Reds fanfic
- Thread starter E. Burke
- Start date
Redshank Galloglass
Banned
If this spunds too biased, know that my character is intended to be biased.
Technically, I'd fear the odds of calling 2-piece minimal bra-and-panties women's bathing attire "bikinis" ITTL are slim to none. OTL it was the outcome of Bikini Atoll being a name in the US media as emblematic of the South Seas and Polynesian voluptuousness, but the only reason for it being in the news was of course the postwar A-bomb tests there. UASR is unlikely to do bomb tests there, during or after the war. Conceivably the FBU does them and there is a parallel ATL naming of the swim gear there rather than in the USA. But of course for sex-obsessed repressed people the UASR itself might likely eclipse the South Seas for prurient imagery. Perhaps the Anglo-French mind will go to Polynesia instead of America because the former is considered "innocent"--also minimal Christian modesty might be seen forcing the formerly naked island babes of the imagination into minimal covering, while in America the brazen harlots just roam around naked--and scary in their confidence and assertiveness.
It boils down then to who has possession of the island group including Bikini postwar. It seems likely to me to be the UASR navy, in analogy with OTL where RN had to largely withdraw to concentrate in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans instead, leaving the Pacific pretty much to Americans wresting it from Japan. The same limitations and compulsions apply here. I forget if Hawaii fell into the British sphere in the course of the Revolution in America, and I'm almost sure the Philippines must have--but even so, Britain was not a lot richer in the ATL and hardly able to garrison both the Atlantic and Pacific. I suppose if the UASR lost control of Pacific islands in the 1930s, they might have agreed to hand them back to British management (now FBU so the French holdings around Tahiti would also be consolidated into a huge blue water provincial sphere) and so it would be FBU having possession of the various islands the USA used for bomb tests OTL. I suppose Bikini was selected for technical reasons, and so the FBU would not be unlikely to choose it too. But in terms of who had raw power in the ocean when Japan finally is subdued, it would be the Americans, and if FBU gets back in there it would be with the leave of the American Reds. UASR policy was IIRC to conciliate the European powers, so weakened by the war and apparently coming around to socialism on a soft parliamentary path--but the matter of policy toward the island colonies would be a litmus test. Even if all the white Hawaii residents were counterrevolutionary expatriates as in Cuba, supplemented by Britons, the islands would spend some years essentially in Red custody, with nothing stopping the Yanks from fomenting an anti-racist worker's revolution to join to the American Comintern sphere but courtesy toward the nominal British ally. Reciprocal courtesy to American service men and women would mean hundreds of thousands of sea crew and soldiers of all ranks roaming around the former US possession casually dispensing their revolutionary attitudes, which no doubt would make the mixed race Hawaiian, Japanese and other Asian subjects of the Crown somewhat uppity and restless, in no mood to submit to pre-war deference to white power. Nominal cordiality between Americans and Europeans would imply that Americans will speak up about the undesirability of returning the Pacific islands, which so many young American Reds would have died on the beaches and inland redoubts of clearing them of Japanese control, to prior servitude and might therefore advocate some sort of mandate autonomy--not aiming to cut the FBU off from their bases, but setting the islands on a schedule for self-control and eventual freedom, just as the USA had planned for the Philippines.
It is possible that the OTL decision that it was too hard and unseemly to hold the PI as possessions, and that Philippine autonomy should be promoted, and eventual independence inked onto the calendar, might have been butterflied completely here, what with the starker conflict between general democracy and bourgeois authority--the latter might have taken a harder line on the Philippines. Also I'm not sure just when the decision to plan and schedule Philippine independence was taken OTL; if it was after or even pretty soon before the ATL revolution, policy makers would have had other items on their minds and simply postponed debating it. In any of these cases, of course the UASR will not have this example of a bourgeois power backing out of formal colonialism. Also, even if Philippine independence was scheduled before the Revolution, American Reds will fully know and understand that the plan was to continue to dominate the islands by unofficial means, therefore even if the Anglo-French fully accept the advice, it means only partial and formal independence for the islanders anyway.
But I think if FBU can be prevailed upon to grant even partial autonomy, as a quid pro quo for the Red Yanks graciously handing the islands back to them, still articulation of local resident's feelings about being permanently relocated for the greater good of their masters developing and demonstrating the means of waging fiery war on the Americans who liberated them from Japanese rule will pose a roadblock against using the atolls for bomb tests; the pressure would be on to use other territories, such as say Saharan sites under French control.
So I would ask @Jello Biafra, is there an ATL anti-butterfly workaround, perhaps on the lines I indicated of happening in the FBU rather than UASR, for the term "bikini" to come to have its OTL meaning? Perhaps instead of testing bombs on Bikini, the European Union does something else there such as develop it for tourism, that brings the name of the island to the tongues of British ad men?
Or should we regard it as a partial translation across the timelines, substituting the familiar OTL term for some ATL name of the type that would be obscure to us?
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Bulldoggus
Banned
My take on horseshoe theory is there are Keynesians, and then there's everyone else. Keynesians should throw horseshoes at the latter.
Redshank Galloglass
Banned
That's not what I'm talking about.
It sounds similar to Mussolini's "we'll smash the heads of the socialists" quote.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Random quotes about the Second Cultural Revolution:
"In the 1930s, girls like me were taught that what we do within the walls of our flats are our business. Today, my grand-daughter is being taught that those walls are oppressive and need to be torn down!"
-Joan Harris, Arizona housewife, 1971.
"Godless, they call us. Well, Adam and Eve didn't need clothes to be god's favored!"
-An anonymous nudist activist, 1963.
"Kollontai said 'sex should be seen as just another urge to satisfy, like drinking water'. Here in America, sex is becoming something in that happens between appetizer and main course.
-Brian Denehy, manager of a collective swinger's club in San Francisco, 1966.
"Whose a bigger whore: me or some British slob who wastes away in the capitalist machine?"
-Delilah, New York prostitute, 1978.
"If we're taught to share the world, and share in parenthood, why don't we share our partners?"
-Elena Jacobs, a practitioner of polyamory, 1976.
"Yeah I don't where a bra. Bras are modern day corsets. They're chains on womanhood. Isn't Marxism about taking away chains."
-Miami pedestrian, 1970.
"In the 1930s, girls like me were taught that what we do within the walls of our flats are our business. Today, my grand-daughter is being taught that those walls are oppressive and need to be torn down!"
-Joan Harris, Arizona housewife, 1971.
"Godless, they call us. Well, Adam and Eve didn't need clothes to be god's favored!"
-An anonymous nudist activist, 1963.
"Kollontai said 'sex should be seen as just another urge to satisfy, like drinking water'. Here in America, sex is becoming something in that happens between appetizer and main course.
-Brian Denehy, manager of a collective swinger's club in San Francisco, 1966.
"Whose a bigger whore: me or some British slob who wastes away in the capitalist machine?"
-Delilah, New York prostitute, 1978.
"If we're taught to share the world, and share in parenthood, why don't we share our partners?"
-Elena Jacobs, a practitioner of polyamory, 1976.
"Yeah I don't where a bra. Bras are modern day corsets. They're chains on womanhood. Isn't Marxism about taking away chains."
-Miami pedestrian, 1970.
Oh great Karl Marx! Still know that Kollontai didn't say that! There was not a single Bolshevik who would support this idea. True proponents of this "theory" were poets-decadents, like Igor Severyanin. This is alien to class theory.
She did say "Sexuality was a human instinct natural as hunger or thirst."
It also seems to match her beliefs.
Bookmark1995
Banned
I know she didn't actually say that. But OTL, a lot of quotes are attributed to people who never said them. Yamamoto, for example, never called the US a sleeping giant.
But her views on sexuality were about tearing down old ideas on family relations, thus ITTL she becomes a cultural icon in the UASR, and ironically, not in her own country until much later.
Redshank Galloglass
Banned
India is supposed to overtake the FBU as the leading Capitalist superpower.