Communist Party-led Provisional Government.
    • The crew of the HNLMS De Zeven Provincien mutinies in 1936, three years later than OTL, in reaction to the announcement of pay cuts and discontent among native crews. The mutineers surrender six days later after being bombed by Dutch planes. The discovery of the participation of communist cells greatly boosts the profile of the Anti-Revolutionary Party and the previously obscure National Socialist Movement at the expense of the centre-right in Dutch politics.
    • During the Spanish Civil War, the junior officers and enlisted of the battleship España successfully mutiny against the Nationalists, unlike OTL, and its escort vessels follow suit.
    • Pétaintist-sympathetic French troops rise up French sub-saharan Africa against the Loyalists with support from Italian Cameroon, taking much of Gabon and French Congo and Djibouti while the other revolts are put down.
  • My Country, Right or Wrong: Some Russian and American White emigres pledge their support to the UASR and the Soviet Union against the Axis despite their opposition to communism because they want to defend their homeland from fascism, even if it is under a government they despise and fought against not so long ago. Among them are heir to the Russian throne and unofficial leader of the Russian Whites Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and General Pyotr Wrangel. The White Americans Adlai Stevenson, Dean Acheson and Nelson Rockefeller form the Patriae Society to organize this support, and are later joined by Theodore Bilbo (KKK member and former governor of Mississippi) and Barry Goldwater.
    N 
  • National Anthem:
    • Hail Colombia is voted by Congress to be the United States national anthem, to the dismay of the DFLP, which preferred America, the Beautiful.
    • The UASR adopts The Internationale and a modified version of Solidarity Forever as its co-official anthems.
  • Named After Somebody Famous:
    • Marius Victor Gracchus chose his surname after the Gracchi brothers, who were Roman social reformers assassinated by their political enemies.
    • Norman Thomas Washington is named after two American presidents, the martyr Norman Thomas and the first president George Washington.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
    • The Putschists name their political organization "National Salvation Front", inadvertently showcasing their sinister self-righteousness.
    • The Green Guard had its infamous "Firebreather brigades", known for making [[Pyromaniac heavy use of flamethrowers]], including against civilians.
    • Richard Heinz becomes known as The Blonde Devil because of his sadistic and brutal treatment of prisoners at Maly Trostenets. The Yanks Are Coming also popularized the name Richard The Black.
  • Nepotism: Sort of. Patton keeps his socialist views secret from his superiors and surrounds himself with sympathetic officers, presumably assuming that he can use a cadre of loyal officers to his advantage. When he receives orders to enforce the suspension of the Constitution, he leads a rebellion. This is unusual in that it's one of the rare occasions in which nepotism is presented as having led to a positive outcome, and also unusual in that the officers he surrounds himself with are not depicted as incompetent.
  • Neutral No Longer:
    • Park Rangers who initially remained neutral during the Second Civil War ended up siding with the Reds when the Whites began to create forest fires and plant mines in the national parks they are meant to protect.
    • France and Great Britain are neutral in the beginning of the war between the Axis and the Comintern, hesitating on which side is the greater threat to fight against. They eventually opt to side with the Comintern against the Axis.
  • Never Suicide: Reza Shah is "found" dead by suicide during the American-backed coup, though the sketchy details point to an assassination.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Wang Jingwei's meddling in the Battle of Changsha is directly responsible for allowing parts of the encircled Japanese troops, including their commander, to escape the cauldron before they can be destroyed.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
    • The Mexican left-revolutionaries received coincidental help from the opposed Cristero movement weakening the military capacity of the Callista Army, allowing them to eventually triumph.
    • Longworth and McArthur's coup, intended to head off a Communist revolution, pretty much ensured it would happen. Sure the Workers' Communist Party had won the 1932 election but having gained power legally it gave full assurances to rule within the Constitution and was trying to take a moderate road. The most likely outcome would've been something like the UK's labour government after 1945, nationalisation and massive reform but within the existing legal framework and with the option to vote them out in 1936 and invokedAelita says this would've resulted in the split of the Left and Ultra-Left factions from the Workers' Communist Party. Instead, by attempting to take power, the National Salvation Front ensured the party had to trigger a revolution for its own survival and discredited capitalism within the entire country. The end result saw Longworth incarcerated by the revolutionaries and MacArthur in exile while the new Communist America was here to stay.
      • On top of the above, McArthur's National Salvation Front's decision to arrest every leading member of the Workers' Communist Party they could get theirs hands on only ultimately served to further radicalize the party, as the leadership was mostly made up of more moderate leftists who represented the party's right and center and skewed towards social-democracy as their predominant ideology. Had these people been standing as the victors of the Socialist side after the Civil War, they would likely have chosen a more moderate, reconstructionary approach to the aftermath, going for the option of attempting to preserve the old United States and its constitution and institutions for the most part, though with some egalitarian and left-wing modifications and overhauls. Instead, the more left and even far-left parts of the party stepped up to fill the vacuum from the arrest of most of the leadership, and these people were mostly hardcore revolutionaries, preferring the approach of smashing and sweeping what they saw as the old, hopelessly corrupt, inefficient and unequal American state completely away, and start over from a clean slate with a new constitution, and in the end it meant their voices were the ones that won out.
    • A similar situation happens in Peru in early January of 1935, when the ruling autocrat Óscar R. Benavides attempts a pre-emptive strike against a possible revolution by attempt to crack down on the local socialist parties and trade unions. But American and Chilean intelligence manages to catch wind of his plans and warns said parties and unions of the incoming attack. Prepared for his attack, the Peruvian left is able to counterattack Benavides' forces when they make their move, starting the revolution Benavides thought he could prevent.
  • Nom de Guerre:
    • During the Second American War, many of the Communist revolutionaries choose to operate under one, most commonly to avoid reprisals against their families. Following the war, many of these men and women choose to fully adopt their nom de guerre as their legal name, to symbolise the new beginning the revolution has brought with it. Recurring characters Marius Victor Gracchus and Sean Cinnéide (neé John F. Kennedy) are both prominent examples.
    • More infamously, one of World War II's most infamous war criminals, the general of the Brazilian Green Guard, operated under the name "O Diabo Verde" ("The Green Devil"). His true identity is Cristiano Boaventura, who used "The Green Devil" as a pseudonym and was molysmophobic, insisting on concealing his face with a gas mask and his hands when meeting other people.
  • No Party Given:
    • Theodore Roosevelt becomes a self-styled 'Independent Republican' after leaving the Republican Party.
    • Eugene O'Neill, member of the Central Committee as Chairman of the Academy of Arts and Sciences is the only 'nonpartisan' of the first two Foster Governments (1934-1938).
  • Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: During WWI, the US government claims their violent suppression of the anti-war SLP is justified for being seditious and presenting a clear danger to the state, the US Constitution and "Liberty" while their actions show a significant disregard for the rights and protections granted to the people they persecute by the very constitution and institutions they claim to defend, going as far as disregarding the results of an election to install their candidate as mayor of New York instead of the SLP candidate who rightfully won.
  • No Such Agency: The Sections 1 and 9 of the MDSS, foreign intelligence and counterintelligence of the UASR respectively, do not officially exist but become known by reputation.
  • Nuclear Option: The first deployment of a nuclear bomb in this timeline also happens under an American government against Imperial Japan. The difference is where the USA detonated it over a populated city IOTL, the UASR instead deploys a smaller version with a Japanese navy fleet in the Korean Straits as its target, where there's no risk of collateral damage.
    O 
  • Occupiers Out of Our Country:
    • The February Uprising, essentially the Filipino front of the Second American Civil War, is an attempt by the Sakdalistas independentists to liberate their country from American rule. The revolts fails due to Anglo-Japanese military intervention.
    • The July Uprising of 1936 in Indonesia is a failed attempt by the Indonesian Communist Party to end Dutch colonial rule.
  • Old Shame: The common practice of employees of the Institute for Sexual Science using public funds to liason with sex workers ostensibly for research purposes and generally the Institute's reliance on their labor to supplement their data in the thirties became the subject of retrospective criticism and a black mark on its history, especially as it was in a period where sex workers were fighting for basic recognition and to assert their basic human dignity.
  • One-Federation Limit: Defied. In the post-WWII world, the three superpowers are the Franco-British Union, the Union of American Socialist Republics, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And that's just the three top dogs.
  • One Nation Under Copyright: Downplayed. In the United States of America, several very powerful rich men hold monopolies on entire industries and wield large amounts of influence over governments, notably calling upon the National Guard to disperse particularly resistant workers on strike, and which doesn't end in Reds!, as anti-trust reforms fail to be passed unlike OTL, until the dissolution of the United States.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted.
    • J. Edgar Hoover and Herbert Hoover share the same surname despite not being related.
    • Same with the generals Leonard Wood and Robert E. Wood.
    • There are two socialists with the surname Haywood, the unionist William "Big Bill" Haywood and the politician and general Harry Haywood.
    • To avoid the confusion between the American and Soviet Red Armies, they are sometimes referred by the acronyms WFRA and RKKA respectively.
  • Operation: [Blank]: The pre-WWII operations of the Comintern's International Liaison Department are mostly named after important historical or cultural figures related to the country where it takes place, but sometimes not that muchList.
  • Opportunistic Bastard:
    • Many people who were famously anti-Communist IOTL are quick to profess their loyalty to the new Socialist post-revolution government, simply because it is a convenient way for them to keep at least some of their status and power.
      • Most notable is J. Edgar Hoover, who — as the American Red Army is about to invade Washington DC — offers MacArthur to have his men from the NBI help with the evacuation effort. As such Hoover and his men are able to gather together a sizeable group of high-ranking businessmen and politicians looking to escape the advancing Socialist army, but instead of evacuating them, Hoover orders them placed under arrest, and then later surrenders them to the Socialist government for legal persecution, thereby successfully currying a lot of favor with the new leaders and escaping any persecution himself. He ends up being appointed to the first People's Secretary of Public Safety following the Revolution, and takes up the task with much zeal, successfully cracking down upon both The Mafia and the Kosher Nostra, as well as several Evil Reactionary groupings during his time in office.
      • Another notable example is Vice Admiral William H. Standley, who bypasses many men his senior to lead a delegation of senior US Navy officers to negotiate the US Navy's transformation into the Workers' and Farmers' Revolutionary Navy. He also presents the deposed commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Luke McNamee, as a sweetener. He fakes being a communist sympathizer, has no love for the Reds but simply hates MacArthur more, hoping the former might preserve the democratic spirit of America contrary to the latter.
    • Following Stalin's death in 1941, many of the high-ranking supporters of his totalitarian policies (most prominently the exceedingly cruel and corrupt Lavrentiy Beria) are covertly purged in the confusion of the on-going World War II by a Benevolent Conspiracy between Russian and American military intelligentsias who wants to push the USSR in a less authoritarian direction. Vyacheslav Molotov, despite his own status as a loyal Stalin supporter, is a notable exception, as he quickly realizes which the way the wind is blowing when he succeeds Stalin as General Secretary, and chooses to give the conspiracy his full support, and the conspirators in turn accept his help as his approval and collaboration makes it easier to achieve their goals. As a result, when the USSR decides to examine and hold public hearings on the extend of Stalin and his regime's crimes after the war, Molotov's substantial part in said crimes is conveniently severely downplayed and even overlooked entirely.
  • Oppressive States of America: Played with. The United States does develop very authoritarian tendencies, which also existed IOTL but are maximized by the failure of progressive economic reforms allowing monopolies to thrive.
    • The suppression of dissidents that occurs during our World War I is much more severe and violent than in OTL, the government invokes the state of exception and assumes extraordinary and extralegal powers, it suspends Habeas Corpus and uses the military to violently put down strikes (in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act) and arrests socialist politicians, even respected statesmen like "Robert La Follette" and elected officials benefitting from legal immunity.
    • On the other hand the US implements a variety of political reforms, including moving towards a parliamentarian form of government, weakening of presidential power, woman suffrage in 1913, national healthcare, overpaid leave, ban on child labor, dismantling of racial segregation-including Texas passing a law abolishing Jim Crow.
    • When the Workers' Communist Party's candidate, Norman Thomas, wins the 1932 US Presidential election in a landslide, Nicholas Longworth and Douglas MacArthur successfully pressure Herbert Hoover to suspend the Constitution. Longworth and MacArthur use this as an pretext to have Thomas summarily executed by members of the military and arrest all leading Worker's Party members. The White Army, National Guard and a host of far-right paramilitaries attempt to put down any opposition, notably massacring Huey Long and disloyal members of the Louisiana State Legislature, because they condemned Longworth and MacArthur's violent seizure of power and refused to swear fealty to them. This is the final straw that sets the stage for the Revolution and the formation of the United Republics.
    • The remnants of the US government and their supporters flee to Cuba and establish a new government, with Douglas MacArthur as President for Life, that ruthlessly suppresses dissent and favors American exiles over native Cubans. After he dies, the "Americuba" government abandons his authoritarian policies and successfully transitions to democracy, though it continues to proclaim itself the legitimate government of the USA and the National Salvation Front (renamed National Party) continues to be a dominant political force.
    • The early years of the United Republics are a downplayed version of this trope. A Red Terror is enacted but it is a targeted rather than universal form of violence, some people are dealt with by kangaroo courts, firing squads and "justice by revolver", but it is nowhere near the scale of the Soviet Union, many of the sentenced were responsible for suppressing American democracy, and it did stop with the end of the war. These actions are seen in-universe as a black spot on the history of the UASR, but none of the UASR leaders are portrayed as evil for them.
  • Opt Out: In the prelude to the Second World War, as it becomes increasingly clear that a violent confrontation with the fascist Axis Powers is going to be inevitable, most of the Actual Pacifists in the UASR government — and there are quite a few — decide to quietly step back, out of general principle.
  • Our Founder: The headquarters of the Hughes-Welch Broadcasting Corporation in London has a massive golden statue of Howard Hughes, the founder of this media empire, in a pilot suit standing outside its front doors, pointing to the Thames.
  • Overly Long Name:
    • Communist America's official name is the North American Union of Socialist Council Republics, generally shortened to the Union of American Socialist Republics, the UASR or the United Republics (the last one is typically used in the FBU and the AFS).
    • The merger of the fascist parties of Jacques Doriot and Pierre Clémenti creates the Parti Populaire National Collectiviste Français, incorporating the elements from both names but leading it to be quite long.
    • The Franco-British Union is officially called The Entente Cordiale of Great Britain and France.
    P 
  • People's Republic of Tyranny:
    • Subverted with the Democratic Republic of Iran, which is formed in a Regime Change by military coup but actually becomes a democracy.
    • Played straight with the Free American State, a Nazi state with the trappings of a federalist constitutional republic and claiming to be the rightful successor to the defunct USA. Their citizens called themselves "Free Americans", their radio station is called "Free America Radio" and their newspaper The New Liberator.
    • The "Sovereign Philippine State" is a Japanese puppet state.
  • The Plague: The Spanish Flu appears but is not as severe in America as in OTL because it is deadlier to people in good health.
  • Plea Bargain: During the trial of the True Democrat Ten, Carl Curtis accepts to testify against the other accused in exchange for a lighter sentence.
  • Please Select New City Name:
    • A bunch of cities get renamed after the Revolution after deceased figures of the communist and labor movementList.
      • In the Negro Soviet Republic, Birmingham is renamed to Chumamji, Swahili for 'iron city'.
    • The Dominican People's Republic gets quickly renamed to the People's Republic of Quisqueya, after the name given to Hispaniola by the native Taino people.
  • Point of Divergence: Originally the timeline diverged entirely because a racist cop in Buffalo happened to pick on a certain Polish immigrant. While this remains probably the biggest inciting event for the divergence from our timeline, it is not the point of departure in the rewrite. The new point of divergence is a slightly different outcome of the interaction between two minor socialist groups at the end of the 19th century, which ends up averting a split that weakened the movement in the long term.
    • Another point of divergence is that the Supreme Court rules against anti-trust legislation in various Real Life cases that were won by progressives. With a government that is pro-big business and the progressive movement appearing increasingly impotent, radical ideologies become more popular among the American people.
    • America enters World War I from the beginning, leading to a much more harsh experience that profoundly shakes the traditional structures of American society, in particular the moral authority of religious institutions.
      • The American participation in World War I from the beginning causes a radical politicization of military officers as well as making the German offensive against Russia less effective, which strengthens the nascent Soviet Union. It results in the radicalization of African-Americans as they end up experiencing life outside of Jim Crow and also ending racial segregation in the military twenty years earlier and racial segregation in general forty years earlier as this becomes the catalyst for an early Civil Rights movement in the 1920snote .
      • The collapse of the two-party system the The Roaring '20s is also an important factor as it reduces the Democratic Party to a regional party in the Deep South with the progressive wing splitting into the Democratic-Farmer-Labor-Party which works in coalition with the Republican Party. This allows the Workers' Party maneuvering room to grow politically due to split voting.
    • Continued British support for the Hashemites allows the Kingdom of Hejaz to triumph over the Sultanate of Nejd in the 1920s, leading to an Hashemite, instead of Saudi, kingdom to be formed in the Arabic peninsula.
  • Politically Incorrect Hero:
    • The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party at first denounces the growing liberalization of society and the upheaval of widely accepted norms brought on by the First Cultural Revolution as "moral degradation". The same sort of sentiments are also shared by the more conservative members of the Workers' Communist Party of America but both eventually grow to accept the new status quo lest they lose any relevance in politics.
    • Pancho Villa, one of the leaders of the Second Mexican Revolution, still commits the gruesome atrocities he commited IOTL with his men, including rapes and massacres with children among their victims in both cases, with the latters particularly directed at Chinese-Mexicans (who were victim of racial hatred across the country and the political spectrum in the 1930's).
    • In its infancy, Communist Mexico turns a blind to practices like child mariages, statutory rape, and a permeating macho culture due to fears it would lose support of the people if it sought to radically stop these accepted practices. The issue is further complicated by these practices being accepted among indigenous communities, possibly leading to those speaking against this macho culture defended under the guise indigenous self-determination to be accused of chauvinism or paternalism. Another untouched issue is the continuing racism between blacks and indigenous peoples despite the state's anti-racism, though the youth of all ethnicities is notably much less racist.
    • During WWII, the Americuban regime is firmly on the side of the Allies, but they're still a dictatorship that gives the native Cuban population no voice and their propaganda against Integralist Brazil includes some very apparent racist undertones.
  • Politically Incorrect Villain: The enemies of the Workers' Party of America and later the UASR are generally bigoted to varying degrees, such as the Ku Klux Klan and segregationists, the Axis and especially the Nazis during WWII, and the colonialist Franco-British Union.
    • Adrien Arcand pushes francophobic policies in his capacity as Premier of Quebec and is also a vocal antisemite.
    • Edward VIII causes a controversy after he declares during a speech that the opinion to intervene in World War II against the Axis is "influenced by wealthy Jews of Central and Eastern European extraction, who own the means of communication". He is forced to retract that statement but makes another similar one later that he is forced to apologize for as well, but still completely believes, telling a friend "It is not antisemitic to state the fact Jews make up a large portion of the communist, war-profiteering, and anti-war circles, nor does it diminish to imply they have a vested interest in war with Germany, for any number of reasons."
    • Turanist Turkey holds revanchist hatred for Greeks and Armenians (and Arabs for Nihâl Atsız's faction) and generally mistreats non-Turkish peoples. Their policies to deal with conquered people are at best slow cultural genocide and at worst outright extermination.
  • The Political Officer: Starting with the Second Civil War, the American Red Army employs Commissars in their units. Their job is to ensure to their best of their abilities that the rank-and-file soldiers maintain combat morale and loyalty towards the revolution (later the state), and also rein in attempts at committing war crimes against civilians.
  • Pre-Asskicking One-Liner:
    • During the Gallipoli Campaign, just before their assault on the Ottomans holding the 400 Plateau, Smedley Butler declares to his marines "immortality is just beyond that bluff. It's ours for the taking. Huzzah!"
    • When the Germans launch the Kaiserschlacht, the American communist junior officers and NCOs rally their mutinous soldiers by shouting "Hold the line, comrades. Make it through this, and be sure to save a bullet for our own generals."
  • Pretext for War:
  • Propaganda Machine: During WWI, the American government establishes the Committee for Public Information to instill a sense of enthusiasm for the war effort into the public, chaired by members of the government and media moguls, and becomes a permanent fixture of the American state.
  • Propaganda Piece:
    • Commander Columbia has explicitely communist propagandistic intentions, portraying personifications of the Comintern nations as a pantheon of heroes fightings fascists and other reactionary villains.
      • In reaction to Commander Columbia, Italy makes its own animated epic Glories to Come, presenting a triumphant vision of Fascist Italy's ambitions and preaching the virtues of the regime, including an undercurrent of misogyny. The film is considered a pinnacle of futurist art.
      • This is later followed by Advance Italians!, a nationalist film following the history of an unbroken family line from the founding of Rome to the newest son's meeting with Mussolini, who is portrayed as a benevolent and loving figure.
      • Later, Nazi Germany releases Knight of the West, a Disney-esque style animated movie featuring the story of a brave Teutonic Knight who awakens from under the mountain to aid the German people in their time of need against the Jewish menace.
    • The British film A Brit in the Revolutionary Air Force has a blatant pro-intervention in WWII and communist sympathetic slant. It does little to dent its success, becoming the highest grossing film of 1941.
    • Freedom Lost, made in 1983, is a low budget Franco-British docudrama commemorating and lamenting the loss of "freedom and capitalism" in 1933. The film is very pro-MacArthur, and posits that the Workers' Party victory was the result of "Soviet interference". It is widely derided, even among more sympathetic Tory circles, for its ahistorical and poorly researched stance, as well as its low budget and poorly made reenactments.
  • Proxy War:
    • The Spanish Civil War (1936-1938) is one for the Comintern and the Axis.
    • After WWII the Alliance of Free States and the Vladivostok Compact fight each other in many proxy conflicts in the ongoing Cold War.
      • The Horn War is the first major proxy war between the two blocs, with the AFS backing Ethiopia and the TCI/VOSCOM backing Socialist Somalia. The war is also notable for being one of the main reasons leading to the split of the Workers' Communist Party of America in two due to opposition between pro- and anti-interventionists in the Horn War. In the end the war is won by Somalia, realizing its territorial ambitions of Greater Somalia.
      • The Indochina War. The high amount of foreign involvement from both blocs makes it essentially an actual war between them rather than a proxy one. It ends similar to OTL with the expulsion of Capitalist forces from Indochina by the Communists, which form a socialist federation.
      • The Indonesian War (1979-1994). It ends with Indonesia suffering partial territorial losses to AFS states like Australasia while the country itself becomes socialist and adopts the name Nusantara.
      • The Congo War (1980s). Mostly waged between the socialist Congo and the capitalist Nigeria, with ample foreign intervention for both sides.
  • Public Bathhouse Scene: In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the local government councils built up public bathing facilities to increase the hygiene of the population. This is a case of Boring, but Practical as sanitation was non-existent outside of the very rich in the 1930snote .
  • Puppet King:
    • The Japanese Emperor Hirohito is severely injured in a 1932 assassination attempt by a Korean independence activist, and never manages to fully recovers from his wounds. Left too weak to effectively fulfill his duties as Emperor as a result of this, Hirohito is forced to cede most of his political power to his advisors, while he is reduced to more of a figurehead. Chief amongst these are his younger brother Yasuhito, Prince Chichibu, who assumes the old position of Kanpaku, chief advisor for the Emperor, and leads Japan down an even more oppressive and imperialistic path than in OTL.
    • MacArthur chooses Raymond Moley to be his puppet president after his putsch but assumes power directly after his flight to Cuba.
    • Turkish President İsmet İnönü is turned into the Turanists' puppet, with any real power held by the Prime Minister, first Riza Nur then Nihâl Atsız.
    • Jiang Jieshi, already the Japanese's Quisling in China, is further undermined by the presence of Japanese "advisors" superceding his administration and military commanders, effectively controlling them, and by implicitely forcing him to stay in Beijing, telling him he's free to move his government to the occupied capital of Nanjing but wouldn't receive any protection from the Japanese forces remaining in Beijing.
    • José Sanjurjo becomes a puppet after suffering a debilitating aneurysm in 1941 rendering him incapable of ruling by himself.
  • Puppet State:
    • The Republic of Cuba was a puppet state of the USA since 1901 before being annexed as its last remnant by the MacArthur regime.
    • Nicaragua, Panama and Haiti assume a quasi-protectorate status under American occupation until the Red May Revolution, after which they willingly become associated states of the UASR after their own revolutions.
    • Assyria and Kurdistan are turned into French and British Mandates of the League of Nations respectively after WWI, alongside OTL Mandates of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.
      • Assyrian, Syria and Lebanon are later turned into client republics by France.
    • The establishment of the Dominion of Southern Ireland after the Irish War of Independence allows the United Kingdom to retain much influence over the region.
    • Paraguay becomes a puppet state of Integralist Brazil after signing the Asunción agreement with it.
    • The Provisional Republic of the Chinese Nation is established by Japan to be its puppet state as it conquers mainland China.
    • The Empire of Japan creates the Republic of Daehan to keep control of Korea through right-wing nationalist proxies.
    • Similar regimes are created upon Japan taking control of the Philippines and Indonesia, creating the Sovereign Philippine State and the Republic of Insulindia.
  • The Purge:
    • In Mexico, Carranza conducts a massive purge campaign of potential Zapatists and their sympathizers in 1918 and 1919.
    • During the Second American Civil War MacArthur promulgates the 'Enemy Agents Order' ordering the liquidation of 'communist political agents' but this quickly becomes an excuse for White militias to engage in ethnic cleansing against minorities.
    • In Americuba he purges his inner circle in response to decreasing sugar harvests and riots in various Cuban cities in 1936.
    • Played with in the United Republics, as William Foster decides to side with protestors during the Revolt of the Cadres and launch an investigation into political corruption, resulting in lots of Sleazy Politicians and government bureaucrats being arrested for accepting bribes or imposing rents in public housing. This in particular is considered a good thing, as it enshrines democratic accountability in post-revolutionary America.
    • In a post-war report, written by a truth commission, it's revealed that up to half a million people died as a result of the persecution of kulaksnote  and union leaders as well as Stalin's own purges. And it should be reminded, that due to Butterfly of Doom, Stalin was unable to enact the complete purges that he did in Real Life.
      • The NKVD under the order of Lavrentiy Beria liquidates all of the Lithuanian political prisoners to prevent them from joining an anti-Soviet collaboration government as the country is about to fall in Axis hands.These mass murders were ultimately useless as the Germans would impose their own rule and treat the Baltic states as colonies.
    • Hitler uses the successful invasion of Czechoslovakia to silence or purge his detractors in the Wehrmacht and remove the incompetents.
    • The Spanish State is fond of those throughout its short history.
      • The Nationalists enact a brutal White Terror against the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.
      • After the Ruiz Affair, Emilio Mola brutally imposed discipline upon the dissident factions of his Spanish Falange, purging, killing, and brutalizing any who would not bend the knee to him.
      • Emilio Mola's seizure of power on the Dia de Reyes is accompanied by a purge of the other factions within the Nationalist camp.
    • After conquering the Spanish Free Soviet Republic, the Spanish State launches a White Terror even more brutal than the previous one against leftists, Catalans and Basques in the newly-occupied territories.
    • MacArthur removes from his administration pro-Axis and isolationist figures like Vice-President Coughlin and Joseph P. Kennedy as it becomes apparent his British benefactors will be fighting the Axis rather than the Comintern.
  • Putting on the Reich: Integralist Brazil. Post-Second World War Britain and France get pretty close to this. Propaganda on all sides of the Cold War will feature this for enemies.
  • Pyrrhic Victory:
    • The Battle of Springfield turns out to be one for General Marshall's Army of the Mississippi during the Second Civil War.
    • The Siege of Gibraltar is one for the Axis, paying a high cost for their conquest of the Rock, with up to 70% losses for the main Spanish contingent while the British only sustain 10% losses.
    Q-R 
  • The Quisling:
    • The very name of Henry Ford becomes synonymous with betrayal in the UASR for his collaboration with Nazi Germany.
    • Jiang Jieshi betrays the Republic of China and joins the Japanese, becoming the leader of the Provisional Republic of the Chinese Nation. He claims to be doing this because the Republic of China led by Wang Jingwei has itself become a Soviet-American puppet.
  • Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Jane Schafer is at first a bit hesitant to join the joint Russian-American Benevolent Conspiracy aiming to clean out the remnants of Stalin's authoritarian cabinet following the infamous Soviet leader's death. After a short explanation of who Lavrentiy Beria is, and the fact that he has used the power of his office to get away with preying on young women for years, she is completely onboard with leading an assassination squad against him.
  • Realpolitik: The UASR and the United Kingdom maintain trade links after the Red May Revolution despite mutual animosity and the former's fiery revolutionary rethoric because doing otherwise would greatly hurt both of their economies.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Winston Churchill gives one to the British government for burning bridges with America and cozying up with fascist regimes.
  • Reassigned to Antarctica:
    • Andrew Mellon was reassigned to become Ambassador to the United Kingdom because of his significant role in the Hoover administration's disastrous handling of the Depression.
    • Edward VIII is made Governor-General of New Zeland after his abdication to keep him as far away from European affairs as possible.
  • Recognition Failure: A Soviet officer fails to recognize a tall man arriving at the port of Sevastopol, only for an old dockworker to do so for him.
    Vanya: "Do you really not recognize the Black Baron?"
  • Red and Black Totalitarianism: Averted with the UASR. The flag of Communist America is dominated by black and red, the colors of anarchism and communism, but it is a democratic state.
  • Red Baron:
    • The Ottoman Turkish soldiers fighting the US Marines during WWI give them the nickname of batıkurtlar, meaning "western wolves".
    • General Smedley Butler is known as "Old Gimlet Eye" among the Marines, or as, related to the above, the "Old Wolf".
    • President Leonard Wood is nicknamed the "People's General" by his supporters and the "American Bonaparte" by Jay Lovestone and the Communists.
    • John P. Lucas, one of the leaders of the anarchist Black Brigades, is nicknamed "The Old Anarchist of Kearneysville".
    • Liren Sun is known as "Australasia's Rommel".
    • As IOTL, Emilio Mola is known as El Director from his work as the main planner for the Unión Militar Española before the Spanish Civil War.
  • Red China: Communist China in Reds! follows a UASR-inspired model of Communist democracy.
  • Red Scare:
    • Hamilton Fish III attempts to start one with his investigations into communist espionnage but he is undermined in the eyes of the public by his own antisemitism.
    • The victory of the Communists in the Second American Civil War naturally leads to significant panic among the remaining capitalist nations, to the point where they enter a tentative rapprochement with the fascist powers until the latter starts getting too aggressive.
    • Franco-British MP Waldron Smithers becomes notorious for his claims that communists have infiltrated the state organs of the Franco-British Union.
  • Regime Change:
    • The Japanese install Puyi as emperor of their Manchu protectorate.
    • The Commonwealth of the Philippines is turned into an Anglo-Japanese protectorate and a de facto British dominion in which Japan has "parity rights".
      • When Great Britain and Japan find themselves on opposite sides of WWII, Japan does one again after conquering the entirety of the island, creating the Sovereign Philippine State.
    • The Dutch East Indies progressively fall under Japanese rule as well after the failed communist July Uprising, culminating in becoming a de facto Japanese colony in 1938.
      • When the Western Allies enter the war the Japanese initiate a coup making it explicit, creating the Republic of Insulindia as another puppet state for their Sphere.
    • The Spanish Republic becomes the Spanish Free Soviet Republic during the Spanish Civil War through the influence of its main backers, the Soviet Union and the United Republics.
    • The International Liaison Department of the Communist International exists to spread world revolution by both supporting already existing communist movements and bringing in line other leftist ones, and by supporting the creations of new ones and their attempted revolutions and coups.
      • The Shah is overthrown in 1940 by an American-sponsored military coup in 1940, Operation Ajax, establishing a Comintern-friendly communist regime in Iran.
  • Reign of Terror: Downplayed. During the Second American Civil War, the Reds enact a Red Terror, a calculated program of terror targeting reactionaries. It does heavily hit religious institutions hostile to socialism, particularly the Catholic Church.
  • Relationship-Salvaging Disaster: The cousins Wilhelm II and Nicholas II go on friendly hunts together during their exile in Sweden despite having been on opposite sides during WWI.
  • Religious and Mythological Theme Naming:
    • The divisions of the Green Guard are named after Christian orders of angels, with the first three being named Seraph, Cherub, and Archangel respectively.
    • The Boaventura brothers, some of whom founded the Green Guard, come from a very religious family and consequently were all named after Christian angels and Jesus Christ: Cristiano, Rafael, Uriel, Miguel, and Gabriel.
  • The Remake: Aelita (1937) is an American remake of the Soviet film Aelita (1924) but also serves as an adaptation of and sequel to the Barsoom series later canonized by Edgar Rice Burroughs himself. The movie becomes of staple of the fantastik genre.
  • The Remnant: Americuba, which becomes a refuge for American anti-communist exiles under MacArthur after the Revolution, claims to be the legitimate continuation of the old United States and acknowledges the UASR as an insurgent state.
  • Renegade Splinter Faction: The American Whites who work with Nazi Germany, such as Joseph Kennedy Jr., Henry Ford and William Dudley Pelley, are this to Americuba.
  • Resigned in Disgrace:
    • Hugo Black, an Alabama Democratic-Republican representative, resigns after it is revealed he has been a member of the Klan.
    • People's Secretary for Railways Robert Taft resigns after being disgraced by the Pineville Wreck and its aftermath, during which a coal train derailed, bisecting the city in two. The Pineville Wreck is merely the culminating point of a long list problems that went unadressed by the People's Secretariat for Railways.
  • La Résistance:
    • Following the MacArthur Putsch, the Workers' Communist Party forms a Provisional Government and transforms the electoral alliance that was the Popular Front into a military one, composed of all the forces opposing the National Salvation Front, including the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and their paramilitary Minutemen, anti-putschist Republicans and Democrats, and the anarchist paramilitary Black Brigades/Libertarian Fighters' League, although the WCPA remains indisputably dominant within the coalition.
      • In White-controlled territory, partisans form the Red Army Fractions and other ad-hoc groups to harass their troops. Black communist rebels, many Great War veterans, in particular are a constant thorn in the White Army's side.
    • As IOTL, resistance and partisan groups are created to resist Axis occupation.
      • In Spain the resistance is composed of the communist Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota and the more liberal Maquis both formed by Spanish Red Army soldiers going underground, and the Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, engaging in terrorism in reaction to Falangist brutality specifically targeting their people.
  • Revenge Before Reason: After being expelled from the communist SFIC, Jacques Doriot vows revenge against the party, turning to fascism and founding the PPF with the aim to completely wipe his former side from France.
  • The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized/The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Employs both tropes to an extent; it's more like The Revolution Will Not Be Sunshine and Rainbows. The new government in America may be more democratic than the Soviet Union, but it is far from squeamish. Nonetheless, it pretty unambiguously has the moral high ground over the old U.S. government, which was willing to suspend the Constitution and declare war on its own populace when an election went in a manner it didn't like while the new communist America allows other parties to run in elections and doesn't suppress the electoral vote when an election goes awry. After the Revolt of the Cadres, most authoritarian tendencies were swept away and democratic values dominate.
    • However, the UASR also had features of a party-state, such as an army loyal to the WCPA rather than the state, that would persist until the split of the perennial ruling party in the 1950s.
    • A sidestory named The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized was written to show Red soldiers are also capable of committing atrocities.
  • Rewarding Inactivity: The Communist Party of El Salvador decides to delay any attempted uprising until after the United States general election and are rewarded when the Red May Revolution successfully brings to power American Communists, who would eventually help them come to power by defeating the Salvadorean government during the Central American Revolutionary War, turning the country communist.
  • Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman:
    • Humphrey Bogart did some odd jobs and some acting in theater and short film, but eventually found his true calling in the Red Guards, fighting against the KKK in the South. As a result of that and his later Civil War service, he was inducted into StateSec, and did several stints as a intelligence agent posted in France, Spain and other foreign countries.
    • Ronald Reagan sort of remains an actor in this time; that is to say, in the 1950s he is a newsreader and sports commentator on radio, and in the 1960s and 1970s, he has become a news anchor on TV.
    • Mao Zedong tries, but never really manages to make a breakthrough as a political leader in the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, some of his political views eventually result in his excommunication from the party's middle management. Instead, he becomes increasingly interested in the trade of writing, and becomes a famous and influential poet and playwright. By the time of his death in 1976, he has published over thirty books, including poetry, plays, and essays on socialism and politics, and his autobiography which numbered four volumes. He later gets readmitted into the party and achieves fame, not as a Chinese leader, but within the body of the Communist International following his election to the top office in the late 50s, serving as the Commissar Prime of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and thus the de jure leader of the Communist world until his retirement later in the sixties.
    • Harland D. Sanders becomes an actual military colonel in the US Judge Advocate General's Corps during WWI. After his bussiness ventures go bankrupt during the Great Depression he puts his cooking skills and knowledge to good use in the volxkuchen. During the Civil War, Sanders' star rose in the Red Army as an indendant, keeping the troops fed. After the war he becomes instrumental, alongside John Kellogg, in reforming nutrition and gastronomic science far beyond the initial mission of military nutrition of the Subsistence Research Laboratory. He also creates the WFRA's new ration system.
    • Greta Garbo never changes her name from Gustafsson and becomes the first lady of the UASR in the late 40s.
    • Henry Ford flees America to join with Nazi Germany when he sees the writing on the wall in America, teaming up with Albert Speer to build up the economies of the Axis to be better suited for total war. Ends up executed following a guilty verdict at the Nuremberg trials.
    • Barry Goldwater becomes a successful writer akin to OTL Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and a political commentator in the 1970s and 80s. He tried to run for an House seat in Cuba in 1964 but his close ties to MacArthur made him unfashionable.
    • John F. Kennedy changes his named to Sean Cinnéide after embracing the Red May Revolution and becomes a judge after his WWII service.
    • Margaret Thatcher becomes a food tycoon instead of a politician.
    • Newt Gingrich attempts to go into politics in the UASR as a military internationalist, but is unsuccessful. Disappointed by his failure, he instead decides to focus on his writing career, becoming a prolific writer of political fiction and science fiction (the latter of which he writes under his full name of Newton Gingrich), but his true breakthrough as an author comes with a popular series of military techno-thrillers, which he starts writing when the Cold War heats up in the 1980s, effectively making him the Tom Clancy of this timeline, with his name becoming a brand in and of itself, just like Clancy's.
    • Iain M. Banks becomes the leader of the FBU Labour Party until his death from cancer.
    • Peter Capaldi, in turn, is the leader of the Entente Section of the Communist International by the ITTL Present Day.
    • Vladimir Putin pursues a successful career in acting rather than politics. Among his more notable roles is as Fyordor "Teddy" Kolchavsky AKA "Dr. Blood", an expy for Hannibal Lecter.
  • Riddle for the Ages:
    • John Birch's fate after he managed to escape imprisonment for the Assassination Attempt against Premier William Z. Foster is a historical mystery, with many conspiracy theories surrounding it. At most, the StateSec investigation of his disappearance confirmed that he managed to escape into Canada with help from right-wing militias, even though the details are very foggy. The closest the mystery ever got to be solved was in 1982, when a Baptist preacher and insurance salesman named John Morrison died in Calgary, Alberta at age 64. It was noted at the time that John Birch's full name was John Morrison Birch, and Morrison was noted to carry some physical resemblance to Birch and some overlap in his personal history (he was born in the same year and same area in India as Birch), but the investigation into his identity ultimately turned out inconclusively.
    • The cause of Stalin’s death during the World Revolutionary War and who is responsible for it.
    • It is unknown wether General René Prioux attempted to march on Paris on his own, or on the orders of his army group commander, or on the personal orders of Field Marshal Pétain during their military coup, as those who knew either died or took the truth to their graves.
    • The unsolved disappearance and death of Santo Trafficante Jr., the leader of the Tampa Mafia and one of the most powerful figures in the Mafia, becomes the subject of fascination among true crime enthusiasts and investigators.
  • Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: Along with The Klan, these work as Black Shirts for the National Salvation Front during the Second American Civil War, the Silver Legion being one of the most well-known. They infamously lacked the professionality of the regular army and the National Guard and committed atrocities against genuine and suspected communists devolving by design into massacres of minority populations. Following the Civil War, many new right-wing militias spring up, as many of the White forces who, for one reason or another, didn't evacuate to Cuba want to continue fighting the war they lost. The largest and most organised of these militias call themselves "The Sons of Liberty", and they manage to establish several semi-independent cells across several states (though mostly in the South and the Midwest) and they are behind a couple of infamous terrorist attacks and attempted insurrections in the years immediately following the founding of the UASR.
  • Rightful King Returns: The return of the Brazilian Emperors to Brazil is a surprisingly straight example of this as Dom Pedro Henrique's entrance to Brazil is used to finish off the Integralist regime by providing a figurehead for the country to rally around in the face of the Brazilian republican right-wing having faced disgrace and defeat under Salgado's insanity. By all accounts, Brazil is a prosperous and burgeoning country significantly more successful than its OTL counterpart and is generally either considered a superpower or a country on the verge of becoming one. The FBU re-installing the Hohenzollern Kaiser to Germany as well as the assorted lesser German nobility and royalty is portrayed like this in the Capitalist sphere, but the German Monarchy is a significantly more contentious institution than Brazil's.
  • Rising Empire:
    • Imperial Germany becomes an even more prominent example of this trope than OTL, since it also aggressively pursues imperialistic goals in Latin America, causing the old US to grow more vigilant towards the Kaiserreich and strengthen its alliance with the British Empire.
    • The Greater Indian Commonwealth's rising political and economic power through the Cold War puts it on a course to eventually eclipse even the FBU in the Capitalist Bloc.
  • Rousing Speech:
    • William Z. Foster delivers several:
      • The "Red Dawn" speech, calling on his countrymen to rally behind the Provisional Government in the fight against the tyranny of capitalism and the National Salvation Front, and announcing the formation of the Union of American Socialist Republics.
      • His funeral oration for Norman Thomas, first speaking findly of the president-elect and his acceptation of his likely deadly fate, then encouraging the American people to fight in memory of those killed by the NSF regime and complete the revolution against capitalism.
      • The speech announcing the Axis invasion of the USSR and asking Congress to declare war on the Axis, and announcing his own resignation.
    • Upton Sinclair gives the "What is to be Done?" speech, outlining the challenges facing the newly-founded UASR, and the necessity of bold action to fully realize the revolution.
    • Jiang Jieshi gives one entitled "China Cannot Be Conquered" after he has become a puppet leader for the Japanese invading China.
    • Plinio Salgado gives one as he begins the invasion of Argentina and the rest of INTREV-aligned South America, characterizing the war as a Christian crusade against Bolshevism.
    • The French fascist leaders Doriot, Clémenti and Bucard make a common declaration the order of military mobilization in France in prevision of war against the Axis, sparking riots in the country.
  • Run for the Border: Several Sons of Liberty terrorists escape the UASR by crossing the border, mostly into Canada, with the most notable example being John Birch.
    S 
  • Saintly Church: The Red Trinitarian Ecumene evokes this. It was formed by pro-socialism parishes that espouse a radical interpretation of Catholic social doctrine and splits off from the Vatican after the Second American Civil War.
  • The Scapegoat:
    • The Republicans gladly leave the Democrats claim the presidency as part of their common National Unity ticket in the 1916 elections so they can blame the cost of the ongoing WWI on them despite the war starting under Republican President Taft because of the Treaty of Toronto he signed himself.
    • As the Axis is incresingly losing the war and Soviet-American forces get ever closer to the Free American State, Virgil Effinger blames their decline on "Bolshevik intruders" and begins to execute their Slavic and Jewish forced laborers, then the brainwashed POWs they had created for "lingering redness".
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: James Buckley's father uses his connections as district attorney to ensure his son doesn't end in prison after he was caught directly planning an attack at a Young Sons of New England meeting.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: During WWI, the scions of rich and politically connected families receive draft deferments or posts at West Point guaranteeing they would miss the slaughter on the frontlines. The rich also benefit from exclusions from rationing while the rest of the population suffers through it.
  • Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: Nazi Germany completely disregards all laws of war impeding their war of extermination against the Soviet Union (just like OTL). While still legally bound by the 1929 Geneva Convention, which required signatories to abide by its dictates in any conflict with non-signatories, Germany very publicly used the fact that both the Soviet Union and UASR had rejected ratification over the requirement to racially segregate POWs to sanction German war crimes.
    • Under the Hague Convention of 1907, warships of a belligerent power could only dock in the port of a neutral nation for 72 hours to make repairs and resupply with victuals and fuel to return to the nearest home port or else be interned for the remainder of the war. Graf Spee's extensive damage required much longer than 72 hours, and she would conduct repairs in then neutral São Paulo well beyond the limits of making her seaworthy thanks to Brazil's cooperation with Germany.
  • Secret Police:
    • The Main Directorate of State Security is the UASR's secret police, tasked with domestic espionage, counterintelligence, as well as foreign espionage.
    • The Free American State has the American State Security Bureau, effectively nothing more than a small subgroup of the Gestapo.
  • Shared Universe: The shared universe of Commander Columbia and the other works part of it is called the Rubyverse after their creators, the Ruby Orchestra collective.
  • Shell-Shocked Veteran:
    • George Patton. No, really; in this timeline the US ends up entering the First World War two years earlier and fighting in some of the bloodiest battles, taking much heavier losses. And Old Blood and Guts himself was on the frontline for them. He may not have developed full-blown PTSD, but he came home a greatly changed man, and very bitter towards the politicians who'd sent a million of his comrades-in-arms to their deaths for no particularly good reason.
    • Jane Schafer, one of the few direct POV characters and an officer who fought in World War II, is quite self-aware about the fact that she is struggling with some degree of Survivor's Guilt and associated traumas after coming home from the Eastern front.
  • Shocking Defeat Legacy:
    • Though the much earlier American involvement in World War I fails to make much of an impact on the Western front, the Americans' presence ends up making a huge difference in the Mediterranean theater, where the Ottoman Empire eventually suffers a much more decisive and humiliating defeat than in OTL. As a result TTL's version of the partition of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the war is a much larger affair. Amongst the most significant changes are the Ottomans being forced to also surrender the territory of Kurdistan to American control (taken over by the British at the start of their second civil war), Western Armenia to Armenia (which soon falls into Soviet hands), and even giving up Istanbul and its surrounding lands which is turned into the International Zone of Constantinople. At the end of it all, the end of the now significantly reduced Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Republic of Turkey is marked by the abdication of Sultan Mehmed VI on November 3, 1922. National anger at this humiliation eventually leads to widespread revanchism in the Republic of Turkey, and eventually sets the stage for the nation joining the Axis Powers as an ally in the Pact of Steel in the prelude to World War II.
    • Much like the Battle of Stalingrad IOTL, the Battle of Moscow in 1941 becomes a defining moment of World War II as it ultimately ends in a humiliating defeat for the up-until-that-point advancing Wehrmacht. Despite mustering up a truly massive force to take the city, the combined American and Soviet forces not only manage to hold their ground, but even pull off a massive counterattack in the immediate aftermath, that sends the Axis forces into a mad dash retreat for hundreds of kilometers. It is the moment that completely breaks any illusion the Nazis, and by extension the Axis, might have had of invulnerability, and marks the beginning of the end of their attempt to Take Over the World.
  • Shout-Out:
    • An in-universe TL was titled Mande Rising.
    • The running mate for Huey Long during the 1932 election is Princeton University President Henry Jones Sr. He later reappears as the Chairman of the Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1938 to 1942.
    • Meanwhile, the candidates from the Prohibition Party in the same elections are Don Keyhote and Sam Chopanzo.
    • The video game reviewer Gameunist Manifesto who makes a video about the game set during the Soviet invasion in Romania, is based on Jim Sterling.
    • The UASR's counterintelligence agency is called Section 9.
    • Jake and Elwood Greyson are Trinitarian ministers "on a mission from God and the People".
    • The first chief commissar of the Food Commissariat, in charge of food rationing during WWII, is named Ramsay Gordon.
    • The entire entry The Fundamental Things Apply is one to Film/Casablanca, with Amedeo Bordiga being an undercover agent as a cafe owner, Dooley Wilson as his pianist and Ingrid Bergman wishing to obtain safe passage. Is also mentioned a movie named I Was A German for Public Safety with Paul Henreid as "Victor Lazlo", Conrad Veidt as Fritz Julius Kuhn and Peter Lorre as his Nazi party contact.
    • One to El Risitas. A Spanish-language propaganda reel showing a poster dismissing the Mexican expeditionary force in Europe as little more than "America's barking chihuahua" and clips from related German propaganda films while a pair of commentators poke fun at its expense while trying and failing to contain their distinctive wheezing laughter as they mock Hitler's mannerisms and racial theories and trade jokes about Mussolini and Salgado. The two are nicknamed "the Giggles" for their distinctive laugh and style of comedy.
    • Several ministers in the first Reed government.
    • The flag of the Free American State is the same as the flag of the American Reich
    • The Reds! timeline possesses its own most mysterious song on the internet, except this one was eventually identified.
    • The mod Tsarstvo - Legacy of the Great War is one to Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, being made for the exact same games with a similar alternate history premise "What if the Russian Empire won WWI?" (instead of the German Empire in Kaiserreich) and enjoying a large popularity among Hearts of Iron mods. It also has an equivalent to the associated Kaiser Cat Cinema in the form of the Ocelot Productions film group.
  • Show Within a Show: While a lot of these exist, the most prominent and frequently returned to example is Samantha Waver's Commander Columbia, a constructed mythology/superhero setting for the new Red America, featuring Amanda Aaron; who becomes the eponymous character when she assumes the aspect of "the new, proletarian Jupiter" to fight with her friends against villains personifying imperialism and for the victory of communism.
  • Shut Up, Kirk!: President-Elect Norman Thomas makes a valiant, but doomed attempt at convincing the men who has come to kill him as a part of the large-scale coup against the incoming Socialist government, that their actions are only going to have the opposite effect of what they are hoping to achieve. His assassins refuse to listen:
    Norman Thomas: Think very hard about what you are doing, son. Once you go down this road, there is no going back. This sets a precedent that will cast a pall over this country for a century. You think what you are doing is going to save the country, to save liberty, but you are the ones murdering them.
    Lt. John C. Williams: (pistol-whips Thomas) Shut up, you Red bastard!
  • Sibling Yin-Yang: A very dark version with JFK and his brother Joe Kennedy. One rejects his family and becomes a revolutionary hero, renaming himself Sean Cinnéide, the other rejects his family and becomes an SS officer... And then there is Robert Kennedy, who becomes the reformist President of Americuba after MacArthur's death.
  • The Siege: The Siege of Gibraltar by the Spanish, French Pétaintist and German forces lasts almost a month, seeing the greatest artillery duel on the Iberian Peninsula since the Napoleonic Wars. In the end their victory over the British is a pyrrhic one.
  • Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: Firmly in the Hard/Soft alternate history category. More specifically, every single PoD that could help the American socialist movement (no early splits, progressivism strangled in the crib, early participation in the First World War radicalizing the troops) occurs. Also, after the Russian Revolution, the Socialist Labor Party doesn't split between reformists and revolutionaries.
    • The "hard" Alternate History is that progressives manage to achieve crucial reforms, but do ultimately not stop the United States from becoming One Nation Under Copyright which results in corporations harshly cracking down on the moderate labor unions, leaving the radical unions as the only recourse left.
    • However there are events occurring outside of America that could not be affected by the PoDs such as the United Kingdom implementing the proposed Imperial Federation, a greater cooperation between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party.
  • Small Name, Big Ego: Honduran dictator Tiburcio Carías Andino publicly boasts that the Comintern will find only ruin and defeat in Central America. It takes them only three months to defeat him and his two allies, and Andino himself flees to Venezuela a week before the Nicaraguan troops reach the capital.
  • Space Cold War: The aftermath of World War II sees the beginning of a Cold War between the Communist and Capitalist blocs, the Vladivostok Compact and the Alliance of Free States respectively, still ongoing to the present-day.
  • Space-Filling Empire:
    • The USSR becomes even larger than OTL after WWII with the annexation of Polandnote  and Mongolianote  as new SSRs.
    • France and Britain are united into one Imperial Union, along with their remaining colonies.
    • Instead of containing a myriad of newborn nations after widespread decolonization in our world, Africa is now host to numerous composite federations and unions, or simply countries that are signficantly larger their than OTL counterparts. These include the West African Federationnote , the Riverine Federation note , the East African Federationnote , the United Kingdom of Egypt and Sudan, and the Federal Socialist Republic of the Congonote .
    • Within Asia and Oceania, there are the Greater Indian Commonwealthnote , the Indochinese Socialist Federationnote , the United Arab Kingdomsnote , the Australasian Commonwealthnote , and the United Kingdoms of Great Malaysianote .
    • The UASR, already comprised of the entirety of the former United States, annexes much of Canada after its collapse. This, in addition to its union associate republicsnote , makes America's size and reach substantially larger.
    • The socialist republics of Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras unite to form Centroamérica.
    • The Pan-American Union, a closely-bound confederation comprised of all Latin American republics aligned to the Comintern, could be considered this even if its member states are still independent.
  • Spared By Adaptation:
    • One of the main points of divergence of the timeline is the failure of the OTL successful assassination attempt on President McKinley, who goes on to finish his second term.
    • All the victims of the sinking of the RMS Titanic count, as the ship never strikes the infamous iceberg and thus reaches New York City in its fated maiden voyage. This also saves the White Star Line down the line and it eventually builds a thousand-foot long ocean liner in the late period of The Roaring '20s.
    • According to the authors, had Samantha Waver lived in OTL, she would've died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, but because of the earlier and larger involvement of America in World War I leading to worse living conditions for American civilians, she survivednote .
    • Theodore Roosevelt never catches the illness that killed him in OTL. As of the 1940s he's still alive.
    • Nicholas II's family and Admiral Alexander Kolchak went into exile in Sweden, avoiding their OTL fate.
      • The Tsarevich Alexei still dies, but 8 years later in 1926, from injuries sustained in a minor motor accident due to his hemophilia.
    • Rosa Luxemburg escapes her OTL assassination and eventually takes refuge in the UASR, her comrade Karl Liebknecht isn't so lucky.
    • The assassination of Emiliano Zapata in April 1919 is averted when Jesús Guajardo, the man who lead Zapata's assassins in OTL, instead goes through with defecting to Zapata's side. In the end, Venustiano Carranza, is instead assassinated in an internal coup, and the coup-makers opt to negotiate a peace settlement with Zapata and his revolutionary forces, ending the civil war in 1922. As a result, Zapata remains an influential player in Mexican left-revolutionary politics up through the 1920s and 1930s.
    • John "Jack" Reed avoids his death from typhus in Moscow in 1920, eventually becoming a foreign secretary of UASR and even the Premier during WWII.
    • Downplayed for Vladimir Lenin, whose death is only delayed by five months.
    • Downplayed for Sun Yet-sen, who lives on for just a couple more months than OTL to finish formulating his Third Principle of the People and publish his testament laying out his recommendations for the Kuomintang, most importantly regarding his succession.
    • Movie producer Thomas H. Ince still tragically dies but 9 years later than OTL, during the Second American Civil War.
    • Mikhail Frunze, a famed Bolshevik general, recovers from his illness and later plays a major role in WWII. After the war, he becomes the frontman of the leftist Internationalist opposition to Molotov.
    • Pyotr Wrangel avoids his OTL death and goes on to serve the Soviet Union during WWII in order to help defend Russia from Nazi invasion.
    • Downplayed. William "Big Bill" Haywood avoids his OTL death in 1928 only to be assassinated by the Whites during the Second American Civil War.
    • Leon Trotsky is offered asylum in the United States and doesn't get assassinated.
    • The leading Republican politician, Nicholas Longworth, doesn't suffer the bout of pneumonia that killed him in April 1931 OTL. Here Longworth, using his position as First Secretary, becomes a leading political figure in the National Salvation Front, and plays a large part in masterminding the MacArthur Putsch.
    • The famous Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and leader of the Black Army, Nestor "Bat'ko" Makhno, does not succumb to his OTL fate of dying of tuberculosis in 1934, and is last reported as still being alive as of 1939.
    • Sergei Kirov is not assassinated in 1934.
    • T. E. Lawrence doesn't suffer his fatal motorcycle accident from OTL.
    • Floyd Olson avoids his OTL death by receiving a successful treatment for his stomach cancer.
    • Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan complete their flight around the world instead of disappearing in the attempt.
    • Ikki Kita fled to Hawaii, avoiding his OTL arrest and execution by the Kempeitai.
    • José Sanjurjo and Emilio Mola do not die in plane crashes, the former continues to lead the Spanish State until he suffers a debilitating aneurysm in late 1941 and the latter succeeds him to lead Spain until they are defeated by the Allies.
    • Mikhail Tukhachevsky is still tortured and put on a secret trial during Stalin's purges like in OTL, but escapes the death penalty thanks to diplomatic pressure, being instead removed from his post and deported. He is rehabilitated when the Nazis invade the Soviet Union.
    • Gabriele D'Annunzio survives the health problems that killed him IOTL and makes a full recovery.
    • F. Scott Fitzgerald recovers from a heart attack that killed him OTL.
    • Sean Cinnéide is never assassinated, having a quite different career in the first place.
    • Alan Bligh lives a few years longer thanks to a variety of butterflies.
  • Squad Nickname:
    • Just like IOTL some American divisions gain nicknames, some being different from OTL while others have no equivalentnote .
    • The Soviet Naval Infantry are nicknamed the Black Devils like in OTL.
    • The regiment sent by the UASR to participate in the Soviet - Japanese Border Wars is called the "Medusa Regiment".
    • One of the most famous regiments of the Mexican Army of National Liberation is known as the "Magonista Regiment".
  • State Sec:
    • Played painfully straight with UASR's version of this, which is known under the formal name of Main Directorate for State Security (MDSS), but most people simply call them by StateSec. They are somewhat less sinister than most examples of the trope however. They control the paramilitary Proletarian Guard, an elite gendarmerie force and their public face.
    • The Green Guard of Brazil is a terrifyingly insane one. Described as green-uniformed soldiers who wear metal cuirasses at the very least as well as dehumanizing face-concealing masks (which are often gas masks), the Green Guard is a borderline militarized cult of Brazil, Integralism, the Green Guard's leaders, and Salgado and is noted to be Ultracatholic. They speak their own internal constructed language to prevent outsiders from determining what they're saying and not only don't hesitate to commit atrocities but seem to revel in them. Though at first starting out as a loose cannon political elite, they do become an actual military elite known for fearlessness and skill in battle. Somewhat subverted though, as the war turns against Brazil and the Green Guard's ranks are continually expanded, the Guard is increasingly filled with scared and frightened children abused into committing atrocities as part of the Guard's hazing rituals and their skills slip back into cannon fodder levels while their habit of war crimes starts to backfire. Fights become one to the death as people recognize the futility of surrendering to them, and they've committed perfidy far too many times for people to feel like risking death in case they try to pull an I Surrender, Suckers and the Guard by the end of the war is a decrepit shell. Huge swathes of the guard desert when a fake intelligence leak is given that claims the Comintern will kill any Green Guardsman who doesn't desert or renounce the Integralist regime and its last diehards gather for a final suicide attack against Communist forces in Uruguay so that they can die on the battlefield rather than face war crime trials.
  • Stay in the Kitchen: Defied. Nothing makes Jane Schafer angrier than being told she can't do something because of what's between her legs. Being discouraged from joining the army in this way only solidified her desire to join.
  • Story-Breaker Power: The United States undergoing a successful communist revolution is understood as being this both in and outside the story. Due to its vast resources, high rate of industrialization, advanced agriculture, and large scientific community, the United Republic has none of the economic disadvantages of real-life communist states.
  • Straight for the Commander: John Birch believed he was doing this with his Assassination Attempt against Premier William Z. Foster in May 1940, stating in a letter that "the socialist serpent will wither and die" if he was to "cut off its head". Scholars with the power of hindsight notice that Birch had greatly mischaracterized the nature of the democratic socialist system the UASR was founded on. Foster was never the head of any serpent, but merely one part of a greater political apparatus, and, as a head of a democratic government, replaceable. The broad agreement amongst historians is a successful assassination of Foster would at most have led to a temporary government under Ben Gitlow before John Reed would have assumed the premiership, and maybe the UASR adopting an even stricter and hasher security policy regarding potential threats from right-wingers during World War II.
  • Strawman News Media:
    • The Los Angeles Times before the Red May Revolution is the mouthpiece of its owner, self-proclaimed General Harrison Gray Otis, and his vehement anti-trade unionist views. In the aftermath of the bombing targeting them on October 1st, 1910, Otis starts a relentless propaganda campaign to blame the MacNamara brothers and the labor movement for the bombing and everything wrong in the city.
    • The British conservative newspapers like The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail cover the Second American Civil War from an unabashedly pro-MacArthur position and publish the most unfavorable narratives about the Reds without regard for their lack of truthfulness. The Daily Mail would publish whatever gossip and rumor would catch the headlines.
      • A scandal erupts when several articles uncritically paroting White propaganda concerning "Negro rape gangs" were retracted following further investigation, including one in The Times, the most esteemed newspaper in the UK.
    • The Hughes-Welch Broadcasting Corporation has an unabashed free market conservative, anti-union, anti-communist and sensationalistic bent in the reporting of its news network, which includes names like The Daily Mail and Le Figaro in both newspaper and news channel forms, attracting an audience of Cold Warriors and strongly anti-communist viewers and also a mass criticisms for its biased and sometimes outright manipulative journalism, and for "degrading the political discourse".
  • Succession Crisis:
    • The failing health of Riza Nur in mid-1941 leads to a power struggle between his two junior triumvirs, the more moderate Zeki Velidi Togan and the hardliner Nihâl Atsız, for his succession as leader of Turkey. Atsız eventually wins and Togan falls in.
    • The incapacitation of José Sanjurjo by a debilitating aneurysm leads to a power struggle, called the Christmas Struggle, between the Nationalist factions for the domination of the Spanish State. Emilio Mola comes out on top after making a purge called the Dia de Reyes and aligns the country with Germany.
    • The death of Americuban President [MacArthur] leads to a power struggle alluding to the one after Stalin's OTL death, with Reformists led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Conservatives led by Secretary of War Edwin Walker and NBI Director Allen Dulles all making a bid to control the presidency. The Reformists manage to come out on top with Kennedy becoming president.
  • Suffrage and Political Liberation:
    • American women campaign for and obtain the right to vote in 1913.
    • The Roaring Twenties see an analogue to the Civil Rights Movement take place and successfully ending de jure segregation. De facto segregation and systemic racism remain a significant issue until the Red May Revolution and even a bit still afterwards.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: One of the biggest changes to urban life is the development of public bathing facilities to promote hygiene as a way of curbing disease and other effects of unsanitary living conditions. Part of this is trying to desexualize nudity among a largely Protestant public, which turns out to be an issue for the proponents themselves, who know perfectly well intellectually that platonic nudity is a thing, but have a hard time engaging in it personally once the bath houses are a reality. Most people grow accustomed to it in time.
  • SWAT Team: The UASR has an equivalent known as the Special Applications Cadre, a rapid-response group trained for hostage-rescue operations.
    T 
  • Take a Third Option: H.H. Kung and many others who do not support either KMT governements, pro-communist or pro-concordist, choose exile and emigrate to Australasia.
  • Take That!: While this wasn't the original intention, over time the lore surrounding Rhodesia became one to the substantial fandom the short-lived country has among right-leaning fans of alt-history: not only is it a repressive pariah state, it's actually had to make some concessions to non-white immigrants and the black majority in order to survive. It could also be seen as a Deconstruction of The Draka, showing in real life, a society like the Draka would be nowhere near the world-conquering empire it was in those books
  • Tank Goodness: To be found in abundance in the timeline! Thanks to the lessons of the Second American Civil War and an earlier end to the Great Depression and earlier re-armament, tank design takes some divergences from our timeline and the vehicles used in Reds! are generally a bit farther "ahead" than our timeline in terms of design. Reforms to the production systems of the Axis powers and Western European investment into any possible allies against a Red America as well as Soviet-American cooperation and investment into Red Latin America and China also mean that rather more tanks are produced in this timeline than in ours. Germany's notoriously inefficient flexible line production systems are replaced with modern Ford-style assembly lines able to roll out tanks by the tens of thousands to fight the more militarised British Empire and its allies to the west and the Comintern to the East while Italian, Swedish, British, Japanese, and French tank programs make more progress than in our timeline. Perhaps the most grandiose statements of this revealed so far are the German Panzer 100 Smilodon, the United Republics TD-21 Spartacus, the Soviet Vladimir Lenin 3, and the British Chamberlain Heavy Tank.
    • In the Cold War, by the mid-2010s the Franco-British Union unveils its newest "advanced" battle tank, the Champion; a tank weighing over one hundred tons with a seven-inch caliber gun and an engine with 3000 or so horsepower. Yikes!
    • Just as in OTL's World War II, Nazi Germany drafts up overly-ambitious plans for super-heavy tank wunderwaffen. They include:
      • The aformentioned Panzer-100 "Smilodon"note  is an absolute beast of a tank weighing at 140 tonnes with 200-250 mm frontal plate armor, sporting a massive 12.8 cm cannon. As opposed to its OTL equivalent of the E-100 which never got past the design stage, a few hundred models are actually built and see combat, though not without running into the expected technical issues.
      • The egregious "Mammut"note  prototype (an obvious Shout-Out to the Command & Conquer vehicle bearing the same name) manages to one-up anything built during OTL's WWII by a wide margin. A downsized variant of the gargantuan "Ratte" design, it weighs over 300 tonnes and carries two massive 17 cm cannons. Only a handful are built and fewer see actual combat, often running into crippling issues before or during confrontations and promptly abandoned by the crew. Despite its less-than-optimal performance, it still leaves a mark in popular imagination on the war and some preserved Mammut chassis are the centerpiece of several war museums.
  • Theme Naming: Post-revolution cruisers of the WFRN are named after songs or literature of struggle. With the Field of Athenry-class being named after Irish Rebel songs.
  • Token Good Teammate: Finland is the only country participating in the invasion of the USSR to be considered democratic in any sense. Downplayed as, regardless of their internal political system, they are still participating in a genocidal war of aggression with revanchist aims.
    • Bulgaria is another downplayed example. Though it still joins the Axis as in real life, it is under an "apolitical" absolute monarchy rather than a fascist regime. As in OTL, the Tsardom still refuses to join the invasion of the USSR and instead focuses on reclaiming Bulgarian land lost to Yugoslavia and Greece in the Second Balkan War.
  • Tomboy and Girly Girl: Janey and Anna, respectively, from the alternate history timeline equivalent of a Lower-Deck Episode.
  • Torment by Annoyance: After becoming Prime Minister of Turkey, Riza Nur would demand the return of Western Armenia from the Soviets every three months from his ascension to the premiership in 1938 to the Turkish declaration of war in 1942, receiving a total of 16 deflections and rejections Turkey would use for propaganda.
  • Trading Bars for Stripes: Reactionaries captured and deemed reformable are proposed to join the army instead of going to prison. This mostly concerns young people.
  • Translation Convention: Paul Matthews translates in English in his autobiography a conversation he had with a German prisoner. The parts in Russian are by comparison untranslated.
  • Tyrant Takes the Helm: MacArthur and Longworth's coup against President-Elect Norman Thomas.
    U 
  • Undignified Death: Oscar Benavides, the president of Peru who waged a brutal war against leftist insurgents in his country, dies when he suffers a gunshot wound to his buttocks that becomes gangrenous due to a lack of medical supplies.
  • Unfriendly Fire:
    • During the Great War, it becomes common enough for American soldiers and NCOs to "frag" sadistic or incompetent officers to be on most field officers' minds.
    • Several "friendly fire" incidents occur in Reorganized China's army between the old guard and the KMT officers, forcing Jiang Jieshi to place Japanese or otherwise neutral formations between the two to prevent them from shooting at each other.
  • Unperson: Hitler declared damnatio memoriae on the Panzer Group 1 for their grave defeat in the Battle of Rivne. Every command from regiment on up was disbanded and their heraldry stricken. The shame was wiped so thoroughly that none of the offending unit numbers would be used again for the duration of the war. When the Panzergruppen were reorganized in January 1941, Panzer Group 2 would become the First Panzer Army, and so forth.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Inherent with the framing devices. The presented sections of history books, journals, academic papers, tabloid articles, and armchair discussions by alternate history enthusiasts come from a very diverse variety of perspectives, and each presents an understandably biased picture.
    • In the entry International Revolution in the 1930s, the timeline authors make annotations directly pointing out the mistakes and biases of the fictional text presented.
    • In the entry Tank vs Tank the text claims there were no confirmed losses of Panzer IV Nashorn (TTL Panzer VI Tiger) to Polish anti-tank fire throughout the entirety of the Polish war. An annotation points out this is not exactly true and discounts losses to anti-tank mines, artillery, and airpower.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: President Vargas' decision to give the Integralists near carte blanche to defeat the communist uprising empowers them to conduct a successful coup against his government, turning Brazil into a fascist dictatorship that would kickstart the South American Theater of WWII, leading to the death of millions.
  • Upper-Class Twit: Richard Finlay, the corporate founder of Maggie Pie (this timeline's version of McDonald's), despite running a successful fast-food company, had some traces of it. Some of his children relate in a biography that they, much to their disquiet, realized that their father, despite his interest in films, and even buying a film company, actually didn't know the difference between film making and film distribution (in fact, he got extremely angry and argumentative when his new employees from said film company tried to explain the difference to him).
    • In-universe, the scion of a wealthy family who gets cut from their family fortune and has to adjust to post-capitalist life is a popular character archetype in American television prior to WWII.
  • Utopia: Deconstructed. Is life in the United Republics better? Perhaps. Is it very different? Absolutely. The authors seem to take a subjective approach. While Communism is often seen as a utopian ideology, and the UASR has many of the facets of utopia (free love, classless society, great freedoms), this comes at a cost that people socialized to live in a capitalist democratic republic might find quite uncomfortable, such as very great social pressures to participate in political and social life and other duties that don't gel well with an individualistic society. The cultural and social values that developed over a century of tremendous divergence, revolution, and the like are very much alien.
    V 
  • Video Nasties: The Video Nasties scare happens like in OTL, but touches the Franco-British Union and intersects with the ongoing Cold War due to many of the films coming from the Communist bloc and America more specifically in a time of heightened tensions between the two sides.
  • Villainous Breakdown: Salgado goes bonkers as the tide turns against him. At one point, he strangles one of his Marshals to death in front of his staff for withholding important information. He goes into another unhinged rant when he realizes one of his abused aides poisoned him.
  • Villain Decay:
    • Legendary mob boss Arthur Flegenheimer AKA Dutch Schultz is hit with this thanks to a failed assassination attempt against the Attorney General of Metropolis as half-assed revenge against the Red government, virtually gutting his power base. He's unceremoniously gunned down afterwards. Ironically, he lived a few months longer than he did in the real world, where he was killed by Murder Inc at the behest of the other crime families in '35.
    • This eventually ends up applying to virtually all of American organized crime, as the failed attempt means the Red Government stomps down even harder on organized crime, and many mob leaders are either imprisoned or killed, including Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Vincent Magnano, Johnny Torrio, and culminating in the arrest of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, with his execution by firing squad effectively meaning the end of organized crime on the American mainland. The surviving remnants end up fleeing to Canada, Cuba or the deep swamps of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida to regroup. Though said remnants eventually manage to reform into a loose organisation called the "New Commission", and reestablish new cells in several larger American cities during the late 1940s and early 1950 (with quite a bit of support from MacArthur's regime in Americuba), they are only a lingering shadow of their former selves, since greatly improved living standards amongst even the poorest UASR citizens have wiped out much of the human misery that formed the basis for the "classic" mafia trades of drugs and prostitution. Instead, they mostly focus on underground high gambling, with side ventures like dog- and cockfighting, bribing public officials and forging documents, something which causes the few surviving old-time gangsters to complain that this new mob more resembles a "sideshow bureaucracy" than a proper criminal enterprise. American organized crime is eventually hit by another anti-mafia wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the UASR starts another round of crackdowns, which is exacerbated by Douglas MacArthur's death, as his reformist successor, Robert F. Kennedy, turns on the Cuban mafia and has them purged from government influence. Weakened by these developments, the mob gradually falls apart into several small fractions who increasingly turn on each in a fight for survival, either through assassinations or by ratting competitors out to the UASR government, which just contributes to hastening their downfall. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the American mafia is considered all but completely extinct.
  • Villainous Legacy: After the fall of Integralist Brazil, Neo-Integralism was born, becoming a significant source of terrorism and political assassinations in the Americas.
  • Virgin-Shaming: Alice Paul gains a reputation of being "Sapphist, frigid, a tease, or 'barren'" because she rebuffed all attempts to court her and took her actual inclinations to the grave.
  • Voluntary Vassal:
    • Fengtian Clique warlord Zhang Zuolin accepts to transform his holdings into a Japanese protectorate, Manchukuo (Manchu State).
    • The surviving Chinese warlords who rule the Beiyang government to the North and are opposed by the rival KMT- and CPC-led government in the South accept Japan's patronage after the Imperial Japanese Army intervenes against the Northern Expedition and expels the NRA from Beijing.
    • The Associated Union RepublicsIncluding of the UASR keep this status willingly and could opt out if they wanted to. Those on the American continent originally opted for this status because the UASR was at first envisioned as a large Pan-American union but Mexico and Chile declining to join more or less killed the momentum for this project.
    W-Y 
  • War Hero:
    • Smedley Butler's fame among the marines reach almost mythical proportions, especially from his service during WWI.
    • George S. Patton serves through World War I, the Second American Civil War and World War II with distinction.
    • Harry S. Truman served in WWI like in OTL but is most well-known for founding and leading the Minutemen militia after defecting from the Whites to fight against them alongside the Reds during the Second American Civil War. After the war he uses his status as a celebrated veteran to enter politics.
  • War Refugees: During the Second Sino-Japanese War, many Chinese war refugees fled to Australasia thanks to T.V. Soong organizing their immigration to Australia and New Zealand. Many of them were politically active, mostly former KMT members or sympathisers who were firmly part of the party's anti-communist Right but opposed Japan and their Chinese puppet regime.
  • Wartime Cartoon: Many are produced as IOTL by America, with Commander Columbia beginning as one (which is also how it became so popular at first).
  • We ARE Struggling Together:
    • Subverted; both during the Civil War and the Cultural Revolution, the American socialist system's greater flexibility in dealing with ideological differences (both within the socialist parties themselves and in allowing the inclusion of right-leaning Democrats and Republicans who opposed the Junta into the political process) ultimately proves more durable than the Soviet system's rigid ideological inflexibility.
    • Invoked by the name of the entry We Are Struggling Together: Viewpoints of the Left and Right Oppositions.
    • The Workers' Party of National Liberation (POLN) was a party built from compromise and suffered from infighting between its anarchist, communist and left-nationalist factions throughout its history until its collapse and transformation into the Socialist Workers' Party of Mexico (PSOM).
    • The Movimiento Nacional of the Spanish Nationalists is an extremely haphazard coalition between the Alfonsites, Carlists, and Falangists only united by their opposition to the Spanish Republic and Communism. When José Sanjurjo becomes incapacitated all three factions turn on each other until only Mola's Falangists are left standing.
    • As the war turns to Brazil's disadvantage in 1943 and consequently Salgado grows more erratic and unstable, the Green Guard general Cristiano Boaventura and the intellectual antisemite Gustavo Barroso squabble openly for power and oppose each other on the conduct of the war, Boaventura favoring buying time to ensure the survival of Integralist Brazil while Barroso continued to believe in final victory as an inevitable outcome. And on top of that, the military is also trying to push its own agenda, calling for peace terms with the Allies to focus all of their efforts against the Communists.
  • We Interrupt This Program:
    • During the beginning of Part II the broadcast of an episode of Star Trek is interrupted by the announcement of the outbreak of the Falklands War.
    • The Argentinian radio interrupts its coverage of the war in Europe to announce the invasion of the country by the South American forces of the Axis led by Brazil.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Practically the whole cast is made up of this. It's also generally an audience reaction since most of those individuals are not considered extremists in-universe.
    • Carranza belived that in order to achieve his goal of a liberal, institutionalized and democratic Mexico, it was necessary to eliminate the factions that opposed him.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: In-universe, the film King Kong Returns' battle between a giant ape and a giant two headed eagle is believed to be symbolic of Ethiopia fighting against the then ongoing Italian invasion of their country, but the timing of the movie makes this unlikely.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: To avoid any strikes in the uranium mines during wartime the UASR government classified any knowledge of the health effects of uranium and worked with native leaders to conceal the information. The miners were issued inadequate protections against radioctivity, leading to a high number of cancers among them and radioactive wastes were dumped into the river, affecting the whole region of the Dinétah Federation. It was only in the 1960s that researches conducted to discover the cause of the higher rate of cancers would begin to reveal the scale of the damages.
  • Witch Hunt: Hamilton Fish III launches himself into a hunt for suspected communists in the army and government. While he is right about the existence of spying communists, he focuses much more on the Jewish identity and foreign origins of the accused due to his own antisemitism and xenophobia which end up discrediting him in the eyes of the public.
  • With Us or Against Us: Premier Nixon adopts this stance with his "Which side are you on?" campaign against third way movements during the Cold War, leading to the suppression of movements like Gaitánismo (which had sided with the United Nations during the World Revolutionary War).
  • World War III: Much like the Cold War of OTL, this becomes a much feared possibility in the Post-WWII world, and indeed it comes close to happening several times. The 1980s, which was a period marked by tensions between the Communist and Capitalist blocs being at their highest, starting with the Crisis of 1979, have been referred to in-universe as the "Long Eighties" and even "World War III".
  • Work Info Title: Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline is a work presenting an alternate timeline about a socialist revolution.
  • Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": The Guarda Verde's concentration camps where they work to death enslaved queer people, atheists, leftists, and many other non-Christians are called "Disposal facilities".
  • invokedWrite What You Know: Joe Goldberg creates Vladivostok AFB, a sitcom about a group of employees of the WFRA's radio broadcasting during WWII based on his own experience running the Santo Domingo AFB station during the Congo War.
  • Your Answer to Everything: RitterStahl's answer to every question relating to making the Axis win something in WWII seems to be "kill Hermann Göring".
  • Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Samatha Waver's innovations in animation to make it appear more fluid earns her the admiration of European futurists, which she abhorres for their proximity to and support for fascism, writing a scathing critique of their belief system after they drew inspiration from the Ruby Orchestra's work for their own fascistic designs.
  • You Shall Not Pass!:
    • During Case Typhoon, the 101st Airborne holds the city of Pskov against the German army for eight days until it is finally forced to retreat as it effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force, at a high cost for the Germans and giving time to the Soviet-American forces to make an orderly retreat.
    • During the invasion of Red Spain by the Axis, its Red Army and the IVA, joined by retreating French loyalists, focus their efforts on holding back the Axis to allow the evacuation of as much men as possible despite knowing they would eventually be overrun.

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