AHC: Most Dystopic Modern Great Power Possible

I'm not sure how to get a lot of those. Maybe a take like others said on the Peshewar Lancers?? Perhaps Yellowstone erupts horribly in the 1800s, lowering global temperatures and causing a small ice age. The UK goes into Anarchy and elements of Britain's government and military relocate to India. Paranoid and outnumbered they put restrictions on the local population that becomes more and more like slavery, with the brits obviously on top and perhaps the more wealthy native Indians as a sort of second-middle class. Meanwhile if Britain mishandles the agriculture of the subcontinent coupled with a small Ice Age could drive people to desperate measures. The government might turn a blind eye to some people turning to cannibalizing the already near-slave native population. Over the years this Britiain-in-Exile is lead by a Military Junta that rules with an iron fist, uses eugenics as an excuse to enslave the natives, and perhaps also uses eugenics to repress woman and 'keep them at the house'.

Not exactly realistic, but was a scenairo I came up with.
 
I might be biased, but I think that the Nazis are an obvious starting template. Maybe if they ended up banning Christianity and establishing a seriously twisted form of Odinism? That could get you the human sacrifices. Gladiator matches could emerge down the road.
 
Do 1 and 3 have to be with their own people, or do war prisoners count? If they do, I can see a WWII-like-era a US pull off everything but 2 and 12 provided enough butterflies.
 
Let's see whether we can do Decades of Darkness, the Draka, and For All Time one better...

With a POD no earlier than the year 1100, try to create a modern-ish Great Power (post-1950s OTL tech level) with the following characteristics:

1) Slavery
2) Human sacrifice
3) Cannibalism
4) Totalitarian government
5) Taliban-level repression of women
6) "Scientific" racism
7) Eugenics (state-selected partners, euthanasia, sterilization, etc.)
8) Regular use of purges (both ethnic and political)
9) Militarism
10) Expansionist imperialism
11) Torture as an accepted part of the judicial system
12) Televised gladiatorial bouts
13) Euthanasia for people the state deems "unproductive"
14) Anything else you can think of that's sufficiently horrible

Bonus points if you don't need to start a nuclear war to produce this monstrosity.

EVEN MORE bonus points if you can make every Great Power in the world behave this way.



...My suspicion is that this level of awful might be ASB, but I thought I'd let the experts mull it over first.
For this dystopia, do we need a successful and stable totalitarian state, with state-mandated or at least legalized cannibalism and sacrifice and stuff, or can we have some collapsing empire, where the people are suffering a massive famine and turning to cannibalism to survive and sacrifice out of superstitious desperation?
 
Sounds like such an extreme world may be ruled by a royal figure- perhaps not a king or emperor, but of such a bearing, regardless; and have many many- foliage? And is a wizard of some sort.
 
Do 1 and 3 have to be with their own people, or do war prisoners count? If they do, I can see a WWII-like-era a US pull off everything but 2 and 12 provided enough butterflies.

The victims of (1) and (3) needn't be their own people. In fact, it's somewhat unlikely that they would be.

UNRELATED SIDENOTE: I do think that people are underestimating (5)'s difficulty. Sure, the Nazis were sexist as all get-out, but even they relied on women's cooperation pretty heavily. Institutionalizing something like the Taliban's Purdah setup would be an uphill battle in 1930s/40s Germany.
 
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For this dystopia, do we need a successful and stable totalitarian state, with state-mandated or at least legalized cannibalism and sacrifice and stuff, or can we have some collapsing empire, where the people are suffering a massive famine and turning to cannibalism to survive and sacrifice out of superstitious desperation?

A sustainable dystopia is preferable, but a collapsing state (perhaps in the wake of environmental catastrophes?) would be acceptable -- and a creative way around the scenario's difficulties.

Do you have a particular PoD/situation in mind?
 
Do you have a particular PoD/situation in mind?
I was sort of thinking of some Nazi Germany Victorious scenario, where they would be trying to starve huge portions of Eastern Europe to death, and their victims are cannibalizing each other. Combined with some psycho SS sacrifice stuff like in the Alternate History story "Moon of Ice", maybe with some abusive concentration camp guards staging illegal gladiator rings? Therefore 2 and 3 wouldn't actually be top-down policies enforced by the government itself, but would still be going on.
 
Just to stir the pot...
- 1 : slavery can exist under another name (debt bondage for instance, or some forms of marriage);
- 2 : mass executions to enforce the conversion of the survivors is a form of human religious sacrifice: opens diverse possibilities;
- 3 : cannibalism doesn't have to be 'dystopic': ceremeniously sharing and eating the body of the departed beloved one, so that his / her flesh survives in your body and becomes part of it in the same way as his / her memory survives in your mind, while 'odd' from our pow, is perfectly understandable;
- 4 : totalitarian government: several recent (late Maoist China, Red Khmers) or current (North Korea) examples, and a resurrected Caliphate with all religious and secular powers in the hands of the same man would by ultimately totalitarian; then on a very local scale I wonder how much an Amish community under its patriarch is 'democratic', and those US small towns controlled by a fundamentalist community where jailed persons have only the Bible to read sound quite theocratic: maybe a post-traumatic Bible Belt could evolve in the religiously dystopic direction (but such cultures frown on any form of frivolous entertainment, so would forbide 12- televised gladiatorial bouts).
- 5 : repression of women: historically how many cultures outside the Abrahamanic ones were / are misogynist enough to require women to hide their basically obscene body under a burqa? Very few if any, 'pagans' worshipping goddess(es) simply cannot be *that* misogynist. Suggesting that the culture of this 'dystopic great power' should be impregnated with fundamentalist Abrhamanism - not specially Muslim, in the Middle-Ages all Christian women were heavily veiled, Hollywood notwithstanding;
- 6 & 7 : 'scientific' racism (including 'social racism' based e.g. on phrenology) and eugenics (at least in the form of selective sterilization; but don't forget the modern project of a sperm bank of Nobel prizes) were not uncommon in the 'white' world from the mid-19th C. to (in some Protestant countries specially) sometimes after WWII: this part is not very hard to fulfil;
- 9 & 10 : militarism and imperialist expansionism are not difficult: is a modern country where full citizenship is restricted to those having served in the military forces, 'Starship trooper' fashion, a figment of the imagination?
- 11 : torture as an accepted part of the judicial system: don't we have modern exemples, as part of the 'Total War Against Terrorism'?
- 12 : televised gladiatorial bouts : given the reactions of a part at least of the audience to unarmed fight competition, I wonder if we are really far away from such: 'sport' as a show is the modern opium of the people;
- 13 : euthanasia for people the state deems "unproductive" can take various forms: in the deep of a harsh winter gather the homeless, the 'rejects' of a city and carry them to a forest without food.... By the way such practice can lead to survival cannibalism.

Thus I fear that (except maybe for *institutionalized* cannibalism, which does NOT have to be dystopian anyway) the proposed combination is far less ASB (the Peshawar Lancers meteor....) than many seem to think (though 12 would be difficult to combine with 5), and certainly not restricted to a peculiar historical precedent. Post WWII some 'fundamentalist' variant of communism, and *even more* in the near future a fanatically fundamentalist Abrahamanic theocracy, seem to be the less unlikely candidates.
 
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I was sort of thinking of some Nazi Germany Victorious scenario, where they would be trying to starve huge portions of Eastern Europe to death, and their victims are cannibalizing each other. Combined with some psycho SS sacrifice stuff like in the Alternate History story "Moon of Ice", maybe with some abusive concentration camp guards staging illegal gladiator rings? Therefore 2 and 3 wouldn't actually be top-down policies enforced by the government itself, but would still be going on.
A quick skim of wikipedia suggesting Soviet prisoners in Nazi POW camps sometimes were forced to end up cannibalizing each other because they weren't really given any food at all, so it's already somewhat OTL to an extent and in a surviving Nazi Germany scenario it's probably extremely likely there'd end up being cannibalism on a larger scale. Honestly, Taliban-level oppression of women is the only thing that seems difficult to have Nazi Germany take part in.
 
Human sacrifice? That's ... iffy. Some have suggested, with archaeological evidence to corroborate the claim, that the 'child murder' temples of Carthage are, in fact, necropolises. Tellingly, the only accounts we have are those of Punic Wars-era Roman intellectuals. I'm very sympathetic to the myth hypothesis - the whole thing stinks of the Spartan infanticide legend whipped up by Plutarch and a generation of patriotic Athenian historians.


Actually more recent research indicates that the Carthaginians really were into child sacrifice in a big way. Earlier research into the child graves that indicated natural deaths have been reexamined and found to be very probably sacrifices.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/21/carthaginians-sacrificed-own-children-study

http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/085/ant0850859.htm
 
For the Aztec Wank:

1) Slavery
They had this.

2) Human sacrifice
They had this.

3) Cannibalism
Thay can have this, have eating te hearts of sacrificed prisioners eaten for religious reasons.

4) Totalitarian government
They were kinda this.

5) Taliban-level repression of women
This can develop later.

6) "Scientific" racism
This can develop later.

7) Eugenics (state-selected partners, euthanasia, sterilization, etc.)
This can develop later.

8) Regular use of purges (both ethnic and political)
Flower Wars!

9) Militarism
They have this.

10) Expansionist imperialism
They have this.

11) Torture as an accepted part of the judicial system
Meh.

12) Televised gladiatorial bouts
Televised Flower Wars.

13) Euthanasia for people the state deems "unproductive"
Can happen later.

14) Anything else you can think of that's sufficiently horrible
Meh.
 
4) Totalitarian government
They were kinda this.

I though the Aztec Empire was more a triple alliance with Tenochtitlan having more power than the other 2 cities?
 

SunDeep

Banned
Let's see whether we can do Decades of Darkness, the Draka, and For All Time one better...

With a POD no earlier than the year 1100, try to create a modern-ish Great Power (post-1950s OTL tech level) with the following characteristics:

1) Slavery
2) Human sacrifice
3) Cannibalism
4) Totalitarian government
5) Taliban-level repression of women
6) "Scientific" racism
7) Eugenics (state-selected partners, euthanasia, sterilization, etc.)
8) Regular use of purges (both ethnic and political)
9) Militarism
10) Expansionist imperialism
11) Torture as an accepted part of the judicial system
12) Televised gladiatorial bouts
13) Euthanasia for people the state deems "unproductive"
14) Anything else you can think of that's sufficiently horrible

Bonus points if you don't need to start a nuclear war to produce this monstrosity.

EVEN MORE bonus points if you can make every Great Power in the world behave this way.



...My suspicion is that this level of awful might be ASB, but I thought I'd let the experts mull it over first.

What about the likely system of government on board an interstellar Super-Orion space ark, bound for Alpha Centauri or Epsilon Eridani on a voyage that's set to take a few hundred years? In isolation, aboard such a vessel (a 'Great Power' upon its arrival, as the all-encompassing government of an entire new world), all of these characteristics could well be adopted- indeed, all of them could be 'justified' by the commanders/dictatorship purely to sustain their existence aboard the vessel long enough to get there. Along with a couple of other nasty ones, like recycling corpses for construction materials (using cremated people's ashes to make new glass, for instance.) It's probably more in keeping with an FTL, but if launched in the late to mid-60's, the space-ark could well be this dystopian by the present day in an ATL.
 
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Could the Aztec "Empire" (which was more of a feudal/tribute network) actually take its practices to a dystopian scale? They managed to piss off pretty much everyone around them. That's how they fell: Cortez allied with their enemies and their disgruntled subjects and staged a rebellion.
 
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