Freedom Party = Nazis
Featherston = Hitler
Population reduction = Holocaust
You really need to read the books, Blue.
Official TL-191 Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Abhakhazia
- Start date
Freedom Party = Nazis
Featherston = Hitler
Population reduction = Holocaust
You really need to read the books, Blue.
Indeed. I know all three. However, what's the equivalent to the Social Democrats of Germany in the Confederacy?
If there really has to be one, the Whigs. The majority political party for much of its history, until Featherston came along and forced it out of the public eye.
With regard to the question I posed about infantry weapons in the SGW, I'm thinking that it may have been just a Turtledovian way of inexplicably handicapping the US so as to give the CS a more realistic chance of defeating the US. What do you think?
Recently, I made a thread on post-Second Great War worldviews and ethics in the TL-191 universe. It petered out, but maybe we could carry the discussion over into this Official Discussion thread.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=248530
Any responses to some of the things raised in this thread?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=248530
Any responses to some of the things raised in this thread?
bguy
Donor
Moving past the CSA as Ireland thing though she does raise a valid other question. How exactly did the Rad Libs manage to blow the '21 election? It should have been an easy win for them with the Whigs so discredited and the Freedom Party so thuggish (especially since the Whigs and Freedom Party were going to split the conservative part of the electorate.)
The Rad Libs still only had fringe support even with the Whig handicapped by the war defeat. They weren't really taken as a serious party by too many folks outside Sonora, Chihuahua, Cuba, and Louisiana.
Abhakhazia
Banned
Exactly. Their main purpose was to give the Confederate West a way to say "Fuck You" to Richmond, which generally ignored them.
I think HT realized he would lose a lot of pages if he could no longer talk about it.
Onto a more story-friendly explanation, you are pretty much right. Another one is that later in the War the US had to have so many CS rifles being used by its Troops, that its Troops had enough Tredegar's to not warrant switching to a new Rifle. More or less, US Companies/Platoons/Squads/etc. had enough of any Rifle type (SMG's, MG's, Bolt-Action Rifles, Assault Rifles), that they could handle any situation and the US Army could get along fine with just using the captured Tredegars. Therefore, it didn't require the US to go through the effort of switching over to a new model.
I don't think the Defense Cuts is a good enough explanation, the US switched to the Garand in '36 in OTL after all. The US Army wasn't exactly well-funded back then.
I think HT realized he would lose a lot of pages if he could no longer talk about it.
That's quite likely. Although I suppose if the US had upgraded to an assault rifle, he could have spent as many pages talking about how much better things were now that US troops didn't have to rely on those old bolt-action Springfields.
But the CS had trouble supplying its own troops with enough assault rifles, and there were far fewer CS troops than US troops to begin with. I think it's unlikely that there would have been enough captured assault rifles to go around for the US.
bguy
Donor
They seemed to have a reasonably big presence in Virginia though. There were newspapers friendly to their party in Richmond, and Reggie Bartlett wasn't treated as a crank for supporting them. And the fact they were able to win Bartlett over shows they did have the potential to appeal to ordinary white Confederate citizens. They also must have been reasonably strong in Tennessee since Cordell Hull was one of them (I doubt he would have belonged if the party was a joke in Tennessee), so there's no inherent reason they couldn't have broken through in the rest of the country.
Fair enough. But their platform was very conciliatory toward the US. In the post-GW CSA, there's no way that would have been popular enough to gain a plurality of the vote.
Abhakhazia
Banned
My guess would be that KY, TN, VA and maybe NC, would be a little more liberal, because liberal ideas from the US could seep south.
The Radical Liberals were seen as the party of "surrender" by everyone else. Sucking up to damnyankees was a very unpopular thing in the postwar scene.
Abhakhazia
Banned
We're talking east of the Mississippi, I believe. And Louisiana, like Sonora, Chihuahua and Cuba has a different culture and society makeup that the rest of the Confederacy.
bguy
Donor
I might throw Georgia in that list as well. Pre-Civil War, the (USA) Whig Party was fairly strong there, so Georgia seems to be a little more "liberal" than the rest of the Deep South. And it includes Atlanta (I assume the Rad Libs would be stronger in the larger cities.)
And even Alabama might be a possibility. Afterall OTL it elected Oscar Underwood to the Senate around this time, and he opposed both Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan. (It wouldn't surprise me at all if Underwood was a Radical Liberal in TL-191.) The fact that Alabama elected Underwood suggests its people might be more liberal than we might expect for a Deep South state. (And of course in TL-191 they have Birmingham as a major center of Confederate industry, so if the Rad Libs dp run strong in the cities that would give them an important stronghold in Alabama.)
Both Alabama and Georgia would be tough wins for the Rad Libs. They probably couldn't carry either state in a one on fight against the Whigs or Freedomites, but with the right wing vote fractured between those two groups they might just have been able to pull it off.
Trotsky said:
Most of our white Confederate POV characters are hard core Freedomites, not exactly an unbiased viewpoint. Reggie Bartlett is the closest thing we had to a Confederate everyman, and he certainly didn't view the Rad Libs as the party of surrender. And even Clarence Potter seemed to respect them. He was foremost a Confederate patriot, so he would not have had any good thoughts about them if he thought they were the party of surrender.
As for sucking up to the damnyankees, as with most things in politics it depends on how you spin it. If the Rad Libs make the case that they can use diplomatic means to convince the US to end the reparations that are destroying the Confederate economy, I think that idea would be very popular with the Confederate people.
RamscoopRaider
Donor
Doing that while ramping up production to meet a massively expanding force would be difficult and they had roughly three years or so to do it in, that is not too much time