Place In the Sun: What If Italy Joined the Central Powers? (1.0)
- Thread starter Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
- Start date
Wow, really- 1961? So the blimp and the early space programme briefly coincided, eh?
I assume they'll stick around for a similar length of time ITTL.
Yes on both counts.
The USN actually liked zeppelins for ASW work due to their extreme loiter time.Wow, really- 1961? So the blimp and the early space programme briefly coincided, eh?
I assume they'll stick around for a similar length of time ITTL.
Yes on both counts.
On a side note, I believe a USN zeppelin and a U-boat actually sank each other in a gun duel, but don't quote me on that.
Makes sense when you think about it. If an airship cuts the engines, it just sits there - you can more or less patrol indefinitely until your crew runs out of supplies. That's Very Bad News for subs that need to surface often (which in WWI-WWII is all of them).
Richthofen can hardly do worse than Das Fatass, at least.
Richthofen can hardly do worse than Das Fatass, at least.
Absolutely right. Now that I think about it, this could actually be a fun direction for alternate technology ITTL....
If Richtofen is as borderline-comically inept yet as cold-bloodedly evil as Fatso Goering, you can call me Meier!
Richtofen and Boelcke will be head of the Imperial German air force, I think. I don't know just what to do with Goering- do you have any ideas? As to Adolf, I refer you here.
At the very least TTL's Goering wouldn't have an addiction to morphine since that happened because of injuries taken during the Beer Hall Putsch.
Would be tempted to say they always are from the moment there was a German economic sphere. The Rhine knits the two together; in the Baroque era, that put a chunk of Germany in the Dutch economic sphere, and after the German unification, the same in reverse.
More seriously with regards to Goering, if memory serves he was an officer in von Richthofen's squadron, so if his old commander rises in the Air Ministry, he might too. Alternatively he might get involved in civilian air transport. A continental Reich will need airlines and airports.
Instead of the 24 hours of Le mans we gonna have the 24 hours of Nurburgring. I Wonder if Volkswagen is going to be founded ITTL since the nazis were largely responsible for it's creation. If not the european popular car problaly is going to be a Skoda or Opel (are my questions off topic? Because I always end up thinking about these smaller things that are affected by the changes)
Also the germans should start investing in China to be in the good side of the kmt.
Also the germans should start investing in China to be in the good side of the kmt.
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Very silly question: With a Turkish name such as Enver Pasha, the surname is "Enver", not "Pasha", no?
Until 1934, there was no surname. Instead there was nicknames or titles. So Enver is name and Pasha is his title.
He just had one name? "Enver?" Odd- at least from a Western perspective.
Regardless, thanks. Should make things a bit easier.
It took me a while to figure that out (I did my own research during senior year/college). Since Turkish history was pretty much a footnote in my high school history textbook, I used to think of the "Pashas" as some sort of powerful aristocratic family that dominated the Ottoman government.
Doubt people would be keen on breaking down halfway around the Green Hell.
Now, Hockenheim? Shorter but more demanding on the engine? Yes please.
Dear Readers,
I feel that the next chapter needs a bit of foreword. I was writing the Ottoman Empire and found that I was really writing two separate things: the Pasha troika's attempts to save the economy and cling onto power (thanks to @Sārthākā for his help there!), and the story of the Armenian Genocide. Here, we have the story of the latter. I haven't pulled any punches and have described the situation rather honestly as I believe it would've happened under these circumstances. However, I in no way condone Armenian Genocide denial any more than I condone Holocaust denial, and the statements I put in the mouth of Sultan Bayezid III are antithetical to my own views. The Ottoman Empire's actions here make it the first really evil state in Place In the Sun, and I will not attempt to justify anything they have done here... because it's indefensible. As ever, if one of my readers objects to a specific line I will remove it, but the dreadful fate TTL's Armenians meet is something I don't want to retcon even though it's morally disgusting... because it's eminently plausible and throws a bucket of cold water on the idea that 'a Central Powers victory means a better world because there's no Holocaust'. Anyhow... here you go.
I feel that the next chapter needs a bit of foreword. I was writing the Ottoman Empire and found that I was really writing two separate things: the Pasha troika's attempts to save the economy and cling onto power (thanks to @Sārthākā for his help there!), and the story of the Armenian Genocide. Here, we have the story of the latter. I haven't pulled any punches and have described the situation rather honestly as I believe it would've happened under these circumstances. However, I in no way condone Armenian Genocide denial any more than I condone Holocaust denial, and the statements I put in the mouth of Sultan Bayezid III are antithetical to my own views. The Ottoman Empire's actions here make it the first really evil state in Place In the Sun, and I will not attempt to justify anything they have done here... because it's indefensible. As ever, if one of my readers objects to a specific line I will remove it, but the dreadful fate TTL's Armenians meet is something I don't want to retcon even though it's morally disgusting... because it's eminently plausible and throws a bucket of cold water on the idea that 'a Central Powers victory means a better world because there's no Holocaust'. Anyhow... here you go.
Chapter 36: The Armenian Genocide
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Armenian Genocide
"The world can choose between the word 'genocide' and affordable oil. It is up to them."
-Anonymous Ottoman official commenting on the world's silence vis-a-vis the Armenian Genocide. His statement is unusual in that it acknowledges the consensus that the Pasha regime was guilty of genocide.
"Constantinople's regime has always stood to murder our people. Nothing has changed in a century and it is only because of oil that they keep a choke-hold over the world. This injustice must and will end one day! Our unique Armenian heritage survives, like so much else, in the United States, and I call upon this government to formally commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the genocide- yes, call it what it is, call a spade a spade, call it a genocide!"
-Makroui Keleshian, president of the National Armenian-American Society, speaking to some four hundred people in Pittsburgh, 1994.
Russia’s invasion of Anatolia in 1915 had enraged Enver Pasha. Admitting failure wasn’t an option for a strongman; the people would turn on his regime if they knew he’d failed to defend them. Thus, he scapegoated the Armenians. Honest Turkish boys from Constantinople and Angora had fought valiantly in the Caucasus only for Orthodox Christian Armenians to stab them in the back with one eye on Petrograd! Enver’s actions against the Armenian people were not without historical precedent- the Turkish overlords had spent the past five centuries looking down their noses on the Christian ethnicities they ruled and had indulged in bouts of persecution before- but were unparalleled in their cold-bloodedness and totality. “It is absolutely necessary”, declared Committee for Union and Progress stooge Nazim Bey in February 1915, “to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so that there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished.” (1) Europe had not heard such rhetoric in centuries.
On 24 April 1915, Enver ordered mass arrests of Armenians across the empire, beginning a years-long Genocide. Armenians were gathered together in their hundreds and even thousands, tied together with rope, and machine-gunned, or they were made to stand in a line shackled tightly together and the leading man was thrown off a cliff- and they were the lucky ones. (2) Millions more were condemned to hundred-mile death marches to camps in Syria, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Heatstroke and dehydration felled many, who died with the sun beating mercilessly down on them, roasting them from the inside while cholera and typhus took their bloody tolls on others. Some Armenians were spared having to walk, instead being shoved aboard cramped cars on the Berlin-Baghdad railway, causing disease and suffocation. The elderly were first to die, then small children. Young men were absent from the march; viewing them as a security threat the Ottomans had executed many before setting out. Thus, mostly girls and women staggered into the Syrian camps, many after surviving horrible sexual abuse. Once there, their sadistic Ottoman guards slowly worked them to death. The war’s end in summer 1916 didn’t affect the genocide, and deportations continued apace; the only difference was that the prisoners were doing pointless makework instead of war-related tasks. Some Armenian women, especially those with Turkish facial features, procured freedom by marrying guards or converting to Islam, while a very few lucky ones snuck out of the camps and flee hundreds of miles to Egypt, Iran, or even Russia. (3) For most though, there was no hope, just years of starvation and backbreaking labour under the baking Syrian sun. The end of the war removed Britain and Russia’s ability to criticise the Genocide; while they might have been able to do so during wartime to weaken their foe, repairing relations with the Ottoman Empire took precedence and London kept mum. Germany and Danubia both wanted good relations with Constantinople and refrained from protesting. Only America, with its small but significant number of Armenian immigrants and descendants, voiced objection to the Genocide, but Charles Evans Hughes’ words counted for little so far away. When the Pasha clique fell from power, the subsequent regime would make vague references to the Genocide, but only as a source of one-upmanship against the Pashas, as opposed to a desire to rectify a wrong.
Ottoman troops in German gear guard a pile of skulls; all that remained of dozens of genocide victims.
To say that the Ottoman Empire was getting away with murder would be a gross understatement and would diminish the millions of innocent lives lost.
The horrible coda to the story of the Armenian Genocide is how it is remembered a century on. The Ottoman Empire’s denial of history is best illustrated by this lengthy quote from Sultan Bayezid III from 2015, two years before his death:
“(When considering the idea that) unusual hardship was incurred by the group of imperial subjects identifying as ‘Armenian’ during the First Great War and in its aftermath, one must bear two things in mind. For a start… the ‘Armenian’ identity as such has not existed in centuries. Should I get on a plane to an ‘Armenian’ city, what would I find? I would find the Turkish language spoken in every corner and the call to prayer echoing throughout the day. An ‘Armenian’ identity is a historical construct. No Armenian state has existed since the sixteenth century, when the region became part of Turkey, and who today remembers the Armenians? What some refer to as ‘Armenia’ has been part of Turkey for only a century less than our capital. If one is to speak of the ‘eradication’, or the ‘genocide’ as some insist on referring to it… of the so-called Armenians, one may as well speak of the ‘eradication’ of the Byzantine people in 1453. Are we guilty of oppressing an ethnic group in this city because the Palaiologos dynasty once ruled here?... One may say that the Algerian government occupies territory once part of the Roman Empire. Is Algiers guilty of crimes against the Roman people? One may say that because this empire captured Constantinople, the city where we now speak, in a long-ago period of history, that we are guilty of genocide. One may speak of the ‘genocide’ inflicted on the ancient Egyptians by Caesar Augustus… Such a view would be sloppy historiography and littered with an all-too-common anti-Turkish bias prevalent in our enemies.
Second, talk of suffering and hardship must be contextualised, for there was a war on. The Russian regime of Tsar Nicholas seldom paid heed to the rights of any peoples with which it entered into context. Should one travel to the Fatherland Defence Museum in East Prussia, one will read of wells being poisoned to kill locals and such like. It is infinitely more likely that whatever suffering was inflicted upon the peoples of north east Turkey was inflicted by the hardship of war and by the savagery and brutality prevalent amongst the Russian army of the period.
Lastly, there is a simple truth which should be evident even to a child: not everything one reads is true! In our schools today across the world young people are taught to ask questions and ‘think critically’- I know I was- but for some strange reason the world community is developing a collective amnesia to this fact whenever the so-called ‘Armenian question’ is raised. Objective historians the world over with years and decades of academic, research experience in the Ottoman Empire have all concurred time and time again that this so-called ‘Armenian Genocide’ is at best a gross exaggeration… One must think that perhaps we are better off without these Armenians today. For if a handful of descendants claiming descent from a centuries-extinct historical group- after all, there has been no such thing as ‘Armenia’ since the sixteenth century, and a people cannot long survive without a land to call their own- can distort the facts so radically and gain such broad acceptance in the world, just think of the damage a million Armenians could do!” (5)
Sultan Bayezid III (1924-2017, reigned 2009-2017).
The former Sultan’s speech sums up the Ottoman Empire’s attitude to the genocide it committed on its own soil- namely, “what genocide?” A survey of Ottomans in Constantinople between 18 and 35 conducted in 2009 revealed that only 43% had ever heard the phrase ‘Armenian Genocide’ and that a little under half believed it to be a conspiracy theory as opposed to fact. Turkish public schools, even in the year, 2021, do not mention the genocide once in their curriculum. Ottoman academia is even more hostile, as evidenced by two professors at the University of Smyrna who were publicly denied tenure for publishing a research paper concluding that the genocide did, in fact, take place. Foreign historians who wish to teach or conduct research in the empire are closely vetted for anything pro-Armenian on their records. This relentless suppression of its own history has earned the Ottoman Empire- otherwise a relatively tolerant state with multiple parties, competitive elections, and something approaching genuine democracy- much condemnation on the world stage. Germany has admitted and apologised for its own ‘auxiliary role’ in the genocide and repeatedly hinted to Constantinople to do the same, while the pitifully small Armenian diaspora (largely concentrated in the United States) has given the Ottomans countless tongue-lashings over the years. Turkish oil money has thwarted the efforts of these good people, as Constantinople and its allies raise the price of the black gold to any country which recognises what happened to the Armenians. Unsurprisingly, the places where Armenia’s story is best remembered are Norway and Venezuela; both in the oil market but without cultural and religious links to the Ottoman Empire.
Flag of the Armenian Diaspora Union, one of the largest international Armenian remnant organisations. The background is the Armenian national flag, the black represents the historic Armenian borders, and the organisation's name is written on the dove.
Flag of the National Armenian-American Society, headquartered in New York City and led since 1989 by Makroui Keleshian, whose parents escaped the Ottoman Empire in 1917. (Ms Keleshian was born in 1934.)
But for these two groups, scarcely anybody remembers that an entire race was all but wiped out a century ago, and there appears to be little future for the seven million surviving Armenians, virtually all of whom live abroad.
Comments?
- An OTL quote.
- Can’t make this stuff up. Disgusting.
- IMPORTANT footnote: This refers to select individual cases happening in TTL. It is in no way my intent to downplay the lethal effectiveness and inhumanity of the genocide either in OTL or TTL and should not be construed as such.
- This gentleman.
- NONE of this is my own authorial opinion. I was disgusted with what I came up with while writing this fictitious statement- and the worst bit is that OTL’s Turkish government isn’t much better than TTL’s Ottoman Empire in the twenty-first century.
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