It's been years and years since I read the early part of this TL so I'm forgetting the main factors that made the UPSA more economically successful than the same areas IOTL. Everything that I remember is them building on earlier strengths. What was it that gave them their initial boost?
Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
As I understood it, political unity based on the broadest popular classes (hence broader economic base) and progressive liberalism--giving people like Priestley refuge for instance. It started as developing capitalism at its best, in a phase where few of the drawbacks are apparent and the advantages plain and to some degree benefiting everyone. In Marxist analysis the working classes are still exploited, but under conditions offering solid and immediate improvements to their traditional economic opportunities.
Over time the big capitals obviously have centralized and consolidated control over wealth and also politics, but the current crisis is in part due to a populist alliance being strong enough to break through the crust of plutocratic control, in my humble opinion rather vindicating the soundness of the Meridian constitution, if not on paper than in terms of the strength and courage of the society it has promoted.
I still have a hard time seeing anything dark or ominous in the development of Societism thus far as shown here. I fail to see anything negative in teaching diverse children off the street the virtue of unbigoted cooperation based on the idea that in helping society I help myself. Rather than asserting the opposite as the sum total of all morality.
There is that whole "rejecting democracy and believing that an oligarchy is an inherent good" thing.
I mean, Societists see the concept of democracy with scorn.
But yes, the messages pushed in that excerpt aren't necessarily bad, but the whole "turning magic tricks into politics" thing is weird.
Normal? Yes. Every political movement has tried to teach people it's 'obvious' truths at a young age.
Alex Richards
Donor
You know, I think that might be what the in TL author of the work is trying to convey- to the contemporary reader there would probably be a sense of 'why would anyone support the creation of the Combine, it's clearly such an awful place'. The whole point of this scene is to demonstrate that it's not as if it just sprung up fully formed like that, and the initial starting points are quite sane and reasonable- there's not necessarily anything all that wrong with the whole 'united we stand, divided we fall, don't let others divide us' mentality.
But we're seeing little hints here and there. Those private armies for example- will they be disbanded (prompting civil strife and radicalism) or end up just being absorbed wholesale into the military without regard for their behaviour in the field of battle, and the newspapers where what was probably initially a cost saving measure (why pay a guy to report on events in Cordoba when we can just get the story off the local press) is already becoming a case of 'a veneer of local news wrapped around an essentially universal, national newspaper'. It's surely an easy step from there to having the local news stories written centrally with a few names changed- like the OTL Trinity Group with their myriad of British local online newspapers, all of which are essentially the same few news stories regurgitated in different settings.
It's the sort of disturbing twist that would make sense for why the Societist regime is nightmarish- there's hundreds of different newspapers, but they're all just saying the same thing, and that's not really all that different from just having one legal newspaper and everything else banned, save perhaps that the populace is somewhat less likely to notice...
We are told, by very unreliable narrator Diversitarians, that Societists are oligarchs who despise democracy.
Hitherto, all developments we are shown of Sanchez's thoughts being adopted are via--democrats! Populists!
I accept that the author has not been outright lying via lying Diversitarians and that the Combine has in fact been taken over by Inner Party oligarchs. But it seems to me that if they ever do so, first a genuinely populist movement at least as democratic as say, the OTL US New Deal movement, must predominate first, and then be captured from within, much as Orwell's Goldstein describes the cynical takeover of British Labour by men who ape working-class looks and jargon but with the goal of seizing absolute power and feather-bedding themselves.
And here's Alex Richards to suggest how they do it:
Indeed, this is the sort of thing Noam Chomsky points out about our so-called Free Press OTL! "Respectable" middle class journalism looks for cues from the respectable ruling classes and goes with their line; a vast thundering herd of mutual agreement thus looks like common sense consensus; dissenters are marginalized and thus effectively silenced. On paper the narrative against the ruling elites is out there, in print, freely available to anyone who chooses to look or tune in. It's just that individuals who do so brand themselves members of the unrespectable counterculture, are kept in zoos called universities and free weekly newspapers (where those aren't bought up and censored with a pro-corporate spin as well).
In short, the very worst thing one seems to be able prove or project with any probability from what we've seen is that the Combine is much like the modern USA of OTL! It obviously differs radically in some respects-cosmetically it looks like what the right-wing warriors against "political correctness" are warning us against--except that in so doing they are merely promoting their own political correctness, not adding to the sum of free and critical thought at all by their direct action--though I grant that by the friction and gridlock they create they may free up the mind of people who are truly critically inclined. But only by making such a din people tend to steer away from serious thought completely, for very understandable reasons!
Maybe the Combine goes beyond merely drowning out dissent, and actively hunts it down and silences it. A certain amount of that clearly happens in our "Free World" too, though one may argue it is of limited impact. Indeed a bit counterproductive one might say--kooks are laughed at and ignored, but martyrs attract attention. We don't know how the Combine deals with counter narratives at all. What we do know is that by this time, counter-narratives--of which Sanchezism is one--get a better hearing in the UPSA than they do in the OTL USA of my lifetime. It could change. But how does it? Only Diversitarians are telling us, and most of what they've been heard to say so far is dark looks and head shaking with no particular content, and smatterings of apparent data that look quite Orwellian--more Maoist or Trotskyite than anything else I can compare with--and that stuff was presented very early in the TL. Except for the bits about geographical places having grid references instead of names, which is recent.
I've been saying this Combine=OTL American Way (as it is, not as liberal progressives or even social conservatives wish it was) pretty much from whenever I started following this. Especially once it was revealed the Combine evolves out of the UPSA somehow.
Which is clearly just their Chilean influences rising up after centuries of repression.
It should be noted that the last thread had a mention of the Carolinian Societists banning a town from using horsemeat in their recipes because it made them different from other towns. Doesn't sound very pleasant to me. Plus, way, way back in the first thread @Admiral Matt noted that the Diversitarian backlash against Societism is actually a lot more similar to OTL attitudes towards Nazism than Communism. This implies that they must have done some pretty nasty things to earn that level of revulsion.
On another note, it's important to remember that this is still very much early days for the movement. What they act like now may be a lot nicer than how they act in the future. For example, I doubt that anyone looking at the Marxist movements of the 1900's would guess that they would be the origins of the Cheka, or the Great Leap Forward or the Khmer Rouge.
On another note, it's important to remember that this is still very much early days for the movement. What they act like now may be a lot nicer than how they act in the future. For example, I doubt that anyone looking at the Marxist movements of the 1900's would guess that they would be the origins of the Cheka, or the Great Leap Forward or the Khmer Rouge.
It has made me wonder though, what about OTL Eastern Bloc attitudes towards the West?
Thande
Donor
Thanks re the first one. The second one was meant to be a diminuitive ("Little Desperadoes") but I'm not sure if it's grammatically correct.
Lycaon pictus
Donor
I interpreted it as being the UPSA's equivalent of the Associated Press… which is also something that could become a powerful tool of repression and uniformity in the wrong hands.
"Could," eh?
Tell me, have you ever heard of Project Censored? I first did in the mid-1980s, and I've participated in it at Sonoma State University.
To be sure, glancing over its top stories just for the past couple years, it might be better named "Project Downplayed" because most of what is highlighted there is not excluded completely from mainstream media. However the items they emphasize are in fact well fact-checked by and large and yet are presented as "He-said, She-said" matters of opinion with very poorly backed opponents given equal weight in their presentations, and more often than not the fact-based side being presented as extremist and unreasonable.
Nowadays there is a lot less pretense by the US mainstream media that they are giving all facts in a fair and disinterested fashion, and much more open partisanship, than was the case when I was growing up or in my young adult years in the '80s.
One of my favorite examples is how the Los Angeles Times handled the incident in which a US Aegis cruiser in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger jet in '86 or '87. The day it happened, it was a page one headline story of course--and that story relied heavily on the US Navy's PR on the matter.
The next day, a story did cover the Navy retracting statement after statement they had made the day before, when it was a page one story--they'd said the plane was off its flight path, but actually it was on it; said it was not communicating but it was, routinely with ground control in English; said it was off course but it was on course, said it was off schedule but it was on schedule, said the flight plan was not filed but it was filed, said its transponder was not working but it was, accurately reporting it to be a civil airliner. They said it was descending toward the battle group, but per flight plan it was ascending when the missile hit it. And before! A whole bunch of mistakes, if mistakes they were, for the Navy to rush to the press without checking first.
This story to set the record straight--and every single one of these many items of "error" showed the USN and the whole project of US force projection into the Gulf in a pretty dismal light--was, strange to say, not on page 1! IIRC it picked up several pages in, and continued on a page away from the back of the major news section. Its headline did not dominate the page nor did say anything like "USN Released False Statements in Iranian Airline Downing" let alone "USN Murdered Dozens of Iranian Civilians." The title mentioned "corrections" if that.
This is how news is slanted--not by burying it, although surely such practices do cause stories to go unreported completely, but by spinning it, by choosing what to emphasize and what to downplay. Technically the story was fully covered--but the context meant that the majority of readers, as well as non-readers who skim headline stories without buying, learned of an Iranian sneak attack on US Naval forces foiled by steely-eyed sailors with their mighty and infallible weapons, and only careful readers learned that actually the Iranians did not attack but rather were attacked, in just the same manner that the Soviets so infamously and cruelly killed the people on KAL 007 some years before. The latter was good not for a day's headlines but for a couple weeks headline stories and a famous line item in the roster of Soviet infamy--the Iranian incident--well, have you ever even heard of it?
Why was the USN in the Persian Gulf in the first place, deployed against Iranian shipping? Well, a US cruiser was shot at with a missile you see, that led to escalation. Ah then, those foolish Iranians, shooting at an American ship! Well, no, actually if you followed the story carefully at the time, it was actually an Iraqi ship that fired an Iraqi missile and killed a bunch of USN sailors doing so. Yet, the rhetoric at the time focused on Iran, not Iraq, so a typical American media "consumer" could be forgiven I guess for the confusion. They both start with an I, and the mainstream media position generally was that both were crazy.
But US policy was not so even-handed. I gather that they proclaimed they were there to interdict both sides's shipping equally, and perhaps did so. But Iran had no way to export oil and thus gain revenue to buy stuff (like say, munitions, from the PRC) while Iraq could sell its oil via pipeline through Jordan. Iran had no pipelines (unless some used to run to Iraq) and was surrounded by hostile enemy powers on every border; only through the Gulf could they sell--or import anything they purchased. In effect we blockaded Iran, the nation that did not recently strike us, and not Iraq, the one who had struck and killed our people--but whom US policy quietly but firmly backed, crazy or not.
Before hearing of Project Censored I was able to figure out for myself how slanted mainstream media was, just by remembering stories they'd emphasized one day and handled quite differently on another. The above was a particularly spectacular case but there are plenty of other examples.
If you look at the Wikipedia article, you can see that leftists too criticize some of PC's styles of operation. But they don't therefore assert that one can trust the news that easiest to get uncritically!
To say then that the Combine has centrally controlled news media and severely restricts alternate slants is then merely a matter of degree's difference from the OTL West, the USA anyway. And it is still not clear that anything more stringent that we accept as normal here in the West is going on there. Possibly it is. And maybe it isn't.
What we do know is that in the Diversitarian sphere, slanting censorship is openly acknowledged to be going on, and is justified not merely on grounds of security but because a heritage of hatred and mistrust of other nations is a healthy thing that holds peoples together and is morally superior to the notion of them cooperating in friendship!
Perhaps this too is a put-on--the policy is there to gratify extremists who really do think that way, while winking and smiling at a majority that knows this is tommyrot and plays along with these blowhards because fighting them is too much trouble.
That's the kind of thing I suppose Thande would think is funny after all. I am amused by it myself.
But it's an open warning that everything you read in ATL English sources is very likely to be a lie. You have to judge for yourself.
Alex Richards
Donor
Actually that's another fair point in there- another subtle indication that just because you're rationalising all the policies to a single standard, doesn't mean it's necessarily the best standard.
I imagine that a Diversitarian State may well have universal female suffrage as a constitutional right, but also state that it's a fundamental right to express that this shouldn't be the case and give reasons for that point of view.