In an alternate world, the central powers won, after the decision not to renew submarine warfare was decided upon by the german empire, the USA would reaffirm its neutrality. Time would go on and the war would turn into a grueling stalemate. In 1920 italy would fall into a civil war, as the communists and nationalists would be opposed to each other.

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Looking to make a gfx mod for hoi4 and I decided to try and make some subideology icons. I made these on my school chromebook so don’t judge and this is also my first attempt

They look perfect on the focus tree, but when i go and pick them they go back to the unknown goal icon in the country interface. How do i fix this?

Decided to make some communist icons as well as update the nazi one a bit. Also sorry if the flair is wrong I’m new to actually posting on Reddit 💔
Subideologies in order: 1. Marxism 2. Leninism 3. Stalinism 4. National socialism

We are pleased to present the first development diary for "Eclipse of the Light" (EOL)! EOL is a submod dedicated to depicting the state of the world in the TNO universe as it progresses into the 1980s. While remaining faithful to the core of TNO, we have made certain adjustments and extrapolations to the existing lore; consequently, some content may differ from the base TNO mod. We believe this will result in a narrative that is both more realistic and darker than the original.

In this development diary, I am thrilled to present the key developments in the United States of America from the post-war period through the early 1980s.

(Due to limited development resources and time, the content presented here is not yet in its final, polished form; we appreciate your understanding.)

One of the foremost questions he had to confront was by no means as simple as it appeared: What is poverty? He defined poverty as a developmental and relative concept. In his view, the predicament of poverty in an affluent nation like the United States was undeniably distinct from that observed in impoverished lands such as Bangladesh.

During the 1960s, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that an annual income of $4,000 for a family of four and $2,000 for a single individual constituted the threshold of a comfortable livelihood; anything below this was deemed poverty. Michael estimated that, according to the Bureau's criteria, between forty and fifty million Americans lived in poverty, accounting for roughly one-quarter of the population. This revelation stunned many. They steadfastly refused to believe its veracity, dismissing it as hyperbolic exaggeration. Nevertheless, these were official statistics, and subsequent events in America demonstrated that his assessments were largely accurate. One need only recall President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous dictum: one-third of the American citizenry ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, such troubling truths were acknowledged; yet by the 1960s, amidst collective intoxication with illusion, society proved unwilling to reckon with the ledger.

The Truman Era: An Abandoned Realm

The failure of the war exacerbated the fractures within American society. Yielding neither wealth nor glory, the United States under the Truman administration plunged into an exceptionally turbulent quadrennium.

Vast numbers of returning veterans emerged as a destabilizing force within society. Upon returning from the battlefields to their hometowns, they were greeted not with embraces and blossoms, but frequently with shattered families. Despite the government's utmost endeavors to propagate patriotic fervor, veterans were met with disdain and cynical mockery. The postwar surge in American crime rates transcended mere economic dimensions.

During the 1940s, a revolutionary mindset began to gain ascendancy—a sentiment destined to resurface in the 1980s. Many Americans came to perceive that the cyclical economic crises of the capitalist system had fully materialized within the United States, or were at least on the brink of doing so. The economic crises and social injustices that had loomed large before World War II remained unresolved by the New Deal. Consequently, an unreasoning, blind revolutionary fervor saturated the nation. This inclination manifested itself most vividly among intellectuals; some former conservatives underwent swift metamorphoses into "revolutionaries." Well into the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, remnants of leftist zeal persisted among certain factions, even ensnaring several progressives. In retrospect, it appears somewhat ludicrous that leading figures among the leftist intelligentsia once penned grandiloquent essays, blithely assuming that America had reached the zenith for revolution and ought to pivot toward "higher," more intellectually elevated themes. In short, intellectuals, true to form, allowed themselves to be beguiled by the deceptive spirit of the age. Mary McCarthy, for instance, once recorded these absurd words: "Class barriers are disappearing, or at least becoming permeable; compared with the middle-class secretary, the factory worker has become an economic aristocrat... That gravely unjust America of sharp contrasts is rapidly passing away."

Yet, the revolution faltered; the nationwide strikes organized by the Communist Party USA and allied coalitions drifted inevitably toward failure. This outcome intensified the White House’s preoccupation with the threat of extremism. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 marked the inception of a structural persecution directed against labor unions and the left wing, utterly shattering communist influence within American organized labor and serving as the genesis of state-sponsored suppression of extremism. In February 1950, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin delivered an address to a Republican women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia, precipitating an ideological crusade that convulsed the entirety of American society.

The reach of McCarthyism proved astonishingly sweeping, encompassing virtually every shade of extremism from Asian communities and Nazism to fascism and communism. Between 1944 and 1952, the United States traversed eight profoundly turbulent years, paving the way for the next occupant of the White House: the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, Dwight David Eisenhower.

The Eisenhower Era: Old Slums and New Slums

Poverty is not merely a social attribute; it is an all-encompassing condition. Those who have endured poverty invariably perceive themselves as passive, helpless, and prone to violence: the poor exist in desolate isolation, yet are frequently obstinate and adversarial. Poverty transcends the mere deprivation of the world’s material wealth; it represents an immersion into an alternative, fatalistic, and hopeless universe—into The Other America, where the human spirit is deformed.

Within this Other America, the ranks of the desolate and unfriended steadily swelled. Severed from the traditional cultures of their forebears, they grew increasingly estranged from religious observance, holding affiliation with neither trade unions nor social clubs. Invisible to the outer world, they consequently became blind to it. Their horizons narrowed inexorably; staring solely at one another, they found themselves utterly bereft of hope.

Such were the denizens of the Eisenhower era, wherein the impoverished were gradually consigned to oblivion. If the middle class had never professed a fondness for squalor and destitution, they had at least previously acknowledged their existence. "Crossing the boundary of wealth and poverty" had once seemed a discernible journey... Now, however, American cities had undergone profound transformations. The destitute still inhabited the dilapidated quarters of the inner city, yet their bonds with the wider populace grew ever more attenuated.

President Eisenhower effectively brought McCarthyism to a close. While the Democrats commanded the global stage, they remained inert. Democratic blueprints continued to heavily curb the excesses of capitalism, forging a more technocratic and corporatized American economic apparatus. The mobilization measures of the wartime economy were largely preserved, albeit redirected toward civilian ends; nevertheless, economic stagnation persisted unabated.

The Lodge Era: Forsaken by the Affluent Society?

Every major American municipality harbors an underground economy—a term requiring no exaggeration. It designates those subterranean grease-shops and clandestine sweatshops tucked beneath the city pavements, bearing witness to the whereabouts of countless souls who labor within the shadows for wages plumbing the lowest depths. Akin to the underworld, the underground economy operates stealthily, shrouded from public gaze.

Puerto Ricans, African Americans, alcoholics, vagrants, and the mentally infirm—when seeking a day’s labor, they were compelled to pay a brokerage fee amounting to roughly one-tenth of their daily earnings. For a task yielding five dollars, they surrendered fifty cents; upon payment, the employment agency directed them to the threshold of a modest diner. Should fortune favor them, they secured the five dollars. If the proprietor rejected them, they theoretically possessed the right to reclaim their fifty cents. Yet many remained ignorant of this recourse, wholly unversed in the law.

These were the outcasts forsaken by the affluent society. Devoid of specialized trades, or possessing skills rendered obsolete by economic progress, they constituted the mainstream of urban poverty in America, numbering in the millions.

While the Lodge administration could trumpet its restoration of American economic vigor, its revival of national prestige upon the international stage, and its reclamation of all things American, it simultaneously forfeited the soul of the nation. Rather than rescuing the other America, the administration exacerbated its devastation. Economic recovery and expansion marched hand in hand with widening disparities in wealth.

Once the scourge of economic depression descended upon a region, vitality drained away. Tax bases shriveled, public services deteriorated, and civic morale dissolved. Low-wage industries might occasionally infiltrate such hollowed-out zones, yet their motive remained opportunism—to reap illicit gains rather than resolve systemic maladies. Alternatively, nothing transpired at all. Thereupon commenced the vicious cycle. Because a district was impoverished and moribund, manufacturers refused to invest or establish plants there; lacking factories, the region descended yet deeper into penury. To borrow the phrasing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Yet a region's economic distress and high unemployment rate inversely dictate the caliber of enterprise it is capable of attracting." Stated more plainly: no corporation of consequence, least of all major conglomerates, would ever invest in such a godforsaken locale.

In 1961, the United States Congress deliberated upon this very malady. True to its historical pattern of formulating half-measures for those lingering at society's economic base, Congress devised remedies for the downwardly mobile that proved wholly inadequate to the task. As a token of solicitude, lawmakers appropriated a meager sum designated for individual retraining programs. The core of congressional policy relied upon extending loans to stimulate industrial development within depressed zones. According to analyses compiled by the executive departments sponsoring the legislation, the fiscal resources allocated were woefully deficient. More critically fatal still was the absence of regional developmental planning, alongside the utter failure to formulate effective antidotes to the pervasive despondency suffocating economically blighted regions.

How did the Lodge administration navigate the Civil Rights Movement? By adopting the posture of an ostrich. The movement achieved zero substantive progress across those eight years; patriotism, external expansion, and the suppression of anti-American forces reigned supreme as governmental priorities. They successfully sculpted America into a colossal, hegemonic monster—one whose body politic, however, was riven by mortal decay.

The Era of the Moderates: The Triumph of Conscience

For certain urban dwellers, progress was far from a blessing, heralding threat rather than hope. This sentiment rang doubly true for the rural impoverished.

In the wake of World War II, American agriculture pursued its relentless trajectory toward mechanization. The fruit of this mechanization was the exodus of vast rural populations toward the cities. Yet even this seismic agrarian revolution failed to ameliorate the plight of the rural poor, whose numbers remained stubbornly, almost unbelievably, stagnant.

Although the Hart administration dedicated itself to forging a high-welfare liberal society, as America celebrated its Bicentennial in the 1970s, tens of millions of its citizens remained mired in destitution.

President Hart exhorted every American to declare war upon poverty and social injustice, summoning the populace to wage an "unconditional war" for its eradication. Congress endorsed the presidential mandate. Throughout the ensuing quadrennium, the White House tirelessly recited daunting statistics, proclaiming billions of dollars funneled into social amelioration. The 1960s had been an era of militant protests—a decade consecrated to the selfless dedication of students and church organizations striving to banish poverty, accompanied by the unvarnished documentary exposes of mass media laying bare America's domestic shames. Indeed, governmental activism appeared so frenetic to many that Richard Nixon, during his 1972 presidential campaign, pledged to decelerate the frantic pace of innovation. How, then, could poverty persist into the 1970s, casting the poor once more beyond the social conscience and erasing them from public consciousness?

As customary, the government exercised meticulous care in compiling data to demonstrate that the preceding administration had wallowed in blind optimism while the incumbent displayed cool-headed sobriety. Across every vital domain—nutrition, housing, education—the state doled out mere fractions of the assistance desperately required by the poor. Given that half of the impoverished demographic consisted of the young, and modern society increasingly demanded advanced technical proficiencies, the prevailing conditions spelled profound peril for these youths on the threshold of adulthood. Unless decisive counter-measures were enacted, this generation of impoverished children was destined to father and mother the next generation of the destitute.

This is not to suggest that progress was wholly absent. The prosperity kindled by the public policies of the 1960s did indeed depress unemployment rates, affording genuine, albeit precarious, gains to segments of the population. Medical care initiatives designed for the elderly represented something akin to a quantum leap in social investment, notwithstanding the erosion of their efficacy by inflation.

The Wallace Era: Keep Away From My Doorstep

Every African American neighborhood possesses a distinct character of its own.

In Atlanta, during a tranquil evening, residents linger beneath eaves, engaged in animated discourse and resonant laughter. In Los Angeles, the morphologies of the Black ghetto assume myriad forms. Only a single feature remains uniform: pockmarked streets differing scarcely at all from those of any other slum. Outwardly, the dwellings maintain an acceptable façade; without diligent observation, one remains blind to the squalor rotting within. The South Side of Chicago unmistakably mirrors the archetype of the metropolitan ghetto, juxtaposing towering housing blocks against a motley array of low-grade taverns. At the peripheries of downtown Chicago, the palpable tension of race relations hangs heavy, pregnant with explosive potential.

In every conceivable aspect, Black poverty possesses a uniqueness all its own. Deeply rooted in history, it manifests as a distinct subculture underpinned by a vicious cycle of economic injustice and racial discrimination—one systematically imposed upon Black Americans by the white majority.

The public impression left by Black poverty is likewise singular. A solitary stroll through the slum avenues illuminates this truth, laying bare the individual visages and diverse psychological postures hidden behind sterile statistics: terror, hunger, faith, and the politics of racial destitution. To witness Black existence is to apprehend, through a lens of profound humanism, the bleak economic ciphers and industrial metrics lurking in their shadow.

Should the legal statutes enforcing racial segregation be instantly abrogated, race would nevertheless endure as one of America’s most pressing moral and political dilemmas. The burdens crushing Black citizens and other minority groups extend far beyond unjust laws; American economic structures, American society, and the subconscious psyche of the populace remain thoroughly infected by racial prejudice. Even if statutory mandates guaranteed absolute equality of opportunity, the majority of Black Americans would remain incapable of fully leveraging such policy shifts. A vast, automated apparatus would continue to silently discriminate against people of color.

Well-meaning souls frequently fail to comprehend the profound depths to which racism has anchored its roots in America. They harbor the comforting illusion that, given sufficient time, Black citizens will rise through their own bootstraps much like the Irish, Jews, and Italians before them. Yet this rhetoric overlooks two decisive verities: Black Americans are a people of color—a reality confronting no other immigrant cohort in America's past—and contemporary Black populations constitute internal migrants within their native soil, subjected to relentless discrimination regardless of destination, perpetually denied the option of fleeing oppression as one might escape tsarist tyranny or famine. To achieve genuine equality, Black Americans require something far more radical than mere social "assimilation": they demand the structural reconstruction of foundational American institutions.

Why did George Wallace ascend to power? The answer lies glaringly exposed: America’s civil rights and antipoverty crusades had collapsed in failure. The reformist policies and compromises of the moderates had served only to exacerbate societal contradictions. Stricken by failing health, Hart retreated from the political arena, while his successors lacked the fortitude to consummate the moderate civil rights agenda. Their constituents watched in dismay as leaders hoarding immense electoral capital behaved like misers, culminating in a thunderous political collapse.

The Wallace administration proceeded to dismantle big government further, curtailing federal authority while expanding states' rights, inciting ordinary laborers against federal regulation, resisting federal intervention in union affairs to preserve blue-collar autonomy, constructing segregated Black schools, and refining educational stratification in a deliberate bid to consummate racial apartheid in both economy and institution. These machinations spawned catastrophic public safety crises; notwithstanding the Wallace administration’s iron-fisted suppression, racial turbulence and separatist fervor continued their relentless upward climb...

1982, United States of America

It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed

My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road

Out of your Dust Bowl and westward we rolled

And your deserts were hot and your mountain was cold

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes

Slept on the ground in the light of your moon

On the edge of the city you'll see us and then

We come with the dust and we go with the wind

-Pastures of Plenty, Woody Guthrie

Hello I came across this new HOI Millennium Dawn sub mod called Statecraft & Contractors looks amazing!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3823180183