god Has A Plan (alternate Battlestar Galactica (RDM))

stevep , I’m making some of the backstory up as I go along, partly to compensate for the Colonials — as far as anyone knows — having had a strictly Earth-based origin.

Of course, there are the conspiracy theorists, hawking their bat-shit insane ‘facts” on the internet and the same types of cable channels they would IOTL....and the devout followers of the ;Colonial faith’ will tell you that because life began out there, someone had to have come TO Earth...right?

lordroel I think you’re asking if Boer Republic is all of South Africa? Please clarify.

I’m not sure how much of the old Boer Republic to give the New version: Orange Free State only, or addin Transvaal? What do you think?

That is one possibility. I was thinking, though, that in either case that would be too much territory for the new RSA to give over to the Boers.

Another scenario is the proposed Volkstaat. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstaat

In this scenario, the U.S. decides to back the Afrikaners and support the formation of a whites-only state. By then, Mandela was in power but barely able to contain the ANC from fighting all-out war with the Afrikaner Army. The fighting got so bloody and brutal the UN threatened to send in troops to occupy the entire territory. The Volkstaat was a compromise that no one was happy with (except the US, which had a foothold in Africa), but was almost necessary to keep the peace and prevent wholesale bloodshed and atrocities. 

The United Colonies of Kobol (UCK), commonly known as the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, or the Colonies, or less commonly Kobol, is a country comprising 12 colonies, four territories and various possessions. The country is located on the continent of Kobol, located in the North Atlantic Ocean roughly midway between North America and Europe At 3.7 million square miles, it is the world’s fourth- or fifth-largest country by total area, and just 101,484 square miles smaller than the United States of America.

The UCK is a federal republic, modeled largely after the United States of America and partly after the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and a representative democracy. There is an executive branch, headed by a President elected every four years; a bicameral legislative branch, split between the Quorum of Twelve and the Quorum of the People; and a judicial branch, headed by the Inter-Colonial Supreme Court. The 12 colonies have their own devolved governments, each with varying powers over their respective colonial territories, but those powers are delegated by the Quorum of Twelve. Eleven of the twelve colonies have governments structured after the federal government; Virgon’s government is a unitary state under a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary government similar to the United Kingdom.

HISTORY

The Colonies trace their origins back at least 21,000 years, with two schools of thought as to their peoples’ origins: extraterrestrial arrival from “out there”, or arrival of people from Europe, Africa and possibly North America. The modern Colonials trace their origins to a more recent date, approximately 400 B.C., in which “travelers” from the Mediterranean — specifically, Greece, Egypt and Italy — traveled west until coming across what is now known as Caprica Bay, on the continent’s east coast. The early Colonials soon explored and settled across the continent, and split into 13 colonies, one of which allegedly left Kobol, sailed east to Europe, and assimilated among the local population.

The 12 remaining colonies grew and occasionally fought among themselves, generally agreeing upon a policy of continent-wide isolationism. That policy was challenged when Christopher Columbus’s second expedition led him to the Caprican Navy, and by 1620 the colonies had agreed to open themselves up to the old and new worlds. They would stay out of those nations’ affairs, as long as those nations stayed out of their own.

News of the independence of the United States of America inspired a movement amongst Colonial intellectuals and politicians to unite the Twelve Colonies, and the Colonies agreed in 1886 to unite under a single government. The Colonial Convention of 1891 saw the Articles of Colonization signed by representatives of each colony, and each colony signed the Colonial Constitution between 1892 and 1894. The Articles of Colonization banned slavery and discrimination by race, gender, religion, creed and national origin in government and in public life.

The Colonies immediately allied themselves with the U.S., Britain and France, and entered World War I on the side of Britain and France — and the Allied Powers — in 1916. In 1940 disputes within both quorums and President Stephen Richards’s pacifist stance kept the Colonials from sending aid to France, allowing Nazi Germany to conquer that nation; public outrage led to Richards’ resignation — making him the only Colonial President to resign his position — and new President Meike Lemke convinced both quorums to back his plan to send reinforcements to Britain to “guard against Nazi tyranny”. The Colonials thereby entered World War II on the side of longtime ally Britain and were the first to announce the news of the Jewish Holocaust to the world, and liberated most of the concentration camps, saving perhaps up to one million Jews from certain death.

After WW II, the Colonies helped America rebuild Western Europe, while convincing British Prime Minister Winston Churchill not to go forward with his plan to attack the Soviet Union. The Colonies developed their own nuclear bomb, and tested it in 1948 in the south Atlantic. While dealing with a Cold War alongside America, Britain and their new NATO allies against the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact, the Colonies also dealt with unrest within their borders — unrest that led to an unsuccessful attempt by Sagittaron to secede from the Colonies in 1956.

The “Sagittaron Issue” waned in the 1960s, and then picked up again a decade later, as terrorist groups took cues from similar groups in Northern Ireland and began bombing Colonial government, military and civilian targets. The Colonial government responded by cracking down on the Sagittaron colony so hard it earned a rare censure from both the U.S. and the United Nations; the Colonies immediately began rectifying several Sagittarian issues with the Colonial federal and colonial governments, and turned their attention towards ending the Cold War.

After Jimmy Carter was elected U.S. President in 1976, the Soviet Union endured a brief, and violent, political war. It began when the KGB assassinated premier Leonid Brezhnev after he refused to consider the KGB's request for a sneak attack on both the Colonies and America, thinking both countries' leadership to be weak and malleable; the military quickly challenged the KGB's orders for conventional attacks on western Europe and limited nuclear attacks on America, the Colonies and Britain. The USSR tried to keep the unrest from the rest of the world and from its own people, but by Christmas Eve many Soviet cities had erupted into unrest, despite the Soviet military crackdown and declaration of martial law. A reform-minded group led by Alexander Yakovlev -- with help from the military leaders who remained after its own 'purge' -- declared itself the new Politburo. The reformers prevailed, and by Inauguration Day in the U.S. January 20 1977, the Soviet unrest was ended, the KGB purged and the military sent to remind hardliners in East Germany and Romania who was still in charge of the Warsaw Pact (even Fidel Castro received a visit).

With the reformers solidly in control, Colonial President Joseph Larson saw the opportunity of a lifetime: an end to the Cold War, and a Pax Terra. The Caprica City Summit of 1978 brought U.S. President Carter and Soviet General Secretary Yakovlev to the negotiating table, and both leaders agreed not only to reduce their nuclear weapons by 75 percent, but to begin winding down the Cold War towards a “total truce”. The USSR would “explore” democracy and end surveillance of tis people, and the U.S. would begin to “make amends” with its African-American and Native American populations and enact national healthcare and pension programs for all of its citizens.

Colonial pundits and publications proclaimed the world had entered into Larson's Pax Terra, a permanent global peace.

There was much opposition to Carter's plans for reparations to the African-American and Native American people, and certain people, both Americans and non-Americans, began to plan to enact drastic, and widespread, changes to the United States. In 1980, voters rejected Carter not so much over reparations and universal healthcare as much as the Iranian War and its aftermath (outrage over the dead Americans in the embassy, a brief skyrocketing of the price of oil and a brief increase of gasoline to $2.50 a gallon, and the subsequent recession). Ronald Reagan proclaimed it was "morning in America" and had a plan to avenge the embassy massacres and reignite the economy, and the military began plans to attack Iran. The Colonies called for peace, but Reagan refused to yield: an attack on Iran would proceed.

Reagan was assassinated by a loner, and George H.W. Bush promised in a televised speech that night to continue Reagan's policies, including war on Iran.

Then came the coup d'etat. At Bush's speech before both houses of Congress, almost all of his Cabinet and all nine justices of the Supreme Court, a bomb exploded, destroying the entire House of Representatives chamber. James Watt, the Interior Secretary -- the so-called designated survivor -- was the only person in the line of succession to survive and, with no Congress nor Supreme Court to challenge him, became the de facto dictator of the US. Watt had backing from the military, and most conservative and evangelical Christian pastors and televangelists began to proclaim Jesus was in charge and Watt His man for these troubled times. Iran was now off the table; the focus needed to be on "cleaning up" America. What America's allies thought didn't matter one bit.

The US entered a nine-year period of unrest known as the “Long Terror”, the Colonies, under Larson, and then Celestra Benedict, working with moderate/conservative quorums, stepped up to work with the Soviet Union as it went through its own, lesser, periods of unrest: while the Colonials internally debated on how to deal with the “American question” Benedict’s summits with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 were credited with keeping World War III from breaking out, and also with keeping the USSR and the Warsaw Pact on the road towards democracy.

The Colonies also got a preview of sorts of future conflicts, suppressing pro-American riots in Sagittaron and the more violent Ha'la'tha crime syndicate in Tauron in 1984 and 1985. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 and the restructuring of the Soviet Union into a confederation headed by a capitalist Russia in 1991 were welcomed with celebration in the Colonies, who understood they had lost one enemy and gained another: the fundamentalist regime that ruled the United States, having put down its unrest for the time being. A new Cold War developed between the American regime and the “Western Allies”, consisting initially of the Colonies, Britain, France, Russia and the rest of NATO, and expanding to include Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia.

The 1990s saw the Colonies and the Allies try to contain the American regime in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. UN peacekeepers were sent to the Canadian/US border in 1996 to head off war; conflict between Colonial and American forces in the Sea of Arabia in 1999 sparked a new age of colonial technical development, with increased emphasis on alternative energy sources that would complement oil and tylium sources.

In 2000, Russia left the Allied alliance, and joined with the United States, sparking fears of a Third World War; the 9/11 attacks inside the U.S. in 2001 were credited to al Qaeda (which wanted America out of “occupied” Arabia) but American regime propaganda also made sure to mislead its people into thinking the Colonials planned it as a “false flag” operation heading towards an invasion of the U.S. homeland.

Tensions between the Colonies and Americans reached a head in 2006, when Colonial intelligence found hard proof of CIA funding of anti-Colonial groups within Sagittaron. In 2007, another round of terrorist actions shook the Colonies, as well as Britain, France, and Japan, leading to a crackdown on Sagittaron independence groups.

2011 saw Sagittaron resident Tom Zarek call openly for Sagittaron secession from the Colonies by “any means necessary” and for a referendum on independence or joining the U.S., and yet another round of Sagittaron terrorist bombings across the Colonies. The Colonial military was given full authority by President Ronalda Demetri Morris to end the unrest “by any means necessary under the Constitution”, and over 20,000 Sagittaron citizens — including Zarek — were arrested on charges of treason, sedition and terrorism. Sagittaron itself was placed under martial law and military rule, which ended in 2012 at the “encouragement” of the U.N.

The United States officially neither admitted to nor denied the Colonial government’s charges of funding and supporting the Sagittaron insurrection, and concentrated on supporting its own allies in South America, the Middle East and Southern Africa. The U.S./Russian alliance and the Colonial/western allies settled into a Cold War, one that briefly threatened to go hot after a series of bombings throughout the Allied nations in 2016.

Both sides had long prepared to fight each other on short notice, and so when American Naval forces began moving towards Kobol in the summer of 2019, the Colonials were ready, sending their own human and cybernetic forces to the United States in response.

Nice updates Brky2020.

So was Watt behind the bombing of the Congress, looks like it.