dystopia

just a little fun writting/AH Challenge, using any POD post 1900 make your home country (or any country really) as dystopic as you can, no acts of God or nuclear war, those are cheep. have fun the winner gets a cookie.

THE COOKIE:
cookie.jpg
 
That's totally the premise of the timeline at the bottom of my signature. Only slight ASB interference.

I'll get around to updating it so you guys can see the Presidency of Dick Cheney. :eek::)
 
Germany: Have the Nazis win WWII in Europe resulting in a Cold war between the US and Greater Germany. Simple as that. Cookie please.
 
Poland is overrun by communists in the Polish-Soviet War, lose millions in Stalinist purges and a Holodomor-style famine. Then the Nazis invade and kill millions more. Then the Russians come back and kill another few million. Stalin lives until 1960. Polish SSR eventually becomes something like Chechnya, and another half a million die, leaving the country in ruins.
 
My unfinished TL "A Time to Remember." You have a McCarthyite Canada with a PM Maurice Duplessis and domestic security legislation tougher than PATRIOT in both the US and Canada. Those with what we know as New Leftist sympathies can be arrested under the catch-all "pro-Communist activities" which can mean whatever the prosecution wants it to mean.
 
Uh many interesting options !

ITALY:

- Mussolini is not freed by Skorzeny, the Germans set up an even more ferocious dictatorship led by nutty fanatics like Pavolini and Farinacci. Northern Italy becomes a de facto slave labor pool for Germany, while Brigate Nere go on murderous rampage to unprecedented level. Fanatic fascists hold up their defence in a Berlin-like way, leaving cities even more damaged than before. At the end of the war, Italy loses also Val D'Aosta and Imperia to France, the whole of Venezia Giulia to Jugoslavia (with vengeful expulsion and cleansing) and Bozen to Austria. The atrocity of the regime makes fascist purges ... well, real purges, with massive trials and executions. The new State has a lot more polarized political landscape, and no bureaucratic class of note. The communist-socialist alliance gains a plurality in 1948, but conservative and American pressures make up for the birth of a moderate government. Enraged ultra-leftists revolt, leading to a military coup,possibly with the return of the King. Italy stays a corrup, Francoist power up to the 70's, when it is finally freed of its dictatorship, but remains mostly a banana-republic.

- The Communist Party wins elections in 1948, Allies do not intervene but foster insurrections: See territorial losses as above, with also Sicily and Sardinia took by the Allies, and set up as a military junta. Hardliners take the control in the country, massive purges as before, even greater purges after Giuseppe di Vittorio and Pietro Nenni take a stand against Soviet intervention in Budapest. The regime itself becomes a little more relaxed afterwards, but it goes down a la Ceausescu in 1989, leaving a Third-World like Italy into massive privatizations, even greater corruption and the collapse of the Welfare-State, while a revitalized Mafia in a unified Italy pretty much joins in with former Secret Services to create a Catholic parody of Putin.

- After massive political tensions, a coup happens in 1964 after the Socialists have joined government. Italy is thrown out of the European Community, but the regime is almost brought down by Union strikes and student rebellions in 1968 or so. An economically damaged, ultra-liberist Italy with huge farming monopolies and fanathical puritanism drags along into the middle 70's when the regime collapse, but the new democratic government has to face communist guerrilla.

-At the height of the "Strategy fo Tension" in the 70's, the Borghese coup succeeds. See before, only that instead of a conservative regime, you have an openly neo-fascist one, also big on atrocious deportation and mass re-education. Italy becomes a worst Colonels' Greece in an even worse economic moment, as the 70's recession happens. The regime goes down in hell in less than 10 years, but its worst killers are safeguarded by provisional arrangements with new governments, meaning that Italy is even more polarized than now.

-After Bribesville (Tangentopoli), the former Communist left wins a majority of seats as Berlusconi decides not to run. The new government adopts draconian fiscal measures to save the economy, bringing the neoCommunists to leave the alliance. Meanwhile, most of formerly moderate electors support the racist and secessionist Northern League in northern Italy and unreformed Fascists of the Italian Social Movement in the South. A moderate coalition government between Centre and Left can't help when the two extremist parties (who now have respectively 20% and 25% of the votes) start fighting one against another, and Italy goes away in a dramatic Yugoslav-like war starting in 1995.
 
-After Bribesville (Tangentopoli), the former Communist left wins a majority of seats as Berlusconi decides not to run. The new government adopts draconian fiscal measures to save the economy, bringing the neoCommunists to leave the alliance. Meanwhile, most of formerly moderate electors support the racist and secessionist Northern League in northern Italy and unreformed Fascists of the Italian Social Movement in the South. A moderate coalition government between Centre and Left can't help when the two extremist parties (who now have respectively 20% and 25% of the votes) start fighting one against another, and Italy goes away in a dramatic Yugoslav-like war starting in 1995.

Surely a civil war in Italy seems a little bit too far fetched, I can easily foresee a lot more tensions than now but a civil war seems a stretch. A possible scenario could be a federalisation of Italy on Belgian lines with constant struggles between thr rich north and the poor south. A perfect receipe for massive instability and quite possible an even bigger north-south gap is the south don't get its act together.

Here is my try for France:

-Communist uprising in 1945 following the war victory, either because the war went differently or because they are not included in the national government. The near civil war can either result in a staunchly right wing regime at best or in a full blown civil war with all the ensuring consequences. .

-The tensions created by the Algerian war boils up in a military coup (successful Algiers Putch) and a junta of Salan, Jouhaud, Challe and Zeller. This require army conscript to support the coup en masse which is doable if De Gaulle is not around for example. The consequences of a succesful coup could be very nasty. The Communists would strongly object to it and likely be supported by Moscow. The Algerian ulcer would still be there as well. France most successful decade economically was the sixties, in a such a scenario the Trente Glorieuses could very well end a lot earlier than the early 1970s.

-Bokassa somehow becoming Emperor of the French instead of Emperor of Centrafrica :p.
 

Goldstein

Banned
I made one some time ago, it was ASBish but pretty dystopic, so I'll upgrade it as much as I can:

the POD is that Emilio Mola avoids the plane accident in 1937, so he finally becomes the main head of the Nationalist movement.

After the Nationalist victory, he becomes the head of a military Junta that centralizes the Republic and exterminates all Leftist and peripheral nationalist sympathizers. This depuration process takes years and leaves a death toll of aproximately two millions, as Mola starts becoming paranoid and senile, and resistance from Monarchists and even Catholic Conservative groups becomes higher.

Finally, in 1956, with the country still isolated and dirt-poor, and the international community still aknowlegding the Spanish Republic in exile (wich is quite leftist, but at least declares itself neutral, and even the most hawkish politicians in the U.S. are too scared of the also anti-American and anti-capitalist Mola regime to collaborate with it), fearing a coup of inner dissidents (wich at this time include Franco), the core loyalist members of the shady Junta approve a "special measures" program, stating that they're under inminent foreign and fifht-columnist attack, decimating their own ranks and using the cartoonish figure of Franco as a scapegoat, stating that they'll go further in their reform of Spain. The pack of measures included:

-An economic Stabilization plan, which cimented Spain's self-reliance, but heavily focused on heavy industry. All the Spanish enterprises were de-facto nationalized.

-The definite closing of all borders.

-Carlism and Falangism were to be supressed as Anti-Spanish and subversive.

-The Junta and the remaining loyal civil politicians were to be integrated in a single political force with a core, definite ideology of self-reliance, national interest and infalibility of the State, wich was called Convergencia Nacional or NAZCON.

-Freedom of movement was to be eliminated.

-An intensive surveillance program was to be implemented.

-As the papacy had become increasingly critical with the Spanish government, Rome was to be shown as corrupted by the Red conspiracy, and so the Spanish church would break away from the main one, with Mola as the maximum religious authority, in direct line with God. With time,church and state would not only be jointed, but undistinguishable from one another.

-New ministries would be built, in the Spartan, monolithic style of the El Escorial fortress.

-Schools of theopolitics would be formed, in order to create a class of technicians/priests/politicians to be formed in the new national principles.

-From now on, Franco would be the responsible of all evils.

It's 2010, and the living standards are still, for the majority of the population, those of post-war times. As far as the population thinks, totally disconnected from reality as it is, since 1960 Spain has recovered its former glory and has restored her Empire, now also encompassing half of Africa, and it's at a perpetual war with the Soviet Union (that now encompasses all of Eurasia minus Iberia), and the Oceanic Federation, which ecompasses the English-speaking world and Portugal. Very little is known about the main ideologies that rule the enemy superstates, as well as the thoughts of the Francoist dissisents ("Bolshevism" and "Masonry", respectively), but they're assumed as vile abominations.

Nobody has seen Mola in public since a long time ago, but we can be pretty sure that he will never die.
 
Last edited:
Guatemala!

I'll take that and you'll see a Central American Federation that mindrapes its citizens into loving me and the Party. Not a single bad thought shall remain and not even the working class shall be free of my brainwashing! We have the technology, and we can win! I would even give some members here an esteemed position in government if I wanted to.
 
It's 2010, and the living standards are still, for the majority of the population, those of post-war times. As far as the population thinks, totally disconnected from reality as it is, since 1960 Spain has recovered its former glory and has restored her Empire, now also encompassing half of Africa, and it's at a perpetual war with the Soviet Union (that now encompasses all of Eurasia minus Iberia), and the Oceanic Federation, which ecompasses the English-speaking world and Portugal. Very little is known about the main ideologies that rule the enemy superstates, as well as the thoughts of Astray's followers ("Bolshevism" and "Masonry", respectively), but they're assumed as vile abominations.

Nobody has seen Mola in public since a long time ago, but we can be pretty sure that he will never die.

Waoh :eek: some kind of "right-wing" North Korea in Spain ...

Was Mola really that extreme?
 

Goldstein

Banned
Waoh :eek: some kind of "right-wing" North Korea in Spain ...

Was Mola really that extreme?


Emilio Mola said:
We must exterminate everyone who thinks differently, in order to create a political climate of terror.

Judge for yourself. Anyway, think this is meant as a Worst Case Scenario, and so it is deliberately exaggerated.
 
Top