Rambam23
Banned
I agree, SARS was not virulent enough to overcome the robust public health systems in place. Maybe if China were way worse off in this timeline
Rosenberg's Reich: The Myth of The Twentieth Century
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I have to agree with this. 70,000 would be a more plausible number.
Unless the entire world's sanitary conditions and healthcare systems are like OTL Sub-Saharan Africa.
Even in that case, 70 million is still too high a number, both in plausibility and imagination. More like 7 million if this all went to shit.
Note that OTL, only 39 million people died of AIDS over the years since its discovery. 70 million in the span of... a year or two? Unimaginable.
Given the speed that people travel today an airborne pandemic ( with secondary animal carriers ) with a reasonable incubation time could infect most of the major cities of the world before its seen as more than a seasonal flu. If enough people are infected to overwhelm medical facilities then the effect becomes exponentially worse.
Something as deadly as Spanish Flu ( which turned the immune system on itself so affecting the most healthy worse ) coupled with the knock on effects of a global economy crashing as long distance travel is stopped could easily hit 70 million dead ( including secondaries such as lack of medical care/aid for other conditions )
No, numbers are ok...if they include not only the one killed directely by the disease (probably around 10 to 30%) but also the one dead due to the collapse of the health system and food distribution (the rest)
Now if the Indian Subcontinent is worst hit, instead of Southern China as OTL, I'd say no more than 20 million directly, and another 40 to 60 million indirectly (Bangladesh is seriously fucked here due to its population density, as would India due to open defecation).
Hey guys, I've another timeline if you'd like to check it out: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/i-remember-a-place-called-hope-a-90s-timeline.466326/
The Weird Fall of the Kennedys
“One might think it rather cocky for organized crime to go after political targets, even decades after Al Capone’s criminal empire became responsible for the death of Senator Charles S. Deneen. Perhaps arrogance was just in the DNA of the New England mafia. Former Massachusetts Attorney General Francis E. Kelly was running for the governorship on a good old fashion Bostonian tough-on-crime platform. Patriarch of the Patriarca crime family, Raymond L. S. Patriarca, had his tentacles deep in Boston and Providence’s underground, and Kelly was an incorruptible figure who had to go disappear. Long before primary season officially began, he went missing though not for very long. Once the body was found, it took shockingly little time for Patriarca to be connected.
“Here’s where the story gets messier. Kelly’s rival in the gubernatorial race was none other than Congressman John F. Kennedy. And the investigators, many of them Kelly’s close allies, found that Kennedy had ties to the Patriarca Family, who had “aided” in helping him win his congressional races. Overnight, newspaper headlines across the Pilgrim State went nearly berserk in coverage of the story. “CROOKED KENNEDY! DID CONGRESSMAN CALL A HIT?” was plastered front page in every Boston newsstand. Patriarca personally denied it, claiming it was personally between him and Kelly, yet the majority remained skeptical, why after all go to all the trouble now rather than when Kelly was the AG?
“While there was no smoking gun to link him, Kennedy was eventually forced to resign from both the race and his congressional seat due to the rumors, especially under the pressure of the no-nonsense President Kefauver. A third candidate in the primary, Endicott Peabody, later won the nomination in a landslide. The family name was destroyed, later attempts by John’s brothers to enter politics floundered pathetically. While Kennedy was never charged, and indeed research for this book has shown he cannot be pegged as guilty, the infamy of his connections to the Boston Mafia stir the imagination with the picture of the ultimate corrupt politician. Even today “Kennedy Assassin Conspiracy Theorists” maintain that one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party did indeed call a hit on a political rival…”
-Excerpt from A Brief History of Organized Crime in New England
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Thurmond and Saddam
Pretty sure this is the 100th update! Thanks for sticking around!
“Throughout the deep South, the unfortunate truth of racial violence, still in living memory is constantly suppressed. In the whitewashing of the Civil Rights movement, it may be easy to forget that opposition to desegregation was often more violent than asking people to not sit in certain bus seats. Sometimes segregationists acted with truly tragic consequences.
Strom Thurmond was one such man. A farmer, he held onto many populist Negrophobic attitudes common of his era and race, especially in the South where the scars of slavery had never healed. The increased integration of African-Americans in everyday life. A wave was coming and Thurmond would rather drown than learn how to swim.
“In June 1957, Thurmond would commit one of the more infamous acts of Southern terrorism. Targeting a Columbia, South Carolina church, he planted a bomb. Upon a tranquil Sunday morning, it exposed killing two and injuring dozens more. Photograph of the violence stunned those who saw them, but the corrupt and white supremacist police department did nearly nothing in the investigation, much to the outcry of the NAACP. It was not until the 70s that Thurmond faced judgment when a new state attorney general reopened the case. Found guilty by a mixed-race jury, he was sentenced to death, dying via lethal injection in 1985.”
-Excerpt from the documentary To Our Last Breath
“ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON KING GHAZI STOPPED IN IRAQ” -New York Times, 1959
“Saddam Hussein, a young and rouge member of the Iraqi army, said that he targeted the King because of the Ghazi’s oppression of progressive Pan-Arabists in favor of a more conservative and monarchical nationalism. Indeed, the Iraq military was more stacking towards loyalists to the throne by the day. But fate was not upon the side of Saddam Hussein when he fired his bullets, the King was not even injured; the attacker quickly executed in prison.
“Meanwhile the relations between Ghazi and Jordan’s sovereign, Hussein bin Talal, had warmed greatly to the extent that two Hashemite kingdoms, united as one in the goal of pans-Arabism.
“To the east, however, the growing movement of Iranian irredentism would be a problem, to say the least…”
-Excerpt from The Birth of The Modern Arab World
The expanded Arab Federation
“Cuomo, Mario (1932-2015). Outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1954-1975. Teammate of two World Series winning seasons. Mario Cuomo was born in Queens, New York to Italian immigrants. At age 6, he…”
-Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of American Baseball
“Throughout the deep South, the unfortunate truth of racial violence, still in living memory is constantly suppressed. In the whitewashing of the Civil Rights movement, it may be easy to forget that opposition to desegregation was often more violent than asking people to not sit in certain bus seats. Sometimes segregationists acted with truly tragic consequences.
Strom Thurmond was one such man. A farmer, he held onto many populist Negrophobic attitudes common of his era and race, especially in the South where the scars of slavery had never healed. The increased integration of African-Americans in everyday life. A wave was coming and Thurmond would rather drown than learn how to swim.
“In June 1957, Thurmond would commit one of the more infamous acts of Southern terrorism. Targeting a Columbia, South Carolina church, he planted a bomb. Upon a tranquil Sunday morning, it exposed killing two and injuring dozens more. Photograph of the violence stunned those who saw them, but the corrupt and white supremacist police department did nearly nothing in the investigation, much to the outcry of the NAACP. It was not until the 70s that Thurmond faced judgment when a new state attorney general reopened the case. Found guilty by a mixed-race jury, he was sentenced to death, dying via lethal injection in 1985.”
-Excerpt from the documentary To Our Last Breath
“ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON KING GHAZI STOPPED IN IRAQ” -New York Times, 1959
“Saddam Hussein, a young and rouge member of the Iraqi army, said that he targeted the King because of the Ghazi’s oppression of progressive Pan-Arabists in favor of a more conservative and monarchical nationalism. Indeed, the Iraq military was more stacking towards loyalists to the throne by the day. But fate was not upon the side of Saddam Hussein when he fired his bullets, the King was not even injured; the attacker quickly executed in prison.
“Meanwhile the relations between Ghazi and Jordan’s sovereign, Hussein bin Talal, had warmed greatly to the extent that two Hashemite kingdoms, united as one in the goal of pans-Arabism.
“To the east, however, the growing movement of Iranian irredentism would be a problem, to say the least…”
-Excerpt from The Birth of The Modern Arab World
The expanded Arab Federation
“Cuomo, Mario (1932-2015). Outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1954-1975. Teammate of two World Series winning seasons. Mario Cuomo was born in Queens, New York to Italian immigrants. At age 6, he…”
-Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of American Baseball
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stirlingdraka
Donor
Both Strom Thurmond and Saddam Hussain dead. Yes! This is a better TL. Shame that Strom killed two innocent people at Church though.
The Astronomer Dreams Alone
A rather sad update, especially for me:
“The loss of German rocket science in the final days of the Second World War was a tragedy. Himmler’s paranoia that German science was full of spies with loyalties to communists, Jews, or Americans, lead to many prominent aerospace researchers being killed. Perhaps you’ve heard of the tragic trial and death of Wernher von Braun, who committed no crime what so ever. Of course, there were hundreds of others who shared his fate. Himmler’s ordering of a purge of academics, in the goal of crippling international knowledge, saw untold information squashed. Though it is perhaps hard to imagine America being so chummy with German scientists who hypothetically lived.
“During the 1950s and 60s, some Americans gave a push for space exploration, to almost no success. President Kefauver was notoriously apathetic to the notion, stating that ‘I just don’t understand this Flash Gordon stuff’. Many thought it a pipe dream. Thus, he never went through the formation of the proposed “NASA”. Senator Kennedy’s, one of the most vocal proponents, fall also hurt the movement. The anti-nuclear movement of the 1960s additionally feared the “weaponization of space”. Most importantly the sluggish progress and public failures of the Soviets in their own space program also deterred Americans. There was no rush to send the stars and stripes into the vacuum above us.
“Now we’ve had artificial satellites, even humans sent into space. But the dream of walking on the moon? Everybody on earth can sadly state the fact that a human being has never yet stepped foot upon that great big rock in the sky.”
-Lecture given by Engineering Professor Neil Armstrong, 2006
“The loss of German rocket science in the final days of the Second World War was a tragedy. Himmler’s paranoia that German science was full of spies with loyalties to communists, Jews, or Americans, lead to many prominent aerospace researchers being killed. Perhaps you’ve heard of the tragic trial and death of Wernher von Braun, who committed no crime what so ever. Of course, there were hundreds of others who shared his fate. Himmler’s ordering of a purge of academics, in the goal of crippling international knowledge, saw untold information squashed. Though it is perhaps hard to imagine America being so chummy with German scientists who hypothetically lived.
“During the 1950s and 60s, some Americans gave a push for space exploration, to almost no success. President Kefauver was notoriously apathetic to the notion, stating that ‘I just don’t understand this Flash Gordon stuff’. Many thought it a pipe dream. Thus, he never went through the formation of the proposed “NASA”. Senator Kennedy’s, one of the most vocal proponents, fall also hurt the movement. The anti-nuclear movement of the 1960s additionally feared the “weaponization of space”. Most importantly the sluggish progress and public failures of the Soviets in their own space program also deterred Americans. There was no rush to send the stars and stripes into the vacuum above us.
“Now we’ve had artificial satellites, even humans sent into space. But the dream of walking on the moon? Everybody on earth can sadly state the fact that a human being has never yet stepped foot upon that great big rock in the sky.”
-Lecture given by Engineering Professor Neil Armstrong, 2006
stirlingdraka
Donor
That is a very sad update. But one day in that TL someone will walk on the Moon.
Saloth Sâr
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“Today in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, controversial religious leader Saloth Sâr died of a heart attack. The monk, a prominent leader in the country’s Theravada Buddhism community, will receive his death rites tomorrow, it is believed that after that he shall be “reborn”, as per his culture’s theology. Sâr drew both praise and criticism, mostly from fellow followers of the ways of Theravada, with his fiery political rhetoric that praised religious Khmer nationalism. This was to the expense of Cambodia’s often discriminated against religious and ethnic minority groups, such as the Muslim population. Critics especially point out that not only did violent speeches by Sâr seem to go against the teachings of the Buddha, but that they contributed to a hostile and cutthroat environment for non-Khmers…”
-Excerpt from a 1999 Asian Times article [1]
[1] A longer war in Europe means that Saloth Sâr doesn’t study aboard in Paris. Therefore, he never adopts Marxist thought or changes his name to Pol Pot. He still wants to see the Vietnamese wiped off the face of the earth, though.
Okay, retconed to a most plausible 12 million, killing about 2% of the population in affected areas. Not enough for societal collapse, but still hell for Asia.
Post-war Europe circa 1953:
The major differences to our 1950s are:
No break-up of Germany into West and East as, upon the insistence of Stassen, Attlee and de Gaulle, the Western Allies would occupy the entirety of the reconstruction zone. Moscow's use of biological weapons had raised grave concerns in the west of Soviets potentially committing war crimes against German Civilians in occupied territory, though the Soviets would keep control of all land the Slavs had won back over Germany before Berlin's surrender.
Italy is neutral and continues to be under fascist rule, as does Albania.
Yugoslavia has warmer relations to the Soviet Union, despite the differences in ideology between Tito and Molotov, and is considered a major European ally to the Soviets.
Portugal is neutral.
Finland is under control of the communists as the Soviets won the Winter War.
Sweden is an ally of the West rather than being neutral. This is because it shares a large oceanic border with a Soviet ally.
Is there a reason why the Soviet partition of Germany still occurred here? Why no Eastern Germany out of the OTL territories given to Poland (and Kaliningrad)?
Who was the first astronaut ITTL and how good is the space program? What country is closest to landing a man on the moon in the "present day"?