First of all i want to apologise to
@TastySpam . Your timeline didn't deserve all this drama and all the attention should be focused on its developing.
I read FoM to start to finish, often posting comments on it. I should have posted my criticism there but i was afraid to start needless drama so i stayed quiet. My stupidity however is causing needless drama on another timeline that didn't deserve it.
But i have to say this for myself and to quite literally sleep well at night
Oh no, i am sure you didn’t realise the unfortunate implications that a reader can found in your handling of decolonisation and fascism but unfortunately there are quite a few of them.
For example the Congo. You pointed this out as one of the examples that your timeline does not glorify colonial empires. Except that the Congo in FoM didn't collapse because of the Belgians, did it? He collapsed because you made Patrice Lumumba a Marxist. You obviously didn’t bother to explain why Lumumba in your timeline is willing to embrace communism, even though in real life he never showed any particular sympathy for the Soviet Union and that in FoM the Soviet Union has lost all legitimacy and already has abandoned its allies in the past.
Of course this is problematic enough when you consider that in real life Lumumba was literally cut into small pieces as the US was concerned that he was secretly a Communist. In FoM it almost seems to confirm that they were right to commit such a crime, that if Patrice Lumumba had lived the shadow of the Kremlin would have extended to the center of Africa.
There is also the problem of how you solved the Congo crisis: it was not solved by the Congolese but by the intervention of France through one of its puppets .. I mean allies.
So the Congo crisis in FoM was caused by the vilification of one of the best known victims of the Cold War paranoia and solved by the intervention of a European power that restored peace to a nation at war and heroically placed said country under its protective wing.
But hey Lumumba isn't the only one to have suffered a similar fate in FoM.
After all, what you wrote about Rhodesia is another glaring problem with your timeline. You see, unlike Ian Paisley, Ian Smith, he never repented for what he did, did he? Even in his final days he has always maintained that the defense of his eighteenth-century racial ideas was more than enough to justify all the chaos, death and violence that occurred under his rule.
In FoM, however, this man is suddenly sane, presented as a reasonable authority figure who obviously hopes to find a peaceful solution with the rebels.
Meanwhile Mugabe is the same asshole as OTL and all the other rebels who in OTL opposed him and his policies are either dead, inexistent or completely willing to collaborate with Ian Smith to create a better future.
But hey the way you talked about it at least the Europeans suffered severe repercussions for their actions right? Except it didn't happen.
I still remember discussions of how De Gaulle's decision to use an atomic bomb against the FNL would have probably made the war in Algeria even more brutal, but in the end there was no consequence.
As in Vietnam, France simply killed a few individuals in particular and suddenly the war was won, with all the other resistance groups completely disappearing.
And what about Africa under fascist rule? Libya and Morocco are perfectly integrated with no protests and resistance with almost no explanation outside of "Rome and Madrid send more and more of their citizens to live in colonies" and "the natives are treated with respect" (forget the fact that historically this would have been contrary to the founding principles of Italy and Spain's governments) and only Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia were in a worse situation than OTL because of the Roman Alliance. In fact, Ethiopia is the only one of these examples to achieve independence and the only country in all of Africa whose independence leaders were not vilified or non-existent.
Seriously if one looks at the map of Africa at the end of FoM he will notice that more or less 75% of the continent is still one way or another under European control (with most of these territories not even considering the idea of pursuing indipendence after WW2 for fearr of a fascist invasion) and that these parts of the continent are presented as the most developed.
The message seems to be more "Africans need European help to have a stable society" than "Africans can achieve greatness independently".
Oh by the way the part about Libya? I wasn't exaggerating, Mussolini was a white supremacist whose views wouldn't have been out of place at a KKK rally or on the Stormfront website. As early as 1921 he had been advocating theories of "white genocide", arguing that blacks were in the process of overtaking the number of whites through the large number of their births. His position regarding the natives of the colonies? He promoted a series of racial discrimination laws considered extremely severe even for the other European colonial powers. He literally freacked out and wrote a telegram of protest after reading a report of a non-commissioned officer playing cards with a native Eritrean.
But of course I imagine a counter-argument could be that somehow the fact that having his life saved by a fictional character may have persuaded Mussolini to abandon his racist and anti-Semitic positions (in 1919 he blamed the Jews for the Russian revolution), right? Except that this doesn’t explain why suddenly all the other colonial powers are doing the same
Of course , but it is difficult not to notice that all the historical leaders who could endanger European domination in Africa are the ones continually and constantly vilified or more simply don't exist in the timeline.
Oh, I really believe it. This is why I am surprised at how you managed to glorify fascism without realizing it.
You will obviously wonder how you did such a thing, pointing to the war crimes committed during FoM's Ethiopian War as clear evidence that this is not the case.
But the problem is, you washed away the worst aspect of fascism to tell your story.
You see the problem with your interpretation of Benito Mussolini is that he has little or nothing in common with the man who led my country in some of the most disastrous militant defeats in our history.
You know what the problem is with using massive doses of Historical Hero Upgrade with the founder of fascism? That fascism itself receives such massive doses.
You didn’t just give us a more heroic portrait of Mussolini and half of Europe's dictators of the time but also of the Fascist ideology itself.
You didn't just created a more heroic version of that wretched bald asshole who brought my country to ruin, but of all of his ideology. Suddenly, when Mussolini develops a coscience, the same happens with fascism. Suddenly this ideology shifts from the constant search for another to hate, to the sudden need to protect of Jews and other minorities. Now it would not be a problem if you did it only with Mussolini, but you did it with all the dictators allied to him, including Franco who IRL was ready to compile lists with the names of Spanish Jews to be delivered to Hitler. Suddenly all these people acquire an intense desire to protect a group particularly dear to Mussolini, even if ia lot of them in real life they were fervent anti-Semites.
You have not simply made Italy, Spain or Bulgaria more competent than OTL, but fascism itself. The economic ruin, the military disasters caused by the paranoia of the dictators towards their armies, the stagnation of cultural life caused by fascism are almost completely ignored if not for a brief mention. Suddenly, together with morality, fascism found competence. I don't think you understood the gravity of this while you were writing FoM. You probably just wanted to have a more competent Italy than usual but at the same time you also introduced the idea that fascism can work, maybe with some obstacles but it can still work.
You made sure that all of Mussolini's plans were a complete success from his military adventures to his diplomatic projects, you made sure that fascist Italy was able to develop atomic bombs and even get to the moon, without suffering from the problems and failures that plagued the USSR in OTL. You made fascism an acceptable ideology by repeatedly testifying that FoM is not treated with the same level of disgust as OTL.
All the incompetence, the corruption that afflicted Mussolini's reign here are non-existent. They certainly made themselves heard at the end of your timeline ... some thirty years after the POD.
You managed to glorify fascism without realizing it, simply by making it survive and thrive for so long.
I don't expect you to understand. I don't think it's easy to imagine the ridicule and madness that Mussolini's regime managed to achieve in our timeline long before the start of WW2. But you still ignored that incompetence or at least significantly downplayed it to tell your story.
A story about the darkest period of my country, about a small and selfish dictator whose thirst for power even led him to kill his wife and son that completely ignores what fascism has represented and still represents for some, including me. You basically turned Mussolini in a man he couldn’t and didn’t want to be for a literary exercise
I am not angry with you nor do I accuse you of having fascist sympathies (maybe monarchist sympathies are more likely) but God I am happy not to live in FoM.
Dude, i should have told you the first time you used it. This is not evidence nor it is an article about Henry Wallace. It is quite iterally a very poor defence of Trump's actions regarding his deals with Russia, entirely based on Whataboutism.
We have far more researched and well written articles about Henry Wallace and a quite a few members of this site are experts or at least know a lot about him and his actions during the 1948 elections.
All of them tend to paint a very different portrayal of the man.
I also wish to point out that seeing that your timeline has basically the Republicans becoming the only party in the US and another series of plot-points (namely Churcill being able to win the 1945 elections thanks to a speech against the USSR, the number of times a monarchy is brought back or saved from its OTL end and you very much insisting that there are no political bias in FoM's take on Wallace) that seem to suggest there are a ot of political bias in your portrayal of the man. I mean political bias are very normal but i think you are the very first one who has his target's dead body being destroyed and dispersed in a river.
I know this last part may be rude and/or less articulate than the other two but i am tired and honestly i have been keeping my opinion about your source regarding Wallace for a long time.
BTW i wasn't lying. FoM is very well written, but it troubes me on multiple levels.
I am going to bed now
Also again i apologise to those (especially the author) who have to deal with me diverging the attention from a beautiful timeline like The North Star just to deal with something i should have done a long time ago.