Red Spies in the White House: An Alternate Cold War
- Thread starter Ulysses Orbis
- Start date
What I only knew is the controversy of the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For those who are unaware will never know they were based on the pygmy people in the heart of Africa. Consider this novel was written in 1964 and racism and discrimination was still very much active.
It's kinda sad knowing I had a book report on this kid's novel when I was 4th Grade around 2006-2007. I also quite enjoyed the 2005 Tim Burton film.
The point here is surely Europe remains under communist governments, that of course will anger the anti-semits. The sad thing is the anti-semitism will be mainstream TTL only because White.
Me too. And yet the media coverage was so infamous that the impression it conveyed was another case of "Americans projecting their shit onto other countries and making up imaginary grievances and offenses where none exist."
I can't blame Dahl though. Society in 1964 was a different place.
As a 10-year old in 2006-2007, we enjoyed the book and film because of the effects, the story, and the morals of it (Charlie the good boy receiving his rightful reward). It's just sad as kid we did not know that there was subtle hints of racism, slavery, discrimination, and exploitation of workers.
Yes. With 10 years, living in a place like Wonka Factory and be payed in chocolate could sounds cool. With more years, well, is like "what the fucking hell I'm reading".
Also add ignorance because cocoa is from America not África...
The Wonka Factory was literally every kid's dream. A land of sweets that looked like a theme park.
Regardless of the subtle negative hints, I think it's not fair to hold the 1971 and 2005 films with contempt. I just enjoy it as movies, especially for the nostalgia. I've seen the 2005 film in 2007, 2008, 2013, and 2014 and even wrote a fanfic about it.
When it comes to Roald Dahl's antisemitism, I think we should look at The Witches as the biggest case of this coming through in his literature:
nerdist.com
Looking Back on the Anti-Semitism in Roald Dahl's THE WITCHES
As a new film adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel The Witches arrives, we can't help but think of the anti-Semitic tropes in the novel and 1990 movie.
nerdist.com
I honestly just thought they were a tribe of people with dwarfism that Wonka recruited because they would have otherwise suffered the same fate of other victims of colonialism and people with the same physical condition as them
Like in neither adaptation they look from Africa and in the second one Wonka went out of his way to be integrate himself, so I assumed they acted both as workers and co-managers of his factory since Wonka didnt have anybody else to share it with and he himself worked there as well since he was the one conducting and testing his scientific experimentation after all
So while he was the owner of the factory and I assumed he was made chief of the tribe, which presumely would be a position passed to Charlie as well once he also owned the factory, I thought that they were more or less working on equal grounds
Like not safely, as nothing with Wonka was despicted as risk-free, but facing the same level of danger and sharing the fruits of their gains, which to me only made sense considering they(Wonka & the Wompa Loompas) always treated each other rather friendly(instead of a slave-owner to slave relationship) and seemingly had fun together with Wonka's hijinks & plans to severely traumatize children
Interesting chapter with the investigation making some progress, some counter scheming and the counter propaganda beginning to emerge and a disturbing vision into the future.
I myself wonder if Winant's death will ever be revealed in truth or would it even matter given no one would believe he made his own choice than being forced to by some cabal of secret world controllers.
Though on the topic of the demagogue and white supremacy emerging in Britain alongside rationing I think i'v got a partial explanation. As we know Henry is trying to decolonize the world in France with a socialist government this processes is going along fairly smoothly with them being willing to cut it while losing power it seems their will be a lot less bloodshed.
Britain by the sound and what we know of White tried to hold onto their old empire and as result likely lost a lot of soldiers but also you would see vast amounts of ''whites'' begin fleeing to Britain. Adding in the collapse of the old colonial deals, them being hostile to communism where they are own a lot chunk of the world and most of Europe and being hopelessly dependent on the United states it's easy to see how their own version could emerge.
Though on the topic of the British army, I think India and Pakistan could prove to be many ways the place where the relationship with most of the common wealth is broken.
The Indian and Pakistani army are still mostly under control of former British officers, the thing is these officers loyalty is as you can imagine to Britain first . Given the USSR thanks to their conquest of Iran is now just outside Pakistan, their feeling the pressure and going to try and take Kashmir to secure their supply of water and get as much land as possible given the threat beside them. Indeed I think Pakistan would go all for it given the alternatives is having one dangerously vulnerable front besides the other facing one of the largest military powers in the world.
The thing is that the British officers in the Indian army would feel the same way, the longer the goes on the more time Pakistani troops are not manning their border with the USSR and given the border with Iran in some places that is very dangerous. I could see many agree it's better to strengthen Pakistan by allowing them to take Kashmir as means India now has both a larger and stronger buffer with the USSR.
Not saying they would refuse to fight, but say being slow to responding, some of the equipment is ill maintained , telling the Indian government their army is not in a good position to fight till a couple weeks later ect till a ceasefire is reached and at the conference Britain would logically support Pakistani gains if not happily then it being better than the alternatives.
Of course once it get's discovered that British troops would this I think your not going to see many ex colonial native countries trust their armies to be trained by Britain.
I myself wonder if Winant's death will ever be revealed in truth or would it even matter given no one would believe he made his own choice than being forced to by some cabal of secret world controllers.
Though on the topic of the demagogue and white supremacy emerging in Britain alongside rationing I think i'v got a partial explanation. As we know Henry is trying to decolonize the world in France with a socialist government this processes is going along fairly smoothly with them being willing to cut it while losing power it seems their will be a lot less bloodshed.
Britain by the sound and what we know of White tried to hold onto their old empire and as result likely lost a lot of soldiers but also you would see vast amounts of ''whites'' begin fleeing to Britain. Adding in the collapse of the old colonial deals, them being hostile to communism where they are own a lot chunk of the world and most of Europe and being hopelessly dependent on the United states it's easy to see how their own version could emerge.
Though on the topic of the British army, I think India and Pakistan could prove to be many ways the place where the relationship with most of the common wealth is broken.
The Indian and Pakistani army are still mostly under control of former British officers, the thing is these officers loyalty is as you can imagine to Britain first . Given the USSR thanks to their conquest of Iran is now just outside Pakistan, their feeling the pressure and going to try and take Kashmir to secure their supply of water and get as much land as possible given the threat beside them. Indeed I think Pakistan would go all for it given the alternatives is having one dangerously vulnerable front besides the other facing one of the largest military powers in the world.
The thing is that the British officers in the Indian army would feel the same way, the longer the goes on the more time Pakistani troops are not manning their border with the USSR and given the border with Iran in some places that is very dangerous. I could see many agree it's better to strengthen Pakistan by allowing them to take Kashmir as means India now has both a larger and stronger buffer with the USSR.
Not saying they would refuse to fight, but say being slow to responding, some of the equipment is ill maintained , telling the Indian government their army is not in a good position to fight till a couple weeks later ect till a ceasefire is reached and at the conference Britain would logically support Pakistani gains if not happily then it being better than the alternatives.
Of course once it get's discovered that British troops would this I think your not going to see many ex colonial native countries trust their armies to be trained by Britain.
I think “the Reds” are more complicated than Saturday morning cartoon villains. France and Italy aren’t Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria. There aren’t thousands of USSR troops stationed in them. If anything, the likeliest dictatorship to be established in those two countries is a CIA-backed fascist one after a military coup.
I can. Dahl has proven that his racism went a lot further than the average Britons in the 1960s.
Some people are acting like retrospectively noticing racism in older works is a thing of the past few years, but people had already been noticing the obvious racist elements in his works in the early 70s.
Forgive me for previously disagreeing. I am not British and Dahl's books are a common book report assignment for grade schoolers as well as being commonly sold in Scholastic book fairs back in the 2000s.
...and has a Jewish wife, which would inflame anti-semitic imagination even more than Kaganovich at the helm.
Not sure if the double quote was intentional or not, but you don't get to tell other members to "just enjoy the story" if they make an entirely reasonable post that is entirely on topic.
Specially when you consider that one anti-semitic common talking point is "The Jew infiltrates our societies through their women" (no, they don't care about this flagrantly goes against their own beliefs about women as people without agenda or personality)
Except you keep forgetting that TTL the CIA doesn't exist and the organization that would be its obvious predecessor (the OSS) is for practical purposes "KGB, American Directorate". So the "FSA" ("Fascist States of America", Post-White America) will have to build any hypothetical intelligence service from scratch.
So there will be no "fascist coup", as it would have to be organized by people who are probably being purged at TTL at the time by the Thiers Administration, under the pretext that they "sympathized with fascism" under Vichy. Coup that would be backed by an organization that doesn't exist to begin with. Not in the short or medium term at least.
Maybe there was some obscure academic here and there, to whom no one paid any attention, trying to talk about racism in the works of Roald Dahl.
But the fact remains that this kind of "critical revision of older works" only entered the mainstream (that is, it ceased to be purely obscure academics and entered public debate) at the earliest in the mid-2010s.
So yes, it's reasonable to assume, if you haven't lived inside the academic echo chamber, that it's something that started recently and has questionable motivations.
(In almost all the cases I've seen, these are people who believe that simply saying "I didn't like this 'cult work'" will make them "lose face" and "look uneducated", so they they invent these kinds of silly pretexts to be able to openly criticize the works, regardless of whether there really are reasons to do that kind of criticism or not)