I see a worst case scenario is this: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the rest of Central Europe crushed between Germany and Russia, France being occupied by Germany, England and Canada defeated by the United States, and finally, Japan, America, and Nazi Germany teaming up to destroy the Soviet Union.
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I still think it is a funny thing to have the USA and Japan on the same side. Americans were very jealous of Japan and fearful that they alone were in a position to mess with American ambitions in east Asia.
I see not everyone else is as outraged as I am by the betrayal of American notions of freedom of thought and tolerance; these were imperfectly expressed and championed OTL but progress was made. Here, it seems likely to me that everything that was rotten about the USA in terms of racial stereotyping and ranking, and bigotry in general, will only get worse instead of being shamed into retirement.
But of course I suppose I have an ideological blind spot. I am probably not the guy to see clearly what must become of this twisted America, since I have no love or sympathy for it.
So--for instance maybe the notion I have that American greed and racism combined make it impossible for the Japanese to be admitted to this world's Axis is terribly mistaken, and in truth the dynamics of the situation will soften and melt away anti-Japanese racism and transform the image of Japan into something noble, and a partnership arrangement will be worked out partitioning East Asia very neatly. I can't see it but perhaps I should just ignore this TL and let it go to hell in its own way. It does seem to me a lot of people are enjoying potentials that seem rather repulsive to me.
I see not everyone else is as outraged as I am by the betrayal of American notions of freedom of thought and tolerance; these were imperfectly expressed and championed OTL but progress was made. Here, it seems likely to me that everything that was rotten about the USA in terms of racial stereotyping and ranking, and bigotry in general, will only get worse instead of being shamed into retirement.
But of course I suppose I have an ideological blind spot. I am probably not the guy to see clearly what must become of this twisted America, since I have no love or sympathy for it.
So--for instance maybe the notion I have that American greed and racism combined make it impossible for the Japanese to be admitted to this world's Axis is terribly mistaken, and in truth the dynamics of the situation will soften and melt away anti-Japanese racism and transform the image of Japan into something noble, and a partnership arrangement will be worked out partitioning East Asia very neatly. I can't see it but perhaps I should just ignore this TL and let it go to hell in its own way. It does seem to me a lot of people are enjoying potentials that seem rather repulsive to me.
I agree with you, but I feel stressing the horrors of this fascist America is beating the dead horse.
Sorry for slacking guys! I'm in the middle of the most stressful move of my life and my dad getting married so it's pretty crazy! I might post an update I've been working on tonight or tomorrow night.
He might, but if he's going to be PotUS, he'd be better to follow the Texas maxim: a fair trial & a real nice, real public hanging. Don't make them martyrs by circumventing the system.
On the plotters, I have a real problem imagining Patton going along or behaving like he is, here. He was fairly rabidly anti-Communist, but disloyal, or inclined to join a coup? No.
I could see Bronfman. I could see Augie Busch. I could see Joe Kennedy Sr. I could see any of hundreds of small brewery owners of this period. But Capone?
Seriously?! Besides being a notorious gangster, he's suffering terminal syphilis! If you insist on using a gangster ( ), I might believe Meyer Lansky, who I doubt anybody not a Mafioso had ever heard of in 1933.Long was a radical with ties to organized crime. He wouldn't run: he'd fit right in...
Who might leave? Robert Heinlein & Isaac Asimov. Robert A., tho sometimes made out a fascist, was fiercely Libertarian in bent. Isaac was almost as fiercely dedicated to intellectual independence; he'd hate leaving New York, but I can imagine him moving to Montreal. There are probably others, too. Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster? Jack Kirby? Martin Goodman? The Christie brothers? Chaplin? Keaton?
I also have serious doubts about suspending the Constitution & SCotUS without a word of protest from ACLU or even a single major media outlet, including the Times & Post.
Your analysis is thorough, as usual. However, IMO if falls down on a couple of points.
Based on the prisoner leasing experience, which was limited to manual labor, convicts were something like only 20% as costly as free labor. For industrial work, that might be higher. In-prison manufacturing, beyond piecework or specialized tasks (garment work), seems impractical.
If we accept you're right & this becomes commonplace, you've driven wages down to an astounding degree & succeeded in prolonging the Depression.
Low wages mean no excess for purchase of more goods, & overproduction in 1929 was a major reason for the Crash in the first place. If buying power doesn't improve, the economy can't recover, no matter what's coming from Mexico or Haiti: there are only so many millionaires, & the market for Packards & Duesenbergs is perforce limited.That's excluding the resulting reduction in product quality from use of prison labor, which cannot have the same sense of "pride of production" even a poorly-paid free worker does. That hampers U.S. exports by comparison to others, & even with prison labor, I have my doubts U.S. exports can compete on price with Japan or China in this period.
You may have hampered U.S. innovation, too: with less need to compete on quality & innovation, & a smaller consumer market, new products (which we take for granted OTL) might never arise. Like, frex, the flathead V8, or the DC-3--or electric washers...
You've also probably driven some companies out of business: if there's no market for cheap cars (& there would be much less of one), what happens to Chevy, Ford, Graham, Willys, & others?
The trouble arises when they pick out somebody who isn't, just to close a case...& cops are really bad at identifying unknown criminals (contrary to TV
). High-profile cases are even worse: that's why the most famous examples of false convictions are almost all high-profile cases where there was a lot of media attention & political & public pressure to close the case, to "get somebody"--without much concern about getting it right. TTL's justice system is making that much easier & much more likely.I don't feature dissent being silenced: it may go samizdat, but it won't go away...& it may turn violent. There's a reason the Black Panthers turned to the idea of armed self-defense, & it wasn't only because of the open carry law.
You think they don't?
Do you really think lower court judges want cases to go to Appellate & SCotUS level? The trouble arises when smart lawyers see apparent loopholes--& the only way to stop that is to kill all the lawyers. (Which is why Shakespeare "advocated" it...: he understood lawyers can make the system work for them.)I wonder if you need to. It might be the state governments & the feds can co-operate, so long as the federal changes don't impinge unduly on state prerogatives.
I'm not sure that can accommodate changes in federal criminal law, when state criminal law (nominally) trumps... Nor am I clear how much a given state administration can, or would, resist TTL's changed federal structure, provided the federals aren't imposing changes (like desegregation on Alabama in the '50s).
Two words: hell no. Marshall might have been a loyal officer, but he was no fascist. He was as straight as they come. And I don't for one instant believe Nimitz in this role, either. Not to mention he's too damn junior to be CinCPac (or anything like it) in 1933. How many priority numbers behind Richardson, Kimmel, Edwards, or King (frex) was he? Enough he wouldn't be selected first.
Why would they? In the first place, I just don't believe Capone goes along. In the second place, even if he does, he's not capo di tutti capi, & doesn't dictate; if anybody does, it's Sal Lucania, not Capone. In the third place, you've ended Prohibition, wiping out the Mafia's #1 profit center, which makes you no friends. In the fourth place, you've given cops more power to screw over gangsters & less oversight or interference; that won't make you lots of friends in orgcrime, either.
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I should probably say up front I am not sure how closely I will be following this thread much longer; it is built on a series of freehand and arbitrary attributions of actions to characters I think are often quite dubious, starting with Hoover's suicide and going on from there. By this point I think we are in an ATL where people often are the OTL persons in name only, and I have my serious doubts about the realism of mass responses attributed as well. Throw in poor military strategy and goofy diplomacy and I start to seriously wonder if it worth looking at.
But at an earlier time--12 pages ago, mid January--I had more hope, and most of what is responded to here goes back to then. I hope that was not misunderstood!
I mean, would even Lindbergh be the wanna-be Nazi he is shown as here? Ford, sure. Lindbergh. palling around with Heydrich like that? Maybe, but I'd like someone to prove it ain't so. A bad man by many modern standards yes probably. A thug and gangster like the high ranking Nazis? I hope not!
I'll just say this once, right here and now, the passages being quoted are light years away from what I think would be smart in the long run, totally unethical IMHO, a worst case attempt to give the TL maximum benefit of the doubt and envision how a repressive USA might work without being immediately overthrown in mass revolution. The author in particular has leaned heavily on the notion of captured wealth plundered from Latin America, which comes up in your quotes below; I'm letting the premise ride despite the fact I suspect such acts of conquest and plunder would turn the northwestern octant of the globe into a bloody quagmire of widespread insurgency and a possible fostering ground for a radical revolutionary US Army faction to mutiny and overthrow the Pershing regime--and if not that, the resulting mess would most likely be like Imperial Japan, lots of talk about glory and honor but damn little butter being brought home to grease the gun-making factories.
In the same way, the prison-industrial complex and "positive justice" are herein described as functional mainly because to an extent the former is in the modern USA, and the latter reigned unchecked in the Third Reich and broadly speaking in all fascist nations until the Allied victory rolled up the whole regime by main force; whatever it says about the human spirit, no internal movement overturned it, though some lonesome more or less heroic people--Otto Schindler, the Catholic bishops and archbishops, a few motley points of light like the White Rose groups, defied or subverted it to some modest degree. At no time though did the German people rise up and say, "this is outrageous and wrong!" It is unclear how widespread the feeling that someone ought to do something about it was (versus the notion that it was working just fine and better than the old days) and people were just too atomized and terrified mixed with complacent to do anything. It is clear that barring external conquest it could have gone on from that day to this, unless one proposes to demonstrate the regime must have disintegrated of its own internal rot. Or more likely in my humble though cynical opinion, nuked the planet to death till it glowed, in rivalry with Japan, the USA, a rump USSR, surviving Commonwealth--someone or other. That would put a stop to it.
Prison-industrial success is a not-crazy best case scenario for the coup regime, in no way intended to be a Utopia as I see things nor a recommendation for technical superiority in economics. It reflects what I think this gang of thugs would develop and prefer over alternatives, never mind how rational and desirable the alternatives are.
And to be fair, the Third Reich did not rely too heavily on prison/slave labor, at least not much before 1939. After they had conquered vast nations far outnumbering Germans or others the SS was prepared to baptize as hidden Aryans, then they did develop slave labor on a mass scale.
Don't forget that after von Braun's team evacuated Peenemunde under British bombing, they took refuge in the mountain cave/tunnel fortress complex known as "Camp Dora," and at Dora, the workers assembling V-2 rockets--arguably one of the most technologically advanced pieces of war kit developed in the war--were not even fed. There ain't no lower limit on worker immiseration, and not much of an upper limit on how sophisticated a product they can be forced to make. Questions of efficiency are something else; but to the Nazis, the workers who died in place and were merely shoved aside for more starving workers to take their place were people they wanted to kill off anyway. I suspect compared to this, the prison-industrial system I envisioned in America would be a paradise of liberal economic efficiency. And if the American system does not start off trying to kill off a surplus of dangerous Others, it will quickly develop that mentality, especially if the USA goes to war against the Allies.
I just want to say once and for all now, you keep saying "what you want" to me; I hope it is clear enough it is not at all what I want, but rather what I think the self-fancied technocrats of this deeply corrupt and vicious society would come to want, to perceive a need for even. But not me Charlie!
The Liberty Lobby was precisely a revolt of the great property owners of the nation against the perceived and anticipated "excesses" of "mob rule." FDR was not conservative enough for them and neither was John Nance Garner apparently. From their point of view, the only thing wrong with the Depression was the danger that desperate common folk might do something drastic in response. With that wolf held from the door, where is the disadvantage of keeping the mass proletarian consumer market depressed? You accurately point out many good products that would serve the USA well in the coming World War OTL. Correct! But these ATL American rulers do not know that so they do not care. If they lose later, it will never occur to them that they lost because common factory workers and farmers could not afford washing machines; they will go to their graves as the Soviets invade from the Pacific and Commonwealth from the Atlantic thinking it was all The Commies and the Joos, and they just didn't manage to catch and kill enough of them in time. That they cut their own throat is the last thing they will allow themselves to see, and any who do are liable to shot as defeatist traitors.
This is also why I think US victory in the coming Great War II is no slam dunk. OTL our authorities were very concerned to see to it that the draft and rationing would be perceived as a fair process by the grassroots. Here they won't. If I trusted the author to bear this kind of thing in mind, I would be less concerned with the various comments smirking about how the Axis is going to wipe the floor with the Allies in this TL. As things are I am halfway out the door already.
To be clear, the next thing is discussion of "Positive Justice," Nazi style. Again I hope it is quite clear that I speak with bitter sarcasm--but also realize, this is just how "law and order" worked in Nazi Germany and in Hitler's broader conquests, and how I think the Americans would adapt it, because as I said, it is not just some crazy racist ideologues who think like this, but a lot of normal cops and prosecutors and even judges. Not everyone appreciates liberal checks and balances, principles such as innocent until proven guilty, and so on, even in societies that benefit from them. It is not clear to everyone we do benefit by them, and the majority of Reich police forces were draw from pre-Nazi takeover cop ranks.
My source on all this is a book called The Twelve Year Reich by the way.
If anything the American injustice system I described was indeed more restrained and with more liberal holdovers than the purged German system.
So imagine how far this mentality can go to make a mockery of US justice, at least by classic liberal standards, in these circumstances. People advocate for this kind of thing, OTL, in modern times. Imagine they start from a less progressive base and with nothing allowed to stand politically in their way.
Of course they think they are doing good. So does the Federalist society. I merely ask, for whom? And if you say, ultimately even the privileged suffer from standards of justice being undermined to magisterial convenience as applied by the powerful against the masses, I say, "amen."
I hoped my withering contempt for this approach was apparent, but it seems not. Sorry about that! I'll strive to be more anvilicious!
Umm...I think the scary violent wing of extremist Black Liberation played a net positive role in the Civil Rights process, being the "Bad Cop" who made the "Good Cop" of the non-violent, Civil Disobedience Civil Rights Negroes and allies look "Good" to the white majority. Who knows if any substantial numbers of white people would have listened to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr if it weren't for Panthers and Nation of Islam types looming up in the background or not? All we do know is, in context I certainly think violent extremism and hyperbolic rhetoric was pretty forgivable. That said, do you believe for a moment that had the Panthers and NoI been able to join forces (unlikely, one was a Marxist outfit, the other a reactionary religious movement, but say they could) and recruit the vast majority of African Americans (but no one else) to follow them in organized and systematic revolt, that the outcome would be a victory?
Nazi example suggests no such movements would amount to any sort of effective threat to the state.
Italian example suggests something different. Indeed Mussolini's Fascist regime was overthrown by just such grassroots dissidents suddenly popping out of the woodwork to zerg rush the whole Fascist machine and send Mussolini running for cover under German protection. And even in their north Italian bastions the masses got hold of Il Duce eventually.
That of course was in the context of the Italian military having the tar beat out of it by the Allied landings in Sicily and advancing slowly but inexorably up the Italian peninsula. And because Italy was a sidekick and it was convenient the allies chose to recognize the insurgent state and forgive it of Mussolini's crimes. Perhaps something like a people's rising, one that convinces a substantial part of Patton's (or the caricature of Patton we have here) forces to turn coat and join them, will happen if an Anglo-Soviet invasion demonstrates the inevitable collapse of the Sons of Liberty state. If this is geographically even possible, it will happen only after an Anglo-Soviet (possibly with a never-conquered France as a third equal partner) alliance crushes the Reich like a nutcracker between them. It might help if Britain keeps Japan on side, as I have been having trouble visualizing the American-German Axis incorporating Japan as a member when that is so contrary to American inclinations. I can go either way actually, seeing both the Soviets and the "white" Axis as cynical enough to do anything, while Britain inherits an old alliance with Japan. Having Japan in the Allies from the get go makes an eventual invasion, some time in the 50s perhaps, more plausible. Assuming the Yanks don't develop A-bombs in the meantime, as what with discouraging people like Einstein, Szilard, Teller, or Fermi from immigrating, we might not. Or might, who knows yet.
Anyway without an invasion I'd think the most likely format for a successful counterrevolution would be the author retconning the implausible slam dunk success of the enslavement of MesoAmerica and the Caribbean, and having South of the Border turn into an unGodly quagmire of misery and this somehow leading to disillusionment and subversion of the Army, much as the Tsarist Russian Army was propagandized by Bolsheviks (many of them drafted into artillery battalions at the start of the Great War to shut them up). In the context of a civil war your dissidents seem likely to have the leverage to become effective, as subversives and partisans.
If neither thing happens, and the author does not seem very open to either nor would I trust their care for realism should they attempt it, then probably dissidents will accomplish little more than operating a shadowy underground of political speakeasies and random peripheral acts the regime will use to bolster their justification of a hard line.
----Then I am quoted saying
"only generate troublesome verdicts when the case is truly and understandably troublesome"
And I had to look up the context. I was talking about the lower courts pretty much doing all the deliberation, with appeals becoming rarer and rarer. This was of course in the context of a half-assed version of "positive justice," in which the authorities are presumed to know best and know all, and as I quoted Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese (during his Senate confirmation hearings IIRC no less!) saying an innocent suspect is a contradiction in terms, in such a top down gaze on the hoi polloi, surely the court of first instance will get it right the first time, no need to confuse appellate courts with annoying facts.
Such a justice system runs "smoothly," as far as the Good People are concerned anyway. It is like Cardassian justice on Deep Space 9, OK? Why would they need or want appellate courts? My suggestion the USA might retain them is a concession to the vestigial American patriotism of the coup regime--they can't quite go to sleep at night facing the bald fact they have made a total mockery of justice and so will allow a limited number of complicated and interesting cases to seep upward, for the amusement and distraction of the higher justices. A controlled trickle up, knowing that if a court should rule inconveniently the state or US government can appeal, and get their ducks in a row to set things right.
If they went whole hog Positive Justice, the appellate courts would simply be abolished, and the lower courts would always rule as expected. Nothing stands in the way of prosecution manufacturing evidence as needed after all, or ignoring or destroying contradictory evidence. Nothing but the consciences of the officers of the court.
That factor may be heavy enough to keep American jurisprudence lively. But for the good of society, the state has a finger on the scales, on the side of the "prudence" element. Cops, prosecutors, lawyers, and judges who do not get with the program soon enough may find themselves on the other side of the bar, or otherwise routed outside the system, perhaps to a shallow grave somewhere. The Sons of Liberty are watching and in the sense that Himmler did, they know justice when they see it.
Can such a system last? Well, we know it can't outlast a conquering army! And I am with you, that such things will leave the USA a brittle and hollow shell of its OTL power. But still a massive one, with a tremendous geographical advantage to boot. The major reason to think that maybe Allies victorious in the Old World will even attempt to dislodge the USA regime in the New World would be that the British will feel some moral obligation to liberate Canada, and might be in a mood to throw a huge portion of the former USA under the Soviet bus in return for their help accomplishing a two front nutcracker starting with handing Alaska back to the USSR on paper wholesale and holding out the carrot of them keeping as much of the lands below the 48th parallel they can manage to seize, if they will help Britain free Canada again. Even then, even with post-1945 tech, is it even possible? When people seriously doubt the Soviets could ever have invaded even one island of Japan? Technology in the Commonwealth and even in the USSR is going to advance, not to mention what they can plunder from a crushed Reich. How much might for instance hovercraft affect the ability of a strong RN covered by a strong RAF to get a foothold on Labrador and start fighting their way down to the St. Laurence? If Russians have blueprints and British technicians on loan to assist them making Torneikroftskis of their own, might seizing Alaska, and working their way on land south from there, be feasible for a Red Army that managed to crush Hitler? I would not dismiss the idea! But maybe not sooner than the Yanks acquire nukes and the whole thing turns into one three way partitioned Orwellian standoff.
But at an earlier time--12 pages ago, mid January--I had more hope, and most of what is responded to here goes back to then. I hope that was not misunderstood!
I'm not enough of a Patton fan to judge that but as I say, poor characterization seems par for the course in this TL. Everyone is a puppet for the author's whims.
I mean, would even Lindbergh be the wanna-be Nazi he is shown as here? Ford, sure. Lindbergh. palling around with Heydrich like that? Maybe, but I'd like someone to prove it ain't so. A bad man by many modern standards yes probably. A thug and gangster like the high ranking Nazis? I hope not!
I'll just say this once, right here and now, the passages being quoted are light years away from what I think would be smart in the long run, totally unethical IMHO, a worst case attempt to give the TL maximum benefit of the doubt and envision how a repressive USA might work without being immediately overthrown in mass revolution. The author in particular has leaned heavily on the notion of captured wealth plundered from Latin America, which comes up in your quotes below; I'm letting the premise ride despite the fact I suspect such acts of conquest and plunder would turn the northwestern octant of the globe into a bloody quagmire of widespread insurgency and a possible fostering ground for a radical revolutionary US Army faction to mutiny and overthrow the Pershing regime--and if not that, the resulting mess would most likely be like Imperial Japan, lots of talk about glory and honor but damn little butter being brought home to grease the gun-making factories.
In the same way, the prison-industrial complex and "positive justice" are herein described as functional mainly because to an extent the former is in the modern USA, and the latter reigned unchecked in the Third Reich and broadly speaking in all fascist nations until the Allied victory rolled up the whole regime by main force; whatever it says about the human spirit, no internal movement overturned it, though some lonesome more or less heroic people--Otto Schindler, the Catholic bishops and archbishops, a few motley points of light like the White Rose groups, defied or subverted it to some modest degree. At no time though did the German people rise up and say, "this is outrageous and wrong!" It is unclear how widespread the feeling that someone ought to do something about it was (versus the notion that it was working just fine and better than the old days) and people were just too atomized and terrified mixed with complacent to do anything. It is clear that barring external conquest it could have gone on from that day to this, unless one proposes to demonstrate the regime must have disintegrated of its own internal rot. Or more likely in my humble though cynical opinion, nuked the planet to death till it glowed, in rivalry with Japan, the USA, a rump USSR, surviving Commonwealth--someone or other. That would put a stop to it.
Prison-industrial success is a not-crazy best case scenario for the coup regime, in no way intended to be a Utopia as I see things nor a recommendation for technical superiority in economics. It reflects what I think this gang of thugs would develop and prefer over alternatives, never mind how rational and desirable the alternatives are.
And to be fair, the Third Reich did not rely too heavily on prison/slave labor, at least not much before 1939. After they had conquered vast nations far outnumbering Germans or others the SS was prepared to baptize as hidden Aryans, then they did develop slave labor on a mass scale.
Don't forget that after von Braun's team evacuated Peenemunde under British bombing, they took refuge in the mountain cave/tunnel fortress complex known as "Camp Dora," and at Dora, the workers assembling V-2 rockets--arguably one of the most technologically advanced pieces of war kit developed in the war--were not even fed. There ain't no lower limit on worker immiseration, and not much of an upper limit on how sophisticated a product they can be forced to make. Questions of efficiency are something else; but to the Nazis, the workers who died in place and were merely shoved aside for more starving workers to take their place were people they wanted to kill off anyway. I suspect compared to this, the prison-industrial system I envisioned in America would be a paradise of liberal economic efficiency. And if the American system does not start off trying to kill off a surplus of dangerous Others, it will quickly develop that mentality, especially if the USA goes to war against the Allies.
I just want to say once and for all now, you keep saying "what you want" to me; I hope it is clear enough it is not at all what I want, but rather what I think the self-fancied technocrats of this deeply corrupt and vicious society would come to want, to perceive a need for even. But not me Charlie!
Indeed. You say that like it is a bad thing!& this becomes commonplace, you've driven wages down to an astounding degree & succeeded in prolonging the Depression.
The Liberty Lobby was precisely a revolt of the great property owners of the nation against the perceived and anticipated "excesses" of "mob rule." FDR was not conservative enough for them and neither was John Nance Garner apparently. From their point of view, the only thing wrong with the Depression was the danger that desperate common folk might do something drastic in response. With that wolf held from the door, where is the disadvantage of keeping the mass proletarian consumer market depressed? You accurately point out many good products that would serve the USA well in the coming World War OTL. Correct! But these ATL American rulers do not know that so they do not care. If they lose later, it will never occur to them that they lost because common factory workers and farmers could not afford washing machines; they will go to their graves as the Soviets invade from the Pacific and Commonwealth from the Atlantic thinking it was all The Commies and the Joos, and they just didn't manage to catch and kill enough of them in time. That they cut their own throat is the last thing they will allow themselves to see, and any who do are liable to shot as defeatist traitors.
I'm a right rotter in this TL all right! That's because I am trying to think like a right-wing rotter.
This is also why I think US victory in the coming Great War II is no slam dunk. OTL our authorities were very concerned to see to it that the draft and rationing would be perceived as a fair process by the grassroots. Here they won't. If I trusted the author to bear this kind of thing in mind, I would be less concerned with the various comments smirking about how the Axis is going to wipe the floor with the Allies in this TL. As things are I am halfway out the door already.
To be clear, the next thing is discussion of "Positive Justice," Nazi style. Again I hope it is quite clear that I speak with bitter sarcasm--but also realize, this is just how "law and order" worked in Nazi Germany and in Hitler's broader conquests, and how I think the Americans would adapt it, because as I said, it is not just some crazy racist ideologues who think like this, but a lot of normal cops and prosecutors and even judges. Not everyone appreciates liberal checks and balances, principles such as innocent until proven guilty, and so on, even in societies that benefit from them. It is not clear to everyone we do benefit by them, and the majority of Reich police forces were draw from pre-Nazi takeover cop ranks.
My source on all this is a book called The Twelve Year Reich by the way.
If anything the American injustice system I described was indeed more restrained and with more liberal holdovers than the purged German system.
Amen, brother. Not just in this ATL either--look at the nature of the legal reform movement sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Republican appointees to the SCOTUS bench and lower courts since the Nixon administration. They are very worried about the alleged erosion of the majesty of the law by the ability of civil rights lawyers to second-guess the courts with appeals, and have moved on many fronts to "streamline" the process in favor of "stare decis," the idea that once rulings have been made they should be presumed correct. In addition to short-circuiting appeals, they do stuff that also resonates with general propertarian values by allowing courts to jack up fees for things like copies of proceedings, from nominal amounts covering the physical administrative costs in the tens and perhaps low hundreds of dollars to thousands on "what the market will bear" principles. This is OTL where the fundamental premises of rule of law, open proceedings, stringent standards of evidence, innocence until proven guilty, even fair access of the poor to legal counsel per Gideon, and so forth still thus far prevail. (Though even with Gideon, it is a commonplace that public defenders are overworked, underpaid and ill respected at best, while quite often gross conflicts of interest are plain..but at least the poor defendant is entitled to some sort of attorney. This was not true except in capital cases until Gideon though, which was the late 60s or early 70s IIRC; I suspect the precedent of supplying them in capital cases also dates well after the POD and is not case law ITTL either. Probably something some states did even in the 1930s, but in the fiscal emergency you can see them being advised to drop it).The trouble arises when they pick out somebody who isn't,{a bad guy that is--SHVK23} just to close a case...& cops are really bad at identifying unknown criminals (contrary to TV
So imagine how far this mentality can go to make a mockery of US justice, at least by classic liberal standards, in these circumstances. People advocate for this kind of thing, OTL, in modern times. Imagine they start from a less progressive base and with nothing allowed to stand politically in their way.
Of course they think they are doing good. So does the Federalist society. I merely ask, for whom? And if you say, ultimately even the privileged suffer from standards of justice being undermined to magisterial convenience as applied by the powerful against the masses, I say, "amen."
I hoped my withering contempt for this approach was apparent, but it seems not. Sorry about that! I'll strive to be more anvilicious!
Umm...I think the scary violent wing of extremist Black Liberation played a net positive role in the Civil Rights process, being the "Bad Cop" who made the "Good Cop" of the non-violent, Civil Disobedience Civil Rights Negroes and allies look "Good" to the white majority. Who knows if any substantial numbers of white people would have listened to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr if it weren't for Panthers and Nation of Islam types looming up in the background or not? All we do know is, in context I certainly think violent extremism and hyperbolic rhetoric was pretty forgivable. That said, do you believe for a moment that had the Panthers and NoI been able to join forces (unlikely, one was a Marxist outfit, the other a reactionary religious movement, but say they could) and recruit the vast majority of African Americans (but no one else) to follow them in organized and systematic revolt, that the outcome would be a victory?
Nazi example suggests no such movements would amount to any sort of effective threat to the state.
Italian example suggests something different. Indeed Mussolini's Fascist regime was overthrown by just such grassroots dissidents suddenly popping out of the woodwork to zerg rush the whole Fascist machine and send Mussolini running for cover under German protection. And even in their north Italian bastions the masses got hold of Il Duce eventually.
That of course was in the context of the Italian military having the tar beat out of it by the Allied landings in Sicily and advancing slowly but inexorably up the Italian peninsula. And because Italy was a sidekick and it was convenient the allies chose to recognize the insurgent state and forgive it of Mussolini's crimes. Perhaps something like a people's rising, one that convinces a substantial part of Patton's (or the caricature of Patton we have here) forces to turn coat and join them, will happen if an Anglo-Soviet invasion demonstrates the inevitable collapse of the Sons of Liberty state. If this is geographically even possible, it will happen only after an Anglo-Soviet (possibly with a never-conquered France as a third equal partner) alliance crushes the Reich like a nutcracker between them. It might help if Britain keeps Japan on side, as I have been having trouble visualizing the American-German Axis incorporating Japan as a member when that is so contrary to American inclinations. I can go either way actually, seeing both the Soviets and the "white" Axis as cynical enough to do anything, while Britain inherits an old alliance with Japan. Having Japan in the Allies from the get go makes an eventual invasion, some time in the 50s perhaps, more plausible. Assuming the Yanks don't develop A-bombs in the meantime, as what with discouraging people like Einstein, Szilard, Teller, or Fermi from immigrating, we might not. Or might, who knows yet.
Anyway without an invasion I'd think the most likely format for a successful counterrevolution would be the author retconning the implausible slam dunk success of the enslavement of MesoAmerica and the Caribbean, and having South of the Border turn into an unGodly quagmire of misery and this somehow leading to disillusionment and subversion of the Army, much as the Tsarist Russian Army was propagandized by Bolsheviks (many of them drafted into artillery battalions at the start of the Great War to shut them up). In the context of a civil war your dissidents seem likely to have the leverage to become effective, as subversives and partisans.
If neither thing happens, and the author does not seem very open to either nor would I trust their care for realism should they attempt it, then probably dissidents will accomplish little more than operating a shadowy underground of political speakeasies and random peripheral acts the regime will use to bolster their justification of a hard line.
----Then I am quoted saying
"only generate troublesome verdicts when the case is truly and understandably troublesome"
And I had to look up the context. I was talking about the lower courts pretty much doing all the deliberation, with appeals becoming rarer and rarer. This was of course in the context of a half-assed version of "positive justice," in which the authorities are presumed to know best and know all, and as I quoted Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese (during his Senate confirmation hearings IIRC no less!) saying an innocent suspect is a contradiction in terms, in such a top down gaze on the hoi polloi, surely the court of first instance will get it right the first time, no need to confuse appellate courts with annoying facts.
No need to kill all the lawyers, just the ones who don't understand that society must operate top down for order and progress. Get rid of the ones who can't see justice from the big picture of the good of society, and persist in myopic notions of fair play for little people who don't matter.You think they don't?
Such a justice system runs "smoothly," as far as the Good People are concerned anyway. It is like Cardassian justice on Deep Space 9, OK? Why would they need or want appellate courts? My suggestion the USA might retain them is a concession to the vestigial American patriotism of the coup regime--they can't quite go to sleep at night facing the bald fact they have made a total mockery of justice and so will allow a limited number of complicated and interesting cases to seep upward, for the amusement and distraction of the higher justices. A controlled trickle up, knowing that if a court should rule inconveniently the state or US government can appeal, and get their ducks in a row to set things right.
If they went whole hog Positive Justice, the appellate courts would simply be abolished, and the lower courts would always rule as expected. Nothing stands in the way of prosecution manufacturing evidence as needed after all, or ignoring or destroying contradictory evidence. Nothing but the consciences of the officers of the court.
That factor may be heavy enough to keep American jurisprudence lively. But for the good of society, the state has a finger on the scales, on the side of the "prudence" element. Cops, prosecutors, lawyers, and judges who do not get with the program soon enough may find themselves on the other side of the bar, or otherwise routed outside the system, perhaps to a shallow grave somewhere. The Sons of Liberty are watching and in the sense that Himmler did, they know justice when they see it.
Can such a system last? Well, we know it can't outlast a conquering army! And I am with you, that such things will leave the USA a brittle and hollow shell of its OTL power. But still a massive one, with a tremendous geographical advantage to boot. The major reason to think that maybe Allies victorious in the Old World will even attempt to dislodge the USA regime in the New World would be that the British will feel some moral obligation to liberate Canada, and might be in a mood to throw a huge portion of the former USA under the Soviet bus in return for their help accomplishing a two front nutcracker starting with handing Alaska back to the USSR on paper wholesale and holding out the carrot of them keeping as much of the lands below the 48th parallel they can manage to seize, if they will help Britain free Canada again. Even then, even with post-1945 tech, is it even possible? When people seriously doubt the Soviets could ever have invaded even one island of Japan? Technology in the Commonwealth and even in the USSR is going to advance, not to mention what they can plunder from a crushed Reich. How much might for instance hovercraft affect the ability of a strong RN covered by a strong RAF to get a foothold on Labrador and start fighting their way down to the St. Laurence? If Russians have blueprints and British technicians on loan to assist them making Torneikroftskis of their own, might seizing Alaska, and working their way on land south from there, be feasible for a Red Army that managed to crush Hitler? I would not dismiss the idea! But maybe not sooner than the Yanks acquire nukes and the whole thing turns into one three way partitioned Orwellian standoff.
ST15RM
Banned
@Shevek23 you have probably heard me pleading and begging to Nap to put my idea into his “book”. But, how would a revolution in Sweden affect the tension and the balance of power? I can assume the Reich would go through the roof when they hear about this. And Stalin would surely have a lot of tentacles in the Swedish government(given that they practically share the border) Would the Swedes invade Finland? Would the rest of Scandinavia go red? There are a lot of questions and I really need answers.
I tend to agree. Nevertheless, your remarks were (& remain) thought-provoking. If the thrust of the narrative is improbable, that doesn't mean the commentary can't still be enlightening.
And if I say "what you want", I mean only in terms of your quoted remarks (as opposed to somebody else's); I mean to cast no aspersions.
So:
My sense is the same. I've only read Farago's bio on Patton, & he seems the "Southern gentleman": perhaps a racist (typical of his era), but not a flaming bigot & Nazi sympathizer. Nor Lindbergh, either, tho my sense of him is (again, based on limited informaton), he leans farther that direction.
In some cases, I agree with that. IMO, the chances of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, & Guatemala or Panama actively going along look better for that time than now; don't forget, some of them actively sought U.S. statehood.
I don't think it will carry the U.S. economy as the writer suggests...not least because he seems to misapprehend how the economy works. It also has a flavor of paralleling Germany's aims at autarky.
That's true. My trouble with it in a U.S. context is, there's a strong strain in U.S. culture of "Don't screw with me.", possibly based on the U.S. being heavily populated with rebels of one kind or another: those who were satisfied (or less rebellious) stayed behind. The same can be said for Canada & Oz, in varying degree. (Canada has a strong strain of obedience to law & order, compared to the U.S.; if you postulate this kind of thing in Canada in the '30s, IMO you'd be nearer right.)
Wartime makes many things palatable in the emergency that would not be otherwise; doing anything like it in peacetime would be troublesome at best. And the economy in Depression does not need lower wages & lower demand, all of which pertain if this model is adopted, nor is lower quality a desired outcome.
Perhaps some of them, including the management of Pierce-Arrow & Duesenberg (perhaps Packard), & I suspect the writer. I don't believe Henry Ford was that big a fool.
That's an excellent point. I was thinking more of industrial production: it means the U.S. starts from a much lower point than OTL (even before 1939) & is likely to peak a great deal lower than OTL.
That is depressingly true. Looking at the widespread acceptance of warrantless surveillance & the "innocent people have nothing to worry about"...
That, & the "don't tread on me" tradition, make me wonder if the U.S. would accept such great restrictions...but then I look at the modern attitude under threat, & I'm not so sure.
I entirely agree with that. More still, the doctrine of state sovereignty (the gov't gets the benefit of the doubt about constitutionality) & the attitude even incompetent council (drunk or asleep through the trial) isn't grounds for appeal. (
)You've captured the tone of the likely outcome, IMO.
Text doesn't translate sarcasm (or contempt) well, sad to say.
That's very possible. I've always had the sense there was a minority who hated blacks & would never accept integration, a minority who actively supported integration, & the great majority who just didn't give a damn either way.
Far from it. I'm more inclined to think, if the Panthers &/or NoI had frightened the white majority enough, the gov't would simply have ground up the black rebels & spit them out & left the black majority (who weren't radicals or agitators) much, much worse off.
That presupposes majority opposition. I'm far from certain the law-abiding majority, TTL, would feel the pinch enough to go along with that. I do think there would be white agitators (ACLU, for a start), as well as black, but I doubt it would amount to a sizeable fraction of the white population. (That saddens me a lot.)
That implies a fight for (in!) Canada. I'm frankly dubious, also, it is possible at all, Canada in or no; even with Japanese aid, it can't be a cakewalk for RN to fight across the Atlantic against USN, & Britain's vulnerability to USN subs (& general SLOC attack) is obvious.
I wouldn't bet against an Anglo-Canadian/Anglo-Canadian-Soviet success, possibly a genuine race to get there first.
I wasn't imagining civil war as very likely, actually; your proposed "southern quagmire", akin Vietnam writ large, makes resistance seem more likely, with an anti-war movement getting bigger by default. (How much of that hangs on the Baby Boom, IDK; it'd probably draw in more black support TTL than OTL, but maybe less sense of entitlement, absent black vets & exposure of the Holocaust.)
I did get the sense that was your intention; I just find it hard to believe lawyers (who make a living out of being troublemakers, after all) would (ever) go along in really large numbers. Your case for the likely outcome is a good one, & for the public at large, not a hard sell; IDK if lawyers, as a class, would see it so positively. How many would oppose it to the point of a bayonet, IDK; maybe fewer than I hope...
I wonder if you get much the same outcome with a "tame" SCotUS: Gideon, Katz, & Miranda all going the other way; fruit of the poison tree never arising; inferring guilt from silence being okay; so forth. I would find that more credible.
Getting that outcome seems to require some prescience in selecting Justices, however... (Not to say a trace of handwavium there would be out of bounds.
)I have real doubts about a Sov invasion of Alaska, & a race for the Bomb might end up less standoff & more like the notional world of The Iron Dream: a nuclear wasteland in substantial portions of Britain & the U.S.
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Hello all! I have returned from the internet-less dark ages of moving out on your own! I hope to resume this TL as well as a new ASB one! I'll be seeing ya!