Best Possible Twentieth Century

NothingNow

Banned
Okay, first things first: Kill the Japanese militarists, the Black Hand and Wilson; then ditch the Czar and put a somewhat Liberal democratic government in place, and get Kaiser Wilhelm a Bugatti. There go most of the big problems.

If the Young Turks manage to stop the rot, the Chinese get back on their feet and Labor Unions manage to keep the pressure up on Big Business, the 20th century will be an age of peace and prosperity, especially if decolonization is Slow, methodical and done with an eye to the future stability of the colonies.

Hey!
Not all of us Ameriteens are randoids! :mad: :p
No. Some of us are productive, if Gun Crazy Socialists with a hard-on for Automobiles and Kibbutz. :)
 
Okay, first things first: Kill the Japanese militarists, the Black Hand and Wilson; then ditch the Czar and put a somewhat Liberal democratic government in place, and get Kaiser Wilhelm a Bugatti. There go most of the big problems.

If the Young Turks manage to stop the rot, the Chinese get back on their feet and Labor Unions manage to keep the pressure up on Big Business, the 20th century will be an age of peace and prosperity, especially if decolonization is Slow, methodical and done with an eye to the future stability of the colonies.


No. Some of us are productive, if Gun Crazy Socialists with a hard-on for Automobiles and Kibbutz. :)

And maybe after that we can give Khrushchev a Cadillac to prevent the Cold War? LOL. :D
 
If the Young Turks manage to stop the rot, the Chinese get back on their feet and Labor Unions manage to keep the pressure up on Big Business, the 20th century will be an age of peace and prosperity, especially if decolonization is Slow, methodical and done with an eye to the future stability of the colonies.

You know, I've always heard this but it has one major flaw- the people affected didn't want it to come slowly. Slow down the process any more than IOTL and I imagine it would get messier, not neater. Then there's also the problem of spreading out the withdrawal- it allows electoral backtracking, ala Kenya and Algeria.
 
I dunno I'd take Rockafeller, Carnegie and the Vanderbilt family over Stalin, Hitler and Hirohito any day of the week and twice on Sunday... ;)

After all, in a Corporatocracy you have people actually working for the corporation... and you have to have people buying the stuff that corporation makes... Henry Ford didn't get rich by oppressing the masses... he got rich selling cars to the masses...

Not a Utopia for sure but CEO's don't kill people who are potential customers because of their skin color, their religion, or because they have a quota of people to liquidate in a certain region in order to cow the populace...
I think this is incorrect. It's a very simple concept to grasp: "Keep your people rich enough to buy your stuff to keep you rich." And yet in the US they ignored it and substituted cheap credit. Yeah it can be done but eventually it's not sustainable. There's no guarantee that corporations will be even as adequate as to ensure their own survival.
 

NothingNow

Banned
You know, I've always heard this but it has one major flaw- the people affected didn't want it to come slowly. Slow down the process any more than IOTL and I imagine it would get messier, not neater. Then there's also the problem of spreading out the withdrawal- it allows electoral backtracking, ala Kenya and Algeria.
True, but if it's done too quickly, places backslide horribly.
 

NothingNow

Banned
And maybe after that we can give Khrushchev a Cadillac to prevent the Cold War? LOL. :D
No, but I have a feeling that if the Kaiser got into Sportscars more than Battleships we might avoid a long war should WW1 break out. If nothing else the Army will be in better shape.
 
I think this is incorrect. It's a very simple concept to grasp: "Keep your people rich enough to buy your stuff to keep you rich." And yet in the US they ignored it and substituted cheap credit. Yeah it can be done but eventually it's not sustainable. There's no guarantee that corporations will be even as adequate as to ensure their own survival.

Yes - why bother to go to all the trouble of building a great and productive corporation when you can just take an existing one through leveraged buyouts and loot it for all it's worth? Who would take the position of the car companies, coming hat in hand to the government like Copperfield asking for more gruel when you can be a banker, and have the government falling all over itself to loot the taxpayer to keep your institution afloat? Why give your employees decent salaries when cutting costs to the bone and mass layoffs is what will raise the value of your stock options? Why be productive when you can be a financier and be paid oodles of money whether you lose you clients money or not? "Unfettered" capitalism eventually becomes infested with parasites without the Orkin Man of government intervention.

Bruce
 
You know, I've always heard this but it has one major flaw- the people affected didn't want it to come slowly. Slow down the process any more than IOTL and I imagine it would get messier, not neater. Then there's also the problem of spreading out the withdrawal- it allows electoral backtracking, ala Kenya and Algeria.

Sans the disasters of the world wars and the influence of Communism, European power and prestige will be enhanced to a substantial extent - it will take longer for colonial subjects to come to think that (1) the overlords have massive clay feet (2) we can win if we revolt (3) we're ready to build the World of Tomorrow right here in our nation. [1] Not that they won't get impatient, but I think it would take longer to reach the boiling point.

My real worry is that sans world wars, the smug superiority of Europe and America re the rest of the world may get worse, and the massive racism of the pre-1914 era may be a lot harder to budge by any new scientific and anthropological ideas: the racism of the time was often downright exterminationist (see London's "The Unparalelled Invasion", 1907 http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/StrengthStrong/invasion.html ) and one worries about a world in which say, the extermination of the Masai would invoke a few sad head-shakes about the Inevitable March of Progress and the Regrettable Things that must be done for the sake of modernization.

Perhaps an "anti-colonial" alliance led by perhaps Japan and a more successfully after 1900 modernizing China might lead to some reconsiderations of the inherent inferiority of the Lower Races, if it doesn't get swallowed up by Yellow Peril fears. I suspect how the relationship between the UK and India (with a strong lobby for self-government already by 1914, and with too much history to be dismissed like jungle tribes) evolves would play an important role here.

Bruce

[1] Sans the Russian revolution, Marxist Orthodoxy will remain that backwards countries will have to go through a period of Capitalism before they are ready for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
 
I've never agreed with the thesis that the World Wars caused decolonization- I think it is a case of confusing correlation with causation. It was the growth of educated elites in the colonized countries that caused it- and those men were being educated prior to the world wars. There were more factors of course (funny enough, some of it was the destruction of traditional government in areas such as Kenya)
 
I've never agreed with the thesis that the World Wars caused decolonization- I think it is a case of confusing correlation with causation. It was the growth of educated elites in the colonized countries that caused it- and those men were being educated prior to the world wars. There were more factors of course (funny enough, some of it was the destruction of traditional government in areas such as Kenya)

Didn't cause it, but it seems rather likely it accelerated it. Few things in history are purely monocausual. And while an educated elite may have been necessary at the start, to get the ball rolling, so to speak, the educated elite of places like the Belgian Congo was pretty darn diminutive at independence: it simply was no longer considered _legitimate_ for white people to rule as overlords over foreign lands and slaughter the natives if they revolted, and there was a history of successful revolt to be imitated at the time, and powerful nations willing and able to provide backing for such movements. There were plenty of educated people in India in 1897, (honestly, comparing it to the Congo in 1960 is kinda ridiculous) but it still took another half century before India became independent.

Bruce
 

tqm111

Banned
A Russian victory in 1905 and having a 1848 style revolution aren't a bad idea. We see the collapse of the French alliance system for at least a decade, no Russian support of the Serbs, so we have a more stable situation for a few years, giving the Social Democrats a chance to gain power in Germany.
The problem are how to get rid of colonialism.

Colonialism would get rid of itself. It's a net loss in the long run for the colonizers.

Don't kid yourselves, all, WW1 is the seminal event of the 20th century. All other disasters in the century descend from it. If you have Democracy in '05 in Russia, then you won't have WW1.
 
"Atlas Shrugged" is going to be a pretty different book ITTL. Perhaps Rand writes something more like "The King and I" in OTL. :p
 
Yes - why bother to go to all the trouble of building a great and productive corporation when you can just take an existing one through leveraged buyouts and loot it for all it's worth? Who would take the position of the car companies, coming hat in hand to the government like Copperfield asking for more gruel when you can be a banker, and have the government falling all over itself to loot the taxpayer to keep your institution afloat? Why give your employees decent salaries when cutting costs to the bone and mass layoffs is what will raise the value of your stock options? Why be productive when you can be a financier and be paid oodles of money whether you lose you clients money or not? "Unfettered" capitalism eventually becomes infested with parasites without the Orkin Man of government intervention.

Bruce

If the govn't is acting as the Orkin Man right now I'm suing for breach of contract because the job didn't get done and if anything it made things worse...
 
I don't deny that warfare would happen, but even corporations would lack the capability to field a military large enough to fight a war of the scale that the world wars were. And even if they did, being motivated purely by profit would prevent a war from getting quite as nasty as it would when fighting over religion or nationalism. Not to say that it would be a nice place to live, I'll take a world ruled over by nation states thank you very much.

The Honourable East India Comapny......:p
 
If the govn't is acting as the Orkin Man right now I'm suing for breach of contract because the job didn't get done and if anything it made things worse...

Well, to extend the metaphor, the government appears to be in the pay of the roaches... :D

Bruce
 
To make a better 20th a good start would be a deep-rooted suspiscion of 'true belivers' who advocate a particular "ism" as a panacea for the worlds wrongs. So whenever someone with an 'ism' in mind tried to gather a following people instictively recognised that they were just making a grab for personal power and rejected them. As a result the world was run as a balance between a large number of 'ism' with none becoming ascendant over others. So we had enough capitalism to generate wealth and reward merit but enough socialism to ensure big business doesn't screw the less fortunate, that sort of thing.
 
All of the horrible things of the 20th century, the world wars and genocides and pandemics, in the long run had a net positive effect. They served as an example of how horrifying we can be when we really try, and have since largely made us keep ourselves in line. As well as spurring progress in numerous areas.

So, in order to avoid killing that progress in its crib, I'd rather posit a better 20th (and consequently, better 21st) century starting fairly late in the game, with various progressive movements being stronger in the 1970's onwards, and much more expansive Space program in the same period.
 
Top