AHC: Have the world become an absolute shithole without Nazi/Soviet victory

Okay, so your alternate history challenge for today is to make the entire world as shitty as is semi-plausible by the turn of the millennium while avoiding the cliches of Nazi victory in WW2 and Soviet victory in the Cold War.

Total nuclear warfare (such as was feared during the Cold War and still feared today) is also out of the question.

I advise you to start as early as possible. Now, alt-hist away!

P.S. Fuck Woodrow Wilson
 
Okay, so your alternate history challenge for today is to make the entire world as shitty as is semi-plausible by the turn of the millennium while avoiding the cliches of Nazi victory in WW2 and Soviet victory in the Cold War.

Well, since you didn't rule it out...

WW2 comes down to Nazi Germany vs Soviet Union (vastly more so then IOTL that is). And it's the Soviets who win. :p
 
Without time for a proper post, probably the easiest way is for all of the European Great Powers/US to acquire hard right governments that refuse to let go of the colonies, perhaps with a PoD in the 19th century. The sheer incompetence of the far right combined with the still-unchallengeable military strength of the collective North Atlantic order equals a complete devastation and looting of the non-Western world combined by inevitable economic degradation in the metropole. The trick is to avoid them destroying each other, which IMO is possible though not enormously likely.
 
I think environmental disasters on a bigger scale could do it, especially nuclear ones, or a much longer use of lead in gasoline.

A much worse decolonization process could involve nuclear or chemical warfare being actively used - think Saddam and the Kurds applied to India in the 1940s, especially if Russia controls all of Germany and Austria plus some of France. In this scenario, the US and others turn a blind eye to colonial repression in the interest of keeping Europe from being totally Red.

Soviet and US biological weapons programs, especially the Soviet ones, could even still (in the case of the Soviets) lead to a global catastrophe with either terrorists or a nightmare accident.

A series of Chernobyl grade nuclear accidents happening in the blasé 1950s could lead to some localized problems on the crapsack scale.
 
Honestly just make the sino Soviet border clash go nuclear, or make the Kargil war/2001 border clash go nuclear.

You’d be killing a few hundred of million and severely damage the future of a country of a billion people, likely keeping them in poverty for decades. While a Nazi victory is ultra-bad, generally they would kill maybe a hundred million people until they collapse, a nuclear war in China or the Indian subcontinent could easily have a higher death toll.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
Ayn Rand's relativism is taken up by every major western nation, and they still defeat the Soviet Union due to the Soviets also accidentally supergluing their hands to the idiot ball.

Most of the Western world is corrupt as hell, with extreme stratification, effective slavery via personal contracts, rampant unemployment, starvation, high infant mortality rates, rampant diseases, frequent rebellion, and Eastern Europe is semi-forcibily dragged down that shit hole with also-corrupt-as-hell China somehow ending up a shining beacon of light in the world.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
Spanish Flu doesn't end suddenly as OTL and cause a civilty's collapse as Black Death.

Virology and epidemiology dictate that this is effectively imposible.

The end of the influenza was almost set in stone from the minute it began. You'd have to heavily screw medical research pre 1900.
 
Smallpox is wiped out later than OTL, or weaponized in an interstate war or terrorist attack.

Also, delaying the Green Revolution would increase the risk of famine throughout the world. A bioweapon designed to wipe out a country's wheat, rice, or corn harvest would be pretty dystopian.
 

xsampa

Banned
Smallpox is wiped out later than OTL, or weaponized in an interstate war or terrorist attack.

Also, delaying the Green Revolution would increase the risk of famine throughout the world. A bioweapon designed to wipe out a country's wheat, rice, or corn harvest would be pretty dystopian.
I would assume the absence of a Green Revolution would lead to the developing world having fewer people because Malthusian growth limits would kick whenever the population increased. This would make many colonies have fewer people than the metropole. For example, Senegal had 2,486,635 people in 1950 while France had 41 million. This will be a factor whenever decolonization approaches because a larger metropole population means a larger potential army, against a smaller colonial population. While size alone doesn't determine victory, it will mean that colonial powers can throw more bodies at the war and weaken the opposition through attrition.
 

Vuu

Banned
Define "shithole"

After 1900, exceedingly difficult. I'd just say to avoid the age of imperialism entirely, and then the entire world is stuck in an equilibrium trap (the prime reason why Asia and India started to severely lag behind Europe) for, like, a 1000 years.
 
Easy, have Reagan go crazy with Deregulation during the Early 80s so when Black Monday of 1987 hits, a full on depression hits, This would lead to a cascading effect that could result in the worst crisis since the Depression, in Addition maybe have an Utterly Incompetent Democrat win in 1988 could make things worse.
 
Worse crash of '87. You get Bill Clinton in '88 followed by Rumsfeld in 1992. Ralph Reed in 2000. Some conservative southern democrat in 2004. Mike Pence in 2008, some open dominionist in 2016 who gets reelected in 2020.
 
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