Autumn in America: A TL-191 Continuation

saying "we're sorry" and letting the last few Intractable Rebels who put up enough of a fight to be relocated to a
I even doubt that is the case. Do you think the Soviet Union would one day allow NeoNazi descendants of Volga Germans the rights to open casinos to apologizes for the deportations ? Modern treatment of the Native Americans is partly out of guilt that the Natives are innocents being murdered . Confederates ? Whi are literal genociders ?
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
I disagree. The *USA isn't trying to fight a worldwide influence war with another major power. It's pals with a typical imperialist power of the era that is moving into the global cop role.

The *USA is entirely capable, with sufficient ethnic cleansing, investment, and re-education systems, of occupying, pacifying, and integrating the former CSA. There's no major foreign rival to object on human rights grounds. The Confederates are hated and seen as a violent, hateful, inferior race by the majority of Americans.

IMO, the most likely outcome--assuming that the Confederates stop being amazing supermen who are individually worth ten Americans--is the USA engaging in a brutal 50-year occupation, mass-abducting white Confederate children to re-education schools, flooding the region with American settlers guarded by the US Army, and then 150-200 years down the line, saying "we're sorry" and letting the last few Intractable Rebels who put up enough of a fight to be relocated to a "detention zone" open casinos there.

It's something the US is quite experienced with. Maybe not on this scale, but we've done it plenty of times before. And that was just to people white Americans thought of as "primitives squatting on land we want", not as "the national enemy who are barbaric untrustworthy monsters who will murder us all in our beds if we give those backstabbing treacherous filth so much as an inch of leeway".
What you are describing here isnt what the US government had in mind for the former Confederates in IATD or indeed in any of the post Second Great War fanfiction you find on this board and elsewhere,What was being offered was a very lenient peace all things considered with most if not all Confederate States as full voting US states by the 1970s. But then again if Americans see Confederates as the national enemy who are barbaric untrustworthy monsters who are hated as a violent and inferior race then why would any American want to inject such a population into the US at any time ? Why is trying to make the Confederates Americans the only answer when its one neither they or most Americans want in any way ?
 
I even doubt that is the case. Do you think the Soviet Union would one day allow NeoNazi descendants of Volga Germans the rights to open casinos to apologizes for the deportations ? Modern treatment of the Native Americans is partly out of guilt that the Natives are innocents being murdered . Confederates ? Whi are literal genociders ?
Well, with enough stories of "my grandpa wasn't a Freedomite, and he got sent to a detention region anyway" and "Dad was forced into the Featherson Youth, here's a picture of him literally crying as US soldiers take his child soldier unit into custody after shooting their Party commissar who would've shot them if they ran", that sort of thing, white Confederates who are sufficiently apologetic for the genocide will definitely be able to engender sympathy after a couple of generations.

Still, I don't believe that the CSA can remain independent or return to independence. The US wants that land too much and the Freedomite regime managed to be too evil for a world largely run by unapologetic imperialists.
 
What you are describing here isnt what the US government had in mind for the former Confederates in IATD or indeed in any of the post Second Great War fanfiction you find on this board and elsewhere,What was being offered was a very lenient peace all things considered with most if not all Confederate States as full voting US states by the 1970s. But then again if Americans see Confederates as the national enemy who are barbaric untrustworthy monsters who are hated as a violent and inferior race then why would any American want to inject such a population into the US at any time ? Why is trying to make the Confederates Americans the only answer when its one neither they or most Americans want in any way ?
Yeah, I don't consider Turtledove's Second Great War series to be well-written, well-plotted, or well-thought out, and that extends to his proposed peace treaty, which is NOTHING like what I would expect a USA that had experienced that war and seen the crimes of Featherston's regime (which manages to make Hitler and Pol Pot look rational and competent) to do.

Nor do I care what other TL-191 fanfics around here propose.

The US has throughout its history been perfectly willing to take land populated by "savages", force the "savages" into a little enclave, and then colonize the rest of the stolen land. What I think the USA would do to the Confederates is the same thing, on a larger scale, with more reasons for people who care about human rights to look the other way.

(I mean, it's not like when conquering some Native American polity, the US could theoretically have found legal reason under the Geneva Conventions that didn't exist yet to imprison 10+% of the adult male citizen population of that polity for direct participation in active genocide)
 
I mean, let's be brutally honest here. Having a separate national identity and fighting off the US in a war did diddly-squat for the Lakota in the end. It did diddly-squat for the Haudenosanee. Having a strong separate national identity did diddly-squat for the states that made up Tecumseh's confederacy. It did diddly-squat for the Neshnabe, and it did diddly-squat for the Anishinaabe against the Canadians. It did diddly-squat for the Cherokee, the vast majority of whom now live across the Mississippi and the Appalachians from their homeland (thanks, Genocide Jackson!).

The simple fact of the matter is that without massive internal and international pressure, from states that can actually do significant economic or political damage, a country conquered by a larger country that wants their stuff can do nothing, and a minority group against a regime that wants to commit cultural or actual genocide is doomed.
 
White Confederates are post-war in a WORSE position than their former slaves. They are a hated minority in a country that is not economically reliant on them. Full-on genocide is impractical (there are probably ~20-30 million white Confederates, the US could do that in theory but it would be a logistical nightmare and would require industrialized murder, which would destroy the US's image and piss off the bleeding-hearts who care about such things as basic human rights (a "boarding school" sounds quite nice and you can look away and say that you're sure the government is just uplifting the poor brainwashed former Featherston Youth or whatever, marching them into gas chambers is so in-your-face evil that even the Nazis tried to hide it from their population).), but white Confederates will be very lucky if they're not subject to grandfather clauses and segregated fountains in a century.
 
I disagree. The *USA isn't trying to fight a worldwide influence war with another major power. It's pals with a typical imperialist power of the era that is moving into the global cop role.

The *USA is entirely capable, with sufficient ethnic cleansing, investment, and re-education systems, of occupying, pacifying, and integrating the former CSA. There's no major foreign rival to object on human rights grounds. The Confederates are hated and seen as a violent, hateful, inferior race by the majority of Americans.
Would the Soviets have done the same to Germany had the US not been a rival superpower?

While I don't disagree with a lot of your points when applied to some hypothetical different TL, they quite clearly aren't consistent with the text of TL-191. Americans don't see Confederates as subhuman in the text, at least not to the extent you make out, and there is never any indication that the US is dishonest with its plans for the former CSA in IAtD.

I get that you don't like TL-191 and think its ASB. I respect that view. But I don't think your criticisms really work in this context. Your proposed TL is interesting, and I'd recommend you do something with it (just changing a few names of characters and making it less obviously TL-191 derived would make it an interesting TL in its own right), but if you're going to make points about something that aims to follow TL-191 canon I think you need to work within its assumptions, otherwise you aren't really being fair to the text presented. While I respect that you don't think TL-191 canon is something worth following up on, its the basis on which I'm making this TL and the mod, and its something people are still interested in as a scenario. That's never going to change, and poking holes in the foundation won't impact that.
 
Would the Soviets have done the same to Germany had the US not been a rival superpower?

While I don't disagree with a lot of your points when applied to some hypothetical different TL, they quite clearly aren't consistent with the text of TL-191. Americans don't see Confederates as subhuman in the text, at least not to the extent you make out, and there is never any indication that the US is dishonest with its plans for the former CSA in IAtD.

I get that you don't like TL-191 and think its ASB. I respect that view. But I don't think your criticisms really work in this context. Your proposed TL is interesting, and I'd recommend you do something with it (just changing a few names of characters and making it less obviously TL-191 derived would make it an interesting TL in its own right), but if you're going to make points about something that aims to follow TL-191 canon I think you need to work within its assumptions, otherwise you aren't really being fair to the text presented. While I respect that you don't think TL-191 canon is something worth following up on, its the basis on which I'm making this TL and the mod, and its something people are still interested in as a scenario. That's never going to change, and poking holes in the foundation won't impact that.
I 100% believe they would've ethnically cleansed even more Germans, and Poles for that matter, yes. IOTL the Russians flat-out annexed Koenigsburg, and big chunks of Poland, which entailed massive ethnic cleansing, and moved Poland's borders west in a way that involved more forced resettlement (which the US didn't object to enough to actually stop because nobody wanted to defend Germans after the leader of Germany ordered the murders of 11 million people and caused the deaths of countless more in a war of aggression). The USSR was perfectly happy to force all sorts of minorities inside its official borders to move, too, and that was at the height of the Cold War. Ethnic cleansing is a favorite tactic of imperialists and revanchists since time immemorial, and Stalin was no exception.

As I've established, I think the text is crap and any attempt to move forward has to deal with that in some way. Whether by trying to forge a more realistic aftermath going forwards or just rewriting the text outright is up to the individual.

The problem is that TL-191's assumptions are completely internally inconsistent and serve only to give Turtledove more books to write. The entire thing is just flimsy justifications for Turtledove to fight WW1 and WW2 again in theaters that make no sense for those sorts of wars, and he flat-out changes which country is paralleling which halfway through (remember McSweeney and the Redeemers? The US was obviously supposed to be Germany and the Confederacy some mix of Russia and France, with the Confederacy under a reformer Featherston becoming less racist and awful just in time for a radicalized fascist US to invade).

By TL-191's assumptions:
--The Confederate leaders are A-OK with industrializing, democracy, and freeing their slaves, the former of which is done by getting nebulous loans from the British and presumably offscreen import substitution.
--The Confederacy is able to beat a Prussian-style US army to a standstill and lose only some peripheral territories in *ww1, despite having no local allies with any significant military ability and its major allies being halfway across the world engaged in a major continental war and apparently not suffering any food problems because Turtledove doesn't care that half of the average Briton's calories in 1910 came from the US Great Plains.
--Exact parallels for Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and presumably most of the Nazi big names except Rommel who's American all show up and take over the Confederacy in a beat for beat retelling of the Nazis' rise and the Great Patriotic War.
--The Confederacy is despite vastly inferior numbers somehow more industrialized than the US, or at least can muster a massive tank army and run a genocide on a scale significantly larger in absolute and proportional terms than the Holocaust at the same time despite having no natural industrial region like Germany and the US do.
--The US is even more racist than OTL despite having no reasons to be that way and every reason to be anti-racist for nationalistic and propagandistic purposes.
--At the same time the US is engaged in a nonsensical Iraq War expy in Utah where stereotypical terrorists are messing around, and apparently they are not willing to do to the Mormons what they did to the Native Americans despite having every reason to do so and no reason not to (the Mormons were hated almost as much as Native Americans, them being white means effectively nothing).
--Corollary to the above, apparently the majority of Americans are anti-interventionist liberals, just like they are in Turtledove's Man with the Iron Heart, which is just as silly and just as eye-rolling in its apologia and nonsensicality.

None of this makes any sense whatsoever and it's internally inconsistent to boot.

What I'm saying is that the US absolutely can and will treat the CSA like it did the Lakota and Neshnabe and whatever other people you care to name. Its only serious rival cannot possibly hope to contend against or outproduce even a divided US occupying Canada and the former CSA, and it is allied with the world's only other real superpower. It has no major overseas colonial empire and a large population with a prodigious, even incomparable industrial core. There is no power to support the Confederate version of the Provos (diplomatically or otherwise), and no reason for anyone to sympathize with such an organization since they would immediately be tarred as Featherston sympathizers even if they didn't overtly claim Featherston's Great Man legacy.

The Confederacy is dead, and it would take a miracle for it to be reborn in any form.
 
I 100% believe they would've ethnically cleansed even more Germans, and Poles for that matter, yes. IOTL the Russians flat-out annexed Koenigsburg, and big chunks of Poland, which entailed massive ethnic cleansing, and moved Poland's borders west in a way that involved more forced resettlement (which the US didn't object to enough to actually stop because nobody wanted to defend Germans after the leader of Germany ordered the murders of 11 million people and caused the deaths of countless more in a war of aggression). The USSR was perfectly happy to force all sorts of minorities inside its official borders to move, too, and that was at the height of the Cold War. Ethnic cleansing is a favorite tactic of imperialists and revanchists since time immemorial, and Stalin was no exception.
They may well have extended the policies of OTL further, but I'm quite sceptical of them doing it to the point where Germany no longer exists as a nation, and it certainly wouldn't be done by simply having another country annex Germany.

Again, the Morgenthau Plan provides a template for how that would realistically work. But even something like that seems to be off the table considering what the books explicitly say the US plans to do.
As I've established, I think the text is crap and any attempt to move forward has to deal with that in some way. Whether by trying to forge a more realistic aftermath going forwards or just rewriting the text outright is up to the individual.

The problem is that TL-191's assumptions are completely internally inconsistent and serve only to give Turtledove more books to write. The entire thing is just flimsy justifications for Turtledove to fight WW1 and WW2 again in theaters that make no sense for those sorts of wars, and he flat-out changes which country is paralleling which halfway through (remember McSweeney and the Redeemers? The US was obviously supposed to be Germany and the Confederacy some mix of Russia and France, with the Confederacy under a reformer Featherston becoming less racist and awful just in time for a radicalized fascist US to invade).

By TL-191's assumptions:
--The Confederate leaders are A-OK with industrializing, democracy, and freeing their slaves, the former of which is done by getting nebulous loans from the British and presumably offscreen import substitution.
--The Confederacy is able to beat a Prussian-style US army to a standstill and lose only some peripheral territories in *ww1, despite having no local allies with any significant military ability and its major allies being halfway across the world engaged in a major continental war and apparently not suffering any food problems because Turtledove doesn't care that half of the average Briton's calories in 1910 came from the US Great Plains.
--Exact parallels for Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and presumably most of the Nazi big names except Rommel who's American all show up and take over the Confederacy in a beat for beat retelling of the Nazis' rise and the Great Patriotic War.
--The Confederacy is despite vastly inferior numbers somehow more industrialized than the US, or at least can muster a massive tank army and run a genocide on a scale significantly larger in absolute and proportional terms than the Holocaust at the same time despite having no natural industrial region like Germany and the US do.
--The US is even more racist than OTL despite having no reasons to be that way and every reason to be anti-racist for nationalistic and propagandistic purposes.
--At the same time the US is engaged in a nonsensical Iraq War expy in Utah where stereotypical terrorists are messing around, and apparently they are not willing to do to the Mormons what they did to the Native Americans despite having every reason to do so and no reason not to (the Mormons were hated almost as much as Native Americans, them being white means effectively nothing).
--Corollary to the above, apparently the majority of Americans are anti-interventionist liberals, just like they are in Turtledove's Man with the Iron Heart, which is just as silly and just as eye-rolling in its apologia and nonsensicality.

None of this makes any sense whatsoever and it's internally inconsistent to boot.
Again, you're restating that you don't like TL-191, and giving your reasons for that. While its a valid and interesting argument, it isn't convincing for someone who wants to do a TL-191 continuation. Your proposed solution is fundamentally to simply stop doing TL-191, which isn't on the table for the TL (and mod, for that matter) I want to make.
What I'm saying is that the US absolutely can and will treat the CSA like it did the Lakota and Neshnabe and whatever other people you care to name. Its only serious rival cannot possibly hope to contend against or outproduce even a divided US occupying Canada and the former CSA, and it is allied with the world's only other real superpower. It has no major overseas colonial empire and a large population with a prodigious, even incomparable industrial core. There is no power to support the Confederate version of the Provos (diplomatically or otherwise), and no reason for anyone to sympathize with such an organization since they would immediately be tarred as Featherston sympathizers even if they didn't overtly claim Featherston's Great Man legacy.

The Confederacy is dead, and it would take a miracle for it to be reborn in any form.
I'd make an argument about how IAtD gives no indication that the US intends to do such a thing, but I think you'd just talk more about how IAtD is bad anyways and we'd just make the rounds on this circle again.

You're trying to argue against TL-191 in regards to a TL that relies on it. Its not getting anyone anywhere.
 
They may well have extended the policies of OTL further, but I'm quite sceptical of them doing it to the point where Germany no longer exists as a nation, and it certainly wouldn't be done by simply having another country annex Germany.

Again, the Morgenthau Plan provides a template for how that would realistically work. But even something like that seems to be off the table considering what the books explicitly say the US plans to do.
The Morgenthau plan wasn't about annexing Germany, it was about borderline genocidal (starvation casualties would be in the tens of millions by my extremely rough estimates) revenge. None of it included plans to annex Germany, just to forcibly deindustrialize it and destroy its capacity to ever be a functioning modern country again.

The books' explanation of the USA's plans are laughable, and quite frankly it's entirely possible that the situation will change those plans. Just look at the end of WW2 and the beginning of the Cold War.
Again, you're restating that you don't like TL-191, and giving your reasons for that. While its a valid and interesting argument, it isn't convincing for someone who wants to do a TL-191 continuation. Your proposed solution is fundamentally to simply stop doing TL-191, which isn't on the table for the TL (and mod, for that matter) I want to make.
I'm saying that if you want to do a continuation, you have to acknowledge the fundamental inconsistencies and ASB-ness of the books, and react in some way to that. Continuing with the "anything that lets the South win so there's more to write" theme where Confederates are invincible supermen whose country has unparalleled industry because of a handwave is one option. Rewriting the series from scratch is another. Looking at how the US has handled similar situations in the past is another.
I'd make an argument about how IAtD gives no indication that the US intends to do such a thing, but I think you'd just talk more about how IAtD is bad anyways and we'd just make the rounds on this circle again.

You're trying to argue against TL-191 in regards to a TL that relies on it. Its not getting anyone anywhere.
I'm saying that having the US just let the Confederates go is fundamentally implausible even if you keep the events of TL-191. There simply aren't enough Confederate whites or enough international support (Japanese aren't powerful enough and are too busy with their own issues, Germany has no reason to support Confederate diehards, nobody else is powerful enough to practically impact the situation) or enough domestic dissent to give a theoretical rebel movement sufficient advantages to regain independence. The US has every incentive to literally pack up and move all industrial equipment in the CSA to the USA, forcibly disarm every household in the former CSA, and then start moving around the troublesome ones to ever-crappier "detention zones" while putting their kids in US-run boarding schools/indoctrination camps.

It's something the US has done before, it's something the US knows how to do, and it's something the US has every incentive to do and no reason not to do after their previous exceptional mercy bordering on timidity blew up in their faces in spectacular fashion and got a city nuked.
 
The Morgenthau plan wasn't about annexing Germany, it was about borderline genocidal (starvation casualties would be in the tens of millions by my extremely rough estimates) revenge. None of it included plans to annex Germany, just to forcibly deindustrialize it and destroy its capacity to ever be a functioning modern country again.
Yes that's what I'm saying. I'm saying that if the TL-191 US had decided to keep the CSA as a rump puppet state (as I believe it realistically would have in 1944, as opposed to the actual course it took, due to the impracticality of re-integration) that something like the Morgenthau Plan would be the most radical course of action.
The books' explanation of the USA's plans are laughable, and quite frankly it's entirely possible that the situation will change those plans. Just look at the end of WW2 and the beginning of the Cold War.

I'm saying that if you want to do a continuation, you have to acknowledge the fundamental inconsistencies and ASB-ness of the books, and react in some way to that. Continuing with the "anything that lets the South win so there's more to write" theme where Confederates are invincible supermen whose country has unparalleled industry because of a handwave is one option. Rewriting the series from scratch is another. Looking at how the US has handled similar situations in the past is another.

I'm saying that having the US just let the Confederates go is fundamentally implausible even if you keep the events of TL-191. There simply aren't enough Confederate whites or enough international support (Japanese aren't powerful enough and are too busy with their own issues, Germany has no reason to support Confederate diehards, nobody else is powerful enough to practically impact the situation) or enough domestic dissent to give a theoretical rebel movement sufficient advantages to regain independence. The US has every incentive to literally pack up and move all industrial equipment in the CSA to the USA, forcibly disarm every household in the former CSA, and then start moving around the troublesome ones to ever-crappier "detention zones" while putting their kids in US-run boarding schools/indoctrination camps.

It's something the US has done before, it's something the US knows how to do, and it's something the US has every incentive to do and no reason not to do after their previous exceptional mercy bordering on timidity blew up in their faces in spectacular fashion and got a city nuked.
I'm tired of this discussion at this point. Neither of us is ever going to convince the other, so I'm just going to disengage here.
 
Yes that's what I'm saying. I'm saying that if the TL-191 US had decided to keep the CSA as a rump puppet state (as I believe it realistically would have in 1944, as opposed to the actual course it took, due to the impracticality of re-integration) that something like the Morgenthau Plan would be the most radical course of action.
As I've stated, I don't think re-annexation is at all unrealistic. It'll be brutal and nasty, but it's entirely within the US's capabilities considering the international situation, and it's the logical course of action for the USA to undertake.

The "impracticality" of re-integration argued by yourself and @rvbomally is greatly exaggerated, and relies entirely on the purported specialness of the Confederates, a purported specialness that is frankly not credible. Just having a distinct national identity and fighting off the US in a previous conflict is not enough. The ethnic Confederates need:
  1. Sufficient numbers that the Americans can't just swamp them.
  2. Sufficient foreign diplomatic and covert military support to mount an active resistance to the US government--this requires significant foreign good will and a general positive worldwide opinion of the CSA and Confederates.
  3. Sufficiently powerful foreign backers that the US can't just threaten them with economic or military intervention.
  4. Sufficient American domestic discontent AND domestic belief that it would be better to let the CSA return to some form of independence.
I would consider a minimum of three of the above criteria necessary for successful resistance, all 4 to have a good chance. The CSA has none.

I and others have pointed out how astoundingly unlikely it is that any of the above criteria, let alone all of them, could be met within at least one generation. That's the problem. The USA can ethnically cleanse the CSA to its heart's content, and there is not yet a developed enough international standard of human rights for anyone to care.

(not that those standards have done much IOTL, just look at--to pick a non-current-politics example--the USSR's actions after WW2)
I'm tired of this discussion at this point. Neither of us is ever going to convince the other, so I'm just going to disengage here.
You haven't tried to convince me of anything? You're just moving the goalposts with this Morgenthau Plan tangent, which has nothing to do with my actual point stated above whatsoever, and I've pointed out that your sole actual argument, a criticism by analogy of my analysis of the situation in the post-war former CSA given the international context Turtledove sketches out, is not supported by the historical evidence of the USSR doing exactly what I'm talking about on a similar scale in a far tenser situation, albeit with a "release valve" of just cramming ethnic Germans into East Germany to make room for ethnically cleansed Poles.

I'm not convinced because you have not given a serious argument for why the USA, with tacit support of a superpower ally, a vast numerical advantage, no peer rivals engaged in serious competition with it, and numerous reasons to commit large-scale ethnic cleansing and colonization in the former Confederacy, would not do those things.
 
Honestly, if I did TL-191, I would have had the CSA's industrialization be through unsavory and dark measures which are basically the worst elements of the Gilded Age combined with how Japan brutally and rapidly industrialized Manchukuo, considering that is probably the most realistic way the CSA could be an industrial power of the level it is shown in TL-191.
 

Faeelin

Banned
The second question is easiest to answer. The idea that the CSA is just a more racist version of the USA is, by the end of the series, absurd. It has a clearly distinct culture, (a completely independent film industry, artistic scene, and different musical culture, all of which predate the Freedom Party are evidence enough for that, and seems like far more of a culture than just knock-off soft drinks and Hyperman),

I forget, who made the Southern music culture, as we are told time and time again? Welp, so much for that plan.

Let's look at what Harry himself has to say:

This is a character, not Harry Turtledove. By your logic Turtledove agrees with Featherston? You still haven't really articulated what the southern identity is, beyond music derived from the African American community the whites genocided.

This is an opinion stated in a high school civics class, by a character unambiguously presented as correct. . . . This is such a simple and obvious critique of the Union's plan that its on the Wikipedia article for the series;

Is the reviewer part of the book? "Look, I read a review which is cited on wikipedia!" is not compelling. You want to tell the story of how the Freedomites win, and get their racially pure state. That's fine! But I am also fine calling out what it is.

I will also note that your quote is factually wrong (the Mormons are ethnically cleansed from Utah). So not sure why you are saying "Look, this incorrect source agrees with me."



Any hypothetical concerns about a puppet Confederacy getting superbombs or demanding back Tennessee are about as irrelevant as Soviet concerns that East Germany might try to re-invade the USSR, or develop nuclear weapons, or any other ludicrous proposition.

If you think this was a "ludicrous" concern, then I simply don't think you've done enough reading about the Cold War period, or even German reunification. It's no secret that Thatcher was worried about it, for instance. And the British faced a less existential struggle than America did!

As for the first, Faeelin again misses the point when I bring up the fact that there are plenty of parallelisms to the Eastern Front. The fact that the pre-war political situation is more similar to that of the Western allies is irrelevant, because the parallelisms are not the point in and of themselves. They exist to serve Turtledove's overarching message; A North America divided in this way would be just as violent and unhappy as the rest of the world.

Note that a Confederacy with systemic ethnic cleansing of the Confederates would, in fact, be as violent and unhappy as Eastern Europe! The Warsaw Bloc was not a nice place to live, anymore than the ex-Baltic states.

This conversation is getting quite tiring at this point, and extended forum posts aren't exactly my favoured medium of discussion, so I'm not likely to make any more statements about my position here. If anyone wants to talk more about it, I'd much prefer to do it in the fan-content or book-talk channels of the SV mod discord.

I'll check back in when you get your next update out, cheers.

It's something the US is quite experienced with. Maybe not on this scale, but we've done it plenty of times before. And that was just to people white Americans thought of as "primitives squatting on land we want", not as "the national enemy who are barbaric untrustworthy monsters who will murder us all in our beds if we give those backstabbing treacherous filth so much as an inch of leeway".

You know, this is persuasive to me. You're right.


but if you're going to make points about something that aims to follow TL-191 canon I think you need to work within its assumptions, otherwise you aren't really being fair to the text presented.
Your interpretation of "canon" is that Potter (who thinks resistance won't work), Flora, and and the US president are crazy because of a US high school teacher before the Second Great War.

It's something the US has done before, it's something the US knows how to do, and it's something the US has every incentive to do and no reason not to do after their previous exceptional mercy bordering on timidity blew up in their faces in spectacular fashion and got a city nuked.
You've persuaded me, thanks.[/quote]
 
I forget, who made the Southern music culture, as we are told time and time again? Welp, so much for that plan.
Yes, it’s stolen. It’s still part of an independent southern culture. It’s also exactly one of three examples of Confederate cultural differenc that I brought up.
This is a character, not Harry Turtledove. By your logic Turtledove agrees with Featherston? You still haven't really articulated what the southern identity is, beyond music derived from the African American community the whites genocided.
Funny quirk of writers, they say things through characters. The character in the chapter is presented as smarter and more correct than everyone else around him, his analysis is presented as correct, and the experience of hearing the analysis is presented as extremely insightful to the viewpoint character, but given some other assumptions you make about the passage it’s clear to me you haven’t taken the time to find and read through it fully.

Featherston is presented rather differently, being a Hitler analogue and all. We aren’t meant to agree with him. We are meant to agree with the person in the classroom.
Is the reviewer part of the book? "Look, I read a review which is cited on wikipedia!" is not compelling.
I brought it up as an example of how obvious it was, I have my own arguments as to how correct it was.
You want to tell the story of how the Freedomites win, and get their racially pure state. That's fine! But I am also fine calling out what it is.
How do you know what I intend for the CSA to look like internally? For all you know I could end up writing it as a bombed out shithole rife with turmoil, still not recovered from disastrous wars and conflicts. rvbomally certainly doesn’t shy away from that in YS.
If you think this was a "ludicrous" concern, then I simply don't think you've done enough reading about the Cold War period, or even German reunification. It's no secret that Thatcher was worried about it, for instance. And the British faced a less existential struggle than America did!
Yes, there were concerns that Germany would exceed its bounds when restrictions were lifted. Did this prevent the establishment of the DDR and BRD in the first place?
Note that a Confederacy with systemic ethnic cleansing of the Confederates would, in fact, be as violent and unhappy as Eastern Europe! The Warsaw Bloc was not a nice place to live, anymore than the ex-Baltic states.
And the Union?
I'll check back in when you get your next update out, cheers.
Alrighty then, see ya.
Your interpretation of "canon" is that Potter (who thinks resistance won't work), Flora, and and the US president are crazy because of a US high school teacher before the Second Great War.
And this is the part that tells me you haven’t read the passage I quoted. A student is written to correctly assert to his teacher that Kentuckians want to be part of the CSA because they are part of a different nation. Ergo, in the Southern Victory novels, the South constitutes a separate nation.

What Potter, Flora, La Follette, and Dewey think doesn’t change that fact. Potter believes that military resistance won’t work, but leaves open the possibility that “Maybe things will change later on.” Truman states outright that “If we do this wrong, our grandchildren will be down here fighting guerillas.” and “I don’t know” in response to being asked about whether the US can succeed in re-integration. They can be right or wrong without contradicting the text. The ending tonally leaves open the possibility of success or failure, but the books are always clear that the South is a nation. Reasoning brings me to believe that due to the canonical fact that the South is a nation, that it cannot be reconciled to being a part of the Northern nation-state, and that re-integration will fail in some way as a result.

I choose creatively to have it fail spectacularly, which I acknowledge is neither the most realistic nor only way for events to unfold, instead being in my view the most thematically appropriate.
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
Yes, it’s stolen. It’s still part of an independent southern culture. It’s also exactly one of three examples of Confederate cultural differenc that I brought up.



Alrighty then, see ya.

And this is the part that tells me you haven’t read the passage I quoted. A student is written to correctly assert to his teacher that Kentuckians want to be part of the CSA because they are part of a different nation. Ergo, in the Southern Victory novels, the South constitutes a separate nation.

What Potter, Flora, La Follette, and Dewey think doesn’t change that fact. Potter believes that military resistance won’t work, but leaves open the possibility that “Maybe things will change later on.” Truman states outright that “If we do this wrong, our grandchildren will be down here fighting guerillas.” and “I don’t know” in response to being asked about whether the US can succeed in re-integration. They can be right or wrong without contradicting the text. The ending tonally leaves open the possibility of success or failure, but the books are always clear that the South is a nation. Reasoning brings me to believe that due to the canonical fact that the South is a nation, that it cannot be reconciled to being a part of the Northern nation-state, and that re-integration will fail in some way as a result.

I choose creatively to have it fail spectacularly, which I acknowledge is neither the most realistic nor only way for events to unfold, instead being in my view the most thematically appropriate.
This right here is the heart of the matter that those who for whatever reasons insist on the US successfully reintegrating the CSA cant or wont acknowledge.HT apparently respects the intelligence of his readers enough to allow them to decide for themselves wether or not it all works out.There are clearly reasons to think it will and lots of reasons to think it wont.
As far as a Morgenthau type plan for the CSA there is a very good chance that the USA would institute such a plan because it checks all the boxes.It cripples the CSA,it punishes the CSA and it doesnt reward the CSA by taking it back in with all the attendant benefits or potentially damage the USA by changing its body politic and culture by reintegrating the CSA.The idea that after the Second Great War and all the history since 1862 that the USA and CSA would have the same mindset as the USA and CSA did in OTL 1865 is pretty ridiculous..Its a fair argument that in OTL both the CSA and Germany lost the war but won the peace. Why are some so intent on recreating that less than ideal outcome in TL-191 ?
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
Honestly, if I did TL-191, I would have had the CSA's industrialization be through unsavory and dark measures which are basically the worst elements of the Gilded Age combined with how Japan brutally and rapidly industrialized Manchukuo, considering that is probably the most realistic way the CSA could be an industrial power of the level it is shown in TL-191.
Perhaps thats how it happened there is no reason to think it didnt just because its not explicitly stated.
 
This right here is the heart of the matter that those who for whatever reasons insist on the US successfully reintegrating the CSA cant or wont acknowledge.HT apparently respects the intelligence of his readers enough to allow them to decide for themselves wether or not it all works out.There are clearly reasons to think it will and lots of reasons to think it wont.
As far as a Morgenthau type plan for the CSA there is a very good chance that the USA would institute such a plan because it checks all the boxes.It cripples the CSA,it punishes the CSA and it doesnt reward the CSA by taking it back in with all the attendant benefits or potentially damage the USA by changing its body politic and culture by reintegrating the CSA.The idea that after the Second Great War and all the history since 1862 that the USA and CSA would have the same mindset as the USA and CSA did in OTL 1865 is pretty ridiculous..Its a fair argument that in OTL both the CSA and Germany lost the war but won the peace. Why are some so intent on recreating that less than ideal outcome in TL-191 ?
Are you seriously implying that the Morgenthau Plan would have been an "ideal outcome"???

Also, HOW did Nazi Germany "win the peace"? Modern Germany is so anti-Nazi it's not even funny, and association with Nazi symbols and ideology is such an instant death sentence for the political fortunes of anyone in the former Allied majors that all but the most crazy fringe far-right groups go to comical lengths to distance themselves from the Nazis in public. Everything to do with the Nazis is so toxic that baselessly calling political opponents Nazis is a common political slur across the Western political spectrum.
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
Are you seriously implying that the Morgenthau Plan would have been an "ideal outcome"???

Also, HOW did Nazi Germany "win the peace"? Modern Germany is so anti-Nazi it's not even funny, and association with Nazi symbols and ideology is such an instant death sentence for the political fortunes of anyone in the former Allied majors that all but the most crazy fringe far-right groups go to comical lengths to distance themselves from the Nazis in public. Everything to do with the Nazis is so toxic that baselessly calling political opponents Nazis is a common political slur across the Western political spectrum.
And despite all of that some of the Nazis basic goals like riding Europe of Jews,Roma and other "undesirables" were largely met as was the Confederate goal to rid the CSA of blacks.Does the USA want that mentality injected into its body politic and culture?
No im not implying that the Morgenthau Plan would be the ideal outcome but I am implying that in the US of TL191 its very possible it would have been seen that way because it cripples and punishes the CSA and doesnt reward them or risk altering the USA for the worse by bringing them back in largely as is.People in TL191 wether American or Confederate dont see things the way we do.
 
And despite all of that some of the Nazis basic goals like riding Europe of Jews,Roma and other "undesirables" were largely met as was the Confederate goal to rid the CSA of blacks.Does the USA want that mentality injected into its body politic and culture?
Well. Ask some Germans from after they got guided tours of the death camps how they feel about Dear Leader now that they know what they did.

And it's not like the USA is necessarily going to let Confederates vote. Blacks and American colonists? Yeah. White Confederates? If they pass loyalty tests and swear loyalty oaths, maybe in small numbers.
 
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