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OOC: I see far too many DBWIs where, apparently, class conflict never erupted into a successful revolution anywhere. This DBWI is to counteract all of those, and then some. :cool: ITTL, revolutionary socialism (note: this is not much like Marxism-Leninism) became the dominant ideology of the "West" after WW1 and has only gotten stronger.

Pigeontoad proposes, in his A World of Tears, the success of the "progressives" in American politics. I believe he had Theodore Roosevelt winning the 1900 Presidential Elections. As the Social Democrats' parliamentary victories left them all too willing to capitulate to the bourgeois system in Germany (see the Junius Pamphlet for some firebrand rhetoric on the subject), so too do the progressive wings of the Republican and Democratic parties leave the nation's left-wing movement vulnerable. It's worsened when Wilson takes lead of the nation, running as a progressive (another of Pigeontoad's little "jokes" :rolleyes:) and brutally suppresses the socialists.

Of course, Pigeontoad is drawing on that old bourgeois notion of history as having no inevitable direction. But he paints a good picture of a world without a strong socialist movement (outside of Russia and China, LOL). The descriptions of the actions of the two big socialist nations read a bit like those old bourgeois books about the (insanely exaggerated) "evils of socialism," where the excesses of the revolutionary period are blown up into some sort of mad, satanic ideology, which I find rather obnoxious.

I really didn't like the way he took his new-wave right wing ideology of "fascism" and seemingly just threw it all over a dart board and dreamed up some bizarre way to make it stick. Okay, fine, the Spartacists don't succeed in Germany, there's twenty years of butterflies to make that happen. But they suddenly just slip into crazy ultra-rightism? And of course Spain, with one of the single strongest anarchist movements in the world, suddenly flaps right down into fascism. I think by the time he was brainstorming how to turn Italy black, he was exhausted so he just said "uh, a prominent socialist suddenly turns into a fascist - no, he INVENTS the ideology!" and called it quits. Made me worry about Mosley for a second there too!

Anyway, the TL ended in 1945, but his Russians don't seem to have the kind of industrial or economic power to compete with his USA. Militarily, they're alright, but as France learned, conventional militaries don't win the day when everybody's passing nukes around.

So what'd be liable to happen in this (shudder) capitalist-dominated timeline?
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