Decades of Darkness

xsampa

Banned
How did the colonial powers maintain (temporary) control of China, especially as they only conquered all of China in the 1920s/30s and how did the colonial economies function? Also, were there attempts at promoting separate identities (e.g Huanghainese) ?
 
I assume there's a complex mnemonic (or they just write them all the way up their arms)
Heh, it's really not much of a jump up from the 50 we have now. I remember singing a "50 state song" in Elementary school, as well as having "know your states" worksheets every year or so at the beginning of a new social studies class.

If this TL is still being worked on, the future of this world isn't looking too great. Assuming no all-out nuclear apocalypse, the seeds are there for truly fascist, Draka-esque hegemon in the *USA which unlike OTL Nazi Germany, is here to stay.
 

SuperZtar64

Banned
If this TL is still being worked on, the future of this world isn't looking too great. Assuming no all-out nuclear apocalypse, the seeds are there for truly fascist, Draka-esque hegemon in the *USA which unlike OTL Nazi Germany, is here to stay.
I've never really understood the idea people get that equate the *USA with fascism or anything like it. I've read Decades of Darkness multiple times and I've found no indication that the United States is turning 'round the path of dictatorship. Hell, they've abolished the electoral college! Despite the fact that slavery is still a firm part of American culture, it's still a democracy. A racist democracy, but for the white people it's still a democracy. Congress still exists, the Supreme Court still exists, the Constitution still exists, it's all just... different, and I get that. Reading about the horrors of modern-day slavery in this world can make people forget that the continent-spanning slavocracy is the same country that declared independence back in 1776, and its government is largely the same.

I've seen people call the *USA a "hellhole" but that just seems to be objectively untrue. There's no social instability (pre-1933 of course, the automation of cotton-picking is sure to cause many unforseen issues) and they've established effective governance over pretty much the whole region above Panama by 1933, and if your skin is right you are free. I have no qualms with calling the *USA Draka-esque, but calling it a dictatorship is just wrong.
 
I've never really understood the idea people get that equate the *USA with fascism or anything like it. I've read Decades of Darkness multiple times and I've found no indication that the United States is turning 'round the path of dictatorship. Hell, they've abolished the electoral college! Despite the fact that slavery is still a firm part of American culture, it's still a democracy. A racist democracy, but for the white people it's still a democracy. Congress still exists, the Supreme Court still exists, the Constitution still exists, it's all just... different, and I get that. Reading about the horrors of modern-day slavery in this world can make people forget that the continent-spanning slavocracy is the same country that declared independence back in 1776, and its government is largely the same.

I've seen people call the *USA a "hellhole" but that just seems to be objectively untrue. There's no social instability (pre-1933 of course, the automation of cotton-picking is sure to cause many unforseen issues) and they've established effective governance over pretty much the whole region above Panama by 1933, and if your skin is right you are free. I have no qualms with calling the *USA Draka-esque, but calling it a dictatorship is just wrong.
A fair point. I meant fascist more in the broadest sense of state-mandated inequality in terms of the most basic civil liberties.

I often say that the US was founded in the opposing forces of the enlightenment and colonialism, and this TL really heightens the contradictions of a "libertarian" slaveocracy to their logical extremes. *US political philosophy must be one big mess of extreme cognitive dissonance. I can't imagine critical thinking is looked upon very highly, at least for the masses.

By the 20th Century, there's probably a very elaborate propaganda and PR apparatus in place to defend the *American way of life and constantly reassure white people everything is fine, as it's been for centuries. Think Fox News and right-wing talk radio, but way more overtly racist.
 
Last edited:
A fair point. I meant fascist more in the broadest sense of state-mandated inequality in terms of the most basic civil liberties.

I often say that the US was founded in the opposing forces of the enlightenment and colonialism, and this TL really heightens the contradictions of a "libertarian" slaveocracy to their logical extremes. *US political philosophy must be one big mess of extreme cognitive dissonance. I can't imagine critical thinking is looked upon very highly, at least for the masses.

By the 20th Century, there's probably a very elaborate propaganda and PR apparatus in place to defend the *American way of life and constantly reassure white people everything is fine, as it's been for centuries. Think Fox News and right-wing talk radio, but way more overtly racist.
Someone once created a speculative map and description of what the world of DoD might look like by 2011. He stated that, thanks to the need to keep the slaves and peons in line, the *US' security state has grown to the point where even the free white citizens are seeing their liberty restricted, especially since, thanks to both interbreeding (masters raping their slaves, the "dance instructors") and the enslavement of Canadian rebels, it's grown more difficult to tell the free from the slaves by just the color of their skin. Keeping half the population in chains, and restricting the civil liberties of the other half in order to do so, has also suffocated high-tech and high-value industry. To quote:
The United States has expanded to pretty much the maximum attainable size (although there may be future possibilities in Africa) and is increasingly consumed with internal issues. The economy, although still growing, is falling behind the other Superpowers (not to mention the Indo-Pacific gang) in high tech and generally in high-value-added enterprises: too many of the population are serfs or only "partially free" in various degrees. Too, the continued and seemingly irreversible growth of the Security State now threatens the liberties of the ruling classes: there is no longer any clear physical distinction between slave and free, and everyone needs their papers at all times. Cameras are everywhere, police are everywhere, informers everywhere. Information services and the internet-equivalent are crippled by security measures - who wants a slave class with full internet access. Increasingly, there is pressure to bring everyone who at least looks white and can speak decent English into the ruling classes: with nearly 50% of the population various classes of non-or-partially-free, the system is looking increasingly inefficient and dangerous to its very rulers. Of course, there are those with very definite opinions about this - and in a state ultimately based on violent supression of dissent and anything even vaguely resembling rebellion, they have ways of expressing these opinions, even at the highest level of government, that the Marquis of Queensbury would not have approved of...
In short, the *US will likely be spending the rest of the 20th century in decline from its post-1933 peak. To keep its vast underclass suppressed, it must expend resources that could otherwise have been used to modernize the state and the economy.
 

xsampa

Banned
How will the *US react to the rise of China and Bharat, since they are non-white/in between white and brown on the racial hierarchy?
 
Someone once created a speculative map and description of what the world of DoD might look like by 2011. He stated that, thanks to the need to keep the slaves and peons in line, the *US' security state has grown to the point where even the free white citizens are seeing their liberty restricted, especially since, thanks to both interbreeding (masters raping their slaves, the "dance instructors") and the enslavement of Canadian rebels, it's grown more difficult to tell the free from the slaves by just the color of their skin. Keeping half the population in chains, and restricting the civil liberties of the other half in order to do so, has also suffocated high-tech and high-value industry. To quote:

In short, the *US will likely be spending the rest of the 20th century in decline from its post-1933 peak. To keep its vast underclass suppressed, it must expend resources that could otherwise have been used to modernize the state and the economy.
Heh, that map is a pretty realistic extrapolation of this demented world's future - the other probable future being nuclear wastelands across the entire planet, as opposed to mainly the Northern Hemisphere like in 1983: Doomsday, or any WW3 TL closer to ours. The *USA aren't going to go full Draka and conquer the rest of the planet. It's logistically impossible, especially after nuclear weapons are developed.

The fields of biology, genetic engineering, and (unfortunely ITTL still considered a valid science) eugenics may be more advanced than in OTL, given that the *USA has no qualms on carrying out various forms of dubiously ethical medical research on low-ranking peons with basically no rights.
 

xsampa

Banned
probable future being nuclear wastelands across the entire planet,
. American South America and Australia will eat nukes, along with South Africa, but Asia and the rest of sub saharan Africa might be OK
 

SuperZtar64

Banned
DoD's United States vs WMIT's Republican Union: Which one is LESS insane?
You ask that as if it needs much thought to answer. That answer is the *United States, easily, without a shadow of a doubt. The reasons for this are pretty self-evident for anyone who has even cursory knowledge of both states...
 
How the fuck is a thread almost old enough to drive still semi-active? I mean, half the characters in the original post are corrupted for crying out loud
Because people want to discuss it. I'm usually around to answer questions, although for the last few months I've been too busy to respond in detail.

Manually editing all of the old timeline posts is a considerable pain, but the rich text document has the entire timeline in a readable format if anyone wants to reread it (and some do).
 
Because people want to discuss it. I'm usually around to answer questions, although for the last few months I've been too busy to respond in detail.

Manually editing all of the old timeline posts is a considerable pain, but the rich text document has the entire timeline in a readable format if anyone wants to reread it (and some do).
It's really quite impressive someone managed to make what's probably the best timeline on AH.com while the New Board was still an infant.
 

xsampa

Banned
Also, DoD is the only TL that goes into detail about the colonization of China, including ita partition, shifting colonial borders, and resistance movements.
 
Because people want to discuss it. I'm usually around to answer questions, although for the last few months I've been too busy to respond in detail.

Manually editing all of the old timeline posts is a considerable pain, but the rich text document has the entire timeline in a readable format if anyone wants to reread it (and some do).

I must politely (but politely) beg you to add in those couple epilogue posts into the text document someday, Jared.
 
The fields of biology, genetic engineering, and (unfortunely ITTL still considered a valid science) eugenics may be more advanced than in OTL, given that the *USA has no qualms on carrying out various forms of dubiously ethical medical research on low-ranking peons with basically no rights.
I doubt this, largely because it's often overstated just how much useful data actually came out of the human experiments carried out by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The short answer is: not much. Sigmund Rascher's experiments on the limits of human endurance, conducted on hundreds of unwilling prisoners at Dachau and Ravensbruck, have been widely cited in medical journals since, but that's about it. Most of the rest was just creative ways to torture people to death, the resulting data more or less stating the obvious, like that you can't survive on salt water alone for two weeks or that injecting dye into your eyes will blind you. Even when they did produce useful data, the West was making the same, and arguably better, progress under more humane conditions. You can also look to the Tuskegee study, the results of which were more or less "syphilis will fuck you up", which was common knowledge for decades by that point. And of course, OTL's eugenics movement produced virtually nothing of value to science or medicine, and was already falling into decline in the 1930s even before WWII fully discredited it.

That said, even though the *US probably won't make any serious advances in medical science that the rest of the world isn't beating them to, they will probably find ways to use it as a tool of social control, and come up with a lot of splendid little crimes against humanity in the process. Once mechanization takes over agriculture and makes a lot of farm laborers redundant, expect to see a widespread sterilization program to cull the slave and peon populations. They'll try to come up with an ethnic bioweapon for much the same purpose, only to cancel it and bury all the evidence once it accidentally backfires on the white citizen population. To deal with the possibility of revolt, expect to see an alt-MKUltra, on steroids and done more or less openly, that won't necessarily produce a docile underclass like they hoped but will leave a whole lot of people driven too insane by drugs and medical torture to even consider organizing a rebellion -- so, in a sense, it could be seen as a "success" for white *America. Expect to see an attempt at a super soldier program, one whose only legacy will be a lot of broken veterans suffering from a lifetime of physical ailments. And just like how the Nazis discredited eugenics in OTL, expect the *Americans to do the same ITTL once their worst abuses are leaked to the outside world, just like how they discredited overt racial supremacy outside their borders (in favor of the sort of cultural supremacy embraced by the Germans).

And of course, there's likely to be a lot of pulp literature and exploitation films about *American human experiments. Medical horror could well be a staple of the New England film industry, given that country's proximity and cultural antipathy to the *US meaning that stories of their abuses will circulate far and wide, likely with government support.
 
Top