SkunkyArt | AlexanderNorthAH — Narcisco: Crusader Complex

The rough PoD is that the composition of Martin van Buren's inner circle during the early 1840s is a little different, resulting in enough of his advisors warning him not to come out as explicitly opposing Texan annexation right out the gate that he listens to them, allowing him to maintain his early lead and win the Democratic nomination. As such, John Tyler continues his independent run for the presidency and deadlocks the electoral college thanks to Henry Clay waffling on annexing Texas as he did IOTL, and neither the House nor the Senate are able to immediately concur on which ticket's candidate to put in power. Suffering from worsening physical health and its resultant negative effects on his mental state, Andrew Jackson decides to go for a "last hurrah" in the form of rallying an army to march on Washington, D.C. to keep Tyler in power; he sees this as fulfilling the will of the people, as Tyler had (barely) won a plurality of the popular vote. Jackson and his militiamen surround and occupy the Capitol and heavily imply that the House should elevate Tyler to the presidency while conspicuously displaying their firearms, but this is treated with outrage and accused of being an attempted coup by much of the rest of the nation. It especially doesn't help matters when Tyler is gunned down by a radical abolitionist in what was supposed to be his first public address after Jackson's March on the Capitol.

Following Tyler's assassination, the United States de facto splits into two factions, with Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay forming a shaky provisional duumvirate in the North and Jacksonian Democrats taking charge of the South, and both sides declare themselves to be the legitimate United States and demand the submission of the other. Jackson's death of natural causes destabilizes the South thanks to him having increasingly become a de facto military dictator, leading to a struggle for power between John C. Calhoun and Abel P. Upshur which the Van Buren-Clay duumvirate decides to take advantage of, sending troops through Maryland to attempt to retake Washington, D.C. The invasion of Maryland kicks off TTL's American Civil War, in the process allowing the South to distort the narrative to portray it as "the War of Northern Aggression."

The war is over by summer 1846 with a stalemate having set in: the South has succeeded in maintaining its borders but is unable to get a foothold in the North long enough to pull it under its control, while the reverse is true for its opponent. The war ends with the Treaty of New Castle, which formalizes the division of the United States and splits the unorganized territories between the two factions by drawing a line west from Missouri's northern border. Adding insult to injury for the North, due to the South holding the capital in Washington, D.C. it continues to claim the title of the United States of America, with the Treaty of New Castle seeing the North renamed as the Federated States of America.

Ironically, Texas is leery about joining the United States after the American Civil War out of fear of its wartime instability and authoritarianism, though the two nations do become close allies. They gain an additional ally, as well as an opportunity to "prove" the power and relevance of the postwar United States, when one Narcisco López arrives to proffer his filibustering scheme to the Southerners. U.S. President John Quitman agrees, and the Americans and Texans launch a successful invasion of Cuba together, spinning it off as an Amero-Texan "protectorate" slated for eventual annexation into the United States. A later filibuster attempt launched by Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon in Mexican Sonora ends with failure after two years of conflict culminates in Raousset-Boulbon's execution by firing squad, but this does have the knock-on effect of convincing Mexico to recognize Texan independence in exchange for Texas dropping its more ambitious claims in northern Mexico, wanting to avoid a potentially more damaging war. William Walker, who launches a filibuster of Nicaragua somewhat akin to OTL, succeeds with Amero-Texan aid, something of significant concern to Britain due to the clear ambition of the United States to construct a canal there.

The Federated States, meanwhile, festers in angry defeatism postwar, though this doesn't stop an influx of German, Irish, Czech, French, Italian, and Hungarian immigrants from the failed revolutions of 1848, who quickly come to form an underclass in Federate society. The period of malaise and hopelessness loses its dominance over the course of the 1850s and 1860s with the rise of Thaddeus Stevens as head of the new Freedom Party, which promotes a religiopolitical ideology known as "universal justiciarship." Universal justiciarship is a Christian radical egalitarian movement which explicitly views the slaver South as Satan's dominion on Earth, states it to be the moral imperative of all humanity to eradicate the sin of slavery from the face of the world, believes that the violence of the oppressed is always just (and in fact a sign of one who has wholly accepted a Godly path of righteousness) with no exceptions, and also pioneers a concept we might recognize as similar to OTL's philosophical zombie thought experiment in how it dehumanizes those declared Satanic agents such as slaveowners, stating them to have willingly "forfeited" their humanity by choosing to engage in the sin of slavery. Universal justiciarship quickly becomes the ideological boogeyman of the United States' sphere, with Washington, D.C. pushing propaganda portraying the Federated States as a nightmarish rogue state where gangs of black men are allowed to assault white women with federal protection from punishment, among other racist lies.

The Federated States de facto descends into a far-left radical Christian one-party state under Freedomite dominance, even officially renaming itself the Crusader States of America in 1861. The United States isn't much better, itself being a de facto white supremacist one-party state under the Democratic Party, and unlike the Crusader States it also suffers a military coup by Robert E. Lee in 1859 in what he sees as a sad-but-necessary move to ensure the Union can modernize as it must if it's to sufficiently defend itself against its radicalized northern brother. While Lee survives a failed assassination attempt two years into his unelected presidency, the bullet embedded into his skull Phineas Gage-s him, resulting in his immediate degeneration into pointlessly cruel totalitarian despotism as he forces the South through an OTL Manchukuo-esque rapid industrialization that chokes the Southern skies with clouds of smog and kills thousands of slaves just in the decidedly unsafe work environments alone. A primitive form of gas mask known as a "humboldt" (due to it being modeled after the respirator device designed by Alexander von Humboldt in 1799) is pioneered to cut down on the high levels of smoke inhalation-related death and disability suffered by factory slaves, and eventually it becomes mandatory for slaves to wear humboldts even outside of industrial work environments, a policy which is later nationalized as a means to even further dehumanize slaves in the eyes of whites and encourage the treatment of them as subhuman mindless automatons (though the humboldts worn by non-industrial slaves are usually nonfunctional). "Indentured servants" imported from the Cuba and Nicaragua Territories are forced to wear humboldts as well, though this is more because enough of them were white-passing that it was starting to concern the white supremacist government, making a means to immediately tell them apart on sight "necessary."

The United Kingdom, seeing the Crusader States as a potential threat to British North America and the United States as a potential threat to its Caribbean holdings, reaches out to Mexico to form an alliance for the sake of containing the American "republics," which Mexico agrees to. As a deliberate middle finger to both the Crusader States and the United States, Britain and Mexico collaborate on expelling the few American settlers in Oregon and divide it between themselves; this infuriates both Americas, but the United States' lack of a land border with the Oregon Territory and the Crusader States' inability to effectively project power west of Minnesota due to the British backing the Sioux against them means there's nothing they can really do about it in practice.

Lee's death of natural causes in 1875 sets off a powderkeg in the United States, and sporadic slave revolts begin erupting across the South which its cash-strapped federal government struggles to adequately respond to. Poor whites, faring very badly themselves and having already started to take a liking to TTL's Marxist theory (which absorbed a lot of universal justiciarship's rhetoric about intersectionality and righteous violence and is friendly to the C.S.-origin idea that killing the oppressor class is a moral imperative) thanks to its repression under the Lee regime only turning it into a "forbidden fruit," begin to rise up as well, and soon a shaky interracial alliance between black and white revolutionaries is formed as they recognize their shared objective, with "indentured" Cubans and Nicaraguans and sympathetic Native Americans later brought in as well. Where the forced wearing of the humboldt was a sign of subjugation, the revolutionaries adopt the visibly unworn humboldt (usually displayed dangling from the tip of a flagpole or firearm or tied around one's waist such that it rests upon one's hip) as a symbol of resistance, to the point that a stylized upside-down humboldt in dark green is used as the centerpiece of the revolutionaries' flag [1]; as a result of this early influence dark green becomes considered the "color" of Marxism ITTL and the stylized inverted humboldt assumes a similar symbolic role to the hammer-and-sickle IOTL. Texas fends off the revolution from spreading over the border and Cuba and Nicaragua succeed in crushing their own revolutionary movements, resulting in the U.S. regime fleeing to form an exile government based out of Havana; it's followed both short-term and long-term by many anti-revolution whites, though just as many head to Texas, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, or elsewhere. The Crusader States never intervenes in the Southern revolution, in part due to its severe paranoia about the prospect of an opportunistic British invasion if a significant amount of troops are sent south, but President John Brown is very loud about his support for the revolutionaries, sends what arms and supplies can be spared and then some south, and promises asylum for any rebel who crosses the border in the event that the revolution fails.

The multiracial coalition is able to hold together against the odds after the revolution, perhaps aided by their bonding over massacring the few plantation owners and other aristocrats who didn't already flee the mainland, writing a new constitution which is significantly influenced by Marxism and universal justiciarship alike. Seeing themselves as having far surpassed the America the Founding Fathers envisioned, they rename their country the Supramerican Archsodality, which will eventually result in "Archsodality" and variations thereof becoming the dominant national title used by Marxist states in later decades. Post-revolution, the Archsodality reaches out to the Crusader States to offer an alliance against a world that hates them both, which the Crusaders are happy to accept... and not just because they're in desperate need of an ally.

As Mexico rises as the dominant power of the North American continent, it sees a decades-long wave of Chinese immigration, which is even larger than that which the western United States received IOTL thanks to a significantly more brutal and protracted Taiping Rebellion. Northern Mexico quickly acquires a very large Chinese minority, with Baja California and parts of the Great Basin outright becoming plurality-Chinese. Civil war nearly breaks out over the issue of Chinese immigration, but a military coup shuts down the opposition with the ascent of the state ideology of cosmicism, a vaguely (OTL) integralism-esque authoritarian ideology promoting interracial harmony and cooperation against the true aggressors of the outside world, though large-scale efforts to assimilate the Chinese immigrants into Mexican culture is made amidst the promotion of mestizaje ideas similar to OTL. [2] This is somewhat successful, as while second- and third-generation "Sino-Mexicans" usually speak fluent Spanish, wear Mexican clothes, and eat Mexican foods (or Mexicanized versions of Chinese food [3]), many Chinese loan words and other forms of cultural influence slip into the Mexican mainstream and barely a plurality of Chinese immigrants convert to Catholicism, leaving much of northern Mexico with large minorities following Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, or Chinese folk religion that are not solely composed of ethnic Chinese. [4] Mexico's dictator does some downright Stalinesque ethnic reshuffling in an attempt to break up particularly large communities of ethnic Chinese for ease of assimilation (which he also uses as an excuse to inflict similar "reshuffling" at best and open ethnic cleansing at worst upon rebellious native groups such as the Comanche and Navajo), but all this does is solidify the formation of a fused "2/3rds Mexican, 1/3rd Chinese" culture [5] which eventually comes to dominate everywhere outside of the most populous parts of what OTL considers to be "Mexico proper" over the course of the next several generations. The fact that many Mexican youth with no Chinese ancestry see the rising hybrid culture as "cool" and "hip" and adopt it voluntarily only solidifies the cultural realignment.

Another component of this realignment is younger generations in Mexico increasingly accepting traditional Chinese views on homosexuality- that is, tolerating same-sex lovers, but seeing them as "beneath" opposite-sex pairings and expecting men to marry a woman to continue the family line- and tolerance of homosexuality increases further as its cultural presence rises thanks to many Chinese homosexuals fleeing to Mexico; this is due to them seeing it as a safe haven with the Qing dynasty's Self-Strengthening Movement adopting increasingly homophobic policies, and when they're followed by homosexuals fleeing persecution in European colonies in South Asia and East Asia this only strengthens the cultural shift. The Mexican dictator of the time and his nephew who succeeds him make no attempt to oppose this shift- the former never married and was suspected by some to be a closeted homosexual during his life, which would easily explain his reluctance to oppose it if true, while the latter's inaction is a particularly odd example of succumbing to slippery-slope fallacy in that the publicization of the contents of his private journals half a century after his death exposed that while he held a strong personal disgust for homosexuality, he had hidden a decades-long incestuous relationship with his sister and incorrectly assumed that social tolerance of homosexuality would lead to tolerance of incest (after all, that was a favored talking point of religious conservatives across the country!). Regardless of hidden reasons for it, though, this lack of governmental action is met with condemnation from traditional religious authorities already feeling left out by the dictatorship's quiet push for increased secularism and lessened religious authority, and this begins a rudimentary culture war of sorts in which traditionalists and Catholics in Mexico increasingly see the new hybrid culture, as well as the Chinese (and to a lesser extent all East Asians and South Asians), as directly tied to homosexuality.

As a result of the above, it doesn't take long for Sinophobic traditionalists in Mexico influenced by the rising concepts behind scientific racism and eugenics to pioneer the idea that attraction to a member of a race or ethnicity different from one's own is a mental illness, a concept which countries such as Texas and the United States-in-exile are quick to latch onto but is immediately opposed by the racially-egalitarian Crusader States and Supramerica, with the former outright banning public promotion of this idea and violently stamping out those who attempt to anyway. Supramerica additionally begins a gradual shift towards tacit tolerance of homosexuality along the lines of the shift emerging in Mexico, with New Orleans and Attucks City [6] in particular boasting vibrant queer subcultures, but the Crusaders spend decades waffling on the issue due to the fiery religiosity so central to universal justiciarship. Cultural conservatives across the West begin rhetorically linking interracial relationships and homosexuality, which quickly leads to using the latter's existing association with pedophilia to link all three together, then insinuating interracial or interethnic relationships to be tantamount to bestiality and using this as a stepping stone to declare all four to be directly connected "perversions" under the increasingly faux-psychology-dominated scientific racism rising to prominence in the West. It doesn't take long for them to start classifying things such as being a Marxist, being a non-Christian, and being a nonwhite who doesn't immediately roll over and happily accept colonialism as dangerous mental illnesses which need to be "identified" and "eradicated" for the good of mankind, leading to a spike in violent persecution of the mentally-ill across Europe and its colonies. As Mexico becomes increasingly unwilling to tolerate these elements within itself- and not just because Mexicanized interpretations of some culturally-Chinese ideas about sociocultural harmony have been integrated into the mainstream by this point- these traditionalists immediately begin emigrating amidst histrionic declarations of how they're being persecuted in their homeland, with most of them resettling in Texas, the United States-in-exile, Spain and the Spanish Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, French Algeria, or French Korea (seized in the early 1880s).

As radical sanism becomes the foremost component of scientific racism and imperialism alike both in rhetoric and in practice, hellish fusions of mental institutions, detention centers, and forced labor camps begin popping up throughout the western world and across colonial holdings in Africa and Asia, with the British Empire in particular using institutions in South Africa to pioneer human experimentation so inhumane it'd make Josef Mengele lose his lunch, while France begins the process of ethnically cleansing coastal Algeria via mass deportation, imprisonment, and execution of Arabs. Supramerica and Mexico take in most of the refugees from French Algeria, but surprisingly the Crusader States accepts hundreds of thousands of Algerian refugees as well, with the Freedomites arguing that even if only a small minority of them are Christians they're still fellow "People of the Book." This is a watershed moment for the CSA beginning to moderate its religious radicalism as it becomes openly accepting of followers of Judaism, Islam, and other Abrahamic faiths [7], with the Freedom Party Central Committee issuing a declaration that their differences are meaningless until the Second Coming, but whether the people of the Crusader States choose cruelty or compassion in the short term will make all the difference as to where they each stand in the eyes of God. Morocco, already under a reformer king shifting the country towards a form of Islamo-councilist constitutional monarchy, is horrified by the masses of emaciated, scarred Algerians pouring over the border and promptly swaps to the informal alliance of anti-imperialist nations forming around Mexico and Supramerica, though it does not formally align itself with them out of fear of French retaliation. The world sits in an uneasy stasis for decades as ideological polarization accelerates and the great powers descend into what could be credibly called a proto-Cold War of sorts.

The Mexican-Asian interactions and dynamics of TTL are not solely limited to the aforementioned rise of the Sino-Mexican syncretic culture. An alternate bakumatsu period saw Mexico forcibly open Japan up to the outside world, additionally converting the Ryukyu Kingdom into a Mexican puppet and making aggressive moves towards Taiwan which the ailing Qing dynasty struggles to adequately address, culminating in the island's outright annexation. A notably later and longer-lasting analogue to the Boshin War sees Mexico intervene in support of an alt-Republic of Ezo, eventually spinning off "Ezochi" as an allied state and forcing the partition of Japan into three opposed shogunates with the goal of keeping Japan weak, divided, and dependent on Mexico. As Mexico increasingly assembles a Pacific empire over the course of the late nineteenth century (most prominently with the annexation of Hawai'i as a formally-autonomous constituent nation which is allowed to retain its monarchy), it doesn't come as much of a surprise when the Mexicans begin agitating for annexation of Ezochi, which is eventually secured with the island rebranded Yaúnmosir- a "Mexicanization" of an Ainu term meaning the onshore land- and southern Sakhalin is additionally annexed under the name North Yaúnmosir. With the Ainu people treated well by Mexico thanks to their willingness to work with the more integrationist Mexicans as opposed to the discriminatory Japanese, this creates a positive feedback loop facilitating excellent Ainu-Mexican relations, and while Japanese living in the Mexican Yaúnmosirs aren't treated poorly or anything they still don't appreciate... well, anything about the situation, to be blunt. Many Japanese living in Yaúnmosir eventually bite the bullet and move to the Mexican mainland to seek new lives (usually ending up in the Great Basin region, resulting in the formation of a distinctly Japanese-influenced vaquero/cowboy-esque tradition there), while others unsuccessfully attempt to form guerilla movements or make the mistake of moving to French Korea or the Spanish Philippines, where they're rapidly forced into the colonies' preexisting de facto slave castes and very quickly start wishing for the Mexicans to come save them. This is not a wish shared by the Japanese still living in the "Mexicanogunates," as Mexican private interests run roughshod over them and extract just about any resource they can think to during this time, rapidly rendering much of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu smog-choked wastelands. This only further contributes to a flood of Japanese emigration to any country that will take them, with an increasing amount heading to the Mexican-aligned flawed democracy in Colombia (currently collaborating with Mexico to build a canal through Panama) or the two Americas. The Ainu fare far better, having earned a "model minority" perception in Mexican culture and forming an outsized presence in the Mexican naval forces to the point that ethnic Ainus serving as maritime "neo-samurai" become stereotypically associated with the Pacific islands and the Mexican navy alike within the span of just a generation.

No direct equivalent to the Berlin Conference exists ITTL, but there are a series of successive region-limited binational or trinational treaties that slowly carve up much of the African continent between European colonial powers over the course of the last few decades of the eighteenth century. The whole continent isn't subjugated, though: a referendum held in collaboration with Supramerica saw the Commonwealth of Liberia vote to become an equal constituent state of the Supramerican Archsodality (bringing the Territory of Inner Liberia with it) while the Republic of Maryland-in-Africa votes to stay independent but align with Supramerica, the Ashanti Empire is propped up and assisted with modernization by Mexico to use it as a counter to British and French colonial interests in the region, and the Kingdom of Kongo, while still a Portuguese puppet state, at least gets to keep de jure independence and Portuguese protection from foreign powers. Unfortunately, no nation intervening on the continent can be said to have had "clean hands" in this regard: Mexico actively backs Ashanti expansionist ambitions in West Africa in exchange for it ending slavery and human sacrifice, Maryland-in-Africa undergoes a smaller-scale expansionist campaign of its own, and while Supramerica does grant most of its later acquisitions in western Africa statehood reasonably quickly and said acquisitions are centered on port cities won from the French or Portuguese, it doesn't change the fact that they were taken in wars of conquest.

There is also a new independent country on the African continent with a considerably stranger background, and in fact probably has the strangest origin story of any nation this world has to offer post-PoD: the Hoarusib Confederacy, which is located in southwestern Africa. Established as a joint Crusader States-Supramerica-Mexico project when the C.S. decided to deal with the still-ongoing Sioux resistance by just marching them all onto boats and sending them somewhere else, the Supramericans and Mexicans reluctantly agreed to help the Crusaders mainly out of fear that the Crusaders would just massacre the Sioux and their allied tribes en masse if the effort failed. Thus, the event alternatively known as the Second Trail of Tears or the Atlantic Trail of Tears begins in the early 1890s, and while the Mexicans and Supramericans offering up their own modernized ships to transport the Sioux (as opposed to the rattletrap floating caskets of the backwards Crusader navy) and the Sioux and their allies being dumped in an actually habitable part of coastal Africa lessens casualties somewhat, none of this makes any of it ethical in the slightest; indeed, public outrage over Supramerican and Mexican involvement in the Atlantic Trail of Tears results in the former's ruling Marxist political party losing the next national elections in a landslide for the first time in Supramerican history and the latter undergoing months of widespread popular unrest culminating in the Mexican dictator's resignation and the restoration of democracy. This does not help the Sioux, so with no choice but to attempt to adapt, they migrate inland in search of somewhere more akin to the Great Plains amidst intermittent feuding with the native Ovambo, Kavango, San, Herero, Nama, and other African peoples before happening upon the site of the abandoned Windhoek colony, which is used as a base for the Sioux to gradually pull together a state of their own centered on the Khomas Highland. With the rising threat of colonial encroachment from the Portuguese to the north and the British to the south, however, the Sioux see the writing on the wall and rush to pull together an alliance system with any willing neighboring groups, successfully creating a confederal mutual defense-based alliance consisting of themselves, most of the Himba, Damaran, San, and Herero, the Kwangali kingdom, the Topnaar clan of the Nama (which also inadvertently leads to !Nara melons becoming an eventual nationwide agricultural staple), and the fiercely anti-European Gcirku kingdom. The Topnaar clan's aid is vital in later successes in coaxing the rest of the Nama to join the burgeoning Hoarusib Confederacy as well. A pidgin language quickly forms and spreads across the Hoarusib Confederacy for ease of communication, and later so does a somewhat adapted form of the Kavango concept of Ekoro and a syncretic religion fusing elements of belief in Mukuru and ancestor-veneration with Lakota spirituality, with the shaky Southwest Bantu-Sioux alliance actively promoting this new faith in hopes of using it to ensure the constituent members of the Hoarusib Confederacy remain unified against their enemies.

The horrors of the camps of British South Africa have been continuing all this time and accelerate to the point that after a 1901 prison break leads to a valiant Venezuelan journalist managing to escape with evidence of British human experimentation and revealing it to the world, Mexico immediately dissolves its alliance with the United Kingdom (which is really nothing more than a formality, as the alliance had existed in name only for multiple decades by this point) and formally announces the creation of the Counter-Imperialist League in cooperation with the Crusader States and Supramerica. Additionally, escapees from the prison break in question are able to return to their communities and (drawing from the example of the multiracial Supramerican Revolution) convince them to work together to forcibly dismantle the institution-camps regardless of race, leading to the unthinkable: a Boer-Zulu-Xhosa-led coalition of whites and Africans alike banding together and overthrowing the British colonial administration, afterwards declaring the Confederal Archsodality of Southern African States and applying for membership in the Counter-Imperialist League. The CASAS also jumps straight to radical social policy such as full legalization of interracial marriage and homosexuality (though not homosexual marriage, that's a step too far even for them), which is looked at warily by some of the more conservative members of the CIL, but they're not exactly in a position where they can afford to turn down a free ally. While the CASAS carries out no anti-white purges or genocides due to the key involvement of whites as part of the revolutionary coalition, this doesn't stop much of the anti-revolution and "neutral" white population of South Africa from fleeing the country anyway. Most of these emigrants are resettled in British Australia, but the more vindictive sorts voluntarily relocate to Texas or the United States-in-exile, itching for a chance to take the fight directly to the Counter-Imperialist powers in the near future.

Developed as what's intended to be a "third option" ideological counter to both the Marxisms and pseudo-Marxisms increasingly dominating the CIL and the sanist eugenicism of the imperialist powers, a new revolutionary ideology arises in disunited Italy known as libertinismo, which primarily argues for the total abolition of all laws regulating moral behavior- effectively, creating a system where no action the individual can take short of outright murder or rape is illegal- and government by a form of census-based multipartisan vanguardism. The notorious book entitled The Libertine Manifesto describes the "ideal government" as a system where the national census mandates every citizen ideologically identify themselves as a specific label (the Sicilian intellectual from whom libertinismo originated proposed they rank their personal views on three separate spectrums of traditionalist-to-futurist, reactionary-to-progressive, and devolver-to-evolver, but acknowledged that other spectrums might be better suited for different nations), with the census data used to create a collection of vanguard parties which are each given a number of government representatives proportionally sized to the corresponding ideological data of the census; said ideological data would then be used to randomly select an appropriate amount of volunteers from each ideological group, with these vanguard parties cooperating to govern the nation until the next census and additionally using their position of power to ensure no collective or confederal entity which could be capable of subverting or suppressing individual freedom can ever exist. While libertinismo supports tolerance of homosexuality both in line with its promotion of maximum personal freedom and for Malthusian reasons and is surprisingly progressive on issues such as mental disorders/disabilities and treatment of the mentally ill, it also believes the CIL does not go far enough on social policy and calls for tolerance of pedophilia, incest, and even bestiality- the writer responsible for libertinismo claims in the manifesto that as an explorer in the Horn of Africa and the Amazon Rainforest he had witnessed animals such as ostriches, lions, and river dolphins performing mating displays towards humans, then goes on to spend the last two chapters describing in horrifically graphic detail how he had personally "confirmed" their intents beyond a doubt. (With the content of said chapters in mind, it's unclear how the hell he got The Libertine Manifesto published in the first place, and while mafia connections have been proposed as an explanation the Sicilian mafia actually openly addressed these accusations with genuine outrage- they might be criminals, but they have standards.) Libertinismo is immediately decried as a debauched and degenerate ideology, with its writer attempting to flee Europe on foot before being apprehended in France and sent back to Sicily to be imprisoned for violation of obscenity laws and bestiality, and while the drama surrounding his arrest and later death in prison (apparently of an STD, natch) doesn't turn him into a martyr it does make libertinismo something of an ideological forbidden fruit discussed in hushed tones in pubs and basements, yet typically too intimidating to bring up or debate in public or around strangers. While The Libertine Manifesto and other previous writings of the author who created the ideology are banned around the world, they're still secretly circulated and duplicated, and covert libertinismo movements do exist in the most reactionary parts of the world (as a backlash to the dominant cultures) and in nations which have free speech laws that ensure discussion of the ideology can't be stamped out. Echoing the author's presentation of libertinismo as a "third option" ideology, these small libertinismo movements usually refer to themselves as some variation of "the Optional/Thirdist Front/Association/Army/etc. of [X]," though even they tend to quietly rip out the last two chapters from their copies of The Libertine Manifesto and pretend they don't exist.

Libertinismo's promotion of extreme social libertinism unfortunately only allows the imperialist powers to continue promoting a perception of interracial/interethnic relations, homosexuality, pedophilia, and bestiality as "inextricably intertwined perversions," but even as sanism and eugenicism reach a murderous fever pitch across the European continent there are two outliers. The first is a reformer-leaning Ottoman Empire, which is gradually transitioning towards an authoritarian constitutional monarchy promoting a "Turko-Arab" reinterpretation of cosmicist mestizaje ideas; ironically it's also inspired in part by Marxist thought, as TTL's Marxism openly presented itself as capable of coexistence with monarchs or aristocrats who choose to live modestly and aid the welfare of the people (reserving its universal justiciarship-inspired zealous promotion of righteous violence for slaveowners both literal and of the "wage slave" persuasion). The second is Portugal-Kongo, which will require somewhat more of an explanation: decades prior, Portugal had begun importing laborers from the puppet Kingdom of Kongo to make up for labor shortages at home following a short-but-devastating epidemic wracking Iberia only to find itself becoming increasingly influenced by Kongolese culture, which eventually led to a "Kongophilic" prince launching a palace coup with the support of ethnic Portuguese and Kongolese sympathizers in the military, purging domestic opposition, and declaring the formation of the United Kingdom of Portugal and the Kongo with his marriage to a Kongolese princess. (Upon the posthumous publication of said prince's personal journals, it became apparent that his primary reason for launching the coup was because he was so desperately in love with said Kongolese princess that he was willing to risk burning Portugal and its empire alike to the ground so long as he could rule the ashes with her as his queen... or at least that's what he claimed amidst the twenty-nine pages of poetically lovesick ramblings he added to his journal the night before the palace coup, but this was probably hyperbolic to some degree.) With the new nation being highly CIL-friendly, openly racially egalitarian, and pro-racial/cultural mixing (the new king believed in a form of cosmicism-inspired culture-centric social Darwinism wherein cultures coexisting within a previously-multicultural state should be allowed to challenge one another on equal footing on the "battlefield of ideas" until a monocultural state composed of only the strongest traits of both cultures remained, with him seeing the "Mexican example" as a clear demonstration of this- after all, hadn't it only become a great power after the rise of the "Sino-Mexican" culture?), opponents of the new Portuguese-Kongolese nation emigrate en masse along with members of the royal family who survived the palace coup to the Portuguese colonies in Mozambique, India, and the Malay Archipelago, forming an exile government comparable to that of the United States-in-exile in Cuba and Nicaragua. After Portugal-Kongo proves itself by successfully fighting off a Spanish/French-led invasion to overthrow its "degenerate," "mentally retarded" government and even manages to extract territorial concessions from Spain, the Counter-Imperialist League offers it membership in its bloc, which Portugal-Kongo accepts.

Desperate to regain ground in southern Africa after the loss of the CASAS, the British purchase the Dutch outpost of Walvis Bay and use it as the starting point for an attempted invasion and subjugation of the Hoarusib Confederacy, expecting it'll be a curbstomp and they can proceed to use it as a beachhead for retaking South Africa. However, they grossly underestimate both the Hoarusib Confederacy's military and Hoarusibi unity, and in mere months Hoarusibi troops have occupied Walvis Bay and accepted an offer of military aid against a hypothetical second British invasion from the CASAS. The infuriated British retreat, and with the CASAS okaying it the Hoarusib Confederacy begins a largely peaceful campaign of diplomacy-based expansion inland to unclaimed parts of the southern African interior the CASAS was reluctant to force its government upon. However, the confederalism and provisions for cultural autonomy built into the Hoarusibi system is more appealing than the centralized government of CASAS to the collection of chiefdoms and kingdoms scattered throughout the region, with the most prominent victory of the Hoarusibi being the kingdom of the Northern Ndebele agreeing to join the Confederacy. This ongoing expansion does gradually erode Sioux influence in the nation at large as Bantu culture becomes dominant, but the Hoarusib Creole language and syncretic religion now forming a plurality in western Hoarusib both remain as clear remnants of Sioux culture and the Sioux had already left a significant cultural footprint upon the other early members of the initial Hoarusib Confederacy. While Hoarusib briefly fears a potential war with Portugal-Kongo as their borders grow closer, the Portuguese-Kongolese pleasantly surprise the Hoarusib with how amicable they are about the whole thing, with the queen and king personally traveling south to negotiate a mutually acceptable border between their two nations and agreeing not to pursue hostilities with Hoarusib- in fact, the Portuguese-Kongolese even offer to help with Hoarusibi industrialization, a deal the Confederacy warily accepts.

The several decades of Crusader States excesses are peacefully and anticlimactically forfeited when the Freedom Party loses control of the executive and legislative branches for the first time in the country's history in 1916, with the Practical Justice Party ("practical" here meaning "in practice") dethroning the de facto one-party state under the "Ten Amendments" to the C.S. constitution, which formalize the prior relaxation of electoral and political restrictions by previous Freedomite presidents and return the country to the secular presidential republic it was initially intended to be, instating universal legislative representation along the lines of Supramerica and (contemporary) Mexico. It is also decided that the country's name will be changed again, with the PJP opening the door for people from across the country to come to Boston and suggest new names before holding a referendum on the most popular suggestions: with 69.2% of the vote, the CSA is renamed for the third time, becoming the Archsodality of Riedon; "Riedon" being a neologism for the country already seeing increasing use across the Crusader States at the time of the PJP first taking power, originating as an intentional mispronunciation of the Arabic word riḍan so that it would semi-rhyme with "freedom" (the intent being to draw from the word's "consent/permission" meaning as a reference to the phrase consent of the governed). Dissatisfied radical Christians and universal justiciars, ironically covertly backed by the the United Kingdom and fellow imperialist powers with the goal of destabilizing Riedon and the CIL, wreak havoc across the Great Lakes states for a few years after the Ten Amendments as a guerilla movement, but Riedon is able to suppress them with Mexican and Supramerican help. However, paperwork containing undeniable proof confirming British involvement in the guerilla violence has recently been sent to Boston by Riedonian spies in British North America, and as 1920 begins the planet will inch ever closer to worldwide war. The CIL may consider itself the inevitable victor in such a conflict, but the governments of its most powerful member states are unaware of one crucial fact: the British were not running all that human experimentation in South Africa simply to be pointlessly evil to the people they experimented on, but rather in pursuit of means by which to modify and improve human beings, and these experiments were not destroyed during the fall of British South Africa, simply relocated to the Australian interior as the violence reached its apex. This research has been making promising steps towards admittedly primitive means of creating what OTL might call "superhumans" but are known here as "preterhumans," and when war breaks out the very first preterhuman soldiers this world has ever seen will be deployed onto the battlefield for the first time alongside deadly chemical weapons and artificial pathogens created through decades of human testing. Regardless of whether the imperialists, the CIL, or neither emerge victorious from the coming war, the decades after its end will see a global preterhumanics arms race that reshapes this Earth as its denizens thought they understood it, and it's unclear if any participant in this arms race will be capable of emerging with its morality intact...