Yes. Banks and Capaldi were also friends IRL.
It was not intended to 100 percent canon, mostly for fun.
Reds fanfic
- Thread starter E. Burke
- Start date
It was not intended to 100 percent canon, mostly for fun.
Capaldi seems to be friends with some Scottish celebrities. He is friends with Craig Ferguson as well (they were in a punk band together).
Bookmark1995
Banned
This is a post that was inspired by reading The Cheese and the Worms, and the Great Cat Massacre. I think a world like the UASR could use some microhistory.
Daily Worker- Sunday Book Review
Contraband by Harry Green
March 19, 1997
A customs building on the UASR-Canadian border are seen as remnants of old past, when the class war divided North America between blue and red. Most lie abandoned, and are not seen as worth the efforts. But while visiting one, Green came across a treasure trove of obscure documents. Through them, Green is able to construct the story of an Canadian customs official, the American items he confiscated, and how the man slowly evolved over the years.
The subject of the book is Henry Gordon, and his time on the Canadian border. From 1956 to 1979, he worked as a border official in the city of Windsor, managing and reviewing items that in the pre-Red Canada were considered contraband. After Canada's Red Turn, he joined the Detroit-Windsor joint police force, working until his death from lung cancer in 1990.
His earliest documents, where he details confiscated books, films, and goods, betrays a man dedicated to serving the reactionary state. But over the years, his memos and documents gradually reveal a shift in his attitude toward the Reds from disgust, to curiosity, to amazement.
Whereas in 1958, he dismissed the novels he confiscated as "Commie trash", by 1967, he reveals that he read some of the contraband, and by 1975, his memos read more like a professional and academic review rather than a simple documentation of contraband.
Through the use of microhistorical research, Green makes the story of Canada's geopolitical shift personal, by telling the personal tale of how one former bourgeois servant achieved his own personal red turn.
4 stars out of 5.
Daily Worker- Sunday Book Review
Contraband by Harry Green
March 19, 1997
A customs building on the UASR-Canadian border are seen as remnants of old past, when the class war divided North America between blue and red. Most lie abandoned, and are not seen as worth the efforts. But while visiting one, Green came across a treasure trove of obscure documents. Through them, Green is able to construct the story of an Canadian customs official, the American items he confiscated, and how the man slowly evolved over the years.
The subject of the book is Henry Gordon, and his time on the Canadian border. From 1956 to 1979, he worked as a border official in the city of Windsor, managing and reviewing items that in the pre-Red Canada were considered contraband. After Canada's Red Turn, he joined the Detroit-Windsor joint police force, working until his death from lung cancer in 1990.
His earliest documents, where he details confiscated books, films, and goods, betrays a man dedicated to serving the reactionary state. But over the years, his memos and documents gradually reveal a shift in his attitude toward the Reds from disgust, to curiosity, to amazement.
Whereas in 1958, he dismissed the novels he confiscated as "Commie trash", by 1967, he reveals that he read some of the contraband, and by 1975, his memos read more like a professional and academic review rather than a simple documentation of contraband.
Through the use of microhistorical research, Green makes the story of Canada's geopolitical shift personal, by telling the personal tale of how one former bourgeois servant achieved his own personal red turn.
4 stars out of 5.
Forgive me, but would the revolutionary society of the UASR really mindlessly imitate the tin-solider showmanship of the British royals? I honestly don't know that we have Marines doing this OTL but I'd be more surprised to learn we don't than that we do. Except I did visit DC a few times when I lived in Virginia in high school, and I don't recall a Buckingham Palace like array of US soldiers of any branch on display like that, not at the White House, not at the Capitol. I think I would have noticed.
Anyway, the Debsian/DeLeonist revolutionary fighters might possibly carry over or reinvent such mindless ceremonial I suppose, but it seems more likely to me they'd think in terms of the military being the People's forces, and that the glory, honor, and effectiveness of UASR forces lies in the "Willie and Joe" (from Bill Mauldin's "Up Front" cartoons he drew for Stars and Stripes while, um, up front in WWII) mystique--two bleary-eyed, grizzle-bearded, ordinary American working Joes who took a casual and pragmatic attitude--cartoon of them saving their Lieutenant and explaining to him while carrying him that "they might have replaced you with one of them salutin' demons" for instance. That American soldiers, according to British and German observers, refused to be taught the arts of war properly and made every mistake in the book--but unlike well trained soldiers, learned from experience and having made each mistake once, never again made that one. That green American troops (in North Africa) broke and ran shamefully--but astonished and upset their more seasoned pursuers by suddenly stopping and turning around and belatedly fighting. That European armies all had their war cries, but Americans could not be bothered with that bull, attacking in a grim and unnerving silence. Bottom line, Americans as citizen soldiers, who reluctantly but thoroughly learned the art of war in a slovenly but businesslike fashion with the overwhelming desire to end the damn fighting by winning so they could get out of this hell and go home again.
I would think that by and large, the Revolution was won in just this fashion. No fancy dress uniforms, no showmanship drill, just pragmatic dirty tricks that left the other guy dead and them alive, slinking and slouching into winning positions. The people in arms, fighting those who would do them harm, with the goal of winning hard and fast and being done with it.
Such a revolutionary tradition, grafted onto the Great Crusade war in all its foulness on the Soviet front and other hard dirty fields, would not lend itself to this kind of ultra-martinetism. Assuming the great people's institutions of government do have visible guards around them (and why should they? Are they not the halls of the People themselves, of by and for them, guarded by their legitimacy and the outrage of a people who may not want to be soldiers professionally but have all done some level of militia service?) I'd think rather they impress the public with their pragmatic military bearing; soldiers in urban camo, eyeing the public cannily, projecting their competence and resolve in their lynx-like casual motion.
But I really don't see the need for a guard, ceremonial or otherwise. Perhaps on parade, to impress foreign dignitaries from nations that still value this sort of thing, just to show that Americans can do it if we want to, and to give the capitalists and Stalinists a good hard stare in the eyes back. But in ordinary situations? No doubt the various centers are guarded, far more effectively than tin soldiers in show uniforms could do it, from concealed positions and with more than adequate force. But what purpose is served, for the military or for the revolutionary public, in ceremonial of that rigid type?
Redshank Galloglass
Banned
Ceremonial Guards tend to exist for showmanship and nothing else. It's one of the many subtleties of realpolitik. The Queen's Guard only exist for tourists first and combat fourth, when in reality such places are protected by a various manner of other more effective forces. Well, to be fair, that might have been different when they were created.
And the "citizen-soldier" stereotype only existed in a world where the USA built a military in 5 years, which is very different from the military presented here, the soldiers of the UASR are clearly professionals in the same vein as the Wehrmacht. No doubt the propaganda will still exist (and the various no-bullshit of Americans such as the silence) but the American soldiers of Redsverse WWII is a different animal from the American Soldiers of OTL.
Honestly I think you overthought this one a bit. I like what you have to say, but all the "Premier's Guard" was intended to be was a flashy example of showmanship that is basically telling the enemies of the UASR "hey, this is what you're up against".
In my opinion, it makes sense that a movement heavily indoctrinated and laced with propaganda would make up stuff like this. We don't have showings like this OTL, but that's mainly a cultural thing if anything. We also don't have Guards divisions OTL, but the Americans do, and I'd argue that's one of the most Bourgeois institutions ever created in a military.
As for the "why should they" question, I feel that camouflaged soldiers presents a far more militaristic and oppressive cultural stance than a bunch of guys in a dress uniforms who may or may not have rifles.
To be quite frank, all I really did with that was create a scenario where a bourgeois cultural phenomenon was coopted by a a proletarian movement, something that happened in this TL and IRL. That's it. All there is to it.
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I didn't know who Pavilchenko was, so I read a few articles.
I don't suppose the OTL version had any flaws of "moral character" you'd care to criticize. She seems pretty exemplary to me, just the sort of Soviet citizen Stalin would be proud to parade. (Meaning no slur on herself at all).
So I suppose you are reacting to the suggestion that she'd be turned into a pin-up icon by horny Yanks.
And by golly, when I look at it that way, I suppose you are right; she herself, being an exemplary Soviet citizen, would not be thrilled at such a role.
(And in the ATL, it surely would not be Eleanor Roosevelt who takes her under her wing in America. FDR is somewhere or other in UASR politics, IIRC, and doesn't suffer from polio either, but he's very far from the top ranks. Of course in the ATL it could be that Eleanor and he separated long ago and she is running around on her own hook, and might well outrank her ex-husband in politics, though I don't suppose she's anywhere in the inner circle.
Anyway I started this post in reaction to the remark about "moral character," meaning to suggest to you that a more free-wheeling, hedonistic lifestyle is not the same thing as simply lacking moral character. It is I think a different kind of moral character, or anyway can be and I suppose in the UASR often is. In many instances and aspects, American hedonism in the UASR is an outgrowth of the radical humanism of the great Western revolutionary tradition, that made "free love" a common slur by reactionaries against all radicals--and a goal sincerely embraced by many of the radicals themselves, in Utopian colonies and in the intersection with Bohemian counterculture.
In the UASR's formative revolution, I suspect there was a lot of intersection between the countercultures and the revolutionary stalwarts who laid the groundwork for mass victory; that many comrades were in fact prostitutes, or frequenters of gay gathering places, or other demimonde type figures, and many more straightlaced and dour comrades found refuge and redoubts in shady places and revolutionized shady people. I would think quite a bit of the puritanical side of revolutionary tradition was present, but as a pragmatic matter, the rebels learned that one of the things they were fighting for was the freedom of people to enjoy life authentically.
Bluntly put, America is very rich. Our productivity is high, and even cut off from imports from the rest of the world (which would hurt a lot less severely in the 1930s than nowadays) and despite a certain degree of devastation and disruption of the economy in the civil war, we could afford to be hedonistic on a socialist basis. With all hypocritical moralizing against things like birth control swept away, and frank and open treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, we could afford to favor a new morality of free love.
And actually I think that that new morality might offset some of the cultural aspects we tend to import into the ATL from the OTL. Pin-up girls and all that--well, the people's armed forces are going to include women after all. They can have pin-up guys if they want, but comrade soldiers going at it with one another directly might take some of the edge off the understandable mystification of sex.
Pavilchenko then might balk at getting into the casual mud with dirty Yankees--except in the ATL, she'd presumably know of legions of male and female Yank-comrades who were and still are in the literal mud of the Soviet front, in the same fight she was in. Whether she is seduced by the American frivolity, or holds to a good Soviet straight-laced role, at any rate she will be recognized far more and more appreciatively for what she is as a soldier against the Axis, and her image might then indeed be placed far and wide--not as cheesecake, but in the inspirational role much like Che OTL.
And if some guys and some women then take it as a pretty as well as inspirational face---is that so bad? Anyway the UASR has plenty of strong and also sexy women for men and some women to fantasize over, some of whom are also war heroes. Pavilchenko is more of a symbol here of the alliance with the USSR than of heroism in the war as such.
And as such I suppose if she comes off as standing for Stalinist moralism against Yankee casual sexuality, that would be OK.
She might become more of a sexual fetish for setting herself us as virtuous and untouchable in fact, a sort of Athena figure....
I usually see "Rodina" translated as "Motherland" rather than "Fatherland," and IMHO I like that better. But we don't have an appropriate word to flip the gender of "Patriotic."
For me the words "Fatherland" and "Homeland" are tainted by Nazi associations, and by my perception of the appropriation of them in just that sense by the American Right in the '90s and 2000s. "'Homeland' Security" indeed! I'd studied enough about the Nazis to know what a big deal the term "Heimat" meant to them, as they meant it anyway, and want none of that baggage here.
I had the perception that GW Bush in particular was trying to normalize this type of Nazi thinking, perhaps because he simply naturally thought that way himself. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq the newspapers quoted him as promising that it would be a "lightning war." That is, quick in and out I suppose. But I leave the translation of "lightning war" into German as an exercise to the reader. I spelled it out in very concerned letters to my Representative and Senators though, at the time.
Anyway I'd much rather hear about the "motherland" than the "fatherland," take some comfort that in French "fatherland" is a feminine noun, and while the word "patriot" and its derivatives are much, much abused, so widespread and indiscriminate is this abuse that it averages out into a reasonably plain word to me.
We can't really say "Motherland War" without it sounding kind of weird. Though it is not that bad actually. Would that be a better translation than "Patriotic?"
He ran as the leader of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in 1936, as I recall, and is sort of the moderate "Progressive Bourgeois" figure in UASR politics.
Redshank Galloglass
Banned
Ahh, so that's why sexuality is such a big part of Reds!: It was a major part of the 20th Century's Left, after all.
Honestly sex has become so much of an in your face commodity that I can't help but read some of this TL's stuff and cringe a bit. It's not the TL's fault but rather it's just the natural conclusion of the politics of the 20th Century's Left and the subsequent New Left.
Honestly sex has become so much of an in your face commodity that I can't help but read some of this TL's stuff and cringe a bit. It's not the TL's fault but rather it's just the natural conclusion of the politics of the 20th Century's Left and the subsequent New Left.
I talked more about the cultural perception - if Americans shoot a film about World War II .... let's say where the characters enter into a polyamorous connection (I myself think that the family of the era of communism will be a polyamorous community), then the Politburo will go out loudly slamming the door, and the Veterans Council Write a collective complaint.
Well ... in Russian, in fact, two words denoting "my home country" - "Motherland" and "Fatherland".
The word fatherland, fatherland in Old Russian and Middle-Great Russian language until the XVII century. It meant not only the "country of the fathers", but also the "family"; "Elected country"; And "hereditary, tribal rights." Also, one of the icons of the icon-painting depiction of the Trinity of New Testament was called (where God the Son is portrayed in the form of a youth on the knees of the Father); The same origin the word patronymic. The word of the fatherland is of the same origin, but more later; According to Sreznevsky his terminology also ended by the 17th century.
According to Vinogradov's observations, the word "fatherland" had a particularly "acute social, political and, moreover, revolutionary meaning" in the generation of the Decembrists and Pushkin, while the word "homeland" in this era was still neutral and meant simply "native places "," City or village where a person was born, "etc. A similar shade arose under the influence of the French Revolution (where" patriot "actually meant" revolutionary "); In 1797 Paul I ordered to remove from the language the word "fatherland" and replace it with the word "state" (together with the words of a citizen, society, etc.)
PS - there are residents of the Northwestern states?
Honestly, after meeting new levs, I always wonder. Dialectical Materialism was replaced by Existentialism, Scientific Communism by Guerilla ... A little more and they can abandon political economy.
Worse than that now they deny the notion of "human", "humanity" and instead of revolutionary struggle are engaged in the protection of minorities (although the policy of identity is not quite consistent with the goals - https://libcom.org/library/i-am-wom...ritique-intersectionality-theory-eve-mitchell).
I hadn't gone into great detail, but the security of the capital, government facilities, and VIPs was already stated to be part of the Secretariat for Public Safety's portfolio. So it would fall to the paramilitary Proletarian Guard (who also fulfill roles similar to the FBI, and border guards). They might, for a mixture of practical and symbolic reasons, maintain something like a non-evil equivalent to East German Stasi's Felix Dzerzhinksy Guards Regiment, as a mixed capital protection/rapid response group, with a custom of encouraging transfers from the Armed Forces to serve. So like SWAT that also had similar duties to the Secret Service and US Capitol Police
Oh man I would be so pissed if I saw a customer let a plate fall to the floor at a place I worked. Even just once would tick me off.
Bookmark1995
Banned
It is part of that culture clash thing being a Rural Canadian and a cosmopolitan, leftist country. Someone who is taught not to waste food would be frustrated by those who are priveleged enough to be picky.
And more importantly, he has to work twice as hard to meet their particular desires.
Yeah I grew up in rural Idaho and knew people who remembered a time when the town I grew up in was just wilderness. A bit different than commie New York.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Were they the kind of people who valued food, and they'll force a stubborn child to clear their plate.
Indeed they were, though my mom is Californian and disdains that kind of behavior.
She says it contributes to the high rate of obesity in the United States. It would be better to serve smaller portions and if the child doesn't like vegetables it's probably because you're cooking it wrong. No one hates food that's sauteed in butter and garlic.