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i've been meaning to ask this for a while now, it's for another TL project of mine. i've mentioned it before, my "Not Quite Nineteen Eighty-Four" idea that i've posted about in the Map Threads a few times. an optional goal for it, so to speak, is to get the admittedly ASB setting (mainly that there might be contrived/implausible events to result in the basic world) to have been created with a historically recent POD in 1948, since that's when Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four (it's also the origin of the name, simply inverting the last two digits of the year it was published rather than the year itself being exceptionally significant). what i mainly want to ask it what it would take for this dystopian world to come to be with a POD in 1948, and more importantly if that would be plausible at all.

anyway, the required effects stemming from the POD--whenever it actually is--are:
  • Britain becomes TTL's North Korea as a reinterpretation of Airstrip One/Oceania
  • the United States becomes a totalitarian police state eventually becoming the North American Union as an imperialist police state which takes over Canada and Mexico as well
  • the Soviet Union expands into the Eastern Bloc, which all become their own SSRs, and corrals the rest of Europe sans Britain into a new Western Bloc
  • the People's Republic of China still comes to be and exerts influence over other parts of Asia, explicitly including Korea and possibly including Central Asia and Japan (i have ideas for Japan but in the current specs Central Asia is still Soviet; i want to explore possibility as to Central Asia leaving the USSR and becoming aligned to China in order to make for a more proper Eastasia analogue)
  • the disputed zone (namely northern, central, and eastern Africa and western, southern, and southeastern Asia) from the original novel is reimagined as being the last bastion of freedom and democracy in the world in part because of a mass influx of pro-democracy refugees, which includes large numbers of intellectuals; currently, i have it as one big state but, depending on the plausibility of that, it could be redone as a collection of allied states instead
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