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Have the red shirted thugs beat the brown shirted thugs.

1. The Andalusi will definitely have an easier time trading east and south than Europeans - the trade would be with coreligionists and in some cases with those of the same culture. There were no Islamic attempts to colonise the new world ITTL - and there's nothing magical about Spain's position...

Why would al-Andalus head west? Heading west is a really low percentage move, and colonising rather than trading even more so. A confluence of factors conspired to push Spain and later western Europe across the Atlantic, which are unlikely to be repeated by a surviving al-Andalus. For...

I believe at the time western knightly cavalry had a technological and strategic advantage over the Byzantine heavy cavalry. Byzantine cavalry was heavily armoured and slow moving, and relied on massed formations to break infantry. Western cavalry of the period were faster, and used the...

You've eliminated the great leap forward and the cultural revolution. China would be a lot better off in this timeline.

Ah, heres your problem. That's not true. Contemporary firearms couldn't even penetrate a plate harness - a javelin has less armour piercing capability than either arrows or crossbow bolts.

Javelins are less effective against heavily-armoured opponents than bows are. In any case, we see the javelin dying out in western europe before the introduction of firearms. The onus is on you to provide a reason for it to reemerge. Theres no much you can do to advance a full-body...

Javelins survived in a few, rare cases, into the early middle ages - we have accounts of thrown spear skirmishes between shield walls in germanic infantry combat for instance - and early knights would use thrown javelins. In the high middle ages though, the javelin wasn't used in western...

Cannon would be much more prevalent, as would early hand guns.

I don't think we'd see that, no. That form of warfare was obsolete by the end of the roman empire, why would a lack of gunpowder bring it back? Peltast-like infantry don't make sense in a medieval environment. As skirmisher's they're outranged by archers and crossbowmen, their lack of a spear...

Poor Poland :(. OTL is already a polescrew as it is! Collectivisation of land probably means famines in store. Hell, "using soviet Ukraine as a model" there might even be a polish holodomor *shudder*. If this timeline ends up mixing a more powerful USSR with a still-isolationist U.S, you're...

I respectfully disagree. Whilst it's true that soviet economic mismanagement, and the "war on the countryside" claimed lives all over the USSR, the holodomor in Ukraine had a distinctly genocidal flavour - things like the law of spikelets were deliberately designed to cause the death by...

Depends on the strain of anarchist thought. Most individualist anarchisms could become the majority form of social organization bloodlessly, and run society relatively efficiently, assuming ideal circumstances. A society run along effectively free market anarchist lines persisted for around...

The problem is that fascism was never as internationally viable as communism. The flaws of fascism are obvious, and it requires very specific conditions to arise. Full refutation of communism's economic precepts (as opposed to the tactics of communists) had to wait for the labour theory of value...

You're shifting the goalposts. Lets try again. Who is there in the world of science, who was awarded a nobel prize and did not deserve it? Plenty of people could be argued to have been more or less deserving, but for the prize to be a joke, you have to demonstrate that it was awarded to...

That is such a load of shite. The Nobel Peace and Economics prizes are sketchy, but the others are no joke at all. Only someone monumentally ignorant of science could even make that claim.

You can get most of the things you've asked for (Slavery, no individual rights) just by having Communism become more widespread. American isolationism + Germany flipping red in the 1930's would be a good start. Communism's also no bar to military tech development - though civilian tech is...

I can think of one way to make that stick. Have the colonists who first come into contact with tobacco be the hardest of hardcore puritans - and have a community leader witness it's use in Native American religious ceremonies. Have tobacco stereotyped as "The Devil's Weed". Play up fire...

Unlikely to be adopted. In the time period you're discussing (napoleonic), the majority of infantry casualties were caused by artillery, against which this gun shield will be completely ineffective. The shields would give a slight advantage in a missile duel between evenly matched infantry...

You need there to not be a unionist majority in the north for this to work. The Ulster Scots aren't going to to quietly, and mainland Britain is sympathetic to them. Either you need to have less Scottish migration to Ireland in the first place, or reduce their population growth/increase...