Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again

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Thande

Thande

Donor
Kaiser Julius said:
So is the Pandoric War a free-for-all?
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It's basically an exaggeration of what happened in WW1 - and this exaggerated form might well have happened if we'd had an earlier WW1 in the 1890s or 1900s - that everyone bangs on about Our Glorious Alliance while in practice everyone knows that it's whoever happened to be in the right place to take advantage at the right time, and it could easily have been the other way around (the pre-WW1 alliances changed with bewildering rapidity in OTL, and in TTL alliances didn't even really exist at all before war broke out).

So for example Russia got involved because it was an excuse to push its territorial claims in North America while the ENA was consumed with conquering Carolina, and then Germany and Danubia declared war on Russia as an excuse to try to gain a stronger position before Russia's continued industrialisation leaves them unbeatable (and also because France, Belgium, Italy and initially Scandinavia declared neutrality) - all opportunism, but the papers in St Petersburg bang on about The Heroic Meridians and those in Fredericksburg talk about the Brave Teutonic Warriors and all that jazz. Naturally this is driving some people intelligent enough to see the hypocrisy towards Societism, especially given the bloodiness of the war.
 
Thande

Thande

Donor
Kaiser Julius said:
So where does the UPSA, Persia, China and the Ottomans fit into all this?
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It started out as an incident between Theoretically Meridian Backed Siamese and Theoretically American Backed Feng Chinese, which escalated into a Feng-Siamese war but the death of a popular American in the incident led to the ENA papers attacking the Meridians, who then (partly also for internal reasons) elected a firebreathing Mentian (left-winger) as President-General, then ENA papers reported war had been declared before it actually had been, a Meridian ironshark (submarine) sank a British warship, and it escalated from there as I described above. Ironically, as has been noted in-story, the Feng/Siamese conflict that started it all has now been resolved, but all the other wars it unleashed are still going and escalating further.

The Ottomans and Persia are presently neutral.
 

Analytical Engine

Thande said:
It started out as an incident between Theoretically Meridian Backed Siamese and Theoretically American Backed Feng Chinese, which escalated into a Feng-Siamese war but the death of a popular American in the incident led to the ENA papers attacking the Meridians, who then (partly also for internal reasons) elected a firebreathing Mentian (left-winger) as President-General, then ENA papers reported war had been declared before it actually had been, a Meridian ironshark (submarine) sank a British warship, and it escalated from there as I described above. Ironically, as has been noted in-story, the Feng/Siamese conflict that started it all has now been resolved, but all the other wars it unleashed are still going and escalating further.
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But, hey, Britain started a war because a guy lost his ear, so...
 

Makemakean

I'm very confused about how everything seems to indicate that Carolina will be annexed once more by the Empire of North America. Because, in an earlier update, Thande wrote as follows:

Thande said:
(ORIGINAL FOOTNOTE)*Not that many Americans at this point would regard Carolina as a nation, of course, and even in Carolina after a couple of decades of Carolinian exceptionalist literature and rhetoric, many Carolinians regarded themselves as fighting not for an independent Carolina but for ‘the real America, the America of George Washington, Ben Franklin and William North, which the damned northerners mouth platitudes to while betraying in the spirit like some latter-day Pharisees’, in the words of Carolinian War Secretary Angus Pryor. It is worth noting that Phelps’ own position on this is often misunderstood due to the popularity of the film Birth of a Nation from the 1920s, which depicts Phelps being hauled up before a select committee in 1851 to defend his actions; Phelps argues in favour of consolidation by stating that “The Carolinians can hardly survive with half their countr—Confederation in our hands.” The select committee meeting was real, but its transcript records Phelps’ words as “The rebels can hardly survive with half their Confederation in our hands”, with no Baumgartner’s Tongue involved.[1] The modified line appears to stem from a theatrical production, The Generals, from the turn of the twentieth century, which was copied wholesale by the later film. The writer of The Generals was an American but, like many by that point, had accepted the narrative that Carolina was always destined to be its own distinctive country, and seems to have made the modification in light of that ‘inevitable’ conclusion. A small but significant illustration in how ‘history’ in the minds of many stems more from the pens of writers of fiction than from those recording facts. (FOOTNOTE ENDS)
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...which seems to indicate that some way or another, Carolina will still emerge from this mêlée an independent nation.
 

Analytical Engine

Makemakean said:
I'm very confused about how everything seems to indicate that Carolina will be annexed once more by the Empire of North America. Because, in an earlier update, Thande wrote as follows:



...which seems to indicate that some way or another, Carolina will still emerge from this mêlée an independent nation.
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I fear that "Events, dear boy" will happen, as I remarked in an earlier post.

Either (a) Carolina isn't annexed as part of the ENA (because it would just be too difficult), and was left under military occupation "for the duration", which (of course) later backfires when they rise up against said occupiers, or (b) Carolina is annexed, but later becomes independent again, this time permanently. Whichever case does happen, Carolina becomes Societist as a result.
 

Youngmarshall

Makemakean said:
I'm very confused about how everything seems to indicate that Carolina will be annexed once more by the Empire of North America. Because, in an earlier update, Thande wrote as follows:



...which seems to indicate that some way or another, Carolina will still emerge from this mêlée an independent nation.
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The fact that the general thinking 10-30 years after the war is that carolina was seperate because of innate differences in culture rather than mere circumstances is probably yet another reason to expect the annexation of it to go badly.
 

Analytical Engine

1SaBy said:
Isn't Carolina mentioned to be part of the Combine and not an independent Societist state?
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The Combine is...complicated.

From what I understand, it is supposed to be one state (because that's the whole point of Societism), but it actually isn't - it's a bunch of independent or semi-independent states which shares an ideology, and is dominated by the former UPSR, which acts as the core.

There was a mention of a more "layered" approach to Societism several updates back, which (I think) is supposed to gradually "ease" areas into cultural homogeneity. So the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking parts would homogenise first with each other, and then with the homogenised English-speaking Carolina and Dutch-speaking Guiana, etc.
 
General Lemarc

General Lemarc

Analytical Engine said:
The Combine is...complicated.

From what I understand, it is supposed to be one state (because that's the whole point of Societism), but it actually isn't - it's a bunch of independent or semi-independent states which shares an ideology, and is dominated by the former UPSR, which acts as the core.

There was a mention of a more "layered" approach to Societism several updates back, which (I think) is supposed to gradually "ease" areas into cultural homogeneity. So the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking parts would homogenise first with each other, and then with the homogenised English-speaking Carolina and Dutch-speaking Guiana, etc.
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I am DYING to see how the Combine and ASN work, particularly the former. Its religion, its culture, the subcultures it tries and fails to get rid of, the whole thing. Thande, we await with bated breath.
 
Hawkeye

Hawkeye

General Lemarc said:
I am DYING to see how the Combine and ASN work, particularly the former. Its religion, its culture, the subcultures it tries and fails to get rid of, the whole thing. Thande, we await with bated breath.
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At the beginning of one of these threads, Thande mentioned that the church works as a tool of the combine government.
 
Redcoat

Redcoat

Banned
Currently still reading this door stopper, I have but two comments. that stood out the most.
Thande said:
>On another note, how far are you planning to continue this TL? To the 1900s? Present day(which would be dependant on when you finished I suppose)?
In theory, 2015-ish, as that's when the imagined timeline exploration team mentioned at the beginning comes from.
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HA!
Thande said:
Part #53: Three Stripes of Neapolitan
>Facing the destruction of all he held dear, the aged Pope Benedict XV attempted to flee the city, but was recognised in the street. The Jacobins fought a pitched street battle in the burning ruins of Rome with the Swiss Guard, and finally emerged triumphant. Benedict XV was beheaded beneath the pillars of what was left of the Temple of Vespasian in the Forum, mere hours before that too crumbled before the flames sweeping through the city.
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First Venice and now Rome! Nooooooooooo.....


Can't wait till I'm caught up, my apologies if this is considered a necro.
 
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