AHC: 'Darkest' 21st century that doesn't involve Nazi victory or global nuclear war

Vorti

Banned
What's your take on this?

I think a pretty bad outcome would be the USSR occupying more of Europe after WW2, and the western world being much more militaristic and standoffish than in OTL, with European countries waging widespread colonial wars against Marxist-Leninist independence movements.

Have Mao suffer an early death not long after Stalin, have Stalin succeeded by a hardliner, and we could see a delayed Sino-Soviet split, which would surely extend the Cold War into the 21st century.
 

TRH

Depends on what you mean by global nuclear war, but it's hard to top the timelines For All Time and Rumsfeldia. The former has basically the whole world get taken over by Idi Amin-style lunatics, and the latter has the whole world besides Europe get taken over by lunatics that would make Idi Amin piss himself in sheer terror.
 

TRH

King_Arthur said:
Scoop Jackson becoming President instead of Nixon or Carter would definetly have prolonged the Cold War as well.
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I'll admit I've never heard that complaint before. He was certainly a notable hawk, but in theory so was Reagan, and he didn't wind up doing too much to escalate the Cold War, especially after 83. What do you expect Jackson would have done?
 

samcster94

Banned
Here are some places to start and at least three of these being true should easily do the trick:
  • A South African Civil War of some kind.
  • Nuclear War by lesser powers(Pakistan-India is obvious).
  • Massive war in South Asia at some point.
  • At least one right wing dictatorship(like Spain,Greece,Portugal,or Cyprus) exists in an OTL EU country.
  • The Civil Rights Movement fails early and President George Wallace or someone similar exists.
  • Something goes wrong for a stable place in OTL, such as more terrorism in Quebec(by French speaking separatists).
  • Japan ends up with an " Viktor Orban like" leader who is an obvious threat to democracy.
  • Israel is somehow destroyed in its cradle(or in 1967 even if it is nearly ASBs given the Arabs were incompetent and hated each other).
  • A major war occurs in Latin America.
  • More Latin American countries(especially after 1959 when Cuba has done so) have gone Communist.
 
Bomster

Bomster

Leon Trotsky succeeds Lenin as the Leader of the Soviet Union. He rapidly industrializes the Union at the cost of many famines and millions of deaths. Unlike Stalin, Trotsky doesn’t trust Hitler, so when Barbarossa happens in WW2, Russia is more prepared. The Red Army defeats Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union “liberates” Europe in the name of the world revolution. The western powers, paranoid of the Soviets and their maniacal leader grow increasingly authoritarian and fascistic in response to the Soviet threat. So basically, Soviets are more militaristic and move further west, Great Britain and America are very authoritarian, and fascism is seen as less of a dangerous ideology and more of a defense against global communism.
 
NHBL

NHBL

Radical evangelicals getting even more influence in the USA, eroding the separation of church and state, would be a nightmare. Prayer in schools, recognition of the USA as a "christian nation," blacklisting of people for being anti-christian instead of for being communists, as the nation marches, banners flying, backwards into the dark ages. (I watched the old Spencer Tracy film "Inherit the Wind" recently.)
 

Lalli

Try somehow combine Twilight of the Red Tsar and A World of Laughter, A World of Tears (not necessarility exactly Disney's president but anyway very authotarian USA where Civil Right Act is delayed by one decade).

- Create few wars more in Africa (perhaps South African Civil War) and perhaps too longer warfare in Rhodesia.
- Make Middle East shithole some decades earlier.
- Indo-Pakistan Nuclear War.
- You can too keep Portugal and Spain totalitarian states longer.
- Longer lasting military juntas in South America. Perhaps civil war in Argentina or Brazil.
- Vietnam War spreads to Thailand.
- Make some shit with Malaysia and Indonesia.
 

King_Arthur

TRH said:
I'll admit I've never heard that complaint before. He was certainly a notable hawk, but in theory so was Reagan, and he didn't wind up doing too much to escalate the Cold War, especially after 83. What do you expect Jackson would have done?
Click to expand...

Say he is elected in 1968 by pandering to Wallace. No detente, no recognition of PRC, way longer Vietnam and actual intervention in Cambodia. That alone will extend the Cold War by at least 15 years.
 

Apollo 20

A bigger blowback from the civil rights movement plus the Cold War takes the US into a white nationalist/Christian Dominionist regime in the 70s and 80s. There is no revival of the US economy in the 80s and 90s, so the Cold War never ends as the US can't afford the 80s military build-up and the Soviet Union takes advantage of the US developments for propaganda purposes. The US stagnates economically, inhibiting the development of technology and becomes a middling economic force with a government more interested in social regulation than economic development. While it doesn't get as bad as "A Handmaid's Tale", it's pretty grim if you're any sort of minority. The end result is that the US and Soviet Union are locked to this day in a bellicose Cold War that threatens to go hot at any time. South Africa is still under apartheid. China is still fighting the Cultural Revolution. Britain is still stuck in '70s-style stagnation and decay. Western Europe is under the shadow of nuclear annihilation with no German reunification and Eastern Europe still under the Warsaw Pact and Soviet domination. Korea is still a mess after the Korean War went hot again in 1997, devastating Seoul. Japan is a rare bright spot along with Australia and New Zealand. The JANZ treaty has the three of them bound together under the Japanese nuclear umbrella. Africa remains a very poor continent racked by poor governance and civil wars. Rwanda-type ethnic cleansings are not unheard of. South America is still in the grip of military governments. India remains poor and poorly governed. The 2004 India-Pakistan nuclear war killed millions. The Middle East remains the Middle East, that is to say, a mess. The 1980s Iran-Iraq War flares up from time to time. Israel is surrounded by enemies. The 2008 war with Egypt was devastating and the country is constantly faced with Palestinian terrorism, which has been met with increasingly repressive measures. Saudi Arabia is using its oil wealth to spread Wahibbism throughout the region, with predictable results.
 
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Octosteel

Interwar period is ripe for this stuff. You could have Europe erupt into socialist revolutions that lead to hardliners controlling Europe on both the reactionary and revolutionary side. Perhaps this could be done if the Soviets beat Poland in 1920 and Trotskyists won, trying to spread revolution via fire and sword. Europe, by the time the dust settle, would be a total mess and a breeding ground for extremism.
 

GeographyDude

Gone Fishin'


No one's mentioned the possibility of the Great Depression not really being solved, and an angry right-wing shift in politics in response?
 
Bomster

Bomster

GeographyDude said:


No one's mentioned the possibility of the Great Depression not really being solved, and an angry right-wing shift in politics in response?
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America never enters WW2, causing the Great Depression to last longer. This leads to great social instability and conflict, which coupled with an expansionistic USSR, causes a general feeling of paranoia in the USA.
 

GeographyDude

Gone Fishin'
samcster94 said:
  • More Latin American countries(especially after 1959 when Cuba has done so) have gone Communist.
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Admittedly, other countries may not do it as well as Cuba. But as far as real live communist countries, maybe Cuba and Yugoslavia are in the running for the most functioning ones?

Fidel Castro and comrades ramped up dairy industry worried about childhood nutrition. They passed out a bunch of shoes all at once, worried about ? hookworm. Well, hell, any government could have done that with just a little bit of snap. Well, Batista didn't, and Fidel did. The communists closed the brothels, not Batista. In fact, I've heard one of the informal sayings of the revolution was, "Our sisters will be your whores no longer."

And then there's an interesting story I heard from this guy in the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) who are Trotskyites, but really super Cuba.

His story, the new communists were building an apartment complex, some women in the neighborhood got interested in it, and perhaps after some initial hesitation, the women were allowed to work on it, and did enough work that most of them earned themselves an apartment! I love this kind of loosey-goosey economy, where you look for a reason to say yes when someone is looking for a job, rather than no.

Now, SWP members tend to be ideologues. And it's a one-way conversation surprising similar to talking with a libertarian. In both cases, they have all the answers, and can't even conceive that there might be ragged edges to the theory and important life areas which the theory just doesn't address very well. The SWPers are also big on trying to sell subscriptions to their newspaper almost like they were Amway salespeople! That part is funny and ironic.

All the same, well worth talking with every so often.
 

Vorti

Banned
samcster94 said:
Here are some places to start and at least three of these being true should easily do the trick:
  • The Civil Rights Movement fails early and President George Wallace or someone similar exists.
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How likely is that?

I don't see how Wallace would ever get elected, but I can see the Democrats not nationally platforming civil rights, and black America taking the Malcolm X route instead of the MLK route.
 
Akai

Akai

Hmm let's try this.

A more authoritarian and expansionist British empire with a domestic Estado Novo esque regime with colonial revolts put down in a manner even harsher than the Boer War, totalitarian Tsarist Russia with Alexei at its head, the Qing reform along Kang Youwei's universalist lines with a quasi-platonic, State Confucian government evolving with an iron-fisted Xuantong Emperor, successful Qutbist states in the Middle East, minor nuclear wars in China, India-Pakistan, Germany losses the war after the implementation of operation vegetarian and then gets Morgenthaued. South African civil wars, Africa has even more wars, America ends up a Bonapartist autocracy, India divided into a Bose-ist state and several breakaway republics, far greater nuclearisation of the world, Orions existing and are widespread, US collapsing, someone attempting Atlantropa.

That's all for mostly pre-1950 stuff.
 
Bomster

Bomster

I just thought of something, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t die in WW2, and just as his father wanted runs for president in the late 50s or early 60s and wins. Due to his father’s influence (and JPK Sr. and Jr.’s own admiration of Nazi Germany) he is very very conservative, which crippled the Civil Rights Movement and caused it to become violent.
 
Solomi

Solomi

- US government nip the Civil Rights Movement in the bud, goes so far to the right that they are the same as or worse than the Nazis; became a fundamentalist/evangelist Christian regime before ending with the Second American Civil War.
- Morgenthau Plan being put into motion.
- Twilight of the Red Tsar-ish with Second Great Purge, Sino-Soviet War with the USSR going nuclear and eventually obliterate itself in the Second Russian Civil War: Nuclear Boogaloo.
- Israel glassed the Middle East as a result of losing Yom Kippur or later war; utterly obliterate Egypt in the process with Iran still falling to the revolution. Arabs goes full-Holocaust on the surviving Israelis.
- Earlier Arabs refugee crisis cause European nations to become more and more authoritarian; new Cold War between an European coalition headed by France and a new Warsaw Pact that centered around Poland.
- Indo-Pakistan nuclear war devastate the subcontinent with Pakistan, Northern, Western and Central India ceasing to exist.
- South African Civil War being a no holds barred genocidal free-for-all with the government busting out the nukes against the rebels and Zimbabwe.
- Halsey became gaijin shogun instead of McArthur and brutalize Japan, essentially turning it into a US colony before the Americans are kicked out.
- Korean War ended with the US nuking several Chinese cities.
- Indochina War spread to Thailand and Burma.
- No Sukarno, Indonesia and possibly Malaysia turn into OTL Syria right now, possibly worse.
- CPP reformers never came into the spotlight and the Maoist continue to rack up body counts; hardliners nuked Taiwan.
- Large-scale South America war that involve most if not all countries in the continent.
- Africa being Africa

All ideas from a TL I'm currently planning.
 
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