On Hacking - Richard Stallman

There are 10,000 people in Nuremburg Stadium, a mix of administrators, Party officials, SS officers and loyal soliders, on the afternoon of October 16, 1945, cheering with varying degrees of madness as Admiral Karl Doenitz, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and then Joseph Goebbels proclaim their loyalty to the fallen Fuhrer and to the ever-lasting Thousand-Year Reich. It doesn't go well at first; both Francois Darlan and Joseph Stalin recognize a defeated, lapdog Germany is in their best interests, so they ask for the impossible, cession of the Ruhr on the one hand and cession to the Elbe on the other. With word of the assasination attempt on Hitler and the formation of the three new German governments (Guderian and von Witzleben having realized that they are the men of vision destined to lead the German people into the future) the American government suspends plans for a third nuclear strike against Germany at the end of October, making an attempt to negotiate with all three leaders in concert with the British, French, and Soviets. Erich von Witzleben is in no position to surrender all German troops fighting; not in the way Guderian or Heydrich might be, but he can save the lives of his men, and of their families, if he moves quickly, which he does.

It outlaws the closed shop, permits union shops only where legal under state law and with worker approval; requires 60 day strike notification; authorizes federal strike injunctions when a strike might imperil national safety; changes the definition of unfair labour practices; goes into lots and lots of unfair union practices; all but does away with union political contributions; and outlaws jurisdictional strikes and secondary boycotts. Heydrich takes a moment to inspect his troops; so he's inside the armory, one of the lowest and best-protected levels of the bunker, when three hundred B-29s and their escorts peel away from three lone bombers flying over the central city, and moment later, a sun blossoms over the Brandenburg Gate. As the roar of gunfire grows louder from the camp, an anonymous, forgotten truck, carrying the unconcious Adolf Hitler and two SS doctors, speeds away toward Munich. Thus one would not hesitate to use words of Chinese origin in speaking with the Baba Chinese, or to use Javanese words in conversation with persons who come from the Dutch Indies, whereas one should avoid words of Arabic or Persian origin except when speaking with educated Malays.

Thus Sanskrit and Arabic words which are pronounced by Malays with the short vowel sound are so spelt in this vocabulary, whereas most lexi- cographers who use c for the short vowel have spelt such words with a, i, or u, as tanira, nixcJwya. With von Witzleben down, Guderian begins slowly disengaging from the front in Schleswig-Holstein to aid Manstein's fight, and the Allies resume plans for use of nuclear weapons on German soil. The nuclear destruction of Berlin on November 13 has decapitated virtually the entire Reich government but Heydrich himself, and the Waffen SS forces facing Guderian and Zhukov don't so much surrender as crumble under mustard gas attack and utterly shattered morale. The Heydrich government (which is fighting a violent civil war between Erich von Manstein's Home Army and Heydrich's SS) refuses to negotiate at all in the hastily-organized conference in Geneva, while Guderian gets bogged down in the Franco-Soviet demands.

The subsequent exchange of fire is heard by both nearby SS and conventional Army troops, and thanks to foolish aggression and clever calculation, the German Civil War has begun. With the areas of devastation so far apart, the subsequent German armored offensive across the Oder fails bloodily for both sides, and Zhukov begins driving Dietrich back towards Berlin. To the south, unimaginative but competent Archibald Wavell has driven Yamashita back into Thailand after fierce battle; the Japanese exhausted their resources with a poorly-managed offensive into India some years earlier, and are far weaker in the area than in OTL. But there is no such talk in Berlin, where Reinhard Heydrich has purged every OKH officer that so much as looked at a swastika cross-eyed, and declared himself provisional leader of the loyalist forces of the Reich. Of 200,000 men in the affected areas, only 8,000 die, and not that many more are even disabled. Taft's popularity is such that only men like Walter Reuther really notice the quietly-passed Labor? Later commentators, men like William Manchester, will write of the air of anticipation hanging over the Pacific at the beginning of December, 1945. Virtually every major Japanese island possesion in the Pacific is in American hands; all the way up to Tanega off the coast of Kyushu.