Thande
Donor
Same way as the OTL spelling (in fact it's an older OTL spelling) so the phrase rhymes, probably half the reason why Smith used it as a slogan on the leaflets (compare the infamous case of Smethwick in 1964 in OTL)
Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Same way as the OTL spelling (in fact it's an older OTL spelling) so the phrase rhymes, probably half the reason why Smith used it as a slogan on the leaflets (compare the infamous case of Smethwick in 1964 in OTL)
New South Wales always did that for me. I've spent more time than is healthy wondering what, exactly, the upper Murray / Sydney coast had in common with northern Manitoba and the original.
Edit: Whoops. Ninja'd. Emphatically so.
Last edited:
I'm going to be honest you lost me around the time the whole diversitarian/societist thing popped up. Neither ideologicies make any sense, and the fact that you focus so heavily on them really takes away from what is otherwise a well written TL turning what was a neat well written timeline into gibberish. The whole diversitarian/societist plot strikes me as unessisary any way. Why resort to inpenitrable and non sensical ideologies when you could've focused on the stuff before that was so much more interesting?
Well from my understanding Societism was about as big a part of the orginal idea as "The Two Georges done right" (though Diversitarianism came later).
And also, they don't seem at all nonsensical or incomprehensible to me.
Societism - The belief that to end human suffering, conflict must also be ended, and to do this, cultural differences must be eradicated.
Diversitarianism - A reaction to the above, saying that a diversity of cultures and societies is not merely inevitable, but good and necessary.
And also, they don't seem at all nonsensical or incomprehensible to me.
Societism - The belief that to end human suffering, conflict must also be ended, and to do this, cultural differences must be eradicated.
Diversitarianism - A reaction to the above, saying that a diversity of cultures and societies is not merely inevitable, but good and necessary.
Thande
Donor
If you look way back at Interlude#1 of this timeline...
Someone commented at the time something like 'the POD's in 1727, how alien could it be if they've found timelines with surviving Roman Empires'? One of the primary goals of this TL, possibly the primary goal, is to show how context-specific the underpinning ideologies of the world are, and that what makes sense to someone from one TL would seem nonsensical to another. The people of LTTW would be appalled by modern right-wing politics in many countries that celebrate capitalism for example: "You've just taken this Marx's ideas, which are probably wrong but well intentioned, and made this hyper-exaggerated opposite of it which makes inequality into a virtue, whereas the original founders of the global economic system like Adam Smith would never see it as anything more than a necessary evil! No-one would ever have thought like that if Marx hadn't come along!" They might also bring up a hyper-reaction against the Nazis having affected modern views on things like eugenics compared to mainstream views in the 1930s before the Nazis came along--which would be more likely to provoke an emotional outrage among people in OTL, because to these hypothetical LTTWers the Holocaust is just words on a page, not history they've lived. And they would be unable to see that they have done exactly the same thing with Diversitarianism as a reaction against Sanchez and Societism, because they are the ones living in a TL where so much blood has been shed over a division that might seem petty to us.
Have you got any equivalents planned for this? (IIRC Thalvetia had Stentyrreans have a similar thing with rockets).
Thande
Donor
At present I'm not sure. It's one of those things that arguably 'should' happen more often in Random TL than what we think of as 'the default', precisely because of the factor I mentioned above, but also as I mentioned above, it (understandably!) provokes such an emotional response to readers from OTL that it would probably be too much of a distraction.
Right, I think I've just had one of my brilliant ideas that solves this problem, watch this space.
Thande
Donor
Ah, now that's a good point too. I've already kind of brought it up with the fact that strategic city bombing of any kind (nuclear or otherwise) in TTL is still considered as monstrous as it was in the 1930s in OTL.
Expo `67 was a fairly big deal, and they're still sort of a thing.
Anyway, good update.
Last edited:
I think Diversitarianism would certainly be ideologically much more favourable to WorldFest than OTL was to World's Fairs.
Be that as it may, I still liked it better before Societism/Diversitarianism, and still feel that they take away from the timeline more than they add. I'm not saying get rid of them, just don't focus so heavily on them to the detriment of everything else like you have been doing.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the typo correction Admiral Matt, have edited.
We are building up now to the big confrontation of the twentieth century, it would be a bit silly for someone to write about the OTL twentieth century and never mention Marx or communism until 1917.
If you mean how when writing about other subjects the in-timeline writers bring everything back to those ideologies--that just illustrates the political climate they are living in, like how in 1950s America the most unconnected things were claimed to be promoting Communism. It would not be an accurate reflection of 1950s America to try to edit around that fact when presenting a history of it. You could not discuss, for example, the struggle for black civil rights without talking about how opponents drew connections between it and Communism. You could not discuss cultural trends in music or literature or comic books without bringing up paranoia about nuclear war and Sputnik and the Red Menace. And so on.
The TL has never been without them. As Owen says, Societism was there from the very first trial maps I did in 2006, which still had the Kingdom of Virginia, Prussia-Poland and Cooksland. In many ways, it is the central subject of the TL.
We are building up now to the big confrontation of the twentieth century, it would be a bit silly for someone to write about the OTL twentieth century and never mention Marx or communism until 1917.
If you mean how when writing about other subjects the in-timeline writers bring everything back to those ideologies--that just illustrates the political climate they are living in, like how in 1950s America the most unconnected things were claimed to be promoting Communism. It would not be an accurate reflection of 1950s America to try to edit around that fact when presenting a history of it. You could not discuss, for example, the struggle for black civil rights without talking about how opponents drew connections between it and Communism. You could not discuss cultural trends in music or literature or comic books without bringing up paranoia about nuclear war and Sputnik and the Red Menace. And so on.
Actually, reading the TL again, there is another group who could be Nazi analogues: the Jacobins. That was, I felt, the first really interesting change in this TL, the development of a totalitarian, highly xenophobic, and genocidal regime in the early 1800s. It also is being referred to with hindsight similarly to the Nazis; there are "Neo-Jacobins", and any far right Republican movements are essentially completely discredited. Then again, the Jacobins didn't have any theories that became taboo after their fall, did they?
Thande
Donor
That's a good point. Linnaean racial supremacy did become taboo in many, though not all, societies. Unlike the Nazis however the Jacobins didn't really get into eugenics (if they had won the war, of course, things might have been different...) which is the specific thing we were discussing.
The Jacobins were literally French steampunk Nazis.
And I really liked them for being so (technologically) advanced and evil.
Of course they don't make sense. What ideology does? Look at Right Wing Christians in the US opposing most of the things Jesus preached (loving everyone, caring for the needy, etc.). Look at Soviet Communism which is so antithetical to what Marx wrote, from its inception in the wrong country to, well, everything. Look at American foreign policy - supporting the 'Free World' by propping up nasty dictators. Look at Apartheid, which classed Chinese as 'Asians' (rung 3 of 4 in their system), but Japanese as 'White'. Etc., etc.