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Greece and Turkey.

That wave struck the UK also, but was sadly mixed up with lunacy about rings of satanists. Investigators untrained in handling witnesses let alone child witnesses seized children from their homes in the middle of the night and interrogated them (providing extensive cues regarding what they were...

Darling's analysis is backwards. The banking system did collapse. The whole system of accounts was revealed to be a forgery. What mattered was political power. Political power alone animated those zombies and political power alone determined what was worth what and who owed who how much. Of...

By the time Jack Pulman died at the age of 53 in 1979 he was already a television legend. I, Claudius had without any question the greatest cast ever assembled for a TV production before or since, and John Hurt's Caligula is as terrifying today as he ever was. All the same Graves...

@superkuf There's too much handwavium in your post to deal with it all... Why, why and why?

You're pulling that last statement out of thin air.

All I can say to that is that what Franco actually wanted was a huge chunk of North-West Africa. In his imagination this was going to be home to millions of Spaniards by now and in 1940 there was nothing prudent about this dream.

Spain offered the possibility of closing the Med, the possibility to move Italian navy units to the Atlantic and greatly enhanced freedom of action for blockade runners, as well as uncontested access to Portuguese tungsten (which Britain bid up to huge prices OTL).

What's surprising OTL is that the two sides talked for so long. IIRC Germany never even clarified its demands regarding bases in the Canaries and Morocco -- there's a huge difference between a 15 year lease and permanently ceded territory. This (and Ribbentrop's general hauteur) prevented more...

There's a paper about it here.

I'd long believed this but apparently it was a carefully constructed piece of post-war propaganda. Franco was good to go in 1940 but unrealistic demands by both Germany and Spain prevented agreement. Vichy was Hitler's main concern -- he was worried about colonies defecting to de Gaulle and...

Does Vichy exist in this scenario? If so Spanish entry has very little bearing on Alexandria and Suez, but if no armistice is agreed between Germany and France then French North Africa is doomed under this scenario. The fate of Suez etc. then comes down to the quantity of resources Germany is...

After the battle of France, Germany probably invades Spain and then grinds through the forts at Gibraltar. With this seized, the idea of building up Libya (i.e. expanding ports & transportation infrastructure) for a push on the Suez Canal becomes much more attractive. Also, Germany gets all...

The thing is it's never a matter of "pick one". You say "nationality or religion, pick one" and someone else will say "here's as much religion as you need and all the nationality you could want". Recent history is full of wars between even uniformly Arabic-speaking Sunni countries: Morocco vs...

Though at least up until its forced breakup it would have been a single negotiating point for a third-party owned system. Some possibility to negotiate reduced-price connections might have existed. Given that minitel terminals were distributed free, one big attraction for Poste, Téléphone et...

If they're half sane they'll realise their business is to manage the surrender. Initiating meaningful negotiations will be extremely difficult given the Allies' commitment to unconditional surrender and every attempt at the tactics negotiating parties normally employ will just associate the new...

Minitel demonstrated some advantages of state monopolies, of which we've only heard of the disadvantages in recent decades. Standards competition, which allows powerful companies to parasitise others' internet investments and inhibits many sorts of activity, was avoided by diktat and great...

It's annoying when people resort to shouting ASB as a matter of habit. The idea is monumentally stupid and borders on being simply strange but it's clearly within the powers of the USSR at that moment in time. Crying ASB is just mod abuse.

It's not 100% true that all his early-war gambles paid off. The earliest and biggest was also his biggest blunder, something that came as a total shock to him. He never expected Britain and France would really go to war over Poland.

The problem is that the way you pose the question makes the answer meaningless. You're basically asking "if a bunch of countries could do something and wanted to do it, could they do it?"