He'd be analogue at most since his parents moved from South Dakota to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas shortly before his birth, so that move won't happen ITTL. Ultimately it's up to David to decide what happens to him, but this the best that can speculated.
TL-191: After the End
- Thread starter David bar Elias
- Start date
Lloyd Bentsen doesn’t exist in TTL. An analogue to the Bentsen family still lives in Dakota by 2022.
Most airports in the Ecological Union were ultimately abandoned, when they weren’t repurposed for agricultural purposes.
On the various notes here, does the Ecological Union basically operate on a modern-day policy of sakoku (isolation)? Did the JWR have that policy as well?
Damn, I guess that leads me to wonder how the Russians feel/deal with that nowadays, and if it still has a significant Jewish population. Who else would the Tsarist regime deem undesirable?
I also wonder how the Russians view their status as being the first country to be hit with a superbomb compared to the other Entente nations (I recall it being said that Britain and France have a similar attitude towards superbombs as Japan does towards atomics IOTL)
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I’m writing with the caveat that the fates of Burton Mitchel III and Ainsworth Layne are not necessarily what Turtledove envisioned for the series, but is the case in TTL. My reply will be divided into more than one part.
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Burton Mitchel III was arrested on orders passed down from the Confederate States Justice Department in 1937, as part of a general crackdown by the Freedom Party on its real and imagined political enemies following the assassination of Huey Long. Mitchel, after three years in prison, was shipped to a forced labor camp in Louisiana. He died in 1941, from health-related problems.
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Ainsworth Layne had faded into political obscurity by the time that Jake Featherston cane to power. Unfortunately for Layne, Featherston had not forgotten about him from the 1921 election. Layne was arrested in 1935 on false charges of treason. Historians would later discover that much of the evidence used to convict Layne had been fabricated. He was executed in early 1936.
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Ramsay MacDonald led the Labour Party to victory in the elections of 1927, following the social and economic turbulence that had marked Britain since the end of the First Great War, and during the proceeding government of Stanley Baldwin in particular. MacDonald initially benefited from the stabilized economic conditions of the late 1920s, only to be confronted by the Business Collapse in 1931. MacDonald went down in defeat in the elections of 1932 to the Conservative-Silver Shirt Coalition led by Winston Churchill and Oswald Mosley.
MacDonald was one of the first high-profile political arrests made under the Coalition regime. MacDonald was falsely accused of playing a key role in plotting the 1925 General Strike. MacDonald’s health deteriorated rapidly in prison. He died in 1934 while still in custody.
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The Tsarists would no doubt target their political opponents not in line with them as undesirables. They'd also target people like ethnic Germans, ethnic Finns, pro-CP Ukrainians/nationalists, Chechens, Circassians again, Tatars, practically any ethnic minority they suspect of a potential fifth column/being allied with their enemies.
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I’m surprised that Featherston waited so long to settle scores with President Mitchel - who seems to have been a key factor in propping up the Whig regime and keeping the Freedom Party down prior to the Great Depression (Perhaps Featherston was grateful he set the precedent for a CS President serving more than one term? HA! Trick question, The Snake is never grateful).
Given that the Freedom Party was almost certainly the reason Ainsworth Layne did not win the election of 1921 (With the Whigs being near enough no-hopers after the humiliations of the Great War) and given Layne was outright manhandled by Stalwarts (at one point being a word and a blow away from death) I’m astonished that even Featherston saw him as any sort of a threat so early in his Administration - unless, of course, Mr Layne played some minor role in politics after that election (perhaps as token Rad Lib on the committee investigating the Hampton Assassination?).
My suggestion would be to show Layne snapped up after the Knight Coup, when Featherston’s paranoia really starts biting (though it should be admitted that I tend to imagine Mr Layne playing a role comparable to that of Conrad Adenauer in the post-War CSA; somebody who did his best to avoid notice by the regime, begged for his life and got nowhere near politics while Featherston was in power, but did a great deal to help rebuild the South & rebuild relations between the various tribes of Americans after the war was done).
If I might suggest a possible outcome for Sam Longstreet (the last Whig candidate for President of the CSA) it would be to show him as passionately opposed to the Featherston Regime - to the point of having some Very Serious discussions with Huey Long and then heading North after the latter was assassinated (It has often been speculated that CS Army & police officers quietly obstructed Stalwart efforts to capture him - the Law is the Law, but a Longstreet is a Longstreet, after all).
This was, at a time, more of an embarrassment than a propaganda coup for the USA - especially after the Smith Administration got well and truly started on it’s appeasement programme - and delivered a body blow to Longstreet’s chances for a Major Comeback in the South - but the ‘Last Longstreet’ was a loud & proud voice in Northern propaganda during the Second Great War and made strenuous efforts to build a better Dixie during the reconstruction that followed.
A hard core of his countrymen simply refused to accept him as anything but a traitor - as was the case of so many men who loved the Truth as much as they loved their country, he died embittered and effectively an exile.
The analogue to Samuel Hoare in TTL was John Hoare, born on a slightly different date in comparison to our world. Samuel Hoare never went into politics. He instead became an academic specializing in classical history at Oxford, where he also worked as an instructor.
Samuel Hoare kept himself uninvolved in politics during under the Coalition government in the 1930s and during the Second Great War. Following the end of the SGW, he left with his family for Australia. In Australia, he remained active in trying to build up the country’s community of Classical scholars. He died in 1962.
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The discovery in Ireland in 1989 of unmarked graves on land controlled by a religious order operating a Magdalene Laundry led to public outrage and an Irish government inquiry that lasted for almost a decade. By 2022, Magdalene Laundries do not operate in Ireland.
During the first generation after the end of the Second Great War, the US military and civilian authorities in the Midsouth focused primarily on trying to preempt the kinds of armed uprisings that had taken place during the previous generation in Utah and Occupied Canada. The US military made use of new counter-insurgency units such as the United States Army Irregular Forces (the Grey Berets) in fighting against anti-US fighters in the former USA. The US military was also aggressive in trying to lockdown any surplus military equipment that could be used as in an insurgency.
The US military gradually reduced its role in the Midsouth, as the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union. This was also due to the success of the postwar US military strategy in the region. By the 1960s and 1970s, the remaining anti-US groups in the Midsouth were little more than protection rackets and smugglers; these were the kinds of groups that formed the basis for most of the Dixie Mafia outfits in the region. The Dixie Mafia outfits in the Midsouth were left to local police or the Bureau of Investigation to deal with by the US government by the time the military occupation of the region ended in 1976.
The JWR was not isolationist by choice, but because they were surrounded by other countries that did not trust them.
The Ecological Union is a regime closer to the older sakoku policy, though there’s no actual legal ban on foreigners entering the country by 2162. The leadership and ideologues of the Ecological Union would prefer a world that joins with them voluntarily.
I assumed with Mitchel that Featherston would not move against him until more secure in power.
With Ainsworth Layne, I assumed that Featherston would move against him out of visceral loathing, rather than because he would necessarily view Layne as a political threat. Layne would personify almost everything that Featherston would despise in someone
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That would be a plausible fate for Samuel Longstreet, and fitting considering the OTL career of James Longstreet.
This is what I wrote earlier in the thread about Samuel Longstreet in TTL:
Samuel Longstreet, like much of the former Whig establishment of the 1934 CSA, thought that the Featherston administration would be an aberration from the established order. This proved to be a grossly mistaken assumption. Longstreet, as well as his former running mate, Hugo Black, were both arrested on direct orders from the Grey House in 1937, after Featherston ordered the assassination of another political enemy, Governor Huey Long of Louisiana. Both Longstreet and Black were imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Mississippi, under false charges of engaging in espionage on behalf of the USA.
Neither Longstreet or Black survived the Featherston regime. Postwar historians managed to confirm that both men died in 1941, though under unclear circumstances.
It depends on the country. In the United States, spec fiction was heavily influenced by the writings of Greg Bliss, who wrote several famous stories centered around alternate dystopian versions of the CSA. A lot of spec fiction in the US by 2022 revolves around either the USA winning the War of Secession or Second Mexican War, or is set in alternate versions of the Second Great War.
In the United Kingdom and France, spec fiction in the early 1980s was primarily related to the Happy Wave sub-genre, which was rooted in works set in worlds where the worst parts of modern history, such as the two Great Wars, never took place. While Happy Wave fiction was not popular for long, it did have a lasting legacy on the analogue genre to steampunk fiction, with the novel President McClellan, set in a world where the Union did not lose the war of Secession.
As in our world, there are also historians in TTL who engage in counterfactual examinations of historical events.
The superbomb attacks that ended the Second Great War, and the use of superbombs by the USA against Japanese military targets during the Fourth Pacific War had a major cultural impact worldwide. The horrors of nuclear war were a significant theme in the post apocalyptic fiction produced in different countries during the first generation after the end of the SGW, and during the Nihilist Wave in the 1970s following the end of the Fourth Pacific War.
A major difference with post-apocalyptic fiction in TTL is that there’s nothing theoretical about the potential destruction of nuclear weapons. Multiple major cities were damaged or destroyed at the end of the SGW.
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I’m assuming that the health effects of the superbomb attacks following the end of the SGW were understood sooner than in our world, given the extent of the destruction in North America and Europe. The health effects of the 1944 superbomb attacks on London, Brighton, Norwich, Paris, and Petrograd would have only compounded the postwar social, political, and economic problems in Britain, France, and Russia.
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By 2022, science fiction is one of the most popular film genres in the USA, if not the most popular film genre overall. There are different kinds of science fiction, from Space Operas, which are literal musicals in this world, to hard science fiction in the mold of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar from our world, to military science fiction, in which the villains are almost always some kind of alien menace.
Musicals are more popular in TL, both on stage and on screen. Westerns are also more popular as a genre in US culture than in our world.
Other popular film genres in the US include crime, a comedies, and romance. Horror tends to be more in the nature of psychological thrillers in comparison to our world, under the influence of German filmmakers. US movies and filmmaking techniques were heavily influenced by their German and Austro-Hungarian counterparts in TTL.
Superhero movies are not nearly as popular in the USA as in our world, but that is partially because there was not a trend towards bigger and bigger franchises as in our world.
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For this answer, I’m writing with the caveat that is not necessarily what Turtledove envisioned in the series, but is the case in TTL.
Antisemitism was given extensive state support in the Russian Empire during the 20th Century in TTL, although the vast majority of the Jews who had once lived under Russian rule found themselves living in different Eastern European governments backed by the Central Powers following the end of the First Great War. The political, military, and religious leaders of the Russian Empire following the end of the First Great War and First Russian Civil War blamed their defeat to the Central Powers and postwar revolutionary violence on an international Jewish conspiracy.
During the Second Great War, Russian forces committed numerous atrocities against Jews in different areas of combat throughout East Central Europe, including massacres and forced deportations. Russian military and civilian leaders also encouraged civilians to launch programs against their Jewish neighbors in areas that they occupied during the Second Great War, and also targeted Jews for forced labor. Along with physical violence, the Russians engaged in the wholesale theft of property and possessions owned by Jews.
During the Second Great War, the Jewish communities throughout East Central Europe staunchly supported the Central Powers, because of the state antisemitism of the Russian Empire. There were numerous Jewish partisan and self-defense units that fought against the Russian military during the war. Jewish self-defense and partisan groups were supported militarily during the war by both Austria-Hungary and Germany.
By 2022, there are no Jews living in the Russian Republic.
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With relations between the Russian Republic and the CP's client states described as a sort of "strained politeness", do/did politicians start to make diplomatic and apology tours, and pay heavy amounts of restitution and compensation to those countries/groups affected once the new Republic was proclaimed?
In the aftermath of the SGW, how was repatriation ensured by the CP from the Russian Empires far flung places for civilians and POWs forcibly deported?
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MaxGerke01
Banned
Wouldnt a military occupation for over 30 years if not radicalizing many former Confederates it would at least help keep the memory of the CSA alive for another generation or 2 because every child in the Midsouth would know why those forces were there ? They would learn more the older they got with many older residents describing the days of the CSA as the good old days ? I know you said there is no active hungering for a return to the CSA that exists but what about for the rest of the 20th Century ?
First of all, why the year 2162? And how is the Ecological Union to sustain itself in this very isolationist way for 150 years after the Tohoku Earthquake? If nobody is supposed to be little more than a farmer, what education do Japanese children receive? And when was the first cohort born to be successfully mis-educated that powered flight doesn't exist? Considering there are serious backlashes IOTL going on (Taliban on women's rights in Afghanistan) or menacingly near (overturning Roe v. Wade), such a scenario is even more chilling because it's now closer too home. No progress can be taken for granted. And this looks a bit like a Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot, but without the auto-genocide.
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