Also, there is going to in any event be a huge wave of Carolinan refugees to the ENA, particularly the elite whites who have more motivation and resources to do it with, once the Societist Bolsheviks take over and start Homogenizing things. They're going to try to undermine the new order any way they can, probably by mustering any influence and resources they have in the ENA to send aid to their (white) compadres down South like the Cuban Exiles OTL. The Politburo in Buenos Aires is not going to look kindly on putting a bunch of people who might be working with Diversitarian subversive elements in complete control of the country. Now, the blacks? They're "free" now, they're loyal.
Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
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Here I think you're thinking about LTTW political movements too much through the eyes of an OTL observer. We look at stuff mainly in economical terms, while in LTTW, people will look at stuff primarily in cultural terms. Societist egalitarianism is very different from socialist egalitarianism. You don't need to have everyone have the same income, the same means, the same opportunities, the same rights before the law, etc. You just need to make sure that they are all part of the same integrated culture. Sanchez does not have a problem with different classes even with as pronounced distinctions between them as there were in the 19th century. I think they may very well go along with separate but equal.
Not if the Societist/Diversitarian Cold War has started as early as the 1920s. Then the government can just shrug of such criticism as Diversitarian propaganda from the counter-revolutionaries that ought to be ignored.
That I can agree with.
I don't think that Societism will bring an end to racism. Quite the contrary. While big sizeable and historically disadvantaged minorities like blacks may be better off, it wouldn't surprise me if smaller minorities may endure a perfect nightmare in the Societist Combine. I mean, just take the Jews, who may very well endure Nazi-like persecution in the Societist Combine:
"Those, pesky, isolationist, dirty Jews who insist on maintaining their own small communities with their own distinct culture, religion and tradition who insist on marrying other members of the same community and plainly refuse to get assimilated!
Something must be done!
The Jewish Question requires a Final Solution!"
I doubt that Societism in Carolina will come about from black Carolinians rising in revolt. Thande has made a lot of hints of the Meridians getting an increased activity in the Caribbean and greater economic power in the American south. I think that what will more likely happen is that the revolution comes from the outside. That once the Societist Revolution has taken place in the UPSA, they will invade their satellite states to impose the new order there as well.
Okay, I finally will concede that you probably have a point. That while slavery will exist in Societist Carolina, it will not quite be along the lines of the "old slavery" such as it used to exist in Carolina.
"Seperate but equal" is the Diversitarian's schtick, though, at least in some of the forms we've seen, like people living in districts assigned to their culture. The Societists would try to avoid that, at least in theory, since that's what the dirty rotten cultural seperatists want to do.
We were just told in the update that some of Societism's excesses were inspired by the accounts of a soldier who saw the brutality of Southern slavery in action, though. That's hard to reconcile with keeping anything like the old slavery around. The New Slavery, such as it may be, is going to have to be organized along very different lines.
We're told that the Combine rules over basically most of Latin America. You know... the part of the New World that is home to millions of people from indigenous cultures. Here comes the new jefe, same as the old jefe: the mestizos and indios need to assimilate to the Latin standard, just like before, except now it's because separate languages are a crime against humanity, ¿me entiendes? Expect the Combine to look to the haciendas and colonial Spanish missions, for inspiration. The Mayans may be the Chechens of TTL.
But how do they impose it from outside? You can't just impose a Cultural Revolution from across an ocean. You need some local patsies. And who will be the most loyal patsies? Well, there's all these black people around being told they need to be kept separate from the whites... maybe our ideology will appeal to them... let's slip in some guns in our next shipment of cotton gins.
Once you've raised the Cultural Revolution fever to the point you're banning local festivals, nothing will ever be the same again.
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Okay, I think you've finally won me over on this point. New Slavery and New Aristocracy will be composed by mixtures of the Old Slavery and the Old Aristocracy.
I don't like where this is going at all...
Well, my speculation was more or less that the idea and original momentum, comes from the outside, but that these outside revolutionaries then ally themselves and provide the inspiration for internal groups that have been historically disadvantaged (like say, the blacks, but also poor whites) who do the bulk of the revolutionary work.
"Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend. And then, let's kill them all!"
I enjoy seeing discussion like that. It does sometimes give me ideas. (One reason why I don't confirm or deny speculation is not just to avoid spoilers but also because I have a habit of changing my mind as I write, so something I confirmed might not end up appearing in the TL and vice versa
Yeah, I know that Hergé, the creator of Tintin, would in the days of the early Tintin adventures encourage that readers write into the newspaper in which the comics were serialized and give their speculations as to in which direction they thought the story was going... so that Hergé could then incorporate plot lines that he liked.
That said, it's a bit annoying that you as an author can actually read and potentially modify the story as you see fit after what our comments are. Like, if I were to figure out how Look to the West is gonna go, whoopsie, seems like Thande changed everything so that Makemakean didn't get to have everything right. Sorry. So, basically, by construction, if I were to deduce and publicly share in which direction I think the story is going, if I am right, then I will indirectly change the way the story is developing.
That is, in a way, incredibly frustrating. By design, it's impossible for me to ever get things right.
If Societism is supposed to be a worldwide threat to international stabilty on the level of International Communism, instead of "only" the producer of a continent-sized North Korea (Is Brazil a part of it? The revamped Romance language makes me think yes), it needs to have something in it that would appeal to the average person, or at least the average middle-class person who is typically the driver of revolutions. "Let's leave the system pretty much the same except with new names for everything and maybe one or two new people in charge" is not a very inspiring rallying cry. The video reels for the Sociedad Internacional need to have SOME kind of achievements to show off. While they don't like democracy, they need to have some mechanism in their ideology for holding their leaders accountable to Society, since the argument is the Old Aristocracy did not. "You see, lower classes, now that we discovered Societism we actually like you now! Now shut up and learn your place." is probably not going to cut it. It's basically the Divine Right of Kings in black paint. People got sick of that a long time ago.
Soviet Communism was similar to Tsarism in its absolutism and in the methods it used to enforce its absolutism, but what its will was, and the institutional background for carrying out that will, was quite different. Comparing Gosplan bureaucrats to boyars will only get you so far. The Soviet System was theoretically accountable to the Communist Party membership and the Worker's Soviets as it was officially an expression of those bodies. In practice, the Party was controlled by the aging revolutionary leaders which resulted in the selection of geezers like Andropov, Kuznetsov, etc as head of state up until they ran out of geezers,and the Congress of Soviets had no power. But theoretically, they both represented "the People".
Now what does the Combine have? They don't like democracy, so anything smacking of that is right out. But they also believe the classes should be organized for mutual benefit, and classes should reflect innate ability. I think they would have something like a technocracy, with talented leaders elevated to leadership, talented intellectuals to science and engineering, businessmen to industry, and everyone else to other slots appropriately sized for their pegs, all chosen by an impartial, fair board according to Modern, Scientific criteria around the time they reach adulthood. This could appeal to those middle class revolutionaries: Meritocracy, but not democracy. At least in theory. Who gets to appoint the Board of Merit? Well... the leaders, it would seem. And so we discover the problem...
Don't step too far out of line, citizen. The Board of Merit may have to reevaluate your class status. They found errors in the evaluations of several thousand people last year; turns out they were all actually temperamentally suited to working in the salt mines. It's a shame our faith in their talents was betrayed so cruelly.
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Kaiphranos
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Or, you might end up being righter than you would have been! It's like you're an ITTL futurist--your predictions may end up swaying things one way or the other! Either the people of the future/Thande will work towards your predictions, like Jules Verne, or try to avoid them, like George Orwell! (OK, maybe that latter one is debatable...)
Well, if you look in the old map-thread, you can find this old thing:
By Thande's admission, socialism used to be the term that people in Look to the West was to refer to what eventually came to be referred to as Societism by, so assuming he hasn't made too radical changes (which is not to be ruled out, after all, things look pretty different up there in Louisiana, Carolina and Virginia), Brazil is part of the Societist Combine.
I think we're in agreement here, yes.
Yeah, this is where things start getting tricky, because democracy as a concept is nowadays so universally a by-word for something positive. Even places like North Korea feel the need to insist that they are democratic, going so far as to call themselves the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Every system of government in the world (with the exception of places like Saudi Arabia) attempts to make their internal structure look at least arguably democratic in nature. Even in places like China, you find things which sort of resemble democracy, albeit in a very convoluted form. You have people elect representatives on a local level, these representatives then elect representatives to a higher level, these meta-representatives elect meta-meta-representatives and so on all the way up to the National People's Congress with its 2987 representatives. Then of course, you add the fact that by law you may only have between 120 and 150 candidates per 100 seats, and that all the candidates must be approved and nominated by the Communist Party of China (after all, by Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat requires a strong vanguard party running the show), but even so, you can sort of see that with, at least in theory, people are electing their superiors, the whole system is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very watered-down form of democracy, but it is still arguably sort of vaguely kind of a form of democracy.
Now, if we're going to go full-scale alien world here (which seems to be what Thande has in mind), we really should be going for a form of dictatorship that doesn't even try to go for something akin to "Chinese Democracy". Rather than having an extremely qualified and much limited form of people electing their representatives and superiors, we much have a system of the superiors appointing people to lower posts. Hence the trickiness, since while people on the bottom can always elect people to be above them, if we have a complete top-down system, we have to ask ourselves the question, who appoints the top-appointers?
The only way I see all of this working other than there being some sort of monarch or super-computer on the top (maybe something more futuristic Societists eventually decide to aspire towards), I can only see all this working if at the top we have some sort of Council of the Revolutionary Guard, or the Supreme Senate of the Society or something, who elect new members to their own body to fill vacancies. These then appoint people in the lower bodies, who then appoint people in even lower bodies, and so all the way downwards. Obviously, appointments made by a second-rate body of people into a third-rate body is subject to review and veto by the first-rate body. I anticipate that you will have some intersections and stuff where different bodies have to come together and make decisions in-between them of how appointments are to be made.
I guess at this point that perhaps I should retract a notion I introduced earlier, that of a "Politburo of the Societist Party in Buenos Aires". It may well be the case that the doctrinaire Societists after the revolution decide that political parties themselves, by implying the existence of other parties and factions, one having dominance over another, is an inherently Diversitarian and thus counter-revolutionary and reactionary idea and that must be purged with, and that in the Societist combine there really does not exist political parties. Thus, no Societist Party.
Very neat, good sir, very neat indeed!
Thande
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Well, I wouldn't deliberately change things just to get around a prediction--I've seen what happens when webcomic artists (for instance) do that and it never ends well. But you might end up having some effect. Think of it as Schrodinger's timeline, you can't observe it without affecting it
Just to emphasise that probably only about 5% of the concepts in those maps will actually happen in TTL. Maybe 10%. They still have Prussia on, for goodness sake, while one of the themes of the final TL is to react against what's usually considered 'inevitable' by having Prussia not only fail to unite Germany but to be destroyed.
Well, I wouldn't deliberately change things just to get around a prediction--I've seen what happens when webcomic artists (for instance) do that and it never ends well. But you might end up having some effect. Think of it as Schrodinger's timeline, you can't observe it without affecting it
Reminds me I one day have to tell you about my Copenhagen Interpretation of Alternate History.
Speaking of quantum mechanics, checked up the terminology page you directed me to and was amused to discover that not only could I find Inversion Theory and the "Eleatic particle problem". I am particularly curious about seeing the latter enter the story, because I remember for the longest of time having extreme difficulties understanding the uncertainty principle, since the textbook I was using was merely talking in terms of shining light on particles to make measurements and I kept being "Well how is that a paradox? Seems the only reason we cannot know both the momentum and the position of a particle is because of limitations to our instruments of measurement!" It was first when I read your fellow chemist Peter Atkin's Physical Chemistry (7th edition) that I finally understood it, as Atkins presented it in brutally mathematical terms. If we knew precisely where the particle was, then by the mechanics itself, the momentum was totally undefined, and if we knew the momentum precisely, then the position was totally undefined. And that moment I felt a glimpse of Nirvana...
But I digress, all this, I cannot help but feel, must be well into the future. You have barely touched on electricity yet beyond giving hints of there eventually being Lectels, and by 1850 OTL, Michael Faraday had done the overwhelming bulk of the research that he was to become famous for. And I don't see how you can get people even noticing the fundamental problems of classical physics that eventually led to quantum mechanics if they aren't at first very well grounded in classical electromagnetic theory.
It wouldn't surprise me if people in Look to the West won't formulate Inversion Theory before the 1940s, 50s or even 60s... Either that or you're going to need a couple of Michael Faradays and James Clark Maxwells on steroids working away in the late 19th century.
You're officially denying it. By implication, you're confirming it. Gotcha.
I think the first leaders would be the revolutionaries, of course; but I think they would try to legitimate their rule by grounding it in Merit, rather than "the will of the people." How would they do this? They can't appoint themselves directly as that looks too corrupt. So, they have a central authority that assigns people to classes (including the leadership track) based on Fair, Impartial, Scientific, Modern criteria. They would introduce some kind of pseudoscience to base their decisions on, and maybe citizens could appeal these decisions every so often to give the system some flexibility. The Board of Merit would have to be appointed somehow; maybe every year, with great pomp and circumstance, the Classes all send a slate of candidates to the Aristocrats, people trained in the Science of Merit to recognize potential Merit in their Class, and the Aristocrats choose among them to pick for their local Boards. The Aristocrats also send Board members who pick new Aristocrats, who, being of such noble Character and Talent, will have first pick of any citizens coming before the Board. For some reason, this system always produces Aristocrats that are very similar to the last crop of Aristocrats. Some citizens whisper that Aristocrats aren't really chosen by Merit at all, but this is merely culturally divisive propaganda spread by perfidious Anti-Humans in need of homogenization and incorrigible malcontents who are probably suffering from Class maladjustment. If you hear someone voice such nonsense, citizen, report it to the Cultural Caretakers immediately.
Interesting. But, they do need some way of referring to the outside world of rebellious nonconformists. IIRC there are schismatic groups of Societists as well, each claiming to be the One True Society.
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Well, I knew Thande designed many aspects of Look to the West to reflect what he considered dystopic (hence, you have the British parliament built in neoclassicist style with the seats arranged along an arch) but this... I mean, the United States of Europe of which Britain is part of... That's the scariest dystopia that Thande can think of.
I mean, I can totally imagine the Matrix if Thomas A. Anderson was replaced with Thomas W. Anderson:
I mean, I can totally imagine the Matrix if Thomas A. Anderson was replaced with Thomas W. Anderson:
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Sorry, Thomas A. Anderson is the character in the Matrix, Thomas W. Anderson is the guy on the forum.
Sorry, I keep getting you guys mixed up.
Edit: Fix'd. In the future I will try to read everything that Thande writes in a Texan accent in my head so I won't forget that he's the Dubya.
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Thande
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Bruce is posting that map, it must be a day with a Y in itYeah, I'm not 100% confident in this map myself...
We're going to find the folks who are posting on this thread, and we're going to give them tax cuts up the major-league asshole to benefit hard-working businesses and the small American.
Bruce is posting that map, it must be a day with a Y in it
When the last LTTW thread of all is finally locked, the final post will be that map, complete with the silly carrier background in all its glory. It shall haunt you forever.
Bruce is posting that map, it must be a day with a Y in it
Hey, that's only the third (or maybe even the second) time I've posted it...
(Bah, memory is going. Darn kids get off my lawn).
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